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Henry

Post-Democracy in Italy and Europe

by Henry on March 1, 2013

Mark Mazower has a good piece on Italy in today’s Financial Times.

The turmoil produced by the Italian elections has directed attention back to where it should have been all along – to the politics of the eurozone crisis. We have had six months of complacency, rising stock markets and wishful thinking. The conventional wisdom was that the crisis had been contained, with Ireland recovering and the risk of a Greek exit from the eurozone reduced. But this view always ignored the politics. … Technocrat prime minsters, such as Italy’s Mario Monti or Greece’s Lucas Papademos … are creatures of banking and economics. While they may understand money, that no longer recommends them to the voters who would rather have someone who understands them. The result is dangerous. It is but a short step from writing off the political class to writing off the institutions of democracy. So far most voters have not done this in either Italy or Greece. But some have and the temptation is there for more to do so [click to continue…]

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Hugo nominations

by Henry on February 27, 2013

John Scalzi reminds me that there are only 10 days left before Hugo nominations close. Three recommendations (one the subject of a recent CT seminar; another the subject of a forthcoming one), and more about other 2012 f/sf books that I liked below the fold. People should obviously feel free to add other recommendations in comments.

Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath (Powells, Amazon). A lovely and original collection of stories by a Swedish author, most published for the first time in English. It’s hard to pick an individual story, but “Brita’s Holiday Village” is as good as any and available online. Tidbeck writes in the afterword about the profound influence of H.P. Lovecraft. However, the affect of her work is very different. Her stories are not motivated by self-loathing or disgust with the human race, but by a kind of wary affection. The monsters in her stories are our faintly embarrassing relations, and acknowledged as such.

Felix Gilman, The Rise of Ransom City (Powells, Amazon). Up for discussion soon at Crooked Timber, along with its sort-of-prequel, The Half-Made World. Like its predecessor, it’s an oblique take on the American Dream, albeit a different version of it – one which perhaps owes less to the mythologies of the West than to Mark Twain, and perhaps O.Henry’s Jeff Peters stories. It’s funny and self-aware in a way that few f/sf books are (another excellent example is Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock).

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty (Powells, Amazon). All you could want to know here, and, arguably one of the best science fiction novels written in the last several decades. I say ‘arguably’ only because one might claim that it isn’t, and shouldn’t count as part of the genre. The underlying question is whether you think about science fiction as a genre consisting of books about the future, or as a particular method of fictional inquiry. If the former, it plausibly should not be included (although the fact that it is haunted by science fiction, as both Gilman and Holbo suggested in their essays for our seminar, explains some of its power). If the latter, it should be, and should indeed be taken as a model for how you do ambitious sociological science fiction, while retaining an interest in individual human beings.

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Some Microfoundations for Pragmatist Democracy

by Henry on February 13, 2013

One of the arguments that Knight and Johnson make is that standard ‘epistemic’ accounts of democracy do not provide a good foundation for understanding what democracy actually does. Such accounts argue that democratic institutions can do a good job at capturing and aggregating the knowledge of citizens, so that the collectivity can make better decisions than any individual. For example, Condorcet shows that if everyone is slightly more likely to be right than wrong, and if they make their judgments independently, then the more people who vote on a question, the more likely that they will collectively reach the right decision. [click to continue...]

Seminar on The Priority of Democracy

by Henry on February 11, 2013

Over the next several days, we’ll be running a seminar on Jack Knight and Jim Johnson’s recent book, The Priority of Democracy. The participants:

Chris Ansell is a professor of political science at UC Berkeley. He works on pragmatism and Western European politics, and is the author of Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy.

Peter Boettke is University Professor of Philosophy and Economics at George Mason University. His most recent book is Living Economics: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

Henry Farrell blogs here.

Ingrid Robeyns blogs here.

Cosma Shalizi is Associate Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and a former guest-blogger here at CT.

Melissa Schwartzberg is an associate professor and political theorist at Columbia University. She has a forthcoming book under contract with Cambridge University Press, Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule.

Adrian Vermeule is a professor at Harvard Law School. His book, The System of the Constitution, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

Post-Democracy

by Henry on February 11, 2013

Charlie Stross argues that we’re living in a post-democratic system.

