1. Save the economy. That’s easy enough. Just hint at an extreme conservative agenda. Works better than taxes, the powerful will turn the money pipe in your direction.

2. Save our schools. Easy cheesy. Privatize, jack up the tuition and market to the elite in China.

3. Jobs. Another piece of cake. Go to Bangkok and Manila and buy up all the little food carts and tricycle taxis, then franchise them to all the poor lazy folk sitting around doing nothing all day.

4. Health care. Just a tad harder due to all the poor folk sitting around doing nothing all day. The trick, of course, is to cut the rising cost of health care. Much of this comes from treating increasingly older peeps, like me! Let’s just stop doing that. Time to wake up, smell the coffee and die.

5. Family values. Lets adopt the Newt Gingrich model: There are no rules. This way, everyone gets to learn just how important it is to blindly follow dear old narcissist dad to the end, no matter how dark and twisted it may be.

6. The environment. I’ve always wondered why anyone would want to live in Canada or Russia or Alaska. Turn up the thermo! Then everything will be nice and warm, and we’ll get the added benefit of sinking New York, Miami, Washington D C and much of San Francisco too.

7. Energy. Put all the GOP front runners and their supporters on treadmills and hook them up to the power grid. ‘Nuff said.

8. Religion. Gingrich model again. Follow the church that kicks down the most money to your campaign. Dope the wife so she doesn’t notice the hypocrisy.

9. Foreign policy. Romney model. Tell your investment managers to squeeze their companies to outsource labor to all those bad countries so their working class won’t have a reason to be angry at us anymore. Ignore effects on our working class, that’s a different issue.

10. Your sexuality. I have lots of gay lesbian bisexual transgender abortion proponent friends. They just can’t work for me any of my straight friends. Maybe they can start a circus or something.

11. Military. Yes, we have one. Yes, it costs a gazillion dollars. But no, we’re not gonna change that because it’s the only way to run a government-sponsored education/health care/social security/job security system that doesn’t look socialist.

12. Taxes. Yes, you need to pay them. We don’t, but you do.

13. The state of capitalism. There is one, and it’s outside the territorial US. If you try to reel it in, that’s class warfare and were just a really tiny little island nation. Only 0.01 percent the size of the US.

14. Foreigners. This is one of those pay-to-play things, which is very Capitalist, which makes it right. If you’re rich and able to drop a few thousand for a Congressional sponsor, you can come in.

15. Domestic policy. Hire them, because they are cheap and will do anything, but make it look like someone else was responsible.

16. Jobs. Do we have to talk about this? OK well then everyone else is responsible for the lack of jobs. But I will change all that. All we need to do is innovate! Stop taxing my friends so they will drop a few mil on a few companies. Not that they can’t do it now, but if we can squeeze this thing long and hard enough, and put enough of you out of work till your eyeballs tweak, sooner or later you’ll come around and give us the break we want. Because we want it. Do we need any other reason? Umm did I answer the question?

17. Divisive politics. Nobody likes this. It’s ugly. It’s hurtful. So, here’s my three-step plan for converting everyone to conservatism and away from that nasty liberal way of thinking. A) Let your greed be your guide. It’s simpler than being ‘fair.’ (B) Acknowledge that you’re an asshole. Once you own that, they can’t hurt you. (C) If they continue to criticize, tell them everyone makes mistakes and then laugh like a crazy fuck. This always confuses them.

18. Getting the votes. This is the secret stuff. First, act like an insane xenophobe warrior for God to get through the primaries, and then just talk about socialism.

19. Racism. Let’s be clear, we didn’t make the rules. The country club management did.

20. Oil and alternative energy. Well, right now, it’s still cheaper to bring the planet to the brink of nuclear disaster for a gallon of oil than it is to set up a wind turbine.

21. Other peoples’ religions. You have the right to your religion as long as it’s about Jesus. After all this is a Christian country. And while you are converting, learn the language too.

22. Wall Street. This is like Amway, everybody kicks them around but in truth, profits are the God-given right of the investment class and – what? My money manager took them? WTF?? Isn’t there a regula– ah, shit.

23. Social security. There’s that word again. Social…ist. Nevermind that you paid into it all your life. It’s still socialist. Better to just give it to the defense contractors and write it off as a bad investment.

24. Drug policy. This is why you should never learn Spanish or step off the cruise ship. If you did, then you might find out that everything south of Texas isn’t full of smugglers and rapists. Trust us, we need a wall.

25. Guns. Look, if everybody has a gun, nobody will ever invade the US. That’s the plan. Nevermind they kill more of our own citizens in a decade than we have in all the wars combined. Guns make America safe!

BONUS: Building a constituency. Getting conservative followers is easy. The trick is keeping them. This requires building the illusion that they are in a special place, an exclusive club that will provide them with everything they ever desired if they just follow you to the end. Between you and me, we borrowed this idea from Osama bin Laden.

OK that’s it, I’m done. I could go on but I’m actually scaring myself with this shit.

That is all, you may go now. Hey! Off my lawn…

Photo: GeekTech

Black Markets as Drivers of Innovation?

Back in December a well-known journalists – I think it was Steve Gilmor – posted that it was “a fool’s game” to try to predict trends for 2012. Figuring he’s probably right, I nixed the idea of drafting such a post.

Yet here we are, less than three weeks through the first month of the year, and I have to say we’ve probably already seen one of the most sensational tech events of the year, the takedown of MegaUpload and Kim Dotcom – and one of the largest events, the crowdsourced rejection of SOPA and PIPA, two congressional proposals designed to protect intellectual property by shuttering websites suspected of delivering unlicensed content.

Obviously, it would be almost impossible to mention one of these events without mentioning the other. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the takedown of MegaUpload was designed to coincide with a hoped-for passage of IP protection legislation, which would have bolstered the government’s [read: lobbyists for the entertainment powerhouses] position, but of course that hasn’t happen…yet.

Still, these events are fundamentally just points along the way to a much, much larger trend that has existed since the dawn of the Internet and likely long before: The never-ending clash between those who believe the Internet (and by extension everything on it) should be free…and those who want to protect the rights of content creators to fair compensation.

Clearly, this trend has existed for a long time, which is why I’m sure there are some readers who question how I could offer this as the most important trend of 2012.

But the world has changed in fundamental ways in the last few years, and we’re now at a place where businesses that don’t have an Internet presence are feeling the impact. Everyone has a stake in the game, and consequently, everyone is vulnerable. Even more to the point, some important groups are actively pushing massive proposals which could shift the Internet landscape in fundamental ways.

We’re in a period analogous to the post-modern industrial age, when the earliest companies in nascent industries such as automobiles, pharmaceuticals, aeronautics and communications were faced with unrelenting competition, often from former employees who carried away vital information to form competitive concerns. Some of these companies weren’t able to fight and adapt. Others were so fierce that they ran ahead of the law, overrunning, acquiring and stealing from the competition faster than governments could react.

Overarching all of this activity – now as then – is the black market.

It’s been estimated that as much as 40 percent of the world’s commerce is now conducted on the black market, and most of this involves illicit manufacturing, distribution and sales of protected products.

In the first half of the 20th Century, noticeable increases in black market activity accompanied and then followed significant military engagements. Much of what the Asian world knows of modern Western commerce sprang out of this era (it’s no surprise, in this respect, that Dotcom built his fortified mansion in New Zealand.) Since the 1960s, an entirely new avenue for black market distribution has evolved – the Internet.

Perhaps ironically, this New Gold Rush is attractive to black marketeers for the same reason Wall Street traders love their playing field: it’s a direct line to the greatest profit with the least possible overhead.

Entertainment properties are at the nexus of this activity because of their immense potential for quick profits, and they’re even more attractive now because they can be reproduced and distributed over the Internet for almost nothing.

But caught up in this trend are all manner of other businesses whose primary products are also software based. This includes everyone from book writers to electronic design automation companies, which make the software used to design and build the very latest semiconductors.

In fact, anything that can be transmitted in software form is vulnerable to piracy. Any business which relies on the Internet to distribute its products is at the height of vulnerability.

SOPA and PIPA have been sent back to the drawing board, but the threat of wholesale distribution of unlicensed intellectual property looms over the boardrooms of legitimate businesses everywhere. (Another proposal, the Anti Counterfeit Trading Act or ACTA, has achieved significant global support and is also on its way to the Senate.)

Even non-profits are vulnerable.

An organization to which I belong is experiencing serious tumult because the literature sales that have financed this self-help group for the past 60 years are likely to be wiped out as followers around the world opt to download free or low-cost PDFs from third parties on the Internet rather than pay for hard copies. Unless the organization rethinks its marketing strategy and embraces online content and ecosystems, this trend could wipe out more than half of the organization’s annual income and force a complete restructuring, irrespective of whether anyone wants to go down this road or not.

Is the legislative approach the only option to protect content creators? I don’t think so.

The current best strategy seems to be outpacing the black market by embracing emerging technologies. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the emergence of apps as replacements for the full Internet experience. This was deemed necessary as most smart phones did not have the processing power to support a full Internet experience. Just as important, it took the user off the Internet itself and gave him or her a small portion of that Web, on a pay-to-play basis.

Almost unwittingly, millions of people have shelled out billions of dollars for these apps, 99 cents at a time, and in doing so have protected the intellectual property of thousands of companies. The same can be said for people buying books through the Kindle and iPad on Amazon and the iTunes stores. For a substantially reduced cost, they are supporting legal commerce and protecting the rights of content creators.

To enhance this approach, entertainment concerns are also changing up distribution strategies by delivering content to the internet almost as fast as it goes to book form or to theaters. Some publishing and movie producers are coordinating marketing to ensure maximum benefit before the black market channels begin their work.

Yet this strategy is also vulnerable. For every dozen or so people who buy books and movies in app form, there are at least four who know how to circumvent the pay sites and download essentially the same copy for free. So other distribution strategies have to be devised.

Business-to-business companies have somewhat of an advantage in that their customers are respectful of sophisticated IP protection mechanisms including special passwords, encryption schemes and coded dongles. But consumers want a far easier user experience.

So technology companies continue to innovate new answers.

Ultimately, however, the onus rests on us, the consuming public, to decide whether we want to honor content creators by justly compensating them for their work, or do we want it for free?

Morality and commerce are, it seems, inextricably linked.

Not because I am for either bill … they are both just really bad ideas … but because the intent is good.

Almost since the inception of the Internet, an idea emerged that everything that can be posted to it should be free. People who, on principle, oppose the concept of intellectual property also support a free Internet. 

Ideas should be available to everyone, they argue.

At their most fundamental level, of course, everything that can be posted to the Internet is an idea.

The Empire State Building may be a physical structure in a fixed location with a finite value, but a photograph of it is merely a digital representation that can be shared with millions of people almost instantaneously. Its value can be reduced to lines of code.

But even in the world of photography – and among writers, artists, musicians and film-makers – there is a strong sense that the content creator should benefit from the production.  These are, after all, professions, employing thousands of people to deliver carefully crafted, high-quality content.

Who gave anybody the right to give this stuff away for free?

If I am a private artist, selling my works only as originals, and I decide one day to allow a viewing of my work at a gallery in New York, am I by extension granting license to anyone who walks in, to photograph my work and propagate it on the Internet? Or, more to the point: am I allowing a professional printer to photograph my work, reproduce and sell it on eBay to his exclusive benefit?

If I am a musician offering my content on iTunes, an author selling my book on Amazon or an Indie producer showing my film at the Sundance Festival, am I by extension allowing the recipient to take that digital copy, reproduce it and distribute it to thousands of other users?

The answer, of course, is no. I’m not giving anyone such right.  In fact many artists copyright their material as a form of protection from just such theft. I have copyrighted articles, screenplays and short stories. I expect to be compensated for their use.

That said, as a journalist and blogger I also fully understand that the communications world is changing.  Millions of bloggers are delivering billions of pages of content every week, often “borrowing” images, videos and other content in the process. Most are aware that they are in violation of somebody’s copyrights, but the convenience factor rates high and the pressure to deliver in Internet time is even higher.

There are of course other solutions.  Wiki Commons provides sites with free photos, video editing software often includes free songs that can be used as background music, and a host of sites allow use of their content with attribution.  To blatantly steal content when such alternatives are available is simply lazy.

But it’s not the bloggers that SOPA and PIPA were meant to address.  At least, not in total.

SOPA and PIPA were created largely through the lobbying of the entertainment industry, to protect the intellectual property rights of big producers and distributors of major productions — films and music videos, for example — that take millions of dollars to produce.

Unfortunately, in their efforts to protect their content, these organizations have created a huge net that, when cast, catches many unintended fish.

SOPA and PIPA literally allow the government to require carriers to shut down entire domains for one or two instances of copyright infringement. While in practice this may be rare, in fact even a single arbitrary shut-down can have disastrous consequences for the owner.  Even worse, take-downs that are predicated on this law, but are in fact intended to shut down sites for other communications (for example, opposition to a government crack-down or an illegal police action) are not out of the realm of possibility.

The legislation is poorly written and should be opposed.

But the right to benefit from an individual’s work must be preserved.

Today, there exists a big vortex in between, and it is called the Internet.

Not that the Internet is at fault. This problem has existed as long as people have tried to protect the distribution of recorded media.  I’m guessing there were cave people who were killed for stealing the sacred stone that had coveted hunting techniques etched to it.

You don’t even have to be a capitalist to comprehend that recorded ideas have intrinsic value, and that the content provider should benefit from their creation.

In fact, there’s ample evidence that many of the entities that have lobbied for SOPA and PIPA – most precisely, the entertainment industry giants – have blatantly stolen content and ideas from writers and artists for decades and are profiting from these thefts even now.

The real problem seems to be that we have no lasting mechanism for ensuring that a chain of ownership extends from the content creators, through the distribuotrs and ultimately, to the consumer.

Personally, I find this hard to accept, since we have the technology to trace a tainted package of beef to a single cow in Brazil or a mislabeled pill bottle to a manufacturer in Germany.

My guess is that the right minds simply haven’t tackled the problem yet.  That there IS a technological solution, or combination of solutions, that can be called into play.

So this is my challenge. If you are reading this blog, and you have such an idea or you know of someone who does, get it patented and put it in play.

Most of us will be glad you did.

While the video may be a tad heavy on corporate messaging, in total it contains a LOT of cool data about our global interconnectedness resulting from the ubiquity of the Internet and smart phones.

Some of the stats in the video will likely trigger your thinking with respect to other stats that could have been added. If you would like to share those, please do so.

Please check it out and let me know what you think.

If you really like it, please share it with your friends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvGNG2e64Lw&feature=youtu.be

lvGNG2e64Lw

The Power of Connections

Somebody must have spiked that Big Apple because these are the same folks who think they’re gonna overtake Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world.

And that the television is dead (Samsung is selling them at the rate of two units per second).

And that all geeks are guys (women are more often the purchasers of new tech than men).

Sure, CES is the epitome of bad timing. It’s just two weeks after the Christmas season, the biggest consumer goods sale ever devised. We get that.

Sure, it’s too big to be advantageous for any one company. Some large companies have known for a long time that it’s possible to get more exposure by doing big press events elsewhere, rather than battling to rise above the noise.

Sure, it’s still about gadgets, which means hardware, which means not software, which means not trendy or terribly profitable.  Or so the thinking goes.

In a lot of respects, CES is about the most illogical trade show ever devised. Which is funny, because it’s the perpetual brainchild of some of the most gifted engineering minds in the world.

In other respects, though, the show’s enormous success is very much the result of crystal clear thinking.

CES isn’t about the tech you bought this Christmas.  It’s about the tech you haven’t even thought about buying  yet, because you’ve never seen it before.  It’s not on store shelves.

CES isn’t about rising above the noise, either, although everyone will tell you so. In fact, CES is about being there, absorbing the technology, learning from others’ insights, triggering adaptive strategies that will help you move your company in the right directions and avoid the signs of early death.

CES is about ignoring the hype and checking out the technology – something you can’t do from a high rise in New York City. You have to be on the show floor, tinkering with gadgets, trying out new ideas, before you can know for sure what is an emerging tread and what is a flop.

The hype for several years was that 3D television and augmented reality were going to be huge hits. The reality was that neither technology was ready. But you had to be on the show floor to know that.

And it isn’t just whether something is hot at CES that makes the show interesting.

It’s also about how cool tech happens.

The iPad wasn’t a sensation just because it was a tablet. Tablets were 15 years old by the time Apple rolled it out.  Rather, the iPad was a hit because it was an incredible achievement in design and functionality, just as Samsung’s new notebooks are with their razor thin profiles.

Smartphones aren”t continually in the limelight because they are nifty boxes. They’ve also a collaborative powerhouse, representing the best efforts of engineers, developers, designers, and operators.

It’s this collective effort to push the barriers of achievement in design and engineering that makes CES what it is.

It’s the coming out party for some of the coolest tech we will see…next Christmas.

This was the year I dreaded for so long, the year I turned in my boots and bridles, and concentrated on my iPad and iPhone.

After nearly a year of under-employment, I had to shortsell my ranch, including turning out a good friend and his daughter and selling a trailer out from under them. I also had to sell horses, tack, trailers, a motorcycle and my truck. I’m actually loaning the truck out at this point, in trade for continued riding lessons for my oldest daughter, who is now thirteen.

All three of the girls did pretty well transitioning from country life to a house in a cozy planned community. It took some work, though, the little ones (ages 7 and 8 at the time) were just randomly walking into people’s houses for a while. You could do that in the country but not here.

I’m very grateful to the lady that rented the house to us. I was still underemployed at the time as a tech writer and didn’t have the best of credit. Shortly after we got here, I landed a temporary PR job that morphed into a social media strategist position once the new marcom VP recognized my skills.

That has been a fantastic experience, although I must admit I had to make up the job along the way, and consequently some of the goals were met rather slowly. There’s no lack of exuberance from the company though, so I expect momentum to pick up quickly in the new year.

I’ve been grateful also for the opportunity to hire some good people that I have met along my social media journey, to help me in this new role. These include Adam Helweh, whose SecretSushi team created our new blog; Janet Fouts, who trained our first cadre of social media users; and Sam Diaz, who helped organize an intern log team and will report with them at the upcoming CES 2012 show.

At the same time, this has been a year of rediscovery for me, as I have not only posted regularly to my SiliconCowboy blog, but also completed one screenplay, started two others, and written a half dozen short stories in whatever spare time I managed to find (usually late, sleepless nights like this).

By rediscovery, I mean that I have reconnected with my muse…that creative spark that sits on my shoulder and spins a tale for me to write. It’s been a tremendous experience, finding that I can tell a story that engages people, makes them think and allows them to feel.
There is tremendous power in content, social media types readily admit. Most people don’t do it. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to create stories and help others to write, too.

Living on our little ranch was a dream come true, but that dream is over for me now. My daughter still gets to experience it by hanging out with the horse trainer, and I greatly appreciate that. After she broke her jaw two years ago riding, I have nothing but respect for her enthusiasm for sticking with it.

We lost a lot when we left that place. In a few short years, I went from almost a half million dollars in assets to tens of thousands in loan debt. It would be stupid to dwell on that, even though I am quite sure my credit card company wants me to keep them top of mind. And I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that I was forewarned by a friend at a former worksite that this could happen.

Still, dreams and caution don’t mix well. You have to be willing to take risks before you can make real gains.

The truth is, all the power I have to keep my family and myself going, comes directly from my spiritual state.

If I can remain calm, focused, on task and committed – whether I am taking my girls to school, planning a social media project, writing a story, or cleaning the house, we will get by. The more I do this, the taller I stand and the better my perspective on the future. I increase my confidence, my willingness, my trust and my humility.

My one true gift – creativity – allows me to feel all of this, and still defy the notion that I am a slave to consumerism. I need not resign to that post.

I am a writer, a thinker, a doer, a creator.

I can spark your imagination, calm your soul, break through your assumptions about reality. I can challenge your beliefs, or show you how strong we are when we weave those beliefs together.

I can show you love, jealousy, remorse, anger, pain and loss, gratitude and surrender. I can ascribe to you great wisdom, honor your tremendous personal strength, or point up your hidden frailties. I can draw out the hero in all of us.

And if you ever dreamed of writing, I want you to know that this power lies within you, too.

I may have lost a ranch, but I have gained my destiny.

Happy New Year.

There are plenty of people who probably are experts, because part of this technology is relatively common in software developer communities, mostly as a way to reduce storage needs. Google also uses this technology, particularly in its Google Earth maps applications, which are used for everything from 3D mapping to identifying mine fields.

However, the technology probably hasn’t been used in quite the way I am about to describe.

What I’m talking about is the notion of social data overlays.

I first realized this possibility when I deleted a secondary Facebook account. In the process of doing so, I momentarily saw a “shadow overlay” made up of social data that was a partial merge of information from my primary and secondary accounts. It didn’t exist in reality, only in some transitory software representation.

But seeing it ignited my imagination.

Overlays are a common tool in many software developer communities, as they simplify the process of building and replicating software environments, reduce storage needs, and increase flexibility.

What if it were possible to overlay the social data from every social account owned by a single individual?

What if you could merge the Facebook posts, Tweets, LinkedIn profiles of a single person or group?

Even more to the point, what if you could data mine chats, discussions, and group interactions?

If this were possible, couldn’t it turn Google + into a true virtual world, with completely transparent social profiles including all the various aspects of an individual personality or group?

Or another spin: what if you could profile the social data of a suspect, and then find him by overlaying the profile on a social network and filtering the results?

As I see it, the data is already there. All that is necessary is a tool that can extract and layer it so that it is comprehensible.

Why would this be useful?

Off-hand I can think of two major possibilities: to build sophisticated profiles of consumer groups, and as a powerful criminology tool.

The consumer group use is obvious since most social networks can’t legally provide information on a single individual.

The criminology tool would have to exist as a capability that would only be called upon in special cases.

What do you think?

These movements are huge. growing organically from ordinary citizens’ sense of frustration with the direction of established political and economic systems and accelerated by the use of new technologies, including smart phones and social media, to circumvent established systems of social control.

The result has been significant regime change with minimal loss of life and a global awareness of pressing political and economic issues.

There’s no question that these movements have had effect. Political strategists have been surprised, cheered and sometimes alarmed by their speed and strength.

Less obvious has been the shift in collective conscience afforded by these movements.

Where a decade ago the world was bent on highly competitive economic and technical achievement, the new decade is more concerned with security and equanimity. Where the outset of the Millenium was defined by geopolitical division across a variety of axis, we’ve since discovered that humanity itself values a balance of work, wealth, spirituality and comfort, and that the major barrier to this goal isn’t the tribes themselves, but a vastly uneven distribution of wealth and power that threatens each of them.

One reason for this change in the collective conscience has been a shift from the dogmatic tracts that define our political and religious history, to a greater reliance on crowdsourced references.

These new archives of our collective past – most notably, Wikipedia and other similar resources – allow us to see events from a variety of perspectives, and to develop our own opinions about them. This is a far cry from the communications paradigms of the 2oth century and before, where a handful of religious organizations, political parties and media outlets defined the world for us.

So where do we go from here?

I would like to think that we move toward a more balanced view of our world, and a more sensible and sensitive way of managing it, but in truth, not everybody is on the same page. There are still vast populations whose quality of life is far below average, and many of these populations reside right in the United States of America.  In fact, there really isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t have large imbalances in health, education and employment.

The world is changing, but it isn’t happening overnight.

Even as technology is expanding our collective awareness, it is enabling those with great power to develop ever more secretive, powerful and nefarious strategies for protecting their positions.

And, as the global economy recovers and our wealth rebalances, we can expect to see a rapid increase in population. This combination greatly increases the amplitude of epidemics, natural disasters and geopolitical conflict, which may yet bring a shift toward more protectionist policies that favor the rich and powerful, leaving the masses to wade through the damage like the survivors of the Japanese tsunami.

In the long run, our biggest challenge is not equality, but sustainability as a species.

If we cannot focus our technology to the goal of achieving harmony with our world, we will have missed the greatest opportunity of our lifetimes.

Social engineering is the intellectual basis for a variety of scams or frauds perpetrated on people, either through mail, over the phone or through the Internet. Social engineering scams take advantage of certain social weaknesses — also known as “cognitive biases” — that make us vulnerable to doing things we might not otherwise do.

According to Wikipedia, social engineering is “similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access; in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the global criminals/victims.”

These techniques focus on manipulation of trust, fear, and curiosity.

For example, if I can gain your trust that I am an employee in the IT department of your company, you might give me information I need to hack your network. Phishing scams work by scaring people into thinking that something negative may happen if they don’t cooperate. Entire corporate information systems have been compromised by someone leaving a hacked USB stick on a table with a filename like ‘executive salaries,’ to be picked up later by a curious employee.

And while such social engineering techniques have enabled millions or perhaps billions of dollars worth of fraud and theft, they pale in comparison to the larger playing field where social engineering has been practiced for a much longer time.

Yes, I’m talking about political social engineering. But I’m not going to reach into the stone age to show you examples. We have living examples of social engineering at work today, and perhaps the most eggregious example is the GOP presidential front-runner today, Newt Gingrich.

Since his early days in congress, Gingrich has perpetrated frauds on the American public to gain their confidence and achieve a personal agenda that has cost this country billions and perhaps trillions of dollars.

For example, even as a freshman Congressman from Georgia, Gingrich perfected the trick of making people believe he had widespread power and influence. At the time, broadcasting companies had won an important battle allowing them to install cameras in the houses of Congress to videotape live sessions. Gingrich realized that these cameras were set to record 24 hours a day, and that they were fixed only on the speaker’s podium. So he would walk in to the House chamber late at night and deliver apparently scathing speeches — to an empty floor. Then his staff would secure copies of the tape and send them around to his political backers to demonstrate how much he was working for them. The trick was so blatant that Congress had to pass legislation requiring that the cameras pan the room to make note of how many people were in attendance during a given speech.

During the Clinton administration, he worked an unlikely ally to stave off health care reform — the AARP. Betting that he could instill enough fear into the executives of that organization to convince them not to support the Clinton health care reform bill, Gingrich hammered home the idea that Americans would lose the ability to choose their own doctors and lose control over their health care decisions – claims that he knew weren’t true. He worked that idea continuously until the board relented and issued a statement of non-support that played a key role is the GOP victory. Twenty years later, when President Obama tried it again, Gingrich went back to AARP with the same ploy, but to a much less receptive audience. All he could achieve was a weakened reform measure.

Gingrich learned early in his political career the power of manipulation. In the 1980s he co-authored a playbook of dirty tricks that was distributed to Young Republican groups to stir controversy on university campuses. This ploy allowed him to attack the public college system as liberal strongholds and brought a powerful new ally to the Reagan and Bush administrations.

But to understand where Gingrich is really going with all of this, you have to look at an even bigger picture … as Gingrich himself has done for some 30 years.

Educated as an historian, Gingrich has authored or co-authored nearly two dozen “historical fictions” – rewrites of history targeted to conservative audiences. The exercise has expanded his historical knowledge and his audience, brought in millions of dollars, and afforded him the title of party historian – a simple fraud, replicated many times over for multiplicative effect.

Most of these works reach back into American history, but some focus on contemporary political leaders, in particular the late President Ronald Reagan. Indeed, Gingrich was instrumental in creating the aura that surrounds the late president and has learned much from the experience. He fully understands the interplay between power, perception and popular culture and envisions himself as an American hero.

In keeping with this, he identifies himself less with politicians, and more with politically adept groups that he can use for specific purposes. His membership in the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank  is well known, but he’s also personally responsible for creating dozens of action groups both within congress and in the non-profit sphere. He uses these front groups and non-profits like a small army, to create the political pressure and illusion of support necessary to move his ambition forward. Just as important, he has a history with these organizations that no other candidate can achieve.

Gingrich is on a quest to prove himself smarter and – by means of social control – more powerful than anyone around him. He is the quintessential narcissist, which is both his strength and his downfall.

For instance, while President Clinton was being investigated for the Monica Lewinski affair – an investigation largely orchestrated by Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House – Gingrich himself was involved in a multi-year affair of his own.

During the Bush years, he engineered the Contract with America, a manifesto representing conservative views. More importantly, and to Gingrich’s delight, the Contract was and continues to be used as the big stick by which conservatives control the GOP, creating and maintaining the deep cleft in American politics today. A brilliant effort at social control through fear, intimidation and the fraudulent promise of riches to come.

Arguably, the Contract With America set the stage for the economic meltdown which followed, by engineering a Bush-era regulatory environment that was unwilling to deal with the excesses of Wall Street money managers. Indeed, many of the schemes that created the economic collapse were themselves monumental attempts at social engineering, rampant with fraud.

The heavy handed, aggressive approach represented by this contract (Clinton referred to it as the “Contract on America”) revealed in part Gingrich’s lust for power. This was further expressed during his showdown with Clinton over welfare reform, in which he caused a shutdown of the federal government to force approval of his reform bill.  Even fellow republicans cringed at the power play and many formulated a plan to oust him as Republican Whip.

Under pressure from this group as well as the threat of censure for multiple alleged ethics violations and a rapidly dwindling public opinion, Gingrich resigned from Congress one day into a new Congressional term in 1998.  Publicly, he denounced his fellow Republicans as ‘cannibals,’ but in fact he was more terrified that his public persona would forever be ruined.

Pegged as a ‘lightning rod of controversy’ and under considerable scrutiny for his morally questionable private life (he reportedly divorced his wife while she lay recovering from cancer surgery to marry his staffer), Gingrich was afraid further bad press would dash his hopes for the presidency.

For a while, it looked like Gingrich – who rose from political obscurity to a charlatan, an oddity and finally a masterful architect of the conservative agenda, would fall again in to the shadows.

But if he did fall, it was only to the boardrooms of countless resource-laden conservative political action groups of his own design, where he continued his ploy of fear-based reconstruction of American opinion of health care policy, ongoing manipulation of public policy, and a new historical fiction: the reconstruction of his personal history.

His numerous non-profit groups, works of fiction and privately-funded public policy documentaries (co-starring his wife Callista, with whom he had the affair during the Clinton years) have earned more than $100 million and afforded him unprecedented public exposure (particularly among conservatives) through book and video promotion opportunities.

So now Gingrich sees his window to make a run for the presidency. Why? Because the country is, like some weakened individual, vulnerable to a good fraud – and he thinks his bag of tricks will work. He’s ready to take the gamble.

After all, he’s Newt Gingrich, social engineer, legend in his own mind.

Author’s note: I am a social media strategist for Broadcom Corporation, and Siliconcowboy is my personal blog. All opinions herein are my own.

