The new iBook textbooks are being marketed in a way that circumvents the university bookstore. Brilliant. Go right to the student in high school. Make them a true believer. Give them an amazing textbook experience starting in 9th grade. By the time these students hit university in 4 more years they aren’t going to know how to not use an iPad while studying.

I don’t think this is right. The bookstore isn’t nearly as important as Thomas imagines. In fact, colleges are much more open to adoption of new technology and curriculum than grade schools for the simple reason that university faculty decide the content of their own courses. This isn’t to say every worthwhile innovation is widely and rapidly taken up, or that everything that diffuses is worthwhile. But when it comes to textbooks, colleges are far more porous than schools.

The key issue is, who decides what textbooks and devices will be used? In public schools, there is a bureaucratic process that sets required texts for entire districts, even whole states. Before they can get kids used to having iPads, Apple needs to get iPads into their hands, and that means engaging with and obtaining the approval of the often strongly politicized curriculum-setting bureaucracy. They may well succeed in doing this, of course. But they must convince administrators, school boards, and state-wide textbook authorities that the iPad is the future. It’s not that Apple can’t do it, but gaining entry to this market necessarily involves winning over these quite powerful gatekeepers.

The situation at colleges is very different. College bookstores make a lot of cash from textbook sales, but this is irrelevant because it’s not accompanied by any means of control. Middlemen may skim a tidy profit, but they are far easier to disintermediate than true gatekeepers. Again, who decides what textbooks and devices will be used? For textbooks, it’s not the bookstore. It’s not the University’s central administration, either. Individual faculty decide. I get to assign the required texts for my classes, up to and including deciding not to assign a book at all, or deciding to write and require my own. (This is something now made easier by iBooks Author.) A consequence is that there is far more opportunity at the college level for the textbook market to shift itself via the uncentralized, independent choices by faculty (to assign books) and students (to purchase hardware). If my students have iPads and I assign an iBooks-authored textbook, the college bookstore would simply be bypassed. No-one would care. Or rather, the people who cared wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. College stores make most of their money from merchandising anyway. If there really are universities that are, in Thomas’s words, “fighting hard for the publishers to maintain the current model” where the bookstore is the middleman and profit-center, I’d like to hear about them. I’ve taught at a large public University and now at a smaller private school. In neither case is there any means by which the school administration or college bookstore can intervene prescriptively in textbook selection. It’s a core principle of academic freedom and university governance that the faculty control the curriculum, and that obviously includes choosing which books to assign.

For devices, the situation is a little different but the same basic priciple applies. As a rule, individual faculty can’t require students to buy iPads as a condition of participation in class. Some universities do require students purchase a laptop, and most at least strongly encourage it. But college administrators are not generally in a position to forbid students from buying an iPad as well as, or instead of, a laptop. They are not gatekeepers of the sort we see at the K-12 level. So, again, while Apple will be happy to partner with colleges that wish to promote iPad use amongst students, they don’t have to worry about resistance of the sort Thomas has in mind.

It’s worth noting that colleges have witnessed two broad changes relevant to the iPad’s prospects. First, over the past twenty years desktops and then laptops have diffused to the point where most college students now own or have access to one. And over the past decade, many schools have seen a second shift as students have begun to choose Macs over Windows PCs, without any centralized decision being made to prefer one over the other. A similar transition could easily happen with the iPad, if students and teachers judge it a compelling enough product and buy accordingly. There would be an intermediate phase—we used to make paper copies of readings available in course reserves or offprint libraries, then for a time those existed alongside PDFs, and now we assume everyone has a computer to read them on. A complete shift to iPads might not occur, of course. I think the main barrier is the amount of long-form written work college students have to do, which makes it harder to rely solely on an iPad. But that’s not my point here. What matters is that at the college level there’s no gatekeeper willing and able to forbid students from purchasing iPads or keep faculty from assigning textbooks (not necessarily exclusively) from the iBooks store. There is such a gatekeeper at grade-school level. When it comes to the contestability of the textbook market, universities are much more porous and disaggregated than grade schools. The iPad may well win the hearts and minds of kids, but first it will have to get past the curriculum bureaucrats. For this reason it makes little sense to say Apple has brilliantly chosen to begin with the easier, more open K-12 market because they can’t yet take on the College Bookstore.

Something’s Always Wrong with Education

The education market is enormous and very heterogeneous. Apple’s initiative covers both grade schools and universities. Those are very different settings, which themselves vary hugely. And as anyone will tell you, the American education system has been in crisis, or facing some central challenge, or in need of some sort of fundamental reform, for a very long time now. Everyone has a scheme designed to fix it.

The alleged problem this time is that in the 21st century students and teachers are being forced to use an outmoded technology from 1950: the textbook. To be honest I was a little disappointed that the teacher in the video didn’t just go the whole hog and condemn the printed book itself as an outmoded technology from 1450. The solution involves Apple selling as many iPads as possible, and taking a cut of textbook sales as well. The demo textbooks shown at the event of course looked terrific, as one would expect. Dynamic transitions, animations, high-quality photography and video, highlighting and note-taking, all that good stuff.

Technology is Always About to Transform Education

Schools have been down the techno-salvation path before with other kinds of hardware and software. It’s worth remembering just how many technologies we already have that were supposed to transform education beyond all recognition. Radio, the television, the VCR, the personal computer, email, the Internet and the web … All of these have been trumpeted by someone as having the power to make education What It Really Ought To Be. The same goes for smaller developments within larger technological shifts. Chatrooms, MUDs, bulletin boards, blogs, FaceBook, Twitter, on and on. Sometimes things do change, in big ways. The TV and (later) the VCR helped make the Open University possible in the UK, for instance. (Which in turn helped make some good comedy possible, as well.) Of course, having a national broadcasting corporation and a state-financed system of faculty and tutors was helpful, too.

Just this week, Wikipedia’s blackout showed how much it has insinuated itself into people’s lives. Of course, the horrors uncovered by Herpderpedia remind you that it’s perfectly possible for a technology to transform how students seek out and use knowledge while not doing much for the basically clueless. Along with the big shifts have come mid-range changes. The availability of free, high-quality software for statistical analysis, for instance, is one of dozens of changes that are substantial or even remarkable within their domain, but which don’t pretend to transform “school” tout court.

As for the textbooks themselves, I’m skeptical that the dynamic bells and whistles are all that effective. I can certainly think of particular cases where they could be. But it’s also easy to imagine books filled with movies or demos that are watched once and then ignored. What Apple laid out yesterday is rooted in the 1990s and its vision of multimedia-enhanced texts. Fine as far as it goes, but don’t pretend it’s going to revolutionize schooling. School is an institution, not just a mode of instruction or a state of mind. Textbooks are not what make people hate school. iPad-based textbooks with zoomable pictures and some embedded movies will not make students love school.

Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook

Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive components and all the rest of it. Sure, why not? But—consider how many of the most sophisticated computer users consume “content” online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use Instapaper or some equivalent tool to create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s technology.

Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because you don’t want to be distracted. A similar point applies in education. The promise of “technology in the classroom” has always been that it will magically “engage” students with what they have to learn. But it hardly ever does, or does only at the margin. You still need a good teacher, an opportunity to learn, and some motivation of your own. Having a good breakfast in your belly helps as well. More dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problems of education—they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.

It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the iPad was launched, a standard criticism was to say it’s a device made for consuming content rather than actively making or doing things. But developers quickly found ways to make it a lot more interesting than that. Apps like GarageBand or Star Walk or Leafsnap—there are loads more—take advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that put it in a different class of activity from watching a video, reading a textbook, or just passively sitting at a computer. It’s these sort of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.

The College Level

I teach at one of the universities mentioned in Schiller’s talk yesterday. At the University level, the most immediate difference from the K-12 case is that faculty typically get to choose which textbook (if any) to use in their courses. So there’s essentially none of the political fighting about textbook content that bedevils public grade schools. Students also have to buy their own books rather than rent them from the school (or have the school buy them).

The most familiar pathology of the textbook market is that publishers hate used booksellers. Publishers want every student to buy a new copy of their text, but—Phil Schiller’s claims notwithstanding—books are annoyingly durable. To fight this, publishers (and textbook authors) produce new editions as often as possible and try to get faculty to require the most recent iteration. There are various inducements on offer to do this, starting with free copies for the instructor and any TAs. As my friend Gabriel Rossman noted the other day, textbook catalogs pitched at faculty often come with little or no information about how much the book will cost students.

Image courtesy of ambrown.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it, and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the next step would be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than $129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or semester—like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the books.

From my point of view, both the iBooks Author and iTunes U apps are potentially very useful for taking sets of lecture notes and making them available to students easily. Many faculty already post their Keynote or PowerPoint slides so students can review them (or use them to avoid coming to class). The iBooks Author app seems like a natural extension of this, especially given its compatability with Keynote presentations. As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into course-management territory currently dominated by systems like Blackboard and Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky to the aggressively shitty.

Finally there’s the question of getting college students to buy iPads. This is a more difficult proposition than it might appear. Most students now buy a computer when entering college. As far as I can see there is essentially no compelling reason for a freshman to buy an iPad instead of something like a Macbook Air, for the simple reason that students are required to write too much to not have a computer with a keyboard. Sure, it’s possible to set up a writing environment on an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard, or even write small amounts of text using the on-screen keyboard. But it’s hard to see it competing with an Air or similar laptop. Anecdotally, the use-patterns in my classes bear this out: almost all my students own a laptop, less than ten percent own an iPad, and no-one owns only an iPad. An unrepresentative sample, sure, but it skews towards students who are relatively early adopters and able to afford the hardware. This makes me wonder whether the iPad will get widespread traction on campuses without institutional support in the form of subsidized purchasing programs or pools of iPads available for particular classes—Duke already has some of the latter.

Encarta is not the Future

The contrast between laptops and iPads for college students brings me back to my earlier point about textbooks. What the iPad does really well, it seems to me, is less about being a whizzy textbook-with-moving-pictures and more about being the sort of device that lets you do things that neither a regular laptop, nor a traditional textbook, nor a single-purpose bit of hardware can do. There’s the GPS, the camera, the accelerometer, the touch interface—the best iPad apps tend to take advantage of these features in some novel way, allowing you to do or make something cool, often in a participatory fashion. Ironically, the best iPad apps for reading things—like Instapaper—work to make the iPad more like a simple, static, easily-read book or article, not less. If the iPad is going to make new inroads in education, let alone transform it, I think it will be by way of specialized apps that take advantage of the many great capabilities of the iPad, not through an augmented-textbook model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.

I’ve been using the Readmill ebook reader on-and-off. I like it quite a bit. Using it prompted me to make an ebook of my own. Because I moved this entire blog over to Octopress a little while ago, everything I’ve ever written on it going back to 2002 is now in Markdown format. So over lunch today I took advantage of John MacFarlane’s amazingly useful Pandoc, which can make EUPB format ebooks out of markdown files, selected thirteen posts from the Archives and made a little anthology called Books I Did Not Read This Year. It’s free to download, because I’m such a generous person. Enjoy it on Readmill, iBooks, your Kindle, or any other EPUB-compatible reader. Daniel kindly made a Mobi version for Kindle owners. I plan on making a few more of these, forming a Press (e.g. “Harbard University Press” or “Pengiun”), and then adding them to my Vita.

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\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{Sweave}{}

\RequirePackage{ifthen}
\newboolean{Sweave@gin}
\setboolean{Sweave@gin}{true}
\newboolean{Sweave@ae}
\setboolean{Sweave@ae}{false} %% Set this boolean to false to prevent the outmoded ae package being loaded by default below (kjh)

I ran into this problem on my desktop machine last year and evidently solved it (given the note I left to myself in the Sweave file), but of course I forgot and wasted some time today with the same issue on my laptop. Chances are the next time it happens, I will google the problem and find this solution. So, hello, future self, I hope you are well.

That’s despite Eckhart using the HTTPS version of Google which is supposed to hide searches from those who would want to spy by intercepting the traffic between a user and Google. Cringe as the video shows the software logging each number as Eckhart fingers the dialer. “Every button you press in the dialer before you call,” he says on the video, “it already gets sent off to the IQ application.” From there, the data — including the content of text messages — is sent to Carrier IQ’s servers, in secret.

