Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
The Xyngaboist Institute is looking for people that have had experiences that are unexplainable. We are interested in anything from alien or ghost encounters to missing or gained time (and everything in between). We research the unexplained, no matter where that takes us.
Uber’s emergence has meant good things for consumers, bad things for Labor and perhaps ruination for those who thought they’d purchased a piece of the American Dream in the form of a taxi medallion. Prices are reportedly falling precipitously, though even at a reduced rate, who wants to buy a piece of yesterday?
Two excerpts: one from earlier this year by Henry Blodgett at Business Insider about the reach of Uber in its home market of San Francisco, and the other from Aamer Madhani’s new USA Today report about beleaguered medallion owners.
___________________________
From Blodget:
In its most mature market, San Francisco, the four-year old Uber is already bigger than the local taxi market. Much bigger, in fact.
According to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who spoke at the DLD Conference in Munich on Sunday, the taxi market in San Francisco is about $140 million per year.
Uber’s revenues in San Francisco, meanwhile, are running at $500 million per year.
That’s more than three times the size of the taxi market.
And Uber’s revenues in San Francisco are still growing at about 200% per year.
Kalanick dropped some other startling statistics about Uber on Sunday:
___________________________
From Madhani:
Until recently in America’s big cities, purchasing a taxi medallion—the city-issued license to operate cabs —was about as sound of an investment as they come.
But with the rise of Uber and other ridesharing services, the value of taxi medallions are plummeting, leading cabbies and fleet owners throughout the USA worried that their industry will be decimated if local and state government doesn’t intervene.
“I have had a pretty successful thing,” said Gary Karczewski, 65, a Chicago cabbie who inherited his medallion from his father 28 years ago and earned enough to purchase two homes and help send his two daughters to college by driving the equivalent of 80 times around the world. “My hope was to wind down soon and give whatever I could sell the medallion for to my mother. But I am not confident there’s a market now.”•
Tags: Aamer Madhani, Henry Blodgett
Corporations have always sold “happiness,” realizing psychology was key to the bottom line, but they did so with some guesswork involved, hoping that small focus groups were accurate, wishing that you would look at that advertisement in that magazine. They approximated as they preyed upon vanities and weaknesses.
Once the Internet made it possible to quantify eyeballs, there was a shift toward real-time engagement of what was going on inside of minds. Apps are just a further extension of that type of measurement. Corporations don’t want to estimate anymore–they want to know.
In Vice, Rose Bretécher interviews William Davies about The Happiness Industry, his new book about the marketing of just about every moment of our lives. An excerpt:
Vice:
What techniques and technologies does the happiness industry use to monitor our emotions?
William Davies:
There are countless new apps and gadgets—way too many to name. To give a couple of examples, there’s Affectiva, which uses a webcam to track consumers’ smiles, and Beyond Verbal, which can analyze your tone of voice on the phone. Just this week I heard that IBM are working with a startup on a tool which analyzes your text messages in order to recommend you a therapist.
Then you’ve got wristbands like Jawbones and Fitbits, which seem to suggest that there’s a scientific answer to how to live: “If you start doing this, you’ll feel better.” And I think that’s very problematic, because there are complex reasons why people behave as they do—some people aren’t simply able to just change what they do in response to data. Sometimes you’ll just go and eat a McDonald’s because you’re feeling lonely. These gadgets claim to be completely evidence-based and have no philosophy in them, and I think that’s slightly disingenuous. Clearly there’s something missing in this data-led view of life—it doesn’t touch upon the transcendent, life-changing, life-affirming forms of happiness that really don’t lend themselves to science.
Vice:
And why is data about our happiness valuable to big business and governments?
William Davies:
Businesses have been trying to predict and influence how people will behave for over a hundred years now. But in the last 20 years there has been a surge of interest in happiness and positive emotion because there’s evidence that happiness in the workplace contributes to productivity, and because stress leads to absence from work. And there’s also growing awareness in the world of marketing—which has been supported by neuroscience since the 1990s—that the best way for brands to develop consumer loyalty is to illicit a positive emotional reaction from consumers.•
Tags: Rose Bretécher, William Davies
“The romantic ideas of ‘home’ are collapsing all around us,” writes Ben Valentine in an h+ essay which meditates on the new book SQM: The Quantified Home. Well, most of us still live in homes similar to the previous generation, but the eyes of the Internet have begun to peep inside, and once every object is, in fact, a computer, it will be impossible to stop the prying. Valentine suggests that “free” products will be a trade-off in which we surrender privacy, the way Facebook costs nothing monetarily but is expensive in other ways. As Airbnb has shown, economic pressures have left doors ajar for strangers. More and more, the unfamiliar faces will be virtual. An excerpt:
In his essay, Bruce Sterling asks us how the architecture and architects of the home will be disrupted – like the music and publishing industries were disrupted – for data optimization? As we’ve done for social media, we’re opening up our homes to private companies for the sake of security and ease. We’re putting security cameras in our children’s bedrooms and connecting our home to the cloud with devices such as Amazon Echo. How will the home as networked site look when created to produce as much advertising data as possible? How can a home look more like an Amazon warehouse?
