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From the Mixed-Up Files Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Last winter I passed by Strand Books and they had this gem of young adult fiction for sale for a measly 48¢. I wondered how this book differed from the movie I remembered as a child. I’m delighted to say that it doesn’t merely hold up, but is actually more rich and more enjoyable as an adult reader. This enjoyability is in part driven by some of the clever narrative structures Ms. Konigsburg used to frame the meta-awareness of the story as it is told. On top of this, it’s also a snapshot of New York before its gritty descent of the late seventies: it’s still a place where a visit with Grandma to the Museum and Schrafft’s with white gloves might have played out over a hazy, warm spring day.
The Gothic and My Grandmother
In other posts, I’ve written about my connection to that scary mountain music of Appalachian South. I’ve also written about how, when art connected to those themes reappears, I find it immediately connects with me. But the most personal connection I had with this material was my father’s mother.
Born and raised in Tennessee with frequent trips to North Texas (and back), she survived the lean times of the Great Depression with her two siblings, went on to marry a Brooklyn-born GI, was a stenographer, and was a loving — and gently eccentric — grandmother.
That said, there were a number of times during her visits to my safe, suburban home where she related some of the viscera, gore, and makeshift tourniquets required by farm life in the early 20th century. I recall her recounting her own grandmother telling her to “hide her eyes” as the field workers helped in the home exsanguination of a dead relative and poured the bowls of blood into the fields. In the days before refrigeration, this, in addition to wrapping the body in ice from the ice-house, was necessary to make sure the body was sufficiently undamaged so that the undertaker could do his work. In fact, this bloody work had a piece of furniture associated with it: the “cooling board,” which, in my memory, she called a “cooling chair.”
As I recall, my parents were out with my grandmother once looking at antiques and someone has mislabeled a piece as a “chaise lounge” which required my grandmother’s correction: “Oh, child, that’s a coolin’ chay-uh.”
Here Comes Everybody
I found this book on a sidewalk in Park Slope about four years ago and I just now got to reading it. I’ve seen Shirky quoted in tech media for many years and loved his talk on how the disruption of mass-urbanization during the 19th century occasioned the proliferation of gin-carts and kiosks that characterized the gin-swilling era we see humorously portrayed in “My Fair Lady.”
In any case, I’m sure this book was much more revolutionary closer to its publication date, but I appreciate that several of the central theses held up. Before getting to the content, I want to raise one frustration about the book’s structure.
Form
Non-fiction / pop-technical book are meant to be read and, in my experience, ought give their jewels away quickly so that the audience benefits and can decide when to go deeper (and how deep to go). This is the heart behind the inspectional reading technique: the belief that writers in this genre tell you what they’ll tell you before they tell it, so that you can track the arc before having made the first formal step.
While many parts of the book didn’t need a deeper read by me (someone within the industry), it’s structure left me guessing as to whether there was some important facet within the next paragraph. There was no real benefit in structuring the chapters like 19th century potboiler serials. The unveiling of the structure at the beginning is perfectly fine. To put it cynically, we’ve already bought the book, now it’s about our payoff, not the author’s.
To the content, though.
Content
The Thesis
Shirky, to his credit, never got too-terribly “Ooh” and “Aah” about insurgent technologies or the people behind them. A few of the technical sites used as examples have not aged well (poor Flicker, Dodgeball, etc.), but this is not a tarnish to Shirky’s observations in the least.
Ultimately, the argument that social technology will make it easier for groups to form and do work that could-not and would-not have been done within organizations like corporations and businesses has been borne out. Previously, to do something big, you needed to make sure that the outcome justified the overhead and synchronization costs. The Catholic Church or the US Army are examples of this. But if the costs of collaboration and group-forming don’t just drop, but fall to zero, people can choose to participate in “big things” for reasons like curiosity or interest. That’s the big idea, and it’s correct. Linux remains strong, the open source ethos has flourished, Wikipedia continues to grow.
Dangerous Possibilities for Collaboration
Shirky even points out that forms of undesirable collaboration were blossoming. While he mentions it at only a superficial depth, he’s diagnosing a lump that wound up metastisizing in the Russian interference with the 2016 election.
[media personality that mobilized a horde of collaborators to name, shame, and undermine someone] benefited from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it – the bargain he crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see.
Boy, that sent shivers up my spine. Consider the manufactured outrage through tools like Facebook.
“Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?”
Consider the “SWAT-ing” and “doxxing” operations that hijack the tools of civic order to harass and abuse.
Lastly, Shirky warns that the resiliency that social software offers also means that bad memes (Flat Earth, extermism) can find, organize, and deploy uninformed actors (in addition to bad actors) to create disinformation that can be used to undermine legitimate facts, institutions, and science.
It was a good read. A few highlights are below: