Britain's very own The Guardian, is currently featuring a brilliant piece by Zoe Williams on the true nature of the word "irony," its use, and (more often) misuse. It's obviously written from the perspective of a Brit (Americans are referred to in the third person) and contains some delicious gems of hilarity throughout.
What a lot of people around here have been calling "ironic" really isn't. It's just cynical. So you don't read the New Yorker ironically, you just read it with a touch of cynicism and personal distance. Nor does an overly active ironic tendency cause one to not enjoy things like Harry Potter. That's jadedness. And it isn't ironic to appreciate bad movies for their sheer inconguity. That's postmodern.
For a slight change in the theme of this post, consider my favorite paragraph from the essay: "But other strands of media use irony to assert their right to have no position whatsoever. So, you take a cover of FHM, with tits on the front - and it's ironic because it appears to be saying "women are objects", yet of course it isn't saying that, because we're in a postfeminist age. But nor is it saying "women aren't objects", because that would be dated, over-sincere, mawkish even. So, it's effectively saying "women are neither objects, nor non-objects - and here are some tits!" Scary Movie 2, Dumb And Dumberer, posh women who go to pole-dancing classes, people who set the video for Big Brother Live, people who have Eurovision Song Contest evenings, Charlie's Angels (the film, not the TV series) and about a million other things besides, are all using this ludic trope - "I'm not saying what you think I'm saying, but I'm not saying its opposite, either. In fact, I'm not saying anything at all. But I get to keep the tits." As Paul de Man pointed out, some time before FHM, "This does not, however, make it into an authentic language, for to know inauthenticity is not the same as being authentic."(4). So, we're not the first age to use irony (as some insist), but we are the first to use it in this vacuous, agenda-free and often highly amusing way."
This kind of insertion of the absurd into sincere discussions has always bothered me, as it seems to be a way of totally short-circuiting productive discussion under the guise of avoiding conflict. It certainly manages to do that, but it does so by failing to say anything at all. Call me whatever you want, I still think that there ought to be things that one takes a stand on, about which one truly says something without hedging. That's why I like my pastor's preaching so much. Yes it means you open yourself to getting nailed. But damn it, there's got to be something worth that.
Yeah, it's been something of an interesting week. I saw Alex & Emma on Tuesday, which was terrible. It came on a night of rather personal coversation, and those who should know about it either already do or can ask me, because I'm not airing that kind of thing in this space.
I spent more time out on jobs than is usual for my normally sedentary self, so I'm a bit stiff to boot, but that's as far as I'm going to descend into outright diary-style ranting. I am firmly convinced that blogs are not an appropriate outlet for that, becuase most people, let's face it, don't really want to know.
I haven't been doing much reading these past few days, so I don't really have much to offer in the way of juicy links. With any luck I'll be headed out this evening to a baseball game, and to give Josiah his paycheck for helping out on the Woodbridge job last week.
Right. Umm, right. Look here. Explicit lyrics. At least I think you could call them lyrics. I'm just too disturbed and amused to really get a clear analysis.
The RIAA, may-they-suffer-unpleasant-diseases, has decided to go after customers directly. Articles are available here and here. Apparently, they're planning on filing hundreds or thousands of lawsuits against individual consumers who share their music collections online. I'm taking bets as to how much the industry revenues drop in the next four quarters. I, for one, from this point refuse to buy anything but independent music.
This article at Slate asserts "The Rich Do Get Richer," and argues that the Bush tax cuts prove that "The rich have figured out how to use the federal government to help them stay that way." Now I'm not sure what I think about the Bush tax cut, though I'm inclined to favor it (heck, it saved me a few hundred on my last tax return, and I'm poor. What's not to like?) But the article, by Daniel Gross, makes reference to this piece by Jane Katz and Katherine Bradbury (Acrobat required), and misconstrues it in the way that most liberals are want to do.
