For the Record

Tyler Cowen, the economist behind Marginal Revolution, quotes Seth Roberts, a psychologist (and blogger), quoting Tyler Cowen:

Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation.…Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.

Cowen fills in the details:

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

Wink! Whattaya think, bloggers?

Hm

Preview art from Andy Diggle and Jock's upcoming Green Arrow: Year One mini-series ("a frivolous playboy with little care for anyone or anything — apparently even himself…finds that he does care about something…justice!"):

"Real's just for people who can't afford to fake it."

The Past: Never Not Funny

Via the excellent Paul Collins:

in 150-year-old correspondence between Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, and a clergyman, the Rev Whitwell Elwin…[Elwin] urged Murray not to publish [On the Origin of Species]. Darwin’s theories were so farfetched, prejudiced and badly argued that right-thinking members of the public would never believe them, he said. “At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,” Elwin wrote, adding that the “harder and drier” writing style was also off-putting.

He suggested that Darwin’s earlier observations on pigeons should be made into a book as “everybody is interested in pigeons”. He enthused: “The book would be received in every journal in the kingdom and would soon be on every table.”

—Shirley English, "Darwin Nearly Failed to Evolve in Print," Times 25 April 2007.

Just Lose It Ah Ah Ah Ah

Today I saw a sign that said

The Craze over Bio-Ontologies

I think it was advertising a talk of some kind. I hope that someone's finally getting to the bottom of this; the bio-ontologies fad has been out of control for way too long, and I, for one, want some answers.

ORIENTALISM

This just in from Mrs. Keyhole:

So, I need to read Dracula for one of my classes, and I bought a used copy. I just started reading it today, and it turns out the person who owned it before has written all over it — lots of underlining, and a few comments here and there ("superior attitude --> insulting people he encounters; bookish/learnish [sic] perspective } ORIENTALISM"), but it's mainly just single words copied from the text itself. I guess they're words the person didn't know (sometimes they have the definition next to them), but the weird thing is, even though they're written out meticulously — each letter looks like it was really carefully formed and all that — they're all spelled wrong. "Idolastrous," "polygot," "calèch" (should be "calèche" — he got the accent right, just couldn't bring himself to finish the word…), "volumptous lips," (to be fair, I think that one isn't actually in the text — Dracula's lips have a "remarkable ruddiness," but there's nothing mentioned as to the level of…volump they have), oh, and my personal favorite: "DRAUCLA."

I dunno, I guess the person's got dyslexia or something, and I should be nicer, but…c'mon!

All It Takes

The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects.…Over time, perhaps in as little as twenty years, and as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination—with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win.

—John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 8.

Trilling

On the fetishization of "madness" as a form of ultimate authenticity:

The falsities of an alienated social reality are rejected in favour of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ—but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished.

—Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 171-2.

A Technology

From wp:

The Emotion Engine is the name of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) used in Sony PlayStation 2 video game consoles.

This is how our emotions work:

While the Emotion Engine is now getting on in years, most PlayStation 3s apparently still use it for backwards compatibility. Unfortunately, Wikipedia notes, PlayStation 3 units that use PAL color-encoding — those sold in Europe (but not France) and most of Asia, for instance — "do not include an Emotion Engine as a matter of cost-saving." They rely on "emulation" instead. But these units are in fact ahead of their time: "It is believed that eventually a hardware revision of NTSC units [ones using the color-encoding standard that prevails in North America] will remove the Emotion Engine chip in these territories." It's only a matter of time.

The Economist Views Bikini Waxing from under the Blindfold of False Necessity

WHILE driving through rural South Carolina recently, I was surprised to find that nearly every home I passed had a sign advertising some cottage industry. Each offered a range of services from “small welding projects” to “bikini waxes”&hellip:

In developed economies home production is generally inefficient. Take the at home bikini waxer, whom I assume is female. Performing bikini waxes from her home, on a back country road, limits the scale of her business…

But does this hold in the internet era? For waxing, yes…

…workers who forgo other employment opportunities will not receive the level of benefits they would get with a traditional employer; and economically, their labour will not reap the productivity benefits of scale and network effects.

