When the grounds shift beneath our feet, we tend to hold on for dear life. We try to retreat into the world we knew, even if it’s no longer viable.
Our communications have been reconfigured by the Second Machine Age, and it appears the same is happening to our economic model. That’s scary. It causes fingers to be pointed, blame assigned. Such transitions may be the natural order of things, but to mere mortals they can feel very unnatural. Is the realization of the Global Village that frightened Marshall McLuhan so much what’s behind the ripples of nativism and violent expressions of fundamentalism across the globe?
Appearing recently at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the wondrous Sapiens, argues that the ferocious reactions to hierarchal transformation at the outset of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century are being replayed now in the early Digital Age. Harari feels certain that withdrawals into old orthodoxies will fail today as they did then, with ancient scriptures having no answers to new questions, leaving techno-ideologies to own the future.
I think Astra Taylor is wonderful, but I doubt her idealistic hopes for the Digital Age will be realized, not because of a lack of will, but because they’re antithetical to the very nature of a society interconnected by smart technology.
Getting rid of the corporate and government intrusion of personal data is probably as realistic as completely taming the Internet’s anarchic side. Those thorny things are with us for good. Unplugging will be all but impossible, especially as the actual plugs increasingly disappear. The Internet of Things will become thething, and going in another direction will be a bridge too far.
There’ll likely be a growing number of splinter societies that attempt to retreat from the mainstream, but they’ll be tenuous and not necessarily positive. A lack of oversight of all kinds will become the norm. I think it has already.
There are policy solutions for combating, say, the excesses of the Gig Economy and other elements of Techno-Libertarianism, but there’s really none for the larger machine we’ve placed ourselves within, one that isn’t only political or idealistic but literal as well. It’s beyond control.
Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.
Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.
Last month, Taylor and more than 1,000 activists, scholars and techies gathered at the New School in New York City for a conference to talk about reinventing the Internet. They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.
“The powerful definitely do not want us to reboot things, and they will go to great lengths to stop us, and they will use brute force or they will use bureaucracy,” Taylor warned the conferees at the close of the two-day session.•
Sweden is all but done with cash money, which is fascinating and frightening. Paper currency and coins aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary in a smartphone society, but the digital equivalent is trackable. As cookies can follow our online travels, these digital crumbs mark our every step.
“Now people can’t get away,” a Swedish street vendor tells Liz Alderman in her excellent New York Times piece on the topic. The opening:
STOCKHOLM — Parishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote “Money, Money, Money,” considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins.
Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic.
This tech-forward country, home to the music streaming service Spotify and the maker of the Candy Crush mobile games, has been lured by the innovations that make digital payments easier. It is also a practical matter, as many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense cash.
At the Abba Museum, “we don’t want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash is dying out,” said Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has leveraged the band’s legacy into a sprawling business empire, including the museum.
Not everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes. Last year, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the amount a decade ago, according to Sweden’s Ministry of Justice.•
By the 1960s, Glenn Gould believed the new technologies would allow for the sampling, remixing and democratization of creativity, that erstwhile members of the audience would ultimately ascend and become creators themselves. He hated the hierarchy of live performance and was sure its dominance would end. It was probably partly a rationalization that helped enable his reclusiveness, but rise up the audience did.
Mr. Gould himself seemed to grow out of no particular musical tradition. He stressed, in fact, that his musical goal was to rethink the repertory in a radically different fashion. Though he had a career of nine years as a popular and critical success on the concert stage, after a performance in Chicago in March 1964, he never played in public again; after 1967, he said, he never even attended a concert.
He said he considered the concert form an ”immensely distasteful” musical compromise that leads to ”tremendous conservatism” in musical interpretation. Mr. Gould contended that the concert’s aura of commerce, its performing stage and its listening audience interfere with music, turning the artist into a ”vaudevillian.”
”The concert is dead,” he proclaimed. For him, the recording represented the musical future. Mr. Gould was also among the first classical musicians to treat the recording as a distinct art form, with its own possibilities and requirements. The phonograph record, for Mr. Gould, was no more a ”record” of an actual continuous performance than a movie was a record of actual continuous events. It was a spliced construction, edited from recording tape.
”During the last 15 years,” Mr. Gould said in an interview last year, ”I spent very little time at a recording session actually recording.”
About eight minutes an hour were spent at the piano, he explained, producing perhaps four different versions of two minutes of music. The rest of the hour would be spent editing, choosing aspects of one version to merge with those of another. His recording of Sibelius’s works, for example, experiments with different aural atmospheres in each musical section. In his most recent recordings, he acted as producer, working in his own studio.
The musical result could be a concentrated interpretation, put together with as much care as a film editor might put together a movie. Mr. Gould believed such pastiche no more detracted from spontaneity and energy than editing would detract from a well-paced film.
The results, though, have been controversial.•
“I detest audiences,” Gould tells that magnificent bastard Alex Trebek (unseen) in 1966.
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From a1969 Life piece in which Oriana Fallaci recalls her misbegotten interview with Muhammad Ali:
Question:
Has anyone actually threatened to break your nose off for something you wrote?
