Good science, bad science

In his wonderful essay "The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object," Goethe described science as springing from "a desire to view Nature's objects in their own right and in relation to one another." Botanists, for example, "must find the measure for what they learn, the data for judgment, not in themselves, but in the sphere of what they observe."

He describes his method:

We may look at an object in its own context and the context of other objects, while refraining from any immediate response of desire or dislike. The calm exercise of our powers of attention will quickly lead us to a rather clear concept of the object, its parts, and its relationships, the more we pursue this study, discovering further relations among things, the more we will exercise our innate gift of observation.

Applying this method to understanding the "hidden relationships in nature" can be especially difficult, requiring an open mind and a devotion to the phenomena under observation. For Goethe, the experiment -- "intentionally reproducing empirical evidence" or "recreating phenomena" -- was the most effective means of systematically discovering the hidden relationships. The single experiment is of limited value; only a carefully studied sequence of experiments can reveal a true nature.

As pattern-recognizing and pattern-organizing beings ("a tendency altogether understandable since it springs by necessity from the organization of our being") we especially run the risk of the false conclusion:

Thus we can never be too careful in our efforts to avoid drawing hasty conclusions from experiments or using them directly as proof to bear out some theory. For here at this pass, this transition from empirical evidence to judgment, cognition to application, all the inner enemies of humanity lie in wait: imagination, which sweeps us away on its wings before we know our feet have left the ground; impatience; haste' self-satisfaction; rigidity; formalistic thought; prejudice; ease; frivolity; fickleness -- this whole throng and its retinue. Here they lie in ambush and surprise not only the active observer but also the contemplative one who appears safe from all passion.

The interconnection of the universe, that "each phenomenon is connected with countless others", requires investigating each piece of empirical evidence. "We can never be careful enough in studying what lies next to it or derives directly from it. To follow every single experiment through its variations is the real task of scientific researchers." Goethe counterposed this kind of thoroughness, akin to constructing an unassailable mathematical proof, to the suspect method of attempting to prove an assertion by "using isolated experiments like arguments", which often "reaches its conclusions furtively or leaves them completely in doubt."

The elevating honesty of Goethe's approach to science contrasts starkly with recent stories of fabricated data (in the case of the Dr. Hwang Woo-suk's stem cell and cloning work). But even more distressing is questionable research paid for by corporations via consulting firms, to affect public policy around toxic chemicals they dump in the environment.

The Wall Street Journal has been running a series called "New Questions about Old Chemicals". In the 12/28/05 issue, Peter Waldman writes about a conference to evaluate current research on perchlorate, a chemical used in munitions production that can block the thyroid's ability to absorb iodine.

The host was the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. The aim was "a critical and objective evaluation" of research on the chemical, a university official later said. But while the university lent its imprimatur and thus credibility to the event, the symposium was paid for by defense contractors and the Pentagon and orchestrated by industry consultants, who kept evidence of their own role to a minimum.

Afterward, the Pentagon dispatched six conference participants to present the event's conclusions to a National Research Council panel that was evaluating perchlorate for the U.S. government.

Intertox Inc., a consulting firm that advises defense contractors, billed them about $75,000 for organizing the September 2003 event, an invoice shows. University documents show that Intertox chose the format and agenda and selected the experts who would appear.

Another article ("Study Tied Pollutant to Cancer; Then Consultants Got Hold of It", 12/23/05) describes how a consulting firm hired by PG&E re-wrote a key Chinese study on the effects of chromium in ground water, suggesting that it may not have been the cause of higher cancer rates. The revised study then took on a life of its own and has been used to support maintaining high acceptable levels of the pollutant.

Science, as any social practice, exists within a matrix of social relations, and in that sense can be considered a class-partisan activity. As with ideology, a ruling class produces science that supports its class position. It does this through the levers of ideology, property and money. Ideology shapes world view, morals, assumptions, etc., much like what Goethe warned against above. Property sets boundaries and obstacles. Money directs research opportunities. "Working class science" or "new class science" would start from a different ideology, have different notions of property, and a different sense of priorities. One could argue that "working class science" can be as dishonest as "capitalist science", and hence impede the overall expansion of knowledge, but the dishonesty works along different vectors.

Goethe elsewhere categorized scientists into four types, based on the kinds of questions they ask. "Utilizers" seek practical results; "fact-finders" seek knowledge for its own sake; "contemplators" apply imagination to interpret the fact-finder knowledge. "Comprehenders" for Goethe can also be considered "creators"; they are "original in the highest sense of the term. By proceeding from ideas, they simultaneously express the unity of the whole."

In Goethe's writings, the practice of science can be seen as a kind of spiritual pursuit, also reflected in his essay on the experiment. Capitalism, though, keeps science constrained at the level of the "utilizer", with the practical results dictated by Capital. The elevation of humanity, the full-flowering of potential, cannot be realized under such constraints.

jd

[All Goethe quotes are from Jeremy Naydler's little anthology Goethe on Science, Floris Books; the essay can also be found in Goethe: Scientific Studies, Suhrkamp Publishers (1988) or Princeton University Press (1995), edited and translated by Douglas Miller.]

Blue Team followup

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the Millennium Challenge 2002 war games: Gen. William F. Kernan and Maj. Gen. Dean W. Cash discuss Millennium Challenge's Lessons Learned - "A discussion on lessons learned from the joint integrating experiment Millennium Challenge 2002" held a several weeks after the games concluded (9/17/02). Some of Van Riper's criticisms had been made public at that point, and the war game organizers comment on them. The games were both "exercise" and "experiment", and held under unnatural constraints. In an experiment, rolling back the clock and re-running portions is legitimate.

jd

Red Team Blue Team

The 2002 "Millennium Challenge" war games highlight two very different approaches to the network form and its application to warfare. The 2002 games were the ones that were halted after Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper's "Red Team" (the "enemy") surprised and overwhelmed the high tech, information-intensive "Blue Team". Van Riper was assigned to head the armed forces of Red Team, in the game a rogue, anti-American Persian Gulf leader. The Defense Department intended to test how new technologies could lift the "fog of war" and overwhelm a lower-tech enemy.

Van Riper, however, understood the technology of Blue Team, and its weaknesses. Blue Team expected to eavesdrop on Red Team's communications, so Van Riper used motorcycle couriers. Blue Team expected to pick up Red Team air traffic communication, so Van Riper used World War II-era light signals to communicate. Van Riper knew that Blue Team had a preemptive-strike doctrine, so he launched a surprise swarming attack on Blue Team's fleet, sinking half of their ships. The Blue Team disaster prompted the Department of Defense game planners to re-start the games with new rules, and Blue Team subsequently won. (For an interview with Van Riper and more on the "force transformation" debate in the military, see the links in an earlier blog post.

The Millennium Challenge fiasco is one of many anecdotes in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005, Little Brown) that explores "intuitive" thinking. The brain carries out various decision-making processes that lie outside of conscious, analytical thought processes. Gladwell reviews how intuitive thinking takes place, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to cultivate it.

The Blue Team planned for total information awareness of the battlefield, which could be analyzed to determine the best course of action. Van Riper holds that battlefield chaos is an inevitable part of warfare, and on the ground, the fog of war cannot be lifted. For him, it was more important to have commanders who could function within the chaos of the battle, without being tethered to, and slowed down by, the decision-making cycle (information collection, analysis, decision) at headquarters.

Gladwell quotes Van Riper: "The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control. By that I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn't depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward." (118)

This of course is a classic description of the "network form", after Arquilla and Ronfeldt. The network is bound together by a common vision and doctrine, and the nodes are free to implement the vision as appropriate. But such a form cannot just happen. As Gladwell writes, "How good people's decisions are under the fast moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal." (114)

But Blue Team's approach is also described as network-centric warfare. The high-bandwidth communication network allows for more effective collection and dispersal of information, better coordination of units, and in theory, a shorter decision-making cycle. Through better information technology, the deployment of resources can be more effective. Can both network forms be right?

Van Riper says that both analytical thinking and the intuitive thinking (or "rapid-fire cognition") have their place. The analysis phase though takes place before the battle. Once the trouble starts, too much information becomes a burden, and slows down decision-making. "I can understand how all the concepts that Blue was using translate into planning for an engagement. But does it make a difference in the moment? I don't believe it does. When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance." (141)

Van Riper's decentralized approach still requires the aggregation of information being collected by the nodes. But the aggregation process can be overwhelmed easily by too much information. "Once hostilities began, Van Riper was careful not to overload his team with irrelevant information. Meetings were brief. Communication between headquarters and the commanders on the field was limited. He wanted to create an environment where rapid cognition was possible. Blue Team, meanwhile, was gorging on information." (143)

An analytical approach to aggregation slows down as more information is available to be analyzed. As the tempo of the moment picks up, the intuitive approach -- guided by intent and sharpened by practice, practice, practice -- becomes the more effective approach.


jd

Interpenetrating nets

One of the simplest constructions in projective geometery is to start with a line (the "horizon line"), and mark three arbitrary points on it. Draw a line through each of the points, such that the three lines now mark a triangle (i.e. for this exercise they can't be parallel). All further lines are then drawn from any of the three points through a point intersected by the other two lines. By continuing to draw lines, a network of hexagons emerges on the plane.

The three initial points constrain, or determine, all of the nodes and connections for the network. "Move any or all of the three original points into any of the infinite number of positions on the horizon line," Olive Whicher writes in her introductory text Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time, "and the network will always arise, each time with a different form and measure." One can see other forms in the resulting pattern. As Whicher describes, "The network is like a matrix in which other interpenetrating nets are to be seen."

In this deceptively simple model, nodes (intersection points) and connections (lines) are shared by different networks. Each network grows out of the same initial determinants (the points on the horizon line). Each network though has its own set of rules for adding lines -- its own law system as it were. The steps above create hexagons, but within the pattern quadrangles can be seen; the quadrangles are completed by adding the missing diagonal. Curiously, the missing diagonal for all of the quadrangles drawn from the same three starting points will pass through the horizon line at the same fourth point.

There is some insight in there -- that phenomena as processes of interconnected, interacting nodes ordered by some lawfulness, have multiple dimensions, and these dimensions interpenetrate. Something like that?

jd

More lost and found history

I have transcribed two articles I did for the Lansing Star in 1976. The Star was a community newspaper in the Lansing/East Lansing, Michigan area published in the 1970s. The first issue of the Star came out I believe in the spring of 1974, and ran through the rest of the decade and into the 1980s. I worked with it from 1974 to 1978; I'm not sure when it stopped publication. The Star succeeded a paper called Joint Issue from earlier in the 70s, the name Joint Issue played on the fact that it was, well, an early 70s community/underground newspaper, and a merger of two other newspapers (Red Apple News? and something else -- before my time).

Both articles look at Michigan State University's international projects. The first article, "MSU Overseas: The Ugly Academic" uses MSU's Vietnam project from the 1950s and early 1960s as backdrop, and mostly rants about then-current projects in Brazil and Iran. The second article, "The Ugly Academic: MSU in South Korea" gives the same treatment to a then-current project with the South Korean goverment. As the articles make obvious, those countries were run by very different governments then: Brazil by a military junta; Iran by a Shah installed by the CIA and a close U.S. ally; South Korea by a dictatorship.

The articles are what they are. I like the outrage expressed in them, but they are a peculiar form of journalism. Looking back on them today, I wish they had more about the actual projects.

The South Korea project is especially interesting. MSU was using computer models to help South Korea re-organize its agricultural sector to free up workers for its growing industrial economy. England did it by enclosures; the Soviet Union did it via collectivization; South Korea managed it with computer models from MSU, though I don't know what form it took on the farm.

jd

Adventures in value

The New York Times ran a story on December 9, "Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese" about the latest development in the strange interpenetration of virtual worlds and this world. Designers of "massive multi-player online role-playing games" like EverQuest, Ultima Online and Lineage, aka MMORPGs, built into the games little economies. Players are willing to pay "real" money to buy things that they use in the online games. In the latest twist described by David Barboza in the NYT article, game-playing factories have popped up in China. Young Chinese play the online games to accumulate game points, scrip and tools that can be sold to other players willing to pay for to get to higher game levels more quickly.

The first reference I saw to this odd twist on the Internet economy was an April, 2000 Los Angeles Times article "Virtual Loot for Real Cash". In Ashley Dunn's LA Times article, southern Californians were doing the collecting. Clive Thompson's clever and fascinating article "Game Theories" (date unclear, May, 2004 I think) mentions a factory in Mexico; now this odd form of production has moved to China.

Economists have fastened on these game worlds as economic petri dishes. Game player behaviors, markets, production, currency, interventions (by game designers and the companies that host the games) have counterparts in these worlds. Edward Castronova, wrote a paper that gained some notoriety, "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account Of Market And Society On The Cyberian Frontier", he expanded on this in his book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games published last month by the University of Chicago Press. Robert Shapiro, an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and now with the Brookings Institution, commented on these virtual economies in his 2003 Slate article "Fantasy Economics: Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games", but Clive Thompson's "Game Theories" article is the best overview of the evolution of these economies.

These economies are fascinating for all of the reasons that have drawn the above writers to them, and rich pickings for anyone who wants to analyze how and why they work the way they do. One dimension I thought of was value in the age of electronics, in relation to the virtual commodities and virtual money used in these games. One paradox of electronics-based production under capitalism is that a labor-replacing technology can result in the expansion of the production of value. I tried to look at this in a paper I did for the Marxism 2000 conference, "The End of Value". Basically, counter-tendencies arise under capitalism that blunt or counteract the value-destroying property of new technologies.

A commodity that exists only in a fantasy space does not in any way make it less of a commodity. There is no such thing as an "immaterial commodity", in this case these commodities exist as aligned molecules in the RAM or on the hard disk of the game servers. These virtual objects are like other goods that take on an existence within the brain (again, material) like ideas and emotions. The virtual goods satisfy the two basic requirements of a commodity: they are produced for exchange (the exchange value dimension), and they satisfy a want (the use value dimension). In this case, the primitive accumulation of game gold or rarities or the production of things in the game world consume human labor, and they satisfy a want of other game players willing to pay money for them. (The New York Times article reports that the player-workers are putting in 12-hour shifts seven days a week to meet quotas for slaying monsters.)

The universe of desire is infinite; "abundance" is only a relative concept, a philosophic outlook, and so there is no limit to what regions -- physical or virtual -- capitalism will spread to, what markets it will organize when it gets there, and what new expressions of exploitation it will devise to wring surplus value out of it. But the polarization of wealth is an emergent property of capitalism.

While desire may be infinite, the ability of the planet to sustain the free range of capital's desire is not. And one hopes that the willingness of human beings to suffer the immiseration that inevitably accompanies the satisfaction of capital's desire is not infinite either.

jd

Lost and found history

Recently I was googling for online references to projects I had been involved with a couple of decades ago. I had this eery feeling about the past, my past, because it wasn't there. Around 1993 or 94, material started appearing on the world wide web, but prior to that date, the continental shelf of online history abruptly stops.

Of course this is not completely true. There have been a number of noble efforts -- often times volunteer -- to put primary source material like geneologies, church records, census scans, etc. online. But today, documents as a matter of course are put online; pre-web they maybe ended up in a depository library or a special collection somewhere, and generally buried in dunes of printed ephemera.

Better to light a candle...

I started to transcribe some of the things I worked on back then, because I think they are of some historic significance. The first bit is the Preface and Introduction to a pamphlet call "Stop the MSU-Iran Film Project", from October, 1977.

The document is an interesting example of mid-1970s campus activism -- that post-Vietnam period where focus shifted to other instances of U.S. foreign policy like Chile and Iran. It is also interesting as an expose of university involvement in that policy. Michigan State University had a particularly nasty record, which the introduction touches on.

The document is also interesting in how similar things are, and also how different things are -- Brazil now has a populist president and is part of the Latin America pink tide; South Korea is an Asian Tiger; the Shah was deposed shortly after the film project and the ayatollahs of the bazaar took over. Who knows what happened to the marxist comrades in the 1970s Iranian student movement.

Looking back now, I would say the mid-1970s was a period of transition from imperialism to globalization, one process was being overlaid and replaced by another. Brazil and South Korea became active participants in the new global economic order -- not just economic reserves or dumping grounds or plantations; Iran represented the first expression of religious fundamentalism as a response to globalization.


jd

More on policed state

See pages 9 - 12 of this Italian judicial warrant regarding the kidnapping of an Islamic cleric in Milan in 2003. It describes how Italian police were able to track -- in incredible detail -- the movements of CIA operatives as they stalked Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, dragged him into a van, and drive him to the U.S. airbase in Aviano. Based on an eyewitness report that said one of the perps was talking on a phone, Italian officials identified the cellphones making calls in the vicinity, and with the phone SIM IDs, could track the movement of the phones as they went into and out of various cells, including moving down the highway to the airbase.

(a) Didn't we see this in some movie already?
(b) Duh! Doesn't the CIA go to the movies?
(c) Hey, this stuff cuts both ways!

(For background see the Washington Post story CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Probe in Milan).

Networks and visibility: unconnected = invisible; connected = visible. And connected in more ways than most of us care to think.

jd

Ecological revolution, take one

The human-Nature relationship is both direct (we are Nature, we sense Nature both inside and outside of our bodies), and also mediated by our tools. As in all interconnections in Nature, the relationship is two-way. We affect Nature, Nature affects us. Humans develop in particular ways through the tools they use. The mediated relationship affects Nature in different ways, new tools change what is possible. And to the extent the tools are taken up and used, they change the human-Nature relationship.

Historian James C. Malin, described an approach to the history of the human-Nature relationship in terms of cultures (or perhaps more accurately, different modes of production, expressed as "cultures") competing for the same environmental space. The degree and scope of exploitation is determined in part by the tools. In his description of this difference, he makes an interesting observation which echoes today in the discussion over "peak oil":

[T]he more complex invading culture possessed technological tools and skills which made available different or wider ranges of options applied to the exploitation of the area, bringing into the flow of utilization existent resources that were latent under the displaced culture. That point deserves special emphasis. The earth possessed all known, and yet to be known, resources, but they were available as natural resources only to a culture that was technologically capable of utilizing them. There can be no such thing as the exhaustion of the natural resources of any area of the earth unless positive proof can be adduced that no possible technological 'discovery' can ever bring to the horizon of utilization any remaining property of the area. An attempt to prove such an exhaustion is meaningless, because there is no possibility of implementing such a test. Historical experience points to an indeterminate release to man of such 'new resources' as he becomes technologically capable of their utilization. ("Ecology and History", 1948, in (History and Ecology: Studies of the Grassland, edited by Robert P. Swierenga, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1984.)

(For more on how new technology changes the available oil equation, see "Why $5 Gas Is Good for America" in the December, 2005 Wired)

Carolyn Merchant has written about "ecological revolutions", where there are dramatic changes in the environment due to either dramatic natural (or non-human) events, or the kind of rapid change brought on by Malin's "invading culture". Merchant's Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), describes two revolutions: the "colonial ecological revolution" brought on by European settlers in the period roughly from 1620 - 1675, and the "capitalist ecological revolution" in the period roughly from 1800 - 1860, both of which dramatically changed the New England environment. From the introduction, it seems clear that she is referring to different modes of production, each of which left it's heavy stamp on the ecology of the area.

John Bellamy Foster's The Vulnerable Planet: A short economic history of the planet (Monthly Review Press, 1999), also breaks down the history into stages: pre-industrial, industrial, and imperialist. While a very concise and readable survey, I couldn't help but notice the startling absence of reference to new technologies that make possible new modes of production. For example,

The Industrial Revolution can be defined as a sudden take-off in growth as the result of a series of economic, social and ecological transformations. Its principal elements were the growth of the factory system the expansion of wage labor, the increased reliance on machine production, and the rise of the modern industrial city. (p. 33)

No mention is made of the revolution in motive power that enabled the transformation of the manufacture system to the industrial system. I wonder if this is a Monthly Review thing -- Ellen Mieksin Wood's book The Origins of Capitalism (Verso, 2002, but originally published by Monthly Review Press; she served as editor of the Review from 1997 - 2000) is a fascinating analysis of capitalism emerging out of English agriculture, but she deprecates the role of the development of the productive forces in the overall process. Productive forces include not just "tools", but technique and organization (skills, craftsmanship, even processes like crop rotation) as well, and not just the tools of production per se, but also the tools of communication and transportation. And it would seem that this changing technical environment makes possible new social forms. But I suspect by narrowing the conception of productive forces, she can separate "agricultural capitalism" from productive forces, and in fact up-end the relationship of productive forces and property relations:

The conditions of possibility created by agrarian capitalism -- the transformations of property relations ... were more substantial and far-reaching than any purely technological advances required by industrialization. This is true in two senses: first purely technological advances ... were not responsible for the so-called 'agricultural revolution' that laid the foundation of industrialization; and second, the technological changes that constitute the first 'Industrial Revolution' were in any case modest. (p 143)

In other words, property relations precede and determine productive forces. I realize it is a weak argument to say, "but that's not what Marx said" to another Marxist. Still, it seems nearsighted to not see the constantly developing advances in science, in agricultural technique, in timekeeping, in shipping, in financial markets, etc. that altered the economic environment -- exposed new dimensions and faces of Nature, changed its shape, and made new forms of social organization and property viable. The absence of a 17th-century "killer app" does not indicate the lack of technological progress, nor does it negate the importance of technological change to forms of property relations that emerged in English agriculture. (And of course the productive forces and the property relations exist in a dialectical relationship, each sphere affecting and interpenetrating the other.)

Anyway, the point I am considering is that to the bundle of interconnected processes -- technology revolution, economic revolution, social revolution -- we must ecological revolution. The project I see emerging is a piece that would compare the human-Nature relationship with production regimes, with stages of capitalism (roughly, mercantile, agricultural, industrial, imperialism, globalization), with forms of Capital (mercantile, land, industrial, finance, speculative). With each stage, the relationship changes in some way. Changes in consciousness are bundled up in that (dialectical). And especially to explore what, if any, new relationships either come to the fore, emerge, or are made possible at the stage of speculative capital (or globalization).

jd

T-shirt globalization

Pietra Rivoli's book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade was the subject of a recent (10/19/05) IMF book forum. The transcript is available. Rivoli gives an overview of the book, as well as a fascinating look at globalization today. She uses the honored dialectical method of starting with one thing, and by exploring all of its interconnections, coming to an understanding of the whole (like Marx did by starting Capital off with an investigation of "commodity" to get to the workings of capitalism). In Rivoli's case, she uses a the life of a t-shirt to explore the global economy. (From one of the "list" links on Amazon, I see there is actually a genre of "commodity biography".) The transcript is worth the read.

jd

[P.S. - NPR did a series based around Rivoli's book in April '05, called The World in a T-Shirt. The NPR page has a map and links to book excerpts.]

Sensuous Materialism

David Abram's remarkable book The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage, 1996) accomplishes an amazing task. Without going beyond the perceptible world, the world of nature, the material world, he is able to infuse it with wondrous-ness, what one might call spirituality except that it is so firmly rooted in the world. As Abram has said elsewhere, "spirit is matter."

Building his argument on the work of French philosopher / phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram provides a concise interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's work. The starting point is the material, sentient body, in the world, and its "silent conversation with things".

-- perception is inherently interactive, an act of participation, a reciprocal interplay between perceiver and perceived.

-- perceived things are encountered as animate, living (unfinished) presences. Our spontaneous pre-conceptual experience yields no evidence for a dualistic division between animate and inanimate phenomena, only for a relative distinction.

-- the complex interchange called "language" is rooted in the non-verbal exchange always already going on between our flesh and the flesh of the world.

Whereas traditional science privileges the sensible field, abstracted from the sensing experience (what one might call mechanistic materialism); and "New Age spiritualism regularly privileges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter" (and going so far as to claim the world is illusion created by mind or spirit),

both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human "subjects" and natural "objects", and hence neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation and use. While both of these views are unstable, each bolsters the other; by bouncing from one to the other -- from scientific determinism to spiritual idealism an back again -- contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive. (pp 66-67)

Interdependence, reciprocity, interaction, participation, interpenetration -- this is the vocabulary of dialectics. This is no coincidence, as Merleau-Ponty was a Marxist in the post-WWII French intellectual tradition (for a fascinating history of that milieu, see Mark Poster's Existential Marxism in Postwar France). And coupled with this sensuous materialism -- a universe sensing and sensed, alive in some way -- this treatment excites, enlivens and elevates dialectical materialism.

Those two words, "dialectical" and "materialism", put together, are weighted down with so much historical baggage. On the one hand, suggesting some connection between Abram's work and dialectical materialism does a disservice to him (and Merleau-Ponty too) inasmuch as it may stop the prospective reader from going any further. On the other hand though, if "dialectical materialism" invokes history, exploitation and class struggle, then that perhaps is good.

Abram's book is a philosophy of ecology. He acknowledges the personal task of "remembering", "renewing reciprocity", not "going back" but "going full circle", "uniting our capacity for cool reason with this more sensorial, mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of a common world root itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and the particular." (270) The sensuous world is always local. He acknowledges also the political task of "engaging in political realities". He doesn't come out, though, and say that the destruction of the environment cannot be stopped short of stopping capitalism -- how can he? It's not that kind of book, and he may not be that kind of person. But that is the insight that "dialectical materialism" provides, and precisely the act that "dialectical materialism" invokes.

"Materialism" may be one of those words that has exhausted its usefulness, or ability to convey new meaning. Engels wrote how the conception of materialism had to keep pace with science. But the idea of "the Universe is one, and is as a whole absolutely self-determined, but no part of it is absolutely self-determined", "every part of the Universe is in mutually determining relations with the rest of the Universe," "the Universe is a material unity, and that this is becoming," "this material unity cannot be determined by thought alone, it is established by thought in unity with practice, by thought emerging from practice and going out into practice," as Christopher Caudwell wrote ["practice" I would say embraces all interaction with the world, doing things, of which laboring and the production process is of course a very important part].

This description of materialism, a dialectical materialism is not the mechanical materialism typically assumed as "materialism"; nor is it atomism or metaphysical materialism -- both outlooks were more or less destroyed by physics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. But it is a materialism that does not allow for a being outside of the Universe, not a Creator or an "Intelligent Designer". The Universe is It, feeling and being felt, not being, but becoming.

jd

The introduction to The Spell of the Sensuous

Mystery Alaska

We watched the H'wood movie "Mystery, Alaska" last night, a cute and familiar story of small town rural America vs what? dehumanized, de-passionized, urbanized, corporatized America I suppose. Almost a Red State / Blue State contradiction without the false moralism (they drink and screw a lot in Mystery). The hockey players of Mystery (Nature = mystery) skate on the river and play on pond ice surrounded by majestic mountains and forests. The New York Rangers play indoors arena hockey with boards (fences) and overlaid lines (cartesia) on the ice. A kind of Lake Woebegone, the women are wholesome and fresh, the men strong and virile and honest (except for the one who left to go to the big city, and returns as an outsider.) The town is beset by a Walmart-like company ("PriceWorld") trying to invade the town, a store clerk's "accidental" response is to shoot the PriceWorld representative (who clearly articulates the contempt of corporate America for, well, Americans).

I was reminded of the polarization of town and country that Marx describes in many places, one of the destructive consequences of capitalism. And that that polarization itself a reflection of, or an aspect of, and/or a contributor to, the alienation of humans and Nature that also accompanies capitalism. Which is likewise an echo of the alienation of humans-as-workers from the production process and the fruits of their labors. (see e.g., John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology.)

Some additional thoughts on this:

One -- alienation as a kind of connection, or anti-connection.

Two -- the appeal of "country" music to city folk as a yearning for healing the human/Nature rift. Of wanting to be closer to something that sounds like Nature. I know squat about country music in general, but I understand that it comes out of rural laboring, whether white agricultural labor ("country" music or "cowboy"/"western" music) or black agricultural labor ("blues"). The sensuous body; the alienation, exploitation and poverty; music as expression...

Three -- the danger of the idolization of rural Americans as People of the Earth, the volk, real Americans vs the urban invaders, aliens, violators, spoilers -- the roots of ecofascism. Instead of recognizing that the destruction of rural life is intimately connected with, is the flip-side of, the destruction of urban life...

jd

Science vs "Intelligent design" scorecard

Some links related to the battle of darkness and ignorance vs. science:

Good news from Dover, PA
Intelligent Design Falls Hard: Dover, PA, reams school board over Creationist teaching (Village Voice)
A Decisive Election in a Town Roiled Over Intelligent Design (New York Times)
Pat Robertson: Intelligent design rejection was a vote against God: "On today's broadcast of 'The 700 Club,' Robertson told Dover residents, 'If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God.' The founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network explained, 'You just voted God out of your city.'"

Bad news from Kansas (don't trust future graduates from Kansas schools posing as scientists)
Kansas School Board Approves Controversial Science Standards (New York Times)

(and also Roanoke, Virginia: 'Intelligent design' supporter wins school board seat)

jd

More trees falling in the forest

A few more notes on yesterday's post regarding speculative capital and timber:

One of Marx's first political writings dealt with timber. His article "Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood", which he wrote as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, defended the right of peasants to scavenge wood from what had once been common land. Wood was the main source of fuel for heating homes and cooking food. For a discussion of this topic, as well as the development of Marx's overall thinking on nature and the environment, see John Bellamy Foster's fascinating book Marx's Ecology: Materialism and nature, 2000, Monthly Review Press. "What was at issue," Bellamy writes, "was the dissolution of the final rights of the peasants in relation to what had been the common land -- rights that had existed from time immemorial but which were being eliminated by the growth of industrialization and the system of private property." (66)

So the trajectory looks something like this: Common land; enclosure or privatization of forest land by the large (family) landowners; the industrialization of timber production and ownership by timber corporations; the ownership by hedge funds and pension funds. Memo to self: for a future project, map the alienation of human from nature onto property relations and see what turns up.

For more on "speculative capital" as I use the term, see a paper I did for the 2002 Global Studies Association meeting. Briefly, the idea is that capital can play different roles or take different forms. "Productive capital" is capital applied to actual production -- tied up in raw materials or machinery or advanced as wages. Inasmuch as this capital is used in industrial processes (and we could include industrialized agriculture here), it is "industrial capital." "Finance capital", following from Lenin (which is fair I think, as Marxist economics is the context in which I am looking at these forms) is the merger of "bank capital" with "industrial capital" under the control of the banks. This capital was still directed towards production. "Speculative capital" is a subset of finance capital, or develops from it, and is capital involved in the trading of financial instruments; derivatives in the broadest sense of the term -- instruments derived from underlying titles or goods or commodities or assets. Typically speculative capital is used in the management of risk.

In this sense, Harvard's large endowment is not speculative capital per se. In its ownership of large tracts of forest the university functions more like a rentier, holding the asset and selling timber rights back to the timber corporations from which it bought the land. It gives an institutional face to the land ownership. When money managers securitize the woods though, e.g. by setting up timber funds that investors can subscribe to, or real estate investment trusts (REITs) that then sell shares on the open market, then this can properly be seen as the functioning of speculative capital. The underlying asset (the forest) has been converted into shares that can then be traded among investors. Inasmuch as the forest generates income, these shares are titles to future income streams -- what Marx called "fictitious capital".

Another WSJ article on 11/4/05, "REITs Spread to Timber Industry As Paper Market Struggles, Firms Adopt New Structure In Bid to Boost Share Prices" by Chelsea Deweese describes how these REITs work:

With growth in the paper market sluggish and the timber market battered by cutthroat competition, timber companies have been looking for ways to boost their share prices and stand out with investors. For the companies, a big advantage to becoming a REIT is that they no longer have to pay corporate income tax on earnings from land holdings.

...

Integrated forest-product companies once tried to do it all: own land, harvest trees and produce paper and other wood products. Today, under pressure from shareholders who want them to maximize the value of their timberland, companies are being forced to restructure.

...

REITs typically pay out hefty dividends, because they are required to pass 90% of their earnings to shareholders. And because earnings from timberland REITs are considered capital gains, their dividends are taxed at a lower rate -- a maximum of 15%, compared with up to 35% for other REITs, whose earnings don't all qualify as capital gains.

...

Timber REITs have performed so well that some non-REIT timber companies have faced investor pressure to do more to keep up, analysts say. Mr. Chercover says some companies are lobbying Congress for changes in the law so their timber operations would be "taxed on a level playing field with the REITs." [the connections in the economy compel other players to keep up or fail - jd]

...

But the growth of timber REITs has some on Wall Street worried. These REITs make money buying and selling timberland real estate to property developers. If the housing market cools and land sales decline, timber REITs may see their earnings suffer. In addition, a real-estate downturn could chill demand for wood for building houses, which also could hurt timber REITs.

"We are in a very strong market for wood, but that's not going to last forever," says Richard Schneider, an analyst at UBS Warburg.

Ben Inker, director of asset allocation at investment firm Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo in Boston, says the REIT structure isn't ideal for all timber companies. Once a company converts, he says, it may feel pressure from shareholders to produce steady revenue, which could force it to cut down trees even if demand for wood dries up.

The article also notes that in the case of Plum Creek raised enough money through the REIT to begin trading in timber real estate, in addition to exploiting the natural resources.

Speculative capital represents an abstraction from the act of production. There is the production itself, then the loans, bonds, etc. that finance of production, and then the various levels of abstraction of speculative capital: the shares that represent titles to production or income streams, the mutual funds or exchange-traded funds that represent no particular company, but an industry or the economy as a whole, the instruments that represent the price movement of those shares, and finally, modern-day derivatives that link together distant and distinct markets and commodities together.

This degree of distancing (can it also be called alienation?) of capital mirrors the trajectory of property.

Finally, speculation is rooted in the management of risk, of which the first and main source is Nature -- storms at sea, weather-related crop failure, floods or drought or hurricanes. From the trade in tulip futures in Holland in the 1600s to the trade in weather derivatives at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange today, speculative capital has had an intimate relationship to Nature. Memo to self -- another project.

Abstraction, insulation, securitization, protect -- the language of alienation.

jd

Timber!

The second article in the Wall Street Journal's series "Awash in cash: Cheap money, growing risks" provides a fascinating look at an odd dimension of speculative capital.

"U.S. Timberland Gets Pricey As Big Money Seeks Shelter" by E. S. Browning (11/4/05) looks at pension funds, endowments and real estate investment trusts buying up timberland in the never-ending quest for higher returns. On the other side of the transaction, lumber and paper companies, under pressure from shareholders to improve bottom lines, are converting forest land to cash. "The result is an enormous land transfer now under way." Mirroring the general process of industrial capital yielding to speculative capital, the industrial owners of the land are transferring title to pools of speculative capital. Per the article, some $30 billion of timberland is owned by financial investors (six times what it was in 1994). Just as speculative capital has no direct connection to actual production processes, the new owners of the timberland are far removed from trees and lumber.

The numbers are amazing: in one sale, a Boston money-management firm bought more than 5% of the state of Maine. Harvard University has 10 percent of its massive endowment portfolio of $26 billion assigned to timber investments; it is the second largest owner of forest land in New Zealand.

Why timber?

With bond yields puny and stocks flat year-to-date, timber offers a shot at stable returns in the high single digits, mostly from long-term growth in the value of the land and its trees. Low interest rates make it cheap for an investor to borrow cash to magnify a bet on timber.

As a hard asset, timber also has appeal as a haven from possible worsening inflation that might undermine financial assets. And it has diversification value: Its market performance historically is largely uncorrelated with those of stocks and bonds -- when they zig, timberland may do nothing or may even zag.

Timber investment itself is not without risk. As more money flows into timber, prices are climbing and yields are falling. Also, as with any commodity, timber has its vulnerabilities -- demand might slacken, or the cost of borrowing to purchase land might rise, hurting returns.

Since speculative capital in general, and in this particular case, remote timber ownership, is abstracted from the transformation of use values, the connection between speculative capital and land, community, worker, environment is tenuous at best. In the case of identifiable owners like Harvard or Yale, the point of resistance is identifiable and confrontable. In the case of hedge funds and real estate trusts, the owners dissolve into the faceless sea of capital. Fund managers can authorize clear-cutting forests or building sub-developments to maximize short term returns. This is not to suggest that industrial capital has any more sympathy for the communities it exploits; only that the terms and terrain of confrontation and resistance change with the forms of capital. Capital becomes, as Marx wrote, a general, a social power.


jd

Dynamic atomism

"In the sciences ... a continual circulation takes place -- not because the objects themselves change, but because new observations produce a need in each scientist to assert himself, to handle knowledge and the sciences in his own way.

"But since human thought also follows a certain circular pattern, a reversal of method will always bring us back to the same point. These atomistic and dynamic concepts will forever alternate, but only in emphasis, for neither will wholly replace the other. This holds true even for the individual scientist. Before he realizes it the most determined dynamist will fall into atomistic terminology, while the atomist will be unable to avoid becoming dynamistic at times." (Goethe, in "My Relationship to Science, and to Geology in Particular", Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by Douglas Miller. Suhrkamp Publishers. 1988. pp 138-9.)

"Atomism" refers to a crude or metaphysical materialism, where the world is seen to be composed of discrete stable particles. If "dynamism" can be construed in the sense of motion, change, development, then the "dynamic atomism" described by Goethe can be seen as a precursor of, or early articulation of, dialectical materialism?

jd

Flood of capital

On page 1 of today's (11/3/05) Wall Street Journal, an article by Greg Ip and Mark Whitehouse titled "Huge Flood of Capital to Invest Spurs World-Wide Risk Taking". I think Greg Ip is one of the WSJ's most insightful writers in capturing the content of the high tech / speculative capitalism.

I think that deflation is the tendency in high tech/digital capitalism, inasmuch as price corresponds to value on a global scale, and less value is bound up in commodities produced under near-laborless conditions. But just like Marx's famous "Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall", it is a tendency that invokes counter-tendencies that mute or even counteract the tendency.

In the case of deflation, one counter-tendency is the rise in labor-intensive production in low-wage production sites (China, Bangladesh, El Salvador etc) on the one-hand, and the expansion of labor-intensive services and various forms of unproductive labor to ensure the circulation of commodities. (For more on this paradox see The End of Value.) While prices may tend to fall in, say, manufactured goods, prices rise for things like health care and education.

The "Huge Flood of Capital" article describes another counter-tendency -- capital that can't be invested profitably in the production of stuff (no need for more capacity) goes chasing for returns in other markets. Per the article, world pension funds, insurance companies and mutual funds have $46 trillion at their disposal, up almost a third since 2000. U.S. companies alone have $1.3 trillion in liquid assets. This capital, when compounded through leverage (investing with borrowed money), pushes up the price in investment markets, in turn reducing overall return. "This means that investors are demanding less compensation than usual for taking on the risk inherent in owning the assets." This in turn can lead to a positive feedback cycle (or a vicious cycle) of more money chasing fewer returns. Or as one person quoted in the article says, "It is a global game of chicken."

The obvious danger is a crash in asset prices if capital is withdrawn for whatever reason -- e.g., investors become more averse to risk, or companies expand investment. Given the high degree of interconnection in modern speculative capital, the danger of systemic crisis is present.

jd

Oil, Wal-Mart, environment

Two bits:

Regarding the "end of cheap oil": A global production line and global market means a dispersed economy; and so requires a dense web of transportation connections to sustain that dispersion. Since most transportation technology uses oil in one form or another for power, the degree to which oil prices can affect such an economy is dramatic. Whether the current high price of oil is historic (in the sense of being part of a long-term crisis, where increasing demand, shrinking reserves and slowing discovery is a long-term trend, and likely to just get worse) or merely episodic (hurricanes and/or political storms are causing temporary disruptions in supply and, with speculators, causing bursts in price, technology is allowing previously hard-to-get oil to be cheaply retrieved affecting the total reserves available, more efficient technology will hold down increasing demand) -- in either case expensive oil has the potential of a serious re-alignment of the connections in a global economy.

From a recent discussion (aired 10/18) on Christopher Lydon's Open Source radio program, called "The End of the Oil Age", I take it this disruption is discussed in James Howard Kunstler's book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. In the show, Kunstler is definitely in the camp that the high price of oil is a historic event, with terrible consequences for the current economic structure. Here's a link to a condensed version of the book which appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. For example:

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

Wal-Mart also figured in a Living on Earth radio program, "Wal-Mart to Reduce Its Environmental Footprint" (aired week of 10/28/05). The story raises in general (albeit implicitly) the contradiction between capitalism and the environment. Capitalism tends to see the environment as an economic externality; the cost of trashing the environment is paid for not by the polluter, but by you and me and everybody else -- via ruined health, taxpayer-paid cleanup, and the loss of unspoiled nature. However, there are ways that going green cuts internal costs; with the environmental benefits being a useful by-product and good for public relations.

