The Great Seduction

For whiners rather than winners

Yes, of course it was a good speech. But I'm left with a nagging feeling that it was written for whiners rather than winners. Blame it perhaps on Springsteen, but the nationalist reactionary language of "Born in the USA" is an inauspicious way of introducing the first genuinely 21st century American President. Like the twenty year old song, the speech was neither modern nor bold ("Born to Run" would have been a much livelier warm-up). Only at the end -- when Obama reached his promised land of identity politics -- did the speech truly reflect the man.

The Democrats tried to appropriate brand America as the backdrop for the speech. Thus the mass of kitchy little flags and all the Las Vegas style imperial symbolism (Are We Rome Yet? -- Yes, We Are!). But the speech itself looked backwards rather than forwards. It spoke of the America of the 20th rather than the 21st century -- idealizing the mythological white working class America that is, for better or worse, shrinking by the minute. It was a speech over-dedicated to the America of laid off car workers and the other supposedly innocent victims of globalisation. For all the talk about America, it wasn't quite an American speech. It failed to paint the future cheerfully, expansively, as inevitably American. Peggy Noonen, who usually has a good feel for these sorts of unspoken Reaganesque details, suggested this morning:

And I'll tell you, Mr. Obama left a lot of space for Mr. McCain to play the happy warrior next week. He left the Republicans a big opportunity to wield against him, in contrast, humor, and wit, and even something approximating joy.

I fear she's right. And, if this morning's rumors are correct and McCain goes for Palin (or even Lieberman), the pedagogical Obama is suddenly going to look very earnest, very unamerican. There still too much Harvard Law School in his act. He's got to have a drink, loosen up and look like he's having fun. There was too much Hillary in the speech and not enough Bill. He needs to stop catering to all the narrow little interest groups within his party and joyfully seize the moment. As Springsteen wrote at the end of "Thunder Road", the most optimistic and cathartic American popular song of all time:

"So Mary climb in, it's a town for losers and I'm pulling out of here to win."

That's the real American journey. And Barack Obama hasn't got to the end of Thunder Road yet.

Knowing Obama

Obama's biggest problem, the pundits parrot, is that Americans don't know him. The O is actually the ?:

"Is Obama more beer than Chardonnay? Is he a Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks guy? Must he talk fancy? Is he one of us despite having what his wife Michelle called “that funny name?”

So, they say, tonight offers the first opportunity for Americans to get to know their next President. It's the "stranger in a stadium's" first meeting with the American people --a physical date with 75,000 screaming fans in a middle American football stadium as well as a virtual date with an audience of hundreds of millions on television and the Internet. This is the standard version of America's first date/sermon with Obama:

"Barack Obama aims to weave the personal with the political Thursday as he explains to 75,000 supporters in a massive stadium — and millions more at home — how as president he would make a difference in their lives."

And it's wrong. You see, Americans do know Obama, they know him all-too-well. We told by the pundits that he has a "unique story" -- but actually his is the traditional American narrative, uniqueness universalized, as equally familiar to Thoreau and Emerson and as it is to Fitzgerald and DeLillo. He's a 21st century version of Gatsby, a chameleon, Schumpeter's ideal type, perpetual creative destruction personalized, who reflects both all our dreams and our nightmares about ourselves and America. He's done exactly what American collectively need to do -- changed, reinvented, retooled himself. He is the 21st century man, a self made man and his is the journey of a confident man. Obama is the future. He is what Americans need to become if they are to prosper in the global economy.

So the speech tonight in Denver is a necessary charade. Americans will pretend to meeting Obama for the first time. But, in spite of of their shy protestations, they all know the guy and we all know that they know him. In contrast, McCain -- with his nostalgic familiarity with a static, irrelevant history -- represents what we are escaping from. He stands for the obstinate past, everything comfortable, all that we need to forget.

Keen Kindle kontradiction

Is Amazon's Kindle the next iPod?  The signals are, at best, mixed. Techcrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and tech analysts like Mark Mahaney and Steven Weinstein have been playing a guessing game about the sales impact of Kindle -- bullishly suggesting that the product, like the iPod, is about to go mainstream and sell millions and millions of units by 2010, 2012 or some other tipping point in the misty future.

But as I argue in my Independent column this week, the cheerleading tech media hasn't been thinking about Amazon's e-book from the perspective of a bibliophile like myself. I'm the Keen Kindle Kontradiction -- the reason why I'm not bullish about Amazon's e-book. I'm a keen buyer of books, purchasing and reading around two hundred each year. I'm also a keen traveller, logging somewhere around 200,000 miles a year on airlines. And i'm a keen gadget geek too, taking with me on all my global trips an iPod, a World Edition BlackBerry 8830, a Canon S80 camera, an M-Audio Microtrack digital recorder, a JVC HD7 camcorder and various laptop computers. So, one would assume, I'm should also be a keen Kindle konsumer -- especially since nothing annoys me more than schlepping heavy books on and off planes and to and from airports.

But I'm not. I don't own a Kindle and have no intention of buying one. And that's because I'm a bibliophile. I love and collect hardback and softback books -- I buy them, read them (at least one or two pages), scribble in them, and then lovingly retire them to my groaning bookshelves as evidence of my immense erudition. And while I don't have a problem reading a digital book (the words are the same, after all), there is no way that I will go digital and stop buying physical books. And that's the current problem with the Kindle. Amazon's business model is that it forces me to an either/or decision. Take my Cult. For $9.99, I can buy the digital download of my book on Amazon or I can buy the physical paperbook for $11.20. But to get both, I have to spend $21.19. That's why I won't buy a Kindle. The analog book doesn't give me digital rights and I refuse the buy the identical product twice -- however impressed  I am by its ergonomic elegance.

The reverse is true, of course, with music. When I buy a physical CD, I'm free to put its tracks on my iPod. And that's one of the main reasons why the iPod went from a nice-to-have to a must-have product. Until Amazon and the publishing industry offer bibliophiles like myself simultaneous digital and analog rights to purchased books, the Kindle will remain a very pale comparison to the iPod.

The children's crusade

In his The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, David Edgerton makes an important distinction between what he calls "technology" and "things". Professor Edgerton, the founding director of Imperial College's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, encourages us to "stop thinking about technology" and instead think of "things":

Thinking about the use of things, rather than of technology, connects us directly with the world we know rather than the strange world in which "technology" lives. We speak of "our" technology meaning the technology of an age or a whole society. By contrast, "things" fit into no such totality, and do not evoke what is often taken as an independent historical force. We discuss the world of things as grown-ups, but technology as children.

Exactly. We discuss the world of things as grown-ups, but technology as children. Things are concrete, while technology is magic; things are historic, while technology is the promise of the future. The New York Times' David Carr takes up this theme of children and grown-ups in his analysis of technology's role at the Democratic convention in Denver. His description of early supporters of the boy Obama as a "children's crusade" is memorable, particularly when imagined in the context of David Edgerton's distinction between the childishness of technology of children and the adult quality of things. As Carr notes, these supporters are about to "occupy the sweet spot of electoral politics and bring a new set of expectations to being courted and served."

So what, exactly, are the expectations of Obama's children's crusaders?

Carr quotes Salon's editor in chief Joan Walsh who says they want to want to "eliminate the middleman" in American media. They want to use technology to do away with the thing of mainstream media thereby using direct e-mail, video and social networking sites to empower the boy Obama to directly communicate with his youth following:

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has all but christened a new era by seizing the medium itself. The network pageantry has been replaced by the network effect — a huge pipe directly to his supporters, no intermediation involved. The press, it seems, just gets in the way.

But, as David Edgerton reminds us The Shock of the Old, behind abstract technology there are always concrete things and behind the children there are always grown-ups. The original Children's Crusade of 1212 -- when 30,000 kids set out for Jerusalem (none reached the promised land, most died on route) -- was, of course, a staged event put on by various European feudal elites to pursue their own particular political agendas. Almost eight hundred years later, I wonder who is behind this digital remix of the children's crusade. Is it the boy Obama -- who understand that by "seizing the medium" he can transform the imperial presidency into the always-on presidency?  This isn't an insignificant question. As David Carr recognizes, this type of plebiscitory digital democracy is of immense historical significance:

There are implications going beyond November. If we stipulate that the modern American presidency is a permanent campaign, there is little reason to expect that if Senator Obama becomes president that the political arm of his administration would simply lock away all those millions of names they had gathered on a disk drive. A highly wired administration could go direct with both its base and its database in times of crisis or need.

Scary, eh? Just as the boys at Google are amassing unprecedented informational power, so the boy Obama might be doing the same "thing" in politics. The digital children's crusade is promising to transport us to a new Jerusalem. Like the original version, however, I fear that it will end in tears.

The end of geography and the beginning of the future

The over-quoted suggestion by cyberpunk writer William Gibson that “the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet" is actually wrong when it comes to the future of the personal computer and the Internet. True, the future has arrived,  but it's surprisingly evenly distributed.  You can find the future of personal computers and the Internet at banks, in movie theaters and supermarkets, in motorcars and aircrafts, on cellphones and digital music players. This future is all around us; indeed, one reason why most of us haven't noticed it is because of its ubiquity.

That future is touch.

In a 1994 interview on Swedish television, William Gibson said "when you use the Internet you enter a realm in which geography no longer exist." Yes and no. The Internet itself, in its spatial anarchism, lacks conventional geography. But to get to the Internet and to navigate it, we have, till now, been dependent on the keyboard and the mouse, two very traditional instruments of geographical exploration. But now the keyboard and mouse are about to be replaced by the human finger as the gateway to the Internet. With touch technology, we've arrived at the end of geography. The future of the Internet is the coming together of the real and virtual. Yet this is no cyber-dream -- anyone can now go down to their local electronics store and touch the future.

In contrast with the much hyped and historically insignificant Web 2.0 "revolution", touch technology has crept up on us almost unannounced. Our fingers are becoming the key interface in managing the technology of our daily lives. In America, we use touch technology every day to do our ATM banking and pay for our groceries, get our boarding passes at airports and organize our lives on our mobile devices. Today, touch technology dominates the interface of Apple's iPod Touch and the iPhone, their iconic new cellular phone which is projected to sell 45 million units in 2009. And now touch technology is about to revolutionize the personal computer.

Ironically, the future existed before the past, touch technology predating the keyboard and mouse combination of the first personal computer. In 1983, a year before Apple came out with the first successful personal computer, the Mac, Hewlett-Packard introduced its touchscreen HP 150 PC, a touchscreen product a quarter century ahead of its time. Since then, HP -- which has a 40 person team dedicated to developing this technology -- has continued to pioneer touch with innovative products like its iPAQ pocket PC and Tablet notebook PCs. But HP's historic breakthrough in touch was the introduction, 18 months ago, of their first generation TouchSmart all-in-one computer. And now HP have introduced its second-generation TouchSmart, a powerful and elegant machine with a more mature new touch layer interface that makes the finger, rather than the mouse and keyboard, its central navigational device.

HP is not alone, of course, in pioneering touch technology. There are persistent rumors in Silicon Valley that Apple is about to take the touch technology from its iPhone and add it to a new range of laptops. Meanwhile Microsoft are already promising touch-screen controls in the 2010 release of their Windows 7 operating system. So now it's the big boys of the hardware and software business who are seriously driving the future. After a succession of false dawns, this revolutionary touch technology is just about ready for primetime.

It may yet take ten or even twenty more years to fully mature, but touch technology is about to radically alter the way we all interface with the Internet. Personal computing is about to get a lot more personal. Replacing the mouse and keyboard with our fingers will do away with the boundaries between man and the machine. Touch technology enables us to travel through the infinity of cyberspace using our body as a navigational tool. Online communications, commerce, sex, learning, security, entertainment and information will all be fundamentally revolutionized. We have arrived at the end of geography and the beginning of the future.

Advantage McCain

Texting the Biden decision is like launching Twitter via snail mail. Rancid old wine in a fancy new bottle. It reveals the intellectual emptiness at the heart of the "change" brand. Biden brings nothing to the ticket except all the insider verbosity/pomposity that irritates most Americans. Thus Biden's dismal performance in the primaries. Thus his also-ran persona and reputation.

Biden is nothing more than a second tier candidate for Secretary of State. If, as I still expect, Obama is elected, who is going to run American foreign policy? Heavyweights like Holbrooke or even Dennis Ross is not going to put up with an interfering, all-knowing Biden (who actually knows less than them).

The boy Obama and his brand managers have panicked into picking a foreign affairs expert VP when the economy will determine the election. Why oh why did they not even look at Hillary, the most accomplished domestic policy expert in the Democratic party? And if not Hillary, then focus on a businessman (Bloomberg?) who is an expert on the economy. And if, indeed, they are right and Americans will have Georgia on their mind when they cast their ballots in November, then why not go for Chuck Hagel, who would have been an intriguing option for the change message?

Advantage McCain. Now he's got a week or two to think through his options. As I predicted on Thursday, the Biden pick now makes the Lieberman option look mighty attractive. On the one hand, Lieberman neutralizes Biden in terms of expertise in foreign affairs; on the other, his liberal social policy makes a McCain/Lieberman ticket more radical than Obama/Biden. The Christian right can suck on their wafers (or whatever it is that makes them feel closer to you-know-Who) -- but McCain might now be able to escape the destructive influence of the church and emerge as a pro-change yet centrist Judeo-Christian candidate.

Obama-guy Steve Gillmor notes on Techcrunch this morning that social media is failing to change politics. That's because social media isn't, in itself, radical -- it's just technology. Change comes through legislative reform, not through mass text-messaging. Obama has flunked his first big test. But this election is going to be determined by failure rather than success. So he better hope that McCain makes an equally conservative VP choice.

We children of Rousseau

Anyone looking for blame in the John Edwards scandal should first read Rousseau and then look at themselves. Throughout the Edwards new cycle, New York Times columnist Judith Warner has been reading Rousseau, focusing on what she calls his "dream of transparency" -- the idea that through self-examination we can all be true to ourselves and reveal our innermost truths in society. In an excellent column today entitled "Starve the Beast", Warner traces this unrealistic idealism about the perfectibility of human nature to Edwards' masochistic public confession of his sins.

Through it all, I heard echoes of Rousseau. I heard Rousseau – who believed man’s inherent goodness was corrupted by society’s worldly institutions – behind John Edwards’s explanation, on “Nightline,” that he was a “small-town boy in rural North Carolina” who “came from nothing” and had been led astray by fame and fortune. I heard Rousseau’s belief in the noble cause of self-examination in Edwards’s approach to his own guilt: “The important thing is: how could I ever get to the place, to that place, and allow myself to let that happen?” And I heard Rousseau’s dream of transparency – of individuals being true and honest to themselves, and fully open to one another in society – in Elizabeth’s sad, sad belief that telling the truth would somehow bring her family peace.

Much as it would be nice to blame Rousseau for everything wrong with contemporary society, we also have to blame ourselves. The John and Elizabeth Edwards spectacle -- an appropriately sado-masochistic public circus for our voyeuristic age -- reflects both our desire for public officials to be absolutely pure and then our horror when the truth of their all-too-human indiscretions are exposed:

But it also seems to me that, in this affair, Elizabeth has been doubly duped, once by her husband and again by the fetish we children of Rousseau make of transparency: demanding Truth, at all costs, declaiming faith in the Justness of public opinion, maintaining that, armed with the truth, we will together be good and fair.

