“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail for other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. ”
In Defense of Gerontocracy?
I have come to see the moral clarity and conviction of young people and the wisdom and pragmatism of the old not as adversarial forces but as two elements in a dynamic system that need to be designed for as parts of a whole.
Here are two reactions to Frank Bruni’s column In Defense of the Gerontocracy: Maybe older is better. Just look at Nancy Pelosi, about US Senator Dianne Feinstein [age 85] apparently scolding of a group of young constituents who pressed her for action on the Green New Deal. The two comments below, from Micah and Paul B., are not directly responding to each other’s posts, but the effect is the same.
From Micah in NYC,
I usually love Frank Bruni’s columns, but this one infuriates me. Sure, yes, there are good Boomers. Fine. But, fundamentally, that’s not what the Feinstein kerfluffle was about. It was about a powerful woman condescending to terrified children who will inherit an Earth rendered uninhabitable by her brutal timidity long after she is dead. I am 23; if we don’t act now to demolish the structures that enable climate change, our planet will be in catastrophe long before I am Dianne Feinstein’s age, or Frank Bruni’s. Acknowledging that is far, far more important than a fragile generation’s ego.
Micah, NYC, 26 February 2019
From Paul B. in New Jersey,
You miss the whole concept of this essay. Ms. Feinstein was not dismissive of the children’s concerns; anything but. What she was saying is that large problems deserve passionate attention but also deep thought and planning. The devil is indeed in the details. The passionate intensity of youth insists upon immediate solutions without thinking deeply on the nature of the problem and the construction of complex solutions, essentially saying, “wouldn’t it be great if... or it is terrible that...” It is only through life long painful experience that anything remotely resembling wisdom is gained and one possesses it only at the apex of life and only briefly. Even though passion may seem to have dimmed, commitment remains. You would do well to listen to the elders while you can, rather than charge into what you know little about. Decent manners would not hurt, either.
Paul B, New Jersey, 26 February 2019
While I do see these two views as connected parts of a whole I will place my bets with Micah — with the the young and the young at heart. At this moment in history, with the ticking bomb of climate change, there is simply not enough time to rely on the slow, wise processes of the past.
As Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone, “If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win.” Or as Alex Steffen has said, “Winning slowly is same as losing.”
Addendum
In the article If Americans Can Find North Korea on a Map, They’re More Likely to Prefer Diplomacy (New York Times, 5 July 2017) Kevin Quealy unpacks several studies that show that when people know more about the geographic location of geopolitical hotspots — when they know where North Korea and the Ukraine are, for example — they tend to favor diplomacy over military engagement.
The people who had the most geographical knowledge were, by-and-large, highly educated, but the next most knowledgeable group was…older people.
“Nearly half of respondents 65 and older found North Korea. The Korean War, which ended in 1953, may be in the memory of today’s older seniors,” wrote Quealy.
From these studies it might be fair to conclude that the lived experience of older people may give them quantifiably different starting points for decision making than the young — which seems uncontroversial when I put it that way, but given Americans’ general state of ignorance regarding geography and history I would want more people in the proverbial “room where decisions are made” who had a living, working knowledge of where things are and what happened there in the past, than not.
“Winning slowly is the same as losing.”
A great challenge to society
Netflix does seem to be pushing cultural boundaries and sparking new conversations all over the world. After it plastered Bangkok with billboards advertising “Sex Education” last month, a conservative Thai political party filed a complaint against the company for airing the racy British comedy, which the party called “a great challenge to Thai society.” The young, progressive Thai internet responded in fury, and in the outrage, people started talking about actual problems in Thai society, like the lack of sex education and the high rates of teenage pregnancy.
Netflix Is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet Earth by Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, 22 February 2019
Untitled, 1 July 2019, CC-BY
A Donkey Kong 64 Benefit Twitch Stream, Or, Too Old to Lead the Charge
"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) Dropped in to a ‘Donkey Kong 64’ Benefit Twitch Stream to Help Raise Funds for Transgender Children"
A member of congress doing a ‘Donkey Kong 64’ benefit twitch stream fundraiser for transgender kids is about the most now thing I’ve ever heard, with the possible exception of the difficult-to-describe scenario of the difficult-to-describe pop group Marshmello doing a difficult-to-describe virtual concert inside of Fortnite’s battle royale (see A live concert inside a video game feels like the future by Nick Statt in The Verge).
About the @AOC Donkey Kong twitch stream, @RaygunBrown observed,
Bloody hell @AOC is a genius. Supporting trans rights on a video game livestream is something that will hit bang on with young voters while her boomer critics won’t even be able to understand what’s happening, much less know how to criticise it.
Researcher and investor Marty Madrid quipped, about the Marshmello/Fortnite concert, “The future of events ... is confusing. I’m getting too old and potentially out of touch to help lead the charge?” The comment applies to both events equally I think.
UPDATE —This is a better, more thorough article about the Marshmello/Fortnite concert: Fortnite's Marshmello Concert Is The Future Of The Metaverse by Peter Rubin, Wired, 5 February 2019.
Happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, and fear
But there’s a problem. While the technology is cutting-edge, it’s using an outdated scientific concept stating that all humans, everywhere, experience six basic emotions, and that we each express those emotions in the same way. By building a world filled with gadgets and surveillance systems that take this model as gospel, this obsolete view of emotion could end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, as a vast range of human expressions around the world is forced into a narrow set of definable, machine-readable boxes.
Silicon Valley thinks everyone feels the same six emotions by Dr. Rich Firth-Godbehere, Quartz, 17 September 2018. Dr. Firth-Godbehere says that those emotions are happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, and fear.
“I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.”
We were looking in the wrong place
I love this article, The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, But It's Not What We Expected by Craig Mod (Wired, 20 December 2018), for how it opens up a new way of thinking about, and looking for, change.
Mod looks at the case of the venerable printed book and argues that while we’ve all been waiting for the physical platform of the book to change — and wondering why it hasn’t — everything else in the stack around, under, and on top of funding, writing, printing, distributing, and promoting books has changed dramatically.
We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve […] Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building — everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t.
Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong. For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year.
Mod’s observations seem to me to be a kind of ninja move for understanding the ways in which the most obvious and highly scrutinized components an ecosystem or piece of infrastructure can seem to remain stubbornly stagnant while in fact all of the unconsidered enabling elements around them are being transformed.
We tend to look at the surface of things, the indicator species, show stoppers, and divas, at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem — and those ecosystems can be fascinating.
Disruption for Thee, But More for Me
That’s where the trouble starts. Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used ‘disruption’ to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.
Disruption for Thee, But More for Me
, Cory Doctorow's takedown of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Locus Magazine, 7 January 2019
The article continues,
[The DMCA] is used for “business model enforcement,” to ensure that disruptive, but legal, ways of using a product or service are made illegal – from refilling your printer’s ink cartridge to getting your car or phone serviced by an independent neighborhood repair shop.
Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.
“And that was the problem with 1968. People went ahead and built those things without worrying much about the consequences, because they figured that, by 2018, we’d have come up with all the answers.”
“[By 2018] the transmission of pictures and texts and the distant manipulation of computers and other machines will be added to the transmission of the human voice on a scale that will eventually approach the universality of telephony. What all this will do to the world I cannot guess. It seems bound to affect us all.”
Sparse prose (a sociology of love)
Pager wrote in sparse prose and fought with co-authors who wanted to bog down papers with jargon and technical details. “Devah had this rare ability,” says the Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier, “to both do the most rigorous social science, and then to translate those findings so that they would be discussed by people of different political persuasions.”
It was this kind of grounding that led Pager’s work to have such a profound impact on public policy … It was research compelled by moral commitments — racism is evil, poverty steals our gifts — and Pager’s ability to see the best in us, including those among us who have been convicted and caged. Hers was a sociology in the service of the dispossessed, a sociology of love.
Devah Pager: Her Work As A Sociologist Highlighted Racial Injustice In The United States, by Matthew Desmond, New York Times Magazine, 27 December 2018
“Your house better be clean, your clothes ironed, but only a sucker would sweep the sidewalk.”
“By nearly any measure, Netflix has had a ridiculous year. When all is said and done, the company will have spent upwards of $10 billion (and perhaps as much as $13 billion) to produce more than 550 new movies and shows. ”
Uncontrolled Space
Historically, the GRU has been Russia’s main agency for operating in uncontrolled spaces, which has meant civil wars and the like. In some ways, the Internet is today’s uncontrolled space.
Mark Galeotti, Institute of International Relations in Prague, as qoted in How Russia's military intelligence agency became the covert muscle in Putin's duels with the West, by
Anton Troianovski and
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, 28 December 2018
The article continues,
“What the GRU demonstrate very consistently is profound innovation with available resources,” said Joe Cheravitch, a Russia analyst with Rand Corp., a nonprofit, federally funded research institute. “That’s what really makes them dangerous.”
The Bottomless Pinocchio
Just this month, the newspaper’s Fact Checker was forced to create a new category of lying just for the Trump era: the ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’ for ‘when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchios, keeps saying it over and over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda.’
It is so much worse than I thought by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, 19 December 2018
Speed
Just reminded myself that the distance between NYC and Chicago is almost exactly that between Beijing and Shanghai, and that the 1st is served by 1 train/day that takes 19 hours, and the 2nd is served by 35 trains/day that take as few as 4.5 hours.
Also, the Beijing—Shanghai route carries about 180 million riders a year, about as many as rode on all of Delta Airlines' network in 2017.
@yfreemark, 21 December 2018
“‘This is a problem a lot of historians don’t grasp,’ Kruse says. ‘We think that because we know it, because we’ve proven it, and because we’ve written it down in a book and put it on a shelf somewhere, that everyone knows it. And they don’t.’”
We are what we celebrate
There are two popular explanations for this mayhem. One is that Europe was always destined to tear Britain apart, since too many Britons loathe the evolution of the common market into a European Union. A second is that Brexit has provided a catalyst for a long-simmering civil war between successful Britain (which is metropolitan and liberal) and left-behind Britain (which is provincial and conservative). Both explanations have merit. But there is also a third: that the country’s model of leadership is disintegrating. Britain is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and self-confidence above expertise. This chumocracy has finally met its Waterloo.
The elite that failed: Britain’s political crisis exposes the inadequacy of its leaders, The Economist, 22 December 2019