From Jaron Lanier, The Serfdom of Crowds, in the Jan/Feb issue of Harper’s Magazine:
The wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 was cloud-based. No one in the pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money. In the past, an investor had to be able to understand at least something about what an investment would actually accomplish. No longer. There are now so many layers of abstraction between the elite investor and actual events that he no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of his investments…
__
The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand. A hedge-fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to create fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical numbers of “friends” through a service like Facebook. But let’s suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks. The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up.
Reading Scott Horton’s piece The Guantánamo “Suicides” finally prodded me into paying for a two-year subscription to Harper’s. I’ve been trying to cut back on the amount of paper that comes into the house, but I realized that I’ve bought at least eight of the last 12 issues over the counter. This may be a feckless leap of faith, since Harper’s has had the same troubles as all the other dead-tree media recently, but too often I just don’t “get around” to reading long, thoughtful reports online. Horton‘s No Comment blog is on my short list of favorites, and he uses all the added-value online features (pics, video, links) cleverly and unobtrusively. It’s one of the blogs I would miss greatly, even if I don’t remember to click on it every day.
Rob
Harpers is the only magazine I dare subscribe to.
NobodySpecial
Well, it’s not a statistic, so now I just have to decide if it’s a lie or a damned lie.
You know, things were much better when we treated economics as the voodoo it is rather than as a science.
Warren Terra
@Rob:
I get Harpers, the Nation, the American Prospect, and Mother Jones. And my subscription to the Atlantic hasn’t lapsed – but there’s no way I’m sending them money.
MaximusNYC
Hmm. One of the reasons I don’t read Harpers much any more is that I find some of the longer pieces to be too full of sweeping denuncations of how This Modern World Is Going To Hell In A Handbasket, With These Kids And Their New-Fangled Intertubes, And Get Off My Lawn!, Etc. Lewis Lapham wrote (writes?) a lot in this vein, IIRC.
The fact is, human beings have been lying to themselves in rather tremendous ways for thousands of years. I don’t know much about the history of financial panics and speculative bubbles, but the idea that they’ve never been as self-delusory as they are now strikes me as obviously wrong.
Also:
What does that even mean? That’s not any sort of accurate literal or metaphorical representation of how high-tech speculators do what they do. Which makes me question whether Jaron Lanier actually knows what he’s talking about.
When the grand extended metaphors overpower the actual reporting, caveat lector.
(To be fair, I haven’t read any of this particular article but the excerpt above. Anne, I think the link is messed up… possibly an extra “http” at the start?)
MaximusNYC
I do love the Harper’s Index… and they print all kinds of amazing bits and pieces of material from other sources.
Anne Laurie
@MaximusNYC:
Thanks! Fixt, for now (FYWP)…
valdivia
I know this is totally OT, and maybe it already made it to another thread but here is this classic on Rahm from SNL.
http://tv.gawker.com/5465990/snls-rahm-emanuel-obliterates-sarah-palin
Sly
@MaximusNYC:
Much the same then as now. Having the benefit of looking back over extended periods of time to see movements in economic systems is the only difference. We can look back over the WWI and Inter-war period and see how the whole system came crashing down now, just as we can look back over the recent decades and see how the present financial panic became manifest.
But seeing it as its happening, especially when there’s an unspeakable amount of money to be lost and gained in the short term, takes a the kind of dispassionate analysis that you really only find in academia. You can certainly blame the system’s actors for the mess they either created, in terms of the financial institutions, or allowed to happen, in terms of governments and central banks. But you can also understand the incentives they had in doing so, because unlike the dispassionate observer, they had real skin in the game.
dirge
It means exactly what it says. I build those search engines for a living. They’ve got a giant room full of half-wit MBAs fiddling with the dials on the stuff I build. They still call them traders, but they’re really Level 1 NOC support.
Top notch financial programmers treat traders like peripheral devices. Like a graphics card. Or a printer. They really don’t know what they’re doing. No one does.
Of course, if I made the sorts of bonuses that those “tenders” make, I wouldn’t be here bitching about it.
Warren Terra
@MaximusNYC:
The lead editorials in Harpers are almost comically overwrought and despairing. This was OK when Lapham wrote them, but his replacements aren’t as talented.
Platonicspoof
@MaximusNYC:
Tremendous ways, horrific ways, psychotic ways. No question. However:
Getting late in this time zone to track down more of Lanier’s premises, but I’ve bolded one part. We are inventing new ways to lie (full disclosure – I’m a splitter of categories).
He has been appearing at The Edge for some time, where, e.g, this 2006 essay shows one direction he is coming from:
“The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.”
(Links to critiques at the end – The Reality Club).
I’m guessing he is also very aware of the way ratings, and many other deformities of recent bubbles were based on math and IT that speculators took on blind faith because it gave the short-term payoff they wanted, not because they understood, e.g., the limits of the models (see Lanier’s bio). I don’t have time to search my bubble folder, and I see a programmer just popped in.
Plus, you refer to the speculators, who may be making informed guesses at their level, but the excerpt in the post says “investors”, which includes the general public, I believe, in Lanier’s article.
In short, speculation on meta level over-generalizes, but I wouldn’t underestimate the number of Lanier’s reasons.
Platonicspoof
For anyone unable to access the Lanier excerpt at the Harper’s link in the post, you can read it here.
wiley
Actually, many of the masters of the universe used the work of advanced mathematicians to design their investment strategies and model them. The models demonstrated that global markets would become very volatile, with increasingly intense highs and lows occurring at shorter and shorter intervals—a manic-depressive cycle.
The masters of the universe knew how to capitalize on the disasters. I surmise that those in the fog are what you might call “suckers”—not the true elite—the closest thing you could call their competition, perhaps.
Then there were the easy marks. If you see advertising telling everybody and his dog they can get rich on Wall Street—“Is that the same car he was driving yesterday?” ads—-the masters of the universe are hungry. Don’t feed them. We’d all be better off paying higher taxes and having more social services.
JGabriel
Wow, the McCain campaign is looking more inept than ever this morning. All those complaints from Schmidt, and others, about Sarah not being prepared for interviews, and apparently all they really needed to do was write the answers on the palm of her hand.
If they’d only known to treat Sarah like a nine-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder, John McCain might be president today!
Of course, even that wouldn’t have worked, since Sarah can’t even remember not to flash her scribbled hand at the audience in an arms wide gesture.
As Stefan Sirucek notes:
So sad.
.
JGabriel
@valdivia: Thanks for the link, Valdivia. That shit is hilarious.
.
Nancy Irving
Harper’s is the best American general-interest magazine, bar none.
Jeff Sharlet’s book on The Family, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel & Dimed, and Lars Eigner’s Travels With Lizbeth all appeared first excerpted in Harper’s.
And that’s just off the top of my head.
Clark
I love magazines, and Harper’s is one of the best. If John Cole published Balloon Juice Monthly, I would subscribe. You kids may find it hard to believe, but if you go back ten years or so, before the late Michael Kelly ruined it; The Atlantic Monthly was a great magazine. Really.
scav
An Even-Tempered Apology. If that’s not a tag for this crowd …
Comrade Scrutinizer
And let’s not forget the Weekly Review, the best three-paragraph news synopsisisis ever.
__
Cerberus
Yeah, not sure that’s actually true. I hear a lot of “this here intertron is making things never before seen happen that are bad bad bad” all the time, but the conclusions seem to be highly idiotic and myopic.
We’re not self-deluding ourselves in new and exciting ways. Indeed most of the most persistent lies are twists on old crap. I mean, most of the blind faith in marketplaces is basically Calvinism being married with Social Darwinism (both older than fuck) to create Prosperity Christianity (leading that actively delusional 27% to literally see capitalism as a magical force that “rewards” the good and “punishes” the bad).
Blind speculation with investments may have new abilities thanks to computers, but it’s basically putting a high-tech spin on the micro-trading of the 80s plus the “everyone can be an investor and get rich” lies of the 1920s. Maybe the exact method has changed, but studies have always shown that “investors” that are valued by their companies have very few skills in either micro or macro economics and are essentially either lucky guessers or open frauds. The fact that computers allow one to commit super fraud with thousands of guesses doesn’t really change the overall worthlessness of the venture (the stock market has always been a predation on our economy since it first came to be, it has little to no real purpose other than the delusion of the “no-risk lottery”).
And the laughable understanding of online media is hilarious. I haven’t seen a site wholly focused on “the future online advertiser” since what, 2001, 2003 at the latest?
Pretty much every site that’s self supported, aka the creator can do it as their job, tends to survive on either donations or as most do it, merchandise, books, random online media companies, or real world appearances (in the case of Jonathan Coulton). And it’s not really fair to call it a delusion in a world where most of the people who become big online would never have had a chance to break through the layers of nepotism and fail especially in the traditional media structure.
Ted Rall pisses me off when he sneers at “online artists” despite the fact that pretty much every “indie political comic creator” he promoted in his books pretty much solely exists online because they were never going to be featured in daily newspapers or even the rapidly disintegrating indie magazines. Given the stranglehold on meaningful jobs by the lootings of this country by the boomers and Gen X, where we go for individual freedom of expression is the internet and the internet is remarkably communistic and utopian in that respect allowing some (such as Jonathan Coulton) basically build a successful career giving stuff away on the internet.
But yeah, the teabaggers are just the racists, libertarians, and Rapturists that are the republican base and the lack of borders in the internet is actually impacting the willful ignorance these people live in. Remember that these people fled to gated communities in the suburbs just to keep those who’d threaten their fantasy world from being seen. They have to grate against reality straining their deliberate delusions with each entry which is why their kids are less strong on the hate even when they convert into or stay in the religion.
And the money is magic people have been dominating our world since we decided that it’d be a great idea to eliminate communists from every level of our culture and our politics and our unions. Now the usual excesses of social darwinism and Randian philosophy has no counterbalance. It’s not some new delusion only possible with twitter.
And similarly, the facebook dig is inane, facebook is pretty much a social friend’s circle to see what old friends are getting up to or organize things like protests. It’s just the old malt shop or political group using the internet. The “mob” aspects are merely a shallower version of forums or comment threads, communities of like minded people who may have been isolated before the time of internet. Oh noes, end of the world, people would know that they’re not alone and marginalized groups can start speaking with louder voices because of it (say like when the entire old media structure pretends progressives don’t exist so a massive online community builds to elect a dynamic black guy and force the recalcitrant media to admit that Iraq wasn’t awesome and become so fearful of the “internet’s power that they write endless diatribes about how it’s the end of us all).
But yeah, I’m beginning to hate technophobic Gen Xers almost as much as I hate the technophilic Gen Xer Libertarians who believe Zombie Reagan will give them endless blowjobs if they can just get rid of their filthy human bodies and all government services.
bob h
I’m a long-time subscriber to Harper’s. As I am not yet willing to give up on Obama, I feel a little alienated from a magazine that has basically declared his Presidency a bellyflop. Miss Lewis Lapham, too.
AkaDad
@Cerberus:
I appreciate the effort and time you spent on this, but I have to disagree. I’m pretty sure fuck is older.
Cerberus
Also Facebook Kid? Really? What’s that bullshit?
Facebook is indeed shallow, it is like all social sites possible to have more friends than you’d ever really talk to. You’d think on that argument he’d go for twitter’s throat given its inherent shallowness, but there you go.
Facebook is basically a deeper version of twitter or a more shallow version of a comment thread or forum. A means to connect with old friends, a game platform for addicting casual games, a means of organizing political action groups, or a more varied version of twitter where you open your gaze to the giant gaping sore of humanity and look inside.
It is variable to the user. Some may focus on the game platform and grab as many friends as possible to dominate casual multiplayer ladders, a technique never before seen, except by the fact that there are bowling leagues and people who started recruiting friends for the league based on skill rather than anything else. Some may twitterize it, using it to keep an eye on movements, keep abreast of interesting things in the area, etc…
And most will use at least the active front page as either an organizing tool or means to keep in touch. What used to be done by phone banks or massive amounts of cell phone texts, can now be done by facebook tools. Schedule an “invitation” for an upcoming event and have people e-RSVP, do a post rounding up your friends and getting them all on the same page, check up with them afterwards and make sure they got home ok. Check in with old friends, chat with them, play some games with them, see what’s up with their life.
It’s the next extension of the phone idea.
How is it that I manage to get this even though I hate cell phones and the parade of super connection tools that have followed and barely use the service, but each and every one of these tools reacts to it like some foreign landscape covered in shieldless plutonium bars.
To think it’s mob think, one would have to think every social event is hideous mob think. Is a protest movement “meaningless” mob think? What about a church service (ok, there’s more there there)? How about a school? The lunchroom of a school? Sports teams?
The fears damage the most important point I feel, continuing to disentangle the lies that the financial elite have any amount of skill that justifies their massive paychecks. How they’ve basically been manipulating the Calvinism that has poisoned our society to assume anyone “successful” must have “worked hard” and “earned it” in order to make themselves seem crucial to the functioning and well-being of the economy when they actual exist as modern pirates, plundering the supply lines for personal aggrandizement.
Instead we get another tired “the internet is disaffected youth, get off my lawn” posts from aging out-of-touch idiots who assume life was better back in the days when their was majority support for preventing women from being regarded as equal partners to men in life.
Cerberus
@AkaDad:
I meant John Jacobs Fuck the 575,000th, 1920s stock investor and overall useless git.
arguingwithsignposts
@Cerberus:
Belonging to neither of those groups, I don’t quite know what to say here. There are some of us DFH’s in the GenX demographic left.
WereBear
Luddites and Republicans like to act as though all this progress has been thrust upon them. When in reality people love it, work on , it, seek it out and enjoy it.
People whine that they don’t understand it when a two year oldknows how to change the TV from broadcast, cable, and Playstation fray my patience.
Just shut up and live among the Amish, and leave the rest of us alone.
Cerberus
@arguingwithsignposts:
You I like. It’s a narrow hate and newly weaned. Grudges are so cute when they’re babies. Cootchie cootchie coo.
scav
@WereBear: Don’t you dare inflict those types on the Amish.
Keith G
@valdivia: Bless you. I am still laughing. The kitties have run for cover.
JGabriel
Question: Will the Sarah Handcheat become as famous as the Dean Scream?
It seems to be getting a lot of coverage this morning on the blogs, but no so much at any of the more mainstream news outlets — so far.
BTW, I think Sarah Handcheat should become her new nickname, and maybe deserves a lexicon entry.
.
Linda Featheringill
To Dirge:
You said you make the search engines that are used to harvest the Market.
Question: Do you feel that the fruit of your labor is being used in the way you intended? Or do you feel that your product has been hijacked and forced into something that is at least a little dirty?
chrome agnomen
handcheat=redneck palm pilot
Rhoda
@JGabriel: Huffington Post isn’t leading with it, so that doesn’t give me a lot of hope. Rather, they’re playing Arianna’s party line about Sarah “warning” Dems and Republicans alike.
JGabriel
Lexicon submission:
Sarah Handcheat — Derogatory nickname for Sarah Palin, based upon her National Tea Party Convention speech of 2/6/2010, where a high-resolution AP Photo captured cheat notes written on her palm, and CNN Video caught her referencing it in response to a softball question from a sycophantic interviewer. Other nicknames derived from the same event include, but are not limited to: Sarah PalmPilot, Sarah Palmprompter, Sarah Handprompter, and Sarah Telepalm.
.
JGabriel
Rhoda:
Yeah, I noticed. Maybe they will if it gets enough hits. But Sunday’s are kind of a weird day for HuffPo headlines anyway — they seem to just provide a mix of highlighted headlines from the previous week, at least in the Blog Bar.
.
Barry
I’ll read this article later, but as has been pointed out, we’ve seen this before – the 20’s, the 60’s, the 80’s. Don’t confuse the basic human mechanism with fancier new toys.
