The Rationalist Manifesto

This video and article says it all, via BoingBoing which also covers it in depth. The Chinese government is a disgrace to their people and history.

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Let me jump right into the water and say: Microsoft’s new Office 2007 is a very different product from its predecessors and as such represents a very weak spot in the usually hardened Microsoft armor. This version of Office may start a huge switch-over to OpenOffice and alternatives.

This is the case not because Office 2007 is especially buggy or resource-heavy but because it is an almost complete rewrite. The user-interface and user-experience are completely different from previous versions.

For computer savvy individuals this may be a boon, as it can be fun to learn a new product — however — for IT managers that will have to bear the budgetary burden of retraining entire corps of minimum and medium wage office grunts to use the new version, this is a definite bust.

This, along with the fact that it takes only one copy of Office 2007 and a Visual Basic macro to convert all the Word documents stored in the corporate database into an open (or more open, at least) XML-based format, voids any justification that previously existed to prevent switching an organization to OpenOffice or other alternatives.

To put it simply: “If we have to re-train the entire organization anyway, why not re-train to something that costs us less? Let’s switch to OpenOffice!”

The retraining costs pull the rug from under the last argument a Pro-Microsoft IT manager may use to justify his budget request. The largest part of Total-Cost-of-Ownership for office productivity suites is the training of personnel. If before, one could standardize on Microsoft Office because that is the suite that people came with prior experience for, this is no longer the case — it is a different product, as different from Office 2003 as OpenOffice is, and even more so!

Microsoft’s sales-force are obviously aware of this chink in their armor as I’ve had reports that they are offering free re-training for Israeli government IT departments in exchange for joining as Office 2007 beta-sites. While Microsoft is trying to create a critical mass for Office 2007 not only for this reason but also to bootstrap the usual must-upgrade-to-open-Word-documents cycle, the fact they are doing this during the beta period is indicative that they are aware of their weakness. Usually they wait for the official product release to do this, so to allow those who can’t open a later-version document the chance to buy the product immediately…

The bottom-line is that open-alternative advocates who want to make use of this temporary weakness of Microsoft’s must collaborate now to raise awareness of the alternatives and inspire appreciation of the hidden training costs of upgrading to Office 2007.

Microsoft does not let its guard down very often, it is time for the tides to turn.

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It is already old news apparently, but I’ve only just now seen the videos from the White House Correspondence Association dinner.

While seeing the first video, I felt at first a very strong cognitive dissonance as a fellow commenter on SE described it.

The dissonance arose because usually it takes intelligence and self-awareness for a person to be able to laugh at himself. As I don’t consider George W. Bush to be intelligent or self-aware, seeing him take part in his own roast gave me a start.

At first, seeing Bush make fun of himself seemed to say:
“I am not detached from reality– obviously I know what people are saying and can even laugh at it — But I am doing what I think is right and never mind my popularity”.

Holy Gristles Batman! It almost made me like the guy, but only for a few seconds, because–

Next I watched Stephen Colbert really fire up that roast and it was while watching the amazing testes that Colbert demonstrated, noting that each and every one of his jokes were about the real substance and not superficial back-slapping slapstick, that it finally clicked:

Bush’s PR guy is a fucking genius.

In G.W’s ‘roast’ by Steve Bridges the jokes were related to his occasional mispronunciation or his ‘cowboy’-ish nature. To rephrase: the jokes involved every trait of the president (and not the presidency) that the media focused-on that have nothing to do with his policy.

So it boils down to being just another type of spin, albeit an ingenious one that is designed to make it seem like the reason Bush is disapproved by two thirds of the American public is because he stumbles in his speech and not because his administration is the worst, most corrupt and least democratic administration since Nixon’s.

The message that Bush’s PR guy tried to convey is that this president’s low approval ratings are a temporary popularity glitch that will blow over while Colbert’s message was that the low approval ratings represent a dissatisfaction with a presidency riddled with corruption and incompetence. Colbert didn’t spare the correspondents themselves and skewered the media for allowing Bush to spin it all his way.

Colbert made it obvious to me that without him for balance the correspondents would have returned to stuffing their smug faces without flinching, right after Bush used them to further spin his agenda.

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CNN in a manipulatively titled article reports that [the] “Senate fails to reauthorize Patriot Act“, which translated from corpo-speech means that the Senate has so far refused to renew it.
I hope the renewal fails and that Dec. 31st comes and goes without the Patriot Act, a.k.a the Police State Act, renewed.
CNN also fails to indicate that the quote of Senator John Sununu, one of the few brave Republicans who oppose the renewal, “Those that would give up essential liberties in pursuit in a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security” is a direct paraphrase of the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin, or perhaps Richard Jackson: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

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If you’ve read my previous post, you might have noticed that last paragraph in which I was hinting at the development that might bring back the balance in Democracy. You would have probably guessed that I was referring to blogs.

Yes, lowly blogs.

For those of you not following closely, blogs, for a while now, have ceased being an ‘online’ world phenomenon only.

Blogs came through an evolutionary process. In every step, Blogs started memestorms and dialogs within their milieu, and every step took that milieu and expanded it greatly, with the ballooning number of blogs bringing this new medium into more and more homes.

At first blogs were weblogs for online events/sites with feedback limited to these issues. They were also an English-speaking phenomenon almost exclusively. This changed rapidly.

The next step took blogs to commentary of the events of the offline world, with great memestorms brewing online without interaction with the world at large, a running commentary track for the ‘real’ world without the feedback getting back to affect it.