Oriana Fallaci:
Something like it happened with Cassius Clay. I had seen him a couple of times, and I went back to his house in Miami to finish the interview. He was eating a melon. I said, Good Morning, Mr. Clay. He keeps on eating the melon and suddenly belches very loud. I think he is just being impolite and I sit down with my tape recorder. And then oooaaagh. He belches again. A big one. Well, I said, let’s go on anyway. And just at that moment, buurp, buurp, whoops, whoops. I turned to him and shouted, I am not going to stay with an animal like you. And I was undoing my recorder, when he took the microphone and threw it against the wall. My microphone! I saw it flying past my head and I took my fists and bam, bam. Went against him. He stood there. So enormous. So tall. And he watched me in a way an elephant watches a mosquito. Black Muslims suddenly came out of all the doors into the room. Evil. Evil. They began to chant. You came for evil. It was like a nightmare. I backed out to my cab, trying to keep my dignity, but really afraid, and went straight to the airport. After the interview was published, Cassius Clay said he was going to break my nose if he ever saw me again. I said, we’ll see, if he breaks my nose, he is going to jail and we will have beautiful news in the papers. I saw him later in New York. I passed with my nose in the air, and he went by without looking at me.•
In 1976, when he was already showing the early, subtle signs of Parkinson’s Syndrome, Muhammad Ali sat for a wide-ranging group interview on Face the Nation, in which he was mostly treated as a suspect by a panel of people who enjoyed privileges that were never available to the boxer. Fred Graham, the Arkansas-born correspondent who’s distinguished himself in other ways during his career, doesn’t come across as the most enlightened fellow here, asking at one point, “Is there ever going to be another Great White Hope, a white heavyweight who will come in and whip all you black heavyweights?” Hyper-political earlier in life, Ali dodged election-year questions as much as possible.
___________________________
Sailor, fisherman, OSS spy and all-around non-conformist, actor Sterling Hayden was ultimately as interesting just being himself as he was when inhabiting a character. In Kim Morgan’s 2014 LARB roundtable interview with Robert Altman collaborators Elliott Gould, George Segal and screenwriter Joseph Walsh, Hayden was discussed. An excerpt:
Question:
So you, George, and Elliott were both in movies with Sterling Hayden [Loving and The Long Goodbye].
Joseph Walsh:
I loved Sterling in the movies, but I never met him personally. [To Segal and Gould] Did you love Sterling?
Elliott Gould:
I loved him. Dan Blocker was supposed to play the part. He was a very good friend of Altman’s. Dan Blocker died and the picture almost went south. And so then we were talking about John Huston, who I loved. Bob cast Sterling Hayden. So Sterling had been in Ireland doing something with R. D. Laing, the poet and philosopher who wrote a book called Knots. And so I asked to spend a little time, a moment alone with Sterling in the house where we shot, where Kathryn and Bob lived, down in Malibu. So we spent that moment alone. And so I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I understood him. So I just loved him.
I liked the way he wanted to live his life, Sterling Hayden.
Elliott Gould:
I visited him on his péniche, which is like a barge. He had it in France on the Seine and I saw him there. And then he had it sent to Northern California and I visited him there too. He was a great guy. I think he worked in the Yugoslavian Underground during World War II.
Joseph Walsh:
Did he really? Wow. Okay.
Question:
And what’s interesting in The Long Goodbye is this modernized Marlowe, from what Bogart or Powell did but …
Elliott Gould:
Oh, Humphrey Bogart was perfect. Our Marlowe was not perfect at all.
Question:
No, of course. But that’s what I love about it. And that Sterling Hayden, who is now an icon in film noir, he’s really this counterculture type of guy in real life. He fit perfectly in that Altman universe.•
In 1981, Hayden, a restless soul who began looking late in life like Tom Waits’ hobo uncle, visits with Tom Snyder for a long-form interview. In part one, Hayden discusses his failed attempts at writing an article for Rolling Stone about the funeral of Yugoslavia’s late dictator Marshal Tito.
John McAfee may be a little crazy, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong: The sky, sooner or later, will fall. In a recent IBT column he co-wrote with Rob Loggia, the online security expert asserts that “World War 3 will be a cyberwar,” which doesn’t seem a farfetched prognostication. In explaining our lack of preparedness for the new normal of battle, McAfee draws an analogy to the Civil War, when weapons had quietly become so advanced that timeworn strategies were rendered surprisingly useless. An excerpt:
Machines Turned Against Us
So what happens when an army or nation, even a seemingly well prepared army or nation, enters or is drawn into conflict unaware that the rules of engagement have changed?
One thing that happens can be seen by looking at the American Civil War. Advances in weaponry and equipment had rendered traditional tactics obsolete, and neither side was aware of it. The result of them not realizing this was tremendous bloodshed.
When the Civil War erupted, both sides entered into the engagement assuming an outmoded form of conflict. Generals on both sides had rigorously studied tactics and strategy manuals based in the Napoleonic era, and followed them during the first part of the war. The result was bloodbaths like Antietam and Fredericksburg.
What happened was that the weapons they had, though they looked much like weapons from Napoleon’s era, were in many cases far more advanced, accurate and deadly. Previously sound offensive tactics were now literally suicidal. Both armies had to learn this the hard way. As the war developed, later battles were characterized more by trenches and fortifications than open battlefields.•
George Pao at the Pew Research Center has published “15 Striking Findings from 2015,” which looks at counterintuitive truths, some of which comment on America’s xenophobic fears. Three examples:
3. For the first time since the 1940s, more immigrants from Mexico are leaving the U.S. than coming into the country. The shift is due to several reasons, including slow economic recovery after the Great Recession that may have made the U.S. less attractive, as well as stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, particularly at the border.
8. People in countries with significant Muslim populations express overwhelmingly negative views of ISIS, according to our spring survey in 11 countries. Recent attacks in Paris, Beirut and Baghdad linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have once again brought terrorism and Islamic extremism to the forefront of international relations. Majorities in most of the 11 countries express unfavorable views of ISIS, but the exception is Pakistan, where a majority offer no opinion.
