Through Open Government for British Columbia (there’s a blog for everything and I read them all), I’ve stumbled across an interesting article called The Political Economy of Peer Production.
To those of you skeptical of all things peer as a broad attack on markets and capitalism, I quote the following: “Despite significant differences, P2P and the capitalist market are highly interconnected. P2P is dependent on the market and the market is dependent on P2P.”
Consistent with the peer production theory, I’m not going to offer a lot of gloss. I leave that to you commenters.
Wow.
The e-poll books are supposed to be operated by tapping a small plastic stylus against the computer screens. The terminals are linked together and are used to register, among other things, whether a voter has shown up at the polls.
But during last month’s primary election, on occasion, one machine in a precinct would show voters as having cast ballots, while another would say they had not come to the polls.
To fix the problem, Diebold officials said yesterday the units could be operated with computer mouses and that they could provide the state with 5,500 of them in time for the general election. Or they could install new software and allow election judges to touch the screens.
During yesterday’s test inside the Marriott’s banquet hall, the mouses were in use. But one poll worker did not heed the warning to operate the equipment using only the mouse, causing the machine to lose contact with the five others it was linked to. It took less than 30 seconds to reboot the machine.
The inexplicable thing about this is that the Sun describes this as “a relatively smooth test.” But my question is: smooth compared with what? Paper ballots don’t have to be rebooted if someone touches them the wrong way. It’s not possible to vote twice with the same paper ballot. It may be the case that compared with previous Diebold tests, this one was relatively smooth, but compared with more traditional voting systems, Diebold’s machines are still an disaster waiting to happen.
Hat Tip: Techdirt
Nick Carr has a puzzling post about the fact that a Google search for “Martin Luther King, Jr.” returns, as its first result, a white supremacist website. The first sentence of the post is “It’s funny how a set of instructions – an algorithm – written by people can come to be granted, by those same people, a superhuman authority.”
One might expect the post to go on to identify someone granting Google’s algorithm a superhuman authority. One would be wrong. Carr writes that AOL, which has licensed Google’s search engine for its own site, “finds itself in the uncomfortable position of promoting the white supremacist site to its customers.” And Google says its results are generated automatically, and so it “can’t tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results.” Carr concludes scornfully that Google believes that “human judgment is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm.”
This is silly. It’s not hard to understand why Google would be reluctant to second guess the results of its algorithm. The issue isn’t that human judgment is inferior to algorithmic results. The problem is that human judgment is incredibly expensive compared with computing power. Because obviously, this wouldn’t be the only example of manipulated search results. I’m sure the White House would immediately write to Google about this result. Tens of thousands of other individuals and groups who believe some search result or another had slighted them would come out of the woodworks to complain. Google would have to hire some new staffers to come up with some rules governing when search results get suppressed, and then they’d have to hire a bunch more staffers to apply these rules to thousands and thousands of individual complaints.
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I’m reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. I’m only a few pages in, but I thought this quote, on page 16, was interesting:
My approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy. Just like the market, the state will have to adjust to this new emerging modality of human action. Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise.
Now, from Benkler’s language, here and elsewhere in the book, it seems quite clear that his basic sympathies are with the “progressive branches of liberal political thought.” Yet Benkler is smart enough to recognize that the story he’s trying to tell doesn’t fit naturally within the progressive narrative. The emerging economy of peer production isn’t being created by democratic deliberation under the wise guidance of state regulation. No government programs are required or especially helpful to the process. Liberals can be excited about it to the extent that it’s an alternative to having the big, evil corporations do stuff, but it doesn’t leave much room for their political program.
In contrast, Benkler’s thesis dovetails nicely with the standard libertarian narrative–at least if libertarianism is understood as an ideology that defends individualism and voluntary cooperation in all its forms, rather than an ideology narrowly focused on promoting markets as the only legitimate form of economic organization. It’s a little bit unfortunate that left-wingers like Benkler and Larry Lessig are the most visible evangelists for the economics of peer production, because this is really a libertarian story: public goods being produced by the voluntary cooperation of individuals without a government program in sight.
Jonathan’s article is here.
If you lose a battle, sometimes the best thing you can do is make it sound like a victory. That’s seems to be the only explanation for a truly bizarre article that appeared on Salon.com yesterday regarding the net neutrality battle. The lead in to the story sets the tone:
“In the Capitol Hill battle over Net neutrality, a ragtag army of grass-roots Internet groups, armed with low-budget videos, music parodies and petitions, have the corporate telecoms, and their allies in Congress, on the run.”
Good lead. Too bad it’s almost entirely fiction. To start with, it is beyond belief that anyone is still peddling this as a David v. Goliath story. The pro-regulation camp a rag-tag army? How ragtag can you be when you count some of the largest corporations on Planet Earth– including both Google and Microsoft–on your side? In fact, the combined market cap of the major “pro-regulation” firms actually exceeds that of their major opponents. (The article does acknowledge the presence of these corporate giants in the pro-reg camp, conceding “[t[hey’ve spent millions to slug it out with the telecom companies,” but dismisses this with the non-sequiterish statement: “they’ve yet to land a knockout blow.”)
But wait, there’s more. Daniel Reilly, the author of the piece, trots out Sergey Brin–the co-founder of Google–as further proof of the ragtag nature of this battle, colorfully pointing out that Brin showed up to lobby on Capitol Hill “wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers.” Well, there’s a real grassroot for you. Of course, he doesn’t mention that poor Brin is the 12th richest man in America, with a net worth of $14.1 billion dollars, according to Forbes.
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I was about start a long rant about the absurd new anti-Internet gambling bill that Congress just passed but then I read Mike’s post over at TechDirt and realized there’s not much more I can add beyond what he’s already said there.
I have to admit though that the “shoot the middleman” approach the government used here could be quite effective at shutting down online gambling in the U.S. in the short term. No major financial intermediary will want to risk violating the new law’s prohibition against the use of credit cards or other financial instruments as a clearance mechanism.
What will be interesting now, however, is the extent to which alternative online financial mechanisms develop to fill the void. After all, I hope that members of Congress aren’t so naive as to believe that this bill will actually eradicate all online gambling. If there’s one thing we know from history it’s that humans have an insatiable appetite for wagering (an appetite that government is all too willing to take advantage of through state lotteries and heavily-taxed casinos). But whenever unsanctioned gambling is in question, government officials turn the debate into a morality play and claim that their regulatory efforts are meant to protect us (or our children, of course) from the supposed evils of using one’s money to enjoy one’s self.
So, what will happen now that all the “mainstream” financial intermediaries are being run out of town? It remains to be seen. But I’m willing to bet (pun intended) that some crafty, innovative people out there in the online world will find ways to get around this ban. Sadly, however, a lot of people will probably have to go completely “underground” to do it. And we shouldn’t be surprised if a shady element enters the scene to try to get a cut of this business. (New Jersey mafia members, call your office!)
Update: After writing this last night I picked up Washington Post this morning and found this interesting article by Mary Jordan about how cell phones are making money transfers instantaneous and dirt cheap for people across the globe. Could this be an evasion technique for determined Net gamblers? Perhaps, but I suppose the feds will then just threaten all domestic cellular companies with serious liability if they assist in completing those financial transactions.
On his aptly named blog Ideas David Friedman discusses the gift economies (two kinds). It reminds me of Tim Lee’s post a couple months ago, Markets Don’t Need Money.
According to Friedman, when someone gives things away, what he gets, “in addition to his own enjoyment and the feeling of a useful job done, is status. . . . You pour your gifts out to the world and the world, if you are lucky, repays you in a variety of indirect ways.”
This is true, but I think it can be a little more direct and a little more than luck. People who are smart or skillful, who work hard, and who give away high quality intellectual property may get grants, may win jobs, command speaking or other performance fees, and have many meals and hotel stays purchased for them, to name a few ways that they are fairly directly rewarded.
On Tim’s post, TLF friend Luis Villa commented correctly on the need for money, but the two economies aren’t sealed from one another in any significant sense. There is a lot of crossover between the money economy and the gift economy. One just uses a standard metric of value and the other doesn’t.
Especially in the intellectual property area, people would do better to think of value rather than focusing solely on money. Pretty much all human action is economic behavior. (I didn’t come up with that idea just now by myself.)
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