While elements of the left turned to revolutionary violence in most countries of the West at the end of the 1960s, three countries experienced this turn to a much greater extent than any other: Germany, Italy, and Japan. This fact has always intrigued me. Why these three? What facts of history or culture link the three? All three endured fascist totalitarian regimes before WW II, but so too did, say, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Portugal, and Spain. The countries of Eastern Europe, however, met the 1960s still under the Soviet imperium, and so opportunities for violent resistance were few, and in any case were unlikely to come from the left. Spain and Portugal and, for a time, Greece, were still under fascism in the post-war period, so opposition tended to aim at enlarging democracy, not at violent resistance. Perhaps that history is a partial explanation, with (some of) the first post-war generation, the 68ers (in German, achtundsechziger) seeking by their armed resistance to absolve their shame at the perceived lack of resistance to fascism of their parents’ generation. Certainly the writings of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), the Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army give this as a justification for their turn to violence.
I have always thought that another causal factor in common between these three countries was the absence of alternating left and right governments. With a succession of right-wing and centre-right regimes in Italy and Japan, and right-wing and grand-coalition (right-and-left-together) regimes in Germany, how were views in favour of socialist change able to be represented and heard? Indeed, in the German Federal Republic, the communist party had been declared illegal in 1956, and remained so until its reformation (under a new name) until 1968. And even the USA may not be an exception to this heuristic: In 1968, the candidate of the major party of the left, Hubert Humphrey, was a protagonist for the war in Vietnam (at least in public, and during the election campaign). And while the candidate of the major party of the right, Richard Nixon, had promised during the campaign to end the war, once in office he intensified and extended it. For anyone opposed to the war in Vietnam, the democratic political system appeared to have failed; indeed, one of those who had most publicly opposed the war, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated. It is interesting in this regard to note that the Weather Underground only adopted armed resistance as a strategy in December 1969, a year after Nixon’s election. In Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism view of democracy, a key role of political argument and verbal conflict is to bring everyone into the political tent. If some voices, or some views, are excluded by definition or silenced by assassination, we should not then be surprised that those excluded try to burn down the tent.
And perhaps because I like the idea of acting according to (an empirically-grounded) theory of history, I always found the primary argument of the RAF very intriguing: That by engaging in armed resistance to the capitalist state, the revolutionary left would force the state to reveal its essential fascist character, and that this revelation would awaken the consciousness of the proletariat, leading to the revolutionary overthrow of the state. Although intrigued by it, I never found this argument quite compelling: First, it could be argued that a democratic state only has a fascist character in response to, and to the extent of, armed resistance to it. So predictions of its fascist tendencies become self-fulfilling. Second, the history of countries ruled by fascism in the 20th century surely shows that life under totalitarian rule makes organizing and engaging in dissident activities, particularly group-oriented dissident activities, less not more feasible. Third, I believe strongly that not only do ends not usually justify means, but often means vitiate ends. This is the case here: suppose the violent left’s violent resistance had indeed worked in overthrowing the governments they were directed at. What sort of society would have resulted? What we know of the personalities of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and their revolutionary colleagues leads me to think that a Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges, rather than a Sweden under Olof Palme, would be a more likely description for life in a West Germany led by the RAF. Thank our stars they failed.
These thoughts are provoked by some recent reading on the subject of leftist urban terrorism in the West, both fiction and non-fiction. The fiction concerns the psychology and consequences of life underground, long after any thrill of plotting and executing armed resistance has passed.
First, a novel about the Angry Brigade (AB), the lite, British version of the Red Army Fraction: Hari Kunzru’s “My Revolutions”. This is a gripping first-person account by someone who had participated in AB actions, and now, 30 years later, is living under an assumed name. His past comes back to him, through some not-fully-explained, but dirty, tricks that British intelligence agencies seem to be running. These dirty actions are (or rather, appear to be) targeted against those who were on the edges of the violent left, but not part of it, who have now risen to prominence in Government (Joschka Fischer comes to mind), and the narrator is used by the shadowy intelligence forces to blackmail or destroy the career of the target of the action. The writing is fluent and plausible, and the tale engrossing. Only occasionally does Kunzru trip: Who ever uses “recurrent” (page 4) in ordinary speech? (Some people may say “recurring”.) Precisely how does the sun beat down like a drummer? (page 10). But most of the novel reads as the words of the protagonist, and not the words of the novelist, indicating that a realistic character has been created by the author’s words.
