Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

Wells and Welles

Ran across this interesting conversation, Orson Welles jamming with H.G. Wells in San Antonio, Texas, of all places. Welles attributed his success to Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” his Halloween 1938 radio version having brought him fame/notoriety. He says in the conversation that “Citizen Kane” was possible only because of the radio broadcast, which was supposedly so real as to inspire widespread panic – likely overstated by the press. (My father once told me that the reaction was far more subdued, from what he could see.) Whatever the case, Welles got some ink, and it built his reputation as a dramatic force.

Here’s the complete 1938 radio version of WotW:

15 years later, in 1953, a very good film version was released, produced by George Pal, and featuring Gene Barry as a square-dancing, high flying scientist-hero.

Debate and contention

I watched this bit of theatre yesterday…

David Brinkley would never have had the Carvile-Matalins back for a second appearance, yet they keep popping up on the George Stephanopoulos version of This Week. In the latest episode, Mary Matalin called Paul Krugman a liar for his comments on the Romney/Ryan out on their Vouchercare plan, a subset of the overall plan to make decent healthcare a privilege for the elite, barely available to the rest of us. We’re already practically there, despite “Obamacare.”

You’ve probably already seen this debate:

Wondering if this changed anyone’s mind, or are we having a lot of preaching to the already-converted on either side of the fence. Echo silo solipsistic wrangling.

Okay, I’m frustrated by politics. But who isn’t?

Trust, reputation, collaborative consumption and service networking

This TED talk by Rachel Botsman describes the online evolution of trust and reputation that’s feeding into new ways of doing business, “collaborative consumption” (AirBNB) and “service networking” (TaskRabbit). More people doing business directly with other people via virtual mediation. Via this trend, people are learning to be more trusting, and with more trust there’s more of this kind of biz.

Cliff Figallo on the acquisition of the WELL

I recently posted about the acquisition of the seminal online community, the WELL, by some of its members. At Social Media Today, my friend and former WELL director Cliff Figallo has an informative and insightful post that gives some context. “The people who log in and participate can be numbered in the hundreds,” he says, “but thousands of people have been active members at one time or another and many of them still think of the community as just that – a true online community that they consider to be their first home in Cyberspace.” He notes its history and influence:

In many ways, The WELL called attention to the social imperative in the early days of the Internet and the Web. It was one of the very first businesses to get an Internet domain name in 1992 – well.sf.ca.us. It inspired early Web developers to design platforms that would support social interaction. In 1996, Wired Magazine put The WELL on its cover, calling it “The World’s Most Influential Online Community,” and documenting some of the melodrama and technical “exploration” that had made it something more than an online forum.

When Katie Hafner was writing that piece for Wired, which later became a book, she interviewed me, and in her office she had a diagram that showed how the WELL derived influence from the communal movement in the sixties, and how it conveyed that influence to the larger Internet and the World Wide Web. Along with the BBS world, Usenet, and email lists, as Cliff says, the WELL inspired the social web – but not just developers, also users who, like me, were discovering that computers are platforms for communication and social connection.

Many of us who are still members of the WELL, and dissatisfied with a lack of depth in drive-by interactions on social media platforms, are hoping to see new growth within the community following its acquisition.

Mondo 2000 in the Late 20th Century Cyberculture

Mondo #8

Former Mondo 2000 editor RU Sirius has been working many moons on a history of the magazine and its predecessors (High Frontiers, Reality Hackers). I was privileged to help a bit with infrastructure for gathering stories as well as contributions on the Texas and WELL perspectives on Mondo.

RU’s published the preface at Acceler8tor…

Called MONDO 2000 — the magazine took the just-then-emerging future of digital culture, dangerous hacking and new medias; tossed them in the blender along with overdoses of hallucinogenic drugs, hypersex and the more outrageous edges of rock and roll; added irreverent attitudes stolen from 20th Century countercultures from the beats to the punks, the literary and art avant gardes, anarchism, surrealism, and the new electronic dance culture— and then, it deceptively spilled that crazy Frappe all out across really slick, vaguely commercial looking multicolored printed pages with content that was Gonzo meets Glam meets Cyberpunk meets something else that has never been seen before or since… but which those of us who were there simply called MONDO — as in, “Yes, the article you submitted is definitely MONDO.” Or, “No. This isn’t MONDO. Why don’t you try Atlantic Monthly?”

We called it “a beribboned letterbomb to the core address of consensus reality.” Briefly, and, in retrospect, unbelievably, it became the flagship of the new culture; the new world that was being created by the onrush of the new technologies.

Bad pharma

According to Cory Doctorow at bOING bOING, physicians often prescribe drugs that are ineffective or harmful because pharmaceutical companies provide misleading data, according to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, “The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal.” Goldacre is the author of the forthcoming book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Summary from the caption on the photo above Goldacre’s article: “Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits.”

It’s a tough problem: you depend on your physician’s authority, and the authority of the healthcare establishment, to guide your decisions about health. Even if you trust your physician, can you trust the voices persistently whispering in his ear, especially if those voices are motivated by profit as a priority. Do pharma companies place their profit above your health? Don’t assume an easy answer – it’s complicated, though Goldacre’s book blurb suggests a belief that pharma uses the complexity as a cloak (“All these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite.”)

In the Guardian, Goldacre writes:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.

Should Apple use Google Maps?

Word on the street is that the new iOS6 maps app is a mess, but Philip Elmer-DeWitt argues in Fortune that launching its own maps system was something Apple should have done long ago. However that argument focuses more on what’s good for Apple than what’s good for the consumer. He says “the company found itself in the position of feeding its customers’ priceless location information into the mapping database of its mortal enemy. That couldn’t go on forever.” Google maps have matured over the years, growing ever more accurate and robust as Google has leveraged “billions upon billions of data points supplied by hundreds of millions of users” to improve its maps over the years, which makes “Google Maps seem so smart and iOS 6’s new Maps app seem so laughably stupid.”

I can think of a competing argument here: letting Google do what it’s done so well and continuing to leverage it could make sense in they way it would support the user’s experience.

On the other hand having the two companies compete, each trying to outdo the other with its offering, could longer-term lead to a better user experience.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Here’s Mashable’s more detailed critique of the new Maps app, with comments and a slideshow, noting that “the problems are so numerous, Maps may never have a chance to prove itself before Google comes back strong. The search giant will soon release its iOS version, probably after just enough time has passed for us all to try Apple’s Maps and pronounce it DOA.”

The WELL owns The WELL

I came to the Internet via the The WELL, an online community that started as a bulletin board system in 1985. I read about The WELL in the Whole Earth publications: CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review. An avid follower of Whole Earth in its various published forms, I was eager to get closer to the community of people who wrote for, read, and published the catalogs and quarterlies. I got a loan, bought a PCs Limited 8086 computer and 300 baud modem so that I could dial in, and spent months winning my wife over to the idea of a huge long distance bill to dial into Sausalito from Austin, Texas. Later the WELL and I both connected to the Internet, so I could use telnet to log in. I invested more and more time and conversation in the community. My membership in the WELL led me to a new career, a set of friends I never would have found otherwise, and various paths to venues for writing and cultural foo.

Salon has owned the WELL for quite a few years, allowing it to be its own thing and sustain its vibrant community of conversations. Now the WELL has been sold – to a coalition of its members.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2012 — Salon Media Group (SLNM.PK) and The Well Group, Inc. today jointly announced that The WELL is now under the ownership of The Well Group, Inc., a private investment group composed of long-time WELL members.

The Well Group, Inc. consists entirely of long-time WELL users with an average tenure exceeding 20 years. The purchase marks the first major online business taken private by users of the business itself.

