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Frank Rich on Dean

Frank Rich has a great column running in today's Times about the Dean campaign's use of the Web. He does some spot-on debunking of the whole McGovern 2.0 meme, and draws some very interesting parallels to FDR's use of radio. But for reasons that will be immediately clear, I particularly enjoyed this paragraph near the middle of the piece:

"The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it," says the author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book "Emergence" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On some candidates' sites, he observes, "there is no difference between a blog and a chronological list of press releases." And the presence of a poll on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying principles of the Dean Internet campaign "are the opposite of a poll," Mr. Johnson says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the Linux operating system's code through open collaboration, so Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

My feelings exactly.

It really is a very sharp piece, and not just because it says flattering things about my book. I just stopped by the Dean blog to see the response there, and it was one of those classic moments of web community interaction: a dozen thoughtful and on-topic posts from people responding to the article, and suddenly a few Clark supporters drop in and make some taunting remarks, a before long everybody's cursing at each other and the Frank Rich article is long forgotten. Seems like 1993 on ECHO or the Well all over again.

SimCandidate

If only there were a LazyWeb for videogames. I've just published a fun little piece in Slate wondering why there's no videogame version of campaign 2004, along the lines of the incredibly detailed sports simulations that come out every year, updated with the latest teams and statistics. If we can have simulations that let you run a theme park or a Caribbean island or a Eastern Bloc insurrection, why can't we have one that lets you run a presidential campaign? As I say in the piece:

This is a strange state of affairs, because presidential politics lends itself naturally to the idiom and audience of today's games. Political campaigns are already structured like games, with an escalating series of discrete competitions that determine the eventual winner. In addition, there's an existing body of readily available data, going back many decades, that could be harnessed to craft the simulation. And the country is filled with Monday-morning Carvilles who cultivate their own theories on how to win the Rust Belt, or why the Republican southern strategy is overrated.

I've already received some interesting emails talking about a few games along these lines from the late eighties and early nineties, including one fascinating message from one of the folks who designed these games. (I'll repost his message if he'll let me.) Sounds like most of these early versions were flops, but it occurs to me that one major thing has happened since then, and that's the aging of the gaming population. There were hardly any 35-year-olds like me buying games in 1988; now we're a dominant part of a huge industry. Sure, teenagers playing Super Mario Brothers for the first time probably weren't ready to role-play as a campaign manager. But those folks have all grown up now, and they're still playing.

Offloading Your Memories

The Times Magazine asked me to contribute a little essay to their always entertaining Year In Ideas issue -- this one on a number of new research projects attempting to record everything in a human life: not just all the email sent and received, or web sites visited, but also the audio of every phone call, and in some cases, video of every waking hour. For space reasons, the piece dropped down a few hundred words, and lost a (somewhat predictable) little riff about how this connects to Vannevar Bush's original vision of the Memex, which was all about using machines to extend our memory. But of course, the Bush vision is really about academic memory -- it's all about being able to track down that reference to the Gettysburg Address that you read five years ago and have almost forgotten. These new projects, on the other hand, are much more clearly directed to the stray details of everyday life. It's not so much remembering some academic treatise as it is being able to determine, for once and for all, who really started that marital spat that's been simmering for three weeks now...

While you're reading through the Times Mag issue, be sure to check out a few ideas that have been percolating around this site for the past year: Social Networks, Video Games As Art, and most recently, Forget The South.

The Anti-Video Game

Discover seems to have recently put most of its content behind a subscriber-only firewall, but I've managed to persuade them to liberate my monthly Emerging Technology column, since so many of them revolve around issues dear to the heart of the blogosphere. But that shouldn't be reason for y'all to avoid buying a subscription to Discover, which has been on quite a roll in the past few years, despite the fact that they've made me a regular contributor during that time.

While you're over there filling out the subscription form, check out my latest column -- a fun one on a new videogame that uses biofeedback technology as the primary controller mechanism. Sort of like a version of Myst where you unlock the puzzles by altering your mood.

Doing The Math On Dean

If Al Gore's surprise endorsement of Howard Dean has you rethinking some of your assumptions about Dean's "electability," take a look at this revealing electoral college infographic that the Times ran last week. To me, it calls into question a lot of what we've heard about how the Democrats can't win without a Southern centrist (the line usually trotted out to explain why Dean will be a huge fiasco in a national election.) But as this chart shows, there's basically no South for the Democrats to win: every Southern state save Florida is firmly in Bush's column, and as we know, Florida isn't really a Southern state anyway. (Too coastal, urban, multicultural, etc.) The undecideds are basically all the Rust Belt states, plus Arizona, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Nevada.

This chart doesn't say to me that the Democrats need a Southerner. It says that they can win decisively if they can find someone who'll play well in the industrial midwest, who can pick up Maine and New Hampshire, and win Florida. Dean could do all those things, I think -- though it does make you wonder whether a Dean/Graham ticket makes more sense than the Dean/Clark ticket I've been fantasizing about since this summer, given the importance of Florida.

It's easy for mainstream Democrats to dismiss the fact that Dean has energized the "democratic wing of the democratic party", but I think that force shouldn't be underestimated. For as long as I can remember, the Republicans have had far more unity between the centrist and their ultra-conservative wings: Bush has passionate supporters at both ends of the party, as did Reagan. (The only Republican president who didn't have the far right's adoration, Bush Sr., didn't get re-elected.) But the reverse isn't true on the Left: the ultra-liberals and progressives were mostly disgusted by Clinton's DLC-style centrism and his welfare reform bills; they were Nader supporters or they believed that all mainstream politicians were beyond the pale. Partially because Bush has been so appalling, and partially because Dean is speaking at least in the tone of their language, if not the substance, that left-wing group finally has a candidate they can whole-heartedly embrace. Assuming that Dean can play his John McCain straight-talking maverick act to the midwest next year, I'm not at all sure that having such a passionate base is a liability, even if they are to the left of the rest of the country. In fact, I'd wager it's a strength.

Excuse Me For Sounding Like A Seinfeld Routine, But...

So I'm on a plane this afternoon, flying back from an extended holiday break with my wife's family in Florida, and I sit through -- for probably the ten-thousandth time -- the extended lecture on how to inflate the emergency life preserver in the event of a water landing. Like most of you, I'm sure, I've always thought that this speech -- not to mention the accompanying demonstration -- was a bizarre waste of time. How many successful commercial aircraft emergency water landings have occurred over the past twenty years? One? Two? Certainly no more than a handful, if memory serves. So the odds of you having to use that life vest are what -- a billion to one? Plane crashes are incredibly rare, but plane crashes where the plane goes down and then everybody suits up in their yellow vests and zooms down the inflatable slides, those are beyond rare.

On today's flight, for some reason, I started thinking about what would happen if you had safety advisories more in synch with the real odds of something going wrong on the flight. Terrorism aside, you're much more likely to have some nut flip out or drink himself to into an insane fury, which means they'd be better off teaching us how to administer a sedative than use our seat cushion as a flotation device. ("In the event that an intoxicated bond trader climbs on the drinks cart and starts defecating on it, please remain seated while the flight attendants locate the stun gun.")

What if other modes of transportation delivered similar safety speeches about equally improbable events? Your average commuter train is much more likely to derail than a plane to land on water, and yet they don't even give you seat belts on trains, much less teach you how to fasten them. Maybe every time you get on a bus, they should advise you what to do if someone plants a bomb onboard that will go off if the bus goes below 50 MPH. (I know, I know -- that was just a movie. But still.) I don't think it's preposterous to suggest that they'd actually save more lives over a ten year period if every flight used the flotation device instruction time to teach a crash course in CPR or the Heimlich maneuver instead. I'm sure you're much more likely to be sitting next to a guy who has a heart attack then you are to be crash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Even if the plane did attempt an aquatic landing, you'd probably have time to run through the life preserver drill before you hit the water. (The ones where you don't have time usually don't leave any survivors.) And doing the drill right before the crash landing has one other added benefit: for once, people will actually pay attention to what's being said.

Forty Years in Forty Sentences

Always regretted that you didn't take that Modern Presidential Politics survey back in college? No worries: just take in this sixty-second rendition, courtesy of Bill Clinton, from a fascinating new interview with Michael Tomasky:

Now, let me just close on an upbeat note here. I don't entirely buy the Ruy Teixiera [and John B. Judis] analysis about the natural Democratic majority. On the other hand, there is something to it.

