Will no-one rid us of this truculent pundit?
I want to be good; I want to live up to the koan. But then I hear something so willfully, viciously stupid, so areal, something that does such violence to our already shredded discourse, something like this—
The New Deal—everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed.
—and I get all Lewis Black again.
The trouble with Holbo’s Complaint (“I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back”) isn’t that it’s hard on US to read their stuff without a sunny heart. It isn’t even that THEM ain’t coming back from around the bend ever at all. —To each their own, you know? If that’s what floats their boat, who am I to judge?
It’s that they’re determined to drag all the rest of us around the bend with them.
The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.
The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.
Kyle Gann gave up on Wikipedia because of it. But giving up the body politic is a bit more difficult. A lie gets halfway around the world by the time the truth gets its shoes on, and that was before a professional corps of altheaphagei took up their stations outside its door, forks aloft. What do we do to beat it back? Must we each of us Epimenidean soldiers take up steel-edged rulers and station ourselves at the palaces of the pundits and whack their knuckles as they wax stupidic—
Oh. Hey. Army of Davids. Self-correcting blogosphere. Wikitopia.
—We will never be done with the long slow slog of the koan: word for word, person by person, dismantling the stupidity, alleviating the ignorance. The wood to be chopped, and the water carried; the dishes washed and the laundry done.
Still. It’s hard, seeing intellectual violence like this, wolves outside the door the way they are, not to want to punch someone in the face. (Or at least spit in their coffee.)
I feel for Kyle Gann, but it’s worth noting that in the comments to that post of his you quote and link to, someone named Galen H. Brown posts a long and fairly thoughtful response about where Gann’s Wikipedia antagonist “T-1” was coming from, and it turns out the misunderstanding and consequent dispute was significantly more complicated—that while T-1 was almost certainly rude, he wasn’t quite as much of an utter ignoramus as Gann’s initial telling would suggest. Moreover, Gann acknowledges many of Brown’s points, and they have a pretty interesting exchange.
Frankly, my own first reaction to the Gann anecdote was to think, wait a minute, for most people, categories in music are about what the music sounds like. To insist that Einstein On the Beach has more in common with Mozart than with pop music is to make a point which you and I know is true, but its truth is a formal one, removed by at least one or two orders of abstraction from the primary way most people experience music. That doesn’t mean the educated perspective is wrong, or even that it shouldn’t prevail, but it does suggest that in at least some sense, the claim that Terry Riley is more like Brahms than like hip-hop is an ideological one, not a fact written on the universe by the hand of God, and consequently subject to critical investigation.
Keep in mind, before you suggest that I’m being too postmodern for my own good, that I’ve had my own issues with Wikipedia culture…so much so that one of my snarky remarks on the subject is reproduced in the Wikipedia entry about, ahem, me.
You’re right; I didn’t read past Gann’s initial post. I was too much in love with the flash of insight linking Brit Hume with a Wikipedia crank and so ran with it.
I should hope that my ambivalence on the subject shines through, though. As much as ambivalence can. —If anything, the problems are reversed: with Wikipedia, we have cultures of expertise in various fields forced into strange arguments they may feel are already settled or not worth the pixels with enthusiasts who lack the vocabulary and reading to engage the experts on the grounds the experts expect; this is a problem of mutual ignorance (which can lead to stupidity), and Wikipedia’s mechanisms help in some cases and hinder others, and the loss of clarity is a problem but it’s one of those we’ll always have with us.
With Brit Hume and the Village, the culture of experts (or what passes for the culture of experts: the gatekeepers of discourse, rather?) are themselves actively engaged in destroying clarity, for the sake of a greasy buck.
So it’s really quite different, even if the frustration is at heart so very similar.
I certainly agree about the frustration at heart. And yes, there’s a real difference between Brit Hume and teenaged Wikipedia cranks; the difference is that teenaged Wikipedia cranks are a higher form of life by several orders of magnitude. People like Hume exist entirely in order to—as you say—destroy understanding.