The original essay by Katz and Bradbury indicates that those that inhabit the upper and lower income quintiles were more likely to be in the same place in the 90s than in the previous decade. Gross takes the quote "Compared to 30 years ago, families at the bottom are poorer relative to families at the top and also a bit more stuck there," at the conclusion of the Katz/Bradbury article and uses it to assert that the poor are poorer than they used to be while the rich are only getting richer. In doing so, he has entirely overlooked the word "relative" from the quote in question.
If you examine the data presented by Katz and Bradbury, the only possible conclusion is that the real income level of all 5 quintiles has gone up, but the upper quitiles went up more than the lower ones on both an absolute and relative scale. Inequality has indeed increased. But while the upward trend is smaller and smaller the farther down the income scale you go, the shift is indeed upward for all quintiles. The poor are not getting poorer, they're just not getting richer as fast as the rich. So yes, the income disparity level has gone from 10 to 14, but the truth of the matter is that real income has gone up across the board. Stick that in your income redistribution pipe and smoke it.
I just read a brilliant piece entitled "Power and Weakness" by Robert Kagan over at Policy Review. It's a deeply insightful analysis of the growing divisions between America and Europe concerning domestic and foreign policy, and has some application for the growing internal division in the US. It's the longest thing I've linked to yet (11K words), but borders on essential reading, so give it a look. For further reading, consider Andrew Sullivan's essay "The Euro Menace: The USE vs. The USA," published recently in The New Republic of all places.
I'm continuing through the writings on Julian Dibbell's blog. This morning I read an essay called "Unpacking My Record Collection", about the wonders of transferring music from physical to mp3 formats. The title of the essay is an homage to "Unpacking My Library," an essay by one Walter Benjamin published early last century and unfortunately unavailable on any online portal I could locate (if anyone finds it, let me know and I'll link). Dibbell's offering gets a little bit weird down towards the end of the essay, but I think he's on to something: there's something about storing music on a hard drive that physical formats simply can't match, issues of quality aside. This is why the record labels are doomed, for it seems that the killer app of the next century is not simply music acquisition, but music sharing, the one thing that they can't allow. And good riddance.
This article by Julian Dibbell has entered into the cyberspace canon. It is quite long, even longer than the other piece I linked to today, but well worth the attention. It deals with the obvious theme of blurring the distinction between reality and simulation, but applies that meme in a very interesting direction: what of the distinction between word and deed?
Joshua Ellis has a great article over on MindJack entitled "Taste Tribes" that discusses the way in which we influenced by and in turn influence those around us, concentrating specifically on the effect that the Internet has had upon the formation of these so-called "taste tribes:" little groups of people who share common likes/dislikes, and tell others about them. It's a long read (like the previous sentence), but good through to the end (okay, maybe not). Check it out.
I'm currently in Sumter, SC, visiting a friend. As you can see, I still have net access, but I won't really be around much until probably Tuesday.
Sahar Akhtar has an article over at Salon about how Apple's new iTunes Music Store is going to kill innovation in music by "unbundling" songs from albums.
The argument goes that singles do so well because they are formulaic, establish a mood immediately, and never deviate from that mood. Think radio bubblegum pop. This stuff is immediately accessible, not risky at all, and pushed by corporate types for that very reason. Akhtar (who is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke) argues that if tracks are separated then people will only but the single-type things they've already heard on the radio.
Now there might be something to this: the taste of the American public cannot be underestimated. And the vast majority of people who download music do so in single tracks (which really annoys archivists like myself - get the whole album people!). But I think that Akhtar's argument falls apart because he has overestimated the American music-consumer. He says that he himself is glad for albums over singles because some of the best songs are elsewhere on the album and never make it to the radio. But honestly folks, how many people do you think actually listen to anything other than the hit single? Akhtar assumes that people do, and given his own status he's a Ph.D. candidate at Duke) one may reasonably assume that he has decent taste and thus listens to whole albums.
I'd wager a lot on the fact that most people don't. So the only people who are going to enjoy the album are self consciously setting out to do so, not stumbling upon a good track because they couldn't get around it. The people who are looking for good music will continue to buy albums, but the people who are looking for a hit single will download only the tracks they want. Why make Philistines pay for music they aren't going to listen to anyway?
That's the title of an article on Wired about some of the more popular doomsday scenarios. Apparently the world is not going to explode due to an advanced physics project gone wrong. Or a plague of nanobots. Or...you get the idea. It's a fun read.
And speaking of death, the job at Woodbridge Foam continues. If John Simpson, my boss, doesn't get some sleep, he'll probably collapse.
Arcadia Restoration Systems - my current employer - is currently completing a warehouse cleaning job for Woodbridge Foam. The warehouse is in excess of 20,000 ft^2, which is nothing to sneeze at. As such, I will be fairly busy for the next three or so days. If you don't hear from me much until Friday, that's why.
Slashdot is carrying a story about how the Council of Europe is in all liklihood about to pass legislation that would require online media outliets to provide the "right of reply" to anyone who feels somehow slighted by said online media outlet. The resolution can be found here.
I'm not entirely sure what to think about this. On one hand, I agree with a few of the provisions in the CoE resolution, namely the idea that it is beneficial to hear news from alternate sources and that online sources can be incredibly damaging to individuals' reputations (remember what the bloggers did to Raines and Blair?).
Yet I am also inclined to agree with the analysis Declan McCullagh of News.com (article here). It would seem that the appropriate "checks and balances" upon media are already in place, as anyone and everyone can publish online, so if you don't like what someone is saying about you, it makes sense to simply write your own side of the story. Forcing your critic to run your own view of things seems a bit draconian. And McCullagh sounds accurate when he suggests that forcing "right of reply" tends to discourage controversial speech of all kinds.
Two things stand out to me here. First, McCullagh is right in his assertion that people aren't stupid and can detect media bias pretty fairly. If something sounds fishy, people can and do look elsewere for their media inputs. But what he doesn't point out is that most people like a little bias in their media. I sure has hell do. That's why I read The Weekly Standard and FoxNews more often than The Nation or Salon. I am not likely to be convinced by either of the latter sources of input, as I consider both of them to be only slightly left of Stalin and thus not worth a flaming bag of poo (though Salon does have good movie reviews). With media diversity being what it is, most people read the sources they want to hear from and ignore the rest. Thus, exercising "right of reply" might only damage the "wronged" party further, as readers of said website know that the person in question, whom they probably are indisposed to like anyway, is forcing the media outlet of their choice to run something it doesn't want to run.
Second, this really doesn't sound like freedom of the press to me. Granted, that particular legal right is only enshrined clearly in the US, but I still think it's a good thing. To me, "freedom of the press" says that anyone can say anything they want, but it doesn't say that you can make me print something you want me to print. Go do it yourself, if it's that important to you. And yes, I am aware of the charge that unless the reply is carried by the offending source it is unlikely to reach the intended audience. Tough. If that's the cost of not allowing the bureaucrats to control the press, then I'm more than willing to pay it. Otherwise, the media would be so full of retractions that there wouldn't be any space left for new stories.
To me, this just seems like an extension of the common European assumption that bureaucracy is the solution for every problem. Great guys. It's worked wonders in the past, maybe it'll work this time.
So this weekend the most interesting things I read came from The Weekly Standard in the form of two articles. The first is by David Gelernter, creator of the LifeStreams computer interface and its commercialization in ScopeWare. In the article, he basically argues for the application of his interface to online journalism, and hopes that by doing this the next great American newspaper can be born, since we obviously need one.
The other article is by Larry Miller, and is worth the read for the humor alone, the politics being fairly standard for the publication.
Enjoy. I did.
Mesh and I saw Better Luck Tomorrow last night at the $2 theater. An interesting, if cliched, film about a group of Asian high schoolers in California who venture into various criminal activities out of sheer lack of anything better to do.
Mesh pointed out, and I agree, that the whole "suburbia as a hell of ennui" is a bit overwrought these days, but to its credit the filmmakers (Justin Lin directs) at least give the characters the benefit of having the suburbia game beaten. They've got the grades, the extracurriculars, decently stable families, affluence, and the early-admissions track in the Ivy league. Still, occasionally the characters seem as if they've paid a bit too much attention to Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame.
The thing that really stuck me about the movie was the complete and utter lack of any adults in these kids' lives. It would have bothered me less if the movie had seemed unrealistic, but it didn't. Except for the slightly glossed over motivations mentioned above, this movie didn't contain any events that stuck me as even implausible. If parents interact with their kids this little, our culture is really screwed.
Andrew Sullivan has a great essay entitled "The Hillary Divide: The Gulf in American Politics" that is really worth the read. She's scary.
Those of you who keep up with new albums might recognize the title as a line from "2 + 2 = 5". As I write this I'm in the process of absorbing Radiohead's new album, Hail to the Thief, on which "2 + 2 = 5" is the first track. I am already of two minds about the album. Aesthetically, I like this album a lot more than I ever liked Kid A or Amnesiac, two albums I found to be brilliant but a bit inaccessible for me. Hail to the Thief sounds, at first hearing anyway, to be a lot more listenable over a long period of time than either of them. Musically, it seems to be a move back to the more standard rock sounds of OK Computer, which is my favorite.
Still, it is obvious that both Kid A and Amnesiac came between OK Computer and Hail to the Thief, because certain electronic, etherial sound devices persist from the intermediaries. This album is far more melodic and singable than either of the previous two. Thus far, I really like it.
Yet I am bothered by the fact that this is, as far as I can tell, Radiohead's most overtly political album. Written and produced at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, the whole album conveys a looming sense that something terrible is about to happen. From Yorke's perspective, this is the case, as in spring 2003 the US and her allies, including Britain, invaded and conquered Iraq, a course of action to which Yorke was unsurprisingly opposed. The album title itself is apparently a reference to the events surrounding George W. Bush's election in 2000, recalling a slogan used by Democratic protestors during and immediately after the election. This sounds a bit too Michael Moore for my tastes.
Part of what has previously attracted me to the music of Radiohead has been their cynical yet apathetic treatment of politics in their music. They haven't seemed particularly happy with the political state of affairs, and from what I've heard of Yorke's speech at live shows, I've always known that at least Yorke falls into the stereotypical liberal celebrity category, though he does have the advantage of being British. Yet in this latest offering, politics seems to be definitely present if not outright prominent. That's disappointing.
Perhaps this is simply Radiohead getting older. It's been, what, 6 or so years since OK Computer, and Yorke is now pushing 33. It's said that as people grow older they become more concerned with the political process: seniors are the demographic group with the highest voting percentage, and under-30s the lowest. Or maybe Radiohead is just becoming as pretentious as the Barbera Streisands and Susan Sarandons of Hollywood, people who think that because they are famous that they must have something of value to say (They're wrong).
For my part, it's a bit too early to tell. I'll have to listen to Hail a few more times before I come to any conclusions. Perhaps Radiohead can recover from this worrisome direction in future albums. Perhaps not. Only time will tell.
Believe it or not, that was the really romantic line from the movie I saw last night, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. And yes, I enjoyed it. It was terrible, but I enjoyed it. Sue me. I went with Mesh and the Roes, so at least I can claim company. Really though, it was fun.
There was one thing that bothered me though. At one point in the movie, when McConaughey calls Hudson his girlfriend, there is apparently some question as to the nature of their relationship. What bothered me is that this happened after they had had sex (presumably anyway...they got naked and stepped into the shower...what are we supposed to think?). One would hope, or at least I would hope, that once something like that has happened a few things have been cleared up. If this is really the way culture views sexuality, I'm content to be way behind the times.
Right, so we all know that FoxNews is basically the conservative mouthpiece in the media these days. The site is wont to periodically run essays from The Cato Institute, Cato being the biggest libertarian thinktank on the Hill these days. Well, someone must have blind-posted Cato's most recent offering, because today's article argues that Iraq never posed a security threat to the US. Quite a humorous thing to read on good old Fox.
As it seems to have generated a bit of discourse, I'll write something about it. Some, especially Nick, have suggested that copyright is essentially a licensing contract between me and the record labels. I think this is a crock. When the RIAA went after those college students, it didn't charge them with breach of contract, but copyright violation. There's a difference, and they know it.
In fact, if it were simply a matter of contract, then filesharing could be completely okay. How? Consider this. Everyone knows about the "click-wrap" EULAs that we all ignore on a regular basis (Come on, have you ever actually read one of the blasted things? Be honest.), and in them it says "by clicking 'Accept,' you agree to..." Let's say I buy a copy of WinXP. Let's say that I then proceed to make a few dozen copies of this and sell them for a buck or two a piece, but do so without ever installing the software or clicking "Accept." Or maybe I simply cracked out the EULA from the install program so that I never had to hit F8. I either case, I have never "agreed" to the terms of their "contract." Is MSFT going to be any less pissed off at me? Of course not. Why? Becase copyright has nothing to do with contract.
So I think I've made the point that the copyright holders don't really care about contractual issues here. But more to the point, I don't think that the idea of the "implied contract" is something we want to endorse. If we do, then all of a sudden you could find yourself having acquired all sorts of contractual obligations simply by going about your daily business. To push the example, say a TV program contains embedded in the credits a clause saying, "By watching this program you agree to pay the creators $5 a piece." You just watched the program, and if we allow implied contracts, you owe $5. That's barking nonsense.
I guess at the base of it all is the idea that I really don't like the idea of "licensing" things that you've essentially purchased outright. Say I have a piece of software that doesn't work like, oh, I don't know, WinXP? Say I'm a decent programmer, which I'm not, but just let it be for a minute. If I want to diddle with Windows to make it work right, I'm not allowed, because MSFT has said that I can't, because the software I'm running is really theirs, not mine. They've deigned to let me use it for a few, specific, and limited purposes. The fact that I've shelled out (*cough*) $500 for the software is irrelevant: I can only do with it what MSFT says I can do with it.
This is a flaming load of dingo's kidneys. I bought the damn thing, just like I would buy a bunch of bananas, and MSFT should't be allowed to tell me I can't reverse engineer anymore than the banana farmer should be allowed to tell me I can't ferment my bananas (thought he might be right about that one, it's hard to say). Same goes for music. If I've got the music in my control, who's to say I can't copy it? The record label? Who gives them the right to say what I can or can't do with my own things? Their legal department? Actually, yes. And that's what pisses me off.
I think you get the drift, and I think that's enough for now.
Yeah, so we had a big thunderstorm last night, and until about five minutes ago I had no net access. I'm back now. Nice to see I've generated some feedback...
A lot of people (think the RIAA) have made the argument that filesharing or and other violations of the existing (*cough* draconian *cough*) copyright laws are anti-capitalist, as they somehow discourage compensation for content creators. While I think that pirating music does tend to discourage buying albums (come on, people, who are we kidding here saying that downloading encourages purchases? Sheesh), I think that there is more going on here than that.
What we've really got here is an example of capitalism at work. Captialism is as destructive a force as it is contstructive (with thanks to Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree). The record labels have found that they have made a fortune selling something that shifting market realities have rendered worthless. Their response? To place restrictions upon the market to artifically restore value to their now-obsolete good. Yay.
In a capitalist system, a good is worth exactly what price the market will bear for it, the natural intersection of supply and demand curves. Well, historically, the choke point for music has been supply. The major labels have a stranglehold on producing CDs. They still do, unless you like cheap Mexican knockoffs, which I don't. But now we can get what's on the CDs without having to acquire the piece of shiny plastic that the labels make their money selling. So, essentially, the market price for these things has taken a major hit, as the supply for music has just exploded. Supply goes up, price goes down, and it's hard to argue with free.
The response of the labels has been twofold. The first has been to try and make their media uncopiable. This has proven to be a disasterious failure, as some of their efforts have been circumvented with a felt-tipped pen, and they'll never be able to do anything about the whole line-out-to-line-in loophole. So, they've tried a second tack: make it illegal to copy their media (witness the recent expansion of copyright to infinity) or circumvent their feeble attempts to prevent copying (cue DMCA, stage right). Basically, they're trying to artifically control the supply of music.
