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| Mar May |
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Clive Thompson's excellent New York Times magazine piece on Google and China plays out variations on Google's famous "Don't be evil" principle inspired by the company's new accommodation with Chinese censorship. Censorship is surely a form of evil; but is it all right to compromise a little bit with said evil if one is doing so on behalf of a greater good? Google's famous mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"; is it okay to fulfill a lot of that mission by betraying a little of it?
These themes, Thompson rightly points out, echo the arguments in the 1980s between the anti-apartheid movement, which argued for boycott, and the "constructive engagement" position of companies that said they were able to do good by doing business in South Africa. But today's U.S. economy is far more deeply entangled with China than 1980s America was with South Africa. Few today would argue for an economic boycott of China; where would we get our goods? It's a historical irony that the record national debt run up by today's conservative Republican hegemony -- heirs to the red-baiters of yore -- can only be underwritten by the heirs of Mao in the People's Republic of China.
So boycott is off the table; maybe engagement is better than nothing. I'm not wholly convinced, and I don't think Thompson is, either. But his piece lays out the nuances in a useful and thought-provoking way.
Most interesting, to me, is this observation about Chinese blogger Zhao Jing:
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The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways. |
I think that observation applies not only in China, but everywhere, and certainly here, in the U.S., where so many observers in the media continue to misunderstand the importance of blogging. Most journalists with successful careers have completely internalized the sort of "empowerment" Zhao experienced when he started blogging. Not only do they take it for granted, they take it as a professional right, and they have a hard time understanding what it might mean for non-journalists to experience. They simply can't accept that a blogger's musings might have significance for him/herself, and reach an audience of 12, or 120, and never engage a vast audience, and that might still feel like a success.
A China full of people -- not all billion, maybe only hundreds or tens of millions, but lots, anyway -- experiencing that sense of "self-actualization" might be a nation that grew less and less satisfied with a censoring regime and increasingly interested in changing it.
That doesn't get Google off the hook, exactly, since Google isn't facilitating self-publishing in China -- the Google-owned Blogger doesn't operate inside China the way MSN Spaces does. But it's another sign that absolutist, black-and-white rhetoric is too limited for this arena. Google might well be betraying its "Don't be evil" slogan; but the slogan might also be too simple-minded for the complexities of the global stage.
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Dave Winer talks about the growing importance of Bittorrent, mentions how Opera (still my favorite browser!) now supports it, and asks for "more non-infringing content."
Hollywood hates Bittorrent because some people use it to redistribute illegally copied movie and music files. In the case of music, you can use Bittorrent to move around large libraries very quickly.
But the most common use of Bittorrent I see out there is not trading humongo MP3 libraries but instead much-higher-quality (.flac, .shn, etc.) recordings of live shows by bands that support such trading. These "lossless" music files are much bigger than MP3s; Bittorrent makes it possible to download them in a reasonable amount of time. The file traders are religious about preferring the higher-quality compression scheme -- many will include little notices begging you not to convert the files to the "lossy" MP3.
Personally, I consider these recordings "non-infringing," though I don't know what the lawyers would say. Largehearted Boy does a daily "Bittorrent Brunch" pointing to new postings, many at Dimeadozen.
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One of my first stops each morning is Jim Romenesko's venerable blog of news-industry items. Since I work with one foot in the world of politics and journalism and the other in the tech world, sometimes the headlines trip me up.
This morning, for instance, I learned from Romenesko that "WP promotes Perl." Aha! The Washington Post has decided that the open-source programming/scripting language Perl is the answer to its problems! No, this is a journalist named Peter Perl, and he's becoming the Post's associate managing editor. I'm not sure how many of Romenesko's readers know, or care, what Perl is. But maybe they should.
Case in point: today's dose of Romenesko pointed me toward New York magazine, where Kurt Andersen ponders whether the Web industry is once more heading into bubble territory -- and concludes that it is. I don't know which is scarier: Andersen's general portrait of ignorance chasing investment returns, or his specific news that Michael Wolff (of "Burn Rate" fame) is plotting his return to the Net industry.
Andersen takes a bemused stance, suggesting that nobody really knows how far the insanity will go this time around. It's hard to argue with that. But -- as many media-industry-focused, New-York-based writers trying to get their heads around trends incubated in other places often have -- he generalizes his own sense of ignorance a bit too broadly, implying that his own failures to pick up the scent of important new tech trends mean that any effort to do so must be doomed.
He kicks off with a series of anecdotes: In 1994, Time's Walter Isaacson told him to nab the "New York" domain name for New York mag, which he was editing. Andersen admits he didn't know what Isaacson was talking about. In 2000, when he was launching Inside.com, his partner Michael Hirschorn suggested that they create blogs on their site. Andersen didn't know what blogs were. Two years later, as Inside was imploding, a friend in the business told him he should look into RSS. The term drew another blank stare.
These experiences, Andersen concludes, "confirm William Goldman's truism about show business: Nobody knows anything."
No, they don't do that at all. In fact, Andersen's advisers all seem to have known some very valuable and important things, things that he could have learned -- and profited -- from. I'll give him credit for openly admitting his ignorance; that's more than a lot of writers would do. But the leap from "I keep missing the boat" to "there is no boat" is unwarranted.
In the mid-'90s, as the hard work of building the Web industry began, it was hard to get people in New York to take what was happening on the Internet seriously. Then, in the late '90s, as the prospect of vast IPO returns loomed, it was hard to get them to view anything that was happening on the Net critically. When the bubble burst, the general feeling in the corridors of media power was, "Thank God that Web stuff is over -- now we can stop paying attention to all those Silicon Valley acronyms." Today, apparently, the bit has flipped once more, and New York is returning to an uncritical embrace of all things Webbish.
What about the middle position? The one where you say, there's enormous value and considerable crap bubbling out of the technology industry, and you try to do the hard work of sorting one from the other?
Ah, but that would mean trying to learn about things like domain names and blogs and RSS before they become buzzwords. And that, it seems, is simply asking too much.
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This past week, my minimal free time was devoted to: spring break for the kids; getting over a miserable cold; and continued work on edits for my book. Blogging recommences henceforth.
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