Urban Studies

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“Manufacturing Will Be Hit By An Identical Crisis To The Music Industry”

September 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Think how strange it seems now: Until recently, one or several musicians would disappear for many months into an expensive recording studio and try to conjure something that would fill our ears, and, perhaps, blow our minds. They threw away the vast majority of the results and delivered a few dozen minutes of entertainment. There was a distribution system which not only supported this process but was even marvelously lucrative.

It was all a dream. The decentralization of the media not only usurped the record store but also the records, squeezing the financial value from these commodities, rendering them a mere promotional tool for the few touring acts that can fill arenas. Good luck with that.

During the halcyon music-business decade of the 1970s, one economist and theorist knew the precariousness of the arrangement, how this fraught ecosystem, still spectacularly profitable, was actually endangered. He was Jacques Attali, a Mitterand adviser who 39 years ago coined the term “crisis of proliferation” in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which foretold the coming perfect storm that would soak the industry. 

In “The Pop Star and the Prophet,” a new BBC Magazine article, singer-songwriter Sam York sought out Attali, wanting to know where the philosopher thought the future was heading. The quick answer is that while he maintains some hope for musicians, Attali thinks what happened to the recording biz is merely prelude. An excerpt:

Attali also had another big idea. He said that music – and the music industry – forged a path which the rest of the economy would follow. What’s happening in music can actually predict the future.

When musicians in the 18th Century – like the composer Handel – started selling tickets for concerts, rather than seeking royal patronage, they were breaking new economic ground, Attali wrote. They were signalling the end of feudalism and the beginning of a new order of capitalism.

In every period of history, Attali said, musicians have been at the cutting edge of economic developments. Because music is very important to us but also highly adaptable it’s one of the first places we can see new trends appearing.

He was right about the “crisis of proliferation”… but if music really does predict the future for the rest of the economy, what does he think it is telling us will happen next?

Attali says manufacturing will be hit by an identical crisis to the music industry, and this time it will be caused by 3D printing.

“With 3D printing, people will print their own cups, furniture,” he says. “Everyone will make their own objects, in the same way they are making their own music.”•

 

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A Brief Note From 1947 About A Snake Ban

September 16, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 4, 1947 Brooklyn Daily Eagle: 

 

 

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“I Really Wanted To Reach Out And Maybe Find Some Evidence That There Was Something More”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because ultimately there’s nothing, and everything we and our loved ones once were cruelly goes away, many of us spend time desperately trying to prove that there’s something beyond. This can’t be it. While it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy, it sure does pass the time.

At Vice’s “Broadly” section, Zing Tsjeng interviews British paranormal investigator Jayne Harris, who specializes in haunted dolls, which look almost like people, almost alive. The opening:

Question:

Can you tell me a little about what brought you to this industry?

Jayne Harris:

My parents were very interested in the paranormal so I heard lots of stories from them. When I was about 16, I started going to various spiritualist churches and seeing psychic mediums. Then my cousin died in a car accident when I was 17. That was the catalyst for me. It sparked more than a curiosity— I really wanted to reach out and maybe find some evidence that there was something more.

Question:

How often do you genuinely find a haunted object or doll in someone’s house?

Jayne Harris:

In our experience, when we get called to people’s homes, we can explain the activity through normal explanations in about seven out of 10 cases. If someone feels that they’re hearing knocking noises, we’ll examine everything from pipework to spaces in the attic where you might get mice. If the lights are flickering, it often needs rewiring. You’re trying to rule out all of the possibilities so that what you’re left with is the true case of what is going on.•

 

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“What Major Crisis Can We Expect In Next Few Years? What The World Is Going To Be Like By 2025?”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dr. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford just did one of the best Reddit AMAs I’ve ever read, a brilliant back-and-forth with readers on existential risks, Transhumanism, economics, space travel, future technologies, etc. He speaks wisely of trying to predict the next global crisis: “It will likely not be anything we can point to before, since there are contingency plans. It will be something obvious in retrospect.”

The whole piece is recommended, and some exchanges are embedded below.

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Question:

Will we start creating new species of animals (and plants, fungi, and microbes) any time soon?

What about fertilizing the oceans? Will we turn vast areas of ocean into monoculture like a corn field or a wood-pulp plantation?

When will substantial numbers of people live anywhere other than Earth? Where will it be?

What will we do about climate change?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I think we are already making new species, although releasing them into nature is frowned upon.

Ocean fertilization might be a way of binding carbon and getting good “ocean agriculture”, but the ecological prize might be pretty big. Just consider how land monocultures squeeze out biodiversity. But if we needed to (say to feed a trillion population), we could.

I think we need to really lower the cost to orbit (beanstalks, anyone?) for mass emigration. Otherwise I expect the first real space colonists to be more uploads and robots than biological humans.

I think we will muddle through climate: technological innovations make us more green, but not before a lot of change will happen – which people will also get used to.

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Question:

What augmentations, if any, do you plan on getting?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I have long wanted to get a magnetic implant to sense magnetic fields, but since I want to be able to get close to MRI machines I have held off.

I think the first augmentations will be health related or sensory enhancement gene therapy – I would love to see ultraviolet and infrared. But life extension is likely the key area, which might involve gene therapy and implanting modified stem cells.

Further down the line I want to have implants in my hypothalamus so I can access my body’s “preferences menu” and change things like weight setpoint or manage pain. I am a bit scared of implants in the motivation system to help me manage my behavior, but it might be useful. And of course, a good neural link to my exoself of computers and gadgets would be useful – especially if it could allow me to run software supported simulations in my mental workspace.

In the long run I hope to just make my body as flexible and modifiable as possible, although no doubt it would tend to normally be set to something like “idealized standard self”.

It is hard to tell which augmentations will arrive when. But I think going for general purpose goods – health, intelligence, the ability to control oneself – is a good heuristic for what to aim for.

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Question:

What major crisis can we expect in next few years? What the world is going to be like by 2025?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I am more of a long term guy, so it might be better to ask the people at the World Economic Forum risk report (where I am on the advisory board).http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-risks-report-2015

One group of things are economic troubles – they are safe bets before 2025 since they happen every few years, but most are not major crises. Expect some asset bubbles or deflation in a major economy, energy price shocks, failure of a major financial mechanism or institution, fiscal crises, and/or some critical infrastructure failures.

Similarly there will be at least some extreme weather or natural disaster events that cause a nasty surprise (think Katrina or the Tohoku earthquake) – such things happen all the time, but the amount of valuable or critical stuff in the world is going up, and we are affected more and more systemically (think hard drive prices after the Thai floods – all the companies were located on the same flood plain). I would be more surprised by any major biodiversity loss or ecosystem collapse, but the oceans are certainly not looking good. Even with the scariest climate scenarios things in 2025 are not that different from now.

What to look out for is interstate conflicts that get global consequences. We have never seen a “real” cyber war: maybe it is overhyped, maybe we underestimate the consequences (think something like the DARPA cyber challenge as persistent, adapting malware everywhere). Big conflicts are unfortunately not impossible, and we still have lots of nukes in the world. WMD proliferation looks worryingly doable.

If I were to make a scenario for a major crisis it would be something like a systemic global issue like the oil price causing widespread trouble in some unstable regions (think of past oil-food interactions triggering unrest leading to the Arab Spring, or Russia being under pressure now due to cheap oil), which spills over into some actual conflict that has long-range effects getting out of hand (say the release of nasty bio- or cyberweapons). But it will likely not be anything we can point to before, since there are contingency plans. It will be something obvious in retrospect.

And then we will dust ourselves off, swear to never let that happen again, and half forget it.

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Question:

As I understand it, regarding existential risk and our survival as a species, most if not all discussion has to happen under the umbrella of ‘if we don’t kill ourselves off first.’ Surely, as a man who thinks so far ahead, you must have some hope that catastrophic self-inflicted won’t spell the end of our race, or at least that it won’t put us back irrevocably far technologically. In your estimation, what are the immediate self-inflicted harms we face and will we have the capacity to face them when their destructive effects manifest. Will the climate change to the point of poisoning our planet, will uncontrolled pollution destroy our global ecology in some other way, will nuclear blasts destroy all but the cockroaches and bacteria on the planet? It seems to me that we needn’t think too far to see one of these scenarios come to pass if we don’t present a globally concerted effort to intervene.

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I think climate change, like ecological depletion or poisons, are unlikely to spell radical disaster (still, there is enough of a tail to the climate change distribution to care about the extreme cases). But they can make the world much worse to live in, and cause strains in the global social fabric that make other risks more likely.

Nuclear war is still a risk with us. And nuclear winters are potential giga-killers; we just don’t know whether they are very likely or not, because of model uncertainty. I think the probability is way higher than most people think (because of both Bayesian estimation and observer selection effects).

I think bioengineered pandemics are also a potential stumbling block. There may not be many omnicidal maniacs, but the gain-of-function experiments show that well-meaning researchers can make potentially lethal pathogens and the recent distribution of anthrax by the US military show that amazingly stupid mistakes do happen with alarming regularity.

See also: https://theconversation.com/the-five-biggest-threats-to-human-existence-27053

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Question:

I have trouble imagining how our current economic structure could cope with all the 10’s of millions of driver/taxi/delivery jobs going.

The economic domino effect of inability to pay debts/mortgages, loss of secondary jobs they were supporting, fall in demand for goods, etc, etc

It seems like the world has never really got back to “normal” (whatever that is anymore in the 21st century) after the 2008 financial crisis & never will.

I’m an optimist by nature, I’m sure we will segue & transition into something we probably haven’t even imagined yet.

But it’s very hard to imagine our current hands off laissez fair style of economy functioning in the 2020’s in the face of so much unemployment.

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

Back in the 19th century it would have seemed absurd that the economy could absorb all those farmers. But historical examples may be misleading: the structure of the economy changes.

In many ways laissez faire economics work perfectly fine in the super-unemployed scenario: we just form an internal economy, less effective than the official one sailing off into the stratosphere, and repeat the process (the problem might be if property rights make it impossible to freely set up a side economy). But clearly there is a lot of human capital wasted in this scenario.

Some people almost reflexively suggest a basic income guarantee as the remedy to an increasingly automated economy. I think we need to think much more creatively about other solutions, the BIG is just one possibility (and might not even be feasible in many nations).

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Question:

What is the most defining characteristic of transhumanism as an idea in the 10s compared with the 00s?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

Back when I started in the 90s we were all early-Wired style tech enthusiasts. The future was coming, and it was all full of cyber! Very optimistic, very much based on the idea that if we could just organise better and convince society that transhumanism was a good idea, then we would win.

By the 00s we had learned that just having organisations does not mean your ideas get taken seriously. Although they were actually taken seriously to a far greater extent: the criticism from Fukuyama and others actually forced a very healthy debate about the ethics and feasibility of transhumanism. Also, the optimism had become tempered post-dotcom, post-911: progress is happening, but much more uneven and slow than we may have hoped for. It was by this point the existential risk and AI safety strands came into their own.

Transhumanism in the 10s? Right now I think the cool thing is the posttranshumanist movements like the rationalists and the effective altruists: in many ways full of transhumanist ideas, yet not beholden to always proclaiming their transhumanism. We have also become part of institutions, and there are people that grew up with transhumanism who are now senior enough to fund things, make startups or become philanthropists.

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Question:

Which do you think is more important for the future of humanity, the exploration of outer space (planets, stars, galaxies, etc.)? Or the exploration of inner space (consciousness, intelligence, self, etc.)?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

Both, but in different ways. Exploration of outer space is necessary for long term survival. Exploration of inner space is what may improve us.

Question:

What step would you take first? Would you first discover “everything” or as much as possible about inner space, or outer space?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I suspect safety first: getting off-planet is a good start. But one approach does not preclude working on the other at the same time.•

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“The Tasks That Have Proved Most Vexing To Automate Are Those Demanding Flexibility, Judgment, And Common Sense”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The MIT economist David Autor doesn’t believe it’s different this time, he doesn’t think automation will lead to widespread technological unemployment any more than it did during the Industrial Revolution or the last AI scares of the 1960s and 1970s. Autor feels that robots may come for some of our jobs, but there will still be enough old and new ones to busy human hands because our machine brethren will probably never be our equal in common sense, adaptability and creativity. Technology’s new tools may be fueling wealth inequality, he acknowledges, but the fear of AI soon eliminating Labor is unfounded. 

