Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months or so, was bound to have a practical limit, and Intel scientists say we're almost there. [Link]

... thanks for bringing this up. Steven's book has influenced other political thinking - you might be interested in Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy essay (http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html) as well as the my own older Nodal Politics piece that I mentioned in my intro (http://www.mindjack.com/feature/nodal.html). The Deanspace volunteers understood this thinking. We had a bit of controversy with a political organizer here in Texas who couldn't get the rationale for creating mulitple similar sites, but it's partly about establishing many presences to identify and cultivate emergent thinking and (eventually) have enough presence to cultivate consensus. The local presences are more accessible locally; because they're part of a network, though, they're more than just local. It's sorta like "Think globally, act locally..." but you get both... and a way to organize and network participation among citizens so that they can coordinate their input to the systems of governance. Ultimately using network tools and Internet applications, you facilitate democracy without necessarily changing the the systems of governance. You still have 'representative democracy,' but citizens have better ways to influence their representatives.

Britt, I agree - the green line is where we should be. Political parties formed to organize people with particular affinities and sustain that organization over time, but with the Internet, that's no longer necessary - we can form coalitions at the drop of a byte. The political parties are increasingly filled with players who are out of touch with the needs and hopes and desires of ordinary citizens who have thereby lost the voice that parties were supposed to give them. Partisan politics is increasingly about telling, rather than asking.

Cory Doctorow has a prescription for 2004: quite building those dang social networksters, learn to love the 'net's complexity, warts and all! [Link]

I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.

About a year ago Joi Ito started a discussion of "Emergent Democracy," about how a mix of our existing tools plus new social software and social network technologies relate to democracy. Joi et al were seeing the potential for blogs to become politically relevant tools, and noting how themes, issues, and positions seem to emerge from blog activity - hence emergent democracy. O'Reilly Books, understanding that this discussion is extremely relevant as Internet tools become essential to political campaigns, movements, and adhocracies, is holding an Emergent Democracy Forum at the beginning of its Emerging Technology conference in February. With Mitch Ratcliffe, I'm writing a book on the subject; Mitch and I will both be at the conference; hope to see you there, too.
[Link]

Lenny Bruce was pardoned posthumously today by New York Governor George Pataki. The pardon was for the obscenity conviction that was part of a pattern of harassment that threw Lenny's life up gainst a brick wall and pounded him until he gave in. He died of a drug overdose in the mid-sixties. A decade ago I wrote a whacky piece remembering Lenny. Though I was a kid growing up in the middle of the West Texas desert, I knew about Lenny via Harvey Kurtzman's "Help!" magazine and the serialization in Playboy of "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People." I suppose we should be celebrating though the pardon comes at a time when free speech is on the ropes again. Pataki's move should remind us how far we've come – before we go back. [Link]

One of the places I blog, Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs weblog, just won the Utne Independent Press Award for Online Cultural Coverage. I'm proud to be a member of the Smart Mobs blog mob, a dedicated, clueful group.

i'd ask all technologists to consider not only what problems a technology solves, but what new ones could emerge. Start thinking like a writer or an abuser of technology. Imagine how people could misuse a technology to hurt others. Consider who gains and loses power from such technology. It's a fascinating exercise and far more fulfilling than just thinking about who benefits from something. And besides, then you won't always be thinking "but the users shouldn't do THAT with this technology."

a lot of the consequences of technology are not predictable and emerge as the technology develops and is adopted widely. I think that in addition to trying to have a vision about the negative effects of technology (which I agree is important) and trying to design around the issues, I think that identifying tensions as they arise and providing feedback to the toolbuilders is important. One of the problem of commercial enterprise is that technologists are often forced to sweep these tensions or problems under the carpet for the better good of profits or commercial interests. Also the cost of changing a design or an architecture often makes such change difficult. I think designing systems to assume they will need to be changed is important. This does get difficult as technologies mature. This is why I think the social software / blog space is interesting. We can still change a lot of the basic architecture of this space. So although I agree it is important to call our to technologists to think, I think that the dialog between technologists and people like you and Cory is more important.

This got me thinking about the aesthetic approach, because it puts the engineering foo and project management wrangles aside for a moment, so that we can look at the process of technology development with new eyes, and think creatively about the project or app as an aesthetic piece. This kind of thinking (outside the box) would live under Joi's carpet where commercial projects are concerned; if I brought this up while wearing my consultant's hat I'd be shown the door. But we now have a world of noncommercial open source projects that people are doing for various reasons, and one of those reasons might as well be aesthetic, and might lead to innovation emerging from those parts of the brain we seldom bring to bear on project work.

Following my nose here:

Nate Wilcox sent me a link to a a Daily KOS post mentioning an editorial Dave Winer wrote. Winer was responding to the Dean and Clark campaigns' adoption of Open Source software, as reported in a Wired News article about the Clark campaign's Open Source strategy. The KOS piece also points to a response to Winer blogged by Jim Moore of the Dean Campaign.

I was surprised at Winer's anti-Open Source rant:

One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.)

How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.

Besides which, Open Source isn't "free software." Even free software is, as Richard Stallman says over and over, "free as in freedom, not free as in beer."

As for commoditization, Winer would do well to think about these comments from Tim O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: ....Open source is a contributor to the commoditization of software, but it's not the only contributor. Open standards lead to commoditization. The Web browser is proprietary, but it's a commodity.

Basically, we're really seeing the development of something that's analogous to hardware with the IBM (Corp.) PC. If you look at what happened to the hardware business, there was a transitional period where everybody tried to play by the old rules. It wasn't until Dell (Computer Corp.) figured out that, no, the rules really are different, and the business levers are different, that we saw somebody figure out how to really leverage commodity hardware.

Ian Murdock, the guy who started Debian, and now runs a company called Progeny (Linux Systems Inc.) is right on track with this. Instead of seeing Linux as a product, he sees Linux as a set of commodity software components he can put together for different purposes.