Henry

It seems nearly certain that the Italian government is going to pardon Adriano Sofri. This has been a continuing sore on the Italian legal system – to all appearances, Sofri was stitched up for a murder he didn’t commit. It’s a slightly involved story (Carlo Ginzburg’s book, The Judge and the Historians, gives a good account). Sofri was one of the founders of _Lotta Continua_, an autonomist Marxist group which bitterly denounced an Italian policeman, Luigi Calabresi, as a symbol of all that was rotten and corrupt in the Italian state (an anarchist railway worker, Pino Pinelli, had mysteriously taken it upon himself to jump to his death from Calabresi’s office window while under interrogation – the subject of Dario Fo’s play _The Accidental Death of an Anarchist_). Some years after Calabresi himself was murdered, presumably by leftists, a former _Lotta Continua_ supporter came to the police and claimed that Sofri and others had ordered the killing. Despite the weakness of this evidence (the witness appears to have been highly unreliable), Sofri and two others were convicted of murder. This has been a _cause celebre_ for the Italian left ever since. There’s no real evidence that Sofri was guilty of anything more than overheated and rather unpleasant rhetoric, for which he has since apologized – it’s good to see that this miscarriage of justice is about to be righted.

As I come across interesting posts on other blogs contributing to the discussion of Benkler’s book, I’ll add links and potted summaries to this post.

First, Brayden King at _Organizational Theory_ about the blinders that network theorists wear:

bq. All of this talk about the new forms of social production is very reminiscent of the excited discussion about “network forms of organization” that have been going on in org. theory for more than a decade. In fact, Quiggin’s comment summarizes much of what Woody Powell argues in his 1990 article “Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization.” In that article Powell enthusiastically portrays another new form of economic production, which he also sees as distinct from the market-hierarchy dichotomy. … My irritation, if I have one, is that both Powell and the new Internet network folks seem obsessed about the technology without really theorizing the form of social action. … As Eszter notes, the networks of the web overlap with existing social structures, like class hierarchies. … The open source movement perhaps hasn’t flattened hierarchies as much as we’d like to think; rather, it’s just created new outlets for their expression. This all leads us to the question, what’s so new about these new networks of social production?

Second, James Wimberly at _The Reality-Based Community_ on the history of cooperative production.

bq. The theme is that new information technologies are reshaping opportunities for cooperation in cultural production and other forms of social action, but face obstacles in achieving them. It’s good stuff, but I miss the grand historical perspective. So let’s have a go, in the new spirit of wiki amateurism. Are we seeing a cultural revolution? No, reversion to the mean. … In pre-modern societies, hunter-gatherer or agricultural, most cultural production is cooperative. … Just as our consumption of oil is a historical blip in the long run (the “Hubbard pimple”), so, culturally speaking was the industrial society of the last two centuries. In the 19th century, industrial workers had negligible leisure and lost many (but not all) habits of self-entertainment. In the 20th, as workers regained leisure, it was overwhelmingly filled by the consumption of goods produced by professionals: sporting events, newspapers, magazines, genre fiction, film, recorded music, and TV. For anyone brought up like ourselves in this world, the reinvention of cooperative cultural production through new technology looks like a revolution. It is, but in the Platonic not the Marxian sense. What we are seeing now, I suggest, is a move back towards the long-run historical norm.

Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a very exciting book. It captures an important set of developments – how new information technologies make it easier for individuals to collaborate in producing cultural content, knowledge, and other information goods. It draws links across apparently disparate subject areas to present a theory of how these technologies are reshaping opportunities for social action. Finally, it presents a highly attractive vision of what society might be like if we allow these technologies to flourish, as well as the political obstacles which may prevent these technologies from reaching their full potential. If you’re interested in debates on Creative Commons, on Wikipedia, on net neutrality, or any of a whole host of other issues, this is an essential starting point.

We’ve put together a seminar on the book, which we hope will help spur discussion around it in the blogosphere. This is an important debate. In a (long overdue) departure from previous seminars that I and others have organized at CT, we hope to include other blogs more directly in the discussion than in the past. We’ll do this by borrowing an idea from Will Wilkinson, and using this post to link to blogs which we think make substantial contributions to this set of arguments (nb that my definition of substantial is necessarily an idiosyncratic one). The material from this seminar is also available under a Creative Commons license (the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License) for others to re-use and add to in creative ways. The seminar is available both as a PDF and as an .rtf file for easier reading and re-use.

