Saturday, April 12, 2003

Venture Capital Model When we see presentations (needless to say, a daily occurence), we are looking for a many things: a good idea and a team that can convince us of its ability to execute on the idea; an interestingly big market; a hard technical problem and the right engineers to solve it; a nice revenue model with a defendable sales channel. We are not looking for brilliance in PowerPoint design. 11:00:28 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

In the Western view, the conferring of "grace" is an act of God, granted to individual human beings either because the merit it (Pelagius) or because God in His inscrutable wisdom has so ordained (Augustine). In the Eastern view, however, "grace" is a permanent state, implied in the act of creation itself and potentially available to any human being merely by virtue of having been created. In this view, the way the believer approaches God is through the consciousness of his own spiritual personality and by studying the example of Christ in order to cope better with the dangers that await him on his journey through life. (Figes) 2:48:20 PM    comment  []

Friday, May 24, 2002

"The events of 1989 mark a decisive shift in the Zeitgeist: History has zigged or zagged. No simple lesson follows, but it is clear that radicalism and the utopian spirit that sustains it have ceased to be major political or even intellectual forces." --Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia 11:59:43 AM    comment  []

Saturday, May 18, 2002

In Praise of Balance by Peter Berkowitz, Contributing Editor, The New Republic Online Review of The Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America, Norma Thompson, Yale University Press "Since our opinions, even under the best circumstances, tend to embrace only a portion of the truth, and because opposing opinions rarely turn out to be entirely wrong, it is crucial to supplement our opinions with alternative points of view." " In politics (as Mill maintains in Considerations on Representative Government), the liberal way requires an appreciation of the need to accommodate both the party of permanence and order and the party of progress and freedom, though the liberal argument for balance in politics prizes permanence and order for the contribution that they make to progress and freedom, and not for themselves or for the sake of any other human goods that they might promote." " . . . liberalism, in the guise of reason and fairness, tilts us in our undertakings toward its favored good, freedom, so democracy, under the same guise, inclines us to embrace its highest ideal, which is equality, not only in those spheres where justice demands it but also in those where justice does not and perhaps should not." " . . . [Thompson's] central substantive claim that ancients and moderns are impressively united in agreement that success for a political regime as well as for an individual depends upon a weaving of masculine and feminine propensities . . . " " [Aristotle's] understanding of moral virtue--according to which the mean or standard for right conduct is the 'mean relative to us,' the standard relative to the concrete individual and the particular circumstances in which he must act . . . by expounding the idea of an objective standard that is nevertheless highly sensitive to context, by providing a kind of anti-formula formula for moral virtue--excellence consists in doing the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reason--Aristotle provides an understanding of ethics that surpasses in insight and suitability the childish relativism and the arid rationalism into which today's democratic theorists constantly slip." "When a certain feminine modesty is abandoned as a guiding moral and political principle, when "all the decent drapery of life is to be torn off," the complexities and the depths of human nature are not revealed but obscured, for it is part of our nature to make laws, to observe social conventions, and to embody wise restraints in tradition." "Mary Shelley depicts in Frankenstein the knowledge-seeking and world- mastering impulses, inimical to every harmonization, embedded in the spirit of Enlightenment. Victor Frankenstein's exploitation of science to play God not only produces a monster cut off from human ties and touch, but also leads to the destruction of his own domestic tranquillity." "According to Tocqueville, the powerful social force that modern democracy brings to the fore, in the name of equality, is a relentless drive to uniformity in thought and conduct. . . . While men were governed by the calculating principle of 'self-interest rightly understood,' women's education revolved around virtue and self-discipline. Women, who stayed at home out of the public sphere, were the guardians of mores, of the habits of heart and mind on which decent conduct, in private life as well as in public life, depended." "The instability or contradiction in domestic relations that Tocqueville's analysis brought to light--democracy in America called upon women to play a role that was inconsistent with the equality and openness to which democracy was devoted . . . " " . . . it is by no means obvious that we have found an alternative way to ensure the preservation and the transmission of the habits of heart on which democracy depends." " . . . the essence of statecraft is not rhetoric but judgment or prudence, which Burke called "the god of this lower world." Judgment is grounded in experience of human affairs and knowledge of human nature. To get things done requires judgment, including judgments about rhetoric, about what must be said and how it must be said in order to get things done. For the sake of democracy and for the sake of justice, rhetoric, which is as useful to the vicious despot and conniving demagogue as it is to the enlightened statesman, must remain judgment's handmaiden." " [Thompson:] 'What aspects of human nature, when recognized and kept in some basic form of balance, provide the strongest foundations for the agreements and arrangements that a flourishing political community needs?' To pursue such an investigation would force into the open important issues . . . " " . . . manly or assertive qualities--those propensities that cluster around courage, including hard- headedness and hard-heartedness--and those that have been traditionally thought of as female or caregiving qualities--those that cluster around gentleness, including compassion and the tender sentiments." "Balance in the human spirit, which must not be mistaken for ambivalence or splitting the difference or playing both sides against the middle, is neither bland nor bourgeois nor boring. It is not a resigned concession to partiality, but a bold gamble on wholeness. It is not the midway point between virtue and vice, but an artful arrangement of virtues that enables them to supplement and to strengthen rather than to subvert each other. Since it involves an openness to the variety of human passions and possibilities, balance is a liberal imperative. Since courage without gentleness is destructive and gentleness without courage is defenseless, balance is a human good. Since balance is, for men and for women, not only an extreme but also a perfection, it is genuinely a thing of beauty to behold." 