Category: Media

How evil are you?

But I lied.

From My First Attempt: “Obviously, the plan is too simplistic to work in real life, but this is a blog.” Indeed™.

Hallelujah! The world’s greatest book, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R. H. Blyth, is back in print. Blyth was an English professor who happened to be in Japan when WW II broke out, and he spent the war years studying Zen and writing books explaining the concept of the non-concept to Westerners. This is a book I had in my olde college days that’s been out-of-print for too long, and the news that it’s back to life is marvelous, simply marvelous.

Blyth shows that Dickens’ Artful Dodger is full of Zen, for example. Really great stuff. Read the whole thing™.

One of the things I like about geeks is our charming belief in the inherent goodness of human nature; this is also one of the things that annoys me about geeks. I like to make fun of the geeks who believe that some new widget is going to end world hunger, liberate the human spirit, and usher in a new era of utopia. Not that technology doesn’t improve and extend human life in all sorts of ways, but there’s always some element of self-deception in the most extreme of these utopian fantasies. Interestingly, the self-deception generally rests on the assumption that the great mass of humans are basically just as clever and just as compassionate, sensitive, and generous as the nerds engaging in the utopian exercise. As errors go, this is an especially interesting one to make, sort of a false humility to the max, only maybe it’s not false.

The latest and clearest example of nerdly utopianism is Joi Ito’s essay on Emergent Democracy. I’m not exactly sure what Emergent Democracy is, even after reading the paper, since he doesn’t exactly bother to define it, but it seems to have something to do with ant colonies, blogs, and the excitation of columns of brain cells by these things called “thoughts”, which turn into “understandings” when enough of them are set in motion:

The proponents of the Internet have promised and hoped that the Internet would become more intelligent, enable a direct democracy and help rectify the injustices and inequalities of the world. Instead, the Internet today is a noisy place with a great deal of power consolidation instead of the flat democratic Internet many envisioned.

…The tools and protocols of the Internet have not yet developed the necessary features to allow emergence to create a higher-level order. These tools are being developed and we are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate the anticipated political model enabled by technology to support some of the basic attributes of democracy, which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments. It is possible that new technologies may enable a higher-level order through emergent properties, which will enable a form of emergent direct democracy capable of managing complex issues more effectively than the current form of representative democracy.

Emergent democracy apparently differs from representative democracy by virtue of being unmediated, and is claimed by the author to offer superior solutions to complex social problems because governments don’t scale, or something. Emergent democracy belief requires us to abandon notions of intellectual property and corporations, apparently because such old-fashioned constructs would prevent democratic ants from figuring out where to bury their dead partners, I think. One thing that is clear is that weblogs are an essential tool for bringing emergent democracy to its full development, and another is that the cross-blog debate on the liberation of Iraq is a really cool example of the kind of advanced discourse that will solve all these problems we’ve had over the years as soon as we evolve our tools to the ant colony level.

Somehow, it’s hard to take any of this even a little seriously. Political theorists since Plato have warned that direct democracy is the worst form of government, essentially mob rule, where emotions rather than logic, reason, and evidence rule. Social psychologists have confirmed this, adding that groups generally function at a level of intelligence only slightly higher than their least capable members. Scale the behavior of groups up to the entire societies, and nothing gets any better, blog or no blog.

Legislative acts are often very complicated. Consider the federal budget, a bill so complex and detailed that it fills five volumes each the size of War and Peace. The vast majority of lawmakers who vote on the budget don’t have time to read it, and they rely on the opinions of specialists on their staffs, among lobbying groups, and within the party staff for summaries. The prospect of even having an intelligent discussion about the budget on weblogs, let alone writing it in the first place, is simply absurd.

As society grows more complex, we rely more and more on specialists to help us understand the issues, and blogs certainly are useful for disseminating the opinions of experts to a somewhat larger audience than before. But expanding the debate on the budget from an audience of a couple thousand people in Washington to a couple tens of thousands on blogs is nowhere near what the authors of “Emergent Democracy” have in mind. The problem, of course, is that The People don’t have the time to delve into the details of each and every issue that confronts the government of a complex modern society; we also don’t have the interest.

Frankly, I don’t think the people who like to fantasize about how blogs are changing government really have an interest in government either, because if they had even a passing awareness of how government really works they would not get caught up in such nonsense. Geeks are used to dealing with complex systems that follow regular rules and are ultimately understandable by the slash and burn of logical analysis. Government is understandable by these methods only if those conducting the analysis have the requisite information about the ways the government system actually works. It seems reasonable to believe that you have to understand a programming language, an operating system, a GUI, a database, and a network protocol to understand a typical modern computer application. So why is that our utopian geeks believe that it’s possible to understand government without a similar understanding of the campaign process, the committee system, the interaction of lobbyists and legislators, and the mechanisms by which the media magnify the influence of different parts of the system at different times?

Geeks probably do think they understand these things despite the fact that they’ve never really studied them and couldn’t give a coherent account of how any of these things work at a significant level of detail.

So I’d like to suggest an exercise for our utopian technologists: show how your technology can affect the passage of a legislative bill on a measure close to your heart; then try to make it happen in real life, and analyze why your expected result didn’t materialize. Then let’s talk about world hunger.

UPDATE: the debate also rages on Joi Ito’s blog.

Bill O’Reilly’s coming in for his share of attacks now that the Justice Department has arrested Islamic Jihad fundraiser Sami Al-Arian for aiding and abetting the murder of 100 Israelis. Here’s one example:

Skewered by ‘Dean of Mean’ Bill O’Reilly — a Survivor’s Tale

Earlier this month, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly found himself on the other side of the firing line for having used the term “wetback” in a discussion about illegal immigrants on his nightly program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”

The Al-Arian indictment is 120 pages long, is supported by 40 wiretapped phone conversations as well as other physical evidence, and looks hard to beat. The man hasn’t been convicted, but it’s not looking good for him. Most of the news accounts of the Al-Arian story neglect to mention the fact that the hot-headed O’Reilly actually broke the story over a year ago that Al-Arian had extensive ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Nuzee.com is a blog index that features RSS feeds, so you can check blogs at a glance.

It’s a great time-saver.

Jeff Jarvis has awarded me the prestigious Jeffie Award for being the Most Curmudgeonly Blogger. I consider this a slight, because I deserve the Lifetime Achievement Award for Curmudgeonly Blogging, not just some little annual prize, so once again we have evidence that Jarvis, the people of New York, media hacks, and all people associated with award competitions are abject morons not fit to share this planet with me.

Where does this fool get off thinking he’s in a position to award prizes to me?

I’m very, very disappointed.

Michele, editor of a small victory, has withdrawn from the rigged and tainted Bloggie Awards:

There’s significant evidence that the voting is rigged. Judges themselves have stepped forward to say they got together with other judges to decide on who in their circle should win. One judge said that she didn’t bother to read the blogs she didn’t know and just voted for the ones she read regularly.

…

I am withdrawing my name from the ballots. They can give my place to someone else, or just leave it blank. I don’t care.

I’m totally impressed, and feel like she qualifies for the Lifetime Achievement Award in Integrity. If the others who were nominated who weren’t part of the circle jerk will kindly follow Michele’s lead, we can uncover the bad guys from who’s left.

The most glaring example of the unsavory nature of this competition can be seen by looking at the Lifetime Achievement Award. In the entire history of the blog, there have been exactly two people who qualify for this kind of recognition, Evan Williams (the Blogger guy) and Dave Winer, the longest running blogger, the original quality blogware producer, and the architect of the XML/RPC standard. Evan was awarded his sometime in the past, but Dave (whose contribution is actually greater than Evan’s) didn’t even make the finals, against such do-nothings as Rebecca Blood and Matt Haughey. Give me a break.

And any blog award that can’t find a nomination for Instapundit is ridiculous on its face.

I don’t say this because either of these guys is my buddy; I’ve never met them, and I trash both of them on a regular basis. But facts are facts.

Amish Tech Support isn’t pleased with this year’s Bloggies, and neither am I, so let’s Boycott the Bloggies:

So, what do I think? Well, first off, I think I should have just taken my nomination form, greased it with Vaseline, and shoved it up my ass for all the good it did. In a way, this looks like a grassroots groundswell reaction against the big folks: Vodka, InstaPundit, Steven Den Beste, James Lileks. Little Green Footballs managed a political, but if mainstream even brushed against you, kiss accolades goodbye.

Yup. Awards for blogs are silly in concept, but if somebody is going to hold himself out as running an awards competition, he really has to do a better job than the bloggie people do. Their categories are silly (“Best GLBT Blog”), their nominations don’t fit their categories (Fark is a political blog? News to me), and most of the blogs that are recognized leaders, like Lawrence says, are omitted.

I really wish that somebody with the time and energy to make a go of it would run a blog awards competition with a rational nomination process, and that the people who deserve to be considered for a genuine award competition would kindly boycott the Bloggies and go for this new award instead. Call it BlogStars, since the name Bloggie is already taken by these amateurs, and set up some categories that make sense, such as best political content, best news content, best regional blog, graphic design, style (not limited to graphics), humor, insight and analysis of current events, technology, arts and literature, movies, weirdest personal diary, Mondo Bizarro, Knee-Jerk Liberal, Legal content, Academic content, that sort of thing: categories that don’t cubbyhole a writer into one and only one area, and categories that people care about instead of Best Latin American blog.

In the meanwhile, I’m boycotting the Bloggies.

UPDATE: Brian the 646 Guy was one of the randomly-selected 50 nominators who whittled the nominees’ list down to the final 4 in each category, and he’s pissed too. Here’s the list of nominees they were given, and it’s short several blogs I know were nominated.

UPDATE: Anonoblogger Centrs explained how the contest was rigged by block voting, but now doesn’t want to be quoted and has deleted her post, as a good caring person should when they’ve said too much. Here are the salient portions, posted before centrs got the call:

“the main problem? it’s rigged. the numbers are grossly skewed. i like nikolai as a person and i know that his intentions are good, but there is just no objective, scientific way for ballots to be cast. this is not even nikolai’s fault. he’s a nice enough person to trust other people to be nice too. unfortunately, they just aren’t…

…i also know that the email padding and nomination committee conspiracy is absolutely true.

for those of you with great weblogs and awesome designs that thought you might be nominated, you didn’t have a chance. you really didn’t, so don’t take it personally…

…i think we need to clarify that nikolai asked people to help him and only a handful responded. of that handful, 75% are of a group that agreed together in advance on how they would vote, actual ballots be damned. they were proud of it, bragged about it and had a good laugh at the fact that they figured out how to beat the system. a system designed by a teenager who was just trying to have some fun. it is misleading to say you only voted once when that vote carried so much weight.”

Oddly, centrs pulled the post out of concern that it was linked by “homophobic” sites, but one of the chief complainers is a gay community webzine, East West, who noticed that one of the finalists for GLBT blog is, you guessed it, straight:

A special note on this category: One of the nominees is not like the others, Min Jung Kim, put forward by some ignorant and misguided Texans as well as herself is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, but that didn’t stop her, according to Nikolai, from pointing out a “loophole”, whatever that means, that allowed for her inclusion. By this very logic East West should be nominated for best Canadian because we eat maple syrup, love Canada, and have friends who live there. Wouldn’t that have been funny? No, not really.

You find your bigotry where you want, because East-West has some unkind things to say about Andrew Sullivan’s sexual orientation (“That Gay Jackass”, to be precise).

Meanwhile, I’ve received, from Mr. Nolan, a list of the e-mail addresses of the 50 who made the final picks, and was not surprised to see that a third were free accounts at Yahoo, Hotmail, and Netscape.

The ultimate issue here is that a group of people, [apparently from Dallas], decided to rig the contest, and the procedures set up by young Nickolai made it real easy for them to pull it off. You have to wonder about people willing to go to that much trouble to win a Wil Wheaton award.

ANOTHER UPDATE: centrs clarifies in the comments that she’s not an anonoblogger, identifies herself, and on her blog posts a detailed run-down on the cheating and the reactions to its disclosure.

She answers the question of why people would be willing to expend so much energy on this particularly lame award competition: they’re Texans. Living out there under that ferocious sun, cut off from civilization, and surrounded by ignorance, Texans are known to go loco from time to time. I know, I used to be one.

My advice to Texans who can read: get out while you still have a chance.

PeterPribik.2y.net is live again; Joe Bob says check it out.