Monday, November 29, 2004

Pattern Recognition

I hate holliday weekends. There's always a bunch of crap about to happen in the world, and BANG the media takes four days to create "traditionally slow news days" as though the world actually turns a bit slower. Then, the following Monday is like a mad plunge into an icy pool of reality. Amid the flurry, a couple of major events are emerging in a pattern that I've been touting ever since I first noticed it.

China's taking ownership of Asean. By entering into a free-trade agreement (of which this is only a harbinger) with other Asean nations China will fulfill its own manifest destiny as the Asian Dragon. Networks, especially economic ones, tend to aggregate. According to Reed's Law the more utility the network provides the more users it attracts, and China, based on its user base and economic power, is a supermagnet. Here's the better news. As China, already constantly moving towards democracy and freedom, pulls more economies into its orbit it will be forced to loosen its restrictive government faster and faster. China will soon reach a critical mass of users and utility that will make it an economic/informational superpower. Don't get scared. Not only is this not likely to prompt too much military buildup, but as China deregulates its economy and society, Taiwan (our main point of contention) will likely slip into China's orbit naturally, without any military influence, becoming the Chinese equivalent of Puerto Rico.

Asia and Brazil, Sittin' in a Tree... Looks like the Pakistani have figured out the painfully obvious way to exploit their natural resources (something Europe and the US have shown minimal interest in). So, Brazil builds the infrastructure, Pakistan supplys the oil fields, and BANG new broadband connectivity between Asia and South America. If Brazil can get Pakistan to support its bid for a permaseat on the Security Council as part of the package then we're talking about the realization of major economic potential in Brazil. Of course, Brazil needs to speed up its own internal reforms (which it's been doing) to serve as a South American international economic hub. The US should largely sit this one out. This is going to be one of those fast and loose relationships that could only get mucked up by too much US/European involvement. Our systems are much too stable and regulated to route through. Good news is, with all the focus on Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, we probably will.

Time for a new bid for PM.
Sharon wasn't the guy to play peacemaker. I never had much hope that he'd pull off this dramatic shift of gears, but the good news is that the political infrastructure that he's created may be able to be used by a follow on. If he bites it over something so ordinary as a budget proposal, don't be fooled. It's because he's alienating his old allies and trying to make new ones out of old rivals. That's a tough bit for anybody. Let's just see how far he can run with the olive branch before somebody else has to pick it up.

More to come...


The Idea Rises...

I'm hardly able to sleep these days. The Idea keeps getting larger, more defined, more... something. The Idea is that great, all encompasing model for a network-based universe. I see hydrogen molecules everywhere, my new basic symbol for mutual dependence, for the simplest of networks. In hydrogen (H2) each atom is in need of the other to remain somewhat stable. Every question that arises results in a network-based answer. A brief, and very civil, discussion of the abortion issue resulted in the question, "When does life begin for a child?" being raised. The answer: at division. At birth. A new nation exists when it divides out of the old national network that encompassed it. A new cell exists when it divides from the pre-existing one. I didn't like this answer much. I'd always liked to think that life began at some point, a gray area to be sure, before the third trimester in which conciousness was achieved. That answer doesn't hold water. It leaves more questions than answers, and none of those questions yield the answer either. Fortunately I can still skirt the abortion issue while holding my answer to be true, because simply defining a child as part of a mother until birth does not give the implicit right to abortion. (Depending on whether or not you're a libertarian, that is.) Anyway, the Idea rises.

I'm finding more network-centricists every day. I'm not even close to the only one, and I realized something today. We're reaching critical mass. Soon, we'll hear the jargon that we've been spewing at each other in ordinary conversation. Soon, our ideas on how to make politics more efficient will be reality. Take a look at this article from The Nation.

It's time to start writing. The Idea is mature enough. It's time to begin pruning the bonzai.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

FedEx vs. UPS: Network-Centricism and the Long View

It's been a long day of dealing with a family crises amid a host of deadlines and a travel schedule. Tonight, happily, I find myself largely caught up and just hanging around my parents' house with my laid-up-after-surgery step-father waiting on my old high school buddy and fellow political activist to get over here with the Chinese takeout. Rockstar.

