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“Opponents See The Birth Of A Neo-Dark Age”

December 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump promised during the election to do “unspeakable things” to terrorists, but the most dreadful of all might be what he does to American democracy. Many of his rallies seemed the night before Kristallnacht, with truth and decency only introduced to be mocked, sucker punched and desecrated. Who knows who may be harmed this time, but something awful seems ready to happen. A lot of evil has been unloosed, and some of the ones who helped free the demons are blissfully unaware. The others are overjoyed. America as a beacon for all, a land of liberty, may be a thing of the past.

Illiberal government’s ugly rise is far from just a U.S. issue. Two excerpts follow, one about our mess and another about a parallel travesty occurring in Europe.

The opening of Anthony Faiola’s excellent WaPo piece about Poland now being a state more driven by insanity than Solidarity: 

WARSAW — The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland.

Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.

In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.•

The opening of Paul Krugman’s NYT op-ed “How Republics End,” which examines parallels between the fall of Rome and America’s potential faceplant:

Consider what just happened in North Carolina. The voters made a clear choice, electing a Democratic governor. The Republican legislature didn’t openly overturn the result — not this time, anyway — but it effectively stripped the governor’s office of power, ensuring that the will of the voters wouldn’t actually matter.

Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.

Why is this happening? I’m not asking why white working-class voters support politicians whose policies will hurt them — I’ll be coming back to that issue in future columns. My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”

So what’s driving this story?•

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“Assassinations Provide Opportunities And Occasions For Wars; They Do Not Cause Them”

December 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Few Americans have distinguished themselves in the aftermath of the election as has David Frum, the erstwhile Dubya speechwriter who’s become a post-partisan truth-teller, history professor and, perhaps, self-designated mourner. It seems all his education, employment and life experience prepared him for this moment which he clearly hoped would never arrive.

The nation’s best-case scenario is a cast of brand-name robber barons fully strip struggling Americans, eventually redirecting the nation’s teeming anger at a foreign enemy (real or imagined) after the check bounces. The worst case is that 240 years of American democracy ends ignominiously, World War II and the Cold War lost retroactively, with a Berlusconi who aspires to be a Mussolini now destabilizing any institutions than can counter his whims with laws or reason.

Trump is aided by wingnuts and political opportunists of all manner, who go along with him to get something out of him. Does anyone think Steve Bannon or Mitch McConnell care more for the Constitution than they do for power? It’s the perfect storm, and a deathly chill comes at us sideways.

In his latest Atlantic piece, Frum writes wisely of today’s shocking assassination of Russian diplomat Andrey G. Karlov in Ankara, arguing that political killings aren’t motivations for war but rather justifications. Putin and Erdogan may not militarize the moment, but Trump might not pass on such a future opportunity.

An excerpt:

Assassinations provide opportunities and occasions for wars; they do not cause them.

Consider an even grimmer example.

The murderer of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey has been described in some reports as motivated by rage against Russian atrocities in Syria. His act may summon to memory the example of Herschel Grynszan, a young Jew who tried to avenge the sufferings of his family at Nazi hands by killing a German diplomat in Paris on November 7, 1938. Hitler seized upon the killing as his excuse for the rampage we know as Kristallnacht.

Yet when a Jewish student killed the leader of the Swiss Nazi party in February 1936, Hitler did nothing. Germany had secured the 1936 Olympic games before Hitler’s rise to power, and there was much agitation that year to rescind the award to protest Nazi anti-Semitism. Determined to maintain domestic quiet, Hitler let the death of Wilhelm Gustloff vanish into historical obscurity. (His killer, originally from Croatia, survived the Second World War in a Swiss prison.)

Even Hitler used outrages for his own ends, rather than being motivated by them.

Will today’s crime spark conflict between Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey? Only if those two authoritarian rulers want trouble.•

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“He Claimed That A Small Part Of Every Human Being Longs To Burn It All Down”

December 19, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

In 2011, I quoted something from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels:

The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah, I guess I am,” said one. “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.”

It’s an odd outcome because the Angels emerged from America’s great triumph in World War II, as it and other motorcycle gangs were formed from the wanderlust of our war vets. But the love of the road turned into hatred for the self, and then, the other.

Five years ago when I published that excerpt, I was more concerned about militias and a scary strain of right-wing backlash that seemed awakened by the election of our first African-American President and gains made by women and other minorities. I never expected those on the fringes to make such gains on the center–to win it. And I’m not exactly someone who spends my idle time at Berkeley cocktail parties.

The ones who wanted to make America white again formed a faction with those who felt adrift in the modern economy, with its wealth inequality and bruising technological shift. The latter group had always looked on others as the “losers” and didn’t want to join them, even if the scoreboard said they already had. Together the haters and the backsliders made a hell of a scene in 2016.

From Susan McWilliams’ Nation piece about Thompson forecasting the rise of Trumpism:

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter.•

Sonny Barger terrorizes Thompson in 1967 on Canadian TV.

Ad for Hunter S. Thompson’s campaign for Sheriff of Aspen in 1970.

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“Those Who Receive Good Livings Are Those Who Are Lucky“

December 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some of the resistance by white working-class citizens to Obamacare, even by those who most in need of it, like Kentuckians, was directed at the Medicaid portion of the law. The reasoning: We deserve healthcare, but they don’t. 

That rejection, if you looked not far below the surface, was sometimes steeped in racist stereotyping. If you exist within seeing people of color as living in “ghettos” as our President-Elect does, it would be easy to make such a mistake, even if the Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers scream otherwise. Post-election, many of these same Trump supporters who worried about “freeloaders” are realizing they may lose not only the ACA but perhaps also the safety net of Medicare. The fingers they pointed at others now point back at them.

Part of the problem is that no one really deserves much of anything. I mean, we all do in a bigger sense, of course, but not so much as individuals living in a capitalistic society in the Digital Age. How do we reconcile our economic system with one that may become highly automated? In such a new normal, workers would be less necessary than ever.

Technology has amped up the culture in myriad ways and entire industries can now rise and fall within a stingy time frame. There was never a more profitable period in the history of recorded music than during the brief, wonderful life of Compact Discs, but the whole format was essentially worthless after just two decades. Twenty years may seem a long shelf life for industries (and the communities and regions built on them) in the near future. All that coming and going will likely leave many of us neither here nor there. It’s not an attractive scenario unless you fancy a future as an Okie with an smartphone. 

A recent post by economist Brad DeLong drops truth bombs about our economic system and suggests non-UBI prescriptions for devastated Rust Belt areas. An excerpt:

In a world–like the one we live in–of mammoth increasing returns to unowned knowledge and to networks, no individual and no community is especially valuable. Those who receive good livings are those who are lucky–as Carrier’s workers in Indiana have been lucky in living near Carrier’s initial location. It’s not that their contribution to society is large or that their luck is replicable: if it were, they would not care (much) about the departure of Carrier because there would be another productive network that they could fit into a slot in.

All of this “what you deserve” language is tied up with some vague idea that you deserve what you contribute–that what your work adds to the pool of society’s resources is what you deserve.

This illusion is punctured by any recognition that there is a large societal dividend to be distributed, and that the government can distribute it by supplementing (inadequate) market wages determined by your (low) societal marginal product, or by explicitly providing income support or services unconnected with work via social insurance. Instead, the government is supposed to, somehow, via clever redistribution, rearrange the pattern of market power in the economy so that the increasing-returns knowledge- and network-based societal dividend is predistributed in a relatively egalitarian way so that everybody can pretend that their income is just “to each according to his work,” and that they are not heirs and heiresses coupon clipping off of the societal capital of our predecessors’ accumulated knowledge and networks.

On top of this we add: Polanyian disruption of patterns of life–local communities, income levels, industrial specialization–that you believed you had a right to obtain or maintain, and a right to believe that you deserve. But in a market capitalist society, nobody has a right to the preservation of their local communities, to their income levels, or to an occupation in their industrial specialization. In a market capitalist society, those survive only if they pass a market profitability test. And so the only rights that matter are those property rights that at the moment carry with them market power–the combination of the (almost inevitably low) marginal societal products of your skills and the resources you own, plus the (sometimes high) market power that those resources grant to you.

This wish to believe that you are not a moocher is what keeps people from seeing issues of distribution and allocation clearly–and generates hostility to social insurance and to wage supplement policies, for they rip the veil off of the idea that you deserve to be highly paid because you are worth it. You aren’t.•

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“This Is Not A Joke”

December 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I haven’t read Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in forever, but if memory serves, this treatise on media and politics as entertainment is more relevant than ever right now. It was composed when the Oval Office was occupied by a B-grade film star but one with serious experience in governance, and since then the sideshow has been fully relocated to the center ring. First the Kardashians took Hollywood, then the Trumps did the same to Washington.

Handing the keys to America to Donald Trump, a Simon Cowell-ish strongman who believes he can run foreign policy the way John Gotti ran Queens, was exceedingly dumb. Chechnya apparently grew jealous. The state hasn’t selected a Reality TV star to run the whole show, but they did use Komanda, an Apprentice-like program, to pick a strategic adviser to the Putin-approved warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. It’s a stunt, but some stunts are dangerous. Perhaps there are certain jobs better left in the hands of professionals?

Eva Hartog of the Moscow Times conducted a smart interview with the “winner,” Filip Varychenko, whom the show described, accurately or not, as a “24-year-old millionaire from Dusseldorf who grew tired of European comforts.” He seems an amiable fellow who’s either blissfully ignorant of the deeds of the dictator he now works for or is wisely pretending to be. An excerpt:

Question:

How did you end up on the show?

Filip Varychenko:

I was working at a multinational company in Germany — I’d rather not say which one — working together with the chairman of the board to develop the business worldwide. It was really fun and interesting; I was traveling a lot. But I wanted to do something more meaningful.

I was looking for a position in the Russian government, but after some research I realized that it’s actually really difficult to get in. It seemed impossible.

Then I read an article online about Kadyrov’s new show. I actually thought it was a joke at first, but I applied anyway.

After a phone interview with the producers they invited me to a casting in Moscow several weeks later. I didn’t believe it was real, so I literally bought my ticket 24 hours beforehand, thinking it was the weekend and if I didn’t like it, I could just leave.

When I got there, I was really surprised to see so many people: men in their 40s and 50s, wearing suits, really professional looking-business people. I was the last person to audition and had to wait eight hours for my turn. But then I got my “golden ticket” — they said: you’re in, you’re going.

Question:

Why did you have to run up mountains, wade through rivers etc.? Why was that necessary for the position of “strategic advisor?” Or was that just for the television?

Filip Varychenko:

You have to understand: this is not a joke. What you saw was only half of how [Kadyrov’s government] really works: they work 30 hours, no, 100 hours per day. And Kadyrov works even more! I don’t know when he sleeps. I’ve never ever caught him sleeping.

There is no day or night, there is just work time. So you have to be ready. They say that if you have a strong spirit, you have to have a strong body.•

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“Ronald Reagan Would Roll Over In His Grave”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave,” President Obama said of the rising number of Republicans friending the thuggish Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, who was encouraged to hack the nation’s elections by the orange supremacist who’s to be our next Commander-in-Chief.

The struggle for power usually conducts a stress test on the avowed moral center of many, and this campaign season was no exception. Evangelicals had to kneel, genuflect and do cartwheels to support a braggadocious serial groom and sexual predator who is far more concerned with a piece of tail than the Lamb of God. Trump would be hard pressed to recite the Ten Commandments, even the many he’s broken. If there’s no fealty to deity let along decency among many in this voting bloc, than what exactly did they see in Trump that was appealing? Was it the Make America White Again message? Was it something else?

Pat Buchanan backed Trump from early on which might seem appropriate since he’s a scapegoating isolationist who is the President-Elect’s most precise political ancestor. But there’s a catch. Buchanan has for decades been an apologist for Senator Joseph McCarthy, the deeply damaged inquisitor who lorded over the House Un-American Activities Committee interrogations of those he accused of having secret communist ties. They were allies of the Soviets and traitors to America, he charged, as he ruined one life after another, because our nation’s sovereignty was supposedly at risk. Funny that Buchanan ended up such an ardent admirer of Trump, who was not at all clandestine in imploring Putin to undermine America’s Presidential election and has stocked his proposed cabinet with allies of the autocrat.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but who would have thought Buchanan would end up sleeping in Lenin’s Tomb?

From Jacob Weisberg’s 1996 New Republic Buchanan profile:

Buchanan’s politics has its roots in the 1930s isolationism of Father Charles E. Coughlin and Charles A. Lindbergh. The hallmarks of this tradition are a fierce and unselective anti-communism, an animosity toward Britain, and an eccentric obsession with the menace of “Jewish internationalism.” Buchanan’s earliest syndicated columns echo these obsessions. In 1975 he attacked the infamous United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. But he laid some of the blame at the door of “Western intellectuals and internationalists, many of them Jews.” The fault was partly theirs, he wrote, because Jews supported the idea of the U.N. in the first place. Attempting to draw out this supposed irony in another piece, he blasted “the American intelligentsia, a significant slice of which is Jewish and avidly pro-Israel.” This echoes Coughlin, in whose lexicon “intellectual” and “internationalist” were not only cusswords but also synonyms both for Jews and for secular liberals.

Buchanan absorbed this view while being “raised Catholic,” as he puts it, in Washington in the 1940s and ’50s. “My father’s sympathies had been with the isolationists, with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee,” Buchanan writes in the first chapter of his 1988 autobiography, Right from the Beginning. By the time he had reached political consciousness, he identified with his father’s heroes: Franco, Douglas MacArthur, and Joe McCarthy.

What the Buchanans admired about these men was their pugnacity and their loyalty to their causes. Patrick’s father taught his sons to fight and encouraged them to do so. The boys were beaten if they didn’t practice “hitting the bag” often enough. “Whenever we were arrested for fighting or came home bloodied, we were not punished by my parents, so long as we had fought fairly. Pop was usually more interested in how well we had done,” Buchanan writes. Much of his memoir is a gleeful recounting of brawls, including ones in which he and his brother Hank ganged up on single victims, or “sucker punched” guys who deserved it. The book is suffused with a thug’s love for combat, which metamorphosed into verbal violence sometime after Buchanan graduated from Georgetown, a year late as a result of mixing it up with two policemen trying to give him a ticket. McCarthy, Buchanan writes, “was cheered because for four years he was daily kicking the living hell out of people most Americans concluded ought to have the living hell kicked out of them.”•

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“Trolls Are Also Distinguished From Their Predecessors By Seeming Not To Recognize Any Limits”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink


The problem with anarchy is that it has a tendency to get out of control.

In 2013, Eric Schmidt, the most perplexing of Googlers, wrote (along with Jared Cohen) the truest thing about our newly connected age: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.”

Yes, indeed.

California was once a wild, untamed plot of land, and when people initially flooded the zone, it was exciting if harsh. But then, soon enough: the crowds, the pollution, the Adam Sandler films. The Golden State became civilized with laws and regulations and taxes, which was a trade-off but one that established order and security. The Web has been commodified but never been truly domesticated, so while the rules don’t apply it still contains all the smog and noise of the developed world. Like Los Angeles without the traffic lights.

Our new abnormal has played out for both better and worse. The fan triumphed over the professional, a mixed development that, yes, spread greater democracy on a surface level, but also left truth attenuated. Into this unfiltered, post-fact, indecent swamp slithered the troll, that witless, cowardly insult comic.

