William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Hitting the back button

Evgeny Morozov's new book, "To Save Everything, Click Here," is of a similar mind as his last one, "The Net Delusion."

Both ridicule the facile utopianism of marketers and apologists for the internet. The internet is great and worth attention, Morozov says, but it ain't all that.

The two books are of a similar mind, but each tours a different landscape.

You might say "The Net Delusion" critiques internet-centrism in international affairs, and is more serious. Its upshot is nothing less than life and death: tyrants use the same information tools to identify and suppress revolution as Facebook insurgents do to foment it.

The landscape of the new book Is domestic, less urgent, but more insidious: technologies are being put into the service of avoiding the very contradictions and inefficiencies that are the warp and weave of a meaningful life.

Thus, lifeloggers quantify calories consumed and BTUs expended, but are steered away from questions that require answers in the form of narratives rather than numbers. Cities set up systems to predict crime and even prevent lawbreaking, but the citizenry barely assesses the impact on civic-mindedness that must surely follow once neighbors are deprived of the need to confront moral questions.

Facebook, Google and other advertising-based businesses ask us, without any trace of irony let alone chagrin, to bring our authentic selves online. But identity is a work in progress, not a graph of pre-determined relationships and consumer habits. By surrendering privacy to corporate services spinning internet platitudes, Morozov suggests, we deprive ourselves of the spaces in which authentic selves are continually being remade, reconsidered.

"The internet" may not even be an it, an identifiable thing, at least not when we use the term to mean something more than physical infrastructure and protocols. One thing of which Morozov convinces you, especially in the new book, is that "the internet" has become a smokescreen for political correctness, a way to shut down debate, bypass political consensus, even bully individuals from engaging in self-reflection.

Both books are must reads, the new one especially so for those of us on the west coast of the United States, where corporate apologists for the internet are in ascendence. Read through it and see what rings true.

Click here to pull the petals off the rose

I've been reading Evgeny Morozov's new book, To Save Everything, Click Here. Am about halfway, and find the book's conservative (small "c") themes already coloring how I interact with Twitter, what I think of the dysfunction in Washington DC, even the wisdom or folly of non-accredited crowdfunding.

I may not yet see the central urgency of Morozov's critique - I still have half the book to read - but it seems to me that the ways in which online connectivity disappoints us, the ways in which the fervent privileging of efficiency as an end (rather than a means) lets us down, that will all be self-evident in good time. Though to read the signs, to call out the false promises, name the hypocrisy, and tie the essential utopianism of information technology hype to historical antecedents, all that can hasten the moment of awakening under the tree of knowledge.

It's a relief to think of the dawning of the internet era as something more like the rise of railroads than the invention of Greek democracy. Railroads are still important today, sure, but air travel is bigger. It's comforting to think there may be something bigger than the internet that will displace it, that we live in the spaciousness of a transitional time rather than a cloister at the end of the world.

Bosses

I bought her book earlier this week and have only just started reading it, but Sheryl Sandberg was on the Diane Rehm show yesterday and I couldn't help but listen to the podcast.

I'm glad I did. Sandberg and Rehm have a terrific rapport. One can imagine them teaming up to do a regular show together.

I went to the Diane Rehm show site to see if I could locate the juncture in the show where Sandberg and Rehm talked about the use of the word "bossy" to describe women who demonstrate the will to lead. "If we want women to lead, we're going to have to stop calling them 'bossy,'"  Sandberg had said.

Lo and behold, the segment is right there as a video clip. Well worth the 4 minutes to view. Indeed, the whole 52 minute show was great.

DIY book reviews

The NYTimes reports that Amazon is changing out how it filters book reviews.

The changes seem to be directed at curbing reviews that are posted by family and friends. Amazon knows a lot about how people are related, broadly speaking. So I'll bet their new filters are effective.

But some reviewers and those reviewed are upset to find previously posted reviews no longer on Amazon's site.

The objections ring hollow to me.

I'm not shy about suggesting that a private network can become so important to public discourse, it should be run as a public commons. For instance, I've advocated in the past that the Gates Foundation should buy Twitter and run it as a global utility.

But Amazon has always been a store and has always been understood as such. The social aspects of the site - telling you what you might like to buy - are all centered around making additional sales. That Amazon does so in a way that makes shopping easier, without seeming to "hard sell," speaks well of how the company strikes the balance.

