“In Some Ways, The Important Thing Is To Be Able To Extract And Transfer Experience And Memory (Data)”

September 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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If you like your human beings to come with fingers and toes, you may be disquieted by the Reddit Ask Me Anything conducted by Andrew Hessel, a futurist and a “biotechnology catalyst” at Autodesk. It’s undeniably one of the smartest and headiest AMAs I’ve ever read, with the researcher fielding questions about a variety of flaws and illnesses plaguing people that biotech may be able to address, even eliminate. Of course, depending on your perspective, humanness itself can be seen as a failing, something to be “cured.” A few exchanges follow.

Question:

Four questions, all on the same theme:

1) What is the probable timeframe for when we’ll see treatments that will slow senescence?

2) Do we have a realistic estimate, in years or decades (or bigger, fingers crossed!), on the life extension potential of such treatments?

3) Is it realistic that such treatments would also include senescence reversal (de-ageing)?

4) Is there any indication at present as to what kind of form these treatments will take, particularly with regards to their invasiveness?

Andrew Hessel:

1) We are already seeing some interesting results here — probably the most compelling I’ve seen is in programming individually senescent cells to die. More work needs to be done. 2) In humans, no. We are already long-lived. Experiments that lead to longer life can’t be rushed — the results come at the end! 3) TBD — but I can’t see why not 4) Again, TBD, but I think it will involve tech like viruses and nanoparticles that can target cells / tissue with precision.

Overall, trying to extend our bodies may be throwing good effort at a bad idea. In some ways, the important thing is to be able to extract and transfer experience and memory (data). We do this when we upgrade our phones, computers, etc.

Question:

Can Cas9/Crispr edit any gene that control physical appearance in an adult human? say for example it it’s the gene that controls the growth of a tail? will reactivating it actually cause a tail to grow in an already mature human?

Andrew Hessel:

It’s a powerful editing technology that could potentially allow changing appearance. The problem is editing a fully developed organism is new territory. Also, there’s the challenges of reprogramming millions or billions of cells! But it’s only a 4 year old technology, lots of room to explore and learn.

Question:

I’m an artist who’s curious about using democratized genetic engineering techniques (i.e. CRISPR) to make new and aesthetically interesting plant life, like roses the size of sunflowers or lillies and irises in shapes and colors nobody has ever scene. Is this something that is doable by an non-scientist with the tools and understanding available today? I know there are people inserting phosphorescence into plant genes – I’d like to go one further and actually start designing flower, or at least mucking around with the code to see what kinds of (hopefully) pretty things emerge. I’d love your thoughts on this… Thanks!

Andrew Hessel:

I think it’s totally reasonable to start thinking about this. CRISPR allows for edits of genomes and using this to explore size/shape/color etc of plants is fascinating. As genome engineering (including whole genome synthesis) tech becomes cheaper and faster, doing more extensive design work will be within reach. The costs need to drop dramatically though — unless you’re a very rich artists. :-) As for training, biodesign is already so complicated that you need software tools to help. The software tools are going to improve a lot in the future, allowing designers to focus more on what they want to make, rather than the low level details of how to make it. But we still have a ways to go on this front. We still don’t have great programming tools for single cells, let alone more complex organisms. But they WILL come.

Question:

So my question is, do you think there will be a “biological singularity,” similar to Ray Kurzweil’s “technological singularity?”

Will there be a time in the near future where the exponential changes in genetic engineering (synthetic biology, dna synthesis, genome sequencing, etc.) will have such a profound impact on human civilization that it is difficult to predict what the future will be like?

Andrew Hessel:

I think it’s already hard to figure out where the future is going. Seriously. Who would have predicted politics to play out this way this year? But yes, I think Kurzweil calls it right that the combination of accelerating computation, biotech, etc creates a technological future that is hard to imagine. This said, I don’t think civilization will change that quickly. Computers haven’t changed the fundamentals of life, just the details of how we go about our days. Biotech changes can be no less profound, but they take longer to code, test, and implement., Overall, though, I think we come of this century with a lot more capabilities than we brought into it!•

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“This Analysis Helps Advertisers Identify The Right Influencers”

September 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Desperation sounds funny when expressed in words. A scream would probably be more coherent.

Nobody really knows how to remake newspapers and magazines of a bygone era to be profitable in this one, and the great utility they provided–the Fourth Branch of Government the traditional media was called–is not so slowly slipping away. What’s replaced much of it online has been relatively thin gruel, with the important and unglamorous work of covering local politics unattractive in a viral, big-picture machine.

All I know is when Condé Nast is using IBM’s Watson to help advertisers “activate” the “right influencers” for their “brands,” we’re all in trouble.

From The Drum:

With top titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ, Conde Nast’s partnership heralds a key step merging targeted influencer marketing and artificial intelligence in the fashion and lifestyle industry. The platform will be used to help advertiser clients improve how they connect with audiences over social media and gain measurable insights into how their campaigns resonate.

“Partnering with Influential to leverage Watson’s cognitive capabilities to identify the right influencers and activate them on the right campaigns gives our clients an advantage and increases our performance, which is paramount in today’s distributed content world,” said Matt Starker, general manager, digital strategy and initiatives at Condé Nast. “We engage our audiences in innovative ways, across all platforms, and this partnership is another step in that innovation.”

By analyzing unstructured data from an influencer’s social media feed and identifying key characteristics that resonate with a target demographic, the Influential platform uses IBM’s personality insights into, for example, a beauty brand that focuses on self-enhancement, imagination and trust. This analysis helps advertisers identify the right influencers by homing in on previously hard-to-measure metrics–like how they are perceived by their followers, and how well their specific personality fits the personality of the brand.•

A Brief Note From 1928 About Robot Armies

September 8, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the July 31, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“In 1972…He Called The Police To Confess Being An Android”

September 8, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a Literary Review piece about Kyle Arnold’s new title, The Divine Madness Of Philip K. Dick, Mike Jay, who knows a thing or two about the delusions that bedevil us, writes about the insane inner world of the speed-typing, speed-taking visionary who lived during the latter stages of his life, quite appropriately, near the quasi-totalitarian theme park Disneyland, a land where mice talk and corporate propaganda is endlessly broadcast. Dick was a hypochondriac about the contents of his head, and it’s no surprise his life was littered with amphetamines, anorexia and anxiety, which drove his brilliance and abbreviated it.

The opening:

Across dozens of novels and well over a hundred short stories, Philip K Dick worried away at one theme above all others: the world is not as it seems. He worked through every imaginable scenario: consensus reality was variously a set of implanted memories, a drug-induced hallucination, a time slip, a covert military simulation, an illusion projected by mega-corporations or extraterrestrials, or a test set by God. His typical protagonist was conspired against, drugged, hypnotised, paranoid, schizophrenic – or, possibly, the only person in possession of the truth.

The preoccupation all too clearly reflected the author’s life. Dick was a chronic doubter, tormented, like René Descartes, by the suspicion that the world was the creation of an evil demon ‘who has directed his entire effort to misleading me’. But cogito ergo sum was not enough to rescue someone who in 1972, during one of his frequent bouts of persecution mania, called the police to confess to being an android. Dick took scepticism to a level that he made his own. It became his brand, and since his death it has been franchised across popular culture. He isn’t credited on Hollywood blockbusters such as The Matrix (in which reality is a simulation created by machines from the future) or The Truman Show (about a reality TV programme in which all but the protagonist are complicit), but their mind-bending plot twists are his in all but name.

As Kyle Arnold acknowledges early in his lucid and accessible study, it would be impossible to investigate the roots of Dick’s cosmic doubt more doggedly than he did himself. He was ‘his own best psychobiographer”…•

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“The City Will Become A ‘Gradual Atlantis'”

September 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some sort of survival mechanism allows us to forget the full horror of a tragedy, and that’s a good thing. That fading of facts makes it possible for us to go on. But it’s dangerous to be completely amnesiac about disaster.

Case in point: In 2014, Barry Diller announced plans to build a lavish park off Manhattan at the pier where Titanic survivors came to shore. Dial back just a little over two years ago to another waterlogged disaster, when Hurricane Sandy struck the city, and imagine such an island scheme even being suggested then. The wonder at that point was whether Manhattan was long for this world. Diller’s designs don’t sound much different than the captain of the supposed unsinkable ship ordering a swimming pool built on the deck after the ship hit an iceberg.

In New York magazine, Andrew Rice provides an excellent profile of scientist Klaus Joseph, who believes NYC, as we know it, has no future. The academic could be wrong, but if he isn’t, his words about the effects of Irene and Sandy are chilling: “God forbid what’s next.”

The opening:

Klaus Jacob, a German professor affiliated with Columbia’s University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is a geophysicist by profession and a doomsayer by disposition. I’ve gotten to know him over the past few years, as I’ve sought to understand the greatest threat to life in New York as we know it. Jacob has a white beard and a ponderous accent: Imagine if Werner Herzog happened to be a renowned expert on disaster risk. Jacob believes most people live in an irrational state of “risk denial,” and he takes delight in dispelling their blissful ignorance. “If you want to survive an earthquake, don’t buy a brownstone,” he once cautioned me, citing the catastrophic potential of a long-dormant fault line that runs under the city. When Mayor Bloomberg announced nine years ago an initiative to plant a million trees, Jacob thought, That’s nice — but what about tornadoes?

For the past 15 years or so, Jacob has been primarily preoccupied with a more existential danger: the rising sea. The latest scientific findings suggest that a child born today in this island metropolis may live to see the waters around it swell by six feet, as the previously hypothetical consequences of global warming take on an escalating — and unstoppable — force. “I have made it my mission,” Jacob says, “to think long term.” The life span of a city is measured in centuries, and New York, which is approaching its fifth, probably doesn’t have another five to go, at least in any presently recognizable form. Instead, Jacob has said, the city will become a “gradual Atlantis.”

The deluge will begin slowly, and irregularly, and so it will confound human perceptions of change. Areas that never had flash floods will start to experience them, in part because global warming will also increase precipitation. High tides will spill over old bulkheads when there is a full moon. People will start carrying galoshes to work. All the commercial skyscrapers, housing, cultural institutions that currently sit near the waterline will be forced to contend with routine inundation. And cataclysmic floods will become more common, because, to put it simply, if the baseline water level is higher, every storm surge will be that much stronger. Now, a surge of six feet has a one percent chance of happening each year — it’s what climatologists call a “100 year” storm. By 2050, if sea-level rise happens as rapidly as many scientists think it will, today’s hundred-year floods will become five times more likely, making mass destruction a once-a-generation occurrence. Like a stumbling boxer, the city will try to keep its guard up, but the sea will only gain strength.•

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“Power, Power, Power, Power”

September 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Victor Frankenstein was right to name his horrid creation after himself because those who enable monsters are monsters. 

Everyone who’s had a hand in enabling the rise of Donald Trump, an American Mussolini, owns his disgraceful behavior, be it a Beltway insider like James Baker or a Silicon Valley emotional homunculus such as Peter Thiel or Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. They don’t emerge clean after backing a condo salesman who’s remade himself as Bull Connor. His stains are theirs. That doesn’t mean they’ll get what they truly deserve in life, as few do, but it’s clear who they are now.

Why would someone who should know better behave this way? For power, either directly for themselves or for some misguided ideology. An excerpt from Hannah Seligson’s Highline piece “Is Ivanka for Real?”:

It’s also unlikely that Ivanka would hear many qualms about Donald’s tactics from her husband. According to news reports, Jared is thrilled about the prospect of making it to the White House or perhaps starting amedia company with Donald after the election is over. He also seems to be unfazed by his father-in-law’s racially insensitive positions. Esquire reported that he told some Jewish friends who disliked Donald’s anti-Muslim rhetoric that they “don’t understand what America is or what American people think.” Somebody who has spent significant time with Ivanka and Jared said they genuinely seem to love each other and have a strong marriage. But he also observed how insular their world can be. Their birthday parties, he said, are assemblages of high-society and power types like Hugh Jackman and Eric Schmidt, not of close friends. Another person who went to Jared’s 35th birthday party at the Gramercy Park Hotel told Esquire that the median age of the attendees was close to 70.

I asked someone else who has known both Ivanka and Jared for years why they had thrown their lot in with Donald so whole-heartedly. “Power, power, power, power,” he speculated. “Jared’s got plenty of money, but the only way he can separate himself from his family is power. They’re a great match because that’s also what Ivanka is after.”

Ivanka and Jared appear to have made the calculation that, even with some bad press, the exposure provided by a presidential run will only make them more influential over time. “It’s in the Trump DNA to capitalize on every opportunity,” said someone who knows Ivanka both personally and professionally. “And Ivanka is taking this as an opportunity to build her brand with millions upon millions of people looking.” On the morning after her speech at the GOP Convention, her official brand account tweeted, “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech” along with a link to Nordstrom, which, at the time, was selling her $158 rose-colored sheath dress. It sold out. The day before, she had posted a picture of Mike Pence and her family on her blog, declaring, “I couldn’t be more proud of what my father has accomplished!” The caption contained a link to the shoes she was wearing —light blue round-toe pumps from her line—that Lord & Taylor still has on clearance for $67.50.•

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“[They] Have A Bold Ambition To Atomize Entire Careers Into Micro-Tasks That Almost Anyone Can Carry Out Online”

September 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Before robots take our jobs, a more mechanical form of human will handle many of them. In fact, it’s already happening.

The new connectedness and tools have allowed for certain types of employment to be shrunk if not disappeared. It’s true whether your collar is blue or white, whether you have a job or career, if you’re a taxi driver or the passenger being transported to a fancy office.

“Meatware”–a term which perfectly sums up a faceless type of human labor pool–minimizes formerly high-paying positions into tasks any rabbit can handle. It’s a race to the bottom, where there’s plenty of room, with the winners also being losers.

In Mark Harris’ insightful Backchannel article, the writer hired some Mechanical Turk-ers to explore the piecework phenomenon. The opening:

Harry K. sits at his desk in Vancouver, Canada, scanning sepia-tinted swirls, loops and blobs on his computer screen. Every second or so, he jabs at his mouse and adds a fluorescent dot to the image. After a minute, a new image pops up in front of him.

Harry is tagging images of cells removed from breast cancers. It’s a painstaking job but not a difficult one, he says: “It’s like playing Etch A Sketch or a video game where you color in certain dots.”

Harry found the gig on Crowdflower, a crowdworking platform. Usually that cell-tagging task would be the job of pathologists, who typically start their careers with annual salaries of around $200,000 — an hourly wage of about $80. Harry, on the other hand, earns just four cents for annotating a batch of five images, which takes him between two to eight minutes. His hourly wage is about 60 cents.

Granted, Harry can’t perform most of the tasks in a pathologist’s repertoire. But in 2016 — 11 years after the launch of the ur-platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk — crowdworking (sometimes also called crowdsourcing) is eating into increasingly high-skilled jobs. The engineers who are developing this model of labor have a bold ambition to atomize entire careers into micro-tasks that almost anyone, anywhere in the world, can carry out online. They’re banking on the idea that any technology that can make a complex process 100 times cheaper, as in Harry’s case, will spread like wildfire.•

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Old Print Article: “Pretty Boy” Floyd Funeral Attended By 20,000 (1934)

September 6, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd was more famous than infamous, which seems a strange thing.

During the 1930s, the soft-featured felon participated in a string of brazen bank robberies and left behind a body count, but such was the hatred for financial institutions in America during the Great Depression that he was widely considered a Robin Hood if not a saint. Stories circulated that he shredded mortgages of down-and-out farmers while emptying safes and shared his ill-gotten gains with the hungry and disheartened, which was nearly everyone.

Who knows? Maybe he found time for such acts of benevolence in between shootouts and jail breaks, but these legends had more to do with what a desperate people needed than what a lone gunman was delivering. It was Woody Guthrie who put it all in perspective in his great song named after the beloved criminal, writing “Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered / I’ve seen lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen.”

Two Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles from 1934 recall Floyd’s wide renown at the end of his wild run.

From October 23, 1934:

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From October 29, 1934:

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“Homo Sapiens Is An Obsolete Algorithm”

September 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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We were a web before there was a Web. Things didn’t begin going viral in the Digital Age, and human systems existed long before the Industrial Revolution or even agriculture. None of this is new. What’s different about the era of machines is the brute efficiency of data due to heightened computing power being applied to increasingly ubiquitous connectedness. 

Some more dazzling thoughts by Yuval Noah Harari’s on “Dataism” can be read in Wired UK, which presents a passage from the historian’s forthcoming book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Just two examples: 1) “The entire human species is a single data-processing system,” and 2) “We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were ‘good.’ In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.”

Harari writes that humans are viewed increasingly as an anachronism by Dataists, who prefer intelligence to the continuation of the species, an “outdated technology.” Like the Finnish philosopher Erkki Kurenniemi, they doubt the long-term preservation of “slime-based machines.” I don’t know how widespread this feeling really is, but I have read theorists in computing who feel it their duty to always opt for greater intelligence, even if it should come at the cost of humanity. I think the greater threat to our survival isn’t conscious decisions made at our expense but rather the natural progression of systems that don’t necessarily require us.

An excerpt:

Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong. The supreme value of this new religion is “information flow”. If life is the movement of information, and if we think that life is good, it follows that we should extend, deepen and spread the flow of information in the universe. According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn’t the apex of creation or a precursor of some future Homo deus. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to cover the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.

This vision is reminiscent of some traditional religious visions. Thus Hindus believe that humans can and should merge into the universal soul of the cosmos – the atman. Christians believe that after death, saints are filled by the infinite grace of God, whereas sinners cut themselves off from His presence. Indeed, in Silicon Valley, the Dataist prophets consciously use traditional messianic language. For example, Ray Kurzweil’s book of prophecies is called The Singularity is Near, echoing John the Baptist’s cry: “the kingdom of heaven is near” (Matthew 3:2).

Dataists explain to those who still worship flesh-and-blood mortals that they are overly attached to outdated technology. Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm. After all, what’s the advantage of humans over chickens? Only that in humans information flows in much more complex patterns than in chickens. Humans absorb more data, and process it using better algorithms. (In day-to-day language, that means that humans allegedly have deeper emotions and superior intellectual abilities. But remember that, according to current biological dogma, emotions and intelligence are just algorithms.)

Well then, if we could create a data-processing system that absorbs even more data than a human being, and that processes it even more efficiently, wouldn’t that system be superior to a human in exactly the same way that a human is superior to a chicken?•

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“ERA Won’t Give Women Anything They Don’t Already Have”

September 5, 2016 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

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You’d like on a personal level embrace your political adversaries, but Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-Steinem who died today, didn’t make it easy.

She clung to a time in America when pretty much everything was run by men–only white men, of course–and trafficked in ugly racial politics, encouraging the GOP to ignore Latino voters and instead rally around white America. If you want to credit the activist for something, it must be admitted she was amazingly consistent in her backwardness, from her early efforts to thwart the ERA to her last-act embrace of the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Oh, and in between she staunchly opposed civil unions and gay marriage (despite having a gay son) and urged banning foreign-born players from Major League Baseball. Schlafly’s face seemed to say it all: It was very pleasant, though the eyes were frequently narrowed, almost in a squint, like she wasn’t quite able to see the whole picture.

In 1973, William F. Buckley, Jr. invited Schlafly and Ann Scott to debate the Equal Rights Amendment. Scott died two years later from breast cancer.

 

“That Belief Is Plainly Irrational”

September 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Thomas Friedman’s popular notion that nations don’t go to war if they share financial concerns (and a taste for McDonald’s french fries) failed to take something awfully important into account: Not everyone is rational and places material welfare above ideology. Some, in fact, are complete loons who want to blow those Golden Arches to kingdom come.

