More or Less

More or less?

That's the question in politics today.

What's the solution to the financial crisis? More regulation, or less regulation?

What's the best way to create jobs? More government spending, or less government spending?

What's the best way for Obama to lead? More TV appearances, or fewer TV appearances?

Should the current healthcare bill provide more coverage to the uninsured, or less?

In Afghanistan, do we need more troops, or fewer troops?

For the vast independent middle, these questions are too difficult to answer. Compassion is balanced against thrift, the free market is balanced against the fair market, the need to lead is balanced against the need to listen -- and heads start spinning.

Americans want change, but they have no idea what change they want. Each side, of course, claims that Americans are clamoring for their kind of change, but the schizophrenic elections we've been having only prove that we have a schizophrenic electorate.

So we go with the person who just feels right -- the person who seems to share our rage, but doesn't share answers. A year ago that person was Barack Obama. Today it's Scott Brown. Tomorrow it could be Sarah Palin. Or it might be Pat Buchanan. Or it could switch back and be a liberal Senator like Sherrod Brown. The public isn't looking for answers. It's looking for a placeholder for their feelings.

Ultimately, the answer to the above questions is probably going to be that we need to do more with less. Maximum regulation with minimum red tape. Maximum jobs created with minimum dollars spent. Maximum health coverage with minimum cost to taxpayers. Maximum inspiration with minimum words. Maximum security with minimum troops. But that's a hard rallying cry. And actually creating "more with less" solutions is hard work.

Obama knows this. Hopefully Scott Brown knows this. But until a ruling majority knows this, and passes this, and explains this, we'll continue to vote, more or less, based on feelings.

Posture Politics

I'm trying to get my head around how Scott Brown won such an incredible victory in one of the bluest states in the country. And I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that he understood -- and won -- the game of posture politics.

Posture politics is the opposite of policy politics. Policy politics is what's practiced by Mike Bloomberg. And it's what's practiced by Barack Obama to a large extent. It takes a look at a problem, gets smart people in a room, and tries to think of the best way to solve the problem. Sometimes it's a government program. Sometimes it's a tax. Sometimes it's a regulation. Sometimes it's the private sector. And sometimes it's a mix of all four. Mike Bloomberg isn't a regular guy, doesn't drive a truck, and exudes the charisma of a blank Excel spreadsheet. And this year, one of the best mayors that New York has ever had came really close to losing. Why? He didn't play posture politics.

Posture politics is all about the message being sent, not the results being delivered. The message that Scott Brown sent was "No one is helping you, but you manage to get by. Why can't everyone make it on their own, the way you do?"

Massachusetts voters, and probably voters around the country, think the following: I can pay for my healthcare, and it costs a lot. Why shouldn't everyone bear my burden? When I screw up, I lose my job. Why don't politicians? When I owe more than I make, I have to cut my spending. Why does the government increase its spending? I work hard, pay high taxes, and I don't feel like I'm getting anything from it. But someone must be. Who's getting these handouts that I don't get?

In a lot of ways, this sentiment is understandable. It certainly resonates strongly with independent voters. Not only do independent voters feel like no one is helping them. They don't want to feel like anyone is helping them. They want to feel...independent.

This isn't governing. It's posturing. But I suspect that when neither party is offering a real way out of our current rut -- certainly no one believes that health care reform is going to turn the economy around -- the person who adopts this posture will win.

The key fact is, at this stage of the recession, with the Democrats having had a year to turn things around, no one believes that either party will improve our situation. So we're left with a certain kind of cynicism. The prevailing attitude is no longer hopefulness. Instead, the attitude is, "if it's gonna be tough for me, it better not be easy for anyone else."

Again, it's not a solution. It's a feeling. And in this race, Brown rode that feeling to the Senate.

What's the Big Deal?

Everyone I know cared about Michael Jackson's death. He was one of those stars who somehow managed to just totally transcend the little niches that now make up our lives. But our lives used to have many more stars as bright as Jackson. That star system is now dying, if not dead.

This article from the New York Times discusses how Jackson might be the last universal pop star. Why? Our niche-filled, fragmented, personalized new society just doesn't have room for people as big as Jackson any longer:

The pop-idol field — like every field that can lead to super-fame — is more crowded than it has ever been, and the variety of routes to stardom keep growing. When the Beatles were on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, more than 70 million people watched, that is, more than one-third of the entire population of the United States. Yes, the Beatles were that good. But at the time, there were three networks and the radio. No Facebook, Twitter, video games, movie multiplexes, Sirius radio, malls or a dozen other potential drains on an audience.