2:37:52 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real, Part I by Curtis White [Review and Criticism of The Western Canon by Harold Bloom] " . . . the question 'of what does the greatness of the great works consist?' is exactly the right question . . . we all should try, to understand what it is that makes for the greatness of the great . . ." [re The Western Canon] "Bloom has taken far less care than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them into one monstrous and threatening whole. . . called variously the School of Resentment or simply . . . cheerleaders. He also strongly implies. . . that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author [which] was a way of showing, what any artist knows, that the sublimely unified self of Romantic genius was always contaminated by that which was not-self . . . " "[Derrida's] deconstructive criticism 'had no other motive than discovering and eliciting the incoherences of a text." . . . Anyone who has taken the trouble to understand Derrida will tell you that this putative incoherence was the discovery that the possibility for the Western metaphysics of presence was dependent on its impossibility, an insight that Derrida shared with Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Buddhist philosopher of sunyata, Nagarjuna, who wrote that being was emptiness and that emptiness was empty too." "Bloom . . . does make a good faith effort to account for the greatness of the great . . . I would like to follow his logic on two principle concepts that form the bedrock of his defense of the canon: the 'anxiety of influence' and the 'uncanny.'" " . . . influence of the work of the past becomes . . . a competition, for the writers of the present. For the would-be canonical writers experience anxiety not only about their relationship to the talents and the works of the past but also about their own mortality. Thus, to join the canon means to compete not only with the past but also with the present in a drive for the qualified immortality of joining the canon and thereby joining communal memory. The principal means through which writers win their . . . struggle with the past and win out over the fear of their own mortality is through 'originality,' what the reader experiences as the 'uncanny.'" "On the other side, the reader's side, reading, for Bloom, is the 'proper use of one's solitude,' a 'solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's mortality.' In How to Read and Why, Bloom writes, Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life. " . . . Bloom's aesthetic of loneliness allows very little for art's 'truth' function." [Discussion and Criticism] " . . . Adorno in particular liked to point out, art needs criticism (which was really, for him, another word for philosophy) in order to complete the fullness of its social as well as its artistic intentions. (Adorno: 'Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.')" "Shklovsky wrote, 'If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. . . . Automization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.' [Shklovsky and Heidegger]sought to oppose poetry to prose for the purpose of the return of perception, for the refreshing of the language that captures perception, and ultimately for the clarifying of our very humanity." "Shklovsky wrote, 'And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.'" "This restoration of those capacities that are most innately human is accomplished through "enstrangement" [which] seeks to emancipate the work from the leaden forms of the past by describing things as if seen for the first time, by telling stories from unusual points of view, or by placing things out of context. Most broadly, enstrangement is at work whenever an image leads us 'to a 'vision' of this object rather than a mere 'recognition.' ' " " . . . unlike Harold Bloom's account, the artistic, social and human motivations for artist and audience are shared and consequential. We are not talking about [a competition]whose triumph over tradition is its own hollow thrill of victory, but a triumph whose purpose is the generalization for both reader and writer of the aesthetic experience understood as the quintessence of human experience. As for the proponents of criticism on the race-class-gender axis . . . Shklovsky's lesson is simple: the art of enstrangement itself is the most consequential social act. It is what art has to give, without apology, to the social." "Shklovsky also calls forcefully to our attention the importance of 'complexity' and 'difficulty.' Why, one might ask, is the greatness of a work often tied to its complexity? . . . The difference is that a Beethoven will test the limits of the diatonic, or work against the expectations of the diatonic for dramatic effect, or even leave that confine for brief and startling moments. . . . it seems to be telling us something both truer and more complete about the world in which we live. It is more adequate to a sophisticated sense of the real . . . " "Shklovsky pushes this understanding of complexity by introducing the aesthetic force of 'difficulty.' . . . difficulty is also about the risk of moving outside of the familiar . . . outside of what Derrida likes to call our 'closure.' The virtue of the difficult, or what we often call the "experimental," is that it keeps the necessary stability of our "closure" (which we surely need in order to share a common culture and live together in it), but it keeps that closure from becoming something deadening. The problem that art helps us face, and great art helps us face best, is the problem of creating social stability without creating a state of administered conformity. In other words, art helps us to think what it would mean to live together as a whole and yet be fully human as individuals. In art, we speak of this dialectic as the relationship between tradition and innovation."   3:28:11 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, May 03, 2002

Japan’s Gross National Cool . . . Japan’s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. " . . . Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower." "Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values—at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with 'Super Flat' art, 'devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.' 'We don’t have any religion,' painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. 'We just need the big power of entertainment.'" But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dismal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting certain kinds of mass culture—a technique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemony around the world. If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century, when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms." "Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion." " . . . a constellation of factors distinct from the economy and its woes has kept yen flowing to the pop industries and other cultural media that Japan projects around the world so effectively: demographics that favor youth and their whims, a reliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputation for cutting-edge technology." "A generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there is power. Not political power, not yet anyway, but consumer power, lots of it." "Japan’s history of remarkable revivals suggests that the outcome of that transformation is more likely to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels of communication, Japan already possesses a vast reserve of potential soft power. And with the cultural reach of a superpower already in place, it’s hard to imagine that Japan will be content to remain so much medium and so little message." 2:27:59 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Re: Postmodern Criticism "But an appeal to the "reasonable" ignores what's most important about POMO analysis. POMO tells us that all understanding is interpretive, that other interpretations are possible, and that our interpretation seems right not because it is right but because it's our interpretation. " "It seems like we have two choices: we fall into an indecisive relativism that says that all views are equally valid or we sprain our brains trying to see how there could be a way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. To say that there's a "reasonable way" to do so seems to me to miss the point because it assumes the very thing that we should be stubbing our toes trying to think through." "On the other foot (er, hand), I personally think it's a mistake to assume that we have to choose among fundamental interpretations. We don't get to fly above all interpretations, including our own, picking and choosing among them. We are our stance in the world, a stance given to us by history, culture, language and accident. So, the lesson I take from POMO is that absolutism is a mistake, that humility is warranted, and that we always have to decide among uncertain choices that are themselves delivered by the accident of history." "So, how do we decide whether the post-feminist-meta- Marx-pre-Freudian interpretation of the Book of Job is worth our time? I don't think POMO actually helps us. It's better at freeing up creative interpretations that challenge the status quo than at enabling us to choose among those interpretations. My guess is that such decisions actually come after the fact: we're inspired/energized/heartened by the critique we just read and only afterwards do we try to "justify" why that critique is worthy of belief. Belief is the last in the series. And it's the least interesting. More important: Does it excite you? Does it reveal the world in a way that matters? Does it set the hairs on your neck on edge? Does it give you a chill? " "Could any lesson of the Web be clearer? Belief is nice, but it's not why 500 million of us are here dishing the dirt" [via JOHO] 10:29:01 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, April 27, 2002

Trust is the first casualty of the cult of transparency "SOCRATES did not want his words to go fatherless into the world, transcribed on to tablets or books that could circulate without their author's authentication. So he talked with others on the streets of Athens, but wrote and published nothing. The problems to which Socrates pointed are acute in an age of recirculated "news", public relations, global gossip and internet publication. How can we tell which claims and counter-claims are trustworthy when so much information swirls around us?" "It seems that openness and transparency are set to replace traditions of secrecy and deference. Yet this enthusiasm for more openness has done little to build public trust. If anything, trust has receded as transparency has advanced." "So it is not surprising that public distrust has grown in the very years in which openness and transparency have been so avidly pursued. Transparency destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies, rather than secrecy." "Furthermore, transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed. It may add to uncertainty rather than to trust. Transparency can even encourage people to be less honest, so increasing deception and reducing reasons for trust." "Global transparency and complete openness are not the best ways to build or restore trust. We place and refuse trust not because we have torrents of information, but because we can trace specific information to particular sources we can check." "Socrates's misgivings are not obsolete today. It is very easy to imagine that, in a world where information travels like quicksilver, trust can do the same. It cannot. Placing trust is as demanding today as it was in Athens." 2:04:50 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, April 24, 2002

The Angry People "What are the angry people angry about? . . . it seems to be about traditional values. . . . what really seems to bother them is the loss of certainty; they want to return to a simpler time, one without that disturbing modern mix of people and ideas." " . . . there turns out to be a lot of irrational anger lurking just below the surface of politics as usual. The difference is that here the angry people are already running the country." 3:35:53 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Reading and Revelation " . . . the journey begins to matter more than the arrival . . . there are always additional choices to be made, if one's life is to remain interesting." "The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading struck me with the force of a revelation. . . . It offered an escape route, however temporary, from . . . the speeded- up, mechanized, money-obsessed existence that had somehow become our collective daily life." " . . . I had purposely constructed for myself a life that was marginal to and therefore shielded from the clamoring demands of the marketplace. Well, 'purposely' may not be the right word . . . " "Rereading is certainly both, as I was to discover. You cannot reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay, you will find a little reflected face peering out at you -- the face of your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers, the older one and the younger one. You know there are two of you because you can feel them responding differently to the book. Differently, but not entirely differently: There is a core of experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between the two readings). And this awareness of the separate readers within you makes you appreciate the essential constancy of the literary work, even in the face of your own alterations over time, so that you begin to realize how all the different readings by different people might nonetheless have a great deal in common." 3:30:17 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go There! "That familiar interjection 'whatever' says a lot about the state of mind of college students today. So do the catch phrases 'no problem,' 'not even' and 'don't go there.'" "Indeed, the reluctance of today's students to engage in impassioned debate can be seen as a byproduct of a philosophical relativism, fostered by theories that gained ascendance in academia in the last two decades and that have seeped into the broader culture. While deconstruction promoted the indeterminacy of texts, the broader principle of subjectivity has been embraced by everyone from biographers (like Edmund Morris, whose biography of President Ronald Reagan mixed fact and fiction) to scholars (who have inserted personal testimony in their work to underscore their own biases). Because subjectivity enshrines ideas that are partial and fragmentary by definition, it tends to preclude searches for larger, overarching truths, thereby undermining a strong culture of contestation." "At the same time, multiculturalism and identity politics were questioning the very existence of objective truths and a single historical reality. As the historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob observed in their book, 'Telling the Truth About History,' radical multiculturalists celebrated 'the virtues of fragmentation,' arguing that 'since all history has a political — often a propaganda — function, it is time for each group to rewrite history from its own perspective and thereby reaffirm its own past.'" " . . . the legacy of multiculturalism and identity politics remains potent on college campuses. On one hand, it has made students more accepting of individuals different from themselves, more tolerant of other races, religions and sexual orientations. But this tolerance of other people also seems to have resulted in a reluctance to engage in the sort of impassioned argumentation that many baby boomers remember from their college days. 'It's as though there's no distinction between the person and the argument, as though to criticize an argument would be injurious to the person'" "Outside the classroom, it's a mindset ratified by the PLUR ('Peace, Love, Unity and Respect') T-shirts worn by ravers (whose drug of choice is Ecstasy, which induces warm, fuzzy feelings of communion)." "At the same time, the diminished debate syndrome mirrors the irony-suffused sensibility of many millennial-era students. Irony, after all, represents a form of detachment; like the knee-jerk acceptance of the positions of others, it's a defensive mode that enables one to avoid commitment and stand above the fray." "What are the consequences of students' growing reluctance to debate? Though it represents a welcome departure from the polarized mudslinging of the 90's culture wars, it also represents a failure to fully engage with the world, a failure to test one's convictions against the logic and passions of others. It suggests a closing off of the possibilities of growth and transformation and a repudiation of the process of consensus building. 'It doesn't bode well for democratic practice in this country . . . To keep democracy vital, it's important that students learn to integrate debate into their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive way, when they're in school.'" 3:04:03 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, April 12, 2002

US Political History The New Left of the '60's was replaced after the dream was dead by 1989 by Identity politics. Assimilation was the enemy now, the domestic version of US imperialism. [The Irish] are shown by the author to be jockeying for a place in the charts of victimhood. ... [more] 3:22:04 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, March 15, 2002

Anti-war on terrorism poem by Ani "ani has been writing a new poem inspired by the tragic events of september 11. we have been getting a lot of mail and calls both from folks who have heard ani recite it at recent concerts, and those who have just heard about it. so, even though it is still untitled, and a work in progress, the poem as it is written so far is printed below." ... [poem] 2:23:26 PM  Google It!  comment  []

What Have We Become? "The topic at hand is societies acceptable mediums. Wow, big thoughts coming out of my brain, unheard of. So I have put together a list of these for your entertainment and perhaps to ask a few more questions." ... [more] 1:47:48 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Thursday, March 14, 2002

