Urban Studies

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“The App Is Like Uber, But For A Sales Force”

June 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Salespeople at companies I have worked for: Scientologists, cokeheads, pathological liars, a fuckface who rang a cowbell each time a deal closed, a lady who loudly worried about the state of her “ta-tas” prior to meeting clients, and one guy so creepy I think about him each time I hear of a string of Craigslist hooker murders.

No, they weren’t all that bad, but the goal of having an in-house staff of highly professional salespeople at every single business is likely unrealistic. Could this department be reimagined, perhaps outsourced, even Uberized?

In a Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims writes about the growing momentum of sales as a contingent position, a potential further fractionalization of the job pool. The opening:

Right now a college student in Sweden—let’s call him Sven—has a rather unusual summer job. He’s in sales, but he hasn’t met anyone from the company whose products he pushes.

His boss is an app. It considers Sven’s strengths and weaknesses as a salesman, matches him with goods from any of a dozen brands, and plots a route through Stockholm optimized to include as many potential customers as possible in the time allotted to him.

The app is like Uber, but for a sales force. It has many of the same dynamics: Companies can use it to get salespeople on demand, and those salespeople choose when to work and which assignments to accept. The startup behind it, Universal Avenue, calls the idea “sales as a service.”

While the Stockholm-based company may be pioneering this model of it, outsourcing functions traditionally considered integral to a business is a trend that’s gaining steam with certain types of companies.

Anyone who needs to put salespeople in front of potential customers who aren’t otherwise economical to reach can do so, it seems, by combining the magic of a remote workforce and fractional employment.•

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“Dystopianism Is Rarely About Technology”

May 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The popularity of dystopic culture, I believe, is far more complicated than a fear of the world ending. We’re not really worried about things falling apart but that they might not.

Part of the allure of apocalypse entertainments is that we get to, if briefly and virtually, quiet the hum of progress, the noise of the new technologies. There’s a deeply buried anxiety within us that the world will continue apace–perhaps at an accelerated pace–leaving most of us in its wake. The death of development on screens and in pages is a relief of sorts, something we crave, not dread.

In his latest Medium piece, “Optimism Doesn’t Sell,”  Jeff Jarvis, who sees the Google Glass as half full, writes about the box-office failing of Disney’s future-positive Tomorrowland:

Much of the dystopianism that surrounds us today is about our machines and the companies that run them: how Google makes us stupid, Facebook kills privacy, Google Glass turns us all into peeping Toms, robots will take our jobs and our car keys, the internet of things will open the door to crime, and artificial intelligence will bring unspecified dangers (the juiciest kind).

But the truth is that dystopianism is rarely about technology. It’s about people. The dystopian fears that his fellow man and woman are too stupid to use technology well, too gullible to see its risks, too timid to control its dangers, too venal to see beyond its temptations.

Dystopianism is the ultimate statement of hubris: ‘I am smarter than the rest of you,’ says the profound pessimist. ‘I can see where you are all going wrong. I can see that you can’t learn. I am better than you all.’

Like game shows, reality TV, and gawking at Walmart shoppers, dystopianism is mostly an excuse for making fun of your neighbors and feeling superior to them. They’re so stupid they’re ruining the future.•

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A Brief Note From 1906 About A Long Walk

May 31, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 1, 1906 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“To Most Students Of U.S. Politics, The Phrase American Socialism Is An Oxymoron”

May 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Libertarianism is supposed to be having a moment in America, but Edward Luce of the Financial Times argues that it’s Socialism that really is. I’ll certainly disagree with the columnist’s depiction of Martin O’Malley as a “left winger” (he’s a pragmatist in the Clinton mold), but it is worth thinking back on the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that moment, it seemed capitalism had ultimately triumphed. What if capitalism leads to robotics so profound that technological unemployment brings about the end of capitalism? Or at least a radical redefining of it? Not impossible.

Luce’s opening:

Leftwing politicians are in electoral retreat across most of the western world. The one exception is the United States. At 15 per cent in the Democratic polls, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, is riding higher than any US socialist since Eugene Debs ran for the White House a century ago.

The fact that Mr Sanders has very little chance of unseating Hillary Clinton is beside the point. His popularity is dragging her leftward. If he flames out, other left-wingers, such as Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland who entered the race at the weekend, are ready to pick up the baton. Elizabeth Warren, the populist Massachusetts senator, will continue to prod Mrs Clinton from outside the field. The more Mrs Clinton adopts their language, the harder it will be for her to reclaim the centre ground next year. Yet she is only following the crowd. A surprisingly large chunk of Democrats are happy to break the US taboo against socialism.

To most students of US politics, the phrase American socialism is an oxymoron — like clean coal or the Bolivian navy. A century ago, Werner Sombart, a German scholar, asked “Why is there no socialism in America?” It was a question that confounded Marxists. As the most advanced capitalistic society, the US was most ripe for a proletarian revolution, according to their teleology.

Yet the US refused to live up to its role.•

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“Few Men Who Engaged In Hustling And Criminal Behavior Had His Vivid Powers Of Description”

May 31, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Harvey Pekar was considered a kook because he didn’t see himself as David Letterman’s punchline, but he was right in believing he deserved respect. Not because he was a fascinating writer and thinker, though he was, but just because he was a human being. That was enough.

In 1997, Pekar was asked by the Northern California publication Metroactive to review a posthumous collection by Herbert Huncke, the original Beat, who was even more of an outcast than the American Splendor writer. It was a great pairing since, paraphrasing Nick Tosches, they both realized you could be a loser with a capital “L.” An excerpt:

Though he went on the road at the age of 12, Huncke was a competent technician and lyrical, evocative writer. He was given to making wry observations and registering complaints about his mistreatment by others, but he also took advantage of, and even stole from, his friends.

Often, however, Huncke was quite helpful and sympathetic to others. Benjamin Schafer, the book’s editor, includes in his afterword a touching account of how Huncke aided him during a bleak period in his life. Huncke hated 9-to-5 restraints and sacrificed much to escape them, including, ironically, his freedom, spending a great deal of time in one of the most restricted environments of all: prison.

Few men who engaged in hustling and criminal behavior had his vivid powers of description. Huncke provides colorful, if grim, accounts of Bohemians living on the edge, of the difficulties they face and of their attempts to cope with them.

At times, the grimness turned to genuine despair. Busted just after getting out of jail, Huncke contemplated suicide:

I wanted to kill myself. Thoughts of disgust, anger, frustration, confusion, and a complete physical let-down had me exhausted. At one point, I promised myself I’d do this bit and when I’d get out, I’d disappear down at the Bowery–anywhere–never show my face to my friends again, sort of fade into nothingness.

But Huncke did not give in; maybe the writing kept him from fading away. He even managed to stay more or less within the law in the 1960s and, partly due to his charm as a storyteller, cultivated a following as a writer and “character.” At the end of his life, the Grateful Dead paid his rent at the Chelsea Hotel, and he lectured at colleges. Huncke, one of the fathers of the Beat movement, survived almost all his literary compatriots, living to a ripe old age in the process.•

 

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“The Fan Became The Engine”

May 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kris Jenner is the new Joe Jackson, and a big ass the new moonwalk.

We don’t have to like what the Kardashian-Jenner clan tells us about our era, but to deny their significance in it–what exactly do those people do?–is to miss the point. From Reality TV to Netflix algorithmic ratings to likes and retweets, the fans, those barbarians, have stormed the gates, overturning the professional class. 

Bill Simmons was part of that revolution, bringing a spectator’s passion (along with writing chops and a funny, if sometimes sexist, sense of humor) to a field that had long been called the “sports pages.” The Internet was his playing field and it graduated him from Boston cheap seats to Los Angeles courtside, a progression that never completely sat right. 

Now that his run at ESPN has finished ingloriously, here are two passages from Jonathan Mahler’s prescient 2011 New York Times Magazine piece, “Can Bill Simmons Win the Big One?” The first focuses on the rise of the fan and the other on the likely bitter ending of a stormy if mutually profitable relationship.

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A brief, reductive history of modern sportswriting in America might look something like this: Practitioners of the craft during the first two-thirds of the 20th century paid for their unfettered access to athletes by glorifying them, “Godding up those ballplayers,” as one sportswriter memorably put it. In the 1970s, sportswriters stopped protecting athletes and started demythologizing them. As they did, their access diminished. The gulf between ballplayers and fans widened.

Enter Simmons and his legion of imitators, whom you won’t find loitering in a locker room, trawling for quotes or sitting at the press tables of an N.B.A. game, where rooting is forbidden. At the center of Simmons’s columns is not the increasingly unknowable athlete but the experience of the fan. His frame of reference is himself. He might not be able to tell you how a ballplayer felt performing a particular feat, but he can tell you how he felt watching it, what childhood memories it evoked, the scene from the movie “Point Break” it brought to mind, which one of his countless theories — newcomers to his column can consult a glossary on his home page — it vindicates. There’s a vaguely metaphysical quality to this approach: the sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls it “the tao of Bill.”

Simmons is more than just a fan; he is the fan, the voice of the citizenry of sports nation. In a larger sense, what he’s doing is nothing new. In much the same way that newspaper columnists call out callous politicians and crooked businessmen, Simmons rails against greedy owners, the commissioners who invariably side with them, overpaid players and dysfunctional franchises. Recently, he lambasted the Maloof brothers, the owners of the Sacramento Kings, for neglecting the team, and David Stern, the N.B.A.’s commissioner, for allowing them to do so. “Once you get approved to purchase an N.B.A. franchise, for whatever reason, David Stern seemingly yields all control over your behavior unless you criticize his officials,” Simmons wrote. “Anything else? Knock yourself out. Buying into the N.B.A. is like buying a house: Once you move in, feel free to disgrace the neighborhood however you want.”

Simmons is a funny, intelligent and original writer. He comes up with surprising angles and conceits — in a column last month, he applied quotes from “The Wire” to moments in the N.B.A. playoffs — that may not always work but certainly prevent him from becoming predictable. He is especially good at describing sports moments, a dying art since the arrival of nonstop sports highlights.

But Simmons’s rise has been fueled by broader forces too. The recent explosion of the sports industry — the emergence of 24-hour sports networks, sports-radio shows, Web sites, fantasy leagues, video games — has been geared foremost toward creating and satisfying the demands of the consumer. The fan became the engine of the sporting world.

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It was a sultry afternoon, and midway through the game, we went inside to the Dugout Club to cool off and talk. Simmons sounded as if he was having some regrets about Grantland. “It hasn’t been as much as fun as I had thought,” he told me. “I’m not sure I would do it again.” Too much of his time was being spent in the office, dealing with administrative tasks, which was encroaching on his column.

Simmons’s literary persona suggests a slacker, a guy who would like nothing more than to spend his days drinking beer and watching sports. This image, enhanced by his loose, casual prose, is misleading. The real Simmons is hard-working and competitive. His rise to prominence has been punctuated by bouts of restlessness and frustration, even when things looked from the outside to be going his way. He’s still chafing over his publisher’s handling of his 2009 book, The Book of Basketball, a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

As far as Simmons has come since he first started searching for an audience, he wants to go much further, to create something more enduring than his column or even his books. But the drudgery of running his own publication is already intruding on the utopian world he has built for himself. And he knows that the only thing preventing him from becoming another overexposed hack, an ex-sportswriter who now gets paid to blather on TV, is his column, which can take days to research and write. “My biggest concern about the site is that I don’t want the column to just be one of the things I’m doing,” Simmons said.

After the game, we drove to Chinatown for a late lunch. “Listen to this,” Simmons said, reading the fortune from his cookie as we were getting up to leave: “An important business venture may soon develop for you.” Everyone laughed. “Or it could be the end of my career,” Simmons joked. “I don’t know, I think I have one more big sellout contract in me.”•

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“We Are Only Aware Of His Story Because He Did Something Unimaginable To Survive”

May 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but modern China almost has been. In a rush to modernization, the focus has been on the greater good, which, as always, has its blind spots, from the world’s highest cancer rates to life-threatening pollution to a healthcare system incapable of nurturing a gigantic population being pulled at a breakneck pace by the sweep of history.

Case in point: The harrowing story of Zheng Yanliang, who took desperate measures to escape certain death in the world’s largest economy.

From Bernhard Zand at Spiegel:

His shroud had already been purchased when, on April 14, 2012, Zheng Yanliang, 48, a Chinese man from Hebei Province, summoned up the last of his strength to lean out of his bed and reach for his toolbox. He took out a hacksaw. Then he wrapped the handle of a backscratcher in a piece of material, which he stuck in his mouth so that he could bite on it. He did not hesitate. He had thought about his options and concluded that he had only one choice, this unthinkable, monstrous deed. He placed the saw against his right leg, a hand’s breadth below his hip, and began to saw.

The life of worker Zheng Yanliang, which began in 1966, probably would have ended in 2012 were it not for a miracle. It’s a life that spans the entire period of China’s opening to the world, and of the great Chinese economic miracle. Zheng diligently contributed to his society’s high-speed transformation, as both a farmer and a migrant worker, as did millions upon millions of his fellow Chinese, in a country where progress for the masses is everything and the fate of the individual means nothing. Zheng’s story shows what can happen when someone falters in this relentless pursuit of prosperity, and when he falls and is taken out of the running. We are only aware of his story because he did something unimaginable to survive, and because photos were later taken of what happened to him. We know nothing about many thousands of other Chinese who fall by the wayside while working to increase their own and the overall gross national product.•

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“In This Case The Entire Business Is Fake”

May 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a fascinating New York Times article, Liz Alderman reports on the ghost companies of Europe, phantom businesses with pretend inventory and customers, which exist merely to supply (unpaid) make-believe jobs to the long-term unemployed, novice workers who need experience or those retraining for new industries. 

Considered broadly, such an arrangement already exists all over the globe, although not with the express mission of helping citizens back into the workforce. A massive number of people already have fake, non-paying jobs in the Freeconomy. Each day, hundreds of millions create content for Facebook, which would make the company the largest sweatshop in world history, if it paid even a nominal amount. Should technological unemployment become widespread, become the new normal, we’ll continue to produce content and products, even if there’s no compensation. Maybe we’ll receive “free” minutes or bonus points or nothing at all. But for that to happen in a large-scale and permanent way, we’ll have to start taxing capital rather than labor, and there will need to be a guaranteed basic income.

The opening of Alderman’s piece:

At 9:30 a.m. on a sunny weekday, the phones at Candelia, a purveyor of sleek office furniture in Lille, France, rang steadily with orders from customers across the country and from Switzerland and Germany. A photocopier clacked rhythmically while more than a dozen workers processed sales, dealt with suppliers and arranged for desks and chairs to be shipped.

Sabine de Buyzer, working in the accounting department, leaned into her computer and scanned a row of numbers. Candelia was doing well. Its revenue that week was outpacing expenses, even counting taxes and salaries. “We have to be profitable,” Ms. de Buyzer said. “Everyone’s working all out to make sure we succeed.”

This was a sentiment any boss would like to hear, but in this case the entire business is fake. So are Candelia’s customers and suppliers, from the companies ordering the furniture to the trucking operators that make deliveries. Even the bank where Candelia gets its loans is not real. 

More than 100 Potemkin companies like Candelia are operating today in France, and there are thousands more across Europe. In Seine-St.-Denis, outside Paris, a pet business called Animal Kingdom sells products like dog food and frogs. ArtLim, a company in Limoges, peddles fine porcelain. Prestige Cosmetique in Orleans deals in perfumes. All these companies’ wares are imaginary.

These companies are all part of an elaborate training network that effectively operates as a parallel economic universe.•

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“Historic Monsters Might Be Punished For 6 Million Years”

May 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not exactly the most pressing concern to sort out how we’d conduct justice should it become possible for humans to upload consciousness to computers and attain a sort-of immortality for our sort-of selves. But it may be theoretically possible and makes for a fun bull session, so Conor Friedersdorf penned a well-written cautionary essay on the topic for the Atlantic, which also considers other unintended consequences of the endless summer. An excerpt:

Radical life extension would so scramble and confound our normal notions of justice that there’s no telling how future Americans would react to the new reality. Historic monsters might be punished for 6 million years … or just three or four times longer than a 150-year sentence a U.S. court imposed on this obscure money-launderer. It’s hard to speculate even when confining ourselves to descendants of ours, in this country, with moral codes closely resembling our own.

In fact, it isn’t clear how we’d react right now.

If today’s Americans magically took custody of servers containing the disembodied consciousnesses of every figure ever mentioned in the country’s newspapers, going back to the beginning, would we stop at punishing former Nazi leaders? Would there be a protest movement to hold Native American killers and slaveholders accountable? What about the folks behind the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? Or the city leaders of towns in the Jim Crow South that subjugated blacks?•

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A Brief Note From 1930 About A Brother’s Keeper

May 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 16, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

May 28, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Check me for ticks? (Brooklyn Heights)

I’ve thought about this and it’s not as weird as it sounds. I go upstate most weekends and the tick population has been huge. Last week I found 3 ticks on my body. I don’t have anyone I feel comfortable asking to check me thoroughly so what is a person to do? My eyesight isn’t the greatest and I’m somewhat hairy, complicating the task from my own perspective.

Perhaps there is someone in a medically related field, or studying, who is not especially squeamish about doing examinations involving nudity? Or just open to it? It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but it does have to be done seriously. A careful full body check and removal of any ticks that are found. I have gloves and a little removal tool. It’s important to find attached ticks within 24-48 hours, so this would best take place on Sunday evenings or Mondays, hopefully on a regular basis. I’m located near Borough Hall.

I’m absolutely willing to pay, but as far-fetched as it sounds I’m wondering whether I might find someone in Activities rather than posting this as a job! It’s quite a dilemma, figuring out how to find these little suckers in places you can’t see. Yeah, could try to use a mirror or smartphone, but not ideal.

If someone is in the same predicament I would be willing to reciprocate. Thanks for reading and considering. Oh yeah, I’m a middle aged, healthy, average looking guy.

“Today, It Mostly Hovers Above Its Hinterlands”

May 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Of all the poems I read as child, Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” is the one that stays with me most: “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads.” No place of a complicated nature could ask for a better defense.

Today, Chicago, like most global cities, is more complicated still, a home to stunning wealth inequality, a place of thriving and one of falling, and one connected more to ideas than geography. It’s not just crowded with markets but a market itself.

At the Financial Times, Edward Luce writes of its “two-city tale.” The opening:

They call Chicago the city of big shoulders. Much like Dubai’s emergence from virtually nowhere in the last 20 years to become a global city, Chicago pulled itself up from its bootstraps in the mid-19th century to turn into America’s industrial hub.

Unlike its peers — Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore — it survived the obliteration of America’s industrial heartlands in the past 40 years by learning to “pour new wine into old bottles,” in the words of Richard Longworth, a leading chronicler of today’s Chicago. Where once it thrived on slaughtered hogs, smelted iron and freight trains, now it hosts corporate headquarters, boasts new economy start-ups and links to other global hubs via O’Hare airport. Today’s Chicago prefers to benchmark itself against Shanghai, São Paulo, Paris — and, yes, Dubai. But is it paying too little heed to what is under its nose?

The fate of a city’s hinterland is one that haunts every great metropolis. For London, it is the rest of the UK which sometimes feels like a different country. For Dubai, it is the Wahhabi heartlands of the Arabian peninsula. For Chicago it is the US Midwest.

In the past, Chicago acted as the locomotive of its hinterlands — in Mr Longworth’s words — buying the Midwest’s farm produce and other raw commodities and then converting them into products. The city was linked umbilically to its surrounding geography and vice versa. Today, it mostly hovers above its hinterlands. But in some ways it is also parasitic on them. Much like the giant sucking sound of London hoovering up the UK’s talent, Chicago takes the best and the brightest from the small towns of America and plugs them into the global economy. Chicago’s success is no longer symbiotic with its rural neighbours. In some ways it comes at their expense.•

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“You’re Going To Be Able To Carry All The Music You Want Around On Something The Size Of A Credit Card”

May 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s more than 40 years since research and development began on the Compact Disc, exactly 30 years since the technology’s amazing rise in popularity and more than a decade since the best market the recording industry ever enjoyed started to lose its groove. How did the biggest music companies in the world not see that the information would become pure? It’s the same old story: They didn’t want to accept it would happen because they didn’t want the huge profits to stop coming.

In “How the Compact Disc Lost Its Shine,” Dorian Lynskey of the Guardian has a smart, sprawling article about the brief dominance of a medium. Three excerpts follow.

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Bootleg CDs were a danger the industry could get its head around – you could hold one in your hand. What it couldn’t comprehend was the threat of the MP3: the idea that music could transcend physical formats. “That happened for two reasons,” says [How Music Got Free author Stephen] Witt. “One was they were enjoying unbelievable profits. Two, the studio engineers hated the way the MP3 sounded and refused to engage with it. A lot of artists hated the way it sounded, too.” What the audiophiles didn’t realise was that most consumers couldn’t tell the difference. “What was the audio experience before the compact disc?” says Witt. “It was cheap vinyl or an AM transistor radio on the beach, and MP3 sounds better than either of those.”

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Just like their predecessors in Greece in 1982, 90s executives were too busy worrying about the next quarter to consider the next decade. The status quo was perfect, until it wasn’t. “My biggest bugbear about this industry is that they all think short-term,” says Webster. “Nobody ever thinks long-term. All these executives were sitting there being paid huge bonuses on increased profits and they didn’t care. I don’t think anyone saw it coming. I remember the production guy at Virgin saying, ‘In a few years, you’re going to be able to carry all the music you want around on something the size of a credit card.’ And we all laughed. Don’t be ridiculous! How can you do that?”

