The Authenticity Hoax infects Australian Politics

On the excellent ABC blog "The Drum", an Australian academic named Jeff Sparrow laments the importation of the discourse of "authenticity" into Australian politics. It seems that the current election campaign has become dominated a competition over which candidate, prime minster Julia Gillard or opposition leader Tony Abbot is "more real", complete with a call for Gillard's handlers to "let Julia be Julia". It's a shame, really.

The first half of Sparrow's piece pretty much tracks the argument in chapter six of The Authenticity Hoax -- he's even kind enough to give me a shoutout. Then he gets to the heart of the matter:

Quite obviously, Julia Gillard's pledge to find herself does not represent a renunciation of politics-as-usual so much as an intensification of it, with her attack on her handlers almost certainly scripted by those handlers themselves, fully aware of the electoral impact of a properly-designed Turnip Day.

The new focus on political character in Australian politics ('what is Julia really like?', 'just what kind of person is Tony?') directly replicates the preoccupations of US campaigning, in which all candidates try for authenticity, all of the time. But why, exactly, have we moved to this presidential style of politics?

Sparrow and I agree that while the temptation is the blame "the media", that's just not good enough. After all, the media is a consumer good like any other, and blaming the media for serving up bad politics is like blaming McDonald's for serving up bad hamburgers. Someone is buying it, the question is why?

Here is where Sparrow and I part company. He blames "market fundamentalism" and the ideology of "neoliberalism":

The neoliberal turn was always about more than pure economics, involving an insistence that notions of individual autonomy, consumerism, efficient markets and transactional thinking should be extended into all social relations, even - or, perhaps, especially - those that had previously been dominated by quite different rules.

I don't quite agree. Think back to the mid-2000s in Canada, where there was so much hand-wringing over "aliented voters" -- the recurring theme then was that none of the parties properly represented the views of individual voters; the need to compromise by supporting a big-tent party was seen as a shameful compromise.

One of the recurring arguments in the book is that the "authentic turn", in politics as elsewhere, is, paradoxically, a consequence of anti-market thinking. And yes, I think Sparrow is right that much of the disaffection of these supposedly "alienated" voters seems to have been a product of their having adopted and internalized the ideology of consumer sovereignty. But we need to be a little more careful: the main ideological motivation for this is not itself pro-market ideology: just the opposite. The desire for the authentic, in politics as elsewhere, is largely a consequence of anti-market thinking, which is just to say that it is the authenticity-seekers who are creating the very conditions for their own exploitation.

Grim times for publishers

It was inevitable that the book industry would get all shook up by technology, in the way that music, film, and newspapers and magazines had done before it. Publishing hung on for longer for no reason other than it took a while longer for a delivery mechanism to come along that would rival the book as a technology.

The upside of this is that it is opening up new ways of experimenting with publishing -- Neal Stephenson's Mongoliad is a really interesting experiment. 

But just as Amazon made the bricks and mortar bookstore obsolete, the Kindle, Kobo, iPad and other such are making the book itself a quaint little objet de nostalgie.

I take no pleasure in this -- I write for a living, and writing is a very conservative business. But for that very reason, I'm worried that the publishing business is even worse situated to deal with the challenge than even the music and film bizes were. But I'm just guessing here, since I have no real experience on the inside. But someone who has worked in the biz, inside and out, is Megan Hustad. She has a great rundown of what the main problems are (with loads of good links as well), but her last point caught me by surprise:

All that said, however, there’s one blanketing sin that largely goes unmentioned. Any publisher that wants to exist let alone remain relevant in 2015 will have to figure out how to wriggle out from underneath it. The fundamental error, as I see it, is that the traditional publishing model privileges this formula:

• Underestimated costs + Overestimated benefits = Project approval.

In other words, before most publishers agree to publish anything, they run sales projections spun from a highly selective glance at the track records of “comparison titles” (as they’re called) that sold well. Comp titles that sold poorly are routinely ignored. Only projects for which all decision-makers have bought into best-case scenarios are pursued.

