CNN: Occupy Debt

(CNN) -- Much like President Obama, the Occupy movement is alive and well and entering its second term, thank you very much. It's no longer about squatting in public parks, getting on the news, or -- in some cases -- getting arrested. No, instead this decentralized, bottom-up, anti-Wall Street effort is taking aim at your medical, student and other loans: It aims to relieve your debt.

Just as Obama appears to have left the lofty rhetoric of "being the change" behind him as he confronts the more practical realities of working a financial plan through an intransigent Congress, the occupiers have given up on winning media mindshare or public support and have turned instead to direct action that helps real people. In its Act 2, Occupy is just occupying the space where it's needed.

Remember, Occupy does not have leaders, an administration or some central office. It's not a single body with a mission control that makes particular decisions. It began as a one-day demonstration in New York, "Occupy Wall Street," spawned by an announcement from the anti-corporate Adbusters magazine, and then mushroomed into similar encampments around the United States and in other parts of the world.

Although police eventually shut down these demonstrations, the social and Internet infrastructure of the movement remained intact. People met one another over the course of the demonstrations, forged relationships online and continued working in their own ways. Different members in different places have chosen to concern themselves with particular problems. Those that resonate with others in the loose collective end up getting support from the various websites and Facebook pages already associated with the Occupy movement. While there is no "official" Occupy movement, when an effort gains support from enough of the trusted Occupy networks, it can be considered a de facto Occupy action.

Most recently, the movement came to the rescue of hurricane victims with Occupy Sandy - a bottom-up, people-driven recovery effort that rivaled FEMA for its ability to bring aid to the people who needed it. The Occupy brand credibility, so to speak, as well as its existing networking infrastructure gave activists a great head start in connecting donors, organizers and providers to victims in the worst-hit areas.

Now, a growing contingent within the greater movement is refocusing on Occupy's original victims, the hundreds of thousands of people burdened with all sorts of debt. Many of the debtors owe many times the original amounts they charged up on their credit cards, medical bills or student loans. 

Such debt is bought and sold on a debt market for pennies on the dollar by debt collection agencies and others capable of pressuring the debtors most effectively. (The reason debt is sold for such a small fraction of its acute value is that most collectors will not be able to recoup the money. They might buy $10,000 of credit card company from a bank or reseller, but most likely only be able to collect a tiny portion of it from the debtors, who either go bankrupt or simply broke.)

In the belief that much of this debt is comprised of unjustified fees, inappropriate credit products or even outright fraud, an offshoot of Occupy called Strike Debt is working to erase it all...by purchasing it, and then forgiving it. Yes, seems it's that easy: Buy debt for a tiny fraction of its face value in the same way that credit agencies buy debt. But then, instead of attempting to collect that money, simply erase it. Families struggling to pay for the compound interest on their 1990s medical bills, for example, simply find out that it's been relieved.

The whole debt-rolling operation, known as Rolling Jubilee, begins on November 15, with a variety show and telethon in New York City entitled The People's Bailout. Occupy-friendly celebrities from comedian Janeane Garofalo and Daily Show writer Lizz Winstead to music legends such as Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Fugazi's Guy Picciotto will perform for a live and -- of course -- streaming audience while the website accepts donations. According to their estimates, every $25 will abolish an estimated $500 worth of debt. According to David Rees, one of the founders of Strike Debt and a leading voice in the Rolling Jubillee, "As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT."

Of course, in a perfect world, debtors would have the opportunity to erase their own debt at this rate. Or, at the very least, on hearing that their debt has been relieved, the rescued debtors would want to pay back the movement so that more debt could be relieved. Currently, legal restrictions and privacy policies prevent this sort of traction from developing. But if you're in a tight debt situation and learn that it has been mysteriously and anonymously forgiven, you might want to consider doing the same for someone else by contributing.

I understand why people might object to this scheme and can already envision the comments forming below this piece as I write. Isn't this moral hazard? Didn't those people get in their own debt? Why should we bail out people who have gotten into trouble like this?

The best answer, of course, is that we already bailed out the banks and creditors -- with tax money. Why not bail out the actual people?And the Occupiers are not focusing on home loans taken out by aggressive real estate speculators, but the personal debt that has already been well documented to be ripe for abuse and fraud by lending institutions and their agents. (The easier answer is that if you don't like this idea, simply do not take part. If you find your debt occupied and relieved, you can surely find banks and credit agencies willing to accept your payments.)

More significant, at least from my perspective, is how actions such as Occupy Sandy and Strike Debt reflect a movement coming of age. True to form, Occupy is making no demands of government, of banks or of anyone else. The occupiers did not involve themselves in the recent elections -- as if electoral politics were just too many steps removed from getting anything done.

