Here’s the AP on the COPA ruling. Says it was a 5-4. Court upheld the original injunction against putting the law into effect. Could conceivably go back to lower court for full trial if the Ashcroft Justice Department chooses to — then we’ll be fighting this poorly conceived and written law for another five years. Another area where a change in administration might be salutary — though Clinton signed the original COPA, it’s not at all clear whether a less porn-obsessed Justice Department would have pursued the case as avidly as Ashcroft has.
More on COPA
MSNBC just sent out their news alert on this opinion under this headline: “Supreme Court blocks Web child porn law from taking effect.” As has been the case from day one of this matter, COPA gets labeled inaccurately as a “child porn law,” when in fact it has essentially nothing to do with child pornography, something that is already seriously outlawed. COPA is about censoring the Internet — ostensibly it aims to protect children from porn, but in reality its provisions are so broad and riddled with holes that, while it could be used to harass legitimate Web sites fostering grownup debate on controversial issues (like Salon), it would be entirely useless in actually keeping real porn away from kids.
Supremes’ COPA decision
I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.
Ronald Reagan vs. the Evil Empire
Did Ronald Reagan singlehandedly defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War? You’d think so, based on the tidal waves of adulatory coverage following his death. My old friend Jim Hershberg has spent much of his career as a historian specializing in the Cold War era, digging up important info from the archives of the former Soviet satellites, and he says, in this great Washington Post piece:
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…For the media and Reagan’s hagiographers to give the 40th president all the credit is like saying a late-inning relief pitcher had “won” a baseball game without mentioning the starting pitcher, the closer or the teammates who scored the runs that gave the team its lead. Historians abhor the idea of attributing a vast, complex phenomenon to a single cause. No one person brought down the Soviet Union, but if I had to choose the one who mattered most, that person would not be Reagan, most of whose policies fit comfortably in the Cold War tradition of containment followed dutifully by presidents from Truman to Carter. Rather, the historical wild card was Mikhail Gorbachev… |
Blogs, bosses and bucks
I had a good time yesterday at Supernova, but it seemed that one of the points I made on our panel caused some consternation among some listeners, so let’s look at it.
I had heard a certain amount of what I thought was wildly overoptimistic forecasting of the widespread adoption of blogging as a tool in corporate America. For instance, Tim Bray said: “Any corporation that doesn’t do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up. They can use the technology to make the enterprise provide a more human face to world.” (I copied this quote from a trade journal article on the conference and promptly lost the URL. Sorry. I wasn’t taking notes myself so if it’s wrong, apologies in advance.)
I agree with Tim and the other optimists that blogging can give enterprises a more human face. But will they let it? What I said yesterday is that I thought the successes to date in public blogging by software developers at places like Microsoft and Sun weren’t likely to be duplicated in other, more traditional corporations any time soon. Software professionals are relatively unique in feeling that (a) their talents are in demand and (b) if they get fired from one job they can probably (except maybe at the very bottom of an economic cycle) get another one pretty easily. In other words, they feel more empowered to spout off on their blogs without fearing for their livelihood than the typical American worker does.
I’m not sure why, but Tim seemed to take this comment to mean that I thought that people in other fields — I think he mentioned construction, it’s hard to remember — wouldn’t succeed as bloggers because they’re “not as interesting.” Of course, that’s not what I said, and it’s precisely the opposite of what I think. Everyone has stories to tell, and everyone’s stories are worth telling: that’s a credo of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been involved with for a decade now.
The stories that programmers are telling in the current explosion of blogs have given their work a vital new visibility; as developers tell their stories to each other, creating a pool of technical, practical and philosophical knowledge, they are also giving the public a new and fascinating window onto their discipline. (I’m as aware of this as anyone — my work on my book is infinitely easier thanks to the profusion of programming blogs.)
Do I think it would be a Good Thing for this pattern to be duplicated in other fields? Of course — and it’s happening in some, predictably in those areas where individual professionals have a tradition of independence (the legal world, academia).
But the utopian vision of blogging somehow flattening corporate hierarchies and allowing Cluetrain-like voices of authenticity to trumpet forth from every Fortune 500 headquarters? Maybe it’s possible on the sort of time scale that Supernova keynoter Tom Malone talked about — from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, that sort of thing. But I don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetimes.
I’m sorry to be the pessimist at the party. But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don’t piss off your boss. And, in an era of health-insurance lock-in and easy outsourcing and offshoring, many U.S. workers remain doubtful that they can simply waltz into a new job should their activities displease the current hierarchy to which they report. So the odds of them feeling at ease publishing honest Web sites about their work lives are extremely poor. The blogs you’re going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don’t have great stories to tell — but because telling the truth has too high a cost.
Someone at Supernova got up and said that he worked in investment banking and thought it was a field that was ripe for blogging. No doubt! I’m assuming that your typical investment banker has managed to sock away some private unemployment insurance cash (also known in some industries as “fuck you” money, something Dick Cheney apparently has in abundance).
