People don’t need what they want, and don’t want what they need. My intuitions about this have been sharpened by reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoirs TO THE CASTLE AND BACK.

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There’s a lot of stuff in there about people being surprised and even flummoxed by the spectacular glee of being given what they want — great things that are clearly good for them. They’re better off by almost every objective measure, and they’d never go back, but somehow they seem to live less.

inkwell.vue.373: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #46 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 5 Jan 10 07:21

While this is definetely an element of Havel’s memoirs. Still, after reading the first pages Havel’s memoirs made me think of something else. I’m reminded of the Red Queen’s race out of Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass. 1872.

Havel writes his memoirs in the year 2005 looking back on his presidency. These short reflective vignettes are interspersed with excerpts from Havel’s memos to his staff which he wrote during his time in The Castle. These memos offer a detailed view on the minutiae of the day to day life of a president and his staff. What is especially poignant are the plethora of mundane details that fill these memos. As Havel puts it himself:

When I think of all those thousands of meetings I held as president, of how many worries and preparations were necessary for every one of them and how many things I had to answer – from the very basic ones concerning the future organization of the world to the most petty ones concerning, for instance, the placement of cutlery or the seating arrangements for some official dinner – it occurs to me that not only will no one ever be able to fully appreciate all that but that today, practically no one knows about it anymore.

How wonderful it is, by comparison, to be a writer! You write something in a couple of weeks, and it’s here for the ages. What will remain when presidents and ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, most likely inaccurate.

Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. 2008. p. 35.

From this perspective Carrol’s Red Queen’s Race finds an uncanny likeness in political life. Good or Bad? Well, this judgement will have to wait.

In November Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß and Jörn Lamla published the book “Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt” to which I contributed a chapter on the political uses of Twitter. And the first reviews are in:

Jochen Zenthöfer for politik-digital.de: Wer archiviert eigentlich Twitter?

Christian Jung at Homo Politicus: Nachindustrielle Politik

[Update: 2010/01/11]
Stefan Anderssohn at socialnet: Rezension vom 07.01.2010 zu: Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß u.a. (Hrsg.): Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt. Campus Verlag (Frankfurt) 2009.

[Update: 2010/03/13]
Online Affairs: Politisches Gezwitscher – Wie und Warum Politiker Twitter Nutzen

My chapter is called “Twitterende Politiker: Zwischem buntem Rauschen und Bürgernähe 2.0″. In that chapter I describe how German politicians use Twitter-Feeds. I also attempt to form preliminary usage-categories. SInce the chapter has been written in April of 2009 some of the examples seem a bit dated. Still it seems the categories hold up quite nicely to the test of time. I’m very much looking forward to early 2010 when Pascal Jürgens and I will quantitavely test these categories on a large data-set. So as always, the best is yet to come.

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age by Larry M. Bartels

Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 by Walter A. McDougall

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 by Peter Brown

Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek by Bruce Caldwell

and finally

Die Philosophie Karl Poppers by Herbert Keuth

Well, at least that‘s the plan.

Are you planning to do some reading? If so, what‘s on your list?

The death of Über-Game-Designer Matthew Sobol sets a surprising chain of events in motion. Before his death Sobol designed a computer program that automatically scans the internet for news of his death. After his death this daemon starts automatic protocols which in the end destabilize the global economy and challenge national security.

With his novel Daniel Suarez emphasizes different aspects of our time which are usually ignored by so-called serious fiction. Suarez’ characters are mostly digitally natives who are battling an older generation who fondly plays with the idea of “shutting down the internet”. He shows the emerging culture of Multiplayer Video Games and weaves them as a different layer into reality, a layer which remains invisible to most onlookers. Yet the author does not restrict his story to the digital realm. He also addresses issues of the ongoing privatization of security and shows a world which is increasingly governed by global corporations.

“Daemon” reads at times like a dramatization of non-fiction books on computer security, sociology, economics and futurology. The author points among others to works by P. W. Singer, Kevin Phillips and Jared Diamond. This stylistic device reminds of Neal Stephenson who anchored his “Baroque Cycle” on the works by the French historian Fernand Braudel. This process is greatly entertaining because it shows the rather abstract ideas of non-fiction writers in glorious technicolor. It also gives the novels more relevance and grounding in present day science then can be normally expected from fictional work.

Initially Suarez self-published his novel. The success of “Daemon” let the Penguin books imprint Dutton to acquire the rights to Daemon and its sequel Freedom TM.

Recently Suarez gave a talk about his book at the Long Now Foundation. There is a video of the event at Fora TV.

This is the background for the new book by Seth Godin “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us“. In this book Godin declares the tribe to the next successful form of social organization and demands of his reader to rise to the challenge and form a tribe around an idea.

To Godin tribes are:

“a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” (Tribes 2008: 1).

This is a fairly wide definition, but Godin differentiates further between tribes that embrace change and those that oppose it.

To him tribes that formed in the past around an idea run the danger of perpetuating an institution in the hope of keeping an old idea alive in spite of changing times. In his eyes these tribes are doomed.

Instead, to Godin, a tribe has to become a micromovement to be successful.

Godin identifies six principles for a micromovement:

1. Transparency
2. The Movement has to be bigger than its leader
3. Movements that grow thrive
4. Movements are most successful if they clearly differentiate themselves from the status quo
5. Excluding Outsiders
6. Enabling Followers to be more successful

Only through this openness to change and the active participation of its members a tribe can be successful, so Godin.

To become and remain a micromovement tribes need leaders. In Godins eyes these leaders are we, the readers. To Godin leaders differentiate themselves through the conscious decision to lead a tribe, instead only to participate in a movement. They are motivated by curiosity and a desire for change. Their ability to lead, their charisma, is derived from their uncompromising faith in the core of their movement. The narrative of this faith gives the followers something to believe in and something to work for. With his short manifesto Godin tries to infuse the reader with the passion and confidence to make that decision and to step up and lead his own tribe.

For Godin, today is the time for heretics in leadership positions. A chaotic present and a future where seemingly anything goes, lead the market to embrace change. In the past curiosity and the desire to change the status quo seemed frightening because this attitude lead to the possibility of failure and with this it threatened success. Today it‘s different. Godin argues, that since success is more and more based on change of the status quo and unpredictable factors, the market demands heretics as leaders. Heretics whose radical challenge to the status quo were in the past anathema to investors are in Godins eyes necessary.

In this short book Godin thinks out loud about leadership in a time of change and the ties that bind subgroups in a society which differentiates itself ever increasingly along the long tails of interest, practice, place and ideas. This book is not so much an analysis of leadership, small group behavior or organization in times of the social web (try for this “Herd” by Mark Earls and “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky), it is clearly a book of ideas. Herein it reminds of the short books by Tom Peters on leadership and talent. Godin tries to inspire the reader and move him to action.

A great shortcut to the ideas of “Tribes” is this interview between Seth Godin and the blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod.

the layer that co-exists as a member of both the Library and the Anti-Library. It is something you may have read, but when read again with a different perspective it exists in another form. These type’s of books are the ultimate for a bibliophile. It is the layer described above and contains the texts that you re-read.

Since a former project by @zenpundit and Soob regarding the antilibrary proved to be great fun, I started to think about my quantum library. So, after careful consideration, here are the books that qualify for the shelves of my quantum library:

Niccolò Machiavelli: Il Principe For a political scientist with a focus on the dos and don‘ts of practical political leadership, this is an embarrassingly obvious choice. Machiavelli’s short text proves different each time around. It was a different book after I visited Firenze, I read it differently after I worked on a political campaign and when I reread it in preparation for my thesis I found yet another text. Now I am waiting for its next incarnation.

Michel de Montaigne: Essays Montaigne is the grand seigneur of all the men of letters. Locking himself away from the world and writing his multi-volume essays was in itself stuff of legends. The scope of his work guarantees different discoveries each time one opens the meanwhile well worn pages.

Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones and El Aleph Borges’ short stories are always rewarding but I find myself regularly revisiting his stories “The Immortal” and “The Babylon Lottery“. Always rich and always different.

Golo Mann: Wallenstein This incredibly detailed narrative of Wallensteins life and time tells of a man of action who in a time of manic change chose the vita activa. Like all great biographies this account of an active life changes its meaning to the reader with personal experience of battles won and battles lost.

Umberto Eco: Il pendolo di Foucault The first time I read Eco’s Pendulum I read it as a thriller of ideas. Only the second time I found it to be one of the greatest parables on the profession of historians. The permanent rewriting of history from the perspective of an ever advancing present has in all its grotesque splendor been seldom portrayed so accurately and so entertaining.

What would one find on the shelves of your quantum library?

In his great book “The Black Swan“? Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces the concept of an antilibrary:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others – a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The Black Swan”? 2007: p. 1.

The blogosphere has picked up on the antilibrary starting with the viral post “What is in your Antilibrary?“? by Münzenberg. I found this post via the blog zenpundit by @zenpundit. This made me look at my own shelves. So what books are in my antilibrary?

Through the work on my thesis I started to get more interested in the scientific process of the social sciences. Especially the divide between the formalistic and the hermeneutic approach to the enquiry into social phenomena seems fascinating to me. Therefor the books in my antilibrary show that interest:

Jon Elster: Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. A great introduction into the basic concepts of social sciences. What are social sciences? What are valid questions that social scientists are able to answer? What is in the methodological toolkit of a social scientist?

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky: Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. And: Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman: Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Two great collections of articles dealing with human decisionmaking. A constant reminder how great social science looks like.

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. One of the foundations for the 20th century school of hermeneutics. What are the boundaries of analytical methods for the analysis of social phenomena? What can we gain in understanding through the hermeneutic circle?

Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power. One of the most ambitious academic projects of modern sociology. What are the constants in the organization of human societies? How is power distributed in societies?

Which books are on the shelves of your antilibrary?