Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

“They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.”
(18th century English folk poem)

In Medieval England, villagers shared the rights to a common pasture. Your cows, sheep, or geese could wander and feed there freely. Slowly, in village after village, commoners lost the rights they had enjoyed, because powerful families asserted exclusive ownership of the once-common land. The rich were few, but they had or could buy friends on the judicial bench. Hence the metaphor: “enclosure of the commons.”

I am feeling inspired by The World of Ends to fend off the loss of the Internet it describes. David Weinberger and Doc Searls write about the Internet as it can be and should be. But I see enclosure ahead for our Internet “commons”–not just in the future, but already starting right now.

Already–*Competition among proprietary browsers means that almost any web page is “broken” for someone. *Spam merchants flood your mailbox, spam-blockers struggle to keep up with their tricks, and our government won’t even outlaw deceptive headers and spoofed return addresses. *Instead, our government exerts great effort to punish music-sharing by kids. *Pop-ups and pop-unders have made millions of dollars for advertisers, meanwhile degrading the web for everyone else. *Smarter advertisers pollute the Web community with astroturf (fake grassroots) websites, discussion-group comments, and instant messages.

“It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” said Doc Searls in a Newsweek interview about fake weblogs. The trouble is that exposing the bad guys in weblogs only works sometimes. * Weblogs were credited with breaking the Trent Lott scandal–but that story got legs only when the mainstream media took it up. * The fake republican letters to the editor were a big scandal in weblogs, but few dead-tree papers responded. GOPTeamLeader.com is still going strong.

If we could find a way to work together, we’d have a much better chance of fending off attacks on the Internet commons–or at least giving warning when such attacks get underway. Let’s not end up like the goose in the nursery rhyme, looking longingly back on the “rights” we used to enjoy. Let’s get together like the Roman geese who cackled and squawked and woke up the sleeping Romans when Gauls tried to sneak inside the Capitol.

Maybe we could start by thinking about the web-degrading mistakes described in World of Ends. When we spot someone trying one of these ugly tricks, we could try to get our weblogs squawking together–scare off the attacker!

One thing for sure: if we don’t defend it, the Internet goose is cooked.

The Court of King George III London, England

July 10, 1776

Mr. Thomas Jefferson c/o The Continental Congress Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Jefferson:

We have read your “Declaration of Independence” with great interest. Certainly, it represents a considerable undertaking, and many of your statements do merit serious consideration. Unfortunately, the Declaration as a whole fails to meet recently adopted specifications for proposals to the Crown, so we must return the document to you for further refinement. The questions which follow might assist you in your process of revision:

1.In your opening paragraph you use the phrase “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” What are these laws? In what way are they the criteria on which you base your central arguments? Please document with citations from the recent literature.

2.In the same paragraph you refer to the “opinions of mankind.” Whose polling data are you using? Without specific evidence, it seems to us the “opinions of mankind” are a matter of opinion.

3.You hold certain truths to be “self-evident.” Could you please elaborate. If they are as evident as you claim then it should not be difficult for you to locate the appropriate supporting statistics.

4.”Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” seem to be the goals of your proposal. These are not measurable goals. If you were to say that “among these is the ability to sustain an average life expectancy in six of the 13 colonies of at last 55 years, and to enable newspapers in the colonies to print news without outside interference, and to raise the average income of the colonists by 10 percent in the next 10 years,” these could be measurable goals. Please clarify.

5.You state that “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government….” Have you weighed this assertion against all the alternatives? What are the trade-off considerations?

6.Your description of the existing situation is quite extensive. Such a long list of grievances should precede the statement of goals, not follow it. Your problem statement needs improvement.

7.Your strategy for achieving your goal is not developed at all. You state that the colonies “ought to be Free and Independent States,” and that they are “Absolved from All Allegiance to the British Crown.” Who or what must change to achieve this objective? In what way must they change? What specific steps will you take to overcome the resistance? How long will it take? We have found that a little foresight in these areas helps to prevent careless errors later on. How cost-effective are your strategies?

8.Who among the list of signatories will be responsible for implementing your strategy? Who conceived it? Who provided the theoretical research? Who will constitute the advisory committee? Please submit an organization chart and vitas of the principal investigators.

9.You must include an evaluation design. We have been requiring this since Queen Anne’s War.

10.What impact will your problem have? Your failure to include any assessment of this inspires little confidence in the long-range prospects of your undertaking.

11.Please submit a PERT diagram, an activity chart, itemized budget, and manpower utilization matrix.

We hope that these comments prove useful in revising your “Declaration of Independence.” We welcome the submission of your revised proposal. Our due date for unsolicited proposals is July 31, 1776. Ten copies with original signatures will be required.

Sincerely,

Thomas Pilkington, Bart.

Management Analyst to the British Crown

Consider the fax machine: it gets no spam. Consider the cell phone: it gets no spam. Before any fax-spam or cell-spam racket could start, the guys who didn’t want spam got the law on their side.

It’s too late to stop email spam, even if we tried. As spam-merchants piously point out, there are first-amendment rights involved here. (Errr–why did the founding fathers want to protect misleading subject lines and spoofed return addresses….?)

The Rights of the Poor

Third-World farmers plant crops on land they don’t own, and hope to gather a harvest. Third-World fisherman depend on rivers and streams they have no power to protect from pollution. If you depend on the Web of information, fun, or maybe your livelihood–your situation is not so very different.

Various industries are seeking to compromise the open, end-to-end architecture of the Internet and replace the public’s information commons with proprietary control. The enclosure of the Internet commons is being achieved through the attempted subversion of open technical standards; unprecedented expansions of intellectual property law at the expense of free information exchange; “techno-locks “that reduce the public domain and fair use rights; and the privatization of Internet governance.

That’s a quote from David Bollier, and it’s part of why I have reservations about The World of Ends. WofE is a lovely, compelling document–David Weinberger and Doc Searls are two of my favorite bloggers–BUT….

1. I don’t share their optimism about their audience.

   D&D urge businesses to give up on subverting the web to their own selfish goals, because it makes the web worse. Do businesses really care if the web gets worse? If I promised you a billion dollars tomorrow, but the cost was making the Internet just a bit worse –what would you do? How about if you knew that if you didn’t grab that billion dollar profit, someone else would do the dirty deed instead?

2. I don’t share their confidence in the future–or even the present.

   The Internet was built on a boatload of government funding, and run as a “gift economy” by academics for many years. That was then, this is now. Count the number of spam messages and popup ads you saw today if you don’t believe me. Who crushed Napster? Who killed web radio? Can you predict what the next target will be?

3. I don’t want stupid companies to stop making stupid mistakes.

   The alternative is that they work in sneakier ways. We all laugh at the fake “teen girl” website promoting beef–the next one will be more subtle. We all laugh at the fake weblogs for Raging Cow–the next company to try to market through weblogs will be smarter. People on Slashdot laugh at the astroturf posters who work for Microsoft. Do you think Microsoft can’t afford to hire people to spend time creating online personalities–charming, engaging, multifaceted–who just happen to think Microsoft isn’t all that bad?

I’m grateful to D&D for a clear, loving portrait of what the Internet could be and should be. But the Internet they describe is already being eroded. Corporate and government wolves are circling, all of them eager to bite off another piece of it for themselves. I say, let’s get ready to pull up our wagons in a circle to fight them off.

I miss my mother.

I miss her wit, her taste for small pleasures and homely achievements, her devotion to family, her complex memories and the use she made of them for explaining a complex world she didn’t always approve of.

I don’t mean to make my mother sound like a sweet mellow grandma. In her old age that was how she structured her life–but the mother I knew growing up was formidable, even fierce. She came from a houseful of liberated ladies and got through an MA at Smith before World War II turned everyone’s lives upside down. She was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, widely read, piercingly quick to see through pretense. But she narrowed her circle after my father died, narrowed it down to a tiny, tiny round by the end of her life. I don’t want to do that with my life, at least not until I get very old and even more feeble. One of the many things I learned from my mother is that the price of staying away from the parts of the world you don’t like is to have your circle diminish to almost nothing.

I loved the way that she re-read all the books she loved, again and again, not too often because she didn’t want them to lose their magical other-ness. When she felt death was getting close, and her eyes were failing, she abandoned restraint and went through every single one of her favorites in sequence. She felt deliciously wicked for breaking her own longheld rules. Here’s a short list: Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, J.R.R. Tolkein, and perhaps surprisingly, the naughty Colette.

Her last year I sometimes chafed, and Frank did too, at the amount of time I spent driving up to NH to be with her. It took time away from work, from family, from getting our new house organized to live in. And yet, demanding and grueling as it sometimes was–you’d get up there, she was out of medicine, she was out of groceries, there was a sudden emergency, you would be running around doing housework and errands and then drive back. And the worst of it was that you still would not have made her really comfortable, or put her life in an organizational state you would like to see. You would just have fought off the wolves that one more time.

After Marie and Kim got the visiting nurses set up to help out (around New Year, when I was in Chile) the chaos improved. But all year, it was hard to see her losing ground, especially toward the end, and often in pain. She never complained, or almost never, and then only about the little things. Not the pain, not the cancer. When she told me that she had probably baked her last batch of cupcakes…I’m glad she was able to tell me that, but it hurt so much to hear it. Instead, she made a point of saying brave things. That she wasn’t afraid of death, that it would be an adventure, because she’d never died before.

I kept on reminding myself that, every visit, I had brought her some happiness and some peace and some pleasure, some relaxation, some civilized peaceful enjoyment, some feeling the world could be a kindly place. That was what we both needed to believe. My life is now empty of all that good stuff as well as the bad stuff. And I miss her very much. I miss the time we spent together. I miss having her to talk to about so many things. I enjoyed listening to her stories of her childhood. It’s almost as real to me now as my own childhood. And now she’s gone.

And I miss her.

Google search result

Time was on Mick Jagger’s side–what was his secret? Maybe his stint at the London School of Economics? And now another LSE hotshot has worked out the pie charts and standard deviations that might someday free all us overstressed workaholics to join a good loud chorus of “Time is on my side.”

Lord (Richard) Layard of the LSE has been telling the British government–and the world, in a series of popular lectures–that economic growth should learn to play second fiddle to human happiness. To quote the Guardian article:

Lord (Richard) Layard, the LSE’s director of the centre for economic performance, has this week delivered three startling lectures which question the supremacy of economics. It doesn’t work. Economies grow, GDP swells, but once above abject poverty, it makes no difference to citizens’ well-being. What is all this extra money for if it is now proved beyond doubt not to deliver greater happiness, nationally or individually? Happiness has not risen in western nations in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in wealth…

Money does matter in various ways. People earning under around £10,000 are measurably, permanently happier when paid more. It matters when people of any income feel a drop from what they have become used to. But above all, money makes people unhappy when they compare their own income with others’. Richer people are happier – but not because of the absolute size of their wealth, but because they have more than other people. But the wider the wealth gap, the worse it harms the rest. Rivalry in income makes those left behind more miserable that it confers extra happiness on the winners. In which case, he suggests, the winners deserve to be taxed more on the “polluter pays” principle: the rich are causing measurable unhappiness by getting out too far ahead of the rest, without doing themselves much good.

More on this topic:

• Why We Work: US News and World Report cover story on how employers expand work into what used to be leisure. Excerpt:

  “Hours have crept up partly as a consequence of the declining power of the trade-union movement,” says Cornell University labor historian Clete Daniel. “Many employers find it more economical to require mandatory overtime than hire new workers and pay their benefits.”

• The case for happiness (A shorter Guardian article summarizing Layard’s position). Extract:

  What would generate more happiness? Less unemployment; safer communities; more harmonious relationships; and, importantly, much more widely available mental health treatment. Lord Layard rightly emphasised this last in his lectures: an illness which accounts for 50% of all measured disability, but which only receives 12% of NHS funds. The case is made; now for some action.

• Link to download Layard’s lectures. 1) What is Happiness and are we Getting Happier?2)
  What Causes Happiness? Rethinking Public Economics
  3) What would make a happier society?

If this keeps up, people might stop calling economics “the dismal science.” And we might not turn up the volume quite so loud on “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

Wow! The variety and invention of our blogworld!

• Blogging as jazz: Jeneane’s impulse to blog 30 posts in 30 minutes (starts here) is full of fun riffs, sweetspots , and memorable tunes.
• Blogging as creation: If you haven’t seen David Weinberger’s “History of My Face”, go check it out. Part satire, part autobiography–remarkable for its courage as well as its humor, with neither of these elements hurting the other.
• Blogging as love: Elaine’s photo of the Elmo pillow she made for her grandson, emblematic of the many ways love makes life a noble adventure, even after the fade on that-cute-nubile-couple-rides-off-into-the-sunset.
• Blogging as activism: Josh Marshall sent me to “Campaign for America’s Future” for information about how conservatives use polls with slanted questions to promote their goal to “privatize” Social Security.
• Blogging as fun: You know the Web has everything when you stumble across Brendan Loy’s photopage of Psychokitty versus Saddam Hussein. (Thanks to Malcolm for the link.)
• Blogging as metablogging: That’s me today!

