Lessig vs. Keen

Siden kritikeren av, vel, internett, Andrew Keen har blitt nevnt en del i det siste – se for eksempel Jan Omdahls omtale av ham – så er det verdt å minne om Lawrence Lessigs fantastiske demontering av boka hans.

Jeg synes særlig slutten på denne anmeldelsen er relevant. Her setter Lessig opp bevegelsen fra en amatørkultur til en profesjonalisert kultursektor som en del av den industrielle revolusjonen. Den bevegelsen holder nå på å reversere, hevder Lessig. Vi får en ny amatørkultur som supplerer den profesjonelle kulturen, og Lessig holder, som jeg gjør, det som en positiv utvikling.

Lessig baserer dette på den tradisjonelle bruken av ordet amatør. Ikke i den nedsettende forstanden en som er dårligere til X enn en profesjonell, en udannet person. Snarere i forstanden en som er drevet fram av kjærlighet til X, ikke profesjonell ambisjon.

Sousa is lamenting exactly the dynamic that Keen is praising -- the loss of "amateurism" from our culture. And I take it Keen would be praising what Sousa laments -- the disappearance of this amateur culture.

I'm with Sousa on this, and quite against Keen. I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn't mean that I'll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create -- independent of the quality created. That doesn't mean we should not criticize works created badly (such as, for example, Keen's book, at least if you don't adopt the self-parody interpretation of it). But it does mean you're missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY Times.

Men et helt annet poeng enn dette er at jeg ønsker å bevege meg mot en kultur der vi er i stand til å se kvalitet mer uavhengig av skaperens rykte. Vi nærmer oss den tiden der William Gibsons "Garage Kubrick" – en person som skaper verk med samme kvalitet som Stanley Kubrick i garasjen sin – ikke alene er teknisk realiserbar (den tiden er for lengst her – denne videoen var filmet av en mann med ett digitalt stillbildekamera som kan ta video og en redigerer med en laptop) men noe som oppstår hyppig.

Når jeg tenker over det, så er det nok mye derfor jeg deltar i bloggkulturen – nettopp på grunn av denne tenkemåten. Jeg ser Garage Kubricks daglig, føler jeg. I alle tenkelige kulturgrener, i alle medier.

Når det er sagt, så er Lessigs anmeldelse et klassisk eksempel på den grundige profesjonelles nådeløse dekonstruksjon av et fullstendig uholdbart amatørargument. Lessigs forsvar er et forsvar for kompetansen i alle former.

SERE

Extremely interesting interview on torture with a conscientious interrogator who got very unpopular in Iraq, at NPR:

What you're describing is taking techniques that U.S. military personnel had been trained to resist ... [and] using those very techniques on the people the U.S. was detaining in Iraq?

Exactly, and I think a key point that your listeners need to understand, so they can grasp the gravity of the situation, is that the primary objective of that approach to interrogation was not truth … but somebody's political truth. In the Korean War, they actually compelled some of our pilots to admit to dropping chemical weapons on cities and so forth, when in fact that didn't happen. Now, that stands in stark contrast to intelligence interrogation, where the overriding objective is provide timely, accurate, reliable, comprehensive intelligence.

And these harsh interrogation methods had been used by the Soviets and the Chinese to get people to say things that weren't true?

That's true. And it's not just harsh physically, but I think the element that was more persuasive was their ability to induce what is known as debility, depression and dread through emotional and psychological techniques that profoundly altered somebody's ability to answer questions truthfully even if they wanted to. It truly undermined their ability to recall, so therefore it would call into question its efficacy in an intelligence-based interrogation.

*I am reminded of a passage in William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. Gibson apparently knew all this already. He posted this passage on his blog (sidebar), back in September 2006, so I'll repost it here, even though the published version is slightly different:

Tito watched the old man fold the copy of the New York Times he’d been reading. The light was going. Fading above this other ocean, the Pacific, which Tito had never seen before.

“I remember proofs of a CIA interrogation manual, something we’d been sent unofficially, for comment,” the old man said. “The first chapter laid out the ways in which torture is fundamentally counterproductive to intelligence. The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality and depth of product, with not squandering potential assets.” He removed his gold-rimmed glasses. “If the man who keeps returning to question you avoids behaving as if he were your enemy, you begin to lose your sense of who you are. Gradually, in the crisis of self that your captivity becomes, he guides you in your discovery of who you are becoming.”

