A War Correspondent Confronts Truth

Today while waiting for my doctor’s appointment, I happened to be reading Fintan O’Toole’s article for the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a recently published collection of letters written by Martha Gellhorn between 1930 and 1949. The title of the article was “A Moral Witness,” and most of the letters in the collection dealt with Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent.

To many Gellhorn may be known better as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. Hemingway, of course, also wrote about war. While his texts may have followed the stylistic lead of journalism, Hemingway himself was no journalist. Indeed, O’Toole calls him “one of the great spinners of self-aggrandizing narratives,” which is probably the best way to summarize his fiction. Gellhorn, on the other hand, was “the real deal” among journalists that chose to cover battles. Like Hemingway, she followed the Spanish Civil War; but, decades later, she was still “in the game,” going off to cover Vietnam in 1966, much to the consternation of all those government influencers that kept sending more and more of our troops there.

However, it was back in the days of the Spanish Civil War that Gellhorn realized that not everyone believed that truth was an ideal to be pursued in either journalism or any other genre of writing. Reflecting on that time in 1959, she wrote in one of her letters:

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

It today’s context, one might almost say that her characterization of lies was a bit too polite. It may, indeed, be a habit, but not necessarily one that is either “homey” or “appetizing.” Rather, it is a habit like addiction, not only filling the vast space of cognitive capacity but also determined to make sure that no truths share that space.

Gellhorn died in 1998. She never got to experience either the horror of 9/11 or the military nightmares of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps that was why she never quite grasped just how addictive lies can be and how much damage they can cause. In the context of the current Presidential campaigns, O’Toole’s article could not have been better timed.

"… our pathetic native self"

I just finished reading Janet Malcom's harsh review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of Ted Hughes, now available online prior to my receiving it in the next issue of The New York Review of Books. I was particularly pleased with her concluding paragraph, in which she dismissed the idea that a biography should be about what the subject was "really" like. Her punch line about that topic was:

If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.

This left me wondering if this was her way of venting about the current mass addiction to social media, suggesting that whose who indulge most heavily are actually the most pathetic. In an earlier age (about which these addicts are totally oblivious), the prevailing motto would have been "Get a life!" In the absence of an authoritative voice to utter that maxim, such addicts can think of nothing to do other what broadcast every detail of "native self" to the entire Internet, neither knowing nor caring about how pathetic that act of broadcasting is.

Follow the Money to the Man Cave

CNET News reporter Max Taves provided an interesting summary of venture capital investments that were concluded over the past week. I treat this as highly recommended reading matter. I further recommend that every reader review the entire list to look for any sort of common trends. My personal interpretation is that the current generation of venture capitalists is being drawn to self-indulgence in a big way. This is not just a shift from products that do useful things to services that allow the idle rich to be more idle. Rather, it seems to be a calculated response to analytical results suggesting that the fastest way to quick profit is through the exploitation of infantilism. Mind you, this amounts to a corollary of the principle that any form of consumerism involves the exploitation of the potential for infantile behavior. So it should be no surprise that, if you want to follow a venture capitalist's money, the path will probably lead you to the man cave.

Addicted to Speed?

Leo Kelion, Technology Desk Editor for BBC News, released a story this morning about Francois Gissy, who achieved a record-setting 207 miles per hour on a bicycle enhanced with rocket propulsion. His goal is to reach 250 miles per hour. However, anyone who read this story beyond the introduction quickly discovered that just about everything Gissy did involved putting his own safety at considerable risk (and "considerable" may be an understatement). Gissy himself even called the experience "scary." Apparently, it was not scary enough for him to persist in trying to reach his goal.

This may bring a whole new semantic interpretation to the phrase "speed freak." Back in the dark ages of my student days, that phrase referred to that particularly kind of drug addict who was hooked on "uppers." It is clear that each stage of Gissy's experimental runs has left him with a "high." It is also clear that each such "high" compels him to go after another one that is "higher." While I have no objection to Kelion reporting this as a technology story, I have to say that this may be the ultimate story about the consequences of the dogged pursuit of a technological goal that probably will have little impact on society (unless you wish to take into account Gissy's next of kin).

The Dirty Little Secret about Analytics

John Cage used to talk frequently about how he would consult the I Ching to make choices for him when composing music. What I remember most is when he said that the I Ching never made a bad decision. If a decision turned out to be problematic (leading, for example, to music that was impossible for a single performer to play), then Cage took this as an indication that he had formulated his question poorly.

This is not just an anecdote about avant-garde practices. It may also tell us something about what happens when Microsoft, Google, and Apple all decide that they need "market share" in the health care industry. This is just the latest data point in the litany of evidence as to why health care is in such a sorry state because industry and business groups feel it is necessary to see to the "health" of their revenue streams by telling expertly-trained doctors and nurses how to treat patients. These days it is all about getting everyone to invest in wearables that will automatically transmit all necessary "health care data" to some cloud site where the resulting data base can enjoy all the benefits of being massaged by the best analytic software that can be dreamed up by analysts (most of whom, of course, are business analysts, rather than health care practitioners).

The thing is that such a data base is ultimately no different from the I Ching. The quality of the answer you get depends on the quality of the question you ask. This is particularly true in non-routine situations. Good doctors know when they are stumped, but they also know that they are stumped because they have not yet figured out the right question to ask. The best ones persist until they finally land on that right question.

The problem is that we live (for over half a century now) in a world in which the judgment of an algorithm is always taken as superior to human judgment. Indeed, we are so addicted to that believe that we cannot conceive of an alternative. This latest phase in the industrialization of health care is yet another step in pushing the most valuable expertise of practitioners out of the system. In other words the price of a higher revenue stream will be a lot more sick people, many of whom will probably turn out to be incurable.

Is Google Making the Next Generation Stupid?

Today's news (which I read as reported by Lance Whitney for CNET News) about Google Play for Education should be taken as a warning that it is probably time for anyone who takes education seriously to return to Nicholas Carr's provocative article for Atlantic Monthly entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" There are a variety of different ways to interpret Carr's thesis and the evidence he submits to warrant his claim. I have written about many of them since the article first appeared. The one that concerns me the most after reading Whitney's article involves Carr's claim that Google is eroding our reflective capacities.

To appreciate the extent to which Carr's claim will apply to future, rather than just present, generations, we need to consider not only what Google Play for Education offers but also what it fails to offer. The former has been fairly summarized by Whitney as follows:

Starting Wednesday, Google Play for Education will be included on the Nexus 7 through the Google in Education program. Google Play for Education offers teacher-approved apps for students, educational videos, and books for those in grades K-12. Teachers can search for approved apps based on grade level and other criteria, buy them via a purchase order, and then deploy them to their students.

The critical part of this description is that the Nexus 7 is the platform. This device is a tablet. Whatever virtues it may have as a reading device, it may be the worst possible technology to cultivate the practice of writing. I mean this in the most general sense of that task: not only assembling words into well-formed sentences but also all the different dimensions of background research (even the most modest of them) that go into figuring out what you want those sentences to say in the first place. Even at the elementary school level, this can (and, by all rights, should) involve practices such as working with multiple sources in an environment in which those sources are conveniently at hand while the writing is taking place. From this point of view, the Nexus 7 is woefully inadequate. Even when the student is reading, it is the worst possible device for allowing the consultation of other material as part of the practice of "active reading."

I would therefore modestly submit that Google Play is not "for Education" but simply for getting kids as hooked on consumerism as their parents already are, dutifully prepared to salivate over technology toys rather than acquiring a toolkit of cognitive skills that will be necessary to reflect on the prevailing problems of the world and then act on them in any meaningful way.

Exposing the Ugly Truth about Innovation Propaganda

In "Asia: 'The Explosive Transformation,'" in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra uses a review of three satirical books about financial success in Asia to expose many of the myths being pushed by those who promote, as I previously put it, "the Kool-Aid of prioritizing technological innovation above all other matters." Mishra is almost painfully explicit in distilling his argument to a single paragraph:

Innovation and originality don’t take you very far—and indeed there are few rags-to-riches stories coming out of India, where old, established business families and active investors in property development, construction, and mining dominate the economy. What is most lucrative for disadvantaged outsiders in this context is calculated conformity with the model of success—once it has been identified. Achievement doesn’t lie so much in the goods or services a businessman offers as in his projection of an appropriate personality. Hence, the rapid proliferation of certain types—the manufacturer of knockoff goods, the huckster, the fixer, and the middleman—who now make up an entire social class in Asia’s still largely informal and unorganized economies.

It would appear that, in a consumerist society motivated only by greed, the very concept of value is yet another casualty in Max Weber's prediction of loss of meaning.

Commoditizing Dreams

One particular passage leapt out at me while I was reading Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRBlog post about Beasts of the Southern Wild:

In movies the imaginary tends to be expensive, so independent live-action films generally work with what is already in place and steer clear of the realms of large-scale fantasy. Our dream worlds are elaborated for us by corporate entities with the necessary means. Beasts of the Southern Wild represents a kind of protest against this state of affairs, an assertion of the right to build one’s own make-believe world, with available tools however rudimentary, rather than submitting to the pre-imagined products of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and the rest.

It struck me that there were more meanings to that “dream factory” epithet assigned to Hollywood than I had initially imagined. Presumably the epithet emerged from the ways in which Hollywood took a mass-production approach to entertainment, putting out entertainment the way Henry Ford’s assembly line put out cars. However, there is a corollary to this interpretation, which is that Hollywood tapped into a means of production through which our very dreams would become commoditized.

Through this corollary, we see one way in which Walter Benjamin’s claim that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end” may be achieving validity. Storytelling (note the italics) is not so much about the story as it is about the subjective and social elements that a storyteller brings to that story. A “dream factory,” on the other hand, dispenses with such complications from the subjective and social worlds and is concerned only with efficient manufacture (and resulting return on investment) of the dream-as-product. Through commoditization, we have lost what O’Brien calls “the right to build one’s own make-believe world.” Indeed, we have become so addicted to the commodity that most of us probably do not even recognize that loss for what it is.

If we then return to my earlier discussion of Tim Parks’ NYRBlog post, “Do We Need Stories?,” we see that Parks put forth the proposition that “the self requires a story.” One may then view O’Brien’s statement as an assertion that, through commoditization, the self has lost the right to tell its own story. Max Weber may have only scratched the surface in warning that commodity-based capitalism could lead to the loss of both meaning and freedom. More serious than either of these losses is the very loss of self. Take away self and the question of whether or not freedom has been lost becomes irrelevant. Man is no longer a slave but simply an automaton that happens to have been constructed out of biological components.

Riches Made them Dumb?

I basically agree with Jeff Bakalar’s lukewarm assessment of Mountain Lion in yesterday afternoon’s column for CNET Update. However, we definitely differ over criteria. Bakalar is disappointed by “a lackluster gamecenter and a dictation feature that requires an internet connection.” I could care less about games; and, while I can believe that voice recognition is likely to take too much out of most local machines, I am not convinced that connecting to a remote server is going to make it any better. Meanwhile, the amusement factor of getting Siri to say stupid things seems to be wearing off; and I am not sure it will catch on with those in the non-mobile world.

Bakalar counts cloud functionality as one of the great assets. I cannot buy this. I have yet to trust any of my writing to the cloud, particularly when it is in draft form. Most important is that I worry about getting to it when I have suddenly been hit by a flash of insight requiring my updating one of those drafts. Murphy’s Law predicts that cloud response will be sluggish (if at all) during such periods of urgency; and Apple just does not have the track record to convince me that their infrastructure software will be up to this kind of challenge.

This brings me to my major disagreement with Bakalar, regarding what he calls “useful updates to some core apps.” Thus far my biggest beef is that Apple took a barely manageable iCal and made it worse by peeling off Reminders as separate software. I suppose that both Bakalar and everyone working at Apple uses Outlook for time management, so this may be a matter of colluding with Microsoft to get more Mac users to go over to their product. It may work. The fact is that the old iCal offered a passable display of what you needed to know at the beginning of each day. This has been relegated to an unwieldy display that now shoves your working area off the screen in Dashboard style. It would not surprise me to learn that no one at Apple has ever bothered to study how iCal is actually used on Macs and simply wants things to look more like they do on an iPhone.

This has led me to reconsider that great 1984 commercial heralding the “first coming” of the Mac. We no longer have a vast audience of mindless zombies staring at a big-screen image of Big Brother. The zombies are still there, but now they are all staring at their personal iPhones and iPads. Were the girl with the sledge hammer to appear, they would never notice her, let alone her revolutionary action.

I am also reminded of the song lyrics that Maria Irene Fornes wrote for the musical Promenade. In particular, I think of the ostinato on the text:

Riches make you dumb.

Apple has become very rich, so much so that shareholders now start to worry when the quarterly numbers do not grow fast enough. Wealth has come from “pushing” (in the addicts’ sense of the word) mobile products with great success, while ignoring the rest of the user community. Has Apple’s riches made them dumb?

Occupy Damien Hirst

As a result of a report in the London Telegraph concerning a modest graffiti attack by the Occupy movement on Damien Hirst's “Hymn” sculpture, I found myself reading an article about Hirst prepared by Kester Brewin for The Occupied Times Web site.  This took a somewhat different tack than my own recent analysis, which basically argued that Hirst is at least honest enough to recognize that one can bring far more substance to arguments over what the market will bear than one can to any philosophical questions regarding the nature of art.  Brewin’s own take on this position arises by using Germaine Greer as a point of departure:

Germaine Greer is clear: ‘Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative – revolutionary even.’ She is applying a clever double twist: Hirst isn’t an artist, but a manufacturer of objects who has developed a careful brand. And yet our delight at his doing this – for the forthcoming exhibition is expected to be vastly popular – reflects on us as branded consumers, thus opening up the possibility of returning Hirst to the place of an artist performing social critique.

The thing is that marketing has been a dominating art form throughout history, even before the word “marketing” became part of our working vocabulary.  That is why I cited Hirst’s remarks about Rembrandt in my own analysis.  Where things get complicated in when analysts such as Brewin try to fold questions of value into questions of marketing.

