January, 2006

Coming in February: Is Old Europe Doomed?

Stay tuned for details about Cato Unbound’s February issue: “Is Old Europe Doomed?” featuring essays and commentary by:
Theodore Dalrymple, celebrated essayist and author of Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses;
Charles Kupchan, professor or international relations at Georgetown University and author of The End of the American Era : U.S. […]

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Wrapping Up: Internet Liberation

Thanks to this month’s essayists for such a stimulating and wide-ranging conversation.
The discussion, you may have noticed, took some unpredictable turns, and this fact has something to teach us about this month’s theme. The Internet has become part of the basic structure of our society, economy, and lives, and a discussion about the Internet is […]

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Honest Mistakes

This last turn of the conversation towards an examination of Jews and the Left is too annoying to pass without comment.
To state the obvious: Jews were an oppressed minority in Europe. And as it happens we were also a hyperactively bookish minority. Marxism and related ideas were new, and it […]

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The Dark Side of Internet Liberation

David Gelernter wrote:
It’s really East European Jews you mean.
Quite correct. I had almost inserted that qualifier myself. It’s impossible to read any history of the American Old Left without noticing the preponderance of Litvak, Galizianer, Ukrainian, and Polish family names.
I guess my underlying error here is that when somebody says “Ashkenazim” I tend to […]

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The Next Great University Will Be Net-based

Here’s a brief reply to Eric, for closure: I completely agree with you regarding the solution to the free-market education problem. I published a couple of pieces on this topic over the last 2-3 months (one in the LA Times, one, appropriately, in Forbes), and I am now part of a project working along these […]

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Liberated from What?

There’s something peculiar about the language of libertarians. In a modern American context, terms like “liberation” and “community” are old lefty code-words. They have become nostalgic. They lend a familiarity and warmth to affairs here in crazy Berkeley. Our archaic tropes mean exactly as much as the ubiquitous “frankly” does in D.C. It’s hard […]

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Liberation: It’s Here

John Perry Barlow:
I guess we’ve run out of time, but to the extent we haven’t, might I encourage you to address one question? I want to know whether you think that the Internet is a liberating phenomenon.
Is that a trick question? Of course the Internet is a liberating phenomenon—it’s liberating in so many different […]

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Academia and the Internet: Rising From the Stalinist Ashes Like the University of Phoenix

Dr. Gelernter, I think your account of Western academia’s failure and mine are different angles on the same story.
(Bear with us, folks, this will get back to Internet liberation; at the end of this rant I’ll explain how the Internet may turn out to be the lever to force constructive change in academia.)
In fact, […]

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I Believe Too

John Perry Barlow asks:
I guess we’ve run out of time, but to the extent we haven’t, might I encourage you to address one question? I want to know whether you think that the Internet is a liberating phenomenon. I still do.
I absolutely do. And there’s no better evidence than that dictators continue to […]

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I Still Believe

You know, I would love to join this discussion in some useful way, particularly since the other designated contributors are all—each in his own way—heroes of mine and, at the least, a group I would love to go to dinner with.
However, starting with Jaron’s essay, and proceeding serenely from that point, we have failed to […]

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The Empty Future

Here’s where the Net is going, as far as I can see. The world is moving to an “Empty Computer” model of computation. In the Empty Computer world, all my digital assets (all my docs, apps, images, videos, soundtracks, mail mssgs etc) are stored in my personal data structure, afloat in the Cybersphere. I can […]

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Capitalism and More

One must, I think, move in fairly rarefied libertarian circles to think that capitalism is over-defended. I also think that pleas of poverty on behalf of academics are overstated. Academics make less than people who make a lot, but they make more than most Americans, for work that is pleasant, interesting, and largely free from […]

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The Road to Professorial Liberation

Eric, Regarding long-time-fandom, thanks very much and the feeling is mutual. But you haven’t described my views accurately.
I’m not pleading on behalf of academics; rather on behalf of humanities and social science academics, a group of which I am not a member. As I pointed out, professors in the sciences have […]

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