The Great Seduction

A liberal Islamic conspiracy

A couple of weeks ago, I predicted that Christopher Hitchens would be crowned the world's top public intellectual in the tri-annual online Prospect Magazine poll. As usual, I was wrong. The current front-runner is  Fethullah Gulen, a modernizing Islamic cleric barely known outside his native Turkey. As I reveal in today's Independent, the obscure Gulen has built up an unnaturally large (10x) lead over his nearest challenger. Such is the wisdom of the digital crowd. Or so it appears, anyway.

I'm actually all in favor of enlightened liberal cleric like Fethullah Gulen who is obviously doing a heroic job bridging the giant gulf between Islamic and Christian worlds. My problem, however, is with Gulen's less enlightened followers who, no less obviously, have obviously been busy rigging the Prospect poll. It's just one more irrefutable example of how anonymous online democracy doesn't work.

Speaking of Islamic controversies, I was in Copenhagen last week, the epicenter of the 2005 Danish newspaper controversy over cartoon representations of the Prophet Mohammed. I flew in to do an interview on the popular Danish public tv show Den 11.time. Great city, great interview, great public broadcasting system, great open sandwiches.

And speaking of interviews, read my chat with WPP boss Martin Sorrell for my Independent column earlier this week. Then wearing my less objective interviewee hat, listen to a wide ranging conversation I had with Interactive TV Today's Tracy Swedlow.

Flintstones rather than Jetsons: The End of America?

Just back from New York City, where I flew in and out of JFK on my way to and from Manhattan. According to John Gapper in this morning's Financial Times, I just had the misfortune of travelling on The Pot-Holed Highway to hell. Gapper is echoing the New York Times' Thomas Friedman's argument that America is facing an infrastructure crisis from hell:

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

And here's Gapper on the journey from JFK to Manhattan: 

If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

So, are Friedman and Gapper right? Is America becoming more third than first world?

I certainly didn't have a third world experience earlier this week. Traveling on a spankingly new Jet Blue Airbus 320 jet from Oakland, I arrived at JFK 30 minutes early, where I read about the imminent "ultramodern" Terminal Five (with free internet access and lots of space for kids to play). I then braved a cab ride into the city. It took me 45 minutes and I spent the whole journey unbumpily doing my email via my broadband Sprint USB modem. In NYC, I headed to immaculate Grand Central Station where I took a quick train to Connecticut. Then, the following afternoon, on my return to JFK, I spent the whole cab ride on my cellphone catching up to friends around the world.

Now, I would much prefer the Heathrow Express to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway?  Of course. And, yes, even Grand Central Station pales in comparison to Berlin's fabulous new train station. But I do have a suspicion that Friedman and Gapper are falling prey to fashionable hyperbole about American decline. Bashing America has become all-too-easy in the dismal gloom of Bush's last few months in office. And I suspect that this pessimism will suddenly lift after November 4th, when the majority of Americans will be celebrating an Obama presidency.

Anyway, I'm off to Korea and Thailand next week. I wonder whether I'll be greeted by Jetson or Flintstone infrastructure.

Americans are not who they think they are

What do Americans want? According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, they have an "overwhelming hunger" for something called "nation-building". Americans, he thinks, recognize their own national malaise -- the infrastructural crisis, the financial debt, the absence of political leadership. To rebuild America, Friedman believes, requires the values of our parents' generation: "work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means". But this, he recognizes, is a complicated message that requires a special messenger. So, Friedman asks, who will tell the people the bad news?

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

The Friedman argument is intriguing. He is the messenger to the special messenger. He is suggesting that "Americanness" is defined by a common misreading of its people's own identity. The bad news is that Americans are living a lie. But the good news, he says, is that Americans are ready for the truth, ready to finally face themselves.

Oh dear: we are not who we think we are. So what, exactly, do Americans think that they are? What are the illusions that they hold in common? What deludes Americans?

It's such an illuminating question that I'd like to come up with my own equally illuminating answer. So, tomorrow, I'm flying to New York City to hook up with a film crew. And, on Wednesday afternoon, we'll go out onto the highly unrepresentative streets of Manhattan to discover the lie/truth about who those poor deluded Americans think they really are. 

Hardly scientific, I admit. But a start, at least, to the great question of our age: What has become of America?

Is new media is killing journalism?

Just back from London where I participated in UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day Debate: "New Media is Killing Journalism" with the BBC World Service and Radio 4's Robin Lustig, Kim Fletcher (ex editor-in-chief of the Sunday Independent) and the Iranian journalist Nazenin Ansari. To get an overview of my argument, see my piece in Guardian Unlimited. The event, held at London's venerable Frontline Club, was sold-out. You can check out the whole debate on the Frontline or UNESCO's UK website.