In the networked home of the future, will we enter a Facebook-like power relationship, willingly rendering all our most private moments visible to marketers for a tax break or a free networked fridge? It sadly doesn’t sound too unlikely to me. SQM: The Quantified Home sets up a history and context to considering the realities of this kind of future home, making the clear complex data and politics already intersecting within our home.
Much of this opening up of the home is economically focused. Given the financial collapse of 2008 and subsequent austerity measures around the world, of which all but the mega-wealthy are still reeling from, we’ve been forced to use our homes as economic tools of investment as much as private spaces for family and loved ones. An investment which fewer and fewer people can afford to make. If architecture, homes, and even cities follow the trend of social media’s economic disparity – exchanging some free services for huge swaths of powerful and valuable data – it’s only going to get worse.•
Tags: Ben Valentine, Bruce Sterling
Tags: Putty Philpotts
Logic and logistics suggest autonomy will be introduced gradually into cars as it has been thus far, allowing for regulatory bodies and human ones to gradually release the wheel over the next two or three decades. But Google isn’t interested in much of an intermediate stage, hoping to make driverless the way to ease on down the road in just five years. From Alex Davies at Wired:
What’s important here is Google’s commitment to its all-or-nothing approach, which contrasts with the steady-as-she-goes approach favored by automakers like Mercedes, Audi and Nissan.
Autonomous vehicles are coming. Make no mistake. But conventional automakers are rolling out features piecemeal, over the course of many years. Cars already have active safety features like automatic braking and lane departure warnings. In the next few years, expect cars to handle themselves on the highway, with more complicated urban driving to follow.
“We call it a revolution by evolution. We will take it step by step, and add more functionality, add more usefulness to the system,” says Thomas Ruchatz, Audi’s head of driver assistance systems and integrated safety. Full autonomy is “not going to happen just like that,” where from one day to the next “we can travel from our doorstep to our work and we don’t have a steering wheel in the car.”
Google thinks that’s exactly what’s going to happen.•
Tags: Alex Davies, Thomas Ruchatz
The driverless cars in 2004’s inaugural DARPA Grand Challenge were largely a joke, a debacle in the desert, but no one was laughing five years later when Google began testing autonomous vehicles on American roads. Almost every technologist now believes they’ll be a permanent part of the traffic within two or three decades.
The machines competing in June’s DARPA Robotics Challenge will likely be awkward and jerky, but we’re really just in the prelude stage. These humanoids won’t necessarily follow the rapid trajectory of robocars, but they’ll certainly improve greatly over time–and maybe not so much time.
And that’s cause for some worry. Presently, the Pentagon is judging only rescue robots to be utilized as part of humanitarian missions, but the military isn’t in the peace business, and every industrialized nation will see its defense department be increasingly robotized. Not all of these machines will be jaws of life.
From Christian Davenport at the Washington Post:
The competition comes at a time when weapons technology is advancing quickly and, with lasers that can shoot small planes out of the sky and drones that can land on aircraft carriers, piercing the realm of science fiction.
But some fear that the technological advancements in weapons systems are outpacing the policy that should guide their use. At a meeting last month, the U.N. Office at Geneva sponsored a multi-nation discussion on the development of the “Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems,” the legal questions they raise and the implications for human rights.
While those details are being hashed out, Christof Heyns, the U.N.’s special rapporteur, called in 2013 for a ban on the development of what he called “lethal autonomous robots,” saying that “in addition to being physically removed from the kinetic action, humans would also become more detached from decisions to kill — and their execution.”
Mary Wareham, the global coordinator for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a consortium of human rights groups, said the international community needs to ensure that when it comes to decisions of life and death on the battlefield, the humans are still in charge.
“We want to talk to the governments about how [the robots] function and understand the human control of the targeting and attack decisions,” she said. “We want assurances that a human is in the loop.”
