The Great Seduction

The Foolishness of Crowds (and certain erudite New York City professors)

At last weekend's Google/Stanford Legal Futures conference, there was a panel about Web 2.0 and American democracy that featured two erudite New York City based professors: Beth Simone Noveck from New York Law School and Jay Rosen from New York University's Journalism School. What is it, I wonder, about working in New York City that makes its distinguished professors so utterly divorced from the realities of the actual world? Perhaps the NYC bakers are putting mind-altering bagels into faculty brown bag lunches; or maybe there's something intoxicating about the water supply in Gotham that is muddying the minds of New York City's most learned faculty.

Whatever the reasons for this mishegas, the results are spectacularly bizarre -- even by the traditionally high standards of idealistic New York City intellectuals. Take specimen #1: Beth Simon Noveck, the Director of the Institute for Information, Law and Policy at New York Law School. Ms Noveck believes so strongly in something called "wiki-government" (ie: having unpaid, anonymous amateurs running of the American government) that she wrote an article entitled -- yes, you guessed it -- Wiki-Government for the Winter issue of the excellent new progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Now Beth is an extremely personable lady and a most distinguished expert and I don't really mean to be unkind (it's not my nature to insult people wiser than myself), but her Wiki-Government article was so misguided that I was forced to write my own response. It is entitled "The Foolishness of Crowds" and has just been published in the Spring issue of Democracy. Here's the first paragraph:

Without a trace of irony, Beth Simone Noveck, a law professor and thus paragon of the professional elite, favorably quotes the George Bernard Shaw adage that "all professions are conspiracies against the laity" ["Wiki-Government," Issue #7]. Does Shaw really mean to indict all professions? In addition to medical doctors (against whom Shaw ran his own vendetta), that must include civil engineers, librarians, architects, nuclear scientists, high-school teachers, and nanotechnologists. When it comes to politics, would Shaw include the professional bureaucrats who successfully engineered the New Deal programs? Is Shaw saying that self-interested professionals consciously conspire against "ordinary people"? Maybe, maybe not. But Noveck does indeed appear to be straight-faced in her concurrence, particularly since she adds that "nowhere is this more the case than in a democracy." READ ON

Like Beth Simone Noveck, Jay Rosen -- who wrote his dissertation under Neil Postman at NYU -- is a very learned expert on media; and, like Noveck, he also has some very silly ideas about the impact of media democratization on American politics. On the panel about democracy and Web 2.0 at Law Futures, Rosen argued that professional political operatives like Bob Shrum and Mark Penn are the problem with the US political system. So,  Rosen argued, let the pure amateurs (ie: the electorate) seize back power from the corrupt professionals. Rosen probably has a point here -- overpaid consultants like Penn and Shrum certainly aren't blameless, yet surely they are more of a consequence than a root cause of the problems with American representative democracy. But what really irritated me about Rosen's presentation was his appropriation of Hannah Arendt to his wiki-cause of pure democracy. However one reads Arendt, it is really hard to dig up anything in her work that indicates she would have been an enthusiast of the pure wiki-government of the masses. Indeed, her Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a 700 page polemic against mob rule, should be required (re)reading for wisdom-of-the-crowd utopians like Rosen and Noveck.

I''m afraid that Professors Noveck and Rosen -- two paragons of a profession which is, by definition, elitist --  have become inebriated with the anti-expert kool-aid of the Web 2.0 wiki revolution. The scary/hilarious thing is that these professors really are serious about replacing trained government professionals with the amateur crowd. I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry at the foolishness of these media mavens from New York City.

The Unreason of the American Age

Michiko Kakutani gives a mildly favorable review in this morning's New York Times to Susan Jacoby's Age of American Unreason. She is certainly correct to argue that "there are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Jacoby." And I think her conclusion about the book -- "useful if less than electrifying" -- is reasonably accurate.

Kakutani is right to argue that the book is a bit of a rehash of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. My own criticism of the book, however, lies in its narrative structure. The book gets better and better -- which is a kind way of saying that it begins inauspiciously and takes several chapters to really warm up. The early chapters -- particularly those focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries -- are densely predictable and do little credit to the later section of the book with its incisive cultural critique of both the Sixties and of our own Internet age. I particularly enjoyed her discussion on the contemporary crisis of professionalism and what she calls our "chronic suspicion of experts."

While I agreed with a substantial amount of Jacoby's analysis, my biggest problem with the book lay in her blanket critique of video. This eclipse of print culture by video has nothing to do with the rise of unreason. There certainly isn't anything more intrinsically reasonable about print culture (The Protocols of The Elders of Zion) than about video (Vertigo). What is also missing from The Age of Unreason is a discussion on American exceptionalism. Are ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism peculiarly American traits? Or are these the new new things of all societies in the post industrial world?

The most encouraging thing about The Age of American Unreason -- which I strongly advise everyone to read -- is its success. The book is a best seller and has clearly struck a nerve with American readers. I'm thrilled that we are going back to Hofstadter and Postman. Now the challenge is to  transform their ideas into what Michiko Kakutani calls a "coherent new argument."

Keen on Lessig

I never expected my new friend, Stanford Law professor and founder of Creative Commons Larry Lessig, to make such a lucid argument about why professional media matters. After all, Larry -- who I fondly regard as the world's most erudite lauder of the appropriation of intellectual property -- is usually quite critical of professionally created media content. But there he was this morning, sitting right next to me, making a spellbindingly sophisticated argument in favor the value of professional media.

Larry had very generously invited me to participate in his Legal Futures conference, a Stanford Law School event featuring the leading scions of the digital aristocracy. With some senior execs from Microsoft, Google and Time Warner, he and I sat this morning on a panel about professional media. So what did Larry choose to discuss? Did he talk about the structural economic crisis of the music industry, the recent New York Times layoffs or the just resolved Hollywood writer's strike. No, no, no. Larry chose to speak about Keen on Lessig. He began his talk about professional media by attacking my assertion, in Cult, that he lauds the appropriation of intellectual property. Larry said I was wrong. He said that I had no proof that he has ever lauded online IP theft.

Now why would Larry begin his discussion about professional media with the defense of the indefensible. After all, everybody knows that, as the rabble-rousing founder of Creative Commons, Larry has lauded -- implicitly or otherwise -- the appropriation of intellectual property. Many of Larry's critics and even some of his friends (off-the-record, of course) -- in the law, in media, in politics and in the academy -- have confirmed this to me. So why confront me on a fact that is patently true? And why challenge me over an assertion that can be found all over the Internet, in blogs and websites critical of Larry's radically permissive attitude toward intellectual property.

It has to do, of course, with the power of mainstream media. What upset Larry is not so much what I said but rather the powerful vehicle of my assertion. Instead of a narcissistic blog read by a handful of insiders (what you are now reading), Cult is a paragon of the power of mainstream media. The hardback version of the book has been a huge critical and commercial success. Cult has already gone through six printings and been read by tens of thousands of enthusiastic readers around the world. It is being translated into numerous foreign languages including Chinese, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Dutch and Turkish. And all this before the launch of the paperback version of Cult later this summer -- an publishing event which will introduce Larry's most intimate thoughts about intellectual property to hundreds of thousands of new readers.

This is, of course, why Larry chose to begin his analysis of professional media at Legal Futures this morning with such a passionate rant. Because of the commercial and intellectual power of professional media, a massive army of readers -- from Warsaw to Beijing to Lisbon to Tokyo -- now know all about Larry's naughtily illicit thoughts about intellectual property. They are shouting it on the streets now. Keen on Lessig has gone global. From the mosques of Istanbul to the Baptist churches of Dixie to the synogogues of Golders Green, everybody knows that Stanford Law School professor and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig lauds the appropriation of intellectual property. And that, Larry -- as you argued with your trademark brilliance this morning -- is why professional media matters.

On anonymity -- by A.J. Keen (with a little help from Jim and Jeff)

I did a Commonwealth Club debate with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Thursday. As I told Jimmy, I think Wikipedia has a lot of promise, but is marred by two fatal flaws: 1) Its failure to economically reward Wikipedian contributors; 2) The anonymity of these contributors. It's the anonymity of Wikipedian contributors which most disturbs me. Given that information is never absolute nor completely value free, I always want to know the identity of its author. This fetish with anonymity, then, is the main reason why Wikipedia is such a flawed intellectual experiment. As I implored Jimmy Wales on Thursday, Wikipedia needs to reveal the real identity of its contributors. Then -- and only then -- will it become a truly credible information resource.

