There’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere about the interaction between search engines, blogs, and professional news outlets. The current round of hand-wringing was kicked off by Andrew Orlowski’s mean-spirited discussion of "googlewashing" in the Register. Seems that an article by Patrick Tyler in the New York Times described the anti-war protesters around the world in the build-up to the current war in Iraq as a "second superpower"–a rather nice way of thinking about us protesters, especially as our influence was almost universally maligned practically everywhere else. But a few weeks later, James F Moore posted "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head" to his website, describing net users, in the spirit of Joi Ito’s "emergent democracy", as a "second superpower"–again, a pretty nice way to describe us bloggers and other ‘net enthusiasts, especially as our influence is almost universally maligned practically everywhere else. Within a short time, bloggers’ posts discussing and linking to Moore’s piece had raised it’s Whuffie far beyond Tyler’s piece, so that any search for "second superpower" invariably returns comments on Moore’s piece instead of on Tyler’s. Says Orlowski:
Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.
Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.
To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.
"Noise," they call it. Too much blogging getting in the way of the "real" news, the news that’s "fit to print". Given the reaction of bloggers to Orlowski’s charges–even those who mock his assertions of "googlewashing" and his weak comparison with Orwell’s "Newspeak", even those who rail mightily against Orlowski’s brushing aside of Moore and Ito’s theories as "neutered" and " vague and elusive"–you might be forgiven for laying charges of "self-hating blogger" at their virtual doors. Because in the end, most seem to agree with Orlowski’s basic assertion–that Tyler’s piece and its commentary should be privileged by search engines, and if not for all the "noise"–soon we’ll be calling it "chatter"–it certainly would be.
Consider Doc Searls’ excellently well-thought-out analysis of the situation ("Maybe it’s about the ratio of linkable to unlinkable pages" and one or two posts every day since). As Searls correctly notes, the NYTimes–along with many other news sites–has a nasty habit of hiding its archives from search engines to protect their for-pay content (anything older than 7-days at the NYTimes) and to force surfers to use their interface to search for articles (they get more ad impressions that way). So it’s no surprise that Moore’s article fares better on search engines than Tyler’s–Tyler’s isn’t on the search engines at all. Searls notes that if the big news outlets want to sequester their stories behind "paywalls" when search engines–particularly Google–provide probably the most-used interface to information on the web, they can hardly complain when information that is publicly searchable becomes more well-known than the information they have, for all intents and purposes, pulled out of circulation.
But what’s striking is that Searls–a renowned blogger (#91 in the Blogosphere Ecosystem)–sees this relative invisibility of "real" news outlets like the NYTimes in comparison with the blogosphere as a problem to be solved, suggesting:
Here’s a thought. What would happen if the archives of all the print publications out there were open to the Web, linkable by anybody, and crawlable by Google’s bots? Would the density of blogs "above the fold" (on page one) of Google searches go down while hard copy sources go up? I’ll betcha it would.
My point: Maybe this isn’t about "gaming" algorithms, but rather about a situation where one particular type of highly numerous journal has entirely exposed archives while less common (though perhaps on the whole more authoritative) others do not.
And elsewhere:
It’s time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve.
And he’s not alone. PuddingBowl is glad to read that "Google might finally be doing something about the problem of ‘blog noise.’" Ryan Lowe believes his undeservedly high number of hits from Google is "proof that Google is far from perfect." Virulent Memes points out that while some bloggers might have something of value to say, "the majority (myself included)… use this or that personal publishing system to deposit their neural bilge into the noosphere?" and suggests that Google "tweak the PageRank system, as they regularly do, to mark down blogs a notch or two." Fernando Pereira writes:
…Google’s ranking system stops at the edge of print and so may present a biased view of authority. This may not be evident to the average Google user, or NYT reader, and it is worth saying. The NYT may be creating a problem for itself by locking up it back issues, but the problem still stands in other areas. Influential writing in many areas is not available online, especially older writing. Blogosphere advocates may huff and puff about the shortsightedness of paper distribution, but the central issue is knowledge, not publishing tactics. Users of Google and other search engines need to be aware of the outgoing "links" into the print world and the implicit bias that not following them imposes on knowledge seekers. Google is an amplifying instrument that makes more obvious the edges of knowledge networks.
And so on. These are all, for the most part, "thoughtful critiques" (in Pereira’s words) but they take for granted 1) the existence of blog "noise", and b) that blog noise is a problem in need of fixing. But why do they (we?) consider blogs "noise" rather than part of the "signal". Why do we have an inferiority complex with relation to the NYTimes and other professional outlets?
One reason, I think, is that we all implicitly consider blogging a form of, or at least an extension of, journalism. As such, we consign ourselves to the "poor cousin" role, lacking the institutional resources–funding, access to sources, editorial review, etc.–of professional news outlets. While there are some formalistic similarities–topical stories, temporal arrangement of information–I think we do a disservice to both ourselves and to professional journalists in this comparison. To ourselves because considering ourselves "journalists-lite" denigrates what we actually do, and to journalists because it portrays their training, standards, and professionalism as unimportant to the task at hand.
