Archimedes’ Hot Tub

After getting more than 4,000 comment spams in 24 hours on Sunday, I decided it was time to require people to subscribe before posting comments. So far, so good.

Al Neuharth, the former chairman of Gannett, tells Forbes that he does not think newspapers will die for a long long time. I’ll note he used the phrase ‘around the world.’ Newspapers outside of the U.S. and western Europe are growing in circulation right now. But I don’t think he used it as a hedge — I think he figures that newspapers have survived media shifts before, and this one will be no different. Though in other media shifts, they weren’t giving their content away on TV or Radio, and their advertisers weren’t completely bewitched, or befuddled, by the new form of advertising.

It’s timely for me to see this, because I was talking to Craig Mathias yesterday, and he told me he thinks all print is doomed. I have yet to have someone tell me to ‘go read this Web site’ for any idea that was important to them - people want me to read books. So I doubt print is doomed. But then, most of the people that I know aren’t under 25, except my children, and at the moment they’re happy with the newspaper because it includes comics.

Michael Wolff has a new news startup, Newser, that is causing him angst, as he describes at length in his latest Vanity Fair column

Some of his worries stem from his high-profile flame-out in Internet Bubble 1. But he’s mostly worried that news is dead, at least for those under 30. People don’t want news, and they can get their comics and sports and art and music and finance information from things besides newspapers. I confess I wasn’t much interested in newspapers when I was younger, but now I get two at home, plus the NYT on Sunday, I subscribe to the WSJ online and I find headlines cannot be avoided. Maybe Newser will do what Topix and Digg and crayon.net and others before it seem to have left open.

It somehow isn’t fair to boil down a seminal, 800+ page work on the development of modern society into a blog post. But a shorthand theme for William McNeill’s book The Rise of the West is to see it as an argument for free exchange of ideas and goods. McNeil thinks civilizations benefit and develop by contact with other societies. Groups thrive as they innovate through adapting ideas from elsewhere, give them their own twist. Thus barbarous and semi-barbarous societies take from more advanced societies until they are strong enough to expose the weaknesses in those societies. That suggested to me some market parallels about the way economies can be sacked and looted by new ideas, especially when they involve a shift of assets away from a region (look at my hometown in the Rust Belt, melting away with its manufacturing base, the local college not a powerful enough patron to keep Main Street alive).

The book is full of interesting notions — the phalanx as the foundation of democracy, the long tension between reason and religion, that France did more for democracy than America. The book was written in 1964, and published with a retrospective essay in 1982, prior to the return of religion as a force in American politic (though that force was probably overstated by clever political maneuvering in both the 2000 and 2004 elections — no amount of maneuvering would have helped in 2006). Yet he leaves the door open for that to happen [”Liberal democratic theory assumed human rationality…but psychologists and social scientists no longer believe that men are ruled by reason, while advertisers and military men know they are not.”] He foresees the rise of Brazil, India and China in world affairs, and even notes that we’re getting close to managing our own evolution.

He is remarkable for his balance, almost never venturing too far in favor of one ancient hero or ideal. For instance, in his discussion of Hellenism, perhaps the most powerful cultural force the world has ever seen, he writes on Plato, who proposed the idea of a philosopher king (a kind of early superman), McNeill subtly notes that not long after the day of Plato, “Philosophers, losing all real hope of transforming or much affecting public affairs, concentrated attention more and more upon personal life and manners.”

Later, while looking at the rise of Christianity, which he calls “one of the central dramas of human history,” he has this to say about its unfolding:

“The actions, thoughts and feelings of these few men [Jesus and his followers] ….continue to exercise vast influence to this day and will do so through foreseeable human time; for the living force of Christian faith, hope, and love, together with the no less powerful forces of Christian bigotry and superstition, are by no means yet exhausted.”

He notes also on the rise of Islam that it was remarkably intolerant of other ideas when compared to Chinese Buddhism or Hinduism, or even Christendom. Islam’s rejection of outside ideas is a puzzle to McNeill, but again, he remains balanced, discussing figures like al-Farabi, who was if not an atheist an Islamic agnostic.
He looks at the advances of Islamic science, among the best in the world in its era, up through the time of Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the west) in the 11th century, and then notes the turn Islamic society made in the 12th century. “Thus by a curious and fateful coincidence, Moslem thought froze into a fixed mold just at the time when intellectual curiosity was awakening in western Europe — the 12th and 13th centuries A.D.”
There was certainly no room for the secularism that became a staple of Western civilization (he does not say this explicitly, but it seems to me that Western secularism may itself have been a reaction to the onslaught of Islam).

Neither Islam nor the other great power of the day, China, get short shrift. Their immense power and wealth were clear vis a vis the relatively barbaric West. But innovations like paper, porcelain, printing and gunpowder, developed in China, were left for their “full and reckless exploitation” by the “looser, less ordered society of western Europe, where no overarching bureaucracy and no unchallengeable social hierarchy inhibited their revolutionary approach.”

There were plenty of revolutions in Europe: the Renaissance, the Reformation and then the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions. Direct political conflict as a result of religion mostly came to an end after the 30 Years War, but there was plenty of tension between religion and reason and the natural sciences in the West. He notes that in the wake of the emergence of Newtonian physics “intelligent and subtle-minded men shuddered at the thought of a dead, mechanical universe of infinite spaces and natural law.” He proposes that this might have been the source of the huge energy that fueled a number of new religious movements in the 1600s and 1700s.

He is not an unabashed apologist for the west either. At one point he notes,

Indeed, world history since 1500 may be thought of as a race between the West’s growing power to molest the rest of the world and the increasingly desperate efforts of other peoples to stave Westerners off, either by clinging more strenuously than before to their peculiar cultural inheritance or, when that failed, by appropriate aspects of Western civilization — especially technology — in the hope of thereby finding means to preserve their local autonomy.

His writing is generally wonderful. To wit:

Civilizations may be likened to mountain ranges, rising through aeons of geologic time, only to have the forces of erosion slowly but ineluctably nibble them down to the level of their surroundings. Within the far shorter time span of human history, civilizations, too are liable to erosion as the special constellation of circumstances which provoked their rise passes away, while neighboring peoples lift themselves to new cultural heights by borrowing from or otherwise reacting to the civilized achievement.

He’s also profound and sweeping: “The two-edged nature of power is nothing new in human affairs. All important new inventions have both freed men from former weakness and deficiency and enslaved them to a new regimen.”

McNeill provides a construct for the whole messy scope of human civilization, the hardest of feats. This book is a tour de force and still well worth reading.

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times looks at a new wave of personal organizing tools, and suggests that sharing will become a new challenge for business. See A Tool to Organize Our Many Organizers.

I had coffee today with DD Gangully, CEO of Dimdim, which makes an open source Web conferencing tool of the same name (and it has nothing to do with his own name, but was picked at random. When I noted the similarity, he sighed and said “I’m thinking of changing my name”). He told me his biggest issue as an entrepreneur is taking home his stress, which had been such a problem for him in his first startup that he avoided starting a second company for years.

But he has addressed this issue with the stress management spreadsheet shown here on his blog.

DD told me that tracking his stress levels at home have worked very well. I guess if you’re disciplined enough to keep a spreadsheet, you probably can be disciplined enough to do what you must to reduce your stress.

I just got off the phone with my friend Niall McKay, and got the great news that a documentary he’s proposed about his father, The Bass Player, has gotten funding. Niall also has a series of other projects that he’s pursuing, such as this PBS project on Sikhs in America. I’m jazzed for Niall, who has a special talent for telling powerful stories featuring everyday folk. I can’t wait to see these!

Niall had other good news, too, but I’m not at liberty to share…

I’m already in more than half-a-dozen online social networks, and just last week was invited to two brand new ones. One represented the first time I was invited to a socialnet built by someone using Ning, the other a new business social network called Doostang.

While I think these networks are fundamental tools for Web sites, I’m now frowzy about them. I don’t for the most part seek to grow my networks — I was aggressive about inviting people to LinkedIn a few years ago, but stopped after breaking past the 150-connection mark. The 150 number is what social scientists think was probably the maximum village group in early human history. I am now at close to 300 connections, but almost always because people now invite me to join their networks, so I’m part of their 150 connections.

I have taken an interest in Facebook, which I joined after three people invited me in one week. I like many elements of how it is organized, and what I can manage. It’s also more personal than something like LinkedIn, and, for me, easier to use than MySpace (it also lacks the spam of that network). All the rest of my networks are basically untended. I even found that I hadn’t gone to Second Life in so long that I lost all three of my friends. Frankly, I find just treading water on two or three networks a time sink (and I’m not including social sites like Flickr).

These social networks have a surface purpose — getting better jobs or friends or dates — but also an evolutionary function – you rack up big online networks and then show them off, as if they said something about our prospects (or, perhaps, our parties). In some cases, as Owen Thomas notes, they’re part of our personal marketing effort, so they really can enhance our prospects. But in most cases I think they’re digital peacock feathers.

I note that none of the social networks I’m on feature a good calendaring function. That’s probably because most of us don’t actually want our networks to see our calendar. My guess is that this will start to change — I was interviewing David Weinberger today for my next Prototype column, and he mentioned that Jimmy Wales used to have it set up so that anyone could schedule an appointment with him just by going to his public calendar and snaring some time (I went and looked and that no longer seems to be the case). As with our parties, we will have to deal anew with the awkwardness of deciding who does not get access to our to-do list or get to see what we really have on our schedule that we claim prevents us from seeing them. A whole new form of social hazard looks poised to emerge.

I spoke this spring with John Williamson, an economist at the Institute of International Economics who created the idea of ‘The Washington Consensus’ as a set of expected reforms for dealing with economic crisis (a term since hijacked for other purposes).

We talked about currency issues in the global economy, and the growing pressure created by the gigantic surpluses China and other nations have built with the U.S. His big worries were that the U.S. trade deficit could send the economy into recession or cause a retreat from free trade. There is no quick fix for the deficit, but he thinks that with quick action, it might be halved in four years.

Despite his worries, he kept his sense of humor.

People tend to break down into two types, those who say we’ve called it as it is and wish the official world would start doing something about it, and others who say we’ve heard you calling wolf before, and nothing’s happened. And that of course is true (laughs). But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem there just because disaster hasn’t happened yet.

The interview as I submitted it to Shukan Daiyamondo is here.
World Voice: John Williamson

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post has an enlightening piece in today’s paper, Norway Debates the Promise, Costs of New Drilling. Norway is the world’s third largest oil exporter, but there is a significant discussion as to whether it should take advantage of the melting of the Arctic ice caps to drill still more.

A memorable quote was this one, from an activist:

“We are a country of petroholics. A nice, little, selfish country of petroholics.”

There’s also an intriguing reference to a philosopher who advises the Central Bank on where to invest its oil profits. I’ll bet this person is not one of Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophers.