White consumption of hip hop…didn’t just mean a bigger market for hip hop; it also pointed to the fact that what soon became the most profitable and desired images in hip hop reflected the ideas about black people most commonly held by its audiences.

The cycle looks like this: mainstream white consumers drive hyper-demand for these images (whites are raised on images of black thugs – images that appeal and seem authentic to whites), thereby fueling higher sales given the size of the white consumer market, which then encourages unscrupulous corporations to demand more of these images to make greater profits.

Black people didn’t look at a map and say, “hey, let’s migrate to the ghetto, that’s a good place to live.”

On Wednesday, the feature elves dropped off a new addition to Facebook’s long-suffering Groups feature: “Groups for Schools.” Colleges and universities can now have super-groups, accessible only to users with email addresses valid at the college, which aggregate sub-groups for various segments of campus. In my case, this is Groups at MIT.

Groups at MIT’s inaccuracies are chuckle-worthy. In real life, I am Course 14 and Course 17 (read: majoring in Economics and Political Science), a resident of Random Hall, and a member of the Class of 2012. But all of Facebook’s top suggestions for sub-groups I should join are dorms in which I do not reside, academic fields which I do not study, and graduating classes of which I am not a member. The top three suggestions are “East Campus” (a dorm); “Course 6″ (EECS); and “Course 18″ (Mathematics).

Facebook’s algorithms are trying to nail down my identity. They are doing a pretty lackluster job of it. Facebook failed to identify “me,” I think, for a fairly obvious reason: the central principle of Groups at MIT’s recommendation system seems to be “How many friends does he have in this sub-group?” Naturally, I would have many friends in a group for East Campus, where I spend much of my time, or for Courses 6 and 18, respectively the first- and third-most popular majors on campus.

These errors are amusing, but their broad implications are a bit troubling. The core problem Facebook is trying to solve is the same one at the heart of many high-tech services that work on imperfect information: “Given the data that I can see, what can I extrapolate about reality?” Groups at MIT rephrases it thus: “Given what I know about this person’s friends, which sub-groups will be the most appealing?” Netflix’s recommendation systems too: “Based on what movies this user likes, what other movies will this user like?” Such services mine your data in order to draw a conclusion about how best to achieve their goals.

In both of these cases, mismatches are probably harmless or amusing. You may not want to be bombarded with inaccurate group suggestions, and you may not appreciate the hours spent watching Daredevil when you were hoping for something on the caliber of Iron Man. But these are minor annoyances, the electronic equivalent of trying to find your keys. The issue is that computer engineers are trying to solve the same problem of imperfect information in much more important territory.

Consider algorithmic dispute resolution, one of Chris’s areas of expertise: “Given that this content has been marked as abusive, what are the odds that the content is actually abusive?” Or spam filters, which have a well-known proclivity for catching legitimate, and sometimes important, messages: “Given how users have reacted to emails like this, what are the odds that this email is spam?” Or smart infrastructure: “Given what these sensors are indicating, what are the odds that the system needs an automated intervention?”

In all of these cases, when the algorithms start failing, we can experience serious problems. Chris documented a case where links to a blog post of his were blocked for abuse on Facebook. The blog post in question documented a political link that had itself been blocked for abuse on Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms for determining abuse had decided that you could not post the link, and you could not post links that discussed your inability to discuss the link. Apparently, the first rule of Facebook’s “Report Abuse” button is that you do not talk about Facebook’s “Report Abuse” button.

Facebook ultimately apologized, and I attribute no bad intentions to the company. But legitimate speech was quashed because of an abuse in the algorithms that identify abuse. Facebook’s anti-spam system alone checks 25 billion items daily. We do not know what the error rate is. One percent? A tenth of a percent? Even a hundredth of a percent means 2.5 million items daily are improperly marked as spam. How much speech is incorrectly disrupted as an inherent risk of doing business on Facebook?

When designing computers to solve problems, we need to take great care with potential pitfalls. Users can lie or be mistaken: just because users mark content as abusive does not mean that it actually is. Machines only have as much context as we can give them: Just because I am Facebook friends with probably a hundred students in Course 6 does not mean that I have any interest in joining a Course 6 Facebook group. Developers may not think through their users’ behaviors: just because a user has sent email to another user does not mean those two people are friends. Users can outguess algorithms; malicious hackers can learn to attack better than automated computer security knows to defend.

