Lately when using Google search I’ve found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what’s true is what’s true for you. And the pages don’t have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen.The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems thinkable to me.
In Digital Willpower World, the problem of fragmented selves doesn’t appear to be an issue. After all, inhabitants are constantly plugged in to willpower-enhancing devices. They no longer toggle between enhanced and unenhanced lives. Bracketing the question of what would happen to such folks if the support systems crashed–as that issue applies to so many things–the problem of inauthenticity, a staple of the neuroethics debates, might arise. People might start asking themselves: Has the problem of fragmentation gone away only because devices are choreographing our behavior so powerfully that we are no longer in touch with our so-called real selves – the selves who used to exist before Digital Willpower World was formed? Consider a contemporary analogue to this problem. Right now, people can use an app that automatically sends happy birthday wishes to Facebook friends. Although this service bypasses the problem of forgetfulness, its use raises questions about sincerity and thoughtfulness.Infantalized subjects are morally lazy, quick to have others take responsibility for their welfare. They do not view the capacity to assume personal responsibility for selecting means and ends as a fundamental life goal that validates the effort required to remain committed to the ongoing project of maintaining willpower and self-control. Even positive reviews of Freedom are tinged with elements of concern over self-infantalization and the loss of resolute choosing.
The Queen Mary Psalter, London, 14th century
In an open Q&A with one company’s chief operating officer, an employee asked about the morale problem and got this answer: “There is no morale problem in this company. And, for anybody who thinks there is, we have a nice big bus waiting outside to take you wherever you want to look for work.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA6XSrM0V_0?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
The landmark birthdays of heroes always serve to underline our own mortality and with Wednesday’s three-score anniversary comes the stark personal realisation that it is more than half my lifetime ago since the eye-popping double-take that day I first set eyes on [Viv] Richards 38 midsummers ago at Somerset’s dear old Bath Festival in 1974 when the gangly young smiler, glistening with gaiety and adventure, clocked Yorkshire’s Test bowlers Chris Old and Geoff Cope all over in a festive flurry of sixers. A new star had risen in the west.
A TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private claim to a public concept. With the speaker, himself, becoming the manifestation of the idea. And so: In the name of spreading a concept, the talk ends up narrowing it. Pariser’s filter bubble. Anderson’s long tail. We talk often about the need for narrative in making abstract concepts relatable and impactful to mass audiences; what TED has done so elegantly, though, is to replace narrative in that equation with personality. The relatable idea, TED insists, is the personal idea. It is the performative idea. It is the idea that strides onstage and into a spotlight, ready to become a star.
A number of science fiction novels were published in the 19th century which hold up today and can genuinely be considered as good literature: Walter Besant’s The Inner House, Joseph Nicholson’s Thoth, and H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. But the good novels are far outnumbered by the bad ones. The borders and matter of the science fiction genre were not consolidated during the 19th century, nor was a standard of professionalism in the genre set, and a number of bad writers produced wretched science fiction during that century.Nonetheless, there is one novel which outstrips all others in its combination of unreadability, cliché, and thematic foulness: An Entirely New Feature of a Thrilling Novel! Entitled the Social War of the Year 1900, or Conspirators and Lovers. A Lesson for Saints and Sinners.
Last week one of my Twitter followers replied in this way to one of my soccer tweets: “Why do you like soccer? Sports need to have a balance btw offense and defense. Soccer fails the test.”Well, we’ve heard that one before. I didn’t reply, but if I had I would have said (of course) that he was failing to make the necessary distinction between offense and scoring. It’s a distinction that obtains in certain other sports — American football teams can run up a lot of yardage without scoring many points, and we’ve all seen baseball teams get thirteen hits and one run — but the distinction is fundamental only in soccer.
Consider this video: one of the most famous and celebrated moments of offensive genius in the history of soccer, which ends with a shot dragged wide of an open goal. It’s impossible to imagine a failed play having this kind of stature in any other sport.
But of course, it’s only a “failed play” according to the logic that equates offense and scoring. In the subtler accounting of soccer, Pelé’s split-millisecond decision, in one of the most heated of all possible heated moments, to let a rolling ball go right in front of his legs and past an onrushing keeper … it’s just brilliant beyond belief. And it even has its own diagram on Wikipedia.
Let’s re-set the scene. Estadio Jalisco, Guadalajara, Mexico; the semifinals of World Cup 1970. First, an utterly perfect pass from Tostão, curling slightly towards the streaking Pelé, creates a threefold convergence: the ball, Pelé, the Uruguayan keeper Mazurkiewicz. Pelé gets there just before Mazurkiewicz, who goes to ground, trying to make himself horizontally big to stop the cannonball of a shot he knows is coming. We’re all watching, we’re all doing the calculus — because calculus is what’s called for here, this is why Newton and Leibnitz invented it, to account for multiple bodies moving complicatedly in relation to one another — we’re wondering whether Pelé is going to get the shot off and whether he’ll try to chip it or blast it or take one touch to get around the prostrate Mazurkiewicz before clipping it into the back of the net … except, see, Pelé is better at calculus than anyone else and lets the ball just roll peacefully past the keeper. In an interview years later, he said, “The dummy was a moment, just something you do. You can’t plan it, it happens, it’s a reaction.” But it was more than reaction: it was a high-speed feat of mathematical calculation, done while at a full sprint with a large black-clad body flinging itself at the calculator’s legs.
The calculator then has to make a sharp turn to fetch the ball, which he does. Mazurkiewicz’s part in the tale is over, but a lone Uruguayan defender has hustled back and gotten to the near post. The goal really is open, but not as open as it looks because of that defender’s intelligent placement of himself and the shallow angle Pelé now has to work with — it wasn’t a sitter by any means. But this is Pelé: he should have made it.
However, he missed. And the really wonderful and amazing thing is: it doesn’t matter. Yes, everyone says that it would have been the greatest goal ever if he had made it, but instead, it’s the greatest play ever. The most perfect embodiment of offensive footballing intelligence ever. Scoring doesn’t enter into it, really. The goal, made or missed, is but a coda to the real story here, which is in so many ways a story that simply defines what it is we love when we love soccer.
What looks like decline is also in some sense a return to normalcy for the United States. What we think of as the “old media” era — the years from the 1950s through the 1980s, when [James Q.] Wilson came of age and made his most important mark — was really an unusual and inevitably fleeting period in American culture. For a few decades, the consolidation of the newspaper business and the outsize power of the big television networks combined to create a genuine media establishment, capable of setting standards, policing debates and keeping troublemakers and provocateurs on the outside looking in.Prior to that period of consolidation, though, the nation’s media were much more, well, Breitbart-ian: more partisan, more sensationalistic, more attuned to scandal and celebrity and less concerned about accuracy and rigor.
In this sense, American journalism in the age of the Internet represents a return to the way that American journalism was practiced in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And a republic that survived the excesses of William Randolph Hearst can presumably survive the excesses of HuffPo and BigGovernment.com.