“How Are We Supposed To Make A Living?”

December 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Just started reading Peter Frase’s Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, though I believe capitalism will be just fine.

You and me, however, we’re fucked.

The problem is that an uber technologized version of capitalism may not require as many of us or value as highly those who’ve yet to be relieved of their duties. Perhaps a thin crust at the very top will thrive, but without sound policy the rest may be Joads with smartphones. In this scenario, we’d be tracked and commodified, given virtual trinkets rather than be paid. Our privacy, like many of our jobs, will disappear into the zeros and ones.

While the orange supremacist was waving his penis in America’s face during the campaign, the thorny question of what to do should widespread automation be established was left unexplored. That’s terrifying, since more and more outsourcing won’t refer to work moved beyond borders but beyond species. Certainly great investment in education is required, but that won’t likely be enough. Not every freshly unemployed taxi driver can be upskilled into a driverless car software engineer. There’s not enough room on that road.

The opening of a new piece about automation by the NYT‘s always clear-eyed Claire Cain Miller, who understands both numbers and people: 

The first job that Sherry Johnson, 56, lost to automation was at the local newspaper in Marietta, Ga., where she fed paper into the printing machines and laid out pages. Later, she watched machines learn to do her jobs on a factory floor making breathing machines, and in inventory and filing.

“It actually kind of ticked me off because it’s like, How are we supposed to make a living?” she said. She took a computer class at Goodwill, but it was too little too late. “The 20- and 30-year-olds are more up to date on that stuff than we are because we didn’t have that when we were growing up,” said Ms. Johnson, who is now on disability and lives in a housing project in Jefferson City, Tenn.

Donald J. Trump told workers like Ms. Johnson that he would bring back their jobs by clamping down on trade, offshoring and immigration. But economists say the bigger threat to their jobs has been something else: automation.

“Over the long haul, clearly automation’s been much more important — it’s not even close,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard who studies labor and technological change.

No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways.•

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“These Numbers Will Shake Even The Most Cynical Observer”

December 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If America has a future as a liberal democracy, and that’s never been iffier, the role the opioid plague played in our perplexing age, a time of tremendous potential for good or ill, will be a topic of study for future scholars. Wealth inequality, the end of the Industrial Age and twilight arriving for the coal and manufacturing sectors left many citizens in pain, physical and otherwise, and Big Pharma was there with scripts in hand, ready to profiteer off the poor and suffering.

Until a couple of years ago, I had relatives who lived in the area of NYC that’s ground zero for opiate addiction. When people ask me if I’ve ever seen the Walking Dead, I say “yes,” though it had nothing to do with TV. Folks there would start with legit if perhaps unnecessary prescriptions to manage back or knee pain and then devolve into street purchases of cheaper heroin when there were no doctors left to shop. It was a one-way elevator, headed always down, for those who’d spent most of their lives on the up and up. You’d see seriously dosed people buying Lottos in bodegas, under the influence of two losing gambles. 

Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail has a really smart and incredibly upsetting investigation (Part 1 + Part 2) into pharmaceutical giants willfully overdosing struggling West Virginia towns. He writes: “As the fatalities mounted — hydrocodone and oxycodone overdose deaths increased 67 percent in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012 — the drug shippers’ CEOs collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars.” No surprise there. The opening: 

Follow the pills and you’ll find the overdose deaths.

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.

Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.

The trail also weaves through Wyoming County, where shipments of OxyContin have doubled, and the county’s overdose death rate leads the nation. One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away.

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found.
The unfettered shipments amount to 433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in West Virginia.

“These numbers will shake even the most cynical observer,” said former Delegate Don Perdue, D-Wayne, a retired pharmacist who finished his term earlier this month. “Distributors have fed their greed on human frailties and to criminal effect. There is no excuse and should be no forgiveness.”•

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Old Print Article: Chuck Connors, “Mayor Of Chinatown,” Dies (1913)

December 20, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Charles “Chuck” Connors was full of life, and other stuff.

The so-called “Mayor of Chinatown” was an Irishman dubbed “Insect” by his neighbors until his penchant for cooking chuck steaks over open fires in the streets earned him a new nickname. An inveterate self-promoter, he was a tour guide, vaudevillian, boxer, bouncer and raconteur. Some of his stories were even true.

One that wasn’t: For a fee, he showed tourists “authentic” Chinatown opium dens, which were often merely apartments he rented and filled with “extras” paid to pretend to be dragon chasers. The crafty man realized that narratives about urban blight, told just so, could be commodified.

Although he initially wasn’t so appreciated by his Chinese neighbors, Connors eventually earned their esteem and his blarney was sadly missed when it was permanently silenced. An article in the May 10, 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced his death.

“He Preferred To Be Called A Public-Opinion Analyst Rather Than A Pollster”

December 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Louis Harris, the most famous American pollster of the twentieth century, just died at 95. I worked for the company in its last pre-acquisition days when I was an undergraduate. The offices were located at 630 Fifth Avenue, a building with a giant Atlas statue at its entrance. On a lunch break one day, I sat across the street on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral reading a copy of The Stories of John Cheever. I absorbed “The Country Husband” (still my favorite tale by the writer), which coincidentally mentions the very same Atlas building right before my eyes. Cool. 

What I can recall about the experience:

  • The break room had a shrine to the late professional wrestler Bruiser Brody, who had been murdered in 1988 in a backstage altercation Puerto Rico. There’s even a Mountain Goats song about the stabbing.
  • The Harris Poll was the least buttoned-down workplace I’ve ever come across. The crew was a mix of anarchist squatters from the Lower East Side (who apparently had no regular access to soap), a few college students like myself, a handful of aspiring actresses and theater directors, several little people, and some LGBTQ folks who told me they had trouble getting non-phone work because they couldn’t or wouldn’t masquerade as something that was more acceptable in America at the time. Oh, and there was a very nice and quiet middle-aged woman who was said to be a former Bob Fosse dancer who’d fallen on hard times.
  • The employees were almost universally extremely liberal politically, even radical, though that seemed to have no influence over survey outcomes. Many polls wound up reflecting a strong conservative opinion.
  • I was instructed that when conducting phone surveys I needed to be more assertive with women in the Midwest, since they could be bossed around. It wasn’t exactly in those words, but close. I was told precisely that when Middle American females told me they weren’t interested in doing a survey that I was to ask to speak to the “man of the house.”
  • I once referred to the company as “Lou” Harris and was immediately told to never, ever do that again. The founder had retired by then but was still a sort of spectral presence.

From Robert D. McFadden’s New York Times obituary of the man who called too much:

He preferred to be called a public-opinion analyst rather than a pollster, a word that he believed trivialized what he did, which went beyond gathering data into new realms of interpretation — useful to clients of his consulting firm and more meaningful to millions who watched his analyses on the CBS and ABC television networks or who read his nationally syndicated newspaper and magazine columns.

His results were sometimes wrong. And critics questioned his early practice of using his polls to promote candidates — notably John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential race — for whom he worked as a campaign strategist. But he gave up political advocacy after a few years to concentrate on public polling and analyses for the newspaper and television jobs that made him a household name in America.

In the 1960s, he developed television’s ability to project national election winners on the basis of early returns after polls closed in the East. But critics said projections before the polls closed in the West discouraged some voters from casting ballots, and the networks voluntarily ended the practice.

Mr. Harris denied that his work affected the outcome of elections or corrupted voting processes. He rejected charges that he was too commercial, although he made a fortune in market research. And he scoffed at accusations that his polls reflected a liberal Democratic bias; he said he often worked for Republicans and was guided by principles of fairness and accuracy.

Like Elmo Roper and George Gallup, his pioneering predecessors, Mr. Harris plumbed attitudes with face-to-face interviews, using carefully worded questions put by trained interviewers to subjects selected as part of a group that was chosen as demographically representative of the nation. (Telephone interviews, faster and less expensive, came into wide use in the late 1970s, and proved to be just as valid.)•

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“Our Men Of Science Will Then Be Able To Give Their Undivided Attention To Disease, Insanity, Excessive Longevity, Interplanetary Voyages”

December 20, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

wernher5 (1)

Henry Miller was oft thought of in his time as a smutty writer, and not without reason, though his best work centered on the psychology of individuals, cities and nations.

Case in point: A bravura passage from 1957’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch about the future of America, and the future of the world, which were one and the same to the writer’s mind. He saw the emergence of a tyranny–or something like it–of technology, which might bring about the end of scarcity and hunger, though he believed we’d crave all the same, perhaps even in a more profound way. Maybe Peter Thiel’s disgraceful political pivot will enable a marriage between the despotism of tech and a government even more autocratic. 

The excerpt:

“If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
(Out of Confusion, by M.N. Chatterjee (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1954).

There are days when it all seems as simple and clear as that to me. What do I mean? I mean with regard to the problem of living on this earth without becoming a slave, a drudge, a hack, a misfit, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a neurotic, a schizophrenic, a glutton for punishment or an artist manqué.

Supposedly we have the highest standard of living of any country in the world. Do we, though? It depends on what one means by high standards. Certainly nowhere does it cost more to live than here in America. The cost is not only in dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration, ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity. We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most gorgeous insane asylums, the most fabulous prisons, the best equipped and the highest paid army and navy, the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs, yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the world; our poets the worst. There are more automobiles than one can count. And as for drugstores, where in the world will you find the like?

We have only one enemy we really fear: the microbe. But we are licking him on every front. True, millions still suffer from cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia, multiple-sclerosis, tuberculosis, epilepsy, colitis, cirrhosis of the liver, dermatitis, gall stones, neuritis, Bright’s disease, bursitis, Parkinson’s-disease, diabetes, floating kidneys, cerebral palsy, pernicious anaemia, encephalitis, locomotor ataxia, falling of the womb, muscular distrophy, jaundice, rheumatic fever, polio, sinus and antrum troubles, halitosis, St. Vitus’s Dance, narcolepsy, coryza, leucorrhea, nymphomania, phthisis, carcinoma, migraine, dipsomania, malignant tumors, high blood pressure, duodenal ulcers, prostate troubles, sciatica, goiter, catarrh, asthma, rickets, hepatitis, nephritis, melancholia, amoebic dysentery, bleeding piles, quinsy, hiccoughs, shingles, frigidity and impotency, even dandruff, and of course all the insanities, now legion, but–our of men of science will rectify all this within the next hundred years or so. How? Why, by destroying all the nasty germs which provoke this havoc and disruption! By waging a great preventive war–not a cold war!–wherein our poor, frail bodies will become a battleground for all the antibiotics yet to come. A game of hide and seek, so to speak, in which one germ pursues another, tracks it down and slays it, all without the least disturbance to our usual functioning. Until this victory is achieved, however, we may be obliged to continue swallowing twenty or thirty vitamins, all of different strengths and colors, before breakfast, down our tiger’s milk and brewer’s yeast, drink our orange and grapefruit juices, use blackstrap molasses on our oatmeal, smear our bread (made of stone-ground flour) with peanut butter, use raw honey or raw sugar with our coffee, poach our eggs rather than fry them, follow this with an extra glass of superfortified milk, belch and burp a little, give ourselves an injection, weigh ourselves to see if we are under or over, stand on our heads, do our setting-up exercises–if we haven’t done them already–yawn, stretch, empty the bowels, brush our teeth (if we have any left), say a prayer or two, then run like hell to catch the bus or the subway which will carry us to work, and think no more about the state of our health until we feel a cold coming on: the incurable coryza. But we are not to despair. Never despair! Just take more vitamins, add an extra dose of calcium and phosphorus pills, drink a hot toddy or two, take a high enema before retiring for the night, say another prayer, if we can remember one, and call it a day.

If the foregoing seems too complicated, here is a simple regimen to follow: Don’t overeat, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke too much, don’t work too much, don’t think too much, don’t fret, don’t worry, don’t complain, above all, don’t get irritable. Don’t use a car if you can walk to your destination; don’t walk if you can run; don’t listen to the radio or watch television; don’t read newspapers, magazines, digests, stock market reports, comics, mysteries or detective stories; don’t take sleeping pills or wakeup pills; don’t vote, don’t buy on the installment plan, don’t play cards either for recreation or to make a haul, don’t invest your money, don’t mortgage your home, don’t get vaccinated or inoculated, don’t violate the fish and game laws, don’t irritate your boss, don’t say yes when you mean no, don’t use bad language, don’t be brutal to your wife or children, don’t get frightened if you are over or under weight, don’t sleep more than ten hours at a stretch, don’t eat store bread if you can bake your own, don’t work at a job you loathe, don’t think the world is coming to an end because the wrong man got elected, don’t believe you are insane because you find yourself in a nut house, don’t do anything more than you’re asked to do but do that well, don’t try to help your neighbor until you’ve learned how to help yourself, and so on…

Simple, what?

In short, don’t create aerial dinosaurs with which to frighten field mice!”

America has only one enemy, as I said before. The microbe. The trouble is, he goes under a million different names. Just when you think you’ve got him licked he pops up again in a new guise. He’s the pest personified.

