 |
 |
 |
| |
|
Some of the Reasons Why "Friday Night Lights" is Different
And very, very good:
- Three cameras simultaneously record the actions of every actor in a scene, inspired by documentary style of D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room) and the Maysles brothers (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens).
- The show uses no sets, and instead shoots in real schools, stores, and houses throughout Austin, Texas.
- The actors don't rehearse before shooting begins, and are free to ad-lib, including...
- Non-actors recruited to play school staff, family members, and salesclerks.
Thanks for the link go to Adam, my guide through the pop-culture wilderness.
Debt and Development, Presidential-Style
Over on the Huffington Post I've attempted to connect the dots between the Hunt Oil's deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, CEO Ray Hunt's multi-million dollar contribution to the half-billion-dollar George W. Bush Library, and the long and messy history of international economic development. Go on and give it a read.
But on the off chance that you don't have the time or stomach for 2,700 words on the topic, I'll share the gist. Congress is off looking for whether or not Ray Hunt had the inside track on Iraq info because of his relationship with Bush. But what I'm arguing is that looking at these two projects -- the Kurdistan oil deal and the massive GWB library project --- in the context of the history of international economic development projects suggests that they are part and parcel of the same destructive mess with or without any sinister quid pro quo. Men like Ray Hunt and George Bush get tangled up in the same economic orbit, and we get a seemingly neverending war in Iraq.
Yeah, it's a bad thing if these dudes were conspiring to do these deals, for sure. And Congress should be looking into it. But really, what was going on in the minds of Ray L. Hunt and George W. Bush doesn't change how destructive their economic entanglements are.
First paragraph:
Co-reported alongside the news
that Hunt Oil Company of Dallas had entered into an oil development
contract in Iraqi Kurdistan was the fact that Hunt Oil's head honcho
was a multi-million dollar contributor to the planned George W. Bush
Presidential Library project. The thought was no doubt tempting:
ah ha, a shady quid pro quo between two Texas oilmen. But
resist the temptation. The modern history of economic development suggest
that the dealings between Ray L. Hunt and George W. Bush don't need
to be so conspiratorial or sinister for them to keep the world unbalanced
and in a constant state of war.
Full thing is in the extended entry.
There's
more...
Pigford: Black Farmers and Obama
Yesterday I wrote a post on MyDD yesterday highlighting one aspect of the Farm Bill I stumbled across, having to do with the compensation of black farmers connected to a 1999 consent decree involving the USDA. That post is reprinted here in full:
There's a little-noticed detail to the ongoing farm bill debate that I thought might be of some interest in the context of the presidential primary process. It has to do with Barack Obama and a uncollected restitution payments owed to many black farmers.
The deal is this. Pigford v. Glickman alleged that black farmers had faced institutional and systematic discrimination at the hands of the USDA for years and years, generation after generation. (Dan Glickman was the USDA Secretary at the time the case was filed.) In case after case, black farmers where denied loans and other lines of credit that their white counterparts were regularly granted. After years of wrangling, Pigford was finally settled in 1999 by consent decree. The USDA agreed to a process by which black farmers could apply for restitution.
All well and good, but those applications were due within six months of the settlement. It's been estimated that as many as 74,000 farmers applied for Pigford payments after the deadline. They were shut out of the settlement for good, it seemed.
And so, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been pushing for Congress to intervene and offer some relief to the farmers who were eligible for Pigford payment but somehow missed the boat. More recently, Barack Obama has gotten in front of the issue. He's co-sponsored legislation championed by the CBC in the House, with the goal of getting in passed as part of the massive Farm Bill. And he's been fairly aggressive against some inappropriate lobbying against the Pigford language by USDA employees. (The USDA is unhappy with the many millions of dollars further restitution might cost.)
In addition to the policy imperative behind Pigford language in the farm bill, it's not bad politics for Obama. Restitution is a very big deal in the rural South -- you know, places like South Carolina, Florida, and the like. It has been for many years, and the flavor of the fight for Pigford compensation is similar to other civil rights fights.
The Senate just finished marking up the farm bill. No word yet on whether Pigford language has survived the sausage making process so far. If it makes it all the way into law, and his campaign sees the political value in it, Pigford may give Obama a healthy boost in some important early states.
Senator Obama has a press release up that seems to imply that his Pigford language was accepted by Ag Committee Chairman Tom Harkin and rolled into the Farm Bill that passed the committee late yesterday. But I'm not entirely clear on that point. So I've asked his press office for clarification, and haven't heard back anything yet.
Might seem like a policy quirk, yeah, but it's a quirk worth many thousands of dollars to many thousands of black farmers.
Waxman's Committee
Today's Washington Post profile of Henry Waxman's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee office was a nice blast from the past for me. I think it's unseemly to talk to much about what went on there, but all I'll say was that working there was an honor, privilege, and education:
Waxman has become the Bush administration's worst nightmare: a Democrat in the majority with subpoena power and the inclination to overturn rocks. But in Waxman the White House also faces an indefatigable capital veteran -- with a staff renowned for its depth and experience -- who has been waiting for this for 14 years.
These days, the 16-term congressman is always ready with a hearing, a fresh crop of internal administration e-mails or a new explosive report. And he has more than two dozen investigations underway, on such issues as the politicization of the entire federal government, formaldehyde in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, global warming, and safety concerns about the diabetes drug Avandia.
...
Republicans and Democrats say that Waxman has marshaled three ingredients from his staff -- tenacity, experience and loyalty -- to make it one of the brightest spots on the new Congress's otherwise mixed record.
Well, I will say just one more thing. There's a fair amount of fake reportorial balance in the piece. Witness:
Republicans have their share of complaints. They say that Waxman's staff cuts corners, plays "gotcha" with witnesses and committee Republicans, bypasses GOP staff members by interviewing witnesses rather than depositioning them, and would rather investigate than legislate. But even some of them speak with grudging admiration.
...
The committee's style can be brash. To depose witnesses, Democratic staff members must notify Republicans, explain exhaustive legal rights and release transcripts only by committee agreement, said David Marin, the Republican staff director. So Schiliro and company favor less formal interviews, knowing that the penalty for perjury can be just as stiff. Word is out among government contractors to demand depositions whenever possible when the oversight panel comes to call.
Unless things have changed a great deal since I was there, there's nothing really brash or underhanded about the office at all. They're just very very good at what they do. They work hard, smart, and with tremendous focus and patience. (The "cut corners" charge is pretty much pure bunk.) I guess that could rub some people the wrong way, but the sense I always had was that that work gained Henry and his staff tremendous -- if, yeah, grudging -- respect on both sides of the aisle and throughout Washington.
Somebody Has the Upper Hand, But It Isn't the American Farmer
The Senate is set this afternoon to pass a massive bill that will set farm policy for this country for the next five years. What's in it? Oh, pretty much what was in it last time around, when it established nearly $300 billion in subsidies, most of which go to big corporate farms. Got a post on the topic over at Huffington Post. Here's how it begins:
On the soundtrack of the documentary Life and Debt, about the impact of the World Bank and the IMF in Jamaica, there's a song by Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka that contains this line: "American farmers get the upper hand/while our farmers [are] going one to one." Watch the movie, and it's easy to see what Mutabaruka is upset about -- Jamaicans standing in line to buy cheap Idaho potatoes while more pricey spuds grown in the island soil sit and rot.
American produce in Jamaican markets is cheaper, of course, in part because of the enormous subsidies that prop up American agriculture. Jamaica is in incredible debt to global lenders like the IMF and World Bank. And in an effort to dig themselves out, they embraced the neo-liberal open-market approach that the IMF likes best. And the effect, naturally, is that the Jamaican tuber has to compete head to head with the American spud given a leg up by its government. To some extent, a potato is a potato. And so Jamaicans buy the cheaper ones.