“Did you interrogate people, yourself?” asked Garreth. The three of them were seated in the back of an open jeep, the black Pelican case under Garreth’s feet.

“No,” said the old man, “I only reviewed the product. It’s a terribly intimate process. An ordinary cigarette lighter will cause a man to tell you anything, whatever he thinks you want to hear. And will prevent him ever trusting you again, even slightly. And will confirm him, in his sense of self, as few things will.” He tapped the folded paper. “When I first saw what they were doing, I knew that they’d turned the SERE lessons inside out. That meant that we were using techniques the Koreans had specifically developed in order to prepare prisoners for show trials.” He fell silent.

Tito heard the lapping of waves.

Non Habeas Corpus

Sure, we have these people locked up already, so who cares about building a case against them. Or, y'know, keeping records about them:

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Which, I suppose, leads one to wonder exactly how they knew these people were evil terrorist illegal enemy islamofascist non-human pond scum. If there weren't any records being kept, or for that matter being collected. How did they do reviews and inventories to make sure that all the cases were properly overseen? That their judgment in each case was correct? How did they even know who they were dealing with?

But lest we forget, these were "very bad people". Terrorists and bombers and "responsible for 9-11". Man, they really locked up some perverters of democracy. Good going, guys.

Which reminds me of something William Gibson said, back at the end of the halcyon days of the first Bush administration.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

*

Oh, completely unrelated - a really weird Google ad in this article:

Nordics Are Israelites
4,000 English Books Say So! Free Saxon-Israel Books & Magazines
ChristsAssembly.com

1) Wolf poses as "grandmother" and kills child, What makes your ears so big? Animal swallows man (not fatally)
2)Victims rescued from swallower's belly.

It seems that bit I wrote about tracing Gibson's Spook Country back to events documented in his blog has now been used by some new media researchers in a lecture, as far as I understand. How cool! Since these appear to be notes taking during the lecture, I'm not quite sure I understand what the lecture is about (creativity and crowdsourcing, I think). But it does look interesting.

boiling water with the lid off

I just finished William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. As always, Gibson describes big chunks of the times we live in better than anyone (in fact, I can't help thinking that he is literally the only author I've read who looks at some of the things he looks at) and its worth reading for those observations, as well as a well-plotted, easy read. The funny thing is, I recognized huge chunks of the plot from my internet reading. I kept thinking "oh yeah, that's that thing, and that's that news story run through a blender and cut up with this other story over here", etc.

Today, as I was googling my way across the blogosphere per usual, I happened to stumble across a link - in Jill's blog, though now I've lost the post itself - to a post on Gibson's blog just when he started blogging again after a lengthy hiatus. This was in October 2004, in the run-up to the re-election of the Dauphin. I recognised the story he told from the novel. Then I looked at the October archive and realised that I got all those stories and ideas mostly from links Gibson blogged. So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times.

I can't help but think that blogs are just huge assets for the biographical writers of the future. Also, the blog is a lot of fun to read. I remember the following paragraph vividly. And as always, Gibson was right on the money:

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

I returned today from the hinterlands beyond the internet and cell-phone to find this beautiful piece of software about to change parts of our perception of data. It seems the cyberspace-ish variant of the internet might actually happen after all, what with all this new touch-screen technology and now this. And Microsoft is actually making this.

Here's the demo version. Only 5 megabytes. Only for Windows (obviously).

Oh, and holy crap what a trip to the Great Wild, Untamed North. Vesterålen is the new Grand Canaria. More on this later.

"John, we've forgotten to take our food pills."

I just found William Gibson's old short story "The Gernsback Continuum" online. There's some trouble with the formatting in my browser, and it runs straight into the next story without linebreaks (the last line is "my little bundle of
condensed catastrophe" and then it goes straight into the next one) but the text is all there. Here's another version, which is better-looking, but has an introduction which is not in the original and which loads very slowly on my computer.

Reading it now, Gibson's early style is way, way over the top. Part of what I always liked best about the Sprawl trilogy was his baroque, lyrical descriptions of his dirty future (his later novels are much more conversational in tone). In his early short stories, though, the style mostly doesn't work. But this one, the Gernsback Continuum, must be one of the most intriguing works of sci-fi from the last century. It tells the story of a photographer who is given an assignment to photograph futuristic architecture from the fifties and earlier. As he starts the assignment, he goes crazy (or perhaps actually comes in contact with alternate presents), and starts seeing the imagined futures of the past in his daily life. Hilarity and postmodern, existential emptiness ensues.