Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis

To speculate is to "form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence" [1]. My speculation tagged posts are things I suspect are true - even though I know I lack evidence. This is one of them.

For some years [2] I have been playing with a speculation that large publicly traded corporations [1], independent of their managers, are self-sustaining super-organisms of commerce-space that, like biological organisms, can change their (legal, regulatory and cultural ecosystem) to their peculiar tastes. I call this entity AmoebaCorp; I imagine it oozing and absorbing in an abstract "space" where individual humans are invisible atoms.

Over the last two hundred years of American history corporate power and influence has waxed and waned. Within the past year the corporate entity reversed a small transient setback and completed a dramatic transformation of its political ecosystem. The power of AmoebaCorp is higher than average, perhaps as high as it has ever been. The power of individuals, both the few that are strong and the many that are weak, has been commensurately reduced.

I wonder what that means for us. Corporations, after all, are not (yet) enemies of individual humans. They need us the way software needs hardware and memes need brains. They certainly need the rule of law; most AmoebaCorp hate war [3]. We individuals, CEOs and peons alike, are frenemies of AmoebaCorp .

On the other hand, I don't think AmoebaCorp can get its mind around what we need to do for global climate change. Its timescape is even shorter than ours. With CT2 (Carbon Tax and Tariff) AmoebaCorp would be our friend, without CT2 it will be our enemy.

In the near term, I fear that AmoebaCorp is and will be an enemy of true invention, and without invention and innovation humanity will be in a world of hurt. AmoebaCorp cannot like disruptive technology, it may be happiest in the periods of stasis common in human history. I think we may be seeing the effects of that stasis in the IP (patent troll) wars, and in the recent history of small startup companies ...

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » No Life Insurance for Bull Riders - Cringely on technology

... Exchange Traded Funds are forcing more and more good tech companies to abandon the idea of ever going public. We saw this trend on this summer’s Startup Tour where not one of more than 30 companies we visited saw an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in its future. Every company saw itself eventually being acquired. But there’s a problem with being acquired, which is that it greatly limits the upside for entrepreneurs...

Cringely misses the point. There's a bigger problem here that fewer billionaires. The problem is that the innovations of those startups will die. They are often acquired to prevent disruption, rather than to enable disruption.

Stasis isn't the worst thing in human history, but we live in a world of 8 billion people. We are exhausting that world. Stasis is not a desirable option. The AmoebaCorp may now be more enemy than friend.

[1] Oxford American Dictionary.

See also:

• Why do companies exist? (10/2/1010 - many links to past posts)
• The Corporation - what next? (8/22/2010)
• Understanding the elections - what's really changed (11/4/2010)
• Slouching towards Skynet (12/9/2007)
• Self sustaining entities: corporations and the Spanish Inquisition (6/2006)

[1] Private, and effectively private, corporations like 2010 Apple and 1893 J.P. Morgan and Company are much more idiosyncratic. [2] Charles Stross has been well ahead of me on this. Marx, of course, had similar intuitions, which did not lend themselves to good history. [3] Some companies sell weapons or invest in security theater of course, so it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Update 12/1/10: The next step.

The obvious is shouted, the interesting is whispered

Perhaps it was always this way, and it is only with time that I see it.

Or perhaps our media is less interesting, more controlled, than it once was.

The obvious is shouted a thousand times an hour. The interesting is whispered in closed doors.

This morning, for example, I wrote ...

Gordon's Notes: The iPhone iAd framework and parental controls

... iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) come with parental controls. Android OS, interestingly, does not ...

...  iOS comes with FairPlay DRM (digital rights management), Android OS lacks a DRM standard. Even Gruber, a giant of fan blogs, does not seem to get this. FairPlay is worth billions to the iOS App market...

This is a small thing, in a technical domain, but it is not hard to discover. It is not a matter of opinion. Any reasonable person who thinks about it for a moment will agree - yes, the way FairPlay DRM manages iOS apps is extraordinarily important to Apple's revenue stream.

Yet this goes unspoken. Unspoken, that is, in the media. I am sure it is discussed at Google and Apple.

I've written before about dogs that don't bark in the night. These silences speak volumes. In my blog I now tag them as unspoken.

Why are some important and obvious things unspoken?

Sometimes it is because people with power understand, often wisely, that the less said the better. China's rare earth embargo is an example.

