Some Words

I’m sure there’s been no end of talk about this article at the NYT. I’m not really concerned with how many of us writting crap there are out there. I’m going to take a moment to talk about the Long Tail that I see cropping up all the time.

Every few years there has to be a new blindingly obvious idea that everyone talks about as if it rewrites the world. The long tail theory is that current idea.

It goes like this: Digital storage is cheap. Linking warehouses to digital access is cheap. These two things will create a ‘revolution’ in the way we deal with many products. Being able to buy something that maybe only five people buy a year is changing all the rules. Things that were not viable a few years ago will become so in the near future.

Ok. I’ve pretty much given you the whole thing. You can buy a whole fucking book on it though, if that’s your thing. Wasn’t the whole selling point of Amazon.com back in the day that they could keep stuff around that a brick and mortar store couldn’t? I mean, I’ll put aside the fact that you’re still selling small numbers. That doesn’t really help the artist does it? They still starve or give up. So then the company who holds the rights to their stuff has less of a problem peddling that long tail. It still doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize that if you keep something available because its cheap people will still use it in small numbers. They’d try to find that book, song, or article anyway, but before maybe it was out of print, or the library lost their only copy. Now its available. Yes, cheap storage made this possible. I’m sorry, but I’m not about to go running around Minneapolis shouting about this amazing new discovery.

This guy is going to be made once everyone gets around to buying his book, or he will if he’s canny. He should start doing a speaking tour and telling college students about this blindingly obvious fact. But why does he get on the money train when others don’t? I’m willing to bet that in the past someone has had this idea and talked about it before Chris Anderson. So Chris puts out a book and suddenly the theory is dominating the discourse. Wikipedia, not always the best source of information but it will do here, says that Anderson got the idea from a study by Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Smith. They published an article about it before Anderson got to the party. He just tacked a pretty phrase on.

What does this teach me? The single most profitable skill to have in America, barring the ability to sign your name to get your inheritance, is to know what blindingly obvious meme is one snappy phrase away from being what people who want to sound smart talk about when they’ve had a couple of beers.

Well, this is one I’ve been thinking about writing for a while. I’ve spent more time on in it than I intended, and I could do some more work on it, but it isn’t worth the time.

Will someone over at The New Republic please muzzle Martin Peretz? I say this because I think it’s pretty easy to say that he’s making it harder on the rest of us Jews. Now, the man has a Harvard degree and he teaches at Harvard, and whatever jokes I make about grade inflation, that shows you have some chops. Maybe he’s too busy with all the other stuff he does with his time to bother coming up with well thought out bits for TNR.

Why does he make it harder to be a Jew? Well, it’s because I support Israel’s existence. But half the time when I talk to friends about Israel they think I see things only from the Israeli side. Personally I think its a lot of scared people making choices they regret/wish they didn’t have to, and I think that about both sides. Now that’s a simplification, because it’s a complex situation that doesn’t easily distill itself into sound bites. Both sides have their stances, witness a recent Hamas interview on BBC World News where the Hamas representative wouldn’t even say ‘Israel.’ I’m tired of explaining to people that I, as a supporter of Israel, don’t have to hate Palestinians. Mr. Peretz plays into that.

But sometimes I wonder if Peretz even thinks about this stuff anymore. Sure, there’s his loaded comment of a few days ago, where he’s at least discussing news that is already crazy. But there’s also this one, where he goes off and hand wringing in Canada over possible civil liberties lost. That’s good! Even if you decide you’re willing to give up civil liberties for security, and I’d hope you wouldn’t be, I would want there to be some hand wringing. They aren’t something to just toss off. Be careful with them, they’re important.

And who could forget this one, where he seems to imply that Israel routinely ‘wins’ insurgencies. I’m sorry, I thought that when bombs go off in Israeli cities, even if there are less of them than there could be, no one was winning.

So, Mr. Foer, I know Peretz is an owner, but could you please muzzle him? You could still bring him out from time to time in one of those nifty mask jacket combos, like in Silence of the Lambs.