In the past I’ve been vaguely aware that the Booker Prize list was a good source of reading suggestions, and also that people gamble on it, which almost makes reading seem cool (obviously it’s not, if any kids are reading this you should probably be off learning to smoke instead). But this year is the first time I’ve had an informed opinion about the books that are up for the prize. Well, the ones on the short list, anyway: I’m not a particularly fast reader, but I happened to make lucky guesses when I decided to read some things from the long list. When the short list came out, getting through it seemed surprisingly achievable, thanks in part to all the shows I’ve been watching on Netflix settling into storylines that I found unwatchably depressing.

So hey! Let’s blog about it, since that’s something I’m trying to do more of:

• Though it’s not the quote-unquote best of these novels, I had the most fun reading The Sisters Brothers — man, do I ever love westerns. Reluctant killers! Lonesome dignity! It’s all great, and if you liked Deadwood or Blood Meridian or Unforgiven you’ll probably like this book, too.
• I think Snowdrops is being turned into a movie and I imagine it’ll be a pretty decent one, like The American or The Ghost Writer or any of those Graham Greene or Le Carre adaptations that sort of make you remember how great the Jason Bourne movies but also allow you to pat yourself on the back for being so much more sophisticated than all that (which compensates for how much less bored you’d be if you were watching Matt Damon beat the hell out of some guy in a customs office). The book itself felt a little thin, but since a lot of my friends are Russophiles I won’t hesitate to recommend it. This is one of the few on this list I own as a physical artifact, too, so if anyone’s interested in borrowing it they should let me know.
• The Sense of an Ending is beautifully written, but meditative and depressing. This book has got a lot of contemplating-a-life-lived-and-going-“meh”. Maybe that’s the kind of thing I’ll want to read when I’m contemplating my life (lived). But I sort of hope not, and it certainly isn’t the kind of thing I want to read today. Still, this is a undeniably masterful novella and if it wins I wouldn’t be surprised (having just checked the odds after writing the non-parenthetical part of this sentence, it seems no one else would be surprised, either).
• Jamrach’s Menagerie is the worst of the lot. It’s pretentious and melodramatic and hasn’t got much of a plan or a point. It did make me tear up at one point, but that’s because I’m a sentimental idiot. Also: it’s about a doomed sea voyage, not a menagerie, and only barely includes a guy named Jamrach. The author seems to think that Moby Dick was great, and you know what, she’s right. Read that instead. (Also: yes, yes, the actual titular menagerie is the motley collection of characters, or whatever. Bah.)
• Half-Blood Blues is very good, but the narrative voice was a little hard to take. The protagonist is supposed to be a world-weary Baltimore jazzman, and his conversational, dialect-filled means of speaking is how the story is related to the reader. But it’s a little strange to be constantly dropping pluralization and contractions, only to turn around and describe a waking bandmate’s eyelids as “fluttering like moths.” Do jazzmen speak this way? Maybe I’m being unfair to jazzmen, but I doubt it. For the record, I am completely on board with the idea that someone can speak in vernacular while still having a rich inner life. For instance: I sometimes say “y’all”, yet I still care deeply about composing rambling, grandiloquent humblebraggy blog posts about the novels I’ve read! But I feel like some separation needs to be maintained. Edugyan’s decision to allow vernacular into the narrator’s sometimes-ornate inner monologue didn’t ring true. On the other hand, this is a lovely book about jealousy and rivalry and friendship, and the action is set against the fascinating backdrop of the jazz scene of Berlin and Paris at the start of WWII. It’s a well-executed, graceful book, and if you aren’t bugged by the narration you’ll probably really like it.
• Speaking of narrative voice: I am kind of shocked that Pigeon English is not the favorite to win. The book’s success is an inspiring true story, and its content is a tragic true one, for one thing. It’s also just kind of amazingly good. The story is presented in the voice of its ten year-old protagonist, and the feat is pulled off perfectly. I have serendipitously gotten to know a kid that age over the last year; if I hadn’t, I’m not sure I would’ve believed how crazy and simple and wonderful PE makes their minds out to be. But that’s what they’re like! It’s probably torture to be around one for more than a couple of hours, but spending a few hundred pages in one’s head is a surprisingly rewarding experience. I think this is the only book of the six that’s going to stick with me, and I hope it wins.

Anyway, as you can see I’m toying with the idea of having opinions about novels instead of opinions about music, as I’m now super-old and it’s all just noise anyway (young people! so awful, right?). If you feel like joining me in this endeavor you should consider signing up for Goodreads, which is kind of a terrible site but seems like a useful way to subject yourself to social pressure to read more and better books. Kay alone has probably shamed me into reading an extra thousand pages this year.

While I’m posting an inexplicable amount, let me just say that I appreciate Matt’s response to my post about Dylan Ratigan’s proposed ban on money in elections. In principle I agree that public financing could help with this problem. In practice, I think it’s very, very rare that campaigns feel they spend beyond the point of diminishing returns (you do occasionally hear this about particular states or markets, so it’s possible, just rare). That means that raising outside money will still be perceived as an advantage, which means politicians will keep doing it. Public funds might just inflate the prices of things that campaigns buy.

But hey, maybe not. I suppose the elasticity of fundraising behavior is the real question here (it might even be one that could be empirically tested). Perhaps easier money would help, but I think there are reasons — mostly having to do with the culture of Capitol Hill — for doubting it.

