The Great Seduction

The Arab street comes to America's main street

As usual, we've been looking into the wrong end of the telescope. While Americans have been worrying about their military impact on the Arab world, they've missed the real story -- the arrival of the Arab street in American politics. At least that's the view of Fouad Ajami, the conservative Arab scholar at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies. In "Obama and the Politics of Crowds", Ajami argues that the great change in the politics of this year's election is the role of the great crowds, the tens of thousands of expectant people who have been flocking to the Obama rallies all over America. Obama's new "politics of charisma" reminds Ajami of the Arab world in which he grew up:

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

Ajami's argues that Obama's "political genius" is that he is a "blank slate", an idea empty vessel for the crowd. Thus, the less Obama says, the more the crowd -- reveling in its "illusion of equality" -- loves him. But Ajami reminds us that, on the morning of November 5, the Obama crowd --  its unnatural alliance of rich white liberals and poor African-Americans -- will wake up to its separate and often conflicting interests and identities. Even in victory, Ajami says, "disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd".

The Arab world, of course, is still reeling from Gamal Abdul Nasser's failure to realize any of his grand rhetoric. Indeed, the whole history of the contemporary Arab Middle East -- from the inertia of Sadat and Mubarak, to the corrupt, violent Baathist regimes of the Assads and of Saddam Hussein -- has been determined by the failure of Nasserism to deliver anything of any lasting value to the Arab street.

Let's hope that Ajami is wrong here. Nobody -- not even conservatives like Ajami -- want an America shaped by the broken dreams of the street. But Obama is going to have to deliver after November 5. The morning after the election, his marathon eighteen month speech about "hope" and "change" ends. Americans will want results. The blank slate must become the great reformer.

Blood in the salons

The BBC's Justin Webb is right to wonder today what the fall-out would be like if Obama should lose:

Should the famously bad finisher finish famously badly next Tuesday there will be scenes of mayhem - not just on the streets but in the salons as well; in fact the latter will be bloodier.

Exactly. In spite of my utter distaste for the McCain-Palin ticket, I have to admit that a Republican victory next week would be ever-so-slightly amusing. The left have worked themselves into such a moral frenzy in this election that the blood will indeed flow in the salons if the unimaginable happens and Obama loses. The problem is that the American left exists now in such an intellectually isolated and holier-than-thou cultural environment that it has become the most combustible force in American politics. Indeed, even if Obama is elected (as he will be), there be scenes of bloody mayhem in the salons when he fails to bring the troops back from Iraq or hots up the war against the Taliban on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

My big concern is that the morally pure left and the right in the American media have become indistinguishable. As John Gapper explains in this morning's FT, the Drudge factor has reshaped the American liberal media so that the Huffington Post has become the liberal mirror-image of the Drudge Report (even Arianna confesses to have designed her site on Drudge principles), while MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is a highly paid stupid leftist version of Fox's highly paid stupid conservative Bill O'Reilly. As Gapper said, "the center is no longer holding" and all we have left is an echo chamber of ill-informed, limousine radicals whipping up more and more hysteria in both old and new media. Gapper is wrong, though, to compare what is happening in America media to developments in the Britain:

It looks familiar enough to a British journalist: this is Fleet Street. It is what happens when you get intense competition among different media outlets, all seeking to play on (and pander to) the audience’s sympathies and biases.

The difference between Fleet Street and the American left-liberal blogosphere is that in the UK most journalists know that all the ideological pandering is a game while in America it is viewed with the deadliest earnestness. In Britain, the salons are for drinking and sex (in that order); in America, in contrast, the salons are full of people who are so greedy for virtue that they think they are right about everything all of the time.

The irrelevance of civil rights

Mark Steel is cacking himself at the thought that Obama might lose. The vision of President McCain freezes Steel with fear:

I know all the commentators are saying Obama's already won but I find myself scouring the internet for reassuring polls, and there'll be an article from Nevada quoting a truck driver that's supporting McCain, and I'm like a hypochondriac that's discovered a lump, frozen with fear and convinced this means the Republicans will win and reintroduce slavery and make it illegal for any creature to evolve.

Maybe we should all be cacking ourselves like the frozen Steel. The polls certainly are tightening with the two latest suggesting an Obama lead of only 3% in the general election. Not that Steel is particularly excited by an Obama Presidency. The British satirist doesn't expect much of a guy who, he says, is in cahoots with Wall Street, in favor of bombing Pakistan and shy of challenging corporate greed. The tragedy of an Obama loss, according to Steel, would lie in the defeat of his millions of supporters. It's the war and race which, Steel believes, has given the Obama campaign its remarkable momentum:

If it wasn't for the civil rights campaign and the movement against the Iraq war, Obama's campaign couldn't have taken off. So for Obama to win would be an inspiration to all those who supported those values, and a humiliating defeat for all those who opposed them, even if Obama himself may well betray those ideas.

Maybe. But one of the most memorable aspects of the campaign is the irrelevance of civil rights as a political issue in the election. It never came up in the debates, both candidates have side-stepped the issue at every opportunity, and it's hard to see how an Obama presidency will have an concrete impact on civil rights.  The fact that Obama is half black and that he will win 99% of the black vote is purely symbolic. Civil rights has become nothing more than an inspirational issue. And that, I suspect, is why white America is about to elect the first black President in the country's history.

Can Obama fix New York's traffic?

Everywhere I go in America, people are dreaming about President Barack Obama. At Birmingham airport in Alabama, I see a smartly dressed middle aged African-American woman so immersed in a glossy book about Obama that she doesn't pick up her phone which rings insistently. On a plane from Baltimore to Columbus Ohio, there are four big guys -- two white, two black -- all in "Yes We Can" t-shirts. On a gloriously warm late October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, all I can hear are fragments of conversations about the latest poll numbers in Virginia and Florida. There is iconography of Obama everywhere. On a train from New York City to Washington DC, I sit next to a woman who tells me that Powell will be Secretary of State. America is teetering on the verge of history. We are all holding our breath. Everywhere the questions are the same. Who are you voting for? Can He lose? An eight year nightmare finally over.... can you believe it?

And then in cab coming from New York's La Guardia into Manhattan, a Pakistani driver is fast forwarding to next Wednesday morning, when we come into work after the deed is done and the history is finally made.  The cab driver, a handsome, unshaven man with two young daughters who he is bringing up to treat all creeds equally, is thinking about President Barack Obama.

We are stuck in the Midtown Tunnel. The traffic is terrible. "What is going to change when Obama is elected?" I ask him.

"Everything."

I press him. "But what exactly will change?"

"The traffic," he says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. "There won't be so much traffic."

He is silent for a few moments, perhaps to think more deeply about Barack Obama's impact on the New York City traffic. "He can make some difference," the Pakistani cab driver says, turning around and smiling gently at me. "You know, he could. He really could."

Somewhere, USA

The October 2008 Wall Street financial meltdown is already reshaping Silicon Valley. Everyone here is bracing for the imminent perfect economic storm of a deep global recession. Lay-offs at both start-ups and established companies have become de rigeur. Venture capitalists are advising their clients to cut to the bone. The Bentley dealerships and the local real-estate market have suddenly gone very quiet.

Just as the last economic miasma, the NASDAQ crash of April 2000, marked the end of the Web 1.0 and the beginning of the Web 2.0 age, so I expect that October 2008 will mark a symbolic watershed in the history of new media. The Web 2.0 revolution, with its over-supply of social networking businesses and user-generated-content sites, has become very stale over the last couple of years. So the October 2008 meltdown arrived just in time in a Silicon Valley perpetually on the move toward the next big thing.

What’s next? In some garage or dorm-room, some smart kids are figuring out the future of media and technology. Global financial meltdown or not, Silicon Valley’s creative destruction – its law of motion -- is unstoppable. My own sense is that we need software and services that resynthesize the digital and real worlds. As NYU sociologist Dalton Conley suggests in his 2009 book Elsewhere, USA, technology has unmoored us from our real lives:

Our daily lives have changed, slowly but radically, over the past three decades. The division between work and home has been all but demolished; our weightless, wireless economy encourages us to work 24/7; marketing has invaded the most intimate aspects of our lives; leisure has become a lost art.

Silicon Valley thus needs to work on reuniting work with home. Having destroyed leisure with their always-on media, the smart technologists needs to reinvent it. The digital economy now must figure out ways to speed up the analog world. Silicon Valley's laws of motion must become America's laws of motion. The weightless economy needs to become rewired in somewhere USA.

Is Google good or evil?

