David Brooks:

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It’s a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

The Behavioral Revolution

What is the price of security that citizens are prepared to pay?

Will surveillance technology force us to choose between our right to privacy and national security?

The Proceedings of The Second Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security.

From the archive:

David Brin debates Brad Templeton on "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?"

I know I'm pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

From Dataveillance to Überveillance and the Realpolitik of the Transparent Society

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, talks about the economics of organizations with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The conversation centers on Shirky's book. Topics include Coase on the theory of the firm, the power of sharing information on the internet, the economics of altruism, and the creation of Wikipedia.

Clay Shirky on Coase, Collaboration and Here Comes Everybody

Simson Garfinkel, in Technology Review:

An interesting thing happens when you try to understand Wikipedia: the deeper you go, the more convoluted it becomes.

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Verifiability is really an appeal to au­thority--not the authority of truth, but the authority of other publications. Any other publication, really.

Recently:

I was googling around and I learned that a reply I made to a blog post on Internet Music became an academic reference. Nice!

Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

We were on this five months ago, so the NYT is a bit late to the story, but the meme is still alive and well. (It seems to be missing from A brief history of all Internet memes ever.)

The meme of the parodies — the cultural kernel of them, the part that’s contagious and transmissible — has proved surprisingly hardy, almost unnervingly so.

It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost anyone in the midst of a crisis.

The Burning Man one is quite good.

The Hitler Meme

Orhan Pamuk:

In the age of westernisation and rapid modernisation, the central question - not just for Turkish literature but all for literatures outside the west - is the difficulty of painting the dreams of tomorrow in the colours of today, of dreaming about a country with modern values while also embracing the pleasures of tradition.

Recently:

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.

Just now:

Roger Catt, the retired Wisconsin farmer who said that “McCain is more of the same, and Obama is the end of life as we know it,” will be voting for the end of life as we know it.

The collector

A George Packer roundup.

As for Palin, the incarnation of red-meat, know-nothing Christian nationalism, she turns out to be McCain’s single biggest mistake.

“In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied.

Roger Catt, the retired Wisconsin farmer who told me that “McCain is more of the same, and Obama is the end of life as we know it,” will be voting for the end of life as we know it.

Wading for a few minutes through the sewage of these Web sites reminds me uncannily of the time I’ve spent having political discussions in certain living rooms and coffee shops in Baghdad. The mental atmosphere is exactly the same—the wild fantasies presented as obvious truth, the patterns seen by those few with the courage and wisdom to see, the amused pity for anyone weak-minded enough to be skeptical, the logic that turns counter-evidence into evidence and every random piece of information into a worldwide conspiracy. Above all, the seething resentment, the mix of arrogance and impotent rage that burns at the heart of the paranoid style in politics.

Slavoj Žižek, in 1999:

At a recent meeting of the leaders of the Western powers dedicated to the ‘Third Way’, the Italian Prime Minister Massimo d’Alema said that one should not be afraid of the word ‘socialism’. Clinton and, following him, Blair and Schroeder, are supposed to have burst out laughing. This says much about the Third Way, which is ‘problematic’ not least because it exposes the absence of a Second Way. The idea of a Third Way emerged at the very moment when, at least in the West, all other alternatives, from old-style conservativism to radical social democracy, crumbled in the face of the triumphant onslaught of global capitalism and its notion of liberal democracy. The true message of the notion of the Third Way is that there is no Second Way, no alternative to global capitalism, so that, in a kind of mocking pseudo-Hegelian negation of negation, the Third Way brings us back to the first and only way. Global capitalism with a human face.

From the archive, Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism

Looking back at the late 1930's.

The "War of the Worlds" broadcast remains enshrined in collective memory as a vivid illustration of the madness of crowds and the deeply invasive nature of broadcasting. The program seemingly proved that radio could, in the memorable words of Marshall McLuhan, turn "psyche and society into a single echo chamber." The audience's reaction clearly illustrated the perils of modernity. At the time, it cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists — or incendiary demagogues — could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation. It remains the prime example used by media critics, journalists, and professors to prove the power of the media.

...

But the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds" is the discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose. It may seem like a counter-intuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media, then why isn't every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might, at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors.

The Hyped Panic Over 'War of the Worlds'

Virginia Postrel:

Through good times and bad, Americans predictably rack up consumer debt, and that debt predictably generates public and private hand-wringing about how it will ever get paid.

The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevitably get harder to pay.

Forms of credit may change, but credit anxiety, alas, does not.

The Case for Debt