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If You Run On Republican Obstructionism, You Will Lose
By: Jon Walker Wednesday January 20, 2010 6:02 amLet me put this as simply as possible. Democrats control everything in Washington right now. They control the White House. They have a huge margins in the House and in the Senate. Democrats have larger margins in both chambers than any party has had for decades. They have zero excuses for failing to deliver. Americans will not find some nonsense about having only 59 Senate seats as an acceptable excuse for failing to accomplish anything. If Democrats think they can win in 2010 by running against Republican obstructionism, they will lose badly.
Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won’t let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.
The party out of power can always run on stopping what the party in power is trying to do. That is often part of their job as the opposition party. Letting the Republicans obstruct, or claiming that Republicans have obstructed the Democrats’ ability to govern only makes the GOP look better organized and more powerful.
The party in power can’t run an effective re-election campaign based on how the party out of power is doing to good at a job being the opposition party. It won’t work, it can’t work, and it will do more harm than good. You can always attack your opponents as part of a broad election strategy, but it can’t be a main focus for Democrats in 2010.
The party in power must run on their accomplishments and point to those accomplishments as a down payment on other promises they will fullfill if they are allowed to stay in power. You must deliver something to the voters and hope they like it. If Democrats can’t run on their record of passing legislation that makes positive change in people’s lives, they will suffer terribly in 2010.
I know, right now, that the Democrats in Washington are a bit shell-shocked by Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts. That is understandable. But the solution is not to shut down Congress for the rest of the year. I know some Democrats can’t wait to start using the fact that they only have 59 votes in the Senate as an acceptable excuse for doing nothing. That would be a disaster, and no one–whether they closely follow politics or not–will find that excuse for failing to deliver plausible. This is a warning: make Republican obstructionism your main campaign theme for 2010, and you will lose badly.
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114 Responses to “If You Run On Republican Obstructionism, You Will Lose”
McMia January 20th, 2010 at 6:08 amThe Democratic Party; Unilaterally disarming since, oh fuck, forever…
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McMia January 20th, 2010 at 6:10 amIf ReidnRahmbama don’t learn to love reconciliation they will surely be retired.
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tzimisce January 20th, 2010 at 6:12 amThe other theme was elect the GOP and gloom and doom will happen. That may be true but the Dems are also totally inept at preventing that doom. Over a year and we still do not have banking reforms? WTF? 10% unemployment and the Dems are forcing through one shitpile of a health bill that does not control costs or get care, again wtf?
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azhealer January 20th, 2010 at 6:12 amand may I add, turning to parliamentary “tricks”, however ‘legal’ or used by Repubs in the past — to get a HC bill through– will be lethal.
A true, thoughtful press conference by Obama saying that special interests hijacked reform, we are going back to the drawing board and writing some reforms that truly benefit patients and not industry will be an electoral winner for the Pres and Dems in 2010.
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Bilbo January 20th, 2010 at 6:14 amThere are a couple of very insightful postings concerning the Massachusetts debacle over on the Matt Taibbi blog this morning. The 3:13 a.m. post is worth reading and a very brief Midnight post had this analysis.
Independents voted for Obama thinking he really meant what he said during his campaign. He’s been a huge disappointment to them and now those Obama voters are staring at a health care reform bill they consider a nightmare. Voting this Republican into the Senate was similar to a panicky phone call to the bank to cancel a check you wish you had not written.
Certainly resonates for me.
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wizardleft1962 January 20th, 2010 at 6:14 amA very insigtful and accurate analysis.
The Democrats wanted poeer back because of the Bush administration and in many ways have carried on the same policies as the Bush-Cheney administration….
See Scott Horton’s new article on Torture at Harper’s Magazine online and how the Obama administration have continued to cover war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The Obama administration is now in violation of the Geneva Conventions as well.
The Democratic Party have governed and legislated from weakness not strength.
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Phoenix Woman January 20th, 2010 at 6:16 amJoe Conason points out that Republicans never, ever let bad poll results stop them from doing what they do:
Perhaps the most outstanding example in recent memory was the 1998 midterm election, held just four weeks after the House Republicans had voted almost unanimously for a highly partisan impeachment resolution against President Clinton. Contrary to the hopes of the GOP leadership, the predictions of mainstream analysts and the usual historical trends, voters then repudiated the Republicans, increasing the number of Democrats in the House by five seats. It was the first time in more than 60 years that the party of an incumbent president had won a midterm election. Yet the Republicans, unchastened by public opinion that ran strongly against impeachment (and in favor of a censure resolution over Clinton’s extramarital misconduct), proceeded with their crusade to oust the president who had been reelected overwhelmingly in 1996. They didn’t even permit a floor vote on a censure resolution. And although they eventually ousted then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, partially as punishment for the bad midterm result, that had more to do with his personal unpopularity than any real differences over policy or politics. If anything, the congressional Republicans became more ideological and more determined to enforce their will.
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alan1tx January 20th, 2010 at 6:16 amAs every good poker player knows, the only way to recover from a loss is to double down.
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wizardleft1962 January 20th, 2010 at 6:18 amI find the Leslie Marshall Radio Program worth listening to as well. She is actually more insightful and far more morally consistent than most of the other so-called liberal radio talk show hosts.
Her analysis last night about Obama and the election was spot on too.
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perris January 20th, 2010 at 6:18 amNot only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted
bingo
more damage was done under bush without a filibuster proof majority then the combined history of this country
but the fault lies with the big 0 even more then those running against obstructionism
obama has either tricked us, been corrupted or is a coward, bending at each and every corporate sponsored whim
first thing, toss lieberman, let him run as a republican next round so we’re rid of him, send him running to the republican party with only one way to maintain dem caucus rights, vote yea on every progressive dem bill period
next obama needs to simply tell his blue dogs the party is over, they will vote for our agenda or they will not get support, without their vote it does not matter if they claim they are democrats, they are voting like repukes
party is over for these maggots, time to get to the progressive work we elected you to
but will this happen
not a chance, obama is a corporatist plain and simple, he will keep his corporate mentor lieberman, he will keep his corporate hound dog rahm and he will (willingly) hand office over to the corporatist republicans who do it overtly rather then covertly
obama, is there a word bigger then epic to go with fail?…cause that’s what you are
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Kassandra January 20th, 2010 at 6:20 amI appreciate your candor. Unfortunately, I’ve grown so cynical about the corporate takeover of our country, my mind immediately goes to “Did they WANT this?” “Did they make this happen?”
I’ll be looking for the way they spin this.
If the Dems decide that, because a REPUBLICAN “took” Teddy Kennedy’s seat that means they will have to go right because that’s what they “think” the “people” want. I’ll suspect strongly the fix was in.
If they decide they’d better adhere a little more to their campaign rhetoric, I suspect the opposite.
Right now, the gnashing of teeth and the tearing of hair are a bit too much after Coakley actually WENT ON VACATION during a campaign fercryingoutloud.
Let’s watch what happens.
If the Senate “health” bill, in all it’s horridness, is passed because the Dems act scared of another Republican ( or that’s their excuse)I’ll strongly suspect they threw the race so they could do just that and the hell with Obama’s agenda.
They don’t care about the rest of itReply
perris January 20th, 2010 at 6:20 amIn response to Bilbo @ 6Obama needs to re-write that bill, not push through the senate bill, then the re-write needs to be made into law through reconciliation
I wonder if Obama is going to cast blame for the bill’s unpopularity where it belongs, square on the desk of Lieberman and rahm
I doubt it, he is hardly the intellect we thought he was
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ShotoJamf January 20th, 2010 at 6:20 amNot only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at.
Anyone who needs proof of this statement simply needs to turn on the electric TV machine box this morning to see wingnut crowing coming from all directions. It’s sickening…and it didn’t have to be this way.
Hey Democratic Party: Get focused or get stomped in November. This ain’t exactly rocket science…
Will the party brass get the message? Um…I doubt it.
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perris January 20th, 2010 at 6:21 amIn response to Kassandra @ 14I’ll be looking for the way they spin this.
If the Dems decide that, because a REPUBLICAN “took” Teddy Kennedy’s seat that means they will have to go right because that’s what they “think” the “people” want. I’ll suspect strongly the fix was in.that is the way the republicans will spin it, that is the way the blue dogs will spin it, that is the way rahm will spin it, that is the way corporate sponsored media will spin it
we are doomed
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TarheelDem January 20th, 2010 at 6:21 amIn response to alan1tx @ 10LOL and as every good 11-dimension chess player knows, the best way to recover from a loss is the concede to your opponent 10 dimensions from the start of the game.
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alan1tx January 20th, 2010 at 6:21 amObama promised health care reform.
He found it to be too much work, so he changed it to health insurance reform. Then he F’d that up.
Sheesh.
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perris January 20th, 2010 at 6:23 amthat was KENNEDY’S seat GA DAMN IT!!!!
this is an IMPOSSIBLE seat to lose and OBAMA lost it!
not much more to say here, am going to move along, see all later
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pejohb January 20th, 2010 at 6:23 amI honestly don’t think it matters what the Dems do from a policy standpoint, most ‘murkins don’t have the attention span to understand any level of detail anyway. What matters is DECISIVENESS.
The majority of our mouth breathing consumerist society spent almost no time questioning Bush and his hole in the head gang, in large part because it appeared they had a plan, and they took no prisoners in delivering it. The ghost of Clintonian triangulation brought down al Gore in 2000, and it will bring down Obama and his Congress starting now.
IMO, from an electoral standpoit, it doesn’t matter whether BHO and the spineless congress shoot for single payer healthcare or a complete handout for Phrma and Aetna, as long as they drop the compromise-athon and do it with purpose. Soon.
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ghostof911 January 20th, 2010 at 6:23 amIn response to wizardleft1962 @ 7The Obama Administration MUST reverse course and begin a serious investigation of the war crimes of the previous administration. Otherwise, as you correctly state, they are also war criminals.
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wreq January 20th, 2010 at 6:24 amProgressives have the dems by the throat. Fight for our agenda or die at the polls. It will be fun to watch the show.
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perris January 20th, 2010 at 6:24 amIn response to alan1tx @ 10is this snark?
doubling down is the worst thing to do on a poker table, you play the good cards you get and toss the bad cards, you don’t play against a better hand
doubling down loses you triple money
obama needs to get on the track that elected him, re-write that bill, at the very least take out the mandate
see all later
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mookieblaylock January 20th, 2010 at 6:25 amIn response to barrelofmonkeys @ 1why would they be shell shocked? Horrible governing and a complete hcr giveaway on a high profile issue. No, there is something else going on below the surface, no one is this stupid. They want to go to the right and apparently don’t mind sacrificing their seats.
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Knoxville January 20th, 2010 at 6:26 amLet me put this as simply as possible. Democrats control everything in Washington right now.
They run everything right now, except their own caucuses. All the House leadership had to do was block the Stupak Amendment from coming to the floor, and all the Senate leadership had to do was get their entire caucus to vote for cloture on a signature Democratic issue so that the whole Senate could vote up-or-down on hcr with a public option.
Whether they’re in power or not, the Republicans do a far better job of running their caucuses and moving their agenda.
Otherwise, Jon is right on.
If the Democrats decide to use use yesterday as an excuse for doing nothing for the rest of the year, they will face more losses in 2010 and probably 2012, too.
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Cellar47 January 20th, 2010 at 6:26 amThe Oh-so-famous 60 votes never mean diddly-squat because the Democratic party is infested with Republicans.
And I’m not just talking Joe Lieberstod. I mean Barry.
He’s not a leader — he’s a follower. As I trust you all recall I didn’t think much of him to start with.
Now I think even less.
Being gay I’m way on the outside of power and always have been. Breeders have a dog in this fight. But watch out cause your dog’s being put down.
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McMia January 20th, 2010 at 6:28 amIn response to azhealer @ 5Hijacked reform?
Rahmbama made secret deals in smoked filled rooms with Billy Tauzin and Karen Ignagni and you sit there talking about the process being hijacked?
