Surviving the Culture Wars

I have finally purchased my own domain, and migrated this blog to WordPress. Blogger is terrible. You may find my final blog post there:

http://www.thomhastings.com/blog/?p=20

Goodbye for a while, do stay in touch.

So, this is my first real post. Consider everything before this point a warm-up, getting past that "awkward" blogger phase where the new blogger isn't very sure of themself or their ideas. After this last week, I am sure.

First, about me. I currently work full-time as a volunteer for an AmeriCorps program called City Year. City Year's tagline is "give a year, change the world." I used to think this slogan was terribly hokey and far too rose-colored. (And that's saying a lot--I'm an idealist to begin with.) However, over the last nine months of my service, I have become a believer. As a result, I will blog (and tweet) more about my experience as a corps member in the future.

Now, about my goals and beliefs. Just like a right to water, I believe everyone on earth has a right to knowledge. That pretty much sums it up. Knowledge is power, it's the foundation of a democracy, and everyone has a right to it--everyone. My goal is liberating that knowledge and making it accessible and open to all who desire it. I see a number of barriers to this goal: legal, technological, and linguistic. Right now I evangelize Creative Commons to attempt to overcome the legal barrier. Next, I intend to help create more free and open source software to help overcome the technological barrier, alongside projects like One Laptop Per Child. Finally, my dream is to someday create fantastic free and open source language learning software (think Rosetta Stone) or even machine translation tools to overcome the linguistic barrier.

So this week has been huge for me. A massive step forward for education and the world, California announced an initiative for Open Educational Resources. Personally though, I was able to participate in an amazing conference in which I met many awesome people. In addition, I met one very special person through my work at City Year.

Over the weekend I gave two talks at a conference called BarCamp. The first was more of a group discussion in a Socratic seminar style format, and one person told me that it was the best talk he's ever heard. The second was my first serious presentation of my ideas (one in particular) to an audience. To those of you who gave it, thank you for your positive, constructive, and invaluable feedback. I will use it as I continue to give talks in the future, ideally with my next at MindShare. The video of my second talk is below.


I made a lot of amazing new friends at BarCamp, like some people who have developed a technology that actually makes the Internet faster. One very noteworthy and related to this post is Alex Peake, who runs empowerthyself.com, which uses the absolutely amazing tagline "Apathy is obsolete." I'll let you check out his site for yourself.

However, just this morning, here at City Year Los Angeles, I had the privilege of hearing Ben Sherwood talk about his life and his goals. To be blunt, I'm freaking out. We share so much vision and belief that it's ridiculous. I sincerely hope that he watches the video of my talk and that we continue to have a dialogue about survival, the media revolution, and the education of mankind.

My most memorable quotes from Ben are "everyone is surviving something," and "live life out of balance," while believing in your own efficacy. He has inspired me to completely defeat the determinism that I feel plagues so many in this world. We tend to believe that the world is too big, and that we can't make a difference. News flash: the world is getting smaller, and our power to change it is proportionately getting larger.

I was so impassioned by my interaction with Ben that I ran off to one of the computers at the office to write this post immediately. In fact, I'm already late for an opportunity to be at a gang prevention workshop in Watts. I have to go. Please check back as I continue to update an revise this post.

P.S. Ben, if you're reading this, please read the following article. I believe it will apply to your and your wife's work, as well as the future of media and the Internet:
iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England

Talk about a personal deus ex machina, I just discovered an entire open business website.

Also, the winners of the "We're Linux" contest were announced:

I just read the a very intelligent blog post on the New World Economy. It's also the first time I've heard that term used outside of Star Trek. I've been waiting.

I think of this blog as an evolving primer for all kinds of openness, especially open business making money honestly while freely helping mankind. This is what Lawrence Lessig calls the 'hybrid' economy:


For my very few readers: be aware that I do update old blog posts. I revise my text and add new videos, links, and other relevant information. This blog is an evolving primer.

For a must-see documentary:

Featuring Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, and Cory Doctorow.
And they want you to help make it.
Book a screening.

Last week my friend Christopher randomly asked me to be part of his YouTube project, WEECY TV. I had an amazing conversation with two neighbors who I had never met, and Christopher did a great job editing it down to a few minutes. I could write about my current work, or the rest of that long, powerful conversation, but I'd rather let the video speak for itself:

My friend Steve commented on Facebook:

Hey Thom, the whole video was pretty cool. We had an Italian economist from the University of Rome come speak last night on the Italian and European economy, but he brought up the same line: there was a brilliant English economist (from the 19th century, the man's name escapes me, the article is titled something along the lines of: "A forecast for our Grandchildren") who wrote that come year 2030 (or so) the world will be at a point where greed will no longer exist because of the wealth will have increased 8-fold for the entire populous, and everybody (entrepreneurs specifically) will have satisfaction with their level of wealth.

Wealth in Europe has risen to that level, statistically it is 8-fold what it was then. But the world hasn't changed, and the Economist predicted the state of man a hundred years later incorrectly. This is because the driving factor of growth (entrepreneurs) was not the acquiring of wealth but rather success, that success is the basic human need which drove entrepreneurship and economics in general.

Thank you, Steve.

From OSNews:

Straight from the mouth of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, on March 3rd during a Q&A session in San Francisco:

What's particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point. Eventually, it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can make services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That's another new model that's coming.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer already made predictions of his own earlier this year and figures that the big MS can handle anything Google brews up.

I assume we're going to see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones. We'll see Google more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before. The seams between what's a phone operating system and a PC operating system will change, and so we have ramped the investment in the client operating system.

All the big companies see it coming, new media is open media.

The soft revolution comes as no shock to the people who know. After all, Cory Doctorow told Microsoft that DRM was a silly move back in 2004. But to the general public, open source is still a concept that isn't fully grasped. How can a company make money on something that can be given away for free? I would say "innovation" or more specifically "Reason to Buy" or even added services, as Canonical and Red Hat understand. Hardware vendors know it too, which is why genius netbooks either demand open source or simply offer it as their cheapest option.

Video below of the Touch Book, which I envisioned about a week before it was released. But that's nothing special, because genius people envision this stuff all day, and with the power of open source at their disposal, these geniuses are starting to pull off the marketing and distribution of new goods and services under new, open business models.

The talks I attended were stellar. The conversations I had on the expo floor were powerful. SCaLE 7x was, in fact, the best weekend of my life. I got to hang around with Jono Bacon, among others. Expect lots of revisions to this post, mostly expansions particular talks.

The best:
Stormy Peters - Companies & Communities (read)
John Todd - Open Source in an Economic Downturn (it wins)
Ross Turk - Open Source Business for Hackers (watch):


The day after SCaLE ended I got to have a conference call with Jamie Boyle and Joi Ito, the Chairman of the Board and CEO, respectively, of Creative Commons. You can listen to the call here:

At about 34 minutes in, in the middle of one of my questions, you can hear a car peel out. I was mortified by embarrassment, but in retrospect it's hilarious. I was calling from a park in Boyle Heights, a physical commons, since I needed a space to listen to the call and take notes away from middle-school kids. As it started to rain, I had to take shelter under a tree with some construction workers from a project nearby while they were cooking some tacos for their lunch break. As it lightened up a bit, they offered me one. Too glued to all of Jamie's words, I didn't want to take any time away from the call. "In a bit," I said. Half an hour later, the call was over and the workers had left, with one taco left on the grill for me. I learned an amazing lesson about community, and it's hard to articulate completely. Here's how I usually think it: "We're all in this together." Our commons are something we all intuitively understand, through our basic understanding of each other's basic human needs and those needs of our common planet, we can also intuitively understand what needs to be done. All that is left to do, is to do it. With that, I give the Legacy of Lessig:

It is more or less a combination of all his talks up until now, and even still in a modern context.

P.S. I might be busy as I have some internships to apply to.

P.P.S. At the end of the call Joi mentions rebranding? I thought this was good:

And this is even older:

I guess digital natives like myself are biased. True enough, the possible brand confusion with closed captioning must be rectified.

A crash course for the attention deficit:

Michael Wesch

Jonathan Zittrain

Lawrence Lessig

Okay, relatively short.

From elearnspace:

Adhering to the motto “a provocative title will surely increase readership”, Atlantic has an interesting article on How the Crash Will Reshape America:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

With that in mind, watch the following video:
Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism


I have a postulate for a module to add to the model that Umair Haque presents:
I postulate that in contrast to the traditional economic definition, goods and services are, in fact, the same thing.
I think that over the last few decades as our economy has shifted from goods-based to service-based, we are debunking a powerful myth.

Goods are services.

Now, before you object, consider this: Let's say I'm a car manufacturer, making Hummers. Now the 20th century capitalism says that a car is a product. I say, the production of that car is a service. A service with environmental impacts that are overlooked if the car is treated as a product. If the car is a product, then the manufacturer forgoes all responsibility the moment that car is purchased. From that point, it's the consumer's choice how to use the vehicle, and the manufacturer cannot be held accountable for the environmental consequences.

In today's economy, car sales have fallen off a cliff, while repair shops are overflowing with work. The car isn't a good, and the maintenance of the car is a sustainable service-based business model. In the following video, Shai Agassi makes the same point about paying for services and not for products-- like with cell phones.


I think this makes a lot of sense for open content, too-- like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is in the upper right quadrant of one of Umair Haque's graphs, as simultaneously disintegrating both property rights and governance. This is the real emergence of collective intelligence, and we are indeed on the cusp of a revolution. The social media revolution and the capitalistic depression are catalyzing this social capital revolution.

Those that thrive in the hybrid economy recognize that services outweigh goods. Google provides a search service. Companies that profit from the Internet are its service providers. Most web servers run Linux. Let this be the first lesson then:

Pay for services, not for software.

This is the unofficial motto of companies like Red Hat, as described in "The Commons: Celebrating Accomplishments, Discerning Futures" (about 36 minutes in.) What servers do Google, YouTube, Facebook, and every other successful web company run on? You guessed it, Linux.

As to the title: some say that sew money in the United States is created out of debt. I don't pretend to understand this, but the 'Zeitgeist' movie series claims that money equals debt. Thinking about this differently, money is society's I.O.U. When you work, you do something for someone, and they pay you as if to say, "I owe you." I owe you food or clothing or shelter or service, but I trust you to know what it is you need most. So, in many ways, we can think of capitalism as sharing, a great series of officially printed IOU's floating around on pieces of paper.

So, for you, a new video: GreenXchange is an initiative to give corporations access to one anther's ideas. If Tom Friedman is correct in the assertion he makes in his talk (below) that "everything that can be done, will be done," then all of these ideas that currently sit unused by corporations could potentially be used by start-ups, or other corporations. Especially in the face of sustainability, which is a problem and a trend which we all currently face, GreenXchange could not be more valuable.


Now, for me: I grew up, as many do, learning that sharing is good. My parents said, "Share your toys," your knowledge, etc. In 8th grade, however, my private school started a laptop program. At the same time, Kazaa was blowing up, along with all peer to peer file sharing. Jonathan Zittran mentions Kazaa in his talk (below). During gym class, I'd walk around the track explaining to my classmates how file sharing on Kazaa was related to free speech. I told them, "Just imagine that I'm telling you the whole plot of a movie, or that I'm singing a song I like." I explained, "That's the same as a bunch of ones and zeroes being transferred across a computer network." Lawrence Lessig points out this similarity in his talk (also below), when he mentions John Phillips Sousa's objection to the "infernal machines." Those infernal machines have now been linked to the Internet, which increasingly dominates our lives, and the Internet has made the "people on the front porch singing the songs of the day" so much more powerful. There are roughly a billion and a half people on the Internet, and they have begun singing together, through Creative Commons.

If you liked the video, check out the rest at ThruYOU.

I will blog for two people, myself and you. As for myself, I will try to navigate the ethical contradictions in which I grew up, with an eye on the future of these ideas. As for you, you are interested in the ways to make money using free stuff.

I will blog to the target demographic which I believe has the highest demand but the smallest supply: open business models--how to make money with Creative Commons. The 'hybrid economy' is the strength of Joi Ito's talk at DLD (one of the Seven Movies of Destiny listed at the bottom of the page), and it is the subject of the following one:

Michael Masnick @ midem 2009 - NIN case study video: Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy


Then again, why try to guess at the NIN business model when Trent Reznor is perfectly transparent about it in a more recent video:

However, Change Congress is Lawrence Lessig's new project:

And Lawrence Lessig is my hero.