Net Smart: How to Thrive Online

_Net Smart:  How to Thrive Online_ by Howard Rheingold
Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2012
ISBN 978-0-262-01745-9

(4)  Literacy now means skill plus social competency in using that skill collaboratively.

(16)  When today's infants grow up, they will be amazed that their parents' generation could ever get lost, not be in touch wiht everyone they know at all times, and get answers out of the air for any question.

(18)  Participatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people.  This value derives not just from the size of the audience but also from people's power to link to each other, to form a public as well as a market.

(19)  Another recent Pew study found that more than 50 percent of today's teenagers have created as well as consumed digital media.

(20)  Starting with the Web's invention (which its creator refused to patent and insisted on giving to the public domain), and continuing with efforts such as the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, some significant online social behavior suggests that in addition to financial compensation and other forms of naked self-interest, people do things together for fun, mutual enrichment, the love of a challenge, out of compassion, and because we sometimes enjoy working with others to make something beneficial to everybody.

(22)  All these superheroes of cybercollaboration knew a few simple things that the rest of us can benefit from learning about, such as how to:
Create a variety of ways to contribute and give volunteers attractive roles
Enable self-election where people choose what it is they want to work on
Give participants platforms to work on together for mutual interest
Acknowledge contributors
Make decision making transparent (if not necessarily democratic)

(24)  Today, _how you know who you know_ matters as much as who you know, and one of the most valuable traits a person could have in a twenty-first-century organization is a knack for knowing "who knows who knows what."

(29)  As [Alan] Kay famously noted, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it"… 

(38)  Oversimplification number one:  attention, memory, and executive control are the fundamental components of thinking - and the executive control process is the particular power you can tap to control your use of social media.

(39)  The part of your brain that you use to retrieve memories and keep information in your working memory is referred to as the "executive control" or "cognitive control" function.

(40)  Our senses are receiving an estimated eleven million bits of information per second, while we are conscious of only forty….

The discovery of "mirror neurons" in primates strongly implies that paying attention to others is one of the few human cognitive capabilities that may be neurally "hardwired".
NB:  Autistics and mirror neurons?

(41)  When it comes to interacting with the world of always-on info, the fundamental skill, on which other essential skills depend, is the ability to deal with distraction without filtering out opportunity.

(42)  What do you move when you shift your attention?

(45)  [Linda] Stone grew even more intensely interested when others reported that they, too, sometimes held their breath while reading or writing email - a phenomenon that she started calling "email apnea."  She told me that she came to realize that "breathing is the regulator of attention."  Stone reminded me that holding one's breath is directly connected to the "fight or flight" response…

Stone remarked that regular breathing patterns, by contrast, activate the parasympathetic nervous system, causing relaxation, the release of digestive enzymes, and a sense of satiety - signs of a "rest and digest" mode.  She pointed out that "we're putting our bodies in a state of almost constant low-level fight-or-flight.

(47)  A range of experiments has shown that the hormone dopamine does indeed appear to be associated with a reward for "seeking" behavior.

(58)  Stone reminded me that "intention is the fuel for attention."  Intention and setting goals are different, she told me, because "a goal is outside and in the future, but an intention is inside you and very present.  And when does behavior change?  It changes in the present."

(63)  [Lester] Fehmi's open focus is a good descriptor of a kind of attention that is not directing itself at a single, task, or maintaining a narrative linking multiple perceptions, thoughts, plans, goals, and memories, but that is continuously awake and alert to itself in the present.

(67)  The narrative network is what is most active when your mind drifts into plans and memories during meditation.  The direct experience network is what is most active when you keep your attention on your breath;  it is probably the one that is active when an athlete is in the zone.

(86)  When investigating a topic, I often add the words "critique" or "criticism" to my search query in order to find contrary or skeptical opinions.

(94)  Like it or not, journalism is becoming something more akin to a network than a guild.

(96)  FairSpin.org's community votes on stories in order for its aggregate judgments to identify opinion disguised as fact, and reflect the degree of political bias detected in stories from both teh Left and Right.  NewsTrust.net is an online community of reviewers (around twenty-two thousand as of this writing) who use a set of review tools devised by veteran journalists.

(103)  I also use paper.li, a service that turns all the URLS tweeted by all the people I follow (or lists of people I designate as knowledgeable about specific topics) into a daily newspaper with headlines, snippets, video, and slides….

Similarly, aggregate.com puts together custom "newspapers" about specified content….

Search and RSS can be combined.  Click on "advanced search" on the home page of Google News or Yahoo! News, perform a search, and then subscribe to that search, so that any time one of the tens of thousands of news publications around the world indexed by those services publishes the set of words specified in your search in the future, it will show up in your aggregator. Set up a Google alert, and have it delivered as a "feed"….

I currently use the Netvibes RSS reader because it provides three levels of organization that I can sync with my mental priorities.

(105)  [Clay] Shirky labels this emerging system that combines digital aggregation with human opinions "algorithmic authority."  He defines algorithmic authority as "the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying 'Trust this because you trust me.'"
NB:  Track record

(112)  The Web, Wikipedia, open-source software, and even the notorious music file-sharing service Napster are all examples of this principle of "many people will cooperate if the medium makes it easy enough."

(119)  The activities that interest-driven groups engage in involve more serious learning and deeper involvement in the crafts of their subculture, generating more sophisticated and specialized roles, methods, products, and tools - what [Mimi] Ito refers to as the genre of "geeking out." [How to geek out on ecological restoration and 100% success for all humanity?] Thirty years ago, two of the people who created today's digital tools, Gates and Jobs, were exactly the kind of interest-based subculture fans Ito portrays, except their fringe subculture consisted of teenage enthusiasts who liked to geek out by building their own computers.  [NB:  maker culture]  Whether they are driven by friendship or interest, the young people across the United States who Ito's team studied, representing a broad demographic sample of the population, use media sharing and production as a form of social currency.  The communities they develop are based on creation, exchange, collaboration, and critique of media created by participants….

Fred Turner, Stanford professor as well as head of Stanford's program on science, technology, and society, claims that people like me both contribute to the commons and profit from it by being "network entrepreneurs."  By this, Turner means that we network entrepreneurs benefit in reputation and audience/public by giving our products freely to our networks, and that when we act to connect previously disparate networks, we put ourselves in a position to profit from the connection.

(126)  When you are trying to decide which one of a number of videos are of higher quality or are more useful than other similar ones, look at how much a video is shared - often a better measure of its relevance than the number of views.

(133)  Tag and search is more natural, more suited to the world, then categorize and pigeonhole.

When millions of people tag, categories emerge, and entities can easily be stored and found via multiple categories - an organizational form that has come to be known as "folksonomy."

(134)  Big corporations whose stock we don't necessarily own profit from our labor.  But is it labor?  Or is it play?  The blurring of that distinction has led some people to refer to this behavior as "playbor."
NB:  What is the economy of playbor? Shirky's love economy.

(149)  Infotention.  "Watch what I'm paying attention to" is the elementary particle of cooperation.

(151)  Punishing those who break the institution's rules is apparently essential to cultivating cooperation;  "altruistic punishment" may be the glue that holds societies together.

(152)  She [Elinor Ostrom] also observed that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:
1.  Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2.  Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3.  Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4.  The right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5.  A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6.  A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7.  Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8.  For common pool resources that are parts of larger systems:  appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
NB:  Plus ecological design principles.

(153)  Wayne Macphail:  "You need coordination to dance, cooperation to dance with a partner, and collaboration to dance with a flash mob."

(153-154)  [Arthur] Himmelman's taxonomy:
1.  Networking is the simplest, with the least risk and commitment - such as handing out business cards, attending conferences, hanging out in a chat room, or commenting on a blog….
2.  Coordination means that all involved parties share information and agree to modify their activities for mutual benefit….
3.  Cooperation, as Himmelman defines it, is "exchanging information, modifying activities, and sharing resources for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose…"
4.  Collaboration is the most powerful means of collective action.  It uses networking, coordination, and cooperation as building blocks, adding to "exchanging information, modifying activities, etc.," the requirements of "enhancing the capacity of another for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose by sharing risks, resources, responsibilities, and rewards."

(161)  The [Climate CoLab] research team discovered that the group's collective IQs were _not_ correlated with the average IQ of the individual group members, nor with the score of the "smartest" person on the team.  The factors found to contribute to a group's collective IQ are the group's facility at taking turns in conversations, members' sensitivity to social cues, and the number of women on each team

(163)  Knowing the difference between a community and a network is as critical socially as crap detection is essential informationally.

(165)  Do those four things - know the territory, assume goodwill, jump in wherever you can add value, and reciprocate - and you'll succeed as a virtual community member.

(167)  Crowdsourced wealth is being created by amateur fashion designers as well as gold mine owners:  the one million online Threadless community members upload designs for T-shirts and vote on the best designs, and the weekly winners are manufactured and sold, sometimes bringing significant profits to the designers.

(171)  Emergency services are being crowdsourced by citizens:  CrisisWiki, an editable directory of disaster and emergency resources was inspired by HurricaneWiki and the South-East Asias Earthquake and Tsunami Blog.

(176)  Weber sketches "eight general principles that capture the essence of what people do in the open source process:  Make it interesting and make sure it happens… scratch an itch… minimize how many times you have to reinvent the wheel… solve problems through parallel work processes whenever possible… leverage the law of large numbers… document what you do… release early and release often… talk a lot."  "Make it interesting" resonates with McGonigal's design principle for epic games:  give people a "sense of awe and wonder" along with a lofty goal to work toward. 
NB:  Democracy - talking loud at the bus stop 

(179)  The four principles that the authors believe make collaborative consumption work mesh nicely with what we know about cooperation theories:  trust between strangers, belief in the commons, idling capacity (do you have a room that is not being used or an automobile that is not being driven at the moment?), and critical mass.
NB:  More democracy

(198)  Sarnoff's law is named after television pioneer David Sarnoff.  With a broadcast medium such as television or radio, the value of the network increases arithmetically_ with the number of receivers:  add more receivers, add that much more value.  Mertcalfe's law is named after Robert Metcalfe, creator of the Ethernet, a precursor to the Internet architecture, who declared that the value of a many-to-many network like an Ethernet or Internet increases even more quickly than that of a broadcast network, because adding nodes _multiplies_ the reach of each node.

(199)  [David] Reed told me that he started thinking about group=forming-networks (GFNs) when he wondered why eBay had become so successful:  "eBay won because it facilitated the formation of social groups around specific interests…."  I quoted my interview with Reed in my 2002 book, _Smart Mobs_:  "I saw the value of a GFN (group-forming network) grows even faster - much, much faster - than the networks where Metcalfe's Law holds true," Reed told me, drawing even steeper curves on napkin.  "Reed's Law," he continued, "shows that the value of the network grows proportionately not to the square of the users, but _exponentially_."

"That Sneaky Exponential:  Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building" by David Reed:   There are really at least three categories of value that networks can provide:  the linear value of services aimed at individual users, the "square" value from facilitating transactions, and exponential value from facilitating group affiliations.

(201)  [David Reed]  "That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from.  The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods).  Where Metcalfe's Law dominates, transactions become central.  The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) are king.  And where the GFN dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.)

Manuel Castells, _The Network Society_…
"Why Networks Matter", Castells's introduction to _Network Logic:  Who Governs in a Interconnected World?_ he lays out seven ways that technologically mediated social networks are transforming society.

First, these networks are global, and the worldwide transit time for information is nearly instantaneous, which Castells contends in the structural basis for globalization. Second, networked organizations outcompete command-and-control bureaucracies.  Third, the networking of civil and political institutions is the emergent response to the governance crisis of nation states. Fourth, networks of activists are reconstructing civil society at local and global levels.  Fifth, networked individualism, virtual communities, and smart mobs are redefining sociality.  Sixth, media space - the public space of our time - now encompasses the whole range of human social practices. Finally, "in this network society, power continues to be the fundamental structuring force of its shape and direction.  But power does not reside in institutions, not even int he state or in large corporations.  It is located in the networks that structure society."  

(204)  [Marc A] Smith, then a sociology graduate student at the university of California at Los Angeles, was able to answer my question about why people would give time, information and social support to others online, even if they didn't know the other people well.  "Social capital, knowledge capital, and communion," Smith answered - a terse explanation that has stood the test of time.

(207)  [Marc A] Smith:  "Don't fixate on the number of connections but on the quality of those connections and the diversity of your portfolio of connections.  It can be worthwhile to connect to less prominent, less highly linked individuals, if they are different from the people in your network…

Smith's "be a bridge" advice made such good sense that I asked him for more.  "Eigenvector centrality!" he replied, smiling at my baffled expression… Eigenvector centrality is an ingredient of Google's PageRank"… A link from a hub that has many inbound links itself adds to your authority.  "So - second piece of advice - get people to link to you.  LInks to you  are proxies for endorsement."

(208)  Most significant, in my opinion, is the way Wellman's [Toronto] NetLab has detailed the social consequences of a shift from a group-centric sociality to what Wellman calls networked individualism

(209)  A group is densely knit (most members knew each other) and tightly bounded (there aren't many connections to people who don't know everyone else), whereas a network is sparsely knit (most members do not know most other members) and loosely bounded (plenty of those small-world-making distant connections to people outside the core).

(211)  Because connections are to people and not to places, the technology affords shifting of work and community ties from linking people-in-places to linking people at any place….  The person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity.
"The Social Affordances of Networked Individualism" Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz, and Kakuko Miyata

(212)  The networked environment, proliferation of networked devices, ease of summoning our own networks with text messages and tweets, and way in which our media powers have shifted our social attention from groups to networks are a constellation of social transformations that Rainie and Wellman call "the triple revolution." The drivers of this revolution, according to Rainie and Wellman's forthcoming book, _Networked:  The New Social Operating System_, are the rise of the personal Internet, spread of powerful movie information and communication devices, and shift from groups to network as the primary focus of sociality.

(217)  "The evidence is extraordinarily clear on one subject.  The overwhelmingly direct cause of reciprocity is giving support in the first place."  Or as [Barry] Wellman put it in a lecture at the Clinton School of Public Service, "The most important criteria for getting help is helping somebody else.  If you want help in the future, help somebody now.  Pay it forward.  We have hard data on that."
NB:  Money buys happiness when you give it away:  Michael Norton at HBS

(219)  Like the diamond or graphite metaphor for network structures, social capital arises from the shape of ongoing relationships as wells the characteristics of individuals.  The two keys to that shape are networks of people who trust each other to some degree, and norms this people share that encourage both reciprocity and occasional uncompensated contribution to a commons….

[Robert] Putnam's team asserts that in civic communities, citizens are bound by horizontal relationships of reciprocity, rather than vertical relationships of authority and dependency.

(221)  Observing reciprocity is another norm that is important to the formation of social capital.  Reciprocating - paying back - can be specific (quid pro quo) or generalized (diffuse).  Diffuse reciprocity means you don't pay back only to individuals but also to the network or community.  Communities in which the norm of diffuse reciprocity is high can more efficiently restrain free riding and more easily resolve collective action problems.
NB:  More democracy

(222)  Bonding social capital refers to ties between people who share strong mutual contexts and invest relatively heavily in their relationship, such as strong-tie friendships, family, neighbors, and coworkers.  Bridging social capitals a function of weaker and more distant ties - again, between people who have more in common than not.  Linking social capital involves ties to people in dissimilar circumstances and communities, or the kind of ties that are necessary for small-world networks. Bonding capital increases feelings of solidarity, trust, and specific reciprocity.  Bridging social capital helps cliques to break out of their insular world views and bring in external information, and assist in diffusing information across multiple networks. "Bonding social capital consists of a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40."

(223)  Add to "it's not what you know, it's who you know" the addendum that success also depends on "how different the people you know are from each other."

(223-224)  [Fred] Turner:  An entrepreneur may recognize different social worlds and might be a kind of peripheral member of different social worlds, but unless they have a place to bring those people together, those worlds never actually meet.  When they meet, they need to not only come together in some place.  They need to do something together.

(226)  One of the real masters of the PLN [Personal Learning Network] craft is Shelley Terrell, an educator of educators I discovered in my first search for social media classroom adepts. I ended up blogging about her for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Web site, DMLcentral.net.

(235)  Scalability:  The average blog has six readers.  Just because things might be public doesn't mean that they automatically will be read by all people across all space and all time.  What scales is variable and, often, it's what you least want that is most visible.

(239)  Mashable, a Web site that has proved to be a reliable source, claims to have an "always up-to-date guide to managing your Facebook privacy."

(248)  Use the search term "link:  http://..." (with your URL in place of the ellipses) to see every link to a specified page.
To check claims by any political faction, use factcheck.org….

The search engine DuckDuckGo claims to be able to help you break out of your search filter 

(258)  Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect"

(265)  Richard McManus, "Detecting Bull:  How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in  Print, Broadcast, and on the Wild Web," http://www.detectingbull.com
Scott Rosenberg, "In the Context of Web Context:  How to Check Out Any Web Page," Wordyard Blog, September 14, 2010, http://www.wordyard.com/2010/09/14/in-the-context-of-web-context-how-to-check-out-any-web-page

(270)  Robin Good (Luigi Canali de Rossi), "Real-time News Curation - The Complete Guide, Part 6:  The Tools Universe," MasterNewMedia, http://www.masternewmedia,org/real-time-news-curation-the-complete-guide-part-6-the-tools-universe

(272)  Mizuko Ito, Heather A Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danan boyd, Becky Herr-stephenson, Patricia G Lange, CJ Pascoe, and Laura Robinson, _Living and Learning with New Media:  Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2009)

Ito Mizuko, "Amateur Cultural Productiona dn Peer-to-Peer Learning," http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/114

(274)  Robin Good, "Real-time News Curation, Newsmastering, and Newsradars:  The Complete Guide, Parts 1-6," MasterNewMedai, September 7, 2010,http://www.masternewmedia.org/real-time-news-curation-newsmastering-and-newsradars-the-complete-guide-part-1

(286)  Pieter Boeder, "Habermas' Heritage:  The Future of the Public Sphere in the Network Society," First Monday 10, no.9 (September 2005),http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1280/1200

Howard Rheingold, "Howard Rheingold's Public Sphere in the Internet Age Widget," Howard Rheingold's Posterous, February 6, 2009, http://howardrheingold.posterous.com/howard-rheingolds-public-spher

Sawdust Caesar: That Mussolini Lip

I noticed that Donald Trump has that Mussolini lip, sticking out his lower lip at the same time he expands his chest in a power or bully position.  Seeing that, I wondered if there were other similarities between the two and thus decided to read  _Sawdust Caesar:  The Untold Story of Mussolini and Fascism_ by George Seldes

(NY:  Harper and Brothers, 1935).  Seldes is a favorite of mine as he is one of the avatars of independent American journalism in the 20th century.  Before IF Stone, there was George Seldes and _Sawdust Caesar_ was one of the books that made his reputation.  It was useful to me as, yes, I did find some other similarities between Trump and Mussolini in the way they use language and approach opposition but I also found some intriguing glimmers of something else in the independent workers' movement in Italy after WWI and the possible forerunner of Liberation Theology in the work of Don Luigi Sturzo.

History is a wonderful thing.

My notes follow with pages numbers () in parentheses.

More on George Seldes at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/20/663606/-Witness-to-a-Century-George-Seldes

(xv)  I have tried to recount the significant facts in the belief that, although history may be "lies agreed upon," there may be some value in stating realities at a time they may be useful to those seeking a new road out of the present world dilemma.

(51)  The poisoning of the world mind is just as necessary for a successful war as the murder of millions of deluded subjects.

(55)  He [Mussolini] immediately made his newspaper the organ of the Fasci, a little interventionist group which had been founded on July, 1914, months before his "conversion," and which had from its origin been his enemy.

(59)  That nation [Italy] officially renounced the Triple Alliance on the 30th of April, 1915, and amidst the applause of half the world joined the forces of Democracy, Humanity, Liberty and commercial penetration on the following 15th of May.

(80)  "We know now," state the former premier of Fiume, "that the new phase of the political fortune of Mussolini, and especially of Fascism, dates from the treason to the cause of Fiume, after his negotiations with Giolitti.  From that moment dates a different attitude of the government vis-á-vis with Fascism and the rapid transformation of it into a reactionary movmeent.  From the end of 1920 the Fascisti were in effect armed by Giolitti and largely paid by him.  

"Giolitti had been called into power to solve two problems, Fiume and Bolshevism.  To solve the former he obtained Mussolini's passive consent to the fratricidal  aggression of Christmas 1920;  to solve the latter Giolitti obtained Mussolini's active consent and engaged himself to furnish arms and other material means for the guerilla warfare against Socialism.

(85)  Prologue to the seizure of the factories in 1920 was the episode at Dalmine, March, 1919, when Fascist agitators caused a strike at the Franchi-Gregorini plant, the workers raising the national, instead of the red, flag, and demanding participation in the operation of the factory which they had seized and refused to leave.

Mussolini called this a "creative strike."  He rushed there to aid the Bolsheviki, addressed them, saying:  "To protect the interest of your class you could have called a strike in the old style, the negative and destructive strike;  on the contrary, thinking of the interests of the people, you have inaugurated the creative strike which does not interrupt production."  In another exhortation he exclaimed:  "you have proven your Will, and I say to you you are on the right road... I say to you that your gesture is new and dignified, by the motives which inspired them, worthy of sympathy.  Your rights are sacred, and I am with you."

(94)  But although he still called himself a Socialist, he was really more of a Bolshevik and a revolutionary opportunist, ready to engage in a civil war, to shed any amount of blood, for the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship which the occupation of the factories [after WWI] seemed to make imminent.

(105)  Don Luigi Sturzo, founder of Partito Popolare Italiano in January 1919 - Catholic Social Democracy political party, non-violent, distribution of land and work and power.

(196-197)  In Sicily, in the old days, he [Cianfarra of the Chicago Tribune Rome bureau] had found that the judges made it a point to encourage habitual criminals, cut-throats, murderers, and bandits to emigrate to America.  As this was before Mussolini restored capital punishment, it was found it cheaper to deport murderers and gunmen than sentence them to life imprisonment and feed them in Italy.

When a murderer appeared before a Sicilian judge the latter would say, well, it's life imprisonment for you, and the sentence will be pronounced Thurday morning.  That is, if you are here.  But there is a boat for New York on Wednesday.

(201)  Power rests on fear as well as the consent of the governed.

(202)  "I have always said - and those who have always followed me in these five years of hard struggle can now remember it - that violence, to be useful in settling anything, must be surgical, intelligent, and chivalrous.  Now, all the exploits of any so-called Cheka have always been unintelligent, passionate, and stupid."

NB:  The syntax and vocabulary remind me of Trump

(243)  Order, Discipline, Hierarchy (The Fascist slogan) have been made actual.

(261)  In diplomacy, the waging of wars and the directing of their occasional interruptions, peace, Mussolini's course has been rather helter-skelter:  in fact, in this field more than any other he has proven himself a zigzag Caesar.

(312)  In many respects Mussolini followed the methods of other dictators.  Lenin had been editor of the Iskra;  Trotsky practiced journalism in Siberia, Switzerland, and Second Avenue, New York, while Stalin undermined the Kerensky regime when he edited the Petrograd Pravda.  Pilsudski was once a Socialist editor of the Rabotnik, The Worker, Kemal Pasha also published a paper to further his aims, and Hitler for years raged in his Voelkischer Beobachter.  A large number of leading dictators gained by experience in journalism the knowledge of the power of the press, and all in turn knew enough to abolish opposition newspapers as the first and probably most important act to insure stability of a regime.  Dictatorship and a free press can never co-exist.

(357)  The Fascist militia is exalted in many pages and children are taught it is their duty "to love at the same time, the book and the gun, the two arms of knowledge."

(361)  "You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them," said one of Musolini's great predecessors, Cavour, and the Fascisti celebrating their first decade laughed at the phrase.

(375)  In almost every sentence of his speeches, in almost every page of his writings, Mussolini curses his opponents.  He is always  shouting "scoundrel," "traitor," "egotist" at the same one;  his enemies are "soft-brained cowards," "swelled frogs," and "a base and pernicious crew";  he never hesitates to call the man who differes from his opinions a liar;  with the utmost contempt he speaks of political enemies and those who have fought duels with him as weaklings, cowards;  referring to foreign statesmen and journalissts who have said he threatens the peace of the world he replies these are the "accusations of fools";  when he can find nothing evil to say of those whom the world honors he calls them "egocentric," he speaks of their "unbridled egotism";  he is always attacking those who "sell themselves for money, for power," whom he despises - and frequently the word "turncoat" comes up and the six four-letter words in Joyce's Ulysses.
NB:  Another resemblance between Mussolini and Trump

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More Notes on Nazis, Fascism, and Tyranny

https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2024/07/notes-on-nazis-fascism-and-tyranny.html

We Are Market Basket

_We Are Market Basket:  The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved a Beloved Business_ by Daniel Korschun and Grant Welker

NY:  AMACOM, 2015

ISBN 978-0-8144-3665-3

(xiii)  On the other side of this conflict - Arthur T.'s side - were employees (all nonunion workers who call themselves associates), customers, suppliers, and a growing contingent of lawmakers.  They were fighting for the man who they believed had always fought for them and whose management style had fostered a unique company culture:  He championed profit sharing;  bonus checks that often paid four figures or more each year;  paid days off if a worker needed to tend to a sick loved one;  scholarships to help pay for employees to attend college;  low prices, high quality, and exceptional service for customers;  and flexibility and reliability to suppliers.  His supporters wanted more than to save this man's job however.  They saw this as a struggle to save a culture and business model that was important for New England.  Market Basket was more than a grocery store for these people.  It represented an ideal.  A "way of life" that should not - and could not - be tampered with.

(xvi)  Unpredecented. That is the word so often used to describe the Market Basket protests.  Never before had nonunion employees banded together to reinstate a fired CEO.  Never before had a protest involved such a broad coalition of employees:  from cashiers to store directors to truck drivers to office workers, and all levels of management.  Never before had a worker protest spilled over, involving both customers and suppliers, all working in unison to shut down a company this large for this long.

(2)  As Chief Executive Officer Arthur T. Demoulas likes to say, it's simply "a person serving another person."

This is Market Basket.

At the time of writing, the chain has seventy-five stores in three states:  Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.  More than two million New Englanders shop there each week.  It's a $4.5 billion supermarket chain that retains its mom-and-pop feel.  Market Basket is a family-owned busniess, and it has been since its inception almost one hundred years ago.

(16)  NB:  Titus Plomaritis - star running back of the legendary late 1940s Lowell High School football team wrote an autobiography published in 2012:  Kerouac connection?

(24)  Burt Flickinger, Strategic Resource Group:  "Market Basket looks at store staffing and service as an investment, where all their competitors look at store labor as being an expense."

(31)  Arthur T. puts service to customers, employees, and suppliers first.  He believes that a manager's role is to nurture a culture and design a set of practices that benefits them;  if this is done successfully, shareholders will benefit as a consequence.  Arthur S., in contrast, takes the view that shareholders should come first;  a manager's primary responsibility is to maximize profits for shareholders, which in theory is aligned with the goals of customers, employees, and others.  These are fundamentally different ways of thinking that do not coexist well.

(33)  Even after joining the board of directors just a year out of high school in 1974, he kept an even keel.  Arthur T. was steadied by a true love for the grocery business.

It is unusual for the son of a CEO to work so many nonmanagement jobs.  It is even more unusual for a member of the board of directors to do so.  This gave Arthur T. an uncommon perspective.

(36)  Associates recall leaving his [Telemachus Demoulas'] office trembling after Telemachus chastised them for not thinking through something carefully enough.  It was the style of a boss of his generation.  Arthur T., on the other hand, is perhaps better suited to today's workplace.  He is equally demanding but is also more of a listener.  Associates _seek_ his opinion.  "He is a magnet," [William] Marsden says....

He once told Marsden, "[Money is] not what drives me.  I want to be a good merchant.  That's all I want."

(37)  At one meeting in 2010, he [Arthur T.] introduced himself to Nabil El-Hage, a new director at the time, by stating his priorities as an executive.  Arthur T.'s central contention was that serving customers well would always result in rewards for shareholders but that rewarding shareholders first can sometimes make it difficult to serve customers well.  "I want you to know how I think," he said.  "The customers come first.  The associates of the company come [next].  The communities are now our social responsibility, and then come the shareholders."

(42)  It does appear that some company cultures are more effective at driving performance than others.  Business scolars find that the cultures that contribute most to performance share three characterisitcs:  members agree on objectives, the culture is distinctive compared with those of other organizations, and the culture encourages adaptability in the face of challenges.  In other words, the best cultures are clear, unique, and adaptable....

The result is a company culture with four fundamental pillars:  service to the community, a feeling of family, empowerment, and originality - that is valuing innovation over imitation.

What makes Market Basket's culture powerful is not only that the pillars are clear, unique, and adaptable but that the pillars work together.  The sense of community purpose motivates people to commit to the family, and the culture of empowerment encourages people to be resourceful in helping the Market Basket family.  The pillars of the Market Basket culture are at the heart of why the 2014 protest took flight and how it beame successful.

(44)  In the early days, corporations had very clear purpose.  Their "characters" were generally short-term and focused on a tangible goal or even a single voyage.  But gradually, corporations survived beyond single voyages.  As time wore on, the purpose became more and more ambiguous, sometimes sidestepping any purpose entirely.

Embedded in the Market Basket culture is the notion that the company exists in order to serve the community....

Arthur T. says that "Market Basket has a moral obligation to the communities we serve."

(51)  Bonano [farmer and MA Farm Bureau] explained to Peterson, "We only produce 15 percent of the food in Massachusetts."  He told him, "All of us collectively cannot supply enough food for Mass[achusetts], so I don't ever feel like I'm competing with my neighbor."  He saw other growers as his allies who had a common objective of supporting local agriculture and building a strong infrastructure.  "We don't wnat to lose the truck drivers, the pesticide people.  We gotta maintain that infrastructure in Massachusetts," he said.

When Boanano thinks about Market Basket, he doesn't just see a high-volume buyer;  he sees a key player in that infrastructure.  It has become a sort of aggregator of vendors.  "I know everybody that grows mums for Market Basket.  I see them at the Christmas parties.  Three or four are in my town.  You're part of team."  He says that team is motivated because they know they are contributing to the welfare of the state.  Every zucchini and every mum they sell has meaning.  It demonstrates that they are having a tangible impact on the region's economy.

(53 - 54)  [Adam Grant's Wharton School university alumni fundraising call center experiment - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.180.1119&rep=rep1&type=pdf & http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/putting-a-face-to-a-name-the-art-of-motivating-employees/]  Those who had received the self-interested stories raised less money after the intervention than they had the week before.  Meanwhile, those who had read the stories that explained the larger significance of their work almost tripled the funds they raised.  The control group remained unchanged, as one would expect.  The lesson is clear:  reminding people that their work can improve other people's lives can work better than asking employees what's in it for them.

(56)  After learning how serious the injury was, Demoulas probed further:  "Terry, is that hospital able to handle her injury?"  McCarthy thought so, but he was still unsure if she would make it.

Then Demoulas asked a question that forever changed the relationship McCarthy has with the company.  He asked, "Do _we_ need to move her?"

McCarthy says of that moment, "I'll take it to my grave."  He had always felt part of the Market Basket family, but this made an indelible mark on him.  He saw a level of commitment from Arthur T. and his team to his family that he hadn't been aware of before.  He felt that he was part of Market Basket's extended family.

McCarthy's story has a happy ending.  The hospital was able to handle the injury.  His daughter fully recovered.  He told the story at a couple of the rallies in the summer of 2014, with his daughter - in tears - by his side.  As he finished his story, McCarthy asked the crowd, "[Arther T.] asked me 'Do _we_ need to move her?'  I ask you, who's _we_?"

There was a saying on many signs at the rallies and on the picket lines:  "Blood makes you related, but loyalty makes you family."

...His sense of loyalty is reciprocal.  He requires himself to be as loyal to others as they are to him.

(59-60)  Those who know him best say that Arthur T. often speaks in inclusive terms of "we" rather than "I."  It is another way that he demonstrates that associates are in it together.  Psychologists have a term for this shift from "I" to "we."  It's called "social identification," in which a person feels a strong belonging to a group and begins to see others through that lens.

(60)  Psychologists realized that the more a person defines himself or herself as belonging to a particular race, the more likely they would be to help others who were deemed to be of the same race while simultaneously discriminating against those who were considered of a different race.

This effect is not limited to race at all.  And it is powerful enough to be recreated in an exercise lasting only a couple of minutes.

[Labeling people as over-estimators and under-estimators]

(60-61)  The researcher has now succeeded in creating two groups based on something completely trivial.  The surprising result is that when research participants are then asked to share money or points with others, "overestimators" almost always give more to fellow overestimators and take from those who they think are underestimators.  Underestimators favor fellow underestimators in the same way.  If this effect can be detected in the lab in a matter of minutes, imagine how powerful a force identity can be if it is reinforced day after day as it was in many communities that resisted the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

(62)  Consider the words of Arthur DiGeronimo, who was once the CEO of Victory Supermarket.  "We were always able to attract good help from other companies," DiGeronimo said.  "Name a company and we could get them.  Except one.  We were never able to get a Market Basket employee to jump ship."

December bonuses based on company performance totaled $44 million in 2013 and then $49 million in 2014.  That is more than $1.6 thousand per associate on average.

(65)  In the 1980s, Fantini Bakery made some missteps that sent it into bankruptcy for a time.  Fantini says that many other chains would have kicked a weak supplier to the curb.  Instead, Market Basket worked with Fantini's father, which enabled him to get back on track and grow into the sizable regional player the bakery is today.  The support he received from Telemachus, Arthur T., and other managers like Miamis and Lacourse not only saved the business but in Fantini's estimation "save [his] dad's life."  These were gestures that Fantini and his father never forgot.

(66)  He [Fantini] says Market Basket executives treated him well from the start but that he had to work to gain their trust.  To do that, "you have to make sure that you are always putting Market Basket customers' needs first and foremost."

(71)  Associates believe that their job is important and that they as individuals have roles in the success of the company.  

When academics talk about empowerment, they describe it as "intrinsic task motivation."  It is how much a person feels that their individual role fits in with the environment at the company.  Empowerment is not so much a personality trait as it is something that resides within the culture of a company.  One cannot empower oneself;  rather, one can feel empowered because of one's relationship with supervisors.  Supervisors have to be willing to give decision-making authority to their subordinates.  In essence, empowerment means handing over the reins to employees so that the person closest to the situation, the one who is presumably best informed, makes the decision.

Companies can create an empowered workforce by first hiring people who have the self-esteem to make decisions on their own.  But more important, they need to convince these employees that what they do has a real impact on the organization at large and that taking the initiative will be rewarded.  

How does a company convince employees of this?  Market Basket empowers associates primarily in two ways.  First, the company distributes leadership across the company.  And second, the company provides constant tutelage.

(72)  Academics call what Arthur T. and his management team do "distributed leadership."  Distributed leadership challenges the view that needs to be one leader around whom followers revolve.  It's been called a "decidedly _un_heroic" form of management.  Instead of concentrating decision making around a single person, it is dispersed and shared.  In distributed leadership, everyone in the company has a role to play, and everyone can have an impact.

(73)  The researchers [from SMU, U of MD, and Seattle U] noticed that the groups with the highest scores on distributed leadership were those in which members felt the greatest sense of purpose, had the most social support (feeling of family) from colleagues, and felt most comfortable making their voice heard.  This was all highly consistent with factors that the research team predicted would be related to distributed leadership.

The big surprise came when they looked at the effects of distributed leadership.  They asked clients to rate each team according to performance in serving the client.  The researchers found a significant correlation between the distributed leadership of teams and a team's ability to serve clients well.

(74)  She [Susan Beek] recognizes the chain of command at Market Basket.  In fact, Beek is quick to describe her role in self-deprecating terms:  "I'm just a worker."  Yet she articulates the management culture at Market Basket perfectly:  "you know the pecking order.  We have that.  But instead of bad stuff falling downhill [like at other companies], for us it's good stuff.  So it all falls down to us, and in the end our customers receive it.  We are expected to work hard, but we do receive benefits for that hard work."

(75)  She says "if you ask anything of him [Joe Rockwell, VP of grocery sales and marketing], he always gets back to you with an answer - maybe not the one you wanted but always an answer  and a reason for such answer."  He and other executives encourage open discussion about ways to improve the store.  They are willing to entertain just about anything as long as it is motivated by improving how the company serves customers.

(78)  Managers need to explain how correcting the mistake will benefit the customer and the company.  When this is done well, correcting a mistake once has a more lasting effect because the associate is now aware of why what they did was ineffective and what a better way looks like.

NB:  customer focused purpose drives down into the details

(80)  Market Basket's management has no use for people who make decisions based on what works for others. 

(82)  Moreover, promotions at Market Basket are not based on seniority.  Senior managers say they give promotions strictly on merit.  While the years an associate has served the company is valued, it is rarely the basis for advancement.  The system is a bit like how one advances in some of the martial arts;  one gets promoted to the next color belt after demonstrating mastery of the techniques at the current level.

By promoting only from within and strictly based on merit, associates know that the only way to get ahead is to demonstrate their ability to solve problems and seize opportunities.

(94)  In contract, Arthur T. saw bonuses and profit sharing as an investment, not an expense.  "If that's reckless spending," he said, "I'm guilty."

(114)  They [an informal group of eight senior managers] called a meeting at headquarters.  They assembled the full corporate office staff in the lunchroom and laid out their plan.  If the CEOs fired one manager, everyone would walk.  They asked for support and offered anyone who was not in agreement the chance to leave.

Then with everyone still assembled in the lunchroom, they brought down Thornton and Gooch.  They gave the CEOs their demands.  Thornton and Gooch were to go to the board and request that Arthur T. be returned with full authority.  They wouldn't work for anyone else.  There was to be no discussion.  The group had agreed beforehand on a code word to end the meeting;  when the group had finished laying out their demands, Tom Trainor said the code word.  Everyone stood up in unison and began to file past a stunned Thornton and Gooch.  "They were just standing there with their mouths open," recalls Trainor.

(116)  "This isn't work for all of us;  this is a family," Tom Gordon said.  It was a group that was clearly unnerved and anxious but also determined.  "You take down one, you get the twenty-five thousand behind us," Gordon said.

Steve Paulenka added, "We're  crazy bunch.  if this was a poker game, we just went _all in_."

(123)  At Market Basket, [David] Courteau says that everyone is treated equally.  It is a climate, he says, that "starts with Arthur T." and the kind of environment where if "you work hard, they notice it."

(132)  Some people questioned whether a nonunion workforce could sustain a protest over weeks.  But their sense of unity, based on their affiliation with the company, was as powerful as any union membership.  "This company never needed, or ever will need, a union," Operations Supervisor Joe Schmidt told public radio station, WBUR.  "We're far stronger than that."

(137)  What they had not counted on was the loyalty of Market Basket customers.  "As soon as we asked people to stop coming in, it pretty much stopped," [Karla] Foster said.

(138)  He [James Post] says a lot of people interviewed on the picket line said things like, "you know, I haven't been a big Market Basket customer, but I really love what they are doing, and I want to be a part of that."

(140)  Customers pressured other customers to boycott even more than associates did.  Associates would encourage people to boycott, but never was there a report of heckling a customer who entered a store.  Associates assumed that shoppers had no alternative.  "It was a positive protest," she says.

(147)  As Steve Paulenka said at one point during the protest, "The customers are the locomotive pulling this whole thing right now.  They have shut this company down and they are not coming back until we come back and we are not coming back until our boss comes back."

(150)  "One of the things they did well was they made an effort to buy as much locally grown as they could," he [Rich Bonanno, president of the MA Farm Bureau and farmer] said.  "So when this happened, it wasn't hurting a California grower who amybe sold to twenty grocers.  You're talking about businesses around here, and Market Basket is a big enough player that they're really hurt."

(160)  He [State Senator Barry Finegold] says, "It was one fo the most bipartisan issues that I ever got involved with."

(166)  This [disgruntled employees, boycotting customers, and disappearing vendors] appears to have left Arthur T.'s offer as the only viable bid left standing.  Moreover, it was at preprotest value and for the full 50.5 percent owned by George's heirs (Arthur S.'s side).  Estimates placed the bid around $1.5 billion.

(174)  There was literally dancing in the aisles at one store.  A couple hundred shoppers organized - with the help of the store director in Londonberry, New Hampshire - what one might describe as part flash mob, part conga line.  Customers cheered and danced triumphantly while the Pharrell Williams song "Happy" blared from the public address system.

(175)  In the autumn following the sale agreement, at least two documentaries were in the works (Market Basket Saga and Food Fight).

(176)  "As I stand before you, I am in awe of what you have all accomplished," he [Arthur T.] began, "and the sterling example you have all set for so many people across the region and across the country."  The big stuffed giraffe was right at his side.  Some managers were back in suits and ties, whereas others still had their t-shirts with slogans like "Market Basket strong."

"The public watched in awe and admiration because you empowered others to seek change," he said.  Seeing everyone again, he said, was like "a little piece of heaven on earth."  Some associates interrupted with shouts of "We love you."

"I love you too."

He continued, "May we always remember this past summer first as a time where our collective values of loyalty, courage and kindness toward one another really prevailed, and in that process we just happened to save our company....  You have demonstrated to the world that it is a person's moral obligation and social responsibility to protect a culture that provides an honorable and a dignified place in which to work."

(179)  Speaking at an event a month after the protest ended, Arthur T. renewed his commitment to the Market Basket business model:  "We go forward with a commitment to go forward and grow a socially responsible company that, at all times, is focused on teh well-being and best interests of the associates, the customers, the vendors, and the communities that we serve."

What he describes is not so much a destination but a continual effort to maintain a business that improves lives.

(182)  Many of those associates went to bat for Arthur T. and his management philosophy.  They fought for the combination of respect in the workplace and wealth sharing.

(190)  The idea that companies need to serve a range of people has even won over some who were once proponents of the shareholder idea.  Jack Welch is one of these.  He was one of the most successful CEOs of General Electric in the 1980s and 1990s.  He was once held up as a hero who was willing to do whatever it took to generate value for shareholders.  But now he says, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.  Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...  Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."

(191)  Cornell Law School Professor Lynn Stout is a leading scholar who is questioning the very idea that shareholders own the company.  She explains that the US Supreme Court has recently ruled that a corporation is an entity unto itself, similar to a person.  This gives corporations a certain independence and the same free speech that a person enjoys.  She says that caes like Citizens Unites v FEC and Burwell V Hobby Lobby hold up this idea.  In the Citizens United case, the court ruled that corporations are covered by the First Amendment and can express political views.  In the Burwell case, the court extended freedom of religion rights to a closely held arts and crafts company on the grounds that it is its own entity.  Stout explains that a person cannot own a company any more than a person can own another person.  "Because of the legal 'personhood' of corporations," she says, "buying a share in a corporation is like making a contract with the legal 'person' that is the company, which is different from buying the company."

(193)  As almost all corporations - Market Basket included - board members have a fiduciary responsibility to serve the _corporation_.  Make no mistake:  shareholders are part of the extended enterprise and, in fact, have a special place and importance in a corporation.  However, shareholders are one of many stakeholders a board needs to consider in its decisions.  This responsibility is stated clearly in the Massachusetts Corporate Code, which sets guidelines for companies that are incorporated it the state (as is Market Basket).  The code states that each director is expected to serve in good faith, use appropriate and reasonable judgment, and act "in a manner the director reasonably believes to be _in the best interests of the corporation_" (emphasis added).  In determining what is in the best interest of the corporation, "A director may consider the interests of the corporation's employees, suppliers, creditors and customers, the economy of the state, the region and the nation, community and societal considerations, and the long-term and short-term interests of the corporation and its shareholders, including the possibility that these interests may be best served by the continued independence of the corporation."

(194)  ... Massachusetts, a state that has, according to one study, one of the top ten hgihest income disparities in the country.  (New Hampshire ranked twenty-eighth on the list.)   

(198)  Rather than trying to become more like Market Basket or some other prototype, companies need to become better at being themselves.  What companies need to do is dig deeper into who they are and how they can serve others better.  It is what some are calling "corporate purpose."  That purpose is a company's reason for being....

Many companies are successful in terms of financial performance.  Much fewer are successful in making a difference in people's lives that others cannot imitate.

(203)  Bill Marsden, the senior executive who was fired along with Arthur T. and has now returned as key advisor, sums it up this way:  "We're a rich company, but it's not because of the money;  it's because of the people."

Joan Didion's Miami and Today's Republican Party

Another found book finally read.  (Ah Cambridge, where the streets are paved with books.)  Going through it, I found that her description of the Miami Cuban exile community during the Reagan years was a precursor of the advanced polarization we find in USA politics today and another vector for the prion disease that, as Charles Pierce writes, ate the brains of the Republican party.

_Miami_ by Joan Didion

NY:  Pocket Books, 1987

ISBN 0-671-66820-X

(17)  Some were American citizens and some never would be, but they were all Cuban first, and they proceeded equally from a kind of collective spell, an occult enchantment, from that febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos which renders exile so potent an organizing principle.  They shared not just Cuba as a birthplace but Cuba as a construct, the idea of birthright lost.

(93)  It was a year [1963] described by Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr, as one in which "the notion of invading Cuba had been dead for years" (since the notion of invading Cuba had demonstrably not been dead as recently as April of 1961, the "for years" is interesting on its face, and suggestive of the way in which Washington's perception of time expands and contracts with its agenda)...

(113)  "This is Miami," Bernardo Benes said about the radio attacks.  "Pure Miami.  A million Cubans are blackmailed, totally controlled, by three radio stations.  I feel sorry for the Cuban community in Miami.  Because they have imposed on themselves, by way of the Right, the same condition that Castro has imposed on Cuba.  Total intolerance.  And ours is worse.  Because it is entirely voluntary."

NB:  the model for the right wing radio game

(129)  Still, "right-wing," on the American spectrum, where political positions were understood as marginally different approaches to what was seen as a shared goal, seemed not to apply.

NB:  changed since 1987.  There is little or nothing left of a "shared goal" now in our politics.

(178-179)  David Gergen had worked in the White House during three administrations, and acquired during the course of them an entire vocabulary of unattributable nods and acquiescent silences, a diction that tended to evaporate like smoke, but the subtext of what he was saying on this spring afternoon in 1984 seemed clear, and to suggest a view of the government of the United States, from someone who had labored at its exact heart for nine of the preceding thirteen years, not substantively different from the view of the government of the United States held by those Cubans to whom I later talked in Miami:  the government of the United States was in this view one for which other parts of the world, in this instance Central America, existed only as "issues."

(190)  As it happened I had heard Jack Wheeler before, at a Conservative Political Action Conference session on "Rolling Back the Soviet Empire," where he had received a standing ovation after suggesting that copies of the Koran be smuggled into the Soviet Union to "stimulate an Islamic revival" and the subsequent "death of a thousand cuts," and I was already familiar not only with many of his exploits but with his weird and rather punitive enthusiasm.