Instead, they simply occupy the space around those in the greatest need and fill in for what's missing.

CNN: Sending Out An S.O.S. - What the storm taught me about people, power, and the commons

(CNN) 

"Rethinking grid dependence in new climate reality."

That was my sole tweet in the aftermath of Sandy, sent after four long nights with my wife and daughter in our cold, dark living room, cut off from the infrastructure -- and the people -- that normally keep us going.

Indeed, in a reality where charging a cell phone requires finding a friend who not only admits to having power but also agrees to let you come over and plug into it, the relationship of self-sufficiency to community resources takes on a whole new meaning. And it reflects not only the core themes of the election, but also the main conceptual challenges facing our society at the dawn of the digital age: Do I depend on the collective, or do I go it alone?

In the hard-hit areas of Lower Manhattan, Queens, Jersey and the unlucky suburbs, people who had their own generators, supplies, and wood stoves fared better than those of us depending on downed wires, closed supermarkets, and electrically ignited furnaces for power, food, and heat -- at least for a while.

Some offered extension cords from their homes, or even a spot on the floor to sleep. Others nodded in acknowledgment when they heard of our misfortune, but offered no help -- as if they didn't understand that we were suffering from more than the inconvenience of no cable TV. Their quizzical looks seemed to say, why should their own success -- but for the grace of God, in many cases -- obligate them to help others?

This all changed soon enough, when they lost the ability to find gasoline to power those generators, ice to keep the food cool, or dry firewood to burn. Then they were out scavenging for resources like the rest of us.

In my little world of media and technology, self-sufficiency had more to do with having chosen to keep copies of all of my work files, computer programs, and entertainment right on my own devices rather than depending entirely on the miracle of cloud computing. This meant that when my family finally evacuated our frigid home (turns out fireplaces don't make much heat), we could bring my book drafts and my daughter's American Girl movies along with us. I'm no doomsday prepper, but I have always had reservations about relegating my files to the servers of others.

When we finally arrived at the closest open hotel room to our home in New York's suburbs -- it was downtown Philadelphia -- we didn't bother with any of our technology, anyway. My daughter was excited to see and play with other kids -- families relocated by FEMA from devastated parts of New Jersey, arriving at the hotel with dogs, hotel vouchers, and printed Google maps. Now that I was in a hotel lounge with working WiFi, I really didn't care anymore about whether my work was getting done, or whether I could dazzle my Twitter followers with any insights or witticisms about this whole mess. I didn't care about the election or about the New York Marathon, or least of all about e-mails about work.

Eatocracy: Anthony Bourdain says help NYC restaurants: Eat out, tip big

Instead, I sat in a hotel lounge with working WiFi, and along with a half dozen dads my age, watched our childhood rock 'n' roll heroes -- Springsteen, Aerosmith, and Billy Joel -- perform at a telethon over images that may as well have been our own neighborhoods: fallen trees, crushed homes, families wading through the floods. Sting came on and did a strange, acoustic version of Message in a Bottle.

And as I sat there with my fellow displaced Sandy victims, I realized that I, for the first time, was on the other side of the telethon. I was the one "sending out an S.O.S." Although I had fared a lot better than the poor denizens of Breezy Point or the Rockaways and I wasn't going to be seeking a FEMA reimbursement or need help rebuilding my home, I was still on the victim's end of the equation. I was the person looking to be shared with rather than looking how to share (or horde) what I had.

With found time to rethink my approach to life and its inevitable disasters, zombie apocalypse scenarios playing out in my head, it became clear to me that the ideological divide America seems to be facing is a false one. Those of us needing help weren't lazy or weak, and those in a position to provide it were able to do so only by virtue of collective resources.

The only home generators that worked all week, for example, irrespective of the long lines at the pump, were the ones that used natural gas, itself the product of the energy grid. The men getting in fights over the few available gasoline generators being sold out of the back of trucks at the local Home Depot (as a 125-pound intellectual, I didn't stand a chance) may have proven their muscle, but ended up with at best three hours of heat before they went in search of nonexistent fuel.

See, what we used to call the commons -- the resources and technologies used by everyone -- are what make individual success even possible. A shared resource like the Internet may allow great entrepreneurs to break from the pack to achieve wild success, but they need to continue to invest in the commons, not as a form of charity or penance but as a self-interested strategy for their own sustainability.

Or, put another way, the family that shares its electricity and living room with less fortunate storm victims will have more friends collecting firewood when the lights go out the next day. Those of us who got hit hard will remember who was there with an open hand, and who wasn't. As the checkout lady at the A&P said to me this morning, "it takes something like this for people to show their true colors." Then she added, with a smile, "at least now you know."

