The Great Seduction

Ralph Steadman joins the cult

I've always been a massive admirer of  Ralph Steadman, so I was thrilled that, in today's Observer, Steadman picked Cult as his most noteworthy book of 2007. It was Steadman, of course, who provided the legendary illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson's  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; a Savage Journey into the American Dream. We still await a Hunter S. Thompson/Ralph Steadman to co-produce a Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley -- an equally savage journey into the American Dream. I can only hope that there's some young writer or artist embedded in the Googleplex, taking notes on Sergei and Larry's moral excesses and sketching Eric Schmidt's chin. Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley is too monstrous a fish to miss. Somebody is going to spear it.

In the meantime, here's the legendary Steadman on why he was seduced by Cult:

I took two challenging books to read in a cabin on Lake Huron in Canada in September: The Idiot by Dostoevsky (Penguin Classics) and District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Faber). But what instead caught my eye was a 'reader's proof' lying on the coffee table of The Cult of the Amateur (Nicholas Brealey) by Andrew Keen. He has had the temerity to point out that our search for instant wisdom through, say, Google and Wikipedia provides not necessarily what is most true or reliable - merely what is most popular. I read it in one sitting then went outside to fish for our supper, firmly believing that the poor fish that swallows my squirming worm on a barbed hook is infinitely smarter than the idiot on the other end holding the rod.

Who is Steadman's fish, who is the worm and who is holding the rod?

Rights AND responsibilities

I spent most of last week in Rio De Janeiro at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). This is the annual United Nations event that brings together many of the world's leading Internet policy makers. I spoke on a couple of panels: the first, organized by the European Broadcast Union, about the Internet's quality of content; the second, entitled Emerging Issues, the closing panel of the entire conference, which focused on the future of Internet governance.

IGF was a quite different sort of conference from the typical Silicon Valley techno-celebration. The latter focus on the rights of Internet users and entrepreneurs. in contrast, much of the discussion at IGF was about responsibilities: our responsibility to protect children from online pornography, our responsibility to provide Internet access to the less developed world, our responsibility to behave ourselves like adults online, our responsibility to establish rules in the anarchic online world.

It was a particular honor for me to he Emerging Issues panel (read and see). Brilliantly moderated by Nik Gowing, BBC World's chief news programme anchor, the panel included the two founding fathers of the Internet: Bob Kahn, currently Chairman/CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and Vint Cerf, currently Google's Chief Evangelist. As Steve Balkam reported in today's Huffington Post, our panel got pretty heated. I argued that our twin responsibilities are to work on providing media literacy for the masses and to challenge the use of anonymity by many Internet users (at least in the West). Cerf -- with whom I'd already clashed at the earlier Quality of Content panel -- strongly disagreed: he called my position "crap" and suggested, in traditional libertarian fashion, that we all have a right to be anonymous on the Internet.

And yet even Cerf, I suspect, is not immune to the argument that a completely unrestricted Internet is self-destructive. As the Emerging Issues panel unfolded, he acknowledged that there was a need not only for a regionally sensitive Internet bill of rights, but also one of responsibilities:

It strikes me that what we just uncovered in addition to the notion of an Internet
 Bill of Rights is the notion of Internet responsibility. And what I see emerging
 out of some of this discussion is literally a law of the net, which may take a 
 very long time to figure out, but some things are going to have to be globally 
 accepted as responsibilities for using this technology.  And similarly we have 
 to arrive at agreements about what rights people have to use it. And finally, 
 I think we have to split local conditions and local practices from the ones that
 we would like to have globally. One tiny example for law enforcement, there may
 be some things that we really need to do on a global basis, we have to agree that
 people have to be responsible on a global scale for certain actions and that we
 will globally enforce failure to observe those responsibilities. That may lead 
 us into a fairly complex territory, just like the law of the sea.  But it may be
 that we need a matrix like that in order to work all this out.

Brave words indeed. Let's hope that Cerf -- Mountain View's Chief Evangelist -- was evangelizing on behalf of Google here, and not just as an iconic technology pioneer. If Google -- with its incomparable financial and technology resources -- gets behind a self-policing bill of rights AND responsibilities, then the Internet could indeed become a more civil, just and productive place.

The question now, of course, is who is going to write the bill; as I told Cerf in Rio, my only requirement is that its content should not authored by an artificial algorithm.

Facebook's holey grail

Now that it been valued at $15 billion (quite a reasonable amount, me thinks, for an unprofitable start-up with annual revenue less than $100 million), Facebook needs to develop a business model. So Mark Zuckerberg has been explaining how he is going to make money out of his social network. On Tuesday of this week, regurgitating the surreal language of Web 2.0, the kid Zuckerberg announced to the world:

"For the last 100 years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation."

Huh? Here's a college-dropout giving the adult world a ludicrous beginning-of-history lesson about the "people", "media" and something called a "conversation." What exactly does this kind of linguistic garbage mean?

Actually it means quite a lot -- once you get behind the idiotic words. According to Wednesday's Financial Times ", this means that Facebook's "new technology represented a new era for advertisers, where commercials would be replaced by messages planted in online conversations between friends."

Now what, exactly, does that mean? Yes, you read it right -- "Messages planted in online conversations...."

It's almost as absurd as that $15 billion valuation. As the FT goes on:

Facebook's new technology, dubbed "Facebook ads", will allow businesses to build custom-designed "pages" on the social networking site. Users will be able to become "fans" of a company's page, 10,000 of which were launched last night. Any actions they take on the page, such as reviewing a product or uploading a photograph, would then be communicated to that user's friends and accompanied by a logo, creating "social ads". The ads will be auctioned, and buyers can opt to pay for impressions on the number of clicks.

A social ad indeed. Facebook is figure out how to transform its users' social networks into advertising networks. I want my 105,000 Facebook buddies to know how delicious Diet Pepsi is, so I'm going to review it on the Mr Diet Pepsi page which in turn will alert all my intimate friends about my feelings toward Diet Pepsi. Facebook is attempting to transform itself into a viral, user-generated advertising network. Thus the kid Zuckerberg's words about marketers finally becoming part of the "conversation". How collaborative, how communal, how delightfully conversational it all is.

Except that it won't work. People -- even the kids on Facebook -- aren't that stupid. They are going know they are being duped by the kid Zuckerberg and his new grown-up friends at Microsoft. After all, why would anyone advertise commercial products to their friends without financial reward? Why would I hawk the benefits of Diet Pepsi to my friends for free?

But, in a Freudian slip, Zuckerberg acknowledged the absurdity of his new business model. In redefining Facebook users as trusted referrer, he confessed on Tuesday, "a trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising."

Exactly. Had Zuckerberg stayed at Harvard to finished his education, he might have learned that a Holy Grail is an illusion (even the Monty Python boys know that). A Holy Grail is a miracle that never happens. Facebook and its surreal plan to plant messages in online conversations is a good example of a Holy Grail. A $15 billion one. Trust me -- your trusted friend -- on this one. And I won't even charge you for my wisdom.

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