The contemporary condition #1

Following up on a topic mentioned before.

At Tablet, James Kirchick has some insights into competitive victimology and online mobbing:

The problem with these little purges, these forced incantations of the latest auto-da-fés, however, is that they never quite end, for the tumbrils always need replenishing. Like all good left-wing revolutionaries, these latter-day cultural warriors are eating their own. There is an unholy synergy existing between the notions of identity politics and the mechanisms of social media, which fused together form a concatenation that is debasing political debate. The mob-like mentality fostered by Twitter, the easy, often anonymous (and, even if a name is attached to the account, de-personalized) insulting, fosters a social pressure that aims to close discussion, not open it. [...]

What makes this current cultural moment so depressing is that both identity politics and the preferred tool of enforcing its precepts—social media—are so easy and widely available to use, and are being used in regressive ways by people who claim to be promoting social justice. What they are actually doing—quite deliberately—is making themselves social despots by driving out everyone who lacks the taste or the ability to shout angry slogans and personal accusations through the social media megaphone. It’s actually difficult to write an essay saying simply that someone is a racist or sexist or homophobe without making easily refutable mistakes—unless they are in fact guilty of that crime. Twitter, however, puts the burden of proof on the defendant, making it very hard to defend oneself against the 8-word tweet that uses a hot-button word to slime whoever becomes the target of the mob’s ire. It’s Salem, with 21st-century technology. And sooner or later, we will all become witches.

  

On directing "the madness of crowds to unexamined targets of outrage"

While I certainly don't agree with everything in Gary Indiana's review of a new biography of William Burroughs (is it really necessary to disparage realism and coherent narrative in praising more experimental fiction? I think not), it is certainly a readable engagement with an author about whose work I know far too little.

In any case, I also liked these passages:

The radically anti-authoritarian, left-libertarian notions he espoused probably look like irresponsible nihilism (or ‘antinomian morality’, in Schjeldahl’s solecism) to many of those ensconced at their computer screens during most of their waking life, or bedazzled by mobiles and ubiquitous electronic signage in a society overloaded with information yet drained of authentic experience. It now seems almost logical that the insight Burroughs offers into the brain-scrambling technical synaesthesia spreading everywhere would be precisely what brands him a crackpot, rather than the silly religions and fatuous disciplines he so often became fascinated by. Still, I feel it’s necessary to say how stupid this inverted logic is.

On social media legions of isolated individuals, with the brainless malice of a concierge, spread ‘the real dirt’ on artists, writers, actors, musicians, athletes and others in the public eye. A tsunami of ugly feelings surges across the global clothesline at the mere mention of ‘Woody Allen’ or ‘Roman Polanski’ in the press; Burroughs, too, has an anti-claque of Torquemada wannabes, enraged over his accidental shooting of his wife in 1951. Social media can launch a witch hunt or pogrom just as readily as a ‘progressive’ uprising, and in either instance directs the madness of crowds to unexamined targets of outrage; the technology itself is probably as addictive as heroin, since it acts directly on neural synapses, and its instantaneous transmission eliminates any space for reflection or analysis between emotional impulse and action. 

It rather seriously overworks the biological analogy of the-internet-as-drug, but as a description of the ultimately frustrating nature of social media discussions these days (one wave of overheated tribal screaming after another...), it certainly struck a chord with me.

   

Switch it off

Although I'm someone who once had (cautiously) high hopes for the Internet becoming a force for creating a better informed, better connected and more tolerant global public sphere, I have been becoming increasingly aware--like a lot of us--that it's about as likely to be a tool for pervasive surveillance, tendentious propaganda and unhinged misinformation.

And although I participate in various forms of social media (because--at least so far--its benefits seem to outweigh its costs for me personally), I've found it, over the last five years or so, to be increasingly a source of frustration and even despair.

Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "Diary" at the London Review of Books crystallises a lot of what I've been thinking along these lines with reference to recent events in Ukraine.

As the conflict over Ukraine intensified my social media feeds became more and more unsettling. Acquaintances from Moscow, the ‘creatives’ who make up the semi-mythical Russian middle class – that normally apolitical but vaguely anti-Putin iPhone crowd who’d joined the protests in 2011 and 2012 – were suddenly frothing with patriotic passion. I imagined myself in some downmarket horror movie where you wake to find your neighbours are vampires, with little ultra-patriotic bite marks on their necks.

I was talking to a work colleague just today about a very similar trend that she had noticed among Russian and Ukrainian friends on Facebook.

More generally, this is good to remember:

A common myth about social media is that it’s a priori a tool of liberation, taking publishing out of the hands of power. But Facebook and Twitter are a perfect vehicle for postmodern authoritarian regimes that focus on opposition narratives instead of simply suppressing them. You can switch off the TV, but you can’t stop a political technologist getting inside social media and generating memes from within.

This is also true for radical Islamism.

For myself, I've certainly been aghast (though not surprised) by Russian propaganda; what has disturbed me more has been the number of Western journalists willing to echo it.

Pomerantsev is eloquent here on this "strange complicity with the Kremlin's cause":

When she wasn’t repeating news from Brighton Beach my New Jersey cousin was sending me links to the Guardian. Comment is Free has become well known for its references to the Ukrainian fascist takeover. My Kiev friends began to message me, looking for an explanation: ‘Is Seumas Milne in the pay of the Kremlin?’ they would ask. Probably not, I said. ‘It all fits into a larger pattern of English racism towards Eastern Europeans,’ Oksana Forostyna, executive editor of the Ukrainian cultural magazine Krytyka, told me. She too spoke of the Ukrainians as ‘the new Untermenschen who get called whores and fascists. All those English jokes and novels about Ukrainian sluts; the weird fixation you had during Euro 2012 that Ukraine was full of neo-Nazi hooligans – there was even a BBC documentary warning football fans not to come – when in truth there are fewer racist attacks in Ukraine than in Britain … Now Putin can play on those prejudices.’

(Germany, has a very similar problem.)

Finally, I can't say that I disagree with this entirely:

‘The only thing to do if you want to stay sane in this war is quit social media,’ Alexey said when I Skyped him.

On related points, I would recommend that people read Evgeny Morozov's insightful book The Net Delusion.

See you online.

Missing Norm already

Like many other people, I was very saddened last night to learn of the death of Norm Geras.

I was about to write something like 'I didn't know him personally', but then it occurred to me that in some way I did. What I mean is that I only ever communicated with Norm electronically--via our blogs and sometimes through email and Facebook--since we 'met' some time after I started this blog in 2006. (I forget now how it happened: it might have been at about this moment, in August of that year.)

This is worth mentioning, I think, because Norm frequently argued for the value of the internet as a new way of bringing people together. (And his commitment to this medium is remarkable: despite his illness, only a little more than a week ago he posted a list of book recommendations.)

He was himself, certainly, (in the face of much counter-evidence) one of the best arguments for the internet being a good and worthwhile thing. With all the fluctuations in my internet habits over the past 7 years, stopping by normblog was among the most consistent parts of my daily online routine.

And, equally consistently, it was one of the most rewarding. Norm's was a voice of reason and sensibility in a world that is all to often the opposite of these things. It was a pleasure to read his reasoning on many issues, even if I found myself not always convinced. (There are, it occurs to me, all too few people with whom it is a pleasure to disagree.)

But I usually did find myself in agreement with Norm, at least eventually.

I know that, for me, his death creates a particular absence that will be difficult to fill. And that is also a strange thought to have about someone I've never met 'personally'.

Condolences, of course, go above all to his family and closest friends.

But the internet is surely left a poorer place without him.

[UPDATE] Tributes to Norm are being collected and reposted at 'normfest'.

Equalising dialogue

This comment from an interview with Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski does a pretty good job of summing up one problem with the internet:

The net has a way of equalizing dialogue in ways that run counter-intuitive to our powers of perception. They’re just words on a screen, one subset of words no more valid than the other...even though one may be written by an expert, and the other by a guy who wears an orange fright wig and lives in his mother’s basement where he tortures Barbie dolls for fun. Seeing one or the other, you would know to let one close and the other not so much (unless you had strong anti-Barbie tendencies). But absent being able to see them, you don’t know what you’re dealing with and tend to apply equal credibility until the day the monster bares its teeth. 