But U.S. ag subsidies are in some ways the worst of both worlds. They send American products out into the world with a distinct advantage. That no doubts weaken the ability of Caribbean farmers, for example, to compete in the new world order. But it's not like they're really all that helpful for their American counterparts.
The profound cynicism I've been feeling of late isn't really helped by the fact that we seem intent on perpetuating these sort of mistakes of the past. That's not surprising, but frustrating no doubt.
"Help us advance this story."
That's how Reuters begins its comment solicitation on reported stories that run on reuters.com. Here's an example -- scroll to the bottom. It's a simple five-word phrase that's also a graceful way of prompting readers to get engaged in their journalistic efforts. Open comment sections on professional news sites often have the feel of a sandbox for readers to play in without sullying the main content. But at least in their language choice, Reuters here is inviting their customers to participate in doing good journalism -- the very core of their business.
More on Agriculture in Africa, Dropping T from LGBT, and Shielding Journalists
Those were the topics of discussion on the Thom Hartmann Program yesterday. It seems as if some Googlers have landed on this site while attempting to learn more about them, which is great, of course. So, a few notes on each:
- Internal auditors from the World Bank are saying that the bank's approach to agriculture in Africa in the '80s, '90s, and early '00s failed. I described them -- industry deregulation, privatization, and open markets -- as Reaganesque/conservative economics, but Thom correctly pointed out that the rest of the world calls this neo-liberalism. Here's the internal Bank study, here's management's response (in pdf), and here's a New York Times piece on the report.
- The references to transgender and gender identity have been dropped from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that Congress is considering. Those who support dropping them from the bill -- like Rep. Barney Frank -- argue that they just can't get an inclusive bill passed. Opponents of dropping them -- like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force -- insist that the transgender/gender-non-coming
can't be left behind just for the sake of political expediency.
Rep. Frank's take is here, the Task Force's take is here, and here's the bill itself.
- There have been attempts to enact federal source protections for working journalists for years and years, and there's a good chance that one will succeed soon. But the protections only extend to journalists who earn substantial income from their endeavors, which excludes a lot of bloggers and other citizen journalists. As Thom pointed out, it also leaves out people working in the context of foundations or on a freelance basis -- which is exactly where a lot of good investigative journalism is coming from these days. Here's a good take on it.
The co-guest for Thom's "Best of the Rest" was the inimitable Matt Stoller, most recently of OpenLeft. The audio is below. I was much less jittery on the radio this time. The trick? Writing stuff down...
The Persistence of Carl Levin
I'm warning you that this is going to be the most boring blog post ever written; I lack the chops to write something clever about the importance of persistence in governing. Anyway, my old stomping grounds of Washington DC is making the switch from a convoluted zone system in their taxi cabs to the sort of meter system that other cities use. Jane and I have joked about this for a long time because the zone system has been something of a white whale for Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, for whom she worked for while on Capitol Hill:
[Mayor Adrian] Fenty had to make a decision one way or the other because of a provision written by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), a longtime proponent of switching to meters. The mayor could have stayed with the zone system, switched to the time-and-distance meters used in most cities or chosen a third option called a "zone-fare calculator," a hybrid zone-and-meter system.
A recent study put out by the Taxicab Commission recorded a zone fare and a hypothetical time-and-distance meter fare for the same trips. The study of nearly 9,000 trips found that short trips are cheaper by meter, while longer trips are cheaper by zone.
Levin said he, too, has faced challenges with D.C. taxis.
"In my own experience, as a D.C. resident, I have encountered at least 10 different cab fares for the exact same trip to and from National Airport," the senator complained in a 2001 speech on the Senate floor. He has been advocating for a change in the system for about 20 years.
