Tech Dissenter - Blogging a critical view of how technology is changing America

This Time, Irony Might Really Be Dead

After terrorist attacks on New York and Washington shocked people around the world on September 11, 2001, it seemed to many Americans that everything had changed. The government promised a rapid response to counter the unexpected national security threats, and the public rallied behind the president. Some members of the nation’s intelligentsia also viewed the traumatic attack as a cultural turning point. Roger Rosenblatt of Time and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair suggested that U.S. culture had reached the “end of irony.” These critics (among others) thought 9/11 would cause Americans to return to the serious-mindedness of prior eras, putting an end to the political and cultural frivolousness of the prosperous 1990s.

Their diagnosis soon appeared premature. Their pronouncement was mocked by defenders of the ironic sensibility in the months after the shock of the terrorist attacks wore off. Developments during the years that followed 9/11 proved the skeptics right. Like partisan politics, culture wars, and pop culture frivolity, the ironic posture of cultural mavens was stalled briefly by 9/11, but returned stronger then ever in the years that followed. Irony reached a new apex in the form of “hipster culture” during Barack Obama’s first term. Hipsters would wear T-shirts ironically of “uncool” bands and products that they disliked. They used this sartorial gesture to signal their wit and hipness to those sophisticated enough to “get the joke.” The ability to mockingly appropriate the lowbrow became a highbrow status marker.

However, with the economic recession and the revival of economic and racial tensions during the Obama years, irony became less compatible with the cultural zeitgeist. Google Trends indicates that the search term “hipster” peaked in the early 2010s and has been in a steady decline ever since (and by 2015, some outlets writing about the hipster movement were declaring it dead) which likely indicates a decline in irony’s centrality to our cultural conversation. During the 2010s, grassroots anger on the Right led to the Tea Party movement and popular conspiracy theories about President Obama’s true allegiances. The Left responded not just with “Daily Show” style satire and mockery, but with also with serious-minded (if not entirely successful in the short-term) activist movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

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The American People Should Amend The Constitution to Prevent Presidents From Being Crooks

The impeachment process is the primary method the United States Congress may use to hold a sitting president accountable for misconduct. However, because the current Congress is split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and because we are operating in a hyper-partisan environment, it is difficult to imagine two-thirds of the U.S. Senate convicting a president through the impeachment process. Too many Senators would need to take action against the de facto leader of their own party. Removal of a U.S. president via impeachment and conviction has never occurred, and it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. For this reason, in our current political environment a president would likely only face accountability for criminal acts after leaving office. If the president self-pardoned at the conclusion of his time in office, a post-presidential prosecution of the crimes he committed during his administration’s tenure could be blocked. The plausibility of this scenario is why a constitutional amendment limiting the president’s pardon power is needed to deter executive misconduct.

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The French Declare the Right to Disconnect from the Office

A recent French law gives workers the right to disconnect from their digital devices when off-work. This is an intriguing idea that other industrialized nations should consider imitating.

Some advocates cite the constant potential of immediate work obligations as contributing to greater levels of anxiety and burnout among modern workers. I can speak from personal experience about the alarm one feels upon receiving an urgent work-related e-mail at 7:15 in the evening. Plans have to be changed, and the few hours of free time at the end of the day are forfeited.

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Why We Shouldn’t Turn Our Politics Into a Costume Drama

Far too often, modern American politics has come to resemble a form of “cosplay,” in which activists of various stripes cast themselves in the role of virtuous freedom-fighters standing up against an all-powerful, malevolent enemy force. This tendency has exacerbated as our pop culture has shifted toward comic book films and science-fiction movies as our key narratives, while politics have simultaneously moved online into radicalizing ideological echo-chambers. As a result, many Americans perceive political narratives along the lines of Manichean or apocalyptic fantasy tales, and cast themselves as heroic combatants in this storyline of existential struggle. One thought-provoking essay recently argued that in comic book films, “Fear is omnipresent, public institutions are not to be trusted, and the best we can hope for is benevolent vigilantes to take everything out of our hands.” The popularity of these movies likely reflect the growing civic distrust in the United States, and may shed light on a disturbing impulse within the American electorate to favor figures willing to defy institutional and legal norms.

