Recent Non-Specific General Threats

In which we consider homelands and security, and specifics and generality... A digression in the Things Fall Apart series, an entry under the banner of The Rough Beast...

The letter that I reproduce below was slipped under the door to my apartment about a month before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It originated from the NAA, which I learnt stands for the National Apartment Association. It's a form letter that my landlords didn't bother to customize with their identifying details - they don't believe in the new formula. It was sent to them by said association and they in turn simply photocopied and distributed it to all the tenants in the apartment building. Thus we all returned home after another cold Bostonian work-day and bent down to pick up our unadulterated advisory. We considered, with alternatively concern and bemusement, the message of the day from The Authorities on the slightly-faded ink of their overtaxed fax machines and photocopiers.

Recent

The letter concerned "recent non-specific general threats to apartment buildings" by Al Qaeda and the like. It was all there: the terrain of uncertainty, the exquisite precision of the language, the advisability of duct tape and social living in our communal relationships, not to mention the knowledge that The Authorities would deign to helpfully provide warnings about our homelands and security. Suffice to say that our little apartment community would have something to discuss in ensuing months.

When the histories of the 2003 Iraq war (the second or third Gulf War depending on who is counting) and the so-called Global War on Terror are written, I hope historians and anthropologists alike can use some of this material. Where others ponder the significance of Downing Street Memos and parse notions of fixed intelligence, I'll instead focus on the small things that troubled me and my neighbours.

As they search for colourful anecdotes about these trying times, I hope they might consider delineating the contours of the strange infrastructure of fear, the bureaucracy, the homelands and the security that we have seen. Perhaps like the vintage 1950s drills about jumping underneath your school desk, or hurtling into designated nuclear fallout shelters when the atomic bomb sirens sounded and that godless enemy attacked heating up that Cold War, these letters will come to be seen as quaint as some currently see the Geneva Conventions.

The cynics might also consider just how fear can be manipulated and to what ends. It is surely a matter of pure coincidence that just two days earlier the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had made his legendary speech apropos Saddam Hussein's purported Weapons of Mass Destruction to the United Nations. Now safely retired after long and loyal service to his country and two generations of Bush Presidents, the good General has apparently let it be known via an aide that the WMD speech was the "lowest point in my life". I find comfort that the terrorist infrastructure of those heady days reached out to affect not just apartment dwellers in Cambridge but also the high-powered politicians and fiercesome soldiers.

It gives one pause; timing is everything in life. The world got ominous tomes and Powerpoint presentations about aluminium tubes, uranium and specific bioweapon trailers during prime time; the next day we got advisories about threats to our apartment communities. But let me not digress about burnt-out cases and fallen angels like Colin Powell even though these are some of my favourite topics, instead I thought I'd share some historical marginalia. Make of it what you will.

SAMPLE LETTER TO RESIDENTS ON RECENT NON-SPECIFIC, GENERAL THREAT TO APARTMENT BUILDINGS

From NAA 02/07/03 6:28PM p. 2 of 2

February 7, 2003

Dear Resident:

Your apartment operator has been notified by the National Apartment Association of a possible terrorist threat targeting apartments and hotels. This alert closely parallels a similar alert in May of 2002. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller raised the national terrorism threat-level to "orange" indicating a "high risk of terrorist attacks".

Ashcroft described the non-specific threat. 'Recent intelligence reports suggest that al Qaeda leaders have emphasized planning for attacks on apartment buildings, hotels and other soft or lightly secured targets in the United States."

At this time, we want to emphasize that this is not a specific threat against any particular apartment building, nor is there a particular time frame or location identified. Please keep abreast of local and national news for emergency information and updates.

All residents are asked to be aware of any suspicious activities and report them to the local FBI Field Office <go to http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm to find the field office that is closest to you> and then to the apartment management office <insert the phone number and names of on-site personnels>. If you believe the activity is an emergency, call 911 immediately, and then report it to the apartment management office.

Here are some tips that can help make a difference at your apartment community.

• Report suspicious people or activities at the apartment community to the management. For example, vehicles, visitors, unusual traffic, noise, solicitors, abandoned packages, residents changing their own locks.
• Get to know your neighbors. Terrorists can succeed through the anonymity that apartment communities may provide.
• Keep apartment keys, access cards and amenity access cards in a secure location and let management know if any have been lost.
• Do not provide building access or access codes to persons unknown to you.
• Do not open your door for service/maintenance personnel without first obtaining proper identification.
• Make sure the emergency contact information that we have on file for you is up-to-date.
• Know the emergency evacuation procedures for your apartment home, if one is required. <apartment operator you may want to attach evacuation procedures to this letter, or instruct residents what to do.>
• Adopt a Family Disaster Plan. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has developed a model plan for you to use ([now a broken link - a copy at the Internet Archive])

The federal government issues these alerts to raise awareness among Americans in hopes that a vigilant community can help thwart terrorist actions. Many potential threats here and abroad have already been halted because residents like you have seen and reported suspicious activity.

Sincerely,

<Apartment Operator: Insert your standard closing>

Non-Specific

I've been wondering of late how these things are propagated, that is, how the opaquely named Department of Homeland Security gets the word out. What I wondered is the relationship between said department and the National Apartment Association? From all appearances in the letter, the NAA is simply acting as as an agent of the government but nowhere is the exact connection explicated. The NAA and its authority are simply facts on the ground.

The thrust of the letter is about vigilance against things falling apart. The "be prepared" rhetoric doesn't go too far into the demonization of the amorphous enemy but the undertone is there. The possible threat, we are advised, "closely parallels" an earlier scare. There are the injunctions to report suspicious people or activities (echoes of McCarthyism) although here it is tempered with the eminently sensible "get to know your neighbours" proposition. There's the listing of officious officials and authority figures, the reassuring comfort of the names of Messers John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge - now safely consulting and lobbying said departments in lucrative private practice. The complete impersonality of this bureaucratic note should be noted, it is the language of Homeland Security. Oh well...

Ponder the title again, I'll remove the caps:

"Sample letter to residents on recent non-specific, general threat to apartment buildings"

I can't think of a better example of non-specific bureaucratese. There's a musical logic in its various clauses, or is it the poetic cadences that one should celebrate? One wonders how many other sample letters exist in the association's portfolio on any number of different topics and to any number of different audiences. One wonders also what the difference would be if the threat were old or indeed specific instead of recent and non-specific, and if the message would be more finely calibrated.

Consider also this comforting sentence with some emphasis on what someone who skimmed might take away

At this time, we want to emphasize that this is not a specific threat against any particular apartment building, nor is there a particular time frame or location identified.

One doesn't want to dwell on a cynical reading of these things because there must have been a fairly well-founded fear. I am well-versed in the anonymity in apartment life and, not to get all existential, that life can be impersonal and anomic. We could all spend more time building communities. The problem is having officialdom mandate the effort. There is only a fine line between the tame "be friendly" admonition and the hectoring "spy on your neighbours" proposition, and the plain reading of the message goes beyond "be vigilant" to "be scared".

General

Fear is a funny thing and in small doses it can be a great motivator; its close counterpart, hysteria, is an unhealthy thing and therein lies the rub. There is a fear tax that we pay when these levels are elevated and it manifests itself in paralysis and uncritical thinking. Those who capitalize on fear can go a long way in exploiting our impairment. It is somewhat ironic then that the injunctions in the letter, like the threat that prompted them, are unfocused, generalized and, yes, non-specific. One definition of the word terror is of a non-specific fear. Those skilled at the theater of fear are much like those who spread gossip and then add "I'm not the gossipy type. I just wanted to let you know so that you would be aware."

The letter ends as follows

<Apartment Operator: Insert your standard closing>

Kafka, Orwell, Ionesco and Beckett couldn't have written it better. You are made aware that there is an interlocutor, the Apartment Operator, who is taking instruction from a higher authority. Ideally the NAA should be in the background, reassuringly disembodied. Fear not said he... Everything has been personalized for you. That is what the script calls for, simply follow it. My landlords paid lip-service to the threat; they were concerned enough to circulate the warning but they were mildly subversive at the same time. I appreciate the fact that they passed the letter on without any editorial changes. Life is too short.

I know a ninetysomething year old lady who gave short shrift to the letter. She had seen it all before and instead regaled us with eye-opening tales of Red Scares and life during the Cold and paranoid War. In our apartment building it was lights out that brought us together. Our coping mechanism for these troubled times was conversation. Indeed in our hallways we were mostly outraged at the sense of insecurity that the letter tried to instill in us. Our search for community was organic and we hardly needed the intervention of that terrorism industry or that army of well-meaning bureaucrats. Not to mention that the urls listed in the letter turned out to be broken links as FEMA immediately revamped its website. At present, only the FEMA kids' disaster plan page remains up. Things fall apart they say.

Threat

Beyond the timing of the release of general warnings, non-specific and otherwise, it has been noted that the color-coded threat level system instituted in the US has been a little handicapped since its inception. The reason is that in order to have green be the colour for the "all-clear" threat level, the natural spectrum of light, as normally seen in rainbows, has been altered in the Homeland scheme. Thus ice cool blue has been promoted to "guarded" whereas tropical green has been demoted to "low". A bureaucrat or marketing person's intelligent design is at odds with evolution, physics and reality.

I arrived in the United States at the end of the Cold War hence I missed most of the distortions that long episode had caused in the culture. I seem however to be getting an education in fear writ large over the past few years of homeland security. As I ponder a life unmoored in a sea of current liquid threats, I look fondly back to those days before sample letters came my way. These days I'm not aiming for green loot or greener pastures, I'd rather have the blues. I seek comfort in recent non-specific general threats, those I can live with.

<Apartment Operator: Insert your standard closing>


Next: The Game of the Rough Beast

File under: language, fear, USA, homeland, security, threat, theatre, manipulation, community, history, politics, cynicism, bureaucracy, earnest, terror, policy, Iraq, communities, The Rough Beast, Things Fall Apart, toli

The Low End Theory of Networks

Ethan Zuckerman has been pondering generativity and aggregation, prompted by Jonathan Zittrain's paper, The Generative Internet and its implications. Many of these themes have been stewing in my head for quite some time so I thought I'd finally join in the conversation with some of my armchair punditry. As seems to be my custom, a one paragraph comment somehow turned into this note. Sadly I don't quite have a toli code to contribute to the fun, and I've already narrated a couple of gospels recently. Thus I'll switch tack and change the frame. This time I give you a theory: the Low End Theory.

• Control versus Participation
• The Rumsfeld Taxonomy of Networks
• The Low End Theory of Networks
• Postscript and Soundtrack

Control versus Participation in Networks

It's interesting that the lawyers, from Lawrence Lessig on, are weighing in on these network things and it's about time... Generativity huh? Zittrain argues a legal case built on abundant economic evidence (and one hopes the linguists would also weigh in). It's a nice restatement of the End-to-End principle in terms palatable to lobbyists. And the argument is much like Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung's paper The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law from a few years ago.

Reed, Saltzer and Clark described the End-to-End principle quite simply in terms of systems design. The heart of the matter is this oft-overlooked sentence

Functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant or of little value when compared with the cost of providing them at that low level.

They knew when they were writing that this notion had wider applicability than the telecommunication networks that were their initial focus hence they labeled their work "end-to-end arguments in system design". The costs that are borne by the "system" are a generativity tax if we use Zittrain's terminology.

In economic terms, if you read the system as a market, restating this principle turns it into a matter of preserving options value. Black and Scholes have a lot to say on this front.

I see this same notion everywhere in the software engineering that I practice. The most successful system in distributed computing has been the web which, by design (pdf) and to a fault, falls back on minimalist protocols and data formats to handle coordination costs and the human factor.

But there are also tensions at work in the design of any system, and hidden assumptions or vested interests at work.

There will always be a difference between the value of a system to its users and its value to its operators and this is perfectly expressed in networks. At issue in this discussion is who gets to see their utility maximized. As Martin Geddes puts it

If there’s one lesson of the Stupid Network, it’s that there’s a massive increase in consumer surplus. The value to users diverges from that to owners. You can’t measure user value by looking at industry revenue.

A priori you have no idea what options are possible at the edge of your market. This means that the design of the core of your system is a political decision. Like an options trader you are gambling on outcomes in the marketplace and attempting to manage risk. Your design decision is anything but neutral despite what the so-called "network neutrality" proponents say (even if I do agree with their endpoint market outcome).

We know that price discrimination is an optimal pricing strategy from many standpoints and, in market utility terms, it makes sense to optimize system design to enable some modicum of price discrimination. The evidence throughout history, however, is that participants in a market hate price discrimination and favour uniform or predictable pricing. For example, flat rate pricing made the fortunes of AOL, and block pricing is remaking the cell-phone industry. By analogy, Paris Metro pricing is not widespread in transportation systems and on the internet because of these explicit user preferences.

Part of the challenges the US airline companies currently face is that we aren't sympathetic to them. One major reason for our disdain is the pricing games that are played with plane tickets. We value fairness even though we are creatures of a rough jungle and there's likely an anthropological basis for our sense of indignation at price discrimination. Perhaps our past ancestors were optimistic planners by nature. However the presence of price discrimination in a market, coupled with flexibility of pricing, and the liquidity of relative transparency allows for the existence of middlemen and the possibility of arbitrage and disintermediation. On the whole, these are good market outcomes but, like many "options", they can't be characterized up front.

Where there are networks, we will find power laws that apply. Similarly where there are markets, we will have sharp elbows and monopolistic temptations as we scramble for the loot. There are echoes of F. Scott-Fitzgerald's notion that "the rich are very different from you and me". These factors are found in every part of the technology industry and, when combined, they play out in the Great Game of consolidation and lobbying. The big network operators will happily oblige in their strategies since lots of advantages accrue to the early movers and great powers, and they can leverage consumer inertia. In the internet we have many intermediaries at the network level; firewalls, middleboxes and the domain name system are potential, and actual, Great Powers (see the Verisign Tax ® we all pay and the "offers you can't refuse" that content delivery networks like Akamai make).

Moving up a level, intermediaries are acknowledged up front in the web architecture as design constraints. I have cast the web's embrace of visibility to intermediaries as Caesar's Tax Collector Principle and I think it is fitting, taxes are good, on the whole, and especially estate taxes - they keep the trains running and the streets clean at least in my neck of the woods.

