We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.
We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.
Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.
Facebook’s S-1 Filing
Facebook officially asserts itself as a non-state actor.
newyorker:
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
This is important. Remember this every time someone carelessly talks about the “land of the free.” We need to deserve to call ourselves that. Right now, we do not.
dbreunig:
In the future we’ll only discuss daily deal sites as a brief symptom of the gradual realization that online populations are populations unto themselves.
Perhaps. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but I’ve been thinking along the same lines recently. I think the Internet is gradually rooting out all “latent groups.” As Mancur Olson postited in his Theory of Groups and Organizations:
Only a separate and “selective” incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way. In such circumstances group action can be obtained only through an incentive that operates, not indiscriminately, like the collective good, upon the group as a whole, but rather selectively toward the individuals in the group. The incentive must be “selective” so that those who do not join the organization working for the group’s interest, can be treated differently from those who do.
Daily deal sites are selective incentive machines. They’re really good at helping businesses find latent groups and and sell fixed inventories or goods with very low marginal costs (they’re really bad at helping businesses sell goods with significant marginal costs).
What would be nice is to devise a way to create “non-deal” incentives to draw out latent groups. Surely we can figure out more edifying ways to get these “populations unto themselves” to get together. Kickstarter is an obvious example. Meetup kind of is too. Of course, Groupon’s predecessor, The Point, was too.
FWIW, I interviewed Andrew Mason about The Point back in the day. He knows his organizational theory.
The thing is — and this is kind of important — governments are not corporations. I cannot stress this enough. There’s the obvious point that in democracies, legislatures tend to impose a more powerful constraint than shareholders, making it that much harder for leaders to execute the policies they think will be the most efficient. … There’s been a lot of bragging in the 2012 primary about candidates that have “real world” business experience, and how that translates into an effective ability to govern. That logic is horses**t. Being president is a fundamentally different job than being a CEO — because countries are not corporations.
Facebook has threatened to sue Mark Zuckerberg, an Israeli entrepreneur who recently took the social network founder’s name. The new Zuckerberg, born Rotem Guez, legally changed his name Dec. 7.
Mashable
Every party in this case is ridiculous.
However, it’s really interesting to see Facebook butt up against government regulations as they outgrow a state-based context. In the future, legally changing your name or other bureaucratic filings might be immaterial within a global, cross-government social network. And that might be the one that matters.
Is this post nationalism?
(via dbreunig)
"Liberating Workers" →
dbreunig:
Christina Cacioppo on why Cherry, an iPhone app that lets you order an an immediate car wash, is compelling:
Like Opez, Cherry enables car washers to become freelancers. They don’t need to work for a car-washing shop and so can retain more of the profits generated by their work.
Historically, one service provided by a car-washing shop has been finding, staying in touch with, and retaining customers. The internet’s made it relatively easier for anyone – from a solo car washer to a car-wash shop manager – to find and retain customers: Angie’s List, Yelp, Groupon, foursquare .. the list of tools goes on and on. (And will continue to go on and on.) A motivated individual can use these tools by himself or herself or can rely on a lighter-weight solution (like Cherry) for the heavy lifting.
We’ll see more of services supporting newly liberated workers.
Spot on. But this is a fine line to walk…
Think of your workplace. How much of what exists around you is maintenance and support for the real reason you’re there? What percentage of your day do you use the talent which makes you valuable?
Car washes and data-verification (which is what we’re seeing Mechanical Turk being used for) are low hanging fruit. These are low skill, low support tasks. If companies continue to keep their focus tight on these menial tasks, the future looks rather bleak. But once their gaze widens to more skilled work, it becomes less about businesses avoiding paying overhead and more about workers optimizing their need to be at a desk 9 hours a day.
Which leads you to reforming how salaries are structured, what health care looks like, what offices are, what a career actually is… It’s a tough nut to crack, both culturally, ethically, and technically.
I’ve been thinking about Christina’s post about Cherry for the past week and I like where Drew takes it, especially by pointing out that the ultra-democratization of labor will run up against some very interesting ethical questions.
Many of the “inefficiencies” evident in large organizations that manage low-skilled labor exist to create more humane working conditions. Salaries, access to training, access to capital goods, access to health care, et cetera aren’t just niceties or fair compensation. They help keep the populace sane.
I’m a fan of creative destruction, but we should be mindful of the stress we put upon individuals as we disrupt old sclerotic institutions (like car washes!).
To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely,
Louis C.K.
There is a great deal wrong with American governance, and not only within government. I think that the concentrated management and diffuse ownership of public corporations has left a relatively small numbers of corporate managers with insufficiently checked control over trillions of other people’s property. And I think that the relatively unchecked power of government to make or break fortunes has made it more or less inevitable that corporations would in time end up writing their own regulations to their own advantage. Occupy Wall Street is a great boon to the extent that it helps draw attention and build effective opposition to the unjust mechanisms of upward redistribution and to the many flaws in our political economy responsible for the disproportionate influence of the wealthy and powerful over the rules that profoundly affect us all.
