Networked Participation in Election 2008, A Precusor to More Public Participation in Politics?

During the recent election, individuals Facebooked, Twittered, texted, emailed, and YouTubed about the candidates, a trend that many consider a renewed commitment to public participation in government. Since the election, President-elect Obama's staff has sought to keep that momentum alive, sending frequent emails to supporters to enlist their participation in passing legislation through grassroots efforts. In a recent article, Karen Czapanskiy and Rashida Manjoo ask an intriguing question in the wake of our reinvigorated electorate: should mechanisms exist that would require give and take between legislative leaders and the public? In other words, should legislators be required to faciliate public participation to enhance the legitimacy, accuracy, and accountability of its laws? In The Right of Public Participation in the Law-Making Process and the Role of Legislature in the Promotion of This Right, Czapanskiy and Manjoo explore a recent decision by the South African Constitutional Court mandating the involvement of citizens in the law-making process and the valuable lessons for other democratic nations that the decision provides.

Here is the abstract:

In 2006, the South African Constitutional Court found a constitutional right to participate in the legislative process in the case of Doctors for Life, Case CCT 12/05 (decided 17 August 2006). In this article, we argue that, first, legislation is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input, and, second, citizenship is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input. Doctors for Life puts South Africa on the road to improving both legislation and citizenship. In the United States, this road is largely untraveled. While rejecting traditional representative democracy as an adequate expression of political participation, Doctors for Life does not go as far as it could in terms of entrenching public participation in the South African legislative process. Nonetheless, it offers a model of an interim place that the United States can consider. The case also offers a model for international human rights exploration in an area of underdeveloped theory, especially in regard to enhancing respect and dignity as aspects of citizenship in a democratic state.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 11:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

When No Dog Poop is an Island

I've twice heard co-blogger Dan Solove talk about the Korean "dog poop girl," a woman hounded by internet shamers when she refused to clean up after her dog on a Seoul subway. The first time I heard the story I just found it funny, but at a conference earlier this year the tone of the audience was different. I felt bad about laughing at some internet satires of the woman that Dan had put on powerpoint slides. Part of it may have been the theme of the conference (legal responses to cyberharassment), but perhaps a larger cultural turning point is in the works.

Surveillance has now advanced to the point that a city in Israel is starting "dog poop DNA banks," enabling enforcers to (potentially) identify the source of any offending rubbish:

[V]eterinarian Tika Bar-On . . . says she hopes to make DNA banking mandatory for all dog owners. At that point, instead of a practice of positive reinforcement, she imagines a system involving sidewalk poop patrols and penalties for nonscoopers. For Bar-On, this is about more than waste elimination: “We can use this DNA database for important things like genetic research on dog diseases,” she says. “We could also use DNA to identify strays and return them to their parents.” But until then, she’s focusing on feces because, as she says, “when you go to the park with your kids and they meet dog poop, it’s not very pleasant.”

My guess is that most Americans would resist the central planning implicit in this solution. But if the alternative to statism is vigilantism, it may start looking more attractive. Like trademark in the commercial realm, DNA here may be the best way to identify source in an orderly way.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 02:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Science and Technology Workplace, A Predominately Male Face

Recent studies suggest that fewer girls and women are pursuing, or staying in, careers in science and technology. Six years ago, 28 percent of the undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. That number, however, dropped to 22 percent in 2005 and now reportedly sits at 10 percent. At the same time, women in the technical community are increasingly leaving their jobs. A recent study published by the Harvard Business Review found that while women made up 41% of newly qualified technical staff, more than half dropped out by the time they reached their late thirties.

Surely, a variety of reasons contribute to the male dominance of science and technology fields. Some blame our "cultural software": young girls are not taught to enjoy computers. As the director of Northwestern University's Center for Technology & Social Behavior Justine Cassell explains, "the girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were 'boys toys' and that true girls didn't play with computers." Others suggest that women leave computer science careers to stay at home, in much the same way that women do in any other careers.

But the Harvard Business Review study offers a less benign explanation for women's departure from careers in computer science, one that arguably accords with our Internet culture: the majority of women working in science and technology leave their jobs for alternative careers or the home to avoid struggling with sexual harassment, the macho "lab coat culture," and the old boys' network that excluded them. Nearly two-thirds of the women surveyed for the study said that they had been victims of sexual harassment in the workplace. A total of 43 percent of female engineers said that they had encountered an "inherently sexist culture" in which it was assumed that only men had the skills to succeed in the most advanced posts. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist at the Center for Work-Life Policy and author of the study, explained that although the "predatory" and "condescending culture" towards women has declined in most workplaces in the past 20 years, it has "survived in the engineering, science, and technology context." This seems consistent with what commentators call the "culture of misogyny" that pervades many social networking sites, blogs, and other Web 2.0 platforms.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 06:07 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Fraud, Everywhere

Recent investor pressure to liquidate investments has exposed fraud of massive proportions. On Thursday, federal investigators arrested trader and hedge fund manager Bernard L. Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, for allegedly defrauding investors of $50 billion. According to the accompanying civil complaint filed by the SEC in federal district court, Madoff ran Bernard Madoff Investment Securities (BMIS), a broker dealer and investment firm, where he also maintained a lucrative investment adviser business. Madoff apparently kept that business on a separate floor of the firm under "lock and key" from BMIS employees. There, Madoff managed money for hight net-worth individuals, hedge funds, and other institutions, a business whose steady returns had long provoked skepticism from traders. Early this month, investors sought $7 billion in redemptions from the business. Unable to pay these returns, Madoff allegedly confessed to two senior employees (his sons, according to the Wall Street Journal's sources) that his investment advisory business was a fraud. Madoff allegedly admitted: "it's all just one big lie," a "giant Ponzi scheme" that for years had paid returns to investors out of the principal received from other investors and had nothing left. Madoff apparently told those employees that the business had been insolvent for years and the fraud was worth billions.

This recalls 1987, the "Den of Thieves" period of insider trading, risky takeover stocks, and manipulations of the junk-bond market. As Time reported that year, maintaining integrity was a "difficult challenge in the deregulated, hurly-burly Wall Street of the 1980s, where traders have been tempted to use insider tips to maintain their competitive edge." Now, as then, fraud has blossomed in the face of loose regulatory controls and oversight as well as a lack of transparency in a complex financial market. One might suppose that our current task is to figure out how to strike the balance between tougher regulation and a productive and unencumbered market. But there are no doubt other important questions, and hopefully our insightful corporate/law and economics gurus Dave, Frank, Lawrence, and Nate will help us explore them.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 09:44 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Zuckerberg's Law of Data Sharing

Technologists have helped us recognize many important laws of the universe, some empirical and some metaphorical. For instance, Moore's Law teaches us that computers double their power about every eighteen months. Metcalf's Law attests to the power of networks: the value of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and social networking sites increases as the number of users do. Reed's Law tells us that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. And Linus's Law explains that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Or: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone."

Here may be another law: Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, predicts that "next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and that next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before." As Zuckerberg explains, people are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are and even what they look like as they crawl home from a college party. So this means, if true, that in the aggregate we will be posting more photos to Flickr, uploading more videos to YouTube and music to Tumblr, sharing travel plans on dopplr, uploading our transactions to wesabe, posting our stock trades to covestor, and many other forms of social sharing. And it also suggests a few other things. First, we will no doubt see more tools emerge that integrate and analyze this data across sites (and hence making it more commercially valuable). Second, we need to keep talking about privacy: how we understand, value, and protect it. As Dan Solove's long-standing project and superb book Understanding Privacy teach us, it is this task that is most urgent to take seriously.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fundraising Creativity

When times are tough, it seems especially important to remember those who rely on others for their well-being. For organizations that support those people, this means attention to fund-raising. In prosperous times, funding often seems relatively easy to generate, compared to recessionary times, when otherwise generous people opt to tighten belts and make charitable giving a first line casualty. In such periods, fund-raisers need to be creative. One way that happens is through visual imagery that compels remembering the less fortunate.

Among the inspired efforts in this season’s fund-raising efforts is the accompanying poster from a campaign for a can drive, a popular fund-raising method. This campaign, called Yes We Can, is for a middle school in New York City, Rodeph Sholom School. It taps into the prevailing thirst for optimism in the nation, reflected in President-elect Obama’s election campaign, while playfully evoking Warhol’s pop artistry. It also conveys a civics lesson to the students, parents and other community members being targeted. It was created by a teacher at the school, math and digital art whiz, Jonathan Cuba.

Posted by Lawrence_Cunningham at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Negative Reviews, Briefly Noted

I hope I can make this an occasional series. Categories will be multifarious.

Yeah, She Annoys Me, Too: Virginia Heffernan on Sarah Vowell ("She delivers a farrago of free-floating pedantry . . . Vowell’s whole alt-­everything vibe is just dated enough to be cringey. . . . With all these middlebrow historians making scholarly work perfectly accessible, do we really need still more accessibility — pierced-brow history, maybe, with TV and pop-music references?").

Not Quite Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars: Chelsea Cain on Susan Cheever ("The word “addict” is so overused that sex addicts have a hard time getting taken seriously, much less getting sympathy. Cheever aims to fix this. The book — like a manual on crabgrass control — is divided into three parts, “What is it?” “What causes it?” and “What can we do about it?”).

Worse than Heidegger: Adam Kirsch on Slavoj Zizek ("Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. . . He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse.").

Kunderan Kitsch?: Andrew Orlowski on Malcolm Gladwell ("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. . . .Gladwell in essence: he always ends with a Hallmark style greeting telling you something sweet, bland and uplifting - that you already knew.")

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 07:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Last Shall be First

A heartwarming Christmas fashion story:

Even seasoned bargain hunters were startled to see Saks’s wood-paneled main sales floor mobbed with consumers nosing like truffle hounds through shelves of marked-down cashmere sweaters and racks of designer clothes with prices seemingly too good to be true.

Will shoppers ever again want to buy luxury goods at full price? The depth of the challenge was suggested by the incongruity this week of seeing Prada wallets, usually kept under glass at Saks, dumped into display stands that at Wal-Mart are known as “end-caps”; lizard handbags at Bergdorf Goodman jumbled on counters as if that Fifth Avenue landmark were an outlet of Loehmann’s; and Ralph Lauren dress shirts at Lord & Taylor thrown together and offered at prices roughly equivalent to the cost of two McDonald’s Happy Meals.