FRONTLINE INTERVIEW: Robert McChesney, media critic and author " The entertainment companies are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States. Those same companies also own all the film studios, all the major TV networks, and pretty much all the TV stations in the ten largest markets. They own all or part of every single commercial cable channel. They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing. [Entertainment companies] are going to take [teen's] over, and their weaponry is films, music, books, CDs, internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams. That's all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market, to colonize this market. And that's exactly how they approach it. So they look at music as just one small part of it. They aren't music companies; they're moneymaking companies, and music is a weapon that generates money for them. " " . . . I do think it's closely related to politics ultimately, in the broadest sense of the term. I don't think culture on that level operates independent of politics. In fact, I think one of the reasons why the music has been so lame recently in the United States hasn't had anything to do with the music industry or commercialism. It's been a response to the broader demoralization of public life, of civic life, of social life. I think music gets better and culture gets better when people engage socially and politically. The two go hand in hand. . . . the people want controversy in their lives. They want that sense of struggle and conflict. Then you replace it with sort of the Howard Stern-Eminem stuff . . . there's a real need people have that's trying to be met, and the market meets it by giving them a sort of white rage, teen rage groups. . . . It's easy to pick on gay people and minorities and women. . . . If you go out and start picking on the WTO and the people that own the country, now that's another matter. . . . But people want tension. People understand there's something going on in the world--it's not just a "Brady Bunch" world we live in. . . . " "[re MTV] Viacom is directly an advertising-related company. They've taken American radio and almost single-handed turned it into a 24-hour infomercial on every station. And that's their genius. The head of Viacom and Sumner Redstone are all about maximizing commercial return. . . . They lead the fight in turning every nanosecond of time on their stations into something that's selling something. . . .it's really a 24-hour infomercial. Every second on the air is selling something." "If you look around the world, it's a global phenomenon. And bluntly, it's all about commercializing the whole teen experience, making youth culture a commercial entity that's packaged and sold to people. So by watching MTV and buying the products there, looking like the people there, buying the music there, you become cool. It's a commercial relationship to coolness, of being acceptable. And if you don't do it, you're a loser. . . . That's the genius of it. . . . it's a self-referential, almost circular thing . . . [MTV] is really ultimately there to serve Sumner Redstone and the owners of that company. It has nothing to do with kids. . . . There's nothing else to it, but it is pure marketing genius. . . . it's all about keeping the cost as low as possible, commercializing it in much as possible, and using market research to sort of make it look as cool as possible. And it has worked." "now payola's legal again. . . . The money goes to the company that owns [the station]. So if you're a label and you pay enough money to CBS or Viacom to get your music on their stations, you could actually buy your way on. . . . So that integrity . . . is lost. . . . that [quality] filter, that editorial judgment, the idea that there's someone listening to the music who really knows music and cares about it is making a decision this is something that the audience might like--it's been corrupted. It's been turned over to the marketing office, and that's means whoever pays the most money can buy the attention of our audience." "But what MTV is struggling with is what's going on with all our cultural industries. We have fewer and fewer owners, but more and more choices. . . . And the irony is that, with all this choice . . . in our commercial media system, with all these new options which theoretically increases the quality because there'll be all these smaller markets that can be tended to, in some ways what it's doing, though, is increasing the commercial logic and commercial pressure. Because they've got to get you so badly that they have to use tried and true methods that diminish, in some ways, the chances of creativity. Your margin of error is so slim that you can't take chances. . . . there are only five companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States and 80 percent of the music worldwide." " . . . There's the argument that these companies do market research, so they must be giving the people what they want, because obviously they're studying what people want . . . What they're trying to do is find out how they can make the most money off of people. So they're going to query them, to see what the areas of entry are. It's not an honest examination of what people really want." "since about 1994 or 1995, has been an unprecedented concentration of ownership. So we have seven or eight companies now, which own these largest media companies. . . . The amount of advertising on American radio today is 18 minutes per hour. It's something like 50 percent more than the early 1990s, because these companies don't have to worry about competition. Two or three of them own all the stations. . . . The only time there isn't advertising, they're selling payola. . . . And it's done not because these are bad people. . . . It's done because this is what the system is set up to produce. . . . If you don't do it, you can't compete. . . . So it's really a systematic issue. It's not of the morality of individuals." "Q: what are the first steps towards eradicating that? A: . . . Ultimately, I think we have to change the nature of the system. . . . this is public property. . . . So the public has a right to intervene there and say, 'These are the terms we want.' . . . Ultimately, we have to . . . think big and really get to the root of the problem. Just eliminate this hyper-commercialism aimed at children, at teenagers. . . . media literacy in schools can be so important--to make kids aware at a very early age that it isn't natural, that it wasn't always like this. "Think of it critically. Someone's doing it because they benefit by it. This is why. This is what they're trying to do to you." So you can arm yourself and understand the nature of the relationship early on, and be a critical participant in society, and not just someone who's manipulated by marketers." ... [more] 2:19:03 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

hermeneutics " . . . the 'art of interpretation'." "Modern hermeneutics falls into three phases. 1. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834): . . . The interpreter's aim is to 'understand the text at first as well as and then even better than its author' . . . A text is interpreted from two points of view: 'grammatical' . . . and 'psychological' . . . ' . . . we cannot fully understand the parts unless we understand the whole. Thus at each level we are involved in a hermeneutical circle, a continual reciprocity between whole and parts . . . 2. Schleiermacher's biographer, Dilthey, extended hermeneutics to the understanding of all human behaviour and products. Our understanding of an author, artist, or historical agent is not direct, but by way of analogies to our own experience. . . . concerned with understanding in the cultural, in contrast to the natural, sciences, and . . . with the interpretation of the products of past societies. 3. Heidegger: In [his] Being and Time, hermeneutics acquires a deeper and wider sense. It is concerned with the interpretation of the being who interprets texts and other artefacts, who may become, but is not essentially, either a natural or a cultural scientist . . . His hermeneutics differs from Derrida's: for Heidegger, words 'show' something beyond themselves, namely being, and we need to think about this, not simply about the text, in order to understand what is said." ... [more] 3:54:46 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, March 05, 2002

Sunday, March 3, 2002 Information Overflow [Review] MEDIA UNLIMITED: How the Torrent of Images and  Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, By Todd Gitlin, Metropolitan Books " ... attempt to make overall sense of what he calls the 'media torrent': television, radio, film, video, music, print media, the Internet--the whole shebang. ... Gitlin's goal is 'to grasp the totality of the media' ... It originates in a web of supply and demand, involving modern capitalism, available technology and human desires, especially the modern desire for what Gitlin calls "disposable feelings," and the quick and transient (and thus self-perpetuating) pleasures of drama, emotion and connection." " ... Gitlin identifies various coping styles. The "fan" selectively over- identifies with media icons; the "content critic," on the other hand, '[b]eholding the media flux ... tries to keep a certain distance from the foam to avoid a soaking' but assumes that 'if the content were only improved, so would the world be.' Other responses include the 'paranoid,' the 'exhibitionist' (an eager participant), the 'ironist' (knowing but not overly subversive), the 'jammer,' the 'secessionist' and the 'abolitionist.' ... the torrent's synergy, he suggests, transcends profit. Capitalism and modern technology don't simply mold us, they confront and accommodate us." " ... 'the media's political impacts. The bigger story is demobilization. The ceaseless quest for disposable feeling and pleasure hollows out public life altogether.' ... Gitlin's sanguine assessment of the role of American popular culture in the world at large. ... Hollywood's fixation with pleasing and teasing, and so maximizing, its audiences: a devotion to distraction, stimulation and 'packaged innocence.'" ... [more] 11:08:34 AM    comment  []

