Thomas Barnett and David Weinberger have a lot more in common than being things David Eaves introduced me to.  They both attack the notion of categorization.

Categorization, to a cognitive scientist, is problematic. Roughly phrased it’s the notion that the world is separated into groups in our cognition - there are many schools of thought that explain how this happens ranging from the debunked yet recurrent Classical theory to a geometric or featural model to a prototype theory and others.

Weinberger being a philosopher is probably more aware of his opposition than Barnett being a politico-military strategist but their equally vehement that categories are a byproduct of human limitation - a shorthand for reality rather than something inherent to it.

Barnett criticizes soundly the notion of thinking about war within the context of war. He cites the problematic deployment of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. A situation he dubbed “Blackhawk Down: the series.” He explains that a huge source of the crippling mishandling of coalition forces is a cultural pathology that exists within the US Department of Defence.

Barnett believes and convincingly articulates that the Pentagon has calcified into a Cold-War machine - the military-industrial complex has gained such momentum that they cannot reorganize to fight the threats it faces and instead needs to fabricate threats to rationalize their current force structure, spending and doctrine. President Eisenhower’s shadow looms ever large.

Anyone familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance isn’t at all surprised by the conundrum the DoD faces - it’s MUCH easier to change rationalizations than it is to change behaviour.

Where does Weinberger fit? David Weinberger believes that traditional conceptualizations of taxonomy (a particular structure of categorization) are futile in a world where everything is miscellaneous. More particularly he believes that organization schemes should be dynamically applied and emergent - information itself and its organization should dictate its structure not the other way around.

Weinberger uses the example of libraries - and the accidental holdovers from the paradigm of physical books; to explain why we hold on to contrivances which were helpful and are now pathological.

Barnett believes that the US Government and by extension Western military powers have contrived an artificial separation of military operations from other operations. Particularly he emphasizes that there is a profoundly mistaken emphasis on the utility of military power. Simple, easily observable fact backs up his assertion - the most powerful military force in the history of mankind is actively threatened by men in towels with 80 year old weaponrs technology.

Barnett articulates  a need for a global system administrator force. A so-called peace waging body that would come in “after action” - that is, after the world’s Leviathan sweeps aside all amassed/conventional military enemies. This force would deliver the DImE support needed to secure permanent peaceful development. That is the Diplomacy, Information Operations, military protection and enforcement and the Economic aid to establish infrastructure.

The kind of war Barnett is talking about without saying it is termed by some fourth-generational warfare (4GW). 4GW is a theoretical notion that war has entered a new strategic phase that has its roots in the post-Westphalian international warfare. Typical examples cited are the Vietnam War, Mao’s Revolution, the Sandinista’s of Nicaragua and of course Al Qaeda and the Salafist Jihadis.

This is the notion of “skipping” typical levels of warfare to move straight to strategic aims. Without regard to tactical or operational capability 4GW combatants will go straight for the strategic jugular.

Military historians like Jeremy Black would argue that fourth-generational warfare is guilty of profoundly selective analysis of history - and they would be right. However, they would also be missing the point. Fourth-generational warfare is not meant to be an analytical framework for historical analysis - it is designed to be a system for establishing an understanding for the wars we are fighting now; not necessarily squaring them with any historical notion of progress. This is the Weinbergian miscellany clashing with the Dewey classification scheme - to conventional histories analysis comes in levels not angles.

Hammes argued that fourth-generational warfare is the strategy of targeting enemy decision making processes. The full deployment of all network capacity to disrupting and maniuplating the decisions of the enemy leaders without engaging in a conventional industrial war - which will invariably lost if fought against the United States. 4GW combatants disrupt or destroy the enemy leadership’s will to fight.

Wlliam Lind, one of the first to articulate the concept of fourth-generational warfare has criticized Hammes for assuming too much rationality from decision makers - Lind attacks the straw-man of economics by criticizing the notion of politicians “reviewing the numbers” of a conflict. He argues that fourth-generational war isn’t won by targeting the “will” of the enemy leadership, he argues, “they win by pulling the states they are fighting apart at the moral level.”

Wittgenstein would roll his eyes at such a statement. This is a distinction without a difference - particularly Hammes is speaking about a desired effect of 4GW (the extraction of the enemy) whereas Lind regresses to a rather abstract causal argument around the morality of a conflict.

This is hugely problematic for historical reasons - but I won’t get into that. A bigger problem lies at the basis of his assumptions about what influences political decision makers to leave wars and of course the nature of the combatants in 4GW.

Whereas Hammes roots his argument in the pyschological realities of will - Lind runs into the blue yonder of philosophical abstraction. Which is made more problematic by his appeal to decision theory to support his argument that rationality has no place in strategic thinking - he abuses beyond recognition the concept of bounded rationality and satisficing to support his claim.

Lind profoundly misrepresents the notion of rationality is being solely the type specified by economists - articulated first by David Hume as instrumental rationality.  Instrumental rationality forms the underpinning of utility maximization and economics.

The issue is that a Humean notion of instrumental rationality is impossible in reality - we would be paralized by the problem of standing up since we’d have to explore all possible options before choosing one; elsewise we’d be irrational under Hume’s and consequently Lind’s conditions.

