Reading :: Revolutionary Wealth

Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Alvin Toffler has been open, particularly in the preface to Powershift, about the fact that his wife Heidi is his coauthor even on the books that bear only his name. For whatever reason, after Powershift, her name started appearing on spines as well as in prefaces. The line of reasoning, however, is still the same - their 2006 book Revolutionary Wealth works within the framework established in previous books dating all the way back to 1970's Future Shock. But, like the other books, it extends that framework to new areas - here, to the question of wealth creation in the 21st century.

The Tofflers acknowledge that new technologies will continue to produce wealth. But they argue that "to forecast the future of wealth, we also need to look not just at the work we do for money but at the unpaid work we all do as 'prosumers'" - that is, work we do as we consume. This blog is one example - but others include Amazon and YouTube reviews, amateur astronomy, and tweeting about speed traps (my examples, not theirs). "Because prosuming is set to explode, the future of the money economy can no longer be understood, let alone forecast, apart from that of the prosumer economy. The two, in fact, are inseparable. Together they form a wealth system" (p.5). So far the Tofflers sound a lot like others who have written about open source, wikis, and other aspects of the new economy. They further postulate that since the US is in the forefront of this shift to a new economy, perhaps that change is at the root of rising anti-Americanism (p.6). (Side note: Phillip Bobbitt argues in The Shield of Achilles, which I will soon review, that the US is leading a move from nation-states to market-states. The argument is somewhat related, but not the same.) They invoke Robert Reich in noting the changes afoot: redefined disciplines, loss of work/life boundaries, porous organizations, transdisciplinarity, and mashups (p.8).

So what do they mean by wealth? “Wealth, in its most general sense, is anything that fulfills needs or wants. And a wealth system is the way wealth is created, whether as money or not” (p.19). They relate wealth to the “waves” described in The Third Wave: The first wealth system was agriculture (p.20; glossed as “growing things” on p.23), the second was industrialism (p.21; glossed as “making things” on p.23), and the third, emerging one is knowledge (p.22; glossed as “serving, thinking, knowing, and experiencing” on p.23). A wealth system, they argue, needs a host society and culture – but these are shaken when two wealth systems collide (p.23).

What goes into a wealth system? The Tofflers propose that there are many “fundamentals,” but only a few “deep fundamentals,” that is, “some fundamentals [that] are so vital to wealth creation that they matter in all economies, at all stages of development, in all cultures and every civilization, past or present” (p.26). These include work (not the same as a job) (p.27) and division of labor (p.27). They also include time, space, and knowledge; these three are covered in their own sections later in the book.

Time, for instance, is covered in Ch.5-8. The Tofflers argue that industrial-age bureaucracies are slowing the move to the new wealth system (p.31). In an open system, it’s impossible to totally synchronize all parts. So what happens when one institution leaves the others behind? Using the analogy of cars on the road, the Tofflers evaluate business (100 mph), civil society (including NGOs) (90 mph), the family (60 mph), labor unions (30 mph), government bureaucratic and regulatory agencies (25 mph), schools (10 mph), global governance (5 mph), political structure in rich countries (3 mph), and law (1 mph) (pp.32-39). We must, they conclude, invent new-style institutions that can keep up and synchronize better (p.40).

Part of that shift involves thinking of labor in new ways. The measure of labor productivity as output per hour, they argue, is a Second Wave measure (p.53). But in a Third Wave economy, each interval of time is worth more than the last (p.55). We’re moving toward customized, personalized time (p.56): a shift to continuous-flow operations that enable individualized consumption schedules, leading in turn to irregular time, demassified time (p.59). (Think about the choice of, say, recording American Idol on Tivo, then tuning in 45 minutes late so that you can fast forward through Kara’s comments.) The interrelated shifts of “acceleration, irregularization, and continuous flow” are changing the landscape of wealth creation, they argue, and “push us farther toward ad-hocracy – the shift away from permanent or long-lasting organizational structures in business to one-shot, short-term organizational formats” (pp.59-60).

Enough on time; let’s talk about space. The Tofflers argue that “wealth, as never before, is on the move” (p.63). Digitalization, for instance, doesn’t transcend space, but it does speed up and facilitate wealth creation (p.66). Partially for that reason, when outsourcing happens, it tends to go to places with political stability and infrastructure as well as labor costs (p.69).

Knowledge is the third deep fundamental. Unlike agriculture and industry, knowledge can be used by many simultaneously (p.99). Knowledge is non-rival; intangible; nonlinear; relational; mates with other knowledge; more profitable than any other product; compressible into symbols or abstractions; storable in smaller and smaller spaces; explicit or implicit; and hard to bottle up (pp.100-101). Increasingly, knowledge becomes part of every job. Learning becomes continual-flow and knowledge has a limited shelf life (p.111). Unfortunately, the Tofflers don’t say much on learning; more unfortunately, they detour into a fairly thin attack on postmodernism in Ch.20, apparently not having read much Latour.

In the next section, the Tofflers tackle prosuming, the invisible economy (p.152). One example is that of the patient who comes to the doctor armed with Internet research, influenced by pop culture and commercials, and full of “take charge” attitude (p.165). But prosuming also gives us a competitive advantage in hypercompetition, which has fueled a shift from sequential to simultaneous activity (p.168). Prosuming increases “producivity,” that is, it increases the growth of the money economy (p.194). Their example is that of the PC gurus who informally help new users get up to speed. Prosumers perform unpaid work; buy capital goods; lend their tools and capital to users in the money economy; improve the housing stock; “marketize” products, services, skills; “demarketize” the same; create value as volunteers; provide valuable free information to for-profit companies; increase the power of consumers; accelerate innovation; create and disseminate knowledge rapidly; and raise children to work in the labor force (pp.199-201). Personally, I think the Tofflers are trying to commoditize everything here, including child-rearing, but I suppose they are trying to look at all factors of wealth creation.

Let’s skip a bit. The Tofflers tread ground that should be familiar to readers of this blog, arguing that capitalism’s assumption of limited supply is challenged by endlessly reproducible intangibles (p.256); suggesting, like Alinsky and Drucker, that stockholders are the realization of the people owning the means of production (pp.259-260); arguing that customized products result in customized prices (p.268); and reviewing the many forms of para-money that are springing up as alternatives to money (p.278). They predict pay-by-the-minute work (see www.odesk.com) (p.281).

Toward the end of the book, in Ch.44-48, they look at the prospects and dangers for various parts of the globe (China, Japan, Europe, US, misc.). The picture is mixed. They end with an epilogue in which they question the notion of counting jobs – a notion that seems meaningless given the prosumer work, shared jobs, and other changes in work (p.383). They also have other very Toffleresque thoughts about the future, most of which you can imagine if you’ve read their other work. I don’t mean to sound dismissive – the Tofflers’ work is of such scope and within such an established framework that they have been able to make some solid arguments and predictions. But by the same coin, these arguments and predictions are in themselves relatively predictable.

So what’s the takeaway? The book is solid, and provides some characteristically systematic thinking about what various changes mean for wealth creation in the future. I’m not sure I’d put it at the top of my reading list, but it’s worth reading.

