Young people have curled around their economic situation “like vines on a trellis,” as [Malcolm] Harris puts it. And, when humans learn to think of themselves as assets competing in an unpredictable and punishing market, then millennials–in all their anxious, twitchy, phone-addicted glory–are exactly what you should expect. The disdain that so many people feel for Harris’s and my generation reflects an unease about the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological acceleration that are transforming everyone’s lives. (It does not seem coincidental that young people would be criticized for being entitled at a time when people are being stripped of their entitlements.) Millennials, in other words, have adjusted too well to the world they grew up in; their perfect synchronization with economic and cultural disruption has been mistaken for the source of the disruption itself.
–Jia Tolentino, Where Millennials Come From
But hold up for a minute: Who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe.
–Claire Dederer, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
I’ve read a lot of confused takes trying trying to make sense of the Trump administration through a traditional left-right lens. I’m sure you have, too. They use words like “pivot” and “establishment” and they struggle to explain when and why Trump does things other Republicans complain about. I find this particular style of Kremlinology unhelpful. Whether “conservatives” or “moderates” are winning is less than half the story.
The biggest division in the Trump White House is between ideologues and grifters. Ideologues care about policy; grifters don’t. Ideologues sometimes fight viciously among themselves over their policy commitments, but they’re united by having commitments at all. Grifters are driven only by the enrichment of the Trump family and the appeasement of Trump’s ego.
Within the ideologue camp, the starkest contrast is between ethno-nationalists (economically populist, isolationist, and sometimes overtly racist) and globalists (economically libertarian, cosmopolitan, and not necessarily racist). There are also disagreements about military policy, but the overall distance between hawks and doves is much narrower.1 There are no analogous divisions within the grifter camp; any side cons they have going are small and personal. The grifters, as I said, are unconcerned with policy for its own sake, but are happy to go along with whatever position is more expedient at the moment.
The other deep division is a matter of style rather than substance: there are douchebags and there are snowflakes , with drones somewhere in between. The key here is shame: the douchebags are psychologically incapable of feeling it, the snowflakes struggle with it constantly, and the drones keep it at bay by crossing their arms and scowling at the floor. Douchebags call up reporters for lengthy profanity-laden tirades; snowflakes call up reporters to say how embarrassed they are; drones call up reporters but ask not to be quoted by name. Douchebags don’t quit because they can’t take a hint; snowflakes constantly wring their hands about quitting but never go through with it; drones quit when asked but never on their own. Douchebags make Trump angry by stealing his headlines; snowflakes by public signs of disloyalty; drones by telling him ‘no’.
Within the Republican party over the last two decades, there has been a rough correlation between ethno-nationalist ideologues and douchebags on the one hand (“conservatives”) and globalist ideologues and drones on the other (“moderates”). But this alignment of substance and style has always only been rough and partial, and one of the things that Trump did during the campaign was to expose, in literally spectacular fashion, how hard it is to pin down a grifter on the conventional political spectrum.
Trump himself is a douchebag grifter, and at the extreme on both axes. But consider some of the other players, past and present, in his administration:
With this multi-dimensional taxonomy in mind, some of administration’s personnel gyrations make more sense. Consider the linked fates of Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. In January and February they were at each other’s throats, fighting over policy. But by July, as ideologues working for a grifter increasingly hostile to ideologues, they found common cause in fighting for policy at all. Priebus, of course, went out on his ear – but that was primarily for being a snowflake in a position where Trump wanted a douchebag. He got one par excellence in the person of Anthony Scaramucci. Then Scarmucci flew too close to the douchebag sun, so he was one of the first go when Kelly started firing douchebags of all stripes.
In conventional political terms, it looks as though the White House lurched away from Priebus’s pro-business Republican establishment towards Bannon’s insurgent right-wing populism, and then quickly back. Those shifts are to some extent real – a collateral consequence of Kelly’s housecleaning is that the globalist ideologues have (or perhaps had) an open shot on goal in getting Trump to push their tax agenda. But it would be a mistake to see the back-and-forth primarily in those terms, not when so often the motivations are personal rather than political, driven entirely by personalities and rhetoric.
At least when it comes to setting policy, the palace politics of the Trump court are less important than they seem. Trump may swagger and rage like a medieval monarch, but unlike them he lives in a modern media environment. His ministers can keep the courtiers out of the throne room, but they can’t keep the king from seeking the counsel of Vulpes et amici or from listening to the tweeting of a million birds in his ear. The flow of information – both the raw “facts” and the all-important framing – to the current president depends less on White House staff filters than at any time in living memory. James Murdoch’s personnel decisions matter in a way that John Kelly’s don’t: more turns on whether Hannity keeps his job than on whether Bannon does.
The place in which it matters more who survives each successive purge is not in who has Trump’s ear at the moment but in who is there to take orders from him. The Office of Legal Counsel is of the view that the President could scrawl a legally binding executive order on a napkin, but Trump’s tweets are deeply underspecified. Someone has to translate them into directives specific enough to implement on the ground and defend before a judge. When that someone is a Steve Bannon, you get the first Muslim ban: malevolence tempered by incompetence. When that someone is a James Mattis, you get the transgender ban: malevolence subjected to a slow rollout. When that someone is a Leonard Leo, you get Neil Gorsuch.
This is why the current apparent depopulation of the White House staff is significant: Trump’s capacity to execute is dependent on having the cadres to embrace his vision, such as it is, and carry it into effect. One reason the “Reagan revolution” deserves the name is that it swept into Washington a large and ideologically coherent cohort of conservative officials and bureaucratic professionals capable of leaving their stamp on every significant government program. To the extent that anything like this is happening under Trump, it’s a bumper crop of grifters and douchebags with an ethno-nationalist streak – and there are only enough of them to destroy existing programs, rather than to create enduring alternatives. This is the future of your Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen.
Except for this: shift your attention from the White House to the agencies and things look rather different (with the notable exception of the State Department under the singularly ineffective Tillerson). The left may mock and disparage, but the reaction from every conservative I’ve talked to has been consistent: Trump’s cabinet is a conservative dream team, and they’re moving quickly and confidently across a wide range of issues. Perhaps simply because Trump has neither a personal financial stake in nor any actual knowledge about most of what the agencies do, he’s been content to leave things up to a crop of appointees who are mostly ideologues and mostly drones.
The current status of the Trump administration, then, might be described as an administrative inversion. The White House, ordinarily the center of policy direction, is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and dignity wraiths die like dogs. The real action is in the agencies. Trump, in this view of things, functions primarily as an electoral rocket car: destructive and uncontrollable, but at least capable of getting things moving. Some Republicans are sticking with Trump because of his style rather than in spite of it – better a right-wing douchebag than a left-wing snowflake – but even those driven by ideology still have something to like. Trump himself may be less than worthless in pushing the policies they care about, and his White House may be a badly-written daytime drama, but as long as he can sign bills and judicial commissions, he’s better than any available alternative. 2
There are ways this alliance of convenience could fall apart, but they are less direct than, “Trump says something else utterly indefensible,” or “The White House staff keep on murdering each other with pickaxes.” These are daily occurrences now, and they are not really news when they happen. Anyone who is ever going to have an experience of total moral clarity about Donald Trump has already had theirs by now. One possibility is that high-profile failures of the conservative agenda in Congress undercut the hope that legislative (as opposed to merely administrative) success is possible under Trump. Another is that Trump’s own appetite for drama and domination – something that is both innate in his personality and strongly encouraged by his preferred media diet – causes him to act out in ways that sabotage the political prospects of his supposed allies and the policies they care about. This is what it takes to get Congressional Republicans upset. Better to have the douchebag grifter inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, they reasoned during the election, but now here he is in office, inside the tent and still pissing inside it. It’s enough to make a drone ideologue go full snowflake.
The reason is that Trump’s path to power as a Republican outsider effectively fenced out both Give Peace a Chance leftists and Carthago Delenda Est neoconservatives of the second Bush administration – that is, anyone committed to significant and sustained departures from the status quo. Trump himself defines both ends of his administration’s military Overton window: tough-talking swagger and fear of getting blamed if something big goes wrong. ↩︎
Mike Pence is technically unavailable, even though he’s next in the line of succession. The only plausible way to remove Trump without party-destroying revenge would be a massive stroke – or something else disabling his ability to yell and tweet. ↩︎
If President Trump tries to stop the Russia probe by firing Robert Muller or by issuing pardons, the House must impeach him and the Senate must remove him from office.
This is not complicated. It does not matter what happened in the past. A President who uses his powers this way cannot be trusted in the future.
The message that shutting down such an investigation sends to people around the president – his family, his business associate, his staffers – is that they can act with absolute impunity because he will protect them absolutely. Even if there was no collusion with a foreign power, no bribery, no shakedowns, no hacking, no corruption, and no obstruction of justice, there will be. A pardon pen that has been used once can be used again. Everyone knows that if the investigations start up again they will be shut down again, and some of them will act accordingly.
An executive branch whose members know they operate completely outside the law is not a presidency; it is a dictatorship. A presidential guarantee of immunity for political and personal crimes is completely incompatible with American democracy.
Republicans cannot indulge in waffling about whether their policy agenda is worth it. No policy agenda is, because sustained executive lawlessness destroys the structure that makes any policy agenda possible. And Democrats cannot indulge in waffling about whether a President Pence (or President Ryan, etc.) would be better or worse. Any President who respects the rule of law and lets investigations run their course would be better.
This is fundamental to the American political system, and it does not depend on whether you think Muller’s investigation has found anything criminal or is likely to. It is about having a President who can do the most basic thing the Constitution requires of him: “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen so hard that it didn’t make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.
He tested this theory by turning them off briefly, but as it turned out the visibility did get quite a lot worse. It just failed to get better again when he turned them back on.
–Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Amazon recommends that customers who buy Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest also buy a two-factor authentication hardware security key. It’s a fitting connection: anyone serious about activist organizing in today’s pervasively networked world should probably have both. The security key is to keep the government from hacking your email and Face accounts; the book is to tell you how to use them effectively. Twitter and Tear Gas is an academic book, not an on-the-ground organizing guide like Indivisible. But it provides the best framework I’ve seen for thinking about how the Internet changes the dynamics of protest movements.
The short version of Tufekci’s argument is that social media provide powerful ways for activists to organize and to get their messages out, but that the types of activism have their own drawbacks. Ad hoc movements can assemble quickly, both in physical space (Gezi Park) and online (#BlackLivesMatter), and they can deploy powerful viral messages (the Battle of the Camel). This helps them leapfrog over repression, interia, and mass media censorship – but also over much of the institution-building work that allows protest movements to enforce message discipline, switch up their tactics, and lever their momentum into other realms. Their heavy use of platform-based social media also leaves them vulnerable to algorithmic fragmentation, pervasive surveillance, and disinformation campaigns.
None of this is to say that activists should turn their backs on networked protest. Instead, just like police pressure, counter-protests, mass-media indifference, and all of the other familiar challenges protests face, these new characteristics of networked protest are simply part of the landscape protesters have to work with. To be an activist today is to worry about these things, and sometimes to find ways to do something about them.
I could summarize the argument in slightly greater detail, but to be honest, Tufekci’s introduction and epilogue do a better job than I could, and if you want anything longer than that, you should just read the book. Instead, I want to pull out a few ideas and assertions that brought me up short. They’re not the only insights in the book by any means; they’re just the ones I found especially powerful.
Social media is not itself the cause of protests or even just a tool; it is a pervasive fact of modern life. Tunisia, Facebook allowed protests that would have taken place anyway to go viral, and enabling them to serve as a focal point for widespread dissatisfaction with the Ben Ali regime. Activists were ready and able to amplify the images of protest and crackdown on social media, which also made it possible for Al Jazeera to broadcast them, and with that, the regime’s control over information collapsed and with it the regime. (This isn’t a new story. The key difference between Jan Hus and Martin Luther was the printing press.)
Leaderless networked ad-hoc organizations can adapt very quickly to get necessary things done, whether it’s recruiting new participants through existing social networks, cleaning up their spaces, or obtaining the necessary supplies to run field hospitals. But they have trouble coordinating changes in their tactics, interfacing with more tightly-coupled institutions (both on their own side and on the other), and even in making basic local decisions like who will speak at an assembly. This results in what Tufekci calls “tactical freeze”: they can do the thing that brought them together very well and at scale, but they don’t learn new tricks.
Relatedly, the process of organizing builds “network internalities.” These are the social bonds, group wisdom, and organizational structure that protests groups build up by solving logistical challenges. It’s convenient not to have to print up detailed flyers telling rally participants exactly what bus to arrive on and where to march as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’s organizers did, and makes it easier to put on a protest. But precisely because Bayard Rustin and his colleagues had built up an organization capable of doing that, the civil rights movement had an immense advantage in its ability to harness the momentum from the March and to shift its tactics in the face of resistance.
Big protests rarely do anything by themselves. They matter because they signal that the social movement behind them is capable of more: it has the capacity to shape public narratives, to disrupt the smooth functioning of the establishment, and to swing elections. Officials aren’t afraid of protests; they’re afraid of losing control of the narrative, the streets, and the electorate. Big turnout is a signal, but it’s a cheaper signal than it used to be. (So is calling your Senator or filing an FCC comment.) The Tea Party was effective at turning its protest energy to electoral power. So far the jury is out on how effective the various anti-Trump protests will be at making this transition. (Tufekci is skeptical: she observes on Twitter that the Tea Party was well-funded and that so far major Democratic donors have not been opening their checkbooks to support grassroots electorally focused organizing.)
Platforms are complicated. Algorithmic filtering, real-name rules, anti-abuse policies, and hate-speech rules all have context-specific effects on the ground – ones that thinly-staffed social media platforms rarely understand well outside of the U.S. Any policy directed at users creates an opportunity for censorship by political opponents: report their accounts for having fake names, or for spamming, or for hate speech, or for copyright infringement, and the platform will spring into action on your behalf. But the failure to deal with abuse also leaves activists vulnerable. A coordinated assault from Twitter eggs can leave a victim unable to use Twitter for anything but impersonal broadcast.
Censorship is denial of attention. Anything that keeps the people who could be affected by a message from paying attention to it is effective as censorship. That includes preventing speech from happening, filtering it out from the media, persuading people to ignore it (e.g. by demonizing the media that carry it, as the AKP did in Turkey with Twitter), burying it in haystacks of distracting competing messages (some would say this is the normal condition of modern life), or by sowing enough doubt and confusion that people aren’t sure what to believe (Hi, Vladimir!). This is a listener-focused theory of censorship, and I find it more helpful than traditional speaker-focused theories for understanding the last year in political media.
Authoritarians survive by thwarting collective action. It’s sufficient for them to preserve the status quo against bottom-up attempts to change it. Leaving people uncertain of what to trust and skeptical about everything is a common authoritarian media strategy: they even don’t need to suppress dissenting messages or get their own messages out if they can leave people with a feeling of paranoia and confused helplessness toward the media. This can come from attacks on the media, from the spread of disinformation, and from creating conditions of general chaos in which people don’t know what to believe. Sometimes these can be emergent features of contemporary media, but often they are deliberately cultivated. (I will say this for filter bubbles: at least their positive feedback can be good for producing coherent shared beliefs and goals.)
Read Twitter and Tear Gas and think about it. Highly recommended.
Suppose that most people live in partisan informational bubbles. Without more, what can we say about effective political tactics? I can think of four types of things to do:
Mobilize your own bubble to turn out politically. You already know the kinds of arguments that will work, and making them to people generally disposed to agree will be satisfying. So this is easy and sustainable, but that also means everybody is already doing it. Maybe there will be an occasional shift in media or a new tactic that will provide a temporary boost, but for the most part this is a Red Queen’s race. Mobilization is the price of admission; if you don’t, your bubble isn’t competitive.
Direct your own bubble along a better or more effective path. You already know the kinds of arguments that tend to work, which makes this almost as straightforward as mobilization. Having these kinds of debates helps you and your bubble figure out what you stand for, which is satisfying, but since you’re pushing people to change their views, there will be some resistance, which can get frustrating. In the worst case, the bubble’s self-defense mechanisms will kick in and treat these attempts as alien infection, sometimes resulting in fission into sub-bubbles. Direction is also necessary, both to develop new arguments for acquiring political power and to use it effectively once acquired.
Expand your bubble by persuading people to join it. The problem here is that anyone you’re trying to recruit, except for the young, is probably already part of a bubble. So proselytizing effectively requires building a smooth onramp from their bubble to yours. That’s hard. First, the arguments that are persuasive within your own bubble are typically not as persuasive outside of it, so you need to step outside yours to learn how the other bubble thinks and talks. Second, you risk activating the other bubble’s self-defense mechanisms: who is this outsider coming in and telling us what to do? And third, you risk activating your own bubble’s self-defense mechanisms: so-and-so says she’s trying to make them more like us, but what if she’s really trying to make us more like them? So this work can have big payoffs, but it can be unpleasant and personally dangerous.
Disrupt an enemy bubble by demoralizing it (the opposite of mobilization) or pushing it to make it less effective (the opposite of direction). As with expansion, this requires speaking the other bubble’s dialect – but passing for a local well enough to avoid triggering the bubble’s self-defense mechanisms requires fluency, not just proficiency. (Even harder!) On the other hand, this operational need for secrecy also reduces the risks from your own bubble; no one needs to know where you’re spending your time. So while this kind of work may be hard, in some ways it can be less personally frustrating than expansion. Disruption is never necessary, but it can be alarmingly powerful when done well.
Broadly speaking, these four types of bubble work will appeal to different personality types. Mobilization produces feelings of solidarity and belonging; direction brings the satisfaction of being right. Expansion takes empathy and patience; disruption takes a special kind of cynicism.
The application of these categories to recent political news is left as an exercise for the reader. The development of an optimal strategy is an unsolved research problem.
I’m sure there are problems with this taxonomy. But it seems to me that if you think bubbles are real (which certainly is the conventional wisdom) and you want your own bubble to win (and who doesn’t?), it’s a mistake not to be thinking about them in adversarial terms. After all, those bastards in the other bubbles will be.
I’ve done a quick pass through Judge Gorsuch’s opinions in the fields I know something about (mainly IP and Internet law) and I’m impressed by what I’ve found. His writing style is designed to make his conclusions sound reasonable and sensible, and in these cases at least, they are. A few highlights:
U.S. v. Ackerman, 831 F.3d 1292 (10th Cir. 2016). The defendant sent an email with an attachment that triggered AOL’s automated child-pornography filters. AOL forwarded the email to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCEMC), where an analyst opened the email and viewed the other attachments. This, the court held, triggered the Fourth Amendment: NCEMC was a governmental actor and it went beyond the scope of AOL’s search. I put a question based on this one in my Internet casebook; the opinion itself is quite good. It gets the technical details of digital searches right enough and it bats down several tempting but dangerous arguments that other courts have fallen for. The private-search doctrine, in particular, is a serious threat to digital privacy, and this is one of the best recent developments pushing back against it.
U.S. v. Carloss, 818 F.3d 988 (10th Cir. 2016) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting). The police knocked on the defendant’s door even though he had posted numerous “No Trespassing” signs. The majority found no Fourth Amendment search because the police had an implied license to walk up to the front door to knock. Gorsuch’s dissenting opinion disagrees, concluding that the signs clearly revoked any such implied license. Both his parsing of the caselaw on implied licenses and the facts of the specific case are excellent. (It doesn’t hurt that his general approach is in keeping with my views on consent in computer-access cases.)
Meshwerks v. Toyota Motor Sales USA, 528 F.3d 1258 (10th Cir. 2008). The court held that high-resolution digital wireframes of Toyotas are not copyrightable because “they depict nothing more than unadorned Toyota vehicles – the car as car.” I’ve assigned this one several times to my IP students, and I cite it with approval in my essay on 3D printing. The result and the reasoning are both, I think, quite correct. It’s the best modern opinion on the copyrightability of digital models of already-existing objects.
Dudnikov v. Chalk & Vermilion Fine Arts, Inc., 514 F.3d 1063 (10th Cir. 2008). The plaintiffs sold Erté/Betty Boop mashup prints on eBay. The defendant, which owned the Erté copyrights, sent eBay a takedown notice, and eBay took down the auctions. The plaintiffs turned around and sued for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, which the defendant contested on personal jurisdiction grounds. The court here held that there was personal jurisdiction, which is both the right result for deterring overly aggressive machine-gun takedown notices, and also eminently justified by existing personal jurisdiction doctrine. Gorsuch’s opinion for the court strikes me as a bit of overkill, and it explores without deciding more issues and details than necessary, but some of that may have been justified by the need to reverse the district court’s opinion to the contrary.
