I may as well admit that I haven’t read all of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, but quite enough of it to see that the mixture is the same as in his previous bestsellers – a great piece of theatre in which half-truths do battle with straw men while the reader watches in safety, defended by barricades of apparent fact against any danger of actual thought.The whole trick depends on sustaining the illusion that only what’s under the lighting exists. The index here, for example, contains three entries for Columbine high school, and none whatsoever for Christianity. Whether or not you suppose Christian myth to be true, it is simply impossible to consider the development of ethical thought and practice in the west without understanding that almost all of it has been Christian, and that what comes after Christianity is itself incomprehensible without it.
One piece of advice, Andrew: Read the whole book before you write about it. It may indeed be true that one can just skim the book and find all sorts of catastrophic errors, but nevertheless: read it. Read all of it. It won’t take you all that long, even when the book is a big one. No one is going to take you seriously if you begin your review by airily proclaiming that you couldn’t be bothered to read the book you’re denouncing. You tell me that Pinker has made all these factual errors, but are you a trustworthy guide to the facts? My first thought — and many will share this thought — is that you’re too lazy to be reliable. So just read the book first.
The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a shopping mall. It already is a shopping mall. Your revolutionary YouTube video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes, that’s the price of “free” when you’re operating on someone else’s network.But unlike our medieval forebears, we don’t have to defend our digital commons from corporate encroachment. Fighting and losing that un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of helplessness, anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined to be our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.
It is not rocket science. And I know there’s more than a few dozen people reading this right now who could make it happen.
We enjoy caricatures of our friends because we do not want to think of their changing, above all, of their dying; we enjoy caricatures of our enemies because we do not want to consider the possibility of their having a change of heart so that we would have to forgive them.
Soviet Constructivist models, courtesy of the University of Western Australia
I am intrigued that so many of the high-profile geekocracy (who ought to know better but are apparently dim-brained slaves to digital fashion) seem now to be using Google+ as their preferred blogging platform. Why would anyone do that? Apart from the antiseptic anti-design imposed on everyone, there is no guarantee that Google+ will be any longer-lived than Buzz or Wave, or that it won’t suffer outages or catastrophic data wipes. I prefer to publish under my own domain names, with software I manage and control: I own the database (and local backups of it). I rent the infrastructure and can move my data wherever I like in 24 hours or so.Of course, my way costs some money (but not much), and some technical know-how (rapidly acquired), while Google+ is “free” and easy. It depends on how much you value your own data. Is it less valuable to you than $10 or $20 a month and a few hours learning ftp chops? Okay then, carry on as you were! Me, I also happen to be a paying user of Gmail (through Google Apps), because that gives me more storage and a service-level agreement. (Because I’m an “enterprise” customer, I can complain when things go wrong.) Even then, I do as I would do if I were using the free version of Gmail: I back it up to local storage (over IMAP).
Terremark’s building in Miami is the physical meeting point for more than 160 networks from around the world. They meet there because of the building’s excellent security, its redundant power systems, and its thick concrete walls, designed to survive a category 5 hurricane. But above all, they meet there because the building is “carrier-neutral.” It’s a Switzerland of the Internet, an unallied territory where competing networks can connect to each other. Terremark doesn’t have a dog in the fight. Or at least it didn’t. Verizon insists there’s nothing to worry about. Terremark will be set up as a wholly owned subsidiary. Its carrier-neutral status will remain. “We’re not going to try to cramp their style at all,” said Lowell McAdam, President and COO of Verizon. “There will be no moves to take certain customers out of play.”I can’t help but think of it in the context of another recent purchase. Earlier this month, Google bought its New York office building, 111 8th Avenue, for a reported $1.9 billion. As the Wall Street Journal described, “about one third of the space is occupied by telecommunications companies.” But that’s severely understating the situation: 111 8th is another of the most important buildings on the Internet, on a short list of fewer than a dozen worldwide. Like the NAP of the Americas, it houses hundreds of independent networks, scattered across the office spaces of multiple independently owned sub-landlords. And now Google owns the whole thing. One assumes that they’re not going to cramp their style either.
“It’s not about the ‘carrier hotel’ space,” said Google Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg. “We have 2,000 employees on site. It’s a big sales center, but also a big engineering center. With the pace at which we’re growing, it’s very difficult to find space in New York. There are very few buildings in New York that can accommodate our needs. This gives us a lot of control over growing into the space.”
But on a day when the government to 80 million people managed to throw the Internet’s “kill switch,” it’s worth remembering that the Internet is a physical network. It matters who controls the nodes. With these two deals, Google and Verizon may have chipped away at the foundation walls of an open, competitive–and therefore free – Internet.
Strangely enough, another misrepresentation, made passingly, stuck worse in my craw. Wood complained of the book’s protagonist: “We never see him thinking an abstract thought, or reading a book … or thinking about God and the meaning of life, or growing up in any of the conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Now this, friends, is how you send an author scurrying back to his own pages, to be certain he isn’t going mad. I wasn’t. My huffy, bruised, two-page letter to Wood detailed the fifteen or twenty most obvious, most unmissable instances of my primary character’s reading: Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Mad magazine, as well as endless scenes of looking at comic books. Never mind the obsessive parsing of LP liner notes, or first-person narration which included moments like: “I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw…” That my novel took as one of its key subjects the seduction, and risk, of reading the lives around you as if they were an epic cartoon or frieze, not something in which you were yourself implicated, I couldn’t demand Wood observe. But not reading? This enraged me.Jonathan Lethem on being reviewed by James Wood. Lethem is going to get hammered for writing this — He’s showing his insecurities, he’s indulging his petty resentments, doesn’t he know that this only makes the critics want to trash him? — but I think he’s doing the right thing. Wood is a tremendously insightful critic, and a major stylist, but here is a case in which he says things that are manifestly not true in an attempt to discredit someone’s book. Those of us who write reviews are not obliged to like anything, and we can be as fiercely critical as we believe necessary, but we have an obligation to get our facts right. Wood really should apologize to Lethem and issue a correction, but that obviously isn’t going to happen.
A random Saul Bass thing, since everybody’s talking about him now — and rightly so.
Ecce Homo, by Jacob Epstein; in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral