Wired has an interesting article on The Rise of Crowdsourcing. It squares with a report I came across recently from a UK think tank on the “Pro-Am” phenomenon, as well as some of the discussions I’ve been following on Longtail economics.

The original article on “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson, in Wired, Oct. 2004, & here’s an MP3 podcast at IT Conversations: Chris Anderson – Economics of the Long Tail.

It’s interesting & exciting, but as the Wired article highlight at the very beginning, it has profound implications for professionals. What does the labor market & the economy look like as more & more tasks are broken down for distributed processing. As an artist & a photographer, I think the digital distribution trend is fantastic. But I’m not sure what things look like when design, photography, & even R&D are handled by a vast distributed network of oddball specialists who will do the task dirt cheap (or even free) because they think it’s cool, or consider it a hobby.

Kevin Kelly has a big article on digitizing books in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. He wades into the swamp of intellectual property issues resulting from Google’s Book Search efforts.

He also fleshes out the copyright “orphan” issue, at least 75% of the books in contention in Google’s scanning effort are works that have been pretty much left for dead by the publishing industry: books that are out of print, with unclear copyright status, an unknown rights holder, & are basically unavailable to most readers.

The publishing industry is of course trying to extort money for works that they’ve already abandoned.

There are important decisions happening every day (Net Neutrality, The recent Supreme Court/eBay decision, the EFF’s suit against AT&T) that will impact the digital environment, access to information, privacy, etc. I don’t think we talk/think/debate about them often enough.

As someone who’s flirted with the idea of “stop the world, I want to get off…” I have to say that this particular methodology of exiting stage left just gives me willies. Not only did he shoot himself in the head with a nail gun (Ouch that smarts!) 12 fucking times (involving one reload), but he wandered around for about 24 hours before going to a hospital complaining of a head ache (No? You’re kidding?). My understanding is that 12 nails is a new record. (I don’t think that this X-ray is actually the guy from Oregon… it was just the most interesting one I found on Google image)

Follow the link above for a video that amused me a great deal. I don’t know what’s more fucked up…the video, or the fact that these people are serious.

There’s a kind of creepy future history/speculation in the Guardian.

“In retaliation, suicide bombers trained by Tehran massacred civilians in Tel Aviv, London and New York… Total casualties were estimated at around 10,000 dead and many more wounded. The attacks, which included the explosion of a so-called dirty bomb in London, were orchestrated by a Tehran-based organisation for “martyrdom-seeking operations” established in 2004.

Dr Patrick Smith of the Washington-based Committee for a Better World, which had long advocated bombing Iran, demanded of the critics: “What was your alternative?”

So the RQ has been doing all the heavy lifting of late, & I’ve been a slacker (shame on me). In any event, there is a great article in the NYT on Google & China with lots of interesting consideration of the new cult of technology in China, details the government’s approach to censorship, highlights some of the cultural differences, etc.

“Given how flexible computer code is, there are plenty of ways to distort the universe — to make its omissions more or less visible.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html

The must-read oped yesterday from David Ignatius:

“The Bush administration has demonstrated, in too many ways, that it’s better at starting fights than finishing them. It shouldn’t make that same mistake again. Threats of war will be more convincing if they come slowly and reluctantly, when it has become clear that truly there is no other choice.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101078.html

Here’s an interesting piece on what the Dems need to do in order to become the dominant party in America. I won’t throw in my spin yet (we’ll wait for the comments to roll in:) Here’s a bit…

“It’s simple. Barack Obama put it exquisitely in his victory speech: “Government can help provide us with the basic tools we need to live out the American dream.”
Here’s a dirty little secret. The Republicans know this. Nothing scares them more than us returning to our simple answers…

Democratic congressmen can do that, for example, by making a credible collective pledge that if you vote Democrat enough you will never pay another medical bill as long as you live. You really think people wouldn’t stop voting Republican then?
It makes a virtuous circle. The most important exit poll finding from last year’s election was not about moral values. It was all the people who said they disagreed with Bush on the issues, but they were voting for him anyway because they knew what he stood for.

What I call “superjumbos”—grand policy commitments that span generations—add value by the very credibility of the commitment.”

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0531,perlstein,66378,2.html

I’ve taken some flack over highlighting the risks from a pre-emptive strike against Iran using nuclear weapons, without indicating what approach the US should pursue on this issue. Our middle-east policy in the current context cannot be extricated from Iraq. Until Iraq has been resolved, taking on the Iran issue is premature. We’ve already bitten off more than we can chew…& Iran knows it.

We need to make it clear to the Iraqi government that we’re leaving, & that it will be sooner (potentially much sooner) rather than later. The process should begin immediately (although I think it’s unlikely). If they make me dictator tomorrow, our approach would look something like the proposals advanced by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Once we’ve consulted with the Iraqi government we should invite regional countries to participate in a regional Iraqi peace process. The US should express their willingness to leave immediately or to stay for a limited period (no longer than a year) with the additional understanding that we will begin to draw down almost immediately if the government doesn’t take immediate measures to address the militias & sectarian violence.

There are people who will argue that we would be signaling failure. The blunt truth is that we don’t have to signal it. We’ve failed. There’s no way to salvage the situation militarily without a MASSIVE commitment of new troops (about a half million), there’s no chance the American people will stand for that kind of investment, the rest of the world has shown no interest in seriously supporting the effort. So if the implication is that if the country descends into civil war, while that’s not an outcome we hope for, without a dramatic increase in multinational interest, there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. Best to pull our troops sooner & mitigate the loss of American lives & spending.

A similar story holds true in Iran. Rather than saber rattling & threatening…we should be pursuing constructive engagement. The bottom line is that we couldn’t possibly sustain any kind of ground campaign, & that absent that, there is no unilateral option short of nuclear weapons that could check any ambitions that Iran might have for nuclearization. The consequences of such a unilateral action by the US would be an unmitigated disaster. We should speak very bluntly with our European allies that the US is NOT willing to carry the torch on this one alone. It will be a very long time before Iran has the technical delivery capabilities to menace the continental US. If Europe wants to play ostrich head in the stand…the brutal truth is that they’ll be in the nuclear crosshairs long before we will. If they want to get serious about shutting down the Iranian program, they need to get clear about how far their willing to go so that Europe & the US can present a united front when we sit down to do some serious horse trading with Russia & China in the UN security council.

The US has become too reliant on “hard power” or our military might & technology. While there are clearly contexts in which a military stick is important, it should be used on a VERY limited basis. Right now, the US is facing the very real danger of watching our “soft power” our economic & technological dominance that has powered our position as a superpower slip away. Constructive engagement is ALWAYS vastly cheaper than almost any kind of military conflict. The cost of one month in Iraq is more than the entire State Department budget for the year.

Our general approach should be to significantly increase (I’m talking about tripling the budget of the State Department within a year) our funding & commitment to diplomacy. We will be very aggressive militarily on issues that impact the continental US (Terrorism for example) & will continue to deploy special-forces & pursue air missions against training camps etc. (allowing the Democrats to continue to be tough on terror) But we’re unwilling to play peacekeeper for the world. Regional problems like Iraq, Iran, Taiwan, & Korea should be referred to the UN. That doesn’t mean that we won’t act outside the scope of the UN, but we will not move to solve distant regional problems unilaterally. If our international partners (Europe, Israel, Japan) aren’t on board, meaning willing to pony up the cash & send troops into harms way, then they can face the music.

We should move diplomatically to pursue negotiations with Russian & China on nuclear exports. But, perhaps most significantly, we should attack one of the crucial items that tie us to conflict ridden out of the way places. I presented a part of this in one of my comments earlier. “Declare a war on fossil fuel dependence. The reason the middle east has become so influential in our policy making is this dependence. Katrina & it’s costs are just a taste of the longer term implications of a warming planet. Propose a massive package/policy (comparable to the moon program) of tax incentives, legislative requirements (make California’s 10% zero emis. Law national, progressively stricter CAFE standards). The correct spin is that while moving away from fossil fuels won’t be great for the huge petroleum companies that have been raking in record profits it will be great for middle class jobs to support the construction of new alternatives infrastructure, maintain the systems etc. I’m talking about a massive program with billions of dollars in new incentives & direct investment.

Just in case the prospect of a new war in the middle east wasn’t enough to curl your toes. The administration, apparently unchastened by their string of glaring failures & absurdly optimistic military projections is seriously considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Iran. This is a HUGE deal. It would erase the taboo on nuclear use & weaken the only firebreak that kept us alive for the long decades of MAD. It has very serious potential consequences in the India/Pakistan, the Taiwan strait… Not to mention the potential human & economic costs in the middle east. Be Very Afraid.

“The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran fro pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increase clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack…The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact