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``` Some notes on the age of unreason, the opaque nature of institutions, the hubris of futurology, the dreaded verbs of journalese, and the fashionable hatred of college professors, plus follow-ups and URL's.
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I'm told that some mail-readers lose the two blank lines that I use to separate successive notes in these messages. The egroups.com archive for the list has the same problem. So I've introduced a clearer note separator.
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RRE's splendid readers have sent me so many interesting cheap pens that I'll never use them all. Accordingly, I will send an interesting cheap pen at my own expense to everyone who sends me a check for US$20 (or equivalent in other currencies) made out to Amnesty International. Please make sure your name and addressed are on the check. I'll pass the checks along to Amnesty. If you don't want them putting you on their mailing list, you might want to attach a note to that effect.
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Those who are interested in our design work may enjoy a new conference paper that I've put on the Web:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/wired.html
This is not the more serious account of lessons learned from our design course that I have promised, but it provides some sense of our motives and a brief description of a couple of the design studies, with links to slide presentations about them. It's not the most profound thing I ever wrote, but it's alright. Do let me know if you find any problems with the writing or the arguments, additional work I ought to cite, etc.
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Let us consider another example of the collapse into irrationality of American political culture. The point here is not that Americans in general are becoming irrational, but rather that a very elaborate jargon has arisen that systematically subverts rational thinking and replaces it with nonsense. What's so striking is how well-engineered this nonsense is. Nonsense need not be sloppy or random; quite the contrary, it can be terribly sophisticated. The people who talk this nonsense do not necessarily intend to talk nonsense; rather, they have cultivated a way of thinking and talking that presents itself as upholding various positive values, but whose real effect is to destroy their minds, to the point where they mechanically repeat lines that, if they were rational, they would scornfully reject.
So, for example, you may recall a recent case in which an inmate was scheduled for execution in Texas even though he had been identified by only one witness, and even though clear acts of omission by his ineffective court-appointed attorney had prevented evidence of his innocence from being presented in court. The matter attracted more attention than the average case of a potentially innocent individual being put to death because the case arose in Texas, whose governor is running for president. The case being in Texas was not a complete accident, of course, given that Texas executes far more prisoners than any other state (or, to my knowledge, than any jurisdiction in the world), and given also that Texas has a long-standing reputation for ineffective court-appointed lawyers. Here is a letter on the matter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (6/26/00, page B12):
Some years ago the death penalty was put to a statewide vote. It passed overwhelmingly. Some people still don't like the idea. Every time someone is put to death, even in another state, these people start to cry about the the person being put to death, yet they don't shed one tear for the person who is really deserving of their tears, the victims.
It is characteristic of the new jargon that a few sentences can pack an extraordinary amount of sophistry. Let us consider a few of the devices that are used here.
(1) The controversy that was current in mid-June did not concern the justice of the death penalty in general, but rather the possibility that a man was being put to death for a crime that he did not commit. The letter does not mention this context, and instead defocuses the issue to something much broader. Opponents of the particular execution are placed against the majority of voters. But even then, what is the point? Is the author saying that the losing side in any controversy in a democracy must shut up? It is entirely unclear.
(2) Pay particular attention to the phrase "some people". It is very common in the new jargon. Its effect is to sneak a stereotype in underneath a near-tautology. Just to illustrate how this device works, one could equally well employ it to say something like, "some people go nuts anytime that anyone except a conservative is found innocent of a crime", or "some people believe that murder requires a ritual sacrifice; they don't care who is sacrificed, so long as it is not one of them" or "some people just want to kill as many people as they can". One could then proceed to rail against the hard-heartedness and bone-headedness of these people, and generally apply to them every stereotype that had ever been applied to people of a certain political persuasion. One would at no point actually say that people of that political persuasion always and necessarily believe that everyone who is accused of a crime is guilty. In fact, one's argument would be logically empty: if you can define a group as "people who believe X" without any further specification, then it follows that everyone in that group has whatever attributes would follow from a belief in X.
(3) Furthermore, observe that the group is defined in an ambiguous way. They are people who "still don't like the idea" -- but which idea? The idea of the death penalty? Or the idea that a majority of Texas voters supported it? Might a reader infer that these perverse people don't like democracy? No such inference could be refuted because the precise extension of the group is never defined. They are just "some people". Surely there do exist people in the world who fit that description. There could be four of them. They could represent 1% of death penalty opponents. We don't know. And we aren't supposed to know.
(4) Despite the sophisticated vagueness of his letter, the author is clearly trying to stereotype opponents of the death penalty. These opponents are portrayed, for example, as emotional people. They are not giving reasons; they are just crying. Their arguments are not mentioned; instead, the author insinuates that their reasons extend nowhere beyond a generalized opposition to the death penalty. It's an insinuation, not an assertion, because the author doesn't out and say so. And for good reason, because if he had said so then everyone would have realized straightaway that it was not so.
(5) Opponents of the death penalty are further stereotyped as being emotionally involved with criminals and emotionally indifferent to victims. This is a heinous insult. It is proven false by many kinds of evidence. Take, for example, Tim Robbins' film "Dead Man Walking", which is clearly a liberal film against the death penalty. In that film, a nun treats a convicted murder with sufficient humanity that she manages to persuade him to admit that he was guilty. The film is dedicated to his victims, and ends by crying for them at some length. If the author had out and stated, "opponents of the death penalty shed no tears for victims", then one could rebut that assertion with evidence. But instead he leaves everything vague enough that rational responses can find no handhold.
(6) But that's far from the worst of it. The issue in the case in June was precisely whether the man being executed was the one who committed the crime. The author simply glosses over the question of whether the right person is being executed. Observe that he identifies this person not as "the criminal", or "the murderer", or even as "the convict" -- each of those characterizations would raise the question of whether the person was in fact convicted fairly -- but as "the person being put to death". He then implies, without quite saying, that "the person being put to death" is not deserving of tears. In other words, the author simply presupposes what is at stake here: whether an innocent man was being executed. This effect is quite common: fancy phrases are used to close up the logical space where the real issue lies.
(7) It's important to be clear exactly how he achieves this effect. He does not refer to a specific case. Instead he discerns a pattern. The crying, he suggests, is independent of the particulars of the case. Observe that he does not speak about the whole universe of people who wanted to halt this particular execution, and focuses instead on people who oppose the death penalty (and not necessarily even all of them). Those people who support the death penalty but believe that judicial institutions need to be radically reformed before it can be morally permissible to execute anyone are defined out of consideration from the start. The author posits an automatic connection in the minds of the opponents, from death penalty to crying, without any intermediate steps. This is a conceit of the new jargon: that "their" positions are "knee-jerk" and automatic, and not motivated by any kind of reasoning. In fact, another conceit of the new jargon, part of its thoroughgoing pattern of projection, is that "they" believe just that about "us". And the projection goes further, inasmuch as this author is himself engaged in an irrational reaction, unsupported by any kind of reasoning, to opponents of the death penalty. He is projecting his own irrationality onto others.
People who are abused with specimens of the new jargon often feel frustrated and confused: they have been presented with something that seems superficially like a logical argument, and they wants to respond in kind. But little or no logic is actually present. The jargon-laden utterance may make no sense, or it may be logically empty. Its real work is done at a subterranean level in the network of associations and insinuations it assembles, all of which are indirect enough to be deniable. In the case at hand, a normal person will assume that "some people" refers to those parties who want to halt the particular execution that was in the news right then. But if pressed with the heinous implications of that assumption, the author can easily point out that the text as written makes no such assertion. Lacking a language to name the varieties of dishonesty that classical logic does not capture, one can only sputter angrily. Or give up and let the madness take over.
Faced with any kind of criticism, speakers of the new jargon regularly try to turn the criticism back against the criticizer. No supporting argument is too weak for this maneuver. It will be argued, for example, that in writing this piece I have done exactly what I have accused others of, such as stereotyping people. Bad arguments like this one serve a purpose: not only do they create confusion, but they force rational people to craft their arguments in ways that anticipate a mind-boggling variety of irrational responses, all of which can be expressed forcefully and in few words. The fact is, however, that I have not stereotyped anyone. The jargon that I am describing exists; it is spoken by many people; and it has the properties I say it has. I do not assert that all conservatives, for example, speak this jargon, although in my experience it is only conservatives who really cultivate it. It will likewise be argued that I am calling conservatives irrational, saying that conservatives have destroyed their minds, and so on. I do believe that conservativism, being a profoundly unjust social order, cannot take over in any society without destroying the minds of a majority of the society's members. But it does not follow, and is not true, that everyone who advocates this social order is irrational or cultivates an irrational jargon.
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I define my research area as the role of information technology in institutional change. I am basically a theorist, which is a hazardous thing, given the huge potential for talking about things one knows nothing about. Fortunately I stand in the currents of a tradition of research in this area. People like Ken Laudon, Bill Dutton, and Rob Kling have been talking in institutional terms about information technology for many years, for example the organizational politics that shape the development of software. And a much wider literature on the role of information in institutions has been developed in the fields of sociology, political science, management, economics, and law, among others. This is the literature that we surveyed in my course on "Information and Institutional Change" this past quarter . The authors in this literature are greatly impressed by the capacity of institutions to persist relatively unchanged for centuries. This persistence has its drawbacks, obviously, but it also has its virtues. It makes the world predictable and it lets people focus their attention on specific activities and specific areas of their lives. Markets would not work without a stable legal system, and democracy would not work without a stable constitutional system. Institutions persist, but they are not immutable, and a theory of the forces favoring institutional persistence also helps us by showing how much a theory of institutional change has to explain. Ideas like these are a tremendous resource for analyzing the ways that societies change as they develop and adopt exponentially more powerful information technologies.
But I am also interested in institutions from the point of view of social equity. Universities and professions are institutions, and most of the jobs that people aspire to are located in institutions as well. So it matters whether these institutions are open to everyone. Partly this is a question of discrimination versus a level playing field. Partly it is a matter of people shaking off limiting beliefs about themselves. But partly it is also something deeper and harder and more subtle: a cognitive problem. Every institution, to start with, assigns its participants to roles: doctor and patient, teacher and student, banker and account-holder, librarian and patron, and so on. Each of these roles brings with it an identity, and in many cases these identities have profound effects on people's lives, including their ways of thinking and seeing the world. Each role also brings a set of social relationships, often complex and consuming ones, and highly evolved ways of thinking together as a community.
The power of a social role such as doctor, patient, college student, parent, factory worker, or congregant to shape identity and cognition obviously has its advantages and disadvantages. It provides a useful way of thinking and talking about the relevant parts of the world, it provides a coherent terrain upon which people can pursue their goals, and it provides a steady supply of information. On the other hand, being socialized into an institutional role can narrow thinking and persuade people to reproduce unjust social arrangements. Institutions persist in large part because of their power to shape thinking, and it is often held that the positive and negative aspects of institutions go together. In particular, it is held that the positive aspects of institutions -- their power to order life in usefully predictable ways -- require us to accept the negative aspects as givens, because only if the institutions are taken for granted by nearly everyone can their benefits be had by anyone.
This kind of pessimism is an easy thing if you happen to like the role that institutions have assigned you. But in an affluent and educated society it is surely too simple. I am particularly concerned with one systematic way in which institutions are almost invariably unjust: by being so opaque that they become cognitively very difficult to enter. Let me give a couple of examples. In her 1983 book "Ways With Words", Shirley Heath reports an ethnographic study of three communities in an southeastern US state: a middle-class white community, a working-class white community, and a working-class black community. She asked why middle-class white children did so much better in school, and why this difference seemed to start from the earliest days of school and just get worse from there. One answer, she suggests, is that the school presupposes a large set of cultural practices of decontextualization. "What letter is that? An M, that's right" -- pulling the letter out of context and focusing attention on it for the sole purpose of naming it. Middle-class white families played these decontextualization games as part of their culture, while the others did not. That is not to say that the other communities had less culture. The working-class black community, for example, had an elaborate tradition of language games emphasizing linguistic virtuosity, including call-and-response games and creative insult contests, all of which had deep meanings in African-American culture. Both language cultures are equally valuable, and each could be the basis for a wide range of practices in school. But because the teachers came from the middle-class white culture, the lessons in school presupposed one culture of language and not another. Children who arrive in school without extensive practice in decontextualization games will usually find them confusing, and lacking some intervention, most of those children will fall further and further behind as the lessons proceed. That is Heath's theory.
Let me give another example. Everyone has had the experience of being clueless in a new situation, walking into it without knowing what to say, what vocabulary to use, how to dress, how to act, and so forth. This kind of experience is understandable. Every social world evolves its own language and customs, and this includes the social worlds that are defined by institutions. All of the world's doctors are part of a social world through similar training, extensive social networks, influential publications, residents transferring from one hospital to another, and so on. Much of the language and culture of the doctor- world is determined by science, of course, and is something that one should expect to study in school. But much of it is just convention, either a matter of historical accident or determined by processes that go beyond the scientific basis of the practice. Fortunately, the medical world has mechanisms for socializing medical students into the social world of doctors. These mechanisms are remarkably dysfunctional from day to day, but they do ensure that every medical student, no matter how little they might have known about the medical world before, will fully absorb doctor culture by the time they are allowed to cut people open and give them drugs.
Many institutions, unfortunately, do not provide these socialization mechanisms, and instead seal off the social worlds constituted by different social roles into separate bubbles that do not interact well enough to give anyone a clear idea of the culture of the others. In universities, for example, the graduate students live in a different world from the professors. It's not an entirely different world, of course, but the professors do a lot of consequential work in faculty meetings and other settings that graduate students are not routinely included in, both within particular departments and in the other institutions (professional societies, conferences, etc) that make teaching and research run. As a result, graduate students often suffer from a kind of paranoia. The missing information about the faculty's thinking, intentions, policies, careers, and relationships creates an imaginative vacuum that gets automatically filled in with all sorts of projections and fantasies that say more about the students than about the reality. Not everyone is susceptible to this sort of paranoia, of course, but graduate students whose parents were college professors often have an easier time because they have gotten the habitus of the university into their bones in a way that others students, for example students whose parents weren't any sort of professionals at all, probably have not. Some departments develop insidious cultures of graduate student paranoia that can persist for decades.
This problem, I hasten to say, is not mostly the students' fault. It is largely the faculty's fault for not including the students in things and not explaining the reasons for things. Even so, graduate student paranoia is probably not a problem that faculty could solve with the best of intentions. Much faculty thinking must remain confidential for the sake of students' and professors' individual privacy. For example, graduate students often suffer from "impostor syndrome" when they first arrive in graduate school: they are seized by the delusional idea that they have been accepted to graduate school by mistake, and that when the mistake is discovered they will be thrown out. Faculty cannot explain publicly why particular applicants for graduate admissions were accepted or rejected, and this creates the imaginative vacuum that impostor syndrome is happy to fill.
Institutions are opaque for other reasons as well. Experts inevitably forget what it was like to be a beginner, and so routinely neglect to explain things that are not obvious. The middle-class schoolteachers who neglect to teach decontextualization games are an example, and many of the practices that experts neglect to explain have this same character of routinized, background, taken-for-granted practices for manipulating printed and spoken representations. Many other untaught practices are social in nature: professional networking is an example. Many practices go untaught because it is taboo even to speak of them. Most professions, for example, follow the general cultural rule that one should affect humility in all things, for example by deflecting praise, and that one should disclaim ambition, for example by giving nice-sounding reasons for career moves such as organizing conferences. These institutionalized silences may protect reputations and make people easier to get along with, but they also hide important career- making information from anybody who did not grow up in the culture of professional ambition. For example, someone who grew up being told, "Work hard and you will be rewarded", will be utterly clueless in the average professional environment, where the hardest worker will be rewarded only to the extent that their accomplishments are publicized, and to the extent that other organizations are waiting in line with better job offers. I suspect that many discrimination claims have their roots in this kind of misguided cultural advice, together with the failure of almost all institutions to make their expectations and internal workings clear enough to their participants.
The good news is that, unlike most institutional pathologies, it is reasonably clear how to go about solving these particular problems: explain things and teach the untaught skills. This may sound simple enough, and it is if you really want to do it, but it takes a great deal of cogitive effort. First of all, somebody has to reflect on their lives insistently and discerningly enough to actually notice the taken-for-granted background of culture and practices that nobody ever explains because nobody from the right social background ever needs to have them explained. Second of all, cultural values need to place importance on explaining the unexplained stuff. It is not good enough to say that everyone should be judged by the same standard, because some people show up at the doorstep with the cultural capital they will need to work toward that standard, where others will not. And third, the unexplained stuff needs to be given a positive value. It is not "just politics", or at least it doesn't have to be. A major problem, of course, is that the unexplained stuff is often unexplained for a reason, and talking about it is an act with consequences within the system. There was a time, recently enough in history, when many people placed an open and explicit value on bringing to the surface all of the stuff that nobody talks about, so that the untalked-about stuff doesn't hold people back or drive them crazy. That time may now be passing. And before it passes entirely, all of us need to stop and explain to ourselves one more time why it was a hopeful time, and why we should hope to bring it back.
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This comes from the Washington Post, 4/19/00:
CORRECTIONS Page A02
A secret 1998 memo to Janet Reno by Charles G. Labella, the Justice Department's campaign fundraising task force chief, said he had determined that President Clinton's waiver for Loral Space & Communications to sell a satellite to China had not been corruptly influenced by camapign contributions by the company's president, Bernard L. Schwartz, to the Democratic Party. The word "not" was omitted in a July 19 article. In the same story, the name of Caryl Clubb was misspelled.
Extremely close readers of the press will recognize this as one of the most outrageously insubstantial of all the reckless allegations that the Washington establishment has issued against the President and his colleagues. And now the Washington Post, a great newspaper now turned into a harshly partisan rag, accidentally, ahem, omits the word "not".
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In case you haven't noticed, it's the year 2000. This is a big deal, because now we can test all of the many predictions for the year 2000 that serious people and prestigious organizations have issued over the years. So where are the high-visibility international conferences at which experts and scholars gather to assess whether those predictions worked out? Well, those conferences aren't happening, and the obvious reason is that the great majority of the predictions have been wildly false. I have already mentioned one example of this syndrome: George Gilder's repeated prediction, as late as 1996, that the telephone and television industries would have collapsed by now. Yes, alright, the economic model of long-distance voice communications is collapsing, but the march of technology has not slain the dreadful US local phone monopolies and the television industry is just about untouched.
Since the high-visibility international conferences aren't happening, we'll have to remember some of those amazing predictions ourselves. In the October 1967 issue of The Futurist, we read the following:
Secrecy Surrounds Report
The World Future Society was permitted to see only a censored version of the TRW report. Sixty-six of the 401 "most likely to succeed events" had been deleted.
"MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED EVENTS"
(as foreseen by TRW scientists and technologists with the modal year predicted for the achievement)
All of the predicted "modal years" are before 2000. And needless to say, almost all of these predictions that The Futurist lists are wildly false. A few of them might have been true, though I've never heard of them:
A major program will be initiated on the development and utilization of nonlethal weapons (1972). [This was surely true.]
Home facsimile systems (economically feasible through integrated circuits) will be in operation providing hard copy of newspaper type material (1978). [I don't know when you could say that fax machines achieved nontrivial penetration of the home market.]
A few more could arguably said to have come true by now (though in some cases you have to be pretty sympathetic), though not by the predicted date:
Lightweight armor (made of titanium of composite materials) will be available to protect against all infantry weapons except local blasts (1974). [Maybe not all such weapons.]
A system for the dissemination of technical information from a national data center will be in operation: (a) with access by company libraries via electronic input-output devices (1971); (b) with access by individual scientists through desk top devices (1975). [This is the Web, and some of its precursors may well be said to satisfy the 1975 prediction.]
Automatic personal medical diagnostic and checkout equipment will be in common use (1978). [Medical diagnostic equipment has advanced dramatically, but it's not clear you cross the line to "automatic".]
Coherent light telephone communication systems will replace wire- based long-distance telephone system resulting in a large reduction in current carry cables and a large increase in communication capacity per system (1980). [This is clearly correct.]
Educational TV/teaching machine systems will be operational on a large scale: ... (b) for advanced societies (1973). [Not the TV part, but distance education on the Web arguably fulfills this.]
In a couple cases the world is making progress toward the predictions but is nowhere near them:
Cross-country superhighways of the future will provide: (a) limited automatic control with emphasis on vehicle separation (1979); (b) automatic lane control operation for specially licensed, certified, and equipped vehicles; steering, braking, and speed control will be centralized in ground based substations (1990); and (c) complete electronic control of the vehicle permitting driver to dial his destination after which the "system" will take over (1995). [Lots of work, including real tests on real highways, but nothing that's remotely close to being safe in real operation.]
The first controlled thermonuclear (fusion) power plant will be demonstrated (1984). [Tons of research, glimmers of progress.]
Low cost, 3-D, color communication service will be available reducing the need for business travel (1977). [I suppose this is coming, but not anytime soon at a quality that will markedly reduce the need for business travel.]