Tags: Christian Davenport
“Carver’s prose does not flinch,” Giles Harvey wrote in a 2010 NYRB piece of the short stories of the late deadpan tragedian Raymond Carver, which were marked by sinewy sentences that spoke truths which could not be altered nor were they protested.
For decades there’s been a controversy over the role of Carver’s editor Gordon Lish in perfecting the lean stories, which were pruned and reshaped significantly from manuscript to publication. It’s a contretemps that survived Carver, who died at 50 in 1988, and one that continues to irk his widow, Tess Gallagher, though it does seem Lish’s participation was more meaningful than the average. And it also feels like stories were sometimes cut too much, that fragments of bone had been removed along with the fat.
More from Harvey’s piece, a passage about Carver receiving the edited copy of What We Talk About When Talk About Love:
He had just spent the whole night going over Lish’s edited version of the book and was taken aback by the changes. His manuscript had been radically transformed. Lish had cut the total length of the book by over 50 percent; three stories were at least 70 percent shorter; ten stories had new titles and the endings of fourteen had been rewritten.•
Of course, we don’t let the questions of Shakespeare’s authorship ruin that canon, so eventually this literary feud will matter little, just the work will remain. But you can understand how it peeves the surviving principals.
The opening of D.T. Max’s 1998 New York Times Magazine piece, “The Carver Chronicles“:
For much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who is now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. The details varied from telling to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more his than Carver’s. No one quite knew what to make of his statements. Carver, who died 10 years ago this month, never responded in public to them. Basically it was Lish’s word against common sense. Lish had written fiction, too: If he was such a great talent, why did so few people care about his own work? As the years passed, Lish became reluctant to discuss the subject. Maybe he was choosing silence over people’s doubt. Maybe he had rethought what his contribution had been — or simply moved on.
Seven years ago, Lish arranged for the sale of his papers to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Since then, only a few Carver scholars have examined the Lish manuscripts thoroughly. When one tried to publish his conclusions, Carver’s widow and literary executor, the poet Tess Gallagher, effectively blocked him with copyright cautions and pressure. I’d heard about this scholar’s work (and its failure to be published) through a friend. So I decided to visit the archive myself.
What I found there, when I began looking at the manuscripts of stories like ”Fat” and ”Tell the Women We’re Going,” were pages full of editorial marks — strikeouts, additions and marginal comments in Lish’s sprawling handwriting. It looked as if a temperamental 7-year-old had somehow got hold of the stories. As I was reading, one of the archivists came over. I thought she was going to reprimand me for some violation of the library rules. But that wasn’t why she was there. She wanted to talk about Carver. ”I started reading the folders,” she said, ”but then I stopped when I saw what was in there.”
It’s understandable that Lish’s assertions have never been taken seriously. The eccentric editor is up against an American icon. When he died at age 50 from lung cancer, Carver was considered by many to be America’s most important short-story writer. His stories were beautiful and moving. At a New York City memorial service, Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, said succinctly, ”America has just lost the writer it could least afford to lose.” Carver is no longer a writer of the moment, the way David Foster Wallace is today, but many of his stories — ”Cathedral,” ”Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and ”Errand” — are firmly established in the literary canon. A vanguard figure in the 1980’s, Carver has become establishment fiction.
That doesn’t capture his claim on us, though. It goes deeper than his work. Born in the rural Northwest, Carver was the child of an alcoholic sawmill worker and a waitress. He first learned to write through a correspondence course. He lived in poverty and suffered multiple bouts of alcoholism throughout his 30’s. He struggled in a difficult marriage with his high-school girlfriend, Maryann Burk. Through it all he remained a generous, determined man — fiction’s comeback kid. By 1980, he had quit drinking and moved in with Tess Gallagher, with whom he spent the rest of his life. ”I know better than anyone a fellow is never out of the woods,” he wrote to Lish in one of dozens of letters archived at the Lilly. ”But right now it’s aces, and I’m enjoying it.” Carver’s life and work inspired faith, not skepticism.
Still, a quick look through Carver’s books would suggest that what Lish claims might have some merit.•
Tags: Gordon Lish, Raymond Carver
Of the two things that could transform the world, Tesla and SpaceX, the former is far more plausible to succeed in its goal, which would be to environmentally remake the home and roads, but Elon Musk sees each as equally necessary for the human race to survive. Bloomberg has published an excellent segment from Ashlee Vance’s new book about Musk in which the writer makes clear how close the industrialist/technologist came to losing both the electric-and-solar empire and a shot at colonizing Mars.
