The World is Not Enough

Megan McArdle wonders "how much music is enough?"

There are a couple of ways to answer this. First, and most obvious, is "all of them." Having every album at your finger tips ought to be enough, right? Seems self-evident. Maybe it is. More in a moment.

Second, I think you could say that enough is having every album you know you want. It would be a complete collection of all the songs you are conscious of being interested.

To expand that a little, you could also say it's every album you could possibly want. So, I know that I don't like country or dirty South rap, but within the general spheres of music that sometimes have an interest in (all sorts of rock, independent hip hop, jazz, some orchestral music, experimental and electronic music), having every possible album, updated on a rolling basis, might be enough.

Finally, I think you could make the case that it's not possible to have enough, that enough is only achieved when you're completely satisfied with your musical options at any given point--which, at least for a picky, anxious listener like me, is borderline impossible. I have more than 10,000 songs on my harddrive, and I more or less meet the second criteria--having every album I know I want--but I'm still often dissatisfied with my choices. And that's why I'm a restless devourer of new music and music reviews, why it's not abnormal for me to go through more than a dozen new albums in a month, and why I'm pretty much constantly searching for great new music. There's no such thing as enough; there's only temporary satisfaction.

Most of what I wrote here, I should note, holds true with any number of things: movies, books, TV shows, blog posts, magazine and newspaper articles. In the internet age, when content seems to bubble up from the pores of every surface around us, it's easy to become addicted to everything new, to feed on the slough of new content being piped into your cable modem. The cheapness and abundance of it all encourages us to devour more of it more quickly, to be satisfied for shorter and shorter periods, for enough to get, not closer, but further away as we have more.

Writing with Clarity

Comments here may be infrequent over the next few weeks as a new chapter, nay volume, of life begins. And there'll be more about that before long, I suspect. But in the meantime, do read Stanley Kurtz's pointed comments on the academic left's obsessions with obscurantist prose. This is an old conservative standby, but Kurtz does a good job with it.

I tend to agree with this critique in general (and you can always point to the Alan Sokal Social Text hoax as the prime example of the left's obscurantist tendencies gone utterly awry), but would probably classify fewer writings as incomprehensibly muddled than some conservatives. When writing about abstract art or modern theater, for example, it's sometimes necessary to write in a manner that, at least initially, seems difficult, even inaccessible. Abstract notions, I think, demand something like abstract prose, at least when describing them, and this prose won't always be generally accessible--much like how detailed economics and policy writing isn't always instantly accessible to the masses. The trick (in interpretive/critical writing anyway) is to bring those ideas into clarity and accessibility on the tail end. So, don't deny the ambiguities and vague ideas, but then use those to point toward meaning (or lack of).

Alternately, you can point to material like the dramatic theories of Artaud which you might be able to dismiss as sheer nonsense, but are also lit by a fairly undeniable linguistic power. He's not always clear, and in some passages he's downright impossible to understand, but that doesn't mean there's not something of value there, that there's no use reading his work and making an attempt to pull some stable, concrete ideas from it. None of this is to argue with anything that Kurtz wrote, or even to suggest that I think he and I would differ much on the principles involved, just to say that, just as there's a liberal tendency to snidely dismiss material that's too accessible, there's an opposite conservative tendency to push away material that doesn't deal with absolutes and concretes in quite as firm a manner as we might like.

Addendum: On the other hand, there are a solid number of conservatives willing to engage in exactly the sort of difficult, somewhat inaccessible writing I'm talking about. Take, for instance, Steve Talbott, whose essay "The Language of Nature" in the new edition of The New Atlantis (unfortunately not yet online)--the quarterly journal of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Kurtz is employed--contains the following wonderful line:

When we crucify the world-text upon a scaffold of grammatical logic, the resulting corpse presents its own fascinations, but these are not the fascinations of the original meaning; they are only a shadow of it.

This is not entirely impenetrable, but robbed of its context, it is certainly daunting, and even in context, it's a sentence that may appear imposing to some readers, and will require rereading by many. However, it's actually a very good sentence in a remarkably insightful essay about how the current scientific approach to nature denies its content and meaning in favor of diagramming its structure in an abstract mathematical manner.

First Dance

"The First Dance," Mark Oppenheimer's NYT Magazine piece on the first dance at a conservative Christian college, is a smart, surprisingly gentle piece that fairly accurately portrays a milieu I have some experience with. Ostensibly, the piece is about the relaxation of dancing restrictions at a small, conservative Christian college, but what it quickly turns into is a picture of the way those schools are changing, the surprising (to the author, and probably many NYT readers) decency of its students, and the way that these school manage to carve out a unique, separate college experience from the vast majority of what's offered in modern higher education.

I went to a similar school for part of my college career (though I finished at a state university), and the article captures the experience surprisingly well. Oppenheimer notes the preponderance of, well, less than mainstream beliefs at the college, "In my week at J.B.U., I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time." And yet he also thinks that the students he met there were, "for the most part, the kind of thoughtful undergraduates whom top secular colleges would be proud to have." This despite an overwhelmingly conservative political outlook: pro-Bush, pro-Iraq war, mostly anti-abortion (I suspect the way he got the middling figures he got on abortion was by including those who believed it should be legal in cases like rape, incest, and life of the mother as believing that it should be legal in some circumstances). Oppenheimer makes a little more of their differences than I might have, of course--finding that only a third would oppose homosexuals teaching in schools doesn't seem like strong evidence for openness toward gays--but he seems to get that many of the students are independent minded, not Christian zombies.

The line, though, that most struck me, was this one: "The only thing they all agreed on was that there was something special about their campus culture, even the parts they disagreed with." These schools aren't perfect (far from it), and they are faced with a constant struggle over how and when to modernize, but these schools, in many ways, are some of the few places that preserve the old small college experience that's been eaten away by the excess and debauchery of the modern university--wide-eyed kids away from home in the middle of nowhere without much money, getting into mild amounts of trouble, but surrounded mostly by thoughtful individuals bent on reading, learning, and thinking through the problems of life.

The true definition of riveting

Boostery hack critics who like to get quoted in ads love to throw around the term "riveting." But I suspect not many of them really know what it means. It's just one of those words, like "visceral," that has entered the pop culture critic's jargon and come to mean "good," maybe in an exciting sort of way. So, being the helpful guy I am, I looked it up:

Riveting (adj):

1. that which holds (the eye, attention, etc.) firmly.

2. 24, especially any scene with Jack Bauer.

Riveting, it's clear, was a word invented to describe everyone's favorite action blast of a television show, 24, the most extreme macho fantasy of the last decade and, not coincidentally, the fictional show that most reflects our nation's views—or at least its fears—regarding the war on terror. Intentionally over the top in almost every possible way, the show posits a world where terror has become a regular part of the American landscape. This season it's especially true. Instead of trying to prevent an imminent attack, the show's hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), is trying to put a stop to a terror wave that's already in progress. Fortunately, Bauer, a do-whatever-it-takes public protector, is the epitome of the modern action hero: a hypercompetent, single-minded terrorist killin' machine who, through 6 seasons, has never stopped to eat, sleep, or use the restroom. In fact, he once actually died and then continued working. Talk about productivity levels--that's devotion to your job.

Mostly, of course, 24 is built to relentlessly bludgeon its viewers with suspense. Each and every week, it straps you in, pulls out the pliers and the blowtorch, and goes to work—and it's jarringly effective. Partly this is due to the creative lengths that the show's writers go to in order to drum up suspense. In the same way that horror movie mavens attempt to satisfy hardcore gore fiends with ever more creative methods of death and dismemberment, the writers of 24 seek to jolt viewers with continually more twisted situations for their hero, Jack Bauer.

Thankfully for all of the besieged residents of 24's America, Bauer is up to all of them. He's Superman, except he doesn't need powers; he's traded the suit, cape, and American flag for a pistol, a cell phone and the ability to override any order, public or private, simply by barking, "I'm a federal agent."

This season looks like most of the others: explosions, mad plots, terrorists with bad accents and what seems to be unlimited funding and manpower. Surely by this point the henchman's union must be demanding some sort of extra compensation for any job that requires facing off against Bauer. He takes out machine gun-toting terrorists by the dozen; we don't need a surge—just send Bauer to Baghdad.

Mentions

I'm sure David Denby's New Yorker essay on the future of movies in the internet age will provoke a lot of discussion amongst the blogogeeks (John Podhoretz has already weighed in with agreement), but for now I'll just say that I think he gets a lot right, but that even in doing so, he misses some of the good ways in which film will evolve as a medium.

And I probably should've mentioned this last week, but the New York Observer has a review of (semi) fallen TNR critic Lee Siegel's book of criticism, Falling Upwards, that's worth reading.

Hostility

I suspect several of you will be interested in this L.A. Times piece riffing on the meat-n-guts splattered poster for Hostel II (not for the squeamish) and the (supposedly) increasingly gory nature of movies and television. I'll admit that when I was a teenager I'd wax ecstatic over any film with the "bravery" to pound us with really shocking gore. This can probably be attributed to pretty basic teen angst and rebelliousness. But I've since come (somewhat) to my senses. I don't mind hard violence too much if it adds some value to the film, and I certainly still have a taste for excess and over-the-top in film, but I'm increasingly wary of the base, exploitative nature of films like Hostel and Saw. In the article, the marketing director responsible for the photo beams with pride as he claims that the poster is "extremely disturbing. You know those poor girls are in for it." It's that sort of frank admittance that the film is solely devoted to gory titillation that bothers me. I find it repulsive in the way of Laguna Beach, daytime talk shows, or cheesy praise music: It's unrepentantly shallow and pandering, lacking even the dumb-fun enthusiasm of a good guilty pleasure.

Dexter: Blood on the Wall

I have to admit: I was apprehensive about Dexter. For one, the premise—a serial killer who works as a police blood spatter analyst—seemed far too consciously offbeat and pleased with itself. And while I loved the satirical amorality of American Psycho as much as the next yuppie-hater, and am quite fond of Seven and Silence of the Lambs, I’m suspicious of any “entertainment” that looks positioned to add to the mythic grandeur of the American serial killer—especially when, like Dexter, it appears ready to ask you not just to give the killer respect, but sympathy. [Mild spoilers ahead]

And in some respects, I was right to be suspicious. Dexter takes the American Psycho route of presenting a fit, attractive, totally affectless serial killer as its protagonist. But instead of allowing us to feel revulsion at such a despicable human being, it asks us to relate, to empathize. And, just as American Psycho conflated disgust between serial killing with our natural antipathy toward the solipsistic materialism of urban yuppie culture, Dexter pulls a similar bait and switch by playing on our natural sympathy for cops, guys with girlfriends and sisters, and vigilantes (crime fighters) who bring the bad guys to justice. Dexter is someone who, by the usual rules of TV narrative, ought to be a good guy; he’s a serial killer, yes, but the deck is stacked in his favor. Occasionally the show gets nervous and backs off, trying to frame its central idea as a question—it is possible to have sympathy for such a cold blooded killer?—but mostly it simply tells us that we should, that it’s okay to look kindly on such a man, that it’s wrong to merely judge him a monster.

This is a dangerous route to go, because it essentially instructs people to ignore their moral sense and to refuse to cast judgment. Dexter’s murderous habit, we’re to understand, isn’t his fault—it’s simply the way he’s wired. The show takes pains never to get too graphic with his murders, never to dig too deep into his rituals and fetishes, never to have him murder an innocent by mistake. It’s a kindler, gentler portrait of a serial killer, one you can take home to meet the folks (or at least the kids—he’s got an attractive, divorced girlfriend, after all). The Sopranos may have humanized its murderous thugs for us, but it never let us forget for too long that Tony and his associates may have been lovable in some respects, but they were also violent gangsters who committed despicable acts. Dexter glosses over its protagonist's gory predilections, making them safe and easy to condone.

That said, the show is often quite captivating. Sure, the shifts in tone we occasionally awkward; early episodes, especially, contained numerous disjointed lurches from light, goody satire to dark, brooding thriller. And, as Alan Sepinwall points out, some of the subplots didn’t work—especially those involving police department infighting—but the primary story was played rather well. The arcs that mattered most (those dealing with Dexter’s father, sister, and the ice truck killer) came through. The revelations about the ice truck killer, I think, were handled particularly well, and in the final few episodes he made an incredibly fascinating, spooky villain. My biggest complaint is that ITK didn’t live through the season’s end. He was such a complex creature—especially in relationship to Dexter—that it would’ve been great to see a season built around his torment of Dexter now that both are fully aware of their relationship.

In the end, I think it’s ITK—Dexter’s truly uninhibited mirror image—that makes the more compelling character. A good guy serial killer is novel, of course (and I’m sure that went a long way toward selling the show), but the way Dexter is presented seems designed to avoid complexity rather than confront it. He is, in the end, just a updated version of Batman—a man with a dark past that drives him to violent action, yet channels it into “good.” But ITK is a real killer, one who murders unabashedly and without reason, and yet still claims to have the moral high ground—or perhaps claims to be above morality altogether. Now that’s a character of real complexity; yet as soon as the show revealed his true nature, it killed him off. For a series that so clearly wants to be seen as bold, innovative, and edgy, that’s a remarkably timid move.

Mmmmm, HDMI cables...

I was going to write something about how the obnoxiousness of people in general and bloggers in specific gloating over their new electronics purchases (mostly flat panel televisions) is the modern day equivalent of showing off baby pictures. Yes, it's wonderful, I'm so happy for you, but does anyone other than you really care? But why bother? The Office already beat me to it.

And yes, my new TV is pretty freaking sweet.

Deconstructing Braff

This is so genius I can't even believe it. More gushing comments, etc. [FYI: The accompanying image is kind of NSFW.]

The man I seek is off by himself in a corner, clearly intoxicated -- not with alcohol, but with music. So with a reverent wave, I approach Zach Braff. He holds up a finger to silence me as he listens to his iPod. After 20 seconds of what can only be described as intense grooving, he removes the headphones.

"Sorry -- I was just listening to this great new artist called Cat Power. I discovered her out of nowhere when she did a 40-minute set on KCRW followed by 2 Amoeba in-stores. But pretty soon she won't be just my little secret anymore." He is referring to Cat Power's inclusion on his soundtrack to Staring At Nothing, his latest movie, which stars Braff, Scarlett Johannson, Jessica Biel, Keira Knightley, Jessica Alba, Anne Hathaway, and Dustin Hoffman.

"It's about how strange this thing we call life can be," explains Braff. "Like in one scene my character meets a guy who walks around covered in bees. And there's a guy who only talks in Pig Latin. And a guy whose guts are all on the outside of his body. And a guy who lives in a trash can like Oscar the Grouch. And -- spoiler alert -- the ending is that my character meets a guy who walks around with chopsticks up his nose. That's when he learns that sometimes love is just a four-letter bed where your heart sleeps."

Addendum: All of this pretty much just goes to show that Reihan is right, even when he does weird things like put his blog posts in the comments section. Of course, maybe this is to be expected when you're the kind of guy who casually admits to having a "favorite social scientist." Favorite food? Favorite movie? Favorite pair of jeans? Okay. "Favorite social scientist?" Extreme. Awesomeness.

Just FYI

Jonathan Last is on a freaking roll.

And I'm still doing the Jeremy Lott thing. (There's even a picture of me, which, come to think of it, might be a disincentive for you to hit the site. Hrrmmm.)

Poorly executed, yet not

Matt Yglesias' explanation of Time's Person of the Year award (which, as you're probably aware, was won by Me this year) is priceless:

I think you've got to give credit to Time magazine. The Person of the Year concept is basically unsound, is obviously basically unsound, is poorly executed each year, is expected to be poorly executed each year, and nevertheless no matter what kind of silly choice they make it gets buzz and sells magazines. Meaning, at the end of the day, that it's actually a really good idea that's always executed well. Other publications would die for a formula that tried and true.

And you've also got to sit back and ponder the ludicrous awesomeness of the interwebs in specific and 2006 in general when you get Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Tim Lee volleying back and forth over the intricacies of the coming robot economy and using Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel--which, at 8, was the first adult novel I ever read--as evidence. The nerds have truly won. Long live the future.

Nothing to do with Stargate spinoffs

You should always devour each and every issue of EPPC's wonderful technology and culture journal, The New Atlantis, immediately and fully upon its release. However, if you haven't had a look at the latest issue (it's a busy month, I know), let me especially recommend Brian Boyd's "The Dotcomrade," which tackles the evolving nature of friendship in an online world, and Sonny Bunch's "Techno-Horror in Hollywood," which looks at technology fears in Hollywood J-horror remakes and their original foreign counterparts. And I would be remiss not to mention my colleague Iain Murray's essay on the meta-fight over climate change rhetoric (the issue is so contentious that we don't just fight over the issue itself, but the right to talk about the issue as well).

Throwing Rocks

Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives; as such, the only people qualified to lead a present-day revolution would never actually do so.

Vive la complacency, right?

School's Out for The Wire

The fourth season of The Wire is over, and it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what I was already fairly certain of—that it’s far and away the best, most brilliant, most powerful dramatic series in the history of television. Calling something Shakespearean is kind of a joke, but if anything qualifies, this is it: the perfectly composed and executed narratives; the expert balance of pathos, humor, and suspense; the dialog, at once so natural, entertaining, and layered with hidden meaning; the sprawling cast of fascinatingly drawn characters. The show is hard to write about because I just end up spewing superlatives.

And, as Ezra Klein points out, it’s so good that pretty much everyone likes the show: Klein, of course, as well as fellow progressive Matt Yglesias, and folks on the other end of the size-of-government spectrum too. And it’s not just liberals and libertarians either: The Weekly Standard ran a positive review by Sonny Bunch at the beginning of this season, and I know it even has fans in the right’s paleocon wings.

Klein thinks this is a result of the show’s unrelenting dour outlook:

Nearly everyone likes the show. That's possibly because it's a masterful story, expertly told, and exquisitely acted. It may also be because it's little kinder to state intervention than personal initiative. While none of the problems would be solved by charter schools, the public schools aren't making progress either. Indeed, it may be the radical apocalypticism of The Wire's vision that makes it so palatable: By offering absolutely no hope, it evades arguments over solutions.

I’d agree. If anything, it doesn’t go far enough. The Wire doesn’t just “evade” arguments over solutions, it posits that no solutions actually exist. As Reason’s Radley Balko notes, the show constantly suggests that “even well-intentioned public policy tends to pervert incentives,” and yet it doesn’t hold much hope for individual achievement either. As Klein writes, “Every one of the kids who'd taken affirmative steps towards improving their lives had seen their efforts destroyed by circumstance.”

And yet, despite the show’s hardline defeatism, it offers a real respect for the dignity and humanity of its characters—every one of them. The cops, the manager/officer class, the politicians, the dealers, the teachers—some of them may come off as jerks or fools, but they all get a fair shake. Not once does the show simply give us a “bad person.” You can, of course, point to the pains the show has taken to get its audience to respect the dealers. But even on the other side, there are no simple bad guys. At the end of the first season, Rawls (a Major then, as I recall), a deft, scheming, manager-class cop who is one of the show’s most often unlikable characters, gives McNulty an amazing, bracing pep talk in the hospital lobby after Kima’s shooting. He is a scheming, self-centered game player, but he’s not without loyalty to his fellow cops, and you have to respect his drive to get things done, no matter what.

The Wire hates bureaucracy, and it hates the system, the man, the rules that pen people in and keep them down—no matter what form they take. But what really gives the show its emotional core is that it loves people, all people, even if they can be awful, and even if they’re part of the system, willingly or not, that it despises.

The Passion of Mel

In my review of Apocalypto, I posed the question of whether the traditionalist motifs Mel Gibson wove into the film were really just a moral gloss on an excuse to indulge in his love of primal mayhem. Rod Dreher hasn’t seen the movie, but based on previous Gibson films, he seems to think the answer is yes:

I suspect that Gibson is … indulging his passion for savagery -- a passion he might not fully understand -- and attempting to justify it by saying that he intends it for a moral purpose. If he knows what he's doing, he's a hypocrite. But if he doesn't -- and my guess is that he is blind to his real motives -- then he's a tragic figure.

He then references my review, particularly the line “Apocalypto simultaneously celebrates both man’s peaceful, communal side and his most primal, violent instincts,” and responds, simply, “’Celebrates.’ On that word hangs everything.”

Dreher is right about the importance of that word, I think. Because that contradiction really is what's essential to the film: It promotes both a rural, peaceful lifestyle and unrelenting violence; it abhors the decadence of modern, urban society, but also plays directly to that decadence by delivering on our desire for wanton violence as entertainment. And though I think it's useful to wonder if one part is just an excuse for the other, I don't think you can really declare one the "real" intention, the "correct" meaning. Both parts, however divergent, are equally true.

The movie is honest about its passion for communal life; it’s also fiercely dedicated to wringing every last bit of cinematic adrenalin from its violence. That’s a major part of what makes the movie so interesting—that it fully embodies both ideas despite the tensions between them.

And I don’t think that, as Dreher suspects, Gibson is blind to his instincts. I think he recognizes his hang-ups and tries to resolve them in his films. He knows he’s got a penchant for violence, and he knows the dark places that might lead. So he uses that drive for something he believes to be good, channeling his mania rather than letting it control him. He puts his bloodlust in service of defending his most basic beliefs. It’s the Dexter approach to movie directing—a sort of vigilante filmmaking, using scandalous means to what he believes to be a moral ends. And the result is some really powerful filmmaking that uses blunt force to in service of some fascinating, even inspiring, ideals: Braveheart, about oppression and freedom; The Passion, about the persecution, suffering, and dedication of Christ; and Apocalypto, about the bonds of family, community, and nature. It's edgy material, but it makes for really good cinema. Bloody good.

Bloggers review movies. Whodathunkit?

At last: Larison posts his Apocalypto review! Read, and be amazed. I'll probably have more to say about his review and Rod Dreher's "here's why I'm not seeing Apocalypto" post soon.

And while you're exploring religion and the movies, Anthony Sacramone has one of the finer reviews of Apocalypto I've read, along with a rather amusing (and quite accurate) take on The Fountain that skewers its shallowness while praising its ambition.

Miramax Gets Churched Up

Apparently, the Weinsteins think there's money in the silver-screen God racket:

The latest hoppers-on aboard the post-Passion, pro-faith movie-distributing train? That'd be Harvey and Bob W, whose Weinstein Co. has just announced a deal with Christian shingle Impact Entertainment to (eventually) put out six faith-based flicks a year.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this, except that, well, markets for everything, right?

Addendum: Over at Looking Closer, Jeffrey Overstreet has some critical thoughts on the creation of what he calls "Contemporary Christian Cinema."

Just Super

If you haven’t been keeping up with Heroes, now is the time to hit up iTunes for back episodes and get with the program. The show lacks any of the grimy moral ambiguity of Battlestar Galactica or The Wire, and it can’t touch 24 in terms of deliriously souped-up action thrills. But it’s genuinely got something that none of those shows, and, as far as I know, no other show on television, has right now: heart.

