The Great Seduction

The Internet: the land of the paid

This morning's newspaper arrived full of bad news. January was the Dow's worst in 113 years. More and more goods are building up as consumer confidence continues to dive. There's rising economic xenophobia around the world with British oil refinery workers trying to throw foreigners out of the workforce. Even Peggy Noonan, usually the most optimistic of optimists, wrote that "we've had  it too good for too long". The party is over, Reagan's once cheerful cheerleader said, the "bill is coming due."

But the worst news of all, the veryworstest, was emblazened on the top of the paper. The revolutionary business model called "free", championed by Chris Long Tale Anderson, is in trouble. In a shockingly frank confession in this morning's WSJ, Anderson acknowledges that "free is not enough" and that "it has to be matched with Paid." As Anderson acknowledges, the free business model has driven the Web 2.0 economy over the last ten years:

Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

As Peggy Noonan recognizes, the bill is now coming due. And the bill for free is going to be massive. Free has hastened the destruction of the newspaper and recorded music businesses as well as building an entire generation of technology "companies" without viable business models.  Like Detroit and Wall Street, contemporary Silicon Valley -- which, to quote Noonan, has had it too good for too long -- has been built upon a series of economic fallacies about profit and loss. Anderson is right. For the Google Generation, the Internet is indeed the land of the free. The challenge now, for the next wave of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, is to transform the Internet into the land of the paid.

A YouTube Post-Presidency

David Cox asks why Frost-Nixon could never happen today. His point is that, more than 30 years ago after David Frost's successful extraction of guilt from Richard Nixon, journalists like Frost have gone soft in their interviewing of politicians. Cox blames the obsequious "Frostie" for this development, a journalist who apparently is more interested in joining the British establishment than in destroying it.

What really interested me most about Ron Howard's excellent Frost-Nixon movie is its reminder of what media was like in 1977. Back then, there was no cable tv, no YouTube, no alternative to the handful of dominant channels in mainstream television. And so for Nixon to make his appeal to the American people, to present his side of the story, he needed to go through mainstream media. And for all Frost's supposed superficiality as a political interviewer, there was never any question about his impartiality or his professionalism.

Fast forward to today's infinitely splintered media landscape. Once again, we have a massively unpopular ex American president who will, no doubt, want to put his case to the American people. Likewise, we all want an apology from George W. Bush about Iraq as well an admission of guilt about the non-existence of those WMDs. But in a media world which has blurred the distinction between professional and amateur content, what's to stop Bush orchestrating an interview with a supposedly neutral journalist on the Internet? We all know about the YouTube Presidency. What worries me is a YouTube post-presidency.

The Google Paradox

I am thinking of calling my next book The Google Paradox. It will be a self-fulfilling prophesy about Google, authors and the book business. The Google Paradox will argue that the more Google does to kill the traditional publishing industry with the free online content from its search engine, the more books will get written about the central role of Google in our new digital economy.

The idea of The Google Paradox occurred to me this week while reading two new books printed on paper by conventional publishers about Google. Both have been written by New York City academicians and both place Google at the heart of the great cultural and commercial transformation being realized by digital technology.

The first, What Would Google Do? by the New York Graduate School of Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, is a hagiography of Google’s business practices. It suggests that Google is the only company that knows how to “survive and prosper in the internet age.” Jarvis argues that Google’s commitment to openness and to the network principle, its recognition of the collaborative and conversational nature of the new economy and its ability to always putting the customer first makes the Silicon Valley technology leviathan the “model” for all other companies in all other industries. It’s not surprising that Jarvis, who is also an evangelical blogger, has chosen such an ecumenical sounding title for his Google worshipping book. He is a digital Jesuit and What Would Google Do? has been written as a conversional self-help manual for analogue executives in commerce, politics, education, book publishing and “even religion” who want to learn how to think like Google so they can survive and prosper in the new media economy.

The second book, Elsewhere USA: How We Got From The Company Man, Family Dinners And The Affluent Society To The Home Office, Blackberry Moms, And Economic Anxiety is much more ambiguous in its affection for the achievements of Google. Written by Dalton Conley, the Dean of Social Sciences at New York University, it seeks to understand why all the connectness of the new information economy is making us all so anxious and unhappy (this anxiousness, of course, is really caused by new media evangelists like Jeff Jarvis relentlessly preaching to us that we need to mimic Google if we are to survive in the digital age). Like Jarvis, Conley finds the “center” of the BlackBerry and iPhone economy at the Googleplex, Google’s iconic office park headquarters in Mountain View, California. But rather than Jarvis’ breathless enthusiasm for all things Google, Conley describes a “total company” culture where Google employees eat, sleep, groom themselves, socialize and recreate on the Google campus. So where Jarvis finds democratization, Conley finds the seeds of totalitarianism. Perhaps they are the same thing.

The irony of Elsewhere USA and What Would Google Do? is that both books rely on the five hundred year-old technology of Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type to explain the wrenching digital transformation of the 21st century. These are both printed books about the death of the printed book. That is The Google Paradox. And it will be published some time next year, so long as I can find a traditional publisher sufficiently myopic to pay me to write a 65,000 word obituary notice for their own business.

How the internet is saving our culture

Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of America's House of Representatives, famously said that all politics is local. But while such parochial wisdom might work for politics, it certainly doesn't make sense for new media in a digital age of the global network. One man who certainly doesn't share O'Neill's focus on the local is Philip Balboni, the CEO of GlobalPost, a very promising international news website launched earlier this month.

A veteran of the television- and print-news business who began his career in 1967 as a foreign correspondent, Balboni has always had what he calls a "great passion" for international journalism. He traces this love back to the dawn of a November day in 1965 when, as a commissioned second lieutenant in the 1st Armored Division, he first saw the coastline of Vietnam from the deck of an American ship.

"There was this amazing, beautiful, exotic country. It was the first foreign country I'd ever seen," Balboni admits, when he speaks to me from his office in Boston, Massachusetts. "That moment, which I can still close my eyes and see, followed by my experience there during the war, instilled in me a love of international journalism, as well as a recognition that Americans weren't well served by the traditional media coverage of the globe, and there was a huge need to learn more about the world."

Almost 45 years after his youthful epiphany off the Vietnamese coast, Balboni has finally realised his dream. Launched on 12 January, GlobalPost is an online international news source that might represent the future of the newspaper. Rather than assembling an expensive full-time staff of foreign correspondents, Balboni and his executive editor, the former Boston Globe and National Public Radio foreign correspondent Charles Sennott, have invented an innovative new business model to acquire and publish high-quality foreign news. They've recruited 65 professional, often prize-winning journalists based in countries as diverse as Turkey, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica and, of course Vietnam who, in exchange for GlobalPost stock and a monthly stipend of $1,000, will write at least one 600-800-word magazine-style piece per week which, Balboni told me, would provide "deep and broad exposure" to the world.

Backed by $8.2m raised from individual investors, GlobalPost employs 14 full-time people in an operation that essentially mimics the foreign-news operation of a traditional newspaper at a fraction of its cost. The site, which is free to consumers, has three sources of revenue: advertising sales, syndication, and a value-added content area called "Passport", to be launched on 1 March. Unlike most new-media entrepreneurs, the experienced Balboni is ambivalent about basing his business on ad sales. "A healthy business," he says, shouldn't rely on realising "much more than half" its revenue from advertising.

GlobalPost seems to have triggered the idealistic young lieutenant again in Balboni. Unashamedly thrilled that his two week-old website has already attracted 90,000 visitors from 177 different countries, this 40-year veteran of TV and print media clearly is on a mission to educate Americans about the complexity of the world. One can but salute such grown-up seriousness in an internet age of mostly infantile dross.

Broadcast Yourholiness

So Pope Benedict XVI is setting up a YouTube channel. Like every other frustrated CEO of a multinational organization, the Holy Father wants to disintermediate the traditional authorities and communicate directly with his global team. As Monsignor Paul Tighe, a former Dublin priest who is now the secretary of the Pontifical Council (ie: running PPR -- Papal Public Relations), explained:

"With the YouTube platform, we now have the capacity to give young people direct access to the thinking, to the thoughts, to the words and deeds of the pope. That allows them to share that with their friends."

