Notes EM

On February 10th, Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian newspaper, published a long investigation into Norway’s ties with companies that produce surveillance and censorship technology that is used in authoritarian states. Their article is in Norwegian (someone should translate it!) and can be viewed on Scribd.  

What follows is a quick summary in English that was sent to me by the author of the article. The sums involved are truly staggering. 

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A 13-page investigation by Dagens Næringsliv in its Saturday, February 10th issue shows that Norway has invested more than 2 – two - billion USD in 15 technology companies producing tech that can and has been used – for either filtering, wiretapping or surveillance of communication in various countries. Although surveillance tech is not the primary activity of all these 15 companies, they have all had, or still have some kind of connection to tech that can and has been used - for filtering, wiretapping and surveillance of communication.

Norway is the owner of the world´s largest sovereign wealth fund. The country’s pension fund - commonly referred to as its “oil fund”- has invested large sums in several producers of technology which has appeared in various authoritarian regimes and been used for filtering, listening to or watch the communication regime opponents. News about these uses of the technology has been debated internationally since the beginning of the “Arab spring”.

According to its ethical guidelines, the Norwegian pension fund cannot invest money in companies that directly or indirectly contribute to killing, torture, deprivation of freedom or other violations of human rights in conflict situations or wars.

Dagens Næringsliv´s investigation also reveals the extent of the Swedish phone giant Ericsson´s businesses with the Syria´s government and military. Ericsson has delivered more than one million telephone lines, infrastructure for landline, GSM and 3G phone services, several hundred multi-standard base stations, inter-city fiber optic links, switches and core network to the Syrian government and military since it was established there in the beginning if 1960s. Ericsson has served the telecommunication needs of Assad senior and junior. Ericsson has collaborated closely with the Syrian Telecommunication Establishment, Syrian military and two phone private companies with close ties to president Assad´s family – Syriatel, owned by president Bashar al-Assads’s and MTN, partly owned by the Syrian first lady´s family.

Network management products from companies such as Blue Coat, NetApp, Fortinet have appeared in countries like Syria and Burma and for filtering, monitoring and surveillance purposes. Amesys, owned by France’s Bull made a deal with Ghaddafi for internet monitoring in Libya. The filtering equipment of Smartfilter, owned by McAfee, recently bought by Intel, has been used in Tunisia and many other Middle-Eastern countries. Comverse Technology owns Germany’s Syborg Informationssysteme, which sells surveillance technology to Norwegian public entities through Tinex, a local Norwegian supplier of military technology. 

I’ve always wanted to know why Steve Jobs parked in handicap spots. Walter Isaacson, alas, doesn’t really investigate this in his biography.

That’s what I’ve just found on page 47 of The Macintosh Reader. It’s in an essay by David Bunnell, Macworld publisher, recounting his visit to Apple’s headquarters in the early 1980s:

“We could tell that Steve was in, because his blue Mercedes was parked in the handicap zone in front. As I was to learn, Steve always parked there. He parked there because when he parked to the side, or to the back of the building, disgruntled Apple employees from the Lisa or Apple II divisions would come by and scratch his Mercedes with their keys.”

This sounds about right to me. And let me take this opportunity to promote my own forthcoming 12,000-word piece on Apple and Steve Jobs. It should appear in one of the next issues of The New Republic.

p.s. I see that this story was subsequently quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0 - it’s odd Isaacson didn’t look that far

UPDATE: I’m no longer soliciting applications

As some of you may know, I’m working on my second book.  At this point, I know enough about the overall structure and flow of the argument that I can start delegating some basic research tasks to others.

Thus, I’m looking for 2-3 research assistants who can commit to 10-15 hours of work every week and who can stay on this project from mid-February to mid-June (I expect the workload to be heavier in the first half of the project). All this work is virtual, so you can be based anywhere; I don’t expect much collaboration between the assistants - you’ll mostly be working with me personally. 

Broadly speaking, it’s a book about the idea of liberal democracy and how it’s being reconfigured (I’m afraid, not necessarily for the better) by the Internet and Internet-related discourse. Given the subject matter, it would help if you have some background in political philosophy, political theory or political sociology and/or some background in philosophy and history of technology. However, I’d be happy to consider candidates from other disciplines and fields, not least because most of the research you’ll doing will be limited to news sites and blogs (i.e. I’m afraid I won’t force you to come up with arguments on my behalf ;-). Foreign languages are a plus but not crucial.

The vast bulk of your time would be spent tracking quotes and news stories on themes that I’m writing about. As already noted, you’ll mostly be going through newspapers, magazines, and blogs; Google will become your second home. If you have access to databases like LexisNexis, ProQuest and EBSCO, it’s definitely a plus. 

Some tasks will be more open-ended than others; while you may be asked to simply track whether Person X has ever said anything on Subject Y, I’d also expect you to do some heavy lifting and try to find examples of Phenomenon Z happening in Context W. Another common task would be to prepare research dossiers - i.e. compiling all relevant recent articles and blog posts - on a given subject. 

What do you get in return? I’m willing to pay a honorarium; it won’t make you rich but I’m mostly looking for people who are genuinely interested in conducting research on technology-related issues or who need a resume booster. As a token of appreciation, I’d also be willing to thank you in the acknowledgments section of the book and provide a reference letter, which - especially if you are planning to work in Internet/technology/politics related fields -  may be of some help. A related success story: one of my research assistants for The Net Delusion ended up getting a job at the US State Department’s Internet Freedom desk!

Send me your resume and 3-4 paragraphs about your research skills and relevant experiences to evgeny dot morozov at gmail dot com

As some of you may know, I’m working on my second book.  At this point, I know enough about the overall structure and flow of the argument that I can start delegating some basic research tasks to others.

Thus, I’m looking for 2-3 research assistants who can commit to 10-15 hours of work every week and who can stay on this project from mid-February to mid-June (I expect the workload to be heavier in the first half of the project). All this work is virtual, so you can be based anywhere; I don’t expect much collaboration between the assistants - you’ll mostly be working with me personally. 

Broadly speaking, it’s a book about the idea of liberal democracy and how it’s being reconfigured (I’m afraid, not necessarily for the better) by the Internet and Internet-related discourse. Given the subject matter, it would help if you have some background in political philosophy, political theory or political sociology and/or some background in philosophy and history of technology. However, I’d be happy to consider candidates from other disciplines and fields, not least because most of the research you’ll doing will be limited to news sites and blogs (i.e. I’m afraid I won’t force you to come up with arguments on my behalf ;-). Foreign languages are a plus but not crucial.

The vast bulk of your time would be spent tracking quotes and news stories on themes that I’m writing about. As already noted, you’ll mostly be going through newspapers, magazines, and blogs; Google will become your second home. If you have access to databases like LexisNexis, ProQuest and EBSCO, it’s definitely a plus. 

Some tasks will be more open-ended than others; while you may be asked to simply track whether Person X has ever said anything on Subject Y, I’d also expect you to do some heavy lifting and try to find examples of Phenomenon Z happening in Context W. Another common task would be to prepare research dossiers - i.e. compiling all relevant recent articles and blog posts - on a given subject. 

What do you get in return? I’m willing to pay a honorarium; it won’t make you rich but I’m mostly looking for people who are genuinely interested in conducting research on technology-related issues or who need a resume booster. As a token of appreciation, I’d also be willing to thank you in the acknowledgments section of the book and provide a reference letter, which - especially if you are planning to work in Internet/technology/politics related fields -  may be of some help. A related success story: one of my research assistants for The Net Delusion ended up getting a job at the US State Department’s Internet Freedom desk!

Send me your resume and 3-4 paragraphs about your research skills and relevant experiences to evgeny dot morozov at gmail dot com

Now I’m beginning to grasp what it must be like to be Cass Sunstein (Sunstein, having proposed the idea of “cognitive infiltration” a few years back, got an entire book from conspiracy theorists in response).

I’m talking, of course, about my most recent column that proposed a solution that I thought was quite innocent: to have search engines add a line on top of some controversial search results to say that they are, well, controversial, and, perhaps, suggest resources that maybe more authoritative on the subject. To judge how well this idea was received by members of certain fringe groups just look at the comments to the piece that ran in Slate; there is hardly an epithet that I haven’t been called!

Some observations:

1. There seems to be a deeply-seated longing for a pro-censorship figure who could then be vehemently opposed by free speech advocates. Alas, I’m not that figure! Virtually half of all commenters on Slate assumed that what I’m advocating is tinkering with algorithms or, worse, hiding results that come from sites that I find cooky. Where in the text do I propose that? Right answer: nowhere. All I proposed was to generate a banner – of the “Be Careful! This subject is disputed!” variety – and place it somewhere next to (unaltered/unchanged!) search results, along with a list of sites that have the best current scientific consensus on an issue (say, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for climate change). I think I haven’t actually pushed this idea far enough in the column; it would be really great to see Google create customized search engines for all those sites and give people an option to search only that universe of sites if they want (much like one can search “one’s world” now with social search). This, of course, would be an optional feature – for people like me, who don’t have the time to sift through thousands of kooky sites.

2. Some people think it won’t stop conspiracy theories or pseudoscience. Well duh: that’s exactly what I wrote in the column! The point is not to eradicate them but to thwart them and to make sure that those who are searching for the most up-to-date information on climate change or vaccination are not recruited by the pseudoscience cabals. This is also, by the way, why I haven’t discussed the efforts of the skeptics (see here); under my scenario – where users are already presented with results from kooky sites on page 1 – those efforts of skeptics have already failed. It’s okay to question whether it’s a valid scenario – perhaps, one needs to go to page 100 of Google Search to see really silly views about vaccination (even though I doubt it) – but if that’s the case then my proposal would impact only a very small universe of queries.

3. Others say it won’t work – there are too many sites and that it’s impractical. Well, yes, I agree: it won’t work with all sites. But this is a case where the perfect is the enemy of the good. Start with just 10 most influential sits – and I’m sure it can make a difference. By the way, most commentators – at Slate and elsewhere – really don’t appreciate the elegance of the solution I proposed. Users actually won’t know which sites Google finds kooky or pseudoscientific or run by conspiracy theorists. The trick is that if one of those sites appears in the first page of top search results for “climate change” or “vaccination” users will see that cautionary banner, asking them to be careful and, perhaps, advising them to stick to a universe of pre-approved sites.

How would Google find kooky sites? How would it know which sites to approve? Well, that’s something to be debated; it can be done in consultation with eminent scientists or a consortium of universities or the Nobel committee. But I really find it hard to believe that a company that can build self-driving cars won’t be able to find 10 sites dedicated to nothing but pseudoscience and that it won’t be able to come up with a list of 10 sites that everyone can trust on a subject like vaccination. Will it have chilling effects on free speech? It might – but only if you really overtheorize it. No results will disappear, nothing will change in the ranking order. I believe that whatever tiny chilling effects such a scheme might have are worth the costs of saving lives that may be lost to silly believes about vaccination.   

Perspectives on Politics (2011), 9 : pp 897-900 (original)

Evgeny Morozov, Stanford University

The Digital Origins of Dictatorships and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam. By Philip Howard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 304p. $17.20.

Philip Howard’s important book offers a timely and thorough treatment of a subject that has been catapulted into the global limelight thanks to recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt: the impact of the Internet on the political cultures in the Middle East.

Howard’s focus is on the relationship between technology diffusion and democratization in countries with significant (i.e., constituting at least 10% of the population) Muslim communities in the period between 1994 and 2010. These 75 countries make for a good analytical set and share more than Islam: They have some of the fastest technology adoption rates in the world, whereas many of their governments try to stymie the political uses of information and communications technology (ICT) while striving to benefit from them economically.

The author’s meticulously researched account stands in stark contrast to two rather simplistic narratives that have become extremely popular with pundits and journalists, who like to view the Internet either as a breeding ground for terrorists or as an almighty force that causes revolutions anywhere it goes. Howard rejects both accounts as misleading. While there are plenty of extremists online, they are still outnumbered by moderates. Likewise, while neither the Internet nor cell phones have caused democratic transitions on their own, he sensibly remarks that “today, no democratic transition is possible without information technology” (p. 34).

Howard makes a convincing case that the impact of the Internet on Muslim countries is worth studying even though the size of online audiences is relatively small. Radio, television, books, and newspapers are more widely available, but the Internet is catching up rapidly—not least because many governments have embraced technology as a touchstone for modernization. The Internet’s impact on religion, gender politics, and collective identity may be harder to grasp than its impact on the organization of protests, but it probably matters much more in the long run.

The book employs a clear structure that is easy to follow. The introductory chapters outline some particular methodological challenges involved in studying the impact of technology diffusion on democratization (with a particular focus on Muslim countries). Howard devotes the core of the book to documenting the impact of ICTs on various political actors in the region: governments, political parties, journalists, civil society, and social elites. In the concluding chapter, he attempts to synthesize his insights into a general theory of technology diffusion and democratization.

ICT policies in Muslim countries have evolved considerably since 1994 and have led to the emergence of what Howard dubs the “wired state.” ICTs are of greater help for democratization if the state is willing to create an independent authority to regulate the telecommunications sector and shield it from political intervention, to privatize national telecommunications infrastructure and break the monopoly status of the national telecommunications provider, as well as to pass strong privacy laws and embark on the spectrum reform.

Predictably, few Muslim countries have taken all of these steps. Instead, most of them are keen to promote policies that boost economic development (e.g., by improving price signals and transparency of the market) but balk at introducing reforms that might weaken their ability to monitor private communications or result in expanded use of ICTs for activism.

Political parties in Muslim countries have greatly benefited from the Internet; they go online to organize, raise money, target previously unreachable publics, and challenge the ideological hegemony of the ruling elites. The Internet is of particular importance in countries where political parties are illegal, as it gives them the only media platform on which to act.

The Internet has also greatly changed the practice of journalism in most Muslim countries. The Internet provides for a richer information diet and serves as an important source of news during political or military crises. It helps to confirm or disprove false news reports from government agencies and creates a way to get news from the diaspora to a home country (and vice versa).

The Internet serves as an important incubator for social movements of both secular and religious kinds, offering them a platform for collective action, both at home and abroad. It also performs important ideational and symbolic functions, introducing Muslim audiences to new values and ideas and signifying modernity in civic life. Civil society is strengthened as a result.

There is also a more pernicious side to technology diffusion, however. The ruling elites in some Muslim countries have used ICTs to censor the political and cultural expression of their citizens—often by purchasing Internet filtering software from Western technology firms. Howard argues that despite such censorship attempts, the growing decentralization of cultural production makes it hard for the social elites to maintain ideological hegemony.

After examining how ICTs have been used by the main political actors in Muslim countries, Howard uses an innovative statistical approach—fuzzy set logic—to demonstrate that technology diffusion has had a crucial causal role in improvements in democratic institutions. By using fuzzy set analysis, he sets out to identify combinations of causal conditions rather than fixate on single causes of democratization, thus striking an elegant balance between technological and social determinism and accounting for the fact that the “logic” of the Internet is mediated by the political realities of the countries where it is used.

The author shows that once combined with other political, social, and economic factors (e.g., size of population and Muslim community, education level, lack of dependency on oil exports), technology diffusion is both a necessary and sufficient cause of democratic transition or entrenchment. Small countries with educated populations and active online civil society are particularly likely to see technology diffusion lead to democratic transition.

The book’s greatest contribution is in helping to move the academic and popular conversation about technology’s impact on democratization from simplistic narratives of “Twitter revolutions”—that is, the role of the Internet in fomenting popular protest—to a more nuanced account of how information technologies may bring on “incremental change in multiple facets of political life” (p. 198) once combined with other conditions favorable to democratization.

Howard’s approach is not without shortcomings. His theorizing of the “wired state” focuses almost exclusively on the positive features of a superior information infrastructure—administrative efficiency, faster economic growth, more government transparency—but mostly glosses over more negative features (e.g., more pervasive surveillance and the emergence of new forms of control). However, technology diffusion is poised to affect both the infrastructural and despotic powers of the state, to use the important distinction made by Michael Mann (see his “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” European Journal of Sociology25 [November, 1984]: 185–214). Muslim countries have not been as aggressive as China in experimenting with new forms of online surveillance and censorship, but this is likely to change as their governments seek to establish control over the Internet to avoid Egyptian- or Tunisian-style popular protests.

The only example of ICTs being used for malicious purposes discussed by Howard at length is that of Internet censorship, which he equates primarily with Internet filtering. He points out that most governments are powerless against sites that are hosted abroad, especially as domestic audiences discover how to access them using various censorship circumvention tools. He argues that the Web is too big and decentralized to be censored effectively and that governments are losing the fight. This is a far too sweeping and optimistic assessment that does not take into account emerging forms of Internet censorship like denial-of-service attacks. Unfortunately, Howard limits his discussion of cyberattacks only to acts of “hacktivism,” that is, individual attacks by activists on Websites of governments and other institutions, but the attacks increasingly happen in the other direction as well, with activists finding themselves targets of such attacks, most probably sanctioned by the governments.

Howard’s discussion of Internet control would also have benefited from a deeper look at the political economy of today’s Internet and the growing importance of intermediaries. A growing share of Internet content is not hosted on stand-alone Websites (which are the main focus of his analysis) but, rather, resides on services like YouTube, Facebook, and WordPress, which do not have consistent policies on dealing with controversial content. Governments are quickly learning how to manipulate the content policies of these intermediaries, if only to complicate the work of their opponents: Supporters of the Sudanese government have been infiltrating Facebook groups of the opposition, flooding them with uploads of pornographic materials and hoping that Facebook administrators would disable these groups for violating its own policies (see “How Sudan Used the Internet to Crush Protest Movement,” by Alan Boswell, McClatchy Newspapers, 6 April 2011). Howard is right to assume that a clever and technologically savvy organization would be able to publish a webzine on foreign servers but the real question is whether anyone would actually be eager (and able) to visit it. If being read means being findable via Google or Bing and having an account on Facebook and Twitter, then visibility requires more than just finding a way to establish a Website on a foreign server.

It is a pity that the author devotes only one page to discussing the foreign policy implications of his theory. His brief recommendations are threefold: a) Western governments that seek to encourage democratization should stop providing censorship software to dictators, b) the likes of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank should be willing to help develop public information infrastructure in Muslim countries, and c) Internet use should be encouraged among journalists and political parties in the region. While it is hard to disagree with these recommendations, they do not address some of the fundamental tensions in the emerging “Internet freedom agenda” of the U.S. government. Would a major U.S.-endorsed push to promote Internet freedom result in some authoritarian governments banning access to American Internet services and replacing them with their own domestic alternatives? Since American sites, for all their flaws, tend to be more permissive (and safer) than local alternatives, could this actually harm the climate for freedom of expression? Should the U.S. government prioritize funding of particular tools to circumvent censorship or focus on solving more intractable problems like denial-of-service attacks?