For those with such resources, blog on! For those lucky enough to work for a company that says “blog on” and means it, cherish your luck. But for most of the rest of the working population, the blogging revolution will be happening in some other office.
Standing room
Like some other well-known bloggers before her, Chris Nolan is working on turning her blog into more of a revenue-generating business. I like Chris’s stuff, even as I sometimes disagree with it, because it’s sharp and unpredictable and rooted in her years of experience as a reporter, and so I wish her well in her efforts to sell ads and subscriptions.
Lord knows it’s not an easy road. Reading Chris’s manifesto for “Stand-Alone Journalism” — she argues that’s a better label for what she does than “blogging” — brought me back to some distant memories from the dawn of the Web. After learning HTML and participating in the San Franciso Free Press experiment, I thought to myself, hey, there’s nothing to stop me from starting my own publication on the Web!
So I did. In January 1995 I took a week’s vacation time from my job at the SF Examiner and published a site. I focused on what was then quaintly known as “multimedia”; I called it Kludge, as a nod to its essential clumsiness and improvised nature, and I posted an issue. This was years before personal content management software, needless to say; it’s all just cruddy hand-coded HTML and crude self-designed graphics. But the articles weren’t so bad (hey, here’s an interview with Marc Canter! Here’s a satirical take on the CD-ROM explosion/implosion!).
What I quickly realized was that, as much fun as writing, editing and designing all that material was — bringing me back as it did to my teenage roots in mimeograph publishing — it was just the beginning of getting a Web site going. If I was serious about making it something more than a labor of love — if I wasn’t going to do all that work on my vacation days — I’d need to figure out how to get people to visit the site, and how to sell ads, and so forth. My best efforts involved dumping a pile of flyers in the lobby of a multimedia conference at Moscone Center. (While I was doing that, a couple of guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo stood at a booth under a big Yahoo banner, giving away T-shirts.)
After briefly toying with the notion of applying to AOL’s Greenhouse program for funding, I thought, nah. When David Talbot started talking about a new publication he wanted to create, I helped persuade him that he should do it on the Web instead of in print. Salon turned out to be a great place for me to write and edit and build Web sites without having to wear all the hats myself (though there have certainly been times during the last decade when my pate has felt a little crowded).
Today, would-be “Stand-Alone Journalists” can rely on much better software tools to create and publish their work. They can plug into far better organized online networks to spread the word of their activities. And they can even turn to simple plug-in approaches to advertising, like AdWords or BlogAds, to try to bring in some cash. But being a “Stand-Alone Journalist” still requires a combination of journalistic and entrepreneurial traits that’s rare. Being a good journalist requires the ability to not mind pissing people off sometimes (Nolan, whose career has had its share of controversy, is no shirker in this regard); being a good entrepreneur demands the ability to charm people as often as possible. Both pursuits, of course, demand persistence, patience, and, in the face of indifference, a stubborn belief in the value of one’s undertaking.
When I read Nolan’s proposed label for the solo-blogger-journalist, the first thing that popped into my mind was the famous quote from Ibsen’s Dr. Stockman in “Enemy of the People”: “The strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.” Standing alone has many wonderful advantages — it’s a stirring posture. But remember what happens to old Dr. Stockman: He is right to blow the whistle about the polluting of his town’s waters, but he’s dreadfully naive about the world around him, he’s ultimately ineffective, and he fails to accomplish much besides his own martyrdom.
So I’m not sure the “Stand-Alone Journalist” label is one that will stick. The linked nature of the Web is ultimately even more important than the independence of the blogger. Standing alone is useless without being connected.
Syndication city
I’m a late addition to a panel at the Supernova conference this Thursday, June 24: I’ll be joining some very interesting people (Technorati‘s David Sifry; blogger, XML leader and now Sun engineer Tim Bray; and Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate). We’re talking about syndication and RSS. The question the panel faces: “Is there more to syndication than reading 300 blogs at once?” What interesting, useful applications for RSS and RSS-like tools are out there or just around the corner?
I’ve got my own answer(s), but in the decentralized spirit of the conference, I’ll open the floor here in comments, and present anything you folks suggest, too.
Here comes the fuzz
This morning’s Times brings a William Safire column that leaps to the defense of the Bush administration’s claims about a Saddam/al-Qaida connection and takes issue with the 9/11 Commission’s staff report on that topic. Safire, astonishingly, complains that the report “fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks.”
Now, if you’ve followed this issue at all you know that there has indeed been a whole lot of “fuzzing up” of “distinctions,” and that it is the hands of the Bush administration that are full of fuzz.
The president, the vice president, the defense secretary and the national security adviser have all served at one time or another as purveyors of this fuzz. They have fastened on three issues: (1) roughly decade-old contacts between al-Qaida and Saddam, in which, as the commission staff report recounts, Osama bin Laden sought bases in Iraq; (2) a report of a meeting in the Czech Republic between 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials; and (3) the presence inside Saddam’s Iraq of a radical Islamic group known as Ansar al-Islam that had ties to al-Qaida and an association with a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The Bush administration, and now its apologists like Safire, maintain that points 1, 2 and 3 together constitute “ties” between Saddam and al-Qaida. But here’s the fuzz: they completely ignore central contradictory facts. For instance: (1) bin Laden didn’t get what he wanted from Saddam — he was rebuffed. (2) Every credible and careful review of the evidence about Atta’s Czech rendezvous has concluded that it never took place. (3) Ansar-al-Islam operated in a part of Iraqi Kurdistan that Saddam did not control, and Ansar, far from being in cahoots with the dictator, wanted to overthrow the Saddam regime — the Islamic Ansar detested the secular Baathists.
How anyone possessed of the facts can conclude that this body of evidence constitutes “ties” remains a baffling mystery. It’s like this: Say a small but vicious band of neo-Aryan white supremacists had approached the Bush administration in early 2001 with a request for federal funding. Say the Bush administration had rejected them. Say these people established some crazy separatist camps in northern Montana on the Canadian border and launched an occasional raid from that enclave. By the logic the Bush administration’s claims on the Saddam/al-Qaida question, it would be fair for us to declare, on the basis of these facts, that the Bush administration had “longstanding, significant ties” to neo-Nazis, and that it was “harboring” them.
So, yes, there has been a lot of “fuzzing.” Do we think that the 70% of the American public who, at one point over the last year, believed that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks (the number is down in the 50s, according to a variety of polls today) simply arrived at that conclusion on their own, based on independent sources of intelligence that they consulted in their spare time? I don’t think so. American voters drew that conclusion because the Bush administration pushed it, at every available speaking opportunity. Bush officials preserved plausible deniability by adopting weasel-word locutions that protected them from the most blatant complaints of lying while preserving the essential charge and establishing the transfer of American outrage at 9/11 from the al-Qaida terrorists who committed the crime to a tinpot Middle East dictator who had nothing to do with it.
Now the administration’s leaders are stuck with the feeblest of defenses: When confronted with the facts, they insist that their claims, once asserted as demonstrable truth, are now unfathomable uncertainties — things that have not been proven, but haven’t been disproven, either.
Right. I can assert that, at this very moment, a troupe of small green crustaceans is performing “Brigadoon” on the far side of Ganymede. You can declare that I’m bonkers. And I can say, “Well, I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it!”
Fallows on blogging, Murray on Bush
Sometimes it just takes me longer to get around to posting on certain topics than I expect. One advantage to delay is that, quite often, someone else winds up making the same point. Instead of rolling out my own rhetoric, all I need do is link to somebody else. Conserves effort; even helps reduce depletion of the global rhetoric reserve!
For instance, I was all set to point out the flaws in the estimable James Fallows’ argument in last Sunday’s New York Times business section about the blogging business. Fallows offered a qualified but optimistic picture of the way Google’s AdSense text ads might provide a healthy business model for bloggers. I was primed to point out the problems here — AdSense doesn’t work well unless your blog has a very narrow focus, and doesn’t bring in many dollars unless that focus is on something sellable (like tech gadgets). But Dana Blankenhorn beat me to it. So you can go read his response.
Similarly, I was gearing up to fulminate about the absurdities in Alan Murray’s Wall Street Journal column arguing that President Bush’s deceptions surrounding the war in Iraq somehow didn’t “break a covenant” with the American people the way President Clinton’s deceptions about Monica did. What Bush critics label as “lies,” Murray argues, the president actually believed in at the time: “Mr. Bush’s broad-brush division of the world into good guys and bad guys can be criticized for its crudeness and simplicity. But most who know him believe it is how he sees the world.”
But Murray’s effort to get Bush off the hook for his pre-war distortions of reality collapses in the face of the president’s continued assertions — up to this week — about ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The rest of the world knows these assertions are utterly bogus. The 9/11 Commission, with its access to classified information and its staff headed up by a former Bush administration official, has now confirmed they are utterly bogus. (Various attempts on the part of some conservative commentators to defend what Bush is saying these days on the basis of technicalities are appalling; by contrast, the Clinton-era parsings of “the meaning of is” — which at the time were elevated to the level of impeachable offenses — were small potatoes.)
At this point, Bush’s and Cheney’s repetitions of the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link represent desperate acts of official mendacity that are simply indefensible. In any world other than one in which, as Dennis Hastert’s spokesman recently reminded us, one party controls “all three branches of government” (refreshing honesty about the Supreme Court, there, no?), we would be hearing talk of impeachment once more.
But no need for me to vent further — Brad DeLong has laid this all out ahead of me.
Andrew Leonard on Social Software
Even if you’ve been following the social-software boom for the last couple of years, you will probably find some eye-opening insights in “You Are Who You Know,” Andrew Leonard’s great two-part feature on the subject in Salon this week (part one, part two). If Friendster and its spawn remain a mystery to you, the series will be even more essential to you. When Andrew took up the editor’s hat here, Salon (largely) lost a great reporter and writer. Good to have him back in such fine form.