The biggest troll of them all, Donald Trump, the racist opportunist who stalked our first African-American President demanding his birth certificate, is succeeding Obama in the Oval Office, which is terrible for the country if perfectly logical for the age. His Lampanelli-Mussolini campaign also emboldened all manner of KKK 2.0, manosphere and alt-right detritus in their own trolling, as they used social media to spread a discombobulating disinformation meant to confuse and distract so hate could take root and grow. No water needed; bile would do.

In the wonderfully written essay “Schadenfreude with Bite,” Richard Seymour analyzes the discomfiting age of the troll. An excerpt:

The controlled cruelty of the wind-up didn’t need trolls to invent it. In the pre-internet era, it perhaps seemed more innocent: Candid Camera; Jeremy Beadle duping a hapless member of the public. The ungovernable rage of the unwitting victim is always funny to someone, and invariably there is sadistic detachment in the amusement. The trolls’ innovation has been to add a delight in nonsense and detritus: calculated illogicality, deliberate misspellings, an ironic recycling of cultural nostalgia, sedimented layers of opaque references and in-jokes. Trolling, as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall.

Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to continue, the joke has to stop, and the victim be let in on the laughter. Trolls, though, form a community precisely around the extension of their transgressive sadism beyond the limits of their offline personas. That the community consists almost entirely of people with no identifying characteristics – ‘anons’ – is part of the point. It is as if the laughter of the individual troll were secondary; the primary goal is to sustain the pleasure of the anonymous collective.

*

For most organised trolls, having an explicit political affiliation or moral cause goes against the basic principle that commitment to anything other than the lulz is suspect. However, for ‘gendertrolls’, a term coined by Karla Mantilla, the objective is clamorously counter-feminist. It is to silence publicly vocal women by swarm-like harassment, misogynistic insults (such epithets as ‘cunt’ and ‘whore’), ‘doxxing’ (exposing the details of someone’s offline life), and threats of rape and murder. As Mantilla sees it, there is nothing unique about this behaviour: it isn’t ‘about the internet’, but a continuation of the ‘long history of men harassing and denigrating women as a means of trying to drive out potential competitors’. It is a ‘mass cultural response to women asserting themselves [in] previously male-dominated areas’.

The new inflection that the internet appears to make possible is the trolls’ disavowal of moral commitment, which depends on a strict demarcation between the ‘real’ offline self, and online anonymity. I am not what I do, as long as I do it online.•

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“We Shouldn’t Try And Protect Jobs; We Should Protect Workers”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Less than 10% of U.S. jobs now reside in manufacturing, but the continued erosion of that sector has sent a shock to our system. No amount of Carrier deals, both economically and politically dubious, will make America manufacture again, and things could get far more shocking if other areas of employment quickly disappear into the zeros and ones.

For instance: What if the more plentiful positions in service, which seem particularly prone to automation, should begin to quickly vanish? In a smart Quartz Q&A conducted by Eshe Nelson, economist Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence, warns that globalization’s most profound disruption is imminent and no legislation will likely be able to prevent its arrival (and we’d be injured in other ways even if it could).

To mitigate the downside, Baldwin suggests “we have to look for inspiration from northern European countries who have comprehensive retraining, help with housing, help with relocation.” It’s a tall order, but shortcuts likely won’t do.

An excerpt:

Question: 

What about Donald Trump’s promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs? He made a deal to keep nearly 1,000 jobs at the Carrier gas-furnace factory by offering a big tax break.

Richard Baldwin: 

We shouldn’t try and protect jobs; we should protect workers. It’s really a fool’s errand to struggle with because after a year or two those jobs will still go. Either they will be replaced by robots or they’ll move to Mexico or China. If Carrier becomes inefficient from being forced to stay in the US, its business will go to competitors in Japan or Germany.

Question: 

So even if we put up trade barriers, the jobs we protect will be for robots, not people? 

Richard Baldwin:

Absolutely. There are jobs for people, even in manufacturing these days, but not for the low-skilled people who have been dispossessed by this. Their jobs were routine and the easiest to replace with automation. The first thing to do is accept the 21st–century reality that no matter what you do, these jobs aren’t coming back.

Question: 

An important aspect of your book is that we still have the so-called third phase of globalization to come, which will drive down the cost of moving people.

Richard Baldwin: 

There are two technologies that are key: telepresence and telerobotics. They exist but are expensive and clunky. Telepresence is half of a table with life-size screens, good light, lots of cameras, and microphones. Then the other half of the table is somewhere else. When people sit at the table you have a very strong impression that they are in the same room.

Question: 
 

So the “movement” of people is not physical?

Richard Baldwin:

It’s a substitute for being there. It’s Skype that’s really, really good.

The second is telerobotics. There are a couple of well-known ones. One is the surgeon operating at a 100-kilometer distance from the patient. But you can imagine that hotel rooms in London could be cleaned by people driving robots sitting in Kenya or Buenos Aires or wherever, for a tenth of the cost here. That’s coming, and it will be very disruptive.

Question:  

What happens to the chart on global income distribution during this phase of globalization?

Richard Baldwin:

It keeps going down.•

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“The Ability To Talk To Your Room Is Effortlessly Convenient”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Surveillance Capitalism is the wave of the future, we’re told, but it could more accurately be called Ambient Capitalism.

To me, surveillance suggests pursuit, a sort of cat-and-mouse game. But more and more we won’t make a squeak as we rest snugly in the pocket of new technologies trying to divine our preferences. As these algorithms quietly do their calculating in living rooms and supermarkets, we’ll hardly know they’re there, anticipating the needs we never knew we had, erasing the lines between private and public. It will be the final shift from a world in which we were primarily citizens to one where we’re chiefly consumers. We’ll have fully been eased inside the machine.

From  Sarah Buhr at TechCrunch:

The Wynn Las Vegas hotel is adding an Amazon Echo to every one of its 4,748 rooms. A first for a hotel to do and a great way to market both the hotel and the Echo device.

However, it also means, should you stay there, you’ll have a built-in surveillance device potentially listening in on all your conversations whenever you are in the room. Call me crazy but there might be a few guests who don’t want Amazon listening in on their wild Vegas weekend.

The irony is sweet, given Wynn Resorts Steve Wynn’s press statement on why he chose to add an Echo to every room:

“If I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa. The ability to talk to your room is effortlessly convenient,” Wynn stated.

But with all that chatter comes Alexa’s ability to upload what you are saying to the cloud. Echo has a listening component that is activated simply by speaking out loud, making it the perfect spy device — not only for Amazon marketing purposes but also for hackers and the government to get information about you without your permission.•

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“He Believed Silicon Valley Technologists Were The Brightest And Best Americans. He Was Wrong.”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ever since Apple’s “Think Different” ad in 1997, the one in which Steve jobs used Gandhi’s image to sell marked-up consumer electronics made by sweatshop labor, Silicon Valley business titans have been celebrated the way astronauts used to be. Jobs, who took credit for that advertising campaign which someone else created, specifically wondered why we put on a pedestal those who voyage into space when he and his clever friends were changing the world–or something–with their gadgets. He believed technologists were the best and brightest Americans. He was wrong.

Some of the Valley’s biggest names filed dourly into Trump Tower yesterday in a sort of reverse perp walk. It was the same, sad spectacle of Al Gore’s pilgrimage, which was answered with Scott Pruitt, climate-change denier, being chosen EPA Chief. Perhaps they made the trek on some sort of utilitarian impulse, but I would guess there was also some element of self-preservation, not an unheard of sense of compromise for those who see their corporations as if they were countries, not only because of their elephantine “GDPs,” but also because of how they view themselves. I don’t think they’re all Peter Thiel, an emotional leper and intellectual fraud who now gets to play out his remarkably stupid theories in a large-scale manner. I’ve joked that Thiel has a moral blind spot reminiscent of Hitler’s secretary, but the truth is probably far darker. 

