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The Semiotics Of Scandal

If the Wilson/Plame affair ends up having a longer, and ultimately more damaging, half-life than any of the other Bush administration mini-scandals (Enron, Halliburton, the Cheney Energy advisors, the original uranium flap), I suspect one key reason might lie not in the content of the scandal, but rather the form. Unlike those other controversies, Wilson/Plame has one key ingredient to its story: a Deep Throat.

There is irresistible, itch-you-can't-stop-scratching quality to a Deep Throat narrative. Whenever someone comes up with a new speculation about the original one, it generates a week's worth of coverage -- and that story is thirty years old! The press will keep clawing away at this new version, until the leaker is revealed (it helps that the leak itself was a criminal act, of course.) It gives the whole story a far more coherent arc -- it makes it a literal whodunit, as a opposed to a "did the White House know that there was some suspect intelligence information in the State of the Union?"

So if there are any structuralist literary critics on the White House payroll, I'd imagine they're advising the President to get out in front of this one: if they know the leaker's identity, they should hand him/her over to Justice immediately. Otherwise it's just going to fester, and maybe explode.

The Dems Debate

My favorite moment from yesterday's debate: Brian Williams ends with a "lightning round" question for all ten candidates with the question: "What's the least popular, but most right, decision you will make as President." Everybody pretty much avoids the question in the same way: they all put on a stern face, and then announce that they'll do something scandalously unpopular like reduce the deficit. (Note to candidates: the unpopular stuff is in the specifics of what you'll cut, or what you'll raise, not in the idea of reduction itself.)

After the first nine gave their non-responses, the camera turned to Dennis Kucinich, who had a massive grin on his face, and a general demeanor that suggested he was dying to answer the question. ("Ooh! Ooh! I know the answer to this one!") In fact, he had a whole list of unpopular decisions: "First, I would take action to stop the federal death penalty. Second, I would move to cut the Pentagon budget by 15 percent … Third, I would move to create a Department of Peace which would seek to make nonviolence an organizing principle in our society and to work with the nations of the world to make war itself archaic." You got the sense that he could have gone on for another fifteen minutes.

Not that I disagree with any of his unpopular ideas, but it was pretty funny to see how eager he was to deal them out.

Anybody else watch the debate? What'd you think?

Mob Spots

Ever since the fall of Trent Lott, I've been fascinated by the thought of the web contributing ideas and strategy to political campaigns, and not just money and meetups. (Both of which are crucial, of course.) I have a feeling that as the 2004 campaign heats up, the blogosphere will become an increasingly rich source of "message" brainstorming, given how easy it is to put together a relatively polished attack ad these days.

In that spirit, I've spent about two hours tonight putting together a little imagined TV spot that a Clark campaign could run against Bush. I genuinely don't know yet which candidate I'm supporting in 2004, so think of this as a proof of concept, not an endorsement. But the concept is threefold:

1. It's really, really easy for people who are not high-powered political consultants to build these things now -- I whipped this baby up using the Web, and Apple's iPhoto and Keynote software.

2. There's a useful way to connect the fantasy world of the Bush deficit with the fantasy world of the Iraq plan. And it revolves around showing Bush in that flight suit again and again, until it's Dukakis in the tank times a hundred.

3. This could just as easily be a Kerry ad.

You can see the mockup here if your browser can view QuickTime movies.

Feel free to circulate, rip, remix, burn, sample, etc.

Updated Sunday, Sept. 28, 1:15 PM: A few additional thoughts. The great thing about this kind of grassroots advertising is that it combines two of my favorite web developments of the past few years: the political force of blogging, and the distributed collaborations of the Lazy Web. I suspect the general pattern of development for these ads will be something like this: an individual somewhere comes up with an idea, and does a quick mockup, as I did with this Clark/Bush ad. Then sometime else pulls together a soundtrack, or tracks down a video clip (Cheney on Meet The Press would be nice), or records a voiceover. Before long you've got a spot that could air on television without anyone being able to tell that it was produced for literally zero dollars.

It would be nice to have a name for this kind of grassroots advertising. I was thinking about "mob spot" (as in Howard's smart mobs.) Used in a sentence as follows: "Check out this little mob spot I did for the Dean campaign last night after three beers."

Updated Sunday, Sept. 28, 10:15 P.M.: Now it gets interesting. We now have a version with music and one with music and voiceover. (Thanks Sean!) I'll try to upload tomorrow some of the original files so people can tinker with the arrangement even more. It'd be nice to have a single image billboard-style presentation of the final three slides: Bush in the flight suit, Clark in uniform, and the final tagline all on one page. Also, some have suggested that using the UN bombing is too harsh, and might potentially seem exploitative. Any suggestions for a better slide?

Remembering Edward Said

My old mentor Edward Said died late last night, apparently from pancreatic cancer, though he had suffered from a rare form of leukemia for more than a decade. I worked with Said during my graduate school days at Columbia's English department in the early nineties. By some strange coincidence, I intersected with him on a few crucial early days of his illness: he taught a seminar on Great Expectations the day he was originally diagnosed, and he started his initial chemotherapy treatment a few hours before my Orals. Whenever I heard word about his health -- I probably haven't spoken with him for five years at least -- I'd think of those two days, and his amazing willingness to show up on the job on what must have been a miserable day.

Like many people, I'm sure, I was deeply influenced by Said's work -- Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, of course, but also some of the earlier less political works, like Beginnings. He was largely responsible -- some might say to blame -- for importing French cultural theory into the American intellectual scene, particularly Foucault, who obviously had a huge influence on Orientalism. But he always resisted the inane wordplay and self-absorption that characterized so much of American theory in the eighties and early nineties. He absolutely despised "radical theorists" like Judith Butler, for instance. I remember him bristling anytime someone used the word "discourse" in one of our seminars -- and I remember thinking at the time that I had first starting using the word myself after reading Orientalism during my freshman year.

I'm sure there will be a flood of eulogies with more insightful surveys of his work (and no doubt some critics, given his political stances.) But I think it's worth saying something here that I've said about Said for more than ten years now: on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I've ever met in my life -- handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing Butler on the world.) I remember vividly one early spring afternoon, sitting through a seminar he was teaching on public intellectuals, in a room overlooking the Columbia campus and the sun setting over Riverside Park, and thinking to myself: there's literally nowhere else I'd rather be right now. I'm sure there are thousands of his students out there sifting through similar memories today.

Let It Change!

I was pretty glad to hear the news that Apple Records is releasing a de-Phil-Spectorized version of "Let It Be" later this year. Like many people, I've always thought that "Let It Be" could have turned out to be the Beatles album with the longest shelf life, if Lennon hadn't brought in Spector to add all the ghastly choirs and wall-of-sound gloss to what should have been showcase for something we have almost no record of: what the Beatles really sounded like as a live rock band in their "late" period.

The Anthology series has given us a little glimpse of that sound, but "Let It Be... Naked" should be an essential recording, I'd wager. I hope that it's just the beginning, though. The Beatles' main catalogue has really been woefully rendered in digital format -- all the classic albums have that britttle, tinny sound of the first generation CDs, before they improved the analog-to-digital mastering process. (For one, all those early CDs are too quiet.) The studio outakes that they've mixed and mastered recently for the Anthology releases sound much better than the "official" Beatles recordings -- as do the songs on the compilations "One" and the new "Yellow Submarine." But if you want to sit down and listen to the White Album, it still sounds horrible. Hopefully, this new "Let It Be" is a sign of things to come...

Watching The Watchers

My new Discover column, "Watching The Watchers," is online. This one's about the fascinating Government Information Awareness site that tracks and filters a vast web of data about government officials. (It's explicitly designed as a mirror image version of Poindexter's Total Information Awareness.) Here's a taste:

"Every piece of information is annotated with information about who entered it," [site creator Ryan] McKinley explains. "Everything can be ranked for veracity and interest. The hope is with that you can come up with pretty simple rules to keep out the things that would make this kind of database unusable. I honestly believe that there's enough genuine interest out there for people to put time into this, and so the amount of garbage that goes in will be pretty small." If the approach works, the garbage will be quickly spotted and demoted by the users of the site, while quality information will rise to the surface. High-rated contributors might rise up as well.

The self-policing of the site makes for an arresting sociological experiment. Most of the time, the trust ratings of eBay manage to block an individual's financial incentive to misrepresent information online. Will a similar approach work when the incentive is ideological instead of financial? Systems that self-regulate by following predictable rules can be gamed, of course. A group of users could agree to rate their own contributions highly and downgrade everyone else's. If they reached a critical mass, they could significantly alter the perspective of the database. It would take a lot of work –– and a lot spare time –– but ordinary people have done a lot of extraordinary things on the Web in their spare time.

A Tale Of Two Threads

Here's a little compare-and-contrast exercise that really showcases what's great and what's awful about the web right now. On the one hand, check out this wonderful 100-post-long thread at Kottke.org. Jason launches the discussion with a fascinating series of questions about bilingual conversations, where speakers switch back and forth between different languages, often in mid-sentence. (Apparently, this is called codeswitching.) And then you have a discussion thread with a signal-to-noise ratio close to infinity, filled with personal anecdotes, speculation, further reading, scientific explanations -- contributed by mostly complete strangers from all over the world, chiming in because Jason asked some great initial questions. It's as rich as conversation as you'll find anywhere, and it's the kind of conversation that would have been for all intents and purposes impossible ten years ago.