But the curse of online anonymity goes well beyond Wikipedia. As I argue in an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times entitled "Douse the Online Flamers", our legal establishment needs to re-examine some of its philosophical assumptions around the principle of online anonymity. My argument, however, is moral rather than legal. I want to see online anonymous bullies and sadists accountable for their actions. I want them to be punished -- fined or even imprisoned -- as a consequence of their immoral actions. "Douse the Online Flamers" was inspired by a brilliant article on the Yale Law School case in the New York Law Journal by Jim Goodale, former New York Times vice-chairman and host of the essential Digital Age tv show. As the lawyer who represented The Times in the Pentagon Papers case, Goodale is also one the country's leading First Amendment lawyers -- and when attorneys as experienced and erudite as Jim Goodale begin to question the law's leniency toward online anonymity, we all need to take note. Jim also introduced me to a partner at Debevoise and Plimpton, Jeff Cunard, an expert on online anonymity and the law, who very patiently answered all my dumb questions. So thanks Jim and Jeff. I couldn't have written my op-ed without you.

It goes without saying, of course, that "Douse the Online Flamers" reflects neither the views nor the wisdom of either Jim Goodale or Jeff Cunard. I'm totally accountable -- it's all the work of A.J. Keen.

We-Think therefore we are

I'll be in London on Monday night to celebrate the launch of Charlie Leadbeater's highly provocative and very readable new book We-Think. Charlie and I are doing a debate at Holborn headquarters of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) at 5.30 pm.

NESTA's tagline is Making Innovation Flourish and our debate is entitled "Mass Collaboration or Extermination by the Masses". The debate, I suspect, will focus on how to best encourage innovation. I know Charlie's innovative position: we-think therefore we are -- innovation in the digital age being best realized through distributed groups. I remain a bit of Cartesian traditionalist, of course: I think there I am being my credo -- innovation, for me, still coming from individuals rather than from the digital crowd.

I'm packing my copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian classic We to throw -- metaphorically, at least -- at Charlie during our duel. Hope to see you in Holborn (tickets are free) on Monday night.

The heavyweight champion of the world

I'm just back from New York City where on Tuesday evening, I appeared on Cody Willard's Fox Business channel show "Happy Hour". Cody's show takes place like at the "Bull and Bear" pub of the Waldorf-Astoria and it resulted in my first -- and hopefully last -- encounter with the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

So there I am on a barstool at the "Bull and Bear", minding my own business, sitting at the bar and nursing a pre interview Diet Coke, reading the Financial Times and nibbling on a bowl of mixed nuts. And I'm introduced to some huge guy who, one of the Fox cameramen tells me, is on the show with me.

"He's a boxer," the Fox cameraman whispers to me.

I give my fellow guest the eye and square up to him. He's a huge fellow, double my size (not that i'm small, of course), with hands the size a New York City sidewalk. But, in spite of his monstrous build, the scars underlining his eyes and his self-evidently reconstructed nose, he's got a very intelligent looking face -- the sort of erudite mug one might associate with a learned young man who has earned a doctoral degree in something really serious -- like science.

"You don't look like a boxer," I tell him, my hand getting lost in his oceanic paw as we shook hands. "You look way too intelligent for that."

His eyes narrowed. If looks could kill, the icy look he shoots down at me certainly would have.  No, not funny at all -- the look said. I don't find you at all amusing.

"He's the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world," the cameraman whispers to me.

And so he is. The big guy (see ominous photo above) is Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukranian heavyweight champion of the world. And, yes, he's a PhD too, from Kyiv University, in Sports Science.

Oh dear, I think to myself, as I back away from Klitschko and his ice-steel gaze. My first shot at the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. And I've blown it. Oh well -- I'll have to stick to blogging (another, more vulgar version of boxing) as a second career.

Here, by the way, is the video of my appearance on "Happy Hour". And here's me, Cody Willard, Fox commentator Father Jonathan Morris and my friend Miranda Tan, founder/ceo of MyPrGenie.