SpaceX began with a dream of sending mice to our neighboring planet in a rocket purchased from the Russians, but consumer frustration forced Musk to build his own mini-NASA start-up, and for his ambitions to grow exponentially.
An excerpt:
Elon and Justine decided to move south to begin their family and the next chapter of their lives in Los Angeles. Unlike many Southern California transplants, they were drawn by the technology. The mild, consistent weather made it ideal for the aeronautics industry, which had been there since the 1920s, when Lockheed Aircraft set up shop in Hollywood. Howard Hughes, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Boeing, and a mosaic of support industries followed suit. While Musk’s space plans were vague at the time, he felt confident that he could recruit some of the world’s top aeronautics thinkers and get them to join his next venture.
Musk started by crashing the Mars Society, an eclectic collection of space enthusiasts dedicated to exploring and settling the Red Planet. They were holding a fund-raiser in mid-2001, a $500-per-plate event at the house of one of the well-off Mars Society members. What stunned Robert Zubrin, the head of the group, was the reply from someone named Elon Musk, whom no one could remember inviting. “He gave us a check for $5,000,” Zubrin said. “That made everyone take notice.” Zubrin invited Musk for coffee ahead of the dinner and told him about the research center the society had built in the Arctic to mimic the tough conditions of Mars and the experiments they had been running for something called the Translife Mission, in which there would be a capsule orbiting earth carrying a crew of mice. It would spin to give them one-third gravity—the same as Mars—and they would live there and make babies.
When it was time for dinner, Zubrin placed Musk at the VIP table next to himself, the director and space buff James Cameron, and Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist for NASA. Musk loved it. “He was much more intense than some of the other millionaires,” Zubrin said. “He didn’t know a lot about space, but he had a scientific mind. He wanted to know exactly what was being planned in regards to Mars and what the significance would be.” Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated an additional $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert.
Musk’s friends were not entirely sure what to make of his mental state at that time. He’d caught malaria while on vacation in Africa and lost a tremendous amount of weight fighting it off. Musk stands 6-foot-1 but usually seems much bigger than that. He’s broad-shouldered, sturdy, and thick. This version of Musk, though, looked emaciated and with little prompting would start expounding on his desire to do something meaningful with his life. “He said, ‘The logical thing to happen next is solar, but I can’t figure out how to make any money out of it,’ ” said George Zachary, an investor and close friend of Musk’s, recalling a lunch date at the time. “He started talking about space, and I thought he meant office space like a real estate play.” Musk had already started thinking beyond the Mars Society’s goals. Rather than send a few mice into earth’s orbit, Musk wanted to send them to Mars.
“He asked if I thought that was crazy,” Zachary said. “I asked, ‘Do the mice come back? Because, if they don’t, yeah, most people will think that’s crazy.’ ” Musk said that the mice were not only meant to go to Mars and come back but they also would come home with the baby mice, too.•
Tags: Ashlee Vance, Carol Stoker, Elon Musk, George Zachary, James Cameron, Robert Zubrin
I’ve been on the receiving end of puzzling looks more than once for saying Catch-22 isn’t the best novel Joseph Heller wrote. That work is a classic American novel in the sense that it overflows and sprawls, attempting almost too much–it’s brilliant and flawed. On the other hand, Something Happened, Heller’s devastating, little-read 1974 book is a precise masterpiece without a wasted word. I haven’t re-read either since my college years, so perhaps my feelings would be reversed now, but both deserve at least equal attention, which is certainly not how it’s worked out.
In an essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Carmen Petaccio agrees with me, encouraging readers to discover Heller’s forgotten novel. The opening:
THE MOST CRIMINALLY OVERLOOKED great novel of the past half century is a book called Something Happened, which this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of its publication. Joseph Heller spent more than a decade writing the novel and was so convinced of its genius that he stashed manuscripts all over Manhattan, ensuring that Something Happened would survive in the event his apartment burned down. When he finally brought the completed draft to his agent, he forced his daughter to accompany him on the trip — so she could deliver the pages in case he suffered a coronary or got hit by a bus. In 1974, 13 years after Catch-22 began its gradual ascent into the rarefied realm of idiom, Something Happened was released to a collective cultural shrug, delivering the book its first firm nudge down the slippery slope that bottoms at obscurity. Today, the novel is perhaps best remembered for Kurt Vonnegut’s artfully impartial appraisal in The New York Times Book Review, which described it as “one of the unhappiest books ever written.” Vonnegut wasn’t entirely wrong.
Something Happened is, by design, a punishingly bleak novel. It’s dense and overlong, sometimes sadistically so, and it offers a minimum in the way of resolution or plot. If the novel’s worldview were a color, the human eye would likely fail to perceive its darkness. What is surprising, though, is how by virtue of that same bleakness, Something Happened becomes one of the most pleasurable, engrossing, and in retrospect moving American novels ever written. If you’ve read Something Happened, and you get why others haven’t, then you make it your little mission to convince people that they should.•
Tags: Carmen Petaccio, Joseph Heller
Sir Hubert Wilkins, polar explorer, was familiar with investigating uncharted swatches of the globe by air, but in 1931 his aim was lower, as he commanded the Nautilus expedition whose goal was be the first to explore the North Pole by submarine. The voyage, which began in New York Harbor, was a grueling, troubled one, and after casualty and numerous engine failures, his benefactor, William Randolph Hearst, begged the adventurer, via wireless, to end the mission. Eventually Wilkins acquiesced, but not before proving a submarine could operate underneath the polar ice cap. Prior to the journey, Wilkins was thought to be batty for even trying, being seriously doubted in an article in the May 2, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Below the piece is Wilkins’ 1958 What’s My Line? appearance.
__________________________
“It was thought to be fantasy”:
Tags: Hubert Wilkins
Here’s an example of what Andrew McAfee wrote about tech toys of the rich becoming tools of the masses: An article from Peter H. Lewis in the July 19, 1992 New York Times, which was prescient about the emergence of smartphones (if a decade too early), without realizing they’d be for everyone. Andy Grove, quoted in the piece, thought it all fantasy. An excerpt:
Sometime around the middle of this decade no one is sure exactly when — executives on the go will begin carrying pocket-sized digital communicating devices. And although nobody is exactly sure what features these personal information gizmos will have, what they will cost, what they will look like or what they will be called, hundreds of computer industry officials and investors at the Mobile ’92 conference here last week agreed that the devices could become the foundation of the next great fortunes to be made in the personal computer business.
“We are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers,” said Nobuo Mii, vice president and general manager of the International Business Machines Corporation’s entry systems division.
How rich is this lode? At one end of the spectrum is John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be ‘the mother of all markets.’
At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is “a pipe dream driven by greed.”
These devices are expected to combine the best features of personal computers, facsimile machines, computer networks, pagers, personal secretaries, appointment books, address books and even paperback books and pocket CD players — all in a hand-held box operated by pen, or even voice commands.
Stuck in traffic on a business trip, an executive carrying a personal communicator could send and receive electronic mail and facsimile messages from anywhere in the country. She could also call up a local map on a 3-inch by 5-inch screen, draw a line between her current position (confirmed by satellite positioning signals) and her intended destination, and the device would give her specific driving instructions (as well as real-time warnings about traffic jams or accidents). Certainly, these are just predictions for now, but they sure are fun to think about.•
Tags: Andrew McAfee, Andy Grove, John Sculley, Nobuo Mii, Peter H. Lewis
Pregnant, my ass. I saw her stuff a whole chicken up her shirt.
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
This week, it became clear that Seymour Hersh was trolling us when he revealed the identity of the SEAL who shot bin Laden.
To the naked eye, Marc Andreessen appears like a giant mass removed from the base of Steve Ballmer’s spine. The Netscaper-cum-V.C.er is an interesting guy, but he’s also an extreme techno-optimist, a true believer to an obscene degree in the transformative power of Silicon Valley, and like most deeply devoted souls, he can be annoying as fuck.
Tad Friend, an enormously enjoyable New Yorker writer who’s uncommonly gifted at simultaneously telling a macro and micro story, profiled the Northern California idolmaker and his milieu, an enchanted land where men (almost exclusively) with money dare to divine the next Google or Facebook, gambling in casinos still under construction, trying to identify black swans and ride unicorns. Along the way, Friend vividly depicts this modern strain of capitalism as well as reveals his subject, of whom he writes these two sentences: “Marc Andreessen mentions Thomas Edison often, his family never” and “Andreessen represents the Valley—both in its soaring vision and in its tendency to treat people as a fungible mass.”
The opening:
On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents’ Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world’s most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road’s newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm’s deal team and its seven general partners—the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong.
Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can’t help but think of words like “jumbo” and “Grade A.” Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes’s Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He’s an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon erase such primitive behaviors as paying cash (Bitcoin), eating cooked food (Soylent), and enduring a world unimproved by virtual reality (Oculus VR). He believes that Silicon Valley is mission control for mankind, which is therefore on a steep trajectory toward perfection. And when he so argues, fire-hosing you with syllogisms and data points and pre-refuting every potential rebuttal, he’s very persuasive.•
Tags: Marc Andreessen, Tad Friend
For pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve taken in at least 250-300 movies a year, though I’ve hardly watched any in the last twenty-four months. I needed a break. But a new piece of Alex Pappademas’ routinely wondrous writing at Grantland has convinced me to see Mad Max: Fury Road. Early on, the writer mentions “The Futurist Manifesto” by Marinetti, a tract that glorifies war and scorns women, before explaining how George Miller’s dystopic film reverses at least half of that mindset. An excerpt:
The key moment comes in the calm after the storm. Max drags himself across the desert, still connected by a length of chain and a blood-transfusion tube to an unconscious War Boy and his car door. He spots the wives, bathing in radiator water like nymphs at a pond while taking bolt cutters to their chastity belts. Half-wrapped in diaphanous linen, they resemble America’s Next Top Model competitors who’ve somehow escaped Tyra’s clutches before the makeover episode. You can read the movie’s politics loud and clear in the fight scene that follows, in which Max’s literal blood tie to a foot soldier of the phallocracy becomes both action beat and telling metaphor. Miller came close to shooting a Gibson-led version of Fury Road back in 2001 before 9/11 and the fall of the dollar torpedoed his budget; presumably, he can’t have anticipated Gamergate making representational parity and misogyny into third-rail issues within the core audience for postapocalyptic action movies any more than he saw Boko Haram coming. But the “men’s rights” crusaders now gnawing their fedora brims in righteous apoplexy over the thought of Mad Max’s manly iconography being perverted to serve a misandrist agenda aren’t actually imagining things. This is an unambiguously and unapologetically feminist, Bechdel test–passing sci-fi blockbuster that begins, I’ll say again, with Charlize Theron commandeering an 18-wheeled battle-dong in order to free some sex slaves and ends by explicitly linking the liberation of humanity in general to the dismantling (and, in some cases, dismemberment) of the patriarchy.•
Tags: Alex Pappademas, George Miller
E.O. Wilson is championing a goal of “Half Earth” for maintaining biodiversity, meaning we would set aside fifty percent of the planet’s land for preserves and parks where non-human species could thrive. Wonderful idea though it is, that will be a steep climb. Audacity is necessary, however. At the Biodiversity Foundation website, Wilson has republished a Mosaic piece in which he and molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll engage in a wide-ranging conversation about conservation, among other scientific matters. An excerpt:
E.O. Wilson:
You probably haven’t heard of it, but I’ve been in from the beginning of the campaign in Alabama to create a national park of hundreds of thousands of acres. [The Mobile-Tensaw Delta] would be the most biodiverse park in America, with a tremendous variety of organisms: 350 species of fish and then, to the north, the Red Hills and the Appalachians – deeply divided terrain with relic plants and animals that were left behind during the retreat of the glacier 10,000 years ago. The people down there have just woken up to what we have.
Sean B. Carroll:
I was in Yellowstone National Park in August with Liz Hadly from Stanford University, and it still possesses all the mammal species that were there 3,000 years ago. We know this from what the pack rats put into the caves in Yellowstone – and if all the mammals are there, you can feel pretty comfortable that lots of the other things are there too.
So there’s a very old park, a very large piece of ecosystem set aside, it’s enjoyed by four million people a year, but it’s a success story. It says that the first thing you do is preserve a big ecosystem and then manage it. It can be done, and it can be managed scientifically.
It doesn’t mean everything that was ever done in Yellowstone was correct, but I was impressed when Liz explained that she knows that all the mammals that were here before European settlement are still here because she’s done the cave work to look at the microfossils. We should feel good about that: grizzly bears, bisons and wolves are in Yellowstone, and they’ve been removed from almost the rest of their entire range.
E.O. Wilson:
And if you go from the USA – which, relative to the rest of the world, is in pretty good shape in terms of biodiversity and sustainability – to the tropics, everything gets worse.•
Tags: E.O Wilson, Sean B. Carroll
From the early attempt to quantify community in the The Woodlands to the sensor-centric, next-level Songdo, smart cities are an accepted (if vaguely defined) aspect of urban experimentation. But only one state, Singapore, is attempting to be a “smart nation.” It never truly was Disneyland with a death penalty, as William Gibson dubbed it in 1993, but it is a city-state saturated with smartphones, seemingly comfortable with surveillance. This ease with connectivity and quantification is one reason why the island nation feels it can transform itself into a techno-topia free of traffic jams and other such urban annoyances. From Anthony Cuthbertson at International Business Times:
The idea of everyone being connected to everything all the time might sound like a dystopian nightmare for some, but {Infocomm Development Authority head Steve] Leonard and [Prime Minister Lee] Hsien Loong believe it is key to creating a healthy and happy society.
