Michael Apted’s Up series began as an explicitly political documentary project. By following a group of twenty British children from the age of seven in 1964, he set out to show that a child’s lot in life is largely predetermined by his or her social class. “Show me a child at seven, and I will show you the man,” declares a voiceover at the start of each installment, paraphrasing Francis Xavier. Since the initial episode, Seven Up, Apted has checked up on 14 of these kids every seven years and asked them to reflect on their jobs, their personal lives, their health, and the decisions they’d made. He named each subsequent film after how old his characters were at the time he was filming — 14 Up, 21 Up, 28 Up, and so on.

Apted’s thesis about social class turned out to be rather accurate — statistically speaking, at least. By the time 56 Up, the latest in his series, came out in January, the OECD had released data showing that Britain had some of the worst social mobility in the developed world. The Guardian completed its own analysis of the data, which shows that mobility has changed very little since the 1970s. And one study even claims that descendants of prominent 19th century families — Jane Austen’s Darcys and Percys — are still benefiting from their ancient privilege today.

Whether or not Up’s case studies live up (or down) to his vision is another question entirely. Seven Up, the debut that sets the scene for the series’ projections, was directed by Paul Almond, with Apted researching the series. In it, we meet upper-crustness incarnate in the form of three little boys named Andrew, Charles, and John. The boys are introduced singing Waltzing Matilda in Latin at their preparatory school — a mark of the privilege the directors assume will define their entire lives. Before the camera, in a grainy black and white, the boys describe with unnverving certainty their presumed paths through the best elementary schools and colleges and onto Oxford, Cambridge, and law certifications.

The boys are asked about the cost of education, and agree that it shouldn’t be free. They complain about uncooperative classmates who cause them to lose house points (think Harry Potter). One of the most cited scenes shows the boys comparing their choice of newspapers. “I read the Observer and the Times,” brags the stiff-lipped John, chiming in after haughty little Andrew parrots his father in declaring that he reads the FT to check on his stocks. To a contemporary viewer in the U.S., their proclamations sound uproariously funny — as though they should be going viral on YouTube a la “Charlie Bit Me,” not the centerpiece of a serious documentary. The Financial Times? Stock shares? A seven-year-old?

These boys all grew up to become who they had always already been thanks to the opportunities their background afforded them. They had dreams — or were they plans? — and these dreams, for the most part, came true. John and Andrew went to Oxbridge, became lawyers, and remained in the upper echelons of British society. Charles didn’t get into Oxford, but he went to Durham — loosely equivalent to a Duke or a GWU, in terms of prestige — then dropped out of the series. Keeping comically close to script for the upper-class life of a British gentleman, Andrew turns a ramshackle barn into a spotless English country estate complete with perfect little hedges, trimmed just so.

A fourth upper-class boy, Bruce, has a less predictable life. At seven he’s a boarder at another fancy school, and says his “heart’s desire” is to see his father, who’s in Africa. Bruce also tells the directors that when he grows up, he’d like to be a missionary, but by his teens he abandons that idea, discovers socialism, and goes on to read math at Oxford. Bruce comes off as thoughtful and kind — it’s clear that he wants to use his good fortune to help others — and lives out his commitment to social justice by teaching in low-income schools in the East End and Bangladesh. Still, he gets burned out by his job, and, by his 50s, ends up where he began: teaching at a prestigious school in London, married to a colleague, with two sons.

It’s not just privileged men that Apted’s films show. The rich boys’ female counterpart is Suzy, whose parents divorce when she’s young. Suzy comes off as cold and petulant early on in the series, and in one scene, rolls her eyes at the camera as her pet dog kills a rabbit in the background. As a young adult, Suzy chain-smokes, lives in Paris, goes to secretarial college, and generally floats around, unsure of her goals. Then, in her 20s, she marries Rupert, a man of considerable means, and suddenly seems much happier. When asked about her change of heart, Suzy credits Rupert for lifting her out of a depressed state that she says originated when her parents divorced. Like Andrew and his wife, Suzy and Rupert live in the country, dote on their children, and live comfortably.

It’s easy to interpret Apted’s message about his upper-class characters as fatalistic — that because of their wealth, they’ll always be on top. John, a self-professed reactionary, takes issue with Apted’s representations of rich and poor, pointing out that he spent many sleepless nights studying for exams in 14. It is later revealed that John’s father died when he was a child, leaving his mother to work to put him through school and earn scholarships (and, undoubtedly, Andrew put a lot of legwork into his gardening). John frames Apted’s failure to acknowledge the whole truth as a sort of political statement — while John believes that the meritocracy is alive and well, Apted, at least in the beginning, seems to dismiss the possibility of such a notion entirely.

But Apted’s examples of privilege don’t illustrate the notion that the rich don’t do their homework. None of his rich characters are lackadaisical or lazy — in fact, they all work rather hard, whether it’s in the home, in school, or at the law firm. There are no trust-fund hipsters in this show. The difference for the rich boys is that just doing their homework — doing things right, so to speak — will, more often than not, afford them success. The stakes are lower, the rewards are higher, and beyond simply money, they benefited considerably from the conditions under which they were raised.

That money isn’t everything is another consistent theme in Apted’s films, and it’s to his credit that he acknowledges the unequal distribution not just of wealth, but of talents, resilience, and character — all of which have far-reaching effects. After all, it’s almost as much of a gamble to inherit good health, a determined disposition, or an aptitude for math, as it is to be born into a wealthy family.

Take Neil: a vivacious little boy from a solidly middle-class family who, at seven, is taken by the idea of being a bus driver when he grows up. By 14, he’s thoughtful and a little despondent, and by 21, he’s been rejected from Oxford, tried out Aberdeen University for size, and dropped out to live in a squat in London. Even though Neil’s parents were teachers and he clearly has a mind for less menial work, he does odd building jobs, pounds out writing no one will read on his typewriter by night, and at one point, ends up homeless, trudging through the Northern countryside looking for the warmest shed to sleep in. He admits to having been suicidal at times, but by 56, he’s found some stability, living in a small town and making ends meet by working as a representative in local politics. Neil’s problem isn’t his lack of inspiration or motivation: It’s an untreated mental health problem, and it’s not his fault.

The trajectories of John, Charles, and Andrew’s lower-class, female contemporaries serve as further examples of how external circumstances can more drastically affect the lives of working-class individuals. At age seven, Sue, Lynn, and Jackie giggle, squirm, and fall all over each other. They lack the composure of the rich boys, who, throughout the series, seemed distinctly aware that they are being filmed. Apted sets the three little East London girls up for futures as cashiers, waitresses, wives, and mothers — but what really happens is more interesting.

By her early 20s, Jackie — the more rambunctious of the three kids — has finished comprehensive school (a nonacademic track) and gotten married. She has a house and a mortgage, but no plans to have children. “I’m too selfish,” she explains, as though she owes us a justification. Shortly after 28 Up is filmed, Jackie leaves the house, the husband, and her job behind, and moves up North. In her 30s, she has three kids by two different men, one who was never really in the picture and one who dies of cancer. By 56, she lives in public housing, unable to work because of a serious case of arthritis. She says she wants to go back to school, but because of her condition, she can’t.