On the other hand, you have the people posting junk comments in some of my old threads here, simply to boost the Google PageRank for their sites. It's not even pure spam -- it's meta-meta-spam: making a commercial pitch by making it more likely for people to find your site on Google by making it more likely that Google will find your find site by linking to it from other people's sites, thus boosting PageRank. Uggh.

By the way, I said all those nice things about Jason so he'd put me back on his blogroll. It really hurt my PageRank when he took me off...

Dean/Clark 2004

For the last three weeks, I've been thinking that an early announcement of a Howard Dean/Wesley Clark ticket would be a brilliant move, but all along I've assumed that it was implausible, largely because it seemed unlikely that Clark would want to hitch his wagon to any of the candidates' stars at such an early date, even if he decided that it was too late to enter the race himself. But now this Washington Post story suggests that the alliance may be on the table.

I think it's a great idea for four reasons:

1. The boldness of the move generates a huge wave of publicity, and elevates Dean from front-runner-with-major-caveats to "it's his to lose" status.

2. Clark gives the Dean campaign at least a hint of a Southern strategy.

3. Dean and Clark on the same ticket unites the two most prominent critics of the Iraq war.

4. Clark's military background helps appease the "Dean's too much of a dove to get elected" camp.

Put aside for the time being the question of whether Howard Dean is the right man for the job. Why wouldn't a Dean/Clark ticket be the right move strategically for both Dean and Clark right now?

When Strangers Call

I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, since it's buried in the archives, but we've been attracting some strange visitors here at stevenberlinjohnson.com. For the past couple of weeks, people have been posting very short, sometimes slightly ungrammatical, messages in response to a few items I posted months ago. Check out the discussion thread here -- scroll past the opening comments, and you'll see a string of "good site" and "thanks for the information!" These posts have the distinct smell of spam about them -- they're formulaic and targeted at a small number of pages in the archives. But what possible purpose are they serving? What's the incentive for posting a short note of appreciation on a page buried on someone's weblog? Is this is a widely recognized phenomenon? Explanations, please....

Your Attention Please

Continuing my tour through Mind Wide Open... In chapter three, I talk about the question of attention and focus, trying out a number of neurofeedback devices designed largely to treat ADD. I also take a suite of attention tests called the Comprehensive Attention Battery, created by a neuro-psychologist named John Rodenbough. What follows are a few of my impressions from taking the test, which turned out to be a kind of reverse-Advil in its ability to make your brain hurt in a matter of minutes.

My tour through the CAB may not have been the most fun I've ever had at the computer, but it left me with a strangely precise awareness of the different tools as I was utilizing them in real-life. I'd memorize a phone number, and think: "right, this is auditory encoding." Or at I'd switch back and forth between watching CNN and reading my email, and think, "This is supervisory multiprocessing." Before, I would have simply said that in each case I was trying to pay attention. Now the two acts seemed as different as doing pushups and running on a treadmill. They exercised different cognitive muscles, and taking the CAB had allowed me to perceive those muscles as distinct entities for the first time.

Unlike Rodenbough, I found that my visual encoding -- for faces, and environmental details -- was the weakest link in my attention chain. Having isolated this property by taking the test, I started to notice confirmation of it in ordinary life. Around the time that I was investigating the CAB, my wife and I were in the middle of a complicated renovation of a new house we'd bought. We'd take trips out to inspect the progress, and on return, my wife's brain would be filled with dozens of seemingly photo-realistic details from the house, while my brain would have a few meager scraps of images and general impressions. We had looked at the same objects, but I had failed to encode. I started to think about it in the language of computer software: my default settings are visual encoding turned off. For my wife, I suspect, it's the opposite: just walking around a room fills her head with details that she can recall days later. It doesn't mean that I'm not capable of remembering visual information. In fact, now that I've located the problem, I've improved a little, because I now consciously switch on the encoding routine when I'm in an environment I want to remember. Instead of scanning a room passively, I break it down into component parts: "Okay, notice the moulding over the doorway -- there's a crack there. Now look at the electrical panel here…" It still doesn't compete with my wife's skills, but at least I'm in the game now.

Jettisoning the idea of attention as a Single Unified Thing leaves you with two primary implications. The first we've already seen: if the art of paying attention is actually divided between several different modes, it's helpful to learn which of those modes are working for you, and which ones aren't pulling their weight. But the second insight operates one level up: if your attention is an interacting system of different modes, then one of the most essential high-level functions that your brain performs is switching modes. You can be the most brilliant auditory encoder in the world, but if you can't switch into auditory encoding mode when it's appropriate, your talents will be wasted. Part of having an effective brain is possessing good tools, but an equally important part is being able to pull the right tool out at the right time.