Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
“Wake the fuck up.”
Where the hell is that fucking plane? Isn’t anyone else besides me worried about this? The government knows where it is but not telling us. I’ll tell you my theory. That plane is the Middle East. The passengers were gassed on that plane and they took it to where they wanted to go. That plane is going to show up somewhere packed with explosives. Wake the fuck up before a disaster happens. Don’t sit back and wait.
Putting up a post about the Pew Research Center’s “Digital Life in 2025” reminded me of a piece Douglas Coupland published in Toronto’s Globe and Mail in 2010 called “The Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years.” It’s a dark and dystopic list of 45 things you need to know even if you’d rather not. Coupland was joking but only a little. Here are a half-dozen choice predictions:
38) Knowing everything will become dull
It all started out so graciously: At a dinner for six, a question arises about, say, that Japanese movie you saw in 1997 (Tampopo), or whether or not Joey Bishop is still alive (no). And before long, you know the answer to everything.
20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989
Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.
16) ‘You’ will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze
While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.
6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?
That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!
3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now
The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.
1) It’s going to get worse
No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.•
An interesting (if audio-only) 1977 Tonight Show clip of Gore Vidal, who may have been Sandusky, trashing Jimmy Carter during the opening weeks of his Presidency, discussing income inequality and demonstrating a waterless toilet. As with all episodes of the program, Johnny Carson performed the monologue with a loaded gun and a bag of cocaine stashed in his underpants.
Tags: Gore Vidal, Johnny Carson
What little I know of 20th-century avant opera concerns the otherworldly work of Robert Ashley, the iconoclastic Ann Arbor-born composer of Perfect Lives and other droning, enigmatic slices of American surrealism intended for TV whether the medium was ready or not for his Lynchian “sitcoms.” Ashley, who in his mature years resembled Andy Williams’ Martian doppelganger, something of an avuncular extraterrestrial, familiar yet unnameable, recently passed away. Here’s the opening of Mark Swed’s 1992 Los Angeles Times piece about his singular career at midpoint:
“One of the most offbeat incidents in American opera occurred a dozen years ago when the city of Chicago hosted the now-defunct annual New Music America Festival and presented a complete performance of Robert Ashley’s radically innovative seven-part opera Perfect Lives. The incident was the unwitting involvement of then-Mayor Jane Byrne.
The mayor, wanting election-year publicity any way she could get it, insisted the festival be named ‘Mayor Byrne’s New Music America’ in return for her allocating considerable city resources and cash. So at her welcoming speech, which was covered by local television news and given on the Perfect Lives set, someone played a joke on her. The opera employs lots of voice-altering electronics, and the microphone she spoke into was rigged, splitting her voice into octaves. She became a breathy soprano and male baritone duet. She sounded like Laurie Anderson.
What made the occasion remarkable was not that a puerile prank was played on a public official, but the brilliance of the result. In the reality-skewered world of Ashley, Jane Byrne belongs on the late-night news impersonating Laurie Anderson, not the other way around.
Ashley’s operas are about the transformation of just such ordinary landscapes into astonishing ones. They are operas intended for television, surreal as rock videos.”
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“The Park,” part one of Perfect Lives:
Tags: Mark Swed, Robert Ashley
From the June 3, 1898 New York Times:
“Sioux City, Iowa–Loaded with wealth, but deserted and starving, John Rochel, once a well-known manufacturer in Sioux City, perished last April on the trail between Dawson City and Alaskan points. The news of his death reached here in a letter to his widow, written by Richard Hendrickson, from Seattle, under date of March 24.
The details of Rochel’s death are meagre, but from what can be gleaned it appears that he was returning from the mines, after disposing of a valuable claim. His party was short of provisions, and as Rochel, who was quite an old man, delayed the march, it was decided to abandon him. Rochel had been engaged here in the manufacture of brick, but was tempted from home by the stories of immense wealth in Alaska. From all accounts he was among the luckiest of the miners at Dawson City, but was unable to bring his winnings back to civilization. His body will be brought here for burial.”
The oil-soaked boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, with its 0.3% unemployment rate during a national recession, is both dream and curse. It’s not exactly Deadwood, but lawlessness and a raft of social problems have attended the latter-day gold rush. From multimedia reporting by Jude Sheerin and Anna Bressanin at BBC News Magazine:
“The male-to-female ratio here is widely estimated to be about 10:1. Many women do not feel safe walking the streets alone.
