A Parable For Librarians

Efficiency Without Function. The goal of the archive is to preserve an object for future use without prejudging its usefulness. You must simultaneously collect and preserve while maximizing the potential future usefulness of the object with the knowledge that it may not actually circulate at all.

The same is true for art: literature is simultaneously the least functional of all writing and the most efficient, where every word, page, thought, letter, mark, and space has to be selected and treated with the utmost care yet without the certain knowledge that it will be seen or penetrated by a single reader.

This formula -- purposiveness without purpose -- is what Kant calls the beautiful.

Jon Chait's Strategy to Tilt McCain

Jonathan Chait at The Plank has two very sharp posts on McCain's "tire gauge lie."

In exhibit A, he takes Time reporter Michael Scherer to task for writing: "In its new hardball mode, McCain's team distributed tire gauges labeled OBAMA ENERGY PLAN, underlining the campaign's contention that Obama offered nothing but more air":

Look, this isn't just a contention, it's a lie. McCain is saying, day after day, that Barack Obama's "energy plan" consists of urging Americans to inflate their tires. That's the entire reason why he keeps saying it. It's just a simple lie. Obama has an energy plan that does not consist of urging people to inflate their tires. Agree with it or not, he has one.

I don't want to pick on Mike, because most reporters are in the habit of repeatign campaign contentions without informing their readers whether or not they have any truth to them. That's journalistic standard operating procedure. It's exactly this practice that makes lying such a successful and common strategy.

In exhibit B, he suggests that Obama call McCain on it:

I'm wondering why Barack Obama doesn't just outright call McCain a liar. All politicians spin, some more agresssively than others, but McCain's claim that Obama's energy policy consists of urging people to inflate their tires is way beyond spin. can't Obama flat-out say, "John McCain is lying. He'll obviously say anything to get elected president. American can't afford another president who has no regard for truth or the facts."

McCain is only hanging in close in the polls because he's seen as a straight-talking maverick. But he's just lying about Obama's energy plan every single day. He did it again today. Doesn't this say something important about McCain's character? Don't the last eight years show us what happens when you campaign in the Rove style and then try to govern? It seems to me that Obama can do something that's both politically valuable and extremely salient to the choice voters face.

I can think of something else that would happen if Obama said McCain was lying -- the honor-obsessed McCain would totally lose it. McCain and his camp really seem to hate Obama's guts now. If Obama called McCain a liar, McCain's contempt for Obama would be impossible to conceal or control. He would look like an angry old man barely in possession of himself. And that could be good for cool-as-ice Obama.

The problem is, personal villification has never been Obama's style. The closest I think we're likely to get is "John McCain isn't telling the truth," which while semantically nearly identical is a good deal short of saying "McCain is lying" or especially "McCain is a liar." From there, McCain, if he's got a brain in his body at all, will say that he knows the real truth about the American people, that the truth hurts, that Obama wouldn't know honesty if it was staring him in the face, etc.

Why Krugman Can Write

It's sentences like these: "The politics of stupidity didn't just appeal to the poorly informed."

Krugman works because he's continually outraged at how idiotic the public discussion is.

Sometimes he's so preoccupied with this that he loses it -- like, in my opinion, when he turned Obama's recognition of the problem with mandates to purchase health care (juxtaposed with Krugman's knowledge that mandates will probably be necessary to ensure universal coverage and bring costs down) to a full-blown conspiracy theory about Obama being a crypto-conservative cynically "attacking from the right."

But when it works, it's glorious.

Oh, If Only

Finally, a show my friends and I can get behind:



1) I love Dr. K's frosted hair.

2) To be both pedantic and perjorative, it's pronounced "Vittgenshtein."

3) Marvelous ref to "cryptozoology"; likewise, "The Peeb," "Girls Gone Wilde," and "Gettin' Head!: History's Most Famous Decapitations."

4) Nobody calls it "argumentum ad hominem"; it's always just "ad hominem." You've gotta be up on the hip kids' abbreviations, 'Lexies! (e.g., Lexy = Sexy intellectual; Lexy-Nexy = The new, super-sexy intellectual.)

5) I can't tell whether they're using "penultimate" correctly or incorrectly, or if they know. (Penultimate = second to last.) Funnier if you suppose it's used correctly.

6) The other references are relatively trendy and smart-sounding, but Hume? That's just cool.

Wow, I have crossed over into some strange geeky universe that I now call my life.

Via Kottke.

Small Pleasures

Beat Happening, "Indian Summer":

The Book To Come

This digital variorum edition of Emily Dickinson rocks. [Sophie Reader required.]

You can read the poem, click through alternate drafts, and see images of the manuscript or a published version of the text. Also space for comments, etc. There are points to quibble with, but it's such a nice, clean start that they're really not worth bringing up.

