Some notes about Y2K, new conservative rhetoric, the wired university, and the limits of automation, plus movie recommendations, follow-ups, and URL's. ** You probably got a message recently asking if your address on RRE was up to date. If you followed the instructions to change your address, please let me know if you get duplicates of this message. We had list-server hassles as you'd expect, and I'm not certain that all of the changes went through. ** Stop the presses!! I have just received this bulletin from a reader: I read your cheap pens piece. I thought you'd like to know that there's a store on the corner of Embarcadero Road & El Camino Real in Palo Alto in the Town and Country Shopping Center (this is like 2 long blocks from Stanford U) called MAI-DO. It has an amazing number of Japanese Pilot pens for sale including more flavors of the Pilot Hi-Tec-C than one could imagine. They're about $2 a piece. I like the 0.3 mm the best, in blue black. They also have lots of notebooks and Japanese organizers and B5 and A4 paper and notebooks. The store is across the street from Palo Alto high school, if you're familiar with PA. It is a privilege to be able to share this with you. Speaking of which, if you want to get one of my remaining excellent cheap pens, this is your last and final chance. Just send a check for US$20, made out to Amnesty International, to me at this address: Dept of Information Studies; UCLA; Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520; USA. The list of probably-available pens can be found at: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/pens.html#available For more on Amnesty International's new campaign against torture: http://www.amnesty.org/ ** I still haven't noticed any five-star international conferences to assess the accuracy of the many predictions for the year 2000. Have you? I didn't think so. We'll have to carry on by ourselves. We'll pick up with an article in the 6/5/00 Wall Street Journal: Twenty years ago, Al Gore, then a 32-year-old Tennessee congressman, persuaded 200 House subcommittee chairmen to predict what their panels would focus on by the end of the millennium. Most of the predictions, as you might imagine, bear no relationship to reality. Blimps. Force field weapons. The extinction of railroads. No new discoveries in pharmaceuticals. Teleconferencing replacing some Congressional hearings. Anti-satellite weapons knocking out telecommunications systems. Vertical take-off airplanes in commercial aviation. Electrical power beamed from space. The paperless office. They overestimated social changes due to technology and underestimated social changes due to other factors. They missed the fall of the Soviet Union altogether. They thought that HMO's would be a good thing, and they especially celebrated the end of interest-rate limits for savings and loans, which led to catastrophe a few years later. Some predictions were more accurate, such as challenges to the safety of genetically engineered products. One big winner in the prediction contest was Al Gore. He correctly predicted the cloning of cows and the prominence of global warming. He didn't talk about computer networks in this document, though he had discussed them elsewhere around the same time. The section written by the telecommunications subcommittee did mention the issue in general terms, but it predicted that France would achieve its goal of world leadership through Minitel. There you have it. ** Reporting Y2K. Before the millennium year leaves us, we must stop and consider a remarkable column that appeared on the op-ed page of the 1/4/00 Wall Street Journal. The author was the befuddling Peter Huber, and the subject was the failure of the Y2K bug to shut down the world on New Year's Eve. Huber argues that the predictions of Y2K catastrophe were simply another in a long line of anti-technology scare stories, and he is particularly incensed by the role of television newscast anchors. He opens with this: Call it the anchorman law of technological catastrophe: If Peter Jennings can see it coming, then it isn't. Then, a paragraph later: The anchorman told us just what was going to happen to our lights and phones, and when. And, right on schedule, it didn't. This is a serious charge. Did Peter Jennings really predict that our lights and phones would fail on New Year's Eve? Huber does not provide us with Jennings' words, or with any close paraphrase of them, or with the date on which he supposedly said them. One wonders: did Jennings really issue predictions, or did he simply, in his role as a journalist, quote the predictions of prominent authorities? We are puzzled. But rather than help us out, Huber commences a rant. He offers the following generalization: The anchorman ... has to explain a snafu's cause and likely effect in two minutes flat. But anything that's real and explainable in so few words is fixable by 10,000 biochemists, engineers or programmers at Merck, Monsanto, or Microsoft. This is one of those lines of reasoning that has a surface plausibility until you think about it for one second. Why should this conclusion follow at all? If the sun suddenly started expanding by a million miles an hour -- not at all implausible, given how little we know about the sun -- that would be easy to explain and impossible for any number of biochemists, engineers or programmers to do anything about. We would hear about it on the news, and then we would die. And is it really so certain that 10,000 geniuses will be enough to stop a pandemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis? Huber's writing is full of such reasoning. Having said this, Huber launches into a nasty ad hominem attack on news anchors, who he imagines to be motivated by envy toward technologists. The attack then expands to other critics of technological society. The market, with its powers of fixing and planning, is said to solve all problems before anchormen even hear about them. Then comes the punch: In his own defense, the anchorman may insist that he just reports what others foretell, but he's being too modest. He picks from a vast and varied catalog of predicted disaster, and makes clear what most professional oracles take great pains to muddy. This is so twisted that it takes real work to understand it. You will recall that we were wondering whether Peter Jennings himself predicted the failure of lights and phones, or whether he was simply reporting the views of prominent authorities. This passage appears to provide both answers at the same time. By choosing to report the story at all, Huber suggests, Jennings is ipso facto endorsing the predictions. The clear implication was that Jennings should not have reported the predictions of, say, the Republican Congressional committees that did predict a Y2K catastrophe -- you will recall that it was going to be Al Gore's fault. He should have ignored the story. The larger implication here is striking: there is no reality, Huber is saying, no truth about which controversies are sufficiently prominent to be worth reporting. It's all a jumble of fragments, with no basis to choose among them except the pure arbitrary will of the anchorman. In particular, Huber is implying that it was not newsworthy that a recently discovered and globally pervasive computer bug, one that took an unknown but very large number of forms, would cause industrial society to shut down overnight unless a massive effort were undertaken to repair unknown thousands of programs, many of which could not be recompiled. So absolutely certain was the planning capacity of the market, he implies, that the populace should not even have been informed that the very survival of civilization had been staked on it, with bets coming due on January 1st. This is an extravagant claim, and it is hard to imagine what it is doing in the newspaper. Huber's article exemplifies a disturbing rhetorical pattern that to my knowledge is new. The pattern goes like this: (1) open your column with a weak or distorted version of your opponent's position; (2) then engage in ad hominem ranting and sophistry, thus creating an emotional environment of rage and disdain; (3) three-quarters of the way along, say "opponent might complain that his real argument is ..."; (4) take advantage of the emotional environment of rage and disdain to brush off the real argument with illogic; (5) now resume the polemics as if nothing had happened; and (6) conclude however you want, unmoored by reason. I've seen this a lot lately, and cannot remember seeing it before. It is very much as though the professional publicists of the new jargon are constantly reading one another's work and copying whatever rhetorical innovations they see there, big or small, whether they make sense or not. These publicists are numerous, and intelligent in their way, and the collective force of their bad faith is considerable. ** The hidden curse of projection. Projection is insidious. Let us consider two analogous examples of the projection that is hidden in the currently fashionable jargon. (1) The phrase "politically correct" is a work of genius. Having been salvaged from "their" rhetoric, it can be filled with all sorts of extra meanings while still claiming to plumb the depths of "their" real thinking. In everyday invective, the phrase "political correctness" is used in two distinct ways: "Politically correct", version A. Every political, social, or cultural idea that is not conservative is labeled "politically correct". "Politically correct", version B. The use of force, intimidation, loud voices, protest tactics, or moral indignation to impose nonconservative ideas or suppress conservative ones is labeled "politically correct". Notice what happens when the phrase "politically correct" is used in both of these versions without any clear distinction being drawn between them: non-conservative ideas begin to begin to seem oppressive, just for not being conservative. The idea is that every idea that is not conservative is ipso facto something that is crammed down people's throats, something artificial and imposed, a divergence from the given order of things. Why is this an example of projection? Look at what's implied when non-conservative ideas, as such, are associated with intimidation and repression. Because intimidation and repression are illegitimate in a free society, non-conservative ideas are associated with attacks on freedom, and are thus labeled as having no legitimate place in a free society. So people who use the phrase "politically correct" according to the current fashion are trying to delegitimate non-conservative ideas under the guise of accusing non-conservatives of delegitimating their own ideas. That's projection. The phrase "liberal media" is also used in two distinct ways: "Liberal media", version A. Journalistic institutions that abandon the norms of objectivity to favor liberals in a systematic way are said to be the "liberal media". "Liberal media", version B. Anything that appears in the media that does not conform