Lynn, a wan, no-nonsense young woman with straight black hair, goes to grammar school and starts a career as children’s librarian. She loves books and children; she’s content at her job. Lynn stays happily married, has two daughters, and despite a health scare, has a stable life — until she’s laid off because of cuts in government funding.

The third girl, Sue, does better than her friends in material terms. She goes to comprehensive school and puts off marriage until she wants kids, which, at 24, is hardly old. She’s divorced by 35, and admits to having had a difficult time raising her kids while working, but she lands a part-time administrative job at a law school and, by 56, is working full-time as a top administrator there. Sue owns her home, is in a long-term relationship, and seems positively radiant.

Did the girls move up the class ladder? It depends who you’re looking at. Sue’s done well, but Jackie’s struggling, and Lynn’s professional luck took a turn for the worse. Apted doesn’t judge or look for reasons for why the girls’ material luck diverged. His message seems to be that while we’re all are creatures of circumstance to some extent, the poor are less insulated from life’s hazards than the rich — and that even if they do everything right and exploit every scrap of luck, talent, and resilience they come by, they may still fall short.

That isn’t to say that hard work counts for nothing, which Nick and Tony, both from working-class backgrounds, exemplify. Nick, a farmer’s son who landed a spot at Oxford to study physics, winds up leaving England to become a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says he left because he wanted to work on nuclear engineering and felt there was no place in the U.K. for him to do that. Apted focuses a lot on Nick’s emigration: he seems to want us to view Nick’s move as somehow instrumental to his success. The evolution of Nick’s accent runs parallel to his social status. Once a wide-mouthed Yorkshire drawl, it softens into a Midwestern-inflected British English. In 56 Up, his teenage son couldn’t sound more American.

Tony, on the other hand, is Cockney through and through. As a boy, Tony aspired to be a jockey, but he wasn’t good enough to win races, so he put his mind to memorizing London’s streets and alleys and became a cab driver. Tony’s hustle runs so deep that at 14, he works at a dog-racing track, making the most of his small, athletic frame and loud voice to run through crowds of people and place bets for punters. It served him well: by 56, Tony’s bought a home in Essex and a vacation house in Spain, though his dream of opening a sports bar there is thwarted by the 2008 financial crisis.

For every Tony, there’s a Paul or a Symon. These two boys, who start the series in a children’s home, seem completely lost as young men. They don’t get very far professionally and lack the motivation and self-confidence to even try. Then, they enter relationships with strong-willed and decisive women who change everything for the better. Symon, who was never motivated by intellectual matters, lives for fostering abandoned children. Paul does odd jobs fixing up a retirement home in Australia and, by 56, has five grandkids. Both seem content; they talk less about money than about how much their wives have made them who they are.

***

By 56 Up, Apted’s filmmaking has retained its lucid, personal quality, but lost its critical edge. Instead of making a political point, 56 is an emotional, existential film about family, aging, and fulfillment. Bruce, the series’ only self-professed socialist, tones down his rhetoric as he gets older. John, the token Tory, talks mostly about his charity work in Bulgaria, where his mother’s family were once part of the ruling class. This doesn’t diminish the quality of the films or make them any less enjoyable, but it does alter their intended message somewhat.

If it’s hard to draw more incisive conclusions from Up, then perhaps that’s because of Apted’s choice of characters. There are only four girls in the series — something Apted himself has spoken of with some regret. A disproportionate number of the children end up at Oxbridge — the equivalent of taking a sample of American kids, and having almost a third of them go to an Ivy League school. There’s just one black kid, and no Asians or religious minorities.

Another reason Up falls short as political commentary is because pinning a society’s inequities onto the backs of a dozen kids and expecting them to perfectly reflect those ills sets up the project for failure. As Apted comes to realize, one person’s life is not a data point — at worst, it’s an irrelevant anecdote, and at best, it’s a metaphor. It would be a mistake to universalize the experiences of these 14 and hold them up as evidence of England’s failure to provide opportunities for all children.

That being said, the series hints at a number of socioeconomic trends that become particularly relevant to the next generation of characters — the childrens’ children. Tony and his wife take care of grandchildren that their daughter can’t raise. Paul’s daughter went to college and studied art history (a degree she doesn’t use at her job, naturally) while his son has five kids and is precariously employed, leaving Paul and his wife to take over when they’re needed. There were no “twentysomethings” in the original series — with the exception of Suzy, briefly, they all went straight from adolescence to adulthood. That’s not the case for their adult children, who, as Sue points out, are much more dependent on their parents than their generation was.

The very opportunities the original Up characters had seem to be fading, too. Will Sue’s daughters, who decide not to go to college, have a shot at the job their mother had — or will they end up working at Tesco? If tragedy or illness befalls Jackie’s boys, will they have a safety net to soften the blow?

It’s almost unthinkable today for someone in Jackie’s position to finish school and almost immediately get a mortgage — and it’s significant that in 2012, Jackie is living in public housing and fighting to hang on to her disability benefits, debilitated by chronic joint pain. It’s equally hard to imagine a young woman in Sue’s position marrying at 24, having a couple of kids, divorcing, and building a successful career as a university administrator without so much as setting foot in a college-level class; or even a modern-day Lynn, teaching disabled kids to read books without piles of debt and an advanced degree in child development.

Even Nick and Tony’s trajectories seem unlikely to be repeated by country boys or East End kids today. Universities in the U.S. are cutting back on teaching jobs and relying increasingly on part-time workers. Today’s Nick might be juggling several poorly compensated adjunct positions without the prospect of tenure or stability, or racking up debt to afford his rent. (Then again, a Nick might also choose to throw in the academic towel altogether and move to Silicon Valley.)

Tony, who exemplifies class mobility built on hard work and determination that politicians love to allude to, would likely struggle to get his start because of difficult economic conditions. He says himself that the taxi business isn’t doing as well as it used to, and that tourists are the ones that keep it going.

The kids of the rich kids will probably be fine — as their parents were, and their parents’ parents were. At the very least, their relative wealth and education will insulate them from future turmoil. But it’s no sure thing that the less wealthy will maintain their parents’ standard of living.

One can only hope that Up’s next generation of working-class children will win other lotteries — the lottery of brains, of resilience, of health, even of love — so that they, too, can have a shot at a good life.

2012 was one of the most high-stakes, high-drama years for muppets in recent history. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian reports. 

Last March, Greg Smith quit his job as an executive director at Goldman Sachs and published an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing his former employer. Smith raised a great many questions about the integrity of the investment banking world, but curiously, only one word stuck. That word was “muppet.”

“Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets,’” Smith wrote.

Smith then went on to land a six-figure book deal to write about his experience at Goldman, which goes to show that you really can judge a book by its muppet.

Goldman Sachs responded to Smith’s allegation by launching an internal probe that became known as “the muppet hunt.” After dozens of staffers were interviewed and millions of their emails were examined, investigators found roughly 4,000 references to “muppets” — 99 percent of which were apparently related to Muppets: The Movie.

No further details have emerged from the affair, but Goldman’s stock price has gained some value in the months since Smith’s accusation, suggesting that a fool and his muppet are not so easily parted.

Muppets — the 99 percent, not ones who trade on the futures market — did not take this assault on their dignity lightly. In July, an Elmo impersonator lost his shit in Central Park and embarked on long, xenophobic, anti-Semitic rants while he solicited tips and photographs from tourists (oddly enough, many street muppets are undocumented immigrants.)

