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The fire this time

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I heard the start of President Bush’s inaugural today on the radio as I was driving to BART. As I pulled into the parking lot he was delivering that line about “history also has a visible direction set by liberty and the author of liberty.” There was a ton of applause. Was the crowd just giving God a hand? Or was this another bit of coded, covert language between Bush and his fundamentalist followers, alerting those in the know that the End Times are near?

I turned off the radio to catch my train, figuring that I’d only heard the introduction to the Inaugural, and would catch up on the heart of the address — you know, the part where Bush actually talked about some of the problems the nation faces and some of his plans for dealing with them — later in the day. When I looked the full presentation up online this evening, though, I saw that that was it: by the time I pushed the “off” button, Bush had rounded third and was heading home, with just a couple more paragraphs to go.

This speech wasn’t just soaring rhetoric. It was a lighter-than-air burst of helium verbiage — lofty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.

The world is a simple place to Bush. For him, “the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right” is one that involves no hard calls. And since America represents freedom and freedom is eternally right, it must still be right even when it locks hundreds of people away for life without trial or it tortures prisoners in a war launched on a lie. We are the forces of freedom; we can admit no wrong because we can do no wrong.

Sounding like a bizarre cross between Hegel, Woodrow Wilson and the nihilists of “The Possessed,” Bush spoke of a “fire in the minds of men” (Dostoyevsky’s phrase, adopted by James Billington as the title of a famous book about “revolutionary faith”) that would spread freedom around the world. Freedom! Who would oppose it? But it is a word so universally embraced, even by those who flout its essence most crudely, that it means nothing when simply uttered; it has meaning only when our actions make something of it, when our deeds fill in its outline.

While Bush’s text spoke of freedom, his imagery told a different story, a tale of retribution and flame. America’s enemies set “a day of fire” on 9/11. We must respond with the “untamed fire” of freedom that America will bring to the benighted world. Fire with fire.

Bush isn’t talking about a little flame of hope in the darkness; he’s not singing “This Little Light of Mine.” He’s talking Biblical conflagration. His fire is the cathartic inferno dreamed of by people who are confounded by a world they know is out of their control — one that, incomprehensibly, is not moving in a visible direction. Burn it down and start anew, clean, fresh, free of disagreement, of doubt, of the pain of history and the sting of one’s own past mistakes.

In this yearning, George Bush eerily finds kinship with those he’d rank as the “enemies of freedom” in misfired revolutions through the ages — movements that placed their commitments to self-defined abstractions ahead of the rights and needs and lives of breathing human beings. The cause comes first. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Condolences, young lady, but it’s all so you can vote.

There must be people out there who find Bush’s fiery talk uplifting. I found it alternatingly depressing and horrifying. Idealism fueled by ignorance and unanchored by reality can be the savagest fire of all.

Antisocial insecurity

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I’ve been fighting a sense of despair on the subject of the brewing battle over Social Security. Here, once again, as with the runup to Iraq, we have a major battle in which the Bush team is systematically bulldozing a set of facts in order to throw up a new Potemkin-village reality in which their ideological preferences make sense. They’ve got the majorities in Congress, they had their “accountability moment,” and now facts are just inconveniences to be flicked away. Social Security must be dismantled, therefore it must be in crisis. Don’t believe it? They’ll keep saying it, and much of the media will dutifully repeat it, until you ask yourself, “Am I crazy?”

So for the record, just as a matter of bearing witness to a set of facts that deserve as much air time as possible right now, here are some Social Security basics. I claim no originality; if you’ve been reading Brad DeLong or Josh Marshall, or if you tune in to the new Thereisnocrisis.com, or if you read the New York Times magazine cover story by Roger Lowenstein last week, this will be old news. Some things just bear repeating.

Social Security is supposed to be a safety net — otherwise we’d all just have IRAs. The stock market is not a safety net. Privatizing a portion of Social Security can’t be a means of saving Social Security because a private account is not Social Security, it’s something else entirely. Saying “We have to privatize Social Security in order to save it” is like saying “We have to destroy the town in order to save it.” (Oh, right, they’ve been saying that lately, too.)

Social Security taxes got a significant boost in the 1980s to help cushion the cost of paying for an increasing number of retirees due over the next couple of decades; that tax hike meant Social Security would run a surplus, and the surplus got stashed away in something called the Social Security Trust Fund. The fund takes your taxes and buys U.S. Treasury bonds. Sometime around 2018 the fund will have to start cashing in some of those bonds in order to cover the extra costs of Boomer retirement. This is part one of the “crisis” the Bush administration is warning about.

There was a federal budget surplus for a while under Bill Clinton, but George Bush decided that that money was “ours.” The Feds should have been saving for that rainy-retirement day, but instead they went on a tax-break bender (and they picked and chose which of “us” got the most back). So come 2018, the federal government won’t have the cash on hand to make good on those trust-fund bonds.

Now we hear a hypocritical chorus on the right telling us that the Trust Fund’s assets are meaningless “IOUs” (Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review) or that the government’s “promise” to pay Social Security benefits is “less and less believable” (George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal).

Note the bias here: Property rights are the foundation of capitalism — but put that property in the hands of a program conservative Republicans have ached to destroy for 70 years, and suddenly it becomes transient, elusive, unreliable. When a Treasury bond is held by a private citizen or a foreign government, it’s a financial obligation, indeed one of the most reliable and conservative investments around. But when it’s held by an arm of the government in trust for the retirements of millions of working people? Then it’s just meaningless paper. (Try using that argument on the bank that holds your mortgage or your credit card account! “Oh, yeah, I know I said I’d pay that money back, but it’s really just meaningless paper, you know, and I already used the money for other stuff that I believe in. We’ve got a crisis.” )

Conservative advocates of the Social Security pseudo-crisis like to say that the Social Security Trust Fund is an “accounting fiction” because it’s just one arm of the government owing another. Of course, it’s not an accounting fiction every April 15 when we tally up the 12 percent or so of our income that we pay into it. It’s only an accounting fiction if you’re George W. Bush and you and your Congress have raided the account and now you’ve got to come up with a good story for the American people about why you think it’s more important to keep cutting taxes than it is to meet your Social Security obligations.

Now, there’s another long-term issue with Social Security that kicks in, oh, somewhere in the 2040s or so, when — depending on whose predictions you buy — the Trust Fund itself might run out. Social Security wouldn’t just vanish, but if the worst happens, then the government could only fund 70% or so of its obligation. This scenario could be avoided by raising the retirement age, increasing taxes, removing the Social Security tax’s income cap or other tweaks. (This is what I meant last November when I wrote that “Everyone in Washington knows we need to fix Social Security,” but — as Dave Johnson rightly chided me for at the time — in the current debate such a statement is easy fodder for distortion.)

Look, I’m sorry, but nothing that happens in the 2040s is a crisis today. And our government has a lot bigger fiscal troubles looming a lot sooner than Social Security’s 40-year horizon.

By deliberately confusing the real-but-manageable long-term problems of Social Security with the non-crisis of 2018, the Bush administration is making it harder to provide a real fix for the 2040s — because its chosen solution of funding private accounts will actually cost the already cash-strapped government trillions more in the short term.

The whole thing is a fiscal and ethical train wreck. Democrats have every right — indeed, they have an obligation — to try to make it a political train wreck, too. If the Republicans really want to go ahead with Bush’s plan, let them do it alone, as Josh Marshall has been eloquently arguing, and let them pay the political price. If there’s anything Democrats can and should be proudly partisan about, it’s Social Security.

Link to it, own it? I don’t think so

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Atrios argues that “you link it, you own it” is an “unwritten but well-understood blog issue.” (Referenced in comments on my post below.) Not in my neck of the Web. I own my own words. I don’t own yours, and I certainly don’t own yours just because I happen to link to your page.

I guess that just shows you how tough it is to generalize about the blogosphere. Here’s the thing: Linking is all about context, right? What words do you link on, what do you say about the site you’re linking to. If I just posted a link in my blog here, without comment, to, say, an anti-semitic Aryan Nation site, that would leave my readers at the least scratching their heads and quite likely thinking I’d lost my marbles. But if I were posting a long commentary on the subject and referring to such a site as an example of a particular kind of right-wing rhetoric, for instance, I’d link to it. I wouldn’t “own it.” If I didn’t link to it, (a) I wouldn’t be using the Web to its full extent to document my argument, and (b) I’d just be making my life hard on my readers — I’ve got the URL already, why should I make them go to Google?

The context for this discussion is not experienced bloggers, who tend to understand how and when to link because it’s in their blood, but non-Web journalists and editors moving online who get their heads in a tizzy because linking is new to them and they don’t really understand it. Telling them “You link it, you own it” is tantamount to telling them, “Go back into your holes, don’t even try to link, because once you start linking we’re going to hold you responsible not only for everything you publish but for everything everyone you link to publishes.” This is a good way of shutting down the Web’s giant conversation, not opening it up.

Furthermore, the “you link it, you own it” principle would spell legal disaster for bloggers if it became widely accepted. It’s just a bad meme, all around.

Here’s what Atrios might be trying to say — or rather, here’s a reworded version of his principle that I could get behind: “You link it, you ought to check it out.” Say you stumble upon some crazy rumor about, er, a politician’s sex life, on a site you don’t know much about. You could, in ascending order of rectitude, do the following: (1) Instantly publish a link to it without comment; (2) publish the link but say that you have no idea if it’s true; (3) publish the link only after you have satisfied yourself that the rumor’s original publisher is trustworthy; or (4) get out your notepad, pick up the phone and try to verify the rumor yourself. Different bloggers will do different things here, and their choices will affect their credibility. Those choices will also, to be sure, affect how widely they’re read. There’s a reason Matt Drudge has such an unmatched record for high page views and low trust!

POSTSCRIPT, Thursday A.M.: Atrios clarifies with some good points, and I think we’re pretty much in agreement at this point. The following seems to be the practice that he’s focused on, and I imagine it is more common in his particular realm of the blogosphere than in mine: “If I link to something saying ‘go read this’ then I’ve put my stamp of approval on it. It’s bullshit to come back two hours later and say ‘uh, well, I didn’t write it, I just linked to it… not my problem.'” The point here is, it’s the “Go read this” that’s the endorsement, not the link itself. A small point, maybe, but these distinctions matter…

1968: the year of the blog

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Having heard Alan Kay’s inspiring talk at the 2003 Emerging Technology conference, I already knew how much of modern computing Douglas Engelbart‘s famous 1968 demo of the NLS (“oNLine System”) contained within it — and how far we still have to go to match the stuff Engelbart showed off then, not only in its individual elements (graphical interface, hypertext, advanced input devices, distance collaboration, and so on) but in their total integration.

What I didn’t know was that the NLS appears even to have had a kind of blog capability as one of its many tricks.

I’ve been watching the amazing videos (shot by Stewart Brand) of Engelbart’s demo — all available online, here. If you take a look at this one, you’ll see Jeff Rulifson explaining that the NLS programmers — who, in true bootstrapping fashion, seem to have maintained all their code within the NLS itself — kept a kind of bug log. Since NLS tracked who was using it and what everyone did when, each entry in the bug log has a little subscript line, flush right, with the name of the person who posted it and the time it was posted.

Sure looks like a weblog! And if you were logged into NLS you could even add comments. (I’d clip a still from the Real stream but haven’t been able to do a screen capture — perhaps part of the Real format’s DRM, or I’m too much of a klutz. Anyway, the video clip is under a minute.)

Links without fear

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There’s a conference at Harvard this weekend about blogging, journalism and credibility. That’s a reasonable topic. The invitee list has caused some discussion in the blogosphere — too many pros? not enough bloggers? Some of this, I think, is just natural “why wasn’t I invited?” peevishness. (I froze through enough Januarys in Cambridge to cure me of any envy.) But reading Rebecca MacKinnon’s FAQ on the conference leaves me with a small sense of deja vu.

There are questions about how blogging and journalism intersect that are worth talking about more, even though we’ve already talked about them endlessly. But there are other questions that arose ten years ago when journalism and the Web first collided (pardon me for donning my old-timer’s hat, but it happens when you’ve been doing something long enough), and that ought to be settled by now.

For instance, MacKinnon asks: “What happens if one of your news organization’s blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate (despite being interesting)…?” This question was first raised in the mid-’90s by mainstream news editors who were hostile to the Web. They asked it because they already had their answer: Links were scary, so let’s not link at all, or only link after a committee of poobahs has said that it’s OK.

The notion that a link is an endorsement is something that died a slow death in the mid and late ’90s, as people who actually spent their working lives on the Web — as opposed to the editors who ran newsrooms and still didn’t know what an URL was — came to understand that an editorial link (one chosen by a writer rather than paid for as part of a business relationship) can be a reference, a courtesy, a footnote, a means of documentation, but that it is not an endorsement. The “endorsement” concept enjoyed a brief revival when Google came along and people worried that if, say, they linked to a Nazi site when they were writing a story about anti-Semitism, they were helping that site out by boosting its page-rank or “Google juice.” Google’s new scheme to defeat comment spam provides the ultimate technical fix to that problem. But even without it, choosing not to link to a site you were writing about, but didn’t approve of, was never much more than a discourtesy to your readers, who’d now have to go Google the site themselves.

Links are part of the vocabulary of writing for the Web. Telling Web journalists they can only link to “approved” sites, or sites whose accuracy is pre-vetted, is like saying, “You can only quote people who you agree with.” If a Web journalist or blogger links to a site and later discovers that it’s “not accurate,” why, then go edit the original story or blog post (and note that you’ve made the edit). Or post again with the new information about why the original link was inaccurate. Or both. The answer is, and has always been, more information, not less linking.

I sat through many conferences in 1996 and 1997 and 1998 that hashed all this stuff over. I’m sure the folks at Harvard have plenty of new controversies to explore; I hate to think Web journalism will be reinventing its own wheels every few years.

Rhymes with Mombasa

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Picasa, my favorite Windows photo-organizing software, has a great new upgrade from Google, which acquired the company a while back.

The funny thing here is that, though you will find Picasa referred to here and there as a “service,” it’s not really that; it’s an old-fashioned, standalone desktop application with a bit of sharing coated on top. I’m not stating that as a criticism — I love Picasa, and it’s helped me keep track of the absurd quantities of photos of my kids I’ve taken over the past five years. Much as I love Flickr, there’s no way I’m going to upload that volume of photos across the Net.

It’s just odd to think of Google, the locus classicus of the new world of distributed web-based computing, doing this sort of product, and just giving it away. John Battelle has more here, noting that there is no business model of any kind behind Picasa. That worries me, only because I’d really like to keep using this software for a long, long time.

Blows against the spampire

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Another turn of the technodialectic: Google implements a new HTML tag to defeat comment spam. Congrats to the Google/Blogger developers for implementing this. On first glance, looks like a smart solution: The rel=”nofollow” tag as an attribute in an HTML link tells Google not to pay attention to the link for pagerank purposes. If your blogging tool is set to automatically insert this code into any links created by commenters on your blog — and we should expect that now from SixApart, Blogger, Userland and anyone else in the biz — then you pretty much have shot the horse out from under the comment-spammers, and they ought to go away. (Though Chuq Von Rospach says they won’t as long as there’s even a tiny fraction of vulnerable, un-upgraded blogging software.) More comment from Dave Winer, who loves the news, and John Battelle, who’s not so sure.

Will this tool also somehow lock-in existing blog power relations, as a commenter on Battelle’s blog complains? I dunno. It seems to me that there’s still plenty of room in the blogosphere for links created by blog authors to point to newcomers. And commenters can still link away — their links will only be followed by live readers, though, and not the Googlebot. On balance, sounds good to me. Of course, the techno-dialectic being what it is, the comment-spammmers will figure out some new, more devious scheme to subvert Google before long.

Follow the money talk

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I have studiously avoided commenting on the flap over Zephyr Teachout’s post about the Dean campaign’s payments to a couple of bloggers, because the whole thing seemed like a minor inside-baseball dustup fanned by the right to try to defuse the Armstrong Williams scandal. (Tim Grieve in the War Room walks us through it all. And Teachout’s more recently posted FAQ provides needed context and defusing.) The payments to Kos and MyDD were disclosed at the time; I remember reading about them; there’s just no ethical equivalency. (Nor is there a financial equivalency: Total Dean payments to two bloggers appear to have been around $12,000, compared with $240,000 to Armstrong Williams — and who knows how many other Bush payola plants still to be outed?)

But the discussion resulting from the controversy is worth having, so let’s at it.

Jeff Jarvis talks about the need for disclosure in a post that parallels my thinking on a lot of this stuff, and asks whether we shouldn’t have metatags for people. (This is actually what Marc Canter has been talking about forever, and the digital identity people keep trying to find an approach that will stick.)

That’s all well and good. But before we even get to something as complex as machine-readable personal tagging, there are simpler and bigger problems at hand: How many times have you followed a link to a new blog and been unable to figure out who’s writing it? I’m not talking about blogs that are intentionally anonymous; I mean bloggers who just haven’t gotten around to posting a “Who am I?” page or link, or who have chosen some sort of willful semi-obscurity even as they blog openly about their coworkers and friends and projects. This is ground zero of transparency, and it seems to be beyond a significant portion of the blogosphere. “Who or what made this page, and what should I know about them?” is the first question to teach everyone about being a smart user of the Web, and it applies just as strongly to blogs as to any other type of Web site. I wish more bloggers made it easier for their readers to find the answer.

So let’s put that aside and look at the more complex question of so-called “blogola.” Starting point for this discussion should be the simple fact that everyone’s perspective is potentially influenced by their financial interests. More so than political leanings or personal relationships, financial involvements are generally understood to be the A1, top-of-the-list category of conflicts of interest. So it will be relevant, for instance, for readers of this blog to know that I earned my paycheck until recently from Salon Media Group — or that, for the moment, I’m on leave working on a book, and living on a book advance from my publisher. My readers here have a right to know that — or rather, if I choose to hide where my living comes from, my readers have a right to be suspicious, to not grant me their trust. If I have a financial entanglement with someone I’m writing more specifically about, I better reveal it — or sooner or later, someone else will, and my readers will rightly feel betrayed.

In traditional professional journalism, these questions are obviated by the interposition of the media company between the journalist and his paycheck. The media company collects cash from advertisers and readers, pools it and pays its reporters and editors. In ethical terms, you could describe the media employer here as a sort of money launderer — by the time the dollars land in the journalist’s checking account, they are supposed to have lost all the potentially compromising markings of their sources. A New York Times writer doesn’t know which of his paycheck dollars came from Macy’s and which came from the used-car classifieds, and so the provenance of his wherewithal cannot (theoretically) influence his work.

In blogging, this buffer between dollar and writer vanishes. The best bloggers, understanding this, do everything they can to disclose their financial interests; this doesn’t automatically grant them credibility — that’s earned post by post — but it is a necessary precondition. It says, “Here’s what you should know about my interests as you consider what I have to say.”

Blogs take a multitude of forms: only a small fraction are close to traditional reporting or commentary; many are personal diaries; others are platforms for companies, political campaigns, movements or organizations. And so the effort to apply the ethical yardstick of traditional media to all blogs is doomed: It mistakes the publishing technology for the published contents. It’s like saying that newspapers follow one set of ethical practices, so all entities that publish on paper — be they mailorder catalogs, government publications, free shoppers or your Uncle Joe’s annual Christmas letter — need to follow suit.

Now, if your government publication tried to pretend it was a newspaper, you’d have a right to complain. (This is precisely where the Bush administration has played fast and loose, with its “Karen Ryan” video press releases masquerading as independent press reports.) When categories get blurred and things enter a fast cycle of change, as has happened in today’s publishing world, the central ethical principle — the only ethical principle that you can be sure will apply in all cases as the ground shifts under you — is disclosure and transparency.

If you reveal your interests and you don’t dissemble — if you tell your readers where you’re coming from and you don’t pretend to be coming from someplace else — you’re likely to do fine. This approach works as well for the “standalone journalist” as for the corporate executive or the P.R. person or the political advocate. The only people who stand to lose are those who were profiting from a system that allowed them to keep their sources of cash relatively obscure. (Why does the word “lobbyist” spring to mind?)

It seems to me that efforts to categorize bloggers are ultimately futile; there are as many different kinds of bloggers as there are bloggers — which is why generalizations about them so often err. That’s why I take issue with this passage from an otherwise extremely good Chris Nolan piece on these matters:

  What’s now known as the “blogosphere” is about to fracture…. There’s going to be a division between folks writing online with lots of editorial experience and tested news judgment and those who are coming to this with an agenda or a set of very specific goals. Sooner or later — it’s already happening, really — the activists will break away from the editorial folks.

I don’t know what Nolan means by “break away,” and I don’t really get how the blogosphere can fracture; it’s already in a million pieces. The two categories Nolan describes can never be fully disentangled. Consider, for instance, the work of Josh Marshall. He is as well-credentialed a “real journalist” as anyone blogging today. Yet his blog, which has provided some of the smartest commentary on the Republican effort to dismantle Social Security that you will find anywhere, has most recently spearheaded a campaign to identify and list those “fainthearted” Democrats in Congress who might be considering breaking ranks and supporting Bush’s plan, so readers can contact them and try to get them to line up in support of Social Security.

What sort of tag would you use here: Activist? Journalist? Or something for which these older labels are inadequate? We’ve got “tested news judgment” and “a set of very specific goals,” together, right there.

These waters have run together; you won’t ever divide them again. It’s one big pool. We’re never going to be able to sort people out and put them in neat little boxes, and that’s okay. But we can try to keep the water clear.

Taggers vs. spammers

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Technorati’s new tag feature is the talk of the moment, and rightly so. First we had the Semantic Web, with its notion of using RDF metadata to organize the universe. But RDF’s complexity seemed to daunt even the uber-geeks, and it’s still not easy to find an RDF-based project in wide usage outside of research environments. As the Semantic Web’s formalisms failed to catch on, the human-readable simplicity of RSS and the informal folksonomy approach of Flickr and Del.icio.us took off like gangbusters. Now Technorati is trying to pull together various islands of simple, bottom-up metatagging into one big information pool.

It’s fun and interesting and worth following. (David Weinberger’s comments are valuable.) My big doubt arises from my memory of a previous metadata experiment. As the Web took off in the mid-90s, many of you will recall, Web publishers were encouraged to tag their own pages with keyword metadata to help search engines organize them. We dutifully did so, but the whole thing got polluted very quickly by metatag hijackers — the metadata equivalent of spammers — who tried to boost the visibility of their pages by appending high-profile metatags (inevitably, most of them were X-rated) to every page in sight. (I’m sorry to say that even Salon, under the prodding of a long-departed marketing executive, briefly participated in this self-destructive game, though that’s now thankfully ancient history.) Things got ugly so fast that the search engines quickly started ignoring metatags; finally Google came along with a better, harder-to-game system, which today legions are still hard at work trying to undermine.

What’s not clear to me is how the 2005 version of keyword metatags can avoid this fate. The moment financial value starts to be associated with the new folksonomies, won’t the spammers come out of the woodwork? If they can debase something as simple and seemingly non-commercial as blog comments, they can debase anything.

In pessimistic moments, I sometimes think that every online enterprise must sooner or later sink into the spamosphere. When I’m feeling sunnier, I simply conclude that any networked technology designed to be open enough to harness contributions from multitudes will inevitably also be open to spam-style manipulation, and that this struggle — what my colleague Andrew Leonard long ago labeled as “the techno-dialectic” — is simply as open-ended as life itself. The trick is to enjoy those parts of the cycle where legitimate users have gained a lap or two on the forces of spam evil. Now seems to be one of them.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I see Technorati’s Dave Sifry offers some arguments for why tagging might be less prone to spam pollution than meta-keywords for Web pages. I hope he’s right…

More core

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Thanks for all the thoughtful comments on my post about software keeping up with multi-core processing.

Jon Udell posts some more on the subject in response to a Register piece by Shahin Khan and a comment by Patrick Logan.

Systems with 7000 CPUs? Do we then need 7000 heatsinks? Or do we consider it a feature and throw away our heaters? (I know, he’s talking about a “miniaturized big-iron system” for users to share — but the hardware advances that go into the servers first usually end up on the desktop a couple of years later.)