Urban Studies

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“Bored Of Blaming Bankers, We Blame Robots Too, And Not Entirely Without Reason”

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

In his latest Financial Times column, “Man v Machine (Again),” Tim Harford doesn’t readily dismiss Luddites as buffoons of history, arguing the laborers had a point: They didn’t believe weaving machines would disappear all jobs but that those they took would be among the best. Perhaps that’s what’s about to happen in a large-scale way thanks to robots. One puzzlement voiced by Harford: Robotics has yet to increase productivity, so either traditional measurements are failing or no one quite knows what’s going on. An excerpt:

The Luddite anxiety has been dormant for many years but has recently enjoyed a resurgence. This is partly because journalists fear for their own jobs. Technological change has hit us in several ways — by moving attention online, where (so far) it is harder to charge money for subscriptions or advertising; by empowering unpaid writers to reach a large audience through blogging; and even by introducing robo-hacks, algorithms that can and do extract data from corporate reports and turn them into financial journalism written in plain(ish) English. No wonder human journalists have started writing about the economic damage the robots may wreak.

Another reason for the robo-panic is concern about the economic situation in general. Bored of blaming bankers, we blame robots too, and not entirely without reason. Inequality has risen sharply over the past 30 years. Many economists believe that this is partly because technological change has favoured a few highly skilled workers (and perhaps also more mundane trades such as cleaning) at the expense of the middle classes.

Finally, there is the observation that computers continue to develop at an exponential pace and are starting to make inroads in hitherto unexpected places — witness the self-driving car, voice-activated personal assistants and automated language translation. It is a long way from the spinning jenny to Siri.

What are we to make of all this? One view is that this is business as usual. We’ve had dramatic technological change for the past 300 years but it’s fine: we adapt, we still have jobs, we are incomparably richer — and the big headache of modernity isn’t unemployment but climate change.

A second view is that this time is radically different: the robots will, before long, render many people economically valueless — simply incapable of earning a living wage in a market economy. There will be plenty of money around but it will flow to the owners of the machines, and maybe also to the government through taxation. In principle, all could be well in such a future but it would require a radical reimagining of how an economy could work. The state, not the market, would be the arbiter of who gets what. Such a world is probably not imminent but, by 2050, who knows?

 . . . 

The third perspective is what we might call the neo-Luddite view: that technology may not destroy jobs in aggregate but rather changes the demand for skills in ways that are real and troubling. Median incomes in the US have been stagnant for decades. There are many explanations for that, including globalisation and the decline of collective bargaining, but technological change is foremost among them.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

March 13, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Weirdo In McDonald’s (East Village) 

I was in McDonald’s in October, I think, at night, in 2012. I had my computer with a photo of Davy Jones of the Monkees as wallpaper. You (female, looked like a kid), came in, ordered your food, sat down at the far table, then asked me if I went around possessing people, and I asked if you were for real. Since then, I have made some startling revelations. Would like to know why you asked me that, then I will tell what has happened since then. Please e-mail me.

“Bizarre Beliefs Are Common In Religion”

March 13, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking about Going Clear, Andrew O’Hehir a new Salon Q&A with Lawrence Wright. Many religions begin as bizarre cults and only survive if they can (mostly) shed the weirdness and stabilize, the sideshow far from the middle ring. Wright believes that could happen with Scientology. An excerpt:

Andrew O’Hehir:

You just said that you think this film could provoke a crisis that might help Scientology. I think it’s useful to point out, as you have done many times, that you did not actually set out to do a gotcha or an exposé.

Lawrence Wright:

Why bother? It’s the most stigmatized religion in America. An exposé, so what? But it is really interesting to understand why people are drawn in to the church. What do they get out of it and why do they stay? If you can understand that, in reference to a belief system that most people regard as very bizarre and has a reputation for being incredibly vindictive and litigious, then you might understand other social and religious and political movements that arise and take very good, kind, idealistic, intelligent, skeptical people and turn them into people they wouldn’t otherwise recognize.

Andrew O’Hehir:

The larger question here that you’re beginning to hint at is what makes a religion a religion? What does that word mean? The IRS has its own ideas, but …

Lawrence Wright:

Let’s start with the IRS because they’re the only agency empowered to make this distinction. It’s not exactly stocked full of theologians either. The way they determined that Scientology was a religion was to make a deal, because they were under legal siege of 2,400 lawsuits. Essentially, Scientology bludgeoned them into this tax exemption, which now denominates them as a religion. Previously, they were seen as a business enterprise and that’s the way they are seen in some European countries. Also, they are seen as a cult or a sect in Europe. But we call them a religion and I’m willing to accept that. It stretches the boundaries, clearly, but if you think of a religion having a set of scriptures – well L. Ron Hubbard still holds the Guinness record for the number of titles by a single author, as far as I know, more than 1,000. It’s a record that’s very hard to eclipse. Everything he wrote is considered a scripture by Scientology, even his novels.

Andrew O’Hehir:

Really? Battlefield Earth is a work of scripture?

Lawrence Wright:

Yes, it’s all scripture. It’s tax-exempt. There’s a huge body of work, not all of it fiction, having to do with ethics and psychology and so on that the church considers its literature. It functions as a community. Really, a religion is only separated from the rest of society by a circle of beliefs. So in that sense, sometimes the stranger the beliefs and the more exotic, the more bound together the community inside that circle is, and I think that’s true of Scientology. There is an origin story that may be a little bit bizarre, but bizarre beliefs are common in religion because religion is a belief in irrational things.•

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“Among Believers, Scientology And Its Founder Are Beyond Frivolous Question”

March 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A couple of weeks before Alex Gibney’s documentary adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear debuts on HBO, here’s a repost of five earlier entries about the religion pulp-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard wrought.

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“A Year Ago, L. Ron Hubbard Was An Obscure Writer Of Pseudoscientific Pulp Fiction”

The opening of Albert Q. Maisel’s highly skeptical 1950 Look magazine article about a new pseudoscience, something called “Dianetics,” conceived by pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard:

A year ago, L. Ron Hubbard was an obscure writer of pseudoscientific pulp fiction. Today he has:

.. Half a million devout followers.

.. A foundation with a chain of bustling branches stretching from Elizabeth, N.J. to far-off Honolulu.

.. The best-selling nonfiction book since Dale Carnegie discovered the secret of success.

.. A swarm of pop-eyed students, who stand in line for the privilege of plunking down 500 bucks for a one-month course which converts them into “professional auditors,” complete with a couch and capable of outpsyching any ordinary psychiatrist.

.. Even larger and faster-growing tribes who pay $200 each for the 15-lecture short course – or $25 an hour to have their ‘cases opened’ by $500 professional auditors.

.. And a small army of associate members, at a mere 15 smackers each, who gratefully keep up with the whirlwind developments of Hubbard’s new ‘science’ of dianetics through the Dianetics Auditors Bulletin.

Dianetics and the Discovery of Fire

Hubbard, you may gather from the foregoing, has discovered the key to success and demonstrated once again that Barnum underestimated the sucker birth rate.

But that, by Hubbard’s own admission, is probably the least of his discoveries.

Unencumbered by the modesty that hog-ties ordinary mortals, Hubbard starts his book – THE BOOK, his followers call it – with the calm assertion that ‘the creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.’

A few lines beyond, one learns that, with dianetics, ‘the intelligent layman can successfully and invariably treat all psychosomatic ills and inorganic aberrations.’

Farther on, one discovers that these psychosomatic ills, ‘uniformly cured by dianetic therapy.’ include such varied maladies as eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, some heart difficulties, migraine headaches and the common cold.

But you ain’t heard nothing yet.•

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“They Become Fanatics On The Subject, Impervious To Argument, Quick To Cut Themselves Off From Doubters”

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The opening of “A Growing Cult Reaches Dangerously Into The Mind,” Alan Levy’s November 15. 1968 Life investigation into Scientology:

The lights in the hall go dim, leaving the bronzed bust of the Founder spotlighted at center stage. From the loudspeakers comes L Ron Hubbard’s voice, deep and professional. It is a tape called ‘Some Aspects of Help, Part 1,’ a basic lecture’ in Scientology that Hubbard recorded nearly 10 years ago.

No one in the intensely respectable Los Angeles audience of 500 — some of whom paid as much as $16 to get in — thought it odd to be sitting there listening to a disembodied voice. Among believers, Scientology and its founder are beyond frivolous question. Scientology is the Truth, it is the path to ‘a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war . . .’ and ‘for the first time in all ages there is something that ….delivers the answers to the eternal questions and delivers immortality as well.’

So much of a credo might be regarded as harmless — practically indistinguishable from any number of minor schemes for the improvement of Man. But Scientology is scary — because of its size and growth, and because of the potentially disastrous techniques it so casually makes use of. To attain the Truth, a Scientologist surrenders himself to “auditing,” a crude form of psychoanalysis. In the best medical circumstances this is a delicate procedure, but in Scientology it is undertaken by an ‘auditor’ who is simply another Scientologist in training, who uses an ‘E-meter,’ which resembles a lie detector. A government report, made to the parliament of the State of Victoria in Australia three years ago, called Scientology ‘the worlds largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.’ As author Alan Levy found out by personal experience ‘pages 100B – 114′, the auditing experience can be shattering.

How many souls have become hooked on Scientology is impossible to say precisely. Worldwide membership — England, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S. — is probably between two and three million. In the U.S. offices in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and seven other cities, the figure may now be more than several hundred thousand. What is astonishing — and frightening — is the rate of growth in the U.S.: membership has probably tripled or quadrupled in the past three years.

Recruits to Scientology are most often young, intelligent and idealistic. They become fanatics on the subject, impervious to argument, quick to cut themselves off from doubters. Many young people have been instructed by their Scientology organizations ‘orgs,’ they are called to ‘disconnect’ from their families. ‘Disconnect’ means exactly that: sever all relations. Such estrangements can be deep and lasting, leaving heartsick parents no longer able to speak rationally with their children.

Scientology is expensive.”•

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“They Take The Best And Brightest People And Destroy Them”

With the 1991 Time article, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” investigative reporter Richard Behar brought concerns about Scientology to the mainstream. The hard-hitting article’s opening:

“By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn’t yet turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help ‘philosophy’ group he had discovered just seven months earlier.

His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. ‘We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,’ Lottick says. ‘I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them.’ The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son’s death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.

The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to ‘clear’ people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner.”•

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“He Sought Out Many ‘Cures’ For His Problems”

William S. Burroughs was more deeply involved in Scientology than we know according to a new book by David S. Wills. The writer just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit on the topic. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What initially brought Burroughs to the Scientologists?

David S. Wills:

Well that’s the first half of the book right there… In a nutshell, he was a deeply disturbed man. He was abused as a child, troubled by his homosexuality, accidentally killed his wife, and was hooked on drugs for decades. He sought out many “cures” for his problems and despite being obviously intelligent in many ways, was incredibly gullible. Ultimately, he came to Scientology for a magic fix, and for a while, he actually believed he was getting it. In fact, as late as 1994 (3 yrs prior to his death) he was convinced of some of its merits.

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Question:

I heard many rumors that scientology cures you of being gay that many high profile celebrities join to get cured of gay. Any truth to that?

David S. Wills:

Long ago, L. Ron Hubbard listed homosexuals as among the lowest forms of human beings (this has subsequently been changed in his books). I have no idea about the rumors of other celebrities… but it is highly likely that Burroughs sought a “cure” for his homosexuality in Scientology. He went through periods of feeling it was a handicap and remarked on a number of occasions that Scientology (temporarily) cured him of various “handicaps.”

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Question:

What is a misconceptions that you had about Scientology that later changed?

David S. Wills:

I thought that the whole Xenu/space opera thing was of more importance. The tabloids and South Park really play it up, but it didn’t get incorporated until later, and even then it was for the high-level members. Really, for the average Scientologist, that wasn’t even a part of it.

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Question:

Did they try to convert you?

David S. Wills:

No. Most Scientologists and ex-Scientologists I talked to were pretty open but not pushy. They were willing to explain concepts but not force them upon me. Interestingly, I did speak to someone who had letters from a Scientologist who’d used Burroughs to convert young people in the 60s.•

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“Their Allegiance And Devotion To The Mysterious Man Is Total”

L. Ron Hubbard interviewed in 1968 about his embattled tax shelter, during the period when he spent much of his time at sea.

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“There Is Alarming Evidence That College Students Are Often Learning Very Little”

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

At his Financial Times blog, Andrew McAfee identifies five keys to economic growth in which America may not be failing but is grading out average or worse. We’re not hopeless by any means, but we need to be less myopic politically. An excerpt:

Despite their universally acknowledged importance, we’re not doing a good job on these.

Education: The primary school system in the US has been called the country’s best idea, but at present the country’s students are no better than middle of the pack internationally. There is alarming evidence that college students are often learning very little and there’s still too much focus on rote learning and mastering skills that technology is already quite good at.

Infrastructure: World-class roads, airports and networks are investment in the future and the foundation of strong growth. But the the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US an overall grade of D+ and internet speeds here are slower than in many other countries.

Entrepreneurship: Young businesses, especially fast-growing ones, are a prime source of new jobs. Unfortunately, entrepreneurship in the US has been on a slow, steady decline.

Immigration: Many of the world’s most talented and ambitious people want to come to the US to build their lives and careers, and the evidence is clear that immigrant-founded companies have been great job-creation engines. Yet our policies in this area are far too restrictive, and our procedures are nightmarishly bureaucratic.

