There are plenty of posts floating around the blogosphere with approximately the same title as this one. At the time of writing, Google clocks over 300 million results for the phrase “why I left Facebook.” I don’t feel it necessary to link to any of them, but I will say that this Sunday is Quit Facebook Day and that it’s easier than ever to Delete Facebook profiles.

Each of these deserters have their reasons, from concerns with privacy to wanting to reclaim wasted time, and it might seem like narcissism to throw my own log onto the fire… except that my story is a little different.

Why did you leave?

The morning of April 21st, as the keynote of Facebook’s F8 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had some exciting news. In front of an eager crowd of developers, he unveiled a new vision for the Internet. Facebook’s “Open Graph” would make the web “social by default,” with Facebook serving as a hub connecting social content like Yelp reviews or Pandora stations. Facebook would be the much yearned for key to unlock the rest of the web.

It was approximately this very moment that my sister’s Facebook account was hacked.

Her contacts—all of her contacts—received an email saying she was stuck in England after a surprise vacation and needed money to get home. Family members, co-workers, ex-co-workers, ex-boyfriends… everyone got this message. Take a moment to think about who you’re “friends” with on Facebook. Imagine them all getting scammed through your account.

She even witnessed the hacker chatting over Facebook with friends, responding to doubters that “lol of course its me”.

Luckily, my sister uses correct spelling and punctuation, which twigged her friends and family to the ruse.

The hack spread to her Yahoo account, answering privacy questions that were now easy to find (hometown? mother’s maiden? pet name?). My sister finally convinced the sluggish customer service to suspend her profile before any more damage could be done.

Admittedly, this story is an anecdote. It still paints a picture of the ramifications of an Internet with Facebook at the center. It wouldn’t have to be Facebook, of course. Having any single key that opens all doors in your life, from your car to your bank account, is dangerous. It’s just happens that Facebook is both well-positioned to be that key and have broadcast that very intention.

But Facebook is a business!

Yes, that’s true. They need to make money to survive. I’m neither faulting them for that, nor saying that everything should be free on the Internet. It’s a bad habit we’ve gotten into.

But FedEx is a business and they don’t open your packages, see what you’re sending, and then tell their strategic partners in order for them to better advertise to you. They could. Nothing’s keeping them from changing their terms of service. If they did, they’d probably lose a lot of customers… and future customers would know what to expect and decide if it was worth it.

Since Facebook stores (but no longer “owns” thanks to past outrage) your content, our example doesn’t quite hold. The hypothetical FedEx policy would mean they’ve retroactively looked at every package you’ve ever sent through them, not just after the policy change. Past customer decisions, made when privacy was intact, would no longer be valid and what was merely poor business with our mythical FedEx becomes a very real justice issue with our very real Facebook.

Why should others quit, too?

There’s reason to believe that Facebook sees the need to address users’ concerns about privacy, considering yesterday’s announcement. Maybe they’ve wised up or maybe they’re scared. Unfortunately, this is hardly the first time Facebook has launched a major change and then wheeled it back under pressure from their users.

Facebook is not going to stop leveraging its size and depth to pursue potential income. It’s nothing personal; not trying to be dicks. They’re just a business (see above). That’s why we have to speak their language and deny them income. Make it hurt in a way they understand. There will be another Facebook and its creators (and investors) will need to learn the “Lesson of Facebook: Respect your users or they will leave.”

Don’t you do web strategy?

Yeah, it’s funny right? I’m either being hypocritical by telling people they need to be on a site that I’m not on myself or irrelevant by warning them off the biggest site on the web. I’m comfortable with that. I’m also comfortable saying that having a multi-channel marketing strategy that includes a mission-relevant action your friends/fans/followers can take is far more important than just having a profile.

Let’s not put the cart before the horse.

I’ve been writing and rewriting annual goals religiously since the ball dropped in 2000, back when I was a senior in college. I take them seriously. A decade later I’ve thrown raves (2001), gone vegetarian (2003), moved to San Francisco (also 2003), and have my own business (2008). Despite such achievements, every year has the same leftovers. Make more art. Exercise more. Spend less. Stay in better touch with family and friends.

A new strategy was called for. Despite Sarah’s success with intentions over resolutions, I have clung to my SMART goals like a wobbly buoy. Wildly successful at life-changing leaps, they admittedly leave behind daily behaviors. Now fully comfortable in my own life, I no longer need transformation. I need grace. I need focus. I need intention. And so my intentions for 2010 are “Less Waste, More Life”.

Less Waste

Worried that my intentions were ambiguous bordering on glib, I almost wrote this as, “Less Dicking Around on the Internet” but as I reread my Tao Te Ching…

So, as ever hidden, we should look at its inner essence:
As always manifest, we should look at its outer aspects.

…I decided that keeping the specifics unnamed might actually let them remain more specific.

Either way, “dicking around on the Internet” had to go. I unsubscribed from all the blogs that consisted entirely of crap entitled “10 Essential Mac Apps for Simplifying Your Workflow” or “25 Vital WordPress Plug-ins for Converting Traffic” or “[number] [superlative] [nouns] for [desirable outcome]“. Every single one made me mad to read, because I either already knew everything it mentioned or—worse—I didn’t… and then had to evaluate each hyperbolic claim as either worthy or worthless. All those feeds are gone. Bye.

Also, blogs written by Hipsters making fun of other Hipsters. Even ironically. Gone.

One step further, my laptop now lives at the office during the week. Yes, I will be sans computas post-six o’clock every day. It will still make it home on the weekends, for purposes of copying torrented content to our media server and whimsical side projects, but otherwise is 100% property of Diligent Creative (who owns it anyway, for legal reasons).

These behaviors have already demonstrated their potential. As Sarah returned from her haircut on Sunday, I sat in the kitchen making DIY moonjars while baking homemade bread (cracked pepper and Gruyere) with the old solar panel primed for installation on our new back porch. Solar projects (Less Wasted Energy!) and home baking (Less Wasted Money!) aside, moments where—merely a week before—I would be reading about things to do had become doing things. Gently setting down my 4-in-1 screwdriver, I looked up and said, “my life used to be like this all the time.”

More Life

It becomes an inevitability that the holes abandoned by retreating waste are filled by something. In my case, I’m resolving for that something to be life. I don’t mean this in the socially normative “Choose Life” sense, but in the literal sense. Plants. Animals. People. Life.

For someone with so many hobbies, I rarely enjoy them in the company of others. San Francisco has a fantastic electronic music scene, but I’ve sat on my ass as great artists have come and gone, weekly events went under for lack of attendance, and acquaintances that could’ve become fast friends have moved on to other cities.

Likewise, I hang out with only a handful of other web designers. Yes, we’re solitary creatures requiring only coffee and the warm glow of Apple logos for survival, but still… we could at least get coffee together. I’m talking the IRL meatspace.

Speaking of, I tried El Diablo at CoffeeBar today. Chipotle-chocolate cappucino. Would’ve loved a wing man.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the biggest example of “More Life” of all:

Sarah’s desire for the pitter-patter of little feet around the house.

By which I mean a kitten. What did you think I meant? Oh, the thumbnail for this post? That’s from the poster for “2010: The Year We Make Contact“. Not a science-fiction fan, I guess?

I’ve attended South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) for several years but this year was special since it was my first (last?) as a speaker. My session was intended to be about non-profits using their website to accomplish their mission, but we never seemed to make it there. Since SXSW decided to format it as a discussion, I was relying on content to come from the audience members—who were unfortunately relying on me. The idea of letting people down is not something I’m either terribly familiar or terribly comfortable with, so now I’m sharing what I would’ve said if my session had been just me with a microphone (two turntables optional).

Edge of the Web

Every new medium emerges from the husk of the old, inheriting a number of soon-to-be anachronistic metaphors. The early web brought with it the book’s concept of pages, whose final vestiges as a mode of organizing content have been all but erased by the Web-as-Platform concept. The web as a place where you read is no longer true, if it ever was. The web is where you do.

Should the last point not be self-evident, go now and count how many of your bookmarks are about reading vs buying, selling, searching, inspiring, or communicating. I’ll wait.

One thing we increasingly do on the web is self-organize. On every social network from Facebook to Flickr, we form groups. Most of the time, these groups are purely recreational alliances of common interest. Every once in a while, they are political. Consider some recent examples:

1. The Facebook Bill of Rights & Responsibilities group that achieved greater democracy in the site’s management
2. Concerned citizens flocking to support a designer whose work was stolen by a stock art company
3. Last weekend’s #AmazonFail uprising that investigated why gay, lesbian, and feminist books vanished overnight from best-seller lists

These three particular victories are interesting because they all have two things in common. First, none of their efforts are centered around or guided by an outside organization, non-profit or otherwise. Second, they were all—what’s a nice way of saying this?—wrong.

1. Facebook’s back-pedal traded a vital discussion (Do I “own” my comments on your Wall? Should I have access to them even if you delete your profile?) for Democracy Theatre.
2. The designer, it turns out, may have been plagiarizing others’ work himself.
3. Even Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody” author and post-organizationalist, admits that #AmazonFail was about misguided emotion and not justice.

The lesson that I take from this ad hoc activism is that the general population is neither apathetic nor disorganized. The multitude is brimming with passion about even “niche” issues like intellectual property law or transgender rights (which have received far less media coverage than global warming) and have the means to come together to make demands of top decision-makers. But, given their respective failures, these campaigns also illuminate the need for non-profits to assume a new role in online activism: providing a strategic avenue for collective action.

No more educate-motivate one-two punch? Their most primary roles wrested from them, where does this leave non-profits websites that raise awareness and compel action (two things they no longer need) only to then bill you for it with a donation request?

Your mission, online

It seems appropriate to confess at this point that I feel blessed to work with non-profits on exactly these issues. This post is written not out of frustration with them but a desire to vastly improve their lot.

If a committed and easily mobilized online audience seems like a burden, it’s clearly because we’re looking at the situation incorrectly.

It might be as simple as structure. If your website is handled by Communications, it’s going to be a place to read and not a place to do. If it’s handled by Development, donor conversion is probably your #1 metric. Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, once noted there was a trough of online stagnancy in middle-sized non-profits. The larger have independent web teams, the smaller has a “web team” who also happens to be the Executive Director. At this top level, directly in service to your mission, is precisely where a tool so powerful as “the Internet” belongs.

Is it as simple as looking at your mission and saying, “How can we use the Internet to achieve this?” Almost, but before you go running off to reinvent your whole website, my experience has found two crucial principles that should guide you: sincerity and granularity.

Consider the top 3 actions on WeCanSolveIt.org: sign a petition, tell friends, donate.

Robin Beck, an online organizer and co-worker emeritus of mine (uncharacteristically optimistic here), claims that we’re so used to dodging the Internet’s scams and spams that to really provoke online activism requires a higher order of sincerity. Non-profits are offering big boxes of “make the world a better place” or at least “feel good about yourself”. If we take the lid off and discover instead a “fundraising ploy” or “list-building exercise”, we’re not going to buy another box.

On its most basic level, this means that the action you’re requesting has to directly solve the problem you say it will. Adam Green of MoveOn and Change Congress publicly dropped some science on a recent email action alert he received in a blog post entitled, “Profiles in Bad Online Organizing, Part I”.

I’m not saying the DSCC has no role to play in getting Coleman to step down. I’m just saying they should play an honest and effective role.

But beyond that, it means asking for something that you couldn’t do without your supporters. You have a task that seems impossible, but you’ve figured out how to break down into smaller pieces so—if everyone does their part—it’s a snap. Which brings us to granularity…

A full academic discussion of granularity is available in “Wealth of Networks” if you can wade through it.

The root of granularity is “grain” and sand provides a great metaphor for understanding it. A sand castle is made of very small granular contributions. A single grain or a heaping bucket all contribute to the achievement of building the sand castle. Donations are granular, as supporters can give any amount they choose. Signing a petition is not, as you can only sign it once—lacking the heaping bucket. A video contest is also not, as it takes a high initial investment—lacking the single grain.

Online, this translates into the scope of transactions that your website is capable of handling. Wikis are notoriously successful at granularity. I could write an entire article on “Wookiees” or, if some reason I lacked the time or motivation to do so, I could merely correct someone else’s spelling of “Wookie”. This range of involvement allows for increased participation (and increased accuracy, but that’s a different article).

Enough theory. Let’s see these in action.

A case study

In my final year as Senior Webmaster for Rainforest Action Network, we pulled off an online campaign using exactly these principles. The organization’s mission is:

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

The impossible goal was to catalog enough products that contained palm oil or its derivatives to map the supply chain back to the primary forces of deforestation in tropical rainforests. The team consisted of a palm oil campaigner (Brihannala Morgan), an online organizer (Robin Beck, see above), a web designer/developer (me), and three awesome interns.

Step 1 was to ask supporters to go to their local supermarket and find products that contained palm oil, palmitate, etc. For this step, the team created an instructive yet entertaining video on YouTube. We further incentivized the mission by awarding the top “Supermarket Sleuths”.

Step 2 was to ask our online activists to enter the UPC numbers (the form is down now) of products they found. For this we connected to a third-party database to help verify that products were real. Since activists could also mark certain products as not containing palm oil, it was mostly self-regulating.

Step 3 was to ask those same online activists (I use the term “online” loosely here, since they’ve spent most of their time in grocery stores) to return, warning stickers in hand, to mark those products containing palm oil. RAN headquarters followed this up with a letter to companies whose products were getting stickered.

Was it sincere and granular? Cataloging every product that contains palm oil was certainly not something that three staff and three interns, all located in San Francisco, could pull off. It was also sincere in its intention to find the major players in rainforest destruction. The project was granular, too. An individual could find, submit, and/or sticker just one product and still add value or could spend a whole weekend (and we had activists that submitted hundreds). If you just wanted to correct false positives, that was also an option.

Was it successful? Wildly. On the first day of Step 3, the phones were ringing off the hook with companies whose products contained palm oil. A few days and they were disclosing their supply chains. A few weeks and the major producers were calling to schedule meetings.

I don’t want to downplay the amount of energy that the team dedicated to this project but, in absolute terms, it was a small investment. Everything from the online form to the backend database could’ve received a lot more attention—although the stickers were sweet—but they still managed to do the job with only a few weeks of staff time and a few hundred dollars (mostly the stickers). Not bad ROI for getting a meeting with a major player in the palm oil business.

Next steps for your organization

If you’ve read this far and want to shift your website to a mission-driven strategy, here are your next steps:

1. Put together a team. Find folks with a past history of pushing the technology envelope (anyone who secretly signed you up for Twitter or has been caught on Yahoo Pipes will suffice). Balance these with folks who have a handle on the strategic goals of the organization. Bonus points if these are the same folks. Three is ideal.
2. Give the team some space. If they’re successful, these people are about to pull off a task that your organization currently deems impossible. Give them some time to figure out how. Tell them not to come into the office for a week and instead generate 100 ways to accomplish your organization’s mission online. The first few dozen ideas will be boring, but then things will pick up.
3. Ground it in reality. Wow, the team came up with seriously wacky stuff, some of it ignoring current realities. Cut anything that you can’t start small and then slowly build up, along with ideas that aren’t both sincere and granular. From the remaining list, ask the team which idea they’re most excited about and do it first.
4. Provide success indicators and time limits. Measure the impact. At what point will the team get more resources and at what point will you pull the plug or say, “That didn’t work, try something else?” Make the measurements matter to the mission.
5. Start small. Don’t try to do everything out of the gate. Do the most important thing. Then the next. Then the next. All the while, keep an eye on those indicators.
6. Celebrate. It can get lonely on the edge. If you’re really doing something innovative, make sure you take the time to pat yourself on the back. Valuing your team’s motivation, rain or shine, is going to be the key for long-term success. Because…
7. Repeat. The first project may catch or it may not. Even if it does, repeat this process. Figure out how often you can afford to take a chance on something new (every quarter? twice a year? annually?) and re-assemble your team when it’s time.

If this seems exciting but a little bit daunting, then we should talk. Diligent was started with organizations exactly like yours in mind and with a mission “to harness the dynamic and democratic power of the Internet for social change.”

That’s mine, what’s yours?

The Infinite Monkey Theorem, an actual thing, suggests that an infinite number of monkeys, typing on an infinite number of typewriters, for an infinite period of time, will eventually reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare. While mathematically true, the probability is so low (1 in 3.4×10^183,946) that the laws of physics becoming temporarily suspended is slightly more likely.

A few years ago, the theorem was a popular citation among professional journalists seeking to discredit bloggers as unequal to bear the mantle of the Fourth Estate. If infinite monkeys could not reproduce Shakespeare, certainly thousands of bloggers couldn’t replace the existing media. As paper after paper stops their presses one last time with the fledgling citizen journalism not yet ready to take their place, the critique is bittersweet. Journalism will survive, but for now we straddle the perilous gap between the old professional paradigm and a new populist one.