People who managed to succeed in the crisis employed mixed strategies. They did make wise personal preparations -- such as wood stoves instead of ineffectual fireplaces, natural gas generators instead of gasoline ones, a good supply of stored food and water. But they also employed ones that showed an awareness of the need for infrastructure, the importance of longer term thinking, and the strength of community.

Our political parties make it out to be an irreconcilable distinction, as if America had to choose between one path or the other: greed or compassion, liberty or communism. But there is no choice. We do not choose between our personal success and our collective welfare.

We don't get one without the other.

iPhone is Not Your Saviour

(CNN) -- Last time around, humanity's savior came in the form of a human messiah. This time, if technology analysts, bankers and venture capitalists are to be believed, it will take the form of a handheld computer otherwise known as a smartphone.

That's right, the new Apple iPhone announced Wednesday is already being credited with saving the United States economy. According to JP Morgan, sales of the new device should boost our nation's GDP by as much as 0.5% in the fourth quarter of this year alone. That's not a misprint, but half a percent of the nation's economic activity, or $3.2 billion.

It's hard to know whether such proclamations - even if true - say as much about the power of smartphones as they do about the weakness of the rest of the economy. In either case, however, I can't help but fear yet another hyper-inflated bubble in the making.

First off, most of the projected $3.2 billion won't be from consumers to Apple, but from wireless carriers subsidizing their subscriber's purchases in return for contract extensions. That's not really "growth" the way we used to define it in economics class. But that doesn't stop us from mistaking wireless as a pure growth industry, and far too many from placing their bets accordingly.

Working as I do in New York's Silicon Alley, it's hard not to bump into an iPhone app builder or investor everywhere I go. Labs, incubators and angel investing groups are quite focused - some might argue obsessed - with launching the next monster iPhone hit, and then selling before it crashes. Top-ranked iPhone app Draw Something, for example, peaked at around 50 million downloads this spring. This was just in time for its developer to be bought by Zynga for $200 million, and then start its descent into obscurity the very next day.

Even the students at the graduate digital programs where I teach have shifted from building for computer or the Web to developing for the iPhone. Like garage bands of yesterday, they toil away in the hope of getting the next big hit.

Yes, we've been here before.

First time, for me anyway, was the CD-ROM craze. Flashy interactivity, new authoring tools and seemingly infinite storage space led many media publishers to believe that CD-ROMs would be to the digital era what books were to that of text. They obsolesced themselves as a viable format (mostly by being slow and boring) even before networking speeds made disks irrelevant.

The dotcom boom appeared just as infinite to those in the know. While Amazon has been left standing, Pets.com and Etoys crashed as quickly as they rose. The vast majority of online retailers surprised the Wall Street analysts betting on them.

Social media was supposed to solve that problem for the tech industry and NASDAQ alike, but climaxed in the IPO of Facebook, a disappointment so far-reaching it has dragged dozens of social media companies along with it, and sent investors and entrepreneurs looking for greener pastures.

Like wireless handheld devices and the apps running on them.

Everywhere I turn, every conference I attend, every magazine story I read seems to be based on one aspect of these technologies or another. Everyone is hard at work on an iPhone app that lists, maps, or socializes some data set in some new visual way. Pictures over text, text over maps, restaurants close to subways, or apps showing subways with WiFi to download more apps.

Don't get me wrong: Wireless is big, and these devices are here to stay, at least until we get comfortable with apps being embedded in objects and technology being implanted in our bodies. And while the opportunity for corporations to make billions on these apps may be overstated, we may still see a new peer-to-peer marketplace emerge between independent developers and the users of their bounty of applications.

But the extent to which entrepreneurs, developers, and even columns like this one depend on Apple and the rest of the wireless computing industry for new grist far exceeds their true impact or potential.

So go, get an iPhone. Enjoy it. But find something or someone else to save you.

Apple v Samsung: What if they had Patented the Alphabet?

Imagine we were just developing spoken language for the first time. And someone came up with a new word to describe an action, thought, or feeling - like “magnify” or “dreadful.” But in this strange world, the person who came up with the word demanded anyone else who used it to pay him a dollar every time the word was uttered. That would make it pretty difficult for us to negotiate our way to a society that communicated through speech.

That’s the way the patent wars on smartphone and tablet advances are beginning to feel to me.

As a human being, I do not particularly care about Apple’s recent victory in the US version of its patent lawsuit against Samsung for copying its iPhone and iPad’s form and features. Now that Apple is demanding that Samsung pull eight of its products off the shelf, my only personal interest is whether the Samsung products, once banned, will become collectors’ items. Will I one day want to show my grandchild the phone that dared to mimic the iPhone?

