

The Intellectual Situation - razorburn
http://nplusonemag.com/the-intellectual-situation

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barrkel
I think the comparison of the internet with Stalinism and even echoes of
Fascism ("The first [they] came for were the travel agents") is more than a
little hyperbolic.

The article is drenched in a nostalgia for a time when the public shut up and
consumed their ad-laden print produced by elite institutions like good little
consumers. After all, "for all its defects, [the NYT] was the best and most
comprehensive [...] in the world".

The power of newspapers, and media more generally, lay in their concentration
of power, the fact of their placement in society acting as a consciousness and
conscience for a nation. The agenda for public debate is set by the media;
politicians and leaders feel public pressure primarily through the media. But
as we all know, the fact of the concentration wasn't a function of their
power, their placement or their importance; it was a function of the large
capital costs of printing. With publishing so cheap, there's no need for such
centralization.

The question that remains is whether this new world is genuinely at a loss for
new kinds of organs that serve the same kinds of public function. That e.g.
newspapers specifically fail to adapt, or become uneconomical, is unimportant,
I think. What's important is that there is debate, that insightful authors get
an audience, and that this process is public enough that politicians and other
leaders are aware of the resulting public pressure.

And for this, I'd like to look at a microcosm of debate and test its health,
and then contrast that with the larger public sphere. Consider tech and
software development. Hacker News is one of our highest quality aggregators,
but this forum is first for centralizing and popularizing links to other
articles we believe to be insightful - and those articles are quite often on
individually run and published blogs; and secondarily, there is some trivial
debate and discussion here. But the best responses are in turn further
articles and blog posts. I think the iterative churn of point and counter-
point that I see pop up on HN is pretty healthy. I also think it's much better
than it ever was when people had to rely on the likes of Dr Dobbs to track
debate and trends. I think developers today are better informed and more
involved with the debate that controls the direction of our industry than at
any time previously.

So this microcosm is why I believe public policy debate is not really at risk
from the death of newspapers, and the way other media dilute themselves with
soft entertainment news and gossip. I think public policy debate in more niche
areas like economic policy, foreign affairs, health, education etc. are more
vibrant now because they don't need to rely on amortizing large capital costs.
And I think the kind of "hub and spoke" system of aggregators as "insight
filters" with substantive articles at the end of links is actually superior to
the alternative, where you have regular columnists on a payroll who may be
more or less insightful on their daily or weekly writing schedule.

As to the stuff about art, games, etc. in the article, I think it's largely
tosh and not very relevant. "High art" is what it is primarily because of its
use as social markers, tokens and objects that signal status; moreover, art
works best when it appeals both to our most base and visceral instincts at the
same time as engaging our highest faculties. But for art to do this
successfully, it needs a high degree of maturity, which takes time in terms of
technology, practitioners and audience. Art is to rational debate as metaphor
is to argument. The more able games are to create metaphor with parallels in
the important things in our lives, the closer to good art they'll be. But I
think they're art none the less; even Dostoyevsky (the last quote, which if I
recall correctly is from a translation of Crime and Punishment) wasn't a
particularly good writer.

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brg
As to the debate about the aesthetics of video games, I am finding it
interesting that there are so many people compelled to attempt to exclude
video games when it would be simpler to ignore the question. But for the
current generation, there is no question that the greatest video games are
indeed art.

I am in a generation where perhaps half of my peers have never played with a
console or a desktop. For me and my closes peers, art has been something which
elicits a feeling, as one 'experiences' art. Kitch is not art because it is so
easily dismissed.

But art takes skill. In reading it is skill in pacing an word choice that
involve the reader; in cinema it takes evocative lighting and framing to get
rapt aattention. However, video games have had a simple method by which they
can achieve the experiential involvement: first person perspective and
control. This has lead to a raft of games which are designed fulfill every
juvenile fantasy at the click of a button. However, one of the first uses of
cinema was blue video and the Canterbury Tales are not high brow discussions
of theology; as a medium video games will mature like any other new technology
aimed we use to study our world.

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Locke1689
I thought this article was great. The topic was interesting and while the
treatment may have been a little light, I think that was the point. The
author's literary style had the curved teeth of some of the most gripping New
Yorker pieces. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree but it was a pleasure to
read.

~~~
iamwil
that was long, even for my tastes. I came away not really knowing what his
point was at the end. I started skimming about 3/4 of the way down. I got the
comparison to the russian revolution, and the web's effect on the NYT. But
what of it?

I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic that "the treatment may have been a
little light". Maybe I just slept too little last night.

Care to shine a spotlight on "the point"?

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kerkeslager
This is a great article. Some choice bits:

> What happened? One standard answer is that advertisers overpaid for ad
> placement in the past, and now the Gray Lady, confronted with precise
> readership metrics, is finally getting paid the pittance she always
> deserved. This seems implausible: could perpetually rationalizing,
> efficiency-maximizing capitalism really have misjudged the efficacy of print
> advertising for more than a century?

> Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow
> we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in
> Gmail’s sometimes tactless data mining of your emails: write a friend that
> your cat has died and you learn, cruelly, of discounts on litter.

> And it’s often proposed that the dignity of games therefore lies in their
> future utility: play Doom now so you can pilot a Predator drone later, or
> learn to reduce your workforce with a click of a mouse. But the most potent
> allure of games surely lies in their fantasized, not their realistic,
> relationship to work. Here, control is angstless, effortless, and enormous:
> you can watch rioters take to the streets of your Roman city for two minutes
> of gametime, send out the police, cut taxes, shelter the rich, and watch
> your city blossom with gentrified villas some five minutes later. There is
> no game, at least not yet, in which you accomplish the mission only to learn
> you’ve been torturing an innocent man, or get passed over for promotion.
> Neither is your guitar heroism cut short by an overdose of heroin or rooted
> in coping with your abusive father. Here is a very un-labor-force-like
> experience of meaningful activity.

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radicaldreamer
n+1 is a great and constantly improving magazine. They just launched their new
website and have a lot of good articles in their archives. The before/after of
their old site and new site is amazing: <http://suyashs.com/the-new-n1-site-
has-launched>

Note: link to my own blog.

