Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 23

J. M. W. Turner, Scarbrough (a drawing owned by Ruskin)

J. M. W. Turner, Scarbrough (a drawing owned by Ruskin) 

colonialist owls

This is a fascinating report: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl.” The argument appended to the report is that this proposal is unwise. 

The key passage, I think, is this: 

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense. 

The authors don’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the federal campaign against the barred owl depends on a reading of human political history. The movement of the barred owl westward is analogized to the movement of Europeans into the North American continent and across it.

Without that history in mind, the increasing dominance of the barred owl over the spotted owl would be just One of Those Things that happens in nature. But by using human political history to interpret such events, the government teaches itself to see barred owls as “invasive” — like they’re on the Oregon Trail or something.

It’s silly, but it’s also one of the subtler forms that the politicization of science takes. 

changes ahead

Faithful readers, this may be the last post on this blog. My longtime hosting provider, Reclaim Hosting, has recently made a number of changes to their security procedures, and those procedures have broken the workflow that I have had here for more than a decade. They have also let me know that they will do nothing to restore that workflow, and the increasing terseness of their replies to my queries indicates, with an equal absence of ambiguity, that they can’t wait until I take my business elsewhere. 

So I am trying to transfer the hosting of this blog to micro.blog, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out. Manton Reece, the developer and owner of micro.blog, is a great guy, but when it comes to support he’s a one-man band, and I don’t know whether the transfer will work at all and, if it does, how long it will take. 

I’ve long been a member of the own-your-online-turf brigade, but I have also been aware that we don’t really own our turf, and I am feeling very vulnerable right now. One of the consequences of the move, fifteen years and more ago, of almost everyone online to social-media platforms is the absence from the open web of technological semi-literates like me. Manton is a great guy and devoted to his customers, but almost all his communications with me assume a level of knowledge that I don’t have; and the people at Reclaim, as I have said, just want me to be gone. 

I have always disliked Substack, but I’m beginning to see why people move to Substack, which handles all these problems for them. I would just say to the proponents of the open web: If you want more people to move onto the open web, you have to be more patient with them than you’ve been with me, and you have to be willing to provide more basic instruction than, so far, you’ve been willing to provide to me. 

I can’t claim that I am a really good thinker, but much of the best thinking I have done has been on this blog, so I will do everything I can to keep it up. I don’t know whether I will be able to write on it any more, but I want people to be able to read it if I can possibly manage it, even if I have to pay two different hosting  providers. 

Until all this gets sorted out, you can find me at my micro.blog site. And if you’re praying people, pray for me, because all this crap is stress-inducing and exhausting. And I really do fear that I am going to lose my place on the open web, which would be terrible for me as a writer. Many, many periodicals want me to write for them, but only if I write what they themselves would write or want to see out in the world. My friends at the Hedgehog Review may be the only people who are interested in what I want to write. Everywhere else I have to trim my sails in ways that I find harder to do as I get older. If I lose my place on the open web I will be seriously incapacitated. 

the state and the people

A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by which people have become “legible” to the state. At that point I had not read a classic, though a somewhat controversial classic, of history, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. I am reading it right now, and when I saw the book’s first two paragraphs I thought, Damn, I wish I had known this when I wrote that essay. Here they are:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since I January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

Highlighting mine. Of course it would be war that created the bureaucratic mechanisms of modern identity, for, as Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”

I’m just making notes for later reflection here, but: The creation of this identity system led to a complex and ever-shifting pattern of relation between the state and modern capitalism. James Burnham, in his landmark book The Managerial Revolution, argued that the comprehensive power of the state would lead to the rise of a managerial class that would take power away from the capitalists. But it hasn’t really worked out that way, has it?

When I come back to these issues — which I will do eventually — I expect to say a little more about Bourne and Burnham, about George Orwell’s reviews of Burnham, and about anarchism. And maybe even about the Church.

styles of acting, styles of being

One of my favorite YouTubers is Thomas Flight, who makes videos about movies. In a recent video, he contrasts the “theatrical” acting style of classic Hollywood movies with the “naturalistic” style of today’s movies. Flight’s treatment of this issue is better than most, but he overlooks a key point — one that almost everyone who discusses this issue overlooks.