Thomas Hammes and other fourth-generational theorists are arguing for a mutliagency, multidisciplinary approach to tackling the problem of our current violent conflict. Network-centric warfare of the kind David Arquilla and Jon Ronfeldt articulated is becoming ever more real.

Barnett argues that only be understanding how military conflict integrates with a broader strategic vision of global integration can the US / NATO possibly hope to win the peace.

Weinberger articulates that only be embracing the dynamic arrangement of information based on problem solving and subjective need can we possibly begin to make sense of the world around us.

Thankfully for Barnett, Hammes and even Lind - we have a body of work that integrates these notions and provides a mechanism for dynamically shifting perspectives to observe the effects of military and non-military operations.

It’s called human security.

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I quit my job in the technology world not out of boredom or disinterest in what I was doing. I love working with software, developing applications people find useful and bringing value to customers or community members through the products I produce. What I took issue with was my skills and talents were being invested in businesses whose profits benefited the richest elements of society. My bosses didn’t need my help getting and staying rich; someone half as smart with a fraction of my ambition can do that job and reap the benefits.

The Impedance Mismatch

It seems so obvious to many people that technology is fundamentally important, even essential in the struggle to make the world a better place. Ranging from alternative fuel sources to reduce carbon emissions, AIDS research to the development of communications technology to give everyone the world a voice.

However, if we were to use Collier’s definition of the bottom billion and to target solving their problems using technology, the momentum of innovation slows to a crawl. For anything resembling high-tech to get a foot hold in these places there are simply far too many requirements that need to exist.

Some social entrepreneurs seek to circumvent these limitations by adapting the technology to suit the environment - projects like the One Laptop Per Child with its XO device pursue this. They’ve built a rugged, portable, low-requirement laptop.

My issue with it is relatively simple - a huge percentage of children born in the developing world will die of diarrhea, smoke inhalation or other preventable diseases before they even get to see the shiny green and white slab of plastic.

How can you expect a 13 year-old Somali farm-girl, the eldest in her family tending a parched scrap of land to appreciate the wonder of the XO? It doesn’t spit out food or clean drinking water, it doesn’t make her crops grow or the market prosper. Literacy is pretty overrated to the starving.

This does not diminish the accomplishment of Negroponte it merely reinforces the notion that connecting what Silicon Valley does with Sierra Leone is a very difficult task.

In electrical engineering and computer science there is a term called the impedance mismatch. We have this very problem with the innovators in technology, the innovators in foreign policy and the people of the bottom-billion developing world. The technology world and the political world don’t understand each other and the solutions the technology world produces have relation only to theoretical problems.

The Infection of Centralized Information

I still haven’t found an answer that lets me stand next to AIDS researchers, agricultural scientists or civil engineers and not feel like I’m wasting people’s time.

What I have figured out is this - information technology cannot possibly hope to change Myanmar or Bolivia for the better until it changes some of the fundamental aspects of Canada or the United States; particularly in the way our political system is formed.

The political system in both Canada and the United States, and in many other countries is profoundly distorted by the capacity for message-control by policy makers. Particularly in the United States, the tightly-knit connections between federal politicians, corporate interests and the Pentagon and their stakes in media outlets results in bizarre interpetations of factual information being spread throughout the country.

Broadcast media has gotten progressively better at what they do. They’re more covert, more pervasive and ultimately more influential than ever before. The handling of politics in 1960’s television looks practically ham-handed by comparison.

Political voices have become more shrill, more extreme and less accountable. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, who are still broadcasting; cannot hold a candle to the irrational and provocative rhetoric being wielded by people like Anne Coulter.

The media, particularly the news, used to be the sentinal against tyrrany. It was the citizen surrogate to provide information for voters to use when they elected leaders or chose to act out against them.

Instead, now, the media acts as a self-interested agent. A mercenary force of fact generation.  The pages and airwaves are filled with a homogenized, undifferentiated miasma of falsehoods, opinions, entrenched ideological rhetoric or outright bafflegab. I have never once been surprised by what I read - the analysis and conclusions are drawn almost before news occurs. The established political groups are pandered to by their preferred media source. Rational, impartial examination of fact - the universally-respectful discussion of policy options; these are mythical pipe-dreams.

Cynizens of the World Unite!

If there is one word to describe the dispositions of Canadians across country it would be “cynical”. The victory of any party is a dubious proposition. This cynicism is exacerbated by the fumbling, knock-kneed analysis by the national news media.

The cynicism is the unsurprising result of many policies which restrict the level of interaction voters have with their supposed representatives. Professional politicians have taken the word “leader” altogether too literally - they believe they establish an agenda that the country follows. With a very narrow collection of people the notion of representing the citizenry, not just your constituency has vaporized in Canada and has only started to resurface in the United States.

The media has failed us utterly - it has been cowed by Harper and leaders like him across the world. It has curried favour with the most disgusting elements of our society and decides to seek the biggest, fattest most ignorant audience upon which it can lay hands. The Globe and Mail and the National Post produce a slaw of op-eds with nary the mention of potential bias or disclosure. If Slashdot were arbiter of the news the combined efforts of the media oligarchy would bat zero in the Insightful scoring.