The contributions are in the order that they are mentioned in Benkler’s response. Henry Farrell argues that not only formal institutions but also informal norms are necessary for these technologies to enable proper collaboration. Dan Hunter celebrates the book, but worries that it covers too many topics, and that it’s written in language that non-academic readers may have difficulty in understanding. John Quiggin examines the underlying motivations behind the production of common resources, and suggests that Benkler’s arguments point to major flaws in innovation policy. Eszter Hargittai suggests that inequalities in the ability to participate may mean that these new technologies won’t do as much to flatten social hierarchies as they might seem to. Jack Balkin claims that Benkler’s book isn’t so much about new modes of cooperation replacing market mechanisms, as existing side-by-side with them. Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that Benkler’s book is guilty of a soft form of technological determinism, which overemphasizes the positive consequences of new technologies and implicitly discounts the less positive. Finally, Yochai Benkler responds to all of the above.

As with previous seminars, please don’t comment on this introductory post, except to point out formatting glitches etc that need to be taken care of. If you have general responses, you should leave them in the comments section of Benkler’s post. If you have specific responses to individual posts, of course leave them in the comments sections for those posts. Finally, if you wish to link to this seminar from your own blog, please link to the introductory post (as this links in turn to all the contributions).

_The Wealth of Networks_ is a very important book, not only for people involved in debates on information and technology policy, but for the left as a whole. While it clearly builds on work by Larry Lessig, James Boyle, Pamela Samuelson and others on intellectual property and the public space, the real contribution (as with some of these other writers) is to a broader tradition of thought; that of people like Jane Jacobs, James Scott, Richard Sennett and Iris Marion Young. Benkler’s vision of the good society is one in which people have a high degree of autonomy, so that they have the practical capabilities to pursue their own interests and their own forms of cultural expression. He argues that new communications technologies, if they’re left unhampered, might radically increase this practical autonomy. They can do this by making it far easier for individuals to become producers as well as consumers of culture, and to share their cultural products with each other, so that they can build collectively on each other’s work. On the one hand, technologies such as the Internet allow us to engage with each other in new ways, and to form networks of collaboration and of conversation, creating possibility conditions for the kinds of diversity and critical thinking that democratic theorists prize. On the other, these technologies do so in a relatively non-constraining way.

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Over the last few days we’ve been getting a new kind of comment spam; it’s semi-relevant to the posts in question, but has, if you look at it, links back to the usual kinds of websites. Unless artificial intelligence has improved a lot more than I think it has, I presume that real human beings are being paid to generate it, in the hope that it will slip under bloggers’ radar more easily than the automated stuff. If you’re a blogger at a reasonably well-trafficked site, you may want to keep an eye out for this.

This would be wankeriffic if it wasn’t so pathetic – Peter Rosse Range, the editor of the official Democratic Leadership Council rag uses the Euston manifesto as evidence for the purported resurgence of an intelligent left in Europe. It starts with generalities about the rejection of anti-Americanism among European lefties.

bq. It is, of course, an article of faith among Europe’s lefties that America is a cultural and intellectual wasteland. But this, too, is beginning to change. A stream of Europeans passing through Washington this spring expressed surprise at the quality and variety of the debate in the city’s dynamic think tanks.

And exactly which debate is it that enjoys such remarkable “quality” and “variety”?

bq. Whereas there’s basically one opinion about the Iraq war in Paris and Berlin — “Everybody already knows it’s bad, so they don’t discuss it,” grouses Der Spiegel’s Claus Christian Malzahn — Washington is a hotbed of disagreement and discussion. Even London’s _Economist_ noted the thriving battles of ideas: “Look at the world of public policy today and it is America that is the land of the intellectuals and Europe that is the intellect-free zone.” Words I never thought I would read in a European publication.

Even apart from the rather dishonest implication that the _Economist_ is a reliable barometer of what the European left is thinking, this is nonsense. The Washington debate over the Iraq war is anything but a “thriving battle of ideas” (in fairness, the _Economist_ article which Range cites as support doesn’t say this, although it’s very stinky in many other ways). It’s a retreat from Moscow, in which those who signed onto the war are trying desperately to salvage the few scraps of credibility that they have remaining to them. Range’s article doesn’t herald a resurgence of anything at all – it’s an attempt to conjure up allies for an exploded policy position out of thin air. Scott McLemee puts his finger on what's wrong:

bq. But in the final analysis, there was something else bothersome about the manifesto — something I couldn’t quite put a finger on, for a while. A vague dissatisfaction, a feeling of blurry inconsequentiality…. Then it suddenly came into focus: The manifesto did not seem like the product of a real movement, nor the founding document of a new organization – nor anything, really, but a proclamation of dissatisfaction by people in an Internet-based transatlantic social network. … Something better might yet emerge … You never know. But for now, with only the text to go by, it is hard to shake a suspicion that the Euston Manifesto owes less to Marx than to MySpace.

Range would like to pretend that there’s an emerging European left that supports the rather contorted position that prominent DLCers have taken on Iraq. This is a politically convenient fiction; some blokes in a pub, a few op-ed columnists and a bunch of signatures on an Internet petition does not a widely-based movement make. But when you’re short of friends at home, the temptation to come up with quasi-imaginary friends elsewhere must be close to overwhelming.

(via Politicaltheory.info)

Between grading, our four month old, and a forthcoming CT seminar, I haven’t had much chance to write book reviews recently (I have a couple backed up, including one of Glyn Morgan’s _The Idea of a European Superstate_, which I’ve had half-written since last summer and promise to finish in the next few weeks). In the meantime, I have read a couple of SF/F books recently which I’d recommend as fun summer reading for those so inclined. First, Charles Stross’s _The Clan Corporate_ (Powells , Amazon), which I enjoyed more than his _Accelerando_, even though the latter has been nominated for umpteen awards. It’s the third of a series, and demonstrates that Stross has a nasty sociological imagination . There’s a nice set-up in the second book of the series where the protagonist (a vaguely left-wing journalist) argues that there’s simply no reason why the king and assorted nobles of a particularly squalid mediaeval state wouldn’t welcome industrialization, as they’d all get rich. You can nearly hear the author cackling into his sleeve as he writes this, and _The Clan Corporate_ demonstrates at length how horribly blase liberal assumptions of this sort can go wrong. _A Connecticut Yankee_ it isn’t. Second, Naomi Novik’s _His Majesty’s Dragon_ (Powells, Amazon,) and its follow-up, _Throne of Jade_ (the third book in the series is coming out in a couple of days). The premise for these books sounds almost preposterously horrible – Patrick O’Brian meets Anne McCaffrey – but it _works_. Somehow she reconciles a story about intelligent dragons and their human riders with an early nineteenth century England that is very similar to our own. It helps that Novik’s a very good writer, and quietly witty too. Both recommended.

Something I’ve been thinking about posting on since I read the opening sentence of this post by Max Sawicky on J.K. Galbraith.

bq. Like Robert Heilbroner, another giant, John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) wrote books persuading people like me to enter a profession dominated by analysis quite unlike their own.

I had a very similar experience with political science; I decided to do a Ph.D. after reading and loving Benedict Anderson’s _Imagined Communities_, which I later discovered to be completely atypical of what most political scientists do and talk about. Do other academics (or indeed non-academics) have similar experiences? What were the books (or other works) that made CT readers decide to enter a field, and did these books (or whatever) give the right or wrong idea about the field that readers entered?

I’ll be at Firedoglake on Sunday, leading the discussion in the second part of their Rick Perlstein book club. If you’ve read my previous post on the topic, you’ll have some idea of what I’m going to say, although I hope to expand my argument, and also respond to Brad DeLong's critique. It should be a fun discussion – Rick himself will be participating in comments. I’ve said before that us more wonkish types need to be talking more to the netroots people – I’m hoping that this will be a good opportunity to help build that conversation.