Monday, March 04, 2002

The Atlantic Monthly | March 2002   Inspired Immaturity (The midlife crisis as a patriotic duty) by David Brooks "I turned forty recently, so it's time I started planning my midlife  crisis. I'm not going to have it right away, but something this humiliating requires preparation." "The biggest threat to the midlife crisis is the new era of seriousness. Wartime necessarily encourages a culture of earnestness. Nowadays, looking around the nation, one sees relatively little in the way of epic silliness. The dot-com jockeys have been tamed. The investment bankers seem relatively chastened. College students are behaving sensibly. Young people seize career opportunities. Middle-aged people watch their cholesterol, and even the big rock groups, such as U2 and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, are ripe for Geritol sponsorship. We have entered an age of prudence." "Over the course of the past two hundred years Americans have vacillated between two great fears—fear of chaos and fear of conformity. During some periods we worried that individualistic energies would tear apart the bonds of community. During others we feared that our national élan was being enervated as we tamed our personalities in order to climb the corporate ladder and lead sensible, respectable lives." "Today conformity is once again a bigger threat than chaos. The forces of seriousness and maturity are everywhere closing in. If this trend continues, we will soon be living in a country unworthy of the greatness that was P. T. Barnum, our true Founding Father." ... [more] 3:03:15 PM    comment  []

Sunday, March 03, 2002

March 2, 2002 Damning (Yet Desiring) Mickey and the Big Mac [Capitalism and Spread of Popular American Culture] "'Why do they hate us?' One answer to that now familiar question may be its opposite: 'Why do they love us?' ... American popular culture is capitalist culture. In capitalism commodities are produced that will spur desire for still more commodities. Capitalism seduces through sheer force of marketing and sheer promise of pleasure. What fundamentalist society would not be horrified by the ways in which traditions and rituals are subsumed by the filthy lucre of the marketplace?" "This view of popular culture has a long heritage. ... 'The Communist Manifesto' ... 'A Theory of Mass Culture:' ... mass culture was 'imposed from above,' that it created 'passive consumers.Like 19th-century capitalism, Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinctions.' It is a kind of cultural indenture imposed by ... the 'Lords of kitsch.' ... Theodor Adorno also argued that mass culture was an instrument of oppressive power. ... a totalitarian dimension; television ... was 'a medium of undreamed-of psychological control.' ... Those ideas have now become unquestioned axioms ... pop culture succeeds because it is imperialist." " ... Tocqueville ... argued ... that there was a fundamental difference between the artistic culture of an aristocracy and that of a democracy. In an aristocracy, members of the nobility form a small class with fixed interests, inspiring a uniform style among artisans and creators. Attention is paid to detailed craftsmanship, and artistry is a form of service. But in a democracy ... there are no restrictions of class or guild on either artisans or their public. Styles are less firmly defined; social arrangements are more fluid; human aspirations vary widely. So artisans offer ... 'imperfect satisfaction' for diverse audiences rather than perfection for the few. Tocqueville also accurately anticipated the nature of pop culture: democracy ... shifts the preoccupation of art from the soul to the body, from the ideal to the real. ... John Stuart Mill in 'On Liberty' ... heralded the growth of liberal culture. With equality and mobility ... citizens 'now read the same things, listen to the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them.' With this expansion of attention to the same things and places, commercial culture has also become more vital. ... Once relieved of concerns about caste and material need, the individual is free to address other issues." "American popular culture offers a powerful promise. Luxuriant and prurient passions are partially satisfied; desires for autonomy are offered fulfillment; material pleasures and possibilities become palpable. Choices are freely made. Who can resist such a siren song? But there is a cost to this shedding of restrictions; there is something inherently disruptive about popular culture. It undermines the elite values of aristocratic art, displaces the customs of folk culture and opposes any limitation on art's audiences or subjects. It asserts egalitarian tastes, encourages dissent and does not shun desire. 'Mass Culture ... is very, very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody' ... 'all the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question.' ... This is even more true now than it was a half-century ago. Popular culture has become the standard-bearer for modernity, heralding its transformations. But for fundamentalists and many terrorists, that is the very problem. ... Popular culture may be hailed by left-wing critics for its liberating energy, but it is also condemned by others as an opiate; among conservatives, it is feared for its nihilistic influence on tastes and morals. ... [more] 1:27:17 PM    comment  []

Thursday, February 28, 2002

COLD safer than HOT New theory shows that high performance needn't mean high risk. 27 February 2002 " ... calculated how to design a system to optimize performance and almost eliminate the probability of ruinous events. They call this design principle 'constrained optimization with limited deviations', or COLD. Surprisingly, a COLD state can completely remove the danger of total ruin while sacrificing only a few per cent of the average yield relative to a HOT state." ... [more] 3:09:10 PM    comment  []