The difference in acting styles is real enough, and obvious to all. And if you ask people who are bothered by older acting styles why they are bothered, they’ll almost always say something like this: “People just don’t talk that way.” To which the proper response should be: “Are you sure about that?”

After all, how do we know what ordinary people — unphotographed people, unrecorded people — talked like 80 or 90 years ago? That’s not information we have access to, because we weren’t there. Even if we know people who are very old, we can’t confirm that their speaking style now is identical to what it was when they were young. Everyone’s speech is, to some greater or lesser extent, shaped by their social context. We don’t learn our words from dictionaries, but from other people. Surely everyone notices the way that people pick up words, phrases, intonations, and gestures from friends. Our verbal acquisitiveness slows down as we get older but it never stops — and a lot of humor arises from this, as senior citizens have a tendency to appropriate language inaccurately.

(Among filmmakers, the Coen brothers are specially aware of how all this works. For instance, Maud Lebowski refers to a penis as a “Johnson,” which puzzles the Dude — “Johnson?” — but then later in the movie he’s using the term himself. I could cite several examples from other Coen movies. And among scholars the best writer on this subject is of course Bakhtin.)

Moreover, everyone code-switches to some extent — that is, employs different linguistic resources according to audience and context — and how they talk in any one situation is but a partial indication of “how they really talk.” So, when public figures get secretly recorded, listeners often feel that they’ve received some insight into “what they’re really like,” but that’s not true. We’re just finding out how they behave in one context among many. And public figures, like all of the rest of us, are constantly assessing what kind of language a given situation calls for and adjusting their talk (or writing) accordingly. The idea that there is one linguistic mode which is “authentic” or “natural” to us is a fantasy.

Which also means that the concept of “naturalistic acting” is pretty fuzzy. “Natural” in what context, and in comparison to what? The assumption most people (including Thomas Flight) make when discussing these matters is that, for any given situation across time, there’s a standard “way that people talk” in relation to which some styles of acting are more “theatrical” and others more “natural.” Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert talk to each other in one style, while Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson talk to each other in a different style, and the latter is more natural than the former — on the assumption that unphotographed and unrecorded couples, in privacy, spoke pretty much the same way in 1934 as they do in 2019.

But we don’t know that, do we?

What if the conventions of private speech between two lovers were more formal then than they are now — or anyway would strike us as more formal? And what if the dominant style of acting in 2019 isn’t quite as close to private speech as we assume? It could be that

Gable/Colbert : 1934 private speech :: Driver/ScarJo : 2019 private speech

We just don’t know for sure, and maybe (probably) can’t know.

I’ve had a version of this post in my drafts folder for some time, though it didn’t mention Thomas Flight, because he hadn’t made the relevant video then. One of the writers Flight quotes in his video is The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, by Isaac Butler, and what originally prompted this post was Simon Callow’s review of that book. In it he writes,

The notion that there is some sort of immutable gold standard for truthful acting is deeply unreliable: cometh the hour, cometh the actor. When David Garrick, nimble and quick-witted, first leaped onto the scene with his dazzling realism and lightning changes of mood, the portly and impressively slow-moving James Quin, hitherto the darling of the pit, was heard to remark, “If the young fellow was right, he, and the rest of the players, had all been wrong.”

Garrick’s quicksilver transformations, so expressive of the Age of Enlightenment, were in turn supplanted by Edmund Kean’s dark and dangerous Romantic intensity. Each was initially admired for being more real than his predecessors; actors are never admired for being unnatural. In 1935 Laurence Olivier’s performances in Romeo and Juliet (he alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio) were regarded as ultrarealist; ten years later, in his Shakespeare films, it is clear that he was a somewhat stylized actor; on stage twenty years after that he was dismissed by many as monstrously mannered. His acting had not changed; the temper and taste of the times had. The shock of the new has a built-in decay, and it is in the nature of pioneers to believe that they have finally reached the promised land, the end of the rainbow.

“Actors are never admired for being unnatural.” Every development in acting style is praised for drawing closer to “real life,” to “the way people really talk.” But maybe styles of acting change because styles of being-in-the-world have already changed. Maybe we change first — we, “those wonderful people out there in the dark,” as Norma Desmond so memorably calls us — and the actors obediently follow our lead.

Guadalcanal: 6

Around the rim of the shield Hephaestus made for Achilles is the Ocean River, the great water that (Homer believed) rings our world — Middle-earth, it’s sometimes called: the place where we live and, often enough, fight and kill and die. And, as I have noted, Guadalcanal Island is ringed by that very ocean. Guadalcanal is thus a kind of microcosm, but one in which the agonistic character of life, the struggle that reveals who we are, is accelerated and intensified. 

Hephaestus’s ocean is a kind of frame, and these stories of Guadalcanal I’ve been exploring are all necessarily framed by the passage across the waters to and from the place of struggle. But what Terrence Malick does in his film The Thin Red Line is add another layer of framing. His version of Guadalcanal does not begin with the crossing of the liminal sea, but rather with two additional contexts. 

The first shot of the film shows a crocodile slipping into water; the last shot of the film shows a small young leafy palm standing, somewhat unexpectedly, in shallow water on a beach.

That first shot is followed by a scene in which we see Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt enjoying the company of a seaside Melanesian community. (We later learn that he’s not taking a vacation, he’s gone AWOL.) Then we shift to the transport ship taking the soldiers to Guadalcanal. 

That last shot is accompanied by a sound: the sound of a Melanesian a cappella choir singing one of the songs we heard them singing in that early scene. This is immediately after we see a transport ship removing the soldiers from Guadalcanal. 

So The Thin Red Line gives us four … let’s call them existential layers. 

A key question for any one soldier — well, actually, any one human being — is: How many of these layers do you perceive? How much of what is is perceptually and epistemologically available to you? 

There’s something fundamentally disorienting about Malick’s movie. On the one hand, as I noted in an earlier post, the soldier who confronts another soldier in battle, in the agon, is confronting himself. And this is existentially harrowing. 

But notice that Private Witt has no interest in the agon. After he goes AWOL among the Melanesian islanders and is forcibly returned to his unit, Sergeant Welsh removes him from battle duty and makes him a stretcher-bearer. Later, he pleads to be returned to battle, not because he wants to fight, but simply because C-for-Charlie Company is, he says, “my people.” We see him tending to the sick and then, at the end, drawing Japanese soldiers away from the other members of his company — and by so doing sacrificing his life. He lifts his weapon in that last moment, but not to fire — rather, to draw fire from the soldiers who surround him. 

Private Witt undergoes his own agon, but it is not that of the warrior. Before that final confrontation, he has already faced himself — not as Hector faces Achilles but in a very different way. He had received a kind of revelation, and he is capable of receiving it, I think, just because, rather than immersing himself wholly in the war, he has already attended to those existential layers that his fellow soldiers never notice.

About two-thirds of the way into the movie, when C-for-Charlie company has just ventured well inland to destroy a small contingent of Japanese soldiers, some of them reflect on what they have done. Corporal Fife (Adrien Brody) remembers a conversation in which another soldier told him that dead people were just like dead dogs. And then we see Witt staring intently at something. After a few seconds we are allowed to see what he sees: the half-buried face of a dead Japanese soldier. 

And then the soldier (who is not a dead dog) speaks to him — speaks to the one person in this whole company who has been formed and equipped in such a way that he can hear. The Japanese soldier says: 

Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness … truth? 

And it is this revelation, I think, that enables Witt to do the great work of self-sacrifice that forms the climax of this film. 

Guadalcanal: 5

If, as I said in my previous post, to confront another soldier in war is to confront yourself, then … isn’t that other soldier … you? Yes. Necessarily. 

It is this necessity that produces a constant hum of meditation in Malick’s The Thin Red Line: “Maybe all men got one big soul,” thinks one of the soldiers.

