by Richard Gowan | Feb 18, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
I’ve spent some of my President’s Day holiday hammering out a review of Surrender is Not an Option, John Bolton’s scaborous memoir of his tenure at the UN. This will eventually come out in the International Journal, based in Canada, but as (i) the wheels of academic publishing move slowly and (ii) the IJ doesn’t put its reviews online, I thought I’d extract a few paragraphs here. These deal with what strikes me as the most interesting and least discussed element of the (generally badly reviewed) book: Bolton’s obsession with the political uses of jokes…
Mr. Bolton states that his audience is to be found in Middle America. He is concerned that many of his fellow nationals are too easily beguiled by the UN. For them, “the United Nations to this day remains the UN of UNICEF trick-or-treating on Halloween, and of famine-relief efforts in natural disasters, or combating diseases in developing countries.” Bolton now sets out to disillusion “those who still think glowingly of the UN as they had imagined it on Halloweens long ago.” His volume may be a first in international relations literature: a book explicitly intended to sour childhood memories.
To achieve this he hauls us through some highly involved descriptions of diplomatic negotiations enlivened by the breaking of confidences, ad hominem attacks on most other participants, and a lot of jokes. Curiously, the most interesting element of the entire project may be the jokes. We already know quite a lot about the humor of the Bush administration – Bob Woodward has revealed, for example, that the president finds flatulence funny. Mr. Bolton is more interested in verbal repartee, and from time to time he is genuinely witty. Describing a visit by George Clooney to New York to discuss Darfur before the Security Council, he notes that the actor was swarmed by female staffers, “providing humility lessons, and therefore character-building, for the rest of us.” However, he is best at skewering those he dislikes with harsh humor, and he knows it, often returning to the same victims (such as his British and Swedish counterparts at the UN) again and again.
This fascination with comedy is clearly essential to his understanding of how diplomacy works. Mr. Bolton has often been presented as a devotee of power politics, seeing little beyond interest, influence and advantage. This book does not dispel that view. But humor seems to act as a guide to how these forces work. He explains how he gained advantage over a senior German official in a meeting on Iran by noting that he inspired “general merriment”, while his adversary only “joked lamely” and then responded “dourly” to Bolton’s comedic success.
Contrary to his stated intentions, Mr. Bolton has not produced a book that will appeal to those suffering belated qualms about whether their trick-or-treating was misguided – it would be utterly ludicrous to believe that anyone without a sad obsession with multilateral diplomacy is going to care one iota whether Mr. Bolton bested largely unheard-of diplomatic rivals in the humor stakes. But for those of us who are burdened with that unfortunate obsession, this is a treasure-trove.
And if that doesn’t make you want to buy it, what will?
by Alex Evans | Feb 18, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs]
Here’s an excellent video with which to while away the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds. The speaker is Clay Shirky, an American writer on the social effects of internet technologies. He says:
What is happening in our generation is that we have a set of tools for aggregating things that people care about, in ways that increase both the scope and the longevity [of their efforts] – in ways that were unpredictable even a decade ago. The coordinating tools we now have – and I’m not talking about anything fancy, I’m talking about mailing lists, usenet, weblogs and wikis – those tools turn love into a renewable building material.
As an example, Shirky cites the case of Linux – which “gets rebuilt every night by people whose principal goal is that it continue to exist the following morning”. Now, he continues, we’re just starting to explore the social application of these tools, and “it [means] that the ability to aggregtate non-financial motivations – to get people together outside of managerial culture and for reasons other than the profit motive – has received a huge comparative advantage.” So what started with small, techie undertakings like Linux is now exploding:
That pattern – of aggregating caring into something stable and long-lasting – is going everywhere. Wikipedia. The anti-anti-immigration protests in Californian schools, that were co-ordinated through MySpace. The monitoring of Nigerian elections by a loose collection of people using SMS and camera phones to watch their own elected officials. The use of Flickr to co-ordinate information and disaster relief after the Indian ocean tsunami, after the London transit bombings, after the Madrid bombings. And the number of places where that pattern will go in the future is much greater than the number of places that pattern has already gone.
We have always loved one another; we’re human, it’s something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add the co-ordinating tools – and you can write an operating system. In the past we would do little things for love, but big things- big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love.
Of course, the catch is that the very same tools also mean that you can do big things for hate or fear, as Shirky himself says elsewhere. Shirky has a new book about to come out in a few weeks’ time, under the title Here Comes Everybody: a book that’s “about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures”. He continues:
Here Comes Everybody is about why new social tools matter for society. It is a non-techie book for the general reader (the letters TCP IP appear nowhere in that order). It is also post-utopian (I assume that the coming changes are both good and bad) and written from the point of view I have adopted from my students, namely that the internet is now boring, and the key question is what we are going to do with it.
Important stuff, this – c.f. the extraordinary protests in Colombia if you haven’t already. As the IHT put it:
A young Colombian engineer used the social networking site last week to organize a massive protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as FARC. On Feb. 4, millions of Colombians marched simultaneously in 27 cities throughout the country and 104 major cities around the world shouting “No more kidnappings! No more lies! No more deaths! No more FARC!”
The idea of the protest was born a month ago, Oscar Morales, the organizer, said. “I thought it was going to be something unimportant, but little by little it became a big mobilization,” said Morales, 33. “Thanks to Facebook, we have created an exponential effect.” Morales started a Facebook group called “A million voices against the FARC” as a virtual protest with his friends. He got an enormous response from other Facebook users, so Morales decided to call for a national march. Colombians living abroad also learned about the protest through Facebook. Expatriates wanting to participate in the event contacted Morales by e-mail. After receiving hundreds of expressions of interest, Morales decided to turn the national march into an international event.
Update: just discovered a terrific article by the New Yorker’s George Packer on ‘Iraq the place versus Iraq the abstraction’, which shows how participatory communication technologies can also contribute to the opposite of what Shirky’s talking about above, i.e. disorder rather than coherence. See Global Dashboard post on that here.
by Alex Evans | Feb 18, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Javier Blas at the FT has the details:
Prices for top-quality spring wheat have jumped by 90 per cent in the past month and a half, boosted by a scramble by corporate consumers to secure scarce grain and speculative buying by investors. A surge on Friday in prices for wheat used in bread to an all-time high of $19.88 a bushel – the highest yet paid for any wheat contract and a three-fold increase from a year ago – prompted the US baking industry to call for wheat exports to be curtailed.
The American Bakers Association stopped short of asking for an export moratorium but pressed for curbs on foreign sales. Lee Sanders, ABA vice-president for government relations, said there was usually a surplus in the US wheat market equivalent to three months of US consumption. “It is currently at a very low one-month level, which is extremely concerning,” she said…
The US is the world’s largest wheat exporter. Faced with strong overseas demand after extreme weather damaged other countries’ crops, its wheat stocks are set to fall to a 60-year low this year. The shortage of top-quality spring wheat is forcing US millers to consider buying Canadian supplies… William Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a Nebraska-based food consultancy, said that one of the key themes of this year conference would be the realisation that the price surge was not a temporary hump but rather a structural change. “We are not facing a short-term price blip…but a sustained move to a new and higher plateau for prices,” he added.
Meanwhile, Gillian Tett is seeing the other side of the equation:
A WFP official, for example, recently showed me the red plastic cup that is used to dole out daily rations to starving Africans – and then explained, in graphically moving terms, that this vessel is typically now only being filled by two-thirds each day, because food prices are rising faster than the WFP budget.