This is frankly astonishing if it turns out to be true. Carrier IQ’s own website proudly announces, via a rolling counter on its front page, that it is installed on over 141 million phones. If they are logging and especially sending any data of this sort of granularity back to Carrier IQ’s servers routinely—text messages, web searches, numbers dialed—it’s hard to see how this won’t be an enormous scandal. You may recall Apple’s Locationgate scandal earlier this year, when it was found that iPhones were locally caching fairly coarse-grained location data based on cell-tower proximity (though not sending that data back to Apple). This seems orders of magnitude more severe than that—real tinfoil-hat stuff. A Carrier IQ press release from earlier this month denies that their software is logging or transmitting keystrokes or user actions in this sort of detail:

Carrier IQ delivers Mobile Intelligence on the performance of mobile devices and networks to assist operators and device manufacturers in delivering high quality products and services to their customers. We do this by counting and measuring operational information in mobile devices – feature phones, smartphones and tablets. This information is used by our customers as a mission critical tool to improve the quality of the network, understand device issues and ultimately improve the user experience. Our software is embedded by device manufacturers along with other diagnostic tools and software prior to shipment. While we look at many aspects of a device’s performance, we are counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools. The metrics and tools we derive are not designed to deliver such information, nor do we have any intention of developing such tools. The information gathered by Carrier IQ is done for the exclusive use of that customer, and Carrier IQ does not sell personal subscriber information to 3 parties. The information derived from devices is encrypted and secured within our customer’s network or in our audited and customer-approved facilities.

This denial was explicitly reiterated by the company in a release retracting a cease-and-desist letter to Eckhart that it had issued in response to some of his earlier work. The video does appears to show that, at a minimum, Carrier IQ’s software has access to the user’s searches, text messages, and other keystrokes. (Skip to 8:40 or so for the guts of the demonstration.) The real question now is determining what the application does with that sort of access—how much of the user’s behavior is actually logged, at what level of detail that logging happens, and what is subsequently transmitted anywhere. This is what’s still not clear to me from the video. Automatic third-party access to all user actions, even if there is subsequent picking-and-choosing about what to log and what to send, seems bad enough in the absence of explicit permission from the user. And of course if Carrier IQ’s software turned out to actually be transmitting much or all of what it saw—well it’s hard to see how that would be legal. So I await further developments with interest.

You can zoom in to the precise location of every accident on the map. Each dot is a life. Drive safely this Thanksgiving.

On the first issue, take Irish names, for example, which are completely intuitive to someone with a bit of a blas, but admittedly are often not spelled in the way a naive English speaker would pronounce them. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”. It’s a very popular girl’s name, and it is of course pronounced “Eee-fah”. As you might expect, Siri can’t handle it at all. That’s a difficult case, but there are a lot of other similarly tricky names in the world, and not just Irish-origin ones. Failure to recognize names really messes up the ability to ask certain questions (e.g. about birthdays), tell Siri about network ties (e.g. who is my daughter), or set appointments with specific people. I doubt users will long tolerate being forced to systematically mispronounce their own or their spouse’s name in order to set up meetings, for example.[1]

On the second issue, Siri’s handling of contextual meanings is very strong in some ways, but not in others. Some real world examples, the good and bad, based on a morning’s worth of use:

• My calendar has an appointment named “Duke flu clinic, Student Union (walk-in)”. I can ask Siri “When is my flu clinic appointment?” and it gives me the right answer. Pretty good! As has been documented in various reviews, you can also say things like “When is my next haircut?” or have Siri follow local temporal contexts like “Make an appointment with John for 4:30 next Wednesday”, “Make that 5:30”.
• But let’s say I have a shared calendar with my wife, Laurie—a possibility Apple is aware of, given the emphasis on “Send a message to my wife” etc. She writes a calendar entry that reads “Kieran volunteers at school”. If I ask Siri “When do I volunteer at school?” it fails, launching a Safari search for “When do I volunteer at school?”. If I ask “When does Kieran volunteer at school?” it fails as well, saying “I found 11 schools nearby, 7 of them are fairly close to you”. To get the right answer I must ask the unnaturally context-free question, “When is ‘Kieran volunteers at school’?” because it can’t deal with the tense changes or indexicals. In a similar way if you have an appointment reading “Dentist” you can’t ask “When is my dental appointment?”
• Some more subtle but telling failures: For joint calendars, you can’t ask questions like “When does Laurie travel to Boston?” even if Laurie has entered an event named “Travel to Boston” in her calendar. Worse, the simpler case fails too. If I have an event called “Travel to Boston” in my own calendar, asking “When do I travel to Boston?” causes Siri to interpret it as an advice-type question, and it searches Google for “When do I travel to Boston?”. Asking “When do I go to Boston?” fails as well. (Result: a map and “Here’s Boston”.) In this case even speaking the literal title of the event fails: “When is ‘Travel to Boston’?” results in a Google search. “When is my trip to Boston?” will not work either. Only “When is my Travel to Boston?” works. If the event is called “Talk at Tufts”, Siri will not understand “When do I talk at Tufts?”, but will understand “When is my talk at Tufts?”.

Again, it’s basically very impressive. But I guess the question is how fast Siri will improve at interpretation, and how willing users will be to take the time to self-censor or carefully craft both event names and questions about events that they know Siri will understand.

[1] Update: Charles Starrett suggested using the phonetic first and last name fields in contacts, which Voice Control can apparently take advantage of. I tried this but it didn’t seem to have any effect on Siri.

There has been a smaller but still noticeable backlash from those who found the scale and content of these initial reactions bizarre or repellent. They argued, variously, that personal expressions of grief by ordinary people for the billionaire CEO of a giant company are simply irrational; that those who insisted on giving Jobs full credit for Apple’s visionary products nevertheless happily absolved him of any responsibility for the conditions endured by workers in the factories where those products are made; or simply that Jobs was a personally unpleasant character unworthy of the love heaped upon him.

Whichever way you see it, there is clearly more at work here than measured assessments of someone who excelled in maximizing shareholder value. Jobs’ charisma is at the heart of it.

Charismatic Authority

Writing in the early part of the twentieth century, Max Weber wondered why people followed the wishes and demands of others in the absence of direct coercion. He thought there were three sources of legitimate authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. The first rests on loyalty to a specific person. You follow a person because of who they are. The second rests on loyalty to tradition. You follow a person because they are in an age-old role, such as Father, or Coach, or Priest. And the third rests on loyalty to a set of codified rules that are accepted on principle: you follow a person because of your assent to the legally-established office they occupy, such as Judge, or Supervisor, or President.

In practice, Weber thought, these forms would be mixed-up or layered one on the other or nested together. But he held to the idea that the different principles mattered. Weber argued that legal-rational authority was on the rise historically, and that it predominated in the modern world. The organizational manifestation of this form of authority is the bureaucracy, most obviously in the form of the State. It is also, though, closely related to the calculative rationality of capitalist markets and the institution of the modern corporation.

Despite the rise of the rationalized bureaucracy, Weber thought charisma remained an important and indeed ineradicable force in society. Charisma is a quality attributed to individuals, but it is more than personality or charm or celebrity or glamour. Although it is associated with religious leadership (the root of the word means “the gift of divine grace”), Weber didn’t care if the claims of charismatic leaders are ultimately provably correct or incorrect, true or false. Calling someone charismatic is a description, not an endorsement. For Weber, charisma is

a certain quality of an individual personality whereby [someone] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, super-human, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are regarded as not accessible to the ordinary person … and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

The idea that Jobs created a reality distortion field around himself was half-jokingly coined by Bud Tribble, who worked on the Macintosh project. But charismatic leadership is not just a cheap Jedi mind trick. Charisma is partly a personal quality, but also a social relation. Because it is a basis for legitimate authority, it’s something people must recognize and in some way assent to in order for it to be effective. Charismatic leaders are internally driven, but they also need to be externally recognized as exceptional and, crucially, they must succeed to some degree in order to find the followers they seek:

Charisma knows only inner determination and inner restraint … and [the leader] demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission. His success determines whether he finds them. His charismatic claim breaks down if his mission is not recognized by those to whom he feels he has been sent. If they recognize him, he is their master—so long as he knows how to maintain recognition through proving himself.

Or to put it another way, real artists ship. The leader must deliver, at least to the satisfaction of his team or band of followers. Once he does, though, Weber argues that “it is the duty of those to whom he addresses his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader”.

Charismatic leaders, by the way, do not have to be kind, ethical, or pleasant people:

How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from any ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is … indifferent for purposes of definition. What is important is how the individual is actually regarded by … his “followers” or “disciples”.

Charisma and Internal Organization

Charismatic leadership is personal in nature and, to begin with, organizationally flat.

The administrative staff of a charismatic leader does not consist of “officials” … It is not chosen on the basis of social privilege … There is no hierarchy: the leader merely intervenes in general or in individual cases when he considers the members of his staff inadequate to a task with which they have been entrusted.

As John Lilly remarks, “The stories of how brutal he could be on the people around him — employees, competitors, and everyone else — are legion, and they’re not apocryphal. He could be deeply dehumanizing and belittling to the people around him … As a leader of people, you have to respect how much he (and more importantly, his teams) accomplished. But I struggle with some of the ways that he led, and how they affected good people.” The combination of inner vision, contempt for rules, and the ability to moblize others results in a leadership style that is at once rebellious and autocratic. It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy, but the Pirate Captain is in charge. He can interfere anywhere and his authority is absolute: “If I don’t hear great sound coming out of that prototype by Monday morning, we’re going to remove the amplifier” “I think he’s bluffing”, Andy Hertzfeld told Burrell Smith after this demand. “But what if he’s not?”

Charismatic leaders create new things, and new standards, deliberately setting themselves against the received wisdom—especially written rules:

From a substantive point of view, every charismatic authority would have to subscribe to the proposition, “It is written that … but I say …” The genuine prophet … preaches, creates, or demands new obligations. … When such an authority comes into conflict with the competing authority of another … the only recourse is to some kind of a contest … In principle only one side can be in the right …

Weber has some more to say about the attitude of the charismatic leader to the world of rational economic planning and bureaucratic administration:

… Charisma lives in, though not off, this world. Whenever it appears, it consitutes a “calling” in the most emphatic sense of the word, a “mission” or a “duty” … It is not that charisma always means the renunciation of property or even of acquisition … What is despised is traditional or rational everyday economizing … It repudiates any sort of involvement in the everyday, routine world.

In terms of personal style, this can be seen in the well-known photograph of Jobs sitting on the floor in his unfurnished house, or in his preference for particular kinds of eyeglasses or shoes or wristwatches. It is not so much a renunciation of material possessions as a disregard for the usual reasons for owning them, and a rejection of the parts of the world that don’t measure up. The photograph is meant to evoke a sort of monastic asceticism, certainly, but on closer inspection you notice the room is illuminated by what looks like a Tiffany lamp. Jobs admired Charles Lewis Tiffany for his ability to mass-produce beautiful things. As Larry Ellison remarked “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve that’s not always good enough.” In much the same way, when it came to managing his organization the charismatic emphasis on a vocation or calling coupled with a contempt for ordinary measures of success resulted in questions like “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” This moment with John Sculley, by the way, is the Mark 1:16-17 of the Apple mythos.

Weber describes charismatic authority in a partly idealized form. He notes that it’s only at the very beginning of a charismatic leader’s career that such a flat organization can be maintained, or the nuts and bolts of planning and specialization be blithely ignored. For one thing, the leader has to deliver on his promises in a way that satisfies those who are following him. For another, he needs help to get anything done.

The Routinization of Charisma

Any successful organization—charismatic or not—faces the problem of maintaining itself as a coherent entity as it gets bigger. How do you keep things working smoothly and effectively as the structure expands and differentiates? Simply getting bigger makes the organization harder to coordinate. More layers are necessary, there’s a greater distance between the center and the periphery, communication between units requires more time and overhead, there are more people to manage and more opportunities for politics. Positions and offices within the organization become turf to occupy and defend for their own sake. And so on.

Charismatic organizations, however, face an additional problem. A paradox of charismatic authority is that the leader changes the world—at least, the followers’ world—but once the leader dies, or moves on, those left behind must face the problem of how to preserve the new world the leader made. Charismatic leadership is transformative. Its mode of action is intense, personal, and often turbulent. But in its aftermath, those left behind may see themselves as having a legacy to preserve, a flame to keep alive, a vision to enact. There is a shift from transformation to preservation. With it comes the danger of calcification and stagnation.

This does not mean that the life of the group becomes static right away. To the contrary, many charismatic movements are also expansionary organizations, often especially in the aftermath of their founder’s passing. They want to convert others. That means energetic efforts to spread the word by conversion, co-optation, or coercion. But whatever about its edges, the core members of the organization quickly face the problem of how to codify and institutionalize the personal vision of the original leader. This is the problem of the routinization of charisma.

It is very hard to preserve the legacy of a charismatic founder within the structure of an organization. Most obviously, the perennial question of what the leader would do now must be settled by those left behind. Even if everyone is honestly committed in principle to preserving the founder’s legacy, as opposed to imposing their own plans, and even if everyone agrees in general outline about what the founder’s vision was, different people still will give different answers to the question, “What would the leader have done in this situation?”

It would be easy to see Steve Jobs as just the sort of egomanical leader who would sooner sink his ship than see someone else at the helm. But this is not what happened. Jobs faced and solved the short-run leadership problem by the standard method of choosing a successor. What’s more striking is that he also saw and attacked the longer-term institutional problem. In addition to picking a new leader and cultivating an echelon of executives that in his view were up to the job, he hired the sociologist Joel Podolny to run “Apple University”. (Podolny is now in charge of the company’s entire HR division). Initially, no-one outside the firm knew what Apple University was going to be. Many thought it was going to be some sort of extension of the educational offerings on iTunes. But it turned out to be much more ambitious and inwardly directed than that: Podolny was charged with anatomizing how Apple worked internally and turning that knowledge into something formally transmissable to new staff. At the time of his hire, I noted that Podolny’s research in Status Signals meant that he was much better-positioned than many bog-standard analysts to understand how Apple works. Whether that strategy will be successful of course remains to be seen. Charismatic leaders are notorious for being unable to envision their creation surviving without them and so avoid planning for that inevitability. In the wake of the founder’s death many charismatic organizations rapidly collapse, succumb to schisms and infighting, or drift aimlessly toward the rocks like rudderless galleons. Jobs and the rest of Apple clearly worked hard to avoid that fate.

Charisma, Craft, and the Division of Labor

So far I have been talking about Jobs internal relationship to the organization he founded. What about the broader community of people who used Apple’s products? Most of the public emotion came from them. To some outside this group, the strength of their response seemed preposterous—a grotesque effulgence of maudlin sentiment confirming every cultish, fanboy stererotype; and all for the love of billionaire businessman who ran a company that made computers and phones. What to make of this side of things?

The double-edged logic of charisma is once again useful here. Charismatic authority is fundamentally destructive of the past, but the feelings of loyalty or commitment it generates can become the raw material for nostalgia. This seems especially true when those feelings are detached from any direct experience of the person they are direct towards. People inside Apple worked with the possiblity of having to face a living, breathing, perhaps very annoyed Steve Jobs. Their commitment to the organization—and their feelings for its leader—had some depth as a consequence.

For people who just use Apple products, though, there is no such direct connection. This means “Steve Jobs” could become a wish-fulfillment figure on whom to project one’s own feelings—a kind of celebrity, in other words, rather than an organizational leader. The connection feels strong because of one’s own life-course and the role of some piece of computer hardware or software in it: the first Mac you owned and what you did with it, the code you write now and the standards you set for it. Their legendary social awkwardness notwithstanding, nerd culture has a thick streak of sentimentality in it, often tied to the cultural objects of pre-adolescence. (If you don’t believe me, browse around Reddit and wait for some posts titled “Does anyone else remember this guy/game/TV show …?”) It’s the positive end of an emotional dipole that has at its negative end the sterile, teenaged rage of anonymous online comment threads. From there, it can be just a short hop to an extravagant emotionality that quickly becomes kitsch: the nerd equivalent of a Princess Diana Doll, a Commemorative 9/11 Musical Lighter, or a Velvet Elvis.

No-one had less time for that sort of treacle than Jobs himself. When he returned to Apple in 1997, he cleared out a large quantity of memorabilia from the company and gave it away to Stanford. Similarly, those swept up in the emotion of it all should probably remember that, as John Siracusa remarked last week, Steve Jobs was not your friend.

There’s more to it than kitsch, though. Jobs was indirectly responsible for many people’s careers—at least, that’s what many working in and around the world of software development and web design felt as they looked back. There’s little reason to doubt them. For a whole swathe of developers, programmers, designers, and writiers, Apple’s products catalyzed their own interest in technology while confirming their belief in the value of good design. Kathy Sierra provides a good example:

We do not mourn Steve because of our feelings for Steve, but because of our feelings about ourselves. … Personally, I believe that much of our feelings for Steve Jobs are not because of our “worship” of his “genius”, but because his work has helped us discover our own.

Or, in a slightly different way, Merlin Mann:

You gotta be kidding me, you want me to use a Mac? Those things are toys, right? … I eventually bought my own toy. I wrote my thesis on a toy. I learned desktop publising on a toy. And after I graduated, every job I’ve had since then has involved one of those toys. And it’s true to this day. I take photos of my daughter on a toy. My kid and I make music together on a toy. … I’m really glad Steve Jobs made the toy, I’m really glad he kept making it better and better, and I’m really grateful to live in a time when you can have such wonderful toys right in your pocket.

This personal connection people feel with Apple’s products, together with Jobs’ own standards of excellence in design and manufacturing, opens up a potentially uncomfortable connection. Apple used to be a niche company, serving a very small portion of the consumer electronics market. Its products were much more expensive than those of its competitors. That’s all changed now. (“Still angry how in 2001 Apple used their illegal monopoly of 3% of the market to force us into this hellish nightmare of devices that work”, Wil Shipley drily noted.)

During Jobs’ second tenure as CEO, Apple found a way to to institutionalize its ability to reliably innovate new products and bring them to huge new markets. They have coped far, far better than average with many of the problems that come with rapid growth. This has been accomplished partly though the company’s ability to decouple from its supply and manufacturing chain while still controlling it through logistical expertise and, more recently, sheer market power. This has allowed Apple to remain sharply focused on hardware and software design, and sales. In an earlier era, the result of such rapid growth would have been a far larger, vertically integrated company with many more factories and workers to directly manage. Instead, Apple has been able to protect its product-centered core—the part of the company made in the image of Steve Jobs—and still take full advantage of a globalized, disaggregated production regime, without being weighed down by it. This was Tim Cook’s main achievement as COO. To echo John Siracusa again (you really should be listening to his podcast), the result is a company that continues to act like a startup even though it’s huge. Apple makes the whole widget—design, software, hardware, service—but without owning the factories where the widgets are actually assembled.

This organizational success created the conditions for some of the backlash we saw last week. It is very unusual to see a company with such a large market have so much sentiment associated with it. At present, three aspects of the company now sit together in an awkward way. The first is the quite personal nature of Apple’s products—at your desk, in your hand, in your pocket—together with the fact that many people use them for creative or otherwise personally meaningful work. The second is the public success of Jobs’ relentless focus on excellent, elegant, beautiful design: “Design is how it works.” The whole thing, not just the packaging. And the third is that, because it’s a huge company selling in a mass market, Apple’s products are assembled in factories in China by low-paid workers working in grim, relentless, dangerous conditions.

This is a well-recognized problem with technological utopias: goods that are simple and elegant to use are often difficult and dangerous to make. A wide gap may open between the consumers and the producers of beautiful pieces of personal technology: it’s an elegant, creative, meaningful future for me, but a lifetime toiling on a Foxconn production line for thee. This gulf is worse for a company like Apple precisely because there’s so much emphasis placed on the intimate quality of the object, and such close attention paid to its design. Jobs wanted people to love his products, take care to notice their craftsmanship, and be creative with them. They were supposed to help you make and do awesome things. But this love and attention to creativity is severed from the manufacturing process.

Too bad, you might say. Such are the hard exigencies of business life. Many a CEO would agree. But Jobs’ outlook makes that sort of cold, rationalized calculation difficult to sustain in a way that’s consistent with the company’s vision of itself. Charisma rejects this sort of thinking. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, ” Jobs insisted of a prototype Macintosh circuit board, “even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” For a long time, though, Jobs was happy to use lousy labor and bad tools behind the cabinet. Eventually, people took a look around the back. The result was a sort of cognitive dissonance.

The tension doesn’t arise just because the products are mass-produced rather than true craft items. After all, in a modern economy there’s no escape from the division of labor. Every good and service you encounter from your first cup of coffee in the morning to the paste on your toothbrush at night is implicated in a huge, interdependent, intensely specialized network of exchange. You can’t get away from it. Even the most intense survivalists dangle at the end of a supply chain of gear, goods, and cultural know-how. As a consumer, the question is which parts of this web you feel you ought to care about. Should your paper be recycled? Should your coffee be fair-trade? Should you stay away from tropical hardwoods, seek out local foods? Now, what about those consumer electronics you love so much?

The factories that make iPads and MacBooks also make components for other firms, but no-one paid much attention to the labor or environmental records of Samsung or Dell. People don’t care about those products enough. Because Apple was relatively small for so long, its customers did not feel much pressure to care much in that direction, either. There weren’t enough of them, anyway. But during its remarkable expansion in the 2000s, environmental and labor activists realized that the effort Apple had invested in its product design and marketing, together with the personal connection many people felt to their Macs, iPads, and iPhones, meant the company was a clear target for social movement activism and consumer pressure. Like the Nike boycotts of the 1990s, the emotional ties people had to the brand—which the company had spent so much time building and profiting from—were there to be appealed to and mobilized for other purposes. It worked, too. Nike pioneered the idea of a corporation that made tangible products while not owning any production facilities, but this decoupled structure wasn’t enough to save them from criticism. In Apple’s case, it became harder and harder for the charismatic leader to wash his hands of this aspect of his creation.

The Half-Life of Charisma

One last story from Andy Hertzfeld about the development of the Macintosh:

Since the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each team member’s signature engraved on the hard tool that molded the plastic case, so our signatures would appear inside the case of every Mac that rolled off the production line. Most customers would never see them, since you needed a special tool to look inside, but we would take pride in knowing that our names were in there, even if no one else knew.

How will Jobs’ charisma persist at Apple? I wonder most whether his death will make it easier or harder for those who want to monitor and improve Apple’s labor and environmental practices. On the one hand, for much of his career Jobs showed absolutely no interest in these or related issues—his strictly personal liberal values notwithstanding. On the other hand, once Apple moved from its niche position into a mass market, the way his charismatic vision was built into the organization made it increasingly difficult for both Apple and Jobs to dissociate themselves from the conditions under which their products were made. There was too much of him in the iPhone and iPad, and he had successfully convinced many of his customers to see themselves and their creative lives in those products, too. Jobs was at times visibly irritated by the pressure from environmental activists. But the company responded to it, nevertheless.

The signatures hidden inside the original Macintosh model suggest how Jobs’ vision might have been extended to the production side of things. Though latent or ignored for a long time, with Apple’s transformation it might have reasserted itself—shoved along by outside pressure—in a way that made concerns with manufacturing conditions consistent with Apple’s overall view of itself. Like bad wiring and bad taste, bad production would ritually pollute the founders vision of things, and the users’ experience of them, in a way that demanded some kind of systematic response.

Apple has shown some movement in this direction, though there is room for plenty more. Now that Cook—the logistics guy—is in charge, a significant shift seems likely only if it is impelled from the outside. The natural constituency to give the needed push is that same group of people who found themselves unexpectedly affected by Jobs’ death. They face their own small crisis of charismatic routinization. They can choose to remember Jobs in a way that emphasizes only his personal character, which risks going down the Velvet Elvis route and instituting a sterile cult of personality that Jobs would have himself despised. Or they might press Apple to be more thoroughgoing and expansive in its commitment to the general principles Jobs cared about, and built into the core part of the company he made—pride in craft, devotion to excellence, a determination to use technology to enable creativity as widely as possible. The intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Of course, he might have rejected that interpretation. I don’t know. Steve Jobs was not my friend. But it will be interesting to see whether the new Apple will feel any pressure to exemplify his principles in this sphere—and whether enough of the company’s many fans will feel Jobs’ memory deserves no less.

What strikes me about this is that Sinofsky’s use of the the word “compromise” (which Gruber follows in order to make his own case) is almost the reverse of how it’s often employed in this sphere. How many times in the past have we heard that it’s Apple that does not compromise on its view of how things should be made? Or think of how often—and as recently as last week—people have said things like “Steve Jobs’ great talent is his uncompromising vision” for the products his company makes? Or consider profiles of people like Apple designer Jony Ive, or his inspiration Dieter Rams, where again the emphasis is always on their singular design sensibility, their purity of vision, their refusal to compromise.

What’s happening here? It’s a matter of perspective. When people talk about designers, an “uncompromising” vision is perfectly compatible with cutting products down to their essentials, focusing them entirely on some narrow set of functions, or making them do one thing perfectly. What’s “uncompromising” is the designer’s commitment to make a perfect thing, without any extraneous fluff or crap. But when people—especially salespeople—talk about customers, the phrase “no compromises” is the claim that the product will do whatever the customer wants, even if different customers want different things. It’s the promise—or pitch—that everyone can have their cake and eat it.

Notice how Sinofsky switches points of view midstream. At the beginning he talks about Windows 8 being “design without compromise”. But by the end he’s promising you as a customer that “You don’t have to compromise!” Uncompromising designers make products that will not appeal to everyone, or be of equal use to everyone, or do everything equally well. On the other hand, IT products advertised to consumers as having “no compromises” try to please everyone all of the time. From the perspective of the Dieter Ramses of this world, Sinofsky’s repeated use of the phrase “no compromises” means exactly the opposite of what it says—and more or less guarantees that the product will actually be riddled with design compromises, all made in an ultimately futile effort to keep everyone happy.

The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.

The usual disclaimers about work-in-progress apply.

Here, then, is your card. You can click for a larger version. Feel free to toot your Bingo progress on the Twitter using this custom-made #ASA2011 hashtag. Remember, there are BIG PRIZES to be won, especially if you shout out “BINGO!” in the middle of a plenary session.[1]

fn1. There are no big prizes to be won. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any professional or personal consequences stemming from shouting out “BINGO” in the middle of a plenary session.

TextMate: Minas Tirith

A once-great but now decaying city. Only the King has the power to renew it, but he is a long absent, indeed half-legendary figure—though there are persistent rumors that he is alive still in some distant land. In his stead, the city slowly falls in upon itself, kept in some sort of working order by its melancholy people. They can repair but not truly rebuild it, and they pray daily for the Return of the King.

BBEdit: The Shire

A quiet, long-overlooked land populated by simple folk who keep mostly to themselves. They are somewhat set in their ways, awkward in their manners, and superficially incapable of apparently simple tasks. Yet they hide deep roots and unexpected strengths.

Emacs: Fangorn

Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.

vi: Moria

Like Fangorn, ancient and deep, with hints of the long labor of a great people. There is, supposedly, a monumental city of stone down here somewhere but it’s so dark I can’t see a damn thing. No, wait! A shaft of light illuminates some runes! They read as follows:

^C^X^X^Xquit qQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl; :xwhat

The Wizard translates: “We cannot get out! We cannot get out! They are coming!”

Microsoft Word: Barad-dur

No need to explain this one.

I was a student at a time when vulgar economics was in a particularly vulgar state. … There was Great Britain with never less than a million workers unemployed, and there was I with my supervisor teaching me that it is logically impossible to have unemployment because of Say’s Law. Now comes Keynes and proves that Say’s Law is nonsense (so did Marx, of course, but my supervisor never drew my attention to Marx’s views on the subject). … The thing I am going to say that will make you too numb or too hot (according to temperament) to understand the rest of my letter is this: I understand Marx far and away better than you do. (I shall give you an interesting historical explanation of why this is so in a minute, if you are not completely frozen stiff or boiling over before you get to that bit.) When I say I understand Marx better than you, I don’t mean to say that I know the text better than you do. If you start throwing quotations at me you will have me baffled in no time. In fact, I refuse to play before you begin. What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouth. … suppose we each want to recall some tricky point in Capital, for instance the schema at the end of Volume II. What do you do? You take down the volume and look it up. What do I do? I take the back of an envelope and work it out.

And here is Beggs:

There are generations of economists who would call themselves Marxists, or admit Marx as a major influence, who have … engaged with other strands of economic thought and folded them into their worldview, have worried little about dropping from their analyses those aspects of Marx’s argument they believed to be wrong or unhelpful, and have felt no need to pepper their writing with appeals to authority in the form of biblical quotations. But in each generation, there are others who have defended an “orthodox” Marxian economics as a separate and superior paradigm, which can only be contaminated by absorbing ideas from elsewhere. … If we are to engage in these ways with modern economics, what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is the two-fold project behind Capital as a critique of political economy: first to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy, and especially their dependence on class relationships; and second, to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal. These two strands of Marx’s thought are as valid as ever. The way to apply them today is … is to deal not only, not even mainly, with economic high theory, but also with the applied economics produced every day in the reports and statements of central banks, Treasuries, the IMF, etc., and ask, what are the implicit class relations here? Why are these the driving issues at this point in history? What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them? The pursuit of a separate system of economics as something wholly other from mainstream economics isolates us from the political and ideological space where these things take place: better, instead, to fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories. A side effect is that we learn to think for ourselves again about how capitalism works, to be able to answer the kinds of question DeLong raised against Harvey, no longer lost without the appropriate quotation.

What is it about Joyce’s novel about a day in the life of a fictional Jewish mayor of Dublin, Leopold Bloom, that has inspired an international literary event cum pub crawl cum Halloween parade?

What other Interesting Facts about Ulysses have I been unaware of, I wonder? While I wait for you to enlighten me, I will perform the sacred Bloomsday ritual of genuflecting solemnly before the Poster of Great Irish Writers. You know the one—an obscure bylaw requires it hang somewhere in every Irish bar in America, and certain sorts of pub in Ireland as well. The Great Writers can be classified into various non-exclusive subgroups based on their relationship to Ireland, including “Fled”, “Driven from”, “Disgusted”, “Hated”, and “Drank half”.

religious experience is an amazingly widespread social phenomenon, and it has a sui generis quality to it that makes it difficult to explain without some sort of experiential link. The longer answer rests firmly on a Durkheimian base. Whether we understand the phenomenon as culture, as shared mental representations, or as beliefs, rites, and rituals separating the sacred from the profane and thereby organizing the believers into a church, I am convinced that much of the character of social life is essentially religious. That is, it is shared, taken for granted, and supra-material. Having experienced sociality that is explicitly religious helps in identifying sociality that is only implicitly so. Hence my claim.

As we know, a central feature of Durkheim’s thinking is his insight that religious experience is a social phenomenon. But the radical character of this insight is often underestimated, maybe because—in the Holy Trinity of undergraduate sociological theory—we often present Marx as the one concerned to undermine the truth of religion or explain it away, Weber as the one who is uninterested in explaining the origins of religion and focuses instead on its consequences, and Durkheim as the one who emphasizes the centrality and universality of religious experience. Although it shouldn’t, this makes it easy to forget that for Durkheim the elemental forms of religious life are rooted entirely in the social structure and the dynamics of groups, not the other way around. Sociologists and others get a lot of mileage in classrooms, papers, essays, and books pointing out the “religious” character of various sorts of activities and rituals, sometimes emphasizing the collective effervescence of group life, sometimes the careful categorization of the sacred and profane. Hence stock examples like the Macy’s Day Parade, the Presidential inauguration, the Superbowl or college football game, rules about about the placement dinner forks at a formal dinner, and so on.

When it comes to interpreting Durkheim, though, we shouldn’t slide from illustrating the continuity of “obviously” religious ritual with secular ritual to the idea that religious experience per se is somehow primary or special, while other, secular rituals are merely like it in some derivative or ersatz fashion. Durkheim is not out to show that there is a distinctive kind of experience—religious experience—which, once identified, can then be found hidden in many other places in society, but rather to argue that religious experiences are themselves the product of kinds of social life, group structure, and social action.

Durkheim’s insistence that researchers and “free thinkers” should “confront religion in the same mental state as the believer” is understandable given his concern to rebut alternative theories of religion. In his view these alternatives missed the most important thing about religion, seeing it either as a primitive survival to be explained away or a sort of understandable but failed precursor to a scientific attitude of mind. Durkheim’s move is to give religion its “truth” or “reality” with one hand, by insisting that it is eternal and will be found wherever you find society, but then to take it away with the other, by revealing that the “truth” or “reality” underlying religious experience is a feature of the social structure—not something numinous or theological in any sense a believer would endorse, but something that can be naturalistically explained by social scientists.

So I think I’d rather not lean too heavily on the phrase “much of the character of social life is essentially religious” because it puts the religious cart before the social horse. I understand what Andy is saying in his post (and what Karen Fields is saying in her brilliant Introduction to The Elementary Forms). Clearly there’s a lot right about the idea that “having experienced sociality that is explicitly religious helps in identifying sociality that is only implicitly so”. But I also think it’s a little too easy, and maybe too common, to leave “religious experience” per se unanalyzed and represent Durkheim as just saying “much of social life is a lot like religious life”. This makes it easy to forget that first and foremost Durkheim was making the radical argument that even the most religiously intense and spiritually meaningful forms of experience were explicable as aspects of the structure of social groups.

I am not arguing that Durkheim’s view is right. He was wrong about a lot of things. But in the first comment on Andy’s post, Bedhaya notes that, upon reading Durkheim in a course he or she taught, some of the religiously-minded students were “perturbed” by the idea that “the sacred power that people experience in rituals is society”. I think they were right to be. They saw where the cutting edge of the argument really is. Durkheim’s goal is to take religious experience seriously in order to explain it socially. This is a much more radical idea than the watered-down version of Durkheim that presents him as affirming the “truth”, “reality” or “eternal” character of religion and then focusing on the quasi-religious character of academic conventions or college sports. It would almost be more faithful to Durkheim’s view—truer to the consternation his argument originally provoked—to begin with the case of the Superbowl and go on to talk about the “quasi-football” character of religious ritual, instead of the reverse.

fitted with military grade armor at least five inches thick, and the wheels are fitted with run flat tires … The doors weigh as much as a Boeing 757 airplane cabin door. The engine is equipped with a Eaton Twin Vortices Series 1900 supercharger system. The vehicle’s fuel tank is leak-proof and is invulnerable to explosions. The car is perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks and has its own oxygen supply and firefighting system built into the trunk. … two holes hidden inside the lower part of the vehicle’s front bumper … are able to emit tear gas The vehicle can also fire a salvo of multi-spectrum infrared smoke grenades as a countermeasure to an Rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) or Anti-tank missile (ATGM) attack and to act as a visual obscurant to operator guided missiles. … The limo is equipped with a driver’s enhanced video system which allows the driver to operate in an infrared smoke environment. This driver’s enhanced video system also contains bumper mounted night vision cameras for operation in pitch black conditions. Kept in the trunk is a blood bank of the President’s blood type.[citation needed] Interestingly, there is no key hole in the doors. A special trick, known only to Secret Service agents, is required to gain access to the passenger area. Furthermore, the entire limo can be locked like a bank vault.

Pretty impressive. However, in their efforts to anticipate every threat, the designers of this thing nevertheless failed to account for the unique engineering characteristics of Irish roads. Foreigners may not be aware that, historically, Ireland’s roads (in conjunction with the system of road signs) have been both its primary transportation network and main form of defense against invasion. During World War II (or “The Emergency” as it was politely referred to in Ireland) the contingency plan against Nazi attack was simply to uproot the road signs and otherwise leave things just as they were, thereby transforming a national transport network into a dangerous labyrinth of treacherous, crater-ridden byways. And so, in an echo of this grim period and forty years of EU Structural Funds notwithstanding, this morning the superlimo got stuck on a hump outside the U.S. embassy.

In fairness to Dublin Corporation and its employees, the Irish road system may not really be to blame here. (Though it’s hard to resist the idea.) Instead, I can attest—as someone who has queued up many times over the years outside the U.S. embassy in the course of getting a various visas approved or renewed—that the ultimate culprit is probably the State Department itself, by way of the variety of security measures it put into place around the embassy during the 1980s. Between them, the system of gates and security bollards, together with the state of the footpath on the Elgin Road, conspired to leave the superlimo high and dry. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.

Update: Via Facebook and elsewhere comes the argument that, because Embassies are sovereign territory, the road was in fact American. On the other hand, of course, the purpose of Obama’s visit was to reaffirm his roots in the town of Moneygall. So Irish reaction has moved quite smoothly from “American President’s Limo Gets Stuck On Irish Road” to “Returning Irishman’s Car Damaged By American Road”.