I recognize that my fields are more obscure and less controversial than other fields in which Judge Gorsuch has written. Others will have more to contribute in discussing them. But technology law is important and getting more so, and it’s important to have a judiciary that understands the distinctive issues it raises and gets them right. Everything I’ve seen so far about Judge Gorsuch’s record in that respect is encouraging.
There’s an interesting – and amusing – parallel between Donald Trump and Henry VIII. From @KngHenryVIII:
There are some feelings that are useful to the true leader. Things like confidence, aggression, and volatility. If you ever even once have felt emotions such as regret, guilt, or embarrassment, that’s God’s sweet and gentle way of letting you know you’re a peasant. Look, if I felt regret could I have married Jane Seymour 10 days after having Anne Boleyn beheaded? Could Donald Trump today ask for the support of black voters after spending months upon months energetically seeking the support of semi-literate racists? Of course not. Let me put it this way, you know that feeling of anxiety and fearful remorse that can steal over you in the darkest hours of the night? I don’t have that. Neither does Trump.
From Tom Slee:
So when I see people saying that Trump understands them (the Canadian government, the technology leaders who paid court), that – in the words of the tech leaders – they will set him straight if he goes off-course, I think: you have no idea how this works. Of course he and his crew will flatter you, tell you how brilliant you are, how much he admires you. Until he doesn’t. Until he decides that you have disappointed him. And then you will hear about it second hand, or maybe through Twitter. You’re out, and the axe will fall, and you’re not so special after all.“
A few quick observations:
Third, we use the results of our new survey to estimate the share of Americans who saw and believed each of a set of 14 fake news headlines. … To address survey misreporting, we also include a set of placebo fake news headlines – untrue headlines that we invented and that never actually circulated. This approach mirrors the use of placebo drugs as controls in clinical trials. Consistent with a similar survey carried out the same week as ours (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016), about 15 percent of U.S. adults report that they recall seeing the average fake news headline. About 8 percent report seeing and believing it. However, these numbers are statistically identical for our placebo headlines, suggesting that the raw responses could overstate true exposure by an order of magnitude.
Using the difference between actual and placebo stories as a measure of true recall, we estimate that 1.2 percent of people recall seeing the average story. Projecting these per-article exposure rates to the universe of fake news in our database under the assumption that exposure is proportional to Facebook shares, our point estimate suggests that the average voting-age American saw and re- membered about 0.92 pro-Trump fake stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake stories in the run-up to the election. Our confidence intervals rule out that the average voting-age American saw, remembered, and believed more than 0.71 pro-Trump fake stories and 0.18 pro-Clinton fake stories.
Comparing the magnitudes of the different coefficients in column 1 suggests that fake news exposure might be ideologically segregated: Republicans are more likely than independents, and independents in turn more likely than Democrats, to report seeing pro-Trump headlines, although for pro-Clinton headlines, the differences are less stark. In column 2, however, we see very similar results for Placebo headlines, and column 3 shows that five of the six coefficients do not differ for Fake relative to Placebo. In the context of our model, we interpret these results similarly to the results of table 4: differences across people in recalled exposure seem to be primarily driven by differences in perceived plausibility, and less by differences in true exposure. There may still be differences in true exposure, but this would need to be documented with web browsing data instead of our survey recall measures.
Are there indeed differences in believing rates that might generate these differences in false recall? Columns 4 and 5 indeed show dramatic differences: Republicans are four to eight times as likely as Democrats to report believing pro-Trump headlines, and Democrats are 50 to 100 percent more likely than Republicans to believe pro-Clinton headlines. Appendix table 1 repeats these regressions in the subsample of social media users with ideologically segregated networks. The relative ordering of coefficients is similar, but the magnitudes are considerably larger: social media users with segregated networks are, as we saw above, more likely to report seeing and believing fake news, and relatively more likely to report seeing and believing fake news that favors their candidates.
—Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election
Donn Denman’s “Make a Mess, Clean it Up!” isn’t quite as good a story as I remembered. But it has stuck with me since I first encountered it in Folklore.org, Andy Hertzfeld’s oral history of the development of the original Macintosh. I have lightly edited it, in keeping with Folklore.org’s Creative Commons BY-NC license).
Andy [Hertzfeld], Burrell [Smith] and I [Donn Denman] had a standing competition playing on the Defender machine. The goal of Defender is to defend your humans from abduction by aliens. The evil green aliens drop down from the top of the screen and randomly pick up your humans, and try to bring them back up to the top of the screen. You control a ship and have to shoot the aliens, either before they grab a human, or during their rise up to the top of the screen. If an alien makes it to the top with a human, they consume him and become a vicious mutant, which attacks very aggressively. You start the game with ten humans, and if the last one dies, all the aliens become mutants, and they swarm in on your ship from all sides.
Often a single mutant is enough to kill you. They move quicker, and with a different pace and pattern than the other aliens, so the normal evasive techniques don’t work very well. Mutants move so quickly over small distances that they seem to just jump on top of you. Your ship is faster over the longer term, so you have to outrun them, establishing a gap, and only then do you have enough room to safely turn and fire at them.
One day Burrell started doing something radical. He immediately shot all his humans! This was completely against the goal of the game! He didn’t even go after the aliens, and when he shot the last human, they all turned to mutants and attacked him from all sides. He glanced in my direction with a grin on his face and said “Make a mess, clean it up!” and proceeded to dodge the swarm of angry mutants noisily chasing after him. “Burrell’s not going to win this competition” I said to myself. “He’s not going to last long with a screen full of mutants!”
When Burrell’s next turn came up I was surprised by how long his ship survived. He’d already developed a technique for dealing with a whole mass of mutants. He would circle around them again and again, and that would gather them into a densely clumped swarm. Then, while circling, he’d fire a burst pattern across the whole swarm, not needing to aim at individuals. He was doing really well, cutting through the swarm like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Burrell was no longer attacking individual mutants, instead he was treating the whole swarm as one big target.
Burrell may have lost that game and the next few, but it wasn’t too long before he was really mastering the machine. Instead of avoiding the tough situations, he’d immediately create them, and immediately start learning how to handle the worst situation imaginable. Pretty soon he would routinely handle anything the machine could throw at him.
I was beginning to see how Burrell could be so successful with everything he does.
My high-school track and cross-country coach used a version of this technique to help us become better sprinters. His theory was that really improving at sprinting requires you to run faster and harder than you are currently capable of. He claimed there were two ways to do that: tie yourself to someone faster than you, or run downhill. So he took us to a grassy hill near school – I remember it as being about a 45-degree angle, although it wasn’t actually that steep – and told us to run all-out downhill, not worrying abut keeping our balance. If we weren’t falling over, we weren’t running hard enough.
I have just posted a short essay, Scholars, Teachers, and Servants, which sets out my views on the essence of a professor’s job. The heart of an academic’s duty is research in the pursuit of truth; scholarship, teaching, and service are three different but mutually supporting uses of the fruits of research. I also say a bit about intellectual corruption, academic freedom, tenure, free speech, and some of the special characteristics of legal academia.
Most of the essay is not new. I wrote it for Jotwell’s fifth-anniversary conference in 2014, Legal Scholarship We Like and Why It Matters, then put it aside while I worked on other things. But recent events have convinced me of the topic’s urgency, so I’ve decided that rather than work on it or sit on it indefinitely, I should post it now with minimal revisions.
I expect higher education to come under a great deal of pressure in the coming years: some political, some financial, some moral, some intellectual. A lot of people will be shouting a lot of things about what universities and professors ought to be doing. Some of it will come from the academy’s enemies, who would like to destroy its institutions, either out of malign contempt or simple expedience. But some of it will come from the academy’s supposed friends, who will ask it to do things it cannot do well while forsaking the ones it can. I’m posting the essay now, in calmer times, as a reminder to myself of what I believe, to help me keep my own intellectual footing in the storms to come. If it is of any use to others, so much the better.