But writing to different standards than those of professional journalists is no reason we should have to hold our hats in hand and beg for scraps from the Internet table. Google and other search engines are not tools for disseminating news stories. We don’t complain that a search for a book like Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning brings up results from e-commerce sites like Amazon, Shopping2, and Target, rather than a link to the current review in the NYTimes–or, if we do complain, we don’t blame either Google or e-commerce sites for "store noise".
The criticism of Google is, as far as I can see, a kind of elitism: blogs are "noise" because they get in the way of access to the "real" information published by the pros. Google comes in for a hit because of its powerful PageRank system, which provides an indirect assessment of the relevance of a sites content by looking at the number of sites that link to it, along with their relevance. If Searls links to a story on, say, emergent democracy, that link counts for more than if I link to it, because Google rightly sees Searls’ site as more relevant to the topic of emergent democracy. Because linking to stuff is one of the things that bloggers do best–and because there are simply so many of us–our cumulative evaluations directly contribute to the working of Google’s search engine. But for many, there is a sense that the popular nature of this participation in the flow of information is in-and-of-itself discrediting.
This, to me, is disheartening. While the NYTimes and other outlets are useful sources of information, they are only useful for the purposes they are designed for. Large commercial news outlets rarely provide useful commentary and analysis, for instance. Their coverage of issues relating to science and technology are particularly hampered both by a lack of specialized knowledge (those journalists studied journalism, after all, not paleontology or physics) and by their rather poor assessment of their readers’ levels of comprehension and interest. And, of course, there’s the Jayson Blair incident, which has given a) the NYTimes a reason to clean house, and b) a free pass to every other newspaper to ignore the Jayson Blairs on their own staffs. In short, they are useful and I agree with Searls that they should be making an effort to improve access, but they are neither the only nor the best source of information on the ‘net, regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of their news coverage.
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American soldiers have taken it on themselves to do some redecorating of Iraqi archaeological sites. Apparently, vandalism of the ancient city of Ur has led to the US military banning US troops from the site.
Ur is believed by many to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. It was the religious seat of the civilisation of Sumer at the dawn of the line of dynasties which ruled Mesopotamia starting about 4000 BC. Long before the rise of the Egyptian, Greek or Roman empires, it was here that the wheel was invented and the first mathematical system developed. Here, the first poetry was written, notably the epic Gilganesh, a classic of ancient literature.
The most prominent monument is the best preserved ziggurat – stepped pyramid – in the Arab world, initially built by the Sumerians around 4000 BC and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BC.
In celebration of Ur’s place in the history of Western civilization, US soldiers spray-painted graffitti on the site and stole bricks from its walls. “Always Faithful”, indeed.
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Via the Yellow Doggerel Democrat–only about 10 minutes after it was reported–comes the very happy news that Ari Fleischer, he of the fleischering non-response, has announced his resignation from the White House staff. Fleischer plans to move into the private sector (although the line between government work and private interests has become very thin of late). Although watching a Fleischer press conference is typically far more painful than multiple root canal surgery performed by 6 monkeys using meat cleavers, I would certainly like to have seen the conference announcing his resignation.
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Police in St. Louis have preemptively raided homes of people involved in the BioDevastation Conference against Genetic Engineering. The activists were arrested in order to prevent their attendance at the conference this weekend and their future disruption of the World Agricultural Forum meetings which start on Sunday.
The build-up to the Forums has been what we’ve come to expect. Panic-pieces in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with headlines like "City police get set to deal with protesters" and "Police don’t know how much disruption protests will cause" soften public opposition when excessive force is used, leaving the police force with a free hand. While citizens are bracing themselves for the inevitable violence, the paper explains that there really is very little to protest.
The World Agricultural Forum’s 2003 World Congress is not meant to be about street protests, or trade disputes between the European Union and the United States. It isn’t here to push a particular agrochemical company’s products, or a certain country’s goals, organizers said.
The Congress, being held Sunday through Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at Union Station, is about deeper issues behind the controversy and commercialization, said Leonard Guarraia, chairman and president of the World Agricultural Forum.
That’s the lead, by the way. The "organizers said" is clearly ignorable–nothing in any experience of journalism suggests that those words, or the name and title of the second source, will be read. Several clicks below the "fold"–in a section called "Critics Claims" (in case you weren’t sure how to tell the WAF organizers’ rock-solid facts from the protesters’ mad ravings) we read that, although it is clearly unrealistic, some disagree with the previous 15 paragraphs of warm fuzzies about the state of modern agriculture.
Yet some criticize the congress for a lack of openness. They say it is a function of big-business and government that leaves the average farmer and consumer behind. [emphasis added]
What else do they "say"?