Institutional survival pressure within organizations — namely political parties — causes them to systematically ignore or repel candidates for political office who are disinclined to support the status quo or who don’t conform to the dominant paradigm in the practice of politics. … The status quo has emerged by consensus between politicians of opposite parties, who have converged on a set of policies that they deem least likely to lose them an election — whether by generating media hostility, corporate/business sector hostility, or by provoking public hostility. … The news cycle is dominated by large media organizations and the interests of the corporate sector. … Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. … So the future isn’t a boot stamping on a human face, forever. It’s a person in a beige business outfit advocating beige policies that nobody wants (but nobody can quite articulate a coherent alternative to) with a false mandate obtained by performing rituals of representative democracy that offer as much actual choice as a Stalinist one-party state. [click to continue…]

Remembering Aaron Swartz Again

by Henry on February 8, 2013

As Crooked Timber readers will already know, there was a memorial service for Aaron in DC this week. Like Rick Perlstein, I wasn’t able to go. Unlike Aaron’s funeral, it was a specifically political event, intended to draw publicity both to Aaron’s causes and the causes of Aaron’s death.

Public deaths are strange. When someone dies, what is left is an imperfect aggregation of different people’s memories, which can never surprise you in the way that the real person could. But when the aggregation of memories is mostly made up of the memories of people who never knew Aaron directly, it is stranger again. The person whom you knew becomes a mythological figure, onto whom others map all sorts of things that may, or may not, have anything to do with the actual individual. It must be much stranger for the people who knew Aaron much better than I did (we were good friends, but not intimate ones).
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Aaron Swartz Memorial in Washington DC

by Henry on January 29, 2013

For those who can be there:

Members of House, Senate Join Family and Friends of Aaron Swartz for Public Memorial Event at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, DC – On Monday, February 4th, family and friends of Aaron Swartz will join members of Congress at the Cannon House Office Building to honor and celebrate the life, work, and legacy of Aaron Swartz, the accomplished activist and technologist who took his own life on January 11. Aaron’s supporters will also discuss possible reforms and other steps that can be taken to honor his memory

WHAT: Public Memorial Event for Aaron Swartz in Washington, DC, free and open to all

WHO:

Aaron’s father Robert Swartz, his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, his friends David Segal and Ben Wikler, and several members of Congress. Likely attendees include Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. David Ellison (D-MN), Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), as well as others to be announced.

WHERE:

Cannon Office Building, Room TBA,
Independence Avenue SE. Washington, DC 20515

WHEN:

Monday, 4 February 2013. 7:00pm – 9:00pm EST

For details or to RSVP, please visit bit.ly/aaronswDC

For more information, or for interviews please contact Trevor FitzGibbon at 202-406-0646 or by email at trevor@fitzgibbonmedia.com.

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Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at rememberaaronsw.com.

Ecco l’Euro!

by Henry on January 22, 2013

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When going through a jar of old coins during the weekend, I found one that I’d gotten when I lived in Florence in 1999, a kind of proto-euro, issued in Fiesole as a combination test/publicity stunt in the run-up to the real thing. It’s acquired a considerable coat of tarnish in the meantime, which is fitting, and I thought it might be no harm to make a photo of it (together with a number of other similarly verdigrised European coins) available, under a CC license, for anyone who might want to use it for blogposts or the like on the ongoing slow-motion calamity.

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Ecco l’Euro! by Henry Farrell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

MIT and Aaron Swartz

by Henry on January 13, 2013

Larry Lessig, in his justifiably angry post on Aaron Swartz’s death says the following:

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

I have heard the same thing from other people – those involved in trying to help Aaron believe that if MIT had said it didn’t believe that Aaron’s acts were felonies, it would have been extremely difficult for the Department of Justice to proceed in pressing its preposterous charges. Had MIT done the right thing, Aaron Swartz would almost certainly be alive today.

There was certainly internal debate within MIT. David Glenn, in his last piece for the Chronicle reported:

“What Aaron Swartz did was a clear violation of the rules and protocols of the library and the community,” says Christopher Capozzola, an associate professor of history and acting associate dean of the school of humanities, arts, and social sciences. “But the penalties in this case, and the sources of those penalties, are really remarkable. These penalties really go against MIT’s culture of breaking down barriers.”

