I'm Now Writing Elsewhere, Come Read Me There

To put this all in one post for the top of this page: I've moved.

If you want to read my essays and link round-ups—the sort of thing I used to put here, but now delivered to your inbox, and at a steady once-a-week rate—you should go and subscribe to Attempts 2.0 over on Substack:

https://stephenfrug.substack.com/

And I am also publishing a series of short stories, which you should go read! Learn more about them here:

https://stephenfrug.com/retcon-a-mosaic-narrative-in-three-movements/

I will of course leave this up for its archives, but if you want to see anything new, go to those places. I hope to see you there!

"You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision"

In an interview in the 1992 film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Noam Chomsky says in an interview:

The U.S. media are alone in that you must meet the condition of "concision" -- you've got to say things between two commercials or in 600 words. And that's a very important fact, because the beauty of concision -- you know, saying a couple of sentences between 2 commercials -- the beauty of that is you can only repeat conventional thoughts. Suppose I get up on Nightline, I'm given whatever it is, two minutes, and I say Qaddafi is a terrorist and Khomeini is a murderer, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, all this sort of stuff -- I don't need any evidence, everybody just nods. On the other hand, suppose you say something that just isn't repeating conventional pieties. Suppose you say something that's the least bit unexpected or controversial. Suppose you say,

At this point the film cuts from one place to another, a series of different statements Chomsky made in different contexts:

• "The biggest international terror operations that are known are the ones that are run out of Washington."
• "What happened in the 1980s is the U.S. government was driven underground."
• "The United States is invading South Vietnam".
• "The best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt."
• "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American President would have been hanged."
• "The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in our total canon."
• "Education is a system of imposed ignorance."
• "There's no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Ghengis Kahn, there are just different factors to be concerned with."

Then the cutting stops, and the interview goes on:

You know, people will quite reasonably expect to know what you mean. Why did you say that? I never heard that before. If you said that you better have a reason, you better have some evidence, and in fact you better have a lot of evidence, because that's a pretty startling comment. You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision. That's the genius of this structural constraint.

(Film transcript from here.)

Similarly, you can't give reasoning if you're stuck with concision; you can't give nuance if you're stuck with concision.

I don't believe it's only the US media that does this — at least, not any more, if it ever was.  Importantly, today, it is true of most social media, certainly big ones like facebook and twitter.  Now, there's an important difference, that on facebook & twitter you get microclimates of conventional opinion, which means outrageous statements (to some people) are treated as banalities (to others).  But nevertheless I think the basic problem — "You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision" — remains: and we are left either nodding our heads at what we agree with (perhaps a particularly nice formulation, perhaps a new instance of a familiar phenomenon or new instantiation of it — this isn't useless at all, but fleshing out what you believe is different from changing your beliefs), or dismissing something as rubbish without giving it a genuine hearing.  Often the same claim will produce both reactions, from different audiences.

It's something other than conversation.  Personally, I find it deeply frustrating.  And to the extent that we are, in fact, more divided than before (an issue I am not sure what I think about), I think this is one of the structural causes.

Everything You Need To Know About Internet Comment Sections, In One Picture

(From this article)

Facelift

So if you're reading this on a computer, not an iThingie or rss-gorge or what have you, you'll notice that the place just got a new look.  I'm not sure I'm 100% happy with it, but I like the idea behind it, if you know what I mean.  The rendering remains a work in progress.

(One thing it now does -- in one of the silliest wastes of time in the History of Man -- is match the main page of my twitter feed.  (Branding!) But the twitter machine lets you have a separate picture for the header; blogger only allows a color.  I like the twitter look better.  Any advice on how to more closely replicate it here would be accepted gratefully.)

The other change I made was to delete my blogroll.  No offense to any of the fine blogs on it.  But the damn things was years out of date, with a great many blogs now moved, retired, renamed or dead,* many new blogs unlisted, etc, and I didn't have the time or energy to update it, so amputation seemed the doctor-recommended option.  If I get time I'll do a new one... except that the entire things speaks to a particular time, when the World & Blogosphere was Young, that has passed.  I liked those halcyon days of yore, and the virtual coffeehouse within them -- they were what made me start blogging -- but liking won't bring them back, and maybe it's no use pretending that they're still around. (cf this)  So since I was getting a new look anyway, I decided to do the amputation and the cosmetic surgery at the same time, and save on the anesthesiologist's fee.

