Rational Points on a Napkin

The Story of Stuff

I was introduced to a video yesterday about our production and consumption of goods. The Story of Stuff was brilliantly done, surprisingly leaving me in an inspired mood. It tied different breakdowns I now see into one large story, the story of consumption.

Besides posting about this video, which I suggest you watch, I also wanted to take a moment for reflection and to share new declarations in my life.

As I've become more aware of "Sarah the consumer", I have changed my habits in a few ways:

1. I try to buy locally whenever I can, whether food stuff or products. My mission this holiday season was to get all my gifts from local Berkeley artisans. And I did. I bought fewer gifts, of higher quality, and I felt...joyful. It was such a better experience spending a day walking around Berkeley and Oakland shopping at small vendors than going to a large mall and crowding into stores to get “stuff” and “more stuff.”

2. I try to no longer buy cheap goods. If something costs more, it is often of higher quality, and will last longer. My ultimate goal as I settle down is to buy very few things for my house, but to invest a lot of money in them. I take better care of those things which are dearer to me. This will also mean that I will consume less “stuff” over my lifetime.

3. I have moved off of “toxic” household cleaners and toiletries and on to natural products. We live in a society that dumps toxins into our world, without thought or care to what we are doing. As I've become an observer of this and called it a waste, continuing along this path is no longer an option for me.

I'm hoping that where previous generations have had the notion of “the American Dream” and the “white picket fence,” my generation will question this and come up with new answers. Most Americans do not have the white picket fence; that number continues to decrease as the middle class shrinks. We have numerous breakdowns caused by the way our society lives. I would love to be involved in a generation that resolves many of these breakdowns, creating a sustainable, less materialistic, and happier life for us.

Lessig's Speech at iSummit '07

Upon discussion with my friends, I have finally posted Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig's speech at the iCommons iSummit this summer. It is an eloquent speech where he begins with the question of respect for the Open Culture movement and the difference between the "commercial economy" and the "sharing economy." The last five minutes of the speech contain his declaration for the next 10 years of his life, to devote himself to corruption, what he calls the "economy of influence."

Conservative and Liberal Are No Longer Relevant

In the past year, my eyes have been opened to corruption, not as a part of our system, which we can find a way to cut out, but as an inseparable weave of the whole. This perspective has come from conversations with others, including in The Wealth of Networks, in my Assignment Zero interview with a State Representative of Utah, and in conversations with colleagues. For me, this is the most important problem worth considering when talking about our political system and issues in the upcoming election. Lawrence Lessig, in his post about Clinton and the problems with her connection to lobbyists, distinguishes between two forms of corruption..."not corruption in the bribe sense. But corruption in the economy of influence sense I've described before." I also am choosing this latter sense and would like to distinguish this form of corruption as something that cannot be used in a partisan sense.

Our current distinctions about politicians or political organizations do not allow us to get to the real problem that is plaguing the ideals of this country and our practical spaces for taking care of these ethics. We label people as conservative or a liberal or a moderate. This labels them as "good" or "evil," based on our check mark for a party affiliation on our voter registration sheet. However, this labelling is misleading and disorients us from actually good and bad politicians. My definition of a good politician is that person whose practices enrich the Commons. A bad politician is the opposite: a person whose practices pillage the Commons.

An example of enriching our Communal spaces: A politician who sees him/herself as a provider to his customers (the citizens who elect them) and continually works to refine and improve his service to them. An inspirational example for me is again Steve Urquhart, Republican State Congressman of Utah (see above for link).

An example of pillaging the Commons: using our Communal spaces, such as our natural resources, which we all own, and producing a toxic product that we pay you for while adding pollutants into our Communal space.

In order to deal with these problems, we can redistinguish our wastes. And that comes to moving from, "I support liberals" or "I support conservatives," to "I support those politicians that will take care of the Communal spaces we share."

Code 2.0 and The Constraints on Liberty

I finally read all of Lawrence Lessig's Code 2.0. It was a brilliant book. Lessig shows how the Internet is moving from a "space beyond regulation" to the most regulable space we have every had. He also shows how the new technology is producing "latent ambiguities" or questions of value that our Constitution never addressed due to the technological space of the day. (I will have another post about this soon.) And he ends with why we are stuck as a society to make choices about what values we will carry into the future, and what can be done about it.

Below, and in future posts, I'm going to write on a few things that struck me from the book. I'm sure there are many experts that have given more insightful reviews of the book than I will do here, but I don't pretend to be a lawyer, a hacker, or an expert in this domain. I plan to just show who I am and how this book has shaped and changed my world.

First, I suggest reading Chapter 7 (beginning on page 120) of the book, if you don't read anything else. A CC-licensed downloadable pdf version is here. This chapter is about liberty and what things constrain our liberty.

Lessig brings forth four modes of regulation on our liberties:

• The Law


• The Market


• Norms


• and Architecture.

The same constraint can be obtained through any of the four modalities or a combination of them. An example Lessig gives is smoking. The law can make it illegal to buy cigarettes under the age of 18; norms can regulate smoking by making it rude to light up a cigarette in the car without asking permission first; the market regulates through price and quality; and the architecture of cigarettes, such as nicotine-treated versus smokeless ones, offer different levels of constraint. If a modality decreases our choice in this example, it constrains us more. And we work through these modalities. If we want people to smoke less, we can pass a law that places a higher tax on cigarettes, increasing market price.

These four modalities shape the constraints and freedoms in cyberspace. A major difference to physical space is that the architecture of the Internet, the code, is a much more powerful regulator of liberty than real space architecture. Architecture is a constraint that is in place before we arrive at a site. If AOL has complaints from its online community about foul language in forums, the programmers can easily write some code to begin tracking the conversations in its forums. If China wants to prevent certain images or sites from appearing on Google, a few programmers can write some code. Every space on the Internet regulates through code and it is happening quite often in an intransparent way. Governments and companies can indirectly regulate us through code, indirect regulation being that we won't know "who" is regualting is. Also, if the code is closed source, we (or at least the small part of the national community that understands and builds code) will not be able to see how this code regulates.

I want to end by saying that I have found Lessig's distinctions useful not just with the Internet but in my political conversations with others. First, while libertarians and some conservatives are concerned with government as "the threat to liberty," liberals are concerned with the market. But by remaining stuck in vilifying one entity as the transcendental threat -- the "evil corporation" or the "big bureacracy" -- we miss the whole. And finally, transparency is the key. As Lessig said, "If transparency is a value in constitutional government, indirection is its enemy. It confuses responsibility and hence confuses politics."

Obama Requests Democratic Debates Go CC

I found this article on digg about Obama requesting for the recent debates to be licensed under a Creative Commons License. Super cool.

Saddam Hussein killed

Saddam Hussein was executed at 7:05 pm PT. I have been watching this on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News since then.

And while there is rejoicing at this prospect among various individuals, and without ignoring the relief/emotions of those whose lives have been affected by Saddam Hussein, I am bothered, not so much by the event, but more by the coverage of it. The news is framing "Saddam Hussein" with too much simplicity. It does not discuss how we Americans are also culpable for his tyranny. In the late 50s/early 60s, the CIA (i.e. We) helped put Saddam in power. Qassim, the current ruler of the time, was anti-American and anti-corporatist. The first assassination attempt in 1959 was carried out by Saddam Hussein (supported by the CIA), and a CIA-led coup and assassination finally took out Qassim in 1963, putting Saddam's Ba'ath party in power.

The news stations are only talking about the Saddam Hussein as if he was one man alone who came to power and ruled as an evil dictator. This is an immoral act of our media, which should exist to educate, unsettle, and shape our consciousness in a democratic and ethical fashion. They could be using this moment to help all of us Americans examine our involvement as a world power in various coups, assassinations, and dictatorships. Instead, they keep us tranquilized, let us continue to lead our unexamined lives, and allow us to remain criminally oblivious to the consequences of our actions as individuals and a nation.

Update: On NPR's January 2 Democracy Now!, John Collins mentioned how CNN framed this event. This is the first time I had heard any conversation about the role of the mainstream media in the coverage of the event. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.

Dependency in Congress

Lawrence Lessig had a short post in Wired's Nov 2006 issue. In it, he discusses an e-mail he got from a colleague in which the colleague made repeated assurances that, in his comments about net neutrality, he was representing no one other than himself and his scholarly frame.

It is a one-page snippet in which Lessig proclaims that this idea of neutrality is interesting in a political world of dependency. He says that the US Congress is no longer acting in a manner laid out by the countries' founders in that they are not in-dependent. According to Lessig, the founders believed "a citizen was considered dependent when he was not free to act in the public good because his own well-being depended on a particular result. `Nondependency' meant being able to choose what was right, without worrying about personal consequences-no agenda other than a democratic one."

The rest of the article discusses how almost all of Congress is now indebted to lobbyists who are supporting a cause for financial gain. He claims that anyone in Congress to see otherwise is seen as strange and naïve. And so far, the losers in industries (tech) have been the ones who have been more focused on innovation than on sucking up to Congress.

According to Lessig, however, the losers are the future. (He doesn't expand on this here, even though I wish he did, but he does say that a poor view of progress is that "protecting the past is the best path to the future.")

My first reaction to the article was disappointment. I found his distinction about dependency interesting, because I didn't know the founders had thought about this phenomenon. However, he did not offer any answers. He called for Congress to be more like the courts, an institution that has still retained their ethic of independence, but my initial reaction was, "What is the point of this article? Asking individuals (corrupt or otherwise) to do something which is perceived as not in their best interests will not work."

However, as I let the article sit more, I realized Lessig's purpose might be something different than a direct call to Congress. His piece, which opens up a lot of questions and gives no answers, could be to open up a conversation. And to do so in Wired is interesting as well. My impression is that subscribers to Wired are active individuals, either in business or technology or both. They are the coders involved in the Open Source phenomenon, innovators following and leading in the development of new practices and products to improve and enhance society. Perhaps Lessig's article is an entreat/reminder/suggestion to bring these knowledgeable and concerned individuals into the political sphere as well.