The Rumsfeld Taxonomy of Networks

If we take Donald Rumsfeld's taxonomy of knowledge as the starting point for our analysis of networks, we find the following.

Unknown Unknowns

Legislators and vested interests tend to worry about "unknown unknowns" and, like Rumsfeld, will focus on threat models and such. This is a matter of governance and regulation; among the core competencies of most governments are the management of information and regulation. Excessive focus on these leads almost inevitably to data mining, intimidation, the co-option of a complaisant although ostensibly independent press, spying by the NSA , movie-plot security and the like, your basic Global Wars on Everyone.

Unknown Knowns

The "unknown knowns" are our unconscious biases that frame of the discussion of networks. The metaphors that different sides use are instructive and perhaps even my casting the conversation in terms of "sides" betrays my viewing this arena as a game of sorts (hopefully not Mortal Kombat or something). Others may view the networks scene as a Clash of Civilizations which would lead to apocalyptic wars and the End of History if one follows Manifest Destiny.

Known Knowns

The "known knowns" in networks have been visibly demonstrated in the economic verve and activity that is taking place on the internet. Even if the four horsemen of the internet ™ were oversold, we can still point to the ongoing transformation wrought by the Four Horsemen of the Web. As an engineer, I tend to think in terms of protocol, hence my nomination of The HUHXtable Quartet (HTTP, URI, HTML, XML) towards that designation. Your mileage may vary and various prognosticators seem to be weighing in with speculations about the identity of these horsemen. With corporations being legal humans, they have assembled an intriguing cast of characters to liven up the debate.

These same historical forces were at work in the history of communication and transportation networks (pdf) and, although we celebrate the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, who is really celebrating Samuel Homfray, Richard Trevithick, and the various others who played a role in the history of railroads or even, more recently, the extraordinary innovation brought about by the lowly shipping container?

Known Unknowns

The sweet spots in our analysis are the "known unknowns". These are the things that make venture capitalists salivate, and monopolists turn to paranoia and worse. It's that seductive notion of the startup in the garage that can change the world, of the eBay or Craigslist economy, of the manufactured serendipity and furious and creative energy that has been on display in the past decade or so on the web. This is where that Long Tail notion comes into play, to shamelessly mine another meme. There is the sense that all you need is an idea, and good connections. The fully leveraged network can be a great leveler and promoter of the innovative forces in a system.

Sidenote: This bit about manufacturing serendipity on the road to riches meshes well with the American Dream &trade; and it is worth commenting on a little. Paul Graham, in his hermetically-sealed world, apparently believes that a start-up culture is a particularism of the United States (or condensation as he puts it). What a peculiar notion. While he's sleeping soundly at night, after a lullaby of unshakeable Manifest Destiny, I'm sure that some Teutonic engineering will suddenly emerge (and he misreads the German economy so completely that he's a front runner for the huhudious awards 2006), or would it be an easterly wind that blows in from Korea or thereabouts that will give him fits early in the morning. I would have thought that the lesson was that the unknowns by definition are unknowable and, if you go ahead, following the Rumsfeld example, and discount even the knowns, you end up traveling in a lightly-armored Humvee on the road from Baghdad airport with a convoy of outsourced mercenaries. Good luck on that front.

The Low End Theory of Networks

But back to my topic... I'll quote Martin Geddes again since he is, as ever, eminently quotable

the end-to-end principle is really an appeal to preserve option value in a world of rapid technology change and innovation. By resisting this force, you’re either betting you can suppress rival distribution channels for competing innovation, or you can yourself be a lead innovator.

Thus Zittrain's pitch about generativity versus responsibility boils down to a tension between architectures of control and architectures of participation (using a much broader sense of participation than the current buzzword).

Stated another way, and since I traffic in coinages, indulge me if you will with Koranteng's first postulate of networks:

The End-to-End Principle in networks is another incarnation of the Low End Theory.

Recall if you will the core tenets of the Low End Theory which follows the Rule of Four as any good code should. Such is the mantra that schoolgirls the world over are reciting as they study Technology Adoption and System Design 101, and it is worth dwelling on:

• Ruthlessly leverage disruptions in the system
• Lower coordination costs through layer stripping
• Favour participation over control
• Temper the human factor to encourage adoption

As should be clear, each tenet of the Low End Theory encourages externalities to accrue in the system in support of preserving options value. Combined, they harness the collective energies of participants and harness innovation. We see these building blocks at work in hardware, in distributed computing and in the various Great Games that are taking place in the technology world. In this respect, I've suggested previously that REST, the web style, was the Low End Theory of Distributed Computing and have also written about The Low End Theory in Hardware. I don't see any reason why networks shouldn't be able to join in the fun, hence my current synthesis.

I like that Ethan is shrewdly focusing on the question of aggregation - that is also a restatement of the examples of eBay and Amazon. A good marketplace will surely allow for middlemen and aggregators, that's the bit about favouring participation. Aggregation however is only one of the styles that are likely to prevail in the market. Astute participants can focus on different areas and make hay.

As an example, it pays to identify the disruptions that underlie the evolution of the system, if you can hitch a ride at the right point, you can build mansions in Redmond. As to the second plank of our game theory, layer stripping restates the end-to-end notion of overlay systems, intelligence at the ends, and the daily reality of leaky abstractions. Similarly the human factor is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is the incoherence of the Tower of Babel which is the bit about coordination costs. On the other hand there are network effects to be gained in communication and group forming that argue for emphasizing community features in the system. From hunter-gatherers on, anything that enabled collaboration has given selective advantages in our evolutionary systems. We want to encourage the sharing of knowledge and information but encounter considerable costs in doing so. The ongoing dilemma we face is about how to build systems recognize the people along with the processes.

Operational efficiency is something that companies like Wal-Mart and Dell are good at, and operational efficiency at the margins is all the rage in the staid banking sector. As Willie Sutton quipped about robbing banks, it's "Cause that’s where the money is". Thus there are other ways to prevail in this marketplace. Rather than optimizing your processes around innovation you can optimize around operations, billing, search, storage, creating markets, or lubricating whatever friction there is in the system. To take an obvious example, the economics of peering is an interesting problem to tackle. Briefly stated it's Animal Farm all over again: some peers are more equal than others. Or call it real estate: location, location, location.

Similarly we are only beginning to realize the social implications of mobility in networks, of intermittent connectivity, of periodic synchronization and of the fluidity of our communal relations. Mobility is thus another of the major disruptions at work in the network marketplace and one that many users have voted on with cold cash all over the world. I'll note anecdotally that many colleagues of mine who were working on desktop collaboration software just years ago are now firmly ensconced at Nokia.

Where there is the realm of the social, there is the realm of conversation and its corollary, the market. To raise the tenor of this conversation, I'll repeat the insight of those 20th century philosophers, the Pet Shop Boys, and their master treatise:

There's lots of opportunities

You've got the brawn
I've got the brains
Let's make lot of money

Thus there is room in the network game for the innovation of Juniper and Skype and all the companies weighing in on the disruption of the internet protocols, and the operational effectiveness of say equipment manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung, and the more astute network operators. Everyone has their own exemplars on this last front: phone, cable, cell, fiber, copper, fixed wireless, wi-fi, ethernet... The TCP/IP suite that is the core of the internet has succeeded and scaled because the abstractions used embraced transparency and existing systems. The incredible ascendancy of ethernet over three decades (and of late wi-fi) is a testament to the value of simplicity and uniformity in network system design, and the concomitant scale and leverage that the low end mass market provides. Like the personal computer, these technologies are canonical disruptions and those who embrace their Fung Wah Bus aesthetic are inexorably moving up-market.

Some have suggested that good starting points for determining strategy are tomes like The Gorilla Game or The Innovator's Dilemma, I believe the jury is still out and the MBA types are best positioned to expound on their merit. I would point to Jim Gray's Distributed Computing Economics as my favourite starting point in determining to the best strategy. In any case, the game is on. In the interim, we are simply picking and choosing which of the hard problems we want to address. Still game theory remains theory; in real life games we have that nagging human factor.

Engineers are currently hobbled in our advocacy of the internet because we don't have good instruments for determining metrics for things like resilience and adaptability that could inform the decisions of policy makers, lawyers, economists, and those who really matter: Mr. and Mrs. Big Money. Politicians everywhere like statistics and large numbers in what passes for their policy debates, especially in this current silly season of nostalgia. We do have large numbers in the internet, the users, but unfortunately we only have waffly options pricing to throw around as statistics. I would hazard that muttering "options value pricing for networks" doesn't quite cut it when compared to the red meat of the corn and sugar lobbies or the pork of the military industrial complex.

One needs to dangle some glitter when we talk to congressmen, or votes or something. Thus I'm an alchemist searching for Black Gold. They told me it was a goldfield; it turns out that it's an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania, a dud concession. Still I've heard there are good things Out West on the frontier, that area called the internet, that web style I need to adopt. Thus the Low End Theory is a work in progress and one could easily get taken to the cleaners by the loaded dice of the other players.

Everybody wants their cut and, if you can tilt the playing field at whatever level you reside at in the network ecosystem, it makes sense to do so, especially if you are judged every quarter by the baying hounds of Wall Street. If you take the market view, the lobbying capabilities of large corporations, a long history of regulation in this sector, and governments' existential need to pass laws or exercise control or compliance of some sort (whether in the name of security, expedience or getting things done) are going to weigh heavily.

We engineers have been lucky to have built enough of the internet and web infrastructure before the lawyers, lobbyists and governments realized what was there. The underlying architecture has proven sound enough to have scaled several orders of magnitude and looks set for several more as the next few billions of humanity come on board. The fact that the internet (after three decades) and the web (in its second decade) are now treated as infrastructure says it all, and this is a Good Thing ®.

The language is also important, and I continue to wince at George Gilder's revolutionary talk although he is now (slightly) chastened. My reading is that we need to emphasize a sedate, gray-suited discourse to keep the bankers and traders happy and the loud "content" industry at bay. Infrastructure should be boring despite the breathless prose we see in the business rags. Technology was made prematurely sexy in the dot com era; the implications of technology are what are important, not the technology itself. The markets for cement and most other commodities don't raise eyebrows and nor should networks. The logical lesson of the end-to-end principle is that communication networks are about connectivity, everything else is gravy.

I'll suggest then that normalcy is what engineers should aim for in this discussion. The Generative Internet is a good contribution to the debate as it is rooted in an understanding of the engineering insight of the end-to-end principle and the way platforms are developed and evolve. The dissection of the personal computer industry is instructive too as an argument by analogy in the technology world. The exploitation of Moore's Law and the black gold of silicon, the sweet spot of the mass-market where Intel and now AMD have been able to make hay, the platform effects that Microsoft has been able to leverage in the mass market etc., all these continue to drive that Great Game.

The weakest part of Zittrain's paper is where he declares that the end-to-end argument needs to be superseded and that "end-to-end does not fully capture the overall project of maintaining generativity". The primary reason for this postulate is the rhetorical strawman he constructs of end-to-end neutrality. Those advocating what they call "network neutrality" are simply being cute. They are implying, for quite pragmatic and rhetorical reasons (read effectiveness of lobbying), that there are no costs to neutrality; that neutrality is value neutral. It's a nice trick as far as framing a debate goes, but it is a trick nevertheless and it should be discounted accordingly.

Odlyzko has noted that spending on communication services (and especially the connectivity component) is huge, dwarfing many other segments of the economy (and before Rumsfeld's folly it was even trending towards the amount spent on national defense in the United States). Those vested interests and a $300 billion dollar sector will buy lots of slick rhetoric and astute framing. Zittrain carries on to suggest that the inevitable endpoint of the end-to-end argument is a network teeming with, on the one hand, viruses and spam and, on the other, silos and walled gardens. Having raised the spectre of these undoubted bogeymen that obviously need regulation, we then require new paradigms and frameworks.

This is either misguided or flawed, depending on where you stand. The end-to-end argument, as restated in the low-end theory, stands up well to these charges. It is an argument about lowering coordination costs. Nowhere is it acknowledged in the original paper that there are no costs to be borne, or that there is any such thing as end-to-end neutrality. To take a concrete example of engineering expediency at work consider the implementation of congestion control in the TCP/IP suite of protocols. This is characterized by some purists as a layering hack. The upshot of current practice is that we have repeated injunctions for other network applications to be "TCP friendly" in order to preserve the commons and the kind of congestion collapse that was observed as the internet began to see increased usage in the 1980s. We can and do embed functions inside of the network systems that we develop and sometimes we even cross layers if necessary, this is simply pragmatism at work.

Thus the very premise of the end-to-end argument is that this is a matter of tradeoffs and decisions about who bears costs. Engineering decisions are never neutral, the low end theory is political and is competing with different styles in the marketplace. Its emphasis on favouring participation over control simply aims to tilt the marketplace in a direction that encourages externalities to accrue to the end rather than the core. Similarly layer stripping as a design principle in the core is about reducing complexity. In other words, it suggests a strategy for those who run the network about how they can reduce their operating costs and accrue their value in the marketplace.

Lastly I'll note that everybody has to deal with gremlins and parasites and, as Cory Doctorow has noted, "all complex ecosystems have parasites"; they are transaction costs in every marketplace. Things always fall off the back of a lorry, the banking sector tolerates a certain level of fraud etc. Further, these transactions costs are acknowledged upfront in the end-to-end argument. Also, the empirical evidence throughout human history is that silos and walled gardens (from the Berlin Wall to CompuServe) are unsustainable in the long run and that it is shrewd to bet on participation over control (and I hope Burma and North Korea don't give the lie to my optimistic outlook). Still this prognostication is only a small part of Zittrain's remit and perhaps detracts from his wider argument.

I'll acknowledge here that linguistically the generative internet is a good coinage, and perhaps it even works better than End-to-End when pitched to the average congressman. This suggests to me that the enduring value of Zittrain's analysis is likely to be in the branding of the debate. Still as the lawyers and economists gear up and build up their legal frameworks and paraphernalia of economic models to throw at us about the design of networks, we engineers should confront them with prosaic notions of building communities and enabling conversations and marketplaces. I hope the Low End Theory can similarly enrich our vocabulary in this light.

