Tenure stronger than ever?

Even to the right-leaning Mickey Kaus on Slate, the recent republican controversy over Ward Churchell may have only helped to bolster the case for academic tenure.

Newt Gingrich is calling for the dismissal of "anti-American" professors:

We ought to say to campuses, it's over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you're anti-American is grounds for dismissal. [Emph. added]

This is the sort of provocative, popular, excitedly half-thought idea you'd say if you were Newt Gingrich or if you had a book to promote. If you are Newt Gingrich and you have a book to promote ... well, Katy bar the door! It's overdetermined. ... If the case for giving tenure to college professors was weakening before, it just got stronger, Gingrich having provided a living, breathing contemporary example of what the system was designed to protect against. ...

EFF and the "Broadcast Flag"

San Francisco - EFF this week announced the next stage
in its challenge to the Federal Communications
Commission's "Broadcast Flag" technology mandate. The
organization released a step-by-step guide, the "HD PVR
Cookbook," that teaches people how to build a
high-definition digital television (HDTV) recorder
unaffected by the technological constraints of the
Broadcast Flag. In addition, EFF is encouraging people
to protest the FCC rule by holding Build-Ins -
gatherings around the country to build unfettered
HDTV recorders in order to experience first-hand
the kind of innovation stifled by the government
mandate.

The Broadcast Flag, which places copy controls on DTV
signals, is aimed at stopping people from making
digitally perfect copies of television shows and
redistributing them. Yet it can also be used to stop
people from making perfectly legitimate personal
copies of broadcasts. More disturbing, the Broadcast
Flag rule will outlaw the manufacture and import of a
whole host of TiVo-like devices that send DTV signals
into a computer for backup, editing, and playback.
After the Broadcast Flag regulations go into effect,
all personal video recorder (PVR) technologies must
be Broadcast Flag-compliant and "robust" against user
modification - meaning that, once again, the
entertainment industry is trying to tell you what you
can do with your own machines.

EFF released its technological challenge to the Broadcast
Flag on the same day that the organization and other
public interest groups challenged the FCC in the courtroom.
In ALA v. FCC, the groups - including the American Library
Association and Public Knowledge - argue that the FCC
has overstepped its authority in mandating the
Broadcast Flag and that the rule should be struck down.

Groups who want to host their own Build-Ins can contact
EFF for a "Throw Your Own Build-In" kit, which includes
a hard copy of the HD PVR Cookbook, a KnoppMyth CD-ROM,
and (of course!) free EFF t-shirts and stickers.

"Even as we're suing the FCC to stop this interference
with technological innovation, we're also helping
television watchers to get off the couch and build
their own fully capable PVRs," said EFF Special Projects
Coordinator Wendy Seltzer, who organized the Build-In.
"Every MythTV built helps demonstrate the creative
development that may be cut off by bad regulation."

For the full press release:


HD PVR Cookbook:


More about the Broadcast Flag:


MacNewsWorld article: "'Broadcast Flag' Prompts Digital
TV Debate":

Disinformation and "Values"

Call it 'What's the Matter With Kansas - The Cartoon Version.'

The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the 'Swift Boat' election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.

Their first foray - an ad accusing the seniors' organization of being against the troops and for gay marriage - was notably inept. But they'll be back, and it's important to understand what they're up to.

The answer lies in 'What's the Matter With Kansas?,' Thomas Frank's meditation on how right-wingers, whose economic policies harm working Americans, nonetheless get so many of those working Americans to vote for them.

People like myself - members of what one scornful Bush aide called the 'reality-based community' - tend to attribute the right's electoral victories to its success at spreading policy disinformation. And the campaign against Social Security certainly involves a lot of disinformation, both about how the current system works and about the consequences of privatization.

But if that were all there is to it, Social Security should be safe, because this particular disinformation campaign isn't going at all well. In fact, there's a sense of wonderment among defenders of Social Security about the other side's lack of preparation. The Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation have spent decades campaigning for privatization. Yet they weren't ready to answer even the most obvious questions about how it would work - like how benefits could be maintained for older Americans without a dangerous increase in debt.

Privatizers are even having a hard time pretending that they want to strengthen Social Security, not dismantle it. At one of Senator Rick Santorum's recent town-hall meetings promoting privatization, college Republicans began chanting, 'Hey hey, ho ho, Social Security's got to go.'

But before the anti-privatization forces assume that winning the rational arguments is enough, they need to read Mr. Frank.

The message of Mr. Frank's book is that the right has been able to win elections, despite the fact that its economic policies hurt workers, by portraying itself as the defender of mainstream values against a malevolent cultural elite. The right 'mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends.'

In Mr. Frank's view, this is a confidence trick: politicians like Mr. Santorum trumpet their defense of traditional values, but their true loyalty is to elitist economic policies. 'Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization.' But it keeps working.

And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front.

It's tempting to dismiss this as an exceptional case in which right-wingers, unable to come up with a real cultural grievance to exploit, fabricated one out of thin air. But such fabrications are the rule, not the exception.

For example, for much of December viewers of Fox News were treated to a series of ominous warnings about 'Christmas under siege' - the plot by secular humanists to take Christ out of America's favorite holiday. The evidence for such a plot consisted largely of occasions when someone in an official capacity said, 'Happy holidays,' instead of, 'Merry Christmas.'

So it doesn't matter that Social Security is a pro-family program that was created by and for America's greatest generation - and that it is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it's the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line. Right-wingers will still find ways to claim that anyone who opposes privatization supports terrorists and hates family values.

A Princeton Philosopher's Unprintable Book Title

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."

The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."

The essay goes on to lament that lack of inquiry, despite the universality of the phenomenon. "Even the most basic and preliminary questions about [bull] remain, after all," Mr. Frankfurt writes, "not only unanswered but unasked."

The balance of the work tries, with the help of Wittgenstein, Pound, St. Augustine and the spy novelist Eric Ambler, among others, to ask some of the preliminary questions - to define the nature of a thing recognized by all but understood by none.

What is [bull], after all? Mr. Frankfurt points out it is neither fish nor fowl. Those who produce it certainly aren't honest, but neither are they liars, given that the liar and the honest man are linked in their common, if not identical, regard for the truth.

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Mr. Frankfurt writes. "A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."

The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."

And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance. "All that is solid," as Marx once wrote, "melts into air."

Mr. Frankfurt is an unlikely slinger of barnyard expletives. He is a courtly man, with a broad smile and a philosophic beard, and he lives in apparently decorous retirement with his wife, Joan Gilbert, in a lovely old house near the university.

On a visit there earlier this month, there was Heifetz was on the stereo, good food and wine on the table.

But appearances, in this case, are somewhat misleading. Mr. Frankfurt spent much of his childhood in Brooklyn, and still sees himself as a disputatious Brooklynite - one who still speaks of the Dodgers as "having betrayed us." And, in any event, Mr. Frankfurt is not particularly academic in the way he views his calling.

"I got interested in philosophy because of two things," he said. "One is that I was never satisfied with the answers that were given to questions, and it seemed to me that philosophy was an attempt to get down to the bottom of things."

"The other thing," he added, "was that I could never make up my mind what I was interested in, and philosophy enabled you to be interested in anything."

Those interests found expression in a small and scrupulous body of work that tries to make sense of free will, desire and love in closely reasoned but jargon-free prose, illustrated by examples of behavior (philosophers speak of the "Frankfurt example") that anyone would recognize.

"He's dealing with very abstract matters," said Sarah Buss, who teaches philosophy at the University of Iowa, "but trying not to lose touch with the human condition. His work keeps faith with that condition."

Mr. Frankfurt's teaching shares with his prose a spirit Ms. Buss, who was once his graduate student, defines as, "Come in and let's struggle with something."

"He was very willing," she added, "to say, 'I just don't understand this.' "

The essay on [bull] arose from that kind of struggle. In 1986, Mr. Frankfurt was teaching at Yale, where he took part in a weekly seminar. The idea was to get people of various disciplines to listen to a paper written by one of their number, after which everyone would talk about it over lunch.

Mr. Frankfurt decided his contribution would be a paper on [bull]. "I had always been concerned about the importance of truth," he recalled, "the way in which truth is foundational to civilization and the various deformities of it that were current."

"I'd been concerned about the prevalence" of [bull], he continued, "and the lack of concern for truth and respect for truth that it represented."

"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "

Research was a problem. The closest analogue came from Socrates.

"He called it rhetoric or sophistry," Mr. Frankfurt said, "and regarded philosophy as the great enemy of rhetoric and sophistry."

"These were opposite, incompatible ways of persuading people," he added. "You could persuade them with rhetoric" - or [bull] - "with sophistic arguments that weren't really sound but that you could put over on people, or you could persuade them by philosophical arguments which were dedicated to rigor and clarity of thought."

Mr. Frankfurt recalled that it took him about a month to write the essay, after which he delivered it to the humanities group. "I guess I should say it was received enthusiastically," he said, "but they didn't know whether to laugh or to take it seriously."

Some months after the reading, the essay, title intact, was published by The Raritan Review, a journal then edited by Richard Poirier, a distinguished literary critic. In 1988, Mr. Frankfurt included it in "The Importance of What We Care About," a collection of his essays.

The audience for academic journals and collections of philosophical essays is limited, however, and so the essay tended to be passed along, samizdat style, from one aficionado to another.

"In the 20 years since it was published," Mr. Frankfurt said, "I don't think a year has passed in which I haven't gotten one or two letters or e-mails from people about it."

One man from Wales set some of the text to music; another who worked in the financial industry wanted to create an annual award for the worst piece of analysis published in his field (an idea apparently rejected by his superiors). G. A. Cohen, the Chichele professor of social and political theory at All Souls College, Oxford University, has written two papers on the subject.

"Harry has a unique capacity to take a simple truth and draw from it very consequential implications," Mr. Cohen said. "He is very good at identifying the potent elementary fact."

It was Ian Malcolm, the Princeton University Press editor responsible for philosophy, who approached Mr. Frankfurt about publishing the essay as a stand-alone volume. "The only way the essay would get the audience it deserved was to publish it as a small book," he said. "I had a feeling it would sell, but we weren't quite prepared for the interest it got."

For Mr. Frankfurt, who says it has always been his ambition to move philosophy "back to what most people think of as philosophy, which is a concern with the problems of life and with understanding the world," the book might be considered a successful achievement. But he finds he is still trying to get to the bottom of things, and hasn't arrived.

"When I reread it recently," he said at home, "I was sort of disappointed. It wasn't as good as I'd thought it was. It was a fairly superficial and incomplete treatment of the subject."

"Why," he wondered, "do we respond to [bull] in such a different way than we respond to lies? When we find somebody lying, we get angry, we feel we've been betrayed or violated or insulted in some way, and the liar is regarded as deceptive, deficient, morally at fault."

Why we are more tolerant of [bull] than lying is something Mr. Frankfurt believes would be worth considering.

"Why is lying regarded almost as a criminal act?" he asked, while bull "is sort of cuddly and warm? It's outside the realm of serious moral criticism. Why is that?"

Why is the Bush Administration Helping to Finance Repressive Terrorist Regimes?

Answer: Because it's in the blood for oil business.

"The Wall Street Journal ran a very, very alarming article from Iran on its front page last Tuesday. The article explained how the mullahs in Tehran - who are now swimming in cash thanks to soaring oil prices - rather than begging foreign investors to come into Iran, are now shunning some of them. The article related how a Turkish mobile-phone operator, which had signed a deal with the Iranian government to launch Iran's first privately owned cellphone network, had the contract frozen by the mullahs in the Iranian Parliament because they were worried it might help the Turks and their foreign partners spy on Iran.

The Journal quoted Ali Ansari, an Iran specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, as saying that for 10 years analysts had been writing about Iran's need for economic reform. 'In actual fact, the scenario is worse now,' said Mr. Ansari. 'They have all this money with the high oil price, and they don't need to do anything about reforming the economy.' Indeed, The Journal added, the conservative mullahs are feeling even more emboldened to argue that with high oil prices, Iran doesn't need Western investment capital and should feel 'free to pursue its nuclear power program without interference.'

This is a perfect example of the Bush energy policy at work, and the Bush energy policy is: 'No Mullah Left Behind.' By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?

The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a 'geo-green' strategy.

As a geo-green, I believe that combining environmentalism and geopolitics is the most moral and realistic strategy the U.S. could pursue today. Imagine if President Bush used his bully pulpit and political capital to focus the nation on sharply lowering energy consumption and embracing a gasoline tax.

What would that buy? It would buy reform in some of the worst regimes in the world, from Tehran to Moscow. It would reduce the chances that the U.S. and China are going to have a global struggle over oil - which is where we are heading. It would help us to strengthen the dollar and reduce the current account deficit by importing less crude. It would reduce climate change more than anything in Kyoto. It would significantly improve America's standing in the world by making us good global citizens. It would shrink the budget deficit. It would reduce our dependence on the Saudis so we could tell them the truth. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) And it would pull China away from its drift into supporting some of the worst governments in the world, like Sudan's, because it needs their oil. Most important, making energy independence our generation's moon shot could help inspire more young people to go into science and engineering, which we desperately need.

Sadly, the Bush team won't even consider this. It prefers cruise missiles to cruise controls. We need a grass-roots movement. Where are college kids these days? I would like to see every campus in America demand that its board of trustees disinvest from every U.S. auto company until they improve their mileage standards. Every college town needs to declare itself a 'Hummer-free zone.' You want to drive a gas-guzzling Humvee? Go to Iraq, not our campus. And an idea from my wife, Ann: free parking anywhere in America for anyone driving a hybrid car.

But no, President Bush has a better project: borrowing another trillion dollars, which will make us that much more dependent on countries like China and Saudi Arabia that hold our debt - so that you might, if you do everything right and live long enough, get a few more bucks out of your Social Security account."

Oxford University Press: Guidelines for Authors

Oxford University Press: Guidelines for Authors

useful document for thinking about writing and submitting a book.

Steal this bookmark!

Tagging, the web's newest game, lets you see what other people are reading and thinking. Welcome to the key-worded universe

Katharine Mieszkowski
Tuesday February 8, 2005

His goals include writing a good novel, seeing The Daily Show live and starting a company that survives longer than two years.

He's posted these aspirations for the whole web to see at 43 Things, a site he and some friends launched at the beginning of 2005. The purpose of the site: anyone can post their goals, resolutions and grand designs, and meet others who share the same ambitions. There are currently 119 other people on 43things.com decreeing their pledge to do a start-up that makes it past that two-year threshold. Nine others are hankering to see Jon Stewart give his mocking spin on the news in person and eight more burn to write a good novel.

But what's intriguing about 43 things isn't the voyeuristic itch it scratches, as we get to see so many people baring their heart's desire. What makes the site work is how it connects all these people to each other. By a simple software tweak known as tagging, this site and many others, like the photo site Flickr and the bookmark-sharing system del.icio.us, have found a new way to organise information and connect people. The surprise is that the organising itself is unorganised - and yet it works.

On 43 Things you state a goal, such as 'write a novel'. That immediately links you to all the other people who have the exact same goal. But you also attach tags to your goal - essentially key words that you choose - such as 'writing,' 'novel' and 'fiction'. Tags are not selected from any pre-codified hierarchy set by the site designers. They simply arise from the grass roots - you and others like you. Now you're suddenly connected to everyone with similar goals, such as 'write a good novel' and 'write a book and have it published' and 'finish my novel'."

It's a very simple concept, and 43 Things is a very simple site, but tagging as it is used here and at some of the web's most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organisation on the internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there's a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn't proclaimed, it just happens.

What 43 Things does for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. "It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned," says Howard Rheingold. "I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged ... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful - and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."

Tagging is by no means perfect - even its biggest proponents are quick to point out that there are glitches. Words are slippery things. "One person's Israel is another person's Palestine. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter," says Dave Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a site that recently enabled real-time searching of the tagged internet.

If you give users control over how things will be categorised, you never know what will come out the other end. After all, what could be more culturally and socially determined than how we choose to label the things we're thinking about? An excellent demonstration of the power of tagging can be found in the ongoing war between file sharers and the entertainment industry. In the peer-to-peer world, the latest file-trading network to feel the heat has been the one constructed around the program BitTorrent, which enables the sharing, among other things, of bulky video files. Rather than target actual file sharers, the Motion Picture Association of America has targeted the operators of websites that helped people find the files. The largest, most popular such sites have mostly been shut down. Now, to find the TV show that you missed, you have to find small, relatively unknown websites where people share pointers to the necessary information. But how do you find something that is unknown?

You can try del.icio.us. Before a small, new website has much presence on Google, groups of people sharing bookmarks on del.icio.us can help direct attention to the right target. There, the "bittorrent" tag, combined with, say, the "Battlestar Galactica" tag, can lead you quickly to the information you need - to dynamic, ad hoc communities that may disappear as quickly as they are created.

"This isn't a big technical innovation," says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext. "It's more the simplest thing that could possibly work, that shouldn't work, but happens to."

Tagging has the potential to spread beyond just a few creative websites. Users of Google's Gmail can add "labels" to their email messages - the equivalent of tags for e-mail. Matthew MacLaurin, a program manager in the social computing group at Microsoft Research, thinks that tags are the future for computer desktop organisation: "I personally believe that, over time, tags will rival, if not replace, folders as a primary way that users create organisation ... Eventually it will be more like folder names - unnoticed and absolutely essential."

There's something brilliantly lazy about tags. You don't have to look up categories that your information fits into, predetermined by a web designer. You just tack whatever comes to mind onto whatever you are doing, and move on to the next thing.

"Humans like to group stuff by whatever is convenient. That's the revolution that's going on here," says Anselm Hook, 37, who lives on a farm in Scappoose, Oregon, where he wrote the code for Books We Like, a book recommendation site that uses tagging. "Tags let people do things by voluntary organisation, not what a scientist says or what some organisation has done to classify things. It's a much more folksy, grass-roots application."

When it's applied to bookmarks, tagging takes your own desire to save things and then later find them again, and turns that impulse into a way to share information. "It's basically a way to remember in public," says Joshua Schachter, who wrote del.icio.us as a way to keep track of all the things he was thinking about posting to the blog memepool. "The actual database represents crystallised attention - what people are looking at, and what they're trying to remember." About a year old, and with 50,000 users, the crowd on del.icio.us is still very much an early-adopter scene, which makes looking at the most popular links - based on how many people have bookmarked them -- a snapshot of what's of-the-moment on the web.

Tags don't have to be popular - you could use obscure words to tag all your information and end up with a secret language known only to you. But then your data doesn't get to play with everyone else's. "The fact that you know that there is a social aspect to this actually encourages you to pick tags that are relevant," says Technorati's Dave Sifry. "It's kind of like this invisible hand of positive social pressure that results in something that's much bigger than the person himself could ever hope to achieve."

After less than a month of allowing tag searches from multiple sources, such as Flickr, del.icio.us and blogs, Technorati is already tracking more than 230,000 tags. "This is about exposing and creating communities. It's helping people find each other. I think that in the end is the fundamental power of tags," Sifry says.

Some think that the social utility of tagging may be somewhat exaggerated. Sure, many bloggers are excited about tags, but we already knew they were into sharing information and ideas. What about everyone else?

On the bookmarking site Furl, you can make the bookmarks you save private or public. Mike Giles, creator of the site, which is now owned by LookSmart, says: "When I talk to people who aren't in the technical elite, most people's reaction is: 'Why would I want to share this stuff? Why would I want to make it public?'" For some people, sharing with the world might not be a motivation, but a deterrent. Do you really care to make the research you're doing public to the world? Is the value of what you might learn from others on the way worth enough to eclipse your desire to keep it private?

