John McQuaid

Jack Shafer finds Michael Crichton’s 1993 predictions about the impending death of the mainstream media are now sounding pretty accurate, if still a bit behind schedule. Crichton’s idea of intelligent bots that scour the web for personalized news and other content will almost certainly come to pass. What if there were, in effect, no mainstream media – no cable news, no newspapers, no traditional journalism institutions at all?

In this scenario you would get your information on, say, the Chinese earthquake from eyewitnesses posting to blogs (which your bot would translate and filter for reliability/readability), from disaster relief experts with NGOs and universities, from geologists and from satellite photography.

Journalists are trained to believe that people crave authoritative voices, and that that kind of authority comes from an institution – an organization with a history, a track record for reporting and interpreting current events. But in the emerging media universe (call it the cloud model) news institutions are in decline and authoritative individuals and loosely-defined organizations (for example, the Huffington Post) are on the rise. More “authoritative individuals” are on the web every day; their authority derives from diverse institutions – universities, government agencies, NGOs, personal experience – and the web’s community linkages give them a reach and influence they could never achieve an an earlier era.

I agree with this:

The magnitude of the crises we face, the speed with which they are unfolding (as we’re just beginning to understand) and their interconnectedness and interpenetration into every aspect of human society mean that the solutions we need to embrace are not going to be the same sort of solutions we’re used to thinking of now.

The discussions we see today — whether we’re talking energy sources, farming practices or fashion choices — are not even the right kind of debate. Unable to mentally grapple with the idea that we need to be aiming for total sustainability right now, we talk to death the same series of inadequate baby steps. Faced with the need to reinvent the material basis of our civilization, we argue paper or plastic.

If you want truly dangerous bright green ideas, go way out beyond what the conventional wisdom thinks is possible. The conventional wisdom’s sense of the possible is irrelevant to reality; it’s being melted by climate change and planetary crisis faster than an Alpine glacier. Think, instead, of the implications of ideas like zero energy, zero emissions, zero waste, closed loops, true-cost accounting for the value of ecological services, product-service systems, visible flows, totally transparent backstories, open innovation, green infrastructure, etc. These concepts are really weird, full of new insights and critical uncertainties — and they, or ideas like them, are very quickly going to become the operating principles of our entire society. If we want to avoid a catastrophic collision with ecological reality, we need to change our thinking.

Our ideas of what’s normal, or even what’s possible, will not outlast the next decade.

Most of the solutions being proposed today for climate change and energy shortages are small-bore fixes, but because they involve some modest economic pain, our political systems (in the developed world, especially the U.S.) can barely handle them, and those of the growth-crazy developing world not at all. Even the programs that are both ambitious and politically viable, such as cap-and-trade/carbon offset markets, aren’t really working yet, and address only a slice of the multiple ripple effects we’re already seeing in the environment, water, food, and general living conditions around the planet. Here’s the question – how do you reinvent government and redefine our collective relationship with the environment on the fly, as material conditions are changing and our expectations – economic, ecological, social – can no longer be trusted?

NASA photo

I don’t have much to add to the copious amounts of bandwidth already accorded Scott McClellan’s book. What’s interesting about the “explosive revelations” is just how unremarkable they are. The war in Iraq was a mistake sold with a propaganda campaign, the media didn’t aggressively question this, the White House was disengaged the week of Hurricane Katrina, Karl Rove and the president ran a permanent campaign rather than governing.

Most of the country recognized these points years ago and rejected the Bush presidency because of them. What’s interesting is that, by simply acknowledging a few political realities, McClellan becomes the instigator of the first big break with the White House’s permanent campaign to evade and deny reality itself. For a long time, those efforts were successful – as in organized crime or the Kremlin, if you broke ranks, they came for you.

Now McClellan’s former White House associates are rolling out a familiar mix of rage and condescension over his words. At this point though, there’s nothing left to defend except the Bush cult of loyalty itself. McClellan evidently made the calculation they couldn’t really hurt him.

Also: please note how Drudge cleverly manages to have it both ways with his headline, “SCOTT THE SNITCH.” Snitching is, by definition, telling the truth, only dishonorably.

The political coverage at The New Republic is often brilliant. But sometimes the writers seem to get lost in the data points and other arcana generated by the daily news cycle. They overdetermine. They gin up intricate arguments that lead nowhere. It’s the curse of being very smart and marinating in really stupid campaign coverage – there’s only so much you can say, but TNR has to say more.