We do have secret weapons in this debate... My grandmother is a surprisingly fierce and effective lobbyist when she puts her mind to it, on topics that sometimes mystify me. Her desire to interact with her progeny and to get on the web to converse with us should not be underestimated. The evidence is clear that she'll even tolerate any amount of spam and the ever-present gremlins and parasites that prevail - in moderation of course. More generally there is the desire to reconnect with old friends (and perhaps old flames), the socialization impulse that lurks in all of us. This is why I try at every opportunity to advocate pragmatism and that we strive to build Sexy Mom Factor Software. Where soccer moms are the demographic the politicians go after, in networks we need to encourage the Grandma Lobby like those cunning financial folks who went after Scottish Widows.

To conclude, participation is winning out over control for the moment, but it is the eternal struggle and I am hoping that the current ascendancy on the internet is not a temporary respite. As with democracy in the Great Game of Politics, eternal vigilance must be our watchword. And to paraphrase he of blood, sweat and tears

End-to-End systems, or Stupid Networks if you like, are the worst form of networks except for all those others that have been tried.

The story is the same as it ever was in the Great Game of Networks and I argue here that the Low End Theory is King, or President, if like me you are a republican (with the lowercase r).

Postscript

I've decided that I like the freedom I've found living within the constraints of a series hence I'll cast this note as part 1 of The Great Game of Networks Series which itself is an offshoot of The Great Game of Technology Series which I hereby retroactively announce. The latter series started last year with some musings on The Great Game of Chips.

Soundtrack

The Low End Theory soundtrack once again comes courtesy of A Tribe Called Quest's 1991 album.

This time we'll hum along to Jazz (We've Got) and nod our head's to Ron Carter's bass:

Stern firm and young with a laid-back tongue
The aim is to succeed and achieve at the age of 21...

[The internet hit the prime time around the age of 21 with the arrival of the web]

So push it, along, trails, we blaze
Don't deserve the gong, don't deserve the praise...

[innovation and manufactured serendipity continues]

A brand new twist with the homie-alistic
So low-key that ya probably missed it...

[low end should be low key infrastructure]

Competition, dem Phifer come sideway
But competition, dem must come straightway

[violators need not apply, we can see you coming]

I take off my hat to other crews that intend to rock
But the Low End Theory's here, it's time to wreck shop

We've got the Jazz (x4)

So peace to that crew, and peace to this crew
Bring on the tour, we'll see you at a theatre nearest you

Next: Disruptions in Networks. Ergo, what's there to leverage?

Print version

File under: networks, end-to-end, systems, Great Game, technology, architecture, design, economics, control, participation, coordination, strategy, adoption, policy, innovation, distribution, aggregation, incentives, arbitrage, politics, observation, analysis, whimsy, web, internet, evolution, resilience, adaptability, essay, Low End Theory, toli

Erustication and The Italian Job

• Erustication Defined
• The Italian Job
• An Erusticated Playlist

erustication n:

1. Extraordinary Rendition to Uzbekistan, Syria or similar by the US government for the purposes of torture and intelligence "extraction". This program was instituted by the CIA in the 1990s and pursued with increased vigour after September 11th
2. A lighter meaning: the sense of bewilderment, heartache and violation that comes from being subject to the capricious whims of a strongman who happens to have authority over you. Close synonym of The Full Bolton.

erusticated v.

1. being subject to erustication.

Most subjected to erustication turn out to have been entirely innocent and simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even those who are no choirboys are tainted; the evidence gathered through torture is rightly rejected in countries with laws, it goes against every sound principle of decency. One hopes that the intelligence gathered did indeed prevent ticking bombs but one should be skeptical about the effectiveness of the policy. Still the compromise of democratic and moral values that erustication implies, the cynicism it breeds in the body politic are heavy prices to pay. When your human rights record can be placed in the same company as Egypt's, how can you claim to lecture a rogue like Robert Mugabe?

I like erustication because like the dental extraction, waterboarding, electric shock therapy and worse that it presages, the word also sounds like the flagellation one would receive from a medieval instrument of torture something like The Rack (Iraq?) used in the Inquisitions of yore. And the effectiveness of the policy is similarly in question. Witchhunts of the Kingdoms of Heaven have a way of casting an unflattering light of hypocrisy on those who might consider themselves righteous puritans. The lessons from Salem to McCarthyism are all about hysteria and opportunism that debase the social fabric of the society. In such times, what was meant to be "extraordinary" becomes customary and a matter of rounding up The Usual Suspects ® and people of "little intelligence value" with results that we know.

Ironically the milder form of erustication was a sentiment felt by quite a number of State Department, CIA and other intelligence analysts who had to deal with John Bolton. The notion that some of the mild-mannered people in the organizations that developed and instituted this practice, felt some of the psychological pressure and bewilderment of the practice tickles my mind. Thus, erusticated is a close synonym to that that other fine American neologism, boltoned.

e.g. "I was erusticated in the past 6 months at work" is a touch edgier and harsher than "I was boltoned by the new boss".

Being erusticated is obviously not for the faint of heart and the ordeal might leave you broken, an empty shell. You have to waste time trying to justify yourself and might even start to blame yourself for your predicament and confess to what "they" want to hear. Rendition also reminds one of the worst practices of the meat rendering industry which we know indubitably leads one down the path to Mad Cow Square. In literature, Kafka and Orwell have described the sense of alienation that than envelops you when in the trials of erustication (and would it they were rather in their "last throes" although per Dick Cheney, "if you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period"). If you're lucky you'll find some kind godfather to step in and defend you but, more often than not, you are alone in the tangled web in which a moral compass is optional and indeed frowned upon.

The lighter meaning, boltoned, is similarly discomfiting as unfortunately I can also attest. The vituperations and glee of those bullies who delight in giving you The Full Bolton treatment is also par-for-the-course. The small-mindedness of bullies is deeply rooted in playground impunity. Boltoned is onomatopoeic perfection in that it sounds like doors being thunderously slammed repeatedly on your fingernails for no reason. You want to say, "What have I done to deserve this? No Ingles! It wasn't me!". And on being boltoned, this article I came across a few months ago seemed quite serendipitous: Is your boss a psychopath?

Many have asked what countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan, Syria, Kazakhstan, Israel and Pakistan get from erustication and the answer is quite clear: the moral compromise lets the leaders of those countries carry on with often egregious domestic policies without fear of reprimand as we have seen repeatedly. Franklin D. Roosevelt's "He's our sonofabitch" quip applies to many of the leaders of the aforementioned countries and not just Karimov or Mubarak.

Michael Scheuer recently argued that the policy has actually been quite effective and I suppose he would be one of those close enough to judge the value of the "extracted information" living as he did in the shadowy world of the CIA. And there's one fairly famous case where the threat of being erusticated and "rendered to Israel and the hands of the Mossad" got startling results and broke a hardened terrorist into cooperation. I can understand threatening, but surely delivering someone to unbounded violence crosses some line. The kind of police cooperation which everyone agrees is needed in the action against nihilists that the entire world must confront is very different from winking at interrogation at the electric shocks and the institutionalized beatings of the Battle of Algiers. Even Scheuer however, must now admit now that, the application of the policy has been very far from judicious since 9/11 let alone extraordinary. I would contend that the logic of outsourcing "wet work" is a proverbial race to the bottom of the moral barrel.

