A VC - Latest Comments in Open Platforms and Innovation

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:22:10 -0000

I'm out of time for college bull-sessions today, but I will just add this:

1) I used to attend McLuhan's lectures at university.
http://3dblogger.typepad.co...

2 You are not plugged into the knowledge of your ancestors when you are plugged into the Internet, any more than you are particularly directly plugged into, say, the teachings of Jesus if you are plugged into reading the four Gospels. Stories get changed in the telling.

3) People who work at making photos need to get paid for their hard work, and shouldn't be browbeaten into being grass-growers for the sheep in the Creative Communism set-up. There's nothing wrong with them copyrighting and selling their photos. It's also not allowed to photograph in museums, not because of pigment, but because of forgery, which is a crime.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:13:39 -0000

<oh, and="" re:="" what="" particularly="" about="" social="" welfare,="" taxes,="" and="" the="" connection="" to="" media="" and="" those="" who="" have="" ownership="" is="" making="" you="" uncomfortable?="" well,="" go="" and="" research="" all="" the="" owners.="" make="" a="" list.="" make="" a="" map.="" if="" you="" aren't="" worried,="" given="" your="" keenly="" developed="" sense="" of="" unfairness="" when="" "america"="" or="" "capitalism"="" takes="" over="" things,="" i="" guess="" you="" have="" a="" double="" standard.="">

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:12:10 -0000

As usual, in dealing with the Internet-educated, I throw up my hands, as I don't know where to start. I'll have to give a long reply to deal even in part with all the memes.

Er, no, I don't have "a lot of anxiety about the Administration". I voted for Obama. Hello?

Nor do I suffer from "FUD" about technology, something that Internet-educated often think is a condescending and patronizing label they can use on anyone *critical* of big IT, technology's overreach, the California Ideology, etc. Difference.
I'm nearly 3 times your age, and I eat more technology for breakfast than you'll eat in a month.

I don't think invoking people who want to ban the FDA as a criticism of capitalism is a very sound approach. You can be a vigorous supporter of capitalism, and still grasp that any liberal democratic civil society with free enterprise still needs government agencies from elected governments to serve the public interest against companies that may pollute the environment, damage health, etc.

Like a lot of the Internet-educated, you find a horror in the idea of labelling anything as socialist, let alone communist. This has been taught to you in a series of superficial but viral memes as "McCarthyism" of "red-baiting" so that whenever you see these word used, except with support and praise, you read for your automatic memes that they user is "hysterical".

It's useful to recall that Joi Ito, who sort of runs the Internet, calls himself a "venture-communist," and that Kevin Kelly, who sort of founded Web 2.0, now proudly uses the term "socialist" for his theories.

Another Internet-educated forums trolling device is to use literalism or "Fisking" to try to undermine what is the rational and needed critique of labelling things for what they are when they are indeed socialist and communist, and saying "Oh, but these words mean so many things they are meaningless" or "but oh, there are so many different kinds of socialism and communism from Sweden to North Korea". Baloney. The words have meaning, you don't have to cite a country-specific or time-specific execution of them, nor hew to the line that "communism is a great idea which is just poorly executed".

No one ever has any trouble understanding the meaning of "progressive," however, which is supposed to only mean one thing and only one thing *you* like lol. I always find that absolutely hilarious! I guess the word "progressive" has been pre-cleared and pre-sanitized.

Quite a lot of Internet education, like the education of colleges these days, is based on a few rewarmed Marxist or "critical" theories, without exposure to much else, so that it seems like "the truth" and anyone labelling it as such as "the red baiters". This is the problem of the Closing of the American Mind.

I think there are many examples of healthy economies. You actually benefit from one, living in the EU or the United States, and it enables you, the most affluent and educated child in the planet's history, to sit on the Internet all day. Oh, I realize there is a hysteria about how "the U.S. is hypocritically using socialist methods" now and great evil glee over such things as taking over Chrysler, but in fact, the notions like FIDC are premised on the concept of a government that backs up a failing bank, and the government, even in a free-enterprise society, still creates jobs and runs some companies.

I am less troubled by these seemingly insurmountable contradictions than you are because I've already lived through the recession of the 1970s, and had parents who lived through the Depression, and have lived in my own recession since 9/11 when one of my jobs was lost in ground zero zone. So I put it in perspective.

The request to produce "a good objective standard" isn't one that I would respond to, as there is no such thing on earth, where all men are partial in their understanding. You have to search out many sources and triangulate and field test.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:48:12 -0000

I thought nation-state was more commonly used to refer back to our conception of governance that involve Social Contract Theory (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau). Could you please explain to me why "nation-state" is such a marker?

I can give a strict utility reason why patent and copyright reform is overdue: We patent and opyright more items than ever now, they are not all the same. I am not exactly sure why we should give all of them the same patent lifespan, nor copyright for 96 years, since clearly some patent and some creative work's lifespans will die out faster than others. I want to maximize my optimality out of my items, therefore I need to adjust patent and copyright law.

I also could just have certain opinions about the constitution and Congress, and the purpose behind why the Framer's put in a clause about the power to limit the rights on ideas. As the bible says: What profit hath man of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; and the earth abideth for ever. Kohelet 1:3-4 I figure these arguments are older. Say at least from 1710.

Exactly what and how are we destroying private property? What criteria makes property private, and other property in the commons? How do we define a damage on this property? How do you want to reward damages?

Capital fundamentalism also doesn't resolve these issues- there are market inefficiencies for the people goods/serives hurt but are not buying a said product immediately. Hence how we got Superfund...

Thinking through this system clearly actually will resolve, hopefully a non-physical property system. I am not sure if I own this post, even if the law claims that I do. Thinking through how to effectively construct a system of this being my property, well...

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:28:12 -0000

I recognize that you have a lot of anxiety about the Administration and about technology.

Unlike you, I'm luckily/unluckily in a position where those critiques about what do the annals of power mean- actually mean something. I'm a random college student, who has a tendency to talk and listen to everyone.

I'm at a particular school, at a particular moment in time at that school. Which is why I am choosing right now not to name names(among other reasons). I'm also in a particualr moment in time where I have written to a lot of people- from real life bankers who have taken bailout money, to actual Anarcho-communist. I'm also friends with people who think the markets are more efficient than the FDA at being rigorous with effective testing and control of drug treatments, and therefore we should ban the FDA.

What particularly about social welfare, taxes, and the connection to media and those who have ownership is making you uncomfortable?

In the US, red-baiting is unusual. It also is unclear if you have a specific meaning to the type of socialism you are referring to and why? Can you quote specific people and names?

What conception of a healthy macro-economy and micro-economy are you relying on? This is going to be difficult for everyone here. The definitions are radically changing, enough so that I am actually disgusted with how "Prestige degree" economics is taught. (but not enough that I know I will go out and buy the textbook one day...)

Who do you think has a good objective standard? Why?

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:59:20 -0000

Equally preposterous-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Who does it belong to-
Alfred Stieglitz or Marcel Duchamp?

If we assume Stieglitz is doing something unique, that photo's going price is currently a hell lot more valuable than a copy of a Duchamp.

http://www.sothebys.com/app...

Oh the same way I am getting one- by reading a lot of books by people with names like Plato. Or Hobbes or Wollstonecraft.

I just happen to read them on the internet because, except for the Republic-(I prefer the Bloom translation, which is not out of copyright), B. Jowett is what you buy.

As for photographing- that really depends on the gallery and/or musuem and what credentials you hold. It is much harder to do in a museum- you need to ask permission first. That being said, I have taken photos with permission from docents and curators for both reference reasons and for the hell of it. I also regularly see people try to take photos in major museums.* Small galleries generally will let. it helps to be carrying an SLR without a flash and to be going to contemporary exhibits as well as talk to anyone who looks like they know anyone important.

The argument of "copy" and what it means to be creative as well as what it means to have the body and hand extended is really old. One of the lead scholars on it is Joel Snyder at the University of Chicago, and a member of Chicago School of Media Theory.

He wrote an article called "Res Ipsa Loquitur," in a book called Things That Talk which actually tracks the intellectual history of how we relate to photographs in the legal realm. It effectively does debunk the idea that photographs are made by the sun. You are just pointing (aka, referencing). The internet will eventually have a similar history, especially because its look/feel is so closely tied with so many other media rich fields (graphic arts, photography, film)- it is just a matter of when and how we choose to deal with it.

"Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among other organs and extensions of the body."- Marshall Mcluhan, "The Gadget Lover"Understanding Media

Photography is an extension of the eye. Paintings period to early photography changed. That may or may not have been a good thing.

The internet is an extension of far more than I can comprehend. It strikes me at a core. It creates and takes away literacy faster than I have heard. The sheer idea that I can be plugged into the knowledge of my ancestors (and I actually have participated in such, being that my real life is profoundly limiting my choices of religion, culture, and place), on close examination, one of the most extreme experiences I have been part of. So much so, in fact, that for a fairly long while, I actually tracked the changes. This is despite bans against internet usage among segments from where I come from. (If you can find out what the word pritzus means...)