Reading :: Powershift

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century
By Alvin Toffler

Powershift is the 1990 followup to 1970's Future Shock and 1980's The Third Wave. As Toffler tells us in the preface, whereas Future Shock looked at the process of change and The Third Wave took up the directions of change, "Powershift deals with the control of changes still to come" (p.xix). The three books form a trilogy that attempts to outline what was then the future: the impending 21st century.

And like the other parts of this trilogy, Powershift sometimes seems quite prescient about this future. For instance, Toffler argues that "closely held specialists' knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it" (p.8). We might think of several 21st century examples here: Rathergate comes to mind, but so does WebMD; the Iranian protests coordinated in part via Twitter and Facebook; and Climategate. If some of these examples make you want to object that specialists' knowledge is sometimes twisted and misconstrued, yes, you're beginning to see a problem with what Toffler is describing: when knowledge escapes its customary boundaries, it's not simply a wayward package, it's interpreted. Multiply the number of interpreters and the number of backgrounds from which they draw, and you don't just get redistributed power, you also get ambiguities and distrust. In any case, it's certainly a "powershift."

In The Third Wave, Toffler argued that the world had undergone three major waves of change based on three objects of human work: agriculture, industry, and knowledge. Here, he argues that each of these waves is associated with a type of power: violence (force), wealth (cash), and knowledge (culture) (p.12). These are additive: the first-wave source of power, violence, has never gone out of style, but it's now layered under the other two sources (p.16). Toffler specifies the definition of power for purposes of future discussion: "purposeful power over people. ... the use of violence, wealth, and knowledge (in the broadest sense) to make people perform in a given way" (p.14). Unlike the other two sources, though, knowledge is more flexible, not finite, and simultaneously usable by many; therefore, knowledge is the most "democratic" source of power (p.19). It's also the highest quality source of power, he argues, compared to violence (low-quality) and wealth (medium-quality) (p.41). Indeed, wealth in particular is undergoing a transformation due to knowledge: the investor (capitalist) is alienated from the source of her wealth (p.59; cf. Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society). And the finite character of capital, he says, is over: something that explodes classical and Marxist assumptions about capital (p.59; cf. Zuboff & Maxmin in The Support Economy).

Toffler also makes the now-familiar argument that "skills are now so varied and fast-changing that workers can't be interchanged as easily or cheaply as in the past" (p.71). All work now has knowledge work and service work components (p.73).

Later, Toffler notes that once, the manufacturer stood between the retailer and consumer, controlling information to both (p.93). But the UPC shifted information control to the retailer by allowing them to examine the many dynamics of retail (from shelf space to placement) at great speed and scale (p.95). More recently, customers have begun paying partially in data (think loyalty cards), data that further accrues to the retailers (p.97). As Toffler says a little later in the book - sounding exactly like Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society - "it is knowledge about knowledge that counts the most" (p.124).

Let's skip ahead a little. Toffler [was "Drucker", fixed 2010.03.10] argues that superior organization is a strategic weapon, the most important weapon in a Third Wave world (p.161). And this "is what today's attack on bureaucracy is all about" (p.161). He characterizes bureaucracies as having two key features, two routine controls: cubbyholes (held by specialists) and channels (held by managers) (p.162). Cubbyholes are places where "specialized information and personal experience are stored"; and with demassification, organizations have become more complex, meaning that more information is trapped in cubbyholes (p.163). Channels are places where information is interpreted and shared: "in every bureaucracy, information is broken apart horizontally and put back together vertically" (p.168). But a faster pace, with more information, means that these channels are choked (p.168). These two features of the bureaucracy are bottlenecks, and in Toffler's view, they are leading to a crash.

So how might an organization develop if it develops away from a bureaucratic organization? One way is the "flex-firm" of small family businesses based at home (p.176). Toffler argues that "huge firms will become more dependent than in the past on a vast substructure of tiny but high-powered and flexible suppliers" such as flex-firms (p.178). Toffler associates flex-firms with "networks" (p.182) but cautions that many other forms are available.

This brings us to those other organizational forms. Toffler identifies several.

• "The pulsating organization": organizations such as the US Census Bureau, which "expands and contracts in a regular rhythm" (p.187). He sees ad-hocracies (such as taskforces or project teams) as one-pulse organizations (p.187).
• "The two-faced organization": a unit that can shift from hierarchical to nonhierarchical command to meet demand (p.188).
• "The checkerboard organization": Alternating categories of people at each level of a hierarchy, as when a Japanese bank in California "alternates Japanese and Americans at each level of the hierarchy" (p.190).
• "The commissar organization": Ensuring that each level of a hierarchy has two or more information channels. Toffler likens these to Soviet Army units with political officers, and suggests that they represent CEOs' desparate bids to keep control in a bureaucracy (pp.190-191).
• "The buro-baronial organization": Feudal organization in large hierarchies (e.g., universities, and to some extent accounting houses and the military). The "barons" feud with each other and form alliances (p.191).
• "The skunkworks organization": "Here a team is handed a loosely specified problem or goal, given resources, and allowed to operate outside the normal company rules" (p.192). "The skunkwork format is inherently and militantly antibureaucratic" (p.193).
• "The self-start team": These emerge without formal sanction or organization and "can function only in an atmosphere that gives individuals considerable autonomy" (p.194). Toffler links these to electronic media.

Toffler argues that this high level of diversity requires new styles of leadership (p.194).

Toffler also cautions that the term "networks" has been overused, becoming a panacea (p.195). He sees flex-form as a broader concept that includes networks. And he foresees the atomization of the company into a consortium of independent contractors and free entrepreneurs (p.198).

This new form of work, he argues, involves new organizations and new discipline (p.205). A heavier load of information requires that the knowledge load be distributed through the managerial ranks. Workers have to continually learn, unlearn, and relearn (p.206). And, as Toffler intimated earlier, it becomes harder to replace the individual: training takes longer, and individuals work in teams that must reach some measure of trust and cohesion (p.208). Along these lines, he predicts that the trend of offshoring labor will reverse because speed will become more important than the low expense (p.392) - a prediction that does not seem to have panned out widely.

Given all that, Toffler makes various policy suggestions, most notably an aggressive buildout of national digital infrastructure (p.400).

My thoughts? It's fascinating to read Toffler's books to see how we've developed differently. As in his other books, he's gotten several things right in Powershift. I'm particularly interested in how he's attempted to build a taxonomy of emerging organizational types, although I'm not sure how useful this taxonomy is. I'm also interested in how closely this text sometimes parallels Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, which was published a few years later. On the other hand, I think Drucker actually underestimates some of the complications of more pervasive digital information, particularly in undermining (in some cases, further undermining) public trust in political, scientific, corporate, and academic institutions. Nevertheless, a fascinating read.

My SXSWi panel ...

... is described on sxsw.com. If you're going to be at SXSW, come on by.

(Upcoming)

I've been quite buried in other work, including writing two articles, putting together a South by Southwest presentation, conducting some primary research, and - today - grading. But I haven't forgotten the blog, and soon I hope to review these books:

• Toffler, Powershift
• Toffler & Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth
• Heckscher & Adler, The Firm as a Collaborative Community
• Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles

I also have these books on my shelf, waiting for me to get to them once I finish Bobbitt's massive effort. No promises on when or in what order.

• Burt, Neighbor Networks
• Bazerman et al., Traditions of Writing Research
• Foot & Schneider, Web Campaigning

The common thread here is how people use texts to connect their organizations and how the logics and values of digitally mediated organizations can look different from those mediated by other sorts of texts. I'm still developing this line of thought, and I realize that Eisenstein's The Printing Press as Agent of Change would probably help - but after Bobbitt, I need something less weighty. So I'm sending Eisenstein back to the library for now.

Also being shipped to me are Byron Hawk's award-winning book on the history of composition (which doesn't exactly fit the arc described above) and several Oxford titles (which do).

Spring break is coming up in a week, so hopefully I can find some reading/blogging time after SXSW. Watch this space.

Coworking in Austin: Cospace

Yesterday, Cospace opened its doors at 911 W. Anderson Ln, Ste 203. It's at the southwest corner of Anderson and Lamar, just across from the iconic bingo parlor.

From Coworking: Cospace

Unlike the other coworking spaces in Austin, this one is in an office park. Other businesses in the building include a video game store, some restaurants, and the Whataburger Learning Center.

From Coworking: Cospace

Here it is, on the second floor: Suite 203. They haven't put up a sign yet.

From Coworking: Cospace

But as you get closer, you see the familiar sticker:

From Coworking: Cospace

Cospace occupies an office that belonged to a graphic design firm for many years. Two vintage drafting tables still stand at the entrance.

From Coworking: Cospace

Peek around the wall and you see an expansive open-plan space with high ceilings, plenty of natural light, and tables that are already being filled. As the space expands, Andrew and Kirtus tell me, they will simply add more tables.

From Coworking: Cospace

From Coworking: Cospace

Along one wall, cubbies present a slightly more private environment with locking cabinets.

From Coworking: Cospace

A "fishbowl" breakroom is here too. Glass walls mean that you can socialize (or make phone calls) in relative quiet, while still seeing everyone.

From Coworking: Cospace

From Coworking: Cospace

Cospace has a variety of spaces available. If you need a private office, one is being rented out, but others are up for grabs. This one is serving as a temporary space for furniture.

From Coworking: Cospace

This one is a small conference room.

From Coworking: Cospace

And here's the larger conference room, which will soon have a projector - and an XBox.

From Coworking: Cospace

If you've seen the other coworking spaces in Austin, you'll notice how different this one is. It has a less eclectic, more businesslike feel and more mixed spaces. It is more similar to a traditional office environment, and I could easily see coworkers having meetings with relatively conservative clients here. At the same time, the natural light floods in - I don't think they even bothered with the overhead lights - and the atmosphere is friendly and open. Proprietors and coworkers alike were palpably excited. They see possibilities all over the place: from hosting meetings to holding social events to simply hanging out and bonding. If you're interested in coworking and live on the north side, I highly recommend you check it out.

Global Guerillas, Tea Parties

"The Tea Party movement in the US is an open source political protest," John Robb declares today on his Global Guerillas blog. Robb, author of Brave New War and analyst of fourth-generation warfare, sees the Tea Party movement as very similar to fourth-generation warfare, particularly in terms of "systems disruption" and swarming. Furthermore, Robb argues that although the Tea Party has been portrayed as a Republican proxy or at least a Republican gain, it's not:

Traditionally, a failure by the government would result in a gain by the opposition party. However, the peculiar dynamics of the two party system in the US works against this. The two parties have converged into a single dominant party with roughly similar agendas. Further, these parties have rigged the system to prevent third party formation. As a result, there isn't a structured process to absorb this movement into the political system.

Robb sketches out some possible repercussions, none of which are solidly positive for Republicans.

I generally agree with this assessment, although clearly Republicans are trying to use the Tea Party to short-term advantage. It's not like Republicans are solid fiscal conservatives either. Ideologically, there's a mismatch, but the mismatch is much stronger at the level of organization. The networked character of the Tea Party, as Robb suggests, is very interesting, more interesting to me than the specific politics.

Last August, I wrote about the related protests at the health care town halls, using Castells, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, and others to theorize the movement's organization and to tie it into previous protests from other ideological quarters. See that post for more on how the movement appears to be organized. And if you're looking for a dissertation topic, I can't think of one that is more fascinating or timely.

Design workshop this Monday, Feb. 1, 7pm, at Texas Coworking

Interesting to see two separate groups meeting like this.

If you're in Austin, the next Design Workshop is today, February 1st, from 7 to 9pm at Texas Coworking. See http://vi.to/practice-ux/ for details. I can't come tonight, but I highly recommend that you do!

Coworking in Austin: Texas Coworking

Recently, I saw a tweet from someone I've been following on Twitter for a while: "Texas Coworking now open at 200 East Sixth, see http://texascoworking.comfor details on this new Austin coworking space"

The tweeter was Paul Terry Walhus, who runs Spring.net and has been a fixture in the Austin tech (and coworking) scene for a while. Along with Derek Williams, a "serial startup engineer" and data consultant, Walhus has rented a space on the third floor of the historic Hannig Row building - across from Buffalo Billiards and the Driskill Hotel on East 6th Street.

As Walhus told me, they had not really planned to open a space - although they had wanted one. They had gone to Conjunctured for meetings, and they liked the idea. But this space opportunity fell in their laps: they found out about the space, moved quickly ("rent is cheap" in the downturn), and signed the lease on the December 31. Consequently, they have not been able to build a community before opening their coworking space, as is typical coworking practice. But that doesn't seem to have hurt them: They already have five clients, mostly women, mostly creatives ranging from web development to handcrafts. And they've maintained good relations with other coworking spaces: proprietors from Conjunctured, Cospace, and LINK Coworking had already contacted them and either toured or planned to tour. They had also discussed a local version of a coworking visa, in which people who purchase one membership can work in other spaces.

Part of what makes this cooperation work - and, I suspect, what will make the coworking visa relatively unused - is the diversity of these spaces. As I've suggested in earlier blog posts, every coworking space seems to be different, not just in configuration, but also in philosophy and clientele.

At Texas Coworking, the configuration is interesting and so is the location. (They have their own picture gallery, but I took my own, shown below.) A spacious board room can accommodate - and has already accommodated - meetings of local organizations. Indeed, it's central to the space, since the proprietors envision a Day mode (coworking) and a Night mode (local tech events).

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

A terrace overlooks Austin's famous Sixth Street and the Austin Convention Center, home of South by Southwest, a few blocks away. Perfect for hosting SXSW Interactive parties and gatherings, they tell me.

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

Inside, Texas Coworking offers an open-plan area, cubicles, and dedicated offices with a view on Sixth Street. The plan is to offer differential pricing.

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

Texas Coworking also offers a kitchen and a dedicated server room (not shown). The server room - and professional data management and security - provide a service that is so far unique among coworking spaces in Austin. The server room will house Linux and Windows 2008 servers, it will have a dedicated "IT guy," and it will allow Texas Coworking to offer a dozen dedicated IP addresses. Naturally, Ethernet ports lead to all rooms.

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

The former space owner, a design firm, decided to "go virtual." Walhus tells me that they have contacted the owner and invited her to cowork there.