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Only a handful of people predicted the CD’s downfall way back in 1982. German computer engineer Dieter Seitzer, the forefather of the MP3, immediately considered the CD “a maximalist repository of irrelevant information, most of which was ignored by the human ear,” writes Witt. If music could become digital data, he thought, it wouldn’t be bound by the Red Book. Webster remembers one industry Cassandra, Maurice Oberstein – who ran CBS and then Polygram in the UK – making a similar point. “He was the only one who went: ‘We’re making a huge mistake. We’re putting studio-quality masters into the hands of people.’ And he was absolutely right in that respect. Once you made a CD with ones and zeroes it was only a matter of time before that was converted into something that was easily transferable.”

The fall of the CD, like its rise, began slowly.•

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“We Will Actually Be Able To Sell The Energy”

May 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Hyperloop might be built and might be free if it is built. Developers of Elon Musk’s futuristic transportation system are seeking ways to vanish customer costs since it will have to be heavily traveled if it’s to become a large-scale success. 

From Katie Collins at Wired UK:

Even though Hyperloop’s pricing consultants estimate a ride will cost twice the price of a plane ticket, [CEO Dirk] Ahlborn is keen to avoid this situation. “We want to make it something you use every single day many times,” he says. He is even debating whether “ticketing is best way of monetising, or are there other ways to make money?”. 

“I really, strongly believe that if we create a hyperloop network and it’s free — in the off-peak times at least, in peak times we would charge a little bit  — but we make money in other ways, that will really change how people live.”

There are already some options for this; for a start, the system works on 100 percent renewable energy, and actually will make more energy than it needs. As such, says Ahlborn, “we will actually be able to sell the energy.” He’s also looking for ideas for alternative ways in which the Hyperloop might be able to make money.•

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Old Print Article: “A Funeral By Phonograph,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1895)

May 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The phonograph was initially a disappointing technology commercially, even if Thomas Edison was something of a smash when he demonstrated his “talking machine” in London in 1888. One nineteenth-century Brooklyn undertaker, however, found a novel use for the new contraption during the funeral of young freak-show performer. An article in the August 18, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the unconventional ceremony.

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“This Was Going To Be A Technological, Computerized Nightmare!”

May 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1973, the former child preacher Marjoe Gortner was hired by OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age, to write a deservedly mocking article about the American visit of another youthful religious performer, the 16-year-old Maharaj Ji, an adolescent Indian guru who promised to levitate the Houston Astrodome, a plot that never got off the ground. Two excerpts from the resulting report published the following May, which revealed a tech-friendly and futuristic cult leader, who would have been right at home in today’s Silicon Valley.

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The guru’s people do the same thing the Pentecostal Church does. They say you can believe in guru Maharaj Ji and that’s fantastic and good, but if you receive light and get it all within, if you become a real devotee-that is the ultimate. In the Pentecostal Church you can be saved from your sins and have Jesus Christ as your Saviour, but the ultimate is the baptism of the Holy Ghost. This is where you get four or five people around and they begin to talk and more or less chant in tongues until sooner or later the person wanting the baptismal experience so much-well, it’s like joining a country club: once you’re in, you’ll be like everyone – else in the club.

The people who’ve been chanting say, “Speak it out, speak it out,” and everything becomes so frenzied that the baptismalee will finally speak a few words in tongues himself, and the people around him say, “Oh, you’ve got it.” And the joy that comes over everybody’s faces! It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. They feel they have got the Holy Spirit like all their friends, and once they’ve got it, it’s forever. It’s quite an experience.

So essentially they’re the same thing pressing on your eyes while your ears are corked, and standing around the altar speaking in tongues. They’re both illuminating experiences. The guru’s path is interesting, though. Once you’ve seen the light and decided you want to join his movement, you give over everything you have–all material possessions. Sometimes you even give your job. Now, depending on what your job is, you may be told to leave it or to stay. If you stay, generally you turn your pay checks over to the Divine Light Mission, and they see that you are housed and clothed and fed. They have their U. S. headquarters in Denver. You don’t have to worry about anything. That’s their hook. They take care of it all. They have houses all over the country for which they supposedly paid cash on the line. First class. Some of them are quite plush. At least Maharaj Ji’s quarters are. Some of the followers live in those houses, too, but in the dormitory-type atmosphere with straw mats for beds. It’s a large operation. It seems to be a lot like the organization Father Divine had back in the Thirties. He did it with the black people at the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. He took care of his people-mostly domestics and other low-wage earners–and put them up in his own hotel with three meals a day.

The guru is much more technologically oriented, though. He spreads a lot of word and keeps tabs on who needs what through a very sophisticated Telex system that reaches out to all the communes or ashrams around the country. He can keep count of who needs how many T-shirts, pairs of socks–stuff like that. And his own people run this system; it’s free labor for the corporation.

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The morning of the third day I was feeling blessed and refreshed, and I was looking forward to the guru’s plans for the Divine City, which was soon going to be built somewhere in the U. S. I wanted to hear what that was all about.