I've personally noticed that the definition of a "big deal" is now unbelievably varied. The World Series used to be a big deal. Now it's just something that baseball fans pay attention to. The NBC Thursday night lineup used to be a big deal. Now I have no idea what's on that lineup.

For some people, you are crazy if you haven't seen the latest episode of The Bachelorette. To others, you're insane if you've never seen Conan O'Brien. For others, you're nuts if you can't name two Lady Gaga songs. But I'd guess that the majority of Americans have never watched The Bachelorette, never watched a full episode of Conan O'Brien, and can't name two Lady Gaga songs. And while YouTube makes previously unseen videos big, it doesn't make them huge. How many times has someone said to you in the past three years, "wait, you still haven't seen that YouTube clip?" But the fact is, there's no single YouTube clip that most people have seen.

Our shared, universal experiences are almost non-existent at this point. And it's easier and easier for us to get caught up in little communities where our personal view of a Big Deal is just reinforced. We mostly surround ourselves with people who have similar interests and get shocked when we realize that they aren't full-fledged members of our niches. If you read Andrew Sullivan's blog or the Huffington Post, you would have thought that the Iranian protests were the second-coming of the French Revolution. If you read US Weekly or other gossip mags, you'd think that Jon and Kate Plus Eight is now the biggest TV show of the decade. If you follow tech, you might think that the latest iPhone is second only to the wheel in terms of important human inventions. If you're a male in your twenties, you might think that everyone fills out a March Madness bracket.

With MJ's death, I think that we instinctively felt a surge in our sense of kinship with each other. We no longer had to worry whether our news was Big News or whether anyone cared about this particular man who we cared about. We could talk to anyone, rich or poor, young or old, in any niche, about this one man and finally be confident that we weren't speaking a different language. For a few days, we came out of our little perfectly-personalized holes and celebrated the life of one of the few men who we all still care about.

Field of Dreams Business Model

I'd heard that Wired Editor Chris Anderson was writing a book called Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. His basic argument is that storage space and bits are so abundant and cheap at this point that almost anything that can be digitized will eventually become essentially free.

What I didn't realize was that he believes that this phenomenon will drastically change even the way we think about business as a whole. Consider this chart that he links to on Wired.com which describes the "world of abundance" that we are entering:

SCARCITY VS. ABUNDANCE

Rules	Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted.	Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden.
Social model	Paternalism ("We know what's best")	Egalitarianism ("You know what's best")
Profit plan	Business model	We'll figure it out
Decision process	Top-down	Bottom-up
Organizational structure	Command and control	Out of control

Particularly interesting to me is the evolution of the profit plan. Instead of a carefully crafted business model which seeks to understand all risks and opportunities before the product has even launched, in the new model, products are launched in beta, ideas are crowdsourced, and the initial set of curious customers becomes the focus group. This is a concept that I've written about before. Because the cost of experimentation is so low when it comes to digital products, business models are less important. As Strategy+Business has written,

Traditional market research (chiefly, consumer surveys and interviews as well as sales data for related products) is not a particularly good predictor of success. Worse, it tends to thwart creativity. For one thing, market research is not suitable for assessing novel product ideas. An innovative product, virtually by definition, is not going to have existing real or anecdotal data to support whether or not it will be well received.

On other words, most new companies aren't like Ford. Ford can't just put out thousands of random models on the road and hope that a few of them don't blow up in traffic.

This idea -- that business models are overrated -- seems to be picking up more traction lately. Consider Umair Haque's take on business models at his Harvard Business School blog:

Business models aren't today's fundamental economic challenge. There's nothing wrong with simple, one-sided business models. In fact, the opposite is often true: business model innovation is exactly the wrong thing to focus on. Consider finance. Securitization was a breakthrough business model innovation for banks. Everything was remixed by everyone. Yet, toxic junk was mostly what was flowing through that new business model. Business model innovation amplified value destruction. Banks who didn't play the securitization game — and stuck to simple, one-sided deposit-taking business models — are today's survivors.

