I see him on the terrace in Cannes, where the inspiration for the Toronto Film Festival was born and nurtured. He’s wearing the hat, and toying with one of the beloved cigars he missed so much in later years. His magnetic and magical charm is irrepressible, infusing the gathering with whispers and waves of inspiration. This charm lives on, flowing like a pure mountain spring from an elemental source. Its sound deepens occasionally, heavy with a lifetime of experiences, but it is never poisoned or blocked.

I see him with Joan, the strong and beautiful woman he loved and shared his life with. Their dynamic could fill volumes, deeper and richer than an entire festival of the films they both loved. My arms ache to give Joan a hug, even knowing that it could barely acknowledge her loss or provide much solace, but still wishing to pay tribute to both of them, to their certain knowledge that every expression of caring matters.

It is a weekday morning, several years ago, and I’m meeting Dusty for breakfast in the deli where he held court for so many years. The day has dawned gloriously, with a crisp morning chill being gradually dispersed by a vigorous sun in a perfect azure sky. It is the closest approximation possible in Toronto of a perfect Cote D’Azur morning. We meet, both look outside, and without discussion Dusty asks for service on the empty patio. The morning chill is still resisting the powerful sunshine, making the brilliant light sparkle like diamonds. The sparkle matches the wit and intelligence in Dusty’s eyes, even as we catch up and he tells me about a life that’s slower, about rhythms of aging. His words melt away in the gathering warmth, evaporating like the dew, and what remains throughout our meal is the vitality and joy that was Dusty, brimming with pleasure at the astonishing panoply of life and ideas which surrounds us.

Of the many splendid things with which you gifted our lives, Dusty, I have most valued your honesty and integrity. Au revoir, mon ami.

Here are some examples of terms I use:

1. audience
2. citizen
3. constituent
4. contributor
5. customer
6. member
7. participant
8. service provider
9. user
10. vendor
11. viewer
12. visitor

Last week’s conversation about Glam, on Michael Arrington’s and Jeff Jarvis’s blogs (here and here), got me thinking about this again, and realizing just how overly broad the definitions of our different roles here is. In many ways, those of us who’ve been around for some time still tend to think of geeks vs non-techs in terms of both support and business, of active users vs lurkers (and worse) in terms of forums and communities, and so on. These two-sided definitions make sense when observing and comprehending online activity from the perspective of personal experience. The more you broaden that perspective, however, the more variant roles and activities become, begging further definition. Beyond a core group, whether it’s social or special interest or a dev team, are far more complex communities and, further, entire societies.

Glam, for example, illustrates how increasingly professional bloggers and web publishers have become sub-contractors for advertisers. This may be a fairly traditional media model, but the old publishing definitions of writer and reader don’t fit the same way here. Whether we’re offering opinion, analysis, or entertainment online, the moment we start selling advertising we become a vendor of space in a way closer to a landlord model than to any other. The advertiser isn’t paying us for our attention, but for the numbers of other ‘eyeballs’ we can attract. So Glam and similar sites are, in effect, supporting a range of commercial activity that spans the entire marketing and media gamut from product to customer. Glam has users and its users have users, and so on.

The media model is one of the more complex ones, especially where it overlaps with pure free speech, but there are many other ecosystems developing in which one of the activities only is the exchange of goods and/or services. The difficulty with new role definitions here is that we each can play far more of them, and in more ways, than ever before. User, whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the term, doesn’t come close to recognizing the range of multiple roles of a billion people beginning to create new ecocosms. There are hundreds of categories and thousands of definitions of hardware and software. There are endless business and job categories. Shouldn’t we have at least as many for the users? There are more of us, doing more various things, than in either of the first 2 groups, which some of us are also part of.

Me Tarzan …you Jane. See Spot run …to get online and click here? Machines are awesome, something I’ve believed in since I discovering Lotus 123 and DBase II about 25 years ago. Free societies, with free speech and free enterprise, are pretty awesome too. Advancing our comprehension of, and communication about, the latter up to the level of the former, is a goal worth pursuing, imo. What do you think?

The contact with NTT started me thinking about the ingrained distrust of big business among denizens of the web. This distrust, regardless of whether it is political in origin, has become an unquestioned tenet of faith in many segments of modern society, sometimes with less basis than we require before accepting a religious tenet.

As I often repeat, neither businesses nor currencies are bad. It is people who do right or wrong.

There are many tech and non-tech small business owners on the web. There are plenty of techs and devs who eat based on their ability to get paid for their skill sets on a consulting basis, and who also believe in a peer to peer social and economic model. Individuals, service providers or consumers, represent the vast majority of the population using the internet. Big business, venture capitalists, and public companies, however, represent the vast majority of both investment and ownership of all the resources here. Understanding these entities, and dealing with them, is unavoidable for anyone interested in new or alternative models of any sort.

NTT America, Inc. is a privately owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. Whether they are as big as AT&T is not publicly known, although they are enterprise driven and undoubtedly more profitable that the Texas based creation spawned by baby bell. Many fret about Google as well, but as a consumer driven company (and without looking at politics or behind the scenes), they should, imo, rank pretty low on the list of big companies whose interests conflict with those of the general population. Anyone who wants more information about a home grown public company such as this can also become a shareholder. Tracking hacker activity to a company such as NTT, only to hear them expresses no interest in correcting the fact that they are publicly registered as responsible for the hosting block, concerns me far more than what an American public company might do.

A public company is a powerful vehicle. The attendant legal structures offer opportunity for various lucrative occupations, such as stock market promotion, which contribute little to society in general. Regardless of this, the vast majority of large companies remain law abiding and respectable. We don’t worry about GM or P&G taking control of our activities or limiting our freedoms. What makes technology different in this respect is its potential for invasiveness. We are right to be vigilant, but vigilance by itself will make little difference to how the next stage of growth is constituted. The only thing that can make a difference is understanding and involvement.

Peer to peer interactions as a class of business aren’t currently more than a speck on the entire landscape. Those who care about liberty and autonomy would do well to adopt a larger focus. In the same way that media and a few other big businesses are struggling to develop micro-management of electronic relationships and communication with customers, the independent operators should be developing macro visions based, not on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but on the power of many. A group of many with modest to reasonable means can elect world leaders and influence economies just as a few individuals wielding vast resources can.

The current corporate business models are, in practice, the most likely to influence events and lives. The only thing that can change this is alternative models of a competitive size. Consider building, joining, contributing to, or at least endorsing one. The more of us who have a personal stake in electronically based businesses, the more we know and trust one another in the marketplace and personally, the less we’ll need to worry about potential threats posed by others.

We can learn to endure and accept astonishing levels of pain. Of the thousands of people that I’ve known and worked with over the past 27 years, barely a handful were cognizant of my having any health problems at all, even when they had been told that I did, and even when they’d seen me during the few years when I needed a wheelchair to get around. In the past, I found this baffling, and interpreted it as meaning that I should keep my physical disabilities a secret. This practice has worked well enough for most business dealings and non-intimate relationships. My pain isn’t me. It is one part of my private self. However, this also means that, for me, the potential for close relationships with others is limited by having to find people who can both learn to interact comfortably with someone they know is in severe pain, and who can delineate between a particular handicap and the rest of the person bearing it.

In fact, many people prefer not to know and can’t cope with even the idea of a ’sick’ person. Others invoke a mechanism which relegates any ‘invalid’ to the sidelines for the benevolent sounding purpose of convalescence. Go away now, dear, and come back when you feel better. My saddest observation is of others with some physical handicap who have internalized a view of themselves as ineligible to participate, or who have adopted elements of either victimhood or martyrdom, or both, in an unhealthy co-dependent response to those around them. My most inspiring observations are of the opposite cases, where individuals learn to accommodate a physical handicap, including pain, and manage to use all their skills and abilities which are unimpaired to a fuller extent even than most perfectly healthy people do. These people often develop native abilities far beyond the norm, and also far beyond a threshold of simple compensation. They can become extraordinary first because they have to, and further because of realizing that they can.

So, having a number of hours over the weekend to indulge my fondness for popular fiction, I should have been reading a Lincoln Rhyme novel, from the series by Jeffery Deaver, which features a brilliant detective who also happens to be a paraplegic. Instead, I read the ending of Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes. Although I would read anything written by Scott Turow (I’d add a brief on tort law to my bedtime reading if it was penned by him), I’d hesitated to buy Ordinary Heroes when it first came out. A son’s insight into a father’s memoir recounting a personal experience of WWII did not sound congruent with my recent personal challenges and state of mind. By their nature, such memoirs, real or fictionalized, tend to include agonized personal responses to pain, death, and sometimes torture. My reading this book at all is a measure of Scott’s ability to tell stories about flawed people in a flawed society without ever discarding an abiding faith in humanity and in the miracle of life. The book ends with an emphasis on the extent to which we invent our own lives, celebrating the triumph of free will juxtaposed against even the most powerful external forces.

Pain comes in many forms. Beginning as the age of 9, I learned about loss, abandonment, abuse, and surviving entirely on one’s own. Most physical pain cannot compare to what such lessons can inflict. In my personal journeys, which have ranged across an environmental gamut from gutters to palaces, I’ve seen many who didn’t survive. I think of people whose hands I held against death who died anyway, and of those who, for one reason or another, were simply unable to surmount their personal challenges. More often, I think of those who did and accomplished things that others, with far more advantages, were unable to, of people who endured and dismissed handicaps of every sort, physical and non-physical, reaching ever forward to invent themselves and the lives they believed they deserved.

Any ordinary person can do extraordinary things. I really believe this, and belief, of course, is the only requirement.

I cheered up.

Sure enough …things got worse.

The people closest to you ‘know what you think’, and can probably also describe your official position on most important things, from politics to marriage to sex. Eventually your persona can get developed to the point where there are multiple versions of the same package tailored to levels of familiarity and interaction (enter FaceBook). The full story is for those closest to you, then there’s a summary version, the short version, the sanitized short version, …the Twitter version.

When was the last time someone asked you a question that made you not only stop and think about the answer, but perhaps even examine some of your beliefs? The sort of question that couldn’t be answered instantly, that couldn’t be answered fully within the confines of chat or forums, email or a blog post, that couldn’t be answered without some serious thought and exchange of views?

When was the last time you asked someone a question that startled them, made them look at you intently wondering if you really wanted to know, or elicited a surprised, “No one’s ever asked me that before!”.

Some of us have a best friend or three, maybe a business partner, maybe a spouse, who sometimes knows us better than we know ourselves, and with whom we can really share ‘thinking out loud’. Those who do often have an air of being grounded, of being at home wherever they are. Whether that’s a result of finding someone to trust enough, or a measure of ability to trust, isn’t relevant for this post. What matters is that the trust, in ourselves and each other, creates strength and vitality and a sense of being intensely alive in our interactions which spills over and transcends private relationships.

Our world moves ever faster and keeps getting more crowded. We live in ever more transient societies. The sound bytes keep multiplying and getting shorter because, like a long url, longer messages can get truncated, or simply drown in traffic and competing noise. Sometimes it’s noisy enough to convince you that no one is actually listening to anyone else. Please don’t buy into it. Some of us are listening, and often wishing that more speakers recognized this.

There’s a lot of awesome potential in the explosion of population and sound. Potential for connection and communication. Every voice, your voice, can be heard. Identifying correctly what people ‘want to hear’ is the standard method of being heard by many. If, however, your goal is to engage and to interact, then deeper listening for things that matter to many is the way forward.

What are the important things that you wish someone would ask you about? Why? Do you wish someone would listen to your thought and ideas? Will you listen to theirs?

Check out the numbers in A Hollow Victory Microsoft which says “the fact is that open source has won this battle”. There’s a lot of spin in this post, which refers only to web hosting software, rather than the OS upon which Microsoft’s empire is built, but the basis is real. Unix and Apache are increasingly adopted by enterprise developers because they work, and new development growth continues to be increasingly based on open source vs Windows.

Open source isn’t about free. It’s about self sufficiency and community. It is about building things for ourselves instead of serving a master.

The anonymous WordPress blog to which I linked above, called There Is No Government Like No Government, claims to be about anarchy, yet is rich with the political cant of the extreme left, with an occasional right wing position thrown in. Does anyone other than me find this ironically amusing?

There’s a hidden chasm in many a segment of open source communities which is tied to political agendas (qu’elle surprise). Many community members bristle at big business, and many corporations deserve it, exhibiting intent to capitalize on free software, as they do on the free content millions of individuals create on the web every day. Open source community members are far more likely to be on the political left than the right. Nevertheless there is a core of practitioners of true free enterprise, which is apolitical. Here new economic models are needed, and here casting aside canned political agendas can make a great difference for all of us.

Open source developers who are apolitical shouldn’t worry about capitalistic opportunism, other than in the aspect in which it gains baseless dominance through big government support, regardless of which party is in power. The fact that open source has the momentum it does, is based on achievement and performance, not politics. Keep that thought.

‘Rasslin’ with people who mean us harm is a pretty brave thing to do, and I’m grateful to those who take it on for all of us.

We can each do something every day to make the world we share a better place. Helping one another isn’t a formal obligation or duty, it’s an exercise of free will. Snoskred does more than her share.

From Please Help! What You Can Do To Stop Internet Scammers NOW.…

“Educating people about scams online is one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life, because every time I think the word is getting out proof comes back to me as a surprise that it is not.
I have the knowledge to stop people from being scammed but it still isn’t enough. I can’t make the word go far enough. I can’t seem to get other people to write about the scams and link back to information I have here on the site about them.
The elderly, the stay at home Mom’s, the disabled, the depressed, the lonely, the vulnerable - these are the people who get scammed the most.”

You can read more about Snoskred’s scambaiting activities here
Snoskred and Sephy’s new site Scam Warning.

To be humble, in my understanding, is to acknowledge ourselves in the context of God (secular or otherwise), of all life, including human life, of our universe, including all that is knowable to us and all that is not. Humility is not a denial or denigration of self, but rather a means of unity with a whole greater than any one of us. Although it is a concept taught as a virtue in many religions, it does not require a theological framework from any one, or any religion, to be understood.

Empathy is a more modern concept. It is the idea that you can do more than observe me and try to deduce something about me. By empathizing you can supposedly feel what I feel. Is this possible? Can you understand me well enough to feel what I feel? If you can, does this mean you can think as I think? That you can understand my motivations, actions, and responses in the same way I do? The answer to all these questions is no. Even a ‘psychic’ does not profess to achieve more than occasional and limited forays into the mind or soul of another.

So is empathy merely a buzzword? A useful term for opportunists? Did you believe Bill Clinton when he looked into the camera and said, “I feel your pain?”. Is it possible that this word is misused and that it can represent a concept of value which is generally not well understood?

In my view, empathy is a form of intimacy, not in the Biblical sense, or in any metaphysical way, but on an emotional level. The empathy may have a basis in familiarity, but it is intimacy which makes it true empathy.

You watch your child, rushing forward with an eager face raised high, stumble on an obstacle, and you experience the fall on a visceral level. I have had a similar experience watching an athlete go down. My imagination expands as far as my experience and knowledge allows. If, for example, I’ve heard the crunch of tearing cartilage in my own joint, my memory can instantly supply the sound. From my knowledge, I can also supply enough personal understanding of the person with whom I am empathizing to contextualize in time. How it feels to fall unexpectedly related to age, previous falls and injuries, how long it will take to heal and forget. Layers of meaning … an entire tapestry of past present and future context.

Empathy for strangers, especially those with whom we do not personally identify, on some level, is really very rare. It is difficult to do unilaterally, because strangers are, more often than not, entirely discomfited by the intense observation required. The projection of intimacy of any sort can be frightening. People who have a talent for it usually learn to keep that talent hidden, and to only reveal it in specific circumstances, usually presented as prescience or acumen.

There’s a less intense, and therefore easier, level of empathy, which is limited to a very specific context based on similar circumstances. We may both be parents of small children and recognize the commonality of what this demands of us each day. We may attend the same school or work for the same employer or be the same age or share the same cultural background, and so on. Empathizing in limited and contained ways with a peer group is natural for most of us. Empathizing with strangers is not.

Empathy, which can give us a valuable understanding of one another, is not a socially passive trait. On the opposite face of empathy is respect. We need respect as an active social trait in order to co-exist peacefully, and we need empathy to co-exist happily.

I believe that we can be highly empathetic without arrogance but not without humility. Arrogance, however, supports not only unshakable belief in knowing what others want, but also claiming the right to decide for them. That is, considered closely, a breathtaking claim to some of us. To decide for others through leadership based solely on arrogance is only possible through the use of force. To decide for others based on the humble understanding that their lives have at least the same value as our own, is to make a contribution of which we can be proud.

Seamless satire from Michael Lewis.

A serious post on irresponsible lending by Dr Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute Blog.

“The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others. He thinks there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities. The businessmen are just the opposite. Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing.”
~Milton Friedman