The protesters say his company, and its St. Louis-based competitor, Monsanto, take advantage of farmers. They believe genetically modified seeds will damage the environment and could threaten human health. [emphasis added]
Andrew Bennett, executive director of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, the PR wing of agribusiness giant Syngenta, welcomes protestors input (without extending an invitation or anything):
"It’s how do you get people off the streets and into the room, or into the fields to help farmers, and put their considerable energies to helping solve the problems."
The St. Louis police had a ready answer to the question of "how do you get people off the streets"–by any means possible:
At least 20-30 people have been arrested this morning in coordinated raids on several St. Louis area homes, apparently in "pre-emptive raids" to prevent their attendance at this weekend’s Biodevastation conference and Sunday’s demonstration against the World Agricultural Forum. Others were taken into custody while riding their bicycles to the BioDevastation gathering at Forest Park Community College, and the police have left the bicycles lying along the road. Sarah Bantz — organizer for MORAGE and a speaker at the BioDevastation conference — was arrested for having a container of Vitamin C capsules, which police are claiming to be an illegal drug.
Let’s just say they were "Iraqed". Apparently the St. Louis police department can be reached at (314) 444-5624, (314) 444-5555, and (314) 231-1212; the PD is "currently in the process of redesigning our site to help serve you better"–allegedly since May 21 of last year. Just in case anyone wants to contact them. I’m not advocating anything here, but given the lack of a website, I thought people might want to know how to voice their displeasure at these heavy-handed tactics.
Anyway, welcome to another day in the Age of Unreason. Future protest, prosecuted today.
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 In the Suburbs Julius Knipl is the creation of Ben Katchor, a brilliant, brilliantly strange cartoonist who explores the interdimensional, intertemporal space of New York City through his weekly comic strip, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer”. When I was working at The Jewish Museum in New York, we were planning an exhibition on Katchor, which finally was launched last September–three months after I moved from NYC… Katchor and Knipl are the subjects of an incredible short film called “Pleasures of Urban Decay”, which explores the city through both Katchor’s and Knipl’s eyes. In the description of the film from its screening at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 1999, we get this answer to the question “Who is Julius Knipl?”:
He is a real estate photographer. A middle-aged Jewish man in a Fedora hat, who perambulates through cavernous city streets. With time to spare between jobs, he observes the city’s idiosyncrasies and listens to the hopes and fears of its entrepreneurs and working people. Knipl’s profession, Katchor explains, is the pathetic marriage of two trendy and potentially powerful fields: real estate and photography.
I’m just winding up a short stint as a real estate photographer for our local paper (a very quirky temp agency placement). It’s fun work–I’ve only lived here for a few months, so I’m really getting to know the town, driving around taking pictures of houses that people are moving out of, learning the different neighborhoods, finding shortcuts. I get to spend a lot of me-time in my car, listening to tunes. But though I’m not quite middle-aged, and alas, don’t wear a fedora, I’ve been feeling very Knipl-esque in my perambulations. I’ve been carrying my own camera (for the paper I use one of theirs, an oldish, 1999 Nikon Coolpix 950, which i’ve noticed is super-fast, literally capturing the image virtually the instant I press the button–unlike my Fuji FinePix 2400Z, which can take up to 2 seconds after you press the button to register anything) around to capture some of the more Kniplish moments. Hence the image above, a sedate, suburban, somewhat-higher-than-middle-class neighborhood, apparently devoid of human life, with the sky quietly roiling towards a massive storm. (Actually, you can maybe just make out the kid walking towards me on the sidewalk to the right, dribbling a basketball, but even so there’s an incredible stillness that caught my attention as I drove by, and I had to stop and try to capture it.)
It’s strange work. Given how strongly we identify our homes with our families, our identities, our private spaces, the “closed doors” behind which we’ve sequestered our feedom), photographing houses seems almost like an intrusion, an invasion of personal space. At the same time, there’s a sort of outsiderness, an exclusion, to photographing stranger’s homes, especially homes in the process of abandonment to new occupants. Artistically, it’s strange, too–the pictures have to be good, but they are for the most part going to be reproduced as tiny, 1-inch, grainy, black-and-white smudges in the weekend Real Estate section. I do get to take the cover photo for the Real Estate section, which is somewhat more rewarding–I even get a byline! The funny thing is that I’m hardly a photographer–more of a “snapshotter”. (Which is unfortunately nothing like the sense in which Bukowski claimed he wasn’t an author, just a type-writer.)
Julius Knipl is the creation of Ben Katchor, a brilliant, brilliantly strange cartoonist who explores the interdimensional, intertemporal space of New York City through his weekly comic strip, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer”. When I was working at The Jewish Museum in New York, we were planning an exhibition on Katchor, which finally was launched last September–three months after I moved from NYC… Katchor and Knipple are the subjects of an incredible short film called “Pleasures of Urban Decay”, which explores the city through both Katchor’s and Knipl’s eyes. In the description of the film from its screening at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 1999, we get this answer to the question “Who is Julius Knipl?”:
He is a real estate photographer. A middle-aged Jewish man in a Fedora hat, who perambulates through cavernous city streets. With time to spare between jobs, he observes the city’s idiosyncrasies and listens to the hopes and fears of its entrepreneurs and working people. Knipl’s profession, Katchor explains, is the pathetic marriage of two trendy and potentially powerful fields: real estate and photography.
I’m just winding up a short stint as a real estate photographer for our local paper (a very quirky temp agency placement). It’s fun work–I’ve only lived here for a few months, so I’m really getting to know the town, driving around taking pictures of houses that people are moving out of, learning the different neighborhoods, finding shortcuts. I get to spend a lot of me-time in my car, listening to tunes. But though I’m not quite middle-aged, and alas, don’t wear a fedora, I’ve been feeling very Knipl-esque in my perambulations. I’ve been carrying my own camera (for the paper I use one of theirs, an oldish, 1999 Nikon Coolpix 950, which i’ve noticed is super-fast, literally capturing the image virtually the instant I press the button–unlike my Fuji FinePix 2400Z, which can take up to 2 seconds after you press the button to register anything) around to capture some of the more Kniplish moments. Hence the image above, a sedate, suburban, somewhat-higher-than-middle-class neighborhood, apparently devoid of human life, with the sky quietly roiling towards a massive storm. (Actually, you can maybe just make out the kid walking towards me on the sidewalk to the right, dribbling a basketball, but even so there’s an incredible stillness that caught my attention as I drove by, and I had to stop and try to capture it.)
It’s strange work. Given how strongly we identify our homes with our families, our identities, our private spaces, the “closed doors” behind which we’ve sequestered our feedom), photographing houses seems almost like an intrusion, an invasion of personal space. At the same time, there’s a sort of outsiderness, an exclusion, to photographing stranger’s homes, especially homes in the process of abandonment to new occupants. Artistically, it’s strange, too–the pictures have to be good, but they are for the most part going to be reproduced as tiny, 1-inch, grainy, black-and-white smudges in the weekend Real Estate section. I do get to take the cover photo for the Real Estate section, which is somewhat more rewarding–I even get a byline! The funny thing is that I’m hardly a photographer–more of a “snapshotter”. (Which is unfortunately nothing like the sense in which Bukowski claimed he wasn’t an author, just a type-writer.)
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By now the story of the Klingon interpeter request by a mental health facility in Oregon has been seen everywhere, discredited, dismissed, and retracted–see for example Alas, a Blog’s overview. Seems the original statement by the mental health pros was misread, some journalists wrote a misleading article, it was picked up by the wire and circulated widely, and now the story has killed itself. The county issued an official list of languages they could, conceivably, find a need to hire interpreters for–for example, if a patient came in who only spoke Slovakian, the county would hire someone proficient in English and Slovakian to act as an interpreter. As a sort of tongue-in-cheek gesture, the people making up the list added "Klingon". No damage was done–it doesn’t cost anything to include a language, the only time money is spent is when an interpreter is actually hired. Somewhere in the press, this got twisted around to say that these were languages that the county was looking to hire intepreters for, but that wasn’t actually the case. Because of all the publicity and misunderstanding, the country has now removed "Klingon" from the list–although if a patient was admitted who indeed spoke only Klingon (a possibility no more unlikely than, say, an English-speaking person fluent in French losing the ability to speak English due to some trauma), they would still hire a Klingon-speaking interpreter.
It’s all kind of a joke until you realize that a lot of people are working to make Klingon ("tlhIngon") a functioning language. Not only by publishing dictionaries and grammars–there are Klingon-only retreats, language classes, and an annual conference. People have translated the New Testament (I’m sure that the bit about the meek inheriting the earth presented something of a difficulty–an idea akin to colourless green ideas sleeping furiously, I would think), Shakespeare’s plays, Kafka’s ("Khafka") short stories, Aesop’s Fables, and other works into Klingon. Google offers a Klingon-language interface to its search engine (but no option to restrict searches to pages in Klingon). There is a Klingon word processor–with spell check. There is even a Klingon programming language called "var’aq" (interestingly, the author claims that var’aq is a Forth- or PostScript-like, stack-based language because of the limitations imposed on computer programming by the structure of the Klingon language. I’d never stopped to consider how programming syntax reflected the syntax of it’s developers, but it makes sense that there is some Whorfian–or should I say "Worf-ian"?–kind of effect there).