Haque, like Anderson, isn't all that concerned with the business model -- he is concerned first and foremost with a company's ideals. He's concerned with whether a company is producing something valuable. The idea is, if you build it, and you value it, the customers, and the revenue, will come. As Haque has said elsewhere, there are a thousand possible business models for most products. In the new society, entrepreneurs should focus less on the model and more on the product -- business models happen.

Of course, all of this goes a little too far in the name of provoking conversation. For many established companies, a tight, lean business model can really reduce costs and have a real impact on the bottom line. For other companies, their product doesn't distinguish them, but the business model is so clever that it makes up for it. And for an established company that has achieved success with a particular business model, continuing to follow and refine that model might make sense.

Unfortunately, business models can be taken easily -- see Nokia following the iPhone and the Apple App Store with their smartphone and their Ovi Store. I think the main point that Anderson and Haque suggest is that experimentation, value-creation and user-input are much more important than a pristine, shiny new business model. If you have engaged customers and a product that actually makes people's lives better, you have a choice of business models. And if you don't have these features, even the best business model won't stand a chance.

Foreign Policy's Third Way

For a long time in foreign policy, the major debate was between two camps: traditionalist defenders of the status quo and "order" vs. liberal defenders of human rights, decolonization and revolution. Then, the neoconservatives formed a new, third camp in US foreign policy. They went even further than the liberals. Instead of just supporting revolution based inside other nations, they would foment revolution from the outside. Iraq was the centerpiece of this strategy.

I think the Iran debate, at least in the United States, shows the extent to which the traditionalist camp and the neoconservative camp have lost their power.

Very few traditionalists are left who would actually criticize the demonstrators because of the threat to stability and order that they represent. If anyone was a potential last vestige of this camp it was Pat Buchanan. He likes a strong state and a traditional, religiously-based order. But in the current debate in Iran, even Buchanan is not fully on the side of Ahmadinejad and the powers that be in Iran. Instead, he is with the youthful, liberal "rabble-rousers." He is urging Obama to stay out of the debate, but he is not criticizing the anti-regime demonstration itself. Here he articulates his support for the protestors whom a real, old-school traditionalist would have denounced:

For six days, the world has watched riveted as hundreds of thousands of Iranians peacefully protested what they believe was a stolen election, challenging the ayatollah who validated it just hours after the polls closed. For six days, the regime, born of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has been leaking legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of its own people, the Islamic world, the whole world.

But Buchanan also articulates nicely the argument against the neoconservative camp:

Why interfere? Why turn a widening confrontation between the Ayatollah Khamenei and the people into a spat between the president of the United States and the president of Iran?

It is impossible to believe a denunciation of the regime by Obama will cause it to stay its hand if it believes its power is imperiled. But it is certain that if Obama denounces Tehran, those demonstrators will be portrayed as dupes and agents of America before and after they meet their fate.

If standing up and denouncing the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad from 7,000 miles away is moral heroism, it is moral heroism at other people's expense.

In the Iran debate, very few voices in the United States are simply against the demonstrators because they support the conservative, stable status quo at any cost. On the other hand, neoconservativism goes too far in the other direction. The neoconservative camp is so intoxicated by the chance for moral heroism that they cannot bear to stay on the sidelines. But that type of aggressive approach has now been discredited. The idea of a Pax Americana, fueled by unending defense spending and dozens of interventionist wars led by America has been undermined, not just by the Iraq War, but by the growing realization that change imposed from the outside is often an unsustainable mirage.

Now, it seems that there is a consensus in favor of the middle ground. We support human rights and we do not value order over freedom. But there is a recognition that for change to be sustainable and authentic, it must be personal and networked. It cannot be imposed from outside by the command and control of foreign diplomats or armies. The neocons went too far, and the traditionalists did not go far enough. The Obama foreign policy -- now embraced by the likes of Pat Buchanan -- is the default. We support forces of freedom from the outside, making sure that revolutions are associated with the grassroots efforts of those on the ground.

The neocons who are not excited by this revolution just cannot get their minds around the fact that the Iranian people themselves are smart enough and courageous enough to gain freedom on their own. They want the United States to own this revolution. We don't -- and that's a good thing. It's also the future of our foreign policy consensus.

The Trust Revolution

A lot of the change happening around us, and some of the change in Iran, comes from a basic shift in who we trust.