“Nasty Elmo” – whose real name is Adam Sandler – turned out to be an emotionally disturbed man who left the park on a stretcher in the back of an EMT van. By mid-September, Sandler was back in costume in Times Square, unleashing a fresh string of assaults onto unsuspecting tourists. When he was taken off the streets for the second time, Mr. Sandler pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and was sentenced to two days of community service. A reporter asked him what had set him off; the rants he shared with the reporter could be “boiled down to his annoyance with and suspicion of people who pose for pictures with him and do not tip.”

The moral of the story? Never look a gift muppet in the mouth.

As traumatic as it was, Elmo’s unhinged behavior did not prepare the world for when Kevin Clash – the puppeteer who practically invented Elmo in the 1980s – was accused of having had sex with teenage boys. Sesame Workshop issued a statement in November saying that “the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want,” and Clash resigned from his position. Clearly, youth is wasted on the muppets.

As the year came to an end, Sesame Workshop had bigger muppets to fry. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney staged a full-blown assault on Big Bird, which, at 8”2, towers over both Romney and President Barack Obama. But Bird’s size did not deter Mr. Romney from accusing his feathered friend of contributing to the nation’s mounting debt crisis.

“I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually, I like you, too,” Romney told muppet emeritus Jim Lehrer during a televised debate. “But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”

After the Democrats used Romney’s anti-muppet platform to criticize him in an advertisement, Sesame Workshop intervened again, telling both parties to remove references to muppets in their campaigns. Muppets, said Sesame, are nonpartisan.

This neutrality was short-lived. Grover, one of the most loved muppets of all, ended the year by rearing his fuzzy blue head in Washington, D.C. Grover always had had a reputation for being funny and cute, but in the days of fiscal cliffs and austerity, he’s best known for his conservative libertarian views. During his leadership of Americans for Tax Reform, a political advocacy group, Grover managed to convince 95 percent of Republicans that when it comes to taxes, sharing is not caring – come hell or high muppet. He even had them sign a document called the Muppet Protection Pledge. Unfortunately, the only muppets the pledge protects are the muppets signing the damn thing. After all, not all Americans are muppets.

Some critics claim that Grover isn’t a real muppet either, but rather, an allegorical muppet — a Goldman Sachs muppet of Greg Smith’s dreams. That would certainly explain why he hates taxes so much. But there is no question that, furry or fake, Grover is a bona fide chaos muppet — and that desperate times in Washington call for desperate, desperate muppets.

How do you make a food fad appeal to libertarians? Invoke human nature.

Every dietary preference has its corresponding political stereotype. Vegans are to Ralph Nader as meat-and-potatoes types are to Dubya. Artisanal pickle-loving hipsters gravitate towards the Obamas, and anti-soda activists have a friend in Mike Bloomberg, at least for now. Omnivores, though seemingly agnostic, are split into two camps: those who will truly eat anything, and those who will eat anything so long as it contains organic ingredients their grandmother could pronounce.

Brides magazine has a fact-checker. She does things like verify the cost of honeymoons and makes sure that Vera Wang did, in fact, design that dress, and compares the captions on winter flower bouquet slideshows with pictures in botany reference books. It would be terrible to mistake a eucalyptus pod for a mere pussy willow.

Many American magazines, from trashy celebrity weeklies to highbrow general-interest journals, have fact-checkers of some sort. I worked as one in 2008, when, with three other Harper’s interns, I fact-checked the magazine’s Index from beginning to end. Being the primary speaker of foreign languages in the intern cubicle, I ended up doing a lot of the international checking for the magazine. Percentage of Russians who say one goal of U.S. foreign policy is “the complete destruction of Russia”: 43. Number of Iraqi stray dogs that Operation Baghdad Pups has helped emigrate to the United States since 2003: 66.

I quickly learned that fact-checking is a predominantly American phenomenon. The French don’t do much of it, most Russian papers certainly don’t either, and even the Swiss — possibly the most exacting and precise people on the planet — do not make use of fact-checkers in quite the same way as Americans do. Yet their presses keep rolling, and their readers keep reading, and their brides still buy roses, if by another name. People even trust the press in Switzerland much more than they do in the U.S.: 46 percent of Swiss people said they had confidence in their newspapers and magazines in 2010. Among Americans, it was only 25 percent.

While fact-checking, at Harper’s and elsewhere on a freelance basis, I found that I spent nearly as much time explaining to people abroad what the hell a fact-checker is as finding the facts themselves. It was frequently assumed that my motive, qua checker, was not accuracy but malice — that I was out to get someone or to prove something wrong. The exchanges that took place between me and my sources sounded a lot like a description in Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, where Gopnik recounts a politician asking him if a fact-checker is like a “theory checker” — that is, if the young woman sitting in her Times Square cubicle would be grilling him for intellectual consistency. “There is a certainty … that ‘fact checking’ is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence,” Gopnik writes. “That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity: it would be naive to think otherwise.”

Gopnik’s politician and the confused foreigners on the other end of my line weren’t quite right. The existence of facts can easily be argued against in an epistemological context, but not often in a journalistic one. At Harper’s, at least, it really was about making sure the numbers — mostly other peoples’ numbers — added up. And frankly, all the fact-checkers I’ve ever known just didn’t want to be responsible for inaccuracies.

The people Gopnik cites were nevertheless onto something. A new culture of fact-checking is emerging in the U.S. — one that’s much more aggressive than the fact-checking of the past. Enabled by online data and information and encouraged by a polarized political discourse, facts — and especially a lack thereof — are being wielded like weapons. We don’t fact-check because we love facts. We fact-check because we hate liars.

***

Whither the fact-checker? For starters, there’s the pursuit of truth and knowledge and all else that is good in the world. This isn’t as squishy and idealistic as it sounds. I know many writers who were profoundly moved by the act of fact-checking, and I, too, found it to be a revelatory, if depressing, experience: In more than one case, I came across an entire news story based on a misinterpreted statistic. Still, it would be absurd to claim that the abundance of fact-checking in the U.S. can be explained because Americans as a people value accuracy more than the Japanese or the French. It would also be very hard to verify.

There is an under-explored financial reason for fact-checkers. Published errors not only look bad, but under certain circumstances, they can lead to lawsuits, which are very expensive indeed. I recently spoke to a media lawyer who told me The National Enquirer employs its law firm, Williams & Connolly (of Pentagon Papers fame), as their primary fact-checking operation. If they’re willing to spend that kind of money to carry out tasks more commonly relegated to interns and philosophy majors, consider the size of the potential litigation.

Then there’s the third reason: politics. Increasingly, for American readers, there are no mistakes, only covert ideologies. And out of necessity, TV networks, newspapers, and some magazines have bought into this mentality wholesale, serving up laborious platters of “fair and balanced” to consumers who lack the will and perhaps also the capacity to engage in any critical analysis of the information they are fed. They compete with one another on the terrain of “accuracy” and “neutrality.” And it is because the U.S. media is so obsessed with its own so-called objectivity that predatory checking — an offshoot of the traditional checking in newsrooms and magazines — has dominated the discourse. Checking is no longer just a link in the editorial sausage machine; it is an integral part of the public political discourse and a fixture in American popular culture. An army of professional and citizen fact-checkers have taken the process out of the newsroom and into the open.