Individual projects are nice, but I think scholarly e-books could really take off if we had 1) semi-standardized formats and 2) no-brainer GUIs to plug information into those formats, both of which would help scholars and readers coordinate their expectations and understand the navigational grammar. There are thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people who will take this kind of information and put it together if you don't have to overcoming coding and additional time hurdles to do it.

"Give users tools to visualize their own data." Still the first commandment for digital scholarship.

The New Kremlinology

Gabriel Sherman at The Plank:

Earlier today, Vanity Fair’s Bruce Feirstein pointed out a humorous and somewhat bizarre reader survey conducted by the New York Times last week. The survey, a pop-up on the Times website, solicited feedback from readers on their opinions on the Times, which isn't that unusual. But the poll's references to recent newsroom controversies including Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, MoveOn's "General Betray-Us" ad, and the NSA wiretapping exposé, were downright shocking for Times Kremlinologists, for whom the survey seemed to offer an unlikely window onto the paper’s Id. The list of topics on which readers were polled potentially indicated which incidents insiders considered the most damaging to the paper's reputation. And there are other oddities. The paper's infamous, artfully-worded 2004 Editor's Note-cum-mea culpa explaining the flawed W.M.D coverage didn’t name names. But the online survey bluntly states that Judith Miller’s Iraq stories “turned out to be wrong.” The survey also misspelled Jayson Blair’s name, referring to the Times fabulist as “Jason Blair.”

I don't care about Jayson/Jason Blair or Judith Miller, and I don't even really care that much about the Times (which frankly surprises me). What I care about is that there are "Times Kremlinologists" -- expert outsiders who try to study the paper or the company based partly on sources and gossip but largely on careful interpretation of public statements and documents.

You see, I think "Kremlinology" is one of the great metaphors of our times. Google the word and you get the obvious references to Soviet and Russian politics, but also Microsoft Kremlinology, Facebook Kremlinology, Clinton Kremlinology; we could easily add Apple Kremlinology, Supreme Court Kremlinology, Federal Reserve Kremlinology, Papal Kremlinology, Vice-Presidential Kremlinology, and many others.

In fact, the one thing that we're really short on is "Kremlinology" of closed and hostile or semi-hostile states. There's still a residual class of Kremlinologists of China and Russia, but none of it really tells us what we want to know. War hawks now are fundamentally uninterested in the internal workings of states of interest, to the point that John McCain refuses to acknowledge (for example) that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't actually control Iranian nuclear policy. Not only are they uninterested, but they're committed to obfuscating the issues.

In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara compares the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War. The difference, McNamara says, is that during the missile crisis and throughout the Cold War, US policy makers were able to empathize with their enemy; they knew them, in some cases personally, and understood their motivations and decision processes. With Vietnam on the other hand, the US was never able to make the same leap of empathy, and fundamentally misunderstood what the Vietnamese wanted and what they were willing to do (including what kind of losses they were willing to accept) in order to do it. My fear is that we continue to make the same mistake.

But hey -- have you seen those pics of the new MacBooks?

The Big and Small Pictures

Liz Gunnison at Portfolio dusts off a "what's the Kindle good for?" piece that, except for the figures on Kindle sales so far (240,000 sold, about $100 million in revenue), could have been written when it launched. But it still seems to make several glaring mistakes when looking at the fundamentals.

For example:

The game in question is reading, after all—not exactly a growth industry, as Simon & Schuster and Random House will tell you....

It's not difficult to imagine that, thanks to its aggressive Kindle marketing push (such as prime advertising space in the middle of Amazon's homepage), those 240,000 units represent a good portion of the total market for the device out there...

Then there's the question of financial means. Only the top 18 percent of households make $100,000 or more, which seems like a reasonable cutoff for figuring out who would spend $359 (down from $399) during a recession on a highly discretionary device, even given a love for reading...

Count out the technophobes and Luddites, a demographic for which e-readers like the Kindle tragically self-select. The 2007 A.P.-Ipsos survey showed that the heaviest readers are female and over 50, while conversely, tech users skew young and male...

To top it off, one can imagine a single device (and Amazon account) being used by an entire household. And we're talking only about those that choose a Kindle, of course, rather than a competing device such as Sony's portable reader...

So, all things considered, how many Kindles does that work out to? Two million? One million? Five hundred thousand?

1) The market for reading is not now nor has it ever been identical to the market for trade book publishing. A device whose primary purpose is reading and viewing documents of many different kinds has a very broad content field to work with, as Gunnison well knows. She's about to talk about newspapers and magazines in a second, and textbooks later on. The fact that the Kindle already allows you to read text and PDF documents of many different kinds, play music, etc., shows you that the "e-book reader" to come will do more than display books on its screen.

2) Certainly, 240,000 represents a "good portion" (half?) of the total market for the device out there -- in its current configuration and at this price point. Not everyone is an early adopter. How many people bought VCRs or DVD players in the first eight months they were out? Also, wait until 1) back to school and 2) Christmas.