When we were a young nation life was crude and simple. Our great enemy then was the redskin. (He became our enemy when we took his land away from him.) In those early days there were no chain stores, no delivery lines, no hired purchase plan, no vitamins, no supersonic flying fortresses, no electronic computers; one could identify thugs and bandits easily because they looked different from other citizens. All one needed for protection was a musket in one hand and a Bible in the other. A dollar was a dollar, no more, no less. And a gold dollar, a silver dollar, was just as good as a paper dollar. Better than a check, in fact. Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were genuine figures, maybe not so romantic as we imagine them today, but they were not screen heroes. The nation was expanding in all directions because there was a genuine need for it–we already had two or three million people and they needed elbow room. The Indians and bison were soon crowded out of the picture, along with a lot of other useless paraphernalia. Factories and mills were being built, and colleges and insane asylums. Things were humming. And then we freed the slaves. That made everybody happy, except the Southerners. It also made us realize that freedom is a precious thing. When we recovered from the loss of blood we began to think about freeing the rest of the world. To do it, we engaged in two world wars, not to mention a little war like the one with Spain, and now we’ve entered upon a cold war which our leaders warn us may last another forty or fifty years. We are almost at the point now where we may be able to exterminate every man, woman and child throughout the globe who is unwilling to accept the kind of freedom we advocate. It should be said, in extenuation, that when we have accomplished our purpose everybody will have enough to eat and drink, properly clothed, housed and entertained. An all-American program and no two ways about it! Our men of science will then be able to give their undivided attention to other problems, such as disease, insanity, excessive longevity, interplanetary voyages and the like. Everyone will be inoculated, not only against real ailments but against imaginary ones too. War will have been eliminated forever, thus making it unnecessary “in times of peace to prepare for war.” America will go on expanding, progressing, providing. We will plant the stars and stripes on the moon, and subsequently on all the planets within our comfy little universe. One world it will be, and American through and through. Strike up the band!•

“The Free World Acted As Though The Fight Had Been Won Once And For All”

December 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

“Anything felt possible,” writes Garry Kasparov in the WSJ of the ebullient time a quarter century ago when it became apparent Soviet autocracy had failed and democracy seemed, at long last, to have triumphed. The walls came down, history supposedly ended, and it was only a matter of time until all nations succumbed to the new reality.

In 2016, with liberal governance in retreat, anything again feels possible, but in a different and chilling way.  

In a reversal of fortunes, in an unforced error, America would appear to have retroactively lost the Cold War, perhaps even World War II. The blissfully unaware, the political opportunists and the truly evil have conspired to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Hope has never needed to be more audacious because this is no joke, it is not a test, we’re really on fire. 

From Kasparov on how the failure to address history left the demons breathing, if barely, waiting to revitalize and pounce once more:

It is difficult to describe what life in the U.S.S.R. was like to people in the free world today. This is not because repressive dictatorships are an anachronism people can’t imagine, like trying to tell your incredulous children that there was once a world without cellphones and the internet. The U.S.S.R. ceased to exist in 1991, but there are plenty of repressive, authoritarian regimes thriving in 2016. The difference, and I am sad to say it, is that the citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.

The words of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Berlin sound naive to most Americans today: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” he said. That for decades the U.S. government based effective foreign policy on such lofty ideals seems as distant as a world without iPhones.

Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was never meant to be put to the test, but it is being tested now. If anything, Reagan’s time frame of a generation was far too generous. The dramatic expansion of freedom that occurred 25 years ago may be coming undone in 25 months.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the end of watch for the anti-Communist coalition formed by Harry Truman after World War II. A year later, baby boomer Bill Clinton was making jokes with Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin and it was time to party, not press the advantage. The U.S. had unrivaled global power and influence, more than at any other time in history. Yet instead of using it to shape a new global framework to protect and project the values of democracy and human rights—as Truman had done immediately to put Stalin in check—the free world acted as though the fight had been won once and for all.

Even worse, we made the same mistake in Russia and in many other newly independent states. We were so eager to embrace the bright future that we failed to address our dark past.•

A remote match via telephone versus David Letterman in 1989.

https://youtu.be/HQOYioDqUrs?t=12m12s

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“Opponents See The Birth Of A Neo-Dark Age”

December 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump promised during the election to do “unspeakable things” to terrorists, but the most dreadful of all might be what he does to American democracy. Many of his rallies seemed the night before Kristallnacht, with truth and decency only introduced to be mocked, sucker punched and desecrated. Who knows who may be harmed this time, but something awful seems ready to happen. A lot of evil has been unloosed, and some of the ones who helped free the demons are blissfully unaware. The others are overjoyed. America as a beacon for all, a land of liberty, may be a thing of the past.

Illiberal government’s ugly rise is far from just a U.S. issue. Two excerpts follow, one about our mess and another about a parallel travesty occurring in Europe.

The opening of Anthony Faiola’s excellent WaPo piece about Poland now being a state more driven by insanity than Solidarity: 

WARSAW — The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland.

Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.

In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.•

The opening of Paul Krugman’s NYT op-ed “How Republics End,” which examines parallels between the fall of Rome and America’s potential faceplant:

Consider what just happened in North Carolina. The voters made a clear choice, electing a Democratic governor. The Republican legislature didn’t openly overturn the result — not this time, anyway — but it effectively stripped the governor’s office of power, ensuring that the will of the voters wouldn’t actually matter.

Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.

Why is this happening? I’m not asking why white working-class voters support politicians whose policies will hurt them — I’ll be coming back to that issue in future columns. My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”

So what’s driving this story?•

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“Assassinations Provide Opportunities And Occasions For Wars; They Do Not Cause Them”

December 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Few Americans have distinguished themselves in the aftermath of the election as has David Frum, the erstwhile Dubya speechwriter who’s become a post-partisan truth-teller, history professor and, perhaps, self-designated mourner. It seems all his education, employment and life experience prepared him for this moment which he clearly hoped would never arrive.

The nation’s best-case scenario is a cast of brand-name robber barons fully strip struggling Americans, eventually redirecting the nation’s teeming anger at a foreign enemy (real or imagined) after the check bounces. The worst case is that 240 years of American democracy ends ignominiously, World War II and the Cold War lost retroactively, with a Berlusconi who aspires to be a Mussolini now destabilizing any institutions than can counter his whims with laws or reason.

Trump is aided by wingnuts and political opportunists of all manner, who go along with him to get something out of him. Does anyone think Steve Bannon or Mitch McConnell care more for the Constitution than they do for power? It’s the perfect storm, and a deathly chill comes at us sideways.

In his latest Atlantic piece, Frum writes wisely of today’s shocking assassination of Russian diplomat Andrey G. Karlov in Ankara, arguing that political killings aren’t motivations for war but rather justifications. Putin and Erdogan may not militarize the moment, but Trump might not pass on such a future opportunity.

An excerpt:

Assassinations provide opportunities and occasions for wars; they do not cause them.

Consider an even grimmer example.

The murderer of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey has been described in some reports as motivated by rage against Russian atrocities in Syria. His act may summon to memory the example of Herschel Grynszan, a young Jew who tried to avenge the sufferings of his family at Nazi hands by killing a German diplomat in Paris on November 7, 1938. Hitler seized upon the killing as his excuse for the rampage we know as Kristallnacht.

Yet when a Jewish student killed the leader of the Swiss Nazi party in February 1936, Hitler did nothing. Germany had secured the 1936 Olympic games before Hitler’s rise to power, and there was much agitation that year to rescind the award to protest Nazi anti-Semitism. Determined to maintain domestic quiet, Hitler let the death of Wilhelm Gustloff vanish into historical obscurity. (His killer, originally from Croatia, survived the Second World War in a Swiss prison.)

