the new freedom movement

I’ve been tracking these efforts for a while. It’s going to shake things up. A lot.

Fun times ahead.

The real problem is that I don’t get along with a lot of tech people. It reminds me of how when I was in acting school I found I didn’t like many actors. Here I am in a space, a culture, a zone where I seem to be getting some traction, and I’m increasingly frustrated with my nominal peers.

In particular I find the crossover between geeks, hipsters and entrepreneurs — a flavor that runs strong in SF — to be especially nettlesome. There’s a kind of passive-aggressive form of snobbish competition which emerges around these kinds of people, a sort of nerd machismo. I don’t really have time in my life to contend with machismo, and the un-manly brand is just annoying.

Cue the record-scratch sound effect. There’s an undeniably enormous element of “I am the things I hate about other people” at work here. I’m a geek, entrepreneur, hipsterish in style, and possessed of my own stinky brand of macho bullshit. The opinion-piece colliery to thinly-veiled autobiographical content is perhaps thinly-veiled self-loathing?

Maybe, but there’s also something particular to my structural-hole-bridging personality that I think prevents me from really clicking into a truly deep groove with any given set of people. My persona is playing twister with the universe, and I’ve always got a food or a hand on some other dot. Never all at home.

It’s an old gripe. There’s not much I can do about this but live through it, to keep transcending whatever games I can. Noticing things one hates about oneself in others is a growing moment once you realize that’s what’s going on, and opportunities are created every time I can see my way past one of these things, to a higher purpose or more integrated whole. This is where you level up as a person, I think.

I am my own man, which is a vastly privileged thing to be. I have, as they say, First World Problems. And although I know I am not like other people in my circumstances, and probably not in my composition, I believe at a core level that I could be anyone, and everyone could be me. Not literally, but situationally. I think we can all be “our own people”, and the world would keep on churning, maybe quite a bit for the better, if we were.

Which makes it particularly jarring when I’m forced to the realization that all this internet goodness isn’t changing human nature, or at least if it is, it is evolving us more even slowly than a W3C spec (cue rimshot). People are still largely the same: shallow, scared, narrowly self-interested: very much not their own people. We may be moving gradually towards a brighter future, but in the mean-time I’m confronting the very things I hope to change manifesting themselves in the very space that I thought would be home base for said changing. That’s a mouthful, but hopefully you catch my drift. It’s a bummer, man.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that people are inherently anything more complex that social pattern recognizers who like to be well fed, safe, sexually satisfied, and part of a community. Beyond that — and even sometimes in the face of that — we are what we believe, what we learn from observation and emulation, what we come to know in the spaces between us and others.

Human nature, such as we reference it, can change. It can change in pretty big ways and with impressive relative speed compared to, say, geology or genetics. Specifically, as soon as we gain insight into ourselves, our selves themselves are changed; a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle of the psyche. It’s one of the reasons I don’t find those “simulation theories“ very philosophically interesting. Epistemology often comes down to pretty basic decisions — what do you believe — and I fundamentally don’t subscribe to a mechanistic/deterministic model for humanity. We’re an organic, emergent phenomena, and thus a constantly moving target. We can’t simulate ourselves accurately because if we did we wouldn’t be us.

And so one can argue that the generation coming up and the generation that’s gotten on board with the internet thing have evolved in fundamental ways. Our assumptions about communication and geography are different, as are our understanding about how knowledge and truth are obtained. I think these shifts are more or less for the better, but in and of themselves they don’t seem to have led to very different behaviors other than the phenomena of internet usage in and of itself. We retain the same patterns of action otherwise; a politics dictated by an elite class of of insiders and talking heads, a social milieu defined by those who are in and those who are out, an economics that is on the way to creating a permanent generational underclass. All of these things should and could be changing, but they aren’t. At least not yet.

Under such circumstances, one can begin questioning the strength of one’s small-d democratic beliefs. I can idealize a world of egalitarian brotherhood and harmony among peoples, but what if peoples themselves aren’t so into it? What if they prefer starfucking, holy wars and reality television?

