As I wrote last week, I threw away a week I didn’t have penning an “insanely long” review (as I described it), of Mark Helprin’s insanely sloppy “Digital Barbarism.”

The part of that book that really got me going was the incessant Red-baiting — the suggestion that the movement of which I am a part is a kind of warmed over Marxism from the 1960s.

That part always gets me going because it betrays a kind of mushiness in thinking that I should have thought a decade of writing by scores of advocates would have driven away. As I wrote about Helprin:

It is in this extreme of Red-baiting that one can see the mushiness of Helprin’s brain: Let’s say he were attacking a bunch of scholars who believed copyright should be as robust as the Framers of our Constitution had it. That was a regime that secured copyrights only to those who registered their work. And not just any work, but only “maps, charts, book or books” (music, for example, was excluded). Imagine the term of the protection was again just as the Framers made it — 14 years, renewable by the author, if living, for another 14 years (but again, only if he registered the renewal). And imagine finally that the rights granted were forfeit if the author failed to deposit the copyrighted work with the government, or if he failed to mark the work with the appropriate sign. Such a reform would certainly be radical. It is wildly more radical than anything any of the scholars Helprin attacks would recommend.

But here’s the question: would one who so recommended be a “collectivist”? Were our Framers “collectivists”? Obviously not. Because the consequence of a limited copyright is not that the collective gets to control who does what. The consequence of a limited copyright is that the work is in the public domain, and anyone has the liberty to do anything he or she wants with the work. The state or the “collective” is not privileged over the individual. The individual is privileged over the state or “collective.” And so strong is that privilege in America that a Court of Appeals in Colorado recently held that the government can’t remove work from the public domain unless it satisfies a strict First Amendment test first.

The kind words of some in response to the review made me think perhaps the week wasn’t completely wasted. But then as I got settled into a 13 hour flight to Australia, I read this piece by Kevin Kelly, “The New Socialism.”

Words have meaning. We don’t get to choose their meaning. If you call something “X” people will hear the equation. They won’t read the fine-print which says (“By X, I mean really not-X).

Kelly says:

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism.

That statement is flatly wrong. It is completely unreasonable to call that “socialism” — at least when the behavior described is purely voluntary. It’s like saying “Because Stalin set up a competition between different collective farms, it’s not unreasonable to call that free market capitalism.” Both statements are wrong because they point to a feature that is common, and ignore the feature that is distinctive. At the core of socialism is coercion (justified or not is a separate question). At the core of the behavior Kelly celebrates is freedom.

Kelly’s argument is like so many today that has implicitly embraced the view that free market, libertarian sorts believe that the only thing in the world is competition, or people working to non-common goals. It is the idea that we are free only if we are antagonistic, and that free market theorists have been working to create a world where individuals struggle against, not with. A world that aspires to dog-eat-dog as its central value.

But that conception of capitalism/free-market/libertarianism has no basis in fact. And so as I ranted in my head about Kelly’s confusion, I was enormously happy to have the chance to hear an economist at the conference I was attending at Canberra present a paper that (unintentionally) completely destroys Kelly’s thesis.

Nicholas Gruen is an economist with the consulting group, Lateral Economics. His paper (PDF) (blog entry) was titled “Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix.” And he introduced the paper by remarking a fact that I had missed — this year is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s first (and last) published book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (alas, the second edition). (Last because he finished his 6th edition of the book responding to the terrors of the French revolution just before he died in 1790).

What the modern misunderstanding of markets forgets about Smith is that his aim was as much to understand the provision of public goods as it was to understand the role of the market. Indeed, you could only understand the role of the market against a background of public goods (including civil society), and one critically important question is how a society produces those public goods.

Unlike statists of later years, Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods — goods that were public goods (since nonrival and nonexcludable, as economists later would formalize the concept), but that were created not by any central actor like the state, but by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. Language is the simplest example — language is a quintessentially public good, but no central coordinator is necessary to produce language. But Smith was eager to describe a wide range of emergent public goods that set the preconditions to a well functioning market.

Obviously, in this focus on civil society, Smith is not alone — even among the heros to libertarian/capitalist/free marketeers. In this respect, Hayek continues the tradition Smith began. He too was deeply sensitive to the health of civil society, and recognized how civil society was produced by “masses of people who own the means of production [and] work toward a common goal and share their products in common, [people who] contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge.” But Hayek too was not “socialist.”

The thing that Smith was pointing to (and Hayek too), is not “socialism.” It is not reasonably called socialism. Because “socialism” is the thing Smith was attacking in the 6th edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Socialism is using the power of the state to force a result that otherwise would not have been chosen voluntarily by the people. As Gruen quotes Smith:

The man of system. . . is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Coercive government action is — IMHO — a necessary condition of something being “socialism.” It isn’t sufficient — there is plenty of coercive governmental action that doesn’t qualify as socialism, like raising taxes to fund national defense, or to pay the police. But if you’re calling something “socialist,” then a requirement for using that term correctly — meaning in the way it is understood at least by people who don’t take the time to read a 3,500 word essay that redefines the term — is to be able to point to the coercive state action that produces the thing you’re talking about.

I’m not an opponent to all things plausibly called “socialist” (though as I’ll argue in a moment, our political culture could do well to avoid the most prominent examples of socialism that Washington has produced over the past 8 years). A graduated income tax could properly be called “socialist,” because it is coerced, though I’m in favor of it. Forcing polluters to internalize the cost of their pollution (carbon as well as others) is not, in my view, properly called “socialist,” even though it is the product of coercive state action. There are many examples in the middle of course — schools, parks, public highways. But all of the examples of proper “socialism” begin with pointing to coercion by the state. A conservative Baptist church is not “socialist” when it voluntarily collects money to give to the poor, even though the result is similar to the result of a “socialist” plan to redistribute money from the rich to the poor.

On this account, none of the things that Kelly (and I) celebrate about the Internet are “socialist.” No one forces Wikipedia editors to build a free encyclopedia. No one sends to the Gulag (Helprin’s book notwithstanding) photographers who don’t use CC licenses to share their photographs in Flickr. Scientists who share their research freely within the Public Library of Science are not necessarily friends of Che. They may be. But their freely sharing their knowledge is not a certain signal of leftist leanings.

All this would have been obvious to Kelly if he had included in his list of purportedly “socialist” organizations the Christian Right. Say what you want about the politics of the Christian Right (and don’t get me started), one can’t say they are “socialists.” But likewise, whatever you think about organized religion (and again, don’t get me started), one can’t deny that it represents “masses of people who own the means of production work[ing] toward a common goal and share[ing] their products in common, [] contribut[ing] labor without wages and enjoy[ing] the fruits free of charge.” Yet it would be patently “unreasonable” to call the Baptist Church “socialism.”

Likewise might this have been obvious if Kelly had focused on other writing about the stuff he and I celebrates, that emphasizes more than Benkler, for example, the commercial or business dimension to this phenomenon. Half of REMIX is about what Kelly calls the “hybrid,” but my point is about the hybrid as a business strategy. So too with the fantastic book, Wikinomics. Again, the focus of that book is on how a sharing economy gets leveraged by a commercial economy to benefit both. In no instance is that leveraging coercion. In no way, therefore, is it “socialism.”

Now of course Kelly works hard in his essay to disassociate the term “socialism” from lots of “cultural baggage” (as he puts it; victims of the Gulag may have a different way of describing that): As he writes:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

And of course, these distinctions are right and true. But what is not true is that something is “socialism” because “technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions.” Tim O’Reilly gave us a good enough word for such technologies — Web 2.0. And if that term is too geeky, then how about “civil society”? Or the extraordinary words of Smith from 250 years ago.

I launch this rant against a friend not to betray a Stallman-like-tic. I think think some fuzzy language is productive. I don’t insist on precision at every linguistic turn.

