Is Rust Really a "Holy Grail?"

I decided to catch up on one of the lapses in my current knowledge of technology by reading Seth Rosenblatt's article about Rust for CNET Reviews this morning. For those unfamiliar with the name, it has been applied to the latest attempt to design, implement, and deploy the ideal programming language. I have lived through several generations of such attempts, including ALGOL, PL/I, and, of course, the notorious close-enough-for-government-work Ada. Since I subscribe to Isaiah Berlin's proposition that an ideal state is one from which you can no longer advance (since any change must be for the worse), I feel I have a right to be skeptical.

Here is Rosenblatt's summary description of Rust:

Rust is an attempt to create a programming language to replace C++ with one that can handle today's heterogeneous, multicore hardware better while also being more secure. According to Mozilla Research's FAQ on Rust and Servo, on which it plans to build a new Web browsing engine like the heavily-used WebKit, Mozilla's own Gecko, or Internet Explorer's Trident, the new language will stop "entire classes of memory management errors" from causing crashes and security vulnerabilities. 

The other major hallmark of Rust is that it has relatively easy-to-use programming language primitives, the simplest level of programming language expressions available to programmers, that are expected to make it much easier for software developers to use modern hardware's multicore central processing units.

Needless to say, it is easy to be critical of these foundations. Hopefully, computer science students are still taught that there are only a handful of primitives necessary for "universal" computation; and they have always been easy to grasp. So the second paragraph is a red herring.

I am willing to grant the first paragraph. However, the literary side of me tends to cringe at the thought of a programming language named for a process of oxidation that usually results in the deterioration of what were intended to be solid metallic structures. Nevertheless, I am less worried about metaphors than I am about Mozilla's priorities. Ever since the days of ALGOL, it has been recognized that even the most daunting challenges of algorithm design pale against the problem of how those algorithms engage with the operating system over such ugly necessities as file management, input streams, and, that area that has been chronically neglected by every generation of Firefox, printer control. Yes, we need quality algorithms to manage the inner guts of computation; but, without an effective superstructure to manage interfaces, those guts may as well be the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no-one around to hear.

Materialism and Teleology

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating article by biologist H. Allen Orr entitled “Awaiting a New Darwin.” The piece is a review of Thomas Nagel’s latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which came out last September. Nagel is as disciplined in philosophy as Orr is in biology. Both have a longstanding reputation for the clear exposition of propositions based strictly on logical reasoning, rather than rhetorical showboating. Orr makes it clear that Nagel’s book should not be casually dismissed, but he makes it equally clear that he does not feel that Nagel’s claims have been adequately warranted.

Nagel’s point of departure is a familiar one, based on the nature of human consciousness. Nagel’s position is that consciousness is too subjective to be reduced to a materialist explanation based on the physical nature of brains and neurons (and, perhaps, matter itself). With this as a premise, he then claims that the current Neo-Darwinist model of natural selection cannot explain how consciousness came to be and offers, as an alternative, an approach he called “natural teleology.” Orr tries to clarify this approach with the following sentence:

Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is.

Without going into details, I feel it necessary to recognize that, for many (Jürgen Habermas being a particularly good example), teleology is a highly objective process. From a mathematical point of view, one may think of it as the achievement of some goal, which may be represented as a point in some multidimensional landscape. The “world as it is,” so to speak, is another point in that landscape and teleology is concerned with how those two points are connected by a path and how that path may be found. This boils down to the mathematical problem of optimization, which means that Nagel seems to be advocating an objective technique to explain how we arrive at a subjective phenomenon, a materialist stance if ever there were one.

On the other hand the philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written very critically about the inadequacy of optimization (or, in his terminology, Utopian thinking). Berlin’s basic argument, nicely formulated in his essay “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” is that any Utopia, like that point of optimization on a multidimensional landscape, is static, meaning that, one a society or an individual “gets there,” so to speak, there is nowhere to go! Thus, in the subjective world, the only “static state” is death; and in the broader ecological scope of the natural world, even death is not a static point.

At least some of the materialist Neo-Darwinists are aware of this puzzle. Thus, the traditional Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection has given way to what has come to be called coevolution. The basic idea is that there is still a landscape; but the shape of that landscape changes to reflect what its “inhabitants” are doing. As the landscape changes, the “optimum point” on that landscape also changes. This means that, wherever you happen to be on the landscape, you have to keep rethinking the direction you want to go in order to get closer to your goal. This strikes me as what makes “natural” teleology natural, rather than merely mathematical. Back in October of 2011, I suggested that, because of coevolution, there may never be that “ideal” cure for the common cold. Every time new medication comes along, the landscape changes, and the cold virus follows natural selection according to a change in the criteria for fitness. (In that same post I suggest that the common cold is not that different from malware.)

Nagel never mentions coevolution in his book. However, Orr does not cite it either as a materialist school of thought. Many of its advocates came out of early research in artificial life, although Darwin himself described it in On the Origin of Species. To be fair, however, Nagel’s book is a short one, only 130 pages, which he uses simply to establish his position. Here is hoping that he develops that position in greater depth and that his digging will lead him to coevolution!

Decoding Zuckerberg

By now just about anyone following the story of Facebook preparing to go public knows that Mark Zuckerberg included a letter as part of the IPO filing that reads more like a personal philosophy of life than a mission statement.  I was therefore interested this morning to read how Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology Correspondent for BBC News, chose to undertake a micro-level text analysis of what he calls an “extraordinary document.”  I definitely agree with Cellan-Jones’ choice of words.  This is definitely a radical departure from what potential investors expect to read before a stock is floated.

Because Cellan-Jones has done such an admirable job, I want to come at this from the other end.  First of all I would have to say that someone (I have to wonder whether or not it was Zuckerberg) has done an excellent job of taking what is basically a defiant defense of a personal creed and rendering it in prose that coaxes the reader, rather than taking to him/her with a sledge hammer.  Whoever wrote this could have given some excellent lessons in style to Karl Marx.  Nevertheless, the top-level message is still a defiant one.  If I had to write a headline it might go something like:

Zuckerberg to investors, do it my way or go away!

Regardless of whether or not I accept “Mark’s way,” however, I think he may have overlooked one particular ugly reality about why Wall Street is so different from Main Street.  This amounts to a variation on the punch line of The American Ruling Class, both Lewis Lapham’s book and John Kirby’s documentary:

Why change City Hall when you can buy it?

When we shift Lapham’s perspective on power from political office to the broader question of who calls the shots for what, it is important to recognize that, unless Zuckerberg is extremely vigilant in making sure that he always holds a controlling percentage of Facebook stock (far from an easy matter), he may unhappily discover that, rather than walk away, those who wish to undermine his “way” may well find ways to buy that controlling interest.  If Zuckerberg does not recognize this possibility, then he may well find himself caught up in what I like to call a “comedy of distress,” if not on the scale of Alexander Pushkin’s A Dramatic Tale, The Comedy of the Distress of the Muscovite State, of Tsar Boris, and of Grishka Otrepyev, then perhaps long the lines of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

POST MORTEM CHUTZPAH

As far as I can tell, Robert Scheer has never received a Chutzpah of the Week award, although his Truthdig Web site has provided source documentation for several such awards.  However, Scheer has the advantage that his weekly column is released on Wednesday mornings with copies at Truthdig and the Web site for The Nation.  He thus found himself in the company of all of the rest of today’s Monday (actually Wednesday) morning quarterbacks trying to assess what happened at the polls yesterday.

Of all the analyses I have read thus far, Scheer’s has been, by far, the most interesting.  True, it carries more than a faint odor of told-you-so thinking;  but, given that Scheer’s thoughts have always given priority to Main Street over Wall Street, it is hard to fault him for sounding like a broken record (yet again).  More important is his rhetorical style.  Where others seem to tangle themselves in their own rhetorical legerdemain, Scheer has the chutzpah to keep his focus on “the working stiff,” even when that means taking those who claim to be his ideological soul mates to task.

In this case those soul mates are the deluded masses who rallied behind Barack Obama blinded by a vision of secular Messianism.  His lack of patience with those enthusiastic voters is on a par with his lack of patience with Obama himself.  This takes us to his choice of words for this morning:

Barack Obama deserved the rebuke he received at the polls for a failed economic policy that consisted of throwing trillions at Wall Street but getting nothing in return. His amen chorus in the media is quick to blame everyone but the president for his sharp reversal of fortunes. But it is not the fault of tea party Republicans that they responded to the rage out there over lost jobs and homes while the president remained indifferent to the many who are suffering.

At a time when, as a Washington Post poll reported last week, 53 percent of Americans fear they can’t make next month’s mortgage or rent payment, the president chirped inanely to Jon Stewart that his top economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, who was paid $8 million by Wall Street firms while advising candidate Obama, had done a “heckuva job” in helping avoid another Great Depression. What kind of consolation is that for the 50 million Americans who have lost their homes or are struggling to pay off mortgages that are “underwater”? The banks have been made whole by the Fed, providing virtually interest-free money while purchasing trillions of dollars of the banks’ toxic assets. Yet the financial industry response has been what Paul Volcker has called a “liquidity trap”—denying loans for business investment or the refinancing necessary to keep people in their homes.

Instead of meeting that crisis head-on with a temporary moratorium on housing foreclosures, as more than half of those surveyed by the Post wanted, the president summarily turned down that sensible proposal. Instead he attempted to shift the focus to his tepid health care reform and was surprised that many voters didn’t think he did them a favor by locking them into insurance programs not governed by cost controls. Health care reform was viewed by many voters with the same disdain with which they reacted to the underfunded and unfocused stimulus program. Neither seems relevant to turning around an economy that a huge majority feels is getting worse, according to Election Day exit polls.

In other words the electorate has been smart enough to see that any promises that Planet Washington would finally bring Planet Wall Street to account for its abuses have now been reduced to dust.  Instead, Planet Washington has itself been reduced to one of those insignificant moons that orbits around Planet Wall Street, and the folks on Main Street welcomed the opportunity to vent their anger about this.  What they have yet to recognize is that, in throwing out the current crop of scoundrels, they have simply replaced them with another crop within the same gravitational pull of Planet Wall Street.

Scheer’s “inconvenient truth” is that our electorate has become more consistent in voting-against than in voting-for:  Those holding office are ultimately the problem, so let’s vote them out of office.  Then it turns out that the new office-holders are just as much a problem as their predecessors had been;  and the Federal Government maintains its business-as-usual inactivity with a consistency scarier than any Emersonian hobgoblin.  Scheer has the chutzpah to tell us that this is the government we have, and he is willing to challenge us by asking if this is the government we think we deserve.  Those seem like perfectly acceptable grounds for a Chutzpah of the Week award.

Information Wants to Cost What the Market Determines

When I am not ranting about the extent to which the information-wants-to-be-free crowd is downright delusional, I try to dig up evidence to support the claim that the world the Internet has made has turned information into a marketable commodity, making it fair game for economic study in general and price analysis in particular. Of course, because of the Internet, information is not only marketable but also marketable on a global scale, which is why my use of the noun "world" is far more than metaphorical. Thus, one might say that the Internet is facilitating the transformation of the entire world into a single market-driven culture.

Unfortunately, the history of market-driven cultures reveals that a focus on values concerned with the accumulation of wealth and other factors of economic growth tends to carry the corollary of willful neglect of poverty, if not downright refusal to acknowledge that such conditions exist. At the level of individuals, there will always be exceptions, the most notable currently probably being Muhammad Yunus through the theory and practice of his Grameen model of banking. However, when we consider the extent to which Yunus has been consistently ignored at more established gatherings, such as G20 meetings or the self-satisfying gatherings of the rich and mighty under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, we see that he is the exception that most convincingly proves the rule.

In this context there is something heartbreakingly quixotic about the Millennium Development Goals effort by the United Nations, particularly in light of the extent to which Internet technology may be both facilitating and thwarting this effort at the same time. This paradoxical situation has come to light in a story by Jonathan Fildes, Technology Reporter for BBC News, which appeared on the BBC News Web site this morning. Consider first Fildes' below-the-fold explanatory background:

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of targets intended to reduce global poverty and improve living standards by 2015.

Specific goals target education, fighting disease and promoting gender equality.

Access to communications technology is a part of one of the targets.

There is probably not an Internet evangelist on earth who has not, at some time or another, trumpeted the power of the Internet to make the world a better place consistent with the vision of the MDG (whether or not that evangelist had ever heard of the MDG, or, for that matter, the UN). Unfortunately, the reality of that globalized market-driven culture enabled by the Internet has revealed a perspective that may be politely called counterproductive to these goals:

The global disparity in fixed broadband access and cost has been revealed by UN figures.

The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there.

Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income.

Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account.

It is realities such as these that make the whole MDG effort so quixotic. We have to consider the extent to which, regardless of what Internet technology can do, the uses to which it has been put have done more to increase the exploitation of the poor than to reduce global poverty. Now, as I have previously asserted, this is not an invitation for all of us to throw our wooden shoes into the Internet infrastructure. It is just a plea that, if we are to take MDG seriously (a premise that, "With the Rich and Mighty," is probably not valid), we need to approach the endeavor with a sense of reality that places people and their cultures before any utopian visions grounded in scientism and new technologies. Needless to say, those who profit from market-driven thinking will apply the full force of their "consciousness industry" to undermine that sense of reality; but that consciousness industry can itself be undermined by those clever enough to use the Internet to do so. All is not lost; but it will be unless a new generation of what I have called "sustainable activism" emerges from grass roots efforts on a global scale, transforming the Internet from an instrument of economic domination to the new medium of communication envisioned by those who first conceived it.

Eterrnal Funding is the Price of Censorship

One of my favorite recurring themes has to do with the premise that just about any form of regulation, if it is to be effective, must follow the metaphor of an arms race. Udi Manber introduced this metaphor back when he was at Yahoo!, where his responsibilities included dealing with protection against malware; but more recently the metaphor has resurfaced in the context of preventing the next financial crisis while recovering from the current one. As I put it last February, financial security is more a matter of Wendell Phillips' concept of "eternal vigilance" than one of closing the barn door to keep the horses from being stolen. Unfortunately, whether you are in the Internet business or just chewing the fat with Socrates over the nature of an ideal republic, it quickly becomes apparent that, if you want eternal vigilance, you have to pay for it.

It appears that the People's Republic of China has now confronted this problem as it applies to their own issues of censorship. The following report appeared on the BBC News Web site this morning:

Reports from China say a controversial government-backed software project to filter internet content could be on the brink of collapse.

State media said the developer behind the Green Dam Youth Escort software had closed its Beijing project team because of a lack of government funding.

Its partner in Henan said without funding, its team would soon close too.

The problem appears to be that the Chinese government saw the problem of maintaining censorship as being a matter of a software product that could be developed and deployed with one year of funding. In other words they wanted to put a lock on the door while the horses were pretty much all in the barn. One could think of the locked door as a form of utopian "goal state." Once that state has been achieved, the system will remain in it; and the job is done.

To go back to the question of financial regulation, this is the fallacy that Benjamin Friedman explored in his review of John Cassidy's How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. Friedman advocated Cassidy's plea that we recognize the difference between "utopian economics," which is all about finding goal states in clean mathematically-based systems, and "reality-based economics," which tries to take into account all of the messier aspects of human behavior. I raise these points not to advise the Chinese on how to deal more effectively with achieving their censorship goal. Rather, I see it as an amusing irony that the Chinese are running into the same problems of achieving the goals of their value system that the Western world has been forced to confront in matters of protection, whether from spam or financial malfeasance. The real irony is that we have two cultures with rather significantly different values, both of which have been drinking the technology-based "Kool-Aid of globalization" to dangerous excess. In Kenneth Burke's terminology the same act is taking place in radically different scenes, and in both of those scenes the agents are now forced to confront unanticipated consequences.

Sister Cities

By way of a disclaimer, I should make it clear that I had never used a bicycle in any consistent way since I was in high school. I tried for a brief period of time to use a borrowed bike to get to work when I had an office in Marina del Rey. I experimented with this new discipline by trying it out on weekends, but I was quickly driven into submission by the masses of enthusiasts that filled the bike paths between my condominium and my office. (The reason I attempted the experiment at all was because I could make almost the entirety of my trip without every having to share the road with any motor vehicles.)

Now I live in the Civic Center of San Francisco, and almost all of my needs to get from one place to another can be achieved on foot. The exceptions that require a car are few enough that I feel pretty good about having "environment-friendly" practices. On the other hand I realize that both of my forms of mobility now seem to place me in an adversarial situation with the bicyclists. At a time when social theorists argue that we are becoming more and more detached from each other, it sometimes seems as if the cyclists have united into a community based solely on "defiance of the other;" and that defiance even has a ritual celebration at the end of the month (Critical Mass) that has earned itself an entry in Wikipedia.

The primary target of defiance, however, is not those who choose alternative means of transportation but the general "rules of the road," the ones we all have to learn in order to pass the test required to get a license to drive. Here in San Francisco the question of getting cyclists to obey general traffic laws comes up from time to time, usually as part of negotiations for more bike lanes; but then it quickly fades into obscurity. After all, cyclists do not need licenses; and it is hard to imagine that we would ever see the laws enforced by impounding offending bikes. So those who drive live with the anarchy that surrounds them among both cyclists and pedestrians; and those pedestrians who read the Chronicle get periodic reminders of how "natural selection" treats those who do not both honor the rules of the road and "walk defensively."

I sometimes wonder whether or not San Francisco is more problematic than other cities because the population is more politicized, but I have recently discovered that conditions are not much different in New York. On May 2 the Op-Ed page of The New York Times ran a piece by Chris Raschka, who takes his cycling seriously, entitled "Braking Away." From a rhetorical point of view, Raschka introduces himself to us in a way that seems to justify the defiant stance that has become so familiar to me here in San Francisco:

Like a goat in a cattle drive, I was jostled by a delivery van on Ninth Avenue, went over my handlebars because of an out-of-town driver on Seventh, and was casually bumped into by a limousine driver on Sixth who stopped and got out to see if I had damaged his side-view mirror, while I lay unattended on the sidewalk.

Having made his point, however, he then gets to the heart of his essay, which is his decision to abandon his usual practices and start honoring traffic lights. His defense of this position reminded me a bit of the sort of logic that would get Spock to raise his eyebrow and offer his "Fascinating" one-word judgment:

The reasons for this are not as obvious as you might think. While it is true that my running of red lights in the past has led to one big traffic ticket and one court summons, fear of retribution is not the main thing.

Nor is concern for my own safety the primary reason. My legal record notwithstanding, I’ve never been a hell-bent rider. Certainly, I didn’t want to hit anyone. And, yes, I believe a bike-friendly city deserves friendlier bikers — but these, too, are ancillary reasons.

No, for me, the real reason for stopping at red lights — seriously, not even right on red! — is simply to see if it can be done.

Frankly, it is not easy. In the old days, reds meant merely coasting for a second, looking left or right and charging through. If I lingered even a moment too long waiting for the Midtown traffic to clear, I was sure to receive the scorn of New York’s bike messengers. One even gleefully shouted, as he passed me by, “Amateur!”

Now, forget about it — I might as well be an alien. First of all, I am the only one. I have never seen another bicyclist waiting at a red light simply because it was red. Children ride past me and snicker. Bankers, with their suit-legs neatly clipped, pedal by on their folding bikes and cast silent derision my way. Even gray-haired matrons whiz past me, the sprockets of their three-speeds clicking out a steady refrain — an accusation, really: chump chump chumpety chump chump chumpety chump chump.

As an outsider I could only wonder whether Raschka was seeking a more individual path for the "defiance culture" of his peers.

However, my personal entertainment only really began today when the Times ran a couple of letters in response to Raschka's piece. One of the writers, a Ms. Barbara Quart, came so close to reflecting my own position that I shall reproduce her contribution without modification:

Chris Raschka is indeed, as he claims, one of a kind. Not only do the mass of bikers on downtown streets go through red lights, but far more unpredictably, they often go against the direction of traffic, or even up on the sidewalk.

While bikers were endangered 10 years ago, these days elderly people with fragile bones like me face grievous injury from bikers every time we cross the street, perhaps never to re-emerge from the hospital we are carted off to. And there’s no way to even identify and hold responsible the fast-moving culprit.

The city, in encouraging this deluge of bicyclists upon us, has abdicated responsibility, and must begin to issue license plates and establish a set of regulations.

Tell it like it is, sister! I just wonder whether or not Quart ever had to deal with a cyclist as defiant as the one I encountered, who tried to pedal at full speed between the sidewalk and a Muni bus that had just stopped to take on passengers! (Yes, this was a narrow passage, rather than that of an often-encountered half-hearted attempt to pull out of traffic at a bus stop.)

The other side of the story came from cyclist John Yohalem:

In “Braking Away” (Op-Ed, May 2), Chris Raschka never mentions the principal reason most of us bikers do not stop for red lights: pedestrians in New York do not stop for red lights. They cross against the light, and if they see a biker coming, they do not notice him. If I paused for every red light, I’d never move at all. When I have the light, I have 30 pedestrians to wade through. I try not to hit anyone. I thank those who pull back for me.

I suppose this is where my own defiance comes to the surface. The sad truth is that coexistence between pedestrians and any vehicles is extremely difficult in a crowded metropolitan setting; and, in a city with hills as steep as those of San Francisco, those who cannot negotiate the terrain clearly need alternative means. On the other hand, I have to wonder whether or not Yohalem and I inhabit the same reality:

When I lived on the West Coast (San Francisco and Seattle), pedestrians stopped for red lights (or they got tickets) and so did bikers (or we got tickets). Unless everyone obeys the traffic laws (double parkers, say!), it’s unfair to single out one group for violations.

For my part I have never seen either a pedestrian or a cyclist cited for a traffic violation in San Francisco, but I do remember a friend who was ticketed for jaywalking in midtown Manhattan! So this may just be one of those cases in which each of us constructs those memories that best serve the point we are trying to make. In fairness to Yohalem, the incident I recall took place long before the current enthusiasm for cycling had emerged; but this was also a time when, on a regular basis, I would join the masses of rush-hour pedestrians going in both directions on the sidewalk as I made my way (on foot) from Grand Central Station to Carnegie Hall. We may have been a large herd, but we all seemed to honor traffic lights in those days.

My guess is that all of this amounts to arguing over symptoms. The "disease" is a "pandemic" inability of cities, at least in the United States, to deal with the current levels of crowding. This is not just a problem of cities lacking the resources to pursue solutions. I would guess that, even before the resource question arises, there are deeper problems of lacks of both will and imagination. In just about any utopian vision that has been conceived, every individual has "breathing space." These days we only encounter those individuals in television commercials; and, because we now accept such commercials as fiction, we may have abandoned the idea that we have the resources to recover that "breathing space." Perhaps disregard for the environment is prevalent because so many sectors of the population feel antagonistic towards that environment; but the problem is that, if we are all wrapped up in hostility towards the problem, we are ill-equipped to give serious thoughts to solution. The result is that we shall find ourselves in yet another situation in which we succumb to a helplessness that can only beget rage.

Messy Reality

The title of Benjamin M. Friedman's latest piece for The New York Review, "Two Roads to Our Financial Catastrophe," refers to his examination of two recent books analyzing the economic crisis. One is by John Lanchester, who is not known for his work in economics and is described by Friedman as "a British writer better known for his fiction and criticism;" but that background would justify the rhetorical flair of his book's title: I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. The other is by John Cassidy, a journalist specializing in economics and finance. His title is less flamboyant but more fascinating for its substance: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.

Friedman provides an excellent précis of Cassidy's "logical analysis" that bears consideration:

… Cassidy is interested in the people behind what he calls "the triumph of utopian economics," and how their ideas came to be so dominant. As he rightly points out, "the notion of financial markets as rational and self-correcting mechanisms is an invention of the last forty years." Such advocates of market efficiency as the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, and contemporary economists like Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas (both also at Chicago) all receive careful attention. So do the political figures who championed their ideas, most prominently Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. Alan Greenspan, with his bizarre devotion to the Russian-born ideologue Ayn Rand, stands out as the chief villain in Cassidy's telling, guilty of not just flawed ideas and sinister influence but "much prevarication" as well.

Cassidy contrasts the "utopian economics" that each of these people helped to propagate with "reality-based economics," which suffers not only from the inevitable intellectual messiness that comes with attempts to analyze the world as it is, but also from failing to line up with the interests of the economy' self-aggrandizing elites. The centerpiece of Cassidy's analysis of the difference between the two economic worldviews is the prevalence and potentially damaging consequences of what he calls "rational irrationality"—a situation in which each influential actor does only what makes perfect sense from an individual perspective, but the combined effect of everyone's acting in this way leads to outcomes that make sense for no one.

Ironically, the logic of rational irrationality can be deduced from the very principles of game theory that lie at the heart of utopian economics; and game theorists are at least willing to acknowledge it as a dilemma, more specifically the "prisoner's dilemma." If utopian economics is all about building the right models against which one seeks to optimize payoff, then the prisoner's dilemma is the classic example in which optimization of the group cannot be achieved by each individual seeking his/her own individual optimization.

Beyond such counterexamples, however, is the question of whether or not reasoning grounded in a philosophy of positivism can deal adequately (never mind effectively) with that "inevitable" messiness of reality. This goes back to whether or not one can build those "right models" in the first place; and I have previous observed that all positivism can tell us is whether or not a model is internally consistent. The problem is that consistency offers nothing when it comes to recognizing that inevitable messiness:

Consistency is thus worse than Ralph Waldo Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds;" it is a pragmatically unattainable goal that distracts us from more realistic goals concerned with "living with the mess" (otherwise known as being-in-the-world).

This emphasis on verbs like "living" and "being" emphasize a further problem with utopian economics, which is that the mathematics of game theory equates optimization with finding an equilibrium point in a complex multidimensional landscape. In other words game theory is, from a grammatical point of view, noun-based and thus totally at odds with verbs like "living." This, again, is a point I have previously discussed invoking one of my favorite twentieth-century thinkers:

Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death!

I would therefore suggest that what makes "rational irrationality" so irrational is its analytic foundation based on the concept of state. That foundation basically clouds any vision of what we have now come to call "gaming the system," which is basically the search of loopholes through which the system may be abused for the sake of personal gain.

This, in turn, provides a lens through which we can think about getting out of the mess in which we are still bemired. If Greenspan has become "chief villain," then his primary act of villainy has been deregulation, which is why so much of the current talk about economic reform concentrates on establishing a new regulatory system. I do not object to such reform, but I think we need to be careful about where it takes us. By their very nature, regulations can only live in that noun-based world, which, in the spirit of gaming the system, can always be subjected to verb-based abuses. Regulations can be useful, but they can only go so far. We would do better to think of the "health and well-being" of economic activities in terms of "Udi Manber's metaphor for safeguarding against abusive and criminal practices on the Internet as an arms race." As I previously wrote, "the safety of the Internet will never be strictly a matter of technology;" and, by the same reasoning, economic health will never be strictly a matter of establishing and enforcing the right regulations. That is just part of the nature of the messiness of reality, which is why being-in-the-world is ultimately a matter of how we act to live with the mess.

Self-Hinderance?

While HBO's new Hung series may be doling out a long-overdue dose of satire to self-help hucksters, it would appear that, according to a recent BBC NEWS story, those hucksters may actually be taking a bad situation and making it worse. The report summarizes a Canadian study published in Psychological Science as follows:

The researchers, from the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick, asked people with high and low self-esteem to say "I am a lovable person."

They then measured the participants' moods and their feelings about themselves.

In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not.

However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly.

The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves.

They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.