On human rights I'm an absolutist, and I err on the side of preventing even the slightest collateral damage because the costs to the innocents and the concomitant debasement of the society in question are, in my judgment, a far too heavy burden. This issue is close to home for me because of the stories of both of my parents but that excursion into personal history deserves separate amplification...

Maher Arar's case is only the most prominent evidence of the living costs of erustication and the fear and cynicism engendered in a society: The true purpose of torture

In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar. The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: you are being watched, your neighbour may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear on to a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay", to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights. But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intimidated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice.

For the historical record, I coined the word erustication as an aside in PITTs: Naming an Aesthetic which was a typical sojourn in metaphorical excess to coin new buzzwords in the technology world. The slightly updated money quote came when I considered the concept of a Loyal Opposition:

In any case, as recent history, and the success of the Cheney, Rusmfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Cambone, Generals Miller (Gitmo-lite) and Sanchez Axis of Righteous Neocon NefarIousnEss (ARNIE) has shown, being loyal oppositionists accounts for squat in these States. We might get tortured in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu-Ghraib or get a little Extraordinary Rendition to Uzbekistan or Syria (ERUStication?) if we aren't careful.

I've since reconsidered ARNIE as Axis of Righteous Neocon Infamy and Excess but believe that erustication is of more lasting value for the language.

Erustication. Run with it. You heard it here first.

The Italian Job

I'm now promoting erustication to the English language because of one of those curious stories that the journalist in me wishes wouldn't get buried in wake of the events of the past week, namely The Italian Job.

To give some context, I am referring to the 13 to 19 CIA agents who kidnapped an Egyptian cleric, Abu Omar from Italy and took him to Egypt where "he was subjected to electroshock treatment" and "lost the hearing in one ear". In these days of "gloves coming off" this is a sadly all-too-common story: Italy Orders Arrest of 13 CIA Operatives.

But there are many twists to the tale, the Italian security services had this cleric under extensive surveillance and were building up a profile of his network, indeed they were likely to have arrested him and his affiliates in short order. Erustication ended all of that work and we are none the wiser about what, if anything, has been gained.

When I first read about this affair, In Italy, Anger at U.S. Tactics Colors Spy Case, the lead sentence was

The extraordinary decisions by an Italian judge to order the arrest of 13 people linked to the Central Intelligence Agency on charges of kidnapping a terrorism suspect here dramatizes a growing rift between American counterterrorism officials and their counterparts in Europe.

Apparently it is extraordinary to prosecute people who break the laws of your country. What cheek! Just because it's Americans who break the law they should not be prosecuted?

As someone intensely interested in strange bedfellows, I appreciate the way the story is playing out, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Indeed the only other story that has got my journalistic juices flowing of late is the one quietly playing out in Chile, At Cult's Enclave In Chile, Guns And Intelligence Files, a story which very nicely packages apocalyptic religious cults, intelligence services, grim torture, Augusto Pinochet and crew, financial looteries, the School of Americas and ultimately Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan and Bush the Elder. I hope those Chilean prosecutors and journalists take their time and pursue the paper trail because I haven't seen such fertile soil in a long while to expose the unseemly side of global politics and nor indeed the outright criminality that prevails over bromides of bon mots.

The Italian Job is the kind of story that should steadily drip into the public's consciousness and arouse outrage and the headlines already tell the tale about the effect it is having in Italy - Italy seethes at US abduction of Imam. It really should have a larger impact in the USA as a case study about the direction of the country, that is if only it is reported by the media.

Unfortunately I don't speak Italian so I haven't gotten the full flavour of the revelations but others have stepped in and especially Robert's Stochastic Thoughts has more than adequately covered the various aspects of the case. Berlusconi who is the anti-choirboy personified knows that if the threads of these stories are pursued to their sleazy end it won't be pretty. So now there is no doubt that Italians will definitely be pulling out of Iraq as we heard. There was already pressure for a pull-out but this story broke the proverbial camel's back.

For the first time in a year I agree with a column by Jim Hoagland. This is a scary thing because Hoagland is normally a reliable indicator of exactly what not to believe. Indeed my political barometer has him calibrated as a polar opposite. I love to read people I disagree with if only to sharpen my arguments and to try to see things from their point of view. Still even he has come to see that erustication is no longer working, indeed he terms it Pricey Rendition:

Is this covert act really worth the likely consequences?

Indeed the erusticated Italian Job perfectly illuminates my Joy in Repetition prescription for opposing the rogues who currently govern the US simply repeat:

• The policy is wrong.
• It's not working. Indeed it's counter-productive, alienates friends and foes alike and worsens things.
• This is how we would change it.

It gets worse when you look closer, as Robert explains, the Italians "are stressing that the CIA has sabotaged the war against terror and that the CIA agents are totally incompetent and self indulgent."

See Italians Detail Lavish CIA Operation and also CIA Said to Leave Trail in Abduction

They ran up tabs of thousands of dollars at some of Milan's best hotels and restaurants. They chatted easily on their cellular telephones and gave out passport, frequent-flier and driver's license numbers when booking flights or renting cars.

And now they are fugitives...

The Milan crew seemed to have made little effort to keep a low profile. Although much of the information they provided may have been false, they seemed to have left a trail worthy of Hansel and Gretel.

Arriving individually or in pairs during the weeks leading up to Abu Omar's disappearance in February 2003, they checked into some of the city's finest hotels: the $450-a-night Prince of Savoy on Milan's grand Piazza della Repubblica, the Westin Palace, the Milan Hilton. They ate at good restaurants and rented cellphones and cars. They offered up their frequent-flier account numbers as well as their passports, Visa and Diner's Club credit cards and driver's licenses....

In hotel bills alone, the group ran up a tab of $150,000, the court papers indicate.

Once the rendition was completed, several of the agents traveled to Venice for a celebration, also at a luxurious five-star hotel, the court papers say. Four others took a vacation along the picturesque Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany.

Italian judicial officials say they are perhaps most angry with the American operation because it ruined their own efforts to crack the cell and arrest numerous terrorism suspects in Italy.

"Not only was Abu Omar's kidnapping illegal in having seriously violated Italian sovereignty, but it was also an inauspicious act that has contaminated the overall fight against terrorism," Judge Guido Salvini said in issuing a separate indictment on the Egyptian-born cleric.

And it gets worse, see Technical illiteracy at the CIA, it turns out that the agents used a pool cell phone from the US embassy which was then returned to the embassy and was later used by embassy staff. Such is the competence of those warriors who are defending you for whom we should curtail our freedoms.

The Italian Job is one of the best B-movies in the canon, a film full of wit and panache. As someone who loves heists, I have watched it more times than I can count. It has some of the best car chases and stunts that we have ever seen and what a heist. Michael Caine and Noel Coward are cheeky sods and simply brilliant. The flag-waving politics are skewered as is the British nationalism and self-importance.