Even Hitler used outrages for his own ends, rather than being motivated by them.

Will today’s crime spark conflict between Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey? Only if those two authoritarian rulers want trouble.•

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“He Claimed That A Small Part Of Every Human Being Longs To Burn It All Down”

December 19, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

In 2011, I quoted something from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels:

The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah, I guess I am,” said one. “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.”

It’s an odd outcome because the Angels emerged from America’s great triumph in World War II, as it and other motorcycle gangs were formed from the wanderlust of our war vets. But the love of the road turned into hatred for the self, and then, the other.

Five years ago when I published that excerpt, I was more concerned about militias and a scary strain of right-wing backlash that seemed awakened by the election of our first African-American President and gains made by women and other minorities. I never expected those on the fringes to make such gains on the center–to win it. And I’m not exactly someone who spends my idle time at Berkeley cocktail parties.

The ones who wanted to make America white again formed a faction with those who felt adrift in the modern economy, with its wealth inequality and bruising technological shift. The latter group had always looked on others as the “losers” and didn’t want to join them, even if the scoreboard said they already had. Together the haters and the backsliders made a hell of a scene in 2016.

From Susan McWilliams’ Nation piece about Thompson forecasting the rise of Trumpism:

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter.•

Sonny Barger terrorizes Thompson in 1967 on Canadian TV.

Ad for Hunter S. Thompson’s campaign for Sheriff of Aspen in 1970.

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A Note From 1947 About A Zoo-Animal Auction

December 19, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 14, 1947 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Those Who Receive Good Livings Are Those Who Are Lucky“

December 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some of the resistance by white working-class citizens to Obamacare, even by those who most in need of it, like Kentuckians, was directed at the Medicaid portion of the law. The reasoning: We deserve healthcare, but they don’t. 

That rejection, if you looked not far below the surface, was sometimes steeped in racist stereotyping. If you exist within seeing people of color as living in “ghettos” as our President-Elect does, it would be easy to make such a mistake, even if the Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers scream otherwise. Post-election, many of these same Trump supporters who worried about “freeloaders” are realizing they may lose not only the ACA but perhaps also the safety net of Medicare. The fingers they pointed at others now point back at them.

Part of the problem is that no one really deserves much of anything. I mean, we all do in a bigger sense, of course, but not so much as individuals living in a capitalistic society in the Digital Age. How do we reconcile our economic system with one that may become highly automated? In such a new normal, workers would be less necessary than ever.

Technology has amped up the culture in myriad ways and entire industries can now rise and fall within a stingy time frame. There was never a more profitable period in the history of recorded music than during the brief, wonderful life of Compact Discs, but the whole format was essentially worthless after just two decades. Twenty years may seem a long shelf life for industries (and the communities and regions built on them) in the near future. All that coming and going will likely leave many of us neither here nor there. It’s not an attractive scenario unless you fancy a future as an Okie with an smartphone. 

A recent post by economist Brad DeLong drops truth bombs about our economic system and suggests non-UBI prescriptions for devastated Rust Belt areas. An excerpt:

In a world–like the one we live in–of mammoth increasing returns to unowned knowledge and to networks, no individual and no community is especially valuable. Those who receive good livings are those who are lucky–as Carrier’s workers in Indiana have been lucky in living near Carrier’s initial location. It’s not that their contribution to society is large or that their luck is replicable: if it were, they would not care (much) about the departure of Carrier because there would be another productive network that they could fit into a slot in.

All of this “what you deserve” language is tied up with some vague idea that you deserve what you contribute–that what your work adds to the pool of society’s resources is what you deserve.

This illusion is punctured by any recognition that there is a large societal dividend to be distributed, and that the government can distribute it by supplementing (inadequate) market wages determined by your (low) societal marginal product, or by explicitly providing income support or services unconnected with work via social insurance. Instead, the government is supposed to, somehow, via clever redistribution, rearrange the pattern of market power in the economy so that the increasing-returns knowledge- and network-based societal dividend is predistributed in a relatively egalitarian way so that everybody can pretend that their income is just “to each according to his work,” and that they are not heirs and heiresses coupon clipping off of the societal capital of our predecessors’ accumulated knowledge and networks.

On top of this we add: Polanyian disruption of patterns of life–local communities, income levels, industrial specialization–that you believed you had a right to obtain or maintain, and a right to believe that you deserve. But in a market capitalist society, nobody has a right to the preservation of their local communities, to their income levels, or to an occupation in their industrial specialization. In a market capitalist society, those survive only if they pass a market profitability test. And so the only rights that matter are those property rights that at the moment carry with them market power–the combination of the (almost inevitably low) marginal societal products of your skills and the resources you own, plus the (sometimes high) market power that those resources grant to you.

This wish to believe that you are not a moocher is what keeps people from seeing issues of distribution and allocation clearly–and generates hostility to social insurance and to wage supplement policies, for they rip the veil off of the idea that you deserve to be highly paid because you are worth it. You aren’t.•

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“This Is Not A Joke”

December 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I haven’t read Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in forever, but if memory serves, this treatise on media and politics as entertainment is more relevant than ever right now. It was composed when the Oval Office was occupied by a B-grade film star but one with serious experience in governance, and since then the sideshow has been fully relocated to the center ring. First the Kardashians took Hollywood, then the Trumps did the same to Washington.

Handing the keys to America to Donald Trump, a Simon Cowell-ish strongman who believes he can run foreign policy the way John Gotti ran Queens, was exceedingly dumb. Chechnya apparently grew jealous. The state hasn’t selected a Reality TV star to run the whole show, but they did use Komanda, an Apprentice-like program, to pick a strategic adviser to the Putin-approved warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. It’s a stunt, but some stunts are dangerous. Perhaps there are certain jobs better left in the hands of professionals?

Eva Hartog of the Moscow Times conducted a smart interview with the “winner,” Filip Varychenko, whom the show described, accurately or not, as a “24-year-old millionaire from Dusseldorf who grew tired of European comforts.” He seems an amiable fellow who’s either blissfully ignorant of the deeds of the dictator he now works for or is wisely pretending to be. An excerpt:

Question:

How did you end up on the show?

Filip Varychenko:

I was working at a multinational company in Germany — I’d rather not say which one — working together with the chairman of the board to develop the business worldwide. It was really fun and interesting; I was traveling a lot. But I wanted to do something more meaningful.

I was looking for a position in the Russian government, but after some research I realized that it’s actually really difficult to get in. It seemed impossible.

Then I read an article online about Kadyrov’s new show. I actually thought it was a joke at first, but I applied anyway.

After a phone interview with the producers they invited me to a casting in Moscow several weeks later. I didn’t believe it was real, so I literally bought my ticket 24 hours beforehand, thinking it was the weekend and if I didn’t like it, I could just leave.

When I got there, I was really surprised to see so many people: men in their 40s and 50s, wearing suits, really professional looking-business people. I was the last person to audition and had to wait eight hours for my turn. But then I got my “golden ticket” — they said: you’re in, you’re going.

Question:

Why did you have to run up mountains, wade through rivers etc.? Why was that necessary for the position of “strategic advisor?” Or was that just for the television?

Filip Varychenko:

You have to understand: this is not a joke. What you saw was only half of how [Kadyrov’s government] really works: they work 30 hours, no, 100 hours per day. And Kadyrov works even more! I don’t know when he sleeps. I’ve never ever caught him sleeping.

There is no day or night, there is just work time. So you have to be ready. They say that if you have a strong spirit, you have to have a strong body.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

December 18, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. faith healer oral roberts
  2. super agent irving “swifty” lazar
  3. bob guccione’s later years
  4. plato’s retreat commercial
  5. dana weems gary hart scandal
  6. ty cobb on tv game show
  7. rudi gernreich futuristic fashions
  8. lincoln watching booth act in a play
  9. life in america in 1815 was dirty, smelly, laborious
  10. michael lewis’ new book

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

December 18, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Donald Trump embarrassed himself with an unfortunate spelling error, so he decided on a course of self-improvement.

I have to learn to spell better before America figures out I’m an imbecile. Maybe Professor Walnuts, Larry King’s educated monkey, can help me. He knows words good.

Lesson one. Type this: “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.”

Starting me with a toughie, Walnuts.

Somebody please shoot me in the head.

Can do.

Wow, monkey brains all over the Lincoln Bedroom. Who’s gonna clean this shit up?

I’ll do it.

I’m choosing someone else, Mitt.

I was honored just to be considered for Secretary of Monkey Brain Mop-Up.

 

  • The NYT explored the so-called “alt-right” movement, a.k.a. KKK 2.0.
  • Stewart Brand talks the ramifications of San Francisco’s 1966 Trips Festival.
  • David Grinspoon explains why planets are likely to be either lush or dead.
  • Read two smart if diametrically opposed pieces on automation.
  • Old Print Article: Clarence Darrow believes free will an “Absurd Idea.” (1931)

“Ronald Reagan Would Roll Over In His Grave”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave,” President Obama said of the rising number of Republicans friending the thuggish Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, who was encouraged to hack the nation’s elections by the orange supremacist who’s to be our next Commander-in-Chief.

The struggle for power usually conducts a stress test on the avowed moral center of many, and this campaign season was no exception. Evangelicals had to kneel, genuflect and do cartwheels to support a braggadocious serial groom and sexual predator who is far more concerned with a piece of tail than the Lamb of God. Trump would be hard pressed to recite the Ten Commandments, even the many he’s broken. If there’s no fealty to deity let along decency among many in this voting bloc, than what exactly did they see in Trump that was appealing? Was it the Make America White Again message? Was it something else?

Pat Buchanan backed Trump from early on which might seem appropriate since he’s a scapegoating isolationist who is the President-Elect’s most precise political ancestor. But there’s a catch. Buchanan has for decades been an apologist for Senator Joseph McCarthy, the deeply damaged inquisitor who lorded over the House Un-American Activities Committee interrogations of those he accused of having secret communist ties. They were allies of the Soviets and traitors to America, he charged, as he ruined one life after another, because our nation’s sovereignty was supposedly at risk. Funny that Buchanan ended up such an ardent admirer of Trump, who was not at all clandestine in imploring Putin to undermine America’s Presidential election and has stocked his proposed cabinet with allies of the autocrat.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but who would have thought Buchanan would end up sleeping in Lenin’s Tomb?

From Jacob Weisberg’s 1996 New Republic Buchanan profile:

Buchanan’s politics has its roots in the 1930s isolationism of Father Charles E. Coughlin and Charles A. Lindbergh. The hallmarks of this tradition are a fierce and unselective anti-communism, an animosity toward Britain, and an eccentric obsession with the menace of “Jewish internationalism.” Buchanan’s earliest syndicated columns echo these obsessions. In 1975 he attacked the infamous United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. But he laid some of the blame at the door of “Western intellectuals and internationalists, many of them Jews.” The fault was partly theirs, he wrote, because Jews supported the idea of the U.N. in the first place. Attempting to draw out this supposed irony in another piece, he blasted “the American intelligentsia, a significant slice of which is Jewish and avidly pro-Israel.” This echoes Coughlin, in whose lexicon “intellectual” and “internationalist” were not only cusswords but also synonyms both for Jews and for secular liberals.

Buchanan absorbed this view while being “raised Catholic,” as he puts it, in Washington in the 1940s and ’50s. “My father’s sympathies had been with the isolationists, with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee,” Buchanan writes in the first chapter of his 1988 autobiography, Right from the Beginning. By the time he had reached political consciousness, he identified with his father’s heroes: Franco, Douglas MacArthur, and Joe McCarthy.

What the Buchanans admired about these men was their pugnacity and their loyalty to their causes. Patrick’s father taught his sons to fight and encouraged them to do so. The boys were beaten if they didn’t practice “hitting the bag” often enough. “Whenever we were arrested for fighting or came home bloodied, we were not punished by my parents, so long as we had fought fairly. Pop was usually more interested in how well we had done,” Buchanan writes. Much of his memoir is a gleeful recounting of brawls, including ones in which he and his brother Hank ganged up on single victims, or “sucker punched” guys who deserved it. The book is suffused with a thug’s love for combat, which metamorphosed into verbal violence sometime after Buchanan graduated from Georgetown, a year late as a result of mixing it up with two policemen trying to give him a ticket. McCarthy, Buchanan writes, “was cheered because for four years he was daily kicking the living hell out of people most Americans concluded ought to have the living hell kicked out of them.”•

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Old Print Article: Clarence Darrow Believes Free Will An “Absurd Idea” (1931)

December 16, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech | Permalink

Famed attorney Clarence Darrow was an extremist when it came to criminality, believing in circumstance but not culpability. He saw law breakers the way the writer of a naturalist novel views characters, as prisoners of nature and nurture, incapable of circumventing either. Based on the remarks he made as reported in an article in the April 4, 1931 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Darrow would have treated all misdeeds as maladies, the perpetrators receiving treatment in hospitals rather than stretches in prison.

In a way, his contention has returned to vogue today thanks mainly not to philosophy but to science, with some neuroresearchers believing our brains, a conductor of algorithms of sorts, governing us rather than the other way around. From Yuval Noah Harari’s Home Deus:

Yet humanism is now facing an existential challenge and the idea of “free will” is under threat. Scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality. Rather, they are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to make decisions by quickly calculating probabilities of survival and reproduction.

Like most people I think the hardware that enables my consciousness allows me a range within which I can make decisions, but maybe my brain is just telling me that?

“Trolls Are Also Distinguished From Their Predecessors By Seeming Not To Recognize Any Limits”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink


The problem with anarchy is that it has a tendency to get out of control.