Thomas Nagel writes on a related topic for the London Review of Books, critiquing Richard English’s Does Terrorism Work? Immoral as it is, politically motivated violence certainly can be used effectively by powerful states (though it sometimes backfires), but the philosopher wonders if terror can secure victory for non-government groups (Al Qaeda, ISIS. etc.). He concludes such actions almost never succeed, except in rare cases where there are extenuating circumstances. Why then the continued improvisation of explosive devices? Nagel argues that delusion takes hold over groups that realize non-violent measures won’t triumph but don’t comprehend that neither will violent ones. An except:

English makes it clear that one of the things these four groups share is hatred and the desire for revenge, which comes out in personal testimony if not always in their official statements of aims. He quotes Osama bin Laden: ‘Every Muslim, from the moment they realise the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews and hates Christians.’ Revenge for perceived injuries and humiliations is a powerful motive for violence, and if it is counted as a secondary aim of these movements, it defines a sense in which terrorism automatically ‘works’ whenever it kills or maims members of the target group. In that sense the destruction of the World Trade Center and Mountbatten’s assassination were sterling examples of terrorism working. But even though English includes revenge in his accounting, this is not what would ordinarily be meant by the question, ‘Does terrorism work?’ What we really want to know about are the political effects.

And here the record is dismal. What struck me on reading this book is how delusional these movements are, how little understanding they have of the balance of forces, the motives of their opponents and the political context in which they are operating. In this respect, it is excessively charitable to describe them as rational agents. True, they are employing violent means which they believe will induce their opponents to give up, but that belief is plainly irrational, and in any event false, as shown by the results.•

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“He Was A Casualty In A War—A War That, By The Way, Continues”

September 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Seminal reading about NYC of the last five decades is “My Lost City,” Luc Sante’s brilliant 2003 New York Review of Books paean to an era not too long ago when hardly anyone here was a have-not, even if they were poor, with a trove of printed matter and records and furnishings to be had on many a curb to whomever was willing to haul it away. The riches poureth over and provided a different, and often deeper, kind of wealth. Okay, some people truly had it worse four decades or so ago. For instance, child prostitutes were a staple of Times Square. Relentless gentrification, however, wasn’t the only way to deal with that horror.

Sante has now republished “The Last Time I Saw Basquiat” in the NYRB, another piece about a time of greater creativity that’s been lost, though he’s hopeful in asserting that the struggle against wealth inequality for an affordable, working-class New York continues. I wish I felt the same. In Cohen-esque terms, the war to me seems over, the good guys having lost. 

An excerpt:

The last time I saw Jean I was going home from work, had just passed through the turnstile at the 57th Street BMT station. We spotted each other, he at the bottom of the stairs, me at the top. As he climbed I witnessed a little silent movie. He stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going.

A month later he was famous and I never saw him again. We no longer traveled in the same circles. I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace. I heard stories of misery and excess, the compass needle flying around the dial, a crash looming. When he died I mourned, but it seemed inevitable, as well as a symptom of the times, the wretched Eighties. He was a casualty in a war—a war that, by the way, continues. Years later I needed money badly and undertook to sell the Basquiat productions I own, but got no takers, since they were too early, failed to display the classic Basquiat look. I’m glad it turned out that way.•

A Brief Note From 1932 About Al Capone

September 5, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the March 3, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Saints Should Always Be Presumed Guilty Until Proved Innocent”

September 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Mother Teresa, now officially a saint, was given an unmitigated flogging in the 2003 Slate piece “Mommie Dearest, written by Christopher Hitchens, that godless heathen (I mean that as a compliment as well as a statement of fact). An excerpt:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the ‘Missionaries of Charity,’ but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.•

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

September 4, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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

  1. the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already
  2. michael graziano human consciousness
  3. automatic body washing machine
  4. sylvia anderson moon suits
  5. david foster wallace denis johnson
  6. what did h l hunt eat?
  7. george spahn ranch charles manson
  8. jaron lanier discussing h.g. wells
  9. pat brown’s meatless hamburger lab
  10. vladimir lenin’s brain

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

September 4, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week,

This week, Donald Trump went to Mexico to appear Presidential, but it was all a ruse to deliver him to…

El Chapo!

El Chapo!

I was tricked!

I was tricked!

Finish him, gigante gordo!

Finish him, Gigante Gordo!

gg

Wow, St. Peter, that's some tan you've got.

Wow, so this is heaven. Hey, St. Peter, that’s some tan you’ve got!

St. Peter?!? I mean, duh, I’m wearing horns.

And I'm wearing the kind of underpants that mutes farts. Hey, this is some piece of real estate. Have you ever thought of developing it?

And I’m wearing the kind of underpants that mutes farts. Hey, this is a big piece of real estate. Have you ever thought of developing it?

How so?

We class up the joint, Pete. Casinos, golf courses, European women who've "modeled," and my name in big letters everywhere.

We class it up, Pete. Casinos, golf courses, Eastern European models and my name in big gold letters everywhere.

That sounds hideous! It would actually make this place even worse. You’ve got a deal.

Great. But first we have to install some air conditioners. I'm burning up in this place.

Great. But first we need to install some air conditioners. I’m sweating like Rubio in this dump.

Not happening, Hamburglar.

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  • Living under Texas border country surveillance is disquieting.

“That’s Not How People Saw It At The Time—In Part Thanks To Giuliani’s Relentless, Trumpian Campaign”

September 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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In a great Politico piece, Kevin Baker sees Rudy Giuliani’s second honeymoon-ish “American Mayor” phase as a brief, mostly unearned aberration in a nearly three decades campaign of race baiting and a distortion of facts that began in earnest with his defeat by David Dinkins in the race for Gracie Mansion in 1989. Those who see Giuliani’s deranged delegate speeches for Donald Trump as odd may think again, as the former created something of a template for the latter during his 1993 rise to the mayoralty, an ugly spectacle of lies and hate speech that served to divide the city. Baker is masterful at defying a collective (and often faulty) memory of NYC politics, recalling the past with great clarity and some glorious phrasing–he describes Daniel Moynihan as “New York’s great stuffed owl of a senator.” Perhaps most damning is the writer’s excoriation of Giuliani’s two terms in office, which were largely lackluster and incessantly petty. An excerpt:

Nobody remembers it this way now, but the Dinkins administration compiled New York’s best record on crime since World War II, adding 6,000 more cops and enjoying a record, 36 straight months of drops in the crime rate. But for New Yorkers this was eclipsed by big headline events like the Crown Heights riot of 1991—a clash between African-Americans and Orthodox Jews that Giuliani would insist on calling a “pogrom,” implying that it was countenanced by Mayor Dinkins. The crime statistics had turned around, and quality of life was slowly but visibly improving in much of New York, but that’s not how people saw it at the time—in part thanks to Giuliani’s relentless, Trumpian campaign to tell them it was a still a cesspool.

Even once-liberal elements of the press internalized Giuliani’s apocalyptic view of his own city. Richard Cohen, in an October 1993 column in the Washington Post the month before the election, scoffed that, “Aside from the deranged, there’s not a single Gothamite who thinks it has gotten better under Dinkins—no matter what his statistics say,” while the Times’ James McKinley concluded, “Mr. Dinkins will never be able to prove his policies have curbed crime.” John Taylor, in Time, conceded that New Yorkers might actually be safer, but that they felt less safe, because the crimes still going on—though he did not give a specific example—were Trumpishly hellish: “Entire families are executed in drug wars. Teenagers kill each other over sneakers. Robbers casually shoot victims even if they have surrendered wallets. The proliferation of carjackings means people are no longer safe even in their automobiles.”

With actual facts about the crime rate effectively banished from the debate, pundits could feel free to embrace the throwback notion pushed by Giuliani that America’s real urban problem was not so much poverty or racism, but black people demanding special treatment, much like their tribune in city hall. Black-scolding reached a sort of frenzy that April, when New York’s great stuffed owl of a senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, gave his famous, “Defining deviancy down” speech, in which he asked “what in the last 50 years in New York is now better than it was” back in 1943, and concluded that nothing was better, especially crime. Moynihan received almost universal adoration for these supposedly bold words, the media having failed to notice that crime was at record lows in 1943 because most of the city’s young men were off fighting something called World War II. Or that there was a deadly race riot in New York that year anyway, set off by a cop shooting a black soldier. Or that Harlem had been officially “off-limits” to visiting white servicemen, or that black people were effectively banned from all of the city’s best restaurants, hotels, colleges, hospitals, or jobs in 1943.

Whatever. The Giuliani campaign, and its attendant press corps, was as far past facts as the Trump campaign is now. The perception became the reality.•

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“The Evening Tore A Painful New Wound”

September 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Father Coughlin reborn as Yucko the Clown, has in the past couple of weeks often tried to keep his Mussolini-esque tendencies under wraps, fitfully feigning concern for key minority voting blocs–the Birther as civil rights activist, President Arpaio as Mexican diplomat–before abruptly reverting to his rancidness as he did with his appalling immigration speech in Arizona. 

Some in the media have already given in to judging Trump merely on how his depraved comments play in the polls. From T.A. Frank at Vanity Fair:

“So how did Trump’s speech, delivered at a Phoenix rally, really go? No one can yet say. Ultimately, the only relevant measurement is whether it moved his numbers up or down relative to those of his opponent…”

Yes, when it comes to the horse race, numbers are the only relevant measurement, and the horse race is of paramount importance. But just because winning by appealing to the sun-less side of the American eclipse is the only concern of Trump, that doesn’t mean his psychotic proclamations don’t mean anything on their own. They do. They’re despicable, and there’s utility in pointing that out independent of their efficacy or lack thereof.

The Phoenix speech was not received merrily within the Republican National Committee, which was already at odds with the campaign. Two excerpts follow about the continuous internecine war. 

From Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times:

The Republican National Committee had high hopes that Donald J. Trump would deliver a compassionate and measured speech about immigration on Wednesday, and prepared to lavish praise on the candidate on the party’s Twitter account.

So when Mr. Trump instead offered a fiery denunciation of migrant criminals and suggested deporting Hillary Clinton, Reince Priebus, the party chairman, signaled that aides should scrap the plan, and the committee made no statement at all.

The evening tore a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee, imperiling his most important remaining political alliance.

Mr. Priebus and his organization have been steadfastly supportive of Mr. Trump, defending him in public and spending millions of dollars to aid him. But the collaboration between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Mr. Priebus’s committee has grown strained over the last month, according to six senior Republicans with detailed knowledge of both groups, some of whom asked to speak anonymously for fear of exacerbating tensions.•

From Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

Late last week, with Labor Day and the final stretch of the 2016 campaign approaching, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Republican National Committee brass — including chief of staff Katie Walsh and political director Chris Carr — in New York City. Kushner, who has in many respects assumed the role of campaign manager, asked a series of direct questions to the GOP officials — all surrounding the troubles the party was having in deploying field staffers, opening up swing-state headquarters, and establishing field offices in battlegrounds that will decide the election.

