Gross National Product - Robert Kennedy

2010-02-11T06:19:07Z

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP -- if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Today at TED David Cameron, according to Chris Anderson the "next PM of England" quoted the second half of this speech from Robert Kennedy.

This Nothing Seen

2008-09-20T03:56:54Z

In night, when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light,
The eye, a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear, stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and through self-offense
Doth forge and raise impossibility,

Such as in thick depriving darknesses
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see:--

And from this nothing seen, tell news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

-- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke

Economies of Interest

2005-10-25T03:59:02Z

Anil wrote a post about The Interesting Economy in which he wonders why those whose photos are algorithmically deigned to be "interesting" do not receive any money. But as some commenters note, in any social software system there are systems of value other than, or in addition to, money, that are very important to people: connecting with other people, creating an online identity, expressing oneself -- and not least, garnering other people's attention.

What is more pleasant than the benevolent notice other people take of us, what is more agreeable than their compassionate empathy? What inspires us more than addressing ears flushed with excitement, what captivates us more than exercising our own power of fascination? What is more thrilling than an entire hall of expectant eyes, what more overwhelming than applause surging up to us? What, lastly, equals the enchantment sparked off by the delighted attention we receive from those who profoundly delight ourselves? - Attention by other people is the most irresistible of drugs. To receive it outshines receiving any other kind of income. This is why glory surpasses power and why wealth is overshadowed by prominence.

More here and here. (Note the circularity of my attention distribution, hee hee.)

Anil displays ads on his blog. I don't, but sometimes include Amazon links in my book posts to get the kickback (see below). Other people take what they deem to be a higher road, not choosing, as we do, to exploit the attention we have managed to gather, to wring pennies from the hapless plebes subjected, however willingly, to our drivel.

The web -- indeed the world -- would be a much poorer place without the collective generosity of its contributors. And to look at Anil's question further: Is it more wrong for people not to reap rewards from their algorithmically computed interestingness than it is for them to not reap rewards when they are recognized on your blog as being interesting? Is a human assessment of interestingness less valuable than computer assessed interestingness? I mean, he gets traffic in part because of the other sites he discusses . And all the links on his blog post are there for free -- I'm assuming he's not cutting a revshare with the sites he links to (Anil, re: the interestingness link? Email me for my address for the checks...). I'm linking to him now, but to be sure, he wants me to, he's got his blog monetized.

This equation makes the idea of putting a web site up without charging for it seem naive, even stupid. Look at all the web sites deigned interesting by PageRank? By the principles of the economy of interestingness, they should be getting a cut of the ads served adjacent to them. And the biggest interestingness freeloaders of all have to be the ISPs -- all this interesting content provided by me, Anil and everyone else is the reason millions of Americans monthly DSL bills.

Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it. When I discovered, in 1994, that there was no web page about Vladimir Nabokov on the internet, I immediately built one, cutting and pasting HTML from another web site, taking up residence on a friend's server. Thousands of people did the same, about herpetology, or collector lunchboxes. Later, when that server went away, I moved the site to Geocities. But never once did it occur to me that I should get paid.

In The Gift by Lewis Hyde, he talks about why artists, and people in the "caring professions" -- i.e. nursing, teaching, etc. are poorly paid. Certain things in life seem repugnant if you when you put a monetary value to them: I'll have dinner with my senile grandmother if you pay me $50. We're going to let your father die unless you pay us $500,000 to keep him alive on life support for another month. Of course you won't pay that/of course you'll pay anything it takes. Giving and caring include even the simple acts of putting pieces of yourself on the internet -- your photos, your poems, your words -- and these too are fraught with difficulty when it comes to money.

One more thing. If economies are things that get gamed, attention economies are among the hardest to game -- it's really difficult to make something uninteresting interesting. They're also in a condition of radical readjustment. You don't need to be television anymore to get a significant amount of attention. You can be Caterina Fake, or Anil Dash. Especially if everyone links to you and increases your....interestingness.