Whether or not the citizens of Singapore have much of a say in the matter is another question. The country’s autocratic style of government has faced criticism in the past for stifling freedom, however it has also been recognised for overseeing Singapore’s remarkable economic growth over the last 50 years. If the ambitious smart nation vision is ever to be realised, it will play a key role.
“Our advantage is that we are compact, we have a single level of government, we can decide efficiently, we can scale up successful experiments and pilots without any delay,” Lee said in a speech in April.
“Also we are able to take a long term view and see through big transformations to the end until they bear fruit for our citizens.”
There are legitimate issues that Singaporeans might have when faced with the prospect of living in Lee’s new nation, most notably those of privacy and security. For Leonard, this is the biggest challenge currently faced.
When asked what the biggest hurdle is in implementing new technologies, it isn’t laws or regulation, it’s mindset.•
I’ve said this before, but before we vote for any politician it would be really instructive to study where they stood at the time of the 2008 economic collapse and in its aftermath. Those who argued for austerity, for taking money out of a greatly diminished economy, should have to answer serious questions about that stance.
In a similar vein, the Dubya tragedy of the Iraq War is playing out again with Jeb Bush running for President. That’s not merely because his brother oversaw the disaster–though he agreed, if fleetingly, that he would still have supported the invasion knowing what we now know–but also due his staffing up with some of the “stars” of his sibling’s inner circle. You shouldn’t be damned for making a mistake but perhaps you should be if it was such a damnable one.
From Paul Krugman at the New York Times:
Jeb Bush wants to stop talking about past controversies. And you can see why. He has a lot to stop talking about. But let’s not honor his wish. You can learn a lot by studying recent history, and you can learn even more by watching how politicians respond to that history.
The big “Let’s move on” story of the past few days involved Mr. Bush’s response when asked in an interview whether, knowing what he knows now, he would have supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He answered that yes, he would. No W.M.D.? No stability after all the lives and money expended? No problem.
Then he tried to walk it back. He “interpreted the question wrong,” and isn’t interested in engaging “hypotheticals.” Anyway, “going back in time” is a “disservice” to those who served in the war.
Take a moment to savor the cowardice and vileness of that last remark. And, no, that’s not hyperbole. Mr. Bush is trying to hide behind the troops, pretending that any criticism of political leaders — especially, of course, his brother, the commander in chief — is an attack on the courage and patriotism of those who paid the price for their superiors’ mistakes. That’s sinking very low, and it tells us a lot more about the candidate’s character than any number of up-close-and-personal interviews.
Wait, there’s more: Incredibly, Mr. Bush resorted to the old passive-voice dodge, admitting only that “mistakes were made.” Indeed. By whom? Well, earlier this year Mr. Bush released a list of his chief advisers on foreign policy, and it was a who’s-who of mistake-makers, people who played essential roles in the Iraq disaster and other debacles.•
Tags: Jeb Bush, Paul Krugman
I loved video games as a child and have no interest in them as an adult, and I wonder sometimes if that’s because it seems like we live inside one 24/7 now. Our heads are in the cloud, our lives held in devices, and that experiment in anarchy we encounter on the Internet is going to increasingly career back into the physical world, as real and virtual forge a new partnership. What a game it will be.
Even to a non-gamer like myself, No Man’s Sky, a video game universe being built by a small team of designers and coders and artists outside London, sounds amazing. The interplanetary game has an essentially infinite playing field and a butterfly effect of interdependence so profound that even the creators are surprised by the causes and effects. Raffi Khatchadourian of the New Yorker visited the Hello Games offices and brings a remarkable clarity to a runaway ambition that’s not yet fully realized. One example: He lucidly explains how “procedural generation”–producing content algorithmically rather than manually–allows a small independent company to turn out a blockbuster-sized vision.
As for what I said above about feeling like we’re becoming players inside of a game, Khatchadourian said this in a Reddit AMA tied to his piece: “Your character won’t be defined as it is in many other games. In other words, you won’t have an avatar that you can build. You will be you.” And at the same time, you will not be you, not exactly. In that sense, the game seems appropriate to the moment.