The same cannot be said for Dana Spiotta’s “Eat the Document”. Although this book too is riveting, it is not nearly as well-written as Kunzru’s book. The story also concerns the later after-life of some formerly violent leftists, presumably once members of the Weather Underground, now living in hiding in the USA, incognito. The story is told through the purported words of multiple narrators, a technique which enables the events to be described from diverse and interesting perspectives. I say “purported” because too often the words and tone of different narrators sound the same. In addition, often a narrator uses expressions which seem quite implausible for that particular narrator, as when the teenage boy Jason speaks of “recondite” personalities in suburbia (page 74): these are not Jason’s words but those of the author.
These works of fiction are partly engrossing to me because I once unwittingly knew a former violent leftist on the lam – the Symbionese Liberation Army’s James Kilgore, whom I knew as John Pape. I wish I could say I’d always suspected him, but that is not the case. Indeed, if anything, I suspected him of being a secret religious believer. He was serious, always intense, and softly-spoken, and ideologically pure to the point of having no sense of humour. The Struggle was all, and life seemed to be all gravitas, with no levitas (at least in my interactions with him. I have no idea how much of this serious demeanor is or was his true self.) Adopting a position as a committed revolutionary is certainly an interesting strategy for a cover; one does not expect underground weathermen to be regular attenders at Trotskyist reading circles, but Pape was. (And he did the homework!) But perhaps someone with a sense of humour does not join a movement of revolutionary violence in the first place, at least not in a democracy.
In the non-fiction category is Susan Braudy’s history of the Boudin family, one of whose members, Kathy Boudin, was a member of the Weather Underground. As with Kunzru’s and Spiotta’s novels, this non-fictional account is also riveting. It is, however, appallingly badly written. For instance, for a history, the book is very fuzzy about dates – when did Jean Boudin die, for example? And much of the text reads like third-hand family anecdotes, perhaps interesting or amusing to the family but not to anyone else. (Aunty Merle always was partial to rhubarb and once asked for it in a restaurant.) And lots of very relevant information is simply not provided, for instance the prison sentences given to Kathy Boudin’s fellow-accused in 1981. As a history book, this is certainly a book.
Finally, a quick report on Hans Kundnani’s superb analysis of the extreme German left, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. Kundnani argues that there were competing strains within the violent German left in the 1960s and 1970s: one strain engaged in struggle (against capitalist and western imperialist injustice) as a form of remedy for the failure – or at least, the perceived failure – of their parents’ generation to resist Nazism, and other strains comprising German-nationalist and, suprisingly, even anti-semitic tendencies. The presence of such tendencies at least explains how some on the far left in the 1960s ended up on the neo-Nazi right thirty years later. Kundnani’s book is superb – interesting, well-written, humane, engrossing, and tightly-argued. I had only one small quibble, which is perhaps a typo or an oversight: On page 252, Kundnani refers to German military participation in a NATO-led attack on Serbian forces on 24 March 1999 as the “first time since 1945, Germany was at war.” Well, the Federal Republic of Germany perhaps. The DDR sent troups to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in August 1968. If I was a former citizen of the DDR, regardless of my opposition to that invasion, I would be annoyed that my nation’s history seems to have been forgotten by people writing after unification on German history.
UPDATE (2010-08-25): My remark about participation by the DDR military in the Warsaw Pact invasion of the CSSR in 1968 is wrong. The forces of the DDR were, at the last moment, stayed, as I explain here. Thanks to Hans Kundnani for correcting me on this (see comment below).
References:
Bill Ayers [2001]: Fugitive Days: A Memoir. Boston, MA, USA: Beacon Press.
Dan Berger [2006]: Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. Oakland, CA, USA: AK Press.
Susan Braudy [2003]: Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left. New York, NY, USA; Anchor Books.
Uli Edel [Director, 2008]: Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex. Germany.
Ron Jacob [1997]: The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. London, UK: Verso.
Hans Kundnani[2009]: Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. London, UK: Hurst and Company.
Hari Kunzru[2007]: My Revolutions. London, UK: Penguin.
Chantal Mouffe[1993]: The Return of the Political. London, UK: Verso.
Dana Spiotta[2006]: Eat the Document. New York: Scribner/London, UK: Picador.
Tom Vague [1988/2005]: The Red Army Faction Story 1963-1993. San Francisco: AK Press.
Jeremy Varon [2004]: Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press.
Some previous thoughts on beating terrorism here. Past entries in the Recent Reading series are here.
Author Archive for peter
Page 55 of 85
Concat 3: On writing
For procrastinators among you writing the Great American Novel, here are some links with advice on writing:
- Hilary Mantel [2010]: The joys of stationery. The Guardian, 2010-03-06. On why writers need to keep loose-leaf notebooks. An excerpt:
That said, le vrai moleskine and its mythology irritate me. Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers? The magic has surely gone out of the little black tablet now that you can buy it everywhere, and in pastel pink, and even get it from Amazon – if they believe your address exists. The trouble with the Moleskine is that you can’t easily pick it apart. This may have its advantages for glamorous itinerants, who tend to be of careless habit and do not have my access to self-assembly beech and maple-effect storage solutions – though, as some cabinets run on castors, I don’t see what stopped them filing as they travelled. But surely the whole point of a notebook is to pull it apart, and distribute pieces among your various projects? There is a serious issue here. Perforation is vital – more vital than vodka, more essential to a novel’s success than a spellchecker and an agent.
I often sense the disappointment when trusting beginners ask me how to go about it, and I tell them it’s all about ring binders.”
- Rachel Cusk [2010]: Can creative writing ever be taught? The Guardian, 2010-01-30. A moving discussion on teaching creative writing, and the relationship between writing and therapy.
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
At the start of last term, I asked my students a question: “How did you become the person you are?” They answered in turn, long answers of such startling candour that the photographer who had come in to take a couple of quick pictures for the university magazine ended up staying for the whole session, mesmerised. I had asked them to write down three or four words before they spoke, each word indicating a formative aspect of experience, and to tell me what the words were. They were mostly simple words, such as “father” and “school” and “Catherine”. To me they represented a regression to the first encounter with language; they represented a chance to reconfigure the link between the mellifluity of self and the concreteness of utterance. It felt as though this was a good thing for even the most accomplished writer to do. Were the students learning anything? I suppose not exactly. I’d prefer to think of it as relearning. Relearning how to write; remembering how.
Caute on Marechera
You did not have to visit many bars or nightclubs in downtown Harare in the early 1980s before encountering the late Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987), Zimbabwean novelist and poet. I knew him slightly, as did anyone who was willing to share a drink with him and enjoy (or endure) a stimulating late-night argument on politics or literature. Some of his writing, for all its coarse language, is powerful and sublime (in the tradition of Burroughs and Genet). David Caute, in a book I have just read, argues correctly that he was a great writer.
The book also captures his personality well, even if it gives the impression that Caute thinks the work forgives the man. It does not. As a person, Marechera was a victim of his addictions and perhaps also of a psychosis – mercurial, abusive, racist, foul-mouthed, illogical, self-destructive, and paranoid: not someone who was nice to be around for very long. Nothing forgives such poor behaviour, not even great writing.
As always when I read David Caute, I am reminded of Graham Greene: both are writers who grapple with the major moral questions and issues of our time, yet both write in the sloppiest of language, insincere and vague, and have the tinnest of ears. Woolly writing might be evidence of woolly thinking or evidence of malice aforethought (perhaps attempting to hide or obfuscate something, as Orwell argued); it could also be evidence of insufficient thinking. In any case, Greene’s and Caute’s arguments are often undone and undermined by their style. We only get as far as page 6 of Caute’s book on Marechera, for example, before we stumble over:
Piled high at the central counter of the Book Fair are copies of his [Marechera’s] new book, Mindblast, published by College Press of Harare, an orange coloured paperback with a surrealist design involving a humanized cat and a black in a space helmet.”
A black what, Dr Caute? A black what? I guess you mean a black person. Just two sentences later, though, you speak of, “An effusive white executive of College Press . . .” So, let me get this right – white people are important enough to have nouns to denote them, but black people not, eh? Hmmm.
Although the effect is racist, I am sure Caute is not deliberately being racist in his use of language here, but rather just sloppy. But the sloppy expression, here as elsewhere, leads one to doubt his sincerity and/or his ear. Of course, someone who spent a lot of time in the company of white Rhodesians could easily forget how offensive the first usage sounds (and is); and we know from Caute’s earlier books that he spent a lot of time in the company of white Rhodesians.
Pressing on, on page 43 we read:
Such rhetoric counts for little against the current surplus of maize, tobacco and beef which only the commercial farmers can guarantee.”
Well, actually, no, Dr Caute. Tobacco and beef were in surplus at the time referred to (1984) due to commercial (ie, mainly white-owned) farms. But maize was in surplus because the avowedly Marxist government of Robert Mugabe used the price mechanism when it came to power to encourage communal farmers (ie, subsistence black farmers) to produce and sell surplus maize crops. This was something so very remarkable – the country in food surplus for its staple food almost immediately after 13 years of civil war and 90 years of insurrection, and because of the fast responsiveness of peasant farmers – that all the papers were full of it. Surely Caute must have heard. (See Herbst 1990 for an account.)
And even beef production was boosted by contributions from communal farmers, particularly after the Government decided not to prosecute the many illegal butcheries competing against the state-owned meat-processing monopoly, the Cold Storage Commission. (One may wonder why a socialist government would not support its own state enterprise against privately-owned competitors until one learns that many members of the Cabinet had financial stakes in the competing butcheries.)
Is the sloppiness in Caute’s sentence then due to Orwellian sleight-of-hand – seeking to promote a case that was factually incorrect – or just due to insufficiently-careful thought? I suspect the latter, although it is throwaway lines like this – as it happens, lines so common in the conversation of white Rhodesians in the 1980s – that make me ponder the sincerity of Caute’s writing.
And, finally, Caute seems eager to berate the left and liberals for their failure to call attention to Robert Mugabe’s ethnic cleansing in Matebeleland in 1982-84, the Gukurahundi campaign. Certainly more could have been said and done, especially publicly, to oppose this. But why is only one side of politics to blame? Both the US and the UK had conservative administrations at the time, both of which (particularly Thatcher’s) made strong representations to Mugabe over the fate of several white Zimbabwe Air Force officers detained and tortured in 1982. These governments did not make nearly such strong representations over the fate of the victims of the Gukurahundi. Perhaps Mugabe was right to accuse the west of racism on this.
And Mugabe’s military campaign in Matabeleland was not launched for no reason: As Caute must know, South Africa and its white Rhodesian friends were engaged in a campaign of terrorist violence against Zimbabwe from its inception, with terrorist bombings throughout the 1980s. The Independence Arch he describes traveling under on the way to Harare Airport was in fact the second arch built to commemorate Independence: the first had been blown up shortly after it was built. And even Joshua Nkomo admitted (at a press conference following his dismissal from Cabinet in February 1982) that he had asked South Africa for assistance to stage a coup after Independence. While Mugabe’s 5th Brigade was certainly engaged in brutal and genocidal murder and rape, the campaign was not against an imaginary enemy.
Although evil may triumph when good people do nothing, from the fact of the triumph of evil it is invalid to infer that nothing was done to oppose it by good people. Where are the mentions in Caute’s account of the strong, high-level and repeated Catholic opposition (both clerical and lay) to Mugabe’s campaign? Where is the mention, in the statement that Mugabe detained people using renewals of Smith’s emergency powers regulations, of the independent review panel established by ZANU(PF) stalwart Herbert Ushewokunze when Minister for Home Affairs, the Detention Review Tribunal, to consider the cases of people detained without trial? The members of this panel included independent lawyers, some of whom were white and liberal. Some people, even some of the people Caute seems to excoriate, were doing their best to stop or ameliorate the evil at the time.
References:
David Caute [1986/2009]: Marechera and the Colonel: A Zimbabwean Writer and the Claims of the State. London, UK: Totterdown Books. Revised edition, 2009.
Jeffrey Herbst [1990]: State Politics in Zimbabwe. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. Perspectives on Southern Africa Series, Volume 45.
Agonistic planning
One key feature of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations identified by David Halberstam in his superb account of the development of US policy on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, was groupthink: the failure of White House national security, foreign policy and defense staff to propose or even countenance alternatives to the prevailing views on Vietnam, especially when these alternatives were in radical conflict with the prevailing wisdom. Among the junior staffers working in those administrations was Richard Holbrooke, now the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration. A New Yorker profile of Holbrooke last year included this statement by him, about the need for policy planning processes to incorporate agonism:
“You have to test your hypothesis against other theories,” Holbrooke said. “Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.” During Vietnam, he had seen officials such as McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s national-security adviser, “cut people to ribbons because the views they were getting weren’t acceptable.” Washington promotes tactical brilliance framed by strategic conformity—the facility to outmaneuver one’s counterpart in a discussion, without questioning fundamental assumptions. A more farsighted wisdom is often unwelcome. In 1975, with Bundy in mind, Holbrooke published an essay in Harper’s in which he wrote, “The smartest man in the room is not always right.” That was one of the lessons of Vietnam. Holbrooke described his method to me as “a form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy’s decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.” (page 47)
Of course, Holbrooke’s positing of policy development as distinct from policy implementation is itself a dangerous simplification of the reality for most complex policy, both private and public, where the relationship between the two is usually far messier. The details of policy, for example, are often only decided, or even able to be decided, at implementation-time, not at policy design-time. Do you sell your new hi-tech product via retail outlets, for instance? The answer may depend on whether there are outlets available to collaborate with you (not tied to competitors) and technically capable of selling it, and these facts may not be known until you approach the outlets. Moreover, if the stakeholders implementing (or constraining implementation) of a policy need to believe they have been adequately consulted in policy development for the policy to be executed effectively (as is the case with major military strategies in democracies, for example here), then a further complication to this reductive distinction exists.
UPDATE (2011-07-03):
British MP Rory Stewart recounts another instance of Holbrooke’s agonist approach to policy in this post-mortem tribute: Holbrooke, although disagreeing with Stewart on policy toward Afghanistan, insisted that Stewart present his case directly to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in a meeting that Holbrooke arranged.
References:
David Halberstam [1972]: The Best and the Brightest. New York, NY, USA: Random House.
George Packer [2009]: The last mission: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan. The New Yorker, 2009-09-28, pp. 38-55.
Precision as the enemy of knowledge
I have posted previously about the different ways in which knowledge may be represented. A key learning of the discipline of Artificial Intelligence in its short life thus far is that not all representations are equal. Indeed, more precise representations may provide less information, as in this example from cartography (from a profile of economist Paul Krugman):
Again, as in his [Krugman’s] trade theory, it was not so much his idea [that regional ecomomic specializations were essentially due to historical accidents] that was significant as the translation of the idea into a mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea” – of economic geography – “to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into [tractable analytical mathematical] models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior – the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards – secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants – was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off – by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again – but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain. ” (page 45)
Reference:
Larissa MacFarquhar [2010]: The deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics. The New Yorker, 2010-03-01, pp. 38-49.
Ljova profile
Yesterday’s NYT carried a profile by Allan Kozinn of Lev Zhurbin (aka Ljova) who featured in a previous post about Joe Stickney’s poetry. From the profile:
Lev Zhurbin, the violist, composer and arranger who performs and writes under the name Ljova, almost always has a lot of projects before him. If he isn’t writing for, or recording with, his folk-classical ensemble, Ljova and the Kontraband, or performing in Romashka, a Gypsy band led by his wife, the singer Inna Barmash, he is working on film scores or transcriptions. (He has arranged Indian and Sephardic pieces for the Kronos Quartet; Asian and Eastern European works for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project; Schubert and Shostakovich compositions for the Knights, a chamber orchestra).”
Which gives me the chance to recommend again Ljova and the Kontraband’s superb album, Mnemosyne. They are even better live, if that were possible.
Vale: Sol Encel
I have just learnt of the death last month of Sol Encel, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of New South Wales, and a leading Australian sociologist, scenario planner, and futures thinker. I took a course on futurology with him two decades ago, and it was one of the most interesting courses I ever studied. This was not due to Encel himself, at least not directly, who appeared in human form only at the first lecture.
He told us he was a very busy and important man, and would certainly not have the time to spare to attend any of the subsequent lectures in the course. Instead, he had arranged a series of guest lectures for us, on a variety of topics related to futures studies, futurology, and forecasting. Because he was genuinely important, his professional network was immense and impressive, and so the guest speakers he had invited were a diverse group of prominent people, from different industries, academic disciplines, professions, politics and organizations, each with interesting perspectives or experiences on the topic of futures and prognosis. The talks they gave were absolutely fascinating.
To accommodate the guest speakers, the lectures were held in the early evening, after normal working hours. Because of this unusual timing, and because the course assessment comprised only an essay, student attendance at the lectures soon fell sharply. Often I turned up to find I was the only student present. These small classes presented superb opportunities to meet and talk with the guest speakers, conversations that usually adjourned to a cafe or a bar nearby. I learnt a great deal about the subject of forecasting, futures, strategic planning, and prognosis, particularly in real organizations with real stakeholders, from these interactions. Since he chose these guests, I thus sincerely count Sol Encel as one of the important influences on my thinking about futures.
Here, in a tribute from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, is a radio broadcast Encel made in 1981 about Andrei Sakharov. It is interesting that there appears to have been speculation in the West then has to how the so-called father of the Soviet nuclear bomb could have become a supporter of dissidents. This question worried, too, the KGB, whose answer was one Vadim Delone, poet. And here, almost a month after Solomon Encel’s death, is his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald. One wonders why this took so long to be published.
Crowd-sourcing for scientific research
Computers are much better than most humans at some tasks (eg, remembering large amounts of information, tedious and routine processing of large amounts of data), but worse than many humans at others (eg, generating new ideas, spatial pattern matching, strategic thinking). Progress may come from combining both types of machine (humans, computers) in ways which make use of their specific skills. The journal Nature yesterday carried a report of a good example of this: video-game players are able to assist computer programs tasked with predicting protein structures. The abstract:
People exert large amounts of problem-solving effort playing computer games. Simple image- and text-recognition tasks have been successfully ‘crowd-sourced’ through games, but it is not clear if more complex scientific problems can be solved with human-directed computing. Protein structure prediction is one such problem: locating the biologically relevant native conformation of a protein is a formidable computational challenge given the very large size of the search space. Here we describe Foldit, a multiplayer online game that engages non-scientists in solving hard prediction problems. Foldit players interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and user-friendly versions of algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology, while they compete and collaborate to optimize the computed energy. We show that top-ranked Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not only the conformational space but also the space of possible search strategies. The integration of human visual problem-solving and strategy development capabilities with traditional computational algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific problems.”
References:
Seth Cooper et al. [2010]: Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. Nature, 466: 756–760. Published: 2010-08-05.
Eric Hand [2010]: Citizen science: people power. Nature 466, 685-687. Published 2010-08-04.
The Foldit game is here.
Railtrack and the Joint-Action Society
For some time, I have been writing on these pages that the currently-fashionable paradigm of the Information Society is inadequate to describe what most of us do at work and play, or to describe how computing technologies support those activities (see, for example, recently here, with a collection of posts here). Most work for most people in the developed world is about coordinating their actions with those of others – colleagues, partners, underlings, bosses, customers, distributors, suppliers, publicists, regulators, und so weiter. Information collection and transfer, while often important and sometimes essential to the co-ordination of actions, is not usually itself the main game.
Given the extent to which computing technologies already support and enable human activities (landing our large aircraft automatically when there is fog, for example), the InfoSoc paradigm, although it may describe well the transmission of zeros and ones between machines, is of little value in understanding what these transmissions mean. Indeed, the ur-text of the Information Society, Shannon’s mathematical theory of communications (Shannon 1948) explicitly ignores the semantics of messages! In place of the InfoSoc metaphor, we need another new paradigm, a new way to construe what we are all doing. For now, let me call it the Joint-Action Society, although this does not quite capture all that is intended.
I am pleased to learn that I am not alone in my views about InfoSoc. I recently came across an article by the late Peter Martin, journalist, editor and e-businessman, about the lessons from that great disaster of privatization of Railtrack in the UK. (In the 1980s and 90s, the French had grand projets while the British had great project management disasters.) Here is Martin, writing in the FT in October 2001 (the article does not seem to be available online):
Railtrack had about a dozen prime contractors, which in turn farmed out the work to about 2,000 subcontractors. Getting this web of relationships to work was a daunting task. Gaps in communication, and the consequent “blame culture” are thought to be important causes of the track problems that led to the Hatfield crash which undermined Railtrack’s credibility.
