A very thought provoking essay.
“… the promises made in the Declaration and the Constitution are so great that their betrayal is an inevitable part of the promise. And that’s what makes them work. … that betrayal “the engine of American history.” The “more perfect union” is a limit approaching infinity. As each generation discovers-inevitably!-that the promises made to them were false, they battle to make them a little more true. …”
Well, that explains it, I’ve been had!
I’m amused at what a domain name geek I am. My principle reaction upon seeing this is to wonder what beuracracy approves the domain name registration for a thing like that. Who ever they are, it was very professional of them to do so.
Interesting map showing the shift toward the Democratic party between 2004 and 2008, by county.
Very sad that this is not a cartogram; but still thought provoking. I’m a bit disappointed by eastern Massachusetts, but I guess loyalty to the homeboy explains that. Note the shift in Indiana.
But mostly, it is very hard not to see a story about racism in there.
I have a vivid memory of watching television with my mother and a black woman. We are all in a small sunny second floor room in a house in Pittsburgh. The television is next to an odd gas fireplace. I am on a couch. On the television is something I have never seen: a large racially integrated crowd. The crowd is singing “We shall overcome.” My mother and the woman are standing behind the couch. Both are crying. I suspect it was this event; but who can say?
A five years later it was easy to believe that a black man might be president. A few years later it was easy to believe a woman might be. But then, the Republican party’s Southern strategy, and sadly all that unwound.
We maybe turning that around. But this isn’t going to be easy. We are very polarized, there is a lot of angry hateful/fearful people out there. It’s is only an example, but let us not gloss over how awful Proposition 8 really is.
I hate most explanations for why people participate in Open Source. I care about this question. I enjoy the game of puzzling out the answer. In a reversal of the usual cliche I love the game and hate the players; the casual players who think they know the answer. After two decades of thinking about this question I love that I stumble upon new answers.
This morning I was attempting to read, yet again, Benkler’s essay on sharing nicely where in he argues that the usual dialectic framing of how to coordinate activities (hierarchy v.s. markets) has blinded us to a third scheme; i.e. sharing. He points out some huge coordination problems that are solved via sharing and he does the good and necessary work of constructing an economic model for why some problems are well solved by sharing.
Part of his model explains why owners have excess lying around, that is suitable for sharing. In that explanation I was excited to to notice a new motivation for sharing.
Benkler draws our attention to excess capacity that owners can not consume. Idle cycles on your PC or empty seats in your car as you drive hither and yon. He model for this is analogous to that seen in value pricing models – i.e. if you own a hotel full of rooms and as the hour grows late you should consider selling those rooms for less; since otherwise they will go idle an you will get nothing.
I found my self thinking at that point about the emotions an owner has about this excess capacity, for example the sense of of lost opportunity, leading to emotions of frustration, grief, guilt. The hostess pressing left overs on her guests as the party wraps up is motivated by a horror at the waste shows how motivating this kind of sharing might be.
But the resource that drives open source is talent so the question naturally arises at this point does this model have something to say about sharing around the creation of these knowledge pools? This is delightful bit. If we think of skill as a capital good then talented people own building full of skills; and they lease out to earn their living. Of course most of the time they can’t find a buyer for all their skills. The rooms are empty. It’s not surprising that they are willing to share freely some of this capacity.
I had already noted many of the motivations outlined above for sharing one’s talents: countering the guilt for letting it go to waste, the positive emotions of generosity, the low cost of giving away the excess capacity. But I had not noticed something else: skills that are not exercised decay. While the hotel room left idle depreciates only slightly, a skill unused decays quickly. The skill demands that I exercise it, it’s survival depends on that exercise. If I horde it, it evaporates.
Just to get things started. Here’s a picture of a daylilly from August 17, 2001
And a Graham Thomas Rose from the same day.