The WELL represents one of the earliest platforms for online dialogue, supporting lively debates and conversations since its founding in 1985. The Well Group, Inc. is excited to take over the management of The WELL, and continue offering the valuable products and services that subscribers have come to expect over the years.

“The WELL welcomes the opportunity to support its existing base and extends an invitation to like-minded individuals looking for a social network that puts the free exchange of ideas at the forefront,” explained Earl Crabb, CEO of The Well Group, Inc. “We are extremely grateful to Salon Media Group for working with us to make this transition a success.”

“In a world where online platforms come and go, this is a testament to the dedication of a truly remarkable community,” explained Cindy Jeffers, CEO of Salon Media Group. “As a true pioneer of the digital age, and a forerunner of today’s ubiquitous social networks, The WELL has played a central role in the origin of countless creative endeavors and cultural movements. We wish The WELL countless more under their new management.”

David Weinberger: Too Big to Know

David Weinberger

I’m leading a discussion on the WELL with David Weinberger, inspired by his latest book, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. David’s been writing about the transformation of knowledge in the Internet era, in the book and sometimes on his blog.

Link to the discussion.

the central hypotheses of the book is that knowledge is moving (= has moved) from living in skulls, books, and libraries to living on networks and the Net.

So, if you want to know about some topic beyond the occasional fact, you’re likely to spend time on some network on the Net. It might be a mailing list, or a Google hangout, or Reddit, or a set of web sites… In fact, The Well provides a convenient example, and also lets me do some basic pandering. (Love ya, The Well!) A network of people connected in discussion and argument know more than the sum of what the individual people know. In that sense, knowledge lives in the network.

For me, the most interesting aspect of this is another of the book’s hypotheses: Knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium, just as it had taken on properties of the old. Among those properties: networked knowledge is unsettled, and includes differences and disagreements that traditional knowledge insisted on removing (or at least marginalizing).

Listening to blogs

Detailed Architecture of BlogSum

Kurzweil posts about a system developed for “mining the blogosphere,” i.e. BlogSum, a sophisticated listening natural language processing system for evaluating and indexing blog content developed at Concordia University. “The system is capable of gauging things like consumer preferences and voter intentions by sorting through websites, examining real-life self-expression and conversation, and producing summaries that focus exclusively on the original question.” This is a technical concept that David DeMaris and I had discussed some years ago, thinking of potential activist/political applications. It’ll be interesting to see how this technology is deployed.

Bruce Schneier: Liars and Outliers

Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier

Check out our conversation on the WELL with security expert Bruce Schneier, who among other things is responsible for the Crypto-gram Newsletter. In this conversation, he’s discussing his book Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. Because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value and erosion of trust, this book and the conversation on the WELL are especially resonant with my own focus and thinking.

In the book, I wander through a dizzying array of academic disciplines: experimental psychology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, economics, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, game theory, systems dynamics, anthropology, archeology, history, political science, law, philosophy, theology, cognitive science, and computer security. It sometimes felt as if I were blundering through a university, kicking down doors and demanding answers. “You anthropologists: what can you tell me about early human transgressions and punishments?” “Okay neuroscientists, what’s the brain chemistry of cooperation? And you evolutionary psychologists, how can you explain that?” “Hey philosophers, what have you got?” I downloaded thousands — literally ­­ of academic papers. In pre-Internet days I would have had to move into an academic library.

What’s really interesting to me is what this all means for the future. We’ve never been able to eliminate defections. No matter how much societal pressure we bring to bear, we can’t bring the murder rate in society to zero. We’ll never see the end of bad corporate behavior, or embezzlement, or rude people who make cell phone calls in movie theaters. That’s fine, but it starts getting interesting when technology makes each individual defection more dangerous. That is, fishermen will survive even if a few of them defect and overfish — until defectors can deploy driftnets and single-handedly collapse the fishing stock. The occasional terrorist with a machine gun isn’t a problem for society in the overall scheme of things; but a terrorist with a nuclear weapon could be.