Oh, and is there any particular meaning to the whole The Wind in the Willows, and specifically the E. H. Shepard illustrations thereof, theme?  Nah.  I've used Toad as my twitter & blog icon for a while.  It just seemed like some nice images to play with and give a thematically consistent yet visually interesting look.  (Again, more successfully here than, er, here.)

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* Not a metaphor, sadly.  RIP Leila Abu-Saba, Steve Gilliard and Andrew Olmsted.  I couldn't bear to delete them from the list, but it's wrong to keep them on too; one more reason for the whole list to just go.

Given My Recent Obsessions, I Think I'm Legally Required To Quote This

We lost the blogosphere. It was vibrant and rich and ever changing and filled with interesting design and BlogAds and PayPal and Amazon wishlists. That's pretty much gone. Today it feels like jazz in the '80s compared to jazz in the '50s. Those who are doing it know that this isn't the time to be doing it. But either they can't stop or they're doing it for the right reasons. That's the good thing, if you're blogging in 2013 you're probably doing it out of love—certainly not for audience or money. So that's good.

-- Tony Pierce

Via twitter, natch.

Resistance was Futile: I Have Been Assimilated

I was following the whole !@#$% election on Twitter and got tired of having ten windows open, so I signed up:
https://twitter.com/StephenFrug
I may not keep it up, but for now, I have some reactions over there.

Just call me Locutus.

No, Click Here and Drag Instead

Gerry is right: sometimes XKCD is better than it usual brilliance.  Today was one of those days.

You have to click through to the main page to get the context.  Do a little clicking and dragging.

Then, when you're finding the interface frustrating, go here instead and use this version.  Much easier. (via facebook)

Post Scriptum: While I'm mentioning alternate XKCD format, anyone trying to read the strip on an iPhone or iPad (or, I presume (but don't know personally) on other smartphones/tablets), and who is frustrated that they can't get the mouseover text (always worth it, and often the best-part), should bookmark this page where you just click on the image for it.

Post Post Scriptum, Utterly Unrelated to the Post: It looks like blogger finally did as it's been threatening and removed the old, easy-and-pleasant-to-use interface and replaced it with the new, difficult-and-irritating-to-use-interface.  (Slower, too!)  I feel like The Dude when he stands there and says: "Well, they finally did it. They killed my fucking car."

Ah well.  At least they let me switch back after the first forced-trial and get a few more glorious months of usability out of it.  Now it's done.  Fucking Nazis.  (Are we going to split hairs here?  Am I wrong?)

Cool Factoid of the Day: Googling "mre uptl"

I just saw this in this Making Light thread, and I thought it was really cool.

What do you get when you Google 'mre uptl'?

(Check it out if you don't want to be spoiled....)

You get responses for New York City.

Why? I'll let David Goldfarb explain it: "Because if you type "new york" with your hands shifted over one letter on the keyboard, "mre uptl" is what comes out." -- So when people type that, "New York" is what they mean.

Which, as Goldfarb goes on to say, is pretty damn impressive.

It does occur to me that, sadly, this is a phenomenon that will only work while a smallish number of people know about it. Because if enough people know about it, and talk about it, as Making Light and (now) I have done... then Google will start to turn up *that* in its searches, and it won't be true any more.

This is a slowly self-refuting fact. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Quote of the Day: One Genius Admires Another

Doctor Horrible is unbridled genius.

-- David Simon

(Link not in the original.)

That, by the way, is from the comments to David Simon's blog (!!!!), which has the marvelous title "The Audacity of Despair". Word to that.

I found the blog because superblogger Gerry Canavan linked to this post on it (which is awesome, incidentally).

Update: Bonus quote from the-website-that-ate-my-morning (thanks, Canavan):

One of the happiest memories of my years working on NBC’s Homicide was the meeting with Orioles officials to propose the above storyline [in which a murder was committed at Oriole Park].

“A murder? Why would we show a murder at the ballpark?”

“It’s Yankee fan who gets killed.”

“Okay, but still…”

“Another Yankee fan kills him.”

Long pause, smiles in the room. Sold.

This Post Which Will Be 30 In the Year 2041

Teresa Nielsen Hayden links to olduse.net: a real-time historical exhibit*, which presents "usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago".

Shouldn't it expand as the net did, and eventually become the entire internet, updated in real time, thirty years after the fact? Which means, thirty years from now, it will contain within itself a rerecreated form of the usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago as it was thirty years ago. Which in turn will morph over time...

And so on, in an endless, iterative cycle, a 'net-flavored version of the Eternal Return.

And around the same time, of course, this post will be in there too: and perhaps someone inside olduse's recreation of the internet will google it up, wondering if anyone would have guessed it; and they'll see me (you, there, are seeing me now) waving across time, thirty years into the future.

Hello up there....**

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0 Title footnote.

* And how marvelous is that concept: a "real-time historical exhibit"? (I guess the various reenactors would say they'd gotten there a long time ago, although I don't know if any given reenactment is really long enough to qualify.)

** Although this is all I've got to say, really.

Rule of Thumb

If a google search for a book title and author's name (from a fairly full one like Stephen Jay Gould The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox* to a simple one like Adapting Minds Buller) does not bring up the Google Books page for the volume in question within the top ten results, then there is no preview (or only a basically-useless snippet view) of the book. If there is a preview of the book, however, then the google books page will be in the top ten google results.

Known exceptions: if the book is very new, reviews, sales and publisher's pages will sometimes crowd the top ten and crowd out the preview; and if the author's name and title is sufficiently general, then non-relevant hits might crowd out the preview.

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* And no, Google, I did not mean Ghould instead of Gould. Oi.

Quote of the Day: On the Fragmentation of the Internet

...when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

-- Adam Gopnik, "How the Internet Gets Inside Us"

It's a good article all around, highly recommended. (I'm a big Gopnik fan, which either solidifies or undermines the recommendation -- I'm not sure which.) And while that was my favorite bit, there were a lot of others that were almost as good. I can't resist quoting two other bits. First, this understated little self-referential sentence from the middle of a paragraph (a little after the above):

That uniquely evil and necessary thing the comprehensive review of many different books on a related subject, with the necessary oversimplification of their ideas that it demanded, was already around in 1500, and already being accused of missing all the points.

And finally, this incredibly nice metaphor (empty if you don't know the original context, but incredibly telling if you do):

[T]he Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.

Read the rest.

Zeynep Tufekci on Wikileaks, the "Tax on DIssent" and the Internet as Privatized Public Space

Via the same Zunguzungu link roundup I got yesterday's quote from, here is Zeynep Tufekci on the lesson of L'affaire Wikileaks:

...the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a "dissent tax" on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one's ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a "quasi-public sphere," where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent....

During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech--it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.

The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere "quasi-public sphere," the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private. If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power.

And then, via one of the links in the very excerpt reprinted above, here is Zeynep Tufekci with more about the internet as a public sphere on private property, and the limits that entails:

The answer cannot be: well, people who are unhappy shouldn’t use those services. Presence on the Internet is effectively a requirement for fully and effectively participating in the 21st century as a citizen, as a consumer, as an informed person and as a social being. Further, many such services are natural monopolies: Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, all benefit greatly from network externalities which means that the more people on the service, the more useful it is for everyone. This makes it very hard for a market leader to be challenged. (Wikipedia is also such a natural monopoly but it is not corporate controlled).

Facebook or Google are optional in the sense that electricity, telephone, modern medicine are optional. Don’t like the medical establishment? Don’t use antibiotics! Don’t like how deregulated electricity markets are run? Well, don’t use electricity! Hey, solar panels are available. Telling people to opt-out of major streams of sociality, information and markets on the Internet makes almost as much sense. While I’ll readily concede the urgency of antibiotics differs from the urgency of social interaction, sociality is a fundamental part of being. It is not optional. It is not a coincidence that solitary confinement is the most severe legal punishment –short of the death penalty—that is legally imposed on people.

The next argument is: well, use an alternative service! That too is as valid as telling people to use a different cable company or an electric utility if they don’t like the current one. In most markets, there is only one or two such utilities, and for good reason. The investment in laying cables and connecting doors is large enough that most markets cannot support multiple, truly alternative services. Similarly, especially in the lives of young people, Facebook acts like a phone directory used to and opting out of Facebook during college would significantly constrain social options for many. Facebook has become de facto social commons, especially in college but now has spread to other cohorts. It takes effort to maintain a profile and people are unlikely to duplicate that effort in multiple services the same way multiple electric companies don’t put down parallel cables to each neighbor to compete with each other. Google is such an environment for searching and for many people who do not have an institutionally-supplied email account they can freely use for personal matters, Gmail makes a lot of sense.

Both articles flesh out the ideas these excerpts are from; click through if the quoted bits interest you.

Quote of the Day (Andy Warhol Never Saw *This* Coming)

...on the internet, everyone is famous for fifteen people.

-- Shaenon K. Garrity