Sly
@Rhoda:
I find most of
Arianna HuffingtonHuffPo to be useless, and all the useful shit to be buried in some small corner of the site that either dies a quiet death or gets linked by someone else and then magically makes the lead.WereBear
The Sarah Handcheat incident (I love the lexicon entry!) is just another illustration of what the Republicans feel as a vulnerability of their side becomes trumpeted as the fatal flaw of The Other Side.
valdivia
@Keith G: @JGabriel:
You are welcome guys! I just saw it again and it was, as Rahm would say, fucking hilarious.
AkaDad
It looks like Sarah uses an Ipalm.
DougJ
No one in the pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now.
What?
This may be the single most wrong sentence I have ever read in my life. Human beings have routinely lied to themselves about anything and everything from the very moment they first began to speak. In fact, they probably invented language in order to be able to lie.
DougJ
Also, a new rule: people who liked the way this article is written are no longer allowed to complain about Matt Taibbi.
valdivia
@DougJ:
what you said. I love Harpers but this piece?
Jamey
Yay, now I have a use for my “I’m with Stupid!” t-shirt…
MikeJ
Meh. I learned to skip over the mention of Jaron Lanier back when Mondo 2000 was still around.
scav
@DougJ:
Now that I think of it, could someone explain to me why I couldn’t lie to myself in this way using a stand-alone supercomputer?
Brian J
Do you do online statements for credit cards and bills and so forth? I’ve found that by doing that, the amount of paper that comes into the house is reduced. Not by that much, of course because Citibank won’t stop sending me balance transfer forms, but it’s less than I used to get.
I wouldn’t let that be the main concern as far as subscribing goes. It’s one issue per month, and if they are doing good work which you can support by giving them money, go for it.
Jamey
Not to arrive late to a fight, but I can cite from personal experience (interviews I conducted for a documentary series) the recollections of a dozen ordinary Germans who were alive during the Third Reich. I just think that The Cloud makes this phenomenon obvious enough (and zeitgeist-y enough) for the likes of even Jason Lanier to notice.
WereBear
Hey, that’s the whole point; paying for content you want, and supporting the actors and causes you want.
Except… that was never the pattern for most magazines. Getting happy readers meant counts of reliable eyeballs, to be sold to the people who bought the ads, which everyone knows is where the real money is/was.
Subscription money basically covered your cost of actually printing and distributing the thing. Which is why I’m astonished newspapers got it so horribly wrong for decades, and are now paying the price.
Amy
Sarah used a PalmPrompter! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stefan-sirucek/did-palin-use-crib-notes_b_452458.html
scav
@Jamey:
But isn’t that more the toobz while the cloud has to do with where the digits are juggled? Or am I misunderconfoozaling again?
WaterGirl
@valdivia: Thanks for starting my day with a laugh! I hope this skit was cathartic for Rahm and made MoveOn squirm.
WaterGirl
@JGabriel:
Seeing the photo of Sara with her outspread arms was too funny. Second BJ laugh (out loud) this morning, and I have only been up for 10 minutes. She really is dumber than dirt.
Maude
@DougJ: at 41.
He must not know about the Guilded Age. Greath swaths of fantasy covered the rich. The peons had no protection.
Computers make the trades faster. It’s easier to go down the tubes.
I don’t agree with the stuff about social sites. Teens will sit at computers across the room form each other, write to each other and giggle. They aren’t stupid and they know it’s superficial. They enjoy it.
HRA
@JGabriel:
OMG You can actually read them on her hand. Wow! We were too close to what may have been if they had won the election.
demo woman
Sarah was suppose to be on Fox News Sunday. Did she sit on Chris Wallace’s lap?
RSA
@DougJ:
This sounds vaguely familiar, based on some reading I’ve done on the evolution of language. Some primates (and perhaps other species) sometimes deliberately deceive each other in their vocalizations, such as raising a false alarm about predators. It’s reasonable to think that being able to lie has some evolutionary advantage and was at least a factor in our development of language.
El Cid
@Maude: I was going to bring that up. I’ve seen various studies showing that the concentration of wealth among the super-rich was so much higher in the 1890s than either the 1920s or now that it doesn’t come too close — and the richest of today in comparison with average income or in inflation adjusted terms aren’t anywhere near as rich as the super-rich of the 1890s.
