Alan Jacobs

Virus-writers seemed, at least at first, to be in it for anything but money. The outcome was simply vandalism, as dull as someone smashing out the light fixtures in a bus shelter. Random bits of software or pieces of equipment would temporarily quit functioning. Random strangers were anonymously discommoded. Somewhere, I assumed, someone had a rather abstract giggle.

I wasn’t impressed, however arcane the know-how that was required. But I was embarrassed at how thoroughly I’d missed this in my fiction: the pettiness of most virus-writing, the banality of the result. I had never depicted, much less imagined, anyone doing anything as pointlessly ill-intentioned. (I began to try, on the margins of my work, to remedy that oversight, if only for the sake of naturalism.)

Last fall, when I learned of the Stuxnet attack on the computers running Iran’s nuclear program, I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another.

But as more details emerged, it began to look less like something new and more like a piece of hobbyist “street” technology, albeit one expensively optimized for a specific attack. The state actor — said to be Israel, perhaps working with the United States, though no one is sure — had simply built on the unpaid labor of generations of hobbyist vandals.

When Lévi-Strauss at last reached the Nambikwara after an 800-mile trek, the encounter shattered his romantic expectations. ‘I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression,’ he wrote, and 'that of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find in it was individual human beings.’ The men of the tribe greeted him laughing; the women tried to steal his soap as he washed in the river. Malnourished, and on the brink of a breakdown, he nevertheless started to gather the material he would use to shatter a generation-old consensus in anthropology. Whereas functionalist anthropologists following Bronislaw Malinowski believed the social lives of indigenous peoples were determined by basic needs like sex and hunger, Lévi-Strauss found something close to the opposite in the tribes he encountered: even in the most dire conditions, they were driven above all by an intellectual need to understand the world around them. When Amerindians chose animals for their totems, it was not because they were 'good to eat,’ Lévi-Strauss argued, but because they were 'good to think.’ The Nambikwara were every bit as scientifically minded as the ethnographers who studied them (their mental inventory for honey, for instance, included thirteen different varieties). The only major difference, Lévi-Strauss claimed, was the 'totalitarian ambition of the savage mind,’ which operated on the assumption that if you couldn’t explain everything, you hadn’t explained anything. Lévi-Strauss witnessed this rage for order in everything from their face-painting to the layout of their camps, and most especially in their myths, which they pieced together with borrowed scraps of older ones in the same way a computer programmer might patch together code.

The human habit of overestimating other people’s happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu: ‘If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.’ But social networking may be making this tendency worse. Jordan’s research doesn’t look at Facebook explicitly, but if his conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people’s lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles’ heel of human nature. And women—an especially unhappy bunch of late—may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Joneses.

As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may see all details here. The author of the book, claiming defamation, demanded I remove it. I examined carefully the claim and concluded that the accusation was fanciful. Unflattering? Yes. Defamatory, by no stretch of imagination. It was my ‘Voltairian’ moment. I refused the request. I did offer to publish a reply by the author. This offer was declined.

Three months later I was summoned to appear before an Examining Magistrate in Paris based on a complaint of criminal defamation lodged by the author. Why Paris you might ask? Indeed. The author of the book was an Israeli academic. The book was in English. The publisher was Dutch. The reviewer was a distinguished German professor. The review was published on a New York website.

The Whale and the Reactor (7)

Strikingly, liberal education is not only effective at enhancing student learning, but also in producing college graduates well-equipped for the challenges of the 21st century economy. Studies in the Liberal Education and American’s Promise initiative of the Association of American Colleges and Universities have shown that the essential learning outcomes of a liberal education are aligned with the skills most desired in prospective workers by private sector employers.

As policymakers continue to search for means to make higher education a driver for entrepreneurial innovation and economic transformation, they should not lose sight of the central value of the traditional liberal arts and sciences – topics all too often overlooked in favor of applied or pre-professional fields – in the development of the student mind.

After all, the radical transparency of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook may not be mutually exclusive with what we might as well call the radical opacity of Christopher ‘moot’ Poole and 4chan. Their uses may even be mutually necessary. Peretti puts it this way: if 4chan is the id of the Internet, then 'Google is kind of like the ego, and Facebook is kind of like the superego.’ If that’s so, then there’s only one way the trend toward radical transparency won’t end up killing the Internet’s soul: if we can leave the light of all that openness every now and then to spend some time in the shadows where the crazy lives.

The devil has his grip on the business of the NFL. Former players, like Aikman, who are still profiting from their NFL image, see little benefit in questioning the safety of the game. Any such comments would be met by the league as a betrayal, and he would probably be relieved of his post as Fox’s No. 1 guy. And you can be sure he won’t let that happen. Troy Aikman has his dream job, and he will echo the company line. Aaron Rodgers’ brain could be leaking out of his earhole, and Aikman will be talking about James Jones’ inconsistent hands… .

Players like Aikman and Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders, two Hall of Famers and a future Hall of Famer, represent the extreme minority of the NFL experience. Yet theirs are the voices that fans listen to. They are the ones people look to for guidance, because their Hall-of-Famey-ness makes them giants. Their greatness as players also defines them, and to question the validity of the game that has made them superheroes is to cast their own capes into the fire. They will never do this. They will be the last line of defense in the fight against science. And I can’t really blame them. Even Steve Young, an extremely cerebral man who was forced out of the league by multiple concussions, can’t find the strength to weave even one controversial thread of commentary. The waters are that deep.

books owned and leased

The 2010 election seemed to be about voters repudiating the $14 trillion national debt, yet politicians of both parties continue to merrily squander taxpayers’ money on themselves. Whatever benefits my opponents is waste; spending on me is vital!

The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that Florida’s new Republican governor, Rick Scott, who ran as a cost-cutting conservative, held a ‘three day party’ to celebrate his inauguration: ‘The governor-elect, family and guests shuttled between events around [Tallahassee] in a presidential-sized motorcade’ of a dozen SUVs, paid for by taxpayers.

Reader Tom Beck of Princeton, N.J., notes that although Mississippi has the worst poverty rate in the nation and its governor, Haley Barbour, regularly rails against government spending by Washington, Barbour lavishes taxpayer money on himself, taking numerous personal trips in a state-supplied private jet.

Ben Smith of Politico reports, 'Flight logs obtained by Politico indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour’s air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. Much of the time, Barbour has used the plane to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match.’ Increasingly, high-level politics looks a lot like a hustle – use denunciations of spending to get elected, then spend lavishly on yourself.