What is a disaffected, disenfranchised cynizen to do? How do we become citizens again?

We take back the message and we fight for our right to know.

A politician should never ever be more afraid of a reporter than a voter. When and if that happens all journalists the world over have become the mortal enemies of democracy.

Distributed Information And The Reclamation of Awareness

When examining the greatest failures of humanity in the last decade - some of the grossest and most abysmal acts it’s difficult to not notice that the level of media coverage after-the-fact is tremendously higher than before.

Anyone who owns a television set can appreciate the difference between being informed and paying attention. There’s a huge difference between a crawler and a half-hour-pseudo-news program.

There has yet to be a single catastrophe wrought by the developed world that resulted from a lack of information - they can be readily isolated to a lack of attention.  the comprehensive carpet bombing of Cambodia, the invasion and destruction of East Timor by Indonesia, the genocide Rwanda, the rapine destruction of Sudan, the unrestrained war in Somalia, the rise of international Jihadist terrorism - the list goes on and on for particular incidence.

However, the international attention-deficit-disorder extends to chronic problems - the spread of malaria, AIDS, shortage of drinking water, food, the narcotics trade.

There also exists examples of what happens when attention is paid - Bosnia, CFCs and the ozone layer, Small pox. These were not issues that stealthily resolved and announced - the impetus to act came from overwhelming public pressure on decision makers to act.

Technology promotes self-organization

Clay Shirky teaches at NYU, he has discussed the new-found capacity for disperate groups to cooperate using technology as the medium of communication. Shirky predicts that this ability for technology to enable self-organization based on self-identification will severely disrupt and undermine the authority and centrality of institutions.

The importance of this to the developing world seems pretty far off until you think about what stands between the starved, malnourished and dying and a life of work and meaningful existence - that barrier isn’t necessarily you and me; it’s potentially our classmates, co-workers - the people disengaged and uninvolved. They feel this way because they feel unimpowered.

Institutions serve as a resilient bulwark for politicians against public opinion. The media used to serve as channel controls - allowing enough to flow back and forth that progress was made.

The ediface of the long-held consensus of apathy is quickly revealing itself to be the product of orchestration and collusion. The degree to which citizens care about the world around them is higher than ever before and people, especially young tech-savvy people, are beginning to feel constricted by the confines of traditional channels.

The capacity to control the discourse is ultimately the most powerful influence in politics - if it is not in the hands of everyone it is fundamentally corrupt.

By expanding the pervasiveness of global connectivity in the developed world - increasing the bandwidth of media and information coming from the bottom billion - we increase the awareness and attention. Linus’ Law suits this well - the more eyes looking at the problem the faster solutions become available and the greater the will to act on them.

This is where it starts - this is where technology can really help the world.

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Charles Darwin taught us that not all change is good. In this case not all biological change is good. Genetic mutations occur, those that increase the chances of the mutant’s survival are called adaptations - everything else is a zoological curiosity, or in the case of humanity, a disorder or disease.

One thing that plagues psychologists and cognitive scientists among many questions, is the underpinning purposive question of the human brain. Why do we have such relatively big bags of goo in our skulls? Darwin provides a framework within which to pursue this explanation - evolutionary adaptation and natural selection.

Geoffrey Miller found that simple competitive natural selection does a poor job of explaining why, in mere evolutionary-moments our brains went tripled in size from the chimpanzee like Homo erectus brains to the contemporary Homo sapien sapien.

Robin Dunbar proffers a social selection explanation. Primates are highly social animals - an adaptation more strongly held across the genus than any other. Socialization increased rates of survival. Dunbar observed that one can predict the size and intensity of social interaction by the proportions of the brain in primates. Specifically, the closer primates become to humans the greater and more complex their social systems.

Miller said that a great deal of our adaptation occurs because sexual selection - the same force that compells Peacocks to grow such extravagant and costly tail-feathers. Creativity, Miller singles out, is an adaptation primarily of reproduction rather than survival. This points to our state of nature being artists not warriors - as comforting observation as any.

Miller also observes something quizzical. Brain size tripled between 2.5 million years ago and 200,000 years ago. Yet, in all this time, innovation was non-existent. The same stone and bone tools developed by our sloped-brow ancestors were used by our contemporaries. This occurred up to the point where our cranial accretion ceased - then and only then did innovation spark. Fire creation and control, cave painting, spears, hunting groups, nomadic tribes all happened following the emergence of our modern brains.

This perhaps, is unsurprising to any parent of a young-adult or someone who was a young-adult not so long-ago. Gerontology shows us that during periods of mental development and growth there are severe and often crippling disruptions in mental activity - mood swings, hormonal oddities and other fluctuations distort the creative process.

Anyone who has attended a high-school art showing knows this.

During adolescence, contemporary humans go through a developmental stage that refines and expands the cortical regions, particularly the frontal lobe. This region of the brain is responsible for planning, complex visualization and impulse control

Like a building undergoing renovations, this region of the brain becomes disrupted and chaotic as it matures - leading to the compulsive, risky behaviour we typically associate with our youth. It’s also why mental disease, like Manic Depression or Schizophrenia, becomes triggered in late adolscence.