Time magazine pays homage to this new world with its nomination of moot [sic] to the Top 100 Most Influential People of 2009 and, at post time, moot is #1 in the online poll (with well over double the votes of #2). If you’re not familiar with the name, perhaps you’re familiar with Rickrolling, LOLcats, or the Anonymous anti-Scientology campaign, all of which have spawned from his online community 4chan. I’d think twice before visiting that last link, as 4chan is also home to such vast quantities of questionable material that not only are there multiple categories of pornographic manga (Japanese comics) but even the origami forum provokes an 18+ legal disclaimer.

Peeking behind the curtain at 4chan, we’re seeing creativity at work. Objectionable ideas bounce around like hail in a raincloud, refined or exaggerated, until they’re powerful enough to fall to earth. To some degree, every creative process is like this…

During the writing of Raiders of the Lost Ark, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan taped the brainstorming sessions, which have since been transcribed and dissected. They contain racist remarks (they discuss whether the “third world sleazos” should be Mexicans or Arabs), underage sex (they debate whether Marion should be twelve or fifteen when she fell in love with Indiana), and questionable historical accuracy (they try to guess when airplanes first had flotation devices). In short, it’s a rough draft.

The Internet has changed the default state of the brainstorming fail-safe mechanism. That’s a overly technical way of saying that, previously, ideas were generated and refined behind closed doors and then made public, now we have front row seats throughout the process. Today’s bloggers don’t slowly build in-depth exposés, they break stories with the information they have and update when they have more—the same process of constant improvement that takes Wikipedia entries from semi-accurate stubs to full-length articles.

But whither the expert?

We’re beginning to see that the expert has two distinct roles to play in this new world. First, that as contributor. The contributors to Wikipedia or to 4chan or to the script of Raiders of the Lost Ark are not monkeys, typing randomly on typewriters, but experts in their field collaborating in a determined fashion. Second, that as aggregater. moot is not 4chan. No more than Jimmy Wales is Wikipedia or Steven Spielberg was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead, they have all leveraged their own expertise to create systems—be they technological or social—for the aggregation of others’ expertise. Scientists studying special relativity, go contribute to this article. Lighting guys, set up over here. Hilarious idea for a motivational poster, here’s an image macro.

The Internet has held a huge mirror up to humanity and is forcing us to confront a reality that has existed for centuries. The world is huge, full of people doing amazing things. We’re no more a superstar waiting to be discovered than the next guy. Not that it matters because the institutions that “discover” people, like record labels or movie studios, aren’t the metric of quality anymore. The line between the Ivory Tower and the great unwashed masses has been erased. We’re no longer experts by standing out, but by chipping in.

The core concept of the Wisdom of Crowds, that aggregated contributions can be substantially greater than even those of exceptional individuals, is completely obvious watching the recent video series by Kutiman, called ThruYOU. Both roles of expert are combined, with hundreds of amateur musicians spliced together by into one grand project. On the one hand, it’s no different than Spielberg coordinating George Lucas’s imagination, Harrison Ford’s acting, and John Williams’ score into a great film. On the other hand, it’s completely different. It’s not upper-class, white guys in California. It’s Kurdish vocalists shot with shaky handycams, it’s Ohioan rappers captured by camera phones, it’s moms with babies, eight-year old violin virtuosos, dorks with recorders, and it’s those pesky millennials that I keep hearing will never amount to anything singing their hearts out under the blue illumination from computer monitors.

It’s all of us.

Quoth Howard Beale:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad… everybody knows things are bad… it’s a depression… everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job… the dollar buys a nickel’s worth… banks are going bust… shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter…

It’s hard to listen to the radio or watch television or whatever verb it is you do to blogs without noticing that several important systems are all falling apart. It’s equally hard to maintain a cheery attitude without being accused of either having buried your head in the sand or being callous to the woes so real for so many people. If you’d like to be happy, and who wouldn’t, I might suggest you embrace the concept of a market correction.

Financially speaking, a market correction is the sudden drop in a stock when a bunch of people simultaneously realize that it’s overpriced. All those tips that had seemed really good as your brother-in-law was pitching you over beers wither to dust in your hands as people come to their senses and realizes that everyone was excited only because everyone else was excited, when there was no reason to get excited in the first place.

Getting more metaphorical, it’s a way to maintain hope that an established system will ultimately regulate itself and that a short-term disaster doesn’t threaten the underlying paradigm. It’s a way to say, “Hey man, I know things seem pretty fucked up right now, but the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Despite any sarcastic tone, I think they’re great.

Forests fires are market corrections, trading decaying oaks for nutrient-rich soil, thus ensuring the long-term life of the forest. Earthquakes are market corrections, drifting tectonic plates stuttering to catch up with one another to avoid gaping trenches of magma. When this planet finally kills off the humans to prevent more carbon from spilling into the atmosphere, it will be a market correction.

I can’t help but feel optimistic, even giddy.

Perhaps you’ve sensed that something like this was coming for a while. Admit it, things have felt a little “wrong” lately. Your intuitive self sensed a deep cancer within the body of buying houses on interest-only loans and flipping them onto the next guy who does the same like a game of musical chairs. Well, now the music has stopped and we have a quiet moment of lucidity, when the lights have come on and—although startled at first—we look around and find joy in the way things could be, should be, and will be again.

If you’ve been frustrated about the “childbirth bubble” where expectant mothers are first given pain medication and then labor inducers, and then pain medication, and then labor inducers, until finally their’s no choice but to perform a Caeserian, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a market correction going on.

If you’ve been irked by the “global food market bubble” making your food tasting bland, unsatisfying, and full of ingredients you can’t pronounce, you’ll be happy to know that eating local and urban farms are forcing a market correction.

If you think that the “partisan politics bubble” has made the national discourse too divisive, despite your sharing more and more values with your neighbors and that, “the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.” You probably already know that there’s some markets getting corrected lately.

And if you think the “lists of links to lists of links bubble” has left the blogosphere a wasteland of search-engine optimized lists, Digg-bait headlines, and lifehacks distracting you from the life you’re supposed to be hacking, you’ll be pleased to find out that the Internet is receiving a long awaited market correction.

Yes, there are growing pains. Yes, the coming world will destroy the current one in its wake. But I have confidence that the turmoil we’re seeing on the world stage is merely a generation of chickens coming home to roost, breaking some eggs, and tomorrow we’ll all be eating some mighty tasty omelettes.

Just last week, AT&T was in the news for two major stories, revealing them as… I think the legal term is “dicks”.

On Tuesday, classified documents were released confirming that they did indeed help the NSA with their warrantless wire-tapping activities. They didn’t just look the other way while the NSA did all the work but coordinated with them, re-routing traffic and purchasing equipment to make surveillance easier. The first of these “spy rooms” was constructed in San Francisco, about four blocks from my office. To be clear, this is not stepping out of the way to let justice be served—the wiretaps are illegal—it’s more like approaching a mugging in progress and offering the mugger a bigger gun.

Then on Wednesday, AT&T announced plans to “filter content” over the internet. They’ve outlined a plan where their servers will monitor the data packets sent through them and delete any that are found to by infringing on copyrights. They feel that somehow, by contributing to the infrastructure, they own what it carries. Imagine your water company deciding when you’re allowed to have water or your power company deciding when you’re allowed to have power. For even less of a stretch, imagine your telephone company (quite possibly AT&T) deciding which phone calls you can make or receive. Consider further that something like “copyrighted content” is not uniformly illegal, as legality depends on usage, and you’ve got a real bull-in-a-china-shop situation (fitting because filtering internet content is a criticism often aimed at the Chinese government).

Put these two together and you see an AT&T that uses their power irresponsibly and, quite possibly, illegally. Not an ideal partner for Apple, whose been trying to keep their image clean. Yet when the iPhone comes out on June 29th, the only way to get it is along with a Cingular/AT&T plan. What’s a nerd to do? Here are a few possible solutions.

Steve’s “blog” has recently had some fairly landmark posts on it about Apple’s perspective on DRM and their environmental policies, both of which have been in response to popular activist campaigns (the Free Software Foundation and Greenpeace, respectively). Perhaps they’d be willing to listen to reason on why telecommunications companies constantly monitoring our communications is not an ideal feature for “our digital life“.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) continues to fight the bully telecoms in multiple arenas. Oh that’s right, AT&T is also starkly against Network Neutrality and even funds astroturf groups to represent a non-existent public outcry in their favor. Almost forgot that. So the second possible solution is to set up a monthly donation to EFF equal to or exceeding your monthly donation (i.e. bill) to AT&T.

The last option is to wait for the iPhone to become available on Verizon (only marginally better on the Net Neutrality front) or another service. This could happen after the exclusive partnership with AT&T is over (see, even Apple gets locked into lame 2-year contracts) or by someone unlocking the iPhone so it can be used with other carriers.