Those present for the meeting, and those briefed on it, insisted there were no fireworks, no drag-out fights. But they said Kushner’s questions reflected a growing realization within Trump’s team that for all the party’s talk about implementing a major swing-state deployment plan, it hasn’t yet materialized.

For weeks, Republican officials and operatives have groused about a dearth of campaign infrastructure in battlegrounds across the country — a state of affairs that could have an impact on GOP candidates up and down the ballot. But like many aspects of the Trump campaign, the deployment plan has been wracked by confusion, false starts and a lack of quick decision-making. On Aug. 18, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, came to Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters for a day of meetings. He left ready to finalize a series of decisions.

But the next morning, Manafort, under withering scrutiny surrounding his work overseas, abruptly quit. His departure created a chain reaction, delaying the talks for days on end.•

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Old Print Article: Georges Claude Was The “French Edison,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1931/44)

September 2, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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A century ago in France it might have been as apt to refer to Georges Claude as a luminary as anyone else. The inventor of neon lights, which debuted at the Paris Motor Show of 1910, the scientist was often thought of as a “French Edison,” a visionary who shined his brilliance on the world. Problem was, there was a dark side: a Royalist who disliked democracy, Claude eagerly collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation and was arrested once Hitler was defeated. He spent six years in prison, though he was ultimately cleared of the most serious charge of having invented the V-1 flying bomb for the Axis. Two articles below from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle chronicle his rise and fall. 

From February 25, 1931:

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From September 20, 1944:

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“You Need To Be Insulated From The Critics”

September 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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What perplexed me about Gawker during the last few years of existence and throughout its holy-shit Hulk Hogan trial was that the principals on the inside of the company seemed tone-deaf at best and oblivious at worst. That allowed an emotional homunculus like Peter Thiel to use a short stack from his billions to drive the media company into bankruptcy.

In Matthew Garrahan’s Financial Times interview with Nick Denton, the former owner discusses why Thiel and others in Silicon Valley were so angered about darts thrown at them by Gawker, stressing insulation from criticism on the outside can be vital when building a corporation. Perhaps the same is true of those running an independent media empire?

An excerpt:

The appeal is likely to take at least a year to get to court, which means Denton and Thiel will not be burying the hatchet soon. And yet they have much in common. They are of similar age: Denton turned 50 last month, while Thiel will be 49 in October. They are both gay, tech-obsessed European émigrés (Thiel is from Germany; Denton from the UK) and they are both libertarians.

There the similarities end, Denton suggests. “Thiel’s idea of freedom is that you can create a society that is insulated from mainstream society … and imagine your own world in which none of the old rules apply.” He is alluding to Thiel’s interest in seasteading — the largely theoretical creation of autonomous societies beyond the reach of meddling national governments. “My idea of free society always had more of an anarcho-syndicalist bent,” he says. “If I was in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war [an anarcho-syndicalist] is probably what I would have been.”

Still, he says he understands the desire to operate beyond the restrictions of normal society, saying that such thinking is common in start-up culture. He points to Uber, the ride-sharing app, to underline the point. When its founders set out to launch a product that would up-end the personal transportation industry, they had to protect their vision from external doubters or naysayers. “You need to be insulated from the critics if you’re going to persuade people to join you, believe in you, invest in you.” Great companies are often based on a single idea, he continues. “And if someone questions that idea, it can undermine the support within the organisation for that idea.”

This, he says, explains Thiel’s animosity towards Gawker. Valleywag, a Denton-owned tech site that was eventually folded into Gawker.com, used to cover Silicon Valley with a critical eye and was a constant thorn in the side of its community of companies and investors — including Thiel.•

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“Remaining Technical Obstacles Will Limit Such Technologies To Certain Niches”

September 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The robots may be coming for our jobs, but they’re not coming for our species, not yet.

Anyone worried about AI extincting humans in the short term is really buying into sci-fi hype far too much, and those quipping that we’ll eventually just unplug machines if they get too smart is underselling more distant dangers. But in the near term, Weak AI (e.g., automation) is far more a peril to society than Strong AI (e.g., conscious machines). It could move us into a post-scarcity tomorrow, or it could do great damage if it’s managed incorrectly.What happens if too many jobs are lost all at once? Will there be enough of a transition period to allow us to pivot?

In a Technology Review piece, Will Knight writes of a Stanford study on AI that predicts certain key disruptive technologies will not have cut a particularly wide swath by 2030. Of course, even this research, which takes a relatively conservative view of the future, suggests we start discussing social safety nets for those on the short end of what may become an even more imbalanced digital divide.

The opening:

The odds that artificial intelligence will enslave or eliminate humankind within the next decade or so are thankfully slim. So concludes a major report from Stanford University on the social and economic implications of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, however, the report concludes that AI looks certain to upend huge aspects of everyday life, from employment and education to transportation and entertainment. More than 20 leaders in the fields of AI, computer science, and robotics coauthored the report. The analysis is significant because the public alarm over the impact of AI threatens to shape public policy and corporate decisions.

It predicts that automated trucks, flying vehicles, and personal robots will be commonplace by 2030, but cautions that remaining technical obstacles will limit such technologies to certain niches. It also warns that the social and ethical implications of advances in AI, such as the potential for unemployment in certain areas and likely erosions of privacy driven by new forms of surveillance and data mining, will need to be open to discussion and debate.•

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“It’s A Beautiful Vision Of The Future, Like A Biblical Event”

August 31, 2016 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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“What hath God wrought?” was the first piece of Morse code ever sent, a melodramatic message which suggested something akin to Mary Shelley’s monster awakening and, perhaps, technology putting old myths to sleep. In his movie, Lo and Behold: Reveries Of A Connected World, Werrner Herzog believes something even more profoundly epiphanic is happening in the Digital Age, and it’s difficult to disagree.

The director tells Ben Makuch of Vice that for him, technology is an entry point to learning about people (“I’m interested, of course, in the human beings”). Despite Herzog’s focus, the bigger story is events progressing in the opposite direction, from carbon to silicon.

In a later segment about space colonization, Herzog acknowledges having dreams of filming on our neighboring planet, saying, “I want to be the poet of Mars.” But, in the best sense, he’s already earned that title.

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“Ride-Sharing Companies Are Particularly Vulnerable”

August 31, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Not an original idea: Driverless cars are perfected in the near future and join the traffic, and some disruptive souls, perhaps us, decide to purchase an autonomous taxi and set it to work. We charge less than any competitor, use our slim profits for maintenance and to eventually buy a second taxi. Those two turn into an ever-growing fleet. We subtract our original investment (and ourselves) from the equation, and let this benevolent monster grow, ownerless, allowing it to automatically schedule its own repairs and purchases. Why would anyone need Uber or Lyft in such a scenario? Those outfits would be value-less.

In a very good Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, Nick Bilton doesn’t extrapolate Uber’s existential risk quite this far, but he writes wisely of the technology that may make rideshare companies a shooting star, enjoying only a brief lifespan like Compact Discs, though minus the outrageous profits that format produced. 

The opening:

Seven years ago, just before Uber opened for business, the company was valued at exactly zero dollars. Today, it is worth around $68 billion. But it is not inconceivable that Uber, as mighty as it currently appears, could one day return to its modest origins, worth nothing. Uber, in fact, knows this better than almost anyone. As Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, candidly articulated in an interview with Business Insider, ride-sharing companies are particularly vulnerable to an impeding technology that is going to change our society in unimaginable ways: the driverless car. “The world is going to go self-driving and autonomous,” he unequivocally told Biz Carson. He continued: “So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by, basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.”

Kalanick wasn’t just being dramatic. He was being brutally honest. To understand how Uber and its competitors, such as Lyft andJuno, could be rendered useless by automation—leveled in the same way that they themselves leveled the taxi industry—you need to fast-forward a few years to a hypothetical version of the future that might seem surreal at the moment. But, I can assure you, it may well resemble how we will live very, very soon.•

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A Brief Note From 1889 About A Tiger In Stuttgart

August 31, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the August 11, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“The ‘Realities’ Of Border Security Varies Based On Who You Talk To”

August 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A CBP Border Patrol Agent investigates a potential landing area for illegal immigrants along the Rio Grande River in Texas

Surveillance is a murky thing almost always attended by a self-censorship, quietly encouraging citizens to abridge their communication because maybe, perhaps someone is watching or listening. It’s a chilling of civil rights that happens in a creeping manner. Nothing can be trusted, not even the mundane, not even your own judgement. That’s the goal, really, of such a system–that everyone should feel endlessly observed.

In a Texas Monthly piece, Sasha Von Oldershausen, a border reporter in West Texas, finds similarities between her stretch of America, which feverishly focuses on security from intruders, and her time spent living under theocracy in Iran. An excerpt:

Surveillance is key to the CBP’s strategy at the border, but you don’t have to look to the skies for constant reminders that they’re there. Internal checkpoints located up to 100 miles from the border give Border Patrol agents the legal authority to search any person’s vehicle without a warrant. It’s enough to instill a feeling of guilt even in the most exemplary of citizens. For those commuting daily on roads fitted with these checkpoints, the search becomes rote: the need to prove one’s right to abide is an implicit part of life.

Despite the visible cues, it’s still hard to figure just how all-seeing the CBP’s eyes are. For one, understanding the “realities” of border security varies based on who you talk to.

Esteban Ornelas—a Mexican citizen who was charged with illegal entry into the United States in 2012 and deported shortly thereafter—swears that he was caught was because a friend he was traveling through the backcountry with sent a text message to his family. “They traced the signal,” he told me in his hometown of Boquillas.

When I consulted CBP spokesperson Brooks and senior Border Patrol agent Stephen Crump about what Ornelas had told me, they looked at each other and laughed. “That’s pretty awesome,” Crump said. “Note to self: develop that technology.”

I immediately felt foolish to have asked. But when I asked Pauling that same question, his reply was much more austere: “I can’t answer that,” he said, and left it at that.•

 

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