Please…
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TarheelDem January 20th, 2010 at 6:29 amIn response to perris @ 15If you are going to shove something through with budget reconciliation (as distinct from bill reconciliation), you might as well go simple and clean. Extend Medicare to everyone. Pay for it with a highly progressive tax on incomes over $500,000 (write in a provision that ensures that it is the income and not the revenues from LLCs and subchapter S corporations that are taxed), immediate reversal of the Bush tax cuts, immediate reinstatement of a highly progressive estate tax, and a significant and highly progressive financial transaction tax on trades over $10 million.
Not one of those items will run afoul of the Byrd amendment.
That can be done in 15 days if Democrats will get some caucus unity for a change.
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tiwatewa January 20th, 2010 at 6:30 amRepublicans are willing to obstruct. Democrats are not… They concede on issues all the time. Republicans WILL obstruct. You can see the effect already – the TSA nominee has withdrawn because he can’t beat the filibuster. You need to recognize that democrats can not force anything past the republicans. Unless they change the filibuster rule. I wish it were not the case. To do anything they will have to concede something.
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aoyama January 20th, 2010 at 6:30 amWho first coined the term “progressive” movement during the aughts. Was it a Nader thing, or did it come from Arianna and other reformed Republicans. I’m not talking Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, I mean the Yes We Can progressives. As a diehard “liberal” from the time I could walk, I feel I should know this.
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tiwatewa January 20th, 2010 at 6:32 amIn response to mookieblaylock @ 25That has the ring of truth.
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dogjudge January 20th, 2010 at 6:33 amHear, hear.
This item echos the letter that I’m going to be Sending Dick Durbin this morning.
Durbin is the #2 in the Senate for the Republicans and we keep getting the same nonsense.
If I hear about the Senate Democrats making concessions to Joe Lieberman one more time, I’m going to scream. Democrats led the fight over abortion rights and they gave those rights away in a heartbeat.
Something about lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way comes to mind.
The Democrats are losing, they’re giving it away.
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SouthernDragon January 20th, 2010 at 6:33 am
In response to Knoxville @ 27Forget about the Democratic Party doing anything. It’s up to the people, the grassroots organizations. It’s up to us. If the Democratic Party wants to help us, fine, if not, fuck ‘em.
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banderson2 January 20th, 2010 at 6:33 amWhat is going on with the democrats? It is almost like they don’t know what they are doing. I think that the progressive democrats in the house and senate need to demand that President Obama start doing what the 53.5% voted him in to do, not what the 46.5% will never support him for doing. President Obama is trying so hard to please the right that he forgets it is the left that elected him. He is willing to commit political suicide for his democratic allies just so he can get the vote of Olympia Snowe or that rat Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. Come on President Obama get in the game. You are a sports fanatic so you should know that if you lose the home team during the game then the visiting team is definitely not going to cheer for you.
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Leen January 20th, 2010 at 6:33 amAnd many of us who literally put thousands of hours in for numerous Dems over the last 8 years and tens of thousands of hours over the last 40 are just not going to do it anymore until we see results for our efforts. What more do these Dems need? Enough of the excuses, enough of the bi partisan efforts. Roll the people’s bus over the obstructionist.
As Dr. Howard Dean has said about health care reform. “Republicans would have steam rolled it through” that is if the Republicans had ever cared enough about the masses having access. They don’t.
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banderson2 January 20th, 2010 at 6:35 amIn response to dogjudge @ 36I agree dogjudge the democrats need to get rid of Lieberman, he is a snake is the grass.
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eCAHNomics January 20th, 2010 at 6:36 amThose Ds better hurry up & pass the senate bill, otherwise how can they finance their next campaign.
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CalGeorge January 20th, 2010 at 6:37 amHUGE wake up call.
When a 3-to-1 Democrat/Republican state goes for a Republican, it’s time to re-evaluate your warmongering, corporation-loving, flash-without-substance ways.
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sadlyyes January 20th, 2010 at 6:37 amIn response to banderson2 @ 38CALLED professional kabuki…ism
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Knoxville January 20th, 2010 at 6:39 amIn response to SouthernDragon @ 37We have to apply pressure, but I don’t think telling them all to fuck off is going to move policy where we want it to go.
Then again, some do need to be told to fuck off. That’s what primaries are for!
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ghostof911 January 20th, 2010 at 6:39 amIn response to eCAHNomics @ 41They already have plenty in the bank but it won’t do them much good unless Obama lets Holder loose to go after the war criminals.
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sadlyyes January 20th, 2010 at 6:39 amIn response to eCAHNomics @ 41hehehehehehe
and good morningReply
barrelofmonkeys January 20th, 2010 at 6:42 amThank G-d that we are having this discussion now, with time to course correct. If we don’t course correct, 2010 elections will be a bloodbath.
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sadlyyes January 20th, 2010 at 6:43 amFrank
Afterward, Frank issued a statement expressing disappointment and conceding that the party’s approach to health care “is no longer appropriate.”
I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results.
If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate healthcare bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate.
I am hopeful that some Republican senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of healthcare reform because I do not think that the country would be well-served by the healthcare status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a healthcare bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened.
Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the Senate rule which means that 59 votes are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the healthcare bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of this process.
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Praedor January 20th, 2010 at 6:44 amGuess who is also on the chopping block come 2010 elections? HARRY REID! Good f*cking riddance to that limpdick. THAT will be another good embarrassing fail right there, the Democraps losing their majority “leader”.
Another loser come November looks to be NELSON! He blew off his constituents who were, like the rest of America, in favor of the public option, and went with the corporations in screwing the people. He’s a gonner. Also GOOD RIDDANCE!
It doesn’t matter if the Democraps have a 60 vote majority or a majority of 51 to 49, the result is still the same: the GOP rules the roost. Thus, I don’t give a flaming f*ck how many Democraps lose in November. I am also looking happily upon Obama’s political demise. Hell, barely a year into his first failed term and he is already a lame duck. Deservedly so, I must say.