Direct access, eh. And who, I wonder, is to blame for not giving young people direct access to the thinking, words and deeds of the pope? Might it be those lazy, out-of-touch local Catholic priests who are not communicating directly enough with their customers. And who better to transform the organization than the innovative guy in charge. As Benedict XVI himself wrote about the democratizing potential of the Internet:

"The proclamation of Christ in the world of new technologies requires a profound knowledge of this world if the technologies are to serve our mission adequately. It falls, in particular, to young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication, to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this 'digital continent.'"

One of the first Papal videos posted on YouTube involved Benedict XVI discussing the Internet as a "new way to speak to God." But, with all due respect to the Holy Father, I'm not so sure this call "for the evangelization of this digital continent" is particularly new. It actually represents the digital version of The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), that select group of viral evangelizers founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 as a counter to the Protestant Reformation. By calling on "young people" to evangelise the digital continent, Benedict XVI is actually disintermediating his traditional structure of power in the church. Are local priests about to join journalists and record label executives in the dustbin of history? Will the Internet trigger the new Counter-Reformation?

The new old

Simon Jenkins is convinced that neophilia, the "raging obsession of the boom years", is history and Gutenburg's ghost has returned to live in Silicon Valley. In our recession/depression, Jenkins says, there's a new "cult of antiquity". He sees this in Obama's arrival at the inaugeration by train and his return to the art of oratory, in the current vogue for live theater and live communication and public congregation and, above all, in Silicon Valley's embrace of "The Printed Blog" (Josh Karp's new start-up)

But Jenkins, a Guardian columnist who happens to be on the left, has fallen into the same ahistorical trap as the conservative David Brooks. Yes, Jenkins is right in his observation that history now seems reassuringly familiar. But the past that we are all now embracing is sanitized and simplified. It's the invented past of supposedly symbolic train journeys in a country that, fifty years ago, slaughtered its railways. It's History for Dummies -- the kind of lazy, ill-informed generalizations which say that Obama won't do an FDR and compare him with Lincoln and our current economic situation with the Great Depression (and yes, I confess to being a dummy sometimes too).

Jenkins says that the old is now new. But it's a new old which bears no resemblance to the past. And he's wrong to believe that the death of neophilia (a shrinking Wired, for example) will enable us to go back to a world that once really had existed:

The early media guru Marshall McLuhan thought that electronics would usher in an age of global villages and virtual friendships. It would render true community obsolete. He was wrong. He understood technology, but not humanity. Live is real. Old is new.

Take, for example, books and paper -- what Jenkins calls the "ghost of Gutenberg". He says that the Printed Blog is proof than old is new. "Prepare to meet they past", he tells us. But nothing could, in fact, be further from the truth. Print newspapers are dying, the book business is in crisis and 2009 will be a year of unrivaled turbulence in both industries. Jenkins is right to say that the future lies in our longing for "true community" and for the live act -- both in the theater and in politics. But this future is entirely foreign to the past. It will be a future in which the copy has been entirely commodified and viable individual brands like Obama (who merges theater and politics) are monetized through a new kind of physical interaction of which we got a sneak preview on Pennyslvania Avenue last Tuesday. 

That's the great irony of the 21st century digital revolution. In this world of ubiquitous free content, the only thing of value is the analogue. Live is more than real. It is our new reality.

The end of ideology?

So what to make of Obama? The NYT's David Brooks, who can be trusted to always find traditional values in the unlikeliest of places, argues that Obama is a new puritan, a post-ideological pragmatist and empiricist who will be requesting similarly Protestant sacrifice from all American citizens, thereby reuniting a divided country. According to Brooks, America has been riven, over the past fifty years, by what Francis Fukuyama calls a series of "Great Disruptions" which have destroyed community and created a new culture of narcissistic individualism:

The information economy began to disrupt the industrial economy. The feminist revolution disrupted gender and family relations. The civil rights revolution disrupted social arrangements. The Vietnam War discredited the establishment... These disruptions were generally necessary and good, but the transition was painful. People lost faith in old social norms, but new ones had not yet emerged. The result was disorder. Divorce rates skyrocketed. Crime rates exploded. Faith in institutions collapsed. Social trust cratered.... As community bonds dissolved, individual autonomy asserted itself. Liberals championed the moral liberation of individuals. Conservatives championed their economic liberation. The combined result was a loss of community and social cohesion, and what Christopher Lasch called a culture of narcissism.... Instead of ending ideology, the Great Disruption produced ideological politics. The weakening of social norms led to fierce battles as groups vied to create new ones. Personal became political. Groups fought over basic patterns of morality.