Now, there are names for things like this. "Price fixing" comes to mind. So does "communism." Free-market capitalism this ain't, folks. Copyright itself has become a legal means of artificially restricting supply and thus increasing profits, not a means of securing a livelihood. If this kind of thing were happening in, say, oil, it would be immediately actionable under any number of anti-trust laws. In fact, all of the Big 5 labels have been successfully sued for price fixing and penalized for it, though it amounts to a hand-slap. Still, I think the conclusion is unavoidable: the current state of copyright is incompatable with capitalist-style economics. Support your local filesharing network!
I came across this list of modified state mottos today. My favorite is West Virginia: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
Lee Bockhorn over at The Weekly Standard points out in today's article that certain liberal types are saying that the post-war situation in Iraq is a showcase for the end result of the Bush administration's limited-government ideology. The basic argument they make is Hobbesian, that without government things fall apart. Bockhorn is right in his critique that this is a straw man if there ever was one. But he misses the fact that if these commentators really want to make the Hobbesian argument concerningg the absence of government, they should probably come out in favor of a Hobbsian-style dictatorship. What they really favor is, as Bockman puts it, a "cradle-to-grave welfare state." I wonder if there's a difference.
One of the things that has been on my mind a lot in the past few months is the concept of egalitarianism. Anyone who knows me decently well will tell you that, for good or ill, I am not very egalitarian in my mindset. Why exactly this obtains is not something I can readily explain, but there it is anyway. Equality really isn't something that seems important to me, and I'd much rather live in a just but unequal world than in an equal but unjust world.
Economics are one side of this. The only nation-sized society I can think of that managed to create something like wide-scale economic equality (the Soviet Empire) did so by making almost everyone poor, and did so through one of the most oppressive regimes the world has seen to date. Yet the American experiment, the closest anyone has gotten to a pure capitalist system on a large scale, contains a massive wealth gap.
Then I started reading Clay Shirky's blog. He manages the Networks, Economics, and Culture mailinglist, to which I subscribe. Two of his articles, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" and "The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality", the latter of which was published only last week, set forth the following choice: "Diversity. Freedom. Equality. Pick two." Basically, in media there can be a wide range of choices, unregulated freedom of expression, and media outlets of similar levels of influence, but never all three at once. This makes a lot of sense to me, and made a lot of nagging worries about my utter lack of egalitarian sensibilities settle down significantly.
Shirky suggests that regarding media, if you leave things alone that the goodies will naturally sort themselves out along a log-type curve with a tiny fraction of participents receiving the vast majority of the goods, while the vast majority of participents will receive almost or exactly nothing.
Shirky has not yet applied this thought directly to economics, political power, etc. but I sure as hell have. If Shirky is right, he may well have destroyed a significant part of Marx's argument, an argument which has always bothered me, by demonstrating that inequality in incomes is not necessarily the result of any inherent injustice, but merely the result of a system of free choice working itself out as such systems always do.
This would, in turn, throw something of a monkey wrench in postmodernism's hatred of hierarchical systems. And this would be good for me, because personally, I like hierarchy. I like knowing where I fit on a scale of authority and respect, even if I don't get any of either. J.R.R. Tolkien is quoted as saying, "Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it's damn good for you," and I believe him.
But more than being an aid in constructing my own personal framework, Shirky may offer a way out of a sticky issue that troubles a lot of us. I think that the hatred of authority present in today's post-enlightenment age has contributed in no small part to the decline of any kind of serious ecclesiology in the Protestant church. Which is something I and others care about. Again, if Shirky is right, he may give us a tool to use in combating this anti-authoritarianism and strike a blow for the return of a serious church hierarchy.
My friend, the estimable Josiah Q. Roe has fixed me up with a blog of my very own. Thus begins my foray into the odd netherspace/community that is the net today. I've spent some time adding links and whatnot, but right now I don't really have time to make a decent first post. I'll get around to it later today.