Bailey Moreland, 25, a barista at Meg-A-Latte coffee shop, carries a stun gun everywhere she goes.
She has had men hit on her even after she points out that she is not only heavily pregnant but happily engaged.
‘Being in a bar, going to the gas station, walking on the street, you’ll get hooted and hollered at,’ she says.
‘I don’t make eye contact with anybody.’
But for many in a nation still bruised by recession, the modern-day gold rush here is a symbol of America’s genius for reinvention.
One of them is Carl Trudel, a 37-year-old maintenance man at the Fox Run motorhome park on the city outskirts.
He sold everything he had after the property market went bust in Florida to migrate north in 2012.
The singleton’s loyal companion in the trailer he calls home is his dog, Dooley. He lavishes affection on the Staffordshire terrier.
Living in Williston is ‘not easy’ and can be ‘very lonely,’ says Trudel.
Yet despite its rowdy bars, runaway prices, long queues at the laundrette or petrol station, and the often-bare supermarket shelves, he seems content.
‘If you have the ambition, the plan, the skills, you will make it here,” insists Trudel. ‘It’s really up to you.
‘But absolutely the American dream is here. That’s why I’m here. And so far it’s happening. Absolutely.'”
Tags: Anna Bressanin, Bailey Moreland, Carl Trudel, Jude Sheerin
From Kurt Vonnegut’s 1988 missive to the people of 2088, via Letters of Note, the guidance wise political leaders would give to citizens in regards to Mother Nature:
Tags: Kurt Vonnegut
I have doubts that Mars One will actually blast off in 2024 (or ever), let alone become a global reality show, but let’s say it does. What will govern this handful of astronauts should lawlessness occur as the cameras beam the crimes back to Earth? That’s what Anders Herlitz of Practical Ethics wonders.
I wonder something else: How will viewers respond when one of the astronauts dies onscreen on a strange and lonely planet? Since these transplanted Martians won’t be returning, death is a given. If the Apollo 11 astronauts had died on the moon, much of the world would have been inconsolable. Would that be the case now? Has reality TV, in all its glorious stupidity, prepared us for bad things happening to foolhardy people? Is the melding of the real and the fictional so ingrained in us now that the blow will be softened? And if so, does that say something good about us (sophistication, maturity, acceptance) or something bad (desensitization)?
From Herlitz:
“I wonder what happens when the first crime is committed. We are going to put four persons inside a spaceship. They will travel with this spaceship for a year. As they arrive to Mars, they will live together in a confined space for the foreseeable future. I wonder what happens when property rights for the first time are violated. What happens when Ann cheats Charlie and jumps out of the vessel before him, thus becoming the first man on Mars, even though they had an agreement that Charlie would be the first? What happens when the first punch is thrown? What happens when the first rape occurs, when the first murder is committed? There will be no law enforcement in any conventional sense. One wonders: will there even be laws? But perhaps more important: since the crew will not return to earth, there will be no consequences of these people’s actions beyond those that they inflict upon each other. And all of this will be broadcasted. We are about to put four volunteers from around the world in a small capsule, give them resources enough to survive for a very long time, and send them to a different planet on which they will live their lives, and we broadcast all this for the world to see. I wonder if this will not so much be a giant leap for mankind, as it will be the materialisation of Lord of the Flies in the arenaTM. Will this be a giant leap backward, where we turn space into a postmodern amphitheatre, and gather gladiators from around the world to meet there?”
Tags: Anders Herlitz
Art Linkletter’s daughter Diane plunged to her death from a six-story window in 1969, perhaps influenced to suicide by LSD. Timothy Leary was the most famous proponent of the drug. Talk show host Stanley Siegel, that button-pusher, thought it a good idea in 1977 to have Linkletter and Leary speak by phone on live TV.
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The Pew Research Center released its “Digital Life in 2025” report. Here are two items from its “15 Theses About the Digital Future,” neither of which is particularly surprising.
From “More-hopeful theses”:
• Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.
David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, noted, “Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own ‘social networks,’ which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation. More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The Internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible. It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do.”
Joe Touch, director at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, predicted, “The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won’t think about ‘going online’ or ‘looking on the Internet’ for something — we’ll just be online, and just look.understood.”
From “Less-hopeful theses”:
• Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.