The latest step saw Blogs merging the online and offline worlds back into one. The dialogue is starting up between Mass Media and Blogs. Blogs are affecting the real world now and the effects are gaining by the hour.

In France it was discovered that some of the riots were being organized online, ignore for a second that some of the media coverage of that is Mass Media attempting to vilify the Blogosphere, but the effect that blogs are having is undeniable. Mark Russinovich’s blog entry uncovering the rootkit that Sony-BMG’s music CDs install on the PCs of unsuspecting customers caused a world-wide outrage. There are more examples every day, going back to when it started.

It is almost possible to place a finger on the point in time that Blogs started trying to affect the offline world– it was during the Democratic Party primaries. It failed at first, as evident from the results of that primary, but that was only the first step. I believe that Blogs were a key motivator to the record turn-out of youth voters during the last U.S. presidential election.

My point is that Blogs as a distributed media promise to bring back balance to democracy by creating a press (and I use the term loosely) in which fear is not so easily hyped and is not the immediate answer to every issue. While there may be some Blogs who will turn into mass-media corporations there will always be countless others who write for the sake of writing or for the quest for the truth and will not resist dissecting the issues to the core instead of falling into the fear=>ratings feedback loop.

Will Blogs fulfil this promise? We’ll have to see. I but I certainly hope so…

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Democracy in its purest form was designed to be a balanced system. Separate judiciary, executive and legislative institutions of government are not enough. Thus the freedom of speech exists to create another institution — the press. The press was designed as a watchdog; it was there to pay the price of eternal vigilance to guarantee freedom. It was to be the eyes of the public into the workings of the government.

The system worked reasonably well for many years. The early United States and later the U.K. were good examples. Of course there were faults in the implementation of democracy at these times. Slavery, disenfranchisement of women and minorities and other issues faulted these early democracies, but the balance of the system itself was maintained.

Mass Media:
The press had for many years practiced its role in earnest, with great vigilance; the watchdog of democracy was truly thus, it bared great teeth and helped maintain the balance of the democratic system. But at the advent of mass media, this began to change and the balance was tipped.

Mass Media is a business and just like any other business its main goal is to make money and create value for its shareholders. This however affects more than the business-world as this specific business also happens to be a pillar of the democratic system.

The economics of Mass Media under a free-market economy mean that as time progresses more media outlets belong to a fewer stake-holders. It is the economy of scale, and it affects Media just like any other business which can scale well. However I am not here to make the crank case that our minds are being controlled by back-room deals by media-barons who want to tell us what to think. The problem arrives without any conspiracy by the basic tenants of big business.

Perfectly reasonably, Mass Media wants to make money just like any other business. The Media’s business model is based on revenue from advertisements and (to a lesser degree) subscriptions. This means they are relying on circulation and ratings — these are both basically the same thing — it means ‘how many people view this media’. It all collapses to a simple equation of Ratings => Revenue.

Thus from the lowly reporter to the high-ranking manager the employees of Mass Media gear towards this goal. “Ratings!” they chant in the boardrooms. “Ratings!” they call out in the newsrooms. Well then, it is a long known open-secret of the trade, perfected to an art by William Randolph Hearst in the late 20th and early 21st century, the best emotion to elevate ratings is… fear. The new equation driving Mass Media thus became: Fear => Ratings => Revenue.

Now on their own there is only so much fear the media can strike into our hearts before the population loses its trust and ratings drop sharply. The problem is not media on its own… To understand what is going on we first have to evaluate yet another pillar of democracy…Politicians:

Politicians are the ‘main ingredient’ of two of the core institutions of democracy. They are the core of both the Legislative and the Executive branches of government. While they may (or may not) have the best interest of the people in mind, their vision of that ‘best interest’ varies greatly from one politician to another. To push forward one’s views, one requires power. To gain power in the democratic system, one requires voters. To garner voters in the democratic system, one has to appeal to the masses…

In the ‘Getting Elected for Dummies’ book, the first chapter lists the ‘Means of Garnering Voters’. There are several means listed under that heading: “Inspire Your Voters” or “Woo Your Voters” are good examples.
However, the item listed right at the very top of the page, underlined and in bold-face type is: “Strike-Fear Unto Their Hearts”.

Now you see. The balance of democracy was broken at the core and in a frightful way without any catastrophic event, chiming of bells or flaring of horns. Silently and without warning three of the institutions of democracy had now gained a common means to pursue their distinct interests: Fear.

While their goals are different, their interests were aligned and so formed the Coalition of Fear.

It is an ad-hoc coalition. The media will give air-time to a fear-mongering politician not because they necessarily agree with his views. They will allow air-time for his messages because it serves their purpose as well; Fear will bring in the viewers, the readers, the listeners and the revenue. The media is so used by the politicians, but at the same time it uses them. In nature this is called symbiosis.

This system will not award the politician who inspires his voters. The lowest-barrier of entry is for politicians who vend fear. And there is always fear to invoke. Fear of change, if things are good, fear of no-improvement if things are bad, fear of foreigners, fear of abstract threats, and even fear of a ‘dangerous’ idea…

As an exercise for the reader I leave this: Think back and try and recall items of news that imply fear. How many of them were brought up by Politicians? How many were already prevalent in the reporting of the media and a politician conveniently became their spokesperson?

What we have now is an unbalanced system, from the physical world we know that unbalanced systems tend to move between extremes. We need to find a way to restore the balance or democracy will not survive. There is a certain development in our world that promises to bring such a balance, and I will discuss it in another post. I do believe most can guess what I am referring to. Will it deliver? We’ll see.

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