SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010
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B5 The connections we lose when we’re always connected blackberry from B1
ative possibilities of the wired life in the New York Times and elsewhere. The ulti- mate anti-Carr is probably Clay Shirky, whose new book, “Cognitive Surplus,” sees promise where “The Shallows” sees peril. So who’s right? Carr leads with what may be his most persuasive evidence: a feeling that some- thing has changed inside his head since he made the jump online. He acknowl- edges the usefulness of the Internet as a conduit of information and a means of doing research. But he has come to think there’s a price to pay for that conven- ience. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, re- programming the memory,” he writes. “My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.” He feels this most strongly when he at- tempts to read a book or an essay that re- quires sustained focus. It’s simply harder to pay close attention than it used to be. Away from the computer, he realizes, this new version of his brain “was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it,” with a di- et of clicks, links and e-mail. “I missed my old brain,” he writes. If you spend your days more or less the
way Carr does — if you are a knowledge worker, a trawler of the vast Interwebz, ever searching for information, diversion and a sense of social connection — you probably have your own sense that life online is often a life lived in distraction. Goodbye, deep reading and linear think- ing; hello, computer-induced ADD. Beyond that astute diagnosis of what
nags at many of us as we trudge through our digital rounds, Carr manages to be scary and yet not quite persuasive. He
leans on summaries of recent research about what happens to our brains (and the brains of monkeys and sea slugs) in response to repeated actions such as those we perform when we’re cycling through e-mail and Web sites. “The news is even more disturbing than I had sus- pected,” he writes. “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educa- tors, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” If “The Shallows” were a piece of re-
portage, sans polemic, Carr would have third parties put the research he cites in context. As it is, we have to trust that it all adds up to what he says it does. There’s very little hint that researchers disagree about how our brains are changing in the digital age and whether that’s a good thing, a bad thing or something in be- tween. He nods at studies suggesting that activities such as video gaming enhance certain brain functions but concludes that “the Net is making us smarter . . . only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards.” That makes it sound as though he thinks the Internet has a mind of its own. Perhaps your iPad is a distant cousin of the evil Skynet of the “Termina- tor” flicks. For me, Carr’s most genuinely frightening suggestion is that we have outsourced too much of our memory to our machines: Why memorize “Ozyman- dias” or the causes and dates of the first Sino-Japanese war when a Google search will tell you in a few keystrokes? I’d be more inclined to trust Carr’s con- clusions if he didn’t also handle history in a way that dispenses with nuance and goes for the reductive stroke. He sweeps through the transition from oral culture to written culture, makes far-reaching statements about how the invention of
maps and clocks reshaped the way we think about time and space, and squeezes everything he can out of the Gutenberg moment (which was really years and dec- ades in the making). So he writes, “Books went from being expensive, scarce com- modities to being affordable, plentiful ones.” Try telling that to all the folks, from the 15th century on, who couldn’t read books or couldn’t afford to buy them. This somewhat rough handling of the historical record brings us to one of the biggest problems with Carr’s argument. He writes as if the entire world is living glued to its screens, but the truth is that many of us, even those in affluent West- ern countries, do not live our lives entire- ly online. A journalist who writes about technology and society is going to spend much of his waking time basting in the electronic juices of the Internet. Maybe American teens do text too much, but not everyone is a tech jockey who lines up at the Apple store for the latest Steve Jobs dream gadget. What about the guy who drives a delivery truck, the lady who sells you stamps at the post office, the me- chanic, the farmer, the factory-floor worker, the insurance salesman, the homeless guy at the public library? They may have computer access, but they are not all leading lives bathed in the glow of an iPad or a BlackBerry. And there are of- fice workers who still read books — just look around you on the Metro. Beyond the borders of the developed world, cellphones may be ubiquitous, but Internet access is not — at least not yet. So when Carr talks about a new modern brain whose neural landscape is being dramatically reshaped by our time on- line, he’s not talking about all or even most of humanity but about a relatively elite segment of the planet’s population. Ditto for his worries about what has hap- pened to our ability to absorb long, sus-
tained arguments. It’s a real problem for those of us who spend our days gazing at screens, but one suspects that deep read- ing has always been a rare skill. The other thing missing from Carr’s ar- gument is what, exactly, those of us who are over-users of the Internet ought to do about it. Recycle the iPhone? Give the laptop to the poor? That’s where William Powers’s book “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” has more to say. It’s less ambitious, more cheerful and ultimately more persuasive than “The Shallows.” Powers, a former staff writer for The
Washington Post, pays far less attention to neuroscience than Carr does, but he shares Carr’s feeling that the “caffeinated click-click-click of the mind” has dis- connected many people from life’s richer intangibles — what we used to call an in- ner life. Like Carr, Powers discovers that he misses the possibilities and creative insights that come from reflection, and he describes a powerful need to step out of the digital stream now and again. For tips on how to deal with today’s digitally enhanced neural overload, he turns for advice and inspiration to seven heavy-hitters from history and literature: Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Hamlet, Benja- min Franklin, Thoreau and McLuhan. (Several of them make cameo appear- ances in “The Shallows,” too, though Pow- ers’s treatment of Gutenberg turns out to be more nuanced than Carr’s.) The title “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” comes from the Elizabethan equivalent of to- day’s handheld devices: tables, “pocket- sized almanacs or calendars that came with blank pages made of specially coat- ed paper or parchment.” Notes could be scribbled on those pages with a stylus and later erased; Hamlet mentions them in the play. To Powers, the table is an example of a then-new technology that made the most of an older one — hand-
writing — to help users manage the early- modern equivalent of information over- load. The principle Powers draws from
Hamlet’s handheld is “Old tools fight overload.” In his case, he turned to Mole- skine notebooks to help him organize and focus his thoughts offline. From Pla- to he takes the lesson of occasionally put- ting distance between oneself and the madding crowd. In one of his dialogues, Plato has Socrates and his young friend Phaedrus take a walk outside Athens, where in the calmer, less distracting countryside they talk about love and rhetoric. (Powers observes that Socrates, apparently an early technophobe, has his doubts about writing vs. speech as the best vehicle for thought.) Seneca offers lessons in how to find some inner space in which to focus; Franklin presents a model of how to manage one’s time and attention — and so on down through the ages. There’s more than a little comfort to be had from looking back and seeing that people did manage to cope with the new technologies that came their way, wheth- er it was writing or printing or the tele- graph of Thoreau’s time. For those who feel they really can’t live without their lit- tle glowing friends, Powers suggests it’s possible to be connected to the digital world and to something deeper as well. For his family, that means going offline on weekends. In “The Shallows,” Carr in- sists that McLuhan was right and that the new digital medium really is the message —that it doesn’t just deliver content but, more and more, determines who we are and how we think. Powers, however, makes a stronger case that it’s still up to us to decide how best to live in, and some- times apart from, this medium we have created.
bookworld@washpost.com
Louisiana’s oil jackpot has been its curse oil from B1
fant mortality, comes in fourth in violent crime, ranks 46th in percentage of people older than 25 with college degrees, and ties for second in percentage of people liv- ing below the poverty line. Oil riches didn’t create these problems, of course, but it is striking that they didn’t ameliorate them. “We’ve always been a plantation state,” says Oliver Houck, an en- vironmental law professor at Tulane Uni- versity. “What oil and gas did is replace the agricultural plantation culture with an oil and gas plantation culture.” Even though Louisiana’s oil and gas
production peaked in 1970 and many com- panies moved their offices to Houston, re- fineries, oil import facilities on the coast and a web of thousands of miles of pipe- lines continue to make the industry a pow- erful force in the state. It is embedded in Louisiana’s mental and economic infra- structure, and remains one of its leading employers. The recent development of shale gas in the northern, poorer part of the state will bolster its influence even fur- ther.
All this explains why, even as the BP oil spill threatens Louisiana’s tourism, fisher- ies and shoreline, local politicians have continued to speak up on behalf of contin- ued offshore drilling: They, and their state, are addicted to oil. “There are no risk-free ways of produc- ing the energy we rely on today,” Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) wrote in a June letter asking President Obama to lift his morato- rium on deepwater offshore drilling. She said the impact of idling 33 deepwater ex- ploration rigs was “like closing 12 large motor vehicle assembly plants, all at once.” Like Landrieu, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) have called for an end to the moratorium, and Vitter has warned that the drilling halt “could kill thousands of Louisiana jobs.” It’s an argument with rare bipartisan
support in an age of bitter division. In- deed, a Rasmussen Reports poll last month showed that 79 percent of Louisi- ana voters think offshore drilling should continue, far higher than the 60 percent who say the same nationwide.
Some of these voters will undoubtedly be among those who turn out to celebrate the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp and Pe- troleum Festival in Morgan City this fall. The festival’s Web site says it is “an event that will prove that oil and water really do mix.”
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ouisiana’s dysfunctional relationship with oil dates to 1901, when a farmer near Jennings noticed some bubbles
in his rice field. He took an old stovepipe out to the field, threw a match inside and the bubbles ignited. With that, the rush was on. As word of his discovery spread, local businessmen bought up adjoining property, brought in a Texas driller and struck oil — so much that it flooded the farmer’s field, creating a small oil lake and ruining several acres of rice. This pattern of rich oil and gas rewards coupled with environmental damage con- tinued. “The oil and gas industry basically crisscrossed our wetlands with canals to make it easier to go out with service rigs and explore,” says Adam Babich, a law pro- fessor and director of the Tulane Univer- sity environmental law clinic. Babich said the companies left dredged material
ting greenhouses gases, energy and chem- ical firms added to the “ferocity” of Hurri- cane Katrina, thereby inflicting extra dam- age on the plaintiffs’ property. Half of the 16 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans recused themselves because of conflicts of interest. Moreover, disclosure forms show that four of the judges who did not recuse themselves had investments in energy partnerships or companies. One judge owned shares in five firms: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy and Dia- mond Offshore Drilling. At times, the industry’s influence has
been even more brazenly displayed in the Louisiana legislature, as the recent experi- ence of Tulane University’s environmental law clinic suggests. Students working there have won a range of cases involving coal plants, wetlands and landfills — and the oil industry. In one suit Tulane stu- dents filed, a judge found that a refinery operated by Exxon Mobil had 2,600 vio- lations of the Clean Air Act. Earlier this year, the Louisiana Chem-
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An oil refinery near Baton Rouge. Even though Louisiana’s oil and gas production peaked in 1970, refineries, oil import facilities and thousands of miles of pipeline continue to make the energy industry a powerful force in the state.
“piled up on the side of the canals, making little berms all over the place, which has completely screwed up the hydrology of the wetlands.” As the companies continued to develop
the wetlands, more and more land was lost. The disposal of chemical drilling ma- terials and equipment further polluted the state’s delicate ecosystem. “We got all this great oil and gas produc- tion and we’ve let those guys rape our state,” says Foster Campbell, Louisiana’s public service commissioner. “They say they gave us jobs. Yeah, but they made bil- lions.” As in foreign petro-states, those billions
have sparked quarrels over tax and royalty revenues. When Harry S. Truman was president, Louisiana powerbrokers reject- ed a revenue-sharing deal on offshore oil extracted from federal waters; after a lengthy court battle, the state ended up with nothing. So Louisianans believed they got their due when they extracted a deal similar to the one the state rejected half a century ago. In 2006, in negotiations over drilling in a new section of the gulf’s federal wa- ters, Landrieu got the federal government to give 37.5 percent of the royalties to gulf states to preserve and restore coastal habi- tats. This time it was lawmakers from other
states who were upset about the govern- ment giving up tens of billions of dollars of future revenue. The whole revenue flap echoed, in a more civil manner, the dis- putes between the Niger Delta states and Nigeria’s central government, or between the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis over the di-
vision of oil revenue in Iraq. Although the oil industry plays an out- sized role in Louisiana’s economy, the money it brings in has decreased in recent years, and the state has struggled to make up for the resulting shortfall. The Louisi- ana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Associa- tion says that the industry accounts for 13 percent of state revenue, down from 40 percent when oil and gas output was higher. And unlike oil-rich nations such as Norway, which has squirreled away about $437 billion from its oil sales in pension and sovereign wealth funds, Louisiana has no stash of money for investments or rainy days. Nor have Louisianans managed to di- versify their economy. There is no Silicon Valley here, no northern Virginia tech cor- ridor. In the 1990s, when Louisiana real- ized it needed new sources of tax revenue to make up for declining oil receipts, the best idea it could come up with was to ex- pand riverboat gambling.
