Driving home from Boston Friday night, I caught much of an interview on Tom Ashbrook’s public radio program, On Point. The interview was with Robert Diggs – the RZA – the founder and leader of Wu Tang Clan, one of the most influential groups in hiphop. RZA was pitching his new book, “The Tao of Wu“, which his publisher describes as “a spiritual memoir”.

For those of you who don’t follow hiphop, Wu Tang revived the fortunes of east coast hiphop in the early 1990s – the center of gravity in the rap world had moved from the outer boroughs of NYC to the West Coast and Dr. Dre’s project – with an astoundingly fine album. “Enter The Wu Tang (36 Chambers)” featured nine skilled MCs, dark and sinister beats, and wonderfully cheezy samples from Hong Kong kung fu films. It sounded like nothing anyone had heard before, and it sounds remarkably fresh almost two decades later.

Ashbrook asked RZA about his interest in those films, revealing a personal interest in the answer – in the early 1990s, Ashbrook tells his listeners, he was living in Hong Kong, moonlight from his life as a journalist, dubbing kung fu flicks. It’s possible, he tells RZA, that his was the voice in those childhood films. RZA shares a story about a long night on Staten Island with his cousin Russell (Ol’ Dirty Bastard) that ended with the two looking for a safe place to sleep and visiting a local movie theatre that alternated between porn and kung fu flicks. While ODB slept, RZA found himself fascinated by the philosophy expressed in the films.

Explaining the significance of the knug fu flicks to Ashbrook, RZA mentions that his universe, growing up in Staten Island and Brooklyn, was a pretty limited one. Kung fu films offered a picture of life in a different place, a world where people of color were badass:

When we watch TV in those days in America, there wasn’t a lot of channels… TV programming was limited. When you see a martial arts film, you had a chance to see a time in history that wasn’t just what the western world was showing us. And especially as a young black man, you know, most of the black figures you’d see were some kind of slaves, some kind of pimps, not the sort of heroes who would inspire you. But through the martial arts films, I was seeing great heroes that inspired me, in the past, hundreds or thousands of years ago. It gave me another perception of history… It gave me a whole interest in finding out what was going on in that period of time, not only in Asia, what about in Africa, Australia?

It takes some work to find opportunities for intercultural encounter and xenophilia in kung fu films, but it’s clear that RZA was looking for something beyond the intellectual influences he was encountering in his own community. RZA and many of the Wu Tang were involved with The Nation of Gods and Earths, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam sometimes referred to as “the Five Percenters”, which offers a complex, syncretic worldview with emphasis on numerology and other esoterica. He’s subsequently found inspiration in Islam, Christianity, Taoism and in chess. While I found that the snippets of philosophy RZA offered in an hour-long interview alternated between profound and goofy, I’ve got nothing but respect for a mind that found a path from kung fu flicks to religious study via hiphop.

I wasn’t listening to Wu Tang when 36 Chambers first dropped. I was living in Ghana and the local soundtrack was heavy on Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and lots of country music. (Seriously. Surprised me, too.) But as I started travelling around the world, I began noticing that the Wu was everywhere. In Ulaanbaatar, the most common tags weren’t in Cyrillic – they were “Wu Tang” and the Wu symbol.

Ulaanbaatar. There’s a “Wu Tang” on the right side of the middle mural.

I never heard much Wu in Ghana – the lyrics are a little raw for Ghanaian tastes, which tend to run towards versus you can recite on the way to church. But friends took me to a corner of Nima, one of Accra’s rougher neighborhoods, that had been dubbed “Alaksa”. I understood the name immediately – local style dictated that you wear a puffy down coat, as members of the Wu did in most of their publicity photos. Wearing actual down jackets in West Africa is impractical, so shops existed to “convert” winter coats to be Ghana-compatible. Tailors carefully ripped seams on the jackets, removed the down and restuffed the coats with crumpled newspapers, which gave the requisite puffy look but were less insulative. They weren’t cheap – kids were paying almost fifty bucks for a converted coat, and they were selling well.

What’s more incredible: that kung fu flicks turned a middle school dropout into a millionaire artist, or that a musical and stylistic statement from Staten Island would shape culture in Mongolia and Ghana?

(That may be a trick question. There’s a deep Central Asia/hip-hop connection, as exemplified in Joe Sabia’s “Tupac in Kazakhstan” video. Sabia filmed the video – which features a couple dozen Kazakhs reciting lines from Tupac’s “Changes” – while racing in the Mongol rally, an overland race from the UK to Mongolia. Unclear to me how Sabia staged the footage, but it certainly seems like many of the folks Sabia filmed knew and loved the song in question… or perhaps it’s complex revenge on Borat. Unclear.)

