That's Going to Leave a Mark

Perhaps irritated by being likened to Idi Amin and described as a "'little professor in glasses' leading 'a bunch of wacked-out muppets'," Larry Lessig lowers the boom on Mark Helprin's new book "Digital Barbarism."

It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive demolition - it's sort of like a more polite, yet still almost as humourous, version of one of Matt Taibbi's famed essays mocking Tom Friedman.

Good News For People Who Like Bad News

"‘Well sure as planets come
I know that they end
And if I'm here when that happens
Will you promise me this, my friend,
Please - Bury me with it!
I just don't need none of that Mad Max bulls**t"¹


Post Holiday book review #2: "Our Final Century"² by Martin Rees

For the last few years, I've had this gradually growing sense that the laws of probability are working against mankind and the continued existence of our current civilization.

While the capacity of the system which sustains us (the earth + all our inventions and institutions) to withstand damage is relatively static, our capacity to inflict large scale damage is growing rapidly (exponentially, arguably).

Looking back 200 years, the only real threats to our entire civilization were things like (natural) viral outbreaks, an object from outer space hitting the earth, or an enormous volcanic eruption - that is, the same threats we have always faced.

Those threats are still with us, but we now face added risks like nuclear annihilation and deliberately engineered viruses. On top of that, our growing integration and ever greater sophistication leave us more and more vulnerable to severe computer viruses, economic crises and any number of other threats.

The odds of any one of these things occurring (severely enough to threaten our civilization) are all very small. But as you keep adding more and more things which could potentially go wrong, the probability steadily rises.

So, what about the book? Rees' contention is that, because of the argument I just outlined, we are unlikely to survive to the end of the century. At least not unless we find a way to send life to other planets or we give up much of our freedom to a totalitarian government. Rees devotes chapters to the various threats we face such as biological agents and nuclear threats as well as more esoteric stuff like universe threatening physics experiments while throwing out various depressing thoughts such as the idea that in any field of science the most pessimistic and negative people tend to be the ones who know the most - i.e. the true experts.

But when I got to the end, to tell the truth, I found it a bit disappointing. The writing is clear and concise and not alarmist in tone at all but I think if you just spend five minutes and close your eyes and imagine all the things which could go catastrophically wrong with our entire world that couldn't have gone wrong one or two centuries ago, then you probably don't need to bother reading it, but maybe it's just me. Still, if you find bad news interesting, or you think what I wrote above is just a bunch of bs, or if you want to see it spelled out thoroughly in book form by someone with actual credibility, it's worth a read.

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For those of you who are skeptical that we only have one century left, here's a timely piece of news from the BBC, (brought to my attention by Doug and his dynamic drivel) which provides a great example of the kind of thing me and Rees are talking about.

According to the article, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth has dropped by 10 to 30% in the last few decades. The same amount is reaching the earth's outer atmosphere as ever, but it's not all finding it's way through to the ground.

The leading theory to explain why is that "tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants" are both reflecting sunlight and 'thickening' clouds so that they reflect more sunlight as well.

Apparently, scientists have been surprised that the increase in greenhouse gases hasn't caused a greater rise in temperatures. But they figure that this loss of sunlight ('global dimming' as it is known) may be offsetting global warming to a large extent.

So it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that the only reason we haven't suffered either a painful cooling or warming so far is that our activities have caused two large impacts on our climate, and they just happened to cancel each other out to a fair extent. i.e. We were lucky.

Now we're not making too much progress on reducing our emission which cause global warming, but the pollutants which cause global dimming are more and more coming under control because they are the cause of the visible air pollution which prematurely kills off so many in our large cities (not to mention blocking out the sky).

But if the dimming effect recedes, we may end up facing a much more severe warming trend. From the article:

"We're going to be in a situation unless we act where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up.

"That means we'll get reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's a problem for us," says Dr Cox.

Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards.

That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable."

Final century? I wouldn't bet against it.


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¹Despite taking it's name from a song lyric, this site isn't really a good source for musical info (especially on anything current), but I have to take a moment to mention the album "Good News for People Who Like Bad News", by Modest Mouse which is probably the best thing I've heard in quite a while and (obviously) provided the title for this post as well as the quote at the top which is from track 6, 'Bury Me With It'.

²In North America, the book was given the title, The Sorcerers StoneOur Final Hour, but I don't see why you would replace the literal 'Final Century' which is what the book is about with a metaphorical 'Final Hour' which just sounds like the hyperbole that it is.

Post Holiday Book Reviews: Rebel Sell

Of all the various forms of writing, the book review has to be one of the ones I know least about. Of course, if I was going to let something like lack of knowledge of what I'm talking about keep me from posting, this blog wouldn't be here. So far, the most interesting book I've read over the holidays has been, The Rebel Sell, which was first (and second, third and fourth) brought to my attention by Darren Barefoot - so here's the review.

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Reading through the Rebel Sell, I was consistently entertained, but I found it difficult to keep track of the general argument in my mind. Looking back over the table of contents, it's not hard to see why, the book doesn't seem to have any coherent structure to it: the chapters are more like a series of meditations on the same set of basic points, with the occasional digression into just about anything the authors happen to find annoying about left-wing commentary. That said, I found myself generally agreeing with most of what was written and finding some definite insights, so I have made the effort to pull out what I believe to be the main argument:

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1. Society has lots of problems (e.g. there's too much pollution, you find the same stores everywhere, lousy conditions on factory farms, school children way too concerned over what they're wearing, etc.)

From here the argument splits in two: the counter-culture version of how to solve these problems (as described by the authors) and the authors view on how to solve them.

