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A World Without Jobs < Andy Crouch's Articles | Culture Making
This article originally appeared in Culture Making, 18 January 2011.Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence is the top story in today’s newspapers. The Wall Street Journal says his brief and poignant memo raises “uncertainty over his health and the future of the world’s most valuable technology company.” These two questions—Jobs’s health and Apple’s health—are the focus of almost all the coverage today.
But I’m interested in the health of our culture, and what will happen to it when (not if) Steve Jobs departs the stage for the last time.
As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.
In the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology. In October 2001, with the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month where unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.
Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.
Technological progress is the fruit of countless scientists, inventors, engineers, and firms. But Apple has done one thing almost no one else does: put the fruits of insanely complex engineering into accessible form. Before the rise of Apple, advances in computing technology largely meant a daunting increase in complexity and the length of the manual accompanying the device. The 1990s were the age of Microsoft, when geeks ruled the world . . . because we were the only ones who knew how to get it to work.
Apple made technology safe for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with a great deal of style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not just in a long list of features and ever-spiraling complexity (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Word), but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are five or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. No geeks required.
Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It’s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn’t, say:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own “inner voice, heart and intuition.”
Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha, and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University. Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself, and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil it is strangely inert. Such a speech would have been hard to take at the funeral of Christina Taylor Greene, nine years old, killed along with five others on a bright Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona. It is no wonder that Barack Obama, who had to address these deeper forms of grief this past week, turned to a vision which only makes sense if there is more to the world than we can see. Anything less is cold comfort indeed.
But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.
A friend of mine says that human beings can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.
It’s true for nations as well.
Jobs’s leave of absence was announced on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and in the entire twentieth century there was no one who conveyed more hope—genuine, biblical, and faith-breathed—to our culture than Dr. King. Then came Barack Obama, whose election ratified much of what King had dreamed of and fought for—a hope genuinely, if not completely, fulfilled.
But President Obama must lead in a world of trouble and terror. He has to venture outside the walled garden of technology presided over by a bitten apple (which in the latest design no longer bears a rainbow but simply glows with stainless perfection). On the very day that Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, President Obama had to address the State of the Union, and there was no “magical, revolutionary device” he could offer. In President Obama’s world, our world, the bitter, bitten fruit is all too real.
Steve Jobs’s gospel is, in the end, a set of beautifully polished empty promises. But I look on my secular neighbors, millions of them, like sheep without a shepherd, who no longer believe in anything they cannot see, and I cannot help feeling compassion for them, and something like fear. When, not if, Steve Jobs departs the stage, will there be anyone left who can convince them to hope?
I’ll probably have a response to this over at scatteredspeculations.tumblr.com sometime soon.
Posted: January 30th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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Juan Cole: Egypt’s Class Conflict | Informed Comment
Egypt’s Class Conflict
Posted on 01/30/2011 by Juan
On Sunday morning there was some sign of the Egyptian military taking on some security duties. Soldiers started arresting suspected looters, rounding up 450 of them. The disappearance of the police from the streets had led to a threat of widespread looting is now being redressed by the regular military. Other control methods were on display. The government definitively closed the Aljazeera offices in Cairo and withdrew the journalists’ license to report from there, according to tweets. (Aljazeera had not been able to broadcast directly from Cairo even before this move.) The channel, bases in Qatar, is viewed by President Hosni Mubarak as an attempt to undermine him.
Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy? Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those. But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed. Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people. The Mubarak regime has had to shoot over 100 people in the past few days, and wound more. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have ignored Mubarak’s command that they observe night time curfews. He has lost his authority.
Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class. Leonard Binder argued in the late 1960s that that rural middle class was the backbone of the regime. Abdul Nasser’s state-led industrialization also created a new class of urban contractors who benefited from the building works commissioned by the government.
From 1970, Anwar El Sadat took Egyptian in a new direction, opening up the economy and openly siding with the new multi-millionaire contracting class. It in turn was eager for European and American investment. Tired of the fruitless Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian public was largely supportive of Sadat’s 1978 peace deal with Israel, which ended the cycle of wars with that country and opened the way for the building up of the Egyptian tourist industy and Western investment in it, as well as American and European aid. Egypt was moving to the Right.