Still we should also remember that Caine and crew were a bunch of Criminals And Thugs (Cats) and their motives are simply mercenary. At the end of the movie, Caine and crew have indeed pulled off their caper against the odds but all that loot is left dangling as the bus itself is perched precariously on a cliff. As the camera cuts away we know what to expect: the slightest wind or a even a bird dropping will push it over the edge strewing those dollars and lira all over those Alpine rocks:

Mission Accomplished

An Erusticated Playlist

The sounds of erustication are normally screams of agony or of gritted teeth. Still one has to find some music if only to oppose it. Thus I give you Live Erustication: The Concert, like Prince said,

"Put the right letters together and make a better day"

• The Jacksons - Torture
  

  It Was On A Street So Evil
  So Bad That Even Hell Disowned It
  Every Single Step Was Trouble
  For The Fool Who Stumbled On It
  Eyes Within The Dark Were Watching
  I Felt The Sudden Chill Of Danger
  Something Told Me Keep On Walking
  Told Me I Should Not Have Come There

  The sounds of whips, albeit propulsive and soulful whips, start out our erusticated musical journey. Ironically this wonderful song is the lead track of the Victory album which as we know in the case of erustication is always pyrrhic.
  
  
  
  
  
  I was going to nominate another track from the album, State of Shock the rocked out collaboration with Mick Jagger, but I thought the connection to electroshock might be a bit too much. For the more reflective, the Victory album also has one of the best ballads of all time, One More Chance, Randy Jackson's masterpiece and Michael Jackson's most heartfelt song, Be Not Always, with lonely, mournful acoustic guitar.
• The Supremes - Stop In The Name Of Love
  

  Before You Break My Heart.
  Think It O-Over.

  Please do Messers Bush and Cheney.
• Rockwell - Somebody's Watching Me
  Paranoia has never been so sublime or soulful. And with Michael Jackson's chorus who can fault it?

  "I always feel like somebody's watching me"

• Full Circle - Workin' Up A Sweat
  It gives me great pause to deploy one of my all-time favourite club songs in the service of erustication but, well, it had to be done. This is one of those obscure hits in the Long Tail of Music that you can now only find on compilations in England even though it is by an American band that recorded for EMI America. Record companies are clueless. Full Circle were perhaps a one hit wonder but there is such wonder in this track.

  Working Up A Sweat
  Over You
  The Way You Make Me Feel
  You Know The Deal

• MC Hammer - Turn This Mutha Out
  I don't quite think that Hammer intended an extraordinary rendition remix of the song that that brought him to fame but this was a burst of energy that matched James Brown at his most fervent. Perhaps it is apt that what later transpired after this debut was B-movie ineptitude
• Massive Attack - Spying Glass
  From one of the top 10 albums of the 90s, Protection, comes this brilliant confection of trip hop dub. The Mad Professor remix is also essential but the lyrics tell the erusticated story.
  
  
  

  You Live In The City
  You Mind Your Own Business
  What You See, You Don't See
  But Some People, They Always See
  They Never Mind Their Own Business
  
  You Move To The Country
  You Live In The Hills
  You Think You're Far From The Wicked
  When You Check It, Them-a Use Spying Glass
  They Want To Know Rasta Business
  Spying Glass

• Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
  

  "I'll be anything you need"

  Well if a sledgehammer is your policy and the literal tool you're using against me, I'll confess to anything you need.

  This will be my testimony

• Michael Jackson - The Way You Make Me Feel
  I was going to use Scream or Leave Me Alone as MJ's erusticated contribution to the debate since he himself has been through quite a bit in recent months. But I think this soulful bad and funky track is just the right touch and one of my favourite songs of his.

  You knock me off my feet



• The Roots - Break you off (ft Musiq)

  We're coming to Break You Off

  Yep, erustication is in the realm of phrenology.
  


• Eugene McDaniel - Headless Heroes and Freedom Death Dance
  These two much sampled tracks off the Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse album are in the cut.

  Better Git It Together
  And See What's Happening
  We Are The Canon Fodder
  Nobody Knows Who The Enemy Is
  

  The Freedom Death Dance is bleaker as would befit the title.
• INXS - Never Tear Us Apart
  Let's hope they don't. I worry that the Australian authorities wouldn't be averse to some extraordinary rendition given the chance.
• Was (Not Was) - Spy in the house of love
  

  I'll Tap Your Phone
  You're Never Alone

• The Last Poets - This Is Madness
  A primal scream off the aptly named Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool album. We are all prisoners snatched away to be branded by red hot irons.


• United Future Organization - Spy's Spice (Mon Espionage)
  In the vein of a dark and dank world of derring-do and covert snatches this fits the bill.
  
• The Police - Every Breath You Take
  This more properly belongs in a Patriot Act soundtrack of surveillance but since we have that practice of waterboarding "in which a detainee is strapped down, dunked under water and made to believe that he might be drowned." and that is all about the loss of the breath of life, I suppose it deserves to be included to round off the infamy

And to conclude, let's be clear about what I'm talking about without euphemisms or snarky commentary, your taxes are paying for scenes like this, the only difference is that under erustication, the burly guards and dogs are not American unlike in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. The techniques might even be grimmer, if you can imagine that.

[Update] a little too shocking for some, hence a link... Dog and Prisoner

See also:

• The Immoral Relativists of the Bush Administration
• On The Importance of Biting Satire

File under: erustication, Extraordinary Rendition, CIA, neocons, rogues, torture, policy, usa, CIA, politics, excess, waste, bolton, The Italian Job, neologism, human rights, Italy, B-movie, Berlusconi, Pinochet, grim, Chile, Strange Bedfellows, Nixon, Kissinger, toli

On Blogging at IBM

Fellow traveler, James Snell, points out IBM's newly published blogging guidelines and policies:

You can read them at length there, they seem fairly reasonable, even if couched in the obligatory corporate PR self-congratulatory bromides about "innovation-based companies". I wonder, are there any companies that claim to be anti-innovation?

Blogging@IBM

IBM blogging policy and guidelines

Responsible Engagement in Innovation and Dialogue

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
   [snip]

Use your best judgment... Ultimately, however, you have sole responsibility for what you choose to post to your blog.

Don't forget your day job. You should make sure that blogging does not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.

The day job injunction is one about focus. When it comes to Freedom of Expression, companies know that they can't control what someone does on their own time and indeed that it can make the workplace a happier one if employees can pursue their muses. My own management chain have worried periodically about my focus. It hasn't been much use telling them that the Technology toli is actually my attempt to gain ideas that feed back into the day job or indeed that I've been blogging about Forms Glue of late. Or even that my education has been all about learning to handle balance and coping with daily insanity of which there is much in large bureacracies. Some just look at the blog and get scared by the veritable outpourings in this land. "How can he possibly write all this they must be asking?" Well I do have weekends, mornings and nights, right? At least I hope I do... Of late the 5am to 7am shift while drinking tea, reading the news and enjoying the early morning sun has been very productive and prolific. Thus at best they can only give a gentle reminder, day job doesn't even get a number in the guidelines.

The good news is that I have only pressed against the spirit of a couple of these guidelines. The one about "Clients, partners or suppliers should not be cited or obviously referenced without their approval" in particular.

And for these I would invoke the "Use your best judgement" plank as a justification.

I like to link. Like the hyphen, the hyperlink is promiscuous, sociable and an assertion of interest. Hyperlinking is the singular power of the web style; a link shares the googlejuice around and often shows that a human has made a judgment. The judgment is value neutral and doesn't imply anything other than interest (or sometimes dissent). The controversies over linking, deep-linking will continue to be fought until this is more widely understood. Links also get spammed but that's another story. A shout out to The Power of the Schwartz or to Sun & Sun (a frequent victim of The Ampersand Curse) is just that: a shout out. I certainly am not going to seek approval to link to these fine folks.

