digitalcommons

The Futurist

The Futurist, by James P. Othmer. Doubleday 2006.

Yates is a globe-trotting, highly paid futurist who can "speak on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America and receive standing ovations from both." He heads for a conference in South Africa and meets a prostitute sent to his room by the conference organizers. He realilzes he has been shoveling bullshit, and she advises him to "tell the truth."

He clicks on the cursor to the left of the title--"Kinetic Tomorrowland," whatever that means--and drags down through eight pages of lies. He deletes it all and begins to type.

The next day he addresses the crowd and confesses he knows nothing and says he is the founding father of the Coaltion of the Clueless.  This change of heart enrages his sponsors, and then his confession is taken as cutting edge wisdom, and demand for his services increases. Instead he takes a job from a shadowy firm that sounds like the Carlyle Group. His travels take him to super wealthy recluses in Greenland, remote islands in Fiji, urban violence in Milan, and a final showdown in a crumbling Arab state. All the while, he tries to come to terms with his drinking, his loss of passion and values, the death of his father, and the girl friend who dumped him.

The author was a creative director at a New York advertising firm where he must have come into contact with futurists, because he has nailed them in his descriptions. Of course this does not apply to my friends who bill themselves as forecasters...

A final description:

One of his tricks had been to take the obvious, the popular, often true perception of the masses, and flip it. _As technology becomes more ingrained in our lives, people will become more cynical._  Bullshit, he'd say. I see thereturn of the old time. Of comfort food. Of handshakes that trump instant messages. Or he would fuse the old with the new and predict a nation that will crave anything that combines the handcrafted with modern applications. Ergonomically correct kitchen utinsils made with Old World materials. Houses with quaint front porches wired with T-1 lilnes. Anything that combines leather, rare wood, and silicon. Not necessarily true, but what they wanted to hear.

Highly recommended.

Capitalism 3.0

Capitalism 3.0: a guide to reclaiming the commons
by Peter Barnes.

Barnes is a successful capitalist who believes capitalism in its present form is gravely flawed, yet he does not look to the state for correction. He sees the first phase of capitalism as one of shortages where demands exceeded supply of goods. Around 1950 this changed and now we are in capitalism 2.0, a time of excess goods and a shortage of buyers. This phase is characterized as being global in scale, abundant credit, ubiquitous advertising, and negative externalities (shifting trues costs to future generations or other countries for polluting, to take one example). He discusses the influence that capital has on the political process and cites three pathologies that come from what he calls "the anachronistic software that governs capitalism": destruction of nature, widening of inequality, and the "failure to promote happiness despite the pretense of doing so. "

Changing capitalism to address these problems is a long term project (30 to 50 years). Central to this is the reality of the commons. The main danger to the commons is enclosure which benefits a few and takes from many. For instance, taking water from a river or lake and dumping pollutants after an industrial process. Barnes sees a need to expand the number of variety of commons that already exist--or could, given sufficient public will and legislative changes.  Some of the common resources include those in nature (forests, the air, and water) but also the radio spectrum, aspects of culture and knowledge, an equitable health care system, the Internet, and social security.  He devotes a large part of the book to explaining how these might work, their relation to corporations, and the need for birthrights for people in various commons. On a small scale the Alaska Permanent Fund is a good example of a variation on a land trust. Residents of the state get an annual payment from the payments into the state coffers by the oil companies drilling on Alaskan land. In 2006 the sum was $1106.96.

I enjoyed the chapter on sharing culture because a theme of my work since 1990 has been the desire to digitize and spread all sorts of digital information and works. This is being carried on in different places, notably by the Internet Archive, collectives in Europe and Asia (some of whom believe intellectual property is an oxymoron), and various "open" projects supported by foundations like Hewlett, Sloan, and the Open Society Institute. The underlying infrastructure to store and move this information is based on the Internet, ever cheaper storage (hard drives, optical discs) and low cost access to these resources. The unlicensed public spectrum has become extremely popular in the countries where it is legal. Wi-fi is just one example of this  spectrum commons.

Just as I was reading the chapter on "Building the Commons Sector" I was wondering what Second Life would be like were it not a commercial enterprise run by a dot com. What if it were more like Burning Man where different rules apply to those participating. Barnes  talks about his son playing Sim City and wonders what Sim Commons would be like. His diagram of the new commons sector included managed global commons, lists of national, regional, and local ones, as well as open cultural commons. His final chapter encourages each of us to get involved, and I think back to my own work from the late 80's to the mid-90's with electronic community networks which I called "electronic greenbelts" alluding to the no-build zones in urban areas that were, in effect, commons even though nobody was grazing sheep. These were not entirely successful, but they did pave the way for involvement in other projects for public access and the current wave of municipal and rural wireless networks being deployed.

I hope this book is read and critiqued, especially by social activists who are critical of capitalism. I look forward to their reactions.

Barnes and his publisher agreed to distribute a free version of this new title, yet they hope it will be a commercial success through the sales of the hardback version. Certainly, it is cheaper to download the pdf file, skim it on screen, but to read the whole version, most will prefer reading a printed format and not on a pda or mobile phone or even a large LCD screen.

The Mission Song

The Mission Song. John Le Carré. 2006.

Since the end of the Cold War Le Carré has mined the conflicts and trouble spots around the world where the KGB and the East German Stasi are not the bad guys. In the novels where he made his name the Communist spooks were usually worse than their British and American counterparts. Since then he has stirred up conterversy by the characters in his novels about the Palestine-Israel ongoing crisis (The Little Drummer Girl), about the role of drug companies in Africa (The Constant Gardener)and by much more obscure wars in the Caucasus (Our Game) and now the Eastern Congo. His ability to embed different points of view and believable action in characters from the many sides of the conflicts is what makes much of his work so compelling.

While Africa is generally ignored, or commands relatively little space in the newspapers and television news, Iraq, Palestine, the threat of terrorism, and events closer to home--whether  it's Europe or North America--receive much more coverage. For the past couple of years the main topic about an African crisis has been Darfur with sporadic reports on Zimbabwe's deteriorating situation, Côte_d'Ivoire , the horn of Africa, and the Lords Resisance Army in northern Uganda. Most of us missed the reports about the first African world war: the plundering of the Congo (ex-Zaire) after Mobutu died in exile. Darlings of U.S./World Bank loans and grants, namely Uganda and Rwanda, pursued their own interests, or at least those of entrepreneurial generals, in invading and exploiting the considerable mineral wealth of the region. Coltan, diamonds, gold, and other minerals also attracted Angola and Zimbabwe and some western interests. Few people are aware of the 3.8 million who died in the ongoing wars from bullets, machete, starvation, disease, and the suffering of the survivors whose lives were disrupted as refugees or in trying to exist in the war zone. It was the most underreported war I know of.

The Mission Song is the story of Bruno Salvador, a "half-caste bastard", an accomplished interpreter in the UK. His mother was Congolese, his father a Catholic missionary, and his birth took place in a Stanleyville convent and he was raised in Kivu, a beautiful region of the Eastern Congo and later at a boarding school for Catholic orphans in Sussex Downs. His skill in languages (French, Swahili, English, and numerous tongues of the Great Lakes region) attracts the attention of the British government who farm him out to a mysterious group hoping to bring peace to the Kivu region by convening a sit-down with war lords and an older charistmatic leader, a sort of local Kenyatta/Mandela/Nyerere figure. Instead he learns of a complex plot by a syndicate (mining companies, wealthy Brits, and by some ties to American Neo-Cons) to carry out a regional coup. The shadow bad guys are the Rwandans, but they are not represented by any defined character, nor are the Americans who seem to be at the top of the voracious food chain for Congolese resources.

Though the Congo is described, most of the book does not take place there but in London just after the subway bombings and an unnamed North Sea island where the plotters assemble for a weekend and try to convince the Congolese leaders to buy in to the unification plot. Bruno's job is to interpret but also listen in on the bugged rooms and public areas using his considerable talents in lesser known regional languages.

This is shorter than many of Le Carre's works, and I read it in two days, after a month of a meager diet of newspaper articles and Web info-nuggets and email. It was a great meal, and when I go back online it will be to read more about what really did happen during the war in the Congo. A good place to start is the International Crisis Group.

Extracts from The Mission Song can be read here

Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan. Penguin Press. 2006

Other than the strong smell and the brown sea of cattle, I had never given much thought to the giant feedlots on I-5 north of Los Angeles, but yesterday I was reading Pollan's book as we drove by, and you begin thinking about the consequences of this kind of food production.

He looks at food production in America, from industrial farms and complex enterprises to small family farms where the owners have gone 'beyond organic' and explains how farm policy linked with energy policy and practices has shaped agriculture and consequently our diet and our health. It is the story of corn on which much of this is based but also the grasses that once provided a more diverse environment and diet for the animals we eat. He pulls together a mass of research about agriculture, from Plato to Wes Jackson to academics who analyze the food chemistry of organic and conventionally grown fruits and vegetables. Only recently have they been able to quantify some of the health benefits in organic crops, though advocates have never needed scientific studies to hold on to their beliefs about organic foods.

Pollan covers the development of big organic operations which had to move from the small farmer's market and co-op distribution to one that resembles the agribusiness model many organic farmers first tried to escape when they went back to the land. There's a particularly good chapter on the marketing prose used by Whole Foods, the face of big organic that most consumers --or at least the affluent ones--will see. This reminds me of the technique used by wine merchants since the 70's of posting little cards, or shelf-talkers, that provide a verbose description of how luscious and unique the bottle of wine really is.

He spends a lot of time in the field: picking out a calf to follow to market, working with hay and learning about management-intensive grazing on the farm of Joel Salatin, a self professed Christian libertarian environmentalist in Swoope, Virginia. For an author who writes about food and dines at Alice Waters' joint when he's home in Berkeley, he struggles with the rigors of farm life and no caffeine or alcohol. He does point out the anti-urban bias of some localist zealots like Salatin.

Probably the most valuable aspect of his reporting is your growing awareness of how complex these different food systems are, and he reminds us how creative accounting leads us to ignore the costs of fossil fuel, obesity, and environmental impact when we bite into a $1 dollar whopper junior or the air freighted organic asparagus from Argentina.  Americans spend about 1/10 of their income on food, down from 1/5 in the 50's and much less than any other industrial country in the world. Salatin discusses the accusation that organic and locally produced food is elitist because only the affluent can afford it.  Pollan observes the customers who come as far as 150 miles to buy the chickens which were just slaughtered by the crew and Pollan. Many are not elite but chose to pay more for the quality of the food and the way the animals were raised (and slaughterd).  Some seem willing to pay a premium because it reminds them of what they ate in childhood. Salatin speaks of cheap food as 'irresponsibly priced food,' but the author knows that is still the determining factor for most consumers.

I used to make wine commercially many years ago, and I planted a small vineyard which is now owned by my former partner. The economics of grape growing and wine making in the U.S. pushes the price of most premium wines much higher than I would want to pay, but economics require a small winery making a few thousand cases a year to get $15 a bottle or there won't be any profit. One of the reasons I still make wine is to have a good supply of good wine at less than $5 a bottle. And there are many small winery operators who made their profits in other sectors (finance, law, high tech) and are now sinking it into a winery.

Pollan hooks up with a  Sicilian who lives near him in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Angelo's year is marked by the natural food gathering and hunting activities in each season: olive curing, winemaking, boar hunting, and mushroom gathering. Pollan had never fired a gun nor hunted, and he relies on Ortega y Gasset's writings to supplement Angelo's  guidance. After he finally nails a boar on private land in Sonoma County, he is immensely proud, but then frets and moans about these very feelings as he looks at the picture his hunting partner took after the kill.

His description of the mushroom gatherers is one of the best and most complex. In some ways they are a community, but they seem more secretive than fishermen when it comes to revealing good places to find mushrooms. Part of it is timing, and for some, a commercial edge because of the high price of some mushrooms. Few will share good spots with others, especially a food journalist. With all the food that he has foraged, he prepares a very special meal and invites those who helped him hunt and gather. He concludes with the statement, "...what we are eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."  He feels we should be more connected to that by knowing the origins of our food, even if we don't killl the pig, crush the grapes, or pluck the dead chicken. He certainly understands the force of industry and the adjustments and compromises farmers, ranchers, and cooks must make when taking part. For foodies with money and time they can patronize restaurants like the French Laundry or Chez Panisse that buy the 'best' ingredients and establish their own connections with local growers, but for most Americans price will determine the bulk of their purchases and eating habits in the kitchen, on the road, or at a sit-down restaurant.

What he does not address is the challenges other developing countries have as they try to feed themselves.  That's a whole other book. The geopolitics of U.S. food aid has been addressed by Michael Maran in The Road To Hell and part of those policies link to the discussion of USDA farm subsidies.  Corn exports to Mexico have increased 18 fold since NAFTA took effect, and this has affected millions of rural Mexicans, some of whom have headed north once they are displaced from the failing farms.

Tiger Force

Tiger Force: a true story of men and war, by Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss

My contact with the war in Vietnam was very marginal. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo I received Newsweek and would follow the stories as the war grew in intensity between 1965 and 1967 when I left Africa, and months later was serving in the U.S. Coast Guard. My commanding officer had been on a patrol boat for Operation Market Time in Vietnam, and the U.S. Air Force had straffed his boat, killing most aboard and leaving him with lingering wounds that took him to Walter Reed Hospital during the timeI knew him. An Army hospital in San   Juan, Puerto Rico, was situaited within view of the apartment of a good friend of mine, also in the Coast Guard. We could look down and see the patients strung out on heroin, trying to rest or hide on the hospital roof. The effects of the war were around us, even if we had avoided going to Vietnam.

This book is the history of a series of war crimes against civilians committed by a reconnaissance and commando unit founded in 1965 by Major David Hackworth, the figure who inspired the Colonel Kilgore figure in Apocalypse Now. Most of the events take place in the Central Highlands during the latter half of 1967. As I began reading I realized this was not a book to read at night. Each soldier who figured in the story was described by where he came from and what he had been doing before enlistment. Several figures stand out: Sam Ybarra from the San Carlos Indian Reservation inArizona, Sergeant Harold Trout, and Lt. James Hawkings all of whom perpetrated continuous acts of cruelty and murder but were never charged or tried. There were senior officers who dismissed any of the reports or charges about the Tiger Force, and there were other men in the field who did file reports or tried to stop the killing. Most, however, were swept along by the violence, even if they had not entered the country with a desire to kill.

Besides the way the Army did nothing with regards to this unit’s crimes (about the time of the My Lai investigations) was the tenaciousness of the Army CID officer who worked on this case in the 1970’s for many years, and even after he retired was reticent about blaming the organization where he spent so many years in its service. The authors heard about the case only by reading the papers of the recently decased former commander of the CID, Henry Tufts. Sallah and Weiss began pieceing together the story and were able to interview grunts from the field all the way up to batallion commanders in order to write a series of articles for the Toldeo Blade newspaper in 2003. A key figure is Gustav Apsey, the investigator for the Army Criminal Investigation Command. Aspey was born in Austria; his father was a Nazi in the German Army and was killed in Yugoslavia. Gustav is an apple that fell very far from the father’s tree. It’s an amazing tale. They won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

I found Sallah’s email online and wrote my initial impressions. First, there are many atrocities that are taking place all over:Congo,  Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri   Lanka, Nepal, Russia,and countless others have taken place. Most are not reported, and even fewer perpetrators are brought to trial or at least account for their actions in something like a South African truth commission. Because of the dedication of CID investigator Gustav Apsey, some of the soldiers who could not keep quiet, and the authors we know a little more about what men are capable of--both good and bad--and why it is so important to chronicle this and to remember. You can check out the Tiger Force reunion site as well as this article about the ongoing reaction to the revelations.

