Lawrence Lessig, in an October 26, 2011, Google Talk:
In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our government-driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new levels by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission-trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that business interests wield control over our legislature.
With heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how we arrived at this crisis: how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic-and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left-Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system. He puts the issues in terms that nonwonks can understand, using real-world analogies and real human stories. And ultimately he calls for widespread mobilization and a new Constitutional Convention, presenting achievable solutions for regaining control of our corrupted-but redeemable-representational system. In this way, Lessig plots a roadmap for returning our republic to its intended greatness.
While America may be divided, Lessig vividly champions the idea that we can succeed if we accept that corruption is our common enemy and that we must find a way to fight against it. In Republic, Lost, he not only makes this need palpable and clear-he gives us the practical and intellectual tools to do something about it.
Decius:
It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.
The availability heuristic is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.
A striking example of availability bias is the fact that sharks save the lives of swimmers. Careful analysis of deaths in the ocean near San Diego shows that on average, the death of each swimmer killed by a shark saves the lives of ten others. Every time a swimmer is killed, the number of deaths by drowning goes down for a few years and then returns to the normal level. The effect occurs because reports of death by shark attack are remembered more vividly than reports of drownings. System One is strongly biased, paying more prompt attention to sharks than to riptides that occur more frequently and may be equally lethal. In this case, System Two probably shares the same bias. Memories of shark attacks are tied to strong emotions and are therefore more available to both systems.
See also - why cellphones don't cause brain cancer.
Friebolin's two data points are misleading in the way they underplay the story on the use of mobile devices.
1. The US population has increased from 1994 to 2008, from 263M to 304M.
2. There are more vehicles per capita on the road in 2008 than in 1994.
3. Total miles driven increased substantially from 1994 to 2008. At a glance, it looks like roughly a 25% increase.
4. Average commute times are rising even faster than total miles driven. In Atlanta, the average commute time is 127 minutes per round trip.
5. The automobile accident rate has declined steadily since the 1920s. (Friebolin's "0.9% decrease" is actually quite misleading because it compares total counts rather than rates. See below ...)
6. Although the absolute number of subscribers has increased (as shown above), per-subscriber activity levels have risen at a vastly greater rate. You'll find growth from 44B MOU in 1996 to 1.68T in 2008 and 2.25T in 2011, according to CTIA. Likewise, texting has gone from negligible levels in 1994, to 33M in 2001, to nearly 200B in 2011. Read those numbers again. That's a 51x increase in voice MOUs from 1994-2011, and a 6000x increase in texts just in the last ten years.
Of course, none of t... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]
On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown
Topic: Futurism
7:05 am EST, Dec 7, 2011
Thelonious Monk:
When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!
Chinnie Ding:
The screen saver is comfort food for thought the way pop chaos theory is: it lets us believe we are more linked by the serendipities of a butterfly's wings than by finance capitalism. As tasks await amid cascading windows or avalanching paper, the screen saver's immersive depths unfurl the cosmic picture that keeps the job in perspective, outsourcing gripes to karma, converting tedium into trance. It acknowledges, and briefly gratifies, one's drowsy desire for not-work.
Theodor Holm Nelson, still pining for Xanadu:
Now all of us can create our own cattle pens!
We are in a world nobody designed or expected, driving full tilt toward -- a wall? a cliff? a new dawn? We must choose wisely, as if we could.
On the one hand, we are getting bread and circuses, vast freebies unimaginable scant years ago -- free e-mail, phone calls and maps, acres of picture space. On the other hand, somebody or something is reading your mail, and that same somebody or something is looking for new ways to control your future.
Some things are more and more fabulous, some things are more threatening and oppressive, except we don't all agree on which is which. Are Facebook and Google marvelous ways of communicating, or a threat to our privacy? Yes!
Patrick McKenzie:
Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.
I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness. Likewise many of nature's five hundred kinds of wild trees had to make way for orchards and cornfields. In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded God's trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get rid of. Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in their beauty fell crashing by millions, sma... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
A perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life
Topic: Futurism
3:43 pm EST, Nov 29, 2011
Bill McKibben:
Can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?
Here's my answer: we're moving, if we're lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We'll either head there purposefully or we'll be dragged kicking, but we've reached one of those moments when tides reverse.
The Federal Aviation Administration plans to propose new rules for the use of small drones in January, a first step toward clearing the way for police departments, farmers and others to employ the technology.
Franklin was complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for defense and maintaining its right of self-government -- and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting that it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.
In short, Franklin was not describing a tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.
Stephen King:
For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. ... A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.
Simon Johnson, in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic:
The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump "cannot be as bad as the Great Depression." This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression -- because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.
Like standing next to a 65,000-foot-high vacuum cleaner
Topic: Science
11:30 am EST, Nov 28, 2011
Mitch Dobrowner:
Landscape photographers count ourselves lucky to be in the right place at the right time if a storm system is moving through -- but I wanted to actively pursue these events. In July 2009 Roger Hill (regarded as the most experienced storm-chaser in the world) and I tracked a severe weather system for nine hours -- from its formation outside of Sturgis, South Dakota, through Badlands National Park and into Valentine, Nebraska. Eventually we stopped in a field outside of Valentine, and there we stood in awe of the towering supercell (a thunderstorm with a deep rotating updraft) which was building with intake wind gusts of 60mph. It was like standing next to a 65,000-foot-high vacuum cleaner.
Words are inadequate to describe the experience of photographing this immense power and beauty. And the most exciting part is with each trip I really don't know what to expect. But now I see these storms as living, breathing things. They are born when the conditions are right, they gain strength as they grow, they fight against their environment to stay alive, they change form as they age... and eventually they die. They take on so many different aspects, personalities and faces; I'm in awe watching them. These storms are amazing sights to witness ... and I'm just happy to be there -- shot or no shot; it's watching Mother Nature at her finest. My only hope my images can do justice to these amazing phenomenona of nature.
Charles Mudede:
When we see a beautiful cloud passing by, sometimes it is best just to live in and then leave that moment forever.
Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.
David Lynch:
So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?
Andrea de Majewski:
The cloud channel has several advantages over regular TV ... It's very relaxing. One reason for this is that there are no ads. No one tries to sell you anything at all on the cloud channel.
Ian Malcolm:
You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!
Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people's computers and cellphones, and "massive intercept" gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.
The documents -- the highlights of which are cataloged and searchable here -- were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.
Benjamin Wittes:
We seldom stop and ask the question of whether and when our surveillance programs are really coming at the expense of liberty at all or whether the relationship might be more complicated than that -- indeed, whether some of these programs might even enhance liberty.
We should ask these questions because the balance metaphor is incomplete to the point of inducing a deep cognitive error. Any crude notion of a "balancing" between security and liberty badly misstates the relationship between these two goods -- that in the vast majority of circumstances, liberty and security are better understood as necessary preconditions for one another than in some sort of standoff. The absence of liberty will tend to guarantee an absence of security, and conversely, one cannot talk meaningfully about an individual's having liberty in the absence of certain basic conditions of security. While either in excess can threaten the other, neither can meaningfully exist without the other.
Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:
The end of the rainbow would be the ability to store all traffic, then decide later which messages were worthy of further study.
It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.
David Frum:
Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.
Corporatism, with its promotion of competition between individuals over scarce resources and money, laid the ground for individualism and for a heightened concept of the self.
Evgeny Morozov:
It's time that citizens articulate a vision for a civic Internet that could compete with the dominant corporatist vision. It's not just geeks and tech-savvy young people who need to think hard about what an alternative civic Internet may look like; for such visions to have any purchase on society, they need to originate from (and incorporate) much broader swathes of the population.
Finding a way to articulate a critical stance on these issues before technology giants like Facebook usurp public imagination with their talk of "frictionless sharing" should be top priority for anyone concerned with the future of democracy.
David Frum:
Cain's gaffe on Libya and Perry's brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership.
Decius:
Everyone participates in the process of producing the truth every day. Your recommendations matter. You will need to be able to think critically about the range of ideas that you are exposed to and decide which ones make sense.
The debt-based economy was invented so that people with money could get richer by having money, that's what it's for. I'm not saying it's evil, it was an idea. But, it doesn't actually work. If the number of people who want to make money by having money gets so big that there are more people existing that way than actually producing anything, eventually the economy will collapse.
Jack Abramoff:
Two fancy Washington restaurants that became virtual cafeterias for congressional staff, the best seats to every sporting event and concert in town, private planes at the ready to whisk members and staff to exotic locations, millions of dollars in campaign contributions ready for distribution. We had it all. But even with these corrupting gifts, nothing beat the revolving door.
Staff members who thought they might be hired by our firm inevitably began acting as if they were already working for us. They seized the initiative to do our bidding. Sometimes, they even exceeded the lobbyists' wishes in an effort to win plaudits. From that moment, they were no longer working for their particular member of Congress. They were working for us.
Eliminating the revolving door between Congress and K Street is not the only reform we need to eliminate corruption in our political system. But unless we sever the link between serving the public and cashing in, no other reform will matter.
Harold Bloom:
I am moved by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations but remain skeptical that you can achieve a lessening of money's influence upon our politics, since money is politics.
Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude. A dark truth of American politics in what is still the era of Reagan and the Bushes is that so many do not vote their own economic interests.
I wonder though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy. I can be forgiven for dreading a further strengthening of theocracy in that powerful brew.
Jane Mayer:
The lineup promoting TransCanada's interests was a textbook study in modern, bipartisan corporate influence peddling.
Lawrence Lessig:
The question isn't whether money is speech. The question is whether we should allow money to so ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