I had a little bit of back and forth with Tim on Twitter about Solyndra and loan guarantees. When I first came to Sunlight I worked on Subsidyscope, and while I wouldn’t want to claim deep expertise on the subject, it’s certainly the case that I used the phrase “loan guarantee” several thousand times more frequently than the average pre-Solyndra American. I have no interest in defending Solyndra or the specific decision to subsidize their work, but I think at least some of the interest in this issue is driven by genuine confusion about this subsidy type and not cynical partisan scandal-seeking.

Subsidyscope has a great explanation of how loan guarantees work; you should have a look at it. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a metaphorical version available that was full of folksy nonsense? I thought so, too.

So let’s say the government needs some dynamite. Maybe Capitol Hill has some stumps to clear; maybe the Vice President is going fishing. Whatever the reason, there’s a problem: the market isn’t supplying enough dynamite for what they have in mind. In fact, a 22 year-old intern at GAO has recently estimated that we will need the output of fully three more dynamite factories to reach the necessary supply level (though he is also quick to point out that all of his input data is of terrible quality; that dynamite experts express varying opinions; that more research is necessary; and, of course, that Challenges Remain. His report does have a rather nice introduction about the history of governmental involvement in the explosives industry, though).

Fine, maybe we ought to build some dynamite factories. Not so fast! Each factory costs $1 million, which also happens to be the entire amount available at current GSA fishing trip reimbursement rates. That won’t get the job done!

Luckily, the market can help us out. It turns out that there are businessmen interested in building dynamite factories. The problem, as any dynamite entrepreneur will tell you, is that any such a factory has a 25% chance of blowing up shortly after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Unfortunately, the current state of the market makes this an unacceptable risk, what with all the regulatory uncertainty and undocumented workers and job-killing health care bills and whatnot. The businessmen wish they could help, but right now there’s simply no way they can justify building those factories. If a factory exploded, its owners would be ruined.

“Aha!” says the government. “I know what we can do! We’ll just pick the four most promising dynamite factory proposals and tell their authors that if they go ahead with building, we’ll promise to cover the cost of their investment if their factory explodes.”

With this guarantee in hand, the businessmen proceed. They build four factories. One explodes. Whoops! Don’t worry, no one was hurt and it looked pretty rad. Uncle Sam cuts a check and everyone’s happy. The government has now spent a million dollars and gotten the three factories it needed. Nice! If they had tried to build a factory themselves, they could have only afforded one — really, three-quarters of one, since it might have blown up (some say government-built dynamite factories are even more prone to this defect that those of the private sector).

So this is the idea: that the government can offer guarantees that tip unacceptably risky — but not totally foolhardy! — economic activity over into the realm of realization. The government is using its unique powers to shift risk instead of shifting resources directly. Sometimes shifting risk can allow money to flow through the economy in new and desirable ways. And it’s often dramatically cheaper than spending funds directly to achieve the same result.

In some ways this is a very efficient way to spend subsidy dollars. In others, not so much: you’re picking winners, you’re shoving money into the finance system where some will be skimmed off, you’re relying on risk estimates which sometimes just aren’t that good. CFDA.gov lists 68 such programs right now; here’s one that helps build ships and shipyards. Here’s one that subsidizes the purchase of Boeing aircraft (note that in this case the default costs are balanced by gains from interest on successful transactions).

I haven’t followed the Solyndra story very closely, but my understanding is that changing market conditions overtook their business very rapidly. The financing pipeline supporting them should have noticed this and shut down but didn’t, either because of bureaucratic inertia or special favors or both. That’s unfortunate. Luckily, the government’s total exposure is likely to be much less than the $500 million face value that’s being widely cited, and the final cost of the program that administered the loan guarantee is likely to be a small fraction of the face value of the lending it enabled.

All of this is a separate question from whether the government should be intervening in the economy in this manner. I think that’s a conversation worth having. But it should be a conversation about programs, not transactions. To focus on one failed loan is a bit like pointing to a lottery winner and saying, “That’s how they think we’re going to pay for our schools — by handing out checks? What a bunch of dopes!” But of course this ignores the bigger picture. Perhaps there is a problem with that lotto payout, but that’s a different and frankly less important issue than whether it’s wise for the government to run a lottery. This is why the intense focus on Solyndra strikes me and many others as a transparently partisan feeding frenzy rather than a considered discussion of energy policy.

I’ve noted before that it’s a bit horrifying. If you haven’t read this essay about it, you should. The plotting that the author relates is very similar to how a Zynga employee explained his work to me.

Usual disclaimer: I’m not speaking for my employer.

Matt wrote a post keying off of Dylan Ratigan’s proposal to outlaw money in politics. He doesn’t see the point of it:

Like let’s say you’re Elizabeth Warren and you want to run a campaign against Scott Brown. How do you pay your campaign manager? How do you let people know that you’re running? To me, this doesn’t solve the problem that when Washington regulates the financial system, it’s dependent for expertise on people with ties to the financial industry. It doesn’t solve the problem of the revolving door. It doesn’t solve the problem that politicians need the “legislative subsidy” of lobbyists to do policy analysis. Nor does it solve the problem of monied interests exercising disproportionate influence over think tanks, advocacy groups, or even (through speaking fees and the like) journalists and pundits. Presumably the people who make the F-22 will still be allowed to advertise about how high levels of defense spending are awesome, just as ExxonMobile will still be allowed to advertise about how fossil fuel extraction is the road to prosperity. You’ll have created some big new logistical hassles for political campaigns without, I think, addressing any concrete issues.

