July 2006 Archives

July is coming to an end and it's hot, hot, hot. The weather service has issued a heat advisory for Michigan from now until Tuesday. According to the NWS the heat wave began on Saturday and is going to continue while high pressure locks in over the southeast and low pressure over the plains combine to send southwest winds my way.

So it is time for another meta post. Since I returned to the daily blogging routine in mid-June I've been thinking about what weblogging does for me. I've noticed recently that blogging, for me at least, is about self-discovery, finding out what issues are bugging me enough to write about in a public forum. I've believed for a long time that too many people fail to examine their own thoughts or place in the world. Blogging is one way to do that; it is about improving one's reflective practice.

Here's the list of what's been top of my mind for the past month.

• Economics. Four posts in this series, a kickoff on Yochai Benkler and peer production, some righteous anger in response to The Corporation, a review of Richard Florida's star turn at the Cato Institute weblog in June, some questions about the power of distributed problem solving
• Education. Four posts - more on the declining economic value of education, some disconnected imaginings for a new education, interpolations in response to a review by Geert Lovink, and gesturing toward a new birth for community education, and yet more models for sharing experience and knowledge over the web
• Rhetoric. The decline of political rhetoric, and the failed appeals to freedom of evangelicals.
• Information management, mostly personal. Two posts here - first recording my current personal information management practice, second attempting to recover information I'd read before. On a social level, the information infrastructure for responding to emergencies
• Aesthetics. The connection between art and teaching, getting annoyed by Hollywood and book trilogies, speculations about time travel in mainstream and genre fiction, a celebration of Ren and Stimpy, praise for Emusic and small music labels. I'm disappointed again and again by the inability to search for music by label on iTunes. I noticed the same thing in books today when I tried to find information about Vintage publishers. I had to hack at the URL for half an hour before I could get past the Random House landing page. Am I the only one who buys books and CDs based on the collective brand of a label or publishing house?
• Warfare, stimulated by the eruptions in the Middle East. Connections to American empire and the machinery of war in the guise of the military industrial complex.
• Criticisms of technology. Mostly a favorable quote of the people conformed as the masses by Ulises Ali Mejias. And a boost for technology, in the form of past dreams about shaking the dust of this planet off my feet and seeing the universe
• Religion. Minor thoughts about religion and the workplace.
• History. A brief reminder to remember our history on Independence day. Also related to the elision of Eisenhower and the military industrial complex and other vain attempts to bestir the United States of Amnesia.
• Personal and meta musings. Thinking about neophilia, whether to split weblogs into pieces, attempting to summarize my current interests and concerns
• A few link dumps. From the 11th, the 24th, the 26th

I'll note one intriguing finding from this list. There's very little connected to my professional or educational interests. I don't know whether this means I'm pursuing the wrong career course or simply that the blog is a way to vent in areas where I don't have a vested interest. Perhaps this will be more fodder for future posts.

Even the movies I've been watching, not to mention the news I've been reading, have been about violence lately. This weekend it was two approaches to the same problem: the industry of killing.

First up was Lord of War, a recent Nicholas Cage flick about a young Ukrainian man who emigrates to the United States and becomes an arms dealer. What better way to make money, huh? America is, indeed, the land of opportunity. Yuri starts his business with his brother, but his brother becomes a drug addict and also starts to feel pangs of conscience about the job. Yuri just keeps on plugging away. To add dramatic tension Yuri is being chased by an Interpol agent, played by Ethan Hawke. There's a love interest too, a beauty pageant winner from Queens.

So is the movie any good? Kinda. On the bad side is the constant narration. Yuri spells everything out for the audience in voice over. It got annoying very quickly. On the good side there are some wonderful scenes, especially the one where Yuri is forced to kill his competitor by African dictator Andre Baptiste. In fact Baptiste gets one of the best exchanges of dialogue in the movie.

Andre Baptiste Sr.: They say that I am the lord of war, but perhaps it is you.

Yuri Orlov: I believe it's “warlord.”

Andre Baptiste Sr.: Thank you, but I prefer it my way.

Two different ways of saying the same thing. But one, 'warlord', feels so banal and the other much richer. The warlord is just another petty dictator, ensconced in some third world country, far from America. But the lord of war, what a rich title; a title that even Americans could be proud of, and a title that cuts so much closer to the truth of the modern American defense industry.

Our next film was Why We Fight, a documentary by Eugene Jarecki. He starts the picture with Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech as president, the famous military-industrial complex. The speech is brilliant. But as Gore Vidal says, we live in the United States of Amnesia, so its commentary is long forgotten.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

From this Jarecki builds a reminder to all of us that America has been running an empire for a long time and military interventions have been the norm rather than the exception. The movie is very well done, I encourage everyone to see it.

I've personally seen a small part of this complex at my summer job. I've been working on collecting information related to ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. I've collected terms related to weapons systems and other technologies covered by the law. For a real walk on the depressing side of the human condition I suggest reading a few documents at Wikipedia about chemical weapons.

All of the imagination, ingenuity, and effort that has gone into better ways to kill our fellow human beings is staggering. For more on this I suggest you start here. We have wasted so many lives.

Via Anne Galloway at Purse Lip Square Jaw I come across some interesting reviews of Utopian Entrepreneur, a book by Brenda Laurel. Anne points to Geert Lovink's review in particular.

It might be true that, for instance, Derrida is in need of mediation. On the other hand, why is there no self-educated working class reading Deleuze? Why has the 'educated proletarian' become such an unlikely, even funny figure? I know this is a weird, untimely consideration. Whereas the world of complicated research in science and technology is overpopulated with eager translators, contemporary theory lacks even basic forms of intermediate journalism. We hear it so often: why do you theorists use such difficult terms? Why can't you talk like us, normal people? No one dares to say this to geeks or bio-technologists. They are the Gods. Everyone has to decipher their oracles. Psychoanalytic and dialectical jargons have been replaced by programming languages and complex biotech procedures.

My emphasis added above. I haven't done nearly enough research into the history of informal education, but websites such as this make me think that something has gone missing in today's world with regard to collective education. Sure the blogosphere is letting us all shout out our own ideas and thoughts but the connection between those thoughts and the physical neighborhoods we all live in are still being determined.

It all leads into a larger critique of education in general. A critique that I'm still grappling with. I'm making vague gestures to a better world that should be out there but I haven't latched onto yet. It may already be there, a la Gibson's 'the future is already here, just not widely distributed.' Or it may have been here, in different guises and images, in the past.

Intellectuals are the fallen Gods. I am not being nostalgic here. This is not the world of Paris, 1968 anymore. Who cares about Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, or Hegel? Their once mighty constructs have rapidly become historical information, fading away behind the infotainment event-horizon, interesting for those specialized in hermeneutics and the archeology of knowledge. Theory has withdrawn from society and can only explain to us where we come from. Today's theory has the tendency to denunciate the new and stress the eternal return of human imperfection. Techno consensus on the other hand will tell us that we should deduct the future, not dig into some dark Euro-centric past. Why miss out? Unless you're not handicapped by some loser mentality, there is no 'selfish' reason to not be part of the corporate global world.

The disappearance of the past is exacerbated by the heroin-like high of the technological new. I love the new as much as anyone. I'm not ready to throw in the towel on my weblog, although there are times when it helps to get away from it all.

I've taken breaks on my own weblog here. Like many I was thrilled with the discovery of weblogs back in 2001-2. I started my own in a couple of different places. In 2004-5 I stopped most of my work on my weblog, as can be seen from a look at the archive links. Now I'm back at it again. My emotional connections to the medium come and go. What little social capital I've built up in the past feels gone. There are lots of reasons for this, my own reluctance to reach out to people, my sometimes overdeveloped sense of privacy.

What we need is a language and method for people to come into and out of groups.

As soon as you start to reflect on the inner dynamics of Silicon Valley, you seem to be out. Instead of calling for the development of a rich set of conceptual tools for those working 'inside,' Laurel reproduces the classic dichotomy: either you're in (and play the capitalist game), or you're out (become an academic/artist/activist, complain and criticize as much as you can). There is no sense here of a possible support line of an 'organic' virtual intelligentsia (in the Gramscian sense) which could cross borders between in and outside. The implicit anti-intellectualism is widespread amongst Californian New Age- infected fifty somethings. The mutual resentment between those involved in technology and business and the ivory tower humanities on the other hand seems higher then ever.

