50 Shades of Grayson (Lighter)

Fusing together the greener future

Climate, Uncategorized Comments Off

Dec 132022

So apparently scientists at Lawrence Livermore Lab, in California, managed a fusion reaction that generated net energy–that is, more energy than went into generating the reaction. There was 3.15 megajoules energy output from the 2.05 megajoules that were input by the laser to fuse the atoms. Of course, the laser drew 300 megajoules to initiate the process. Still, it’s an huge development with the potential—in 30-50 years—to provide unlimited, non-carbon energy.

I’m of two minds on this.

On the one hand, I am amazed by the creativity and persistence that led to this. It may be a solution to our carbon-created climate problem. Which leads me to the second hand…

Way more climate change resisters were not denying the problem and maybe not even the unfortunate end-state to which it would inevitably lead than there were denying the situation. (Our focus has mainly been on the deniers. This is, in retrospect stupid because they are idiots.) And this only lends strength to their underlying belief that science will solve the problem. In other words, the vast majority of those opposed to the “climate change movement” were not denying it so much as they were blithely ignoring it because (a) any climate remedying action would negatively impact their economics or comfort or both, and (b) somebody (aka science) would come to the rescue.

My issue with this is that it’s kind of a weak argument and not a guarantee. Maybe this path of fusion energy will help us dodge this bullet. (Maybe. Jury’s still out. And there’s that little unknown about the timing of the solution…) But eventually there will, in fact, be a problem that science will NOT be able to come riding to the rescue like a white night to our civilizational damsel in distress.

“Whom the gods want to destroy, they send 50 years of good luck.” Your mileage may vary.

Friends, colleagues, countrymen… do you suppose you could call back?

Uncategorized Comments Off

Sep 092016

Somebody should do a PhD thesis on the (negative) impact, let alone debasement of friendship wrought by social media. It’s impossible not to be right, though it would be restricted to academic circles because everyone who is “social” on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., would not merely deny it but viciously counter-attack. Still…

Maybe I’m off-put by nostalgic remembrance of how things never actually were. Or worse, perhaps the recognition of how NOT central—Hell, questionably peripheral—I am to my friends and business colleagues is weighing on my meagre self-esteem. In any case, here it is.

Not that long ago I read a few of articles. A couple were in the WaPo and were essentially about why smart people have fewer friends and why if you’re smart you will have fewer friends. I worked the logic backward: I have few friends and I seem relatively happy—at least at the moment, so I must be smart. Awesome. The last article was from HBR. It’s title: You Have Fewer Friends Than You Think. It WAS in keeping with the other two, so I instantly felt satisfied.

I thought about those articles recently, having notice of how many people I know are simply rude. It’s rampant and everywhere. But I was thinking specifically about how few people respond to communication. For instance, the business colleagues—people I was working with and helping—and friends(!) who can’t be bothered to respond to phone calls, emails, and texts. Who detach and go radio silent in the middle of an exchange. It’s outrageous.

Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about people met only in passing or those “friended” or “contacted” in social media. These are people with whom I have a fifteen year of history; people I’m paid to collaborate with to address a client’s needs (and they’re the client!!).

For a long time, even though I personally choose to respond to everyone within a seemly time, rarely more than 24-hours, I cut these people a lot of slack. “Everyone’s really busy…,” “There’s lots of priorities…,” and so on I would say to myself to excuse their behaviour.

I no longer feel so charitable.

First, you’re not that important. Not to me or anyone else.

Second, you’re common. Apparently like everyone else doing what’s good for you only as long as it’s good for you. That’s not special. And adults, never mind the menschen do what the have to do in their social group particularly when it doesn’t immediately benefit or satisfy them.

Or maybe I’m just coming to terms with the fact that I, too, have fewer friends than I think I do.

Capitalism as religion: a thesis

Uncategorized Comments Off

Aug 162016

Those who know me are aware of a hobby horse I’ve ridden for at least the past decade. My contention is that someplace along the way between Adam Smith and now, Capitalism evolved from an explanation and theory to a cult and a broader philosophy to a full blown religion with its own dogmas, catechisms, and so on.