In 2013, Eric Schmidt, the most perplexing of Googlers, wrote (along with Jared Cohen) the truest thing about our newly connected age: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.”

Yes, indeed.

California was once a wild, untamed plot of land, and when people initially flooded the zone, it was exciting if harsh. But then, soon enough: the crowds, the pollution, the Adam Sandler films. The Golden State became civilized with laws and regulations and taxes, which was a trade-off but one that established order and security. The Web has been commodified but never been truly domesticated, so while the rules don’t apply it still contains all the smog and noise of the developed world. Like Los Angeles without the traffic lights.

Our new abnormal has played out for both better and worse. The fan triumphed over the professional, a mixed development that, yes, spread greater democracy on a surface level, but also left truth attenuated. Into this unfiltered, post-fact, indecent swamp slithered the troll, that witless, cowardly insult comic.

The biggest troll of them all, Donald Trump, the racist opportunist who stalked our first African-American President demanding his birth certificate, is succeeding Obama in the Oval Office, which is terrible for the country if perfectly logical for the age. His Lampanelli-Mussolini campaign also emboldened all manner of KKK 2.0, manosphere and alt-right detritus in their own trolling, as they used social media to spread a discombobulating disinformation meant to confuse and distract so hate could take root and grow. No water needed; bile would do.

In the wonderfully written essay “Schadenfreude with Bite,” Richard Seymour analyzes the discomfiting age of the troll. An excerpt:

The controlled cruelty of the wind-up didn’t need trolls to invent it. In the pre-internet era, it perhaps seemed more innocent: Candid Camera; Jeremy Beadle duping a hapless member of the public. The ungovernable rage of the unwitting victim is always funny to someone, and invariably there is sadistic detachment in the amusement. The trolls’ innovation has been to add a delight in nonsense and detritus: calculated illogicality, deliberate misspellings, an ironic recycling of cultural nostalgia, sedimented layers of opaque references and in-jokes. Trolling, as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall.

Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to continue, the joke has to stop, and the victim be let in on the laughter. Trolls, though, form a community precisely around the extension of their transgressive sadism beyond the limits of their offline personas. That the community consists almost entirely of people with no identifying characteristics – ‘anons’ – is part of the point. It is as if the laughter of the individual troll were secondary; the primary goal is to sustain the pleasure of the anonymous collective.

*

For most organised trolls, having an explicit political affiliation or moral cause goes against the basic principle that commitment to anything other than the lulz is suspect. However, for ‘gendertrolls’, a term coined by Karla Mantilla, the objective is clamorously counter-feminist. It is to silence publicly vocal women by swarm-like harassment, misogynistic insults (such epithets as ‘cunt’ and ‘whore’), ‘doxxing’ (exposing the details of someone’s offline life), and threats of rape and murder. As Mantilla sees it, there is nothing unique about this behaviour: it isn’t ‘about the internet’, but a continuation of the ‘long history of men harassing and denigrating women as a means of trying to drive out potential competitors’. It is a ‘mass cultural response to women asserting themselves [in] previously male-dominated areas’.

The new inflection that the internet appears to make possible is the trolls’ disavowal of moral commitment, which depends on a strict demarcation between the ‘real’ offline self, and online anonymity. I am not what I do, as long as I do it online.•

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“We Shouldn’t Try And Protect Jobs; We Should Protect Workers”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Less than 10% of U.S. jobs now reside in manufacturing, but the continued erosion of that sector has sent a shock to our system. No amount of Carrier deals, both economically and politically dubious, will make America manufacture again, and things could get far more shocking if other areas of employment quickly disappear into the zeros and ones.

For instance: What if the more plentiful positions in service, which seem particularly prone to automation, should begin to quickly vanish? In a smart Quartz Q&A conducted by Eshe Nelson, economist Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence, warns that globalization’s most profound disruption is imminent and no legislation will likely be able to prevent its arrival (and we’d be injured in other ways even if it could).

To mitigate the downside, Baldwin suggests “we have to look for inspiration from northern European countries who have comprehensive retraining, help with housing, help with relocation.” It’s a tall order, but shortcuts likely won’t do.

An excerpt:

Question: 

What about Donald Trump’s promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs? He made a deal to keep nearly 1,000 jobs at the Carrier gas-furnace factory by offering a big tax break.

Richard Baldwin: 

We shouldn’t try and protect jobs; we should protect workers. It’s really a fool’s errand to struggle with because after a year or two those jobs will still go. Either they will be replaced by robots or they’ll move to Mexico or China. If Carrier becomes inefficient from being forced to stay in the US, its business will go to competitors in Japan or Germany.

Question: 

So even if we put up trade barriers, the jobs we protect will be for robots, not people? 

Richard Baldwin:

Absolutely. There are jobs for people, even in manufacturing these days, but not for the low-skilled people who have been dispossessed by this. Their jobs were routine and the easiest to replace with automation. The first thing to do is accept the 21st–century reality that no matter what you do, these jobs aren’t coming back.

Question: 

An important aspect of your book is that we still have the so-called third phase of globalization to come, which will drive down the cost of moving people.

Richard Baldwin: 

There are two technologies that are key: telepresence and telerobotics. They exist but are expensive and clunky. Telepresence is half of a table with life-size screens, good light, lots of cameras, and microphones. Then the other half of the table is somewhere else. When people sit at the table you have a very strong impression that they are in the same room.

Question: 
 

So the “movement” of people is not physical?

Richard Baldwin:

It’s a substitute for being there. It’s Skype that’s really, really good.

The second is telerobotics. There are a couple of well-known ones. One is the surgeon operating at a 100-kilometer distance from the patient. But you can imagine that hotel rooms in London could be cleaned by people driving robots sitting in Kenya or Buenos Aires or wherever, for a tenth of the cost here. That’s coming, and it will be very disruptive.

Question:  

What happens to the chart on global income distribution during this phase of globalization?

Richard Baldwin:

It keeps going down.•

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“Perhaps Life Is Something That Happens Not On A Planet But To A Planet”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “Why Most Planets Will Either Be Lush or Dead,” David Grinspoon’s wonderfully lucid Nautilus piece about the Gaia hypothesis which was excerpted from his book Earth in Human Hands, the writer suggests that “once life has taken hold of a planet, once it has become a planetary‐scale entity (a global organism, if you will), it may be very hard to kill.”

We’re sure trying our damndest to off ourselves, what with a climate-change denier heading into the White House and China choking on its insta-modernity. It’s possible that even if “life as a whole persists” and our worst impulses don’t bring us to full species collapse, a global Easter Island, that scenarios could play out in which millions or hundreds of millions perish and quotidian existence is transformed into something harsh and traumatic. The survivors would be a scarred people on scarred earth. Just because humans have spent a couple million years or so as part of a feedback system that has seen life on the planet persevere doesn’t mean we can’t also turn out the lights.

From Grinspoon:

As far as we can tell, around the time when life was starting on Earth, both Venus and Mars shared the same characteristics that enabled life to get going here: They were wet, they were rocky, they had thick atmospheres and vigorous geologic activity. Comparative planetology seems to be telling us that the conditions needed for the origin of life might be the norm for rocky worlds. One real possibility is that Mars or Venus also had an origin of life, but that life did not stick, couldn’t persist, on either of these worlds. It was not able to take root and become embedded as a permanent planetary feature, as it did on Earth. This may be a common outcome: planets that have an origin of life, perhaps even several, but that never develop a robust and self‐sustaining global biosphere. What is really rare and unusual about Earth is that beneficial conditions for life have persisted over billions of years. This may have been more than luck.

When we stop thinking of planets as merely objects or places where living beings may or may not be present, but rather as themselves living or nonliving entities, it can color the way we think about the origin of life. Perhaps life is something that happens not on a planet but to a planet: It is something that a planet becomes.

Think of life as analogous to a fire.  If you’ve ever tried to start a campfire, you know it’s easy to ignite some sparks and a little flicker of flame, but then it’s hard to keep these initial flames going. At first you have to tend to the fire, blowing until you’re faint, to supply more oxygen, or it will just die out. That’s always the tricky part: keeping it burning before it has really caught on. Then it reaches a critical point, where the fire is really roaring. It’s got a bed of hot coals and its heat is generating its own circulation pattern, sucking in oxygen, fanning its own flames. At that point it becomes self-sustaining, and you can go grab a beer and watch for shooting stars.

I wonder if the first life on a planet isn’t like those first sparks and those unsteady little flames. The earliest stages of life may be extremely vulnerable, and there may be a point where, once life becomes a planetary phenomenon, enmeshed in the global flows that support and fuel it, it feeds back on itself and becomes more like a self‐sustaining fire, one that not only draws in its own air supply, but turns itself over and replenishes its own fuel. A mature biosphere seems to create the conditions for life to continue and flourish.•

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“The Ability To Talk To Your Room Is Effortlessly Convenient”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Surveillance Capitalism is the wave of the future, we’re told, but it could more accurately be called Ambient Capitalism.

To me, surveillance suggests pursuit, a sort of cat-and-mouse game. But more and more we won’t make a squeak as we rest snugly in the pocket of new technologies trying to divine our preferences. As these algorithms quietly do their calculating in living rooms and supermarkets, we’ll hardly know they’re there, anticipating the needs we never knew we had, erasing the lines between private and public. It will be the final shift from a world in which we were primarily citizens to one where we’re chiefly consumers. We’ll have fully been eased inside the machine.

From  Sarah Buhr at TechCrunch:

The Wynn Las Vegas hotel is adding an Amazon Echo to every one of its 4,748 rooms. A first for a hotel to do and a great way to market both the hotel and the Echo device.

However, it also means, should you stay there, you’ll have a built-in surveillance device potentially listening in on all your conversations whenever you are in the room. Call me crazy but there might be a few guests who don’t want Amazon listening in on their wild Vegas weekend.

The irony is sweet, given Wynn Resorts Steve Wynn’s press statement on why he chose to add an Echo to every room:

“If I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa. The ability to talk to your room is effortlessly convenient,” Wynn stated.

But with all that chatter comes Alexa’s ability to upload what you are saying to the cloud. Echo has a listening component that is activated simply by speaking out loud, making it the perfect spy device — not only for Amazon marketing purposes but also for hackers and the government to get information about you without your permission.•

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“He Believed Silicon Valley Technologists Were The Brightest And Best Americans. He Was Wrong.”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ever since Apple’s “Think Different” ad in 1997, the one in which Steve jobs used Gandhi’s image to sell marked-up consumer electronics made by sweatshop labor, Silicon Valley business titans have been celebrated the way astronauts used to be. Jobs, who took credit for that advertising campaign which someone else created, specifically wondered why we put on a pedestal those who voyage into space when he and his clever friends were changing the world–or something–with their gadgets. He believed technologists were the best and brightest Americans. He was wrong.

Some of the Valley’s biggest names filed dourly into Trump Tower yesterday in a sort of reverse perp walk. It was the same, sad spectacle of Al Gore’s pilgrimage, which was answered with Scott Pruitt, climate-change denier, being chosen EPA Chief. Perhaps they made the trek on some sort of utilitarian impulse, but I would guess there was also some element of self-preservation, not an unheard of sense of compromise for those who see their corporations as if they were countries, not only because of their elephantine “GDPs,” but also because of how they view themselves. I don’t think they’re all Peter Thiel, an emotional leper and intellectual fraud who now gets to play out his remarkably stupid theories in a large-scale manner. I’ve joked that Thiel has a moral blind spot reminiscent of Hitler’s secretary, but the truth is probably far darker. 

What would have been far more impressive would have been if Musk, Cook, Page, Sandberg, Bezos and the rest stopped downstairs in front of the building and read a statement saying that while they would love to aid any U.S. President, they could not in this case because the President-Elect has displayed vicious xenophobia, misogyny and callous disregard for non-white people throughout the campaign and in the election’s aftermath. He’s shown totalitarian impulses and has disdain for the checks and balances that make the U.S. a free country. In fact, with his bullying nastiness he continues to double down on his prejudices, which has been made very clear by not only his words but through his cabinet appointments. They could have stated their dream for the future doesn’t involve using Big Data to spy on Muslims and Mexicans or programming 3D printers to build internment camps on Mars. They might have noted that Steve Bannon, whom Trump chose as his Chef Strategist, just recently said that there were too many Asian CEOs in Silicon alley, revealing his white-nationalistic ugliness yet again. They could have refused to normalize Trump’s odious vision. They could have taken a stand.

They didn’t because they’re not our absolute finest citizens. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who understand the essence of the nation in a way the tech billionaires do not, more truly represent us at our most excellent. They possess a wisdom and moral courage that’s as necessary to us as the Constitution itself. The Silicon Valley folks lack these essential qualities, and without them, you can’t be called our best and brightest.•

A Brief Note From 1911 About Shaving Cats

December 14, 2016 in Old Print Articles | Permalink

From the August 5, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

cats5

“The Future Of Incarceration Is To Not Be Called Incarceration”

December 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Why put more police on the streets when we can turn all of America into a police state? We can all do time together. Build walls, create ethnic registries, neutralize any part of the press that might raise a hackle about our new demagogic abnormal. Make the whole thing a prison, especially for the non-white among us. That seems to be the mentality of the moment.

If we survive this stupid, scary era and someday find our better angels, prison reform, a surprisingly bipartisan topic, needs to be taken seriously, with mentally ill people placed in proper facilities rather than warehoused behind bars, and drug use decriminalized even if it’s not fully legalized. Whether or not the U.S. takes this necessary leap, other nations surely will. 

