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Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Pounding Bogosian 
| | Eric Bogosian has a blog, of sorts. It's a series of dispatches, or "meditations." Here's how he ends Letter 29. |
| | But what's all this intense possessiveness about? Most of my stuff is out of print, impossible to find. My record, "Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll" as well as the film of the same, gone. I don't think "Pounding Nails" is available anymore. Shit, I hope people are bootlegging my stuff. Give it away. I like it when people hear my recordings, see my tapes. They're better than most of the crap out there. |
| | So, I'm not going to think when I hear someone sampling or borrowing or stealing, that they are "post-modern". No, from now on, I'll think, man, that's pre-modern. Before everyone got so possessive. |
Odds that John Poindexter will be fired: 100%
| | While belief in markets remains one of the world's most touchingly naïve religions, the belief that technology itself will fix us is an equally enduring faith, and the PAM project is fascinating because here the two ideas intersect. Not for the first time, techno-utopianism - which tends to sprout such parallel beliefs (cf. "hive mind", "self-organizing systems", "self-correcting blogosphere") - has met capitalism, and found a face it likes. The two tend to lean on each other, like a couple of drunks propping each other up. |
| | In an editorial called Poindexter's Follies, the New York Times this morning calls for John Poindexter's famously empty head: |
| | The time has obviously come to send John Poindexter packing and to shut down the wacky espionage operation he runs at the Pentagon. The latest idea hatched by Mr. Poindexter's shop — an online futures trading market where speculators could bet on the probabilities of terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups — was canceled yesterday by embarrassed Pentagon officials. The next logical step is to fire Mr. Poindexter. |
| | In testimony before Congress yesterday, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, disowned the futures project. The insensitivity of the idea boggles the mind. Quite apart from the tone-deafness of equating terrorist attacks with, say, corn futures, the plan would allow speculators — even terrorists — to profit from anonymous bets on future attacks. The project's theoretical underpinnings are equally absurd. Markets do not always operate perfectly in the larger world of stocks and bonds. The idea that they can reliably forecast the behavior of isolated terrorists is ridiculous. |
| | The "Policy Analysis Market" would actually have opened for business on Oct. 1 had Senators Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan not blown the whistle. Despite Mr. Wolfowitz's pledge to kill it, however, the problem of Mr. Poindexter remains. He is a man of dubious background and dubious ideas. A retired rear admiral, he served as Ronald Reagan's national security adviser and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to the rebels in Nicaragua. He was sentenced to six months in jail for lying to Congress, a conviction overturned on appeal. He resurfaced under the Bush administration at the Pentagon. His first big brainstorm post-9/11 was a program known as Total Information Awareness, designed to identify potential terrorists by compiling a detailed electronic dossier on millions of Americans. |
| | Want to know what makes possible the hiring of boobs like Poindexter, and the fruition of stupid ideas like this terrorism futures market? Just look at it as a market effect. |
| | Form follows funding. When you have lavish, unfettered funding — big dumb money ready to say yes to every idea that might pay off, somehow, someday — you get to see market cancer at work on a gargantuan scale. We saw it when VCs poured billions (at its peak exceeding the per annum GNP of half the countries in the world) into dot-com companies that served mostly as stock inflation projects. And we're seeing it with defense spending — at least in some areas. |
| | Maybe it's time for the stockholders to call some more highly placed executives to account. |
| | [Later...] Several people, including Eric Norlin, thought this futures market was a fine idea — and, what's more, very cluetrainy. |
| | If so, then maybe somebody should set up a private market for the same thing. Why should the Pentagon fund the whole thing, hm? These kinds of things do exist. |
| | The idea of using a futures market as a tool for prediction is a good one. So is the idea that whole markets are smarter than any one participant. But the potential of this policy analysis market to influence events was way too high. So high, in fact, that it influenced its own destruction. |
| | I'll have more to say about this, though probably not here. Stay tuned for a pointer. |
The trend away from trends
| | Most people want to be up on the latest trends. But they aren't sure what the latest trends to be up on are. And so over the decades, a trend-anointing caste has developed, proclaiming the arrival and departure of trends for the benefit of the rest of us who are too insecure to make these sorts of decisions for ourselves. |
| | Trend-spotting, in fact, is one of the mainstays of the modern media. Too bad, really. Just as endless TV news reports about crime cause folks to worry about becoming a crime victim, so this torrent of trend journalism creates socially insecure citizens living in perpetual dread that someone, somewhere is being trendier. |
| | But all that is changing. Thanks to the Internet, trend-spotting has been put in the hands of common folk. Just as calculators made everyone an expert at multiplication, the Web is making everyone a whiz at trends. Trend-spotters are turning out to be like stock brokers and travel agents -- middlemen done in by Web-enabled "disintermediation." ... |
| | A significant percentage of the Internet's resources are now devoted to tracking what people are doing on the Internet. In other words, following trends. |
| | Keeping up with the hottest Weblog personal Web pages, for instance, is easy via Daypop or Technorati, which blog buff Harvey Kirkpatrick says are the best of the growing number of sites devoted to ranking the growing number of blogs. |
| | Of course, old-fashioned trend-spotters -- those with a vested interest in clinging to the past -- argue that these computer-generated sites are just crude spews of data, that finding the real trends still requires a trend professional. |
| | Deep down, though, they hear the clock of history ticking, and know the correlation between social trends and Internet searches grows every day. Notice all the Pilates joints opening up in your neighborhood? No surprise; Web searches for the exercise technique are up 50%! |
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