SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama's "Good Enough" Revolution
Why the Imperfect is the Enemy of the Good
MP3s exemplify "disruptive technology," a new product initially ignored by major investors due to its low quality yet catches fire due to its convenience. The history of recorded sound has been at the vanguard of the Good Enough Revolution throughout the 20th century: 78 rpm records sounded better than 33s, analog 33s delivered higher fidelity sound than brittle, cold, digital CDs, which make compressed MP3 files sound like dog poop.
People like poop. Wired magazine reported: "Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University, recently completed a six-year study of his students. Every year he asked new arrivals in his class to listen to the same musical excerpts played in a variety of digital formats—from standard MP3s to high-fidelity uncompressed files—and rate their preferences. Every year, he reports, more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They've grown accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive sizzle—a.k.a. distortion—found in compressed music. To them, that's what music is supposed to sound like." MP3 poop sounds like angels singing. And MP3s don't scratch, take up room, or get stolen by your roommate.
From the ridiculously portable Flip video camera to streaming video through a laptop to the low-tech Predator drone plane that screws up the best-laid plans of Afghan wedding planners, Good Enough dominates the technology world. Cheap and easy, that's how we like it.
At least at first glance. Convenience isn't always, well, convenient. The Flip records videos in a file format that's hard to manipulate. I have 25 feet of shelf space dedicated to compact discs but I won't suffer like my friend Mary, whose computer decided to melt down at the same time as her back-up hard drive, taking $15,000 worth of iTunes downloads with them. Print newspapers are hurting, but they can't be turned off with the flip of a switch as the governments do in China and Iran whenever the Internet masses get rambunctious. And dispensing death from the Predator's ticky-tacky lawnmower-engine buzz is a surefire prescription for blowback by inspiring the Pakistani jihadis of the future.
In the world of ideas, President Obama has come to symbolize the triumph of Good Enough. (Candidate Obama, he of "hope" and "change," has been discontinued.) Obama, along with his PR flacks and Congressional allies, loves to paraphrase Voltaire: "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good." Better to move forward incrementally than not at all.
Repeatedly ceding ground from the wimpy compromises he made by negotiating against himself, Obama deploys this mantra against anyone who pushes for significant change. "We can't afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary," said the president after bailing out bankers but not Americans who had lost their jobs and/or homes. Now he's using the same mantra to tout the toothless, inconsequential mess that came out of the global warming summit in Copenhagen, and a healthcare bill that manages to make the current disaster even worse.
"The general consensus [on healthcare] was that we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good," said Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana and a key Obama ally.
Unfortunately for us, Obama's argument relies on a historical example that doesn't apply today.
Obamaite pundit Jonathan Alter summarizes liberal thinking: "You don't always get everything you want the first time up at bat," he argues. "Roosevelt was constantly going back to Congress to strengthen...Social Security, which was not until he had been in office for more than two years. A lot of New Deal types really hated Roosevelt's Social Security plan because they thought it was so weak. And then later they changed it, and they changed it again, and they changed it again."
Other Obamaites point to the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s, which started out weak but wound up strong and meaningful under LBJ. Perfect isn't achievable now, they argue. But Good Enough is. Get half-assed reforms through on long-standing problems like the economy, climate change and healthcare, they say, and we'll improve upon them later. But this approach relies on two logical fallacies.
First, Good Enough often turns out to be Even Worse Than Before. Prices of insurance company stocks rose sharply on news that Obamacare was close to passage—an ominous sign for patients. "All in all, relative to the last version of health reform issued by the Senate, things have turned out pretty well for the health insurance industry," said Carl McDonald, an analyst at Oppenheimer. "In particular, all versions of a government-run health plan have largely been eliminated." Companies like Sigma and Aetna will be allowed to pass new federal taxes on to their patients, which will include tens of millions of new "customers" forced by the government to sign up—at their own expense. Obamacare will be like a smash to the face for the 20 percent-plus of workers already reeling from many months of unemployment.
Second, looking to the middle of the 20th century doesn't make sense. Back then historical progress was assumed to be a continuous process. Organized labor, civil rights groups and New Left activists fought hard for movement forward for higher wages and equal rights. They never settled, and they didn't let Congress settle either.
Our times are different. Although we are clearly entering a period where breakdown, collapse and even revolution could occur, we're currently stuck with late-period American capitalism and its political leadership. They are stagnant, devoid of dynamism, and alienated from the people. Obama's half-assed compromises on issues like gays in the military, torture, Guantánamo, healthcare and global warming will be touted as triumphs in the next few elections. Neither Obama nor Congress will view them as building blocks, part of a continuous movement toward historical progress. We will not revisit these debates. They will be over.
Good Enough will always be good enough for Obama. But not for us. Like the kids who've been made to believe that MP3s sound OK, we would be better off with nothing at all.
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously.")
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
MP3s exemplify "disruptive technology," a new product initially ignored by major investors due to its low quality yet catches fire due to its convenience. The history of recorded sound has been at the vanguard of the Good Enough Revolution throughout the 20th century: 78 rpm records sounded better than 33s, analog 33s delivered higher fidelity sound than brittle, cold, digital CDs, which make compressed MP3 files sound like dog poop.
People like poop. Wired magazine reported: "Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University, recently completed a six-year study of his students. Every year he asked new arrivals in his class to listen to the same musical excerpts played in a variety of digital formats—from standard MP3s to high-fidelity uncompressed files—and rate their preferences. Every year, he reports, more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They've grown accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive sizzle—a.k.a. distortion—found in compressed music. To them, that's what music is supposed to sound like." MP3 poop sounds like angels singing. And MP3s don't scratch, take up room, or get stolen by your roommate.
From the ridiculously portable Flip video camera to streaming video through a laptop to the low-tech Predator drone plane that screws up the best-laid plans of Afghan wedding planners, Good Enough dominates the technology world. Cheap and easy, that's how we like it.
At least at first glance. Convenience isn't always, well, convenient. The Flip records videos in a file format that's hard to manipulate. I have 25 feet of shelf space dedicated to compact discs but I won't suffer like my friend Mary, whose computer decided to melt down at the same time as her back-up hard drive, taking $15,000 worth of iTunes downloads with them. Print newspapers are hurting, but they can't be turned off with the flip of a switch as the governments do in China and Iran whenever the Internet masses get rambunctious. And dispensing death from the Predator's ticky-tacky lawnmower-engine buzz is a surefire prescription for blowback by inspiring the Pakistani jihadis of the future.
In the world of ideas, President Obama has come to symbolize the triumph of Good Enough. (Candidate Obama, he of "hope" and "change," has been discontinued.) Obama, along with his PR flacks and Congressional allies, loves to paraphrase Voltaire: "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good." Better to move forward incrementally than not at all.
Repeatedly ceding ground from the wimpy compromises he made by negotiating against himself, Obama deploys this mantra against anyone who pushes for significant change. "We can't afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary," said the president after bailing out bankers but not Americans who had lost their jobs and/or homes. Now he's using the same mantra to tout the toothless, inconsequential mess that came out of the global warming summit in Copenhagen, and a healthcare bill that manages to make the current disaster even worse.
"The general consensus [on healthcare] was that we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good," said Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana and a key Obama ally.
Unfortunately for us, Obama's argument relies on a historical example that doesn't apply today.
Obamaite pundit Jonathan Alter summarizes liberal thinking: "You don't always get everything you want the first time up at bat," he argues. "Roosevelt was constantly going back to Congress to strengthen...Social Security, which was not until he had been in office for more than two years. A lot of New Deal types really hated Roosevelt's Social Security plan because they thought it was so weak. And then later they changed it, and they changed it again, and they changed it again."
Other Obamaites point to the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s, which started out weak but wound up strong and meaningful under LBJ. Perfect isn't achievable now, they argue. But Good Enough is. Get half-assed reforms through on long-standing problems like the economy, climate change and healthcare, they say, and we'll improve upon them later. But this approach relies on two logical fallacies.
First, Good Enough often turns out to be Even Worse Than Before. Prices of insurance company stocks rose sharply on news that Obamacare was close to passage—an ominous sign for patients. "All in all, relative to the last version of health reform issued by the Senate, things have turned out pretty well for the health insurance industry," said Carl McDonald, an analyst at Oppenheimer. "In particular, all versions of a government-run health plan have largely been eliminated." Companies like Sigma and Aetna will be allowed to pass new federal taxes on to their patients, which will include tens of millions of new "customers" forced by the government to sign up—at their own expense. Obamacare will be like a smash to the face for the 20 percent-plus of workers already reeling from many months of unemployment.
Second, looking to the middle of the 20th century doesn't make sense. Back then historical progress was assumed to be a continuous process. Organized labor, civil rights groups and New Left activists fought hard for movement forward for higher wages and equal rights. They never settled, and they didn't let Congress settle either.
Our times are different. Although we are clearly entering a period where breakdown, collapse and even revolution could occur, we're currently stuck with late-period American capitalism and its political leadership. They are stagnant, devoid of dynamism, and alienated from the people. Obama's half-assed compromises on issues like gays in the military, torture, Guantánamo, healthcare and global warming will be touted as triumphs in the next few elections. Neither Obama nor Congress will view them as building blocks, part of a continuous movement toward historical progress. We will not revisit these debates. They will be over.
Good Enough will always be good enough for Obama. But not for us. Like the kids who've been made to believe that MP3s sound OK, we would be better off with nothing at all.
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously.")