Exactly. We children of Rousseau need to get beyond our hypocritical unrealistic expectations of elected public officials. There's nothing wrong with politicians having extra-marital sexual affairs. Nor, indeed, is there anything wrong with a degree of moral hypocrisy in public life -- provided that it doesn't have a destructive impact on the community. Indeed, given the opportunities of powerful men, I'm always suspicious of the powerful politicians (Bush, Cheney...) who fail to have affairs. Any public figure -- married or otherwise -- who fails to take advantage of the occasional available thong will, I suspect, live to regret it.

For a nuanced take on the idea of hypocrisy, I've been reading David Runciman's very interesting "Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond". Unfortunately, there's no chapter in Runciman's book about Rousseau. Perhaps Judith Warner could expand her column today into a book entitled We Children of Rousseau which traces the intellectual journey of "Truth" & "Justness" from Rousseau to our modern age. To learn how we got from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions to John Edwards' confessions would be a fascinating read.

The text-message isn't the message

The distant chuckle you can hear through the crackle on your cellphone is the deathly-clever laughter of Marshall McLuhan, that medium-is-the-message dude, who is chuckling from the grave about Barack Obama's decision to text his VP decision to the world.

In 08', the old McLuhanite truism that the medium is the message has, supposedly, been digitalized into the text is the message. Cellphones, we are told by McLuhanite hipsters like Garret M. Graff, represent the technology of revolt. First the people texted in Philippines in '01, then Spain in '04, most recently in Myanmar and now Obama is texting-the-revolution in '08. If only the Bolsheviks had all owned iPhones in October 1917, Graff's implies, then the revolution would have probably turned out okay. According to him, cell-phones are the most "intimate form of communications today" for young people and a group he calls "registered minority voters":

These days, Mr. Obama texts when he has a new speech to promote, an important TV appearance or a major rally. If he’s going to be campaigning nearby, he’ll let you know. John McCain, by contrast, doesn’t seem interested or engaged in technology. David All, a 29-year-old Republican strategist, lamented last month that Mr. McCain’s campaign had never sent him a text message.

But Barack Obama's obsession with text-messaging actually proves that McLuhan was wrong. Obama's text-message isn't the message and, rather than radical, his use of the latest digital technology is staged, symbolic and strategic. I don't know whether Obama will text the news tomorrow or Saturday about his VP choice. Nor do I know exactly who he'll choose. What I am sure about, however, is that he's using this supposedly radical new technological platform to send a conservative message. Kaine, Bayh and especially Biden are all reactive, defensive choices that speak against real legislative change in America. The only really radical decision Obama could make would be to ask Hillary to be his VP. But Obama has become too mired in his message of change to really change. So Hillary will be overlooked and we'll get a non-entity like Bayh or a windbag like Biden.

Oddly enough, it's likely to be John McCain, the techno-fossil who doesn't even know how to text-message, that is likely to announce a radical VP choice. It wouldn't surprise me if he went for Lieberman, a decision that will undermine Obama's change mantra. And McCain will send this radical message traditionally -- the words coming out his mouth rather than text-messaged from his cellphone.

The cred crisis

My friends -- to borrow an expression from the now friendful John McCain -- we are facing a cred crisis. Not the credit crisis -- although anyone trying to get a mortgage knows there is one. No, what we are facing is a credibility crisis. Nobody believes what anyone else is saying anymore.

Thus the supposed need for a new news service called Newscred which claims to house all the world's "credible news in one place." Newscred allows us to read, personalize and, of course, vote about which "articles, journalists and news sources are credible and which ones aren't." And so Newscred aggregates the cred of the crowd and then feeds it back to all of us -- thus solving the cred crisis.

