This is too good to just post a link to on FB or Twitter or even that Tumblr I started with such earnest hopes for the unleashing of my strangely bounded creativity. In a column worthy of the Irish Times’ old contributor, Myles na Gopaleen, Frank McNally lists the History of Ireland in 100 Excuses.

It’s almost impossible to cherry-pick because half of the fun is the cumulative effect, and the other half is they’re so damn funny. Still and all:

1. Original sin.

3. The 800 years of oppression.

9. It was taught badly in schools.

10. The Modh Coinníollach.

25. We only did it for the crack.

72. I must have had a bad pint.

80. The money was only resting in my account.

86. The banks were throwing money at us.

90. The Welsh just seemed to want it a bit more than we did.

As they say, words to live by. My sister Eleanor suggests we use it as the rough draft of our next report to the Troika.

Why should a global blog care about American legislation?

For all the talk of the unintended consequences of SOPA’s anti-piracy measures, it is no accident that Crooked Timber could one day end up as collateral damage of this legislation. SOPA/PIPA are the latest in a long line of laws that seek to externalize the enforcement costs of a beleaguered business model.

We could lose our domain name and more, and with no effective recourse, simply because a commenter posts a link to allegedly pirated content. Or because a touchy content owner doesn’t like us linking to them, and doesn’t like what we write. I say these unintended consequences are not accidental because to the intellectual property zealots who privately draft our public laws, Crooked Timber would simply be an acceptable level of road-kill. Funny how ‘tough choices’ are bad things that are done to other people, eh?

More broadly, you should care because SOPA/PIPA are explicitly extra-territorial. SOPA degrades the domain name system in ways that have been repeatedly and explicitly spelt out to US politicians by Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf, two of the guys who invented the DNS the Internet. They were ignored.

(Somehow, it’s ok for law-makers to screw up part of the critical infrastructure while cheerfully admitting they have no clue how it works. Think how that would go down with, say, healthcare or the economy. I know most of them have no clue, but can you imagine them announcing that to a hearing and everyone laughing sympathetically? Yes? Welcome to my world.)

Also extra-territorially, PIPA messes with search results outside the US. And under SOPA, domain names of non-US sites but registered with US registrars could be seized even more easily and without reasonable or timely appeal. There are many, many ways to get screwed by this, even if you don’t live/vote/spend in America.

These are not bugs. They are features. The aim of SOPA and similar laws is to eliminate barriers to the fast and cheap enforcement of private property rights. Abuse is already rife of the currently allowed punitive actions that do not follow due process or include similarly quick and effective channels of appeal. (See notice and takedown under the DMCA, or Whois just about anywhere.) This legislation was created for one narrow commercial interest group out of a whole ecosystem. None of its effects are unintended.

You need to care about this because the infection is spreading to where you live.

Alongside the State Department’s pronouncements on ‘democracy brought to you by Twitter’, and exhortations to other countries to stop blocking the Internet, the US is actually better known abroad for another export: intellectual property maximalism by force.

Via wildly asymmetrical bi-lateral trade agreements, America bullies Australia’s public health system to pay over the odds to US Big Pharma, and threatens to blacklist Spain for not passing laws written by the US film industry. SOPA/PIPA may sound so crazily over the top that they’ll never work anywhere else. Just see how high that one flies the next time the USTR visits your capital city.

But there is hope. Hell, there may even be some common sense.

Finally, the Internet works
The SOPA/PIPA moment is a turning point. Thanks to Wikipedia, this supposedly arcane Internet policy issue has been on every BBC TV and radio bulletin I’ve caught in the past 24 hours. It is mainstream news around the English-speaking world.

(Incidentally, some of the media exchanges are pure comedy gold, as Big Content employees interview each other, trying to be fair-minded but genuinely perplexed that any of this is an issue. BBC Radio 4 interviewer to a Telegraph commentator: “But how can anyone except pirates be against anti-piracy? Surely everyone is in favour of this law, except, of course, for its unintended consequences..?”)

You could see this turning point in neoclassical terms:

•Rent-seekers and gate-keepers coordinate to externalize their costs onto the public and hobble new market entrants, via lawmakers delighted to accept ‘free’ money.
•Citizens face collective action problems in finding out about and stopping it.
•The Internet saves itself at the last minute by reducing the barriers to information
and advocacy, and making it too costly for politicians to stay ignorant and happy.
•Oh, and the whole technology industry also rides in on a larger-than-expected white horse, followed by, possibly, the White House Blackberry User in Chief.

Or you could tell it as the story of the moment people realised the Internet is about more than porn.

Either way, the time is long gone when dreamers could believe the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. The Internet is simply an elegant set of chokepoints being squeezed by anyone who can get their hands around one. The time has come to pick a side.

Movements are formed in moments such as this one. Changes in behavior flow from changes in ideas, and from evolving beliefs about what can be done.

Now, I’m not going to go all Holy Jebus on you, and I realize there are many, many issues we should all throw our weight and our pennies at. But Crooked Timber is a blog, and it depends on a functioning, open Internet. So I ask readers to think about what steps you might take to help prevent foolish, frightened or greedy people from getting themselves lathered up and breaking the Internet all over again.

GET INVOLVED
We’ve already linked to EFF’s SOPA page. If you live outside the US and want to make a difference in what is still a lopsided debate, consider joining or donating to the following organisations:

UK: Open Rights Group (Disclosure: I have recently joined its Board of Directors)

Ireland: Digital Rights Ireland

Europe: European Digital Rights (EDRI), a Brussels umbrella group run by the redoubtable Joe McNamee. Their list of member organisations is also a good source of like-minded orgs.

Feel free to suggest other Internet rights groups below.

• All of us at Crooked Timber agreed/acquiesced to going dark for a day to protest at SOPA/PIPA, for what I imagine are similar reasons. This post, however, represents my own views. Big thanks to Kieran for organizing a URL re-direct at very short notice.

ISOC does essential work campaigning for public policies that keep the Internet open and offering technical training, especially in developing countries. It has hundreds of local chapters around the world that teach people how to build out the Internet and develop their own professional and technical leadership skills. The chapters push for open and ready access in their own countries and feed in information and viewpoints to ISOC’s global advocacy work.

But let me step aside from how ISOC would probably describe itself, and put some less modest flesh on these bones.

Outside the most developed countries, there are probably just a few thousand people in the world who are building out the Internet for the bottom two or three billion. Pretty much all of them will have come up through ISOC. They will have done country code management training days or learnt to deploy IPv6. They’ll have been sent to an IETF meeting or taught how to configure a name-server. Through their local or national ISOC chapter, these individuals will turn enthusiasm and a little knowledge into real professional competence and a set of relationships that make things happen for their countries.

If you look at the development of the Internet, it’s clear that a critical mass of knowledge, curiosity and, above all, relationships are responsible. Each country has replicated this process with its own kernel of people building the country code, routing the traffic and agitating for openness and investment. This all happens long before a local telco incumbent or communications ministry clues in. (Though often these organisations will include people who get involved and informed via the local ISOC chapter.) ISOC has spent the last two decades quietly turning human technical latency into real, live bit-streams, with all the good and some bad that flows through them.

It’s hard to exaggerate ISOC’s reach, but let me give an example. About a year ago I was traveling around East Africa for work. A road trip in southern Ethiopia concluded earlier than expected and I had a free afternoon in Addis Ababa. I contacted the local ISOC chapter and within less than twenty four hours had set up meetings with Internet entrepreneurs and activists. Those sessions were more eye-opening than my previous days of visits to regional IT centres. If you want to plug in to practical yet visionary technologists anywhere, ISOC is the place to go.

But ISOC is more than a social agency for geeks. Let’s take a moment to refresh on the different layers of the Internet; the physical pipes, the interlocking protocols, the software and applications. AT&T or Deutsche Telekom own the pipes. Facebook and Google run software and sell services that go through the pipes. What ties it all together are the protocols and standards in between. Those protocols and standards are a mix of computer code and human behavior. They are developed openly and with the object of maintaining the ‘end to end’ nature of the Internet. The Internet Society is an essential part of this.

Every company that builds its empire on the Internet, and every government that finally gets around to noticing it, inevitably wants to make the Internet proprietary, tame and, ultimately, finite. They give lip service to the Internet as a common pool resource whose value is its limitlessness and ubiquity, but in practice cannot get beyond a mindset of parsing, constraining, monetizing and controlling. Left to their own devices, business and government will devour and destroy the precise characteristics of the Internet that make it a continuing platform for innovation and creativity.

As the legal and philosophical home of the IETF and IAB, ISOC plays a critical role in creating and maintaining the actual and metaphorical middleware; the base protocols that allow anyone’s software to run, or content to flow through. ISOC is an astonishingly important, albeit deeply unassuming organization. I wish ISOC and everyone associated with it many more decades of productive work.

‘Wherever You Are’, the lovely song sung by the Military Wives Choir led by Gareth Malone, is at least worth a hunt through Youtube, along with footage of how it came about. The song’s release follows a TV series about choirmaster Gareth Malone turning a group of women into a proper choir while their military husbands were away in Afghanistan. The women’s letters to their husbands were gleaned for touching – though admittedly a bit saccharine – lyrics to a song written for them. Eventually the men came home, and the choir sang beautifully in the Royal Albert Hall on Remembrance Sunday. There were many tears along the way, not least those of viewers. The song was number 1 in the UK at Christmas and has now been released in the US. The proceeds are going to charities that support ex-service men and women. It is certainly worth a listen and even ordering from Amazon US (whenever they get around to re-stocking it).

The real reason I hesitate just a little bit in recommending this sweet song is a niggling worry about sentiment. We all live in a post-Diana world where the stiff upper lip has given way to increasingly orchestrated and maudlin displays of public emotion. A leader who can’t emote, especially on television, is no good. As soldiers don’t have a choice about which wars they fight, it’s a good thing that citizens of democracies don’t, as a rule, pillory service men and women. But I can’t help thinking all these TV programmes about soldiers and their feelings, army wives singing and crying, and kindly townspeople meeting hearses; they give the rest of us a deliciously tender moment to feel in sympathy, rather than think hard about the reality of an all-volunteer force fighting largely wars of choice.

Seventy years ago, George Orwell wrote that the British ‘common people’ have always distrusted a standing army (a view long-shared by the state, according to Alan Mallinson). Publicans had, in Orwell’s recent memory, often refused to serve men in uniform, and the goose step never took off here because Britain was the rare country where people were unfearful enough to laugh at it. Officers had, for at least a hundred years, changed immediately into normal clothes when they finished work. Today, at least in part because of the need to blend in in Northern Ireland, British soldiers spurn the dramatic and unnecessary buzz cuts of the US military, and quite happily look like civilians when they’re off duty.

In spite of Britain’s historic and rather healthy distrust of soldiers and soldiering, we see a creeping sentimentality in public perceptions of the military. The very good publicity and fundraising on soldiers’ disability and rehabilitation done by Help for Heroes has the unintended consequence of associating the military, in the public mind, with continued pleas for sympathy and support. As the World War II generation dies out, Poppy Day nonetheless goes from strength to strength. Its dissociation from the Great War is almost complete, and the day is now a month-long exercise of the thought police. Ironically enough, the Labour creation of Armed Forces Day – another obligatory show of respect– is seen by many serving as simply more drilling for yet another march down High Street on a weekend you’d rather have to yourself or your family.

All this pomp and sentiment is simply a form of distancing. Mass media omnipresence and fly on the wall coverage of the military has the opposite effects to either honest empathy or critical understanding. It puts the soldiers on a pedestal of sentiment that implicitly says ‘I could never do that’, under-cutting the typical military refrain that they are just ordinary people doing an extraordinary job. It also keeps the idea of soldiering at arm’s length. Our boys are puking with fear before venturing out of the patrol base, but they do it anyway. They’re seldom depicted asking themselves – as they often do and as we should ask ourselves – what are we really doing there, and is there anything more at stake than a face-saving retreat on our own timetable?

Wherever You Go; with its slightly ropy solo, sentimental lyrics and Disney-esque melody, always makes me cry. When my husband deploys next year, I will probably indulge in a few bus journeys into town looking out the misty top window to hide my tears as I loop it on repeat to ease out my emotions in manageable doses. But at least I know this is an indulgence, and not something to be cultivated.

The Bad Karma Diaries is about two girls going into their second year of secondary school, Anna and Denise, or rather Bomb and Demise, in text-speak. They decide to start a business, and a blog, and then also a karma exchange for the bullies and bullied kids in their school. It all goes horribly wrong; adventures are had, lessons are learnt, ways are mended – somewhat – but there’s no moralising at all.

The verdict? “I loved it I loved it I loved it! :D Is there a sequel?? :)”. I’ve had a few misses as we navigate the tricky reading years between much-loved children’s stories and those first steps of her reading grown-up books for real. So it’s very nice to have really hit the spot. If you are looking for a funny, clever, non-preachy but still very enlightening book for the young teenager in your life, look no further.

For Aifric’s birthday next year, I’m thinking of sending Jo Walton’s gorgeous Among Others. If, as they say, Harry Potter is about confronting your fears and doing the right thing, and Twilight is about the importance of keeping your boyfriend, Among Others is about the joy of reading (especially SF & fantasy), surviving loss, thriving as a fish out of water, and the inherent value of thinking long and hard about people in your life, both good and bad. Not just for adolescents, then.

Any thoughts on books – especially recently published ones – for 12-14 year old girls or boys?

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

‘Concerned the female unemployment rate is higher and getting worse’;

‘Troubled that axing child benefit nudges middle class women out of work for good’;

‘Alarmed that women know health and education cuts doom their children to shorter, poorer lives’;

‘Horrified that targeted cutbacks to legal aid mean demonstrably more women will be murdered by the men they love’.

Not at all.

Silly women, the government thinks! Just because of our blue-sky thinking to cut parental leave in the never-ending War on Red Tape, why would women think we have it in for them?

But the UK equivalent of the American soccer mom is deserting the coalition government in droves, and she must be won back. How? The coalition can’t miss this once-in-a-generation chance to destroy the welfare state in order to pay for banks and the imaginary economy they’ve destroyed. The cuts must go on.

Then what shall they do to win women back? How about some cheep ‘n cheerful eye-catching measures that show our hearts are in the right place? Let’s;

• Ban forced marriages, because that’s too simple an issue to cock up
• Pretend we can stop porn on the Internet, because women are too stupid to know it doesn’t work like that, and we can still get ours anyway
• Talk very loudly about how hideous it is to sexualize children, especially working class ones who don’t know any better
• Spend bazillions on our buddies’ flagship ‘free schools’ in west London to show we really care about the kids
• Remind everyone constantly that the Prime Minister’s heart is in the right place; he has NHS frequent flyer miles and he feels our pain

And you know what? Cameron is right to be a little perplexed that women are losing faith in him. Because the government’s faux-regretful gouges at the post-war social contract don’t just hurt women. They hurt everyone who’s not been sensible enough to be born or become wealthy. It’s just that women voters seem to be among the first to cop on to it.

But you can’t play the ‘trust me because I’m a reasonable, personable man with a clever wife I adore’ card more than once. Women aren’t stupid, and neither is the electorate.

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did.

For all that, it arrived into an insanely busy household of people who didn’t have time to meet their own friends, let alone pluck new ones from the ether. It languished there for several weeks. And when it finally got to someone with a moment to do something about it, I very nearly didn’t.

The letter said the man in question had been born in Ireland, educated in England, and was now working for some sort of military attaché in the British embassy in Washington. “Spook!” my friends cried.

Apparently, he was finding it a challenge to make friends in DC because everyone in the embassy went home to their families every night. Johnny-no-mates, I thought. Though at least it also said he didn’t know the letter was being written.

And it said twice that he was “a decent, entertaining fellow”, which, added to the very proper, English military thing, made him sound as dull as mud. You see, the thing about receiving a Victorian letter of introduction is that, however romantic it seems in retrospect, it makes the man in question sound about as exciting as the dutiful Dobbin in Vanity Fair.

I said to my sister-in-law, Nicole, if I don’t ring him this evening, I’m not going to. I thought he’s probably a braying Hoorray Henry with jug ears, the height of whose year is the Glorious Twelfth. He’s tall and gangly, with sticky out years, probably red-haired, and hasn’t finished a book since Eton. Nicole said this was quite an assumption. And anyway, I loved red hair.

I phoned him up. It was a Thursday night about half past nine. He was utterly bemused but couldn’t hear a word. He was at the 9.30 Club to see a band. Hmmm. Not a social write-off, then. We texted and agreed to meet the following night.

But on Friday night we were on different sides of the city with different groups of friends. We phoned back and forth with arrangements. I confided my fears about him and he insisted he was a jug-eared ginger who went by Lord Haw Haw. The calls got flirtier, but the logistics got harder. We didn’t meet.

On Saturday, I had lunch with my boss Paul’s boss, Paul. Over a beer and steak near where the buses leave for New York, I told him the story and showed him the letter. Spook! He said. (He would.) And then ordered me out onto the pavement to call the guy, saying if I didn’t I may as well not turn up to work on Monday. Thanks, Paul.

On Sunday, I bought a new, short skirt and rang on the bell of a stranger’s house in Dupont. Ed opened the door and my initial thought was … hmm. Bit skinny, bandy legs. Nice accent; kind of posh but Irish, too. Likes my jokes. Considerate. Lovely brown eyes and golden skin.

There then followed, in short order, a date in a pub to watch Munster play rugby, to which we each brought reinforcements. I later found out he has no interest in the sport. He flirted with another girl and I, in revenge, went after the helicopter pilot he’d invited as wingman. Him falling drunkenly asleep in an exhibit in the Spy Museum. Definitely not a spook, then. The evening ending in separate taxis and disarray. Mutual apologies the following morning and the scheduling of a proper date. Me encouraging my toddler nephew to call him from my mobile, accidentally on purpose. Him just dropping by on a seven mile run in one hundred degrees. Me inviting myself on his Californian holiday. Him accepting.

And in longer order; a cross country move for work, the sudden loss of my job, home and visa, family bereavements on both sides, unemployment in Dublin, me getting a new job in DC just weeks before he left for his next posting, and months and months of uncertainty at long distance. Then I did something uncharacteristic. I stood my ground and waited.

Because about half way through an adult life where I’d followed one opportunity to the next, moved house every nine months, lived in no country longer than three years, and always thought the point of it all would be revealed in the next job, the next city; I had stumbled into something stronger than my own will, something whose logic and grammar I intuitively accepted with questioning but not doubt. And waiting for the person chosen for me to feel that too, for the next job and the next home and the next ones after that to be willed by someone else, and for all other possibilities to be forever foreclosed, I was calm and perfectly still.

This day last year, in a sunny cottage garden in the Luberon, he crouched down beside my chair and gave me a handful of wild lavendar and thyme he’d picked as he walked and struggled to decide. He began a speech so pained and passionate that I could not tell if it meant the beginning or the end for us. I retained none of it as I concentrated on keeping my face neutral and my breathing steady, ready to bear the worst with dignity, until the very end when the tumble of words paused and he said “… and that’s why I want to marry you.”

We went walking down a country lane to gather ourselves, pulling flowers from hedges as the sun set and pausing to listen to children divebombing into a swimming pool, marveling that the exchange of a few words had changed everything for us.

We married four months later in freezing Dublin. Meg, the author of our happiness, and Mary, the book club queen, were guests of honour and read out an epic poem of our romance. It’s now hanging in the downstairs loo.

Ten days later, Ed left on exercise in east Africa and was out of contact for much of three months. The day we re-united and got the keys of our married quarter in Scotland, he charged out the door for Libya (only to spend a week cooling his heels in Brize Norton before returning home horribly behind on his email). Every time the headlines say ‘the army may be called in’, his phone starts buzzing. It’s like being married to an anti-Superman; when trouble calls, he’s ready. Oh, and that’s it. Phew.

Now, in the present, I see hideous army curtains and a professional life shoe-horned into a new home every year or two, with an unlikely infantry officer who reads me poetry in the bath and whose steady gaze brought me to tears when I ardently vowed to cherish him. And in the future; deployment and more absence, love letters on thin blue sheets, perhaps a welcome redundancy and many more fresh starts, this time together.

‘Reader, I married him’ is just the beginning of the story.

ICANN’s Board has now decided not to renew Rod Beckstrom’s contract as CEO when the deal expires in 2012.* There had been calls for Beckstrom to resign or be fired before the end of his contract, but I’m glad the Board is ensuring that the search for a new CEO is not rushed unnecessarily. Hasten slowly, as my grandmother used to say.

As many know, the Board’s new Chair, Dr. Steve Crocker, has spent considerable time over the past year or so on regular phone calls to Rod Beckstrom, not so much in coaching mode as providing a sounding board and voice of experience. That solid working relationship is a credit to both and will help to ease the transition to new leadership.

The Board has given itself time to think hard about a new CEO and make sure the decision is the right one. Presumably they will set up a search committee. I hope that committee can include or consult members of the Internet community. Here are some points the search committee might consider.

‘Multi-stakeholder’ is not a slogan. It’s ICANN’s DNA.

Rod’s most obvious legacy is a largely new, mostly American executive team with shallow ties to the global Internet naming and numbering community. They will need to work hard with the community to show they understand that ‘multi-stakeholder’ is more than a slogan, and that transparency and accountability are not optional.

The next CEO needs to understand that ICANN is not a California nonprofit that happens to have a lot of volunteers. It’s a unique, multi-stakeholder organisation with a global responsibility to Internet users everywhere.

Avri Doria, who has long experience as a volunteer in ICANN and the IETF puts it well:

“There is a mismatch in the self-identity of ICANN. To some of us, both among the volunteers and among the professional staff, ICANN is a multi-stakeholder driven organization that has hired a professional staff that implements the decisions of the volunteers and assists those volunteers with their work.

I believe more has to be done to make sure that the distinctive character of ICANN as a multi-stakeholder driven organization is preserved and furthered.”

ICANN’s community members aren’t a nuisance to be managed, nor simply a rod to beat the ITU’s back with. They are why the organization exists at all. The Board could do worse than pull a CEO from this pool.

Follow the money, and the politics, and the technology

The CEO needs to master the detail. Unless she or he understands the business models, geo-politics, technology and market trends, and all the gory technical details about how the Internet works, the CEO will not understand what motivates the scores of interested parties clamouring at the table.

There are no shortcuts to mastery, and no room for a figure-head. With a minimum two-year learning curve for a rookie CEO to be fully effective in this role, we need someone who can hit the ground running.

Put it another way, globally, there are probably about 500 key people involved in running the DNS and numbering systems. If the CEO doesn’t know these people already, and know where the bodies are buried – i.e. is not already one of the 500 – then she or he will be a liability for at least the first year.

Also, recognize that this job demands a successful track record in international policy and political circles, as well as good, old-fashioned operational experience. There is a real temptation to hire plausible-sounding management types who have led tech organisations undergoing rapid growth.

But folks, setting up a sales office in Asia is not in the same league as dealing effectively and diplomatically with ministers around the world. Pure private sector leaders simply don’t understand the complexity of operating in a political environment, and we don’t have time to teach them.

(This is not a shot at Rod, who worked as a senior appointee in the USG before he joined ICANN.)

Our people are our greatest asset. No, really.
To lose one or two VPs/Chiefs may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three or four looks like carelessness. To lose seven is vandalism.

The remaining long-term ICANN staff are demoralized and eyeing the exits, especially as the new top level domain program creates opportunities for them to take their insider knowledge and relationships elsewhere. A new CEO needs to value quality of work and integrity, not simply reward yes men and women. To retain good staff, she or he needs to rein in the prevailing mediocrity and caution that destroy motivation and ingenuity on sight. Encouraging staff to develop themselves and take risks – and backing them up when they fail – is the best way to encourage a confident, open culture of cooperation with the community.

Running ICANN is always going to be terrifying. It faces down a political or legal existential threat that is truly FUBAR about every two years. (Of course some of these, it makes for itself.) Hats off to anyone with the courage to take it on.

So credit where it’s due; I don’t agree with much of how Rod runs the organization, but his instinct to publicly call a spade a spade is admirable, albeit wielded inopportunely. A CEO needs to override sensible advice once in a while, and set out a vision just an inch or two beyond everyone else’s grasp.

Good luck to Rod who still has miles to go with ICANN, and to the Board that must now decide how to replace him.—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

• For a more pungent analysis of Rod’s legacy, read Kieren McCarthy or Kevin Murphy at The Register.

When I was a teenager, I met Mats Wilander and had the bright idea of giving him my autograph, instead of the other way around. That way he’d remember me. Cringe. Another time, in college, I met Umberto Eco and blurbled away to him about smoking for several minutes until the postgrads he was there to speak to managed to get a word in. Why, only last month, I was introduced to Alastair Darling and asked him if he’d ever been to DC.

Maybe that’s what happened to the girl from Reason.tv. In this video clip (spotted on BoingBoing a couple of days ago) Matt Damon responds to her assertion that he works hard because acting is insecure, therefore teachers would be better if their ‘incentives’ were similar. Coz it’s in their interest to, see?

Asking a man who financially never needs to work again to agree that the fear of not having a job is what motivates him/teachers is head-scratchingly silly.

By the by, in the BoingBoing comments, Cory Doctorow also makes a beautiful case for education as a public good:

“Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

… But functional democracies require that all people—not just those who are already wealthy—are given the foundational knowledge that allows them to prosper and participate in the full range of social activities that make nations great.”

Words to ponder.

The increasing Americanisation of the FT now has writers review books by their brothers and sisters in arms. The British tradition of publishing book reviews by people who are real-life critics and not part-time cheer leaders and quarterbacks may be nasty, discomfiting and sometimes unfair to writers – and for this I blame editors – but it gives a reader a much clearer view of the essential question; ‘Is it any good?’. I imagine it’s also costing unsung book reviewers their living as money is thrown at superstar writers at the top of the pile.

Case in point: this week’s review by Annie Proulx of a novel, ‘Irma Voth’, by Miriam Toews. Without the name recognition of Proulx, it’s hard to imagine the review being published anywhere except, perhaps, a town newspaper wishing to fill up space and appear cultural by inviting the doyenne of the local book club to write a little something. Proulx dedicates 800 of her 1000 words to describing the plot of the novel from beginning to end; 800 tedious words of ‘this happens and then that happens’, and then a final 50 to more helpfully add that Irma Voth is a parable of redemption with a decent pay-off. It’s just not a very good piece, and yet it is given star treatment.

Proulx’ review occupies the most prominent real estate in the sadly pared back FT book review section, and has an apparently custom-ordered illustration to go with it. The picture alone takes up the same amount of space on the page as 6 of the mini-reviews that comprise the meat of the section. What a waste of space! The books editor may have imagined a gloriously co-branded vista, with the joint intellectual capital of Proulx and the FT expanding geometrically as far as the eye can see. What’s ended up on the page is a colossally wasteful exercise in winner-takes-all back-scratching that is unworthy of either party.

Which is not to say writers don’t have anything interesting to say about books. (And Lionel Shriver’s reviews for the FT are much better than those of Proulx.) Where would the LRB be without writers talking to and about other writers? However, a weekend book review section is for readers, and editors booking puff pieces from rock stars to add to squeezed book sections the illusion of mass would do well to remember this.

What does it mean to ‘get’ a book, or at least to think you have? It’s something that happens in a reader’s mind when the characters, story, feelings and ideas of a novel unite into something greater than their sum, becoming a complete world of their own, a world that teaches true things about the world we live in. A good book that sits uncomfortably in its own era resists understanding just as it teaches you how to read it. Sunnyside is the sort of book you think about for a long time after reading, and will probably come back to again.

The first time I read Sunnyside, I zeroed in on its theme of whether life has any meaning. In a romp about war and movies, fame and money, cartels and kaisers, fairytale princesses and schoolgirl brides, performing dogs and Parisian whores, the questions are asked again and again; in this crazy, violent and speedy world, does life have a meaning? Can stories give it any? Does history repeat itself? And if it does, so what?

Early on, a boy’s redoubtable single mother explains why we are alive: “See that wave in the distance? We’re here to see how lovely it is. God wants us to see beauty and to make the lives of others better. And there’s a pleasure in responsibility.” It’s not enough for Lee, who does everything he can to parlay his good looks for fame and a ticket out of the army. Charlie Chaplin himself, at the apex of everything Lee wants, struggles for conviction in the absence of meaning.

The flip side of these questions of fate bubbles up everywhere: since life is so random, painful and uncontrollable, surely it must be easier to avoid deep attachments to living creatures who can only fail us or be cruelly taken away? Lee, a reluctant American soldier in World War I France, and Chaplin each strenuously resist love because it can only end in pain. When Lee tries to rescue puppies from a burning building, he pauses, thinking “If you want anything badly enough, it’s dangerous.” Chaplin is too frightened to pursue the one woman smarter than he, but is still shattered when fate takes away his purest, most selfless love.

Sunnyside’s characters work vigorously to shape their lives with their will, not so much up against but finding their way through enormous forces like war and capitalism. The three main characters are all men in their twenties and old beyond their years. They’re performers, looking for an audience. Their mothers have been dominant in their lives, and they don’t have the gift of easy friendship. They’re different and apart, and they mostly don’t mind. They yearn for fame or understanding, to be appreciated and understood. Fame seems just a more extreme version of the solipsism a doughboy needs to survive. None of them yearns for a soulmate in a book that won’t allow romantic love as a solution to life’s ills.

I vividly remember reading Sunnyside in a wooden cabana in central America where I’d gone to rest and reflect after I’d lost my job in late 2009. It rained every day and smelt of damp, and I was fed up of yoga, beans and rice. In between gloomy siestas one day, I read a passage that made me laugh out loud and literally gasp at its artistry and wisdom. I put the book aside for a moment, thinking ‘I will never write like this’, and didn’t honestly feel too bad about it. It made me think again of how many different things it takes to make a great novelist.

Sunnyside has marvelous characters, great yarns, a masterful control of tone and voice, the magpie eye for historical research and a philosophical motherlode that keeps on giving. One novelist’s tool that we don’t much talk about, however, is wisdom. Sunnyside is littered with rye and timely observations on life. When General Ironside tries to derive the Allies’ objective in Archangel from his Westminster briefings, he likens the reasons for going to war to an opera’s plot; “the plot could be as complex as a spiderweb, but if you could not explain the point in a heartbeat, you were lost”. Elsewhere, Private Lee is surprised that the Hun call their war dogs simply Kriegshund. It was rare in wartime that a word meant just what it sounded like: “Generally, things were named ironically, as if to annoy you and harden you to misfortunes.”

Sunnyside’s characters remain with me. His minor characters are anything but thin. With my soft spot for Jane Austen and British military men, I fell immediately in love with Ironside whose infinitely sad blue eyes and apologetic, worldly-wise tone belie his utter lack of hesitation in getting down to brass tacks, dispatching orders and traitors each as easily as the next. Rebecca Golod is a harmless-looking little girl whose intuitive grasp of criminality and total lack of compassion for her hapless marks reminded me that goblins and changelings don’t come from nowhere. And still, I worried for her.

People left puzzled rather than exhilarated by Sunnyside’s many plot lines and detours didn’t much like the ending. It sounds too glib to say ‘the point is, there is no point’, because this is a novel with a heart of gold. Having a movie-maker for a main character means the book can think out loud about what makes a good story, and, especially, how to finish one. As Chaplin says; “No story ends happily. The happy ending is only about knowing where to end on a smile, at the very moment where fortune is still on the ascent. The open road. The wedding.” Running through the options to finish a story, Chaplin counts out “Puppies. The lovers reunited. Or it’s all been a dream.” It’s a great set up for the ending of Sunnyside.

What’s this all about? See the introduction to the Sunnyside book event here.

People think of Garret as a dizzy academic, and not the resolutely calculating man he could be when it came to tallying odds and gaming a scenario. This was the man who coolly reckoned at the beginning of his career that while he was constitutionally more suited to the Labour Party, he would achieve less at the head of it, and so joined Fine Gael. His first job was writing the timetable for Aer Lingus, long before there was software for that kind of organisational nitty gritty. He had an extraordinary memory for this sort of thing; on a walk near Cahersiveen a decade ago, he explained to me the old train route there, the stations it called at, the time of each train and effect on the local economy. He giggled when I said we should call him Rainman instead.

One of the best things Garret did, politically, was to go out over the whole country at the beginning of the 1980s to recruit young people and women into Fine Gael, bringing into public life a new generation, and re-inspiring the women who’d first tuned in to politics with Declan Costello’s tract , ‘The Just Society’. He phone up my mother, Louise, soon after we’d moved to Tipperary and hardly knew anyone, and got her to run. She very nearly won. But having gone out on a limb as a complete blow-in to the community and lost, Mum expected a little consolation. Garret’s rapidfire response; ‘Well of course you weren’t going to win, but you helped to get out the vote for the number 1.”

The general elections of the 1982 period all roll into one, in my memory. It seems like a long period of running door to door with my sister, brothers and other party children, decked out in an endless roll of colourful stickers, always in earshot of a tractor pulling a trailer and speakers blasting out the cheesy vinyl single; “Fine Gael, Fine Gael, oh-oh the future we hail!”. As children on the imaginative cusp of adolescence, we felt in the middle of a great adventure, on a quest to change the whole country, led by Garret the Good. Admittedly, I was ten years old and the finer policy points were a little beyond me.

Our families’ political fortunes and multi-generational friendships had been intertwined since the Easter 1916 journey of Garret’s father, Desmond FitzGerald, and my great-grandfather, Eoin MacNeill, in a truck to a prison camp in Wales. Some of my tenderest memories of Garret are from the time of my aunt Bairbre’s death, now almost twenty years ago. Bairbre was an accomplished historian, schoolteacher and a profoundly ethical woman, who Garret had always cherished. When Bairbre was dying, Garret and my uncle Michael reconciled, following Michael’s earlier departure from Fine Gael to help found the Progressive Democrats. My old friend Colin Murphy reminisced with me today about the morning Garret, my Dad, brother Remy and sisters Annaick and Eleanor followed Bairbre’s coffin in convoy from Dublin to Kerry. Garret gamely let us keep his spirits up on the long journey, but we all fell into the most profoundly speechless silence as hundreds of Bairbre’s and my uncle Joe’s uniformed students lined the bridge over the Laune and up into Killorglin. The morning of the funeral, Garret’s merriment and joy were briefly back as over a dozen of us pounded the breakfast table while Garret cooked the sausages. Emily and Bridget Hourican whipped us all into several choruses of ‘Sausage-maker, Sausage-maker, fast as you can!’, and Garret conducted us with the spatula.

When he came to Washington DC almost two years ago, Garret stayed with Henry and his family and visibly thrived on having the two small boys buzz around him, in between trips into town for dinners with John Bruton and other Irish and American politicians. This was a timely moment for me, because Garret was the first non-DC based family member to meet my then brand new boyfriend, Ed, and sent back a glowing report to Mum. On learning that Ed was in the British Army and had spent time in Northern Ireland, Garret asked for Ed’s regiment, mentally pegged it straight away and said “Oh good. They never gave us any trouble.”

(That also prompted him to tell us about a still painful incident when Irish police had unwittingly arrested British security forces for coming south of the border looking like Provos. He never could get Margaret Thatcher to believe the episode was an innocent one, and not dreamed up as a provocation, and put it down to her inability to imagine herself acting in such a straightforward way. On the whole, though, his stories about her were fond, though not especially warm, and respectful.)

I think Garret lived such a mentally sharp and active life for so long – still writing his regular economics column in the Irish Times to the end – because he was just so curious and endlessly interested in and enjoying the people around him. Every summer, he and his daughter Mary organized a weeks-long summer house rental in the south of France, where a rota of family, friends and especially his beloved grand-children and their friends would come through, with 20-30 people at a time sitting down for dinner. (Everyone took turns cooking dinner and Garret calculated contributions based on a characteristically complex but fair formula.) Just last week, my sister Annaick was telling me about once being exiled to the children’s table. She’s twenty eight. Main course done, Garret went right over to the younger crowd and demanded to know what they were talking about. Books and films, came the answer. “Ah good, much more interesting,” he said, and sat straight down to listen, learn and interject.

Garret was famously devoted to his wife, Joan, and many wondered at how he ultimately regained his energy and many enthusiasms after she died. But he was far more robust than his unworldly public image seemed to suggest. When, fairly late in life, he lost all his savings in the misguided GPA investment, Garret rolled up his sleeves and set to work writing, writing, writing to provide for them both. After Joan died, Garret carried on industriously writing, thinking and talking to his wide and varied circle of family, friends and peers.

More than anything, Garret loved the company of clever women. When my parents turned up on the annual summer holiday, he would decry their failure to bring at least two of their four daughters. Truth be told, he loved to be sat at dinner beside a clever, pretty girl. And while he had the normal allowance of conversational set pieces and an endless array of mind-bogglingly detailed information on obscure topics, Garret always asked lots of questions and listened curiously and carefully to the answers. He was the rare Great Man who relished a real conversation.

One summer, he gave me some drafts for a lecture tour of American universities he was to give in the autumn, talking about US/EU relations. I pointed out he had hardly mentioned Russia, and that relations with then-resurgent Russia were the linchpin of his arguments about Europe and America’s differences of philosophy and material interest. His loud and delighted exhalation – “Ah!” – began a memorable couple of days of discussion, reading, and re-writing. Garret’s intellectual openness and generosity were a joy to encounter.

The last time I saw Garret was at my wedding just before Christmas. He caught my eye as I started up the aisle, and his rheumy smile steadied me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. Garret was a decade younger than my grand-parents, but because both grand-fathers died early, I’ve always thought of him as being just a little of that mold. It has been lovely to be one focus of his curious and pleased interest over the years, to be a cherished knot in the silvery net of friendship between families and generations.

Garret adored his extended family and was always excitedly tender towards his own grand-children in particular. Garret’s children, and especially his daughter Mary, shaped their way of living to place Garret at the hurly burly centre of decades of family life. They generously shared him with many other people, and will miss him the most. But I will leave the final word to my mother, Louise, who told me this morning that “to have known him and been loved by him was enough”.

I’m a little nervous of the pronouncement that this novel is about the themes it evokes and the questions it implies, not least because it might lessen the fun of reading it and hitting on these questions yourself. But I want to stake very firmly the claim that this book needs to be gobbled up, because picaresque is serious stuff.

Sunnyside made me laugh out loud in public and on my own, pepper Wikipedia with historical queries, plague family and friends with its insights and asides, and cry the embarrassing, heaving sobs of true loss, not the fictive kind. And, annoyingly, in the middle of a grand World War I narrative where faceless millions perish mostly off-screen, Sunnyside made me care very much if the dog makes it.

Three writer/critics from London and New York have very patiently born with me while we pulled this seminar together:

Stuart Evers, who reviews books for the Guardian, Independent, and others, and has just produced a collection of short stories: Ten Stories About Smoking, says that for all Sunnyside’s good humour, charm and intelligence, the book is darker than it first seems. Sunnyside mirrors the invention of celebrity culture that it documents; there is no such thing as truth, there are just stories, myths, and images, and the yarn-spinners are as much in the dark as everyone else.