John Surico’s smart Vice article “What Will the Future of Incarceration Look Like?” explores the noble, common-sense fixes proposed by the “Reimagining Prison” initiative. An excerpt:

Mentally-ill inmates not only take up a good chunk of who’s behind bars in this country, but also provide serious challenges when it comes to staff unequipped for the challenge

The outgoing sheriff Michael J. Ashe Jr., who oversees the county jail in Hampden County, in Massachusetts, is considered to be a pioneer in this field—someone who witnessed massive incarceration growth throughout his time there, since he started in 1974. He reacted with measures that are just now becoming the mainstream, like stress rehabilitation, college-level classes, and required hours of rehabilitation, or vocational training.

“As state hospitals continue to close—and even though we still have some of the best mental health hospitals in the world—the last place these individuals need to be is in a correctional facility,” Ashe told the room. “So I really feel these things will need to be addressed in the years ahead.”

For guidance on what is, perhaps, the best way to punish, Baz Dreisinger traveled around the world to see, and maybe even learn from, how other countries treat their prison populations. Her journey resulted in a book, Incarcerated Nations, which sheds light on the philosophy behind American incarceration and how it stands apart globally.

In Singapore, Dreisinger, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said there’s an ad campaign aimed at hiring formerly incarcerated individuals, sort of like a “ban-the-box” promotional. In Norway, she added, one of the prisons actually seems more like a cattle farm, with open space and no bars. And in South Africa, she attended a restorative justice seminar in a prison that is considered to be one of its nastiest.

“The future of incarceration is to not be called incarceration,” she told me after the panel. “I think what I wanted to emphasize is that it’s about reenvisioning and reimagining justice.”

“So for me, the future has little to do with prisons—the word ‘incarceration’ itself, and the space we’re standing in,” she continued. “So I envision a system that is grounded in community courts, reparative systems, truth and reconciliation commissions, and ‘facilities,’ insofar as absolutely necessary, which is always involving a really small number of people.”•

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“In 2050 Your Digital Life And Your Real Life Will Be Almost Seamless”

December 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t worry so much about the development of superintelligence as I do a lack of basic intelligence.

Liberal government is in retreat in 2016, and America now has a climate-change denier as President-Elect even as China, with its atrocious air pollution and scary cancer rates, should be serving as a fossil-fuel cautionary tale. Sometime it seems the phones have gotten smart and the people have not.

Our powerful new tools, with all their potential for greatness, have bedeviled us in a variety of ways, exacerbating wealth inequality and making it possible for some nations to remotely tamper in the elections of others. The tech advancements that further emerge will also be both boon and bane. A hammer is a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and all the virtual swords will be double-edged.

In forecasting our world in 2050 in a smart Datamation piece, Donald Prell doesn’t ignore the species-ending potential of global warming, though he takes a techno-optimist’s view of tomorrow, believing answers will emerge before the questions kill us.

His line about the seamlessness of actual and virtual life I quoted in the headline, however, seems to me as much a threat as a promise. Perhaps we shouldn’t forget the difference, maybe it’s not best to be able to squeeze a VR tour of the Holocaust into our lunch break. Time will tell if removing the borders was wise, though they likely will vanish.

An excerpt:

The Internet of today has instantaneously allowed people-to-people contact worldwide.  In 2050 all of the world’s population will be in touch with each other, making the world borderless.  However, there will be problems; privacy will have become obsolete, our private information will all be part of public records on the Internet.  A new international body – combining the present ICANN in California and the International Telecommunication  Union  (ITU)  in  Geneva – will  be  regulating  privacy, security, standards and all of the technological attributes of the Internet.

Everyone will be having fun using Virtual Reality.  If you and your friends decide to play a game about World War II, you all will have the option of hopping off the couch and join with the troops storming the beaches of Normandy.  A university professor at UCLA will meet with his or her colleagues from MIT and the University of London in one office to discuss the mater at hand.

Augmented Reality (AR) will allow those using special hardware to view the real world environment in which reality is modified by a computer. Imagine a  construction worker  using  an  AR helmet  on  the  construction site, or an architect viewing his plans for a building while visiting the site where the building is to be constructed.  Medical school students taking physiology will visualize different systems of the body in three dimensions.  With AI-powered robots having more computational  power than the human brain, it’s likely that by 2050 we will be able to  upload  digital  versions of our brains and be able to exist in that dynamic form forever!  Which brings up the question: what does life mean?

In 2000 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first robotic surgical tool.  The da Vinci Surgical System couples a robot with telepresence technology, allowing a surgeon to be in one location and the patient, along with the surgical robot in another.  By 2050, for some operations, the surgeon will not be needed – Dr. Robot will handle the total operation.  Smart drugs will enhance cognitive brain function and neural connectivity while strengthening the prefrontal cortex and boosting memory and recall.

In 2050, robots will play a major  role in  monitoring  and  caring for our planet.  Bee bots will assist in the pollination of crops that we previously relied on biological bees to perform.  Using special optics, including infrared  cameras, robots will be  used  where humans fear  to  tread.  Artificial intelligence coupled with advanced sensors will enable the robots to become decision-makers, which will allow them to be used in many occupations.

3D printers will be common in every household. Simple objects a person might need will be created by a computer/printer filled with different compounds similar to ink, which will allow it to create in a few minutes an object that is requested.   The blueprints  for objects  will come from a public database, available online.

A computer bought in 2050 will be a billion times more powerful than the one I am using now to  write  this article.  That means several computersin 2050 will have the same computing power as all the computers existing today!

Almost invisible pervasive computers will be everywhere: buildings, highways, vehicles, even in the clothing we wear.  In 2050 your digital life and your real life will be almost seamless.•

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“There’s No Other Way To Explain Obama’s Inability To Imagine This Nation Could Elect Donald Trump”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Hope is usually audacious but sometimes misplaced.

Without that feeling of expectation in a country founded on white supremacy that has never erased institutional racism, Barack Hussein Obama would certainly have never been elected President of the United States, not once, let alone twice. But his hope has also served as an escape hatch for white Americans who wanted to not only ignore the past but also the present. By stressing the best in us, Obama overlooked the worst of us, and that worst has never gone away.

It’s doubtful he behaved this way merely due to political opportunism: Obama seems a true believer in America and the ideals it espouses but has never lived up to. I love him and Michelle and think they’re wonderful people, but the nation has never been as good as they are, and even on a hopeful day I’m unsure we even aspire to be.

From “The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America,” a painfully true Atlantic essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The black president that Ta-Nehisi Coates describes is one who thinks he could have ever really “embraced” or “chosen” blackness. He seems to truly believe that he exercised some great act of charity and agency in adopting black cool. My first black president seems to think that he can raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the world that keeps his brothers in bad jobs, poor neighborhoods, bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

There’s no other way to explain Obama’s inability to imagine this nation could elect Donald Trump. Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. Even after Donald Trump was elected, Obama told Coates that all is not lost. He is still hopeful about the soul of white America. He said nothing about the soul of black America. That is where my hope resides. It is where my faith has always resided.•

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