The real kicker is that there are people who are raising their children as bilingual Klingon speakers (while we still continue to insist on waiting until high-school to start teaching foreign languages at school). I recently watched the documentary Trekkies, which is a pretty interesting glance at the Star Trek fan communities, of which the Klingon contingent are a part. Star Trek, for some reason, manages to grab some people’s attention in ways that even Tolkien’s world does not–maybe because of the inherent pessimism in Tolkien vs. the inherent optimism in Star Trek? Anyway, there is a section in the film on people learning and using Klingon–not only the language, but the culture as a whole. Klingon has managed, through the efforts of otherwise "normal" people (as opposed to the mainly academics who have pushed constructed languages such as Esperanto), to achieve an incredible foothold. A "Wired" article published in ’97 claims there were 1200 speakers, although Wired claimed a year earlier in a nother article that the number who were fluent was less than a couple dozen.
From an essay on constructed languages (the second Wired article mentioned above) comes this technical overview of Klingon:
Klingon has three official parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and everything else. Adjectives don’t exist per se: there is no word meaning simply "greedy," although there is a verb "to be greedy" (qur). And most adverbs are agglutinative; that is, limitless strings of suffixes can be attached to a verb to modify its meaning. Some of the suffixes are familiar, such as the ones that can be translated as "perfectly" or "seemingly." Some are not, such as the suffix that indicates the sentence’s subject is changing something in the world, or the suffix that lets you know the sentence is a question answerable with "yes" or "no."
…. Sentence structure is object-verb-subject, a virtually nonexistent combination in human linguistics. It can be found in about six out of the tens of thousands of languages that humankind has spoken through the ages. The word order for ‘Lieutenant Worf killed the Romulan with his phaser’ in Klingon is ‘phaser his using while Romulan kill Worf Lieutenant.’"
The official home of the Klingon language is the Klingon Language Institute, which is surprisingly serious given the dismissal most of us treat its subject matter with. To be honest, I can’t really think of any deeper meaning to all this, but it sure is intriguing.
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So I’m taking a lot of flack for my critique of Gates, some of it less than entirely civil. Stephen Bates, who I responded to earlier, gets me, I think, but now I’m coming under fire from new quarters that aren’t quite so forgiving as the Yellow Doggerel Democrat. Mac Diva finds my position via-à-vis Gates lacking in “realism”, which is fair enough, but then Elayne Riggs at Pen-Elayne on the Web (permanent link bloggered; scroll down to “Opening up the FloodGates”) said my posts remind her of “some fanboys’ reaction to an issue of a comic that didn’t read the way they expected it to regardless of whether the story worked”, which I am reading as un-complimentary. (An aside: both make note of my nom de blog, “OneMan”, and it seems perhaps time to clear that up–the name was originally part of the joke: a site called “One Man’s Opinion” was clearly the home of a “OneMan” whose opinions they were; plus, it played on my assertion, in my about page, that I am just one man, that I’m not trying to speak for everybody or even anybody else. But it seems to arouse suspicion in the way that names like “Atrios” and “Jeanne d’Arc” don’t, so for the record, my name is Dustin and I’m not a transsexual. Yet. So far as I know.)
Now, I don’t feel I have to be “right” about this (or that there even is a “right” in this matter–or if there is, there’s an awful lot of lee-way before “wrong” is reached) and I don’t necessarily care that Mac Diva and Elayne Riggs disagree with me (though being agreed with is so much nicer, don’t you agree?), but I do want to be understood, and if I haven’t been, than I am obviously not being clear enough in my objections.
I agree with all comers that we live in an era of savage capitalism and that, for better of worse, Bill Gates has a bank account that boggles the mind. I also agree with those who say that it is a Good Thing that Gates is giving that money away, although I would prefer if he simply gave it en masse to the UN, a la Ted Turner, to apply to areas that are widely agreed upon as most in need of cash flow. A lot would still go towards health issues, which international organizations repeatedly point to as the most pressing issues in today’s world, but some would also go to emergency humanitarian relief, slavery/trafficking issues, child labour prevention, and so on. Still, bully on Bill for at least stepping up–a lot of the obscenely rich, especially in the tech field, see no need to bother.
This does not change the fact that we are in drastic need of a systemic change in the way we allow business to be done. Gates has been rewarded for the most heinous of business practices, including his wielding of monopoly power, but also, and to my mind worse because of the human rights issues involved, using prison labour. In the human rights field, he joins other rich folk who have made fortunes while (by?) inciting genocidal attacks on native populations in Nigeria, Ecuador, and East Timor; creating massive pollution wastelands in those same countries as well as along the US-Mexico border, along the Alaskan and Spanish coastlines, in the African copper-belts, and elsewhere; undermining or attempting to undermine democratically elected governments in Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere (the US?); supporting and probably shaping structural readjustment and austerity programs that have led to rioting and worse in Argentina, Brazil, Haiti, and just about everywhere else they’ve been applied, as well as causing drastic shortages of food and medicines in many of those countries; used patent laws and other restrictions to restrict the availability of medicines and medical aid to the people most in need of it; undermined local subsistence patterns in countries like India, Haiti, and elsewhere by forcing greater amounts of land to be used for export crops and thus limiting the ability to grow food for local needs and increasing dependence on imported and more expensive foodstuffs; and so on. As I said, Bill Gates is not responsible for all of this, but he is representative of those who are, those to whom I am supposed to feel grateful for their decision to return some of that “ill-gotten” gain in the way they choose to the people they choose.
Elayne Riggs characterizes my objections as saying “how dare this rich person do things out of enlightened self-interest[?]”. It is not so much the “self-interest” I object to, but the idea that, in acting according to such interests, Gates and other philanthropists are somehow to be considered “enlightened”. Gates is investing in making the world more like the way he imagines it should be, pure and simple. Some of those goals I agree with–a world free of the suffering and death caused by malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and so on is certainly something I can get behind–but big parts of Gates’ world-view I cannot agree with–increasing corporate power, for instance–and with a bankroll as big as Gates’, it’s difficult to take the good stuff and leave the bad. It’s more of a package deal. And, as I’ve said before, Gates is investing in short-term gains in the health field–by not addressing the underlying system, he is simply making it easier to exploit the same people he is allegedly helping. So more children will be free of infectious diseases so they can work in African mines or Indonesian sweatshops; more young women will have access to reproductive health services (and ostensibly abortion) so they can control their fertility and devote more of their 5-10 prime working years (employers in the Free Trade and Export Processing Zones like their women laborers young–they rarely last to 25, hardly ever to 30) to the factory instead of to carrying and raising children.
Now, my skeptical readers might ask if this is a “choice” I would deny to them, and inasmuch as I can agree that it is a choice, I have to say “No”. Obviously I would rather have people healthy and alive and able to “choose” to work under such conditions than sickly or dead. But, again, I’m not going to thank Bill and his rich co-philanthropists for investing in future sweatshop labour, not to mention the other uses to which healthy, young, and non-infectious persons might be put. And I certainly am not going to thank them for making that those the only “choices” available to a large and growing percentage of the world’s population.
Finally, there’s the personal swipe: “I suppose it’s nice to have luxury enough to sit around and debate these philosophical issues rather than, you know, fighting for survival and accepting charity graciously from one of the too few people inclined to give same.” Although I am far from wealthy–I’m not even employed, much to my chagrin, and the coffee can is running low–I guess it is a “luxury” to question the inequities of the world we live in and hope for–work for–change. As I wrote privately to Mac Diva, I realize there is a great deal of idealism in what I have written on this subject, but without idealism how are we supposed to move forward? Realism is fine for slowing down, maybe occasionally even stopping, regressive policies, but it is idealism that makes for progress. If idealism is a luxury, fine–but it’s a luxury I think we can all wish would be available to everyone.
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Steven Bates, the Yellow Doggerel Democrat, writes a good reply to my arguments about Bill Gate’s philanthropic urges. He correctly identifies the core of my discomfort (or one of the cores–I may not be the best judge of the merits of my argument) and offers a good argument in defense of Gates’ charity. Ultimately, his reply rests on the question of how Gates’ philanthropy differs from the charitable giving of the rest of us. I’ve given a few dollars to causes I believe in, ranging from the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice to the Smithsonian to Pacifica’s WBAI–how is that different from Gates doing the same thing with the charity’s of his choice.
I want to reiterate that I’m not against charitable giving per se, nor even large-scale philanthropic giving at Bill Gates’ level. Rather, I am concerned with the issues of power around such giving, the way that giving on Gates’ scale (as opposed to the average person’s charity) warps the field of social services by focusing resources in particular areas–areas dictated by the interests of the wealthy. I am even thankful that those funds are being made available–but I am made uncomfortable by the randomness with which those funds have come to be used for Gates’ specific set of interests. If Gates had been rather interested in the traffick in women and children, or in child labour in Indonesia, or whatever, those are the areas that would have received his funds, not reproductive health and infectious disease issues.
Because of the immensity of Gates’ wealth (which outweighs many countries’ GDPs) his philanthropy cannot help but massively restructure the fields in which he invests–just as Microsoft’s investments have shaped the development of the IT field over the last decade-plus. Gates is a shrewd businessman, and I am sure that he has considered his charitable giving shrewdly, investing in fields that seem to him to offer the greatest potential benefit and the most efficient application of his funds. But is he necessarily the person best-equipped to make those sorts of decisions? The way we think of property tells us that Gates is free to use his money in whatever way he sees fit, and we should be thankful that he has chosen to apply it in the service of mankind, but maybe he is not the best person to decide how his wealth should be distributed.
Deeper than this is Gates’ involvement in the system on which his wealth is premised. As I said before, the conditions that made Gates wealthy are the same conditions that make other people poor. Humanity, rather than being able to apply that wealth widely to problems, has had to wait until Gates’ personal decision to apply it narrowly. (I should note that it’s not just Gates, but all the beneficiaries of massive and rising inequalities in wealth distribution–Gates is just the example at hand. Gates has chosen to invest in causes I believe in, rather than, say, the anti-abortion movement, or the family values movement, but that doesn’t change the power dynamics at play.)