Writing in the journal, the researchers suggest that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as "I accept myself completely," can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem.

Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts.

If people are instructed to focus exclusively on positive thoughts, negative thoughts might be especially discouraging.

I have always been suspicious of self-help gurus (a suspicion that continues to be aggravated whenever one of them appears on Public Television during Pledge Week); but this study led me to recognize that the whole self-help movement is yet another front on what, in previous writing, I have called the "War against Reality." In the past I have concentrated on strategies for denying reality; but the self-help evangelists are actually a bizarre extension of that Enlightenment scientistic utopia in which the individual can control everything, not just the natural world but the subjective one as well. The fact that the low self-esteem subjects in the Canadian study were actually in a better mood when not trying to block out their negative thoughts may be a sign that accepting reality is preferable to either denying it or enduring the frustration of trying to control it. The study thus can be seen as reinforcing the narrative position of the Showtime series, United States of Tara, whose protagonist has decided that living with multiple-personality disorder is preferable to trying to beat the symptoms into submission through medication. Paddy Chayefsky took a similar approach in "Marty;" in that narrative, it is only after Marty comes to terms with all his negative qualities (passionately unloading them on his despairing mother) that he can finally strike up a conversation with a woman (who is, herself, very much a wallflower) and discover that he can form a relationship.

In a peculiar way it may well be that we deal with the unpleasant realities of our lives in the same way that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross postulated that we deal with the prospect of our respective deaths. As we are assaulted by those unpleasant realities, we go through the same five stages that form the basis for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' model:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Perhaps one way to interpret the Canadian study is that, by putting up barriers to acceptance, self-help gurus make things worse for those with low esteem whom they claim to be helping. PBS should take note of this. If all those Pledge Week Specials are actually making people feel worse about themselves, they are probably going to feel less inclined to make pledges!

"The Hobgoblin of Little Minds"

To some extent yesterday's polemical attack on logic can be attributed to what we might call the fundamental fallacy of positivism, which is its attempt to equate certainty with consistency. If, as I suggested yesterday, much of the mind-rot of our current "reckless thinking about semantics" can be attributed to computer science education, then the problem with such education is that, where artifacts of both hardware and software are concerned, consistency is the only form of certainty that matters. Thus, if we talk about compiler construction in terms of the formal description of a programming language and an equally formal description of the capabilities of a computer, then the "proof that the compiler works" amounts to establishing the consistency of the programming-language-representation with the compiled internal-machine-representation. Whether or not that former representation has anything to do with what a programmer "intends" (let alone what a client who has hired that programmer "wants") never signifies in establishing such consistency. Consequently, it is no surprise that such a question of "customer satisfaction" should, itself, be reduced to a consistency problem by introducing a discipline called "requirements analysis," through which "what the client wants" could be represented through a formal "specification language." In this positivist framework all that mattered was that the programming-language-representation be consistent with the specification-language-representation.

To some extent we should probably grant that the positivist assumption is correct: Consistency is the only thing of which we can be certain. My point is that we put too much stock in accepting that assumption. Like the World Wide Web, the world itself is too messy for us to expect certainty. Indeed, the whole point of Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is that there is quantifiable uncertainty in any "instruments of measurement" that we apply to observing that world. Consistency is thus worse than Ralph Waldo Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds;" it is a pragmatically unattainable goal that distracts us from more realistic goals concerned with "living with the mess" (otherwise known as being-in-the-world). This does not mean that we cannot, from time to time, "clean up" some of the mess. This is basically how we deal with what Henry Miller called the "order which is not understood;" and it is our natural capacity to deal with the mess that motivates what I have called the "hermeneutic imperative" of our approach to education. However, the mess will never be entirely eliminated; and we shall never drink from the Holy Grail of certainty. Were we do to so, we would arrive at a utopian state; and, as Isaiah Berlin has observed, the fact that such a utopia is a state means that, once it has been attained, there is no reason for anything else to happen. In other words "living with the mess" turns out to be the fundamental reason for living at all!

Who Benefits from Social Software?

The last time I read one of Caroline McCarthy's posts to her blog, The Social, it was to fuel one of my frequent rants against technology evangelists, particularly those obsessed with Web 2.0 snake oil. Last night she took on a topic subsumed by this general rant concerned with the quest for useful information in this utopian world those evangelists keep flogging. The post is sufficiently short that it makes sense to examine it in its entirety:

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

McCarthy was spot on in backing off from the study itself and the circumstances under which BuzzLogic commissioned it in order to ask the more fundamental question of what the results actually mean. On the other hand I feel contentious enough to counter her question with a deeper one: Can this study possibly mean anything? My point is that the entire Jupiter Research methodology may be too flawed to provide data that would support any meaningful interpretations. The problem with any survey is that the questions often bias the nature of the answers; and, since this was a commissioned survey, there is the added risk that this bias has been induced by the sponsor. If we want to be serious about the general question of utility, then the survey is probably too blunt an instrument. We need a more ethnographic approach through which we can examine what people really do when they are trying to collect useful information before making a purchasing decision. Yes, information like that can be found on blogs; and those "trusted referrals" probably have at least some decision-support value. On the other hand how many users are out there who, out of either a lack of technical understanding or just plain laziness, set up a Google search and seek out things that look like opinions in the little content excerpts? How many of them can go to the next level and recognize which of those search results are for sites explicitly set up to collect reviews? How many of them know which search results are taking them to an individual opinion (such as a blog), rather than a collation of multiple opinions? Given the generally low numbers in this survey, we cannot dismiss that first (admittedly naive) sector without a better understanding of who they are and what they think they are doing. We may thus be wasting too many cognitive cycles on what is fundamentally a GIGO (Garbage-In-Garbage-Out) project!

Further Consequences of Globalization

I sure hope Tom Friedman saw this report on the BBC NEWS Web site:

The Indian head of an Italian auto parts company has been beaten to death in a suburb of Delhi, allegedly by a group of sacked workers.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, of Graziano Transmissioni India, died at the company factory in Greater Noida.

Police said more than 100 dismissed workers entered the factory vandalised machinery and attacked Mr Choudhary.

The confrontation came after a long industrial dispute. The workers denied killing Mr Choudhary.

Nearly 300 workers at Graziano Transmissioni were dismissed two months ago after they demanded pay rises and allegedly ransacked its offices, the AFP news agency reported.

How does this fit into your utopian vision of globalization, Tom? How much does Graziano Transmissioni know about what happens in India, other than the premise that labor is cheaper there? Some new chickens may be coming home to roost!

Strife as Economic Incentive

Once again I find myself turning to SPIEGEL ONLINE for a timely extended discussion of a complex global problem. The problem in this case (given that there are so many these days) is the current standoff between Georgia and Russia and the question of whether or not the Cold War is "heating up" again, "a proposition devoutly to be wished" by many strident American (Republican?) voices. However, I am less interested in the skillful analytical work that Ralf Beste, Susanne Koelbl and Dirk Kurbjuweit have applied to all of this complexity. Rather, I want to call attention to one paragraph, which is actually highly incidental to their analysis, that calls attention to a piece of context that probably should not be ignored:

Currently, the entire world is sending its emissaries to the Caucasus, transforming Tbilisi into the global capital of international politics. Over the past two weeks, prices at the five-star hotels of Tbilisi have soared, and yet these luxury establishments are still nearly fully booked.

At a time when it seems as if the entire world is suffering an economic crisis (much of which, unfortunately, can be traced back to greed-based poor decisions originating in the United States), here is an (albeit small) economic sector that is doing well: the hotel sector of the travel business (and probably at least one small set of airline routes). This has less to do with whether or not the beneficiary is in the luxury sector than it has to do with the role of crisis as economic stimulus. I am a product of history teachers who believed that it was the Second World War, rather than the New Deal, that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, basically because the War created an unprecedented demand for manufacturing that revived our key industrial operations in a way that the New Deal never could. However, are we to conclude that war (or at least the threat of war, which is, for all intents and purposes, what the Cold War was) is the only effective way to stimulate a deeply depressed economy?

One answer may be to consider an economic system as if it were a metabolic system, somewhat in the spirit of the approach that James Grier Miller took in his book, Living Systems. (Miller actually viewed "The Society" as a living system in Chapter 11 of his book and addressed economics in terms of regulating production within that system.) Thus, if stress "is an unavoidable effect of living" (as is stated in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia) to which the body responds "with a combination of psychic and physiological defenses," then economic systems, if they are to survive, must have their own "defenses," which have more to do with (not necessarily rational) agent behavior than with psychology or physiology. Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death! Thus, it is the forces that "stress" an economy (such as social crisis) that ultimately keep the economy "alive" and functioning in the best interests of all, rather than languishing in a condition of depression, which, while not strictly static, is not particularly dynamic.

Berlin's arguments against stasis grew out of his critical analysis of utopianism and his conclusion that any utopia must necessarily be static. Thus, if stress keeps the body going (as long as it is at a level that can be managed by the body's copying skills), then social crisis may, indeed, be the most effective economic stimulus. The only problem with this theory is that, in the wrong hands, it may be applied as an excuse for inducing crisis as an economic solution. Sadly, this may explain the motives behind Tom Hayden's analysis of the current Georgian crisis as a product of neoconservative thinking trying, once again, to gain the upper hand. Having bankrupted the American economy with excessive an ineffective spending in the name of the "War on Terror," the agents responsible for this folly would now attempt damage control by seeking economic incentives through a revival of the Cold War. Once again we seem to be experiencing an attempt to repeat history without, as I have previously called it, "any Marxian overtones of farce" (unless one has a really sick sense of farce)!

Playing the Text Analysis Game with Nicholas Carr

Today's San Francisco Chronicle had a review by Mary Eisenhart of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, by Nicholas Carr. The focus of the review is as follows:

Carr devotes the second half of his book to the study of unintended (at least by the innovators and cheerleaders) consequences of the 20th century's technological breakthroughs and likely parallels in the 21st's.

As one might expect, Carr views most (if not all) of those unintended consequences as running the gamut from unfortunate to downright dangerous; and, as the title suggests, he makes as much of a case for Edison's "electronic age" as he does for the "Internet age," which is the primary attraction for most of those "innovators and cheerleaders." Since I have now run up a count of 175 for my used of the "consequences" label, I was naturally interested in learning more about this book, particularly in light of the number of times I have used this label in conjunction with the "Google" label. More recently I have also been invoking the phrase "technocentric ignorance" when I write about such consequences. Thus, I was eager to read Eisenhart's review in its entirety. What fascinated me most, however, was her account of a game of text analysis that Carr played to make a point of the nature of consequences and how we think about them.

The game involves comparing two paragraphs. Unlike Eisenhart I would like to present both of them initially without attribution. Here is the first:

The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

Here is the second:

[As] machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Note that, at a denotational level, both of these texts come very close to saying the same thing. Nevertheless, each text is embedded in a radically different context; and it is basically that context that determines the nature of the tone connoted by the text. In one case the tone is utopian, and in the other it is dystopian. Before reading further, see if you can find any clues in the "raw text" that will allow you to distinguish them.

Let me now continue the game by declaring the source of one of these paragraphs: It has been extracted from Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto. This should be enough to let on that this particular paragraph is the one with the dystopian connotation. With this additional information, again try to figure out which is the dystopian paragraph before reading further.

All right, game over. Kaczynski's is the second of the two paragraphs. The first is by former Wired editor Kevin Kelly, cheerleader par excellence. Eisenhart wraps up her review by offering a final quotation from Carr's book and her reflection on that quotation:

"What was for Kaczynski a paranoia-making nightmare is for Kelly a vision of utopia," he writes - and it's a fact that should give us all pause as we rush headlong into the connected future.

I could not have said it better myself!

Hate Makes the World go 'Round

I was so perplexed by Bob Franken's blog post this morning on Huffington Post that I had to remind myself who he was. Fortunately, his biographical statement (probably written by himself, as is the case with similar statements for actors that one can read in Playbill) quickly tweaked my memory:

Bob Franken has been doing history’s play-by-play for decades. Through Bob, millions of viewers around the planet have been brought to the front row at just about all the world’s major news events…war, political, legal, you name it, he’s been right there.

Bob has specialized in live coverage, with a knack for taking the story, tempestuous, or complex, and making it understandable. He is famous for a sardonic style that looks for irony, and finds it.

An Emmy-award winning reporter, recently inducted into the Society for Professional Journalists Washington Hall of Fame, he covered combat in both Iraq wars, the White House during the George W. Bush administration, the Clinton scandals, the Supreme Court, Congress for ten years. He forced world attention on the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with his extensive reporting from there.

He’s been there live through dramas like the Terri Schiavo tragedy and countless natural disasters.

Bob Franken can share a unique perspective on the news of our time…how every story is different, how each is the same, what’s the first thing he looks for when he arrives to go “Live From the Parking Lot.”

Ah, yes, he is one of those all-too-familiar faces from the world of network news, who are usually best at providing us with (as we used to say at MIT) insights into the obvious. At least his Road to Hell was paved with good intentions. The reason I started reading the post in the first place was because it promised to be a nice bit of text about the overuse (and probably abuse) of the noun/verb "change" in the wake of the Iowa caucus. However, the insight into the obvious reared its head once I got "below the fold" (Web-browser style):

This campaign is fueled by nothing short of hatred. We have nothing that resembles the common-goal "competition of ideas," where advocates on either side of an issue respect the other.

Since I had to be reminded of his roots in television journalism [sic], my first reaction was that he had been reading too much of Jürgen Habermas' idealistic visions of the European Community as a new culture of mutual understanding emerging from a community of ideas; but, even when Habermas has spoken to the general public in crystal clear language (a far cry from the way he writes his essays and books), I do not think he has ever registered a blip in any American media channel other than The New York Review.