. . .
These practical advantages of wholesale outsourcing rely, however, on unexamined assumptions. It is these that the Railtrack episode comprehensively demolishes.
The first belief holds that properly specified contracts can replicate the operations of an integrated business. Indeed, on this view, they may be better than integration because everyone understands what their responsibilities are, and their incentives are clear and tightly defined.
This approach had a particular appeal to governments, as they attempted to step back from the minutiae of delivering public services. British Conservative governments used the approach to break up monolithic nationalised industries into individual entities, such as power generators and distributors.
They put this approach into effect at the top level of the railway system by splitting the task of running the track and the signalling (Railtrack’s job) from the role of operating the trains. It is not surprising that Railtrack, born into this environment, carried the approach to its logical conclusion in its internal operation.
. . .
In 1937, the Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase had explained that companies perform internally those tasks for which the transactional costs of outsourcing are too high.
What fuelled the outsourcing boom of the 1990s was the second unexamined assumption – that the cost of negotiating, monitoring and maintaining contractual relationships with outsourcing partners had dropped sharply, thanks to the revolution in electronic communications. The management of a much bigger web of contractors – indeed, the creation of a “virtual company” – became feasible.
In practice, of course, the real costs of establishing and maintaining contracts are not those of information exchange but of establishing trust, alignment of interests and a common purpose. Speedy and cheap electronic communications have only a minor role to play in this process, as Coase himself pointed out in 1997.
. . .
And perhaps that is the most useful lesson from the Railtrack story: it is essential to decide what tasks are vital to your corporate purpose and to devote serious resources to achieving them. Maintaining thousands of miles of steel tracks and stone chippings may be a dull, 19th century kind of task. But as Railtrack found, if you can’t keep the railway running safely, you haven’t got a business.”
Reference:
Peter Martin [2001]: Lessons from Railtrack. The collapse has demolished some untested assumptions about outsourcing. Financial Times, 2001-10-09, page 21.
Claude E. Shannon [1948/1963]: The mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, October and November 1948. Reprinted in: C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver [1963]: The Mathematical Theory of Communication. pp. 29-125. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Illinois Press.
Symphonic Form
Composer and musicologist Kyle Gann has an interesting post citing David Fanning’s quotation of Russian musicologist Mark Aranovsky’s classification of the movements of the typical symphony, a classification which runs as follows:
- Movement #1: Homo agens: man acting, or in conflict (Allegro)
- Movement #2: Homo sapiens: man thinking (Adagio)
- Movement #3: Homo ludens: man playing (Scherzo), and
- Movement #4: Homo communis: man in the community (Allegro)
This makes immense sense, and provides a neat explanation of the structure of symphonic form. Many of my long-standing questions are answered with this classification. Why normally 4 movements? Why is the first one normally louder and faster and more serious than the next two? And why does the first movement often seem more like an ending movement than a beginning one? In other words, why is the climax to the first movement so often more impressive and more compelling than that for the other movements? Why is there usually a middle movement that is noticeably less serious than the outer movements? Why is the last movement often in rondo form? Why do some composers (eg, Mozart, Mendelssohn) include a fugue in their last movements? Why do some composers include a song to brotherly love (Beethoven) or a hymn (Mendelssohn) in their last movements?
Of great relevance here is that the German word for movement (of a musical work) is Satz, meaning “sentence”. In the German art-musical tradition, a musical work first makes some claim or states some musical position, and then (in Sonata form) argues the case for that claim by exploring the musical consequences of the theme (or themes), or of its component musical parts, before returning to a re-statement of the initial claim (theme) at the end of the movement. In this tradition, the theme, being a claim which is developed, does not have to be very interesting or melodious in itself, since its purpose is not to please the ear but to announce a position. Beethoven, for example, was notorious for not writing good melodies: his most famous theme, that of the first movement of the 5th Symphony, has just 4 notes, of which 3 are identical and are repeated together. But he was a superb developer, perhaps one of the best, of themes, even of such apparently insignificant ones as this one.
The distinction between writing good melodies and developing them well strikes me as very similar to that between problem-solving and theory-building mathematicians – both these cases essentially involve a difference between exploring and exploiting.