But while the details of legalities and impact to share prices and even consumer choice don’t keep me or any of my friends up at night,  there is nonetheless something creepy about Apple’s suit. It’s not so much that Apple - the biggest company in the world - has turned into a competitive monster; it’s the territory that Apple’s fighting over. It feels as if the technology innovation wars are no longer over one piece of technology or another, but over us humans.  

It’s one thing for Apple to defend the look and feel of its phone - things like the little button on the bottom, which are apparently obvious but actually the result of a lengthy and painstaking design process. They may deserve a few years exclusive on stuff like that.

But when it comes to gestures, such as the now ubiquitous “pinch and zoom” technology through which users stretch or shrink pictures and text, well, that no longer feels quite the same. They are gestures that may have begun on the device, but which have become internalized, human movements. When my daughter was three I used to watch her attempt to enact those same swipes and stretches on the television screen - a phenomenon so prevalent that many television dealers now keep a supply of Windex handy to clean their giant flat screens of children’s fingerprints on a regular basis.

That’s because these gestures are not simply technological innovations, but the language through which we humans are coming to navigate our way through the emerging digital landscape. We take to gestures and movements that grow out of the ones we use here in the real world. To translate them into the digital realm well requires skill, but the gestures themselves are not the typical territories - like land masses - over which corporations have traditionally fought. They’re inside us.

Usually, advancements of this sort are developed through consortia of companies. The HTML standards through which the Web is rendered are not owned by a single company, but developed together and used by everyone. Imagine if one musical instrument company owned the patent on the piano keyboard, and another on the tuning of a violin. Or what if every typewriter company had to develop its own layout of letters? What if blowing one’s nose into soft disposable paper were owned by Kleenex?

While Apple deserves to be rewarded for the innovations it comes up with, there’s a limit to how far into our learned behaviors that the company should be awarded protection from competitors. Our transition toward a digitally functioning society is no less momentous than the shift from grunters to speakers, or from speakers to readers and writers. As such, it will require an equally cooperative spirit from the people and companies who take us there. 

Just Took My First Job: @Codecademy

So my officemate (or more accurately, office donor) Ian Alexander was perusing the net a few months ago, and then shouted across the room to me, “these guys are doing what you’ve been saying.”

He was talking about Codecademy, a website built by two Columbia University students (well, former students) who realized that computer coding was becoming an essential skill for participants in an increasingly digital culture and workplace. They set on an experiment: Could they create a command line interface so compelling, so easy-to-use, that it quite literally taught people how to code?

The result, a work-in-progress of online courses for Javascript, html, and more, realized that dream and more. I was intrigued and inspired by their approach of offering free programming skills to anyone who has the time and energy to learn. Instead of making students bear the cost of their education, these guys want to transfer the cost to future employers, who will eventually pay Codecademy for access to programmers looking for work - whose skill levels and achievements have been documented by the courses.

Thrilled to have found people actualizing the agenda I espoused in my book Program or Be Programmed, I wrote about Codecademy in one of my CNN columns. I wrote so enthusiastically about these courses that the “standards and practices” people at CNN called to make sure I wasn’t an investor or business partner. I wasn’t, but they were onto something: if I was already talking like a partner in this enterprise, maybe I should be.

So I went and met the founders in real life. They were very familiar with my work - as inspired by what I had written as I was about what they were doing. They wondered whether there might be a role for me at Codecademy a bit like, say, Vint Cerf’s role as “Net Evangelist” for Google. So did I. Besides, there must be something better to do with my freshly minted PhD in New Media and Digital Culture than go for tenure at a college, right? Couldn’t I participate in higher education without putting my students into lifelong debt?

Thus, my first real job since serving as a tennis attendant one summer at the public courts in Westchester. I’m now a member of Codecademy, dedicated to promoting code literacy and digital education.

What will that mean? We shall see. I’m not about promoting one website’s solution to the problem of digital literacy as much I am about promoting the culture of knowing the code. This is bigger than just computers. We live in a programmatic world - “code literacy” in business or economics means something different than it does in religion or politics. But coming to grips with the underlying languages of digital landscapes we inhabit is a great and accessible first step toward seeing the languages and agendas embedded in pretty much every other landscape on which we interact.

They are all operating systems, and they are all fungible by those who bother to learn how they are put together. That’s what I’ll be writing and speaking about a lot in the coming months. I am also planning to develop some courses for the site concerned a bit more with the “why’s” than the “how.” Maybe a new radio show about this as well. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I’ll be taking the courses at Codecademy starting today. If you want to go through the experience at the same time or to be in my peer group, come on over.