One way to appreciate those complications is through the film Max.  This was an extremely clever attempt to examine Adolf Hitler as an aspiring artist in the period immediately following the First World War.  His paintings are, to say the least, naïve;  but his sense of discipline is encouraged by the art dealer Max Rothman (who happens to be Jewish).  Through that mentoring, Hitler is exposed to the full-frontal assault of the Dada movement and its pioneering efforts in performance art.  He is also drawn to National Socialism while it is still virtually embryonic.  The punch line of the film is Hitler’s discovery that his true métier may be in oratory as performance art and that National Socialism provided the perfect “stage” upon which he could practice that art.

Am I arguing that Hirst is a latter-day Hitler, building an audience of rabid followers of consumerism as Hitler had done for National Socialism?  I am not ready to take quite that extreme position.  Nevertheless, I think that anyone who attracts a mass following should be viewed with suspicion.  The extreme position I can take is that there is little difference between an eager disciple of Hitler and a faith-driven follower of Jesus.  To invoke the language of Marshall McLuhan, both are too susceptible to letting the medium obscure the message.

Ultimately, Brewin is pleading for a more reflective world, which means a world more attentive to messages than media.  It is a worthy ambition.  In a world addicted to consumerism, however, it may also be a futile one.

A Generation of Internet Shut-Ins?

Joan Lowy just filed an Associated Press report based on the following observation:

The share of people in their teens, 20s and 30s with driver's licenses has dropped significantly over the past three decades, not only the United States, but also in some other wealthy nations with a high proportion of Internet users, transportation researchers have found.

The hypothesis she explores by way of explanation has to do with that “high proportion of Internet users” factor.  As she puts it:

Virtual contact through the Internet and other electronic means is reducing the need for face-to-face visits among young people, researchers say.

Those who still have an interest in literature may recognize the literary implications of this proposition.  It means that the world envisaged by E. M. Forster's short story “The Machine Stops,” may be emerging as a reality.  That story, of course, is a cautionary tale about the helplessness that ensues in a society of shut-ins dependent on some “master technology” to satisfy all of their needs.  As you might guess, it does not have a happy ending.

When  I saw the headline for Lowy’s story, I figured that a new generation had emerged that preferred walking and public transportation to gas-guzzling automobiles;  silly me.

Playing the Franchise Card (again)

The Hunger Games does not open until tomorrow, but the BBC is already treating it as a major news story.  They are hardly alone, but they may be the most honest player in the pack.  What struck me while watching Tim Masters’ report for World Service Television News was his preference for the noun “franchise” over “movie” (or any of its variants).  Yes, one cannot avoid mentioning that the lines for the opening have been forming for several days;  but, at the risk of sounding too cynical (if that is possible), folks need to line up for something now that they have their new iPads.

Still, there may be a similarity.  The first generation of the iPad certainly had a lot both to attract and to sustain customer attention;  but, like so many other brain children of Steve Jobs, it also created a “hunger” (yes, I’m playing with my words) for what the next model would bring.  Apple has always been good about creating a craving strong enough for what would come next that would eventually block out any pleasure taken in what you already had.  Thus, a film based on the first book of a trilogy is likely to create that hunger, perhaps even as soon as the lights come up after the screening of this first film in the set.  Selling a franchise is not about creating desire for the product but about creating desire for one product motivated by a strong desire for what would follow it.

This is, of course, a dicey business.  Edgar Rice Burroughs made a successful (at least for his strong fan base) franchise out of his books about the adventures of John Carter.  Walt Disney seems to have turned that franchise into “one of the biggest flops in cinema history.”  In trying to prognosticate about The Hunger Games in the historical context of what just happened to Disney, I am reminded of how, back in 1999 writing for The New York Review of Books, Louis Menand compared Star Wars and Titanic.  In a review of The Phantom Menace, his opening sentence was:

Star Wars is entertainment for eight-year-old boys.

Two paragraphs later, he then described Titanic as a movie for ten-year-old girls.

We should not think about The Hunger Games in the context of either the initial Star Wars success or the John Carter failure.  We should think of it as the franchise that is trying to move in on Twilight’s turf.  Perhaps what matters most is that the ten-year-old girls are already hooked on the Suzanne Collins books;  and this new attraction may have come right around the time that they were beginning to have their fill of Bella and her romantic entanglements.  Nevertheless, I think it is important to stress that weasel-word “may.”  Ten-year-old girls can be fickle;  and hopefully Lion’s Gate will have enough Hollywood smarts to avoid counting any numbers they do not yet have.

Simic's Study of Ignorance

While I was basically sympathetic with the jeremiad posted by Charles Simic to NYRBlog yesterday, I would like to take issue with one of his turns of phrase:

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today.