Howard is justifiably angry with the Western media for their grossly exaggerated account of the Web as a hotbed for Islamist movements. But equally troublesome is the media’s penchant for portraying bloggers as agents of democratic change. Many regimes have tried to co-opt bloggers: even Iran has recently held a blogging competition among pro-government bloggers (see “Iran Holds Its Own Blogging Competition,” by Cyrus Farivar, Deutsche Welle, 1 April 2011). Howard is right to suggest that the Internet helps to create fractures in the ideological hegemony of social and political elites, but it is also true that some of the positions taken by socially conservative bloggers in Muslim countries—which constitute a sizable share of the government’s blogosphere—may embolden their government to be even more radical in their foreign or social policies. The diversity of bloggers, their relations to state power, and their ability to help legitimize certain government policies need to be theorized more rigorously. As long as the ideological hegemony of the elites remains a problem—and it very well may be in most Muslim countries at the moment—the Internet could be of great help. On the other hand, the Chinese officials openly state that their task is to guide, rather than suppress, public opinion online. They have been quite successful in dispatching hordes of Internet commentators to do this.

Could some of the democratic gains identified by Howard be due to the fact that governments in Muslim countries are still ignorant of modern public relations and online propaganda? Would smarter and more Internet-savvy regimes be able to reestablish some of their ideological hegemony even in the new digital and decentralized public sphere? Is “networked authoritarianism”—a term used by scholars of the Chinese Internet—more of an oxymoron or a template that could be adopted by other governments? Ultimately, Howard shies away from commenting on just how easy it would be to subvert the democratic potential of the Internet. Still, his book is a well-informed and ambitious study that expounds on the historical relationship between technology diffusion and democratization in Muslim countries in a very nuanced and technologically literate manner.

The Herring: Beginning when Jim Clark met Marc Andreessen and founded Netscape, every technology executive seems to have had their own “road to Damascus” experience regarding their newfound faith in the Internet. How long have you been thinking about it?

Jobs: For probably seven or eight years. I don’t know if you have tried the NeXT e-mail system, but it is really the best in the world. So we’ve been using the Internet for a long time to send mail to people. They never did that at Apple. The more relevant question, I think, is when did we start recognizing the value of the World Wide Web. NeXT has had a long association with the Web. Tim Berners-Lee, the European physicist who led the team that developed the original foundation for the Web, used NEXTSTEP. So we were somewhat exposed to it from the very beginning. But I don’t think we quite got it until maybe two years ago. That’s when we started to see that the Web was going to be phenomenal, and it was going to change the way people think of computing.

The Herring: How so?

Jobs: The old way to look at computing was as a straight line between the desktop and the enterprise, with the primary focus on improving desktop productivity. That world, as we all know, is owned by Microsoft. But the Web is changing all of that. One way to view the Web is as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel. At least that’s how NeXT looks at it. Now who cares about that? Businesses! Suppliers! They are the people who can best leverage the Web by using it to conduct business and make money. So the Web completes the computing loop by providing businesses with a new way to interact with their customers.

The Herring: Perhaps ironically one could say it’s like the old mainframe computing model, but with all of your customers hooked into your network, too.

Jobs: Exactly! The browser is just a 3270 terminal [IBM workstation] on multimedia steroids. Right?

The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world?

Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality. Look, I love Marc Andreessen, he’s a great guy. But he’s young, and he’s got Microsoft to deal with.

The Herring: But Netscape does have 10 million customers using the Navigator, and that is reality.

Jobs: Yeah, but they give it away. They have probably made $20 million off their browser business. Do you think they will make a lot of money on 2.0? It just ain’t gonna happen. They don’t have 10 million customers anyway, they have four million.

The Herring: We haven’t personally checked the numbers, but Netscape claims to have a system in Mountain View that identifies users every time they fire up Navigator, and so they can verify those numbers.

Jobs: Okay. So maybe they do. And I think that’s wonderful. But, by the way, I couldn’t give a shit about the browser. We are not going to make any money by selling browsers, and I personally don’t think they are going to make any money from it either. If you can get a browser from Microsoft for free, why are you going to pay $39 to Netscape?

The Herring: But if Navigator is platform-independent, and…

Jobs: But everybody uses Windows. Come on — 90%+ of the people use Windows, so 90%+ of the people are going to hook into the Internet using Microsoft. Now, you know me, I love the Mac too, but I am trying to be really objective here. Plus Microsoft is…

The Herring: …busy making all its apps Web-friendly.

Jobs: Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape. And it has a certain track record of being successful at those kind of things. So I wouldn’t write off Microsoft right now. But all I am trying to say is that no one is going to make money by selling browsers. I do think a lot of people are going to make money off the pipes, but that ain’t us. The pipe is going to be owned by the RBOCs. Pac Bell and all those guys are going to provide cheap ISDN lines into the home that come with a little box that turns it into Ethernet, and they are going to be impossible to compete with. But, as we’ve been talking about, the new Web set-up is just like the mainframe computing model, where all the apps will run off the server, and these will mostly be custom apps.

The Herring: Enter NeXT Computer.

Jobs: Well, as it turns out, the businesses that can best use the Web are the exact same people we have been talking to for several years about NEXTSTEP and Enterprise Objects. Those customers now have a real need to build custom apps on the Web so they can vend products, information, and services to their customers. As we started to think about it, we came up with four categories of things these customers are going to want to do with the Web. [Mr. Jobs gets up and starts drawing on his whiteboard.] One, they are going to do static publishing. That’s where somebody makes a Web page and vends it. Anybody can look at it at the same time as 3,000 other people, and it doesn’t change until someone goes in there and changes it by hand. The second thing people will be able to do, which is going to be a lot more exciting, is what we call dynamic publishing. There are already a few examples of people doing this — like the Federal Express package-tracking Web page. You give it a number, it goes into four or five different databases and finds the information you need, and then presents it to you so you can browse it. Now there isn’t a little gnome in there that makes up this page for you, the computer makes the page for you. It’s a custom page answering your custom request, dynamically created on the fly. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you seen our Chrysler demo?

The Herring: Only when you demonstrated it on CNN.

