I watched "The Seventh Continent" so that you don't have to

Summary: the modern bourgeoisie live lives of quiet desperation, layered over with meaningless daily ritual and endless consumption of commodities. But the children aren't fooled.

Eventually, these fools come to see through the bitter shallowness that is their existence under global corporate capitalism, and kill themselves.

Amen brother

I'm now assuming that most people who comment on blogs at this point are idiots. That said,this guy Sorn (you'll probably need to scroll down), referring to a recent posting on Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic site (about a letter written to Andrew Sullivan), strikes me as very sane, despite the spelling mistakes.

P.S. Although all the commenters are too polite to point it out, the careful reader will note how Sorn's rebuke to the letter-writer is a subtle criticism not only of Sullivan, but of Coates himself, since both men seemed more or less seemed to confirm the initial argument.

Kindle and Orwell

I have to admit that I don't get Kindle, and I don't get ebooks in general. I don't understand why anyone bothered to invent such things. It wasn't as though there was a huge outcry for reading Pride and Prejudice off of a LCD screen (or whatever sort of surface they've come up with to replace it).

Books remain, I think, a superior technology for most of what we use them for, and because of that are not likely to disappear any time soon. But that is a topic for another day. This entry is about the fact that we seem to criticize ebooks for the wrong reasons. For example, Nicholson Baker doesn't like ebooks because...well, uh...here, you tell me. Many other writers have started up an anti-Kindle effort because of what happened with some users' copies of Nineteen Eighty Four several weeks ago. Briefly, the story is this. Amazon had some issue over copyright on the book, so they pulled it, not just off of its shelves (so to speak) but also from customers who had already purchased the title. The book disappeared into thin air: as not a few commentators have noted, the resonances with Orwell's story were just too resonant for the media to ignore.

Aha, said the critics, you see the problem now. Unlike a paper book, you don't actually own an ebook. It doesn't exist on your Kindle--it exists up in "the cloud", and all you have paid for is the right to access it. On the seller's terms. If you had actually bought the book, Amazon couldn't have taken it from you. Their copyright problems would have remained that: their copyright problems. You still would have your copy. And extrapolating from this particular incident, Kindle seems to make for a very convenient method of censorship. Any time that there is a problem with a book--any kind of problem--Amazon can just pull it. The users may wail and cry, but as long as Amazon refunds their fees, there's not much they can do.

So, yeah. Censorship. Which is a bad thing, for sure. But also not a new thing. There are lots of ways of censoring information. The publishing industry does a pretty good job of keeping about 90 per cent of what is written from most of us. It can do this because of economies in scales in terms of printing books, distributing books, getting some books displayed in book stores and not others. You already knew that. But the thing is that Kindle allows authors to bypass a lot of this crap. Theoretically, at least, the same kind of long tail economics could work for Kindle as for other sorts of new media. But it also has new, different ways of keeping books away from us; or even taking them away.

Because of the way we talk about communication, and more specifically because of the way that we have always talked about the impact of the printing press, we tend to think about media forms in terms of all or nothing: they are precursors to a new democratic revolution, or they're going to lead to the ultimate panopticon. But in terms of the freedoms allowed, most media forms give on some fronts, and they take on other fronts. The Kindle is probably going to be like that. At least, if it's anything like any other form of media introduced into the Western World in the past 2,000 years.

Let us now praise journalists who are not nearly so famous as they deserve to be

It is in the nature of modern journalism (as with so much in our world) that sounding intelligent and interesting is more important than actually being intelligent and interesting. Examples of mediocrities who play the game well: Andrew Sullivan, Ron Rosenbaum, Christopher Hitchens (Yah, you want me to add Gladwell, too. Well to hell with that: everyone's on him right now. And he's not the worst offender by a long shot.) An counter-example would be David Cayley, who I am almost certain you have never heard of. Much of this could be attributed to the fact that he's Canadian, except that I doubt most Canadians have heard of him, either. They might know who Gwynne Dyer is: they have almost certainly heard of names like Barbara Frum or David Suzuki. But Cayley is not a household name anywhere except maybe his own house; he barely has a Wikipedia page.

David Cayley has produced work for the Canadian radio series Ideas for the past 25 years or so. His masterpiece may be the recent 22-episode set of radio interviews on the idea of science in the modern world, although it's hard to pick a favorite because almost everything the man does is so good. When I was just out of college, Cayley's work, along with some magazine stuff that Taylor Branch did on race in modern America, were what made me want to be a journalist. People like that made journalism out to be a place where you could write about ideas and communicate to people who normally didn't think about the sorts of things that you were talking about. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that most working journalists don't get the kind of gig that Cayley got: writing hour-long docs for a government-sponsored radio program that doesn't need to make a profit. Well okay: he's made better use of that opportunity than most people would. Cayley always challenges the listeners, and he always challenges himself. A good illustration of this is his most recent piece on Ideas. It's about critics of the global warning consensus. I haven't listened to the whole piece and I don't have the scientific chops to critique it in any case, but here's the thing: Cayley is no shill for the oil companies. He's been writing about environmental issues since the 80s, and generally from a point of view sympathetic to environmentalists. The first time I ever heard about "deep ecology" was when I heard an interview that Cayley did with the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.

Cayley doesn't do a piece on the arrogance of the scientific status quo because he wants to preen. He does it because he's genuinely curious, and always ready to concede that he might not be as smart as he thinks. He is an intellectual contrarian in a way that poseurs like Hitchens or Sullivan can only dream of being.

Bud Light?

My respect for the President of the United States has taken a serious hit.
What a wimpy choice of beer.

Last post on this topic. Ever.

Now that I've calmed down a bit, and started to think about this whole thing from the viewpoint of a media analyst, I realize that my previous post got things exactly wrong. The fact that no one knows what went down on the professor's front door-step is precisely what has made it chum for the commentariat and all the professional posters out there in blogland. There is just enough information to allow people to give their interpretation, but no so much that the interpretations could ever be refuted, only argued about.

Add to this the fact that race and class both got pulled into the discussion very quickly, which allowed folks on the one side to accuse anyone who dared to disagree with them as, at best, clueless white people intent on denying the realities of modern America, and those on the other side to don the mantle of aggrieved populist rage.

Side note. There was actually a sane op-ed to come out of this: one by Glenn Loury in the New York Times. (And for an example of how not to cover a story like this, check out Emily Bazelon and her two guests on this week's Political Gabfest.)

Didn't a Japanese film-maker do a movie about this that one time?

Here's the latest on the Henry "Skip" Gates scandale. The Cambridge police have released the police report on the arrest. The report doesn't present Dr. Gates in a very favorable light. In fact, he comes off like a very arrogant Harvard professor, desperate to play the role of a victim. Having met several Harvard professors in my four-year undergraduate career there, I have to say that I do not find this to be an entirely outlandish portrayal. The size of the egos bouncing around the Yard are comparable only to only a few other places in the United States--some parts of Hollywood, and maybe Wall Street. On other hand, as a few bloggers have pointed out, it was the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, who made out the report. So, you know, he maybe doesn't have the clearest view of the ground on this particular matter.

Dr. Gates, for his part, tells a very different story: one in which he was trying to be as reasonable as possible under the circumstances (those being, like, having to justify walking around in your own fucking house).

Who woulda thunk it, huh? Two guys, get in a fight, end up telling two different stories that make the other guy look like a jerk?

So, with all that, here's my question:

WHY TEH FUCK IS ANYBODY STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS? WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED THERE? WHO KNOWS WHAT ANYBODY'S MOTIVES WERE? YOU SURE AS HELL DON'T! I DON'T! CHRIST ALMIGHTY, I DOUBT THAT GATES AND CROWLEY EVEN KNOW AT THIS POINT!

SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!

Jesus.