What quirk of character leads a person to search for new and different perspectives? John Hummel is an interesting case study. A lapsed Mormon, Hummel decided to spend a year encountering 52 different religions, one a week, and documenting the encounters through audio interviews and blog posts. His visits thus far have included mosques, synagogues, churches, and temples, and he’s interviewed Buddhists, Baptists, Wiccans, Satanists and several flavors of humanists, including Atheists. Not every experience is fully comprehensible to him – many faiths lead long services that involve languages he doesn’t speak – but he’s got a gift for finding moments of beauty in every encounter:

The next day I had a chance to interview Pastor Singh. We spoke of how the Sikh religion started, the beliefs and practices. The entire time, he and his congregation were gracious, making sure my needs were met. When I left, he was still making sure I had anything I needed – water for my trip, a bit of food if I was hungry.

I didn’t, but asked him if there was anything he needed. His eyes twinkled as he patted me on the arm. “All I need if your love, my friend,” he told me.

I was wrong. It’s not the discovery of the unknown that’s the best part. It’s meeting the people.

Hummel now identifies as an atheist, but he’s putting significant work into an exploration of a wide set of religions, attending a service a week and reading at least one text significant or sacred to the people he’s meeting with. His goals are complicated – he’s trying to demonstrate that religions he knows nothing about aren’t evil cults, but groups of people who want to be good and help one another. But there’s another motivation – a fascination with the unknown: “Then I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands, and a lot of curiosity. Like ‘I wonder what the people in that church down the road believe. And what they do to help the community.’ Or ‘That temple looks really keen – I wonder what they do in there?’”

What turns curiosity into action? What convinces a former Mormon to seek out – and hug – Tibetan Buddhists? Or visit a different New York City mosque on each evening of Ramadan? To step out of a kung fu movie and start reading Lao Tzu?

And how do we cultivate lots, lots more of it?

My presentation at Applied Brilliance today was a quick version of my Innovation from Constraint talk, a talk that makes the argument that some of the best design ideas come from facing the constraints provided by material circumstance. Using a whole mess of examples stolen from Afrigadget, the talk argues that we hack technologies once they become familiar – from charcoal to bicycles to mobile phones. I ended with a couple of examples of innovative uses of social network technology, making the case that people were often using web2.0 tools for activism because the tools were what they had access to in closed, repressive societies, not because the tools were somehow shinier than traditional media tools.

After all four morning speakers presented, the session moderator presented the four of us, and the room, with an interesting dillema. He asked us to imagine that we were architects and that our firm had been hired by a developer to build a super-luxury seven star hotel in Senegal. We each offered our hopes for a hotel that was environmentally responsible and culturally sensitive, at least, within the constraints of our own worldviews. While I wanted to ensure that the public spaces of the exclusive hotel were open to the general public, incorporating Dakar’s remarkable musical culture, Tom Shannon wanted to bury the hotel deep underground and fill it with ice rinks and other cold-based features, powered by thermal exchange towers spanning the deep ocean and the hot, humid sky…

So our moderator changed the question – assume the developer rejected all your interesting, environmental culturally appropriate ideas and insisted on Dubai meets Disney in Dakar. Would you take the job, or would you turn it down, forcing you to fire most of the staff of your firm? Our panel split pretty evenly between those who felt that one had to defend artistic and cultural vision versus those who felt that even an ugly, evil hotel could have benefits to local workers and craftsmen if executed wisely. (Guess which camp I was in.)

What was exciting was turning this second question over to the architects and designers in the audience and getting their feedback after a short deliberative session. Many of the teams fought the question, arguing that the goal was to persuade the developer that the only way to compete in a global market was combining luxury with responsibility. But my favorite response came from an architect who referenced the ideas of creative reuse in my talk and said, “Build the hotel. Assume it’s going to fail and be left to fall apart. How do you build a building so that it can be hacked after the fact?”

Amazing idea. Not unlike Stewart Brand’s critical observation in How Buildings Learn that we need buildings that can be shaped to our needs, evolving over time. But it’s a very different design challenge to build something designed with the idea that it might be impermanent, and might be more useful in its component parts than as a coherent whole – it’s a way of thinking that I suspect must be disconcerting to a lot of architects. Discussing the idea afterwards, another architect mentioned that environmentally conscious architects are working hard to design and execute buildings that have almost no construction waste – this is probably a very different strategy than one you might take where your agenda as an architect is to provide local craftsmen with new skills and materials that aren’t available locally… like the difference between designing software when you’re trying to minimize expensive human labor and when you’re trying to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of distributed minds.

The downside of giving a lot of talks is that you don’t get enough downtime to develop your own ideas. The upside – you get lots of amazing ideas from people riffing off the ideas you’ve shared. A balancing act…

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s show today. Since I’m just down the road, I’m pinch hitting. (I guess that the fact that Omar’s known for his work on social networking in the African American community and since I study social networking in Africa, I can talk in his stead…)

Robert Gaskell of the Planetary Science Institute describes himself as a “maverick mapmaker of the solar system.” His specialty is interpreting what spacecraft see and turning it into maps of the solar system. He explains that, like a farmer’s son who learns to drive the tractor by riding alongside his father, he learned his craft by being raised by mathematicians, who started his education with “the topology of folding diapers.”

The math Gaskell is now interested in involves modeling asteroids, planetoids and other space features so we can figure out how to navigate around them… and he explains that his knowledge of the field is like that of the son on the tractor. He’s worked on a wide range of outer space projects and learned in the process about modeling the destinations of spacecraft.

He shows us the launch of the Dawn space craft, which is headed towards the asteroid Vespa. It’s making a two year journey powered by ion propulsion, an engine that spews out electrified xenon gas. Dawn will orbit Vespa and dwarf planet Ceres – to navigate, the engineers need accurate models of the asteroids. It’s possible to detect the position of the spacecraft using a huge radio telescope, tracking the craft’s small signal. And you can track craft speed by examining the doppler shift of the signal. But to navigate, you need to be able to see features on these celestial bodies and manuver in response.

Gaskell’s innovation was to realize that the way we generally build these maps was overly difficult and clumsy. Traditionally, we look for images taken in fly-bys that are from the same position, with the same lighting and at a high level of cleanliness and clarity. But Gaskell remembered making a charcoal sketch of a still-life as an eight grader and realized that the techniques of shading he’d learned those years ago could be applied to modeling other worlds. Specifically, he focused on ways to construct “limbs” – the demarcation between a lit portion of an object and space – and “terminators” – demarcation between a shadowed portion and space – which jointly allowed him to build 3d computer models from hybrid images. The inputs included a wide set of images captured in fly-bys, not just the perfect images.

The technique has been used to model several celestial bodies that NASA and other space agencies have wanted to orbit or land craft on. By creating highly accurate models, the spacecraft can find visible features on the asteroid’s surface and pinpoint their location. Gaskell is now modeling Mercury and a few of the satellites of Saturn, finding locations where probes could safely land.

He ends by showing us a 3D movie of the asteroid Itokawa, the destination of Japanese space probe Hayabusa. The asteroid rotates solemly in virtual space as Gaskell points out the “pencil-shaped boulder” that served as lodestar for navigators guiding the probe. As we don red and blue 3D glasses, the film soundtrack swells. It’s “The Rainbow Connection”, and we sit silently in a hotel ballroom, watching a movie of a place none of us will ever see while a stuffed green frog sings. It’s a special moment.

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s show today. Since I’m just down the road, I’m pinch hitting. (I guess that the fact that Omar’s known for his work on social networking in the African American community and since I study social networking in Africa, I can talk in his stead…)

Artist, scultpor and inventor Tom Shannon starts his talk with cartoons, designed by his alter-ego, Teapot. They include the Nice Ass pavillion (a pair of shapely mounds), the Tuning Fork Factory (predictably shaped) and the High Rise Camping Tent (“All the inconvenience of camping in one convenient midtown location.”)

As absurd as these ideas are, they’re not far from the absurdities that Shannon has actually designed. He shows us the original design for the Empire State Building, a 86-story structure with a flat top. The iconic pointed shape is the result of an interest in dirigibles – the pointed top was designed to be a landing and mooring platform. In the 1950s, the tower gained a TV tower. In the 1980s, Shannon proposed adding a optically perfect, polished sphere. It would reflect the environment out to the ocean horizon, showing the traffic as well as the celestial sphere as a vision hovering about New York City.

He didn’t get to build the sphere, but he’s now working on a project called Air Genie, which – oddly enough – may accomplish the same thing. Air Genie is a giant circle filled with helium. It’s 110 feet in diameter, the minimum size needed to support the 60 million LEDs that cover its surface (weighing 20 tons). This allows the sphere to have the resolution of a laptop computer at 50 meters. He shows us an image of New York photographed by an on-board camera and “reflected” on the sphere’s surface.