Microsoft's MacLaurin thinks that it can be easy to overstate how much you might have in common with someone who tags similar things to you: "I'd say it's more a matter of figuring out who knows where the good stuff is, and less about finding new friends by tagging. I cannot imagine forming a relationship with someone because we tag our photos a similar way on Flickr."

Tagging can also make for some rude surprises. Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, stumbled upon this Flickr picture when searching the tag MLK on Technorati on Martin Luther King Day. As she wrote in her blog: "I personally was offended - these sentiments reflect the polar opposite to those espoused by Dr King. More to the point, such an illustration is inappropriate - that poster has as much to do with Dr King as would a picture of a banana peel." As Blood points out, in the context of a Flickr user's personal photo list, the tag might make sense, but out of context, it was jarring.

Then there's a more basic problem: The ad hoc nature of tags means that some of the most popular tags can be the least interesting. Do you really want to look at all the photos labelled "photo" on Flickr?

But maybe that doesn't matter. You just ignore the more general tags, that mean less to you, and search the more specific ones that strike your fancy. The system doesn't have to be perfect to work well enough for participants to find it useful. danah boyd, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, puts it this way: "Now, we're not just going with how Google wants to organise things. Now, we're going with how a collection of people have come up with schema to organise data. And it's not about accuracy. It's just a particular way of organising data."

From a crowd that has enough in common, you can get a spontaneous, collective understanding out of the sum of everyone's contributions: "If you take a bunch of people's instincts and find where they overlap, you have a fairly good picture of the core of the understanding of that thing," says Schachter from de.licio.us.

But will tagging continue to be useful as it gets more popular, as millions of people start adding tags? Or, worse yet, will spammers discover it, and ruin it for everyone? "Maybe it will turn out that tagging will only work for relatively small applications among people who think alike, and that's a type of solution too. The thing that's so exciting is that we're so completely at the beginning of this," says David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. "We'll go through the normal sorts of scaling problems and despair, and brilliant insights and joy."

Over at 43 Things, Benson founded the site with his friends at Seattle's Robot Co-op with the hope of making all their own vague plans and aspirations more likely to actually happen. The site's ambitions spread from there. "Psychologists have known for a long time that specifying your goals helps you achieve them by making you focus a bit more on your desires and articulate more achievable outcomes," Benson writes in an email.

"We think the social aspect of doing this together might heighten the process - just as Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous meetings introduce more accountability."

It's still too early to tell how much users will help each other achieve their goals. You can see the positive peer pressure having some influence in some of the more modest ambitions members have decreed - like making Firefox my default browser. Will the people who share the goal of "Bring 'Building Basecamp' to Boston" actually get together and do it? Will those who have pledged to "build community in my immediate central Seattle neighbourhood" make it happen?

The web is littered with the corpses of millions of good intentions. But, like the future of tags, there's only one way to find out.

Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy: Michael Heizer's CITY

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Michael Heizer was an Earth Art pioneer and an art-world hero, but he turned his back on all that to begin building a sculpture as big as an ancient ruin in the remote reaches of Nevada. Now he's learning that you're never far enough away from things — things like mortality and financial peril and the plans of the U.S. government.
------
You just don't get it, do you? This is a czarist nation, a fascist state. They control everything. They tap my phone. They'll do anything to stop me. We're the front lines, man, fleas fighting a giant.''

It is a clear, crisp, gorgeous winter afternoon in the high desert in Nevada, and Michael Heizer, who has spent the past 32 years and many millions of mostly other people's dollars constructing ''City'' -- one of the biggest sculptures any modern artist has ever built, one and a quarter miles long and more than a quarter of a mile wide -- is in a state of extreme agitation, even for him. His pique is rising as he maneuvers his truck down a bumpy mountain pass, filling the truck's cabin with cigar smoke. I sense that he's rather enjoying himself.

We are driving through Murphy Gap. Pinyon and juniper cluster along the slopes on either side. This narrow, serpentine passage of astonishing beauty cuts through the Golden Gate Range, far from civilization. Aside from Heizer's voice and the truck's engine, there is an endless, empty, engulfing silence.

Coal Valley, on the eastern side of the mountain range, is a desolate, flat plain of yellow rabbit brush and silver sage for grazing cattle. To the west, Heizer's valley, Garden Valley, is vast and nearly uninhabited. Size is deceptive out here. ''City'' looks from the edge of the valley like a low-lying bump, barely visible. When you drive just a mile from it, south across the valley, it basically disappears into the brush. But picture a sculpture the size of the Washington Mall, nearly from the steps of the Capitol to the Washington Monument, swallowing many of the museums on either side. That's how big it is. Only once you're inside do you see all the mounds, pits, passageways, plazas, ramps and terraced dirt, most of the sculpture having been dug below ground level, masked from outside by berms. The shapes echo the mountains. ''I'm not selling the view,'' Heizer contradicts when I mention this. ''You can't even see the landscape unless you're standing at the edge of the sculpture.'' True. Even so, the echoes are plain as day.

We are maybe 30 miles from Nellis Air Force Base and the military's supersecret Area 51, and more than 100 miles from Yucca Mountain, where the federal government, if all goes as planned, will begin to collect the nation's nuclear waste in 2010. Trains will transport the waste from across the country, through the middle of Atlanta and Chicago and Salt Lake City and Kansas City, to Caliente, a town just north of here. From there, more than 300 miles of track will have to be laid, at a cost of more than $1 billion, to carry the waste the rest of the way.

As it is currently conceived, the route will cut across Garden Valley, within ear- and eyeshot of Heizer's sculpture and the ranch right next to it where he lives, a kind of survivalist compound of cinder block and solar panels, an oasis of cottonwoods and wild plum trees in the middle of a wide, empty plain. Having moved long ago to this virtual end of the earth, and having also moved heaven and earth to build in isolation his immense sculpture, Heizer now finds the federal government is plotting, as he sees things, to ruin it and him.

Heizer knows it's highly unlikely that he or anyone else will suddenly stop Yucca cold, but he says he's hoping at least to persuade Department of Energy officials at this 11th hour to redirect the tracks next door through Coal Valley and Murphy Gap. Of course he is deeply pessimistic. ''I've always been a pessimist,'' he tells me, ''but now I think things are going to get really, really bad.'' Squinting into a fresh plume of cigar smoke, which rises like a dark cloud around him, he starts imagining first the rail, then wells, then electric power lines invading the valley, while ''sniveling toady'' politicians, as he calls them, do nothing.

His soliloquy crescendos, linking defense contractors like Kellogg Brown & Root and Bechtel to the government as a sinister cabal machinating against him -- ''I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out a hit squad to kill me!'' -- when the silence of Murphy Gap is suddenly shattered by a heart-stopping boom.

An F-16 buzzes our truck. It looks as if it can't be more than 100 feet overhead, turned sideways to maneuver low through the snaking pass. Then as quickly as it appears, it's gone.

Who knows? I think. Even paranoids may be right sometimes.

This is a story about a man, his dream and a railroad. Everything in it is outsize, including the landscape. It's otherwise a familiar Western saga, pitting a brooding, determined loner against big, bad Washington, except that in this case the hero's personality is at least as radioactive as the train barreling toward him.

At 60, with hawkish steel gray eyes, a kind of wary stare, a deeply lined face and haphazardly combed-over hair, Heizer is still gaunt from a decade-long battle with a neurological disorder that left him weak and in crippling pain. If illness reinforced his native martyr streak, it also strengthened his resolve, making the sculpture a mission. The knowledge that the government or his body or both could prove his work's undoing makes him more fierce at the same time that he seems swallowed up in his clothes: dusty khakis, a checked vest over a plaid shirt, a sheepskin hat with earflaps and cowboy boots. He affects the look of other ranchers in this hardscrabble stretch of range, a resemblance that partly belies his upbringing.

Born in Berkeley, Calif., Heizer comes from an accomplished family of academics, geologists and miners with some history in Nevada, a history that he's proud of and that explains how he ended up making art here. During the 1960's, sculpture moved outdoors, and Heizer was one of the movers. In the early 60's, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre and Walter De Maria were digging holes or talking about digging holes, making performances out of the process. De Maria was imagining milelong parallel walls in the desert, and Robert Smithson was mapping the New Jersey landscape, visiting quarries, making ''Nonsites'' out of rocks he collected and conceptualizing Earth Art, which became a catchall term for disparate experiments. It was an era of chest-thumping, clashing personalities, proclaiming to remake art from scratch, and Heizer fitted right in.

His contribution was to go West. The Abstract Expressionists had linked American art with scale. Jackson Pollock's paintings were said to refer to the Western landscape. Heizer took the idea to its logical next step. He literally made art out of the Western landscape, replacing scale with size: his works didn't just allude to big things; they were enormous. The bigger the hole or ditch he dug, the more monumental the sculpture. Negative sculpture, as Heizer called art made out of the space left behind from digging, crept into the mainstream consciousness, even if many people have never heard of him. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the memorial design for ground zero are both riffs, in part, on Heizer's negative vocabulary.

Adventuresome patrons and dealers like Robert Scull, Heiner Friedrich, Richard Bellamy, Virginia Dwan and Sam Wagstaff gravitated to the moody Westerner with the Ayn Rand vision and smoldering charm. They bankrolled his most radical art adventures. He dug holes in the Sierra Nevada, near Munich, Germany, and elsewhere; mostly the holes were shallow, the slopes gentle. But awe, even fear, was sometimes part of the work: the fear a viewer might feel about falling into one of the deeper holes. Heizer also scattered dyes and powders and drove a motorcycle to leave tire tracks, like drawings, across dry lake beds. He dug trenches, at intervals across hundreds of miles in the desert.

His best-known work was ''Double Negative,'' for which he cut a 1,500-foot-long, 50-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide gash onto facing slopes of the Mormon Mesa in Nevada by blasting and scraping away 240,000 tons of rock. It became a landmark of Earth Art, never mind that Heizer wanted nothing to do with any movement -- or, increasingly, with most other artists. ''I burned hot and was making something totally original,'' he recalled one afternoon while shuffling through some stacks of photographs of ''Double Negative'' in his office. ''It was a moment of genius and unprecedented.''

Then he couldn't resist taking his usual gratuitous whack at Smithson, his former friend, whose ''Spiral Jetty'' in Utah, finished just after ''Double Negative,'' became an icon of Earth Art. Smithson, as Heizer sees it, ''just copied my M.O., did a complete heavy borrowing, an identity theft.'' Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973. Over the years, most of Heizer's friendships with artists he knew then have fallen away.

In 1972, Heizer acquired land in Garden Valley and began work on the first part of ''City,'' his own version of Easter Island or Angkor Wat: a modernist complex of abstract shapes -- mounds, prismoids, ramps, pits -- to be spread across the valley. It was to be experienced over time, in shifting weather, not from a single vantage point or from above but as an accumulation of impressions and views gathered by slowly walking through it. Artists in the 1960's and 70's -- Donald Judd, Andre, De Maria, Smithson, others -- were pushing sculpture off its pedestal. This was sculpture pushed all the way into the Western desert, the sort of work that you couldn't buy or sell even though it was very expensive to produce. Its materials were dirt and rock and cement and rebar, not marble or porcelain or bronze, and its tools were not chisels but heavy machinery.

The sculpture was meant not just to employ nature -- the soil, sun and air -- but also to make art out of engineering. Heizer traded in his paintbrush for a bulldozer, which, not incidentally, he could operate himself, unlike some of the other so-called Earth artists, but the work still required a crew. Artists have always had assistants. Heizer's happened to be construction workers with cranes and forklifts.

''City,'' in its vastness, was meant to synthesize ancient monuments, Minimalism and industrial technology. The work derived inspiration from Mississippian tumuli (ancient North American mounds), the ball court at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and La Venta in southern Tabasco, where his father, a prominent anthropologist and archaeologist, had excavated. At the same time, it suggested airport runways and Modernist architecture.

Heizer resists such strict comparisons, stressing his basic abstract impulses. ''The trouble is,'' he explained to me, ''once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli -- I'm not ripping off those shapes. I said I derived some of the shapes from the serpent motif at Chichen Itza, and now I have to live with this forever, as if that's the whole meaning behind it.'' Years ago he told another interviewer, ''The only sources I felt were allowable were American; South American, Mesoamerican or North American. That might mean Eskimos or Peruvians. I wanted to finish off the European impulse.'' Whatever its sources, in its ambition and idiosyncrasy, it is clearly a very eccentric, American vision.

During the mid-1950's, the National Academy of Sciences raised the question of what should be done with the country's radioactive military waste. The academy proposed various underground sites around the country. Nevada wasn't on the initial list.

But Nevada was where the military had been exploding weapons, where fallout from atomic tests had drifted across mountains and valleys near Heizer's ranch. Nevadans came to learn firsthand what it meant to live in the shadow of the blasts and to distrust what the government said. ''Part of my art,'' Heizer explained when he picked Garden Valley, ''is based on an awareness that we live in a nuclear era. We're probably living at the end of civilization.''

In its remoteness and its intimation of eternal landscapes and ancient monuments, which survive after the societies that built them disappear, ''City'' reflected this sentiment. At the same time, it was inspired, Heizer said, by what he calls the ceremonial city: ''Every old city has the same sort of ceremonial feature, whether it's the Tuileries or St. Peter's or Teotihuacan. The long, stretched-out format of my sculpture is in dialogue with this ancient way of formatting space.''

Heizer also designed ''City'' to blend into the contours of the valley and to act as a kind of bunker or container, open to the sky but dug into the earth, low to the ground (he admires Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings) and, as much as possible, disguised from outside, so that the natural vista would be largely preserved.

The military metaphor of the bunker, with its defensive aura, is hard to miss. When officials from the Department of Energy recently flew over the valley to survey the rail line, they reported briefly mistaking the sculpture for a military project. Years ago, Heizer compared the first part of ''City'' -- a sloped, flat-topped mound with projecting beams that he called Complex One -- to a blast shield. He has since constructed pits and perimeter mounds, turning his work into a sort of airy, roaming fortress made of millions of yards of dirt, so many yards by now that he long ago lost count. ''My interest is in making this thing internalized,'' he said while driving the two of us slowly across the sculpture late one afternoon as the setting sun turned the mountains orange and purple and cast the deepest pits in black shadows. ''It is connected to the environment but not to the landscape. Landscape to me is a planar thing, just a view. Environment is everything down to the ecosystem. Big difference.''

Ten years after Heizer conceived ''City,'' Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which insisted that the Department of Energy find deep geological disposal sites -- and also that the United States must permanently dispose of spent fuel from nuclear reactors, not reuse it, which meant that there would be less dangerous plutonium floating around in the world, but more waste to dispose of. After much political wrangling, three remote Western sites were recommended to President Reagan in 1986, one in eastern Washington State, near Hanford, where the U.S. had already built nuclear facilities for bombs; another in Deaf Smith County, Tex., near a secret plant for nuclear warheads.

The third was Yucca, near Area 51, where the Air Force conducts its so-called black programs, testing its most secret weapons. This is a no-fly zone. Fighters escort out, or shoot down, any plane that strays into the area. The pilot who flew me by helicopter to Heizer's ranch one stormy summer day last year was careful to check in with the Air Force controllers; still he kept one cautious eye on the horizon for lightning, the other out for military jets.

Naturally, no state wanted to store nuclear waste. Nevada, during the mid-1980's, was not in the best negotiating position. Las Vegas was still far from being the boomtown it would become. The state had only one congressman. So it wasn't altogether surprising when in 1987 Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, ordering the Department of Energy to focus exclusively on Yucca.

By then, Heizer had reached an impasse on ''City.'' He finished Complex One in 1974, mostly working by himself, using a paddle-wheel scraper a farmer lent him and following plans drawn up by seismic engineers; then he started on Complexes Two and Three, gargantuan mounds that proved to be vastly more troublesome. Combined, the three Complexes were meant to form a horseshoe, like a stadium open at one end, around a broad pit or plaza. Complex One had protruding, 30-ton, T-shaped and L-shaped columns; Complexes Two and Three were angular dirt mastabas, crystalline shapes, up to a quarter mile long, entailing hundreds of thousands of yards of dirt, one with pointed slabs, like ancient stelae, 70 feet high. ''A lot of money over the years went into simply trying to maintain old, useless equipment,'' Heizer said. ''I never stopped working on the pit and the Complexes, whenever I could afford to. But we're talking crazy optimism here.''

He took commissions to raise money and kept revising the plans for ''City,'' which he had never imagined to be a lifelong undertaking but which was clearly turning out to be one. Some help arrived during the late 1980's when Charlie Wright, the director of the Dia Center for the Arts, visited with potential sponsors and provided cash to shore up what had already started to erode because of harsh weather and construction problems. Dia was founded in 1974 by Philippa de Menil and her husband, Heiner Friedrich, a charismatic but spendthrift German art dealer who sponsored Heizer's Munich sculpture years before. Friedrich considered supporting Heizer at the start of ''City,'' but the two fell out. Then Dia's fortunes briefly collapsed. Wright, with fresh patronage, revived Friedrich's original ambition to back all sorts of grand art projects, like Heizer's.

Then Heizer got sick. In 1995, he mistook pain in his fingers and toes for frostbite because he had been standing in the cold 12 hours a day working on his sculpture. ''I thought I was eternal,'' Heizer told me one evening, relaxing after dinner in his living room, flexing his hands while staring absently at the Science Channel. ''I still do. But back then I took no care of myself. I hadn't seen a doctor or a dentist for 20 years.'' When the pain moved to his back, a medevac helicopter had to speed him to a doctor, who prescribed Tylenol and told him he was drinking and smoking too much. The pain became unbearable. On his way by plane to a hospital in New York, he collapsed and nearly died.

Polyneuropathy was the diagnosis, a nerve disease that progressively caused him to lose much of the use of his hands. His weight plummeted. For a while he couldn't walk, then he had to use crutches. He was in the hospital for months. His recovery was slow. Fed up, he resolved to demolish what he had done so far of ''City.'' Meanwhile, Wright had been succeeded at Dia by Michael Govan, who picked up his plan to aid Heizer in 1996, cultivating more donors, above all the Lannan Foundation. Able to hire workers and rent heavy equipment at last, Heizer went back to work. Although still ailing, he finished the first Complexes by 1999, when I initially visited him -- 27 years after he started. Unbowed, he declared there were another four, even grander, stages to go.

If he'd never gotten to those, he would still have accomplished a feat on a scale not unlike, say, Mount Rushmore, which, along with the cowboy paintings of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, is just about the only American art Heizer now volunteers to praise. Two Remington cowboy sculptures are on either end of the long table in his living room, and he keeps handy an old book of Russell's paintings of the West. ''I love these artists because they're so precise and faithful,'' he says.

I was flabbergasted when I returned last summer, after several years away, to see what Heizer had accomplished since my earlier visit. I couldn't decipher the work at first, save for a few distinctive shapes. The sculpture melded with the valley. But then Heizer packed me into his truck and drove me to the sculpture, a quarter mile away from the ranch. The additions now dwarf the first phase of the project, making

Complexes One, Two and Three, which are collectively nearly the size of Yankee Stadium, look tiny and precious. The new phases are more pneumatic -- raked dirt formations resembling hills, valleys and mountains. There is a patch of unspoiled sage, like a park, smack in the middle, for flood runoff through the valley (Heizer was thrilled to discover that it actually worked during the recent January storms); and there's now a concrete sculpture, ''45o, 90o, 180o,'' which both evokes ancient Egypt and resembles a board game on the scale of an airport hangar. ''I call it a defracted gestalt,'' Heizer said while slowly steering the truck to the steep precipice of what he calls Alpha mound. ''From the ground you grasp the size but can't make out the shapes -- the opposite of what you sense from the air -- and your perception changes as you move around.''

