Uncategorized – News For Wombats

A falswiftiable hypothesis

It’s not very often that philosophers make empirically testable predictions, but it’s happened.

In considering whether Taylor Swift’s rerecording of her songs are covers of her earlier tracks, my coauthors and I asked what would happen if she were to acquire rights to her original recordings. We conjectured: She wouldn’t rerecord the remaining albums. We took this to show that her motive was commercial displacement of the original— a typical function for early covers, one that’s often cited to explain the etymology of the term itself (“covering over”).

Now Swift has bought the rights to her earlier records. Recording was complete for the new version of her debut album. Those tracks may be released at some point, but a doppleganger album doesn’t have the same rationale it did before. She hadn’t gotten very far in rerecording her album Reputation, though, and now there won’t be new versions of the tracks from that album at all.

The thought experiment is made real, y’all, and we are vindicated.

Personal interpretation

In a post at Cover Me, Riley Haas describes Depeche Mode’s 1990 song Personal Jesus as having “sex appeal with a sinister undercurrent of dominance and submission.” Michelle Kash, whose cover is featured in the post, “said she aimed to turn it from a song about a man dominating every aspect of a woman’s life to a song about sexual freedom.”

There’s breathy sex appeal in the original, sure, but I had always thought of that as just Depeche Mode being Depeche Mode. They could write a song about standing in line at the Orange Julius, and it would have sex appeal and an undercurrent of D&S.

Boyd’s pragmatist theory of reference, maybe

In the previous post, I suggested that there might be no unified “pragmatism”. By this I meant that we wouldn’t (as a matter of philosophical method) want to invent the term if it weren’t (as a matter of the history of philosophy) already entrenched and an actors’ category. I’m not sure if I want to take that back, but I do want to talk about something in the neighborhood of “pragmatism” that probably deserves a name.

In the Pragmatism lectures, William James insists that pragmatism makes meaning and truth a matter of what will happen in the future. Continue reading “Boyd’s pragmatist theory of reference, maybe”

Open internet, again and always

Net neutrality is under attack again, and my first defense of it is what I wrote back in July.

As a user of the internet, I want to be able to access the content which I decide matters. I want it to come at the same speed other content would come at, rather than having it be faster or slower based on whether someone who owns that content has decided to pay more for access to me. If they get control over accessability and relative speed, then I’m not a consumer anymore but instead I’m the product that the service provider sells to their customers. That’s why net neutrality matters.

I’ve read some contrarian arguments that net neutrality isn’t such a big deal, because platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter can still nudge traffic and content around according to their own private algorithms. Political agitations and manipulations via social media have shown the power of that. However, that only shows that net neutrality is not sufficient for a healthy internet.

It remains obvious to me that net neutrality is necessary for a healthy internet. Summoning more monsters won’t solve the monster problem.