Fixing The Fixer

Mark Stein, one of my oldest friends, has helped edit and re-issue the memoirs of Mendel Beilis:

One of the great trials of the twentieth century was the 1913 blood-libel trial of Mendel Beilis in Czarist Russia. Beilis, a Jew, was arrested in 1911 by the Czarist secret police. He was accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy in order to use the boy’s blood to bake matzah for Passover. Beilis was jailed for over two years, under horrible conditions, while awaiting trial. He heroically resisted all pressure to implicate himself or other Jews. In 1913, after a dramatic trial that riveted the Jewish people and much of the rest of the world, Beilis was acquitted by an all-Christian jury.

This is a genuinely moving and gripping account. With something of a happy ending, even. Aside from Beilis's own responses to his troubles, which display an unassuming heroism in the face of forces bent on his destruction, it is quite heartwarming to see that a good many Christians supported and came to his aid, but also his neighbors and acquaintances. Very oddly, his friends and supporters included even members of the Black Hundreds, the anti-semitic nationalist group that was pushing the libel.

The post title is a reference to a supplementary essay that claims Bernard Malamud plagiarized large sections of his famous novel The Fixer from Beilis' account.

The anti-Kurzweil

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder is a fascinating mess. It’s centered around a single big idea – that some systems are not merely robust to disruption and shocks, but are capable of actively gaining from them. Taleb’s background is in finance and trade and his theory is deeply rooted in his trading strategies, but it goes far beyond that, purporting to be a very general theory of systems and indeed life in general. The book spins out implications of this idea at multiple levels, from economics to diet to basic philosophies of life. It is deeply personal – the author is clearly trying to pack a lifetime’s worth of thought into this package, which works both for and against the ideas. Taleb is in desperate need of an editor but probably too arrogant to accept anybody else’s intervention in his work. So the book feels kind of shapeless. 

Taleb’s thinking quite deliberately does not take the form of any kind of traditional academic theorizing. If there’s anything like a formal theory in this book, it is so enmeshed in his personality and biases that I couldn’t really make much sense of it. This is despite the fact that I share a large subset of his biases, his contempt for high-modernist central planning for instance. He is so confident of the correctness of his biases that he feels free to build them into this theorizing without much justification. The result is that the book quite often reads like a personal brag than a philosophical or scientific treatise (his habit of boasting about his physical strength and calling his opponents “half-men” also contributes to this impression).


So for me the actual content of this book remained tantalizingly obscure. This was frustrating, because it did seem like there were some deep, important, and profound truths hidden away, but they weren’t conveyed in as effective a way as I would have liked. Perhaps it is too much aimed at the world of standard economics that he despises, a foreign territory to me (but he despises all of academia just as much). If I try to summarize my understanding of what he is saying, it comes out both trivial and contradictory. For instance: apparently the secret of economic antifragility is to arrange your resources so they have limited downsides but at least small probabilities of large or unlimited upsides. Sounds like a great principle, but doesn’t sound like any more useful (to an economic naïf like me) than “buy low, sell high”.


The contradictory part is when he gets into ethics, where his main principle seems to be that one is obligated to have “skin in the game” – that is, personal exposure to risk. He is exquisitely scornful of the Wall Street types who manage to profit while destroying value for others, but how is that different from what he does? Financial trading (unlike actual economic production) is inherently zero-sum, if you profit, you are inherently always taking advantage of somebody else. I’m missing some distinction that I’m sure is there. Perhaps taking advantage of your peers (those who have the same skill and risk portfolio as yourself) is OK, but preying on the defenseless masses is not? A deeply ethical/aesthetic sensibility pervades Taleb’s work, and I find that quite appealing, but his sensibility is different from mine in ways I can’t quite tease out.


This short quote:

You cannot sit and moan about the world. You need to come out on top. (p 386)

encapsulates an important quality of Antifragile. He advocates action and winning over being right in any abstract academic sense. Academics don’t have skin in the game, they don’t suffer when they are wrong, thus their pronouncements have no weight. This makes some sense, but also doesn’t seem to leave room for any standard of value but money or power. The frank acknowledgement of the brutally competitive nature of life, while no doubt common on Wall Street, is pretty jarring in a book with the intellectual ambitions of this one. It’s an anti-intellectual stance, denying the possibility of any sort of un-self-interested enquiry. Taleb is well aware of this problem and his rhetorical strategy is to create a couple of separate personas to manage the contradiction of being an anti-intellectual intellectual. Fat Tony is the street-smart winner, uninterested in ideas for their own sake, while Nero Tulip represents the more cultured and cultivated side of life (but he too must play and win financial games).


One passage in the book really clarified Taleb’s position in the intellectual firmament for me: where he figures out a way to describe himself by identifying his polar opposite:

I was just reading…about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality. I felt some deep disgust — as would any ancient — at the efforts of the “singularity” thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion. (p370)

I’ve mentioned Kurzweil a few times here, mostly to note his boring drone of a speaking style. Taleb seems to have the opposite flaw – he is so determined to be interesting that he doesn’t know when to put his personality aside and let his ideas speak for themselves. My own background is a lot closer to Kurzweil’s though, so maybe I am just too much of a nerd to catch the antifragility train.

Speaking of Kurzweil and AI – it occurs to me that minds and biological systems are necessarily antifragile (or at least robust), due to their evolutionary history. Every biosystem that exists has managed to do so despite being situated in a chaotic, dynamic and often hostile world. Computer systems are nothing like that. Like the formal theories of mathematical logic that gave rise to them, they are practically designed to fall apart at even a single mistake or contradiction. People are pretty aware of this and have been trying to back-fit various kinds of robustness onto computers, but it never goes very deep. Someday someone will reconstruct computation and computational intelligence on a truly robust foundation.

The Opposite of Mathematics

I recently stumbled across a book whose premise intrigued me: Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. This is an edited volume that explores the different ways mathematics and narrative interact. The power and fascination of this combination (collision? intersection? union? mating?) arise from how opposed these ways of looking at the world are, and how powerful – both have been proposed as being the metaphysical foundation layer of reality. They can’t both be, but maybe in setting them against each other in various ways one can get a glimpse of something more fundamental than either. 

Mathematical structures exist in a timeless Platonic eternity, they alone (perhaps God also) are not subject to time and change. Mathematics is also thought to be universal, so much so that we believe if we ever meet an alien race we will be able to talk to them by starting with the Pythagorean theorem. Narrative on the other hand is essentially both temporal and specific; this particular and peculiar sequence of events happened to these people, at this time. Narratives are rooted in a particular culture and often don’t translate well to others. Mathematics is a narrow path; but part of the appeal of stories is the sense that anything could happen. Narrative and mathematics thus seem to be so different as to barely inhabit the same universe, but obviously they do intersect in the human mind if nowhere else.

This particular collision of worldviews has some personal resonance for me. I spent my formative years around an artificial intelligence lab, and one of my academic efforts back then was to try to dislodge some of the stale ideas that I felt were holding back the field, which tended to take mathematical form (in most non-humanities fields the pressure to at least seem to have a rigorous formal foundation for your work is intense). One strategy was to displace some of this overly-mathematical conceptual infrastructure with ideas from narrative theory.

The writers in this volume, for the most part either professional mathematicians or historians / philosophers of mathematics, are not quite as brash or as confrontational as I was back then. They are mostly looking at mathematical practice, that is, the very human situated activities that somehow enable the transcendental structures of mathematics to reveal themselves. Since mathematics is a human activity, and a demanding one, naturally it makes effective use of the full range of human mental tools, including such un-mathematical things as rhetoric, narrative, analogy, and figurative language. Mathematics and narrative intersect in other ways, such as stories with mathematical protagonists, or explorations of the formal structure of stories. (This particular volume doesn’t pay too much attention to the small subgenre of mathematical science fiction, but see these other collections).

An even more personal resonance: one of the chapters contains a story involving someone I knew: Tom Trobaugh, who was in grad school with me and tragically committed suicide. I knew him mostly as a musician, I had no idea that he was doing mathematics at a professional level, but apparently he did during his life and oddly continued to do so after his death. The chapter in question takes off from a rather bizarre episode where Trobaugh appeared to one of his co-authors in a dream, after his suicide, and provided a key insight:

The first author must state that his coauthor and close friend, Tom Trobaugh, quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous, killed himself consequent to endogenous depression. Ninety-four days later, in my dream, Tom's simulacrum remarked, "The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf." Awaking with a start, I knew this idea had to be wrong, since some perfect complexes have a non-vanishing K₀ obstruction to extension. I had worked on this problem for 3 years, and saw this approach to be hopeless. But Tom's simulacrum had been so insistent, I knew he wouldn't let me sleep undisturbed until I had worked out the argument and could point to the gap. This work quickly led to the key results of this paper. To Tom, I could have explained why he must be listed as a coauthor.

The article as a whole is a detailed meditation on the nature of agency, rhetoric, and literary form in mathematics, especially in the envisioned automated forms of it that have been a gleam in the eye for most of the 20th century.

My own writing and thinking isn’t very mathematical in the usual sense, but it often seems to hover uncomfortably between structure and narrative. My background leads me to always gravitate towards conceptual abstraction, and I assume the value here (if any) is in the Big Ideas, not the specific happenings of my life. But in order to get thoughts to flow into the blog format they often require a temporal hook, if usually a trivial one like a holiday or event or random experience, such as a chance encounter with a book. My hunch is that all writing has to bridge this gap between the personal and the universal, the temporal and the timeless, and there a thousand different ways to do it. The blog is a relatively new genre of writing that encourage new recombinations; being able to experiment with them is one of the attractions of the form.

Intellectual Archaeology

One thing you can say in favor of electronic books – they don't have to be stored in the garage because of lack of shelf space, so they don't get used as nesting material by the local rodent population. I spent much of the past weekend mucking the rat poop out of the garage, and in the process needed to carefully examine each precious volume as I removed it from one chewed-up box into a new and hopefully impenetrable plastic one.

It's like doing archeology on one's self, every past interest is there, like shards of pottery, buried in a succession of layers. Every time I do this (during moves or major housecleanings or emergencies like this) I re-sort them, based on vague criterion of how they fit together (like "professional" vs other, but in fact I work as hard as I can to blur that line, so that doesn't really work very well). Some even make it to a box to sell or donate, but not very many this time since what remain after the last few filters are those I can't make myself part with. A few get pulled out to give to my children, but they are at the stage of where they would rather find their own books.

It is difficult to pretend that all these books, all these abandoned directions of thought, represent a coherent project, that I was after something during all that time I was accumulating them. Yet there is something that ties them all together, even if it's only my personal history. That is rather disordered, to be sure, but it's not nothing.

I guess I continue to cart around these obsolete chunks of dead trees because they do in some weird way constitute a large chunk of my identity. And just like the part of myself that lives in the head, they are falling victims to decay, to the the depradations of nature and time.

Review of Graeber's Debt

David Graeber has emerged as one the of the founding intellectuals of the Occupy movement, and his book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years has received a good bit of attention as a result. It promises to reveal a new and powerful way to look at the world, reconfiguring our notions of money, credit, and basic human relations. Even better, from my perspective, it has a worked-out theory in opposition to the libertarianoid, market-based view of humanity, and an explanation of how that displaced the truth. Sounds perfect for me! But I wanted to like this book more than I actually did.

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The traditional economic story is that we started with barter, and when that proved inconvenient, invented money and markets. Graeber will have none of that. According to him, no real society ever operated on barter in the usual sense. The real start of economics is loose systems of personal obligation and credit. In tribal or village societies where everyone knows everyone else, it is not hard to keep track of what favors are owed to who. Enumerated exchanges, whether by barter or by money, are reserved for strangers with whom one can expect to not interact with much in the future. Society is more like a potluck party than a market -- everyone is expected to bring something to the table, but it would be very rude to make explicit demands, or try to bargain prices.

Graeber calls this "baseline communism" and it is the economics of ordinary human relations, dinner parties, and exchange within a community, firm, or workgroup (he doesn't mention Coase, oddly). This vision runs completely counter to the usual economists's ways of thinking, where self-interest is paramount and nothing that is not priced and convertible to utility units can exist. Graeber's agenda seems to be in part to assert a new common sense, one based on normal human relations rather than calculation. As a mathematical type myself, I am only partly buying this -- or, as a rationalist, I have to believe that self-interested motives underlie human behavior at some level -- which doesn't mean that Graeber is wrong that naked, explicit calculation is something more recent, new, and anti-human.

The way violence, or the threat of violence, turns human relations into mathematics will crop up again and again...it is the ultimate source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt (p14)

This introduces another theme of his, which is that the concept of debt confuses the moral and the mathematical, it turns the normal idea of obligatory behavior into something quantifiable, fungible, and as a result more sinister and onerous. I confess to not quite getting this idea enough to describe it very sensibly. But I think his agenda is clear enough -- in his view, monetary debts have become tools of oppression, sometimes obviously such as in the cases of debt-peonage, but more subtly as a tool of social control. That this has been allowed to happen is because of the confusion of such debts with moral obligations, and breaking that link is what he is about.

...in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land"

As hinted above, it is war and violence that, as a side-effect of destroying traditional society, replaces it with the cash nexus:

Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y...and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result...was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage" -- and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence....(p238-9)

So, Greaber is telling a story that has been told many times before -- the fall of traditional societies to centralization, bureaucratization, war, the state, rationalization -- but he's doing it through a lens that is new (at least to me), that of debt and differing conceptions of money and trade.

---

He ends with a concrete proposal:

It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality,, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. (p 390)

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So, what didn't I like? Something in the tone of the book seemed off to me. It's an odd mix of academic anthropology and political special pleading. This makes it difficult for me to read, because one never knows how much to trust the authors' objectivity. A more self-critical spirit would be welcome.

Graeber is constantly speculating on the thinking and motivations of people who lived thousands of years ago and/or half a world away, in a breezy and offhand manner, as if they are going to be applying his version of common sense in what is merely a different context. This runs counter to what I normally think of as the anthropological style, which heightens the strangeness, difference, and ultimate unknowability of different cultures. At one point in my life I ate that kind of stuff (eg, Cliffeord Geertz and Michael Taussig) right up. Graeber's more down-to-earth approach is quite different, and perhaps refreshing in a certain way, but I don't trust it.

My mistrust is heightened by one rather glaring example where he refers to a world that I do know well, and gets quite a large number of things wrong:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages. (p96)

I can count at least six errors in that one sentence. Which may not be important, but doesn't lead me to trust Graeber on the areas where I am less expert. Also, I went into this book hoping to learn more about the tradition of Jubilee and debt-forgiveness, but he didn't get into that very much.

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One more quote:

We have already seen how both Vedic and Christian teachings thus end up making the same curios move: first describing all morality as debt, but then, in their very manner of doing so, demonstrating that morality cannot really be reduced to debt, that it must be grounded in something else.

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and a special note for MLK day: it occurred to me that in his I Have a Dream Speech he inverts the metaphoric use of debt that is Graeber's subject:

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

Performing Ourselves

Sherry Turkle was on the Colbert show a few nights back, plugging her new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I'll reserve judgement on the book -- you really can't summarize any sort of serious thesis in that context, and I have to say you have to be pretty brave to go up against Colbert. But I found one remark jarring: she complained that "people are performing on a Facebook profile...adolescents suffer from performance exhaustion". I immediately thought about Erving Goffman, who pointed out that performance is characteristic of all social interaction. And Colbert called her on it as well, presumably without the benefit of a deep knowledge of sociology.

I don't know if it's marketing or something else, but pop-tech books all seem to get slotted into the "tech is going to make us unto gods" or "tech is killing our souls" buckets. I'm pretty sure Turkle's work is more subtle than that, but she certainly seems to fall in the latter category here. Other recent entrants in this genre include Jaron Lanier (reviewed here), Andrew Keen, and Nicholas Carr. I find this irritating and simplistic. Why do the effects of technology have to be good or bad? Can't they simply be different?

So, what is it about the performance aspect of Facebook that might be objectionable? Well, for one thing, it's a much less subtle, less rich medium than face-to-face communication. F2F performances can be improvised, adjusted to situations, respond to the performances of others in an intricate dance. Performing on Facebook or Twitter is by contrast a rather crude affair (for instance, there's no analog for eye contact), which tends to degenerate into trivia and naked self-advertisement. You have far less control over context -- most of the problems with Facebook seem to revolve around how it collapses social contexts into a formless blob, resulting either in embarassment (if you allow stuff to escape from its proper context) or repression (if you limit yourself to interaction that is appropriate for every possible audience)*. This however is not a new problem:

Socrates: Writing, you know, Phaedrus, has this strange quality about it, which makes it really like painting: the painter's products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish an explanation, they go on telling you the same thing, over and over forever. Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it just as easily as under the notice of those who comprehend; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid. And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.

Facebook and Twitter identities are a strange mix of oral and written communication styles. Frankly, it's way too early in the evolution of digital social networks, or whatever you want to call them, to say what they are ultimately going to do to our souls.

I give Turkle a lot of credit for being one of first humanist-type people to take the sociology of digital technology seriously. Now of course that's a whole industry, but she has been at it for decades. Unfortunately, getting old in this world may mean you can't keep current with what the kids are up to these days (as a youngish greybeard myself I am acutely aware of this problem). I'm pretty sure that the critics are right and the displacement of traditional media by the digital world entails the loss of some valuable things. But obviously it also creates a great many new and wonderful things, most of which have yet to be invented. The human soul and persona will adapt to them as it always does.

*[update: this was written before Google+ Circles came along to "solve" this problem. Why that don't actually seem to help will have to be a topic for another post.]

"A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil"

As I knew would happen, my earlier unfair review of Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants obligated me to read the thing and give it a real one. I have to say I wanted to pick a fight with this book, for reasons that are unclear to me. Partly it's because it is in some ways very close to my own point of view, yet so different in important respects, and I'm a People's-Front-Of-Judea type of guy. Partly it's that Kelly is selling grand visions, but he seems to be unable or unwilling to also adopt the equally important critical stance. But I was disappointed in my search for an argument, because this turns out to me an essentially religious book, and in my experience there's no point arguing with religion. Either you buy into the vision or you don't. So the subject of this book is not actually technology, but the nature of existence itself and where it is supposed to be going.

You'd think the story of technology would be a large enough subject in its own right, but Kelly's scope is so all-encompassingly vast that he has to devote the a good chunk of the book to a discussion of biological life. This is necessary because a key part of his argument is that life and technology are just different aspects of the same process. Evolution (or whatever you want to call it) may have started with chemistry and nucleic acids but is now working with electronics and silicon. In support of this argument, he compares the evolution of various technological forms with biological evolution (eg, the way variant forms of military helmets or trumpets can be arranged in phylogentic trees), and then elides the differences between them, in order to paint them as just different phases of some grander tendency of the universe to evolve towards complexity/goodness/whatever. Progress, in other words. The technium (Kelly's term for the whole sphere of technological development) is simply an extension of the biosphere, or both are manifestations of some underlying, more abstract tendency.

That's the first part of Kelly's thesis. The second is that the evolution of both life and technology is a strongly convergent process, meaning roughly that while evolution obviously involves large amounts of randomness and contingency, its general tendencies and ultimate destination is in some sense foreordained. It was inevitable that we'd evolve multicellularity, muscles, eyes, and computation, although the exact form may vary across the possible universes. Kelly labels this "ordained becoming" and I believe most of these ideas have their roots in the work of Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionist who (not coincidentally) also has a "theology of evolution" at the core of his thought.