Thus saith The Economist's Free Exchange blog. The smug and static picture of the economy here enrages me to no end. The writer is so fucking confident that s/he, the enlightened journalist, understands the costs and benefits of self-employment far more than the ignorant South Carolina bikini waxes, tragically forgoing scale and network effects out of some overdeveloped sense of pride or autonomy. Doesn't the entire structure of neoclassical economics that The Economist so smirkingly defends rest upon the belief that, all things considered, businesspeople know better than outsiders and regulators, that one of the prime benefits of a free market is its ability to elicit correct information at just the right time? I could have sworn that I was just reading something trotting out that damn Hayek argument the other day (not that I think it's a bad argument, but still). Are at-home bikini waxers really so stupid, so immune to the promptings of the invisible hand, that they need the help of some globetrotting Economist reporter to shore up their bottom line (apparently by "set[ting] up a commercial shop in a central location")? It's incredible how casually the writer moves between a "command economy" perspective on the stupidity and waste of competing small entrepreneurs and an academic and arrogant political economy whose sole justification is the promise that those same competing small entrepreneurs will lead us to utopia.

And how dare these fucktards purport to know the effect "the internet era" will have on bikini-waxing efficiency. Who the hell knows? Where is The Economist's crystal ball? What if multiple bikini-waxing establishments ally, pooling supplies and marketing dollars and customer references — could that yield scale and network effects? What if they enter into relationships with, I don't know, tanning salons, hair-cutting shacks, whatever — what principle of economics precludes the ability of any number of diverse initiatives to substitute for the glories of scale & network that The Economist apparently believes can only come from some kind of pubis-pruning equivalent of a megachurch?

These people think they're the capitalists. But in their stodgy self-satisfaction they forget the words of the prophet: all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

The "O" Should Actually Be a Little Heart

I just discovered in my "dropbox" a mini-poster from "POM," the company that makes pomegranate juice & tea. It's a periodic table; the joke is that they've added POM as element 122!! Shrug. The weird thing, though, is that the back of the poster says, in part, "Check out POM Tea's entire ad campaign and buy the collectible posters at www.pomtea.com." I guess they're trying to do an Absolut thing. But wait: check out their entire ad campaign? I thought the postmodern ad was premised on effacing its own advertorial purpose, because modern sophisticates won't deign to pay attention to something that transparently sells itself to them — hence the blog title "Ads without Products" (I mention this chiefly because said blog praised Michael Bérubé's awful, ignorant review of Unger's What Should the Left Propose?, to which I will return sooner or later). Somehow I feel this Pom periodic table resonating with a baffling press release put out by DC Comics and circulated in various places:

KRYPTONITE DISCOVERED IN SERBIA

[…]

A new mineral, matching the chemical composition for kryptonite suggested in ‘Superman Returns,’ was discovered by a team of geologists in a Serbian mine, according to London’s Natural History Museum. Unable to find a suitable match to a known mineral, the geologists turned to the Internet, which revealed the rock’s relation to the most famous element in comic books.

“The universe is full of mysteries, and some have been foreshadowed by comics,” said Paul Levitz, DC Comics President and Publisher. “We look forward to scientists figuring this one out.”

This has nothing to do with krypton the element, as it turns out. The story seems to be that the Serbian guy googled the chemical composition of his new mineral, and it matched some background text that shows up in the Superman movie. But kryptonite is radioactive, dammit! There's no way it's just sodium and boron or whatevs. Serbia and Hollywood are lying about kryptonite. 8 |

Doing a Thing Redux: Feelings, Art

Does it make sense to love a work of art or a genre thereof not because of its consistent quality but rather because, against a backdrop of repetitive mediocrity, it occasionally shines forth with some unexpected burst of transcendence? I think, at the risk of sounding arrogant, that this is one reason why I enjoy both hip-hop and superhero comics. In the past hour, reading through Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, which I pretty much love, I've been unable to stop thinking about a weird line from a stealth-favorite song of mine: "No Other" by Lil Wayne and Juelz Santa, from the 2006 DJ Drama/Lil Wayne mixtape Dedication 2. Wayne's from New Orleans, so he riffs desultorily (here and throughout) about how shitty that whole hurricane thing was, and how shitty life in general is. It's pretty good stuff. But I prefer Santana's verse, especially a bit into his opening: "Wayne, I feel your pain and I see your stress / How they think your people s'posed to get through Katrina off a FEMA check?" (Answer: selling drugs.) But I don't want that jokey parenthetical to undermine the achievement here. I honestly get that whole spine-tingly thing every time the words pass through my speakers. Santana means it, goddammit, and while he's only a few seconds away from converting the whole thing into a paean to the gangster lifestyle, up to and including torturing enemy drug dealers, he's genuinely sad for that fleeting moment. "I feel your pain"? What a weird thing for a rapper to say. What a brave thing for a rapper to say, if you want to be a little ridiculous about it. See also a far superior song: Clipse, "I'm Not You," Lord Willin', at 3:48: "I see them pay for they fix when they kids couldn’t eat / And with this in mind, I still didn’t quit / And that’s how I know that I ain’t shit." Would any of this have an impact if it weren't so atypical? Or maybe I'm the only idiot who thinks it has an impact at all.

Doing a Thing, Seat of Pants

Keyhole Confessions Mark II begins here. How goes it?

I just finished reading Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's book Off the Books: [lol: but it's a book!] The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, which came strongly recommended by Tyler Cowen, the economist who's (chiefly) behind the ever lovable blog Marginal Revolution. I'm not sure that I share Cowen's unreserved enthusiasm for Venkatesh's work — I found the prose dull and distracting (similar, in fact, to Cowen's in In Praise of Commercial Culture, which is nevertheless also worth reading), and textual déjà vu cropped up in way too many places, as if no one at Harvard University Press could have been bothered to read over the whole book in one sitting before sending it off to the printers. But regardless: the book's about the underground/"shady" economy of a particular ghetto neighborhood in Chicago. I use the word "ghetto" advisedly: it's more or less isolated from outside influences and resources, it's almost entirely black, and it's desperately poor. But as Venkatesh shows, drawing on years of observations accumulated by hanging out with the people who live in this place, high rates of (official) unemployment and anemic streams of income don't testify to economic idleness. Actually, the ghetto has a crazy, amazing, inspiring economy, vital and active and testifying to the irrepressible human impulse -- dare I say it? -- to truck and barter. There are tons of "small-business owners," even if the small business is stealing socks and selling them in the park, or selling drugs, or sleeping on the floor of a convenience store to serve as a makeshift security guard (as some homeless people do).

Problems: two thriving sectors in the ghetto are super-illegal and taboo: drug-selling and "sex work." Also, even legit-ish business activities, which keep everyone alive and kicking, typically involve wages below the minimum, entrepreneurship without the proper permits, use of spaces in violation of building and zoning codes, etc. So the law is almost never on these people's side: the pseudo-contracts and property rights on which they rest their livelihoods have no legal standing. Uh oh. Also: in the absence of much policing or government, gangs stand in as sovereigns, taxing businesses (quite literally) in exchange for sham protection and attempting to secure a monopoly on the means of violence. Also: partially because of overly fearful assessment of the risks of trying new things outside of the comforting familiarity of ghetto life, people don't try to expand into radically new areas or ways of doing business or even different parts of the city. Too scary, too risky. They always nurse dreams of the big time, but they don't dare to try to live them out. And they're probably right: the world would probably fuck them, as things now stand.

Solutions: legalize prostitution and drug sales, but don't replace them with monopolistic brothels or "Big Pharma." A profusion of competing sellers should yield, in classical fashion, lower prices and better output, while preserving employment within the territory. Less violence and exploitation because the law can now be invoked. Puritans will object, but: whatevs. Slash regulations, grant amnesty to existing quasi-legal enterprises, institutionalize and regularize and accord legal existence to block associations and, hell, even gangs, as long as they stop killing people. These neighborhoods are already more organized than the boldest civic-participation leftist fantasy world; what we need to do is grant the organizations the respect and power they deserve and have earned. Energize and empower and liberalize. Fuck it: make these places islands of libertarian experiment, dispensing with the bugbears of the minimum wage and lengthy permit processes. Maybe it'll work. Beats doing nothing, and at least it would mark out a direction: not weeping over the ghetto as a hopeless den of sin and crime but recognizing, purifying, and radicalizing the elements within it that command respect and spark hope. Don't fucking hand it over to the homogenizing powers of shopping malls and yuppies and blah blah, although such things may occasionally help, as long as they're in service of the larger trajectory. The point is to preserve the diversity of activities, the competing nodes of authority, the casual amenability to individual initiative so alien to us white-collar office drones -- but to give them greater scope, more power, and a larger setting on which to play out. Other thoughts? I'm in a mood. Maybe we can put our money where n+1's mouth is.