Excerpts

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Humans, as we know them, will not persist.

That’s not to say we’ll certainly meet with some sort of extinction event, even if that’s a very plausible scenario sooner or later. It does, however, mean speciation will likely occur whether as a result of our commandeering of evolution through biotechnology or via the establishment of space settlements in environments far different from the one that sustains us.

If you read this site with any regularity, you know my opinion that sending humans to Mars in the near- or medium-term is needless and crazy. Doing so within the next decade as Elon Musk plans to seems particularly foolhardy. Reusable rockets carrying robots to do reconnaissance and infrastructure-building for the foreseeable future seems wiser. But billionaires get a bigger vote than the rest of us, so off we (probably) go.

In “The Martians Are Coming–and They’re Human,” an excellent Nautilus essay, Scott Solomon analyzes how Mars would remake Homo sapiens, explaining why perhaps that planet’s pioneers will develop orange skin, why sex between Martians and Earthlings will be verboten, etc. An excerpt:

Take this all together—no sex between Earthlings and Martians, founder effects, changes to the microbiome, natural selection in the harsh Martian environment, and low gravity—and the message is clear: Settling Mars could eventually lead to the evolution of an entirely new human species. This happens routinely to animals and plants isolated on islands—think of Darwin’s famous finches. But while speciation on islands can take thousands of years, the accelerated mutation rate on Mars and the stark contrasts between conditions on Mars and Earth, would likely speed up the process. In just a few hundred generations—perhaps as little as 6,000 years—a new type of human might emerge.

In 1950, Ray Bradbury published a series of linked short stories called “The Martian Chronicles” that imagined a distant future in which Mars had been long ago colonized by humans, who have subsequently lost all interest in and connection to Earth. The Martians have brown skin and yellow eyes. “Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?” asks one Martian. “The third planet is incapable of supporting life,” states her husband. “Our scientists have said there’s far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”

Bradbury’s fiction may well prove prescient. Should some disaster occur on Earth, colonizing Mars might be necessary for our long-term survival. Yet the strategy meant to preserve our species might ultimately change us forever.•

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Almost all the promises Uber used to sell itself as an agent for social good have turned out to be utter bullshit.

The rideshare service isn’t in business to employ Iraq War veterans or keep African-Americans safe from police brutality. Travis Kalanick’s outfit isn’t here to free you from the shackles of bureaucracy, unless you’re very troubled by a steady income and benefits. It isn’t part of the solution for employment woes, as people who should know better have said. At long last, Uber is a corporation that will do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible without regard to the effect it has on human beings, drivers, passengers and anyone else.  

Another piece of the company’s hype as an agent for social change has fallen into tatters. The idea that Uber would make transportation colorblind has turned out to be a fugazy. From Gaby Del Valle at the Gothamist:

Uber has long claimed that its platform prevents drivers from engaging in discriminatory practices, like refusing to pick up people of color, but a new study suggests that Uber and other ride-sharing apps haven’t stopped drivers from racially and sexually discriminating against passengers.

According to a study conducted over two years by the National Bureau of Economic Research, black passengers are more likely to wait longer for a ride or have their ride canceled than their white counterparts, while women are likely to be taken on longer rides by drivers who either want to charge them more money or flirt with them (or both).

The study involved nearly 1,500 rides in Seattle and Boston, and the findings are based almost entirely on data from Uber rides, since Lyft displays the rider’s name and picture before a driver chooses to accept the ride, making discrimination nearly impossible to quantify.

In Seattle, undergraduate students from the University of Washington were given identical phones with Uber and Lyft pre-downloaded and told to take a few pre-determined routes. They were instructed to note what time they requested the ride, when the ride was accepted by the driver, what time they were picked up, and when they got to their destination. The results showed that wait times for black passengers were up to 35 percent longer than they were for white drivers.

In Boston, researchers set up two different Uber and Lyft accounts for each rider—one with an “African-American-sounding” name and one with a “white-sounding” name—and had passengers order rides from both. (“White” passengers had names like Allison, Brendan, and Brad while “black” passengers had names like Aisha, Hakim, and Darnell).

In Boston, profiles that appeared to belong to black men had a cancellation rate of 11.2 percent, compared to just 4.5 percent for passengers who appeared to be white men. Passengers believed to be black women had a cancellation rate of 8.4 percent, compared to 5.4 percent for white women.•

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In the 1969 National Geographic feature “The Coming Revolution in Transportation,” the idea of driverless autos centered on retro-fitting roads and highways, making them over into “guideways.” An excerpt:

The Unicontrol Car–a research vehicle built to test new servomechanisms–is easy to drive. Still, it does have to be driven. I asked Dr. Hafstad about the proposed automated highways that would relieve the driver of all responsibilities except that of choosing a destination.

“Automated highways–engineers call them guideways–are technically feasible today,’ Dr. Hafstad answered. “In fact, General Motors successfully demonstrated an electronically controlled guidance system about ten years ago. A wire was embedded in the road, and two pickup coils were installed at the front of the car to sense its position in relation to that wire. The coils sent electrical signals to the steering system, to keep the vehicle automatically on course.

“More recently, we tested a system that also controlled spacing and detected obstacles. It could slow down an overtaking vehicle–even stop it, until the road was clear!”•

It hasn’t worked out that way. The eyes and ears of the operation–the brains, really–will be within the vehicle with an assist perhaps from wi-fi–enabled gadgets on the outside; any contributions from driving surfaces will be secondary. Key to the “formal education” of cars will be the sharing of information among them, which will permit constant learning. Perhaps someday they’ll be smart enough to tell us how to replace millions of jobs lost in the trucking, taxi, delivery and limousine industries.

From a smart interview Jason Anders of WSJ conducted with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, whose company is tasked with supplying Teslas with autonomous capability:

Question:

Tesla announced that all of its coming vehicles are going to have your technology. Is Elon Musk pushing things too fast?

Jen-Hsun Huang:

If you don’t develop the technology and deploy it, it never gets better. At some level, you have to put it on the road. But what’s important is it’s a massive software problem. So companies like Tesla who have a great deal of software capability have an advantage. There’s a rigorous methodology of developing software. The software becomes better and better over use.

Question:

What can’t the cars do today?

Jen-Hsun Huang:

A whole lot of stuff. We’re going to have an AI inside the car that’s going to look around corners. So even if you’re driving, the AI might prevent you from an accident. There’s all kinds of things that the AI could predict on your behalf.

Question:

Can the car be doing too much?

Jen-Hsun Huang:

The thing to realize is the quality of the software improves over time, whereas people’s performance of driving decreases.

Question:

What about at first, when very few cars on the road are driverless?

Jen-Hsun Huang:

Making sure we don’t cause an accident is something we can control, and we ought to do that as quickly as possible.

But the cars will learn from every other car’s experience. We’re going to see capabilities of computers grow way faster than at any time in the history of our industry.•

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A horrifying sign of the times is the peddling of packaged air, sold in bottles so that those with disposable income in badly polluted locales can breathe freely. It sounds like a smog-saturated setting imagined for a dystopic, futuristic novel, or, you know, contemporary China. Considering one of the two major American political parties would like to shutter the EPA and its nominee wants to remove “70 or 80% of the regulations,” we all might want to grab a six-pack if we can afford to.

From 

Would you pay $100 for a whiff of Welsh air?

In some of the world’s most polluted cities, people apparently will: Sales of bottled air from fresh-smelling places are taking off.

An Australian company is hawking six-packs of air bottled in places like Bondi Beach in Sydney or the eucalyptus-covered Blue Mountains. A Canadian firm sells containers of Rocky Mountain breeze as an antidote to smoggy skies (“a shot of nature,” its marketing promises).