Ways to Disagree Agreeably or Nobly Attack the sin, not the sinner. Attack the position, not the person holding the position. Adopt a good-humored bantering tone. Reverse the polarity: Adopt the mask of a Fool and praise Folly (Erasmus, The Praise of Folly). Adopt the mask of a Knave, and exalt Vice (Swift, "Modest Proposal"). Write a parable about a bushel basket, or a seed, or a broomstick, or some other common object; leave the reader to figure out the meaning. Write a fable about mice or a frog. Write a fairy tale about Puss and Boots. Pass along a folktale about Coyote, Fox, or Br'er Rabbit. Give the Vice a name, such as Sporus, and savagely attack the fiction -- leaving the reader to speculate about the real target. Create a cast of characters and celebrate vice in all its forms; score it to the tune of "An Old Woman Clothed in Gray," and call it an Opera (Gay, The Beggar's Opera). Change Macheath to Mack the Knife  and call your critique of markets The Three Penny Opera. Confess the sin you attack, make yourself the prime instance (Rousseau's Confessions). Write an allegory, about Duessa or Archimago, leaving the reader to tie it to proper names (Spenser, The Faerie Queene). Write a mock epic in praise of Dunces (Pope, The Dunciad). Celebrate a Fool so affectionately as a Mock Epic Hero that the reader joins the writer in loving the victim, (Dryden, "MacFlecknoe.") Write a tale of your Travels, depicting current vices as comic figures in outlandish fictional countries (Swift, Gulliver's Travels). Keep conspicuous silence (Cordelia in Lear). Speak truth out of love in madness (the Fool in Lear). Refuse a required gesture (the Christian refusing to place pinch of incense on the Roman altar, and dying for that act of insubordination). Leave the disagreeable truth lying about, where it is likely to be found. Act surprised when it is discovered. Offer a servile and tansparently stupid misinterpretation. Place the disagreeable truth in a subordinate clause, preceded by the word not. (To the Unconscious a statement and its opposite are one and the same). Tell a joke, embodying the disagreeable truth. ("Only joking, Sire!") Affirm a falsehood falteringly. Go to the limit of insult, and then further, and then further still, until the rancor turns to camaraderie ("Playing the Dozens," Flyting Contests in Beowulf, the mutual insults preceding the Epic Bouts in the WWF). Be moderate: Moderation is the mid-point between two extremes. Link to two sites, at either end, and choose them carefully. (Pick, for instance, a weak site to the right, a strong to the left.) "The moderator always wins." Link to a number of sites, while posing as the referee. (Doc Searls is a master of this, long may he avoid being trampled in the melee.) Damn with faint praise. Hesitate dislike. Pose as Jesus, eschewing only martrydom. Condemn a writer's views while imitating his or her prose style, or vice versa. Invoke an author by using his or her key phrases, but never mention the author's name, nor link to the site. Take the miscreant across your knee, and beat him or her soundly until the pain turns to pleasure. Let the evil-doer count the strokes and kiss the rod when done. (Our preferred strategy here at WB, we find that the clients learn to love it, and remain obsessed with spanking the rest of their natural lives.) Of course, you can also try irony and sarcasm (The Legacy of High School -- yeah! right!).   ... [original posting] via Wealth Bondage 11:00:05 AM    comment  []

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

The Atlantic Monthly | March 2002   The Apocalypse of Adolescence " ... an apocalyptic nihilism is taking root in this nation's children ... Since the end of World War II adolescents have been chafing against an ever more impervious, unheeding social system. Their outrage has found expression, with increasing intensity, among the inchoate 'juvenile delinquents' of the early postwar years, the Beats of the 1950s, the hippies and political radicals of the 1960s, the drug and gangland subcultures of more recent years. And now it's expressed by the kids who carry out school shootings and other acts of vicious and inexplicable violence." "What we are witnessing is clearly something new. A frightening momentum has been building ... the public policy that we are developing to cope with troubled kids is only exacerbating the situation. ... the state's growing arrogation of power to punish rather than to rehabilitate. This is a policy that expresses both fear of and contempt for children." "'We understand how teens think, what they want, what they like, what they aspire to be, what excites them, and what concerns them,' the Teenage Research Unlimited Web site brags. What this understanding translates into in the marketplace is hypersexuality, aggression, addiction, coldness, and irony-laced civic disaffection—the very seed-bed of apocalyptic nihilism." "The national task of recentering ourselves and our children will be enormous, and will require painful shifts in our expectations of expediency, personal gratification, and the unfettered accumulation of wealth. ... Children crave a sense of self-worth. That craving is answered most readily through respectful inclusion: through a reintegration of our young into the intimate circles of family and community life. We must face the fact that having ceased to exploit children as laborers, we now exploit them as consumers. We must find ways to offer them useful functions, tailored to their evolving capacities. Closely allied to this goal is an expanded definition of 'education' ... to embrace an ethic of sustained mentoring that extends from community to personal relationships." ... [more] 3:22:05 PM    comment  []