Air Genie could land on a college campus and teach us about geography and plate tectonics, he speculates. We could float spheres above two cities and allow teleconferencing on a city to city basis. Because the sphere can see behind itself, it can become somewhat invisible by displaying the background behind. And – and critically, I suspect – it would be a great light show at a huge dance party.

Shannon would like to float larger objects in the air. This means moving beyond helium, which is effective, but very expensive. He shows us a highly speculative project, a set of translucent islands that hover above the ocean. They need to be island-sized, he tells us, because they’ll float on vacuum. “Perhaps they’ll be built by nanotech, made out of clear diamond”, and will allow landmasses and water to float above water. He tells us that the vision is slightly closer to reality with the advent of graphene, a carbon honeycomb a single atom thick which could contain helium or other atoms permanently.

He’s obsessed with platonic solids and the characteristics of them, he tells us. This fascination has manifested in a series of pieces that involve spheres, hovering in air in free space. The spheres are powerful magnets, that hold themselves in tension and opposition. Showing us an installation at the Tokyo Broadcasting Headquarters, he explains that these installations are affected by the earth’s magnetic field, which is connected to the earth and sun’s magnetic fields – it’s literally and visibly connected to the universe.

A series of sculptures explore “heavy weightlessness”. He shows us a polished stainless steel surface, apparently hovering in thin air. It’s balanced on a very small point, so while it weighs a couple tons, air currents will move it. The newest sculpture in this series is premiering at an art installation in Aix en Provence, where it lives in a beautiful meadow, designed to both capture and evoke morning dew.

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s show today. Since I’m just down the road, I’m pinch hitting. (I guess that the fact that Omar’s known for his work on social networking in the African American community and since I study social networking in Africa, I can talk in his stead…)

William Uricchio of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department leads off a morning session on “invention” with a discussion about participatory culture. He notes that there’s a separation between the US and Europe on these topics. Americans tend to be more optimistic about technologies like Wikipedia, while Europeans are more skeptical. He notes that there’s also a generational fault line between people who think that these technologies are benevolent versus those who think they’re dangerous.

Uricchio shows a picture of the earth seen from the moon. He notes that this image shows us the pinnacle of a certain scientific regime that made the photo possible via space travel. He suggests that the image shows us object/subject relationships, three point perspective and other aspects that are part of modern culture. He invokes Heidegger, suggesting that the idea of a world concieved as a picture would have been inconcievable in the Middle Ages. The ability to grasp, pin down and picture reality is characteristic of modernity.

His talk starts with a section titled “Modernity and the algorismic vision” – algorism is a word we don’t see much these days. It’s a real word – it’s a way of doing arithmetic by following simple rules – but while it dominated discourse from the 1500s through the 1900s, the word “algorithm” – more complex procedures or processes. Algorism was the underpinning of the three point perspective – you could reproduce reality with a high degree of accuracy by following simple rules. “Follow the rules and you can’t go wrong.”

We’re now living in a different age, an era of participatory culture. Participation is an old phenomenon, something that’s been around forever. But it was overwritten by the culture industries at the start of the 20th century. We’re moving away from this commercial, centralized production of culture, being shaped in part by technologies like fiber, capable of delivering information at 32 terabits per second, which would allow us to transmit the Library of Congress in a few seconds. This raises questions of whether we become a culture of storage, or of circulation.

Uricchio quickly namechecks some participatory phenomena:
- the creation of thousands of applications for the iPhone
- SETI@Home, an application of grid computing
- open source and commons production that makes Wikipedia possible
- crowdsourcing, which he characterizes as “group production privatized, for profit” through systems like Threadless.

Common to these all is the notion of the algorithm. He shows us Photosynth, the remarkable application that’s capable of creating rich 3D spaces from photos found on the web. Rather than building a space by building a model, the model emerges from the production of thousands of amateur photographers. “From Descartes to the moon shot, it’s been about specifying who’s the subject and who’s the object.” But that’s extremely unclear in the age of Photosynth. Who’s the agent making the picture? Whose perspective are we seeing? In a participatory age, we’re moving from an I to we. Our experience is experiential, not just spatial, and we need to reconsider how we look and see.

I had the realization the other day that the main way in which I procrastinate from the work I should be doing is by taking on other work that’s interesting, but not always necessary. So while I should be finishing a book proposal and authoring a couple of articles before succumbing to the challenges of new parenthood, I’m picking arguments with the transparency community and putting a new roof on sections of my house. In other words, I’m an idiot, just an idiot as described by Max Weber.

So rather than spending the next three days writing blog posts about topics that have fascinated me, let me offer links and a thought or two, in the hopes that perhaps you’ll write something and I can read it, and I can write the pieces I’m supposed to write.

The conversation about Lessig’s “Against Transparency” article is proving to be a lively one. New Republic has published four responses – pushbacks from David Weinberger, which I read in draft and which helped shape my thinking, and from Sunlight’s founders. The other two are from Jeffrey Rosen, who sees a role for the courts in mediating between secrecy and disclosure, and Tim Wu, who argues that the system’s too screwed up for transparency to help, and that the key is better leadership. Good, provocative stuff. Hope that Lessig will address some of Ellen, Michael and David’s pushbacks at some point soon.

The fine folks at the Nieman Journalism Lab have been taking a very close look at AP’s plans to save the news industry by ensuring that news content is accurately attributed and paid for. Basically, it’s a giant middle finger pointed up at Google and other entities AP believes unfairly aggregate and profit from their content. It’s got echoes of RIAA’s lawsuits and depends heavily on technology that AP admits doesn’t yet exist. Should be fun to watch this roll out.

Nieman did a great job of exploring AP’s “Protect, Point and Pay” plan in August, and I missed it, as I was blind at the time. I came across the plan and the Nieman analysis because Zachary Seward wrote up a fascinating talk by AP head Tom Curley to a group of journalists in Hong Kong. A note to Curley – if you find yourself saying, “We’re not actually that dumb” more than once in a Q&A session, you might, in fact, be that dumb.

Kiva, the online microfinance-promoting community, has received a great deal of (deservedly) laudatory attention over the past few years for driving a new set of “donors” into supporting microfinance – since people who give to Kiva are generally paid back, “donors” needs to be in quotes. Now Kiva’s coming under some scrutiny for glossing over some of the details in their model. In a great post on Center for Global Development’s website, David Roodman explains that “Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems“. You’re not actually lending money to the smiling entrepreneur in the picture – you’re lending money to the microfinance institution that has already lent to that entrepreneur.

This nuance has some commentators, like Roodman, drawing comparisons between Kiva and child sponsorship programs, which invited you to sponsor a child – who you received photos and letters from – while your funds went to sponsor community development programs. Roodman points out that some of these letters were faked, leading the development community to crack down on some of the worst offenders. A blog post from Saundra at Good Intentions are Not Enough titled “Deceptive advertising hurts the entire aid industry” comes out swinging, citing industry best practices that seem to contradict what Kiva is doing. And Tim Ogden has “Even More Questions about Kiva“, largely focused on the possibility that Kiva donors may be especially vulnerable to financial losses by microfinance institutions.

Kiva’s done a great job of communicating with participants and building widespread buzz and support for their work – should be very interesting to see how/whether they address these critiques.

Heard of OKCupid? If you’re a happily married guy, expecting a kid, (as I am) the safe answer to that question is “no”. (I asked Rachel, and she knew immediately. Hmm.) It’s a free online dating service that has marketed itself aggresively via LiveJournal and Facebook quizzes. And it’s clearly a company with a badass statistician somewhere in a senior position, as they’ve just released a pile of fascinating stats about communication between members, segmented by religion and race.

Basically, the data is normalized by “interest” – i.e, it’s looking at a set of people who have answered some common questions and should have a high interest in one another independent of demographic factors. OKCupid’s invisible, snarky statistician has then looked at who actually sends a message to another – i.e., what site users actually do when presented with a possible match – and grouped response rates on a matrix that looks at the reported racial origin of participants.

I expected a big “homophily line” down the center of these matrices, evidence that white people were more inclined to date white people, Asian people to date Asians, etc. What resulted is far more interesting. In quick summary:
- Men are much more likely to respond to an inquiry from a woman than vice versa. (Duh.)
- White men are much pickier about responding than men of color.
- Black women are more likely to respond to messages than any other women.
and lots of other weird, fascinating stuff, like an apparent fascination for Middle Eastern women by white men, and a mutual disinterest between Indian men and women.

As you can imagine, all comments on these stories – and on ReadWriteWeb’s overview article, “‘White Guys Suck’ & Other Insights from OKCupid Study on Race & Online Dating” – are polite, well-reasoned and civil. :-) Okay, they’re not, but they are fascinating, as is OKCupid’s discussion of religion and dating online.

And that’s what I’m not writing about. Hope you’ll pick up the slack.