More and more such decision problems are being relegated to algorithms. And that means that ensuring quality algorithms becomes more important. I do not want to put myself in the way of progress—as someone who has been getting hundreds of (mercifully filtered) spam messages daily for the last two weeks, I recognize that there are great benefits to be reaped by applying algorithms well. I ideally want my inbox clean, my network secure, and my buildings and utilities smart. Of course, to achieve these goals we will have to accept a nonzero error rate. But that does not mean that we should not try to make the error rate very, very low.

Paul Kominers, MIT ’12, studies economics and political science.

The word of which ‘data’ is purportedly the plural has simply disappeared; this means two things. Firstly, passively, it creates a linguistic space into which ‘data’ can drop – there is no ambiguity in using ‘data’ in a singular sense. Secondly, and more importantly, if ‘datum’ has effectively disappeared, it tells us that ‘data’ cannot be simply its plural; unanchored, it has moved away from this simply derived meaning, to a distinct and independent meaning of its own. It has accordingly accreted usage rules of its own, unencumbered by any latin past.

‘Data’ no longer means just one (damn) datum after another. Twentieth-century ‘data’ refers to a mass of raw information, which we measure rather than count, and this is as true now as it was when the word made its 1646 debut. This universal perception of data as measured rather than counted puts the word firmly and unambiguously in the same grammatical category as ‘coal’, ‘wheat’ and ‘ore’, which is that of the mass, or aggregate, noun. As such, it is always and unavoidably grammatically singular. We would never ask ‘how many wheat do you have?’ or say that ‘the ore are in the train’ if we wished to be thought a competent speaker of english; in the same way, and to the same extent, we may not ask ‘how many data do you have?’ or say ‘the data are in the file’ without committing a grammatical error.

I now have to unlearn using data as a plural and instead begin reusing it in the way I intuitively learned it; as an aggregate singular noun.

In support of his subversive educational enterprise Nelson has mustered both heavy artillery and covering fire. The former comes from Benchmark Capital, the VC behemoth which has invested $25 million dollars to found Minerva. The latter comes from the long list of luminaries Nelson has recruited to form his advisory board, including such superstars as Larry Summers (former President of Harvard), Senator Bob Kerrey (former head of the New School), and Pat Harker (president of the University of Delaware and former dean of Wharton, Nelson's alma mater).

I am a big believer in educational access. Education is awesome. Extending education to those who cannot presently achieve it is extra awesome.

And yet I'm troubled by the Minerva Project; specifically, by the lack of credible answers to a few questions that the painfully shallow news coverage have yet to actually address. So I'm posting them here and trying to think through what some of the answers might be. 

Question 1: Who will the students be?

According to Minerva's website, their admissions process will rely "strictly on the world's most demanding intellectual standards, while giving no weight to lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate." For the sake of argument I'll accept this as a reasonably meritocratic mission, at least for an online university that doesn't have to worry about cultivating diverse perspectives in a brick-and-mortar classroom.

But let's compare two quotes from adjacent paragraphs in this Economist interview:

“I don’t want or need to disrupt Harvard. I care about the kid who should have got into Harvard but didn’t,” says Mr Nelson.

…

The plan is for admission standards to be higher than current Ivy League levels,

Wait, what? Who wrote this? Forget that: who edited it? Who allowed these two sentences to appear so closely together and make my brain feel like it'd been filled with coarse sand?

If Minerva has higher standards then Harvard, than how is a student who can't get into Harvard supposed to get into Minerva? Even the most cynical critics of elite admissions processes tend to make their cases at the perceived academic margins (legacies, athletes, disadvantaged students, etc) as opposed to the intellectual core of your class. Put another way: any student who is capable of meeting some undefined "higher standard" of admission than that held by an elite institution would by definition be one of the most attractive applicants in their pool. In other words the kid who "should" have gotten in already will have. 

An article in the Atlantic described Minerva's mission slightly differently:

[Minerva is for] those students who are being shut out, whether it's a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts…Worldwide, [Nelson] believes there are anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 students who fit his target demographic.

This is a different argument, one which does not suffer from the incongruity above. Here, Minerva is cast not so much as a university for Schrödinger's student, who simultaneously is and is not one of the top students in the world. This goal is much more modest: Minerva is intended for very good students who wanted to attend elite schools which could not find the space for them.

The problem with this goal is that it is driven, not by the merit or match of the educational environment, but for the desire for prestige, affirming, shining, oily; the sweet and sensual nectar of life-giving prestige.

Take the reference above of a "smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown." This is a poignant example: it sounds tones of rejection and loss which resonate with everyone.

But hopefully the reason that student had their heart set on Brown was because they felt it was the right match for them: because they loved its open curriculum and brick buildings and Providence location and fantastically creative culture and all of the other things that make Brown Brown. But just like that state school isn't Brown, neither is Minerva. In fact, the only thing Minerva has – or could have – over that solid state school is the glorious glow of prestige descending like an angel from the advisory board on high.

I did not attend (or apply to) MIT as an undergrad. But I did have a prestigious private school I was in love with. I didn't get in. I went to a solid state school. I wasn't as happy as I thought I would have been at the private school, but that was not because of the (lack of) prestige: it was because my state school didn't have all of the things that made me fall in love with the private school in the first place. Neither would Minerva. 

When viewed from this angle, Minerva only solves one of two problems: 1) a problem which doesn't credibly exist, or 2) a problem of providing prestige to those who value it above all else. Either seems like questionable ground on which to found an institution. 

Question 2: How will they pay?

But let's assume, for a moment, that there are hidden masses of  brilliant spurned students who feel matched to Minerva. How will they pay for it?

Nelson makes a big deal of the fact that Minerva's thus-unspecified tuiton will be "half that of the Ivy League or less." The Atlantic ballparks this at $20,000 annually or less, which is indeed less expensive than MIT without financial aid, which will run a wealthy family north of $50,000 a year.

However, MIT, like most of our prestigious peers, gives an awful lot of money away to students who need it: last year, our financial aid budget exceeded $100 million. And we do this because we try to make the best education in the world affordable to the best students in the world.

This is particularly relevant to Minerva's target demographic: smart students in the developing world. We give a lot of money to these students. And I mean A LOT. OF MONEY.

Why? Because otherwise, they couldn't afford it. MIT is extremely expensive in America, where median household income is about $50,000 a year. It's unfathomably expensive in the rest of the world, with a median global income of $1,700 per annum. And of the difference is provided out of our own pockets because international students aren't eligible for federal aid. But we still must – and gladly – give every student we admit enough money to attend.

These financial realities are part of the reason why international spots are capped at a certain percentage of our class. It gives us the freedom to take the best students in the world, without having to compromise our process by taking only those international students who can pay, or rejecting top international students because they can't.

So how is Minerva going to make itself accessible to all of these students in foreign countries? Nelson says he wants to make Minerva the elite university of choice for "the child of a Foxconn line operator in China." But according to Forbes, average income in China is only $10,200 annually. It's hard to imagine even a relatively well-paid worker being able to balance a tuition check with rent and food and everything else. In short: if you don't have financial aid available to your best international applicants, you will not be able to enroll and educate your best international applicants. You will instead be left with a very, very small number of good students who can pay, and a larger number of not-so-good-students who can pay. This creates obvious problems for Minerva's stated goal of high educational standards.

But while discussions of financial aid appear nowhere on Minerva's website, a recent tweet by them assured me that aid would be offered.

So what kind of aid will it be?

I apologize if this sounds cynical but I am extremely skeptical that a for-profit university is going to be profligate with grants. All colleges are businesses, but some are more businesses than others: in 2009 the President of Harvard made a very respectable $700,000, while the CEO of Strayer (a chain of for-profit universities) banked over $40 million. Believe it or not when you don't give any of your money away you can make an awful lot of it!

This is not to say that for-profit schools can't give financial aid. To the contrary, as this article reports, the average for-profit college receives 75% of its revenue from federal grants and loans. This is accomplished in part by aggressively recruiting educationally risky students as a vehicle for securing federal aid, a set of practices which led to the recent Congressional investigation of for-profit colleges for educational fraud. Consider that though for-profit colleges only enroll about 12% of the nation's students, those students are responsible for over 50% of student loan defaults.

If I may draw a very deliberate analogy to the most recent debt-fueled financial crisis: counterparties (the student and the federal government) take on all of the risk of an asset of a questionable value, while the university, playing the role of financial intermediary, cleans up on the fees (the federal financial aid).

But even this is beside the point, as Nelson envisions "only 5-10% of Minerva's students will be U.S. citizens", which is to say that only a very small portion of Minerva's students will even be eligible for federal aid.

So what happens with the other 90% of international students who need 90% of their tuition covered?

There is, as Forbes reported one huge and relevant difference between Chinese and American households: debt, and the lack thereof. "The average US household debt is 136% of household income, compared to 17% for the Chinese." This is especially true in education. Student loan debt in America now exceeds $1 trillion; the domestic loan market is already near the saturation point. But the emerging markets of the developing world are not nearly so highly leveraged in higher education.

Suppose Minerva provides not grants, and not federal aid, but instead extensive private loans to the students of the developing world. Then, the relevant questions of the university change from "what education can we provide at what standard" to "are we achieving a sufficient return on investment for our student loans."

If this is the case, then the old insight about ad-supported media maps nicely to Minerva. Remember: when you watch a show, or read a newspaper for free, you're not consuming the product of content; you are the product, and your attention is being sold to advertisers. If Minerva's financial aid is primarily private loans at high rates of interest to underleveraged students in the developing world, then I'd be willing to bet the real product is the debt being sold to investors. 

If that's true, then Minerva isn't a university: it's an emerging markets fund hiding behind the mask of higher education.

Question 3: What's really going on?

As far as I see it there are two explanations here.

Explanation 1 is that Ben Nelson, altruistic visionary, earnestly believes, against the odds and experience of literally every other educational institution, that there are hundreds of thousands of students in the world who are:

• of equivalent or higher academic caliber than current students of elite, prestigious universities, but who are not admitted to elite, prestigious universities, and
• have the resources to pay Minerva's tuition, which will likely many times global median income, without compromising the first two characteristics or being plunged into hopeless, crippling debt, because
• they have been given generous, reasonable aid by the benevolent benefactors who inhabit the halls of high tech venture capital.

Explanation 2 is that Ben Nelson, Wharton grad and former M&A consultant, has realized that:

• there is more international demand for prestigious, name-brand American education than there is supply, and
• if he can conjure prestige ex nihilo then he can tap that demand by distinguishing Minerva from the unsavory, disreputable actors already choking the for-profit university market, and
• in the process, and of financial necessity, load his comparatively underleveraged international students with loans that will return an appreciable rate to his investors

Now, I don't know which one of these explanations is true, but I do know which one I personally think is a hell of a lot more likely, and hint: it's not the one that involves relying on the altruism of venture capitalists. In fact, in the Minerva spirit of treating colleges as investment properties, I came to conclusion that I didn't even care which explanation was true, because either way it's awful junk that I'd short in a second if given the chance. 

The truth is that if you're a student (especially an international student) who can't go to a place like MIT but still wants to learn something, the situation isn't great, but it's better than it ever has been before. Here at MIT we give away OCW and MITx for free; I also highly recommend Khan Academy and Stanford's Engineering Everywhere.

Granted, it might not be the same as actually attending an elite school with a terrific education and meritocratic admissions and financial aid.

But then again, neither is the Minerva Project.

(originally posted to MITAdmissions).

Jay opened the forum in what was for me a fascinating fashion: by situating journalism in its historical social and technological contexts. Some of it was familiar (we had printing presses, and now we have the Internet) but much of it was new to me. For example, Jay spent a good deal of time discussing how early journalists in the West legitimated themselves by describing the first individuals to report on the proceedings of Parliament. Because not all of the public “out of doors” knew what was happening, early journalists had a very simple claim to authority: presence. “I was here. You were not. Let me tell you what happened.”

This dynamic was produced by the complex interaction of many legal and technological factor, but perhaps the most salient property was this: the means of information production were scarce. Cameras were scarce, notepads were scarce, presses were scarce, print was scarce, space was scarce.

But as Jay’s colleague Clay Shirky (among others) has observed, in the digital age the chief scarcity is not information anymore. The journalist can say “I was here”, but she can no longer say so exclusively; a thousand other people were there as well, holding up their cell phones and posting videos to YouTube. Indeed, the crux of the crisis in journalism is, as many have noted, this change from information scarcity to information abundance. It affects the profession of journalism – by which I mean, as we seem to have long meant, a particular profession performed through and associated with the media of newspapers and broadcast – at every level. But now there are people seeing and recording what only field reporters once could see and record. And, at the other end of the office hierarchy, there is no longer the same pressing physical scarcity driving editors: you don’t need to cut content for on the front page when your front page can be as large as you need it to be. In other words, what journalism has looked like was not only because of what journalists wanted it to be, but also because of the shape of the technological vessel into which it was poured. As Jay said, 3 broadcast channels wasn’t a thoughtful, intelligent, educated choice made to strike a precise balance: it was a historical accident, produced by a contemporary confluence of legal, technological, and economic factors. It shouldn’t be dismissed, but it also shouldn’t be idealized.

There was a consensus among Jay, Ethan, and I think much of the audience (certainly myself) that the most important scarcity nowadays is the scarcity of attention, and that there was an increasing trend towards (reliance upon?) information curators like Maria Brainpicker to help filter newly-abundant information. Or, to paraphrase Shirky: we’ve switched from “filter, then publish, to publish, then filter.”

To me this raises a very interesting question:

We know something about how the profession of journalism worked, by which I mean we know something about how it was legitimated and reproduced. It was both necessitated and legitimated by physical scarcity (as described by Jay), and it was reproduced by association with particular sorts of institutions and physical media, be they radio, television, the New York Times or the journalism classes Jay teaches at NYU.

What I don’t know – and I’m not sure if anyone knows – is how this new profession of information curators works.

How are these information curators trained, legitimated, reproduced? If a primitive journalist relied on “I was there, you were not” and physical media, in what ephemeral turf does a curator of information and attention stake her claim? Will accrediting institutions give rise to these curators? Will they instead be driven by modes of practice or power relations which are very different from those in traditional journalism? An interaction of the two? Something else entirely?

In his answer to my question Jay made a very good point, which is to study those who are already successful curators to see what they do. I think this is the right way to go. Every day, I read everything posted by TalkingPointsMemo, BoingBoing, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Colossal, Barstool Boston, and a variety of other sites which I think are characterized by a curatorial dynamic more than anything else. But how did they become what they are? How did people come to trust them? Is it taste? Is it luck? Is it a method of audience relation? Will future information curators be people who have great subject matter expertise (we will all subscribe to THE authority on a field), or will they instead be people who can curate many conversations and translate the complexities into the vernacular for the rest of us (as Maggie Koerth-Baker does for BoingBoing?). Are the answers to any (or all) of these questions true for all people, or are they themselves specific to domains and their interpretive communities, and if so how?

I think this question is a bit more complex than the usual “how do I make a great video that will get a lot of views” or SEO stuff. It’s a matter of from where curatorial organizations derive (or how they produce) their own legitimacy. We kinda sorta know how journalists did it (“I’m there. You’re not.”) But what about the future?

If anyone has any interesting ideas – or knows of people who have already studied this question – I’d love to hear them. And I’ll post up a liveblog / video of the forum as it becomes available from Civic.

e: Liveblog up, courtesy of Matt Stempeck.

e2: Video and audio here.

The story blew up over the weekend, with summaries on Slashdot, Gizmodo, and BoingBoing. Within hours Foursquare killed the app’s access to it’s location information too.

In the immediate term this constitutes a win for Facebook privacy – something about which I’ve blogged extensively.

In the long term, though, it doesn’t fix anything. The problem is not the app, creepy as it may have been; the problem is the ecosystem which the app inhabits, the nutrients which support it, the root system upon which it draws for sustenance and support.

The problem, in other words, is that we have a design and information paradigm in which there is poor understanding among users about how and to whom their information is available, and a poor understanding by tech companies about how to design spaces in a manner which enables contextual integrity.

Shutting down “Girls Around Me” is akin to a gardener cutting off the head of a dandelion. It removes the most evident, colorful, obvious problem – but underneath the weed remains, and soon grows anew. Brownlee gets this. Hopefully others will too.

I’m one of those who is decidedly not a fan of the Kony 2012 movement. There’s the shady finances, the evangelical ties, the exclusion of African agency and, oh right, the seemingly important fact that Kony isn’t even in Uganda.

So why is Kony 2012 so popular? Probably for the reasons identified by the Nigerian author Teju Cole, as quoted here:

Seven thoughts on the banality of sentimentality.

1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.

2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.

5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.

7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

Another question to ask is how is Kony 2012 so powerful? How has their message propagated?

Invisible Children released a very powerful 30 minute documentary which received over 30 million views in 24 hours. It’s got lots of moving music, poignant shots, and terrible, misleading facts.

In many ways it reminds me of Loose Change 9/11. In 2005, when Loose Change broke out on Google Video and the early days of YouTube, it seemed like half the Internet watched it and began to think 9/11 was an inside job based on a lot of “facts” presented in a compelling narrative. The only problem was almost none of it were true. Specific claims which were made were false. But it was wrapped in a compelling narrative, and it was on video.

I have a feeling that the dynamics which drove Loose Change to success might be driving Kony 2012 too. Not just in terms of slacktivism but also in terms of a viral video which can be passed around and facts just presented to people to inject into their brains.

A user from Qingdao, China, downloaded the free application “Where’s My Water?” as the 25 billionth download from the App Store, Apple announced on Monday.

They won a $10,000 gift card to iTunes.

I always wondered what the end of humanity would look like. Now I know.