The idea is not meant to denigrate or debase the economic value and general force for (economic) progress that Capitalism provides. I am a supporter. I don’t think it needs to be torn down and replaced. (By what?) Like anything and everything else, all the good it affords comes with ugly costs that have to be bourne… by someone. Besides, to appropriate Churchill: it’s the worst economic system around, except all the others.

No. When I jump on my hobby horse and ride through the Western frontier of this notion, my point is only to expose what should be obvious. Unfortunately, those who dislike and have a grudge Capitalism and its effects use the argument and corrupt my intent by forming lynch mobs. Equally unfortunate, those who are acolytes refuse to accept any of these otherwise obvious conditions and deny the argument entirely, unthinkingly–like any religiously observant follower ought, I might add.

This post is not to get into the foundations or substance of this argument. That will come later. It’s to seek genuine insights for validation or refutation from the one or two people that read these posts. Why? I’m burnishing the idea into a thesis to propose for graduate work.

“Oh great,” you say, “Another useless bit of academic crapping on capitalism.”

Not so much. I would hope that like pointing out to the 280-lb, 165cm person that perhaps approach to food (Straight, direct, and unimpeded… as a psychological crutch for feelings of exclusion…) as observed from outside might be the something to internalize and act upon, the take-away from such a thesis and study would be a recognition that there is a way to make and use, or direct capitalisms tendencies toward greater things. Not toward the inevitabilities of religious fervor.

If you have any thoughts or directions toward published works: books, monographs, journal articles from any specialty study area, feel free to send them my way.

Thanks

Intrapreneurshit

Uncategorized Comments Off

Jul 132016

Like long forgotten songs on a K-Tel compilation, Intrapreneurship, the notion that employees of large organizations can hustle and scramble like entrepreneurs to create innovation and radical growth, is back! Of course, its day in the 1980s sun was a failure. But today’s promise is the success of Silicon Valley’s disrupting wunderkind.

Should intrapreneurship actually catch on, again… it will fail. Again. Smart executives of targeted enterprises and government departments ought to remember why it failed before and take a pass this time. The flawed assumption is that entrepreneurs thrive in any environment. Except, everything that makes entrepreneurship admirable is suffocated in the low oxygen atmosphere of the large organization.

The entrepreneurship allure is palpable: a dream of agility, disruption, and outsized growth leading to dominion over new and even undiscovered frontiers. With unicorns on every horizon, it’s hard to ignore. But for large organizations, it’s a mirage that will squander resources and frustrate everyone.

The larger the organization, the more its strength weighs upon it. It can no more be an entrepreneurial entity than the growth business is a colossus bestriding the world. The pitch to turn an eighteen wheeler into a Tesla is ridiculous and counter-productive.

Large organizations need not ogle enviously at the upstart entrepreneurial organizations rapid, often false growth that captures market and media attention. Appreciate your own qualities. Large organizations are mostly slow and steady. They have to be. Oscillating around opportunistic pivots would rend the behemoth from seam to seam. A material mistake by a small business constantly changing anyway is bad but recoverable. A material mistake for a large organization could prove mortal (without government intervention). Demands of governance and responsibility befitting its stature command the organization to be circumspect. One role of large organization is to stabilize tempestuous seas.

Sounds banal compared to the romantic entrepreneur. But, this gummy stateliness belies vast virtue. Large organizations have the power to change markets and industries. That they may choose not to because they’re comfortable has nothing to do with intrapreneuring. The taxi industry did not have to actively ignore its suzerain being upended while focusing on rigging regulation. Moreover, a start-up did not succeed in digitizing music nor create the consumer smart phone industry. Apple did. Ultimately, large organizations control innovation and disruptive change.

Your favourite innovation guru will have written that when industries heave with revolution, some venture-backed entrepreneur has used a technology or method to disrupt a cozy environment. But even where that is the case, it’s because the large incumbents were sleeping. As often as not, industries are turned inside out because competitive, large organizations acquire or introduce changes to the competitive environment and evolve the marketplace. In effect, they reinvent themselves and their worlds.

