Dave Eggers

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Kevin Kelly’s AMAs on Reddit are always among the best: smart questions and smart answers. Here are a few exchanges from his latest one:

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Question:

It seems you’ve been all over the world. I assume you’re already living in your favorite place to live. But if you couldn’t live there, what would be your second choice?

Kevin Kelly:

Singapore. I am half Asian now and Singapore is one of the few cities in Asia I could imagine living in. It’s vibrant, but still works, and it is far greener than you’d think. It’s not Disneyland with the death penalty.

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Question:

Can you paraphrase your argument against The Singularity?

Kevin Kelly:

In short: Timing. Longer: it will happen but only be visible in retrospect. During the time, it will just seem like incremental change.

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Question:

It seems like you spend a fair bit of time thinking about the future, probably just in general as well. Where’s your day-to-day “thinking time” look like? Do you have a time scheduled during the day to stop writing/beekeeping/whatever and just think? Do you focus on a particular problem or idea to think about or just let your mind run wild? Considering your quantified self connection, have you found any useful tips for finding your most creative moments?

Kevin Kelly:

I block out lots of time to 1) Read (books) 2) Think in silence 3) Sketch and doodle 4) Go for walks.

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Question:

My question is, how do you see automation of the workforce transitioning to post-scarcity(if at all)?

Kevin Kelly:

Automation of work will create new scarcities while filling the world with plentitude in other ways. New scarcities will be such things as human attention, human relations, silence, errors, questions.

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Question:

In a tweet, you once suggested that content we have today, say on Facebook and Twitter, will be gone in 25 or 50 years. Are you confident these companies will not be around and/or transition? Also, are you able to provide brief, clear, simple vision of how laypersons might expect to reliably store data in next 25 years? Thanks for consideration.

Kevin Kelly:

It is very unlikely that ANY company at its peak today will be around in 50 years. They just don’t have long lifespans.

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Question:

Have you read The Circle? If so, what did you think of it?

Kevin Kelly:

I think The Circle is both brilliant and profound. I think the book will take its place alongside 1984 and Brave New World. It doesn’t have much chance of happening, but it is a cautionary tale to keep us honest.

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Question:

What do you think contributed most to your success?

Kevin Kelly:

No TV.•

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A paragraph from Margaret Atwood’s New York Review of Books’ review of Dave Eggers’ The Circle about the malignant undercurrent of technotopia:

“Some will call The Circle a ‘dystopia,’ but there’s no sadistic slave-whipping tyranny on view in this imaginary America: indeed, much energy is expended on world betterment by its earnest denizens. Plagues are not raging, nor is the planet blowing up or even warming noticeably. Instead we are in the green and pleasant land of a satirical utopia for our times, where recycling and organics abound, people keep saying how much they like each another, and the brave new world of virtual sharing and caring breeds monsters.”

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In Felix Salmon’s critique of Dave Eggers’ new novel, he writes glowingly of “It Knows,” Daniel Soar’s 2011 London Review of Books piece about three volumes regarding Google and the place of the Plex in our world. (Or is it our place in the Plex’s world?) A passage about the late GOOG-411 service:

“Levy tells the story of a new recruit with a long managerial background who asked Google’s senior vice-president of engineering, Alan Eustace, what systems Google had in place to improve its products. ‘He expected to hear about quality assurance teams and focus groups’ – the sort of set-up he was used to. ‘Instead Eustace explained that Google’s brain was like a baby’s, an omnivorous sponge that was always getting smarter from the information it soaked up.’ Like a baby, Google uses what it hears to learn about the workings of human language. The large number of people who search for ‘pictures of dogs’ and also ‘pictures of puppies’ tells Google that ‘puppy’ and ‘dog’ mean similar things, yet it also knows that people searching for ‘hot dogs’ get cross if they’re given instructions for ‘boiling puppies’. If Google misunderstands you, and delivers the wrong results, the fact that you’ll go back and rephrase your query, explaining what you mean, will help it get it right next time. Every search for information is itself a piece of information Google can learn from.