I don’t watch Ratigan’s show, so I don’t know for sure, but I would be surprised if he was pitching this proposal as a way to end lobbying as a legislative subsidy, much less as a means to address the revolving door problem. And of course there won’t ever be a silver bullet that makes money completely irrelevant to the political process.

But, contra Matt, I think it’s easy enough to see Ratigan’s motivation. In the absence of contributions, campaigns would have to deprofessionalize and rely to an even greater degree on motivated volunteers. An optimist would say that this might produce less homogenous candidates and campaigns, but you could easily make the case that it would just entrench the electoral power of crazy old people.

On the legislative subsidy front, well-funded lobbying campaigns would no doubt still yield results. But it’s not crazy to think the situation would be improved if corporate lobbyists were competing for legislators’ attention with public interest NGOs on a level playing field. Matt says that “it’s too difficult for elected officials to get expert technical opinion on issues without relying on interested parties,” but outside of the government itself I’d say that avoiding interested parties when seeking advice is pretty much a non-starter.

I think the most compelling argument for defunding elections is that it might select for a different class of politician. I’ve read estimates from retired congressmen that put the share of their time spent fundraising in the 30% range. That’s insane. To endure the rigors of constantly begging wealthy supporters for large sums of money — to say nothing of excelling at it — must require a very strange set of skills. I suspect that those skills don’t relate much to aptitude for governing. And I suspect that that time investment comes at the expense of other duties. I’m not naive enough to think we’d have a wave election that stuffed Capitol Hill with policy experts. But perhaps we’d get a few, along with some better orators, coalition-builders, horse-traders and glad-handers.

To be clear, it’s obvious that Ratigan’s proposal is mostly about making good TV (a nobler motivation than most proposals to amend the Constitution). And I don’t want to pretend that it wouldn’t carry substantial problems. Offhand, it seems very likely that, short of explicit restrictions on political speech, this policy would just formalize the de facto requirement that candidates be personally wealthy; celebrity candidates would be massively empowered by their name recognition; the press’s political coverage pathologies would become all the more problematic as their role in conveying campaign messages increased in importance; turnout might drop, leaving an electorate that behaves more like primary voters, selecting for politicians with more extreme views; and the whole thing would be an enforcement nightmare.

Still. It’s hard to escape the sense that federal politicians have become so professionalized — so good at the game they play, so aware that the incentives they face have little to do with the quality of governance they deliver — that we’re all beginning to suffer for it. I’m not sure there’s a solution to this problem short of a societal collapse and reboot, but it’s easy to see why an optimist reach for a different answer.

Matt pointed me to this post, by Matt Rognlie, as an argument against my previous post‘s a la carte pricing dreams.  I’ve seen this pro-bundling argument before, but I’m not swayed by it. Still, since I now have several people who are smarter than me about economics telling me I’m wrong, perhaps it’s best to spell out my objections here rather than via sputtering, half-formed tweets.

Unbundling might be desirable even if it reduces efficiency in dollars per entertainment program available. It might be desirable even if it raises the price per entertainment program consumed!  As you might’ve guessed, what follows will have more than a whiff of paternalism about it. I know that some people feel that so long as a dollar isn’t spent on a drug raid, a war, or some other destructive purpose, the appropriateness of its use shouldn’t be questioned. I’m at least a little bit sympathetic to that view. Still, I think the TV industry has understandably structured itself in a way that maximizes television consumption (in both dollars and time–but mostly dollars), reaching a level above what most consumers would prefer. I think the industry has been able to do so because of various limits on competition. Consequently I’ll be glad to see its size reduced, even if by some measures the result is a worse deal.

It’s obvious that we have too much television.  This should be apparent even if you consider me a snob for thinking society would be improved if Repo Games were disappeared forever (and, ideally, its creators imprisoned). The still-recent advent of high-quality time-shifting/on-demand technology removes 24-hour programming as a requirement for television outlets; and allows content, free of time constraints, to be efficiently recycled to viewers who previously couldn’t watch it. This should have allowed us to dramatically reduce the amount of television that’s being produced and sold while keeping viewers’ satisfaction constant. But of course that didn’t happen[1].

Now to Rognlie’s argument. While in broad terms the windfall of utility from infinite supply born of zero marginal cost seems like it should dwarf any fixed costs, in practice — at the level of an individual subscriber — it seems as though the utility we derive from additional television consumption and variety falls off quickly. Netflix streaming’s success — despite wide acknowledgement that its selection is poor — speaks to an appetite for satisficing behavior in this area, doesn’t it? Most people would agree that there is a lot of garbage on TV and that they are paying too much for it. I appreciate that Rognlie’s argument anticipates this, but in practice it seems doubtful that everyone will have perfectly idiosyncratic views about what that garbage is in the way that his parks example supposes[2]. It seems like there are good reasons for thinking that we are investing more resources in television production than a real market dynamic would afford.

I don’t like Rognlie’s use of parks. I think it’s an appeal to emotion, and that it ignores parks’ function as a means of progressively redistributing resources and as a source of positive externalities. The metaphor that’s more commonly applied to the cable industry — correctly, I think — is an all-you-can-eat buffet[3].

The buffet business model allows for a lot of variety in dishes, but at a low level of quality.  Diners will be stuck cross-subsidizing one another in fairly arbitrary ways, and may face incentives to overconsume as they draw near the grim end of their personal utility functions.  Decisions about how to allocate resources within the restaurant will be made in a way that’s only vaguely connected to market signals; to the extent that those decisions reflect diners’ preferences at all, they will probably be plagued by selection effects.

Buffets suck. They’re a bad deal for almost everyone.

Right now the home TV industry gives consumers few non-buffet choices. I think that’s likely to change, that it’ll mean fewer total resources will be directed toward the industry, that consumer satisfaction with the programming they buy will increase, and that that will be a good thing.

[1] There’s no reason that consumer satisfaction would have to remain constant, of course. But in a real market you’d expect consumers to be able to take the gains from this type of innovation either as consumption or by saving money while keeping consumption constant, right? The television vendors’ market power means that this latter scenario is not an option; gains have to be taken as consumption. The falling share of per capita hours spent on TV suggests to me that consumers would prefer to allocate this windfall differently.

[2] And in practice it doesn’t seem as though the proliferation of channels really has afforded the kind of utility-enhancing long-tail variety that a la carte opponents suppose.  Not to get all Current TV on you (assuming Current TV still exists), but economic and cultural realities have led to each new channel  just carving out tiny new “lifestyle” niches in the same suburban, straight, white, consumerist orientation. The model can’t even support a music video channel, for pete’s sake, or programming for huge market segments (women! black people! hispanics!) that isn’t an insulting, low-budget joke.

[3] Food has a real marginal cost, of course, but the price of cranking out one more steam tray of crappy lo mein is minimal compared to the operation’s fixed costs (which, for this argument, include the costs of adding each new menu item). And in most cases adding another menu item won’t push a diner to consume more in absolute terms; it’ll just improve the diner’s lot by providing them with more variety, shifting how they allocate their choices prior to getting full.

It’s not often that I disagree with Tim Lee, so let me relish this.  I think Netflix is being smart!  Or at least not-that-unwise. Tim casts his argument in terms of movie availability, and from that perspective he’s probably right: the DVD-only Qwikster (or however you spell it) might have a bit less leverage in amassing movie libraries than the currently-unified Netflix (then again, it might not; as far as I know Netflix has only committed to splitting its brand and customer base; the two entities might still sit together at the bargaining table).

But I think this fails to recognize the ambition of Netflix’s plans. They’re not competing with Blockbuster, or Redbox, or jeez, who is even in the movie rental business anymore?  They’re now competing with DirecTV and Comcast, first by agreeing to sell consumers video content by the ounce instead of the unwieldy, one-size-fits-all sacks of the stuff that the cable companies insist upon.  Second, I imagine they’ll begin riding the inevitable logic of a la carte pricing to its conclusion, making more deals with both marquee and low-cost cable channels, allowing customers to add that pre-time-shifted content to their lineups for a couple of bucks a month.  Netflix is also pursuing original programming, establishing itself not only as a cheaper, higher-tech and more convenient disintermediating marketplace for television, but as an exclusive provider of certain high-esteem shows (imagine if they do manage to land an exclusive on one Mad Men-style success…).

To Netflix customers who mostly think of the service as a way to get movies, I can understand why today’s move seems dumb.  But as someone who mostly thinks of the service as a way to watch television shows, it makes perfect sense.  And of course I’m delighted to see a business/tech innovation achieve what the cable/satellite market and federal regulation could not: a la carte programming and the consignment of cable network operators to a bulk-bandwidth-vending fate (I’ve been saying for a while that the natural monopoly implied by the physical realities of cable systems means that they ought to wind up as utilities, every bit as boring and regulated as the water company; I think the net neutrality fight is best understood as the death throes of an industry that, understandably, doesn’t want to be in a commodity business).

I think that this shift means that your Netflix bill will inevitably get more complicated as new option plans are made available.  That by itself is a pretty good reason for isolating the DVD-by-mail side of things; those customers want different things, and the situation was already getting confusing.  And I think the move really will free the company to concentrate more on the streaming product (I expect that they’ll soon be pushing for more uniformity in the interfaces to the service that various integrated media solutions provide, for instance). The poisonous rage of the network operators that carry those streaming products’ bits remains a real threat, but if Comcast & co. can be successfully coaxed into a gentle senescence, I think the future of a net-only Netflix is bright.

INCIDENTALLY: I think all of this can be understood as a huge indictment of Apple.  Not that iTunes hasn’t been a big success, but they’re retreating from the rental/streaming market.  They never quite managed to move past thinking of the service as a content-supplier/”we have legal content!” validator for Apple hardware products, nor to meaningfully relax their quality standards (well, except for the iTunes software, of course) in order to compete for the market segment Netflix pursued. It’s ludicrous that new receivers don’t come with big “iTunes-ready!” stickers on it; that stereo equipment manufacturers have to play catch-up, begging Apple to let them provide iPod support. It’s flat-out insane that Airplay is a closed standard, its proprietary nature used to help prop up a consumer router business.  A fucking consumer router business!  If ever there was a market you wouldn’t want to be in… At any rate, it’s a reminder that even Apple misses occasional opportunities.  And note that I say all this as a mostly-satisfied Apple TV owner.  They settled for a lucrative niche when entertainment industry world domination was within their grasp.

This post is making the rounds. I’m not sure how good it is — it’s less of an argument than a heartfelt and anguished cry from someone horrified by the commodification of something they love.  I’m sympathetic.  And the author is right, certainly, that many firms will half-heartedly pursue gamification projects, produce lackluster results, and fail, giving the trend a bad name.

But I’m not sure that “gamification is bullshit”, as Bogost maintains.  After spending an hour with someone who works for Zynga, I’m convinced it’s not that at all.  Here’s what it is: price discrimination plus a radical version of behaviorial economics.  It’s the further weaponization of marketing’s insights into consumer behavior. It isn’t just something dreamed up by morons from the marketing department–it’s actually much more frightening than that.

I mostly really like The Awl these days — contra Quinn, I think the site started strong, had a rough patch, and now is back to publishing a lot of great stuff. But this is not a very good article. It’s credulous about things that call for skepticism, and skeptical about things that are perfectly reasonable.

A lot of people seem to believe that it doesn’t cost anything to make documents available online, but that is absolutely not so. Yes, you can digitize an academic journal and put it online, but if you mean to offer reliable, permanent availability, it costs a huge amount of money just to keep up with the entropy. Plus you have to index the material to make it searchable, not a small job. Everything has to be backed up. When a hard drive fries, when servers or database software become obsolete or break down, when new anti-virus software is required, all this stuff requires a stable and permanent infrastructure and that does not come cheap. Finally, the more traffic you have, the more it costs to maintain fast, uninterrupted server access; you can see this whenever some little blog is mentioned in a newspaper and its server crashes five seconds later. In the case of JSTOR you are looking at many millions of hits every month, and they can’t afford any mistakes.

Actually, all this stuff really is pretty cheap. And then there’s the other nice thing about the internet: digital content of genuine utility can be more-or-less counted on to self-perpetuate.  Release a valuable DRM-free file onto the network and its preservation somewhere is more or less funded automatically by the people who exchange it. Besides, costs continue to fall while the size of scanned documents remains constant.

It’s true to some extent that dealing with large-scale distribution and managing bitrot in any particular centralized location does involve costs.  So it’s not that JSTOR doesn’t need money.  It’s more that we don’t need JSTOR.

There are nearly 19,000 documents in this 33GB download [of out-of-copyright JSTOR documents uploaded in protest by Greg Maxwell], and anyone can take them off The Pirate Bay—and then what? It will tax an ordinary home computer quite a lot to search just this one file, the archives of a single journal of the 1,400-plus currently distributed by JSTOR; that’s the tiniest drop in the bucket. The practical futility of Maxwell’s gesture only demonstrates that JSTOR is providing an invaluable service to the public, even with respect to documents in the public domain—one that could be improved upon, maybe, but completely impossible for individuals to duplicate using existing technologies.

This is just flat-out wrong. Someone who knows what they’re doing will need to OCR those PDFs and dump the results into Solr or something like it, but the actual language-to-be-searched will be a fraction of that 33GB total.  This was a big but tractable problem for a home computer a decade ago.  Today it’s basically trivial; my rough guess is that the task is on par with searching through a decade’s worth of email.  Besides which, people who actually need this data — researchers, for instance — can deal with not-that-much-more-inaccessible tools to get at it.

I’m sure JSTOR’s system is impressive.  But you know what?  There are a lot of people on the internet who can build impressive systems, and many of them are willing to do so and make the results available for free if it’s for a halfway decent cause.

It seems far more likely that if he meant to distribute any JSTOR articles on a file-sharing site, he would have stripped out any copyrighted material first (1.7 million of the 4.8 million articles he downloaded, according to the indictment.) That would be child’s play for someone like Swartz to do, and it would certainly have decreased his chances of landing in the soup.

Spoken like someone who’s never had to figure out if a document is in copyright (much less do so programmatically). Unless JSTOR had already done the work of figuring this out, it would’ve actually been a very difficult task.  That 1.7 million number is likely representative of documents that can be positively said to be in copyright.  It is much harder to positively say that something is out of copyright.

Still, the government’s indictment alleges that he intended to distribute the stuff to the public “through one or more file-sharing sites,” without offering any details as to why they think he was going to do that. If they hope to prove this allegation based solely on the 2008 Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, it would seem that they have got an uphill climb.

For one thing, Swartz has been working for years on analyzing huge data sets at Harvard and elsewhere. He has a longstanding professional interest in the study of large data sets. Sure, it’s a little bit fishy that he didn’t use the network at his home institution in order to access JSTOR. If the allegations in the indictment are true, it would also appear that Swartz took steps to cover his tracks in order to escape detection. I could think of a zillion possible reasons for this with one lobe tied behind my back: Did Swartz want to keep the nature of his work secret from a colleague for some professional reason? Had the Harvard IT department refused to permit him to take that much data down?

I don’t really know what to say about this other than it seems like a stretch to me.  Occam, etc.

From that point on, the article is actually pretty good, discussing the strangeness of the government’s decision to indict, the specific charges being brought, and ending with a very nice wrapup that appropriately and respectfully invokes Lessig and Malamud.  Still, while you all know I’m usually as cranky as anyone about internet utopianism, it really is the case that digital technology is both incredibly powerful and incredibly cheap.  JSTOR and the journals are more rentiers than humble archivists struggling to cover costs.

 

I am now substantially de-jetlagged!  Let’s get this published quickly, then deal with the chaos of my inbox.

Matt was nice enough to respond; if you haven’t already seen it, you should go read it. A few quick things, presented in bullet form because I think trying to write narrative transitions often gets me in trouble:

• Matt’s right that broadcast spending matters most at the top, of course.  I would suggest, though, that this affects many if not all other levels of office, as politicians feel obligated to give to one another in order to reify and ascend their parties’ hierarchies.
• When discussing broadcast media, I really meant to do so in the context of independent expenditures.  It was foolish of me to link to the Obama campaign’s spending breakdown — that gesture, intended to convey the staggering scale of communications costs, mostly just confused the issue.  The point I wanted to make was that restricting speech that affects a race but which is made by an entity other than one of the candidates’ campaigns is thorny, but perhaps not as thorny as we pretend: the mediums of expression that are most relevant to this problem aren’t, shouldn’t and never will be places were we can guarantee perfectly free speech.
• Still, I admit I probably emphasized broadcast more than it deserved simply because it was rhetorically convenient for me.  I don’t know if there are SuperPACs paying for (non-coordinated!) GOTV efforts — I suspect that campaigns wouldn’t like that idea, but who knows. But I’m sure that plenty of them are paying for direct mail, which is immune to the critiques I leveled at broadcast media. And I’ve read some decently compelling evidence that campaign professionals consider broadcast media and direct mail to be substitutable.
• As for spending by campaigns themselves: I suppose I’d personally be open to the idea of providing a floor of support for candidates, but I wonder how much of a difference it’d make.  It would be silly to extend the analogy very far, but in some other culturally important areas, revenue sharing sure seems less helpful at generating healthy competition than salary caps have been.  Besides which, it seems like more robust electoral competition is something you’d pursue to make elected officials more representative of the electorate’s views.  To the extent that this is a problem at all, my impression is that institutional structure is the bigger culprit.
• I’ve heard various political science professors endorse variations of “the more politics the better!” but this has always struck me as pretty silly — either a manifestation of a fairly pathetic urge to be counted the most cynical, counterintuitive and therefore sophisticated guy in the room; or an overextension of the term “politics” to encompass every aspect of every democratic system for reconciling conflicting claims, to the extent that the term loses much of its meaning.

Maybe this is horribly consequentialist, but for me it really comes down to this: for several reasons it strikes me as deeply unwise to put our working legislators on a constant fundraising treadmill (particularly given our legislative institutions’ other tendencies toward self-lobotimization). Yet that’s where we’ve found ourselves.  Efforts to untangle this problem quickly run afoul of speech rights.  But the speech rights in question almost invariably belong to people who wield incredible financial, social and political power.  What’s more, the rights in question tend to be concerned with the amplification of those individuals’ speech in forums that are not and will never be available to most people, rather than rights associated with getting one’s message across some threshold of discoverability.

My principled friends will be aghast, but the idea of trampling on that particular subset of super-speech rights bothers me basically not at all.  Sure, I would prefer a solution to this dilemma that arrives in a neatly-packaged, internally consistent collection of philosophical and legal thought.  But if I can’t have that, I will be content with something that wades through the pragmatically-minded muck along with much of the rest of our system.

(For the record, I would be happy to support a compromise that allows unlimited political contributions in support of speech that takes the form of blimps)

There’s no way to write this post without seeming like I’m just being a shill for my employer. And yet, as I write it, I need to be careful to point out that I am not speaking on behalf of my employer, and could easily get myself in trouble for posting it. Really, this is all downside for me.

But in the last week a couple of friends have written posts that begin, more or less, with “Given that campaign finance legislation is fundamentally incompatible with the first amendment…” And look, yes, I know that this is, if not the legal status quo, then at least what awaits us at the bottom of the legal slip and slide that our juridical institutions are gleefully hurtling down. But let me be the lame parent worrying about what all this water will do to the lawn: I still don’t buy that money is speech.

It’s probably necessary to look at this from a couple of angles. First, there’s the case in which money is given to someone else in order to support that candidate or cause’s speech. Our campaign finance laws remain relatively strong in this area, and understandably so: if it’s not my speech, my speech rights aren’t (as) relevant. Handing you a pen is not speech; neither is handing you a dollar to buy a pen.

The situation is admittedly more difficult in cases where we’re talking about restricting individuals’ ability to spend on their own expressions when those expressions benefit particular candidates or political outcomes. In a theoretical sense, I get it. It’s an intractable problem. That pen might amount to a precondition to self-expression for you, making it, from a practical perspective, indistinguishable from the act of expression itself. If we can’t summon the political will to guarantee everyone access to pens, we can sure as hell not start drafting pen-control laws and asking Staples cashiers to enforce them (in the case of the FEC, this is a generous metaphorical comparison).

I love philosophical abstractions as much as the next guy, but let’s get real: most types of communication are cheap. This is about broadcast media. The money-in-politics discussion is about domination of a small number of more-or-less zero-sum distribution channels, most of which are subject to physical constraints that necessitate a high level of regulation. Your freedom to speak within these channels is already severely limited in both a legal and practical sense.