This is the first same region that was being developed and expanded during our ascension to Homo sapien sapien.

So, perhaps we as a species were in our teenage years during this time. Spending our time listening to rock music and being angry at australopithecus instead of mastering flame or building housing.

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I miss you Daniel.

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What I found profoundly disgusting about the electoral process in Canada, and it seems to have become acceptable - is the belief on either/any side that the opposition does not first and foremost have the interests of Canada at heart.

Such disrespect is juvenile and intellectually stunted and it needs to stop.

No party is innocent in this respect; Harper and Dion perpetually exchange snide condescending remarks in the newspapers. This snarkiness tears the fabric of discourse and collaboration upon which the parliamentary system is founded.

I am confident that Sir MacDonald, a man famous for among other things a wickedly barbed tongue, would find the kind of invective interchange going about simply pathetically amateurish. Not only do they do it, they do it poorly - the party leaders in Canada retain the wit of an upset teenager.

Disagreement does not necessitate disrespect. I am a Liberal but under no circumstances could anyone ever get me to admit that a Conservative, by virtue of being a Conservative, has anything but the interests of the country as the primary motivation for her policy choices. Someone can be informed, rational, logically consistent, altruistic and yet still painfully irrevocably wrong.

Unfortunately for the parties in Canada, it seems that if someone disagrees with you it is because they are stupid, naive or corrupt. This is childish and cowardly - if one can’t reconcile that someone intelligent and informed can come to a contrary position, one has no place in politics - or really any intellectual pursuit.

One’s policy suppositions must rest soundly on the evidence used to develop them, not on some lentel of counterfactuals or a presupposed ideological framework.

So it is therefore difficult to introduce topics into campaign debate that are difficult to square with the attempted campaign narrative of each respective parties. As David Eaves points out, there is a gaping hole where foreign policy should be. I observed that technology has no place in the discussion, except in reference to the economy (it seems curious that something so important to all the campaign planks of all the parties gets no attention and is just presupposed to work as intended).

The Liberals cannot win with symmetric tactics - Harper can rout the painfully wooden, extremely francophone Dion in the battle for emotional connection. What Harper cannot hope to dominate is the world of reality and factual information.

Harper is drafting policy for the Canada we see on CTV; not for the real one. Basic, elementary facts, within the intellectual grasp of a child fly in the face of swaths of policy.

But here’s the tactic that will kill Harper - recognize some good ideas he has. Say loud and clear “We the Liberal party are not opposed to good ideas. The Conservatives, once in a while, have decent policy - when that happens we’ll use it - but do you want occasionally good policy? Or do you want the party that will pick the policy every single time?”

Of course, this is boil the ocean problem-solving lunacy on my part; but wouldn’t it be nice to hear SOMEBODY aside from Michael Ignatieff express an interest in picking the BEST policy options instead of slagging a party’s religiosity or haplessness?

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The web, social networks and the like are taking an unprecedented role in the current elections. Obama’s campaign was made in part by the massively successful online initiative his team generated. Marc Gendron, and others like him have made great strides in integrating the Liberal party with contemporary media.

However, using tech in a campaign isn’t enough. Technology with its ever expanding influence over everyone’s lives shouldn’t be a peripheral aspect of policy - it’s as important to the functioning of a nation as foreign policy, fiscal policy, health care etc. It affects every single one of these areas and many more.

Further, compared to many other areas, technology policy (if correctly implemented) is highly cost effective. Sadly, there are so many questions that haven’t been answered and likely won’t be during this election.

What is the government (whichever one) going to do about intellectual property? How do we protect and encourage both future and current innovators - the current law puts them at odds and the encumbants have the resources to crush invention. This cripples Canada and forces innovation to places like Taiwan and China.

What is the government going to do about our cell phone price-gouging? The oligopoly established by Bell, Rogers and Telus is verging on the criminal; the degree of collusion, price gouging and other infuriating activity is exactly the right kind of activity for government intervention in the market. The market actually bars many people for owning a mobile phone - the very same people who would benefit the most from having one.

What about the internet and net neutrality? We don’t have the same imminence of a bandwidth bottleneck that the United States is coming up against but we will sooner or later and the government needs to act now.

Our research is lagging - innovation in Canada is not growing at the rate it should. We are better than this, we’re one of the most highly educated countries in the world - there’s no good reason why we can’t be the most innovative.

What about technology in government. This has become a cliche of mine (and David Eaves) whenever we get on this topic. The Canadian government has barely caught up to 1994 in terms of interface with constituents. This needs fixing and it needs fixing yesterday.

Why am I paying to file my taxes online? I’m essentially losing a chunk of my return because the government won’t throw up a series of online forms and instead outsources to for-profit corporations. Why isn’t there an open API for this?

Why is are the precise responsibilities of any given government employee mysterious? Why can’t I know their activity for any given week? Why can’t I look up an hour-by-hour schedule of every member of parliament? The voters are their boss - every other job I’ve ever had, my boss knew my work schedule. I pay their salary - I want to know what my money is doing.

