1-7 Star Rating – Page 189 – Public Intelligence Blog

Extraordinary, Beautifully Put Together, Basic Reference, March 4, 2008

Ronald J. Deibert

This is a beautifully put together book in terms of brains, content, presentation, and coverage.

An edited work, with ten primary authors, it actually reflects the collaborative efforts of an international network of collaborators, and can safely be considered the seminal basic reference on this topic.

The first 150 pages include an introduction and six chapters, on measuring global internet filtering, the politics and mechanisms of
control, tools and technology for filtering, filtering and the international system, corporate filtering, and ethics. The rest of the book, 285 pages, is taken up by regional overviews and then country-specific summaries of filtering policy.

The motives for filtering are three: politics & power; social norms & morals, and security concerns.

Two types of filtering occur: announced, and disguised. Announced filters show a blocking page, unannounced filters pretend there was an error. Blocking anc be of entire sites, or specific pages identified by keywords.

The eye-opener for me was that filtering is not just on content, but on capability. Skype and Google Earth are two of the primary capabilities that are being denied to the people around the world by repressive ignorant governments who would rather have perpetual poverty than allow the people to leverage every aspect of the Internet including free global communications.

This is a first class intellectual, social, economic, and political contribution to the literature.

I recommend the following ten books along with this one:
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations
The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/03/042010/01/05

Review: Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Economics

More Relevant Than Ever, Great Addition to the Literature, March 4, 2008

William K. Tabb

Although this book was published in 2004, I did not notice it until recently, and I must say, I find it more relevant than ever today, in 2008. It could have lost a star for not being sufficiently visionary or for not offering a specific implementable plan for overturning the broken global economic governance regimes that it so brilliantly dissects, but out of respect for the author's superior scholarship and my own limitations, I must go with five stars.

Indeed, I am astonished to not see another review. The author deserves reading and recognition.

Here are a few of my flyleaf notes:

+ Superb detailed examination of how the so-called global economic governance organizations are the last gasp of the pyramidal pathologies, lacking in democratic public dialog or deliberation.

+ author struck me as overly generous to the USA but he clearly points out the need to understand and respect the detailed reaons why others do not agree with US “designs” and the US insistence on treating each country alone, rather than in a regional context.

+ I was taken with the author's concise focus on the dangerous combinations of US subsidies, excessive borrowing (this was before the subprime mortage and credit crisis we are now experiencing).

+ Switzerland has reformed SLIGHTLY and is still the banker of choice for dictators and corrupt despots who are looting their countries, creating failed states and perpetual poverty. I have a side note: “time to invade Switzerland and demand open banking?”

+ The author points out that free flowing investment and rules against expropriation are diametrically opposed to sovereign governance and any attempt to provide for sustained development and financial stability.

+ Global institutions too easily manipuated by developed nations.

+ QUOTE pages 373-374: “The excess capacity visible on a global scale, downward pressure on prices, the threat of deflation, and the impact of desperate countries seeking to compete by ignoring labor rights and environmental concerns produce a shallow and uneven development.

I put this book down with considerable humility–like John McCain, economic (and methematics) are my weak zone. I did learn enough from this book to realize that this author is gifted and should be listened to and given an opportunity, along with C. K. Prahalad and Jeff Sachs and Paul Krugman, to restore the social aspects of political economy.

Other books that strike me as complementary to this one:
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Afterthought: the index is *very* disappointing (publisher's fault) but the bibliography by the author is itself another book and quite fascinating and comprehensive.

2008/03/032010/01/05

Review: The Big Switch–Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

4 Star, Information Society, Information Technology

Very Worthwhile, One Major Flaw, March 3, 2008

Nicholas Carr

This is a very worthwhile easy to absorb book. The author is thoughtful, well-spoken, with good notes and currency as of 2007.

The one major flaw in the book is the uncritical comparison of cloud computing with electricity as a utility. That analogy fails when one recognizes that the current electrical system wastes 50% of the power going down-stream, and has become so unreliable that NSA among others is building its own private electrical power plant–with a nuclear core, one wonders? While the author is fully aware of the dangers to privacy and liberty, and below I recap a few of his excellent points, he disappoints in not recognizing that localized resilience and human scale are the core of humanity and community, and that what we really need right now, which John Chambers strangely does not appear willing to offer, is a solar-powered server-router that gives every individual Application Oriented Network control at the point of creation (along with anonymous banking and Grug distributed search), while also creating local pods that can operate independently of the cloud while also blocking Google perverted new programmable search, wherer what you see is not what's in your best interests, but rather what the highest bidder paid to force into your view.

The author cites one source as saying that Google computation can do a task at one tenth of the cost. To learn more, find my review, “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator” and follow the bread crumbs.

The author touches on software as a service, and I am reminded of the IBM interst in “Services Science.” He has a high regard for Amazon Web Services, as I do, and I was fascinated by his suggestion that Amazon differs from Google, Amazon doing virtualization while Google does task optimization (with computational mathematics). Not sure that is accurate, Google can flip a bit tomorrow and put bankers, entertainers, data service providers, and publishers out of business.

I completely enjoyed th discussion of the impact of electrification and the rise of the middle class, of the migration from World Wide Web to World Wide Computer, and of the emergence of a gift ecnomy.

The author also touches on the erosion of the middle class, citing Jagdish Bhagwati and Ben Bernake as saying that it is the Internet rather than globalization that is hurting the middle class (globalization moved the low cost jobs, the Internet moved the highly-educated jobs).

I was shocked to learn that Google can listen to my background sound via the microphone, meaning that Google is running the equivalent of a warrantless audio penetration of my office. “Do No Evil?” This is very troubling.

Page 161: “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seemsx oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization.” Well said. The only thing more shocking to me is the utter complacency of the top management at Amazon, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. Search for the article by Stephen E. Arnold, the world's foremost non-Google expert on Google, look for <Google Pressure Wave: Do the Big Boys Feel It?>.

The author touches on Internet utility to terrorists, and our military's vulnerability, but he does not get as deeply into this as he could have. The fact is the Chinese can take out our telecommunications satellites anytime they want, and they are not only hacking into our computers via the Internet, they also appear to have perfected accessing “stand-alone” computers via the electrical connection. See <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>.

The portion ofthe book I most appreciated was the authors discussion of lost privacy and individuality. He says “Computer systems are not at their core technologies of emancipation. They are technologies of control.” He goes on to point out that even a decentralized cloud network can be programmed to monitor and control, and that is precisely where Google is going, monitoring employees and manipulating consumers.

He touches on semantic web but misses Internet Economy Meta Language (Pierre Levy) and Open Hypertextdocument System (Doug Englebart).

He credits Google founders with wanting to get to all information in all languages all the time, and I agree that their motives are largely worthy, but they are out of control–a suprnational entity with zero oversight. I can easily envision the day coming when in addition to 27 secessionist movements across the USA, we will hundreds of virtual secessions in which communities choose to define trusted computing as localized computing.

The book ends beautifully, by saying we will not know where IT is going until our children, the first generation to be wired from day one, become adults.

A few other books I recommend:
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Age of Missing Information
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/03/022010/01/05

Review: Here Comes Everybody–The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Five for Synthesis & Explanation, March 2, 2008

Clay Shirky

I was modestly disappointed to see so few references to pioneers I recognize, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Joe Trippi, and so on. Howard Rheingold and Yochai Benkler get single references. Seeing Stewart Brand's recommendation persuaded me I don't know the author well enough, and should err on the side of his being a genuine original.

Certainly the book reads well, and for someone like me who reads a great deal, I found myself recognizing thoughts explored by others, but also impressed by the synthesis and the clarity.

A few of my fly-leaf notes:

+ New technologies enable new kinds of groups to form.

+ “Message” is key, what Eric Raymond calls “plausible promise.”

+ Can now harness “free and ready participation in a large distributed group with a variety of skills.”

+ Cost-benefit of large “unsupervised” endeavors is off the charts.

+ From sharing to cooperation to collective action

+ Collective action requires shared vision

+ Literacy led to mass amatuerism, and I have note to myself, the cell phone can lead to mass on demand education “one cell call at a time”

+ Transactions costs dramatically lowered.

+ Revolution happens when it cannot be contained by status quo institutions

+ Good account of Wikipedia

+ Light discussion of social capital, Yochai Bnekler does it much better

+ Value of mass diversity

+ Implications of Linux for capitalism

+ Excellent account of how Perl beat out C++

Bottom line in this book: “Open Source teaches us that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial.

Other books I recommend:
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

There is of course also a broad literature on complexity, collapse, resilience, diversity, integral consciousness and so on.

2008/02/272010/01/05

Review DVD: Michael Clayton (Widescreen Edition)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Reviews (DVD Only)

Superb on Multiple Levels, Closes Beautifully, February 27, 2008

George Clooney

There are some really fine reviews. I will just say I consider this a five star film, not the average of four as shown. It was so very good that I paused it each time I had to get up for anything, and then watched the last four segments again this morning to ensure I had not missed anything.

At three different levels, a small boy and his dad talking about a fictional empire, at the street level, and at the strategic level of big law firms, I found this film extremely engaging and worthy.

For the first time I can remember, I actually read all of the closing credits because the producers had the brilliant idea of having Clooney take a taxi ride while his face did this whole range of reflective expressions that kept me glued to the screen.

Here, in priority order, are ten other DVDs I recommend–the first, Fight Club, is not at all what you would expect from the title, and I only watched it on my teen-ager's recommendation. He was right, it's a DVD for intelligent people. All these I list I own and recommend for purchase, not just rental.
Fight Club (Widescreen Edition)
The Departed (Widescreen Edition)
Live Free or Die Hard (Unrated Edition)
The Lives of Others
Seven (Single Disc Edition)
Firewall (Widescreen Edition)
Primary Colors
Lord of War (Widescreen)
Pulp Fiction
Batman Begins (Widescreen Edition)

2008/02/262010/01/05

Review: The Powers to Lead

5 Star, Diplomacy, Leadership

Superb Mix of Scholarship & Pragmatism,

February 26, 2008

Joseph S. Nye

Anything by Joe Nye stops my work and receives my undivided attention. This is an absolute gem of a book, a mix of world-class scholarship and world-class pragmatism. It goes to the top of my leadership list on Amazon.

The book opens with the observation that two thirds of US citizens believe their is a leadership crisis. The intellectual center of the book is its focus on “smart power” defined as a balanced mix of soft and hard power that is firmly grounded in “Contextual IQ,” a term credited to Mayo and Nohria of Harvard.

The author defines leaders as those who help a group create and achieve goals. He states that leadership is an art, not a science. I especially liked the early phases, “good contextual intelligence broadens the bandwidth of leaders.” He likens the relation of leaders and the led to surfers and the wave–can ride it but cannot move it this way and that.

Soft power, his signal contribution to the global dialog on international relations, is concisely defined as att5ractive power, yielding the power to ask instead of compell. He cites McGregor Burns in communicating that bullys who humiliate and intimidate are counter-productive, that “power-wielders are not leaders.”

There is a fine review of leadership styles, attributes, and a reference to female leadership rising (I have long said that women make better intelligence analysts because they have smaller egos and a great deal more emphathy and intuition). He provides a matrix for evaluationg inter effectivenesss and ethics in relation to goals, means, and consequences.

I was struck the emphasis on emotional intelligence and the needed ability to rapidly evaluate loyalty networks that might not be immediately obvious. He distinguishes between public politics and private politics.

The book concludes with a really extra-special and lengthy disucssion of leadership ethics and morality. The last two pages prior to top-notch notes and bibliographies are 12 take-aways on leadership (he had the wit to avoid making them the 12 commandments) consisting of a fragment that I list below, and explicative annotation that I do not–the book is worthy of buying for these two pages and the moral-ethical conclusion alone, but certainly this is an important book that should be read any anyone seeking to lead others.

1. Good leadership matters
2. Leadership can be learned.
3. Leaders help create and achieve group goals.
4. Smart leaders need both soft and hard power skills.
5. Leaders depend on and are partly shaped by followers.
6. Appropriate style depends on context.
7. Consultative style costs time, but has three major benefits.
8. Leaders need both managerial and organizational skills.
9. Leadership for crisis conditions requires advanced preparations, emotional maturity, and the ability to distinguish between operational, analytical, and political contexts.
10. Information revolution is shifting context of postmodern organizations from command to co-optive style.
11. Reality testing, constant information seeking, and adjusting to change are essential but (buy the book).
12. Ethical leaders use consciences, common moral rules, and professional standards, but conflicting values can create “dirty hands.”

I have just two nits with this book, neither of which is a buy-stopper:

A. On page 94 there is an annoyingly facile and superficial reference to the 9-11 commission citing cultural dissonance as one reason the FBI and CIA did not share information. As one who has both read and written extensively on this topic, not only have we all identified numerous examples of internal failures (e.g. the FBI rejected two walk-ins, one in Newark and one in Orlando, prior to the event; CIA sent line-crossers in and conclusively established there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, but George Tenet parked his integrity on the same shelf Colin Powell used, and let the White House lie 935 times to the public and Congress). I have an edited book scheduled on Cultural Intelligence for 2009, this is an important topic, and merits better treatment from the author.

B. This book could usefully be expanded, or followed by another book, to integrate the books I list below, and the world-changing conditions they represent.
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization
The Knowledge Executive
The Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Having said that, I consider this to be one of the author's top three immediately current and relevant books, and relatively priceless if we can get “Mr. Perfect” to read it (more than once), along with the author's two recent works, Understanding International Conflicts (6th Edition); and The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone.February 26, 2008

2008/02/242009/10/30

Review: The Ingenuity Gap–Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Future, Information Society

Key Piece in a Body of Work of Great Import, February 24, 2008

Thomas Homer-Dixon

I have read and reviewed one earlier book by this author, and bought the two more recent works a week ago after realizing I had seriously under-estimated the relevance of this author's work to my holistic integrative “civilization resilience” intent.

This is a five-star book and I expect Upside of Down will be as well.

I was immediately struck by the grace with which the author credits key other minds in the body of the work rather than just as a footnote.

Here are the highlights from my flyleaf notes, and a few other recommended readings:

+ Complexity soaring, need ideas for better institutions and better social arrangements.

+ Delusion of control over complex systems we barely comprehend

+ Citing Paul Rober: ideas co-equivalent to capital and labor

+ Not enough time to reflect (I am reminded of

The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

+ Full credit to H. G. Wells for anticipating the need for a World Brain to manage the complex of complexes

+ Excellent overview of mistakes by the economists. I recommend as well

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

+Wealth gaps + migrations = poor global management

+ Losing 25% of our biodiversity

+ Delays in policy understanding, decisions, action, and outcomes compound losses over time

+ Mike Whitfield cited on need for holistic view, keystone species, and radical differences in compressed time scales. I am reminded of everything written by Richard Falk, Ervin Laszlo and others in the 1970's and 1980's.

+ Population factor is profound

+ Corruption is the primary obstacle to reform

+ Garbage overtaking coastlines while nitrogen leeches into water and carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere

+ Citing David Harvey, “hypercapitalism” compresses time and space while over-producing both wasted production and concentrated wealth

+ Our collective ego is blocking our collective intelligence. See the new book, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

+ Losing our sense of place, not getting enough signals to understand the tipping point circumstances

+ Complexity goes awry (he cited Perrow, whose book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies remains a seminal work (simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and fix; complex systems have multiple points of failure that interact in unpredictable and sometimes undiscoverable ways; we live in a constellation of complex systems well beyond our ken)

+ Complex systems characterized by multiplicity; causal feedback; some tightly coupled; interdependence; openness; synergy; and nonlinear behavior.

+ Chaos theory warns us that nature will magnify the smallest perturbation from humans

+ Four stages of human perception of nature: 1) Balancing; 2) Anarchic; 3) Resilient; 4) Evolving.

+ Citing Wally Broeker: “Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

+ Social systems are path dependent, delay at any point can be disastrous

+ Lessons of financial crises: governments and the IMF are out of touch with speed and breadth of financial systemic changes; computer-driven changes can accelerate and deepen mistakes

+ Citing Kofi Annan: “imbalance between economic, social, and political realms can never be sustained for long.”

+ Author: social system out of synch with natural and technological systems

+ Software code doubling every two years, bugs a real problem, still in pre-industrial era

+ Information glut has a critical bottleneck, lack of a sense-making bridge from data to our cognitive absorption

+ Ingenuity is both technical and social

+ Our biggest problem is the failure of our economic institutions and policies

+ Washington DC bureaucrats, including senior CIA analysts, “largely out of their depth”

+ Pace of change, depth of ignorance, and political resistance all assume scary proportions

+ Self-organizing resilience and adapting systems could be key

+ As ingenuity gap widens “need imagination, metaphor, and empathy more than ever.”

+ Afterword: relentless increase in complexity while “world economic system is profoundly dysfunctional.”

+ Most interesting to me, as I have committed to publish a book on “Cultural Intelligence” in 2009, is the author's citing of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, saying culture is “information–skills, attitudes, beliefs, values–capable of affecting individuals' behavior.”

There are other notes but Amazon imposes a word limit. This is a great book, and I honor it by listing other great and relevant works below (to my limit of ten):

The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Category: 1-7 Star Rating

Review: Access Denied–The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering