Book Review: Cindy Sheehan and the Starfish Movement

Cindy Sheehan is leaving the anti-war movement to which she gave so much life, energy, and focus. She will be back, no doubt, in some form. I wish her well in restoring herself and renewing her own life. But I firmly disagree (and this is a blue-moon moment) with William R. Pitt that "Anyone glad for her departure from activism is celebrating a disaster."

While I doubt I'd use the word "glad" to describe my own feelings, certainly "relieved" qualifies. At any rate, in no way does "disaster" describe this moment. Quite the contrary: this woman endured everything from divorce to death threats to arrest to public taunting and ridicule from the mass media; it is time she retreated and renewed.

There is also a broader theme to this, which I am going to explain with a book review. Yes, a book review. The book is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The authors are Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, and they have written one of the most crystalline gems of social insight that I have seen in any non-fiction these past 20 years. In a mere 200 pages of text, these two Stanford grads provide more clarity of perspective on our society, its group psychologies and cultural transformations, than you are likely to get from a shelf full of punditry or a year's worth of television. I do not think I am overstating the case for this book: it is the most important and clarion piece of non-fiction to arise in this first decade of the 21st century. It is a book made for, and by, its era.

The metaphor of the title is a comparison of "top-down", hierarchically-structured groups and organizations, such as we are all familiar with in corporate America and government (that's the spider, who can be made lame from the loss of its legs and dead from decapitation); and the fresh wave of decentralized, leaderless, or non-hierarchical organizations that have become such a force in society over the past decade of the Internet (this is the "starfish," which can be chopped up into numerous pieces, each of which will respond by growing a new organism or member).

The book opens with a heady analysis of how a starfish phenomenon evolved in one particular category: the P2P file sharing services in the Napster/Grokster model. The authors show how the early versions of these spontaneous organizations got stuck in "spider" mode, and were therefore eventually trapped and killed by big corporate media and its legal juggernaut. But these Napster-type experiments benefited from such attacks by a response of ever-increasing differentiation, diversification, and "starfish"-style regrowth. Brafman and Beckstrom finally lead the reader to the eMule service, which took decentralization to the point of anonymity and total leaderlessness. Big Media cannot attack an entity like eMule, because it has no head, no governance, no bank accounts: there is nothing for a legal or corporate machine to assault, except for individual users of the service, who, aside from being virtually innumerable, are mostly children and rarely wealthy.

The authors go on to reveal both the beauty and the danger inherent in the starfish-mode of organizational being, drawing examples as diverse as Wikipedia and al Qaeda. Along the way, they present portraits of environmental groups, activist organizations, online merchants, and Internet services. But if this book stopped with mere sketches of eBay, Alcoholics Anonymous, Apache, craigslist, Goodwill Industries, and IBM, then it would be merely an interesting intellectual snack for the MBA crowd.

The Starfish and the Spider becomes a banquet of cultural insight because it digs past the surface that so many pundits and social commentators stop to admire. Brafman and Beckstrom turn the starfish on its back, examine it in varying light, carry it into vastly disparate environments, and constantly ask questions of it. In doing so, they discover some principles and characteristics common to starfish organizations and the people who inspire and influence their growth.

One of their most fascinating discoveries is in the figure of what they term "the catalyst." It is here that we are brought back to Cindy Sheehan (this is my own connection, so if you think it's a stupid association, don't blame the authors of the book). The catalyst is the person who founds a starfish group, the one who gives it form, ideas, value, focus, and meaning. Examples of catalysts that Brafman and Beckstrom offer are:

Granville Sharp, leader of the abolitionist movement against slavery in England

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who founded the women's suffrage movement that Susan B. Anthony later took up with still greater energy

Craig Newmark of craigslist

Bill Wilson of AA

One thing the authors point out is that

a catalyst is like the architect of a house: he's essential to the long-term structural integrity, but he doesn't move in. In fact, when the catalyst stays around too long and becomes absorbed in his creation, the whole structure becomes more centralized.

So one common feature to the life and health of a growing decentralized movement or organization is that the catalyst almost always leaves or at least recedes into the mesh of the whole, once the group has matured enough to work autonomously and to withstand assault. Whenever a catalyst attempts to assume a traditional, CEO-type of leadership role, the organization loses its dynamism, its life as a starfish, and becomes a centralized, hierarchical spider--much easier to mark, and then suppress or assimilate.

For a corporate entity, this may not necessarily be a bad thing: growth-as-profit, after all, can be nurtured in a traditional corporate management structure. But growth-as-message can become stilled or silenced when there's a top dog in place, approving this, denying that; or simply being a figurehead in a particular place as the focus of activism or just attention.

The anti-war movement has benefited enormously from Cindy Sheehan's presence, personality, experience, and energy. We have admired her from afar for some two years now: I first wrote about her here (note also that the fractiousness and in-fighting that Sheehan noted in her parting statement existed way back then, too).

Since then, however, the movement has grown, thanks largely to Sheehan's example and leadership. But I agree with Brafman and Beckstrom, that a time inevitably comes for every starfish organization when its formative human force must retreat. In our own democracy's formative stage, George Washington had to decline the crown that his followers attempted to place on his head. Other catalysts have had to spurn a crown or a corner office, and always for the good of the whole, for the sake of the movement's continued growth.

Since Sheehan first camped out in George Bush's backyard, Code Pink, IVAW, and hundreds of other "starfish arms and legs" have formed around her and taken on their own life in the anti-war sea. It is time that these organisms were allowed to share in both the light and the tribulation, the accolades and the calumny.

The blogosphere--itself a starfish organization--has benefited from Sheehan's influence and example. I think she recognizes this as well, and thus chose Daily Kos as the forum for her parting message. It is perhaps only seemingly ironic that the world wide web is perhaps the least "spidery" vehicle of communication on earth today. Only on the Internet, for example, could you find a science writer for a stodgy paper like the New York Times writing a scathing indictment of the Bush administration--it happened today.

As Brafman and Beckstrom point out in their book, this kind of seeming chaos is unique to a starfish-style organization: "When you give people freedom, you get chaos, but you also get incredible creativity." Even on the website of a spider organization like the New York Times.

Clearly, we probably need more chaos; and we certainly need more creativity. Congress has failed to carry out the will of the people, because it cannot respond to the fluid movement of the starfish; it is too mired in its own iron-stranded matrix of excess, corruption, deceit, and self-indulgence. As the authors of The Starfish and the Spider indicate, we can only overcome the turgid inertia of Washington politics by redoubling the starfish energy of the anti-war movement. In other words, it is time for a catalyst to step into the background, so that the whole is given renewed life. And so that a long-suffering and heroic Mom can once more feel the quiet joys of private life that the rest of us so often take for granted.

Geek Wednesday: How Much Does Air Cost?

Geeks, technophiles, gearheads, and webaholics: we've got a new assignment for you, once again courtesy of our friends at Save The Internet. Here's the pitch:

The FCC is on the verge of turning over a large chunk of the public airwaves to the same giant phone and cable companies that control high-speed Internet access for more than 96 percent of connected American homes.

This public "spectrum" could revolutionize the Internet in America. Its wireless signal passes through concrete buildings and over mountains; it can connect tens of million of Americans who are being passed over by Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

Don't let the FCC give away our wireless Internet to these price-gouging giants. The FCC deadline is fast approaching. Act now!

Remember when Bechtel Corp. "owned" the water of Bolivia--even the rain that fell from the sky, so that you were expected to pay them even if you went outside and opened your mouth in the rain? (to see and hear the whole insane story, rent or buy The Corporation, one of the great documentaries ever made). Well, this is along the same lines: selling the air to Big Telcom so they can charge you megabux for your Wi-fi so that fat corporate trolls are made wealthier, fatter, and more trollish.



Social Networking Update: LinkedIn now has an "Answers" module, where users can post questions to the community and receive intelligent, well-thought responses. I found a question about what is required to be a success as an author or editor, so I posted a response. By the way, the titles of those books in that post are all real: I just sat beside a "Business Motivation" shelf at B&N and copied them out on the MacBook. Amazing.

