Reading the literature on social media and the Arab Spring, there’s a recurring sentiment I’ve run across:

- Jeff Neumann: Social Media Didn’t Oust Tunisia’s President — The Tunisian People Did

“Did social media have an effect on events in Tunisia? Undoubtedly, yes. Is this a social media revolution? Absolutely not.”

– Achalla Venu: What happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt?

“So the common trait between the revolution in Tunisia and the ongoing revolution in Egypt is — they all are human revolutions not caused by Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr and many others but they all played their part.”

– Jillian York: Not Twitter, Not Wikileaks: A Human Revolution

“I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight. But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”

Despite their affirmation of the importance of social media during the uprisings, these authors (and many others) want to assure us that their analysis remains appropriately human-centered, that they are not making the terrible mistake of describing tools as if they had some sort of agency.

But here’s the funny thing—we describe our tools as having agency all the time. This isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s an essential part of our expressive repertoire around technology.
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When I read Evelyn Waugh long ago, many thoughts passed through my mind, but I can safely say that the idea of writing a blog post starting “Henry and I have a piece in the Daily Beast …” was not among them. Nevertheless:

Henry and I have a piece in the Daily Beast on the politics and economics of saving the euro, along lines that will be familiar to readers here. Some reactions from Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman.

Steve Jobs has died. He was 56. Here is his 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford.

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In light of today’s announcement of the Chemistry Nobel Prize winner, Dan Shechtman, I thought I’d make a shameless plug for my father’s latest book: Drive and Curiosity (AMZ, BN). Chapter 8 is all about Dan Shachtman. He is singled out for his “stubbornness” given that he did not let himself be talked out of his observation of a structure that all chemists and physicists believed impossible. Funny thing is, even Shechtman proved at one point in one of his college exams that it was impossible. Despite the journal rejections and other pushback that followed, he persevered and voila. By the way, it’s not a stretch for me to be making this connection to my father’s writing. The book source on the Nobel Prize page about Shechtman for further reading is a book co-authored by my father and my brother: Candid Science V. Conversations with Famous Scientists.

This photo (from the book) is of Dan Shechtman and Alan Mackay in my parents’ living room in 1995.

I’ve been grading papers half my life, so I think I know a thing or two about how it should go. Here’s a simple point that, I think, is not always clear to the grader him or herself (I’ve found it necessary to explain this to newbies, when advising them about how to do their jobs); that is almost never clear to the students themselves; that really ought to be to made clear – and made explicit – to all involved. There are two basic functions comments on papers can serve.

1) Explaining/justifying to the student why she got the grade she got, not the higher grade that, perhaps, she hoped for.

2) Communicating something significant that will teach the student to be a better writer/thinker.

I think graders try to do 2 but feel vaguely obliged to make 2 do double-duty as 1. And students typically expect 1, although many of them are also healthily open to 2. But 1 and 2 often come apart. It’s damned hard to provide anything that would really be sufficient to accomplish 1 in a general way. And even harder if you’re trying to do 2, too. And 2 is more important, and do-able, so basically you should just do 2. Clear your head of the vague feeling that you should be doing 1, except a bit around the edges, in the natural course of doing just 2. [click to continue…]

Today (Wednesday, Irish time) is the hundredth anniversary of Flann O’Brien’s (Brian O’Nolan’s) birth. Several of us here at CT are fans – I think it was John Holbo who first transformed O’Brien’s Plain People of Ireland (the interlocutor in many of his newspaper columns) into the Plain People of the Internet. This piece by Fintan O’Toole is the best account of his life that I’ve seen. This longer article by Roger Boylan in the Boston Review is also worth reading, as long as you take good care to stop reading at the point where Anthony Cronin, bard-befriending bollocks and professional bore, introduces himself and goes on to provide “many delightful insights” into his own “rich and various” life.

People may reasonably disagree about which are the very best bits of O’Brien’s work. My own favorite is the description of the practical philosopher De Selby’s efforts (in The Third Policeman) to take advantage of the “appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye.”

De Selby, ever loath to leave well enough alone, insists on reflecting the first reflection in a further mirror and professing to detect minute changes in this second image. Ultimately he constructed the familiar arrangement of parallel mirrors, each reflecting diminishing images of an interposed object indefinitely. The interposed object in this case was De Selby’s own face and this he claims to have studied backwards through an infinity of reflectins by means of a ‘powerful glass.’ He claims to have noticed a growing youthfulness in the reflections of his face according as they receded, the most distant of them – too tiny to be visible to the naked eye – being the face of a beardless boy of twelve, and, to use his own words, ‘a countenance of singular beauty and nobility.’ He did not succeed in pursuing the matter back to the cradle ‘owing to the curvature of the earth and the limitations of the telescope.’

I’m not going to be able to blog my opinions on the latest iteration of the eurozone crisis in any detail, thanks to an exceptionally busy week (comprehensive orals to be supervised, reports to be written, grant applications to be reformulated, papers to be presented and book workshops to be sat in upon). Semi-organized versions of my thoughts can be found here and here; John Quiggin and I have another short piece that will likely be coming out soon. But fwiw I was distinctly heartened by the news today that Wolfgang Schäuble and Alain Juppé are both floating the idea of real fiscal integration and accompanying democratic reforms of the EU. This has plausibly been orchestrated. If they are right to think that this could be pulled off, it would finally create an intersecting set in the Paul Krugman Eurovenn. I’m still not optimistic – but I’m now prepared to up the odds to a 35% chance that Europe could actually get out of this alive. I’ve always suspected that Schäuble was playing a complex game – he’s now putting his cards on the table. Unsurprisingly, this is giving rise to howls of indignation from conservative and euroskeptical Germans – this Spiegel piece (in translation) gives some flavor.

FDP parliamentarians have long been convinced that the finance minister is not playing with an open hand, and that he would prefer to force them out of the coalition. But there has also been an increasing amount of discontent over Schäuble among the ranks of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. … Many conservative parliamentarians, regardless of their position on the common currency, feel as if they are being treated with contempt. … Many German politicians are also insinuating that he has a hidden agenda. They fear that one of the last fully committed supporters of the European project is taking advantage of the crisis to advance his dream of a United States of Europe … heedlessly allowed himself to be drawn into a dangerous debate over whether the EFSF could get a banking license and leverage its assets to borrow even more money from the European Central Bank (ECB). Most of his German predecessors in office would have rejected such notions with indignation and referred to Germany’s traumatic experiences during the 20th century … In addition to being imprudent, Schäuble’s comments showed bad timing. … discovered that Schäuble was using a torrent of words and statements in an attempt to conceal what he is really planning and thinking. … Schäuble’s political style is also characterized by a good deal of posturing. … Schäuble had merely demonstrated another tactic from his bag of tricks as a seasoned politician.

That he’s arousing such vehement opposition (and nasty articles in prominent German news magazines) suggests that he may have a better chance of pulling this off than I would have thought yesterday. Fingers crossed …

Ed, in comments on the previosu post, made a request for a post on the Occupy Wall Street movement. As with the movement itself, I have more enthusiasm than analysis to offer at this point. I went to a (very small) meeting a couple of weeks ago which was part of the planning for a similar protest in Washington starting on 6 October (more info here). Things have certainly grown since then, and it could be quite a big event.

In the generally undirected spirit of the movement, here is an open thread for your comments, predictions and so on.

The US Administration has been ambivalent about the Arab Spring from the start. But three recent developments have palce the US more clearly on the opposing side than at any time since the fall of the Tunisian regime. The list of motives is long, and its variety indicates how many things are more important to US foreign policy than the democratic aspirations of people in Arab countries

• The autocracy in Bahrein has sentenced doctors to long prison terms for the crime of treating injured demonstrators. The US reaction is to sell the regime more weapons, as part of the deal that keeps the 5th Fleet based there

• The assassination of Anwar Al-Awaki was carried out in close co-operation with the Saleh regime. Although the US has called on Saleh to leave, it’s clear that the Eternal War on Terror takes precedence over the concerns of Yemenis

• Finally, there’s the promised veto on Palestinian statehood, driven by US politics, which are now characterised by the “antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachment to others” against which Alexander Hamilton warned two centuries ago.

As with the Iraq war, there is such a mixture of motives and inconsistent policy goals that it’s a safe bet that few if any will be achieved in the long run. Conversely, I think that attempts to find a coherent national or class interest driving US policy are doomed to failure. There are a bunch of different interest groups, each with their own veto points and spans of control, and the outcomes are good for (almost) no-one.

Alex Downes, who has just become a colleague of mine at GWU, has a great piece on this topic, with this title, in the new Boston Review. Key paragraph:

Is the bloody aftermath of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq the exception or the rule? Does regime change work? The short answer is: rarely. The reasons for consistent failure are straightforward. Regime change often produces violence because it inevitably privileges some individuals or groups and alienates others. Intervening forces seek to install their preferred leadership but usually have little knowledge of the politics of the target country or of the backlash their preference is likely to engender. Moreover, interveners often lack the will or commitment to remain indefinitely in the face of violent resistance, which encourages opponents to keep fighting. Regime change generally fails to promote democracy because installing pliable dictators is in the intervener’s interest and because many target states lack the necessary preconditions for democracy.

The rest of the piece is a summary of political science’s findings on the (usually dismal) record of efforts by outside actors to change regimes. These findings:

Despite what interveners hope, regime change implemented by outsiders is not a force for stability. More than 40 percent of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change have a civil war within the next ten years. Regime change generates civil wars in three ways. First, civil war can be part of the process of removing the old regime from power and suppressing its remnants. In Hungary in 1919, a Romanian invasion unseated the Communist regime of Béla Kun. His successor Miklós Horthy carried out a “White Terror” that killed roughly 5,000 supposed Communists, communist supporters, or sympathizers. Similar conflicts and purges followed the ousters of Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile.

Second, regime change fosters civil war because it abruptly reverses the status of formerly advantaged groups. Remnants of the old regime’s leadership or army may wage an insurgency against the new rulers rather than accept a subordinate position. This happened in Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion in December 1978. The Vietnamese army quickly defeated the Khmer Rouge in conventional battles, but Pol Pot, other top leaders, and many fighters escaped to remote jungle hideouts along the Thai and Laotian borders. Determined to regain power, the Khmer Rouge waged a decade-long insurgency against Vietnam’s puppet, Heng Samrin, and occupying forces. Similarly, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sunni Ba’athist ex-soldiers took up arms to eject U.S. occupiers and restore Sunni rule.

are similar to Chris’s argument of a few months ago that the Libyan intervention was unlikely to produce a stable government because

Some Libyans may rally to the Gaddafi regime out of a sense of wounded national pride at outside interference. And even if Gaddafi falls (which I hope he will) the successor regime will lack the legitimacy it might have had, and will no doubt be resented and undermined by nationalist Gaddafi loyalists biding their time and representing it as the creature of the West.

Chris got some ill-considered flak for purportedly making a normative claim that any new regime would be ‘illegitimate,’ when he was in fact making an empirical argument which accords well with the state of the art among political scientists who study these issues.

The latest Financial Times weekend had a piece by Simon Kuper about how studying English literature had spoilt the experience of reading for him. Whereas once, as a child or an adolescent, he could immerse himself in a novel, the academic study of them had taught him to read as a critic. That second-order relationship to the text, just made the whole thing much less fun than it had been. I see what he means. Relatedly, one of the problems about writing for a blog like Crooked Timber with so many readers who know more than I do on just about any topic is the the difficulty in sharing books, films, or music that you’ve enjoyed because I’m scanning the horizon (or the potential comments thread) for the dorsal fin of the Great White Critic for whom the immediate pleasure taken is a symptom of hopeless naivety and a failure to adopt the necessary critical distance. But to hell with that. Sometimes some discovery is so fantastic that I just want to share, and that’s how I feel about reading Anne Tyler. Since reading a post about her on Norman Geras’s blog (Norman is great for that stuff, just ignore the politics) I’ve made my way through The Accidental Tourist, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Noah’s Compass, Celestial Navigation, Earthly Possessions, Ladder of Years, The Tin Can Tree, Digging to America, Back When We Were Grownups, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and I feel blessed that I still have (by my count) seven to go.

For those who don’t know, Tyler’s novels, nearly all set in Baltimore, are mostly quiet dramas of family life and relationships. The wider world of politics and economics doesn’t intrude much, so we’re a long way from the grand themes of Jonathan Franzen and the like. Many of the books are somewhat similar, in that a person has their habits and their conception of who they are turned upside down by an encounter with someone utterly unlike themselves. Sometimes they are changed; sometimes they revert. Her male characters are often stiff, calculating and habit bound; women more open and spontaneous, but she manages to achieve a sympathetic engagement with all of them. And all of her families conform to the Tolstoyan cliché. Her writing is also extraordinary. Highly economic and unfussy and yet she has an ear to capture a scene or a moment in a phrase that sticks in the memory – “By now he was looking seriously undermedicated” from A Patchwork Planet, for example.

The novels are about you, and me and our relationships and difficulties with spouses, parents, children, in-laws and colleagues. Since I became enthusiastic about Tyler, I’ve given some of her books as presents and then been asked if I was “making a point” about the recipient’s relationship. Well no I wasn’t, but I take this as good evidence that Tyler sees and captures the universal in all of our peculiar cases. I mentioned Tyler to a bookblogger friend, Kate, recently, and she asked me which are the best. I’m hard pushed to say. The Tin Can Tree was a bit of a struggle and some of the others disclosed themselves slowly but turned out to be among the best. Perhaps Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant would be a good place to start.

Cover note – over the next several months, I hope to review as many new books on the political economy of advanced industrialized societies post-2008 as I can. There is a lot of interesting work out being done which isn’t getting covered as well as it should in US public debate. Next up: Lane Kenworthy.

Conflict of interest warning: Although I’ve I’ve tried to review the book as though it were written by a complete stranger, Colin was effectively the co-supervisor of my dissertation and is a friend (albeit one whom I don’t see nearly enough of).

Colin Crouch – The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism (available from Powells, Amazon (deprecated)).

The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism looks at the prospects of neo-liberalism (which Crouch sees as claiming that “optimal outcomes will be achieved if the demand and supply for goods and services are allowed to adjust to each other through the price mechanism, without interference by government or other forces”) post-2008, and argues that they are pretty good. Even if neoliberalism should have been discredited, it is emerging more powerfully than ever, as states cut back welfare and public spending in the wake of the crisis. Crouch argues that neoliberalism, despite its claims, is effectively “devoted to the dominance of public life by the giant corporation.” What neo-liberals, and some leftists, see as a conflict between the market and the state is in fact an argument over how the two should relate to each other. Neoliberals are not pushing for free markets so much as a certain style of politics, which masquerades as a commitment to free markets, independent of politics, but in fact is an unhealthy hybridization of the two. To the extent that politics pervades markets, and markets pervades politics, both suffer.
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