At the front, the Texas Coworking sign is not up yet, and they don't yet have a concierge - a concierge who will connect people, getting to know clients and finding opportunities for them to collaborate. The physical mail slots, however, are already there and waiting to be filled.

From Coworking: Texas Coworking

Other amenities will include a jobs board.

So the physical amenities are good already and will improve as the proprietors remodel and implement their other plans. The location is fantastic - if you like working in downtown Austin or if you are involved in an event at the Austin Community Center. The terrace and boardroom are major draws for social and business meetings.

Philosophically, the space is a bit different from others I've discussed here. It seems to fall somewhere between the co-op style of Conjunctured, which caters to independent professionals, and the concierge-style approach of LINK, which caters to telecommuters. But the clientele currently leans toward independent professionals. And the differential spaces, with differential pricing, suggests a hybrid between coworking and executive suites.

Another differentiator is the concierge. Whereas other Austin coworking spaces rely primarily on space planning and coworkers themselves to make connections, Texas Coworking's proprietors see the concierge fulfilling part of that function.

In sum, Texas Coworking is an exciting entry into the coworking space here in Austin. While holding true to the general idea of coworking, they have differentiated themselves from the other spaces and expanded the possibilities of coworking for independent professionals. I'm looking forward to visiting the space more often.

Writing Research Across Borders 2011

If you're interested in writing research, please consider Writing Research Across Borders. It's a terrific international conference focused specifically on writing research. I went last time and it was fantastic. And of course I'll be going again.

More information:

• February 17-20, 2011
• George Mason University
• Washington D.C./Northern Virginia

The proposal deadline is May 3, so get cracking!

My SXSWi panel: What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work

Some of you may have been following my research on coworking in Austin, part of a larger arc of research into loose organizations that perform knowledge work. I'm happy to announce that my South by Southwest Interactive panel has been accepted. We'll be presenting on "What Coworking Tells Us about the Future of Work" on March 15 here in Austin.

Besides me, the panel includes:

Drew Jones

http://shift101.com/

http://shiftworkspace.com/

Drew is a trained anthropologist and consultant who has been studying how work is changing as Gen Y takes over the workforce. He's involved in a consuntancy, Shift101, and a related coworking space, Shift Workspace. Drew literally (co)wrote the book on coworking and another on innovation.

Gary Swart

http://www.odesk.com

Gary is CEO of oDesk Corporation. oDesk facilitates connecting, maintaining, and building trust among online workteams. Gary will talk about the practical challenges of "loosely coupled, highly aligned teams working remotely, including our own use case of 70+ remote resources working directly for oDesk from around the world."

Liz Elam

http://www.linkedin.com/in/lizelam

http://www.linkcoworking.com/

Liz is a former global account manager at Dell, but now she is about to unveil her own coworking space in Austin. Liz brings a hard-nosed business sensibility to coworking and seeks to accommodate teleworkers at large local companies. Whereas Drew has examined coworking as an anthropological phenomenon, Liz has researched it thoroughly from a for-profit business perspective.

I'm really thrilled about the panel. Hope you can make it.

UPDATE: The panel is scheduled for 11am in Hilton H.

Coworking in Austin: A New Map

View Coworking spaces in Austin in a larger map

In the Pipeline

Here's what's coming up:

• Looking through my recent blog posts, I was surprised to discover that I haven't blogged a review of Heckscher and Adler's The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy, which I read a month or so back. I'll try to post a review soon.
• I'm finishing Toffler and Toffler's Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives and will blog it soon.
• I'll also read Toffler's Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, which I believe will complete their oeuvre.
  
• Finally, I'm planning to review a fourth activity theory collection, van Oers et al.'s The Transformation of Learning: Perspectives from Activity Theory.
  

After that? We'll see.

Reading :: Critical Perspectives on Activity

Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work, and Everyday Life
Edited by Peter H. Sawchuck, Newton Duarte, and Mohamed Elhammoumi

I went on an activity theory reading binge recently, reading three newish collections (a fourth is in the queue). Unlike the others I've reviewed so far, this one is not explicitly centered around Engestromian third-generation activity theory. Rather, it's part of the broader CHAT tradition anchored in Vygotsky, Luria, Leont'ev, and later Russian psychologists, and it's oriented more toward issues of education than it is toward working. So it's not as intrinsically interesting to me as the last two collections, but it still had some bright moments.

In their introduction, Sawchuk, Duarte, and Elhammoumi call activity theory "the most comprehensive analytic framework for analyzing human practice and learning currently available" (p.2) and discuss how this framework can be made more comprehensive by applying it to various issues and problems. One is, of course, the "broader societal debate over the nature of 'knowledge economies' and, by now, one of the most frequently discussed policy issues of all, 'lifelong learning'" (p.2). This is the third of the three AT books I've read that focus explicitly on addressing knowledge work, as my own recent book Network has done, so I'm glad to see the trend. At the same time, the editors want "to express a type of 'critical' perspective on activity and to recover, express, and press forward many of the original Marxist elements of the Cultural Historical tradition" (p.4). After all, they say, "Marxist dialectics is not a generic theory of change. It is a theory of change that is rooted in actualities of particular historical epochs. In our current historical context, it is a theory of change within and beyond capitalism specifically" (p.8).

Marxism plays a big role in many of the contributions. In Elhammoumi's "Is there a Marxist psychology," for instance, he argues that Vygotsky is more like psychology's Feuerbach than its Marx: Vygotsky and his successors were not able to move to radical categories beyond the pre-Marxist ones (p.24). In particular, activity theory should be based on a Marxist concept of spatio-temporality (p.31) and move beyond the individual as a starting point, starting instead with the "individual-form" (p.33).

Lompscher's "The Cultural-Historical Activity Theory" reviews the three stages of CHAT, then suggests that CHAT needs a fourth stage (p.35). The chapter provides a dense account of the three stages (the third of which is Engestromian AT; p.47). Then he argues that the computer has not been sufficiently theorized in any of the stages. In particular, third-generation AT characterizes the computer as a tool (p.49).

However, over the last few decades, the computer has become the new leading productive power (Haug, 2003: 38), penetrating and transforming all aspects and domains of production, including management, distribution, consumption, scientific research, and so on, and producing a new stage and mode of capitalist production - the transnational high-tech capitalism (the title of Haug's book) with the Internet as its medium. National and international economic processes have changed and continue to change dramatically with serious and far-reaching political consequences across the globe. As a result, human activity is changing in all spheres, including the borders between men's and women's work, between outside and self-regulation, and between work and learning, as well as between work and leisure time. (p.49)

That is, the knowledge society/information society/knowledge work/high-tech capitalism poses challenges to AT, challenges that AT has not addressed well because AT has still not theorized digital technologies beyond labeling them as tools. Not surprisingly, Lompscher cites Ruckreim (p.50; not Ruckreim's recent piece in Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory, but apparently a similar piece). He ends by expressing hope that AT can be found to be compatible with systems theory and media theory (p.50).

