In just four years, everyone on earth may be an author. When books were the dominant form of publishing, a small minority of the world’s population had their words published. Now, Twitter, Facebook, and social networking sites are making authors into the majority. From the year 1400 to 2000, according to Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed, the number of published authors rose by tenfold every century. For the past decade, authorship has grown by tenfold every year. Eventually, the authors predict that everyone on earth will be published.

Near-universal authorship is changing society, Pelli and Bigelow write. People are “trading privacy for influence,” and businesses and governments are being forced to adapt to the power that individuals now wield. People who fret about illiteracy throughout the world may soon extend their concern to people who can’t publish.

That concern is misguided, Albert Jay Nock writes for the American Conservative. Universal literacy creates near-universal mediocrity in literature, according to Nock. Teaching the world to read creates a market for schlock that forces worthwhile literature out of the market. In the article, which is fittingly behind a paywall, Nock writies:

The average literate person being devoid of reflective power but capable of sensation, his literacy creates a demand for a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation; and this form of literature, being the worst in circulation, fixes the value of all the rest and tends to drive it out.

Nock laments mass literacy for the bad writing it creates. He should prepare for mass authorship.

Source: Seed, American Conservative (subscription required)

Image by  Foxtongue , licensed under  Creative Commons .

UPDATE: We tried to reach Albert Jay Nock for a comment, but found the conversation a trifle one-sided. Indeed, Nock has been dead for more than half a century. We regret the error.

When Dick Cheney and his minions defend torture saying, “it worked,” they are channeling Joseph Stalin, according to Andrew Brown in the American Conservative. “One of the first disconcerting things to discover when you inquire into the interrogation habits of the KGB” Brown writes, “is that their practices weren’t defined as torture at all.” Leaving aside the infamous waterboarding, practices like sleep deprivation and stress positions were cornerstones of both the KGB’s terror and that of Bush and Cheney.

Of course torture “works” in getting information, Brown concedes, but that information is inherently unreliable. The confessions extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other targets of U.S. torture have the same evidentiary value as confessions that Trotskyists were responsible for sabotaging the Soviet economy in the 1930s. Brown writes, “Torture is a means of forcing people to lie to us, under circumstances that compel us to believe them, because otherwise we would have to face the truth about ourselves.”

The arguments made for torture, including the ones made to the continuation of torture policies under President Obama, are couched in the language of pragmatism. “Pragmatism is not a substitute for philosophical rigor, however,” David Schimke wrote for the latest issue of Utne Reader, “and it cannot be used as an excuse to ignore the past.” In this case, an absolute abolition of torture is both pragmatic and moral, since torture cannot reliably deliver the truth and undoubtedly serves to hurt the U.S. moral standing in the world.

Sources: American Conservative (subscription required), Utne Reader 

“My retirement plan is to be found stiff and cold at my writing desk.”

—Sandra Steingraber, “Sounds Like a Lot to Me,” from Orion

“Avoid internalizing society’s sexism, racism, ageism—pick an ism, any ism. See things from others’ points of view. Watch less TV. Sing and dance more.”

—Paul Krassner (interviewed by David Kupfer), “In the Jester’s Court,” from the Sun

“Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?”

—John Derbyshire, “How Radio Wrecks the Right,” from the American Conservative 

“…We face the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Shit is real.”

—Andre Torres, editor’s note, from Wax Poetics (not available online)

  Sources: Orion, The American Conservative, The Sun, Wax Poetics

Bipartisanship is en vogue under the Obama administration. Even though politicians aren’t working together yet, they’re accusing each other of not being bipartisan enough. That spirit of cooperation is effectively killing the far right and the far left wings of American politics, Jack Ross writes for the American Conservative, and destroying the political principles that people once stood on.

When movements such as the liberal netroots of Daily Kos are integrated into mainstream politics, according to Ross, they lose their opposition voices and fail to truly challenge the political establishment. The problem is that without a vibrant fringe, politics tends to sacrifice principles in the name of compromise.

If the recent stimulus package is any guide, that spirit of bipartisanship hasn’t swept Washington DC just yet. After the bill past in spite a near-total lack of support from Republicans, Senator Lindsey Graham responded saying, “If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country’s screwed.”

Source: American Conservative