Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

Current figures suggest that more than 22,000 perished in Myanmar (Burma) this weekend. Now the story seems to be the most consequential in the world.

Yesterday’s figures suggested that more than 350 perished in Myanmar (Burma) this weekend. Then the story seemed like a regrettable natural disaster.

There’s that old axiom, attributed to Josef Stalin, that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” I think there’s undeniably something to that. But I also can’t deny that I’m staring in the face two different numbers that make two very different impressions on me. In this cases, 20,000 deaths are a tragedy and 300 is a statistic.

It’s an ugly truth that I willfully ignore disasters when damage estimates are small. Unless you know someone who lives near the site of a natural disaster, it’s easy to ignore all the reports of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis. It’s probably smart not to get too worked up over natural disasters we humans, by definition, have no ability to control. It may even be wise.

And yet I can’t escape the fact that doing so seems terribly, inhumanely callous.

People who’ve known hard labor know calluses. That toughening of the skin so that the pressure so often put upon it starts to cause no injury. Perhaps even no feeling. The toughening can be unsightly, but it’s the body’s natural and necessary response to pressures that would otherwise cause tissues to rip and bleed. Given the choice between a callus and an injury requiring attention and rest, our bodies will usually choose to toughen rather than tear.

Perhaps, in our concern for the welfare of others, we need a similar amount of callousness. A similar detachment and unconcern that allows us to get on with what needs doing in our lives. That allows us to get up after hearing about five American deaths in Afghanistan, or the death of 30 Iraqis in an explosion, or 20 in a tsunami, or one in an industrial accident.

We have no time to mourn all these losses. We cannot, perhaps, spare the time and energy to consider, regret, and mourn every loss of life anywhere in the world. We cannot even spare the time and energy to mourn every loss of a fellow citizen of our country. Or even of every loss of a fellow citizen of the city, province, or state in which we live. Sometimes, it seems like we don’t even have the ability to mourn those family member we lose.

I see the necessity of this callousness. I think it makes good practical sense as a means of survival. But that doesn’t make me any less disappointed to notice it within myself or others. Any less sure that it’s wrong to stare at immense loss and be unable to shed even a tear. Any less disappointed that I only see a tragedy when the death toll reaches 22,000. Any less sure that 350 is a tragedy. Any less disappointed when I overlook the tragedy of one.

In school, Sunday’s the day where you have to make up for the procrastinating you did all weekend. Out of school, Sunday’s only the day where you recognize that you’ve done nothing all weekend.

Surely this doesn’t hold true for everyone, but my weekends tend to naturally fill themselves with consumption of media. All the things I didn’t get to read, watch, or listen to during the week become the priority during a distraction-less weekend. As such, the whole weekend can easily be consumed by the act of consuming.

If Clay Shirkey’s assertions are to be believed — and I’m not saying they are — in previous decades all free time went to consuming. In the pre-radio age, it went mostly to consuming alcohol. In the television age, it went mostly to consuming sitcoms. But while Mr. Shirkey’s certainly right that television’s roles as the thing people do with down time is waning, consumption still plays a large part in modern existence.

Today one isn’t restricted to watching what’s on television or listening to what’s on the radio, or reading what’s on paper and in possession, but we still consume a great deal. There’s little doubt that young people watch less television than they used to. But they also have the ability to spend hours in front of YouTube, a different-but-similar dummy box.

The most interesting contention that Mr. Shirkey makes about the future is that we’ll be creating more and consuming less. It’s certainly a possible trend, but it’s doubtful that we’ll move from “all free time being devoted to TV” to “all free time being devoted to creating.” After all, one must consume things in order to create. Things created in a vacuum are usually uninteresting rehashes of painfully common ideas. (Something with which I’m intimately familiar…)

Surely one can go too far in consuming. A quick guesstimation says that of the 15 hours I was awake Sunday, 11 of them were devoted to the act of consuming media. Surely I learned a lot and laughed a lot but by the end I had a bad case of consumption fatigue.

It’s possible that the mythical people who used to constantly watch TV in their free time never had a bout of consumption fatigue, but you can count me a doubter.

They probably didn’t combat consumption fatigue by creating, but it’s possible that did combat it. Because creating was a harder task, people could spend more time doing tasks that were not explicitly either. Cooking from a recipe is both an act of consumption (of the recipe) and creation (or foodstuffs). So too is knitting, sewing, or drawing while watching television an intermediate between the two. Then of course there’s running, hiking, biking, walking, and playing, all of which are neither consuming nor creating by any traditional understanding of the words.

The fact is, we’re not moving from a world of consuming to one of creating. At best, we’re shifting the balance slightly. It’s easier to create and share things today than at any time in the past. Today anyone can write a blog, edit a wiki, create digital art, or mash-up two old things.

But everyone has experienced creation fatigue as “writer’s block.” Or procrastination. Or a general feeling that “it’s just not coming.” We’ll never be able to create infinitely without encountering these roadblock.

People, too, know consumption fatigue. Rarely do they identify it as such, but that general feeling of needing to get out of the house is one of many possible misdiagnoses of the problem. And I’d guess that it’s no more or less common today than it was in the past.

I don’t think the ratio of consuming and creating will change much in the future. Surely more will be publicly shared, but I’m not certain much more time will be spent on non-consuming behavior than has been in the past. And despite some bouts of consumption fatigue, I’m pretty sure I’m fine with that.

Public Domain

Law making, like many things in life, is about compromise. But the problems with which politicians must deal are not always about compromise. Some things are too important and too urgent to be dealt with adequately through endless compromises with other politicians and the public at large. Sometimes, in the course of running a country, laws are broken. Sometimes this is done willfully, sometimes through misunderstandings. I’d guess that it’s often done with a heavy heart.

I’m willing to guess that presidents seem to age so rapidly because they are so often forced to break laws and enter moral “gray areas” to do what they honestly feel is best for the country.

George W. Bush has deservedly gotten a lot of flack for all the laws that have been broken under his administration. Torture was once against the law. We now know that for a least a few years after September 11, it was an approved policy used by the administration. Breaking the cover of a CIA agent and subsequently lying about doing was once grounds for imprisonment. Hundreds of other actions of questionable morality and legality have no doubt occurred.

When one makes laws, they do so by fighting over inches in the hope that with enough concerted effort they’ll make progress of feet or even yards. No legislator has ever reached the end of her career convinced that she made it all the way to the end zone. That she accomplished all that she set out to do. That the laws are all of the kind and character that she would like them to be.

But much that the president does is of a different type entirely. Surely sometimes he does engage in the same game of inches that it so often played under the Capitol’s rotunda, but that’s hardly his only duty. Sometimes he must authorize snooping in violation of laws, either foreign or domestic. Perhaps he authorizes the use of force without congressional approval. Sometimes, I’m sure, he must decide whether individual men live or die.

Most of this is hidden from both the American people and the world. Part of this is probably for fear of prosecution of the president or his administration, but the full extent of government knowledge or action cannot ever be publicly known. Then there is, of course, the usefulness of allowing the American people to think that the government doesn’t make decisions in private.

Commentators often claim that elections should be decided on issues alone. That middle class Americans should have voted en masse for John Karry, Al Gore, Walter Mondale, and George McGovern. That people shouldn’t judge their presidential candidate on anything but their legislative agenda.

Ignoring the fact that presidents lack any meaningful power to pursue a legislative agenda, the fact remains that the presidency is a job that requires careful decisions in the face of hard choices. Decisions that cannot be predicted by a legislative agenda, and so must be judged by external factors. A candidate’s temper, history, or friends are legitimate ways for the American public to judge a president’s character. To determine how she will act when faced with urgent decision for which laws provide no clear right answer.

Surely there’s less information about a person’s character in whether or not they wear a flag pin than there is in my little finger. And the fact that you once met a terrorist or were endorsed by a closed-minded bigot doesn’t count for much. But the notion that people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who they’ll vote for on more than a legislative agenda is patently absurd. I’d certainly rather have a president whose judgement I trusted than one who promised to legislate in my favor.

You could feel, almost as soon as you’d read the title, that this was one of those ideas that was going to be a little too clever for it’s own good. One of those things that at first brush sounds rather clever, but fizzles after about eight sentences when it shallowness becomes clear.

Surely writing a review of the review that you’re writing is a clever conceit, there’s no denying that. But it has the very real pitfall of being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The review is inherently trapped by the basic idea and judgment that began it. If in the first paragraph the review was condemned as mediocre, the rest of the written piece must then be mediocre.

By the same token, if the initial judgment was that the idea was a work of genius, there would be an almost insurmountable level of expectation that would make it almost impossible to fulfill, and thus to write the rest of the review.

Most reviews are written after the work under review has been completed and polished. Not this one. This one is being reviewed as it’s simultaneously being written. Thus the quality of the review that it presently being written is based on the quality of the review that’s presently being written. It’s a sort of recursive review that feeds on itself indefinitely, unable to rise above it’s initial assessment of itself.

This review is further impeded by the fact that it cannot ever assess the work holistically, but must, in each paragraph, judge only those previously written. This obvious limitation could be taken as emblematic of the echo chamber that’s created by a small circles of elite intellectuals endlessly reviewing each others works. Feeding endlessly on the works of each other, the act of reviewing itself becomes recursive.

In this way, the review suggests a Dadaistic contempt for the very act itself. Unfortunately, the suggestion is neither borne out by thorough examination nor accepted public consensus. When an idea lacks either wide acceptance or textual support, it is incumbent upon the reviewer to provide at least a smidgen of evidence for their premises and thus their conclusion.

It somtimes feel unfairly dismissive to see something dismissed as “too clever by half,” but here the phrase is apt. Though it begins with an interesting idea, the review quickly fizzles for want of a more thoroughly thought-out execution. Though one can understand that the form itself would seem to limit this possibility, that seems a more cogent argument for abandoning the form than for excusing it’s myriad flaws. If it’s impossible to do it well, perhaps it shouldn’t be done at all.

Today is one of those days.

Sometimes it hits. It’s rarely anticipated. That desire to feel that feeling you felt in the past. Maybe it was your first day of school, or your first kiss, or your first home run. Maybe it was that night when you did that thing, or that afternoon when you did that other thing. Maybe it was just that one time that you don’t remember very well but do remember fondly.

But you’ll never feel quite that way ever again.

One could, of course, question if you ever felt that way you remember yourself feeling. After all, memory is a flawed device that frequently deceives. It’s not only possible but likely that dinners at Grandma’s house were a little less magical than you remember them being. It’s hard to doubt that memories sometimes papers over the worst parts, colors in the bits that have faded with time, and generally makes events from your past look better than they really were.

But that’s a different matter. This is about how you’re no longer the same person you were ten years ago. If that’s true, you’re also not the same person you were five years ago. Or two years. Or a year. Or six months ago. Or three months ago. Or last month. Or last week. Or yesterday. Or 10 minutes ago. Or just a second ago.

This of course could lead us to ask, “Well, who are we anyway?” But again, that’ll have to be left to a different time.

The fact is, any feeling you had in the past was shaped by all the feeling you’d had until that moment. And the second you’ve had the feeling of first riding a roller coaster, you’ll never feel that way again. Your first experience of something colors the way you’ll experience that thing the rest of your life. So does that second experience of it. Every experience changes your relationship to those you’ve had and those you’ll have in the future. Some of these changes are probably for the better, some may not be.

The reason you’ll never get to relive that moment again is not that you’ll never be 12  or 21 ever again. It’s because you’ve already experienced that. And then you’ve experienced other things. And so you’ll never feel precisely that way ever again.

This can be a sad thought. It’s not exactly exuberating to think that you’ll never experience the joys of your childhood ever again. To think that you’ll never feel that way you did again.

But there’s no way to avoid it. You’ll never be that person again. You’ll never feel that way again. Time “marches on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.” We’ll never be the same again. There’s no going back.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, has some very interesting ideas about how the internet’s changing society and why. So on today’s “Other People’s Words,” a selection from a recent speech he gave on the topic. Video of the speech is available, as is the full transcript.

He begins by describing the role gin played in allowing the industrial revolution, and the role sitcoms played from about 1950 onward in keeping people with new-found free time busy.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first — hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.

Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, “Don’t go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don’t go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark.” But it’s something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there’s no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, “This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now.”

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to try something. I’ll present the same argument three different ways. I hope that by the end, you’ll understand why.

First

The length of an argument is directly proportional to it’s strength.

Second

Generally, the length of an argument is proportional to it’s strength. Barring excessively and pointlessly wordy arguments, five words are much less likely to convince than even fifty. Surely five words on taxation can energize those who already agree with you on the topic, but it’s much less likely to convince those that oppose you than is a thoroughly reasoned 500 words. There’s no denying that some may never be fully convinced, but they’re more likely to understand if they hear a thorough explanation than if they hear a sound bite.

Third

I have this idea that the length of an argument is, generally speaking, directly proportional to it’s strength. That is: a long argument is far more likely to succeed in actually convincing someone to change their opinion than a short one. Now, having said that, I should add that not all arguments that are long will be strong. A long and rambling argument is a long and rambling argument. But given a roughly constant rhetorical strength and skill, a short quip is likely to leave the opposition in opposition.