It was unbelievable. The city was to consist of ‘modular units adaptable to any desired shape.’ The structures would have waste-recycling devices so that water could be drunk over and over. They even planned to have toothbrushes with handles you could squeeze to have the proper amount of paste pop up (the crowd was agog at this). There would be a computer in each communal house so that with just a touch of the hand you could check to see if a book you wanted was available, and if it was, it would be hand-messengered to you. A complete modern city of robots. I was thinking: whatever happened to mountains and waterfalls and streams and fresh air? This was going to be a technological, computerized nightmare! It repulsed me. Computer cards to buy essentials at a central storeroom! And no cheating, of course. If you flashed your card for an item you already had, the computer would reject it. The perfect turn-off. The spokesman for this city announced that the blueprints had already been drawn up and actual construction would be the next step. Controlled rain, light, and space. Bubble power! It was all beginning to be very frightening.•

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“The Houston Astrodome will physically separate itself from the planet which we call Earth and will fly.”

“The Human Brain And Human Hands…Had No Substitute”

May 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Medium piece, Gerald Huff answers the points made by writer Walter Isaacson and roboticist Pippa Malmgren during a recent London debate, in which they argued against the likelihood of large-scale technological unemployment. Isaacson touting work created by the so-called Sharing Economy, contingent jobs which squeeze laborers, was either his least-researched response or most disingenuous one. 

From Huff:

What is different about the technologies emerging now from academia and tech companies large and small is the extent to which they can substitute for or eliminate jobs that previously only humans could do. Over the course of thousands of years, human brawn was replaced by animal power, then wind and water power, then steam, internal combustion and electric motors. But the human brain and human hands — with their capabilities to perceive, move in and manipulate unstructured environments, process information, make decisions, and communicate with other people — had no substitute. The technologies emerging today — artificial intelligence fed by big data and the internet of things and robotics made practical by cheap sensors and massive processing power — change the equation. Many of the tasks that simply had to be done by humans will in the coming decades fall within the capabilities of these emerging technologies.

When Isaacson says “it always has, and I submit always will produce more jobs, because it produces…more things that we can make and buy” he is falling into the Labor Content Fallacy. Without repeating the entire argument in the linked article, there is no law of economics that says a product or service must require human labor. The simplest example is a digital download of a song or game, which has essentially zero marginal labor content. In the coming decades, for the first time in history, we will be able to “make and buy” a huge variety of goods and services without the need to employ people. The historical correlation between more human jobs due to increased demand for goods and services from a rising population will be broken.•

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“The Idea Of Hooking A Bunch Of Brains Into A Common Network Has A Certain Appeal”

May 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even before the Internet, we’ve always been inside a hive mind of sorts, things have forever “gone viral” in one sense or another, though technology has made such functions more immediate, intricate and seamless. Of course, we’re only at the beginning. What becomes of us as individuals if our brains are always “plugged in” and we become a true neural collective, if our gray matter moves from “dial-up” to “broadband”? It will create new problems even as it helps solve many others.

A passage from “Hive Consciousness,” Peter Watts’ new Aeon essay:

Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom(2003) describes a near future in which everyone is wired into the internet, 24/7, via cortical link. It’s not far-fetched, given recent developments. And the idea of hooking a bunch of brains into a common network has a certain appeal. Split-brain patients outperform normal folks on visual-search and pattern-recognition tasks, for one thing: two minds are better than one, even when they’re in the same head, even when limited to dial-up speeds. So if the future consists of myriad minds in high-speed contact with each other, you might say: Yay, bring it on.

I’m not sure that’s the way it’s going to happen, though.

I don’t necessarily buy into the hokey old trope of an internet that ‘wakes up’. Then again, I don’t reject it out of hand, either. Google’s ‘DeepMind’, a general-purpose AI explicitly designed to mimic the brain, is a bit too close to SyNAPSE for comfort (and a lot more imminent: its first incarnations are already poised to enter the market). The bandwidth of your cell phone is already comparable to that of your corpus callosum, once noise and synaptic redundancy are taken into account. We’re still a few theoretical advances away from an honest-to-God mind meld – still waiting for the ultrasonic ‘Neural Dust’ interface proposed by Berkley’s Dongjin Seo, or for researchers at Rice University to perfect their carbon-nanotube electrodes – but the pipes are already fat enough to handle that load when it arrives.

And those advances may come easier than you’d expect. Brains do a lot of their own heavy lifting when it comes to plugging unfamiliar parts together. A blind rat, wired into a geomagnetic sensor via a simple pair of electrodes, can use magnetic fields to navigate a maze just as well as her sighted siblings. If a rat can teach herself to use a completely new sensory modality – something the species has never experienced throughout the course of its evolutionary history – is there any cause to believe our own brains will prove any less capable of integrating novel forms of input?

Not even skeptics necessarily deny the likelihood of ‘thought-stealing technology.’•

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“Perhaps A Society Comprised Of Contented People Doing What They Wanted Would Be Better”

May 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the IEET essay “Aristotle, Robot Slaves, and a New Economic System,” philosopher John G. Messerly uses Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? as a jumping-off point for a discussion of how we’ll live should we experience a critical mass of technological unemployment. Messerly is largely sanguine, predicting we’ll still enjoy life when we’re second best, the way we continue to play chess despite being checkmated by our silicon sisters. Of course, he doesn’t explain how we’ll get from here to there, how we will come to “share the wealth.” It may not be such a smooth transition.

An excerpt:

I think that Lanier is on to something. We can think of the non-automated work as anything from essential to frivolous. If we think of it as frivolous, then so too are the people that produce it. If we don’t care about human expression in art, literature, music, sport or philosophy, then why care about the people that produce it.

But even if machines write better music or poetry or blogs about the meaning of life, we could still value human generated effort. Even if machines did all of society’s work we could still share the wealth with people who wanted to think and write and play music. Perhaps people just enjoy these activities. No human being plays chess as well as the best supercomputers, but people still enjoy playing chess; I don’t play golf as good as Tiger Woods,  but I still enjoy it.

I’ll go further. Suppose someone wants to sit on the beach, surf, ski, golf, smoke marijuana, watch TV, or collect coins. What do I care? Perhaps a society comprised of contented people doing what they wanted would be better than one informed by the Protestant work ethic. A society of stoned, TV watching, skiers, golfers and surfers would probably be a happier one than we live in now. (The evidence shows that the happiest countries are those with the strongest social safety nets, the ones with the most paid holidays and generous vacation and leave policies; the Western European and Scandinavian countries.) People would still write music and books, lift weights, volunteer, and visit their grandchildren. They would not turn into drug addicts!

This is what I envision.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

May 27, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

help me find a shrinking potion (reno nv)

i’m looking for a real working way to shrink. i know its very strange, but i’m serious, and i know that there must really be a way. i would like to shrink myself to 3 inches tall. no joke. i’m a 24-year-old male. i’d do anything, anything to get a hold of something that really honestly works. thank you!

“She Brings To All Her Photographs An Unflinching Yet Compassionate Eye”

May 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark, best known for Streetwise, just passed away at 75. In 1987, Vicki Goldberg penned a longform NYT portrait of Mark, whose career ascended as documentary photography in print was being elbowed aside by pictures of celebrities with perfect teeth. Her sojourns inside brothels and hospices and gypsy camps and squats raised the old question about people who carry cameras into squalid corners–those of exploitation. These risky assignments improved Mark’s station in life, but how about her subjects? I feel certain we’re better for her work, even if a lone journalist, no matter how gifted and determined, can seldom counteract injustices we’ve unloosed upon the world. 

An excerpt from Goldberg:

WHENEVER SHE PICKS UP A camera, Mark, 47, puts herself in an emotional no-man’s land. She claims that she doesn’t take risks–”War photographers do that”–yet hers is the archetypal saga of the photojournalist who conquers obstacles and emotional shock to bring back accounts of unexplored territory: hospices for the dying, brothels in India, camps for children with cancer.

She brings to all her photographs an unflinching yet compassionate eye. In the midst of exotica or on the fringes of society, where she often chooses to be, she does not exaggerate the unavoidably alien, freakish qualities a less complex photographer would emphasize, but tries to find clues to what is familiar and human. Thus a picture of three Indian prostitutes solemnly, uncomfortably awaiting a man’s decision becomes a poignant, harsher version of young girls at a dance. Mark says that Falkland Road, her 1981 book on the Bombay brothels ”was meant almost as a metaphor for entrapment, for how difficult it is to be a woman.”

Her subject matter raises an old question about photojournalism: Do photographers exploit those less fortunate than themselves for the sake of their art? Mark herself simply asks whether the poor should be ignored; many have eagerly posed for her, she says, precisely because they wished to be noticed at last. And as Richard B. Stolley, who as managing editor of Life magazine assigned to Mark many of her most important stories, puts it, ”If she weren’t such a good photographer, the charge would never arise.”

MARK ASSISTED HER HUSBAND, the film maker Martin Bell, on Streetwise, a documentary about homeless teen-agers she had photographed in Seattle. The film was nominated for an Academy Award. Her own honors include the University of Missouri’s top award for a feature picture story (twice), the Page One Award, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Canon Photo Essayist Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award (twice), the Philippe Halsman Award and numerous grants. She belongs on any list of top contemporary photojournalists with the likes of James Nachtwey, Sebastiao Salgado and David Burnett. Stolley refers to her as ”one of the top three or four in the world” and adds, ”she is probably the best – how can I put this without sounding sexist? – I don’t know of another woman photojournalist as good as she is now.”

Photojournalism has recently scaled new heights of public esteem. Museums and galleries lavishly display pictures that were previously seen only in print. Films like Under Fire and Salvador set the photojournalist on center stage and biographies of past masters assure that the legendary glamour shines on.

Yet at a time when magazines are cutting back on photo essays in favor of twinkling pictures of media stars and token illustrations in text pieces, outlets for photojournalism are steadily diminishing. Mary Ellen Mark is one of the few photographers today whose stories have regularly appeared in such publications as Life, The Sunday Times of London, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Paris-Match, Stern and Time. And in a magazine forum that sometimes seems to be split between hardship and glitz, she has an offbeat and distinctive vision of both. She does essays on Ethiopian refugees or the elderly in Miami; then, to earn a living, she takes advertising and publicity stills for films and countless celebrity portraits.•

 

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A Brief Note From 1895 About An Embalmer

May 26, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 18, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“There’s No Way To Make It Not Happen Now”

May 26, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve barely read any science fiction in my life even though I read constantly. That’s a bad thing to admit, right?

In Ed Finn’s Slate interview with Neal Stephenson, tied to the publication of his latest novel, Seveneves, the author briefly comments on the existential threats we face. The exchange:

Question:

The story is a meditation on existential threats to the species. Having not so long ago founded Hieroglyph, a project dedicated to optimism, what do you think we should be most worried about and how do you see our chances?

Neal Stephenson:

Well, aside from the threat of a big asteroid impact, the thing that we should be worried about is climate change, which is going to happen. There’s no way to make it not happen now. I think that dwarfs everything else. 

Question:

Do you see yourself as essentially an optimist in the long-range survival of the species?