This has little to do with being entrepreneurial. It has everything to do with being observant, smart, and courageous. These mark the entrepreneurial character but are not exclusive to it. Most organizations require innovation of some sort, not all need the peculiar and destabilizing qualities of the entrepreneur.

This intrapreneurship fad is but a means to a desirable end: innovation, which in turn leads to growth (and maybe reinvention). A large organization does not have to weaken its chances pretending to be something it is not and cannot be. Of course, large organizations should do things to remain vital and purposeful. But they should play to strengths.

Large organizations should get and be strong at anticipating changes to their world as has Royal Dutch Shell. They should strive to innovate. That will necessarily keep them apprised of near and distant (technology) innovations around them. Large organizations have the resources to do something better than be entrepreneurs: they can buy entrepreneurs—at the right time.

Large organizations have been known to get fat and lazy, ferreting out challengers, buying them, and burying their technologies to maintain control of their worlds. The world no longer allows that. Enterprises need to tack: don’t buy the start-up or growth company to shelve it; buy it to grow it and, maybe later, internalize it. I say maybe because the choice could be to shape the smaller organization to benefit from and provide benefits to the large organization. This is a different skill, but one a large organization could more probably create.

Many enterprise organizations would be better off creating a farm system of minor investments and expertise at observing real entrepreneurial action. Supporting and keeping them alive, all the while creating the internal conditions to ingest entrepreneurial output and do what enterprise organizations do best: serve scale.

Large organizations have to be stable, not ossified. An aircraft carrier is no PT boat. It is built for stability in even the roughest waters. To be the indispensible centre of many critical operations, ths largest of naval vessels must be stable. Necessarily, it doesn’t move nimbly. It would be absurd to expect it to operate like a frigate. But even with the responsibility to provide a dependable platform, the aircraft carrier and its personnel are always prepared and vigilant for stormy seas or competitive attack from the sky or under the waves—from other navies or even pirate flotillas.

Think about that. Maybe the idea of a carrier group fleet would serve large organizations well in structuring themselves to do battle in their own corporate oceans.

That grinding noise at Westminster Abbey? Charles Darwin rolling in his grave

Uncategorized Comments Off

Feb 192015

A PowerPoint slide being “shared” and “liked” within LinkedIn says: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” This is a corrupted Darwinian notion I first saw first in a Globe and Mail op-ed piece entitled, Why leaders must take a different tack when managing change, contributed by Symantec Canadian General Manager, Sean Forkan. His first-person counsel is not especially enlightening. But there is that one sentence at the end: “As the saying goes, ‘it is not the strongest nor the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.'”

So people appropriate and massage powerful thoughts for their own purposes. Why quibble with variations on the theme? It’s just convenient and relevant cribbing of inspiring words.

How can I be so nasty—or petty? To start, the phrase has no greater provenance than some unnamed hack contributor to a Web quotations page or creator of a PowerPoint slide. Try to find anything remotely like this quotation in Darwin’s writings, especially in On the Origin of the Species. Even Herbert Spencer, who actually coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” never used this language. That smart people are willing to quote inspirational nonsense suggests a troubling lack of rigour. But I digress and, frankly, I don’t really care about that.

This plagiarism does, however, raise an idea that could rock what we, the chattering classes, hold dear about change (management) and innovation. If you read to the end, you might even re-evaluate what you’ve been told about innovation and innovators, such as Steve Jobs. Maybe you’ll just ignore it or malign me, which might be easier. Your call.

Start by really understanding the idea commandeered for this motivational meme. Darwin referred to evolutionary adaptation. In Darwin’s observation, species did not initiate change. “Fitness” was what best suited prevailing conditions through a process of selective adaption, admittedly over generations. And Darwin was silent on any propensity to or ability for managing the change required to adapt, as was Spencer.