Inventions and discoveries are crystals inherent in the technium, waiting to be manifested. There is nothing magical about these patters, nothing mystical about technology having a direction. All complex, adaptive systems...will exhibit emergent forms and inherent directions. (p 186)

Given the above points, the story becomes not so much "what technology wants" as where technology (and everything else) is inevitably heading. This may be a difference which may make no difference, just as it doesn't matter in some sense whether a sunflower follows the sun because it "wants" to or it has an innate tropism-generating mechanism. Calling the trajectory of technology a "want" suggests, though, that it might want something different, or that it can be induced to go somewhere else. The arguments Kelly advances suggest otherwise.

The third part of the book is devoted to those who think they can escape from technology (such as the Amish) or put a halt to its onslaught (such as the Unabomber). It's a bold choice to make Ted Kaczinsky the focus of a chapter, I thought. Kelly does a credible and fair job of presenting his viewpoint. But the (perhaps unintended) thrust of this is to paint anybody who hopes to argue with or resist the advancement of an autonomous, self-willed technium as a madman. There are many level-headed and sane critics of technology that could have been used as foils. In some ways Kaszinscky is Kelly's mirror-image: both are equally eager to totalize technology, to paint it as a unified and nearly unstoppable force.

The urge for self-preservation, self-extension, and self-growth is the state of any living thing...there comes a moment in the childhood of our biological offspring when their childish selfish nature confronts us, and we have ot acknowledge that they have their own agenda (sic)... Collectively we are at one of these moments with the technium...At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this direction, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything, and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believe) to resist (p187)

It's odd that more reasonable efforts to redirect technology are given short shrift, given that Kelly was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which advanced the idea that you could repurpose and redirect technology for alternative purposes. I guess his later career at Wired has overridden that...but he does run a site called Cool Tools which is very close in spirit to the old WEC, so he hasn't abandoned that ethos (in fairness, Kelly does discuss his personal transition from low to high tech).

The fourth part of the book is an effort to characterize the nature of the inevitable progress of technology. "Technology wants what life wants" which is "increasing efficiency, increasing opportunity, increasing emergence, increasing complexity...increasing freedom, increasing mutualism increasing beauty... " (p 270). This is the point where things skidded off the road and into the gauzy, light-filled realm of heaven for me. I've been a technologist all my life, and while I certainly believe in the wonderful things it can do and the beauty it embody, I can't take such a rosy view. Technology is not just your iPhone and Facebook, it's hydrogen bombs, ecological disaster, and the constant radical undermining of human values. It's not just those either, of course, but to consider one side without the other can't be done if you are trying to get an honest picture of the technosphere. It's the same as with biological life, which for all its beauty has no particular interest in your personal well-being and contains many "wanters" that treat humans as so much raw material, from mountain lions to malaria parasites.

Kelly is not oblivious to the possible downsides of technology, of course. But when it comes time to tot up the good vs the bad, it comes down to this:

The message of the technium is that any choice is way better then no choice. That's why technology tends to tip the scales slightly toward the good, even though it produces so many problems...it compounds the good in the world because in addition to the direct good it brings, the arc of the technium keeps increasing choices, possibilities, freedom, and free will in the world, and that is an even greater good.

Argh, this is libertarian rot. A greater availability of choice is not always "good". Would we be better off if anyone could have the choice of obtaining RPGs or nuclear weapons at the local 7-11? More choices can make people overwhelmed and unhappy. And if we are being propelled irresistibly forward into some foreordained attractor, do we really have any choice at all?

Kelly is constantly revisiting the issue of whether technology makes us better people or not. I find this a ridiculous question, and it undercuts his own premise. We do not have the option of doing without technology, with all due respect to Amish refuseniks. As a civilization, a species, we've built ourselves a technological layer that we now live in and can't get rid of (unless we are prepared for an order-of-magnitude dieoff). The question of "is technology good or evil" is a stupid question, frankly. You can talk about a particular bit of technology and what its effects are and what human interests it serves or subverts, but to try to put a moral valence on technology as a whole is like a fish giving a lecture on "water: threat or savior"?

As before, I can't help but compare Kelly to Latour. Both start with what should be a fairly straightforward task of describing the processes of science and technology, but end up going off on wild metaphysical joyrides. The difference is that Latour has a political/sociological view, while Kelly's is primarily religious (not that Latour doesn't get into that now and then). Both are trying to locate agency somewhere other than in its traditional home of individual humans, but while Latour distributes it throughout the material world, Kelly seems to locate it in some transcendent heavenly omega point. That's why ultimately Latour seems to be more of a humanist -- the desires he talks about are human-scaled, even if they inhabit odd objects.

To summarize: this book is the product of a particular kind of vision, of a world that is hurtling despite itself towards a transcendently positive future of increasing complexity and capability. "Technology" is not the real subject, that just happens to be the current edge of the curve. It's an attractive vision, and certainly it's possible to see some of this in the world when approached from the right angle. Evolution and related processes do have a ratchet effect; the world is learning to do what it does better. That's great, but either this happens with human guidance or without it. If technology in truth can't be managed, then we don't really need to think about it, we can just play with our gadgets. If, on the other hand, technology can be shaped and guided by humans, then we need better ways to do just that. Dealing with climate change is the most obvious area where we need more control, not less. Getting transported into ecstasies by the technical sublime doesn't help. The reality of our technological world -- its glories and its disasters, its potentials and ptifalls -- has to be faced squarely. Trying to paint a moral valence on technology as a whole is a mistake; like the humans who propel it forward, it contains multitudes.