The fact is that Americans are a contentious lot; and they have been ever since the representatives sent to the Continental Congress that signed the Declaration of Independence recognized just how much the people they represented differed over what would eventually be documented as the first statement of our "founding principles" (the difference of opinion over slavery being the example that probably provoked the most serious consequences). Furthermore, just to make sure that the blame is shared, there is just as much contention across the populations of that mass of land that we now call "Europe," not to mention the many tribes that inhabit the African continent, the land that constituted the Fertile Crescent, and most of Asia. What is more interesting about American history is the ways in which a highly robust social system managed to emerge from all that contentiousness that gave little, if any, truck to such elevated concepts as "respect."

If Franken were really good at looking for irony (as the above biographical statement claims), he need look no further than the simple proposition that some intuitive sense of governance always manages to prevail over all that contentiousness. However, the nature of the government that emerges from that intuitive sense is not that different from the way in which Karl Marx described history in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Nevertheless, however intuitive that sense may be and however much it may be battered around by a context that, as Marx put it, "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," the social system itself keeps going with the persistence of that pink bunny that commercialism has now embedded in our consciousness. I suspect the reason it prevails is that, while those who make it are always making messes, our culture seems to have been endowed with a talent for compensating for those messes. In other words, if we have any common goal at all, it is to apply our lives and fortunes to get out of a mess once we wake up to the fact that the mess is biting our collective asses.

All this, of course, is anathema to not just Franken but the whole culture of the mainstream media; and the problem has nothing to do with whether or not those media are being run by a handful of conglomerates more concerned with quarterly reports than with the concept of a "public trust." Rather, the problem is a narratological one: the need to deliver a "story" that not only addresses the classic 5WH formula of journalism (who, where, when, when, what, how) but brings the ingredients of that formula to some form of closure. Closure requires that any mess be "cleaned up" and delivered in a "neater package," under the assumption that readers do not want to be left feeling that the mess is still there. I suspect that is one reason why The Wire has played much better with critics than the general public, since every "story" it has told since its initial season has always concluded with the grim reminder that "the mess is still there." However, the only life that is not about cleaning up messes is a utopian one; and, as Isaiah Berlin has observed, as appealing as utopianism may be, it ultimately leaves us without any purpose in life, which would be a bigger mess than any of the ones that confront us!

Autism or Infantilism?

While I enjoy Andrew Keen's writing and admire him for entertaining the proposition that "the Internet is killing our culture," my own interests have led me to explore a malady of greater depth and breadth. Yesterday I suggested that a more critical question was whether or not we were become a culture, not of amateurism, but of autism. During the summer I pursued another perspective, that of the infantilism of our culture, manifested by symptoms such as our adoption of a lifestyle best depicted by the Eloi of H. G. Wells' Time Machine or our passionate and unreflective embrace of what I called "Secular Messianism." The proposition that we are turning into a nation of Eloi was reinforced today by an article for SPIEGEL ONLINE by Frank Hornig, published under the header "Oursourcing your Personal Life." Hornig has tried to assess the scope of the impact that outsourcing (still, as a rule, to a call center in India) has had on our day-to-day activities. Here is the lead to his story:

When asked to describe his new life, Michael Levy goes into rhapsodies. "You become lazy," he says. "It's just wonderful."

Up until this summer, the 42-year-old led a normal middle-class life in New York, working as a lawyer for the Department of Justice. Lately, though, he's had an entire staff at his disposal, who take care of his personal life around the clock.

Take, for example, a recent situation in Las Vegas, where Levy was holding his bachelor party. Sitting at the poker table with friends, he didn't feel like discussing the room arrangements personally with the hotel reception. "Please call and tell them to put an extra bed in room 21057," he instructed his assistant by e-mail via his Blackberry. Personal secretaries also arranged bridal shop appointments for Levy's fiancée before the wedding, and organized tuxedo rental for the guests.

Hornig's basic thesis is that the technology behind outsourcing to an Indian call center now makes it possible for middle-class Americans to have a servant class at their disposal. Furthermore, that servant class comes at an affordable rate: $29 per month for Levy. Presumably, even if his feelings about our President have changed, Tom Friedman is still holding up stories like this as examples of the virtues of globalization; but, from my own point of view, the real punch line is in that first quote from Levy himself. Wells' Eloi were peaceful and physically attractive; but they were also lazy, because, by their very nature, they did not have to do anything. Put another way, if the Catholics are currently down on Philip Pullman for attacking their institution, Wells did nothing less than deconstruct the Garden of Eden into a sociopathic breeding ground; and Hornig has turned this into a one-two punch by demonstrating that the American middle class (if not the middle class of the industrialized world) has embraced that sociopathy with all of its passion.

For Wells probably the greater tragedy of the Eloi was not that they were lazy but that they were unreflective. The underlying cause is still the same. If one does not have to act out of necessity, one hardly needs to act at all; and, if one does not act, one does not have to anticipate the consequences of one's actions. There is that word again. Through our inability to reflect on consequences (or, for that matter, to even recognize that consequences exist and require reflection), we have become a culture that "can't solve our problems any more;" and we react by turning even the slightest of our problems over to an Indian call center. As a result, we are as "mindless and ineffectual" as the Eloi; and we are in it so deep that we can no longer see what we have become. Perhaps this is the "whimper" to which the world will succumb, at least according to the "gospel" of the "Reverend" T. S. Eliot.

Knowledge of the Social World Considered Strategic

At the end of August, I wrote a post entitled "Knowledge of the Social World Considered Dangerous," which had grown out of a series of posts concerned with the dangers of enterprise software ignoring (or, worse yet, misunderstanding) the social world. The primary danger I was exploring had to do with being careful what you wished for; or, to invoke one of my favorite concepts, thinking about the consequences before figuring out how to make your wishes come true. Today David Rohde filed a story for The New York Times from the Shabak Valley in Afghanistan, which throws an interesting light on this whole matter of wishes and consequences; and, if one comes away from this story without any sense of a resolved conclusion, then at least one has learned how complex the issue is. (Those familiar with Plato may recognize that this is the lesson of his "Theaetetus" dialogue, which begins with the quest for a definition of knowledge and ends with Socrates' reassuring Theaetetus that, even if they could not find a satisfactory definition, their time was far from wasted.)

Let's start with the wish, which probably can be traced back at least as far as the Vietnam War, if not further. As the discontent with our involvement in Vietnam grew, it was fueled by the voices of social theorists (most of which were speaking from their metaphorical armchairs) grousing about out blatant ignorance of the social context in Vietnam and therefore our failure to understand just who the "actors" were, let alone the nature of their motivated interpersonal actions. This armchair theorizing is arising once again; and this time the theorists have two contexts to fuel their grousing: Afghanistan and Iraq. For a while in Iraq, it seemed as if General David Petraeus was taking some of this theorizing to heart and trying to develop strategy around his own anthropological understanding, which, while it may have been amateur, was not without merit. Afghanistan, however, has received less attention, at least while we were able to sustain the "mission accomplished" myth that we had eliminated the Taliban and would soon be able to do with same with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Then the word began to leak out that, for all of their extremism, the Taliban was winning more hearts and minds than the "legitimate" government was, probably because so much of the population was perceiving that government as hopelessly corrupt (and may have been right in their perceptions).