I've been skeptical of fashion's real contribution to the economy. These developments remind me a bit of Keynes on Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren:

When the accumula­tion of wealth is no longer of high social im­portance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid our­selves of many of the pseudo‑moral principles which have hag‑ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money‑motive at its true value.

The love of money as a possession ‑as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life ‑will be recognised for what it is, a some­what disgusting morbidity, one of those semi­criminal, semi‑pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribu­tion of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

The articles of fashion mentioned in the article are losing none of their beauty or design elegance--only their ability to signify their acquirer's wealth. This is one area where deflation is overdue.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 09:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Professional Ethics Rankings

Lawyers continue to receive relatively low public ratings for professional honesty and ethics, according to the annual Gallup poll on the subject. The poll, by telephone of 1,010 adult Americans, asked people to assess the standards of honesty and ethics in 21 professions as very high or high/average/low or very low.

Nurses receive the highest scores (84/14/<2), followed by pharmacists, high school teachers, doctors, cops, clergy, funeral directors and accountants. Lobbyists receive the lowest: (<9/27/64). Lobbyists are preceded in their cohort by labor union leaders (16/45/35), followed by lawyers (18/45/37), then business executives (12/49/37), advertising professionals, stockbrokers, Members of Congress, car sales-people, and telemarketers in dead last. In the middle cohort are journalists (25/44/31), bankers (23/53/23), building contractors and real estate agents.

Results for most professions were roughly constant this year compared to last. But two points stand out. First, bankers took a beating this year, the first time since 1996 they registered below 30% in the very high + high category and, at 23%, the lowest they’ve received in the poll's history. The pollsters attribute the results to the economic crisis, natch. Second, business executives last year registered 14% in the very high + high category which, while not a huge drop to 12% this year, is the lowest they’ve received in the poll’s history—having hit highs of 25% in both 1990 and 2001. The economic crisis, again.

Posted by Lawrence_Cunningham at 12:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Who Hid All the Poor People?

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently commented on a strange incongruity in the current economic downturn--everyone she sees seems to be doing all right:

One of the weirdest, most perceptually jarring things about the economic crisis is that everything looks the same. We are told every day and in every news venue that we are in Great Depression II, that we are in a crisis, a cataclysm, a meltdown, the credit crunch from hell, that we will lose millions of jobs, and that the great abundance is over and may never return. . . . And yet when you free yourself from media and go outside for a walk, everything looks . . . the same. . . . [For example,] [e]veryone’s still overweight.

Charlie Gibson of ABC may have the same problem. Perhaps we are just a "nation of whiners," as Phil Gramm claimed. But Wonkette dissents:

See, Peggy, many average mortals realize that we’re in a bad economy when they “lose lots of money,” unlike you, who will only understand it when 1930s-era hobo anachronisms start showing up on the corner of Park & 79th. . . .[T]he Wal-Mart death stampede this morning is, for what it’s worth, a solid 2008 equivalent to the terrible 1930s stereotypes on which she bases economic well-being.

Peggy is right when she says “the mall is still there.” But people aren’t at the mall, you see! They’re at Wal-Mart, where people shop on “Black Friday” when they’re poor. And they’re all there, all trying to buy the same limited number of cheap goods. It becomes a race, and they’re willing kill people as collateral damage. And yes, “Everyone’s still overweight,” Peggy, because the unhealthiest foods — usually corn-derived and subsidized by the government — are the cheapest and most readily available in this country. . . .

But in defense of Noonan, it's important to realize how hidden the suffering may be in this downturn. As Drake Bennett notes, the price of clothing and food has gone down relative to what it was in the 1930s:

Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we'd see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn't be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there's more work - or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.

And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it's getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance.

Culture also plays a role in "closeting" those hit by hard times. Think about the tactics used to defeat SCHIP last year, when various forces opposed to subsidizing children's health insurance blamed uninsured kids' parents for their plight. As Ezra Klein noted, the message was clear: ask for help, and you get smeared. One of the most heartening things about the recent Studs Terkel tribute on "This American Life" was an interviewee's anger at her son's use of this type of rhetoric with respect to poor African-Americans out of work. "Your father was looking for a job during the Depression, and he couldn't find one!" she declares, the searing experience of poverty giving her a lasting sympathy for those on the margins.

One of C. Wright Mills's greatest insights concerned the threshold of politics--when personal pain becomes a matter of social justice. There will be many voices over the coming years telling those slipping out of the middle class to "tough it out," to "get more education to become globally competitive," to make do with less. While that's all good advice, there are some other sources for the current crisis that need to be examined:

[From] 2002-2006 . . . [h]ousehold income increased a total of $863 billion over the period. $626 billion of the total gain went to the top 1 percent of households. The bottom 90 percent got only $41 billion, less than 5 percent of the total gain.

Resources didn't just evaporate over the past year or so due to a natural disaster. Political decisions systematically reallocated them. And until the tens of millions of Americans with insecure health coverage, crumbling infrastructure, and housing insecurity "come out" to demand a better deal, we can only expect more of the same.

UPDATE: An explanation for Peggington's perspective.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 07:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Thanksgiving Entertainment

Regular Co-Op readers may have realized that I am a big fan of the radio program This American Life. Here’s the link to one of my all-time favorite stories: Opening Night. There’s not a legal connection; there’s not even a Thanksgiving connection. It’s just flat-out hilarious.

Best Thanksgiving wishes to everyone, with a special thought for those who may feel less fortunate than they did last year.

Posted by Sarah_Waldeck at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Medicalization Menace? A New Culture War

The NYT's Well blogger Tara Parker-Pope notes the new pride many of those with ADHD feel in the wake of Michael Phelps's success:

[T]he Olympic superstar . . . is emerging as an inspirational role model among parents and children whose lives are affected by attention problems. . . . Children with the disorder typically have trouble sitting still and paying attention. But they may also have boundless energy and a laserlike focus on favorite things. . . .

Like Adrienne Rich's Marie Curie, or Kay Redfield Jamison's geniuses, these "disordered" individuals are simultaneously sufferers and successes.

They're also part of a larger cultural movement questioning the medicalization of various "deviant" personalities. Rather than treat boys for ADHD, some Norwegian schools just start them in school later. Allan V. Horwitz worries that "normal sadness" is being rendered socially unacceptable on account of pharmaceutical fixes:

Consumption of antidepressants has soared since 1990. Roughly 10% of women and 4% of men in the United States take antidepressant medication at any time. . . .The blurring of the distinction between normal intense sadness and depressive disorder has arguably had some salutary effects. For example, it has reduced the stigma of depression and created a cultural climate that is more accepting of seeking treatment for mental illness. Many people with normal sadness might benefit from medication that ameliorates their symptoms. However, the usefulness of medication for normal sadness, and especially the trade-off between symptom reduction and adverse effects, has not been carefully studied—partly because the necessary distinctions do not exist within the current diagnostic system.

The decontextualized definition of MDD, however, has had substantial costs. Since 1980, an enormous “medicalization” of unhappiness has occurred. Life’s ills—whether a failure to attain an expected promotion, ongoing conflict with a spouse, or overwhelming distress from coping with competing family and work demands—are too often treated as mental disorders based on the report of a few symptoms of sadness. The medicalization of social life triggered an immense rise in the consumption of antidepressants. The efficacy of these medications for the treatment of normal sadness is often overstated, and their potential to cause harmful effects has sometimes been underestimated.

Medicalization may also be contributing to cyberchondria. We should not ignore the market forces contributing to the process, as David Healy notes:

One consequence of the recent "biological" turn is that psychiatrists increasingly fail to appreciate the dynamic of their relationships with their patients. There is a growing split between pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy that is most evident in North American psychiatry. Actual time with patient is shrinking rapidly. Psychiatrists now commonly prescribe medications after only a brief encounter with the patient, and with only occasional follow-ups. . . .Prescribing antidepressants has become as antiseptic a therapeutic encounter as giving an antibiotic.

The antibiotic analogy is apt. As I argued last year, while the internal experience of equilibrium and happiness is often intrinsically good, the external display of such affect can be a positional good. We see increasing reports of people in competitive jobs taking pills or shots to maintain an upbeat affect and appearance. The competition to seem upbeat could become an arms race--individually rational, but collectively self-defeating. Antibiotic use can follow a similar pattern--while any individual wants to be on the safe side and take the drug, widespread overuse leads to resistance.

One more example of medicalization spawning collectively self-defeating behavior is cosmetic surgery. As Anthony Elliott's brilliant new book on the topic shows, “[T]he flipside of today’s reinvention craze is fear of personal disposability" (145):

My argument is that the new economy spawned by globalization intrudes traumatically in the emotional lives of people - with many scrambling to adjust to today's routine corporate redundancies. (...) [C]orporate layoffs, downsizings and offshorings are affecting people's sense of identity, life and work. (...) Many have reacted to this sense of social dislocation and economic insecurity - what I term today's pervasive sense of ambient fear - by turning to forms of extreme reinvention in general and cosmetic surgical culture in particular. Many are calculating that a freshly purchased face-lift or suctioning of fat through liposuction is the best route to improved lives, careers and relationships. (9)

As Charles Taylor argued in his great essay "What's Wrong With Negative Liberty," we should always interrogate the conditions under which choices are made. The enhancements achieved via the medicalization of hyperactivity, sadness, and plain looks are contestable. As market-driven pressures for conformity ratchet up, we may see new identity politics developing around introversion, hyperactivity, sadness, heaviness, and plainness.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Brain as Belief Engine: Patternicity and Synchronicity

I recently got a chance to hear Cass Sunstein's presentation on "Believing False Rumors" at a conference on privacy, free speech, and the Internet. Sunstein discussed the many dynamics leading to errant "informational cascades," including self-defeating attempts at correction (which paradoxically tend to entrench the original mis-impression). This article by Michael Shermer discusses some biological bases for the problem:

In a September paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko test my theory through evolutionary modeling and demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity. They begin with the formula pb > c, where a belief may be held when the cost (c) of doing so is less than the probability (p) of the benefit (b). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

Shermer calls our propensity to find "meaningful patterns in meaningless noise" patternicity. The same phenomenon could be observed on Wall Street. As Michael Lewis reports, when "asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell[, t]he man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up.'" "Fixated on Friedman," they were willfullly blind--though perhaps my moral judgment on results here is influencing my view as to their intent.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 07:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Some Holiday Joy

Chris Lydon's Open Source has been one of my favorite podcasts for the past two years. The host has a passion for culture and politics; his intellect is about as wide-ranging as that of the great American critics Wilson, Trilling, Kazin and Howe. My favorite episodes have both featured Bach; the first a tribute to conductor/pianist Craig Smith, the latest an interview with pianist Andrew Rangell. The Rangell interview focuses on

the perfect nest of piano masterpieces that Daniel Barenboim and others refer to as the Old Testament, the 48 preludes and fugues conceived in 1722 and refined over the last 28 years of Bach’s life, the set known as The Well-Tempered Clavier.

