As I studied Freud's old age and his late work, I came to see that the problems he encountered were in many ways still ours.
Freud the analyst of sex was something we all knew about. But there was a second phase of Freud's work, little read, that bears strongly on our own crises in politics and religion. Freud was, I came to believe, something of an expert on how and why authority goes bad.
The Zabinskis’ effort was not just merciful, it was human in the deepest sense of the word.
While the Nazis depopulated the ghetto, the Zabinskis repopulated the zoo — this time with humans. Those who had papers or Gentile looks were passed via the underground to other parts of Poland. The rest stayed.
Wikipedia has been a resounding success story as a collaborative system with a low cost of online participation.
However, it is an open question whether the success of Wikipedia results from a "wisdom of crowds" type of effect in which a large number of people each make a small number of edits, or whether it is driven by a core group of "elite" users who do the lion's share of the work.
In this study we examined how the influence of "elite" vs. "common" users changed over time in Wikipedia.
The results suggest that although Wikipedia was driven by the influence of "elite" users early on, more recently there has been a dramatic shift in workload to the "common" user. We also show the same shift in del.icio.us, a very different type of social collaborative knowledge system.
We discuss how these results mirror the dynamics found in more traditional social collectives, and how they can influence the design of new collaborative knowledge systems.
The Academy of Military-Industrial-Complex Studies
Topic: Society
8:53 pm EDT, Sep 15, 2007
In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.
Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language."
"The school's built around the marketplace that surrounds the defense industry, but the program's not involved in war or peace. Still, there are some realities about good guys and bad guys that will surely be discussed."
The program was the "brainchild" of Frank Mezzanotte, magnet programs coordinator of Harford County Public Schools.
Mezzanotte was inspired by the opportunities APG has to offer, and that the project was four years in the making.
John Wallace, a science teacher at Edgewood High School, helped in the development of the curriculum.
Wallace, a former Navy commander, retired from APG’s Chemical Biological Defense Command (now the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center) as a command naval liaison. Wallace said he decided to get involved in the program because of his bio chemical warfare background, and because when he served in the Navy he was trained in "disaster preparedness."
"I believe that military and the civilians that work on APG have a lot to offer this exciting program! We have subject matter experts on Explosive ordnance disposal, security operations both physical and intelligence and incident management and response."
There's less than 50% chance that the United States will exist by the middle of this century. And that is actually good news.
This reminds me of The New Middle Ages, an essay by John Rapley in the May/June 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, which Decius and I recommended. That essay is behind a paywall at Foreign Affairs, but if you disable Javascript, you can read it here (via the Wayback machine). (You must disable Javascript because otherwise the page will immediately redirect you to afr.com.)
Rapley writes:
Often what takes place is not so much collapse as reconfiguration -- what some scholars have described as the emergence of a new Middle Ages. And close study suggests that the power of statelets and other new political actors will be less transitory, more significant, and more resistant to intervention than is usually assumed.
What killed off the European Middle Ages was capitalism. In the last decades of the twentieth century, as capitalism began to operate on an increasingly global scale, the nation-state and the other structures and institutions of the modern era started to fray around the edges, leading scholars to talk of a new medievalism.
Wandering through many cities of the developing world today, one comes up against the limits of modernity. Still, although the weakness of the state today is most pronounced in the developing world, the state's retreat is also a global phenomenon. What is emerging is a global economy increasingly centered on what some theorists have called "global cities" -- major urban centers that are connected less to their hinterlands and more to their counterparts elsewhere.
Today, pundits writing about the future of the US empire tend to adopt an inward-looking approach similar to that of earlier generations of historians of the Roman Empire. For example, scholars debate topics such as whether the US economy can bear the cost of maintaining so many overseas military and diplomatic operations. But they tend to neglect the vast portion of humanity kept at bay beyond the empire's borders, who regard it with the same mixture of awe, longing, and bitterness with which the barbarians once regarded the Eternal City.
As states recede and the new medievalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome. The globe's variegated informal and quasi-informal statelike activities will continue to expand, as will the power and reach of those who live by them. The new Romans, like the old, might not enjoy the consequences.
A Win-Win Scenario: 'Game School' Aims to Engage and Educate
Topic: Society
8:44 pm EDT, Sep 4, 2007
This isn't unschooling, but it's not your typical classroom, either.
Don't use the word "fun" to describe what will go on in the Game School, a proposed New York City public school that will use "game design and game-inspired methods" to educate sixth through 12th graders.
If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorstep of a Marshall McLuhan-meets-Milton Friedman world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren't the only empires at risk. Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways.
Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive.
The Manhattan Project: A Great Work of Human Collaboration
Topic: Society
8:00 pm EDT, Sep 3, 2007
Richard Rhodes, from the introduction to The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians:
It was epic in scope, in numbers of people and scale of investment and construction; epic as well in its daring transfer of physical and chemical processes directly from the laboratory to the huge enrichment and separation facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington. I can think of no other major new technical process that has been industrialized in so short a time--testimony to how dangerous the new weapons were understood to be, capable even of turning defeat into victory if it came to that.
Fortunately, it didn't come to that. It came instead to a decision, more controversial now than it was in the summer of 1945, to use the first two bombs against Japanese cities in the hope of shocking the Japanese into surrender before the invasion of their home islands, scheduled for November, took an even greater toll of American and Japanese lives. That decision is discussed in The Manhattan Project by experts; I would only remind you that destroying Japanese cities with firebombing--destruction fully as total as the atomic bombings brought--had been underway for months, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would already have been burned out by August 1945 had they not been removed from the U.S. Air Force's target list. The moral decision to use terror bombing against civilian populations had been made two years earlier, in Europe, and it was fully implemented in Japan in the last months of the war, until only cities with less than 50,000 population (excluding those on the atomic bombing target list) remained untouched.
These hard choices and decisions, following as they did from a great, and in the long run humane, work of human collaboration, are much of what gives the Manhattan Project story its almost mythic resonance.
Walter Isaacson calls it "fascinating"; Jennet Conant (whose work appears in the book) calls it "remarkable ... compelling ... and horrifying"; Bruce Babbitt was "enthralled."
A few months ago, I was sitting with an undergraduate art student and the conversation inevitably turned to activism. The young artist says to me, “I don’t like the activist scene. They are all self-righteous, they tend to be hippies and they don’t have any fun.”
What caught my attention was the description of activism as a “scene.” I countered, “but what if it isn’t a scene? What if anyone in any scene could take part?”
He then insightfully countered back, “You’re kidding yourself. Everything is a scene, activists being one of the more obvious.” I initially dismissed the idea as a defensive reaction by yet another naïve hipster but his point remained with me. He was right.
Activism is a scene and in fact, viewing the world as a series of cultural “scenes” has become normative. Instead of an ideological position, activism is yet another system of sign-play that allows one to differentiate themselves from others. If this kid sensed that most activists got into the game because they could carve their identity out of the rough-hewn block of self-righteousness, he was right. What he sensed, and what is absolutely accurate, is that what makes activism completely unpalatable for others is that activists are completely unaware of how transparent their disdain for the people they are trying to save is.
If activism, like all scenes, is built on the premise of defining who you are not versus who you are, then the contradiction reaches its most painfully obvious form in a scene dedicated to helping those in other “scenes.”
Activism, as a scene, must overcome its own cultural contradiction.