It is this investment in remedying the symptoms of massive exploitation that I find questionable. The same patent laws that Gates has used to bolster his personal fortune (and that of his company) have been used by pharmaceutical companies to deny access to medical care in the countries that Gates now wants to support it. The poverty that Gates exploited by using prison labour is the same poverty that causes the spread of infectious diseases. What Gates is decidedly not doing is using his wealth to challenge the basis of that wealth, to forestall the exploitation that lays at the root of his pet causes.
How does that jibe with the more typical charitable giving of myself or of Stephen Bates, who even works as on the executive committee of his favored charity? First, I disagree with Bates’ characterization of this as "a difference of scale, not substance"–the quantitative difference between our giving and Gates’ is so large as to become a qualitative difference. The application of several times many Third World country’s GDP just in the domain of health services will have a massive impact, far outstripping any typical individual’s, or even most non-profit organizations’, potential effect.
But more compelling to me is the source of that wealth. It’s not so much that I consider Gates’ wealth "ill-gotten" (to use Bates’ term) simply because he has carried out some unsavory, anti-competitive business practices. There are many sources of wealth, and Gates’ is probably one of the least malignant–unlike some companies, Microsoft does not appear to have been involved in acts of genocide, torture, murder, or the overthrow of democratic governments (I could be wrong about Microsoft’s relatively clean hands in this regard, however). But Microsoft has been, under Gates’ direct leadership and afterwards, complicit in the expansion of corporate power at the expense of public power, in the drive for lowered wages and higher profits, in the dissemination of a corporate, free-market ideology that drives IMF sanctions and structural adjustment programs–all of which have directly or indirectly contributed to the disempowerment of people around the world and the denial of basic services. Although individual workers indirectly support this system when we work for companies like Microsoft, we have not been instrumental in defining it and in bringing it about. The wealth that we manage to accumulate is, roughly, sufficient to sustain ourselves and our families and to participate in our communities, part of which can include charitable giving–it is not enough to effect massive systemic change in the way wealth is distributed.
Where Bates’ argument is most compelling, to me, is in its pragmatism. I agree that, given the state of the world at the moment, I’d rather have someone like Bill Gates blowing his wad on vaccines and pre-natal care clinics than on yachts and sports cars. I, and ostensibly Bates, give part of what’s left over after our basic needs are met because we recognize that the system is not meeting those needs for everyone, that some people and some causes are not taken care of in our society. We contribute as best we can. One of the reasons our system is unable to meet these needs, however, is because of the wealth-acquitisitiveness of Gates and his hyper-wealthy cohort. The resources that they have drawn away from these services (and which they may or may not choose to selectively invest back into them) has produced the gap that good samaritans try to fill in some limited way.
I don’t think Gates is a bad person for divesting himself of his wealth in the service of society–I think he is a person who is trying to do the Right Thing in a system that doesn’t normally encourage doing good. But I don’t admire him for giving away money that he shouldn’t, in any ethical framework worthy of the name, have had in the first place, that was gained at the expense of a wide swath of human necessities, some of which he proposes to replace now. Ultimately, I am proposing a reexamination of the basis foundations of our society, and I know that’s not very practical. Maybe I should simply keep my peace, rather than risking the flight of Gates’ and his fellows’ capital from the few areas they have chosen to feed it back into. But I feel that these questions should be raised and discussed, and I thank Bates (and before him, Jeanne d’Arc) for giving me (and I hope others) a chance to do so. As for Gates, maybe he has had a change of heart, as Bates suggests–I think that having a family can do that to some people–but that doesn’t exonerate him for his past and ongoing negative contribution to the shape of current affairs.
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Jeanne D’Arc has a short post linking to an article on Salon about Bill Gates’ philanthropy. "My Microsoft-hating son will never forgive me for saying this," she writes, "but I love Bill Gates." The Salon article discusses Gates’ commitment to dispose of 95% of his massive $43 billion dollar personal wealth through charities involved in such issues as reproductive health and the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases in the Third World. According to Salon, whose story is based on an interview Gates recently gave Bill Moyers’ "Now", Gates is a stand-up guy: "Gates may be a ruthless businessman, but he is giving away billions of his dollars in a dedicated effort to fight AIDS, develop vaccines for scores of deadly diseases, and improve educational and healthcare opportunities for millions of impoverished women and children. On the most important issue, Gates passes the test with flying colors."