Basic research: Companies tend to concentrate on applied research where they can capture the rewards from their efforts. This means that government has a role to play in supporting original, early-stage work for which the rewards are spread more broadly. Most of today’s tech marvels, from the internet to the smartphone, have a government programme somewhere back in their family tree. But funding for basic research in the US is on the decline as a share of gross domestic product.•

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“Welcome To The Future, Or At Least Jacque Fresco’s Vision Of It”

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

Jacque Fresco, one of those fascinating people who walks through life building a world inside his head, hoping it eventually influences the wider one, turns 99 today. A futurist and designer who’s focused much of his work on sustainable living, technology and automation, Fresco is the brains behind the Venus Project, which encourages a post-money, resource-based economy. An excerpt from a 1985 Sun Sentinel profile by Scott Eyman followed by two videos, the first about Venus and the second a 1974 interview with Fresco conducted by a pre-suspenders Larry King.

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You can hear the glorious, smoothly humming hydraulic future in Jacque Fresco`s eager voice, see it in the eye in your mind. Cities and their inhabitants thrive under the sea. Houses are heated by pipes laid beneath highways that conduit the gathered asphalt heat into private residences. Grain is stored in the natural refrigerator of the polar regions.

Fossil fuels have been abandoned, as solar power runs everything from your air-conditioning — if you need it in houses that are properly built and insulated, which you probably won`t — to your backyard barbecue, where a mirror and two pyrex reflectors cook both sides of the meat at the same time. And when something goes wrong with your car, two handles are turned, the entire engine unit pulls out, a courtesy engine is plugged in and you`re back on the road while the garage works to find the problem.

Welcome to the future, or at least Jacque Fresco`s vision of it. It all seems eminently attainable . . . until you open your eyes and look around. What you see are 22 acres with four organically flowing domed structures — two of which are finished, one of which is furnished — a little lake with a baby alligator sunning himself by the water`s edge, and a landscaped path leading back among 400-year-old cypress trees. It is here, on this quiet patch of land in Venus, Fla., that Jacque Fresco and his companion, Roxanne Meadows, are constructing a prototype of the possible.

“I tried walking around with a briefcase, and selling myself,” says the peppery Fresco, a vigorous and muscular 69. “And I found that people think you`re an idiot if you don`t have anything to show them, if all you have are ideas and a vision. All right. I`ll show them something.”

Welcome to the world of Jacque Fresco, social conceptualist and inventor, one of those people who create something tangible where before there existed only that most intangible of intangibles: an idea.•

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“I Will Find Another Way To Ship The Machine”

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

For very good reasons, neither Washington D.C. nor the private sector wants techno-anarchist Cody Wilson to succeed in his goal of making 3D-printed automatic firearms readily available, so his company, Defense Distributed, might get Napstered. But if such printers become omnipresent, the design for creating these weapons will be accessible and neither shipping nor handling will be required to get your hands on your very own killing machine. That’s when things may get scary. Scarier. From Andrew Zaleski at Backchannel:

Before he can disrupt the government, though, Wilson will have to first best it on its own terms. Wilson disputes the idea that he violated arms export law by publishing the files for the Liberator, the AR-15 lower receiver and the magazines.

“This is Joe Schmo, working in his garage, drawing up some prints for something, and the government’s coming in there saying you can’t hold that up in public and you can’t talk to people about it,” says Matt Goldstein, Wilson’s lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Wilson says now he’s just asking for permission to place his files online again, although he frames this impending battle as something more. “There will be a Defense Distributed v. United States that those bastards at UT law will have to read one day,” he says.

In such moments he steps outside of himself, and speaks of founding Defense Distributed as a fateful event, one for which he’ll be remembered a long time. “When I was in high school, I read Robert Payne’s Life and Death of Lenin… And something about Lenin as a figure was just,” Wilson’s voice trails off. Then he completes the thought: “The zeal of a man who doesn’t just have the idea but can inflict the idea. I want that.”

For the moment, the infliction of the Ghost Gunner on America has been stalled by FedEx and UPS, which refuse to deliver it. In a February email to those who had purchased Ghost Gunners, Wilson kept up his bluster: “I will find another way to ship the machine.”

Yet when we talk again in early March, he sounds jaded. “It’s a massive enterprise of deterrence and prevention in which we are subsumed,” Wilson says by phone. “It’s like the nightmare of a startup with the added complication that no one will allow you to do it anyway.”

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There’s a quotation attributed to Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and philosopher to whom Wilson owes some credit for his present ideas, that reads: “The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.”

Whether done consciously or not, Wilson had moments where he reflected Baudrillard’s thinking. “Besides the song and dance and ‘Cody Wilson’s a big clown,’ there’s a deep dissatisfaction and yearning on the part of all these badasses I work with,” he told me the night I’d arrived in Austin. “We just want something else. We’re cowboys of the digital era—what a grand synthesis on our part.”•

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“There You Have My Remedy. There’s My Plan To Cure All Your Urban Ills.”

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

By 1996, Ray Bradbury was so terrified of crime in the U.S. (which had actually begun a steep decline), he wanted to hand over the rule of our cities to “enlightened corporations” and let them mall-ify America. Not a great idea. 

He also wished every city to have a quaint small-town plaza imposed upon it. In a 1970 essay “The Girls Walk This Way; The Boys Walk That Way,” he first proposed the plan which he never let go of. It was really more about his own sense of nostalgia than any rational improvement to modern living. Via Open Culture, here’s the heart of it:

Here is my remedy. A vast, dramatically planned city block. One to start with. Later on, one or more for each of the 80 towns in L.A.

My block would be a gathering place for each population nucleus. A place where, by the irresistible design and purpose of such a block, people would be tempted to linger, loiter, stay, rather than fly off in their chairs to already overcrowded places.

Let me peel my ideal shopping center like an onion:

At the exact center: a round bandstand or stage.

Surrounding this, a huge conversation pit. Enough tables and chairs so that four hundred people can sit out under the stars drinking coffee or Cokes.

Around this, in turn, would be laid the mosaics of a huge plaza walk where more hundreds might stroll at their leisure to see and be seen.

Surrounding the entirety, an immense quadrangle of three dozen shops and stores, all facing the central plaza, the conversation pit, the bandstand.

At the four corners of the block, four theaters. One for new films. A second for classic old pictures. A third to house live drama, one-act plays, or, on occasion, lectures. The fourth theater would be a coffee house for rock-folk groups. Each theater would hold between three hundred and five hundred people.

With the theaters as dramatic environment, let’s nail down the other shops facing the plaza:

Pizza parlor. Malt shop. Delicatessen. Hamburger joint. Candy shop. Spaghetti cafe….

But, more important, what other kinds of shops are most delicious in our lives? When browsing and brooding, what’s the most fun?

Stationery shops? Good. Most of us love rambling among the bright papers in such stores.

Hardware shops? Absolutely. That’s where men rummage happily, prowling through the million bright objects to be hauled home for use some other year.

Two bookstores, now. Why not three?

One for hardcovers, one for paperbacks and the third to be an old and rare bookseller’s crypt, properly floundered in dust and half-light. This last should have a real fire-hearth at its center where, on cool nights, six easy chairs could be drawn about for idling bookmen/students in s‚ance with Byron’s ghost, bricked in by thousands of ancient and honorable tomes. Such a shop must not only spell age but sound of its conversation.

How about an art supply shop? Fine! Paints, turpentines, brushes, the whole lovely smelling works. Next door? An art gallery, of course, with low- and high-price ranges for every purse!

A record shop, yes? Yes. They’ve proven themselves all over our city, staying open nights.

What about a leather shop, and a tobacconist’s … but make your own list from here on! The other dozen or two dozen shops should be all shapes, sizes and concepts. A toy shop. A magic shop, perhaps, with a resident magician.

And, down a small dark cob-webbed alley, maybe a ramshackle spook theater with only 90 seats where every day and every night a different old horror film would scuttle itself spider-wise across a faintly yellow parchment-screen….

There you have my remedy. There’s my plan to cure all your urban ills.

Good grief! you cry, what’s so new about that!?

Nothing, I reply, sadly. It’s so old it now must become new again. Once it was everywhere in some form. Now it must be thought of and born all over again.

It has existed in the arcades surrounding St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, for more than five hundred years. It exists in the Galleria in Milan where, one hundred years ago Mark Twain fell in love with it and wanted to stay on forever at its “tables all over these marble streets, people sitting at them, eating, drinking, smoking — crowds of other people strolling by — such is the Arcade. I should like to live in it all my life. The windows of the sumptuous restaurants stand open, and one dines and enjoys the passing show.”

If we could summon Mark Twain back from the dead he might well point out, ironically, that we already have many such plazas in Los Angeles, which have languished and fallen into disuse. We have forgotten why Pershing Square and the Olvera Street Plaza were built: as centers about which to perambulate souls and refresh existences.

Life really begins at dusk in Rome. In the blue hour, and late on through the idle evening, shopping continues, mixed with time to wander, linger, sit, and stare.

The Plaza I have constructed here should never be built unless it opens for business at three each afternoon. Week nights it should stay open until at least 11:00. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights the closing hour should be 1 or 2 a.m.

Will this take some real doing? Yes. Because your average small American businessman is locked into a nine to five schedule. No new hours are worth considering. So, thousands of new customers are ignored and your small business flounders for seemingly inexplicable reasons.

Your small businessman has many reasons to affiliate himself in such an amiable environmental plaza as the one I propose, where he will be guaranteed a fresh river of pedestrians every hour. And being situated on the north, south, east or west side of the plaza will not affect his business by so much as a cent.

Bring that small businessman in, then, into this effort to recenter our lives. Give the community back to the community, to build a base for young and old, and discourage the endless miles of mindless driving as millions of people pass other millions looking for Somewhere To Go.

But, the Somewhere To Go will only work, I repeat, if it opens late and closes late.

Which brings us round to a final description of my Plaza:

  • Bandstand at the center on which local talent can sing and play.
  • Four hundred or five hundred chairs surrounding the bandstand, where people can sit all night, every night, under the heavens. In winter, such as it is in California, outdoor heating can be installed.
  • Around this, the great pedestrian treadway. On this, real people actually walking!
  • And around them, in turn, the shops, the theaters.
  • Underneath: parking. Or the next block over, hidden, for God’s sake, behind bushes and trees!

Final points:

  • In all eating places, plenty of booths facing each other, for conviviality. Too many places, like Baskin-Robbins, have seats lined up against the walls. The message implied is: So Long. Get Away. Goodbye.
  • Again: late hours. Better a small businessman working ’til midnight than a small businessman bankrupt and on relief.•

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“They Have The Potential To Influence The Stock Market And Distort Political Discourse”

March 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a NYRB blog post, James Gleick tries to identify the invaders among us, the social bots that cajole and troll on Twitter. Who are they? Just as importantly: Who are we if we’re not quite sure if we’re communicating with something not human, or if we know we are and yet still choose to interact? An excerpt:

A well-traveled branch of futuristic fiction explores worlds in which artificial creatures—the robots—live among us, sometimes even indistinguishable from us. This has been going for almost a century now. Stepford wives. Androids dreaming of electric sheep. (Next, Ex Machina?)

Well, here they come. It’s understood now that, beside what we call the “real world,” we inhabit a variety of virtual worlds. Take Twitter. Or the Twitterverse. Twittersphere. You may think it’s a stretch to call this a “world,” but in many ways it has become a toy universe, populated by millions, most of whom resemble humans and may even, in their day jobs, behumans. But increasing numbers of Twitterers don’t even pretend to be human. Or worse, do pretend, when they are actually bots. “Bot” is of course short for robot. And bots are very, very tiny, skeletal, incapable robots—usually little more than a few crude lines of computer code. The scary thing is how easily we can be fooled.

Because the Twitterverse is made of text, rather than rocks and trees and bones and blood, it’s suddenly quite easy to make bots. Now there are millions, by Twitter’s own estimates—most of them short-lived and invisible nuisances. …

Most of these bots have all the complexity of a wind-up toy. Yet they have the potential to influence the stock market and distort political discourse. The surprising thing—disturbing, if your human ego is easily bruised—is how few bells and gears have to be added to make a chatbot sound convincing. How much computational complexity is powering our own chattering mouths? The grandmother of all chatbots is the famous Eliza, described by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in a 1966 paper (yes, children, Eliza is fifty years old). His clever stroke was to give his program the conversational method of a psychotherapist: passive, listening, feeding back key words and phrases, egging on her poor subjects. “Tell me more.” “Why do you feel that way?” “What makes you think [X]?” “I am sorry to hear you are depressed.” Oddly, Weizenbaum was a skeptic about “artificial intelligence,” trying to push back against more optimistic colleagues. His point was that Eliza knew nothing, understood nothing. Still the conversations could run on at impressive length. Eliza’s interlocutors felt her empathy radiating forth. It makes you wonder how often real shrinks get away with leaving their brains on autopilot.

Today Eliza has many progeny on Twitter, working away in several languages.

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A Brief Note From 1893 About A Mustache Sale

March 12, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 14, 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“In these troublous times when money is scarcer than the fabled teeth of hens or than the upper molars of the female of the bovine species, it has been noticed that a man will part with almost anything in his possession for the sake of a little ready money. But the worst case of destitution which has come to notice so far, is that of Hiram C. Truesdale, the popular young attorney, whose future always seemed bright and who appeared to be on the road not only to reputation but great fortune. But he has more and more felt the gnawing tooth of poverty and has tried in devious ways to escape the gnaw. He has offered his old clothes for sale at greatly reduced rates, but he could find no purchaser for various reasons, the chief one being that the trousers were too long to fit the ordinary user of such articles. Article after article was put up, first a toothbrush, then, a No. 1 Kodak, then a hammerless shot gun, then his vote, and in fact everything that he hoped something could be raised on, but to no avail. Finally, a gentleman appeared, who said to him in a moment of particular financial despondency: ‘Harry, you have a remarkable handsome mustache, which I have always admired as a thing of beauty, and if you will cut it off and give it to me I will give you 25 cents for it.’ Harry hesitated for a long time and tried to raise the offer to 30 cents, but they buyer stuck to his price and finally prevailed. The mustache was sacrificed and Mr. Truesdale was relieved from his financial troubles.“•

“This is Achzivland”

March 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Not far from the madding crowd of the Middle East, is Achzivland, a micronation that is, yet is not, a part of Israel. Ruled since 1971 by Eli Avivi–he and his wife “seceded” that year and began issuing their own stamps, currency, passports and offering a haven to hippies who wanted strip down and light up–the state has successfully resisted Israel’s decades-long attempts to reign it in (and once fended off armed Palestinian invaders). It’s proven too tiny to get a grip on, too small to fail. From Raffi Berg of the BBC:

While most Israelis vote for a new parliament next week there’s one place in the north of Israel that will be an election-free zone – one-man rule has been the way there for more than 40 years.