3) Dude, $100,000/more is the cutoff? Have you seen who buys an iPhone? Are you forgetting about those college students with discretionary income that you mention in about a minute?

4) If you're a total technophobe -- say, if you're John McCain -- you're not an Amazon customer anyways. You buy used and new paperbacks from your favorite store that you've been going to for years. An electronic bookseller is most likely never going to reach you.

5) Throughout the essay, Gunnison "forgets" that Amazon isn't only making money off of sales from the Kindle; it's making a big chunk from the content for the Kindle. So it doesn't matter whether one person in the family buys a device if everyone in the family is buying books. Most families only buy one refrigerator, one microwave, one toaster, but they buy food to go in them for everyone.

You sell the razor, and then you sell the blades. When push comes to shove, nobody else was blazing a path out there with e-book readers that Amazon could then get in on. It had to get out in that market in a big way in order to create an ecosystem where it could sell that content at all. And just like Apple was able to create a strongest MP3 player because it wasn't an electronics company but made great software, Amazon was able to make the strongest e-book reader because it wasn't an electronics company but knew how to sell books.

I say "forgets" because with all of this stuff, Gunnison "remembers" that the fundamentals for the Kindle actually look much better, because Amazon makes a ton of money from selling books, and college kids read a lot and buy gadgets. She then gets to sound like a genius for saying "one way Amazon could make it better is..."

The thing is, there's a germ of a decent argument there. If you're going to expand the market for reading, you have to think about reading itself in an expanded field. If you're going to change the way that people buy, read, and store media, you have to make that more attractive for the early adopters/cool hunters who start generational trends. It means that you need a full-throttled document viewer, something small and portable and versatile, capable of displaying most of the kinds of electronic content we can now view on a computer screen, and possibly driving whatever will come next.

A Short History of Paper and Film

Before the mid-nineteenth century, paper was primarily made from discarded rags, especially cotton and linen. The production of linen from flax already partially transforms the fiber into a high-cellulose material, and cellulose is the fundamental ingredient of paper. The cloth was broken down into a pulp, mixed with water, recast and dried. Wood-pulp paper is made through a similar process, but the wood first has to be chemically treated in order to produce a similarly high-cellulose product. Sulfur and caustic alkaline sodas can transform pulped wood into a cellulose mix nearly as good as linen. And there is a much larger supply of wood and plant cellulose than linen or cotton. In the nineteenth century, wood appeared to be a virtually unlimited natural resource; in this respect, the shift from linen to woodpulp is similar to the shift from whale oils to petroleum.

In the early nineteenth century, chemists and papermakers experimented with a wide range of materials in search of a substitute for rags. Not only was the supply of good quality cloth limited, but reuse of rags also had the drawback of spreading disease, especially cholera and tuberculosis. In the nineteenth century too, the lifting of excise tariffs and production regulations made paper production and circulation much less expensive, putting more demand on an alternative to rag paper. Joel Munsell's history of papermaking (first published in 1857, before woodpulping became popular) lists 110 different candidates (mostly unsuccessful) for paper, from animal substances and asbestos to white wood and wool, including banana leaves, cabbage stumps, hornets' nests, leather cuttings, manures, plaintains, and saw dust. Experimentation with cellulose and various chemical treatments led to the production of the first polymer plastics, and eventually to collodion wet-plate photography and finally to flexible celluloid film.

Photography, too, simultaneously evolved from daguerrotype images on metal plates (which could not be reproduced and so retained some of the auratic quality of traditional artwork), wet collodion-on-glass and dry gelatin treatments before eventually arriving at the continuous flexible film similar to what we know today. Eastman Kodak, the company credited with the introduction of flexible film (and the supplier of continuous film rolls for Thomas Edison's early motion pictures), had originally used a chemical treatment on ordinary paper in their famous camera. Users could take multiple pictures, send their camera (including the paper film) to be developed by the office. This radically democratized photography. But the regular paper stock produced poor quality negative images and positive prints, so they quickly switched to the paper-based celluloid polymer. In The Manufacture of Paper, R.W. Sindall classifies photographic film with carbon and parchment paper as merely another form of "special paper" treated with a substance to produce a special effect.

But there's another way in which film borrows from nineteenth-century developments in paper production, which is the high-volume industrial production of continuous sheets. Woodpulp paper solved the problems peculiar to linen, and with the lifting of taxes, the mid-nineteenth century saw an explosion of paper documents: not only books, but newspapers, advertisements, leaflets and manifestoes. Along with wastepaper wrappers, cardboard, and other nondocumentary uses, paper formed much of what we'd recognize today as the visual and material culture of modernity. And the seat of the most important innovations was probably the newspaper, which combined literary and political writing with advertisements, photography, and other "new" arts, and which contributed the most to technological advances in print and papermaking. Continuous printing, linotype and phototype, transform printing in exactly the same way from the single-page, handset letterpress as celluloid film (and eventually the cinema) transform photography from the single-shot daguerrotype and glass plate.

History Never Happened

Unlike almost every other liberal I know, I really like David Brooks. Really. I do. He's smart and funny and seems to have a heart and a mind and he's good on TV, and I liked reading Bobos In Paradise, and I like to watch him when he's on NBC or PBS and I like to read his column in the New York Times.

But his column today -- which otherwise has all the hallmarks of one of his better columns, like big ideas set against a sense of history and a certain wry synthesis of pragmatism and idealism -- just feels so, well, wrong, that it's a little embarassing. It's almost like he forgot what he was writing about when he was halfway through and never bothered to see whether one paragraph made any sense when put next to another, so it winds up arguing against itself.

Here's the core of the argument:

We’re about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they’ve asked: Why can’t we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the rest of today’s problems?

The answer is that, in the late 1940s, global power was concentrated. The victory over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output. Within the U.S., power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing class — men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

Okay, this sounds pretty good, and pretty smart. But then you stop to think for a little while about the Cold War. And then it doesn't sound very good at all.

For one thing, Brooks makes it sound like the U.S. was the only global power after World War II, and we weren't. We might have been the biggest game in town, and we still are. But Russia and China, then as now, were big drags on the ability of the rest of the world community to get very much done, especially in the way of crisis intervention, human rights, and global agreements. We just didn't notice those things so much, because we were so worried about killing each other most of the time.

It's true that the Marshall plan was a great effort at global institution building aiming to solve real problems. But what happened when we tried to extend it eastward? Russia said no, and we didn't have the power to force it. So Eastern Europe kinda got screwed. And that was an effort where we were giving money away to rebuild nations, with very few strings attached.
 
Just think about the UN in 1945, with its 51 member nations, and the UN of today, with 192. That's not a move from unipolarity to multipolarity. That's just pure political fragmentation. And it occurred before the Berlin Wall fall, largely as a result of revolutions and partitions freeing different nations from colonial powers. The concentrated powers couldn't do much to project stability then, largely because they were actively taking sides, even when they weren't the colonial power being forced out.

The UN and its resolutions ultimately couldn't do very much to stop apartheid in South Africa, resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, bring any kind of permanent resolution to the war between North and South Korea, prevent bloodshed in the partition of India and Pakistan (or the partition between Pakistan and Bangladesh), prevent mass killings in Cambodia or dozens of other places, or the seizure of territory like Tibet and parts of present-day Israel. It's possible that the global community by way of its norms and institutions, carrots and sticks has done a better job of keeping a lid on such conflicts, but it's not like it was one unmitigated success after another until we suddenly forgot how to act.

You could make the argument that conflicts then were framed as ideological ones, clashes between competing world systems, while now they're nakedly functions of parochial self-interest. But I don't know whether this is really a new phenomenon either. Local interests have always been pretty parochial. Again, I think we just didn't notice so much before.

You could also make the argument that it's harder now even for friends and allies with common ideological assumptions to work together beyond simple self-interest. If France has contracts with the Iraqis, they're never going to support an invasion, even if they "should" agree with its principles. But if that's the case, then Brooks is suffering from a fatal lack of self-consciousness. After all, it's the U.S. that's the elephant in the tea room, not anybody else out there in the multipolar universe. The rest of the world has been able to put together some important agreements on climate change, or on international law and human rights. It's the so-called leader of the free world that won't go along with any of it, because of our narrowly parochial self-interest. And we weren't always so good at getting countries with common values to play along. France pulled out of NATO, most of the rest of the world was deeply ambivalent about American power, and any attempt to lock in US strategic advantage (which is what a lot of those institutions and agreements were all about).

And if this is the argument, that interest trumps shared values, then it doesn't seem at all like a "league of democracies" will do anything to ameliorate the problem. And here Brooks nails shut his own coffin. He begins his story by noting that the "Doha round [of free trade talks] collapsed, despite broad international support, because India’s Congress Party did not want to offend small farmers in the run up to the next elections." But then he ends it by endorsing a League of Democracies. "Nations with similar forms of government do seem to share cohering values."

That may be -- but they also share similar economic realities and democratic pressures, and when those pressures say "don't get rid of the farm subsidies, especially for a free trade agreement that we don't understand and makes us anxious," serious democracies have to respond to them. There is no reason at all why democracies, let alone a league of democracies, will have any greater success at overcoming inertia and doing good things in the world. In fact, there are good reasons (and Brooks names several of them) to believe the opposite.

Unless you think China and Russia are the problem, and that you can isolate them and cut them out of the loop to get things done. In which case, welcome back. The Cold War missed you. History never happened.