Technology, politics, culture
First there was Intel’s Viiv. Now, it’s Nintendo’s turn. That game box that used to be called the Revolution? It’s now Wii. (Pronounced “we.”)
Maybe people will end up calling it The Game Box Formerly Known as Revolution. Because I don’t think too many people are going to embrace this name.
Or maybe we should read it as Roman numerals. But that would make it the W2, which, you know, is already taken by the IRS.
In the wake of the latest pair of plagiarists caught — a young Harvard student novelist with a fat book deal and the CEO of Raytheon — we are left, once more, to shake our heads and wonder: Why do they do it? Isn’t everyone on notice today that Google has made it virtually certain that you will get caught?
My assumption has always been that writers do it because, fundamentally, writing is hard, shortcuts are tempting, and some writers lack the self-discipline and/or self-respect to resist that temptation. That’s one of a bunch of possible reasons Jack Shafer’s essay on the latest plagiarists proposes over at Slate. Another rationale he suggests is “Even If You Get Caught, You’ll Probably Get Away With It.”
We can’t make writing any easier; it is what it is. But we — everyone in the fields of journalism, publishing and media — can surely do a better job of shaming and shunning those who are caught.
John Robb, over at his Global Guerrillas blog, says U.S. confrontation with Iran is “now unavoidable.” [link courtesy Rafe Coburn]
According to Robb, it will be an air attack only, given our overcommitment of ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will aim not simply at taking out the nation’s embryonic nuclear capability, but rather at toppling the current Iranian government.
| To accomplish this regime change under the given restraints, the US will utilize a rapidly evolving method of air warfare called the “effects-based operations” (EBO). The EBO is a process that incapacitates a nation-state’s systems (typically critical infrastructure) and organizations to achieve desired strategic outcomes.” In the past this has meant a combination of precision-guided munitions, special operations, and stealth technology to precisely target critical nodes in national infrastructures and systems. The destruction of these nodes, due to the power of network dependencies, will typically cause sustained system collapse (in much the same way a downed power line can cause a regional blackout, but in this case intentionally). A good real world example can be seen in the first Gulf War. During that war, a US EBO shut down Iraq’s critical infrastructures to separate Saddam’s leadership cadre in its Baghdad bunkers from its army in Kuwait. It worked nearly as desired. With Iran, the effect desired would be much more complex: regime change. |
Robb says he thinks the operation will succeed, in the short term:
| Iran will be torn apart from within. To accomplish this, the US will conduct the EBO under the pretense of forcing Iran to dismantle its entire nuclear program — a condition that the Iranian regime will find impossible to accept. Simultaneous with the air campaign’s suppression of Iran’s minority Persian government, the US will arm and actively support ethnic guerrillas (Kurds, Balochs, Azeris, etc.) to turn sections of the country into autonomous zones. Without the ability to utilize any of the capabilities of conventional warfare (from airpower to armor to massed formations), let alone command forces in the field or marshal a nation for war, the Iranian government would eventually collapse and its successor will accede to the growing set of US demands. |
But the whole thing is “rife with downside risks and uncertainties”:
| …rocketing oil prices, global terrorist attacks, and severe diplomatic fall-out. Further, Iran’s government may prove to be more resourceful than anticipated and outlast the attack, only to resume production of nuclear materials with the intent of revenge. Worse yet, the US might inadvertently collapse the US-led post cold war environment as countries, distrustful of US intentions, scramble to safety amid rapidly gyrating economic and social instability. |
I’d thought that the collapse of our effort in Iraq, the continued failure to capture Bin Laden, and the growing peril to our achievements in Afghanistan might have left the Bush team feeling a little overextended on the military side. If Robb is right, we’re in for an extremely rough ride from a president who has always rebounded from popular-approval lows by fanning war fever.
I was lucky enough, as a high school senior in New York City in the mid-’70s, to take an elective course in “urban studies.” The course consisted of reading a bunch of real books, not textbooks, and talking about them. (Later I came to understand that virtually every college course, at least in the humanities and social sciences, proceeded along the same lines.)
I’ve forgotten all but one of the books we read. But the one I remember, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I remember vividly, for its calm, reasonable, and, to me, profoundly persuasive rejection of the Big Central Plans approach to urban design — which had previously made perfect sense to my 17-year-old mind. Diversity matters, Jacobs argued; people crave variety in their experience of their surroundings, and engagement with other people, and living cities offer people wide and varied opportunities for hanging shingles and rubbing elbows and delighting others.
Jacobs’ book gave me a lifelong, visceral understanding of principles that I would later see popping up in other, unexpected contexts, thanks to writers like Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, and experiences I’d have in helping build one small corner of the online cityscape.
Jacobs died today at 89 [thanks to Kottke for the news].
Congress is considering allowing the big phone and cable companies that now control most of the broadband access in the US to do something they want to do, but that has never been done before: turn the level playing field of today’s Internet into a sort of class-system environment, in which packets sent by companies that pay more get preferential treatment. This is a lousy idea that, at worst, could entirely disrupt our basic assumptions about the open Internet.
The companies involved keep saying, “Trust us,we will only use these new powers for good,” but I’m sorry, I don’t.
The Save The Internet coalition is a good starting point to find out more and see what you can do. Farhad Manjoo’s Salon piece about AT&T and the Net is an in-depth look at the issue; it’s fair to both sides of the argument, but I think you’ll come away from it as I did, wanting to make sure that AT&T doesn’t get its way.
Also, a couple of weeks ago Kevin Marks presented the technological case for why these companies do not need the privilege they seek. Supposedly it’s to make it more feasible to deliver high-quality audio and video over the Net. But, er, they can do that now, in many different ways, as Marks says.
Last night Kurt Andersen posted a comment in response to my post below about his New York magazine article on the new Net bubble. It deserves highlighting. Andersen wrote:
| Actually, my point in admitting my ignorance in early 1994 (of the Web) and early 2000 (of blogs) and early 2002 (of RSS) was not so much the ignorance, which I don’t think was at all unusual (let alone extreme) at those respective moments — but rather how quickly in the internet realm the arcane becomes commonplace. (The phrase “worldwide Web,” for instance, had appeared exactly twice in the New York Times when I first heard it in early 1994; “blog” apparently wasn’t coined until the spring of 1999, and didn’t appear in the Times until the spring of 2001; and RSS first appeared in the Times in the spring of 2003.) |
Fair enough. So Andersen’s point wasn’t to emphasize that he was unusually far behind the curve, but rather to underscore how speedily the phenomena he was catching up to would go mainstream. But I think these divergent readings of the same passage only end up underscoring my argument — that such things look very different from the West Coast end of the telescope.
I don’t know how useful it is to venture deeper into the thickets of chronology. “Early 1994″ is a lot different from later 1994 in matters of early Web awareness; Peter Merholz may have coined the term “blog” in spring 1999, but the concept of “weblog” was long-established by then (I wrote in May, 1999: “A phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today”); RSS was in wide use at Salon and other places by 2000 and commonplace by 2001-2.
More interesting, to me, is the usage of New York Times reference-counting as a yardstick of prevalence. My argument was about how slow and sometimes blind the New York media culture can be to picking up on trends and practices that have already become commonplace elsewhere, particularly in Silicon Valley and the Web industry. It wouldn’t surprise me that New York Times keyword counts similarly lag. I mean, RSS first rearing its head in spring 2003? I — and a lot of other people — were living inside our feed readers by then.
Certainly, this industry moves fast. But the New York perspective tends to see new tech and Web trends as popping up instantaneously, out of nowhere, and that exaggerates their true speed and robs us of the opportunity to understand their provenance.
The Web wouldn’t have seemed like quite the bolt-out-of-the-blue if you’d been paying attention to the steady acceleration in Internet growth and awareness that had preceded it in the early ’90s (a lot of people had Internet e-mail before they’d ever heard the prefix ‘http’). Blogs were less of a surprise if you’d had an ear cocked to the remarkable flourishing of personal Web-based journals from 1995-8. If you checked in on any kind of frequency to Dave Winer’s Scripting News in the late ’90s, which a lot of us did, you couldn’t help getting an education in RSS.
All of which is simply to underscore my argument: that media people ought to pay a little more advance attention to technology people. The techies’ early-adoption enthusiasms serve as a distant-early-warning system — not infallible, but valuable — for the new wrinkle that will be a media-world craze in two or three years. I can understand how New York was blindsided in the 1990s. But there’s no excuse for it today.
Clive Thompson’s excellent New York Times magazine piece on Google and China plays out variations on Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” principle inspired by the company’s new accommodation with Chinese censorship. Censorship is surely a form of evil; but is it all right to compromise a little bit with said evil if one is doing so on behalf of a greater good? Google’s famous mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; is it okay to fulfill a lot of that mission by betraying a little of it?
These themes, Thompson rightly points out, echo the arguments in the 1980s between the anti-apartheid movement, which argued for boycott, and the “constructive engagement” position of companies that said they were able to do good by doing business in South Africa. But today’s U.S. economy is far more deeply entangled with China than 1980s America was with South Africa. Few today would argue for an economic boycott of China; where would we get our goods? It’s a historical irony that the record national debt run up by today’s conservative Republican hegemony — heirs to the red-baiters of yore — can only be underwritten by the heirs of Mao in the People’s Republic of China.
So boycott is off the table; maybe engagement is better than nothing. I’m not wholly convinced, and I don’t think Thompson is, either. But his piece lays out the nuances in a useful and thought-provoking way.
Most interesting, to me, is this observation about Chinese blogger Zhao Jing:
| The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways. |
I think that observation applies not only in China, but everywhere, and certainly here, in the U.S., where so many observers in the media continue to misunderstand the importance of blogging. Most journalists with successful careers have completely internalized the sort of “empowerment” Zhao experienced when he started blogging. Not only do they take it for granted, they take it as a professional right, and they have a hard time understanding what it might mean for non-journalists to experience. They simply can’t accept that a blogger’s musings might have significance for him/herself, and reach an audience of 12, or 120, and never engage a vast audience, and that might still feel like a success.
A China full of people — not all billion, maybe only hundreds or tens of millions, but lots, anyway — experiencing that sense of “self-actualization” might be a nation that grew less and less satisfied with a censoring regime and increasingly interested in changing it.
That doesn’t get Google off the hook, exactly, since Google isn’t facilitating self-publishing in China — the Google-owned Blogger doesn’t operate inside China the way MSN Spaces does. But it’s another sign that absolutist, black-and-white rhetoric is too limited for this arena. Google might well be betraying its “Don’t be evil” slogan; but the slogan might also be too simple-minded for the complexities of the global stage.
I'm a writer, editor and website builder. These days I'm working on MediaBugs.org. I wrote Say Everything and Dreaming in Code. I was co-founder and managing editor of Salon. I maintain a mirror version of this blog at Open Salon.
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software