Oscar Gandy, an emeritus professor at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, explained, “We have to think seriously about the kinds of conflicts that will arise in response to the growing inequality enabled and amplified by means of networked transactions that benefit smaller and smaller segments of the global population. Social media will facilitate and amplify the feelings of loss and abuse. They will also facilitate the sharing of examples and instructions about how to challenge, resist, and/or punish what will increasingly come to be seen as unjust.”
Tags: David Clark, Joe Touch, Oscar Gandy
President Abraham Lincoln, refined man that he was, always turned down requests to appear on faux talk shows on the Internet. But here are some other things he agreed to do (courtesy of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years):
Judge cockfights:
“The Clary’s Grove boys called on [Lincoln] sometimes to judge their horse races and cockfights, umpire their matches and settle disputes. One story ran that Lincoln was on hand one day when an old man had agreed, for a gallon jug of whisky, to be rolled down a hill in a barrel. And Lincoln talked and laughed them out of doing it. He wasn’t there on the day, as D.W Burner told it, when the gang took an old man with a wooden leg, built a fire around the wooden leg, and held the man down until the wooden leg was burned off.”
Wrestle for the entertainment of knife-wielding gamblers:
“Offut talked big about Lincoln as a wrestler, and Bill Clary, who ran a saloon thirty steps north of the Offut store, bet Offut that Lincoln couldn’t throw Jack Armstrong, the Clary’s Grove champion. Sports from miles around came to a level square next to Offut’s store to see the match; bets of money, knives, trinkets, tobacco, drinks were put up, Armstrong, short and powerful, aimed from the first to get in close to his man and use his thick muscular strength. Lincoln held him off with long arms, wore down his strength, got him out of breath, surprised and ‘rattled.’ They pawed and clutched in many holds and twists till Lincoln threw Armstrong and had both shoulders to the grass.”
Drink whiskey from bungholes:
“When a small gambler tricked Bill Greene, Lincoln’s helper at the store, Lincoln told Bill to bet him the best fur hat in the store that he [Lincoln] could lift a barrel of whisky from the floor and hold it while he took a drink from the bunghole. Bill hunted up the gambler and made the bet. Lincoln sat squatting on the floor, lifted the barrel, rolled it on his knees till the bunghole reached his mouth, took a mouthful, let the barrel down–and stood up and spat out the whisky.”
Press barefoot boys’ muddy soles to the ceiling:
“He put barefoot boys to wading in a mud puddle near the home trough, pulled them up one by one, carried them to the house upside down, and walked their muddy feet across the ceiling. The stepmother came in, laughed at their foot tracks, told Abe he ought to be spanked–and he cleaned the ceiling so that it looked new.”
Last year Seymour Hersh made comments about the official U.S. government report regarding the Obama bin Laden killing, labeling it as “bullshit.” It was taken to mean initially that the journalist believed the terrorist hadn’t actually been eliminated, but he quickly clarified, saying that bin Laden was dead but that the White House version of the mission was fantastical. In a wide-ranging New Republic interview conducted by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker editor David Remnick pushes back at his contributor’s assertion. An excerpt:
“Isaac Chotiner:
Speaking of Hersh, he claims that the U.S. government’s story of the Osama bin Laden raid is bullshit. What do you say to that given that your magazine ran a piece that relied heavily on government sources?
David Remnick:
I thoroughly stand by the story we published.
Isaac Chotiner:
And his comments?
David Remnick:
Look, there is a difference between what people say loosely or in speeches and what we publish. All I can be in charge of is what we publish. I have enormous respect for him.
Isaac Chotiner:
Hersh wrote a piece a few months back hinting that the rebels were the ones who used chemical weapons in Syria. Why did that run in the London Review of Books and not The New Yorker?
David Remnick:
Or The Washington Post. I have worked with Sy on many dozens of pieces and am proud of that work. And a lot of those pieces had the potential to break a lot of crockery. I was willing, and am still willing, to go to the wall with investigative journalism. But if he and I disagree, it is not an easy thing. I hope we will work again together. I hope you will print this: I wish him all the best, and I think he is one of the great journalists of our age.”
Tags: Barack Obama, David Remnick, Isaac Chotiner, Seymour Hersh
“He had big, muscular fingers, and he snapped them with a sound like the crack of a black snake whip.”
Prior to antibiotics and penicillin, lesser methods were used to treat a raft of ailments–including, um, finger snapping. From an article about the fad in the December 19, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A friend who was born in Central Illinois asked me the other day whether I have ever heard of the snapping craze that raged in the back country districts in his part of the state some thirty odd years ago. I have inhabited this planet for a little over half a century and have always been interested in popular delusions, but I had never before heard of the snappers. My friend said that a snapping doctor, who came from nobody knew where, started a curious movement by lectures in rural schoolhouses and churches. His theory was that all diseases could be thrown off by bringing the body up to a condition of high nervous tension by a peculiar method of snapping the fingers, which he had discovered and which he alone was competent to teach. He had big, muscular fingers, and he snapped them with a sound like the crack of a black snake whip. He soon got his audiences to work snapping and made them believe that they were experiencing marked benefits from the performance. For complete instruction in the art, however, he charged $50.
The craze had a run of a few months, and while it raged the school children snapped their fingers at recess time, and in the farmhouses men and women gathered evenings to practice the marvelous new healing art.”
Some aren’t looking to defeat the robots but to join them. They want no confrontation.
Members of the Grinder subculture aren’t waiting for science and technology to perfect and normalize the melding of humans and machines but are instead taking matters into their own hands, one magnetized fingertip at a time. From “Who Wants to Be a Cyborg?” Alex Mayyasi’s Priceonomics post which begins with an anecdote about early adopter Rich Lee:
“If you ask Lee why he did this, as we did, he’ll reply, ‘I realized that if I want to be a cyborg, I have to do it myself.’
Lee recognizes that this ‘is not a goal that everyone has now.’ But he is not alone in his ambition. Lee associates with a loose-knit community of ‘grinders,’ people interested in augmenting their human bodies with implanted technology. Other enthusiasts have implanted magnets in their fingertips so that they can feel electromagnetic fields, placed a device that sends biomedical data to the Internet via bluetooth under the skin of their forearm, and built hardware that allows them to experience color as sound.
For decades, technologists and science-fiction writers have speculated about a future in which humans meld with machines. New technologies like Google Glass, meanwhile, lead to comparisons with The Terminator and speculation that it is the first step down the path to an augmented reality.
The grinder community, however, is not waiting for the future to arrive; they’re building it by tinkering with their own bodies. And their first, do-it-yourself steps toward becoming cyborgs show that humans can already modify or augment their experience to a surprising degree.”
Tags: Alex Mayyasi, Rich Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us the web and refuses to take it back no matter how nicely we ask, just did an AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
___________________________
Question:
Do you ever look at the stuff on the web now and feel like Robert Oppenheimer?
Tim Berners-Lee:
No, not really. The web is a — primarily neutral — tool for humanity. When you look at humanity you see the good and the bad, the wonderful and the awful. A powerful tool can be used for good or ill. Things which are really bad are illegal on the web as they are off it. On balance, communication is good think I think: much of the badness comes from misunderstanding.
___________________________
Question:
Edward Snowden- Hero or Villain?
Tim Berners-Lee:
Because he ✓ had no other alternative ✓ engaged as a journalist / with a journalist to be careful of how what was released, and ✓ provided an important net overall benefit to the world, I think he should be protected, and we should have ways of protecting people like him. Because we can try to design perfect systems of government, and they will never be perfect, and when they fail, then the whistleblower may be all that saves society.
___________________________
Question:
What are your thoughts on the increased surveillance on internet based mediums like GCHQ’s monitoring of all the Yahoo video chats. Do you personally think it should be controlled, non existent or fine the way it is now?
Tim Berners-Lee:
I think that some monitoring of the net by government agencies is going to be needed to fight crime. We need to invent a new system of checks and balances with unprecedented power to be able to investigate and hold the agencies which do it accountable to the public.
___________________________
Question:
What other names did you consider other than the world wide web?
Tim Berners-Lee:
Mine of Information, The Information Mine, The Mesh
None had quite the right ring. I liked WWW partly because I could start global variable names with a W and not have them clash with other peoples’ (in a C world) …in fact I used HT for them)
___________________________
Question:
What was one of the things you never thought the internet would be used for, but has actually become one of the main reasons people use the internet?
Tim Berners-Lee:
Kittens.•
Tags: Edward Snowden, Tim Berners-Lee
I’m looking for good quality human skeletons, also animal skeletons. Contact email. Thanks!