But LinkedIn is for our professional and not our horny self. For the latter, I recently discovered Orkut, a Google-administered social networking and dating site. The profile entry section is very detailed, though not a total slog to get through; and because it's run by the geeks of the big G, the design and functionality are very cool, sure, and breezy. I'll let you know if it helps me with my HTML (come on, you know what HTML really stands for, right?).

Fire-foxy Lady: In case you don't recognize that lovely lady in the picture, she's the Lizard-Wrangler-in-Chief of Mozilla/Firefox, Mitchell Baker. I've been reading her blog at the Mozillazine, and much of what I see as the potential of open-source modeling for government and mainstream business can be discovered in the writing of this extraordinary woman.


The Geek Groan, or why there are no geek comedians: So the Tux car at the Indy 500 finished last, and one reader of C-Net's story on the disappointing finish commented "It's real hard to get good drivers for Linux hardware."

Dell-buntu ships: You can order one now. Though the savings won't exactly blow your socks off, these units are cheaper than comparable Vista boxes, and marginally less expensive than their counterparts at System76 or Linspire. I put together a Dell desktop box, sans monitor, for $700 that I know would make Ubuntu fly; and my friend Nearly Redmond Nick added a monitor and ended up with $1080 for a box with 2GB RAM, 22" monitor, upgraded processor, video card and 1 year support.

Still, my previous advice stands for any Windows switchers who are contemplating Linux but don't want to stick their head under the hood and spend a lot of time in Synaptic Package Manager (software download utility for Ubuntu) or the Terminal/Console (geek command line): get a flavor of Linux that features a more complete installation with all available third-party drivers, such as Xandros, Linspire, or my own favorite, MEPIS. I have another video demo of MEPIS, below. I'll simply say it again: the more I use this Linux distro, the more I like it.

But as I said last week, I'll slip into a Best Buy one day later this week, once the Dellbuntu boxes are there, and check out what Dell has done with the Feisty Fawn. Meanwhile, if you're looking for a way to install Ubuntu onto your existing hardware but without having to partition your hard drive or jump through any other geek hoops, Wubi may be your best option. It will allow you to run Ubuntu just like any other software application on a Windows box. And Ubuntu running in Wubi will run your Windows applications inside Linux...your computer will be like those Russian dolls, one within another within another...


But what's the big deal about open source software, after all (aside from the fact that it's cheap to run, free to have, exponentially safer than Windows and usually just as functional)? Here's one answer, which I wrote nearly two years ago, in June, 2005:

To me, the Open Source Society represents a return to, and recovery of, Democracy. A democratic society works through its challenges collaboratively, in a spirit of active inquiry, where dissent is both tolerated and even encouraged. In a culture like ours, where the Cult of the Specialist seems to have locked us into inner cubicles of narrow expertise in which one's identity is defined exclusively by one's specialty, the Open Source model offers us some hope of recovering Freedom--especially freedom of the press.

Later in the week I'll have a review of an ingenious book that goes further into this theme. It's called The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by yet another two Stanford geniuses.

But then again, really--who needs open source when Microsoft is constantly innovating on behalf of the people? Yep, the coffee table PC: just think of the possibilities.

"We see this as a multi-billion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Hugo-Not: Crossing the Border of Tyranny

Sometimes, even those toward whom you are favorably disposed cross a boundary and make you question how you'd ever thought kindly of them.

Granted, I've never felt completely warm and fuzzy about Hugo Chavez. True, I defended his right to live when Pat Robertson was ready to call out the Death Squads of Christ to Venezuela. And I did find Chavez's UN speech, in which he referred to Bush as a "demon" both entertaining and revealing.

But now he has crossed the line from socialist revolutionary to petty despot. He is taking over the businesses and the press of his country and turning them into state organs of profit and propaganda.