And as far as picking fights goes, it often isn't the wisest thing but sometimes it serves to clear the air (see On The Importance of Biting Satire for example). I've noted:

Sometimes you have to resort to the down and dirty column.

I like my satire savage. It should be vicious, biting and deeply heartfelt. The targets should feel a sharp wound.

Less said on that however.

I would say a similar thing about the "Use a disclaimer" item. This is a weasely concession by overly freaked-out folks to keep lawyers employed. I do recognize that the things I cross-post at the official Inside Lotus blog should have a different tenor, coming as they do from company hosted facilities and presumably, in that respect, I am acting as the public face of Lotus. Thus I take a greater care with my words in the toli that surfaces on that forum.

On the other hand, I think it is obvious that an individual doesn't speak for a company.

In legal terms, and as the son of a lawyer, I can confidently say that a disclaimer adds no value or protection whatsoever. If someone objects to your blog post, website or email, and if they have deep pockets (say the Scientologists for example), they can, and will sue willy-nilly and tie you up in court, protestations of disclaimer notwithstanding. The wonder of the lawyer lobby is that it manages to keep risk aversion and litigation at such a high pitch in the cultural zeitgeist. It is true that oftentimes, the market will tar you with the brush of guilt by association; in economic terms therefore it is wise for companies to worry about such things. But a certain humanity is often lost by blandly avoiding controversy. There are many a company with Strange Bedfellows all over the world (whether it is in the pursuit of oil, gold or blood diamonds, paying bribes to people while later tarring said countries with the brush of corruption. It takes two to do the corruption tango.

If you really did believe (as for example many executives did in the apartheid era) that it was imperative to share in the fruits of the sweat and tears of others - sanctions be damned! like Reagan and Thatcher maintained) then one should indeed expect swift retribution from the marketplace if appropriately sensitized. I remember Barclays Bank paying a heavy price in the 1980s for such an attitude (and it is only 19 years later that they are emboldened to return to South Africa). I can think of many such examples and perhaps you could point me to your favourites e.g. watching a nice liberal mother explain to her 4 year old son why the Del Monte can of peaches from South Africa had to be put back on the shelf and the Waitrose brand peaches (without the colourful logo) substituted, circa 1988 in Brent Cross shopping centre in London.

Now employee blogging is much the same as employee use of any technology, be it phone, email or the web. Oftentimes, the use of said technology can be very productive and useful (in moderation) and indeed it can sometimes save lots of time and keep the employee focused on corporate business. If I'm able to arrange renewal of my license over the phone or the web during my lunch break, I presumably wouldn't have to take an afternoon off work to head to the DMV. I recently joked in passing about how I recently had to respond to an anonymous email from some department or other to justify maintaining my office phone since it had seen relatively little activity in this era of instant messaging and email. It is incidents like that that lead people to talk all too often about "faceless corporations". That legal fiction of personhood is frequently invoked by companies but often conveniently forgotten when the lights go out.

American society is deeply litigious and gets stuck on the notion of explicit adherance to the letter of the law as opposed to the European notion of staying within the spirit of the law and letting an experienced judiciary adjudicate when the boundaries are overstepped. This means that there is a vast industry of tax and accountancy lawyers who specialize in weaseling out of the letter of the law with new tax shelter products every year engaged in an arms race with the IRS.

In this vein I would suggest that if Lotus was Old Europe, that IBM is heartland America, a New World of slightly puritanical rectitude. Coming from a culture that is often reacting to the fights between these two elephants, I would say that each approach has its merits and that perhaps the grass should have some say in these things.

Sometimes of course, this excessive concern for litigation has benefits for society, for the greater good as it were. Cambridge sidewalks tend to get cleared fairly quickly when it snows since people who twist their ankles and fall in front of your house will get their 50 cents and more in legal revenge. In comparison, English and French sidewalks were treacherous in the winter time - it often felt like a tightrope or walking the plank (in my tradition of metaphorical excess). There is also huge innovation in the kinds of cups that are used for coffee to prevent litigation-induced scalding. I don't drink coffee but I am amazed at what I see people holding when they walk out of Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks. It's Nuclear Star Wars leading to good old Teflon all over again.

The 401K account, which is about the only thing other than the plain providential, and literal, lottery, that Americans will have for retirement if Dubya and Cheney have their way with Social Security - what with their continued focused and highly selective war-mongering, and deficit spending like proverbial Palm Wine Drinkards, is just a case in point about this phenomenon. A lawyer took a look at the tax code, found a loophole and now every dinner table conversation is about the 401K. Following up on the same idea, it is plain fact that the Roth IRA is the most popular political and economic innovation of the past decade. Bless you Senator Roth, wherever you are, you citizen you.

On the other hand this is the same tendency that leads to much inhibition. The US has half of the world's supply of lawyers and the world's largest insurance industry and for good reason. I shouldn't even mention the reinsurance industry and the whole stack of derivative products founded on this litigious risk mitigation tendancy.

Playground swings are no longer as fun since manufacturers have shortened the rope to prevent high velocity and now parents will strap you in like a pilot. Where is the thrill of youthful daredevil inventiveness going, I ask? My cousin famously broke his arm as a child on our playground swing and he is much the better for it. He bacame a far more sensitive soul once he had to be confined to a cast and realized his limitations and the wisdom of the repeated warnings of his parents and entire family. Actually it was the traditional healers of his father's village of Taviefe in the Volta region of Ghana who set his arm in place, armed with their inimitable herbs and centuries-old experience. We turned to tradition as opposed to modernity. A great respect for tradition and confidence in his roots was fostered in this experiece. Certainly in family lore we all know better where we come from.

I can't imagine my Auntie Grace filing a lawsuit against the swing manufacturer, or her sister in whose backyard the great swing was to be found, or perhaps even her nephew, me, who was in attendance at the fateful fall and who didn't intervene. That however is the degenerate kind of thing that would happen, and does happen fairly frequently in the US where the ties of family and societal culture are sometimes loosened into anomie.

There are already far too many emails emanating from corporate accounts with noxious disclaimers, clogging up mailing lists everywhere and causing comprehension problems. They are a public nuisance and there is no reason to add further disclaimers to the mix.

As you might have guessed, I dissent on that front, my Blogger profile simply says "Oh, and I work at Lotus/IBM". The Girlfriend Fiancée says that that tag line is "a little unprofessional" but it wasn't chosen without care. This joint is an individual one, this is a someone's voice you are hearing, engaging and thinking aloud in public conversation.

I think that suffices. What do you think?

Update: My friend Justin adds some Mediocre Indian Cuisine to the advertising mix. Join me in welcoming another jaundiced Lotus/IBMer to the blogosphere. He started the blog before these newfangled stamp of approval thingimijigs were published and we are all the better for it.

There is another post lurking about where and how people at IBM blog, but that's another conversation for another early morning, right Tessa?

Soundtrack for this tale: Brooklyn Zoo by ODB


File under: blogging, ibm, policy, culture, Lotus, law, freedom, history, communities, life, politics, economics, business, corporations, ghana, roots, tradition, technology, toli