Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 177

two quotations on technological impermanence (plus commentary)

Jason Snell:

Every time an app I rely on exposes its mortality, I realize that all the software I rely on is made by people. And some of it is made by a very small group of people, or even largely a single person. And it gives me pause, because whether that person decides to stop development or retires or is hit by the proverbial bus, the result is the same: That tool is probably going to fade away.

A lot of the software I rely on is a couple of decades old. And while those apps have supported the livelihoods of a bunch of talented independent developers, it can’t last forever. When James Thomson decides to move to the Canary Islands and play at the beach all day, what will become of PCalc? When Rich Siegel hangs up his shingle [NB: idiom error] at Bare Bones Software, will BBEdit retire as well? Apps can last as abandonware for a while, but as the 32-bit Mac app apocalypse taught us, incompatibility comes for every abandoned app eventually.

Robin Rendle:

At some point or another this website, this URL, won’t resolve though. Maybe the Internet Archive will stick around for a while, but then everything is locked within this vast archive.

But if my URL is dead, my website dies with it.

My work shouldn’t be presented in the Smithsonian behind glass or anything, I’m just pointing at this enormous flaw in the architecture of the web itself: you’re renting servers and renting URLs. Nothing is permanent because on the web we don’t really own any space, we’re just borrowing land temporarily.

The variety of impermanence that Jason Snell talks about is one that I reflect on often, which is why I try to minimize my vulnerability to it — for instance, by writing whenever possible in plain-text files, which are as future-proof as anything digital can be. I love BBEdit, in which I am writing these words, and hope that Rich Siegel will keep working on it into a hearty old age, and then will pass it along to a new generation of custodians of his work — but even if BBEdit dies my text files will not. I’ll just open them up in a text editor I like less, and will be deprived of some features and keyboard shortcuts that are deeply embedded in my muscle memory. Not the worst of fates. 

By contrast, I am reluctant to invest heavily in Drafts, which is a fantastic app, but also (a) is owned and maintained by one person, (b) keeps its data in a database rather than in text files, and (c) has no mechanism for exporting its data into text files. Too many potential points of failure for me. Even worse are browser-based, cloud-located notes apps, which could fail utterly at any moment. I’m old enough to remember what happened to Gnolia, but what really soured me on relying on any cloud-based app for my basic information was the collapse of Stikkit, a brilliant notes/contacts/tasks app whose users loved it a great deal more than its makers did. 

Paper, text files, and open standards for non-textual data — that’s my recipe for future-proofing my work. 

To some extent that system addresses the problem Robin Rendle points to – but only to some extent. It was a little over a year ago that I fully realized that I don’t own my turf online. My work on this blog isn’t vulnerable in the way that Facebook posts or tweets are, but it’s still vulnerable. If my hosting company were to suffer a catastrophic data loss, I’d be okay — I back everything up regularly. But if my hosting company were to decide that my critique of Amazon for memory-holing Ryan Anderson’s book marks me as a transphobe with whom they will not do business, and if other hosting companies took the same view … well, then I might be in a certain kind of trouble. 

I must make a distinction here: My data I own, my internet presence I rent. It’s interesting to think about how this situation differs from that of my published books and print essays. It’s possible for anyone to download this entire site — that’s what wget does, and I’ve used it to download my old Text Patterns blog to my hard drive — but I’m sure no one else ever has, so if anything were to happen to shut down this site or that old blog, then anyone interested in what I’ve written online would have to hope that the Internet Archive and its partners have the whole thing crawled and saved. 

But if you’ve bought one of my books, or a journal in which one of my essays appears, then even if I were to suffer Damnatio memoriae, you’d still have those texts, and it’s impossible for me to imagine a world in which anyone would go to the trouble of taking them away from you. 

So does that mean that I should focus my attention on writing for print publication instead of online venues like this blog? That would make sense if I wanted to ensure that people are still reading my work after I’m dead — but that would be ridiculous for a writer as insignificant as I am. As I often say, it’s quite likely that I will outlive all my work, and I’m just fine with that. So I’ll write in venues that give me pleasure, that seem fitting for whatever interests me at the moment. And then, one day, if I get the chance to set my affairs in order, I’ll hand over to my family a stack of notebooks and a hard drive full of text files, for them to do with as they please. 

Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man…. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration; — diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation. 

— Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia 

not through me

If you are using Clubhouse, and you agreed to their not-quite-but-almost demand to share all your contacts with them, and I am one of your contacts, then I am extremely unhappy with you. It is unethical for Clubhouse to ask for that information, and unethical of you to provide it.

Further reading on this: Vox, Inc., OneZero. [UPDATE: This Ars Technica report is comprehensively damning.] 

