October 2005 – Page 2 – Richard Bennett

Web 2.0: old Kool-Aid in new bottles

How silly is the thinking behind the Web 2.0 movement? Try We Are the Web by Wellbert Kevin Kelly: There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one … Continue reading “Web 2.0: old Kool-Aid in new bottles”

How silly is the thinking behind the Web 2.0 movement? Try We Are the Web by Wellbert Kevin Kelly:

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

In retrospect, the Netscape IPO was a puny rocket to herald such a moment. The product and the company quickly withered into irrelevance, and the excessive exuberance of its IPO was downright tame compared with the dotcoms that followed. First moments are often like that. After the hysteria has died down, after the millions of dollars have been gained and lost, after the strands of mind, once achingly isolated, have started to come together – the only thing we can say is: Our Machine is born. It’s on.

Presumably, he speaks from experience about the wiring of all those other planets, having visited them while toking hash.

Nicholas Carr didn’t drink the Kool-Aid (or smoke the hash). See The Amorality of Web 2.0:

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call “the mainstream media.” Here’s O’Reilly: “While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls ‘we, the media,’ a world in which ‘the former audience,’ not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.”

I’m all for blogs and blogging. (I’m writing this, ain’t I?) But I’m not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere – its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from – and, yes, more important than – what bloggers can do. Those despised “people in a back room” can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition – or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don’t want to be forced to make that choice.

Carr has already got the 2-fers hoppin’ mad, of course.

h/t Jeff Jarvis, who’s very upset with Mr. Carr:

So Carr is really saying two things: He is saying that the professionals are better than the amateurs because they are paid. I don’t buy that. And he distrusts the amateurs, which is saying that he distrusts the public those professionals supposedly serve. Which is to say that he distrusts us. Well, distrust begets distrust. So the feeling is mutual.

It’s quite simple, really: It’s all about supply and demand. When distribution was scare and made content scarce, it promoted the creation of a professional media class. Now that neither is scarce, the economics are changed. The market is free. Lots of content is free. There is more content. I believe that there is thus more good content. So media must rethink their business models, their value, their relationships to the marketplace. And I believe that is good. Carr believes disruption is amoral. I believe stagnation is unnatural.

There is at least one good thing about Web 2.0: it’s taking part of Jeff’s mind off Howard Stern, at least for a while.

I have a somewhat cynical view of all this: the people I see beating the drum for Web 2.0 are exploiting it economically; Tim O’Reilly chiefly. This guy always manages to turn a handsome profit bashing capitalism, and more power to him for that:

More immediately, Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.

But that doesn’t mean we have to buy the largely fanciful vision he uses to con his customers out of their lunch money.

More to come after we’ve read O’Reilly’s essay on his current meme, What is Web 2.0?

Another Terrorist Supporter at the Guardian

Regular readers will recall our link to the gory tale of the killing of a Chinese democracy activist reported in the Guardian which turned out to be hysterical (the guy was beaten but not killed.) The Daily Ablution has more on the reporter, who fits a profile of sorts: Today’s Private Eye, making explicit comparisons … Continue reading “Another Terrorist Supporter at the Guardian”

Today’s Private Eye, making explicit comparisons with the Dilpazier Aslam affair – to which the Eye has gleefully alluded at least three times – raises some interesting points concerning Mr. Joffe-Walt’s background.

Of course, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Guardian foreign correspondent, who has 18 months of experience as a professional journalist, was moved to act as a “human shield” in Iraq (he found the experience “very stressful”). Like Mr. Joffe-Walt’s dissociation from the real world, such sentiments are to be expected in the Guardian newsroom.

What’s of more concern is the reporter’s avowed support for a terrorist organisation (does this sound familiar?). In an interview with Newsweek magazine, he reveals that:

“I support the Earth Liberation Front. I think what they do is morally defendable as long as they don’t kill people. That’s the principle of direct action.”

The ELF, a group of serial arsonists, caused over $43m worth of damage in 600 attacks between 1996 and 2002 (PDF), when FBI named them the largest and most active terrorist group in the US. They remain active.

I wish we could say we were surprised by this, but after the Dilpazier Aslam affair we put nothing past the Grauniad.

Miers doomed

The White House’s Harriet Miers support group is sad and depressed: “The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over … Continue reading “Miers doomed”

The White House’s Harriet Miers support group is sad and depressed:

“The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings.”

Excellent.

Kaus on the Judybats

Mickey Kaus is kind enough to answer the question we posed yesterday on the press obsession with Judy Miller. with six reasons. First on the list echoes what we said yesterday: a) Treason: Miller wasn’t just perceived as in cahoots with neocons in foisting the war off onto the public. She was doing it from … Continue reading “Kaus on the Judybats”

Mickey Kaus is kind enough to answer the question we posed yesterday on the press obsession with Judy Miller. with six reasons. First on the list echoes what we said yesterday:

a) Treason: Miller wasn’t just perceived as in cahoots with neocons in foisting the war off onto the public. She was doing it from within the New York Times, which the Left correctly perceives as one of “its” institutions. As a traitor within the liberal camp, she has to be expelled and punished, in a way she wouldn’t be punished if she’d been an equally mistaken and influential reporter for National Review. The host body rejects her.

And most intriguing is the femme fatale angle, which certainly explains Arianna’s personal obsession. While Arianna’s looking hotter with her recent facelift, botox job, and blonde hairdo, the former wife of a gay man isn’t really in the running for the race Miller’s been winning for twenty years. Andrew Sullivan disagrees, however.

Not getting it

Can somebody please explain to me what’s so all-fired significant about Judith Miller? She’s all the leftwing blogs have talked about for the last week, to the point that their obsession with her has drowned out some truly important things, such as the Iraq constitutional referendum and Game 5 of the NLCS. And there was … Continue reading “Not getting it”

Judith Miller is just some reporter who happened to get tipped-off that Joe Wilson was selected to go drink tea in a hotel room in Niger for a week while asking people if they wanted to confess to committing any felonies because he had a nepotism connection in the CIA. His mission was silly, his handling of it was silly (clue: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), so his selection had to be silly.

In the course of communicating the nepotism angle to reporters, some Administration officials may have inadvertently run afoul of some arcane law owing to Plame’s long-ago status as a covert agent, so in the end what we have here is more a Comedy of Errors than an evil Neocon plot to undermine the security of the republic. The leftwing obsession with a story that’s obviously technicality and small potatoes simply undermines their credibility with the voting public.

The media are clearly fascinated by Miller because she’s one of them, and one with a number of enemies because she hasn’t always toed the approved Bush-hating line that’s expected of elite journalists, but the rest of us don’t have that excuse. And one sad consequence of this great Miller pile-on is the complete marginalization of America’s Mom, Cindy Sheehan, who just got a new car, and the world’s leading intellectual, the grammarian Noam Chomsky, who just won a poll.

It’s all very sad.

Democrats gone wild

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big advocate of two robust political parties, because it’s been my experience that the worst laws pass with little or no debate. Since Schiavo, it’s also become increasingly apparent that the Republicans aren’t using their power in Washington as it should be used, even though their … Continue reading “Democrats gone wild”

So I eyeballed the recent critiques of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? with great interest. These are The Politics of Polarization and What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?, analyzed by Mark Schmitt and Kevin Drum.

Frank argues that the US electorate, especially the lower middle class, has shifted to the right in recent years because the Right has placed wedge issues like Gay Marriage in the center of the debate. This viewpoint is compelling to the Moveon.org/Air Hysteria/Michael Moore crowd because it reinforces a couple of ideas that are very important to them: the myth that the Left is more tolerant and diverse, and the myth that the average voter is easily confused by the political masterminds of the Right, a Machiavellian crowd with unmatched powers of persuasion.

This was all fine until somebody went to the trouble of analyzing voting patterns to see if the theory was correct. That’s what Bartels did, and this is what he found:

• Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle- and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites – and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era.

• Has the white working class become more conservative? No. The average views of low-income whites have remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years. (A pro-choice shift on abortion in the 1970s and ‘80s has been partially reversed since the early 1990s.) Their positions relative to more affluent white voters – generally less liberal on social issues and less conservative on economic issues – have also remained virtually unchanged.

• Do working class “moral values” trump economics? No. Social issues (including abortion) are less strongly related to party identification and presidential votes than economic issues are, and that is even more true for whites in the bottom third of the income distribution than for more affluent whites. Moreover, while social issue preferences have become more strongly related to presidential votes among middle- and high-income whites, there is no evidence of a corresponding trend among low-income whites.

• Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? No. The partisan attachments and presidential votes of frequent church-goers and people who say religion provides “a great deal” of guidance in their lives are much more strongly related to their views about economic issues than to their views about social issues. For church-goers as for non-church-goers, partisanship and voting behavior are primarily shaped by economic issues, not cultural issues.

So why has the Democratic Party lost the ability to win Congressional and national elections? The white middle class has become increasingly close to the Republican Party:

On the other hand, if the idea is to appeal to a large class of white voters who have become noticeably less Democratic over the past half-century, the place to find them is in the middle and upper reaches of the income distribution. These affluent whites are more liberal on social issues than working-class whites are, and if anything they have become increasingly liberal on social issues over the past 30 years. Moreover, their views about social issues are more closely connected to partisanship and voting behavior than those of working-class whites – and they have become much more closely connected since the 1980s. Those facts suggest that “recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues” may not be such a “criminally stupid strategy” on the part of Democratic leaders (Frank 2004, 243). Indeed, it may be a testament to the success of that strategy that affluent white voters have not become even more markedly Republican, despite the fact that they (still) attach at least as much weight to economic issues as to social issues.

And to this I would add that the traditional base of the Democratic Party, industrial workers, is an increasingly small group in the US, and the tactic of replacing them with teachers’ unions aggravates the Democrats’ problem with the middle class.

In The Politics of Polarization, Galston & Kamarck argue that voters are more partisan that in the past:

It is not news that our political elites are more polarized than they were a generation ago. Less well known is a dramatic new development—a Great Sorting-Out of the electorate—that has occurred along many dimensions. Self-described liberals are much more likely to vote Democratic, and self-described conservatives for Republicans, than in the past. Party affiliation is a far greater predictor of voting behavior, as is religious observance. Blue states are bluer, red states redder, and swing states fewer than in previous cycles. Even individual counties have become increasingly polar, with far more conferring a vote of 60 percent or greater for a presidential candidate than in the past.

The initial reaction to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrates this new politics of polarization. Under normal circumstances, a natural disaster brings people together. Not this time. According to a Washington Post poll released September 7, 2005, 74 percent of Republicans but only 17 percent of Democrats approved of President Bush’s handling of the crisis; about two in three Republicans rated the federal government’s response as good or excellent, compared to only one in three Democrats. (Independents were more evenly divided.)

What is equally striking about the politics of polarization is that a strong plurality of Americans continue to associate themselves with the moderate center of the political spectrum. In fact, the politics of polarization is occurring against a backdrop of sustained ideological stability. In 2004, the electorate was 21 percent liberal, 34 percent conservative and 45 percent moderate. That is practically a carbon copy of the average over the past thirty years — 20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, and
47 percent moderate—with remarkably little variation from election to election.

And they also point out that liberal Democrats are vastly outnumbered:

With three conservatives for every two liberals, the sheer arithmetic truth is that in a polarized electorate effectively mobilized by both major parties, Democratic candidates must capture upwards of 60 percent of the moderate vote — a target only Bill Clinton has reached in recent times — to win a national election.

So why is it that the leadership of the Democratic Party wants to react to these dynamics (a shrinking Democratic base and an increasingly polarized electorate) by retreating ever more deeply into an ideological ghetto that’s hostile to the interests of the average voter?

Why indeed? We’ll address that tomorrow.

Bennett indicted

Now that’s a headline you don’t want to see if your name happens to be Bennett. But it’s no relation: Ousted Refco Inc. Chief Executive Phillip R. Bennett was charged with securities fraud in connection with hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from investors who bought stock in the future-trading firm’s initial public offering. Finding … Continue reading “Bennett indicted”

Now that’s a headline you don’t want to see if your name happens to be Bennett. But it’s no relation:

Ousted Refco Inc. Chief Executive Phillip R. Bennett was charged with securities fraud in connection with hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from investors who bought stock in the future-trading firm’s initial public offering.

Finding out you’d been indicted by reading the WSJ would be a real pisser.