How broken is a system where the media is given privileged access to information? A privilege extended only if they play nice with the reigning party.

The Canadian government’s technology is comical - a high-school student could produce a higher quality product than many currently deployed across minitries.

The software powering the governmental directories, the national archives, the Treasury database and many more is older than many governmental employees.

Software is milk, not cats. If a month goes by and the code base hasn’t been improved something is terribly wrong.

The problem can’t be money - using higher-quality, more secure open source software instead of the calcified pathetically outmoded garbage-ware they run now is a cost-savings manuever.

Anyone who works in enterprise software can tell you that, over time, the most expensive aspect of software is support and legacy integration. Forcing employees to use ancient, unfamiliar applications with archaic interfaces is a recipe for a hefty support staff and a long legacy integration invoice.

I believe the difficulty lies in a combination of ignorance, apathy and political wisdom (like so many other things).

Your average politician is statistically likely to be a social science student and also likely to be a lawyer. Some are doctors, some are economists - very very few are engineers, scientists or software people. So their view of technology is very narrow in scope.

The same is true for the average population - techies represent a very small (but growing) percentage of the population and thus most people don’t (and shouldn’t) care too much about IPv6 deployment, fibre optic relays, net neutrality etc.

Admittedly, techies (and I include myself in this group) do a piss-poor job of making these issues relevant to people - our obsession with precision and accuracy in explanation cripples our communication. That, and we have a strong incentive to keep everyone ignorant about our domain of knowledge - just like lawyers and doctors.

So there’s a general ignorance about the ramifications of policy options - when you don’t understand the issue, the choices proffered by experts sound equivalent. Worse, the constrictive and destructive options frequently have powerful interests willing to craft the message at great expense - often making their option sound better.

Anyone in politics knows the best avenue to success is to find a parade and get in front of it. There’s no parade for technology policy - because it’s so univerally important it’s distributed across many disciplines. Unless you’re an expert it’s nearly impossible to aggregate all these different pieces into a coherent picture (and when you are an expert it’s just really hard).

So when discussion crops up regarding a national protocol for medical records that sounds like a health problem. When discussing electronic voting machines that sounds like an electoral issue. If I want to create a governmental social network that sounds like an HR problem - and so on.

Government is letting their tools define their solutions when the problem needs to dictate it. In other words, when all you’ve got is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.

Many ministers are concerned about the cost - technology reform sounds expensive. Why does it sound expensive to them? Because when they want to find out how much something costs they get a quote from their preferred software vendors.

These vendors of course price gouge because they know the government can pay whatever price they quote. The largest software companies in Canada (aside from EA, BioWare and Ubisoft) all make software for the government - they rake in piles of tax money by over-charging for absolutely god awful software.

It’s often deliberately broken deprecated open source packages with a half-assed rebrand applied. They then of course license a support agreement so the company can be paid to fix problems they created in the first place.

The Canadian government needs a project managers office - an appointed, trans-ministerial body that handles software and technology related issues. They consult, gather requirements, draft RFPs and oversee externally and internally developed applications.

An important department in this office should be community management for open source initiatives - the default go-to resource for software development. If something needs to be made quickly or is unlikely to have a community surrounding it then and only then does the project gets outsourced to a private vendor.

Everything produced or purchased by the government must be open source - Canadians pay for it, so we should be able to get as much value for our tax-dollars as possible.

The job opportunities this creates are immense, the cost savings equally so. This also provides incentive for small software vendors to enter the market-place by providing value-add services to customers and the ability to compete alongside established players for government contracts.

By using a bounty-style system, scholarship and internship programs the government can get piles of high-quality code very cheaply.

Keeping everything open source means security flaws, bugs and other issues can be addressed quickly and integration issues will virtually disappear.

I’m not suggesting software solves all problems but software should never ever be the problem.

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Having had to wait until I could get back to Toronto to have access to a machine running Vista, I got my taste of a usable Google Chrome Beta about week later than I should’ve.

It’s rare that I deliberately catalogue the blogospheric consensus prior to using a product in discussion - I don’t want my experience cluttered with the biasing analysis of others (can you tell I’m a usability engineer?). However, in the case of Chrome I found the discussion surrounding it both too interesting and often surreal to with hold.

Tech Crunch IT, in an uncharacteristic bout of skillful prose,  proffered what I think is the most interesting analysis on the issue of MSFT & Chrome - juxtaposing it with both the American election and continued devolution of MSNBC.

While I won’t touch the American election material (being a Canadian, I’m yelling into a strong head-wind) I am a consumer of both Microsoft and Google products and feel I can speak to them, their business models and the effects of Chrome on each and others.

Chrome is an excellent core system from which to deploy web applications - the cited purpose of Google. I have a tough time believing that Google intended to deliver a value to customers other than the stated one,. That value is better performing Google apps and more responsive AJAX in general.

I think that Google Chrome should for the time being, be compared to similarly intended products - which isn’t a browser per se, but a heavily modified browser for a specific purpose. That means XULRunner and Internet Explorer’s Window’s in-situ renderer. Google isn’t a browser so much as a DHTML engine with enough UI bolted on to be servicable.

