We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Dead trees and pajama kids at the Adam Smith Institute

The ASI hosted a gathering of bloggers and curious old media types in Westminster last night. Times journo Danny Finkelstein and well known blog commentator Tim Worstall. As with all the ASI events I have attended, I rather enjoyed myself and there was a large posse of OG bloggers to swap scandal with.

Read more about it from Jax here.

Now THAT’S art

Harry Hutton, the funniest man in the blogosphere, has auteured a short film.

The eyes have it

This morning I was on SkyNews on the Saturday live programme debating blogging. It was one of those discussions the media in the UK has started to have, as in… these bloggers are not going away, so let’s make them sound a bit ridiculous and question whatever it is they do. Yawn.

I was in the studio with Bobbie Johnson, a blogger and technology correspondent of the Guardian, and Iain Dale, a former Conservative party candidate, political commentator and.. wait for it.. a blogger. We had fifteen minutes to argue with the presenter about what is a blog, are they any good, shouldn’t blogs be like journalism, what is the bloggers’ responsibility, is it good or bad that they are undermining and stretching the current rules and frameworks etc. So three years ago, dahling…

The questions were extremely basic and there was no time really to answer anything other than try to get a sound-bite in. Perhaps that is why I could not take the whole thing too seriously. Both Bobbie and Iain were good and made the experience rather enjoyable…

The best thing about this morning was an excellent tip from the studio make-up person – she recommended a smudge-proof eyeliner that will do what I want from it, i.e. stay put and make my eyes look smokey. For those interested it is MAC fluidline eye-liner gel. Perhaps the traditional media has something going for it…

Adriana_light21.jpg

And here is a gratuitous pictures of me, with the make-up on.
And yes, it was rather sunny today.

Cross-posted from Media Influencer

Update: Tim Worstall actually watched it! I wish he had been there too but flying all the way from Portugal for the sake of a few silly questions about blogging just does not seem worth it.

Help one of the good guys

Zeyad, one of our favorite Iraqi bloggers needs to raise money to attend CUNY’s School of Journalism.

If you have enjoyed his postings, consider giving him a hand.

More than Jaw-Jaw on War

Matt Welch has written a farewell lament in Reason on what he describes as the demise of warblogging. He harks back to the explosion of the grassroots media after 9/11 when many Americans found that their assumptions about the Middle East and terrorism were turned upside down. From this development, he defined the warblogger as a writer who transcended old partisan divides due to the defining event of a terrorist threat to the homeland.

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

Now, Welch has acquired a new job on the Los Angeles Times, and argues that the political blogging movement has reinforced partisan politics rather than bridging this supposed gap. Yet, the developments that Welch cites to bolster his thesis are disparate and amenable to alternative interpretation. He argues that the “current-events bloggers” have taken a strident approach to particular issues within the Culture War:

The Culture War, which seemed to take a back seat to the genuine article in those traumatized days of late 2001, has come back with a vengeance, with current-events webloggers taking a central role in the hysterical Red/Blue scrums over Terri Schiavo’s comatose body, Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple, and the pressing national security issue of whether people of the same sex should be able to obtain a marriage certificate.

His other examples are the inability of the blogosphere to create a permanent alternative to the mainstream media, like the Pyjamas website and the use of bloggers to galvanise activist support, especially within the Democratic Party. Welch does also emphasize that weblogs are now far more useful for the dissemination of knowledge and the procurement of differing viewpoints on particular issues. But he still views the development of warblogging as a lost opportunity:

But as I look back at December 2001, and prepare to hang up the blogging fun of Reason’s Hit & Run for the stodgier print pages of the L.A. Times, I can’t shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they’d previously sealed off from themselves. You couldn’t predict what anyone would say, especially yourself.

To which the answer is: if you just look at blogs from the political perspective, it will appear more partisan, as activists have established and learned how to use these tools to their advantage. More importantly, many of those who blog on current events have strong and individual voices ranging over a wide spectrum of subjects. Warblogging did not run into the sands or fade away. After a while, bloggers preferred to jaw-jaw on more than just war.

Condolences

My personal condolences to Glenn Reynolds on the sudden death of his grandmother. Check out the old photos. She was stunning in 1938. Her husband looks so much like a young fighter pilot I wonder if he became one!

I am sure she was a fount of family stories and this must be an immense loss to Glenn.

Semi-unplugged

For the last ten days or so, and for about another week, I have been and will continue to be semi-unplugged. Unplugged because my pay-by-the-month internet connection was disconnected a while ago, by some insonsiderate person pushing the wrong button at my internet service provider, but only semi-unplugged, because I have at least been able, thank goodness, to revert to the previous pay-by-the-minute arrengement which preceded my current although currently interrupted arrangement.

I am, therefore, able to link to particular places on the internet that I already know how to get to quickly, such as to this blog posting which I did for the Adam Smith Institute, in which I explain the effect of my present internet miseries, but I am not, as I explained at greater length in that posting, comfortable about just going a-wandering. I can switch on, go somewhere, download it, switch off, and read it. But, I deeply fear switching on, going somewhere, reading it, going somewhere else, reading that, looking something else up, deciding to write something, looking up other stuff, deciding to write something else and making a start with that, . . . you get the picture. It might not cost all that much, especially at the weekend, but in sad old Britain where local phone calls still cost, it could cost me a whole lot too much for comfort. If I did the sums, I might well decide that my state of only semi-linked-ness is a false economy, and that I should just plug myself in regardless and do whatever I feel like doing. But I do not want to have to be worrying.

So, this has been what Americans call a “learning experience”, or what we know on this side of the pond as a considerable nuisance or words to that effect.

However, the particular combination of circumstances – not being permanently connected, but still being able to connect temporarily – has provided me with something you seldom experience in life, namely the contrast between two important stages in my life, with the full knowledge of what both states were like. It really has been a learning experience. → Continue reading: Semi-unplugged

Samizdata quote of the day

Whoever said “there is no such thing as bad publicity” obviously never had their career “Dan Rather’ed” into tiny pieces by the twenty thousand bloggers.

The Pirie Diet

I do so agree with what Madsen Pirie, who is now guest blogging at the Singleton Diet, says about mustard:

Second breakfast consisted of a croissant with the rest of the honey-roasted ham, this time with Florida mustard and fresh orange juice. After it came black coffee. As you might gather, I like mustards, pretty well all of them, wholegrain, English, Dijon, French, Florida, and so on. I even regard sausages as just an excuse for mustard.

I have a jar of Tesco wholegrain mustard on the go right now, and very tasty it is too. I also often eat meat just to eat mustard, but I never really spelled this out for myself before, so I am grateful to Madsen Pirie for doing this for me.

The Singleton Diet, as already reported here, started out as occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton blogging about what he was eating. The idea was for him to get slimmer. But after a while, Alex got fed up with blogging every day or even every few days about his dietary intake, and the Singleton Diet faded. (Whether Alex is now any slimmer, I am not sure, but I rather think he is.)

But now, the Singleton Diet has sprung to life again, with Madsen Pirie as a guest writer. I think this is a really good idea. Who wants to blog about everything they eat for ever? Almost nobody, and if anyone did, who would want to read that for ever? But a succession of different eaters is another matter entirely.

As regular Samizdata readers will know, if you have a pro-freedom attitude towards the world you will always have lots to complain about. But the economic rules and institutions that we favour have also poured forth a Niagara of good news, and in no area of life is this more true than in the matter of food. Thanks to the farmers and especially to the food retailers, we – especially we who live in London, as Alex Singleton, Madsen Pirie, and I all do – now have a world of exciting and exotic food products to choose between and to enjoy. What better way could there be for a man like Madsen Pirie, one of the most notable of London’s freedom mongers of recent decades, to demonstrate that he is capable of enjoying life and not just of proposing improvements for and regretting the derangements of it caused by others, than for him to do a spot of food blogging? It should be a lot of fun.

The Future is drowned by dross

Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and blogger, recently argued that the roots of the Web 2.0 movement creepily echoed the concept of self-realisation underlying Marxist philosophy. Keen describes Web 2.0 as a utopian project to construct new technologies which allow individuals to publish and promote their creative endeavours in music, art, or other forms of print media. The reduction of barriers to entry that this entails has had a radical effect on the traditional media. Keen portrays the movement as ideologically driven by a broad grouping of Silicon Valley veterans, fusing the dynamics of the 60s counter-culture with the techno-utopianism of the 1990s. It is an awkward fit as the New Left is shoehorned with libertarianism and the diversity of the figures cited lends doubt to the utility of the argument beyond a straw man network effect:

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the ’60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google’s Larry Page. Between the book-ends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle.

Keen is aware of his own leanings. Web 2.0 is drawn as an ideology and a political endeavour in order to level the playing field and allow his cultural conservatism to come into play. With arguments that echo those hurled at the development of mass media at the beginning of the twentieth century, Keen laments the passing of a common culture, the rise of mediocrity and the destruction of the existing elite. The future is drowned by dross. With the rise of more enthusiasts and more voices, Keen laments that the role of the media is lost and that personalised media will reflect individual preferences, losing sense of a wider world.

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries — beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people — is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent…..Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural “flattening.” No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion — Socrates’s nightmare…..

……One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

It must be such a chore to be one voice amongst many.

The intrepid Michael Totten in Iraq

I must say that I always enjoy reading what Michael Totten has to say even if I do not always agree (though in truth I find myself agreeing more and more often). His reports from Lebanon were always compelling.

He is now writing from Iraq (Kurdistan to be exact) and I strong recommend people take a peek at his blog.

It’s the thought that counts

I have always had a particularly soft intellectual spot for David Friedman, the economist, for it was he who wrote the first book I ever read which seemed really to describe for me how I wanted to think about the world. It is called The Machinery of Freedom. (David Friedman has a father, called Milton, who also dabbles in economics.) And I now like David Friedman’s blog, which he calls simply Ideas.

However, I do not always agree with David Friedman. Here are some recent thoughts of his:

Finding presents for friends and relatives is often a problem, made harder by the economist’s puzzle of why one should give presents instead of giving cash and letting the recipient, better informed about his own preferences, decide how to spend it. A possible answer is that although I know less about the recipient, I know more about the gift. Acting on that principle, I occasionally pick a book that I and my wife particularly liked, buy a bunch of copies, and give them out as Christmas presents.

What giving money and giving the same book to several different friends have in common as present giving strategies is that they both exhibit an unwillingness to think about the individual desires of the person receiving the gift. “It’s the thought that counts” is no empty slogan. And the particular thought that matters is: “What particular kind of person is he, and what might he really like?”

In one of my very favourite movies, The Apartment, the Shirley MacLaine character’s rich and uncaring married man lover, chillingly played by Fred MacMurray, gives Shirley MacLaine a twenty dollar bill as a Christmas present. He does not even put in a pretty envelope. He just gets it out of his wallet and hands it over. Soon after that, she dumps him, and quite right too. Why? Because this moment proved that he did not care enough about her to give any thought, before meeting with her, to getting her a real present, of the sort that she would like, and which would show that he had thought about what she would like. He simply hadn’t been thinking about her.

Were I one of David Friedman’s friends and I got the same book last Christmas from him that several of his other friends had also got, I would feel ever so slightly slighted, and for the same reason. “He has thought about his own opinions, but he has not thought about mine.” (A copy of The Machinery of Freedom with a carefully composed and hand-written message inside the front cover would be another matter entirely.)

Blog postings, however, are different. Those, like Christmas presents, also come free of charge to the receiver. Yet I do not feel in any way slighted because a blogger has failed to craft an individual thought entirely for me, but has instead given the same thought away to all his readers. On the contrary, incoming emails full of individual thoughts, just for me, can be rather scary, because, like Christmas presents, they can imply an obligation to reciprocate, also individually, which may be unwelcome.

However, notice that a similar principle applies, and in a good way, to blog postings with which one happens to disagree, by thoughtful people like David Friedman, as applies to Christmas presents. A present that shows that the giver has done some thinking is welcome, even if one already has that CD or that book, or happens not to like that kind of chocolate. The “wrong” thing is still right, because it’s the thought that counts. I feel the same way about David Friedman’s occasional wrong (as I think) thoughts in his blog. These mistakes, if mistakes they be, show that he is at least always thinking. Far better lots of thinking, and the occasional consequent disagreement between me and him, than no thinking, and a mere string of truisms.