Robert Hanks used to write about books and such for the Independent, and is now a solo gunslinger in the world of culture. He has fascinating views about zoos, and I wish he’d write a book about them. Robert’s take on Sunnyside is that it doesn’t really work as a novel, but absolutely nails Chaplin’s shaping of modern celebrity. Before the movies, famous people were something you heard or read about or looked at pictures of; “Chapin’s fame abolished distance: people in every corner of the world knew his face, the twitch of his moustache, how he walked”. Sunnyside also shows something far deeper, that people began to respond in a new way to movie stars, inserting themselves and their own imaginative lives right into the idea of Chaplin.

Adam McGovern, the New York comics man behind Pood, and a writer on the Comic Critique Blog, points out that you didn’t hear much about the poor old artist in the age of mechanical reproduction until Chaplin came on the scene. Nowadays, what with blogs, twitter, and online seminars on group blogs, you are never done with hearing from the artist. Adam did a fascinating Q&A that elicited this little story from Glen:

“I found that a critic was tweeting about the experience of reading the book. No matter how much I furrowed my brow and squinted at Twitter, I couldn’t figure out if what he was saying was positive or negative. It drove me crazy.

Sunnyside is the anti-Twitter.”

I’ll be posting the essays over the next few days, and rounding it all off with Glen’s essay in response. Comments are encouraged!

If you’ve not yet read Sunnyside and the essays seem a bit of a deep-dive for starters, try my piece ‘Why You Should Read Sunnyside, Best Book of the Year‘, from Christmas 2009. At bottom, the reason this seminar is to encourage people to pick up and enjoy this marvelously fun and thoughtful book.

The response to this speech was overwhelmingly strong and supportive, both in the immediate and lengthy applause and, since then, in a constant stream of handshakes, twitter and facebook shout-outs, and emails – many of which were privately sent by current members of the ICANN staff. I am re-producing my comments here so that they may be more widely available and spark further public debate.

I know the Internet community well enough to say that this is not a popularity contest, and the support I’ve received for my comments isn’t personal. There is a widely shared and profound disquiet at how this organization has been managed, horror at the near-vandalism of the damage done, and a growing sense that it must stop.

“My name is Maria Farrell. I am a member of this year’s Nominating Committee, appointed by the NCUC (Non Commercial User Constituency), and I was previously a member of the ICANN staff.

I have the distinction of being the first of a mass exodus of staff from the ICANN organization, in a series of forced departures which continue to this day.

I have kept silent and not spoken about this out of loyalty to the organization and respect for the leadership, and also my desire not to make a difficult situation worse for the ICANN staff. But my profound disquiet about how the organization is operationally being managed has moved me to speak to the Board today.

There has been a vast hollowing out of expertise, of relationships, of institutional memory, and of goodwill for this organization, and I believe the impact on ICANN ’s operational effectiveness has been profound. The impact on the international reputation is also quite an issue.

There is a climate of fear stalking the ICANN staff. People are afraid to speak frankly internally, and to speak unpalatable truths behind closed doors, the sorts of things that need to be discussed to allow the organization to function efficiently.

People are afraid of losing their jobs by doing their jobs.

The collegiality that we knew as former ICANN staff seems to have evaporated as we have hemorrhaged talent over the last year or so. The culture of collegiality has made way for one of managing up and managing expectations, rather than serving the community.

Operational planning is in some disarray, as budgets are made up as we go along, priorities change, and internal communication is nonexistent.

I believe also that ICANN’s relationships that have been cultivated around the world over many years and with much assiduity have been trashed.

This hollowing out of the expertise of the ICANN organization, of goodwill, and the trashing of its international reputation has come to such an extent that I believe it requires urgent board attention.

These are very harsh words. I don’t deliver them with any sense of ease or happiness, but I do believe although the board doesn’t wish to be involved in micromanagement, that it needs to pay attention to these issues.

Thank you.”

[ applause ]

>>Peter Dengate Thrush (Chair of the Board of Directors): Thank you. Can I say the Board gets regular reporting on these matters from the staff. I’ll just ask the ceo to report briefly on staff matters.

>>Rod Beckstrom (CEO): Sure. First is we do track our turnover. Total turnover last year was below 15% for the organization. The industry comps for non-profits in the U.S. are between 20 and 30% a year for high-tech companies, a similar range. Our turnover rate is actually quite low.

We don’t publish statistics on voluntary versus involuntary turnover, for privacy reasons. We have also done a survey of our staff satisfaction, and we have an entire process that’s working on that overall. We’re very proud of our accomplishments. We’ve added some outstanding people to the organization and are very focused on execution. At the same time, I really appreciate your sharing your own views. Thank you.*

END OF TRANSCRIPTION

A few minutes later, Lesley Cowley, MD and CEO of Nominet (the .UK registry) came to the microphone to reiterate the concerns of the country code community at the loss of expertise & knowledge among the ICANN staff. Pointing out that the quoted 15% retention rate goes across the organisation, while the community’s concern is with the loss of senior staff, Lesley said her ‘back of the envelope’ calculation was that ICANN has lost 78% of its senior staff under the current leadership.

Lesley encouraged the Board to monitor and implement staff retention and morale initiatives in the overall strategic plan, pointing out that the CEO’s retention figures were based on a previous financial year, and that ‘experience is still walking out the door’.

• I’ve minimally tidied up the transcribed remarks for readability. You can listen to the audio here.

Scroll forward to minute 23.10 for my remarks and the response to them, and 37.25 for Lesley Cowley’s.