This new wave of checkers — what the Times public editor famously called “vigilantes” — are different from the editors and aspiring writers at newspapers and magazines who silently bulletproof the stories their magazines publish (Peter Canby, the New Yorker’s head of fact checking, has acknowledged that “checkers are distinguished only by their mistakes.”)  The vigilantes work with a very different goal. They’re guerrillas; they live to pounce, to catch their enemies at their most vulnerable moments, and to parade their heads around on a stick, declaring smugly: untruth!

The patron saint of this new fact-checking scene is Craig Silverman, who runs a blog-turned-book, regrettheerror.com, and has a column on Poynter.org. Silverman calls fact-checking the “new American pastime” and is a serious and measured commentator: He appears genuinely concerned with setting the record straight, and writes at length about the importance of accuracy in journalism and the effect it has on public information. (He’s not above calling people “lying liars,” though.)

FactCheck.org, which is run by the Annenberg Center, is another somewhat serious operation that exhaustively nitpicks politicians’ statements. In the vein of FactCheck.org are ABC and washingtonpost.com’s online fact-checking operations. Finally, there’s PolitiFact and its notorious Truth-O-Meter, a digital graphic used as though truth can be measured with the same instrument you stick into a chicken to make sure it’s reliably free of salmonella. Late last year, Politifact was embroiled in a micro-scandal involving its “lie of the year.” The lie in question was a statement made by members of the Democratic party that “Republicans voted to end Medicare.” This statement, said Politifact, was a complete exaggeration: Republicans merely wished to privatize the program.

Politifact did nothing to clarify the problem. In fact, it made things worse. Even after the site — a Pulitzer Prize winner! — decided that Democrats had been lying egregiously to the public for an entire year, people still disagreed, largely across ideological lines, about the semantic problem of whether or not ending Medicare as we currently know it could be described as ending it, period. As a result, Politifact began to be regarded as siding with Republicans. Brilliant.

Unsurprisingly, media innovators (are there ever not media innovators?) are trying to get past the problem of partisan checking. “Truth Teller,” one of the apps up for consideration in the Knight News Challenge hopes to “capture, analyze, and fact-check events and speeches as they happen.”

“One of the biggest complaints about political coverage is that it allows untruths to go unchecked,” reads the proposal. Truth Teller “instantly dices the rhetoric and calls out statements that do not reflect reality.” The app aims to go beyond the capabilities of humans by using an algorithm to parse political speech in real time and “determine semantic intent and context that would be compared to the news organizations’ data and Wikipedia.” This would result in a live video displaying the “truth level” of a speaker’s sentence, along with reactions from Twitter — an ultra-ultra-high-tech Truth-O-Meter that tweets.

Even if you value truth, it’s easy to be discouraged by reading these fact-checking blogs. Their motive is a sound one — ostensibly, they’re there to verify that published work and public statements are correct. But to what end? Can you convince a rabidly partisan public that the statements that have been hammered into their heads are false? If this sort of predatory fact-checking were actually effective for anything but sport, a great number of politicians would be out of business by now. Call it checking for the converted, or debunk-tainment: The tone of it is smug, not informative. This brandishing of “facts” is also a gateway to laziness. Why produce thoughtful and coherent critiques when you can just wield truth-bytes like weapons? Gopnik’s “theory checker” would serve a higher function in combating the lazy narratives of mainstream news than a hundred corrected factoids.

***

Until recently, the defensive/traditional and offensive/vigilante sorts of fact-checking rarely ventured onto one another’s turf. It wouldn’t make any sense for a checker at a magazine to draw attention to all the mistakes she found in a soon-to-be published article, and vigilantes just don’t do quiet. But in the past three months, we’ve seen a conflation of behind-the-scenes bulletproofing and dirty-laundry exhibitionism that speaks to a greater cultural shift in the way we think about truth.

The Lifespan of a Fact, a book “based on” (but, as it turns out, not accurately confined to) a series of exchanges between author John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal, came out last month. The book is an extended annotation of an essay that D’Agata wrote for the aptly named Believer magazine that deals loosely with the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas in 2002. Lifespan draws attention to the traditional fact-checker’s role in the publishing world. And through Fingal and D’Agata’s dialogue, it highlights the tension between the role of the fact-checker and the claims of the artist.

If the fact vigilantes suggest an outer limit to the revelatory powers of accuracy, D’Agata’s willful ignorance of such standards provides the opposite limit. Artist or no, facts do matter. As it turns out in Lifespan, D’Agata is indulgent, lazy, self-centered, and has no respect nor regard for his audience. When Fingal tells him as much, D’Agata’s excuse for everything is merely “art” — by which he means that the number nine sounds better than the number eight, ergo it’s okay to lie to readers about how many seconds a suicidal teenager spent falling to his death. Rather than taking his intern’s sound advice, D’Agata spends a great deal of energy explaining that he isn’t a journalist but an essayist and that this is enough to liberate him from the prosaic constraints of reality. D’Agata’s contortion of the facts in the name of Art is not unlike a political contortion of the facts in the name of ideology. The motive is the same: Mold history into what you consider a more fitting narrative. That’s not art. It’s revisionism.

The oddest thing about The Lifespan of a Fact is that D’Agata consented to and even participated in its publication. The book demonizes D’Agata as both a writer and a person (Fingal comes off as bratty, but not deluded), and in a sense, it was quite noble of D’Agata to subject himself to the onslaught of abuse from almost every writer, fact-checker, and critic in the country. But it’s especially fitting that a month later, D’Agata became a punchline in another scandal: Mike Daisey’s.

It was hard to ignore the Daisey fiasco, but for the sake of clarity, let us recap: Daisey, a monologist, gave a moving 45-minute performance about his experience at the Foxconn plant in China. He called it The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and broadcast it on This American Life to massive acclaim. During the monologue, Daisey described meeting underage workers, poisoned workers, maimed workers; he claimed to have gone to a meeting of a secret worker’s union in a Chinese Starbucks. People believed his monologue to be true, mostly because it was presented as such, and by that time, the Times and other investigations had confirmed that all these things were happening at some time or another. The problem was that Daisey hadn’t seen them himself. He was creating a composite to better draw attention to his cause.

Drama ensued   This American Life dedicated an entire episode to essentially shaming him. The episode — entitled, “Retraction” — served as catharsis for NPR public radio, for Ira Glass, for anyone who’s ever been misled or who’s ever mistrusted the media. It is nothing less than excruciating. Daisey breathed through his mouth audibly and paused for long periods of time before answering Glass’s questions. Glass was his irritating, twee self, with an uncharacteristically stern edge. TAL could have reacted differently — making a straightforward statement about the inaccuracy of Daisey’s report, issuing a press release, banning him from the premises — but instead, This American Life theatrically burned Daisey at stake, as though to say: Don’t hate the lie — hate the liar.

It makes sense that NPR public radio took such a defensive approach. NPR has been under attack for its perceived liberal bias. But this kind of lashing out against inaccuracy, rather than dealing with it in a tasteful and direct manner, has become its own form of theater. NPR TAL had another good reason to own the mistake. They tried to fact-check Daisey before the piece came out and failed to catch errors — he had planned his lie too well, but ultimately not well enough. This has happened before, with amongst others, USA Today’s Jack Kelly, who managed to dupe his editors and third-party fact-checkers (to be fair, some of them were at Reader’s Digest) into buying made-up details of his sensational stories.