10. Christians are declining as a share of the U.S. population, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. While the U.S. remains home to more Christians than any other country, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian dropped from 78% in 2007 to 71% in 2014. By contrast, religious “nones,” driven in large part by Millennials, have surged seven percentage points in that time span to make up 23% of U.S. adults last year.•
I wasn’t familiar with Taffy Brodesser-Akner before 2015, then I read wonderful pieces she wrote about Kris Jenner and Don Lemon, two people I normally wouldn’t care about, and I was hooked, always looking for her byline. In the New York Times Magazine’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue, she’s penned the postmortem for wrestler Roddy Piper, who could boast like Ali even if he pulled his punches. One of the biggest stars in the history of the business, Roderick George Toombs, as he was christened, was driven to an early death by the industry’s very real toll, dealing with the brutal schedule of slams and falls with cocaine and steroids and painkillers and sleeping pills. The act of constantly living a fantasy also exacted a price, as his public comments were often puzzling, a mix of carny kayfabe and ill-advised opinions. You weren’t sure if his words were a work, and he didn’t seem certain, either.
The short piece doesn’t delve into Piper’s demons but instead focuses on his impact on the boom period of the 1980s, when the pseudo-sport went national. An excerpt:
Piper (né Roderick George Toombs) was hired by the W.W.E. in 1984 as a manager. When he finally made it into the ring a year later, it was as a villain, to engage in vicious rivalries with everyone from Andre to Mr. T (at the height of his A-Team fame). His theatrical loathing for his opponent made the matches magnetic, and he became the most beloved hated man in the W.W.E. universe. And his ability to bring all those crazy feuds to life during his interviews energized story lines in a way the W.W.E. had never before been able to successfully pull off.
With Andre, Piper asks if it’s true that Big John Studd body-slammed him. No, Andre says, it isn’t. Piper, neck veins pulsing, suggests that even he could body-slam him. Interview over. Andre grabs Piper’s shirt, uses it to fling him across the room and walks off the set. Piper, red-hot with rage, screams, ‘‘You think you’re tough?’’ He stares into the camera and does an Incredible Hulk pose that shows off his terrifying trapezius muscles. ‘‘You ain’t nothing!’’ You have never seen a man so committed to seeming to have lost all control.
Piper never won a world championship, but he didn’t need to. He was the W.W.E.’s hero, his energy a shot of adrenaline into wrestling’s weary heart. In 2005, he was inducted into its Hall of Fame. And in July, when he died in his sleep from cardiac arrest at 61, it was hard not to think that he had used up all his energy prematurely, keeping all those other clowns afloat for so many years.•
Plenty of bright people handicapping the Mars-or-bust business make sound arguments for why states will ultimately win the new public-private Space Race (costs chief among them), but one of the least convincing is that massive wealth won’t necessarily fall to those who pioneer in this area, thereby reducing the ambition of corporations. That’s a misunderstanding of the mindset driving Musk, Bezos, etc. Most of the Earth moguls in the competition are looking for currency of a different sort–to leave their mark on humanity in a large-scale way never before possible. As is the new custom of Silicon Valley, a place awash in riches, money itself is a secondary measuring stick.
From Miriam Kramer’s Mashable piece about what the Falcon 9’s success means for Musk’s Mars dreams:
“I think that there’s so much more to understand and learn about the nature of the universe, and that understanding will grow proportional to the scope and scale of civilization,” Musk said during the meeting. “The probable life span of human civilization is much greater if we’re a multi-planet species as opposed to a single-planet species.”
In Musk’s mind, to turn that vision into reality, companies need to start bringing the cost of spaceflight down dramatically, and one way to do that is through building reusable rockets.
At the moment, it costs companies about $60 million to buy a SpaceX Falcon 9, but only about $200,000 of that is the cost of the fuel needed to launch the rocket and payload to orbit.
Most rockets today are built to be discarded once they deploy their expensive satellites, cargo or even people into space, but that’s not the way Musk wants to do things.
In Musk’s vision of the future, a fleet of reusable rocket stages will be able to fly multiple payloads to orbit over the course of their lifetimes, effectively slashing the cost of spaceflight, Musk said. Instead of this once-use mentality, Musk hopes that rockets will be more like airplanes in the future.
“I think it is critical step on the way towards being able to establish a city on Mars,” Musk said during the press conference. “Because I think quite vital to that goal is reusability in orbit-class rockets. It is really fundamental to that goal. Without which it would really be unaffordable.”•
Blessed is the journalist who can make patent law interesting, and Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal is just such a writer. In his latest column, Mims thinks through the litigious hoverboard industry. While the sudden popularity of this personal-transportation device may ultimately be as fleeting as that of any other trendy merch, the welter of lawsuits surrounding it are meaningful. Mims explains how our patent system isn’t likely to protect Shane Chen, who claims to have invented the technology, but may actually make is easier to crush him.
An excerpt:
The original in this case would be the Hovertrax, made by Inventist, in Camas, Wash., near Portland, Ore. Inventist founder Shane Chen claims he invented the hoverboard, and holds a patent, having first filed an application in 2012. After a brief dalliance with entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Inventist last month licensed the Hovertrax to Razor USA, maker of the eponymous scooter.
One reason for the deal, says Joalene Jolivette, head of sales at Inventist, is that Razor has more resources to sue the biggest importers of hoverboards from China. “Razor has spent over $1 million inside of a week dealing with cutting off some of the knockoffs into the states,” she says.
