Sabotage. Ballot stuffing. Mass suicide. Protest Web sites. Welcome to the world of online chess.
For the last four months, chess addicts and duffers worldwide have engaged in a struggle to beat the world’s top chess player, Garry Kasparov, in the ongoing chess game Kasparov vs. the World, presented by Microsoft’s Gaming Zone.
Every two days, Kasparov, playing White, makes a move. Then, chess players who have signed up with MSN get to vote on an answering move. On each turn, “the World” makes the move that gets the most votes from the chess players who’ve signed up with MSN. (According to Microsoft, 6,000 to 10,000 players vote on a typical turn.) Think of it as a contest pitting the democratic process against one brilliant chess player.
Well, that was how it was supposed to work. But several days ago — somewhere around Turn 58 — things began falling apart, as detailed in an MSNBC story yesterday.
The World team was provided by MSN with assistance and advice from four expert commentators. On the 58th turn, the World’s only hope was to eke out a draw from a difficult position. At this critical moment, however, one commentator’s suggestion didn’t make it online in time for thousands of MSN players to read her analysis. The result? Black made a questionable move; the commentator, Irina Krush, resigned; and on the next move, the World — or possibly just a few disgruntled chess players who’d stuffed the online ballot box — voted to commit chess suicide by giving up Black’s queen.
Oh, brother. “You live by the Internet, you die by the Internet,” a Microsoft spokeswoman told MSNBC. “This was only possible because of the technology, but in this case the technology caused a problem” — meaning the glitch in posting Krush’s advice.
For once, Microsoft’s official line hit it pretty much on the nose. “You live by the Internet, you die by the Internet” is exactly right — but it’s not technology that is at issue. It’s online democracy that here, in the limited forum of an online chess game, shows itself flowering with almost distressing abandon.
This squabble may only be about the moves in a chess game, but to the players who have taken the time to puzzle over Kasparov’s strategy, those moves are well worth arguing about. As soon as Microsoft set up the game and its online voting mechanism, it brought a community into being. Not a “community” of shoppers, as so many Web companies hope to create; but a real community, with its own discussions, its own fights and even its own politics.
Setting up an online democracy is a scary thing. The citizens are rarely grateful — more often than not they tend to rise up and complain. So it is no surprise that Microsoft has ultimately had its efforts rewarded with a stream of protest. Participants in online democracies of any sort tend to be awfully vocal. When you live by online democracy, you die by online democracy, too.
It is not a pretty process, and there are plenty of people who will be turned off by the idea that a simple chess game can end in protests and recriminations. But it is also possible to look at this debacle in another way: If a dispute over a move in game of chess can spur an active online debate, it bodes well for the intellectual health of a world in which the Internet plays an ever-increasing role.
Over the weekend, Rick Santorum pushed back at Salon’s story about his opposition to birth control, and the moderators at the ABC News debate Saturday night took note: They asked Mitt Romney what his stance was on states banning contraception. (Unsurprisingly, they did not get a straight answer.)
Salon staff writer Irin Carmon appeared on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes” on Sunday morning to discuss the week’s news in general and this story in particular. In the excerpt below, Carmon stands by the coverage and explains what Santorum and Romney’s positions on contraception and reproductive rights really mean. Watch the full show here.
What more is there to say about Mark Halperin? He certainly hasn’t gotten any better since last year, when a panel of experts (me) named him the world’s second biggest hack. He’s still wrong about everything. He’s still shallow and predictable. He’s still both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.
Halperin spent 2011 gearing up for the presidential elections by parroting transparently lame spin from Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, insisting that Palin was really going to run for president and taking Trump’s farcical vanity “campaign” seriously as anything other than a time-wasting stunt. He still takes Mark Penn seriously as a wise campaign sage and not an amoral grifter. And he got in trouble for calling President Obama a “dick” on “Morning Joe,” because the president criticized the GOP at a press conference. (This after Halperin spends years writing columns calling him a weak-willed wimp, because he is a Democrat.) The worst thing was not that he called the president a dick, it was that the president hadn’t even been dickish. (Well, the worst thing was the whole “Morning Joe” team giggling like stoned teenagers that Halperin said a bad word.) Halperin is so dedicated to being wrong about everything that, upon his return to the airwaves, he actually made a point of mentioning that, had he been on TV during his suspension, he would’ve been wrong about something. Plus he did a “Morning Joe” appearance from an airplane bathroom which is surely illegal.
All that’s left, really, is to proudly announce his ascension to the throne as worst hack in America.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Halperin’s worst low of the last year actually happened in 2010, but it occurred after the Hack 30 was finished, and is thus eligible for inclusion here. Immediately after it was announced that Elizabeth Edwards had died, MSNBC had Halperin on to eulogize her. Halperin did not mention his integral role in the national smearing of Edwards as a harridan (“an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy-woman,” in the eyes of unnamed “insiders,” according to Halperin’s last book).
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Nothing sums up everything hatable about cable news and politics and possibly America itself better than “Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s daily extended advertisement for Starbucks products and Joe Scarborough’s odd belief that he is funny and charming.
The former Florida congressman and possibly attorney of some kind followed up his unremarkable political career by becoming a wildly successful moderate TV talker. (“Wildly successful” in terms of monetary compensation and publicity — his show is watched by less than half the number of people who watch Fox’s daily televised morning train wreck “Fox & Friends.”) Joe’s supposed to be some sort of maverick because he’s not a doctrinaire Republican (anymore), but what he is is a totally doctrinaire member of the moderate Beltway political establishment.
So every morning he and Mika Brzezinski — who either pretends to be a weak-willed flighty moron because she thinks it’s necessary for her continued professional success as Joe’s oft-belittled second banana/screwball love interest or who is actually tragically stupid — perform the world’s most self-satisfied kaffeeklatsch (along with Willie Geist, the former Tucker Carlson sidekick and a man born to play the guy who dies first in a war movie). Their rotating cast of regular guests includes some of the biggest superstars in political hackery, from Jon Meacham to Mark Halperin to Whitey Bulger-defender/plagiarist Mike Barnicle, but what people who are far too easily entertained love most is the “banter,” that nonstop juvenile japery that I guess passes for wit when it’s 6:30 a.m. and you’re a tragically dull Washington, D.C., lifer. Joe can’t stop cracking up at the word “sodomized” during a discussion of … rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn! Hysterical stuff.
(Let’s pause here to remember Scarborough’s long history of being a sanctimonious “decency” crusader, demanding tough FCC penalties for fleeting obscenities on television, which seems to have ended after he said “fuck you” on air one morning, at which point his show instituted a somewhat glitchy seven-second delay.)
It’s Mr. Scarborough’s jocular chauvinism that is the most immediately repellent thing about him and his program, but what may be even hackier is his utterly unself-aware devotion to the “civility” myth. The civility crowd consists of a bunch of rich elites who’ve convinced themselves that all of America’s problems (their list of America’s problems basically consists of the federal deficit and “incivility”) would be solved if Republicans and Democrats sat down in a room and all agreed to basically become Rockefeller Republicans. This weird fantasy animates most of Scarborough’s political analysis, which is especially rich coming from an actual former Republican congressman who rode into Congress not based on a nationwide yearning for civility but rather run-of-the-mill right-wing anger, and who eventually voted to impeach a president for nakedly partisan reasons.
As an official political media elite professional, Joe rails against the “media elite” in columns written for Politico, the D.C. newspaper and website that used to publish Scarborough alongside a liberal counterpart until the liberal counterpart left and wasn’t replaced. These columns, amateurishly written and barely edited, show just how easy it is to become an important political power player if you have the requisite Bloombergian opinions and the correctly sized head for television.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
His unconscionably bad 9/11 “tribute song,” an ill-conceived celebrity vanity project that becomes more offensive the more you think of it.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
In an unprecedented move, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA’s call that emergency contraception, or Plan B, be available on store shelves to women of any age. Irin Carmon joined Tamron Hall on MSNBC’s News Nation to discuss the outrage. Watch here:
Salon’s Justin Elliott discussed the foreclosure crisis and the new Occupy Our Homes campaign — which is launching Tuesday — on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell.
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