According to Brooks, Obama can disrupt the Great Disruption by replacing the culture of narcissism with that of shared responsibility and sacrifice. Brooks calls this a "Grand Bargain" in which all Americans agree to share the burden of fixing healthcare, Social Security and the government deficit. He sees Obama as a page turner who can get America to its "next chapter" of its history.

The problem with this argument is its ahistoricism. As an American conservative, Brooks' future lies in a very local past. Thus, for Brooks, Obama is a reinvented founding father and his value is in his Franklinesque "discipline, equipose and self-control." But what Brooks doesn't acknowledge is that the global forces which have created the individualism and autonomy of the Great Disruption are, if anything, more powerful now than they've ever been. We live now in Elsewhere America, a radically individualized and personalized place of home offices, BlackBerry moms and economic anxiety. And Obama, with his beloved BlackBerry on his buckle, his individual identity monetized by a successful book deal, his disintermediation of traditional media via the Internet, his ability to effortlessly glide above all institutions and groups, is a new paradigm of an entirely autonomous individual in an infinitely fragmented and transient world in which community and social cohesion have evapourated. 

The other problem is that all this talk of the end of ideology is itself the product of a highly individualised culture. Rather than a sociologically rooted figure, Obama seems to have come from no particular culture or community. He can be everything to everyone because he came from nowhere. Obama, then, is just Obama. He is indeed a post-ideological individual in an age of radical individualism where nobody wants to acknowledge group economic interest or solidarity (which is what "ideology" traditionally means). It is indeed true that Obama rejects the idea of ideology. But that's because he's the owner of the most valuable brand in the global digital economy, and not because he's the second coming of Benjamin Franklin.

In Defense of Nobody USA

While I agree with some of Janet Maslin's criticisms of Dalton Conley's new sociology of the digital future Elsewhere USA, I do think that her New York Times review is excessively harsh (is she trying to emulate Michiko K?). In particular, I think Maslin's dismissal of all Conley's theories is wrong:

But Mr. Conley has no big new point to make. He awkwardly coins new locutions (“weisure” to conflate work and leisure, “convestment” to do the same with consumption and investment). He struggles with jargon while trying to interject the term “intravidual” into our collective conversation.

But what Maslin's calls his awkwardly coined "new locutions" are actually brave attempts to make "big points" about our new digital social reality. She mocks Conley's neologism "intravidual", but this term explains the way in which the digital revolution is altering individual psychology by "breaking down physical barriers to group affiliation".  Conley believes that the ease with which we join online "communities" is undermining the "self-reflectiveness" and the "individualism" and "social self" that are intimately bound up with our membership of physical associations. It is "difference", Conley believes, that makes gives the modern person a coherent sense of identity, it is what transforms them into an socially definable individual:

It is only when the groups don't match up -- when we are confronted with difference and when those differences are multifaceted -- that the individual emerges.

The digital revolution, with its supposed freedom to invent oneself online, dramatically changes this. Conley argues that it's this very freedom which might be destroying the modern idea of individualism:

"In the postmodern or information economy, those restraints have been totally removed. You can join as many groups as you want, deploying multiple aliases while you are at it. Members of stigmatized groups have always experienced the phenomenon of multiple selves.... The difference today is that there is no need for anyone to reconcile the many facets of their identity."

Conley hints that the consequence of this intravidualism, the freedom to carry infinite selves, is mass autism, a collective descent of the wired into a state of dysfunctional social interaction. Maslin agrees that this is "fascinating" but complains Conley fails to "pursue" this idea fully. But I'm not so sure. His theory is both intriguing and disturbing. It suggests that intravidualism of our networked society transforms autism from a supposed brain defect into the natural condition of everyone. And this looming threat of mass autism is, I think, a sufficiently "big point" to make Elsewhere USA (which could also be entitled Nobody USA) a worthwhile read.

Middle Eastern hope?

