Tag: news

The New Yorker, after many years of “Makers Faires” and
Make magazine and the cultural movement celebrating
home-usable technologies of object creation,
lets loose the hound of digital grumpus and cultural critic
Evgeny Morozov to take a long piss and dump on it. Why, the maker
movement is no revolution!

Why doesn’t Morozov like makers? He just doesn’t, that’s all.
They have pretensions to revolution, but look around: people still
have jobs, mostly, if they need them. What these techniques or
ideas might mean to bring joy or fulfillment to those who embrace
them on a personal level isn’t really worth thinking about; these
digital freakazoids with all their talk of hacking and making are
just a little bit vulgar, aren’t they?

Morozov quotes Stewart Brand, avatar of the ’60s generation
version of the “makers movement” with his Whole Earth
Catalog, disapprovingly: “A hacker takes nothing as
given, everything as worth creatively fiddling with, and the
variety which proceeds from that enriches the adaptivity,
resilience, and delight of us all.”

And what’s the matter with that? Well, the “brutally honest”
part is that, well, it apparently doesn’t lead to some apotheosis
of a socialist revolution where no one needs to work anymore.
(Though the technologies Brand has hyped have done a hell of a lot
more to change the quality and physical stress of a great deal of
the work people do in modernity than a socialist revolution has
ever managed.)

Forget the personal–all that matters is the political. “In the
absence of a savvy political strategy, the maker movement could
have even weaker political and social impact than [advocate and
former Wired editor Chris] Anderson foresees,”
Morozov writes.

But its impact needn’t be “political” or “social”–the very idea
behind the movement doesn’t require this. It is about expanding
choice and power in how people choose to live and relate to the
world of objects–it needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, get any more
“political” or “social” than that.

Yes, as Morozov points out, governments are out in the market
spending massive amounts of money for its goals, and DARPA has
found that “makers” can help them, and so they hire them. This need
have no impact on how an individual chooses to use and incorporate
maker tools or philosophy in his life.

Morozov has the usual problem of the
socialist-leaning intellectual complainer of modernity–he
doesn’t really want to spend a lot of time spelling out what he
does want (no one has to work, because, well, the state will take
care of it) so he just moonily bitches about the ways other people
choose to find fulfillment and joy.

Because, damn it, no matter how cheap and ubiquitious
communication and tools become, everyone still isn’t
equal!

Now that money can be raised on sites such as Kickstarter, even
large-scale investors have become unnecessary. But both overlook
one key development: in a world where everyone is an entrepreneur,
it’s hard work getting others excited about funding your project.
Money goes to those who know how to attract attention.

Simply put, if you need to raise money on Kickstarter, it helps
to have fifty thousand Twitter followers, not fifty. It helps
enormously if Google puts your product on the first page of search
results, and making sure it stays there might require an investment
in search-engine optimization. Some would view this new kind of
immaterial labor as “virtual craftsmanship”; others as vulgar
hustling. The good news is that now you don’t have to worry about
getting fired; the bad news is that you have to worry about getting
downgraded by Google.

It’s ultimately kind of gross (as was this
earlier New Republic attack on Kickstarter)–social
criticism as “I don’t like it and I don’t get it.” Parts of
Morozov’s article work as relatively limp and voiceless and thin
reporting on a phenomenon that is far too well along in the culture
to be receiving this kind of “look at this!” level reporting from a
supposedly serious magazine.

But there is a big point–the one atop Morozov’s head:

Seeking salvation through tools alone is no more viable as a
political strategy than addressing the ills of capitalism by
cultivating a public appreciation of arts and crafts. Society is
always in flux, and the designer can’t predict how various
political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt,
augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed.
Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have
done better to advocate reinstitutionalizing it: pushing for
political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and
decentralization of power they associated with their favorite
technology.

Don’t seek joy, fulfillment, or power in your personal choices,
in the day to day moments of your life and your relation to its
things, experiences, and economy: work rather toward convincing a
small elite above you to institute rules to force other people to
do whatever they think is right with those other people’s time and
resources. Don’t just Make–remake society (that is, everyone
else)! 

And my favorite lefty sneer, of the “if someone is making money
off of it, it’s bad” variety:

For all her sensitivity to questions of inequality, [old Arts
and Crafts advocate Mary Dennett] also believed that, once “cheap
electric power” is “at every village door,” the “emancipation of
the craftsman and the unchaining of art” would naturally follow.
What electric company would disagree?

Well, sneers the politico-aesthete Morozov, electric power might
be, ahem, useful, but you do realize a
corporation is selling it to you? Need I say more?