The complete version of the very cool 1974 film The World of Buckminster Fuller.
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Give me more and more information. I love it, even if I can’t remember it all. But in an Aeon essay, Douglas Hine argues that a surfeit of information infuses us with a sense of ennui. An excerpt:
“This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.
Information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world
The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and the counterculture survivors gave it one – the great escapist myth of their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable, information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world.
The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.”
Tags: Douglas Hine, Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand
The automation of the workforce is good in the long run but difficult until the new normal becomes, well, normal. How can a roboticized economy and a free-market economy coexist? New industries will be created, of course, but there still may be a shortfall in employment. One solution: an economic output tax. From Rachel Emma Silverman at the WSJ:
“Carl Bass, the chief executive of Autodesk, acknowledged that workplace automation has eliminated or reduced many manufacturing jobs, and will continue to do so in the future, leading to major shifts in the labor market. Entire industries, such as trucking, will eventually be disrupted by robotic advances like self-driving cars, he said. (Bass cited the book, The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee as a source for this robot-heavy scenario.)
But, Bass asked: ‘Are the jobs lost to automation ones that you would want for your children?’ Few parents, he said, dreamed their kids would someday become fuel pumpers or elevator operators, jobs already replaced by automation. In the next 30 years, Bass added, smart machines and robots will outnumber humans on the planet.
Bass presented some outlandish ideas to help societies deal with the structural changes generated by a robot-heavy workforce, including taxing economic output rather than income, or implementing a ‘negative income tax,’ in which governments pay citizens a stipend in order to guarantee a level of income.
‘With our creativity and imagination, we will find harmony with the robots,’ Bass said.”
Tags: Andrew McAfee, Carl Bass, Erik Brynjolfsson, Rachel Emma Silverman
Steve Jobs, that grandiose dreamer, didn’t just want to build Apple a new campus, he wanted to create a new California–or recreate the old one. From Cathleen McGuigan’s interview with the project’s architect, Norman Foster:
“Architectural Record:
The Apple headquarters you’ve designed for Cupertino, California, will have 12,000 employees in one building.
Norman Foster:
You could compare that with a typical university of the same size. Traditionally, you’re probably talking at least 16 or 17 buildings. The Apple building will occupy the site much more tightly than what was there. It was the former Hewlett-Packard site, and, just in the last month, we demolished all the buildings that were there. It was a large number of them. [The new Apple construction will cover 13 percent of the site, while the two dozen former HP buildings, in total, covered much more, according to Foster’s office.]
Architectural Record:
So what made the form of a ring the logical choice for this building?
Norman Foster:
It’s interesting how it evolved. First of all, there was a smaller site. Then, as the project developed, and the Hewlett-Packard site became available, the scale of the project changed.
Meanwhile, the reference point for Steve [Jobs] was always the large space on the Stanford campus—the Main Quad—which Steve knew intimately. Also, he would reminisce about the time when he was young, and California was still the fruit bowl of the United States. It was still orchards.
We did a continuous series of base planning studies. One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London. And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus. These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle—essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails.
Remember, the main building caters to 12,000 people, but the wellness center—the fitness center—is probably responding to the needs of the entire Apple community in Silicon Valley, which is 20,000-something. Also, another building on the site is the presentation center, which will allow Apple to do the kind of things like product launches that otherwise would require space in San Francisco or wherever. And, a bit like the airport, where you have one building—although it is in itself quite large—it is essentially compact.”
Tags: Cathleen McGuigan, Norman Foster, Steve Jobs
From the August 5, 1899 New York Times:
“Mount Holly, N.J.–Frederick W. Pope, the fourteen-year-old son of Charles A. Pope of Columbus, is paralyzed hopelessly as a result of an application of cocaine by a dentist, and has lost the power of speech. Seven weeks ago the lad suffered from a severe toothache and went to a dentist to have the tooth extracted. It was necessary because of the lad’s nervous condition for the dentist to administer some drug. He used cocaine to relieve the pain.
A short time after the tooth was pulled paralysis set in on the right side of the body. It was thought by the physicians that the attack would pass away and leave the lad unharmed. Yesterday the boy was stricken speechless. Several physicians have examined him, and all agree that the case is a hopeless one. The general opinion is that the cocaine went to the brain.”
