Law n Thangs

There’s an excellent article in Sunday’s NYT Magazine by Steven Johnson, excerpted from his new book Everything Bad Is Good for You. He may not have enough evidence to support the title’s broad assertion, but his argument represents a very important contrast to the forces of censorship and demonization. It’s about time someone stood up for the merits of modern television and video games, instead of just raising the First Amendment banner (which of course is still an enormously important concern here). I think this proposal in particular is excellent:

“What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show’s violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ”Survivor” over ”Fear Factor.” If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ”24” over ”Law and Order.” If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.”

Absolutely. The fact that we’ve had “prurience” ratings for years without even considering such a system is a testament to how far our concerns about our children have diverged from our goals for them. Do we really want to take a bat to the knees of their ability to understand complexity in order to preserve some small shred of their innocence?

To extend the argument a bit, it seems like the things we disapprove of children being exposed to are things we recognize that adults have a right to see. So in the process of helping them become adults, why don’t we give it to them straight? We can answer whatever questions the truth produces, rather than making up a web of white lies that then requires untangling right in the middle of adolescence, adding more confusion to a period that could certainly do with less. After all, having boobies in their yogurt commercials hasn’t destroyed the moral character of the Europeans. I really don’t see why we’re so afraid of them.

evan :: Apr.25.2005 :: Notions :: 1 Comment »

Check here for the new Most Ridiculous Song Ever (bottom of the list, though there’s competition at the top). The fact that it is a remix of one of the other Top 10 Most Ridiculous Songs might seem unfair, but I really think that Mr. Kelly and the Cash Money Millionaires rose to new levels of foolishness here, especially with the blink-blonk-blink ‘Japanese’ noises in the beat and Mr. Kelly’s repeated random proclamations of “soo much money”.

The fact that this has rocketed to the upper reaches of my Most Played playlist in iTunes should in no way be interpreted as a blanket endorsement of booty-feeling. I continue to believe that booty-feeling is only appropriate in an environment of mutual respect and consent, although the presence of money in amounts equal to or exceeding “soo much” shall be recognized as implicit consent.

evan :: Mar.25.2005 :: NetBits :: 2 Comments »

I’ve been sitting on this for a few weeks, but I thought I should share it with all of you who have been desperately wondering what I thought about the beef between 50 Cent and The Game:

50 Cents Does More Shit On NYC Radio That I Don’t Give A Fuck About.

Mr. SergDun has graciously seen fit to cover almost everything that is wrong with the world of hip hop in this fair city. Not only does he make the all-important point that Hot97 is garbage, but he specifically points out that Funkmaster Flex is the head garbageman, spewing useless nonsense directly into our ears every day via the trunk-mounted woofers of Escalades everywhere. “#1 Station of Gossiping Bitches”, indeed. Well done, Serg, well done.

evan :: Mar.17.2005 :: NetBits :: 3 Comments »

Hunter roolz, Stuy droolz! HCHS senior David Bauer laid waste to the competition in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search. Not only did he devise a new method of neurotoxin screening, but the boy is raising funds for Liberia! Looks like he fell prey to Asumana’s glorious influence in the lab rooms, though not on the soccer field.

Time to add one to the ol’ list of prestigious alumni, and wallow in the sheer magnitude of how not on it I am.

evan :: Mar.16.2005 :: NetBits :: 3 Comments »

On Thursday, April 7th, a bunch of interesting fellows will be giving a talk at the New York Public Library on “Who Owns Culture?” (via BoingBoing). I’ll be there and I hope some of you will join me. It’s $10 for regular humans (only $7 for Young Lions, though I hear you can use your Ancient Elephant or Sneaky Hyrax card, too). Anyone who reads some or all of Lessig’s latest book beforehand qualifies for bonus points.

I really like that this event is being hosted by NYPL, because libraries are the primary examples of how keeping copyright limited in both scope and duration has been enormously good for our society as a whole. I think the talk will probably focus on what rights we as a society have to make sure our collective creative output, our culture, is preserved for future generations. In Kembrew McLeod’s new book Freedom of Expression®, Rick Prelinger notes that copyrights on films now last longer than the physical medium of film. This means that if the rights to a film cannot be easily established and cleared, it is most likely the film will rot in its can before anyone will be allowed to archive it. Even when the media is not at risk, there is the very real danger of works just being forgotten. Copyright now extends for so long, and the period of commercial viability for most works is so short, that most works will slip out of the public consciousness entirely before anyone is allowed to distribute them freely and widely. Sure, many of those works might be better off forgotten, but I don’t think we should be making that decision for everyone who comes after us. We can archive it all, easily. We should let the kids in 3723 decide for themselves if they like Better Than Ezra or not.

evan :: Mar.02.2005 :: Notices :: 4 Comments »

I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple of days, but better late than never: if you are still using Internet Explorer, go download Firefox now. That link should be the last one you ever click with IE.

“But hold on,” you say, “I’m just a mindless follower, and IE still has over 90% of the browser market. Shouldn’t I just use what everyone else does?”

Yes, you might think that, but you’d be wrong. Over 90% of people don’t drive a new BMW, but if I offered you one in exchange for your ‘99 Taurus, would you turn me down? That’s the deal here. You can continue to use an outdated browser so beholden to commercial interests that it can’t even be bothered to block unrequested pop-up windows, or you can use a free, fast, open source browser that you can customize with any combination of thousands of extensions that seamlessly improve your browsing experience. If you’ve ever valued any computer advice I’ve given you, go install Firefox now. Then go install some of these extensions. I’ve found all of them useful, I bet you’ll at least like a couple:
Continue Reading »

evan :: Nov.11.2004 :: Notices :: 6 Comments »

Why didn’t we think of this in college? How many brains does it take to put together the fact that Britas use a charcoal filter with all the advertisements for fine “charcoal-filtered” spirits? All that Popov and Georgi has rotted my gut in vain!

(via MetaFilter)

Two other things are funny: Google “cheap vodka” and Feel Lucky. Also, check out Boris Yeltsin’s campaign promises.

evan :: Nov.11.2004 :: NetBits :: 1 Comment »

John Peel has died. He may have been the greatest radio DJ ever. I only heard his shows a few times, but every time I did I heard something I’d never heard before and instantly loved. There really has never been a British artist I’ve liked that hasn’t been on his show, and more often then not they’ve released their performance as a Peel Session EP, which are all prized pieces of my collection. Byron Bitchlaces had the idea of posting one’s favorite Peel Session track. For me, it’d be off of the Boards Of Canada session, not because they’re rare, exclusive, or remixed tracks, but because they were the first I heard of BOC, and that’s a wonderful gift from John to me right there. I couldn’t for the life of me pick just one, though, so here’s a couple:

Aquarius
XYZ

RIP John. You’ll be missed around the world.

evan :: Oct.26.2004 :: Notices :: 1 Comment »

is that I can’t be sure our President won’t do this.

evan :: Oct.20.2004 :: NetBits :: 1 Comment »

I’m totally green. As green as I wanna be. So green I’m golden, at least according to David Owen’s article in last week’s New Yorker. “Green Manhattan” is an excellent exposition of something I’ve always felt in my gut: density is frickin’ awesome for the environment. The worst thing we do to the environment is drive cars, and we do a awful lot of that. But in the city people do very little of that. On top of that we consume so much less land that, according to Mr. Owen, to accomodate NYC’s 8 million residents in a suburban density pattern, you’d need to cover the entirety of New England plus Delaware and New Jersey. That’s an awful lot of open space being saved from the terrors of landscaping and left to the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen. We also consume roughly 8 times less electricity per capita. The list of efficiencies inherent in apartment-living and skyscraper-working go on for quite a ways, but I think this quote from the article sums up the most important one:

Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior energy advisor for the city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with the city, I attended a conference call where somebody said, ‘We really need to raise energy and electricity prices in New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And my response at that conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy prices in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s really bad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the city that a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re really talking about, in the simplest terms, is a business that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot, and which of those do you think is worse for the environment?’”

The fact is, we in the city are the sacrificial lambs of this environment. We get by with less so that soccer moms can drive SUVs around with impunity and not worry about their precious shore houses being washed away by a flood of melted icebergs. I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t environmental problems in the city. Obviously the general level of pollution is bad and it would be better if there was more park space around, but the article makes the point that those are the problems we have to solve, i.e. urban densities are scalable, while suburban ones are not. Look at China, which now has over 100 cities with more than a million inhabitants, and I don’t believe that counts the millions of non-resident migrants that are in the cities working illegally. The U.S. has 9 such cities, and many are shrinking. Americans seem to have decided that they have a right to live in a cul-de-sac on a hill, and therefore have a right to cheap gas so that they can putter about to their heart’s content and never have to walk a block without their running pants on. Sure, we have more room to spread out than China, but the road don’t go on forever.

Of course, some Americans think that they have a right, not only to drive around, but to pretend to be farmers while they’re doing it. I can’t get started on farm subsidies, though, because I’ll just get to the point where I have to fly down to Kansas, rob five banks, and hand the money over to the MTA just to feel like there’s a shred of justice in the current federal budget.

evan :: Oct.18.2004 :: Notions :: 11 Comments »