On Israel’s coastal road, just south of Lebanon, lies a crossing into a land of another kind.

Large blue iron gates with white painted signs mark the border, but there is no entry procedure – visitors just arrive, then go and look for the president.

This is Achzivland, perhaps the most unusual piece of territory in the Middle East. It has the trappings of a state – a flag (of a mermaid), a national “anthem” (the sound of the sea) and a constitution declaring the president democratically elected by his own vote (never actually cast).

Achzivland also has a House of Parliament – a timber structure with scatter-cushions round a table – though it has no serving MPs and has never held any sessions.

It also issues – and stamps – its own passport, which requests bearers be allowed “to pass freely without let or hindrance” wherever they may travel.

Set among picturesque landscape, and with a history stretching back to the Phoenicians, Achzivland has been governed by its oldest inhabitant, Eli Avivi, and his devoted First Lady, Rina, since the couple “seceded” from Israel in 1971.

Next to the ailing Sultan of Oman, “President Avivi” is the longest-serving ruler in the region, having survived several attempts by one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East to oust him – not surprisingly, Israel has never recognised Achzivland.

But the tiny “state” has stood its ground, with a gutsiness well beyond its size.•

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“The Space Migration Part Is What I’m Working On Right Now”

March 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Timothy Leary had numerous odd experiences behind prison walls. There was the time he dropped acid with Massachusetts inmates, the one in which he shared a Folsom cellblock with Charles Manson and let us never forget the time he was lectured in the pen by friend Marshall McLuhan. Such was the life of the LSD salesman.

One of the few trips Leary never got to take, except posthumously, was a trek to outer space. In 1976, during his “comeback tour” after stays in 29 jails and a retirement of sorts, Leary dreamed of leaving it all behind–way behind. The opening of John Riley’s People article “Timothy Leary Is Free, Demonstrably in Love and Making Extraterrestrial Plans“:

High in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in a wood-heated A-frame beside a rushing stream, the retired guru speaks:

“After six years of silence, we have three new ideas which we think are fairly good. One is space migration. Another is intelligence increase. The third is life extension. We use the acronym SMI2LE to bring them together.”

The sage is Timothy Leary, high priest of the 1960s LSD movement, who is just four weeks out of the 29th jail he has inhabited since his first arrest in Laredo, Texas, 11 years ago. That charge was possession of less than half an ounce of marijuana that his then-wife, Rosemarie, had handed to his daughter. In recent months, when Leary was appearing before federal grand juries investigating the Weather Underground, he was moved from prison to prison for his own safety. Now paroled at age 56, he will soon start a term of probation whose length will be set by a federal judge.

Leary fled a federal work camp in California in 1970, an escape planned by Rosemarie and the Weather Underground. The Learys went first to Africa, then to Switzerland, where their marriage collapsed. Leary met and was captivated by a then 26-year-old jet-setter, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, whom he married in 1972. Three weeks later they traveled to Afghanistan, where U.S. authorities captured them both and flew them back to Los Angeles.

“Joanna visited me regularly,” Leary says. “She published several of my books and lobbied and schemed to get me free.” He looks at her adoringly, and she turns from the breakfast dishes in the sink to kiss him. Joanna tells how she collared Betty Ford on a street in San Diego and pleaded with her for Tim’s freedom. “I’m doing for my husband what you’re doing for yours. You’re helping yours get elected President, and I’m helping mine get out of prison.”

“One of the plans that she was continually hatching to break me out,” says Leary, “was for her to descend onto the Vacaville prison grounds in a silver helicopter blaring Pink Floyd music, wearing nothing but a machine gun. We called it Plan No. 346.”

“You know,” he continues, after Joanna has left to drive to a village 10 miles away for groceries and cigarettes, “in 1970 the U.S. government directly and bluntly shut me up. It was the greatest thing that could have happened, because I had run out of ideas.” His face, its prison pallor turned to brown by the mountain sun, breaks into a grin. A woodpecker hammers at the chimney of their Franklin stove. “Does that every morning,” says Leary. “We’ve named him the tinpecker.

“Well, SMI2LE, as I said, is a good idea. The acronym is woven into Joanna’s belts and purses. The space migration part is what I’m working on right now. Los Alamos [the atomic laboratory] is not far away and I have lots of questions about laser fusion. And this valley is an ideal temporary planetary base of operations for getting away from earth.”

Leary not only wants to live on a space station between the earth and the moon, he wants to take some of the planet with him. “How far can we see from here?” he asks. “Half a mile? According to a professor at Princeton, such an area could be compressed to a degree that I figure could be fit within a NASA spacecraft.”•

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“It Was A Wild Dream At The Time”

March 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A decked-out space habitat peopled by Earthlings may grace the moon or Mars or some other mass during the twenty-first century, offering a chance for zero-gravity sex and retirement far from the kids. If it is to be, much of the infrastructure and architecture probably needs to be built with found materials being fed into 3D printers. From Oliver Burkeman at the Guardian:

Inflatables have come a long a way since the 1960s, when Nasa commissioned tyre company Goodyear to design an enormous galactic inner tube. The 9m-wide rubber doughnut never made it into space, but it proved to be a huge inspiration to others – including Guillermo Trotti, then an enthusiastic architecture student in search of a thesis project, who designed a seminal proposal for an inflatable habitat on the moon in 1974. His Counterpoint lunar colony, a model of which now resides in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, envisaged a network of inflated domes and structures moulded from lunar basalt to house a community of 200 people, sustained by an ecosystem of soybean plants, trout, catfish, 200 chickens and 50 miniature goats.

“It was a wild dream at the time,” he says. “But it caught the eye of [architect] Buckminster Fuller and I won a Nasa research grant to develop it. Now, 40 years on, it doesn’t seem such a crazy idea.” Trotti went on to co-found the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture, which offers what is still the world’s only space architecture masters programme. Every year, its students’ projects push Nasa scientists to dream a little bit further, with provocative visions for Mars landers lowered from hovering “skycranes” and spacecraft propelled on long tethers to create artificial gravity.

“If you look at the history of the industry, what we do in space is really a mirror for our contemporary values on earth,” says Neil Leach, who edited a recent issue of Architectural Design devoted to space architecture. “The Apollo mission was part of the cold war, the ISS was a defining moment of international collaboration, and now we’re seeing private entrepreneurs really leading the way, with companies like SpaceX [founded by PayPal billionaire Elon Musk] and Blue Origin [founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos]. Reflecting our earthly priorities, environmental sustainability is now top of the space agenda.”

The current buzzword in Nasa circles is ISRU, or in-situ resource utilisation, the space equivalent of using locally available materials.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

March 12, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

diaper play

Hi, im a young guy looking to get Into diaper fun. I get turned on from the the thought of diapers. Wearing them, using them, and all that. Im looking for ppl who share the same interest or are open-minded enough to wanna get into it.

“They’ll Know The State Of Health Of Your Dog”

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

It’s pretty clear privacy is all but over, even inside the home. The Internet of Things will likely be the thing pretty soon, and once every last appliance is connected, the quantifying and monitoring will begin in earnest. Many positive advances will be made because of this new counting machine–yes, we will all count!–but the catch, of course, is that there’ll be no way to opt out, no choice. You too will be judged. From Sarah Butler at the Guardian:

“We are coming to the era of the connected customer, the latest in a series of shifts created by technology,” [Dixons Carphone CEO Seb James] told the Retail Week Live conference in London. “This shift is going to bump off as many retailers as the last. It will be a total asteroid strike at the heart of retail.”

The new technology, from health monitoring smartwatches to washing machines that can tell engineers when they need repairing – will mean retailers need to offer services to help consumers with the new products and keep them operating correctly. …

“Your connected home will know when you’re in, what mood you’re in, your temperature preferences and family members. They’ll know the state of health of your dog, how far you jogged this morning and what brand of toothpaste you like and how much you have left.

“It’s a little bit creepy but we’re all going to have to get used to it as information which used to be so hard to get is now going to be so easy to find new skills and tools [to deal with it].”•

______________________________

“What will it be like? How will we choose to live?”

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A Brief Note From 1904 About A Human Ostrich

March 11, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 12, 1904 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paid Work For Human Beings Could Become A Lot Scarcer — And Soon”

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

It’s not a done deal that automation is going to create a troubling amount of technological unemployment, but that scenario has to be considered a real possibility. What then? Will we have endless down time to do more free work for multibillion-dollar corporations? From Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times:

Economic growth, even where it looks impressive, seems to be creating fewer jobs than in the past, and for the most part, poorly paid ones. The main metrics for economic success now appear to be decoupling from labor markets, the main source of income and meaning for citizens.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, underlined the point last week at a London conference on the future of work. “The share of labor in the economy is collapsing, and that will continue,” he said.

Some speak of a third industrial revolution; others call it the second machine age. With the processing speed of computers doubling roughly every 18 months and machines becoming ever smarter, paid work for human beings could become a lot scarcer — and soon.

Forty-seven percent of all employment in the United States is susceptible to automation over the next two decades, according to a study by Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael A. Osborne, an associate professor of machine learning, at the University of Oxford.

It is not just truck drivers and tax preparers who risk losing their jobs, economists say. Robots can pick strawberries, distinguishing the ripe ones by taking hundreds of digital photographs a second, and algorithms apparently make more objective court decisions than human judges, who according to a study in Israel are more lenient after a food break.

This hyperdigital age is also creating some new jobs for humans. Among the 10 fastest-growing job descriptions identified by Dr. Frey were big data architect and iOS developer. But over all, he said, “It seems that job creation is not going to keep pace with automation.”•

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“I’ve Been To A Clown Orgy Before!”

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

Speaking of pornography: You can’t really trust an industry in which everyone is a star. 

In the gradual mainstreaming of porn into American life, which has pretty much reached full saturation, technology has enabled anyone to achieve such stardom from the comfort of home, making it debatable whether an actual centralized industry is even necessary anymore. But the annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, the Oscars of oral, still serves one purpose: As it did with David Foster Wallace for his 1989 piece “Big Red Son,” it provides a sharp-eyed journalist with a fun-house mirror of America, our soul visible by way of our holes. In a new Grantland piece “Porntopia,” Molly Lambert brings her customary insight and wit to this year’s gathering of the vibrators.

(Wallace, by the way, wrote one of my favorite sentences ever in his AVN Awards article, a description of the comedian Bobby Slayton who served as the show’s emcee that year: “A gravelly-voiced Dice Clay knockoff who kept introducing every female performer as ‘the woman I’m going to cut my dick off for,’ and who astounded all the marginal print journalists in attendance with both his unfunniness and his resemblance to every apartment-complex coke dealer we’d ever met.”)

From Lambert:

The first AVN Awards took place in 1984, held in Las Vegas at the same time as the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The CES-AVN connection began because the adult industry’s main source of revenue was video tapes, and CES-goers were early adopters of new tech like VCRs. The interaction between the two created the fan-star dynamic that dominates today. “If you had a CES badge we’d give you a free badge to the AVN show,” explains Paul Fishbein, a founder of AVN. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights follows the industry’s early-’80s shift from film to video; on Marc Maron’s podcast, Anderson compared his film’s plot to that of Singin’ in the Rain, which depicts mainstream film’s move from silents to talkies. The video experience changed the way customers consumed porn. Allowing audiences to watch at home rather than brave a theater broadened the market, which prompted Fishbein to found Adult Video News magazine in 1983 as a consumer guide for sex shops stocking tapes.

As Fishbein and I walk through the Hard Rock casino looking for a place to sit down — there are no places in casinos to just sit, by design — a female performer approaches and chastises him for missing a “clown orgy” the night before. “I’ve been to a clown orgy before!” he tells her.

“Each one is unique and special!” she persists.

“I know they are,” he says consolingly.

Fishbein, gray-haired with blue eyes, is affable and warm. He wears a pink gingham shirt with a green Ralph Lauren logo. I like him instantly. Fishbein sold AVN in 2010 and now produces content under a shingle called Plausible Films. AVN, he says, “isn’t quite what it was when CES people were in town.” He lights up talking about some of the first adult classics, which were plot-oriented and couldn’t afford to have endlessly long sex scenes because film stock was so expensive.5 Video made it possible to prolong sex scenes, but the form was still shaped by practical concerns. “If you try to watch 20-minute sex scenes in real time, you’re gonna fast-forward. You can’t do it. In real life you have sex for a long time,” Fishbein says. “Visually, as a stimulant, you need it to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Five minutes is the right length for a sex scene, in my humble opinion.”

Fishbein recently spearheaded the making of a documentary called X-Rated: The Greatest Adult Movies of All Time, which premiered last month on Showtime. X-Rated assembles a canon of representative adult films organized by decade, starting with 1971’s Deep Throat. It was a passion project for Fishbein; he has a point to prove about the ability of porn to stand alongside mainstream film. “Some of these movies were unbelievable; they’re so outrageous and they have these strange sensibilities,” he tells me. “But when you watch them in context of when they were made, they’re a perfect reflection of what’s going on in American society in the ’70s and ’80s.” As for today? He’s pessimistic. During final cut, he realized X-Rated has a downer ending. “It sort of feels like it’s a eulogy … Even our host, Chanel Preston, says at the end, ‘Well, we hope that this isn’t the end of the adult industry,’ but who knows what’s going to happen in the future?”•

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“It’s Tough Being Paddy Chayefsky These Days”

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

It’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. Charlie Brooker, the brilliant satirist behind Black Mirror, comes closest. If he doesn’t make it all the way there, it’s not because he’s less talented than the Network visionary; it’s just that the era he’s working in is so different. I’ve read many articles about Brooker’s impressive program and pretty much all of them miss the point I believe he’s making about our brave new world of technology. That includes Jenna Wortham’s recent New York Times Magazine essay, which referred to Mirror as “functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course.” The Channel 4 show is barely about the future. It’s mostly about the present. And it isn’t about the present in the manner of many sci-fi works, which create outlandish scenarios which can never really be in the service of telling us about what currently is. Brooker’s scenarios aren’t the exaggerations they might seem at first blush. In almost no time, our hyperconnected world delivers something far more disturbing than his narratives.

Chayefsky and Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan could name the future and we’d wait 25 or 50 years as their predictions slowly gestated, only becoming fully manifest at long last. None of that trio of seers even lived long enough to experience the full expression of Mad As Hell of 15 Minutes of Fame or the Global Village. Brooker will survive to see all his predictions come to pass, and it won’t require an impressive lifespan.

Consider the initial episode, “The National Anthem.” In this installment, the British Prime Minister is blackmailed by an unknown terrorist into having sex with a pig on live TV in front of a gigantic worldwide audience. It’s supposed to be a shocking media event that unfolds before a rapt world, but the most surprising thing about it is that more people don’t time-shift it. About three years after “Anthem” aired, ISIS released its first beheading video, marrying Hollywood torture porn to real-life extremism, and millions of curious people pressed play. Ah, for the simpler days of pretend PM-on-pork penetration.

Another episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” offered a similar example of the future arriving fast on the heels of a seemingly outrageous provocation. “Merits” creates a world in which humans are reduced to automatons, forced to ride stationary bicycles to provide power the world desperately needs, the riders soothed by drugs and apps and pornos they can purchase with merit points earned by pumping pedals. One of the disconsolate workers not fully anesthetized by the sensory overload, Bing, offers his points to a beautiful coworker, Abi, so that she can buy a ticket to compete on Hot Shots, an even-more-offensive version of American Idol, hoping to become a pop star and escape a life of drudgery. She walks into a latter-day dance marathon where they don’t only shoot horses but the riders as well. Abi doesn’t realize her version of stardom and is instead shunted into pornography, another body offered up to appease an unwittingly depressed populace. Last year, just three years after this episode aired, the Fappening arrived one weekend on screens in our pockets, a hacked sex show sent to distract and titillate the world. One of the victims of the breach was the British actress Jessica Brown Findlay, who had portrayed Abi in “Merits.” Again, technology enabled the so-called future to arrive before the prophecies had been digested, and it looked even uglier than dystopic fiction.

And that’s how things are now. Before Brooker (or anyone else) can fire a warning shot, before we can decide how to proceed, tomorrow is already moving in for the kill, a drone at our doorsteps that may be delivering takeout or, perhaps, a bomb. If you hurry, there’s still time to smile into the camera. We’re all pioneers now, constantly, without traveling anywhere, without moving a muscle. We live only in the past and present, the future hardly existing. That’s what Black Mirror is really about.•

 

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“He Was Always On Display And Always Had To Take Into Account What Others Saw And Said”

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

As much as living in an endlessly public, hyperconnected world may be, perhaps, an evolutionary necessity, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the root cause of a global mismatch disease, that it isn’t bad for us on the granular level. You and I, remember, we don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. There’s something medieval in the new order, the way privacy has vanished and judgement is ubiquitous. But unlike during the Middle Ages, we’re now not exposed to just the village but to the entire Global Village. What effect does that have? From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens:

The imagined order is embedded in the material world. Though the imagined order exists only in our minds, it can be woven into the material reality around us, and even set in stone. Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them, they should ignore it. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth.

In modern architecture, this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape in stone and mortar. The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy. This private room almost invariably has a door, and in many households it is accepted practice for the child to close, and perhaps lock, the door. Even parents are forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission. The room is decorated as the child sees fit, with rock-star posters on the wall and dirty socks on the floor. Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.

Medieval noblemen did not believe in individualism. Someone’s worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy, and by what other people said about them. Being laughed at was a horrible indignity. Noblemen taught their children to protect their good name whatever the cost. Like modern individualism, the medieval value system left the imagination and was manifested in the stone of medieval castles. The castle rarely contained private rooms for children (or anyone else, for that matter). The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room on the castle’s second floor, with posters of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur on the walls and a locked door that his parents were not allowed to open. He slept alongside many other youths in a large hall. He was always on display and always had to take into account what others saw and said. Someone growing up in such conditions naturally concluded that a man’s true worth was determined by his place in the social hierarchy and by what other people said of him.•

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“What Is Email But A Giant, Electronic, Super-Efficient Post Office?”

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

The German postal system grew from the nation’s military courier apparatus to become a multifaceted marvel, contributing subsequently to networks all over the world, leaving its mark on Soviet socialism and American capitalism. It has a latter-day parallel, of course, in the Internet, which was incubated and nurtured by the U.S. Defense Department wing DARPA. The Financial Times has a passage from David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules about the mixed blessing of bureaucracy, which allows for large-scale progress, making the unthinkable manageable, before beginning to succumb to its own weight, a sideshow giant who wows until his heart gives out. An excerpt:

All these fantasies of postal utopia now seem rather quaint. Today we usually associate national postal systems with the arrival of things we never wanted in the first place: utility bills, overdraft alerts, tax audits, one-time-only credit-card offers, charity appeals, and so on. Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid.

Yet at the same time that symbolic war was being waged on the postal service, something remarkably similar to the turn-of-the-century infatuation with the postal service was happening again. Let us summarise the story so far:

1. A new communications technology develops out of the military.

2. It spreads rapidly, radically reshaping everyday life.

3. It develops a reputation for dazzling efficiency.

4. Since it operates on non-market principles, it is quickly seized on by radicals as the first stirrings of a future, non-capitalist economic system already developing within the shell of the old.

5. Despite this, it quickly becomes the medium, too, for government surveillance and the dissemination of endless new forms of advertising and unwanted paperwork.

This mirrors the story of the internet. What is email but a giant, electronic, super-efficient post office? Has it not, too, created a sense of a new, remarkably effective form of cooperative economy emerging from within the shell of capitalism itself, even as it has deluged us with scams, spam and commercial offers, and enabled the government to spy on us in new and creative ways?

