stevenberlinjohnson.com

Connections

I'm just checking out of a hotel room in Bellevue, Washington, where I've been for the past three days attending a small conference on social software hosted by Microsoft Research. Lots of great ideas floating around, ably blogged by others. For me, one of the most rewarding parts of an event like this is that it reminds me of the strange intimacy of the blogroll. I got to spend some time with a few people -- David Weinberger, and Joichi Ito in particular -- whose blogs I've long followed, but who I've never met in person before. It's been said many times already, but there's something extraordinary in these kinds of face-to-face encounters, because you really do know these people through their blogs: you know all these stray tidbits about their lives, you know their obsessions, and something about their voice. And so when you meet them, you're already halfway into a great friendship. You've only been in the same room together for a few hours, but you feel like they're practically old college buddies.

The other thing that pleased me to no end came out of a conversation with my old friends Linda Stone and Clay Shirky. Some of you may remember that Wired prominently featured both of them in a story they did on the tech world's "connectors": the people who know everyone, and who are inevitably responsible for figuring out exactly who you need to talk to and making the introductions. Now, I had completely forgotten this, but Linda reminded me that I had originally introduced Clay and Linda, back in the FEED days when Clay was writing his wonderful pieces for us, and Linda was still at Microsoft. Who connects the connectors, you ask? That would be me.

The Science Of Eternal Sunshine

I'm at PC Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona this week -- gave a lunchtime talk here yesterday, and so now I'm able to kick back a little and enjoy myself, see a bunch of old friends. It's interesting to be here again. The only other time I attended was in early 2001, shortly after we'd launched our site Plastic and just as I was finishing writing Emergence. I gave a little presentation on bottom-up systems and there was definitely a sense that the audience was interested in the topic, but it certainly seemed to be on the margins of people's interest. Coming back three years later, it's been fascinating to see that bottom-up organization has shown up in almost every panel and talk in one form or another. It's a dominant thread now. In fact, there was so much interesting discussion -- particularly on a panel that Tim O'Reilly ran on politics -- that I wanted to respond a little in my talk, but I decided to stick to the brain, since that's what I was asked to do.

Also, check out a piece I just wrote for Slate about the wonderful new film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. I've written up a little riff about how the film's theory of how the brain forms memories -- and how they might be erased -- is actually more nuanced than you might think.

Rumsfeld Faces The Nation, And Stammers

Okay, blogosphere, here's some red meat for you. Go crazy with your linking! This is just the kind of priceless exchange that used to die out within a few seconds of airing, but now will circulate for the next two weeks. As it should. As it should. Video clip available here.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase "immediate threat." I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says "some have argued that the nu"--this is you speaking--"that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain."

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--

Mr. FRIEDMAN: "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."

Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know.

Props to Tom Friedman for playing the bad cop, despite his support for the war.

Al Qaeda Is The New Nader

With the elections yesterday giving control of the Spanish government to the Socialists, over the coalition of the willing's Popular Party, we're going to see a wave of posts and op-eds explaining how the 3/11 terrorist attacks threw the election to the party "soft on terror," thereby allowing Al Qaeda to get exactly what they wanted: a regime that would be "friendly" to them. No doubt a version of this argument will be trotted out again and again during the runup to the 2004 election here.

So seconding Josh Marshall's call for a strong Kerry stand on national defense issues, let's make it clear once again what many of us were saying a year ago about the Iraq war, and what Kerry should be saying now, if he can get around his vote to authorize the President to go to war. We're not opposed to operations like "Iraqi Freedom" because we somehow think that terrorism isn't that big of a deal. There is no more important issue in the world today. We're opposed because we think that pre-emptive, destabilizing attacks against nation-states in the Middle East that aren't associated with Al Qaeda will create MORE opportunities for Al Qaeda, not less. Those opportunities will come from: 1) distracting the US leadership from its primary focus tracking down Al Qaeda members and Bin Laden; 2) giving Al Qaeda incredible recruiting material by showing that the US is willing to unilaterally take over Arab nations at will; 3) creating a new breeding ground for chaos and instability in Iraq.

This formulation needs to be drilled into people's heads: we opposed the Iraq war because we predicted that this particular engagement would lead to more Al Qaeda strikes, not less. (We supported the Afghanistan war because we felt it would, on the whole, lead to less.) In other words, we thought that invading Iraq was ultimately "friendly" to Al Qaeda: hard on Hussein and his secular dictatorship, but soft on the shadowy, nationless networks of Islamo-fascism. So when the Spanish vote out the Popular Party, or the US votes out the Bush Administration, it's not that we're trying to give the terrorists a break. It's that we think the Bush Administration has been playing directly into the hands of Al Qaeda for the past two years, enraging young Arab men with elective wars that do nothing to combat Bin Laden and his minions directly.

The terrible attacks of 3/11 might have happened anyway, of course. But if you're trying to win the war on terror, and terror keeps winning, it's reasonable to question the strategy. Beyond a certain point, it's soft on terror not to question the strategy.