Ray McDermott and Jean Lave take up the question of another knowledge society characteristic, lifelong learning, in their chapter "Estranged Labor Learning." Yes, "Labor" is struck out; McDermott and Lave steal a page from Marx here, rewriting his essay "Estranged Labor" with learning in mind (p.92). As they explain in their framing, Marx argued that the more wealth the worker produces, the poorer he becomes - and that labor produces itself and the laborer as commodities (p.90). Similarly, they argue, school children are alienated from their own learning because learning can be measured only relatively to others (p.91).

Skipping ahead, in the chapter "Contradictory Class Relations in Work and Learning," Livingstone focuses on learning organizations in the knowledge society (p.149). "Dominant claims for the emergence of a knowledge-based economy remain suspect in terms of the restricted power most workers have to develop their knowledge and skill in capitalist workplaces, but most potential workers appear to be making concerted efforts to develop them nonetheless" (p.149). Yet "The socialization of the forces of knowledge production" is "a continual challenge to private capitalist efforts ... to control the social relations of knowledge production" (p.150). He argues that "This opposition between socialized forces and private relations of knowledge production is the fundamental contradiction of knowledge development and learning in advanced capitalist societies" (p.150). In response, he says that unions "continue to represent the most sustainable organizational sites for collective development of independent working-class consciousness" (p.158).

Paul Adler's "From Labor Process to Activity Theory" compares the two theories, using a case involving the rationalization of software development. Labor theory, based on Braverman, has recently lost ground to postmodernist theories (p.160), and Adler argues that one reason is that whereas LPT predicted mass deskilling, capitalist development has involved upskilling (p.160). Adler promises a more dialectical reading of Marx to explain this development.

Engestrom contributes the chapter "Values, Rubbish, and Workplace Learning," in which he draws on rubbish theory - which follows the nature, paths, and steps of movement that transform objects from products to rubbish to durables (pp.194-195). After all, Engestrom says, in AT "values at work are embedded in the object of the activity" and "being embedded in multiple activities simultaneously, objects have lives of their own and resist goal-rational attempts at control and prediction. Negotiations of objects are always also negotiations of values and motives - not just of 'what' but also of 'why,' 'for whom,' and 'where to'" (p.194). So Engestrom draws on rubbish theory, interprets it in third-generation AT terms, and applies lessons back to AT.

As a whole, the collection is solid, but I had a hard time getting enthusiastic about it. For me, the most interesting parts were the ones that focused on developing activity theory to address knowledge society challenges. But much of the book looked back to the past, burrowing deeper into Marx's original work, grounded in early industrialism, rather than aggressively adapting AT for the present.

Reading :: War and Anti-War

War and Anti-War: Making Sense of Today's Global Chaos
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Reading through the network warfare literature some time ago, I was a little startled to see that Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote the foreword to Arquilla and Ronfeldt's In Athena's Camp and that their own book on war, War and Anti-War, was mentioned. I had heard of their other books, but not this one. But as I subsequently learned, David Ronfeldt was influenced by the Tofflers' work early on. I soon picked up this book and read it over Christmas break - and spotted some familiar themes.

Just as their later book Creating a New Civilization focused on applying Third Wave concepts to politics, this book applied those concepts to warfare. That is, the Tofflers have latched hold on a big idea and have explored various permutations in their later books. In this particular instance, they were inspired to write the book after learning that "a group of American generals were busy reading our 1980 book, The Third Wave" (p.8). They argue that the shift from second- to third-wave civilizations means a shift to a new kind of economy and a new kind of warfare (p.3, 9). Indeed, they say, we get a military revolution only when a new civilization challenges the old and changes occur at every level simultaneously (p.34).

They develop these themes, postulating that "Throughout history, the way men and women make war has reflected the way they work" (p.35). First Wave warfare was about agriculture: annexing more land and labor, or else devastate the agriculture of the enemy (p.38). Second Wave warfare involved standardizing everything - military training, organizational doctrine, weapons, people - and massing for the counterpart of mass production: mass destruction (p.43). But third-wave warfare is about knowledge. That means de-massification, heterogeneity, speed. More specifically, it means activating the entire battlefield instead of sweeping linearly, and it means closely integrating air and ground forces (p.60). Exhibit A is the Gulf War, in which the US used both Second-Wave and Third-Wave actions to defeat a Second-Wave force. For instance, the US used both Second-Wave attrition bombing and Third-Wave pinpoint bombing (smart bombs) (p.76). The US deepened the battlefield in all dimensions: distance, altitude, time (p.78). The emphasis was not on hitting the "front" but on hitting command and communication points, sidelining backups so that they couldn't get to the point of battle, synchronizing the US' combined operations, and establishing total battlefield awareness (p.78). (For a discussion of how the Iraqis learned from this encounter, see John Robb's Brave New War.)

The Tofflers emphasize that Third Wave warfare resembles its work: the workforce and war force change in tandem (p.87). For instance, decision authority gets pushed to lower levels, which in the Gulf War meant field commanders. (See John Arquilla's argument in Worst Enemy that command could be pushed even lower.) But they also expect a radical diversification of kinds of wars (p.95) and niche threats, just as we have niche products (p.104). For instance, they mention terrorists and narco-warlords, against which a country cannot massively retaliate (p.122); spoofing satellite information to make it impossible for Third Wave forces to distinguish between friends and enemies (p.121); and robot wars that automate the battlefield just as they have the factory (p.125), leaving human soldiers as the "varsity squad" of war (p.128). All these scenarios have either come true or are in the works.

Third Wave armies, like Third Wave workers, must emphasize de-learning and re-learning as well as using knowledge to substitute for other resources (p.172). "Spin" or propaganda becomes incredibly important (p.194; see Arquilla's Worst Enemy again, as well as Bullets & Blogs). In particular, they foresee decentralized media (which are realized today in blogs and tweets) and "telecomputers" (which are realized in today's smart phones) could vastly multiply a Rodney King moment (p.199; see Bullets & Blogs for a concrete example).

And like Castells, Drucker, Arquilla & Ronfeldt, and others, the Tofflers caution that the state will not be the only player in Third-Wave security. Althoughe the UN is a club of nation-states, world events will be influenced by non-national players (p.250). The nation-state has lost its monopoly on violence (p.270), so the kinds of conflicts multiply, and military forces must be tailored - and must partner with nonstate actors such as non-governmental organizations (p.271; 291).

Overall, like many of the Tofflers' books, this one concentrates on the grand sweep rather than the details. At points it is quite speculative. But it syncs surprisingly well with the networked warfare literature of the time and of the present. If you've developed an interest in how warfare is practiced, especially beyond nation-states, check this book out.

I'll be speaking at UT's iSchool on January 26

If you're in Austin, please consider coming to see me speak at UT's School of Information on January 26. I'll be discussing some of my more recent research.

Reading :: Creating a New Civilization

Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Okay, let's talk about the most striking part of this book's cover first. Under the authors' name, the cover tells us: "FOREWORD BY NEWT GINGRICH." The word "GINGRICH" is in exactly the same type and size as the authors' last name.

