It was a holiday weekend, so maybe you missed “Literary Devices,” the short story by Richard Powers that we ran — courtesy of our friends at Zoetrope All-Story. For contractual reasons this story is only going to be online for two weeks. The first week is almost up! So go, read, enjoy. It’s about a mysterious e-mail correspondent, AI-based storytelling, communal myths online, and lots more. Then you can read this great 1998 interview with Powers by Laura Miller.
First, we take Baghdad
I have been reading with great interest the recent reports on the front pages of the New York Times and (today) the Wall Street Journal, outlining our government’s plan to invade Iraq in considerable detail.
Presumably there are many people in Iraq, up to and including its dictator, doing the same. It must make for even more interesting reading over there.
Has a war plan ever been quite so brazenly run up the flag pole in full view? What’s really going on here?
There are only a handful of credible scenarios:
(1) This “war plan” is bogus. Our military leaders are planting disinformation in the media. This would be an entirely appropriate tactic on their part; what’s astonishing is that the Pentagon correspondents reporting on the plans do not seem ever to mention the possibility that they are being used.
(2) The “war plan” — which involves a blitzkrieg-like “war of effects” to paralyze the enemy’s command structure with precision-guided attacks — is a deliberate intimidation effort, a chess move on the part of the Bush administration to avoid war entirely by convincing the Iraqis that resistance is futile. In such a scenario, there’s a different kind of disinformation at work — an inflation of the potency of American forces to persuade the enemy to fold. Again, it seems amazing that the reporters who may be serving as a conduit for this propaganda game do not ever raise the possibility that this is their role.
(3) The “war plan” is real, and the administration doesn’t want it revealed, but the Pentagon reporters are just so good at their jobs that they got the story anyway. This is certainly possible, but unlikely, given the extremity and effectiveness of the Bush administration’s press-management techniques.
(4) The “war plan” is real, and it is being intentionally leaked to Pentagon reporters by officials who are so confident of our might and so certain that everything will go as planned that they do not mind letting the enemy in on their playbook. In a way, this is the scariest of the possibilities, because it suggests a troubling level of hubris on the part of our leadership.
Yes, the American military is unmatched in the world today. Yes, we have technology that is several generations ahead of our opponents. But war is hell; the fog of war is real; happenstance and chaos remain powerful players on the battlefield. If the big Iraq attack doesn’t go exactly as planned, this kind of overconfidence may come to look costly and foolish.
Reversitude
In case you’ve missed it, Susannah Breslin, the Reverse Cowgirl, has parlayed her Salon blog (“wherein a writer tries to justify the enormity of her porn collection”) into a TV deal. She’s blogging the progress of the show as it develops. You can help her name it.
Keyword-to-keyword combat
I’ve never seen this before. Where have I been? [Courtesy Mitch Ratcliffe]
Supernova
It has been a long time since I attended a technology conference. Somehow the last two years of industry implosion have left me feeling the opposite of gregarious. (Also, having become a parent, I’m not as quick to travel…) But the lineup that Kevin Werbach has assembled for his upcoming Supernova conference (Dec. 9-10) looks well worth the trip, and hey, it’s not much of a trip for me anyway (it’s in Palo Alto), so I’m planning to be there, barring a crisis. The theme is decentralization; the roster includes Sergey Brin of Google, Mitch Kapor, Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, and a lot of other interesting people.
Spam in every pot
An insidious, (relatively) new form of spam exploits a laxly designed aspect of Windows to pop commercial messages onto your screen and make them appear to be system notifications. Details here. It won’t work if you have a properly configured firewall, and you can turn off the “messenger” service that makes it possible pretty easily. Still, it’s a depressing indication that the spammers of the world will dragoon into service any little nook or cranny of your computer’s technology and turn it into a conduit for worthless commercial messages you will never ever respond to. Makes me wanna holler…
Meanwhile, IBM published this paper by David Mertz reviewing and field-testing several different spam-defeating technologies.
Am I in hock or not?
I keep seeing references, as in today’s needlessly snarky San Francisco Chronicle piece about Salon — and even by smart people in the blogosphere who should know better — to Salon’s “$79 million in debt.” So let’s squash this meme one more time before it propagates uncontrollably into the ether, like our old “error message haikus“:
Salon does not have $79 million in debt. Salon has substantially no debt.
Salon’s financials report an accumulated deficit of $79 million for our seven years of operations. If you break this down I think it’s roughly $50 million in cash and the rest is non-cash accounting charges. If you look at the financials over the years you’ll see that our spending for a couple years at the height of the boom (1999 and 2000) accounts for a disproportionate chunk of that.
This money represents losses, not debt. You’d think that’s an important enough distinction for the financial press — and the pundits in the blogging gallery — to get right. Argue all you want about our business strategy, our prospects and the quality of our prose; but let’s keep the facts straight.
“Smart Mob” hobnob
Howard Rheingold is in The Well’s “Inkwell” conference — which is free to the Web to read — talking about his new “Smart Mobs” book with Bruce Umbaugh, Cory Doctorow, Christian Crumlish, Dave Hughes and other folks.
Soy vey
OK, by now regular bloglodytes have seen this link a million times. In case you haven’t, though, I’m going to cycle it once more into rotation: It’s — how to describe it? No description is really apt. Soy-sauce-superhero-Flash with-cheesy-but-great-pop-music anime-samizdat! I dunno. See for yourself. Then check out this translation of the lyrics, courtesy Tom Tomorrow:
Funky that guy is Kikkoman.
Soy sauce is good for the body.
There is also a sterilization action.
Markoff on TIA
Must-read John Markoff story in today’s Times detailing meetings held under the auspices of DARPA last summer that considered — only to wisely reject — restructuring the nature of the Net to allow the government to track pretty much everything. One more piece of the growing and increasingly weird “Total Information Awareness” puzzle: “The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.”