Two pieces of hopeful Middle Eastern news. Firstly, the Guardian is reporting that the Obama camp is prepared to talk to Hamas. This is absolutely essential because Hamas is the democratic representative of the Gazan Palestinians. Nicholas Kristof is wrong to argue that America should try to "strengthen the Palestinian Authority". No, no, no. The PA is utterly discredited. Why try to bring back to political life a corrupt and unpopular organization that has been on American life-support for years? So the news in the Guardian is really encouraging, particularly if Obama can use this opportunity to explain to the America people that Hamas has more in common with the IRA than with Al Qaeda.

The second piece of good news concerns Iran. Yesterday, I argued that to do any viable business in the Middle East, Obama needed to play the Tehran card. Today, Mark Lander reports in the Times that Hillary is considering handing Dennis Ross the Iran portfolio which Lander describes as "significant" because it would "underline Mr. Obama’s resolve to begin engaging diplomatically with Tehran."

I knew Ross back in the mid Eighties when I was a graduate student at Berkeley and he was running the Berkeley-Stanford program on American relations with the Soviet Union. Ross became mentor to two of my closest American friends, Jim Goldgeier, the author of the much acclaimed America Between the Wars and Andrew Carpendale, who became a senior adviser to James Baker at State in the first Bush administration. Since then, Ross has led peace Middle Eastern negotiations for both the Clinton and Bush senior administration. Given the failure of all these negotiations and the lingering suspicion in the Moslem world of his pro Israeli sympathies, Ross might not be quite the ideal person to now manage the thaw with Tehran. But I hope he's learnt something from all these failures. As Woodrow Wilson Center's Aaron David Miller told the Times:

“Iran sits at the nexus of everything we care about; it is the single biggest foreign policy issue this administration will confront. This relationship is not going to come around quickly.”

I would go further than Miller. The challenge of normalizing relations with Iran (and thus with Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah) is the single biggest foreign policy challenge since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. It's the only way of achieving a viable peace both in Israel/Palestine and Iraq, it gives America many more options in Afghanistan and Pakistan, plus it might represent the beginning of the painful acknowledgment in Washington that its pro Egyptian and Saudi policy over the last quarter century have been a massive strategic failure.

Hillary was right to insist on State. While Obama is confronted with a massive and probably intractable economic and domestic infrastructure problems, there is now an opportunity to fundamentally realign American foreign policy interests. With Ross and Richard Holbrooke and the other diplomatic dream team she is piecing together, it might be Hillary, rather than Barry O, who has the last laugh in the '08 election.

The Iran Question

Tom Friedman is right. The Gaza War about who is going to join Israel as the regional superpower in the Middle East -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Iran? The answer is obvious. The Saudis and, particularly, the Egyptians have demonstrated such pathetically myopic self-interest to entirely discredit any claim to regional influence. Meanwhile, the Iranian investment in Hezbollah and Hamas is proving to be a brilliant political move guaranteeing that an Arab-Israeli piece runs through Tehran. 

Former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht reiterates Iran's central Middle Eastern role in this morning's WSJ. As Gerecht notes, Egypt's political future may well also run through Tehran:

Through Hamas, Tehran can possibly reach the ultimate prize, the Egyptian faithful. For reasons both ancient and modern, Egypt has perhaps the most Shiite-sympathetic religious identity in the Sunni Arab world. As long as Hamas remains the center of the Palestinian imagination -- and unless Hamas loses its military grip on Gaza, it will continue to command the attention of both the Arab and Western media -- Egypt's politics remain fluid and potentially volatile. Tehran is certainly under no illusions about the strength of Egypt's military dictatorship, but the uncertainties in Egypt are greater now than they have been since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.

But what neither Gerecht nor Friedman acknowledge is that the only way to achieve peace in the Middle East is for the Iranians to emerge as regional counter power to Israel. The Palestine problem will never be solved until there is some sort of strategic rebalance of power in the region. Without that balance, the Gaza War will beget more Gaza Wars, more civilian massacres, more mutual bloodshed.

The most significant foreign policy challenge for Obama is the question of whether to do business with Iran over both their nuclear ambitions and a viable Middle Eastern peace. It's in almost everyone's long-term strategic interest -- the Americans, the Palestinians, even the Israelis -- to bring the Iranians to the negotiating table. If Obama has the nerve, he could realign the region and force a peace that would, in turn, encourage political reform in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If not, if Obama refuses to acknowledge the new reality of Iranian power in the region, then the situation will to degenerate to the point that an Israeli-Iranian war will be inevitable.