Many commentators have said that it’s impossible to fact check someone who’s determined enough to fabricate news in the first place, and with limited time and resources dedicated to the operation, they’re probably right. There will always be pathological liars in all parts of life who will get away with, and even make a living off of falsehoods, only to be exposed later on in a turn of karmic justice.

But the problem with NPR TAL-style retroactive fact checking is that it doesn’t focus on the facts themselves: it gives undue attention to liars or mistaken reporters, confirming all our cynicisms about the news while morally empowering whoever uncovered the error. In the end, we don’t learn about the facts. We learn about the people who don’t care about the facts. Facts become weapons, but the story rarely deepens. And worst of all, it won’t make the Daiseys and Kellys of the world disappear. We’ll just know who they are, where they went, and what they lied about.

#OWS Phase II

Monday, November 28, 7:30pm

Northwest Corner Building, Columbia University

550 W. 120th st., Corner of 120th and Broadway

Sponsored by: Jacobin, Dissent Magazine and the Center for American Studies at Columbia University

On the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the 99 percent poured into the streets for a massive day of protest against glaring inequalities of wealth and political power. Following nationally coordinated police raids on protest camps, occupiers face new choices about the direction of OWS. What next? On Monday, November 28, we will discuss how social movements with diverse tactics, needs, and goals grow and gain power in the face of repression.

The conversation will feature Frances Fox Piven, an activist and scholar of social movements at The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Liza Featherstone, journalist and author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart; Nikil Saval, associate editor of n+1 and labor activist; Michael Hirsch, labor journalist and editorial board member of New Politics; and Dorian Warren, a fellow at the Roosevelt institute and professor of political science at Columbia University.

This will be the first in a series of conversations inspired by Occupy Wall Street. Upcoming events will discuss foreclosure resistance, student debt erasure, and taking over the banks.

Joann Sfar, the director of Gainsbourg (Vie Héroïque), did not set out to direct a film about Serge Gainsbourg the man, or even Serge Gainsbourg the musician; he wanted to capture the Gainsbourg he saw in his dreams. Sfar wrote on his website that the film would resemble “a fairy tale” rather than the Vie en Rose-style biopic that many anticipated; instead of recounting the songwriter’s life in a convincing, if conventional, manner, his film would be a phantasmagorical homage, unafraid of blatant omissions and fabrications. “I see him as a new archetype,” wrote Sfar of Gainsbourg, “one as complex as Cyrano, Don Juan, or Albert Cohen’s Solal…I want to speak about the poetic reasons why we identify with him.”

The result of Sfar’s experiment with unreality is an unusually flattering portrait of a public figure seldom remembered for his virtues. Gainsbourg was an alcoholic, a womanizer, a walking advertisement for unfiltered Gitanes; he chased after women 20 years his junior, talked a clueless France Gall into singing about a schoolgirl who sucks lollipops for loose change, and recorded “Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus,” a song so suggestive that the Vatican denounced it as profane. Gainsbourg was well known for seeking out trouble on every front, but in Sfar’s portrayal, he comes across as more mischievous than misogynistic — a self-conscious young man who could never quite believe his luck when he had a date with a pretty girl. Throughout the film, we see Gainsbourg’s tender side: Serge cooing at babies; Serge dropping a whiskey glass out of nervousness on Juliette Gréco’s floor; Serge eating pickles with his parents in their little Parisian kitchen.

The songwriter’s much-documented decline is addressed too, albeit selectively: It is largely by omission that Sfar characterizes Gainsbourg as a lovable, dorky poet. Sfar’s screenplay mercifully leaves out the singer’s American TV appearance when he said, in what appeared to be a drunken stupor, that he wanted “to fuck” Whitney Houston. “Lemon Incest,” a truly atrocious song Serge recorded with his daughter Charlotte when she was 13, also goes unmentioned, as do the majority of his songs recorded after 1980.

The songs that do appear in the film are redemptive. Gainsbourg’s varied and exhaustive songbook covered virtually every pop genre imaginable, from witty chanson and snappy jazz to teen pop, reggae, rap, and electronica; he played a part in composing almost every popular French song of the 60s and 70s, and his trademark use of wordplay, double entendres, and literary references continues to influence lyricists today. Sfar’s characters routinely burst into song in the middle of dialogues (a device popularized in France with Alain Resnais’s On Connaît la Chanson), and the rerecordings the actors made are, for the most part, rather good. Then again, songs like “La Javanaise” are virtually unfuckupable.

Sfar attempts to qualify the film’s otherwise unmerited title, Vie Héroïque (a heroic life), by revisiting the scandal surrounding Gainsbourg’s reggae version of “La Marseillaise,” a track recorded with local musicians in Jamaica entitled “Aux Armes et Caetera.” The song had patriots, well, up in arms — and drove the conservative press to publish openly anti-Semitic remarks and even to advocate revoking Gainsbourg’s French citizenship. These attacks frame Gainsbourg both as a victim of bigotry and a hero defending freedom of expression, but in real life, Gainsbourg didn’t care at all about politics. He was not an activist, and the Marseillaise incident had more in common with Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock – a symbolic, rather than consequential, pot stirring. Sfar would have been better off directing a film entitled Serge Gainsbourg: Badass than attempting to martyrize the misogynistic provocateur.

Of course, no Gainsbourg biography is complete without a mention of his love affairs, and, in this regard, Sfar’s film does not disappoint. We see all three of his wives, and numerous girlfriends, including Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis) and Brigitte Bardot. Lucy Gordon is a convincing Jane Birkin (Gainsbourg’s final wife, with whom he spent the last decade of his life) with her coltish figure, desperate, breathy register, and very bad French. Brigitte Bardot is played by Laetitia Casta; she is an appalling actress, but, fortunately, so was Bardot, and Casta mimics B.B’s tone-deaf singsong with an uncanny accuracy. Casta’s impersonation is at its truest when Sfar, invoking the opening shot in Godard’s Contempt, trails the camera over her naked body as she writhes around on her bed. Sfar chooses not to explore the Gainsbourg paradox – or, just how it was possible for such a conventionally unattractive man to seduce the world’s most beautiful women.

Visually, Sfar indulges his own interest in comic-book aesthetics and Jewish culture indiscriminately, to the detriment of the film. A respected graphic novelist best known for The Rabbi’s Cat and The Professor’s Daughter, Sfar creates a magical-realist setting complete with animated segments, larger-than-life personalities, and, most unfortunately, an animated talking cat (seriously). These stylistic decisions register as gimmicks, not necessities. They’re also ugly.

Even more problematic is the way in which Gainsbourg’s Jewish identity, which has been largely overlooked since his death, is a literal character in the film – appearing in the form of animated alter ego with enormous ears, a big nose, and a scheming, self-destructive streak. This figure follows Gainsbourg throughout his life, making intermittent appearances during romantic encounters, songwriting sessions, and even childhood memories. Through a series of fictionalized flashbacks, Sfar suggests that Gainsbourg’s ambivalence towards the French authorities is rooted in his childhood experiences wearing the yellow star and fleeing from the Nazis, and that his obsession with beautiful women began when he was very young. These narrative extrapolations, while intended to lend the film its fairy-tale quality, are overstated and much too neat: The appeal of Gainsbourg’s public persona was his total unwillingness to fit such middle-of-the-road Freudian diagnoses.

Joann Sfar’s biggest success in Vie Héroïque is in theater actor Eric Elmosnino’s portrayal of Gainsbourg’s blasé ambivalence. The one attribute Sfar wisely refrained from ascribing to “his” Gainsbourg was musical passion, and for good reason: Serge Gainsbourg never really cared for music. He wanted to be a painter, and never stopped seeing himself as a failure for quitting art; it was out of financial necessity that he started performing as a pianist on the Parisian nightclub circuit. Even when it became clear that his musical, not artistic, talent was his key to success, he continued to dismiss his songwriting as unserious. “I’d be willing to cut my ear off like Van Gogh for art, but not for a song,” he told a talk-show host on French television at the beginning of his career. When asked some years later how it felt to have composed a winning Eurovision entry (performed by France Gall), he replied that all it meant to him was “45 million” – the sum, in francs, he had received from the profits. This scene is recounted in Vie Héroïque and is particularly significant: From then on for Gainsbourg, commercial success and artistic failure came hand in hand.

When Gainsbourg died in 1991, President François Mitterrand spoke at his funeral, comparing him to Apollinaire and Baudelaire and lauding him for elevating music to an art form. Sfar fails to see the irony in this celebration. Instead, he gushes.

In college, I worked for a summer at an alternative music-PR company in exchange for vodka soda cranberries and free tickets to see live bands. From 11 until seven, I proofread pitch letters and pasted in the names of over a hundred rock critics and bloggers (“Dear Sasha, check out Yoko Ono’s live show!”) I sent the emails, click after click; re-pasted said names into an antiquated version of FileMaker Pro, and watched as a publicist and her friend, a well-known Lower East Side DJ, flirted with emo-band frontmen of ambiguous sexualities.

At the time, it offended me terribly that I did not, in fact, need a Columbia education to perform working-world tasks for hours on end. I wondered why I had worried so much about the SAT, and consoled myself with the vodka, which was invariably third-rate, and the music, which seemed like the best thing ever but in retrospect kind of sucked. I told myself that my As in Literature Humanities and Middle Eastern Cultures did play a part: They had given me the poise and self-confidence to get hired in the first place. Besides, I wrote for the school newspaper. I was not wasting my time.

Then, in mid-July, a high-school junior claimed the seat opposite me. She was the boss’s friend’s daughter.

—

During my junior year at Columbia, I responded to a call for applications from a prestigious literary agency that had posted on the Philosophy Department LISTSERV. I wrote a florid cover letter that quoted Borges, put on my nicest high-heeled shoes, and spent the majority of my interview talking about literature and France. When I got the job I was elated. Salman Rushdie! J. D. Salinger! Books!

Over the course of two months, I read a couple of manuscripts, but mostly got intimate with a large pile of contracts and a scanner. My boss (who, I must point out, was both brilliant and kind) apologized as I struggled to open rusted-over cabinets and sort through disintegrating papers. “You’re a great intern,” he told me as I left. “It was a pleasure having you.”

I still don’t understand why the agency recruited a philosophy major over a subservient fifteen-year-old. My tenth-grade self would have been much happier—and more productive—in the noisy backroom full of computer servers and fans. Not too long ago, I would have cranked up the volume and reveled in Courtney Love’s screeching. But I was in college.

Instead I went home and read a lot of Marx.

—

My first “real” job was an underpaid consulting gig at an international economic organization that purports to creating a fairer, cleaner, greener economy but claimed not to have the funds to pay a college graduate a living wage. During the interview, my boss, a speechwriter, worried about my lack of economic training for this unpaid job. “I’m reading about development economics,” I reassured him, referring to, but not naming, No Logo. My boss needn’t have worried. I spent my days on Google figuring out the hobbies of third-tier government officials. See George swing. Watch Wilhelm run.

That year, I applied to graduate school.

—

Because being paid for working is too much to ask these days, babysitting was, until just a month ago, the most lucrative and available form of labor I could perform. It felt more productive than pushing paper, and never pretended to require knowledge about the leading exports of Madagascar. I rather enjoyed it: The kids were adorable, I was paid in cash, and my days were spent far from screens and fluorescent lighting.

The downside was that it made me feel old. I worried about being mistaken for a mother, and by extension, formerly sixteen-and-pregnant. I envied the carefree cartoon-watching and ice-cream-eating summers my charges took for granted. Last summer, when I was watching two elementary-school-aged girls on the Upper West Side, I felt older still when I found an errant resume lying on the oak coffee table in the living room.

The name in the header was Gossip Girl worthy. Somebody had obviously paid close attention to details like line spacing and fonts. And the young woman’s accomplishments—let us call her Angeline—were astounding.

Angeline was the LeBron James of the labor market. By the time she’d turned 17, Angeline had worked at a cardiovascular research lab, a local conservancy organization, and an art website. She was a math and squash champion who helped kids in Harlem with their homework. She had a perfect GPA and a spot at Yale in the Fall.

I looked her up on Facebook. She was horrifically pretty.

That summer, Angeline worked at J. P. Morgan as an investment-banking high-school analyst. She’s now a summer analyst at the same company. I found out through LinkedIn, and wish her the best in her future endeavors.

It seems clear that Yale needs her more than she needs Yale.

—

It’s no secret that youth has tremendous cachet in our aging and cancerous society. Add an anemic economy to the equation, and it’s all but inevitable that employers will start to hire kids halfway through college, or straight out of high school, for reasons both practical and economic.

Angelines will proliferate. The lab manager, the nonprofit head, and the art editor were all right to have hired her. She was not entitled, at least not professionally; her mind had not been cluttered with complex formulas or liberal arts. She did not expect, nor need, to be paid or intellectually engaged and she could not thrust a diploma in anyone’s face while demanding higher pay or a bonus. She was on her way to the Ivy League—that much was clear by the time she turned 15—and probably hadn’t had a summer off since. What more could J. P. Morgan want? She was, in HR terms, a perfect fit.

As Angelines replace more educated workers, the “skills myth”—namely, that one is better equipped to read, Google things, and follow orders after earning a B.A.—will crumble. Overdeveloped analytical skills and inflated expectations will become liabilities as hoards of nubile young hopefuls climb over each other to work for free. Forget gap years, camp counseling, or waiting tables. Teenagers will work in the nation’s best banks and law firms, replacing interns, entry-level workers, secretaries. They they will be cheap—too cheap to fail—and will get younger and cheaper still. You can’t break child-labor laws when victims are willing and no money changes hands. They’ll learn everything they need to on the job.

This isn’t to say that hiring younger will have an equalizing effect or create opportunities for the less privileged. Elitism is here to stay; it will simply take even more symbolic forms. Earlier this year, PayPal-co-founder Peter Thiel started a fund to encourage entrepreneurs under 20 to drop out of college and start businesses with $100,000 of his hard-invested money. The catch is that they have to have already successfully applied to and enrolled at a respectable university.

