Alan Jacobs

His obsession with cities—and with programming—never abated. By early 2006, having dropped out of N.Y.U. and bouncing between jobs, he found himself working for a San Francisco software start-up called Odeo, which was going nowhere. One day he proposed an idea to his boss based on a notion that Dorsey had been noodling over for years. He was fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio. Dorsey suggested that his company create a service that would allow anyone to write a line or two about himself, using a cell phone’s keypad, and then send that message to anyone who wanted to receive it. The short text alert, for him, was a way to add a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.

I met Daniel Ellsberg for the first time recently. Ellsberg was a US military analyst, turned conscious objector, who released the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 as an act of civil disobedience to try to stop the Vietnam War. He has also since been heavily involved in the decades-long battle to eliminate nuclear weapons. In our short conversation he kept returning to an idea that I found alarming. When talking about what technology wanted his hope for the future was technologies that were incorruptible. We had to make things, he said, that would not turn against us. Ones that could not be abused, unlike say, nuclear energy. Or genetic engineering. I was speechless for a while. Ellsberg considers himself a realist, but this call for incorruptible technology is a utopian dream. There can be no incorruptible technology, just as there can be no incorruptible free will. Any free will capable of producing a constructive thought will — by necessity — be capable of producing a destructive thought.

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

So when you give a well-loved book to someone else, it is above all an act of trust: you are trusting the recipient not to massacre the book in his or her interpretation of it. Tonight , therefore, we will be witnessing not only a million Quixotic acts of giving, but a million Quixotic acts of trust.

“Go, little book,” authors used to tell their creations, in the end-of-the-book convention called the envoi . “Into the hands of strangers I confide you.” And when we give away a book we have loved, this is what we ourselves are thinking: Farewell, we wish the book. May your new owners treat you well; may they not throw you against the wall or use you for kindling. May they pardon your faults and praise your virtues. May you bring wisdom or knowledge. May you bring joy.

Kelly’s long engagement with technology furnishes a fountainhead of rich observations on the life of tools. But the “ethical void” Morozov limns here is pretty vast. Kelly is one of the foremost proponents of a perspective I like to think of as gnostic empiricism: worship of the space left around facts by the death of god.

Today, the role of the telegraph in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—just like the role of the tape recorder in the 1979 Iranian revolution and of the fax machine in the 1989 revolutions—is of interest to a handful of academics and virtually no one else. The fetishism of technology is at its strongest immediately after a revolution but tends to subside shortly afterward. In his 1993 best seller The Magic Lantern, Timothy Garton Ash, one of the most acute observers of the 1989 revolutions, proclaimed that “in Europe at the end of the twentieth century all revolutions are telerevolutions”—but in retrospect, the role of television in those events seems like a very minor point.

Will history consign Twitter and Facebook to much the same fate twenty years down the road? In all likelihood, yes. The current fascination with technology-driven accounts of political change in the Middle East is likely to subside, for a number of reasons. First of all, while the recent round of uprisings may seem spontaneous to Western observers—and therefore as magically disruptive as a rush-hour flash mob in San Francisco—the actual history of popular regime change tends to diminish the central role commonly ascribed to technology. By emphasizing the liberating role of the tools and downplaying the role of human agency, such accounts make Americans feel proud of their own contribution to events in the Middle East. After all, the argument goes, such a spontaneous uprising wouldn’t have succeeded before Facebook was around—so Silicon Valley deserves a lion’s share of the credit. If, of course, the uprising was not spontaneous and its leaders chose Facebook simply because that’s where everybody is, it’s a far less glamorous story.

I don’t think journalism school is a place to learn how to write computer code. I think a lot of the tool kit you’ll need, you’ll get on the job. I think our job, if you want to be a long form journalist, is to read a lot of really great long-form journalism and learn how to write it…. Reading is my own particular hobby horse. I think in a lot of programs there isn’t a lot of time built in just to read, to read the people who did it really well.

To say that rappers possess originality and that they rely on traditional literary devices is not to say that they don’t – or shouldn’t – borrow from other sources. And it’s not to say that writers of prose and poetry shouldn’t borrow from other writers of prose and poetry and, for that matter, from rappers and jazz musicians and newspaper reporters and advertising copywriters and absolutely anyone else. All art comes from art. To admit this is not to concede that there’s no such thing as originality any more than it’s a license to borrow without attribution and then call it your own. William S. Burroughs freely admitted that he cut up texts and re-arranged them and inserted the results in his novels. Michel Houellebecq is free to be influenced by Perec and Borges and Burroughs (and anyone else), but I think he’s making a mistake if he thinks copying from Wikipedia adds to the beauty of his books. He’s too good a writer to make such a lazy claim. And while I agree with Helene Hegemann that what matters is not where artists get their materials but what they do with them, I believe all artists need to give up the cheap crutch of claiming that since it’s all been done before, all they can hope to do is rearrange the familiar in some unfamiliar way and then call it “authenticity.” That trivializes art. And it’s stupid and wrong.

Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right lines across the city, you’ll find its Kabbalistic heart and so on.

The thing about that is that it’s intoxicating—but it’s also bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s paranoia—and it’s paranoia in a kind of literal sense, in that it’s a totalizing project. As long as you’re constantly aware of that, at an aesthetic level, then it’s not necessarily a problem; you’re part of a process of urban mythologization, just like James Joyce was, I suppose. But the sense that this notion of uncovering—of taking a scalpel to the city and uncovering the dark truth—is actually real, or that it actually solves anything, and is anything other than an aesthetic sleight of hand, can be quite misleading, and possibly even worse than that. To the extent that those texts do solve anything, they only solve mysteries that they created in the first place, which they scrawled over the map of a mucky contingent mess of history called the city. They scrawled a big question mark over it and then they solved it.

Take a look, for example, [at] the Civil War blogging done by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic… . Coates is not an his­torian, but he’s a smart guy committed to learning. He often blogs on classics of Civil War history, like Roll Jordan Roll or Battle Cry of Freedom. He establishes a topic, or a problem, or a point of view, and then lets commentators have at it… . Coates actively moderates the discussion, pruning out cranks and the uncivil, commenting frequently. The result is not academic history, but it’s a stunningly high level of historical discourse conducted in real time. The reviewers—the people who post comments—have the satisfaction of participating in a live dia­logue rather than a dead archive. Coates, the “editor,” gets to foster real collaborative education. Suppose the job of editing and commenting looked more like this? Moder­ated, live interactions, and an ongoing discussion among peers. An editor might choose one article a week. He or she would post the article with a comment on its merits/weaknesses. Readers could then comment in real time, acting as peer reviewers, with the editor acting to “prune” and police the comments. All read­ers would see opinion evolving, and see the process of peer review in action.

The first people to perform useful studies specifically on composure in crisis were World War II combat researchers, who could examine soldiers under literal fire. In 1943, one of these men, a British officer named Lionel Wigram, noticed a pattern in his studies of infantry units on the Italian front. Whenever a 22-man platoon encountered enemy fire, Wigram realized, the troops always responded in the same proportions: A few soldiers would go to pieces and try to escape, a few more would react valiantly, and the vast majority would enter a sheeplike state of bewilderment, unsure of what to do. Wigram wasn’t a scientist, but his insight about our instinctive reactions to crisis was remarkably accurate. According to modern research by survival psychologist John Leach, when a random group of people finds itself in a sudden emergency like a fire or a natural disaster, 10 to 15 percent will consistently freak out, 10 to 20 percent will stay cool, and the rest will become dazed and hesitant sheep.