While staying up until the wee hours of the morning helping a friend of mine out with a research paper I came to a nifty realization. The topic of the paper is irrelevant, but I came to realize something interesting while comparing FedEx and UPS as business entities. Both businesses are very successful and have bucked the last few years economic downturn. Strikes me that this says a lot about the market for connectivity which is fundamentally what the parcel service industry is about. Interestingly enough FedEx has done better over the long haul and with a great deal more consistency. I know that coincidence isn't causality, but I'd just like to point out that FedEx is built on an entirely network-centric business model from the operator to upper-management level, and that the company tends to grow like a network on all levels. UPS, which has many network-centric components utilizes a somewhat antiquated unionized workforce and seems to have a more stolid and traditional management structure. FedEx has incorporated many of the benefits of being a union employee into its corporate structure, and offset the slight sense of instability with a great potential for upward mobility, drawing its future managers from the line employees. Sparing you any further comparisons, it would seem that almost all market analysts are putting their money on FedEx. Granted that's FedEx to win and UPS to place, since the market for parcels is still emerging into the developing world and there's definitely room for Sharks and Jets in that town, but the money seems to be on FedEx based on one phrase: "Growth Potential." For reasons that never seem to be specified analysts (of many different types) say FedEx has more room to grow. Could it be that the network-centric model simply allows for unlimited potential growth whereas the top-down model eventually reaches a point of critical-mass at which it either divides or collapses? Is that why FedEx has more room to grow? True, both businesses are hybrids of the two models. To be an aggregate network model business FedEx would have to be a co-op, and UPS can't deliver packages efficiently without having a vast communications/transit network, but while UPS clearly draws the line between its business and how it runs it, FedEx seems to believe that networks... well... work. Given that FedEx dumps virtually all of its charitable donations into IT related education facilities it seems that they've even taken it upon themselves to bring about a more network-centric (and thus network-friendly) world. Who do you think has the long view in mind? I know where to bank my retirement money.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Reflections on Re-election

Well, I joined many Americans this week in my disappointment at the re-election of George W. For me it was partially the fear of what might happen under another four years of neoconservatism, but also the feeling that I'd just been sucker punched. Unlike many Kerry supporters of my generation I'm not suggesting that the election was stolen or fabricated. I don't think that the Diebold machines were all hacked or that hundreds of thousands of minorities were denied their right to vote. I don't think the Republicans had to do any of that. I think we were outplayed on a basic level. Their media campaigns were better. They sold their ideas in thirty second sound bytes. They adapted to the global information age, and, frankly, we didn't. Kerry supporters assumed that because their ideas were so much better for the country, their ideals so much more worthy of the greatest nation on earth that they would triumph. We were wrong.

The Republicans learned to sell George W. Bush as John Wayne. They sold values and a stern father. They sold steadfastness. It wasn't hard to fit that into the attention span of the average American, but it's nearly impossible to fit concepts like "making the war on terror multilateral" into a soundbyte. Kerry's mantra "fighting for the middle class" is just wrong from a sales perspective. No marketing exec worth his salt is ever going to include the word "middle" in something. The popularization of the prefix "mid" is thanks to marketing execs who want to avoid seeming boring in a society that values standing out. Further more, the middle class just doesn't sound like a group that needs fighting for. Would you ever say: "I'm fighting for the guys who aren't bad off, whose kids are all in college, and who just bought a new lawn mower." No, no you wouldn't.

It's time to get off our high-minded horses. It's time to get our hands dirty. In my home county of Shelby County, Tennessee we won. We turned a starkly divided county flat out blue. We mobilized minorities. We made sure that voting rights were protected. We politely asked people to listen. We didn't attack their ideas, but showed them how our ideas were compatible. We didn't approach people wearing Kerry buttons and waving flags. We waited until we heard conversations about "those ungrateful French" and then we talked about how frightened we were that the euro was getting stronger than the dollar under Bush. We asked what they were interested in and we told them how our ideas could help. We let pro-lifers be, and we didn't try to sell everyone on ideas that Bush had made controversial. We played his game, and here, in this little patch of racially charged politics, we won.

Now, we're getting organized. We came together for John Kerry, but we're staying together for each other and for you. We're keeping this going, not for ourselves, but for those we love and for those we've never met, for our soldiers, for our children, and for our future. Spero Meliora are the words on my family crest. They mean "Aspire to Better." We aspire to a future worth creating.