“Oh come on,” you say, “These big tech companies have a dozen ways to get your information.” Probably true. But your motto, and mine, should be, Let surveillance capitalism come into the world – but not through me.

This story, interesting in itself, is a reminder that the...

This story, interesting in itself, is a reminder that the only thing that anyone knows about The Bell Curve is that it is very, very wicked. No one knows what Charles Murray argued — few people even know that he is one of two authors of that book — but everyone knows that the argument is indefensible. Even Scott Alexander knows that he should distance himself from Murray in some way because of The Bell Curve, though he has never read the book and has only a vague idea what it is supposed to claim. The Bell Curve is the Popery of our moment. 

up the Amazon

I find that life is full of lines, lines I may not even know the existence of until I cross them. There’s an annoyance, say, an annoyance I can live with until one day something happens and I can’t live with it any more. The line has been crossed. Sometimes it’s not a thick clear line; it may be as thin as a hair. But once it’s crossed it’s crossed. 

Buying from Amazon has, for many years now, made me uncomfortable, but I’ve continued to do it … until now. I have had plenty of reasons to ditch Amazon — it is obviously, and in multiple ways, a predatory and intentionally unethical company — but I could never quite resist the convenience. But when Amazon decided to memory-hole a perfectly reasonable book simply because it outrages a handful of “activists” who claim — primarily on Twitter, and quite falsely — to represent all trans people, that brought me right up to the invisible line.

And then, oddly enough, the thing that pushed me across it was the deletion of Anderson’s book from AbeBooks — which is to say, Amazon decided to prevent hundreds (thousands?) of independent used bookstores who post their inventory on AbeBooks from selling When Harry Became Sally, obviously without asking those bookstores their views on the subject. 

(By the way, I don’t think the loud activists who have enlisted Amazon to act own their behalf really want to silence people like Ryan T. Anderson. The people they desperately want to muzzle are the detransitioners Anderson cites and quotes.) 

Anyway: I won’t be buying anything else from Amazon. I have canceled Amazon Prime, and the only reason I haven’t closed my account altogether is that, as Amazon helpfully explains on this page, if I did so all of my Kindle books would disappear. (I could actually strip the DRM from my older Kindle books, the ones in the .azw3 format, but as far as I can tell no one has figured out how to strip the DRM from the newer .kfx format. The various apps and sites that claim to de-DRM Kindle books are reluctant to admit this, but it’s true. Also, I could disconnect my Kindle from the internet, which would keep Amazon from erasing it, but that’s a solution that would last only as long as the Kindle itself is functional.) So I figure that if I never give Amazon any more of my money, that is a compromise I can live with. But goodness, I wish I had never bought a Kindle. 

All this is a reminder — as if we needed another one — of how deeply implicated we all are in Big Tech. There’s a new plug-in for Chrome and Firefox called Big Tech Detective that “will alert you if the website you are on is exchanging data with Big Tech by identifying and measuring connections to internet protocol (IP) addresses owned by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.” If you have any doubts about how much of the so-called “open web” those companies control, an hour or two of using Big Tech Detective will eliminate them. 

But we’re not completely helpless. I can decline to give another penny to Amazon, and you can too. I encourage you to make your own break. It feels really good to be out of the Amazon orbit, in much the same way, interestingly enough, that it feels really good to have achieved escape velocity from the gravity well of Twitter. These days, whenever I take a look at Twitter I think, “I can’t believe I ever tweeted.” Maybe next year I’ll take a look at amazon.com and think, “I can’t believe I ever bought stuff from this place.” 

free speech under technocracy

In a recent post I commented that Amazon’s deleting of Ryan Anderson’s recent book is not a free-speech issue. What I meant by that is that free speech is something guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and is relevant only to government action. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” etc. Non-governmental entities are, generally speaking and within certain limits, free to make their own decisions in these matters. When Amazon says, “We don’t sell certain content including … material we deem inappropriate or offensive,” the company is giving itself nearly absolute latitude to decide what it does and doesn’t want to sell — and is almost certainly within its legal rights to do so. 

However, as Glenn Greenwald recently noted, several of the biggest and most influential companies in America are tightly linked, in their ethos and increasingly their behavior, with one of the two major American political parties, in such a way that it is increasingly accurate to see the Democratic Party as the political wing of Big Tech, in much the same way that Sinn Féin used to be the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Greenwald: 

The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing. When it comes to the internet, our primary means of communicating with one another, that power nominally rests in the hands of private corporations in Silicon Valley.