But in the two dozen other cases, the world is nowhere near achieving the prediction, is making little or no progress or even attempt at progress, and does not seem to care. I will not quote these verbatim because they are pretty much of a rogues' gallery of 1960s futurist cliches. Just a few examples:
permanent base on the moon (1988)
solar power plant in space beaming power to earth (1983)
directed energy beam weapons (1989)
mass-produced prefabricated housing (1970)
synthesis of live matter (1980)
nuclear powered underwater recreation area (1990)
Just to look at this list is to detect the main problem with giant technical predictions: they say more about the cultural and political biases of the moment than they say about the reality of technology. Many of the predictions that seem ridiculous to us now date from the Cold War era when a huge establishment took for granted large-scale government high-technology programs, and when Cold War paranoia meant that absurd ideas had to be taken seriously on the off chance that the Russians would get them first. Many of the predictions failed because of political choices not to pursue the space program. But even those countries that still enthusiastically pursue nuclear power have not chosen to pursue most of the directions that TRW predicted. Are these political matters or technological matters? Well, that's the main problem with the predictions. They take for granted a very simplistic theory of the place of technology in society: they identify a technological limitation and they simply stipulate that it will be overcome real soon now. To dissent from such predictions, after all, is to disparage science, rationality, and progress. But that's not how technology works. Technology evolves through the interaction of many small innovations from many sources, and through the interaction between technical matters narrowly speaking and the many-faceted institutional environment within which they develop. When the Cold War environment changed, the Cold Warriors' predictions failed to come true.
One old-fashioned futurist did have a strikingly successful record of predictions. That would be Al Gore, and it's not surprising that a politician, someone who lives the political context of technology all day, who got his predictions right. Maybe I'll return to him another time.
In any event, I mention all of this because we are so utterly awash with predictions right now. One whole genre of predictions concerns my own line of work in the university, and so I have a personal interest in the matter. But the futurists' predictions affect just about everyone, and many people are making plans for their lives based on scenarios that seem absurd. Surely everyone's lives will change as information and communications technologies continue their exponential quantitative growth. But we should beware of the confident people who have simple stories to tell about the qualitative form that these changes will take. Some of them are hoping to create self-fulfilling prophesies. Others are naively channeling ancient Western cultural forms. But I think it's likely that 33 years from now their texts will be the same laughingstocks that the predictions of the futurists of 1967 are now.
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In my last set of notes, I quoted Steve Ballmer of Microsoft as follows:
I think the people we work with say we're tough, aggressive. They even say we come in with our elbows up a bit high. But never has anyone said we're untrustworthy. And I don't believe that. It's a reflection of the fundamental issue that we have the right and the obligation, even, to add value to Windows. The court disagreed with us on that, several times. Perhaps the court thinks our refusal to agree [with it] is some sign of untrustworthiness.
I then claimed that Ballmer's statement was false on the grounds that many people have called Microsoft untrustworthy. Some readers were unimpressed, and insisted that, read in context, the word "anyone" should refer only to "the people we work with". Well, alright, so we need to think of someone who has worked with Microsoft but who never expects to work with Microsoft again, and so has broken the code of silence that has prevented so many of the company's victims from testifying about it. Such a person is Charles Ferguson, who sold Vermeer to Microsoft because Microsoft's operating systems and office applications monopolies had made it impossible for him to expand his company any further. I happened to review his book, "High Stakes, No Prisoners", last time as well, and even though he has some good things to say about Microsoft, he also says this:
Microsoft now possesses great power, causes significant economic damage, and has demonstrated an almost complete lack of restraint in exploiting any advantage at its disposal, fair or unfair, ethical or unethical (page 316).
Netscape, to be sure, played its cards stupidly, but the sheer ruthlessness and efficiency of the Microsoft assault has sent a chill through the entire technology sector (317).
Microsoft's style also, I think, further lowers ethical standards throughout an already brutally competitive, ruthless industry (317).
... Microsoft's competitive behavior often skirts the edge of the law and routinely oversteps ethical boundaries (317).
Microsoft's intellectual property violations, predatory behavior, FUD, false dealings, and strategic use of monopoly power are integral to its ability to create further monopolies and to deter or destroy innovative competitors (318).
I can't find the word "untrustworthy", but I think the concept is clearly there. Now, I can imagine someone arguing that "anyone" must refer only to people who were working with Microsoft at the very time that they called the company untrustworthy. But if that's so then the slickness quotient has redlined and we can go home.
**
RRE readers have been helping me to refine my list of verbs that often appear in the newspaper and rarely appear anywhere else...
To start with, I've been persuaded that "beef up" does often appear outside of newspapers. I guess I put it on the list because I don't like it. I've taken it off.
One reader also put in a good word for "glean", which, he tells me, plays an important role in Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead". The appeals court was sympathetic, but not sympathetic enough. The word is toast.
We've also got a bunch of new verbs for the list: cull, hike, laud, mull, quell, sideline, stymie, underscore, and voice. I suppose that a couple of these have specializes uses in real life: a rancher culls a flock; a center hikes a football. But the newspaper versions are cliches anyway.
Then some borderline cases: ensue, rail, slay, and stave off.
And "tap" in the sense of "choose".
So the list reads as follow: bolster, burgeon, cull, foster, garner, glean, hamper, hike, laud, mull, quell, revamp, sideline, stem, stymie, tout, underscore, vie, and voice. Type any of them into google.com and you'll see what I mean.
Meanwhile, one especially quick-witted reader faxed me the chapter on "journalese" in Rene J. Cappon, The Associated Press Guide to News Writing, New York: Prentice Hall, 1991. It's very funny. All your favorite news cliches are there: crucial, ironic, historic, concern, and speak out. We have the politicians who "craft" legislation and continually "vow" instead of, say, "promise". We have "knife-wielding assailants" and "escalating confrontations", "posh restaurants" and "wrenching debates". "Tempers, tensions, violence all flare. ... Demonstrators spark angry confrontations." And so on. I'll just add a few of my own: the phrase "up to" and the words "boon", "hopeful" (as a noun), "linchpin", "lagging", "staunch", and "stalwart".
**
It is fashionable to hate college professors, and the stereotyping of college professors is nowhere so developed as in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. See, for example, the review by American Spectator writer Tom Bethell of Jim Powell's book of hagiographies of prominent conservatives, "The Triumph of Liberty" (Wall Street Journal, 7/11/00, page A24). This is a book in which Ronald Reagan appears in a section entitled "Peace" (I am not making this up), and so we can't expect too much. But that's no problem for a hardened propagandist. Listen, line by line, to the first paragraph:
"Liberty has never been a fashionable cause."
Even though conservative media pundits outnumber liberals at least ten to one, those same pundits can present themselves as the courageous defiers of fashion. Why? Because they know that nobody will call them on it. It's the height of dishonesty.
"Ruling elites have feared it as something that might threaten their hold on power."
Here the author plays on a some/all ambiguity. Some ruling elites have certainly feared liberty, but have elites to Mr. Bethell's liking never ruled? Surely they have. Not only that, but the opposition between "liberty" and "elites" is ill-drawn: conservatives are pretty selective in their support for liberty themselves.
Today intellectuals, having attained a considerable measure of power themselves, are at best ambivalent about it, and for decades they have toiled to enlarge and centralize government.
Intellectuals? Power? What power would that be? You must be talking about Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Phil Graham, all former college professors. Following current fashion, the author deniably pretends that all intellectuals are alike, and doesn't bother counting the many intellectuals who see things his own way. In fact, he has just gotten done quoting a passage describing Milton Friedman, surely an intellectual, as "the greatest champion of liberty during the 20th century".
This would surely have surprised their bookish predecessors, who for centuries craved little more than the freedom to publicize their opinions.
Notice the subliminal cut on today's intellectuals, who have evidently left their books behind in their quest for power. The word "bookish" works here in a special way. It's normally a disparaging term, but Mr. Bethell plainly does not wish to disparage the older intellectuals. Rather, and quite in line with current fashion, he is putting that disparagement into the mouths of the supposed power-elite intellectuals. Vagueness serves this kind of writing well: it allows outrages to go past in a form that can't be refuted. For example, can you name the precise centuries in which intellectuals, to a much greater degree than today, "craved little more than the freedom to publicize their opinions"? I can't. But because Mr. Bethell leaves his imagined past utopia in soft-focus, we can't prove that it didn't exist.
Later on he says this:
"Mr. Powell scoured libraries and out-of-print booksellers, interviewed specialists and visited historic sites. (Very few academics these days would bother with such essential legwork.)"
Think of it: this intrepid author went to libraries and booksellers, interviewed specialists, and even visited historic sites! That's so impressive. What's not impressive is Mr. Bethell's calumnious assertion that few academics would do the same. What are we to make of this? Two possibilities: either Mr. Bethell doesn't read the work of many contemporary academics, in which case he is guilty of the same sin that he falsely paints on others, or he does, in which case he is just talking through his hat. This is an especially outrageous example of the systematic stereotyping that corrupts public discourse in our country today. It's not right.
Now, I can imagine that many readers have heard little about academics besides the calumnies of Mr. Bethell and his ilk. Those readers are invited to peruse a random sample of the scholarship that is being published today:
Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, New York: Knopf, 1997.
Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Despite the fashionable slurs, the truth is that we're living in a golden age of scholarship. I don't know if contemporary mores place a higher value on scholarship than in Mr. Bethell's hazy utopia, whatever century it might have occurred in. I do know that today the Internet and cheap air travel have made scholarship much easier than ever before, competition for scarce humanities faculty positions has raised the standards of scholarship to inhuman levels, and archivists in universities, libraries, and museums maintain a enormous global infrastructure that connects scholars to endless millions of documents. Serious scholars have access to a global network of research libraries, most of them with Internet-accessible catalogs and interlibrary loan agreements. And the results of this access to the raw materials of scholarship show up in complaints by publishers about books that have a hundred pages or more of scholarly endnotes, every one of which required the very legwork that Mr. Bethell alleges to be out of fashion.
The real difference here is not between the lovers of liberty and the intellectuals. The real difference is between propagandists who write for magazines underwritten by paranoid billionaires and have childish ideas about scholarship, and serious people who ignore the propagandists and write serious books. The danger is that the propagandists will win.
**
In my 2/7/00 notes, you may recall, I dumped on the extreme lyrics of Rage Against the Machine. In doing so, I was particularly scornful of the following lines:
Jesus stripped bare And raped the soul he was supposed to nurture
which, aside from being untrue, are hardly the most effective way to mobilize the oppressed people of Los Angeles, who have a pronounced tendency to believe that Jesus was a good guy. Since then, however, RAtM's fans have been educating me. That song, it seems, concerned unspecified abuse that the lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, experienced as a child from his screwed-up father. The Jesus thing was a metaphor of how a father's abuse can look through a child's eyes. Okay, I can buy that. I still don't buy the stuff about Mumia abu Jamal, though, and I don't like their glorification of violence. It doesn't work and it's not right.
**
It would seem that I mistakenly placed the Sunset Strip in North Hollywood. The section that I had in mind is actually along the northern edge of West Hollywood, at least until the next earthquake. (North of the Strip you have the Hollywood Hills, which are part of Los Angeles, at least until the devolution movement succeeds.) And that no-cruising law just went into effect. Just don't circle around the block looking for a parking space in front of Book Soup.
**
But West Hollywood will get over it. My real faux pas was to refer to Indiana University as the University of Indiana. The U of I, as everyone knows, refers to Illinois, next door. I am so sorry.
**
Some URL's.
Open Source Napster Server http://opennap.sourceforge.net/
IBM Systems Journal issue on pervasive computing http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj38-4.html
The New Design Space: Relationship Management http://www.crd.rca.ac.uk/~chrisd/dopplor/
Designing the Space of Flows http://www.thackara.com/steal_these/
The Design Challenge of Pervasive Computing http://www.doorsofperception.com/projects/chi/
Doors of Perception Conference http://www.doorsofperception.com/
Back to the Future: An Episode of Technological Vision Assessment http://www.crd.rca.ac.uk/~chrisd/essay/
Annual Design Awards http://www.businessweek.com/datedtoc/2000/0024t.htm#CXANNDA
PFIR Statement on Internet Policies, Regulations, and Control http://www.pfir.org/statements/policies
Big-Name Players Team for Location-Based Internet http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article/0,2171,12_422171,00.html
Intellectual Property on the Internet: What's Wrong with Conventional Wisdom? http://www.researchoninnovation.org/iippap2.pdf
review of design books by John Chris Jones http://www.analytica.dial.pipex.com/jcj.htm
Principles of Graphic Design http://www.mundidesign.com/
A New Corporate Wanderlust Puts a Quiet Brake on Salaries http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/072400corporate-migration.html
Higher Education in the 21st Century: Global Challenge and National Response http://www.iie.org/svcs/publications/report29/
How to Ensure That Privacy Concerns Don't Undermine e-Transport Investments http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/eTP.html
Toysmart.com in Settlement With FTC http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/22privacy.html http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2313384.html http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/07/toysmart2.htm
Texas puts mothers' maiden names on the Web http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.95.html#subj6
Virtual Universities: Testing Quality in Australian Higher Education http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/s153481.htm
Connecting Communities http://www.benton.org/Library/PublicMedia/home.html
Internet privacy bill in Ireland http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/finance/2000/0711/fin9.htm http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/finance/2000/0711/fin10.htm
Carnivore and Open Source Software http://www.crypto.com/papers/openwiretap.html
FBI statement on Carnivore http://www.fbi.gov/programs/carnivore/carnivore.htm
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