Thank You for the Music

In the December 9 issue of Rolling Stone, The Edge picks his post-punk playlist. I like the implied modesty of this one:

11. "Teenage Kicks" The Undertones, 1978

We did a kids' daytime TV show with the Undertones. It would have been for this, their first single, and for ours. And they were the same as us — snot-nosed, pimply teenagers. But they were writing great songs.

Yeah. Whereas . . .

One for the Plinth

Train, Mechanical, by Paul McCarthy, at L & M Arts, Los Angeles.

Reviewed by Jason Edward Kaufman

I never much cottoned to Paul McCarthy, but Train, Mechanical (2003-2010), part of “Paul McCarthy: Three Sculptures,” which inaugurates the new Los Angeles gallery of New York-based L & M Arts, has made me a reluctant fan. The grotesque sculpture is a robotic double image of George W. Bush copulating with a pig, just the sort of shock-schlock that McCarthy has made his stock in trade. While I generally have no patience for any of his slovenly garbage, this new work may well be a masterpiece of political agitprop: an appalling satire that captures as no other the revulsion and rage engendered worldwide by the long, dark tenure of our 43rd president.

The spectacle consists of a row of motorized, life-sized animatrons of Bush and hogs, their mechanical armatures covered with pink fleshlike resin. The Bush figures’ hips pump as their oversized heads turn from side to side, periodically spinning full circle, “Exorcist”-style, lips parting in orgasmic reverie. The daisy chain continues as the pigs in turn are penetrated in the ear by piglets. The ghastly contraption is set atop a metal frame containing the computerized machine that automates it. No need to belabor a close reading here: the figures, self-absorbed in bestial depravity, represent the utter debasement of statesmanship, democracy, and truth that marked the Bush years.

On this weekend of derbies

First, a confession: Liverpool Football Club serve a special purpose in my life because they give me something to hate. A pantomime villain to boo and hiss, if you will. A Professor Fate to laugh at as they stumble from catastrophe to catastrophe. Let's be straight - that is the way of things these days in the city of my birth. The days of the "friendly derby" are no more, for reasons which are far too complicated to go into with this post.

That said, I found it impossible to resist the charms of Peter Lupson's Across the Park (sutitled Everton FC and Liverpool FC - Common Ground) because the reasons for the "friendly derby" are contained within its pages. The simple truth is that both clubs are linked historically in a way that perhaps no other clubs are, springing as they did from the same Methodist church side. Little did the Reverend Ben Chambers know, when in 1878 he formed a football team to keep the St Domingo church cricket team fit in the winters, that he was starting something which would bring twenty seven league titles to the city, shared between two illustrious clubs.

St Domingo soon changed their name to Everton FC and became founder members of the Football League in 1888, playing their home games at Anfield and winning the title at their third attempt. Soon, though, a dispute between the ambitious (and tory, not to mention Orangeman) John Houlding and the rest of the club led by (the liberal) George McMahon over rent - Houlding was renting the ground and subletting it the Everton - led to the Toffeemen upping sticks across the park to build a brand new stadium and leaving Houlding with a ground but no team. His solution was to draft in a scratch team of Scottish pros and, having been told by the Football League that he could not use the name Everton, Liverpool FC were formed in 1892.

Clearly, neither side was going to get over this bitter schism overnight but, in time, the ties between the clubs began to grow ever stronger, not least because of the great friendship between Everton chairman Will Cuff (who, as a lad, had watched St Domingo play their first games in Stanley Park) and his counterpart at Anfield, John McKenna.

Such was the healing of the rift that in 1902, when John Houlding died, Everton sent their own representatives to his funeral and flew their flags at half-mast at Goodison.

All of this, plus the many other connections between the clubs down the years through John Moores (who, Blue though he was, owned shares in both clubs) and his family, as well as the great communal grief and inter-club co-operation over the Hillsborough disaster and the Rhys Jones murder, is described in compelling detail by Lupson and even if it does have a bit of a "hey, can't we all just get on?" tone to it it is a thoroughly enjoyable and quite convincing read which would, I'm sure, be enjoyable for any fan of the English game to read. Even Villa fans.

I still want us to batter the red bastards tomorrow, of course.

It's Friday! Let's Boogie!!

Guster: "Stay with Me Jesus"
Director: Kathleen Judge

Reeling in the Ears: The Irish Top Ten 2010

The 2010 Irish Top Ten was somewhat delayed this year owing to the bad weather and the recession. Nevertheless, it has proved to be worth the wait, since all of this year's entries are home-grown, with the exception of the Thurles Male Voice Choir, most of whom are Welsh. There was some dismay expressed when this list appeared prematurely on Wikileaks at the absence of one or two of the nation's better-known and more widely acclaimed recording artists, but it's worth bearing in mind that this particular list comes courtesy of independent pirate station Raidio Siamsa (89.8 FM), whose listeners are nothing if not purists, and the slightest whiff of conglomerate approval or the imprimatur of the state broadcaster is enough to condemn any artist, in their eyes, to the Purgatory of corporate mediocrity, thereby disqualifying them from consideration. Thus, no Daniel O'Donnell, no Bono, no David McSavage. Here, instead, are the very best of last year's sea-green incorruptibles:


10: "Mommy, Drop the Gun," by Crystal Meth (Kimmage Music)

9: "Stop Calling Me Your Bird," by the Pigeon Holes (Phist the Lord Records)

8: "Smokeless Coalition," by Floorless Komplexxion (Hemi)

7: "Fuck Me, Fuck My Children," by Conditional Discharge (Xiao Long Bao)

6: "Hurling for Your Love," by The Thurles Male Voice Choir (GAA Official Audio Recordings)

5: "Nip Lip Bip, Nip Lip Bip Nip," by The Picky Eaters (Retro-Hetero-Metro)

4: "Dream Home in New England," by White Collar Clive and the Emigrant Solution (Drummbeat)

3: "Let Them Snort Coke," by Kill All Dee-jays (Deathrattle/Gerrymade)

2: "My Brown Trousers," by the Liquidity Problem (Loose)

and, by universal agreement,

1: "Death Before Bosco," by the Twittershit Spangles (Afternoon Wank)



You can find previous top tens here, here, here, here, and here.

Better Than Fine

I said recently, when reviewing Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender that there remains to be written a fantastic, comprehensive demolition of arguments for cognitively based sexual differences. Allow me to recommend Rebecca Jordan-Young's Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. My problem with Fine's book was one of style rather than substance, but if this review is anything to go by, Jordan-Young's book may be the one to go to for clarity as well as comprehensiveness.

On a slightly related note, let me also recommend a couple of articles on the scientific method that recently landed on my desk: Jonah Lehrer, writing in The New Yorker magazine, discusses a phenomenon known as "the decline effect":

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

It's also worth reading Lehrer's follow-up blog, in which he responds to the letters that The New Yorker received about his article.

But even those theories that do get replicated are shadowed by uncertainty. After all, one of the more disturbing aspects of the decline effect is that many results we now believe to be false have been replicated numerous times. To take but one example I cited in the article: After fluctuating asymmetry, a widely publicized theory in evolutionary biology, was proposed in the early nineteen-nineties, nine of the first ten independent tests confirmed the theory. In fact, it took several years before an overwhelming majority of published papers began rejecting it. This raises the obvious problem: If false results can get replicated, then how do we demarcate science from pseudoscience? And how can we be sure that anything—even a multiply confirmed finding—is true?

The other article that caught my attention was this one by Benedict Carey in the New York Times on the publication of a research report in a psychology journal that claims to show the existence of ESP. The broader argument was what interested me.

For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.

By incorporating statistical techniques that are now widely used in other sciences — genetics, economic modeling, even wildlife monitoring — social scientists can correct for such problems, saving themselves (and, ahem, science reporters) time, effort and embarrassment.

Although, of course, even if those results are replicated, it doesn't necessarily mean they're correct.

The Thrill of the Kill (or Kill Your Pet Lion)

Ted Williams writes on the phenomenon of canned hunting in Audubon magazine.

It was at Lido’s Game Farm in Taghkanic, New York, that I finally participated in a “canned hunt.”

In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas.

But Lido’s has pheasants only, so a guy named Dave threw them from a tower for a dozen of us to shoot. Some, diseased or wounded from past shoots, dropped to the ground. Other times we’d fire simultaneously, and the bird would exude feathers as if you’d shaken a slashed pillow in a nor’easter. Once someone shot while Dave was still holding the pheasant, and he screamed: “Hey, what you shooting at? Don’t never play games wid me!” The year was 1991, and I was on assignment for Audubon.