Consider: “A woman has a right to privacy.” If you’re for a woman’s “right to choose” you’re probably convinced that that’s a good argument. But you won’t convince anyone standing outside an abortion clinic with a sign by such an argument. You may succeed, however, if you gave them a longer explanation about how you feel that a woman should be guaranteed a safe medical procedure when she feels it is necessary. And that you also hope that it’s rarely necessary. Surely a sudden conversion is unlikely, but I find it hard to believe that it wouldn’t be more likely.

So too with the argument for “higher taxes,” which the political left in most countries desires. Couched in those terms, it turns off everyone but the most ardent supporters. But expanded to explain all the good that those taxes would empower the government to do on behalf of its citizen, people would become more likely to accept the argument. Soon, they too might take to the streets shouting “higher taxes.” Again, they’re not likely to convince many that way, but they’ll learn.

Much of people dissatisfaction with the “sound biting” or all cultural and political arguments is because they understand the implicit logic of the relationship between length and strength. They understand that you’re much less likely to convince a person in a 30-second television commercial than in a 30-minute discussion. I think that implicit understanding should not only be illuminated, but expanded so that everyone will finally come to understand the argument.

There have been a number of recent attempt to steal elections. Of course not all have succeed, and probably, not all have been known. Though I don’t have much advice about how to keep your fixing from being known, I have some ideas about how you can succeed despite it being known.

First, there are some initial conditions that are very helpful in making rigging possible. They include:

• A corrupt bureaucracy to help with the fixing. Without at least a small force dedicated to the autocrat, he or she has almost no hope of meaningfully changing the elections results. There must be a secretive and relatively powerful force, traditionally the army, who is willing to help. It is for this reason that incumbents are usually much more able to rig an election than outside candidates.
• A world unwilling or unable to intervene on behalf of justice. Fortunately, the default mode of the international community today is non-intervention. Unless or until your rigging has resulted in the deaths of over 500 people, the rest of the world is unlikely to be terribly concerned that you’ve rigged an election. Even if your rigging results in the death of that number, mediation is much more likely than any movement of force. As such, you can expect to keep at least a little personal peace and security even if you’ve been a thoroughgoing tyrant.
• A pacified public. This isn’t completely necessary, but that it helps can not be doubted. There are generally two way to pacify the public in your country, love or fear. Perhaps the best way to pacify though, is a little of both. That’s secret has been working solidly for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party for years.

Now we should note that there’s more than one way to steal an election. Simply changing the results in counting can if few enough people notice. For our purposes, as was the case recently in Zimbabwe, we’ll assume that the opposition has some legitimate claim to victory.

1. Do everything in your power to delay the announcement of final results. If you’ve not released the results a few days after the election, consider claiming that there were irregularities that merit recounting. Though the opposition may claim to know the results, make sure that you don’t let anyone in the government either agree or disagree with them. This allows you to demand a run-off or a re-vote.
2. It’ll help to use some coercion. If the election didn’t go your way, be sure to rough up at least a few people who are responsible for this. It’s best to make sure that you can’t be directly linked to the violence, but that everyone understands that you’re responsible. This could be especially useful in turning the tide if you succeed in getting a run-off.
3. Be sure it’s not to outrage the world that prefers to be uninvolved. They’ll probably do their best to look responsible to those concerned in their home country, but will be very reluctant to intervene. Be aware that if your violence — or other coercion methods — become too well known they may be forced to intervene. This is bad for you and uncomfortable for them.
4. It’ll help, too, if those who might intervene fear that you’ll create greater instability if you lose. If they see you as dangerous or unstable, they’re much more likely to fear you and let you remain in power, however disastrous this is for your country or its citizens.
5. Once the world makes clear it’s intention to look away, (re)inaugurate yourself. They’ll forget soon enough and you’ll be free to rule for however long you claim you need. Tyranny will have triumphed again.

Since it’s been warm outside recently (at least where I live), what better time is there for a poem about snow? This fun little poem, “Snow, Aldo,” is by Kate DeCamillo.

Once, I was in New York,
in Central Park, and I saw
an old man in a black overcoat walking
a black dog. This was springtime
and the trees were still
bare and the sky was
gray and low and it began, suddenly,
to snow:
big fat flakes
that twirled and landed on the
black of the man’s overcoat and
the black dog’s fur. The dog
lifted his face and stared
up at the sky. The man looked
up, too. “Snow, Aldo,” he said to the dog,
“snow.” And he laughed.
The dog looked
at him and wagged his tail.

If I was in charge of making
snow globes, this is what I would put inside:
the old man in the black overcoat,
the black dog,
two friends with their faces turned up to the sky
as if they were receiving a blessing,
as if they were being blessed together
by something
as simple as snow
in March.