Does this mean that Creating a New Civilization, published in the same year that Gingrich's Contract With America swept in a Republican majority, (1994) is a Republican text? No. The Tofflers hurriedly deny that they are Republicans, produce their bona fides of the day (they're pro-choice and against school prayer, p.9), and argue that today Left and Right have less meaning; political power is being transferred "away from our formal political structures - the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties - to electronically linked grassroots groups and to the media" (p.8). Gingrich, they say, gets this point (p.10). And in this, the slimmest of all the Tofflers' books, they try to make sure that we get it too. They essentially take the concepts from their 1980 book The Third Wave, review them, and apply them to politics with updated examples.

Some of these examples are startling. Recall that First Wave civilizations are based on agriculture; Second Wave civilizations are based on industrialism; and Third Wave civilizations are based on knowledge. Third Wave civilizations to grow and make things, but they do them so efficiently that the output is greater and the number of people involved in those activities is smaller. (For instance, US farmers are a vanishingly small part of the economy, yet are much more productive than their predecessors.) The real growth is in knowledge and services. Fresh from the first Gulf War, the authors argue that "One of those services might well turn out to be military protection based on [US] command of superior Third Wave forces" (p.31).

The rest of the book makes arguments that are familiar if you've read Castells (although Castells wouldn't be caught dead talking to Gingrich, I suspect) or Drucker. For instance, just as Castells argues that any work that can be routinized (generic labor) will be either outsourced or programmed, Toffler and Toffler argue that "any task that is so repetitive and simple that it can be done without thought is, eventually, a candidate for robotization" (p.57). They argue that therefore the feared practice of "deskilling" is actually trailing-edge, an application of obsolete Second Wave thinking. Like Drucker, they point out that service workers are not well respected, and we must find a way to give them the same respect as we have given to those in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors - and we must get them to increase production (p.53). Also like Drucker, they point out that the rise of knowledge work means heterogeneity and difficulty in finding people with the right skills - "a gynecologist can't do brain surgery" (p.44) - and on the next page they emphasize the role of innovation in the knowledge economy as Castells does (p.45). Finally, like Drucker, they believe that the argument between capitalism and socialism is obsolete (p.67). Although the global economy is unstable, state enterprises are too bureaucratic and slow to adapt, and their performance undermines the legitimacy of the state (p.67). This is a point that seems very fresh just days after the latest failure of our enormous Homeland Security bureaucracy.

And that gets us to politics. In Chapter 7, the authors argue that the Left-Right divide is also obsolete, and the real news is Second vs. Third Wave politics, and both political parties have elements of both: Second Wave politics emphasize "preserving the core institutions of industrial mass society - the nuclear family, the mass education system, the giant corporation, the mass trade union, the centralized nation-state and the politics of pseudorepresentative government" (p.73). In contrast, Third Wave politics recognize that the most urgent problems "can no longer be solved within the framework of an industrial civilization" (p.73). They particularly single out "the Democrats' reflexive reliance on bureaucratic and centralist solutions to problems like the health insurance crisis" (p.75) and they praise the Republican efforts to deregulate, to privatize governmental operations, and to embrace market economics (p.76). Yet the Republicans have their own problems. Both parties are mainlining nostalgia (p.77).

So, in the next chapter, the Tofflers lay out principles for a Third Wave agenda. First, questions for distinguishing Second from Third Wave proposals:

1. Does it resemble a factory?
2. Does it massify society?
3. How many eggs are in the basket?
4. Is it vertical or virtual?
5. Does it empower the home?

And in the next chapter after that, the Tofflers provide suggestions for reconstituting democracy in Third Wave terms. In a demassified society, they say, we are all in a minority and our feedback systems (voting, polls) are consequently too crude. We need to rethink and reconfigure them, the Tofflers argue (p.95). We also need to find ways to represent ourselves - to institute semidirect democracy (p.96). Third, "we need to divide up the decisions and reallocate them - sharing them more widely and switching the site of decision-making as the problems themselves require" (p.100). This recommendation reflects other calls to push power to the edge - say, empowering CIA representatives who talk to a terror suspect's father to communicate directly with counterparts at the TSA. This distribution of power and decision-making is vital, since the decision load is now too high for the elites to handle (p.102). The Tofflers, in fact, believe that democracy becomes an "evolutionary necessity" in a highly complex society because the decision load must be distributed enough to be bearable (p.103).

In sum, this is a highly readable and skimmable book, and unlike the Tofflers' other books, it's only 112 pages. You might think of it as Cliff's Notes for The Third Wave. And the Tofflers restrain themselves from speculating too much about the future. Like the Tofflers' other books, it also sketches an overall vision for the social and organizational changes our globe is facing. On the other hand - again like the Tofflers' other books - some of these concepts are underdeveloped and undertested, and particularly in the sections on politics, I would have liked to see more detail and less glossing. But if you're interested in this line of inquiry, I highly recommend the book.

Reading :: Rules for Radicals

Rules for Radicals
By Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky tells this story about organizing the African-American community against Kodak, which at that time dominated Rochester, NY. What tactics could they use?

I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet. The hundred blacks who would be given the tickets would first be treated to a pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; then the people would go to the symphony hall - with obvious consequences. Imagine the scene when the action began! The concert would be over before the first movement! (If this be a Freudian slip - so be it!) (p.139)

Alinsky reasoned that (a) the protest would ridicule the "prize cultural jewel" of the establishment; (b) it would be entirely legal, so "the law would be completely paralyzed" (p.139); (c) the protesters would enjoy the tactic (p.140).

But he also reasoned that the tactic was proof against the protesters getting cold feet: "But we knew that the baked beans would compel them physically to go through with the tactic regardless of how they felt" (p.141). And here's the striking contradiction in Alinsky's book: yes, its advice involves manipulating the establishment and public opinion, but it also involves manipulating the communities Alinsky organizes. It's a rather pragmatic book, ostensibly bent toward empowering the "Have-Nots," but in implementation it involves empowering the community organizer the most, leading eventually to his or her relinquishment of the reins to the movement leaders.

Rules for Radicals has been in the news a bit lately. Alinsky has been credited as an influence on Barack Obama, who served as a community organizer himself and later wrote a chapter in the edited collection After Alinsky. More recently, freelance investigators on the right have adopted Alinsky's tactics, bringing heat on the organization ACORN. So my interest was piqued, apparently along with everyone else's: I had to wait a while for UT's library to free up a copy.

The book is interesting and provocative, beginning with the dedication: "an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical ... Lucifer." Later, Alinsky compares the book to Machiavelli's The Prince, arguing that while that book was written for those in power, this book "is written for the Have-Nots on how to take [power] away" (p.3). Specifically, the problem is

how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life. (p.3)

This is not an ideological book, he argues (p.4) (and perhaps Breitbart's Big Government is a testament to how the book's tactics can be applied by different ideologies). Indeed, Alinsky seems to assume that transferring power to the Haves is a context-free plus, and he frames the struggle as a simple contest between Haves (and their allies, the Have-a-Little-Want-Mores) and the Have-Nots. In this way, Alinsky is a more limited thinker than Machiavelli, who addressed multiple power centers with competing interests and alliances. Alinsky also sweeps under the rug the obvious next question, which is what to do when the Have-Nots are successful in taking power away - becoming the Haves - or when evenly matched groups take each other on.

In fact, Alinsky's musings on the nature of power itself are unfocused, making a hash out of the term, eventually exclaiming that "life without power is death; a world without power would be a ghostly wasteland, a dead planet!" (p.53). These musings are hardly great philosophy, but that's all right: Alinsky's genius is not in philosophy nor in ideology, but in amoral bare-knuckle political tactics.

Although the "rules" that have been popularly cited reside in the chapter "Tactics," let's start with the earlier rules of Means and Ends in the chapter "Means and Ends." These rules purport to be descriptive of all conflict rather than prescriptive, and they include the following:

1. "one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue" and "varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of the conflict" (p.26)
2. "the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment" (p.26)
3. "in war the end justifies almost any means" (p.29)
4. "judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point" (p.30)
5. "concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa" (p.32). Side note: here, he tells a story in which he had the chance to "out" a gay opponent, and he refused to do so - but he declares that if that had been the only tactic he could have used, he would have done so "unreservedly" (p.33)
6. "the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means" (p.34)
7. "generally success and failure is a mighty determinant of ethics" (p.34)
8. "the morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory (p.34; Alinsky points to dropping the A-Bomb on Japan)
9. "any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical" (p.35)
10. "do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments" (p.36; he argues that Machiavelli's greatest weakness is his blindness to the necessity of moral garments, p.43)

Given these rules, which are taken as givens that all parties will follow and rationalize, Alinsky wants to put aside any pretense of strict ethics or morality and build strong organizations that will win. The name of the game is building a large organization - and here, Alinsky's approach is more like Maoist guerilla warfare than asymmetrical warfare. It shows its roots in the 1960s and 1970s (the book was written in 1973 and is sprinkled with slang of the time: "Who's the cat?" "What's his bag?" (p.98)). Alinsky argues strongly that single-issue organizations are by their nature small and transient, too small and transient to do much good; rather, community organizers should concentrate on building multi-issue organizations in which people support each others' goals (p.77). So the emphasis is on establishing the organizer as a feared adversary of the establishment (p.100), then crystallizing a core group that accumulates members through defining grievances and mutually supporting redress of those grievances (p.105). The only issue at the beginning of the movement is to bring in more recruits (p.113).

Alinsky warns that community organization is always preceded by community disorganization: attacking the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community (p.116). The function of the community organizer is to compel negotiation. "In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems," Alinsky tells us, clarifying that everyone has a plight, but "what the organizer does is to convert the plight into a problem," which is "something you can do something about" (p.119). And he acknowledges here that "in a highly mobile, urbanized society the word 'community' means community of interests, not physical community" (p.120). So the community organizer creates a problem, identifies or creates a community that shares it, crystallizes and organizes that community by disorganizing the current patterns governing the actors' relations, then grows the organization in a way that it learns - because "without the learning process, the building of an organization becomes simply the substitution of one power group for another" (p.125). In other words, Alinsky is describing something that sounds a lot like interessement.

A side note. Alinsky valorizes the community organizer considerably, and himself in particular. He tells a number of stories that follow this pattern: Alinsky meets with representatives of a community that are suspicious of him (Mexican-Americans in California, First Nation in Canada); he gratuitously insults them; they respect him because they believe he is treating them as equals rather than patronizing them. He exhorts would-be community organizers to do the same. And here's a key similarity that Rules for Radicals shares with The Prince: so much of this advice boils down to "it depends." How do you gratuitously insult your hosts while conveying that you are doing it because they are your equals? How do you apply tactics in a particular situation? Like Machiavelli, Alinsky puts forth a number of working principles, but doesn't - can't - provide hard guidance on how to implement them (see p.138).

And that brings us to the famous chapter on Tactics. "Tactics means doing what you can with what you have," Alinsky declares (p.127), and lists the now-famous rules:

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have" (p.128)
2. "Never go outside the experience of your people" (p.128)
3. "Whenever possible go outside of the experience of your enemy" (p.128)
4. "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules" (p.128)
5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon" (p.128)
6. "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy" (p.128)
7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag" (p.128)
8. "Keep the pressure on" (p.128)
9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself" (p.129)
10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition" (p.129)
11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside" (p.129; example: passive resistance)
12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative" (p.130)
13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it" (p.130)

Here, sounding like George W. Bush, he quotes Christ: "He that is not with me is against me" (p.134). And he offers these points:

• "The real action is in the enemy's reaction." (p.136)
• "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength" (p.136)
• "Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with the action" (p.136)

The chapter winds down with miscellaneous advice. For instance, he advises that the organization should always have two or three stool pigeons for controlled leaks (p.147) and he encourages organizers to induce cannibalism among the Haves, since they will fight for power among themselves when the status quo is destabilized (p.149). He also encourages every organizer to do a stint in jail so that they can engage in reflection, synthesis, and philosophy - like a prophet in the wilderness (p.156). He confesses here that without such periods of isolation, he would not have been able to write a book.

Moving on, Alinsky comes to a new tactic about which he is rather excited. In "The Genesis of Tactic Proxy," he describes how he "[asked] Eastman Kodak stockholders to assign their proxies to the Rochester black organization or come to the stockholders' meeting and vote in favor of FIGHT [a relevant community organization]" (p.172). This tactic snowballed and became successful, not just for community organizations, but because it

showed a way for the middle class to organize. These people, the vast majority of Americans, who feel helpless in the corporate economy, who don't know which way to turn, have begun to turn away from America, to abdicate as citizens. They rationalize their action by saying that, after all, the experts and the government will take care of it all. They are like the Have-Nots who, when unorganized and powerless, simply resign themselves to a sad scene. Proxies can be the mechanism by which these people can organize, and once they are organized they will re-enter the life of politics. (p.178)

And Alinsky looks ahead to making this tactic work. "What will be required is a computerized operation that will quickly give (1) a breakdown of the holdings of any corporation, (2) a breakdown of holdings of other corporations that own shares in the target corporation, and (3) a breakdown of individual stock proxies in the target corporation and in the corporations" (p.180).

In sum, the book was fascinating. It has a lot of flaws, of course. For instance, its means-justifies-the-ends approach assumes a bipolar world in which the Have-Nots should always triumph - and it doesn't describe how to wind down a conflict or call a truce, how to compromise outside the organization, or how to develop a lasting settlement among competing organizations. Finally, its assumption that organizations must be big and multi-issue to make a difference is dated: the Zapatista netwar is one example of how many single-issue organizations can be temporarily networked to have a much bigger impact than they could have individually, but that didn't involve creating an umbrella organization, it involved leveraging communication technologies. Yet, like The Prince, this book provides a set of (take your pick: nasty, underhanded, effective pragmatic) tactics that I imagine will work.

Practicing UX in Austin

If you're in Austin and working in interaction design or user experience design, a former student of mine is starting a group for practicing your skills. First meeting is at Genuine Joe Coffeehouse this Monday. It sounds like a great opportunity to practice, to network, and to develop ideas.

The RPG jiahdi

Here's the question being debated by talking heads last Sunday, due to Umar Mutallab's Christmas Day suicide bombing attempt. Was this really an al-Qaeda plot, they asked, or was this a peripheral, self-radicalized actor? One panelist compared the incident to Nidal Hasan's shooting spree at Fort Hood. Were these "real" AQ members or loners who were play-acting at jihad?