Referencing throws the idea of social contracts in the air by lowering the barrier of who and when and how I choose to engender community with. Referencing radicalizes the notion of the time needed to pass for a technology to turn into a source of knowledge.

The sheer fact that you have a fully fleshed out alter ego, on a website, somewhere- generated in part through the process of refined referencing (a MUD) doesn't bother you at all? We iterate until we get it right.

*If you are going to photograph in a museum: do not use the flash- as odd as this sounds, some pigments used in paints are not particularly lightfast.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Michael R. Bernstein — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:16:38 -0000

Did you mean 'when a VC is in the role of an angel', or were you saying 'angels are a subset of VCs'?

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Michael R. Bernstein — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:15:19 -0000

Pretty much everything you attribute to my opinions ('if you think', 'seem to think', 'ever eager', 'world view', etc.) is almost completely wrong, and certainly not implied by anything in my comments.

Except that you think that any correction offered is an attack on (or attempt at refutation of) your argument or your point of view.

I actually think you have a point, sort of, or would, if it weren't being obscured by the... screeds you're typing up here.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:26:23 -0000

Er, no, you have a tendency not to accept other points of view can exist besides your own, and persist despite you "setting them straight," and you see things in 0/1, black/white, common among technologists and web mavens.

Um, I don't make any claim about taxation being voluntary, that's off track.

Try to remember what the debate is about at the start. I said that it didn't matter, in a sense, what Fred Wilson decides to do which his wealth, even if he funds lefty causes dear to his heart that would in fact undermine the system that makes him his wealth lol, as long as he doesn't spend other people's money.

What that means isn't the other-people's-money of his fellow VC class, but leveraging private foundations or laying claim to tax dollars. And it means as follows, for me: as long as he doesn't use his wealth and class and position to impose these lefty causes on us all in the form of government and governance of everyday city affairs, using his VC-funded tools of social media to pre-deploy the leftist ideology everywhere.

Because frankly, it's just a modern-day form of a Hearst newspaper empire backing a presidential campaign if you fund Twitter, which was given to all the lefty early Silicon Valley adopters and A-listers first, who got insiders' specials for massive autofollowing (later denied to others who came later), to flog Obama in the last elections. It's the same thing.

William Randolph Hearst thundered that the word "socialist" could never, ever appear in a newspaper column; Steve Gillmor of the News Gang thundered at me and muted me because I called the ideas of Lessig "socialist" -- two sides of the same coin, two media concentrations, two sets of funnelling for ideology.

Indeed, media concentration and ideological tilting are what is happening even in "free social media" when you look at a number of causes, and how they are influencing a number of issues being decided in the Obama administration, not by Congress, but by various "czars" appointed in the executive branch. There's a reason why you have three branches of power, it's called "checks and balances".

There isn't anything "surprising" or "evil" about this -- newspapers have always influenced politics. What's different about it, however, is that a) new social media claims to be more free and different and not like old media in this regard b) so many influential tekkies (not Fred) pretend they have no politics and are merely "the norm" and "the mainstream" when they are not.

So, ever eager to prove that in fact things that seemed capitalist are really socialist (this is a heavily popular and sardonic meme these days with auto companies and banks being taken over by the state), you try to somehow "expose" and "play gotcha" on me, showing that why, gasp, OMGODZORS, even government money goes into venture capital funds.

To which I can say, um, ok. So, uh, is Fred's operation funded by my tax dollars? I haven't heard that, but perhaps some strained and attenuated case can be made about this by contriving some stretched point about a tax break, or some company within a company within a something. Or perhaps there's some other venture capital fund that is made up of some civil employee union pension fund or funded with tax dollars -- and what of it? People with funds invest them to make the interest they have to pay out, and the monies are commingled. Duh?

If you point is "wow, taxed dollars aren't capitalism and yet they go in capitalist venture funds! Gotcha!" then I can only stare blandly and say, um, ok, but you seem to think that under capitalism, there is no social welfare, and that only socialist countries have social welfare. In fact, the U.S. has a good deal more social welfare than many people's democracies claiming communist purity. And that's normal and right, and isn't about confiscatory tax policy taking 54 percent, like Holland, only to dole it back out to you in various entitlements as the state sees fit.

And while taxation in America isn't voluntary, it's not so onerous as to inspire a revolt *lately.*

So the moral of the story is that no, I am not "factually mistaken" about anything. You, however, still fall victim to the extremities of your world view, evidently, unable to understand the nuances that would go into a liberal democratic society with a mixed economy and free enterprise.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Michael R. Bernstein — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:27:22 -0000

Hmm. You have a tendency to respond to fact-checking as if it were an ideological challenge.