I found out today that a lot of “men’s rights” groups are claiming that “most child abuse is committed by women,” and citing a study by the American Humane Association (the folks who made sure no live bugs were squished during Men In Black!) I tracked this to its source, and here is the actual statement by AHA:

Although females are more often identified as perpetrators than males in nonfatal child abuse and neglect, NCANDS and the U.S. Advisory Board found that males (often enraged or extremely stressed fathers or male caretakers) are the perpetrators in 57% of child abuse-and neglect-related fatalities (U.S. Advisory Board, 1995).

First deception, these guys aren’t talking about “child abuse” –they are lumping in “child abuse” cases with about an equal number of “neglect” cases. Second deception, neither abuse nor neglect includes failures by the non-custodial parent, such as failure to pay child support.

According to a US 1999 Census report custodial parents include 2 million fathers and 11 million mothers. Only custodial parents show up in the statistics for neglect.
Therefore, just by the US census numbers, you’d expect women to commit 5.5 times as much “neglect” as men because that’s about the ratio of custodial mothers to custodial fathers.

Let’s look at some real numbers. Illinois FY2000 published statistics on abuse-plus-neglect–about 50% of cases fell into each category–showing 9,022 males and 11,577 females guilty of abuse-or-neglect. Let’s say roughly 10,000 (of the 20,599 total) committed “neglect.” Since only a parent with custody can “neglect,” using the US census ratio 5.5 to 1, only about 1,500 of those 10,000 “neglecters” were men and the other 8,500 were women. Subtract the “neglecters” from the total and you are left with about 7,500 men and 3,000 women. These are the people committing real “child abuse” as opposed to “neglect.”

So I sure don’t think it is fair to say most child abuse is committed by women. And I’d like to say more about “neglect.”

Back to the US census report: Of 11 million mothers with custody, only 2.1 million got child support to the full court-approved amount. To my way of thinking, that leaves 9 million mothers raising kids with inadequate financial help from absent fathers. If you divide the corresponding 9 million absent dads among 50 states, let’s say 200,000 such fathers live in IL. Let’s compare these 200,000 absent IL fathers to our estimated 8,500 IL mothers guilty of “neglect.” So you see, I don’t really even think it’s fair to say most child neglect is committed by women either.

Disclaimer/revelation/whatever: My point is not that men are evil abusers and child deserters. There are many millions of lovable, loving dads, and I know lots of them. My point is that before you start throwing misleading statistics at some gender not your own, you should remember that all genders live in glass houses.

Yeah, and especially don’t throw them at my gender!

I remember the women’s movement, way back when. No, I don’t go back to the days before women could vote, though my mother did– and don’t you also know people born before 1925?

One of the heroes of “my” women’s movement was Gloria Steinem, who toured the US from 1969 to 1974. Somewhere within that range, she came to NH and I heard her speak. From all she said, I remember one thing: that she had spent her youth making friends only with men–until she realized how many other women felt as she did. That is, she was scorning women who scorned her back–all of them fixated on impressing men, all of them convinced that other women weren’t worth making friends with.

I quickly joined a consciousness-raising group. Our hottest topic: were labor pains were as bad as fiction suggested? The answer: no. Many years and two kids later, I agree. Labor pains feel like diarrhea. On the bad side, they last longer. On the good side, you don’t feel embarrassed. Even better, a spinal anaesthetic makes them vanish.

Despite Gloria’s inspiration, and the experience of “consciousness raising”, I didn’t get bona-fide women friends for years–until I was pregnant. During my grad student years, almost all the people who shared my work interests were male. As a mom, my “work interests” shifted to child-rearing. My point–Gloria, are you listening? Friendship rarely arises from idealistic “what a good person” motives. Friendship more often arises from “that person is doing stuff I want to do” motives.

OTOH–I still think Gloria Steinem is a genius.
One of the funniest and most famous things she wrote is an essay, often reprinted (and multiply online): “If Men Could Menstruate.”

In conclusion, I would like to quote this Mother Jones interview with Steinem at 61:

“Old is not a thing. We’re the same people, going through a different stage….
Remember when you were 9 or 10 or 11, and maybe you were this tree-climbing, shit-free little girl who said, “It’s not fair,” and then at 12 or 13 you suddenly turned into a female impersonator who said, “How clever of you to know what time it is!” and all that stuff? Well, what happens is that when you get to be 60, and the role is over, you go back to that clear-eyed, shit-free, I-know-what-I-want, I-know-what-I-think, 9- or 10-year-old girl. Only now–you have your own apartment.”

Woo hoo! If this is indeed so, I can hardly wait!