Firedoglake is running a bookclub on Rick Perlstein’s _Before the Storm_, which I reckon is the best book on American politics that I’ve read over the last few years. It’s very interesting how the book has come to occupy a near canonical position for left of center bloggers. It’s not only influenced wonkish types like myself and Kevin Drum, but also netroots people like Kos and Jerome Armstrong (whose recent book, which I liked, is clearly influenced by Perlstein), and Matt Stoller (who describes it in the Firedoglake thread as the “single best book on movement politics” that he’s read). But there’s a sort-of-disconnect there – or at least a part of Perlstein’s argument that doesn’t really fit with the netroots agenda as I understand it.

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Political theorist Ramin Jahanbegloo has been imprisoned in the Tehin prison in Tehran as a purported American agent engaged in “cultural activities against Iran.” Tehin is a notorious center of torture, but as far as we know he is still physically unharmed. I missed being a colleague of his by a few months; he left the University of Toronto the year before I arrived. My friend Melissa Williams is organizing a letter writing campaign to the Iranian authorities; she asks that writers

bq. be careful to adopt a respectful tone and avoid political condemnation. Bear in mind that our purpose is to secure Ramin’s safe release, not to make statements of principle, however valid.

While I appreciate that the Iranian government can arouse some pretty strong feelings, I’ll second Melissa’s cautionary note – but I would also urge CT readers to consider writing to their local Iranian embassies or representations. I’ll be writing further posts as more information emerges.

I’ve been travelling back and forth between Ireland and the US, attending a conference and grading over the last week, so I couldn’t participate in the Jonathan Chait bashing that’s been convulsing the left blogosphere. But I can’t resist pointing out the sheer silliness of this purported riposte from Chait.

bq. But it’s not true if you take account of their political style, which is distinctly New Left. It’s a paranoid, Manichean worldview brimming with humorless rage. The fact that the contemporary blog-based left, unlike the McGovernite New Left, lacks a well-formed radical program is some measure of comfort. However, I think there’s lots of evidence to suggest that this style of thinking is suggestive of a tendency to move in more radical directions over time. That, of course, is exactly what happened to the New Left, many of whose members starting off as relatively sensible liberals, or left-liberals before veering into the abyss.

This smear by association deconstructs itself – if you want to complain about bloggers’ paranoid, Manichean worldviews brimming with humourless rage, surely it’s best not to do so in paranoid, Manichean blogposts brimming &c&c. Chait, in his efforts to carry out the _New Republic’s_ self-appointed guardianship of sort-of-slightly-liberal-centrism (and to vilify those who have the impertinence to be to his left) becomes that which he’s complaining about. Peer not too long into the abyss of the blogosphere lest it peer back into thee.

In any event, I’d take the humour of McGovernites such as John Kenneth Galbraith (who as Scott McLemee pointed out last week was not only known for witty epigrams, but also for elaborate spoofs) over that of _New Republic_ apparatchiks any day of the week. As McLemee’s piece shows, Galbraith’s spurious psychologist Herschel McLandress, had the New Republic faction’s number a long time ago.

bq. Epernay [Galbraith’s pseudonym] enjoyed his role as Boswell to the great psychometrician. Later articles discussed the other areas of McLandress’s research. … He developed the “third-dimensional departure” for acknowledging the merits of both sides in any controversial topic while carefully avoiding any form of extremism. (This had been mastered, noted Epernay, by “the more scholarly Democrats.”)

(see here for Tabarrok’s original; see here for No. 1 in this series)

The US has one of the most deplored health insurance systems in the world and one of the most admired veterans’ health care systems. Could the difference have something to do with the fact that America’s health insurance firms operate in a competitive market with lots of private suppliers while veterans’ health care is dominated by monopolistic, government provided hospitals?

What would our health system look like if it operated like the Veterans’ Administration?

Look to France for the answer. “Healthcare in France: is “mainly under state control … The state plans out hospitals, the allocation of specialized equipment, etc.” However, as Kevin Drum notes, this

bq. works pretty well. French healthcare is excellent, waiting lists are short, the supply of doctors is high, overall costs are reasonable, and patient satisfaction levels are excellent. It couldn’t be transplanted whole into the United States, of course — doctors are paid considerably more here, for one thing — but it’s a pretty good model for what we could accomplish.

Porter Goss has resigned.

Update: Laura Rozen has more.