The Smith show captures, in the words of Russell Sherman, an extraordinary "way to live:"

"Everything he touched he cherished, and relished with an incredible tenderness, conviction, and belief. . . Everything he did, he did with flair, a cherubic smile, and a Mozartean sense of absolute pleasure and happiness in the task itself.”

Many thanks to Lydon for bringing both these gifts to us.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 06:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Chastening the Collectivist Impulse

As the election draws nigh, financial panic has given way to something like legislation-phobia in some swathes of the electorate. I think that caution can be overblown, but has a ring of truth when it brings up specific instances of misguided government responses to crises in the past. Sasha Abramsky's recent article on fear provides a great example of the right kind of cautions for collectivists:

Today the very notion of "recession" is enough to put the Federal Reserve Board into a tizzy. Yet in rushing to lower interest rates to stave off a recession in the middle part of this year, and in then throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into hastily cobbled-together, poorly coordinated rescue packages for banks and mortgage lenders, the Fed may well ultimately have unleashed an inflationary spiral that will, in the long run, do at least as much economic damage as a corrective recession would.

As for climate change, while it's clearly a massive problem, it's also an extremely complex one. Yet suddenly, as the reality of a warming planet belatedly enters public consciousness, we've all become climate experts. Every storm, every deviation from the norm regarding daily temperatures, rainfall, wind speed, is now blamed on global warming. And so we look for quick-fix solutions. In glomming onto one such panacea, biofuels, we may actually have made the problem worse, while contributing to a massive global food crisis. In short, we're becoming so fearful of the future — the next attack, the next economic collapse, the next environmental catastrophe — that we're undermining the present.

It's useful to compare that wise counsel to the usual empty rhetorical attacks on collective action.

For example, here's David Brooks on the "lessons" of behavioral economics:

And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other's risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters. . . .

If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see "Nudge" by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they're even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.

Note that Brooks gives no specific examples here of government's "worse perceptions" of reality. Having promoted Nudge, he might want to take a look at Sunstein's critique of the precautionary principle, a more sophisticated version of Brooks's deep skepticism. Sunstein and Hahn have claimed that "the precautionary principle does not help individuals or nations make difficult choices in a non-arbitrary way. Taken seriously, it can be paralyzing, providing no direction at all." Even failure to make a decision often amounts to a decision. A policymaker "guided" by Brooksian skepticism would have likely made virtually all the deregulatory decisions that led us to the current financial crisis, throwing up his hands at the inevitable politicization and incompetence of government. Sometimes those handicaps of the collective pale in comparison to the destruction wrought by the greed and recklessness of a well-heeled elite.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 09:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sister Emmanuelle of France

There appears to be growing terror on the right that the upcoming presidential election may lead to policies that reduce the fortunes of multimillionaires in order to provide basic necessities for the poor and health security for all. I don't have it in me to argue for the moral necessity of such redistribution--check out Thomas Pogge's website for an encyclopedic and compelling collection of works on the topic. But I do find some inspiration in the parable of Lazarus and Dives. And I find consolation in the story of the recently departed Sister Emmanuelle of France, who counseled herself with words that reflect that great Christian teaching:

In [her] book, mischievously titled “Confessions of a Nun,” Sister Emmanuelle wrote seriously of a life of faith and service. “Remember the simple soul of your brothers and sisters in rags,” she counseled herself. “Do not turn yourself to the ‘beautiful world’ unless it is useful for the slums; do not let your original vanity carry you off to the heights.” . . . [She was] an outspoken advocate for the rights of the poor.

The whole obituary is beautifully written, and a nice respite from the bizarre posturing and vapid rhetoric that so many anti-Obama scare tactics have degenerated into. Though now is an occasion for political struggle, she is a vivid reminder of what a person brimming with kindness and good will can achieve regardless of the political environment.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 01:57 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Which is the More Plausible Apocalypse?

According to James Dobson's Focus on the Family, things are gonna be pretty bleak if Obama wins. As one blogger summarizes, FoF worries/predicts that by 2012, under Obama:

A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80.

The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn.

Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples.

It's a wonder Dobson didn't just subcontract out this work to Tim LaHaye of Left Behind fame--but then again, even LaHaye's been going "off message." Of course, Dobson's letter looks downright public-spirited compared to other tactics of the right, such as faked attacks and depictions of Obama as an avatar of Islamofascism.