Is Google good or is it evil? Is the company an all-knowing behemoth that is hubristically “transforming our lives”, big brother-style, with its intrusive technology or is it a plucky, selfless Silicon Valley start-up that is “audaciously” organizing all the world’s information for all of our benefit? Is Google Orwell or is it Disney?

The answer might depend on whether you trust the marketing instincts of English or American publishers. Last Tuesday, I was in London to do a debate at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) with the New York Times reporter and prolific Silicon Valley based author Randall Stross who has just written a highly informative and strictly unbiased new book about Google called Planet Google. Stross’ main point is that Google – through its ubiquitous search engine artificial algorithm, Google Earth and Google Sky maps, G-mail email service, YouTube videos, Google Book Search, Google’s Android mobile phone and its myriad of other knowledge initiatives – has one simple goal: to manage all the world’s information. Stross even notes that Dr Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and PhD-in-chief (UC Berkeley 1982), has run the math and concluded that it will take the company exactly 300 years to index and search all the information in the world.

So does Stross argue that this makes Google good or evil? It may all depend on whether you buy Planet Google in the US or UK. In America, the book (published by Free Press) comes with the cheerful subtitle One Company’s Audacious To Organize Everything We Know; while its British publisher (Atlantic Books) have given the same book the much more ominous subtitle How One Company is Transforming Our Lives. Identical book, identical author, identical information, same one company -- but an entirely different vibe about what Google is really up to.

This Anglo-American ambivalence over Google reflects, I suspect, our universal ambivalence about Google. The truth -- and even on planet Google there remain truths -- is that Google’s greed for knowledge is both thrillingly audacious and terrifyingly threatening.  Google is, in fact, a co Orwell-Disney production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101, then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at a click of a mouse, know all there is know about ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

Is this what we’ve always wanted or what we’ve always feared? Is planet Google a nightmare or is it a dream?

According to Randall Stross, Google is beyond good and evil. In his book, he explains that the numerati at Google are meticulously organizing their mission to become organizers of all the world’s information. Eric Schmidt has worked out that between 2 and 3% of today’s information about the world is searchable -- but that in 300 years time, 100% of this information will have been sorted and indexed by Google. By 2308, then, we really will be living on Schmidt’s planet Google. And I am simultaneously relieved and rather miffed – yes, that all-too-typical ambivalence about Google -- that I won’t be around to observe this peculiarly familiar new world.

Sarkozy's image problem

I was on Sky tv news last night commenting on various strange stories including this one about Nicholas Sarkozy. Apparently, the French President is suing the maker of a satirical voodoo doll that, his lawyer claims, has illegally appropriated Sarkozy's image. Here is what the lawyer, Thierry Herzog, wrote to the manufacturer of the Sarkozy look-a-like voodoo doll:

"Nicolas Sarkozy has instructed me to remind you that, whatever his status and fame, he has exclusive and absolute rights over his own image."

Absolute rights over one's own image... in this digital day and age? Even Sarkozy, with his Louis XIV complex, must be joking here. That would mean Sarah Palin could sue Tina Fey for becoming the real Sarah Palin. It would allow Chairman Mao to take Andy Warhol to court. It might even mean that it would become illegal to take people's photograph without their permission, thus at a stroke putting all paparazzi out of work.

I usually don't like the break the law, especially when it comes to copyright. But even I can't resist plastering Sarkozy's photo on my site, thereby challenging his absolute right to control his own image. This Gallic clown makes George W. Bush appear presidential. Is the he -- to excuse the pun -- for real?

Should we sick Dr Lessig on Sarkozy?

Gen iPod self-destructs

Nick Cohen put its well in tonight's London Evening Standard:

The global recession will hit everyone but not equally. The extent of the pain will depend on how much debt you are in. Too many of today's young Londoners are members of what the think-tank Reform calls the "iPod generation" "Insecure, Pressured, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden" and they are looking terrifyingly vulnerable.

This "terrifyingly vulnerable" Gen iPod has, of course, bought into all the most seductive mythology about the digital world. Not only are they the most technologically wired and financially indebted generation in history, but they are also the most ideologically misguided -- having stupidly bought into the open-source myth, with its childish conceit that it is noble to give away one's labor for free. Thus not only is Gen iPod  insecure, pressured and debt-ridden, but -- as I argued today on InternetEvolution (also see my interview today on Wired) -- they are also the misguided masses who have been pouring their labor into Wikipedia, Wikia and all those other "property is theft" open-culture social networks.