Neither Inventist nor Razor would say how many lawsuits that represents, but theirlegal action against the maker of IO Hawk hoverboardsis public, and a lawyer for hoverboard company Swagway told me that company is being sued as well.
At this point it might sound like the patent system has done its job—to “allow someone to profit from inventions which are expensive to invent but easy to copy once made,” says Christina Mulligan, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in Internet and intellectual-property law.
With all the Ivy League lawyers, MBAs and statistical gurus rattling around the halls of Major League Baseball front offices, it’s difficult to believe teams don’t already have their own proprietary risk-management systems in place, but Sapient Global Markets aims to fill that niche in all sports, providing stress tests or something like them for franchise’s macro and micro decisions.
Dave Donovan figures what’s good for banking and the financial industry is good for baseball and sports in general. So the managing general partner of Sapient Global Markets in Boston is bringing risk management to major sports.
Donovan, a Marblehead native and Natick resident, is talking to teams about building financial risk management models to help make better financial decisions and protect their assets — essentially their players.
“Because there’s such an emphasis by teams on acquiring the right players, especially now where you have financial constraints with luxury taxes, etc., we’re looking at it the same way as we do with banks,” Donovan said. “Banks want to make as much money as they possibly can. Their constraint is regulation. They have stress tests they have to do for the government after banks almost took down the world because they weren’t financially compliant. We’ve been working with these banks to measure their risks and you can apply the same concepts in sports.
“Banks have portfolios of securities and they need to have those securities managed in a way that they can understand their risks at all points, 24/7. They measure it against a number of outstanding events that could happen that could potentially affect that portfolio, whether it be oil rising to $100 a barrel or unemployment going up to 10 percent or a nuclear war and a number of other things. We model against that. In baseball, you can do a similar exercise and get a good read on your portfolio.
“Your roster is no different than a portfolio of securities. Those are your assets. That’s what you’ve put your investment in, so it only makes sense that you should monitor your assets.”
Sapient Global Markets can build models for any situation, including individual players, by using formulas and calculations based on the data that is important to each team.•
If Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt truly believes that his company’s long-term goal is to turn out machines that are under human influence, I would have to assume he hasn’t been to the office very much lately. In what sounds like a PR offensive, Schmidt and co-writer Jared Cohen have penned a Time essay asserting that when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, humans will keep their hands on the wheel, if not literally. As if anyone can promise that once AI makes more major strides.
An excerpt:
Based on the work of DeepMind, which is involved in AI research, we believe that makers of AI should adhere to the following principles. First, AI should benefit the many, not the few. In practical terms, AI has the potential to help the doctor and the patient, the business and the employee. As a society, we should make use of this potential and ensure that AI always aims for the common good.
Second, AI research and development should be open, responsible and socially engaged. As we continue developing AI, new questions will continue to arise, and we will need to answer them collaboratively, including everyone from engineers and scientists to philosophers and activists. In particular, those whose industries will change as a result of AI will need to be part of this global conversation.
Third, those who design AI should establish best practices to avoid undesirable outcomes. Is a system doing what we need? Are we training it using the right data? Have we thought through the way any system might yield unintended side effects—and do we have a plan to correct for this? There should be verification systems that evaluate whether an AI system is doing what it was built to do.
The Washington Post, which went from taking the pulse of the world to barely having one of its own, just another newspaper laid low despite its Watergate fame, couldn’t have hoped for a better fate than Jeff Bezos buying the company in 2013 with some of his couch-cushion change. But as WaPo has become something of a digital juggernaut, aggressively publishing 1,200 pieces a day online to gain eyeballs, the question is whether the quantity has been matched by quality. It isn’t quite Buzzfeed with brain-numbing listicles, but some of the content is questionable. There are no easy answers to the thorny new questions, though I certainly enjoy it more post-Bezos.
While Mr. Bezos has rarely visited the paper’s offices, he holds a one-hour teleconference with the paper’s top managers once every two weeks. Twice a year, Post executives fly to Seattle for daylong retreats with their boss.
On the calls, Mr. Bezos is given briefings on everything from how the paper is dealing with ad blocking to the status of technology upgrades. He primarily focuses on improvements to the paper’s digital products, particularly its mobile apps, and its distribution strategies and has stayed out of editorial matters, executives said.
“He does not get involved in the journalism except to encourage us to hire the best journalists that we can,” Mr. Ryan said. “He has really focused on the technology and customer side, which has been one of the hallmarks of Amazon. Our engineers have an open line to him and he has made his expertise available to us anytime.”
… Some critics have raised questions about whether the new focus has resulted in an increasing amount of poorer quality content in the drive to attract more readers and whether it will ultimately lead to what the Post will need most to survive: more digital subscribers. The paper’s executives declined to get into specifics about finances or how many digital subscribers they have signed up. The New York Times had 1.04 million digital subscribers at the end of the third quarter, while The Wall Street Journal had 819,000.
Post executives say while they are always looking for the best ways for content to succeed, they insist they are not cheapening their journalism. “The Internet is its own medium but we approach everything as Washington Post stories. They may not always be traditional newspaper stories, but we are not living in a traditional newstelling time,” said editor-in-chief Marty Baron.•
All superpowers have their challenges, and China more than most. Rapid industrialization, mass urbanization and the building of insta-cities have left the environment in utter disrepair just as the economy seems poised for a serious slowdown. China plans to innovate its way out of the jam, like a rather large Silicon Valley of 1.357 billion.
