Now for some pointless musing about what’s really going on. The point of SOPA/PIPA is not to combat piracy in the sense that most people understand it. I finally figured out what’s going on when I realized that for people supporting SOPA, the biggest internet pirate isn’t some torrent site like The Pirate Bay, it’s Google.

The “secret” plan isn’t to censor the internet, or take down pirate sites, or throw Google/Facebook/Wikipedia offline. The goal is to maximize revenue for existing intellectual property and the method is straightforward crony capitalism.

1. Finance political campaigns.
2. Lobby for a laws that provide leverage.
3. Negotiate lucrative blanket license agreements with major players.

Nobody in Hollywood cares about real piracy because most smart people realize that there isn’t a lot of money there. The people who use sites with pirated content aren’t easily converted into paying customers. This law will do nothing to shut down sites like The Pirate Bay or prevent people from using them. Instead, this law is aimed squarely at more lucrative targets, with the intention of facilitating a transfer of wealth from companies like Google/Facebook/Twitter to associations of content creators.

My prediction: If SOPA/PIPA pass then some form of step 3 won’t be far behind.

This seems like a new and different equilibrium, one that hasn’t ever been explored at superpower scale. For every warrantless wiretap and NSA datamining sweep, we have videos of cops beating protesters, wikileaks, and open mics. These moments allow us all to reacquire a shared truth, a common state of being. This happened. There’s no denying it. Information flows in all directions. The truth does not just want to be free, it wants to be ever present.

For every dusty DEA agent secretly slapping a transponder on a beater car (how depressing that job must be), we have a new revelation about the private lives of Texas judges, or the free hand NYC lieutenants take towards the liberal application of pepper spray. These things don’t have to be whispered about. They don’t even have to be reported. They can just be shown.

I guess sometimes I feel like both the state and the people think they’re looking through one-way mirrors.

It’s a window people. A window.

Contra Deadspin, I think this is the biggest sports scandal in modern history. Yes, the OJ murder was a circus, but it was a single (and terrible) crime of violence by a lone individual that was investigated and prosecuted in a timely fashion. What this situation at PSU exposes is the compromised moral center of the entire institution. As we look into this PSU mess, we ought to look at ourselves and more importantly our participation in institutions closer to home. I’m not saying there’s a Sandusky at the center of football programs all over the country. What I am saying is that the same moral calculus exists for everybody else. Football is king. Football fans are the great enablers. And nobody in any position of power is willing to peak inside and criticize the machine.

I’m a recent convert to fandom. I’m a student at a big time football school (some say the biggest). I enjoy watching the games. I think the massive tailgating that goes on around Austin on game day is a good and positive expression of community in a world that otherwise likes to strip away community in the face of acerbic progress. And all of this sets up a space where the main players fail to properly evaluate the toll of big time (and big money) athletics on many student athletes, or the way the educational mission of a large and varied institution is reduced to being a conduit for huge television deals. Because student athletes are not properly compensated (and are forced into grey and black market transactions), and because coaches and programs extract disproportionate rents due to NCAA regulations, as long as the BCS remains an “old boys club” and entertainers on ESPN make bank while the educational institutions themselves hemorrhage cash amidst declining state support and rising tuition, I’m done with college football.

Done.

UPDATE: I guess I should be clear that I do think that Mack Brown runs one of the cleanest programs in college football, even as I think that football at the college level is hopelessly corrupt.

3. Be important enough to have an email problem.

One strange trend is for people (usually from an engineering background) to complain on blogs and things about having an email problem. The phrase “email is broken” is usually mentioned.

What’s broken is the engineering mindset. Chances are if you are important enough to have an email problem, you are important enough to have an assistant devoted to prioritizing your email. Weird that this obvious solution isn’t adopted more often. (Maybe it is — not every successful person with a blog complains about email.) Instead we’re subjected to endless blog posts. I may never be important enough to have an email problem, much less an assistant of any kind, but for some reason the endless complaining about email online from people that are really rubs me the wrong way.

First, the cost of attending a Swiss university as a Swiss citizen is like 400 CHF a semester. Now obviously you’ve got to live, and so living expenses rise above and beyond that paltry sum, but the idea of trying to scrounge around for tuition, or take out the kind of comically large loans that are required in the US is just unheard of. Second, a college education (or even a high school education) is somewhat uncommon. The Swiss tend to dispense with higher education in favor of a system of apprenticeship. From what I’ve heard this is generally a sweet deal, in part because basic wages in Switzerland are quite generous. A university or graduate education does not confer the kind of social status on people in Switzerland than it does in the US, and the opportunity cost in terms of forgone wages is higher, while the present value of future earnings is lower (many Swiss have to take their PhDs off of their resumes to get a job!).

It seems like all of this is the result of a fairly efficient government that doesn’t spend a lot of unnecessary capital on military or healthcare, above and beyond what is required for the civilized first-world lifestyle we typically expect, and a populace that is content with a comfortable life of reasonable ambition.

Trying to view the status quo in the US through this lens is difficult. I’ll try to cut a simple slice through all these different dynamics anyway, even though I’m biased and flirting with financial ruin in a costly US system with precious little reliable financial support. What I think I can say is that in some sense, there’s a whole lot less of a culture of competition in Switzerland. One might naively expect that the lack of competition (for status, jobs, etc) would result in lower skills across Swiss society in the disposition of various duties. This is, however, clearly not true. In fact, the extent of competition in the US serves to sort the capable from the driven, and in fact being capable is, in an ideal world, the only criteria that would matter for the disposition of any career related duties.

I suspect that on the American side of things, the current tumult among the young is markedly different than in the past. I’m tempted to insert The Great Stagnation hypothesis here and finish the argument, and my personal experience seems to support this notion, but the Swiss experience seems to imply that the costs of stagnation don’t have to be quite so high.

I remember a lunch discussion in Michigan that included a mix of senior faculty and graduate students. The topic of discussion was the trend for young people to stay at home later in life, and one of the senior faculty members commented on how plentiful opportunities were when he was coming up through the system as a young academic. The fruit was there just waiting to be plucked. There are even echos of this general malaise written into the Affordable Care Act where family plans can be applied to adult children as old as 26. 26 seems like a ridiculous age to still be receiving basic services from parents, but unemployment among that demographic has made this an appealing policy fix.

As a young American caught up in all of this whose career is basically fizzling (and even I started off in a better position than today’s college graduates only a few years behind me — who were, are, and remain basically screwed), you can imagine how all this makes me feel, out here on the vanguard of the bitter generation.

1. Hard to see how the mechanized adaptive exercises would transfer to non-STEM areas of basic knowledge.
2. Based on what little I know, problems in education are too complex for these kinds of solutions.
3. The people at TED are just totally blinded by privilege.
4. Also, there’s a bit of this going on.
5. Better education will probably require real public engagement, not the ad hoc interest of a philanthropist for the latest technological fad.

If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.

Salman Khan just personally fixed education for almost everyone on the world. Mark this day. He solved it. I’m stunned. #TED

Bullshit.