Now I'm dying to know what "comparison titles" my publishers looked at for the Authenticity Hoax.

Plagiarism, laziness, and the wisdom of keith richards

As long as you turn the set on and put your finger in the air, if there's any songs out there, they'll come through you. It's very easy to get hung up on just the simple mechanics and craft of songwriting rather than the more important thing that real master musicians like the wherling dervishes can tell us about: just letting it go through you and come out the other side. -- Keith Richards, 1983

Sometimes you have to wonder what year the New York Times thinks it is. About seven years after it became a widespread (and widely-reported) probem,  Trip Gabriel had a piece this weekend reporting that the digital age is blurring the lines of what constitutes plagiarism for university students. Aside from having nothing remotely new, the piece is an absolute mess, quoting academics tossing out one half-baked theory after another, without even attempting to do some basic analysis of whether any of it makes the slightest sense.

Stop if you've heard this before: the cut 'n paste features of the internet haven't just made it easier for lazy students to cheat. No, the rip/mix/burn online culture has actually changed our definition of the self.

 Lord, are we still talking this way? Apparently so:

A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language....

 In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

Look, we may be on the road to some po-mo world where nobody ever says anything new, but the very fact that we find these cases worisome proves that we haven't quite left modernity behind.

We should start by reminding ourselves that plagiarism is foremost a moral question. Sometimes it is illegal (such as when someone makes use of copyrighted material), but the essence of plagiarism is that it is one of a clutch of ethical offences that include fabricating memoirs or news reports, fraud, lying, hypocrisy, and forgery. What unites these is that they all involve some form of misrepresentation.

In many ways, plagiarism is just the flip side of forgery: The forger passes off his own work as that of someone else, while plagiarists pass off the work of others as their own. Plagiarism is an offence that involves the misrepresentation of the self. The reason why we get hung up about these things is because we hold fast to a number of moral ideals about the self. We give these ideals names like uniqueness, integrity and originality, but the motivating principle is what we can call the ethic of authenticity.

As an ethic, it is an injunction to be true to oneself, to place the cultivation of your real self at the forefront of your concern. Our culture remains strongly committed to the ethic of authenticity. Indeed, the reason plagiarism is on the rise is not because we care less about the morality of misrepresentation but -- paradoxically -- because we care about it too deeply.

Because of our commitment to authenticity, we tend to look down on ideas that are borrowed or derivative. We fight over credit for things, partly because there are potential financial or status rewards, but also because we believe there is something profoundly unjust about people receiving credit for books they didn't write or inventions they didn't invent.

But this actually gives us a strong incentive to lie about where we got our ideas. When her plagiarism scandal first hit, Harvard girl wonder Kaavya Viswanathan claimed that she had simply internalized themes and passages from her favourite books. This is the plagiarist's usual gambit, and it is parodied in the  film The Squid and the Whale. At the school talent show, Walt announces that he is a about to sing a song he wrote, and proceeds to play a song from Pink Floyd's The Wall. When he's caught, Walt denies that he has done anything wrong. He claims that because he believed that it was the sort of song he could have written, the fact that he didn't was immaterial.

Hilarious, yes, but not far from the truth. Every writer runs into situations where he reads something that seems so obvious, that is so perfectly phrased, that he feels that he would have put it exactly that way, if only he'd thought of it. On these occasions, plagiarism doesn't feel like stealing so much as the appropriation of part of one's true self.

But even this is probably overthinking the problem a bit too much. It's only at the end of Gabriel's piece does a sane voice enter the scene, in the form of Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at UC Davis. Most of the cases of plagiarism, he says, did not come from students who were in the thrall of some metaphysical theory of postmodern identity. Instead, they were simply  “unwilling to engage the writing process,” i.e. they were lazy.

Or as Keef might say, it's easier just to let the ideas flow through you and out the other side. 

Occam's razor remains a very useful tool, even for reporters.

More from Rob Horning.

The off-the-grid paradox

The New Scientist has a short interview with off-the-grid guru Nick Rosen, who explains why it's getting easier than ever to live minimally. Turns out, it's because the gridders have developed so much awesome technology:

Is living off-grid today very different to how it used to be?

In the 1970s we had the "back to the land" movement and in the 1980s and 1990s, the survivalists. In the last five years a much more sophisticated and multilayered off-grid population has emerged. These days, technology makes it quite comfortable, thanks to wireless communication, low-energy appliances and, of course, renewable energy, which has come a long way since the 1970s.

Is foodie-ism a horse race or a dog show?

Someone tweeted this link about the evolution of foodieism out of French nouvelle cuisine. I'm not really sure I understand it, but the argument seems to be something like this: Nouvelle cuisines became like a horse race -- about breeding the biggest and best horse on the field. In contrast, there is the dog show conception of success:

“Best in show” is rooted in standards of authenticity – i.e., the best representation of a type. Increasingly, foodie culture in the U.S. and other parts of the world has begun to adhere to these “best in show” standards as they seek for authentic representations of food.

I'm not really sure I understand this.

Borges, Journalism, Wikileaks

Nick Rowe and I were both thinking about Borges’ Library of Babel the other day, though for different reasons (I think). For Nick it was part of another of his fun posts that start from way beyond leftfield and end up nice and close to home. I was trying to figure out something helpful and original to say about Wikileaks and what it means for journalism. This is where I’m at:

Imagine two libraries. The first library contains every important book that has ever been written. It’s a big library, but not that big.  There is only one problem: it is very hard to get into. Access to the stacks is strictly controlled, and when it comes to the best and most important books, it is almost impossible for civilians to even see them. And so while the public knows where all the useful information is to be found, that doesn’t do them much good since they can’t get at it. It’s basically a useless library, so let’s call this the Library of Robarts.

The second library is much, much bigger than the first. It contains every possible book that could ever be written, from a book that is entirely blank except for a single “A” on the first page, to a book that is nothing but “zzzzzz” on every page. It also contains books of any arbitrary length, since individual volumes can be concatenated to form much longer books. Unlike the first library, this one is open to the public. Anyone can go in and wander the stacks to their hearts content, and is free to spend days, months, or even years in the reading rooms.

But this library, too, is totally useless. It's useless not despite its size, but because of its size. Imagine you are looking for a copy of Moby Dick. You find one that you think is the right one, except it is very hard to know for sure. That is because in addition to the true copy of Moby Dick, the library also contains every possible version of Moby Dick that varies from the true one by a single letter or punctuation mark. And one that varies by only two letters or punctuation marks. Here’s the key point: the only way you could ever know that you had the correct version of Moby Dick is if you already had a true version of Moby Dick! In order to find what you want in this library (called the Library of Babel) is if you already know what you are looking for. As Nick puts it,  "What makes a library useful, indeed what makes a library a library, is not just what it contains, but what it does not contain. The optimal size of a library, even if we ignore the cost of books, librarians, and bricks and mortar, is finite."

From the public’s point of view, the ideal library would be mixture of the two regimes. We want the limited size (only the important books!) of the first library, but the open-access of the second.

So what does this mean for journalism? For most of its existence, journalism has taken place in a Library of Robarts world. Officials have secret information that the public wants. The job of the journalist has been to learn about, and hopefully obtain, information that is being kept secret. The journalist in this case is, literally, the medium through which important secret information becomes useful public information.

In the aftermath of the Wikileaks affair, some have argued that this is a sign that we are moving from a world where useful information is secret, and therefore scarce, to an era where useful information is public, and therefore plentiful. That in fact is Julian Assange’s stated goal: a world of absolute transparency, where there are no official secrets.

At first blush, this seems like the ideal mixed-library regime: All and only important official secrets will be made public. The truth will be out there, governments will be more accountable. And journalists will become obsolete, as we will have evolved, say some commentators, into a “post-journalism” world.

Is this plausible? I’m not sure. After all, the two libraries I talked about above are just examples of two ways of hiding a very important piece of information. You can secret it away in a place where no one can get it – put the papers in a safe, or secure it behind very hard encryption, for example. Or you can hide it in plain sight as it were, by embedding the one useful bit of information in a sea of irrelevant information.

Governments typically adopt the first tactic when trying to keep secrets. They put a classified stamp on it, limit its promulgation, lock it up, encrypt it, and so on. But sometimes, when faced with a pesky access to information request, they go the other way. They release the requested document along with a huge pile of other related documents, hoping to bury the needle of useful information in a big useless haystack. “You want information?” they say. “We’ll give you information!” That is, they switch from the Library of Robarts tactic to the Library of Babel tactic.

A big deal has been made about the sheer size of the Wikileaks document dump, with over 90 000 files made public and another 15 000 or so in the queue. Less frequently, it has been observed that the volume of information is not a feature of the leak, but a bug. In his post on the Wikileak, Jay Rosen wondered if the sheer scale of the revelations would have a counterproductive effect. Here is what he wrote:

We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs. My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

I think he gets the effect right (reaction has been pretty muted) but not the rationale. I don’t think people kinda shrugged at the Afghanistan logs because the scale of the problems they reveal seems intractable. Rather, I think it is because the scale of the information that was revealed is journalistically intractable. Wikileaks didn’t give us the happy medium library, with its combination of useful and public information, it gave us the Library of Babel, where every good story was hidden in a sea of otherwise useless data.

The lesson for Wikileaks is that information is better when it comes not in a torrent but in useful drips. That is something the Telegraph understood last year, when it tormented the British political class with daily Chinese-water torture revelations about MPs spending habits.

The lesson for journalism, I think, is that it doesn’t really matter which library system we’re operating in. Whether it’s all hidden in Robarts, or in plain view in Babel,  the information still needs to be mediated. Except instead of making useful secrets public, the task of the journalist will be to show the public what is needle, and what is haystack. If anything, journalists in the Libary of Babel world will have to be be more knowledgeable, more specialized in the fields they cover, because in order to find the good stories, they'll already have to know what they are looking for.



rational optimism about the BP spill?

Over at Time magazine, Michael Grunwald argues that the environmental effects of the BP spill in the gulf have been greatly overstated, while his colleague Bryan Walsh replies, in effect, that it's too soon to tell. The last part of my interview for Canadian Business magazine with Matt Ridley seems relevant:

CB: The two big public crises right now are the sub-prime crash and its downstream economic consequences, and the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Economist Richard Thaler has argued that this is a symptom of a very modern problem, where neither the public nor the private sector seems to know what to do about it.

MR: I would put a slightly different slant on it, and instead of saying that neither public nor private sectors seem able to cope, I would say that public opinion doesn't seem able to cope. I'm terribly struck by the fact that there was an equally big, and certainly longer-lasting spill, in the Gulf in 1979 called the Ixtoc, and I'd never heard of the thing!

The bottom line from it, like from nearly all oil spills, is how quickly the system recovers once it is stopped. I hate saying that, because it makes me sound complacent now, and of course it hasn't stopped yet. And the thing about oil spills is that they are dreadful for the people in the localities. But I have actually covered a number of oil spills in one way or another over the years, from Exxon Valdez to a couple of British ones in Wales and Shetland, and the story is always the same: the media struggles to find the oiled bird, and when the media is gone you get a complaint from the local people saying that everyone thinks their beaches are ruined when it fact they are fine, six months on. So I have a feeling that it is the public perception that is getting worse. Fifty years ago you could get away with much worse. People didn't make as much of a fuss.

And that's no consolation; that's a good thing! That's a sign of how much better we're getting at being intolerant of bad things.

Hey, America! Want a free copy of my book?

Like the subject says. Any Americans out there want a copy of my book? Send me an email explaining why you'd like me to send you one, and I'll ship a copy off to the one I like the best. I'll even inscribe it if you like. I'm a jandrewpotter at gmail dot com. 

What's new in gangsta cred

In one of the most sensible judicial decisions in memory, a New York City judge has ruled that anyone, even wannabe gangstas, have the right to look like idiots in the name of authenticity:

Judge Ruben Franco said that although Julio Martinez may have offended the fashion police with his low-hanging and underwear-exposing pants, his manner of dress didn't deserve a ticket from a cop.

All I can say is that I'm glad that saggy pants wasn't a thing back when I was into things. As bratty suburban teams we roamed the streets at night, rifling cars for cassettes and lobbing eggs at rich folks' houses. We thought we were gangsta -- Colors had just come out, so we upped our cred by wrapping our heads in blue and red bandanas. It was a serious thing though, in some parts of America, and the media tried to spook us with stories about kids inadvertently wearing a red bandana while wandering into crips terrritory and getting shot for their troubles. Even just a few years ago, activists staged protest marches in Harlem after a baseball cap company started selling Yankees caps in the colours of bloods, crips, and the Latin Kings.

But time gentrifies all things eventually, and nowadays tourists can pay $65 to get a gangland tour of south central L.A. Meanwhile, Complex magazine brings us a top-ten list of the most gang-affiliated hats in sports. Surprisingly, the Yankees don't even make the list; number 2 is the Cincinnati Reds, and number one are the LA Dodgers. This is shocking news to Matt Bartosik of NBC Chicago, who concluded a blog post about the Complex story by saying, "Still, it is disturbing to think that a sports hat might not signify loyalty to a favorite team but rather to a band of criminals."

Is MIA DOA?

1. Her new album is tanking, she's fighting with Oprah and dissing Gaga -- is this the end of the line for Maya?

2. You've heard of slow food, slow travel, even slow money. But in light of the Wikileaks frenzy and the Shirley Sherrod fiasco, do we need slow journalism?

3. Forget scarves and berets, and verlan is passe. What's cool in France? It's boules.

4. David Shields, fiction, and the hunger for the real.

Praise comes in many forms

Glen Payne reviews The Authenticity Hoax:

Now, who could be better positioned in the modern status-seeking game than a Canadian philosophy PhD publishing credible arguments in an attractive hard-cover book that all those self-professed authenticity-seekers are just Veblenian status-seekers (swapping “conspicuous authenticity” for “conspicuous consumption”) who would see how absurd they were if they just read their Rousseau more carefully? Potter’s book strikes me as annoying the same way it would annoy me if I were running a marathon and the guy running next to me spent the race defending intricate theories about how competitive sports were ill-conceived nonsense and then sprinted ahead near the finish to cross the line before me.

Awesome.

Wikileaks and the Paradox of Transparency

What is the impact of the War Logs leak? I think this is best split into at least four questions.

1.  What is the impact on journalism?
2. What is the impact on operational security?
3. What will the impact be on public support for the mission?
4. What is the impact on the military?

1.  Following Jeff Jarvis, we can frame this as the question of “what if there is no more secrecy”? Journalists are, more than anything, information brokers, gatekeepers, and editors.  The big career score is “breaking a story” – that is, being the first person to report on something that becomes a cultural touchstone.

But what happens when there are no more secrets? When, for all intents and purposes, everything is made public, when there is no more use for “access journalism”? I make some tentative explorations of this in chapter five of The Authenticity Hoax, where I’m quite skeptical of the positive claims that are made in favour of maximal transparency and openness.  It’s part of a broader debate being played out between publicity-maximalists like Jarvis and privacy advocates like Andrew Keen, and it is one of the relatively few areas where I’m closer to Keen than to Jarvis.

There’s no magic way of figuring out where the line ought to be between transparency and secrecy. In every case you have to ask who benefits from more transparency, and who benefits from secrecy. Jarvis has a good posting on this where he questions his own commitments:

I make the mistake of thinking that we’ll navigate toward openness via rational and critical discussion. But we’ll more likely move the line because of purposeful subversion of the line like Wikileaks’. The line will be move by force.

This is the nub of the problem. Jay Rosen’s post on this is excellent, and his key point is to note that Wikileaks is the first “stateless” news organization. Why does this matter? Partly because it means it is harder for governments to control it, which can be a good thing. But it also means that Wikileaks has less reason to be responsible and accountable. When newspapers and other “state-based” organizations break news, it is because they perceive themselves as serving the broader public good, and they have a natural constituency that keeps them accountable. Where’s the accountability here, with Wikileaks? I don’t see it, and it bothers me.

2. That said, what is the material effect on the release of these documents on operational security in Afghanistan? From what I’ve read in the documents so far, I don’t see much to be too worried about. I suppose one way of getting at it is to ask whether, if you were working over there, how you would feel about this release. Safer? Less safe? The same? I  don’t have the knowledge or the expertise to answer this adequately.

But perhaps this isn’t a good standard to use anyway. If the military had its way, virtually nothing would be released to the public, in the name of “OPSEC”. OPSEC is just the military version of the “national security” line that the government uses to keep information from the public. But OPSEC and National Security can’t be a get-out-of-jail free card, used to trump all requests for access or information. There is a lot in these documents that I think the public has a right to know about, and that the military could very well have chosen to share with the public years ago, on their own terms.

3.  A lot of people who support the mission are very upset about this leak. For example, my friend Brian Platt got “up on his high horse” (as he put it), arguing that unlike a targeted leak designed to unveil a scandal, this document dump is “a senseless leak, an act of pure treason,” whose only purpose was to screw over the military.

That’s no doubt true, and I share Brian’s suspicion of the motivations behind these leaks.  But just because someone has an agenda, it doesn’t mean the documents aren’t genuine, or valuable, or useful. But more to the point, I’m not convinced that this leak will have the knock-on effect of undermining support for the mission.

Most of the opposition to the mission is  fact-free ideological leanings by people who are against the war not because of what is happening on the ground, but simply because the war exists in the first place -- they are opposed to the mission in principle. In which case, new information -- however positive -- is not going to change their minds. At the same time, a lot of the pro-war faction is pretty much immune to bad news of any sort, and will always be willing to double down on the military commitment no matter how poorly things are going.

The real action is in the fuzzy middle; people (like me) who are unsure of what the goals of the mission should be, and how best they might be achieved, and to what extent realism has to be balanced against idealism. These are people for whom facts on the ground matter, and there is nothing in the documents, on balance, that I can see that would lead the fence-sitters to become devoted anti-war lobbyists.

If anything, I think the opposite is true. The picture that emerges from the documents is of a professional military working in an intense and difficult situation, and performing its job as humanely as possibly under the circumstances.  Canadians have had no indication as to the pace and tempo and intensity of the conflict since the insurgency started in 2006, and that is by design. The military brass has acted under the assumption that if we knew what was going on – how much contact there was, how many IEDs were being found, how many friendly fire or civilian casualties there were – that the public would pull its support. I think that does the public and the military a disservice.

It does no one any good if the public is kept in the dark about what the war is really like. If there is material in these documents that will undermine the effort in the mind of a reasonable public, then that is an argument for making them public. A war that relies for its support on keeping important truths from the public is not a legitimate war.

4. Ultimately, I think that the effect of this leak will be counterproductive for all concerned, in the same way that access-to-information laws have been  counterproductive. In Canada, ATI legislation has helped construct what has been called “the neurotic state” – a government and bureaucracy that is paranoid, highly media-averse, and reluctant to put anything of any consequence in writing.

This is probably what will happen with the military. This leak of very sensitive material is going to convince the government bureaucracy and the military brass that they simply can't put any points of dispute or debate down in writing. There will be an increasing trend towards pseudo-transparency – the release of lots of communiqués and reports that say nothing at all. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be points of contention or matters of urgency; it just means there won’t be a record of it anywhere.

For journalists, coming on the heels of the Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal, it means access will be more difficult to come by. Sources will dry up, interviews will be cancelled, strict and useless talking points will be the order of the day.