By 2007, Google knew enough about the structure of queries to be able to release a US-only directory inquiry service called GOOG-411. You dialled 1-800-4664-411 and spoke your question to the robot operator, which parsed it and spoke you back the top eight results, while offering to connect your call. It was free, nifty and widely used, especially because – unprecedentedly for a company that had never spent much on marketing – Google chose to promote it on billboards across California and New York State. People thought it was weird that Google was paying to advertise a product it couldn’t possibly make money from, but by then Google had become known for doing weird and pleasing things. In 2004, it launched Gmail with what was for the time an insanely large quota of free storage – 1GB, five hundred times more than its competitors. But in that case it was making money from the ads that appeared alongside your emails. What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.

Three years later, the service was dropped, but by then Google had launched its Android operating system and had released into the wild an improved search-by-voice service that didn’t require a phone call. You tapped the little microphone icon on your phone’s screen – it was later extended to Blackberries and iPhones – and your speech was transmitted via the mobile internet to Google servers, where it was interpreted using the advanced techniques the GOOG-411 exercise had enabled. The baby had learned to talk. Now that Android phones are being activated at a rate of more than half a million a day,​4 Google suddenly has a vast and growing repository of spoken words, in every language on earth, and a much more powerful learning machine.”

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I posted an excerpt from the new Dave Eggers novel earlier, and here’s part of a riposte to the book that Felix Salmon wrote for Reuters, which contends that the author gets Silicon Valley all wrong. Because the novel doesn’t come out for another week and I haven’t read it, I don’t know what to say about this critique. Eggers seems to have purposely written about the Valley without firsthand experience in the same way that Kafka imagined America or Stephen Crane the Civil War, hoping to create something of an impressionistic truth. At any rate, this is from Salmon:

The thing about the Valley that Eggers misses is that it’s populated by people who consider themselves above the rest of the country — intellectually, culturally, financially. They consider themselves the cognitive elite; the rest of us are the puppets dancing on the end of their strings of code.

Besides, we all share the downside of being part of an always-on, networked society, whether we participate on social media or not. If you’re going to suffer the downside, you might as well enjoy the upside — that’s all the motivation that anybody needs to get involved, there’s no need for crude coercion.

In science, there’s a phenomenon called ‘herd immunity’: if you vaccinate a high enough proportion of people, the entire population becomes immune. The evolution of the web is similar: enough of us are connected, in many different ways, that no one has real privacy any longer. Eggers can see that, but he then tries to reverse-engineer how we got here, and, by dint of not doing his homework, gets it very wrong.

The Circle is a malign organization; you can almost see its CEO, Eamon Bailey, stroking a white cat in his suburban Palo Alto lair, dreaming of Global Domination. In reality, however, the open protocols of the World Wide Web led naturally and ineluctably to our current loss of privacy. Tim Berners-Lee is no evil genius; he’s a good guy. And the Eggers novel I’d love to read is the one dominated by the best of intentions. Rather than the one which thinks that if technology is causing problems, then the cause must always be technologists with maleficent ulterior motives.”•

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Eggers visits Conan in 2004:

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Dave Eggers’ latest novel, The Circle, is a satire about, among other things, social networking, that really good and really bad idea. Here’s the opening of an excerpt from it running in the New York Times Magazine this week:

“My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven.

The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands. On land that had once been a shipyard, then a drive-in movie theater, then a flea market, then blight, there were now soft green hills and a Calatrava fountain. And a picnic area, with tables arranged in concentric circles. And tennis courts, clay and grass. And a volleyball court, where tiny children from the company’s day care center were running, squealing, weaving like water. Amid all this was a workplace, too, 400 acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. The sky above was spotless and blue.

Mae was making her way through all of this, walking from the parking lot to the main hall, trying to look as if she belonged. The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees, and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. ‘Dream,’ one said, the word laser-cut into the stone. ‘Participate,’ said another. There were dozens: ‘Find Community.’ ‘Innovate.’ ‘Imagine.’ She just missed stepping on the hand of a young man in a gray jumpsuit; he was installing a new stone that said, ‘Breathe.’