The question, I think, is a false choice. In a networked organization such as al-Qaeda, working to maneuver around slowly changing hierarchies with tremendous electronic surveillance abilities, weak ties are at a premium. AQ doesn't need to recruit members and have them move up and mature in the organization in order for them to become useful. They don't necessarily even have to meet them (although meeting could help with indoctrination). Really, they just need to provide a framework or story in which such actors see an affinity between their own deeply felt plights and AQ. Such stories can be disposable in the same sense that suicide bombers are disposable.

In fact, suicide bombers tend to be recruited from the peripheries rather than the centers of social networks.

That fact means that a given loner who wants to play-act jihad, putting himself or herself in the position of hero in a story she or he writes, can find others (AQ) willing to reinforce that story in exchange for credit. AQ provides a story in search of actors. In taking on the role of actor, the loner achieves heroism and affiliation. Think of it as a role-playing game in which you become the hero - as long as you accept your destiny and the constraints that go along with it, the role you need to play.

The affiliation is largely virtual, though, making it very difficult to determine which individuals might become AQ agents until after their attacks. Pursue them too aggressively and you get a lot of false positives. You also get perpetual uncertainty: Who could choose to affiliate with AQ? Where could AQ attack next? And that uncertainty translates into elevated hierarchical responses, increasing the sclerosis in air travel regulation and other infrastructure.

The good news, as Andrew Samwick points out, is that apparently such loners are not easy to recruit. We've had very few attacks, even on airliners, and no one has blown themselves up in Starbucks or under bridges. Possible factors: (a) AQ is not yet effective at detecting and recruiting potential jihadists; (b) the mix of social isolation and fervent Islamism is fairly rare here in the US; (c) political-religious grievances are not as raw here in the US as in, say, Palestine.

Reading :: The New Global Economy in the Information Age

The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Reflections on Our Changing World
Edited by Martin Carnoy, Manuel Castells, Stephen S. Cohen, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso

In 1992, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and the new Yeltsin government invited the authors to come to Moscow to advise it on political economic policy. A year later, their analyses were published in this book, which is an interesting time capsule of the period. It's also a place where Castells sounded themes that he developed in his later work.

As the authors argue in the collaboratively written introduction, "The first political casualty of the information age is the communist state system, based on a 1920s-model hierarchical industrial organization and incapable of incorporating new, flexible management of rapidly changing technology" (p.2). But they argue that it may not be the last casualty: Capitalist states are similarly vulnerable to the transformations that are underfoot, including a new international division of labor "based less on the location of natural resources, cheap and abundant labor, or even capital stock and more on the capacity to create new knowledge and apply it rapidly, via information processing and telecommunications, to a wide array of human activities in ever-broadening space and time" (p.6). The authors interpret the Reagan administration's response to the changing world thus: "The Reagan administration's 'solution' to increased international competition and informationalization was to deregulate such critical sectors as telecommunications, air transport, and financial services, to break unions and lower real wages, to decrease federal tax rates, and to redistribute income to the top 1 percent of income earners. The idea was to make U.S. industry more competitive through cheaper labor and to legitimize such action politically through lower tax rates. ... the emphasis is on cheap inputs, not higher productivity" (p.11).

The authors are not enchanted with this strategy. What was striking to me in the subsequent chapters, however, was that Exhibit A was the lack of US success and productivity compared to the Japanese, whose model was perceived as far superior, especially in Cohen's chapter "Geo-Economics." I remember the widespread fear that the Japanese were going to own the US - but looking back, the Japanese "lost decade" began in 1991, and they lost ground economically throughout the 1990s - falling prey to a bubble somewhat similar to the one we have just experienced in the US. Realizing that fact helped me to put the authors' assessments and arguments in a historical context.

In Castells' chapter "The Informational Economy," he analyzes the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in the global economy, arguing that "the increasingly important role of applied knowledge and information is a characteristic of advanced economic systems, transcending the historical characteristics of their modes of production" (p.16). He argues that

(1) "the greater the complexity and productivity of an economy, the greater its informational component and the greater the role played by new knowledge and new applications of knowledge" (pp.16-17);

(2) one strong trend is "the shift, in advanced capitalist societies, from material production to information-processing activities, both in terms of proportion of GNP and in the proportion of the population employed in such activities" (p.17). The "real transformation" is the information economy "wherein an ever-growing role is played by the manipulation of symbols in the organization of production and the enhancement of productivity" (p.17);

(3) another trend is "a profound transformation in the organization of production and of economic activity in general," a change that "can be described as a shift from standardized mass production to flexible customized production and from vertically integrated, large-scale organizations to vertical disintegration and horizontal networks between business units" (p.18). That doesn't mean the decline of the large corporation, but rather their organizational transformation leading to more flexibility and adaptability (p.18);

(4) a fourth trend is "a global economy, in which capital, production, production, management, markets, labor, information, and technology are organized across national boundaries" (p.18), meaning that "the national economy now works as a unit at the world level in real time" (p.19);

(5) and these all take place within a significant technological revolution, based in advances in information technologies. Telecommunications in particular create "the material infrastructure needed for the formation of a global economy" (p.19). Information technology is a critical factor allowing for flexibility and decentralization (p.20).

One result of these transformations, Castells argues, is the end of the Third World as a relatively homogeneous economic region (p.27). It gives way to a Fourth World of marginalized economies (p.37) - an idea that Castells later developed in terms of "black holes." Another, he hopes, is that of "leaner, smaller, more effective, high-tech-equipped, and information-oriented military forces" that would be "at the disposal of all major nations" for peacekeeping (p.42).

In the next chapter, "Multinationals in a Changing World Economy," Martin Carnoy considers the question of large multinational enterprises (MNEs). These MNEs are "attractive and usually necessary additions to any country's economy," but are also "footloose," without allegiance to a nation's development goals - and, in fact, frequently willing to shape national development goals to their own needs (p.46). MNEs, he says, are concentrated in four sectors: oil, autos, electronics and high tech, and banking (p.48). Carnoy notes that US and British MSEs tend to be antistate and more "footloose" than other MSEs, which frequently have some sort of nationalist association (p.86).

The fourth chapter, "Geo-Economics," is Stephen Cohen's assessment of "America's mistakes" and Europe's chance to avoid making them (p.97). The US, Cohen asserts, is not transitioning well to the new realities: it has "set out in the wrong direction," creating a less generous, just, and secure society (p.97). Cohen points to new international competition, particularly from Japan's "developmental state" (pp.98-100) with its answer to Fordism: "Toyotaism," with its measures for high-volume flexible production (p.111). The results are not good: a large trade deficit and an enormous national debt of ... $600 billion! (Ah, the good old days, when we only owned $600B. Currently it's $12,097,698,782,543.93.)

Let's skip to the epilogue. The authors, like so many authors, see hope for real change in a new President. "Bill Clinton's election signals the exhaustion of the laissez-faire economic model whose profoundly negative effects on American productivity and competitiveness we have documented and analyzed in this book" (p.161). Doesn't this passage remind you of Castells' pronouncements about Obama in his 2009 book?