In a recent feature on Clay Shirky (focusing on his new book, Cognitive Surplus) Guardian contributor Decca Aitkenhead analyzes Shirky’s famous optimism about Internet culture.

According to Aitkenhead, the new book “argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation. It proves… that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia–for no financial reward–because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness.”

Shirky argues this always a good thing; Aitkenhead describes herself as a “kneejerk” cynic of these trends,  a “techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking” and “troubled by its juvenile vacuity.”

Shirky responds:

I have the amiably simple-minded view of this stuff you would expect from an American, which is that I think freedom is good, full stop. So therefore I think I’m probably constitutionally incapable of seeing a massive spread in those freedoms as being anything other than salutary for society.

And adds, about his luck at predicting the future as an optimist:

[The] thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.

The Tate Britian

A coalition of writers including playwright Caryl Churchill and the critics Rebecca Solnit and Lucy R. Lippard are signers of a letter printed in The Guardian last weekend calling for the Tate Britain to disassociate itself with BP. According to the letter, “The public is rapidly coming to recognise that the sponsorship programmes of BP and Shell are means by which attention can be distracted from their impacts on human rights, the environment and the global climate.”

According to this report from Art Info, “The primary signatory was [a] veteran of exposing the opaque and politically-loaded sources of funding for arts institutions, Hans Haacke — whose 1970 MoMA Poll addressed New York governor and Museum of Modern Art board member Nelson Rockefeller’s continuing support of Nixon’s Indochina policy.”

The Guardian letter goes on to say:

As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists at Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high-profile cultural associations.

We represent a cross-section of people from the arts community that believe that the BP logo represents a stain on Tate’s international reputation. Many artists are angry that Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship. Little more than a decade ago, tobacco companies were seen as respectable partners for public institutions to gain support from – that is no longer the case. It is our hope that oil and gas will soon be seen in the same light.

In a short review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, Nation magazine book editor John Palattella quotes one of the more bracing pieces of the book, which focuses on the “the hive mind spawned by the social-media technologies of web 2.0″ and what it means to the exploding forces of online advertising and for intellectual and political culture. According to Lanier, the predicament is that:

[T]he combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given away without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.

Or, as Palattella refines the thought:

[E]ditors who justify not paying online contributors on the grounds that gratis articles provide invaluable exposure are not publishing journalism. They are grifters running editorial scams and killing journalism in the process.

According to Macphee, this is "Kropotkin both holding up a portrait of himself and having an image of himself holding up a portrait of himself flowing out of his forehead."

For the past few weeks, Josh Macphee over at Just Seeds has been publishing a great collection of anarchist and radical book covers in a blog series called “Judging Books by Their Covers.” There are a handful of Norwegian-published anarchist titles here; a cool set of Portuguese modernist book covers here; some work by the designer Flavio Costantini here; and a strange set of covers from a series of books published by the Liberation Support Movement, a Canadian group that focused on African liberation movements in the 1970s, here, here, and here. All are well worth a look.

According to Macphee: “I’ve been really digging designing book covers of late, which has made me look much closer at all the other covers I come across and already have on my shelf.”

The Rolling Stone issue with Michael Hastings' hot Afghanistan article also has a naked Lady GaGa on the cover.

The article that everyone is talking about, “The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings, won’t even be on newsstands until Friday. The piece, a profile of Stanley A. McChrystal, went live on the Rolling Stone website Tuesday, but by then it was already the talk of the town — Washington, especially — after being leaked to a number of interested parties by Rolling Stone itself. And then the piece got the biggest response of all: Obama forced McChrystal to Washington on Wednesday to explain his comments to the magazine and then, after getting that explanation, fired him.

Even before McChrystal’s firing, Hastings, a former Newsweek reporter, was shocked by the response to his piece. In an interview he said “We end up ignoring Afghanistan, so I’m quite surprised it’s creating such a stir. I knew I had some decent material to work with, but I’m surprised at the level of involvement.” In the days since, Hastings’ surprise has surely deepened, but his role in McChrystal’s sacking seems to have made him ambivalent about the entire situation, if his most recent two pieces (here and here) are any indication.

Commentators online have compared the swift reaction to another great Rolling Stone scoop: Carl Bernstein’s 1977 revelation that hundreds of American journalists had been working for the Central Intelligence Agency, which led to congressional hearings in 1978. But the case of the McChrystal scoop seems somehow different: after all, the General was fired before the essay was even on stands. There’s even a debate ongoing about the how the piece was published online: it seems a number of mainstream news outlets (Time and Politico) ran the piece early and illegally–that is, before Rolling Stone had made the decision to publish online. The media, it seems, couldn’t wait until there was a legitimate version of the story to link to. And then there’s speed of the Administration’s reaction to the story, which is remarkable, even in the age of the Internet.

It’s hard to quote a short passage from Susan Orlean’s tiny New Yorker web-essay “Alphabet Soup,” which describes the author’s experience of having a book publishing by a large American publisher. One letter, after all, leads to another… but it’s a telling commentary on corporate publishing, and it is, according to Orlean, “a true story.” Here’s the heart of the essay; the entire piece is available here.