Take this piece by Isaac Chotiner, who writes of his experience with MSNBC: “I increasingly started watching the channel last year because of its political focus, and for the novelty of seeing outspoken liberals on television. How often does one hear a news anchor rant against the corruption of Bush’s Washington, after all?” But then he notes that MSNBC (actually, he is talking mostly about Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann) is notably pro-Obama and anti-Clinton, in addition to being anti-Bush. And that the pro-Obama slant seems to be based not on a cool analysis of policy differences or leadership potential, but crass, button-pushing emotion. And this is bad, because it’s like Fox News. Except, not really:

If an Obama presidency were to bomb in a way similar to George W. Bush’s (unlikely, sure, but I’m speaking hypothetically here), it’s difficult to imagine that MSNBC would treat Obama as reverentially as Fox still does Bush. (In fact, I could see an issue like press access leading to a break between the channel and President Obama even if he thrives in office.)

MSNBC has found a crass, semi-winning formula that is entertaining, gives liberals a voice, and is probably not as bad as Fox. Given the state of the cable news business, that sounds pretty good. He also warns that the pro-Obama spin creates a false impression of the candidate’s support. True enough, but how many people regularly watch MSNBC, and how many of them take Chris Matthews seriously?

There are two reasons why I left the newspaper business and, at the moment anyway, have no intention of going back. The first was that many of the people controlling the business today do not care all that much about journalism. The second was that, among those who do care, hardly any have a clue about what has hit them, or what to do about it.

I don’t have any magical suggestions, but it’s clear the future of most newspapers is paperless, free, and heavily local in character. But these are very broad descriptions; there is still an enormous range of possible outcomes, good and bad, even with those preconditions.

For instance, the “hyperlocal” idea is useful but inadequate if taken literally, given that we’re in an era when categories of local and global are increasingly blurred. Virtual communities know no geographical boundaries. Both economic globalization and climate change have serious local and global effects, and political/policy fixes will increasingly have to straddle those categories. The more “hyper” the local in newspaper coverage, and the more it becomes just a buzzword, driven by business models that don’t incorporate an understanding of the community or the world, the more blinkered and navel-gazing the local newspaper will become. Not good, given where they’re starting from.

Lee Abrams is Tribune’s new innovation director, coming from XM Radio and a long, highly successful career as a radio executive, and he’s made a practice of writing long, stream-of-consciousness memos about what’s wrong with newspapers. His latest is up on Romenesko. (Speaking of, why did Tribune – apparently – make Abrams abandon his blog? Seems like exactly the kind of reflexive, decidedly non-innovative corporate diktat that is killing the business.) It’s great to see an outsider and proven innovator looking critically at the business. But I’m not loving what I’m reading:

*Changes are made but they are SO subtle that no-one outside of the building notices.

*Writers and Editors content is undermined by a generally dated and tired look, that is tweaked but not noticeably evolved.

*Are rife with assumptions. That people will find great stories…that the paper will get credit for breaking stories…that the writers are known commodities…that the paper is the center of the local news universe. Well—not necessarily. Historically yes, but in 2008, not a given. Gotta REALIZE WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED by the Google’s and Fox’s…and FIGHT BACK…RECLAIM YOUR TURF! Ain’t gonna happen by osmosis.

*Are not very aggressive. At least by today’s standards. If a radio station had the circulation declines facing newspapers, all hell would break loose and you’d see the big guns pulled out. I don’t see that in newspapers. When AOL started declining, they blew up the company. My point is that we gotta fight back….fight back to reclaim. It’ll never be 1938 again, but there’s no reason newspapers can’t aggressively get in the 2008 competitive groove and grow again.

Well, yeah. But all of this has been obvious for years. If Tribune needs to spend big bucks to hire a proven innovator to come in and write memos telling its employees what any reader can see, things are worse than even I imagined. And while a little old-fashioned fire in the belly can’t hurt, it’s not a solution. Abrams mentions Fox and Google as the competitors, the enemy newspapers must gird themselves to battle. But if you’re at at a medium-sized, Tribune-owned paper, are Fox and Google really your chief competitors? How are newspaper execs, editors and reporters supposed to get lathered up for a fight when they don’t even know who or what their rivals are anymore? (Blogs? XM Radio? iPods? Jon Stewart?)

Again, no brilliant solutions here. But newspapers do need to blow things up. The current model, with its layers of editors, copy editors, classified ad reps and pillar-of-the-community caution, has to go. Papers need to experiment, try new formats, new models. There’s the open-source idea advanced by newassignment.net, or by local startups such as Paul Bass’s New Haven Independent. That’s one way to inject both new perspectives and some buzz into the business at the same time. But papers also have to protect and nourish two things they already have – reporting and the newspaper “brand.” Original voices and journalistic credibility are pretty much all papers have left – and they’re good both for making money and for the healthy functioning of society.

The Politico’s John Harris identifies an important source of the pathology afflicting campaign coverage — web traffic:

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days. . . .

As leaders of a new publication, Politico’s senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news — sometimes big news, sometimes small — that drives that day’s conversation.

Interestingly, Harris denied precisely this notion in an email exchange with Glenn Greenwald some months back. Citing a number of recent surveys, Greenwald goes on to point out that the “day’s conversation” the Politico and other news organizations are seeking to drive has veered far from what actual voters think is relevant or interesting:

The standard excuse that journalists like Harris give for their obsession with insipid gossip — “it’s what The People Want” — is the opposite of what The People say when they speak for themselves. And while it’s possible that what The People say they want is not really what they want, the declining audience and influence of establishment news outlets across the board is potent evidence of how false is the justification that the political media focus on irrelevancies because it’s what The People demand.

All too often the media conversation hews to 20-years-out-of-date cultural hot buttons that are also the obsessions of the conservative media and right-blogosphere. The conservative media tend to move en masse toward the outrage of the day, be it Edwards’s haircuts or Obama’s pastor, and the MSM reflexively follow, generating links and web traffic along the way. But this year those kinds of concerns are out of sync, to say the least, with what the majority of Americans are thinking, given the epochal screwups of the past eight years.

It’s an odd dynamic: the Internet/hypertext and a creaky set of boomer-era cultural attitudes, feeding one another. And it’s particularly dangerous for the mainstream media precisely because there is no “mainstream” on the Internet (or, perhaps, anywhere anymore). Web audiences are passionate, but demographically small and highly segmented. Multiple linking and web traffic generate both buzz and advertising revenues, and those turn create an illusion of broad cultural relevance. In fact, though, the endless hankering to be the next hour’s top item on Drudge is driving the media to cultural – and economic, and ultimately political – irrelevance instead.

The director’s cut of Blade Runner is terrific on the big screen (in my case, the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring). One trivial observation: The Tyrell Corporation occupies a monumental headquarters that dominates the L.A. skyline; it clearly has enormous resources in order to be able to produce armies of genetically-engineered replicants. So you’d think it would also have platoons of staff scientists (otherwise, who is occupying all that office space?) and be subsidizing research at universities. Even if most of the population has migrated off-world, advanced research institutions must still exist somewhere, if only to facilitate the colonization of other planets. Tyrell also ought to have middle managers, lawyers and lobbyists, not to mention security guards. Instead, the company appears to operate exclusively on the genius of its founder and the services of creepy freelance genetic artists who live and work in squalor. I’m not sure if this has any significance to the themes of the movie, or is simply the easiest dramatic architecture. But it is interesting that the standard features of the corporate-industrial world, which are great fodder for stories set in dystopian futures, are absent from this particular one.

Also: in 2019 L.A. everyone smokes.

There’s good news and bad news out of Burma today. The good news: the Burmese generals have apparently agreed to let international aid workers into the areas hit hardest by Cyclone Nargis three weeks ago. The bad news: the junta is evidently planning to use its grudging concessions as leverage to grab a big prize – billions in reconstruction aid:

Burma’s military junta is seeking up to $11.7 billion in reconstruction aid at a donor conference scheduled this weekend in Rangoon, the former Burmese capital, raising fears among human rights activists and Western governments that Tropical Cyclone Nargis could become a diplomatic and financial windfall for the reclusive regime.

Burma has a gross domestic product of only about $15 billion, and Burmese officials have not indicated how they reached their damage assessment when as many as three-quarters of the 2.5 million victims of the May 2-3 cyclone have not yet received assistance.

If this gambit succeeds, it would be the worst of both worlds: disaster capitalism meeds totalitarianism. “Disaster capitalism” is a term coined by journalist Naomi Klein and explored in her book The Shock Doctrine. The basic idea is that our era’s mega-disasters have become a huge business for giant infrastructure corporations, and an excuse for clumsy free-market social engineering in which government support for disaster victims and reconstruction is supplanted by a kind of laissez faire free-for-all. (This thesis is a bit too deterministic for my taste, but Klein does put her finger on a broad trend we’ve seen in New Orleans, the 2004 tsunami and other disasters.)

In Burma’s case, the regime presumably hopes to get the billions while eschewing the free market part of the bargain. That would be a disaster in and of itself – sending billions to Burma without strict controls on how and where and by whom it is spent would facilitate one of the biggest thefts in history. Surely the diplomats and relief officials now on their way to Rangoon are well aware of this. The problem is, as the Post article notes, that both countries and corporations have been coveting Burma’s largely-untapped natural wealth for decades. They’ve sat by while the Burmese junta has become steadily more isolated. Now, there’s an entrée. But if history is any guide, unleashing the developers on Burma under the guise of reconstruction would enrich the regime and the companies involved, while providing little accountability on actual aid and reconstruction for the cyclone’s victims.

The Manhattan Institute‘s City Journal has an interesting piece up on the bottom-up reconstruction efforts in New Orleans. It’s filled with telling examples of how, given the fumbling redevelopment efforts of the city government, most of the reconstruction has been accomplished by residents and NGOs. Their creative efforts, accomplished in the face of endless red tape and wrongheaded urban planning, are indeed a bright spot, a good harbinger for the city’s future. For example:

Architect Byron Mouton is finding that his middle-class and affluent clients are doing the different in pursuit of the practical. In Gentilly, a neighborhood of mostly twentieth-century homes that took seven feet of water, one client, an artist, wanted a new flood-resistant house like the one his neighbor is building, with a bottom floor raised at least a story off the ground, but couldn’t afford the $30,000 to $40,000 extra charge. The architect’s solution: a “disposable” first floor that the client will use for nonessential purposes. In Mouton’s design, the second floor contains the kitchen, art studio, and living space, as well as an ample porch so that the artist won’t be cut off from the outdoors. In other twentieth-century neighborhoods, some homeowners are similarly designing ground floors as “floodable” car garages or children’s play spaces.

Aside from the hard information, though, the piece is a tendentious attempt to impose a libertarian ideal on a place that no amount of individual effort or entrepreneurship alone will fix. Let’s start with the elephant in the room: the government. Here’s the piece’s framing paragraph:

New Orleanians have achieved much of this success by doing what New Yorkers couldn’t do after 9/11: ignoring the potentates and eggheads hankering to turn devastation into conceptual art. They’ve been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree—and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master.

Yes, government at all levels has failed New Orleans. And individuals have done their best to make up for it, often with minimal government support and a great deal of government interference. But that doesn’t mean those people wouldn’t be a lot better off with a government that actually was working to help them.

The basic predicament of New Orleans – its siting, mostly below sea level, on an eroding, hurricane-prone river delta – is extraordinary and requires a sustained national, i.e., federal, commitment. Without one, the city may not even be there in 100 years. But it’s not getting it. (Even the 17th Street canal floodwalls are still, ominously, leaking.) Any long-term planning for the city should be looking at ways to tie flood control structures into a single system, and integrate that with the urban landscape, with neighborhoods and homes. This includes things like the drainage canals running along backyards, evacuation routes, and emergency planning. In other words, New Orleans desperately needs more competent government and better urban planning – not less. Personal initiative is great, but it only gets you so far in an age of global warming.

It’s also obtuse to compare the redevelopment efforts at Ground Zero with New Orleans. From size of the footprint (confined vs. sprawling), to the type of development (high rise business vs. mostly single-family residential) to the strategic problems (terror target/flooding), they bear no resemblance to each other, and have radically different lessons to offer urban planners. Beyond that, I am not sure what the point of the comparison is – the kinds of small-bore initiatives underway in New Orleans can’t build skyscrapers and public monuments.

Just as the author duns urban planners for paternalistic social engineering, she falls into the same trap, treating New Orleans as a kind of grand libertarian experiment, the proverbial clean slate in which all social structures are literally washed away and people start fresh. This meme has popped up lately in other places too. It is a romantic and wrongheaded notion. It is true that New Orleans is a kind of grand, improvised experiment. But it does the city and its people a disservice to pat them on the back and say, hey, great job you’re doing all on your own – let’s keep it that way.

Via Kottke, here’s an interesting roundup of the news and commentary on Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee South African sprinter who propels himself using carbon-fiber prosthetic blades. Initially rejected from mainstream competition because he was deemed to have an unfair advantage, Pistorius was last week granted the right to compete in the Olympic trials.

Watching a clip of Pistorius running the 400m with able-bodied athletes, I’m struck by how different his race
strategy is.  Because of the blades, he actually has to kind of stand up straight at the start in order to continue moving forward.  As a result, his start is much slower than that of the other athletes. But halfway through the sprint, he starts to pick up tremendous speed and, while other runners are starting to show signs of slowing down, he sustains this speed across the finish.  It’s amazing to watch–and not only because Pistorius is doing this on prosthetic legs.  In order to accomplish this feat, he has to utilize muscles and techniques that able-bodied runners don’t rely on.  Why should these things necessarily place him in a separate category?  Embracing new kinds of competitors and strategies is how a sport–how anything, really–evolves. 

As the cyborg revolution continues, and the lines between natural and artificial blur further, traditional categories of athletic ability break down (given the ubiquity of doping, they are already outmoded, if not useless). Is Pistorius disabled, differently abled, or super abled? Should bionic enhancements be banned, regulated, or encouraged for all? One gets the sense that, looking back 50 or 100 years hence, this will turn out to be the moment when everything changed.