Maude
@El Cid: You are right. One book that points out the British form of class is The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. It’s about transportation to Australia.
In the 1890’s there were no unions no worker rights. The child labor laws came into effect in the US in 1916.
The rich could acrue wealth on a huge scale.
Peons were sub human.
The phrase going through the motions is British. It means that after children fell alseep after woking in the factories, their hands were going through the motions of their work.
THe Repubs are a version of the upper class. They make things up and despise “regular” People.
Raygun started the have and have not class attitude and we still see it.
One good thing is that Obama really ticks the “upper crust” off.
jwb
@DougJ: I think the idea is that the cloud leverages mental capacity, so Lanier isn’t arguing that humans haven’t always already been lying and living in self-deception but rather that the cloud has infinitely expanded our capacity for lying and self-deception. The article struck me as not very rigorous updating of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment for the Age of Cloud Computing.
JGabriel
@HRA:
My favorite part of her cribbed notes:
Sarah Palin: Can’t even put a cheat sheet together without having to backtrack and correct it.
I mean, really, you wouldn’t expect “tax cuts” to be a phrase a Republican would screw up,
.
racrecir
Hey, take it easy on Sarah. She got paid $100,000 for that gig and wanted to make sure everyone got their money’s worth. And that’s what the tea party movement is all about: making sure this country gets its money’s worth. What makes Sarah so special is that she leads by example. What our government needs right now is more people like her willing to put in that kind of extra effort…for us!
gnomedad
@MikeJ:
I agree that Lanier’s contrarianism doesn’t always make sense, but he is so smart and well-credentialed that I pay attention to him even when he’s wrong.
Joe Bauers
@JGabriel:
I know, right? You’re a Republican politician and you have to write “tax cuts” on your hand to remember it? I would have thought she’d be more likely to forget her own name.
El Cid
@Joe Bauers: You know what’s funny, though?
What would the typical Democrat [Democratic politician running for office] write on their hand?
I mean, I don’t think the average Democrat yet has figured out how to describe the health care reform they are (somewhat) likely to pass in terms they could write on their hand.
Unless they had really, really big hands.
JGabriel
@El Cid: I realize it’s inconvenient at times, but, overall, I’m kind of glad that Democratic proposals and governing philosophy are not something you can fit on the palm of your hand.
.
El Cid
@JGabriel: I’m glad that Democrats are involved in the intricate realities behind policies, but that doesn’t mean that policies don’t have a basic essence that you can emphasize to the average person. It’s happened quite a lot throughout our history, where complicated policies are discussed and pushed in ways that people understand and support. To do so is neither inferior nor anti-intellectual, any more than those generations of writers in the 1940s and 1950s who began popularizing science for the average person who would never likely encounter any formal training.
tesslibrarian
I’ve yet to figure out how texting is much different than the notes we used to pass in school–they’re just more timely, can be sent to someone in another classroom w/o waiting for the bell to ring. (do they still ring bells to change classes?) Posts to social network sites like facebook are even less different since I frequently don’t see what a friend has posted until morning or until I get home from work.
And how much do you want to bet that Palin’s hand-notes were as contrived as her into-the-mike “Can I call you Joe?” folksiness before the debate? Sure, she needed the help (“O’Biden?”) but to the rubes who love her, it makes her more like “real people” somehow. Why people embrace being idiots is beyond me.
*
That Jaron Lanier piece is terrible.
DougJ
@jwb:
I guess I think our capacity for lying was infinite to begin with.
jwb
@DougJ: I guess it comes down to whether you believe it possible to expand mental capacity through technology.
4jkb4ia
The Lord of Bubble Watch states last week that Pitt has done “more than enough” and that the A-10 could get 5 bids. Despite “No. 138 St. Louis” not being one of the 5 bids, this was all happy news, especially since South Florida beat Georgetown and that loss doesn’t look so bad.
I was sorry to see that Roger Hodge was fired. He was doing a perfectly good job IMHO. The articles I saw were thought-provoking and they published the excellent Alice Munro story.