Aethaer, a British company, is hoping to turn packaged air into a popular luxury item in fast-growing markets like China. The company sells glass jars holding 580 milliliters (a bit more than a pint) of air from Wales — with a “morning dew feel,” according to its website — for 80 pounds, or $97.

The company’s 28-year-old founder, Leo De Watts, said he hoped buyers would come to regard his product as a collectible, like a “sculpture or a limited-edition print made by an artist.” “Clean air is actually a very rare commodity,” he said.

The market for all kinds of pollution-fighting tools is booming in many smog-choked cities in China, India and Southeast Asia. Innovations abound, including air purifiers that are attached to bicycles and outdoor towers that are meant to suck up smog.

Bottled air is one of the least practical but most talked-about ideas.•

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“Estimating longevity is as much an art as a science,” writes Ben Steverman in a Bloomberg piece about actuarial projections of American lifespans. Lately, it’s been a dark art, as death has been coming earlier to a surprising number of U.S. citizens and the long-term picture for millennials has dimmed.

If I had to guess the causes, I would go with the aftershocks of the 2008 recession (especially since earlier deaths spiked from 2010 to 2014), opioid and alcohol abuse and obesity, though I wonder if the rising suicide rate is the chief culprit. Steverman lists most of these factors in his report.

The opening:

Death awaits all of us, but how patiently? To unlock the mystery of when we’re going to die, start with an actuary.

Specializing in the study of risk and uncertainty, members of this 200-year-old profession pore over the data of death to estimate the length of life. Putting aside the spiritual, that’s crucial information for insurance companies and pension plans, and it’s also helpful for planning retirement, since we need our money to last as long we do.

The latest, best guesses for U.S. lifespans come from a study(PDF) released this month by the Society of Actuaries: The average 65-year-old American man should die a few months short of his 86th birthday, while the average 65-year-old woman gets an additional two years, barely missing age 88. 

This new data turns out to be a disappointment. Over the past several years, the health of Americans has deteriorated—particularly that of middle-aged non-Hispanic whites. Among the culprits are drug overdoses, suicide, alcohol poisoning, and liver disease, according to a Princeton University study issued in December. 

Partly as a result, the life expectancy for 65-year-olds is now six months shorter than in last year’s actuarial study. Longevity for younger Americans was also affected: A 25-year-old woman last year had a 50/50 chance of reaching age 90. This year, she is projected to fall about six months short. (The average 25-year-old man is expected to live to 86 years and 11 months, down from 87 years and 8 months in last year’s estimates.) Baby boomers, Generation X, and yes, millennials, are all doing worse.•

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It’s not likely that Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are spoken to honestly very often, certainly not by those who work for them. What good could come of that for an employee? Perhaps, then, no one has been brazen enough to directly point out that their defense of Trump supporter and emotional homunculus Peter Thiel, if not his politics, is utter horseshit. 

“There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault,” Zuckerberg wrote in defense of maintaining Thiel as a Facebook board member. Bezos added at a Vanity Fair event that “it’s way too divisive to say if you have an opinion, you can’t sit on my board…that makes no sense.”

What really makes no sense is Thiel being treated as if he just so happens to be supporting a fellow conservative, a right-of-center politician who earned the Republican nomination. But Trump isn’t that. He’s someone who’s called for a ban on Muslims entering the country, used anti-Semitic memes online, labeled Mexicans rapists and African-Americans inherently lazy, threatened to jail his political opponent who’s been found guilty of no crime, promised to change libel laws to diminish journalistic freedom and boasted about sexually assaulting women.

Thiel, who’s spoken out against multiculturalism, made puzzling comments about suffrage and had a checkbook ready when racists like Hulk Hogan or Trump needed an assist, wants people to accept that he loathes his candidate’s overt bigotry–his “personal characteristics,” as Thiel terms it–and only supports the GOP nominee because he somehow possesses the magical talents to “fix America,” or some such thing, despite having demonstrated not even a basic understanding of foreign or domestic policy. As I’ve said before, Thiel is the single best argument for a return to the draconian progressive tax rates of the Eisenhower Administration. 

The venture capitalist has the absolute right to support financially and otherwise this Berlusconi who dreams of being a Mussolini, but sitting on the board of Facebook and working for the Y Combinator is a privilege, not a right. Zuckerberg and the rest can’t pretend this is politics as usual. Il Duce and his fellow 1930s Fascist Adolf Hitler also were popular with millions of their citizens. That wasn’t “diversity,” but tyranny. So it is, perhaps, again.

From David Streitfeld at the New York Times:

Two weeks ago, Mr. Thiel revealed that he was donating $1.25 million to support the election of Donald J. Trump. As these things go, it was a small gift. Dustin Moskovitz, a founder of Facebook, is giving tens of millions to support Hillary Clinton. But the news made Mr. Thiel a pariah in much of the tech community.

He was accused of promoting racism and intolerance. There were demands that Facebook drop him from its board of directors and that Silicon Valley’s leading start-up incubator, Y Combinator, sever ties with him. Emotions and accusations raged on Twitter. …

“I was surprised by the intensity,” Mr. Thiel said. “This is one of the few times I was involved in something that was not a fringe effort but was mainstream. Millions of people are backing Trump. I did not appreciate quite how polarizing the election would be in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.”

“By lending his image, his voice, his influence and substantial capital to Trump, Thiel isn’t simply exercising his legal right to vote: He is fueling and enabling racism, sexism, sexual assault, violence and tyranny,” Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital, a Los Angeles venture firm, wrote in a blog post.

She said she turned down an investment of $500,000 — a huge sum for a small firm like Backstage — because of the investor’s ties to Mr. Thiel. Ms. Hamilton did not identify the investor or respond to an email.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, defended the company’s association with Mr. Thiel, emphasizing that it did not endorse his views — and much less Mr. Trump’s — but was striving to be inclusive toward those whose values differed from its own. Critics noted that if diversity was such a cherished value in Silicon Valley, why wasn’t there more of it?•

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Former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli, who said he was reporting using a video service called "periscope" on his smartphone, stands with reporters after Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton leaves an apartment building Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016, in New York. Clinton's campaign said the Democratic presidential nominee left the 9/11 anniversary ceremony in New York early after feeling "overheated." (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Martin Shrkeli is guilty of being bad person, but he’s certain he’s a good capitalist.

As Donald Trump is a stress test for American democracy, the pharmaceutical executive is one for our economic system. Both run fairly well if those occupying seats of power act decently and responsibly, but, come on, let’s be adults here. 

The smirking 33-year-old entrepreneur, who believed only the profits of his shareholders mattered when he drastically spiked the price of lifesaving medicine, essentially performing a legal mugging of those who depend on EpiPens, never should have been placed in a position to monopolize such a market. Regulation that encouraged competition was required, as was a lever that thwarted those who exploited the system. It’s just another reminder that corporations aren’t of the people, by the people and for the people–they aren’t people. 

David Crow of the Financial Times penned an excellent profile of the remorseless, brat-faced “pharma bro” as he awaits trial on securities fraud, still treating life like a zero-sum game. An excerpt:

If the private Shkreli is any different to the pugnacious public persona, it is not immediately apparent. “This is my date spot if you will,” he says, gesturing to the dark panelled walls of his favourite haunt, as he launches straight into his defence. I should not, he swiftly makes clear, expect any regrets.

“To me the drug was woefully underpriced,” he says. Rather, he thinks he should have charged a higher price still because Daraprim can keep people alive: “It is not a question of ‘Is this fair?’, or ‘What did you pay for it?’, or ‘When was it invented’. It should be more expensive in many ways”.