The show takes recent trends in superhero films and expands on them. The new crop of superhero movies has succeeded largely due to its willingness to focus on the heroes as ordinary folks with ordinary problems. One one hand, they provide an opportunity to witness the special effects extravaganzas that we demand from our monster movie hits, but they also promise us a decent human core story about a guy with girl problems, a hard childhood, or trouble fitting in. The heroes in those films are involved in epic struggles to save the world, but, like all of us, they’re also just trying to get along in it and be happy.

Heroes expands on that idea by shifting the emphasis almost entirely to the ordinary and the everyday. And though it doesn’t have BSG’s depth (or Lost’s illusion of it), it’s got a solidly engaging story arc and, most importantly, tremendously endearing characters. They are, for lack of a better word, cute—and yet not a bit cloying, not a bit irritating. They react as you might expect both to the strange and ordinary events in their lives, alternately incredulous and accepting, and, most importantly, they share information consistently and sensibly.

And unlike so many of the long-form narratives in our current television landscape, there’s very little overt cynicism to the show. Oh sure, bad things happen, and there’s distrust and deceit and painful decisions (this is drama, after all), but the show wants to showcase and celebrate decency and good-heartedness rather than negativity and dysfunction.

Yes, the show has problems—its chance meetings between characters occasionally seem arbitrary, and there’s an ill-defined but undeniable glossy soap feel to some of it (creator Tim Kring's previous show was Crossing Jordan). But it’s really a fun, determinedly good-spirited take on what it might actually be like to just suddenly sprout superpowers in the midst of a very ordinary life.

Wikiality

The NYT Magazine's cover story on the intelligence community's use of Web 2.0 information-sharing tools like blogs and wikis does an expectedly good job of covering the issue's bases: advantages (faster information development, more communication), disadvantages (inability to keep secrets), legal and cultural criticisms (laws that prohibit cross-agency sharing, civil liberties violations that occur from massive information collection and analysis). What interested me most was its description, somewhat familiar to Wired-reading geeks out there, but still nicely stated, of the benefits of information dispersal capabilities of newer web technologies:

The C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly… What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

… In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically.

The reason this works, when it does, is because of the assumption that in a massive, dispersed information-sharing community, bad faith either doesn't exist or is mitigated by a tide of good actors. The counterpoint to this is the Colbert notion of "wikiality"--the mass movement of information sharers to game the system and produce inaccurate results. You can argue that there's no real incentive for such activity, nor is there an effective mechanism for organizing the large dispersed groups that it would require. But we've already seen similar schemes work with other popular information collection tools: Googlebombing is an overt attempt to distort the value and meaning of information in order to alter public perception. Web 2.0 knowledge sharing works because it assumes a collective incentive to organize and disseminate trustworthy information will drown out individual bad actors; it fails, however, to account for the way mass media can mobilize groups to form a collective interest in acting in bad faith.

Sad Feet

Over at Grist, Yolanda Crous, in an essay on the enviro-friendly kids movie, Happy Feet, tells us how bothered she was as a kid by hammy after-school specials with "messages." Now, thankfully, she's been reformed and is no longer irritated with Happy Feet's environmental preaching:

The good news: I was not annoyed by Happy Feet's environmental message. The movie manages to introduce complex issues (food chain disruption) in surprisingly subtle ways (birds start stalking baby penguins because they don't have enough fish to eat).

But then comes the rub. The problem with the movie, as she sees it, isn't that it's too preachy--it's that it's not preachy enough!

Everything else in the movie annoyed me... [this] cookie-cutter cartoon-with-an-environmental-message also comes with a few unadvertised messages -- and socially irresponsible ones at that. Apparently, all females in the South Pole are hip-swaying, breathy-voiced, man-crazed pushovers, all Mexicans are short, and all African-Americans are superfly playas. It seems Antarctica is a land of overwrought stereotypes as well as overwrought singing.

It's comforting to know that even if you grew up bored and exasperated by the hammy, obvious messages of after school specials and "very special episodes," you can mature into a decent, stereotype-aware, socially-responsible California liberal who knows that, however much kids might just want guilt-free entertainment and fun, what those youngsters really need are hearty liberal morals and political correctness.