What would have been far more impressive would have been if Musk, Cook, Page, Sandberg, Bezos and the rest stopped downstairs in front of the building and read a statement saying that while they would love to aid any U.S. President, they could not in this case because the President-Elect has displayed vicious xenophobia, misogyny and callous disregard for non-white people throughout the campaign and in the election’s aftermath. He’s shown totalitarian impulses and has disdain for the checks and balances that make the U.S. a free country. In fact, with his bullying nastiness he continues to double down on his prejudices, which has been made very clear by not only his words but through his cabinet appointments. They could have stated their dream for the future doesn’t involve using Big Data to spy on Muslims and Mexicans or programming 3D printers to build internment camps on Mars. They might have noted that Steve Bannon, whom Trump chose as his Chef Strategist, just recently said that there were too many Asian CEOs in Silicon alley, revealing his white-nationalistic ugliness yet again. They could have refused to normalize Trump’s odious vision. They could have taken a stand.

They didn’t because they’re not our absolute finest citizens. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who understand the essence of the nation in a way the tech billionaires do not, more truly represent us at our most excellent. They possess a wisdom and moral courage that’s as necessary to us as the Constitution itself. The Silicon Valley folks lack these essential qualities, and without them, you can’t be called our best and brightest.•

“The Future Of Incarceration Is To Not Be Called Incarceration”

December 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Why put more police on the streets when we can turn all of America into a police state? We can all do time together. Build walls, create ethnic registries, neutralize any part of the press that might raise a hackle about our new demagogic abnormal. Make the whole thing a prison, especially for the non-white among us. That seems to be the mentality of the moment.

If we survive this stupid, scary era and someday find our better angels, prison reform, a surprisingly bipartisan topic, needs to be taken seriously, with mentally ill people placed in proper facilities rather than warehoused behind bars, and drug use decriminalized even if it’s not fully legalized. Whether or not the U.S. takes this necessary leap, other nations surely will. 

John Surico’s smart Vice article “What Will the Future of Incarceration Look Like?” explores the noble, common-sense fixes proposed by the “Reimagining Prison” initiative. An excerpt:

Mentally-ill inmates not only take up a good chunk of who’s behind bars in this country, but also provide serious challenges when it comes to staff unequipped for the challenge

The outgoing sheriff Michael J. Ashe Jr., who oversees the county jail in Hampden County, in Massachusetts, is considered to be a pioneer in this field—someone who witnessed massive incarceration growth throughout his time there, since he started in 1974. He reacted with measures that are just now becoming the mainstream, like stress rehabilitation, college-level classes, and required hours of rehabilitation, or vocational training.

“As state hospitals continue to close—and even though we still have some of the best mental health hospitals in the world—the last place these individuals need to be is in a correctional facility,” Ashe told the room. “So I really feel these things will need to be addressed in the years ahead.”

For guidance on what is, perhaps, the best way to punish, Baz Dreisinger traveled around the world to see, and maybe even learn from, how other countries treat their prison populations. Her journey resulted in a book, Incarcerated Nations, which sheds light on the philosophy behind American incarceration and how it stands apart globally.

In Singapore, Dreisinger, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said there’s an ad campaign aimed at hiring formerly incarcerated individuals, sort of like a “ban-the-box” promotional. In Norway, she added, one of the prisons actually seems more like a cattle farm, with open space and no bars. And in South Africa, she attended a restorative justice seminar in a prison that is considered to be one of its nastiest.

“The future of incarceration is to not be called incarceration,” she told me after the panel. “I think what I wanted to emphasize is that it’s about reenvisioning and reimagining justice.”

“So for me, the future has little to do with prisons—the word ‘incarceration’ itself, and the space we’re standing in,” she continued. “So I envision a system that is grounded in community courts, reparative systems, truth and reconciliation commissions, and ‘facilities,’ insofar as absolutely necessary, which is always involving a really small number of people.”•

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“There’s No Other Way To Explain Obama’s Inability To Imagine This Nation Could Elect Donald Trump”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Hope is usually audacious but sometimes misplaced.

Without that feeling of expectation in a country founded on white supremacy that has never erased institutional racism, Barack Hussein Obama would certainly have never been elected President of the United States, not once, let alone twice. But his hope has also served as an escape hatch for white Americans who wanted to not only ignore the past but also the present. By stressing the best in us, Obama overlooked the worst of us, and that worst has never gone away.

It’s doubtful he behaved this way merely due to political opportunism: Obama seems a true believer in America and the ideals it espouses but has never lived up to. I love him and Michelle and think they’re wonderful people, but the nation has never been as good as they are, and even on a hopeful day I’m unsure we even aspire to be.

From “The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America,” a painfully true Atlantic essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The black president that Ta-Nehisi Coates describes is one who thinks he could have ever really “embraced” or “chosen” blackness. He seems to truly believe that he exercised some great act of charity and agency in adopting black cool. My first black president seems to think that he can raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the world that keeps his brothers in bad jobs, poor neighborhoods, bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

There’s no other way to explain Obama’s inability to imagine this nation could elect Donald Trump. Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. Even after Donald Trump was elected, Obama told Coates that all is not lost. He is still hopeful about the soul of white America. He said nothing about the soul of black America. That is where my hope resides. It is where my faith has always resided.•

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“We’ve Been Having A Kind Of Mars Moment Lately”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The recently departed John Glenn worried about war being waged in outer space, and wherever humans go, chaos, as well as creativity, will surely follow. While Elon Musk has unilaterally decided that direct democracy will govern Mars (and, hey, how nice for him!), we’ll also launch far less savory arrangements into the stratosphere.

In the Trump years, if awful priorities and utter incompetence don’t ground our further forays into the final frontier–sadly, that’s the most likely outcome–you may see beauty pageants on Mars, Saturn’s rings dipped in cheap gold paint and low-gravity golf courses on the moon, where everyone can drive the ball like the pre-Calligula Tiger Woods.

Actually, voyaging into space may become more necessary than ever if, say, you want to flee a nuclear war with China or escape a fossil-fuel dystopia dotted with internment camps. Just thinking out loud here.

The New York Times has a thoughtful consideration of the nebulous state of NASA in the time of Trump, which was written by Dennis Overbye, whose smart, graceful articles about space exploration I’ve been reading since I was a kid. Now we’re both old, and I mostly blame him. The opening:

Two weeks after a presidential election that could have vaulted him to the head of NASA, John Grunsfeld reached across his peanut curry at a small restaurant on the Far West Side of Manhattan, grabbed my notebook and sketched out a plan for a trip to Mars.

Dr. Grunsfeld, astronomer, astronaut, and former associate administrator of NASA, was in town to promote a National Geographic TV series about Martian exploration. On his shirt was a picture of a space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope.

We’ve been having a kind of Mars moment lately. Audiences filled theaters last year to watch Matt Damon as The Martian. Personalities as diverse as President Obama and Elon Musk have declared the Red Planet the next great destination.

In the days leading up the election, Dr. Grunsfeld said, NASA was thinking about a Mars mission to get ready for the transition. He himself was rumored to be on the short list to run the space agency should Hillary Clinton have won.

“NASA has never had a scientist as administrator; you and I would have had fun,” he said.

Now, nobody knows where NASA’s rockets are going on their biblical smoke pillars. Donald J. Trump’s one mention of the space program during his campaign was to tell a kid that potholes on Earth need fixing first.•

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“How Long Will It Be Before You, Too, Lose Your Job To A Computer?”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s not a sure thing automation permanently obviates a wide swath of human workers, sending most of us to the exit or the dustbin. Perhaps it’s not different this time than it was during the Industrial Age, with machines relieving us of our jobs and new and better ones emerging in their stead. 

The pace of epochal change matters greatly. For instance: Driverless capability may not be hugely damaging if it becomes widespread in five decades but is probably a real threat should that time frame be adjusted down to 20 years. No one has yet developed a suitable Plan B if too many positions disappear too rapidly or if enough new work doesn’t develop.

Not all labor has to be disappeared for society to capsize. Only enough citizens have to be directly disrupted for all of us to feel the ramifications. As we’ve seen with manufacturing and will likely soon witness in the service, transportation and delivery sectors, among others, just enough pieces of the foundation need fall away for desperation to take hold.

Complicating matters, today’s technologists aren’t working on half-measures, not the way banks wanted to keep tellers as they added ATMs. Jeff Bezos wants supermarkets 100% free of cashiers, and Tesla and Google and Uber want cars that commandeer the wheel completely.

That could lead to an even greater race to the bottom. More McJobs done by yesterday’s high school juniors being handled by today’s senior citizens–until those positions too are decimated. Bellhops and truckers won’t all be able to be uniformly upskilled overnight, and they aren’t points on a flow chart but people who need to feed their families. 

MIT’s David Autor has said that the problem of mass automation would be “one of distribution, not of scarcity.” True enough, but that’s no small problem.

Two excerpts follow from two smart articles on the topic, one that sees the Google Glass as half-full and another which does not.

The opening of Chris Mims’ WSJ piece “Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs“:

Since the 1970s, when automated teller machines arrived, the number of bank tellers in America has more than doubled. James Bessen, an economist who teaches at Boston University School of Law, points to that seeming paradox amid new concerns that automation is “stealing” human jobs. To the contrary, he says, jobs and automation often grow hand in hand.

Sometimes, of course, machines really do replace humans, as in agriculture and manufacturing, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor in a succinct and illuminating TED talk, which could have served as the headline for this column. Across an entire economy, however, Dr. Autor says that’s never happened.

The threat that machines pose to workers is in the news again, after an election that turned on the frustration of working-class voters. Last week, Amazon.com Inc. introduced Amazon Go, a store without cashiers.

Three days later, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Andy Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants Holdings Inc., the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. chains, to be secretary of labor. Mr. Puzder has said that self-serve ordering kiosks, like those recently unveiled by McDonald’s Corp., will help his company eliminate workers.

Such developments are worrying. But a long trail of empirical evidence shows that the increased productivity brought about by automation and invention ultimately leads to more wealth, cheaper goods, increased consumer spending power and ultimately, more jobs.•

From Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece “Our Automated Future“:

How long will it be before you, too, lose your job to a computer? This question is taken up by a number of recent books, with titles that read like variations on a theme: The Industries of the Future, The Future of the Professions, Inventing the Future. Although the authors of these works are employed in disparate fields—law, finance, political theory—they arrive at more or less the same conclusion. How long? Not long.

“Could another person learn to do your job by studying a detailed record of everything you’ve done in the past?” Martin Ford, a software developer, asks early on in Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books). “Or could someone become proficient by repeating the tasks you’ve already completed, in the way that a student might take practice tests to prepare for an exam? If so, then there’s a good chance that an algorithm may someday be able to learn to do much, or all, of your job.”

Later, Ford notes, “A computer doesn’t need to replicate the entire spectrum of your intellectual capability in order to displace you from your job; it only needs to do the specific things you are paid to do.” He cites a 2013 study by researchers at Oxford, which concluded that nearly half of all occupations in the United States are “potentially automatable,” perhaps within “a decade or two.” (“Even the work of software engineers may soon largely be computerisable,” the study observed. )

The “threat of a jobless future” is, of course, an old one, almost as old as technology. The first, rudimentary knitting machine, known as a “stocking frame,” was invented in the late sixteenth century by a clergyman named William Lee. Seeking a patent for his invention, Lee demonstrated the machine for Elizabeth I. Concerned about throwing hand-knitters out of work, she refused to grant one. In the early nineteenth century, a more sophisticated version of the stocking frame became the focus of the Luddites’ rage; in towns like Liversedge and Middleton, in northern England, textile mills were looted. Parliament responded by declaring “frame breaking” a capital offense, and the machines kept coming. Each new technology displaced a new cast of workers: first knitters, then farmers, then machinists. The world as we know it today is a product of these successive waves of displacement, and of the social and artistic movements they inspired: Romanticism, socialism, progressivism, Communism.

Meanwhile, the global economy kept growing, in large part because of the new machines. As one occupation vanished, another came into being. Employment migrated from farms and mills to factories and offices to cubicles and call centers.

Economic history suggests that this basic pattern will continue, and that the jobs eliminated by Watson and his ilk will be balanced by those created in enterprises yet to be imagined—but not without a good deal of suffering. If nearly half the occupations in the U.S. are “potentially automatable,” and if this could play out within “a decade or two,” then we are looking at economic disruption on an unparalleled scale. Picture the entire Industrial Revolution compressed into the life span of a beagle.

And that’s assuming history repeats itself. What if it doesn’t? What if the jobs of the future are also potentially automatable?♦

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“The Political Upheavals Of 2016 Have Forced Economists To Reconsider”

December 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What is the best way to treat the inequities of globalization and technological disruption? Universal Basic Income and government spending on education are often suggested as panaceas, even if neither seems very likely to triumph in America, where the political will is lacking. And let’s not forget that UBI programs are not all created equally. Some are downright pernicious. In general, investment in education pays myriad dividends, though should enough lower-skill postions rapidly disappear, it will be be impossible to quickly upskill everyone from a blue collar to a white one.

In a Financial Times column, Gavyn Davies writes about the “losers of globalization” and the challenge of finding a way up for those pushed out. An excerpt:

The political upheavals of 2016 have forced economists to reconsider. The final shape of what is now called “populism” is not yet entirely clear. It does not seem to fit easily on the traditional right/left, or liberal/conservative, spectrum. This is why two of the most obvious benefits of the political revolution, Theresa May and Donald Trump, are hard to categorize in this regard.

There does, however, seem to be one unifying theme and that is a resurgence in economic nationalism, with a collapse in support for internationalism or globalisation. Since the “elites” are seen as the main beneficiaries of globalisation in the developed economies, this has gone hand in hand with anti-elitism and a rejection of advice from “experts”. The latter could easily develop into anti-rationalism, which would surely prove disastrous in the long term.

Economists have now recognised these dangers, and a new consensus has started to emerge. There has been (almost) no change in the overwhelming belief that free trade and globalisation are good things for society as a whole. But it is now much more widely accepted that the losers from these changes can be more numerous, more long lasting and more politically assertive than previously thought.

The new consensus holds that the gains from globalisation can only be defended and extended if the losers are compensated by the winners. Otherwise, pockets of political resistance to the process of globalisation will begin to overwhelm the gainers, even though the latter remain in the majority.

While the compensation principle seems clear enough, the complexity of actually getting it done is much greater. As Jared Bernstein says, the rust belt needs help, but it is not clear how to help the rust belt. Nor is it at all obvious that there would be a political or economic consensus supporting some of the most obvious measures that could be adopted, at least on the scale that would be needed to make a noticeable difference.•

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“This Is Wishful Thinking. It Isn’t Going To Happen.”

December 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a recent Guardian essay, Stephen Hawking identified our age as the “most dangerous time for our planet.” Considering climate change, wealth inequality, the retreat of liberal democracy, and, perhaps, a re-embrace of nuclear proliferation, the physicist may very well be correct. While I thought his prescriptions to address the widening chasm between haves and have-nots were noble, they didn’t seem realistic to me. I have serious concerns that we’re increasingly taking a horrifying path.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Vivek Wadhwa feels similarly about Hawking’s best intentions. He suggests a better answer might be citizens having a greater voice in the nature of the technological tools shaping our future, though I’m dubious if that will make a dent, either. Technology isn’t often directed by a succession of sober-minded, rational choices. An excerpt:

Technology is the main culprit here, widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. As Hawking explained, automation has already decimated jobs in manufacturing and is allowing Wall Street to accrue huge rewards that the rest of us underwrite. Over the next few years, technology will take more jobs from humans. Robots will drive the taxis and trucks; drones will deliver our mail and groceries; machines will flip hamburgers and serve meals. And, if Amazon’s new cashierless stores are a success, supermarkets will replace cashiers with sensors. This is not speculation; it is imminent. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The dissatisfaction is not particularly American. With the developing world coming online with smartphones and tablets, billions more people are becoming aware of what they don’t have. The unrest we have witnessed in the United States, Britain and, most recently, Italy will become a global phenomenon.

Hawking’s solution is to break down barriers within and between nations, to have world leaders acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many, to share resources and to help the unemployed retrain. But this is wishful thinking. It isn’t going to happen.

Witness the outcome of the elections: We moved backward on almost every front. Our politicians will continue to divide and conquer, Silicon Valley will deny its culpability, and the very technologies, such as social media and the Internet, that were supposed to spread democracy and knowledge will instead be used to mislead, to suppress and to bring out the ugliest side of humanity.•

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“Fewer Pointed Hoods, More Khaki Pants”

December 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

An angle used to dismiss the idea that the Make America White Again message resonated with a surprising, depressing number of citizens has been to point out that some Trump supporters also voted for Obama. I think that argument is simplistic. Some bigots aren’t so far gone that they can’t vote for a person of a race they look down on if they feel it’s in their best interests financially or otherwise. That is to say, some racially prejudiced whites voted for President Obama. Trump appealed to them to find their worst selves. Many did.

Likewise the Trump campaign emboldened far worse elements, including white nationalists and separatists and anti-Semites. Thinking they’d been perhaps permanently marginalized, these hate groups are now updating their “brand,” hiding yesterday’s swastikas and burning crosses and other “bad optics,” and referring to themselves not as neo-Nazis but by more vaguely appealing monikers like “European-American advocates.” It’s the same monster wrapped in a different robe, the mainstreaming of malevolence, and they won’t again be easily relegated to the fringe regardless of Trump’s fate.

In the New York Times piece “An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas” by Serge F. Kovaleski, Julie Turkewitz, Joseph Goldstein and Dan Barry, the journalists explore a beast awakened and energized by Trump’s ugly campaign. It’s a great piece, though we should all probably stop calling these groups by their preferred KKK 2.0 alias of “alt-right.” An excerpt:

Let us pause. Not even two years ago, white supremacists like Mr. Schoep would rant from the fringe of the fringe, their attention-desperate events rarely worth mention. Today, though, the Schoeps of America are undergoing a rebranding, as part of the so-called alt-right: a grab bag of far-right groups generally united by the belief that white identity has become endangered in what they deride as this era of dangerous diversity and political correctness.

The deceptively benign phrase “alt-right” now peppers the national conversation, often in ways that play down its fundamental beliefs, which have long been considered intolerant and hateful. The term’s recent prevalence corresponds with the rise of President-elect Donald J. Trump; alt-right leaders say his inflammatory statements and Twitter habits in the campaign energized, even validated, their movement.

The movement is also acutely image-conscious, seeing the burning crosses, swastikas and language of yesteryear as impediments to recruitment. Its adherents talk of “getting red-pilled,” a reference to the movie “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist ingests a tablet that melts away artifice to reveal the truth. New, coded slurs have emerged. Fewer pointed hoods, more khaki pants.

But the alt-right movement is hardly monolithic…•

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“You Feel Like You’ve Walked Into Another World”

December 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Brute efficiency is more closely associated with fascism than democracy, and there are reasons for that. Main one: Humans aren’t machines, not yet at least.

While Mussolini and Bilbao dreamed of workers emulating robots, incredibly cheap and powerful microchips have made it possible for today’s technologists to eliminate the middle man and woman. Not that everyone in Silicon Valley is as heinous as Peter Thiel, who has a moral blind spot reminiscent Hitler’s secretary. Many want a brighter tomorrow for all, but their disruptions run counter to that goal, exacerbating wealth inequality, suppressing wages and potentially eliminating millions of jobs–entire industries, even–without creating suitable replacements. That may not, strictly speaking, be their responsibility, but their futures, as surely as ours, depend on it or the emergence of some other suitable solution. 

Two excerpts follow from new pieces on our technologically enhanced Gilded Age.

From Alexandra Suich of the Economist “1843”:

San Francisco is having its Manhattan moment. Buildings are stretching skyward, and people are moving here in swarms to seek their fortunes. [Ken] Fulk is helping reimagine the city’s interiors. He came to prominence in 2013 with the opening of The Battery, a private club, which quickly became an after-hours destination for techies, who linger in banquettes beneath the main lounge’s exposed-brick walls.

But most of Fulk’s business is designing private houses for the city’s wealthy technorati. His clients include Mark Pincus of the gaming company Zynga; Kevin Systrom of the photo-sharing app Instagram; Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp, the online review site; and Michael and Xochi Birch, who sold their social network, Bebo, for $850m in 2008 and now own The Battery. While minimalist interiors are in vogue, Fulk’s signature style is bold, eclectic and gleefully maximalist. “With contemporary design, you feel like you walked into a hotel room,” says Systrom. “With Ken, you feel like you’ve walked into another world.”

Fulk uses loud colours, lush materials and found objects that infuse spaces with playfulness and whimsy. He loves taxidermy and furniture with a backstory. His own office in San Francisco’s SoMa neighbourhood, called the Magic Factory, has doors salvaged from a mental institution and an aeroplane. On the main floor is a shop where clients can peruse some of Fulk’s discoveries. He has two cabinets that were used to archive specimens at the British Museum, and a stuffed musk ox that he bought from a museum in Kansas City when it closed its dioramas. San Francisco is pulled between extreme wealth, poverty and counter-culture, and there are competing elements within Fulk’s own work too. “Like the city itself, there’s a tension between high and low,” he says.•

From Maya Kosoff at Vanity Fair “Hive”:

While Amazon has already supplemented many of its warehouse employees with machines, Amazon Go stores will almost certainly require the presence of some number of human staff. Still, Amazon appears to be moving decisively toward replacing workers with automation wherever possible. Since 2014, The Los Angeles Times reports, Amazon has added 50,000 warehouse workers but also more than 30,000 robots, causing hiring to slow at its warehouses. Nor is Amazon the only tech company with plans to eventually automate as many jobs as possible. Earlier this year, Uber bought an automated trucking start-up called Otto, which recently completed its first delivery—a beer run—largely without the assistance of its human driver. Although Otto has described its self-driving technology as a way to help truckers on long cross-country trips, Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick hasn’t been shy in the past about his vision to eliminate commercial drivers in the future. “The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car—you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” he said in 2014. “When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle.”

Not everyone in Silicon Valley is sanguine about a future where millions of retail or trucking jobs have been replaced by machines. A growing number of tech leaders, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman among them, have begun advocating for a universal basic income: a guaranteed minimum stipend that the government would pay to everyone, ensuring some cushion as technological change roils the labor market, and allowing workers to develop new skills. Altman might want to start by focusing on the 3.5 million cashiers in America, who could soon join the 3.5 million truck drivers in having to worry about a robot taking their job. That economic anxiety is part of the reason why Donald Trump, who promised to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas, won the presidential election last month. But outsourcing is only part of the picture. In the end, it won’t be globalization, but automation, that will transform the U.S. economic landscape. Look no further than your friendly local Amazon Go store, coming soon to a neighborhood near you, to see that future in action.•

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“People Don’t Want The Right Answers. They Want A Story.”

December 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

 

The media was flawed, Facebook irresponsible, the FBI reckless and Russia devious, but it’s still the American people mostly to blame for electing as President an unqualified, bigoted sociopath, thereby creating the single biggest threat in more than half a century to our liberty (an admittedly unevenly distributed good throughout our history). It was an unforced error, a self-lacerating act, and we will pay for it dearly, not just for four years but for decades.

Unburdened by shame and unhampered by facts, Donald Trump is at best a robber baron and at worst an American Mussolini. If the former unfolds, we’ll be dining on little more than bread and Kardashians. Should the latter become reality, we’ll have retroactively lost World War II and the Cold War.

Wondering how nearly 63 million citizens could have behaved boneheaded enough to make Brexit seem a bad hair day, Gary Silverman of the Financial Times interviewed Michael Lewis about his new book, The Undoing Project, which analyzes the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and may help explain our Election Day massacre.

Lewis believes the human desire for exaggerated stories over cool statistics is in part responsible for the political ascent of the Simon Cowell-ish strongman, though the author, an admittedly wonderful writer, has sometimes himself been known to err on the side of narrative.

An excerpt:

The two psychologists are known for their work on “heuristics”, mental shortcuts that enable people to process all the information coming our way but can cause us to make mistakes. They are the cognitive equivalents of optical illusions — tricks played by the mind rather than by the eye.

A classic case involves what the psychologists dubbed “anchoring”. People given five seconds to estimate the product of 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 will provide far higher numbers than those asked to multiply 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8 in the same time period. Seeing the bigger numbers first skews their thinking. A similar result is obtained if subjects are asked whether Mahatma Gandhi was more than 114 years old when he died or 35. People in the first group will provide a higher estimate of his age at death.

To Lewis, Trump has been dropping anchors like a battleship commander. After the election, for instance, Trump not only alleged that his opponent Hillary Clinton had received illegal votes, but that she had received “millions” of them. He offered no proof, but he used a big number. Putting all those zeroes in people’s heads can pay off later on, Lewis says, in much the same way as a lawyer seeking astronomical damages in a lawsuit can expect a larger pay-off than a litigant taking a more measured approach at the outset. “Trump anchors everything in this crazy number. He will always say the crazy number because the negotiation happens around the crazy number.”

Trump’s frequent use of violent imagery takes advantage of what is known as the “availability” heuristic. People make decisions based on memories. But more vivid information — the name of a celebrity, for example, as opposed to that of another person — is easier to recall, giving it greater weight in decision-making. When Trump speaks of gruesome Isis executions or murders committed by undocumented immigrants, he is providing voters with more memorable information than dry facts and figures. 

“A vivid story about something an illegal immigrant did is going to have much more of an effect than statistics about illegal immigrants and crime,” Lewis says. “People don’t want the right answers. They want a story. They don’t think in statistical terms.”•

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“We Should Not Dismiss The Idea Too Quickly”

December 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Libertarians, it seems to me, are perpetual adolescents when it comes to politics. They see idealism where I see immaturity. Laws and regulations will always be less than perfect, but I still trust those things a great deal more than corporations, Silicon Valley billionaires and those who get hard when reading about Dickensian boot-blacking factories.

Before forming a political alliance with far-right wingnuts and white nationalists, Peter Thiel, a rich man and a very, very poor one, had been out front among technologists in supporting the wet dream known as seasteading, hoping to swim away from those pesky regulations so that he could, I suppose, breathe as easily as the Chinese. Perhaps there would be no “soulless children” there expecting free lunches.

More specifically, Thiel and others in 2008 established the Seasteading Institute to build a floating nation in the ocean, many nautical miles beyond regulation, where Burning Man could walk on water. This planned “soaktopia” never worried me, except for revealing a scary mindset, a longing by some for a runaway free market here on solid ground. Thiel himself ultimately came back to earth and worked toward exactly that goal. For the non-superrich, the next four years may not go so well.

In a Bloomberg View piece, Tyler Cowen extols the virtues of seasteading, believing retired people could float away their golden years on endless cruises, which seems to ignore both human psychology and the immense number of seniors in the population. An excerpt:

Although seasteading is sometimes viewed as an extension of self-indulgent Silicon Valley utopianism, we should not dismiss the idea too quickly. Variants on seasteading led to the founding of the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the caveat that conquest was involved, as these territories were not unsettled at the time. Circa 2016, there is a potential seasteading experiment due in French Polynesia (more information here). The melting of the Arctic ice may open up new areas for human settlement. Chinese construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea raises the prospect that the private sector, or a more liberty-oriented government, might someday do the same. Along more speculative lines, there is talk about someday colonizing Mars or even Titan, a moon of Saturn. On the intellectual front, a book about seasteading, by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, is due out in March of 2017.

Seasteading obviously faces significant obstacles. The eventual constraint is probably not technology in the absolute sense, but whether there is enough economic motive to forsake the benefits of densely populated human settlements and the protection of traditional nation-states. Many nations have effective corporate tax rates in the 10- to 20-percent range, which doesn’t seem confiscatory enough to take to the high seas for economic motives alone. Furthermore, current outposts such as Dubai, Singapore and the Cayman Islands offer varied legal and regulatory environments for doing business, in addition to the comforts of landlubber society. More and more foreign businesses are incorporating in Delaware to enjoy the benefits of American law. So, for all the inefficiencies and petty tyrannies of the modern world, seasteading faces pretty stiff competition.

Counterintuitively, I see the greatest promise for seasteading as a path toward more rather than less human companionship.•

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“Reversing The Trend Toward Greater Concentrations Of Income…Might Be, In Fact, Nearly Impossible”

December 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

President Obama ran the most pro-Labor Administration of the past fifty years, which led to great gains in household income for middle-class and impoverished citizens. That went almost ignored, especially during the recent election. But his measures didn’t in any way curb wealth inequality, which actually accelerated during his tenure. Some argue that an increasingly yawning gap between haves and have-nots is fine as long as those at the bottom are progressing, but that’s nonsense. Having such a disparity erodes democracy and allows some to further game the system for themselves.

In “A Dilemma for Humanity: Stark Inequality or Total War,” Eduardo Porter cites Walter Scheidel’s new book, The Great Leveler, as he wonders if anything can corral runaway inequity, arguing that history says such a situation only ends through violent upheaval of one kind or another.

I do believe policy could counteract current wealth inequality as it did during the Gilded Age, but it would take the best of circumstances politically, and for the next four years at least we’re going to have the worst. If the choice of Andy Puzder today as Labor Secretary is any indication, it will be catastrophic. He’s just the latest joke on the white working-class voters who trusted Trump, whose victory has quickly revealed itself to be the single biggest troll of our time.

From Porter:

History — from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible.

That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, The Great Leveler (Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead.”

Professor Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

The big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”•

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“Attacking The American Political System Was The Highest Prize Of All”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

It was a galling affront, even unfathomable, to Garry Kasparov when it was said that machines would one day conquer humans in chess. As World Champion, he considered it his responsibility to protect the species from this indignity. He was shocked when he failed.

I wonder if the retired Russian grandmaster is even more stunned about the recent global turn of events, as numerous countries have tried to retreat from globalization, reviving the natavistic, xenophobic and isolationist tendencies associated with the dark forces of World War II and the Cold War, though this time the reliably noble are also in retreat, as is liberal democracy itself. Russia has returned to autocracy and the U.S. may not be too far behind. And the Kremlin, with hacks and leaks, had a hand in that latter outcome.

In an excellent Playboy interview conducted by Alexander Bisley, Kasparov speaks about the ghosts of yesterday’s politics now haunting the twenty-first century, saying, “The past always returns in one form or another. There are periods in which the past even becomes the dominating factor in the present. Right now we are going through a moment like that because we don’t have a vision for the future.” He also discusses what he believes will happen to Russia at the time of Putin’s inevitable fall from power.

The opening:

Playboy:

After Trump’s election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a state-run news agency that “there were contacts” with the Trump team, saying “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage.” Do you believe Russia is responsible for Trump’s election?

Garry Kasparov:

The whole story of the rise of Donald Trump is extraordinary. Putin believes that if you’re strong enough and if your opponent is not responding, you can go as far as you want. For Putin, who’s always looking for an opportunity to show his strength and militancy, attacking the American political system was the highest prize of all. Now, President Barack Obama is very much reaping the harvest of his weak foreign policy because Russia tried to demonstrate its political might by attacking the very foundation of American democracy. It’s a fact that Russia definitely helped Donald Trump to be elected by revealing all these emails that were hacked, stolen from John Podesta and the DNC. Maybe Russia went even beyond that.

Playboy:

Extraordinarily, the NSA Director Michael Rogers said that there was “a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Garry Kasparov:

I agree that’s extraordinary. You have one of the top security chiefs of the United States pointing at Russia. Clearly it’s Russia. If this is correct, that means it comes as close as one can imagine to a declaration of war. The very mechanism of American democracy—the foundation of power—was in danger by interference of a hostile foreign power. And what did Obama do? Nothing.

Playboy:

Shouldn’t this be a bipartisan national security issue?

Garry Kasparov:

I’m surprised Chuck Schumer isn’t demanding a full-scale congressional investigation. Where are the Democrats?•

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“The Slow And Gradual Nature Of Populist-Fueled Democratic Backsliding Is Difficult To Counter”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If we are hollow men (and women), American liberty, that admittedly unevenly distributed thing, may be over after 240 years. And it could very well end not with a bang but a whimper.

Those waiting for the moment when autocracy topples the normal order of things are too late. Election Day was that time. It’s not guaranteed that the nation transforms into 1930s Europe or that we definitely descend into tyranny, but the conditions have never been more favorable in modern times for the U.S. to capitulate to autocracy. The creeps are in office, and the creeping will be a gradual process. Don’t wait for an explosion; we’re living in its wake.

From “How Democracies Fall Apart,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz’s smart Foreign Affairs article on the illiberal impulse going viral:

Post–Cold War populists such as Chávez, Putin, and Erdogan took a slow and steady approach to dismantling democracy. These leaders first come to power through democratic elections and subsequently harness widespread discontent to gradually undermine institutional constraints on their rule, marginalize the opposition, and erode civil society. The playbook is consistent and straightforward: deliberately install loyalists in key positions of power (particularly in the judiciary and security services) and neutralize the media by buying it, legislating against it, and enforcing censorship. This strategy makes it hard to discern when the break with democracy actually occurs, and its insidiousness poses one of the most significant threats to democracy in the twenty-first century.

The steady dismantling of democratic norms and practices by democratically elected leaders, what we call “authoritarianization,” marks a significant change in the way that democracies have historically fallen apart. Data on authoritarian regimes show that until recently, coups have been the primary threats to democracy. From 1946 to 1999, 64 percent of democracies failed because of such insurgencies. In the last decade, however, populist-fueled authoritarianization has been on the rise, accounting for 40 percent of all democratic failures between 2000 and 2010 and matching coups in frequency. If current trends persist, populist-fueled authoritarianization will soon become the most common pathway to autocracy.

Even more disheartening, the slow and gradual nature of populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter. Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce.•

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“I Imagine That The World’s Best-Kept Secrets…Will One Day Sit In Plain Sight”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What surprises me most about the new abnormal isn’t that surveillance has entered our lives but that we’ve invited it in.

For a coupon code or a “friend,” we’re willing to surrender privacy to a corporate state that wants to engage us, know us, follow us, all to better commodify us. In fact, we feel sort of left out if no one is watching.

It may be that in a scary world we want a brother looking after us even if it’s Big Brother, so we’ve entered into an era of likes and leaks, one that will only grow more profoundly challenging when the Internet of Things becomes the thing.

In a wonderful New York Times essay, William Gibson considers privacy, history and encryption, those thorny, interrelated topics. An excerpt:

I have ideas about history, more than I have about privacy, and it is here that my confusion deepens exponentially. I believe that our ability to create history, to transcend generations via our extraordinary prosthetic equivalents of memory, is the most remarkable thing about us. Unless we’ve forgotten something, lost it to history, we’ve yet to encounter another species capable of the same thing. Should the F.B.I. or other agencies be able to unlock the iPhones of terrorists? To be able to do so makes them able to unlock yours or mine. Should I be able to encrypt documents in such a way that the F.B.I. can’t decrypt them? If I can, terrorists can as well. (Not that I necessarily accept terrorism as the ultimate fulcrum in such arguments, but it’s become the one most often employed.)

In the short term, the span of a lifetime, many of us would argue for privacy, and therefore against transparency. But history, the long term, is transparency; it is the absence of secrets. So we are quite merciless, as historians, when it comes to the secrets of the past, the secrets of the dead. We come to know them with an intimacy impossible in their day. It would be unthinkable for us to turn away from their secrets, to allow the Iceman his privacy or to not scan beneath the bitumen to recover an Egyptian priestess’s tattoos.

And here, to complete my tangle of confusion, is encryption, no doubt aggravated by my inability to understand the concept mathematically. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that the future is all too liable to have its way with today’s most sophisticated encryption technology. I imagine that the world’s best-kept secrets — those of both private citizens and state institutions — will one day sit in plain sight on whatever it is that our descendants display data on.

Privy to that information while looking back at us, our ancestors will know us differently than we currently know ourselves, just as we now know the Victorians quite differently from how they knew themselves.•

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“Trump Has Used The Media To Take Over An Existing State Apparatus”

December 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The two short quotes below are from Stanford media historian Fred Turner, who sat for a very smart Medium interview conducted by Kim-Mai Cutler. In the Q&A, Turner explains how the very type of tools developed to combat fascism wound up being subverted in this era of fake news, often a tactic of white nationalists. The academic also places Donald Trump on a continuum of tyrants, including Mussolini, who caused catastrophic carnage in the last century.

“Some key elements of fascism include the following:

  1. A reversionary desire to return to an imagined state of greatness from the past.
  2. A celebration of heterosexual masculinity. You could think of Vladimir Putin’s need to take off his shirt or Donald Trump’s obsession with the size of his hands.
  3. A charismatic leadership style.
  4. An absolute disregard for facts and a celebration of myth.
  5. An integration of the corporation and the state, which is what Mussolini wanted to do and feels reminiscent of what Trump wants to do today.
  6. A deep, structural racism. There is always someone on the outs. In Japan, it was particular minority groups. In Germany, it was obviously the Jews, but it was also gypsies, queers and communists, among others. And you can see that kind of racism, that kind of in-group and out-group dynamic here, with Trump.

Many people have called Donald Trump a populist. I don’t think that’s quite right. His anti-elitist rhetoric is certainly in that vein, but his racism, his sexism, and his emphasis on a return to a formerly great America, belong to the fascist line.

To me, the constellation of forces that he’s put into play look like early Mussolini. The key difference is that Mussolini and Hitler came to power by essentially building parties first. Trump has used the media to take over an existing state apparatus. Whether he’s able to do what he wants or not, whether he’s competent or not, and whether institutions will resist him, that’s an open question. I don’t think he’s Andrew Jackson though.”•

“One of the things we see with Trump and the Twitter-sphere is that when new technologies come on the scene, they don’t replace old technologies. They layer onto older technologies.

Twitter and its liberating potential is already mass mediated. It’s already commercial. When Donald tweets, he isn’t just tweeting to a general populace. He’s generating stories for CBS and NBC, and for that matter, Facebook. He’s generating stories that create an entire media sphere on their own. That is the source of his power. He is using the old fascist charisma, but he’s doing it in a media environment in which the social and the commercial, the individual and the mass, are already completely entwined.”•

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