Infrastructure Priorities

The other day I was listening to Frank Deford's comments on Morning Edition concerned primarily with the fall from grace of basketball in New York. This led to a reflection of Madison Square Garden having become a relic of history (my words, not Deford's) in an age when just about any city either had or was planning an even higher-tech arena. I forget his exact words, but they were something to the effect that such arenas had become a city's excuse for infrastructure. Regardless of the exact wording, the authorial intent really stuck with me.

I have had any number of experiences with infrastructure, both positive and negative. On the positive side I have been in any number of cities of different sizes that have been impressively accommodating to whatever my day-to-day activities happened to have been, whether they involved work or tourism. Unfortunately, very few of those cities are in the United States, which is why most of my infrastructure experiences have been negative! I had my first car when I became a graduate student in the Greater Boston Area, and there was no end of deterioration that I would encounter both within cities and along the arteries that connected them. Decades later I was living in Stamford, Connecticut, when the Mianus River Bridge on Interstate 95 collapsed. Now I live in a city with any number of socio-cultural advantages but where day-to-day life tends to bring frequent encounters with infrastructure failures, each of which, at best, is treated by trying to close the barn door after the horse has been stolen.

So, between Deford's curmudgeonly dismissal of the new sports arena as an excuse for infrastructure and a residence from which I can see infrastructure deterioration just by looking out my window, I came this morning to C. W. Nevius' column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently negotiations are under way to bring the Golden State Warriors back to San Francisco; and the deal involves (you guessed it) building a new ("state-of the-art," as Nevius emphasized) sports arena in Mission Bay. Needless to say, this is one of those efforts that is going to involve considerable flows of money. Just to get into the right ballpark (which seems like the appropriate metaphor for both the location and the intention), consider that it will probably cost the Warriors around $60 million to get out of the current lease with the Oakland-Alameda County Sports Authority before it expires in 2027. Think of that as a baseline for which the financial planners will have to find the right multiplier (it had better not be an exponent!) to cover everything else. Meanwhile, we have a public transportation system that progressively gets worse and costs more. Whenever possible, I tend to go for the pedestrian option, which sometimes provides an entertainment benefit in observing traffic congestion. Some of that congestion is just a matter of too many cars; but there are also the incidents of utility-related breakdowns below the surface of the streets. Those are the occasions when things really come to a screaming (considering the way people react, that usage is literal rather than figurative) halt.

The point behind Deford's swipe has to do with how rapidly any city, regardless of its size, seems to embrace a state-of-the-art arena as an instrument of development. The embrace is so passionate that no one ever bothers to ask whether there might be better ways to spend the money that would also further development but in less noticeable ways. Besides, wasn't Mission Bay supposed to be the site of a major complex that would make San Francisco a world leader in biotechnology?

Should Television Drama Pay Attention to Narrative Theory?

Reading Mike Hale's "'FlashForward' Watch" post this morning to the ArtsBeat Blog on the Web site for The New York Times gave me an appreciation for the extent of my love-hate relationship with this new television series. As a rule I do not read these "morning after" posts, since both my wife and I almost always use our VTR for time-shifting. However, since last night's viewing used the VTR only because we were a bit late in starting, I decided to see what Hale had to say. Ultimately, however, what interested me the most was the first (and only at the time of my reading) comment submitted:

I like the idea of the show, but i can’t quite figure out how far along in time the show has moved since the blackout 2 weeks ago. It seems like a very short period of time (perhaps a week or less?) but the data that they looked at about crow populations (which that kind of data is not monitored by anyone so that is inconceivable anyway, but i digress) had data through December 2009 on it… So i am confused.

— Jonathan

As far as I am concerned, Jonathan has no reason to apologize for his confusion. There is nothing wrong with expecting the reader/viewer to play an active role in grasping the unfolding of a story; but this should not be taken as an excuse to remove all responsibility from the storyteller. Mortimer Adler used to write about "active reading" as an imagined conversation between the reader and the author of the book being read. A serial format encourages such conversations and expands their scope from the solitary setting of the armchair to such social settings as the breakfast table and the water cooler. Admittedly, the author is not present "in the flesh" at such conversations; but those conversations tend to assume the author's presence "in spirit." Thus, if Jonathan is confused, I am less interested in grilling Jonathan than I am in wondering whether or not, in this particular case, the authors know what they are doing.