The List

Just a quick post to say that Mind Wide Open has hit a number of bestseller lists this week: it's #21 on the New York Times extended list, #22 on the BookSense independent bookseller list, and a whopping #7 on the San Francisco Chronicle list for the Bay Area. So thanks to all of you for buying the book, coming out to the readings, and talking the book up to your friends. Particularly you wonderful San Franciscans!

If you're in the neighborhood, please come by to celebrate with me at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble in Brooklyn, on Seventh Avenue and Sixth Street. I'll be doing my final official talk and signing of the tour there at 7:30 tonight.

The Sendmail Mystery Deepens

Lots of great suggestions to my plea for help with sending mail yesterday. The question I have now revolves around this issue of ISPs blocking the SMTP port (port 25, whatever that means.) I think this is the source of the problem I've been having, and my mother's been having. If I'm understanding this right, using a third-party SMTP provider is not going to help in these situations, because if port 25 is blocked, thus keeping me from sending mail from Earthlink's authenticated servers, it's going to keep from from sending mail from someone else's authenticated servers. Right? Which means we're back where we started from...

Also, gotta love this: I haven't gotten around to stripping the Google ads from the individual entry pages, and so if you look at the ads being served up on this story, each links to a service that would at least partially solve the problem I raised in the original post. Not bad, Google. Not bad at all.

Sendmail Blues

One of things that I noticed traveling around on my book tour last month was that the increased availability of high-bandwidth connections -- whether cable modems in the hotel room, or wi-fi in Starbucks and airports -- has created a new kind of annoyance that wasn't an issue when we were mostly using dial-up connections over the phone lines: sending mail has become much more of a struggle. Because you're actually connecting to the net through some random ISP, the SMTP servers you normally use (in my case, Earthlink) won't let you send messages from them. And so you have to use "authenticated SMTP," which allows you to sign in with a password and ID to use the server. I finally figured out a way to do this with Earthlink about six months ago, and thought that the problem was solved, but now apparently some of these ISPs are blocking ASMTP requests for some strange reason. (T-Mobile, for instance, wouldn't let me talk to my authenticated SMTP servers at Earthlink when I'm surfing at a Starbucks.)

The end result is that I spend on average fifteen minutes switching between different send mail configurations every time I go to a new hotel or grab some wi-fi time. I've just persuaded my mother to switch off of AOL after years of telling her that her life would be easier using a service like Earthlink, but she travels even more than I do, and so this constant tweaking with her send mail settings is pretty much a deal-breaker for her. At least with AOL once you've flipped through all the annoying pop-up ads, you can actually send mail reliably wherever you are.

Please, someone tell me that I'm missing something here, and that there's an easy solution for this. You'd think about fifteen years of email being a pretty mainstream, non-techie affair, they'd have made sending mail something that required zero thought by now.

In Which I Make A Bold Political Endorsement

I've said all through the primary season that the candidate I was supporting was whoever turned out to be the winner: they were all (or at least the main candidates were all) appealing enough in their different ways, and so the real deciding factor to me was who could run a winning campaign. And so now we have a winner, which means that it is time for this humble blog to officially announce its endorsement of John Kerry for POTUS. I'm happy Kerry got the nod for a couple of reasons, most of which others have commented on: the stature and national security credentials, the war medals, the track record of tough campaigning, the lack of spending caps between now and the convention. But I'm just as excited about another quality of Kerry's that hasn't been mentioned as much: he's absolutely great on Imus -- natural, funny, eloquent without droning on the way he sometimes does. I thought it was very striking that Imus switched allegiances and is now supporting Kerry; I imagine there are a lot of swing voters in the Imus audience who will be impressed by that. The two times I've heard Kerry on the show, I've come away thinking that if he calls in there once a week until November he'll have the election sewn up.

Another thing worth saying is that I think the primary process went incredibly well this year, on a number of fronts.

1. The field. People always like to snipe about the "seven dwarves" running from the party that doesn't hold the White House and that doesn't have a clear leader, but the accusation just doesn't stick this year. It really was a great, diverse field running: two party stalwarts with long records in the House and Senate; a politically gifted rising star from humble roots; a charismatic rogue Governor who brought new life and young voters into the process; a brilliant decorated general. Even Sharpton, whom everyone expected to be the laughing stock, actually turned out to be genuinely entertaining during the debates.

2. Open to innovation. All the credit goes to Dean and Trippi and Zephyr Teachout on this one, but still: this primary season changed politics forever in the way supporters are organized and money is raised.

3. The voters actually got to decide. Unlike just about every primary process since '92, there was a real open-endedness to this year's race. In the past, you often got the sense that the candidate picked by the commentariat and the Party Establishment was going to win no matter what the voters felt. But this was a genuinely unpredictable year: first Dean's heroic surge and Kerry's descent, then the incredible reversal of Iowa -- along with Edwards' consistently strong showings despite the initial hype about Clark.

4. The power of positive campaigning. All in all, a very positive primary season, where the most positive candidates were rewarded for avoiding negative ads. All of which means that Bush machine will have to spend some money establishing the negatives for Kerry, rather than referencing ones already in the public awareness, as with Clinton in '92.

5. The timing. Not too short, and not too long either.

So that's my take on it all: a strong primary season produced a strong nominee. Now everybody go give him some money. He's going to need it.