Jeffrey Rosen raises the possibility of a different electoral apocalypse that may be a tad bit more plausible than Dobson's eschatology:

An Obama victory would maintain the current balance of the Court, while a McCain Court could create a solid conservative majority. . . .Before the crash of 2008, the previous two most serious depressions in U.S. history--in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--triggered populist economic regulations by Congress and the states to protect citizens from the excesses of industrial capitalism. In both eras, conservative Supreme Court majorities struck down those regulations--from minimum-wage laws to parts of the New Deal--as an affront to property rights and limits on federal power. This triggered a political backlash from Americans convinced that the decisions were bad for the country. The greatest danger posed by a McCain Court is that it might revive those now-discredited ideas.

Broadly, many conservatives want to second-guess the states when they pass progressive regulations--involving affirmative action, economic redevelopment, and gun control--while deferring to the states when they pass regulations favored by social conservatives. . . . This year, liberals are in a perilous situation, where a conservative president could create a conservative Supreme Court majority for decades to come.

Where is the "Dobson letter" for liberals this year? I'd love to see a comparison of whatever fundraising letters are sent out by the ACLU and similar groups to Nostradobsonus's libertine dystopia.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 07:19 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Is the Net Impeding Our Intellectual Life (or Something Else)?

Recent books and articles contend that the Internet has made us narcissistic, shallow, and uncreative. See here, here, and here. According to critics, search engines produce easy answers, discouraging independent and critical thinking. They also provide access to bogus information, confirming prejudices and fostering stupidity and extremism. These arguments seemingly build on the work of many thoughtful scholars, such as Neil Postman who authored Amusing Ourselves to Death and Benjamin Barber who wrote Consumed.

In Wired, David Wolman takes this argument to task, characterizing these critics as modern-day Chicken Littles. Just as the telephone did not extinguish letter writing and modern transportation did not ruin community life, the Internet will not stunt intellectual life in the twenty-first century. Wolman argues that digital technologies, in fact, give us more opportunity to become engaged in the world of ideas. Wikipedia and Wiktionary demonstrate a bona fide hunger for learning and accurate information. And irrationality and prejudice cannot be blamed on technology—it was there long before the emergence of the Internet and will remain long after we have moved on to another communications medium.

The Internet's overall impact on our intellectual life is surely debatable. But recent reports suggest that it is having a positive effect on our family lives, bringing us in closer contact with our loved ones than ever before. As the Washington Post notes today, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report, described as the first of its kind, that finds our families lives richer as a result of Information Age technologies. The report notes that 25 percent of adults said that cellphone calls, emails and text messages, and other forms of online communications made their families closer. 60 percent of responding adults said that the technologies had no impact on their family lives, and only 11 percent said the technology had a negative effect. 47 percent of the adults said cellphones and the Internet had improved family communication. Barry Wellman, an author of the report and sociology professor at the University of Toronto, explained that the communication innovations allow families to "know what each other is doing during the day" and does not "cut back on their physical presence with each other." The findings were based on a nationally representative poll of 2,252 people, which explored technology use and profiled a group of 482 adults with children.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 11:25 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Doctorow’s Discontent with Content

Readers of this blog know that I am a fan of Cory Doctorow’s work. In addition to his fiction, Cory writes nonfiction. His main topics are technology, creativity, copyright, and the future of the future. I know this because I read his work and his latest book, ©ontent, gathers his thoughts on these topics and says so right on the cover. Ah it is so easy. Maybe too easy. Deceptively easy. And that is also Cory’s gift.

©ontent sings. From the opening where Cory tells Microsoft’s Research Group why DRM is foolish to his thoughts on protecting artists to his views on the information economy to his idea that giving away his work is the best thing he can do, Cory offers detailed yet accessible arguments about the way technology, creativity, copyright will affect the future of the future. The essays span several years of writing. Cory makes bold claims about DRM and the market. He presents a rallying call for the United States to keep pace with the changes in information economy lest the rest of the world surpass us. Reading the essays provides insight about his ideas and how they evolved. Remember Cory writes for Boing, Boing, writes science fiction, lectures, and more. His livelihood is at stake here.

Now I can’t say I agree with everything Cory says, but I think what he says merits consideration. Sure, he is in a rarefied world. Maybe he can give away work and still make money. Maybe he is just an evangelist and should be distrusted on those grounds. Then again, read the book. Cory identifies real changes in how our creative system operates and the way in which adherence to the old one could harm us. The last essays grapple with the problems of security and control. They present the possibilities that await us. And that is the point. Cory is speaking of possibility. As he says “We choose the future we want to live in.” ©ontent helps us understand what that future could be and how to have a say in it.

Posted by Deven_Desai at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Is today a holiday?

“Who are your heroes?”

This is one question that I’ve never been able to answer comfortably, whether asked years ago by a college admissions officer or recently by a documentary filmmaker. The problem with picking a public or private hero these days is that everyone comes as a package – and history is all too eager to reveal the rotten bits, from Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves to Coco Chanel’s liaison with a Nazi officer. Sure, it’s possible to choose a fictional character or someone so far obscured by the mists of time and legend that any tragic flaws have disappeared. That seems a bit too easy, though, and it certainly doesn’t speak to previously anointed communal heroes who have lost their luster.

Take Columbus Day, a federal holiday in such disrepute among the chattering classes that none of the 3 newspapers that appeared outside my door this morning even mentioned it. (One of Saturday’s papers did note in passing that today would be a “partial holiday,” with the bond market closed but the stock market open.) Can we celebrate a guy who took a bold navigational risk -- but then sanctioned the enslavement and/or massacre of those he encountered? Like Chief Justice John Marshall, we’re embarrassed to acknowledge the events following the “discovery” of America but unwilling or unable to disown the intervening centuries.