This new model resembles the National Basketball Association. The big-timers—the Zuckerbergs and Gateses—will complete their token year in school and head right to the pros. They—not their graduating classmates—are the real winners in this game.

—

The reason for the bachelor’s degree’s impending obsolescence has a lot to do with the high costs, and now publicly-recognized flaws of American four-year colleges. It is also an inevitable consequence of just how available higher education has become. With limitless student loans and free-for-all admissions to for-profit colleges, education is no longer a surefire indicator of class or race—a valuable function for the reproduction of both hierarchies—or even intelligence or ability—the supposed backbone of the information economy.

And even if it did reflect someone’s intelligence, what would a degree tell us? Spending time earning credits in a classroom is not necessarily a bad thing, but does it really make you a better worker?

Angeline would suggest not. Increasingly, the real marker of ability will be in who is smart enough to drop out or bypass higher education altogether.

I’ll be the first person to appreciate the sheer pleasure of learning about fascinating ideas from brilliant people. I loved going to class, reading books, and writing papers. I loved arguing with classmates. I still do.

But college did not prepare me for working in a cubicle. College did not teach me how to make small talk at the water cooler. Even the most prosaic and boring freshman-year lectures did not come close to mimicking the brain-fog and listlessness induced by a day spent under fluorescent lights. I learned nothing about teamwork.

What college did was make me want more than the adult world has to offer.

—

Last week at work, I found, in a stack of papers on the printer, a leaflet about a corporate work-study program for high-schoolers. It was presented as both an act of charity (the school was low-income and the hires ended up doing exceptionally well) and a smart business move. “Students willingly perform repetitive tasks, freeing up higher level employees for more complex assignments,” it read. “Companies give, but get something in return.”

Abrahamian explains why a salon revival may be the best way to fight epistemic closure in the digital age— where the internet is a medium that never forgives, and never forgets.

Before the digital age, we took for granted that a social faux-pas, a bad night out, a simple mistake would be eventually forgotten; in fact, our youth was wagered on the premise that awful haircuts and embarrassing behavior in our formative years wouldn’t be held against us later on. Forgetting allowed us to fully experience the lexicon of adolescence: we grew out of the tantrums and into our noses; we grew tired of the circus and fond of the theater; in short, we were given the freedom to grow up and not look back.

Today, we air our dirty laundry in real-time; we haven’t even a moment to reflect before it becomes a part of our virtual D.N.A. In The New York Times Magazine’s July 19 cover story, “The End of Forgetting,” Jeffrey Rosen laments the Internet’s capacity to systematically archive personal identity, arguing that the threat of lifelong searchability makes it increasingly difficult to reinvent ourselves and that our society is experiencing a “collective identity crisis” as a result.  He invokes a familiar cast of characters in the narrative of online privacy: the schoolteacher fired for her Facebooked drunkenness; the teenager laid off after admitting she was “so totally bored!!!,” the Canadian senior citizen who once dabbled in hallucinogenic drugs and now cannot cross the U.S. border. These stories were once quite shocking; today we hardly bat an eye and blame the subjects for their lack of savvy.

We can add to that list the participants in Ezra Klein’s Journolist. In early 2007, Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein started the e-mail forum to discuss politics with colleagues and acquaintances off the record.According to Klein, the list was meant to use the Internet’s connective capacities to create “an insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.” Membership gradually grew to include 400 prominent writers, editors, academics and reporters, for whom the list was something of a safe haven – a place to talk without the burden of adding to the public record or putting their career at stake.

But in a trackable, Googleable, searchable world, it has become very easy to speak one’s mind, but increasingly difficult to change it. Journolist was originally meant to remedy this. Its informal, spontaneous, and spirited e-mail discussions ranged from health-care reform to foreign policy to local news. Though most members admittedly leaned toward the left, they still frequently disagreed. This isn’t to say that the list was a raging hotbed of disputes and denunciations — Politico’s Walter Shapiro compared it to “cafeteria chatter.” Journolist, after all, was an e-mail listserv, tedious to read and all-too-easy to ignore. Even so, Journolist allowed members to test out half-baked ideas for soundness before transferring their thoughts to their columns, articles, blogs, or lectures. Privacy, wrote Klein, was “essential” and could “only be guaranteed by keeping these conversations private.”

The list was active until early this summer, when an anonymous member leaked to FishbowlDC and The Daily Caller, a conservative online journal, strings of emails that Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel had written to the group. Weigel’s private messages, as well as retorts from other members, were published without context, purporting to expose Weigel – who had just been given a Post column — as biased and unfair. Enraged conservative commentators labeled Journolist a “liberal conspiracy.” Weigel resigned (he now writes for Slate.com), and Klein shut down the forum the same day. Journolist’s downfall suggests that despite the frequent celebration of the Internet as an interactive, democratizing medium — a digitized public sphere, a meritocratic forum of ideas – it is a medium that never forgives, and never forgets.

Imagine that you are struck with a curious and rather outlandish thought that you don’t necessarily want to defend for the rest of your life but nonetheless feel compelled to share — if only to see how others react. You write an impassioned paragraph detailing your idea but pause before posting the entry online. Without an editor, you are the sole judge of the quality of your work, and you are aware that by hitting the “publish” button, you would be subjecting yourself to possibly harsh, often anonymous criticism. You must take into account the Internet’s systemic indelibility: that henceforth your entire intellectual stance could be defined by a single, possibly ill-conceived argument.

So you vacillate between killing the conversation before it begins or risking becoming “misrepresented and burned,” as Rosen puts it. Inevitably, this ends in some form of self-censorship. Not every form of online self-censorship is necessarily harmful —  if people stopped documenting such things as the intimate details of their breakfast,  society would hardly be worse off — but aside from oversharing, what will happen to plain sharing? Withholding inane tweets or provocative photos is one thing, but what will become of intelligent exchange and thoughtful conversation?

In 1981 Jürgen Habermas outlined the ideal circumstances for speech in the “common competitive quest for truth.” Every competent actor must be able to take part in a discourse, introduce and question every assertion, and introduce his attitudes, desires, and without any internal or external forces preventing him from doing so. But because the Internet never forgets, these conditions are impossible to recreate online; its restrictive forces exist not just in the moment but in the indeterminate future too. As a result, ideas become crystallized, locked in time, and indelible.

But ideas are not by nature static; to think and to discuss is to invariably change one’s mind. When mercurial acts of spontaneous thinking and feeling move online, they become not just a matter of starting a conversation and nursing a spark of thought between people, but a matter of brand-building, networking, even dating. Online, ideas are permanent; they have no room to change or grow. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas argued that individuals need an element of inconsequence in order for ideas to “become emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence.” But at present, ideas are currency, and their exchange a calculated and Machiavellian act.

The online forum is thus overwhelmed by the monetization of information. The lure of instant publication and the dizzying proliferation of gossip gone viral are hard to resist; most publications, hungry for content and desperate for traffic, have no qualms about printing invasive material. This leaves us in an Orwellian atmosphere of suspicion and betrayal. If confidentiality is contingent on not receiving a tempting enough offer, whether it take the form of money, notoriety, or the thrill of shaping Twitter’s trending topics, then who really can be trusted with our digital communications? Post-Journolist, the idea of “private e-mail” is beginning to sound like an oxymoron, and the mandate of constant self-censorship is spreading accordingly.