As an upper-middle-class college-educated straight white male, it’s hardly my place to judge anyone, but it would be really cool to see something unexpected in the next year or so. I’m always optimistic and constantly hopeful.

Hippy music, please:

One of my most important original philosophical catchphrases is “The Most Important Thing Is To Stop Struggling.” It’s something I remind myself of frequently as my career goes through its whips twists and turns. Sometimes you find yourself in one of those situations where everything seems hard, impossible to begin on, just overwhelming. Sort of like being waist-deep in rubble.

Often the short term answer is to roll up your sleeves and dig out, because this is sometimes a devastatingly effective cheap psychological trick. That pile of dirty dishes never takes as long as it feels like it’ll take, for instance.

But, then there are the times where you feel constantly like you’re getting reset to that buried state, where you’re beating your head against the wall, doing the Sisyphus shuffle. When you notice that, it’s time to take a breath, look around, and see where/how/when to move laterally. Because as much as life is unfair, and full of adversity and strife and honest-to-goodness challenges, it’s also supposed to be — like the CSNY song there — sort of Easy.

And I don’t mean that in a lazing-about-in-the-sun sort of way, I mean it in the way that people talk about spreading a gospel. I can’t site chapter or verse, but there’s some bit I remember reading about how debating a strident non-believer isn’t a good use of time, because when you’ve got The Word you just need to find someone else who’s ready to hear it.

That’s a meta-lesson I take to heart, because really the whole premise of what I’m doing with my life and my company is a kind of gospel. We basically believe there are good ways to use open tools to make it easy, inexpensive and effective for millions of people to put their thoughts on the internet in ways they can personally own and control. We believe that by lining up all the right tools and making them easy and clear to use, we can radically lower barriers to entry in what is still an Emergent global conversation.

Speaking of old hippies, this idea has some roots for me in this passage:

Now I want to get into the idea of what is it about truth that makes truth important, cause there’s something about truth that’s really special … So, think what is truth, and what is it that we’re doing here, and what is it about being a man … like, one of the things about a man is that a man is the only animal that has a choice to make about truth. See, a cat doesn’t lie to you … you know, if cats like your vibes they crawl right up on you. If they don’t like your vibes, they’re not too hot for you. Right? The thing about truth is … God is I think trying to communicate with himself … And he has, on this here planet, about three and a half billion transceivers walking around, babbling to each other, constantly, trying to carry the circuit load for that incredible conversation that’s going on, of God talking to himself. See? And so there’s something that’s trying to be said too … right, and so we have to talk and we gotta listen when we talk as well as when we listen, in order to discover what it is that’s being said around here.

There’s a fundamental belief we carry that if we can open up enough channels and manage the flow, things will work out ok. That’s why it’s important to get people routed around firewalls in Dubai, because only with a greater ability to exchange information will we move, as a species, beyond the petty bullshit that’s tearing us apart.

Because it’s only through individual impulses, millions of honestly aligned little free-will seekers, that things actually get done. You can’t give people freedom or equality. Those are things that need to be taken. All we can do is make the most of our ability to coordinate, to learn, to align, to act, and to do all this in the common knowledge of a universal fraternity (the French kind, not Greek).

This is happening.

And when you’re delivering on the path to that kind of future, it may be hard fucking work, but it’s also easy. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter, as the poet says. And if it’s not easy, ask yourself why. Did you lose the script, or are you missing the easy way forward?

Apropos the previous posts about political power-grabbing and whistful public longing, and after a quick trip through the Jon Robb link farm, another thought I’d like to log for the register: in this crazy modern era of ours, in which the existing system is fumbling more than the San Diego Chargers, how long before we really start to think outside the box. Like waaaaay outside the box.

For instance, just off the top of my head:

• Why not real international solidarity between people of the same generation?
• Why do we still grow food in the dirt? Why not just go ahead and use engineering?
• Why not start your own tribe? Literally.
• Why is it only old people get to live in dedicated communities? Own a home with your roommates.

