Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 224 – Public Intelligence Blog

Elegant essay with embedded references, March 6, 2008

David Boren

Edit of 14 Mar 08: FRAUD ALERT. I like and admire David Boren, but I am now fed up with his sanctimoneous appearances calling for “bi-partisanship” while failing to recognize all the other parties that have been–with malice aforthought–shut out of the political process. “Bipartisanship” is CODE for”save the two-party spoils systme.” ENOUGH. Anyone who cannot explain the difference between Transpartisanship and Bipartisanship is a FRAUD.

This is an elegant intelligent book of reflection, but I have to say up front that is misses the core point: the need to end the strangle-hold of the two parties that dismissed the League of Women Voters from the presidential debate process because they had the temerity to want to ask questions not provided in advance, and to include third, fourth and fifth parties. I know many people will be reading this book, and perhaps also this review, and the mere existence of the book as a focal point for dialog is worthy of five stars.

There are eight specific electoral reforms that could be easily passed, four in time to impact on November 2008, the others for impact in 2010. The fact is–and I saw this demonstrated in Oklahoma where I went to see for myself how Michael Bloomberg fared. He was, in my view, made to look the fool because no one there knew the difference between bipartisanship (code for keeping the the two party spoils system alive) and transpartisanship, which buries the two party mafiosos and restores sovereignty to the people.

I funded the Earth Intelligence Network at the same time that Jim Turner, Ralph Nader's first hire, created the Transpartisan Policy Institute. We identified the top experts on the ten high-level threats, and we have devised tranpartisan answers to 52 tough questions not a single candidate can answer coherently today. In my view, there is still a need for an independent transpartisan team to run for the full range of positions, and demonstrating in advance of election they can balance the budget.

This book deserves five stars, but it is futile unless Senators McCain, Obama, and Clinton will sponsor the simple eight point Electoral Reform Act, and we discuss openly the degree to which Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dough Feith are impeachable for their role in telling 935 explicitly documented lies, and in the case of Cheney, 25 explicitly identified high crimes betraying the public trust.

Here are ten other books I commend to anyone concerned about our future.
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

I will end on a positive note: there is no lack of money–for one third of what we spent on war this year, we could have begun the rapid eradication of the ten high-level threats to humanity, and catalyzed the creation of new wealth everywhere.

Bipartisanship is NOT the right answer. Electoral reform and Transpartisanship, such as represented so ably by Reuniting America, is the best possible path to restoring America the Beautiful.

2008/03/062009/10/30

Review: Hard Call–The Art of Great Decisions

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Politics

Formula Book with Limited Sources, March 6, 2008

John McCain

Edit of 10 November 2008 to lament the betrayal of John McCain.

The election is over. Obama fooled most of the people, and the Democrats out-frauded the Republicans with at least $300 million in illegal campaign contributions and double voting between New York and Florida and varied other states. McCain did himself in, allowing Bush staffers to destroy any attempt to address the substance of governance, and less the staffer that helped create the first speech by Governor Palin, Vice Presidential Operations was staffed by inept has-beens from spin-land, none of them with any deep knowledge about governance.

Sadly Obama, himself a talented individual, has been bought and paid for by Wall Street, and his transition team is totally committed to keeping the two party spoils system alive. He is, in short, a fraud. I am deleting fivce of the HOPE books below, and herewith provide five books that should give any citizen pause–Obama will be Cheney lite, seeking to pursue Abraham Lincoln's treasonous expansion of Executive powers with the active connivance of a treasonous Congress unfit to represent the United STATES of America.

Obama – The Postmodern Coup
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
Constitutional History of Secession

Bernie's review is great and I have voted for it. I am going to stop buying formula books that combine a politician's name with a staffer's library browsing. I was especially distressed to not find the world “intelligence” or its commercial equivalent, decision-support. There is nothing wrong with the content, but as someone who writes and reads broadly about intelligence and decision support under conditions of ambiguity, this book could not hold my attention.