Sometimes it is because some things aren't obvious until they are spoken. Not just spoken in an eccentric blog with an unusual readership, but spoken in a bigger platform. These silences end in time.

Most often though, I think it is because most struggles are bipolar, and neither of the two parties wants to introduce a meme that might disturb both. Perhaps, as happens in American politics, there is something both parties agree should happen, but one party wishes to maintain an illusion of total opposition. Perhaps the unspoken fact might introduce a disruptive third position, and both parties prefer the enemy they know.

These days, when I write in this blog, I try to write about things are not spoken. My Reader Share, and its secondary (inferior) twitter stream, are for interesting things that are shouted.

The iPhone iAd framework and parental controls

iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) come with parental controls. Android OS, interestingly, does not. This is rarely discussed [1].

Parental controls should be important to parents with children who, by age or disability, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and injury. They are, of course, also important for cultural reasons.

Even though Apple's iOS includes parental controls, they are very weak. Disabling Safari does not disable embedded browsers, and many, many applications embed WebKit browsers. It is not hard, for example, to navigate from the NYT's iPhone App to Google's image search.

The worst offenders use Google's AdMob/AdSense/Mobile Ads platform. That platform, unsurprisingly, uses WebKit. A product that uses Google's Ad Platform breaks iOS Parental Controls.

Apple has an ad platform too. It's called iAd. It's not based on WebKit, it's an Objective C (Cocoa) framework. This morning I viewed the Tron iAd featured on the New York Times iPhone app. The Ad was ... impressive.

Clearly Apple's iAds have a high barrier to entry. Perhaps not as high as a television or major print advertisement, but much higher than traditional web advertising. The one I saw was essentially an application. iAds will need to scope their material to the parental control rating of the container application.

The Tron Ad did not have an obvious WebKit escape. Whether one exists or not, it is clear that iAds can achieve their goals within a fully constrained environment. Apple's iAds are Parental Control friendly, Google's Mobile Ads are not. If Apple were to enable a Parental Controls block for embedded browsers, they'd break Google's Ad Platform on iOS devices. Children are an important advertising target. This should be interesting.

[1] Another unmentionable is that iOS comes with FairPlay DRM (digital rights management), Android OS lacks a DRM standard. Even Gruber, a giant of fan blogs, does not seem to get this. FairPlay is worth billions to the iOS App market.

Climate Change 2010: Plan B

It was always a long shot, but 2010 was when we knew that plan A for greenhouse gas management had failed.

Plan A was Europe, China and the US agreeing to limit CO2 emissions and then extending that agreement to India and every other country that mattered.

Plan A might be known as Plan Gore, because Al Gore was a leading exponent. His personal life went down in flames around the time Plan A died. Plan A was always a longshot, but it was stone dead when the ailing US economy flatlined at the end of the Bush II. The Great Recession killed Plan A, but it also dramatically reduced world greenhouse gas emissions. So maybe it was a bit of a wash.

So what's next? Plan A isn't coming back any time soon. Europe's economy is on the ropes. China is fragile and facing history's greatest economic bubble. The US economy is tottering along, but the GOP thinks a dead America is better than America cheatin' with Obama.

Yes, it does seem a bit bleak. On the other hand, even if Gore had won in 2000 it would have been hard to equal the greenhouse gas decreases of the past three years of economic misery. I can even imagine, if the GOP won it all, that Plan A might return. Only Nixon could go to China, and in the US only the Crazy Party can manage the fear filled right.

In the meantime, there's Plan B.

How could Plan B work?

Well, we know where we need to go. We need a worldwide Carbon Tax and a Carbon Tariff (CT2). The Carbon Tax is obvious. The Carbon Tariff is how nations manage cheaters -- other nations that don't play along.

With CT2 everything else plays out. We get investments in energy conservation technologies, we get energy conservation directly, and we get investments in every conceivable form of low carbon energy production technology. CT2 also brings in a boat load of revenue, which each nation may use as it sees fit. Some may offset other consumption taxes (ex: VAT), others may subsidize transit or invest in energy research.

We know where we need to go to CT2, but how do we get there? Most of all, how do we break the WTO rules that would block Carbon Tariffs?

What if a small nation, like the Maldives for example, started by introducing CT2 locally -- with rates that seem right for a global regime? Then the Scandinavians sign on. The big one next one is the EU. After that it gets harder. Canada, Australia, the US and China are all going to hold out. I'm guessing the next big ones would be India, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.