But sloppiness here has serious political consequences. When a founder of the movement which we all now celebrate calls this movement “socialist,” that plays right in the hand of those would attack everything this movement has built. Again, see Helprin. Or Andrew Keen.

It is a fact that in America the term “socialism” is a smear. I’m not defending that fact. I wouldn’t give up defending programs merely because they could be so smeared.

But I do think that now is not the time to engage in a playful redefinition of a term that has such a distinctive and clear sense. Whatever “socialism” could have become, had it not been hijacked by revolutions in the east, what it is in the minds of 95% of America is not what Wikipedia is.

And indeed, when I look around at the real socialism of the past decade, I am almost Declan-esque in my revulsion towards it: America has plenty of “socialism.” The most recent versions we should all be very skeptical of. This is the general practice of socializing risk, and privatizing benefits. I’d be happy to join the “anti-socialist” movement if we could agree to end that perversion first.

But that deal notwithstanding, I will never agree to call what millions have voluntarily created on the Net “socialism.” That term insults the creators, and confuses the rest.

I’m annoyed with facebook today, for obvious reasons. I started writing this blog entry a few times but kept coming back to a paper I wrote in grad school in 2003. Honestly.

It’s my best response. facebook take note, this is how we should be building communities.

The Extraordinary Community

The intent for my final project was to gain an understanding of how community is experienced by users in virtual spaces, as well as to propose alternatives for their development. In exploring this topic, I first examined how community experience occurs in both physical and virtual spaces. I then looked for alternatives that would enable virtual spaces to realize deeper possibilities. This process was quite useful, in that it provided a framework in which to process these concepts, as well as a jumping off point for new ideas.

The first concept I explored was that of trace, in relation to the writings of Elizabeth Grosz. Pondering how individual and group trace occurs in both physical and virtual space, I discovered that trace in the virtual world is more dependent on emotion and thought than trace in the physical world. These virtual traces are entities of their own, not reliant on a specific physical space.

This led to the study of sense in relation to the writings of Brian Massumi. I proposed that way-finding and relationship-making in virtual communities was based more on a sixth sense or a shared interest than on a common physical presence. Unlike geographically based communities, virtual communities are Interest Locations, or spaces of thought commonality. Enabled and facilitated by virtual networks, Interest Locations occur at the points where thoughts and minds meet (Massumi, p.186).

Finally, I examined the concept of the everyday in virtual communities in relation to the writings of Dell Upton. I concluded that while the structure for the habitus, or the “nexus of spaces and times that repeatedly trigger bodily habits and cultural memories” is supported in virtual communities, there is a lack of support for “the art of inventing” (Upton, p.719-720). Therefore, most virtual communities support a very limited form of the extraordinary. What I mean by this is that virtual communities are extremely good at helping participants to share thoughts and discussion and even to organize action, however, their lack of participant ownership and design limit creativity and the potential for change.

This last point is the crux of my final recommendation for alternative virtual community development. Before getting into this concept further, it is important to examine a number of virtual communities in an attempt to identify where the art of inventing is possible and where it is limited.

There appears to be three types of functions, or invention potential, generally allowed in online communities. These are the functions of responding, connecting, and organizing.

The function of responding exists in sites such as Google, Slashdot and Epinions. In these sites, a user’s main contribution is their response, usually in the form of a recommendation or vote. An example of this function can be experienced in the search engine Google. This engine uses a technology called PageRank, which relies on the “democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value” (http://www.google.com/technology/index.html). Votes are calculated not only by a link from page A to page B but also by a system that analyzes a linking page’s importance. In this way, participants, whether intending to or not, play a role in the site’s content design.

Similarly, on sites such as Slashdot, much of the content is generated by users, allowing the virtual community to partially design site content. Still, published content is chosen by Slashdot staff. Other sites, such as Epinions, eBay and Amazon, allow users to vote on products, services or other users, providing participants with the ability to respond to a number of situations.