There was also pressure from prominent alumni:

“MIT has a duty to get down on its knees and beg that this prosecution be dropped,” says Richard M. Stallman, a Boston-based programmer and prominent “free culture” advocate who attended graduate school at MIT in the 1970s.

Academic administrators read the Chronicle with some attention, especially when it comes to their own institution. They can’t possibly have been unaware of the potential fallout – not the risk of suicide, but the risk both of sending someone to prison for the crime of mass-downloading journal articles, and of condoning legal theories which criminalize a wide variety of activities in breach of terms of service, activities that have been committed by nearly every quasi-sophisticated network user at some point.

Capozzola’s description of the issues seems to me to have been an entirely reasonable position. I can understand how administrators in the university would reasonably have been royally pissed at what Aaron did, if the facts were more or less as they have been presented. What I cannot understand is why they didn’t publicly adopt a position along these lines – saying, quite clearly, that Aaron’s actions were unacceptable abuses of the network, but also stating, equally clearly, that they did not merit felony charges, on stretched and dubious interpretations of the law, that potentially had decades of jail time attached to them. I particularly cannot understand why MIT - an institution which as Cappozola says, has a tradition of openness and of tolerating (and indeed celebrating) creative rule-breaking didn’t step up to the plate. Again – it didn’t have to condone what Aaron did. It merely had to make it clear that these actions did not constitute major felonies, and that prosecuting Aaron as a felon was wildly inappropriate.

I know that MIT faculty, MIT students, and MIT alumni read this blog. I respectfully suggest that they start contacting the people that they know at the university looking for some answers from the administration. Why did MIT not take action on this when it could have done some good? Is MIT’s official position that breaches of terms of service do indeed constitute felonies with decades of associated prison time? Or that they sometimes do, and sometimes don’t? Or some version of quod non scripsi, non scripsi? I don’t think that MIT can slide through this without explaining its inaction, since that inaction had quite clear, and quite predictable results (not leading predictably to Aaron’s suicide, but leading, extremely predictably to the Kafkaesque situation which precipitated his suicide).

Update: two commenters point to this email apparently circulated internally within MIT, in which the university’s president promises an internal investigation of how MIT made its choices, and whether better choices might have been available. So consider this post revised to a request that people hold the administration’s feet to the fire, and circulate the report externally as well as internally.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

by Henry on January 12, 2013

I don’t want to write about the circumstances of his suicide – it’s too raw. I do want to write about who he was. I suspect that the media will turn this into a story of Aaron as persecuted hacker, which gets at only one part of him. He was one of the kindest, sweetest, and most generous people I ever knew. He made a lot of money at a very young age, which would have ruined most people (including me). It didn’t ruin Aaron. He used it to live an itinerant life, jumping from project to project, all intended to work towards creating a better world. His enthusiasm was boundless, as was his generosity. When Crooked Timber had big server problems a few years ago, he immediately jumped in to offer to host us (we ended up finding hosting elsewhere). He saw that Rick Perlstein didn’t have a website, back before Rick Perlstein was Rick Perlstein, and he built one for him. He gathered together everything he could of the old Lingua Franca, preserving it and making it available. A skilled techie, he helped put together the revived Baffler, a journal noted for its discontent with things technological. Aaron’s life was a struggle against the forces of entropy, decay and political corruption. He never saw a good cause, but he wanted to adopt it, and do everything he could for it (if a criticism could be made of him, it was that he moved on too quickly from project to project). I knew he had been in a dark place the last few months, because of what was happening to him, but I didn’t know how dark. I’ve lost a dear friend, but American politics and intellectual life has lost someone who did many good things for many people, often quietly, but always to good effect. Other CTers may have other memories of him; those are mine.

Update: Aaron’s family and current partner. Quinn Also, Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Mark Bernstein, James Fallows, Brewster Kahle , Carl Malamud, The Baffler. By request, Aaron’s guest-posts here at CT. Scott McLemee’s story on Aaron from a few years back is here.

Update 2: What Larry Lessig Says.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.” In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

The last time I saw Aaron, we didn’t talk about the JSTOR incident itself, for all the obvious reasons. We did talk about the Kafkaesque nightmare he had landed in, where literally anything he said could be taken grossly out of context and used against him by a prosecutorial apparatus apparently more driven by vindictiveness, stupidity and politics than by any particular interest in justice or the public interest. He told me how, when the police finally came around to search his apartment, some weeks after the charges had been laid, he jokingly asked them what had taken them so long. Of course, he then found these words being twisted by the prosecutors to suggest that he had effectively admitted he was guilty.

