long nonfiction reviews
Great quote from The Soap Opera Is Dead! Long Live the Soap Opera! by Rebecca Traister: "The daytime industry they built, like any feminized (and thereby marginalized) genre, was one in which borders went unpatrolled; that, along with a culture of mentorship, meant that other ambitious and talented women unable to find purchase in prime time or film became soap-opera producers and writers at roughly the same rate as men - a still-inconceivable parity."
Cole Stryker, Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web: There’s a lot of this book that’s not really about 4chan or Anonymous, but about the development of unmoderated or awfulness-seeking sites on the web. The book makes for a primary document in its own right, insofar as it shows how someone can recognize how hostile certain spaces are to women and still not connect that with his own judgments about those spaces’ “importance.” Stryker contends that 4Chan is the source of most web memes and therefore the most fascinating place on the web. Maybe a biographer often buys into a subject’s own narrative.
I’m more interested in the gender stuff: Stryker reports that there aren’t many women on 4chan (how we know this is unclear, but I’m not arguing) and that it’s pretty hostile to women, except for female cosplayers and for visitors to /cm (Cute/Male anime, separate from the main Cute anime board-which does clearly reflect the marked status of women). So “[t]he 4chan adage ‘There are no girls on the Internet’ suggests that anyone claiming to be a woman is actually a man either trolling or getting a sexual thrill out of posting as a woman,” and women who post pictures of themselves get encouraged to strip, so that “4chan’s relationship with women is weird and sad.” But not 4chan’s users? Or only when they’re on 4chan? He also says that yaoi is naked male anime but yuri is femslash; this may be true of how 4chan boards define the terms, but somebody is a little nervous about anime guys having sex with other guys. 4chan also revels in the use of offensive terms, and Stryker has a good conversation with Lisa Nakamura about the thrill of shock value and the desire not to be held responsible for consequences of racist and sexist abuse. She says, “A lot of disenfranchised, disaffected white people feel like they’re also fighting the man, they’re also on the edges, but in some really important way they are not.” He says, in response, that homosexuality is much more accepted on 4chan than non-whiteness, while by contrast the US in general has “gotten over its fear of racial minorities to a much larger degree than its fear of gays”; I wonder how he knows this.
Getting back to the most interesting place on the web: Stryker is surprised to find out that the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica, which cataloged some of 4chan’s greatest hits, has zero interest in 4chan. She founded it to document Livejournal drama, which he then discusses for a couple of pages and then leaves behind. This underscores just how much this is a book about what (some) men find interesting and important; Stryker doesn’t seem to get that some people’s narratives start and end in different places, and seems bemused by the ED founder’s claim that she really only cared about LJ.
The book ends with broader discussion about anonymity versus identifiability on the web, and as usual there’s short shrift given to persistent pseudonyms/autonyms that aren’t connected with government ID. Stryker is supportive of anonymity; as 4chan’s founder says, it’s a way to fail and not be stuck with the consequences of that failure forever, something that people a generation ago were able to take for granted. One can resist identificatory practices on the internet or one can negotiate with them; anonymous stands for resistance, though not always successfully. (I would love to read a book about how privacy/reputation worked before the industrial age, how that changed as Westerners started moving away from their birth locations more, and what we can learn from past experiences.)
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology: double colon in the title aside, this is actually a pretty good overview of evolutionary psychology, with some (less successful) attempts to use Darwin’s own personal life to illustrate particular strategies people use as a result of evolved traits. Wright generally does a good job of reminding readers that traits evolved to improve reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation may be useless or counterproductive outside that environment, and he strongly argues that there is no moral force to evolution. Indeed, properly understood, he contends, evolution can make us more moral: recognizing that many of our impulses (to punish, to cheat, to love our children, to favor ourselves and our relatives over other people) are directed by biology frees us to become more universally minded, since in fact we have no unique moral claims and should treat all humans as having equal interests in well-being.
Still, Wright also demonstrates the temptation to equate “evolved” with “unchangeable,” for example by equivocating in his definition of equality. He argues that we have to choose between equality for men (that is, roughly equal access to women imposed by monogamy) and equality for women (that is, roughly equal access to resources held by men, which would be possible if multiple women could marry the same wealthy man). Obviously he’s defining equality differently for each condition, which is a problem, but the bigger problem is the acceptance of the constraint that wealth will be so unequally distributed that an individual woman (or her family) might prefer marriage as a subsequent wife to a very wealthy man over marriage to a very poor one. As he then touches on briefly, without recognizing that it avoids the “choice of inequalities” issue, the third way to solve the problem of potentially conflicting preferences is to avoid huge resource disparities (and, not for nothing, to allow women to accumulate wealth in ways other than by marrying men). Oddly, he is only willing to allow for “mildly” progressive taxation, for no evolutionarily grounded reason I can discern.
There may be a more technical literature on this, but I was also unsatisfied with his discussion of Victorian morality (and hypocrisy, which he thinks is fine from an evolutionary perspective). He cogently explains why “high-quality” women might prefer a madonna/whore morality and condemn “lower-quality” women who were more promiscuous, who would be pursuing their own strategy of getting as much investment from multiple men as they could given their relative undesirability as long-term mates (this is a consequence of the idea that any fertile female can expect to reproduce, but not every fertile male can). However, he then skips to the idea that the beneficial effects of repressive sexuality for “high-quality” women grounded social morality, and I just don’t understand why (1) “low-quality” women wouldn’t fight back or (2) the overall effects on society would be positive, as he suggests. He might well say that multiple equilibria are possible since competing strategies co-exist, but I still don’t get from there to his apparent assumption that Victorian morality was either shared by all Victorians-even the poor people excluded from respectability and often sexually exploited by it-or a good idea on balance despite its excesses. I don’t get how you can say prudery for upper-class women combined with unspoken but widespread sexual access of upper-class men to prostitutes and servants is a stable and/or productive strategy without addressing the interests of, you know, all the other people on which this strategy relied. More generally, there just wasn’t enough about change over time. Obviously Victorian morality was not so stable that it couldn’t change; Wright suggests that sexual mores are likely to move in cycles, but to me this just highlights the gap between evolutionary psychology and real explanations. There are too many moving parts between what the science can tell you and actual social issues. His metaphor is that evolution has produced dials which environment can move around a lot. But I’m less interested in the dials than in the settings!
Roddy Dowd, Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide: Hard to know what to make of this book, which presents Goldman Sachs as a hero telling truth to the market and Eliot Spitzer as a villain, with Hank Greenberg as his victim. Dowd doesn’t explain much about Gen Re, the transaction that led to Greenberg’s ouster from control of the incredibly successful insurance company he’d built, but even Dowd has to admit that it was an out-and-out fraud designed to fool investors and regulators about the profitability of AIG’s trading partner, and that anyone apprised of its details would have known that. Dowd presents evidence both ways, but clearly thinks that Greenberg didn’t really know the facts of the transaction, despite the fact that the reason to laud Greenberg is that the man obsessively monitored risk and insisted on knowing every aspect of AIG’s business. The problem, and the real cautionary tale, is that Hank Greenberg’s presence was used as a substitute for actual accounting risk control. Can you call a man a success when he builds a company whose assets and liabilities are greater than those of many countries and that, with him gone, cannot accurately tell you what’s on its balance sheet? I think that question answers itself.
Dowd’s condemnation of Spitzer suggests that outright fraud revealing, at the absolute minimum, an absence of a corporate structure that could detect and prevent such frauds, should have been written off as inconsequential because AIG was too big to punish. He also argues that Spitzer became megalomaniacal in treating big banks like criminal enterprises, except that they were criminal enterprises that succeeded in looting the economy and are still going. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and Dowd gestures at that in the end, though he still maintains that Goldman was just exercising good business sense when it demanded to be paid par (face value) for its now-nearly-worthless holdings. He suggests that the government had few choices but to pay that rate (even as he points out that it would have been possible for AIG to refuse Goldman’s collateral calls and litigate it out-there’s an adage, which he repeats, that there’s a courtroom on every corner in New York), but I’m not nearly as sure and I just don’t trust his judgment by that point. However, Dowd’s more general conclusion is easy to agree with: that repealing Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banks and thus prevented the kind of disastrous overleveraging we saw in the runup to the crisis, was an enormous and foundational mistake.
Also, and this is just a pet peeve, where was the editor? There were three misused homonyms, each of which is plausible but wrong (took the reigns, said his peace, and into the breech).
William Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: Patry, who begins this short book on copyright’s overextension of control with the mildly ironic request not to preface any discussion of the book with the fact that he’s now Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, doesn’t have much to say on the subject that you couldn’t get more punchily from Larry Lessig and the like. He focuses his discussion on the use and misuse of metaphors, specifically piracy and property, in expansionist copyright rhetoric, but I was most amused by his discussion of the metaphor of work-as-child: Daniel Defoe claimed, for example, that an author’s work is “as much his own, as his Wife and Children are his own.” Patry makes two points in response: (1) no author creates in a vacuum, and (2) copyright law has never actually worked that way. By contrast, I’d think the most obvious responses include (1) actually, you do not own your wife or your children, at least (Inspector Clouseau voice) not any more, and (2) if you claimed the rights to do to your children what copyright owners do to their works (including to sell, chop up, and destroy them), we would send you to jail. Someday I want to write a paper on this metaphor, and, though today is not that day, Patry does have a good point about the rhetorical differences between “orphan” works-poor works faultlessly separated from their owners and in need of protection from exploitation-and “abandoned” works-which also need to be taken care of, but differently.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Cole Stryker, Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web: There’s a lot of this book that’s not really about 4chan or Anonymous, but about the development of unmoderated or awfulness-seeking sites on the web. The book makes for a primary document in its own right, insofar as it shows how someone can recognize how hostile certain spaces are to women and still not connect that with his own judgments about those spaces’ “importance.” Stryker contends that 4Chan is the source of most web memes and therefore the most fascinating place on the web. Maybe a biographer often buys into a subject’s own narrative.
I’m more interested in the gender stuff: Stryker reports that there aren’t many women on 4chan (how we know this is unclear, but I’m not arguing) and that it’s pretty hostile to women, except for female cosplayers and for visitors to /cm (Cute/Male anime, separate from the main Cute anime board-which does clearly reflect the marked status of women). So “[t]he 4chan adage ‘There are no girls on the Internet’ suggests that anyone claiming to be a woman is actually a man either trolling or getting a sexual thrill out of posting as a woman,” and women who post pictures of themselves get encouraged to strip, so that “4chan’s relationship with women is weird and sad.” But not 4chan’s users? Or only when they’re on 4chan? He also says that yaoi is naked male anime but yuri is femslash; this may be true of how 4chan boards define the terms, but somebody is a little nervous about anime guys having sex with other guys. 4chan also revels in the use of offensive terms, and Stryker has a good conversation with Lisa Nakamura about the thrill of shock value and the desire not to be held responsible for consequences of racist and sexist abuse. She says, “A lot of disenfranchised, disaffected white people feel like they’re also fighting the man, they’re also on the edges, but in some really important way they are not.” He says, in response, that homosexuality is much more accepted on 4chan than non-whiteness, while by contrast the US in general has “gotten over its fear of racial minorities to a much larger degree than its fear of gays”; I wonder how he knows this.
Getting back to the most interesting place on the web: Stryker is surprised to find out that the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica, which cataloged some of 4chan’s greatest hits, has zero interest in 4chan. She founded it to document Livejournal drama, which he then discusses for a couple of pages and then leaves behind. This underscores just how much this is a book about what (some) men find interesting and important; Stryker doesn’t seem to get that some people’s narratives start and end in different places, and seems bemused by the ED founder’s claim that she really only cared about LJ.
The book ends with broader discussion about anonymity versus identifiability on the web, and as usual there’s short shrift given to persistent pseudonyms/autonyms that aren’t connected with government ID. Stryker is supportive of anonymity; as 4chan’s founder says, it’s a way to fail and not be stuck with the consequences of that failure forever, something that people a generation ago were able to take for granted. One can resist identificatory practices on the internet or one can negotiate with them; anonymous stands for resistance, though not always successfully. (I would love to read a book about how privacy/reputation worked before the industrial age, how that changed as Westerners started moving away from their birth locations more, and what we can learn from past experiences.)
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology: double colon in the title aside, this is actually a pretty good overview of evolutionary psychology, with some (less successful) attempts to use Darwin’s own personal life to illustrate particular strategies people use as a result of evolved traits. Wright generally does a good job of reminding readers that traits evolved to improve reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation may be useless or counterproductive outside that environment, and he strongly argues that there is no moral force to evolution. Indeed, properly understood, he contends, evolution can make us more moral: recognizing that many of our impulses (to punish, to cheat, to love our children, to favor ourselves and our relatives over other people) are directed by biology frees us to become more universally minded, since in fact we have no unique moral claims and should treat all humans as having equal interests in well-being.
Still, Wright also demonstrates the temptation to equate “evolved” with “unchangeable,” for example by equivocating in his definition of equality. He argues that we have to choose between equality for men (that is, roughly equal access to women imposed by monogamy) and equality for women (that is, roughly equal access to resources held by men, which would be possible if multiple women could marry the same wealthy man). Obviously he’s defining equality differently for each condition, which is a problem, but the bigger problem is the acceptance of the constraint that wealth will be so unequally distributed that an individual woman (or her family) might prefer marriage as a subsequent wife to a very wealthy man over marriage to a very poor one. As he then touches on briefly, without recognizing that it avoids the “choice of inequalities” issue, the third way to solve the problem of potentially conflicting preferences is to avoid huge resource disparities (and, not for nothing, to allow women to accumulate wealth in ways other than by marrying men). Oddly, he is only willing to allow for “mildly” progressive taxation, for no evolutionarily grounded reason I can discern.
There may be a more technical literature on this, but I was also unsatisfied with his discussion of Victorian morality (and hypocrisy, which he thinks is fine from an evolutionary perspective). He cogently explains why “high-quality” women might prefer a madonna/whore morality and condemn “lower-quality” women who were more promiscuous, who would be pursuing their own strategy of getting as much investment from multiple men as they could given their relative undesirability as long-term mates (this is a consequence of the idea that any fertile female can expect to reproduce, but not every fertile male can). However, he then skips to the idea that the beneficial effects of repressive sexuality for “high-quality” women grounded social morality, and I just don’t understand why (1) “low-quality” women wouldn’t fight back or (2) the overall effects on society would be positive, as he suggests. He might well say that multiple equilibria are possible since competing strategies co-exist, but I still don’t get from there to his apparent assumption that Victorian morality was either shared by all Victorians-even the poor people excluded from respectability and often sexually exploited by it-or a good idea on balance despite its excesses. I don’t get how you can say prudery for upper-class women combined with unspoken but widespread sexual access of upper-class men to prostitutes and servants is a stable and/or productive strategy without addressing the interests of, you know, all the other people on which this strategy relied. More generally, there just wasn’t enough about change over time. Obviously Victorian morality was not so stable that it couldn’t change; Wright suggests that sexual mores are likely to move in cycles, but to me this just highlights the gap between evolutionary psychology and real explanations. There are too many moving parts between what the science can tell you and actual social issues. His metaphor is that evolution has produced dials which environment can move around a lot. But I’m less interested in the dials than in the settings!
Roddy Dowd, Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide: Hard to know what to make of this book, which presents Goldman Sachs as a hero telling truth to the market and Eliot Spitzer as a villain, with Hank Greenberg as his victim. Dowd doesn’t explain much about Gen Re, the transaction that led to Greenberg’s ouster from control of the incredibly successful insurance company he’d built, but even Dowd has to admit that it was an out-and-out fraud designed to fool investors and regulators about the profitability of AIG’s trading partner, and that anyone apprised of its details would have known that. Dowd presents evidence both ways, but clearly thinks that Greenberg didn’t really know the facts of the transaction, despite the fact that the reason to laud Greenberg is that the man obsessively monitored risk and insisted on knowing every aspect of AIG’s business. The problem, and the real cautionary tale, is that Hank Greenberg’s presence was used as a substitute for actual accounting risk control. Can you call a man a success when he builds a company whose assets and liabilities are greater than those of many countries and that, with him gone, cannot accurately tell you what’s on its balance sheet? I think that question answers itself.
Dowd’s condemnation of Spitzer suggests that outright fraud revealing, at the absolute minimum, an absence of a corporate structure that could detect and prevent such frauds, should have been written off as inconsequential because AIG was too big to punish. He also argues that Spitzer became megalomaniacal in treating big banks like criminal enterprises, except that they were criminal enterprises that succeeded in looting the economy and are still going. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and Dowd gestures at that in the end, though he still maintains that Goldman was just exercising good business sense when it demanded to be paid par (face value) for its now-nearly-worthless holdings. He suggests that the government had few choices but to pay that rate (even as he points out that it would have been possible for AIG to refuse Goldman’s collateral calls and litigate it out-there’s an adage, which he repeats, that there’s a courtroom on every corner in New York), but I’m not nearly as sure and I just don’t trust his judgment by that point. However, Dowd’s more general conclusion is easy to agree with: that repealing Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banks and thus prevented the kind of disastrous overleveraging we saw in the runup to the crisis, was an enormous and foundational mistake.
Also, and this is just a pet peeve, where was the editor? There were three misused homonyms, each of which is plausible but wrong (took the reigns, said his peace, and into the breech).
William Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: Patry, who begins this short book on copyright’s overextension of control with the mildly ironic request not to preface any discussion of the book with the fact that he’s now Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, doesn’t have much to say on the subject that you couldn’t get more punchily from Larry Lessig and the like. He focuses his discussion on the use and misuse of metaphors, specifically piracy and property, in expansionist copyright rhetoric, but I was most amused by his discussion of the metaphor of work-as-child: Daniel Defoe claimed, for example, that an author’s work is “as much his own, as his Wife and Children are his own.” Patry makes two points in response: (1) no author creates in a vacuum, and (2) copyright law has never actually worked that way. By contrast, I’d think the most obvious responses include (1) actually, you do not own your wife or your children, at least (Inspector Clouseau voice) not any more, and (2) if you claimed the rights to do to your children what copyright owners do to their works (including to sell, chop up, and destroy them), we would send you to jail. Someday I want to write a paper on this metaphor, and, though today is not that day, Patry does have a good point about the rhetorical differences between “orphan” works-poor works faultlessly separated from their owners and in need of protection from exploitation-and “abandoned” works-which also need to be taken care of, but differently.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.