But technology as a field of endeavor is reluctantly connected to its humanist critics. The two cultures still thrive, from both sides of the aisle.

On the other hand, let's face it. Postmodern theory and cultural criticism haven't been very helpful either for Laurel & Company. Doesn't matter if you take Jameson, Zizek, Butler, Habermas -- they all lack basic economic and technological knowledge. As long as they confuse Internet with some offline cybersex art installation, there is not much reason to consult these thinkers. They add little to Laurel's conceptual challenges in the field of user interface design or the criticism of the male adolescent geek culture. Cult stud armies will occupy the field only if the IT-products have become part of mass culture. This means a 'delay' of at least five to ten years.

Theory is running behind the facts. The Gutenbergsche baby boom generation, now in charge of publishing houses, parts of mainstream media, and in leading university positions, share a secret dream that all these new media disappear in the same pace as they arrived. Lacking substance, neither real nor a commodity, new media failed to produce its Rembrandts, Shakespeares, and Hitchcocks. The economic recession followed by the NASDAQ 'tech wreck' only further deepens the gap between the forced 'freshness' of the techno pop workers and the dark skepticism of the high art establishment.

Lovink published this review in May 2002. So the people waiting for the collapse of new media may have changed their mind, or else shifted their concerns to the creeping tide of blogosphere fascism. There's still a lot of resistance on the part of those at the center of the media world against those on the periphery.

Laurel is an expert in human computer interface design and computer games and a great advocate of research. 'The Utopian Researcher' could have been a better, more precise title. She has some pretty insightful things to say about the decline of corporate research. The speed religion, pushed by venture capitalists and IPO-obsessed CEOs, has all but destroyed long-term fundamental research. “Market research, as it is usually practiced, is problematic for a couple of reasons. Asking people to choose their favorites amongst all the things that already exist doesn't necessarily support innovation; it maps the territory but may not help you plot a new trajectory” (41). Laurel's method, like many of her usability colleagues, is to sit down and talk to people, “learning about people with your eyes and mind and heart wide open. Such research does not necessarily require massive resources but it does require a good deal of work and a concerted effort to keep one's assumptions in check” (84).

The connection between technology and short term gain is complex. A lot of the contemporary finance industry depends on technology to do the work, run the models, figure the risks. When people complain about the short-term time horizon of business they are, in part, complaining about the technology that enables the short-term thinking.

As a result of this industrial research has changed a great deal. I wrote a paper last winter about Bell Labs and the infrastructure that created and fostered it for fifty years. For 50 years, almost exactly in the middle of the last century, from its founding in 1925 to the breakup of AT&T, Bell Labs was the model for business research. And it worked. I don't know of many other companies that have produced six Noble prize winners.

Laurel is on a mission to change the nature of the computer games industry, away from its exclusive focus on the shoot-'em-up male adolescent market. She outs herself as a Barbie hater. Fair enough. She wants to get rid of the “great machine of consumerism,” a strategic cause many share. However, this goal hasn't made much progress over the last twenty odd years -- and Laurel will be the first to admit this. Laurel says: read my advice and keep on trying. I would counter this “will to action” and instead call for a break. It is time to stop and take time to go through some fundamental questions. For instance, I would like to call into question the implicit equation between utopian entrepreneurism and the very specific techno-libertarian agenda of the venture capital class.

So it's time for a critique. Technology will help. It's already given us a lot of power. The means of creating and distributing information are getting cheaper and more accessible. But access to the media is not enough. We need to widen the critique, take a step back as Lovink suggests, and call into question the utopian nature of entrepreneurial activity. Technology needs something more than a libertarian gloss.

Although Laurel sums up all the problematic aspects of short-term profit driven technology research, she does not propose alternative forms of research, collaboration, and ownership out of a fear to “activate the immune system.” Her fear to be excluded from the higher ranks is a real dilemma, which I don't want to demise easily. Laurel tactically avoids a critique of the George Gilders, Wired, the Bionomics suits, and others, which Europeans, for better or worse, labeled as the 'Californian ideology.' The pillars of the techno-libertarian business agenda don't seem to exist. Laurel may never have been a true believer, but she's not saying anything about this once so dominant agenda. And this is where the trouble starts.

Back in June the Cato Unbound web site ran a short debate between Richard Florida, of Rise of the Creative Class fame, and three other economists called “The Future of Work.” Strangely enough the exchange didn't force me to start pulling my hair out because of unwarranted claims about the utter brilliance of the free market, something I expect whenever I come into contact with the Cato Institute.

Florida basically summarized his major thinking in four points.

1. In the new economy talent has become the fundamental factor in production.
2. Regions become the fundamental geographic unit of the new economy because talent concentrates into regions, not necessarily nations.
3. The forces of concentration for talent lead to greater political divides between areas of haves and have-nots.
4. The divisions in the global economy are becoming more extreme.

The criticisms of Florida's thesis are pretty mild. Robin Hansen thinks Florida is hand-waving when he uses the term creativity, and linking said creativity to closely to those 'bohemian fringes.' Frank Levy says that the creative class is just another name for skill biased technical change. And Edward Leamer wants to use the word talent instead of creativity, and worries that a talent economy may increase inequality.

None of the respondents mention the impact of all these economic changes on democracy, but I think it's worth considering. Modern democracies are intimately connected to the rise of middle class societies. The expansion of suffrage to all adults is a relatively recent development, even in the United States. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution is less than 100 years old.

Nowadays the rising importance of talent is leading to a winner-take-all society, with growing income inequality. I don't think it's likely that we will overturn the 19th amendment anytime soon, but the social and economic fabric that supports democracy seems to be dissolving.

Levy does raise some very interesting questions about education in all of this mess.

If I am right in this judgment, an educational system that stresses creativity is at least as important as an attractive environment for the high IQ types. Consider, for example, one part of education that everyone stands up for—how to teach problem-solving skills.

In the workplace, solving a problem usually involves two steps. First, parse a messy set of facts to determine what technique applies. Second, execute the technique. In the classroom, “problem solving” is often defined as the second (rules-based) step and the first step is ignored. I firmly believe that an algebra student needs to know how to solve a system of two equations and two unknowns. But once the student is in a real job, she won’t be paid to solve the equations by hand—a computer will solve the equations. Rather, she will be paid to recognize when a two equation system is a good way to answer some complex question. Teaching this kind of recognition looks more like project work or a business school case than it looks like assigning the first five problems at the end of the chapter on simultaneous equations where choosing a solution technique isn’t much of an issue.

So we need to introduce more real problem-solving into education. But as I suggested in the beginning of this essay, even the best education will not solve the basic distributional problem now facing the country. Any economist will tell you that rising labor productivity is the key to rising living standards. As we now can see, however, that statement only holds in the aggregate: the distribution of the rising living standards is always up for grabs.

It all fits into things I've said before.

Last winter I read a book called Splintering Urbanism for a class with Paul Edwards about the history of information infrastructure. The thesis of Splintering Urbanism is that the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century acceptance of public support for urban infrastructure began to come apart in the 1970s and 1980s, coincidentally with calls for deregulation and privatization. One of the results of this is glocalization, a neologism coined by the authors to describe localities that are hooked up to the world economy but disconnected from their physical neighbors. Gated communities, special business districts, transportation hubs, are a few of the examples they give.

Graham and Marvin are professors of urban studies so their approach to the problem is different than Florida's economic sociology, but both of them indicate something fundamental. Florida shows that the current economy is pushing us toward enclaves of wealth and Graham and Marvin show that the accepted role of public institutions, such as the government, for building infrastructure has been assailed for the past thirty years. Together these two events don't bode well for economic fairness or equality.

I've been prompted to think about time travel by two recently read novels and a movie. The novels were The Time Traveller's Wife and Slaughterhouse Five, the movie The Lake House. Is there any difference between the treatment of time travel in these works and more conventional science fiction genre works, such as H.G. Wells The Time Machine.

The Lake House and The Time Traveller's Wife are both mainstream works that use time travel to illuminate character and emotion, especially love. The Lake House is a love story between a man and a woman who communicate with each other despite being in the same house at two different times. They exchange letters through the mailbox at the lake house of the title.

The Time Traveller's Wife is also a love story. The main male character travels back and forth to different times in his own life. He meets his future wife when she is a young girl, but he is already in his twenties. The novel is basically a long revelation of how this relationship grows.

In Slaughterhouse Five Billy Pilgrim becomes 'unstuck in time.' (a wonderful phrase) He wanders, like the protagonist of Niffeneger's novel, back and forth throughout his life. The difference is that there is no physical travel. Instead it's all mental. Being unstuck in time is really just another way of being prone to the whims of memory. Unlike normal humans, Billy has the advantage of voyaging into the future.

The Time Machine treats time travel on a larger, societal level. Time travel is a device for discovering what the distant future of humanity will be like - to travel 802,000+ years into the future and meet our human descendants, the Eloi and the Morlock.

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy also uses time travel to critique society. In this case the travelers are transported into the future to see how a utopian society would work. Most early time travel novels use the change in time to “place enlightened representatives of their society in Utopian or Dystopian worlds. Most of these tales had very little to do with actual time-travel because the journeys themselves were limited to a one-way trip; but the stories did provide their authors with a literary means for making spectulative commentary about the future and the nature of contemporary society itself.” John Flynn on time travel literature

So in the spirit of making unsubstantiated generalizations I'd say that time travel is used for very different metaphoric purposes in genre science fiction versus mainstream fiction. Genre science fiction uses time travel to critique contemporary society. The scale of the concerns is often much larger than the individual person. Mainstream fiction uses time travel as a character device, a way to analyze how people interact romantically and socially. The scope is much smaller.

I'm not saying that one or the other attitude is better or worse. It's just something I noticed in recent reading and viewing. For every instance that supports my thesis there may be objections. I haven't read Gabaldon so I don't know where her work fits in my scheme, it's just another item to consider.

I'm feeling a bit surly and miscellaneous today. No particular reason that I can identify. Miscellaneous, an interesting word. My computer dictionary says it comes from the Latin miscere - to mix. It fits.

So here's a mix of recent readings.

The neoeconomic consensus is beginning to fall apart.

• David Sirota starts it off with a broad summary
• New Democratic Network has some nifty graphics. I especially like the disconnect between productivity and wage growth.
• An interview with Bob Rubin, ex-Clinton treasury secretary that hints at the sea changes.
• Hale Stewart lays out the disconnect between college education and wages

In the Middle East:

• Juan Cole on the killing of UN workers
• Todd Gitlin on proportionality
• The UK Independent runs the scenarios
• Billmon breaks down and then recovers
• Abuaardvark on birth pangs of the new Middle East

Some hints for keeping cool without air conditioning, via Kevin Drum. Some taco recipes, via Steve Gilliard

Have a good night. Peace be with you.

There comes a time in any project where it seems like everything is going in too many directions at once. That the center cannot hold and things are about to fly apart.

Blogging is no different. There's a constant cycle of push and pull inside of me between keeping everything I write here, in a single location, and writing multiple blogs on different subjects. In the past I've also been torn between wanting to try different weblog tools. Four years ago that made a lot of sense because weblog tools were constantly evolving and changing. Today the churn in weblogging software seems to have slowed. Movable Type and Wordpress appear to have come out on top in the web application space, and Radio Userland still has it's adherents. And new sites like Myspace or .. that offer blogs as part of a social network don't really appeal to me.

So here are some weblogs or topic areas that have been sprouting in my mind.

• Information Ethics. Mostly because that's the really broad area I'm hoping to write my master's thesis on. In particular ethics and copyright. This idea moves back and forth between a focus on the thesis process in particular and a broader, perhaps group-based, effort at the School of Information.
• Writing prompts and creativity. A perennial interest of mine that's persisted for at least the last decade. Visions of turning this into a low-level moneymaking effort spin in the back of my head, probably through links to books, other sites, or AdSense.
• Deep Reading. A fleeting thought to write a blog about a particular author and analyze their work. The classics have been especially intriguing this summer, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare.
• I was at Border's a few days ago reviewing a copy of The Well-Educated Mind. It's basically another lifetime reading plan, great books of the Western world, or the Western Canon a la Harold Bloom. There are even more lists here. So I ask why do these lists proliferate so widely and nothing comparable seems to appear for mathematics or science?

To fork or not to fork, that is the question. Here's a backlink to yet more issues that have been surfacing in my consciousness recently.

I've got nothing to say today. My news reader light is blinking furiously, the unread count continues to grow. I'm about to pull the 'mark all read' switch and just let it go for a day.

So apropos of nothing. What is it with all of the custom tshirt business that I keep finding on the web these days? Is it new or just another manifestation of Web 2.0 goodness?

My current favorite design via a weblog that reviews tshirts. Ah what a wonderful web we weave.

Thanks to those who have stopped by to comment recently, or in the past. And for the unexpected, but appreciated, mention on the Second Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans.

Complaints about the American education system are evergreen. “A Nation at Risk” was published in 1983 and catapulted the odious William J. Bennett to public stardom. We've been suffering through 'books of virtue' ever since. But the education reformist wagon goes way back. John Dewey gained a lot of fame and notoriety for his ideas on democracy and education. Further back into the nineteenth century we get Horace Mann.

So today I'm trying to imagine what a new education philosophy would look like:

• For one thing education is too often confined to what happens in schools. I think we need to break this connection as soon as possible. People have to believe that education happens all around them, and then they need to be empowered to learn.
• Easy community building tools need to be developed that encourage people to learn together in groups. This points to the yearning for collaboration mentioned by Bill Tozier recently.
• Education needs to be both an individual and a communal strategy. I've been pleased to participate in two self-directed community education endeavors over the last few years, a philosophy discussion group in Minnesota, modeled on Chris Philips Socrate's Cafe, and the Toastmasters group at UMich.

Part of this will be mediated through computers. See the work of people at Umich on collaboratories. These programs are more beneficial for those who are on the margins. People who are at the center, for example in a wealthy research university, are more likely to rely on their face-to-face ties. This isn't a bad thing. Face-to-face ties are still much richer than solely online relationships.

The unconference phenomena is another alternative mode of organizing for communal education. Some examples are BloggerCon, Bar Camp, Woolfcamp.

I don't think there is one single solution to the education dilemma. I was heartened to read recently about a study by the U.S. department of education which found no difference between private and public schools. Some might take this as an argument against education vouchers. I'm not so sure. I would like to see a world where both public education and vouchers could coexist. And more attention paid to those left behind.

The bigger problem is that education just doesn't pay. In corporate environments training is the first expense to be cut during economic downturns. I've seen this happen in my own personal experience. Funding for public education is pathetic. The salaries of teachers are ridiculously low considering the size of the burden we, as a society, place upon them. When I compare the salaries of teachers to CEOs I can only conclude that America is doomed. We need to think bigger thoughts than we're thinking now, about equity, money, and philosophy.

I don't have much to add to the current discussions in the blogosphere about the crisis in the Middle East. So instead I'll link to some of recent reading:

• Matthew Yglesias on the Green Lantern theory of politics in action
• Michael Totten tries to sympathize but gets eaten by the conservative undead.
• Stirling Newberry on the violence tax
• It's all about sex and violence, read the Update II part especially.
• Shooting ourselves in the foot and being stabbed in the back.
• Billmon is down right now, but always has good stuff to read.
• Arthur Silber traces the money trail between American taxes and Israeli bombs and the never ceasing drums of war.
• Graphic images of war. via Rising Hegemon

Through my peregrinations around the web I found this extraordinary mp3 of Mazen Kerbaj, a musician in Beirut. He's a free improv trumpter. Here's a bit of what he said about his music.

anyways, music and drawing are the only things keeping me going these days. i recorded two hours of bombs + trumpet from my balcony yesterday night. some bombs were really close (what kind of mouthpiece do the israeli pilots use to have this sound?). the tension you get in your playing is incredible. also, i draw all time. i always said that i regret not being adult during the war to see if you can do something in these situations. now i feel bad to draw or play music while people are burning. i convince myself by saying it is my only way to resist. that i have to witness. that it is very important. but i am not really convinced. i try to be a fucking witness. to show a little bit what's happening here. in my own way. but having regards for what is a good drawing or a good music track drives me crazy. i cannot stop saying after a bomb: “yeah, this one was huge. i'll leave a long silence then make a small sound to balance the track.” this is totally crazy!

I was reading Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood last night. Her basic argument is that the United States has created and continues to support the global capitalist system by using it's massive military power to coerce other countries into joining.

The capitalist mode of economic imperialism is the first imperialism in history that does not depend simply on capturing this or that bit of territory, or dominating this or that subject people. It needs to oversee the whole global system of states and ensure that imperial capital can safely and profitably navigate throughout that global system. It has to deal not just with the problem of 'rogue' states or 'failed' states. It also has to keep subordinate states vulnerable to exploitation. Moreover, to be really effective, it has to establish the military and political supremacy of one power over all others, because, if global capital needs an orderly system of multiple states, it is hard to see how it can tolerate a system in which military power is more or less evenly distributed among various states.

But the physical coercion is more often than not hidden. Iraq was a perfect target in the Middle East because it wasn't a major threat. It “was a suitable target not because it represented a threat to the US and its allies but, on the contrary, because it represented no threat at all. The US could thus 'shock and awe the whole region (and the world), with (or so the geniuses in the White House thought) little risk to itself.”

Listening to the recording of Mazen playing his trumpet as rockets explode around him and car alarms go off I was struck by how arrogantly we, all of us as Americans, can be. We will never have to live through an aerial attack or 'shock and awe'. Our military is too strong to be challenged in that way.

So my sympathies go out to all those, Lebanese, Israeli, Iraqi, who are suffering today in the Middle East. I wish for better times ahead.

I recently wrote about the common canard that education will allow us all to get good jobs in a world where outsourcing and globalization are the dominant economic paradigms. There are so many loads of bunk inside of that idea that it's hard to know where to begin.

Brad DeLong recently posted some thoughts on this very issue. He wrote, in response to Greg Mankiw,

I don't think this works particularly well. Yes, if you confront a computer with a strongly nonlinear increase in inequality and ask it to explain it by increases in skills and the values of skills of those at the top, it will spit back that there is evidence of nonlinearity. But so much? The top 0.1% in the United States has gone from 2.3% of income in 1980--23 times average--to 7.6% today--76 times average. The next 0.9% has gone from 6.3 times average to 9.2 times average. And the next 4% has gone from 3.2 to 3.7 times average. Just what have been the changes in technology over the past twenty-five years that have made the skills of the 130,000 households in the top 0.1% so much more highly-valued vis-a-vis the skills of Mr. and Ms. 95th percentile? We are awarding 550,000 advanced degrees a year in this country. The overwhelming majority of them must be gaining little or nothing in relative-income terms vis-a-vis their predecessors of 1980--and those 15,000 a year or so who will someday join the top 1% have seen their relative incomes triple. Continuity: just what is it that the top 13,000 have learned that the other 537,000 have not that is so valuable?

The implicit model, I think, is that when you get an advanced degree--or perhaps when you get an advanced degree from a good school--you not only get skills, but you also get a lottery ticket. Either because of dumb luck or because of the interaction of talent with formal education and technology or because of the interaction of the willingness to work like a dog beyond all reasonable measure with formal education and technology, the lucky or talented or workaholic today can, thanks to revolutions in computer and communications technology, leverage their symbolic-analyst skills over a much larger base of routine manufacturing, marketing, and distribution workers than they could have a generation ago. In this model, we have become much more of a “winner take all” economy than we used to be. Much more income is distributed in the form of winner-take-all tournaments than used to be the case.

What frustrates me most about the 'education will save us' canard is the individuality of it all. The role of the individual who chooses further education is important, but there is much more going on. Community is just as important. And the community is currently the weakest link. We need to be open to the possibility that a community may need to protect its education and economic resources against globalization.

For some individuals education may be a winning strategy. Education still has an economic benefit, just look for the studies that show college graduates earning much more than non-college graduates. But those college graduates still need to live in a strong community. And here we can link strong education to the conservative self-preservation motive - avoid 'broken windows.' If current trends continue we will get communities where the numbers of people who benefit shrinks and those who get shafted grows. If this goes on more and more windows will be broken.

DeLong concludes:

We should think, and think hard, about all these issues. But I don't think that it's useful to characterize this mechanism for increasing inequality as “a rise in the premium paid to the skills acquired through education.” I'm not sure what to call it, but it is something very different.

The problem is really individual versus community action. For the individual education will be a good thing. It will also help the community in the long run. But there is a lag between the individual benefit of education and the community benefit. It's a lag that we don't have to have.

Something can be done on the community level and on the individual level at the same time. The community level should be working on creating community business and natural enterprises a la Dave Pollard. The problem is that globalization never allows these community based enterprises to grow. Instead the work is shipped off to the next cheapest bidder as soon as possible. Gradually the local markets decline, the tax base shrinks, the education system declines, the jobs move further away... It's a vicious cycle, and we need political action to respond.

Late last month Jay Rosen, one of my favorite media analysts, published an essay called 'The People Formerly Known as the Audience'.

The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.)

Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.)

Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

A few days later Ulises published a response - 'The People Currently Conformed as the Mass'. Via wirearchy

The argument is that today TPFKATA are not content with being merely consumers: they are producers, re-mixers, contributors, product designers, fact-checkers, etc. But Rosen's remark about the old days when the population listened in isolation from one another and my own observations about the new ways in which people produce in isolation from one another leads me to ask: Are we really talking about a community of producers, or a mass of producers? Put differently: Is production the new consumption?

My argument is that TPFKATA function as a mass of producers, and that this has everything to do with technology (or more specifically, with how technologies are being applied in a technocracy. Much like the old media (newspapers, radio, etc.) was instrumental in giving shape to the imagined community called a Nation (see the work of Anderson, 1991), the new media is crucial in imagining emerging forms of “virtual community.” But the kinds of sociality that these “virtual communities” prescribe are actually more aligned with the dynamics of a mass than with a community.

Masses are not sites of rich social interaction. Masses foster an alienated form of individualism, making it difficult for people to come together meaningfully. Because of their large numbers, masses may give the appearance of robust communities, but a closer look reveals that people feel irreparably alone in a mass.

Technocracies engender masses by commodifying the interactions between people. The blogosphere is a perfect example of how interaction has been commodified and reduced to the exchange of attention. In an attention economy, attention is capital, and bloggers with (bigger) audiences can capitalize on that attention —quite literally, if they are using things like Google ads. But a blogger with lots of readers can be said to have rich social interactions with them in the same impoverished sense that a person in MySpace with lots of contacts can be said to have many good friends. In fact, I would suggest that the more attention capital is accrued, the less opportunities for meaningful social interaction are engendered, and the more entrenched one's position in a mass becomes.

TPFKATA are content to believe that blogs are “First Amendment machines.” That might be the case in a few instances, but not for the mass. From the perspective of a technocratic hegemony, what could be more perfect than a system where all is talk and no action? TPFKATA, armed with the new technologies, are ascending to power, we are told. But the meaning of this form of power revolves around commodification, which in the end neutralizes and domesticates it. TPFKATA have gone from being massified, pacified consumers to being massified, pacified producers.

Don't get me wrong: I am very appreciative of good citizen journalism, open content projects, etc. But to assume that the mere use of the technologies is enough to liberate the old audience is unwise, and not warranted by the majority of the current examples. What we need to understand and critique (with the hope of eventually avoiding) is how the people formerly known as the audience are still very much the people currently functioning as consumers and masses.

The conversation has continued in various places since then. Ulises most recent post comments on the reactions. Most of them have taken the form of “But my community/weblog/web site is different, it's a real community not a mass.” Ulises responds by saying that an exception doesn't disprove the rule.

My own opinion is that both of the boosters and the critics of online community building need to be considered. As an aside the comment by Trish Grier at Donatacom about the gender differences in blog writing are very interesting. My own writing is much less personal than some of the female bloggers I read. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader whether this individual sample proves the rule.

I recently watched two documentaries, Hell House and Revolution OS, back-to-back and want to offer some insights I noticed about the different notions of choice and freedom that both of these films reveal.

Hell House is about a Halloween display put on by a church in Texas. The display is modeled on a haunted house, but instead of ghosts and goblins, the villain is sin. Of course, sin comes in a very conservative Christianist wrapper. Abortion, homosexuality, the 'occult', raves, suicide, and other detritus of contemporary American culture are read through a fundamentalist Biblical lens. The upshot of all this is to convince the visitors to Hell House to repent their sins, accept the glory of Jesus Christ as their personal savior, and become converts to evangelical Christianity. I think the movie is pretty evenhanded. There is no editorial voice that supports or condemns the work of these true believers. Instead their actions and words pretty much fill the whole movie.

There is one moment when the voice of a few critics is allowed in. A few of the teenagers who visit Hell House complain to the logistics manager about the stereotype portrayal of homosexuals and other groups. The response to this criticism is fascinating.

The manager appeals to one of the basic American argument frames, choice. One of his critics complains that raves aren't anything like the portrayal at Hell House, which shows raves as places where young women are given date-rape drugs and then kill themselves afterwards because they can't remember who raped them. A young woman in the film says that she has been to many raves and nothing like that has ever happened to her. The manager says “Good for you..you see it's really all about choice..you made the right choice.” The dialogue continues for a few more moments and then the manager returns to his point about choice, “It's all about choice”, he says, “if you make the correct choices you'll be saved.” And in that moment, he contradicts his own argument. When he says the situations are about choice he's lying. To him there is no choice, there is just the truth. And that truth is his truth. It is not about choice; it is about fear and punishment

When this church member says it's about choice he's appealing to the liberal belief that people are free to choose their destiny. But everything about Hell Houses implies the opposite. People are not free to choose, some things are punished and some things are allowed. It is Pascal's wager filtered through Disney; a theme park ride with the message that you are going to hell unless you change your lifestyle.

But the sins/choices presented are very selective. There's no depiction of people refusing to give shelter to the poor, no depiction of people turning the other cheek. The forgiveness of the New Testament is gone, conveniently forgotten for the expediency of making a political point.

I cringed at the final scene of the Hell House tour. After the audience has seen all of these 'sins' and watched the sinners writhe in the fake 'hell', a door is opened and a member of the church leads them into the debriefing room. He starts his speech with an apology about how much it hurts him to show the audience all these horrors, but there is a way for them to be safe. “Through this door,” he says, “you can find salvation. We are ready to pray with you if only you are willing to go through this door. I'm going to open this door and count to six. You can choose to go through it or not.” The door is opened and a light (the light of heaven, no doubt) shines into the darkened room. He counts, some people go through the door, others don't. The manipulation is palpable. Everything is a setup, like some giant spiritual Rube Goldberg machine, to take away the choice of the audience.

Of course this message of damnation is nothing new. Jonathan Edwards made the same point during the First Great Awakening and he did with much better rhetoric. What's different now is the cloak of choice. I say to these people: make your arguments, but stop pretending it's about choice.

The other movie, Revolution OS, is about Linux and free software. It starts with Richard Stallman creating the Free Software Foundation in the 1985. Then goes onto Linus Torvalds creating Linux in the early 1990s, and on through the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s. The argument is that something truly novel is going on with Linux and other open source projects. A new form of production is being created that is based on freedom and sharing instead of the market. Stallman summarizes this in the phrase “free as in freedom, not beer.”

Here the argument for choice is completely different. Stallman clearly believes, deep down, that freedom to tinker with the source code for software is important. Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others make the same point. It is all about the freedom to choose what you do with your computer and software. Read the 'Right to Read.'

In both of these movies choice is a pivotal concept. For Hell House choice is used defensively. It is a rhetorical shield to hide behind. For Revolution OS choice is about changing the world, giving people freedom they might never have realized they lost before. In one everything is supernatural - the world is a symbolic veil that is read easily into the metaphors of the Bible. It is completely, and utterly Manichaean. Good versus evil. In the other it is decidedly mundane, but still spiritual. Computer code is the expression of our very human dreams for choice and free will.

The final irony is this: I can admire the believers in Hell House. They are arguing passionately for their personal beliefs. But the converse is impossible. The people of Hell House will never admire my beliefs, because to them my beliefs are anathema. This is why the separation of church and state is so important. I don't want to purge the United States of these religious reactionaries. But the more I listen to what they say, the more convinced I become that they want to purge America of me.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest over the last weekend and I was disappointed. Three hours of setup for the sequel, with nice special effects along the way. Ultimately disappointing.

But seeing it reminded me of a problem that I've detected in at least two different artistic endeavors: movie making and genre writing. It's the problem of trilogies or series that just can't bear the weight of three parts. They really should be pared down to one or maybe two parts because there's just not enough story to sustain them any longer.

Examples that come to mind: the Matrix, Pirates, X-Men, Spider-Man, Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Thomas Harlan. All of these works were created by artists with a grand vision but the exigencies of the marketplace seem to have done them in.

The prevalence of trilogies in fantasy and science fiction is especially noxious. I recently went looking for used copies of work by Joanna Russ, who wrote most of her novels during the 1960s and 1970s. Every one of them stands as an independent work and is usually only 100-200 pages long. Compared to the doorstoppers that currently grace the shelves of SF/F it's parsimony to an extreme degree.

My speculations for the general increase in the number of multi book series and multi part Hollywood movies is economic. I think publishers and movie makers have taken the idea of selling a guaranteed product and extended it as far as it will go. I'm neither an expert in publishing or movie making, but it seems like the marketing is beginning to overwhelm the art.

No doubt this complaint about the market submerging the art is an old one. It's nothing new to observe that art is affected by the market. What's different seems to be the form of this control. For some reason three has become the magical number for book and movie contracts.

X-Men 3 was criticized because it crammed too many plot threads (read the comments) into a single movie. But this is the logic of selling your projects in lots of three. The cast was only signed for three movies so every storyline must be dumped into the pot. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was one long commercial for next summer's blockbuster.

It may be just coincidence but I think a lot of these trends began in the 1970s and 1980s. The studio system in Hollywood never seemed to be as sequel happy as modern day cineastes. Nor did the publishing industry of earlier in the century. I suspect that this was caused by the decline of the old publishing and movie making systems and their replacement by the corporate conglomerates. The industries of culture have long since sold themselves out.

There are exceptions to all of these cases. Music seems to be an endeavor that avoids the linked series of albums or CDs. Although the same marketing pressures are applied to ensure that radio singles are prominently placed and the audience is not too surprised by unexpected artistic surprise. Stephen King seems to be an author who has a defined brand but is less likely to be forced into the straightjacket of serial work.

Genre does have a purpose. So does repetition and consistency. I just sometimes wish that the logic of moneymaking wasn't quite so blatantly foregrounded.

Whenever I take an interest in politics it's usually to look at the language and rhetoric that is used to make arguments. When I see other people take an interest in the same issue I'm usually willing to read. Here are some posts on political rhetoric, all from a liberal perspective, that I've found interesting over the last few days.

Glenn Greenwald and Dave Neiwert have been consistently good about following the eliminationist rhetoric that regularly emanates from the conservative blogosphere. Neiwert links it to the paranoid style of American politics limned by Richard Hofstadter.

Greenwald just penned this missive about the need for journalists to pay attention to the extremism of the right-wing blogosphere.

The extremist and increasingly deranged rhetoric and tactics found in the right-wing blogosphere -- not only among obscure bloggers but promoted and disseminated by its most-read and influential bloggers -- is, indeed, “a very common disease.” When it becomes commonplace to hurl accusations of treason against domestic political opponents, or when calls for imprisonment and/or hanging of journalists and political leaders become the daily fare -- all of which is true for the pro-Bush blogosphere -- those are serious developments. And they merit discussion and examination by the media.

Eliminationist rhetoric is a real problem, however. People who call for the death of others in order to make a political point don't believe in the same political values of democracy that I hold dear.

A common tactic in many of these arguments is to complain about the failure of one side to condemn the extremists inside of its own coalition or party. I'm not sure if this is an argument that has always been present in politics, or if it's a recent development. The paradigm recent example I can think of is Clinton's Sister Souljah moment from the 1992 campaign.

So why do people insist on lumping together the opposition and then berating them for tolerating idiots in their midst? Can't we all just accept that people agree with each other partially, instead of completely? So I'm not asking you to condemn anyone, I'm just asking you to stop being a hypocrite. I could care less if people don't condemn their political allies. But don't turn around and complain about the other side if they fail to condemn every single nutcase that may be on the fringes of their coalition.

Of course that plea for reason will be ignored. As Arthure Silber notes it is impossible to be nuanced when discussing politics today. We are well on our way to becoming the stupidest country on Earth.

Another well worn example of crazy talk is the “I'm just saying” defense so perfectly captured in the recent example of Bill O'Reilly spinning about Saddam's tactics. At least Saddam kept violence under control, says O'Reilly, and that's just a fact. Of course, 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink; say no more', he's not really calling for oppression, he's just saying it worked for some.

The only response to this insanity is to laugh and watch The Daily Show. Matt Stoller responds

The April issue of the Communications of the ACM contained an article about hastily formed networks. A hastily formed network is a network formed in response to a disaster or crisis of some kind. For example, the response to Katrina last summer and fall. Some students at SI collected material about the various responses to Katrina.

Today I came across another story related to disaster response. It seems Tom Evslin and Jeff Pulver are trying to convince the FCC to mandate an emergency voice mail system for people affected by a disaster. Phone calls to people in the disaster area would automatically be routed to voice mail. This would only happen if there was no answer on the line. Whenever the person reached a working phone they could leave a message for their family, telling them that they are alright.

As any Red Cross emergency volunteer will tell you (Mary is my source for this), names are a lousy way to locate people: they never get input the same way twice; they are not unique. Phone numbers are great but the phones weren’t working. However, ever since telco switches went electronic, there has been no hard connection between a phone number and the physical line it is linked to.

Those evacuees who had voice mail could leave greetings saying that they were safe and giving their location. Family members could leave each other messages. Our proposal, over-simplified, is that phone companies be required to provide voice mail free to ALL of their subscribers when those subscriber lines are in an emergency area and/or have been down for twelve hours or more. Then everyone who had a phone line will still be reachable through his or her old phone number even if the line itself is drowned or unreachable.

A further post on the price of emergency voicemail.

I've been looking for a weblog post I read two or three months ago about the future of libraries, but so far I've failed to retrieve it. This kind of situation is one of the most frustrating technological problems I regularly encounter. There's just no way to easily retrieve this information right now.

I do have some programs on my Mac that help solve these problems. History Hound and browseback are two programs that keep track of pages that you display in your web browser. Both of them allow you to search the pages for information. Unfortunately neither has worked in this case because I don't remember any key phrases fine enough to recall the passage.

When I see something of interest on the web I usually save it to ListMixer for later review. But these items expire after a month, which is a good thing. If they stayed around for much longer the list would become impossible to navigate easily.

The weblog search engines, such as Technorati, Sphere, Feedster, or Google BlogSearch, are useful, but didn't help in this occasion. Again my memory of the post isn't accurate enough to find something. The number of posts mentioning the future and libraries is quite high.

I wrote about my own information management last week.

Enthusiasm is lagging. It must be the heat. It got into the 80s today, with an afternoon thunderstorm. Tomorrow and Sunday are supposed to be in the 90s. And there's no sign that the humidity is going to let up. The dewpoint is at 68, and it's almost midnight. So as the physical world sends me into lethargy, the mind begins to flag as well.

It's not all useless. I want to point out this new post about shared online and education and peer production by Jon Udell. Udell is one of the best commentators on technology writing today. He has a very good sense for both the technology and the social impacts. His post is about a video he created to show people how to maintain a Scotts Classic reel lawn mower.

But in an era of commons-based peer production there will be increasing numbers of folks who will package their knowledge and experience in video form, and publish it freely, just because they can. Everyone's an expert on something. If it's quick and easy to document some aspect of that expertise, and if doing so makes you a global authority on that topic, people will choose to do it.

If I'm right about where this is headed, the video-sharing sites will soon offer more than cute animal tricks, stupid people tricks, and experimental artwork. They'll start to be windows that open on many areas of knowledge and experience, the sharing of which will accelerate the production of new knowledge and the deepening of experience.

Via Daring Fireball, I recently came across Instructables, a web site that collects step-by-step instructions for making a mad scientist light, LED throwies, and solving Sudoku. It's all very similar in spirit to Make magazine.

Paul Graham posted a shorter than usual essay this month about copying what you like from others. In that spirit I'll conclude with a long quote from Mr. Graham.

How do you avoid copying the wrong things? Copy only what you genuinely like. That would have saved me in all three cases. I didn't enjoy the short stories we had to read in English classes; I didn't learn anything from philosophy papers; I didn't use expert systems myself. I believed these things were good because they were admired.

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's an outlier.

Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking “I'm reading Ulysses” as they do it. A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel up to being virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through? That's what you really like.

Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

There's a connection between all of this and Benkler's peer production and the future of education. But you'll have to discover that link for yourself.

I was watching a few of my favorite episodes from Ren and Stimpy on DVD last night and I started thinking about comedy and taste.

Commedia dell'Arte is a form of improvisational comedy theater which flourished in Italy from the 16th to the 18th century. It consisted of stock plots, and characters, which were often adapted to fit the local audience. I was reading up on this subject for last Tuesday's book club, The Innamorati by Midori Snyder. Commedia is one of the major themes in the novel.

During my research I stumbled upon the origin of the term 'slapstick comedy'. Commedia was a very physical form of theater with a lot of tumbling and use of the battacchio, “a club-like object composed of two wooden slats which, when struck, produced a loud smacking noise; little force, however, is transferred from the object--called the 'slap stick' in English--to the person being struck, allowing actors to strike each other repeatedly with great audio effect while causing very little actual damage.”

When I think of modern slapstick comedy I think of the Three Stooges. And to tell you the truth I don't much care for the Stooges. So what's the difference between Ren and Stimpy and the Stooges?

A big part of it is animation. I like the visual capabilities of animation much more than real-life comedy acting. It will be interesting to see how the recent developments in CGI animation that have changed the comic book movie industry will be used by future comics. So far I don't think anyone has really begun to tap this possibility. Adam Sandler or Jim Carey movies may be close. But animation can still go further, at least so far. You only have to look at some of the backgrounds used in Ren and Stimpy to see the potential.

Animation also abstracts the violence. I dislike America's Home Videos even more than the Stooges because most of it is violence. There's no sympathy involved. In a cartoon the violence is so absurd it becomes unreal. Think of the gravity defying flights of Wile E. Coyote, or Tom and Jerry. They're inspired by slapstick but convert it into a different form.

When it comes to Ren and Stimpy in particular I have to praise the writing and the audio design as well. The stories are often full of allusions, to Macbeth's wife, or Julius Caesar. I personally love “Stimpy's Fan Club” when Ren starts talking about “These hands”

[plotting Stimpy's death]

Ren: I was nice today. NICE to those STUPID people and their STUPID fan club. My hands... DIRTY! THE DIRT WON'T COME OFF!

[screams]

Ren: President... Ha! What a joke. President of what? His fan club! How they love him! They think he's a god, but I know he's as mortal as we. The idol of millions is a fool! Lying there sleeping. sing-song Lying there sleeping. How easily I end all the madness... with these hands! AND WITH THESE HANDS I HOLD THE FATE OF MILLIONS! Just one squeeze... then it's over.

[moving toward Stimpy]

Ren: Just... one... squeeze... AAAAH! MY BRAIN!

[falls unconscious]

And the musical cues, The Nutcracker Ballet and Night on Bald Mountain, remind me of Disney animation, not to mention being kick-ass pieces of music. And the screams, with their insane echo, are perfect.

I concluded my internet browsing last night by reading two reviews of the DVD edition. Both of them mention the groundbreaking style of Ren and Stimpy.

The importance of Ren & Stimpy, both in terms of animation and in terms of culture, cannot be overstated. The amount of variety there is in television animation today is often taken for granted; yet, had it not been for Ren & Stimpy, animation on TV would still be limited to dreck like The Smurfs and He-Man. In short, Ren & Stimpy made it acceptable for cartoons to be cartoony. The show has spawned a whole slew of imitators, many of which are very good, although most have the habit of taking only the gross and bizarre elements and ignoring all the subtext. This is unsurprising, since most viewers only seem to view Ren & Stimpy as a sick and wacky cartoon, without realising what goes on beneath the surface. The show has been described by more than a couple of critics as a statement about the rise of AIDS in the US, and it is no secret that Ren and Stimpy are a gay couple in a sadomasochistic relationship (Ren beats Stimpy, and Stimpy enjoys it). Such subtleties are, of course, lost on the average viewer, but it is a testament to the quality of the show that it can be enjoyed by people of all walks of life: the Rens as well as the Stimpys, so to speak.

I recently watched the documentary film The Corporation which stitches together an argument about the many ways the modern corporation is sociopathic. It condemns corporations for failing to be concerned with others, is amoral, etc.

The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.

One of the great phrases from the film is 'externality machine.' An externality is an effect of an economic transaction on non-participants, according to economists. Pollution is a classic case of a negative externality. Dumping waste into a river causes no harm to the corporation, in fact it usually saves them money. But it does grievous harm to anyone who lives down river.

The criticism leveled by The Corporation is that companies routinely externalize their costs onto others and then reap the rewards of profits. So Walmart doesn't provide it's workers with health insurance, relying on Medicaid, and the taxpayers, to pay the costs.

This idea of externalizing costs and internalizing profits reminded me of an essay in the current New Left Review by Robin Blackburn. The essay is called “Finance and the Fourth Dimension.”

During the past two decades the financial and banking industry has developed an ever-growing number of financial vehicles to manipulate risk, such as derivatives, private equity and hedge funds. The result has been lucrative. “As a percentage of total US corporate profits, financial-sector profits rose from 14 percent in 1981 to 39 percent in 2001.” But where have the costs gone?

Blackburn lays out some of the scandals that have hit the industry, including the mutual fund scandal, LTCM, and others. The costs/risks have disproportionately fallen on pension plans, which then get bailed out by the government.

The foregoing sketch suggests that financial profits over the last decade have mainly taken the form of the cancellation of promises made to employees -- exploitation over time -- the erosion of small capital holdings by large and unscrupulous money managers and the swallowing of shoals of tiny fish by the shark-like financial services industry. Few of the gains from the reallocation of capital through superior risk assessment have been channelled to production. Financial profits have instead prompted a surge in upscale real-estate prices and the turnover of the luxury goods sector. The mass of employees and consumers have sunk deeper into debt. Yawning domestic inequalities have been compounded by escalating international imbalances, with an inflow of foreign capital covering a deficit on the US current account. With a sagging dollar, an oil price shock and rising interest rates, American households -- the consumers of first and last resort -- are likely to find the strain of carrying the world on their shoulders even more difficult. Financialization promotes such a skewed distribution of income that it ends by undermining its own credit-driven momentum.

The latest crisis is the backdating of stock options. Through statistical analysis Eric Lie, an economist, discovered the following odds.

Statistical analysis revealed that the odds of the favorable timing of 12 options granted to William W. McGuire, CEO of health insurance giant United Health Group (nyse: UNH - news - people ), from 1995 to 2002 was 1 in 200 million.

Similarly, for Jeff Rich, former CEO of Affiliated Computer Services (nyse: ACS - news - people ), the probability for the wonderful timing of his six grants was 1 in 300 billion on a random basis. And Louis R. Tomasetta, the CEO of Vitesse Semiconductor (nasdaq: VTSS - news - people ), got nine grants, with a 1 in 26 billion probability of their lucky dates of issue being picked by chance. Tomasetta was fired in May because of his role in the company's options grants process.

Who wouldn't want to be so lucky? It's proof that being a CEO is like winning the lottery. There's no link between performance and pay for these people.

It's been a long day. My book group discussed The Innamorati by Midori Snyder tonight. Very interesting. I hope to have some thoughts here within the next few days, but tonight I need to get some rest. So to inspire myself and you to greater thoughts I offer a few links that have been especially piquant these last few days.

Some cool weblogs:

• Out of the Past, on film noir.
• Democratic Strategist, good data driven analysis of opinion surveys and more.
• Deep Genre, one of the more interesting SF blogs I've encountered recently.

An interview with Geoff Ryman, author of Air and Was. He had some provocative things to say about morality in fiction at Wiscon, the interviews have some of that as well.

The 15th anniversary of Slacker by Richard Linklater just came up recently. One of my favorite movies from the 1990s.

Chevy Chase and comedy in the 2000s. Midwest Values PAC is Al Franken's web organization. Maybe he'll run in 2008 against Norm Coleman. We can certainly hope so. An article by George Lakoff distinguishing between incompetence and ideology re: Bush. The Economist on Inequality in America.

A recent post at my favorite godless liberal weblog, Pharyngula, on the gender and age distribution of writers for skeptical magazines such as the Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic prompted me to think a bit about attitudes toward religious expression in the workplace. I'd be interested to see what Eric thinks.

My personal opinion is that religion should be kept to a minimal level in the workplace as much as possible. I've been relatively lucky to work in environments where religion has never been a major issue or concern. People have talked about it during their lunch breaks or around the proverbial water cooler, but there's never been any pressure to accept a particular faith or join a church.

This research report on religious diversity and the workplace suggests that complaints about harassment because of religion have increased by almost 85% between 1992 and 2003. The complaints mentioned in the article are directed at Muslims, Sikhs, Rastafarians, and Wiccans. The people at religioustolerance.org offer some guidelines to dealing with harassment.

It does remind of a conundrum about evangelical Christianity that Fred Clarke raised over at Slacktivist in a recent post to his ongoing critique of the Left Behind books series.

In this installment of the series he looked at a passage where Rayford Steele, the main character, refrains from evangelizing to his daughter after his conversion experience. Clarke writes:

L&J, to their credit, disagree. Rayford Steele -- their mouthpiece and LaHaye's Mary Sue avatar -- seems to recognize that the Great Commission and the obligation to spread the gospel do not require us to offend and scare off those around us. They seem to arrive at this conclusion for wholly pragmatic, tactical reasons, rather than principled ones (i.e., not because treating others with respect is the Right Thing To Do, but because treating them with disrespect doesn't seem to work), but let that slide. Whatever their reasoning, they have recognized that the willingness to be “fools for Christ” does not entail an obligation to be assholes for Christ.

I doubt L&J would go so far as to agree with me about evangelism being a form of hospitality, but here at least they seem to agree that evangelism ought not to be blatantly inhospitable. Elsewhere in these books, they often take the opposite stance, and the preponderant emphasis of the series does seem to come down more on the assholes-for-Christ side of the argument, but here, briefly, on page 218, L&J and I seem to agree on something.

(I tried to find a less vulgar alternative to “assholes for Christ,” but the term was unavoidably apt. I realize that this term will be off-putting for some readers -- particularly for those to whom the desperate plea above is directed -- and that's unfortunate. But again, the term seemed inescapable, and it does seem strange that the naming of the phenomenon should be considered more offensive than the thing itself.)

I've encountered some people who take the evangelizing part of religion way too seriously, most of the time outside of the workplace. One time I was approached by someone at Best Buy and asked if I had found Jesus. I gave an inconclusive answer and received a five minute talk about the demons that he could see surrounding me. I smiled politely and went about my consumer business as soon as possible. The ironies of being proselytized in Best Buy, a paragon of consumerism, are almost too multitudinous to contemplate.

I don't necessarily object to hearing what other people believe. Most of the time I'm willing to listen attentively and then depart quietly once the episode has passed. Afterwards I sometimes wonder if I should have objected more to their proselytizing, but I guess I'm more tolerant of others foibles than arguments. Whether that's a good or bad personality trait I'll leave to others.

I wonder what the best practice on this issue according to human resource professionals. I remember reading a few employee handbooks that discouraged people from putting explicitly political messages in their offices. Here's an article that hints at some guidelines. I usually interpreted this as a sort of no campaigning during work type thing. The law seems clear, religion cannot be used to discriminate, but the line between discussion and harassment is a narrow one.

It's been twenty-three days since I began this effort at daily writing. So has it been worthwhile? Thinking aloud in a semi-public manner has a strange appeal. Some people read these writings or at least web browsers keep making requests for the pages. Fewer still leave comments. But that's alright. It's mostly been useful to me as a way to clear out the cobwebs and to speak about the concerns that I have.

One of the more interesting books I read a few years ago, when I was reading about creativity, had the wonderful title 'Shaving the Inside of Your Skull.' That's what this exercise of blogging feels like. A chance to clear out the dead wood and clarify my own thoughts. If someone happens to read a particular cri de coeur and find support or solace here so be it. It's what every author would wish for.

Looking back over the recent spate of entries and thinking about what I've been reading over the past few weeks I think I've identified some of the things about the world that are really bothering me.

• Climate change. I saw An Inconvenient Truth last weekend, July 1st. The movie was well done but I felt like I was listening to tape recording I'd already heard many times before. And yet there are still people who bury their heads in the sand and refuse to recognize reality when it hits them in the face. The world is changing, humans are the cause, and we must decide what to do about it.
• Intelligent design. Foolishness abounds in this debate and it never seems to cease. I remember reading about creationism during the mid-1980s, when the tide of Darwin doubt was at its last high water mark. I read the criticisms of evolution with as much openness as I probably ever will. Then I read the responses and the debate ended for me. Evolution is supported by mountains of scientific evidence and yet the battle against stupidity never ceases. The argument from design is silly because the perception of design is inside of our own, very human, heads. It's a massive projection of ourselves upon the world. A projection that the awesomeness of the world doesn't need.
• Globalization and outsourcing. I've become more and more disillusioned with the Washington Consensus on economics over the past few years. It may be the continued inequities in America's economy or the shrill complaints of those who never learnt that trickle-down economics was a farce. The canard that education will save the day is just the latest frustration I've vented.
• Information commons and community. This is one I haven't mentioned much in recent weeks. I've followed the work of Lawrence Lessig for a number of years since the Eldred case. The control of corporations and business over intellectual property has reached absurd proportions. Something needs to be done. So more activism, more research, more writing.

One of the dilemmas of art that I find fascinating is the conflict between entertainment and education. Should art distract us from our lives or should it try to teach us something about how our lives should be led? In between these two poles there is another way, realism. Realism just wants to imitate nature, to be the mirror we hold up to the world.

Suppose we take as a given that all fiction has a moral purpose, and that purpose may be explicit or implicit. What does that mean for science fiction and fantasy? Does this change if we look at SF/F from a feminist perspective?

There is an underlying assumption about teaching that drives most science fiction, making it one of the most didactic genres. Most SF stories posit a world different than our own requiring the author to teach the reader about the form of the world, its scientific accomplishments, and social structures. Another teaching moment occurs during the comparison of the contemporary world to the alternate world presented by the story. The reader may see the contemporary world differently through contrast and comparison with the world presented inside the story.

Is this a good or bad thing? I remember Harold Bloom was fond of quoting Oscar Wilde to the effect that 'all bad art is sincere.' Hidden inside this statement was a judgment that most didactic and genre art was less valuable than 'real' art. This attitude is certainly present in much of the literary academy, or at least it felt that way a decade ago. Some of that may have changed. I'm not sure. Why is it so unlikely that art might teach us something? What makes critics so reluctant to accept didactic art?

I started thinking again about this question after Wiscon. A panel on the morality of fiction raised a lot of questions that I'm still trying to answer. One of the statements made during the panel was that readers do not like to be preached at. It's an interesting turn of phrase. We assume that a fiction with a direct moral message is automatically going to be preachy. For me being preachy is connected to religion and proselytizing. My online dictionary glosses it as 'giving moral advice in a tedious or self-righteous way.'

In the last century or so it seems that mainstream literature has rejected proselytizing in favor of realism. Teaching the reader something has become passe. Wiscon, by focusing on feminist science fiction, is opposing that turn away from education. Art can be about much more than imitation.

One of my perennial interests is personal knowledge or information management. How do you keep track of all the stuff that comes at you? I'm an omnivore when it comes to collecting information. I'm working at improving my skills for disseminating information. So for the sake of my own future self who might want to know how I managed my information back in mid-2006 and any others who care, I offer the following list.

I'm dividing the post into three parts input, storage, and output.

Inputs, or how I do my daily read.

I use Firefox on my home and work computers. Bookmarks are synced with the Foxmarks bookmark. I have a couple of key groups that I check daily: news sites such as NYT, WashPo; political blogs - Tapped, Billmon, Dailykos, Political Animal, Sideshow.

To read RSS feeds I use NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, both synchronized through Newsgator. I keep my feeds in different groups based on topics - libraries, knowledge management, film, economics, politics, philosophy, poetics, productivity, business, science, techanalysts, SF. There's also a @1 feed which contains my favorite feeds that I read daily. It usually takes me a week to cycle through all the groups of feeds. Some weeks I'll focus on certain groups instead of others, such as reading the SF group during Wiscon.

For mail I use Apple Mail, hooked up to my personal and school accounts. I also have a yahoo account which sucks up a lot of account registration and commercial sites. Gmail I use for high volume mail lists, in two different accounts. I'll check into gmail every few days, but sometimes let them linger for a month or more, depending on mood.

For searching I mostly use Google. In Firefox I've added search engines for Amazon, Technorati, Wikipedia, A9, Yahoo, Teoma, Clusty, Furl. If Google fails I'll go through the list to see what other search engines suggest. The Groowe.com toolbar is also a good add-on to Firefox, especially for repeated searches across different engines.

For photos at Flickr I've just started using 1001. A nifty Mac application that let's you subscribe to communities, tags, individuals, etc. It also let's you mark items as favorites, or use them on your desktop.

Storage

Short term storage is usually ListMixer. I really like this site because bookmarks expire after 30 days if you don't use them. I copied an Applescript onto my computer that sends the current open tabs from NetNewsWire to Listmixer. I'll use this every few days when the number of tabs in the current window starts to become cluttered, usually around 20-30 tabs. I'm considering creating another script to take the list and dump it into a blog post tool, such as ecto.

Longer term bookmarks get sent to del.icio.us or furl. I use furl to store items, such as news stories, that I expect to search through in the future. Del.icio.us usually gets more high level items, such as the home page for different sites, instead of individual stories. So an article from the American Prospect will get sent to furl, while the address for the weblog goes to del.icio.us.

Output

Weblog posts are managed through ecto. I've been making extensive use of the draft facility the past few weeks to capture ideas and partial thoughts. It's become even more ubiquitous than TextMate, my preferred text editor.

One of the things I like most about the Macintosh are the many different outlining applications that are available. I've tried to use all of them at some point. My preferred ones are OmniOutliner, Yojimbo, DevonThink, and Hog Bay Notebook now known as Mori.

Yesterday I wrote about Stephen Hawking's recent call for space colonization. Today I want to link what I said to some things I've written recently about the problems of crowdsourcing.

Hawking posted a question at Yahoo answers two days ago. He asked 'how will humans survive the next 100 years?' In less than 24 hours there were over 14,000 responses. As of today there are 15,620 answers.

A naive crowdsourcing proponent would say that this is great; it's democracy in action, let the best idea win in the market of ideas. The problem is who will actually read all of those 15,000 answers. Here are some of the many barriers to making use of this information.

• Dealing with spam might not be immediately obvious. How can you tell if someone promoting a new fuel additive or energy saving appliance has no commercial interest? In order to make a judgment you'd need to research the affiliation of all the respondents. That's a lot of time. The task has just grown tremendously.
• Flame wars. How do you manage people who just end up arguing for the sake of arguing?
• Linking to individual responses. There is currently no way to link to individual responses. So even if you were trying to read and evaluate all the responses you couldn't link to any one of them directly.
• Intellectual property. Who benefits from the expression of these ideas on the web? If someone implements a particular idea do they owe anything to the person who first presented it?
• First mover advantage. Those who do read the responses are likely to read the first few pages and then quit. Similar to the studies that have shown people only look at the first few pages of search results. This means whoever responds quickest will have an advantage.
• Lack of community. See this critique of community and technology at Ideant

Technology isn't the problem. The problem is the social and economic structures it's embedded in.

Earlier today I encountered this wonderful post on analog synthesizers at O'Reilly Digital Media hub. The post is a collection of half a dozen videos uploaded to YouTube. The videos are all from the 1970-80s and show various people using analog synths. I was particularly interested in th