Provocative and Thoughtful

. . . is how Laurie Taylor describes the responses to the recent Thinking Allowed program on the absence of utopian thought in the world today. You can hear my contribution at 11 minutes 15 seconds.

Liza with a Die

Now we know who to blame:

Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?

A: My work on behalf of AIDS.

A brave, contrarian career move, when so many other celebrities were campaigning against AIDS. Or maybe she just needs a new agent.

Kill Your Pet Puppy

Nice to see a dissenting opinion:

A 2006 survey of Americans by the Pew Research Center, for instance, reported that living with a pet did not make people any happier. Similarly, a 2000 Australian study of mortality rates found no evidence that pet owners lived any longer than anyone else. And last year Dutch researchers concluded that companion animals had no effect on their owners’ physical or mental well-being. Worse, in 2006, epidemiologists in Finland reported that pet owners were more likely than non-pet owners to suffer from sciatica, kidney disease, arthritis, migraines, panic attacks, high blood pressure and depression.

This pattern of mixed results also holds true for the widely heralded notion that animals can cure various physical afflictions. For example, a study of people with chronic fatigue syndrome found that while pet owners believed that interacting with their pets relieved their symptoms, objective analysis revealed that they were just as tired, stressed, worried and unhappy as sufferers in a control group who had no pets. Similarly, a clinical trial of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy found that interacting with therapy dogs did no more to enhance the participants’ morale than reading a book did.

Presents of Mind

If Santa left you disappointed this year, you could do worse than download the pdfs to the translations of Cornelius Castoriadis's Rising Tide of Insignificancy, Figures of the Thinkable, and A Society Adrift, and then self-publish them using Xlibris, Lulu.com, or one of the other online publishing ventures. I gave my copy of A Society Adrift the rather gloomy cover above, but there's nothing to stop you tarting up your edition with pictures of bald-headed Greeks, Molotov-lobbing Athenians, or a large cock. Whatever takes your fancy.  It makes them easier to read on the train if you don't have an iPad, and there's a good chance people will ask what it is you're reading.  Especially if it has a large cock on the front.

A Happy New Year to All Our Reader

We collectively promise to be more productive next year.

Not more interesting. Just more productive.

My Brilliant Blogging Career

...or "how the internet killed my brain and sprained my wrist by telling me lies and feeding me too freely available porn."

But that's enough of that. Here's something for you: I watched the remake of The Karate Kid the other day. The kids in my class chose it as their end of term DVD treat and though my heart sank as I counted the hands in the air I actually really enjoyed it on the whole. Here's the thing though - it has no Karate in it. The new version is set in Beijing and since Karate is a Japanese martial art we see Jackie Chan (who is an absolute revelation, by the way) imparting the ways of Kung Fu (you're thinking of David Carradine now, aren't you?) to Will Smith's lad.

You should have called it The Kung Fu Kid, you fucking tossers!

Would I have been as angry about that when I was twenty two as I am about it now? We'll probably never know. The Kung Fu Kid. It has Kung Fu in it. Not Karate. Karate is Japanese. It should have been called The Kung Fu Kid. Is that really too much to ask?

Bah.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Books on the Fly

Each time I update LibraryThing with my latest reads I feel guilty about not offering an opinion for the benefit of friends. It's rare that anyone would actually want to read anything accumulating in that pile in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen unless prompted by the recommendations of others or as punishment for some ineffable crime. Even so, the odd book turns up that actually looks like it might be worth seeking out, and when it isn't, I want to make sure my friends are forewarned. Books very very rarely live up to their hype, and more fool us if we take the word of paid shills in the mass media or blurb writers married to the author's daughter/son/publisher. So here's a quick run-through of the worthy, worthwhile, and worthless from the past couple of months:

The Information Age Trilogy, by Manuel Castells.

Volume One: The Rise of the Network Society

Volume Two: The Power of Identity

Volume Three: End of the Millennium

I encountered Castells in passing through a reference to him in either one of David Harvey's books or a footnote to Erik Olin Wright and was intrigued enough to want to find out more. Castells is a self-described neo-Marxist who takes seriously the significance of the new social movements that had such an impact in the 1960s and which he documented at the time. He also accepts some of the implications of the move from industrialism to post-industrialism without yielding to the relativistic arguments advanced by postmodernism. His is a Marxism, it should be said, that most orthodox Marxists would find problematic. As an anarchist I saw little to disagree with in Castells's description and diagnosis of social dynamics. He is what Olin Wright would describe as a "sociological Marxist" rather than a "historical Marxist," which is to say he might more suitably be called a Conflict Theorist; he disregards the vulgar Marxist base-superstructure dichotomy in favour of interpenetrating social forces and sees no need for a labour theory of value to explain capitalist dynamics. Consequently, his works constitute a clear-eyed up-to-date account of globalization and neo-liberalism reinforced by in-depth case studies of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the rise of the women's movement, and the transformation of the labour market. It makes for fascinating reading, but at around 1,500 pages (excluding index and bibliography) it's a challenging read, particularly when one feels the argument could have been summed up in a work a quarter of that size. The sheer quantity of statistical and empirical data is impressive but doesn't add that much to the discussion; most of it could happily have been contained in the appendices.

Bakunin: The Creative Passion, by Mark Leier

A relatively light read after Castells, Leier's book is a reasonably decent biography of Bakunin that doesn't strain the intellect too much and manages to avoid in-depth accounts of Bakunin's writings other than to acknowledge his anti-Semitism and various other flaws and to draw out his differences with Marx. I found Leier's almost matey style and frequent references to current popular culture highly annoying. They felt completely out of place, for me at least, in what is ostensibly otherwise a serious work. This isn't a book that would entice the reader to find out more about Bakunin, but it will satisfy a general readership who might not have known of the big man's existence before.



A New Paradigm for Understanding Today's World and



Thinking Differently, both by Alain Touraine

Touraine has always hovered on the periphery of my awareness ever since A level sociology 30 years ago, and the discovery that he is Castells's mentor prompted me to seek out his most recent publications in order to get a grip on his work. A New Paradigm for Today's World pretty much repays the compliment to Castells, drawing on his ideas and research and quoting him directly on occasion. A bit of a lovefest all round, in fact. Essentially, Touraine's argument (I conflate both books here) is that sociology and political theory have lost sight of the role and significance of the subject, both descriptively (sociology) and prescriptively (political theory). Sociology is so focused on structural, deterministic explanations that it fails to recognize the contribution of the subject in praxis. At the same time, French society is so hierarchical and centralized, so state-dependent, that the rights of the individual are lost or surrendered in collectivist solutions to social problems like the wearing of headscarves in French schools. He thus recommends a new sociological approach that takes sufficient account of the role of the individual within structures (which sounds to me like the late Sartre, even though Touraine cites Sartre as the founding thinker of the dominant ideology permeating French political thought), as well as a new politics founded on the promotion and protection of the rights of the individual (which sounds to me like a call for liberal, Amnesty-style campaigning).

What struck me above all, however, was how very French Touraine's descriptions are, particularly Thinking Differently, where the description of sociology's failings surely only apply to French sociology. Much of what he demands from the discipline strikes me as common-sensical among British sociologists. Vive la difference, I guess.

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, by Cordelia Fine

There's a fantastic, comprehensive demolition of arguments for cognitively based sexual differences yet to be written. Cordelia Fine's book isn't it. This is page after page of à la carte research findings that provide evidence to contradict the widely known arguments in the works of folk like Simon Baron-Cohen, John Gray, Stephen Pinker, David Buss and so on, whose works seem all the more convincing because of the way they are couched in neurological terms. Fine is a neurologist herself and well able to dismantle their arguments. My objection is only to Fine's writing style. I began reading her earlier work A Mind of Its Own, but you won't see it included in My Library because it's practically unreadable. Tedious and repetitive. And sadly, this book follows the same format. Fine's position is most likely closer to the truth than that of her targets, assuming that her depth of knowledge and familiarity with the evidence count for something, but her lack of rhetorical skills will mean, I suspect, that fewer people take on board her views simply because she fails to convey them with any consideration for the reader.

Why I am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge, by Jonathan Marks

A bit of a hodge-podge, this one. I wasn't really sure what to make of it. Marks seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the claims made for and respect bestowed upon science and scientists, but his book doesn't hold together in any coherent way. He starts off by rehearsing the now-familiar arguments about scientific method—problems with induction, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, all make an appearance—before proceeding to identify social and professional influences that distort or undermine the onward, ever-upward progress in the accumulation of impartial, objective knowledge about the world. As an anthropologist he makes legitimate and perceptive points consistent with a form of epistemological relativism that your stereotypical scientist (think Dawkins here; Marks seems to) would find appalling but which any sociologist of science would shrug his/her shoulders at. Finally, Marks lays in to a range of pseudoscientific theories like Creationism and Intelligent Design, but also Eugenics, Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Alchemy, all now discredited, he insists, but which at one time or another have been regarded as perfectly respectable by similarly respectable scientists.

I read this book in preparation for Steve Shapin's Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority, but on reflection I should perhaps have proceeded straight to Go. I wouldn't have collected £200 but might have saved 15.

Some Future

A couple of articles from the magazine and website of The Futurist. Cory Doctorow interviewed by 60 members of his public:

Audience: In your novel Makers, you talk about people who take electronic gadget waste (referred to as e-waste) and turn it into something new. Where do you see this happening in real life?

Doctorow: A large part of the e-waste problem is that we design devices that are meant to be used for a year but take a hundred thousand years to degrade. I wonder if we won’t someday design some devices to gracefully degrade back into the part stream, back into materials faster. Bruce Sterling wrote a manifesto about this for MIT Press called Shaping Things. He proposed that, with the right regulatory framework and technology, it might be possible to start readdressing design decisions so that things gracefully decompose back into components that can be reused in next-generation devices.

Audience: In For the Win and in Little Brother, you discuss small, technologically savvy networks sparking revolutions among a larger, much less sophisticated group, like enslaved factory workers who were waiting for a catalyst to overthrow their oppressors. Do you really believe that a few thousand well-connected individuals can trigger revolution?

Doctorow: My themes in those books aren’t small groups of people using technology to liberate larger groups, but rather that information rapidly diffuses through small groups, and then larger groups of people use it to help themselves. This is characteristic of all technological diffusion.

Audience: Does that go both ways?

Doctorow: Technology is good at disrupting the status quo because technology gives an advantage to people who want to undermine something that’s stable. Imagine a scenario in the Middle Ages where someone had just invented earth-moving technology and you manage security for a city. You want to defend your city with earth-moving technology. I want to break into your city with earth-moving technology. You need a perfect wall; I need to find one imperfection. Your task is exponentially harder than my task.

When you look at Orwell in 1984, he comes across as a technophobe. What he was seeing was a small piece in the arc of technology, where tech had realized an old totalitarian dream, where there had been states previously who wanted to assert control over private lives of the people who lived in them but they couldn’t make that a reality until technology gave them an assist. According to Orwell, this is what technology does: It allows authoritarians to assert authority. But not long after he wrote that, technology became a tool to undermine the state.

Today, we’re living in another one of those inflection points. We went from technology as a liberating force during my adolescence—it gave young people access to tools, ideas, communities, that even the most powerful and rich couldn’t have dreamt of before—to an age where everybody’s kid gets an iPhone with an application that tracks them like they’re a felon. Every library is mandated to put spyware on their computers, and students who are caught using proxies or another tool that might enhance their privacy are thrown out of school. Educators are scanning students’ Facebook pages. I’m hoping for another swing of the pendulum.

Audience: What did you think of the recent Viacom versus Google verdict?

Doctorow: Here’s the background: Recently, Viacom sued Google, owner of YouTube, for a billion dollars, claiming that YouTube has a duty to police all the material it hosted before the material went live. Viacom also argued that YouTube should not be allowed to have any privacy settings for its users. Right now, if you want to post a video of your newborn taking a bath and you just want to share it with family, you can show the video privately. You can select a privacy setting. Viacom argued that there should be no private videos, because Viacom had no way to police these videos to see if copyrighted material was being shared. By extension, they were arguing that no one should have any privacy settings, because if it’s illegal for YouTube it should be illegal for everyone.

If Viacom had won, they could have changed established law. There’s a copyright law called the Digital Media Copyright Act (DMCA) published in 1998. DMCA exempts people who host content from liability if that content infringes on copyright if they take it down expeditiously. If you have a Web server and one of your users posts something that infringes on copyright, you aren’t liable provided that when you receive a notice that the material is infringing you take the material down. This is what YouTube does with all of the material that its users post. It’s a ton of material; 29 hours of video per minute is uploaded to YouTube. The DMCA allows all the user-generated material on Web sites to exist. It’s why Blogger, Twitter, and Wordpress exist. There aren’t enough lawyer hours between now and the heat death of the universe to review all this material before it’s posted online. In other mediums where similar protections don’t exist, like cable television, very small amounts of user-generated material are shared.

Over the course of the court proceedings, it turned out that, even as Viacom was suing YouTube, it was still uploading videos to YouTube because they needed to have them there as part of their media strategy. Various Viacom divisions were paying as many as 25 marketing companies to put Viacom videos on YouTube under false fronts because no one officially connected to Viacom could put the videos on YouTube. The firms were even “roughing up” the videos to give them a “pirate chic.” At any big media company, beneath the top layer of corporate leadership, beneath the people who file lawsuits for things like copyright infringement, you have a layer of people who understand the realpolitik. These are the actual content producers. They say to themselves, “I have a new TV show. I have to get a certain number of viewers or it will be canceled, and I can’t do it unless I have my video on YouTube.” The real question is, how do you empower those people? We need to start a secret society for clued-in entertainment executives to help each other across companies.

What the court held in the case was that you don’t have to preemptively police all material before it gets onto the Internet. Viacom said it would appeal. It was a foregone conclusion that they would. One day, your university will change its Internet-use policy based on this case. Your Internet service provider will change its policy based on this. It affects everyone, even people who use the Internet for reasons besides uploading entertainment content.

This case speaks directly to how we will share information collectively in the future. It’s the basis also of all of tomorrow’s political organizing. The more constricted that becomes, the harder it becomes to resist bad laws.

Audience: Last year in Spain, the government deactivated 3 million phone numbers. The owners of the phones had to go to a store and show ID to register their phones to get service again. A few weeks ago, Senator Charles F. Schumer (Democrat–New York) proposed mandatory registration of cell phones in the United States because the Times Square bomber used a prepaid phone. How do we resist this in the context of the May 11 threat of terrorists using prepaid phones?

Doctorow: This is another example of politicians shouting terrorism as a way to get anything passed. If the Times Square bomber didn’t have access to an anonymous phone, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have just bought a phone using his ID. What he was worried about was blowing up Times Square, not whether or not he would get caught afterward. All of the 9/11 bombers used a real ID when they got on their planes. Being identified after you committed your suicide atrocity is not a downside. These people record videos with their information before they act. Our current approach to antiterrorism seems to take as its premise that al-Qaeda was trying to end aviation by making flying inconvenient.

In the other article that attracted my attention, author and anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses the "new monogamy":

Marriage has changed more in the past 100 years than it has in the past 10,000, and it could change more in the next 20 years than in the last 100. We are rapidly shedding traditions that emerged with the Agricultural Revolution and returning to patterns of sex, romance, and attachment that evolved on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago.

Let’s look at virginity at marriage, arranged marriages, the concept that men should be the sole family breadwinners, the credo that a woman’s place is in the home, the double standard for adultery, and the concepts of “honor thy husband” and “til death do us part.” These beliefs are vanishing. Instead, children are expressing their sexuality. “Hooking up” (the new term for a one-night stand) is becoming commonplace, along with living together, bearing children out of wedlock, women-headed households, interracial marriages, homosexual weddings, commuter marriages between individuals who live apart, childless marriages, betrothals between older women and younger men, and small families.

. . .

But the most profound trend forward to the past is the rise of what sociologists call the companionate, symmetrical, or peer marriage: marriage between equals. Women in much of the world are regaining the economic power they enjoyed for millennia. Ancestral women left camp almost daily to gather fruits, nuts, and vegetables, returning with 60% to 80% of the evening meal. In the hunting and gathering societies of our past, women worked outside the home; the double-income family was the rule, and women were just as economically, sexually, and socially powerful as men. Today, we are returning to this lifeway, leaving in the “dustbin of history” the traditional, male-headed, patriarchal family—the bastion of agrarian society.

A Society Adrift

Not Bored! have made available a new pdf file here of

A Society Adrift: More Interviews and Discussions on The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, Including Revolutionary Perspectives Today.

Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service. Electronic publication date: October 2010.

Notice ii
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in English, with Standard Abbreviations v
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in French, with Standard Abbreviations vii
Foreword x
On the Translation l
French Editors' Preface li
PART ONE: ITINERARY
The Project of Autonomy Is Not a Utopia (1993) 5
Autonomy Is an Ongoing Process: An Introductory Interview (1990) 16
Revolutionary Perspectives Today (1973) 35
Imaginary Significations (1981) 63
Response to Richard Rorty (1991) 95
On Wars in Europe (1992) 113
PART TWO: INTERVENTIONS
Is it Possible to Create a New Form of Society? (1977) 138
What Political Parties Cannot Do (1979) 156
The Stakes Today for Democracy (1986) 165
"We Are Going Through a Low Period . . . " (1986) 171
Do Vanguards Exist? (1987) 177
What a Revolution Is (1988) 189
Neither a Historical Necessity Nor Just a "Moral" Exigency: A Political and Human Exigency (1988) 199
When East Tips West (1989) 205
Market, Capitalism, Democracy (1990) 210
A "Democracy" Without Citizens' Participation (1991) 220
Gorbachev: No Reform, No Turning Back (1991) 226
War, Religion, and Politics (1991) 234
Communism, Fascism, Emancipation (1991) 242
Ecology Against the Merchants (1992) 247
A Society Adrift (1993) 250
On Political Judgment (1995) 264
No to Resignation, No to Archaism (1995) 269
A Unique Trajectory (1997) 273

Bigger Johnson

The September 27 issue of Publishers Weekly features an interview with Steven Johnson discussing his new book (see below) and the future of the publishing industry. It's well worth a read. I was particularly struck by Johnson's conception of ideas as networks, since it chimes in with some of the arguments advanced by Manuel Castells in his Information Age trilogy, the first volume of which is titled The Rise of the Network Society.

When I gave the book to Kevin Kelly to read, he wrote back, "It's a book about how ideas are networks that are made up of a network of ideas." I love that. An idea is not a single thing. It's literally a network in your brain, and it's almost always a network in terms of the flow of information that leads to the idea. A solitary moment of inspiration is absolutely the exception, not the rule.

Until I encountered your description of the Web as a developing city, complete with homage to Jane Jacobs, I hadn't realized how much I wanted a visual analogue to understand how the Web is evolving.

You know how people talk about American exceptionalism? I think there's a kind of Web exceptionalism, where people say the Web and the Internet have these magical properties, where open source software can happen and people can collaborate and make Wikipedia, but that these kinds of things never happen in the real world. Part of my argument is to show how these patterns of innovation have a long history in the so-called real world. When you think of the organizational structure that sustained Renaissance development as being partially the city states, you have to understand the particular quality of cities: they're not really owned by anybody. They're collectively built, and although they are the seat of commercial activity that is closed and propriety and market-driven, the space the city creates is not. When you push the analogy over to the biological systems and you can see the innovation that develops in those environments, you start to see deep patterns. People often talk about the Web like it's this 1960s commune—"Oh, the Web, weird things happen there!"

Where Good Ideas Come From

The always-interesting Steven Johnson, author of such books as Emergence and Everything Bad Is Good for You, has a new book out, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. In the October issue of Wired, he discusses the book with Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants.


Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.

Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Kelly: The musician Brian Eno invented a wonderful word to describe this phenomenon: scenius. We normally think of innovators as independent geniuses, but Eno’s point is that innovation comes from social scenes,from passionate and connected groups of people.

Johnson: At the end of my book, I try to look at that phenomenon systematically. I took roughly 200 crucial innovations from the post-Gutenberg era and figured out how many of them came from individual entrepreneurs or private companies and how many from collaborative networks working outside the market. It turns out that the lone genius entrepreneur has always been a rarity—there’s far more innovation coming out of open, nonmarket networks than we tend to assume.