The US, Canada and Australia go next.

China goes last.

That's Plan B.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Global Warming: We're scr***d. 8/18/2006

Wetware routers and intermittent consciousness

Today's Carl Zimmer article gives new insight into the nature of consciousness. Even in neurotypical brains decision tasks create a psychic bottleneck, which is also a sort of perceptual blindspot. Our consciousness goes "offline", very briefly, when we make choices (emphases mine) ...

The Brain: The "Router" in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing | Carl Zimmer | DISCOVER Magazine:

... The brain is, in the words of neuroscientist Floyd Bloom, “the most complex [jg: known] structure that exists in the universe.” Its trillions of connections let it carry out all sorts of sophisticated computations in very little time. You can scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second, a task that pushes even today’s best computers to their limit. Yet multiplying 357 by 289, a task that demands a puny amount of processing, leaves most of us struggling.

... The fact that we struggle with certain simple tasks speaks volumes about how we are wired. It turns out the evolution of our complex brain has come at a price: Sometimes we end up with a mental traffic jam in there...

... If we don’t have enough time between two tasks, we slow down on the second one—a lag known as the “psychological refractory period.”...

... Psychologists have long been puzzled by the psychological refractory period because it doesn’t fit with other things we know about how the brain works. We are very good at doing many things at once... Yet there are simple jobs—like math problems—that our brains can handle only one at a time. It is as if signals were flying down a 20-lane superhighway, and then the road narrowed to a single lane...

Each time we perform a task we perform it in three steps. Step 1: Take in information from the senses. Step 2: Figure out what to do in response. Step 3: Carry out that plan by moving muscles...

...  scientists varied one of the three steps of the thought process to see if they could change the length of the psychological refractory period. Only when they tinkered with step 2—figuring out what response to make—could they produce a change...

... when we have any two simple decisions to make, we must wait for the first task to move through a bottleneck before taking on the second. That is what makes mental multiplication so hard. Instead of carrying out many steps simultaneously, we have to do them one at a time.

... In 2008 the scientists reported that during the psychological refractory period, a network of brain regions are consistently active, some near the front of the brain and some near the back...

... these regions appear to be part of a network that is important for our awareness of our own experiences. This helps explain why we are oblivious to our mental traffic jams.

.. The brain began measuring how long a task took only after the previous task moved out of the bottleneck. Whenever a perception of a sound or a letter got stuck in the mental traffic jam, the subjects were not aware of it...

... The neurons that take in sensory information send it to a neural network that he and his colleagues call the "router." Like the router in a computer network, the brain’s version can be reconfigured to send signals to different locations. Depending on the task at hand, it can direct signals to the parts of the brain that produce speech, for instance, or to the parts that can make a foot push down on a brake pedal. Each time the router switches to a new configuration, however, it experiences a slight delay...

The "router" theory is very much an unproven model. If something like it holds up, however, we will find variations in router performance. There may be advantages and costs to different router algorithms. There will be articles on router performance in autism and schizophrenia and in disorders of consciousness (coma, etc). Perhaps we will discover ways  to train and retrain our internal routers for different settings.

It wasn't the primary emphasis of the article, but I'm struck again by the contingent and intermittent nature of our consciousness. Continuity of consciousness is very much an illusion. We are offline, briefly, thousands of times a day.

Rajini Vaidyanathan, Gordon Brown and me - strange loops in 2010

I'm killing time at DC's Union Station, waiting for my train to BWI and home, when I'm accosted by a young woman with a note pad. She tells me she's from the BBC, and she wants to know what I think of an engagement.

Even I couldn't escape that news. I knew someone named Kate was marrying an English aristocrat. I had nowhere to go that minute, and she seemed to be in pain, so I tried to come up with something quotable. She told me to look to the BBC site ...

BBC News - Rajini Vaidyanathan - Royal wedding: American reaction to the Prince's engagement

... But even those who won't be across every dress, table arrangement and invite, are celebrating the news.

"It's fun," says John Faughnan of Minnesota. "It beats reading about the great recession."

Mr Faughnan said he had only learned Kate Middleton's name this morning, and the future Queen's profile here in the US is still relatively low.,,,

My Manchester born mother was thrilled, and it was a funny enough story to share on Facebook. Then it got more interesting.

