People like Nick Bilton over at The New York Times Bits blog argue that norms like thank-you messages can cost more in time and efficiency than they are worth. However, such etiquette norms aren’t just about efficiency: They’re actually about building thoughtful and pro-social character.Take my six-year-old daughter. When she looked at her new iPod Touch (a Chrismukkah gift), she saw it as a divine labor-saving device. Unlike the onerous handwritten thank-you notes she had to do for her birthday, she envisioned instead sending quick thank-you texts to friends and family. Months later, she still doesn’t understand why her parents forbid the shortcut. And she won’t. Not anytime soon….
At stake, then, is the idea that efficiency is the great equalizer. It turns every problem into a waste-reduction scenario, but its logic has a time and a place. Social relations are fundamentally hierarchical, and the primary way we acknowledge importance is through effort. Sending laconic thank-you texts to family treats them no differently than business associates.
In claiming that effort is the currency of care, I’m not suggesting that efficient communication only belongs to instrumental contexts. For example, I encourage my daughter to routinely send short texts to people who are important to her. After all, every exchange can’t be deep or premeditated. A spontaneous “hi” here and “how are you doing?” goes a long way to reminding others that they aren’t alone and remain in our thoughts. But if a grandparent didn’t text, I would consider it incredibly rude and lacking in sympathetic sentiment if my daughter issued an unspoken ultimatum — like Bilton did with his parents — of get-on-my-technology-platform or get frozen out.
Bronfman’s Haggadah, which is illustrated with watercolors by his wife, Jan Aronson, includes quotations from such goyim as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there is no Hebrew in it. God is depicted as an “energy,” as opposed to an anthropomorphic deity, and Moses plays a starring role (traditional Haggadahs usually minimize mentions of Moses, to emphasize God’s, not man’s, role in freeing the Jews).Aronson’s illustrations attempt to capture these departures. In her rendering, the burning bush is not really on fire. “I figured Moses was trying to decide what he was going to do with his life,” she said. “And he went out to tend to the sheep, either at sunrise or sunset, and the light was coming through the bushes, and he was meditating. And it dawned on him that what he should do is go back to Egypt and take care of the business that was left. And so it wasn’t a burning bush per se.”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian-American rabbi in North America, summed up the new Haggadah’s approach to Judaism to the crowd with a quotation from “The Book of Mormon” (the Broadway show, not the religious text). “It’s a metaphor!” she said, and then she led the room in the singing of “Oh Freedom,” a Negro spiritual.
I get a lot of mail from people who agree with me, but are impatient and want to propose methods of moving to a better situation very quickly – with some kind of Ponzi scheme that people would buy into quickly, thereby causing things to change rapidly. I always respond to these people that what I’m actually advocating is a slower and more deliberative process. I’d rather take 20 or 30 years, because that’s probably how long we have before the employment crisis from automation will become severe. What I prefer to advocate is not that we change as fast as possible, but to engage in a more deliberative political and longer-term dialogue, which is why I wrote a book rather than proposing a Ponzi scheme to spark a quick transition. Besides, our current arrangements might not give rise to lock-in because ultimately it’s not sustainable.
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.
Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there’s more. There’s location data from your cell phone, there’s a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.
This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.
A milkman and his terrier pose at the back of a milk truck, May 1948.
Photograph by Melville B. Grosvenor, National Geographic
For many — so, so many — of my Twitter friends.
Into the city they go, Yeshua and the nucleus of twenty or so men and women who have been following him about. The narrow stone streets are packed with visitors who’ve come in from the province for the biggest festival of the year, a festival of death averted, in which the people of the one God remember how he saved them by smiting the rest; and the visitors see, well, something like a parade, with Yeshua riding on a borrowed donkey, and the friends around him shouting make way, make way. Who’s this? It’s another bloody prophet. It’s that crazy preacher who says we don’t need the law. It’s the rabbi from up north who heals people. What, the river-dipping one? No, he’s dead, this is another one. It’s a king! Rubbish, kings ride on horses, not donkeys. But there are prophecies about donkeys. Maybe he’s the one. Oh come on. This fellow? Where’s his sword? It’s the king, it’s the king! Keep your voice down, idiot. Better get the children indoors, just in case.
Is it a king? The scene is hard to read. It’s like a royal progress and a parody of a royal progress, all at once. Yeshua is doing exactly what a christos would do if he were making a momentum play, gambling on snowballing crowd support. Yet the details are off-script somehow, from the donkey, to the way that only some of the friends seem to be shouting the slogans you’d expect, to the way that the man himself doesn’t have his face set in the shining megawatt mask of charisma. It isn’t clear what’s happening. But something is, and though only a portion of the crowd are young enough, or hopeful enough, or desperate enough, or unwary enough, to give Yeshua their acclaim, quite a lot of them are curious enough to follow and see what comes next: for the parade, or procession, or whatever it is, is clearly heading for the temple, up the twisting alleyways to the top of the city, and the narrow gateway where the press of yellow housewalls and tile roofs opens out all at once into the wide forecourt of the one God’s most sacred place.
Palm Sunday, from Sue Symon’s Bath Diptychs, a mixed media life of Christ on permanent exhibition in the nave of Bath Abbey. The left panel of each pair is calligraphy, the right panel embroidery. In the embroidered panels Christ is represented by a white circle.
If you have the biggest computer and the biggest data, you can calculate how to target people with a political message, and have almost a guaranteed deterministic level of success. Politics then becomes about who has the biggest computer instead of what the agenda is. The way Obama won the last US election was by having the best computer strategy. That method of winning an election works, but if that is to be the future of politics, it will no longer have meaning. The path we are on is not compatible with democracy.