Well, perhaps. But if you’re a truck or bus or taxi or limo or delivery driver, a hotel clerk or bellhop, a lawyer or paralegal, a waiter or fast-casual food preparer, or one of the many other workers whose gigs will probably disappear, you may be in for some serious economic pain before abundance emerges at the other side of the new arrangement.

Autor certainly is right in arguing that the main economic problem caused by mass automation would be “one of distribution, not of scarcity.” But that’s an issue requiring some political consensus to solve, and reaching a majority isn’t easy these days in our polarized society.

From Autor’s smart article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?“:

Polanyi’s Paradox: Will It Be Overcome?

Automation, complemented in recent decades by the exponentially increasing power of information technology, has driven changes in productivity that have disrupted labor markets. This essay has emphasized that jobs are made up of many tasks and that while automation and computerization can substitute for some of them, understanding the interaction between technology and employment requires thinking about more than just substitution. It requires thinking about the range of tasks involved in jobs, and how human labor can often complement new technology. It also requires thinking about price and income elasticities for different kinds of output, and about labor supply responses.

The tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly. I referred to this constraint above as Polanyi’s paradox. In the past decade, computerization and robotics have progressed into spheres of human activity that were considered off limits only a few years earlier—driving vehicles, parsing legal documents, even performing agricultural field labor. Is Polanyi’s paradox soon to be at least mostly overcome, in the sense that the vast majority of tasks will soon be automated?

My reading of the evidence suggests otherwise. Indeed, Polanyi’s paradox helps to explain what has not yet been accomplished, and further illuminates the paths by which more will ultimately be accomplished. Specifically, I see two distinct paths that engineering and computer science can seek to traverse to automate tasks for which we “do not know the rules”: environmental control and machine learning. The first path circumvents Polanyi’s paradox by regularizing the environment, so that comparatively inflexible machines can function semi-autonomously. The second approach inverts Polanyi’s paradox: rather than teach machines rules that we do not understand, engineers develop machines that attempt to infer tacit rules from context, abundant data, and applied statistics.•

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Old Print Articles: The Tyrant Of Wrangel Island, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1936)

September 15, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Inhabitants on Wrangel Island, before Semenchuk’s mad reign.

 

Konstantin Semenchuk, the scientist who ruled for two years in the 1930s over the Soviet station on the remote Wrangel Island, is so forgotten today he doesn’t even merit his own dedicated Wikipedia page, but it’s unlikely those he governed ever forgot what Time magazine described as the madman’s “shifty-eyed” visage.

Perhaps there’s a scholar somewhere who can explain what exactly provoked Semenchuk’s seemingly insane criminality and the tragedies it brought about, but there’s no easily accessible record that spells out anything beyond the charges and result of his trial. The facts as we know them: He was appointed as Governor of Wrangel Island in 1934 by Stalin’s Soviet Union and was accused of starving, extorting, poisoning, raping and murdering the native people and his own rival coworkers. At the conclusion of a short and sensational Moscow trial, Semenchuk was sentenced to death along with his accomplice and dogsled driver, S.P. Startsev, for, among other crimes, having killed N.A. Wulfson, a doctor whom he sent out on a fake mission through a snowstorm. What follows are a succession of 1936 articles from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle which paint pieces of a ghastly portrait.

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From May 19:

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From May 20:

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From May 24:

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“Anything You Should Be Allowed To Do For Free, You Should Also Be Allowed To Do For Money”

September 14, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the Washington Post has capsules of two new books with a Libertarian bent, one of which is Markets Without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests by Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski. The main premise seems to be that activities deemed legal if done for no financial gain should also be permitted if there is a charge. Selling kidneys and sex are two chief examples. On the face of it, that makes a lot of sense, except…

What if placing a financial value on a kidney reduces the number of organs donated for free, making them unaffordable except to people who could bid the highest? Would we want the market regulating such a thing?

Prostitution would seem like an easier problem: It’s always existed, so let’s stop being silly and just legalize it. One argument against: If it was okay to have group-sex clubs (like the infamous Plato’s Retreat), wouldn’t that create a ground zero for STDs that could go beyond the participants? Couldn’t it be a public-health threat? Sure, people can arrange for such risky group behaviors for free now, but legalization would commodify and encourage them.

It always seems exciting to strip away regulations, but there are hardly ever simple solutions. At any rate, I look forward to reading the book. 

From Somin:

In Markets Without Limits, [Jason] Brennan and [Peter] Jaworski argue that anything you should be allowed to do for free, you should also be allowed to do for money. They do not claim that markets should be completely unconstrained, merely that we should not ban any otherwise permissible transaction solely because money has been exchanged. Thus, for example, they agree that murder for hire should be illegal. But only because it should also be illegal to commit murder for free. Their thesis is also potentially compatible with a wide range of regulations of various markets to prevent fraud, deception, and the like. Nonetheless, their thesis is both radical and important. The world is filled with policies that ban selling of goods and services that can nonetheless be given away for free. Consider such cases as bans on organ markets, prostitution, and ticket-scalping.•

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3 Classic Videos: John DeLorean (1988), Ayn Rand (1979), Phil Spector (1965)

September 14, 2015 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In 1979, John Z. DeLorean was poised for greatness or disaster, having left behind the big automakers to create his own car from scratch, a gigantic gambit in the Industrial Age that required huge talent and hubris. Esquire writer William Flanagan profiled DeLorean that year, capturing the gambler in mid-deal, still bluffing, soon to be folding. The opening:

For a man who looks like Tyrone Power, is married to the stunning young model in the Virginia Slims and Clairol ads, and earns six figures a year, John Zachary DeLorean certainly doesn’t smile much. He can’t. Not just yet, anyway. The reason is simple: The most important project in his life has yet to be accomplished. DeLorean wants to make a monkey out of General Motors. He is on the verge of doing it, but he has a way to go.

There will be no rest for DeLorean until he finishes doing what no one else in the history of modern business has dared attempt–to design, build, and sell his very own automobile from scratch, an automobile the world’s largest car company wouldn’t, couldn’t, and probably shouldn’t build.•

In 1988, his dreams dashed and reputation destroyed, DeLorean was living in Manhattan, now a born-again Christian, still believing he would get another chance. He granted a rare interview to a local TV station from his old stomping grounds in Detroit. Funny to see him strolling through Central Park.

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Ayn Rand, author of Objectivist claptrap, had very specific taste in fellow writers, which she revealed to interlocutor Alvin Toffler in a 1964 Playboy interview:

Playboy: Are there any novelists whom you admire?

Ayn Rand: Yes. Victor Hugo.

Playboy: What about modern novelists?

Ayn Rand: No, there is no one that I could say I admire among the so-called serious writers. I prefer the popular literature of today, which is today’s remnant of Romanticism. My favorite is Mickey Spillane.

Playboy: Why do you like him?

Ayn Rand: Because he is primarily a moralist. In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in terms of black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture of indistinguishable scoundrels on both sides. He presents an uncompromising conflict. As a writer, he is brilliantly expert at the aspect of literature which I consider most important: plot structure.

Playboy: What do you think of Faulkner?

Ayn Rand: Not very much. He is a good stylist, but practically unreadable in content–so I’ve read very little of him.

Playboy: What about Nabokov?

Ayn Rand: I have read only one book of his and a half–the half was Lolita, which I couldn’t finish. He is a brilliant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.•

Here she is at Madison Square Garden with Phil Donahue in 1979, explaining why she wouldn’t vote for any woman to be President of the United States.

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The Bobby Fischer of the recording studio, Phil Spector, ultimately more unhinged than unorthodox, couldn’t permanently muffle the dark voices within a Wall of Sound. Mad even back in 1965, he “amused” Merv Griffin, Richard Pryor, et al.

“Japan Is Already A Robotics Powerhouse”

September 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you’re a homogenous culture with a lack of fervor for immigration and a graying population as Japan is, robots are a necessity, an elegant solution even, as Yoshiaki Nohara writes in an Financial Review article. For a country like America that embraces immigration (well, some of us still do) and has thrived on youthful demographics, it’s more complicated.

From Nohara:

The rise of the machines in the workplace has US and European experts predicting massive unemployment and tumbling wages.

Not in Japan, where robots are welcomed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government as an elegant way to handle the country’s aging populace, shrinking workforce and public aversion to immigration.

Japan is already a robotics powerhouse. Abe wants more and has called for a “robotics revolution.” His government launched a five-year push to deepen the use of intelligent machines in manufacturing, supply chains, construction and health care, while expanding the robotics markets from 660 billion yen ($US5.5 billion) to 2.4 trillion yen by 2020.

“The labour shortage is such an acute issue that companies have no choice but to boost efficiency,” says Hajime Shoji, the head of the Asia-Pacific technology practice at Boston Consulting Group. “Growth potential is huge.” By 2025, robots could shave 25 percent off of factory labour costs in Japan, according to the consulting firm.•

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“If Amazon Encourages Its Staff To Be Straight With Each Other About What Should Be Fixed, So Much The Better”

September 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tim Harford’s FT reading of the recent New York Times Amazon exposé is, well, subjective.

Most of us probably recognized a place in which workers are asked to surrender their lives for a corporation, given impossible goals and abused and undermined when they prove human. Making it worse, there would seem to be a thick air of paranoia in the offices because a good percentage of the criticism is rooted in power consolidation, not job performance. It sounds like the Hunger Games with an on-campus farmer’s market, a place where sociopaths thrive. As anyone who’s worked in Internet companies (myself included) knows, these types of outfits are toxic and meant to be avoided, stock options or no stock options.

Harford’s take is different, and to me, puzzling. He sees a culture in Amazon that may actually be refreshingly straightforward, a paragon of things improving through workplace honesty. Perhaps its candor just being misinterpreted as rudeness because the company embodies a rare virtue? If only that were so. That kind of arrangement would be great. 

His opening:

Last month’s Amazon exposé in The New York Times evidently touched a white-collar nerve. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld described what might euphemistically be called an “intense” culture at Amazon’s headquarters in a feature article that promptly became the most commented-on story in the newspaper’s website’s history. As Kantor and Streitfeld told it, Amazon reduces grown men to tears and comes down hard on staff whose performance is compromised by distractions such as stillborn children, dying parents or simply having a family. Not for the first time, The Onion was 15 years ahead of the story with a December 2000 headline that bleakly satirised a certain management style: “There’s No ‘My Kid Has Cancer’ In Team.”

Mixed in with the grim anecdotes was a tale of a bracingly honest culture of criticism and self-criticism. (Rival firms, we are told, have been hiring Amazon workers after they’ve quit in exasperation, but are worried that these new hires may have become such aggressive “Amholes” that they won’t fit in anywhere else.)

At Amazon, performance reviews seem alarmingly blunt. One worker’s boss reeled off a litany of unachieved goals and inadequate skills. As the stunned recipient steeled himself to be fired, he was astonished when his superior announced, “Congratulations, you’re being promoted,” and gave him a hug.

It is important to distinguish between a lack of compassion and a lack of tact. It’s astonishing how often we pass up the chance to give or receive useful advice. If Amazon encourages its staff to be straight with each other about what should be fixed, so much the better.•

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A Brief Note From 1954 About Space Ship Sales

September 14, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 5, 1954 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

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“It Does Much More Good Than Evil”

September 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We like to think we have empathy, but how can we truly see things through someone else’s eyes, especially if their reality has known extremes ours hasn’t? To help us, some of them paint a picture.

Ai Weiwei does that, in many different ways. The Chinese artist has been imprisoned and beaten and detained, continually detained. There seems to be some sort of detente in his current state of relations with government authorities, but his experiences don’t go away–they shape him. So he may view consumerism and technology differently than I do, but his feelings from within his context are just as valuable. Maybe more so.

For a NYRB article, Ian Johnson facilitated a pizzeria lunch in Berlin between Ai Weiwei, his passport in hand once again, and exiled writer Liao Yiwu. The artist believes China, viewed broadly, is better for its modernization, and that the world is mostly improved by social media. An excerpt:

Question:

What do you think of think of the modernization theory—that when people get to a certain standard of living, when people are no longer just concerned with food or shelter, they start to demand things. We could see that historically in South Korea, or Taiwan, say thirty years ago. Does that have any relevance to China today?

Ai Weiwei:

It does, very obviously. If you see those young kids, they’re better off than their parents. They’ve been sent to study abroad. They can travel more freely. They get on the internet. They get iPhones and iPads and video games.

Question:

Are the Chinese authorities aware of it?

Ai Weiwei:

They are aware of it, but I don’t know to what degree, and I don’t know if they have the right measures. To understand the crisis you need a philosophical mind and the system never really had that kind of discussion—like the one we’re having now, and to openly discuss it. To openly discuss it means first you have a balanced view and you get every mind involved, so the solution will be more democratic rather than some authoritarian solution, which will just create more problems. All they care about are results, but life is about more than results. It’s about our involvement, our passive involvement in each individual’s mind, and that’s why we can say we love it or we hate it.

Question:

One way people engage is through social media. Obviously that’s changed things a lot but it also seems to encourage a bit of a, not civil society, but uncivil society—people cursing each other and so on.

Ai Weiwei:

It does much more good than evil. Of course, if you have a society that never had a public platform or public property, it’s something new. It becomes an outlet for huge pressure. It’s like an explosion, but only because the building is not well-designed. If you had ten outlets [of expression], people would be much more friendly and courteous.

That’s why a modern structure is so important to deal with contemporary problems. It’s not about ideology. All those concepts of democracy or freedom of speech. It’s really about efficient tactics to solve modern problems. That problem is to recognize and protect each individual’s rights and to contribute them to society. Of course China is far from that. First it needs a philosophical understanding and then it needs laws to protect those rights and legislation designed for separate powers. All of that is not established in China now and that’s why I say China is not a modern society.•

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A Note From 1934 About Forbidden Handshakes

September 11, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 30, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“There Is A Strong Current Of Nostalgia For The Late ’70s And Early ’80s In New York”

September 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Image by Richard Sandler.

Image by Richard Sandler.


New York City has always been about money, but it wasn’t always only about money.

In a wonderfully written T Magazine piece, Edmund White wonders why there’s nostalgia for NYC of the 1970s and early 1980s, and I think I know the answer: Despite being something of a dangerous dump in those days, when even the President told us we could drop dead, that’s the last time the city belonged to us all, people of every class, before it became wholly about real estate and Wall Street. It was livable, you could make a living, even if sometimes you had to run for your life.

It wasn’t all good. For all the NYPD harassment of minorities now, the city then was much more divided racially. And the child prostitution that was allowed to flourish in Times Square isn’t something anyone could feel nostalgic about. But it did seem, on some level, we were all in it together. Most working-class people have now been pushed to the margins of the city by real-estate prices and gentrification and globalization, and that won’t stop until they go over the edge. That’s the only edge left.

White’s opening:

THERE IS A STRONG CURRENT of nostalgia for the late ’70s and early ’80s in New York, even among those who never lived through it — the era when the city was edgy and dangerous, when women carried Mace in their purses, when even men asked the taxi driver to wait until they’d crossed the 15 feet to the front door of their building, when a blackout plunged whole neighborhoods into frantic looting, when subway cars were covered with graffiti, when Balanchine was at the height of his powers and the New York State Theater was New York’s intellectual salon, when John Lennon was murdered by a Salinger-reading born-again, when Philip Roth was already famous, Don DeLillo had yet to become famous, and most literary insiders were betting on Harold Brodkey’s long-awaited novel, which his editor, Gordon Lish, declared would be ‘‘the one necessary American narrative work of this century.’’ (It flopped when it finally came out in 1991 as ‘‘The Runaway Soul.’’)

This was the last period in American culture when the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow still pertained, when writers and painters and theater people still wanted to be (or were willing to be) ‘‘martyrs to art.’’ This was the last moment when a novelist or poet might withdraw a book that had already been accepted for publication and continue to fiddle with it for the next two or three years. This was the last time when a New York poet was reluctant to introduce to his arty friends someone who was a Hollywood film director, for fear the movies would be considered too low-status.•

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“There Is An Automation Revolution In China”

September 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Robots will show up in China just in time,” Daniel Kahneman has reportedly said, and that’s probably a true statement, though not an uncomplicated one. In order to sustain itself with a giant population that will go gray without also developing widespread automation, China will need robotics on a mass scale. Of course, the problem is huge swaths of the employed will be disappeared from their jobs. They will be promised a better life, better positions, but these guarantees won’t likely be true. It will be a transitional phase with great pain.

Other nations that will have to keep pace with China in this new “arms race,” even if they don’t have the same complex population issues. These countries, America included, will have to seek political solutions.

From Yue Wang at the South China Morning Post:

There is an automation revolution in China. Factory owners are turning to robots amid rising labour costs, worker-protests and greater demand for quality. In 2013, the country overtook Japan as the world’s largest market for industrial robots, accounting for 20 per cent of global supply, according to the International Federation of Robotics, an industry group based in Germany.

As robots march into Chinese factories, global automation companies are racing to invest. Demand is primarily driven by the car sector, which accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of robot demand in China, according to consultancy Solidiance.

But the big race is now in the electronics sector.  Adapting robots to the needs of fast-changing production lines is a challenge for global players such as Japan’s Fanuc Corp, Yaskawa Electric Corp, German’s Kuka Corp and Swiss robot maker ABB.

“Robotics has the limitation of requiring intensive change-out to adapt to a new product model or production line scenario,” says Pilar Dieter, a partner at Solidiance. “If a robotics manufacturer can solve this dilemma, they will certainly hold a coveted position in the market.”•

 

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Old Print Article: Examing Hitler’s 16,000-Volume Library, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1942)

September 10, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Karl May, left, in 1904.

Karl May, left, in 1904.

Making complete sense of the perfect storm of hatred and insanity that enabled Nazi Germany is impossible, but still we try. Are there any clues in the elaborate personal library that madman Adolf Hitler assembled? Probably not, but for curiosity’s sake, he was particularly enamored with the work of Karl May, a writer of Westerns who never visited America. (In all fairness to May, Albert Einstein was also a fan.) During the heat of WWII, an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle looked at the titles on Hitler’s shelves, trying to make some sense of it all.

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“I’ve Seen How Quickly New Roles Can Appear And Disappear”

September 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Education now is largely preparation for a world that won’t exist on graduation day, and it’s not entirely the fault of our learning system. No one can really pinpoint where to from here, not with robotics and AI moving forward in a rapid but unpredictable manner. It’s difficult to learn to dance on a moving floor. Professions can rise and fall in a day, relatively speaking.

In a Fast Company piece, Ryan Holmes offers prescriptions which aren’t new but are the best we currently have: a more free-range education based on the Montessori method and guaranteed basic income. An excerpt:

White-collar roles once thought to be the exclusive domain of human beings could also end up on the chopping block. The first to go, according to the experts Pew surveyed, include paralegals, bookkeepers, transcriptionists, and medical secretaries. The widespread use of DIY tax and finance software and automatic transcription tools like Siri only hints at the changes to come in these sectors. The important thing to note is that these jobs aren’t just repetitive mechanical functions. They require an ability to learn and adapt to new information. And this is precisely why the coming AI revolution is so scary.

I’ve seen how quickly new roles can appear and disappear even in my own sector, social media. Just a few years ago, “social media manager” was one of the most in-demand job functions on the career site Indeed.com. Then social media management tools—including those made by my company, Hootsuite—became more widespread and easy to use. Social media use has increased exponentially since then, but demand for dedicated social media managers hasn’t kept pace. This is still a critical role in large organizations, but for many businesses, ever more sophisticated technology has transformed social media from a discrete job into something that people all across an organization can do. …

Promoting creativity and encouraging independent thinking might help us stay ahead of job losses in the short term. But in the long term, advanced robots may well be able to execute even some of these uniquely “human” functions better than we can. Here we’re getting into the realm of “strong” or “full” AI—machines that aren’t just able to learn basic tasks but can master pretty much anything. If you’re a futurist, this is when talk of the “singularity” comes into the picture—the moment when computers can make themselves smarter, leading to capabilities that match, and then quickly exceed, our own.•

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“In Her Prime, She Didn’t Have Casual Readers”

September 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Reassessment–a chastening, even–often attends the publication of a biography, especially in the cases of writers or politicians. Joan Didion’s received a surprising number of calls for impeachment with the publication of Tracy Daugherty’s book about her.

I’ve never been a fan of Play It As It Lays (leave the smut to the professionals, please), but Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are sensational (in the best sense of the word). Yes, Didion was a fashion-magazine veteran savvy enough to wear cool sunglasses and pose at the wheel of her Stingray, but her efforts at auto-iconography don’t even rate when compared to, say, Hunter S. Thompson’s. Since they both had the chops, who even cares?

A lot of the backlash stems from the then-aphasiac author’s depiction of California as haywire during the ’60s and ’70s. Her home state, that traitor! Sure, a big-picture take of the fantasia that is California can’t completely satisfy, and perhaps her portrait flattered East Coasters, but maybe most disturbing is that she did land on numerous and troubling truths of that place in that time. Although some will argue that these were mere distortions.

From a very well-written Barnes & Noble review of Daugherty’s bio by Tom Carson, a self-described Didion skeptic:

In her prime, she didn’t have casual readers; her gift for imposing her sensibility on events didn’t permit it. The paradox of The Year of Magical Thinking‘s success was that it introduced her to a nonliterary audience largely unaware that she’d been generating intimations of morbidity, desolation, and the existential jitters out of pretty much any topic put in front of her, from 1968’s career-defining essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem on. When “California” still blended the worst of heaven and the best of hell in Noo Yawk intellectuals’ minds, no other writer matched native daughter Didion at being the anti−Beach Boys.

In her home state’s very entertaining transformation from freakish American exotica to the place lit by rockets’ pink glare that the other forty-nine all try to be, she’s a pivotal figure: the last West Coast chronicler to make a career of insisting that where she came from was special, strange, and always latently monstrous. That happened to be precisely the view her culturally unnerved audience wanted endorsed at the time, but Didion also invited derision by treating her perpetually threatened morale as the ultimate gauge of how badly the twentieth century was botching its job. In a memorable hit piece, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called her “a neurasthenic Cher.” Pauline Kael read Didion’s “ridiculously swank” 1970 novel Play It as It Lays “between bouts of disbelieving giggles.” Maybe not insignificantly, she tends to drive other woman writers up the wall — especially if, like Kael, they’re California gals themselves — more than men, who usually flip for her solemn tension.•

__________________________________

In the 1970s, Tom Brokaw profiled Didion, when she still called California home.

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“Political Orders Change”

September 9, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Can Homo sapiens survive climate change, the long recovery process that will follow it and become a thriving multi-planet species? Not without huge changes.

In an excellent Nautilus interview astrobiologist David Grinspoon conducted with writer Kim Stanley Robinson, the sci-fi author discusses how humans can endure the Anthropocene. Robinson believes it will require a global economic system with ecology at its heart. Hard to imagine that shift, even with a planetary Easter Island in our eyes. Perhaps when it’s even clearer that there’s no other choice we’ll make the right one?

One exchange:

David Grinspoon: 

So, are we talking evolution or revolution? Do we need to escape from path dependence and start anew?

Kim Stanley Robinson: 

No, we have to alter the system we already have, because like an animal with evolutionary constraints, we can’t change everything and start from scratch. But what we could do is reconstruct regulations on the existing global economic system. For this, we would need to wrench capitalism so that the global rules of the World Bank, etc., required ecological sustainability as their main criterion. That way, prices would shift to match their true costs. Burning carbon would cost more than it does now, and clean energy would become cheaper than burning carbon. This would address the most pressing part of our crisis, but finding a replacement for the market to allocate goods and price them is not easy.

As we enter this new mass extinction event, at some point there is going to be a global civilization response that will try to deal with it: try to cope, survive, and repair landscapes and ecosystems. The scientific method and democratic politics are going to be the crucial tools, I’d say. For them to work, we need universal justice and education because we need active and well-educated citizens who are empowered and live at adequacy.

From where we are now, this looks pretty hard, but I think that’s because capitalism as we know it is represented as natural, entrenched, and immutable. None of that is true. It’s a political order and political orders change. What we want is to remember that our system is constructed for a purpose, and so in need of constant fixing and new tries.•

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“The Automobile Just Isn’t That Important To People’s Lives Anymore”

September 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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American auto sales have ticked up since the beginning of our unbalanced economic recovery, but teens are no longer rushing to get licenses and become owners, which sends a mixed message about the idea that we’re passed peak-car, an idea which began reverberating in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. 

The belief was that smartphones, not cars or motorcycles, were now the tools of freedom, and that’s true, but the changes also have to do with the flattening of the middle class, the skyrocketing of college-tuition costs and the emergence of the Gig Economy.

Certainly the sector is bracing for a radical reimagining, with driverless cars in development and more powerful companies hoping to enter the already robust rideshare sector. The auto industry might hope the shift away from purchases are more fashion than fundamental, but for that to be true two major trends–the rush toward urban living and the proliferation of mobile devices–would have to be reversed. And that’s not happening.

One caveat to all this is we may have passed peak-car only according to the rules imposed by Big Auto. 3-D printers might reawaken the want for wheels if costs fall precipitously and vehicles become green and highly customizable.

From Marc Fisher’s Washington Post article “Cruising Toward Oblivion“:

For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.

“The automobile just isn’t that important to people’s lives anymore,” says Mike Berger, a historian who studies the social effect of the car. “The automobile provided the means for teenagers to live their own lives. Social media blows any limits out of the water. You don’t need the car to go find friends.”

Much of the emotional meaning of the car, especially to young adults, has transferred to the smartphone, says Mark Lizewskie, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pa. “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android, and instead of customizing their ride, they customize their phones with covers and apps,” he says. “You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”

The number of vehicles on American roads soared every year until the recession hit in 2008. Then the number plummeted. Recently, it’s crept back up. Similarly, the number of drivers has leveled off. …

No, it’s the economy, stupid, some car industry analysts and executives say. The recession hit this generation just as it was about to put down roots. Fewer jobs meant less money, which translated into an inability to buy, insure or maintain a car.

Now, as the economy bounces back, auto sales are up 4 percent in the first half of this year. Americans are choosing big vehicles again. Thanks in part to low gas prices, sales of SUVs and light trucks are up. Sedans, subcompacts, hybrids and electrics are down.

“This is all actually economics, not preferences,” says Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group funded by government and industry grants. When the cost of owning a car drops below 10 percent of income, “young people will stop telling pollsters they can do without cars. You say you’re not interested in owning something if you can’t afford it,” he argues.•

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“Drones Are Set To Become A Defining Feature Of This Century”

September 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The sluggishness of legislation to keep pace with drone development isn’t a surprise, but it’s still worrisome. Looking back to the Montgolfier brothers’ 18th-century experimentation with hot-air ballooning and forward to a time when the drone is ubiquitous, Gbenga Oduntan of the Conversation wonders about the future of international regulation, a thorny enterprise for sure. An excerpt:

Drones are set to become a defining feature of this century. Thousands are already in operation in most developed countries worldwide – and that is likely to grow to hundreds of thousands as drones of different shapes and sizes are deployed by the media, emergency services, scientists, farmers, sports enthusiasts, hobbyists, photographers, the armed forces and government agencies.

Eventually commercial uses will dwarf all others. Amazon promises to deliver purchases within 30 minutes via delivery drones. Domino’s Pizza has staged hot pizza drone delivery. More than 20 industries are approved to fly commercial drones in the US alone, and developing countries are following suit.

The question is, is this boom in drones moving faster than the law? How to fit such a proliferation of drones into the current regulations? The answers will need to be written into national and international laws quickly in order to govern an increasingly busy airspace. Many existing laws may need to be tweaked, including those governing cyber-security, stalking, privacy and human rights legislation, insurance, contract and commercial law, even the laws of war.•

A Brief Note From 1911 About An Upset Stomach

September 8, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 11, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“The Trainee Wasn’t A Fresh-Faced J-School Graduate”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In both the CBS News video I embedded yesterday and in the recent Nieman Reports article by Celeste LeCompte, an argument is made that the automation of newsrooms, a process that began back in the 1970s, is a good thing that’ll free up the hands of journalists to do more important work. Well, that’s part of the story.

Seasoned reporters who could do more than an inverted triangle piece always did so. This arrangement isn’t a new occurrence courtesy of the Second Machine Age. Those small-scale stories were mostly a training ground for cubs to practice a formula and grow beyond it. Software taking on this task will mean fewer hires and less-on-the-job learning, ultimately providing a smaller pool of potential talent and fewer eyes, ears and voices–at least on the professional end of things. And that, of course, doesn’t even begin to speak to the missteps, ethical and otherwise, that will occur.

I’m not saying such software isn’t a useful tool; it certainly is. But as is always the case with technology, something’s lost as something’s gained.

The Nieman Reports opening:

Philana Patterson, assistant business editor for the Associated Press, has been covering business since the mid-1990s. Before joining the AP, she worked as a business reporter for both local newspapers and Dow Jones Newswires and as a producer at Bloomberg. “I’ve written thousands of earnings stories, and I’ve edited even more,” she says. “I’m very familiar with earnings.” Patterson manages more than a dozen staffers on the business news desk, and her expertise landed her on an AP stylebook committee that sets the guidelines for AP’s earnings stories. So last year, when the AP needed someone to train its newest newsroom member on how to write an earnings story, Patterson was an obvious choice.

The trainee wasn’t a fresh-faced j-school graduate, responsible for covering a dozen companies a quarter, however. It was a piece of software called Wordsmith, and by the end of its first year on the job, it would write more stories than Patterson had in her entire career. Patterson’s job was to get it up to speed.

Patterson’s task is becoming increasingly common in newsrooms. Journalists at ProPublica, Forbes, The New York Times, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Yahoo, and others are using algorithms to help them tell stories about business and sports as well as education, inequality, public safety, and more. For most organizations, automating parts of reporting and publishing efforts is a way to both reduce reporters’ workloads and to take advantage of new data resources. In the process, automation is raising new questions about what it means to encode news judgment in algorithms, how to customize stories to target specific audiences without making ethical missteps, and how to communicate these new efforts to audiences.

Automation is also opening up new opportunities for journalists to do what they do best: tell stories that matter. With new tools for discovering and understanding massive amounts of information, journalists and publishers alike are finding new ways to identify and report important, very human tales embedded in big data.

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“I Fear That The IRS Doesn’t Have The Courage To Take On Scientology”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It might seem strange to call a filmmaker a writer of perfect essays, but that’s an apt description of Alex Gibney. The director consistently turns out potent work that brims with intelligence and never loses its precision despite the great passion propelling it. Having just followed up a documentary about one popular storyteller (L. Ron Hubbard) with a film about another one (Steve Jobs), Gibney did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Have any Scientologists done anything in retribution for Going Clear to you personally? I thought it was a great documentary by the way.

Alex Gibney:

They have tried to make my life uncomfortable through online harassment and occasional in-person confrontations. But it’s what they are doing to the subjects of the film that is really terrible. Those who appeared have reported harassment by PIs, economic and physical threats and lots of on-line vilification.

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Question:

My question is about Going Clear. At the end of the film, you display a list of high ranking Scientologists who refused to be interviewed or never responded to your interview requests. Among those is Tom Cruise and Captain David Miscavige. What would you like to have asked these men, if you had been given the opportunity?

Alex Gibney:

I would have asked them both about specific aspects of the story. For example, I would have asked Cruise detailed questions about the Nazanin Boniadi episode. I also would have asked him how it is that he can defend the allegations of human rights abuses that have been confirmed by so many. Re: Miscavige, I would have asked him detailed questions about the battle against the IRS and also about the hole and the Cruise wiretap and so much much more. I find it instructive that Miscavige won’t permit anyone to ask him questions.

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Question:

Do you see Scientology continuing to have tax exempt status, or do you think the “religion” is on the way out?

Alex Gibney:

I fear that the IRS doesn’t have the courage to take on Scientology. I think they should lose their exemption because they are really a money-making organization disguised as a religion and because the church has an appalling human rights record. Why should we subsidize that? I wrote a piece about this in the L.A. Times.

Question:

Isn’t that pretty much true of all organized religions?

Alex Gibney:

Depends. I don’t have any problem with subsidizing anti-poverty programs. But I think the exemption should be based on that – which in theory it is supposed to be – rather than on belief in a deity.

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Question:

What do you make of Pope Francis and his tenure as Pontiff? Shockingly, MEA MAXIMA CULPA gave me more respect for Pope Benedict, and I lost a lot of respect for Pope John Paul II.

Alex Gibney:

I am truly impressed by Pope Francis. I love his principled stands on the growing disparity between rich and poor and the destruction of our environment. He has changed things more than I ever thought possible and acted as a moral force for change for everyone. I find it appalling that prominent wealthy Catholics suggest that he should not involve himself in economic issues. If a Pope can’t talk about morality and economic justice, he shouldn’t be Pope.

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Question:

What were you most surprised to learn about Steve Jobs?

Alex Gibney:

Three things. 1) I was fascinated to find out about his interest in zen. What CEO has a monk as a spiritual advisor? 2) I was surprised to learn how much the teams at Apple took care of invention of the actual products. Steve was more of a storyteller.

Question:

What’s number 3?

Alex Gibney:

Good question.•

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“New Forms Of Slavery Are The Hallmark Of These Wealthy Countries”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can find in President Trump’s support the desire for an illusory America that will never be. The very complex problems which the candidate is ill-prepared to address have been dutifully avoided. There’s no discussion of automation vanishing jobs. There’s no talk about how China is the world leader in cancer rates and air pollution as partial payment for its hellbent shift into capitalism. You’ll hear from Trump that Dubai has such beautiful, modern airports and lavish golf courses because that state’s leaders are much smarter than ours are, but there’s no mention of their willingness to use quasi-slave labor. 

In a London Review of Books piece about the ongoing refugee crisis, Slavoj Žižek examines the need for a nouveau forms of slavery in the contemporary global economy. These people are still cheaper than machines, for now.

An excerpt:

New forms of slavery are the hallmark of these wealthy countries: millions of immigrant workers on the Arabian peninsula are deprived of elementary civil rights and freedoms; in Asia, millions of workers live in sweatshops organised like concentration camps. But there are examples closer to home. On 1 December 2013 a Chinese-owned clothing factory in Prato, near Florence, burned down, killing seven workers trapped in an improvised cardboard dormitory. ‘No one can say they are surprised at this,’ Roberto Pistonina, a local trade unionist, remarked, ‘because everyone has known for years that, in the area between Florence and Prato, hundreds if not thousands of people are living and working in conditions of near slavery.’ There are more than four thousand Chinese-owned businesses in Prato, and thousands of Chinese immigrants are believed to be living in the city illegally, working as many as 16 hours a day for a network of workshops and wholesalers.

The new slavery is not confined to the suburbs of Shanghai, or Dubai, or Qatar. It is in our midst; we just don’t see it, or pretend not to see it. Sweated labour is a structural necessity of today’s global capitalism. Many of the refugees entering Europe will become part of its growing precarious workforce, in many cases at the expense of local workers, who react to the threat by joining the latest wave of anti-immigrant populism.

In escaping their war-torn homelands, the refugees are possessed by a dream. Refugees arriving in southern Italy do not want to stay there: many of them are trying to get to Scandinavia. The thousands of migrants in Calais are not satisfied with France: they are ready to risk their lives to enter the UK. Tens of thousands of refugees in Balkan countries are desperate to get to Germany. They assert their dreams as their unconditional right, and demand from the European authorities not only proper food and medical care but also transportation to the destination of their choice. There is something enigmatically utopian in this demand: as if it were the duty of Europe to realise their dreams – dreams which, incidentally, are out of reach of most Europeans (surely a good number of Southern and Eastern Europeans would prefer to live in Norway too?). It is precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger – when we’d expect them to settle for a minimum of safety and wellbeing – that their utopianism becomes most intransigent. But the hard truth to be faced by the refugees is that ‘there is no Norway,’ even in Norway.•

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