Jobs: I will show it to you in more detail in a few minutes, so you can have a better idea of what I’m talking about. The third big application for the Web will be commerce. The security issue here is the red herring, so to speak. And frankly, it is going to take Visa and MasterCard to solve this problem. Netscape can’t solve this problem; we can’t solve it. Before you start sending your credit card number all over the Web, you want someone to guarantee that if there is fraud, you aren’t going to be held responsible. And who can guarantee that? Not Netscape. Only Visa can say that, and it will solve that problem. The real issue here, however, is that if you are going to sell something over the Web, and you’re a medium-to-big company, you’ve got to have an order management system. But guess what? You already have an order management system that you’ve been running your company on! So, to be efficient, you need to tie the Web into your existing order management system. It becomes multi-platform that way, right?

The Herring: Right!

Jobs: Now you are constrained with the UI [user interface], but a lot of apps can be written in constrained UI. Look at the number of 3270 apps that have been written in the world and are still used. So, if you can constrain yourself to the existing UI today and write your app, not only will you get multi-platform capability, but you can roll your apps out to the contracted agents working for your company, and eventually out to your end-customers. For example, Merrill Lynch works with over 10,000 people who do not work directly for them, but help Merrill Lynch sell its products and services.

The Herring: How long do you think it’ll be until this Web-centered world fully comes into play?

Jobs: Static publishing is already happening today. Dynamic publishing is just beginning to happen, but is really going to be the big thing in 1996. Web-based commerce should also start kicking in 1996, and, in my opinion, building internal apps for the Web won’t really get going until 1997. When we looked at these developments, we realized that the final three require custom software. And that’s what we do here at NeXT, Custom ‘R’ Us, right? So we created this thing called WebObjects to help make it easier for people to build custom apps for the Web. For example, it took Federal Express four months to build its Web site — using WebOjects, you could build that same site in four hours.

[Mr. Jobs then showed us the Chrysler Corporation Web site that the NeXT team built with WebObjects and an Oracle 7 database. During this demonstration, Mr. Jobs searched the site for several specific models of cars, at different price ranges, in different colors, and sorted in different ways, and each time he was instantly presented with a Web page that included all the cars he had requested. He also showed how the NeXT team had built a custom function into the site that allows customers to calculate their own financing options and identify which dealers have the exact models they are looking for.]

The Herring: That’s pretty cool. How did you do that?

Jobs: It takes your request, parses it in WebObjects, grabs all the data, and dynamically builds it into a Web page for you to browse. The way we set up the car financing feature is that it actually sends an OLE call to another Windows computer that launches an Excel spreadsheet that does the calculation for you, and then OLE messages the information back and shoves it onto the Web page. You can’t possibly do this in a static environment. I would think that this site is, what, an order of magnitude or two more dynamic than any other Web site out there right now. Wouldn’t you agree? And we set up the whole Oracle database, we built the whole app, we scanned in all the pictures — everything, in about 48 hours with four people. And, to reinforce something I talked about earlier, the site I just showed you will help Chrysler sell cars, because it distributes information to customers far better than Chrysler’s dealers can.

The Herring: And pretty soon, with 3D immersion on the Web, you’ll be able to get in the car and test drive it.

Jobs: I personally don’t think that will happen for a long time. But what will come soon, when we have MPEG decoder chips in every computer, is the ability to download a high-quality video so you can watch the car drive around.

The Herring: Does WebObjects work across all platforms?

Jobs: It’s very portable. It can run on our Mach operating system, it runs on Solaris, H-P UX, Digital UNIX, and it now runs on Windows NT. It’s also fully distributed, so you can have objects on different machines and one object can send a message to another object without even knowing where it is. In fact, you can move an object from one machine to another without ever changing the app, it just automatically works itself out.

The Herring: It also seems to work pretty seamlessly with the Oracle database.

Jobs: We discovered over the years that almost all mission-critical apps make extensive use of databases. So we tried to figure out the coolest way to integrate data sources with objects, and we came up with this thing called the Enterprise Objects Framework [EOF]. In essence, EOF allows you to graphically connect the data-structures in your objects with any SQL database, and it will automatically — automatically — make the data in your object persistent and coherent with that data in your database without any programming. And it is exceptionally powerful. EOF is far-and-away the most aggressive database technology out there for objects. It’s really slick. With EOF, you don’t have to know about SQL. It has full TCP/IP communications built in, so you don’t have to know about that. It also has Sybase and Oracle client libraries in it, so you don’t have go out and buy those. You literally just point it at the database on the network and it works! So when we wrote the WebObjects framework, we based it on our experience with EOF. What that means is that your object doesn’t have to know anything about the Web — it literally doesn’t have to know anything about its UI, it doesn’t have to know about HTML, it doesn’t have to know about URLs. And, like EOF, it doesn’t have to know about the database or the connectivity. Everything is taken care of automatically. So WebObjects is far ahead of anything anybody else is doing out there.

The Herring: Why do you think you have built up such an advantage?

Jobs: The reason we are ahead, I think, is because our understanding of the fundamental business model of the Web is more advanced than Netscape’s, or that of anybody else we’ve talked to. We’ve spent eight or nine years developing PDO [Portable Distributed Objects, NeXT’s object model], we’ve spent four years developing EOF, and we have just leveraged that by spending about 1.5 years developing the WebObjects framework. The other guys haven’t even gotten started yet.

The Herring: When will WebObjects ship?

Jobs: WebObjects is in alpha right now, it will go into beta by the end of this year, and we are shipping in production in the first quarter of 1996 — my guess is by February.

The Herring: Do you worry about Microsoft?

Jobs: My goal over the next few years is to stay far ahead of Microsoft, until the Web is so ubiquitous, that even Microsoft can’t own it.

The Herring: Could a Windows-compatible-only Web strategy become Microsoft’s Achilles’ heel?

Jobs: I gotta tell you, multi-platform compatibility ain’t what it used to be. Windows has won. It beat the Mac unfortunately, it beat UNIX, it beat OS/2.

The Herring: But it took 10 years. [Laughs]

Jobs: We can all laugh at how long it took, but then we can all cry about the fact that it did happen. An inferior product won, but it won. And there is no changing that. I still think multi-platform is important, but not as much as it used to be.

The Herring: Netscape’s vision is that multi-platform capability is important, and…

Jobs: Wait a minute, let’s zoom back for a moment. It’s not Netscape’s vision, it’s Tim Berners-Lee’s vision. His original idea was that the Web would become the circulation system connecting us all together. Netscape embraced this vision, and it has done a better job than any other company in doing so. But as we all know, Microsoft has embraced the same vision Netscape did two years ago. So to state that Microsoft and Netscape have diametrically-opposed views would be foolish. They have both bought into the Tim Berners-Lee vision, and Microsoft is going to be a force on the Web, whether you like it or not. Look, I remember the day when Microsoft entered the application business for the first time — its first programs ran on the Mac, not the PC. It was back in 1984, when we launched the Mac. Today, half of Microsoft’s revenues come from application software, and it is the leader in that business. Now I am not a cheerleader for Microsoft, but I think it would be stupid to think it isn’t going to be a big player with the Web. And don’t get me wrong. I take my hat off to Netscape. I love Netscape.

The Herring: Why do you love Netscape?

Jobs: I love Netscape because I love any group of people willing to work their butts off for 18 months to get something done and take a new concept to market. I love that!

The Herring: How about Sun’s Java software?

Jobs: My view is that putting a programming language like Java in the client will slow the Web down, and allow Microsoft to catch up. So while NeXT thinks Java is a fine language, and eventually it would be great to see it in the client, I actually feel that for the good of the Web, and for the good of the industry, the Web ain’t broke, so let’s not fix it. The most important thing right now is to let the Web accumulate users and establish ubiquity, until it’s so entrenched that even Microsoft can’t own it, and then let’s add in all the cool stuff. Now I am not denying that the UI on the Web strains its use, but I am a little worried that in the microcosmic lust for perfection, macrocosmically we will give Microsoft the time it needs to own the Web. I hope that doesn’t happen.

The Herring: We suppose that’s one way to look at it.

Jobs: As an example, I predict that by the end of this year, Microsoft will announce that it has a Visual Basic variant or deviant that it proposes as the Web-client language. And Sun and Microsoft will have a war. And Microsoft will put everything it has into that war, because if it can win, it will have killed Netscape along the way. Netscape will put everything it has into that war, because if it loses, it is in trouble. So I ask you, who will win that war? Probably Microsoft. I hate to say it, but it has a lot more resources. So, in a way, Java may be the undoing of some very good things that are happening with the Web right now. I want to emphatically say that I like Java, but I am looking at it from a geopolitical perspective, not a technology perspective. So having said all of that, WebObjects works perfectly with Java. [Laughs]

The Herring: In our interview with Jim Clark, he said that Java “has a facility to protect you against the transmission of viruses, and a cryptography envelope that can wrap around and protect programs delivered over the Internet.”

Jobs: Well, that is just not a true statement. We know a lot about cryptography here. We have invented far-and-away the best public key encryption technology in the world outside of what’s inside the NSA. It blows RSA away. We have been told by people who know. Therefore we know that any language in the client is going to be susceptible to viruses.

The Herring: Any thoughts on @Home? You’ve already stated that the RBOCs will own the pipeline.

Jobs: I think several of the RBOCs will make a lot of money selling unlimited use of ISDN and an Internet account for $20 to $25. That’s reality, that’s product you can have in your home in January, and @Home is talking about a cable modem product that I may be able to get in a year or two. I mean, fine, asymmetric cable modems are very interesting. But all I’m saying is that you have these multi-billion RBOCs who already have customers in every home in their territory, and they have trucks with people who can install new products, and they have bought a zillion servers and have set up Internet farms, and they are ready to roll. I’m just mentioning that that is a fact.

The Herring: What about Apple?

Jobs: Well, I love Apple. I hope they make it.

The Herring: You sound concerned.

Jobs: [Shrugs]

The Herring: So what is NeXT’s growth strategy?

Jobs: We have three major new things coming out in the next nine months. One is D’OLE, the distributed OLE product which will be out by the end of the year. We have WebObjects shipping in the first quarter, which takes us into the Web market in a very big way. And we have OpenStep for Windows shipping in the second quarter. Our big initiatives then are really the Web and Windows. With the introduction of our Windows product, we are really going from having 10% of the seats available to us, to having over 90% of the seats available to us. And we think WebObjects should become pretty big, because we think the Web is going to be pretty big.

The Herring: Is an IPO in the near future for NeXT?

Jobs: We don’t have to go public, but there are other issues such as employee liquidity and credibility with our customers. So I see an IPO sometime down the road.

The Herring: Closing comments?

Jobs: The Web is great because it breaks down two big barriers. It breaks down the platform barrier, because it is multi-platform, and it breaks down the internal/external barrier. Small to medium-sized customers will be able to share information seamlessly across the Web with their customers, and that should increase everybody’s productivity. But, again, I think the biggest issues that are going to determine the fate of the Web are not technical issues, they are business and political issues. Maybe I am getting too old, but that’s what I think.

Couldn’t be more timely:

…already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge-production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card-filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his own note file.

Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, 1928

The first paragraph of Matt Cartmill’s review of Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions book. It appeared in the International Journal of Primatology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1991)

This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor. This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.

Full review can be read here (academic paywall!)

The Internet: Let’s jump straight to the very heart of the matter: why do you hate Jeff Jarvis? 

The Critic: I certainly don’t hate him! But I do have rather complex feelings about Jeff. Shouldn’t we all? I’ve really tried not to pay any attention to him for a couple of years — he couldn’t last much longer, I naively said to myself — but soon I’ve realized that Jarvis has become too dangerous to be left unchallenged. I had no dog in the future of media fight but privacy is something that is very dear to my heart, as I am interested in the future of surveillance. Jarvis’s foray into this field did not promise anything particularly auspicious; hearing Mark Zuckerberg bloviate about the virtues of “frictionless sharing” is already more than enough. 

Think of the annoying crying toddler who sits next to you on the airplane and is screaming at the top of his lungs. Do you hate him? Probably not. First you try not to notice - you reach for the ear plugs or put on those fancy noise-cancelling Bose headphones or some such - but then the battery runs out, you wake up and discover that the crying toddler is still at it - but now he is actually dispatching weather advice to the crew and they are taking him seriously. This sorta describes my feelings towards Jeff Jarvis. And, please, I have nothing against toddlers! 

I: Still, something is fishy about your review. Did you really have Jeff Jarvis in your crosshairs since June? What a jerk!

C: Mamma mia! What’s with Jeff’s persecution complex? This must be the stuff of his wildest dreams. Back in March (which is actually June in Jeff’s universe) I did tweet - in response to a message from the fake (and much funnier) @JiffJarvis that I had been assigned to review the Internet maestro’s book — but that was all! I didn’t know Jarvis’s book wasn’t finished - otherwise I wouldn’t have offered him such an opportunity to try to preempt my criticisms by praising me in it. (Never mind he completely misunderstands my arguments even when praising me; still, I’ll accept any praise Jeff has to offer - I’m in good company here, right next to Habermas!)

Please note that I did not name the book nor mentioned Jarvis by name or by his Twitter handle.  Perhaps, he pays close attention to all the tweets from @JiffJarvis but to say that I’ve been boasting that I had him in the crosshairs - when I didn’t even name him or his book! - is a bit disingenuous. But I grant him coherence: the whole response is disingenuous. 

And I was genuinely looking forward to reading the book! Unfortunately, it has met all my expectations…

I: But Jarvis is a sick man. Don’t you care about his two cancers and his heart condition? We know that they do things differently in savage Eastern Europe but here, in the real America, you’ve got to show respect to one’s elders!

C: Not sure what Jeff’s cancer or his heart condition have to do with the quality of his book or my review of it. If this line of defense persists, I’ll start claiming the “born in Chernobyl / raised under a dictatorship” privilege. I hope Jarvis is not going to bring up Hitler or the Holocaust, because this is where it’s headed. (I’ll pretend I didn’t notice him invoking 9/11 in his response.)

I: Let’s keep Hitler out of this. Still, did you write this review just to gain attention and pimp your own book? 

C: You’d better check with my shrink but I don’t think so. On days like this I like to remind myself of that beautiful line I found in a book that I read recently - I think it was actually in Public Parts - ”I like the attention. I am human”. But I guess this, too, falls under the kinds of privileges that Jeff grants only to himself.  When Jeff seeks attention, this is all kosher and alright - that’s the very crux of publicness - but when others do so, he just hates it! No worries, Jeff: you won’t have many rivals in the run-up to this year’s Diva of the Interwebs Award; I withdraw…Now it’s just you, Jay Rosen, and Andrew Keen!

I: But aren’t you trolling? Why are you attacking Jeff Jarvis’s personality? Isn’t it a rather vulgar approach that is at odds with serious intellectual critique? Shouldn’t you lead by example? 

C: This trolling business is very funny. Apparently, Jeff thought I was trolling right until too many people told him that I had delivered a devastating (lethal, perhaps?) blow to his book, at which point he thought that, well, my review was not trolling and he stooped to writing a long-winded (and predictably incoherent) response. Or, perhaps, his publisher has given him no choice. In any event, don’t you think that calling me a troll, proposing that I wrote this review only to attract attention to myself or implying that I had written it even before he finished writing the book is a much more serious personality attack than anything I have actually said in the review? 

I: It sure does sound like it. But, still, why bring Jarvis into it? 

C: Well, there is another way to think about it: a good half of the book is about Jeff Jarvis, his attempts to attract publicity to himself, his quirky fights with zi Germanz, his taste in saunas. Had I not gone after Jarvis’s personality, I fear I would have been accused of leaving out important parts of the book…(But wait, I was!) A nonfiction book that has its author as the main character probably deserves a thorough treatment of the author’s character, don’t you think? And I think (hope?) I only plumbed the shallows. 

I: But Jeff claims he believes in the power of ideas! This is why he writes books; he is an idea man. You, on the other hand, depict him as a charlatan who is influential only because he knows how to make senior media executives regret they have never learnt the art of PowerPoint back in the day. This can’t be the case, can it? 

C: I’ll let this quote from Jeff-the-idea-man answer this question for me (it can be found in the book under review): 

“[Seth] Godin is to blame for my writing books. He sat me down one day and said I was a fool if I didn’t write one – and I would further be a fool if I thought that the book was the goal. No, he said, the book would build my public reputation, which would lead to other business. It has.” 

For the record: my only regret is that Seth Godin did not stress the word “one” when advising Jarvis. Two autobiographies of Jeff Jarvis in two years is a little bit too much. 

I: That is a bit offensive for my taste. But if you are right, how can such a smart man teach at a prestigious university? 

C: No idea. Still, make no mistake: Jarvis doesn’t give a hoot about ideas, which becomes painfully obvious if you read both my review and his response. What I really loved about that response is how he tries to capture the essence of my every paragraph - and fails in half of his attempts. For example, when I say that in his universe good things are technologically determined and bad things are socially determined, he proceeds to summarize it as me claiming that he believes that “technology is good and people bad” and summarily dismisses this as a figment of my imagination. But, of course, that’s not what I wrote! (And guess how he explains the Rutgers suicide just three paragraphs down in his response? “I blame society”.) 

In that particular paragraph, I was pointing out that Jarvis doesn’t have any coherent philosophy to explain the interaction between technology and society or the casual mechanisms that stem from that interaction. Alas, Jarvis doesn’t care much about such intellectual subtleties; he believes that if he doesn’t say something directly in plain language, it is not to be found in the book. And then he has the guts to accuse me of anti-intellectualism!

I: But surely you are only bashing Jarvis because you are a privileged scholar and he’s a public intellectual, that rare glib creature who is close to the common man and who does not want to complicate ideas for fear of being misunderstood? How much Habermas - skimmed, at best, between a dinner of yummy German bratwurst and the much-awaited football game - can the common man have in one sitting? 

C: I am afraid that in making this point Jeff only further reveals his complete ignorance of who I am and what I do. First of all, he writes that I am with Georgetown University — which has not been the case since June 2010. Nor am I an “editor” at Foreign Policy; “contributing editor” means something very different, which Jarvis, having spent decades in journalism, seems not to know. So much for his stellar reporting.

Alas, he can’t pull a Sarah Palin “let’s bash these learned men” trick on me: all I’ve got is a BA from a mediocre school somewhere in the Balkans. Predictably, I have absolutely zero interest in taking Jarvis to task for not adhering to strict academic standards (which I myself flout at every given opportunity). 

Yes, technically, I am a “visiting scholar” at Stanford, which I always understood to mean that I am visiting a bunch of scholars. (“Visiting scholars” would be a far more apt description of what I do!) None of this, of course, means that Jeff should get a free pass on intellectual standards, which for me transcend the borders of the university.

