Zuckerberg Goes Head-to-Head with Aristotle

One of my favorite topics, outside of the domain of music, on this site has been Max Weber’s proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. My own effort to keep loss of meaning at bay has involved a concerted effort to read texts that require sustained cogitation, rather than simple “consumption” based on a “bottom line.” This is the sort of reading that sticks with you long after you put the book or article down; and experience has taught me that it often involves interaction with the physical medium (not only annotation but also leafing back and forth through the pages to recall what one thinks one has previously read). Thus, it is not reading that fares very well on a computer screen, whether we are talking about a monitor or a desk or the surface of a tablet.

Not too long ago I posted a “progress report” on my efforts to work my way through the “Nicomachean Ethics” of Aristotle. I am still at it, but I have just embarked on a domain that has already started my reflecting on the fact that I have begun to spend more time on Facebook since the demise of Examiner.com. It turns out that Aristotle devotes two entire books (the eighth and ninth) of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to friendship; and in the revised Oxford translation edited by Jonathan Barnes and published by Princeton University Press (in the Bollingen Series), this comes to about 27 pages. In other words there is a lot more to friendship than creating a social network by clicking a Friend button!

To some extent I might be accused of trivializing Facebook by writing that last sentence. However, I prefer to look through the other end of the telescope: By its very nature, friendship is a highly complicated dimension of human interaction that, by its very approach to interface, has been trivialized by Facebook to a degree that the noun has been almost entirely stripped of meaning. This may seem like an extreme position to make over a rather innocuous piece of software. However, it is basically yet another instance of a precept expressed by H. L. Mencken that I cannot cite too often:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

It is through clarity and simplicity that Facebook has managed to build up such a large user community, but size signifies only in matters of marketing rather than the complexities of social interaction that occupied so much of Aristotle’s thought. One might almost argue that a Presidential election came down to choosing between a candidate that was not afraid to confront complexity and one that had a clear and simple answer for everything without caring very much whether or not that answer would be effective if put into practice.

Nevertheless the nature of meaning has not yet been entirely lost. The good news is that there is still a body of individuals out there, however small their numbers may be, that are not afraid of big books and complex arguments that do not always result in easy resolutions. We may have to keep a low profile for the next four years; but, as long as we continue to express ourselves through media that exceed the prevailing attention span, we have a fighting chance of keeping at our business. We just have to view that low profile as a safety measure, rather than a sign of weakness.

Dangerous Generalization

Today’s post to the Social Business blog by Rich Harris on ZDNet has a fascinating headline:

Will advertising lose the war against word of mouth?

While this question may entail “a consummation/Devoutly to be wished,” Harris’ supporting argument has at least one questionable proposition:

59% of Americans believe offline word of mouth is highly credible, 49% believe online is.

Is this really true?  My guess is that the answer to this question is the rabbinical one:

It depends.

In other words it depends on just whose mouth is the source, whether that source is offline or online.  Thus, my neighbor may spend as lot of time reading Consumer Reports;  but, if he has never driven a car, I would be unlikely to hold a conversation about the best car for me to buy.  My guess is that there is an analogy to this assertion for just about anything I would be thinking about buying.

This does not negate Harris’ assertion that most people recognize that any advertising source is suspect.  However, that is a trivial conclusion to draw once you accept the premise that any communicative action has a motive, since you are unlikely to share the motive of the advertiser.  Nevertheless, identifying motive is never easy, even in the most conducive of settings.  Thus, however effective word-of-mouth may be, the question of finding a reliable and authoritative “mouth” is still with us and not easily solved.

Loss of Expertise?

In my recent posts inspired by Max Weber’s warning about loss of meaning, I have tended to dwell on specific words and concepts whose meaning has been eroded, if not entirely demolished in our era of newspeak.  However, the nature of meaning itself is also at stake, not only in terms of philosophical perspectives concerned with the “meaning of meaning” but also with regard to how meaning is put to use.  Thus, a corollary to loss of meaning is loss of expertise;  and we seem to be seeing more and more evidence of it every day.

The loss of expertise, in turn, may be seen as a consequence of the extent to which “knowledge work” has become reduced to a “sweatshop industry,” whose workers amount to little more than “mindless drones.”  The “knowledge worker” is expected to be able to deploy a limited repertoire of routines in a work setting in which efficiency counts for more than effectiveness.  It is unlikely that this worker knows why those routines do what they do;  and in some cases (s)he may not really know what they do, only the circumstances in which they are to be deployed.

We may well start to be seeing this loss of expertise where it matters most, in the development of the software infrastructure on which this degraded sense of knowledge work depends so heavily.  For those who preach that the future of our economy lies in innovations in information technology, software engineering may well be the “last best hope” for real knowledge work.  However, even where we expect to find it, it is no longer what it used to be.  My own most painful confrontation with this ugly truth has been in the shoddy nature of OS X Lion on my Mac PowerBook, an operating system so flawed that I would have taken it for a Microsoft product.

However, if this was a consequence of a new work [sic] force for which operating systems are no longer “cool,” BBC News just ran a Technology story that cuts closer to the “heart of cool.”  A whopping eighteen months after the launch of the iPad, Facebook has finally released its own “native” app.  However, if this effort was far from a day late, it is even further from a dollar short.  The initial user response has been a host of stories about all the bugs that were quickly encountered.  This puts the extended development time in an interesting light.  The BBC report claims that Facebook offered no explanation for the delay, offering only the following statement from Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor:

We’re releasing it now because it’s done.

Add “done” to that list of words that have lost meaning!

Automation has always been a threat to workers.  At a policy level we have believed that automation should be an incentive to acquire new skills.  However, those skills are now under threat, too and have been reduced to a command of fleeting techniques that are here today and gone tomorrow.  In E. M. Forster’s cautionary tale, “the machine stops” because no one is left with the skills to keep it in proper working order.  Software development has now become a machine, and it is being run by workers who really have no idea what it is doing or how it can been maintained.  Forster’s machine degraded gradually, and we may now be experiencing the beginning of such degradation in our information technology infrastructure.

Standard & Poor Confirms a Hypothesis

In my Saturday piece on the downgrading of our Standard & Poor (S&P) credit rating, I hypothesized “that S&P just wanted to take both the Legislative and Executive branches of our Government to task on the grounds that their handling of the debt ceiling legislation amounted to dereliction of duty.”  This seemed like a viable hypothesis at the time, but I had no idea where it might stand within S&P itself.  Thanks to a report that just appeared on the BBC News Web site, I have discovered that my hypothesis may actually have some confirming evidence.

It turns out that S&P has a Sovereign Ratings department.  While this should not have been a surprise, it affirms the extent to which the institution recognizes that there is never going to be a one-size-fits-all approach to rating credit risks.  The head of this department is David Beers, and the BBC report includes remarks he made in a conference call this morning.  Here is the text that pertains to my hypothesis:

If [there were] broader consensus among parties about how to make fiscal policy choices over the medium-term horizon and in turn that translated into a more substantial and more robust fiscal stimulation package, those two things could together in time lead to the rating returning to AAA.

