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``` Some notes on the US elections and computer science, followed by a batch of follow-up items and several recommendations, plus URL's. Some of the follow-ups and most of the URL's draw on subscribers' notes, so you should regard the whole thing as a collective effort.
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RRE messages can be forwarded electronically to anyone, except for a rare few that are clearly marked to the contrary. In fact I strongly encourage you to forward RRE messages to everyone who can use them. All I ask is that Eudora users not use the "redirect" command to do the forwarding.
I much appreciate everyone's comments on "Networking on the Network". I've made a batch of revisions and will send out an announcement for it this week. I've been working on NotN for years now, and I really want you to help me get it in into the hands of every PhD student in the world. So please think hard and come up with ways to get the NotN announcement to people who can use it. The new version adds a bunch of new material, most of which I've already mentioned. I've also deleted some passages that weren't working, like the shamanic and Reichean stuff that weirded people out. My next project, which probably won't happen until I get some more books written, is a long section toward the end of NotN that relates the sociology of social networks to a sort of spiritual philosophy. It's all in my notebook, but not quite in presentable form.
John McCain is the strongest Republican candidate in forty years. So why is the Republican establishment terrified of him? One reason is obvious enough: having committed themselves to George Walker Bush, they will look like idiots if McCain wins. But pride alone does not explain the evidence. The real reason is that McCain has discovered a fault line through the middle of the Republican coalition. It's a line between two very different kinds of conservatives. On one side are conservatives in the mold of Edmund Burke. These people want to restore a society of orders and classes -- a divine order in which everyone knows their place. They know that George Walker is a dim-witted aristocrat who owes everything to his father's connections, but that's precisely why they support him. Despite his dissolute youth, sleazy business dealings, and indifferent performance as the governor of Texas, they regard him as the model of "character" because of his breeding. That's how they think.
That kind of conservatism obviously holds a limited appeal for the great majority of voters, however, and so the establishment has spent the last twenty years building up its think tanks and propagating its pundits to sell working people on another kind of conservatism, one based on the verities of decency and self-reliance. Come the election year, then, the establishment thought they had it all figured out: having created a gaggle of nebulous enemies to keep working people in a froth, they could nominate one of their own, persuade the voter- unfriendly theocrats to return to their closet strategy of stealth, fake left with empty talk about inclusiveness and compassion, cruise to victory on working-class conservatives' votes, treat themselves to some great big tax cuts, and implement all of the institutional changes they had ever dreamed of. First they'd repeal the 1960s, then they'd repeal the 1930s, then they'd repeal the 1790s, and then if they got a second term they'd repeal the Renaissance.
But along comes John McCain, the ultimate product of the working-class conservative culture of the military. McCain is a conservative, no doubt about it. But McCain understands something: that the average American does not want a society of orders and classes, does not want a return to the Middle Ages, and thinks that the whole reason why people like themselves died in the American Revolution and a bunch of subsequent wars was to get away from that sort of thing. So McCain is campaigning on conservativism: not the pundit conservatism that blurs things together, but the conservatism of decency and self-reliance that a lot of normal Americans, unlike their establishment betters, actually believe in. The establishment is freaking because McCain is calling them on their game. It has a decent paper trail by now, this establishment conservatism, and that paper trail is all about special- interest pork. But normal Americans don't like special-interest pork. So it doesn't matter whether McCain's own paper trail lives up to the hype: the fact is that, by really being the candidate that Ross Perot was in his dreams, John McCain has found the key to American politics in the year 2000.
So put yourself in the shoes of the Republican establishment. Let's say that John McCain raises $10 million on the Internet and then wins in South Carolina. Then perhaps McCain wins the nomination, in which case the establishment is hosed. Having gone on to crush Gore, McCain will have completely discredited both of the country's major political machines. His power fulcrum will be awesome. Or, alternatively, the establishment puts on a giant display of money and machinery to stifle the popular rebellion, in which case it is discredited just as badly. Al Gore goes on to win in November, and the establishment operatives disembowel themselves. In either case, the establishment will spend a lot of money telling Senator McCain's supporters that they are actually liberals. They might actually start to believe it, and we will return to a 19th-century style of morally centrist class-based politics.
