The Front Porch – County Highway

Jeremiad

Stop Spying on Me, You Creeps

Barack Obama’s outsourcing of the surveillance state

A new model for managing the mental activities of the public

Putting a rationalist gloss on progressive fantasies of control advances the technocratic will-to-power

By Jacob Siegel

The supreme irony of technocratic politics is that it requires a charismatic figurehead to reach its full potential. Daniel Bell picked up on this in his study of post-industrial society when he remarked that “no matter how technical social processes may be, the crucial turning points in a society occur in a political form.” A culture of deference to machines does not eliminate human control over politics. Instead, it concentrates power in the hands of ever fewer people, pushing politics back toward an obscure kind of absolutism. “It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power,” Bell concluded, “but the politician.” Barack Obama was that politician. Yet Obama appeared pragmatic to a fault, almost Spock-like in his unflappable rationality. The furthest thing from a leader interested in overhauling the basic conventions of America’s constitutional democracy. Perhaps that explains why many Americans persisted in viewing him as a moderate even as he oversaw the most radical …

Report

The Golden Pineapple

The holy grail of the pineapple growers and how it destroyed Maui

A modern-day tale of the Garden of Eden

Man’s expulsion is followed by wildfires

By David Samuels

There are many American dreams, of which the Golden Pineapple is one. As its name suggests, the Golden Pineapple — known upon its market debut as the Del Monte Gold — was distinguished by its Technicolor golden hue, as well as by its sweetness, the product of an ideal brix-to-acid ratio, and an unusually long shelf life that allowed it to be sold as fresh fruit even in the continental United States, where a pineapple, especially one grown in Maui, might take two or more weeks to reach a supermarket shelf. The Golden Pineapple was created by a methodical, decades-long breeding program sponsored by Hawaii’s three leading pineapple growers to create the perfect fruit. In the records of the Pineapple Research Institute (PRI), the Golden Pineapple was known as “the 73-114” — the identifying number which represented the year and the number of the pot in which it was grown. This end-product of over two million genetic crosses accomplished over forty years with the goal of creating the …