So Joi Ito, hoping to undermine the established order of things in Japan (you go!), gets a bit angstish about the idea that there is less than equality of outcomes in a power law situation, but taking hope from the notion of social networks, opines that soon we will have emergent, direct democracy as a result of all our banging away on keyboards. Comes a long range cruise missile from the far side of the warblog universe, with Richard Bennett on the return address, suggesting Ito-san is not only naive, but well-nigh a bosom buddy of Mr. S. Hussein himself. Much chaos erupts, with a threatened IP banning, apparently forgone, perhaps due to being out of continent. When last sighted, Ito-san was carousing with 150 fellow Saddam-symps in Palo Alto, CA, USA, before running for the plane back to Narita - no doubt escorted by a brace of the Air Guard's finest F-16s to make sure he gets there. What fun!

Kidding aside, this is worth some digging. I want to start by saying that I am extremely, perhaps unrealistically, optimistic about the impact of the 'Net in general and the future of blogs in particular over the long haul. I'm a passionate believer that the advent of low threshold, (potentially) high reach media - you're reading it - is a Good Thing. In a (un)wired age, media are no less than the vehicle of cultural replication for civilization, and the throttling down of many messages to those that fit through a broadcast channel is an insidious bias on that process. While I've no illusion that we are going to abolish those media now or ever, I give a hearty cheer every time we tear a bleeding chunk off their hide by extending the power law curve to more creators and more readers.

But I have no idea what the result will look like. Depending on your count, the American culture has been under the influence of mass media for 50 to 150 years (taking the advent of Harper's as a far benchmark). If, like myself, you occasionally spend time digging into early 19th century American newspapers in search of remote ancestors, you'll come to realize that the vituperation of the one party and other is truly as American as apple pie. Before the wire services and the chain papers took over, every little county seat had at least two papers of record, so each could trash the other. At first glimpse, the blogosphere seems a throw-back to those days. There's something to aggravate everyone, from the outing of Trent Lott to righteous Fiskings to holding the NYT's editorial bias up to scorn.

It all feels right, getting more messages into the memetic stew, but don't ask me to predict the ultimate cultural and political result. I'm sure Marconi and Farnsworth had no idea what would come of their inventions 100 and 50 years on. Likewise, Doug Engelbart was thinking about enabling work teams in the aerospace industry, and not about letting loose a rip-snorting demassified medium. One of the commenters to Joi's original post opined "Similarly, to succeed at something as big as changing a society, you have to concentrate and control a lot of power ". Not so, if you're willing to wait 50 years or more, and don't suffer under the illusion that you're in control of the outcome.

Which finally wanders around the issue at hand, emergent democracy. In another context, Cory Doctorow recalls:

The techno-utopianism is the one thing you never shake when you grow up in a Marxist household; its the unshakeable faith that technology can affect positive social change.

Joi suggests what's actually going on when he says:

Interestingly, 150 is the magic number from The Tipping Point of how many people you can have a real social relationship with...

• An organic organization which resembles a kin network but may not include blood relations
• Based on interdependence; unique and autonomous individuals more dependent upon each other
• Common values and beliefs provide a harmony of interests, erasing possibility of opportunistic behavior

There's anecdotal evidence. The social relationship number. The informal Valley wisdom is that 100-150 is about the biggest organization you can manage 'flat' - that is, around common goals and vision rather than formal structure. Years ago at Apple, I and then intern Jonathan Steuer coined the 'Iron Law of Mailing Lists' which predicably collapse into dissension when there are over 50 active contributors.

These are suggestive, but the scaling limit is directly implied by the notion of 'low goal incongruence.' Gents, goal incongruence is what politics is all about. If you think you can avoid that at the scale of a nation, I've got some juche for you right here, because it's just your flavor. Having observed at first hand how supposedly coherent sets of people like the old Well-beings made a hash of things, I shudder to think about that sort of 'organization' in any proximity to the coercive powers of war and taxation. Give me that representative government, because it's still the worst thing except all the alternatives. While Mr. Bennett may have the manners of a troll, he does have a point.
10:15:07 PM    

Why digging through old posts to decide what to put in the archive list, I came across this oldie from last April where I was a bit skeptical at the time that Europe was playing balance of power, in spite of a post at Instapundit quoting the Prof's 'Paris correspondent' Nelson Ascher. (Archive link broken, naturally.) See if your skin doesn't crawl a little when you read Ascher's quote:

"Whatever has been said during the American-European Kulturkampf has to be revisited in light of recent events. I think we have been interpreting the European intelligentsia?s standpoints as sorry little differences of opinion within a shared worldview. Now, maybe that?s what is really simplistic. When, for instance, I see the BBC, Le Monde and so on behaving exactly like Pravda, I cannot avoid the strong impression that we are facing a new, coherent and, for all purposes, official ideology, an ideology that came to fill the vacuum left since the end of the Soviet Union. It may be far-fetched to say it, but a kind of Second Cold War does not sound to me absurd at all. "

7:57:30 PM    

Somehow I ended up with two meeting-free days, luxury of luxuries, and have been catching up on research, correspondence, and a little site maintenance. Some new things you will find:

By popular demand, an archives list, which I'll call 'Portfolio' to keep up the site theme. This list is selective and manually maintained. I'll add in the articles that get the most interest (or that I happen to like) as they roll off the main page, and retire the eldest when things get out of hand.

Added to the blogroll some new entries that have become frequent reads: BoingBoing, Ross Mayfield, Doc Searls, Sifry's Alerts, and the site for Andrew Odlyzko, who needs to get a blog.

Finally, added a number of new entries in the backfile. These are articles that I originally wrote for Howard Rheingold's late lamented Electric Minds site in 1996-7. There's a lot of stuff in here about transaction costs, the nature of platforms, platform war strategy and tactics that I'm likely to refer to here sometime, and there's no reason to do it over. You can also see how some of my forecasts made out. I've gone through and either killed or repointed dead links, of which there were many after six years. These versions don't do justice to the original site design, which has been frozen in amber in Abbe Don's archives.
3:38:16 PM