Heizer occasionally refers to the valley as virgin land; he obsesses about the originality of his conception, about protecting his property and his art from violation by the rail, from developers hunting for underground water, from people trying to sneak in to see the sculpture before it's finished. His project is propelled by anger and resentment and monomania but also by Eros: sculpture as voluptuous, unspoiled and ecstatic, an organic body (one mound from the air, I saw, clearly resembles an erect phallus).

The question, at a time when there's so little talk about government financing for new art of any sort, is whether a country that claims to prize its rugged individualists and its native treasures, both natural and cultural, will care enough to try to avoid ''City'' by running the nuclear train elsewhere -- whether accommodations will be made simply to preserve a sculpture and the equally obscure, awesome valley it occupies.

Obscure, in the art's case, not just because it's physically remote, but also because Heizer has frightened away almost everyone from seeing ''City.'' He's the opposite of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose ''Gates,'' to be unveiled this week in Central Park in New York -- another gigantic sculpture project decades in the making -- is ephemeral. Christo and Jeanne-Claude regard the public spectacle of their installation as part of the work itself: the art is a kind of temporary performance. Only when ''City'' is finished -- Heizer predicts it could take another decade to complete the 15 miles of concrete curbs that delineate the mounds and shore up the dirt slopes -- will the public be invited. Meanwhile, as he kept insisting to me while we were bumping down what sufficed for the path through Murphy Gap, anyone trying to show up uninvited will be arrested for trespassing or shot at.

Before I visited him the first time, he interrupted a tirade on the telephone against critics and people he contemptuously called art tourists who want to make the rounds of Earth Art. Then I heard gunshots. When he got back to the phone, he said he'd had to shoot at some coyotes. Then he just picked up the tirade where he left off. In a narrow pass along the drive across the desert this time around, I noticed someone had crudely painted ''Mike's Country Stay Out'' on a rock. The only directional sign for 35 miles was pocked with bullet holes -- used as target practice by ranchers, Heizer told me. It's a message, he speculated. Like him, he said, they just want to be left alone.

Heizer's ranch is a three-hour drive north of two million people in Las Vegas, but it's an hour's drive from almost anyone. His driveway is an unmarked dirt road meandering across several empty valleys and mountain ranges, more than an hour from blacktop. He rarely leaves the ranch these days, and hardly anyone visits except the construction crew. Heizer's Garden Valley is in Lincoln County, which, like half of Nevada, is a place where ranchers run cattle up-country during the spring and summer, down-country during the winter. This is mountainous range. Gold miners used to prospect here; there is still mining for opal and vermiculite.

Heizer and his second wife, Mary Shanahan -- a slender, friendly, brown-haired woman with a wry sense of humor, 21 years his junior, a painter, who was his assistant before they married -- tend a small herd of cattle. They're raising beefalo. They also grow alfalfa. Their house is simple, comfortable, a low two-story building with a big kitchen in front. Heizer fixed it up with hickory floors and fir beams. There's a metal shop, a dog kennel, a bunkhouse for workers to sleep in overnight, pens for cattle and farming equipment scattered along with half-finished sculptures in the yard.

Mary, although she's from Michigan, is a Western classic, soft-spoken and steady. She can birth a calf, make plum jam, change a truck tire, help oversee the complicated accounting on the project, ride herd over construction workers and ranch hands, format the digital images of the sculpture on the computer, reprogram electronics for the testy solar panels and in her spare time retreat to a studio behind Heizer's office and paint abstract pictures of an ethereal calm and Western light. She's in charge of the herd. The plan is to keep expanding it, she said. She and Heizer live pretty much like many small-time ranchers in their elective isolation. He's just the only guy around building the equivalent of the ancient pyramids in his front yard.

Lincoln County is Mormon country, where ranching families go back to the 1800's, people don't like the government telling them what to do and outsiders are regarded with suspicion. It took a while for locals to get to know Heizer, who stayed to himself. His prickliness was always partly calculated: it kept away unwanted busybodies and skeptics while burnishing his reputation as art's ornery outlaw. One evening I discovered Mary and Heizer laughing in the living room. She had come across some old letters that Robert Heizer, Michael's father, had written to various people. They were rants, she said. Like father, like son, I surmised.

When I initially visited Heizer, his pent-up frustration had made him extremely testy with what was then a laconic crew that had no experience constructing anything like ''City.'' The dozen or so men who now work with him -- several of whom trek hundreds of miles each week across the desert to accommodate Heizer's sudden decisions to shift several hundred thousand yards of dirt a few inches this way or that -- profess deep affection. He's a perfectionist; they shrug.

If Heizer, over the years, picked fights and lost allies, insisting, against common sense, he was the first, the only, the best artist around, clearly some people have stuck loyally by him. ''The people who really spend time with him love him,'' says Michael Govan, who, along with Lynne Cooke, Dia's longtime curator, visits maybe three or four times a year to check on the sculpture's progress. ''Never a nickel gets spent on anything that's not necessary,'' Govan adds. ''If Mike weren't managing the construction and we had used outside contractors, it would have cost double, I'm sure. He's honorable.''

The patrons Govan has enlisted -- the Lannan Foundation, the Riggio family and the Brown Foundation, the same Browns, by the way, of the defense contractor Kellogg Brown, which Heizer said was scheming to bump him off -- have stuck with a project that could cost nearly $25 million by the end. ''Mike does things how he wants,'' says J. Patrick Lannan Jr., the foundation's president. ''But it's going to be a monumental gift to culture for generations to come.'' Even Heizer is astonished: ''I told them they're playing with fire. I'm an artist. I don't work with drawings or models. This is a creative process. It's an act of faith on their part.'' When I traveled with Govan and Cooke to ''City'' last summer, Govan mentioned that he had reread Irving Stone's ''Agony and the Ecstasy.''

Later he dug up a passage from the book and e-mailed it to me:

''During all these months the Pope kept insisting that Michelangelo complete his ceiling quickly, quickly! Then one day Julius climbed the ladder unannounced.

'' 'When will it be finished?'

'' 'When I have satisfied myself.'

'' 'Satisfied yourself in what? You have already taken four full years.'

'' 'In the matter of art, Holy Father.'

'' 'It is my pleasure that you finish it in a matter of days.'

'' 'It will be done, Holy Father, when it will be done.' ''

Heizer figures that when his own work is done, it will be there for anybody to see for centuries -- that he's building not for today but for the ages. It's a perspective he came by naturally. His father was collaborating on a book about the transport of massive stones in antiquity when he died in 1979, at 64. An obituary by colleagues from the Berkeley anthropology department described Robert Heizer as ''a lone, work-addicted man whose prodigious production required rigid self-discipline.''

Preserved in a file cabinet in Heizer's office is a page from The San Francisco Chronicle, dated Dec. 17, 1941. It's a picture of a slender, youngish Robert holding a box of 350-year-old rusty iron spikes that bound the oaken ribs of a sunken Spanish explorer ship. A 1946 newspaper cartoon of Robert is tucked in the same folder. He's depicted as a bespectacled Indiana Jones in tie and tweed jacket, brandishing a skull before a pile of bones. Some of the mounds in ''City,'' it occurs to me when I see the cartoon, are shaped like bones, and the stelae are a bit like the spikes.

In front of Heizer's house there is also a gigantic perforated sculpture resembling Swiss cheese. During the 1930's, Robert Heizer discovered tiny perforated horns, shamanist objects, left behind by hunter-gatherers who lived beside a prehistoric lake in Nevada.

Heizers have been in or around Nevada since the 1880's. Heizer's grandfather, Olaf, whose own father was chairman of Stanford's physiology department, became the chief geologist for California. He conducted geological surveys in Sumatra and helped map Tennessee, Washington and California. (A family story, Heizer says, is that one of Olaf's horses was used by Eadweard Muybridge for his stop-action photographs.) Ott F. Heizer, Heizer's other grandfather, ran the largest tungsten mining operation in Nevada.

Heizer recalls: ''I was taken out of school by my dad when I was 11 and lived in Mexico City, then later in Paris. I went with him to excavate in Bolivia and Peru. I never finished high school. I was a straight F student anyway. My father admitted to me later that he'd thought I would come to no good. It was tough for my parents because I hated school. I didn't have many friends. I wasn't a sports guy, a team player. The only sport I liked as I grew up was riding motorcycles, and you do that alone.''

At 19, he briefly took a few art classes in San Francisco and started making geometric paintings, then moved to New York in 1966. He supported himself working for slumlords, lugging a compressor over the cobblestone streets in SoHo, hooking up a spray gun and painting a six-story building top to bottom (white in the rooms, brown in the stairwells) in a day. ''It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but I met a lot of artists that way,'' he remembers. ''I met Walter De Maria painting his loft. If you wanted your loft painted for $60 in three hours, I was the guy to call.''

His switch to sculpture in 1967 grew partly out of the geometric paintings he had been doing, which were shaped canvases. These served almost as diagrams for the sculptures he would make in the earth. Much of that first outdoor work was fleeting, almost provisional, the opposite of ''City.'' In 1968, he was included in ''Earthworks,'' the influential group show at Virginia Dwan's gallery, and then in the Whitney Museum's painting annual in 1969, where his contribution wasn't strictly a painting but -- and this helped in a small way to redefine photography -- a huge photograph of a dye painting in the desert.

''When I met him he was 24,'' Dwan recently told me, ''a young 24, sensitive and vulnerable. He has changed over the years, as a result of defending himself from attacks, real or imagined. I was flummoxed by the work. I couldn't figure out this person who seemed to come from outer space, so I asked Walter De Maria, who said, 'Yes, Virginia, he's an original.' So I knew this was someone to be reckoned with.''

For ''Double Negative,'' in 1969, Dwan gave Heizer money, sight unseen. Working partly with Dwan's gallery director, John Weber, Heizer called her from Los Angeles one day to say it was done. A few years later, Dwan bought for Heizer the first parcels of property in Garden Valley, which he chose because the land was cheap, the soil and climate were right and not much of the rest of the valley could be homesteaded. ''When I visited at first Mike was living in a trailer and had a big young Mormon working for him,'' Dwan recalls. The road in and out was a weedy livestock trail, which sometimes got so bad in winter that Heizer would be locked in for months, seeing only a couple of sheep trailers and an occasional pickup truck. Fearful of being robbed, he surrounded the place with cyclone fencing and left only at night to get back before dawn.

Eventually he built himself a house out of cinder-block seconds. When Dwan finally saw the first Complexes, she cried. ''There he is in the middle of nowhere, without an art world to talk to, without a bar where he can go find friends for support, building something much larger than anyone has ever built, knowing he is going to be criticized for grandiosity, and yet going ahead and building what he must. That takes courage.''

Heizer still commuted to New York and Los Angeles, doing commissions, networking. He liked the dinners at Odeon, the parties at Chateau Marmont with movie stars -- until he decided he didn't. ''They're frivolous, I'm not,'' he told me. ''You don't control your own destiny in New York. It's fine if you trust the system and agree to move along the street in an orderly fashion. But you can't carry a weapon to protect yourself, even though it's more dangerous there than here. I find it castrating.''

It has been said that the early works Heizer and Smithson and De Maria and others did outdoors seemed like a fresh start, full of promise. Nancy Holt, the sculptor who was married to Smithson and who used to be close to Heizer, recalled traveling with the two men: ''To go outside into the landscape, that sense of liberation, just crossing the Hudson River, it was glorious. The mass media picked up quicker than the art media what was happening. This was when everyone was seeing the earth from outer space for the first time; 'ecology' was a new word. And when you look at the old photographs of us, you can see the joy in our faces.''

That was then. Should the rail go through, Heizer now claims, he'll dynamite ''City,'' never mind that he is building it to be indestructible for thousands of years, or that the people giving him money aren't likely to fork over another million or so dollars to destroy it and return the desert to its original condition. But with him, it has become all or nothing. Posterity isn't the next generation; it's a millennium. ''Double Negative'' was ''the most incredible sculpture I've ever seen or done,'' Heizer says. ''When I finished I laughed. I knew I'd done it. There was no precedent in the history of mankind.''

And he did not just add his sensibility to radical art movements of the 60's and 70's. As he sees it, he single-handedly, without influence from any other living artist, started a ''revolution.'' ''I'm self-entertaining,'' he declares in another fervid soliloquy. ''My dialogue is with myself.''

The sculptor Richard Serra, Heizer's contemporary, who was an acquaintance of Heizer's during the 60's and whose own work sometimes now rivals Heizer's in size, has said: ''Whoever tells you he dropped from heaven knows the opposite is equally true.'' Serra hasn't seen ''City,'' but he told me that he could imagine ''the work may empower people in ways that don't have to do with scale, in ways that we can't foresee. Heizer's stance is empowering because what artists do is individuate themselves, and this guy has done it to the nth degree.''

Of course, Heizer is not really on his own in the desert, as the nuclear train proves. There was also the MX during the 80's, he reminded me one morning. We were in his kitchen with Gracian Uhalde, his nearest neighbor, who has a ranch about 15 miles away and who works as a contractor on ''City.'' We sat before cups of strong espresso that Heizer likes to serve in glass tumblers at the table his father built for him years ago out of mining timbers scavenged from some abandoned mine shafts in the Golden Gate Range. The MX plan was to crisscross Garden and other nearby valleys -- Coal, Dry Lake, Delamar -- with rail tracks leading to silos for moving around and hiding missiles. (''Peacekeepers,'' as President Reagan called them.) Mary spread an MX map over the kitchen table. It showed the valleys as a checkerboard of rail lines. ''With the MX we won,'' Uhalde said, meaning the government decided not to go through with it. ''Now they're back at it.''

When I found Uhalde working at ''City'' later that same morning, he moseyed over, stomping his feet against the bitter cold, and slid a pinch of chewing tobacco into his cheek. In his early 50's, he has a broad, well-creased face, partly hidden behind a huge white handlebar mustache. His faded overalls matched his light blue eyes. I noticed part of his left pinkie was missing. A calf-roping accident, he told me. Heizer calls him a cowboy, a small-time rancher, which to Heizer is a big compliment.

''People are here because we want to be here, because we're attached to this place,'' Uhalde said. ''You don't come to Lincoln County to make it in the world.'' Like Heizer, he has become outspoken against the Yucca rail plan, which he fears will destroy his cattle's grazing land.

''My grandfather came from the French Pyrenees in the 1880's -- he was Basque -- and at first he emigrated to Idaho as a sheepherder. At some point he was asked to take a herd of about 2,000 to Carson City. He didn't speak a word of English. He told me he had been given a burro and a tent, and when a bear killed the burro, which he needed to carry the tent, he had to leave the tent behind. In return he got 400 sheep, and he settled in Ely, north of here, where there was a Basque community, a kind of subculture.''

Uhalde went on: ''Now we have about 10,000 acres altogether, between the ranch here and one up north, and we farm about 150 acres for hay and have a couple thousand sheep plus 600 cows. We've been around for 100 years. I think the government figured they'd have no resistance in Garden Valley because no one lived here.''

He handed me a palm-size square pamphlet titled ''Atomic Tests in Nevada,'' which was printed in March 1957 by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Uhalde had been carrying it around lately. It showed cartoons of bowlegged cowboys on the range, watching mushroom clouds rise over the mountains. Allowing that ''fallout can be inconvenient,'' it provides helpful tips like opening windows to avoid shock waves, wearing sunglasses if staring at fireballs and brushing off clothing when covered with radioactive dust.

''I believe it was in 1962,'' Uhalde continued, ''that they did a hydrogen test that looked to me like snow falling in the mountains, the fallout was so bad. My dad never trusted the government. So he and Joe Fallini, his closest neighbor then, who lived 60 miles away, bought a Geiger counter. Deer started showing up with burn patches. Joe's cousin, a little boy, died of leukemia after that. There were dozens of test shots back in those days. We would try to figure out where the pink clouds were heading.

''Then in the late 80's my sister started having symptoms. They thought at first she was epileptic. She was in college at the time. By '92 she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Around then I got a tumor growing in my bladder. We both applied for downwinders' compensation. We got a total of $50,000.

''Now we say, just leave us alone and take your nuclear glow train through some other valley, along the highway or whatever. Just not here. Here you've got ranching -- small-time, old-style ranching, with the valley as a natural, reusable resource -- coexisting in peace with Mike's project, a cultural monument. The rail will kill all that.''

Heizer joined us in the freezing cold, and he piped in that there were even bigger threats from developers who want to tap the valley's water table. ''The train is just part of the problem,'' he said. ''Developers want to rape this place.'' Railroad Valley, just next to Garden Valley, has oil wells and a refinery in it, Uhalde added.

Is there oil in this valley? I asked.

''God, I hope not,'' he said.

At the end of 2003, the Department of Energy announced the proposed nuclear rail line to Yucca. The Bureau of Land Management, which controls public lands, meaning most of Garden Valley, issued what's called a temporary segregation to reserve the rail route. Next will come an Environmental Impact Statement. When I called to ask about Heizer's fate, Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, said simply that Dia had proposed various ''interesting alternatives we're considering.'' The department plans to issue a draft of what it calls the ''Rail Alignment Environmental Impact Statement'' by late spring or early summer. After that come hearings and another chance for public response before the final E.I.S. is issued and the fate of the rail line is decided sometime early in fiscal year 2006, Davis said.

''We have several laws to comply with,'' Gene Kolkman added. He is field manager for the B.L.M. in nearby Ely and oversees land withdrawal. If the rail line intersects free roaming area for wild horses, that will require modifications because the horses are protected by the Wild Horse and Burro Act. Ranchers must be compensated if the rail cuts off grazing lands and harms their livelihood. ''It's very seldom that a project comes in, especially a controversial project like the Yucca Mountain railroad line, and that it ends up being authorized as it was originally configured,'' Kolkman said.

A former Energy Department consultant on Yucca who is rooting for Heizer's plan to move the route to another valley (and so who asked not to be identified by name) nonetheless defended the selection of Yucca. No site is perfect, he said. But he acknowledged the problem of shipping the waste to Yucca. Spent fuel contains heavy metals, and they aren't called heavy for nothing. They require massive rail containers for transport. Cement for constructing the storage site must also be carried to it, tons of cement, on the scale of Hoover Dam. This is to be one of the largest public work projects ever. The shortest route would skirt Las Vegas, but the more politically feasible path -- and the one mapped by the Department of Energy -- goes from Caliente through the middle of nowhere, which is to say, right through Michael Heizer's front yard. Politics has trumped art, the consultant said, at least for the moment.

Heizer disappeared from the living room where he retreated after dinner one evening and retrieved an old, crumbling children's book. ''Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,'' the 1939 classic by Virginia Lee Burton, is about Mike Mulligan and his red steam shovel, Mary Anne. They quit the big city, frustrated because steam shovels were succeeded by electric and diesel shovels, and they find work in the countryside. In faraway Popperville, they dig a cellar for a new town hall but, in their haste, they forget to leave a way out. They end up entombed in the cellar, Mike as the janitor, Mary Anne as the furnace. Heizer says he loved the story so much as a boy that his mother used to call him Mike Mulligan.

At the sculpture the next morning, while Heizer tinkered in his studio at the ranch, I spotted Jim Hicks hunched beside his truck with his coat collar turned up, cupping his hands against the freezing wind to light a cigarette and looking absently out from the rim above Pits 4 and 5, a nearly sheer drop of 50 feet. Hicks has the chapped lips and weathered face of a cowboy who has spent his life in the great Western outdoors. He has been working on ''City'' for years. He told me he makes the daily commute across the mountains and the desert from Ely, two hours each way, to work 10-hour shifts on this project. ''I can't sleep anyway, so why not drive?'' he said, laughing. Like the other men, he enjoys working for Heizer.