Let me try to make my point through another series that differs from FlashForward in just about every possible way, except for the host network. That series is Castle. For all its fluff and banter, the high point for me in Castle came in the first season when we got to see the similarity between the diagram the cops were constructing while working a case and the diagram that Castle had drawn for the plot of his latest novel. As an author Castle understood that stories do not really work very well without a well-conceived structure for support. When Beckett (whom I keep wanting to call "Sam") sees one of his diagrams, she quickly grasps that his approach to structuring the elements of his narrative is not that different from her approach to structuring evidence in order to hypothesize the explanatory narrative behind a criminal act. Most television stories are so formulaic that everyone knows the structure without having to work out the diagram explicitly. (Most Castle episodes are good examples.) Watching FlashForward I have the uneasy feeling that its creators are making things up as they go along, which would make Jonathan's confusion perfectly understandable. Much as I would like to see how the plot develops, its unfolding is beginning to irritate me. If it descends any further into what is emerging as irresponsible storytelling, I am likely to bail on the whole affair.

An Anti-Chutzpah (but Audacious) Republican

Anyone who did the math in yesterday's Chutzpah of the Week award post should know by now that there were, in fact, six Republican senators who support Jim Webb's time-off measure. The BBC article I cited actually quoted one of the, Chuck Hagel. That quote deserves consideration:

We cannot continue to look at war and the people who fight and die in wars as abstractions, as pawns, as objects.

This is a very noble piece of rhetoric, and I wish it had swayed four more Republicans to get the vote count up to the required level of 60. Nevertheless, it also opens up a philosophical can of worms; and we would do better to take a long hard look at the contents rather than quickly shut it up again.

Regular readers know that I share Senator Hagel's disgust for the practice of what I have called "objectifying the subject," whether it is in the interest of commerce or the rationalization of some hopelessly misconceived government policy. However, such readers also know that I get very nervous with the casual use of words that we have never bothered to understand very well. Because of my continuing interest in "social software," one of the words that really bothers me is "community," particularly when it is invoked as a shibboleth by some blathering technology evangelist. However, exactly a week ago I was confronted with the prospect that we were being just as abusive of the noun "humanity" and that this particular abuse seemed to be worming its way into the general global Zeitgeist. Now Senator Hagel did not explicitly use the word "humanity;" but the concept behind that word is the underlying subject matter of the quoted sentence. From this point of view, Senator Hagel has made an assertion about war that is either very ignorant or very revolutionary. I really have no idea which he intended it to be, let alone which I would like it to be; so let me try to pursue the issue.

The verb "continue" implies the extension of something. In this case I take that "something" to be what Giddens would call the "regular social practices" of military operations. What we must first recognize about those practices is that they are trained, which is (as should be obvious) the objective of "Basic Training." The regularity of those practices is important, because it endows them with a property of predictability without which the entire procedural concept of a chain of command would not be able to function. Having been spared my own experience of Basic Training, my understanding of it comes only from conversations with friends and colleagues. Back in my student days I had a friend who enlisted in the Coast Guard. When I saw him after he had completed his Basic Training, he told me, with some amusement, that he was not allowed to keep a copy of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" essay; but he then added that, in retrospect, this was entirely consistent with the objective of Basic Training. He recognized that Basic Training was, to a rather high degree, objectifying him, basically for the sake of the quality of his performance once training had been completed. It would appear that, on the basis of the above quotation, Senator Hagel does not want this practice to continue.

