Category Archives: General

Against Commencement Cermonies

I have never sat through a commencement address; I have never managed to finish watching a recommended one on YouTube; and I certainly have not ever read one to the end. (The other day, in a bookstore, I noticed a little book containing an apparently famous one delivered by David Foster Wallace; I couldn’t finish that either, and that’s saying something because I’ve been given to understand that it bucks a trend I note below.) I’m not sure from whence stems my antipathy to this form of oratory. Perhaps because I find the very idea incredibly pompous and suffused with a ludicrous self-importance: hundreds of young men and women sitting, patiently, listening to some ‘inspirational speaker’, providing advice, reminding them of the importance of their accomplishment, and providing a road-map ‘for what lies ahead.’ Some of the content of the commencement speeches is witty–but too much seems like second-rate witticisms–and perhaps some of it is sage advice, but too often it is redolent with bromides and clichés. I’ve come now to suspect, in perhaps excessively cantankerous fashion, that the commencement ceremony is a gigantic rip-off, a modern-day opportunity to make money for cap-n-gown manufacturers and photographers. And for extremely self-satisfied college administrators to preen and strut.

My  personal history of graduation ceremony attendance is quite dismal. I did not attend my undergraduate graduation ceremony because I had already left for the US; I attended my master’s because my mother was keen to see photos (I described this as providing proof that I had attended classes while away from home); lastly, I did not attend my doctoral commencement because I was away, working on my post-doctoral fellowship in Australia. At Brooklyn College, when called upon to do so twice in my capacity as a professor, I have been out-of-town on one occasion, and on the second, attended for as long as I could before leaving. In my own case, my absences were convenient but I would not have attended anyway; I knew I would find the ceremonies tedious in the extreme. (When I finished my Ph.D, I knew I had no intention of attending my commencement; the graduation ceremony would have felt like an interruption; the course of study completed, work lay ahead; to finish the doctoral degree was to complete the proverbial jump from the frying pan to the fire; I did not need to attend my commencement for my PhD to experience closure, that had already been achieved in far more satisfying fashion by my doctoral defense, where my thesis advisors had tested me in the presence of my peers.)

At the heart of this antipathy, I suspect, lies a dislike for such a curiously non-egalitarian setting, one redolent of political rallies and propaganda-and-ideology-dispensation.The students sit in the audience, they are made to file in, in order, and to be seated; administrators and other sundry big-guns take the stage; the only student to speak is the valedictorian (just a reminder folks, that grades are really the most important thing!), and then, the commencement speaker, whose ‘success’ in life more often than not, meets well-accepted societal norms. (Will we have one chosen from Occupy Wall Street in this graduation season?) The standard commencement ceremony reeks of temples and stadiums, of priests and kings and their subjects. I’d rather celebrate educational accomplishment some other way.

Note: I’m well aware that many students find these ceremonies extremely important for a variety of reasons; on which, more anon.

Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter

Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a ‘scurvy bilge rat.’ Rather, he buys DVDs, makes multiple copies of them using a ‘duplicator’ and ships them to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004….

That sounds like massive copyright infringement to me. And it is. But Mr. Strachman is not going to be brought to justice any time soon. Not even by the MPAA:

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops. “We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.

Mr. Strachman’s activity, if carried out by anyone else, for any other reason, would have brought the wrath of the Righteous Copyright Enforcers, sorry, the MPAA, on his head. But Mr. Strachman is doing it for ‘the boys over there,’ fighting for our freedom. So Mr. Gantman eases up, knowing well that if there is one line you do not cross, it is the one that would turn you into a non-supporter of the troops. (Except when you are going after retired generals speaking unfavorably about the conduct of wars overseas; then you load both barrels and fire.)

Of course, the studios have tried to help ‘our boys’ as well, ‘sending military bases reel-to-reel films…and projectors for the troops.’ The reason studios send ‘reel-to-reel films’  to military bases and not DVDs is that they are well aware that DVD-burners and laptops are a dime-a-dozen on bases, and that the young, just-above-teenaged soldiers who make up a sizable portion of the troops overseas are quite likely to respond to DVDs in precisely the same way that young, just-above-teenaged men and women in the US react to DVDs back home: They’d make copies of them or rip them and pass those on. The studios love ‘our boys,’ they just don’t trust them to observe the laws they are defending.

Note:  As expected, the New York Times article linked to above uncritically parrots an MPAA talking point:

Although the most costly piracy now takes place online through file-sharing Web sites, the illegal duplication of copyright DVDs — usually by organized crime in Eastern Europe and China, not by retirees in their 90s in the American suburbs — still siphons billions of dollars out of the industry every year.

It would be extremely useful for the Times to tell us how these staggering ‘billions and billions‘ numbers are calculated. For I have no idea. It would also be a useful enhancement of this debate if once, just once, the Times might talk about how movie attendance is enhanced by the word-of-mouth buzz created by the presence of ‘pirated’ DVDs and torrented versions of movies. Just once.

The Real Social Software: ‘Crowd Solutions’ To Co-ordination Problems

Consider a familiar, mundane, urban situation: You walk into an ATM vestibule in a bank. Your arrival has been preceded by other customers. No queue exists. But a ‘queue’ forms nevertheless and it deploys a simple algorithm: You simply wait till everyone that was there before you takes his or her turn. You don’t care in which order the rest of the ‘crowd’ uses the ATM; it is sufficient that you not use the machine before anyone else was there. You presume–and you would be right–that everyone else in the vestibule is following the same principle. If there are any ‘jumpers’ they will–in all probability–get called out; you don’t need to do this enforcement for those that were before you, they will take care of it. You might however, need to do this for someone who shows up after you and tries to use the machine before you. There is no conversation, no explicit agreement among the users. Rather, an implicit convention, the contours of which are familiar to the ATM users from a host of other situations requiring an efficient ‘crowd procedure’ to solve a problem, is put into place and followed. An extraterrestrial watching this scene would notice that a gaggle of people standing around in various positions in this enclosed space had somehow agreed upon an ordering in which to use the machine without negotiating among themselves.

Crowds solve co-ordination problems like this all the time, without explicit instruction (and in doing so, they solve problems that in their abstract form are not amenable to tractable mathematical modeling or solution). A classic well-known example is, of course, the sports fans who file out of a stadium and empty it quickly, and efficiently. As lines of fans exit into the aisles, they quickly fall into an alternating scheme that lets every other person go ahead into the exit. Later, on the exit ramps, things can become chaotic (and sometimes even go terribly wrong when stampedes occur). But the preliminary filing out into the exit ramps is almost always orderly. Or consider conference attendees asking questions of a speaker using a two-mike arrangement (one in each aisle of the auditorium): the questioners take alternate turns at each mike, a convention that does not need to be enforced. (There is a slight wrinkle here; sometimes one line grows quicker on one side than the other, and then, the questioners on the other side need to recognize this and grant priority accordingly. But by and large, the alternation works).

Because I live in a large populous city, I have ample opportunity to observe successes and failures of this kind of social software. On 34th Street, at the Herald Square station, crowds persistently fail to solve a simple co-ordination problem. Sometimes only two turnstiles will be available at one entrance for users to exit and enter. Bizarrely, the simplest, most efficient solution is never arrived at: one line should use one turnstile for exiting, the other should use the other turnstile for entering. Instead, an undignified hustle to try to sneak in before another user can exit takes place (and vice-versa). Watching this is mortifying: it’s like witnessing a demonstration of collective stupidity. It’s puzzling too: why can’t the crowd figure it out? The absence of an explicit shaming mechanism has something to do with it, of course. Getting called out for queue-jumping is one thing; being accused of simply trying to get ahead in a free-for-all isn’t. Conventions and mores like these–at some level–underlie the failures and successes of almost all crowd solutions to co-ordination problems.

These sorts of co-ordination mechanisms have been studied by many different disciplines–economics, computer science, philosophy, sociology for instance–precisely because they manifest themselves in so many ways. (Think about language for instance, in the way that Wittgenstein analyzed it in the Philosophical Investigations.) And they remain endlessly fascinating because the kinds of co-ordination problems that social interaction can throw up promise to remain diverse, unpredictable, and imprecisely amenable to the kinds of solutions and failures noted above.

Six Years of Walking To Work

This past weekend, I completed six years of walking to work. My daily commute is a thirty-minute walk, give or take a few minutes depending on whether I’m trying to get to class on time, or perhaps lugging a slightly heavier backpack than usual. Somehow, miraculously, my walking commute has ensured that while living in New York City, I can evoke for myself some of the sensations of a campus town; somehow, incredibly enough, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of a city of eight million souls, I have been able to find this mobile oasis of relative calm. My walk takes me through Ditmas Park into Midwood (home to Brooklyn College); I try not to take the same route every day so that I can sample more of the neighborhood’s beautiful Victorian homes (I don’t live in one unfortunately), but I’ve noticed certain routes show up more often than others (we are creatures of habit after all).