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
posted by Ted Rall at
4:38 PM
9 Comments:
I've been reading this sort of thing all over the internets today. The mainstream has finally caught up with you Ted.
Not sure the analogy is perfect, but your assessment of Obama is spot on. One of the main contradictions the "pass the bill" crowd refuses to reconcile is this: on one hand they say we must pass this bill because it won't be revisited for 20 years if we don't act now! On the other hand, they say we can fix it once it's created. Wait a minute - which is it? 20 years or now? We'll fix it as we go or it'll take 20 years? What a load of crap. For those that say getting it started is the hard part, this bill is as about as shitty a start as you could get. You cannot fix something that is a pile of shit, and this bill is a pile of shit. We need a solid foundation to build on. Even a limited public option would have been a decent foundation. Leave it to the left to capitulate to the point of the biggest corporate giveaway in human history. On the heels of the banker bailout, liberals who support this bill should be ashamed.
Let me give you leftists some tips when voting for someone:
Just because someone can wax eloquent doesn't mean they are telling the truth (see Hitler)
Look at someone's actual accomplishments before voting for them. Talk is cheap (see above)
When someone asks you what accomplishments your candidate has to run for President, don't say "winning the primary" like someone here did.
Just because a black man is "clean and articulate" (to quote known plagiarizer Joe Biden) does not mean they are qualified for President
Don't think that voting for a black man will get rid of your white liberal guilt.
You leftists were sold a slick story (BJ Bill is envious). Get used to your stupidity.
33 RPM vinyl better than CDs? Really? I'd rather have my music without the crackles and the horrific RIAA de/compression scheme on vinyl records.
What you might refer to is the Loudness Wars, which nicely coincided with the rise of CDs and deprived music fans of any dynamic range worth mentioning. That's not the medium's fault, but the music producer's.
Regarding MP3s, though, you are partially right - many MP3s do sound "good enough". Nevertheless, can *you* really tell a difference between a WAV and a 320kbps MP3?
When you say that Obama is worse than Bush, I can stomach that. When you say that CDs are worse than LPs, you've crossed over into Turntable Creationism.
Turntable Creationism is a "science" by which a personal preference for large package fetishism is justified by non-existent audiophile specs. Your ears may prefer the rumbling noise floor, reduced frequency range and compressed dynamic range of vinyl records, but they are not superior in any measurable way. Vinyl decays faster, skips more and requires more expensive equipment and higher maintenance to compete with CDs played back on a $50.00 player. All due respect, I own about 700 LPs.
The highest quality commercial playback format was quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape. It is certainly rivaled by DVD audio specs (where the mastering wasn't botched to please MP3 fans). If you want to argue analog versus digital, you better have a sweet reel-to-reel set up.
I've worked in analog recording studios that spent a fortune on antique gear. When they want to listen to a reference recording to keep their ears tuned up, they fire up a CD player, not a turntable. In fact, I've never seen a turntable in a recording studio (surely some crank has done this for larfs by now).
In short, the CD is the last audiophile format we may ever see. The music industry is now sorely regretting, as one bigwig put it, "selling our master tapes on a large scale."
@Anon11:58 There's no contradiction- it's easier to revisit something that's already passed than to bring up something that failed all over again.
We pass this- we revisit it in a year or two. More importantly, we shift the viewpoint to "Americans want government involved their health care"
We DON'T pass this - the take away message is going to be "America doesn't want government involved in their health care" and it'll take the better part of a generation to overcome that frame enough to bring it up again.
@Russell- Oh, hell yes. If McCain and Caribou barbie had gotten in, no doubt in my mind we'd be in WWIII by now. Probably even have gone nuclear.
So-called "late capitalism" has been around since late Lenin and the late Soviet regime. Not very original on Ted's part. As for his not so clever observations about people preferring "good enough", the rational explanation is that most people cannot afford or can't be bothered to pay for really good. Or, in the case of American politics, they are convinced that there are only those two options to "choose" from.
As for Y_S's observation:
We WIll NOT STOP With What We've Acheived at COP 15. The Environment MUST be Cleared (emphasis mine) of Carbon Dioxide To Save The Future.
I hope that never happens.
Totally agree with you on Obama. We should all start working on making it possible for 3rd parties to get onto ballets and into the debates.
If you want to drive around with a record player listening to 78's, or try jogging with a record player...go for it. Please make a flip video and send it to me.
Here's a little thing on that insurance thing...
Haven't you noticed the amount of the fine, like $800-$1600 range?
That's actually what most official "National Health Insurance" idealists were talking it could be. It could be, he's letting the insurance company think it's "Winning" and spend all the money it can doing this. Then, after the first bill, he rams through the "Since all Americans now have to have health insurance, you must treat them with reasonable care." measure. The "Fine" is chicken shit compared to health insurance premiums, and frankly if they started jailing a lot of tax protesters, it'd crash the prison/court system and shock the economy.
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