Democrats have a lot to fear in this. Bill Bradley does not remotely have the demographics to win in the fall, and the liberals who support him are living in dreamland. Even supposing that Bill Bradley were a real liberal, as opposed to a guy who last week decided to reinvent himself one small notch to the left of Gore, liberals don't have the luxury of picking the candidate of their dreams because they aren't out there rebutting the pious cliches of doctrinaire conservativism in public debate. Liberals can't afford to lose this one, for the simple reason that the next Republican President will throw a legal switch that effectively makes it impossible for labor unions to represent their members in the political process. And that will be it for the Democratic party. The liberals must therefore throw everything behind Al Gore, they must hope that McCain and Walker annihilate one another, and they must pray that their man gets his act together real soon. In particular, they must pray that Al Gore proves himself equal to the opportunity that Bill Clinton clearly saw but just as clearly screwed up: building an inclusive politics on spiritual values. George Walker maybe they can beat. But if John McCain intercepts that pass then it's all over.
Can I ask computer scientists to help me out with something? ALthough I got a PhD in computer science in 1989, since then I have been out of the academic computer science loop. My research works best, however, when I can build conceptual bridges between computer science and other parts of the world, and so I need your help in getting back into the loop. Looking around at the increasingly wired world, I keep noticing a pattern: the technical and institutional problems of connecting everyone to everyone else. These problems recur on many levels:
* Packet switching is a decentralized mechanism for connecting anyone to anyone else at any time; of course a packet-switched network has no architectural conception of "connection", but one can easily construct such a conception on a higher service layer. If the network does not have to provide any latency guarantees then this is easy enough. But if such guarantees are required then suddenly all of the world's routers have to share information intensively enough to make promises they can deliver on.
* Transaction processing "connects" everyone to everyone else, in the sense that everyone in the world is potentially in contention for the same seat on the airplane, the same box in the inventory, the right to submit the $120.00 bid in the auction, and so on. The problem, then, is that everyone needs to be connected to some central point so that incompatible transactions are not processed. And if a transaction requires several operations to be performed as an atomic bundle, then all of the operations that may ever need to be performed as a bundle need somehow to be within hailing distance of one another. Connecting six billion people to a single point is obviously a challenge that is best avoided, if only one can figure out how.
* Databases are often used simultaneously by thousands of people all over the world. A database's designer faces a dilemma: either the heavily used parts of the database are cached in numerous distributed locations, in which case changes to the database become cumbersome and even dangerous, or else those parts of the database are stored in centralized locations, in which case users experience slow responses to their queries. Lots of fancy handshaking is required in practice.
I gather that much computer science these days is concerned with this problem. It's hard to imagine any general solutions because of the difficulty of characterizing the highly distributed patterns of use. I don't imagine that I can solve the problem; instead, I want to write about the institutional (legal, economic, organizational, political) aspects of it. I see people's lives and relationships increasingly bound together by these "switchboards", as I call them, and I want to understand the consequences. For example, when do these switchboards tend to become monopolies because of network effects? And then what follows from that? What I want are analytically deep computer science articles about various "connecting everyone to everyone" types of problems, and about architectural and conceptual approaches to solving them. These articles could be from the networking literature, or databases, or groupware, or any number of other subfields. Although I can handle the technical literature perfectly well, I particularly want articles that I can recommend to relatively nontechnical people. I also particularly want articles that throw light on the problem but do not fit the characterization of it that I've given. I would greatly appreciate any references or other clues you can offer.
I got another death threat. It was in response to the message whose subject line read "spam self-regulation is one of the really bad ideas". It consisted a long tirade about how regulation would stop progress, and how if I persisted in advocating regulation then I would be better off dead. Aren't we taking ourselves just a little too seriously here? I'm not going to be deterred by conservative threats, and I hope that you won't be either. In fact, I think that one reason why the Internet has been making so little progress is that there haven't been enough lawsuits. In economic terms, legal decisions are public goods -- everyone benefits from the guidance they provide -- and so it stands to reason that not enough of them will be produced. In fact, lawsuits produce public goods even when they are settled, simply by providing the parties to other disputes a preview of how the issues would sort out. We've had some excellent lawsuits against spammers, and we need more of them. People who denounce "lawsuits" are really just denouncing lawsuits against people like themselves. They have no problem filing lawsuits of their own. That particular sort of hypocrisy is very 20th century, and we're all bored with it.
In discussing the commercial forces arrayed against the Internet's open platform model, for example in the proprietary networks of AOL and Time Warner, I messed up my biology a little. The mollusc that attaches itself to the insides of pipes and sucks out the nutrients that go by, reproducing until it clogs the pipe, is called a zebra mussel, not a tiger mussel. I was writing quickly and got my striped animals mixed up. If you search for "zebra mussel" on the Web, you will discover a minor industry of research on this pest, a nonnative species in the US where it is causing a lot of trouble, for example in the Great Lakes. I think it makes an excellent metaphor.
I mentioned a freeware program called NetCD that plays CDs on one's CD-ROM drive, automatically downloading song titles from a server when it can't find them on your machine. In response, an RRE subscriber wrote this, which I've revised only slightly:
The application you mentioned, NetCD, accesses the cddb database. Therein lies a story that might show why distributed applications aren't as successful as expected. cddb has been hugely popular for years, and there are dozens of applications on every platform that were programmed to use the database. Then cddb's owners decided that applications must conform to certain restrictions in order to access the database (e.g., display a cddb logo for a certain number of seconds, provide a link to cddb, etc). That caused enough of an uproar in the user community that a clone service, dubbed freedb, was started using an old version of the cddb database. (Note that the cddb was and still is at least partially supported by user submission of information.) cddb is now working on a new enhanced version of the cddb protocol that will provide access to more information (more credits, weblinks, genre info, etc.); using this protocol for some developers will require a license.
This, to me, is the problem with distributed applications like cddb. They can provide a wonderful service, but eventually, someone will want to own the data. Judging by all the corporate activity around this problem, they will soon be able to legally own collections of data like CD #3413241324 is Michael Jackson's Bad.
So I guess I don't know how it's going to get any better either, but for different reasons.
For more information, see:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/08/0945228.shtml http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/09/0923213.shtml http://www.freedb.org/why/ http://www.cddb.com/dev/faq.html/page=all
In response to my cri de coeur about Doubleclick's new policy of collecting individually identifiable information, some people asked why I recommended turning cookies off altogether, and why I did not suggest a half-way measure such as changing one's cookies file to read-only. Here's the answer. I talk with a lot of reporters about online privacy issues, and the reporters continually bring home to me the fact that normal people don't know about esoteric stuff like files being read-only. Normal people shouldn't have to know about that sort of stuff. The whole problem with cookies, as with much else about the interface between personal computers and public networks, is that the data flows are not transparent. Heaven only knows what data any of the applications on your personal computer is uploading to some random computer in the Cayman Islands.
I was willing to tolerate this situation so long as the Web was, for a really complicated and accidental set of historical and technical reasons, more or less anonymous. (For example, the average person cannot be tracked effectively using IP addresses. This is surprising, given that the Internet protocols depend on having those addresses. Why is it? It's because most normal people dial in to ISP's that assign IP addresses to them dynamically on a per-session basis, so that Web sites and other Internet servers cannot use the IP address to track them from one session to another unless they can somehow attach an identity to each of the dynamic addresses. This is a seriously esoteric fact, and yet it is fundamental to the significant degree of privacy that normal people do in fact retain today on the Internet.) Now that Doubleclick has decided to subvert the existing anonymous system, it's time for an uprising against the lack of transparency that is unfortunately fundamental to the World Wide Web as we know it. The philosophy of the Web is to obscure the interface between client and server, but the philosophy is wrong. That interface is a sensitive personal boundary that needs to be visible and comprehensible to the individual that it affects. The Web is broken, and will remain so until this problem is fixed.
If the latest fiasco with cookies is the last straw for you, you might want to investigate Freedom, a well-regarded Internet privacy program from Zero-Knowledge Systems. The following description borrows liberally from their Web site: Freedom is an encrypted, anonymous Internet presence system that lets you create multiple pseudonymous digital identities (nyms) which interact in cyberspace exactly the way your regular online identity always has, but cannot be associated to your real-world self. By hiding your IP address and intercepting cookies, it prevents people from tracking your movements on the web. That way, you can have the benefits of cookies (remembering passwords, your personalization of sites, etc) without letting the site owners learn the real world person's habits. Freedom also makes it easy to view and delete the cookies sent to each nym. It's available at .
In response to my essay on the cooperative publication of journals, the most common response was, "you're not accounting for a wide range of costs, like typesetting, printing, distribution, and marketing". But the whole point of Web-based cooperative journal publishing is that those costs are all reduced and shifted so that they needn't pass through the hands of the publisher. Authors do their own typesetting, readers do their own printing, the university that houses a journal does its own distribution cheaply on the Web, and expensive marketing was only necessary to persuade librarians to pay for everything else.
One journal editor told me that he still wants to charge for his journal to pay for administrative support and to send the editors to conferences, both as a reward for hard work and to make sure that the editors meet face-to-face occasionally. Well, journals will require less administrative support once we have decent Web-based tools to manage a journal through the whole life cycle of article submission, refereeing, revision, acceptance, publication, archiving, and so on. And the perks for the editors can be paid for by licensing a paper publisher to print and sell an annual bound volume of the journal to those who want it, while the online version stays free. We'll need more complicated measures in the interim, but that is where we are headed -- assuming, that is, that we have the backbone to stand up to the copyright interests.
My essay on journal publishing was intended as a humorous polemic, not as serious analysis. For serious analysis, I highly recommend the bracing (if not uncontroversial) work of Andrew Odlyzko, which (long-timers will remember) first appeared on this list in July 1994; see . Particularly relevant here is his "The slow evolution of electronic publishing" , which starts with an entertaining discussion of the adoption rates of various technologies. He argues that "[a] decade does seem to be the time scale on which new technologies are fully adopted", and that "Internet time" is more or less of a myth. True, the Web did drive the growth in Internet traffic on a very fast curve in the mid to late 1990s, but that is not the norm. (In fact, some people argue that the explosive growth of the Internet starting in the mid 1990s was really an artefact of pent-up demand whose satisfaction had been delayed by the government's "acceptable use policy", which in turn was driven by the great and prolonged difficulty that the government encountered in persuading private firms to take over the Internet.) More typical, he observes, are the slow adoption curves of IPv6 or HTTP1.1. Keep this all in mind the next time an Internet enthusiast predicts giant technology-driven social transformations on a three-year time frame.
I asked who first said something like "people tend to overestimate how much will change in two years and underestimate how much will change in ten years". One outstanding precedent, it turns out, is J.C.R. Licklider's celebrated "Libraries of the Future" (1965), in which a footnote on page 17 (quoted in Odlyzko's "slow evolution" paper) says:
A modern maxim says: "People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in five or ten years".
He evidently regards it as a commonplace. So I assume that someone else said it earlier.
After I wrote my little piece about Wal-Mart and the potential role of wireless computing in the collective lives of recreational vehicle enthusiasts, RRE readers kindly started educating me about RV culture. In doing so, they reconfirmed for me a law of nature that I teach in my classes: if you pick anything that someone cares about and define the community of everybody in the world who cares about that thing, then analysis will demonstrate 100% of the time that that community has much more sophisticated forms of collective cognition then you had imagined, even if you already knew all about it. I've been informed that Europe is actually full of RV's (I had assumedthat Europeans mostly travel by train), that Wal-Mart publishes a US road atlas with all of their stores marked out on it, and that the best RV club is the SKP's . (The Good Sam Club, I am told, is basically just a marketing thing.) These clubs, together with various grassroots groups, "have a network that forms and re-forms constantly across US highways and into Canada and Mexico. Some popular wintering spots, like the Salton Sea (old US military base) become little towns every year with streets, sanitary arrangements, etc". So my point is not that RV culture does not exist, since X culture exists for nearly every X you can possibly think of, but rather that wireless computing could help amplify the culture-forming processes that are already at work. The point, obviously, generalizes. What do you care about? What would it be like for the culture of people who care about that thing to become more intensively organized?
In response to Starhawk's essay on "How We Really Shut down the WTO", some military people said that Starhawk obviously does not understand military control structures. She had argued that a centralized, top- down command system could not have organized the civil disobedience actions in Seattle. But, the military people said, the military is very used to decentralized operations, which make all kinds of sense in the chaotic combat environment where communications are poor and rational action requires deep knowledge of the local situation. As a result, the protesters' command system does resemble that of the military, except that each small military unit has a hierarchy.
You may recall that I asked for a device the size of a ham sandwich that serves recordings of Grateful Dead shows, and that works with other ham sandwiches to connect each user automatically to whichever server will be most reliable. It turns out that Akamai does something similar, though not with the self-organizing feature that I wanted. It's called FreeFlow .
Recommended: Mary Poovey, Accommodating merchants: Accounting, civility, and the natural laws of gender, Differences 8(3), 1996, pages 1-20. This is an article about the role of gender ideology in the emergence of a market economy in England. Merchants had to persuade the king that something called the market even existed, and that creating the institutional framework for the market's efficient functioning would be in the king's advantage. Their main weapon in this effort was double-entry bookkeeping, which created the statistical basis for measuring the economy and portraying it as something lawlike in the same fashion as Newton's heavens. The real day-to-day life of business, however, involves all kinds of ambiguity, complexity, contingency, and other messy stuff that accounting systems do not capture. In order for "the economy" to be presented as a thing of crystalline beauty, therefore, this stuff, which had always been central to everyone's understanding of business, had to be hidden. Poovey's argument is that the businessmen mapped the distinction between the lawlike economy and the hidden messiness onto invidious gender distinctions, rendering the messiness invisible by defining it as women's work. The messy stuff was messy because women were messy, unruly because women were unruly. The argument is actually a lot more complicated about this, and it's a really elegant argument, with all sorts of compelling internal logic.
The main problem with Poovey's paper is that you mostly just have to believe her. Her argument is intended to apply to a moderately large number of people over a certain number of decades, and it only works if the processes she describes really were general. She does provide several compelling documents to support her argument, and if these documents are representative then the case is closed. This is a problem that confronts nearly all narrative history: one must assert generalizations that one can reasonably believe in, having read the whole mass of archives, but that one cannot adequately demonstrate for the reader within the manageable scope of a paper or a book. I had hoped that Poovey would expand on her argument in her recent book, "A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society" (University of Chicago Press, 1998), but in that book she is after a different target: the social construction of value-neutrality in early modern science. This is an important topic, but not one that I am deeply interested in. Still, it is right next door: both are concerned with the hidden agendas in institutions that claim to be objective and neutral. I have nothing much against objectivity and neutrality, but I have plenty against institutions that pretend to be objective and neutral when they really are not. The world is full of that sort of thing, and it doesn't have to be.
Recommended: Metropolis. Metropolis is my favorite magazine, period. It's about "design", by which they mean the more artistically inclined varieties of design, everything from furniture to cities. What's so good about it is its emphasis on context. A lot of design magazines are focused entirely on the object, but Metropolis shows things in real use, in history, as part of culture, and in the intersection between the aesthetic and technical sides of design work. Although it certainly observes that certain designs have gotten tired, it is not obsessed with fashion -- it will not make you hip, much less edgy. Metropolis has been around for years; I first encountered it in the 1980s when it was, in best 1980s style, the world's most gigantic magazine -- at least two by three feet, though presumably it has grown in my memory. Although I don't have any sense of how it has changed since then editorially, it has shrunk to a more conservative and mailbox-friendly size. It costs $29.95 for 10 issues. The Metropolis Web site has a batch of past articles, although the webmasters make little attempt to reproduce the layout of the pages, the pictures, etc.
Not recommended: Brill's Content. I bought the first issue of Brill's Content at Union Station in Washington the day it came out. It was the issue that had Steven Brill's epic article about press leaks from Kenneth Starr's special prosecutor office, and I was so pleased to be walking around Washington with this thing under my arm that I actually subscribed to it. At first Brill's Content seemed like a meritorious if quixotic project: an attempt at truth-telling about the media without the one-sided "liberal media bias" type agendas that depend so heavily on vagueness, fancy paraphrase, selective use of evidence, and outright falsehoods. And at first that's how it seemed. But then it changed, or else perhaps my perception of it caught up with reality.
That reality was not nice. The first thing I noticed was their need to create a compelling headline by imposing a clear-cut interpretation on situations that have two sides to them. Okay, I said, it's a magazine; they need to pay the rent. But then I started seeing things that I really didn't like: tendentious articles that are obviously driven by a party that doesn't like its press coverage. There was a piece about Consumer Reports, for example, that consisted of nothing but verbatim complaints about Consumer Reports by the public relations departments of companies whose products Consumer Reports has flunked. I knew this because I taught a class about public relations and read articles by the PR people. Then there was a cover story about the JonBenet Ramsay case that was written totally from the perspective of the murdered child's parents. Now, some people have argued that the police fouled up a serious situation, or that elements of the press sensationalized it. But this article argued that there was no story at all, and that an "industry" of reporters were cynically promoting their careers by pretending that there was. This will not do.
Worst of all, Brill's Content has been all too willing to go along with antimedia bandwagons such as CNN's disgraceful failure to stand behind the reporters who presented evidence of American soldiers using poison gas against defectors in Vietnam. I don't know whether that story was true or not, but I do know that CNN's stated reasons for discrediting the report and firing the reporters were superficial and unpersuasive. As with the San Jose Mercury-News' exile of Gary Webb for his "Dark Alliance" articles about the CIA's toleration of the Contra crack trade, the central theses of which were ultimately vindicted by the CIA's own report, the grounds that CNN gave for firing its reporters would put the vast majority of investigative reporters on the street. A serious article on the case would have evaluated carefully the possibility that CNN had caved in to another right-wing campaign to suppress a news story it didn't like, but Brill's Content took CNN's and the campaigners' objections at face value. They did provide the fired reporters with a little space to present their side, but not nearly enough to make a legitimate debate of it. This stuff has become way too much of a pattern, I'm afraid, and I will not be unhappy if Steven Brill's quixotic project fails. Brill himself has recently announced his departure from the magazine for an Internet startup, however, so we can at least hope that the new management will turn things around.
Recommended: Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo, Common Courage Press, 1999. Noam Chomsky has an astounding command of facts and an incredibly sharp eye for double standards, and these attributes alone make all of his political writing worth reading, whether one agrees with it or not. His book about the war in Yugoslavia is no exception. He opposed the war, of course, and regards it as part of a thoroughgoing pattern of American bullying and doubletalk throughout the world. And only the most obdurate supporters of the war will not have to rethink their reasons after reading Chomsky's case against it.
His method is simple enough. (1) Ask whether the publicly stated justifications for the war are factually true. Many of them simply were not, such as the arguments that bombing was required to stop ethnic cleansing that had not yet started on a significant scale before the bombing began. This category also includes the remarkable diplomatic history, which includes several episodes in which the United States unambiguously flouted international law and its own agreements. (2) Ask whether those justifications would also require the United States and its allies to take other actions that they have never contemplated taking. Many of them certainly do, especially in the case of Turkey, whose treatment of its Kurdish minority is highly analogous to the Serbian government's treatment of the Kosovars, with the exception that the Turkish government's policies, implemented with American hardware, are much more violent. NATO is hardly in a position to get righteous about Serbia when a NATO member in good standing is doing the same things only worse.
Except in some of his fast-forward discussions of the war in Bosnia, I found Chomsky's logic pretty much ironclad. That does not mean that one must necessarily reach his conclusions, but if one wants to reach different conclusions one must reach them for more complicated reasons than were the norm at the time. Notwithstanding the force of Chomsky's logic, however, those who are unacquainted with his writing style will need to consciously prepare themselves for the foot-thick layer of sarcasm with which the entire book is written. His basic rhetorical technique is to quote a random sample of op-ed slobbering over America's righteous goodness, and then to recycle those quotes over and over as the atrocities and nonsense accumulate. It's a fair technique, though, and I come away persuaded that the op-ed page is even more of an ideological free-fire zone than it ordinarily seems.
I find it helps if you understand that Chomsky is an anarchist. His problem is with government as such, and with the power elites that he believes run it. Most serious academics find his arguments simplistic -- the technical term is reductionistic -- because he does not leave analytical room for the kind of contestation over government that one sees in real life. Chomsky views this kind of complexity as a pious hope, a tertiary effect that simply draws attention from the primary effects that somehow never get past the filters of acceptable debate. You will have to decide for yourself, of course. Just make sure that you are not simply filtering out the arguments on the basis of some automatic reflex, such as labeling him "anti-American" or swallowing whole the ad hominem of his critics. One of my teachers at MIT said that "Chomsky wins arguments even when he's wrong", and I've seen that effect myself. But facts are facts and logic is logic, and if you're going to disagree with Chomsky's arguments then you need factual and logical reasons. That's all.
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/chomsky_humanism.html
Not recommended: Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles (Sony). When Time Magazine declared this its record of the year, it was 1999's equivalent of Metallica winning a Grammy. Having ignored RatM as long as I could, and being a resident of their designated battleground, I decided I had to break down and buy it. One's first impression, of course, is of the sheer power that is somehow pouring out of one's speakers. These guys are very talented; they have not only invented a highly effective genre of rap lyrics that is a cross between Public Enemy and Bob Avakian, but to my amazement they have also discovered entirely new things to do with an electric guitar. I didn't think I would survive my first listening to the record, but then after my third listening I couldn't put it away.
Having focused my mind on what the innovative lyrics were saying, however, I've gotten over it. It's too bad that the right-wing fringe candidates have made such a joke of themselves with their complaints about this record, since it really is disturbing. Time credits RatM with a "social conscience", and while a social conscience is certainly praiseworthy, I wonder if we really need the kind of conscience that RatM's lyrics represent. Sony will come after me if I quote them at any length, so suffice it say that they clearly advocate rioting (in several places), violence ("Violence is in all hands / Embrace it if need be"), and murder ("So long as tha rope / Is tight around Mumia's neck / Let there be no rich white life / We bound to respect").
I agree that many of RatM's lyrics are entirely arguable, but still I have to ask some questions. Easy ones first: we know that Mumia Abu Jamal did not get a fair trial, and that unfair trials are epidemic both in Philadelphia and in Los Angeles, but do we know that Mumia Abu Jamal is innocent? We really don't. Get him a fair trial, make him a symbol of unfair trials, make him a symbol of unfair trials for political radicals, but don't make a hero of him. Next question: what do the royalty checks from this record look like? You can campaign for justice even after you get rich, but you can't get rich calling for rich people to be killed.
I look at the RatM promo picture on the back of their CD's lyric book and I ask, "who are these guys, and who is their constituency?". I mean, I do support a lot of the causes whose URL's they provide at the end of their liner notes -- the textile workers' union, for example -- but do those causes support them? How can they claim to speak for the oppressed people of Los Angeles when you say things like "Jesus stripped bare / And raped the soul he was supposed to nurture", when in reality the great majority of oppressed people in Los Angeles regard Jesus as the Son of God who came to earth to redeem their sins and provide them with their principal source of strength and hope in life? I can understand anticlericalism, especially when the church sets up a false opposition between straightening out one's soul and organizing for dignity on earth, but this I can't understand. These guys didn't get where they are by rousing the oppressed masses, so who does listen to them? Is anyone really listening to them? And if so then what are they thinking? People certainly are oppressed in the world, and in Los Angeles. But is this kind of hyperbole going to help them? Is rage ever a useful emotion, or does it simply make you into part of the problem?
My liberal friends talk around this sort of thing by saying that the rappers are reporting violence, not encouraging it. I could sort of buy this for some of the rap lyrics a decade ago that told fictional stories about urban warfare, but that's not what this is. RatM do report things, but they don't tell stories. The particular lyrics I've quoted are clearly presented in the author's own voice. They are declamations -- not reports, not depictions. They fall just about dead center in the First Amendment's speech protections, so there can be no question of censoring them. Disapproving of them, though, is another matter.
Recommended: Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers, New York: Walker, 1998. This is a highly entertaining account of the cultural history of the telegraph, written so to make evident the parallels to the cyberspace craze. It's very funny in that way. It's not intended as serious historiography, but you can read it in a couple of hours.
Recommended: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. The 20th century is a closed book now, and even though the numbers are arbitrary, they still retain a psychological kick. When with enough time and distance the history of the 20th century is written, I think that a central theme will be the rise and fall of rationalism. Rationalism is not rationality; it is, rather, a false and superfical imitation of rationality elevated to an ideological excuse for social control. It comes in both right-wing and left-wing varietes, as do critiques of it. It originated in the 19th century, but only during the 20th century did the tools became available to really put it into practice. And having been put into practice in a thousand ways worldwide, it was responsible for many of the century's accomplishments, and for most of its disasters.
Scott's book makes the case for rationalism as the main organizing theme of the 20th-century state, and indirectly it makes the case for the critique of antirationalism as the main organizing theme of 20th-century intellectual life. A great deal has thus been written against rationalism before, and Scott's book, which is based heavily on secondary sources as well as his own fieldwork, ultimately does not expand the critique beyond the outer horizon of this substantial body of work. Along the way, though, it proceeds by the sheer force of clear writing to make that critique more vivid than it has ever been. He organizes his story around a single observation: the need of the rationalist state to make the world legible, that is, visible to practices of accounting and management that can be coordinated in administrative centers far from the localities where policies happen to people's lives. In particular, he observes the recurring pattern whereby rationalists impose a rectilinear order on the world, partly to make the world literally visible to the visiting inspectors but also as a sheer symbol of rational order. For example, his discussion of Le Corbusier's philosophy of urban planning is devastating, and it starts with the guy's drawings, which always portray a beautiful geometric order that would only ever be visible to someone riding in an airplane. The planned villages of the Soviet Union and Tanzania were arranged likewise, with little regard for the terrain they rested on or the practicalities of social life or agriculture within them.
These examples represent the mature and baroque form of rationalism. But Scott also tells an even more compelling story about the origins of rationalism in the necessity of tax extraction in the absolutist states of 18th century Europe. This period of ceaselessly Darwinian tribal warfare was been exactingly described by Perry Anderson in his outstanding "Lineages of the Absolutist State" (Verso, 1974), but for Scott it is a tale not of huge structures but of the small things of local knowledge and practice that were flattened out by the war-fueled drive to collect taxes from them. A traditional agricultural system might divide plots of land into numerous strips that are cultivated by different people in different seasons, but the administrative systems of the 18th century were incapable of collecting taxes unless good-sized hunks of land are assigned to particular people in a stable way. The resulting rearrangement of land into neat parcels may have been nonsense in agricultural terms, but they made sense on paper. Scott tells a similar and especially fascinating story about surnames, which despite their seeming antiquity were (he argues) actually invented and assigned by modern-day administrative convenience and not by venerable local custom. In each case the logic is the same: those absolutist regimes which rendered their realms legible succeeded, and those that did not failed.
The rise of the absolutist state, then, was in many ways a vindication of rationalism. Agriculture may have suffered, but the relative weakness of the state's powers of representation and coercion meant that crops got grown even as taxes got collected and wars got fought. No wonder, then, that the nouveau absolutist regimes of the 20th century should have sought to follow the pattern. They failed because they succeeded in their aims: the more administratively legible their societies became, the more they fell apart. Nor were the methods of rationalism confined to the totalitarian world; Lenin, after all, got his rationalism from the United States, and Scott tells remarkable stories of American and Soviet agricultural planners happily communing in hotel rooms as they planned the communes of the rationalist future.
For Scott, the story ends with the collapse of rationalism and the vindication of local knowledge and local practices over the assaults of the hubristic planners. But for me, Scott's story does not reckon with the very real successes of rationalism, which he notes along the way but cannot digest. I think that Scott's story can be usefully complicated by combining it further with Anderson's. For Anderson, absolutism was a necessary waystation on the path from feudalism to capitalism, and he concludes his book with a striking analysis of the differences between the Japanese and European forms of capitalism in terms of their different forms of feudalism and of Japan's failure to consolidate an absolutist state before moving along to capitalism. Older social forms, he argues, persist in the new.
We can look at Scott's book as supplying a missing piece of this story. Absolutism was not just the apotheosis of the state; it also consolidated enough centralized power to impose a uniform regime of representation on the whole society, and then this in turn was a prerequisite of a functioning market. The metric system is a good example: only an absolutist state would be capable of imposing it, only an ideologically rationalist state would think of imposing it, and only once it was imposed could it reduce transaction costs enough to generate a critical mass of market activity. Once we get beyond the simplistic opposition between "centralized" and "decentralized" that structures both Scott's quasi-anarchism and the ideologies of the market, we can see that markets in fact represent a complicated compromise between the two. Properly functioning markets honor the locality of rational choice, but they only function properly if enough of an institutional grid has been laid down to make trade practicable among an unbounded number of parties who are not ritually bound to one another. The pattern continues to the present day: the government pioneers new forms of representation and interconnection, and then it privatizes them. Markets want transparency and uniformity -- "perfect information" -- and in this imperative they are the natural allies of government, not its opponents.
Some URL's.
Linux and DeCSS: What the MPAA is Really After http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/016.html
valuing the AOL / Time Warner merger http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/2000/02/07/loo.html
opting out of Doubleclick cookies http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy_policy/privacy.htm
Scientology opponents set up shop in Clearwater http://www.sptimes.com/News/020600/TampaBay/How_much_oddity_can_o.shtml
Scientology critics' extensive online video gallery http://www.xenutv.com/
alt.religion.scientology Web Page Summary http://members.home.net/jmwood1/arsweb.html
National Geographic's Map Machine http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/mapmachine/
GPS implants http://www.newscientist.com/ns/20000108/newsstory8.html
the record companies are freaking about this http://www.napster.com/ http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/02/04/napster_swap/
IETF Policy on Wiretapping http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-iab-raven-00.txt http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34055,00.html
new magazine of political journalism http://www.americandispatches.com/
Digital Arts and Culture conference, Norway, August 2000 http://cmc.uib.no/dac/
environmental networking conference, San Francisco, May 2000 http://www.planetworkers.org/planet.html
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