A word of warning, though. I lost. My argument that new media is indeed killing journalism wasn't popular. I teamed up with Kim Fletcher and we were crushed by the Lustig and Ansari team. We got less than 20% of the wise Frontline club audience vote who decided that new media is not, in fact, killing journalism. Lustig, in particular, performed with his trademark brilliance. That this radio icon, who epitomizes the best of old media, should be arguing in favor of the democratized Internet, might be seen as slightly ironic. But then again, my own role as the amateur defender of professional journalism is also a bit paradoxical.

Is Facebook really worth $15 billion?!?

Confession time. Here's what I dream about at night:

Every wannabe media mogul has had this fantasy. You’ve won the lottery of lotteries and now have a cool $15 billion ($15,000,000,000) sitting in your bank account. So what media company would you buy?

READ ON to learn why Facebook's $15 billion valuation is the most absurd economic digital development since AOL backed into Time Warner at the climax of the Web 1.0 irrational exuberance.

Web 1.0 + Web 2.0 = Web 3.0

Yes, I've seen the future of the Internet and it is summarized by the most prosaic of arithmetical truths: Web 1.0 + Web 2.0 = Web 3.0. The future of the Internet is the combination of the traditional media expertise of Web 1.0 media with the user-generated democracy of the Web 2.0 revolution. That represents the best of all worlds and is manifested by the deal announced on Wednesday in Frankfurt between Bertelsmann and Wikipedia.

Bertelsmann is, of course, the quintessential authoritative media company -- the German owned international empire of publishing houses (Random House), record labels (BMG), magazine publishers (Gruner & Jahr) and broadcasting companies (RTL Group). The user-generated information website Wikipedia, in contrast -- with its absence of central authorities, controls or formal editors -- is the anti Bertelsmann media company.

So what happens when you combine the best of Bertelsmann and Wikipedia?

You get Bertelsmann's plan to publish the German version of Wikipedia's content in a one-volume physical book. Now, of course, the current information on the German language Wikipedia site would fill a multi-volume set of encyclopedias. So what the deal involves is editors at the Bertelsmann subsidary Wissen Media acting as the expert curators of Wikipedia's user-generated content. Professional editors, then, will pick 50,000 commonly researched keywords from the 740,000 entries on Wikipedia and then standardize these entries as short definitions in what will be called a Lexical Yearbook which will sell for 20 euros.

Rather than the Lexical, maybe they should call it the Lyrical Yearbook. It certainly represents a lyrical marriage of the best of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. What I particularly like about the deal is that 1 euro from every Yearbook sale will be donated to Wikimedia Deutschland. I just hope that the Germans figure out a way to financially reward Wikipedia editors for their labor.

This Lexical Yearbook -- and not unrealisable abstractions like the Semantic Web -- is the real commercial future of the Internet. Web 1.0 + Web 2.0 = Web 3.0. The future, then, is a mash-up of Bertelsmann and Wikipedia. Everybody wins. Trust the practical Germans to transform clever American innovation into viable commercial product. Now can we expect a similar deal between The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the blogosphere to produce a a paper newsblog?

Bomb Hillary

Last October, at the memorable News Xchange event in Berlin, the British broadcaster Jon Snow argued that "one of the greatest responsibilities to humanity" is for us, as news media, to report Iran accurately. He was right then and he's even more correct now.

So where is the news media (Krugman?) in response to Hillary Clinton's remarks this week about obliterating Iran? Who is methodically thinking about the consequences of these words:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran... We would be able to totally obliterate them"?

Iran is a republic slightly larger than Alaska (1,648 million sq km) with a population of 66 million. Over 7 million Iranians are under 14. The average age of Iranians is 26.4 years-old. 51% of the people of Iran are of Persian ethnicity, the other major ethnic groups include Azeris (24%), Gilaki and Mazandarani (8%),  Kurds (7%) and Arabs (3%). 98% of Iranians are Moslem (Shia 89%, Sunni 9%), the rest are Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and Baha'i. 58% of Iranians speak Persian, the majority of the rest speak Turkic (26%), Kurdish (7%) and Arabic (3%). That's a lot of people, languages, religions and cultures.

Is this what Hillary wants to obliterate?

I used to support her, but this is a sentence too far for me.  She is transforming herself into Hirohito's Japan in the late summer of 1945. Maybe we need to incinerate her before she obliterates all of us.

 

80% of success is just switching on

How to explain Apple's 51% jump in Mac sales for Q1 of 2008?  When asked yesterday to make sense of the 2.3 million Mac computers sold in the first three months of this year, Steve Jobs was uncharacteristically humble:

“We’re not economists, so we don’t have any more insight than everyone else, but there were sure a lot of people in our stores last quarter.”

But it's not just the excellent Apple stores that account for the remarkable sales success of Mac computers this year. Woody Allen got it right when said that 80% of success is just showing up. Jobs has continued to do what he's been doing for thirty now -- showing up by building high quality personal computers that are easy for people to use. Meanwhile, Microsoft have failed to show up. That 51% increase in the purchase of new Mac computers is a direct consequence of Microsoft's Vista fiasco. In contrast with Apple's OS X operating system, Vista is an absolute disaster; it's perhaps very worst consumer electronics products that I've ever had the misfortune to use.