However you look at it, this is a brute force example of Stalinism. Hugo Chavez has crossed the line, and he had better step back quickly, or else he has taken the first step on the road to the destruction of his government and his former vision of a better, more just nation.

Who else is blaming the media for all his problems? Our buddy Paul Wolfowitz, who is just returning to his old employer's favorite fallback excuse: the liberal media is to blame for everything we do and for every seeming error we commit.

I've been fired a number of times in my career, and I have never had to sling shit or spit backwards at anyone in public over it. Where does this guy get off? He swung his main squeeze into a corporate cushion so he could more easily slap her up on the desktop whenever he felt like it during the day. And this is the media's fault?

This last one would be as funny as that, except that it's about an author I really do care a lot about. There are reports that the final Harry Potter tome is being printed in secret and amid darkness by employees who are under threat of immediate dismissal if they are caught reading, let alone copying, the text they are printing in a perpetual night of police-state fear.

If this is true (and if it's not, I blame the media), and Ms. Rowling is endorsing this insanity, then she too is setting herself up for a fall. This kind of obsession over plot, this compulsion over suspense, is what makes for bad stories--the kind we have not gotten from Rowling so far. Literature is not about what happens; it is about the meaning that each individual takes away from the story. Before I ever read Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, I knew a lot about it, and I knew how it ended. But once I read it, it was just as beautiful and original as if I'd never heard about it before. I also remember seeing The Green Mile well before I read King's novel, and the book was still one of the most moving reads I've had in my life.

The same goes for Harry Potter: if you were to tell me everything that's going to be in this final book, I'd still read it and love it for its messages. In fact, I had seen the first movie before I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and its metaphor fairly leaped off the page at me nonetheless. Two years later, I was writing my own book about the penetrating social and personal messages contained in these stories of wizards and witches.

Ms. Rowling: if you are going to go stir-crazy over information leaks from printers, it will degrade the quality of your future work. Let go and let this phenomenon take its own course, so that you can remain an artist and not lower yourself to the level of a plot-hack. You stand in the forefront of fiction writers today because your work causes affliction to demagogues like this kook. Why do you think Bishop Burke (who, in addition to hating Harry Potter, also hates Ted Kennedy, Sheryl Crow, and Michael J. Fox) wishes to suppress your work, Ms. Rowling? Could it be that when he looks at Lord Voldemort, he sees himself? Could it be that you successfully strip away the purple veneer of piety and reveal the rotting corruption beneath it? Could it have something to do with the way a "Ministry"—either of "magic" (religion) or of state (no KR reporters allowed on our plane)—manipulates and intimidates the press? Yes, you've laid that bare as well, in front of the most dangerous audience of all—the children. Voldemorts like Bush, Burke, and Chavez can't stand that kind of treatment, you know.

So it doesn't matter to me, Ms. Rowling, what we hear or when about the outcome or the plot of the final book. What matters is the meaning, which no one can "spoil," try as they might. I am far less concerned about whether Voldemort dies in Book 7 as I am about whether we can succeed in killing him off in our world, before it's too late.
___________________


And now, your Bush Administration MSE moment. We'll be presenting these quotations from one of the core texts of every psych graduate student's bookbag, The Psychiatric Mental Status Examination, by Paula T. Trzepacz and Robert W. Baker, throughout the coming weeks. Today's comes from page 51, in the "Mood and Affect" section—just think of the Bushian comedic "search" for WMDs at the Correspondents Dinner a few years back:

La Belle Indifference: Lack of the normally expected concern for an apparently serious condition...La belle indifference is associated with conversion disorder (previously known as hysteria) and various neurologic disorders. These patients typically lack insight regarding the emotions or conflict that underlie the conversion.

Monday with McKenna: Gay Marriage

The images are from APOD; the music is from the Beatles; the movie is from Apple's iSight. Oh, and the blog today is from Terry McKenna.

June is the month of weddings, so as we head into June, it’s time for this blog to consider Gay Marriage. 