My parents generation was willing to question pretty basic assumptions about how they were supposed to live. It didn’t all work out, but it was a worthy exercise I believe. I think my generation is in an even more (potentially) radical space, thanks to these here internets. Not only can we interconnect with like-minded folks around the world with unprecedented ease, we can self-publish, self-learn, and figure What Actually Works in ways that were completely unthinkable to previous generations.

It looks bleak in some ways, but in other ways it looks pretty bright and wide open. Bears remembering.

I’m an opponent to conspiracy theories, see them as disempowering distractions which create endless rationalizations for complacency. At the same time, I am an unabashed fan of conspiring. It’s my own little paradox of proactivity: don’t waste your time trying to unravel a hidden coterie behind why the world is what it is, just get busy making your own.

Spent last night talking Redneck Socialism over pizza and beer with Face and The Girth. We’re bandying the ideas of rolling up on California’s Canada and implementing a takeover. Prosperous though our lives have become here, the golden state feels like barren ground for the revolution, and we’ve sometimes a great notion there’s an opportunity to do something more than live what passes for the bourgeois American Dream (home ownership, retirement savings, etc) in this 21st Century. At the risk of some material comforts, we can be heroes. After all, risk is our business.

As Eric Schlosser points out, it’s been liberals attempting to “look tough” who are largely responsible for the prison industrial complex. This kind of hollowness, this essentially immasculine fear of appearing weak, the willingness to do truly terrible things to literally millions of people… this is the quintessential malaise which infects the contemporary Democratic party, and prevents real reform.

Redneck Socialism is our answer. Simply put, we see politics not as a deliberative exercise, where senatorial comity and “bipartisanship” are the ideals, but rather as the pragmatic and utilitarian pursuit of the Public Good, which is a very real thing, and which has very real enemies. We’re blowing fat lines of Huey Long style populism here. It’s impossible to contemplate the requirements of the post-modern Public without confronting the realities of inequality, and the abusive nature of much contemporary corporate/other power. We have to stop poisoning ourselves, our planet, and developing a massive underclass for profit, and find more and better ways of making money. It ain’t really that hard to do.

This can also be seen as the boots-on-the-ground extension of The New Freedom Movement, which has a broader cultural agenda to help wake up the zombies and usher in a golden era for the species. By taking on a large but not impossibly huge chunk of territory — bigger than a compound, smaller than the world — we’re looking to enact our ideas for change by directly engaging and altering the course of the existing system. In other words, DC looks like a lost cause but it seams reasonable we might crack Salem or at least Multnomah County.

In sooth, “Socialism” is a pretty meaningless phrase. Almost as amorphous as “Capitalism” in light of how our twin dynamos of Wall Street — “I drink your milkshake!” — and the sad ghost that politicians blithly catchphrase as “Main Street” have collapsed. Finance has devolved into scheming con games and outright gambling, and I don’t know where these fucks live (Disneyland?) that they think bloviating about “main street” can be anything but a reminder of how Wal*Mart used and abused most of regular America, but there you have it.

So we’re looking to move beyond. Our belief is that by outing elephants in the room, having the courage to address unspoken issues and bring up sacred cows, while at the same time remaining totally pragmatic and ready to play bare-knuckled politics with all comers, we can advance something much more meaningful than “bipartisanship” or “centrism.” Splitting the difference isn’t leadership.

First of all, some mood music.

Lord I just want my life to be true
And I just want my heart to be true
And I just want my words to be true
I want my soul to feel brand new

I want to hold hands yeah
Yeah and I want make love
I want to keep running all day and and all night
Even when my mind tells my body that's enough

And I want to stand up yeah and I want to stand tall
If I ever have a son, if I ever have a daughter
I don't want to tell them that I didn't give my all

I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's first novel, Twenty Seventh City. It's a really wonderful story of political intrigue and personal neurosis, and there's a killer line towards the end from the perspective of a young woman upset with her somewhat pedantic boyfriend: "Suddenly she was living in a new world made for people like him, for people who can despise it and succeed in it anyway."

(man, google books is cool)

In addition to being a well-crafted line in a segment that portrays the ideosyncratic hypocrisy of well-educated/elite criticism of the status quo, this quite effectively captures the essence of my particular angst du jour, that I might end up being more than just middle-class successful — what with my structural hole oriented persona and all — but without actually mattering in the ways I genuinely care about.

See, I'll frequently rattle on about how I'm "ambitious" or that I want to "change the world," but what does that really mean? It means I want more influence. As I develop economically useful skills, and in particular build a highly effective organization around these skills, I've come to realize just how power-acquisitive I actually am. To wit, for the first time in my adult life I'm not in debt, and aside from some class-wariorish vibrations around the edges and the occasional adolescent yen to drive a really fast car, my primary financial interest is in figuring out how to apply this newfound economic capacity towards constructing that proverbial lever big enough to move the world.

Because look, if I'm able to realize my life's goals, by the end of this decade I'll have mouths to feed. That's a real thing that I want to do. No rush, but it's there. In the interim, I've got this opportunity, this liberty to move/spend/risk, and it doesn't make any sense to blow it getting sucked into some kind of rat-race or hamster wheel, even my own groovy alternative-looking one.

The way I see it, the big opportunity isn't in direct opposition to the floundering establishment but rather in the lateral development of alternative mechanisms which outperform the entrenched. I've got nothing but love for kids who want to take it to the streets, but I'd rather spend my energy creating another option than pretending we can tear it all down. My operating assumption is that the cancer-causing global system will keep sputtering along — possibly more lost years, but slow collapse if any for the American Empire — and that we are going to have to deal with that.

While I'll support those with the right temperment for the work, and I sincerely hope for the best from our post-modern aristocracy, who as I see it we're sort of stuck with, I really don't think the idea of an establishment takeover, the long march though the institutions is really my cup of tea. I don't fit the profile.

But that's ok. The way I see it, nothing succeeds like success, and results still matter even in this tragic and corrupted world. My place is in the greenfields and blueskies, coming up with more of the Crazy New Shit. There's maybe more meritocracy out there than it often feels like and I think if I can get some wins, interesting things might start happening.

Really I'm contemplating the whole multiple bottom lines thing. Investing is about returns, but also overall outcomes. A savings account is the worst of both possible worlds, because you get a crap percentage and the Bank gets to play with your money. I am not about to start into a 401k. Alternatives: Move your money, boostrap a project, start a tribe!

The way to cut my personal gordian knot lies in putting enough meat on those bones, enough specific postulates to the general theory, enough stories in the backlog, that it starts to feel more like a really actionable set of objectives, and less like an underdefined nebula of potential. It's the resurrection of the super-project, the thing that goes above, beyond, around and through my normal work.

So the tangible steps here are:

1. Finish tinkering with the old website so that it more supports this project from a writing standpoint.
2. Start more serious planning/networking with my people about how to leverage our resources.
3. Figure out an intake process for new participants.
4. Likewise, an outreach process.
5. Produce culture.
6. ???
7. Revolution!

I'm more than halfway serious. I think the time is now to shoot the moon, because if it don't work out I think I can pretty much always settle down and cruise, and in another five to ten it'll be harder to do anything so uncertain. In brief, I detest the world and intend to succeed on my own terms in a way that's hopefully both enviable and replicable. I want a family, but no picket fence. I want a compound, but not some "back to the land" anachronism. I want a direct line to every center of humanity worth being wired into, and the ability to cross-connect at will.

I want the world and I want it pretty much now. Fortes fortuna adiuvat, will to power, etc.

Via Atrios we bounce to BoingBoing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad.

There are several parallel struggles going on right now to define the form and structure of the 21st Century economy both globally and here in Estados Unidos. Some are in the headlines (health care, transitioning off carbon-based energy and dealing with climate change, reforming finance) and a couple other big ones are not.

The two things which fly under the radar are that classic favorite, the military industrial complex, which is verboten for polite political discussion, and the struggle to define the balance of power around information. In this latter struggle, we have some real choices to make, and they’re pretty important.

If something like this treaty goes through, the future looks pretty damn dim for internet-enabled innovation, culture, and industry. In essence, the treaty denies non-creators any meaningful ability to “own” the information contained within products they purchase. It also creates highly restrictive requirements for “policing” infringement which will create enormous legal overhead for what are today simple staples of online life (e.g. forget about Flickr or Youtube).

The mindset behind these treaties is a dictatorial one. The powers that be in the information economy — large scale copyright holders — want the rest of us to remain dutiful non-threatening consumers of their data, digital serfs. If they are successful in cementing that vision in law, it will create at best a two-teir economy, with the conventional/commercial “mainstream” plugging away as a sort of digital shopping mall of culture, and a secondary, underfunded, alternative information underground of Free Culture competing. At worst, the shopping mall will strangle the alternative, and the underground will be reduced to simply grey/black-market activities.

This isn’t what any of us want, really. We want the whole of culture to be Free (as in speech, not as in beer) and for all the mighty talent and resources currently contained within the mainstream to be a part of that. This means change, which isn’t pleasant for the powers that be. However, it really will be better for everyone if the focus is on creativity and delivering value rather than hoarding and punishment.

So, it’s unclear what kind of leverage can/should be exerted on these secret treaty negotiations, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

It’s Autumn again, October already. It’s my favorite season, a time of ripeness, of harvest. I like the clear sharp crispness in the night air, the smell of wood smoke. I like the feeling of things getting done, the world re-engaging after the languid distraction-fest of summer.

Slotting back into the groove I feel myself skipping around a bit, a familiar lack of clarity about “where all this is going.” I feel the need to shake things up, to make some new moves. When the groove isn’t a hot one, it can start to feel like a rut.

I’m happy to be doing a little roadshow as part of my work, and to be generally making steady progress with that. It really starts to feel like that could go through a real transition in the next year, create some opportunities for life-changes.

But there’s a difference between opportunity and action, and even with some flexibility on the professional/work front I’m far from sanguine that my scene will work itself out. I have this desire to really rethink what I’m doing from the ground up; the why, the what, the how.

I still feel young and strong, but I also feel the brevity of existence. I’m free now in ways that are kind of special. Working my ass off is one use for that freedom and strength, and one that’s been paying off pretty well, but there might be other configurations worth considering.

The real question is what the heck do I want to accomplish? I’d like to see my favorite internet building block mature into a real solid thing. I’d like to see more of the world. I’d like to find a means of engaging the massive injustice and inequity that spirals all around us in a way that feels like it might be effective.

The last bit is the really vexing one. I have little doubt in my ability to succeed in my career track. I’m also connected to enough elite/up-and-coming peoples — latest awesomeness: Jason Woliner, mastermind behind the refrain, “at the time of this recording, Dick Cheney’s alive!” is directing network television — I get a feeling that should I need to tap some favors, I can. The whole question is: to what end?

Nationally, politics is a massive disappointment, and isn’t looking to improve much anytime soon. There are some interesting local developments, including this little thing in my old back yard, but it’s hard to see how it really all fits together.

Outside the political, in the realm of personal transformation, lifestyle development, and wildcat DIY action, it all feels so small, undermatched for the task. How can these things scale? It’s a really hard question, and one I don’t have good answers for aside from vague hand-waving about the internet, but this feels less and less real over the years.

This vagueness is debilitating. Sooner or later it’ll have have to come to an end.

(Note: updated with some next-day polish and exposition)

It's 4am+ in Paris, and I'm reading some Krugman. Week full of Drupal, head full of business, this jumps out at me:

Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets, in which speculators spent their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important business decisions: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

This is why I currently lean against Chapter Three pursuing investors, venture capital or the like, even though we could probably do so successfully and there are some cool (Y-combinator) options out there. In my opinion too much of that is about angling towards a big payday from selling out, "an exit" or "liquidity event." This isn't a bad thing per se, and I'm certainly not knocking anyone's choices along these lines, but this question of "capital development" is a large one for me.

Even in the face of the Great Recession, the market my business operates in is growing. Not everyone's a winner and some people are having problems meeting their nut — something we think about a lot as we staff up — but there's tons of work out there and lots of enticing larger-scale growth on the horizon. Pretty decent prospects out on this here internet, honestly.