''I've worked on an airport runway and on highways,'' he said, ''where you've got big crews; the bosses flood the projects with equipment, nothing's complicated, you know beforehand the shape and the curve or whatever. This is completely different, 180 degrees.''

How so? I asked.

He nodded toward Beta Mound, an immense, quarter-mile-long construction of dirt with sloping sides, a flat top and a rounded nose. Hicks pointed to the nose. ''I used an 16-foot blade on the grader and most of the time, to get that angle just right on the mound, only about one foot of the blade was scraping the ground.'' He paused. ''I did that. Maybe you wouldn't notice, but somebody will. And that will last hundreds of years.''

When I came across Bill Harmon, who pours concrete for the curbs, he echoed what Hicks said about discovering, in the process of building ''City,'' an American can-do ideal, the fine art of heavy construction. Harmon is from Ruby Valley, 230 miles north, and during the week he lives in a trailer at Uhalde's ranch across the valley with six other guys working on the project, including his two sons, Clint and Bo.

''Mike is demanding,'' he said. ''But that's why things are as good as they are. I've worked in concrete all my life, and I've never had the time or money to do something to the best of my ability. Everything is hurry up. It's about making money. That's the American way. But here we have to produce something that has more to do with accuracy than I've ever been allowed even to imagine. This here is my chance to do the best I can. I travel over 400 miles a week just to be here. And my boys take pride in it, too. When it's finished, I'll be able to say, I had the chance to do that.''

I asked him what he thinks the sculpture is about. ''It's hard to explain,'' he added. ''At the beginning I was lost. I can read a set of blueprints, but I had no idea what we were building. I could not see why we were doing this. I got stuck on the practical stuff -- was this a stadium? Were we going to live in it? And then Mike wanted everything within a sixteenth of an inch, even on a concrete slab that was 78 feet by 240 feet.

''But gradually I got the idea. I can't say exactly what it means now, but I know it has to do with history and with making something that will last. I'm not an artist, but I can tell you I'm real proud to be working on something like this.''

Gracian Uhalde, whom I came across later, echoed that sentiment. ''It takes a while to get used to how Mike does things. But we admire him because he's not afraid to be different. And we're glad for him. It's not too many people in life get to see their dream come true, is it?''

I left at dawn the following day. Roaming antelope and coyote hunting for rabbits had made the dogs bark at night. Now a dozen cats huddled in the cold on the long wood table outside Heizer's kitchen window. Heizer had risen early to say goodbye. He told me he was sleepless, fretting about some of the things he'd said. He didn't want to hurt people's feelings. He wanted to give credit to people like Virginia Dwan, John Weber, Robert Scull and Richard Bellamy, who had supported him, and to Mary and his former wife, Barbara. So much of Heizer's hubris is bravado, I think -- his not having enough people around to vent to, to talk back to him. And in the end the work, which possesses him and drives him and other people crazy, is the only thing that will count -- if it isn't spoiled by the nuclear rail line or if Heizer doesn't blow it up first.

He walked me to my rental car and kicked the tires. ''They're crap,'' he said. ''They'll blow out if you hit a big rock, and then you'll be stuck.'' He reminded me to call when I reached the paved road, so that he'd know I got there.

With that, I drove off, tires crunching in the cold gravel, as the first rays of sun hit the snow on the mountains, casting the valley in a pearly gray pool of winter light.

Michael Kimmelman is the chief art critic for The New York Times.

DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you. While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the opposite. In fact, the laws regulating property—and intellectual property, in particular—have never before been so complex, onerous, and rigid. Copyright protection has been growing in fits and starts since the early days of the Republic. In 1790, a copyright lasted for fourteen years and could be renewed once before the work entered the public domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was increased from twenty-eight to fifty-six years. It was extended several more times during the twentieth century until 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act added twenty additional years (to both existing and future intellectual property), increasing copyright protection to seventy years after the death of an author. Some of the most significant changes in intellectual property law took place in the Copyright Act of 1976, after which it was no longer required to register one's work in order to protect it. Anything "fixed in a tangible medium"—e-mail messages, those doodles in the margins of this magazine—automatically became copyrighted. Recent laws—like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which increased protection of copyrighted material on the Internet, and the Sonny Bono Act—have elevated intellectual property's status to such a degree that many courts and corporations often treat it in virtually the same way as they do physical property. This is a category mistake, and one explicitly forbidden according to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'' Unlike Europe, whose laws center on the "moral rights" of the author to control his creation, American copyright law has always had the strictly utilitarian goal of providing just enough incentive for someone to create. Copyright is a bargain: The government grants a limited right to profit from your intellectual property in exchange for your agreement to give the public limited access to it during that period (such as the "fair use" right of a teacher to make class copies of an essay), and, eventually, for it to lapse into the public domain. But as copyright terms lengthened and intellectual property became a larger part of American industry, the logic of incentive has been overshadowed by the logic of reward, the thinking being that if my work continues to have value, why shouldn't I profit from it for as long as I want? "In our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity," writes Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig in his most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. "Yet the current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value." But if we have fallen into what New York University communications professor Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "the property-talk trap," it has had the unintended effect of mobilizing citizens by demonstrating the stake we all have in the debate over how intellectual property should be considered. Once an arcane part of the American legal system, intellectual property law is now at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences, and politics. People are increasingly aware of the role intellectual property plays in their everyday lives; they bump up against it every time they discover they can't print a passage from an e-book or transfer a song from their computer to their iPod. These days, it is not uncommon to hear people casually conversing about legal concepts like "fair use" and the "first sale doctrine." Much of this awareness results from the well-publicized lawsuits the Recording Industry Association of America has brought against music downloaders. This is unfortunate, because it has created the impression that those in favor of liberalizing copyright law condone the theft of intellectual property. Leaving aside questions about the appropriate legal remedies for, and the economic implications of, downloading, taking copyrighted material for which one has not paid is simply illegal. The fact that illegal downloading is a mass phenomenon indicates that our intellectual property laws aren't working in much the same way that the speakeasies of the '20s and '30s pointed out the irrationality of Prohibition. Neither downloading nor drinking, however, made the activities more legal. It is in more common—and only marginally illegal—pursuits that ordinary citizens are realizing they have a legitimate stake in the debate over the scope of copyright law. As the price of digital video cameras and editing software plummets, the number of people who sync home movies to music, splice together clips from favorite television shows, and even produce documentaries has soared. TiVo and other digital video recorders have made it possible to trade programs over the broadband Internet connections that are finding their way into homes across the country. Young fathers are practically required to transplant images of their newborns into great works of art by way of Photoshop. In December 2004, Google announced "Google Print," a project to bring millions of easily searchable, digitized books to the Internet. The project, which has already begun and may take a decade to complete, will further heighten awareness of our vexed relationship to intellectual property. After digitizing the entire holdings of Stanford and the University of Michigan libraries (as well as sections of the libraries of Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library), Google Print will search the texts of these books—although one will only be able to read the entire text of those works whose copyright has lapsed and are therefore in the public domain. As for copyrighted titles, one will be able to search their text for names and key phrases but won't be allowed to read the books themselves (a function like Amazon's helpful, but similarly limited, "Search inside this book" service). Instead, one will be directed to a library or bookstore where the book can be located. As amazing an effort as Google Print is (creating nothing less than a virtual "universal library of knowledge"), its logical goal—giving readers full access to the entire contents of that library—will be undercut by our intellectual property laws. It is an inherently unstable situation, and it is only a matter of time before someone (Amazon? Random House?) develops software to link this vast cache of literature to a convenient print-on-demand service (for which the hardware already exists). When it becomes possible to hold an inexpensive, physical copy of one of Google's digitized titles in one's hands—but only if it was first published prior to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain—people will begin to understand the implications of having something so obviously beneficial (universal access to universal knowledge) tethered to laws from another era. Google Print may be the Trojan Horse of the copyright wars. * * * While a range of copyright-infringing technologies has been changing the way we interact with our culture, critics of excessive copyright protection have been forging a coalition to demand that the law be brought more in line with the capabilities of these technologies. The challenge is considerable. Individual intellectual property rights are often in conflict with one another, and the only groups with a common interest in the direction of such laws are those corporations who want to lock up culture in perpetuity (or "forever minus a day," as former Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti once suggested). Even following the twists and turns of the debate is difficult, since negotiations are seldom held in public. "This cultural war is almost invisible," writes David Bollier in Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture. "It is happening quietly and incrementally—in rulings by distant courts, in hearing rooms on Capital Hill and obscure federal agencies, in the digital code that Hollywood and record labels surreptitiously implant into DVDs and CDs." One of the most suggestive responses to this dilemma has come from Duke University law professor James Boyle, who, in his landmark book Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (1996), diagnosed the problem succinctly. "What we have right now is an exponentially expanding intellectual land grab, a land grab that is not only bad but dumb, about which the progressive community is largely silent, the center overly sanguine, and the right wing short-sighted." Boyle's subsequent work is an extended plea that we value the public domain. "Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property,'' he writes. Boyle is one of the founders of "digital environmentalism," the movement that is fashioning a new understanding of what the public domain—the "commons," as Boyle and others have called it—might be. The great achievement of the environmental movement, from which Boyle draws inspiration, was its ability to convince a swath of the population—consumers and industrialists alike—that they all had a stake in this thing called "the environment," rather than just the small patch of land where they lived. Similarly, digital environmentalists are raising our awareness of the intellectual "land" to which people ought to feel entitled. Digital environmentalism is a two-pronged movement, with one group raising the awareness of the cultural stakes of intellectual property among everyday citizens, and the other pressing for legislative and legal change. The difference between the two is one of emphasis, with each participating in the battles of the other. Neither are anarchists or utopians; rather, both perceive of themselves as conservatives in the traditional sense of the term. "The point is not that copyright and trademark law needs to be overthrown," writes Bollier. "It is that its original goals need to be restored. Individual creators need to be empowered more than ever. The volume and free flow of information and creativity need to be protected. The public's rights of access and use must be honored. We must strike a new balance of private and public interests that takes account of the special dynamics of the Internet and digital technology." For those in the legal camp, the central event of recent years was Eldred v. Ashcroft, the 2002 Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Appearing before the court, Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of copyright violated the Constitution's stipulation that copyright exist for only "a limited time.'' The court rejected Lessig's position by a vote of seven to two, holding that while the extension was perhaps unwise on policy grounds, it was still within Congress's constitutional authority. A second legal challenge, which Lessig brought in 2004, went nowhere. Developments on the legislative front have been, if anything, more discouraging. Laws that strengthen copyright and increase penalties for infringement are introduced, and reintroduced, in Congress every year. In 2004, the Induce Act, a bill so broadly drawn that it would have held manufacturers of TiVo and iPods legally responsible if their customers used them for infringing copyright, died in committee, but it is only a matter of time before a similar piece of legislation passes. The cultural prong of digital environmentalism has had somewhat more success. Represented by writers like Bollier, Vaidhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System), Kembrew McLeod (Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity), and others, they all advocate the path of activism and resistance. Working within existing law, they propose that artists and authors aggressively exercise their intellectual property rights in the face of threats and legal challenges from overbearing copyright holders. Bollier, for one, perceives the work of digital environmentalists as benefiting from the momentum generated by legal challenges like Lessig's. "Acts of civil disobedience against the antisocial, personally intrusive claims of copyright law have only grown since the Eldred ruling, in part because of it," he writes. Their premise is that, like a muscle, intellectual rights grow stronger only when exercised. "For the most part, we don't need any new legislation. Fair use is a great solution, but for it to have any real impact on our culture we need to vigorously and confidently (though not carelessly) employ this legal doctrine in daily life," writes McLeod. The problem, they contend, is less the laws than the lawyers. Lawyers representing copyright holders encourage their clients to limit access to their intellectual property as much as possible. "The lawyers tell us 'You may gaze upon and buy the products of American culture,'" Bollier writes in Brand Name Bullies. "'But don't be so naïve as to think that you can actually use them for your own purposes. We own them.'" And the lawyers representing creators (artists, writers, and filmmakers, for example) who want access to copyrighted material for their work have decided that the transaction cost of boldly exercising fair-use rights is simply too high. Their primary goal is to avoid confrontation, even when they know that the outcome—should the case come to court—would favor their clients. The strategy of the cultural digital environmentalists is twofold. First, they challenge the lawyers at cultural institutions, whether they are book publishers, Internet providers, or movie distributors. Second, they spread the word about how poorly the current intellectual property system balances the rights of individuals and society. This tactic has given birth to the genre of the "copyright horror story." These are tales of intellectual property laws run amok: The artist who receives a cease-and-desist letter from the Vatican for using an image from the Sistine Chapel in a collage titled "The Sistine Bowl-Off." The company that was sued for devising software to teach tricks to a robot dog. McDonald's claim to own phrases like "Play and fun for everyone" and "Hey, it could happen." An Adobe e-book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that bears a warning forbidding one to read it aloud. In telling such stories, digital-environmentalist writers are trying to do for intellectual property what muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens did for corrupt governments and Eric Schlosser did for fast food: Go behind the curtain to reveal how something we take for granted—in this case, the cultural commons—really works. "We, as citizens, own these commons. They include resources that we have paid for as taxpayers and resources that we have inherited from previous generations," Bollier writes in his previous book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. "They are not just an inventory of marketable assets, but social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings." Some copyright horror stories read like science fiction, depicting life in an anticommons in which everything is owned: letters of the alphabet, familiar phrases, and popular songs like "God Bless America" and "Happy Birthday" (which won't enter the public domain until 2030). And like the best science fiction, these stories pose a serious question: To what extent do we already live in such a place? Is our world an intellectual property version of The Matrix where, despite the illusion of freedom, we are little more than digital sharecroppers, licensers of a culture we mistakenly assume is ours? The science-fiction metaphor helps explain a tension central to the intellectual property wars. We do, in a sense, live in the space between two competing realities: According to the letter of the law, intellectual property is well protected, but legitimate access to it (by artists, parodists, critics) is guaranteed. In practice, however, our rights to access are ambiguously drawn and, as a result, prohibitively expensive to exercise. The difference in views between the commons and the anticommons is one of perspective. Can an artist who spends a fortune in legal fees successfully defending his legitimate fair use of a copyrighted image really be said to have won? "Fuck fair use," Lessig is fond of saying. "Fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create." * * * The line between science fiction and reality is often difficult to discern, as exhibited by the case of the college student who received trademark #2,127,381 for the phrase "freedom of expression." Fortunately, the student was Kembrew McLeod, who applied for it in order to make a point. McLeod, now professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, is no stranger to using media pranks to exploit the absurdities of the system. In fact, he even once sold his soul in a glass jar on eBay. McLeod may be the most optimistic of the digital environmentalists. "We can fight back and win, especially because many recent court decisions have upheld free-speech rights in the age of intellectual property," he writes. Getting people to exercise those rights is another issue. "The problem is that many individuals and companies either don't know this or don't want to take a risk." McLeod's and Bollier's books are full of inspirational stories of those who have taken such risks and successfully faced down the corporations who have improperly used their copyrights, such as artist Tom Forsythe (creator of "Food Chain Barbie"), who was awarded $1.8 million in legal fees after Mattel pursued an "unreasonable and frivolous" suit against him. In September 2003, a group of Swarthmore College students posted on the Internet damning copies of internal memos written by employees of Diebold, the largest producer of electronic voting machines. The memos detailed various security flaws in Diebold's machines, and it wasn't long before the students received cease-and-desist letters demanding that they remove the memos from their websites. Although Diebold withdrew its legal threats in the wake of bad publicity, the students sued the company for falsely accusing them of copyright infringement. On September 30, 2004, a judge agreed that Diebold had deliberately misrepresented its copyright claims and awarded the students legal fees and damages. This past summer, director Robert Greenwald made "fair use" of a substantial amount of Fox News footage in order to document its conservative bias in his documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. Fox grumbled about the movie but never sued Greenwald for copyright infringement. In 2004, underground hip-hop artist DJ Danger Mouse edited together the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with selections of the Beatles' White Album to produce The Grey Album. Despite a flurry of cease-and-desist letters from EMI/Capitol (which owns the copyright to The White Album), over 170 websites continued to host The Grey Album in support of DJ Danger Mouse's right to create. It went on to become one of the most frequently downloaded independent albums of all time. The Boston Globe called it "the most creatively captivating" album of the year. If anything, Bollier's "bullies" and McLeod's "bozos" are their own worst enemies. "As we look back twenty years from now, Mattel and other businesses like Fox News may ironically be remembered as some of the greatest promoters of fair use," writes McLeod. "Virtually every time these companies try to step on freedom of expression® in court they end up expanding the parameters of fair use in case law, and they also intensify the backlash against this kind of behavior." Recent stirrings in legal theory may give some comfort to the activist wing of digital environmentalism. Taking for granted the fact that the problem is less the letter of intellectual property law than the spirit in which it is interpreted, Richard Posner, a federal appeals judge and prolific legal theorist, and others have suggested some ways to remedy this problem. Foremost among them is the doctrine of "copyright misuse." In his California Law Review article "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of Eldred," Posner argues that it is more valuable, and feasible, to strengthen fair-use practices than to lobby for new copyright laws. The problem with the current system, according to Posner, is that copyright owners systematically make improperly broad claims to their rights. The book, DVD, or baseball-game broadcast that comes with a notice stating that no part of the work may be copied without permission is, in fact, in violation of the doctrine of fair use (for which one doesn't need permission). Posner argues that when a copyright holder affixes a warning on copies of his work that "grossly and intentionally exaggerates the copyright holder's substantive or remedial rights, to the prejudice of publishers of public-domain works, the case for invoking the doctrine of copyright misuse" has been made. The copyright misuse doctrine is attractive for a number of reasons. It is a flexible approach to protecting the public-policy goals underlying copyright law (promoting "the progress of science and useful arts") without having to pass new laws every time a technical innovation—radio, movies, television, copy machines, VCR, the Internet—creates a new set of challenges for copyright holders. And it is especially valuable to users of copyright because it is "one of the only copyright-limiting doctrines that arise from actions taken by the copyright holder," writes Kathryn Judge in her Stanford Law Review article "Rethinking Copyright Misuse." Aside from the possibility of being sued, the primary problem for those who want to make fair use of copyrighted material is the uncertainty of their position; while the law seems to support them, their backers and/or insurers may deem the cost of exercising their rights excessive. The doctrine of copyright misuse might provide a mechanism for a creator to address that uncertainty. For example, employing the principle of copyright misuse, an artist who believes he has a legitimate right to make fair use of a copyrighted work can proactively challenge a copyright holder who he believes is protecting his work more broadly than required by copyright law. While such a maneuver wouldn't necessarily guarantee that the artist will prevail (he might of course be wrong), copyright misuse is one way the claims of the copyright holder might be tested without enduring an expensive lawsuit. Copyright misuse isn't as satisfying as a Supreme Court victory or the passing of a new set of intellectual property laws. And it isn't clear that it is robust enough to protect fair use in the way that Posner and others want it to. But perhaps by bolstering the practices of everyday people it will help reclaim a familiar cultural landscape. Because in the end, the goal of digital environmentalism is quite modest: a world in which, as McLeod writes, the digital future looks "a lot like the analog past." Robert S. Boynton is director of New York University's magazine journalism program. His new book, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, is being published this month by Vintage.

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