Clever, eh? There's one problem, though. In a Newscred world, how are we supposed to determine credibility? How do we all know what to trust in the newspapers? And why should we trust the other members of the Newscred community? The truth is that the blind lead the blind on Newscred. It should be renamed BlindSquared.

There's one other problem too. I don't trust Newscred. Having just snooped around the website myself, I was confronted by headlines about BB gun-shooting neighbors, that marine monster Phelps and other fishy nonsense. This isn't credible. It's even worse that mainstream media.

I may be naive, but I know what I trust. I trust edited newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the London Independent and the London Guardian and the Financial Times. My friends, the cred crisis hasn't reached me yet -- I still believe what I read.

Is Vint Cerf mad?

Is the honorable Vint Cerf -- father of the Internet and now Google's Chief Evangelist -- stark raving bonkers?

I've always suspected the crazy Cerf was more than a little mad. Having crossed swords with him in the past, notably at the United Nations conference about the Internet in Rio last year, he has always appeared to me to be on another planet, in another dimension, playing with a different deck of cards than everyone else in the room. To some that might signify professor Calculus style genius; to me, however, it suggests that the old geezer is really round the bend.

And now I have proof that the crazy Cerf is certifiably mad. In today's Observer, the loony has written a truly insane piece entitled: If you think the Web was cool, wait until it goes space age. No, I'm not joking. Here is what the crazy Cerf has been up to at NASA:

My colleagues at Nasa and I are even working on an interplanetary internet, which will make getting information to and from spacecraft in the far reaches of the solar system more reliable.

An interplanetary internet. That's very doable. It's going to take Verizon about twenty years to get their high-speed fiber optic network to all 50 American States. So how long will it take to wire up the "far reaches of the solar system"? Is the Crazy Cerf going to privatize space? What happens if he bumps into extra terrestrial versions of Nick Carr or Doris Lessing out in the far reaches of the solar system who would rather be reading books than surfing the Internet?

Oh crazy Cerf, what planet are you on? Closer to planet earth, here's his vision for useful applications of the Internet in the future:

After working on the internet for more than three decades, I'm more optimistic about its promise than ever. It has the potential to change unexpected parts of our lives: from surfboards that let you surf the web while you wait for the next wave to refrigerators that can email you suggested recipes based on the food you already have.

Brilliant -- a totally brilliant analysis of how we want "unexpected parts of our lives" to be changed. All my surfer friends tell me that they are so bored sitting on their boards waiting for the next wave that they'd love to check their email in between the action. While all the cooks I know have been fantasizing about adding an intelligent refrigerator to their kitchen -- pity the Crazy Cerf didn't add that the fridge could then go on and automatically make the food and then distribute it those surfboarders checking their emails in between waves. Now, that would solve a really major social problem.

Speaking of solving major social problems, the crazy Cerf thinks that the Internet is about to create global democracy AND freedom:

Closer to home, we're at the cusp of a truly global internet that will bring people closer together and democratise access to information. We are all free to innovate on the net every day and we should look forward to more people around the world enjoying that freedom.

Huh? Has the crazy Cerf been reading his newspaper recently? Did he hear about the ways that Russian hackers used the Internet to attack Georgia prior to the real Russian invasion? Has he heard about Internet censorship in China? Has he been checking his spam lately?

The problem, I suspect, with the crazy Cerf, is that he holds the Kafkesque title of "chief evangelist" at Google. The omnipotent search engine needs an evangelist about as badly as it needs another high-end chef at its Mountain View restaurant-office. Everyone outside a few undiscovered villages in outer Borneo has already heard of Google -- it's the best known brand in the world.

So my suggestion is that we change the crazy Cerf's title to "Mankind's Chief Evangelist". Then let's stick the old dude on a rocket and email him to the far reaches of the solar system. NASA -- can you hear me? Have you got a spare spaceship to fulfill a mission that will truly benefit all of us. Mankind's gift to the universe. Infinite Vint.