• For Dodgers' interpreter, his job is a thrill beyond words — latimes.com
  Beautiful story about Kenji Nimura, the LA Dodgers trilingual interpreter. Classic bridge figure makes good tale…
  (tags: baseball translation bridgefigures xenophilia spanish japanese english)

Celebrated legal scholar, intellectual property activist and now congressional reformer Lawrence Lessig has written a provocative and somewhat surprising article in this month’s New Republic. Titled “Against Transparency“, the article questions whether a move towards increasing government transparency – as advocated by President Obama as a candidate and by nonprofit groups like the Sunlight Foundation – will lead towards better government or, as he fears, towards cynicism, disinterest and disengagement from the political process.

It’s a surprising essay not just because Lessig is on the advisory board of Sunlight, an organization that seems firmly in his crosshairs in this piece. (Not only does he open the piece with a story about a Sunlight Foundation project that Lessig doesn’t think will lead towards positive social change, he spends significant time through the piece analyzing Justice Brandeis’s quote “sunlight is … the best of disinfectants,” from which the Sunlight Foundation takes its name.) Lessig has been one of the leading thinkers exploring the future of cultural production in a digital age and firmly believes that laws and norms need to adapt to changes brought about by new technology. Why would Lessig – Lessig! – be pushing back against the well-meaning folks in the transparency movement who are trying to use new technologies to give all citizens access to government information?

Unfortunately, this essay isn’t Lessig’s most linear piece of argumentation. My friend David Weinberger offers a useful roadmap to the article. His is a more thorough overview of Lessig’s argument – I’ll offer my over-brief summary below, with a suggestion that you read both the original piece and David’s summary:

- The rise of digital tools and a push towards government transparency will lead to huge amounts of government data to be available online.

- It’s possible to misunderstand this data, especially data about lobbying and political campaign financing. It’s too easy to assume that because money changed hands that the money in question bought a vote.

- Because transparency efforts will lead us to conclude that our political system – and perhaps our medical system – are corrupt, they run the danger of creating a disengaged and cynical populous, the opposite of what transparency advocates want to create.

- Since money in politics can be a corrupting influence – and likely is in some fraction of the cases identified via transparency efforts – we should work towards public financing of congressional elections, not just making the current system more transparent.

So perhaps the argument is an “and”, not a “rather than” – transparency systems need not be bad things, but they’re unlikely to solve the American crisis of confidence in Congress by themselves. As Weinberger points out, we might embrace the transparency movement, but work to draw accurate conclusions from the data released, not just the hasty, knee-jerk ones Lessig worries we’ll make.

I was in agreement with Weinberger (as I so often am) until I got another, unrelated email. This came from my friend Mohammed Nanabhay, the head of New Media for Al Jazeera. He’d stumbled on an article on Freedom News, a blog with a strong right wing tone. The article was titled “Lawrence Lessig- Creative Commons & Obama Tech advisor ties 2 Mohamed Nanabhay”. Here’s my quick summary of that article:

- Lessig, who’s a tech advisor to “Barack Hussein Obama”, founded something called Creative Commons.

- Al Jazeera is a “client” of Creative Commons.

- Al Jazeera’s online presence is maintained by a guy named Mohamed Nanabhay, who has other presences online.

- In one of Nanabhay’s other online identities – his twitter feed – he posted a link to a story that could be (mis)read as being pro-Hamas.

I got forwarded the article because Mohamed found the allegedly pro-Hamas article from my Twitter feed. It’s by Gary Brecher, a regular columnist for Moscow newspaper, The Exiled, and while it’s blunt, raw and more than a little cynical, it’s hardly an endorsement of Hamas, Hezbollah or any other terrorist group, as the Freedom News article suggests.

But that doesn’t matter in the context of the Freedom News article. This form of connect-the-dots “journalism” makes arguments by connecting people you don’t know about (Lessig) to bad people you do know (Obama, Al Jazeera) and offering “proof” of those people’s badness via other people, places or media they’re connected with. The argument doesn’t work well unless you’re convinced of the presumptions behind it – unless you find Al Jazeera threatening, you’re unlikely to be particularly worried that Lessig’s project is being used by the network… and if you know anything about Creative Commons, you know that Larry’s got a lot of “clients”. (In case it’s not clear, I think that both Obama and Al Jazeera are the good guys, and support them, Lessig and all aspects of a pro-Marxist, anti-freedom, blame-America-first agenda.)

Of course, if Lessig’s secret pro-Hamas tendencies don’t convince you he’s a bad guy, here’s a Freedom News story about the video he presented at Google of Jesus getting hit by a bus. The video is pretty charming, actually, and it’s by Javier Prato. Lessig was making a point about the importance of fair use, as the clip relies on Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit, “I Will Survive.” But that’s not the point – Lessig is a evil monster who advocates that Jesus be revived, dressed in a diaper, paraded through Hollywood and hit by a Los Angeles bus. Should this man really be advising us on technology policy?