In the 1970s, Continental Airlines offered passengers electronic pong games in its on-board pub.
Disney theme parks have always been something of a totalitarian state, a paranoid experience, with omnipresent surveillance, and undercover security clad in tourist wear ready to pounce on any wrongdoing. They’re watching you to make sure you don’t interrupt the happiness. (And don’t even try to die there.) So it’s not surprising that the company is going all in on Big Data, hoping to extract information from visitors to help decide which rides will be added or menu items subtracted–and who knows what else. From Christopher Palmeri at Businesswek:
“Jason McInerney and his wife, Melissa, recently tapped their lunch orders onto a touchscreen at the entrance to the Be Our Guest restaurant at Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort and were told to take any open seat. Moments later a food server appeared at their table with their croque-monsieur and carved turkey sandwiches. Asks McInerney, a once-a-year visitor to Disney theme parks: ‘How did they know where we were sitting?’
The answer was on the electronic bands the couple wore on their wrists. That’s the magic of the MyMagic+, Walt Disney’s $1 billion experiment in crowd control, data collection, and wearable technology that could change the way people play—and spend—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. If the system works, it could be copied not only by other theme parks but also by museums, zoos, airports, and malls. ‘It’s a complete game changer,’ says Douglas Quinby, vice president for research at PhoCusWright, a travel consulting firm.
That would suit Disney just fine, as it expands its global empire of theme parks and kicks up efforts to fend off rivals. The most formidable is Comcast’s (CMCSA) Universal Studios, which this summer will unveil a massive expansion of its hit Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at its parks near Walt Disney World.
One hitch for Disney could be if devotees such as the McInerneys find MyMagic+ confining, confusing, or even a bit creepy.”
Smart vending machines are only nominally interested in your coins–even your bitcoins. What they really want is the true coin of the realm, the most valuable currency of the day: information. We aren’t the children of Marx and Coca-Cola but of Orwell and Red Bull. The opening of an Avram Piltch NBC News piece:
“Just how well does your office soda machine know you? A network of smart, connected vending machines will soon use facial recognition, NFC and a membership program to market and sell everything from food to electronics on their giant touch screens. The product of software giant SAP, these new high-tech machines will also use cloud technology and data analysis to make sure they stay stocked with your favorite drink and get repaired as soon as they break.
SAP Senior Director Carston Kress showed us a sample machine, which had a giant color touch screen in lieu of a window. The display had a rotating animation of snack items (sodas, candy bars, etc) on top of a lime green background. The top of the machine also had a camera, which it uses for facial recognition in order to see who it’s marketing to.
‘For example, you have a group of people like us, three men and a woman,’ Kress said. ‘This would be recognized by the machine and it can now drive a personalized campaign to the audience that stands in front of it.'”
Tags: Avram Piltch
The Pill first drove free love and then the free market. Being able to delay pregnancy made it possible for women to pursue previously unavailable educational and professional opportunities. But ever since birth control became readily accessible in 1960, one unfair question has persisted: Can they have it all? Fact is, no one can have it all. A male CEO with children probably isn’t spending as much time with them as is necessary. Everyone who wants a work life and a family life juggles and balances, not just women.
In a New York Review of Books piece about Alison Wolf’s The XX Factor, Marcia Angell writes about an unintended consequence of women moving primarily from the community into the workforce:
“But there is something more serious these couples are giving up—civic engagement—and Wolf has a chapter on that, called ‘Something to Regret?’ ‘Earlier generations of educated women,’ she writes, ‘worked largely in schools, or volunteered in the community, because little else was on offer.’ They were the social and political activists. Now paid employment has largely displaced volunteering in the community. Moreover, many ambitious women no longer become teachers, except at the college level, because the pay and prestige are greater in other professions. Wolf quotes from an interview with sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol: ‘Women were the ones who stood up for welfare, and made the case for the public good, for everyone. Now it’s all so narrow.’
Obviously, we can’t and shouldn’t return to a time when women were expected to tend to the needs and welfare of the community gratis because they had no other options and no one else would do it. But we do need to modify the cult of overwork, in child rearing as well as in careers, to make room for highly educated women and their husbands to be more active citizens. In particular, I wish upper-middle-class women were stronger advocates for the rights of less privileged women, both in their own country and abroad.”
Tags: Alison Wolf, Marcia Angell