American Bullshit

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American Bullshit

Alex Golub and some RSS folks are talking about using people as filters, or, as Alex puts it in a witty and wide-ranging note:

I am deeply skeptical about the idea that the kind of super-intelligent, suited-to-my-needs here-it-is-you-great-guy-you kinda filtering being done by a computer. To be frank, I think that what filtering really requires it taste, good taste. And I'm not sure we even know enough about what that concept means to begin asking whether it's something we can teach a computer.

The easiest way to deal with data aggregation is simply to use another person as a filter.

I think this is important for many reasons - here's a brief summary: After a few thousand years of reflection on perception, knowledge, aesthetics, pleasure and ethics from the Greeks to the present, the concept of taste has come to serve as a sort of central node - the nebulous region where the sensory and the intellectual mingle, where spirit and matter, form and substance, outside and inside, etc., touch. It's a bearishly difficult thing to talk about sensibly, not least because it underlies our basic notions of sense and sensibility. Try hard as we may, we never can quite account for taste, which is why we usually cheerfully and automatically agree there's no use arguing about it.

Taste subverts binary logic: As I once suggested on Gonzo Engaged, voice attracts sensibility - the idea being that sensibility (like taste) is a living tissue, a complex membrane formed over time from innumerable acts of judgment, some of which never reach consciousness. Its complex weave of myriad influences lies beyond exhaustive analysis.

Alex's notion of "using other persons as filters" suggests that at least some of the deeper drivers of self-organizing networks have to do with sensibility. When people and tastes "click" in mysterious, instantaneous ways, communities crystallize out of the aether.

My only quibble with using people as filters for news is, American Journalism defines itself as such through a notion of objectivity that pretends, in utterly bad faith, to repress the affective and judiciary qualities that comprise the act of taste: it aspires to be "tasteless."

This may offer a clue to the extraordinary boom in blogging, with its concomitant antipathy to "objective" journalism: We know in ''fact'' that no human can escape the infinitely complex and subtle elements that go into forming judgments, and we know that any attempt to disguise these is lame, disingenuous, and epistemologically impoverishing. Much of what constitutes the "object" of attention has to do with its subjective perfumes of attitude and affect. These scents do not - pace the American Obsession with Journalistic Objectivity - hobble knowledge, they are in fact knowledge itself. They must be treated with extra care precisely because they yield insight that no bare-boned language of factual literalism ever will. It's just that they do so in ways that necessarily elude the clear and distinct binary oppositions ever so dear to Cartesian journalists and computer programmers.

If you believe that American Journalism achieves neutrality because it eschews attitude and affect, have another bite of pure unadulterated bullshit. As Richard Mynick's anatomy of BigMedia under Bush makes clear, it is quite possible for a newspaper serenely to claim it is providing "balance" while in fact it is serving up a Texas barbecue of money and influence fully under the spell of robust and imperturbable bad taste:

If the Pentagon buys tens of billions of dollars of weapons that even Rumsfeld said won't work, from companies closely linked to the ruling right wing government, this must not be discussed. It's not polite. If Wall Street touts the stock of various companies on what later proves to be totally fraudulent grounds, this may be mentioned, but not in a way that raises penetrating questions about the breadth of Wall Street corruption. If CEO's earn 450 times what average employees earn, this inequality's rationale may not be explored in too high-profile a manner—it's unattractive.

The bland cuisine of Well-Mannered White Middle Class Meaning appears so natural that we have no idea what the world tastes like. 9/11 wafted hints of smells. Almost instantaneously, that olfactory knowledge receded to the place least helpful in terms of opening the public mind: to internalizing belletristic meditations, set in shiny - writerly - prose, shedding light on nothing, for which BigMedia duly received Pulitzer recognition. Awards doled out, Robert Blake and Bush's Puppet Theatre divert the alleged American Mind from what was glimpsed in that moment - that jarring instant beyond the bounds of good taste and recommended television viewing - that odious canape redolent of the absence of bullshit.