Twenty bloody years. But it's done now and will stay done. (Leaving aside all of the home rule arguments against federal office holders meddling in District affairs) congratulations, Senator. Good governing. Do these new young punk legislators have that sort of staying power? We shall see.
Who knows -- maybe having a clear and comprehensible taxi fare system in DC will be the butterfly that causes the hurricane. The capital city will suddenly be a friendlier, more sensible place, which will in turn spread peace, prosperity, and rational government throughout the whole of the land...
The View from the Staten Island Ferry
To the horror of some of my friends, neither Jane nor I had ever been on New York City's own Staten Island Ferry. We took a return-trip ride on it this Sunday. It's pretty great -- you get a great views of New Jersey, Manhattan, Governors Island, and part of Red Hook, Brooklyn. What's more, it's completely and totally free!
I took this shot of the Statue of Liberty on the way back to Manhattan. I know it's not a great picture, but there's something I like about the how the clouds, light, and water contrast, and the fact that this iconic statue is so teeny tiny way off in the distance.
Me on the Radio Box
I'll be on the Thom Hartmann Program again tomorrow for the "Best of the Rest" segment on underreported news. I'm thinking maybe the new World Bank report on the failure of the organization on agriculture in Africa, the journalists' shield law that just passed the House, the dropping of transgender from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, perhaps a Darfur mention...
I go on at 2:30pm ET, and you can listen live on airamerica.com. And while you're there, read the blog!
More on Anthropologist-Soldiers
To anyone interested in the future of anthropology as an academic discipline/profession, this vigorous debate over whether or not anthros should be working for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan is fascinating:
At issue is a longstanding code of ethics for the discipline, one which decrees that anthropological research should never be used to inflict harm, must always have the consent of the population being studied, and must not be conducted in secret.
The debate over the role of anthropology in national security is expected to come to a head next month in an American Anthropological Association report examining the ethical questions of cooperating with the military.
...
The military's own descriptions of the new teams give pause to Price and others - such as one Pentagon official who likened them to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States.
Simply put, the question isn't whether or not having Army anthropologists is good for the Army or whether or not the Iraqis/Afghanis studied by them will be irreparably harmed. The question, in my mind at least, is limited to whether doing this sort of thing is so destructive to the practice of anthropology that it makes it not worthwhile in the long term.
And at the risk of being overly critical, I'd suggest that if anthropology had done a better job in the last several decades making a clear case for what the purpose and use of the discipline is, they would have a better argument for what they do needs to be protected and not mucked around with.
Good Piece on the Business of Pandora
Inc. Magazine has a solid overview of Tim Westergren's struggle to keep the Pandora music service alive as a viable business:
Tim Westergren is due to take the stage in an hour, yet he seems half asleep. His shoulders are rolled forward, his hair floppy and unbrushed, and he's wearing loose blue jeans and scuffed hiking boots. He ambles around the auditorium he's rented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art while the staff of Pandora, the online radio company he founded, buzzes around him. The salespeople smile at the advertisers, the biz-dev folks pump the arms of partners, the engineers form a nervous little knot. Meanwhile, the crowd gathering outside the auditorium doors keeps getting larger.
Pandora has been around in one form or another since 1999 and has spent most of its existence on the brink of shutting down. Yet Westergren has always found a way to rescue his company and infuse it with new hope, new direction. Tonight is one more of those times: Pandora's biggest product launch since its debut. The company is announcing a move into mobile products, which will let listeners access their personalized radio stations over Sprint (NYSE:S) phones or Sonos and Slim Devices in-home music players.
Finally, at 6:45, the doors open and Westergren, 41, snaps to life. Most companies have customers. Pandora has fans.