An example of online mundanity can be found in social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr is organized hierarchically – blogs are not valued for the quality of the ideas, but for the amount of “followers” and “re-blogs” they receive. Until recently, users were even ranked by their “tumblarity” – an index based on how much content was generated and re-generated. This encourages the proliferation of unchallenging content, often in the form of puppy photos, 1990s nostalgia, and snark – in short, mere entertainment. Ideas that ought to be seen once and destroyed are now produced at an alarming rate, but no longer have the privilege of disappearing.

If we want to encourage the exchange of ideas, we should not worry, at age 24, if what we say tomorrow will be of any particular consequence ten years later. The need for a private space for conversation without the weight of the web-wide world on our shoulders is more pressing than ever. We need a space to ask questions that Google already has the answers to; where it’s alright make comments only to later take them back; where it’s encouraged to agree, to disagree, to argue, and to play devil’s advocate, all for the sake of the argument. Now more than ever, we need a room of our own to change our minds as often as we choose in good faith.

The concept of the salon – the original journolist, if you will – is a viable alternative to online idea-sharing. Habermas used French salons from the 18th century as examples of “organized discussion among private people” to counteract the insidious forces of the mass media (which, at the time, took the form of our beloved free press.)  Loosely guided, spontaneous discussion amongst friends and acquaintances will do more for our minds and imaginations than any number of re-blogs and re-tweets; it will offer a means to counteract the Internet’s “chilling effect” on all peoples’ expressive capacities, and the resultant foreclosure of personal and intellectual serendipity, new ideas, and creative connections. Getting off the Internet might seem a regressive, conservative, and dull suggestion; it is, by all means, a disappointing conclusion to a great experiment in human connectivity. But it is necessary to take conservative action in the name of progress. A small step back could make room for many great leaps forward.

We could not have learned the hard way. We were raised in the midst of booms and bubbles and unsustainable prosperity; we didn’t realize how lucky we were, our parents would say. If we scowled at the broccoli on our plate, we would predictably be reminded about the starving orphans in Africa. If we whined about blisters, we were told we were fortunate to own shoes at all. Our parents, who came of age with televised Vietnams and Soviet repression, still love to invoke gratitude when confronting us about our bad attitudes. We were taught to be grateful for our homework, for our itchy sweaters, for the unhappy greens and fishes on our plates; we were, after all, among the privileged few to have such luxuries.

“Ingrate” became parental abracadabra for enforcing guilt-driven compliance. It still brings out an almost religious state of bad conscience, and we respond accordingly: Trash is taken out; dry turkey is chewed and swallowed with anxious fervor; grace is uttered and sins of gluttony, sloth, greed, and pride are absolved. We are grateful for what we have, so long as we are the ones who have it.

The importance of gratitude has been emphasized for centuries. Cicero proclaimed that gratitude was “not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Gratitude is also a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian thought. Men must thank the giver of all gifts for the blessings he has bestowed upon them, whether they realize their value (Psalms, Hebrews) or not (Job), and most important, he must do so unconditionally (Thessalonians).

Unlike feelings of love, envy, despair, annoyance, greed, optimism, pessimism, and even happiness, gratitude is seldom presented as having a downside. Harmless at worst, it is a sign of conscience, of a certain down-to-earthness, even maturity. Whatever the cause of our gratitude, the emotion is experienced in a uniform way — we feel elated, relieved, content, and perhaps a little guilty. But there are important differences between “horizontal” gratitude — being grateful that parents worked hard to put us in good schools, for example — and a fuzzier, metaphysical “vertical” gratitude for, say, not having been born in a Palestinian refugee camp. Horizontal gratitude is primarily directed towards our fellow man, when thanking friends for help, receiving a gift, or even appreciating food or art. But vertical gratitude is bottom-up: quite literally thanking God (or an equivalent) for one’s lot in life.

That the world needs horizontal gratitude — that we ought to respect one another, try to appreciate people and return favors — goes without saying. But to systematically praise the heavens that our lives have turned out so fortunately has less desirable ramifications, too. Dorothy Parker was likely referring to the vertical variety when she wrote that gratitude was “the meanest and most sniveling attribute in the world.” Though vertical gratitude does not necessarily arise out of malice or spite, it is a mistake to consider it a positive attribute. Vertical gratitude permits us to emote, rather than act, as a way to reconcile our privilege with flagrant global injustice. To be unconditionally grateful for one’s privileged status in a world with limited, unequally distributed resources, is to be grateful that such injustice exists at all.

*  *  *

Typically, vertical gratitude grows from a sense of Geburtsglück, or birth-luck: “I was born X — thank God I was born X!” This is nothing like the luck one feels when winning the lottery or escaping a close brush with a speeding vehicle; there’s no urgency, no adrenaline, no pointed awareness of what non-luck is like. By virtue of being born with a certain privilege, you will likely never have to experience life otherwise. But if, through some serious misfortune, you are forced to join the ranks of the less fortunate, would still you feel grateful for having once been so rich? Probably not; you may even curse your former luck for having set you up for such disappointment and making it necessary for some, like you, to live in squalor. Perhaps your former gratitude would then be exposed as just a gentler expression of what you felt as a birthright, a sense of entitlement.

Vertical gratitude also hurts our critical capacities by forbidding dissatisfaction with a scale that tilts, albeit by chance, in one’s favor. It is no coincidence it was so often evoked by the conservative political groups I encountered when studying at Columbia. Every time a protest was organized to demand changes – a less Eurocentric reading list, more financial aid for minorities, and so on – protesters were told they should count themselves lucky for being a student there at all, and that if Columbia did not meet their exceedingly high standards, they should not have applied in the first place. Moreover, the conservatives would argue, the existing standards –  inequality, Eurocentrism and all – are exactly what made it possible for Columbia to become a first-rate university. Why jeopardize its (and your!) prestige by pressing for unneeded changes?

The cyclical backlashes against nondiscrimination activists – feminists or otherwise – rely too on the idea that a given group should be happy with their position, which, while imperfect, could be much worse and is a marked improvement on the past. This is a dangerous impulse. Was there not a time in American history when slaves were advised to be grateful for the “protection” of their masters, and white abolitionists told to be glad they were not born slaves. Where would we be if such gratitude – and its requisite complacency – had prevailed?

The generation now reaching its mid-20s in the West is arguably the first to inherit that oft-described sense of global connectedness that the media began proclaiming after the Berlin Wall fell and that has become exacerbated by the Internet and 24-hour news cycles. This illusion of networked cosmopolitanism provides round-the-clock access to a multitude of opinions, images and lifestyles, as well as the foreign, constricted contours of lives we cannot begin to imagine living. Our gratitude for having equal rights as women, for not having to use an outhouse, for eating and drinking as we please, and for walking down the street without the threat of bullets or landmines, results in relief and pity as we retreat from digital dystopia to our protective cocoon of privilege. We see enough to decide that we want our lives to stay the way they are, and react to the manifest and overwhelming unfairness of globalization not with indignation but with a weary complicity. Instead of growing angry about the fact that we have so much more than others – that is, that others have so much less than us — we put a smile on our faces and accept that we truly do live in the best of worlds.

We wouldn’t want to seem unappreciative, now, would we?