Neal Stephenson:

Yes, I think that we’ve got the prerequisites that we need in the way of technical know-how and resources. There’s a lot of energy. There’s a lot of stuff for us to work with. Solving problems has become a kind of routine operation, and so now it’s really a matter of organizing people in some way that doesn’t have terrible side effects.•

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“It Is Likely In The Next 200 Years Or So Homo Sapiens Will Upgrade Themselves Into Some Idea Of A Divine Being”

May 26, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

This has already been a remarkably rich year for new books, but the best one I’ve read so far is Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Dense with ideas and beautifully written, it’s a dazzling, wide-ranging look at how we came to be the only human species on Earth, and how that may very well change in the future. The Guardian has a cheeky piece succinctly explaining Harari’s feelings regarding cyborgism. An excerpt:

What did he say? “I think it is likely in the next 200 years or so homo sapiens will upgrade themselves into some idea of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic engineering or by the creation of cyborgs, part-organic part non-organic.”

Aren’t historians supposed to talk about the past, mainly? Yes, and Harari does also do that. He reckons that great fictions such as religion and money have been the key to humanity’s success because they made people function in large, flexible communities.

I see. Can I have his royalty cheques, then? I suggest you ask him about that. He also thinks these fictions are now reaching their limits because technology will make rich people amortal and virtually all-powerful, meaning that they won’t need God any more.

What’s amortal? It means, theoretically, you could live for ever, as long as someone doesn’t get annoyed and smash you up.

Far from guaranteed, I should think. And how will technology accomplish this? Well, you could have intelligent nanobots injected into your blood to rejuvenate your cells and repair any damage. You could implant a computer and various utensils into your body, giving you superhuman powers. Or you could just simply upload your mind into a computer so you could exist anywhere and experience anything.•

 

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“Will The Flight Affect Your Reproductive Organs?”

May 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

sally-ride-nasa

Sally Ride (Season 15, 1983)

Like any pioneer in an age of mass media, Sally Ride was asked a lot of dumb questions. She answered them, but not without some consternation.

Ride, who became the first American woman in space in 1983–cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was the first overall twenty years earlier–and passed away in 2012, is the subject of today’s multi-scenario Google Doodle. The opening of “A Ride in Space,” a painfully titled People piece by Michael Ryan which profiled the astronaut as she prepared for her Challenger mission:

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER

This is the hero factory. In this network of squat gray bunkers set apart from downtown Houston by a freeway, a side road and two speed traps, the likes of Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were introduced to the world and transformed from men into legends. Today’s reusable space shuttle may be less exotic than the old space capsules; still, as NASA demonstrated on one steamy Texas afternoon a few weeks ago, it can still make an astronaut into a household name. Case in point: Sally Kristen Ride, mission specialist on this week’s scheduled flight of the shuttle Challenger and the first American woman in space.

“This mission has a lot of historic firsts,” NASA spokesman John Lawrence coyly announced as the session began. But the television crews and tourists had not convened to hear about Indonesia’s new communications satellite, or the radish seed experiment designed by two Cal Tech students and placed on the shuttle by the largesse of movie wizard Steven Spielberg. All eyes brushed past shuttle commander Robert Crippen, Capt. Rick Hauck and crew members John Fabian and Norm Thagard. Instead, they focused on Ride, 32, the living proof that the Brotherhood of the Right Stuff is now admitting sisters.

No other astronaut was ever asked questions like these: Will the flight affect your reproductive organs? The answer, delivered with some asperity: “There’s no evidence of that.” Do you weep when things go wrong on the job? Retort: “How come nobody ever asks Rick those questions?” Will you become a mother? First an attempt at evasion, then a firm smile: “You notice I’m not answering.” In an hour of interrogation that is by turns intelligent, inane and almost insulting, Ride remains calm, unrattled and as laconic as the lean, tough fighter jockeys who surround her. “It may be too bad that our society isn’t further along and that this is such a big deal,” she reflects.

No American ever had more of the makings of an astronaut than Sally Ride. A California teenage tennis champion who flirted with turning pro, she started college at Swarthmore and transferred to Stanford. She earned two bachelor’s degrees: English, because Shakespeare intrigued her; physics, because lasers fascinated her. As she soars through the empyrean, television commentators will make her résumé familiar to the world: Ph.D., astrophysics, Stanford. Astronaut training, 1978. Capsule communicator—the crucially important link between Mission Control and spacecraft—for shuttles 2 and 3. She married astronaut Steve Hawley, 32, last July. She flew her own plane to the wedding at his parents’ home in Kansas.

This much is known of her life, but much more is unknown—and she aims to keep it that way. Ride and Hawley (who is scheduled to fly next March) avoid appearing together in public. They bar the press from their home in a suburban development near NASA. Sally Ride is not the sort of person about whom anecdotes cluster. She is an indifferent housekeeper—a genetic inheritance, perhaps, from an insouciant, good-humored mother who allowed her daughters to buy a collie only after carpeting the house in collie colors to make the dog’s shedding less obvious. She is certainly a remarkable athlete. When a high school science teacher once attempted to demonstrate the difference between resting pulse and exercising pulse by measuring Sally’s heart rate before and after she ran around the campus, the two rates were almost identical. She is also not without quirks—she firmly believes that Anacin tablets go down more easily when the little arrow imprinted on them is pointed toward the back of the throat. That superstition Sally laughingly ascribes to overexposure to the humanities while in college.

Ride considers herself an astronaut and a scientist—and she has little use for reporters who try to transform her into a celebrity. “They seem to ask the same stupid questions,” her sister, Karen, observes. “Sally has an obvious impatience for that.”•

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