He boasts of other attempts to buy old drugs for fatal diseases with the “ingenious plan” of inflating their prices as well, and suggests that executives who eschew such tactics are, in effect, defrauding their investors. “If you have a drug that is $100 for one course of therapy, and you know that you can charge $100,000, what should shareholders think when you say, ‘I’d rather not take the heat’?” he asks. …

The conversation, like any other in the US these days, soon turns to the presidential election. While not registered to vote, Shkreli instinctively supports Donald Trump despite his flaws. “The symbolism of his success is in many ways what you’re voting for. It’s sort of like the Statue of Liberty; he’s an icon that represents something.

“I think that his supporters endorse being rash, being American, being polarising and having this un-PC, unedited attitude. In many ways it’s not a surprise that I identify with that.” Later, it occurs to me how often Shkreli himself speaks in Trumpisms, like this: “I’ve had my photo taken a lot with people who say, ‘I support you, you inspire me, you’re the American dream’.”•

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When Peter Thiel, a billionaire and a miser, pressed a pillow across the face of Gawker Media, I argued that despite the many inanities of the editors at the flagship site, it would be a huge loss if these properties, employing such smart and talented people, would disappear. Think of all the potentially great writing that would be sacrificed. 

Such an example can be read in a new piece at Deadspin, one the sites purchased by Univision and thankfully continued. It’s Dave McKenna’s gorgeous and heartbreaking “The Writer Who Was Too Strong To Live,” a postmortem about Jennifer Frey, a journalistic prodigy of the 1990s who burned brilliantly before quickly burning out. A Harvard grad who was filing pieces for newspapers before she was even allowed to drink–legally, that is–Frey was a full-time sportswriter for the New York Times by 24, out-thinking, out-hustling and out-filing even veteran scribes at a clip that was all but impossible. Frey seemed to have it all and was positioned to only get more.

Part of what she had, though, that nobody knew about, was bipolar disorder, which she self-medicated with an ocean of alcohol. As she slowly drowned, her career and family and friends floated away, and she died painfully and miserably earlier this year at age 47. 

Three notes on the piece:

  • People who are able to do everything and handle it all and never complain and seem superhuman are often living a lie and headed for trouble. We’re not robots, and it should be viewed as a danger sign when someone can function as one.
  • It’s hazardous to project too much of our own experiences onto others. The late David Carr, who wrote a 1997 Washington City Paper profile of Frey, one that bothered her greatly and correctly recognized the beginning of her fall from grace, encouraged McKenna to write about Frey while she was still alive, saying “maybe it’ll give her a kick in the ass.” Carr, who’d made a miraculous recovery from a hellacious addiction, assigned his own type of trouble to her, not realizing she was bipolar in addition to alcoholic and that some mixture of nature and nurture–life itself, really–had already delivered the boot.
  • What’s most harrowing about the piece is the realization that sometimes nothing can be done. Frey certainly didn’t want to lose her daughter and career and house to alcohol, but there was no rehab or 12-step program that could undo her mysteriously malfunctioning brain chemistry. None of her friends or relatives could unlock the problem, either. It was a question with no answer.

It’s really impossible to choose the “best part” of McKenna’s article because it’s all the best part, so I’ll just excerpt the opening:

Jennifer Frey drank herself to death.

Frey’s obituary in the Washington Post, her last full-time employer, merely gave “multiple organ failure” as the cause of her March 26 death. But alcohol killed her as surely as a bullet killed Lincoln.

She died abusing a drug that kills millions of people every year. But the life of Jennifer Frey was not a common one.

Frey was a can’t miss kid in sportswriting in the early 1990s. Just months out of Harvard, she was subjected to a high-profile episode of sexual harassment on the job. In response, Frey spoke forcibly and with righteousness for her gender and her profession in print and on national television as the controversy over women in locker rooms crested.

“There is a lot of talk about the players’ indignation at being forced to allow women into their dressing room,” Frey wrote while still an intern at the Miami Herald. “Few people are aware of the indignities felt by women beat reporters who are frequently harassed by athletes who do not understand that the women are there to do a job, not enjoy a peep show.

“It is not fun for a woman to go into a male locker room. It is not exciting. It did not ‘turn me on’ when a major-league baseball player dropped his pants and asked me to evaluate his anatomy.”

Soon after, she was wowing her elders at the Philadelphia Daily News and New York Times, and, in an era before the internet, writing reported stories at a blogger’s pace. Frey was also living like someone ready to take Manhattan and then the world. Everybody who knew her through the 1990s remembers Frey as both the organizer and the life of every party, and a party could be found in every town Frey filed copy from.

“Along with everything else she had, she was so much fun,” says Chuck Culpepper, a writer at the Lexington Herald Leader when he met Frey at a 1991 NCAA tournament game. “My God, was she fun.”

Mike Wise, who first worked with her at the New York Times in the early 1990s, vouches for the good times that awaited anybody lucky enough to be near vintage Jennifer Frey. “Being around her, you were just in awe,” he says. “If friends are going out for dinner, she would find the best place, and it didn’t feel like you were meeting her for dinner, it felt like you were in a parade going down Broadway and she was leading it.”

Frey was recruited from the Times by the Washington Post in 1995, at a time when the sports section was as stacked with big names as at any time in the history of the newspaper. Frey was set to become as big a deal as anybody on the masthead.

That never happened.•

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I try not to use the word “never.” Not ever. That term will almost always eventually be wrong, even if we’re not still around when our serious theories become laugh lines.

Paul Mason embraces this dangerous word in a Medium essay, arguing that “maybe the economy never recovers.” Wow, that’s a big statement.

But Mason needn’t be right forever. If salaries are depressed for too long and wealth inequality grows too wide, we can see serious social fraying, even collapse. That may not be plausible, but it certainly is possible if the levers of change–protests, unions, legislation, etc.–fail.

If new and better jobs emerge that replace those disappeared into the zeros and ones, that’s fine. But not everyone who’s a truck driver can become a Self-Driving Car Engineer. In fact, it’s tough to believe any of those engineers will be needed soon enough. Machines should be able to engineer the machines. Neither will it be necessary for long for autonomous taxi and truck companies to have owners. With a few modifications, they can be self-sustaining outfits.

Even if good jobs not prone to automation surface in the long-term future, it will be awfully difficult to get from here to there without significant policy changes. As Mason notes, positions are being automated “faster than new work can be invented.”

The essence of his answer is that we need to “actively [promote] automation, but at the same time…end reliance on wages for work.” Universal Basic Income, he believes, should be used to support those doing healthcare and environmental work, for instance, those jobs being uncoupled from capitalism.

Mason believes we’re in the early stages of a “500-year event,” but I’ll bet like with everything else in today’s souped-up society, the action and reaction will occur in a much briefer time frame.

An excerpt:

Capitalism is failing to adapt

So how could one of the greatest technical leaps forward ever be causing something bad in economics?

The answer is — there’s something unique about information technology, which suppresses capitalism’s capacity to adapt.

When the system is in big trouble, over the past 240 years it usually adapts. It morphs radically, so that the old generation look at it and say — “this can’t be capitalism”. Usually when it adapts, it creates a new synthesis between technology and society — so you get the factory system in the 1800s, you get railways plus heavy engineering in the 1850s, you get the scientific management revolution before the first world war; you get the science-led postwar boom of 1948–73.

I think the problem is: the new technology is suppressing the economy’s ability to adapt.

Let’s think about what normally happens. Old jobs are automated, but new jobs replace them, with higher wages. New commodities command higher prices. Carlota Perez calls this the techno-economic paradigm and each time it’s happened so far it produces an economy based on higher value: higher wages, higher prices, higher living standards.