I think we ought to distinguish between advertising and speech. I think everyone’s got a right to express what they believe and to see if it can convince others. I don’t think the right to force your message in front of others’ eyeballs is nearly so sacrosanct. It used to be pretty difficult to disentangle these two things, but every hour we spend marching deeper into the digital age makes the distinction clearer.

Or so it seems to me, anyway. I’m not claiming that our existing set of campaign finance laws is coherent; I’m not claiming that engineering a legally defensible alternative would be easy (though I have some ideas, many of them admittedly involving a jackboot on the throat of television ad sales executives). But I do think that the conversation about money’s role in politics needs to be tied more closely to a conversation about broadcast media’s role in politics. Personally, I think the latter is both a huge waste of resources and a wellspring of perverse incentives for politicians and the electorate. And I don’t think it deserves to hide within the aegis of rights that we quite correctly treat with reverence.

Cute trick, but this is no good. Sure, I overuse the em dash — anyone who’s read anything I’ve written will quickly learn that truth about me. But I think the linked column betrays an impoverished conception of writing. Call it Editor’s Disease: the written word as its own artifact (or, worse, as precursor to embodiment in A Font About Which Editor Has Strong Opinions). If your thoughts stray to subjects like kerning before your composition is complete, I think you’re doing something wrong. If your goal in writing is to create clean, efficient prose, well, great, but personally I value those qualities in the consumer electronics I purchase, not the things I read.

I like to think of text as a convenient embodiment of speech, and the speech I most like to record aspires to being a witty, conversational and perhaps slightly tipsy soliloquy. Real human speech is not only full of asides, but is most effective when it’s delivered with a sense of timing. Em dashes are great for satisfying both of those requirements, largely because of the flexibility acknowledge by the article.

If you’re in the market for project management software — and it seems like a large portion of people working on the internet perpetually are — let me encourage you to check out my cousin Sophia’s startup, Webplanner. I am admittedly not the world’s biggest Silverlight fan, but the software seems to do a nice job of actually having something to do with projects and how they are executed (as opposed to, say, Pivotal, which has always struck me as a more awful videogame than bug tracker), while not being quite as stripped-down-to-the-point-of-frustration as Basecamp. Worth a look.

I was glad to see Tim writing about Stephen Colbert’s decision to start a PAC. At work we’ve been excited to have such a high-profile figure talking about the campaign finance system — excited enough to dress people in bear costumes, in fact.

But I don’t think Tim gives Colbert enough credit. Yes, there are tensions within Colbert’s efforts that are related to speech rights. But it’s a mistake to expect Colbert to be perfectly logically consistent. I think his aim is to point out absurdities within our system — absurdities that are to some extent the product of the contradictions Tim mentions. This undertaking can be done — and can be useful — without offering a solution.

Tim’s critique also ignores the issue of disclosure, which is central to Colbert’s focus on Citizens United, and which is the motivation behind his pursuit of a media exemption. I’m sympathetic to arguments about the importance of preserving avenues for anonymous political speech. But a good case can also be made that it is reasonable to expect those who avail themselves of privileged mediums of expression to stand by the statements they make in them. In practice if not in law I would face different obligations for a statement I whispered to a friend versus one I slapped on a billboard. I think that’s reasonable.

Finally, Tim’s post sidesteps the thorniest questions associated with distinguishing corporate speech from speech made by humans. He rightly observes that “this isn’t how free speech jurisprudence works”, but I find that argument more depressing than compelling. The personhood question is so dreary and vast that I’m hesitant to bring it up here. But when it comes to political speech, the same culpability two-step is very much in play: like Dr. Jekyll trying to cordone his negative impulses in a separate entity, the division between an active, proudly amoral leadership and the slumbering ownership whose authority they exert often leads to bad outcomes. I think it’s telling that defenders of corporate money in our system can’t brook the idea of requiring that the owners of that money be forced to approve its use for political ends. It puts the lie to their protestations that corporate giving is simply a vehicle for expressing individuals’ speech rights collectively.

Clearly, political and legal momentum are not on the side of people who feel the way I do. But our system has long acknowledged these tensions in its prohibition on direct giving from corporations to politicians. That PACs can and do launder this kind of money doesn’t validate the practice.

Tim’s point is that some of our society’s legal traditions and most cherished principles demand that we not restrict corporate speech. Colbert’s point is that those principles are forcing us to further empower inhuman actors whose influence on our political system may imperil our society, and perhaps even our planet. I don’t think either side is wrong.

Regarding the new caps on debit card interchange fees:

TechNet said the loss of revenue to banks and card networks could lead them to cut costs in the technology systems that protect personal financial information from fraud and identity theft.

You have to sort of admire the brazenness of this threat. I mean really: that’s astounding.

I guess I’ve seen enough frightening ads on Metro to be convinced that this really is just a transfer from banks to merchants. But hey, that seems okay! Particularly given banks’ ongoing profitability relative to everyone else, their continued lack of punishment, and the concentration in the payment processing market.

Besides, won’t merchants just turn right around and send that money into the supposedly-loss-leading (but I suspect just loss-???ing) “online coupon site” bubble, which will then distribute it to consumers during whatever time is left between now and the conclusion of that sector’s frantic race to the bottom? I’d say it’s a toss-up between this and Secret Millionaire for the title of “Most Serious-Minded New Attempt to Address Inequality of the Last Decade”*.

* They say you can damn with faint praise; I aspire to composing praise so faint that it amounts to dragging the target into the town square and cutting its head off

At my last job, everyone was an architect. Software architects, information architects, perhaps solution architects — I don’t remember all of them, to be honest. It was a little silly, but also kind of sweet: it reflected a desire to treat everyone at the firm in an equal way, and was an effort to recognize each person’s creative contribution. When I left I was both a little bit relieved and a little bit sad to lost my nominal architect status.

I needn’t have worried.

I’m heading to the beach on Monday, which means that the beard had to go.  I don’t know when it might return — certainly not for a long time.  It was fun, but I think I’m probably just not cut out to operate a beard at a professional level.  Ah well.

Of course, there was still the question of how to shave it off.  Usually this is taken as an opportunity to briefly sport some funny or Wolverine-related facial hair configurations, but I decided I’d waste even more time and nerd it up a bit.

I adapted one of the demo sketches that ships with Processing to facilitate lining the shots up; if you want to do something similarly dumb, you can find the code after the jump (you’ll need to update the system path near the bottom).

I encourage those of you with access to small, gullible children to tell them that the above gif represents how beards actually grow in.

(more…)

Yes, yes, the song is awful, and internet commenters are mean, and she’s very inspiring, etc.  But what about the technology?

That seems to me to be the interesting part.  Because while a lot of people are going on about the crappiness of the video, it seems clear that this would not have become the internet meme it is unless it crossed some threshold for plausibly professional production (embarrassing webcam karaoke might be mocked, but not to this degree).  Certainly when I first saw the video last weekend, having never heard of Rebecca Black, I simply assumed that she was some new tween sensation whose handlers had created an unutterably condescending and awful new product to sell to prepubescent dopes.

But it turns out that the video is basically a high-class version of the karaoke booths at Six Flags where you can pay to be videotaped in front of a green screen.  Sure, the edge-detection effect that opens the video is lame, and all the fake depth of field stuff is off-putting, and the autotuning is obvious.  But isn’t it… believable?  Isn’t it kind of amazing how well a fly-by-night effects company was able to ape what was the state of the art in pop music videos not so long ago?  Perhaps I’m wrong about the costs, but the utter disposability of the song — and Black’s acknowledgement that she didn’t like it even while recording it — indicates that this was not a huge investment for her family.  In other words: I suspect we’re looking at a budget in the low single-digit thousands of dollars.

Maybe I’m wrong and this is a case of fantastically rich parents and/or some strange social failure that forestalled any effort at quality control.  But preliminarily, I’m pretty impressed by the level of polish that can now be achieved without — clearly — anybody involved being able to muster the enthusiasm to give a damn.

I guess it’s serendipity that this post showed up over at Yglesias’s blog this morning.  It discusses a paper that argues that deficits actually lead to more demand for government, as shifting costs to the future lowers the public’s sense of the cost of government services, prompting them to consume more.  This doesn’t seem very controversial to me (or at least I’m not qualified to say anything interesting about it).

But just yesterday I was thinking about something very similar in the context of the current storm over Twitter.  Not so much because of the specific question of how much Twitter client variety we’ll see, but the larger question of the firm beginning to make decisions that will help it generate revenue rather than decisions that will help it generate user adoption.

And it occurred to me that we basically debt finance our social networks.  There are a few exceptions, but in general nobody’s willing to pay for social experiences on the web.  So instead we’ve arrived at a model where open registration, open APIs and open bars at SXSW are used to attract users.  Then, once network effects have given the experience value, and so long as transition costs remain inconveniently high, value can be extracted from those users.  Lots of people tell lots of stories about how this can be a positive-sum interaction (usually fairytales about how valuable anonymous usage data is, or how people will suddenly start enjoying the experience of looking at ads if the sales pitch is sufficiently personalized).  But in practice it seems to always be the case that user experience is degraded in some way.

This isn’t a particularly great insight, I suppose: that you can goose demand if you shift costs into the future.  Discount rates exist; it’s why economists fret about declines in consumer borrowing.  It’s why people still smoke cigarettes.

I have an aesthetic aversion to it — a general sense that things would be better if costs were presented up front.  That it would be preferable for Twitter to be a protocol like email rather than a service like Facebook.  Maybe even that it would be more moral for them to be.  That the costs associated with transitioning between social networks every, what, five years are high enough to be worth complaining about.*

But this is probably is just a meaningless prejudice on part.  Twitter wouldn’t have become Twitter if those costs had been apparent from the start.  To wish it could be otherwise is just to say that you want foolish angel investors to buy you toys for free**.  The service will probably remain fine for a long time, and then it’ll get worse, and we’ll all bitch about it and eventually something else will come along.

I just hope that when Google finally decides it needs to make some money off Gmail that they have the class to ask me for it to my face instead of creating some privacy-violating Rube Goldberg device by which other corporations agree to exchange money for making my life very slightly worse, as if I was plugged into the Matrix to power cybernetic tyrants with my mild irritation.

* Whatever this inclination is, it’s closely related to the sense I have that mobile vendors shouldn’t use contracts to subsidize handsets, and that cable TV should be a la carte, and that bandwidth should be billed on a metered basis.  In all cases these “innovations” probably facilitate commercial activity that’s desirable, but I’d be happy enough to see it disappear simply to avoid the sense that people are being duped.  I guess it’s just pique.

** To be clear, I’m in favor of this.