Were it not for a cultural gloss on the significance of Columbus Day, not to mention the desire for a federal holiday between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, Cristoforo Colombo might have faded to the same obscurity as many of his fellow explorers. Italian-American immigrants starting in the mid-nineteenth-century, however, saw an opportunity to legitimize their presence by adopting as one of their own a predecessor on the same journey, a man who was already recognized by mainstream Americans. Never mind that “Italy” didn’t exist in 1492, or that Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag. Columbus Day became less about the historical figure and more about ethnic pride, and woe to the urban politician who failed to march in the local parade.

Fast-forward to 2008, and Columbus Day is also el Dia de la Raza, among other designations; it is a day not only of parades, but also of protests. The clever p.r. move of the nineteenth century is now met with silence by much of the media, though tomorrow’s papers will surely include a red, white, and green photograph or two. Would that my vowel-ended forebears had chosen to rally around a historically vague hero like Saint Patrick and advocate nothing more polarizing than the excessive consumption of green beer. Still, the federal government has enshrined Columbus and his day as a celebration of both his voyages and of Italian-American culture – so whether or not you’re willing to leave the gun, you may as well take the cannoli.

Deconsecrating a civil holiday is a tricky business, even if the day is observed primarily through used-car sales and out-of-step marching bands. As Tyson Foods learned recently when it agreed to replace Labor Day with Eid al-Fitr as a paid day off at a Tennessee facility, holidays are a cultural battleground. While Columbus Day may eventually transform into something more inclusive, or be combined with another observance like the joining of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays to form Presidents Day, many of us do in fact have a federally sanctioned day off. One that, media silence notwithstanding, requires at least a moment of reflection.

Posted by Susan_Scafidi at 01:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Perfect Albums

Album, the word may evoke a creaky, leather-vinyl, cardboard tome with faded Polaroids, instamatics, and school portraits. It may remind one of a black gold-based vinyl disc spinning at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. It does not always remind one of a smaller, shiny disc full of digits unleashed by a laser. But all are albums; they are collections which is what the word means. So even a playlist is an album. For me music is a vital part of the word album. As many know the music industry continues to die a slow death. The single has returned with a vengeance. Pushing eight or more songs in conjunction with the one or two songs a consumer wanted is harder to do. Some might argue that most of those songs were crap anyway, and they are often correct. Still, there are albums, concept albums, that defied this model. Those albums were works of art. The musicians took you somewhere as they told a story. The Beatles and Pink Floyd leap to mind as strong examples of this approach across several albums. In jazz Miles Davis did quite well. More recently, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is quite good.

So here is my question: who else has created a true concept album? Put differently who else has created a perfect album which means you rarely, if ever, skip a song when listening to the album? I am sure there are recent examples and I have missed them. In addition, I am sure that there are older ones I have missed.

Here are some of mine; please share yours:

Abbey Road, The Beatles
Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd
Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
Hounds of Love, Kate Bush
So, Peter Gabriel
Aja, Steel Dan
Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits
Hotel California, The Eagles
Sea Change, Beck (another close call that I may revise)
The Flat Earth, Thomas Dolby (odd one, requires several listens to see how the less known songs make sense)

Posted by Deven_Desai at 12:45 PM | Comments (34) | TrackBack

Using Social Tools to Rob Banks

CNET reports that a man has used Craigslist to rob a bank. O.K. more precisely, he posted an ad on Craigslist and that was a key to his scheme. The robber wore "a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask," approached a bank guard, disabled him with pepper spray, took the cash, and escaped. You might think such an outfit would be obvious and easy to track. That's where Craigslist comes in. The robber had posted an ad for road maintenance workers on Craigslist. The ad told interested candidates they would be paid the going rate of $28.50 an hour and they should show up wearing, you guessed it, the same outfit as the robber. The potential workers became unwitting decoys. The case is even more odd in that the inital vehicle of choice was an inner tube.

For the tech/law folks out there, yes the police are seeing whether Craigslist's records can help trace the robber.

Image: DB COOPER Source: WikiCommons

Posted by Deven_Desai at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Weapons of Mass Distraction"

I'm beginning to think that Barack Obama might only be able to win the presidency in the midst of an economic crisis. That's not because of any defects in his candidacy or ideas, but due to a shocking inadequacy of the press. They are actually willing to take at face value any outrageous claim made by a candidate and to run it as a headline story. As Eugene Robinson observes,

[W]e know that it's not in the public interest to spend the rest of the campaign talking about fringe characters who once crossed paths with Obama, McCain, Palin or Joe Biden instead of debating the economy, the war on terror, health care or any of the other big issues that will define the next presidency.

We all understand that the strategy of the McCain campaign is one of distraction -- his campaign aides have acknowledged that they want to shift the focus from the economy to character, which means personal attacks against Obama. Lacking any fresh mud to sling, the McCain people are trying to exhume guilt-by-association charges that were exhaustively examined months ago during the primaries.

There's an obvious reason for this pattern of reporting on the most shocking claims--sensationalism sells. Yet at some point journalists are professionals, not mere stenographers. What are the limits to what they're wiling to report?

For example, here's part of a column from Bobby May, the McCain campaign chair in Buchanan County, Virginia, which describes "the platform of Barack Hussein Obama" as follows:

The White House: Hire rapper Ludacris to "paint it black."

Illegal Immigration: "Learn to Speak Spanish";

Reparations to Black Community: Opposes before Election Day and supports after Election Day;

Homosexual Marriage: Coddle sexual perverts. Give tax breaks for NAMBLA membership;

Drug Crisis: Raise taxes for free drugs for Obama's inner-city political base;

One might dismiss this as the work of an extremist. But after one particularly inflammatory speech by Palin alleging that Obama had terrorist ties, a man shouted "kill him!," referring to Obama. Politics of personal destruction are designed "merely" to assure that one's opponents are crippled politically when they come into office--so that many will say of Obama "he's not my president," just as they dismissed Clinton. But as Israel learned, extreme rhetoric can have tragic consequences. Even if the campaign press doesn't care at all about informing the public about the issues, it should at least consider the extraordinary dangers it creates when it presents hate and fear "objectively" as worthy of public attention.

As Benjamin Friedman has shown, when economic meltdowns occur, the search for scapegoats is rapid and ugly. This is the time we need to pull together. Only a campaign on the issues puts "Country First."

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 08:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Campaign Journalism: Merely Distracting or Truly Destructive?

Sarah Palin got to the top of the news cycle today with an attack on Barack Obama for "palling around" with terrorists. I mean, who can be bothered to try to explain the differences between the candidates' domestic or foreign policies? Isn't it so much more fun for journalists to have an endless discussion of whether the association with Ayers matters, whether they should be covering it, whether they should be discussing whether they should be covering it, etc.?

Jon Stewart calls it perfectly:

Everyone likes new and shiny. We're bored. What's great about that is [Democratic VP candidate Joe] Biden is an absolutely eccentric character. That's how powerful Palin's story is — it has cast the first African-American presidential nominee, the oldest [non-incumbent] presidential nominee, and a really wild cork vice presidential candidate completely out of the picture. The press is 6-year-olds playing soccer; nobody has a position, it's just ''Where's the ball? Where's the ball? Sarah Palin has the ball!'' [Mimes a mob running after her.] Because they can only cover one thing.

But even this media critic presumes that the real story here is the more interesting personalities of McCain, Biden, Obama--not the extraordinary policy differences between the Republican and Democratic nominees. No wonder the press was so scared by the civic journalism movement.

The financial crisis represents a "revenge of the real" on personality-driven reporting, with predictable consequences. The question now is whether this wake-up call for our personal finances can lead journalists to treat the campaign news as more than a high-stakes game of chicken, where outrageous statements become front-page stories simply because of the dangers they pose for their utterers and their objects. Consider this language from Daniel Koffler:

[W]e are embedded in a culture of wanton consumption for no other purpose than itself. The time we enjoy most consumer goods we purchase is breathtakingly short - and having degenerated into a nation of consumerist appetitive beasts, the American people are incomparably better equipped to blunder our way into a crisis that threatens our economic or political system than we are to solve one.

I would not apply that characterization to the many Americans who are just scraping to get by in places where health insurance, a decent job, and an adequate education are ever-receding dreams. But I do think it's an accurate description of a media elite whose only value is higher ratings . . . and which, as a result of that obsession, is ready to regurgitate whatever pablum a desperate candidate comes up with in an effort to "otherize" her opponent. That type of reporting makes media outlets little more than marketing departments with a stenography division.

Hat Tip: Rod Dreher.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 05:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Chicago Cubs and the Curse of Legal Formalism

On Saturday night, Deven's Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Cubs 3-1, completely a dominating three-game sweep in the National League Division Series in which they outscored the Cubs 20-6. Thus will it be more than 100 years between world championships for the Cubs, who famously last won in 1908. This century of losing has been blamed on everything from billy goats to black cats to twenty-something fans in head phones to the refusal to install lights at Wrigley Field. I want to suggest a new source: legal formalism.

In addition to being the centennial of the Cubs' last championship, 1908 also was the centennial of one of the game's most infamous gaffes, by Fred "Bonehead' Merkle. Some detailed history. On September 23 of that year, the Giants and Cubs, tied for first place, played at New York's Polo Grounds. Tied 1-1 with two outs and runners at first (Merkle, then a rookie first-baseman) and third, the Giants' Al Bridwell singled, scoring the runner from third, and apparently winning the game.Giant fans immediately ran onto the field, a common practice in those days, both to celebrate and to head to the stadium exit in right field that was closest to the trains and streetcars home. To get out of the crowd, Merkle turned right and headed for the clubhouse, which was located behind centerfield (the Polo Grounds remains my favorite of the now-deceased ballparks), without touching second base. That left the force at second base in effect. Amid the chaos, Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers got a ball (no one knows for sure whether it was the actual ball that had been hit on the play and that fact never has been established; some stories have a Giants player throwing the actual batted ball into the stands) and tagged second base and umpire Hank O'Day called Merkle out on the force, which nullified the run and ended the inning. The game then was called because of darkness and declared a tie. The teams finished the season tied, so the tie game was replayed; the Cubs won 4-2, winning the pennant and then the World Series--their last.

And here we have legal formalism at work. O'Day's call was correct under