But information disrupts this process in three ways: in its effect on work, and its effect on ownership, with the emergence of new models of sharing and collaboration.•

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Mark Sullivan 70's Rock Archive

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Brian Wilson needed a lifeguard but Ahab showed up.

A ghost in a sandbox by the 1970s, the genius Beach Boys composer succumbed to a combination of bad brain chemistry and worse parenting, regressing to almost infantile behavior, completely broken despite his prodigious talents. Horribly overweight and highly addicted, he was likely dying.

Enter Eugene Landy, a show-biz aspirant who detoured into academia and, still craving fame, positioned himself as a psychologist to celebrities. He employed his odd, steeply priced “24-hour therapy” to smother the problems of the rich and famous. Wilson, whose relationships with family and bandmates were fractious at best, proved an easy mark.

The musician may have died without intervention, but the ensuing life with Landy was far from nice or normal. Pilled up and locked down, Wilson became an isolated one-man cult to the Svengali, practically his prisoner, suffering from Stockholm syndrome in sunny Los Angeles, only detached from the therapist’s side for good in 1992 by court order. 

Wilson just released a new memoir, which made me think again about Landy’s strange methods. From a 1989 People article, when the controversial psychologist finally began to fall from the stars:

The accusations covered a lurid range of alleged professional improprieties, including drug use and sexual misconduct. In the end, all were set aside except one charging that Hollywood shrink Dr. Eugene Landy, who has numbered among his clients Alice Cooper, Rod Steiger and Weight Watchers’ founder Jean Nidetch, had improperly prescribed medication for Beach Boy Brian Wilson. Yet Landy’s guilty plea on that one charge was enough to convince the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance that action had to be taken. Two weeks ago the controversial psychologist surrendered his license for two years.

As part of a negotiated settlement, Landy, 54, who does not have a medical degree and therefore cannot legally write prescriptions, admitted he had dispensed drugs to Wilson. (Sol Samuels, an L.A. psychiatrist, actually wrote the prescriptions.) The withdrawal of his license theoretically prevents Landy from seeing patients in California. But if the intent was to liberate Wilson from Landy, the board action failed, since Wilson, 46, and Landy remain in close contact.

Landy’s lawyer, Mark Meador, said that Landy had agreed to surrender his license because a formal hearing would have meant “laying out Brian Wilson’s life for the media.” Undoubtedly it would have meant unwelcome publicity also for Landy, who became both famous and wealthy in the ’70s by pioneering a technique called 24-hour therapy, in which he and his assistants virtually lived with patients, monitoring their every move. When Landy began treating Wilson in 1975, the Beach Boys’ creative linchpin had suffered several nervous breakdowns. He was obese, a heavy user of psychedelic drugs and a virtual recluse in his Bel Air mansion, where he kept a piano in a giant sandbox. He had long since stopped performing in public. In part due to Landy’s therapy, which at one point included padlocking Wilson’s refrigerator, the blimpish songwriter lost more than 100 lbs. and embarked on a comeback.

In 1976, concerned that Landy was exercising a Svengali-like influence on Wilson, the songwriter’s fellow Beach Boys, including his cousin and their manager, Steve Love, were able to ease the psychologist out of the picture. But by 1983 he was once again directing Wilson’s life.•


“We are worried that Brian Wilson is going to follow Elvis.”

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Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations are a push of the flushometer from disappearing down the vortex, but the stench will likely linger, for all of us but especially for the Republican Party.

Even without the burden of being fronted by the orange supremacist, the GOP is a dysfunctional mess, now openly discussing blocking the Supreme Court nominees of a potential Hillary Clinton Administration, but Trump’s resistance to playing nice, part of what catapulted the hideous hotelier to political success, threatens to salt the earth for Republicans. In 2016, we’ve witnessed an extreme example of identity politics, and it would seem those on the right who identify with Trump’s inflammatory shit show are at least equal in number to those who still embrace the party itself. A devastating loss on November 8 won’t make that division disappear.

From Demetri Sevastopulo at the Financial Times:

Trump has sparked a populist fire that has already radically altered the landscape of US politics. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the GOP vowed to reach out to Hispanics and other minorities. Now many establishment Republicans worry that Trump’s campaign rhetoric, tapping into a community that feels abandoned by the political elite and fears that their white culture is under threat, has dramatically turned back the clocks on that effort. After the ­election the Republican party will face a bitter fight for its soul, as the pro-trade wing led by Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, faces the wrath of the anti-establishment Tea Party and the anti-trade and anti-immigrant Trump supporters.

David Gergen, a politics expert who has advised four presidents, stressed that the 2016 race had completely upended American politics. “An Arab ambassador emailed me a few months ago to say, ‘We have reached a new milestone. For the first time in history, it is easier to understand the politics of the Middle East than the politics of America,’ ” he said.

“Trump has essentially run as an outsider who staged a hostile takeover of the Republican party. If he loses, as is expected, he will still have won the votes of some 50m voters or more, and they will represent a continuing, potent force, roiling with resentments.

“Before Donald Trump brought his wrecking ball to the party, one might have thought it highly likely that Republicans could reunite after yet another losing election. But one of Trump’s many, ugly legacies is that the chances of the party losing its coherence — or even breaking up — now seem better than 50:50.”

“Trump took the Tea Party and made it the Trump Party,” said John Feehery, a former top Republican congressional aide, causing a “major realignment” of the GOP. If Clinton wins the presidency, Ryan will find himself in an impossible position, since trying to deal with the growing anti-establishment, pro-Trump caucus inside his party will complicate any efforts by the ambitious politician to work with the White House towards implementing his preferred tax- and trade-related policies.

Grotesque income inequality in the US — illustrated by the fact that fewer than half of American households are now considered middle class — coupled with the pessimism that emerged from the lingering effects of the financial crisis, created a perfect storm that allowed a candidate like Trump to emerge.

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Haven’t had a TV for years and can’t say I miss it. Don’t want to spend all that time watching more and more shows, as wonderful as the seemingly endless content might be. The only program I’ve gone out of my way to view in the past five years is Black Mirror, a brilliant and often hilarious satire that some have called futuristic, though it can barely keep up with the present.

That’s not the fault of Charlie Brooker, the program’s creator, who’s brilliant. As I wrote in 2015, it’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. In our souped-up world, with ubiquitous cameras and speeding media cycles, as soon as you can get a handle on a situation, the moment has passed. It’s on to the next outrage or suspiciously communal viral moment. It all seems quantified, commodified and focus grouped, even the spontaneous bits. If someone can break through this sound-stage world with something genuine, no matter what it is, how we appreciate them. We’d even consider them for President.

In a Vice interview conducted by Angus Harrison, Brooker, who’s just released the third season on Netflix, discusses the near-impossibility of being a futurist when every day is tomorrow, the difficulty of satirizing and ever-more extreme society. An excerpt:

It’s impossible not to recognize a hint of frustration in his voice when I mention the binary “technology goes wrong” view of the show some people have. “I think sometimes, when people are parodying it, they miss how self-aware it is,” he says. “I know when it’s being a bit silly.”

It’s an important distinction, given the 21st century’s unstoppable, almost unknowable rate of progress. The idea of being lectured or chastised for behaving in a certain way feels alienating and reductive. Yet, crucially, Black Mirror has never really set out to make people look stupid; rather, its intention has always been to make people look like people. Flawed, bruised, and lacking the requisite software to cope with the threats and promises of the digital age.

Take “Be Right Back,” surely the best episode of the second season—if not the entire show. It’s a harrowing hour of television, in which a young woman clones her recently deceased husband using the blueprint of his identity, as spread across his social media activity. The episode isn’t a lecture: The characters are left confused and morally conflicted, much like the viewers. Is this where satire has to turn in an increasingly extreme world? To the intimate and the personal?