Though the software is installed on most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut analyzed its workings, revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience — ostensibly so carriers and phone manufacturers can do quality control.

But now he’s released a video actually showing the logging of text messages, encrypted web searches and, well, you name it.

CarrierIQ went after Eckhart, but the EFF came to his defense (thank you).

Here’s Eckhart’s dizzyingly comprehensive and alarming video breakdown of CarrierIQ:

As Wired notes, it’s not clear what CarrierIQ is doing or who they are giving this data to. All we know is that it is happening consistently, and, until now, in secret.

To roughly summarize the Atlantic argument: Lt. Pike, like all of us, is the product of an institution: the police force. Institutions socialize individuals into them. What Pike did is not as attributable to him as it is to the institutional practices of policing. And we should be focusing on those rather than the corporeal person through whom those practices manifested themselves.

In the discussion with Julian I pointed out that I don’t actually disagree with the merits of this argument. Like my good friend Will Frank, who in his thesis articulated something that had been stewing in my head for years in a less coherent fashion, I don’t believe that human beings have free will sufficient to meaningfully assign moral praise or blameworthiness. We are all fundamentally products of systems and of institutions; the behavior which comes out of us is not because of us, but because of what happened to us.

But I also feel strongly that it is OK – more than OK, it is important and necessary – to condemn Lt. Pike for his brutal actions, and to make a strong stand against them as things which are wrong and bad.

In the week or so since this discussion took place I’ve been trying to figure out how I can hold both of these ideas in my mind at the same time.

One explanation is relatively simple. Hard determinists of the insufficient will for praise/blameworthiness school don’t believe that actions don’t have an effect. It’s just that the actions (and their effects) aren’t meaningfully “yours.” But it’s not an argument from or for nihilism. It’s an argument about origin.

In other words, even if I realize that Lt. Pike acted as he did because of the institutional practices which manifested through him, and even if I think he thus isn’t truly accountable in a moral sense for his actions, I can still find the actions (and the forces which caused them) deplorable, and so deplore them. And I can still consider Lt. Pike, like an ax murderer, someone who is unsafe and unworthy to be in the general population.

But there is another dynamic this teases at: the problem of theory and practice.

It might be descriptively correct that Lt. Pike was a product of institutions. As a hard determinist, I would believe that. But in everyday life – in everyday politics – that isn’t a conversation you have. Instead, you have to have a conversation within the rhetorical hegemony of free will and individuals as agents and so forth.

In my posts with Julian I described this as “snowglobing the discussion.” What I meant by that metaphor was that these arguments about Lt. Pike the individual are trapped in a rhetorical snowglobe where things like independent actors and agency and will and so forth matter, and to a certain extent we need to engage within that space, even if, stepping outside the tiny false world of the snowglobe, we realize that it’s the institutional issues which are truly the problem. But that realization doesn’t make the argument inside the snowglobe any less important, because it’s inside the snowglobe where, you know, the argument is located, and where policies are advanced, and where minds are changed, and so forth.

I have the incredible good fortune to be taking CMS 790 at MIT this semester. It’s an introduction to core theories and methodologies of media studies taught by department head William Uricchio. And it’s a really mind-expanding class.

The other day we were talking about paratexts and deconstructionism and hermeneutics and all that fun stuff and one of the other grad students – Abe – brought up this dilemma. He’s an MIT employee in one of the academic game research labs but also a CMS student, and he talked about the difficulty of balancing the insight of everything being interpretive and floating and so on with the practical need to, you know, get funding for your lab, when your funders want numbers and metrics and objective goals. And the basic question was: well, maybe these understandings of interpretation and deconstruction are accurate, but are they helpful in practical, day-to-day things you need to do?

I brought up the Lt. Pike issue above and the whole debate over will vs institutional power. I said the same thing as Abe, which is basically that, in my example, the hard determinist angle might be true, but it’s not an argument which you can generally have, and so there are these multiple layers, and you have to figure out which layer you’re operating in to know how to do the work you want to do.

Professor Uricchio, in response, said it’s all about interpretive communities. And I think that’s right, but I also feel like there is this real layering of communities as well. Each layer of unpacked meaning and interpretation is wrapped within another layer of meaning and interpretation. And basically you have to engage with each / any / all of them. Lt. Pike is both an institutional product and a individual actor. A GAMBIT game is both an inevitably meaningless experience waiting to be deconstructed and a concrete definable thing with certain markets and targets and historical attributes. Which thing it is – and how you engage with it – just depends on which rhetorical, interpretive babushka you happen to be located in at that moment.