If that is really true, then his assertion about war should be taken as very revolutionary; and I think that is the way I would like to read it. Military historians can probably come up with better examples than I can, but I suspect that the overarching narrative of military history has a lot to do with one side understanding the regular social practices of its opposition, identifying the vulnerabilities in those practices, and exploiting them. We have even turned a literary construct from Greek mythology into a metaphor for this process: Achilles' heel. Now we are faced with strident ideologues who want to play fast and loose with the concept of war, itself, enjoining us all to support America's "War on Terror." Such rhetoric is never toned down by suggestions that the speakers are playing dangerously with words and concepts they do not understand; if anything such challenges only escalate the stridency.

Senator Hagel has now taken a different approach. He has been bold enough to suggest that the regular social practices of our Department of Defense (not to mention the Department of State and possibly the entire National Security Council) may be the source of vulnerabilities that have been (and could readily continue to be) exploited by new strategies of terrorism, such as those practiced by al-Qaeda. This is an act of audacity far beyond any of the denotations or connotations that Barack Obama has dared to suggest. Indeed, it would probably be dismissed as impossible (and probably insane) by just about anyone in our "ruling class," possibly while invoking another famous metaphor, which is the problem of getting a battleship to change course. Perhaps Hagel has decided to retire because he really does not want to fight this battle. I would understand this decision and sympathize with it. On the other hand I hope that this remark will inspire at least one reputable journalist to challenge every aspirant to the White House with the assertion that Hagel made: Are we looking at war in a way that can only make us vulnerable to the primary threats of attack that we now face?

Trying to Confront the Nature of Experience

Every now and then I read something on confused of calcutta that really disconcerts me. Often this just leaves me depressed for the rest of the day (if not longer). Every now and then, however, I find myself provoked into trying to tease out just what was bugging me; and, if I am lucky, I figure out a way to start making lemonade out of the lemons. This seems to have been the case with JP Rangaswamy's recent observation about technology adoption:

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for a company in aerospace, defence, high-end manufacturing or investment banking. Before 28 you didn’t have the seniority, after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour.

All that changed with Generation M. The pyramid sort of inverted overnight, as the mobile multitasking multimedia generation caught hold of life in their inimitable way. Now it’s the 14-25 year old who first gets to play.

Now I have to confess that I am about as skeptical about Generation M as I was about a year ago when I wrote my "Generation M Goes to Work?" post on my last blog. This time, however, JP seems to have provoked me into thinking more about age itself. One of my conclusions is that, whatever the age numbers may be for technology adoption, I still subscribe to Mark Twain's aphorism about how our appreciation of age (his father in his case) advances along with the years we have lived. However, while Twain made his remark with a certain sense of comfortable satisfaction with the aging process, I see more of a "tragic sense of being."

Consider the hypothesis that, in Heidegerrian language, we only really begin to appreciate our experiences of being-in-the-world once we have progressed beyond the age of 40. I would argue that this is the case because of all that biological evidence that addresses how past experiences bias present perceptions; and, in the way we tend to live today, 40 is about the age by which we have accumulated an experience base with a fair amount of both breadth and depth. As the above quotation points out, however, it is also the age at which we leave the "fun of the trenches" and succumb to the more deadening aspects of the workplace.

At this point it is really tempting to invoke the concept of "wisdom;" but I need to avoid that temptation because of the ways in which the noun-games that have been brought on by knowledge management frenzy have robbed most of our common-sense vocabulary of all of its meaning. Let me, instead, continue with the vocabulary I was using in the last paragraph and suggest that, for all the claptrap that grew up along with knowledge management faddism, we still do not really comprehend the nature of that experience base at the level of either the individual or any of the communities in which that individual is embedded; and, since we understand it so poorly, we are equally inadequate in our efforts to leverage it, to engage the past as a valuable resource when confronting the issues of the present.

These paragraphs were initially provoked because the paragraphs quoted above then led to some musing about examining Facebook usage data.