Who should care if Pandora lives or dies? For one, all the future Aimee Manns running around out there:
Westergren started composing scores for low-budget independent films, and that's when he began thinking differently about music. He'd ask directors about the sounds they were searching for and listen as otherwise articulate, creative people struggled to find the right words, usually falling back on descriptions like "something like Natalie Merchant, but more scary." Sitting at his piano, trying to evoke a frightening Natalie Merchant, Westergren thought about what terms such as "scarier" and "darker" and "happier" meant in purely musical terms. Would changing the rhythm, the melody, or the alto sax arrangement produce the desired result? If so, then wouldn't it be possible to create a giant database of music based on its underlying characteristics, which would make it easier for listeners to find exactly what they were looking for?
Around the same time, he read an article about the plight of singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. Though Mann's two previous records had sold a respectable 227,000 copies and won critical acclaim, her record label was refusing to release her current effort; it was focusing instead on blockbuster artists with sales in the millions. For Westergren, Mann's story brought back bitter feelings about Yellowwood Junction, which had built a strong following in the western United States but had no way to get its music out to larger audiences. "All the ideas that had been swimming in my head coalesced at that point," he says.
The article has more of a focus on the nuts-and-bolts business side of Pandora than other stuff I've read. (It is in "Inc.," after all.) And there's details on the PR blitz Tim's been engaged with ever since the Copyright Royalty Board institute a rate hike on Internet radio. Here's some of that PR now -- a messy but fun interview I and my occasional partner-in-crime Adam Conner did with Tim on how Congress should respond to the new royalty rates.
Bonus: Your Scola guide to the Music Genome Project, the clever technology behind Pandora.
Nericas and Africa's Green Revolution
Nericas is shorthand for New Rices for Africa, the seed varieties developed by science to be heartier and higher-yielding than traditional rice plants. Celia Dugger's reporting in the New York Times that farmers in places like Guinea having trouble getting the seeds or building up the infrastructure it takes to make full use of them:
Here in West Africa, where rice is a staple crop, the African Development Bank is financing a $34 million program in seven countries to spur wider use of the new rice seeds. But the obstacles are daunting.
Farmers typically lack credit to buy seed and fertilizer. And the agricultural economy itself suffers from a lack of investment. Foreign aid for agriculture has plunged over the past two decades. And African governments -- some, like Guinea, endowed with natural resources and cursed with corruption -- have too often spent less of that wealth than they might have on rural development.
Decent roads to move crops to market are scarce. So are storage facilities to preserve harvests and crop insurance to protect farmers from drought, flood or bumper yields that perversely cause prices to collapse. All can wipe out the income farmers need to provide reliable demand to seed companies, making sale and distribution of the improved seeds a high-risk venture.
...
"If we don't develop the infrastructure, there's no way we'll attain the Green Revolution," said Monty Jones, the plant breeder whose groundbreaking research led to creation of the new rices. "How do you bring the Nericas to farmers? How do you get farmers to know the seeds exist?"
There's a passing mention in the article that Nericas seeds aren't patented. And yeah, Guinea is rich with natural resources and could build the infrastructure that high-investment agriculture needs. But it's probably worth a mention in the piece that the so-called "green revolution" hasn't always worked out so well. Take, for example, the cycle of debt and farmer suicides currently plaguing India.
Life Without Government
Even Ronald Reagan knew enough to limit his "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" to the country's money troubles of the late 70s, but you hear his words used as some sort of pseudo-libertarian nonsense argument all the time. And not only out of the mouths of professional Republicans, but from perfectly intelligent people who live on the West Coast and build genius technologies and should really know better. So this post is brilliant -- what your day would be like without that pesky govmint cramping your style. (Via Ezra Klein, who I was mean about two posts ago. Such is life.)