Tags: Raffi Khatchadourian, Sean Murray
As costs and chips shrunk and things formerly known as supercomputers slipped into our pockets, space exploration ceased being a top-down affair possible only for governments. Perhaps a corporation like SpaceX will best NASA in a rush to Mars, and maybe a different free-market concern will establish a city in a moon crater. At the very least, satellites will become merely expensive toys–and then inexpensive ones. As 3D printers continue to improve, the stratosphere will grow more clogged. In this new normal, should there be formalized rules of engagement that all must abide?
That’s the prescription suggested in “The Democratization of Space,” a new Foreign Affairs piece by Dave Baiocchi and William Welser IV, which calls for a 21st-century version of the Outer Space Treaty to address a raft of issues, including the situational awareness of the growing number of satellites launched. An excerpt:
IN 1967, the United States, the Soviet Union, and many other countries signed the Outer Space Treaty, which set up a framework for managing activities in space—usually defined as beginning 62 miles above sea level. The treaty established national governments as the parties responsible for governing space, a principle that remains in place today.
Half a century later, however, building a basic satellite is no longer considered rocket science. Thanks to the availability of small, energy-efficient computers, innovative manufacturing processes, and new business models for launching rockets, it has become easier than ever to launch a space mission. These advances have opened up space to a crowd of new actors, from developing countries to small start-ups. In other words, a new space race has begun, and in this one, nation-states are not the only participants. Unlike in the first space race, the challenge in this one will not be technical; it will be figuring out how to regulate this welter of new activity.
FREE-FOR-ALL
Computing gets much of the credit for lowering the barriers to entry to space.•
Tags: Dave Baiocchi, William Welser IV
In Ashley Halsey III’s Washington Post piece about the future of driverless, he focuses on two important aspects: 1) The U.S. government seems at this point to be an ally of the technological shift, and 2) Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication is an important part of next-level car safety, a fact often lost in the awe factor of witnessing cars driving themselves.
I’ve yet to read many thoughtful comments from anyone in American government in regards to the profound economic destabilization this changeover may provoke. This new industry will likely kill far more jobs than it creates, which doesn’t mean we should be Luddites about it, but we should be thinking of solutions should this situation arise.
An excerpt:
The administration push is recognition of a fact that is largely lost on many Americans: though it will dawn gradually, the era of the autonomous car is upon them. …
Like any innovation in the automotive marketplace, the advent of cars that talk to each other (known as vehicle-to-vehicle or V2V) and fully autonomous cars will take years to unfold.
Foxx anticipated that the technology would be fully rolled out within 10 years and that it might be three decades before fully autonomous vehicles rule the roads.
The secretary and officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also showed a firm commitment to cementing the marriage of two closely related technologies: driverless vehicles and direct computer communication between cars on the road.
“V2V offers things that you just can’t get through on-vehicle sensors, through cameras and radar and lasers and so forth,” said a NHTSA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the subject. “V2V sees around corners, it sees 15 cars ahead in traffic and across three or four lanes of traffic. It sees not only the car that is about to speed into the intersection, but whether the driver has applied the brake or not.”
Tags: Ashley Halsey III
Daniel Mendelsohn, who writes beautifully and deeply on pretty much any topic, has a piece in the New York Review of Books about the films Her and Ex Machina, which allows him to drift from times ancient to modern, from Homer’s Greece to Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory to Hollywood’s soundstages, while weighing in on the race between carbon and silicon, a contest we’re certain to lose at least on the micro level. Technological unemployment is less cinematic than the emergence of conscious machines, however, so Strong AI has become the focus of modern storytelling. Mendelsohn wonders why so many of these narratives about “alive” devices revolve around matters of the heart and whether this new “love” means we have surrendered some of our humanness. An excerpt:
It’s hardly surprising that literary exploitations of this strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the nineteenth century—which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms capable of replacing human labor provoked writers to question the increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of technology in society: a steam-powered man in Edward Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M.L. Campbell’s 1893 “The Automated Maid-of-All-Work” features a programmable female robot: the feminist issue again.
But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein(1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” alludes, with grudging admiration, to the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor Frankenstein, even as its epigram, from Paradise Lost (“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?”) suggests the scope of the moral questions implicit in Victor’s project—questions that Victor himself cannot, or will not, answer. A marked skepticism about the dangers of technology, about the “enticements of science,” is, indeed, evident in the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his “child,” who strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” often seems more human than its human creator.
Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.•
Tags: Daniel Mendelsohn