It seems significant that while both postal services and the internet emerge from the military, they could be seen as adopting military technologies to quintessential anti-military purposes. Here we have a way of taking stripped-down, minimalistic forms of action and communication typical of military systems and turning them into the invisible base on which everything they are not can be constructed: dreams, projects, declarations of love and passion, artistic effusions, subversive manifestos, or pretty much anything else.

But all this also implies that bureaucracy appeals to us — that it seems at its most liberating — precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted that we can go to sleep on a bed of numbers and wake up with all those numbers still snugly in place.

In this sense, bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I like to call “poetic technology” — when mechanical forms of organisation, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshalled to the realisation of impossible visions: to create cities out of nothing, scale the heavens, make the desert bloom. For most of human history this kind of power was only available to the rulers of empires or commanders of conquering armies, so we might even speak here of a democratisation of despotism. Once, the privilege of waving one’s hand and having a vast invisible army of cogs and wheels organise themselves in such a way as to bring your whims into being was available only to the very most privileged few; in the modern world, it can be subdivided into millions of tiny portions and made available to everyone able to write a letter, or to flick a switch.•

 

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A Brief Note From 1885 About Second Thoughts

March 9, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 17, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

St. Paul. — Mrs. Eulitz, of Glenrillen, died and was buried on the 3rd. On the 8th she was disinterred and showed signs of life by the flush on her cheeks and the perfect appearance of her body. She is now believed to be in a state of suspended animation.•

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“The Most Important Factor Has Been Technology”

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

The decentralization of media has allowed some silent insecurities to grow loud. There’s nothing sadder than some middle-aged mook doing a podcast from his basement, complaining, obliviously, about the privileged existence of women and minorities. There are so many available for download that I can hardly count. For such wounded warriors, things are likely to only get worse, as women eventually come to prominence on the American political landscape. 

Would a female U.S. President drastically alter the country’s mindset away from sabre-rattling and toward greater enlightenment? Not instantly, probably. African-American police officers often engage in racial profiling of other African-Americans, so it’s not only about the electing of an individual but the reimagining of a system. Hopefully such a rethinking of priorities will be a byproduct of women gradually gaining greater parity in politics. In a WSJ opinion piece, Melvin Konner explains why male dominance is on the decline:

The Bible, the Iliad, the great Indian epics—all of them are full of sex and violence. I don’t know whether Helen’s face was what launched a thousand Greek ships against Troy. I don’t know whether David really fell in love with Bathsheba and had her soldier-husband sent to die at the front, or if Solomon had seven hundred wives. But all the evidence suggests the plausibility of such stories, and this culture of male domination didn’t come to an end with the ancients. It prevailed throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance as well.

But then what happened? Why did some men begin at last to let go of their privileges?

The great transformation of the past two centuries—the slow but relentless decline of male supremacy—can be attributed in part to the rise of Enlightenment ideas generally. The liberation of women has advanced alongside the gradual emancipation of serfs, slaves, working people and minorities of every sort.

But the most important factor has been technology, which has made men’s physical strength and martial prowess increasingly obsolete. Male muscle has been replaced to a large extent by machines and robots. Today, women operate fighter jets and attack helicopters, deploying more lethal force than any Roman gladiator or Shogun warrior could dream of.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

March 8, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

My Life’s Work (Upper East Side)

I’m selling:

  • My unpublished novel: Death by MURDER, a psychological thriller with erotica.
  • Plans for a free energy device – I can prove they’re mine.
  • The short story “No Limits,” which explores true defiance in a child.
  • An idea for producing temporary zero gravity on land – primarily for amusement parks.
  • An idea for an automotive sensor to help in high speed maneuvering.
  • An idea for a piece of self-changing artwork.
  • Several ideas for scenarios in erotic novels / movies.
  • Several ideas for erotic devices.
  • The true novel Seven Years in Korea – I have notes but I will record the full stories on tape – it is the heartwarming and sometimes hilarious account of an American teaching English in South Korea.

It’s not a joke, it’s not a scam, I’m tired of red tape, I’m tired of not having enough money for research and development, and I am definitely tired of not having enough money to go to the doctor when I’m sick and hoping that it’s nothing serious. I’ve got gold here, but I don’t have the tools or the strength to mine it.

We’ll have our lawyers meet, draw up papers, and get it done. I’m asking $3,000,000.00 USD. For all this, for the movie deals that could follow, for the sales from the devices, this is a steal.

“A Digital Future Can Frighten People”

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

Rose Jacobs of Newsweek has a story about the emergence of robotic factories in Europe (Industrie 4.0, as its called), not the first time that magazine has covered the rise of industrial machines. The article notes these plants aren’t yet devoid of human workers, but it’s tough to see how that isn’t just the result of a transition not yet completed. Manufacturers argue industrial automation is propelled by consumer demand for cheaper prices and greater convenience. In that sense, it’s not much different than the mechanics of Uber marginalizing drivers to appeal to riders. An excerpt:

You might expect a world built on sensors, software and machines to be devoid of humans. But in Amberg, the 10,000-square-metre shop floor is populated by 1,020 workers over three shifts. And their labour looks relatively physical: a young man lying on his back inches his way under an elegant blue-and-grey machine, as you would under a car needing repair; a woman nearby bends over a circuit board wielding tweezers. Yet other members of staff peer at screens, never touching the products rolling down glassed-in assembly lines.

“A digital future can frighten people,” says Günter Ziebell, production unit leader in Amberg. “But we complement automated tests with eye checks.” More to the point, this project has created demand for people with experience and creativity, who can improve the processes. So the management structure in Amberg has become very flat, allowing, for example, line workers to speak with the IT department directly rather than go through their bosses. Any employee can initiate a project that requires an investment of less than €10,000, and managers simply check every quarter that their teams are neither spending too much nor too little. Employees also earn bonuses when they suggest changes that are later implemented. The average employee earns an additional €1,000 per year this way, says Ziebell. He stresses the importance of schemes like this: “If a digital factory is being managed top-down, you wouldn’t get many advantages from it.”

But even if increasing automation hasn’t sapped jobs in Amberg, fast-growing efficiency means new plants might have been built to meet rising customer demand – and new positions to fill them – are now unnecessary. It is an issue that the Germans, at least, are attempting to address head-on, with plans under way to form a national-level working group for Industrie 4.0 that includes employee representatives as well as private businesses and industry bodies.

Dieter Wegener, Siemens’s coordinator for Industrie 4.0, argues that companies aren’t pushing these developments forward – consumers are. We want customised products, we want them now, and we want them made efficiently, whether to bring down prices or preserve natural resources. This isn’t possible without networked production processes. As Mr Wegener says, “This is coming from you and me.” He also argues that Germany is at least two years ahead of the industrial internet community in the US “but we appear as if we’re following the Americans. The Americans are better at marketing.”•

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