For the Record: The Era of Tubes

Got kind of snappish with a good Twitter friend, of which I'm not proud, but for the record, and because we maybe got somewhere:

A bit beyond the criticism of the media well deserved as it is what in the f*#k is Tom Perez doing?
After Iowa which was unforgivable now virtual rally failures?
You know that line "You had only one job"?

— Heim Yankel (@heim2yankel) May 10, 2020

People have a weird idea of what his one job is. DNC raises money and is doing it pretty well. https://t.co/cxwHJjInRn Much better than Republicans except in the dark money field. That's not the problem.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 10, 2020

David Brooks Plagiarism Watch: On Trolls

Troll by Nicola Robinson, 2014, seen as a personification of change in midlife,

Not a lot of obviously objectionable material in today's David Brooks ("When Trolls and Crybullies Rule the Earth"), bringing together the ghost of a pretty interesting idea on the cultural consequences of the shift from privately consumed print media to group-absorbed online media with the observation that there are a lot of unnecessarily mean guys on the Internet, which is true.

The interesting idea is from a theologian called L.M. Sacasas writing at an online journal called The New Atlantis riffing off a famous idea from the late Walter Ong, S.J., in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy, about the Renaissance-era universalizing shift from oral to print culture:

In oral cultures, communication happens almost exclusively in the presence of others. The speaker’s audience is always before the speaker; indeed, it is literally an audience, a gathering of those near enough to hear. This physical presence means, as Ong noted, that oral cultures were more agonistic than literate cultures. Mutual understanding and the search for knowledge are labors of face-to-face interaction, and labors that may arouse the passions. “By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.”

Writing, on the other hand, “fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another.” Writing also abstracts the speaker from the audience, which therefore ceases to be literally an audience. The two are no longer present before one another. Communication tends to lose the heat of the moment.

The Internet, Sacasas suggests, restores something like the ancient presentness to communication:

When we type out our statuses, link to articles, post memes or images, we do so as if we were members of literate but pre-digital societies, for we are not present before all those who will encounter our messages. Yet, given the immediacy with which the messages arrive, we are in an important way now much closer to one another. We might say that we have an “audience” whose immediate presence is constituted in time rather than space.

Brooks, of course, begins by pretending to have gotten the Ong material out of his own reading, in paragraphs 1-3—

And for another point of view on the Singapore Summit

Hot take on the summit from blog SingaporeUncensored:

1. The US can’t pay because a nuclear yet cash-poor North Korea sees it as insulting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/776055ce-9745-439e-9ee4-c0…

2. The US hinted to Singapore to pay, source: Singapore defense minister quoted in WaPo link above. This is key because it means US “owes” us a favor even if it’s just a small logistical detail.

3. Safeguarding Singapore’s FTA (Free Trade Agreement) partner status with an infamously anti-free-trade Trump: priceless. Trump just left all his G7 “allies” in Canada threatening a trade war. Last thing Singapore should do is stay on the sidelines and wait for Trump to call us out for “unfair” trade deals. Singapore has to step up and be counted. Paying $20M helps? Imagine how many more jobs or companies may suffer if trade margins get jeopardized.

Source: https://ustr.gov/countries…/southeast-asia-pacific/singapore

Trump dumped Singapore and Malaysia under the bus when he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership just when they thought they were getting a chance to become less cornered by Chinese expansion and forced into it, and the Singapore government, slavish and colonized as ever, is hoping to placate crazy Trump with friendly gestures. Business losses, I'm hearing, went well beyond the government's outlay as security closed down the whole of the downtown area from the Shangri-La Hotel where Trump was staying to the artificial island of Sentosa where Kim stayed and the summit was held.

Online Singapore, which is getting tougher and tougher, is not impressed. Things are happening in Southeast Asia, I haven't written anything about the astonishing events in Malaysia yet, and elsewhere.

Groomin'

Male chimps grooming (da da da da) on a Sunday afternoon, Via Cooler Insights.

David Brooks ("The Blindness of Social Wealth") begins with a story from Robert E. Hall's This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis That Imperils Home, Work, Politics, and Faith (2012) illustrating how you can you take a concept of "social wealth", understood here as a kind of capital of human relationships, as literal wealth, money in the bank, that you may be able to draw on in a tight financial spot, a share in a company you thought went bankrupt long ago and that turns out to be thriving:

Bob Hall was a rancher. In 1936, in the midst of the Depression, he was suffering from a cancer that was eating the flesh on the side of his face. His ranch had dwindled to nearly nothing, and weeks after bankers took the last of his livestock, Hall died, leaving his family deeply in debt.

His sons pleaded with anybody they could find to make a loan and save the family ranch. No one would do it. Finally, in desperation, they went to their neighbor, Buzz Newton, who was known for his miserliness, and asked him to co-sign a loan. “I always thought so much of your dad; he was the most generous man I have known,” Newton answered. “Yes, I’ll co-sign the note.”

Bob Hall’s grandson, also named Robert Hall, drew out the lesson in his book “This Land of Strangers,” noting: “The truth is, relationships are the most valuable and value-creating resource of any society. They are our lifelines to survive, grow and thrive.”

Which seems like a dubious moral to me; old Bob Hall had saved the ranch for his children not by the strategic investment in relationships but by heedlessly befriending anybody at all—all the decent people he'd been friends with turned the kids down. It was the least likely friend who came through, like the little man in the forest in the old fairy tales who gives the simple-minded third brother woodcutter a treasure in exchange for a charitably offered sandwich. Old Bob Hall wasn't a capitalist of friendship, he was a nice guy.

Power Down

Adults-only event at Legoland, Tempe, AZ, via TempeTourism.

Shorter David Brooks, "The New Power Structure", New York Times. 5 April 2018:

Shorter in the first place because it's missing the obligatory opening four paragraphs in which Brooks pretends that he is writing an opinion column rather than a publisher blurb for New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—And How To Make It Work For You, which was released on Tuesday, and tries to suggest that he's seen some other inferior "windows into this new world" to compare this one to:

Trail of human wreckage

David F. Brooks looking for something cutting-edge to condemn that has nothing to do with sexual assault, tax cuts for the rich, or Russia, asks "How Evil is Tech?"

He's not talking about 3D printing, gene therapy, or cancer vaccines, of course, but the Internet of Kids, who are spending too much time on their damn phones, making them sad and suicidal:

Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road.

Who are "some"? And don't call me Surely. But that sounds pretty scary: how many kids are dying, on average, from their habitual phone use?

Poison waiting in the dregs

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Virtues of Reality", New York Times, August 21 2016:

These kids today and their internets! What's the world coming to? Instead of driving drunk, getting in bar fights, and having furtive unprotected sex they now stay home, play violent video games, and jerk off to electronic porn. I bet that's why they won't move out of their parents' houses and get jobs and wives. (It couldn't have anything to do with the economy, right?) It makes me so mad I could spit.

Ross is now in favor of hooliganism and hookup culture? He's a booster of that Caligulan Thrill that used to get him so hot and bothered back when he was a pious lad of 35, last year sometime? I guess what pisses him off today is that, in this fantasy world he's constructed for the pure pleasure of screaming at it, the young men (he says "people" but it's all about boys) are all avoiding God's just punishment for their irremediably sinful nature.

The funniest thing in the column, aside from including a link to an essay by his mother—no, back up, that's part of the funniest thing in the column, speaking of fantasy worlds:

Pancake people of the universe!

Julia Faye in Frank Urson's Chicago (1927). Via MoviesSilently.

Shorter David Brooks, "Building Attention Span", July 10 2015:

What's up with all this twittering and twattering? Everybody needs to hitch up their trousers and join a damn book club!

The subject today is a debate that has perhaps been best summarized by Jon Swartz, in USA Today, vintage 2010:

The ongoing debate on the Internet's social merits has raged for years. And the advent of Facebook, with its 500 million users, has further underscored the talking point: Does social media like Facebook and Twitter make us more social or anti-social?

If you believe a new survey, the answer is a resounding "yes."

I knew it! They does make us more social or anti-social! But which?