I think there are two essential ways to trust people and institutions:

We can trust people and institutions because they are powerful. They have demonstrated that they can "get things done" and that if they can't do something, they know people who can. They can mobilize vast numbers of people and resources to achieve a goal.

We can also trust people and institutions because they are authentic. They seem to know who or what they are and act without many obvious contradictions. They have a track record of telling the truth.

In institution after institution, we have begun expressing the second kind of trust -- the trust in the authentic -- and we have become more and more suspicious of the powerful. Of course, history is filled with eras when the authentic eclipsed the powerful. I just think that we've entered yet another one of those eras.

President Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton is a perfect illustration of this. Barack Obama was one of the least powerful people ever to win the presidency. He had no long-established network of supporters. He had a very thin record of doing favors for people, and so he had virtually no chits to cash in to get things done. He had no real relationships with the powerful politicians in Washington or abroad. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was one of the most powerful politicians in the world. Her husband was the former President, whose ability to do favors for people was virtually unmatched. She had an enormous network of supporters to marshall in case of trouble. She knew all the world leaders from her travels as a senator and as First Lady. The Obama vs. Clinton matchup was a matchup of authenticity vs. power. On one side we had someone who had never lied to us and seemed utterly comfortable in his own skin and without contradiction. On the other side we had the wily operative who knew how to get things done. We went with authenticity.

The same phenomenon is happening in Iran right now. For a long time, because many Iranians believed in the United States as an evil caricature, the Iranian people trusted power. Obama's friendly approach to the country gave Iranians the freedom to trust authenticity over power. That shift is essential to any revolution -- all revolutionaries place a bet with perceived authenticity over perceived power. Further, by telling the truth about America's past meddling in Iran, Obama heightened the contradictions between America's level of authenticity and the regime's level of authenticity. As Pat Buchanan stated recently,

The dilemma for America is that the theocracy defines itself and grounds its claim to leadership through its unyielding resistance to the Great Satan—the United States—and to Israel. Nevertheless, Obama, with his outstretched hand, his message to Iran on its national day, his admission that the United States had a hand in the 1953 coup in Tehran, his assurances that we recognize Iran’s right to nuclear power, succeeded. He stripped the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad of their clinching argument—that America is out to destroy Iran and they are indispensable to Iran’s defense.

By lying about the election results, the central authorities in Iran lost trust because they lost authenticity. Now Iranians are rallying against established institutions and the incumbent candidate. They are trusting a more authentic choice (rebellion) over the more powerful choice (acquiescence to the regime).

Media is experiencing the same trust revolution. We no longer trust only those media sources which have the longest histories or the most relationships or the most reporters. We trust media that seems authentic -- fewer ads and commercials mean fewer internal contradictions.

All in all, this is a progressive sign for society. A society that is more fearful is more likely to trust the powerful. A society that is more secure can afford to go to the next level and trust authenticity. Authentic individuals and institutions are less likely to resort to force and are more sustainable due to a lack of internal contradictions. From politics to Iran to the media, the old human compulsion to trust only the powerful is crumbling. That's a very good thing.

The Press Release Is Dead

The anti-coup protests in Iran have demonstrated that the world of the press release is now officially dead.

I guess it's pretty obvious that the press release was dying. It's a very one-way, very inauthentic method of communicating. It is carefully, centrally crafted. It takes hours to be approved by bureacracies. And once it goes out, it's almost immediately discredited as self-serving.

As Andrew Sullivan puts it,

You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

Think about how CNN -- roundly discredited in its treatment of the Iranian protests -- treats press releases. During the chaos of the past twenty-four hours, CNN would have certainly reported on any kind of "official statement" released by an Iranian government authority. To CNN, stuck in the past, an official statement from a governmental authority isn't some unreliable student protester on the ground running for his life and publicly twittering about it. It's a press release. It's from a central government. Someone might have even typed it up in an office located at a government agency. To the old media, that has credibility. The new generation doesn't trust it.

The same thing happened during the presidential primaries and election. The blogosphere would almost never simply report on an official press release from a campaign's media office. Those releases were considered so inauthentic and obviously self-interested that they became meaningless. So while mainstream media types would lead stories with bland press releases, blogs were publishing them only to vigorously tear them apart and figure out what was really happening.

Right now, society's informational ecosystem is getting much more densely populated. People get information from experts with blogs on specific areas, from general bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, from twitterers, and yes, occasionally, from the New York Times or CNN or other members of the mainstream media. It's a crowded field.

And this doesn't just go for news organizations. Public relations and marketing are changing too. My understanding is that press releases sent out to media bigwigs about new products mean less and less. Developing relationships with the real thought-leaders in your field and getting them to truly understand and trust what your organization is about is now much more important.

People will gravitate toward whatever information is most relevant and most trustworthy. Relevance is created by speed and subject matter of the dispersed information. Trust is created when the source of the information has a history of expertise, impartiality, and an established relationship with readers.

Press releases generally don't create either relevance or trust. In the Darwinism of this crowded new media environment, they don't survive.

Beta World

This week a fight broke out between Tim O'Brien, a tech reporter for the NYT, and Jeff Jarvis, author of the book What Would Google Do? and proprietor of the blog BuzzMachine.

At the heart of the debate: is it fair for blogs to break stories that are really just unconfirmed rumors? It started when O'Brien's NYT ran a Sunday piece accusing blogs of having low standards. O'Brien thinks that blogs disgrace journalism in a way when they publish things that they don't know are true.

Jarvis doesn't dispute that blogs sometimes (perhaps often) print unverified rumors. He just thinks that publishing the rumor breaks down the wall between journalist and audience and makes the process of journalism more democratic and transparent. According to Jarvis, by publishing a rumor, the journalist is saying "Help me out. Do you know anything about this topic?" She is running in "beta" mode, where a company puts something half-finished out there and lets the masses help find the bugs.

But this debate doesn't only apply to journalism. Jarvis says that it's not just newspapers that have the NYT's outdated view of product production -- it's any part of society that is still stuck thinking in the mass production mode:

....there’s the problem: journalism’s myth of perfection. And it’s not just journalism that holds this myth. It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you’re welcome).

There is a certain level of authenticity about running in beta. There's a humility -- you are not desperately trying to sell something shiny and polished -- rather you're coming clean and explaining who you are and what you're about. It's like Barack Obama coming right out there and admitting that he'd done cocaine. I think more and more, this is what we will expect -- authenticity over perfection. This article regarding the importance of Twitter to certain politicians confirms that notion:

Biz Stone, who co-founded Twitter, said politicians are increasingly establishing themselves on social networking sites, much as entertainers have done...

Stone sees [politicians] Booker and Newsom's emphasis on personal transparency as a triumph of humanity, rather than technology.

"If they have good character and compelling things to say they'll make friends," Stone, who is fan of both men, said of Twitter politicians....

Booker compared the level of personal connection to sitting down simultaneously with thousands of people at their kitchen tables. He's tweets about his penchant for coffee and working late and has a proclivity for quoting renown philosophers and leaders.

"I don't have to go through the media to reach people anymore," said Booker, who estimates that he's gaining 5,000 to 7,000 new followers on Twitter every day. "My staff has been concerned, but I've seen how it lets people connect with me."

That ability to publish frequently and independently allows everyone to give up on striving for perfection and begin emphasizing speed and authenticity. So what you have here is a media world that is increasingly saying "politicians, products, companies, we are not going to go through you to get to the article anymore. We are going to use the crowd to verify and confirm. We are going to go beyond press releases (which might mean publishing unverified rumors and labeling them as such) in order to get to the truth. And at the same time you have politicians (and even some products) who are Twittering and getting around the media to get their unalloyed version of reality out to the masses quickly.

In both cases, the product being pitched is much less edited and polished. But by using beta mode to go around traditional sources of resistence, politicians and journalists may each be putting out a more authentic, raw product. It's possible that we now value transparency and speed in our society so much that fairly soon, institutions and individuals won't have the choice to do anything else.

Killer Correlators

My twin brother made an interesting observation the other day about the field of education. While kids are in school, they read plenty of textbooks. They read scores of primary source documents like The Federalist Papers. And they read dozens of novels. But why aren't they reading books like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers? These books teach the very skills that we say we are looking for: critical reasoning, creative thinking, scientific observation and curiosity about the way the world works. Now I see that there's another one of these books out now, called Catching Fire, that gets a great review in the New York Times. The thesis: the invention of cooking is the reason humans developed a host of other modern physical traits. Fascinating, fact-based, paradigm-shifting, thought-provoking. And just one in a long line of a new field of study: Correlology.

From Freakonomics, to Guns, Germs and Steel, to Moneyball, to The Tipping Point, to The Black Swan, a new way of thinking about the world is ascendant. While the books are firmly in the realm of social science, they have nothing to do with socialism vs. capitalism, atheism vs. religiosity or Freud vs. Jung. All of these books pivot off of one major point: common human assumptions about the way things work and relate to each other -- about the correlation between cause A and effect B -- have been overlooked. You know you're reading one of these books if you see a bunch of sentences start with the phrase "Recent research shows that while other factors play a role, there is one factor that truly explains phenomenon X."

In a way, these authors are selling conspiracy theories with science to back them up. They are like conspiracy theories (and just as oddly appealing) because they unveil the secret forces behind the phenomena we see, from the sudden success of the Oakland A's (Moneyball) to the sudden success of a trend (The Tipping Point). But their data, stats and research gives them the appeal of science along with the thrill of secret-sharing. More than anything else, these books are selling the killer correlator. In a very emergent sense, they don't tell you the exact decisions to make -- they tell you what decisions will matter. They tell you the proper metrics to evaluate.

Now, social science obviously wasn't invented in the past few years. But for some reason, the past few years has seen a wave of popular books in this field of Correlology. Why should this be so?

I think part of the answer is that because of our increasingly hyper-social service economy, understanding social science is taking on increasing importance to increasing numbers of people. Second, our institutions are becoming more transparent and meritocratic. Old methods of running institutions, in which ideology, basic corruption and a good ole' boys' networks pre-determine decisions, are no longer sufficient. In a world of metrics, where thousands or millions of people are armed with data and evaluating your decisions, getting it right is more important than ever. In a world of complete mobility, where free agents or employees or stock holders or customers are ready and willing to pick up and go at the drop of a data point, figuring out how humans work is more key to success than it has ever been.

I personally find these kinds of books fascinating. And while I haven't been following the New York Times bestseller list for decades, I have noticed that these books do seem to have come into their own in recent years. While I offered a few suggestions above, I can't quite wrap my mind around why these books have soared in the popular imagination. Please leave your suggestions in the comments section -- I have a feeling that this is a subject I'll be posting about again.

Obama's Elegant Optimism

There is a seeming contradiction at the heart of Obama's message. On one hand, he is all about hope, freshness, and audacity. On the other hand, he is an incrementalist, rarely taking a radical, contrarian stance. His foreign policy is more realist than idealist.

To me, the way to square this circle is to realize that he is the embodiment of a new kind of elegant, collective optimism.

Barack Obama didn't invent optimism. But his form of optimism is very different from the optimism that came before him. While he believes that people and institutions can change, he doesn't necessarily think that he, by sheer force of being optimistic, can change them.

Consider these lines from his Cairo speech yesterday:

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.

He isn't saying that he's confident in his ability to make things better. He's expressing a confidence that people throughout the world yearn to be free, and that the force of that collective desire -- not the force of his own desire, or the force of arms -- will free them.

His optimism is realistic. It's not based on cover ups or cheerleading. The courage we get from Obama is that he's willing to go near the fire of truth and trust that he won't get burned. Watching that, the hope is that we will be willing to get close to the fire as well:

No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors.

He's not an optimist of the Thomas Friedman variety. That kind of optimism is faith-based. Those kinds of optimists are always telling you how optimistic they are. They are salesman who believe that their cheery demeanor can create change. They seem to believe that most moments in history are decided by the man who wants to charge the hill, take on the fight or just say "screw it" and plunge into the tussle outgunned but not outgrinned. The default is fighting, and life is all about getting bruises and getting back up with a smile on your face. For these optimists, wars and summits aren't real. Values other than fight vs. flight are rarely considered. Rather, historical moments are like movies, and the important thing is to ask what your cool, feisty character would do in any given situation.

Obama's form of optimism is more elegant than the cruder, earlier form. He's not the ever-smiling carnival barker. He isn't optimistic in his ability to change things, or in a single individual cowboy's power to make things right. He's not obsessed with the good old days when two wise men meeting in the oval office and bargaining over people's lives could make it all better.

Rather, he is optimistic because he thinks that thousands of individuals, all working freely and in concert, can change the world. Obama's Cairo speech marked the end of the President as the tireless CEO going around the world and desperately boosting America and convincing the world how awesome we are. Like most great leaders, the President is instead going around the world telling his audience how great they can be. If the United States can have a small part in their story, that's a role we're eager to play.

Geoffrey Canada: Making a Difference One Block at a Time

If there's one person who comes to mind when I think about how to create real bottom-up change, it's Geoffrey Canada. Canada came to my attention through my twin brother Jonathan who works in the New York City public school system. He was so impressed with Canada that he bought his book and became an evangelist for his work, excitedly telling me about this man he thought might become mayor of New York one day.

Today on Carlos Watson's new website The Stimulist, I write about how President Obama has taken notice of Canada's work and is using him as a model for his nationwide poverty-reduction program. Check it out here.

And check out a fascinating video of a Charlie Rose interview with Canada below:

You Never Know Who's Reading: Craig from craigslist Responds to My Post

The power of social networking:

Yesterday I posted about emergence, craigslist, and Obama. I tweeted my post to the world on Twitter. Wouldn't ya know it but Craig Newmark (the Craig Newmark of craigslist fame) was paying attention to his Twitter feed, found the post, read it, linked to it and recommended it.

Check out Craig's blog -- his blog, not his list -- for more of his thoughts on ways that the bottom-up culture of this new society will transform the citizen's relationship with government.

p.s. I wonder if Craig's dog is named "Craigsdog," or if he calls him car "Craigscar" etc. For most people I guess that joke would run out of steam, but I think he could get away with it.

How Twitter Lets You Eavesdrop on The World's Conference Call

One of the real benefits of the world of Twitter and blogs is that laymen get a view inside the minds of leaders.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how the best experiences in the workforce come from observing and listening to the big shots who know what they are doing. Even being cc'd on an e-mail from a superior to a client can be a revealing experience. As a lawyer, although document review was tedious, I found it fascinating to be able to go through a corporation's e-mails and see how various executives interacted with each other and with clients. Some of the most interesting experiences were just shutting up as people who knew what they were doing argued and negotiated with each other on a call. At every step of our lives, we learn to fill bigger shoes by watching someone else walk in them.

That's why the ability to see entrepreneurs, writers, venture capitalists and economists blog and tweet is such a fascinating and informative experience. You can instantly get a sense of how they think, what types of ideas they value and the kinds of arguments they respect. In fact, I think that this is one of the major benefits of Twitter over Facebook. You can't just friend anyone on Facebook, but on Twitter you can "follow" thought-leaders and eavesdrop on their brains.

Many young 20-something professionals I know have become accustomed to that puzzling, nerve-wracking obscurity of the higher-ups. We find ourselves like jealous teenagers with a crush, wondering what the boss wants, who he really likes, why she is talking to person X, etc. We wonder if our e-mails are written in the proper tone, or if we are relatively poised on phone calls with clients. We wonder if our latest industry report is "so 2008" or if our boss or manager has ever made a bad investment or a poor hiring decision. With tools like Twitter, we finally get a chance to see how successful people try, fail, and ultimately succeed on a day-to-day basis.

The web's transparency doesn't just let us get inside government practices or your daughter's binge drinking habits as expressed in a Facebook photo album. It lets us get inside the heads of people who have been there and done that. The former chief economist of the IMF. A lead partner at a venture capital firm. Former Major League baseball players. Of course, we need to be careful not to let these gurus overwhelm our capacity for individual thought.

But if we can resist that temptation, sites like Twitter lets us sit in on that global conference call and understand what makes the call's "participants" tick. The hope is that eventually, like a baby learning to talk, all that observation will result in imitation -- and eventually, independence.

Blue Magic Economy

Are we going back to 2007?

Matthew Yglesias does a nice job summing up one of the big problems in the current economic dynamic: the more the economy grows, the higher the price of oil rises. The higher the price of oil rises, the more of a strain it puts on the economy. Before the economic crisis really hit, you'll remember, one of our economy's biggest problems was the high cost of oil. Yglesias writes:

What if six months [from now], the economy is actually growing? Not growing rapidly. But just growing. Like, the number is above zero rather than below it.

Well it seems to me that we’ll be right back where we were in the summer of 2008 where sky-high gas prices were clobbering everything. And we haven’t really done anything over the past year to leave ourselves better-prepared for that situation.