I’m going to try and cut and paste the list of current applications in Facebook Platforms:

• All (1097)
• Alerts (65)
• Business (34)
• Chat (43)
• Classified (27)
• Dating (46)
• Education (66)
• Events (37)
• Fashion (25)
• File Sharing (24)
• Food and Drink (32)
• Gaming (138)
• Just for Fun (458)
• Messaging (84)
• Mobile (26)
• Money (28)
• Music (70)
• Photo (70)
• Politics (33)
• Sports (42)
• Travel (40)
• Utility (165)
• Video (67)

I think there’s a big lesson for us all in the data presented above. Just For Fun leads, then comes Utility some way behind, then comes Gaming. Music, Photo, Video and Messaging bunch up a little later, and Business is around half the size of any one of those.

I’m sure someone can write an app that plots the movement of numbers in each of these classifications over time, or make it possible for someone else to do it. Any views, Dave? Enjoying your travels?

Now this is the supply side. What would be even more interesting is the demand side and how that behaves across these classifications? How many people are using applications in each classification? I accept there is risk of misclassification or fuzzy overlaps, but I am not looking for exact sciences here, I think the trend information is good enough.

I find this an interesting intellectual exercise; but, amateur anthropologist that I am, I believe very strongly that supply-and-demand data need to be gathered and examined at both the microlevel and the macrolevel (which the above quotation has used as a point of departure). Furthermore, as the quotation suggests, both of these levels need to be analyzed diachronically, that is, attending to how they unfold in time, rather than how any “instance-snapshot” looks. This could lead us in a profoundly new direction, because while databases and "knowledge bases" may have failed us in our attempt to achieve a better understanding of personal experiences, the right mix of macroanalysis and microanalysis of behavior in a rich social environment like Facebook may yield more viable results, both in enhancing our understanding and enabling those experiences to be leveraged in present behavior. Perhaps I am being too optimistic about how much of the human condition we can ultimately grasp, but I think that the first steps in blazing this particular trail deserve serious attention!

The Capacity of Evil to Blunder

Yesterday I finally had a chance to watch the VTR recording I made of Lawrence Wright on Book TV, talking about his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. One of the points that came out very clearly in the interview reinforced an observation from Publishers Weekly (quoted on the Amzon.com page) that "planning terror is a sloppy business." Put another way, the "road to 9/11" was not the steady and methodical advance through the steps of the plan of an evil genius. All of the "players" in al-Qaeda were as all-too-human as were the "players" in the FBI, CIA, and NSA; and each side was as capable of blundering as was the other.

I feel this is important to bear in mind in examining the Al Jazeera English report of the latest video to be posted on the Internet by Ayman al-Zawahri, generally regarded as the number two man in al-Qaeda (even if al-Qaeda's greatest strategic strength lies in its loosely distributed organization). In the video of Osama bin Laden that came to light immediately after 9/11, what may have been most striking was that he seemed almost bemused that things turned out as catastrophic as they did. He was sort of like the engineer who was silently thankful that, for once, he had escaped the clutches of Murphy's Law. The al-Zawahri video, in contrast, positively reeks of the sort of pride that, in a dramatic setting, would presage a fall from a great height; and, indeed, his deliberate efforts to taunt Bush may very well blow up in his own face, literally as well as metaphorically.

Consider the following excerpt from the Al Jazeera account of this video in which he talks about the congressional bill that tied funding for the US effort in Iraq to a timetable for troops to withdraw:

"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," al-Zawahri said, adding the bill was evidence of American "failure and frustration".

He did not mention the vetoing of the bill last Thursday by Bush.

Perhaps al-Zawahri made this tape before Bush had imposed his veto. Perhaps he had received news of the veto but did not appreciate its significance. Perhaps he did not realize that this kind of taunting would probably only strengthen Bush's resolve to keep "surging" (probably with increased forces), just as past resistance forces have drawn strength from Bush's arrogant taunts. At the very least those remarks are liable to sway the American public to be more sympathetic to Bush's persistence, which may well sandbag any hopes for substantive dialog between the Congress and the White House.