While the connect-the-dots strategy is common on some right wing blog sites, it’s becoming increasingly common across media. It was the basic strategy behind the Obama/Reverend Jeremiah Wright story: Obama is a member of Wright’s congregation and Wright is a bad guy, as evidenced by controversial comments he made about race, which means that Obama endorses everything Wright ever has and will say, and is therefore a racist, bad guy. This particular bit of connect-the-dots didn’t come from fringe bloggers – it was put forward by ABC News.

The left’s done its share of dot-connecting as well. They Rule was a prize-winning data visualization by Josh On, which showed the boards of directors of Fortune 500 corporations and made it easy for users to see which directors served on multiple boards, or which corporations had interlocking boards of directors. You might read interlocking directorship as an indication that certain skills are required to oversee the management of a company… or you might read it as evidence of a class of secretive oligarchs who control corporate America from the shadows. The title of the visualization and the portrayal of board members as men in suits who appear fatter if they’re serving on multiple boards, might prompt the latter response.

The problem with connect-the-dots is not that it’s a bad journalism technique – much excellent investigative journalism has been done by connecting the dots. The danger is that it’s an easy technique to misuse, and you’re more likely to misuse it if you’ve got an axe to grind. Perhaps the scariest form of misuse I know of today is taking place in Iran, where interrogators are forcing confessions from political prisoners, knitting together details from their lives into complex conspiracy theories centered on the recent green revolution. These narratives are based on real-world connections – they have an air of truth because the interpersonal relationships are real ones – but the motives implied are manufactured to support a paranoid and conspiratorial worldview. Omid Memarian, an Iranian blogger and independent journalist, has been imprisoned and forced to confess and explains to This American Life that he was forced by his interrogators to recast the actual details of his life into paranoid fantasy worthy of a Tom Clancy novel.

Lessig points out that transparency tools promise to generate a great deal more information that can lead towards dot-connecting exposés. Some of these are likely to lead to valuable journalistic followups – others may reveal connections that look improper but turn out to have reasonable explanation. Lessig offers a story about Hillary Clinton’s changing stance on a bankruptcy bill. Lessig shows us how Clinton’s position changed, first in influencing her husband’s decision as First Lady, and then voting twice as a Senator. He points out that there might be good reasons for Clinton to have changed her opinion (perhaps the fact that she was representing the state that hosts Wall Street), but notes that the knowledge that Clinton took $140,000 in contributions from the credit card industry tend to eliminate any doubts in a reader’s mind. We’re all good Wu-Tang Clan disciples – we assume that cash rules, and that Clinton’s vote was based on the contributions, not on any other possible factors.

Lessig’s argument might be stronger if he was able to explain why Clinton voted the way she did, independent of possible financial influence. Instead, he ducks, suggesting instead that we’re unlikely to really want the long explanation, citing “attention-span problems”, which he sees as systematic and likely to damage the body politic by removing context from connections and correlations. In other words, even if there were a good explanation for Clinton’s actions, we’d probably miss it, because our attention span leads us to accept a believable connection, even if it’s not the accurate connection.

I hope Lessig’s wrong, because if he’s right, even campaign finance reform won’t save us from the excesses of connecting the dots and guilt by association. Make every political campaign publicly financed, and we’ll still find connections that make us suspicious and mistrustful. We’ll pay more attention to who congresspeople meet with, where they spend their time, what jobs they accept after leaving office. Some of those correlations will be newsworthy and worth investigating – others will be coincidental and explainable by other factors, including a congressperson’s interest in the issues. If we tend to pay attention to sensational explanations, or explanations that align with our ideological preferences, and discount more reasonable, more thought through explanations, we’re in real danger of losing faith in our government, because the trend towards increased transparency is likely to be irreversible.

Carl Malamud, a constant advocate for access to US government data, writes in response to Lessig, arguing that Lessig’s article isn’t an attack on the transparency movement, but a need to locate transparency in a larger framework of good governance efforts. Malamud, like Lessig, quotes Brandeis: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

In other words, while we should embrace the tools that allow us to connect dots (the blogs, the databases, the fruits of the transparency movement), we are challenged to understand the dangers of our own zeal, as well as that of those that surround us. The solution is not to fight against transparency, or even for the reform of campaign finance – it’s to understand that a world in which we can all connect dots and share our zeal, we all need to learn how to read and listen in a way that’s careful, cautious and skeptical, especially when the data we see leads to the conclusions we’d like to draw.