“Possibly,” Brooker nods. “I hadn’t thought about it like that, but quite possibly, that’s where you have to go if reality starts outpacing the grotesqueness of the fictional world.”

This outpacing, of course, specifically alludes to the two starkly prophetic instances in earlier episodes of Black Mirror—series one’s “The National Anthem” and series two’s “Waldo Moment,” both of which depict events with eerie similarities to real political events: Cameron’s pig-fucking debacle and the rise of Donald Trump, respectively. Yet, while the parallels do bear striking resemblances, the episodes show more the mind of a writer who is fearful of ochlocracy and the corrosion of democracy.•

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Below are four unsettling if not unexpected paragraphs from an excellent report by Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff of the New York Times about the American military’s transition from nuclear secrets to software codes, as billions spent on placing us on the bleeding edge of AI warfare are enabling weapons systems with automated capacity. A human is said to remain in the loop at all times, the machines unable to make their own decisions, but as other nations catch up in Artificial Intelligence as they have in traditional battle networks, will rational decisions still rule the day among numerous states with differing priorities, especially since fleets of such weapons will ultimately become relatively cheap and widely available?

For now, freestyle chess, which teams human and computers, is the model of the Department of Defense, a strategy it’s termed “centaur warfighting.” The future is far more cloudy.  As the journalists write, “the debate within the military is no longer about whether to build autonomous weapons but how much independence to give them.”

An excerpt:

Almost unnoticed outside defense circles, the Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop what it calls autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with the kind of weaponry that until now has existed only in Hollywood movies and science fiction, raising alarm among scientists and activists concerned by the implications of a robot arms race.

The Defense Department is designing robotic fighter jets that would fly into combat alongside manned aircraft. It has tested missiles that can decide what to attack, and it has built ships that can hunt for enemy submarines, stalking those it finds over thousands of miles, without any help from humans.

“If Stanley Kubrick directed Dr. Strangelove again, it would be about the issue of autonomous weapons,” said Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.

Defense officials say the weapons are needed for the United States to maintain its military edge over China, Russia and other rivals, who are also pouring money into similar research (as are allies, such as Britain and Israel). The Pentagon’s latest budget outlined $18 billion to be spent over three years on technologies that included those needed for autonomous weapons.•

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Buckminster Fuller was right on some vital points even if most of his designs never made a leap from the drawing board. He knew, for instance, that the idea of race was a phony tribal concept steeped in ignorance, wealth inequality was a real threat to democracy and childbirth per family would decline as the infant mortality rate decreased.

The theorist, who certainly realized the delicate balance of our environment, may or may not have been right when he insisted pollution itself was a great resource gone unharvested, a recyclable more or less, but that’s an awfully dangerous assumption. Even if it’s so, our “creation” of these raw materials could extinct the species long before we establish a collection day. Technocracy has its merits, but I wouldn’t want to wager everything on it.

In a smart Aeon essay, Samanth Subramanian wonders about the renewed capital of Fuller’s teachings in this time of climate peril and technological prowess, when those domes Elon Musk dreams of printing on Mars may soon be as needed on Earth. The opening has a great, largely forgotten anecdote about a Vermont town deciding in 1979 to build a Fuller-ish dome around itself to deal with falling temperatures and rising gas prices, before quickly quashing the project. The writer also de-mythologizes much about the Futurist, whose self-promoting prowess was Jobsian long before Jobs was born.

An excerpt:

Fuller wasn’t the first person to dream of domed cities – they’d featured for decades in science fiction, usually as hothouses of dystopia – but as an engineering solution, they feel thoroughly Fullerian. Implicit in their concept is an acknowledgement that human nature is wasteful and unreliable, resistant to fixing itself. Instead, Fuller put his faith in technology as a means to tame the messiness of humankind. ‘I would never try to reform man – that’s much too difficult,’ Fuller told The New Yorker in 1966. Appealing to people to remedy their behaviour was a folly, because they’d simply never do it. Far wiser, Fuller thought, to build technology that circumvents the flaws in human behaviour – that is, ‘to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions’. Instead of human-led design, he sought design-led humans.

Winooski’s grand dome never went into construction. By the end of 1980, after the election of Ronald Reagan as president and a summer of stormy criticism over the cost and visual impact of the project, the mood had shifted. But Fuller, who had first advanced the idea of a domed city in 1959, continued to champion it until his death in 1983. ‘The way consumption curves are going in many of our big cities, it is clear that we are running out of energy,’ he wrote. ‘It is important for our government to know if there are better ways of enclosing space in terms of material, time, and energy.’ The most ambitious of his urban lids was the dome he wanted to lower over midtown Manhattan, a mile high and two miles in diameter. As well as a perfect climate, Fuller said, the dome could protect New Yorkers against the worst effects of a nuclear bomb going off nearby.

In the great flux of postwar United States, Fuller was convinced that the world was marshalling its resources poorly and unsustainably, and that change was a burning imperative. The world finds itself again passing through a Fullerian moment – a phase of political, environmental and technological upheaval that is both unsettling and exhilarating. Within this frame, Fuller’s life and ideas – the sound ones but also those that were tedious or absurd – ring with a new resonance.•


Fuller introduces the Dymaxion House in 1929.

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E-sports aren’t nearly the weirdest event to have graced the several iterations of Madison Square Garden, which hosted poultry shows during a more agrarian age and week-long walking races that thrilled a pre-automobile audience. The question is whether the action, mostly virtual, at the League of Legends World Championship, which held its semifinals recently at MSG, announces a new and lasting arena-friendly competition or if someday these gatherings will be looked back on as are handsome chickens and panting pedestrians.

After attending the LLWC gathering, Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal was transformed from skeptic to (sort of a) true believer, despite his Frogger Era upbringing. “If you are a serious e-sports fan, I apologize that this column probably reads as if the Journal sent a dog to cover the World Series,” he says, in one of his typically witty articles.

Without necessarily understanding the game, Gay explains the culture and the seemingly mysterious allure of people watching a screen showing other people playing a game on another screen. God knows if such a spectacle will truly sustain, but the NFL in 2016 probably wishes its athletes were comprised of pixels, unblemished by domestic-violence charges and undiminished by brain injuries.

An excerpt:

We arrived Friday night to a cascade of thousands walking into the Garden. E-sports owns a rap for being a predominantly male audience—unlike, say, a Jets game, which is a richly cosmopolitan crowd—but there were a good number of women. I’d say the average age was somewhere in the early to mid-20s. Josh and I stuck out like Regis Philbin and Larry King.

Inside, the arena was packed, loud, happy. This really threw Josh. He is a lifelong Knicks fan whose family had season tickets to the team for years. He’s not used to seeing enthusiasm at Madison Square Garden.

If you’re wondering if e-sports really is people sitting in an arena watching other people play videogames, I’m going to give it to you straight: It really is people sitting in an arena watching other people play videogames.

But the drama was fascinating! Underneath an enormous four-sized jumbo screen, two five-person teams were positioned at the Garden’s center, like Ali vs. Frazier: SK Telecom T1 and the Rox Tigers, both of South Korea. (South Korea is to e-sports what Brazil is to soccer.) They had nicknames like Peanut, Joker, Bang, Wolf and Faker. (Yes: e-sports names are about 900 times cooler than golf nicknames.) The 20-year-old Faker (real name: Lee Sang-hyeok) is considered the Michael Jordan of e-sports, a revolutionary player who has transformed the game.