However, that in and of itself is boring to me. I like money, but beyond a relatively minimal point it's not really motivating or interesting. The personal threshold at which it becomes merely a way of keeping score for me is somewhere just north of paying all my bills and having enough left over to stay well-stocked on goat cheese and olives. That'll change if/as I end up taking on bigger financial responsibilities, family and the like, but for know that's where it is.

What's of enormous interest though is the growth and development of a whole new way of doing business, and one that addresses the principle task of empowering people to take ownership and agency over their personal (and of course organizational) destiny with regards to this information-driven world we all now inhabit. The "infrastructure play" as they say, helping this post-capitalist open source economy really take root and flourish.

At the same time, I'm increasingly disenchanted with the state of national politics. While I don't want to abandon things to be run into the ground (President Cheney???!?), it just doesn't feel like there's a lot that can really be done at that level given the constraints of the system.

Yet I'm ambitious and power-acquisitive as ever. Much as I wax nostalgic about the good old days of bohemian simplicity, I don't see myself abandoning my current career arc in any wholesale manner. I'd like to regulate my work-life a bit better, do more for the community, and spend more time on really interesting things, but overall "building the internets" is the best ticket I have to ride, and I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

So basically the plan is to continue to build my skills, capacities and resources, and start planning bigger and bigger projects/maneuvers. Towards that end, the best opportunities for me appear to be an lateral and local organization.

As The Girth is fond of positing, we could likely return home and probably beat out Jordan Papé/whoever for eventual control of the State of Oregon. Likewise, there's a lot of interesting work going on around citizen-level international solidarity, and my participation in the Drupal community gives me trusted contacts on five continents, spanning the gamut from government employees to avowed trotskyites.

So maybe there's a future in sustainable business ownership success which leaves me with enough free capital, latitude and connections to work these angles. My job title, after all, is "CTO", and if I do right I should be able to keep the business rockin' without having to spend so much time in the trenches on individual projects. Higher-level visibility. Put that together with a little long-term planning, and something pretty interesting could emerge.

If nothing else, I love these conferences because they get me thinking BIG again.

---

Credit where it's due, that photo is from a wonderful art installation put on by the EMU Marketing department that I helped assemble (throwing 60,000 lines of printed code around is fun).

In an interesting piece by Greg Clark, about the future of the economy, a tangent-provoking paragraph:

Modern society seems comfortable with the rich and poor living in vastly different housing, eating disparate qualities of food and facing radically dissimilar crime risks. No one pickets four-star restaurants because they feed only the rich, or the Waldorf Astoria because only the wealthy can afford to sleep there. But when it comes to medical care, Americans display strong ethical resistance to having the poor receive a substantially inferior product.

I am really kind of tired of the false dichotomy implied here, that the only reasons to support redistributive or equalizing policies and forces — roughly, those that take from the rich and provide for the non-rich — is some kind of moral or charitable ethic. Not that I don’t think basic humanity demands this in some cases, but I see it as a weak argument, and one with an unattractively smarmy implied conceit.

Let’s talk about real shit. I am where I am because of a number of social welfare programs. Government support helped my parents both feed me and send my sister and I to creativity-inducing schools. It wasn’t the only factor, but it was an important one.

Likewise, my current prosperity is only possible because I can easily find and employ people with advanced educations, and there are millions of literate consumers for all my potential products.

It’s a very limited vision which equates simple monetary/luxury value (e.g. a night at the Waldorf Astoria) with something (e.g. your health, your safety, your education) that has an enormous social capital value and direct implications for your future life chances. It’s an especially limited vision that sees these as a series of individual questions.

The reality is that economic “winners” have every reason to be engaged and supportive of the right sorts of socially redistributive policies. A rising tide of health, creativity and freedom will actually and honestly lift all boats. We need to stop thinking of all these programs — even direct aid like WIC or cash assistance — as charitable hand-outs, and start seeing them as social investments in collective opportunity. On any individual case, the payoff may be marginal or even negative — scammers will scam, and well-meaning people will still blow it — but just like with any investment strategy, you have a mix of results, and the winners here are really big ones.