Getting rid of shill reviews is likely a decision being made in the interest of keeping the right tone on the site and maximizing sales.

People who want to be sure to avoid the loss of their reviews should post them elsewhere.

The situation reminds me of something Eric Goldman said on his and Venkat Balasubramani's blog the other day: "There's only one way for users to truly control the fate of their online digital assets, and that's to host all of their content on their own website."

Some smart, influential people already post book reviews on their own website. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the aforementioned Gates Foundation, does this.

I post book reviews under the "books" category on this blog, and also on the system the Seattle Public Library uses. (Here's a sample, a thread on the new Ian McEwan novel, Sweet Tooth, which I also posted about, twice, on this blog.)

A problem, of course, with having reviews disaggregated across the web is that they can be hard to find. But this need not be that case, not for long. An interim solution might be some kind of River 2 aggregator, pulling RSS feeds of individual book review sites or pages from across the web.

Image: Wikimedia.

Sweet Tooth 2

I finished the new McEwan novel.

The revelation in the last chapter is gimmicky. A bit like the final scene in the movie, The Usual Suspects, only less satisfying.

I freely admit the novel would have to be read again to test whether foreknowledge of the final turn would deepen appreciation of the narrator's earlier observations. But I fear that McEwan pulls the plug on the book's structural ambition there at the end.

I'm not revealing exactly what happens because I don't want to ruin the story for BF, who hasn't read it yet. BF is a regular reader of this blog who gave me my best birthday present ever when, on a conference call earlier this week, he introduced me to several other folks on the line by describing the subjects of my most recent blog posts, including the initial post about Sweet Tooth.

Now BF, and everyone else who hasn't read the book, I still wholeheartedly recommend it. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the writing is so good. McEwan is as sure with words as Lionel Messi with a soccer ball.

Sweet Tooth

Today we're in Palm Springs, chilling in the sun, reading.

I've started Ian McEwan's new novel, Sweet Tooth. It's told in the first person by a recent university graduate, Serena Frome. She relates the story of how she was recruited to work for the British domestic intelligence service, MI5, at the end of the Swinging Sixties.

Hold on, ostensibly it's told by Serena Frome looking back from the present day. She tells us so early in the book, and at one point she digresses to reflect on how the naked body of her 54 year old lover/recruiter looks merely middle aged in her mind's eye today, not shocking and alien as to her younger self.

I'm sure McEwan sets up the decade-framing device because it will be necessary for a turn in the story later, but interest really picks up when the narrator drops the long lens and speaks as if within the moment of what's told. I've just finished a scene where Serena has survived a vetting by three generations of MI5 operatives and been given her first assignment to "run" an agent in the field. The telling is the more engaging for plausibly being told contemporaneously.

But I'm only a third of the way into the book.

It's about international politics, too, and how the institutions of western democracy are defended in ways overt, surreptitious, and something in between. So I may report back when finished on what lessons the older narrator - who presumably lives among us - may have for us concerning today's geopolitics.

Ancient Times

On the plane home from New York last week I started reading Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve."

It's a book about 15th Century humanists who scoured monastic libraries to find copies of copies of copies of texts originating in Roman antiquity.

Not finished with it yet, but wanted to share some of the thoughts the book is provoking:

• While by definition we live in the present, among contemporaries, we (those of us in Western technological societies alive today) may be naïve to presume that we continue to live in a modern or postmodern era. Art and architecture critics may have this right more broadly than they mean when they fix the modern in the 20th Century.
• It is not necessarily the case that a new class of overlords will soon secure the keys to social media and use information technology to snuff out the free flow of information. Not necessarily. But looked at in an historical context, it is a bit embarrassing that those developing technologies that might empower and liberate individual human minds are companies, like Facebook, utterly lacking in humanistic ambition. (I think the Gates Foundation missed a huge opportunity when it failed to buy Twitter a few years back.)
• History's lesson for authors is that an author's work must be copied in order to survive. Over and over and over again. In cultural circumstances she cannot begin to conceive. Don't put all your hopes in digital formats. Papyrus would be better.

Image of ancent papyrus scroll, copyright, The University of Kentucky Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments.