more than 95 theses

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Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution. In fact, I’d think asking such questions would be an important part of the job of a media critic, or a lead Bits blogger.

Instead, the response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions. If a Luddite is someone who fears and hates all technological change, a Biltonite is someone who celebrates all technological change: because we can, we must. I’d like to think that in 1860 I would have been an early train passenger, but I’d also like to think that in 1960 I’d have urged my wife to go off Thalidomide.

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— Neither Luddite nor Biltonite: Interesting Times : The New Yorker. I cite this because I have had a similar experience: though, unlike Packer, I do use Twitter, often, and have this tumblelog, and have another blog, and create blogs for my classes, and read and respond to all my students’ papers electronically, and have and use a Kindle, etc., etc… . nevertheless, if I express any reservations whatsoever about any new technologies whatsoever, I get sneering responses from people who can’t tell the difference between being a Luddite and trying to think.

“The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state’s bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya’s), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?”

— Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis. - By Jacob Weisberg

“It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America. The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy. The idea was that legislators would convene at a safe remove from voters and, thus insulated from the din of narrow interests and widespread but ephemeral passions, do what was in the long-term interest of their constituents and of the nation. Now information technology has stripped away the insulation that physical distance provided back when information couldn’t travel faster than a horse.”

— The Internet vs. Obama - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com. This seems ridiculous to me. Democracy would be subverted if technology enabled one set of interests, representing one point of view, to dominate our representatives. But everyone is using the same technologies. Our current problems are not created, or in my view even exacerbated, by technology: they are created by corrupt politicians whose votes are always for sale. (See my recent post quoting Larry Lessig on this.) We shouldn’t blame the technologies, we should redirect them and use them better.

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What would the reform the Congress needs be? At its core, a change that restores institutional integrity. A change that rekindles a reason for America to believe in the central institution of its democracy by removing the dependency that now defines the Fundraising Congress. Two changes would make that removal complete. Achieving just one would have made Obama the most important president in a hundred years.

That one — and first — would be to enact an idea proposed by a Republican (Teddy Roosevelt) a century ago: citizen-funded elections. America won’t believe in Congress, and Congress won’t deliver on reform, whether from the right or the left, until Congress is no longer dependent upon conservative-with-a-small-c interests — meaning those in the hire of the status quo, keen to protect the status quo against change. So long as the norms support a system in which members sell out for the purpose of raising funds to get re-elected, citizens will continue to believe that money buys results in Congress. So long as citizens believe that, it will… .

The only certain effect of this first change would be to make it difficult to believe that money buys any results in Congress. A second change would make that belief impossible: banning any member of Congress from working in any lobbying or consulting capacity in Washington for seven years after his or her term.

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— Lawrence Lessig, “How to Get Our Democracy Back”

“Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and pedants alike, place names such as St Paul’s Square were banned and unceremoniously replaced with an apostrophe-free version: St Pauls Square. The council’s reasoning was that nobody understands apostrophes and their misuse was so common in public signs that they were a hindrance to effective navigation. Anecdotes abounded of ambulance drivers puzzling over how to enter St James’s Street into a GPS navigation system while victims of heart attacks, strokes and hit ‘n’ run drivers passed from this world into the (presumably apostrophe-free) next.”

— The Curious Case of the Evolving Apostrophe

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My research shows that the fleur-de-lis, in and of itself, is the single most enervating thing you can put on a jersey. The New Orleans Saints have great colors, but they’re wearing a Frenchy flowery thing on their heads, so it’s really no mystery why they spend January watching the playoffs on TV. If they could just keep the jerseys, lose the “Saints” motif, and maybe rename themselves the Devils, they’d give themselves half a shot… .

When kickoff time comes, I’m going to be sitting with a crawfish po’ boy and a frosty mug of Blackened Voodoo, screaming for the Aints to avenge 42 years of profound suckitude and all-around futility and bring a championship home to the ancient town of Marie Laveau, Professor Longhair, and Peyton Manning. But you don’t mess around with wearing a fleur-de-lis in a contact sport. You just don’t.

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— Michael Bérubé - American Airspace