I've had several false starts on the blawg this month (not to mention shepherding tax returns through — Beware the Ides of April, even though that's technically the 14th). I've started on several pieces only to have somebody in DC up past his bedtime make things worse.
- Every generation has some variation on complaints that "young people don't read [the right kind of] books, leading to the collapse of civilization." Here's another example, that I'm afraid evades two aspects of "reading" by teens.
First, and perhaps most obvious, the definition of "book" (and "[right kind of] book") is more than merely "problematic" — note that every single example cited concerns "dead-tree books." I'm old enough to remember Respectable Adults sneering at mass-market paperbacks, even when they were A Clockwork Orange and 1984 and The Dispossessed and, perhaps most to the point, Fahrenheit 451… mostly with covers conceived and executed by people who were not the target audience, let alone teens themselves. It wasn't just judging the books by their covers, but by their very format — and that continues with e-books, especially when those e-books are being read on something other than a dedicated e-book device. (If you spot me on the bus or the train staring at my phone, I'm not doomscrolling — I'm reading We or some other book that the self-appointed Guardians of Culture consider suspect at best.)
Second, there's a glare of condescension in there — the unstated assumption that "what is worthwhile in Western Civilization exists at 'book length' (usually novels and textbooks) only." A voracious reader does need to read some at book length… but they could do that by reading the archives of this blawg from front to back. More, a voracious informed reader is going to read in the lengths established by the fields of interest/study. As an obvious example, law is far, far more oriented toward individual opinions (whether common law, civil law, sharia, whatever) and journal articles. Even moreso in the sciences, both as to "generalities" and "breaking topics." There's no need to point out the problem of long, descriptive passages revealing that the author was paid by the word and not the concept, especially with fiction: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas has a great deal more to say about "virtue" than, say, The Faerie Queen. In short, the purpose of reading matters; and it especially matters to teens who have largely been stuck with badly-written, often ill-conceived textbooks as the exemplars of "book length."
- Young people would probably run for office more frequently if the gatekeepers would (a) do a better job of gatekeeping, (b) figure out that elected office has an expiration date, and (c) knock off the "pay your dues, and only in the way that past generations have" crap. Then we end up with wide-eyed credulous crap like this piece that almost entirely misses the point: Party gatekeepers gave us both candidates for President last year, giving us a choice between the lesser of "who cares?" Unfortunately, it's actually difficult to choose rationally between bad alternatives — and people do a remarkably poor job protecting their own interests when all choices offered are against those interests.
In short, my generation (and the prior generation) needs to shut up and get off the ballot. That's different from not listening to the old farts at all (seeing as how my generation paid the price in Vietnam, we know a little bit — perhaps all too viscerally — about conflicts serving shadowy purposes either forgotten or never revealed). The only dominoes we should be actually making decisions about are the double-nine sets in the rec room, and definitely not for others.
- From the Department of Everything Old Is New Again, a new generation has created its own Gilded Age via multinational "tech companies" that cut corners on the tax bill (translation note: the UK phrase "tax avoidance" doesn't mean the same thing as the American phrase "tax avoidance" — it's much more condemnatory, often reaching what would be called "tax evasion" Over Here). Which, I suppose, beats outright theft, although anyone who actually knows enough sophomore-year computer programming, and how the von Neumann-compliant processors of today work, should have figured out long ago that "generative AI" necessarily gets its input by making copies — precisely what copyright law is concerned with. This is not to say that copyright law couldn't benefit from some considerable rethinking and revision; it is to say that imagining that copyright law has already changed to be exactly what generative-system proponents think it should be (just ignore the massive conflicts of interest) rather resembles a different kind of thinking one's way to success.