This brings us to today's Times report, based on the following background paragraph:

In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.

In other words the Department of Defense has decided that it is looking for a few (or more) good social theorists who are willing to get up out of their armchairs and see how well their theories stand up to practice under fire (literally, not metaphorically). Since the Times story was filed from Afghanistan, it concentrates on the impact of this new strategy in dealing with the Taliban problem:

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

On the surface this seems to be good news. Social theory really can stand up to practice. However, some of theorists who are still in their armchairs disagree:

Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.

“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”

This is where the story turns to that problematic confrontation between wishes and consequences. To invoke an Asian metaphor, Professor Gusterson sees this as a camel's nose getting under the tent; and the rest of the camel just not have the sorts of humane values that Colonel Schweitzer is currently extolling. Here is an even more critical voice:

Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.

“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”

What does all this mean and to whom does the meaning signify? While Professor González is right to raise a red flag over activities that serve short-term interests, I feel that the exploration of new strategies for our interpersonal relations, both in war and in peace and particularly on an international scale, is just as important for the long-term needs of living in a peaceful world as it is for the short-term objective of getting us out of the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also believe that both these short-term and long-term goals are more important than whether or not the discipline of anthropology will be "harmed." Is Professor González worried that theory will change as a result of bumping into practice? If so, then I fear he has a potentially dangerous fundamentalist view of theory. His concern about abuse is more to the point. However, abuse of any knowledge is always a problem, whether in anthropology or physics; but whether or not that abuse harms the discipline is ultimately determined by those who study and practice that discipline.

As a result, I would say that the argument will involve the opposition of two positions. On the one hand we have those who flat-out distrust anything that our current Administration does; and, given its track record, they have every right to be suspicious. On the other hand there are those who see this as a step towards making the world a better place and feel that giving this new approach a try is better than wallowing in our current messes. I tend to side with the latter camp but with the proviso that, as I have previously discussed, there is a fundamental "tragic flaw" in utopian thinking. The truth is that we are always going to be in some mess or another, just because life is like that. This is not the boulder rolling back on us when we finally get it to the top of the hill. It is that we have the capacity to solve problems and there is no reason to assume that such a capacity will ever become as vestigial as our appendices. So I would like to applaud the efforts of the Department of Defense to find value in social theory, recognizing that I am a member of neither our armed forces nor any academic department in the social sciences!

Facebook in the Enterprise: The Reality Factor

This morning Tim Ferguson filed a story on CNET News.com that nicely complemented my recent post about the impact of Facebook on worker productivity. Ferguson's story is about a poll recently conducted by the security company Sophos, which he nicely summarizes in his "secondary" headline:

Half of businesses are restricting employees' access to social-networking site Facebook, due to concerns about productivity and security.

The productivity factor basically aligned with the results I had previously reported, so much of my interest was in the security side of the coin. Here are the results that caught (seized?) my attention:

The issue of security was also raised by the Sophos research. In a separate poll by the company, 66 percent of workers said they are concerned about colleagues sharing information on Facebook.

Details such as employment history and mobile phone numbers have been found on the site and could be used for identity theft or to launch corporate phishing attacks, security experts warn.

Sophos research found that 41 percent of Facebook users are willing to divulge personal information to complete strangers.

Sophos last week released the results of a Facebook ID probe indicating that a relatively large percentage of people were willing to divulge e-mail addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and other data to a stranger--a fake character created by Sophos, in this case--who requested "friend" status of 200 randomly selected Facebook members.

"Everyone's just sort of letting it all hang out online without thinking who might be watching," [Graham] Cluley [a Sophos "senior technology consultant"] said.

So, if JP Rangaswami really does believe in that "wisdom of crowds," then is there not some element of "wisdom" in those 66 percent of the participants in the Sophos survey; and, if so, what does that wisdom entail?

My guess is that this is not a story about the triumph of an "economics of abundance" over an "economics of scarcity," as JP has recently tried to argue. (Indeed, I find the very concept of an economics of abundance to be as suspect as any other utopian ideal; but that is another story better told by H. G. Wells or Isaiah Berlin!) Rather this story involves an issue raised in a comment by Peter Smith, which is the proper role of freedom in enterprise work. Smith sees enterprise management through the lens of the conflict between freedom and controls; but I wonder if this might be a case where we should be thinking in terms of a dialectical synthesis, rather than an opposition. Just as Justice Holmes recognized that freedom of speech is not the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded building, enterprise managers need to find the right mix of freedom and controls that can derive benefit for social networking sites while remaining cognizant of their risks and liabilities. This is clearly no easy matter; but, in a world of complexities and consequences, why should we kid ourselves into believing that major management decisions should be easy?

Speaking for the Government

It was good to see PC Magazine run Chloe Albanesius' piece about all the imagery now available in virtual mapping programs. Her lead lays all the cards on the table for the subsequent analysis:

Virtual mapping programs have garnered some criticism from those who believe they might be adequate tools for terrorists staking out U.S. landmarks, but there is little the government can do to prevent publication of these images, according to the federal agency that handles satellite photography.

Unfortunately, her paragraph about that agency could have been framed in more precise language:

There are no federal guidelines to which companies like Microsoft or Google must adhere before the release of programs like Microsoft's Live Search Maps, Google Earth or Google Street Views, said Dave Burpee, a public affairs officer with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency does not handle Internet mapping issues.

Presumably NGA is part of Homeland Security, although an alternative reading would have complete separation between NGA and Homeland Security. In either case the paragraph does not indicate any government agency responsible for "Internet mapping issues." This is probably a good thing, although Ms. Albanesius may have inadvertently alerted the government to this lacuna! More interesting, however, is the text that follows:

Burpee stressed that the NGA is "very much on the side of openness" and would not deign to tell Microsoft and Google how to operate their businesses.

But Burpee did acknowledge that "in a perfect world, for the support and defense of U.S. troops, it would be better if that [detailed imagery] wasn't there." But NGA does not "have the legal authority" to demand that the companies pull down mapping information, he added.

"Even if we wanted to do something about it, we couldn't," Burpee said.

Much of the satellite imagery used by such programs comes from international companies over which U.S. agencies have no jurisdiction, he said. The largest U.S.-based satellite imagery companies are Colorado-based Digital Globe and Virginia-based GeoEye. "The rest are all foreign," he said.

The most interesting bit is the quotation (which, remember, is from a public affairs officer of the United States Government) in the second paragraph. This seems to indicate that "for the support and defense of U.S. troops" is a modifier of the phrase "perfect world," meaning that it is one of the characteristics of such a "perfect world." Now, since only Victor Borge renders his punctuation marks as spoken text, we have to assume that the actual commas were supplied by Ms. Albanesius. So we are not absolutely sure whether the connotation that "the support and defense of U.S. troops" is an attribute of a perfect world can be attributed to her or to Mr. Burpee. If nothing else, it does reflect the sort of mind-set that has taken over the country in the post-9/11 age of "homeland security." Once again, when we read our texts, it always seems to be the little things that matter the most!