Paul Miller

I just wandered into a bookshop in SF where Carl Bernstein was giving a talk. One half of the Watergate team, Bernstein has just published a biography of Hillary Clinton. I haven’t read it, but I will do now. He was very good.

According to most Dems I’ve met on this trip, the political debate now is about who will be Hillary’s running mate. It will take a fairly major upset for her not to win the nomination. And okay so I’ve only been on the coasts but people expect her to win the Presidency as well.

Bernstein said something interesting when someone in the audience suggested that there hadn’t been any good journalism to bring down Bush. He said American journalism is as good now as it’s ever been but what has changed is the system that forced Nixon to resign in the 1970s. Washington is now a different beast to the one where he made his name. Money plays a much bigger roll. Makes what Larry Lessig is looking at all the more important.

Steven Johnson links to a feature about America’s generation Y increasingly starting up businesses. Some really interesting stuff in there.

Generation Y, born between 1977 and 1994, may well be on its way to becoming the most entrepreneurial generation in our nation’s history — and for very good reasons. They took their baby steps during our first true entrepreneurial decade, the 1980s; watched their parents “restructured” out of what were once lifetime corporate jobs; (and) saw barriers to entry collapse as technology democratized the business start-up process…

Although I have no data to back it up, it certainly feels like it’s happening on this side of the pond too. I’ve been hanging out with Make Your Mark quite a lot over the past year and been amazed at the level of energy around the campaign from young people who are sometimes on their second or third businesses. And as Steven mentions, this generation is certainly the most political for quite a while. Frustrated with the old structures of politics and ways of doing things, we’ve created our own.

Which all means I’d better get on with it before I’m over the hill… I turn 30 in two months time.

David Miliband gave an interesting speech at a Google event yesterday which puts him firmly into the tiny group of politicians who ‘get’ what’s now happening with the internet.

Gordon Brown is in a fairly unique situation in that he knows that he will be Prime Minister in six weeks time. Normally in the UK, leaders become Prime Ministers overnight. So how about using the advance notice to get people to apply for Cabinet posts and opening up the process a bit?

It might go something like this:

• Gordon decides what posts he wants in the cabinet
• Invites people to apply (I’d suggest only Labour MPs to begin with and that people can apply for a maximum of three posts)
• Applicants send a proposal for what they would do in the job, how they would do it and their relevant experience in the form of a CV
• Gordon and an elder Labour statesman (Neil Kinnock springs to mind) interview the best candidates.
• New Cabinet is announced on 27th June and their applications made public

Crazy idea?

Just a thought for all the coalition negotiations that are going on this weekend in Scotland and Wales following the elections – why don’t they video their meetings and make them available on the web afterwards? It would be really interesting to see how they’re done and demystify the secretive world of backroom political deal making.

Stop, collaborate and listen.

Demos have a new collection out today called The Collaborative State. I’ve got two pieces in there: One on the online response to Hurricane Katrina (co-authored with Niamh) and another about how Government can use online collaborative tools more generally called Flesh, steel and Wikipedia (written with Molly).

Simon and Catherine had an op-ed article (sub req’d) in the FT yesterday which sets out the overall argument of the collection. The book also includes a piece by the brilliant Yochai Benkler, whose Wealth of Networks I reviewed last year.

I realised recently that political theatre has changed quite substantially in the last decade in the UK. When I think back to 1997, the background to the Blair campaign was all about big crowds waving flags and placards and cheering and clapping. I think it was borrowed from the US with those huge party conventions with booming “The Next President of the United States” introductions and balloons falling from the ceiling.

But today that’s gone. The backdrop for the emerging UK political generation is their own front room. Cameron doesn’t do big speeches – he speaks to a webcam. The only place he can have a cheering backdrop is at Tory party conference and they’ve changed the format of that away from a set piece speech for the leader. Also – historically at least – the party hasn’t really attracted the cheering type.

I guess it might be a practical. It’s hard to find enough supporters to make a convincing crowd in an age where political party membership is low and party funding is too tight to manufacture those kind of opportunities. Peter Hitchens said this morning on Start the Week that he thought the two political parties would disappear – something I wrote about a while back with Tom. It still wouldn’t surprise me to see one of the main parties go into receivership.

But I also wondered whether the shift of image is deliberate. Maybe the Tories have made a calculation that people have less trust for the kind of politician who needs a cheering crowd. It would make some sense of Peter Mandelson’s comments over the weekend that imply Labour should skip a generation. Love him or loathe him, his ability to spot political currents ahead of time is probably unrivaled. He well knows that the style of the next generation of Milibands, Balls, Coopers and Lamys is a much more laid back, low-key politics rather than the fist clenched, booming Brown.

I went along to hear George Osborne speak at the RSA yesterday morning about the internet and was very impressed. Normally, listening to politicians talking about technology is a bit embarrassing. They fall into lots of very obvious traps and sound very naive.

But the shadow chancellor has met the people, read the books and obviously spends a fair amount of time online (using Firefox which earned him extra brownie points). The speech should be a real wake up call to Labour and the other parties. It made me realise quite how far behind they are.

Read the full speech here.

The Enron story seems to be everywhere at the moment. The movie was on the TV the other night, the papers all have bits about the sentencing of various lesser players and Malcolm Gladwell has written a piece for the New Yorker which he describes on his blog as a ‘semi-defense’ of the company. His basic argument is that the investment and business journalism communities were just as much to blame because they didn’t spot what was going on.

The piece isn’t purely about Enron though. He describes information problems as either ‘puzzles’ or ‘mysteries’ and gives a number of other examples of approaches to solving them, including how to find Osama Bin Laden and how the Allies worked out that the Nazis were developing the V1 bomb during WWII.

It made me think back to The Long Game which I helped write along with Paul Skidmore and Jake Chapman. Jake is a professor of systems theory and he encouraged Paul and me to think of regulation as a complex problem rather than a complicated one.

A complicated problem is one where if you understand the constituent parts you can make an assessment of what’s going wrong. A complex problem is one where you can’t; you need to look at the way that the parts are interacting and even then it will be difficult. In the pamphlet we called complicated problems ‘difficulties’ and complex ones ‘messes’.

Regulators are part of the systems that they are trying to regulate and don’t have the level of perfect control that they (and other actors) sometimes try to portray. This is one of the reasons you often get unintended consequences of regulation and why almost all policy dilemmas are messes rather than difficulties.

Lovely quip from Sandi Toksvig on the News Quiz:

“You’d think with a Government as right wing as ours, at least the trains would run on time.”