My current plan is to wait on the iPhone. Mostly this is because I’ve learned my lesson on buying 1st generation new product lines from Apple, having purchased one of the first G4s back in 2000 and one of the first MacbookPros last year. Both are phenomenal machines, with just a few kinks that have since been worked out. But, unless I wait the full 5 years, this doesn’t address the political aspects of avoiding AT&T. Also to consider: does it make a damn difference? I’ve been boycotting Sony for almost ten years now and I don’t think anyone but my mom even knows. Ultimately, I think it’s a “can you look at yourself in the mirror-like shiny Apple logo?” issue. And that’s a question we need to ask ourselves over more than just the phone we use.

It’s workplanning season where I work and everyone is struggling to incorporate the organization’s anti-oppression and diversity initiatives into their priorities. On the one hand, I’m very lucky because I’ve got the web in my corner—clearly the biggest force for democracy since the printing press. On the other hand, thinking outside of the server-shaped box is sometimes difficult for the technically minded and there’s clearly a huge difference between the possibilities inherent to the medium and the capabilities of a small web team at a non-profit. What follows is not a list of the projects I’m pursuing over the next 12 months, but the principles that are guiding my brainstorming. Please feel free to suggest some actual projects (or challenge my anti-oppression analysis).

Oppression, as I’m using the term, is ideological domination resulting in exploitation of one social group for the benefit of another. Racism is a form of oppression based on ethnicity, valuing (at least in the United States) people of European descent over African, Native American, etc. Sexism is another based on gender and there are lots more. A common tendency is that these dominant ideologies tend to be both reinforced from a centralized source (mass media) and also internalized by oppressor and oppressed alike—to the point where (for example) a woman might believe that she could never be as good a lawyer as a man because she’s “too emotional”.

Now, some ideas on how the web can help.

Open the vectors. McKenzie Wark’s “A Hacker Manifesto” (have I mentioned I love manifestos?) well describes a Vectoralist Class which maintains its power largely by controlling access to information, not land or wealth. Considering the role that mass media plays in reaffirming oppressive narratives (e.g. all African American youth are in gangs), opening the vectors so that marginalized stories can be told is an immediate disruption. This process involves relinquishing editorial control and finding alternative methods of distribution, for instance community-generated feeds replacing hand-picked content or facilitating non-traditional authorship (i.e. stewarding content from an oppressed community to the mass media). It’s important to examine both the input and output, so the content that’s being produced (and valued) and the ways it’s being disseminated without being manipulated to conform to pre-existing standards.

Interrupt feedback loops. The coder in me might suggest that power and privilege seem (ironically?) to follow a Power Curve. A Power Curve, aka Zipf Law, aka the Pareto Principle is a relationship exhibited in lots of situations, but most often when previous performance affects future performance—called the Yule Process. Popular websites get linked to more often than non-popular websites, making them more popular. Books that sell well appear on lists or are talked about, making them sell better. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. On the web, it was pointed out long ago that there’s still a lot of area under the curve and the web lacks the necessity of focus that makes the it possible to dominate an entire field. Amazon.com isn’t limited by shelf space, it can offer a book that sells very few copies. A local movie theater has to show movies it knows will make money so it can pay rent; YouTube doesn’t. LonelyGirl15 or ZeFrank are stars without ever having begged Paramount to distribute them.

Challenge the story. Digging up dirt seems like what the internet does best. As our failing Fourth Estate sleeps on the job, citizen media and general muckrakers do their job for them. It’s not just journalism-type information that’s getting out into the public because of the internet. The amazing Maplight project (which just won NetSquared’s Innovation Award) connects corporations that give legislators money to how those legislators then vote on legislation supporting those corporations. Following the money and seeing how bought your Senator is has never been easier. Personally, I think this would be one of the biggest (and first) losses if network neutrality failed to be safeguarded.

Man, this was a hard one to write. Everyday posts are a bitch.

My step-father is a business professor at Krannert School of Management and recommended I check out David Aaker, whom I guess is considered a bit of an authority on the subject. Aaker stresses relevance as an element of branding that a lot of people forget.

Relevance occupies the space between someone knowing who you are and someone liking what you do. Say I’m hungry for a salad. There are thousands of places I could go to get one (including produce stores to make my own). Even though I’m familiar with McDonald’s, it’s not going to pop into my brain as a destination. I don’t connect “salad” and “McDonald’s”, even though I might connect “food” with “McDonald’s”. It’s not relevant to the current question. Similarly, while I might consider Black & Decker relevant if I were looking for a hedge trimmer or cordless drill, I wouldn’t if it were a rice cooker I was after.

