Had dinner last night at the Swiss Ambassador's residence for the second time in one week. Last week was the kickoff meeting for the ISC alumni club. I will be speaking at the ISC symposium this year so that qualified me to be a member. I met Ambassador Reverdin for the first time at this dinner. He struck me as smart, classy person with a good sense of humor. Also notable were the two pianos. He played one of the pianos to signal the beginning of dinner.
Last night, I was invited to dinner with some people who attended Davos and a few of his friends, including the EU Ambassador and the British Ambassador. It was a much smaller group and as usual, I talked a lot about blogs and democracy in Japan. It was a very healthy discussion representing a variety of views. (Will not go into detail since one of the issues discussed was the issue of being misquoted or unfairly portrayed in the media...)
I really enjoyed the discussion. I wonder if there aren't very many such discussions, or whether I'm just not invited to them very often. ;-) Also enjoyed listening to ambassadors talking about politics at the residence of the Swiss Ambassador. Seemed like a good place to get a balanced impression the European view of the war.
PS Anil is not nearly as annoying in person as he is online. When I met him at my party I was suprised by how warm and friendly he was. Later I started introducing him to others like this: "Anil is not an asshole but he plays one on TV." He told me that his ability to manage his online personality was his key to success.":)"
Just got out of a meeting of the Association of Corporate Executives or the Keizaidoyukai where I am a secretariat member and was the youngest member when I joined. The Keizaidoyukai is one of the two most powerful economic associations in Japan. The other one is the Japan Business Federation or the Keidanren. The Keidanren is the federation of all of the big companies, the members representing their companies. The Keizaidoyukai represents individual corporate executives. The Keidanren is more powerful, but the Keizaidoyukai has played a very important role in the past in pushing for reform. The Keizaidoyukai was founded after the war by a group of visionary business leaders in their 30's to rebuild Japan. It has grown into a large organization with over a thousand members and an average age of 66 years old.
Tony Kobayashi, the chairman of Fuji-Xerox is the chairman, but his term will end next month and is most likely going to be succeeded by Kakutaro Kitashiro, the chairman of IBM Japan. I'm a big fan of Tony Kobayashi and Mr. Kitashiro is someone I greatly respect. I should be overjoyed that Mr. Kitashiro is taking over the Keizaidoyukai but today we had a meeting with him and I was quite negative. I felt a bit bad, but I told the group that I was considering resigning because I was frustrated with the lack of measurable results from our meetings and that I thought it was difficult to try to gain the support of younger members when most of the people in the association were basically retired and had a lot of time to talk and not act. We all talked about how we needed to reform the Keizaidoyukai if it was going to be an agent of change in Japan.
I walked away feeling like I should give Mr. Kitashiro a chance to change the Keizaidoyukai, but with a feeling that it would be difficult. I can barely stand the tedious task of trying to convince the senior Japanese business executives. I can't image the really young leaders wanting to spend their time in these meetings. It's really a pity considering the strong philosophical foundations upon which the association was founded, but as with anything, age and power bring a variety of issues and it is losing its edge…
PS I resigned from the New Business Conference per my promise that I made here.
I was disturbed (but not surprised) to read in the newspapers that a recent NBC poll shows that 42% of the US population believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11th attack (the reality, of course, is that none of those involved in September 11 were Iraqis and there was no Iraqi involvement of any kind in the attack). How do so many people come to be so misinformed?
The misinformation is certainly deliberate and has been done by "Team Bush" to justify attacking Iraq. Rumsfeld mentioned Al Qaeda 8 times in his last press conference on Iraq, this constant drip feed of Saddam/Al Qaeda eventually influences people.
We have discussed the importance of a free press before in this group, so where has the free press been in the USA the last few months? Has the free press not been able to counter government misinformation or has it not tried?
One problem with a free press is that it might produce the news that gets the sales, so how do you guarantee that truth is involved?
Why do US citizens tolerate being lied to by their government?
Has the USA lost respect for the truth?
Several of us have been talking about a revolution in Japan recently and I've been interviewing many people about their thoughts on the need, the possibility and the correct process.
I think it is clear that it will take something on a revolutionary scale to change the Japanese system enough to make it a functioning democracy. This revolution probably does not involve violence. This revolution will require the people to want change so much that they become actively involved in trying to cause change.
Most people still have jobs and are generally happy. Most people believe that they cannot cause change. And in fact, there is no easy mechanism for the people to cause change.
Several people have suggested that a revolution won't happen until we have a true economic meltdown -- maybe in a few years.
