In Lieu of an Update, a Nitpick

Some time way back was a post about some of the hitches we're experiencing as our cultural digitization accelerates. Since then we've seen the unwarranted social media manhunt of Ryan Lanza, beautiful but fake Hurricane Sandy photographs, the bursting of the "Romney will win in a landslide" filter bubble, and so on. But today we're revisiting a recipient of the original post's criticism: QUOTE SITES.

There's a whole bunch of them out there, but they're pretty much the same: websites amassing pithy sayings from famous people and inviting browsers to search and peruse their ad-dappled indexes. One such site is Philosophical Quotes, whose Twitter feed I've recently begun following.

A few days ago, @philo_quotes posted:

« Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another. »
Plato

Which is a beautiful quote -- but doesn't it sound sort of familiar? 

Plato technically did write that, sure. But in the Republic the line is spoken by Glaucon, and his suggestion that astronomy belongs in the philosopher's curriculum is immediately shot down by Socrates, Plato's mouthpiece within the dialogue. It's equivocal to present the statement as part of Plato's philosophy, since it was only proposed in order to be dismissed.

Yeah, sure. Nobody cares, nobody needs to care. But it's essentially erroneous information that most people following @philo_quotes (over 150,000 of them) will credulously accept. However much we might disagree with his assessment of astronomy's value, our man Plato was a stickler for the truth and would not appreciate being quoted out of context.

I emailed Philosophical Quotes to point this out. The site master thanked me for doing so, but the quote is still there. Well, whatever. Why should he give a shit?

To me this is another line (however small) underscoring the supreme necessity of the fact checker amidst our century's unprecedented gout of information. It also implies that a greater share of the burden of verification has been foisted upon the consumer's shoulders, whether he knows it or not. Want to be a more effective Internet user? Read more books.

On Comments On Current Events, Part 1

All day Friday, the only thing anyone on the Internet wanted to type about was the incident in Connecticut. Of all the commentary I've parsed, my favorite has been:

Take that, us!

Judging by the contents of my Facebook and Twitter feeds tonight, our friend's prediction was accurate.

This demonstrates one reason why joyless fuddy-duddies like me complain that the Internet and the new mass media landscape are reducing people's attention spans. (Because it is, because it does.) Social movements can't gain much momentum if The Issue of the Day (whatever it may be) is contending with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, video games, etc. for people's attention.

Oh, but look at all of the the #guncontrol vociferations we've retweeted! Of course we care! Of course we feel strongly about this and want it to change!

Feeling strongly and vocalizing about a social problem will never be enough to make it go away. Posting fiery comments on Facebook and Twitter, signing petitions, and sending copied email texts to your congressman makes little to no difference. Whether the issue is gun control, foreign policy, reproductive rights, etc., getting anything done requires groundwork.

I speculate that it's hard to muster up and sustain the kind of ardency and outrage that compels a person to put aside what he's doing, change his routine, and dedicate himself to activism (because activism, whether of the personal or organized sort, is pretty much the only way social change is ever deliberately effected) when (a) TV, video games, Facebook, and the rest of that list are constantly and perpetually pulling his attention in different directions (b) the use of these media is tremendously reinforcing, making it less likely that the user's behavior will deviate toward a direction away from them (as activism often requires).

(How many dedicated activists, do you suppose, play World of Warcraft on a regular basis?)

Again -- this is speculation, and only speculation. I can't confidently assert that the ease of mass communication and potential for mobilization offered by social media are offset by its general sedative effect. Nor can I say with any certainty that the public of the early 21st century is actually more opiated than the public of the early 20th or 19th centuries, but something tells me that the Internet, television, and games are a much more potent tranquilizer than the classical diet of theater, dime novels, and booze.

Yeah, yeah -- I'm not saying it should be everyone's responsibility to go out and save/change the world. But it would be nice if people, instead of just posting about it on the Internet, asked themselves what they could do, as individuals, to help fix the thing they're complaining about. And I wonder if a social environment so saturated with such powerful multimedia distractions inhibits the fostering of focused and committed activists.

Speaking of escapism, here's another comic. My name is Patrick (hi, Patrick!) and I'm part of a problem.

Zombies for Sale

Scotus Week continues here in the States, and while the main event (the healthcare reform ruling) won't come cartwheeling into the ring until tomorrow, Monday's first act caused a considerable hubub. There was the surprising draw match in the matter of Arizona v. United States, but what raised my eyebrow (and blood pressure) was the United States Supreme Court's reversal of the Montana Supreme Court's decision in Western Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Attorney General of Montana. In a nutshell: the Supreme Court still believes its Citizens United ruling was a fine thing, and that a state government with a contrary law on its books needs to get with the program.

You've certainly heard enough wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Supreme Court's pernicious decision that the United States would be better off as a de facto oligarchy, so I'll try not to do any more bitching here. But I do bitch about it. And sometimes my bitching enters the ears of younger folks who, for whatever reason, aren't constantly wringing their hands and reloading CNN.com's frontpage every twenty minutes. Occasionally these kids will ask me what I'm screaming about and want to know the reason why Citizens United tends to make people hysterical.

What's the story with Citizens United? Well, it basically entitles tremendously wealthy entities to make indefinitely tremendous political expenditures. In order to keep pace with their opponents on the campaign trail, politicians will be cuddling up even closer to business interests in exchange for donations.

Well, gosh! But what do all these donations buy? Well, they buy. You see, it takes a lot of. Hmm. Well. This is a good question.

Let's get our facts together here with some help from OpenSecrets.org!

According to a breakdown of campaign expenditures in 2008, of the $6.53 million spent on communications in the 2008 presidential elections, about $3.6 million went towards "broadcast media," i.e. television spots. And whoever spends the most money on television adverts is probably going to win the election. Small block quote from part of an election roundup:

The historic election of 2008 re-confirmed one truism about American democracy: Money wins elections.

From the top of the ticket, where Barack Obama declined public financing for the first time since the system's creation and went on to amass a nearly two-to-one monetary advantage over John McCain, to congressional races throughout the nation, the candidate with the most money going into Election Day emerged victorious in nearly every contest.

In 93 percent of House of Representatives races and 94 percent of Senate races that had been decided by mid-day Nov. 5, the candidate who spent the most money ended up winning, according to a post-election analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The findings are based on candidates' spending through Oct. 15, as reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Continuing a trend seen election cycle after election cycle, the biggest spender was victorious in 397 of 426 decided House races and 30 of 32 settled Senate races. On Election Day 2006, top spenders won 94 percent of House races and 73 percent of Senate races. In 2004, 98 percent of House seats went to the biggest spender, as did 88 percent of Senate seats.

There's a rarely-discussed subtext here, and a question that isn't usually posed. Why does this happen? Why in the world should the candidate with the most television commercials win the election? That's not how the system was built, was it? 

Why would TV adverts (or robocalls and and junk mail campaigns for that matter) be the determinants of a presidential election if the voters -- whose civic obligation it is to participate responsibly in said election -- are keeping abreast of current events, the accompanying issues, and the candidates' positions on them, like good citizens are supposed to do?

