COMMONS MAGAZINE
You’ve heard about the new iPod video player and believe me, this is big. Now kids will be able to watch movies behind their textbooks in class. They’ll have another way to sit in the back seat and ignore their parents on family car trips. I mean, we wouldn’t want parents and kids actually to talk with one another.
The must-read of the day is FCC Commissioner Michael Copps’ statement concurring in the decision to allow the SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI mergers. Copps believes that more conditions should have been placed on the merged entities. He also blames his own agency for the lack of competition in the market for telecommunications services.
If you want to understand the titanic struggle between reactionary Old Media business models and the counterintuitive models of the emerging networked environment, look no further than Google Print Library Project. This ambitious, innovative effort aims to digitize millions of library books and make them “discoverable” by Internet users through Google keyword searches.
As environmentalists continue to slog away – with diminishing success – against a market juggernaut that continues to commodify nature at every turn, many people are starting to wonder: Has environmentalism lost its way? This fear was catalyzed last year by the controversial “ Death of Environmentalism” essay, which many enviros lambasted as exaggerated and simplistic and others hailed as a much-needed kick-in-the-pants for a stodgy movement in need of fresh leadership.
One of the great “discoveries” of the Net over the last decade has been the power of rating systems in affecting trust and the willingness of people to make purchases online. Yet the power of rating and reputation systems were not so much invented on the Net as “revealed,” because rating and reputation system are a natural and universal artifact of all forms of human cooperation.
Since self-organizing social networks are dynamic and evolving, any analysis must take account of intersubjective and fluid relationships. Everything is constantly in flux. In order to understand how online networks direct and control themselves, it is necessary to treat the types of interactions and exchanges as different types of links.
Not ten years ago, the accepted wisdom was that the Net was neither safe for significant transactions nor would people trust those whom they had not physically met. It was further assumed that the Net was the province of techies and that it would never become a consumer, global medium.
Last night the wife said,
bq. “Oh boy, when you’re dead
bq. You don’t take nothing with you
bq. But your soul – think!”
For contemporary economists, most economic behavior revolves around aggression and self-interest. These social emotions are considered the primary drivers of the market. This emphasis, unfortunately, neglects the extremely influential role played by empathy and reciprocity in our economy and in society more generally. New discoveries in neuroscience are revealing just how primary these emotions are in all aspects of our lives.
Over at Stay Free!, one of my favorite blogs, Jason Torchinsky has proposed a brilliant new unit of measurement: the “Walt Scale” of crass commercialism. Think about it: we have Nielsen ratings for levels of TV viewership, “Q” ratings for the likability of celebrities, and hedonics analysis to put a price tag on pleasure denied. In physics, there are ohms and ergs and rems.
One of the most disturbing traits of human beings is their behavior in crowds and mobs. Seemingly rational and compassionate individuals, when placed into a group and acting as a collective, can assume a monstrous group personality. This dynamic is not confined to the “madness of crowds” situations, but can be found in the “groupthink” of a distinguished board of directors who approve actions that they individually know to be wrong, but seem incapable of checking when acting as a group member.
There is a grim symmetry to the gasoline act that recently passed the House of Representatives, in particular the provision to make old military bases available for oil refineries. Take land once used to defend the nation, and use it to feed the habit that makes much of that defense necessary.
Should nations and indigenous peoples be able to protect their cultures against the global market power of Hollywood, American TV and pop music? Tomorrow, the 190 nations that belong to Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) will vote on a treaty to authorize precisely that. Every Unesco-member nation except one is expected to support the treaty, ponderously known as the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression.
In economics, arguments about the power of self-interest vs. cooperation are often based on moral grounds. Polemicists cite the role of each in contributing to the common good, or to a person’s moral character, and so forth. But from an evolutionary perspective, the question is quite different: Does a given attribute represent an “evolutionary stable strategy” – i.e., does it contribute to a species’ evolutionary “fitness” in a stable, persistent way over time? Does it enhance a group’s survivability?
In recent years, the story of the scientific commons has been chiefly one of enclosure: the privatization of research, new limits of how knowledge may flow, and worsening ethical conflicts of interest. But now, surprisingly, there is a burst of good news.
Thanks to a variety of innovations in Internet-based software and networking, academic scientists are laying the foundation for new online genres of sharing and collaboration. I call this neglected trend the “renaissance of the science commons.”
Were all the artifices of civilization stripped away from Human Nature, what would be left? Is there an irreducible essence of what it means to be human? There are really no satisfactory answers to these kinds of questions. The problem is not that humankind did not evolve in a vacuum, but rather human beings are born incomplete. There is a deep evolutionary expectation that, as humans interact with other human beings and their environment, certain developmental responses are triggered. Some are predetermined, and some are not.
Whenever I read critiques about the spiritual emptiness of consumerism and mass culture — familiar diagnoses that are more or less accurate — I often come away feeling discouraged. After all, the splashy superficiality of consumer culture is the pervasive reality of our lives. It is always available, highly developed and utterly normative. By contrast, a wholesome and viable alternative is ill-defined. It tends to be a grab-bag of “don’t“s — a set of negatives that invite cynicism, not a coherent and compelling “positive” that is inspiring on its own terms.
Some seventy percent of the earth’s surface consists of oceans, and we all own it. But getting access to what we own isn’t always easy. Or even possible.
Here’s the basic math. Half the population of the U.S. lives within 50 miles of the coast. But 70% of coastal land is privately owned; and the percentage is increasing all the time. A relatively small group of private owners constitutes a blockade to a much larger group of common owners. What gives?
Roughly 197,000 of humankind’s 200,000 years on Earth have been consumed by surviving the raw challenges of Nature: disease, famine, climate, natural disasters, and fellow predators. The multiple colorations, shapes, weights, and immune systems of the races of mankind reflect 200,000 years of opportunistic adaptations. Just 60,000 years ago, the continued survival of homo sapiens was in question, dependent upon the luck and pluck of just 200 ancestors. Only within the last five hundred years, just 0.25% of the human record, did the population of humankind exceed 500 million.