Having said that, the fact that people are mistaking it for a full-fledged browser this early in the game speaks to the quality and robustness of the system.

What I also find difficult to reconcile is the hyperbole surrounding the significance of the product’s release with regards to the corporate landscape. It’s yet another solid product in Google’s gigantic line-up of products.

Some have said this steps outside the core competency of Google. I would argue that it’s actually quite obviously within the scope of Google’s capacity even in the face of more intuitively obvious candidates.

I believe Google’s real strength lies in what it does better than anyone else in the world - understanding how people use the web.  They are brilliant at releasing truly disruptive products - they know what functionality is important to users and what isn’t; often better than users know it themselves.

As a long time Galleon user, its nice to see a browser that makes proper use of Webkit’s strengths. Chrome beats Safari as a browser hands down. Still, the best browser anywhere is still Lynx.

Much has been said about what this means for Microsoft - frankly nobody has said anything to convince me it’s a big deal. Microsoft is top dog still, despite people like me predicting its impending demise for nearly two decades. When looking at how to survive in a world with Microsoft one need examine only two companies - IBM and Apple. Which, in a strange way they stand as corporate analogies for fourth-generation warfare.

Microsoft is very comparable to its peer in a different sector - General Electric.  However I think Bill Gates has more in common with Jack Welch than Thomas Edison. Welch and Gates, unsurprisingly, are some of history’s greatest CEOs precisely for this feat. Microsoft was the first software company in much the same way GE was the first electric appliance company and they’ve consequently become concommitant with all its effects.

To suggest that Microsoft is going down because Google is growing akin to suggesting Bank of America is going out of business because Investors Group is gaining traction - it just doesn’t make sense and totally misses the point.

Google does not sell a hugely successful game console (and it can’t), Nintendo isn’t going to put Microsoft out of business. Microsoft’s peripherals are some of the best on the market - Logitech isn’t going anywhere but it isn’t a threat. The Zune may not be an iPod killer but it’s doing well enough for Microsoft to keep it going.

Microsoft isn’t about a single product or even a suite. Gates, and his paternal allegiance to Windows and Office, is gone. Microsoft is an everywhere company, just as GE is an everywhere company.

The vulnerabilities of Microsoft and GE can’t come from a corporation or its effects - they can huff and puff but this brick house ain’t going nowhere. The trends that uproot companies like this are generational - huge in scope and beyond the prerogatives of any particular agency.

That said, internal mismanagement can doom Microsoft - just as GE faced hard times. Tim O’Reilly sounds like early 90’s Steve Jobs when he beats up on Microsoft as an out of touch, dessicated and creatively barren company. While the pathos of this argument is entirely sound - the logos is diminutive.

Microsoft understands its customers very well - they are responsible for rafts of research on usability engineering and possess some of the most sophisticated testing apparatus and methodologies available anywhere.

I think what gets lost is the environment in which Microsofts constructs their products. Like NASA or the military - the constraints are bizarrely complex and the product that emerges as a result is often puzzling when that’s not taken into account.

This may sound like a pep talk delivered at a MS project all-hands meeting. Let me be clear, Microsoft can and does produce a mountain of garbage in addition to quality products. The point I’m (attempting to be) making is that Microsoft establishes the cultural paradigm in which we interact with virtually every aspect of the web.

They do, as a firm, what is essentially only possible elsewise via open source - there aren’t any operating systems on par with Windows that were built entirely by one company; let alone the myriad other products Microsoft releases.

Microsoft and GE internalized the concept of long-tail, just as any large production company has ( be it book, movie, video game) - you can’t guarantee a best-seller only influence it, so release as many products to as many people as you can in as intelligent and efficient a method as possible.

This is something Google, Apple, IBM etc. can only do in limited channels and on a limited scale.

It’s also something that in and of itself is valuable - thus I don’t think Microsoft is going anywhere (except into your fridge, tables, mugs, toothpicks, nose hair trimmers, toilet seats…)

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So we get to play along at home for the impending election. Ours of course will be comparatively banal, short and unimpressive. We don’t have a heart-rending primary to psyche us for a thrill ride leadership race.

Instead, we have a cadre of thoroughly vetted and utterly banal talking-heads vying to get their parties in power so they can be as facile and useless as Harper or Martin ever was.

Clearly, this is not an election about change. Certain Liberals sealed the fate of this election when they picked Dion over one Canada’s leading minds - Michael Ignatieff. Not once have I regretted my decision to support Ignatieff and Dion has done little to convince me otherwise.

There is a strong part of me that wants to see Dion soundly and resolutely defeated so he won’t rear his pointy head in Canadian politics ever again.

Dion has cost the Liberals another election - which would’ve been handed to anyone with more media presence, better speaking ability and the capacity to make fun of righty wingnuts.

A leader in as tenuous a position as Stephane Dion found himself that December must strive his utmost to win the loyalty of his fallen opponents. Dion has instead inflamed and goaded them, meanwhile he’s been utterly facile with Harper and his Conservatives.

With his hamhanding during bi-elections, childish response to the Green Shift suit and positively ridiculous attempts to criticize Harper in the media and during question period. Dion makes my Quaker grandmother look positively sharp tongued by comparison.