E.g., in the radio program, Andy Ruben, the VP of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability at Wal-Mart says that by reducing the package size of just one toy brand that Wal-Mart carries will save it $2.4 million in transportation costs (presumably more will fit in each cargo container coming from China, and on each warehouse on wheels), meaning 3,800 trees that will not be harvested, and 1,000 barrels of oil that won't be burned.

jd

Materialism quote

"But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, it has to change its form." Frederich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Tools and consciousness

An article by Gautam Naik, "Arrowhead Case: Knapping Hits a Spot For Flint-Stone Fans" appeared in the 10/6/05 Wall Street Journal, on the modern-day hobby of "knapping" -- making Stone Age tools the Stone Age way. Naik quotes knapping superstar Jim Spears: "Every stone is different and every stone is a challenge... It helps me get into the minds of ancient people."

The means by which we interact with the world -- tools, processes, production, rituals -- structures and bounds our thinking. To understand a people, try out their tools. Okay it's more complicated than that, and it would be extremely difficult to forget everything we know and the way we know it -- the recreation of the past is always problematic -- but immersion into the tool culture of a people provides a peek into a different consciousness.

jd

Goethean Science

The journal Janus Head's summer 2005 issue is devoted to "Goethean science". Craig Holdrege of The Nature Institute is one of the guest editors.

jd

Policed state

First some links that came across a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility mailing list today:

Secret tracking codes in Xerox printers cracked: Xerox and other printer manufacturers print tracking codes on each document the user prints, ostensibly to thwart counterfeiting

Adobe, others slip anticounterfeiting code into apps: Applications designed to not open certain images, again "to foil counterfeiting"

FBI to get veto power over PC software?: Declan McCullagh reports that according to a recently released FCC document, "to preserve the openness that characterizes today's Internet, 'consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.'" To which Declan cautions the reader: "Read the last seven words again."

Wiretap rules for VoIP, broadband coming in 2007: Rules to ease wiretapping.

The rest of this post is excerpted from a discussion that I contributed to on "the police state". The conference took place in 1995. The complete text is no longer available:

The "police state" is not just a state form, but a description of social relations. It includes not just the obvious relationship of the state to the citizen, but also the realms of neighborhood life, social services, production, the reproduction of labor power, and culture. The "police state" describes not just the "state" as the organ of enforcing class rule, but also a "state of existence", which can be roughly described as the absence of legal protection of the property-less classes; or the rule of the propertied class unfettered by a social contract or constitutional law.

...

The contemporary police state is the form which capitalist society assumes on a foundation of electronics technology. We frequently describe this as the form that capitalists must use to preserve their property from the property-less, and to protect their rule from the new class creating itself in the wake of the new technologies. But we can also look at this in other ways.

In order to maintain high tech production, and the circulation of commodities, and hence the realization of value and of profits, the capitalists must turn to more and more sophisticated techniques. In general, all of these techniques involve the spontaneous construction of a "surveillance society", where people are monitored as workers (if they still work), as consumers (to the extent they still consume) or, otherwise, as non-producing non-consumers. This surveillance society is both needed by capital, and is also only feasible because the technology is cheap enough to allow the collection and storage of new types of data. The once-unique purview of the state -- the collection and storage of personal data -- is now possible by private firms willing to pay the minimum wage to have someone key-in data from public records, or pay for tapes from state agencies, or match information from credit bureaus, census reports and on-line telephone directories . To the degree that information commons is enclosed and privatized, communication is subject to censorship -- not by the state, but by the "owner" of the system via which communication takes place (as has happened with the joint IBM-Sears project called Prodigy) .

Contemporary production relies on fewer workers who are expected to devote their attention, creativity and loyalty to the "knowledge-intensive" workplace. The proper "attitude" is a key job requirement. At the point of production, workers are screened before employment via private firms that handle background checks, or in the near future, perhaps, via a national "work eligibility" database, and during employment by keystroke monitoring, drug tests, "smart" badges, videotaping, and computer logs. So workers must submit to the surveillance regime or be blocked from participating in the high-tech capitalist economy.

After the workday, consumer profiles are created via purchases at the grocery store, credit card purchases, loans and mortgages, drivers license information, calls to the "National Psychic Network" -- that is, via any of the expanding list of activities that leave a data trail. Companies, because of increased competition, shrinking markets, the need to be more efficient in marketing, (or as entrepreneurs, creating new commodities in the form of various kinds of mailing lists) are compelled to collect and utilize this data to survive in the contemporary business climate. This "data shadow" can be accessed in turn by employers or the state. For the non-producing non-consumers, their data shadow is different -- it exists in the welfare and police data systems. People are categorized and classified, and some effectively filtered out of the high tech economy, by what Oscar Gandy, Jr. calls "the panoptic sort".[Oscar Gandy Jr., The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, 1993; See also, "Consumer Profiles and Panopticism," proceedings of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Chicago, 1994; Computer Underground Digest, available in the comp.soc.cud newsgroup on the Internet; "Computers and the Poor", CPSR Newsletter, 1993; and "Workplace and Consumer Privacy Under Siege," Macworld, Special Report, 1993.]

Capitalism in the age of electronics means both the end of privacy, and the extension of privatization, as further reaches of human activity are commodified in the search for profit. With the end of privacy, comes the end of legal protections like the right not to self-incriminate (the data shadow does not know how to keep its mouth shut, and laws illegalize such a broad range of human activity). With privatization comes the conflict of civil and human rights with property rights. Compelled by the demands of the high tech economy, capitalism can take no other form that the "police state."

jd

Creative Commons

Here is a clear description of the Creative Commons license.

Although not confronting the logic of "intellectual property", the license does provide a convenient way for creators to flow around existing law. Perhaps in that way the Creative Commons concept serves to undermine IP.


jd

Predictive markets

Found this on Marty Kearns' fine Network-centric Advocacy blog, a reference to Yahoo's technology prediction market, Yahoo Tech Buzz. Prediction markets are based on the notion that crowd thinking in many cases is more accurate than "expert" thinking. James Surowiecki popularized this idea in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (see earlier posts on this blog). John Brunner also had something like this in his classic and remarkably prescient 1970s sci-fi novel Shockwave Rider.

The Yahoo market uses NewsFutures engine. See their "A Simple Example" page for how these markets work.

"Market" is accurate in the sense that people trade "shares" that have some either real money value (as in the case of the Iowa Electronic Markets political futures market) or play money value as is the case with the Yahoo Tech Buzz market. The notion is that the "market" only works if the participants have something at stake (presumably something scarce and desirable, like real money). In the case of play money markets, this might be reputation or desire to win or "to be right" or "not be wrong". I wonder if the structure of "market" is necessary for such a mechanism to work -- could there be a predictive commons? Surowiecki argues that for crowds to be "smart", they need to be diverse and the members independent, otherwise you get herd behavior. The market by definition assumes the separation between participants on the basis of conflicting (self) interest. But the positing of a "self" is a philosophical assertion, and "self-interest" a political position. Perhaps some sort of collective-interest expressed through the individual, the struggle of internal contradiction as opposed to "self-interest". Hmmm.

Research indicates that these markets can be more accurate predictors than a room of experts. Marty's blog calls for one for environmental issues. An open source version anyone.

jd

Richard Lewontin NYRB article

Richard Lewontin, co-author of The Dialectical Biologist, has a review of a couple recent books on evolution in the Oct 11, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books. In "The Wars Over Evolution", he covers a lot of ground.

He unmasks creationism dressed up as "intelligent design" ("if the living world is too complex to have arisen without an intelligent designer, then where did the intelligent designer come from?").

He gets to the spring of creationism -- the social and psychological dislocation resulting from the technology revolution and globlization are driving a pummelled and bewildered people into a soothing story of love and redemption:

What is at issue here is whether the experience of one's family, social, and working life, with its share of angst, pain, fatigue, and failure, can provide meaning in the absence of a belief in an ordained higher purpose. The continued appeal of a story of a divine creation of human life is that it provides, for those for whom the ordinary experience of living does not, a seductive relief from what Eric Fromm called the Anxiety of Meaninglessness...

He also defends Darwinism from those who would make it into more than it is. He concisely summarizes the fundamental tenets:

Darwinism is a population-based theory consisting of three claims. First, there is variation in some characteristics among individuals in a population. Second, that variation is heritable. That is, offspring tend to resemble their biological parents more than they do unrelated individuals. ... Third, there are different survival and reproduction rates among individuals carrying different variants of a characteristic, depending on the environment inhabited by the carriers. That is the principle of natural selection. The consequence of differential reproduction of individuals with different inherited variants is that the population becomes richer over generations in some forms and poorer in others. The population evolves.

He challenges the notion of directionality or progress in evolution ("evolutionary biology is not, in fact, committed to progress"):

[T]he modern empirical science of evolutionary biology and the mathematical apparatus that has been developed to make a coherent account of changes that result from the underlying biological processes of inheritance and natural selection do not make use of a priori ideas of progress... So why does evolution not result in a general increase of the fitness of life to the external world? Wouldn't that be progress? The reason that there is no general progress is that the environments in which particular species live are themselves changing and, relative to the organisms, are usually getting worse. So most of natural selection is concerned with keeping up.

Lewontin swiftly dismisses sociobiology, memes, evolutionary psychology and other attempts to overlay Darwinism onto social processes:

"We would be much more likely to reach a correct theory of cultural change if the attempt to understand the history of human institutions on the cheap, by making analogies with organic evolution, were abandoned. What we need instead is the much more difficult effort to construct a theory of historical causation that flows directly from the phenomena to be explained."

Good stuff.

jd

Random quotes

"The flood control equation is the sum of many parts, and to view only one or two of those parts without consideration of their relation to the whole is to invariably reach a badly flawed conclusion." Yazoo (Mississippi) Delta Levee Board

"There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there." William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

"The ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies ... I shall call knowledge... The elements in poetic diction which must conduce to it are, as we shall see, metaphor and simile... A little reflection shows that all meaning -- even of the most primitive kind -- is dependent on the possession of some measure of this power. Where it was wholly absent, the entire phenomenal cosmos must be extinguished. All sounds would fuse into one meaningless roar, all sights into one chaotic panorama, amid which no individual objects -- not even colour itself -- would be distinguishable." Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

"We have learned from Saussure that a human language is structured not so much as a collection of terms, each of which possesses a determinate meaning, but as a complexly ramified web, wherein the knots, or terms, hold their specific place or meaning only by virtue of their direct or indirect relations to all other terms within the language. If such were indeed the case, then even just a few terms or phrases borrowed directly from the vocal speech sounds of other animals would server to subtly influence all the ratios of the language, rooting the language, as it were, in a particular ecology, a particular terrain." David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

jd

P2P and Human Evolution

Michel Bauwens has written an interesting piece "Peer to Peer and Human Evolution": "peer to peer as the intersubjective dynamic at work in distributed networks, and how it is creating a third mode of production, peer production, a third mode of governance, peer governance, and universal common property regimes."

There is quite a bit there -- p2p economics, p2p politics, even p2p spirituality. Hopefully after I have had a chance to look through it I can offer some substantive comments.

For a weekly newsletter that includes comments on Michel's manuscript, as well as lots of interesting links and bits, see http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

jd

More pattern recognition

Maybe there's a pattern here. I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. He references "apophenia" (see the 8/30/05 post below), a term which, I like to think, I came across on my own, by as much accident as web crawling and googling can be. Not that it matters -- inspired by, learning from, borrowing, building on the borrowed, cross pollination. A quote from Marshall McLuhan in "Media and Cultural Change" (in Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, 1995, BasicBooks): "If the business of the teacher is to save the student's time..." How development is done.

For example, Gibson (publish date 2/03): "Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, [Parkaboy, one of the characters] says." Ray Kurzweil, quoted in Steven Gibson's Emergence (publish date 8/02): "Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations... Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry."

No surprise -- themes? memes? circulating. Cultural echoes. Resonance. The "quality of the time" expressing itself.

On a separate track (but really, how separate can it be?) I am also reading David Abram's remarkable The Spell of the Sensuous (more on this in a future post I hope). In one section he discusses the impact of the phonetic alphabet on consciousness -- references to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy among others. So me digging out the book referenced above, and then coming across this (bear with me through the extended quote):

[Harold Innis] changed his procedure from working with a 'point of view' to that of generating insights by the method of 'interface,' as it is named in chemistry. 'Interface' refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of 'symbolism' (Greek 'symballein' -- to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. This interplay of aspects [as is likelier to happen in conversation or dialogue -- jd] can generate insights or discovery. By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction.

Following an interesting observation that the process of transferring data, information, knowledge to computer tape -- he was writing this in the early 1960s -- required people to look at the knowledge structurally -- to understand the form of the knowledge: "This has led to the discovery of the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition."

And then McLuhan quotes from Kenneth Sayre's 1963 Modelling the Mind:

Classification is a process, something that takes up one's time, which one might do reluctantly, unwillingly or enthusiastically, which can be done with more or less success, done very well or very poorly. Recognition, in sharp contrast, is not time-consuming. A person may spend a long while looking before recognition occurs, but when it occurs, it is "instantaneous." When recognition occurs, it is not an act which would be said to be performed either reluctantly or enthusiastically, compliantly or under protest. Moreover, the notion of recognition being unsuccessful, or having been done very poorly, seems to make no sense at all.

Wheee!

jd

Après Le Déluge

Political power is exercised through social networks. Yes individuals make history, and yes under specific conditions, but never alone. History, inasmuch as it is made by humans, is always made by humans organized -- networked -- with others.

The contest over the re-building of New Orleans is underway. As always the question is, in whose interests? Not whose individual interests, but whose class interests? And the contending forces will be represented or expressed by networks of individuals, sharing common values and goals. In most cases the contest will play out within a broader arena of class interests -- the contestants share a common interest in the supremacy of private property, the extraction of maximum profit, the maintenance of basic existing class relations -- but the how being up for grabs.

How a real class contest might be fought is a much more interesting question. The hurricane and flood are providing a real opportunity. The shock at the stark display of absolute disregard of the country's ruling class for the poor; and the profound disillusionment with the government -- its tax-breaks for the rich, its oil war, its abandonment of responsibility to provide for the general welfare -- creates an opportunity for a new politic. But without the networks in place, networks with a coherence around goals and vision, the opportunity will recede as suredly as the flood waters.

It is not unfair, or exaggerated, to call the ruling class a "ruling class". They are networked (perhaps better to say there are many networks, at different layers, regions, sectors, etc, inter-networked), and generally are conscious of their goals and vision. A telling article in the September 8, 2005 Wall Street Journal (see the Common Dreams repost), titled "Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future", describes a representative of one such network.

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

The owners and regional managers of the New Orleans economy live in the same neighborhoods, vacation at the same resorts, and interact in the same social circles. They run the city. And this network is moving to implement its vision of New Orleans after the flood. "[Anton O'Dwyer] says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin [the Mayor of New Orleans] to begin mapping out a future for the city."

One of the sub-texts in the talk of the future is if it is possible to re-make the city without its poor. "The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss [a wealthy local businessman] says, with better services and fewer poor people. 'Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,' he says. 'I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out.'"

There are other forces competing to steer the future of the region. An article in today's (9/15/05) WSJ reports "with as much as $200 billion beginning to gush out of Washington for the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone, the fight already has begun over who will control the spending and make critical decisions about the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast." The future funds may be controlled by a federal body a la the Tennessee Valley Authority, usurping the state and local governments. This of course does not mean that the local networks are necessarily out of the picture -- their means of exerting control over the situation may more easily be accomplished via a Republican Party-controlled federal agency than a Democratic Party-controlled state or local authority. Which of course doesn't mean that the Democrats would re-build the city with democracy in mind, only that they are answering to a different network of capital.

It appears, as has been the case historically, that the poor are a political pawn in the maneuvering, with no clear organization or network articulating their class interests. Class cuts across race, albeit not evenly, and there is no reason to expect that the black owning class will represent the class interests of the poor, whether black or white, except in as much as they can rely on the votes of the un-propertied to maintain their political position. For example, from today's article:

On Monday night, nearly 30 black business leaders from New Orleans and Baton Rouge met at a church in the capital city to discuss ways to make sure that all New Orleans citizens are included in conversations about how to rebuild the city.
"What makes this city so great is the gumbo mix of people," says Alden J. McDonald Jr., chief executive of Liberty Bank & Trust Co., one of the nation's largest black-controlled banks, and chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce. "Everyone has to be at the table."

The rhetoric of inclusion implies that all classes need to be represented, but this is unlikely, no? Simply because the poor, by-and-large, while loosely "networked" through churches, gangs (who stepped up to provide some semblance order at the Convention Center), neighborhood social circles, etc., are not organized for political power, and so the political leadership can so easily be usurped. This is not because of any inherent failings among the property-less, but because the ruling class deliberately works to undermine independent expressions of class power that emerge in spite of the poverty of resources, education, etc.

This raises an interesting dimension of networks. What about the space between the nodes and links, the negative space or anti-matter of networks? In this case, these would be the dis-connected. The people-without-value (in the Marxist sense of the term that is -- no use-value as worker, and no opportunity to realize the exchange value of their labor power). Of course un-connected in one sense, but connected in other dimensions -- economically as consumer without real choice or politically as voter without real choice. Or culturally as spring of innovation and desires. Or historically, as agent of mayhem, rebellion or revolution.

jd

Tech workers / stepping up

Technology workers -- programmers, sysadmins, database developers, site designers, data entry folks, cable-layers, etc. etc. -- have stepped up in different ways to bring some network structure to the chaos of information swirling around in the vacuum of leadership following Katrina. Some notable examples:

The Katrina Help Wiki, based on a model developed for the tsunami aftermath, and based on wikipedia technology.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project. For some background on this, see the Network-centric Advocacy press release on same.

The Public Web Stations project that provides an elegantly simple way of quickly setting up Internet kiosks to help evacuees connect to the online world to use the resources above. See the discussion on the Linux Desktop Forums for posts on where and how these webstations are being used.

jd

Hurricane Katrina and networks

The Gulf of Mexico area, or which New Orleans is the de facto center, is a major node in energy extraction, refining and distribution. Per Daniel Yergin in an opinion piece in the September 2 Wall Street Journal:

The full extent of the Gulf of Mexico energy infrastructure is hard to grasp. Altogether, about 800 manned platforms, plus several thousand smaller unmanned platforms, feed their oil and gas into 33,000 miles of underwater pipelines, a good part of which eventually reaches shore at Port Fourchon at the mouth of the Mississippi. That adds up to 35% of domestic oil production (including oil from state as well as federal waters) and over 20% of our natural gas coming from off-shore. Add to that the 10% of U.S. oil imports that flow in through the same corridor, plus the string of refineries and pipeline networks that sprawl along the Gulf Coast, and you have a complex that constitutes our single most important energy asset.

In addition, New Orleans is the major transfer point for North American grain floating on barges down the Mississippi River. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 2 that Cargill alone had 300 barges holding grain, salt and fertilizer stranded on the lower Mississippi. Each barge is capable of holding 55,000 bushels of grain, as much as 60 semis.

"By closing the New Orleans ports, Katrina effectively eliminated the cheapest way for American industries in the nation's heartland to do business overseas. Some economists figure that the competition of the river-barge industry with the railroads and trucking companies saves companies roughly $1 billion annually.

Agriculture-industry officials say other U.S. ports simply don't have the capacity to absorb the two billion bushels of grain that move annually through New Orleans. "The ports in the rest of country are already at capacity," said one federal official.

Other damaged ports in the area compound problems. According to an article in the September 1 New York Times, Chiquita Brand's facilities in Gulfport, Mississippi, which last year handled about 25% of its banana imports to the United States from Central America, were too damaged to receive shipments.

The distribution problems in particular highlight the interconnectedness of the global economy, and vulnerabilities that loom large in very specific areas. The port of New Orleans, like that of Los Angeles and elsewhere, is a super-connector in the global economy. (See an earlier blog item for more on the L.A. port; also, "Networks and Globalization"). The global transportation system is not a particularly robust network. The cost (both financial and political) of adding new ports (i.e. nodes) capable of handling today's super-tankers and super-container ships means that the failure of any one node (whether by hurricane, dirty bomb or strike) can have a powerful impact, as options for re-routing traffic are limited.

In the energy distribution system, the Straits of Hormuz represents the biggest chokepoint (15 million barrels of crude pass through it every day, 10 times the daily production of the Gulf of Mexico platforms). The scramble to build redundant and/or politically secure pipelines and tanker ports in the Middle East, Caucasus and Balkans explains much about global politics.

Daniel Yergin points out in the article cited above that since 1973, U.S. strategy for energy security has been securing sources of oil, and policy from support for Israel and the Saudi royals to the 1991 Gulf War and the takeover of Iraq relate to this goal. A new security model is needed, Yergin argues:

But a host of developments -- from terrorism to the California power crisis to the East Coast blackout to Katrina -- have emphasized a return to what might be called the World War II model of energy security, assuring the security and integrity of the whole supply chain and infrastructure, from production to the consumer. (The gravest energy threats during World War II were when Nazi U-boats came close to cutting the tanker pipeline across the Atlantic that supplied U.S. military forces). This more expansive concept of energy security requires broader coordination between government and the private sector; more emphasis on redundancy, alternatives, distributed energy and back-up systems; planning and pre-positioning of vital supplies ("strategic transformer reserves" for electric substations); and methods that can quickly be applied to promote swift market adjustment. As with the August 2003 blackout, this crisis underlines the need for modernization and new investment in the energy infrastructure that supports our $12.4 trillion economy.

That is, expanding the energy network in various ways to provide robustness. The same could be said for other transportation systems. An interesting challenge will be that, while historically the government has provided the coordination and funds to ensure that infrastructure is modern, adequate and maintained, in the era of neo-liberalism that support is withdrawn. Just as the levees of New Orleans were left to sink or wear out or whatever exactly happened to them, because the money disappeared in tax cuts to the rich or went to pay for the war in Iraq, so the general infrastructure of distribution is more or less ignored. This provides a crisis not just for the worker/consumer/unpropertied, but also a crisis for sectors of Capital that require the infrastructure for the extraction of surplus value and profit. In the absence of a broad class-based movement for change, the differences within the capitalist class provide the engine for politics. So it will be interesting to see what comes of Katrina in the halls of Congress.

jd

New Orleans ranting

New Orleans after the deluge ranting:

-- The black faces on the rooftops, on the streets, in the Superdome. Looks like race, but really it's the hard reality of class in America.

-- The totally inept response of city, state and federal government to the disaster. (a) why do I bother to pay taxes? (b) doesn't the Navy or the Marines have landing craft, boats, etc to pick up people from rooftops? Or to deliver food and water? (c) the U.S. seems to get its armed forces to places quickly with no trouble (d) why a "Federal Emergency Management Agency" if they can't manage an emergency? (e) remind me again what "homeland security" is?

-- Aaron Brown on CNN (and Kyra Phillips too) going on about "looting" in the wake of the disaster. With no food or water, and no prospect of food or water from the inept State, what would any sane person do? Worship the sanctity of private property and die in three or four days? Or...

-- The helicopters flying over the city should have been waving signs saying "Sorry, your relief effort is in Iraq". Some 35% of Louisiana national guard troops and 40% of Mississippi national guard troops are in Iraq.

-- How far the privatization of social caring has gone -- the president and governors and mayors telling people to not look to the government for help, instead go to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army. And send money to those organizations. Because your tax money went to Iraq; which leads to...

-- It's not like no one imagined this could happen. The New Orleans Times-Picayune had repeatedly run stories about the tenuous state of the aging levee system and what might happen if a major storm struck the city. See, e.g., Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?. Following 1995 flooding, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, to address the problems. But, per the story just cited:

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps [Army Corps of Engineers - jd] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

-- The communist impulse among most people to help their neighbors, to pull together, to share and support, to violate property rights to ensure human rights; vs. the capitalist impulse to "stop looting", protect property, and either abandon the people-without-value outright, or shove the police state stick farther up the collective ass of those who survive.

-- And don't forget those who make money off of this: the credit card processors are scraping their 1 or 2 or 4 percent off of the top of every donation. Good news for the shareholders of donation processor Kintera: stock is up 17% since Monday!

-- So when do we start talking about the destruction of the environment? The loss of wetlands to mindless development? Global warming resulting in rising sea levels and extreme weather? Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

One could go on. And on. And on.

In network terms? New Orleans as transportation node. As energy production node. As cultural node. Seriously disrupted, the consequences will slosh through the economy.

Or 1.3 million human nodes in the greater New Orleans area disrupted, thousands lost. A disturbance in the Force.

jd

(Thanks Jon for additional bullets).