And it is not difficult to keep track of this stuff. The debates are all televised. We have armies of journalists following both campaign trails and investigating both candidates' histories, and they're all trying to one-up each other in bringing new information to the public's attention. And let's not forget that we're living in an age when finding a candidate's (any candidate's) stance on an issue of concern is as easy as typing (for instance) "romney on emissions" into Google and clicking the "search" button.

What person who knows his* own convictions, has determined which issues supersede the others in their importance to him, and has done his homework on the candidates, their backgrounds, and their pledges would be swayed in one direction or the other by an unctuous attack ad? For that matter, why would he need someone calling him or knocking on his door to remind him to cast his vote on election day?

Because these people don't determine our elections. Elections in America are determined by Americans. God help us.

Political campaigns spend oceans of cash on television adverts because all the data indicates that elections are determined by what strategists euphemise as "low-information voters:" the tens of millions of reality TV-watching, Budweiser-drinking, food court-plodding dunderheads who can be counted on to agree with whomever speaks loudest and to vote for the guy whose campaign ad they saw most recently (if they vote at all) because they can't be bothered to be distracted from their distractions. These are the people the campaigns need to reach in order to win, and they can do so most effectively by buying up more commercial time than their opponents.

Political organizations wouldn't be spending millions on flimflam if they didn't have very good reason to believe that the voting-age citizens upon whom an election depends are extremely susceptible to flimflam.

Yeah, well. What do you expect? People are stupid.

No! Shut up! They don't have to be. But we build them that way, and so they are.

This is a talk for another time, though.

You have to admit it's a very nice little game that's been arranged, though. You have a cadre of humungous multinational businesses and industries whose products, services, and collateral runoff make and keep Americans dull, disinterested, and tranquilized. (Whether this is by design or as a side effect varies on a case by case basis and is another conversation entirely.) Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, these entities can pump as much money into presidential campaigns as they please. The election effort becomes a contest between candidates to curry favor with enough of these entities to afford to broadcast their "messages" (vote for me because vote for me) to the largest percentage of the same masses that said entities have systematically zombified and rendered otherwise inaccessible. Whoever buys the most zombie votes then assumes his new position of power, which he uses to repay his obligation to the entities by helping them achieve a further consolidation of their power.

You'd almost suspect it had been orchestrated, like some sort of political Magic: the Gathering combo. But it's more likely that things just tend to work out for people when they're already controlling most of everything.

* Yes, yes, I know I use the male pronoun as a default, and I'm aware that it's exclusive on the implicit assumption that the voting "person" is male. But "his or her" is clunky and "their" is incorrect. Someday I will switch it up and default to female pronouns for a while.

The other Walden, the Videogame

Savvy reader Adam points out that Walden, A Game is not the first attempt at a Thoreau video game and directs us toward Transcend, a no-budget app game by Chris DeLeon (who calls it a "notgame," which is evidently now the video game counterpart to the ten-minute student art film). Not that you're necessarily going to like this any more, but this did affect me in interesting ways, writes Adam, and just like that I became obliged to investigate Transcend.

The "game" is simple: using the touchscreen, you guide your character (represented by the letter "A") along a procession of screens representing such diverse, immersive environments as "field rendered in ASCII characters," "underground path rendered in ASCII characters," and "cave rendered in ASCII characters." Along the way you encounter three companions (each represented by a different letter of the alphabet) who blurt out a greeting, follow you around a while, and then peace out when you reach the beginning of the next "level."

Transcend is an inane, clunky, sub-bush league game that's no fun to play and can be completed in less than fifteen minutes if you're able to blunder your way through the more arduous screens. But the whole thing basically exists to feed you Walden quotes (which appear onscreen as a deliberate voice reads them out loud) whenever you cross from one screen to the next:

Our life is frittered away by detail.

“Is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

I am eager to believe that DeLeon is the most brilliant troll to haunt the "art game" scene, but his website and all the text in Transcend that wasn't extracted right from Walden suggest he might have acted with the same oblivious, totally unironic earnestness as the academics working on Walden, A Game. But either way, he's managed to design and put up for distribution on the App Store a game that actually berates you (though indirectly) for wasting your time on it while you're playing it. Adam writes:

It made me angry. I played it on an iPad I'd just gotten as a gift, and it made me hate myself for using the thing, angry about my job, etc.

I never used it again after that, quit my job the next week, and gave away the iPad a few weeks later. And some time thereafter actually picked up Walden at the library.

This is a Walden game I can support (even though I'd never play it again or actually recommend it be played by anyone else). By trying to render the "world" of Walden as an expansive pseudo-environment where the player is made to spend minutes or hours virtually tending his virtual bean patch, foraging for virtual berries, observing virtual chickadees, and other narcotic Harvest Crossing XI-type activities, Walden, A Game overreaches and becomes something totally contrary to the principles argued for in the very book on which it is based. Transcend, on the other hand, is a piece of shit game designed for an inessential electronic toy/status symbol that repeatedly tells you that you'd be better off doing more worthwhile things with your time. If Thoreau were sufficiently alive to appreciate the irony (whether intentional or no), I think he'd be positively tickled.

Well played, Mr. DeLeon! (Or notplayed, as it were?!)


(Before anyone asks, my own relationship with video games remains complicated. That might be a talk for another time, though.)

Stuck in My Craw File #429520: Walden, the Videogame

The Onion, America's finest satirical journal, has been really spot on for the last couple of years. Remember that piece about the grotesque new MacBook? How could you forget it? The one about the new Six Flags rollercoaster based on a miserable codependent relationship with a woman named "Deborah?" Priceless. And what about the story about a bunch of University of Southern California academics receiving $40,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to design a video game based on Henry David Thoreau's Walden? Har!

Oh, wait. That last one wasn't The Onion. It was TIME.

Well. Let's talk about Walden, a Game. It's the only way I will be able to get over it.

Composing a more substantive response to this news than ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING was a greater challenge than I thought it would be, likely because the incongruity between what's written in Walden and some fan's idea to make a video game about it should be so searingly obvious to anyone who has so much as read the book's back cover, and in so little need of explanation as to actually defy explanation. But as I am of the belief that one is better off not holding any convictions unless he can articulate and account for them, I suppose I'm obligated to scrutinize the anatomy of my knee and its peculiar jerkings.

Question one: what's this Walden book about, anyhow?

In brief: this guy Henry David Thoreau, a sort of libertarian hippie type, believes that there's too much bullshit in the modern world ("modern" meaning 1840-1850) and its outstanding effect is a population that's widely unhappy and dull. Thoreau posits that a happier and richer life would be one lived with a minimum of unnecessary bullshit, and to test this idea he goes out to live by himself in a little shack in the woods by Walden pond, where all he has to worry about are securing and maintaining food and shelter. He finds that when one lives deliberately and severs as much "civilized" nonsense from his life as possible, a kind of lucidity follows, tuning him in to the essential sublime brilliance in all things, et cetera et cetera.

So from the beginning: this is a piece of literature whose main argument is that people would be happier shedding the trappings of technology and engaging more directly and personally in their transactions with the world. And now there are some people, people who have presumably read this book more than once, who want to turn it into a video game. The NEA is giving them $40,000 in taxpayer money to do it.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? SERIOUSLY ARE YOU ACTUA

So I guess my question is what's the bloody point? I'm imagining something like Animal Crossing (the most depressing game in the world) without the cutesy visuals, and with snippets from Thoreau's writing wedged between the completion and assigning of fetch quests. My personal hope is that players who manage to achieve a 100% (or 200% as the case sometimes may be) completion rate in Walden, a Game are treated to a special message à la Guitar Hero à la South Park: "GO OUTSIDE."

On that note, may I suggest a substitute to playing Walden, a Game? 

GOING OUTSIDE.

Of course everyone should spend time in nature; but not all of us are able to set aside our lives for the time it would take to conduct an experiment like Thoreau’s, says the game's lead designer.

Fair enough. But do you suppose Thoreau would prefer that those interested in his ideas and legacy spent five, ten, twenty hours hunched before a computer screen indoors, following his pretend footsteps in a pretend forest; or that they tore themselves away from all the screens in their lives for just a few minutes and went outside? Found their own special places? Thought their own thoughts? Experienced their own moments of revelation?

Would anybody truly be willing to argue that someone who goes outside for half and hour and practices a deliberate mindfulness of his surroundings experiences less of nature than he would by playing a video game about experiencing nature in his sterile, climate-controlled, artificially-lit bedroom or cubicle for the same amount of time?

Walden, a game [sic] posits a new genre of play, in which reflection and insight play an important role in the player experience. While traveling the virtual world of Walden, the player applies themselves to both daily task of maintaining the basic aspects of life at Walden Pond, as well as having the opportunity to focus on the deeper meaning behind events that transpire in the world. By attending to these events, the player is able to gain insight into the natural world, and into connections that permeate the experience of life at Walden.

I don't think you can gain real experiential knowledge about nature and the world through pseudo-experience. That's not how it works.

You want to talk about the great outdoors? It reeks.

Nature is full of awful stenches. Nature is uncomfortable. Nature is mud and hairy coyote shit and vomit balls with fractured rodent bones poking out. Nature is rotting logs, grubs, maggots, and mold spores. Nature is a cloud of flies jumping from a half-decomposed animal carcass to a dung pile to your cheek. Nature is walking into spiderwebs face first, sap and evergreen needles stuck between your fingers, tripping on tree roots, and falling into poison ivy. Nature is blackberry seeds stuck between your teeth, trees with four-inch thorns protruding from their trunks, gnats flying into your eyes, poisonous snakes, ticks buried in your skin, and bears taking your food. Nature is sweating, shivering, bee stings, briars, and wet feet in the winter. Nature is pissing against a tree, shitting in the bushes, and wiping your ass with leaves.

The first step toward achieving that transcendental wonder for the wild world is to appreciate the fact that the living part of planet Earth did not make itself with any regard for you, your comfort, or your capacity to comprehend what it is and what it does. This is not something you can really know until you've been out in the thick of things (I never really grasped it myself until going on a camping trip that very nearly killed me), and the thick of things cannot be conveyed by a virtual "environment" that only communicates to your visual and auditory senses.

The potential for those sublime moments of peace and truth is always there, but you can't really receive them without first exposing yourself to the grime, stench, and discomfort. Supposing your can get the full taste of one without sampling the other can only be called shallow and shortsighted. It's the difference between diving into the pond and wading at the edge with your trouser legs pulled up to your shins. It's the difference between the living, growing, respiring thing and the mass-produced polystyrene image of it. It's the difference between doing something and playing a video game about it.

If you want to learn about nature, go outside and pay attention. You don't even need to be out in the middle of nowhere to do it. Nature is everywhere. The planet you're standing on is nature. Find a public park, a vacant lot, or really any place where the weeds are pushing up  through the concrete, and just pay attention to what's going on around you.

It might take a few minutes. It might take a few visits. But it's happening.

If you want a kid to understand nature, take him outside. Don't make him play Going Outside: the Game.

If you want a kid to read Thoreau, make him read Thoreau. If he is incapable of absorbing ideas that aren't being delivered through a video game, then Walden probably isn't for him anyway.

What we have here is a video game that's probably not going to be much fun, replicates something most people can do without a computer (going outside), and is designed to convey a set of ideas that you can simply go ahead and read without any intermediary Animal Crossing nonsense. It's basically pointless. And given that it's based on a book admonishing humanity for all the inessential nonsense it lugs around with it, Walden, a Game seems doubly pointless, and doubly demeaning to the spirit in which Thoreau wrote it.

The NEA grant is just insult added to insult -- Walden, a Game ain't a $40,000 idea, and with so many austerity hawks in Congress looking for programs to cut, the NEA picked a very bad time to endorse such a ridicule- and publicity-prone waste of treasure.

Misinformation Age

Some lateral supplements to the last post:

1.) A friend of mine used to edit Wikipedia articles in order to win bets. He and a buddy would be out drinking somewhere, and they'd get into an argument about the veracity of some factoid or other.

"If you're so certain you're right," my friend would say, "why don't you put twenty bucks on it?" So they'd shake on it, each convinced the other would be handing him a twenty the next time they met.

My friend would make sure he got home (or at least to a computer) first, and then immediately open up the Wikipedia page pertaining to the contentious topic. Discovering that he was actually in the wrong and stood to lose twenty bucks, he'd click "edit" and alter the article to verify his argument.

A couple of hours later, he'd give his buddy a ring and refer to their wager.

"Yeah, I looked it up. Guess you were right," his buddy would grudgingly admit.

My friend has done this more than once.

I'm not condemning him -- a twenty dollar bill is a lot to lose for being wrong about a trivia question, after all. But instances like these are an unavoidable collateral of the open-sourcing of knowledge, and they are worth considering -- especially as Wikipedia settles into its elected role as the source of information.

As a nonprofit institution, Wikipedia has to employ its editors on a volunteer basis, and these dedicated sifters of the knowledge vat take their duties quite seriously. My friend's changes were doubtlessly spotted and reversed. But when a prankster or vandal pulls something like this, how many trusting readers see and accept the false information before somebody notices and corrects it? In the case of a particularly obscure topic, how long is it before a knowledgeable reader or editor removes the false information, and how many people see and believe it before then?

Who remembers the term Wikiality, coined by Stephen Colbert?

But back to my friend's bamboozled drinking buddy. "He's an idiot," you might say. "He should have checked other sources."

But does anyone check other sources anymore? Do we expect ourselves to? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers: what's the percentage of Internet users who consult Wikipedia as their go-to instant reference, and then just leave it at that? Of the people who use Wikipedia on a daily basis, how many of them regularly check an article's sources and revision history?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a joyless buzzkill of a Luddite who reads the worst in everyone and everything and can take a wonderful creation like Wikipedia and treat it like it's a problem. But is it better to just ignore stuff like this?

2.) Part of my job at the Quaker retreat requires me to compile a weekly events bulletin. Early on, I got in the habit of including a quotation from one of my favorite authors and thinkers at the top. Some weeks I'll sit down with something specific in mind. Some mornings I'll sit down an hour before the thing needs to go out, and I'll cheat -- pick a famous thinker, activist, leader, etc. on a whim, and just punch "[name of person] quotes" into Google. Topping the list of results is almost always BrainyQuote.

At least Wikipedia strongly insists on the citation of its contributors' sources. BrainyQuote apparently has no such policy. If a famous person is reputed to have said something -- such as Freud's "sometimes as cigar is just a cigar" -- it gets slapped up on BrainyQuote. (If there is a Freud text actually containing this quote, there are some Freud scholars who would be very interested in knowing about it.)

But the quote I found one morning was another supposedly attributed to Freud:

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

If there was ever a sentiment espoused by a German psychoanalyst that would resonate with Quakers, this would definitely be it. But when I copied the quote and pasted it into Google, all of the results that popped up were from similar "things famous people said plus advertisements" sites, none with any citations. But eventually I found this on the FAQ page of a Freud museum in London:

Where did Freud say that mental health meant the ability "to love and to work"?

This formula was cited by Erik Erikson but it is not to be found in Freud's works, although the sentiment is sometimes implied. During his long engagement Freud stated that his own ambition in life was to have Martha as his wife and to be able to work (e.g. "Couldn't I for once have you and the work at the same time?" Freud-Martha Bernays 21 Oct. 1885). Freud also referred to Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity] as the foundations of society. In 'Civilization and Its Discontents' (1930) he wrote: "The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love... "

So yeah: the first (and therefore more authoritative) Google result for pithy Freud aphorisms attributes to Freud two things of which there is no record of the man ever actually saying or writing. It would be difficult to argue why this frightens me -- in even such a minor instance -- without getting into a cumbrous philosophical argument, so we'll skip that.

I have unfortunately lent out my copy of 1984, so I can't quote Mr. Orwell directly; but if you've read the book, you understand the Party's conviction that the past only exists insofar as what people know about it (i.e. what they're told about it) in the present. We can put whatever words into whomever's mouths we wish, provided enough people believe the words were actually said by this person. The apocrypha becomes the reality. (The Founding Fathers all held beliefs identical to those of today's evangelical Christians; Oceania is at war with Eastasia and has always been; Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well; it says in the Bible that if we're good, we go to heaven as soon as we die.)

But what we're observing today actually isn't as Orwellian as it is Huxleyian. (Huxlian?) In this case, the past is not distorted or reinvented because the records have been altered, lost, or destroyed -- but because nobody bothers to read them.

(Postscript: Mr. Pangrac suggests "Huxley-esque." That's a big derp on my part.)

3.) Speaking of misinformation, here are twenty-five people who think Barack Obama killed Andrew Breitbart. And these are likely just a handful of the whole pack.

Why do I doubt we've heard the last of this? If a baffling cultural bugbear like birtherism could hatch, grow, and slouch around for so long without dying, I doubt we should count this new one as a freak flash in the pan just yet.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen: between now and November, will any well-known public figures (the equivalent of a Donald Trump) go on television and say something to the degree of "hey, I'm not SAYING Obama had Breitbart whacked, I'm just wondering -- isn't it just SUSPICIOUS is all?"

Now, on to some Other Stuff.

A.) The print version of my novel should be available by early April, inshallah.

B.) I'm considering putting up Google ads on this thing. Yeah, yeah -- I'm not thrilled about the idea either, and I don't expect it to amount to anything more than nickels in a change jar. But my financial circumstances are such that even some extra coinage isn't something I'd turn down.

Us, the Web Kids

A few days ago, Mr. Hulcher -- an old acquaintance with whom I have shared many steamy late night conversations (all most assuredly heterosexual) over the years -- brought to my attention a manifesto of sorts titled "We, the Web Kids."

Composed by one Piotr Czerski, it hails the web-nurtured youth of the modern age as something like a generation of real-world Newtypes and the Internet itself as an epochal engine of transformation that's changing society and humanity in a wholly and unquestionably positive way.

It's a bold statement -- and like most bold statements, it comes from a proclaimer who probably didn't think things completely through. As I am (1) of the opinion the the truth and/or essence of any matter lies between pairs of contraries (2) sometimes accused of being some kind of joyless, elitist Luddite, I feel compelled to offer a contrarian's two cents on Mr. Czerski's credo.

What Mr. Hulcher first brought to my attention was this excerpt from the piece:

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.

This is not the first time I've seen this thought expressed (nor will it be the last), and it never fails to raise a lump in my throat.

My stock response to this is that there's a tremendous gap between possessing access to knowledge and possessing knowledge. What worries me is the thought that people are becoming unable to differentiate between the two, and more inclined to feel that the latter is as good as the former. There's a proportionately wide distance between understanding something and getting the gist of it, which is usually all you acquire from punching a question into Google or skimming a Wikipedia page.

Yes, yes -- Wikipedia is a wonderful source of information and I use it as a reference all the time. Not everyone can afford of stack of hardcover encyclopedias. Not all of us are fortunate to have a well-funded and maintained library in the vicinity of our residences. But the suggestion that being able to look something up on Wikipedia is just as good as learning something is absurd. Introspection will tell us that most of the time, we don't retain what we read when we browse Wikipedia, hopping from article from article at arbitrary points.

Knowledge (and the process of acquiring and internalizing it) changes people, and I would like to think -- perhaps naively -- that it's usually for the better.

I recently read a John Muir quote printed on a woman's tote bag: When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.

Naturally, the knowledge corresponds to the physical facts. You don't have to be a tech devout to perceive that there's no Wikipedia article that's not connected to another. Deepening and refining your understanding of one aspect of existence tends to affect your perspective on the rest of the world's contents, changing how you think and act (again, I would hope for the better) during the intervals between glances at your computer monitor or smartphone.

If we permit ourselves to internalize and actually possess only generalized notecard versions of the facts and place all the rest into some external knowledge vat, we're cheating ourselves, denying ourselves the opportunity to let all of this information actually affect us -- to ferment from data into knowledge and make us a smarter and better people. I'm reminded of those middle-aged men who spend tens of thousands of dollars on exercise equipment and show off their personal gyms to visitors, but then only use the free weights or treadmill once every week or two -- or of those college classmates I knew who'd download 100 gigs of music on Soulseek and Limewire and then only really listen to 5% of it. Both parties might as well have not even bothered. (I have dozens of these metaphors. How about a person who spends all his time in the library and only ever reads the the dust jackets?)

Long story short: I would admit the Internet is a promethean milestone in the development of humanity if it made more people more knowledgeable rather than more capable of accessing tidbits of information on the fly, parroting them, and shortly forgetting about them.

As it stands, my overall inclination is to suspect that the Internet is better at giving people fewer reasons to learn anything than actually helping to make them more intelligent. Referencing something gets you a quick answer; learning something brings you understanding. One is quick, the other is slow. When you don't take the time to learn, you're not actually learning -- says the joyless elitist Luddite.

[W]e feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it.

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.

Although Mr. Czerski does not repeat the DigiMao "information wants to be free" chorus word for word, he arrives just short of it and ignores the fact (like most web cenobites) that not all information is equal. Given his jab toward journalism at the end of the piece, let's focus on that for a moment.

We already know that many of our most venerated newspapers as having trouble adapting to the 21st century because, thanks to the web, people don't want to pay for news anymore. They're as unwilling to pay for print subscriptions as digital pay-per-view articles. We might attribute this behavior to (1) the fact that free access has become the standard (2) bloggers and news aggregators have a tendency to comment on paraphrased versions of the newspapers' stories, essentially giving the product away for free. The newspapers' web revenue dries up because the leeched traffic makes their pages less valuable to advertisers. (That's one prevailing of the story in a nutshell; doubtless you wish to correct me.)

As someone shooting his thoughts at you from his own "web-log," I sure can't say I'm opposed to blogging. And since some of you are probably arriving here from the Twitter, you know I can't say I wholly despise microblogging. Nor can I say that social media, under the right circumstances, doesn't provide a valuable service that traditional journalism has a hard time matching; particularly in spontaneous, chaotic scenarios that erupt in places where journalists are not present. For instance, we would probably know next to nothing about the NYPD's abuses during the Occupy Wall Street crackdown if it weren't for web-savvy activists at Liberty Park; before that, most of the information we got from the Tehran and Tahrir Square protests came from youngsters armed with mobile phones and Twitter accounts.

Some feel that this demonstrates that traditional newspaper-style journalism is outmoded and not long for this world. Soon it will be replaced largely by the bloggers and twitterati, and we will lose nothing in the exchange except for the pesky notion that information on current events should come with a price tag.

Blogging and tweeting work best as a supplement to traditional reporting. They are no replacement for investigative journalism -- the kind where a reporter goes beyond the event itself and presents why it's happening, what precisely is happening (because there is more than one angle to any event, and the version that's reported immediately as it happens is often inaccurate), and to place in in the context of other events, both local and global, short term and long term. This is not as easy a thing as it sounds.

Journalistic organizations (or "corporations," to use the pejorative) complain about the Internet eating all of their money because they run a business with a high overhead. Stuff that's not already in the external information vat takes time and resources to gather, check, correlate, and present. Thus, newspapers -- especially those with reporters and bureaus spread across the globe -- might take it personally when the public decides they don't want to pay for news.

Bloggers, tweeters, and news aggregators are very good at commenting on and disseminating information that's already in the vat, but most of the time they're not contributing anything new. Even in our shiny happy brave new wired world, traditional investigative journalists are still the ones doing the most arduous work toward putting breaking information and extensively-researched analyses of current events into the vat.

I recently read a great piece in The New Yorker about Obama's transformation from post-partisan idealist to cynical Washington pragmatist over the last three years, which the reporter (Ryan Lizza) constructs from internal White House memos and details from the Obama administration timeline. This is very good, very useful information about our elected head of state that does much to contextualize his behavior in office. A part time blogger would not have been able to write this. He wouldn't have the time, the resources, nor the access. It was likely the only thing Mr. Lizza worked on for at least a month. (In the for-profit blogosphere, going a month without updating is suicidal.)

Contributing new and meaty information to the external knowledge vat requires time and toil of a degree that somebody unable to dedicate the better part of his waking life to said information's acquisition would be unable to put forth. Journalists, like the rest of us, require food and housing; and serious investigative reporting (unlike blogging) is not the sort of thing one can do well when he has a day job and can only do his research and writing on evenings and weekends.

When the public decides that it deserves to have the fruits of a professional journalist's labor for free, what is a professional journalist to do?

Hey! Why doesn't he start a blog, slap up some Google ads, and sell coffee mugs and T-shirts?

If he's Perez Hilton, that might work. But if he's the sort of reporter interested in filing long, dry, information-rich reports on complicated, unglamorous things and old and unphotogenic policymakers whose names the public probably doesn't recognize, he's probably not going to have much luck breaking even. (Especially when he's not able to update every other day.)

Why don't we tell him to stop whining and fund his work via Kickstarter?

Between journalists, which do you think would be more likely to get enough cash to get his project off the ground: the one who wants to write an investigative profile of video game designer Tim Schafer or the one who wants to write an investigative profile of Hussein Tantawi (Egypt's "interim" head of state)? Yes, we both know which probably contributes more toward ensuring a well-informed voting public (which is absolutely necessary if the citizens of continent-spanning economic and military powerhouse with a plethora of international interests and commitments are being trusted to choose their own statesmen), but why do I get the feeling that most netizens would throw their five bucks toward the former and ignore the latter?

History will probably show that the decline of investigative journalism coincided with a sharp uptick in the number of YTP vids and dissertations about silly video games. I wonder if this constitutes Mr. Czerki's "we take for free but we give something back" web kid ethos? Sure -- we'll drive you and your medium out of business by getting your contributed information elsewhere for free (while telling you it's your fault); and in return, we add to the vat 843,316,629 pointless Rage Comics and nine-minute monologues about the post-broadcast editing of Derpy Hooves's My Little Pony debut and what it means for civilization. To me it seems this doesn't quite constitute a balanced account, but remember that this opinion comes from a joyless elitist Luddite. Don't take it to heart.

We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities....

Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy.

Tell me what democracy looks like!

Actually, it often doesn't look so good.

While we regard ancient Athens as the birthplace of Western democracy, it's worth remembering that the city's most accomplished thinkers thought democracy was a really bad idea.

I often hear people claim that the Internet is democracy incarnate, and civilization could/should/will evolve into a libertarian direct democracy as it integrates the Internet more deeply into its nervous system. This, they say, is a thing to be greatly desired.

I think that the idea that a democracy is the best society -- and the more direct the democracy, the better -- is an idea in need of reexamination.

In its purest form, the democratic principle is one whose logical endpoint can be summed up as:

What is most popular is what is best.

By the standards of democracy, the best food is McDonald's, the most worthwhile human pursuit is watching television, and World of Warcraft is the second most important thing in the universe, exceeded only by everything else in the universe (if a subject's importance to humanity can be gauged by the amount of information humanity compiles about it). This is why it's important, I think, that people get smarts before they get suffrage. (Again, I would be a lot more optimistic about the potential of the Internet as a tool for broadening general knowledge and civic competence if I couldn't pick any report on CNN.com, scroll to the bottom, and read the viewer comments section without immediately craving liquor and sleeping pills.)

(Statement: I am not advocating a dictatorship or other authoritarian system as an alternative. I do not presume to prescribe anything. I am in favor of whatever system of government will sustainably benefit the most members of the public over the longest period of time. After watching half the American public cheerfully vote against their own interests every other year, I am not confident that democracy is that system.)

A friend suggested once that the elected legislators of our country could (I'm not sure if he also said "should") be entirely replaced by an Internet-enabled direct democracy. Basic idea: every measure is simply put up for a vote, every citizen with an I.P. address can cast an e-ballot, and the government proceeds based on the majority vote. Pure, direct, simple, good.

Your joyless elitist buzzkill of a Luddite would like to express a few reservations about this proposal.

I. Most members of the voting public haven't the time or interest to read every piece of national business going up for a vote. Remember when everyone was in an uproar about how long and complicated 2010's healthcare bill was? Imagine if you -- as a responsible citizen who is honor-bound to cast a knowledgeable and reasoned vote about the matter at hand -- had to go through pages and pages of legislative text every freaking time something was to be voted on. Most people frankly have better things to do, which is why we select and subsidize statesmen to do it for us (ostensibly on the basis of their diligence and competency).

II. If you hadn't noticed, the masses tend to make foolish and shortsighted decisions about -- well, just about everything. People tend to react to events with kneejerk responses and snap judgements rather than reason. If any research has been taken toward measuring what sort of effect the culture of the Like/Dislike Button has on this natural human tendency, I'd be interested in seeing its findings.

There are plenty of things we could do to fix, say, our carbon emissions problem. (It's been awfully warm for February, don't you think?) How about a gas tax that would funnel cash into public transportation, infrastructure, and alternative energy sources? It sure makes sense in the long term -- but it would be cumbrous and painful in the short term, and that's the sole object of most people's concerns. Again, this is a problem of human nature. I would hail the Internet if it could train people out of it, but something tells me it's doing more harm than good in this regard.

But back to the idea of web-enabled direct democracy: imagine if government was even more subject to the prevailing public mood on a given day in making its decisions. How effective is the House of Representatives? It's an intransigent, smoke-blowing clusterfuck precisely because its members are the most subject to public mood swings of all our statesmen. A direct democracy means everything becomes more like the House of Representatives.

III. People tend to be very easily swayed by demagogues. If you lean left, think about Glenn Beck mobilizing the loonies in the 2010 midterms. If you lean right, think about all those electrified kids who voted for rock star candidate Obama despite having only a vapid understanding of current events, domestic policy, etc. The more direct the democracy, the more power is granted to charismatic charlatans who are best at stoking and taking advantage of the basest instincts of the masses -- and one might guess that they can do it better with an extremely efficient, ubiquitous, and unregulated mass medium at their disposal. In the information age, misinformation travels and settles with more rapidity than ever before. (OBAMA IS A MOOSLIM might be an instance.)

Ancient Athens had a much more directly democratic system of government than our own, and they were extremely prone to demagogues who goaded the voting public into making very, very bad decisions. You can read all about it in Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War -- and it looks like you might just have to take a look at the book instead reading the summary. Its Wikipedia article is pretty bare bones; the reason for this is because it's not as immediately interesting to the public as, say, Beyoncé, whose Wiki page adds up to 11,000 words to the History's 3,400.

(Once more: in a true democracy, what's most popular right now becomes what's most urgent and important.)

Hm. Speaking of the Greeks.

The impression I get from reading texts about and by the ancient Greeks is that the average educated Athenian citizen was, proportionately, much smarter than the average American citizen. (Yes, yes -- it's not totally fair to compare the educational institutions of an ancient city state and a modern nation state with very differently-constructed societies. I know) Greek education placed a superlative emphasis on memorization and the internalization of knowledge. They were famously able (and required) to memorize very, very long chunks of the Iliad and Odyssey -- assignments that would be decried as absolutely unreasonable by the students of today's public schools (and their whining parents). There is no reason to suspect their powers of retention were limited only to poetry.

Socrates -- a much wiser man than you or me --famously condemned the advent of the written word because he feared what might happen if human knowledge became externalized:

[T]his invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

This quote exists within our cultural knowledge today because pupil of Socrates named Plato remembered it -- and then wrote it down. And you're reading it now because I was able to punch "socrates written word" into Google and copy/paste it here.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Again: I can't say that the Internet isn't tremendous; that it hasn't done a lot of neat things and won't continue to benefit and astound us. But I feel as though the notion of it as an unalloyed blessing to humanity is, to put it kindly, somewhat overstated. Or, to put it frankly, it's a fantasy. The reality is that, at best, the Internet is a tool that lets people do the same old shit people have always done since antiquity in a more rapid and less thorough way; and at worst, it's mostly serving to make people more scatterbrained, frivolous, demanding, and shallow: it's more a massive annexation of Newton Minow's vast wasteland than the bridge to a better future and a better humanity.

Either way, your joyless elitist Luddite acknowledges that he loses. The wheels turn with too much momentum for anyone to halt at this point. But before he stops typing and passes out for the evening, he'd like to share a few words from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts....

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.

As we go full steam ahead toward our digitized New World, I can only hope we'll consider what we're jettisoning in order to get there.

ON ANOTHER NOTE, you should totally buy my book, which is available for the Kindle and all like devices. It has no Luddite whining and is in fact about ska bands and sunrises. And it's not even eight bucks!

Transmission (under the hood / of ideas)

Well, this business with The Zeroes (my novel, now available for the Kindle and all enabled devices!) has been on my mind pretty constantly for the last week or so, so I haven't had much opportunity to worry myself with much else. In order to calm myself down, I went back to Jersey for the weekend to visit the family, meet up with friends, play EarthBound, and generally avoid doing or thinking anything productive. I needed a break, dammit.

The day after I arrived home, my car began acting funny. You know what you don't want to see when you open up the hood to take a look? TRANSMISSION FLUID EVERYWHERE.

So I'll probably need to have a new transmission put in or buy a new car. The place I'm living/working at gives me a $500 stipend once a month. In all likelihood, a new transmission will effectively cost me two months' pay.

All of a sudden it seems tremendously imperative that I move as many copies of The Zeroes as possible. (Available on Kindle! Check back in two to three weeks for a print version! FOR GODS SAKE I NEED THIS REALLY

In the meantime, I haven't got much else prepared this week -- except for maybe this letter I wrote to a colleague recently. Guess something in his one-paragraph message must have hit some sort of spigot.

Sorry for taking so long to answer. I’m awful at keeping up with personal email, since my inclination is to give the most worthwhile response possible to anyone who took the time to write me a worthwhile response. So instead of just answering these things off the cuff, I put it aside and think it over – and then forget about it until I’m cleaning out my inbox three to six months later. Ach.

Your praise is much appreciated, and I can understand and sympathize with your not reading fiction. Novels aren’t really in vogue these days (except for the kind with vampires, private detectives, and/or vampire private detectives that you buy at the airport, read in a week, and then never touch or think about again), and people with artistic temperaments tend to gravitate towards alternative forms that promise a bigger audience and a greater potential for gain. (Well, the sensible ones do, anyway.)

I think this New Media business is partially to blame – and not only because of the havoc it’s been wreaking on our attention span/s (“span” in the individual case, “spans” in the cultural). Why follow the life of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina when you can just flip on some reality TV show or follow somebody’s Facebook feed a few years backward? Why push through some author’s pretend version of events when the world now converts itself – seemingly automatically – into a series of concentric, simultaneously-occurring narratives that perpetually spell themselves from one day to the next?

I think there’s still a place for good fiction – even if not many people are writing or reading it anymore.

I recall once reading a tract by some Nietzsche/Kierkegaard-spouting philosophy student about how he stopped reading fiction and now only reads philosophy books because fiction doesn’t go far enough. At its best, he says, it’s only distilled philosophy.

My tendency is to see it as the difference between an idealized principle and the situation “on the ground.” You can read an economics textbook and get an understanding of what the markets should be expected to do over the next few months or years, but there are always too many unseen variables and fudged assumptions at play to do anything but produce educated guesses. Nor can you understand the whole extent of any situation within the system on purely economic terms; there is more to humanity during a given fiscal year than what they produce and consume. Another comparison (one closer to my heart) would be how Kepler’s Laws should permit you to understand and predict everything about planetary motion within the Solar System, but that’s not the case. They’re extremely accurate, but it’s the smaller variables – the orbital perturbations from the interactions of the planets’ gravitational fields on each other, for instance – that prevent the idealized model from fully matching the truth of the situation.

Fiction is very often philosophical, but philosophy always assumes nice, round, easily-divisible numbers and simplified cases that prevent one from fully understanding its implications within dynamic, mutable circumstances without accounting for the particulars. Am I making any sense? It’s the difference between the Republic of Plato and North Korea’s “socialist paradise” (their words, not mine). It’s the difference between reading a statement like “the meaning of the world does not reside in the world” from some early twentieth-century philosopher and understanding what this might really mean (or how it might apply) to a person living their life on this planet.

Fiction gives us a controlled environment in which we can explore what happens when the pure idea is introduced to the muddy reality. (Plato would certainly agree that any object from the World of Ideas can never be pulled into physical existence without suffering some significant wear and tear.)

Sometimes the truth is too elusive and subtle to be condensed into a declarative statement. Sometimes it’s too good at evading articulation to be conceived (or conveyed) on its own. Fiction offers us a way of giving these fragments a “delivery” vehicle, without which they would be meaningless and inert.

If a novel doesn’t take its argument and follow it to the scary, uncharted place it needs to go – stops short at a point where it’s easy to do so – then that is the fault of the novelist, not the novel. (Of course, nobody really understands how far anything goes. That’s why people still puzzle over philosophy and write novels nobody reads.)

(Another problem I have with replying to email like this is that when I finally get around to it, I end up penning very long answers to questions I wasn’t actually asked.)

Long story short: maybe you shouldn’t read my novel, but I’d suggest taking War and Peace for a spin while this life affords you the opportunity. If you ever break your abstinence from fiction, that is what you should do it with.

Yrs,

PR

#SOPA

Aha. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) -- the panic button du jour of the web-savvy. For the last month or so it's been all over the papers, blogs, and status updates. Google came out against it. Boing Boing, Reddit, and Wikipedia blacked themselves out in protest; various bloggers and webcomic artists took down their pages on the same day in solidarity. Facebook and Twitter users adopted STOP SOPA avatars. David Reese (of Get Your War On fame) came out swinging against it. Thousands of concerned netizens copied emails to their senators, signed petitions, and hashtagged #SOPA.

Their protests did not fall on deaf ears. On January 14, the White House voiced its opposition to the bill in its current form. Six days later, the Senate tossed the bill into procedural purgatory. We're sure to encounter it (or something similar) again in the future -- but for the time being, the Internet remains safe for AMVs, sprite comics, lipdubs, Let's Plays, and all the rest of the time-wasting nonsense that brings a glimmer of joy to our gray little lives.

I do not wish to suggest that the staving off of SOPA is an insignificant or negative development. Its passage would have been a disaster. However, the ferocity and extent of the public outcry that led to its mothballing is curious -- especially when we consider that #occupy, a movement aiming to correct the disparity of wealth that still stands as a long-term threat to our national stability, has all but disappeared from the public dialogue.

What can we learn from this?

When it comes down to it, we're actually pretty okay with the fact that our economic system benefits a tiny, established elite at the expense of everyone else. For that matter, we're not really so concerned about our crumbling infrastructure, our unsustainable energy policies, our foreign wars and exorbitant defense spending, the rising oceans, our borked education system, the federal budget deficit, or the fact that we're still leaving people to rot in GITMO without trials or terms of release.

But if the The Man thinks he can take YouTube away from us, he's got another thing coming.

I guess it's comforting to know where the American public is willing to draw the line.

Recently, I finally got around to reading George Orwell's 1984. I'll say nothing about that now -- except that I recall reading an essay somewhere about the contrary visions of the future as laid out by 1984 on one hand and Huxley's Brave New World on the other. In Orwell's Oceania, the ruling class uses terror and brutality to remain in power; in Huxley's 632 A.F., order is maintained by keeping the populace perpetually occupied with toys, games, sex, and consumerism. The author's conclusion was that our present is more in line with Huxley's vision than Orwell's.

Pop quiz: Should we interpret the tremendous outcry over SOPA as another point for Huxley? (Include the soma riot in chapter 15 of Brave New World in your answer for a gold star.)

#occupy Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Last night I went to sleep in a really foul mood. When I woke up, the first thing I did was check the news, so I began this morning in an even worse mood.

You've probably already seen the reports. You don't need to be told that Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD brought the truncheon down on the Occupy Wall Street camp at Liberty Square last night.
Some weeks ago, when touring the park and dropping off some supplies for the campers, my friend James ominously stated that the NYPD's budget outweighs that of some smaller nations' sovereign military forces. The scene that began at around 1:00 a.m. was practically a YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK exposition for the pleasure of New York's Republicans and sadists.

Nor should it be news to you that journalists were aggressively prevented from accessing the scene (and in several cases bullied) by the police, so most of what we know about the crackdown comes from Twitter, yfrog, and YouTube. You don't need to be told the stories of unprovoked beatings and gassings, wanton (hell, downright gleeful) destruction of protestors' property (tents and tarps were slashed, cameras and computers were broken, and I can only imagine how much donated food was chucked into the garbage trucks that pulled up to the park along with the police vans and sonic cannons), and the refusal of Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD to comply with a New York City judge's ruling to allow protestors back on the scene.

You don't need to be told. All of this is old news. Every columnist, blogger, and interested social media user has already reported the facts and weighed in, leaving your present armchair correspondent with precious little to contribute. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll be able to move on from the subject and thinking about something else until I've tossed my two cents (well, three) into the distended coin purse of Internet discourse.

FIRST CENT: THE FATE OF THE LIBRARY

Scratch that. Contrary to previous reports, the famous Liberty Square Library has not been destroyed, which makes the diatribe I had prepared (and its exquisite allusions to Alexandria) totally unnecessary. This would make me feel so much better about the whole thing were it not for....

FIRST CENT: JUDGE STALLMAN AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

This afternoon -- hours after a New York County Supreme Court Justice issued a restraining order against Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD -- Judge Micheal Stallman ruled that the demonstrators' first amendment rights do not permit them to camp out at the park indefinitely, and that the police crackdown (bulldozers, pepper spray, batons, and all) was all good and legal. And just like that, Liberty Square has reverted back to Zucotti Park -- for now. Protestors are being allowed back on the site, with the proviso that they can't build another campsite.

There's a whole lot about this to make one feel scared and upset, but on the whole, the movement probably stands to make a net gain from this. Just when the American attention span was in danger of flitting elsewhere, and a month before the merciless New York winter threatened to move in and kill the movement slowly and ignominiously, the Liberty Square occupation goes out with a great sound and fury that shocks the whole world into tuning back in.

For the time being, public assembly isn't altogether banned -- and if the Occupy crowd can muster the tenacity we've come to expect from them, they'll back, tents or no tents. Bloomberg and the NYPD just giftwrapped them a reason to press forward, and here's hoping they rise to the occasion.

SECOND CENT: MAYOR BLOOMBERG'S BONEHEADED STATEMENT

"We have been in constant contact with Brookfield [the park's owners] and yesterday they requested that the City assist it in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules in the park," Bloomberg writes. "But make no mistake – the final decision to act was mine."

I can admit -- through a great deal of teeth grinding -- that Bloomberg's case, in its own limited context, is not an unreasonable one. But toward the end, there's a part I cannot read without biting my tongue:

Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.

A major motivating force of Occupy Wall Street was the fact that nobody who mattered -- lawmakers, executives, members of the mainstream media -- was listening when people tried to get a word in about America's growing income divergence and systemic flaws in its economic system over the noise about debt ceilings, job creators, and Kim Kardashian. Since writing blog posts, mailing letters, submitting articles to left-leaning magazines, and holding lectures wasn't convincing our greasy-palmed policymakers that economic injustice is a real and very serious national problem requiring an earnest solution, some people decided to find a more visible platform on which to air their grievances.

And now Bloomberg congratulates them on a good try and tells them their time is up. Two months is all they get before their platform gets yanked out from under their feet. Better luck changing the world next time, kiddies; also, you're welcome for the two months.

Putting aside the arguments about right to assembly, that last sentence is what really boggles my mind. If saying a thing like "now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments" with a straight face in a post-Citizens United America isn't absolutely daffy, it must be smug and malicious.

You already know about the Supreme Court's unfortunate ruling that handed America's oligarchic interests their own personal bullhorns and national P.A. systems for the sake of "free speech," so you don't need to be told. It was already the case that the entrenched minority could control the media, but Citizens United now allows them to pick and choose which politicians they want to see running for office, and spend however much money they want filling the airwaves with slander and misinformation.

Admittedly, that does read like a hyperbole. We're exactly not looking at a Netrunner future just yet -- but the point is that the wealthy have more free speech than the rest of the populace. They get to control the conversation. They pick what's on TV. They pick what's on the radio. They pick the issues our lawmakers are willing to fight for. Occupy Wall Street was a brilliant tactic towards leveling the playing field and circumventing the gatekeepers to introduce economic injustice into the national dialogue. (Before #occupy, you sure as hell didn't hear those words mentioned beyond "fringe" publications.)

Without a sustained public demonstration, we're back to "you've got your free speech and I'VE GOT MY FREE SPEECH." The encampment was precisely what gave the demonstrators the ability to make their case heard. Without that platform, the people who are driving the push for accountability in the financial industry and an America that isn't rigged against most of its citizens' interests are stuck trying to shout over the owners of the world's biggest megaphones.

THIRD CENT: TEABAGGERS AND TROLLS

I'm seriously starting to wonder if Karl Rove isn't cutting checks to people who troll CNN.com's user comments sections with "TAKE THAT HIPPIES OCCUPY A SHOWER WHY DONT YOU HA HA HA HA" bilge.

Earlier tonight I expressed this sentiment on another social media platform and received these responses from a distant acquaintance:

Karl Rove hasn't paid me shit. You'd be surprised how many people, myself included, who feel all this occupy nonsense is a waste of time. And furthermore that it is populated mostly by young academic types who can afford an ipad to tweet about their 'noble' endeavors. Most of those who are really getting fucked by the system are too busy actually going to work in order to feed their families to bitch about it. 

Of course there is a minority of haves and a minority [sic] of have-nots. That is how it has been since the dawn of civilization. Why should that suddenly change? And as for all the socialist idealists present at these protests, they need to wake up and realize that socialist and communist societies are just as guilty as capitalist ones of having extreme inequity between rich and poor. The only difference is that at least in capitalism you have an outside chance of making it into the privileged class with a mix of hard work and luck.

Compared to most of the rancorous gibberish I've been reading all day to furnish myself with excuses to take smoke breaks, this is positively constructive and reasonable.

But the point is that the sheer loathing directed towards the evicted Occupiers is astonishing. They're all stoners. They're all criminals. They're all basement-dwelling America haters. If they're not pampered, soft-handed academics, then they're penniless, filthy hippies. They're nothing but a bunch of whiners who don't understand how the world works. They should just get a $50,000 a year job with health benefits, like I did, because it's really just that easy.


Okay. Let's assume, for argument's sake, that the Occupy demonstrators really are nothing but a bunch of stoners, inexperienced students, unemployable burnouts, and messy hippies. Does this really make their grievances any less valid?

And to introduce some variety into our sources, let's look at a few numbers offered by FOX News' own Juan Williams. Thirty-nine percent of Americans fully approve of Occupy Wall Street. Seventy-six percent agree that the United States' economic structure disproportionately favors the wealthy. Fifty-five percent feel that income inequality is a significant national problem. Sixty-eight percent favor raising taxes on citizens earning more than $250,000 a year.

So why are we hurling epithets at the people -- be they hippies, stoners, slackers, or hell, even frustrated working stiffs -- who are making a serious effort to get America to notice and confront the fact that it has transformed into a de-facto oligarchy?

"Get a job," they're told by people who already have jobs, and choose to ignore the 16% underemployment rate and a minimum wage that has not kept pace with living expenses.

"Go out and vote," they're told by many of the same people who, in their next breath, complain about partisanship, gridlock, and the remarkable inability of Barack Obama to get even a god damn jobs bill passed during a period of widespread chronic unemployment.

Can you blame them for feeling as though the conventional avenues might not be a viable option?

And there's still more to this. A characteristically brilliant piece by Matt Taibbi hits the nail squarely on the head:

Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it....

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Let's pull out our cultural barometer and see what's in the air right now.

The acquaintance we heard from above blithely admits that people are getting fucked by the system. We know and accept that our government is broken, our politicians are bought, and nobody in power has the balls to give our most pressing issues anything more than lip service; we understand that the Supreme Court has basically tossed aside judicial impartiality, but we're also aware that nobody will listen if we complain. We know that the bankers who crashed the economy have gotten off scot-free and are still making billions of dollars ripping off the have-nots and helping the haves turn their money into more money, and most of us are apparently perfectly willing to let this slide. We accept that climate change is going to drown our cities and decimate our agricultural capacity, and we're not doing a thing to prevent or prepare for it. We know the food we eat is probably killing us, but that's cool too. We know the folks in the board rooms at our inescapable multinational corporations care singularly about profits, but we've come to expect that from them and learned to live with it. We've embraced the emptiness of our culture to the extent that we now celebrate vacuous bullshit with a lack of irony that would make Andy Warhol's speed-addled brain turn somersaults, and we're tired of trying to resist it. You already know all this; you don't need to be told. Nobody approves of how things are going and nobody's happy with how they are, but we've convinced ourselves that we have no choice but to shake our heads, take our stress-reliever of choice, and get on with our lives as they are, because nothing we do will make an ounce of difference.

And when a motley group of students, hippies, literati, and urbanites devises a model (albeit temporary) alternative and propose that things should be and can be different, we castigate and tear them down for having the nerve not to resign themselves to the insufferable status quo that the rest of us invited on ourselves and continue to hoist upon our backs.

The losers had it coming. God bless America.