But increasingly, the Democratic-controlled government and their allies in the corporate media are realizing that they can indirectly and through coercion seize and wield that power for themselves. The First Amendment is implicated by these coercive actions as much as if Congress enacted laws explicitly mandating censorship of their political opponents. 

In other words, Congress need make no law abridging the freedom of speech if the companies that control the flow of information agree to do the abridging for the dominant party in Congress. And clearly they have, generally speaking, so agreed. 

As marriages of convenience go, it’s certainly effective — but may be more fragile than the wedding party believes. A great many people think that the GOP is finished, and Lord knows it looks to be in shambles. But remember this: the party was certainly in shambles when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. And then, only six years later, Ronald Reagan was elected President, ushering in twelve consecutive years of Republican occupancy of the White House and twenty of twenty-eight. If Republicans can find just one politician capable of creating a coalition, the leaders of the big tech companies may find themselves devoting more time to testifying in Washington than to running their companies, and the decorous marriage of the Democrats and Big Tech may end up in a shotgun divorce. 

I have a theory: Google has changed how college students ...

I have a theory: Google has changed how college students interact with their teachers. I estimate that 90% of the questions that students email to ask me are already answered on their syllabus and the webpages linked to from the syllabus. But hardly anyone thinks to look at the syllabus before firing off an email question. My theory is that they are strongly habituated to dealing with a question by asking Google, and in relation to our class, I am Google. 

Damnatio memoriae

Let’s be clear: Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally has not been banned, and there are no “free speech” issues involved here. (Not in any precise sense, though I may say more about this in another post.) A retailer has decided not to sell a product. But because the retailer involved is Amazon, and Amazon has such an outsize influence over the book market, it seems to me that every published author ought to worry about what might happen to their sales if they got on Amazon’s bad side.

A number of interesting and important issues converge on this decision. For instance, the fact that by removing the book with no warning, no explanation, and no opportunity for appeal, Amazon is violating its own publicly announced guidelines: “If we remove a title, we let the author, publisher, or selling partner know and they can appeal our decision.” Or the fact that for a couple of days any search for Anderson’s book yielded a result for a book critical of Anderson’s that Amazon would clearly prefer you to read. (That now seems to have been replaced with a standard 404 page.) Or the apparent fact that there are no other topics of current dispute on which dissent is absolutely prohibited: for instance, you can still purchase Pluckrose and Lindsay on critical theory and Douglas Murray contra identity politics — for now. Or the fact that Amazon no longer has an email address you can write if you want to protest such a decision.

But to me, the most interesting point for reflection is this: The censors at Amazon clearly believe there is only one reason to read a book. You read a book because you agree with it and want it to confirm what you already believe. Imagine, for instance, a transgender activist who wants to understand the position held by Ryan Anderson and people like him in order better to refute it. That person can’t get a copy of the book through Amazon any more than a sympathetic reader like me can.

But another, deeper belief lies beneath that one: It’s that ideas like Anderson’s are not to be refuted but rather, insofar as it lies within Amazon’s vast power, erased — subjected to Damnatio memoriae. And the interesting thing about that practice is that it is simultaneously an assertion of power and a confession of weakness. Amazon is flexing its muscles, but muscles are all it has. Its censors don’t want anyone to read Anderson’s book because they know that they can’t refute it. They have no thoughts, no knowledge — only reflexes. And reflexes will serve their cause. For now.

two quotations on conspiracy belief

Ian Leslie: 

The US-based online conspiracy cult QAnon played a central role in last month’s violent insurrection at the Capitol. QAnon is a complex, sprawling conspiracy theory about a clique of vampiric paeodophiles who run the world. It sounds as if you’d have to very stupid or completely crazy to believe any of it, yet many thousands do, and it’s worthwhile trying to understand why. This clip from an interview with a former QAnon follower who has now recanted makes for compelling viewing. The woman in question, Ashley Vanderbilt, is intelligent and reflective and likeable, and provides an insight into how people like her get sucked in. The groups she started interacting with online (presumably on Facebook and elsewhere) were not explicitly ‘QAnon’. They were just people discussing some horrible, outrageous practice that needed to be exposed. They didn’t get straight to the “Bill Gates is drinking children’s blood” stuff. They started by discussing something relatively bounded and real: child trafficking. That triggered a powerful curiosity in her: “It piques your interest, because as a mom I want to protect my kid.” So Ashley started asking for information from her online contacts, whom she had grown to trust, and then more, and as she did she fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. “Eventually you get to that huge crazy theory, and you believe it. But it didn’t start that way.” Vanderbilt goes on to talk about how her intense absorption in the cult meant that she wasn’t fully present for her 4 year old daughter. I was really moved by her introspection and by her bravery in coming forward to talk about this. Her description of how she was drawn in reminded me of a passage from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, in which he relates how American prisoners of war were interrogated by Chinese communists during the Korean War. The Chinese sought to persuade the Americans that they had been on the wrong side all along, with the aim of turning them into informers, and they had considerable success. Their approach was systematic and subtle. They didn’t start conversations with the prisoners by telling them America is evil and communism is good. The strategy was rather to “start small and build”. They would get the Americans to assent to statements like “The United States is not perfect”. Later they would ask them to make a list of “problems with America” and put their name to it. And so on, inch by inch, until at least some of the prisoners crossed the line and became true believers. I have no idea if QAnon operates as it does deliberately or if there is some bottom-up process for recruitment that has just evolved but the approach sounds similar. In many less dark situations, this is how good persuasion works anyway. People are hardly ever persuaded to “change their mind” by arguments, in the sense of a 180 degree reversal of their position. But over time, step by step, a mind can be changed. 