Everyone thought that Obama would be a modern Roosevelt to Bush’s Hoover. Nope. Bush = Coolidge, Obama = Hoover, and the next President has the opportunity to be Roosevelt. One thing for sure though, it wont be Obama. He is a Chicago crook through and through. He is a corporatist with banker dick buried in his butt and insurance company dick tickling the back of his throat. There’s no way he can (or wants to) change what he is.
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milly January 20th, 2010 at 6:45 amWhy is Cenk the only person calling for Tim Kaine’s head?
Howard Dean was criticized for winning. Tim Kaine is not criticized for losing. Odd.
And Michael Steele is the winner? Odd.
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Praedor January 20th, 2010 at 6:46 amIn response to CalGeorge @ 43Sadly that is NOT the message that the Democraps will see. They will, as ALWAYS, see this loss as meaning that they were STILL not GOP enough. They actually will believe that the result is due to overreach when it is actually about not having any reach whatsoever.
Democraps are incapable of learning.
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ghostof911 January 20th, 2010 at 6:46 amIn response to barrelofmonkeys @ 48If the criminals from the prior administration are put in cages at The Hague, there will be no bloodbath in 2010.
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brendanscalling January 20th, 2010 at 6:50 am“Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted.”
well, yes and no. The republicans were always able to peel off a few democratic votes, but the dems in 2009 were unable to peel off ANY republican votes. Now, one can argue that the republicans pretty much told the dems flat out this was how they were gonna play 2009 and that the dems should have taken that seriously, and one can argue that the democrats need to start acting like a parliamentary block themselves, but the fact is that the GOP was able to pass legislation when they didn’t have the majorities that the dems do is because the dems cooperated and the GOP won’t.
dems need to learn how to play the game.
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BooRadley January 20th, 2010 at 6:51 amIn response to barrelofmonkeys @ 48
Greg Sargent has the new post-Massachusetts election talking points from the Senate Democrats:
The talking points direct people to make the case that now that Dems have lost their supermajority, Republicans have a newfound responsibility to help govern, rather than obstruct. The talking points contain this line:No, I can't imagine Republicans ever saying such a thing. They'd shout from the rooftops that Democrats were obstructing progress and endangering the nation. The traditional media would join that chorus -- and the Democrats would cave. Mitch McConnell has really done a number on the Democratic psyche.“It is mathematically impossible for Democrats to pass legislation on our own.”Can you imagine Republicans in the majority — who, by the way, never had as many votes as Dems do now — ever saying such a thing?
« Race and Social Network Sites: Putting Facebook's Data in Context | MainJanuary 16, 2010
Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms
When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over' (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this:
- People I knew didn't used to like to be public.
- Now "everyone" is being public.
- Ergo, privacy is dead.
This isn't new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!
Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.
Let's take this scenario for a moment. Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn't want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he'll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it'll spread, he'll tell her not to tell anyone.
Facebook isn't in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob's trust because it knows that Bob can't totally run away from it. They're still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it'll spread to everyone. And it's fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.
Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it's in Facebook's interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would've just turned everyone's content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what's going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they'll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can't be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people's content out there who I'm pretty certain don't think that I can.
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don't want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?
Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don't have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That's the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn't dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?
Don't get me wrong - folks have the right to enter the public stage. As long as we realize that this ain't always pretty. I will never forget the teen girl who thought that her only chance out was to put up mostly naked photos online in the hopes that some talent agency would find her. All I could think of was the pimp who would.
There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.
If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.
People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?
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Read also:
- Michael Zimmer's "Zuckerberg’s Remarks Aren’t Surprising, Nor New, Nor True"
- Craig Kanalley's "Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg"
Category: facebook
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Posted by zephoria at January 16, 2010 5:55 PM | TrackBack
Comments (21)
I'm reminded that other channels of communication are perfectly glad to make money off of teens by providing them ways to use "private" disclosures as social capital. They know that this will fuel use and bind them to their service.
A few generations ago, "Ma Bell" metered access to phone information. Access was sold then one residential line, and telephone extension, at a time. Teens back then begged for their own extensions. Many parents relented -- and rented them. (Yes, rented them, including the hardware. Ah, what a different world back then!).
Later the most affluent teens got separate land lines. In the eyes of the parents, this was done to accommodate their kids. Perhaps even "free up the main phone" for other calls.
But unknowingly, what the teens were really craving when they asked for their own phones was a means to improving their status. And not just because multiple phones were a "status symbol." The phones became hubs of privileged information. Similar to what you describe as the case of Facebook, back then teens were also eager to spread this information. And maximize its value by whom they told and when. Through the phone, teens selectively passed information in the way that best served their social advancement.
In other words, nothing has changed since those days but the channels of managing information. I agree with you that privacy is as important today as it was then. So now let's imagine if Facebook ruled The Phone Company of the 1960s.
Imagine the telephone company back then selectively and quietly converting some of its residential lines to party lines. (Those who don't know what a party line should google it -- bizarre!)
The phone company couldn't do that because they were regulated. Even without regulation, this change is simply unimaginable.
I don't think laws are the answer. I'm against regulating social networks. I know that's not what you're suggesting. I'm not sure what is the answer, because Facebook made this move quite confident it would lead to growth and not mass defection.
Yes, I too am scared. It's unnerving to watch a large networks, with profits in mind, play with our privacy and then turn around and tell us we should get over it.
You are right of course. If the information that the Facebook were making more widely distributed weren't of value to its owners, the network would have no motivation for making the change in the first place.
Posted by Jeff Larche | January 16, 2010 6:43 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 18:43
Fred:I think it's possible to refine the profit incentive argument even further: Facebook not only has a financial interest in opening up profiles, but a competitive one as well. Twitter is now their biggest competitor and has a better opportunity to monetize their users content than Facebook does because Twitter users expect their content (except in the minority of cases) to be public. Maybe not commercialized, but at least not private. This affords Twitter a massive amount of flexibility over Facebook.
Another question is whether users should ever trust corporations like Facebook to protect their privacy. Are there any instances where the companies like Facebook have an interest in securely protecting their users privacy and have successfully done so? I think Facebook has a direct conflict of interest in protecting users privacy and am generally skeptical about whether a social network can ever put the privacy of their users first and profits second.