'Counter-Culture' view of the world:

2 a) The 'Counter-culture' (think Naomi Klein, AdBusters, anti-globalization protestors, Rabble.ca etc.) believes that these problems are reflective of a systemic problem with (Western) culture / capitalism / paternalistic institutions (like organized religion, schools, hospitals etc.). Collectively known as 'the system' or 'the man' these institutions enforce statism, conformity, oppression, rationality, stifling of creativity etc.

3 a) Since the specific problems we see are just symptoms of the underlying disfunction of our society / culture / system, the way to solve them is not by addressing them directly, but rather by changing the 'root problem' - i.e. changing the system.

4 a) Since the government, the church and the other institutions are part of the problem, they can't be effective as part of the solution. The way to solve the problems is by taking individual action and by forming together into groups (as long as these don't become too formalized - otherwise they are betraying themselves by becoming part of the system) in order to defeat / change the system.

5 a) Once the system is defeated, the general mass of people will see the light / 'have their consciousness raised' and will be ready to do things the new way (which will then solve all of our problems).

Author's View of the World:

2 b) The authors believe that most (many) of the problems we face are not caused by 'the system' but are instead collective action problems¹. Basically, prisoner-dilemma like situations where what makes sense for each of us individually doesn't make sense for us collectively (e.g. I am safer if I buy a gun and you don't but if we both buy guns then we are less safe than if neither of us did - hence the rationale for gun control).

3 b) Rather than changing the system, what we need to do is improve the system to solve these collective action problems.

4 b) Since, by definition, a collective action problem requires collective action to solve, solutions which disregard our collective institutions (i.e. government) in favour of individual (or unformalized group) action are doomed to failure.

5 b) The way to solve the collective action problems is to institute solutions which apply to everybody. Rather than being coercive limitations on our freedom as the counter-culture would suggest, these rules will instead protect us from harmful prisoner's dilemmas.

6 b) If only counter-culturalists would stop trying to destroy the system they could work towards fixing it, and we would have the necessary political willpower to solve our collective action problems.
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Once we have this framework, the entirety of the book can be seen as a long series of examples which attempt to support the argument (and show that the Author's view is accurate while the counter-cultural one is counter-productive).

A couple of the more memorable examples they give are:

School uniforms: Counter-culturalists reject the oppression of conformity and uniformity they bring while the authors suggest they are just a practical way to stop the collective action problem whereby students are forced to put great effort into buying and wearing the right clothing to avoid being seen as geeks/losers etc.)

Advertising: Counter-culturalists think we can defeat the advertising system by turning brand power against the companies which own them through culture jamming, protesting etc. while the authors suggest that advertising is just a collective action problem in which one company can gain an edge by advertising but then other companies have to respond and then it just keeps escalating like an arms race. What's needed is government rule changes to help companies get away from this self-destructive behavior (they recommend making advertising only 50% tax deductible - a good idea in my view).

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The biggest source of confusion (for me) was that the authors dwelt at great length on one particular example - the example of counter-culturalists trying to defeat 'the system' through their consumption choices. So much so that at first I thought the book was actually just about this particular case and was thus puzzled at all the other unrelated examples they threw in.

So we hear about Adbusters selling their own branded shoes, Naomi Klein living in a loft instead of a suburban house, alternative music instead of the mainstream, free range chickens and on and on, with the Authors consistently asserting that not only are these consumption choices not going to destroy capitalism, they are in fact reinforcing it (because these purchases are only done to achieve status by being unique but eventually what was initially cool (i.e. grunge music) becomes mainstream so the counter-culturalists have to find some new cool trend to buy stuff for, leading to a never ending cycle of consumption in the pursuit of counter-cultural status symbols).

Aside from the confusion caused by not clearly separating this frequently cited example from their core argument, I was surprised the authors would choose this particular example to focus on since it doesn't seem like one of their strongest.

The primary weakness of the consumption example (to me) is that, clearly not all 'counter-cultural' purchases are made in pursuit of distinction or status. Lots of people buy organic produce, not to feel morally superior or just to be different, but because they're willing to pay more to avoid the negative externalities caused by pesticides. If everyone started buying organic food and it started being sold by Kraft or whoever, most of the current organic food advocates would see this as a good thing - not as a sign that organic was no longer cool and that it was time to buy something else.

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Looking at the book as a whole, the big weaknesses were the lack of structure, the over-emphasis of the one (not particularly strong) example, a tendency to argue against their opponents weaker points and ignore their stronger ones and a tendency to sometimes gloss over things a little too quickly.

Strengths were the clear entertaining prose, the wealth of interesting examples, the emphasis on collective action problems and the need for government involvement to solve them, and the broad range of ideas and other points of view that they covered.

The true message at the core of the book comes through when the authors talk about what they call the counter-culture's cardinal sin: opposing (or at least not endorsing) positive changes in the laws/regulations because they were just superficial changes that are all part of the same corrupt, screwed up system. As an example of this, they mention how in Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore rejects gun control laws as a solution since they don't get to the root of the problem which is the culture of fear in the United States.

I'd go into more detail on the strengths and weaknesses but I've already written too much (writing a book review is hard).

In a nutshell? If you're interested in consumerism or environmentalism this book is the best I've read on the topic in quite a while - even in this long-winded post I've only scratched the surface of what's in it. I just wish they had taken the time to structure their argument in a logical, easy-to-follow manner (it would have saved me some trouble anyway).

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I feel like I haven't really gotten the point across about just how many collective action problems we face so perhaps I will add an (infrequently) recurring post on 'Collective Action Problem for the Day' starting with some of the better ones mentioned in the book and then moving on to whatever seems worthy/relevant/topical as time goes by.

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¹ If you want more background on what is a Prisoner's Dilemma / Collective Action problem, the Wikipedia article is excellent and very readable.