More than four years ago, I wondered (dubiously) if China could ever transition from its knockoff Apple stores to creating a company like Apple. It would appear the state is moving in the right direction.
China has ambitious plans to source as much as 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, at the same time its economy is projected to slow. It also aspires to be the next space superpower while facing major health and environment challenges, such as an ageing population and water shortages.
The Chinese government knows that surmounting these challenges while achieving its goals can only be accomplished through science. Indeed, China is pegging its future prosperity on a knowledge-based economy, underpinned by research and innovation. For a country that invented paper, gunpowder and the compass, such lofty ambitions could be realized. This year pharmacologist Tu Youyou became the first Chinese researcher to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for helping discover a new drug for malaria that has saved millions of lives.
“With a solid base built upon the large quantity of research, China is [about] to take off in world-leading innovations and scientific breakthroughs,” says He Fuchu, the founding president of PHOENIX, the Chinese National Center for Protein Sciences. “High-quality research is built upon the accumulation of incremental advances,” He says.
The Nature Index shows China is already a high-quality scientific powerhouse. Since the first Nature Index database started in 2012, China’s total contribution has risen to become the second largest in the world, surpassed only by the United States.
But, what sets China apart is the rapid growth of its WFC. While China’s contribution grew 37%from 2012 to 2014, the United States saw a 4% drop over the same period.•
While it won’t much help those who’ve invested their lives in the value of a taxi medallion, it would be beneficial to a growing population of workers if we could figure out a way to protect employees participating, willingly or otherwise, in the Gig Economy. In his latest Financial Times column, Tim Harford has a suggestion: “Libertarianism with a safety net.” If that sounds oxymoronic, it’s intentional. The writer believes we need to consciously uncouple the welfare and corporate states, providing assurances to all citizens so that they can be unmoored without being at risk.
Uber maintains that they are not. That seems defensible: a driver can switch the app on or off at any time, or work for a competitor such as Lyft on a whim. Few employees who acted in this way would be employed for very long.
Then again, does a driver who puts in 60 or 70 hours a week providing Uber-assigned rides according to Uber-determined rules and rates not deserve some sort of security? Some authorities think so: the company has lost a number of rulings in California as judges and arbitrators have found that, in certain cases, Uber drivers are employees.
Such judgments are likely to vary from case to case and place to place, and the uncertainty helps nobody bar the lawyers. Alan Krueger, former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, draws a parallel with the emergence of the workers’ compensation system a century ago. Sensible rules were agreed, he says, once lawsuits over industrial accidents became expensive and unpredictable.
Americans misunderstand December 25 even as they celebrate it. One example is the song “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which is commonly perceived as a nostalgic and heartwarming ode when it’s one of the saddest pieces of music imaginable, a tearful tune about someone not being able to make it back to their loved ones. The crushing line (“If only in my dreams”) seems to have been psychologically elided the way the suicide threat tucked in neatly at the end of Sinatra’s plucky Horatio Alger classic “That’s Life” was. It’s not so much about embracing hope as willful ignorance.
Of course, the Fox News “War on Christmas” is a much larger philosophical disconnect, where non-Christians are somehow a threat to a Christian country. It’s just another scattershot reaction to the crumbling of the American middle class stoked by Roger Ailes’ hot-air machine. The formerly privileged know something they used to have has been stolen from them and assume, for some reason, that it involves Christ-ified consumerism.
As the tug of tinsel goes, so does U.S. politics, an unholy rabble bent on crucifying the truth. Objective information is beside the point. It all depends on what you wish for.
Once upon a time, Americans settled around the television to enjoy a white Christmas together. Nowadays, it seems, they are too entrenched on opposite sides of the “war on Christmas”, or commoditising it to oblivion, to remember Bing Crosby’s crooning. To say the US is a civilisation divided may strike some as an overstatement
For the most part, the country still speaks one language. Black and white, straight and gay, Jewish and Muslim all flock to the latest Star Wars movie. Interest in the Oscars and the Super Bowl obliterates sociological distinction. So too does fear of economic insecurity. These things unite most Americans.
Yet the things that divide the country are growing. If you listen to the Republican presidential debate, one message overrides all. Conservatives do not just disagree with President Barack Obama — they hate him profoundly. When asked if they would back a Donald Trump nomination, even the most moderate Republican says anyone would be better than this “feckless, weakling” president, to quote Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor.
Likewise, if you ask a liberal about today’s Republicans, it does not take long before the word “stupid” is used. People who support Mr Trump are idiots. People who oppose him must be snobs. The two sides neither speak to each other, nor obtain their “information” from the same outlets. Facts are what you feel comfortable believing. No one in your social group is likely to challenge you.
Is the idea of America as a republic of shared values under threat?•
If the recent Anne Case-Angus Deaton research is correct, America’s former middle class is dying, and not just metaphorically.
While other ethnic and racial groups are holding steady or making gains, caucasians in the U.S. are perishing in middle age at an increasingly alarming rate. Suicides have spiked as have overdoses. Why this ugly turn? Perhaps something to do with the financial collapse of 2008 and the very lopsided recovery? Maybe the decline of the white working class in a globalized, technologized world minus the safety net of unions and progressive taxes? Could it just be the cheaper “weapons” (e.g., opioids) at hand?
The findings show that two distinct but intertwined trends are driving America’s overdose epidemic: a 15-year increase in deaths from prescription opioid pain reliever overdoses as a result of misuse and abuse, and a recent surge in illicit drug overdoses driven mainly by heroin. Both of these trends worsened in 2014.