Gaga, Madmen, and other authenticities

1. Over at the Awl, Natasha Vargas-Cooper does a great job footnoting last night's Mad Men episode. She ends with a look at Don's risque pitch for Jantzen "two piece" bathing suits, and concludes: "The difference between the image and the authentic are going to remain mixed up for a very long time. Though we all know now that the real difference between a bikini and underwear is just what we call it."

2. Speaking of image, the NYT on Sunday had a very good piece on the meaning of Lady Gaga:

“I HATE the truth!” Lady Gaga yelled somewhere in the middle of the second of her three sold-out dates at Madison Square Garden this month. Conveniently, it hates her back. No one in recent pop memory has been a greater enemy to the authentic than Lady Gaga.

3. Over at Businessweek, Steve McKee takes another stab at the idea that a proper brand strategy needs to be focused on "authenticity". The danger is, that at a time when there's more transparency than ever, the public can call BS on a company that doesn't practice what its brand delivers:

In such an environment, it behooves everyone in business to consider the extent of their brand's authenticity. Nobody wants to be exposed as a fraud.

 4. Hezbollah has opened a theme park:

ABC basically found that the former Israeli military bunker is now home to war porn and propaganda. Museum attendees and volunteers apparently aren’t so concerned. “I believe it’s our right to have our own propaganda,” a tour guide tells ABC’s Lara Setrakian. It’s like Disneyland starring Farfour.

Shall we play a game? What BP learned from Hollywood

Last weekend I was talking to a friend who had recently been to the Pentagon to talk to some honchos, and he said he'd even made it to the depths of the building where the real dark arts are practiced. He made the observation that it was pretty clear that a lot of the design of the place was most likely influenced by Hollywood -- that is, by their cinematically-constructed beliefs about what the Pentagon ought to look like. 

This is a widespread phenomenon, one that is most obviously at work in the tourist-trap area of most historical cities. We don't want to know what Rome is really like; we want to see a Rome that fits our sense of what it ought to be like, which is why there is a market for the faux-authentic in the first place. 

This is harmless enough in the case of mass tourism, but what about when a major corporation preys on our assumptions of authenticity to buff its much-tarnished image? That's the heart of the controversy over the faked images of BP's command centre. As Chris MacDonald points out, the images aren't misleading in any material way; rather, they seem designed to enhance the "authenticity" of the command centre, by making it look more like the one we all remember from movie's like War Games. 

Does it really matter? I agree with Chris, that this doesn't really affect the cleanup at all, nor does it really do much further damage to the company's reputation. But I'm tempted to go even further and (setting aside their despicable attempt at blaming the photographer) offer a half-hearted defence of the company, since you can sort of see their reasoning on this: As the spill has dragged on, it has become increasingly imperative for the company to be seen to be In Charge, to be Doing Something. And in the eyes of a public trained by years of Hollywood action films, the people In Charge and Doing Something are always in a room full of lots of screens showing video, graphs, charts, satellite images, and so on. You can imagine them saying to themselves, cripes, if we show our workers sitting in front of a bunch of blank screens, they'll think we don't have a handle on the spill. 

Yes, this is a weak defence, and it is in no way intended to let the company off the hook for any of its many transgressions against basic morality. But it does serve, I think, as an example of what happens in a culture where authenticity, as distinct from truth, is the cardinal virtue. 

INSTANT UPDATE: Seconds after I posted this, I came across this website, Hollywood Screens, devoted to cataloging all of the cool command screens in Hollywood movies. And lo, what is there at the very top? They've posted the pic of the BP command centre. 

Markets and Morals

A while ago I did an interview with my friend Chris MacDonald, who teaches philosophy at Saint Mary's and runs the very popular Business Ethics blog. It was a really useful interview (for me anyway), and it helped me clarifiy some of the points I was trying to make in the book. 

Here's a link to the interview. Like me, Chris has a number of online personalities -- you can follow one of them on twitter @food_ethics