[[title courtesy of The Giant Rat of Sumatra by The Firesign Theater]]

Book Review -- Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get A Life

This chatty and engaging book by Thomas Geoghegan explores the little-known world of the present-day German industrial economy -- a form of quasi-socialism which involves large measures of worker control, through unions, "works councils", and other mechanisms. Contrary to what you would expect if you read only the financial press, this model appears to work quite well -- Germany is the world's biggest exporter (outdoing China), and they've managed to retain and make use of a skilled manufacturing workforce. According to Geoghegan, the lifestyle of a typical middle-class German is vastly better that that of a similar USian, at least along some obvious dimensions (vacation time, guaranteed health care, job security and hence no need to work like a dog to keep your job) and some non-obvious ones (a strong feeling of social solidarity, the way job stability helps to build a high-value workforce).

This is a book of personal impressions rather than something systematically researched and thought out. Geoghegan wanders in and out of the country in a daze, not quite believing this can work. Most of the people he talks to in Germany believe their system is doomed and the Anglo-American model of capitalism will triumph there as it has everywhere, and the German workers will join the race to the bottom along with the rest of the world. Yet even the center-right parties (the Christian Democrats) have robust support for the existing system.

There is some wistful but unconvincing speculation about how the US could somehow someday adopt a model like this. I'm dubious. The social and economic fabric of the US has frayed so far that it is hard to imagine it coming together again to make a society like that of Germany, where people feel responsibility for each other and enact that responsibility through social institutions with enough actual power to restrain economic rapaciousness. OTOH, think about the hellish world that present-day Germany grew out of. So dramatic changes for the good can happen. I hope it doesn't require passing through utter catastrophe.

Geoghegan's earlier book, Which Side Are You On: Trying to be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back is also very good.

Speaking of solidarity, another interesting-looking book on my queue is Yellow Blue Tibia, a novel in which Stalin after the end of WWII enlists a troop of Soviet science fiction writers to create a a new threat to bind the country together -- sort of Watchmen meets Gary Shteyngart. Uniting-against-a-fake-common-enemy is a hoary idea, but presumably the setting puts a new spin on it.

Loci of desire

I haven't yet read Kevin Kelly's new book What Technology Wants. I suspect I'll find it mostly annoying -- he has a habit of addressing issues I care and think about, in ways that are sort of like my own opinions, but taken too far or off in some quasi-theological direction that I find grating (OK, and the fact that he reaches orders of magnitude more readers than I do might also contribute to my annoyance). But I did pick it up in the bookstore and look in the index to find no mention of Bruno Latour, which was slightly surprising, since Latour has been talking about investing agency into non-humans for decades.

But then it occurred to me that there is something fundamentally different about Kelly's view and Latour's (disclaimer: I actually have no idea what Kelly's view is, I'm judging the book by its title which may not be fair). Latour grants agency to things, but I very much doubt he would ever imbue technology as a whole with desires, as Kelly does. Latour is interested in the politics of things and the networks that connect things and people; their alliances, their conflicts, their failures and triumphs. His project is to tease out and describe these networks -- for instance, how a mass spectrograph connects the researchers and engineers who developed it, the manufacturer, its purchasers and users, the inscriptions it generates, the actual sample being measured, and the theory it will hopefully support. Under the Latourian view humans and non-humans have ontologically equal status and are connected in networks as equals.

That is an intriguing if difficult idea, but it's very different from Kelly's, which posits some sort of overarching teleology. In Latour's world model, everything (technology included) is radically distributed and radically democratic. In Kelly's, technology is some external, autonomous, and presumably unstoppable force of nature rolling over humanity like a tidal wave of disruption.

I can actually see merits to both views; they can both be useful perspectives. But I think Latour's is subtler, richer, and ultimately more humanistic since it is all about how the desires of humans and technologies are connected.

Damn, now I guess I'll have to read Kelly's book to see if I'm being unfair to it.

The broader issue is one that has obsessed me for some time -- the fact that in the modern era nobody really knows what wants are or where they come from. A whole constellation of forces, from the Freudian unconscious and the Darwinian roots of behavior through the modern-day manipulation of the mass media -- all conspire to make it glaringly obvious that desire is never a simple act of an atomic self. So what is it, and how do we talk about it intelligently?

Here's another critique of Kelly's book, also unfair since it came out more than 30 years before he wrote his.

Review: You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget is a stimulating but aggravating book. He's grappling with deep and important issues, and has some valuable insights, but for every insight there are three examples of oversimplification, poor metaphors, or wrongheadedness. The book is framed as a critique of technology; an informed antidote to some of the mindless cheerleading that is common in the industry; a plea for humanism amidst what apparently is the soul-crushing nature of the modern digital world. God knows that's an important thing to do, but it needs to be done with more intellectual rigor and less formless whining.

Lanier's book is wide-ranging and even when it treats a topic superficially it is thought-provoking, so this is somewhat of a set of scattered reactions to a variety of points, not a complete review.

Unwired

The book reads somewhat like an extended argument with Kevin Kelly (former editor of WIRED), who is basically the opposite of Lanier: a technological optimist, determinist, and autonomist (his forthcoming book is "What Technology Wants"). Lanier terms his opponents variously "digital Maoists" or "cybernetic totalists", which are pretty good coinages, if not exactly illuminating. I kind of sympathize with Lanier on these points. The gushing cyberutopians of WIRED and the like give me hives. I just don't know how important they are. Presumably anyone over the age of 25 or so can tell that it's just marketing hype, turning tech dreams into lifestyle accessories and VC pitches (remember the "push technologies revolution"?). Ten years ago, when people were less familiar with the internet, such cybergush could get a lot of traction. These days the internet is integrated into our lives (along with pocket phone computers and other sfinana) and my instinct is that people don't need or respond to the gushing as much, which makes Lanier's critique of it seem somewhat dated.

Also exaggerated:

I remember [Ted] Nelson trying to speak and young American Maoists shouting him down because they worried that his system would favor the intellectual over the peasant. (p 101)

Even allowing for Lanier's somewhat nonstandard use of the term "Maoist", this has the flavor of a tale that grew in the telling.

Nostalgia

Something about the tone of the book sets my teeth on edge. I think it's all longing for the good old days of the late 80s or so, when digital technology was free, less commercial, what a joy it was to be young and idealistic in those days, la di fucking da. Translation: Jaron is old now and he's pining for his youth. Believe me, I can sympathize, I do a lot of nostalgic yearning myself, but I'm not under the illusion that it's interesting enough to put into a book. The revolution did not happen just as we envisioned, what a surprise, do revolutions ever work that way?

Standardization

One of the themes of the book is that standardization is bad and dehumanizing. Standardization is a widely-studied phenomenon, there is a lot of interesting things to say about, but I haven't found anything new here (I've learned a lot from bhyde's blog). Lanier's take is reductive and in places just wrong. He opens with some plaints about MIDI, the standard developed in the 80s to link music synthesizers:

Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. It was away for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool distinguishable from the music itself. Different people could make transcriptions of the same musical recording, for instance, and come up with slightly different scores.

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn't avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality. (p 9)

That is certainly a poignant and evocative image of loss. Computers have killed music, or even worse, they've removed all the subtlety and juice from it. There are several things wrong with this.

First, is it true? Has music really gotten more rigid since the introduction of MIDI? I'm not a musician so it's tough for me to say, but I seriously doubt it.

Second, is the description of the MIDI standard accurate? Partly -- MIDI does impose its concept of a scale on music -- its model is more like a piano than a trombone. But it does permit pitch-bending and is thus not limited to only the fixed tones of a keyboard instrument, which I think is what is implied in the above.

What is most astonishing about the above is that it ignores the (quite interesting) fact that the standard imposed by MIDI is just a modern echo of an earlier process of standardization in music. The equal-tempered Western musical scale evolved through a pre-digitial process of standardization, with the usual accompaniment of politicking and controversy. As a result, pianos can only play 12 notes out of the infinite possibilities in an octave. Did this standardization kill music, make it more lifeless? I wonder if pianos and other keyboard instruments were regarded as dehumanizing, deadening to the spirit of music, when they were introduced. I'll bet they were, yet somehow music survived.

Further: let's say that the MIDI standard did have the negative effects that Lanier attributes to it. Even so, to judge it one would have to balance it against whatever positive effects the standard had, such as allowing a player of one type of controller access to a huge variety of sound synthesizers. This is why standards get defined in the first place, and since nobody forced musicians to use MIDI one would guess that they are realizing actual value from it.

Personhood

Throughout this book, I'll explore whether people are becoming like MIDI notes -- overly defined, and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer. (p 10)

This echoes the worries of the early industrial age when we were all going to be turned into cogs in the machine. And those critics were right, in part! Yet humanity survived, personhood survived, was mutated, it gave rise to us.

One of the changes Lanier bemoans is the decline in custom-built home pages what with people managing their online identities through standardized tools like Facebook and blogs. Yeah right -- I really miss all that shitty HTML from 1987. This is one case where I see no problem at all. Anyone can still make a custom web page and many people do. Facebook and blogs have reduced the overhead so hundreds of millions of people can now have a presence.

Facebook and similar social platforms come under attack for what it is doing to the word "friends", among other things. If people are collecting ten thousand Facebook friends and competing on that basis, that is somewhat disturbing. Here's another point with some validity, but it's hardly original, and worse, the built-in assumption that this is somehow diminishing our humanity is so stale. Technology may be changing it, but that is exciting and disturbing and interesting. To assume that all change is for the worse is the mark of a mind that has gone over to the conservative side. This is a terrible thing to observe in someone previously known for creativity.

People have been bemoaning the diminishing effects of cognitive tools on the pristine mind for thousands of years:

Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind... Plato'™s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. -- Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

So Lanier may be in good company but at this point perhaps we can take a broader view.

Hive Economics

The book is on better ground when it talks about the economics of open source and its threat to cultural creators (but that's not terribly original -- everybody's been writing about the death of newspapers; Seth Finkelstein has written a lot about the Wikipedia sweatshop; and it's even been discussed here).

The people who are most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation. (p 93).

This quote resonated because I posed exactly this question to Richard Stallman in the very early days of the Free Software movement. The answer was vaguely that programmers would no longer be able to have proprietary code but could charge for consulting and similar services (the analog of musicians giving away the digital music but charging for concerts). It didn't convince me, but open-source took off anyway, and some people do make a living in that model but essentially large swathes of the computer industry have been "demonetized".

Jaron has some proposed solutions to demonetization in the arts, but they didn't seem very convincing. Presumably all of them and more are being tried. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the demonetized in general but it's hard to work up sympathy for artists in particular. The ones that are good will find a way to make a living, and if fewer people can do that I don't think the world will be terribly impoverished. Anyway, they are supposed to be the avant-garde and having your job undermined by technology and capitalism is going to happen to all of us sooner or later; they are just leading the way.

Conclusion

We need more digital humanists. We need technically informed people who are skeptical of the promise of cyberutopians. Lanier's book is a step in a good direction, but is also infuriating because it touches on all sorts of interesting points but in ways that are not terribly insightful and in many cases trivializing. A little more focus would have gone a long way. The book is subtitled "a manifesto" but it reads like a collection of assorted complaints rather than a unified call to action. Many of the points touched upon (the nature of social relations in a wired world; the effect of standardization on expression; the undermining of revenue models for content creators) are worthy of a book in themselves and of course some have them.

The unifying theme of the book, such as it is, is that technology has the potential to undermine our humanity and has in fact done so already in many respects. It seems to me that humanity has already weathered much more severe and damaging transitions than digital networks (agriculture, the printing press, industrialized war, global capitalism, to name a few). All of these have shaken up and changed what humanity is, but they have not destroyed it. Computers will be the same. Whatever the core of humanity is, it can survive Facebook's standardization of social relations and even the death of newspapers. Humans have a way of humanizing technology which is stronger than technologies' ability to dehumanize us.

[[Update: Here's a much more entertainingly deranged version of essentially the same thesis:

The Noosphere is not, as we hear among the ignorant jabbering belched from the bowels of the blogosphere, some sort of mystical "living tissue of collective consciousness"; it is not the "Mind of Gaia"; it is not what Sir Julian Huxley⁶a close collaborator of H.G. Wells, describes as "a global unification of human awareness," an "organized web of thought, a noetic system operating at high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy." Huxley's image of the Noosphere as "the union of the whole human species into a single inter-thinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought," is actually the idea of Wells' "World Brain" blogosphere. This sort of garbage, which could only be the product of people brainwashed by too many so-called "cyberdelic experiences" in virtual reality, is intended to twist the scientific optimism of Vernadsky, ⁷obscuring the domain of Vernadsky's real science, and maliciously weaving him into the anti-science, Green Cybernetics cult promoted by Al Gore and his fellow pro-British heirs of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell.

Courtesy of the LaRouche Youth League!]]

Impressive futurism; misleading book titles

Pretty good call:

In 1883 [Charles Ammi] Cutter wrote a futuristic essay entitled "The Buffalo Public Library in 1983". imagining what a library might look like in 100 years, he envisioned readers sitting at desks equipped with "a little keyboard" through which they could connect with a central electronic catalog, ordering books form the stacks by punching in a call nmber. He even foresaw networks of libraries connected by a "fonographic foil" that would enable them to communicate telegraphically, accessing each others' collections so readily that "all the libraries in the country...are practically one library".

From Glut, by Alex Wright. Cutter was the inventor of the Library of Congress cataloging system. The practically one library bit is here.

On the whole I was disappointed by this book, which I was hoping would have some insight into the nature of thinking under conditions of infoglut. What it turned out to be is a history of information classification systems through the ages, from Sumerians to the web. Given that, it was pretty interesting. The author has a degree in library science and it shows. The treatment of Ted Nelson, which is the part of this history that I know best, is reasonably informed and fair, and he had some interesting things to say about the historical tensions between hierarchical and bottom-up organization.

Actually, this is an excellent book except for the title, which is misleading.

It's funny because I recently read another excellent book on a completely different topic: Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner, and had the same reaction. It was an frighteningly insightful memoir of Hitler's rise to power and how the educated, well-intentioned classes in Germany were totally paralyzed. The title in no way reflects the contents -- it should have been called Capitulating to Hitler.

Amazon/WorldCat connector

Hack of the day: putting a WorldCat button on Amazon book pages. Details here.

I don't imagine Amazon would approve of this, since it's main purpose is to aid in using my wishlist as to cache my books-to-read list, then fulfilling it for free at the library rather than through spending money at Amazon.