Apparently not, this is the essay’s slambang conclusion.

That Morozov found such a prominent place for this weak tea in
the New Yorker is just one more tired and limp volley in
an ancient old east coast vs. new west coast cultural wargame of
long standing, the old literary staid literary political types vs.
the new vibrant frontier markets and “personal liberation” types,
but it doesn’t make this piece’s existence in “America’s best
magazine” any more defensible.

Morozov doesn’t try to prove Brand’s judgements of cultural
impact of giving people tools, digital or physical, to make and
shape their world wrong–he just points at them and doesn’t like
them.

It’s OK that he doesn’t like them. Morozov doesn’t have to make
anything he doesn’t want to make. He can happily not-hack the rest
of his lifelong days; he needn’t make toys for his kids or drones
for his entertainment or 3D print anything at all. He can even stop
paying his electric bill.

But that tools for personal fulfillment that he doesn’t care for
exist and flourish makes the world a better place–for everyone but
him, apparently. And you know what? That’s OK too.

For more insights into Stewart Brand’s work as an apostle for
the tools of cool, see
my 2006 review of a book about him, From
Counterculture to Cyberculture, and my 2010
interview with him.

Reason on Evgeny Morozov.

Netflix, as should be
fairly obvious, has a significant financial stake in the net
neutrality fight. If Internet service providers charge companies
based on how much bandwidth they use, obviously that’s going to
roll over to companies like Netflix, whose customers may use lots
of it to stream the next season of House of Cards. So in
their latest letter to investors, Netflix is assuring that they’ll

fight tooth and nail to avoid this situation.

Via Entrepreneur:

Netflix is threatening to rally its roughly 34 million domestic
users against a hotly contentious ruling last week overturning
laws that heretofore stated all data on the internet should be
treated equally.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals against net neutrality
in a case brought by Verizon against the FCC means that service
providers can now theoretically charge inflated fees to companies
like Netflix, for instance, whose video streaming facilities
require more bandwidth.

Translation: the end of net neutrality could hypothetically mean
that streaming quality diminishes or that consumers must pay more
to ensure that streaming bandwidth remains high.

“Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISP, we would
vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open
internet they are paying their ISP to deliver,” Netflix pledged in
a letter to investors.

I don’t think the word “draconian” means what they think it
means. Is there any other provider of limited resource (and yes,
for now, bandwidth is still a limited resource) that doesn’t charge
those who consume more a higher amount of money than those who
consume less?

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During a drug policy panel at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, today, Texas Gov. Rick
Perry
said states have a right to go their own way on marijuana,
although he personally continues to oppose legalization. “I am a
staunch promoter of the 10th Amendment,” Perry said, explaining
that states should be free to set their own policies in areas such
as abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana, and “then people will
decide where they want to live.” At the same time, he declared that
Texans “certainly would never jump out in front of the parade”
toward legalization, although he
said he supports “policies that start us toward a
decriminalization and keep people from going to prison and
destroying their lives,” which is “what we’ve done over the last
decade.”

What Perry means by “decriminalization” is pretty much what New
Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
means when he says he will “end the failed war on drugs”:
giving nonviolent drug offenders a choice between a treatment slot
and a prison cell. In other words, it’s not really
decriminalization, which at the very least means eliminating
criminal penalties for users, not using those penalties as a hammer
to reform them against their will—which is also what Barack Obama’s
drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, had in mind when he declared that “we
certainly ended the drug war.”

Still, Perry’s federalism is one of the few things I like about
him, although I would argue
that he is not quite as committed to that principle as he claims to
be. U.S. News reporter Steven Nelson says
Perry’s willingness to let 50 cannabis flowers bloom (or not, as
the case may be) is “a more liberal position than the one held by
the Obama administration,” since “the Justice Department said in
August it will conditionally allow Colorado and
Washington to open state-licensed stores, but reserved the right to
shut them down for violating federal law.”

Nelson has a point, although President Obama’s recent
comments about legalization in Colorado and Washington suggest
he is willing to learn from state policy experiments even if he is
also prepared to squash them. Yesterday White House Press Secretary
Jay Carney
said Obama, who
told The New Yorker “it’s important” for
legalization in those states “to go forward,”  is “not
endorsing any specific move by a state.” Rather, “he’s talking
about the issue of disparities in prosecution of our drug laws that
an experiment like this may be addressing.” For now, at least, the
laboratories of democracy are up and running. 

During a drug policy panel at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, today, Texas Gov. Rick
Perry
said states have a right to go their own way on marijuana,
although he personally continues to oppose legalization. “I am a
staunch promoter of the 10th Amendment,” Perry said, explaining
that states should be free to set their own policies in areas such
as abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana, and “then people will
decide where they want to live.” At the same time, he declared that
Texans “certainly would never jump out in front of the parade”
toward legalization, although he
said he supports “policies that start us toward a
decriminalization and keep people from going to prison and
destroying their lives,” which is “what we’ve done over the last
decade.”

What Perry means by “decriminalization” is pretty much what New
Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
means when he says he will “end the failed war on drugs”:
giving nonviolent drug offenders a choice between a treatment slot
and a prison cell. In other words, it’s not really
decriminalization, which at the very least means eliminating
criminal penalties for users, not using those penalties as a hammer
to reform them against their will—which is also what Barack Obama’s
drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, had in mind when he declared that “we
certainly ended the drug war.”

Still, Perry’s federalism is one of the few things I like about
him, although I would argue
that he is not quite as committed to that principle as he claims to
be. U.S. News reporter Steven Nelson says
Perry’s willingness to let 50 cannabis flowers bloom (or not, as
the case may be) is “a more liberal position than the one held by
the Obama administration,” since “the Justice Department said in
August it will conditionally allow Colorado and
Washington to open state-licensed stores, but reserved the right to
shut them down for violating federal law.”

Nelson has a point, although President Obama’s recent
comments about legalization in Colorado and Washington suggest
he is willing to learn from state policy experiments even if he is
also prepared to squash them. Yesterday White House Press Secretary
Jay Carney
said Obama, who
told The New Yorker “it’s important” for
legalization in those states “to go forward,”  is “not
endorsing any specific move by a state.” Rather, “he’s talking
about the issue of disparities in prosecution of our drug laws that
an experiment like this may be addressing.” For now, at least, the
laboratories of democracy are up and running. 

This afternoon, the Free Snowden site, put
together by the Courage Foundation to do exactly what the site’s
name says, relayed questions sent via Twitter to National Security
Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden for responses. Then they hosted
Snowden’s answers.

Some notable points:

• Snowden thinks it’s possible for the United States to recover
  from the damage caused by the surveillance scandal with new laws
  and oversight. “We can correct the laws, restrain the overreach of
  agencies, and hold the senior officials responsible for abusive
  programs to account,” he writes.
• America’s whistleblower protections are extremely weak in the
  national security arena. Snowden had no “official channels” to
  report this wrongdoing. “I still made tremendous efforts to report
  these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the
  proper clearance who would listen,” he writes. “The reactions of
  those I told about the scale of the constitutional violations
  ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to
  risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom … .”
• He thinks it’s “interesting” that President Barack Obama gave
  his limp
  NSA reform speech prior to the release of the report by the
  Privacy and Civil Liberties Board declaring that the NSA’s mass
  metadata collection system is
  illegal and should be stopped. “When even the federal
  government says the NSA violated the constitution at least 120
  million times under a single program, but failed to discover even a
  single ‘plot,’ it’s time to end ‘bulk collection,’ which is a
  euphemism for mass surveillance,” he writes. “There is simply no
  justification for continuing an unconstitutional policy with a 0%
  success rate.”
• He says he never stole anybody’s passwords or tricked coworkers
  to get access he shouldn’t have, contrary to reports.
• He says not all spying is bad. He is against the indiscriminate
  mass surveillance of citizens who are not suspected of any
  wrongdoing. “This is a global problem, and America needs to take
  the lead in fixing it,” he writes. “If our government decides our
  Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable
  seizures no longer applies simply because that’s a more efficient
  means of snooping, we’re setting a precedent that immunizes the
  government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same kind of
  indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the
  NSA is doing.”
• Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper under what conditions would he
  return to the United States, Snowden responded that he wants to,
  but the laws under which he’s charged forbid him from mounting a
  fair defense for his actions. Over at Politico, Eric Holder says
  the Department of Justice would offer Snowden a
  plea deal to return home, which sounds like a typical tone deaf
  response from our nation’s prosecutors.
• When asked about the recent
  BuzzFeed piece where anonymous government intelligence
  officials said they wanted to kill Snowden, he responds he’s
  concerned “that current, serving officials of our government are so
  comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell
  reporters on the record that they think the due process protections
  of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts.
  These are the same officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor
  the 4th and 1st Amendments. This should bother all of us.” I would
  add that it’s also a concern that even a relatively young media
  outlet like BuzzFeed is already falling into the entrenched
  Washington media habit of allowing government officials
  anonymity — not for the purpose of providing valuable
  information the public deserves to know, but to attack others
  without having to risk any consequences.

Read the whole livechat here.