Explicit Book Pr0n

To facilitate our readers' intellectual stimulation, I've replaced the original photos in the post below with higher-resolution pix from my camera, enabling them to see the spines of my unread tomes - and thus the true extent of my ignorance - more readily.  Any suggestions regarding books I might wish to discard will be entertained, providing you've already read it yourself and can give a précis of its shortcomings. ;-)

It's All Gone Very Quiet

I can't seriously believe that anyone misses posts at this blog all that much, but if you're wondering why there's not much happening here, it's because I've found myself caught up in a classic Socratic dilemma: The more I read, the more I realize how little I know, which means I have to read more, which results in me realizing how little I know, and round and round we go. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to have a firm opinion on anything. Of course, you might say, that never stopped me before, but that's because I hadn't read as much as I have now. ;-)

Here's some idea of the scale of the problem:

This is actually my CD shelf converted to hold books. My CDs are all in boxes and in the attic unless I play them regularly. There are one or two reference books here that I can knock off the list of "to reads," and there are a couple of books mixed in here that I've read but kept in the same place for ease of recollection.   Cassell's Dictionary of Slang is a cornucopia in its own right and deserves to be read in its entirety. At some point.

There's no great order to this collection, since I've bought new shelves recently to give me more space, but I've managed to keep the J.G. Ballards together.

These are actually books that I've read. Most of them, anyway. I hold onto them if they have reference or sentimental value, otherwise I pass them onto charity via my wonderful friend Trish. Looking at these now, I could get rid of a fair number, but I doubt anyone would want them. The framed photo is me and Felix Savon in Havana.  The unframed one is my nephew Ollie with his children's BAFTA.  My mom and dad bought me the Laurel & Hardy figurines.

Lots to go at here. Recent purchases include Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris, Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind, Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity, Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers, Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies, and The Rough Guide to Sex, which I bought thinking it was The Guide to Rough Sex. This bookcase above, incidentally, is two books deep.

This is supposed to be my bookcase of "next to reads" but there's an overflow on the adjoining case. I find myself picking from them at random for my train read, depending on how I feel that morning and how heavy the volume is. Heavy books get read at home. The big yellow volumes stacked horizontally are the last hard-copy editions of Readers' Guide Abstracts, before we went virtual. They're nice to have because I can show visitors I'm a published editor. Recently bought books on this case are Stefan Collini's Common Reading, my most recent purchase; Bakunin, by Mark Leier; Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine; and Communication Power, by Manuel Castells. There are also two unread biographies of Engels I'm looking forward to.

This is the overflow bookcase of "next to reads." These are mostly books bought with the best of intentions, but when I actually consider the prospect of reading them, I manage to find something less worthy but more attractive. New purchases here usually have something to do with Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time program, which is why it features Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, writings by and about Hazlitt, and the In Our Time volume itself. There's about eight Steven Aylett books on this case that I really should have a go at, but none of them look as much fun as Bigot Hall.  If you buy ANY books shown here, make it that one.

Yes, I've even got bookcases in the porch. This is the motherlode, containing some books that I've had with me for nigh on a decade. It's a kind of elephants' graveyard of unread books, the desperately worthy and intellectual stuff that I've promised myself I'll read but which become less attractive the closer I get to them. Some of them I've dipped into and put back, and I suspect they may never get read. Others are just sitting there until I've ploughed through the more urgent material, urgent being defined as more engaging rather than relevant. It isn't that I have ADHD so much as an overstimulating job that presents subjects that arouse my curiosity with such regularity that I cannot satisfy it before another subject arises. Highlights of this bookcase include Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought, Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Jonathan D. Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud, and Darconville's Cat, by Alexander Theroux. All fascinating in their own way. I imagine.

To finish on a defiant and optimistic note, two cases of books that I've read.  These are books either that I intend to hold onto—all my Sartre and Castoriadis books, for instance—or books that I haven't yet had a chance to pass on to Trish.  The most recently read books are in the case below, stacked horizontally.  This bookcase is also two books' deep.  The books I read on holiday, and which you'll find listed in the "My Library" app to the left of this page, I either left behind in Cyprus or passed on to Martin. I notice, looking at this picture, that there are even books on this final shelf that are there because I had nowhere else to put them and they still remain to be read. The Fernand Braudel trilogy, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, and Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. I shall probably wait for the DVDs to come out.

So that's the story. As to why nobody else on the C&S team blogs here . . . I'll let them tell you.