 

 

Trail of Feathers by Tahir Shah

Tahir Shah is about 40, the son of Idris Shah a famous popularizer of sufism in the west. He seems to have no interest in that topic but instead writes travel books about sensational destinations and characters he meets as he pursues various themes: finding King Solomon's Mines, being an apprentice with a magician and conjurer in Calcutta, and searching for the origins of the birdmen of Peru in Trail of Feathers. To get ready for the trip he visits an oddball who is certain that many of the ancients actually 'flew' and stops in to see the famous old traveller Wilfred Thesiger author of Arabian Sands. Shah's journey leads him to Lake Titicaca, Nasca, Lima, and Iquitos where he launches an expedition in search of yage or ayahuasca which is said to make those who ingest it feel as though they are flying. 

Shah fills in the local color with background from other books and research, much as Paul Theroux does. Theroux's latest novel, Blinding Light, also deals with an author in search of ayahuasca but in Ecuador not Peru.  There are some photos, but these make me wonder why he did not include pictures of some other people who figured so prominently in the stories he tells.  I enjoy his knowledge of arcane trivia, some of it quite grotesque.  Click on the thumbnail to read one page.

Possibility of an Island:Houellebecq

I just finished Possibility of an island by Michel Houellebecq (Knopf 2006) the nihilistic French (yet anti-French) author living in Ireland. The novel intersperses the story of present day Daniel, a rich, vulgar satirist/clown, with commentary by his neo-human Daniel24 many centuries later. This book has some of the same witty comments on the decadence of western society and the kind of ambiance he imagines results from a race of finely tuned genetically improved neo-humans. Isolation, rationality, elimination of desire and other human emotions, yet memory of the person from whom you are cloned. The philosopher leader of this race writes her tracts, inspired by the style of an old manual for a JVC video recorder.

For a normal thinking human it is a very depressing book, punctuated by chuckles and nods of agreement. Stefan Beck, writing in New Criterion (3/06) said Houellebecq's generalities are not valid because he writes as if all existence can be compared to life, morality, and actions inside a whorehouse. Much of his despair is "pure marketing"  and "propaganda of defeat."  However, the protagonist and the author both love Welsh Corgis (He is pictured with his dog on his shoulder), as does Queen Elizabeth. Fox, the fictional dog, is a major character.

Here are a few selections I noted as I read:
"On a map on the 1:200,000 scale, especially on a Michelin map, the whole word seems happy; on a map of a larger scale, like the one I had of Lanzarote, things deteriorate: you start to make out the hotels, the leisure infrastructures. On a scale of 1:1 you find yourself back in the normal world, which is not very pleasant; but if you increase the scale even more, you are plunged into a nightmare: you start to make out the dust mites, mycoses, and parasites that eat away at the flesh. "

The huge number of deaths in French retirement homes during the heat wave of 2003 has figured in several of the author's interviews and in this novel:

"Like it was every year now, summer was scorching in France, and like every year the old died en masse, owing to lack of care, in their hospitals and retirement homes; but people had long since stopped feeling indignant about this, it had in some way passed into tradition, as though it were an natural means of solving the statistical problem of an increasingly aging population that was necessarily prejudicial to the economic stability of the country."

Patterned on the Rael cult, the Elohim followers/cult are a big part of this novel.

"After intense lobbying of the American business world, the first convert was Steve Jobs--who requested, and was granted, a partial derogation in favor of the children he had procreated before discovering Elohimism. He was closely followed by Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and then a growing number of leaders of the most important firms in the world."

There is a wonderful passage about what still works in the post-human future:

"...I discovered numerous objects manufactured by man, some in a good state of preservation. All those that preserve data during power cuts had deteriorated irreversibly as a result of the passage of centuries; I thus left to one side the cellular telephones, computers, and electronic pagers. The machines, however, that were made up of only mechanical and optical components, had for the most part stood up well. For some time I played with a camera, a double-lensesd Rolleiflex with matte-black metalwork: the crank that enable the movement of the film turned faultlessly; the glass of the shutter opened and closed with a small silky sound, at a speed that varied according to the number selected on the focusing know. If photographic films had still existed, and developing laboratories, I was sure that I could have taken some excellent photographs."