It looks like the context is that Jaron Lanier has stated that music in the digital era is a mashup of music from other eras and that musicians are becoming more and more crowdsourced even if the audience is narrower and narrower. So this is a data point that I can’t vouch for.
AhabTRuler
Naw, people are just as fucking dumb as they ever were, it’s simply that technology allows one to do more damage.
b-psycho
Even Sarah can’t cross Rush…:
4jkb4ia
St. Louis U., aka Rick Majerus and the Imposters, are not on anyone’s idea of a bubble but they’ve got Dayton, Xavier, and Temple coming up to prove something to somebody.
Mike in NC
I’ll be happy if we get to hear Tweety discussing “Palin’s Handjob” shortly.
Mike in NC
Or as a poster I recently saw in a catalog read, “Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups”.
The Moar You Know
Lanier is, and I don’t know any other way to put it, a Luddite – and I mean that in the literal sense of the word. I’ve been reading his book “You Are Not A Gadget” and his lack of understanding of even the most basic elements of technology is utterly appalling.
The conclusions he draws about modern technologies and the ramifications thereof, based on his lack of initial understanding of their underpinnings, are even more lacking in any sort of basis in fact.
Please don’t read this idiot’s crap and treat it with any sort of legitimacy.
The Moar You Know
@Cerberus: Thank you. It’s long past time that someone came clean and admitted that my generation may well be far more of a failure than the boomers that came directly before us.
NobodySpecial
@The Moar You Know:
Horseshit. That’s Boomer propaganda talking. Obama’s a frigging Generation X figure. I’d argue they’re bigger failures for taking what the Greatest Generation left them and pissing it away on the likes of Ronnie Raygun.
And this whole discussion about cloudtech making things worse or not making it worse – from as far back as the South Seas Trading Bubble, man’s been using shenanigans to fleece suckers out of their money. The only difference with technology is that now they can do it in microseconds instead of days or weeks for the con to start working.
Martian Buddy
@Maude: I’m in the middle of reading that right now after just having finished The Ghost Map. One thing that really struck me about the latter was the way in which outbreaks of disease in lower class neighborhoods were attributed to the moral failings of the lower class–who, being lower class wretches, could never be expected to be anything better than squalid and disease-ridden due to their congenital inferiority. Update the language to contemporary American English and you’d get a typical conservative rant about lazy welfare queens buying booze with their food stamps.
Martian Buddy
@4jkb4ia:
Isn’t that true of pretty much any era, though? I’m not a music major or anything, but I can think of a number of composers who did arrangements of folk tunes or drew their inspiration from the folk music of “exotic” places. The recent “blending” craze would seem to me to be more of the same.
FlipYrWhig
I love Harpers, although Warren Terra is right about the histrionics of some of the recent opening editorials, and a lot of the literary pieces are tedious and/or twee, and I _hated_ John Leonard’s insufferable book reviews. But for the low price of the subscription, you get a huge return on usable and stimulating stuff. And one of my proudest accomplishments is that I once won the cryptic crossword contest.
RSA
@gnomedad:
I don’t know if this is snark, but Lanier is kind of the opposite of well-credentialed. I haven’t come across any bio of his that mentions where he went to school; all we see is an honorary doctorate from NJIT. Of course, he’s done a huge amount of interesting work in any case.
de stijl
I’m not tracking this.
With a birthyear of 1961 – 1981 being the consensus definition of Gen X (at least per Wiki FWTW), there is a tiny fraction of Gen Xers who were old enough to vote in the 1980 election, certainly not enough to sway the election if every single one of them voted for Reagan.
Looking at the 1980 vote demographics on Wiki, the younger you were the more likely you were to vote for Carter.
Royston Vasey
MIDDLETOWN, Connecticut – A Connecticut emergency official says some people have died in an explosion at a power plant in Middletown.
Betsy Hard, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, tells The Associated Press that she does not know how many people have died, or how many were injured in the explosion .
She says Middletown authorities have asked surrounding communities for help. Hard says urban search and rescue teams are on their way.
NobodySpecial
@de stijl:
I meant the boomers pissed it away, not Gen X. Sorry.