It seems to me that all paths towards reading this particular text lead to a strategic blunder. Whether or not it will turn out to be an Aristotelian "tragic flaw" for al-Qaeda in Iraq (if not for al-Qaeda's overall reputation) remains to be seen. From a dramatistic point of view, however, the fact that General David Petraeus seems to be figuring out how to do things right at the same time that al-Zawahri has made this media blunder may make for an interesting plot twist! Fortunately, things tend to move slowly in the Congress; so their natural pace should afford them the luxury to cool it long enough to see how Bush will respond to being taunted both here and in Iraq.

Leveraging What Works

The thing that most impressed me about General David Petraeus was that, on his first tour of duty, he seemed to have a very good sense of what did and did not work coupled with an action plan for using the things that did work to his advantage. When he received his new appointment, I wondered whether or not he would continue to exercise this skill. Reporting for Reuters, Yara Bayoumy has identified at least one situation, in the Anbar province, where Petraeus is doing just that:

At a news conference in Washington on Thursday, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, hailed Abu Risha and other Sunni tribal leaders.

He said the Sunni Arab tribes were "helping transform Anbar province and other areas from being assessed as lost as little as six months ago to being relatively heartening".

So what is it that Petraeus found at the Sunni tribal level that "worked" will enough to be incorporated into his own strategy? Here is Bayoumy's lead:

A year ago, Iraq's Anbar was the most dangerous province for U.S. troops. Al Qaeda had dug in across the vast desert region. Iraqis were afraid to leave their homes in the local capital Ramadi, where insurgents held sway.

Then last summer Sunni tribal leader Sheikh Abdulsattar Abu Risha gathered his fellow tribal chiefs together and created a police force to try to restore security.

Under the umbrella of the Anbar Salvation Council, Abu Risha says his initiative is showing early signs of success, with recruitment putting some 20,000 police on the streets of the Sunni-dominated province.

"The situation (in Anbar) was unbearable before, people were tortured, shot dead, bodies littered the streets. We couldn't even leave our homes to bury the dead," Abu Risha told Reuters from Ramadi by a crackly satellite phone.

Abu Risha's initiative -- partly in response to Sunni Islamist al Qaeda's indiscriminate killing of civilians in Anbar -- has revived 15 large police stations that now come under the control of the provincial police chief.

Now, while car bombings still plague Anbar, and especially Ramadi, their number has fallen, U.S. military officials said.

And for the first time in three years, U.S. military deaths in the insurgent stronghold stretching across western Iraq number fewer than in Baghdad, where a new security crackdown began in February with additional troops.

This is definitely a "good news" story; but, more importantly, it is a story about a solution that was conceived and implemented at a tribal level. Not only that, the story is about a Sunni tribe that refused to have anything to do with the practices of another Sunni-based organization, al Qaeda. We are so obsessed with the primacy of the concept of "nation," whether in our own world-view of government or the world-view at the core of the United Nations, that we find it hard to conceive of any governance structure grounded on any other concept. T. E. Lawrence was probably able to conceive of such governance but had no skill in trying to convince his own country, which was both nation-bound and empire-bound. This is not to promote Petraeus as a latter-day Lawrence or as a "wise man" of political theory. Petraeus just believes in leveraging anything that works. If his superiors allow him to continue with this strategy, he may be our best hope for getting out of the mess we have made for ourselves.

The Technician Versus the Venture Capitalist

I continue to worry about the blinders that cultures wear that inhibit just about any chance of their communicating with other cultures, even in the face of the persuasive arguments set forth by the likes of Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Appiah, and Jürgen Habermas. These blinders inhibit conversation on just about any topic, even those of critical global importance. One of the most important topics right now is the climate crisis. Yet, whatever Habermas may tell us about the need for enlightened understanding, it would appear that heated disputation occupies most of the spotlight.

The "heat," of course, comes from what I have called "'points of friction' across social boundaries;" and those points of friction constitute a fact of life in the social world. In fact, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argued, in her appropriately-titled book, Friction, they can be a source of innovation as readily as a source of conflict. What will result from the friction can rarely be predicted, but often it helps to have a better understanding of those points that are actually bumping into each other.

On February 15 Pacific Gas and Electric, along with the MIT Club of Northern California, organized a forum on the topic of solar technology. This forum turned into a prime example of heated disputation; and, unfortunately, when we start to tease out the "story behind the story," we discover that this particular source of friction is unlikely to turn into a source of innovation. The specific points of friction that bumped into each other were Vinod Khosla, who can probably be described fairly as one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and Hermann Scheer, whose early resume presents a background of qualifications for dealing with both technical and social issues:

Born in 1944, Hermann Scheer graduated from highschool in 1964. He attended the Officers School of the German Federal Army from 1964 to 1966, serving as lieutenant during 1966-67. Hermann studied economics, sociology, political science and public law between 1967 and 1972 at the University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. He received his PhD in Economic and Social Science in 1972. Dr Scheer was appointed Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart in the Faculty of Economics, 1972-76. He worked as system analysts at the German Nuclear Research Center from 1976-1980.

To understand the origins of the friction, we should first recognize that any event sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric will have, as its first priority, the business of energy. To warp my recently-cited Mencken adage, no one ever rose through the ranks of an energy company by obsessing over the consequences of a clearly sound business decision. (When the energy companies put out those advertisements that try to convince you otherwise by showing really cool nature footage, it helps to remember another adage: Whenever anyone says, "It's not about the money;" you know it's about the money!) So, when we read about what happened at this forum, we should put aside anything Al Gore may be trying to tell us about the future of the planet and recognize that this was a discussion about making good business decisions.

In that context Khosla, with his reputation for making some of the best business decisions in the history of Silicon Valley, was perfect for the forum. The fly in the ointment was Scheer, whose combination of technical and social expertise has earned him a seat in the German parliament, where he now feels more beholden to the German public than to any business institution. Thus, the heated dispute that ensued was not so much about energy policy as it was about the classic question of whether an enterprise is more accountable to its customers than it is to its shareholders, with Scheer serving as advocate for the customer and Khosla assuming the role of "shareholder par excellence."

The good news is that the debate has spilled over from verbal exchanges to text; and CNET News.com has provided a "venue" for the resulting texts. Khosla provided his position statement last week. His rhetorical strategy was to frame the argument as one between environmentalists and pragmatists. Personally, I think this put him in a weak position, since everything else he said then begged the question, "Pragmatic for whom?" After all, this would not have been the first time in history where what was pragmatic for the shareholders was not at all pragmatic (and perhaps even damaging) to the customers! This forced Scheer into the position of defending his own pragmatism from the customers' point of view, and that is basically what he did in responding to Khosla this morning.

Since, in this particular situation, I feel I am more of a customer (of Pacific Gas and Electric, mind you) than a shareholder (since I have no direct investment in any energy company but I know that the energy sector is covered in many of the funds whose shares I hold), my sympathies tend towards Scheer's arguments. Nevertheless, I fear that Scheer has not really grasped that the playing field for this argument is not one of "technology facts." Scheer can throw as many of those facts as he likes a Khosla, and he can even back many of them up with sound economic figures. However, he never really recognizes that these are not necessarily the criteria for making those good business decisions; so I doubt that he will score any significant points against Khosla. The real problem, however, is, as I observed above, that, while their differing contextual assumptions could complement each other in innovative ways, both parties are so intensely invested in their own contexts that this is unlikely to happen.

I would like to conclude by not trying to reduce this to a four-legs-good-two-legs-bad situation, pitting "two-legged" business decisions against "four-legged" public policy. I am a firm believer that sensible business decisions played a strong role in breaking the oppressions of apartheid in South Africa at the end of the Eighties. I am more concerned with that metaphor of cultural blinders that I invoked at the start of this post. Yes, the interests of the general public are in opposition to the interests of the shareholders; but, if that opposition is now cutting off any possibility of conversation, then we are in really deep yogurt. Furthermore, if the climate continues to change the way many of the models are predicting, a large number of us, shareholders included, may soon find ourselves in very deep water!