It is, therefore, no coincidence that Jimmy Wales' open-source search engine experiment, Wikia, has seen a dramatic reduction in its contributions over the last month (just look at the plunge of that red line). The steeper the credit crunch, the bigger the drop in the numbers of people willing to line Wales' pockets with their free labor. From a average of over five thousand daily contributors at the beginning of September, the number of daily contributors has now dropped to just over a thousand.

And so Gen iPod has finally woken up to the free labor fraud. My fear, however, is that it's too little, too late. That plunging red line is symbolic of Gen iPod's crushed dreams. Not only are they financially broke, but also their digital idealism has been bankrupted by the great cash. With nothing to believe in and nothing to buy, to what and to whom will Gen iPod now turn?

Remixing Robespierre

Now comes the fine print of an Obama Presidency. Apparently, he is thinking of appointing a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in his administration, somebody who, according to BusinessWeek magazine, would be "one of Obama's most important advisors." The piece quotes a DC lawyer and telecommunications apartchik, Andrew Lipman, who sees this new CTO as the executor of Obama's Four Year Digital Plan:

"Obama sees greater broadband penetration as an enormous economic engine, much like the railroads were a century ago. That is why the CTO will play such a critical role in any recovery plan."

Universal broadband as the American railroads 2.0? I'm far from convinced. The railroads provided transportation to settle the West and to both build and link up new communities. In contrast, broadband provides a very different kind of transportation -- one that allows individuals to escape their physical communities, to create virtual loyalties, to lose their identities in the narcissistic chaos of cyberspace. Broadband penetration throughout America will actually kill most local retail stores, it will fatally undermine local newspapers, it will destroy local television and radio stations. No, rather than the railroads, broadband is more akin to the triumph of automotive culture in the first half of the 20th century, a development which destroyed the railroads and undermined the economic and cultural viability of small town America.

So who should be America's new czar of technology? BusinessWeek suggests Google evangelist Vint Cerf, the mad father of the Internet. While one of Silicon Valley's most viral thinkers, ex Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, suggests my old friend Dr Larry Lessig:

Overall, though, I still like the idea of Lessig in the White House....Oh, and wait until you hear what he says about how he’d retard corruption in the Capitol."

Retarding corruption in the Capitol....Talk about history repeating itself. As American CTO, the all-too-virtuous Dr Lessig, the author of a new anti Hollywood rant called Remix, is actually a personal remix of Maximilien Roberspierre, another skilled practitioner in the art of retarding corruption. And with universal broadband penetration and thus two way live video connectivity in every American home, the eagle-eyed Dr Lessig might even get to retard corruption in all of our living rooms too.

Cheating death

I'm in currently London where many of the city's buses are carrying a tart advertisement for POM 100% Pomegranate juice, a medicinal beverage produced by the Californian based POM Wonderful pomegranate drinks company. The ad contains the image of a torn noose with the message:

CHEAT DEATH: The antioxidant power of pomegranate juice

Cheating death was also the subject of a conversation I had today with King's College Professor David Llewelyn, one of Britain's leading authorities on intellectual law. Llewelyn, who is a writing a book about intellectual property entitled Invisible Gold --introduced me to the concept of "IP balance of payments" which refers to a country's import and export of products legally protected either through patents, copyright or brands.

Llewelyn explained to me that there is a quartet countries -- USA, UK, Japan and Sweden -- currently carrying what he calls an "IP balance of payments surplus". Every other country in the world, then, is carrying an IP deficit -- meaning that they are importing more IP protected products than they are exporting. As Llewelyn suggested, this is the real "battlefield" of the 21st century, where countries will either invite or cheat economic death. He explained that high growth countries like China, India and Korea are all challenging the dominant quartet and it's from this international war over IP that the next generation of global economic powers will emerge.

Llewelyn also suggested that the we are all, as individuals, participants in a kind of Darwinian IP struggle for survival. The next frontier, he explained, is in the development of branded individuals who will use IP law to protect their unique identities in the digital economy. Thus Llewelyn advised me to register my own uniqe brand as The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley (TM) -- to guarantee the safety of my invisible gold.

Just as countries have an IP balance of payments, so individuals too carry either a surplus or deficit of IP. The new global elite of the 21st century will, of course, have the healthiest surplus. To cheat death, then, I would advise you to work on your personal IP balance of payment. Legally defensible identity may well be a better guarantor of immortality than even the antioxidant power of pomegranate juice.