Plutocrats and the New Soviet Union

One of the joys of reading blogs is that you get to follow writers who are focussed on one particular area, and who, as a result of that almost monastic concentration, are able to produce insights of sudden insight unavailable to otherwise skilled wordsmiths who write more generalist pieces.

Here's one such gem that caught me by surprise as I finally came across it in my overburdened RSS reader:

an extreme concentration of wealth at the center of our market economy has led to a form of central planning. The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy. As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces. A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth. The result was inevitable: gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.

...

The result of central planning in the US has finally hit the wall. The list of problems is endless. The misallocations range from the dangerous $600 trillion derivatives market to the destruction of the US middle class (by exporting jobs and the substitution of income with debt).

Oh, yes; of course.

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Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, We Salute You

Think about it.

El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido

As RMS has always emphasised, free software is political, because it is essentially about liberty. Openness and transparency are also political - just look at how the ruling classes fight them. But beyond that, I find myself wondering how the ideas behind free software can be applied more directly in terms of changing the world.

One way is to take the idea of collaboration, and apply it at the simplest level: sharing information and uniting voices for or against something. That's the basic intent of the site Avaaz.org:

Coming together in this way, Avaaz has become a wonderful community of people from all nations, backgrounds, and ages. Our diverse community is brought together by our care for the world, and a desire to do what we can to make it a better place. The core of our model of organizing is our email list, operated in 13 languages. By signing up to receive our alerts, you are rapidly alerted to urgent global issues and opportunities to achieve change. Avaaz members respond by rapidly combining the small amounts of time or money they can give into a powerful collective force. In just hours we can send hundreds of thousands of messages to political leaders telling them to save a crucial summit on climate change , hold hundreds of rallies across the world calling for action to prevent a genocide, or donate hundreds of thousands of euros, dollars and yen to support nonviolent protest in Burma.

It's hard to tell how much good this kind of thing does, but the investment of time is so minimal that it's a bit like Pascal's Wager: worth doing however low the rate of return.

But beyond this kind of Concerned Letter-Writing 2.0, how can the technologies of connection be harnessed to do something more practical? Like this, maybe:

When Estonians regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991 they not only acquired new political freedoms, they inherited a mass of rubbish – thousands and thousands of tonnes of it scattered across illegal dumping sites around the country. When concerned citizens decided that the time had come to clean it up, they turned not to the government, but to tens of thousands of their peers.

Using a combination of global positioning systems and GoogleMaps, two entrepreneurs (Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nolvak) enlisted volunteers to plot the location of over 10,000 illegal dump sites, including detailed descriptions and photos. That, in itself, was ambitious. Phase II of the clean-up initiative was, by their own admission, rather outrageous: clean-up upwards of 80% of the illegal sites in one day, using mass collaboration.

So, on May 3rd, over 50,000 people scoured fields, streets, forests and riverbanks across the country, picking up everything from tractor batteries to paint tins.... Much of this junk was ferried to central dumps, often in the vehicles of volunteers.

Only connect.

Chinese Whispers

One of my hobbies is to try to spot the emergence of unintended consequences of major events. The classic, perhaps, is the fall of the Communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which was supposed to be a victory that showed the West's strength, but turned out instead to make our lives hugely less safe. Here's another - and a profound one at that:

Just as damaging for China in the long run, however, may be the effect on ordinary citizens. One place the Tibetan flag no longer flies is in the window of a bed shop in the English city of Sheffield. Its owner is a Tibetan sympathiser, who displayed the flag last month. Two young Chinese, apparently students, visited and made threats. That night his windows were smashed. A celebration supposed to mark China's emergence as a friendly global power has made some people think for the first time that its rise is something to fear.

Only a whisper at the moment, but I predict it will become a fearsome - and fearful - roar before long.

Microsoft is Losing the Battle...and Losing It

Microsoft must be either really desperate or desperately out of touch with both reality and the prevailing perceptions of its actions if it can allow one of its apologists to write stuff like this:

With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I thought the days of property expropriation in Europe were over. Now I wonder, following the European Commission's latest policy twist in its interminable case against Microsoft.

To say nothing of this:

This is not a dispute about the goal of interoperability, as such. At the limit, Microsoft's detractors and many of its competitors would only be satisfied with disclosures that allowed them to clone its software outright, free of charge. Formally, of course, this is not on the table. But the unilateral voiding of standard intellectual property rights, coupled with nominal royalties for a company's innovation and knowhow, are a close approximation.

Well, no, actually: it is all about interoperability. People want access to the APIs - the surface of the black box - so that the innards can be recreated using completely different code, not "cloned".

What's heartening is the generally intelligent level of comments on what is a sadly unsubtle piece of puffery.