Photo: Wandering American Blog

In December of 2010 I wrote an article detailing how I thought crowdsourcing had become the biggest social media phenomenon since the millenium. A few months later, I revisted that piece as the Arab Spring rocked the world and evidence began to mount that social media played a very real role.

Now, the US is involved in its own social media-based revolution, which began on Facebook and Twitter as the Occupy Wall Street protest against hoarding of capital, and a variety of other similar complaints.

Indeed, for a while, it seemed as though Occupy Wall Street could be crippled by its own lack of focus, but it’s now become clear that the inclusiveness of the movement may be its strength.

As proof, one need only see the ever-increasing number of self-fashioned “I am the 99 percent” Facebook photo posts, each describing in detail the personal challenges of living in an economically unbalanced society. (These postings, by the way, are gaining increasing visibility due to the streaming status capability of the improved Facebook, which allows users to hover over a posting to preview a photo or article. This preview capability includes its own sharing function, which has accelerated the sharing of photos and quotes.)

The size, persistence and continuity of the mostly non-violent movement has created a virtually impermeable wall of evidence that the Occupy movement is a compelling and deeply organic social development, clearly among the most significant in the past 100 years.

No social movement before it has been less organized, less planned, less directed in its creation. Nor have many been more persistent in the face of continual and relentless opposition. Every day, Twitter lights up with reports of new encampments being torn down or protesters being moved, only to return again. (In fact as this article was being written, New York City police were already organizing to tear down the encampment there. By daybreak, bands of Occupiers who had been communicating via Twitter were recollecting at various points in the city to decide their next move.)  This is the true spirit of uprising.

It is paradoxical but perhaps no coincidence that the target of these Occupy movements is the complex and virtually untouchable power base of the capitalist economy. Crowd sourcing has resulted in a clear bulls-eye, as perhaps no other location on the planet is more responsible for the imbalance of wealth. (As a deeper part of the paradox, it is worth noting that Wall Street’s financial giants have their own extremely secure private social networks.)

Still, we see that the movement resonates with people in other countries, and so Occupy protests are sprouting up in major cities around the globe.

These are not protests over shopping days or health coverage for hair loss. They are calls to action for sweeping economic reform; a complete rethinking of the power and control mechanisms that have been emplaced over the last two centuries … a re-evaluation of fundamental economic foundations.

A few years ago, small groups organized by political PR firms, armed with conservative agendas and backed by privately-funded think tanks, enacted a plan to ‘occupy’ local town halls, using social media to document their successes. But this relatively extremist Tea Party succeeded only in forcing GOP leaders to cripple health care reform and stall the national agenda.

Coming on the heels of the social media-based landslide election of President Obama, the town hall disruptions missed their goal but arguably, accelerated the erosion of productive conversation in Washington. In the end, they simply added fuel to the fires of choreographed television political reporting, heavily loading political analysts with the same dogma and divisive diatribe that has blinded the nation to its real problems and enabled the sweeping burglary and castigation of weakend poor and middle class Americans for so long.

So today, the real conversation is on the streets.

It is spilling out of the mouths and cameras and Blackberrys and iPhones of everyday Americans who, individually and often without any support, from every state and every occupation, every race, creed and religion, have reached a singularly incontrovertible conclusion: That the prospect of achieving an equitable society in our own lifetimes is quickly fading.

Many, in fact, fear that this conclusion was reached long ago by the real powerbrokers; that the hoarding of capital is a strategic and cynical plan by the few to rise above the coming debacle.

Such would be a recipe for great social change even without social media. And Wall Street would be the clear target, whether it was planned or just eventually sniffed out.

Given this environment, the collective intelligence that is crowdsourcing should not be underestimated, nor should it be challenged.

It is the essence of free speech, the quintessential protest sign of the 99 percent.

It’s worth noting that conventional media, and especially television, still play a critical role in the Occupy movement. Any large-scale protest is by nature a highly visual event, and is therefore attractive to broadcast media. Still, Occupy Wall Street has clearly not relied on broadcast media to ensure that people know about it. Indeed, many followers of the movement have voiced skepticism that the traditional media can effectively report on the movement without biasing in favor of disruptions and violence. 

In the final analysis, it may be noted that the great accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street has been its ability to realign the collective conscience - and perhaps a few consciencious Wall Street insiders - from the jaded notion that capitalism is an unrivaled economic machine, to the realization that the American public really does understand deep economic issues, and they seriously don’t like what is being done.

Author’s note: I am a social media strategist for Broadcom Corporation, and Siliconcowboyis my personal blog. All opinions herein are my own.