When Advertising Tried Harder
When my aunt-outlaw* was cleaning out her basement last summer she offered me the pick of old books she didn't want anymore. She's an artist and had a number of design books, and I picked out a big, slightly water-stained copy of When Advertising Tried Harder. It was the early 60's, when the rough-around-the-edges new breed of copywriters and designers crashed the gates of Madison Avenue advertising firms. The gray flannel suits were aghast to find non-Ivy League 'ethnics' like Italians, Jews, and Irish in their design meetings. But the advertising that these men and women produced were just obviously better than the old grandiose 50s style ads. It was brash, direct, and tried to say something meaningful. Compare this Oldsmobile "futuramic" ad from 1948 to the Volkswagon "Think Small" campaign of 1959:
 
If you can find a used copy of When Advertising Tried Harder anywhere, buy it. It's simply excellent.
(*"Outlaws" are the equivalent of inlaws for people who the state doesn't let marry.)
Trapped in the Liberal Blogosphere
Wow. This is our liberal blogosphere? I just dug up reviews of Daniel Brooks' The Trap and found ones from Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum. Neither Ezra nor Kevin have much sympathy for someone who would chose to do non-profit work at the quarter of the salary her classmate pulls in at a corporate law job. Or for those mixed-sex couples who find that the only economically feasible way to have kids is if the woman quits working. None of what we're seeing today is all that surprising, or even accidental. The net effect of the Reaganite economic policies was to cut off oxygen to middle class life and force people to either climb up or fall down. Yet we have shining lights to the liberal blogosphere shunning those who would protest against it. Someone in some well-appointed office at the Heritage Institute is rubbing his hands with glee.
(What to make of the fact that both Ezra and Kevin feel perfectly comfortable pundititizing a book they haven't actually read? Since I'd rather not be shunned at next gathering of online lefties, I'll leave it at that...)
The Trap
You're (a) a well-educated, creative, ambitious, urban twenty-something or thirty-something. But often you feel like (b) Theo Huxtable in that episode of the Cosby Show where Cliff shows him how futile it is to attempt to live on the salary of a "normal person." Then you really should read The Trap to understand why your life is the way it is.
You Can Have Civilian Anthropologists and You Can Have Army Anthropologists. But You Can't Have Both.
Seed Magazine's Jonah Lehrer thinks that having anthropologists engaged in the Army's doings in Afghanistan is "a really good thing." I have to disagree. Yes, on balance it's probably beneficial for the United States military to have culturally-literate guides, just as it would probably be super for them in the short-term for journalists to be repairing to base each night to share the latest news on the ground. But it's ultimately destructive for both the individual anthro/journo and the usefulness of their respective fields. The trade-off you have to accept is that the world is better off having those professionals able to do their work in challenging environments for years to come. Here's how Dustin Wax puts it on Savage Minds, my favorite anthro blog (referencing an older post):
Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist at the Office of Naval Research, thinks anthropological knowledge is essential to modern warfare, and is on a campaign to bring this Gospel to the Department of Defense. Her long article at RedNova -- originally published by the Military Review -- is a backhanded compliment to stubborn anthropologists whose knowledge and expertise is "urgently needed in time of war" but who, "bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism", "entirely neglect U.S. forces".
I’ll leave the long history of anthropological involvement in wars of conquest and national defense to Ms. McFate and cut straight to the chase: a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of "U.S. forces". This is a practical as well as an ethical argument -- it simply is not possible, even were there enough anthropologists who shared McFate’s priorities.
Also, anthropologists in the field often have to labor under the suspicion that they're CIA informants, particularly in Latin America and other places where there's a history of CIA involvement. Working in a war zone while getting a paycheck from the United States Army is unlikely to help matters on that front.
Army Anthropology
I abandoned my graduate studies in anthropology for many reasons, but one of them was definitely that I couldn't envision what role the discipline would fill as there were fewer and fewer 'unknown' people, places, and cultures left. And I couldn't see how I could fit into the anthro world circa 2010 if I didn't want to or wasn't able to get one of the very very few tenure-track professor jobs that open up each year. It turns out that my future could have been with the U.S. Army! The anthro world is sensitive enough about the enabling role the discipline played in colonialism and even apartheid that I can't imagine that this development is playing too well there.
(A loaded quote on Army anthropologists from Lt. Col. David Woods, commander of the Fourth Squadron, 73rd Cavalry: "Who else is going to do it? You have to evolve. Otherwise you're useless.")
Women Bloggers are Too Different
The perennial question of why there aren't more women political bloggers is less interesting to me than it probably should be, considering I'm a women who blogs and often about politics. But I will say that Catherine Morgan's introduction to her terrific list of 100+ female political bloggers contains an important clue:
I decided to take some time today and surf the Internet for as many women blogging on politics that I could find. The refreshing thing about women political bloggers is their diversity.
Yep, women blogging are indeed a diverse bunch. But I suspect that might be a negative rather than a positive. Blogging tends to reward focus and repetition, if success is measured by traffic and mentions. The most visited blogs in the political space hit the same topics head on, again and again, day after day. Many of the women on Catherine's list instead couch politics in other topics -- making ends meet, community life, "mommy" topics. (Which brings up another issue: mommy blogging = women blogging. But that's something you just don't want to get me started on. Seriously, the swag bags at the first BlogHer had bibs in them...)
Reading about politics from "softer" perspectives is more interesting, more sustainable, and more real than the relentless focus on the horse race side of politics, in my opinion. But that approach carries less value in the political blogosphere as it stands, it just does. Reorienting readers and commenters away from horse race blogs to politics-writ-large blog would both make the politico-blogosphere better and highlight more women writers. But that's super hard.
Information Age Coping Mechanisms
Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame is, in my opinion right on the money here. It seems to me that there's almost no single indicator of how successful and happy any 21st century knowledge worker is going to be than how well he or she can cope with being inundated with information from personal email, mailing lists, RSS feeds, Google Groups, YouTube channels...Here's Merlin:
Figuring out what you can afford to ignore in life is starting to seem like an art form to me. Since failure to filter incoming stuff properly over time has consequences way beyond annoyance, I’m starting to think that getting it right may be another one of those emerging knowledge worker skills.
Cory Doctorow has a compelling new column up at Internet Evolution called "The Future of Ignoring Things" that connects information glut to the very architecture of the Internet:
It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see.
It seems to me that the only way for those of us work tethered to the Internet to keep stress to a manageable level is to figure out how to be comfortable with what network engineers call "packet loss" -- the fact that no matter how much we're reading, writing, communicating each day, we're still going to miss an enormous amount of stuff. It used to be that learning how to say "no" to demands on your time was considered one of the keys to a successful work life (and personal life, for that matter). Now the key to surviving and thriving in the information age is learning how to keep yourself from obsessing over just how much information is out there.
(Until, of course, that glorious day when you finally come to the end of the Internet.)
Blogging's "New and Now" Problem
As I take a second turn at answering why blog coverage of the Jena Six
has been light, I suggested over at the Personal Democracy Forum that
part of it is that the blogging medium is focused
on the new and the now -- perhaps too focused.
Stallman Schools Me on "IP"
Finding an email in my inbox from Richard Stallman is not the way I start most mornings, but on a recent morning, there it was. Richard is the force behind the free software movement -- the mind behind "free as in free speech, not free as in free beer." He took issue with my use of the terms "intellectual property" and "intellectual property protections" when referring to Monsanto's seed patents in an article on genetically-modified farming in India and Iraq. Richard was kind enough to allow me to reprint this initial email to me, and I thank him for that. Here it is:
I've made a link to your article from stallman.org, but please forgive
me for asking you to consider changing one aspect of the article: its
use of the term "intellectual property". After 17 years of
campaigning against patents in the software field, I have come to the
conclusion that that term must be rejected totally. I firmly refuse
to use it.
To illustrate the problems the term causes, I cite a couple of the
passages in your article.
What Order 81 did was to establish the strong intellectual property protections on seed and plant products
More precisely, what it establishes are patents. Referring to them as
"intellectual property protections" is gratuitous vagueness, and the
result is to confuse patents with copyrights and trademarks, which in
fact are entirely different. People who think they understand patents
(or copyrights) in terms of "intellectual property" actually have got
a false understanding.
The term "intellectual property" is also propaganda for Monsanto's
side. Why else would they use the term so much? It frames the issue
in a way favorable to them.
("Protection" is also propaganda for Monsanto's side. It suggests
that these restrictions on farmers are needed to prevent some sort of
unjust destruction, which is the opposite of the truth. So I reject
that term also as a description for what patents do.)
when it comes to engineered seeds like Bt cotton, Monsanto owns the tiny speck of intellectual property inside each hull,
A patent is an abstraction, a monopoly created by fiat. Reifying it,
speaking as if the patent were some speck of substance inside a seed
that Monsanto owns, plays into Monsanto's hands.
Most of us are in favor, more or less, of property rights for physical
things, such as a plant or a seed. If the patent meant that some
speck inside the seed were Monsanto's physical property, rejecting
Monsanto's claim to own it would be very radical, and that would be
a handicap for our cause.
That is not how it works. Every part of the physical seed is the
property of the farmer that grows it. The patent is a restriction
imposed on the farmer's use of his property. It is nothing at all
like property rights for physical objects; it is a radical new kind of
power, which had never existed anywhere in the world 50 years ago.
Rejecting physical property rights is radical, but rejecting
Monsanto's power is conservative. If we educate citizens to recognize
this, we will eliminate the spurious handicap, and have a better
chance to defeat Monsanto and others like it.
I think it's fair to say that Richard is an anti-"IP" absolutist. In his critiques of my piece, I think he's in large part right. I goofed; my use of it was sloppy here.
"Intellectual property" is such a loaded term because it carries with it all the positive associations that "property" enjoys, at least in modern American society. That's why those among us who control the most stuff use it so aggressively. (See, for example, the U.N.'s "World Intellectual Property Organization.") Though, to nitpick, I'm not sure I entirely agree with the distinction Richard makes between patents and copyright. I'd argue that copyright is an abstraction, too, as well as a "monopoly created by fiat."
It can be tough to come up with alternate phrasing the twelfth time you've written about patents/copyrights/trademarks in a single post or article. And "intellectual property" is a useful short-cut for explaining the control over ideas and creations to general audiences. But I know better, and should have made the extra effort not to use it in the way that I did. Thanks to Richard for helping me to see the light.
Carson/Jacobs Mashup
On the same day (yesterday) I went to the Jane Jacob's exhibit at MAS, I read The End of Print about graphic designer David Carson. Carson's known for using typography in innovative ways and mixing type with photographs, illustrations to create gritty and messy work that isn't always entirely legible but still generally manages to convey the meaning of the content. I was inspired. I own several design programs. See above.
Window on 51st and Madison
I was able to move the photos from the Jane Jacobs' exhibit from my neutered Mac Book to my desktop by resurrecting the old "burn things to CD" technology. Here's how the Municipal Arts Society people are using the corner of 51st and Madison to demonstrate Jacob's teachings on mixed use, block size, and building stock.
Jane Jacobs at MAS
The Jane Jacobs' exhibit at the Municipal Arts Society is excellent, both educational and remarkably well designed. In one particularly neat feature, there's a Lucite overlay in front of a window looking out onto the corner of 51st Street and Madison Avenue. They've put up markings on the overlay pointing out practical examples of Jacobs' four principles -- mixed uses, varied buildings, concentration, and frequent streets. I'd put up a picture of it, but all of my photos are stuck on my Mac Book whose AirPort has decided to take this Monday off.
Other highlights include snippy anti-Jacobs letters from Robert Moses and historian Louis Mumford, and a model of LOMEX (Lower Manhattan Expressway) that Jacobs fought against in the 60's.
|
| «
September 2007 | Main
| November 2007
» |
|
|
|
