Amor Mundi 1/5/14
01-06-2014
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Missing NSA Debate About Capitalism
Hero or traitor? That is the debate The New York Times wants about Edward Snowden. But the deeper question is what, if anything, will change? Evgeny Morozov has a strong essay in The Financial Times: "Mr. Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US's surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric - tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform - has been useless." The basic truth is that "No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data - be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it.... What eludes Mr. Snowden - along with most of his detractors and supporters - is that we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities - with democracy the main victim. This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and have some political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates about capitalism - or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto of the privacy debate."
Considering the Fourth Amendment implications of the recent Federal injunction on the NSA's domestic spying program, David Cole notes something important about the world we're living in: "The reality of life in the digital age is that virtually everything you do leaves a trace that is shared with a third party-your Internet service provider, phone company, credit card company, or bank. Short of living off the grid, you don't have a choice in the matter. If you use a smartphone, you are signaling your whereabouts at all times, and sharing with your phone provider a track record of your thoughts, interests, and desires. Technological innovations have made it possible for all of this information to be collected, stored, and analyzed by computers in ways that were impossible even a decade ago. Should the mere existence of this information make it freely searchable by the NSA, without any basis for suspicion?"
Jason Kottke thinks that the blog is no longer the most important new media form: "The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you'll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even in the aggregate. For the past month at kottke.org, 14 percent of the traffic came from referrals compared to 30 percent from social, and I don't even work that hard on optimizing for social media. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren't seeking traffic from blogs anymore. Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to 'share this on my social media channels' rather than post it to my blog." Of course, it may be the case that the blog form remains deeply important, but only for those blogs that people visit regularly and then distribute through social media. The major blogs are more powerful and popular than ever. What we are learning is that not everyone is a blogger.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explains why he's frustrated about the way we're having the conversation about paternity leave: "So rather than hear about the stigma men feel in terms of taking care of kids, I'd like for men to think more about the stigma that women feel when they're trying to build a career and a family. And then measure whatever angst they're feeling against the real systemic forces that devalue the labor of women. I think that's what's at the root of much of this: When some people do certain work we cheer. When others do it we yawn. I appreciated the hosannas when I was strolling down Flatbush, but I doubt the female electrician walking down the same street got the same treatment."
The Professional Palate Unmasked
Breaking a tradition of his profession, New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt has decided to reveal his face. During his explanation, he stakes a claim for the continued importance of the critic in the digital age: "So is there still room for the steady (and, yes, sometimes weary) voice of the professional in a world where everyone's a critic? Of course there is. This is especially true in the theatrical realm of restaurants, where the quality and enjoyment of your dinner can vary dramatically depending on where you sit, what time of day you eat, how long the restaurant has been open, and what you happened to order. Anonymity would be nice, but it's always been less important than a sturdy gut and a settled palate. Most important of all, however, is a healthy expense account, because if a critic's employer allows for enough paid visits to a particular restaurant, even the most elaborately simpering treatment won't change his or her point of view."