Looking at my son’s face, I could see the worm inching its way into his consciousness ready to deliver its venomous instructions:  Be cautious. Conform. Obey. The entire architecture of surveillance was migrating to a place inside his head. I recalled the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s mournful observations, as she watched totalitarianism engulf Europe in the buildup to World War II. She feared that the sovereign value of individuality might be extinguished by this noxious force.  “The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism”, she wrote, “is not that they are wrong but that they could become true…that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”. My heart was breaking, touched by memories of an earlier time, overwhelmed by the sense of what we are loosing, what my boy may never know.

Since that evening, I have learned to recognize the terror worm in many of its guises. A student whom I am supervising in an independent study on “distributed coordination” finds in Al Qaeda’s military operations a fascinating case study. Last week he wondered if I thought his online searches could get him into trouble.  “With whom?” I asked.  He wasn’t sure. “No way,” I reassured him, “this isn’t East Germany in 1980. It’s not like the Stasi are out there watching.”  Later I realized that it didn’t matter if anyone ‘watched’ or not. All that mattered was that he was already infected.  Still later I realized, maybe they are watching….

My banker friend in Chicago admonishes me, only half joking, not to talk about my sense of outrage on the phone. “It’s all data”, he cautions. “They look for patterns.”

Another friend has just arrived. In her hotel room she opens her suitcase to retrieve some work. Her face reddens in confusion and alarm: the once neatly packed contents of her case are a jumble of clothes and papers. “They’ve been through everything”, she says in disgust. “I need a drink. I need a shower.”

One evening at home, my son and I recall highlights of our Paris trip, especially his scientific sampling of pastries and chocolates across several neighborhoods.  “Let’s return soon”, I say.  He hesitates.

“I had such a great time, but I don’t know if I want to travel again. The airport was so scary. Remember when they yelled at you, Mom?”

He says he wants to write a book. I ask him what it would be about. “I want to write about a dystopia, you know, like Vonnegut–where no one has any rights. It would be very depressing, but there would be little glimmers of hope. The big surprise would come at the end when the reader would discover that it’s not a dystopia after all. It’s real life.”

I’ve got my work cut out for me now.  I must find a way to disable the terror worm in my boy.  In my boy and in yours. When the last soldier returns to American soil, this war on this front will continue to rage. It’s unintended consequence: the suppression of the hard won sense of psychological self determination that is the hallmark of our age. This contest isn’t over. We must win back what we are losing– not from the terrorists, but from the hackers.

The detection effort starts in an obvious place—the airport. My twelve year old son and I embarked joyously on his first trip to Paris. I tried to insulate us with laughter and conversation from the humiliating new rituals of the search process. Then, crossing the threshold of the metal scanner, his belt buckle set off an alarm. A TSA agent asked him to step aside. My son stood, for just a moment, frozen and uncomprehending. The agent abruptly pulled him out of the line, and I saw fear flash across my boy’s face. I moved forward to reassure him, but was blocked by another agent. “He’s my son”, I pleaded.

“Step back, ma’am.”

“Look, he’s just twelve, let me stand with him”.

“Move back, ma’am or we’ll have to call security”, he growled.

The outrage rising in my throat made me feel sick. With my heart racing, blood rushing to my face, and pin pricks of sweat trickling down my chest, I was flooded by a déjà vu. I was on a wooded road in the lake country of Pinochet’s Chile. At twilight a checkpoint suddenly rose up out of the shadows. Soldiers in camouflage with automatic weapons lounged by the roadside. There was shouting: out of the car, documents, hands over your heads. I learned then the feeling of nauseating vulnerability in confrontation with a capricious force that had turned its back on reason. The toxic cocktail of ideological indoctrination, scant training, and little accountability meant that the ordinary person was guilty until proven innocent. Shaming and danger could be triggered by the slightest resistance.

One learned to live cautiously during those dark years– never quite free of fear, anticipating the government’s many eyes and ears, and conforming to evade exposure. Returning to the States after life in Chile, I knelt down in the terminal and kissed the ground. I can still taste the rush of gratitude I felt for a life without fear and backward glances. I knew I could never take for granted the good fortune of living where reason and the rule of law prevailed, where rights could not be violated on a whim. No matter what its imperfections, I had come home to the light.

The airport that night was still a far cry from Pinochet’s Chile– but not nearly as far as it used to be. I looked behind me to the long lines of submissive travelers slowly snaking their way to the x-ray machines, shoes off, baggies in hand. We had internalized the new drills without protest, editing our behavior as carefully as we edit the contents of our carry-ons. Does anyone mention the lunacy of this planet-wide assault on innocent citizens? Do we complain that our belts and shoes are less likely to contain explosives than the plane’s cargo which is barely scrutinized? No– we shuffle with heads down, vulnerable, trying to follow the rules without attracting attention, each of us guilty until proven innocent. We anticipate and conform– anything to avoid being called out by those who are watching. We had become smaller, while they had grown larger. Then I realized it: This was the work of the terror worm. (to be continued…)

    The new society of individuals is one of the great achievements of the twentieth century, expressed in the spread of human rights and the values of individual dignity. It has challenged feudal and patriarchal structures. It has upended norms of conformity and anonymity associated with industrialized mass society. It has triggered a new era in politics and commerce, a new structure of individualized consumption, and a demand for individual voice. You and I would not be here now, meeting like this, our disembodied voices converging in a global distributed information milieu in my home and yours were it not for the accomplishments of this new human mentality.

    But this new society is also deeply contested. It is opposed by an ancient religious vision newly revitalized and spreading in various forms across the middle east, central Asia, and now throughout the most alienated pockets of the global Islamic community. It is contested by the varieties of fundamentalist and other conservative movements in the US. There are regressive proto fascist groups and extreme conservative factions across Europe.

    Tragically, the newest threat to the fragile accomplishments of late modern self determining individual comes from our own governments, and uniquely the US government under the leadership of the Bush White House and its agents– determined to hijack history and set it on a new course. This would be a fascinating subject for discussion and debate were its not for its immediate, acute, and destructive effects. My children are at risk. So are yours. It’s a technology story, it’s a political story, but most of all it’s a story of a full blown assault on the sanctity of the individual. It all starts with the terror worm.

    Years ago, when we were distracted with grief and dismay, White House hackers stealthily released a destructive “terror worm” here at home. With our societal immune system badly compromised by the shocks of 9/11, our existing fire walls proved no match for this new menace. The terror worm has by now burrowed its way into our public places and our homes. It invaded our bodies and infected our children. Like most worms, this one was concealed in a series of attachments sent by the Security conglomerate of Homeland, Transportation, and National: warrantless wiretapping programs; secret data mining of emails, credit card purchases, Internet searches, and travel plans; rendition, torture, and the abrogation of habeas corpus. More is on the way: GPS tracking, biometric scanners, online indices of suspicious persons, DNA databases. These technologies of control invented to catch the bad guys have become the hosts upon which the worm hitches a ride to its ultimate target: the intimate recesses of our daily lives. Like chronic fatigue or Gulf War syndrome, there’s no official recognition of the anxiety the worm produces. Its presence is only detectable as things we count on, and cherish, unexpectedly vanish (to be continued…)

Episode II:
After Mom died, the only person who seemed to know anything about her–her health and the likely causes of her death–was a man whom she had never met. He was the State Medical Examiner. How could someone who had never laid eyes on my Mom, who had never spoken with her, know more about her health than the doctors with whom she visited regularly? You’d think the State Medical Examiner would be some distant bureaucrat. Turned out to be just the opposite. He returned my phone call with the hour. He was kind and understanding. He spoke with me patiently and answered all of my questions. Later, I thought of more questions, and days later, still more. He rigorously returned my calls and never showed the slightest bit of boredom with my queries. He said that Mom was a ticking time bomb, just the sort of person who could fall over dead at any moment. And that’s exactly what happened. She fell like a tree. He carefully explained why.
Episode I:
My mom is dead. I still don’t know who killed her. There are various hypotheses. Did my mom kill herself? Did I kill her? Was she killed by her primary care physician, her cardiologist, her orthopedic surgeon? Other docs she saw? Was mom killed by her friends? My brother? Was it any one of the myriad pills organized neatly in their containers on a tray she kept on her kitchen table (that tray now sits in my linen closet: a sentinel, a reminder, a tale waiting to be told), or maybe the interaction among them?

My mom is dead. I have passed through the many stages of grief, charted and uncharted, and now I am looking for answers. Why? Knowing who killed my mom won’t bring her back. But whoever killed my mom may also be lying in wait, ready to kill yours. I don’t want your mom to die the way mine did–an unnecessary death. I am a scholar. Such are my skills. I intend to use them to try and prevent your mom’s death. Or your father’s. Or yours. Or that of any of your beloved ones. There is no real fix for health care in this country, or any other, that does not address the agents of my mom’s death.

In the coming days and weeks and months, I’ll be exploring these hypotheses and more in this space.

Big city mayors meet this week to discuss what they can do to reduce global warming. Alot of their talk will focus on how to get people to do less: drive less, use less electricity, etc. As in the spirit of John’s recent post, the debate takes the form of parsing a scarce resource. It’s punitive and puritanical. Worst of all, it assumes that the institutional demands on us stay the same. As always, it’s the individual that is asked to sacrifice and change–not the institutions.

But inside the support economy is a far more sustainable and profound response to climate crisis. It entails the shift from concentrated to distributed patterns of life, work, consumption. Start with our daily obeisance to the gods of command and control: the commute. The commute exists because in the late eighteenth century canny British factory owners figured out that they could get more work out of people and use fixed assets more efficiently if everyone worked in the same place at the same time. Today, the concentrated pattern of work costs far more than it saves for firms, individuals, and the planet: It feeds needless bureaucracy; it destroys value by insulating employees from consumers; it requires mass-carbon-spewing transport. The barriers to distributed working are not technological or substantive. Progress on this front has been slow because employers don’t want to give up physical supervision, because office politics require face time, because people who work “away” take unfair hits on their careers and prospects. Concentrated work patterns express power politics and are maintained out of inertia on both sides of the power equation.

According to this week’s FT, even carbon trusts aren’t trustworthy. People are buying carbon credits that turn out to be meaningless and fraudulent. The bankruptcy of trust is truly pandemic. Alex says that folks have habituated, that we aren’t hurting enough to constitute new markets of trust. But these nascent markets are already ubiquitously exploited. Companies tout their trustworthiness in ads and marketing that anyone with a brain cell knows is fraudulent. Life in the straight commercial world is a perpetual cycle of longing, seduction, and abandonment. Last week, preparing for a European trip, I decided to see if my Platinum Amex was worth the annual fee. I needed two of the benefits they market–travelers cheques and a car rental.

arly on, I realized that none of it was going to work. I decided to follow it through, in a kind of hypnosis, now fascinated with finding out just how outrageous the experience could become. Altogether, I spent about four hours on the phone, and got nothing. They wouldn’t sell me cheques and charge them to my card. The platinum agents kept telling me they would, then they connected me with the “right person” who said they couldn’t. I repeated the cycle several times with the exact same result.

Barack Obama’s campaign stunned the country, and anyone else on the planet who was paying attention, when they announced last Friday that they had already raised $25 million. This apparently miraculous achievement shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read The Support Economy or is familiar with its argument.

The biggest market in the political or commercial world today is the market for trust.

People are starved for trust. THere is a desperate need to find leaders and companies that offer true trustworthiness– as measured by truthfullness, authenticity, accountability, and responsibility. Both politics and commerce have been engulfed by lies, corruption, narcissism, and indifference. This has accelerated the growing chasm between individuals and organizations.

THis crisis of trust is now epidemic. But this crisis has a flipside. All civilized humans need trust to feel sane. The crisis has therefore precipitated vast new markets for trust. If anyone in business or politics can find their way toward real trustworthiness, they will encounter an unlimited market ready to support them with money and allegiance.

Are you a dialectical thinker? That means, you don’t think in a straight line. Instead, you think in a zig-zag. The further one line of reasoning, trend, or development stretches in one direction, the greater the energy that will drive a new trend, development, or line of inquiry in the opposite direction.

We began The Support Economy with one simple proposition: People have changed more than the organizations and institutions they must depend upon–as consumers, employees, and citizens. We saw a chasm developing between the two sides. Life was becoming painful in that chasm.If you think in a straight line, you just see things getting worse, ad infinitum. Companies get bigger, more remote, and more outrageous in their treatment of the individual. Public institutions get more bloated, more inwardly focused, more indifferent. On the inside, everyone is on the take. On the outside, we are left to fend for ourselves.

Psychological self-determination is expressed in three different dimensions. In the first dimension people want to live their lifes the way they choose to live it. This is the sense of sanctuary. The second way people express their psychological self-determination is in the widespread desire for voice: we want to be heard and we want our voices to matter. The third way we want our psychological self-determination to be expressed is in our desire to be connected: we want to be part of communities.

Business is conducted from the inside out. Business processes are organized from the point of view of the individual consumer and aligned with the individual’s interests. Forget about what niche you’re in, or even what industry. The new enterprise asks, “Who will want us to support them, and what do they need?” Then figure out whom you need to collaborate with to make it happen. Wholly new “support networks” will cluster around individuals, families and virtual communities with the sole purpose of supporting their aims.