Me on the FCC

I've got a short piece on the court's rebuke of the FCC's indecency calls against Fox in today's NRO.

“I cuss, you cuss, we all cuss for asparagus.” Now, thanks to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals, we’ll all be able to do so on network television. Last week, the court took a look at an indecency charge leveled by the FCC against Fox for on-air profanity and said, roughly, “To heck with that!”

About a Vlog

Julian Sanchez begins to explore--quite successfully, I'll add--the real potential of political vlogging (still the worst bit of terminology to gain significant traction on this here web thing--even worse, I think, than "liberaltarian"). I've been playing with various prosumer and home-level digital video editing tools for 7 or 8 years now, and I've wondered when this sort of thing would take off. For a long time, it's been too technical, too time-consuming, and/or too expensive to do at the no-budget blogger level, and though it's still not exactly a snap (you can write a blog post in just a few minutes; a vlog like Julian's is bound to take at least a couple of hours), it's gotten to the point where it's doable, at least for full-time stay-at-home writers like Sanchez. Anyway, good show; it may be time for me to start trying something like this (after, of course, I finish the stack of books I'm supposed to read and numerous essays and articles I'm supposed to write over the next few weeks).

Be My Friend, Obama?

At NRO, I've got a piece on Obama's Facebook cult today...

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.” If that’s true, then no man, or at least no politician, has grown as much in recent months as Barack Obama.

Of course, when Emerson wrote the line, a “friend” was still likely to be someone you’d met in person, and the word itself was still a noun. These days, a “friend” might be any random Internet onlooker, and the verb “to friend” has surfaced on our lexicon’s fringes. Social-networking websites like Facebook and MySpace have made “friending” so easy as to be meaningless, and have established the Internet “friend count” as a status symbol. Politicians have always been at the forefront of the fake-friend game, so it’s hardly surprising that all of the top-tier 2008 presidential candidates are using social-networking sites to reach out to prospective voters. But while all the contenders have come to play in the online sandbox, it is Obama who has reaped the most rewards.

Obama’s social-network campaigning is unmatched, with more than double the MySpace “friends” of any other candidate, as well as thousands more Facebook messages and a customized social-networking site of his own. In these online communities, the barriers between politician and citizen are reduced, and the formal conventions of politics dissolve amidst the casual protocols of IMs and text messages. Instead of showing up on a field to wave signs from a distance, Obama’s Internet fans come to hang out, to chat, to talk about themselves and their lives, to send “virtual gifts”—in other words, to be Obama’s friend.

Deadlines Kill

I know I've been lax about updating this thing, but it'll just have to wait a little while longer. I'm under hellish deadline pressure, and adding even some no-pressure content creation right now would probably cause a tear in my brain, if not an outright implosion. For now, though my latest NRO piece, "Jacked In," on the how the Presidental candidates are using social networking websites, is up. Now if only I can get some work done, I might have time to be social myself. Here's a teaser for the piece:

The art of campaign politics is, in many ways, the art of networking. It’s a practice that’s hard coded into Washington’s DNA. Washington, or at least political Washington, lives and breathes by endless, obsessive networking — coffee meet-ups, happy hours, cocktail parties, and business cards power-blasted at anyone with a pulse and a Blackberry. To live and work in D.C. is to be caught in the perpetual rush to know and befriend — or at least make genial contact with — everyone. During election season, the town’s network culture expands as candidates take their campaigns — which are really just massive networking drives — on the road. But even the most relentless parade of stump speeches and town halls can only touch the few souls who are physically present. Consequently, candidates are increasingly using the Internet, with its limitless geographic scope, to connect with voters, substituting human interaction for web-based interactivity. And what better way to press the digital flesh than via the new wave of social-networking sites?

Me on Geeky Tech Stuff at NRO

I've got a piece on Tim Wu's wireless Carterphone paper up at NRO today.

Not surprisingly, Wu, a leader in the fight to regulate the Internet (he coined the phrase “net neutrality”), thinks the wireless industry could benefit from greater regulation too. He makes several major recommendations, including applying neutrality rules to wireless networks, and enacting a “wireless Carterphone” policy that would prohibit wireless operators from approving the devices attached to their networks. The paper offers some useful coverage of the complexities and weaknesses of the wireless industry, but his major recommendations — all predicated on the notion that the wireless industry is essentially uncompetitive — don’t seem warranted. At best, Wu offers solid suggestions to the wireless industry about how it might improve its service offerings, but too often his report reads like a list of consumer gripes designed to prod telecom bureaucrats into various regulatory moves.

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.

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).

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.

That is, like, soooo meta

Over at TechLiberation, Tim Lee and Jim Harper invite fellow tech wonks and internerds to assist them with a--hold on for dear life while I type this--peer produced paper on peer production. It's like if Charlie Kaufman were to write a policy paper. Just thinking about it puts my brain in the gravitron. Yeesh.

And while you're there, read Adam Thierer's awesome smackdown of the critics of so-called "predatory pricing" of game consoles. Paragraphs like this are what 2006 is all about, kids:

Unless he wants to make the argument that video game consoles have suddenly become life essential goods on par with food and water, his argument is just plain silly. After all, would anyone die if they had to wait a few weeks before they bought a stand-alone video game console at regular retail prices? How spoiled are we as a culture when we're even having a debate about fair video game console allocation?

Personally, I'm waiting for some indignant to socialist to just come out and demand console game equality for all citizens. And that means two controllers. No skimping!