Henry Dampier

My column for this week is now up on Social Matter. It’s about some of the dashed hopes related to the World Wide Web. Please leave a comment over there if you have something smart to say about it.

Here’s the intro:

The World Wide Web became popular on a wave of general optimism. The idea was that this network would give anyone with a computer equal and free access to unprecedented stores of knowledge.

What public libraries did to democratize knowledge, the internet would do – but faster, better, and more cheaply.

This new medium would break the monopolies of the big media companies. People would eventually stop watching TV, stop reading magazines, and stop caring about Hollywood.

Peer to peer file sharing would make copyright enforcement impossible. Cheap digital tools would unleash the creativity of the masses. The un-censorable network would transform people who would’ve otherwise been television drones into knowledgeable digital citizens.

Anyone who wanted it could have a platform to speak truth to power.

How many of these assumptions have turned out to be accurate, and how many have melted away?

As it relates to some of my other projects cooking on this site, I didn’t make much progress last week owing to work keeping me busy. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make some more time for it this upcoming week.

My column this week at Social Matter is about the history of the apprenticeship system (mostly in America) and why it’s so challenging to revive it despite a lot of interest in doing so. Here’s an excerpt:

When intelligent people discuss the problems with the higher education system in the Western world – namely that it costs too much and fails to prepare most of its students and graduates for fulfilling lives – the suggestion to revive the apprenticeship system which existed in bygone times often comes up.

Billionaires like Nassim Taleb and Peter Thiel have both advocated something like a return to the apprenticeship system which was ubiquitous up until the early modern era. These suggestions are also often echoed by bloggers and others who know vaguely about what they want, but aren’t quite clear on what the old apprenticeship system was and why it ultimately faded.

This article will attempt to clear out some of the confusion and obfuscation around the issue.

One company that attempted to revive the apprenticeship concept for high tech companies just shut down earlier this month. In the closing letter, the founders cited some failed matches and high expenses for managing the relationships between ‘apprentices’ and mentors. Their ambition was to create a national apprenticeship network, but the model couldn’t scale.

Some states have also attempted to create larger apprenticeship programs outside the construction trades, where they are still prevalent (albeit in a different way than was traditional).

Despite all these well-intentioned efforts, many if not most of them are likely to fail. To understand why, we have to retrace the history of why compulsory education and labor reforms displaced the old apprenticeship model.

Head on over and read the whole thing. Please comment at Social Matter if you have any suggestions for follow-up topics. In particular, I’d like some suggestions for sources to learn more about the guild system in Europe.

What I’m working on

I have about 5,000 words in excerpts and notes written down about The Vampire Economy, which is a pre-WW2 book about the economy of Nazi Germany drawn mostly from letters and interviews. I’m going to experiment with some audio recordings on my phone (was good enough for at least a couple podcasts I’ve appeared on) of some of the more fun quotes from the book.

I’ve also collected and reformatted most of my posts from this blog and Social Matter. I’m going to be collecting them into a compilation that I’m going to be selling on Kindle and iBooks (the latter might be a later release than the former). This is mostly done and waiting for me to get a newsletter up and running to my satisfaction. That’ll make for an exceptionally fat eBook. In the future, I’ll be doing collections more frequently to prevent it from piling up like that.

I’ve made some progress on the e-mail course that I mentioned before. This’ll be a teaser for a weekly newsletter which will have a writing style closer to what my regular blogging was like. I’m getting that up before any of the other stuff. It a bad idea to start off with a drip course because it’s so time consuming to put together properly, but I’ve completed enough work on it that I don’t want to drop the project.

My book project is stalled at around 30,000 words. Some of the material is good — generally, one notch above the typical quality level on this website. I’m not sure that it needs to be a full book, or that the political manifesto type format is all that worthwhile. This is one of those not-so-hidden pitfalls of self-publishing, and it’ll be the last time that I attempt a full-length book without a publisher.

I’m unsure that the world really needs more opinionated books written by 29-year-olds. I’m going to look for some criticism to determine what I do with the manuscript. If I’m going to finish it, I want to be confident about it — and if I’m going to junk it, I want to junk it so that I can get started on some more worthwhile projects.

If I do elect to cancel it, I’ll just publish what’s mostly completed on the blog for free.

An example of an alternative project would be a digest of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s most important works. I also have a bunch of other ideas that I’d like to tackle, like a discussion of Soviet infiltration in the US government during WW2 using Diana West’s book on the topic as a jumping-off point.

Today, I published an extended column on the logical progression in American history from the American founding to Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement and our contemporary conflicts over race. Here’s an excerpt:

The grand idea of Civil Rights for everyone enjoys almost universal uncritical adulation in the United States. Part of the reason for this is that people who oppose the law – either explicitly or implicitly through their behavior – will quickly discover that their property rights have been severely restricted. The term ‘civil rights’ is really a program of the restriction of rights which creates certain conditions under which the state can seize or redistribute property, whether it happens to be corporate or personal. A corporate, government, or nonprofit leader must terminate an employee who can be shown to be discriminatory against protected classes of people.

The racist is a boogeyman that’s popular to hate. Anyone who can proclaim that they don’t discriminate immediately enjoys a warm feeling of being on the good side of society.

‘Racism’ tends to be portrayed as a universal evil that has been overcome by the march of rational philosophy, much like how the development of sewer systems and indoor plumbing made it so that people no longer dump feces on the streets (except in contemporary, high-tech San Francisco).

Also, I’m working on a couple book reviews that I should have up here over the next couple weeks. I’m trying to change the way that I work so that I spend a lot more time in focused organization, planning, and research than I just do writing off the top of my head from a list of topics.