This seems to presume that the blame for what Simic calls the “Age of Ignorance” can be spread equally across the entire American population.  In the context of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s theory of a “consciousness industry,” however, I would suggest that pervasive ignorance is the result of a highly calculated effort diligently pursued by those who could appreciate how it would benefit their own self-interests.  That effort began with the rise of consumerism following the Second World War;  and the first boy to cry “wolf,” so to speak, may have been Newton Minnow, when he observed that the domination of advertising over content had turned television into a “vast wasteland.”

What Simic calls “years of indifference and stupidity” may actually be the product of deliberate debilitation of mental capacities brought about by the addictive nature of consumerism that became the most successful product of American industry.  Indeed, it has been through such addiction that Simic’s observation that “deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country” emerges as a corollary.  Unfortunately, those running the consciousness industry became so enamored of it that they assumed they could use it to addict the rest of the world, not realizing that most other countries out there had their own consciousness industries better attuned to their respective “customer bases.”  We thus now stand on the brink of being a country that no longer produces anything of value to any other country;  and that is where the “indifference and stupidity” that our own consciousness industry worked so hard to cultivate will turn out to be our undoing.

What Raspberry Pi May Tell Me

Once upon a time, computers were for programming.  We used them at work to facilitate (usually routine) tasks associated with our jobs.  We used them in research laboratories to broaden the scope of the sorts of tasks they could facilitate.  Then the hobby culture came along;  and kids started using them to build stuff, sometimes more for amusement than for facility.  For the most part the kids did things on a smaller scale, but they could be impressively creative about it.

The Internet changed all that.  We started doing other things with our computers, many of which had to do with communication.  Then the commercial folks got wind of what we were doing and realized that any technology that could change the playing field on which people communicated could also change the rules of the game for advertising.  Now, on the Internet, everybody knows you’re a consumer;  and they are all moving heaven and earth to communicate with you.

Raspberry Pi may be a sign that we can get back to the Garden.  It is cheap ($25);  and it is so bare-bones that only a hobbyist can love it.  Nevertheless, it is a computer, even if you have to provide your own keyboard and monitor.  The point, however, is that it is not a computer for Web surfing or running the latest cool stuff from the App Store.  It is a device that only appeals to those who still believe that programming can be a creative and fun activity.  I almost added “if any of them are left” to that last sentence;  but, according to Vincent Chang’s Crave report for CNET News, demand for Raspberry Pi went through the roof as soon as it was launched yesterday in the United Kingdom.

Will it spark a similar interest in programming if it expands its business to the United States, or will our consciousness industry spare no expense to make sure that its electrons never flow on American soil?

Curtis Learns about Death

Ray Billingsley’s comic strip for today’s Curtis is rather a departure from his usual offerings.  Curtis is basically a hedonistic kid driven by little more than self-indulgence;  but today he had a more sobering experience.  It came at the barber shop, where Gunther (who never gets Curtis’ name right) has closed for business in order to throw a big party.  The party turns out to be for the death of his uncle, which left Curtis more than a little perplexed.

Half of the strip is Gunther’s explanation monologue:

He said if we had to remember him with tears, it’s be better not to remember him at all

He no longer has to bother with all the bull life hands out!

No more struggling to pay the rent, low-class reality shows, clueless politicians, or neighbors who don’t act very neighborly!

Heck, we oughta cry when babies get born into this messy world, and celebrate when we leave and go on to glory!!

Curtis delivers the punch line with a wistful look on his face as he leaves the barber shop:

I’ve never thought about it that way before …!

Of course “that way” has been a significant element in the history of just about every major religion:  Life is pain;  death is relief from pain.  It was only with the emergence of a secular society motivated by little more than its addiction to consumerism that we saw a change in this positive outlook on death.  Now this ancient message has become comic strip material;  and, if that is not some kind of barometer indicating just how “messy” (as Gunther put it) the world has become, I don’t know what is!

Redirecting the Attacks on Apple

This morning Larry Dignan used a post to the Between the Lines blog on ZDNet to give “equal time” to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in the face of the beating that Apple has been taking from two extended reports in The New York Times by Charles Duhigg, the first co-authored with Keith Bradsher and the second with David Barboza.  The good news is that Dignan definitely got it right in shifting the focus from Apple to the broader issue of the impact of globalization on supply chain management.  He probably even got his punch line right:

The bottom line here is we enable a supply chain that has a lot of warts. We want to examine those warts, but not really. This flap about worker safety isn’t about Apple, the tech industry or any other vertical. It’s about us.

However, there is still a need to establish a context for this broader view;  and, for me, the best way to set that context is by recalling two movies that, by all rights, should have had greater impact.  The one most relevant to the case Dignan made is Robert Greenwald’s 2005 documentary The High Cost of Low Price, which is basically a systematic study of the consequences that have evolved from the “Wal-Mart economy” that has consumed our culture’s attitude towards just about any commodity.  However, if we also wish to focus on the consequences of brutal working conditions (for which Dignan offers an inadequate gloss on viewing supply chain abuses “through the Western lens”), then we need to turn to Richard Linklater’s 2006 docudrama Fast Food Nation and the book by Eric Schlosser on which it was based.

There is a subtext in Duhigg’s reports based on the old joke that everybody likes to eat sausage, but nobody wants to know how sausage is made.  Upton Sinclair investigated that “inconvenient truth” in The Jungle, which Schlosser acknowledged as a major source for his own writing.  The thing is that, while Schlosser made the case that things have not changed very much for sausages, there has been a change in that the sausage is now a metaphor for the iPad.

Dignan asserts that “the buy American movement never quite worked.”  He has good warrants for this claim;  but, after yesterday’s stake in the ground at Davos, I would suggest that his vision is dangerously narrow.  We now view the global supply chain as a potential risk to “homeland security,” from which we conclude that we need a strategy to protect it (which would mean protecting all of those abusive work practices that make the whole machine tick).  However, if we were really serious about homeland security, we would be strategizing to restore a level of self-sufficiency that started to go down the tubes when we first got bitten by the bug carrying the infection of profits-through-global-outsourcing.  (I would love to single out Tom Friedman as the infecting agent, and he may well have been the first bug to deliver an effective bite.  However, we have to be fair and realize that he was just the messenger of a message whose consequences he could not fathom.)

Ultimately, this is a matter of dueling propaganda campaigns.  The party line of the consciousness industry is the one that Dignan accepts as an axiom:  We are addicted to consumerism and demand to satisfy our addiction through low prices.  The fact that Apple has become a “drug kingpin” for this metaphor is purely incidental.  One way to reject this propaganda is through an alternative campaign that promotes self-sufficiency.  This may be what Barack Obama originally had in  mind by making “Yes, we can” a campaign slogan;  but in all likelihood he had sold out to the consciousness industry even before he had won the election.  We, as a culture, need to believe that we can restore self-sufficiency without retreating into isolationism.  The 1% do not want us to believe this, but we need to see whether or not the 99% will embrace such a vision and decide to move towards it.

Television Trumps Cinema Again at the Golden Globes

Once again curiosity got the better of me when it came to reviewing the results of the Golden Globes.  However, while last year my curiosity was directed at Melissa Leo, this year there really was not anything in the movies category that drew my attention.  It is as if the movie industry now shares with Broadway that “vast wasteland” epithet that Newton Minnow once used to condemn the quality of television in the Fifties.  (This leads me to wonder whether Minnow was aware of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s theory of a “consciousness industry.”  Given what things were like in the Fifties, if he was, he probably did his best to conceal the influence.)  Now it is television, particularly the pay cable channels, that is willing to take on gutsy substance without worrying about having the narrative get interrupted by commercials or having scripts that will scare away sponsors.  Thus, while many view the Globes as a barometer for the Oscar results, I could care less how those contenders finally get rank-ordered.  I prefer to be drawn into serious extended narrative;  and that just is not Hollywood’s bill-of-fare.

My only problem with the Globes is that I have yet to figure out their criteria for classification.  I have already written about the arbitrariness of how the Emmy Awards have muddled the distinction between drama and comedy (classifying United States of Tara as comedy, almost as if in denial of the more serious subtext of the narrative).  The Globes muddy the waters further by adding “miniseries or movie” as a category along with “drama” and “musical or comedy.”  As a result Homeland ended up classified as drama, while Game of Thrones ended up in the “miniseries or movie” category.  The good news is that this allowed both Kelsey Grammer to be acknowledged for getting to exercise some solid acting chops in Boss (drama), while Idris Elba could be similarly recognized for Luther (miniseries).  It also meant that Game of Thrones (miniseries) did not have to compete with Homeland (drama), even if that means that it was then bested by Downton Abbey.  (It also leads me to wonder if this “game of categories” had been designed to make sure that the judges would not have to choose between Downton Abbey, which is as best a mild, although highly polished, diversion, and Homeland, which left any serious viewer wondering just what has been achieved in “Homeland Security” since 9/11.)

I know better than to kid myself.  I realize that David Simon was able to hone his craft in television while working on Homicide for NBC.  However, I suspect that the constraints imposed by NBC made him seek out a less restrictive environment, which he found in HBO (perhaps by virtue of Charles Dutton, who already had plenty of reputation, making his directing debut with a miniseries for HBO based on The Corner, a book that Simon had co-authored).  Both NBC and HBO make programming decisions that are ultimately “ruled by numbers.”  However, it seems as if HBO and Showtime are more willing to take a “portfolio management” approach to their numbers that makes them less beholden to that consciousness industry and the need to ground everything in a subtext of consumerism and its addictive nature.  In the movie industry, on the other hand, the exceptions to the rule come from those odd independent efforts that may make the occasional splash or two but will never make a wave big enough to shift the status quo.

Steve Jobs without the Hagiography

I was wondering whether or not The New York Review of Books would select Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs for consideration and, if so, whom would be assigned the task.  The answer can be found in the latest issue (January 12), in which Sue Halpern is the designated reviewer.  Anyone who takes the trouble to search for Halpern’s name on this site knows that I have a high opinion of her.  When she writes about the objective world of science and technology, she always seems to equip herself with enough background to make it clear that she is speaking from an informed position, rather than just relaying the canned assertions of others.  She then has a knack for projecting her “objective content” into both subjective and social worlds, meaning that she is better equipped to discuss implications and consequences than the usual crowd of evangelists, not to mention many of the more emotional nay-sayers.

By now most people know the basic backstory behind Isaacson’s biography.  Basically, he was hand-picked by Jobs to write the “authorized” account.  Given the single-minded focus Jobs could apply to just about anything he did, one wonders how this selection process occurred.  Did Jobs draw up a “short list,” which, after considerable deliberation, was finally whittled down to a single individual?  My own guess is that this is not likely, particularly since one of the prevailing themes of the book concerns his preference for gut-level decision-making.  That being the case, there is a good chance that Jobs’ gut was informed by browsing the biography section of a physical bookstore, where he would discover that there was this author with reputable credentials, who had already written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.  One can almost hear Jobs’ gut shouting out, “That’s the guy for me!”

(I suppose it is possible that this scenario could play out through Amazon recommendations;  but I am not sure it would have as much appeal to the gut, so to speak.)

Yes, I know that sounds irreverent;  but then I have never been particularly interested in writing biography.  I figure that an obituary for some individual who has received comparatively little attention is about as far as I can go, even when the subject is someone who had been involved with a considerable chunk of my personal life.  So I do not have to worry as much about showing the same respect for my subject matter as any good biographer would.  Thus, Halpern is dispassionate enough to recognize hagiography when she reads it.  To her credit, however, she has come up with a balanced account that gives all of the virtues their due without disregarding many of the vices that tend to get ignored in “authorized” accounts (or, in Isaacon’s case, relatively quarantined).  In other words any reader who would like a well-written overview of Jobs’ accomplishments would probably be better off reading the few pages of Halpern’s review, rather than taking total immersion baptism in all 630 of Isaacson’s pages.

Nevertheless, after one has read Halpern’s opening paragraph, one has a clear sense that she is holding herself in check.  She is doing everything that a responsible reviewer should do, but her choices of words reveal that she has bottled up some very strong personal opinions.  Thus, as one works through her essay, one begins to wonder if she will ever uncork that bottle.

Those who dislike spoilers should probably stop right here, because the cork finally pops out in the last three paragraphs of the review.  They have been so artfully constructed that I cannot resist reproducing them:

Steve Jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs’s emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn’t get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read. Friends and former friends speculate that his bad behavior was a consequence of being put up for adoption at birth. A former girlfriend, who went on to work in the mental health field, thought he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. John Sculley, who orchestrated Jobs’s expulsion from Apple, wondered if he was bipolar. Jobs himself dismissed his excesses with a single word: artist. Artists, he seemed to believe, got a pass on bad behavior. Isaacson seems to think so, too, proving that it is possible to write a hagiography even while exposing the worst in a person.

The designation of someone as an artist, like the designation of someone as a genius, is elastic, and anyone can claim it for himself or herself and for each other. There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

The day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

I agree with Halpern about the elastic nature of the “artist” concept (as well as the “genius” concept).  Since I spend the better part of every day working on what I write about the performing arts for Examiner.com, I find that I use both of those words with extreme caution;  and I am always suspicious when the term is self-applied.  At the same time I appreciate that the connotation of the word “artist” need not be strictly positive.  I seem to recall at least one of my reading sources referring to Adolf Eichmann as an “artist of extermination;”  but, even without such repugnant surface-level usage, history is filled with examples of dark perspectives.  There are any number of reasons (including the religion of my ancestors) why I cannot possibly imagine engaging in a conversation with Richard Wagner;  and I was certainly not surprised to read that Robert Schumann came away frustrated by his attempt to do so.

Still, the thing about Wagner is that we can judge him by what he did, rather than who he was.  Halpern has saved her strongest feelings about what Jobs did for her final paragraph.  The bottom line is that everything he accomplished was done in the service of the addictive powers of consumerism, which I continue to associate with both how we got into our current economic crisis and why our prospects for recovery are so bleak.  When we add to that the impact of Jobs’ activities on both the global environment and working conditions in some of the most destitute parts of the world, that Eichmann comparison seems a bit less absurd, even if it remains distasteful.  The idea that Apple may be guilty of crimes against humanity may be too extreme to stand up under rigorous argumentation;  but sometime it makes sense to follow Brian Eno’s “oblique strategy” of withdrawing from an extreme position, rather than being too weak to recognize that it is a position at all.

On the Balance between Saving and Consumption

Sheldon Garon has a provocative and informative piece on the op-ed page of today’s New York Times.  His title is “Why We Spend, Why They Save;”  and his argument is distilled from his recent book, Beyond Our Means:  Why America Spends While the World Saves.  The “they” of his piece today is a bit more specific than the title of his book, since all of his contrasting examples come from European countries.  I suspect that “the world” is a bit too much of a generalization, Particularly if you are going to include much of the African and Asian continents.

Nevertheless, his point is a good one.  The key differentiating factor between the United States and his counterexamples, according to Garon, is that, as a culture, we lack “a balanced approach to saving and spending.”  He then offers several examples of how saving is accepted as a way of life in major European cultures.  By contrast, he describes conditions in the United States following the Second World War as follows:

The United States emerged from the war with unparalleled prosperity and hardly needed further savings campaigns. Instead politicians, businessmen and labor leaders all promoted consumption as the new driver of economic growth. Rather than democratize saving, the American system rapidly democratized credit. An array of federal housing and tax policies enabled Americans to borrow to buy homes and products as no other people could.

This “unparalleled prosperity” ultimately led to unparalleled deregulation, reinforced with an apparent amnesiac attitude towards the past history of the Great Depression.  Garon then traces the nuts and bolts of the consequences of deregulation to current conditions in which most of the 99% have enough wealth to consider saving any of it.

I would like to suggest that another approach to Garon’s argument may be framed in terms of how we think about time.  Consumption is driven by thinking about the present, which entails an entirely different mindset from thinking about the future, that being the motivation behind spending.  Furthermore, that motivation can be reinforced by thinking about the past, at least as far back as that history of the Great Depression.  I have argued often that we are a culture that has lost touch with the value of history and that this has induced an underlying amnesia in our thinking about economics.  I have further argued that our consumerism is an addiction that may have emerged from that “unparalleled prosperity” but is now aggravated by the power of our many recent technological innovations.  It is through that addiction that our ability to think about the future has been suppressed, resulting in our radical imbalance between saving and consumption, particularly in comparison to our European cousins.

In other words consumerism may have undermined more than our grasp of history and savings in “economic reasoning;”  we may also be experiencing a more pernicious atrophy of time-consciousness itself!

Freedom to Consume?

I have been reading Tim Parks’ New York Review account of Ingo Schulze’s novel Adam and Evelyn.  This is basically a comic novel, much of whose plot depends on the division of Germany into East and West,  The “Adam” is a skilled Taylor in East Germany, who has, by Eastern standards, made a comfortable life for himself.  Nevertheless, he follows his girlfriend into the West after Hungary opens its border with Austria.  Adam’s life changes, but not for the better.  A tailor cannot make a living in a culture where people have no end of choices of clothes they can buy off the rack, even if those clothes do not fit very well.  What struck me was how Schultze (at least in the English translation by John E. Woods) was able to encapsulate Adam’s plight in a single sentence:

Too much, too many, an inflation of stuff that buries everything else, the essential things, the real things.

I do not take this as nostalgia for either the ideals of Marxism or the reality of Communism.  However, in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s ideal vision of an America that would make the world safe for democracy, it seems as if our country has succumbed to a distorting conflation of democracy with consumerism.  Freedom of choice has less to do with selecting those who govern and more to do with choosing Coke over Pepsi (or, in the case of a recent Harry’s Law episode, choosing to ban the presence of foreign cars within the limits of one’s city).

In the past I have written about losing touch with the real as it pertains to people so absorbed in their personal mobile devices that they are oblivious to the real world around them (such as traffic).  However, reality has also been buried (to use Schulze’s metaphor) under mounds of ideology that have, once again, crippled our government to the point of failure (or so it seems in the wake of the deadlocked “super-committee” on spending cuts).  This is the sort of thing that makes the 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength" look pretty good in their petition to have their taxes increased;  but here, too, we need a reality check.  These millionaires may appreciate the value of a “public good;”  but that does not mean that they recognize the differences between corporate management and governance.  Perhaps the more dire consequence of Max Weber’s “loss of meaning” is that, through our addiction to consumerism, we have become a culture that can no longer accommodate reality in our shared life-world (let alone the proposition that the life-world must, out of the necessities of social theory, be shared).  From a Darwinian perspective, I would think that this will make our chances for survival pretty low.  Then again, most fundamentalists, regardless of their specific faith, always seem to have a pretty low opinion of Darwin!