Zipcar lifts the burden of car ownership and gives me what I want: a convenient way to get to the outlet mall and back. I don’t need to take adult ed classes on auto maintenance nor turn car ownership into a hobby.

Zipcar does for cars what The Cloud does for computing. It divvies up labor and lets specialists deal with issues with far more expertise and much better economies of scale than distributed ownership. We don’t need to know how to change the air filters or set up MySQL to drive to the beach or post a photo album.

On top of efficient division of labor, cloud computing/commuting also distributes risk appropriately. This means that the inevitable lemon car or DOA hard drive is handled as part of a larger batch rather than dumped, hot-potato-like, on individual hapless victims. This also means that consumers, in aggregate, make better choices. When presented with two hard drives — one of which is $10 more than the other, but also 5% more likely to fail — an individual is likely to go for the cheaper option and roll the dice. The cloud, on the other hand, is more likely to make rational cost-benefit analyses. An sysadmin who buys 100 hard drives knows that 5% failure rate means 5 dead drives, not a random gamble.

This kind of logic extends to all sorts of capital goods, including housing. Putting so much capital into a single investment strikes me as somewhat feudal in an era when capitalism argues for diversification and specialization (that is: buy REITs and outsource your real estate management).

What I like best about the cloud approach is that it’s eminently capitalist while capturing the flavor of socialism. We pool our resources, but we pay for what we get within a robust marketplace. (Zipcar will have really succeeded when they face a viable nationwide competitor).

Now I don’t believe that we should completely alienate our cars/condos/computers to some vendor and end up at its mercy. Even as I keep more and more of my stuff on Google and other clouds, I also want the option of backing it up on my own personal hard drives. And yes, some people take deep pleasure in ownership, tinkering with the car or repainting the shed. (I myself just built a new computer this week). But for those of us who aren’t expert mechanics, programmers, or construction contractors (nor friends with one), trustworthy cloud services can help mitigate the risks associated with ownership while tapping into expertise not otherwise accessible.

These are useful speculations, and for those of us who desperately await universal health care and a “Manhattan Plan” for green energy, critical ones. Yet I suspect that the most important question will not be how a President Obama might leverage Internet power. Eight years of Bush-Cheney executive imperialism has made our President quite powerful enough, thank you. Rather, the health of our democracy depends on whether Congress will figure out this Internet thing.

Americans hold Congress in greater contempt than even W., yet it was not always this way. The Founders had intended the legislative branch to function as the heart of our democracy; John Quincy Adams even went on to become a Congressman after his tenure as President. Since then, though, legislators’ relationships with their constituents has diluted as states and Congressional districts have grown in population. Meanwhile, television concentrated national attention on that dude on the tube. The office of President thrives in an age of mass celebrity.

The Internet – the realm of the “long tail” – was supposed to break concentrations of power. It would be more than ironic, then, if blogs and social networking instead super-powers an already-muscular Presidency. It would also endanger the legislative essence of our democracy.

We now have definitive proof that the Internet can power up a grassroots political network. If the Obama campaign is the most successful startup in American political history, then it’s vital that its core techniques not remain a trade secret. Those methods are more desperately needed to strengthen our fractured and anemic Congress — supposedly the People’s branch of government.

If you harbor any doubt about the danger an emasculated Congress presents American democracy, consider the bailout debacle. This sad chapter in American legislative history saw Congress not only cede leadership to the Administration, but also abrogate its relationship to the American people. Yes, they ultimately passed something, but not without engendering serious suspicion that they were merely authorizing the economic equivalent of the Iraq War resolution. (And, on the other hand, there was a serious risk that they would pass nothing at all.)

What we need, then, is a movement – a movement to Change Congress. But while Larry Lessig is right that it’s time we flushed earmarks and other corrupting influences out into the open, I would love to see big thinkers like him also apply their brilliance towards something even more audacious than transparency. We need something like a Geek Corps; a Geek Corps for Democracy that will rework the interface between legislators and their constituencies: to rebuild trust and honest, genuine relationships between lawmakers and We the People. Television atrophied these relationships, replacing them with top-down “communications” that withered our citizenry’s bottom-up power. The Internet can restore them in the very ways that Obama has shown us we can.

What would such a reworking look like? In the example of the bailout, perhaps a set of YouTube videos that explain, in simple illustrations and plain English, exactly where things had gone wrong. Or maybe, more ambitiously, a collaborative public solution-building exercise joining the expertise of economists with the values of everyday citizens. Who knows? The point of a Geek Corps for Democracy would not be to apply preconceived ideas but rather to embed themselves within several Congressional Districts and experiment, in hundreds of little ways, how to rebuild community within each District and then between the District and its representatives in Congress. Probably, this would entail a lot of parties and other social gatherings at first, just to bring people together. Over time, though, each Geek would try many different approaches – listservs, wikis, virtual worlds, house parties, social networking, etc, etc, – and keeping track of what works. And what works will probably not be sexy, probably work because of the implementation not concept, and probably be different from one part of the country to the next.

Carefully noting what’s worked for the Obama campaign would, of course, give the Geek Corps a head start. But it would be the benefit of all of American democracy that these lessons give some authority back to the “people’s branch” of government. Regardless of who occupies the White House, concentrating even more power with the Presidency threatens to compound one of the gravest errors of the past eight years.

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”

–Oliver Wendell Holmes

Holmes’ view is not very popular today, but the reality is that a modern society cannot exist without a well-funded government. Nobody likes taxes, and we all believe we deserve the full fruits of our labor, but it is a common human foible to attribute all of the credit of our own labor to ourselves and not to the help of many others.

A business — big, small, or otherwise — could not possibly exist without the infrastructure of government — not merely the roads paved by our common funds, but the police who ensure public safety, the courts that ensure the enforcement of contracts, the regulations that instill public confidence in the business’s goods.

We are not a socialist collective, and we should not be. But Massachusetts is a Commonwealth, and I take that appellation seriously. As our on Constitution states in Article X:

Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary: but no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people.

Consent is, of course, key (we being of the tea-dumping crowd, after all), but the point here is that in pledging to support a Commonwealth, we accomplish what we cannot alone.

For those who live in Boston or Cambridge, walk over to the historic Longfellow Bridge sometime and take a good, hard look at the crumbling concrete and rusting steel. We have been starving our government for decades on the false belief that government is “wasteful” and that, magically, we can get MORE by giving LESS. This is the kind of wishful thinking that took us to to the very pinnacle of Wall Street illusion.

We’re all responsible to contribute to the costs of civilization. We’ll all pay the price if we don’t.

—-==–==–==—-
Yes on Three

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated

– Mahatma Gandhi

I leave it to my friend Matthew Pearl to express the importance of voting Yes on Three. You may notice a seemingly active debate in the comments that follow. If you look closely, though, you’ll find that there are only two handles, “SaveTheDogs” and “GreyhoundTrainer”, going at it. Follow their links and you’ll get a good, strong whiff of Astroturf. Like this fake blog with “BS” all over it.

The racetracks’ and casinos’ PR firms must be pretty worked up about this initiative to throw so many hooligans at the problem. Don’t believe a word.

Vote Yes on Three.

So where to turn for helpful information? Well, the sense I’m getting is: while many experts know and agree on what’s happening (collapse of mortgages and mortgage-backed derivatives, collapse of other lines of credit, credit crunch across the board), we are in uncharted territory as far as what happens next and the consequences for our national and global economies. Here are some links to articles that might be helpful based on looking around quite a bit:

• Post today by Dean Baker in TPM : “The main cause of the economy’s weakness is not insolvent banks and lack of credit; it’s the loss of $4 trillion to $5 trillion in housing equity as a result of the bubble’s partial deflation. Families used their equity to support their consumption in the years from 2002 to 2007, as the savings rate fell to almost zero. With much of this equity now eliminated by the collapse of the bubble, many families can no longer sustain their levels of consumption. The main reason that banks won’t lend to these families is that they no longer have home equity to serve as collateral. It wouldn’t matter how much money the banks had, they are not going to make mortgage loans to people who have no equity.”
• Paul Krugman — particularly Crisis Endgame (”This flight to safety has cut off credit to many businesses, including major players in the financial industry — and that, in turn, is setting us up for more big failures and further panic. It’s also depressing business spending, a bad thing as signs gather that the economic slump is deepening.”).
• Pretty serious macroeconomic analysis from Brad DeLong, concluding, “there is now no time for tolerance of the three objections to this analysis and this plan of action, roughly: (1) it’s immoral, (2) it’s unfair, and (3) it can’t work in the long run.”
• RGE Monitor — Financial intelligence company with limited free membership during this crisis. My friend Jarrett highly recommends Nouriel Roubini’s Global EconoMonitor, e.g.
• The Worst Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression — caution — reading this will be like jumping into icewater
• Harsh assessment of the original Paulson/Bernanke Bailout plan

There’s much more out there, but my own conclusions, in trying to keep things simple in my own head, are that (a) we have been in a bubble since the close of the Clinton years; (b) Greenspan refused to pop the bubble, instead superinflating it; (c) exotic new financial products multiplied the force of the bubble many times greater than normal; (d) the final popping of the bubble will have real and psychological effects that will crash the economy to below where it “really” is right now.

There’s nothing that policy and leadership can do, now, about (a)-(c). We can only hope that wise leadership will steer us away from (d) if at all possible…

I don’t know if this cabbage is alive by the biological definition of “life” (if I plant it, will it grow?) but it certainly reminds me of the tenacity of life. If the carrot you’re chewing on is still crisp, you can bet it’s because the millions of cells that constitute it are still, in their own way, still “breathing and kicking.” I suppose there is a morbid edge to this realization — not unlike hearing the lobster tapping the side of a boiling pot — but truthfully, the world around us is teeming with life, and with every breath and heartbeat we are killing thousands of organisms that would otherwise do us in.

If you meditate on this long enough you may come to the conclusion that there’s no good reason why any one of us is any more deserving of life than a whale, a tree, a paramecium, or a sad little cabbage at the bottom of the crisper drawer. And I suppose there are many ways you can respond to that conclusion, but the one that I’ve come to is a deep sense of gratitude for the inexplicable privilege of living.

The human race survived because our ancestors learned to fear tall cliffs and dangerous animals. In our own lives, we learn that aspiration leads to disappointment, that rejecting others protects our selves, to hit back.

It’s hard not to let prudence blossom into cynicism.

Against the weight of our life experiences, hope seems a fragile twig indeed. Yet while the fawn instictively flees from flame, human babies reach for it. Long ago one of our ancestors captured fire and tamed it. We find true love. We seek the end of disease.

Humanity survives because of fear; we thrive because of hope.

Hope is not an emotion but a discipline. It is easy to criticize, to doubt, to give up. But for hope to survive the calamaties of daily life requires singular focus and determination. Mere longing flares and dies. True hope abides in the deep stillness of faith.

This is a beautiful song with only one musical misstep, IMHO (the awkward bridge of “Time… time won’t leave me as I am…”). It takes the classic circular structure that I particularly love, starting with a three-line stanza beginning with “The more you see the less you know” and ending with a three-line stanza beginning with “The more you know the less you feel.”

The final message is classic U2 in both its religious and ecumenical thrust, reminding us that God loves us all, even the unfaithful. It’s also classic U2 in its earnestness, emerging from faith that love and reason will see us through troubled times.

Many of the reviews of this album dwelled on U2’s era of irony / self-awareness / self-indulgence (Achtung-Pop). If this song is indeed a paean to NYC, it’s also a word of encouragement and advice to not let self-awareness become self-doubt, as these critical lines tell: “Don’t look before you laugh / Look ugly in a photograph.” These words are painful, evocative of a teenager whose sudden realization of identity leads her to mug for the camera to avoid the reality of her true beauty. If, like that girl we all know, NYC is waking up to itself, it needs the reassurance that “Oh you look so beautiful tonight.” Audaciously, unashamedly, U2 offers it that assurance.

Those same lyrics also evoke — and exorcise — U2’s era of pretentious facadism. In confessing “All that you can’t leave behind,” U2 acknowledged that the act of remaking yourself is both impossible and inherently self-indulgent. Personally I feel like they are coming to peace with the realization, “The more you know / The less you feel.”

Fire but scorches the earth:
rain snuffs reckless flames
Rivers carve running
seeking rest.

The sea’s breezes
chastise intemperate land.

But
sometimes
the earth trembles
placid no more the ocean rises
and the tidal wave
comes

The pathetic fallacy, indeed, fails. And maybe life goes on.

Being American mattered (matters) to me. Perhaps I enjoy imagining myself part of the figurative and literal weight the United States throws around the world. I remember my twelfth birthday in Taiwan twenty years ago, soon to face a maelstrom of what we now call “identity issues.” In Singapore I felt an echo of the need I had back then to be American, different (better) than my parents’ countrymen. I had worn my Nike Air Jordans like gang colors, planting myself, for once, on the other side of the chink divide. Maybe that desire, globalized, explains the popularity of western “bling” – a word my middle-aged Taiwanese aunt let drop as we shopped in one of Taipei’s modern malls.

If Air Jordans symbolized my embrace of American-ness, then it’s worth noting that Michael Jordan himself did serve as an ambassador of non-white America to both the world and to his own country. “Be like Mike,” Nike encouraged back then; today, Accenture urges us to “Go on, be a Tiger.” It isn’t all just race or imperialism, even if sometimes it seems that way. Singapore doesn’t promote English so it can become white or to replicate British colonialism but because English is, for the moment, the international language of trade. Which makes it a practical middle ground for a polyglot people.

The migration of “bling” halfway around the world through boundaries of language, culture, and generation might bring dismay to cultural purists or hard-line Marxists, but for all the evils of consumerism, it’s nice to imagine that shopping malls provide some common ground across these places I’ve been. Walking the mall has always been a hobby of mine, a legacy of my Long Island heritage. Singapore is a mallrat’s paradise, especially the touristy area where I stayed. (No less than three malls connected directly with the hotel). One of my hosts believed that a relatively high standard of living, a low tax rate, and not many other choices combined to make shopping a national pastime.

Parts of Taipei have the feel of a kitchen sponge that never gets wringed dry, and so the refrigerated mall was a refuge of sort (such is the role they played for me in Honduras, as well as in Florida). The middle-class downtown mall lacked authentic snake-bile stalls and betel-nut girls, for sure, but they made up for in their own kitschy and Engrish way. They kept enough local character that I was able to find Japanese sport coats suitable for my scrawny frame. (By contrast, I recall one Brooks Brothers in the Midwest where the smallest waist size was 38). On the other hand, the Taipei 101 mall might as well have been airdropped duty-free from Hong Kong International. Bling indeed.

Ethan Zuckerman speaks fervently of the rise of the Fourth World – people who link the local with the global and skip the national altogether. I’m not sure if he considers the Mall of America part of that world: it’s no joke, of course, that many of the products there are made in the Third World, but isn’t consumerism the main driver of globalization today? Perhaps we are exchanging our chains of racism for a more insidious worship of faux-luxury goods, but for now, I welcome this proxy battle between our parochial and our universalist identities.