Tom Slee’s Self-Assessment

by Henry on January 7, 2013

Tom Slee

The first half of that 15 years was spent writing and studying/researching No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. Whimsley started off as an attempt to promote the book, but soon moved into technology & politics, where it has stayed ever since. The total cost of this writing project to me and my family is now well into six figures in foregone income: several years ago I “negotiated” a four-day working week, largely to pursue this project. On the other hand, it has to coexist with a nearly-full-time job, which means that although much of what I write has a pseudo-academic bent, I doubt that I’m in a position to obtain qualifications relevant to what I write about. … That is not a picture of success, and given the generous support I have received, the responsibility for remaining mistakes clearly lies, as they say, with the author. My major reward from blogging has been to discover a small but select group of very smart people who have continued to read this blog, promote it from time to time, and engage in conversation. Thanks to each of you.

… writing to have an impact at the age of 53 feels very different from writing at the age of 38, and the numbers make it clear that it’s not working. To reinforce that feeling, the traffic for an individual post at the blog depends hugely on whether some of a small number of individuals link to it: I am still dependent, that is to say, on patronage and on chance, and I have not managed to build an audience of my own to sustain significant interest. I write slowly and infrequently, and usually long pieces. Clearly the style and content of my writing has failed to build a significant audience. … I have no credentials behind what I write, I’m terrible at self-promotion, my networks related to my writing are minimal, and although some pieces have been provocative I am uncomfortable in the culture of quickfire debate that drives much political writing. None of those things is likely to change. If anything, the effort has emphasized to me the importance of credentials

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Poor Little Burckhardt

by Henry on January 3, 2013

Perhaps these heebie-jeebies are mine and mine alone, but the parallels between this Sasha Issenberg piece

The Obama campaign embedded social scientists from the Analyst Institute among its staff. Party officials knew that adding new Democratic voters to the registration rolls was a crucial element in their strategy for 2012. But already the campaign had ambitions beyond merely modifying nonparticipating citizens’ behavior through registration and mobilization. It wanted to take on the most vexing problem in politics: changing voters’ minds. … as campaigns developed deep portraits of the voters in their databases, it became possible to measure the attributes of the people who were actually moved by an experiment’s impact. … An experimental program would … develop a range of prospective messages that could be subjected to empirical testing in the real world. Experimenters would randomly assign voters to receive varied sequences of direct mail—four pieces on the same policy theme, each making a slightly different case for Obama—and then use ongoing survey calls to isolate the attributes of those whose opinions changed as a result.

and this classic Frederik Pohl short story

It was the morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream. It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words. He shuddered and opened his eyes. Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling. Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scent was normal enough — except for the sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared: “Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up and down the ballot? YES! You just bet you are!” Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles … but his voice goes on and on through one June 15th after another.

are a little more immediate than I would like.

I’m bullish about how experimentalism can improve democratic practice, when it happens under conditions of rough power equality. But it can equally be used to improve techniques of manipulation. One of the big themes of Pohl’s 1950s science fiction (The Space Merchants, “The Wizards of Pung’s Corners”) was how unpleasant the world could become if advertising actually worked. We may be about to find out if he’s right.

SASE Conference: States in Crisis

by Henry on January 2, 2013

I’m on the executive committee of SASE, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, which means that I plug their annual conference every year around this time. This year, the conference theme is States in Crisis, and is taking place from June 27-June 29 in Milan, Italy. The conference’s main target group is economic sociologists, but there’s a good mix of people from other social science disciplines, including political science. If you’re interested, you have two weeks to submit paper or panel proposals …

Academic and Workplace Freedom – Open Thread

by Henry on December 20, 2012

Since we are not allowing regular comments on the letter below, I thought it would be only fair to open up a different thread for people who want to comment more broadly on matters related to this case, or the general issues it raises. No trolling, but feel free to comment as per on a regular post.

Shorter Eugene Volokh

by Henry on December 15, 2012

Train kindergarten teachers as shooters. Tool them up. Problem solved.

Update: I can only imagine that Megan McArdle is jealous of all the attention Eugene Volokh has been getting.

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