Tuesday, May 07, 2002

This is something I would love to see.  A small town newspaper builds a site with Radio.  It provides Radio to all of the community leaders in town, such as the local fire department, the police, the schools, the community organizations, the local sports teams, the zoning board, etc.  All told it provides 50 licenses, templates, and a location to post ($2k).   It then links to these organizations via its home site and aggregates RSS style news.  It accepts more community weblogs from others that buy the software on their own and begin to publish (my town's girls soccer team has a Radio weblog, through no work done by me). It then sells Radio, plus a place on their main site, to local businesses.  $250 a year.  The local travel agents, the real-estate agents, the landscaping businesses, etc all post new info on specials, tips on what your next purchase or activity should be, etc.  There would easily be, in most 20k person towns 100 small companies that would do this = $25 k.  All the paper would need to do to get these people publishing is give them the link to download the software. Now, most of this could be done without an RCS server and simply through FTP, a static host (available at most ISPs for low $$), and linking.  Simple.  An RCS and some manipulation of RSS newsfeeds would add another level of sophistication and community building.    Think of the benefits!  All the news you could ever want on a town in one place = fresh, decentralized, and useful.  Produced by the people who make it. Excellent. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

NYT book review. Fukuyama takes on biotechnology in "Our Posthuman Future." Fukuyama has a nose for important topics. I find that he is almost always writing a book about topics that I am thinking about. In 1989 he wrote the "End of History" to proclaim the ultimate victory of the western idea of free markets and free minds.  His conclusion was that with the end of the cold war, no other system could stand in the way of the west's ultimate victory.  We are headed towards a world of democratic states with free markets, a single homogenous model of how to organize society, shorn of the Hegelian dialectic.  How right he was (the current situation in the ME doesn't represent real competition).  In 1995, he published "Trust", a book about the origins of group formation for economic purposes (given that we all increasingly live in a homogenous state see above). He wrote this book just as the online world was exploding, and there were questions as to whether communities online could challenge the geographic state (offline) for dominance.  People asked: Would the state melt away?  The linch pin to this: could these communities generate the wealth necessary to challenge state power by creating economic trust relationships? His conclusion:  No, economic trust relationships are tightly tied to cultural and social trust relationships that are tied to geography.  How true this conclusion proved to be. His newest book, "Our Post Human Future" looks at the world of biotech and its capacity to change our assumption as to the nature of man.  His conclusion:  biotech is bad because it will alter our fundamental human nature by eliminating genetic determinism.  His reviewer writes:  >>>The longest section of the book, and the most interesting, explores the question of whether there exists a human nature that these technologies can be said to violate. If human beings are infinitely plastic, with no fixed essence, then whatever we do to alter ourselves will not offend any preset natural order, and will not infringe the moral rights that supposedly flow from our nature. Fukuyama defines human nature in these words: ''human nature is the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors.''<<<  To stop this change, he advocates that the government should shut down most forms of biotech in order to prevent fragmentation.   Fukuyama's conclusions on this topic are dead wrong.  The path to further growth and experimentation in a homogenous state is through experimentation with enhancements (biotech, info tech, and nanotech) at the level of the individual.  It is unstoppable. Granted, I understand his fear.  Fukuyama is a social philosopher. He thinks that rapid enhancements to individuals will throw the current social structure into chaos.  He reasons:  How can there be geographically local social structures when the people that participate in those structures are fundamentally different? He is right, we will see fragmentation of existing social sub structures due to these new technologies, but that fragmentation is the path to growth.  A path to more complex human substrate that will organize along new lines. His mission should have been to find those factors that will drive the development of the new nodal point rather than to step back in disgust.  There are common factors that won't change as genetic determinism melts away. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]