“Faker right now is the greatest of all time,” said a fan behind me, Elias Vargas, 17, who’d driven to the Garden from Lancaster, Pa with two friends. “He does things, like his rotations and his mechanical skills, that nobody has reached.”

I’m not going to pretend any of this made sense to me.•

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In an excellent New York Times Magazine piece, Jenna Wortham writes of the boon and bane that attends Barack Obama being the “first digital President,” the one who ushered into D.C. the start-up spirit of technologists, significantly shrinking the distance between the Y Combinator and K Street. 

Silicon Valley’s ideas and energy can be an intoxicating engine of creativity and leaders in that community claim to want to satisfy all the world’s wants, but let’s not forget these are huge corporations primarily concerned with the bottom line, not justice or equality or paying taxes. When Travis Kalanick briefly uses Iraq War veterans to try to foster good will, keep in mind that he has no long-term commitment to them. Most of the industry doesn’t view Washington as a sibling but as a profligate son.

Even truly benevolent titans like the sweater-clad 2.0 version of Bill Gates (formerly a bullying, vampiric capitalist) talks openly about how he doesn’t want the government to have his money because he can spend it more wisely. Perhaps that’s true in his case, but you wouldn’t want to base a country on such thinking. The gritty work of Congress should not and cannot have the brevity and grace of a particularly satisfying TED Talk.

As Wortham further notes, “fixing problems with technology often just creates more problems, largely because technology is never developed in a neutral way,” and that’s a challenge that will only grow more profound as AI develops further. She does, however, credit President Obama with realizing the limits of venture capital to cure the world’s ills, referencing his recent address at Carnegie Mellon. An excerpt from that speech:

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences — setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio — then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.•

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In 1789, Benjamin Franklin identified death and taxes as the only things we can be certain of. It wasn’t a completely original quote, but it seemed a permanent truth, with no one betting against the continued presence of graveyards and other shovel-ready projects. Some Futurists would like to make a liar of the most famous kite flier, delivering to our doorsteps a-mortality and post-scarcity, like a couple of pizzas lowered gently by a drone.

On the economic side of things, Transhumanist Presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, not a fan of tariffs, recently found a kindred soul in visionary Venus Project architect and theorist Jacque Fresco, who even at 100 years old still hopes to radically remake our cash-and-ownership economy into a resource-based one.

In a Vice “Motherboard” piece, Istvan argues that Fresco’s far-out ideas, which would not only eliminate taxes but also currency, may be the best means to preventing violent upheaval should the robots devour all the jobs. An excerpt:

Over the next 20 years, I see automation taking nearly all jobs, and I doubt capitalism will survive that. As a result, I advocate for beginning the process of eliminating taxes and doling out a universal basic income—one that swallows welfare, Social Security, and all health services. Otherwise, I see inequality dramatically growing and an even larger befuddled welfare system than we have now. When robots take all the jobs, I also see civil strife and revolution occurring if corporations and the government don’t give back enough to society.

For me, the most important aspect of the future is to actually get there, and I worry that without giving something to unemployed humans, a dystopic society of violence and chaos will come about. The last thing America—and the scientific community—needs is a civil war.

Some experts have predicted that fully automated luxury communism is the way to go, and it’s a term increasingly being thrown around. Basically, it argues that humans should be pampered by technology, and to do so, communism should finally become the dominant economic system. Fresco doesn’t buy this.

He thinks that if we could just get rid of money and ownership, most of the humanity’s problems would disappear. And he claims only a resource-based economy—an idea he said he’s been working on since he was 13 years old—could do this.

The resource-based economy goes like this: In the future robots will do all the jobs (including creating new robots and fixing broken one). Now, imagine the world is like a public library, where you can borrow any book you want but never own it. Fresco wants all enterprise like this, whether it’s groceries, new tech, gasoline, or alcohol. He wants everything free and eventually provided to us by robots, software, and automation.•

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Allan Pinkerton had an idea in 1857: Why not use the new technology of photography to create a pictorial file of repeat offenders causing the majority of the crime? That way the police could become familiar with broken noses and twisted smiles, making it easier to round up the usual suspects. The word “database” wouldn’t be coined for another century, but that’s essentially what the Rogues’ Gallery was. The subjects may have been uncooperative at times, but one way or another they were made to pose.

Now we’re all rogues, or at least suspected of such behavior. Here’s the opening two sentences from a recent Ars Technica article by David Kravets:

Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Tuesday. That means there’s about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology says.

While such files can be viewed as an invasion of privacy by police, an invitation for us all to be pre-criminalized, they also pose another problem: As tools improve, these images may be used to steal identities. And it’s not just limited to faces–our voices may also be stolen right out of the air.

From John Markoff at the New York Times:

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The software components necessary to make such masking technology widely accessible are advancing rapidly. Recently, for example, DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary known for a program that has bested some of the top human players in the board game Go, announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.”

The irony, of course, is that this year the computer security industry, with $75 billion in annual revenue, has started to talk about how machine learning and pattern recognition techniques will improve the woeful state of computer security.

But there is a downside.

“The thing people don’t get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially,” said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of Future Crimes.

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Guaranteed Basic Income has become a serious topic of discussion in think tanks and Silicon Valley boardrooms, among some conservatives and libertarians as well as liberals, but, if instituted, it could wind up being more a pain than a panacea. If used as a Trojan horse by those looking to pull away social safety nets, it could be devastatingEven done with the best of intentions, it really wouldn’t be a better life than a good job with a chance for advancement. It could wind up an anodyne, part of a means to quiet the masses with bread and Kardashians.

Or maybe, possibly, it would free us to be creative beyond our wildest dreams in a post-scarcity society, building spaceships in our garages with cheap 3D printers. But I would have to bet the under on that one.

In a Vice “Motherboard” Q&A conducted by Alex Pasternack, Douglas Rushkoff speaks to his fears about GBI as a mere palliative. An excerpt: 

The thing that surprised me—the thing I’m working through now—is this whole idea of guaranteed minimum income. I make a pretty strong case for it in the book: In a society with abundant resources, people deserve food, housing, and medical care. We have gotten to a place where people need jobs not because we need all that work done, but because we need an excuse to let them have the food and housing which is already in abundance. That’s ass-backward. So just let them have it.

But I spent some time at Uber, and I heard my guaranteed minimum income argument come back to me but from their lips, and it sounded different. They were telling me how they understood that Uber drivers don’t get paid a living wage—but that once the government instituted a guaranteed minimum income, then it wouldn’t matter that the drivers don’t get paid enough to live! Or that their jobs were replaced by machines. At least they’d have enough money to hire Uber cars when they need to get somewhere!

So guaranteed minimum income doesn’t really empower anybody. It just creates more cash for people to spend as consumers. It doesn’t give the workers any more ownership of the “means of production” than they had before.

And I’m still working on this problem, since I believe that food, housing, and medical care are basic human rights for which you shouldn’t need a job, but I don’t like how guaranteed minimum income becomes an excuse for more exploitation of those at the bottom, and a new two-tiered society.•

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In a smart Five Books interviewEllen Wayland-Smith, author of Oneida, discusses a group of titles on the topic of Utopia. She surmises that attempts at such communities aren’t prevalent like they were in the 1840s or even the 1960s because most of us realize they don’t normally end well, whether we’re talking about the bitter financial and organizational failures of Fruitlands and Brook Farm or the utter madness of Jonestown. That’s true on a micro-community level, though I would argue that there have never been more people dreaming of large-scale Utopias–and corresponding dystopias–then there are right now. The visions have just grown significantly in scope.

In macro visions, Silicon Valley technologists speak today of an approaching post-scarcity society, an automated, quantified, work-free world in which all basic needs are met and drudgery has disappeared into a string of zeros and ones. These thoughts were once the talking points of those on the fringe, say, a teenage guru who believed he could levitate the Houston Astrodome, but now they (and Mars settlements, a-mortality and the computerization of every object) are on the tongues of the most important business people of our day, billionaires who hope to shape the Earth and beyond into a Shangri-La. 

Perhaps much good will come from these goals, and maybe a few disasters will be enabled as well. 

One exchange from the Five Books Q&A:

Question:

Speaking of the Second Coming, the last book on your list is Paradise Now, by Chris Jennings.

Ellen Wayland-Smith:

It’s called Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. He goes through five utopian experiments in nineteenth century America. It’s a beautifully written book and interesting as well because he takes the odd era of 1840s America and shows how it gave rise to five very different experiments in alternative living. He does a sensitive job of exploring their differences and similarities but he also examines how crazy they seem today. Some of the ideas seem mystical and fabulous; certainly Noyes had some spectacularly strange ideas about gaining immortality through sexual intercourse. The fact that so many of these strange communities sprung up seems unbelievable to the twenty-first century reader. Chris Jennings points out that we seem to have lost something, there seems to be a diminishment of expectations, a loss of energy.

Question:

In the wake of the American Revolution over a hundred experimental communities were formed in the United States. Do societies become less experimental as they age into their institutions? Is the West losing the audacity necessary for experimentation?

Ellen Wayland-Smith:

That is an interesting question. The 1840s were an incredibly weird time. It was a crossroads. It was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Class identification and geographical identification suddenly became uncertain, that was upsetting. There were also an explosion of religious sects at this time, with the disestablishment of state and church. I think it was a time when people felt very vulnerable. All these changes and uncertainties crystallized attempts to live otherwise.

Question:

Jennings writes that a present day “deficit of imagination” accounts for the fact that there are no utopias at present. Do you see a strong foundation for that analysis?

Ellen Wayland-Smith:

There does seem to be a lack of interest in what is transcendent, which keeps people from finding more meaningful ways of constructing their lives. But what accounts for the absence of utopian schemes at present is probably less a ‘deficit of imagination’ than a cynicism about whether these things can work. As I began by saying, utopian projects usually end disastrously.•

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  • America is not a “nation founded by geniuses, so it can be run by idiots,” as the Foxworthy faction of the GOP would have you believe. Our Forefathers’ greatest gift may have been to realize they were deeply flawed, that the Constitution was no Holy Grail, and that it would need to be amended, to be a living, breathing thing. We’re only as good at any given point as our interpretation of what America means. It’s up to us.
  • While longstanding traditions give our system a resilience new democracies don’t enjoy, our foundation, strong though it may be, can collapse. Most Americans are raised believing the checks and balances of our federal government will keep our system from imploding, but the strength of those levers are dependent on a number of other factors. For one, the Fourth Estate, journalism, needs to be healthy to serve as a watchdog. Due to technological disruption and changing customs, that industry isn’t faring well right now. This problem informs another: We must be an educated populace that holds democracy dear and wants it for all citizens. Also: The person holding the office of the President needs to be a sane, reasonable figure not given to autocracy, because the occupant of the Oval Office has copious opportunities to abuse power. If the President does attempt to shred the Constitution, the Congress and the Senate must act boldly to remove that person. That’s our last line of defense short of revolution.

In an excellent Politico article “Yes, American Democracy Could Break Down,” Yascha Mounk lays out exactly how things could fall apart, if not in the time of Trump, then at some point. An excerpt:

If you game it out, there are at least three likely scenarios that lead to a crisis. The first case would be Trump ordering the federal bureaucracy to do something blatantly unconstitutional—like, say, closing down mosques or prosecuting political opponents. It is likely that many senior bureaucrats would refuse to comply with such an order, either resigning in protest or simply disobeying the relevant instructions. In a political world in which leading politicians and most voters have a deep commitment to democratic norms, this is an effective form of resistance: The press would be likely to cover the story prominently. Public opinion would rally against an administration that insists on issuing illegal instructions. The President would back down. According to Constitutional scholars like Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who has written extensively about limits of executive power, this is exactly the kind of mechanism by which, despite its vastly expanded powers, the executive has effectively been constrained since 9/11.

But all of this assumes that we can still count on a shared commitment to democratic norms, and have a President who is sensitive to widespread outrage. So what would happen if a President Trump decided that he would rather persist with an unpopular course of action than risk looking weak? Or if public opinion didn’t swing against him in the first place? (Since many recent polls show broad support for discriminatory policies against Muslims, this is hardly an unimaginable scenario.)

In essence, there would then be little to stop the President from a simple power move: firing all bureaucrats who disobey his orders, and replacing them with loyalists. There is, in fact, a clear precedent for this in American history. In the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon instructed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Congress to look into his illegal activities during the Watergate scandal. When Richardson resigned his post in protest at the President’s attempt to interfere in judicial proceedings in such a blatant manner, Nixon instructed Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do his bidding. When he, too, resigned in protest, Nixon turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork—who duly complied. By the end of the night, Cox was gone.

If a President Trump took a leaf out of Nixon’s playbook and repeated the Saturday Night Massacre at an even bigger scale—including rank-and-file bureaucrats as well as political employees in his purge—it would undoubtedly sow chaos and deplete federal agencies of much-needed expertise. But finding a team of hacks to follow his orders, however haphazardly, would not prove difficult. If he wanted to close down mosques, or have his cronies prosecute political opponents, he probably could.•

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Since Bob Dylan was the surprise winner of this year’s Nobel Prize, those aghast at the announcement (mostly writers without Nobel Prizes) have taken comfort in Kevin P. Simonson’s 1991 Hustler interview with Kurt Vonnegut, in which the author labeled the songwriter the “worst poet alive.” This insult from the guy who turned out Slapstick!

In addition to being wrong about Dylan, Vonnegut’s hatred for the magazine’s infamous owner, Larry Flynt, also seems off-base. It’s not that the publisher was or is a charmer (he’s not), but his “literary output” proved much more influential than Vonnegut’s, with pornography today available on every phone in every pocket. He was right about human nature, whether we like it or not.

If you think that’s good or not depends on what you prefer: a repressed though less outwardly ugly society where things are hidden, or one in which there’s way too much information and everything may be revealed. The latter can be discombobulating, but I think the former is more dangerous.

Click on the exchange below to read a bigger version.

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As I’ve mentioned before, this Baba Booey of an election makes me wonder if we’re looking at the beginning of the end of the two-party political system in America. Could a centrist coalition be possible if Democratic and Republican bases drift further from the middle? Will independents be emboldened not by Donald Trump’s Thiel-approved Lampanelli-Mussolini mashup but by the lack of concern he’s shown traditional ideological lines? It really doesn’t make much sense that a culture so decentralized and splintered and long tail in pretty much every other way would remain traditional in this one, even if entrenched machinery demands it remain that way. 

Douglas Coupland has similar thoughts in a new Financial Times column, which also opines on “logarithmic technologies” impacting politics and the future of online voting. An excerpt:

I look at the current US electoral situation: 330 million people, and Donald and Hillary are what the system has spat forth. What ought to have been a four-party election (Democrats/Republicans/Sanderians/Trumpfs) instead became a two-party slate so ghastly that the metaphor most commonly used to describe the situation is that of a burning dumpster.

A country’s citizenry is toasting marshmallows over burning garbage trying to pretend everything is OK, and it’s not OK.