More than six out of 10 drug overdose deaths in 2014 involved opioids, including opioid pain relievers and heroin. The largest increase in opioid overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids (not including methadone), which were involved in 5,500 deaths in 2014, nearly twice as many as the year before. Many of these overdoses are believed to involve illicitly-made fentanyl, a short-acting opioid.
In addition, heroin-related death rates increased 26 percent from 2013–2014, totaling 10,574 deaths in 2014. Past misuse of prescription opioids is the strongest risk factor for heroin initiation and use—especially among people who became dependent upon or abused prescription opioids in the past year. The increased availability of heroin, its relatively low price (compared to prescription opioids), and high purity appear to be major drivers of the upward trend in heroin use, overdoses, and deaths.•
Russia in the time of Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities, is the strangest thing. A kleptocracy littered with petro-oligarchs and poisoned journalists, it’s hard to get to the truth even when everyone knows where it lies.
Even beyond the Kremlin, the deaths can be shockingly violent and the crimes baffling and awful. Case in point: the Bolshoi Ballet, that grand thing, became a lurid headline after a sulfuric acid attack on its artistic director, Sergei Filin, at the outset of 2013.
As HBO prepares to screen Bolshoi Babylon, the New York Times’ Gia Kourlas (an excellent person I worked with once) has scored an interview with the Bolshoi’s usually reticent longtime principal dancer, Maria Alexandrova. It speaks to the opaqueness of the company and the wider culture.
The opening:
New York Times:
Do you have much contact with Sergei Filin?
Maria Alexandrova:
We practically have no relationship. He just basically publishes on the board what performances he wants me to dance, and I dance them. We say hello to each other as civilized people, but we have no relationship whatsoever. I’m not outside his office begging for parts. He gives me the parts. I dance them. And what he gives me, I use the opportunity and what he doesn’t, I use that opportunity to be involved in other projects.
New York Times:
Was it like that before the acid attack too?
Maria Alexandrova:
Before that, when he was dancing, he was my main partner for eight years. [Nikolai] Tsiskaridze and Filin were my main two partners. You don’t necessarily have to love or hate someone; you just get on with it. There was no conflict. In Russian ballet, there are no easy people. We’re all difficult characters. Some are more intelligent and some are less intelligent, but you don’t have any people in Russian ballet who are angelic with easy characters. We live in a difficult country; we work in a difficult theater; we depend only on ourselves or you find whichever other way you want.
New York Times:
Within the Bolshoi, people took sides after the acid attack: Filin’s or Dmitrichenko’s? [The dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko was found guilty of arranging the attack and sentenced to five and a half years in prison.] Which were you on?
Maria Alexandrova:
I chose the theater. I chose my profession. The hardest thing is to explain to people within the company, yes, a terrible tragedy has happened, but it’s part of life, and we should not take sides and divide people between good and bad and black and white. That was always my position. We should think of our profession; we should think of our theater. Even now, I am absolutely deeply convinced that we still don’t know the truth of what really happened and why it happened.•
One of the most fun pieces ever from the old-school Holiday magazine centered on very far-flung travel. It was Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 prognosticationof Mars as residential address and pleasure destination. An excerpt:
So you’re going to Mars? That’s still quite an adventure—though I suppose that in another ten years no one will think twice about it. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the first ships reached Mars scarcely more than half a century ago, and that our settlement on the planet is less than thirty years old.
You’ve probably read all the forms and literature they gave you at the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs. But here are some additional pointers and background information that may make your trip more enjoyable. I won’t say it’s right up to date—things change so rapidly, and it’s a year since I got back from Mars myself—but on the whole you’ll find it pretty reliable.
Presumably you’re going just for curiosity and excitement; you want to see what life is like out on the new frontier. It’s only fair, therefore, to point out that must of your fellow passengers will he engineers, scientists or administrators traveling to Mars— some of them not for the first time—because they have a job to do. So whatever your achievements are here on Earth, it’s advisable not to talk too much about them, for you’ll be among people who’ve had to tackle much tougher problems.
If you haven’t booked your passage yet, remember that the cost of the ticket varies considerably according to the relative positions of Mars and Earth. That’s a complication we don’t have to worry about when we’re traveling from country to country on our own planet, but Mars can be seven times farther away at one time than at another. Oddly enough, the shortest trips are the most expensive, since they involve the greatest changes of speed as you hop from one orbit to the other. And in space, speed, not distance, is what costs money.
The most economical routes go halfway around the Sun and take eight months, but as no one wants to spend that long in space they’re used only by robot-piloted freighters. At the other extreme are the little super-speed mail ships, which sometimes do the trip in a month. The fastest liners take two or three times as long as this.
Whether you’re taking the bargain $30,000 round trip or one of the de luxe passages, I don’t know. But you must be O.S. physically. The physical strain involved in space flight is negligible, but you’ll be spending at least two months on the trip, and it would be a pity if your appendix started to misbehave.•
The trouble with everyone being connected and quantified isn’t only that we’re sharing, intentionally or otherwise, so much personal information, but also what that data can further reveal once algorithms have had their way with it. It’s like an inverse game of telephone in the Smartphone Age, the information becoming more precise as it travels.
The Wall Street Journalreports today that Silicon Valley lending startups are looking to base personal loan decisions on analyses of data from individuals’ phones. The apps running on a person’s device, entrepreneurs have found, “generate huge amounts of data — texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media posts, retail receipts, and so on — indicating thousands of subtle patterns of behavior that correlate with repayment or default.” How you use your phone reveals more than you think:
Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.
Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports on a new study published in Science that reveals how a person’s economic status can be determined through a fairly simple analysis of phone use. The researchers, working in Africa, collected details “about when calls were made and received and the length of the calls” as well as “when text messages were sent, and which cellphone towers the texts and calls were routed through.” They analyzed this metadata to “build an algorithm that predicts how wealthy or impoverished a given cellphone user is. Using the same model, the researchers were able to answer even more specific questions, like whether a household had electricity.”
I am not a number, you declare. I am more than a credit score. You may well be. But the tell-tale phone reveals more than one’s financial standing and trustworthiness.•
Sometimes simpler communications delivery systems can make for more complicated lives for the humans utilizing them. Case in point: baseball reportage. Just a few decades ago, during the Print Era, the information arrived at a glacial pace and was often outdated by the time you read it (e.g., Street & Smith’s annual baseball preview issue). The articles were longer and more contextualized, though it wasn’t perfect since narratives often disagreed with hidden data that had yet to revolutionize the sport. But the job seemed doable, if not easy.
Now Twitter and other channels of instant gratification rule the day, and those working in the industry need to become 24/7 insta-journalists, nearly as robotized and indefatigable as the software they work with. There are tremendous rewards for those who can keep up with the inhuman pace, but there are costs as well. It’s a harbinger, too, of the way many other sectors are developing. You don’t want to sink, but when you can never stop swimming your arms do get awfully tired.
In an insightful behind-the-scenes look at MLB’s recent Winter Meetings, Andy Martino of the New York Daily News writes of Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal, a Twitter monster who’s the reigning champ of baseball scoops, describing him as “usually winning but always anxious, forever pursuing the next victory.” For many, that’s the new normal.
An excerpt:
As much as any individual, Rosenthal, 53, is the exemplar of the methods and manners in which sports information is now disseminated — though he never expected to be anything of the sort. When he started covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1987, Rosenthal imagined a future at Sports Illustrated. He followed a trajectory familiar to talented sportswriters: He started out as a beat writer, became a columnist and got hired by a magazine, in his case the Sporting News. As the number of sports-focused TV outlets grew, he began making appearances. Early in the new century, Rosenthal realized that he had the contacts to begin breaking stories, and he decided to go for it. The news cycle was bending to new technology, and Rosenthal was connected enough to ride the wave. Now, he works on an endless hamster wheel for his 729,000 Twitter followers and millions of viewers, usually winning but always anxious, forever pursuing the next victory.
It is impossible to overstate the impact of Twitter on the baseball business, and not only for the fans and media. Just as execs work the reporters in the lobby, they sit in their Winter Meetings suites, monitoring Twitter. The Mets task a valued team official, Adam Fisher, the director of baseball operations, with watching social media, and relaying the news. Fisher, like Paul DePodesta, is a Harvard graduate with a dual background in scouting and analytics. He has vital responsibilities in both areas for the Mets. But social media is important, and part of Fisher’s job is to stay on top of it.
The first Twitterized Winter Meetings were in 2009, in Indianapolis. During the previous baseball season, beat reporters all over the country were experimenting with the medium, not realizing just how perfectly it would suit the winter months. Like many of us, Rosenthal resisted, preferring to publish full stories and columns on the Fox Sports website. But the creators of MLB Trade Rumors, a wildly successful site that aggregates baseball reporting, told him that he had to tweet to be credited.
“Basically, Trade Rumors said to me, ‘We can’t follow everybody on their website,’ ” Rosenthal says. “(Twitter) is how we follow people. If you want credit for your stories, this is how you’re going to have to do it. I was like, ‘Who are these guys to dictate to me?’ But they were right. I couldn’t argue it.”
The change brought consequences — and not all of them positive.•
Donald Trump, the pre-diabetic potentate of Apartheid America, is impressed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s rule has made his country stink worse than Lenin’s corpse. “At least he’s a leader,” says America’s aspiring flabby strongman, which is like saying that at least the captain of the Titanic was a “steerer.”
Scarborough pointed to Putin’s status as a notorious strongman.
“Well, I mean, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?” Scarborough asked.
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,” Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”
“But again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough said.
The Republican presidential front-runner said there was “a lot of killing going on” around the world and then suggested that Scarborough had asked him a different question.
“I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me [that] question, you asked me a different question. So that’s fine.”
Farhood Manjoo’s latest New York Times column, “In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers,” argues that the freestyle-chess approach of person-computer tandems tackling tasks (e.g. travel agent) is the best path forward. That’s probably a little too rosy a view.
In the short term and perhaps medium one that combination may be winning, but it also assumes that software won’t continue rapid improvement. The writer acknowledges the opaqueness of pricing that existed pre-smartphone, but seems too nostalgic to completely comprehend how much it bedeviled consumers. Companies that backpedal from a full-on software approach may reap benefits, but the question is for how long.
An excerpt:
Now, rather than consult an insurance agent, you simply search online. You never go into a bank —you just use the tireless A.T.M. — and at the supermarket, there are thoseself-checkout machines. You can buy stocks without a broker, you can publish a book without a publisher, you can sell a house without an agent and you can buy a car without a dealer. Slowly but surely, the robots seem to be replacing all the middlemen and turning the world into a self-serve society.
An economist would praise the great disintermediation for its efficiency. As a customer, you may have a different reaction: Look at all the work you’re now being asked to do. Was it really wise to get rid of all those human helpers?