• ESPN – OTL: Seats Of Gold – E-ticket
  Extremely good piece of sportswriting. Writer spends $1200 to sit in a "Legends seat" at Yankee stadium, uses occasion to explore the economics of Yankees ticket pricing, suggests that the team may have finally "harvested" the golden goose.
  (tags: sport baseball economy pricing essay sportswriting)

I’m reading Paul Collier’s controversial new “Wars, Guns and Votes” (NYTimes review), where the brilliant development economist addresses the uncomfortable question, “What if democracy doesn’t bring prosperity to very poor nations?” Collier’s research suggests that autocracies are more likely to protect citizens from political violence up to an income level of $2700 per capita, at which point democracies function better. I’m not deep enough into Collier’s book to address concerns about his thesis or suggested interventions – though I’m looking forward to reading these responses from Mutuma Ruteere in Kenya and from a team of development economists writing in the Boston Review - but I’m already struck by the power of Collier’s core argument.

Collier posits that what we see in many underdeveloped nations isn’t democracy but “democrazy”, an adoption of some of the most visible trappings of democracy (most notably elections) without the underlying structures (free press, independent electoral commissions, educated electorate, post-ethnic political structures) that make it possible to have functional elections. By overemphasizing the importance of elections (remember the Bush administration’s drive towards elections in Iraq, or the Obama administration’s push towards the deeply flawed Afghan election?), we may nurture political structures that aren’t democratic and which reward certain types of electoral fraud and abuse.

I was thinking of this as I looked at a project launched by my friend and colleague, Sami ben Gharbia. Sami is the head of Global Voices Advocacy, the free speech arm of Global Voices, and he’s a passionate advocate for political and human rights reform in his homeland, which he’s been exiled from. In anticipation of Tunisia’s presidential and parliamentary elections on October 25th, he’s launched Babtounes.com, a lovely tool to aggregate and visualize online conversations – most notably Twitter conversations – about the Tunisian elections. The tool uses a WordPress blog and Juitter to aggregate several searches against the Twitter database and give a one-stop shop for watching that online conversation.

Sami knows full well who’s going to win the election. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has held power since 1987, when as prime minister, he impeached Habib Bourguiba, the first president of an independent Tunisia. (Wikipedia uses the wonderful term “a medico-legal coup,” as Ben Ali had Bourguiba declared medically unfit to serve.) Ben Ali has “won” “elections” in 1999 and 2004, with margins of 99.66% and 94.48% of the vote, and his victory in 2009 will likely be by a similar majority.

An essay in the Arab Reform Bulletin by Hamadi Redissi helps explain why the election outcome isn’t much in doubt. The country’s electoral system gives 75% of parliamentary seats to a party that wins a simple majority in elections. Since Presidential and parliamentary elections are held simultaneously, you need only rig one election every five years and you’ve got unrivalled control of the country. You can use that control to limit candidate lists (Socialist challenger Dr. Mustapha Benjaafar was excluded from the 2009 election through interpretation of a requirement that a candidate be the elected leader of his party for two years before elections) – there are only three candidates running against Ben Ali, and two have made it clear that they’re not interested in being president, simply in demonstrating support for the electoral system. Being in power also gives you control of the state media, and allows you to oversee the election through the Interior Ministry – there is no independent electoral commission.

So, if the election is fait acompli, why watch? My guess is that Sami is watching so that we understand precisely how the election was stolen, so that activists can challenge the legitimacy of Ben Ali for another five years, and so that they can demand a reform before Ben Ali’s successor runs in 2014, or the old man changes the constitution to allow a sixth term. But the other reason might be to try to maintain interest in politics in the face of an electorate that has become – understandably – cynical and disinterested. Magharebia writes about the use of Facebook in Tunisian elections – that Ben Ali’s Facebook group has received only 6,000 members seems remarkably low to me. Perhaps it reflects the sort of disinterest expressed in this (deeply sarcastic) poem by Nakhlet Oued el-Bey (Translation by Mona Yahia for Magharebia):

The nation cast their votes transparently and with freedom of speech
Having discussed programs and issues of destiny.
Results were soon announced with no cheating or forgery.
Having gone through ballots,
It turns out that people’s main concern is bills
And their only wish is to save some dinars.
They are after a life with no thought or debate,
Except about the championship and who the Cup will go to.

Fair enough. There’s a lot more drama in the World Cup than there will be in the upcoming Tunisian elections. But that doesn’t excuse people who care about the future of human rights and democracy in North Africa from watching.