So the Brin crowd's argument isn't as idealistic as you charge: it's primarily concerned with the fact that privacy policies on sites like Facebook are fundamentally conflicted and therefore untrustworthy. Instead of asking everyone to be public they are warning everyone that expectations of strong privacy protections by companies like Facebook are illusory, so only share the data you are comfortable with eventually being public.
Posted by Fred | January 16, 2010 7:46 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 19:46
kethryvis:i can't blame FaceBook as much as i'd like to. Did they do this all sneaky-like? Sure, and for that i'll get ticky at them. BUT. i think the problem is that people think the Internet is a "private" space. My blog is my blog, no one reads it but me and my friends, right? So why the hell is CNN reading my blog over their airwaves?!oneoneeleventyone! It's mine! It's private! i can't believe my parents found my blog now i'm in huge trouble. HOW DARE THEY!!! IT'S PRIVATE!!!
No, it's not. You put it on the internet, where anyone with Google can whip around and find what you said. Lurker culture is embedded into the internet. Just because you don't see the eyes doesn't mean they're not there. People have forgotten that as they've moved rapidly onto the 'net; that the 'Net really is just one huge glass house. We think we've put up one-way glass, but not really.. it's just barely tinted.
that being said, the Internet does not demand information. What's that old saying, on the Internet no one knows that you're a dog? It's TRUE. The Internet (and it's social media) only knows about you what you tell it. No one is forcing you to say you make $10k a year at McDonald's and live in a dumpy apartment and you only get 'net access through your local library. The Internet only knows that if you tell it. FB doesn't know anything about me that i didn't tell it. If i don't want the Internet/world at large to know something, i don't tell it.
In college, i played the Game of Scruples with my roommates and some of their assorted friends. They were amazed that they could not score a point on me, but i scored off of all of them and won the game. This was because i knew the possibility existed that this group of people would spread rumours and backstab, so i held my personal information close to my chest, only letting out that info which was innocuous and didn't care if it got outside that group. They, on the other hand, didn't care who knew what and made it very easy for me to tell how they operated, which is how you play Scruples (by guessing how people will react to certain ethical situations). I treat the Internet the same way; i don't want it to beat me in Scruples.
While i agree we need to be able to trust our Internet mogul sites with this type of information, the fact is that privacy is a two-way street and i think it's high time for people to take responsibility for their own privacy as well. You have to trust the people you give your info to so that they don't sell it for a sackful of quarters or something more nefarious. However, we also should be watching what info we do give out, even to those "trustworthy" sites/people on our Friends lists. If it's info you don't want to run the risk of having it turn public (either through your own fault, your friends', or the site's) then don't put it out there at all. Then we can perhaps tip the balance of power back the other direction.
Posted by kethryvis | January 16, 2010 7:51 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 19:51
"Because not everyone want[s] to share everything to everyone else all the time." That was the gist of my reaction to "We live in public", last year's documentary about the strange, sad career of Josh Harris. (See it if you haven't.) Some of the people loudly proclaiming the death of privacy are doing so not so much because they stand to profit from it as because they're exhibitionists of sorts, not in the conventional sense (although Harris did broadcast video of himself and his girlfriend having sex) but in a broader, if-nobody's-watching-me-I'm-not-really-alive sense. Such people don't seem to understand that, as you argue, most people will choose to make public only what they believe it will benefit them to make public, which is far from everything.
Posted by Ralph Haygood | January 16, 2010 9:20 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 21:20
Yeah, I'm with Marshall on this too. But it's ludicrous to expect a large corporation to behave in a manner other than to maximize shareholder wealth. That applies to Facebook's privacy stance, Google's interactions with China and the US Federal government, and the actions of both Google and the carriers with respect to "net neutrality."
We don't have elections every two years for seats on the boards of directors of large corporations like we do for the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. The CEO of a corporation is not chosen every four years in a competitive process involving even all of the stakeholders, let alone the people of the nations in which these large corporations do business. The way you change corporate behavior is to buy from their competitors, or do without their products and services.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management of Google, in his rather lengthy blog post on "openness", said this (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html):
>
"On the web, the new form of commerce is the exchange of personal information for something of value."
It's up to us as consumers to actively examine the "value" we are getting in every such transaction, regardless of how difficult the "services" make that and how tempting their offers of "free" stuff and "discounts" are.
Posted by Ed Borasky | January 16, 2010 9:35 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 21:35
Ed - I agree that the key is definitely to get people to think through the value they are getting with each transaction, but how would you propose doing this?
Posted by zephoria | January 16, 2010 10:15 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 22:15
josh:I accept that I might not be the typical Facebook user, but I find it insane that they think that their users would prefer for everything to be public. When I created my account (so very long ago) I thought that the selling point was the layered privacy. I don't really use it much; so I'm not terribly worked up about the changes. Still, the degree to which their privacy controls are confusing suggests that the company knows that its users prefer some degree of privacy and obfuscate the degree of publicness willfully.
Posted by josh | January 16, 2010 10:16 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 22:16
I just don't get it. I read the ReadWriteWeb article. More to the point, I watched the video. I read the transcript. At no point does Zuckerberg say or imply that "privacy is dead". Facebook hasn't turned off privacy controls. They've made them more granular and more user-controllable.
It concerns me that so many people are blaming Facebook, and Zuckerberg, based solely on Marshall Kirkpatrick's interpretation of a few sentences.
I'll readily admit that FB isn't my favorite social media site. Personally, I only use it because that's where my sister posts. I never got into FB because it claimed to be "private". "Bob only allows his friends to read what he writes". This being the WWW, that expectation of "privacy" is flawed (not to mention naive).
ANYthing you place on a site you don't control is out of your control... and "privacy" needs to be understood better than most people understand it. It's certainly true that a lot of FB users have already been "sharing" their "personal" information with an ever-wider audience. That was happening long before FB changed its policy configuration controls. That sharing deserves discussion and education.