But given the nature of the debate currently in the country, with the polarisation of views across the country right now, we don't see anything immediately on the horizon that would make this the most likely scenario.

I take this to mean that the downgrade had less to do with any quantitative metrics concerned with how much we would be able to pay how many of our creditors if they all decided to cash in their bond holdings and more to do with the qualitative question of how our government would react in response to such a demand.  To return to the language I used on Saturday, S&P issued the moral equivalent of a vote of no confidence in the ability of the United States Government to act upon effective decision-making in a time of economic crisis.  When I suggested that our current problems have more do to with such decision-making than with our level of debt a week ago, I concluded by asking, not entirely rhetorically:

Would you lend your money to such a government?

My guess is that most of us would respond with a variation of that old Sixties chant:

Hell, no!  We won’t loan!

While the wording may be a bit coarse, I think it captures the logic behind the S&P decision.  The ball is now back in the court of the Federal Government.  As an institution, it can continue to dither and stagnate under the emotion-driven pressures of conflicting ideologies;  or it can wake up and recognize that it has just been beaten with a really big stick of dispassionate logic.  All we are saying (in Sixties language again) right now is to give logic a chance;  but my guess is that emotions are running way to high for logic to be allowed at the table, let alone prevail.

Putting the "Social" Back in Social Networking

Sharif Sakr may be on to something.  Those who do not recognize the name may have missed my “Understanding Misunderstanding” post last week, when I introduced him as the “Technology of Business reporter” for BBC News.  The post was concerned with an article that he wrote about the nature of business communication and the extent to which it may be facilitated by “technologies of simulacra” (my phrase, not his), such as avatars.  Today he has a piece about social software in business settings;  and, while a sample space of two rarely provides a meaningful statistic, what he “may be on to” is the recognition of just how fundamental communication is to the operation of just about any business.  Thus, while last week he considered the question of whether communication through avatars could be as effective as face-to-face encounters, this week he takes on the role of communication through social software in the workplace, thereby shifting the topic into the domain of “knowledge sharing” and “knowledge creation” or innovation.

By way of a case study, he considers Salesforce Chatter and its use by Scancom, a small British business that supplies software products for Blackberry users.  For the Managing Director of this company, Chen Kotecha, efficient software development is critical for the survival of the business.  Products have to be delivered rapidly and flawlessly.  Thus, it is important that any developer who hits a snag be able to leverage the experience of other developers who may have encountered similar problems, particularly when one of those others successfully resolved the problem.  Kotecha believes that Chatter encourages ongoing communication in his facility through which such “knowledge sharing” is enabled.

However, Sakr then takes an interesting twist to address whether or not Scancom constitutes a representative case study.  He considers larger and more sophisticated products, such as the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite and encounters skepticism from a representative of the Gartner Group, which puts a lot of effort into dispassionate analysis of new technologies:

"Most corporate collaboration tools are designed by people who aren't socially adept", says Gartner analyst Tom Austin.

"Google and Microsoft are populated by engineers and they are failures at social tools."

Austin's view is perhaps borne out by the fate of Google Wave - an attempt to merge document sharing with social networking, which was abandoned due to lack of interest.

The only way in which I might disagree with Austin is that, where he sees ineptitude, which may just be innocuous, I see psychopathology that reveals itself through painful consequences on an all-too-regular basis.  Indeed, in light of the “It Gets Better” movement that has arisen to counteract the bullying of young homosexuals, for which social software has been poignantly instrumental, I would say that, from the technology point of view, things will keep getting worse.

However, through Austin’s skepticism, Sakr finds his way to the conclusion he should have known from the very beginning, which is that effective communication is more important than efficient technology.  This conclusion is reinforced through one final case study:

Meanwhile, folk at the Centre of Creative Collaboration, a small building near London's King's Cross, are quite proud of the way they do things.

People come here at 10 every Friday morning to drink coffee, share ideas and start collaborative projects - and there have been some real commercial successes.

The Centre is not like social networking, because far from immersing themselves in the distracting babble of daily business, these people deliberately remove themselves from it.

But neither is it like the more 'serious' collaborative tools, because people come here to make new acquantainces rather than stick within a regular trusted team.

The approach is based on 'open innovation' and it is far less structured than any online collaboration tool currently available.

"It's a different process, that's all", says co-founder Brian Condon.

"Just because people are having fun in a pretty informal environment, that doesn't mean they're not creating things that can deliver business advantage."

Perhaps Condon and his colleagues know something the software engineers don't.

With all due respect to Condon, what Sakr “discovered” at this Centre is something that the workplace anthropology literature has known for at least fifteen years, one of the best examples being the chapter on “War Stories” in Talking About Machines:  An Ethnography of a Modern Job by Julian E. Orr.  The “modern job” that Orr studied was that of the technicians who repair copy machines, research conducted under support from Xerox Corporation.  The “War Stories” chapter addresses the same issue of benefitting from shared experiences that was so important to efficient operations at Scancom;  but the Xerox technicians did not need technology to share their stories.  Those stories, for the most part, were exchanged in the “real” social world in which technicians would meet at a bar after work and jaw about what had happened during that day;  and, while it is true that Xerox would later try to harness technology to expand the domain of those conversations from the local bar in (for example) Denver to the entire global community of technicians, it is hard to overestimate the value of a localized communication setting in which the “full bandwidth” of social discourse (whose dimensions extend beyond to the linguistic to the paralinguistic) may be utilized.

Thus, we return to the ground that I had staked out in my “Understanding Misunderstanding” post.  The underlying problem that continues to confront business operations, regardless of the size of the business, concerns effectiveness of communication;  and, from an operational point of view, effectiveness may be evaluated on the basis of how well the communicating parties understand each other.  The bad news is that the “problem of misunderstanding,” as I put it in that earlier post, is not an engineering problem;  but this can also be turned into good news, because it means that those who manage business operations must tend to not only the support technologies that are deployed but also the people who actually use them.  Such attention must recognize that those people are as likely to arrive at their “best work” without technology assistance as with it, which means that the workplace must be a social world that can work both with the available technology and beyond any of its limitations.

A Cynical Reflection on a Well-Turned Phrase

While reading "The Mission of Father Maciel," Alma Guillermoprieto's no-holds-barred exposition on the scandalous life of Marcial Maciel in the latest New York Review, I came across the following sentence:

Uneducated and mendacious, Maciel nevertheless had a genius for politics, and for personal relations.

Given that, by this point in her text, Guillermoprieto had established those opening adjectives as thoroughly warranted, I could not help but wonder if her use of "nevertheless" was appropriate. Could that "genius" for politics and the broader domain of personal relations have been a product of his mendaciousness and lack of education? Could this be the "dark side" of Isaiah Berlin's "Political Judgement" essay (which, coincidentally, also appeared in the pages of The New York Review)? Berlin's point was, of course, far more innocuous than Maciel's behavior. He argued that the many subtleties of a rich educational background might actually "do more harm than good by interfering with other factors that might contribute to more effective judgment" (my words, not Berlin's). He overlooked the possibility that baser motives could be a dominating factor, turning to figures like Otto von Bismarck for positive models without taking more negative examples (such as, say, Joseph Stalin) into account. Had Berlin lived to read Guillermoprieto's article, what would he have concluded about the "political judgment" of Maciel?

The Software that Cried Wolf?

Here is one of those stories that one expects to get from the BBC but which they actually harvested from their Associated Press feed:

New York's police chief has delivered a cheesecake to an elderly couple in Brooklyn, to apologise for dozens of mistaken police visits to their home.

A computer glitch had led officers to Walter and Rose Martin's home 50 times in the past eight years, police said.

The latest intrusion came on Tuesday, with officers pounding on the front and back doors, shouting "Police, open up!"

Thursday's visit - cheesecake in hand - went well. The Martins, aged 82 and 83, shared pictures of their grandchildren.

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly visited the couple's modest home on Friday to "apologise and explain" for the mix-up, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told the Associated Press.

The problem started in 2002, when the Martin's home address was used as "test data" for a new computer crime-tracking system.

The couple complained about the harrowing visits in 2007, but the data remained in the system despite efforts to "purge the records", Deputy Commissioner Browne said.

He added that the Martin's address had now been flagged with alerts "barring officers" from questioning the octogenarians.

This is a really nice little story about how the NYPD can put its best foot forward towards community relations.

As a story about software systems, however, the positive twist of the tale is, as they say, not so much. Indeed, it is yet another incident of a case where those with the power to do so could not update a database to repair inaccurate contents. There is also a question of how the matter was resolved. What if there is a criminal problem at the Martin's address? What procedures are in place regarding how that "flag" is handled to determine whether the report is valid or an artifact of this latent error? Furthermore, assuming those procedures exist (which, as far as I am concerned, may be a bit of a stretch), how will they impact the efficiency of police responsiveness in general, since, presumably, the database was initially set up to improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of such responsiveness? Only when we have good answers to these questions shall we know whether or not this narrative can be applied as a lessons-learned case study; and only if the narrative can be applied will there be even the slightest possibility that the next time it occurs (and there will be a next time), the outcome will not deteriorate into farce.

Carrots and Sticks

Given the way events are unfolding in Israel, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva might want to give serious consideration to holding a "lessons learned" meeting with former President Jimmy Carter and our current envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell. Both of these men clearly understand the value of the reputation of an "honest broker;" and both appreciate the difficulty of both establishing and maintaining that reputation. Lula is currently in Israel on a trip described in a BBC News report as follows:

Mr Lula described his visit to Israel as "a mission of peace" that he hoped would help his country emerge as a bigger player in foreign affairs.

Lula seems to subscribe to many of the precepts outlined by Dennis Ross (who took his own hard knocks in the Middle East) in his Statecraft book, particularly those that apply to the judicious management of both carrots and sticks. Thanks to the blinders imposed by our own media, most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that Brazil has any carrots to bring to the table. This is why we need to turn to a source like the BBC to enhance our "sense of reality," at least where global matters are concerned:

He [Lula] informed Israeli President Shimon Peres that Israel had been accepted as the first non-South American partner in the free trade group, Mercosur.

Brazil is Israel's largest trading partner in Latin America, and trade between Brazil and Iran has also grown by 40% during Mr Lula's presidency.

So how does the Foreign Minister of Israel react to a world leader who gives equal priority to both world peace and effective trade relations? Here is how the BBC reported the answer:

Israeli and Brazilian media said Avigdor Lieberman declined to attend meetings with the visiting head of state and his address to parliament.

Mr Lieberman was reportedly upset that Mr Lula refused to visit the grave of the founder of the Zionist movement.

Mr Lula also opposes sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

Had anyone else (even Israeli) done this, I would be thinking about giving an early Chutzpah of the Week award; but I have come to accept that such behavior is business as usual for Lieberman, apparently with the approval of his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Apparently, now that the United States has grown out of the faith-based policy making of the Bush Administration, Israel is determined to fill in the gap, persisting in the metaphor of hauling the Ark of the Covenant into battle. Let us hope that Lula can keep a cool head in the face of such silliness and persist in his efforts.

Republican Opposition (again)

We can now take it for granted that, whatever action the current Administration takes on any issue, the Republicans will speak out against it. Thus, while it appeared that the Republican's had ceded Sunday morning television to the Democrats, particularly David Axelrod's representation of President Barack Obama's disapproval of recent Israeli actions in the strongest of language, all in the interest of restoring the reputation of the United States as an "honest broker" in support of George Mitchell's ongoing efforts to negotiate a Middle East peace, we knew it would not take long for the Republicans to find cause for complaint. It was only a question of what the complaint would be and who would be doing the complaining.

The "who" turned out to be an interesting choice, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who happens to be the only Jewish Republican in the House; and, according to an Agence France-Presse story that just appeared on Yahoo! News, he held a breakfast with reporters to say his piece (otherwise known as the Republican Party's latest salvo on the White House). As I see it, the critical sentence from his statement is the following:

Peace is what we are about in this country and we're about trying to facilitate that, but it should be peace on Israel's terms.

In other words his attack against the recent highly critical rhetoric from Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Axelrod-speaking-for-Obama is basically an attack on their combined efforts to recover that "honest broker" position, without which Mitchell will never be able to accomplish very much.

This reminds me a bit of that joke that reductively trivializes the difference between Democrats and Republicans:

Democrats think Republicans are stupid.
Republicans think Democrats are wrong.

Whether or not he realized it, Cantor reduced the whole question of Middle East negotiations to the premise that Israel's policies and actions are "right;" and, as a corollary, any opposition to those policies and actions, whether from Israel's neighbors, the United States, or the European Union (which has now decided to stand with Obama's position), is "wrong." This is the same Manichaeism under which former President George W. Bush saw foreign policy as a battlefield for the ultimate conflict between good and evil. It is the sure way to kill any possibility of communication between opposing points of view, either face-to-face or through a mediating agent like Mitchell. In the face of such reasoning, Cantor (or the Republicans who helped him prepare his remarks) failed to appreciate that "peace on Israel's terms" can only be the one-sided pax Romana that comes about when a conqueror totally subdues the conquered. The problem is that, like democracy (to reflect on an observation made by Mohammad Khatami about the political situation in Iraq), peace cannot be imposed; it must be cultivated in its own environment and allowed to grow of its own accord. (Also like democracy, as Gordon Wood observed in his latest book, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, what actually grows is not necessarily what those who planted the seeds expected!) The failure of the Bush Administration to appreciate this precept had a devastating effect on our standing in the world community, and the Obama Administration has done much to restore that standing. It is, to say the least, regrettable that, in their obsessive drive to recover political control, the Republicans now seem so determined to dismantle that recovery.

Neither Sticks nor Stones

As could have been guessed, the rhetorical assault over Israel's latest settlement development move has had no effect. We could have seen it coming. We already knew that the full extent of regret on the part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to do with the bad timing of the announcement, rather than the substance of the Ramat Shlomo plan itself. This was confirmed by the latest report on Al Jazeera English:

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has rejected calls from the US to halt settlement plans in occupied East Jerusalem, saying plans for building new homes would go ahead.

In a speech to Israel's parliament on Monday, Netanyahu said construction "will continue in Jerusalem as this has been the case for the past 42 years" in reference to the 1967 occupation of the mainly Arab territory.

Yesterday I reported that we had heard little from Israel's defenders in this country to respond to the level of indignation expressed by Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chief of Staff David Axelrod (presumably speaking on behalf of President Barack Obama). Yesterday AIPAC finally released a statement, which at best can be described as muted:

AIPAC calls on the administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State.

Nevertheless, it is clearly a reaction against American indignation, even it is it not a blatant endorsement of Israeli arrogance. If it assumes that defusing the tension is strictly an American responsibility, rather than a joint effort of both the United States and Israel, then the statement is unlikely to improve the reception it is likely to get "in the lobbies of the Congressional buildings," as I put it yesterday. There is no guarantee, of course, that the lobbying power of AIPAC will fall from its currently lofty height. However, if, as is likely, AIPAC is one of the major impediments to our being perceived as an "honest broker" (which would justify why a country like Brazil should now be considering entering as a mediator), then a radical diminishing (if not elimination) of AIPAC influence will be prerequisite to rebuilding our credibility in the Middle East.

Vindicating Carter

I have always felt that the one American who has seriously and persistently pursued the premise that peace can only come to the Middle East by honoring the principles that mean the most to both Israelis and Palestinians has been former President Jimmy Carter. He may keep changing his tactical recommendations. However, he keeps his eye on the prize; and his premise still provides the foundation for his strategic point of view. Thus, for him the greatest threats arise when that premise is violated.

This week we saw the Obama Administration take steps towards embracing the same premise. Israeli settlement development has become a blatant dishonoring of Palestinian principles, and it was beginning to seem as if the Obama Administration would apply the same benign neglect as preceding administrations, probably because Israel puts as much force behind its lobbying guns as it does behind its armaments. Unfortunately, Israel seems to have deteriorated to a condition in which they put as much faith in lobbying as they used to put in the Ark of the Covenant; and, as was the case with the latter, they suffered a major setback for their arrogance (which their own Scripture describes as Divine punishment). Fortunately, this time around the setback may lead to a serious rethinking of the settlement policy, as a result of a move that may have undermined the usual lobbying forces.

That move, of course, was the announcement of settlement plans for Ramat Shlomo, located in East Jerusalem, that coincided with the state visit by Vice President Joseph Biden. Biden refused to take this arrogance in stride in the interest of diplomacy. Instead, he used every opportunity to deliver the message that the United States would not tolerate such counterproductive measures; and that included delivering that message while on the same stage as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ultimately, this squeezed a few apologetic remarks from Netanyahu but no sign that the policy was going to change. Meanwhile, after Biden had concluded his visit, his position was reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and this morning David Axelrod was dispatched to the NBC division of the "Sabbath Day Gasbags" circuit (otherwise known as Meet the Press). To make it clear that neither Biden nor Clinton were having second thoughts about pulling any punches, Axelrod took the same position in his own remarks about the Israeli actions:

This was an affront, it was an insult but most importantly it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region.

We have just started proximity talks, that is shuttle diplomacy, between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and for this announcement to come at that time was very destructive.

The strength of this unity of voices can be appreciated by the fact that we have heard little hue and cry from Israel's defenders to the effect that this Administration position is yet another act of latent anti-Semitism. That dog is just not going to hunt this time, just as the Ark of the Covenant could not be counted on the lead the Israelites to military victory.

One incident, of course, does not redeem the reputation of the United States as an "honest broker." However, it is still a step in the right direction. If it has created a situation in which organizations such as AIPAC will be less welcome in the lobbies of the Congressional buildings, that could well further serious moves towards peace in the Middle East. The window of opportunity may be narrow, but it can still be wide enough to reverse a status quo that has impeded that elusive goal thus far. We should watch this coming week to see whether or not this opportunity is taken seriously.

The Representation Question (again)

Reading John Nichols' "post-mortem" analysis ("Bye Bayh") of Indiana Senator Evan Bayh's decision to retire has returned me, once again, to why it is that our government continues to be so ineffective, no matter how dire the circumstances. Nichols' point of view is that the Democratic Party should not be bending over to make compromises with conservative Democrats for the sake of controlling 60 seats in the Senate. Nichols would rather see the Party go for broke over a progressive agenda. I sympathize with his position. The Republican Party seems to be on much firmer ground in attracting voters on the basis of "values," often by convincing those voters that the Democrats care about nothing other than "playing politics." The Republicans, of course, are playing hardball politics just as much as the Democrats; but their strategists are better at keeping this little pea of wisdom concealed as they play their shell game.

What gets lost in both the Democratic compromising and the Republican shell shuffling is that, left to their own devices, most people are not particularly interested in ideologies. They simply want to delegate the voices they would have in a "pure" democracy to representatives who will have the time and (hopefully) the wisdom to provide them with a satisfactory present and a promising future. This is the fundamental motivation behind the first Article of the United States Constitution. It is important to remember that the Constitution, itself, was the product of a gathering of representatives, who then had the responsibility of taking the result back to the people they represented and convincing them to vote for it. (The whole purpose of The Federalist Papers was to facilitate that convincing process.)

The "official" reason for Bayh's retirement was that he felt that the Congress had become too partisan. This is so easy to say that it hardly means anything. One can just as easily accuse the Congress of being not partisan enough, if one allows the adjective to expand beyond the boundaries of the usual political parties. The effective representative puts the interests of those he represents ahead of his own, but he must also put those same interests ahead of the political party whose organization may have facilitated his election. In other words, when being partisan towards the "political machine" becomes more important than being partisan towards the electorate itself, the electorate is no longer being effectively represented; and the principles of our Constitution are in jeopardy. This is why John Adams was so strongly opposed to having political parties in the first place, and his decision to stand on that principle probably contributed to his failure to get elected for a second term as President.

There are, of course, organizational assets to political parties. To some extent they reflect the precept that, when a government grows to a certain size, the representatives need representatives. This is because getting things done in politics is ultimately about having the right conversations with the right people, and there are only so many conversations that an individual can conduct each day. On the other hand we tend to think of conversations as limited by face-to-face contact time; and this may actually be a setting in which the Internet can change matters in a positive way. Consider the hypothesis that a well-managed and properly secured system of social software could broaden the scope of the conversations that a representative could conduct. If that hypothesis could be warranted, the representative might have less need of the organizational benefits of a political party, just as we have seen that Internet-based funding and campaigning is beginning to jeopardize the power of machine politics.

Perhaps all those announcements of exodus from the Congress are delivering the same message of an unwillingness to be part of a government that is no longer "of the people, by the people, for the people." Where are those with the wisdom to deliberate over whether this might be the case? If so, where are those with both the wisdom and the will to do something about it?

"Hurry up please it's time!"

I found it interesting that yesterday's report of the study of brain regions that are active when actors perform described an experiment based on excerpts from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Having heard the poem read aloud several times (including a recording of Eliot himself), I continue to be haunted by that mundane interjection, "Hurry up please it's time!," in the "A Game of Chess" section. We may puzzle over how many layers of meaning Eliot built up over this trivial phrase; but the nature of time-consciousness remains one of the great challenges in our understanding of what the brain does that endows us with mind.

In many ways the continuing success of the Internet is all about better serving our consciousness of time. Our telephone technology matured to a point where, at least for domestic service, we accepted that a phone call would have the immediacy of a face-to-face conversation. However, when we started communicating through the Internet, we sacrificed that immediacy in a variety of ways. We discovered that the nature of the network itself meant that the instant at which an electronic mail message was sent was not the instant at which it was received at its destination site(s). The first experiments with digital video were frustrating. Not only were the images small, but also their flow of time was not smooth. However, because video on the computer screen was so "cool," we learned to live with these shortcomings, just as we gradually recognized that electronic mail delivery can never be instantaneous. There was even a whole area of research concerned with identifying behavioral practices during video conferencing that would compensate for the temporal weaknesses of the technology.

Today the technology has improved to a level where images not only fill the screen but fill it with high-definition resolution. Nevertheless, time remains a problem. I was first really aware of the problem when I tried to watch the entire Carnegie Hall concert given by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra on YouTube itself. This was shortly after the concert took place, and the bottom line was that the technology was not up to the task. As I summarized the experience at the time, YouTube was a fine place to watch short snippets; but it was not up for an uninterrupted delivery of a full movement of a symphony by Johannes Brahms. Those interruptions can destroy the listening experience, and they are beginning to surface with greater frequency. The recent live HD broadcast of Turandot from the Metropolitan Opera had similar problems; and I was surprised that none of my New York Times RSS feeds ran a statement from the Met informing their vastly-expanded audience about the nature of the problem (which apparently involved uploading from their end). However, this is not just a problem of real-time events. Even my beloved archives of the performances available through the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall have suffered. The player for these archives supports three levels of resolution. When it was launched, I quickly discovered that my DSL service at home could not keep up with the data rate for a high-definition signal; but mid-level resolution served my needs quite satisfactorily. Now I am happy if I can get uninterrupted flow at low resolution. None of this should be surprising in light of just how much video is being consumed through the Internet. When once think tanks like the Institute for the Future were asking what we would do with "bandwidth to burn," we now discover that the traffic jam has come to the Internet.

As a result, I found myself more concerned than enthusiastic over the following BBC News report that was released this morning:

Pupils in North Yorkshire have jammed with one of the UK's leading orchestras, thanks to high-speed broadband lines.

The video-linked music workshop over 10Mbps (megabits per second) connections provided sessions with the Southbank Sinfonia.

The project was organised by NYnet, which has set up high-speed broadband in the area.

It demonstrates what could be achieved using video conferencing.

David Cullen, chief executive of NYnet, said: "This level of connectivity enables both unique experiences such as this, and plays an ongoing role in day-to-day learning that can truly enhance the educational offering in the region."

Superfast broadband is transforming public services in other countries, allowing people to work from home and access medical and educational services remotely.

I actually have friends who attempted something like this in the pre-Internet days, trying to set up a performance that involved musicians in California and Massachusetts. I wonder what they would say about how well a 10-megabit connection would manage for the time-sensitive subtleties that arise when a teacher is trying to get a student to phrase a passage properly. I worry even more that, while medicine has clearly benefitted from broadband communication technology, we have not yet recognized that there may be time-critical situations in which relying on the technology may end up doing more harm than good.

Once again we face the problem that mindless evangelizing of a technology impedes our ability to have serious discussions about that technology's limitations. We rush to take advantage of new (or "cool") capabilities, giving little thought to what is actually happening when we do so or what consequences might subsequently arise. Thus, when those consequences do arise, we are caught off guard; and the results can be anywhere from frustrating to catastrophic. When it comes to the matter of how we listen to serious music, this is a case where one of my prize oxen is in danger of being gored!

The Complexity of the Abuse Problem

This morning the BBC NEWS Web site ran an interesting report about the problem of abusive practices, particularly towards children, in the brave new world of social software on the Internet. Given that the undiscriminating embrace of this technology may be equaled only by the mindless evangelizing that continues to promote it, these stories are valuable. Nevertheless, this particular account reflects a bias that may not be particularly productive. Here is how the story opens:

Major social networking websites have been criticised for not introducing a help button for children to report concerns about grooming and bullying.

Jim Gamble, from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), hit out at the sites as one site, Bebo, adopted the button.

He said there was "no legitimate reason" why other sites like MySpace and Facebook had not done the same.

As Bill Clinton would have put it, I feel Gamble's pain. I have long argued that the Internet is a hazardous place whose dangers have been consistently overlooked or downplayed by social software evangelists, and most of my attention has been towards hazards to adults. By all rights the risks to children should be even greater, and we need voices like Gamble's to raise consciousness about those risks.

Nevertheless, I fear that Gamble may not entirely grasp the nature of the technology. The Bebo "button," which is illustrated on the BBC NEWS Web page, is an instance of what tends to be called reporting technology. Most of us have encountered it in some setting or another. Indeed, anyone reading this should be aware of the technology, because it is at the top of the page. If I write something that offends, then a reader can click on the "Report Abuse" hyperlink to notify the Blogger support team that I have done so; and, whatever my past rants and inquiries into the dark side may have been, I have tried very hard both to edit my text before submitting it and to stay on the right side of the boundary of normative social practices.

The rub, however, resides in that second infinitive phrase. Where is that "boundary of normative social practices?" When reporting technology is engaged, it is basically a request for a judgment on where a particular item sits with respect to those practices. How does such judgment take place? More importantly, in the midst of the heavy volume of content flowing through the Internet pipes, how can each such judgment be made both effectively and efficiently?

The bottom line is that there are no good answers to these questions, so Gamble's indignation has missed the point. Where MySpace and Facebook are concerned, the question is not whether or not they choose to adopt a simple button-based reporting technology. The real question has to do with what happens when the button is clicked? What sort of account (and, once again, the concept of λόγος from Plato's investigation into the nature of knowledge in "Theaetetus" rears its head in the world of Facebook) is elicited when abuse is reported? Then, what happens to that account (even if it is nothing more than "the abuse button was clicked") after it has been submitted? To offer a reductio ad absurdum example of just how vulnerable this process is, I recently learned of a situation in this brave new world of outsourcing in which reports of abuse were being read by individuals who did not understand the language of either the content or the account very well.

So, while it may distress Gamble, there is, indeed, a "legitimate reason" why MySpace and Facebook have not jumped on the reporting technology bandwagon. Worse yet, it is unclear that Bebo is quite the paradigm of vigilance that Gamble would like it to be. Consider the following excerpt from a BBC Panorama report that I cited this past March:

Internet ratings company Nielsen claims that Bebo, with its one million Irish users, was the most popular site in Ireland after Google in 2007.

Sectarianism on the site hit the headlines after threatening posts surfaced following the 2006 murder of Catholic school boy Michael McIlveen in Ballymena.

Three years on, and some pages on Bebo brazenly continue to promote violence.

Has this situation changed since March; and, if so, was the change the result of the adoption of the reporting technology that Gamble so admires?

As I see it, the real problem with social software is that problems of offense and abuse are human problems for which humans have to be in all parts of the loop from the very beginning. The most dangerous consequence of Internet volume has been the gradual erosion of person-to-person "Contact Us" mechanisms in favor of alternative technologies, such as blogs in which users can discuss problems among themselves (which may or may not be monitored my the technology support team) or FAQ pages (where one may be able to vote on how informative they were without any confidence that one's vote counts for very much). The erosion is, of course, understandable. There are just not enough individuals available for "contact" to keep up with the load of users trying to make contact.

Thus, conditions are such that technology providers search frantically for bandages because no one seems to have the resources to analyze the nature of the problem and think about solving it. One would think that there are plenty of educated people out there who would be more than happy to work the problem. Is it then a question of not wanting to put budget into those resources? If so, then we are back in the days of the Ford Pinto, when managers decided that the cost of settling with the victims of a defective product was lower than the cost of repairing the product. I wish I could say that this is another instance of a farcical repetition of history; but, where the safety of children is concerned, this just is not the case.

On Choosing Words Carefully

It has been a while since I placed a text under a strong magnifying glass; but, considering how volatile conditions currently are in Iran, I think it is worth examining Barack Obama's most recent statement this way. If he thinks he is pouring oil on troubled waters, then others may see him as setting a match to that oil. Let us consider his first (and most quoted) paragraph (using Robert Dreyfuss' most recent blog post for The Nation as my source):

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

This text starts out immediately on the wrong foot with its use of "must." This is nothing more than that great classic of Bush-speak, "ya gotta understand" (which I once called "the only rhetorical device Bush has mastered"), with less folksy phonology. It presumes that the speaker's point of view is the only valid one, and this shows a flagrant disregard for the message behind the subtitle of (now "banished") Dennis Ross' Statecraft book, which is the need "to restore America's standing in the world." The bottom line is that this one little word reveals that, when push comes to shove, we can fall back on the same might-makes-right reasoning of the Bush Administration that got us into so much trouble.

This injudicious use of the word "must" is followed by the equally suspect adjective "unjust." Like it or not, the Iranian government has a justice system. We may not like the way it works, and we are under no obligation to agree with it or support it. However, using the word "unjust" amounts to invalidating it; and, like it or not, we do not have grounds to do so.

This then takes us to the even more highly-charged adjective "universal." Presumably, this adjective was engaged because it appears in the title of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Unfortunately, subsequent debates and decisions emerging from the United Nations since then have demonstrated that there is far from "universal" agreement when it comes to taking the 30 articles of this Declaration seriously in practice. Thus, Obama would have done better to make his point on the basis of his grounds for support, referring to "rights granted by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights" without shoving the "universality" of those rights in the faces of those currently violating the Preamble (free speech) and Article 20 (assembly) of that Declaration.

As was the case when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was first elected, we would do well to recognize how little this disputed election has to do with the governance of Iran. Power still resides ultimately with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and the president is little more than an "interface" between the world of this religious leader and the world of other countries, whether their governments are secular or sacred. Khamenei has made it clear that those who protest are indisputably at fault and will thus be subjected to the consequences of their faulty actions. Those are currently the "rules of the game" in Iran. If we are going to even try to exercise statecraft, we cannot begin by denying that those rules exist. This puts most of the Western countries in a great bind. However, this may have been Khamenei's intent. He is testing us to see if (and how) we can negotiate from such a difficult position. This will be Obama's real test as to whether or not meaningful relations with Iran can be restored. Khamenei has created that test, and it is now up to Obama to figure out how to pass it.

Bringing the Hamas Question into the Spotlight

Once again, we must turn to Al Jazeera English to satisfy our need for a context-based account of our alleged "vigorous engagement" towards peace in the Middle East, particularly as regards whether or not Hamas will be allowed to participate in that engagement. The basis for their latest report began with the morning papers:

Several ex-senior officials in the US government have written to Barack Obama, the president, urging him to seek dialogue with the Palestinian Hamas movement, a newspaper report says.

The Boston Globe on Sunday reported that the group has called on the White House to hold talks with Hamas leaders to persuade the Palestinian group to lay down arms and join the rival Fatah in a unity government.

Specific names cited in the Al Jazeera account include Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Paul Volcker, hardly the sort of names one would associated with the accusations of Chamberlain-like appeasement that the Bush Administration was so quick to flourish. Just as surprising as the signatories, however, was the amount of time it took for this story to surface:

The letter was handed to Obama just days before he took office in January, the newspaper reported.

Where Al Jazeera could go beyond the Boston Globe was in seeking out a source who could address both sides of this Hamas question and its potential for impeding any serious engagement. They found such a source in Marl Lynch, Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University:

I think that there is a group of people who think that it is necessary. Hamas controls Gaza, you can't get aid into Gaza without working with Hamas and they represent a large portion of the Palestinian people.

On the other side you have a lot of people who say that the international community has a series of conditions. They haven't met those conditions, they have blood on their hands and there are a lot of people who have deep qualms about talking to Hamas.

Al Jazeera also provided a European perspective in the form of Clare Short, a former British Labour Minister, who just led a delegation of six European politicians to Damascus to meet with Hamas officials:

The Europeans seem, at least to my eye, more open to the possibility of working with Hamas towards meeting those conditions rather than having them as preconditions.

I found this a discreet way to address the current American position. Neither the Al Jazeera staff nor their sources would come out and say that there was one factor in the United States with which European politicians would not have to contend, that factor being the significant lobbying power of AIPAC. We need to remember that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were courting AIPAC energetically at the organization's last convention; and we know that all-too-many decisions in Washington are biased by "deals that dare not speak their name." Recall that Obama's AIPAC speech was, to put it politely, conciliatory, while my reaction to the review of Clinton's Secretary of State nomination by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described AIPAC as "the greatest threat to Clinton's effectiveness" as an "honest broker." It may be that, if Europe is making progress towards being such an "honest broker," then the wisest thing the United States might do is to withdraw from the negotiations, recognizing the suspicion with which our country continues to be viewed by all Middle East countries except for Israel. The Bush Administration would never have considered such a possibility. Would Obama be audacious to entertain it as a means to an end that is as important to us as it is to the European Community?

Signal and Noise from Corporate America

Last night Daniel Bases wrote a lead for his Reuters story that was hard for someone with my analytic bent to resist:

It pays to communicate but Corporate America is doing less and less of it with investors as the U.S. economy falls deeper into recession, undermining market confidence in the process, a new study showed.

As I write this I see that I have accumulated 114 posts with "communication" as a label and 269 posts with "economy." The above sentence seemed to suggest that these two topics might be on a collision course; so I felt compelled to continue reading in the interest of trying to figure out what, if any, damage might ensue. Here is what I found:

The number of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index with a consistent track record over the past 10 years of issuing quarterly earnings per share guidance is down 36 percent in the last 10 months, according to Thomson Reuters Proprietary Research.

Well-known companies such as General Electric, Microsoft, Costco Wholesale, and Nucor have stopped giving consistent earnings guidance.

"They are just pulling back because they don't want to continue to have to put out numbers that they cannot meet on the street," said Martin Sass, chairman and chief executive officer of MD Sass, an investment management firm with $6 billion in assets under management.

"It has devastating implications for their credibility, their stock prices, and the like," he said.

For those, like myself, who try to invest wisely without deep-ending on tracking those investments, I feel it is worth observing that "earnings guidance" is a technical term. In a 2005 Commentary piece on researchstock.com, Richard J. Wayman called it "a relatively new term;" so I suppose it is now more familiar to those to try to follow the financial news as thoroughly as possible. Here is Wayman's definition:

Earnings guidance is defined as the comments management makes about what they expect their company to do in the future, also known as “forward looking statements.” These comments often focus on sales or earnings expectations in light of industry and macroeconomic trends. These comments are made to investors so that they can evaluate the company’s earnings potential.

It goes without saying that it is not easy to make credible "forward looking statements" under volatile conditions; but what does that mean for the more general issue of communication between a company and its investors? By not making any statement about the future, it seems as if a company may end up sending one of two messages:

1. Things are going to be so bad that we do not want to frighten you into selling off your investments in our company.
2. Things are so unpredictable right now that we really do not know what is going to happen over the next quarter, so we are not going to say anything about what might happen and ask you to trust our skills in running the company.

Neither of these messages is particularly beneficial to the company. In current conditions the first interpretation is likely to induce the very fear it is trying to prevent. The second interpretation is more honest; but will such an act of "coming clean" raise the level of trust that investors have in the company? Richard Bernstein, chief U.S. investment strategist for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch offered the following comment to Bases:

We pay very little attention to guidance at all. It's basically public relations to manipulate investor thinking, and has little to do with true fundamentals.

From his point of view, even that "act of 'coming clean'" is "basically public relations to manipulate investor thinking;" and, given how much deception and opacity we have been facing, it is hard to disagree with him. Nevertheless, we find ourselves in a situation where not communicating at all ends up sending messages that are just as noisy (in the technical sense of information theory) as any guidance messages.

The problem is that a statement of earnings per share over the coming quarter is nothing more than a single number. About two years ago I wrote a blog under the title, "If You Reduce it All to a Single Number, that Number is Almost Certainly Wrong!" Nevertheless, ours is a culture that desperately hungers for such numbers; and, as I observed almost a year ago, that is the culture that Nicholas Carr was trying to confront in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Whether we read it in an earnings guidance statement or in the first page of Google search results, we blindly accept answers while ignoring any message that provides the reasoning behind those answers. I would thus argue that the issue is not, as Bases seems to suggest, that we should be concerned that Corporate America is not throwing numbers at us; rather, the issue is whether or not it is in Corporate America's interests for investors to understand the nature of the situation behind those numbers. As an investor, I would think that it is in their interests; but I am sure there are plenty of companies whose managers would disagree. Nevertheless, since it is my money that is at stake, I feel that I should at least have the right to decide to invest it in companies who appreciate the value of understanding and avoid those who messages are little more than what Wayman calls SWAGs (Systematic, Wild Ass Guesses)!

Who Gets to Dictate the Terms?

In reviewing the appointment of George Mitchell as the US special envoy for the Arab-Israeli conflict, I made it a point to stress that the current tensions on Gaza can only be resolved through productive communication. Needless to say, you cannot have productive communication if you do not have communication at all; and, where Gaza is concerned, this involves the disquieting question of who will be allowed to communicate. Adam Entous and Arshad Mohammed recognized this problem in a dispatch they filed for Reuters early this morning:

President Barack Obama plans to dispatch his Middle East envoy to the region next week, in a quick start to the new administration's efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and shore up a shaky Gaza truce.

Obama has taken the Middle East by surprise with the speed of his diplomatic activism.

Western, Arab and Israeli diplomats said his envoy, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, plans to meet leaders in Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, but they ruled out direct contacts with Hamas Islamists who rule the Gaza Strip.

A Western diplomat said Mitchell was likely to go to Saudi Arabia but said Syria was not now on his schedule.

What is disquieting is that the exclusion of Hamas smacks of what I had called "Sin-of-Omission Diplomacy" when it was perpetrated by the recent Bush Administration. Where foreign affairs are concerned, the "change we can believe in" is a change in our lamentable tendency to regard ourselves as "the sole arbiter of who should and should not participate in discussions" over diplomatic crises, such as the current situation in Gaza. Hillary Clinton's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said all the right things about getting beyond such selfish thinking, but actions always speak louder than words. It would be nice to know if the "they" in that third paragraph of the quote encompassed all the enumerated parties or just reflected a submission to the principle that whatever the United States says is how things will go. Both interpretations are equally depressing; but I, for one, voted the way I did to get beyond another Presidential term of Bush-style bully diplomacy.

In all fairness, however, it is probably the case that the United States is not the sole impediment to the prospects of productive communication. Another Reuters dispatch, this one from Jeffrey Heller, indicates that Israel has its own part to play in this process:

International calls to investigate Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday to promise military personnel state protection from foreign prosecution.

"The commanders and soldiers sent to Gaza should know they are safe from various tribunals and Israel will assist them on this front and defend them, just as they protected us with their bodies during the Gaza operation," Olmert said.

Last week, the military censor ordered local and foreign media in Israel to blur the faces of army commanders in photos and video footage of the Gaza war for fear they could be identified and arrested while traveling abroad.

Israeli media reports said the military had been advising its top brass to think twice about visiting Europe.

This is not so much a question of who gets to participate in the discussion as one of the agenda for that discussion. It is hard to imagine having a discussion about Gaza without raising questions about grievances. By all rights those questions should address who has legitimate cause for grief and who should bear the responsibility for that grief. There is no question that Israel had a hand in bringing grief to the civilians of Gaza; but blocking any discussion of this matter is to cut off an approach to "truth and reconciliation" that we had no trouble accepting when it was practiced in Africa. Meanwhile, as Entous and Nidal al-Mughrabi reported for Reuters this morning, Hamas is doing its best to assess which Gazans have that "legitimate cause for grief" and draw upon Hamas financial resources to provide at least interim compensation. Put another way, Hamas is showing signs of acting responsibly as an elected government, even when those signs continue to "pass unnoticed" before the eyes of both the United States and Israel. The "time of waiting" for Mitchell's appointment may be over; but we may be due for a much longer wait before any productive communication can begin.

Confused Reporting

It is unclear why two fundamentally unrelated events reported by Edward Luce were packaged as a single story on the Financial Times Web site. The pessimistic explanation would be that someone over at the Financial Times decided that it was time to run a things-are-not-going-well-for-Barack-Obama story, even if, prior to Inauguration Day, it is a bit of a stretch to say that "things are going" at all. Furthermore, only one of those events, the decision of Bill Richardson to withdraw his nomination for Commerce Secretary (for what appear to be perfectly acceptable reasons), is directly related to Obama's transition planning. The reporting of this decision was then convolved with a discussion of the rate of progress in Congressional deliberation over the next round of actions to take towards economic recovery (which I am sure we all expect the Congress to do between now and Inauguration Day).

This second side of Luce's report was further confused by what appeared to be a failure to recognize the difference between deliberating and dithering. If one wanted to pick on the Congress, a better place to start might be with Majority Leader Harry Reid's comment on Meet the Press that it was important to "do it right the first time," as if, through a sort of "Kol Nidre effect," all actions (vows) taken in 2008 (particularly when under the duress of pressure from the Bush Administration) are now "off the books." From a Constitutional point of view, this may be a new Congress; but, particularly over the last three months, many things have been done (particularly involving the commitment of Federal funds) that cannot be undone. The Congress that meets this week does not have a clean slate but one on which much has been written, and it is no easy job to sort out how much of that text is wisdom and how much is folly.

However, if we give Reid some slack by taking "the first time" as a rhetorically confused slip of the tongue, then this may actually be a sign that, as I had previously written, Congress is ready to begin "deliberating over solutions rather than providing ineffective bandages made out of checks for large amounts of money." Put another way, Reid wants to run the Senate in such a way that it steers a course between the Scylla of the tendency to expect instant gratification under the new Administration by virtue of Barack Obama's "messianic aura" and the Charybdis of pressure for immediate action applied by the fear-mongering faith-based alarmism of the Bush Administration. From that point of view, any rumors that Obama would have a Congressional solution plan on his desk on January 20 is a gross departure from realistic thinking that could easily be taken as psychotic. The idea that Fox News would think of pressuring House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer over the Congress needing the time until the President's Day recess for proper deliberation should remind us that journalistic practices are still in serious need of improvement; but it is even more preposterous that the usually-staid Financial Times should decide to treat such claptrap as news. The only "real news" that came out of today's antics of the "Sabbath-Day gasbags" (as Calvin Trillin used to call them) is that they are already hard at work trying to tear down our new Congress before the first gavel has fallen in either the House or the Senate!

Negligence Begets Arrogance

This month began with a report from our Government Accountability Office (GAO) that basically took the Treasury Department to task for failing to monitor just how funds from the $700 billion bailout package would be spent. So, if the Treasury Department is not interested in following the money and if our Congressional representatives are not doing anything because they are on vacation, does that mean that we, as the public, have no right to know what is happening to our money? Associated Press Writer Matt Apuzzo decided to take on the role of concerned citizen and address that question by going directly to banks that had received bailout money. He filed his story last night, and it is not particularly pleasant reading.

The bottom line is that, when asked to give an account of what they were doing with the government support money they received, the banks chose to pull a Bartleby and reply that they would prefer not to do so:

After receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending it. Some won't even talk about it.

"We're choosing not to disclose that," said Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which received about $3 billion.

Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money, said that while some of the money was lent, some was not, and the bank has not given any accounting of exactly how the money is being used.

"We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to," Kelly said.

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking," said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Ga.-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Some banks said they simply didn't know where the money was going.

Depressing as this may be, it is hardly surprising. If our current Administration has turned laissez-faire policy into "a failure to govern at all," why should the public assume that their representatives through the press will be any more effective than their representatives in the Congress? We are back on the turf that Jürgen Habermas tried the chart in The Theory of Communicative Action in his examination of Max Weber's "Diagnosis of the Times." I examined this diagnosis on my old blog, and this seems like a good time to review it. Here is how Habermas introduced his findings:

In his diagnosis of the times Weber keeps closer than usual to the theoretical perspective in which modernization is represented as a continuation of the world-historical process of disenchantment. The differentiation of independent cultural value spheres that is important for the phase of capitalism's emergence, and the growing autonomy of subsystems of purposive-rational action that is characteristic of the development of capitalist society since the late eighteenth century, are the two trends that Weber combines into an existential-individualistic critique of the present age. The first component is represented in the thesis of a loss of meaning, the second in the thesis of a loss of freedom.

If we do not believe we are suffering from a loss of meaning, then consider the basic concept of banking in terms of the models of operation initially conceived, the motives for those models, the disconnect between those models and the practices that brought about economic collapse, and now what appears to be the willful disregard of that disconnect. Were we to reduce it all to a question of "production," then our banks are no better at putting out beneficial products that the public wants than General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are. By placing the needs of the customer below the needs of the shareholders (whose latter needs have never amounted to anything more than greed-satisfaction), every bank now on the Government dole has basically sacrificed the very meaning of banking; and, as always seems to be the case, we get stuck paying for that sacrifice. That, of course, is Weber's second loss: Because our collective voice, even when we vote, is ultimately drowned out by the more powerful voices of those who deal in the exchange of shares, the concept of banking may have lost its meaning; but we have lost our freedom (perhaps best illustrated in my recent attempt to describe our "hostage situation") through "collateral damage."

Both Weber and Habermas chose to attribute these losses to the underlying nature of capitalism itself, and I think there are some valid grounds for doing so. However, I am optimistic enough to believe that these losses can be regained not through the abandonment of capitalism but through a rejection of faith in "free markets" in favor of an ongoing regulatory framework that provides a cushion against the greatest hazards of poorly calculated risk. As I previously suggested, the danger of "serfdom" that so concerned Friedrich Hayek does not necessarily come from the control of fascist authority; it can also come from a willingness to accept the control of instruments we do not really understand, such as those instruments used in the exchange of "shares of debt" as if they were shares of a corporation, which played such a major role in debilitating our economy. More important, however, is that, as is the case with addiction, we seem to be either unwilling or unable to acknowledge our losses; and we shall not regain them until we are willing to recognize that they have been lost. In the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was remembered by history as our "recovery president." Will Barack Obama summon the necessary leadership to be remembered as our "rehabilitation president?"