In many cases, yes, but there remain vast realms of commerce in which guidance from a human expert works much better than a machine. Other than travel, consider the process of finding a handyman or plumber. The Internet has given us a wealth of data about these services. You could spend all day on Craigslist, Yelp or Angie’s List finding the best person for your job, which is precisely the problem.•
Genetic tests to screen individuals for a predisposition to obesity or cancer or some other health-threatening condition are a great thing, but they need to be uncoupled from workplaces. Companies can claim to remain unbiased toward workers who shows tendencies of poor future health, but insurance costs incentivize misuse of such information. Right now the costs of the tests make them a prime perk for employers to offer to those who voluntarily want subsidized lab work, but those prices shouldn’t remain prohibitive in the long run. Going forward, it’s more a question of what corporations will be legally allowed to require. I have a feeling, though, they’ll find out regardless.
The opening of Rachel Emma Silverman’s WSJ report:
Employers want workers to know what’s in their genes.
A handful of firms are offering employees free or subsidized tests for genetic markers associated with metabolism, weight gain and overeating, while companies such as Visa Inc., Slack Technologies Inc., Instacart Inc. recently began offering workers subsidized tests for genetic mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
The programs provide employees with potentially life-saving information and offer counseling and coaching to prevent health problems down the road, benefits managers say.
Screening for genetic markers linked to obesity is the latest front in companies’ war on workers’ weight woes.
Obesity-related conditions such as Type 2 diabetes comprise a large share of overall health-care costs, estimated to run more than $12,000 a worker this year, according to a recent survey from Towers Watsonand the National Business Group on Health.
TV has always been a box built to sell us things, no matter how the system is dressed up. Today’s next-level sets–and the even smarter ones of tomorrow–want to eavesdrop on and parse our living-room conversations for keywords to streamline the pitches, just like the Internet does. The hope is that this and other shared data enabled by the Internet of Things will lead to personalized ads that attract eyeballs. What’s inside our brains is valuable.
Set-top boxes are increasingly storing and sharing viewer data with advertisers. Broadcasters are gathering data on viewers when they sign up to their online players and services. ITV, which relaunched its online ITV player as ITV Hub in November, has more than 11 million registered users, for example. Channel 4 meanwhile replaced its 4OD platform with All4 in March. Users have to register their name, gender, date of birth and location; and the platforms also track which programmes they have watched and favourited. We might have thought we were the ones watching TV, but it turns out that the TV is now watching us.
Revolution will be televised
All this new information can be collated to create highly targeted and personalised adverts. Earlier this month, Channel 4 used the Future of TV Advertising conference in London to showcase the results of what it described as the “world’s first video ad personalisation”: its campaign to personalise Coke bottles in the summer of 2014.
The conference brought together senior advertising figures from around the world, including representatives from the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter. Two buzzwords crept into every session and lunch conversation: “addressable” and “programmatic”. Addressable advertising is about creating tailored adverts such as the Channel 4 examples from viewer information collated from set-top boxes, registration details, or cookie data from online search and shopping habits. Programmatic advertising is about automating the way in which ads like these are bought and sold. Together they are seen as a revolution in TV advertising.•
In a beauty of a Baffler piece, Tom Carson, great stylist of the Magazine Era, thinks the bejeezus out of the history of families depicted on American TV sitcoms, what they used to tell us about ourselves and what they do now. I’ve always believed the best of the form were the shows you could imagine recalibrated with just a few small adjustments into deep drama, and I don’t mean a laugh-track–less Lou Grant at 10pm but rather Ted Baxter recognizing the dark night of his soul at 3 o’clock in the morning.
In one segment, Carson brilliantly dissects a classic, The Honeymooners, perhaps the closest thing to Beckett’s existential endgames that ever aired on U.S. television, its restless characters repeatedly running headlong into dashed hopes, diverted from utter defeat only by a hasty kiss so that the whole nightmare could be prolonged, played out again next week at the same time, same channel. An excerpt:
In the 1950s and ’60s, TV’s view of family was strikingly at odds with its view of marriage, which by default (thanks to the period’s taboos) was also its view of sex.
Midway between August Strindberg for hockey fans and Ubu Roi relocated to Eisenhower-era Brooklyn, that astounding show The Honeymooners was all about frustration and hostility. It was also presciently pro-feminist in its lampooning of men as big babies whose idiot dreams spawned messes their tuckered-out better halves were forever cleaning up. At the time, the Kramdens’ and the Nortons’ more reactionary counterparts were the Ricardos and the Mertzes on I Love Lucy, whose title character may have set back women’s lib twenty years. Her crazed aspirations to some sort of identity separate from or equal to her husband’s were the chucklesome proof she was a delightful dunce. Not least because she was a genius at it, I’ve always loathed Lucille Ball for turning herself into male chauvinism’s answer to Stepin Fetchit, especially since—off camera—she was one of the shrewdest and most resolute women ever to conquer showbiz.
In both those shows and others like them, the point was that husbands and wives were antagonists. Their dueling worldviews—and, by implication, incompatible sexual agendas—were the source of the comic friction. In TV terms, marriage was the war and children were the armistice. (For I Love Lucy, Little Ricky’s birth was the equivalent of the Peace of Westphalia.) The Honeymooners, God love it, never went that route, staying true to its name; when you think about it, the only other American classic with a title as acrid is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. That your head would explode if you tried to imagine Ralph and Alice Kramden as parents, or even Ed and Trixie Norton welcoming a little future sewer worker, is backhanded testimony to how intransigent the show was.•
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