Thursday, June 02, 2005
Baby Steps into the Blogosphere
A colleague sent me a link to a blog called ”TPM Cafe,” which apparently grew out of something called the “Talking Points Memo,” and a suggestion that I “try to hook up with these guys.”
More specifically, he linked me into Matt Yglesias‘s post called ”Infopolitics as Metaphor and Reality.” Yglesias apparently questions whether or not the “information age” is real, or simply a useful metaphor:
[I]n all these contexts, “the information age” almost always serves as a kind of metaphor for the notion that the public sector ought to become more flexible, more consumer-oriented, and so forth. . . . All that’s fine as far as it goes (except when, as in the case of Klein’s enthusiasm for privatization it’s not fine), but it leaves what I think is a pretty noteworthy blank spot—the literal politics and policy of the information age. There’s a broad set of issues related to intellectual property law, telecommunications policy, the dispensation of the radio spectrum, and so forth that are actually about the information age where the policies we have nowadays are unsatisfactory and where mainstream liberal figures have tended not to show much leadership.
As a devout believer in the reality of the information age, I felt compelled to comment. And so, today I made my first official blog posting (my previous significant contributions to on-line discourse all having occurred before blogs were blogs), under the title ”Towards Coherence in Infopolitics”:
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The Education of a Baby Blogger
It occurs to me that as the proud owner of a new website and blog, I should spend a bit of time trying to understand this new phenomenon of blogging. I confess that I’ve fallen behind. Most of my work on Digital Phoenix took place before blogging was much of a phenomenon. I hate feeling behind the curve on an important information sector development, but keeping up to speed is a full-time job. So I’m going to spend the next month learning what’s going on.
more...
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Sunday, December 07, 2003
Combating Anti-Americanism
Jean-François Revel’s recent book, Anti-Americanism, put a terrifying label on a phenomenon that we can no longer ignore. Anti-Americanism has transcended mere political opposition abroad to emerge as a full-blown hate movement. We need to understand that movement if we’re going to defeat it.
Anti-Americanism is coming to bear an eerie resemblance to anti-Semitism, (or anti-Zionism, as it is known in fashionable circles). Anti-Americans blame the U.S. for supporting or opposing authoritarian regimes, for investing or failing to invest in developing countries, for lowering or raising trade barriers, and for intervening or failing to intervene in crisis zones. Anti-Semites have long blamed the Jews for being submissive and assertive, communists and capitalists, stateless people and people committed to building a state. The history of anti-Semitism demonstrates the danger of ignoring such hypocrisy simply because its internal inconsistencies render it absurd.
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Saturday, February 01, 2003
Cri de Coeur
I’m a liberal. I’m proud. I’m angry. And I want my good name back.
Liberalism is a bold and noble pursuit: it seeks to liberate, to liberalize, and to spread the ideals of liberal democracy. True liberals yearn for a world in which every person feels secure enough to take calculated risks, is well enough informed to appreciate the consequences of those risks, and is free enough to act upon his or her own choices. In our heyday, we offered depressed American workers a new deal, war-ravaged Western Europeans a recovery plan, repressed Eastern Europeans a declaration of their human rights, and we declared war on poverty. We made freedom work. We made markets work. We made tolerance and inclusiveness work. We expanded our liberal society from white, male landowners to enfranchise the landless and the poor. We recognized the equality of all people, regardless of faith, race, gender, or sexual orientation. We integrated polyglot huddled masses into a coherent civic entity. We brought liberty and stability to long-warring European and Asian tribes. And though each of these expansions cost substantial money, time, effort, and blood, our gains always exceeded our costs by a vast amount.
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Promoting Innovation in the Software Field:
A First Principles Approach to Intellectual Property Reform
Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law, 8:1: 75-156, Winter, 2002
This article started life as a paper that I wrote for a 1999 seminar on antitrust and intellectual property, but really came to life only in 2000. The article introduced a fundamental—and somewhat iconoclastic—belief, namely that everything that we learned about software markets during the Microsoft trial was an inevitable consequence of the intellectual property rights that we grant on software.
Though I have subsequently refined this argument elsewhere, this article remains the most formal treatment that I have given it to date. The article itself is split into two parts. The first presents a conceptual model for assessing the relative strength of competing IP regimes, for understanding their relative costs and benefits, and for gravitating towards a societally optimal regime. The second considers the software industry as a case study, and demonstrates the inevitability (and thus the predictability) of Microsoft’s behavior.
I understand that my model has been well received and built upon elsewhere, both in the literature and in classroom exercises.
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Friday, November 01, 2002
From Investor Fantasy to Regulatory Nightmare:
Bad Network Economics and the Internet’s Inevitable Monopolists
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology: Volume 16, Number 1 Fall 2002
The Internet investment bubble has come and gone. For a few years in the late 1990s, it seemed as if the people, companies, and organizations tied to the Internet could do no wrong. That perception changed abruptly, and it now seems as if they can do no right. In the meantime, large numbers of Internet firms were formed, spun out to the public, and valued at outrageous levels by ravenous equity markets. Many Internet companies took full advantage of this nearcanonization; they ran through obscene amounts of cash and burned out as quickly as they had been born.
Pundits have been able to see the inevitability of the bubble’s deflation with perfect hindsight. Ex post discussions of the bubble tend to include pejoratives like “Ponzi scheme,” “irrational exuberance,” “mania,” or the seemingly more neutral “widespread accounting irregularities.” At the same time, more than a handful of those able to exercise this hindsight lost fortunes during the bubble, some made fortunes, and quite a few undoubtedly did both.
The current widespread recognition that the downturn was inevitable notwithstanding, many questions about the bubble remain. One such question is why it occurred. Simplistic references to manias and to crowd psychology are less than entirely compelling. After all, such attitudes could be applied to any industry at any time. The unanswered question remains: Why technology stocks in the late 1990s? What was it that made these investments so attractive during that brief period? Even Ponzi schemes need a reasonable initial pitch to get started. The answer must be that investors misunderstood something. But what was that something?
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Saturday, April 20, 2002
God—America—Faith
I was supposed to write about technology today. For some reason, though, I really don’t feel like writing about technology. I feel a strange need to write about faith. I’m not sure why. Faith has been my bete-noire for a long time now. In fact, for as long as I can remember. I’m afraid of faith because I have observed its power and I don’t understand it at all.
For a long time, I felt great anger at the concept of faith. Sure, I knew people who’d been helped by it. But I could also look around and see the pain and suffering that it caused, the crimes and unspeakable atrocities committed in its name. I have always considered myself fortunate to live in a country without an official religion, without an imposition of faith. And I have long been suspicious of those who attempted to interject faith into the American forum. Couldn’t they see what a wonderful thing we had developed here? Couldn’t they appreciate the brilliance of the Constitutional formulation? Free Exercise and No Establishment. The First Amendment sets out two rules for religion: every individual is free to exercise whatever faith—or lack thereof—they may possess, but the government may not favor any particular faith—or even a combination of faiths. Those two rules allowed us to develop into the most pluralistic, tolerant society in recorded history.
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Monday, September 17, 2001
The Terrorist in the Mirror
By all reports, we are about to embark on a lengthy battle against a potent political philosophy: the belief that the long-term frustration of deeply held beliefs justifies violence against civilians. This philosophy exists at the fringe of virtually every political movement in every part of the world—including this one. We can only defeat it if the non-violent mainstream of each political movement feels motivated to curb its own extremists. We can start by looking in the mirror.
Americans are quite fortunate in this respect. Our violent lunatics tend to dwell on small and apparently manageable fringes. While no mainstream organization actually condones these fringes, many of us tend to view at least some extremism sympathetically, as “misguided,” “overzealous,” or simply “counterproductive.” These attitudes give aid and comfort to the enemy, and will preclude a successful anti-terrorist campaign. It’s easy to condemn violence in the name of a cause you oppose. The challenge is to be equally harsh on extremists who commit violence in the name of a cause you support.
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