Many Americans now are chafing at the limits of what can be quickly accomplished under an increasingly gridlocked U.S. political system. In their frustration, they are also losing sight of the humanity of their opponents. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. In the 1990s, militia members portrayed themselves as modern-day minutemen, casting Clinton Administration federal agencies such as the ATF as tyrannical. This red-state narrative conveniently & hypocritically disappeared when a right-wing president, George W. Bush, again took office. Recently, American political cosplay has revived, expanded, and taken on a more continental flavor, with Antifa wielding the black and red flags of leftist Spanish civil warriors, and with Alt-Right supporters cosplaying as Nazis, Confederates, and other extreme-right factions.

When groups are engaged in politics as cosplay, the use of uniforms clearly mark insiders from outsiders, forming a ritualistic display of group unity, rather than a coalition of like-minded people willing to have a conversation with outsiders. Contrast the civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, or even the more ideologically sketchy Million Man March and Glen Beck’s “Restoring Honor rally,” whose participants generally did not wear uniforms, with the global rallies and marches of Klansmen and neo-fascist blackshirts and Marxist guerillas, whose participants did. In the aforementioned costumeless marches, at least someone could slip into the crowd unidentified, and one could not tell at a glance whether that person was a curious observer or an enthusiastic participant. The adoption of a uniform makes the group’s demonstration more implicitly militaristic, and makes it seem more plausible that violence may occur between group members and hostile non-members.

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Technology, Psychology, and Mass Shootings

In the aftermath of the horrific events in Las Vegas, today’s post suggests that Americans should emulate the British “stiff upper lip” attitude and should work to keep calm in the face of mass violence. This is not easy, given how horrific such events are, and of course such a stoic reaction will likely be unrealistic for those who actually had loved ones impacted by the tragedy. Furthermore, this proposed sense of calm should not involve an illogical and inhumane degree of apathy and complacency in the aftermath of outrageous violence. Nor does it suggest an abandonment of the desire to find policy solutions to address and mitigate the problem of gun violence.

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Will There Be a Digital-Age Revival of Antitrust Enforcement?

It increasingly appears that the economics of the Internet tend toward the monopolization of certain distinct online niches. There is one dominant search engine (Google), one dominant social networking site (Facebook), one dominant online encyclopedia (Wikipedia), and one dominant online retailer (Amazon).

Bloomberg View economics columnist Noah Smith recently wrote an article entitled “Monopolies Are Worse Than We Thought.” In it, he contends that “There’s now evidence that market concentration could . . . be hurting workers, by decreasing the share of national income that they receive. It’s probably making inequality worse.”

U.S. public policy has traditionally disapproved of monopolies. However, after the Clinton Administration’s mostly unsuccessful attempt to break up Microsoft, there have been few recent administrations that have aggressively prosecuted alleged antitrust violations within the tech sector.

Furthermore, according to Josh Barro of Business Insider, “with the possible exception of Google, these firms are so far from meeting traditional definitions of anti-trust violations that very novel enforcement definitions would have to be developed to restrict them.”

That’s the dilemma that an ambitious young law student named Lina Khan attempted to address in her article in the influential Yale Law Journal. According to Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post, she “laid out with remarkable clarity and sophistication why American antitrust law has evolved to the point that it is no longer equipped to deal with tech giants such as Amazon.com.”

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Amazon Should Locate Its 2nd Headquarters in a Struggling Midwestern City

Amazon has announced it will expand to a second headquarters outside of its current base in the Pacific Northwest. It is inviting companies to bid to be the next home of the Amazon corporation, and there are some 50,000 jobs at stake.

The contest is not the kind of development in the modern economy that I like to see. Instead of companies staying in a particular community and investing in its development, which would be the most ideal situation, giant corporations are instead often eager to relocate to whatever city offers them the best deal.