The New Litmus Test

The controversy over Harriet Miers continues, with the Administration desperately trying to shore up support among both moderates like Arlen Specter and conservatives like the Bible crowd and the “victims of liberalism” crowd: In that conversation, which has been the subject of feverish speculation, Rove also told Dobson that one reason the president was passing … Continue reading “The New Litmus Test”

In that conversation, which has been the subject of feverish speculation, Rove also told Dobson that one reason the president was passing over better-known conservatives was that many on the White House short list had asked not to be considered, Dobson said, according to an advance transcript of the broadcast provided by his organization, Focus on the Family.

Blogosphere luminaries Jeff Goldstein and John Cole face down over Bush’s motivation and come to no conclusion.

OK, I have a theory about Miers that I haven’t seen anywhere, so I’m going to throw it out even though it’s raw speculation with nothing to back it up except trace elements of DNA found near the crime scene. Here we go.

Bush doesn’t care about abortion, and neither do the bibliocons. They understand that even if the Supreme Court was to strike down Roe, the states would legalize it anyway, and they’d lose their moral authority. It’s one thing to say that five men in black robes are imposing their personal views on you, and quite another to be faced with the certain knowledge that the people hold values that define you as outside the mainstream. So it’s best if Roe stays intact and the conservative movement has the issue to complain about.

The real problem that bibliocons have with the court showed up earlier this year in the great shouting match over the corpse of Terri Schiavo. All along the bibliocons and paleocons had been telling us they were fed-up with activist judges getting involved in state and local issues where they didn’t belong, but suddenly they were all over the courts for refusing to be activist with respect to the family and the State of Florida. So it became clear that the right wants the mirror image of what the left wants, an activist bench that is willing to impose its personal values and beliefs on the rest of us.

Looking for judges who have that sort of orientation is a hard search, because the conservative team that the right’s been grooming since Roe (Luttig, McConnell, Olsen, et. al.) is all about judicial restraint, and none of them can be relied upon to jump into the breech on Schiavo-type cases and do the right thing by the right. So Bush had to ignore the conservative farm team and draft a close personal friend with the proper religious credentials and the requisite lack of judicial hang-ups.

So that’s why we have Miers, to make the far right wing of the Right-to-Life conservative movement less ineffectual the next time we have a case before the courts involving a corpse on life-support.

Put yourself in Bush’s shoes: his approval ratings started going down when he flew to Washington to sign the Schiavo bill, and they’ve never recovered. The press pounced on him over Katrina because he made himself vulnerable, and they’re not letting up.

And this isn’t a cynical move orchestrated by Rove, it’s George W. Bush being sincere. And sincerely stupid.

There you are.

UPDATE: See some discussion of this theory at Cathy Young, Jeff Goldstein, John Cole, and Doc Searls. Cathy thinks I’m wrong, citing Judge Greer as an example of a good religious judge, but she misses the fact that religiosity isn’t a monolith: Miers is a born-again, while Greer is just a garden-variety Southern Baptist who was expelled from his church for sticking by the law. As she’s a born-again with no demonstrated commitment to the rule of law, I don’t see Miers as another Greer. In fact, I’d much rather see Greer on the court than Miers.

It’s a miracle

It turns out the dude the Guardian reported murdered before their very eyes is, uh, still alive: Lu Banglie, the Chinese democracy activist who was savagely beaten at the weekend, has been found injured but alive. They haven’t corrected their original story, of course. Ht: Jody

It turns out the dude the Guardian reported murdered before their very eyes is, uh, still alive:

Lu Banglie, the Chinese democracy activist who was savagely beaten at the weekend, has been found injured but alive.

They haven’t corrected their original story, of course.

Ht: Jody

China deals with a dissident

This is how China deals with dissent: The men outside shouted among themselves and those in uniform suddenly left. Those remaining started pushing on the car, screaming at us to get out. They pointed flashlights at us, and when the light hit Mr Lu’s face, it was as if a bomb had gone off. They … Continue reading “China deals with a dissident”

This is how China deals with dissent:

The men outside shouted among themselves and those in uniform suddenly left. Those remaining started pushing on the car, screaming at us to get out. They pointed flashlights at us, and when the light hit Mr Lu’s face, it was as if a bomb had gone off. They completely lost it. They pulled him out and bashed him to the ground, kicked him, pulverised him, stomped on his head over and over again. The beating was loud, like the crack of a wooden board, and he was unconscious within 30 seconds.

They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance – retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.

There’s no hiding the fact that China is still run by savages.