Many of the voiceovers in this movie are clearly identified soliloquies: Nick Nolte’s Col. Tall, for instance, or Elias Koteas’s Captain Staros. But three characters in this movie — Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), and Private Train (John Dee Smith) — have distinct Southern accents, and it’s not always easy to tell their voices apart. And I think that is intentional. That is, these thoughts are not supposed to be identifiable with one soldier. They are the thoughts of all the soldiers. (I suspect it matters that all of these speakers are privates, the lowest rank — the ones not differentiated from their neighbors by holding command.)

Sometimes their voices are identifiable. It is Private Witt, the central character in the film, who speculates that all of us share a soul — what Emerson called the “Over-Soul”: 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 

And it is Private Bell who muses, “Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out.” In us. The flame of humanity, “the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.”

But I believe, as some of the more attentive viewers of this film have argued, that the character we hear from most often, in voiceover, is Private Train, whom we see at any length only twice: Once as the soldiers are approaching the island, confessing his fear, and once as they are leaving the island, saying that he has had a lifetime of experience already and has earned some peace. Surely in these points as in others he speaks for his colleagues. One big experience for C-for-Charlie Company; one big soul. 

(Private Train also has a tattoo on his upper arm, which reads: 1 JOHN 4:4. For those of you keeping score at home, that verse reads: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” We may return to this.) 

But the Over-Soul is bigger than what can be held on an American troop ship. One of those American soldiers says to a Japanese soldier — see the image at the top of this post — “Where you’re going you’re not coming back from.” And it’s true. But it’s equally true of the man who speaks those words. What you say about your enemy you say about yourself, whether you know it or not.

When I hear that sentence I think of a poem by Horace. David Ferry’s translation follows.  

Aequam memento (Odes II.3) 

When things are bad, be steady in your mind;
Dellius, do not be
Too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune.
You are going to die.

It does not matter at all whether you spend
Your days and nights in sorrow,
Or on the other hand, in holiday pleasure,
Drinking Falernian wine

Of an excellent vintage year, on the river bank.
Why is it, do you suppose,
That the dark branches of those tall pines and those
Poplars’ silvery leafy

Branches love to join, coming together,
Creating a welcoming shade?
Have you not noticed how in the quiet river
The current shows signs of hurry,

Urging itself to go forward, going somewhere,
Making its purposeful way?
By all means tell your servants to bring you wine,
Perfumes, and the utterly lovely

Too briefly blossoming flowers of the villa garden;
Yes, of course, while youth,
And circumstance, and the black threads of the Sisters
Suffer this to be so.

You are going to have to yield those upland pastures,
The ones you bought just lately;
You are going to yield the town house, and the villa,
The country place whose margin

The Tiber washes as it moves along.
Heirs will possess all that
Which you have gathered. It does not matter at all
If you are rich, with kings

Forefathers of your pride; no matter; or poor,
Fatherless under the sky.
You will be sacrificed to Orcus without pity.
All of us together

Are being gathered; the lot of each of us
Is in the shaking urn
With all the other lots, and like the others
Sooner or later our lot

Will fall out from the urn; and so we are chosen to take
Our place in that dark boat,
In that dark boat, that bears us all away
From here to where no one comes back from ever.

The story of the Nisei linguists — who served in the Seco...

The story of the Nisei linguists — who served in the Second World War as translators, interpreters, and intelligence officers, while their parents were imprisoned in internment camps — is a remarkable. James C. McNaughton’s book about them is available as a PDF here. 

Guadalcanal: 4

As I noted in my previous post, the peculiar nature of the Guadalcanal campaign creates a kind of narrative frame — the arrival by sea, the fighting, the departure by sea — that any account of the campaign is bound by. This traversing of emptiness surrounding a tragic agon. 

I think it was Jakob Burckhardt, in his famous book The Greeks and Greek Civilization, who first identified the agon — the contest or competition — as “the paramount feature of life” in ancient Greek civilization. 

Thus after the decline of heroic kingship all higher life among the Greeks, active as well as spiritual, took on the character of the agon. Here excellence (arete) and natural superiority were displayed, and victory in the agon, that is noble victory without enmity, appears to have been the ancient expression of the peaceful victory of an individual. Many different aspects of life came to bear the marks of this form of competitiveness. We see it in the conversations and round-songs of the guests in the symposium, in philosophy and legal procedure, down to cock- and quail-fighting or the gargantuan feats of eating. In Aristophanes’ Knights, the behaviour of the Paphlagonian and the sausage seller still retains the exact form of an agon, and the same is true in Frogs of the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, with its ceremonial preliminaries. The way that life on all levels was influenced by the agon and by gymnastics is most clearly illustrated by Herodotus’ account of the wooing of Agariste (VI.126). Cleisthenes of Sicyon announced at the Olympic games, where he had just won the victory in the four-horse chariot race, that he invited applicants for his daughter’s hand. The wooing, itself an agon, is a kind of mirror image of the mythical wooing of Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus. Thirteen suitors came forward, all personally outstanding and of high birth; two were from southern Italy, one Epidamnian, one Aetolian, one Argive, two Arcadians, one from Elis, two Athenians and one each from Euboea, Thessaly and Molossus [in Epirus). Cleisthenes had a stadium and a palaestra prepared for them, kept them with him for a year and tested their courage, temperament, upbringing and character; he accompanied the suitors to the gymnasium and observed their behaviour at feasts. 

(This book, assembled from Burckhardt’s lectures, was published after his death in 1897 and against his will. The early modern period was his area of specialization, and he did not think himself qualified to publish a book on the Ancient Greek world. But the idea got around, to Burckhardt’s annoyance, thanks to a former colleague: “The mistaken belief that I was to publish a history of Greek culture derives from a work of the unfortunate Professor Nietzsche, who now lives in a lunatic asylum. He mistook a lecture course that I used often to give for a book.”) 

The agon is a kind of domestication and confinement of the battle encounter, of the confrontation of people who are determined to kill one another. The ancestor of the agon, and in a way its heart and soul, is the confrontation of Hector and Achilles in the 22nd book of the Iliad. Perhaps the most important thing to be said about the agon as depicted by Homer that it is only secondarily a competition with your enemy, with the Other; it is primarily a contest with yourself. 

Homer makes this abundantly clear through one distinctive element of the encounter between Hector and Achilles. Recall that Achilles has returned because of his grief and guilt at allowing his dearest friend Patroclus to enter the battle wearing his armor. Hector has taken that armor from the dead body of Patroclus and is now wearing it. Meanwhile, Achilles has had new armor made for him by Hephaestus, including a great shield. In my introduction to Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles I describe what Hephaestus has made: 

In Homer’s poem, the shield is complexly figured, but at the heart of its depiction is a simple contrast. First, there is a world of peace, in which the arts (both the artes mechanicae and the artes liberales) may be cultivated: dancers and acrobats and musicians appear there, well-cared-for fields of crops, vineyards full of ripe grapes, and herds of animals domesticated for human use. Evil things happen in this world: two lions kill a bull; a man has killed another man. But herdsmen watch over their cattle to limit the ravages of wild beasts; and in the city of peace judges determine a penalty for murder, a penalty that the angry family of the slain man agree to. Such agreements are what make a city peaceful. But none of these arts and agreements obtain in the second city, the city of war; there, all is sacrificed to the cultivation of a single “art”: that of killing. 

All through the Iliad Hector is depicted as a reluctant warrior. In Book VI he tells his beloved wife Andromache that he has learned to fight in the front ranks of the Trojans — he does it because he must, to protect the city he loves; but fighting does not come naturally to him, as it does to Achilles, who doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s not fighting.

So when these two men met on the field of battle, what do they see? Hector sees the world he loves, the world of peace and art and hot baths, with war only an interruption of that better human story; and Achilles sees his own armor, the armor of the ultimate warrior. Each confronts himself, and this is the essential character of the agon. 

In Malick’s The Thin Red Line, this is what battle does to the men: it forces each of them to confront himself. Again and again that confrontation is revelatory.  

Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier:The [CrowdStrike] cat...

Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier:

The [CrowdStrike] catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. […] This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing — as opposed to personal computing — a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable — at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability. 

A reminder that presentism is perhaps an even bigger threat to our economic infrastructure than it is to our common culture.