Another function that is commonly possible is that of connecting. Virtual communities enabling connection with others who share common interests include Friendster, Craig’s List and Classmates. Users may be allowed to have their own page within the virtual community, enabling a level of ownership where presence can be established and from which a connection can be made. In addition, users can connect with the physical world. An example can be seen on Craig’s List, where users may connect with jobs or apartments in their geographic communities.

Finally, the function of organizing is enabled on sites such as Evite and MeetUp, as well as FlashMob websites, where users can organize events and invite others to either attend or to even participate in the process of organization. This has been a strong characteristic of the Internet, and one that has arguably changed the ways in which community organization may occur.

In the functions of responding, connecting and organizing, virtual communities provide a space of habitus, however, due to the structure of these communities, the potential of invention is limited. These virtual communities require a user to go to a specific virtual location that is owned by and designed by a specific entity, thereby innately limiting agency. These spaces, even with their limitations, are still quite important and useful. However, it is vital to question how virtual communities can create extraordinary experiences that support agency and change, beyond the level commonly available. The answer lies in examining practices that allow for the art of inventing and then pondering how these practices can be applied to virtual communities and everyday life.

Two examples that appear to enable the art of inventing at a deeper level can be seen in the development of Linux and as well in distributed computing practices.
Linux is an operating system developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, who at the time was a student and hacker in Helsinki. The code of the program is available and free to all. Anyone can change it, and in fact, the program’s success is due to the fact that programmers from around the world have continued to develop the code. While programmers are allowed to develop their own, propriety version of Linux, historically, they have shared code with each other. In this way, everyone owns the code. It is not reliant on its founder, the way most virtual communities are on theirs. If Torvalds stops working on Linux, development will continue (Linux International). This lack of ownership and the ability for every participant to change the rules aligns with the Hacker’s Code of Ethics, which believes in access, freedom and decentralization of information, as well as the ability to “create art and beauty on a computer” (Levy, p, 458).

Another example where the extraordinary can be experienced in virtual space is in distributed computing, which allows users to process data on their personal computer as part of a larger project. SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is the largest of these projects and allows anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to participate (SETI@home). Participants not only share a common interest in extraterrestrial life, but they also share in the creation of knowledge. As of June 1, 2002, users working separately yet together, had completed more than 1 million CPU years of computation (SETI@home).

In the distributed computing project Folding@home, where participants used their computers to simulate part of the complex folding process of a protein molecule, findings were confirmed in the laboratory and the results were published in a scientific journal (Stanford News Service).

“The implications of this ‘public computing’ paradigm are social as well as scientific” (Anderson). Dr. David Anderson, who is working on a new platform for the SETI project, writes the following:

“Not only does it provide a basis for global communities centered around common interests and goals, but it gives the public more direct control over the directions of science progress … because computer owners can contribute to whatever project they choose, the control over resource allocation for science will be shifted away from government funding agencies (with the myriad factors that control their policies) and towards the public. This has its risks: the public may be easier to deceive than a peer-review panel. But it offers a very direct and democratic mechanism for deciding research policy.”

Here, we are no longer simply speaking of participation, but of agency and change. These peer-to-peer networks are owned and designed by everyone. They do not require participants to visit a structured website owned by an outside entity, but rather provide a true space for invention. In these cases, the virtual community visits the participant and the creation happens in multiple spaces at multiple times.

Participants, specifically in the case of Linux development, define their participation. In addition to responding, connecting and organizing, community computing practices create, and they often create collective good (Rheingold, p. 71).

In allowing every participant to own and design the virtual community, these spaces enable the art of invention.

In conclusion, I propose that the alternative development of virtual communities enable participant ownership and design, as well as decentralization. There must be a way to combine the methods of Linux development and distributed computing with structured virtual communities. As more mobile devices are Internet enabled, the potential to integrate these abilities in the everyday appear to be possible. What will it look like when distributed computing is applied to affordable housing challenges; or when the trade of goods enabled through virtual networks reduce the amount of garbage discarded; or when car pooling is empowered via trusted, mobile networks? When communities, whether defined by interest or geography, are empowered to truly work together to make decisions, take actions, and solve common problems, then the truly extraordinary may occur.

References
Anderson, Sr. David P. Public Computing: Reconnecting People to Science. Presented at the Conference on Shared Knowledge and the Web, Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, Spain, Nov. 17-19 2003. Available at: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/talks/madrid_03/madrid.htmlc.
Grosz, Elizabeth. (2002). Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Linux International website, available at http://www.li.org.
Massumi, Brian. (2002). Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Rheingold, Howard. (2003). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing.
Upton, Dell. (2002). Architecture in Everyday Life. New Literary Horizons: (2002) 33:707-723.
SETI@home website, available at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html.
Stanford News Services, available at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/02/folding1023.html.

In spite of the move towards open-source (read:Linux) by several companies Active directory is being used in almost all Fortune 500 companies, with Sun being the oddball in that list. Although I won’t get into the discussion of which environment is best, it is true that with Active Directory Management tools you can control and manage all your networking resources from a central place, set Security grpoup management ruls, OU management at appropriate levels and even the management reports of security audits.

But that’s where the fun ends, as managing AD can be a painful task, a task that even if well done, it’s going to drain your company’s resources, which could be used for improving your marketing campaigns, your production line, etc.

While this is true, there are options to limit the resources used to keep your Active Directory running at full capacity. For instance, Ensim provides a unified platform to help you to develop and mantain your network in a few simple, secure steps. Their Active Directory Optimization offers reducing time and prevent error. They also give you efficient capacity allocation, tracking, analytics, and extensibility. 

Ensim’s Active Directory Tools are easy to use and mantain. You also get training courses to develop the skills that you need to use, manage and even do upgrade their software. If you want migrate your software to a new platform, they also offer Exchange Management Tools. With Ensim Unify Migration Tools, you only need around 30 minutes to migrate your entire user base, with up to several thousand users.

Compared with traditional, manual method, you would need around 30 continuous hours to complete the migration, not to mention the time and expense you need to put into solving probles derived from migration errors or omissions . So you will not only save time but also save your money.

We all know that Internet has created wonderful opportunities for business owners. Companies look for good hosting companies to make their online presence a success because a bad hosting company will drive away their prospective customers. Especially companies that do business on the Net need to find about hosting security of the hosting company.

Web Hosting comparison sites or directories are playing an important role in providing information about hosting companies and their plans. Webhostingrating.com is one such website and is providing a large number of web hosting articles along with a lot of other useful information. Some of this website’s articles  analyze current Linux web hosting and other tackle cheap web hosting offers from many hosting companies.

This website also allows webmasters to add their own personal reviews just like this web hosting reviews website does, so that as a webmaster I don’t have to rely only on stars or points but also get to know what the experience of existing webmasters is. This is, in my opinion, a very useful (from a user’s point of view) tool to have in my toolset.

Nowadays, with the advances in technology, flash drive has become a common storage device for most computer users. Flash technology is handy, reliable and fast; it connects via USB, you just need to plug and play (even Linux distributions support it), it doesn’t need any driver installation. With 16GB drives available on the market and 256GB on the works, just imagine you can carry your entire MP3 and video collection in your pocket. It’s just any music or video fan’s dream.

You can spice up that dream even further, by making the Flash drive unique, by adding some personalization to it. Pexagon offers a wide variety of flash drives with reasonable prices. They are available in 14 exciting colors and 6 capacities ranging from 512MB to 16GB. You can make the flash personal, customize store-it with laser engraving on both sides of the drive and it is absolutely FREE with no minimum order whatsoever.

With graduation season and father’s day upon us, Personalized flash drives can make the perfect graduation or father’s day gift. You can choose a theme, such as: “Congratulations” or “Happy Father’s Day” to be engraved on one side of the drive and the person’s name on the other side. To make this offer more exciting, Pexagon also gives 20% off when you order using the url in this post. Even if you don’t want to give this to someone else, it can be a cool gadget to show off to your friends and colleagues.