On Facebook a friend pointed out that Rajini Vaidyanathan is a bit of a comer, as can be seen in her YouTube interview with Gordon Brown. She's not always stuck with boring reaction interviews on a painfully boring topic.

The lady has a trajectory, and I met her near the start.

A strange loop.

Michelle Bachman and Jesse Ventura: Fruitcakes are not the worst

Minnesota has an undeserved reputation as a sober sort of place. So it surprises some to learn that the Tea Party's Michele Bachman hails from a GOP safe seat in the burbs of the Twins.

The truth is, Minnesota is a cross between California and Oregon. I love it here, but we made the wrestler and talk show host Jesse Ventura Governor in 1999. Ventura only served one term; after four years everyone, including Jesse, was happy to see him go. Minnesota then elected Tim Pawlenty Governor. Pawlenty is now running for President.

Bachman is 100% fruitcake, but Ventura isn't far behind. Pawlenty, on the other hand, is not a fruitcake. Pawlenty is a devout Marketarian, a banal servant of money and power.

Bachman is a lousy Representative. Ventura was a lousy governor. Even at his worst though, Ventura did less harm to Minnesota than Tim Pawlenty.

Bachman is a wart on the face of American democracy, but she's not a cancer. There are worse things than fruitcakes in government.

See also: Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat.

The phone call is dead - sort of

Phil Bradley comments on a Tech Crunch essay on the death of the phone call.

That seems strange to me, since I spend a lot of time on the phone. Reading more closely though, neither is claiming that remote voice communication is dead. What they're trying to say, but can't quite get it, is that the unscheduled phone call is dead. (Voice mail is beyond dead.)

I agree, and Thank Darwin it's gone.

The unschedule phone call was rude. It was almost as rude as having a neighbor walk into your bedroom unannounced. Does anyone of a certain age remember enjoying the sound of a ringing phone (ok, teenage passions excepted)?

We only tolerated it because there were no alternatives.

Now, when we need to talk, we schedule it. My mother knows I phone her daily at a certain time [1]. When Emily and I need to do an impromptu conversation  we usually text first to setup the call. At work all my phone calls and conferences are scheduled, even if only by email or IM.

The unscheduled phone call is going away, and the world is a better place without it.

[1] Via Google voice to Montreal. GV has saved me about $4,000 in phone bills over the past 2-3 years.

Argentina of the North? We should be so lucky.

Like Nicholas Kristoff, I’ve used Argentina as a metaphor for the twilight of America. I thought of it as an example of a rich nation that quietly fell apart even as its income disparity grew.

I’ve called American "Argentina of the North”.

Now, like Kristof, I am apologizing to Argentina …

A Hedge Fund Republic- - Nicholas Kristof - NYTimes.com

… The best data series I could find is for Argentina. In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.

Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007…

Another metaphor bites the dust. Sorry Argentina, but at least we can aspire to learn from your experience.

Torture and the constitution: The fury beings with the Ghailini trial

Now we get to the discussion we’ve long expected.

Civilian courts do not allow testimony obtained through torture. The GOP is the party of torture, so they are enraged.

Incidentally, this NYT article has one of the most misleading and lousy headlines of the past few months atop an article that buries everything that matters.

What is being tested here is not Obama’s strategy, but rather America’s care of its Constitution (emphases mine). America will fail …

Terror Verdict Tests Obama’s Strategy on Trials - NYTimes.com

… Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.

… the reason some Guantánamo cases are hard to prosecute is that under the Bush administration, evidence was obtained by coercion, creating a problem for prosecutors regardless of the legal venue…

… many observers attributed any weakness to the prosecution’s case to the fact that the Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness apparently because investigators discovered the man’s existence after interrogators used abusive and coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani…

… But the question of where Mr. Mohammed will be prosecuted has remained in limbo, and Mr. Holder has made no more referrals from the detainee population to either system.

While Judge Kaplan could still sentence Mr. Ghailani to a life sentence, even some proponents of civilian trials acknowledged that his acquittal on most of the charges against him was damaging to their cause because it was a stark demonstration that it was possible that a jury might acquit a defendant entirely in such a case…

“The paradox with these kinds of cases has always been that if these individuals are found not-guilty, will the American government let them go free, which is the construct of a criminal proceeding? And the answer is no. That is the reality. This case highlights that tension, and will complicate the political debate about how to handle more senior Al Qaeda figures, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed cannot be convicted in a constitutionally valid trial because he was abundantly tortured. That was one of the GOP’s gifts to America.

The GOP has been, and will be, the party of torture. That is the source of their rage; they love their vision of the Constitution, but they hate the reality of the Constitution.

Apple-Google armistice day - Google Voice for the iPhone is available.

Google Voice for iPhone is available, the first Apple Google war is over. It lasted from about July 27, 2009 to Nov 9, 2010.

I speculated on why it was ending in September when the ceasefire was official. I listed nine items. If I had to pick one cause it would be Facebook shafting Apple at the Ping launch.

Detroit, dialysis and special needs

Charlie LeDuff has written an essay on the state of the worst bits of Detroit. If you're feeling sturdy, you can follow it with a Robin Fields review of the state of America's universal care system for dialysis provision.

Have you read them both? No, Scotch is not a good solution.

Both essays made my skepti-sense tingle. It feels like we're missing some context, that we're probably getting a simplified view. The dialysis experience described here, for example, is not what the insured middle class gets. Even so, I think there's fundamental truth in both stories.

The dialysis problem feels most "easily" fixable. Health Care Reform, once it survives Limbaugh and Palin, can absorb this isolated program. Yes, it will survive. Mega corporations are now pivoting to life in a post-HCR world. They control Limbaugh, he will do their will.

Detroit is harder. Everyone who can leave has left. The remainder are the disabled and the children of the disabled, enmeshed in a nest of poverty. To a first approximation, it's a densely concentrated adult special needs community, with a high concentration of special needs in children as well. (I know a special needs community well. You would be wrong to read this as a condemnation.)

I think there are fixes for Detroit. We need to look for lessons from New Orleans pre and post Katrina, lessons from the most impoverished aboriginal communities, and lessons from war ravaged cities like 1980s Lebanon and 2010 Baghdad, lessons from 1970s Harlem. Detroit can be improved, but it will take decades ...

Slow hard work. There is no lack of challenge in the world.

Instapaper makes you more productive ...

This can help get to Inbox zero ...

Gordon's Tech: Instapaper: editor's picks and more

... You know you do it. Sitting in a boring phone meeting... Browsing web sites on your corporate box (or iPhone* or iPad). All's fine until you see something you really want to read. That's crossing the line though. I can't read something good and pay attention to a dull meeting. Worse, I might continue when the meeting is done -- when I should be doing real work. (I assume everything I do on a corporate machine is monitored of course.)

Instapaper solves the problem. I click the Read Later bookmarklet and put the browser down. I'll read the article, elegantly formatted, on my iPhone later. If you don't have an iPhone, you can read it with any web client through your free Instapaper account...

The most vile societies in human history...

Adam Goodheart is blogging the Civil War ...

A Senator Secedes – Reluctantly - NYTimes.com

... The imperious, aristocratic senator was no bleeding heart, to say the least. Master of more than 300 slaves, he did not hesitate to flog them when they transgressed, wielding the whip with his own hand. Nor did he hesitate to take sexual advantage of the women under his power, fathering several children with them. (In one instance, he did so with a household servant, and then with her teenage daughter.) In politics, he had popularized the phrase ‘cotton is king,’ and gave a notorious speech in 1858 arguing that every society, even a republic, needed an inferior ‘mud-sill’ class to ‘do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life...

White South Carolina was "wild for secession" after the election of Lincoln. However we may see the early Lincoln now, white Southerners believed he would end the slavery they seemed to love.

How much, I wonder, was their passion driven by shame and guilt? The greatest anger I see comes from men and women (and children!) accused of crimes they deny to themselves. Crimes they deny to themselves, even as they know they are guilty.

The white southern United States of 1860 was a vile society, among the most vile of the past three hundred years.

Which others belong in that hall of shame?

Nazi Germany, of course. But who else? The obvious other examples, such as Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's China, and Stalin's Russia were all essentially medieval tyrannies in modern times. They were as much evil regimes as evil societies.

Are the only contenders 1930s Germany and 1860s American South?

America the senescent

I think, more than all of the economic and demographic indicators, this tells us that America's time as a great nation is over ...

The baby steps that have taken the United States from decrying torture to celebrating it.  - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

... In an America in which the former president can boast on television that he approved the water-boarding of U.S. prisoners, it can hardly be a shock that following a lengthy investigation, no criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.* We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man...

Move over France, we need a spot on that bench.