katherine st asaph

Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don’t merely risk being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two days, the New York Times’s David Brooks, Politico’s Roger Simon, the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen and others have vilified Snowden for revealing the government’s aggressive spying on its own citizens, calling him self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist.

Yet even as the insults pile up and the amateur psychoanalysis intensifies, keep in mind that Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

MySpace has now shut the door on the past and accelerated ahead into its shiny — or rather space-y — social music discovery future. But in its rush to fulfil JT’s vision of tech brand rebirth it’s managed to miss the fact that all the old clutter lying around the place was the only thing giving it any character. You know, those blog entries that angsty teens wrote back in anger in 2005. Where are they now? Gone is where. Vanished. Disappeared*. Replaced by Pinterest-esque notice board spaces urging users to DISCOVER MORE and CONNECT TO MORE… (Subtext: Srsly, won’t SOMEONE please just start CLICKING. Someone? Anyone?)

Fame today is a matryoshka doll: inside each celebrity is a series of smaller, hollow simulacra, and, at the very core, there is a hard little being who feels buried alive. … The relationship between modern celebrities and their greatest fans is rather like the relationship that once existed between cops and robbers in the movies. (And in life, if you believe the Mafia lore.) Classic cops and robbers have the same DNA: they understand each other, because, at some basic level, they are the same people. The Bling Ring (as the Los Angeles Times called them) already possessed many of the items they were stealing, but what they craved was proximity and identification.

Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have the one belonging to Paris Hilton. Only Paris has that – unless someone goes over to her house and takes it. There’s nothing new in stealing from the rich. What is new is the idea that the purloined items aren’t the main thing that’s been taken.