The Open Society Institute and Asia Society hosted an event with Open Society Fellows Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov that explored the changing landscape of Internet censorship. Special attention was given to the techniques employed by governments to co-opt and steer online discussions in ideologically convenient directions. Focusing on the specific cases of Russia and China, the panelists discussed how the strategies and tools of control, manipulation, and censorship have evolved in both countries.

Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue and an Open Society Fellowship selection committee member, moderated the discussion.

This event was presented in cooperation with the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations.

The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age

Paul Starr:

News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us. They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.

From 2004, Joe Nye:

In the era of the Founding Fathers, newspapers were extremely partisan, and George Washington was dismayed by the harshness of political language. For much of its early history -- to say nothing of the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction -- the country was as closely divided as it is today, and bitter campaign rhetoric reflected the closeness of the competition.

From a 2004 review of Paul Starr's book, The Creation of the Media:

The most important -- and interesting -- questions are structural.

Americans fundamentally misunderstand what is unusual about their communications media, and why.

From years ago, Richard Hofstadter:

Although Federalists and Anti-Federalists differed over many things, they do not seem to have differed over the proposition that an effective constitution is one that successfully counteracts the work of parties.

Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers

What's in a name, Tim?

Nickipedia is a very simple, large API (and perhaps website) that provides a brute-force way of name standardization, by building a large database of known nicknames and misspellings and providing a search function on top of it. People could also contribute their own lists of nicknames and query against that list as well.

Nickipedia - Sunlabs wiki

The test must always be whether the public, after the fact, considers itself better off — and that judgment can be made by only the public itself, as it recently was, by way of elections.

From the archive:

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

In Defense of Secrecy

Martin Wolf, the world's preeminent financial journalist, asks:

Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?

Hoping for the best is foolish. Yet hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus program.

All along two contrasting views have been held on what ails the financial system. The first is that this is essentially a panic. The second is that this is a problem of insolvency.

Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell.

Under the second view, a sizable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent. Personally, I have little doubt that the second view is correct and, as the world economy deteriorates, will become ever more so.

The correct advice remains the one the US gave the Japanese and others during the 1990s: admit reality, restructure banks and, above all, slay zombie institutions at once.

Be advised:

We should probably tell you that the full title of this game is Zombies! Apocalypse - Massive Multiplayer Online Zombies Massacre, even though that's basically given away the point of it all.

Rattle once said:

I think Decius and I should start to practice claiming that MemeStreams is worth four billion while keeping a straight face.

A final thought from Jack Handey:

It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.

Obama's New TARP Will Fail

Think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were a politicized financial disaster? Just wait until pension funds implode.

The Next Catastrophe

It's all about the incentives.

The history of socialism is the history of failure—and so is the history of capitalism, but in a different sense. For the history of socialism is one of fundamental failure, a failure to provide incentives and an inability to coordinate information about supply and effective demand. The history of capitalism, by contrast, is the history of dialectical failure: it is a history of the creation of new institutions and practices that may be successful, even transformative for a while, but which eventually prove dysfunctional, either because their intrinsic weaknesses become more evident over time or because of a change in external circumstances. Historically, these institutional failures have led to two reactions. They lead to governmental attempts to reform corporate and financial institutions, through changes in law and regulation (such as limited liability laws, creation of the FDIC, the SEC, etc.). They also lead market institutions to reform themselves, as investors and managers learn what forms of organization and which practices are dysfunctional. The history of capitalism, then, is the history of success through dialectical failure.

Our Epistemological Depression

Rebecca Solnit:

Iceland is the only part of Europe that never begat monarchs or a hereditary aristocracy, and I hoped to find here a kind of perfection of the democratic ideal, or at least a hopeful indication of what could be.

Listening to Icelanders, I felt like I was hearing a fairy tale told backward, a tale in which they had been dispossessed of their great gifts and birthrights.

Icelanders are aware of the problem and yet seem unable to fix it.

I ran into Andri Snær Magnason, who had helped organize the event, the next morning and asked him why at a concert for the environment no one had said anything about the environment, or politics, or democracy, or dams, or actions people could take to make a difference. “They didn’t want to preach,” he said firmly, as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

Iceland's polite dystopia

Sam Tanenhaus:

What our politics has consistently demanded of its leaders, if they are to ascend to the status of disinterested statesmen, is not the assertion but rather the renunciation of ideology. And the only ideology one can meaningfully renounce is one's own.

Conservatism Is Dead

Alec Dubro:

We’d desperately like to believe that there is a way to preserve our car-centered civilization, while simultaneously placating the gods of atmospheric warming. Even the president-elect believes it, and Obama made fuel-efficient cars a central part of his energy policy.

Even on its face, this seems like a tepid response to climate change. In fact, efficiency has always led to more production and consumption.

Cars don’t move people, cars move cars.

Without divine intervention – which seems to be the basis for most energy reduction schemes – there is simply no way to maintain both the atmosphere and personal transportation.

The one step we ought to take right now is to withdraw our support – financial, political and emotional – from the pursuit of an energy-efficient car. We'd have better luck creating a perpetual motion machine.

From the archive:

The greenest thing you can do in your kitchen is not tear it up and put in a new one.

The Myth of the Efficient Car