But whereas Abdel Nasser’s socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970, from 1970 to 2000 there was no real development in the country. Part of the problem was demographic. If the population grows 3 percent a year and the economy grows 3 percent a year, the per capita increase is zero. Since about 1850, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries have been having a (mysterious) population boom. The ever-increasing population also increasingly crowded into the cities, which typically offer high wages than rural work does, even in the marginal economy (e.g. selling matches). Nearly half the country now lives in cities, and even many villages have become ‘suburbs’ of vast metropolises.
So the rural middle class, while still important, is no longer such a weighty support for the regime. A successful government would need to have the ever-increasing numbers of city people on its side. But there, the Neoliberal policies pressed on Hosni Mubarak by the US since 1981 were unhelpful. Egyptian cities suffer from high unemployment and relatively high inflation. The urban sector has thrown up a few multi-millionaires, but many laborers fell left behind. The enormous number of high school and college graduates produced by the system can seldom find employment suited to their skills, and many cannot get jobs at all. Urban Egypt has rich and poor but only a small “middle class.” The state carefully tries to control labor unions, who could seldom act independently.
The state was thus increasingly seen to be a state for the few. Its old base in the rural middle classes was rapidly declining as young people moved to the cities. It was doing little for the urban working and middle classes. An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.
The military regime in Egypt initially gained popular legitimacy in part by its pluck in facing down France, Britain and Israel in 1956-57 (with Ike Eisenhower’s help). After the Camp David accords, in contrast, Egypt largely sat out the big struggles in the Mideast, and made what has widely been called a separate peace. Egypt’s cooperation in the Israeli blockade of Gaza and its general quiet alliance with the US and Israel angered most young people politically, even as they racked up economic frustrations. Cairo’s behind the scenes help to the US, with Iraq and with torturing suspected al-Qaeda operatives, were well known. Very little is more distasteful to Egyptians than the Iraq War and torture. The Egyptian state went from being broadly based in the 1950s and 1960s to having been captured by a small elite. It went from being a symbol of the striving for dignity and independence after decades of British dominance to being seen as a lap dog of the West.
The failure of the regime to connect with the rapidly growing new urban working and middle classes, and its inability to provide jobs to the masses of college graduates it was creating, set the stage for last week’s events. Educated, white collar people need a rule of law as the framework for their economic activities, and Mubarak’s arbitrary rule is seen as a drag here. While the economy has been growing 5 and 6 percent in the past decade, what government impetus there was to this development remained relatively hidden– unlike its role in the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the income gained from increased trade largely went to a small class of investors. For instance, from 1991 the government sold 150 of 314 state factories it put on the block, but the benefit of the sales went to a narrow sliver of people.
The world economy’s [pdf] setback in 2008-2009 had a direct and horrible effect on Egyptians living on the edge. Many of the poor got hungrier. Then the downturn in petroleum prices and revenues caused many Egyptian guest workers to [pdf] lose their economic cushion. They either could no longer send their accustomed remittances, or they had to come back in humiliation.
The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.
Posted in Egypt | 18 Comments | Print
§ 18 Responses to “Egypt’s Class Conflict”
Juan, Thanks for all your work and perspective on Egypt.
Can you recommend any history books? I’m interested in both the long version (not so much the ancient history, although I don’t know a lot about that either), esp the transition to Islam, and much more detail on post-WWII. Esp the details of the ‘peace’ with Israel. From what I’m picking up on al Jazeera, it sounds like the terms Israel got were completely humiliating toward Egypt.
That would also explain why Abbas gave into everything & still couldn’t get a country out of it. Israel hadn’t humiliated him & the Palestinians enough.
Are these remains of the Cold War ? Did it start with the removal of Mossadegh ?
Thanks. I relie on sources other then TV for my information and appreciate clear intelligent writing. I talk with my clients about world events and I desire to have non inflammatory information to calm fear and avoid the panic that makes people stressed.
Do you think the Egyptian people would accept Omar Suleiman as their transitional president, or is he too closely linked with the regime? Would Mohamed ElBaradei be a possible president, or is he not dynamic enough?
It started before modern medicine and has gone on longer than most
Excellent !!!
as Dr Zewail said and you implied
“2. The economic situation: the masses of the poor have been left behind, the situation of the middle class has actually gone backward, while a small elite at the top benefits from what economic progress there is– because of a marriage of power and capital.”sounds familiar doesn’t it
a description of the whole capitaist world, the US in particular – there will be an explosion in more places than the middle east150 dead according to Al Jazeera. Without in any way wishing to show the Iranian regime in a good light, contrast the coverage of that with the coverage of one dead in similar circumstances in Iran. There are worthy and unworthy victims, as John Pilger explains.
I await the subterfuge and provocation necessary to paint the opposition to Mubarak as some kind of fundamentalist madness that threatens us all. However, Egytians are a bright lot and I imagine they are pretty good at chess.This excellent writing provides much needed sociological, economic and historical context for the events unfolding in Egypt today, and by analogy in other states in the Middle East.
I think this sentence in the last paragraph of “Egypt’s Class Conflict” needs to be highlighted and placed in the first, not the last, paragraph –
“Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable.”
What is happening in Egypt right now is about the foundations of state authority. Is a state’s authority with its people based on “power,” brute force, or is it based on its perceived “legitimacy” in the minds of its citizens? Prof. Cole clearly explains the reasons why and how the legitimate, citizen-acknowledged authority of the Egyptian state disintegrated into government-rule maintained through the barrel of a gun!
I’m sure many Egyptians do consider the Mubarak government to be either a puppet of or a part of a US-Israel-UK axis, which is standard fare for non-Islamist regimes in Middle East. However, Mr. Cole’s “class conflict” description of the roots of this crisis is somewhat seems to be at odds with reality.
It may well be true that the Egyptian public expects the government to guarantee gainful employment to all; they won’t be the only populace to hold that expectation. It is somewhat less clear that Egypt adopted “neoliberal” economic policies, if neoliberal is understood to mean reduced state intervention and greater reliance on market forces. For example Mr. Cole describes recent economic developments this way: “An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.” That kind of rent-seeking activity is certainly not the hallmark of a market-oriented economy. Furthermore, as the ILO study cited Mr. Cole suggests some of the steps needed to generate employment in Egypt such as “the removal of remaining obstacles to investment in general and FDI in particular; providing incentives to investors through availing land and infrastructure” (see p. 36) are standard parts of the neoliberal prescription. It may be the Egypt suffered from lack of neoliberalism rather than too much of it. It may well be that some privatizations involved insider deals and favors, but that is the fault of the mechanism used to conduct the transactions not privatization itself. Whatever the benefits on the economic policies employed by President Nasser, modern socialist societies have proven woefully inadequate at generating robust employment growth as the examples of Cuba and Venezuela show.
In short, instability in Egypt may be a result of a stagnant economy and Mubarak’s government may have mismanaged the economy but there is little evidence there was some utopian socialist alternative.
The disappearance of the police from the streets had led to a threat of widespread looting is now being redressed by the regular military.
Last night a fellow being interviewed in an Al Jazeera studio opined that some of the looting was being done by the police in plain clothes. The implication was that they were being ordered to do this. A few minutes ago on Al Jazeera a fellow on the street claimed that some of the looters arrested were found to have police IDs. I can only wonder whether any of this will prove to be true.
In every country, people (formerly the poor, nowadays the poor and middle-class) wish for a government dedicated to their good rather than to the good of foreigners, the very rich, etc.
Here, in USA, we see the bankers and various other of the very rich getting ridiculously richer — and getting bailed out when they have screwed up — while everyone else is static or worse, and the national debt increasing as if without limit, and still the government (and pols of both major parties) treat our nuttily expensive military-imperium as a “sacred cow” that cannot be touched, cannot be reduced, even as it is seen to do no good whatever.
Americans should be feeling envious of the Egyptians who, if they have nothing else, have at least their pride and their revolution.
Thanks for the refresher course on power, authority, and legitimacy.
I don’t mean to belittle the problem of inequality — it needs to be addressed, and pronto — but Egypt also faces serious resource constraints. Food prices are rising, which are closely related to oil prices. Egypt has food subsidies, but they are made possible based on oil and natural gas exports, and and Egypt’s oil exports are declining. Natural gas exports have been able to close the gap but now natural gas exports have leveled off.
Not all of these problems, obviously, are within Egypt’s power to address — not much they can do about rising wheat prices. But everyone is going to have to address resource constraints due to the inability to increase worldwide oil production since 2005; and likely within a few years, we will have a decline in worldwide oil production. Egypt is a dress rehearsal for, well, the rest of the world.
Gail Tverberg’s comments on Egypt are quite interesting:
Thanks so much for the link to the ILO paper by Samir Radwan, which is excellent.
[…] CROSS SECTION OF BLOG COMMENTS ON EVENTS: –Juan Cole: The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the […]
Just a thank you for your site and your time and effort in keeping it up to date and informative. I constantly push it on my students (who are less than supportive at times since I teach in one of the reddest of the red states!) and it has done some good in providing at least a spring board for discussions of the role of the media and alternative viewpoints. We are about to begin an entire unit on the region for the post-WWII period and I think this brief analysis contrasting Nasser and Mubarak’s policies will be required reading. Keep up the good work!
As went US-controlled Latin America, so goes the US-controlled Middle East.
Thanks Juan! I’ll be using this post in my introductory sociology class when I introduce Weber’s ideas on power and authority.
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Yep.
Posted: January 30th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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My appearance on the Underground Railroad (w/Jay Smooth of IllDoctrine.com) Radio Show (1/29/11)
Here’s a recording of my appearance on the Underground Railroad on WBAI hosted by the great Jay Smooth (of IllDoctrine.com, NPR, and other things). We speak on the current happenings in Egypt (around the 55 minute mark) and also the State of the Union(1 hour 50 mark).
I hope I wasn’t too dry or nonsensical.
Much thanks to Jay for inviting me on the show!
Posted: January 29th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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Exclusive: Tunisia Internet Chief Gives Inside Look at Cyber Uprising | Danger Room
TUNIS, Tunisia –- When Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship began unraveling here last month amid violent street protests, Tunisia’s internet administrators saw a massive spike in the number of sites placed on government block lists. But, in contrast to the embattled Egyptian government, the Ben Ali regime never ordered internet and cellphone communications shut off or slowed down, the head of the Tunisian Internet Agency says.
“I think Ben Ali did not realize where the situation was going or that he could be taken down,” Tunisian Internet Agency (French initials: ATI) director Kamel Saadaoui tells Wired.com. “Maybe if he had known that, he would have cut the internet. But the number of blocked sites did grow drastically when the revolution started. They were trying desperately to block any site that spoke about Sidi Bouzid. In a few weeks the number doubled.”
Egypt’s blackout, confirmed Thursday by internet-monitoring company Renesys, shut down four out of five of the country’s ISPs, with one connection left open to Noor Group, which hosts the Egyptian stock exchange, Rensys reported. The move signals an unprecedented clampdown on communications as activists, apparently inspired by Tunisia’s successful uprising, are taking to the streets in massive numbers.
During its 15-year existence, the ATI had a reputation for censoring the internet and hacking into people’s personal e-mail accounts. All Tunisian ISPs and e-mail flowed through its offices before being released on the internet, and anything that the Ben Ali dictatorship didn’t like didn’t see the light of day.
Saadaoui, its director of three years, complains that the perception of the ATI as an oppressive cyber-nanny is undeserved. He was just following the regime’s orders, he insists. Now that the government has changed, he’s following those new policies, helping open up Tunisian internet access as never before.
“We are computer and electronic engineers, not policemen,” Saadaoui says at his office in the ATI headquarters, a handsome, white bungalow near Pasteur Square in a high-end neighborhood of Tunis. “We don’t check e-mail and we don’t filter websites, even though we have filtering engines on our network. We run the engines technically, but we don’t decide to block your blog. We don’t even know you have a blog.”
‘It’s useless to block. Whatever we do, there are ways to get around it.’“But,” he adds, “we give access to these engines to other institutions that have been mandated by the government to choose which websites should be blocked. They have the gateway that has all the mail to be read.”
In other words: don’t blame us. We just work here.
Saadaoui described the governmental oversight of the internet as an encrypted interface built and maintained by the ATI. Only the government can manipulate it.
“We gave them an interface where they can go in and add anything they want to block,” he says. “We don’t even know what they were banning because the list is encrypted. We can only see the number of blocked sites and some other technical aspects, such as CPO load, how much traffic … things like this. Sometimes we learn about the blocked sites when people call in and ask why their blog has been blocked. Then we know.”
At first, the regime banned around 300 websites, but as internet use grew throughout the country –- from 1 percent of the population in 2000 to 37 percent as of last November –- the blacklist bloated to more than 2,000. When the government started going after proxies, Saadaoui said, the number jumped to many thousands. He estimated that around a thousand of the blocked sites were political, and the rest were proxies.
The revolution began Dec. 17 in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, when 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the humiliating tactics of local officials. The suicide jolted Tunisians. They began to protest in the streets — and clash with police.
Around 100 people died throughout the country. The media, controlled by Ben Ali’s advisers, reported only that criminals were looting.
But videos of the protests, riot police and their victims appeared on Facebook, and bloggers began reporting the daily events with first-hand accounts, photographs and videos. This information helped drive the uprising, and the government responded by allegedly hijacking Tunisian Facebook passwords.
At the same time, hackers began to attack the Tunisian government’s control over the internet. They bombed the ATI’s DNS and website, and tried to bomb the e-mail centipede gateway. The National Computer Security Agency — which fights hacking, phishing, viruses and fraud — took on the activists who tried to overload government websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks.
“When the hackers did DDOS they did a good job, and Anonymous did a good job,” Saadaoui says, smiling. “But not on everything. They weren’t able to take down the DNS, they weren’t able to take down the main servers or the network, but they were able to DDOS websites. They were able to bomb Ben Ali’s website.”
Open, But Uncertain, Future
Since Ben Ali fled the country Jan. 14, the transitional government has removed several restrictions on internet use while the 60-person ATI aims to focus on tasks more befitting an internet regulator: providing bandwidth and IP numbers, DNS management, IP addresses, research and development, electronic commerce, and web hosting. The agency is also the ISP for all public institutions.
How the dictator-less Tunisia will rebuild its internet architecture is still being discussed, Saadaoui says. But one optimistic sign is that 33-year-old blogger and activist Slim Amamou, who was arrested during the revolt, is now the secretary of state for youth and sports. The Ministry of Communications and Technology has announced that anyone who has a SMTP server can have direct access to the internet without going through the governmental post office.
The interface that allows the government to block sites, however, still exists. Saadaoui promises that it will be used only to block pornography, child pornography, nudity and “hate,” using URL classifiers.
“The new government told us to keep the filtering engines where they are and to allow them to add categories that they don’t like,” Saadaoui says. “The difference now is that they will ask a judge to approve the filtering. The problem is not filtering, the problem is who filters and based on what law. Before, people would filter without applying the law, and now we will filter with a judicial mandate. And the current mandate is to block pornography, pedophilia, nudity and hate.”
Many Tunisians, such as Amamou and the hackers who fought the ATI during the revolution, prefer a completely open internet. Saadaoui disagrees. He says the current filters are necessary on a political level: “The limits are symbolic. It’s a message from the government that we are a Muslim and conservative society and that we would appreciate if you didn’t go to these [filtered] sites.
Besides, Saadaoui says, everyone knows how to sidestep the restrictions, anyway.
“Tunisia has a lot of young, open people who know how to go around filters via hotspot proxies,” he says. “So really it’s useless to block. Whatever we do, there are ways to get around it.”
See Also:
- Tweeting Tyrants Out of Tunisia: Global Internet at Its Best
- U.S. Had Helo Deal With Ousted Tunisian Dictator
- Nuke Watchdog Wants to Lead Egypt Revolt. No, Really
- Egypt’s Internet Shutdown Can’t Stop Mass Protests
- What’s Fueling Mideast Protests? It’s More Than Twitter
Whatever we do, there are ways to get around it.
Posted: January 29th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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BBC to Trim World Service
The service, which began broadcasting in 1932, is one of Britain’s most visible exports and is known for bringing uncensored news to places where there is no free press. It currently has a budget of $432 million a year, a staff of 2,400 and a listening and viewing audience of 180 million a week, and 241 million across television, radio and the Internet.
The BBC is facing deep cuts in spending over the next several years, and earlier this week announced that it would cut 25 percent, or $54 million, from its online budget. But it hastened to point out that it was the government, which is responsible for financing the World Service through the Foreign Office, that made the decision to cut the budget so sharply.
“I want to stress that these are cuts that we would not have chosen to make without the funding reduction by the government,” Peter Horrocks, the BBC’s global news director, told reporters. “We made our case as strongly as we possibly could.”
The government had praised the importance of the World Service, Mr. Horrocks said, but “the funding that we have received makes it difficult to reconcile that.” In fact, he said, when other factors were taken into account, the budget cuts were equal to about 20 percent annually for three years, or $73 million a year by 2014.
In the House of Commons, angry legislators, some from the ruling Conservative Party, lined up to denounce the plans.
“There is very deep concern in the House about this decision,” Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of Parliament, said. Pointing out that even as it intends to cut the World Service, the government is increasing its overseas aid budget by 37 percent in real terms, Mr. Tyrie added: “I hope that he will hear the message from the House that if there is a choice between the two, we want to put the World Service first.”
Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Labour member of Parliament, said that the BBC World Service was “the most trusted voice in the world — more trusted than any Government, and more trusted than any other broadcaster in English or any other language.” He added: “To undermine the BBC World Service is to undermine truth.”
But William Hague, the foreign secretary, said that the BBC had to accept that cuts were being made across the government and that it had to shoulder some of the burden.
“The BBC World Service has a viable and promising future, but it is not immune from public spending constraints or from a reassessment of its priorities and services that have become less well used,” he said.
Outside the World Service offices, staff members held a demonstration against the impending cuts and laid wreaths saying things like “R.I.P. World Service.”
“As far as I’m concerned this announcement is a death knell for the World Service,” Michelle Stanistreet, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, told The Guardian. “We knew there were cuts coming down the line, but I think the scale of the cuts that are proposed has staggered everybody.”
The cuts include the closure of the Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian services, as well broadcasts in English for the Caribbean and in Portuguese for Africa. The broadcaster also intends to cut radio broadcasts to China, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey, and to cease evening radio broadcasts in Arabic.
In addition, the service will cut off radio programming in Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Ukrainian and Azeri, the official language of Azerbaijan, as well as radio broadcasts to Cuba in Spanish.
The BBC pledged that it would reverse the cuts in 2014, when it takes over responsibility for financing the World Service from the Foreign Office.
I turn to BBC America every morning. The absolute best for international news.
Posted: January 26th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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Zygmunt Bauman | Does “Democracy” Still Mean Anything? (And in Case It Does, What Is It?)
Posted: January 21st, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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Wikipedia’s 10th birthday, and what Jesus’ page can tell us about it. – By Chris Wilson – Slate Magazine
Posted: January 17th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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NY TIMES: ESP Report Sets Off Debate on Data Analysis
In recent weeks, editors at a respected psychology journal have been taking heat from fellow scientists for deciding to accept a research report that claims to show the existence of extrasensory perception.
The report, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is not likely to change many minds. And the scientific critiques of the research methods and data analysis of its author, Daryl J. Bem (and the peer reviewers who urged that his paper be accepted), are not winning over many hearts.
Yet the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.
By incorporating statistical techniques that are now widely used in other sciences — genetics, economic modeling, even wildlife monitoring — social scientists can correct for such problems, saving themselves (and, ahem, science reporters) time, effort and embarrassment.
“I was delighted that this ESP paper was accepted in a mainstream science journal, because it brought this whole subject up again,” said James Berger, a statistician at Duke University. “I was on a mini-crusade about this 20 years ago and realized that I could devote my entire life to it and never make a dent in the problem.”
The statistical approach that has dominated the social sciences for almost a century is called significance testing. The idea is straightforward. A finding from any well-designed study — say, a correlation between a personality trait and the risk of depression — is considered “significant” if its probability of occurring by chance is less than 5 percent.