This is critical because as we know them, the words “change management” or “fitness to change” or any other variation lend themselves to the opposite interpretation. The implication being that a good executive, or one following our published guidance and pursuing the motivational direction of the imitation Darwin, could positively conceive and purposefully direct change IF (s)he and the organization were fit to make such change.

That’s quite materially different.

To use this counterfeit quotation to give weight to change management “fitness” and still be true to Darwin’s brilliant idea, one is obliged to accept that change management is about adaptation. But adaptation is responsive not directive. In nature, those fit to survive are those that best adapt not those that are most fit to create change.

To recap, modelling on natural evolution via pseudo-Darwin is an excellent idea: evolution has about a billion years of successful experience. But it demands one appreciate that change management must be about adaptation, which is to say accommodation toward prevailing conditions. Prevailing conditions because nature does not evolve toward what doesn’t exist. It can only adapt to what does exist.

So, therefore, fitness or willingness or ability to change is nonsense at least as far as invoking quasi-Darwinian thought as support. These are a separate matter entirely and warrant a separate non-Darwin shrouded discussion. Of course, the premise for those discussions has to start with responsive adaptation instead of directive change.

That’s change management; but innovation compels change to a product, process, or people so it must be implicitly about change. We have to accept that. So the Darwinian notion of adaptation to prevailing conditions, as indicated above, has to hold for innovation as well. Buckle up. It means the innovation myth of your favourite business leader or guru may be in for some rough treatment.

Consider the evidence. IBM nearly went extinct until Gerstner’s adaptations made it fit to survive. Branson cannily adapts Virgin’s ethos to the conditions of various prevailing environments, experimenting to see where its adaptations best fit. For a long time, Nokia adapted successfully, transforming through industries and technologies. It stopped adapting and has all but gone extinct. Microsoft, which has prolonged some of Nokia’s “genes,” has a well-documented record of obstinately refused then aggressively conceding to adapt. Blockbuster is the archetypal non-adapter. The quality of the management of change or the willingness or ability to change in all of these instances was necessary—maybe—but not sufficient. The adaptations were the thing.

IF you’re still with me about fitness to survive being based on the success of adaptations to prevailing conditions, then we have to concede that an innovator does NOT create or step into some imagined future. The successful innovator actually adapts best to the prevailing market conditions. In other words, any start-up and Steve Jobs do nothing more(!) than adapt to conditions that already existing. Steve didn’t see the future; he saw the present whether that was Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad. It is a present that everyone else simply can’t see the way that some people can’t see the symbolism or the theme in a book or movie, or the way that extinct species couldn’t “see” that they weren’t optimal for prevailing conditions.

For those that got this far, I apologize. Every metaphor fails at some point. Lesser people, and gurus, continue ramming home their notion as though it’s not happening. I won’t. Evolution and organizations changing or innovating are very different things that don’t track together at a certain point. But, my point is that the idea at the outset ought to be understood and followed. It can lead to fascinating revelations. Here are merely two:

Adaptation is going on all the time. All people always adapt naturally. Those who don’t adapt are artificially denying nature. Adaptation is not a theory or a strategy or a plan. It is action. If it works, you succeed. If you don’t, you adapt again. If it still doesn’t work. You become petroleum eventually. Therefore, in the big picture, change management is about allowing prevailing conditions to cause pain, letting natural adaptation happen, then doubling-down on those that show the most fitness.
If you want to innovate, and evolution is your model for survival, you must be rapidly responsive not creative. You must provide, for a price, a means for your customers to best adaptations to prevailing conditions—because they may not.

Cicero, anticipating 2015…

Uncategorized Comments Off

Feb 052015

Marcus Tullius Cicero lived and wrote between 106 and 43BC. He was a lawyer and “first man” who documented Rome under Caesar. I was doing a little research and came across the following quotation from his works. I guess, some things never change.

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”

Damn.

Optimism and technology

Uncategorized Comments Off

Feb 042015

[Some old thoughts, which may be “published” on other blogs, etc., notably Politik-Substance]

It turns out that at least among technologists there is a clear, nearly religious moral divide on the subject of Edward Snowden and his revelations of government electronic snooping. This I found out by provoking the issue while discussing privacy at a technology conference in Banff. There are fundamental ethical and legal questions about whether governments should be allowed to acquire data that seems private, and under what conditions. But I suggest that some of the “Snowden is saint/satan” and “government is villain” reaction comes from the same sense of betrayal felt by a spurned lover or an NRA regional president the day after a mass shooting in a day care centre. Let me explain.
It shouldn’t be a wonder that technology advancement, particularly if it affects consumers’ lives, happens most actively in the United States. Americans are, by-and-large, an optimistic bunch: always looking for another sunny “Morning in America.” That perfectly harmonizes with technology and innovation’s very nature of optimism. It is, in fact, impossible to be pessimistic and work effectively in a field of technological advancement. The whole point of technology and innovation is to make a better tomorrow—to the extent of whatever the technology promises.
Although I tend toward what I believe is being realistic, which some of my colleagues refer to as cynical, I think optimism is wonderful. It is sustaining through the inevitable troughs of bad luck and setbacks in this life. Optimism wilfully ignores the probabilities stacked up against you. And by this conscious refusal to accept the possibility of defeat—even when it is overwhelmingly self-evident, optimists sometimes achieve the seemingly impossible.
Be it gunpowder and nuclear energy, synthetic painkillers, or mobile “social” applications, neither their creators nor their enthusiasts expects anything but good from such technological advances. Within tolerable, typically commercial limits and subject to consumer happiness, it’s all good, good, good.
The dark side of being optimistic about technology, however, is blindness to the risks of undesirable, yet highly plausible uses and outcomes of those good technologies. It is all too easy to see the bright side because that is the intent. Clean, infinitely available nuclear energy begat the atomic bomb and protective firearms kill school children and other innocents. Likewise, technology that implicitly knows where you go and that you are communicating generates vast deposits of privacy-threatening metadata and other information for marketers and governments to assay.
The recent revelations of Edward Snowden expose states, overzealously perhaps, doing what they do to fulfill a higher level societal need: safety and protection. These unveilings also reveal another instance of hopeful inventors coming face-to-face with the dark side of their creations. From my seat, it’s a bit hard to know which is more troubling to them.
Like everyone else, technologists feel violated by governments inferring private information from digital exhaust. And while there may be a heavier weighting of civil libertarians in the group, never mind a clash of democratic ideals—specifically, privacy within and security of the nation—I surmise that part of the reaction is creator’s guilt. How could our wonderful child do such a thing? Or, more to the point, our creation is being used against us: and we don’t like it.
So Edward Snowden is canonized despite being a thief and traitor now suckling from an “enemy” state’s graces. Western governments are (justifiably in some senses) vilified. The consumer/citizen is maltreated at least as far as privacy goes; and that’s as far as the citizen wants to go because venturing farther into these grey places would affect the pleasant state of consumerist narcosis. But nobody talks about the inherent corruptibility and affliction of the technology.
Alas, the genie is out of the bottle… again. Society will eventually metabolize these new conditions, catch up, and adjust both ideals and practices to account for these technologically driven realities. Innovators will create solutions to the problem they themselves created. And balance will be restored… before the cycle repeats. Because that’s the great thing about optimism: it’s sure to be better tomorrow.

Jeffrey Simpson: bespectacled Cassandra

Uncategorized Comments Off

Feb 022015

I met Jeffrey Simpson, the Globe and Mail National Affairs columnist, once over top of seat 14D on a flight between Ottawa and Toronto. He has no cause to remember me. I am, after all, not a name brand except probably in my own house. Besides the encounter lasted only long enough for a rapid introduction and gratuitous (though completely genuine) fawning praise for his work. He seemed to be an affable man, with the look of a trustworthy and studious lawyer, accountant, or economist. But how much can you really get from one and a half minutes?

In any event, I mention this only as a lead in to the real point, which is that I am certain that there is not in Canada another more sensible, (usually) politically unaligned assessor of the flows of Canadian politics and society. Andrew Coyne might be a solid rival, but there always seems to be an ideological undercurrent flowing through his writing. Besides, I’ve never encountered Mr. Coyne and he’s rebuked my efforts to contact him. But, back to the point: I feel for Mr. Simpson; he is often so stone-cold right and timely. But his words float off with the winds and are lost until sometime later on those who should have paid heed will come to terms with whatever advice he had provided, will deny ever having been warned. (I suspect.)

What triggered this is a column on Jan 31, which may or may not have been intended to reach farther than its grasp. The column was dedicated to the impact and foolhardy commercial choices made by Canadian businesses (and individuals) in response to the ups and downs of the Loonie. I’m not going to rehash the piece. Suffice it to say, though, that to my read, it is much more than a simple analysis of the obvious: when the dollar’s low, Canadian businesses benefit in international markets but claim too costly to invest in productivity enhancement; when the dollar’s high, Canadian business complains that they are suffering from narrowed profits due to low productivity and don’t have the resources to invest… in productivity enhancement. All the while, it all looks like the death spiral of an airplane that makes the wrong corrections at the wrong time, all the while with the pilot focused on responding to the immediacy and warnings of the instrument panel.

Maybe I’m looking too deep. Maybe the piece is only 700 words to fill 1/3 of a weekly quota, and means only that these responses to the Loonie’s oscillations is typical and cyclical. In any case, I stand by my assessment: Jeffrey Simpson is, in the course of 90 seconds on an Air Canada Airbus 319, a nice person.

We are all Israel now

Uncategorized Comments Off

Oct 222014

I say this at the risk of overreacting and seeming unhinged, or of being accused that just because now circumstances have “come to me,” that I am recognizing what so many others in the world have lived with for years and decades. I say it at the risk of being charged with tarring with an Islamophobic brush. So let me be clear.

First, in Canada we do not expect our quiet interrupted by deadly hostility. It’s arguable that, the murder in Quebec a couple days ago notwithstanding, we are more than a decades since the last major instance of political terrorism and murder in Canada (FLQ). We are and have been complaisant about it with only a brief introspective interruption in mid-September 2001. So, the grizzly footage from Parliament hill today where an honor guard soldier was shot (and as of this writing remains alive) and an armed intruder in the Parliament building was gunned down has the shocking effect of an ice bucket challenge. It may even jar us, particularly in the nation’s capital, out of innocence.

Second, there is no proof yet that this has anything to do with Islamic State or jihad or even a connection to the jihad-inspired killing in Quebec the other day. It is the easy conclusion to draw within the global context of our national announcement that we will actively support our allies in the military action against Islamic State (ISIL, etc.). It’s likely, but that is pure speculation at this point because it’s also likely that this is the work of one or two deranged fools.

Third, the reference to Israel is NOT meant to conjure up Arab-centric hostilities toward that nation–though I recognize it does. What it’s meant to address and the real point is that the people of Israel live day-to-day everyday with the very real threat of terrorism and attack that makes a gunman or two in downtown Ottawa look like a picnic. They get on with life. But, and this is the important but, Israelis are not innocent. They are wary. They are prepared. They know that their conditions are dangerous–maybe as dangerous as living in Beirut or Miami or Detroit. They are aware and take precautions. Any innocent easiness that danger is “over there,” has never been a luxury in any part of the Middle East. Lebanese, Syrian, Israeli, Egyptian,… It’s been decades since the IRA made Belfast a similar situation. And let’s not begin to forget genocidal dangers in Eastern Europe and Central/the Horn of Africa…

It may be a luxury we have to consider tarnished here as well, particularly if it turns out that the perpetrators are not those with a local agenda as had the FLQ or Marc Lepine or the bumbling 18 in Toronto several years ago.

The unbearable lightness of being… Snowden

Uncategorized Comments Off

Sep 302014

I read the news today (well, on the weekend, actually), oh boy. It seems that the Internet is coming under attack in the East. It made me wonder about the poster child for Internet utopianism: Mr. Snowden, in his lavish or maybe squalid Moscow apartment.

China has, of course, been a strong “administrator” of Chinese Internet for a long time now. Everyone there and here expects the regime to nose in on and strong arm service providers, search engines, portals, and users in their age-old quest to control everything about that society. But we all had such high hopes for Russia after the fall of the Wall in ’89. Democracy and capitalism would roll through the former Soviet Union like Siberia-bound train. It seemed to start pretty well, and then members of the billionaire oligarchy ended up in jail, their assets nationalized. Punk rock girls went to jail. People disappeared. The president, despite following constitutional rules slowly and steadily became an imperial government of one. Flash forward and the old bear is annexing Ukrainian sovereign territory and fomenting insurrection with some soldiers that they lent to (or “allowed” to go fight with) rebels in eastern Ukraine.

During this period, as everyone knows, Edward Velcro-hands absconded with classified secrets of the US and other governments, secured while he was a trusted contractor to the National Security Agency. Instantaneously, in the heady days of Wikileaks and Julian Assange’s 15-minutes of fame, Snowden became a hero to patriotic freedom lovers the world over, not least within the civil rights and other such communities in the US. So roundly loved and lauded was he, that he immediately fled the country first for Hong Kong and then for the loving embrace of Mother Russia. This, of course, so that he would not be tried as a thief and traitor.

The secrets about “Five Eyes” and US/other government surveillance of its own citizens showed clearly that the Western governments about whom he had discomforting information to reveal were not doing very good things–to their own citizens. To make a long story short, the whole episode and Snowden himself always speaking from Russia via video catalyzed and crystalized popular awareness of the dangers of the Internet. That is, it revealed that the Internet is not a utopian garden where there is peace, love, and understanding (except for the Nigerian scammers…), somehow removed from the rest of the world. It also showed that governments were bringing the rest of the world–all that bad stuff–to this electronic Eden.

What was revealed but did not obviously trouble those who were troubled by the trouble that Snowden found himself in was, in fact, that the world is a nasty place. The kind of ugliness that we see on television drama and in movies actually happens someplace in the murkiness of the shadows and behind closed doors. Moreover, it happens because while civil rights and protection from government encroachment on one’s privacy, to pick a popular theme in this situation, is important, national security might trump it. That is, its a judgment call: your privacy or your safety? It is arguable that we elect our governments to fall on the side of our safety when things get rough. But that is not the point here.

What Western governments were exposed as doing was in and of itself bad. But what Snowden exposed was tactical information that eliminated any kind of advantage in a bigger forum–like international affairs. In any case, the point is that although he is a wanted man, he is alive. He propagated navel gazing and pontificating about these subjects to the point that one has to wonder whether the safety issue has been sufficiently, artificially, and probably disastrously poisoned. But that’s enough back story and evangelizing.

Why I thought about Snowden this weekend is because of the laws that Tsar Putin is intending to have enacted. Specifically, Putin intends to extend the state’s right to control the Internet in Russia. The details can be found elsewhere, but the broad strokes are that any individual with a blog read by more than 2000 people will be considered a media outlet and subject to the laws governing media organizations. Portals, search engines, and other service providers online must operate specifically off of servers located in Russia which would be firewalled at the Russian border AND fully subject to the state having unfettered access to all logs and records. There’s more.

About Edward Zhivago, I wonder if he’s at all disheartened by this turn of events? It’s not like he can complain much about it. Perhaps he’s morally OK with the situation because the Russian snooping and surveillance would follow the rule of law, such as it is? Let’s admire the fact that Putin has no intent of spying on his people from the shadows: he’s fully up front about it. In any case, I prophesy that if he is as smart as alleged, he won’t be making any video appearances at SXSW castigating this unfortunately imposition on the privacy, rights, and freedoms of Russian Internet users. Or, if we do, it will only happen once.

Older Entries