the infinite plasticity of the digital

Here's a nice piece on Iraq, which was in the London Review of Books a while back. I was using it to research something, and I thought I'd share it with the general public: What I Heard about Iraq.

Funny thing about this piece is that it seems like something you'd put up in a weblog, and the thing I kept thinking about when I read it was "can I really trust this?" It would be a much more powerful piece if every statement came with a link to the source.

Actually, despite what William Gibson calls "the infinite plasticity of the digital", that is to say: the way in which all digital data can be changed at will (witness: the way the whitehouse.gov pages have been tweaked), there is a great deal of credibility to web arguments, because you can read the sources instantly. In some ways, even more credibility, as long as the data reflects the argument.