Fungible Convictions

I’m currently enjoying some rare downtime, lying in bed with the dog and watching the Wake/UVA game. It’s been a ridiculous month, filled with:

• My Center’s response to the Haiti earthquake, which has resulted, mainly through Chris’s work, in coverage from BoingBoing, the New York Times, and lots of other outlets.
• A Project Management course at Harvard University’s Extension School, a class that ate up 2pm-5pm most days the last three weeks, plus hours of group work each night.
• The demoralizing loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, seriously curtailing what’s possible in health care reform
• Unexpected interest from my neurologist in the lightheadedness I sometimes have, requiring me to do a four-day EEG next weekend, which means I’ll be stuck at home looking like this:



• Needing to throw together some presentations—with great help from MIT colleagues—for a group of high school honors students on a tour through Boston
• Packing my office for our move from 14N to the old Media Lab building
• And planning my IAP course, materials for which are now posted at http://fungibleconvictions.com/web-typography.

But I have to say, this crazy month has been pretty fun. It’s the first time I’ve been reminded of my favorite, exhausted days from high school, when having little spare time meant I stayed mentally engaged, and being among colleagues who also had little spare time meant we stayed engaged with each other. We all end up doing things we’re not exactly prepared or qualified to do but find fun in it and end up doing it well. (One more dorky highlight: I got in touch with Robin Kelley, author of the Thelonious Monk book I’ve been praising, and one of the profs in my department was a researcher with him and wants to get him to MIT for a talk.)

All the same, it’s a quiet afternoon, watching basketball, half-reclined as I count down the next hour before leaving for the North End for good food with my wife, dad, and step-mom. Things are good.

Dear Massachusetts friends,

Tuesday is the special election for Ted Kennedy’s open U.S. Senate seat, and with it rides the fate of health care reform: the 60th vote.

I urge you to book an extra 30 minutes Tuesday morning to go to your polling place and vote for Democrat Martha Coakley:

Your voting location:

http://www.wheredoivotema.com/bal/myelectioninfo.php

Tons of my friends have the dreaded “pre-existing condition”. I have one. Someone in your family has one. If Coakley loses and health reform fails, it may be decades before discrimination based on pre-existing conditions can be fixed.

The bill isn’t perfect. But it lowers costs in the long-run, cares for the most vulnerable, and ensures coverage for millions of Americans.

Vote Coakley on Tuesday to pass these needed reforms.

Andrew

PS Forward this note to your friends throughout Massachusetts.

Really remarkable interview between Chris Matthews and Bishop Thomas Tobin, who banned R.I. Congressman Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion because of Kennedy’s support of abortion rights.

Matthews, who is Catholic and indicates in the interview that he is pro-life, hammers the bishop on a single point: if you’re going to withhold communion from a legislator because of his undertanding of the law, what specific law would you have him make instead?

And even more to the point, Matthews asks, if abortion is to be illegal, what would the punishment be for performing one? Prison? For how long? Who would be punished? The woman? The doctor? Medical staff?

The Catholic church, as other ecclesiastical bodies do, has a persuasive moral argument against abortion. But as Chris Matthews says, once a church heaves legal arguments atop its moral ones—as the Catholic church has done in denying Kennedy communion for supporting something that is legal—it must start advocating for the specific punishment of criminal acts. In other words, to paraphrase Matthews, if you think abortion should be illegal, you need to start arguing that women and their doctors should be going to prison. Not many people go that far.

I want to be clear. I’m not making my own opinions known here, except to the extent that I think Matthews is right: if you think something should be illegal, you should plan for the consequences of its enforcement. And I don’t see the Catholic church, at least in the person of Bishop Tobin, doing that.

“…and that is that health care is a moral issue.”

I spent a good deal of this weekend suddenly sad, and in trying to explain it to my wife, one of the things I lingered on was a dissatisfaction with how well I do things I know I should do.

The quote above is from Ted Kennedy’s memoir, written as he thinks back on his time spent in a Boston hospital convalescing from a broken back, when he realizes that the average person is an illness or accident away from utter ruin. I cite the quote because it exemplifies Kennedy’s ability to do what he should do. He sees a moral issue to address, and he therefore spends the next forty years addressing it.

Most of us though are like me. If we’re not lazy, then we’re at least in search of comfort to displace discomfort, driven not by a roaring fire but by warm gray coals, ones we stoke every so often, the kind of fuel that gets us through the day and the years but can’t power our souls to do all the things we should do.

It’s always troubled me. Most of us do just enough to get by, but why don’t I do more? Why is my capacity for personal comfort larger than my capacity for moral action? I have little to lose by working a bit harder, reading more books again, getting up early on a Saturday to volunteer, calling old friends more often. Why does that simple motivation fail me and most of us?

It’s a related issue that permeates Kennedy’s memoir, in the words of his father Joseph: you’re either going to live a serious and productive life, or you’re not, and if it’s the latter, know that I’ll love you all the same but I won’t have much time for you. Ted Kennedy had many opportunities to live a comfortable life but always ran up against his father’s—let’s face it—threat that if he’s not going to choose to face the harder things life has to offer, then he’s out of his father’s life.

Is that what it takes before people always do what they should do?

I’m fundamentally in agreement with professed ACLU aims, but my view of it as an organization is a bit more negative, particularly after going to a Mass. ACLU meeting a while back and leaving early with another person with whom I shared the glazed over reaction that wordlessly says “Wow, what nuts!” It didn’t help that one of the attendees was a guy that we ban from MIT events because he habitually asks 20 minute questions during Q&A.

ACLU lawyers—and libertarian lawyers along with them—have a particular panache I love, though, and I’ll support them so long as they use it. Namely, they’re able to identify and eviscerate legal absurdities. One that they laid low today was the U.S. government’s argument that it should be allowed to withhold evidence of prisoner abuse on the grounds, in part, that that evidence’s release would embolden America’s enemies. From the Washington Independent’s story on the ACLU’s argument:

“No court has ever upheld the suppression of descriptions of government misconduct on the ground that those descriptions would inflame the nation’s enemies,” writes the ACLU lawyers in their brief filed today. “To do so would enshrine into the [Freedom of Information Act] the fundamentally antidemocratic principle that the more egregious the government misconduct at issue, the more protected it would be from public disclosure.” A law enacted “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed,” writes the ACLU, citing the Supreme Court, would thus be “transformed into an instrument of cover-up.”

And with that, any federal judge hearing this and similar future cases should have no doubt that the law’s letter and spirit demands releasing evidence of abuse, no matter how damaging to the government. For if we’re not a nation of laws, what are we even protecting through torture? Life, you might respond. We torture to protect lives. Our government-sanctioned torturers were thinking of protecting their fellow citizens and their families when they did what they certainly didn’t want to do, you might say. Be that as it may, the law tops it all. Why, after all, did we fight the Revolution or the Civil War or the two World Wars—to demand and defend laws. Our countrymen laid down lives because we believed in laws and their equal, just application. Closet totalitarians in this country like to point out that “life” comes before “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence. But the thriving of both presupposes law.

So, really, it’s time to release those transcripts.

I have to admit I’m biased in favor of Google. I have friends who work in both the Cambridge and Mountain View offices. I’ve tried, and provided feedback on, every beta Google has produced. I worked for a group trying to get funding from its philanthropic arm, Google.org. And every time I hear CEO Eric Schmidt speak at a conference, he strikes me as one of the most intelligent, well-versed, sober, geektastic corporate leaders I can think of. (If you have an hour, this interview with the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta is definitely worth watching:

.)

So perhaps I’m biased when I don’t see a problem with Google archiving so-called orphan works, publications that have been abandoned by both author and publisher, are out of print, and are effectively if not technically out of copyright. I don’t see a problem with making available works that no one can easily see/acquire, that no one is promoting, and that no one is making money from—but that may, and often do, still have great value.

I’m also biased, however, in favor of one of the great archival minds of our age, Robert Darnton:

Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

The question for Darnton and others, though, is: is this a bad thing? Google does not somehow become the exclusive copyright holder to orphan works. Other groups and companies are welcome to do the same thing and to also make money from it. And this particular monopoly is, contradictorily, limited and temporary. There will be well-funded competitors. There’s no indication that Google wishes to charge for access—it’s fair to assume Google will monetize the collection through targeted advertising as it does with search results and within Gmail. The original orphan works don’t disappear.

So I don’t begrudge Google its ambition. While experience shows that powerful groups try to control archives as a way of shaping history, experience also shows that seemingly dominant businesses, such as General Motors and Microsoft, are inevitably outflanked. And most important, as Schmidt explains in the Auletta interview, Google thrives only in so far as it is trusted. It’s a business that deals in user data, and that demands trust. Trust broken once is trust lost, so it’s in Google interest to welcome competing ideas, to accept criticism, and to be, above all, open.

The ‘Wonkette Part’ Of David Denby’s Book Really Just A Bunch Of Major, If Not Libelous, Errors

No one can get in the head of New Yorker writer David Denby, but to read this piece on Wonkette—one that eviscerates Denby’s criticism of blogs and exposes serious flaws in his own writing/research ability—is to understand perfectly the relationship between old-school and new-school writers.

Representative John Boehner (R-OH) said something curious on Meet the Press just now. He said that the Obama stimulus package focuses too much on giving money directly to states instead of helping people keep their jobs. What’s odd about this is that states can’t borrow money—they can’t run deficits like the federal government can, meaning that if there’s a shortfall, the states must cut services and jobs.

State governments and their contractors are huge employers. I don’t get why Boehner would argue against federal aid to the states in order to keep them solvent.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration will soon launch recovery.gov, a website dedicated to tracking expenditures from that aforementioned stimulus package. The website “shall provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use funds made available in this Act,” and will also “provide a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts awarded for purposes of carrying out this Act.”

“Pobody’s nerfect.”

Thanks to Henry for having everyone over to his place to watch the Inauguration.

Jory John of 826 Valencia published a fabulous collection in the Times today of children’s requests of Obama. My favorite was by this smart-ass. It’s something I would have written in fourth sixth grade too:

Dear President Obama,

Here is a list of the first 10 things you should do as president:

1. Fly to the White House in a helicopter.
2. Walk in.
3. Wipe feet.
4. Walk to the Oval Office.
5. Sit down in a chair.
6. Put hand-sanitizer on hands.
7. Enjoy moment.
8. Get up.
9. Get in car.
10. Go to the dog pound.

— Chandler Browne, age 12, Chicago