Gay Marriage is one of those issues that keeps bubbling over (similar to the issue of illegal aliens).  One of the guys I know (he’s a member of the church choir where I sing) asked me to sign a petition that demands that our state legislators put the question of gay marriage to an UP or DOWN vote.  I said no.  He was stunned.  Actually nonplussed! (You don’t have many opportunities to use nonplussed, so I thought I’d fit it in). 

For gays the issue is simple: they want to join the rest of us in having the right to express a lifelong commitment of love and devotion, and what else but marriage fits the bill?  Think about it.  Where formerly, gays had been restricted to the shadows of our society, they now want to bring their lives and relationships in from the shadows and make them part of the public record.  Quite a change from the closeted world of gay life before the 1970’s.  Also different from the androgynous late 70’s where public gay life was marked by hedonism and abandon (a period that came crashing down with the AIDS epidemic). 

So gay marriage is a good thing, isn’t it?

Polls are an inaccurate resource, but if you watch the polls, you’ll see that the American people have been both generally for and against gay marriage at different times over the past year.  Apparently now is not a good time for gay marriage.  According to the most recent CBS News poll, only 34% of Americans support gay marriage, and nearly half believe that gay sex should be illegal.  Hmmm…. 

But despite the polls, most Americans don’t devote much time to the topic of gay marriage as they go about their lives.  The issue is really a right wing smokescreen, useful to distract voters from the overall failure of the Bush program.  I don’t accept their arguments, but their fear of change is to be expected.  Conservatives articulate two concerns: first, that marriage as we practice it now is essentially an unchanged and universal institution - so how dare we alter it?  Their second concern is that the restructuring of marriage would somehow threaten all of our marriages. 

Before I discuss marriage (briefly) let me first point out that our civil society should concern itself with one thing only – is the change beneficial or harmful?  And by the way, despite the polls which suggest otherwise, the shift toward gay marriage has ALREADY HAPPENED.  By the time a middle of the road institution like the CBS News Poll is ready to ask the question “should gays be allowed to marry” the societal changes that would allow gay marriage to be accepted have already taken place.  All that's left is to bring up the rear – our very conservative South and the mountain states. 

Change can be a problem.  The 1960’s was a time of vast societal change.  The changes in favor of racial civil rights were good.  But the era also began a questioning of the rest of our society’s norms, and the intensity of the questioning was accompanied by a drift into permissiveness that became outright abandon.  A few middle class kids lost their way in a blizzard of sex, drugs and rock and roll (many more passed safely into and out of their purple haze).  The era was troubling to sincere representatives of society.  Nixon may have been manipulating us by speaking about the silent majority, but I still remember my parent’s confusion about the pot and LSD that at least one of their kids was using.  (He eventually straightened out).

My summary above omits a lot, and sounds like pop sociology, but it serves one purpose: to remind us that when change is occurring, we have a genuine concern – is it ok?  Regarding gay marriage, our question should be: does Gay Marriage represent a throwback to wantonness? Or is it something worthy of support?

Before I answer, let me complete my musings about marriage.

On the surface, my parent’s marriage was identical to mine with my wife.  But the preconditions for marriage were different.  In theUS, from the Federalist era through the early 1960’s, marriage was the only way that women could secure a place in society.  Unmarried, a woman remained on the margins.  My mother wanted in.  She was 32 years old and a practicing RN when she married.  Immediately after marriage, she stopped working, and soon after started raising a family (6 births over 10 years).  By the time my wife and I married, it was different.  She and I had both recently obtained MFA’s and we both expected to work throughout our lives. 

But at least my father didn’t purchase my mother’s virginity, and neither did my mother bring a dowry.  But dowries continued to be paid in Europe, through the Victorian era and were respected by European law.  Before the Victorian era, among property owners, marriages were often brokered and the woman was very much property.  If Biblical marriage is at all similar to ours, then what do we make of this passage from Exodus?  "If a man seduces a virgin who is not pledged to be married and sleeps with her, he must pay the bride-price, and she shall be his wife. If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he must still pay the bride-price for virgins." NIV   Here is a reference from Wikipedia: One common penalty for the kidnapping and rape of unmarried women was that the abductor or rapist had to provide the woman's dowry.   (In either case, the unmarried woman compensated only for the loss of her value on the marriage market.)

So marriage HAS changed.  (And I haven’t even mentioned polygamy or concubines).  Along with the change, we now expect a man to remain faithful and sexually exclusive – women have always been expected to be faithful.  This last change is VERY recent.  With marriage being a love match between equals, we expect life long fidelity. 

Despite the moralizing of those on the right who deplore moral relativism, in fact, morals are defined differently by different cultures. As culture evolves, morals evolve as well.  The people who wrote the Bible did not notice the personhood of women (almost no one did, so the Bible is not alone).  In our day, we recognize both woman and gays as persons, so our societal codes and restrictions must change along with our changed perceptions.

So… what of gay marriage? 

Conservative’s qualms should be dismissed as nonsense.  Marriage is a multifarious institution that has evolved to meet the needs of each age and culture.  And as far as impacting straight marriage – it’s hard to imagine how.  For myself, I don’t like to see men kiss, but that’s pretty much my only inhibition.  When gays want to marry, they are moving in a conservative direction.  They want to be part of our social order, and given a place at the table.  As such, gay marriage represents moral renewal, not a retreat into degeneracy.  Yes, gays still frequent their leather bars; but straight men seek their amusements too.  I’m not going to moralize, both sets of amusements are fine as far as they go.  But neither is representative of what either straights or gays want from marriage.  Again.. Gays want In. 

It is time.

--T. McKenna

Painting, President, Planet

I saw this painting hanging on the wall of my accountant's office (click the graphic to enlarge it), and it was so revealing to me that I snapped a photograph of it. My accountant thought I was simply admiring, as he did, the impressive realism of the painted scene. But what I saw was an artist's rendering of modern culture.

"Can you see what this painting is telling us about our culture, and the relationship between spirituality and commerce?" I asked Peter, my accountant.

He gave me a blank look in response, so I stood beside the painting and explained:

"There's the Stock Market, massive, brightly lit, with a stream of busy blurs of people moving before it. On the right is the Federal Reserve Building, seen in profile as it were. Again, massive, rising out of the steps over which Washington stands in regal, giant splendor. Squished between these two and shoved way into the background, so that it is thrown into near-total shadow, is Trinity Church. It has a narrow, cramped, faded look about it, compared to the bright, white, flag-draped monumentalism of the other two buildings. This is a picture of how the spiritual center has been pushed out of the center, and into a distance of shadowed, pale irrelevance."

The accountant's jaw slowly dropped as I delivered this little speech, and then he muttered that "this used to be my favorite painting..." I told him it still could be, but for a different reason.

Now for the rest of us, the point of all this is not to bewail any supposed morbidity in religion and spirituality. If you've read my writings about fundamentalism at this blog, or my discussion of Lord Voldemort in The Tao of Hogwarts, then you know that the eclipsing of institutional religion is to my mind anything but a subject for regret or lamentation.

So what's the problem, if any? Well, what isn't in the painting? Nature, of course: not a single bush, animal, plant, even a cut flower. Hell, you can't even see the sky! Only the brick and stone monuments of two ideologies: church and commerce, with the suggestion of state in the Federal Reserve Building.

Thus, my point is that we can't reduce this issue to a debate about competing institutions—church and state, spirituality and commerce. We have to transform both by making Nature and the health of the Earth primary, ascendant in our thinking. This, in a nutshell, is the entire message—the mission, if you will—of our blog. We need a new leader within ourselves, before we can think about leaders in our governments and businesses. That leader must be Nature—the nature within us, and the nature around us. There is no separation.

With that point made, maybe you can guess who I'd like to see in the White House. The rightful and duly elected President of the United States. If he decides it's not right for him now, I respect that decision. He will remain a force of sanity and truth in any event. But if he tosses his hat into the ring, I'll hand out leaflets for him in downtown Crawford or at Liberty University. My only advice for him would be: turn within and trust nature, your own true nature, Mr. Gore. It'll lead you right.