This arbitrary cutoff makes sense when the effect being studied is a large one — for example, when measuring the so-called Stroop effect. This effect predicts that naming the color of a word is faster and more accurate when the word and color match (“red” in red letters) than when they do not (“red” in blue letters), and is very strong in almost everyone.
“But if the true effect of what you are measuring is small,” said Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, “then by necessity anything you discover is going to be an overestimate” of that effect.
Consider the following experiment. Suppose there was reason to believe that a coin was slightly weighted toward heads. In a test, the coin comes up heads 527 times out of 1,000.
Is this significant evidence that the coin is weighted?
Classical analysis says yes. With a fair coin, the chances of getting 527 or more heads in 1,000 flips is less than 1 in 20, or 5 percent, the conventional cutoff. To put it another way: the experiment finds evidence of a weighted coin “with 95 percent confidence.”
Yet many statisticians do not buy it. One in 20 is the probability of getting any number of heads above 526 in 1,000 throws. That is, it is the sum of the probability of flipping 527, the probability of flipping 528, 529 and so on.
But the experiment did not find all of the numbers in that range; it found just one — 527. It is thus more accurate, these experts say, to calculate the probability of getting that one number — 527 — if the coin is weighted, and compare it with the probability of getting the same number if the coin is fair.
Statisticians can show that this ratio cannot be higher than about 4 to 1, according to Paul Speckman, a statistician, who, with Jeff Rouder, a psychologist, provided the example. Both are at the University of Missouri and said that the simple experiment represented a rough demonstration of how classical analysis differs from an alternative approach, which emphasizes the importance of comparing the odds of a study finding to something that is known.
The point here, said Dr. Rouder, is that 4-to-1 odds “just aren’t that convincing; it’s not strong evidence.”
And yet classical significance testing “has been saying for at least 80 years that this is strong evidence,” Dr. Speckman said in an e-mail.
The critics have been crying foul for half that time. In the 1960s, a team of statisticians led by Leonard Savage at the University of Michigan showed that the classical approach could overstate the significance of the finding by a factor of 10 or more. By that time, a growing number of statisticians were developing methods based on the ideas of the 18th-century English mathematician Thomas Bayes.
Bayes devised a way to update the probability for a hypothesis as new evidence comes in.
So in evaluating the strength of a given finding, Bayesian (pronounced BAYZ-ee-un) analysis incorporates known probabilities, if available, from outside the study.
It might be called the “Yeah, right” effect. If a study finds that kumquats reduce the risk of heart disease by 90 percent, that a treatment cures alcohol addiction in a week, that sensitive parents are twice as likely to give birth to a girl as to a boy, the Bayesian response matches that of the native skeptic: Yeah, right. The study findings are weighed against what is observable out in the world.
In at least one area of medicine — diagnostic screening tests — researchers already use known probabilities to evaluate new findings. For instance, a new lie-detection test may be 90 percent accurate, correctly flagging 9 out of 10 liars. But if it is given to a population of 100 people already known to include 10 liars, the test is a lot less impressive.
It correctly identifies 9 of the 10 liars and misses one; but it incorrectly identifies 9 of the other 90 as lying. Dividing the so-called true positives (9) by the total number of people the test flagged (18) gives an accuracy rate of 50 percent. The “false positives” and “false negatives” depend on the known rates in the population.
In the same way, experts argue, statistical analysis must find ways to expose and counterbalance all the many factors that can lead to falsely positive results — among them human nature, in its ambitious hope to discover something, and the effects of industry money, which biases researchers to report positive findings for products.
And, of course, the unwritten rule that failed studies — the ones that find no effects — are far less likely to be published than positive ones. What are the odds, for instance, that the journal would have published Dr. Bem’s study if it had come to the ho-hum conclusion that ESP still does not exist?
The last sentence is so important. If science were indeed about brute objectivity, wouldn’t most peer-reviewed articles across the disciplines be banal confirmations of phenomena? This should be the case but it isn’t because, well, science is in the business of producing truths as much as they are in the business of observing them. The former, however, is never acknowledged.
Posted: January 10th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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NY TImes: Adding Islam to a Latin Identity
Posted: January 9th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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Pitchfork: TV
A bit campy but still profoundly educational for someone like me who is minimally knowledgable about this music and would like to know more.
Posted: January 8th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
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