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TNO 2(12).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 1995
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent, vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Neurotic game-playing on the net Virtual house-hunting Things I do not recommend
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Welcome to TNO 2(12).
This issue includes an article about aggression on the net. I was inspired to write this article by a rather unpleasant recent experience, but the issues are obviously of broad concern. My focus is not on the badness of bad guys, though, but on practical responsibility: the ways, beyond the right and wrong of the case, in which we permit ourselves to be abused by others, including our tendency to accept the self-serving logic of the aggressor. Neurotic game-playing can flourish on the net to the extent that its community structures are weak, and it provides us with an opportunity to reflect on our own complicity in that weakness.
My "recommendations" this month are much longer than normal, and just this once, after two years of happy recommendations, they are things I think poorly of. My point is not to beat anybody up but to encourage thinking about the precise nature of the vacuum that these regrettable entities fill.
I wrote this month's "wish list" in my head while driving around and around San Diego looking for a place to live.
A footnote. At least once a day I run into someone whose first words are "did you get my last e-mail"? What these folks don't seem to realize is that this question often has no determinate answer. If I have gotten no recent e-mail from the person then I can say no. But otherwise I have no way of knowing. Very often I've seen a message from them and have replied to it. Now one possibility is that my reply is still waiting in their mailbox, so that my answer should be "yes". But another possibility is that they have seen my reply and have sent a reply to it that I have not seen, so that my answer should be "no". This is way too much to explain while passing someone in the hallway, so my standard response is to say "I don't know; what did it say?". Often they cannot actually recall what it said, or did not intend to tell me, given that I will be able to read it perfectly well once I get back to my office. What they're doing instead, I think, is responding to a sense that our relationship is ill-defined at that moment -- we do not have enough shared context to feel connected or hold a proper conversation. In other words, asking me whether I've seen the most recent message is a symbolic way of reestablishing the coherence of shared background upon which the relationship is based. Such are the faultlines between synchronous and asynchronous media, and I hope they don't develop into faultlines in the relationships between people as well.
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Net games.
I want to talk about the Internet as a venue for certain kinds of abusive game-playing. But first I want to discuss the concept of personal responsibility. People who find such matters distasteful may wish to skip ahead.
I have been mugged twice. The second time it happened I wasn't paying attention one night, so that I stepped off a curb and found that a shotgun was aimed in my face. After I handed the guy my cash, he threatened to come back and blow my head off if I called the cops, whereupon he fishtailed down the street in a red muscle-car with the lights out.
The first time I was mugged, though, was more instructive, and I'm almost glad it happened. This was many years ago, and I was living in a loft in Chinatown in Boston. To get home from the subway I had to walk through the Combat Zone, and it was there one night that I looked over my shoulder and saw two suspicious characters closing on me. Part of me said to run, but then another part of me said that running away from them would hurt their feelings, whereupon one of them executed this very professional choke-hold while the other one stood by, preparing to stab me if I did not pass out. My last thought before losing consciousness was that I was going to be raped; my first thought after waking up with fewer material goods and a badly bitten tongue was that I should call up and cancel my credit cards.
If you've never been assaulted then you might find the thoughts I reported having, particularly the solicitude I felt for these guys' feelings, to be odd. In fact they are common. Many women have reported being unable to defend themselves against assaults because they feel obliged to take care of others before themselves, and I think that many more men would admit the same thing if they were more aware of their feelings and had social permission not to be "tough". The most common interpretation of this phenomenon is in terms of gender socialization, and that is surely part of it. But another interpretation, which emerges from the recovery movement and fits more closely with my own experience, is that it is about self-esteem: giving others' feelings priority over one's own, even in extreme situations, is an expression of the value one places on one's own life and well-being. I think today I would probably be able to run away in such a situation. But I'm a different person now than I was when I was first mugged.
Many people in the recovery movement also believe in a much more difficult concept, which is that I bear some responsibility for having been mugged. Many other people resist such ideas, given that the muggers themselves certainly bear full responsibility for their own actions. Permitting them to mug me is not the same as giving them permission to mug me. I find that it helps to distinguish three equally legitimate but quite different concepts of responsibility, which I will call legal, moral, and practical: legal responsibility is whatever the law says it is, moral responsibility apportions moral right and wrong when something bad happens between people, and practical responsibility pertains to issues of why things happened and a posteriori of how they can be prevented from happening again. Legal ideas about responsibility tend to reflect complex and historically shifting accommodations between moral and practical ideas, and I won't consider them any further here. In the case of the muggings I described above, the muggers were 100% morally responsible for the muggings that took place and I was 0% morally responsible. But practical responsibility is a whole different matter.
Much havoc occurs when the moral and practical conceptions of responsibility are confused with one another, or when one of them is emphasized to the exclusion of the other. Let us briefly consider three examples:
* Many survivors of abuse and assault find it very difficult
to explore the ways in which they have permitted themselves to be victimized because this sounds to them as though it detracts from the moral responsibility of their victimizers, who usually claim with great and practiced casuistry that they are themselves the innocent victims in the situation. The batterer might argue that the victim provoked the battering, or seduced and rejected the batterer, or whatever. These claims may actually be true in some cases, but they are complete non sequiturs. Batterers and other abusively controlling people are generally in massive denial: driven by an underlying terror of abandonment, they experience themselves as powerless and their actions as fully controlled by the other party. And the battered party may come to believe this as well. As a result, people who work with survivors of battering relationships were long reticent to admit that these survivors often return to a batterer even without a strong financial reason to do so; they did not want to provide support for (utterly false) claims that the battered party had thereby excused the past battering, consented to further battering, or else "wanted" to be abused in any sense that would reduce the batterer's moral culpability. The most abusive lines of the batterer's ally are precisely the innuendoes that confuse the practical and moral varieties of responsibility: "You did choose to walk in that neighborhood after dark, now didn't you?" For this reason and others, everybody needs to be the judge of practical responsibility for their own lives without submitting to the judgements of anybody else.
* Some large and successful organizations offer workshops which
teach people to view the world entirely in terms of practical responsibility. Lifespring, for instance, actually teaches people that they are 100% responsible for everything that happens to them, that every ill that befalls them is evidence of a hidden motive, that this stance reflects "empowerment", and that any other stance is just part of the disingenuous rationalization for one's perverse desire to be victimized.
* A rising political trend in the United States has laid claim
to the phrase "personal responsibility" and has constructed an elaborate system of ideas about the "victimology" of certain social movements that have sought to identify and redress social ills. People who employ these ideas generally speak as though it is always clear and obvious who bears responsibility in a given situation, and they will engage in harsh lectures about "taking personal responsibility" when they perceive someone as adopting the social identity of a "whining victim". In practice, though, these ideas are empty, and serve as an excuse to apply the burden of "personal responsibility" in an arbitrary fashion depending on who the parties are. It is as though American English has now differentiated two versions of the word "victim". When given its normal pronunciation, with a major stress on the first syllable, it refers to the victims of violent criminals, liberals, and government regulators. But when given its newer pronunciation, with an extra-heavy stress on the first syllable, it refers to those people who have chosen to construct themselves as victims of racist white people, sexist men, private businesses, abusive parents, or the police. To be sure, some people really are whiners. But to raise "whining" to a broadly but selectively applied stereotype is the very antithesis of moral reasoning.
Some clarity about the nature of personal responsibility is a prerequisite for any serious understanding of the dynamics of unhealthy interactions between people. In a series of books that were both highly popular and thoroughly lampooned in their day (e.g., "Games People Play" and "I'm Okay, You're Okay"), Eric Berne described these phenomena in terms of "games". An example of a game is Uproar. Everybody knows pairs of people, especially parents and teenaged children, who repeatedly get themselves into a situation in which both parties are mad and one of them storms out slamming a door. Each of them will be deeply involved in assigning responsibility for the event to the other, and this will be one way that they effectively conspire to enact the same scenario over and over and over. Now it could be that, in a moral sense, one of them really is primarily in the wrong. But that does not explain, in a practical sense, why both of them consent to participate in the endless cycle without either repairing it, doing something different, or leaving. Everyone who plays a game has a practical responsibility for their own participation, and discovering such a game in one's life provides an opportunity to grow by exploring what's behind it and how it might be healed.
It is important to keep clear that Berne is asking a practical question, not a moral one. His point is definitely not that all assaults that occur, for example, are instances of a game; he is referring to people who do something to make physical coercion a pattern in their lives. People who assault others are just about the lowest form of life and are morally responsible for their actions absolutely regardless of what their victims did or didn't do or could have done differently. And many assault survivors most certainly found themselves with absolutely no options in situations that they could not possibly have been expected to foresee. But the practical question still remains of why people who see trouble coming and have viable options to ameliorate it nonetheless sometimes fail to do so, and fail to do so repeatedly.
The answer to this question is mysterious and depressing but not all that surprising. Berne claims that all of us, or at least those who have not healed their game-playing tendencies, transact tacit negotiations with everyone we meet. We go around effectively broadcasting queries such as "I like to be the one who storms out slamming the door in a game of Uproar; do you want to be the one who gets to complain about having the door slammed in their face?". When our interlocutor doesn't want to play the other role in any of our games, we just say nice-to- meet-you and move along to someone else, until we find someone who wants to play. Then perhaps we fall in love, go into business together, discuss politics, or whatever on the surface we claim we are doing.
I have had many occasions to think about Berne's theory as I have run a large mailing list on the Internet. Among the many social functions that e-mail makes more efficient, it seems, is the social trolling through which game-players find their partners. I have identified a couple of such games. One of them is called Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas. It has two major roles, Professor (P) and Questioner (Q), and goes like this:
P: forwards material out to a large Internet mailing list that has any sort of political content
Q: sends professor a message in response that presents itself as an innocent inquiry full of high-minded language but in fact is utterly snide and often laced with innuendo
P: takes offense and mails back a reply that reacts to the bait in any way
Q: declares victory by adopting a tone of wounded innocence and professing shock and/or rueful disappointment that ("just as I thought") a Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas
The cycle may repeat, with P continuing to take the bait and Q escalating the rhetoric of wounded innocence, grave injustice, unconscionable rudeness, abuse of authority, and so on. It takes very little indeed for Q to portray himself (in my experience it is always a man, or at least someone employing a man's name) as the victim of rude closed-mindedness. For example, I find that even referring to Q's argument as "conservative", even in the context of a perfectly level-headed response, is enough to produce howls about stereotyping and labeling and party lines and thought police. One guy called me a fascist because I used the word hegemony -- never mind that the guy who gave the word hegemony its modern meaning did so while rotting in a fascist jail. The twisted logic is of course part of the game -- an invitation to play another round, double or nothing.
As in most games that involve accusation, the protagonist in Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas proceeds by creating and exploiting ambiguity, or at least pretending that ambiguity exists, about issues of moral responsibility. I am attacked through an accusation of having conducted an attack myself. Like most abusive behavior in real life, the attack works precisely by creating confusion and conflict about reality within the person being attacked.
Was he really being snide?
Am I imagining things?
Am I overreacting?
Am I just looking for an excuse to snap at someone?
Maybe it's a cultural difference?
Don't I have a responsibility anyway?
And above all...
Am I hurting his feelings?
This very common pattern deserves fuller treatment on another occasion, as do the larger political project and form of self-fashioning in which Q is engaged. My topic here, though, concerns practical responsibility. Briefly put, why do I fall for this game? Let us cut me some slack and forget the first half dozen occasions that this scenario occurred, before the pattern ought to have become clear. The hard question is why I continue to play this game the twentieth time around.
For one thing, I find it very hard not to reply to e-mail. I can rationalize this by saying that it's moral, it's responsible, it's polite, and it's a norm of Internet etiquette to reply to everybody. But if I am really paying attention, and am not in denial, I really can tell the difference between people who are offering me a game of Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas and people who, while perhaps not sharing the political views that were expressed in the item I happen to have forwarded to a mailing list, and while perhaps employing some arguments that I find mistaken, nonetheless are interested in commencing a grown-up professional relationship. Messages reflecting these two intentions really are as different as night and day, even if I could not provide a formal grammar to distinguish between them.
So why do I keep choosing to play this game? No doubt the answer has a number of layers to it, but one part of the answer is that I have a big red button on me that relates to unjust accusations. You don't need to know where this button comes from, but you can probably imagine what it is like. In any case the upshot, it seems, is that when someone offers me a game of Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas, I frequently go right ahead. I am better now at declining such offers than I used to be, and I expect to be even better in the future.
But my thing about unjust accusations is probably also one reason why I am prone to accepting invitations to another game, which might be called Censorship. Like all games, this one comes in first-, second-, and third-degree forms. (Berne's definitions of these degrees don't work very well, so I'll modify them to make them fit the case at hand.) Fortunately it is hard to engage in third-degree games over the Internet, since these involve actual physical violence (but see Kali Tal's article in TNO 1(6)). But first- and second-degree versions of Censorship have both become common on the net. The game involves two players, a Moderator (M) and a Contributor (C), and it goes like this:
C: joins a mailing list and submits items to the list that don't really belong there, repeating if necessary with less and less suitable material until...
M: rejects those items
C: asks why the items have been rejected, usually while affecting a tone of bewilderment and wounded innocence
M: offers just about any explanation at all
[at this point C might attempt to escalate the game by baiting M into saying something s/he'll later regret, and M might accept the implicit offer by taking the bait]
C: declares victory by registering protests about having been censored, usually with high-toned language about freedom and hypocrisy and so on
Once again let's ask about practical responsibility. It may be objected that M is entirely innocent in a practical sense, inasmuch as precisely two options are available: publishing the unsuitable submissions or not publishing them. But other options actually are available, such as negotiation, suggesting more suitable lists, offering to call C on the telephone, preparing a boilerplate text explaining the nature of moderated mailing lists and the policies of this particular list, offering different sorts of explanations or offering no explanation at all. Of course, I do not mean to say that every list moderator is playing a game whenever someone complains about a posting not being published on his or her list. In fact, I think that e-mail affords situations in which game-players can enroll others in their games, such as the two games I have mentioned here, with only a very minimal level of agreement from those others.
Nonetheless, these considerations should not distract us from the perfectly real possibility that M actually does bear some practical responsibility for a particular episode. I know that this has been the case in a few instances with my own mailing list. In a first-degree version of the game, someone might send me a note, in that disingenuous tone that healthy people do not put up with, challenging me as to why I don't post certain kinds of materials on my list, or else insisting that I post particular items. I might respond by explaining that the list consists simply of whatever I find interesting, whereupon my interlocutor will declare victory by saying something like "oh, so the list just exists to push your own views". Any attempt to respond to this sort of nonsense is obviously further game-playing on my part, and I sometimes manage to abstain and sometimes do not.
Let me tell you what a second-degree game of Censorship is like. Recently I received a series of long messages from this guy I've never heard of, written in exaggeratedly high-toned language, which vilified a mailing list moderator for declining to publish something he wrote. I found these messages totally confusing and replied briefly saying so. I then received an equally confusing and obviously disingenous explanation from this person, followed by an even more confusing message reporting some kind of problem with my own mailing list. I replied to the problem report with a simple "what are you trying to do?", and I got an even more confusing message back that, I realized, meant that he was trying to post something to my list. This is impossible, however, since the list is only for my use. He had received a message from the server explaining this in perfectly clear terms and giving instructions for subscribing, but he had bizarrely ignored the explanation and treated the rest of the message as an unsolicited personal invitation from me to join my list. So I explained that my list is not a discussion group -- and got back even more high-toned complaining, together with incoherent accusations of double standards, singling out, and so on. By now I had had it with this guy. If I were a rational person I would have realized that "having had it" is simply what it feels like to decide to accept an invitation to certain kinds of games, in this case a game of second-degree Censorship. Yet I plunged right in, explaining that moderators can do whatever they like with their mailing lists and advising the guy to get a life. I don't feel particularly bad about this as a moral matter; it was certainly proportionate to the situation. But proportions may have little to do with cause and effect in practical reality.
Before I knew it, high-toned tracts accusing me of censorship and unprovoked rudeness were making their way to the faculty and staff of my department, some people in the hierarchy of my university, a CPSR mailing list, and heaven knows who else. These messages (some of them entitled "Language of an Assistant Professor") included numerous false and misleading statements and generally verged on libel. Probably the most offensive falsehood is his claim that I told him that I would not publish his tract because I disagree with it. In fact I have never read his tract and have never exchanged the first word with him about its contents.
In any event, at this point I began to snap out of my denial and ask around. It would seem that the guy has been practicing this technique serially: trying to post a meandering tract on various mailing lists where it doesn't belong, getting rejected, and then vilifying the mailing list moderator to every address that can be connected with the moderator in any way and to several other mailing lists besides, until finally someone refuses to publish his messages and the cycle begins over again. His principal tool in assembling and distributing his messages seems to be the Web: he searches the text in the list owner's Web pages looking for material that can be quoted in constructing a charge of hypocrisy, and then he searches for potentially relevant e-mail addresses that can be used to deliver the resulting message. In my case, he evidently went through the Web-based archives of my list that Kee Hinckley and Al Whaley so kindly maintain and sent his message to a large number of the people whose messages I have sent out. (He does not use a Web browser to send the mail but Windows Eudora, suppressing his recipient lists with a blind cc.) I am also told on good authority that he sent his tract to vice-president@whitehouse.gov along with a note explaining that my mailing list, among others, had refused to publish it.
It is hard to know what to do about this. Would I have been just as victimized even if I had not played my part in this fellow's game? I could certainly have supplied him with less ammo by retreating into euphemism and high-toned language, the better to resist quotation out of context. But if his past practice is any guide, he would probably then have kept escalating his provocations until I took the bait, or else satisfied himself with the basic charge of censorship if I did not. It is also hard to imagine what redress I could have. I would simply be signing up for a more strenuous game of second-degree Censorship if I approached his service provider, posted a public query asking for others' experiences with him, or placed a phone call to his mother. Besides, I don't even know what country he's in.
Will such behavior become more widespread? As the net grows, it will include more people looking for fellow players of their games, and it will also include more potential places where such games can be played. Perhaps a list moderators' union would help, by analogy to the extensive network of system maintainers who share notes about viruses, security holes, system hackers and their attacks, and so on. It might also help to put names on these games, or at least to tell stories about them, so that fewer people fall for them unnecessarily. Or perhaps this kind of behavior will simply become part of the price we pay for our enjoyment of the net. Most people who have gotten this guy's messages have simply blown them off as the work of a crank. (When I walked into my department's office the next morning, the entire staff asked me in unison, "who is this guy?". Actually, they didn't use the word "guy".) And I got an opportunity to learn something about myself. The Buddhists say that we should be grateful to everybody, no matter how awful they are, since they provide us with another occasion to deepen our appreciation for the illusory and transient nature of all things. By that measure this guy is a true hero of the net, and all thirty million of us should send him individual messages of appreciation for his tireless work. (That's just a joke. Leave him alone.)
The net has a way of making old things new again, and obviously this includes issues of aggression and abuse, right and wrong, injury and responsibility, and the rest. And just as in the corporeal world, our actions on the net either contribute to a healthy atmosphere of integrity and pluralism or they do not. This applies in a straightforward way to the people who wreak havoc on the net, but it also applies to the people (most of us) who abet havoc, who permit havoc to be wreaked upon us, and who comfortably play out the role of isolated social atoms judging things at a distance. We know what we think about a game-playing troller, a builder of viruses, an author of hoaxes, a broadcaster of advertising to mailing lists, a forger of message headers, or a propagator of libel. These people are aggressors against the whole community of the net. But what about the rest of us -- the ones who took the troller's bait, who didn't virus-check that disk before sending it out, who didn't read that alarming message closely enough before passing it along to a mailing list, or who went ahead and believed something that just didn't add up?
The Buddhists are right: these people are here to teach us something, and we're lazy if we don't figure out it what it is. Sentencing wrongdoers to a zillion years at hard labor sometimes feels good, and sometimes no doubt it's even morally called for, but it does little to change how much wrong gets done. And banishing perpetrators only shifts them to another neighborhood, where they will immediately start playing their usual games on someone else. Pests flourish to the extent that communities are atomized, demoralized, and disunited. Once we get off our butts and start building the institutions and customs and skills of community, they will no longer be able to feed on us, and they may even start seeking out the help they need to heal their own wounds. I have no control over these people, and the more I stop trying to control them the less nutrition I will provide to their defenses and their delusions. What I can do, though, is describe the reality of the situation -- put a name on it as best I can -- and hope that others will do the same, extending or deepening my own analysis and bringing in their own ways of thinking about the problem. This kind of consciousness-raising is a prerequisite of both individual and community healing; the will to be of service to the community comes next; and the formal skills of listening, organizing, and building come after that. These skills can and must be taught, but they presuppose that everyone is looking to their own health, taking responsibility for the things they have control over and refusing as much as practically possible to be assaulted by the things they do not.
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Wish list.
Having returned to San Diego from a few months abroad, I spent much of late November looking for a new place to live. This is an appalling waste of time. Fortunately I knew the city well and could narrow down the blocks I wanted to live on, first through my general knowledge of various neighborhoods and then by driving around and observing the remarkable block-by-block demographics in each area. I spent some time responding to ads in the paper, but this was way too hard. Many of the ads don't list an address, thus requiring me to leave a phone message that may or may not ever get returned in a useful form. Even when an address is present, I still have to drive over there and look at the place from the outside before deciding whether to suffer the even greater hassle of trying to make an appointment to look at it from the inside. Many apartment building managers, I'm convinced, really don't care whether their vacant units are rented out anyway.
In consequence of all this, I ended up spending a great deal of time designing networked computer systems to support apartment- hunting. As always in the wish list, "design" here isn't just about technology. It's also about creating the architectures and institutions that structure incentives in the interest of doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing. So far, it seems, developments in this area are primarily driven by the corporate owners of huge apartment complexes. These include videotapes of apartments that you can borrow from Blockbuster, free "magazines" of apartment complex advertising, and (I'm told) a few Web pages. These projects are oriented to marketing a particular company's products, or those of an alliance of large companies, and not to the creation of standards to let everyone market their property.
Now the obvious thing is to create a Web form that asks for the same information as the person on the phone when you purchase a want ad in the newspaper. Then a prospective renter calls up and browses the resulting ads in any of a dozen forms. This scheme should be extremely cheap, since nobody has to buy any newsprint or lug anything around town in a truck. It also lends itself to arbitrarily elaborate extensions, and one can imagine categories of ads like in the yellow pages: two-line text listings might even be free, with display ads formatted in PDF, possibly even hyperlinking to further information in glorious multimedia back on the seller's home machine. Clicking on the phone number might automatically dial the phone, and so on.
But this scheme only solves a few problems. It's the obvious way to start, by implementing familiar mechanisms in digital form, but we can do a lot better. Let's crank up the technology a few years and imagine an online version of the "Aspen Project" of the Architecture Machine Group (the predecessor of the Media Lab at MIT). What they did was drive around Aspen, Colorado while pulling a wheeled cart with a running video camera on it. They did this three times for each segment of each street, with the camera looking forward, to the left, and to the right. Then they put all of the resulting video clips on a videodisk and built an interface that lets someone "drive" virtually around Aspen. When the person "turns" the corner, for example, the system directs videodisk player to cue up the clip corresponding to the street that one is "turning" onto. Mike Naimark, now at Interval, was involved in the original Aspen Project and has done a variety of subsequent-generation versions of it, including a system you might have seen at the Exploratorium that lets you "fly" around San Francisco with a joystick.
Now imagine someone building a version of this for the whole of San Diego. If you figure that San Diego has something on the order of 2000 km of streets and the car moves at 50km/h and shoots 3 sets of video (forward, left, and right) at 2 degrees of zoom (a few buildings with yards and landscape versus close in to the buildings themselves) then the result is 240 hours of video, the equivalent of perhaps 150 movies and thus easily within the range of video servers that will soon become available. Someone shoots all of this, sets it up on a Web-accessible server, and offers several different sorts of services, each interlinked with a different database. So I could "drive" down the streets of the area east of Balboa Park, and some of the houses might have "for rent" signs on them; when I click on these signs I get a page with the full details. Or else I could start with a map of the city, draw circles around areas that interest me, call up the want ads that fall within one of those areas, call up a street map of that area with the available properties marked on it, and then take a "drive" past all of them.
Depending on how the architecture works (particularly how many different video "trips" can be running at once), it would be beneficial for everyone to get free access to the driving mechanism without necessarily using the enhanced services. That way more people would be aware of the system and have a hotlist link to it. Then individual services build on top of the system would each have their own fee structure. Advertisers would pay for the want ads and for other annotations on their property (such as the clickable menu on the window of a restaurant), but browsers might pay for other services such as architectural information and other commentary on the buildings. (Think of the "Access Guides" that I recommended in TNO 2(6); they are organized block-by-block rather than by topics.)
Unfortunately, such a system could have a variety of less happy uses. Imagine if the video database were linked to a phone book, or a mailing list, or a customer database enriched with detailed demographic information. A less serious concern is that the video system might accidentally pick up people or situations that shouldn't be immortalized on video. But the folks who are shooting the video would presumably post some warnings and send someone ahead of the car to alert people that it's coming and give then a chance to retreat inside. Of course, the people might react in a less cooperative fashion, and it would be a fascinating scene to observe at a safe distance in any case. Another issue is what happens when the video goes out of date: Is the video going to be dated? Who pays for it to be reshot when the appearance of the buildings or the street changes?
Would such a system invade everyone's privacy? The question
has already arisen in the case of overhead representations in
"GIS" digital mapmaking. (See excellent work on this subject
of Michael Curry
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This month's recommendations -- not.
In the spirit of the season, this month I am going to get off my chest a bunch of antirecommendations -- some holiday turkeys that I regard as musts-to-avoid. Those wishing to accentuate the positive may wish to move along to the "follow-up" section.
Terence K. McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, New York : Bantam, 1992. Also, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Terence McKenna has achieved a certain amount of fame in the cyberculture for drawing an analogy between shamanism and virtual reality. My quarrel is not with this analogy -- both of them, after all, involve a sort of controlled hallucination. My quarrel, rather, is with his ideas about shamanism. McKenna is an ethnobotanist, which in practice means that he goes down to the Amazon, hangs out with people in traditional cultures, and trips out on gnarly mushrooms. His books are basically arguments for the legalization of hallucinogens based on the great virtues of shamanism. The problem is that he very misleadingly tends to conflate shamanism with drug-taking, so that his readers end up with little sense of the personal discipline involved in real shamanism or of the simple fact that drugs are simply not needed in order to practice shamanism at a high level of sophistication. A vastly better introduction to shamanism is Sandra Ingerman's "Soul Retrieval", which I mentioned in TNO 2(8) and could not recommend more highly.
The Red Herring. This is an extraordinarily expensive magazine, with a self-indulgently meaningless title, from the subculture of venture capitalists and people dedicating their lives to cleaning up one day on an IPO. I gather that its principal attraction for this audience is copious data on high technology companies that are raising funds. The actual copy, though, is unimpressive. The people in this world are accustomed to hearing entrepreneurs pitching their companies by means of thoroughly self-serving presentations with no pretense of critical perspective or analytical detachment, and that, unfortunately, is precisely what the "articles" in TRH are. To each their own, I suppose.
The Weekly Standard. The son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb and the protege of Bill Bennett, Bill Kristol made his name in 1993 as the author of a series of bone-crushing faxes that crystallized conservative resistance to the Clinton Administration. Having grown up steeped in the critique of liberalism, Kristol accurately saw its deep vulnerabilities at a time when most of his fellow conservatives were disoriented by George Bush's loss at the polls. Although I only read the faxes in bits and pieces through others' quotations, I was impressed by the clarity of his vision in this regard. Which makes it all the more surprising that his new project, a weekly conservative political magazine published by Rupert Murdoch, is so totally lame. John Judis argues that this is simply one reflection of the bankruptcy of American conservatism as an intellectual movement (despite all of its talk about "ideas"), and it's true that nothing being written today holds a candle to the National Review in its early days. But part of the problem is simply that Kristol is no longer a marginal hell-raiser with nothing to lose. He believes that the task for conservatives, now that they have decisively taken over the Republican party, is to soften their message enough to build a working electoral coalition. In my opinion this approach is misguided, given the many structural forces working against the Democrats in the long run. But Kristol opened his magazine with a heavily publicized quasi- endorsement of Colin Powell, and that tactical orientation has continued. Very little of this stuff will be worth reading next month, must less in the next century.
The concept of "memes". The term "meme" was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his popular biology book "The Selfish Gene". The argument of the book is that evolution can be viewed as a process by which individual genes use organisms as vehicles for their own propagation rather than the other way round. This is an amusing turnabout, but it is also a simplistic substitute for biology's crying need for theories that straddle multiple levels of analysis. The concept of a "meme" was introduced by analogy to this. A meme is simply an idea, and the rhetorical trick is to portray ideas as agents trying to spread themselves around in society, mutating and recombining through a process of natural selection in which our minds (brains, I suppose) are so many grey meat machines. Now, Nietzsche said something like this a hundred years ago in reference to the "will to power" of metaphors. The idea didn't make much more sense then, but at least Nietzsche had larger and more disturbing things in mind. The word "meme" has gotten a boost lately from its frequent use in Wired magazine, from which it has been taken up into the shifting jargon of the subculture of cyberspace. The concept does have attractions. It is one way -- better than nothing, I suppose -- of talking about a crucial phenomenon: people's incomplete awareness of the contents, origins, and logics of the ideas that they have acquired from others through the language they speak, the symbolism of their machinery, the seeming platitudes that they pass along from the evening news, and much else. But it is nonetheless a poor theory of these things. One basic problem is the biological metaphor: memes are to genes as people's minds are to creatures. I suppose it would be churlish of me to point out that biological metaphors have been a staple of authoritarian thinking for a long time; at least these particular biological metaphors appeal in a misleading way to whole ecosystems and not to single organisms with authoritarian "heads". The deeper problem is that these metaphors are moving in an antihumanist direction. Do the people who talk about memes really think of themselves as passive cultural dopes, or as inert media through which great swarms of ideas pass? Such a notion flies in the face of the massive work in which many organizations engage to encourage the proliferation of certain ideas and discourage the proliferation of others. It also greatly underestimates the large amount of collective cognition that is part-and-parcel of group identity among people with shared interests in society -- not least the cyberculture, with its shared "bet" on benefitting from the outcome of technology-driven social upheavals. At the end of the day, treating ideas as "memes" is an abdication of personal responsibility. You choose what ideas you think and say and write, and you should take responsibility for them.
Those Dewar's ads. You've seen them, in Wired for example: the ones that are aimed at men in their early 20's who are figuring out what's involved in being a man. What's involved, it would seem, is drinking this crummy blended scotch. The ads are based on ridicule and the fear of ridicule, and reveal the extent to which the cultural construction of masculinity, with its foolish poses and burdensome roles, depends on the threat of ridicule. Let's just all just move along -- to a world in which people's self-esteem cannot be manipulated by corporate drug pushers.
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Follow-up.
In response to my article about those computer ads in TNO 2(10), one reader told me that Microsoft Windows was responsible for a great deal of togetherness in his family, inasmuch as his kids' game software is often so difficult to install that he must spend endless hours helping them with it.
And in response to my wish in TNO 2(10) for voice annotation to
web documents, Michael Chui
Web picks.
The telecommunications technology that has had the greatest impact on political processes in the United States is still not the Internet but the fax machine: several organizations have set up weekly fax broadcasts to their membership, and the practice is spreading. Republican theorist Bill Kristol, for example, is famous for his 80's faxes, mentioned above, against Bill Clinton's health care proposals. Jesse Jackson has a fax broadcast as well, the texts of which can be found on the web pages for the Rainbow Coalition at http://www.cais.com/rainbow/
The Political Participation Project can be found on the Web at http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ppp/home.html
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA
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Copyright 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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