to the conservative party line of the day is said to be evidence of the "liberal media". Notice what happens when the phrase "liberal media" is used in both of these versions without any clear distinction being drawn between them: the very existence of any single non-conservative idea in the media, or even a single phrase that does not convey a conservative spin, is made to serve as evidence that the media as a whole are biased against conservatives. In other words, "liberal media" can mean "the media as a whole are liberal" or "those parts of the media that are liberal", and the phrase is used ambiguously to blur the difference between these two ideas. So even when hundreds of conservative pundits appear in the media daily, the slightest divergence from the conservative party line is still evidence of the "liberal media". This systematic ambiguity between different uses of the phrase "liberal media" also makes it possible to argue for the existence of "the liberal media" just by gathering lists of every non-conservative phrase that appears in the media, regardless of the number of conservative phrases that might also have appeared. Of course, the PR message about "liberal media bias" takes more forms than this, and those other forms would make equally good objects of investigation. I am not claiming to disprove the (patently absurd) claims that the media exhibit a liberal bias. My topic here is this one particular ambiguity and its consequences. And its consequences are another example of projection: any nonconservative idea in the media is ipso facto portrayed as an example of "liberal media bias", and therefore as illegitimate. Under the guise of pretending that the media eliminate conservative views, the jargon actually promotes the elimination of nonconservative views. This is not just theory, either. Any media outlet that runs a liberal cartoon or columnist can expect to receive angry letters protesting the "blatantly liberal views" that it has allowed to appear, as if devoting space to any nonconservative at all were ipso facto illegitimate. This is not a way that rational and decent people think, but it is altogether common right now. Projection is an integral component of every example of aggression. When one country invades another, for example, it almost invariably stages an attack against itself by the country it wishes to invade. When men who batter their wives are compelled into therapy, those few who ever become capable of explaining their feelings explain that they felt, throughout their attacks, that in reality their wives were attacking *them*. The new jargon is not the moral equivalent of physical violence, of course, but it exhibits the same structure: attacks on "them" disguised as accusations that "they" are attacking "us". The more that the jargon develops -- the more rhetorical devices it acquires for engaging in projection -- the more primitive does the aggression become. Unless this irrationality is brought into the light and shown for what it is, it will only get worse. People who can be sent foaming at the mouth against imagined enemies are dangerous to everyone except the tiny elite who get to imagine who the enemies are. ** Realistic optimism for the wired university. In the wars over information technology in the university, I am a neutral. I am neither an enthusiast nor a critic but a realist. Realists have it hard: they don't have an easy rhetoric they can use, and they don't fit into the conventional "pro versus con" story frame within which these disputes are narrated. I know people in both camps, though I admit that I find the extremists in the enthusiasts' camp much more insufferable than the extremists in the critics' camp. In talking to both camps, I have noticed a pattern. Many people on both sides imagine themselves to be a small and embattled minority pushing up against the inertia of established institutions. The enthusiasts, many of them, are individual faculty and researchers who are depressed at the difficulty of persuading their institutions to support large-scale initiatives in this area, and at their colleagues who remain focused on their individual research topics and not on the urgent work of revolutionizing the institution to take advantage of the technology. The critics, many of them, are likewise individual faculty and researchers who see university administrations acting like corporations and entering into partnerships with corporations to create commercialized cyberuniversities with no regard for the faculty, or for what education really means. Although these views seem like opposites, they come remarkably close to both being right. I want to transcend what they have in common -- a sense of futility that derives from an insufficiency of imagination. Not everyone fits these two patterns, of course. Some universities do have technology enthusiasts who are running significant programs online, for example degree programs that have students in Singapore. And a remarkable number of critically minded people have had a hand in shaping either the technology or their own institutions' use of it. Andrew Feenberg of San Diego State is an example; he did some the first, if not the very first, experiments with online teaching almost twenty years ago. Mike Cole at UC San Diego has been running classes at multiple UC campuses over video links. There are others. These people are not anti-technology; that is not what "critical" means to them. Rather, they want to ensure that the technology is used in a way that fits with serious ideas about education, so that the technology itself does not drive educational theory or practice. Although I am friends with many people in this latter camp, my work does not fit into any camp. I do often use technology in interesting ways in my classes, but I am not trying to change the world by doing so. Instead, my work in this area is mainly analytical and normative. I want to sketch a structure of ideas from which we might work in reinventing the university in the wired world. I am not trying to shaping technology in a direct way; rather, I want to shape imagination -- imagination not just about technology, but about the larger unit of analysis that includes both the technology itself and the institutions within which it is embedded. My work is also distinct from the valuable community that conducts research on organizational informatics -- the institutional dynamics, largely cognitive and political in nature, that affect how information technology gets used in particular organizational contexts. These people, particularly the school that came out of UC Irvine, focus squarely on the political processes that shape information technology: office politics, for example, or the politics that are shaping the development of online publishing, as in Rob Kling's current work at Indiana. Such work is thoroughly needed, but it's not what I'm doing. I'm focused on prescription and imagination -- not "how is it done?", but "how *should* it be done?". We often think of imagination as an escape from reality, but that's not what I mean. I want to develop a realistic imagination, one that is informed by the real dynamics of institutions, by the real grindings of power politics. I want to *intervene* in these politics, providing the raw imaginative material that will be needed by anyone who is trying to set things straight. My critically-minded friends sometimes call me an "optimist". They do not mean this in a good way, and not because they are pessimists. Rather, an optimist, for them, is someone who does not understand the politics of the situation. Engineers are trained to focus in a narrow way on the technology, and so they are often blindsided by political factors that they don't understand. Think, for example, of the huge project in California to build a new computer system to track deadbeat parents and make them pay child support. That project crashed and burned for political reasons: extracting child support was the turf of local authorities, and each local authority had its own way of doing things. Nobody had (or exerted) the power to compel the various local authorities to do things in a standardized way, and so the development project was torn apart as every local authority demanded that its own procedures be supported. (The same thing happens in the private sector every day. We just don't read about it as often.) The engineers who ran that project were doubtlessly competent in a technical sense, but their competence silently presupposed that someone else, the client, had the wherewithal to impose the unified political order that the unified technical order required. An optimist, for the critics, is someone who goes around imagining new technologies -- and thus new institutional forms -- oblivious to the political realities that will shape any real technology in practice. So am I an optimist in that sense? No, I don't think so. To the contrary, I offer scenarios that ought to work just *because* of the institutional forces. I see design as judo, a matter of catalyzing a change by using technology and relatively minor institutional changes to clear a path for the existing forces to head off in new directions. That is the purpose of my proposals, and the test of them. I do agree with those who say that the university must change or die. But not all "changes" are equally good. Many are bad, and many others will never happen. I want to identify the good changes that can actually happen, and I use institutional analysis to that end. ** Why the Web isn't just a fashion. The last time I spoke on the topic of the wired university, someone in the audience told me that the Web is just a fashion, that young people have grown bored with it, and that wild-eyed tales of the impact that technology will have on the university are irresponsible and should be discarded. This was by no means the majority view in this particular audience, but I was surprised to hear it at all. I had imagined such arguments to be extinct, and I was surprised at how poorly rehearsed my answer was. So what *is* the answer? One can start with the obvious part: the technology has been improving by a factor of 100 every ten years, that being a rough equivalent of Moore's Law, and we know enough about the technologies in the lab that we can be confident that this improvement will continue for at least thirty years. That's a factor of 1,000,000 improvement, enough so that we can imagine having computing devices in the paint on the wall if we can think of a reason why we'd want that (see Hal Abelson et al, Amorphous computing, Communications of the ACM 43(5), 2000, pages 74-83). But that's not a very good answer. What if automobile tires became cheaper by a factor of a million? We'd get our tires replaced more often, and cars would be 2% cheaper, and we'd probably have to pass environmental laws for all the people who would burn tires for fuel. But otherwise life would not change a great deal. Automobile tires are only useful in conjunction with