It’s not often I disagree with Jeanne d’Arc in any fundamental way, but in this case I definitely do. Like the robber barons of yore, Gates’ philanthropy is a gesture–a huge gesture, of course, given how much money is involved, but a gesture nonetheless. Gates refuses to even address, let alone challenge, the political conditions in which poverty, disease, and poor pre- and neo-natal care are rooted–for instance, "He blandly ducks a pointed question from Moyers asking him to comment on the Bush administration’s opposition to funding for reproductive health and family planning services worldwide." A commitment to change without considering the means by which real empowerment of the people affected by the status quo can be achieved isn’t a great leap forward, it’s a band-aid. Yes, Bill Gates’ aid may help ease the suffering of thousands, even millions of impoverished people, but it does nothing to prevent or stem further suffering.
But that’s not my real issue with Gates. The big problem is that Gates–through the "ruthless" business practices Salon notes but claims are "nothing compared to the right of a child in India or Uganda to live free of crippling disease" (and who could argue with the right of children to live free of disease?)–has amassed enough wealth (and the power that goes with it) to make these decisions for people all over the world. This is the philanthropic problem, that individuals–through the exploitation of workers (prison labor and temp workers, in Gates case), tax codes, consumers, the environment, etc.–become the conduit for basic necessities. History has shown that capitalists are very selective in their philanthropic programs, generally investing only in those areas that mesh most closely with the interests of capital. Around the turn of the 20th c., Rockefeller, Mellon, and Carnegie invested in universities and libraries, for instance, to help meet the emerging need for a well-educated, literate management class; a half-century later, the Rockefellers invested heavily in the promotion of Area Studies around the world, to supply the new American demand for accurate and organized knowledge for the attainment of Cold War objectives. Public health and hygiene, whether in the Third World or in the slums and ghettoes at home, have long been favored by capitalists–of course it looks great to donate to such causes, but it also helps to sustain an exploitable pool of labor. It probably doesn’t hurt that the diseases of the poor have often managed to find their way into the homes of the rich–a risk that has only become greater with the rise of rapid cargo transportation that has made many of today’s fortunes possible.
Of course, keeping people healthy and safe is a Good Thing, one which I can hardly object to. What I object to is allowing a limited number of people to decide what problems are important and how those problems should be addressed. Are Gates’ personal concerns necessarily those of the world as a whole? What if he’s incorrect, or if something goes wrong? What if the solutions he favors work fine in ex-Soviet Georgia but fail miserably in rural India?
This is not a question of expertise–I assume that Gates is smart enough to work through organizations that know what they’re doing–but of selectivity and, ultimately, accountability. Gates is not funding a program to relieve suffering through state- and region-level political and economic reforms, he is funding a handful of issues that interest him. And, ultimately, if a program he has funded fails, he can say he gave it his best shot and it just didn’t work. He’s already consigned himself to the financial loss by deciding to give the money away. Nobody selected him as their representative, on health or any other issue. And nobody can "unselect" him–Gates has no reason to listen to even listen to the complaints of those people who feel his intervention in their lives is unwarranted (and it does happen, all the time–medicines are rejected, medical advice refused and even resented–notably by those who question, with good reason, the motivations of the foreigners dispensing their wares).
But from the viewpoint of those whose suffering he wishes to alleviate, it’s not just a matter of resources ill-spent, it’s a matter of resources that no longer exist to address their needs. Gates gets a clear conscience and a slightly more manageable bank statement, but the poor have to continue to suffer.
Ultimately, it is the practices of capitalists like Gates that need to change if the problems of poverty are going to be addressed in any meaningful way. Although in the Salon article Gates comes off as part of the solution to these problems, he and his ilk are part of the problem. Maybe the biggest part of the problem.
Jeanne d’Arc has written intelligently and even bravely on the Mother Theresa Redemption Racket, showing how Mother Theresa sold redemption to the worst sort of exploitive scum, over the long term underwriting and sustaining their actions. Gates’ actions, while involving wealth an order of magnitude (maybe several orders of magnitude) greater, is more of the same–an investment of money earned through the exploitation of the poor in the handful of causes that matter most to him. I actually respect Gates a lot more than most of his colleagues at Augusta, for recognizing that all that money had better uses than lining his own pockets, but that doesn’t change wrongness of a system in which (mostly) men who screw people over the most are rewarded by being able to make decisions that a) effect millions of people, and b) ultimately maintain the status quo.
(A bit of a disclaimer: I’ve worked for non-profits funded, in whole or in part, from the endowments of the very very rich, including Andrew Carnegie. While that may seem to contradict what I’ve written above, I don’t think it does. There’s nothing wrong in choosing to apply one’s labour to whatever causes one feels drawn to, for whatever reason. I love that Jimmy Carter works with Habitat for Humanity, and have no complaints that the time he gives to this organization is time he doesn’t give to, say, the Red Cross or Greenpeace. What Gates’ does is different–Gates takes the surplus wealth generated by other people’s labour and applies it in the way he sees fit. The organizations I worked for were doing important things, I believe, and I was happy to be able to contribute to that–but I would not feel so happy if I had worked for an organization that, say, included one workday a week at the charity of my bosses’ choice.)
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