I made no claim as to whether pouring tax dollars into venture funds was a good idea, I was merely pointing out that, factually, you were mistaken.

Unless you're going to take the position that taxation *is* a voluntary allocation of resources?

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

fredwilson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:05:18 -0000

I saw it on tumblr today. I want to hack it and turn it into a popcorn popper ;)

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:04:36 -0000

Isn't this sort of investment of people's retirement funds and such what got this country into trouble?

And, if you think spending tax dollars on venture funds is so grand, say, let's get rid of old-fashioned venture capitalism entirely and confiscate everybody's income with a 54 percent tax, and then reinvest it in only those projects that, oh, Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor and Dave Winer find valuable because they are on the Tech Investment Committee of the future. If you don't like this, then I can only say, patch or GTFO, as the coders will tell you. And if you wonder, why isn't Fred on the technocommunist TIC of the future? And the answer is: Fred didn't show up because he doesn't travel to the right conferences. It's the law of showing up.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:59:25 -0000

So you say. Reform into...what?

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

gregorylent — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:41:25 -0000

disqus is a pain in the ... now .. login, lose the place of where i wanted to reply, slow ... whatever i was going to say, gone, and i am on a fast connection ..

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Michael R. Bernstein — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:35:02 -0000

Plenty of tax dollars go into venture funds, actually.

And they would most definitely go on doing it even if the returns were (on average) negative. How do you think Vegas stays in business?

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Michael R. Bernstein — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:28:40 -0000

The Beanzawave is USB-powered: http://www.fastcompany.com/...

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

fredwilson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:43:15 -0000

I'd like to overturn this debate too :)

But seriously, gates is doing a lot for education reform in this country

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

fredwilson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:41:17 -0000

Thanks for sharing this. I like seeing both sides of the debate

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:09:19 -0000

I truly despair for people's education these days. It's clearly such an awful lot of Marxist claptrap. It rivulates through everything.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:07:18 -0000

This is a preposterous statement, merely put up to defend a pronounced copyleftist point of view. You are not required to copy other people's work in order to "afford" a B.A.

Copying work in a museum by hand is allowed; photographing it is not. The Internet is a photocopier.

How do you think we got college degrees before the Internet?!

Referencing work is not what people do on the Internet; they copy, and the artist does not get paid.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:47:19 -0000

And I have copies of my coffeepot, thankyouverymuch. It is a hard object to sketch, and hence worthwhile to sketch.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:44:17 -0000

Bring something harder.

I'm not sure if this is now more apparent because of media and more wealth spread to more people-

Or if what you say is true.

Hard data.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:26:08 -0000

Could I say that I cannot afford my Bachelors if I were to comply to copyright rules as it stands?

Standard rules of art practice includes copying others work. It is very normal to go into a museum and copy in your own hand others work. It is also normal to reference or rework a piece that you saw. I can't pull an Edward Manet Olympia anymore. Especially, if one would note, if high and low culture mix heavily, as it does now.

Disney is part of my BA, the same way Andy Wharhol is. The same way Eva Hesse is. except, ummm...I never said that in public, until I get paid for a major work.

Depending on degree, without a high level of prestige, I really cannot rework

I do not claim to agree with everything he says. I do claim to think that creative works should pass into the public domain more quickly.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

ShanaC — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:03:25 -0000

Well no one quite knows what to do with media. Especially new media. I just walked into one of the most famous academic bookshops in the world- and they do not have enough books to really keep up with the subject. I'm finding it hard to find out what I should be reading.

Foucault famously re-read Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as the ideal way to control a society in Discipline and Punish.

As for Captialism to quote my facebook profile:

"Becoming A Marxist's Wet Dream while remaining a believer in a Mostly Free Market."

The only thing I like that is Marxist tends to be art critics. Media theory tends only to be critical theory mostly because it descends from the likes of Marxists of the Frankfurt school- who talk about Symbols and Gaze for god's until when. (Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Clement Greenberg...all marxist in theory, who knows what they did in practice) New Media theory tends to be, well, pretty much dead unless you are reading Lev Manovich, is right now in the domains of lawyers...The internet moves faster than academics.

And I will leave you alone about reading v coding. You never know these days.

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

Prokofy — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:51:46 -0000

Thanks for the links. Doesn't the Panopticon predate Foucault? I find "critical" media theory like "critical" accounting and "critical" literature often to be rewarmed Marxism -- the lens isn't trained on the actual authoritarian societies and is trained on Western societies as if capitalism is the authoritarian problem. It isn't.

As for clubs, I'm like the other Marx on that one : )