OK, back to those Barbie dolls.... 

(Via Io9)

The 'hacker superiority complex'

A couple of questions from an interview with Jaron Lanier in the Spectator, to which he provides interesting answers.

You criticize the culture of the tech world several times throughout this book, but you are also part of it: can you explain this paradox?
There are a lot of very positive things about the tech world. It’s remarkably unprejudiced and I’ve never encountered racism in it. There are a lot of good qualities, so I don’t want to criticize it too much. I remain in it, and I enjoy it. However, there is a smugness, or a kind of religious aspect to it. There is a sensibility that says: we have skills that other people don’t, therefore we are supermen and we deserve more. You run into this attitude, that if ordinary people cannot set their Facebook privacy settings, then they deserve what is coming to them. There is a hacker superiority complex to this.

Do you think this culture of superiority in the tech world is making society less democratic?
Well I think this culture really undermines our discipline because to me the only proper way to describe the profession of engineering is to serve people, otherwise it’s not a sensible activity. There is no rational basis without people as the beneficiaries. Just in order for me to function sensibly I need to believe in people, not robots. When we don’t put people at the centre of the world, I think we create rather bizarre technologies that don’t tend to make sense.

Remembering life in the stone age, circa 1977

Comments from a Wired interview with William Gibson, who reflects on how new music styles (in this case punk) spread in a pre-Internet age.

I suspect — and I don’t think this is nostalgia — but it may have been able to become kind of a richer sauce, initially. It wasn’t able to instantly go from London to Toronto at the speed of light. Somebody had to carry it back to Toronto or wherever, in their backpack and show it, physically show it to another human. Which is what happened. And compared to the way that news of something new spreads today, it was totally stone age. Totally stone age! There’s something remarkable about it that’s probably not going to be that evident to people looking at it in the future. That the 1977 experience was qualitatively different, in a way, than the 2007 experience, say.

Whether it was a 'richer' or otherwise better way of discovering what was new, I can't say.

But it was certainly different.

Still, like Gibson, I'm certainly glad to have discovered Gangnam style, which in 1977 I no doubt would have missed...

Filmic wanderings

It's funny how the internet leads you places. Just today, for example, while looking up something quite different I ran across two very interesting videos.

The first, an excerpt from Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World:



The second, the trailer from the upcoming Terrence Malik Film, The Tree of Life, which looks excellent:

Gemütlichkeit, pixelated

The Bavarian town of Oberstaufen is the among the first location in Germany to feature in Street View.

It looks like a charming place.

Even if it seems to suffer from periodic blurriness:

But, rest assured, dear reader: this is only a problem in virtual Germany.

(Pictures source)

Filling in the blanks

Andrew recently posted an interesting diagram of the different kinds of suggestions that Google autocomplete offers when you start typing in phrases to the search box, which are, in turn, based on the number of people typing in similar questions.

The diagram in question focused on religions, so, typing in 'Why are Christians so' would, it is reported, bring up suggestions such as 'crazy', 'hateful', 'intolerant' and 'stupid'...and these are just the ones that overlap with the same question about Muslims. And so on.

I've just tried it and am not getting any suggestions whatsoever, so it seems that somebody might have deactivated this particular suggestion string. As the company explains, they 'exclude a narrow class of search queries related to pornography, violence, and hate speech.' (This would, however, it also seems to exclude the search phrase 'Why are Buddhists so happy' -- noted on the diagram at Andrew's post -- which doesn't seem hateful to me at all.)

Apparently, though, turning off the hateful autocompletes only applies, it seems, to religions and ethnic groups and not so far to countries.

I tried typing in 'Why are Americans' to see what would come up. I received -- along with the expected 'so fat' and 'so stupid' -- the rather surprising suggestion 'afraid of dragons'.


I was not aware, previously, that this was a problem, I must admit. Has the dragon plague gotten worse since I left?

If you type in 'Why are Germans so' you get the completion suggestions: 'rude', 'mean', 'smart', 'tall' and, erm, 'hot'.

Interestingly, typing in the equivalent 'Warum sind die Deutschen' offers the suggestions 'pünktlich' (punctual), 'so dumm' (so dumb), 'so unbeliebt' (so unpopular) and 'in Afghanistan'.

Which seems to suggest, respectively, a desire for practical knowledge, a capacity for self criticism, a tendency toward self-pity and, finally, some remaining political interest in the big questions of the day.

Not that I'm dismissing for a moment the American fear of dragons.

The Cameron Variations

Even if the Internet never comes up with another Fun Thing as good as the David Cameron poster creation machine, then it's nevertheless established its Daseinsberechtigung.

I mean, the original is humourous enough.

But the variations....

I'm quite fond of Cthulhu, Absorbency and...um...Kittens.

The following isn't nearly as funny, but it was the first thing that occurred to me.



Thanks to the Ranter for bringing this to my attention and for discussing it so (expectedly) well.

Lies, damn lies, etc.

I've been more than usually depressed recently about the relationship between the Internet and the stupidity of my fellow man.

Perhaps you have friends and/or acquaintances who send you all kinds of stupid shit via forwarded e-mails about all kinds of fucking nonsense. And yes, sadly, the only kinds of forwarded e-mails I seem to fall into those categories.

They have little to do with spreading Complex, Careful Thinking and everything to do with, say, the illegitimacy of one Barack Hussein Obama (born in the foreign nation of Hawaii) to serve in the highest office in the land. Or the way that said atheist muslim devilspawn wants to kill your granny. Or how climate change is just a figment of some capitalism-hating hippie's imagination. Or the ways that Muslims are so stupid they can't even manage to fly a plane.

Or, more recently and most grandly, that Muslims are, by mid-century, going to take over Europe.

This latter theme, however, has not just been part of the tin hat brigade's fevered imaginings. No, this notion -- that of a future 'Eurabia', overrun by the unwashed, fervently breeding, Mecca-worshiping masses -- has become a key theme of the semi-respectable -- or at least more established -- right.

Given the frequency with which this kind of shite has been able to circulate on the interwebs, I was pleased to see a sensible response that is also ready-for-YouTube.

The following information from BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less (with grateful thanks for the reference to Momus) is a healthy reminder that the Internet can just as easily spread thoughtful responses to deranged nonsense.

Responding to a much-viewed YouTube video raving the usual panicky Eurabian line, the BBC statistics show offers a page of text, a recorded programme and a specially produced YouTube video carefully examining the 'information' presented in the 'muslim takeover' video linked to above.

The latter two are offered here for your edification.

Listen, watch, consider and pass them on, if you so choose.

On productive myopia and getting to the bottom of things

I find a lot to agree with in the following observation by John Darnielle:

In an abundance of information - in this glut which is if not a permanent reality then at least the one we expect to have with us for a few generations - the soundest strategy is focus. The future belongs to the myopic.

I was reminded of a comment by computer science professor Donald E. Knuth that I have admired for some time.

In the process of explaining why he became a happier man after giving up his email address on 1 January 1990 (after having used email for fifteen years...I note, only in passing, that this was about the time that I was receiving my first email address....), Knuth states:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

I suppose we're not going to be seeing Dr. Knuth on Twitter any time soon.

Searching the commons

The head cold I brought back with me from London is continuing to wrap my neurons in a fuzzy layer of cotton wool, making it difficult for me to think in linear terms. (Either that or I'm suffering from a brain tapeworm...not a pleasant thought.)

It was fortunate, then, to run across a link at Boing Boing which led me to a fascinating photo collection at Flickr Commons, to which the New York Public Library has just begun contributing, of images that have no known copyright restrictions.

As the NYPL states:

Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public photography resource.

Remarkable indeed. A quick browse through the archive brought up some interesting snaps. (Click for full-size images.)

Midsummer day, Bronx Park, 1911 (Library of Congress)

Blanche Rogers, with pistol. (Library of Congress)



Jiu-Jitsu for Women (George Eastman House collection)

All work and no play...

I'm hardly what you'd call a video game freak. I have, however, been an intermittently avid player since about 1977, when we got our first Pong console, and there were periods where things got a bit...obsessive. (Four words: Ultima, Elite, SimCity, Doom.)

I suppose the main thing lacking these days is time; however, I still love the idea of video games and their creative possibilities, and I play the odd demo now and then to see what's going on out there. (My latest discovery--like, a million years after everyone else, I know--is Oddworld. Very cool.)

Hence, I've been enjoying reading the newish Boing Boing gaming blog Offworld, which has a knack for highlighting things that might appeal to even non-hard-core gamers.

Little curiosities like the five-minute art-game Passage, by game designer (and simple-living advocate) James Rohrer. (via)

Or this Counterstrike level based upon Van Gogh paintings:



(via)

I also, via Mightygodking, discovered the oddly fascinating Auditorium.

OK. Break's over. Back to work.

You can, unfortunately, get here from there

Having invested a fair amount of blood, sweat and -- yes, dear reader -- even the occasional tear in this here outpost of reason and sensibility (and, admittedly, a certain amount of bitterness), it is fascinating to see just how people find their ways to us.

Yes, sitemeter is quite a fascinating little tool.

Bing has even developed quite an entertaining regular feature at his (wonderfully entertaining) blog based on the search terms by which people find him.

This is always very funny.

We're not quite up to such humour. We are not, fundamentally, funny people.

Nonetheless, let me just put it this way: you'd be surprised how many people use the vast power of the internet to find new dessert recipes.

Really, it's amazing.

We seem to receive a large portion of our relatively few visits via search requests along the lines of 'new German desserts' or 'fun desserts' or even the extraordinarily odd 'how humans affected desserts'.

To be honest, I cannot even begin to comprehend the context in which the last set of search words can even provide a meaningful answer.

Nor can I even imagine what kind of let-down it must have been for this person to click that link at the top of the Google.com search page (at least it's still there today) only to find my long-winded critique of a book about the genetics of capitalist development.

That must have been a drag. I'm sorry, whoever you were.

Then, as you might imagine, the 'obscene' part of our title also brings in its share of visitors. (I haven't kept stats on this, but quite a few are located in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.)

Many of them, I imagine, must be sorely disappointed when, instead of the dozens of lissome Central European bondage addicts that they were hoping to find (no, really, they are quite specific), they stumble across a text-heavy blog populated by two academics with anger management issues.

That must be a tough few moments for them.

So, I suppose my point is that despite the fact that we have little to do here either with pornography or sugary delicacies, we get a lot of traffic (OK, a trickle...) that is seeking one or the other.

And I am repeatedly astounded by what they were seeking.

However, today, someone stumbled upon our humble little electronic abode by searching for something that was both quite specific and quite disturbing in a way that was new to me.

I say this although we are -- I believe -- quite open-minded people.

Really.

We are not prudes.

However, even we were a bit taken aback when we found out that -- at least today -- if you type the following into Google.co.uk, we end up at the top of the list:

german granny fucking out side in the wood or fields

And someone, who visited us at about 2 o'clock this afternoon, did type this into Google.co.uk.

What I perhaps find most intriguing about this is both its extraordinary specificity (she must be German, she must be a senior citizen, she must be engaged in sexual intercourse, and she must be out-of-doors) as well as its tolerant broadmindedness (she can be doing the aforementioned in the wood or in the fields. In the end, it's all good).

What is also interesting is that Google.co.uk also adds the helpful suggestion: 'did you mean', it asks,

german granny fucking outside in the wood or fields?

And with 'out side' transformed into 'outside', we slide down (at least today) to second place in the rankings.

Such an enormous difference the space bar can make, eh?

([UPDATE]: Um, apparently due to this very post, that is no longer true. We're now top-ranked in both cases. Excellent...)

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Unfortunately, I can't say too much about the searcher. Mr. visit 23,470 (and, yes, odds are we're talking about a he) shows up as 'unknown' in terms of server and country.

Which is a shame.

Somehow, I want to know more.

I think there must be a story here. One that the world should know.

He disappeared after only one page view, so he obviously didn't find what he was looking for.

And this makes me feel immensely relieved somehow.

Joy to the World ...

... Charles Darwin is online, completely!