In this way, branding closely mimics findability on the web. Findability is the conceptual sequel to information architecture that stresses the process of users finding your information over the internal structure of the information itself. Do I care if your product is considered top of the line if I never click to the page that describes it?

The folks over at Xerox PARC (who have previously brought you the mouse, desktop icon, etc.) have put together a model of human behavior while looking for data that they call “Scent Navigation Information Foraging”, abbreviated both appropriately and hilariously as SNIF. SNIF suggests that people roam the web like hungry beasts in search of information. When we catch a scent, we bound off in that direction (by clicking a link) and smell the air again (by scanning the page). For instance, if I were looking for a job from Lockheed Martin, I wouldn’t expect to find a job description on their (awful) homepage, but I would scan for any trigger words that might help me get closer like “careers”, “jobs”, “opportunities” or failing those “about us” or “corporate”. Finding one, I’d pounce and then see if I could get closer from the next page, until I had the poor data-gazelle in my gnashing teeth.

With farms and factories producing far more than we could ever want, the problem of scarcity has been for the most part solved on a physical plane (though problems of sustainable production and equitable distribution of resources remain). Still, demand for branding remains high due to the “supply” of relevance being finite. We simply cannot hold information about the offerings of every single company in our heads. Our collective psyches are slashed and burned for profit, with very little regard for what we ourselves may or may not want to store in there. Cynicism, sarcasm, and an increased resistance to advertising is the end result.

A healthier and more sustainable strategy for branding may be to further pursue the foraging model in greater depth. Advertising would be limited to those seeking advertising, and specifically seeking the products being advertised. This simple evolution—contextual branding—is not only respectful, but how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Like other landscapes allowed to recover after intense resource extraction, perhaps our minds will eventually return to a more peaceful state.

This video also marks my jump to Revver… How’s the quality compare to the old YouTube stuff?

Maybe this issue hasn’t quite hit mainstream news yet, but almost every blog I read is weighing in and I’ll be damned if I don’t use my position of privilege (by which I mean “a Mac user”) to contribute on the subject as well.

The most recent uproar began when Mike Monteiro called out Carson Workshops for it’s ovewhlemingly white list of presenters. Jason Kottke poured gasoline on the fire, presenting gender percentages of various web conferences.

A backlash began from the event organizers. Eric Meyer heroically blamed the system, saying “Call that decision a manifestation of old-boy clubbiness if you want, but it isn’t.” He cites the research they did about who would attend an event with X, Y, Z speakers… lo and behold, the “A-List” was mostly men.

Trying to cite Micki Krimmel in this whole affair gives me a “circular reference” error, because back to back posts from Mickipedia praise Monteiro and critique the recent rise of the word “poser” in tech circles. Violet Blue recently got called one, Leah Culver has come out in favor of the word, and Leah and Micki both shared spots on Violet’s Sexiest Geeks of 2006 list.

I bring up the poser discussion to illustrate the vastly different understandings of what an “expert” in this industry might be. Eric Meyer knows more about floating divs than I may ever, but his site is not nearly as nice looking as Becca Wei‘s, a top designer of WordPress themes (currently, two of the five “featured” themes are hers). Is he an expert because of the books he’s had published? Because of the panels he’s spoken on? How much of his success under these criteria are tied to his race, sexuality, or gender?

Before I jump in and tear anyone claiming that 0% of presenters at a conference being women is justified a new vagina (my first instinct), I should make sure my own house is in order. Of the blogs in my feedreader with single authors (so not Boing Boing, for instance), 41% are female. Yay, me. I am not a pig.

However, a closer look reveals most of the female blogs I subscribe to are people I know, not “experts” (though exceptionally talented writers, artists, designers, and otherwise crafty people). I really have as far to go as everyone else.

This is really what it comes down to: who do we, as a community, hold up as our experts? Who’s contributions do we say have value? While it’s easy to say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but this is the way the world works”, I can only say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but that puts you squarely in part-of-the-problem and not part-of-the-solution“. How should the world work, and what can you/I/we do with the power we’re afforded as white, heterosexual males to make it that way?

Disclaimer: I bear Eric no ill-will; these are really tough, personal, and often emotionally-charged issues. His follow-up post acknowledges as much.