JOLLY DAYS

It Is A Template World

This article by David Brooks about Obama's cut and paste rhetoric is reminiscent of this article appearing yesterday in the NYT which describes a professor who aggregates online content into books using templates. 200,000 of them at last count. A human being hardly touches the content, sort of like Obama's speeches.

About the prolific litterateur,

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author….[Parker] has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

Brooks about Obama,

Obama stuffed his speech with the textbook clichés that Democratic consultants tell their candidates to use when talking about trade — warnings about Chinese perfidy and lead paint in toys….He made a series of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand distinctions about which sort of trade deals he’d support and which he wouldn’t. It added up to a vague, watered-down version of economic light beer. In the end, he suggested a few minor tweaks in the U.S. tax code that would have a microscopic effect on outsourcing, and a few health and safety provisions which might have teenie-weenie effects on investment decisions. The ideas he sketched out in the speech aren’t dangerous. They’re just trivial.