So, what is one to do?  My father, for one,  is utterly incredulous of this election - he’s far more interested in the race south of the border; one that would make Sun Tzu proud of the Democrats. They’ve forced McCain into a nasty position and followed the Napoleonic adage of never interrupting your opponent when he is making a mistake.

I’m not a political expert, which is what makes my position more infuriating to me because I have a hard time convincing myself to not be as uninterested as my father.

I remind myself of several things - Harper is a member of the Conservative party, a coalition of every non-Liberal they could pin down, calling them Tories is fatuous - they have neither the honor or history. Dion is a Liberal, and while I’m somewhere far south of enthusiastic about his leadership I believe in the party behind him. The hardworking and engaging individuals who could do a lot to make this country a better place if given the chance.

I know those people will get their chance eventually - but sooner is better than later.

I also know that the man who inspired me to get seriously involved in domestic politics, Michael Ignatieff, is still in this party. If after the disappointment he and everyone around him faced, can find it within themselves to remain loyal to the party and its promise - surely I can.

When faced with a coalition Harper had to get clever. He did, in the most damaging way possible. Instead of getting clever at innovating policy solutions and forging multi-lateral partnerships, he got very clever at tactical politics. He is better than ever at burying problematic media coverage, releasing effective ads and otherwise dominating public discourse of his House.

Harper hasn’t gotten any cleverer at writing policy. For a much purported “policy wonk” he hasn’t produced anything worthy of headlines - let alone the history books.

Imprisoned druggies and more guns is the Harper conception of tough-justice.

Invent more crimes rather than addressing the serious ones you’ve got. Fact, reason and expert opinion matter little - the Conservative answers to policy exist in only one book.

Allow men less qualified than a highschool student to approve laws that constrict our freedom of expression impose utterly unenforcable, draconian and universally damaging barriers to what can be done with media.

Instead of focusing on how inept Harper and the Conservatives are at doing their jobs - what does Dion choose to focus on? In the last three official party dispatches I’ve received the Liberal party seems fixated on connecting any form of scandal or controversy they can drum up to the Conservatives. They even go so far as to suggest Conservative culpability in the Listeriosis outbreak.

Something tells me Warren Kinsella isn’t being consulted on this - it seems to literally contravene everything he laid out in The War Room.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that policy is never the (or even A) deciding factor in elections. Canadians can’t possibly be expected to make informed decisions weighing the calculus of the expansive, meticulously crafted Liberal plans against the narrow pamphlet deli menu of the Conservatives.

People want change - I WANT CHANGE DAMNIT!

So the questions one has to ask going into the campaign is which party is least afraid of progressive change? Which party has the biggest, most energized group of innovative, forward thinking people and is willing to help their ideas mature and see implementation?

As Taylor Owen and David Eaves, two of those promising, engaged and inspiring people, pointed out in their LRC article. Real change isn’t coming from our leaders, it’s coming from individuals all over the country.

These change-makers are not motivated by religious fervour or hatred of the opposition, duplicitous self-interest, or passionate support of irrelevant outmoded or patently idiotic causes. That is not something that can be said with the same truth about the Conservatives, NDP or Bloc Quebecois (it’s hard to tell which is the most ironic party name in Canadian politics).

As a progressive I am struggling to remain engaged. This is a hostile landscape for people more interested in improvement than partisan success. It is a very harsh environment for those ideas which don’t fit neatly into pre-existing entrenched political ideologies. However, Conservatives have proven themselves phobic of ingenuity, of principled compromise and of anything that might look bad to their pastors.

The NDP have, conversely established themselves as the petty, non-issue party whose guile is outdone by their cloddish mishandling of public perception. The Bloc faces much the same fate - it has bolted on some prefab policies and modeled itself as a disloyal powerbroker.

As much as my heart is Green, they are fundamentally undoing their efforts by subverting the efforts of the only party with the capacity to take an environmental agenda to the national level. I hope that the Green can find the pragmatism in themselves to seek results before principle - we need Green policies and they aren’t ever going to come from the Conservatives.

I was hopeful of Harper and the Conservatives - I saw them as a restoration of the Tories, a sharp antidote to the largesse of Liberals like Harper - Big Red’s Boogeyman.  Harper, however, has shown himself over these years to have more akin to the smug, red-faced neo-con GOP than the venerable and storied Tory conservatism and flint-nosed practicality.

If Dion is not the Liberals then Harper is not the Conservatives - so what does his party, in aggregate stand for? With Gary Lunn, Stockboy Burt Day and Stephen Harper himself it seems to be hairspray. Seriously though - their five point policy platform is catastrophic. Not a single one of the areas they hoped to address has improved and some have worsened. His party seems fixed on Calvinist moralistc fantasies rather than pragmatic, factually informed policies predicated on outcomes and quantifiable success.

It seems in the logic of federal politics, policy is successful by definition if it is implemented - I think anyone without a poli-sci degree can see problems with this reasoning.

So - it seems the choice is less vexing than it was - everyone in Canada except those living in Cartierville-Saint-Laurent needs to get to the polls and vote for their Liberal representative.

I wonder what the missing 40% of Canada hopes to gain by sitting on their hands? Whoever you are, know that you are embarrassing the rest of us.

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It’s been going on for over a week - I think I’m going mad.  At dusk through twilight, every night. I’m faintly aware of some rustling - a movement behind me or beside me. Focused, as I am, on the computer screen in front of me I only catch the narrowest of glimpses as I turn sharply to look where I thought I heard something.

I think I see things in the corner of my vision - darting hither and yon. I start questioning my grip on reality - things are beginning to crumble.

Then one night I awake in a start. Fully awake in that semi-panicked lucidness one experiences when alarms go off. Only, there were no alarms, merely a scratching. The scratching against cardboard. I thought it was coming from the alley-way outside my door. This was odd, certainly, but it seemed truly bizarre my brain could interpret that as a threat.

Then I realized, ominous, that the scratching came not from the out of doors but from my kitchen.

So, with trepidation I enter the kitchen and reach for the lightswitch. As soon as the lights blink on there is silence, merely the softest of thuds punctuating the cessation of the infernal “scritch scritch scritch”.

Nothing stirs. I cast about looking for a probable source - bleary eyed fatigue coming upon me rapidly. I find nothing. Frustrated and more than a little wary, I return to my quarters - closing the door and blocking the threshold.

This evening, I sat, aglow with the victory over a vanquished final exam.  Feasting on the finest muffins and donuts in all the land I luxuriated for an evening’s recreation on the internet.

My reverie was perturbed by the rustling of plastic - like someone stepping on a grocery bag. Then from the crevace between a Rubbermaid container tub and my counter something emerged.

From the shadowy depths it came, unhurried, unafraid. It came out, blinking, into the low-carbon footprint light and cast its gaze upon me.

I stopped what I was doing to turn and face my foe.

He was filled with trickery, he’s beady black eyes filled with the mischief of thousands of generations of his kin. I stared silently back at him. Neither of us knew what to say - so we said nothing.

We knew then, the war was on.

In this first phase I’m attempting an end-run. I hope to take him alive, so I may parade his shame before he is exiled.

As you can see here - I’ve made a fiendish entrapment device to capture my devilish adversary.

He merely alights atop my strategically placed box of Pirates of the Burning Sea CSG to gain access to the device wherein lies the butter of peanuts.

He simply slips through the aperture and his fate is sealed.

This is but the first phase in what may be a prolonged battle of attrition against a wiley foe.

While the odds are not good, I am confident that in the end - I shall be victorious.

The forces are arranged, gambits made - and so, the game begins.

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I should disclose that I do not own a television and haven’t read a newspaper with intent for at least a couple of years - I’ve perused some online articles of various publication (almost all American) but a physical dead tree hasn’t smuged my fingers in a long while.

Do I miss it? No - I don’t miss dealing with heaping piles of recycling. I also don’t like mucking about with the physical paper itself.

When the National Post publishes articles like this one (thanks David Eaves). It really cements some journalists as ignorant blowhards with an incumberance of verbiage and a dearth of knowledge and capacity. They still haven’t figured out that their job is easy, that’s why everyone is doing it.

I think people tend to forget that newspapers are assembled by former journalism students, not domain experts. People writing in papers are not exactly the brilliantly intelligent geniuses who go off and discover DNA, invent the world wide web or micro-loans - they write stories about stuff they saw or stuff other people saw. Hardly the premise for expert analysis.  How else could one explain the painful factual errors? The jaw-dropping oversimplifications, or glibness toward a force that will put every self-important key-puncher out of a job in no time flat? Either they are insane, stupid, or liars. They can pick, I’d believe any of the three.

Given that their job is to report on things it’s amazing how poorly they perform even that function - so poorly in fact, that readers are willing to forgo institutional authority to get the news they want rather than what some decrepit out-of-touch editor thinks we need to hear.

The pathetic ego-stroking exercises like the one in the National Post really drive home the fact that journalists actually think they’re smarter than the rest of us - when the simple fact is that journalists are at best as smart as you and me and probably less smart (after all, they’re clinging to a dying business model).

“the market place of ideas is going to be more superficial and unedifying than it already is.”

This is the kind of remark that would get one’s ass kicked in highschool, and for good reason. It’s astonishingly arrogant to suggest that newspapers stand between the world and some alarmist mythology of superficiality. Newspapers are the primary culprits of this insertion of idiocy - how else can you explain Margaret Wente?

Here’s the kicker, the evidence Kay cites in support of the web is regarding investigative journalism - which is the one part of newspapers not under threat. He also talks about resource investment; the whole point of citizens journalism is that they don’t need to invest resources - everything is cheap; that’s how it wins.

Who will be firmly unemployed by the blogosphere? Jonathan Kay and people like him - under-informed op-ed writers who think they’re smarter than their readers. Kay has demonstrated himself incapable of providing sound evidence for his argument, misinterpreting the reality of subject on which he is opining and capping off his demonstration of ignorance with a display of arrogance that puts mine to shame.

People like Kay are killing newspapers faster than the blogosphere - alienating audiences by insulting them is hardly a way to win their loyalty.

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