complementary goods, such as automobiles, that are not getting cheaper at anything like the same rate. (Some pundits have blamed health and safety regulations for the failure of cars to drop in price as quickly as semiconductors. Really.) The same thing happens with computers in many contexts, and I would guess that the processor chip is no longer a large percentage of the total cost of a calculator. Lots of people would be happy to have a ten-times-faster processor to display Web pages more quickly, but there's a limit to what most of them are willing to pay for it. So it's not simply a matter of the price of the hardware coming down, even though many people seem to regard that as an adequate argument. A better argument starts from ubiquity. The chips will be so cheap that we can expect them to be embedded in everything, from cars to appliances to furniture. People who scoff at computers because some of the cool kids don't surf the Web can be quieted by reminding them that everyone in an industrial society is a "computer user" any time they drive, cook, bank, or (in most cases) work. But the embedding argument isn't good enough either. So what if computers are around all the time? Lots of things are around all the time. To really answer the question, we have to talk about the ways that people are bound into institutions. Institutions shape identities; they create incentives; they structure relationships; they define the terrain over which we live out the major strategies and tactics of our lives. An institution is like a grammar; it doesn't tell you what to say, but it provides the raw material for saying, and it thereby sets rules that are hard to transcend because everyone else is expecting them. A computer system is also like a grammar: it defines a grammar of the actions that its users are allowed to take. One designs a computer by articulating the grammar of an institution and inscribing it into the software. Institutions lend themselves to computerized augmentation, and computers, which follow rules much more rigidly than any bureaucracy, help inscribe institutions more deeply in our lives. Information technology is radical and conservative at the same time: it is radical because of its exponential quantitative growth, but it is conservative because its whole mode d'emploi reproduces or even rigidifies institutional orders. That's a broad generalization, of course. The forces amplified by computing can tear an institution apart, or enable institutions to invade the turf of their competitors. Every institutional order is a dynamic equilibrium whose persistence is entirely contingent; nothing is given in the institutional world. But amongst all the change, the relationship between computers and institutions is pretty much the same. The picture of cool teens walking away from the out-of-fashion Web is misleading because it presents information technology as a contingent choice, as something that one can take or leave, as a choice separate from all other choices. If you look at technology just as technology then that's how it's likely to look. But if you look at technology as part of the social world, and the social world as a sprawling complex of institutions that bind us together in historically specific ways, then it's all too clear why radically improved information technology will change the world: because the world is already changing itself all the time, and because the world created information technology precisely to amplify that existing logic of change. ** You have probably guessed that my message comparing conservatives and liberals on the subject of personal responsibility drew some flak, and if so then you guessed right. What most struck me about these flak messages is their authors' profound lack of acquaintance with liberal arguments. They *thought* they were acquainted with liberal arguments, of course, but they were really acquainted with conservative caricatures of liberal arguments. The most common response, to my surprise, was that personal responsibility extends only to the condition of oneself and one's family. (None of them explained why it extended so far as to include one's family.) Most of them opposed this to what they called "social responsibility", which they implied did not exist, or treated as nebulous and more or less optional, or explicitly equated with communism. I thought of myself as having been hardened to the excesses of the current jargon, but I wasn't prepared for this kind of in-your-face selfishness. I was expecting a different argument, that personal responsibility consists in responsibility for one's own actions. But no: these authors believed that one is responsible (only) for one's own *condition*. Nobody else's condition matters, it seems, and only after some thrashing did I manage to extract any admission that one is responsible for other people's conditions to the extent that one's own actions have affected them. I had prepared myself for the inevitable moment, only a couple of steps of logic along, where my own views would diverge from those of the liberals I wrote about. But that never happened. The people who wrote to me were unaware of, and uninterested in, the idea that we all become responsible for one another's lives to a certain degree because of the roles we play in various institutions, and that we come to occupy those roles through our socialization and acculturation, much of which is unconscious or habitual, and because these institutions organize life in our society so