And a lot of the other indices in the economy are back to where they were at the end of 2007: stocks are up big, commodities are up, gold is up, real estate sales are up, and many are saying that soon, because of a weakened dollar, exports will be back up. Remember that Jay-Z video for the song Blue Magic where instead of displaying dollars he displayed euros? That video was made while the economy was still riding high -- but was seen by some as a sign that we were headed toward disaster.

Again, the question remains, what happens next? Have we spent trillions of dollars just to go back in time two years? Will we just bob up and down between bad and worse -- bad being 2007, with high oil prices, high stock market prices, low unemployment and fear of a coming crash, worse being 2008, with low oil prices, low stock market prices and an actual crash at hand? Generally, those kinds of swings from high to low end in the drug addict hitting bottom.

Can't you picture the Federal Reserve (whose loose monetary policy was blamed for getting us into this economic crisis in the first place) singing these lyrics from Jay Z's song "Fallin'"? Fallin was on the same album as Blue Magic, which came out at the end of 2007. January 2008 is when the recession officially began.

I know i shouldnt've did that I know its gon' come right back
I know its gon' destroy everything i made
Its probably gon' get ya boy sent away
But this game I play, ain't no way to fix it...

Said where i would stop before i even started
When i get to one brick, then The Game i will depart with
Got to one brick then i looked to the sky, said
Sorry God, i lied, but give me one more try...

The irony of selling drugs is sort of like i'm using it
Guess its two sides to what 'substance abuse' is ...

Cause come January, it gets cold
When the letters start to slow, when your commissary's low
When your lawyer screams "Appeal!" only thinkin' bout a bill
When your chances are nil, damn, gravity's ill...

Barack's List

It seems like two basic rules of the natural world and the Web 2.0 computing world are the following:

1) Let the users do the work of creation, invention and operation
2) create a framework of mathematical patterns/rules/formulas within which the organisms/users/market participants operate, and guide a light maintenance system that can come in and clean things up if there are major problems.

For a take on how "light governance" rules the natural world, consider this NYT piece on how cities are formed without any strong hand -- other than mathematical formulas -- guiding them:

The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank. Why this should be true, no one knows.

Even more amazingly, Zipf’s law has apparently held for at least 100 years. Given the different social conditions from country to country, the different patterns of migration a century ago and many other variables that you’d think would make a difference, the generality of Zipf’s law is astonishing.

Keep in mind that this pattern emerged on its own. No city planner imposed it, and no citizens conspired to make it happen. Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we’re still in the dark about what that something might be.

There are dozens of other natural examples of this phenomenon in a book that I've flagged before called Emergence, by Steven Berlin Johnson. As Johnson hints at in his book, this emergent phenomenon also applies to a totally different part of our society -- Web 2.0 companies. Union Square Ventures, in a post I've flagged before, expands on this concept. According to them, Web 2.0 is a perfect example of letting users generate the content while the rulers generate and maintain the rules (often extensive) within which the users act:

We have marveled more than once on this blog about the remarkable efficiency of Craigslist. That service is essentially a very lightweight governance system that manages an enormous collection of users who contribute all of the content and much of the oversight that makes the service work. It is because Craig and Jim focus on managing the efforts of their users instead of doing the work of those users that Craigslist is so phenomenally efficient. Many of the most interesting web services are like Craigslist, at their core, lightweight governance systems. Facebook and Twitter come to mind.

Now compare this to Franklin Foer and Noam Schrieber's insightful post from The New Republic discussing Obama's guiding political philosophy. They write:

In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers.

I think that the fog of the financial crisis has obscured some of President Obama's general attitude toward liberal governance. To my mind, there's no way that Obama's philosophical side is pleased with the government's role in General Motors or the financial markets in general. I think he'd love to emulate the elegant way that some of these web services have made themselves relevant in people's lives. I think that in Obama's ideal world, government would look like the Union Square Ventures' description of the ideal Web 2.0 company:

Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.

If one day we find that we are "intimately familiar with the power and the pleasures of government services," it would be pretty much a 180 degree turnaround from our normal conception of government. The government that Reagan railed against was a government that was impersonal, unsustainable, and distant. If Obama can get us to trust government like we trust Facebook -- that is, to trust both its power and its empowerment -- he'll go a long way toward defanging Reagan's old anti-government arguments. If he does that, he'll set the groundwork for an entire generation to trust government again.