OK, that last sentence sounded a bit drastic … if nothing else, everybody agrees that the current US election is a hyperbole leaf-blower — and most everyone agrees that something is going random within American democracy. Both parties have somehow come to equate a possible electoral win by their opponents not as a democratically elected majority win but, rather, as mob rule. Each side believes the other is unfit to govern, period — and so it’s not just a matter of winning an election: the other party needs to be smothered and buried. As a bonus, this election has highlighted a specific perversity of human nature — the fact that believing in something that one knows is illogical or untrue somehow makes it much easier to believe.

Actually, let’s take a chill pill and think this through. Maybe there’s no need to be so cosmic about what can seem like the American two-party system’s mutual suicide pact. I wonder if, instead, what we’re witnessing is merely the painful birth of a three- or four-party US political system — something most mature democracies already have, and something the US ought to have seriously adopted decades ago were it not for the country’s battered-wife relationship with its dual-party system that dates back to the late 18th century.

Technically, all it would take for America to enter the multiparty system is to click its heels together three times and say, “Let’s have more political parties”, and much of today’s schizocracy would vanish. People would be able to better choose candidates they can actually believe in and, as we see globally, coalition building would ensure more adult-like behaviour and a willingness for give and take over issues which, at the moment, allow only unyieldingly polarised righteousness and stasis.•

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videodrome-1

Video as a new way to pay for journalism seems a bubble to me, though I have to admit print ads were a bubble that paid for news for about 150 years. Of course, in a far more quantified age, if a system of collecting money for getting people to watch a few seconds of an ad goes bust, it probably will happen sooner than in fifteen decades.

But even if video doesn’t become the coin of the realm, it’s the primary media of the moment and immediate future. The lazier among us always skimmed articles, but now you’re not really required to do even that to follow current events. We’ve more recently used technologies to skip past ads during the game, but now we can disregard most of the game as well.

We’ve shrunk time down to just the interesting bits, the moments of impact, which are neatly packaged for us via video. Or we just drink from the stream of live video for a few minutes to get a “taste.” That’s not to say the horrors of Aleppo or the glories of the gridiron are only thrown at us minus context–prerecorded pieces can contextualize–but the more you boil something down, the more that evaporates into the air, unseen.

Despite Youtube, it’s interesting that the things people usually watch from start to finish now are fiction, the endless stock of TV or near-TV content. Fantasies can still be fully embraced, while reality has been collapsed into the palms of our hands.

Excerpts follow from: 1) Jacob Weisberg’s NYRB piece about the scramble for attention in the time of Google and Facebook, and 2) Jarrett Bell’s USA Today article about the NFL’s fumbling ratings.


From Weisberg:

Earlier this year, Facebook announced a major new initiative called Facebook Live, which was intended to encourage the consumption of minimally produced, real-time video on its site. The videos would come from news organizations such as The New York Times, as well as from celebrities and Facebook users. Interpreted by some as an effort to challenge Snapchat, the app popular with teenagers in which content quickly vanishes, Live reflects the trend toward video’s becoming the dominant consumer and commercial activity on the Web. Following the announcement, one executive at the company predicted that in five years the Facebook News Feed wouldn’t include any written articles at all, because video “helps us to digest more of the information” and is “the best way to tell stories.”

Facebook’s News Feed is the largest source of traffic for news and media sites, representing 43 percent of their referrals, according to the web analytics firm Parse.ly. So when Facebook indicates that it favors a new form of content, publishers start making a lot of it. In this case, news organizations including the TimesBuzzFeed, NPR, and Al Jazeera began streaming live videos, which were funded in part by $50 million in payments from Facebook itself. These subsidies were thought necessary because live video carries no advertising, and thus produces no revenue for Facebook or its partners.

Why, if it generates no revenue, is Facebook pushing video streaming so insistently? For the same reason that it does almost everything: in hopes of capturing more user attention. According to the company’s research, live videos—which feel more spontaneous and authentic—are viewed an average of three times longer than prerecorded videos.•


From Bell:

HOUSTON — It’s an election year, silly.

That wasn’t the entire company line, but the impact of the dramatic presidential election cycle was certainly a prevailing sentiment as NFL owners gathered Tuesday for their quarterly meeting and assessed the league’s unusual and precipitous dip in TV ratings.

Assuming the results aren’t, well, rigged, NFL games — the undisputed king of U.S. sports viewing — were down 11% for the first six weeks of the season when compared to a similar point last year.

Blame it on Hillary vs. Donald? Or a sign of deeper problems for the NFL?

“It’s a very muddied water right now because you’ve got obviously the debates going on and you have the Donald Trump show,” Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank told USA TODAY Sports. “That’s a lot of commotion right now. It’s pretty hard to figure out right now what’s real and what’s not.”

The first debate, which ran opposite of a Falcons-New Orleans Saints Monday Night Football matchup in late September, drew a record 84 million viewers. The second debate, coinciding with a New York Giants-Green Bay Packers Sunday night prime-time clash, had 69 million viewers.

“Obviously, the debates have had a big impact,” Houston Texans owner Robert McNair told USA TODAY Sports.

But the debates represent just the biggest of several suspected factors. Tom Brady served four games in Deflategate jail. Peyton Manning retired. The younger generation is increasingly watching games or clips streamed to mobile devices.•

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miami-flooding

Last night’s debate was likely the final ugly stand of the campaign for Donald Trump, the worst American™, the last time he could hector from a national pulpit non-white people and the Constitution itself, with eyes narrowed, fingers pointed, scowl fixed. He was revealed once more in all his damage, bleeding from his wherever, a lucky man who’s been handed everything but feels as if he’s being robbed yet again of what will finally quiet the fury within. But even if Trump, a Berlusconi who dreams of being a Mussolini, is now to be hoisted on Election Day by his feet from a virtual meat hook, he’s already done serious harm to the country.

I don’t mean his coarsening of the dialogue and mood or the undermining of our democracy’s legitimacy, though, of course, those things have weight. As I’ve written before, the real cost of the hideous hotelier is that he’s distracted us at a crucial juncture from vital issues at hand that need addressing to secure America’s future. Vladimir Putin couldn’t have done it better himself, though let’s give him some credit.

In a smart, impassioned Vice “Motherboard” essay, Derek Mead speaks to this same issue. An excerpt:

Climate change is especially important in this regard, as it will exacerbate most of the other ills of our current world, including resource-based conflict, pandemics, extreme weather, and food insecurity. For example, Florida is set to be ravaged by rising seas, including the properties of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax. But rising seas are just one final problem; in the interim, we can expect warming weather to negatively influence everything from hurricanes to the spread of disease, as is potentially the case with Zika (which also didn’t make an appearance in the debates, despite an ongoing funding crisis).

For all the pseudo-talk of the economy in the debates, climate change is already costing us billions of dollars a year, and it is only going to get worse, as even the Pentagon is preparing for.

And despite this endless stream of bad news and heel-dragging from our elected officials, we’re already seeing positive impacts from investment in clean energy and divestment from climate-polluting industries. There’s no better time to push harder on mitigating the worst effects of climate change, which threatens all aspects of our livelihoods. Ignoring the climate for favor of arguing over who’s a stronger leader is simply irresponsible.

Climate may be the largest threat for humanity as a whole, but here in the US, the most immediately pressing one is inequality. Inequality is a problem across all demographic breakdowns—racial, economic, geographic, and so on—and for yet another election, the answer has been summed up with varying shades of the word “jobs.” It’s too late to reverse the tide of globalism, unless we want to turn ourselves into some sort of hermit kingdom, but as the leader of the tech economy, the United States is still in a strong position to shape the world’s economy to our advantage.

This is not a simple truth: As shuffling alliances and developing nations reshape the world order, and as the massive disparity in income and capital in the US mixes with a future economy defined less by ownership and more by timesharing everything, the non-barons among us have a difficult road ahead.•

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