completely that our only alternative to playing our roles would be to live in a shack in the woods. It follows that, even if one is only responsible for one's own actions (and not, say, for the systems that one unfairly benefits from), then one is responsible for the condition of all of the people who suffer from the institutions that we uphold, collaborate with, help reproduce, and so on. But the argument never got to that point. Some of our fellow citizens are pretty far gone, I'd have to say, and we need to see that they don't take us with them. ** My argument in "The market logic of information" turns on a subtle point about the relationship between transaction costs and organizing costs, and I gather that I did not explain my views on the matter very clearly. The issue arises, you will recall, because of Ronald Coase's theory that the boundaries of capitalist firms are decided by the cost of using market mechanisms (transaction costs) in comparison to the costs of organizing productive activities by command and control within the boundaries of a firm (organizing costs). Fans of capitalism often claim that the Internet will being about a closer, indeed a perfect, approximation to Adam Smith's idealized market by reducing transaction costs. The theory, however, makes it just as likely that the Internet will increase the role of command and control by lowering organizing costs even faster than it lowers transaction costs. So things start to seem less determinate. The question, one might suppose, is which set of costs is dropping faster. Some people seem certain that it is transaction costs that are dropping faster, and they can certainly point to cases where this is true. Fortunately, we do not need to decide the matter on that kind of macro level. As a broad generalization, the Internet lowers transaction costs in a wide variety of ways, each relatively small in proportion to the overall cost of doing business, but it lowers organizing costs in a single big way, mainly by increasing economies of scale in cases where analogous activities are coordinated from a center. No major controversy is required, therefore, about which set of costs is dropping faster. Lower transaction costs, other things being equal, break companies into smaller pieces. Lower organizing costs through economies of scale, other things being equal, merge companies into larger, homogeneous units. And together, these forces push toward the same endpoint: focused monopolies. Every firm spins off the activities that it doesn't do best, and it can do so because of reduced transaction costs, as well as because of the economies of scale that the outsourcing firm itself is enjoying. Then every firm combines itself with other firms that also do what it does best, and it can do so because of reduced diseconomies of scale in organizing. That is the argument. ** Getting beyond automation. I got a call one day from a reporter who was writing about a conflict in Texas over software, marketed by Nolo Press if I recall correctly, that helps people with their legal problems. The Texas Bar wanted to restrict this software, and the reporter told me that every single expert on computers that he had consulted had laughed and jeered and was certain that the lawyers had taken their position out of a pure, crass self-interest in stifling competition. I was surprised, though I shouldn't have been, because it wasn't so obvious to me. Some areas of law are more settled and clear-cut than others, and in those areas it would be irresponsible to suggest to someone that they can consult some kind of intelligent program instead of talking to a lawyer. I would be uninclined to ban the software simply on free speech grounds, even though I am not happy either, not entirely, with the idea that software is speech. But I wasn't overwhelmed by the simple theory about stifling competition. (Here is the citation for the reporter's article: Greg Miller, A turf war of professionals vs software, Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1998, page A1.) This small experience set me to thinking about the attitudes of technology enthusiasts. Have you ever noticed that some enthusiasts for automation seem to hate the people whose work they want to do away with? It's necessary, perhaps, to protect one's own feelings by spinning a caricature of the threatened parties as bone-headed and backwards and reactionary and selfish and static, and to laugh at them for being caught flat-footed in the crosshairs, and to interpret their every word and act in this light. As a professor I get this a lot, like the time a different reporter, for a local business magazine, called me and ranted about professors in this manner under the guise of asking questions. The fact that professors have conducted endless thousands of experiments with new technology in their classrooms did not compute for this reporter, who went ahead and wrote whatever propaganda she had in her head when she dialed my number. "Academic elites resist change" was the special of the day. This kind of hatred is a real conversation-stopper, and I suspect that at some level that's its purpose: who is going to listen to someone whose every word is filtered through that kind of stereotype? Now, I realize that many people who embrace technology do not hate the people whose jobs the technology might affect. But, I would propose, those are often the people who *don't* think in terms of automation -- that is, removing people from the system and installing computers