supported the industry and been support- ed by the industry in return. “There is certainly a friendly relation-
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ship between elected officials and the in- dustry,” former senator Bennett Johnston (D-La.) told me. “The fact that you were a friend of an industry that is important to your state doesn’t mean you didn’t believe it,” he said. “I think the oil and gas indus- try is very important to my state and, I think, to the country.” After Johnston retired in 1996, he be-
he economic reach of the oil indus- try has helped it win over the state’s political establishment, which has
came more than a friend of the industry: He joined the boards of Chevron and Co- lumbia Energy Group, a natural gas trans- mission company. In 2009, his lobbying firm, Johnston & Associates, received $160,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. For his part, former senator John Breaux (D-La.) says that the relationship is no different than those between Michigan politicians and auto companies or Califor- nia politicians and the entertainment or high-tech industries. “We supported them and they supported us,” he told me. After he left office in 2005, Breaux formed a lobbying firm with Republican Trent Lott. In 2009, the firm was paid $530,000 by Chevron, $330,000 by Royal Dutch Shell, and $600,000 by Plains Ex- ploration and Production, an independent oil company.
Because energy holdings are such a common presence in the investment port- folios of Louisiana’s leading citizens, in- cluding members of the judiciary, it can be hard to find an impartial judge to hear an oil case. In late June, the New Orleans federal
judge who suspended the Obama admin- istration’s moratorium on offshore drilling disclosed that he had bought and sold shares of a variety of oil and gas compa- nies. He hurriedly sold off shares of Exxon Mobil after realizing that the company was affected by the freeze. And last October, the plaintiffs in an un- usual case about global warming couldn’t get enough impartial appellate judges to hear their case, which alleges that, in emit-
ical Association — whose members in- clude Exxon Mobil, Shell and Chevron— supported a bill that would have blocked state funding for any university whose le- gal clinic sued a government agency, a business or an individual. During hearings, the association’s presi- dent, Dan Borné, sat side by side with the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Robert Adley (R), who also owns Pelican Gas Management. The measure, debated shortly after the BP spill began, died in committee. But be- fore the legislative session ended, oil in- dustry supporters did succeed in blocking a bill that would have allowed the state to retain outside counsel against BP.
country to ruin. More than a generation later, the nation is ruled by a mercurial leader who doles out cheap gasoline in an effort to paper over persistent social in- equality. While Louisiana is a far cry from Ven- ezuela, does it have any better chance of breaking free from its oil addiction? According to Jeffrey D. Sachs, an econo- mist who heads Columbia University’s Earth Institute and who has written about the resource curse, a better question is whether the rest of the country will. Sachs is no expert on Louisiana, but he says that the United States, once the world’s biggest oil producer and exporter, itself exhibits all the symptoms of “a pretty classic oil na- tion.” Louisiana, in other words, is not alone
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in suffering the pathologies of oil depen- dence. “We have lots of the characteristics of
petro-states ourselves even though we use that term for others,” he says. He cites our overdependence on oil and a tax policy that keeps oil relatively cheap. Moreover, he adds, “big oil plays an unnatural role in our politics. . . . Oil elects presidents, drives our foreign policy, our domestic policy, our climate change policy. . . . It’s led us to terrible energy policies and a breakdown of regulation. We look to the Niger Delta as an example of what an oil state does to its own environment, but it’s precisely what we’re doing to our own en- vironment.”
mufsons@washpost.com
n the 1970s, Venezuela’s oil minister predicted that oil, which he called “the devil’s excrement,” would lead his
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