Of course, mayors have lobbied business leaders to bring jobs to their home cities for decades. However, companies considering expansion into a new region often appear to have a clear shortlist of contenders and a largely internal relocation process, rather than promoting this type of publicly-announced nationwide bidding free-for-all. Very unlikely markets have expressed their hopes of winning the Amazon second headquarters lottery, just as pro basketball fans in almost every city with an NBA team, even unlikely contenders, think their local franchises will somehow convince LeBron James to sign with them. Sorry to break it to the people of New Orleans, but the Pelicans aren’t going to get LeBron, and the Big Easy isn’t going to become Amazon’s next tech hub either.

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The Silicon Backlash: How the Tech Industry Went From Media Darling to Political Scapegoat

American culture is experiencing an unprecedented backlash against Silicon Valley and the wired world that it has provided us. The tech giants are being slammed by criticism from all sides. On the Left, they are criticized for aiding the spread of anti-Hillary fake news and for fostering income inequality. On the Right, they are criticized for allegedly enforcing “political correctness” and preventing their workers from expressing non-liberal ideas. This has led even parties on the usually anti-regulatory conservative side of the American political spectrum, from relatively mainstream Fox News blowhards to racist alt-right extremists, to come out in favor regulating digital platforms like utilities.

It’s interesting to consider how we got here. For most of my adult life, the Internet has existed, changing the workplace, popular culture, and social life in profound ways. However, for most of that period there has been surprisingly little political commentary and social criticism about the Internet’s transformative effects. When television first emerged as a dominant medium, it received some scorn from cultural critics for being allegedly mindless and lowbrow. The rise of the Internet was an even more profound change than the rise of television – no one was doing financial transactions or finding love over their TV sets, after all – and yet its emergence did not seem to elicit the same amount of cultural angst.

There are some good reasons for this. Television was closed, centralized, and unilateral, with a few networks dominating its early years. The Internet was open, decentralized, and interactive. If someone accused the Internet of being a “vast wasteland” of lowbrow culture and poor-quality writing, you could respond by advising them to create and upload superior content. The Internet quickly became far too diverse and vast to be subject to any such generalizations. Any topics you might be interested in, and millions of others you had no interest in, were being discussed and documented somewhere online. Individual users’ experiences were totally self-customizable. Furthermore, they could participate in online discussions, which seemed to be a major improvement over television, which did not allow you to talk back to it (at least, it was far less responsive when you tried).

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What the Reforms of the Industrial Age Can Teach Us About the Challenges of the Digital Age

In an interview published in Real Clear Future, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) compared the digital revolution to the industrial revolution. This thought experiment caught my attention, because I have given considerable thought to that exact same comparison. I disagree with Senator Sasse on many political matters, but this son of rural Nebraska who earned a U.S. history Ph.D. from Yale certainly has one of the keenest minds and one of the most unique perspectives of any current American politician.

Sasse views the current digital revolution as one of the four fundamental stages in human societal evolution throughout history: “You have hunter-gatherers, you have the rise of agriculture, and then you had the rise of the big tool economy: industrialization, urbanization, mass immigration both across the seas and most fundamentally from the American countryside to cities, as you go from about 86 percent of the public working on the farm at the end of the Civil War to almost 60 percent of the public working in big cities by World War II. And then now this new thing, the digital economy, the mobile economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy—the post-industrial economy, fundamentally.” He argues that “Industrialization is the only real analog for this moment.”

How does the trajectory of the digital revolution resemble the industrial revolution? Well, like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroads (which received government funding), the Internet started with public subsidization (the government-funded ARPANET project), but later became a chaotic private economic competition that was sometimes bad for workers and consumers, and then veered toward monopolies that carried their own problems and risks. The resulting centralization of power and money allowed the corporate winners of this competition to become a class of “robber-barons” who spent their money to influence the American political system. We may be seeing similar developments today, as tech companies try to avoid regulation and attempt to influence the boundaries of public debate in their own self-interest.

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