My first book was acquired by two people I will call Editor A and Editor B, who ran a small imprint at a big publishing house. We had a great lunch to celebrate. A few months later, Editor A left book publishing to become a newspaper writer. Editor B became my primary editor. She and I had a nice lunch to talk about my book.

A few months after that, Editor B was promoted to publisher of the larger house—let us call it Publisher W—that owned the small imprint. Because Editor B—that is, Editor/Publisher B—now had too many duties to edit my book, I was assigned to Editor C.

Editor C and I had lunch. A few months later, he got a new job at another publishing house. I was assigned to Editor D.

Editor D and I had lunch. It was a pleasant-enough lunch, but Editor D had no actual interest in my book or me; he was just taking it on because Editor/Publisher B, now his boss, had asked him to.

A few months later, Editor/Publisher B was fired.

A few months after that, Editor D, now freed from his promise to Editor/Publisher B to oversee my project, asked me if my book was done because according to my contract, it was due.

My book was not done.

I paid back my advance to Publisher W and sold my book proposal to Publisher X. My editor at Publisher X—let’s see, that would be Editor E—had been a magazine editor, and was brand-new to the publishing world and full of crazy excitement about it. I was starting to get a little sensitive about all this change, and I asked Editor E if there was any chance that the publishing world would not always seem to her worthy of crazy excitement; that is, I asked Editor E if she thought she would ever leave. Editor E assured me that this was simply not possible.

Editor E and I had lunch. A few months later, she called me and said an incredible opportunity had presented itself in the newspaper world and she was leaving.

I was assigned to Editor F. I was very scared of Editor F, and I don’t think we had lunch. I finished my book. I had the longest acknowledgment section in the history of the written word.

Publishers Marketplace yesterday linked to the troubled Borders book chain’s most recent 8-K SEC filing, which discloses the company’s executive salaries.

According to the filing Thomas D. Carney, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, got a raise and is now making $450,000 a year. Mark R. Bierley, who was recently promoted to chief operating officer, also got a raise and is now getting $600,000 a year. The salary of Michael  J. Edwards, president of the company and chief executive officer, is holding steady at $750,000 a year. All also receive generous stock options, which are detailed in the filing. This comes just months after news (covered here on MobyLives) that the company paid nearly $1 million to two departing executives.

Chad Post (here) and Ed Nawotka (here) call attention to Amateur Thursdays, a new “literary web TV show” that’s currently in development. The show is being launched by Fabrice Rozie, who used to be the French cultural attaché in New York, and Giovanna Calvino, who, as everyone seems to highlight, is the daughter of the late Italo Calvino. She has also produced programming for Italian television. The new show, which is expected to launch in the fall, is currently raising money using Kickstarter.com, where it is being pitched using the gag-inducing and nonsensical line “Vogue Meets the New York Review of Books.”

According to Rozie, “The name comes from T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party in which a character calls his wife’s attempt at hosting a salon her ‘amateur Thursdays.’”

Nawotka notes that “the concept isn’t entirely new –- there have been several online book chat shows in recent years” but highlights the project’s “distinctly European flair.” Post finds it a “pretty interesting concept” and compares it to Titlepage.tv, which has already launched and describes itself simply as covering  “conversations about books.”

The would-be producers of The Cocktail Party explain their project this way: “To us and hopefully many others, reading is one of the great joys of life. We want to make a show as mesmerizing and fun as reading is to us.”

Tony Judt: Fibbing about his kid?

In a Newser column posted Monday, Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff accuses the famed historian Tony Judt (author of Postwar, among many other volumes) of writing his son’s half of a jointly authored Father’s Day op-ed that appeared in the June 18th edition of The New York Times. The idea that Judt’s 15-year-old son (Daniel Judt, who is a student at the Dalton School) could have actually written his half of the op-ed seems preposterous to Wolff.

Any of us who are writers and who have had 16-year-olds know what happened here: In our well-intentioned efforts to encourage our progeny’s careers and to slip our words into their mouths, we sometime go too far (though usually in school assignments rather than the New York Times).

Let’s say it: Judt, who sounds in the piece like he’s having a conversation with himself—or as he might imagine himself at 16—is. He’s made up his son’s part. How the New York Times could not have been wise to this is preposterous (figuring, no doubt, that if the parties in question were in agreement on their respective authorship, who could say otherwise).

When asked to respond by the NYTPicker blog, Judt emailed back a quick and simple reply: “Who is this clown Wolff–I’ve never heard of him.” He went on to deny Wolff’s charge: “What sort of media commentator doesn’t check his facts first? He could have written to Daniel or me and we could have set him right. Since, as he kindly points out, I have advanced ALS and use a secretary for dictation, he could have checked with him too. But then he would not have had a story.”

Wolff, however, stands by his story: “What else would he say? You expected a confession? I stand by the obvious: No 15–or 16 year old–writes like that. None, Never.”

Amazon subsidiary AbeBooks here selects 25 iconic book cover. According to the post, “If you saw these particular editions in a bookshop window, then we believe you would stop and stare. Most have been around for some decades, some are very famous, some were famous, and a few have been forgotten. Every one is all worth a second look.” Among the gems selected are 1st editions covers for Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.