Diplomacy under Threat

Apparently, Donald Trump has become so frustrated with his attempts to advance his policy in the Middle East that he ended up showing his true colors:

https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/4/5/trump-threatens-iran-in-expletive-filled-social-media-post

Screen shot from Al Jazeera video 

Is Failed Crisis Management Evil?

Once again I feel a need to comment on an article that just appeared on the Al Jazeera English Web site:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-banality-evil-200505075710643.html

This article draws upon the concept of the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by Hanna Arendt in her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. The authors of the article, Catherine Rottenberg and Nira Yuval Davis, explain Arendt’s terminology as follows:

She invoked the term to describe how Eichmann, a key bureaucratic functionary of the Nazi party, carried out his technocratic duties without questioning their purpose.

I find it somewhat ironic that this perspective can be traced as least as far back as the Crucifixion, at which one of the last “words” of Jesus was “they know not what they do,” suggesting that those killing him could still deserve forgiveness.

Rottenberg and Davis then try to make the case that the banality of evil can also take place “through the carrying out of bureaucratic tasks in an incompetent and negligent way.” For me this recalled the old joke that, if stupidity were a crime, it would be impossible to build enough prisons for the criminals. Even so, I think that Jesus was a bit too forgiving of those that “know not what they do,” particularly when they have embraced ignorance as a matter of conscious choice. In this case the conscious choice is one of viewing market value as the only relevant social value, relying only on the numerical calculations that determined market value without allowing for any other factors, many (most?) of which are not quantitative, to enter the calculus.

Max Weber saw the problem with such prioritizing. He argued that it would bring about two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom. The first of these should be clear enough: The very meaning of “value” as been so distorted that we have become a world population for which no other value is realistically conceivable. One may then recognize loss of freedom at least at the level of no longer having the freedom to think for ourselves about what we value. Even deeper is the issue that only those that command significant financial resources are free to make choices about what factors impact the world in which we live, whether that world is suffering a plague or just losing its icecaps.

I prefer not to pass judgment on whether those that have brought about loss of meaning and loss of value are evil. In this sort of a mess, nothing will be gained from finger-pointing. On the other hand, we might do well to recall what was written in our Declaration of Independence after the one sentence that so many of us know by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It that context, perhaps we should view to prioritization of financial resources as an act of usurpation against those self-evident truths. By all rights, such Government could be overthrown by the electoral processes already in place; but, as we have seen over the last decade, the “meaning” of those processes is yet another manifestation of Weber’s loss-of-meaning syndrome.

That particular loss may well lie at the heart the mess in which we are stuck, and it remains to be seem if there are enough people that still respect valid meaning with the power to get the population as a whole out of that mess.

Memorializing Robert Silvers

As a reader of The New York Review for more decades than I recall, I did not have to be reminded of the significant role that Robert Silvers played in editing the content of that "paper," as he called it. Indeed, I had mixed feeling about reading all the memorial encomiums in the latest issue, even when they were by some of my favorite contributors. Nevertheless, one sentence by Zadie Smith struck me as worth singling out of attention:

He [Silvers] was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least it came at the price of a readable sentence.

This may be the best diagnosis of the current backlash against expertise that I have encountered thus far. Yes, Michael Gove was probably on to something when he declared, "We've had enough of experts;" but, like many who make such sweeping generalizations, he could not distinguish the baby from the bathwater. Rather, he was incorrectly generalizing expertise as the work of a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts," as Anna Russell put it in making fun of rabid Wagner fans. Indeed, the last time I invoked Russell's turn of phrase was in a reaction to a full-page advertisement by the Harvard University Press (in The New York Review, no less) touting the number of "experts" they had published.

On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the feeling that, while I believe in the "readable sentence" as much as Silvers and Smith do/did, it is hard to avoid feeling that it is an endangered species. Ultimately, it is being driven to extinction by the proliferation of tweets, suggesting that the Darwinian process may be as applicable to mindsets as it is to organisms. Put another way, we now live in a world in which our very resources of information, broadcast media as well as the Internet, no longer required the "readable sentence" as a useful too for communication. Indeed, those who even care about "readable sentences" are probably, themselves, doomed to extinction over the next decade or so. How else are we to explain the dangerous expressions of extremism that we encounter wherever we choose to look, even at the ballot box?

Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

Obama's Worst Mistake

According to Alexander Mallin of ABC News, President Barack Obama told Fox News Sunday this morning that his "worst mistake" was not having "a plan for the day after" the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This is a perfectly respectable answer, but it also conceals a far worse mistake. This was the mistake of assuming that he was governing a population that consisted, for the most part, of rational people. Indeed, the very fact that he was being interviewed by Fox News, which owes its survival as a network, to the very defiance of rationality, suggests that he fumbled a great opportunity. Yet that lack of rationality has engendered one of the most ineffective governments that those of my generation have witnessed. It is hard to tell whether Obama could not reverse this situation because he simply could not see the beast for what it was worth or because he was too well-mannered to do anything about it. The result seems to be that the ill-mannered have taken Obama's failure as an opportunity to rule the roost; and now the rest of us can only fret over what might happen if one of them succeeds.

What Would Will Rogers Say?

My favorite Will Rogers quote would have to be the following:

I do not support any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

These days it seems as if the Republicans are setting the bar for a "disorganized political party" and seem to just keep raising it. Could it be that the Internet has turned us into a culture that prefers anarchy to governance, even if the side-effects of anarchy include the laundry list of social abuses that now take place regularly on pages of the World Wide Web? Once upon a time the "futurists" were predicting that, by giving every individual his or her own voice, we would finally achieve a "true" democracy. Ironically, those futurists seemed blithely ignorant on how Athenian democracy was first conceived and how it actually worked. Rather than democracy, we have abundant opportunities for the unbridled execution of power, leading to the detriment of many for the sake of those who can shout louder than anyone else. At least the Democrats can take comfort that Will Rogers no longer can make fun of them.

What Price Exercising Free Speech for the Sake of Giving Offense?

If the American Freedom Defense Initiative wanted the world to pay attention to them, they certainly got their wish. By arranging an event that would focus heavily on an exhibit of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, this organization may have established one of the most extreme cases of exercising free speech solely for the purpose of giving offense. However, while the speech may have been free, the exercise came with a price. According to an ABC News report by Emily Shapiro, that price amounted to $10,000. This is the amount of money that the organization paid out of its own budget for security. According to Shapiro's report:

Security included security officers, uniformed officers, SWAT, FBI and ATF, Joe Harn of the Garland Police Department said at a news conference.

Now, I am not a constitutional scholar and/or expert; but I have tended to assume that the right to free speech does not include the right to incite violence. Thus, the question arises as to whether or not the American Freedom Defense Initiative expected violence and expected it because they knew that the images they were exhibiting would incite it. If that were, indeed, the case, why were federal, state, and local authorities taking fee-for-services to allow such provocative behavior?

The Latest Round of Ignoring History

Last week the Facts & Arts Web site ran, "A Greek Morality Tale," an analysis by Joseph E. Stiglitz of the damaging effects of austerity that was almost painful to read. Unfortunately, much of the pain came from the conclusion:

One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail.

Ironically, the leading beneficiary of the sort of judgment that Stiglitz counsels is Germany, through the planned recovery it experienced following the Second World War. Unfortunately, Germany is now the leading "austerity hawk."

Actually, Stieglitz himself does not take Germany to task. Rather, he lays the blame on what he calls the "troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These are all institutions of the rich and mighty getting richer and mightier than they are in narrowing that enormous gulf between extreme wealthy and abject poverty. In such organizations "humane values" are no longer part of the mindset. The days when the filthy rich could cleanse their souls, so to speak, through philanthropy are long gone; and no one of any import seems to regret their passing.

Meanwhile unemployment has reached crisis proportions in just about every corner of the world. As I wrote back in 2011, this has become the age of "youth without future," brought upon by those whose incessant fixation with the immediacy of the "bottom line" has led to a willful ignorance of history. Is it any wonder that such youth, feeling abandoned by those who should know better, are attracted to the lure of extremists, most of whom can only be counted upon to make matters worse?

Does the Internet Undermine Utilitarianism?

Tim Parks' NYRBlog post about the Charlie Hebdo affair, "The Limits of Satire," basically tries to analyze the situation from a utilitarian point of view. In other words he is more interested in the usefulness of satire than in questions of freedom of speech (or, for that matter, hate speech) that have occupied the mass media ever sense the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office. He argues that the utilitarian objective of satire is "to produce an enlightened perspective on events, not to start riots." While I do not question this position, I feel it overlooks the extent to which it has been undermined by the Internet. When Jonathan Swift wrote his "Modest Proposal" essay in 1729 (the case study behind Parks' analysis), he could reasonably assume that his readers would be members of an "enlightened" class of Englishmen, rather than either the starving Irish or a coven of insane gourmet chefs. American satirists, such as Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher, probably also take for granted that most of their regular viewers are similarly "enlightened" and thoughtful, looking for something other than having their opinions reinforced by Fox. The problem is that, thanks to the Internet's capacity for mass distribution of content to sites about which we know little if anything, such content is now encountered by less "enlightened" audiences; and, more often than not, the consequences are not good.

Parks gave another telling example. After it appeared, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was just another book, enjoyed by many readers and respected by many others. Then it got on the Booker shortlist, and the newspaper India Today decided that it was now worthy of attention. They ran an interview with Rushdie, after which a large swath of South Asian readers learned that the characters included prostitutes named after Muhammad's wives. That was the one small step that led to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, putting the author's life at risk.

I take the Rushdie story as a case study in pre-Internet mass communication. Charlie Hebdo, on the other hand, is a post-Internet story. Whatever benefits satire may provide for "enlightened" discussion, we can no longer assume that it is read only by those those respect such an enlightened stance.

Skidelsky's Futile Gesture

It is hard for anyone who still attaches value to reason not to feel sympathetic with the punchline of Robert Skidelsky's latest column to appear on the Facts & Arts Web site:

But democratic countries need symbols of the extraordinary if they are not to sink into permanent mediocrity.

The title of Skidelsky's article is "Philosopher Kings Versus Philosopher Presidents;" and it basically praises the virtues of Ireland having a President, Michael Higgins, who is a poet who also happens to be well-versed in philosophy. Unfortunately, Skidelsky seems to overlook that, even in democratic countries, power lies within the practices of politicians. (Skidelsky cited Higgins quoting Max Weber, but even Weber recognized that particular inconvenient truth.) Politicians, in turn, thrive most successfully is a social world dominated by that "permanent mediocrity." I believe it was The Capitol Steps that came up with a song about supporters of Ronald Reagan that included the line:

The unexamined life is quite all right with us.

To be hyperbolically blunt, politicians gain office through large chunks of the population who cannot even spell Weber's name, let alone tell you anything about him; and they see no reason why this should be a problem. This is probably why Hegel preferred the philosopher king to a democratically elected president, philosopher or not. Unfortunately, he never really addressed the question of how a philosopher king would rise to a position of leadership.

The Elections Lost!

The title of Elizabeth Drew's latest NYRBlog post is "Why the Republicans Won." A more appropriate title may have been "Why the Electoral System Lost." The basic argument has to do with how little electoral practices resemble what the Founding Fathers envisioned while they were drafting the Constitution. We have now reached a stage in which money controls everything, not only through influencing how people vote but also in preventing those identified as supporting the opposition from getting their votes into the system. It verges on the pathetic to think that groups protesting for democracy around the world still look to the United States as some sort of standard to be met.

Fight Back Against the Politicians!

Election Day is near. So we have any number of volunteers manning telephones to tell you how you are supposed to vote. Unlike the better endowed commercial institutions, they cannot afford robocalls to invade your privacy. These are, believe it or not, flesh-and-blood individuals who think they are aiding the democratic system.

I have decided that the best way to deal with them it to teach them some manners. As soon as one of those hesitating voices says anything about what is on my ballot, I remind them that they should begin by asking:

Am I interrupting anything?

Obviously, this is not part of the script they have been given. Some are immediately flummoxed and hang up the phone (which may take away the personal gratification of you hanging up on them). Others, try to bull on ahead, in which case you can remind them of their lack of proper telephone etiquette. If they give them an argument, you can then tell them they just screwed up getting your vote. Basically, there are any number of ways to turn their invasion into your entertainment, which may be the only way to get those idiots on the right learning curve.

Follow the Polls Off a Cliff

While I appreciate Al Jazeera English's commitment to keeping a close eye on the referendum in Scotland, I fear they are looking too close. It now seems as if they are running daily articles on the latest poll of how Scots plan to vote. Admittedly, these come from wire services, rather than their own staff. However, no one seems to be in the loop when it comes to qualifying numbers with respect to their statistical significance. Unfortunately, all Al Jazeera English is doing is relaying data from one place to another. However, in this case data that has not been subjected to rigorous interpretation techniques is no better than statistical noise. Al Jazeera English readers deserve better.

Sound, Fury, and Indigestion

Once, purely through an accident in my travel schedule, I happened to find myself in Williamsburg, Virginia on the Fourth of July. I remember this because it was the only time I found myself in a celebration of the Fourth of July whose major objective was the reading of the Declaration of Independence. (To be fair I have heard this subsequently on National Public Radio, always with the participating of "name" actors; and I have attended at least one reading outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. However, Williamsburg was the one place that directly associated the Fourth of July with the date on the Declaration.)

Since then I have been in a variety of different cities on July 4. Inevitably, it is all about the fireworks, often with "warmup" activities getting under way on the evening of July 3. However, if all of that sound and fury pushes the significance of the date into the background, they are nothing compared with Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, which is 99 years old today. It is almost as if this celebration of gluttony has earned itself the position of one of those rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, it is understandable. After all, reading the Declaration of Independence says nothing about the "American way of life" being committed to consumerism above all else.

Perverted Democracy

Paul Wilson's review of Machael Ignatieff's aptly-titled memoir Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, in the April 24 issue of The New York Review, plays up the failure side of the story with his own title, "The Road to Rejection." His conclusion, however, has less to do with the specifics of Ignatieff's failure as leader of Canada's Liberal party and more with the prevailing environment that thwarts such leadership:

Of all political systems, democracy is the easiest to pervert, because it depends far less on rules than on mutual respect among the players. When that breaks down, as we have seen in the United States, good governance itself breaks down, and no amount of reform measures can easily bring it back. George Orwell, in holding up "common decency" as a bulwark against "smelly little orthodoxies," understood that.

Nevertheless, it is unclear that Orwell appreciated the full impact of such "smelly little orthodoxies." Our own Founding Fathers recognized that such groups would exists but felt that they could be held in check by the structure of government. Sadly, they neglected to consider that possibility that even the smallest of narrowly special interests can rise to significance with a sufficient amount of money behind it. Wilson is right that governance has broken down in the United States; but he does not follow through on the role that market-based thinking has played in the breakdown or, for that matter, the role that the Internet now plays to reinforce those wishing to implement such thinking.

Power is now simply a matter of who can move around large sums of money with maximal impact. When you can buy the opinions of others, the practice of politics no longer requires persuasive skills. When such an economy of opinion is not only enabled but also facilitated by a communications technology as powerful as the Internet, we may as well acknowledge that we now live in an age of brutality far beyond Thomas Hobbes' darkest expectations.

"Person of the Year"

The Associated Press story about the selection of Pope Francis and the Time Person of the Year was less interesting for the result than it was for the account of the contenders. Apparently it came down to a choice between the Pope and Edward Snowden. No manner how strongly anyone feels about Snowden, positively or negatively, there is no denying his impact on our lives, not just in the United States but around the world. Before his massive leak of data from the National Security Administration, talk about the dangers of a surveillance society were limited to a handful of individuals who could not always substantiate their suspicions. Now the topic is on everyone's lips, and reform is easier to achieve when everyone is talking about the situation from their respective points of view. With that in mind, my own vote would have gone to Snowden; but I have been pretty dismissive of the whole Person of the Year thing for some time. Remember, Mark Zuckerberg was Person of the Year for 2010; and his respect for privacy (sic) has been a public matter for some time.

The Associate Press article also included a few sentences about other contenders:

Besides Snowden, Time had narrowed its finalists down to gay rights activist Edith Windsor, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Time editors made the selection. The magazine polled readers for their choice, and the winner was Egyptian General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who didn't even make the top 10 of Time's final list.

For my money (which does not go into a subscription to Time) this "state of the playing field" simply affirms for me just how much of a waste of time this whole project is.

In a Democracy, You Make Your Decisions Your Way, Not Ours!

Having just finished Mark Danner's "Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now" in the latest issue of The New York Review, I suspect I am a bit overly sensitive to the delusions of those who think that the United States has some kind of "manifest destiny" to spread its way of life around the world, whether it involves the prioritization of consumerism or our particular approach to a "democratic government." (That latter actually reminds me over Voltaire's witty observation about the Holy Roman Empire. In the current state of affairs, one might say that what we have right now is far from democratic and probably just as far from being a government!) It will therefore be interesting to see how our philosophy of our-way-is-the-only-way will fare now that the Libyan National Assembly has voted that the foundation of all legislation and state institutions will be Sharia Law. The impact of this decision on the rights of those who do not necessarily embrace the faith of Islam remains to be seen, as is the question of whether or not the United States will decide that interference in a decision made by the National Assembly is none of our business.

A Serious Category Error

There was an interview on BBC World Service radio a couple of days ago, which seems to have been conceived to provide some enlightenment over what seems to be a monotonically increasing number of instances of public unrest over discontent with government decisions and actions. I was unable to catch the name of the interviewee, but he made one casual remark about the fact that most countries in the developing world did not really "get" the idea of democracy or the concept of free markets. By lumping these two concepts in a single sentence, he seemed to be implying that the two were related.

I would argue the opposite, which is that they are at cross-purposes. The ideal of participatory democracy is one in which all voices are equal, which means that all decisions are subjected to "the wisdom of the crowd." Cooler heads going all the way back to Socrates (at least as he was depicted by Plato) recognized that this system has some key flaws, which is why most successful efforts at a constitutional government have tried to address those flaws without abandoning the concept of general public participation.

On the other hand, the free market mentality is not about a level playing field. Rather, it is about a worldview that equates wealth with power and encourages a brutal Hobbesian approach to the acquisition of wealth. Within this model, the power of wealth may then be applied to manipulate the public, thus undermining the principles that motivated the formation of a constitutional government. The current state of affairs in our own country would suggest that the power of wealth has succeeded in rendering just about every aspect of government ineffectual to the point of irrelevance.

When we try to tell the rest of the world that we live in a democracy, we are really only talking about a flimsy cardboard stage prop erected to conceal that we now live under a plutocracy.

Sir Tim Gets it Wrong Again

Once again the Technology division on the BBC News Web site seems to be providing Sir Tim Berners-Lee with a bully pulpit. This time he is speaking out against surveillance. An article introduced yesterday began with the following summary:

Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned that the democratic nature of the net is threatened by a "growing tide of surveillance and censorship".

I assume that the quote marks refer to what Berners-Lee actually said. However, on the basis of his past remarks, I suspect that he believes in "the democratic nature of the net." This would be a dangerous misconception. As it now exists, the Internet is probably the closest instance we have of a viable anarchy. As I observed last month, the very concept of governance is about as alien to the Internet community as you can get. At best the concept receives occasional lip service, but that kind of babble shuts down as soon as any questions about drafting a constitution arise.

In the physical world I am just as glad that I do not live in an anarchy. I may not like much of what government does, but I know that I would like things even less if government were entirely eliminated. In the early days of the Internet, anarchy did not seem to be too risky, since control resided in the hands of those with the necessary technical competence, whose sense of governance involved little more than common sense. These days anything I do on the Internet I do with caution. Common sense no longer prevails, and it is easier for more people to exercise power in more destructive ways. Indeed, anarchy is now so firmly established that the prospect of reining it in through governance is little more than an idle dream. It is about time for Sir Tim to wake up and start smelling the virtual Molotov cocktails!

Authority and Prosperity

In my jaundiced view of Janine Zacharia's article for yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle entitled "Silicon Valley innovation—can it save the country?," I suggested that the prosperity of Silicon Valley may owe more to its authoritarian culture than to the inflated apotheosis of innovation. I was particularly amused by the "Prosperous Silicon Valley," which placed the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Silicon Valley, taken as a "country" unto itself, with those of the leading nations of the world. It turned out that the second-ranking nation was Qatar, whose 2012 GDP was $104,756.

Ironically, Qatar made this morning's news. Al Jazeera English (which is based in Qatar) reported that the Court of Cassation had upheld the sentencing of poet Mohamed Rashid al-Ajami to fifteen years in prison. This was actually the result of a previous appeal, since the original sentence had been life. The crime was "insulting the Emir of Qatar and spreading incendiary material." The evidence was a poem about the Arab Spring, which included the line:

I hope that change will come in countries whose ignorant leaders believe that glory lies in US forces.

I wish to call attention to how discreetly worded this text is as my own evidence of how easily authority can be provoked.

We do not talk very much about poets in Silicon Valley. I suppose we assume that they have all been quarantined to the many institutions of higher learning. where their courses are attended by bored students out of the necessity of core requirements and their academic departments are in danger of being eliminated due to budget problems. All this reminds me of the poet Wilfred Owen, who fought in the First World War and died in battle exactly one week before the Armistice. His most famous line is:

All a poet can do today is warn.

The certainty of authority has no room for warnings. However, the corridors of power, whether in Qatar or Silicon Valley, are so well insulated from warnings that one has to wonder why there should be such a need to lock the poets away in prisons.