I've recently got two new laptops -- a Mac and a PC running Vista. Even though I'm not a regular Mac use, the OS X computer, with its intuitive operating system, worked delightfully right of the box. Whereas the Vista machine has caused me all sorts of incredibly irritating problems including not working with my old printer. Most tellingly, when I switch on my Mac, it takes no more than 30 seconds for the machine to boot up. But when I turn on the PC, it takes several minutes to boot and then the computer presents me with a serious of counter-intuitive choices that seem designed to confuse and frustrate me.

It's doesn't take the genius of a Steve Jobs or a Woody Allen to figure this one out. I'm no Mac cultist, but it's obvious that people prefer quality and convenience to crap and inconconvenience. In the personal computer business, 80% of success is just switching on. That's why Mac sales increased 51% this quarter and why Apple now have a 6% share of the American personal computer market. And that's also why the final final battle of the great Apple-Microsoft war has yet to be fought.

Serious wisdom

Check out the May issue of Prospect magazine for my review of Charlie Leadbeater's We-Think, Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Lee Siegel's Rage Against the Machine. You'll have to pay the read it -- but this is a smart investment because reading Prospect will make you wiser about the world.

Speaking of serious wisdom, Prospect is once again running a readers' poll to discover the world's leading public intellectual. You can vote here from a long short list of 100. Last time around, in 2005, Noam Chomsky was elected, beating Umberto Eco into a distant second place. But things have changed in the public intellectual business over the last three years. We are now living in a Christopher Hitchens world -- as proven by Prospect's rather dodgy decision to put Alexander Linklater's portrait of Hitchens on the cover of its public intellectual issue. In 2005, Hitchens came in fifth, two places behind co-atheist Richard Dawkins. But that was before God is Great and the Hitchification of Anglo-American media.

Who would get my vote? Certainly not Chomsky, a crazy fossil of the archaic American left miraculously brought back to life by the idiocy of the Bush regime. Hitchens is unChomsky: a work-in-progress, omnivorous, always-on. He's my own personal role-model of a subverter of subversions -- although, like Dawkins, I think he's a bit too self-inflated with comfortable English common-sense to be the world's leading intellectual. Jurgen Habermas (#6 in 2005) is full of anything but common sense, but his problem is just the opposite -- too much academic theory and not enough clarity. If you want an American king, then how about New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (#7 in 2005) -- who wins my vote for the world's most public-spirited and coherent economist.

In 2005, a crowd of 20,000 people voted in the Prospect poll. The election of the crazy fossil Chomsky (who got 4,800 votes) doesn't speak highly of the wisdom of that crowd. Anyone-but-Chomsky is my candidate, with Hitchens as the odds-on favorite to be crowned as the next intellectual master of the universe.

O'Reilly 3.0?

Of all the thundering Web 2.0 prophets, the only one I haven't had the honor of formally debating is Moses himself, Tim O'Reilly. It was O'Reilly and his marketing mavens at O'Reilly Media, of course, who, back in the primordial soup of 2004, invented the term "Web 2.0". And it was O'Reilly who, in his September 2005 essay "What is Web 2.0", brilliantly juxtaposed the core principles of Web 1.0 with those of Web 2.0. Without O'Reilly, I couldn't and wouldn't have written Cult. Not only did his essay profoundly enlighten me about the revolutionary qualities of Web 2.0, but also his generous invitation to FOO Camp in September 2004 resulted in a 48-hour epiphany that transformed me from believer into sceptic.

So I'm thrilled that I've finally had a kind of debate with old Moses O'Reilly. He and I found ourselves implicitly arguing with one another in a really incisive new documentary entitled "The Truth According to Wikipedia" filmed by the Dutch television show VPRO. Many of the Web 2.0 prophets are featured in the documentary Including Jimmy Wales, Charlie Leadbeater and Chris Pirrilo. But it's an unshaven O'Reilly, a grizzled alpha meme producer if there was ever an grizzled alpha meme producer, who dominates the Web 2.0 team.

So anyway, Tim, I need to borrow your wisdom again. Having watched "The Truth According to Wikipedia" a new truth has dawned on me. As I'm sure you know, the truth about Web 2.0 is that the lights are out and the party is over. Web 2.0: circa 2000-2008 RIP. The whole "web as platform" thing has played itself out. We all now know its technological strengths and weaknesses, its cultural accomplishments and failures, its economic appearance and reality. We are back in 1999/2000 again -- in no-man's land, historically orphaned, in-between epochs.

So, Tim, what comes next? What is the next big thing after Web 2.0?

Now I know you are way too prophetic to call it "Web 3.0" -- but it does need a catchy name so we can package it up for the media. And it needs ideas, organizing principles, a central theme. Is the new new Internet thing about technology, culture, politics or society? What will it do to America? And how will it change the world?