Subject: LL9804312 Ben Seattle: reply to Louis Paulsen on proposed electronic news service Date: Wednesday, April 15, 1998 8:31 AM Hi Louis, Thanks for your interest. Louis Paulsen: >I certainly don't oppose cooperative Internet ventures, >but I do have some questions: I appreciate your questions. I am trying to better understand how a electronic news service will likely develop and evolve. I believe that such a news service, that serves the working class, is inevitable. I believe that some people read my proposal and immediately make all sorts of assumptions about what this news service would or would not be like. I think it is far better to do as you have done--and ask intelligent questions. I will reply with my own opinions. Only time will tell if they are accurate to any degree. In many cases, your guess about what this may look like will be as good as mine. > As there are hundreds (at least) of parties and organizations > with access to the Net, who is going to be the 'editor' of > this news service and reduce the millions and millions of words > down to a number which people can reasonably consume? Because the hundreds (or more) of different groups do not get along very well, it is not realistic to expect that there is any way that a single editor could be chosen. These groups are often in very intense competition with one another for the support of activists. They are frequently not on speaking terms with one another. Fortunately, current technology does not require that a single editor exist. Here is what I wrote in LL9804.039: Readers themselves (thru a collaborative process) and competing political trends will rate articles and decide what will appear on various competing "front pages" that will function as windows into a single common database to which all trends will contribute. Such a news service will eventually provide millions of readers easy access to a common indexed system of progressive articles, commentary and opinion on all important topics and will, furthermore, allow readers to add their own public comments or questions to all articles and, in this way, will serve as the launching ground for a large number of forums. So, in short, there would not be a single editor, or even a single group of editors. There would be a *single database* to which all trends contributed articles with a uniform format (more on that in just a bit). Each political trend, or group of like-minded people, would be able to decide for themselves what articles were most important or useful for their own purposes. Each political trend would have the ability to have its own front page--but would be free to use the articles created by other groups (with whatever modifications they believed were appropriate) because there would be no copyright. Instead of copyright, we would simply have a common-sense tradition that appropriate credit (and hyperlinks) to original material be given. Even though there would be many competing front pages, however, all front pages would link to a common database. As soon as a reader begins to follow the hypertext links (since the articles would be linked to one another in various ways) or use the indexes, the underlying unity of the database would reveal itself. From the perspective of the reader, there would be a *single source* full of a large amount of news and information, organized such that everything is quick, easy and convenient to find, read and comment on publically thru the use of what I call "public interactive margins" (ie: public notes that could be left in the electronic margins). These margin notes would be readable by other readers who would have the option of viewing these notes or not, depending on their preferences at the time. In the experimental site I am working on (and which may or may not resemble what will evolve in real life) the common format of each article would include a short title, long title, short summary and long summary of uniform length limitations (ie: no more than 5 words, 20 words, 65 words and 200 words, respectively). Readers who see a portion of the article (ie: the title or the summary) would be able to "drill down" to get more of the article. If the reader is sufficiently interested, she would be able to easily drill down to the entire article and see what it is linked to and the electronic margin notes which other readers have attached to it. > What would this "news service" provide for people that will be > better than we can do right now with a web browser, mailing > lists like leninlist, USENET groups, and multi-link sites like > Jay's List of Progressive Resources? Good question. All of the above methods are useful--as is the news service at your own www.workers.org. All of these resources offer us something we can learn from and use. But something more systematic is needed. The main issue here is that all of the above methods can be unnecessarily time consumming when you want to find something. Suppose a reader, on the spur of the moment, becomes curious about China. She would be able, using the proposed news service, to quickly see a list of all articles on China by all groups on the left. She would be able, depending on her preference at the time, to see only the titles or the summaries (and then drill down as desired). She would also be able to limit the time period used (ie: view only a list of articles from the last six months, or only the articles from the period around the massacre in Tiananmen square). So this would be something which combined features of all of the services you list above, and somewhat extended and automate them. In addition, such a news service would summarize key articles in mainstream newspapers (such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), magazines (such as Business Week and the Economist) and leftist journals. This would help to insure wide coverage and far-reaching debate. At the same time it would be far more focused and efficient than a search using Yahoo or Alta Vista. Extending the example above, the reader would be able to get a list of summaries of significant articles about China originiating in mainstream newspapers and magazines. The summaries would be made by what would eventually be a sizeable number of volunteers. Also (and this is very important) all articles in the database could be rated by readers. As as reader, you would be able to view (should you prefer) only articles with high ratings. Furthermore, there is a phenomena in cyberspace that certain people (or groups) have highly exagerated estimations of their own abilities. On the Spoon's M-I list, for example, there used to be a guy named Malecki who made lots of posts but actually had very little to say. Readers of the proposed news service would be able to easily filter out spam of this kind using a variety of bozo filters. You read an article that appears to be full of complete nonsense? You can press a button and not have anything by that same author appear on your screen for the next six months. Similarly, you could screen out electronic margin notes by bozo know-it-alls. Collaborative filtering would be the most powerful tool. A reader could ask to see articles that were rated as interesting by *those readers* who had given a favorable rating to the same articles that she herself had rated favorably. Put in simple terms: this means you could choose to see what articles are most popular with that subset of readers who tend to agree with you. Briefly, also, I will mention money. How would all these groups that often act like they hate each others' guts be able to trust one another well enough to work around issues involving money? Fortunately, the answer here is simple: This technology is becoming so dirt cheap that money no longer needs to be the kind of issue it once was. I am, at present, playing around with a database that the public would be able to update over the web. It costs me only $40 a month. Once I get it going it would likely be able to handle hundreds (or maybe thousands) of people per day. This is hardly millions, but the technology is getting cheaper and easier to use every day. > How does your analogy of Iskra work? Iskra was > formed very early in the history of the Russian > Social-Democratic Labor Party, at a time when many > questions regarding the application of Marxism > to the situation in Russia had not even been addressed. > It is now 100 years later. The Leninist, Social-Democratic, > and reformist parties have traditions and have developed > their theoretical lines to an incomparably greater extent. > There are splits among these trends and there are > REASONS for the splits. It would have been unrealistic > to try to publish a single "Iskra" for the RSDLP as late as > 1910, let alone 1920, so how can there be a single "Iskra" > for all the descendants of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks > in 1998? Yes. There are reasons for the splits. The most significant of these reasons, in my view, is the split between revolutionary and reformist politics. I have strong feelings on this myself. It is the influence of reformism, in my view, that is responsible for the split in the working class and progressive movements and that keeps the bourgeoisie in power. Yet both reformist and revolutionary trends would be able to contribute articles to this common database while maintaining separate and competing "front pages". I believe that, in the long run, such an arrangement would be very much to the advantage of revolutionary politics. Readers would be able to easily compare, for example, reformist and revolutionary perspectives on the same issues. This can only facilitate political development. Various trends that do not get along might be likely to contribute copyright-free articles to a common public-domain database--because the general sentiment of progressive people would be in favor of doing so--and this sentiment would not be easy to disregard. The news service would function both as a platform for cooperation between trends and as an arena of struggle between them. Because of the underlying unity of the database, however, it would become very difficult for any trend to use the tactics of "information isolation" to advance its aims. "Information isolation" involves keeping readers ignorant of criticisms of an article or criticisms of a political position. Because of the ease with which all readers would be able to post electronic margin notes, and so forth, such a news service as I have proposed would accelerate the development of what I call "transparency", in which charlatanism and related phenomena would come face to face with extinction. I can picture a lot of this happening over the next ten years. As I see it, we may be able to cast a very wide net and concentrate into one place an immense amount of passion and betrayal. And the resulting mixture could prove to be very explosive. Iskra ushered in a period of both cooperation and competition between trends that considered themselves to be Marxist. Both the cooperation and competition were of service to the working class. Such an electronic news service as described above could help similar processes in the early part of the 21st century. More at: www.communism.org (see task #1 in article "1917 was the beta version") www.pix.org/pof/ (see section dealing with proposed electronic news service) www.pix.org/mad-form.htm (Media Abstract Discussion) Sincerely, Ben Seattle ----//-// 14.Apr.98 email: ben@pix.org web: www.Leninism.org