Category Archives: Opinions

Snark, for and against

This looks like an interesting book: Snark, by David Denby, the film critic. He warns that cheap sarcasm is becoming the voice of the internet.

Here’s an attack on the book.

And here’s a defense.

Both sides make interesting arguments, but for now I lean towards Denby. I think there’s something about the way writing works on the internet that encourages well-formulated, empty cynicism. It’s easy to write, fun to read. And yet .. there’s something liberating in that voice. Perhaps, as Adam Sternbergh’s says, snark is a way of calling bullshit on the powerful. Not the best way, but a way. Anyway, I’ll read the book.

Links via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the intelligent gaming site.

That histrionic gift by which such men impersonate the feelings of their followers

Fyren ligner litt på Jonas Gahr Støre??

When you trace back the history of spin, PR and propaganda, the threads converge on Walter Lippmann’s 1922 Public Opinion, one of the great and dangerous books of political philosophy. Lippmann argued that people are unable to gain an accurate picture of the world they live in. Pure democracy therefore doesn’t work, and society needs the guidance of benevolent experts.

80 years later we know that expert rule doesn’t work, but Lippmann’s challenge to the fundaments of democracy remains unanswered. I sure don’t know how. Everything he says is correct. The best I can do is “well it seems to work anyway”.

Lippmann’s analysis of how people form opinions, and how this process may be manipulated, inspired Edward Bernays to create the PR industry. Edward Bernays inspired Goebbels, but Goebbels could just have skipped the middleman: Public Opinion contains all the building blocks of a theory of mass manipulation.

I’m too hard on Lippmann. He wanted government experts to protect us from manipulation. But it was implicit in his distrust of democracy and individual judgment that, to do that, the government must itself manipulate. And Public Opinion told it exactly how.

Today the book is mostly forgotten, but its ideas permeate every aspect of our lives. They’re there in every political statement, every advertisement, every press release. We live in the world Lippmann describes, and more so because only the wrong people listened to his ideas. Read Public Opinion yourself to restore the balance.

An idea about the internet

The internet is to the city as the city is to the small town, and the small town to the countryside.

In functionality: It’s larger, faster, more anonymous, more specialized, more complex. Some new things become possible, some old things difficult.

In scariness: Isolation, predators, freaks, Angry Internet People. Uncaring and lawless. Too large, too fast.

In attitude: A mixture of arrogance and nostalgia towards the simpler life. In response, resentment and envy. “How quaint and charming!” vs “Who do they think they are?”

A city person goes out in the country to relax, and dream of leaving it all behind for a more authentic and natural life. An internet person finds the same quiet in the city when their gadgets are turned off. They dream of leaving them off forever, to live the authentic urban life.

Attempts to live these dreams will probably lead to boredom, possibly to happiness.

Sweet, bland and uplifting

Andrew Orlowski writes that Malcolm Gladwell is a guru for the brain dead.

Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable.

..

“…In embracing the diversity of human beings we will find the true way to human happiness.”

So there you’ve got Gladwell in essence: he always ends with a Hallmark style greeting telling you something sweet, bland and uplifting – that you already knew.

Gladwell isn’t the worst offender, but the anecdotal approach to popular science often results in a kind of pretend learning. It’s something you read so you can feel on top of current research, without doing any hard work. It doesn’t teach you facts, and it doesn’t teach you how to think about the subject. It’s like Guitar Hero. It doesn’t make you a better guitar player, it just reduces guitar playing to your level.

There are a lot of good popular science books. There are two signs to look for: The first is that the book doesn’t rely on anecdotes. The second is that it doesn’t make you think you actually understand the subject. Science is really really hard. If you close a book thinking you understand the subject, but the part that sticks in your mind is a story about some wacky scientist, then you’ve read bad pop-sci. Stop doing that. It’s making you dumber.

Jeg, en demokrat?

Så var det på tide med den store demokratidebatten igjen. Er du en demokrat? Mange vil i dag nøle med å svare ja. Det var enklere før. Da var du en demokrat hvis du trodde på allmenn stemmerett og maktdeling. Så fikk vi politikerskandaler, demokratiske folkerepublikker og Kleppe-demokrater. Ordet tynger. Jeg føler at jeg forplikter meg til noe jeg ikke helt vet hva er. Kan jeg være demokrat, og samtidig være uenig med regjeringen?

I dag vet vi at det rene demokratiet ikke alltid er løsningen. Demokrati kan trekkes for langt, noe ekstremdemokrater aldri har villet innrømme. I blant blir det bare kaos når alle skal være med å bestemme. Og det er ikke alltid folket har rett. Visste du f.eks. at Hitler ble demokratisk valgt? Grunn til ettertanke!

Jeg vil nok heller kalle meg selv en post-demokrat. Jeg tror på stemmerett og sånn, men jeg går ikke i tog av den grunn. Og om noen velger å bo i et land som styres av en tyrann, så respekterer jeg faktisk det. Så vidsynte bør vi være. Mange demokratiforkjempere er så intolerante. Bittelitt politivold, så er de på barrikadene. Er det rart folk nøler med å kalle seg selv demokrater?

Gi meg heller en ny og åpen demokratibevegelse. Som anerkjenner det verdifulle arbeidet tidligere generasjoners demokrater har gjort, men samtidig ser at verden nå er annerledes. Alt er ikke svart-hvitt. En sånn demokrat vil jeg være, (men det er greit hvis du er uenig).

One giant airport security area

Security after September 11 seems to be modelled on the court of the Red Queen. Absurd rules, and no sense of humor. Bruce Schneier is one of the sane voices, and Schneier on Security collects his essays on terrorism, privacy and identity theft. It is the book to read on your next plane trip.

Schneier says the choice between security and privacy is false: Some anti-terror measures give you both, others neither. Most security is just security theater, intended to make you feel safe, and to help officials cover their own asses. They’re not defending us against the next terrorist attack, but themselves against the next post-attack investigation.

Security is always a trade-off. There’s a cost in money, time, or civil rights, and perfect security is never worth it, (otherwise you’d never leave your house for fear of a car accident). Massive surveillance of streets and internet traffic may make us slightly safer, but not much, and at great cost to personal freedom. All state power is abused, and if we give our state the power of East Germany, it will behave like East Germany.

Schneier on Security is so sensible that it hardly seems an achievement. But on this side of the looking glass, sanity is radical. Fear and blame and stupidity works against us with a devilish logic. Schneier’s message to people who are worried about their online privacy may thus be extended to all security issues: You’re screwed.

The lonesome death of libertarianism

The financial crisis has put me in the position of being both on the winning and the losing side. As a risk-hater I’m a winner. Nobody tells me I’m a fool for renting my apartment any more, which is nice. As someone who likes free trade and free markets, I am apparently a loser. So says pundits. They say libertarianism and “free market fundamentalism” has now been discredited. I’m far enough away from being a libertarian that I have a choice in whether I feel struck by this criticism. I don’t mind public responsibilities and safety nets on principle, I just doubt our ability to do it well. Sometimes we do, and that’s fine with me. My main disagreement with social democrats and socialists is that they’re often economic illiterates, and don’t consider the hidden costs of good intentions. I’m a pragmatic. So there’s a large gulf between me and an objectivist. But I’ll say three words on behalf of the “free market fundamentalists”: 1) They’re not in charge. 2) In a broader sense we’re all free market fundamentalists these days, even the Norwegian left. 3) What applies to the financial world does not necessarily apply to the rest of the economy. This last point goes both ways. That deregulation works in many markets does not mean it works in the financial market, which functions differently. Deregulation is not good in itself, and neither is regulation. Reality doesn’t listen to Theory. So let’s try not to overcompensate.

Og du da, er du for eller mot rasetenkning?

Document.no’s oppsummering av deres langvarige leserdebatt om rase og kultur er deprimerende lesning. Jon Eirik Lundberg konkluderer med at leserne deres delte seg opp i to leire: for eller mot rasetenkning. Jepp, man har i seks måneder diskutert om man er for eller mot inndeling av menneskeheten i raser med signifikante genetiske forskjeller, og hvilken rolle dette eventuelt spiller i aktuelle kriser og konflikter. Jeg skal ikke beskylde Hans Rustad for rasistiske oppfatningene, tvert i mot. Jeg skal heller ikke spille det avskyelige “sånt kan man da ikke si offentlig!”-kortet og be om “sensur” eller “redaktøransvar”. Det som gjør meg trist er det klare bildet denne debatten gir av noe som har gått galt, et forfeilet prosjekt. For selv om alt skal kunne debatteres, er ikke alle debatter verdifulle, og som politikkblogger hadde jeg en gang en drøm om at vi kunne bygge noe bedre på nettet enn det som fantes i midtstrømsmediene. Om man bare fikk samlet alle de engasjerte, smarte amatørene som ikke slapp til ellers, så ville vi få til noe vakkert. Men det viste seg at engasjerte, smarte amatører ofte er ganske dumme de også. Document.no-debatten framviser beleste idioter av mange slag, med løsslupne nazist-beskyldninger, misbruk av evolusjonsbiologi, og hjertesukk over at de hvite mistet makten i Sør-Afrika. Det er så smart og velformulert, og det er så feil og bortkastet. Document.no sikter høyere enn de fleste, og det står det respekt av, men når noen spør meg hvorfor jeg mistror verdien av nettdebatter er det dit jeg sender dem.

This election is based on a true story

Jan Haugland is astonished at the Norwegian press’s obsession with the American presidental election, and says it’s worse than the last time. I hadn’t noticed, partly because I pay little attention to the Norwegian news media, and partly, I guess, because I’ve gotten so used to their strange foreign news priorities. The abnormal now seems normal to me. My theory is that news is a form of soap opera. We invest time in its characters and their backstories, and get neverending new stories and plot twists in return. American politics is one of the best shows on air: it’s written by the smartest political consultants in the world, it’s in a language our journalists can read, and there’s a huge amount of bonus material and fan communities on the web for those who want more. And unlike actual soap operas it has that “based on a true story” appeal for those who want to pretend they’re doing something useful. American politics is important, but less for us than EU politics, (which is dull and in the wrong languages). And the truly important things, the developments that will change your life tomorrow, take place in areas like economics and technology, and in the dark corners of our social structures. You can rarely tell a riveting story about economics, so it’s not told, (correction: it’s told, but not reported). So while we obsess about Obama and McCain, the future sneaks up on us, ready to knock us over the heads with a hammer and say: Surprise!