Sadly, for many people, the "privacy horse has left the barn" a long time ago. But the people to blame (if anyone is to blame) are the ones who have been sharing everything with "friends" numbering in the hundreds or thousands, not with the company that truly is giving them what they've asked for, whether they've asked for "everyone", "friends" or "only me".
I'm glad we're having this conversation. But I'd like to see us stop blaming the Big Bad Corporation and lay the blame where it belongs: at the feet of the users who don't understand what "publishing" information really means.
Posted by Vicki | January 16, 2010 11:13 PM
Posted on January 16, 2010 23:13
Sorry, but while I fully agree with you on the dynamics in a typical high school (blindfully: I went to a male-only geek dominated school), I tend to disagree with the filter that Marshall puts on that decision.
First, I agree with Vicki: Facebook mostly introduced more control. I'm a very heavy user, in mostly two languages, and geeky academic link and comment on local parties don't collide this well; that fine-grained ability to keep context separate was a blessing we both (if anything, as teachers) had been begging for ages. I was expecting you to hail that.
Secondly, Facebook forced the question on everyone and they didn't use the usual “Opt-out—tag you're it until you figure out everything” solution. They prevented you from using the service unless you though about all what this blog is about for a while: public can be good, “friends” can mean litterally everybody, you'd rather focus on caring for people's interest, etc. Yes, there are some aspects that you can't make private (group membership) but that's a good think if you ask me: I'm fed up with groups being used as badges, and not places for discussion on political matter. You have no idea how I'd love to post to every group administrator a screen grab of their page where is says “There is no discussion here.” with a Big, Phat, Red ‘#FAiL!’
Thirdly, you do not want to live with people who take a rational and interested take on every decision they make: it's called Econ Grad School and it's a special kind of hell. You are much better of with people who spend time figuring things out and deciding on basic collective rules and negotating the rest, in a human, political way, rather than having people with the social skills of an econometrician leave for no apparent reason.
Finally —and this is the comment I'm trying to leave everywhere, including on your Facebook wall— everybody, Kirkpatrick first, assumes that it is obvious that Facebook makes money by forcing people to reveal some information (as I pointed out, they seem to do the opposite to me, but let's assume); isn't Facebook business model a combination of targeted ads and focused census info? Doesn't that kill their purpose to give away what they sell? Yes, they could be trying to get Google juice; but do most people search for the words that you come across on Facebook? Don't they see that all that on their Friends' page (and it is interesting elsewhere)? Or… they are trying to get at twitter—by forcing public figures to reveal what they purposefully put on a personal page, while controlling their Fan page & their twitter stream? That would defeat the very smart business of being backstage and selling exclusive offers through targeted ads to opinion leaders, while letting Biz, Jack & Ev figure out a way to make money with their ad-hating, publicity starved attention… So, no: as an economist who has been spending years trying to figure out how to give an economic value to sites like Facebook, it doesn't seem obvious to me how this is in their, or their investors interest.
It certainly is: Zuckerberg is intelligent, bold & well advised and he sits on such a sh-tload of data it makes me cry trying to thing of the name of the sheer size of it—but I'd love to understand how or why it is, because behind that, there are the real social consequences of his move, and I don't see it in yours, or Marshall's take.
Posted by Bertil Hatt | January 17, 2010 1:27 AM
Posted on January 17, 2010 01:27
One of the reasons why I created a Facebook account was Privacy and control. When I first registered as a student at College it was required that I use my college e-mail address. So anyone couldn't just login to Facebook.
Facebook decided they should open access to everyone. This is when things began to go down the drain. When I would publish something I knew that my friends would be able to see the photos, wall posts, status etc. It was actually fun. When they opened Facebook to everyone this also brought the marketing companies and pushed Facebook to sell more, and more of our "private" data for advertisements e.g Beacon.
Now Facebook wants to become a Twitter like service. Everyone doesn't use twitter and everyone doesn't want the world to know what we are doing. Everyone doesn't care about self promotion to want so much publicity.
One may argue that you have Privacy controls... If I need a PhD on privacy controls every time they change the site or decide what information "should" be public I dont think I want to spend the time learning how to keep the settings I already was using.
Posted by Billy F. | January 17, 2010 1:33 AM
Posted on January 17, 2010 01:33
Chris Brew:This reminds me of the activities of Max Clifford in the UK. He is a publicist who acts as an agent for people who are (typically) doing "kiss-and-tell" stories in the press. Possibly his interests align with those of his clients (I almost said "subjects" or even "victims"), and often he provides a service that is highly appreciated by those of his clients who are already public figures, but to some extent he is just another part of an apparatus that draws vulnerable people into damaging public self-exposure. It is neither wholly false nor wholly true to claim that people who use his services understand what they are getting into. The UK has a lot of Levi Johnsons as a result.
Whatever Mark Zuckerberg says, the changes in Facebook's policy are going to cause some users to unintentionally reveal things that they will (either now or later) wish they had not. The consequences of this are unpredictable, but certainly not wholly positive. Zuckerberg has to live with the likelihood that this decision will cause collateral damage to vulnerable lives. Legally, Facebook is probably in the clear, morally and ethically, not so much. It's creepy to try and pass the decision off as some kind of beneficent public service, which is what Zuckerberg seems to me to be doing.
Posted by Chris Brew | January 17, 2010 6:19 AM
Posted on January 17, 2010 06:19
Having not yet watched the Zuckerburg presentation, it does seem a familiar tune: technologists with an economic interest in a certain type of behavior assert that their technology innocently reflects real world changes in culture.
I don't doubt that privacy norms are changing. Richard Sennet's work about public and private life in the centuries before ours shows some significant changes. But to first assert a technology with a privacy model that is often based primarily on what's technically achievable, then to say the norm has changed is to subtly rewrite recent history while we're still in the middle of it, all for economic gain. It's dirty pool.
Nick Carr made a passing comment on Gillmor Gang that has haunted me for over a year: that Google, Facebook and other companies are setting the terms of much of our future cultural engagement. No wonder people are chilled by the forces they are marshalling to tell us to behave in their interest, or to be the outsider.
Posted by Todd Sieling | January 17, 2010 11:13 AM
Posted on January 17, 2010 11:13
gregorylent:a decent yogi knows everything about you .. privacy has always been an illusion based on limited minds ..
tech is out-picturing what the mind can do .. the illusion of privacy is dying, just as the illusion of separateness ..
it is of course a good thing ..
Posted by gregorylent | January 17, 2010 12:36 PM
Posted on January 17, 2010 12:36
fjpoblam:Vicki: I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I begin to tire of "If you don't want it public, don't put it online." Meaning, go back to snail mail? NOT!
The concern for privacy isn't in my mind the growth of a Luddite community. It's the maturation of internet users: a conscious decision not to become a "hive mind."
We know computers are powerful enough to hold our data and respect our privacy: and that (we) programmers are bright enough to tell those powerful computers how to do so.
I see Zuckerman's attitude as a lazy cop-out.
Posted by fjpoblam | January 17, 2010 12:38 PM
Posted on January 17, 2010 12:38
"Ed - I agree that the key is definitely to get people to think through the value they are getting with each transaction, but how would you propose doing this?"
I have no idea how to do this. It's certainly a subject of debate in the blogosphere, and at least the "net neutrality" debate and the "financial disclosure" debates have reached the attention of federal regulatory agencies and probably Congress and the White House. People still do watch "60 Minutes" and Oprah, right?
Posted by Ed Borasky | January 17, 2010 2:23 PM
Posted on January 17, 2010 14:23
jef wallace:OK, so how many of you ladies have sexy pics on your profile that the freaks of the world are now going to get to see ? how many of you have teenage kids that are now, by definition, through imperial Zuckerberg edict, how would you put it: LIVING IN PUBLIC ???? or as I would put it: IN DANGER !!!!!!
this flip flop is about getting the North Vietnamese re-education model of forced confession going here in the USA. now they know what you read, who you admire... if you use the status updates more than you use twitter status updates, because they are private-to-your-friends, "they" (who? EVERY "THEY" IMAGINABLE) will have total access to YOUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS IT EXTENDS BACK SEVERAL YEARS.
Is Mark Zuckerberg out of his mind? No. Money-hungry? Obviously not.
He is either under severe CIA blackmail, or some kind of sleeper agent programmed since childhood
to PLIAGIARIZE SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEA (we all know about your lawsuit mark...)
to RIDE SEAN PARKER'S TALENTS TO THE TOP (we know about that too...)
to let a DISINFORMATION MOVIE FULL OF LIES come out about the founding of his company: http://showhype.com/story/popcrunch-justin-timberlake-facebook-movie-the-social/
not to say what the KGB is doing with this information... or worse.
and you were paid how much for creating this value ?
some things are public, and some things are private. anyone who doesn't like that gets an electric eye in their toilet bowl, or gets to live in the movie "a scanner darkly". hell, anyone who doesn't UNDERSTAND that - it's like not understanding SEX - should be under suspicion as an Outer Party member.
Big Brother Is Watching You ??! NO !!!!
Posted by jef wallace | January 17, 2010 3:00 PM
Posted on January 17, 2010 15:00
I really like this sentence: "The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them." Commercial interests are driving the debate around information, making a lot of people believe that sharing anything publicly is always a win for them and society. It isn't: innovation, new ideas, construction of your personality requires intimacy. It might not generate few dollars for online advertisers if you don't put everything public, but it might be much more valuable for you this way.
Posted by Christophe Bruchansky | January 17, 2010 3:43 PM
Posted on January 17, 2010 15:43
Private Citizen:As a conscientious objection, please consider logging out of Facebook on January 28th, Data Privacy Day. Let Facebook know privacy is still the "social norm".
Posted by Private Citizen | January 17, 2010 7:31 PM
Posted on January 17, 2010 19:31
danah, with respect re power being the way to think this stuff through, I'd demur and say it economics - Facebook's actions were certainly predictable at least two years ago. I know this, because I wrote an essay on just this issue then as part of the series on the myths of FreeConomics in early 2008:
The Limits to Freeconomics II - Why your data is free, but everywhere in chains"
Power is a second order factor here, the primary one is money.
What is frustrating, frankly, is that its taken so many of the Social Mediarati 2 years (and more) to even begin to realise this! Bravo for writing about it.
Posted by alan p | January 18, 2010 12:15 AM
Posted on January 18, 2010 00:15
Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin reported last night that David Bahati, the author of the "Kill Gays" bill is planning to attend the National Prayer Breakfast, sponsored by the Fellowship Foundation/The Family, on February 4th. President Obama is also expected to attend that breakfast.
If "The Family" wants Bahati at its event, that's their choice. Bahati's presence sends a message that his views are condoned by the event's sponsors. If he's there, Obama can't attend. It's that simple. Nor should any other member of Congress or Administration official.
More at AMERICAblog Gay.
In 2006, the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier published an incisive, groundbreaking and highly controversial essay about “digital Maoism” — about the downside of online collectivism, and the enshrinement by Web 2.0 enthusiasts of the “wisdom of the crowd.” In that manifesto Mr. Lanier argued that design (or ratification) by committee often does not result in the best product, and that the new collectivist ethos — embodied by everything from Wikipedia to “American Idol” to Google searches — diminishes the importance and uniqueness of the individual voice, and that the “hive mind” can easily lead to mob rule.
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Jonathan SpragueJaron Lanier
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Now, in his impassioned new book “You Are Not a Gadget,” Mr. Lanier expands this thesis further, looking at the implications that digital Maoism or “cybernetic totalism” have for our society at large. Although some of his suggestions for addressing these problems wander into technical thickets the lay reader will find difficult to follow, the bulk of the book is lucid, powerful and persuasive. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace.
Mr. Lanier, a pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, is hardly a Luddite, as some of his critics have suggested. Rather he is a digital-world insider who wants to make the case for “a new digital humanism” before software engineers’ design decisions, which he says fundamentally shape users’ behavior, become “frozen into place by a process known as lock-in.” Just as decisions about the dimensions of railroad tracks determined the size and velocity of trains for decades to come, he argues, so choices made about software design now may yield “defining, unchangeable rules” for generations to come.
Decisions made in the formative years of computer networking, for instance, promoted online anonymity, and over the years, as millions upon millions of people began using the Web, Mr. Lanier says, anonymity has helped enable the dark side of human nature. Nasty, anonymous attacks on individuals and institutions have flourished, and what Mr. Lanier calls a “culture of sadism” has gone mainstream. In some countries anonymity and mob behavior have resulted in actual witch hunts. “In 2007,” Mr. Lanier reports, “a series of ‘Scarlet Letter’ postings in China incited online throngs to hunt down accused adulterers. In 2008, the focus shifted to Tibet sympathizers.”
Mr. Lanier sensibly notes that the “wisdom of crowds” is a tool that should be used selectively, not glorified for its own sake. Of Wikipedia he writes that “it’s great that we now enjoy a cooperative pop culture concordance” but argues that the site’s ethos ratifies the notion that the individual voice — even the voice of an expert — is eminently dispensable, and “the idea that the collective is closer to the truth.” He complains that Wikipedia suppresses the sound of individual voices, and similarly contends that the rigid format of Facebook turns individuals into “multiple-choice identities.”
Like Andrew Keen in “The Cult of the Amateur,” Mr. Lanier is most eloquent on how intellectual property is threatened by the economics of free Internet content, crowd dynamics and the popularity of aggregator sites. “An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship,” he writes, recalling the Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s 2006 prediction that the mass scanning of books would one day create a universal library in which no book would be an island — in effect, one humongous text, made searchable and remixable on the Web.
“It might start to happen in the next decade or so,” Mr. Lanier writes. “Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”
While this development might sound like a good thing for consumers — so much free stuff! — it makes it difficult for people to discern the source, point of view and spin factor of any particular fragment they happen across on the Web, while at the same time encouraging content producers, in Mr. Lanier’s words, “to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.” A few lucky people, he notes, can benefit from the configuration of the new system, spinning their lives into “still-novel marketing” narratives, as in the case, say, of Diablo Cody, “who worked as a stripper, can blog and receive enough attention to get a book contract, and then have the opportunity to have her script made into a movie — in this case, the widely acclaimed ‘Juno.’ ” He fears, however, that “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” are “staring into career oblivion because of our failed digital idealism.”
Paradoxically enough, the same old media that is being destroyed by the Net drives an astonishing amount of online chatter. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier observes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
In other passages in this provocative and sure-to-be-controversial book he goes even further, suggesting that “pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise,” that “online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media.”
Online culture, he goes on, “is a culture of reaction without action” and rationalizations that “we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm” are just that — rationalizations. “The sad truth,” he concludes, “is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before a storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”
Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Books » A version of this article appeared in print on January 15, 2010, on page C27 of the New York edition.
The mini ice age starts here
By David Rose
Last updated at 11:17 AM on 10th January 2010The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.
They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.
This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.
However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.
This image of the UK taken from NASA's multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather
Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.
Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.
Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.
The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.
On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.
Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.
As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.
A composite photograph released last year to highlight the issue of melting ice and global warming
However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).
For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.
But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.
'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’
Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.
Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970
But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.
Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.
For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.
It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.
'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’
As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.
Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.
In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’
He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.
For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’
Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’
Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.
'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'
But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.
'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’
Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.
He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’
He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.
The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?
Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.
Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.
William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.
Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an 'increasingly rare event'
According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’
But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.
In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.
'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’
The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.
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These'll be the same experts that said we would have a mild winter then? Why do we listen to these experts. I am being bombarded by financial experts telling me what to do with my money. However, just 12 months ago they all claimed that they didn't see the crash coming either. They rely on our short memories, we should remember what they tell us and hold them accountable. Just like politicians should be. If I vote for you because of your stated manifesto, you should be accountable for breaking it. The guaranteed vote on the EU constitution anyone?
- John, KUWAIT, 11/1/2010 07:39
I am neither sceptic, denier or believer. I simply could not give a monkeys. I loaf about burning tyres in the garden to keep me warm and wonder at the antics of loonies who build windmills and who seem to want to go Victorian again. Be like me, life is so much easier. What will be will be.
- Carlotti, Spain, 11/1/2010 07:24
Britain has a hundred years of coal, which we are unable to use because of ridiculous EU rules and "friends of the earth nutters.
Use the coal and employ miners and forget the ghastly windmills!
- Daffyd, Colwyn Bay, Wales, 11/1/2010 07:14
CO2 is life. the more CO2, the more life. the warmer the earth, the more life and food. Greenland is called Greenland because it was green when discovered. do not be a fool and follow the teachings of these globalists. most of these people were once red(commie), but when that fell apart in the soviet union and eastern europe, the reds turned green. think. use your brain.
- Bill, Upper Darby, PA. USA, 11/1/2010 06:34
"say some of the world's most eminent climate scientists"
Haven't they said and been quoted far too much already. Give it a rest!
- WeAreAngry.co.uk, ENGLAND, 11/1/2010 06:32
It's perfectly fine to care about the state of the environment and man's imapct upon it. I'm for renewable energy and switching over to cleaner, longer lasting power sources. This is fine and entirely responsible.
However many are angry and distrustful at many in the Climate Change Lobby due to their McCarthy-esque tactics and the fact that they seem ENTIRELY adverse to the idea of the open debate of their ideas. Usually a sure sign that someone's viewpoints will fall apart when they don't have the strength of truth behind them. That puts myself and others very on edge and if we doubt these things then perhaps it's not selfishness that motivates us but indignation at the slow, angry realization that we are being deceived.
- E Carlson, Los Angeles, United States, 11/1/2010 06:10
The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.
Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.
Zuckerberg:
"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."
That's Not a Believable Explanation
This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."
I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.
Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.
This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.
Facebook's Different Stories
First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.
Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.
The Flimsy Evidence
What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.
Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.
But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?
The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.
(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)
This is Very Important
Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.
I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.
Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.
Fuck Facebook.