I:  But you do seem to speak quite authoritatively about Habermas and expect similar treatment from Jarvis…

C: More breaking news for Jeff: I am not a Habermas scholar either and Jarvis’s assertion that I try to hold him to some unreachable academic standards is bunk. It was he who has chosen to venture into discussions of the public sphere and Habermas and it was he who fumbled the effort. I was just stating the facts for the benefit of those who may not have read Habermas at all. Academic nitpicking it isn’t. 

In fact, if you read my review closely, everything that I say about modern academia is either bad or pejorative. How on earth could one interpret what I wrote - starting with the first paragraphs about Bradbury’s novel! - as part of an effort to defend rigid and exlusionary academic standards is beyond me. In the review, I accuse academics of being narrow-minded and trading in “pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous” terms - but Jarvis interprets this jab to mean that I am “putting a fence around [my] world of academics” and am defending a “closed world…excluding others from entering their fields.” Boy, what a load of nonsense! I was making the exact opposite point, blaming academics for being inaccessible - but Jeff’s sloppy populism knows no borders. 

I: Okay but the question still remains: Why didn’t you do justice to Jarvis’s ideas in your review? 

C: A reviewer’s ability to do justice to ideas in a book under review is a function of the author’s ability to articulate and connect those ideas in the first place. Why have I not engaged in a more substantial discussion of Jarvis’s ideas? Because there aren’t many! I picked a few ideas that I thought were most important and consequential: his treatment of privacy and his treatment of the public sphere. I probably spent close to 2,000 words on those two ideas alone. But Jeff somehow thinks that I am talking about him when I am actually talking about his ideas…I know his persona is fascinating - but come on, it’s not so fascinating. 

What else is in the book? Well, there are some mediocre attempts to write history and discuss some relevant academic articles; there are business maxims; there is plenty of preaching - but serious ideas are hard to come by in this book. Not much else. I’ve looked. 

I: But, wait,  there are chapter names, page numbers, words, sentences in this book! Doesn’t this count for something? Why do you mention none of this? 

C: Technically, you are right, the Internet. There is even a bibliography of sorts at the end. But it’s one of those cases where the whole is much, much less than the sum of the parts. Perhaps, this is why Jarvis has preferred to respond to my review on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis rather than to deal with my critique as a whole. After all, if you manage to say something in response to every paragraph, it seems to deflect the whole point of the review, right? Wait, did someone say “trolling”? But I digress. 

Essentially - as I do point out in the review - Jarvis’s argument boils down to “privacy is important but so is publicness”. It’s an argument that is trite, boring, and uninteresting, which I point out in the review. In its originality, it’s akin to “sun is important but so is water” or “cars are important but so are roads.” Now, try selling me a book about it! Perhaps, I’ll just wait for the TED talk…I am sure it will have great slides!

I: Wow, this does sound immensely boring and banal! How did his publisher find this argument refreshing? 

C: That’s a mystery to me as well but let me guess. The only reason why anyone pays attention to Public Parts is because Jarvis, in claiming to write a book about publicness, has found a way to build that conversation on top of the growing public anxiety about privacy. Of course, you won’t hear this from him directly: he’ll always deny that he juxtaposes privacy and publicness - and he hedges his bets in the book quite well. But this is just a clever ruse: implicitly, he still treats publicness as if it were the opposite of privacy. 

And how couldn’t he - who would pay attention otherwise? (As I ask in the review, how many copies could a book advising lawyers and doctors to get a web-site sell in 2011?) Whether he likes it or not, Jarvis badly needs this dichotomy to exist; as you can see from the Amazon video in which he promotes the book, he actually jumps to this argument directly, just 30 sec into his talk: he knows that it sells.

His whole argument has an amazing strawman-like quality to it: show me at least one privacy advocate who does not recognize that, on average, it’s beneficial for lawyers and doctors to have web-sites! Who are those people Jarvis is hoping to convince that privacy is not the only value that we need to treasure? Do they exist? As I pointed out in the review, these people are hard to come by - and he doesn’t name any in the book. 

I: But why didn’t you simply recount Jarvis’s tricks in making his chapters connect to each other? You had written more than 6,000 words - surely you could say more about how chapter 3 builds on chapter 2? 

C: To fault me for not explicating every step he takes in making sure that these loose “ideas” hang together would be unfair to prospective readers of the book. Public Parts is one of those books, where it’s not the ideas but rather how they are studied, probed, and presented that says more about the author, his thinking, his motivation, and the broader culture that finds such “ideas” appealing. In other words, the reason why this book is culturally significant is not because of the (un)originality of its argument but because, in our day and age, this passes for a serious attempt to think about an important Internet-related issue.

I thought I made this point quite clear by ending the essay with a long section on Internet intellectuals in general. Alas, Jarvis is not unique in his mediocrity and, for all his attempts to claim that this a personal attack on him, I don’t think he alone is worth such a huge effort. He is a good case-study but he represents a much bigger problem. And, by the way, I do think this mediocrity has high costs - not just when it comes to thinking about the future of publishing or culture but also in the context of foreign policy, a field that I myself have been researching for quite some time now. Do you really want Jeff Jarvis to influence the thinking of someone - anyone? - at, say, the State Department’s Iran or, for that matter, Belarus desks? I certainly do not. 

With this, I’d like to reiterate my main criticism of Public Parts: this book refuses to make an even cursory attemp to examine the changing relationship between the public and the private, as it claims to. Rather, it reads like a long marketing prospectus for Jeff Jarvis, where ideas, mediocre and poorly articulated as they are, have at best only a supporting role. I’ve simply done my best not to lose the forest for the trees, which, by the way, seems to be Jarvis’s preferred way of reasoning (see his response to my review, where he attacks every paragraph but refuses to confront its essence as a quintessential example).

I: But surely your review is not perfect? 

C: I’m more than happy to acknowledge that in a 4,000-word response that Jarvis has produced, he did manage to score one gotcha. I am, indeed, inconsistent in using terms “salary” and “income” when refering to his earnings. Jarvis’s salary is made public by default as he works at a public university;  his income isn’t. He does disclose (all of? some of?) his sources of income but he never says how much he makes in total. 

I: Who’s next? 

C: To quote Sarah Palin: “Um, all of them.”