Five books that ignore the criminal parties and focus on We the People:
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/03/042009/12/04

Review: The Pirate’s Dilemma–How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Resilience, Culture, DVD - Light, Education (General), Future, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Beyond Five Stars–Moving, Relevant, Powerful

March 1, 2008

Matt Mason

I read a lot. Non-fiction. This is one of the most important and inspiring books I have read in some time. It is especially meaningful to me because my oldest of three sons is a pirate who refuses to waste my money on college “credentialing” and has told me point blank there is nothing he cannot learn on his own.

While I have been totally “open” since I published E3i in the Whole Earth Review (Fall 1992) and was called a lunatic by the spy world, and I have given a Gnomedex keytone on “Open Everything,” this book–I am shaking my head trying to find the right words–has been an inspiration to me.

Bottom line: the pyramidal structure, the Weberian bureaucracy model that characterizes all governments and corporations, is DEAD. The circule model, the open network model, is kicking serious butt.

This author has in my view demonstrated world-class scholarship, given us gifted writing, and developed a story line that I can only call DAZZELING. This is an important story we all need to understand.

Here are my flyleaf notes:

+ Pirates are rocking the boat.

+ Information Age has hit puberty.”

+ Citing Mark Ecko, a graffiti artist whose brand is now worth $1 billion: “The pirate has become the producer.”

+ Punk capitalism.”

+ Punk Plus equals creative destruction at hurricane force.

+ Purpose is everything.

+ Citing Shane Smith: In America there is no anti-status quo media–it's all the same four big companies…there is no voice.

+ Punk and green are converging on substance and style.

+ Citing Richard Florida, “Rise of the creative class”

+ 3d printing is here now, 3d product download is on the horizon (I envision FedEx Kinko's as a “one of” production facility, but the dumb ass at FedEx CEO blew me off when I proposed that he print books to lower their carbon footprint).

+ USA was founded on the basis of piracy of European technologies.

+ Three core punk ideas are 1) do it yourself; 2) resist authority; 3) combine altruism with self-interest.

+ Canal Street moves faster than Wall Street.”

+ Pirate radio as musical petri dishes creating new spaces.

+ “Today a new generation is demanding more choice.”

+ Net neutrality matters (FYI, Google has a programmable search engine that will let you see only what others pay to let you see. Google is now totally EVIL.

+ Lawsuits are a sign of corporate wekaness.

+ Monsanto is totally evil, and these morons have filed patents claiming they own all the pigs on the planet. Hard to believe. Time to close them down.

+ INSIGHT HALFWAY THROUGH THE BOOK: Punk and integral consciousness, pirates and creative commons, are converging.

+ 3 pirate hyabits: 1) look outside the market; 2) create a vehicle; 3) harness your audience.

+ Remix is HUGE.

+ Graffiti is explained brilliantly by this author.

+ Open Source is going physical, e.g. open source beer.

+ File sharing boosts sales and extends range of for-sale music.

+ Free education online (and my own idea, one cell call at a time) is the ultimate positive sharing experience.

+ 1.5 billion youth around the world waiting to explode in creativity or destruction–I ask myself, what are we doing to help them go creative?

+ Four pillar s of community: 1) Altruism, 2) Reputation; 3) Experience; 4) Pay them (revenue sharing with customers).

+ Authenticity is huge.

+ Weaker boundaries = stronger foundations.”

+ Hip hop as “sustainable sell-out,” a “powerful form of collective action.”

+UN Secretary Gen3eral Kofi Annan recognized hip hop as an international language.

+ Flash mobs

+ Create a virus and feed it: 1) Audeince makes the rules, 2) Avoid limelight, speak only to the audience; 3) Feed the virus; 4) Let it die.

Conclusion: our youth have a new world view, empowered by global information technology, and they are the pinnacle of incredibly efficient networks.

I am just totally blown away by this book. The author has written a manifesto of enormous import.

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

5 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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.

Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

Review: A Letter to America