Monday, February 25, 2002

Tells, The fine art of losing at poker "Most people are taught at an early age a number of rules that are meant to govern their actions throughout their lives. Parents, teachers, and the Bible preach to us that telling the truth is always better in the long run. That rigorous education settles into the subconscious and becomes the foundation for the character we display as we grow into adults. Tells are simply a result of conflict between the implanted notion of morality and our intention to deceive. ... Our innate desire to tell the truth is most counterproductive at the card table. Having a poker tell can be disastrous. Anyone playing poker is trying to deceive his opponents. Deceit is essential to the game." " the deductive reasoning necessary to becoming a winning poker player. No single observation helped me all that much, but when I put them together, the information became extremely useful. ... the younger the player, the looser he is, the more likely he is to bluff. Older players tend to be wiser, more in control of their emotions, and to play a much more straight-up game. ... one thing is certain: the more attention you pay to the body language of your opponents, the less money you'll leave on the table when you walk away."  ... [more] 4:23:20 PM    comment  []

Sunday, February 24, 2002

Does Human Nature Have a Future? The end of history, Bobos, and biotechnology. "The end of history would seem to have arrived, in particular, because the principle of liberal democracy has triumphed: All human beings are now recognized as free and equal beings by those in the know everywhere in the world. ... most sophisticated Americans are no longer moved by love and death. ... Americans now prefer comfort to truth. Feel-good therapy has replaced the genuine desire to know oneself. ... the view that it is more important to feel good than to be good ... the new model Americans--the bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos--even claim to have reconciled the modern conflict between bohemian self-expression and bourgeois productivity. They manage to work hard and to have countercultural tastes without being in any way alienated from their social or political world, without yearning for a life better than the one they now have." " ... The sociobiological return to nature consists in the recognition of what is required for us to live comfortably and productively as a certain kind of social animal. The family can in this way be rescued from the assault of the liberationists. Families ... do a better job of raising kids than the alternatives ... Religion is also back; it's a great source of comfort and socialization for social beings. According to the sociobiologists, though, love and faith are just illusions--useful ones, to be sure, helpful in dealing with the experiences of anxiety and homelessness that come with self-consciousness or individuality." "Bobos claim to be laid-back bohemian nonjudgmentalists on everything. Or almost everything: When it comes to the soul, they reject as repressive the morality of traditional religion, but when it comes to the body, they are far from being laissez faire. They are pro-choice on abortion. But when it comes to seatbelts and smoking, there ought to be a law. Being chaste, they say, is unrealistically hard for our young people. But they can and should just say no to drunkenness and obesity. Sex of all kinds can be safe, but being fat is genuinely risky business. In their puritanical disdain for cigarettes, drunkenness, and rich food, the Bobos show themselves to be far more bourgeois than bohemian. Comparatively speaking, their predecessors--the martini-drinking, chain-smoking, dessert-eating, and war-fighting WASP establishment--laughed in the face of death. ... Bobos restlessly over-organize their own and their children's lives to keep themselves from having time to think about how empty their lives are. They constantly plan for their children's future because they can't figure out how to be in love with them in the present. ... They do not really experience themselves as being fully at home in this world. ... Bobos don't have the virtues associated with war, and they can't imagine their own lives without easily acquired wealth and liberty." " ... Many experts say that advances in biotechnology could soon add at least a couple of decades to the average human life, with the not-so-remote possibility of doubling the average human lifespan. ... Would human life be worth living if it were completely freed from the hard and joyous responsibilities of birth, parenting, and aging? ... an indefinitely long life, without virtue, might immeasurably heighten the fear of sickness and of death? ... Ritalin is now given to boys who used to be regarded merely as spirited or aggressive. And Prozac calms women who used to be regarded merely as nervous or anxious. Drugs are taking the edge off being either a man or a woman, and they perhaps are leading us to the sort of androgyny that Marx, for example, thought we would have at the end of history." "The political objection to depriving human beings of the pains, problems, and perversities that naturally arise from self-consciousness is that we will have succumbed to a form of tyranny. And yet we may well not be able to recognize that we are enslaved. In the Brave New World the tyrants will be the experts who exempt themselves from the consciousness-negating treatment. We have a hard time seeing experts as tyrants, because they don't claim to rule through personal authority but on the basis of the impersonal results of scientific studies. After all ... most Americans have no idea of the extent to which they have already surrendered their sovereignty--their personal judgments concerning their personal experiences--to such experts.  ... [more] 3:42:20 PM    comment  []

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

"The Klamath water crisis has been in the making for more than 100 years, ever since the federal government decided to subsidize a farming economy in an arid area where none belonged. The result is an overstressed ecosystem in which there are too many claimants for too little water." "Nor is the problem the Endangered Species Act, which has to do with far more than the protection of flora and fauna. It speaks to the human condition as well: when an entire species is sufficiently threatened to require protection, it usually means that the same ecosystem will eventually fail the humans who depend on it as well. More water for agriculture will certainly cheer the farmers and may spare the administration a political problem. But it won't save the basin." ... [more] 3:59:23 PM    comment  []

The Iceberg Secret, Revealed By Joel Spolsky Insights into software project management and client relations. ... [more] 3:35:44 PM    comment  []