I had several people over to my house yesterday including people from the press, IT industry, financial industry and non-profits ranging from someone in their 20's to people in their 60's. It was my own little deliberative democracy representing a variety of views. Anyway, we talked a lot about revolution. The older participants remembered the student uprisings in the 60's and 70's in Japan and described how they started and were eventually stomped out by the riot police. I talked about how blogs could encourage activism and they described that the way the students got "activated" was similar. We decided that the environment which caused the student uprisings does not exist today and the establishment and its ability thwart such an attempt is much stronger.
So, we decided that we focus not on politics or revolution for the moment, but on "truth." We will focus on having meetings and creating tools to help people in pursuit of "the truth." We talked about many things that we thought people should know and analysis that should be conducted and the members from the media explained that more than any malicious intent, it was the lack of incentive and will for them to spend the energy to do this that kept these sort of things from being reported. Someone mentioned that "the truth" is subjective. Yes. It is. But I think it is much easier to argue for the necessity of knowing the truth than arguing for democracy (a concept that I am find is actually quite alien to many Japanese) or the overthrow of the establishment. I think that blogging, polling and other tools that help us find out what the people think and expose and analyze what those in power are doing will help people become aware and active. That's the first step. We decided to continue to have regular meetings to talk about how to collect facts and highlight important truths.
What is bringing on this rant is the question that has been bugging for days now: how could "support democracy in Iraq" become to mean "bomb the hell out of Iraq"? why did it end up that democracy won't happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.
I hope my efforts get support for democracy in Japan doesn't mean that we want someone to bomb us. Someone joked with me yesterday that the US should bomb Japan to democracy since Japan seems to be re-arming and we have a rogue regime. (Once again, this is only a joke...)
Salam
The entities that call themselves "the international community" should have assumed their responsibilities a long time ago, should have thought about what the sanctions they have imposed really meant, should have looked at reports about weapons and human rights abuses a long time before having them thrown in their faces as excuses for war five minutes before midnight.
[...]
To end this rant, a word about Islamic fundis/wahabisim/qaeda and all that.
Do you know when the sight of women veiled from top to bottom became common in cities in Iraq? Do you know when the question of segregation between boys and girls became red hot? When tribal law replaced THE LAW? When Wahabi became part of our vocabulary?
It only happened after the Gulf War. I think it was Cheney or Albright who said they will bomb Iraq back to the stone age, well you did. Iraqis have never accepted religious extremism in their lives. They still don't. Wahabis in their short dishdasha are still looked upon as sheep who have strayed from the herd. But they are spreading. The combination of poverty/no work/low self esteem and the bitterness of seeing people who rose to riches and power without any real merit but having the right family name or connection shook the whole social fabric. Situations which would have been unacceptable in the past are being tolerated today.
Salam also thinks the human shields should go home.
What are some illustrations of what your “emerging democracy” will look like? In other words, how specifically will it “rectify the imbalance and inequalities” of the world without jeopardizing the many benefits of our existing representative democratic institutions?
I think that initially emergent democracy should be looked at as something that will be an addition to the current system. I think the initial impact will be in more activity by the people and a clearer more intelligent voice of the people. It seems to me speed has increased with global TV journalism, but that now politics and discourse tends to revolve around short soundbytes. I am over-simplying here, but if you can imaging what scaling of deliberative polling might look like. Add a self-organizing element to this. If there was a clear "opinion of the people" on every key issue, this could help guide politicians and force/help mass media to be less reactive. Eventually, if this "opinion of the people" really worked and became intelligent enough, (This will take some time, I believe) maybe people could play a greater and greater role in governance. Again, I think this is an experiment which will take time, and I am not pushing to replace anything right away. I believe that creating a new voice through blogs is a great way to get started.
Question 2: The Face-to-Face Universe
The Internet does not exist independently from other forms of citizen engagement. From your article, I have the impression that the Internet is a panacea from which will eventually emerge new types of democratic systems and institutions that will solve the ills of society. You do discuss deliberative democracy, but what other types of transformations have to take place in the way citizens engage in face-to-face dialogues and deliberations in order to contribute to the improvement of our political, economic and social structures? And how will these new types of face-to-face encounters work in tandem with your discussion on emerging democracy in the digital sphere?
I also think that face-to-face is very important. I think that the Internet lowers the cost of interaction greatly, increasing the ease of organizing and the value of face-to-face meetings. The Internet is no replacement for face-to-face. In fact, I think the number of face-to-face contacts should INCREASE as emergent democracy puts people in touch with more and more people who they want to meet.
Question 3: Hijacking Self-Organizers
You write, “It is possible that there is a method for citizens to self-organize to deliberate on and address complex issues as necessary and enhance our democracy without any one citizen being required to know and understand the whole… If information technology could provide a mechanism for citizens in a democracy to participate in a way that allowed self-organization and emergent understanding, it is possible that a form of emergent democracy could address many of the complexity and scalability issues facing representative governments today.”
Could you elaborate on this idea? It’s intriguing. What would be a possible illustration on the national level? And if such self-organizing initiatives could be created with the help of information technology, what mechanisms would be in place so that these participative endeavors were not hijacked by individuals or groups with their own political motives and agendas?
I think this is an interesting question. I think about this a lot. I think that the key is that when everyone is active and engaged, it's much harder to "pull a fast one" on them. In a representative democracy, most people don't really know what is going on behind closed doors or what "deals are cut." In an emergent democracy, everyone is watching and the process is quite transparent. This ties into the question about co-opting bloggers, but I think that such attempts would be quickly found out and discarded and that mechanism for detection could easily be put in place.
My question is do you see the co-opting of the bloggers who benefit from the Power Law as a major obstacle to your theory of Emergent Democracy?
No, because I do believe that this is the strength of blogs and other very active feedback networks. It's actually VERY easy for people to join the dialog. For instance, you posted a comment on my blog, and now you are an active part of my conversation. In fact, just linking to me guarantees that I will read what you said, if it is picked up by technorati, a simple process. On the other hand, deliberate attempts to co-opt the community, such as the Raging Cow thing by Dr. Pepper, is a good example of how sensitive the community is to co-option. I think that the more popular your blog is, the more people are watching and checking to make sure integrity and honesty is maintained.
Can the weblog community really come close to replicating the levels of trust engendered by people within communities who have spent life times together engaged in the discussion and implantation of political, social and economic issues?
No. The problem is, many people have only these "strong tie" community trust networks to work with. How else are you going to get to know someone in Iraq, or Afghanistan? The idea of the strength of weak ties is that you need to reach beyond your local network. Also, in an exceedingly open and complex world, you are made to interact with more and more people from more and more places which reach beyond your community. A trust network that spans communities could be built which could enhance your ability to communicate with, interact with and build trust in such a world. Like, face-to-face, I don't think that this new trust network necessarily displaces strong tie trust networks in tight communities, but enhances it by allowing weak ties to be more easily created and managed.
I think you raised some great questions and issues that we need to think about when trying to design the tools for ED. I don't think I answered your questions completely, but wanted to get some thoughts off in a timely way. Thanks for reading the paper and sharing your thoughts.
All of them are accomplished writers and command a large and devoted audience of readers. But it is their entrepreneurialism that sets them apart. I call them GoldBloggers!
Via Chris Pirillo. So Chris, how did YOU find this site? Were you googling for "make money blogging"? ;-)
Next time I see Joi, I'm going to ask him how his emergent democracy idea will help get radical new ideas into political life. Letting the masses run things is OK, but you don't get the radical innovations that only a small wacky minority sees at first.
Remember, 50 years ago most Americans thought it was OK to discriminate against blacks. It took a radical minority to push the idea through that that wasn't OK.
So, in the paper, I am arguing that democracy should protect the rights of the minority while being governed by the will of the majority. In emergence, for instance in the brain, the trick is to allow diversity to stimulate new ideas and creativity.
In Calvin's theory of how our brain works, he explains that the edges or parts of the surface of the brain which are not adjacent to many other areas is where new ideas form which can come back and influence the rest of the brain.
In evolution and the theory of genetic drift and gene pools, it can be shown that when you have large populations, genes tend to stay more similar and drift more slowly but on islands with smaller gene pools, genes can go wild... like the Galapagos islands.
So I believe the trick is to have the various levels. The radical ideas and the great products come from small groups (the creative layer) to be allowed to work on a diverse set of ideas. When these ideas reach a certain level acceptability, the social level (the early adopters?) picks up the idea and "puts it on the radar." It then gives the opportunity for the idea to take a real shot at the masses. If you think about The Woz, I would say that the Home Brew Computer Club was the creative layer where the idea percolated. Then, Silicon Valley (the social layer) decided to give the idea a try. Eventually, it chanaged the world (the political layer). Many ideas don't make it past the first layer or the second.
What I think good emergent democracy will enable is exactly the kind of thing you are talking about Scoble. Right now most "thoughts" are thunk by experts in powerful positions. Was The Woz, an "expert"? Smoking might not have been intuitive, but it took a huge number of people fighting against Big Tobacco for A LONG TIME trying to break through the resistance that Big Tobacco were able to put in place with their money before this thing was able to happen. Couldn't this have been enabled more easily with emergent democracy where the debate could have captured the hearts and minds of bloggers more easily than the years in court that this took for people to notice?
Scoble... why are comments turned off on your blog?
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