On a sunny Monday in June, Mae stopped in front of the main door, standing below the logo etched into the glass above. Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo — a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center — were already among the best known in the world. There were more than 10,000 employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had offices all over the globe and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. It had been voted the world’s most admired company four years running.

Mae wouldn’t have thought she had a chance to work at such a place but for Annie. Annie was two years older, and they roomed together for three semesters in college, in an ugly building made habitable through their extraordinary bond, something like friends, something like sisters — or cousins who wished they were siblings and would have reason never to be apart. Their first month living together, Mae broke her jaw one twilight, after fainting, flu-ridden and underfed, during finals. Annie had told her to stay in bed, but Mae went to the Kwik Trip for caffeine and woke up on the sidewalk, under a tree. Annie took her to the hospital and waited as they wired her jaw and then stayed with Mae, sleeping next to her, in a wooden chair, all night, and then at home, for days, had fed Mae through a straw. It was a fierce level of commitment and competence that Mae had never seen from someone her age or near her age, and Mae was thereafter loyal in a way she’d never known she could be.

While Mae was still at Carleton, meandering between majors, from art history to marketing to psychology — getting her degree in psych with no plans to go further in the field — Annie had graduated, gotten her M.B.A. from Stanford and was recruited everywhere, but particularly at the Circle, and had landed here days after graduation. Now she had some lofty title — Director of Ensuring the Future, Annie joked — and had urged Mae to apply for a job. Mae did so, and though Annie insisted that she pulled no strings, Mae was sure Annie had, and she felt indebted beyond all measure. A million people, a billion, wanted to be where Mae was at this moment, entering this atrium, 30 feet high and shot through with California light, on her first day working for the only company that really mattered at all.” 

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Writer Ève Curie (daughter of Madame Curie) graced the cover of “Time” in 1940, as she did her part to fight the scourge of Nazism. Ève did tons of work for UNICEF and lived to 102.

As the magazine industry founders in the face of a media paradigm shift, Molly Lambert and Alex Carnevale at This Recording have published a smart piece called “15 Best Print Magazine Runs of All Time.” They pinpoint spans of time when a magazine thrived creatively and transcended all the other rags on the rack.

It’s a really great list, though I have some nits to pick. The heyday of Premiere isn’t represented at all. And some of the time spans seem stingy (Life wasn’t great just from 1940-1965 but until the end of its original run in 1972; Mad was amazing for a lot longer than 1958-1963). But I quibble. Below is an example of some of the entries.

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12. Might (1991-1995)

Dave Eggers’s San Francisco magazine was known for rambling essays on provocative topics. Some have cited their “Are Black People Cooler Than White People?” as the first recorded LOL. They also did an issue that was entirely about cheese, and let David Foster Wallace make the argument that AIDS was going to make sexual pursuit better and more rewarding by making it more difficult. If you write about all the things you find interesting it is possible that somebody else will also be interested, or better yet become interested just because it’s written well.

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Patti Smith performs in Copenhagen in 1976. In between gigs, she contributed articles to “Creem.”

6. Creem (1971-1980)

Cooler than Rolling Stone, Creem featured articles from a dream roster of counterculture writers like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer, Patti Smith, and Cameron Crowe, all of whom made or embossed their names here (plus countless other staffers who did all the work). The original arrogant confrontational blog, indier than thou when it still meant something, Creem articles expose all other music criticism as falsity. Our favorite kind of snobs, Creem touted the MC5 and ABBA equally.

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2. Time (1939-1945)

Before Time became the absolute mess it is now, two men made this venerable institution the most well-written compendium of critical thought ever to enter the public sphere at the time. Whittaker Chambers joined Time in 1939; soon enough he and James Agee were the primary composers of the arts section of the magazine. Chambers ascended to the magazine’s editorial board, and kept writing. It only got better from there.

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