David French: 

But the more I see the conspiracies play out in real life, the more concerned I grow. When large numbers of people hold beliefs with religious intensity, those beliefs not only provide them with a sense of enduring purpose, they also help them form enduring bonds of friendship and fellowship. The conspiracy isn’t just a set of intellectual convictions, it’s also a source of community. It’s the world in which they live. […] 

Sweeping away a falsehood is of little use unless you can replace the lie with a meaningful and empowering truth. You cannot yank a person from their community and then leave them homeless. Do not pretend we can replace something — no matter how malignant — with nothing. […] 

When you fear for the mind and heart of your conspiracy-committed mother or uncle or son, don’t wait. Engage. But don’t engage immediately with argument, but instead with the fellowship and love that makes the heart want to turn towards truth. You become the person who loves them, accepts them, and helps provide that vital sense of virtuous purpose. 

The conspiracy theory is often the symptom of an underlying disease — a disease of hate or fear that robs a person of joy. The fierce anger and furious purpose of the conspiracy mindset is a hollow replacement for the peace and faith found not just in truth, but in truth communicated by a loving and empathetic family and friends. 

the warming center

When power was out all over Waco and the temperatures were dropping into the single digits, the city set up “warming centers” for residents in danger. This got Aaron Zimmerman – the rector of my parish church, St. Alban’s – musing. A year ago St. Alban’s had completed the addition of a brand-new Parish Hall, only to have the church shut down by the coronavirus before we could even enjoy it. Since then the space had sat mostly unused. But it was spacious, and well-lit, and well-heated; it even had a kitchen and wifi. Why not offer it to the city as an additional warming center? So Aaron called the mayor, and the mayor agreed. 

It ended up being a wonderful ministry to people very much in need – including people with unaddressed chronic health issues that some of our medical-professional parishioners could help. You can and should read the full story here.

I am so proud of my church! But I’m also feeling a twinge or two of retrospective envy. Teri and I were huddling around our fireplace when we could’ve been in a big warm room eating a breakfast made by Corey MacIntyre? 

Finally: Don’t forget that we’re still doing Morning Prayer six days a week – and other services as well – on our parish YouTube channel.

Conservatism Inc.

Ross Douthat, in an exceptionally insightful column:

As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump. These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one. And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.

Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible. There are threads linking Reagan to Donald Trump or William F. Buckley Jr. to Sean Hannity, as the right’s liberal critics often note. But to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.

In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession. Part of this feeling is justified, insofar as liberalism really has consolidated cultural power everywhere outside Conservatism Inc. But the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.

This is cogent, clear, and indisputably true. Who within the world of Conservatism Inc. is even making the slightest attempt at appealing to people who aren’t already on board?

P.S. Perhaps I should say that I stand in an odd relation to all of this because, as I have often noted, my conservatism is fundamentally theological and a conservative theology – a genuine Gospel of Life – yields a set of political policies that spans the spectrum of Left to Right. (Or at least, the Left as it used to be and the Right as it used to be.) But a constant awareness of human fallibility and the typical forms that that fallibility takes – have I mentioned that I wrote a book on Original Sin? – will, I think, push one towards an Oakeshottian mode of thinking about politics, a conserving tendency, a disposition to be skeptical about utopian hopes and plans, regular appeals to Chesterton’s Fence. So perhaps it’s not surprising that for a long time conservative outlets were very hospitable to my writing. And perhaps it’s also not surprising that as Conservatism Inc. has taken hold I have had to find other homes for my work, work which at one time might have been seen as an expression of the conservative temperament but now … not so much. Because the “conservative disposition” isn’t what it used to be: now it’s primarily a “deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.”