Jeff Jarvis's new book goes on sale Tuesday. I've read a pre-galley copy of the book and am working on a more substantial commentary. But for now I at least wanted to mention it.

In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book's central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It's about you.

From the archive:

Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ... Buy my shit! Buy it -- give me money! Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

You might wonder:

Is more what we really need?

What Would Google Do?

Robert Darnton:

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

No one knows, because the settlement is so complex that it is difficult to perceive the legal and economic contours in the new lay of the land. But those of us who are responsible for research libraries have a clear view of a common goal: we want to open up our collections and make them available to readers everywhere. How to get there? The only workable tactic may be vigilance: see as far ahead as you can; and while you keep your eye on the road, remember to look in the rearview mirror.

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Whether or not I have understood the settlement correctly, its terms are locked together so tightly that they cannot be pried apart. At this point, neither Google, nor the authors, nor the publishers, nor the district court is likely to modify the settlement substantially. Yet this is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.

You might wonder:

Is more what we really need?

Before you take sides, consider Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Oh, wait, is copyright protection preventing you from accessing the work of an author who died 99 years ago?

Google & the Future of Books

Want It!

People will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

Expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research can demand exactly that.

So worrisome has the situation become that students at prestigious universities are even talking about becoming butchers.

If you spent six or seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting a graduate degree and you end up doing this, that is not a happy thought.

How does it feel?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

Do you want to make a deal?

Bloated, depressed, hooked on empty optimism. Will anyone finally escape this floating slaughterhouse? Do you even care?

Dissolving bodies is gaining increasing popularity ... They are mostly in pieces, stored in stacked plastic boxes marked with phrases like "One Eye" or "Mouths With Teeth."

"If you don't measure it, you can't improve it." She laughs. "It sounds more awful than it is."

There's got to be a pony in there someplace.

They Call Her One Eye

A banker at a Wall Street investment bank said that as business ground to a halt this fall, "There were a lot of football catches on the trading floor, and occasionally you'd hear the sound of footballs crashing into monitors." In November, he was sacked in a fourth round of layoffs.

"What do you think you are doing?" Madoff demanded. Eating a pear, the employee replied.

What you can do is signal a sense of motion, a sense of ferment and activity and direction.

Of Footballs, Fruit, and Ferment

It could be that sending 30,000 more troops is throwing money and lives down a rat hole.

There is often a mismatch between what we see when we look at our children, and what is really there.

In India, a "liberal" father is one who allows his children to choose whom they want to marry.

Maybe fault is like gravity, built into the universe, and we should be putting quarks and muons on trial instead of the creatures they combine to form.

In prison, nothing is more depressing than an empty mailbox.

Mr. Dalrymple goes to Pakistan.

The situation here could hardly be more grim.

Members of the Taliban already control over 70 percent of Afghanistan, up from just over 50 percent in November 2007. The blowback from the Afghan conflict in Pakistan is more serious still.

The most alarming manifestation of this was the ease with which a highly trained jihadi group, almost certainly supplied and provisioned in Pakistan, probably by the nominally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba -- an organization that aims to restore Muslim rule in Kashmir -- attacked neighboring India in November.

It is a classic South Asian catch-22, which allows Lashkar to continue functioning with only cosmetic restrictions, whose main function is to impress the US. Yet the fact remains that until firm action is taken against all such groups, and training camps are closed down, the slow collapse of the Pakistani state will continue, and with it the safety of Western interests in the region.

From the archive, Steve Coll:

Clearly, Lashkar knows what it must do to protect the Pakistan government from being exposed in the violent operations that Lashkar runs in Kashmir and elsewhere.

And from last September, Dexter Filkins:

What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t they coming for you?

“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”

Entertain whom? I asked.

“America,” he said.

Finally:

"You can't fight here! This is the war room!"

Pakistan in Peril

I just finished watching Night on Earth:

Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night.

Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Beatrice Dalle, and Roberto Benigni) for this hilarious quintet of tales of urban displacement and existential angst, spanning time zones, continents, and languages.

Jarmusch’s lovingly askew view of humanity from the passenger seat makes for one of his most charming and beloved films.

From the archive, Jonathan Lethem:

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Alfred North Whitehead:

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

From 2006:

What makes a post "interesting" is when it lies at the intersection of many otherwise "different" vectors.

From last year, David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Nothing is original

Dexter is back in the sea of poppies.

The Taliban are everywhere the soldiers are not, the saying goes in the southern part of the country.

And that is a lot of places.

The Obama administration has agreed to deploy 20,000 to 30,000 additional troops. But whether extra troops will have the desired impact is unclear.

Back in October, it was noted:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

From 2005:

"Trying to get rid of drugs in Afghanistan is like trying to clear sand from a beach with a bucket," said an American counter-narcotics agent.

From 2006, a snowflake:

Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward. Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?

From 2007, a UN report:

On aggregate, Afghanistan’s opium production has reached a frighteningly new level, twice the amount produced just two years ago.

From 2008, an NYT Sunday magazine feature:

This past spring, more US troops arrived in Afghanistan. They were effective, experienced warriors — many coming from Iraq — but they knew little about drugs. When they arrived in southern Afghanistan, they announced that they would not interfere with poppy harvesting in the area. “Not our job,” they said.

From late 2008:

Not all "victors" experience wars in the same way.

Consider this:

All Music Guide calls it "a kind of warm, nearly-poppy, guitar-filled trip into Middle Eastern chants, tight bass grooves, and drums that hover beneath the surface."

Finally, Rory Stewart:

Without music, time has a very different quality.

In Afghan South, Taliban Fill NATO’s Big Gaps

On Tuesday, President Obama delivered his highly anticipated inaugural address. Many observers noticed and commented on the respectful reference to nonbelievers. But just a few sentences beforehand, Obama referred to the Taliban and al Qaeda. These remarks have not drawn the same level of attention, although I'd argue they are more significant.

Let's take a look.

Obama said:

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

He ends this paragraph with a forceful declaration about our collective will to defeat al Qaeda. This is status quo rhetoric.

Far more significant, however, is the carefully worded reference to "peace in Afghanistan" which opens the paragraph.

One hopes it is not, in fact, "too late" to achieve the Uncoupling.

In any case, time will tell.

From October 2008:

The solution for people who have spent a long time in Afghanistan was ... to work with the Taliban and somehow to uncouple the Afghan fighters from al-Qaeda. Seven years of killing later, it feels a bit too late to try that now. So, western policy seems glued to fighting a war that many people in the know are now saying the west is never going to win.

From October 2008:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

From January 2009:

We will not be able to eliminate the Taliban from the rural areas of Afghanistan’s south, so we will have to work with Afghans to contain the insurgency instead. All this is unpleasant for Western politicians who dream of solving the fundamental problems and getting out. They will soon be tempted to give up.

Two or Three Things I Noticed About The Speech