While walking to work is pleasant enough, it is when I walk back home in the evenings that the pleasure of the walking commute really manifests itself. For no matter how stressful the workday, a thirty-minute walk, away from the office, away from workday demands, through tree-lined streets and past magnificent testimonials to a time when beautiful homes were still being built, is often enough to bring me back to a far more quiescent mental state. While a walk does mean exposure to the misanthropic antics of car drivers, I’ve sheltered myself reasonably well from the indignities that they most commonly visit on pedestrians (refusing to yield when I have the Walk signal or at pedestrian crossings marked with a stop sign, or most irritatingly of all, blowing their horns loudly and persistently at a minor delay).

Rain,  snow, and extreme heat, all unfortunately features of the New York weather, often make me wish I had a more convenient way to get to campus, but their interruptions are not severe enough to make me do anything more than find a raincoat, bundle up a bit better or think about the air-conditioner waiting for me.  (If I had to pick my most implacable foe on these walks it would be rain, and especially in the early spring and late fall; there is nothing quite as miserable as a cold, grey, East Coast shower at these times of the year.) And of course, nothing quite puts my walk, and these minor discomforts, in perspective than the misery inflicted on those millions who brave traffic jams to drive to workplaces.

Perhaps more than anything else, this walk to work feels like a throwback, back to a perhaps imagined time, when ‘workzones’ were not so centralized, when city spaces were not clogged with fume-spewing monsters that killed thousands every year, when work schedules were not so tightly calibrated. This walk of mine functions then, like a little time-machine; I leave behind in my office (and home), my usual technological accompaniments, and head out the door to indulge in the most basic of human activities.

Note: Unbelievably enough, yesterday, after I posted this, and started my morning commute, this happened: I stopped at the corner of Argyle and Dorchester (I think), and stared; the streets and blossoms looked incredibly beautiful, the dappled shade making each street even more inviting. I hesitated: which route should I take? A lady in a car pulled up and asked, “Are you lost?” I said, “No, just checking out these beautiful streets!”. She smiled, waved, and took off. And I kept walking.

Even ‘Degenerate Art’ Can Tempt: The 1937 Entartete Kunst Exhibitions

In July 1937, in Munich, the Nazi Party mounted the Entartete Kunst exhibitions of ‘Degenerate Art.’.  The exhibit featured over six hundred paintings, sculptures, prints, and books, a collection put together by a six-man commission that had confiscated–from the collections of thirty-two German museums–art deemed ‘modern, degenerate, or subversive.’ The exhibition remained in Munich till November–and was then staged in eleven cities in Germany and Austria. (Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s condemnation of modern art and architecture, suggesting pure-race artists produced art infused with classical ideals of beauty while mixed-race artists produced monstrosities, had already underwritten Hitler’s views on the relationship between classical Greek and Middle-Ages art and Aryan art. Schultze-Naumburg, by juxtaposing samples of modern art with photographs of people with deformities and diseases, had even suggested modernism was a malignancy.)

The Entartete Kunst exhibition, roughly organized into themes, was staged in shabby, crowded, cramped rooms–presumably, the chaos of the curated organization meant to amplify and provoke the supposedly inchoate visions on display–and surrounded by polemical paraphernalia to hammer home associated propaganda points (such as the exaggerated prices paid by the museums that originally housed the art works).

I have always been intrigued by the Nazi decision to display the ‘degenerate’ art as opposed to destroying the art pieces (perhaps accompanied with a printed reproduction of an image of the artwork destroyed). While the Nazi exhibit was meant to show the art as ugly and to hold it up for ridicule, derision, and eventual rejection, they did mount a comprehensive exhibition of potentially subversive art, collected and put up for display in one venue, available to the population at large. Indeed, by mounting a parallel exhibit of German art that met with the Nazi Party’s approval the risk they took was great; they were able to provide for comparison samples of ‘classical’ art and ‘modern’ art, and ask those who visited the exhibits to ‘make up their mind’ about what they found offensive, ugly, timid, or revolutionary. While the Nazi propaganda  pointed accusatory fingers at the art works, the potential for the art to stake its own claims was never lost.  Viewed from an alternate, subversive perspective, the Nazis provided a great service; they put together a collection panel that traveled the German nation, collected its best modern art and put it on display in major German cities: a large, state-sponsored exhibition of art that most modern nations would be happy to put together.

The artists and art ‘featured’ in the Entartete Kunst exhibitions suffered; artists met the fates of exile, imprisonment, bans, death; art was condemned and destroyed. But even if framed by ridicule and condemnation, the artists and their art met the minds and sensibilities of Germans; their art was talked about, discussed, and possibly subverted a mind or two. The Nazis intended for ‘Degenerate Art’ to serve as a bad example, one to be avoided in the future; but in picking the tactic of prominent, curated, collective display they also took the risk art could have served the exact opposite function.

Video Game ‘Cloning’: What Is It Good For?

Cloning of video games is a Bad Thing. Or so sayeth Brian X. Chen and some video game developers (New York Times, March 12th, ” For Creators of Games, A Faint Line on Cloning”). Roughly, the thesis advanced is: ‘cloning’ can be destructive of developer motivation and the video game market, and thus seems to require legal intervention (by the application of patenting protections). I want to raise some questions that I hope will complicate the picture Chen provides us of innovation and its relationship to its legal regulation.

So,

In any commercialized art form, be it movies, literature or fashion, the creators often tread a fine line between inspiration and shameless copying. Some small video game makers say that line seems to have all but disappeared….“When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that’s when getting imitated turns into a compliment,” said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer. “Getting cloned is like getting punched in the face. It’s like a robbery.” Demoralized, Vlambeer stopped development of Ridiculous Fishing for several months. “It was kind of a motivation black hole,” said Jan Willem Nijman, another founder. “It almost destroyed Vlambeer.”

So, copying is ‘shameless’; the imitated seems to think it is both a ‘compliment’ and ‘like getting punched in the face’ and like ‘robbery;’ it can act as demotivator. Ismail’s statement starts by noting ‘inspiration’ and the creation of ‘different games’, which would seem to be a good thing (for game players at least). But something goes wrong: even though a new game has been created, it has employed ‘cloning’, the copying of  ”the soul of a game — its gameplay mechanics, design, characters and storyline — “. And this has demotivated the folks at Vlambeer.

This story raises questions well worth pursuing. What did Vlambeer do? Did it make another game? Did the presence of the new, ‘cloned’ game force them into other innovative avenues of development, rather than just working on a previously explored artistic niche? Did the cloning prevent Vlambeer from staying safely and staidly on the same beaten track? What brought Vlambeer back to working on games? What do they work on now and how? More generally, is it the case that those developers whose games have been ‘cloned’ start working on another game or do they exit the development market? Does cloning produce an arms race with games developers innovating furiously to maintain a cutting edge?

Other questions suggest themselves. Did consumers get more games out of this episode of cloning? Were the ‘cloned’ versions of the game better in any regard? Even if the “gameplay mechanics, characters and storyline” are ‘cloned’ what does it mean to say the ‘design’ was cloned? Was the interface of the cloned version identical, or did the interface work ‘better’ in some interesting dimension? For instance, are any of the ‘cloned’ games faster? Do they load quicker? Do game players indicate their preferences for these new games in any way?

After not raising these questions, Chen turns to possible legal protections and regimes:

One reason that cloning is so frequent in the game industry is that there is no easy way to protect a game. A piece of published writing or a photograph can be copyrighted, but not the mechanics of a game. Small game makers could seek patents protecting software design, but they generally shy away from this because acquiring a patent can be both time-consuming and relatively expensive, said Ellisen Shelton Turner, an intellectual property lawyer at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

In addition, because games so often draw inspirations from previous works, many game creators believe that patent protections could stifle creativity in future games, Mr. Turner said. “A lot of them are anti-patents,” he said. “And only in hindsight do they think patents are the proper thing to do when someone has stolen their idea.”

But what are the ‘mechanics’ of a game and why are they kinds of things that could be be copyrighted? Turner claims that developers shy away from acquiring patents because of the difficulties of the process but then in the next sentence puts it down to their acknowledgment of the creativity-stifling potential of patent protection. Those same developers might know that their development has drawn freely on the creative output of other developers and that seeking patent protections might be damaging to the ecology of the game development world; developers might be more cognizant of this ecology and its particular constraints, than say, corporate ‘intellectual property’ lawyers.  The belated self-knowledge that Turner ascribes to game developers might rather be their acknowledgment of the particular contours of their development community: that their decision to not seek patents  comes with a price attached while contributing to very particular freedoms enjoyed by game developers.

Finally, the central claim, that cloning results in bad outcomes:

The founders of Vlambeer, the maker of Radical Fishing, said they disagreed that cloning was good for consumers. They said cloning would make it more difficult for small companies to take risks on new ideas, but easy for big companies to succeed by rehashing old ideas. As a result, all new games could look extremely alike and unoriginal.

“If we go into that sort of spiral we’ll end up in a place where there’s only cloners, and there’s a limited amount of creativity happening,” Mr. Ismail said. “That’s the biggest horror scenario.”

This ‘horror scenario’ seems overstated. First, in light of the questions raised above. Second, because, peculiarly, in the scenario envisaged, game players appear to have no agency, no discrimination. They do not grant any game-maker first-mover advantage, they seem not to select between games, they mindlessly take on clones just because they are similar to extant games.

‘Cloning’ suggests the creation of identical copies; but the situation at hand deals with new games that incorporate central features of the older game. This fact, and the nature of the game development process, which draws on a ‘commons’ of code, algorithmic techniques, and a grab-bag of tricks and solutions to game development problems, considerably complicates the picture of the game development world and its possible legal regulation that emerges from Chen’s article.

Skream’s Where You Should Be, Eight Hours in Brooklyn, and Summer

I’ve written before, on this blog, about the “fine-grained, specific recall” of memories that listening to a song can bring about. I’m inclined to think that any time I pen a note of appreciation here about a particular piece of music, I will do so by also noting and paying attention to its associations; it seems to go with the territory. (A new series, so to speak: Songs and the Things They Make Me Remember.)

Last time, it was BB King’s Thrill is Gone and remembering my time as a bartender in a small jazz bar in Newark. Today, it’s Skream‘s Where You Should Be (featuring Sam Franck) and the summer of 2011. There are two twists in this tale. For one, this song goes hand in hand with a video–but not its official music video, which comes off a distinct second-best–and secondly, the associated memory is very recent.

In August 2011, Next Level Pictures released a video titled Eight Hours in Brooklyn; ostensibly a concept shoot for a commercial, it was shot using a Phantom Flex camera, and featured dizzying, super slo-mo shots of skateboarders carrying out flips and a formation ride down a road next to an elevated subway track, hydrant bathers, pickup basketball games played by tattooed teenagers, break dance moves, and a close-up of a tattoo under construction. As soundtrack, it featured Skream’s Where You Should Be.

Where You Should Be is a sophisticated piece of pop dubstep; and it is too, a breakup song. Its lyrics are simple and plaintive; they don’t aspire to high poetic levels. Consider, for instance:

How can I feel good about this life I’m living//When you’re not here//Right beside me

or,

These lonely days//Turn to lonely nights//Everything’s upside down//And I’ve lost the will to fight

But for all that, set to the bass, melody and slightly spooky vocals of the track, they work well. And Where You Should Be works especially well with Eight Hours in Brooklyn, which of course,  isn’t about breaking up with anyone. But the video’s images immediately taps into a melancholia that always seems to be associated with summers on the East Coast: the knowledge that all this cannot last, that the summer, hot, sticky, humid and kvetch-invoking as it is, is also the time for cool, T-shirted nights, barbecues, beach trips, and cold beer. And in August, the light begins to change, the shadows lengthen, and we are reminded that we had better get on with the business of making the most of it before the change of season, before, once the glories of fall have gone, we’ll be stuck with slush, snow, and the grimy greyness of winter.

In August 2011, I was working on a book, and dealing with all the frustration and self-doubt that that always seems to entail. I tried to stay sane, mostly by lifting weights, and by endlessly bitching and moaning, to anyone that would listen. And sometimes, by diversion. Watching Lost was one particularly undistinguished way, listening to music was another. Eight Hours in Brooklyn was a perfect three-minute break from editing, revising, and worrying whether anyone would give a rat’s ass about my self-indulgent reflections.

So, thank you, Skream; thank you Phantom Flex camera; and thank you, videomakers. You got at least one writer across the finish line.

Labor Relations in Low Earth Orbit: The Skylab Strike

Three weeks ago,  the world celebrated the twenty-eighth anniversary of the end of the manned portion of the Skylab mission. Well, not really. Enthusiasts of manned space exploration certainly did; others had to be reminded. Students of the history of science can edify us about the scientific value of the three Skylab missions (meant to replace Apollo 18, 19, and 20). My interest here is to note the significance of Skylab for labor relations in space: the crew of the third Skylab mission, which lasted eighty-four days–Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Edward Gibson–went on strike for a day during their stay before relenting and going back to work.

Their story remains a fascinating one, one illuminative of the dynamics between a rigid, controlling, science-regulating administration and a group of workers ostensibly selected for their discipline and the psychological wherewithal to resist the stresses of space. (By noting this incident, I do not mean to diminish the crew’s activities, and to reduce their twelve-week stint in space to this story.)

From the moment the crew went into orbit, their lives were a blur of experiment and regulation, tightly controlled by NASA at Houston. For every single second of their waking days the crew was prodded, poked, telemetered, scanned, and required to work through long, tedious check-lists of activities; every bodily function had to be recorded and regulated; this was, after all, a mission whose primary objectives included the study of the effects of long-term habitation in space. The interior of the Skylab space station might have been 350 cubic meters but there was nowhere to hide from Ground Control. This was a scientific experiment, on taxpayer expense, and NASA intended to get its money’s worth.

The trend of excessive, panopticon-like control of the crew had been set from the very beginning, when Bill Pogue had vomited shortly after arriving at the station, and decided, in collusion with the other members of the crew, to not  report the incident back to Houston. But the crew were being monitored and eavesdropped on, and soon they were being castigated like a triplet of hand-in-cookie-jar-schoolboys and being warned that all such incidents had to be recorded and reported. That early ‘eavesdropping’ incident was by far the most trust-destroying interaction between the crew and Ground Control.

Faced with remote discipline at its extreme, the crew asserted resistance. The crew acquired notoriety for ‘complaining’; they certainly had the most combative, unvarnished conversations ever with Houston, a far remove from the usual, sanitized excerpts that read, ‘Houston, all systems go, we are ready to go spacewalk and provide wonderful visuals’. Finally, matters came to a head, as Pogue, Carr and Gibson ‘took a day off’. I do not remember what Pogue and Carr did on their self-enforced furlough but Ed Gibson, the Caltech solar physicist, retired to the solar observation station and spent the entire workday recording images on his own sweet time, not bothering to make any detailed entries in his lab handbooks. ‘Negotiations’ followed; work schedules were altered; expectations adjusted, and work went on.

The Skylab story prompted much discussion about the regulation of work in space including suggestions the ’revolt’ really wasn’t one. But these do not discount the contentious, irritable, edgy relationship between Houston and Skylab-IV, and they certainly do not refute the notion that even highly motivated, highly trained, military types and scientists, fully convinced of the value of their work, when placed in an artificially controlled, too-tightly-regulated environment, are likely to find conditions oppressive and push back.

Bill Keller Needs to Drop the Snark and Do Serious Journalism

Over at the New York Times, Bill Keller, who has been doing his best to make sure it will be hard to take him for a serious  journalist, writes a piece–bursting to the seams with snark–on Wikileaks. Keller thinks he is providing a serious evaluation of the fallout of Wikileaks (most particularly, its leaking of a gigantic corpus of military and diplomatic secrets last year). But Keller–whose trafficking in superficiality has been embarassingly on display for all too long on the NYT’s Op-Ed’s pages–simply cannot be bothered with seriously engaging with the issues that Wikileaks raised. Like: the need for transparency for those in power (as opposed to the privacy rights of individuals); the relationship of journalists with politicians; and most importantly, the all-too-evident eagerness of modern journalists to roll over and play faithful stenographer or megaphone for Wall Street, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon.

Instead, all Keller can do, in a pathetic display of lame attempts at sophomoric snark, is dish out one jibe after the other at Julian Assange. (His evident dislike for Assange tells me that Assange really hit home.) There are, count-em, sixteen paragraphs in Keller’s peice. It’s not till we get to the seventh or eighth paragraph that Keller stops being juvenile and starts to say something substantive.

And it’s not much. Roughly: Wikileaks exposed too much. In response, the always-secretive have become more secretive. And now life is harder for all us Serious Journalists[tm]. So let me get this straight:  in response to exposure,  those ensconced in power have dug their heels in, become more opaque, stepped up their chilling attacks on journalists and potential whistle-blowers, and this is Wikileaks fault? Could Keller be more offensive, more of a fawning lapdog of the powerful and the opaque, if he tried? I don’t think so.

Keller also forgets, in his Why-Did-This-Nonconformist-Crash-This-Comfortable-Politician-And-Media-Garden-Party litany, the role that the rest of his supine media crew played in ensuring that Wikileaks’ impact was minimized. Who took up cudgels on Wikileaks behalf? Did the media give ample column inches and airtime to the case for Wikileaks? Were the corporate-government smear jobs on Wikileaks adequately highlighted? Has the media establishment stepped back from its passionate embrace of those in power and looked a little more closely, a little more aggressively, at their pronouncements? They are the ones in power, remember?

If the secretive and powerful have become more secretive in response to exposure, the response of a serious journalist should be to make sure the secrecy is investigated even more closely.  It most emphatically should not be to shower scorn and ridicule on those who took risks in trying to expose the powerful. The idiotic quoting of the off-base SNL skit, which confuses the privacy of private citizens with the opacity of governmental entities, is perhaps the best indication that Keller has lost the plot. But far more offensive is the simpleminded acceptance of the government’s position: if you dare expose us, we’ll become even more secretive.

Keller is pushing back at the wrong forces in this debate. In doing that, he is merely the latest depressing example of the incestuous embrace of the political and media establishments in this nation.

Provincialism’s Easy Allure Or, Writing Outward From The American Academy

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin writes,

As sophisticated as the recent literature about conservatism is, however it suffers from three weaknesses. The first is a lack of comparative perspective. Scholars of the American right rarely examine the movement in relation to its European counterpart. Indeed, among many writers it seems to be an article of faith that, like all things American, conservatism is exceptional.

Robin then goes on to point out continuities between American and European conservatism before going to to provide a rich intellectual history of conservatism, one that aims to show it to be a dynamic force of reaction and counter-revolution through the ages, one implacably opposed, not to change per se, but to a change in the hierarchies of political ordering and power.

My intention here is not to dispute or examine this analysis; for that we have a faculty study group at Brooklyn College. Rather I was struck, as I read Robin’s listing of weaknesses in recent scholarship on conservatism, by the presence of a similar lack of comparative perspective in Robin’s work, by its only-partial expansion of the analytical lens to focus on American and European conservatism alone. From the taxonomy constructed above, it would appear that conservatism as a political entity, an intellectual movement or body of work, or as force of reaction and counter-revolution is confined to Europe and the United States. To be sure, its impress might be felt elsewhere–after all, the counter-revolutionary governments of the United States and Europe have acted to resist revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America–but as a political and intellectual force it originates in those spheres alone. (The index of authors in Robin’s work does not list African, Latin American or Asian conservative political theorists, or polemicists.)

Now, conservatism as reaction does not appear to be confined to these spheres; the long, bitter, disputed histories of these continents is ample evidence for that claim; reaction here, must have found its grounding too, in patterns of thought and theory articulated by, among others, intellectuals, writers, journalists, and party hacks. (Here I am not identifying “conservatism” with a named political movement or party, but rather, in accordance with Robin’s thesis, as the forces of reaction that have resisted movements of resistance aimed at upending established hierarchies of order, using a variety of polemical, political and rhetorical strategies, including, most recently a genuine populism that seeks to include previously oppressed classes in the spoils of power.) Perhaps examining conservative thought more broadly–geographically speaking, at least–might have enabled an engagement with questions like: Are Mario Vargas Llosa and Olavo de Carvalho conservatives in Robin’s sense? Are the South African theoreticians of apartheid to be understood as conservative? Where do the theoreticians of the Indian caste system fit into a taxonomy of conservative thought? And so on.

In pointing this out, I am doing no more than indicating the blindingly obvious, and a scholar as accomplished as Robin would be the first to note this himself. (It might be that I missed in my reading, a stipulation that “conservatism” was to be understood as identifying a particularly Anglo-American-European ideology.)

Then why the lack of the “comparative perspective” in Robin’s work? Besides the straightforward one that one writes about what one knows best, I think the blind spot also exists for the same reason that in my recent book on legal theory I concentrated on American common law first, with European civil law a distant second, and do not investigate in any adequate sense, Latin American, African or Asian scholarship in the relevant domains: to write from the vantage point of the American academy is to all too easily take it to be the center of the academic and intellectual universe. This is not because one assumes a mantle of superiority but rather that that is the seat that we are pointed to, the position we assume, and it seems, are almost required to take ex-officio. In this tacit assumption of centrality, even the most allegedly cosmopolitan amongst us are reminded of the enduring and persistent allure of provincialism.