So that means that we're in every race. You start with 45 percent, you're in a race. I don't care what anybody says. So sometime between 1992 and 2000, for the first time -- probably in the last four years, for the first time since 1964 -- we were no longer at a cultural disadvantage in our base. So both parties go into this next election with a natural base of about 45 percent. So in 2004, this race will be about -- it goes back to your question about the Democrats' dilemma and our division. We have to improve our turnout to their level, as we did in '98 and 2000 but not in 2002. And then we have to win the votes among the other 10 percent. That's eminently doable.

He makes it sound so easy. Sigh.

Let Me Help You Help Yourself

I've written a little bit here before about the rhythm of writing and publishing books. Having started my publishing career on the Web, I used to bristle at the sluggishness of the print world. But now that I've been through the process three times, I've really grown fond of the pace and pattern of it all, each new stage rolling in like the change of seasons.

One of the milestones that's (usually) fun is the day the first review arrives. For Mind Wide Open, this happened to be yesterday. Early reviews -- the book won't be officially released until mid-February -- are almost always limited to industry publications like Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, and thus are more summaries than value-judgments. But they'll slip a little praise or criticism in most reviews. I'm happy to report that it's the former, not the latter, in the Kirkus review faxed to me yesterday. The pull quote: "An enthusiastic invitation to explore your mind from science writer Johnson, who takes a lucid trip through the country's brain labs... Celebrates the brain's complexity and wonder even as it demonstrates that you can get to know your mind better than you ever thought."

Don't worry -- I won't post here news about every single review that appears. (Just the ones that I feel the need to respond to.) But I thought the I'd share the first one, since it's such a cool little milestone.

By the way, one of the three main categories that Amazon, at least, is listing Mind Wide Open under is "Self-Help." It's totally an appropriate category, but I'm still cracking up a little at the idea that I've written a self-help book. Look out, Dr. Phil!

Apple On Speed

I always enjoy reading the Arstechnica in-depth software reviews, even if I don't always agree with them. Their latest dissection of OS X -- this of version 10.3 (AKA Panther) -- is yet another gem. I was particularly struck by this passage:

Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release — and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems...

At every WWDC, I am more and more impressed at the sheer volume of "stuff" that has changed under the hood in each new Mac OS X release...

I'd been thinking a little recently about Apple and speed, though not speed in the sense of window redrawing, but speed in the sense of upgrade cycles. It seems to me that Apple has managed to release a prodigious amount of new software in the past two years: two significant upgrades to OS X, each with hundreds of new features (along with the performance increases.) But also think of all the new applications. Start with the iLife package -- major upgrades to iTunes including the Apple Music Store; upgrades to iMovie and iDVD; entirely new applications in iPhoto and iChat AV. And then somehow they've managed to produce what basically amounts to a complete productivity suite, built from scratch: iCal, Address Book, Mail, Keynote, iSync. And on top of that, in a year they've managed to assemble what a lot of people seem to think is the best browser on the market -- Safari.

Am I missing something, or is this a significantly faster development cycle than Microsoft's? Exclude all the things that aren't directly in Apple's market (the XBox games, PocketPC development, etc) and focus just on Windows OS development and consumer applications. They basically update Windows and Office every 2-3 years, and they've brought out a couple of new applications over the past 48 months that come to mind: OneNote, Live Meeting, etc. And then there's the Media Center version of Windows, which is something like the iLife package. But still, considering how much bigger Microsoft is than Apple, it seems amazing to me that Apple's even competitive here, much less ahead of Microsoft in updates/new apps shipped per year.

The question I have is twofold. First, do you think what I've said above is true? And secondly, if it is true, why? Is this like the performance increases that Ars talks about: the ultimate payoff from going with a UNIX core, and generally embracing open-source code (as in Safari, for instance)? Is it a payoff from the Cocoa development environment, which supposedly makes it incredibly easy to develop new applications? Is it the fact that most of these Apple apps are more minimalist in their features, as opposed to Microsoft's bloatware, thus making it easier to get stuff out the door? Or is there some other ingredient I'm missing...