instead -- and who think, instead, in terms of technology as tools for people to use. It is true that the real efficiencies from information technology come when the whole institution is restructured in some way. But that, very often, is just what the automation view misses. If you're trying to replace people with machines, then you are not in a mood to reorganize people and their relationships, and you are definitely not in a mood to work with those people to learn all of the things that they know, and that you don't know, about how the work really gets done. The neutron bomb method of design has been tried, and (with a few exceptions) everything that can be done that way was done a long time ago. The lawyers in Texas should be welcoming legal software as a way to help people understand what their questions are, thus bringing them to the doors of lawyers. But the designers of legal software should be thinking about their products in the same way. The same goes for the role of computers in many other areas. When technology enthusiasts go around hating people, let's call them on it. Because hatred is bad for the world, and it's bad for design. ** Movies. Some readers asked me why I recommended Spike Lee's new film, "Bamboozled", given that the critics were decidedly mixed. I'll admit that as drama it's flat, and that Lee didn't pull off the goals he set for himself. Forget about that. The movie would be worth the price just for its collection of film clips and artefacts from the blackface era. It also succeeds in showing what's so offensive about blackface and the representations that went with it. Some critics, I gather, complained that the movie aims at a nonexistent target, given that nobody in real life is putting on any blackface shows. It's hard to believe that an actual film critic would say that. It's a satire, and satire by definition communicates a message by extrapolating. Spike Lee believes that a lot of current mass-cultural representations of black people are similar in spirit to blackface, and he's arguing that something as offensive as blackface is not as far below the surface as we would like to think. But that's too intellectual: the real point of the movie is the visceral impact of the symbolism. Indeed, I don't think you get the point of the movie is you just perform some kind of intellectual calculation of how offensive the imagery is, or if you just engage in obligatory displays of outrage, etc. The point, if you are white, is to catch a glimpse, however momentary, of what it's like to be represented in that way. One movie that I *don't* recommend is "The Contender". I mention it because it's relevant to my articles about the presidential campaign. In it, a woman senator who has been nominated by replace a deceased vice president is smeared with allegations about her past sexual life. It is a truly terrible movie. Here's what it's like: if Sidney Sheldon were a Hollywood liberal, this is the sort of movie he would make. The melodrama is crude, the motivations are thin, the sets are cramped, and nobody who knows the first thing about politics could find any of it remotely realistic. It's a cartoon. Yet critics take it seriously. Why? Well, if you can ignore how dreadful it is as a movie then you can ask about the issues it addresses, questions it raises, stances it takes, and so on. It's about double standards and all that. Fine. But my view is that you can't separate its awfulness as a movie from its political message. Why? Because you can't engage in political analysis without a realistic understanding of concrete political processes, and this movie is clueless in that department. First of all, the movie presents the attack on the woman senator as the work of a single representative, clearly meant to be Henry Hyde. In the real world, however, character assassination is organized through sprawling, loose-knit networks of activists. The Henry Hyde figure would have a staff, and that staff would be in contact with the staffs of think tanks and lower-visibility sorts of issue-advocacy PR organizations. The movie shows the villainous Hyde figure making comically high-risk moves that would never happen in real life, and it does not show the effects of the echo chamber of pundits. It imagines that the attack on the woman senator would be motivated purely by her gender, and not by ideology, and it shows the senator and others getting away with ideological views that bear no relationship to anything that would be practicable in the political environment that the movie claims to critique. Finally, the movie does not show the role of a chosen and sustained positioning of the victim, such as the business about "Gore the exaggerator", which was picked and promoted very consciously by the RNC over a long period. Liberals who lack all artistic taste may get a warm feeling from this movie, but they will not be informed. Indeed, this is the first movie I can remember that made me take the side of the misogynistic right-wing Congressman. I'm guessing that we won't have a lot more movies like that real soon. If you want to see an exceptionally well-made movie, go see "Almost Famous". It probably won't be in theaters for much longer. Set in 1973, it concerns a boy who gets an assignment from Rolling Stone to follow a mid-level rock band, and the groupie who he meets there. The director, Cameron Crowe, took tremendous care with every aspect of it. The period sets are terrific in a subtle way, and the whole movie maintains a perfect pitch. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Lester Bangs, is the voice of the director as he explains amid heavy sighing and self-conscious uncoolness why it is so hard for rock and roll to keep its ideals of truthfulness in a corporate world. The movie resolutely eschews 60's and 70's stereotypes, going easy on the bell bottoms and psychedelic imagery and all that. Instead, it's a calm story about genuine people in an crazy environment. ** Like any editor, I often wonder who is reading this mailing list. I know who's subscribing, but that's a lot more and probably a lot less than the actual readership. Mostly I don't know. But from time to time I get another scrap of evidence. Compare my message about "campaign lunacy" of 10/9/00 to quotes from Gore campaign people that appeared in the newspaper over the next two days: [George W. Bush], his staff, and most of the media are engaged in a campaign of character assassination. RRE, 10/9/00 ... the Republican criticism of Mr. Gore's misstatements, which [Joe Andrew, the national chairman of the Democratic National Committee] described as "character assassination". NY Times, 10/10/00 George W. Bush makes false statements all the time, enormous ones about issues that really matter to people's lives ... RRE 10/9/00 "Our focus is on their distortions of major issues that actually impact people's lives," said Douglas Hattaway, a spokesman for Mr. Gore. NY Times 10/11/00 An alternative hypothesis, of course, is that my observations were all obvious, and that any sane person would say the same thing. But ask yourself, why don't you read anything remotely similar to my campaign articles in the newspaper? It's sure not because of liberal bias. I'm not pointing out these quotes as a boast. Rather, as with much of what I do on this list, I want to point out the possibilities of the medium. When I write a political commentary, people often say, "you should send this to the New York Times". But my goal is to make those gatekeepers unnecessary. There's no substitute for paying people to write good journalism, and I certainly support that. The people who write about computing for the Times are still serious, even if the political reporting has gone to the dark side of hell. But I also want to demonstrate that the Internet can help us interconnect the world so that the big media are not the only way to get the word out. ** In reply to my obnoxious claim that the Internet is playing no major role in choosing the president this year, I received an indignant message from a reader who works in a hotbed of Democratic moving and shaking. She believes that the only reason why Bill Clinton is still president is because of the Internet's role in getting the truth out in the depths of his afflictions. I can certainly believe that the Internet did play such a role. What she's leaving out, however, is the role that the Internet played in creating Bill Clinton's troubles in the first place. The whole Whitewater hoax was endlessly stirred by conspiracy theorists who used the Internet to pool their fetid imaginations by sending around endless mixtures of fact, distortion, speculation, rumor, and illogic. Much of this material bubbled to the surface in the conservative media, all of it edited to seem plausible so long as you weren't aware of basic facts, and then it turned into endless abusive investigations, investigations of the investigations, and so on. So what's the balance here? Whatever it is, the Internet doesn't come out looking good. The same kind of junk is circulating now as part of the campaign of character assassination against Al Gore. The difference this time is that the reporters just make up lies on their own, and borrow them from their colleagues, rather than getting them off the Internet. The Internet is truly irrelevant this time around. The far right has succeeded through its lies in robbing Al Gore of the tremendous credit that he deserves in the Internet's creation. It's just not clear at this point whether he should want it. ** Some URL's. election stuff Campaign 2000 Online Resource Guide http://www.rtndf.org/politicsonline/ Gore interview in Red Herring http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue84/mag-gore-84.html The George W. Dance (not polite, needs big computer) http://www.george-w-dance.homepage.com/ Bush Violated Security Laws Four Times, SEC Report Says http://www.public-i.org/story_01_100400.htm Bush Gets a Free Pass from Inquiring Minds http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=3288 The Media, the Schools and Our Man Bush http://www.star-telegram.com/columnist/ivins2.htm everything else E-Rate's Success Silences Critics http://www.wtonline.com/vol15_no14/cover/1851-1.html Toymakers Suffering from Technology http://www.salon.com/mwt/wire/2000/10/13/toy_trouble/ SDMI Hacked http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2000/10/12/sdmi_hacked/ Why the World Needs Reverse Engineers http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2636304,00.html You Say You Want a Revolution http://www.reedhundt.com/book/ newsletter on electronic toll collection http://www.ettm.com/ What Makes an Online Course Succeed? http://chronicle.com/free/2000/10/2000101201u.htm IETF meeting, San Diego, December 10-15 http://www.ietf.org/meetings/IETF-49.html Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/PDF/y2k.pdf more about campus wireless http://chronicle.com/free/2000/10/2000101101t.htm http://chronicle.com/free/2000/10/2000101202t.htm end