“He Is Funny, Frightened, Confused, Weepy, Sexual, Evangelistic, And Overbearing”

January 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

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Talk-show host Stanley Siegel just died, and at one point that would have been huge news in New York City.

Before Howard Stern and Reality TV, venues that encourage emotionally damaged recruits to act out every last pathology to pump up the ratings, television host Siegel and his questionable taste and utter neuroses were considered controversial. During the 1970s, his raucous live morning show on the local ABC affiliate made his name as famous in New York as any politician, athlete or Broadway star.

Siegel invited his therapist to psychoanalyze him each week on the air, allowed a wasted Truman Capote to sit down as a guest when he was clearly in no condition to do so and angered a good number of politicos and entertainers with his brash, often-insulting questions. He was the anti-Carson, and it worked wonderfully well for a while.

In the 1977 New York magazine article, “Give Us a Kiss, Stanley,” which was written by journalist and playwright Jonathan Reynolds, Siegel was analyzed a little bit more, captured at the height of his entertaining narcissism. An excerpt:

Every day, Siegel wallows guiltlessly in his own persona, exulting in the dust, high jinx and cobwebs he reveals. He is funny, frightened, confused, weepy, sexual, evangelistic, and overbearing right in front of everybody’s eyes. In terms of emotional exhibitionism, Stanley Siegel makes Jack Paar look like Thomas Pynchon.

In the nearly two years he has been on WABC-TV at 9am, he has sextupled the ratings of his dreary predecessors, increased WABC’s rate card from $35 to $100 for every 30-second spot sold, knocked the venerable Not for Women Only and mega-venerable Concentration out of their time slots, and gained a host of admirers from Robert Evans to Eleanor Holmes Norton.

People tune in to the Stanley Siegel Show to see how Stanley feels–for if there is one predictable element in the program, it is that it will always be clear just how Stanley feels — for if there is one predictable element in the program, it is that it will always be clear just how Stanley feels. He has turned famous guests, WABC-TV’s employees and batches of stay-at-homes into an army of psychotherapists, and how can a psychotherapist not tune in to see how the patient is progressing–or deteriorating?•

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Art Linkletter’s daughter Diane plunged to her death from a six-story window in 1969, perhaps influenced to suicide by LSD. Timothy Leary was, of course, the most famous proponent of the drug, so Siegel, that button-pusher, thought it a good idea in 1977 to have Linkletter and the guru speak by phone on live TV.

At the 4:30 mark a passage from one of the most infamous TV interviews ever, Siegel questioning a seriously inebriated Truman Capote in 1978, a time before the commodification of dysfunction was prevalent.

One of my favorite video clips of all time: Smartmouth Siegel interviews labia salesman Al Goldstein and comedian Jerry Lewis in 1976. When not busy composing the world’s finest beaver shots, Goldstein apparently had a newsletter about tech tools. He shows off a $3900 calculator watch and a $2200 portable phone. Lewis, easily the biggest tool on the stage, flaunts his wealth the way only a truly insecure man can.

“America Quickly Pulled Ahead Of The Rest Of The World In Almost Every New Technology”

January 13, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Northwestern economist Robert Gordon may be too bearish on the transformative powers of the Internet, but he does make a good case that the technological innovations of a century ago dwarf the impact of the information revolution. 

A well-written and sadly un-bylined Economist review of the academic’s new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, looks at how the wheels came off the U.S. locomotive in the 1970s, courtesy of the rise of global competition and OPEC along with increasing inequality on the homefront. Gordon is dour about the prospects of a new American century, believing technologists are offering thin gruel and that Moore’s Law is running aground. The reviewer thinks the economist is ultimately too dismissive of Silicon Valley.

An excerpt:

The technological revolutions of the late 19th century transformed the world. The life that Americans led before that is unrecognisable. Their idea of speed was defined by horses. The rhythm of their days was dictated by the rise and fall of the sun. The most basic daily tasks—getting water for a bath or washing clothes—were back-breaking chores. As Mr Gordon shows, a succession of revolutions transformed every aspect of life. The invention of electricity brought light in the evenings. The invention of the telephone killed distance. The invention of what General Electric called “electric servants” liberated women from domestic slavery. The speed of change was also remarkable. In the 30 years from 1870 to 1900 railway companies added 20 miles of track each day. By the turn of the century, Sears Roebuck, a mail-order company that was founded in 1893, was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day from a catalogue of 1,162 pages. The price of cars plummeted by 63% between 1912 and 1930, while the proportion of American households that had access to a car increased from just over 2% to 89.8%.

America quickly pulled ahead of the rest of the world in almost every new technology—a locomotive to Europe’s snail, as Andrew Carnegie put it. In 1900 Americans had four times as many telephones per person as the British, six times as many as the Germans and 20 times as many as the French. Almost one-sixth of the world’s railway traffic passed through a single American city, Chicago. Thirty years later Americans owned more than 78% of the world’s motor cars. It took the French until 1948 to have the same access to cars and electricity that America had in 1912.

The Great Depression did a little to slow America’s momentum. But the private sector continued to innovate. By some measures, the 1930s were the most productive decade in terms of the numbers of inventions and patents granted relative to the size of the economy. Franklin Roosevelt’s government invested in productive capacity with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam.

The second world war demonstrated the astonishing power of America’s production machine. After 1945 America consolidated its global pre-eminence by constructing a new global order, with the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods institutions, and by pouring money into higher education. The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of prosperity in which even people with no more than a high-school education could enjoy a steady job, a house in the suburbs and a safe retirement.

But Mr Gordon’s tone grows gloomy when he turns to the 1970s.•

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“Public Policy Can Play A Powerful Role In Curbing The Ill Effects Of Technological Disruption”

January 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It’s not a done deal that technological employment will be widespread, that the “lights-out” factory will become the norm, but it’s possible to the extent that we should worry about such a scary situation now.

I doubt the answers will lie in somehow reigning in technology. Not to overly anthropomorphize robots, but they have a “life” of their own. If humans and machines can both do the same job, the work will ultimately become the domain of AI. The solutions, if needed, will have to emerge from policy. Not the kind that artificially limits machines, but the type that provides security derived from social safety nets. 

In an In These Times article, David Moberg writes that “much will depend on whether we humans leave robotization to the free market or whether we take deliberate steps to shape our future relationships with robots.” I disagree with his suggestion that perhaps we can design robots to merely augment human production. That’s implausible and at best an intermediary step, but the author writes intelligently on the topic.

An excerpt:

If we’re on the brink of a period of robotic upheaval, labor organizing will be more crucial than ever. Workers will need unions with the power to negotiate the needs of the displaced.

Another aspect of the disruption could be an exacerbation of economic inequality. MIT economist David Autor argues that the advent of computing in the late 1970s helped drive our current stratification. As demand increased for abstract labor (college-educated workers using computers) and decreased for manual, routine labor (service workers with few skilled tasks), he says, the pay for different occupations consequently became more polarized, fueling the rise of inequality.

But Lawrence Mishel and his Economic Policy Institute colleagues, along with Dean Baker, argue that this model of polarization misses important nuances of contemporary labor markets and ignores the primary driver of inequality: public policy, not robots. They point to a range of U.S. policies, including encouragement of financial sector growth and suppression of the minimum wage, as contributing to burgeoning inequality. 

No matter who is right, it’s indisputable that public policy, in addition to unions, can play a powerful role in curbing the ill effects of technological disruption.

Luckily, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.•

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“Consciousness Doesn’t Happen. It’s A Mistaken Construct.”

January 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a piece that landed on Afflictor’s “50 Great 2015 Articles Online for Free” list, the Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano wrote of building an artificial brain, a process which would strip from gray matter its mysticism, arguing that consciousness was merely a sort of illusion perpetrated by the computers in our heads. Graziano furthers the discussion in a new Atlantic piece, suggesting that once we separate false narratives from explanations of consciousness, we may be able to hasten the creation of intelligent machines. An excerpt:

The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It’s a quick sketch.

What’s it a sketch of? The brain processes information. It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That’s the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness.

This is why we can’t explain how the brain produces consciousness. It’s like explaining how white light gets purified of all colors. The answer is, it doesn’t. Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.•

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“Small Drones Have Also Proven To Be Effective Tools Of Mischief”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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For every action, a reaction: Small drones, in addition to all the good they can do, can be used for illicit surveillance and delivering explosives and smuggling, among other nefarious deeds, so Michigan researchers created a concept prototype of an anti-drone tool called “robotic falconry,” which nets the interloping technology and commandeers it to a safe place. What will the countermeasure be when spy drones can fit on the head of a pin? There’ll be a market, so something will emerge.

From Marcia Goodrich at Michigan Tech News:

In January 2015, a Washington, DC, hobbyist accidentally flew his DJI Phantom quadcopter drone over the White House fence and crashed it on the lawn.

Two years earlier, a prankster sent his drone toward German prime minister Angela Merkel during a campaign rally.

Small drones have also proven to be effective tools of mischief that doesn’t make the national news, from spying to smuggling to hacking. So when Mo Rastgaar was watching World Cup soccer and heard about snipers protecting the crowd, he doubted that they’d fully understood a drone’s potential.

“I thought, ‘If the threat is a drone, you really don’t want to shoot it down—it might contain explosives and blow up. What you want to do is catch it and get it out of there.’”

Safe Drone Catcher

So Rastgaar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, began work on a drone catcher, which could pursue and capture rogue drones that might threaten military installations, air traffic, sporting events—even the White House.•

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“The Most Important Resource For Prospective Space Miners Is Water”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In her BBC article about asteroid mining, Sarah Cruddas asks a vital question: “Would it be worth it?” If we’re not placing any onerous timeframes on such prospecting, the answer, of course, is “yes.” Exploring and colonizing space will require us to build using resources gathered up there, since transporting them is prohibitively expensive. Even more vital than attaining iron for tools is securing a steady supply of H2O. As the author notes, the first water to be extracted from an asteroid will “mark the beginning of new era.” An excerpt:

The first thing to understand about space mining is that it is not only about mining asteroids, or even the Moon and then returning those resources back to Earth. “Instead, there is a lot of value in keeping the resources in space and using them to continue our exploration of the Solar System and beyond,” says Anderson. 

The most important resource for prospective space miners is water. The reason: travelling into space by current standards is the equivalent of taking a road trip across America, but having to bring all your fuel with you – only much worse. It takes more energy to escape the first 300 kilometres from Earth than the next 300 million kilometres. “Once in Earth’s orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System,” says Lewicki.

But if rocket fuel was sourced from space for space, that problem can be avoided. When water is broken into its constituents – hydrogen and oxygen – you have two of the most commonly used elements in rocket fuel. What is most exciting for those looking to mine space is that water is throughout our Solar System. It is on the Moon, Mars and asteroids, and that’s just the places we know about.

Asteroids are of particular interest to Planetary Resources. “We know asteroids have water because it has been found on meteorites which have landed on the surface of the Earth,” says Lewicki. “They also don’t need much energy to land on. It’s easier than a trip to the surface of the Moon.” These near-Earth asteroids could act as off-world ‘gas stations’.

And as humans venture beyond Earth orbit, water will be essential for life support and growing food.•

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“Look For The Most Frantic Person In The Lineup And You Can Bet They’re Working With An App”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Some people actually believe that those participating in the Gig Economy, that Libertarian wet dream, are mostly entrepreneurial souls gladly Ubering others just until they secure seed money for their startup. That’s preposterous.

Piecework employment isn’t good at all for Labor unless basic income in uncoupled from work, which isn’t the arrangement most citizens find themselves in. And if wages remain flat and too many people are reduced to rabbits with tasks but no benefits, we’re in a collective quandary.

Andrew Callaway has penned a Policy Alternatives article about his perplexing experiences in the so-called Sharing Economy. The writer ultimately doesn’t feel that such an arrangement is bad for everyone, but that most will not prosper within its new rules. The opening:

If you spend enough time in San Francisco, you’ll notice sharing economy workers everywhere. While you’re waiting to get some food, look for the most frantic person in the lineup and you can bet they’re working with an app. Some of them are colour-coded: workers in orange T-shirts are with Caviar, a food delivery app; those in green represent Instacart, an app for delivering groceries. The blue jackets riding Razor scooters are with Luxe—if you’re still driving yourself around this city, these app workers will park your car. 

In the Bay Area, there are thousands of such people running through the aisles, fidgeting in line and racing against the clock. They spend most of their time in cars, where it can be harder to spot them. Oftentimes they’re double-parked in the bike lane, picking up a burrito from inside an adjacent restaurant or waiting for a passenger to come down from the apartment on top. If you look closely, you’ll see a placard in the window that says Uber or a glowing pink moustache indicating they drive around Lyft’s passengers. Last summer, I was one of them.

Oh, Canada! I’m writing you from Berkeley, California to warn you about this thing called “the sharing economy.” Since no one is really sharing anything, many of us prefer the term “the exploitation economy,” but due to its prevalence many in the Bay Area simply think of it as “the economy.”•

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“It Felt Good To See The Blood Coming Out”

January 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The novelist Jennifer Egan began penning occasional features for the New York Times Magazine in the 1990s. Her 1997 piece, “The Thin Red Line,” looked at the self-harming habit of cutting, in which (mostly) adolescent girls slice their skin to relieve pressure. Like drugs or alcohol, it’s a self-destructive coping mechanism, and similar to anorexia or anxiety, it’s a disorder that seems a consequence of us being mismatched to the modern world we’ve created. The article may have been the first time a lot of Americans understood the behavior. The opening:

One Saturday night in January, Jill McArdle went to a party some distance from her home in West Beverly, a fiercely Irish enclave on Chicago’s South Side. She was anxious before setting out; she’d been having a hard time in social situations — parties, especially. At 5 feet 10 inches with long blond hair, green eyes and an underbite that often makes her look as if she’s half-smiling, Jill cuts an imposing figure for 16; she is the sort of girl boys notice instantly and are sometimes afraid of. And the fear is mutual, despite her air of confidence.

Jill’s troubles begin with her own desire to make everyone happy, a guiding principle that yields mixed results in the flirtatious, beer-swilling atmosphere of teen-age parties. ”I feel I have to be all cute and sexy for these boys,” she says. ”And the next morning when I realize what a fool I looked like, it’s the worst feeling ever….’Oh God, what did I do? Was I flirting with that boy? Is his girlfriend in school tomorrow going to give me a hard time? Are they all going to hate me?’ ”

Watching Jill in action, you would never guess she was prone to this sort of self-scrutiny. Winner of her cheerleading squad’s coveted Spirit Award last year, she is part of a Catholic-school crowd consisting mostly of fellow cheerleaders and the male athletes they cheer for, clean-cut kids who congregate in basement rec rooms of spare, working-class houses where hockey sticks hang on the walls and a fish tank sometimes bubbles in one corner. Jill is a popular, even dominating presence at these parties; once she introduced a series of guys to me with the phrase, ”This is my boy,” her arm slung across the shoulders of some shy youth in a baseball cap, usually shorter than she, whose name invariably seemed to be Kevin or Patrick.

But in truth, the pressures of adolescence have wreaked extraordinary havoc in Jill’s life. ”Around my house there’s this park, and there used to be like a hundred kids hanging out up there,” she says, recalling her first year in high school, two years ago. ”And the boys would say stuff to me that was so disgusting … perverted stuff, and I’d just be so embarrassed. But the older girls assumed that I was a slut…. They’d give me dirty looks in school.” Blaming herself for having somehow provoked these reactions, Jill began to feel ashamed and isolated. Her unease spiraled into panic in the spring of that year, when a boy she’d trusted began spreading lies about her. ”He goes and tells all of his friends that I did all this sexual stuff with him, and I was just blown away. It made me feel dirty, like I was absolutely nothing.”

Jill, then 14, found herself moved to do something she had never done before. ”I was in the bathroom going completely crazy, just bawling my eyes out, and I think my mom was wallpapering — there was a wallpaper cutter there. I had so much anxiety, I couldn’t concentrate on anything until I somehow let that out, and not being able to let it out in words, I took the razor and started cutting my leg and I got excited about seeing my blood. It felt good to see the blood coming out, like that was my other pain leaving, too. It felt right and it felt good for me to let it out that way.”

Jill had made a galvanizing discovery: cutting herself could temporarily ease her emotional distress. It became a habit.•

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A Note From 1852 About Monkey Entertainers

January 12, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the August 7, 1852 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Sounds Like A Sea Change To Me”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It’s difficult to imagine anything as intractable as a Big Auto corporation with thousands of employees and shareholders, and they don’t get more venerable than Ford, birthplace of the Model T, brainchild of the namesake plutocrat who was sometimes a populist but just as often an employer of strike-breaking Pinkertons. It was Henry Ford, after all, who sold America its first set of wheels.

That legendary car maker is interested in reinventing itself as a “smart mobility” company, as Steven Levy learned while poking around the premises. In a smart Backchannel piece, Levy writes that old Hank’s great-grandson, William (Bill) Clay Ford, Jr., doesn’t fear Apple or Tesla, believing his own outfit can achieve bleeding-edge Digital Age greatness, that Detroit’s most famous name can compete with Silicon Valley and its EVs and ride-sharing and autonomous.

The opening:

Is the Ford Motor Company…pivoting?

Startups do it all the time, occasionally with seismic consequences. Android was originally conceived as an operating system for cameras. Slack began as a video game. Airbnb really was all about air mattresses. But none of these companies was a 113-year-old pillar of the economy, with 197,000 employees, billions of dollars spent on branding, and countless tons of metal emblazoned with the company logo rumbling along the world’s roadways. The mind reels at the notion that Ford — Ford! — would change directions like an angel-funded six-person SOMA venture switching gears after a failed app.

Yet that’s what the Ford Motor Company seems to be doing. Or at least that’s what I sensed when I attended a Ford media day in Dearborn, Michigan, last month. (It was a palate cleanser for 2016 events — CES, followed by this week’s giant Detroit Auto Show.) The point of the day was to emphasize Ford’s evolving strategy. Making cars will remain a big part of Ford, but the company is committed to an additional but vital business model, a high-tech effort based on “smart mobility.” This approach not only doesn’t focus on selling vehicles, but even embraces some instances where potential car owners might forgo a Ford, or any other vehicle, in their driveway. Part of the vision would even point people to public transit. Sounds like a sea change to me.

To confirm whether this is indeed an epochal moment, I tap the perfect source: William Clay Ford, Jr. He’s executive chairman (and a former CEO) of the company founded by his great-grandfather in 1903, and he’s altogether one the most intriguing figures in the auto industry; his weaves between anachronism and futurist qualify him for a cognitive DUI. Bill, I ask (Can I call you Bill?), is Ford attempting the biggest pivot of all time?•

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“This Was Shaping Up To Be The Most Surreal Year Of My Life”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

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I recall reading and loving Michael Idov’s “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” his strange 2011 GQ journalistic walkabout in which he reported from the insane Ukraine film set of certifiable auteur Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Several unforeseen WTF professional and geopolitical moments later, he found himself one of Russia’s top screenwriters, crafting successful TV shows and films during the chill of the Second Cold War, perhaps an astute social commentator or maybe an unwitting government stooge.

Idov’s written a piece about his unexpected life changes for the New York Times Magazine, which is the first excellent longform article I’ve read this new year (sorry, Sean Penn). A passage about how the magazine editor began to branch out from the news biz to show biz, which offered greater freedom from the Kremlin’s intentionally fuzzy censorship rules:

Russia and the United States had exchanged the first salvos in the new cold war. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, barring certain apparatchiks from entering the United States. In an asymmetric response, the Duma barred all Americans from adopting Russian children — a sudden jolt of direct discrimination, as my wife and I had been considering exactly that.

At work, too, not a week seemed to pass without a new law designed to curb free speech. Hastily adopted legislation basically made it illegal to offend any social group — though as wielded by the authorities, the new laws primarily seemed to protect the strong from the weak. Impugning the Soviet Union’s conduct in World War II was illegal. Disrespecting Russia’s ‘‘territorial integrity’’ was illegal. Mentioning drugs or suicide in a way that could be construed as ‘‘instructional’’ was illegal, and prosecutors could use an agency called Roskomnadzor to shut down any website for so much as an unruly user comment. A vile anti-gay law banned speech that ‘‘creates false equivalence between traditional and nontraditional lifestyle.’’ (This in a country whose pop stars’ wardrobes suggest that Russia’s biggest natural resource is rhinestones.) I had to fight Condé Nast’s in-house counsel for the right to publish a positive review of the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra; he objected to the use of the word ‘‘love’’ to describe a same-sex relationship.

The genius of all these laws was in their purposeful inconsistency, which ensured that almost anyone could be silenced at any time; they were designed to be implemented capriciously, to weed out undesirables. Editing a magazine became hazardous to your health — mental and otherwise. GQ’s political columnist, Andrew Ryvkin, was beaten up on the street by two pro-­Putin writers of some renown, Sergei Minaev and Eduard Bagirov. I myself ended up slapping a Tatler editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theater after he wrote anti-­Semitic diatribes about me. This was shaping up to be the most surreal year of my life.

One night, I called Ryvkin with a spur-­of-­the-­moment idea: ‘‘Let’s write Louie, but about me in Moscow.’’ Ryvkin had a similar background to mine (he spent his formative years in Boston) and similar comedic sensibilities; we both worshiped 30 Rock and Louis C.K. Three weeks, a few joints and several pizzas later, we had a pilot. The main character, a neurotic, blocked, broke Brooklyn novelist, comes to Moscow to promote his book, gets Jew-­baited on live TV by a glib Russian oligarch and reconnects with his childhood friend Roman, now an out-­of-­control photographer modeled on Terry Richardson. The friends spend most of the episode crafting an appropriate response to the slur and finally head over to the oligarch’s club to beat him up. When they get there, however, the offender offers the novelist a plum job in Moscow, forcing him to sell out on the spot.

The script was a mishmash of autobiography and anger, filled with profanity, drug use, gay jokes, Nazi jokes and weird structural hiccups. I was venting every frustration of my day job. In a good measure of how little I cared about the pilot’s suitability for Russian TV, I named its protagonist Matt Rushkin, ‘‘Rashka’’ being an émigré’s derogatory term for Russia itself.•

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“Oregon’s Founding Is Part Of The Forgotten History Of Racism In The American West”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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That wonderful Wallace Shawn gathered all his guilt into an indigestible lump to write, in 1996, The Designated Mourner, about intellect under siege as society goes up in flames. Not as good as Aunt Dan and Lemon or Marie and Bruce, but interesting stuff in the run-up to the new millennium. In retrospect, Shawn seemed to have misfired a bit. It wasn’t the top that was vanishing but the middle. 

Another thing we’ve lost besides the middle in our new normal is memory, that decidedly un-pliant thing. Even things from a few years ago seem like ancient history. Perhaps more than designated mourners what we need now are designated reminders, people who can point out that the world didn’t begin with downloads.

One of the most colorful of current reminders is Matt Novak, founder of Paleofuture. After moving that site at Gizmodo, Novak penned “Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia,” a post that seems very timely right now. Not that Oregonians are responsible for the Bundy brigade of anti-government interlopers, but it does speak to the history of regional resistance to authority. The opening:

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.

Waddles Coffee Shop in Portland, Oregon was a popular restaurant in the 1950s for both locals and travelers alike. The drive-in catered to America’s postwar obsession with car culture, allowing people to get coffee and a slice of pie without even leaving their vehicle. But if you happened to be black, the owners of Waddles implored you to keep on driving. The restaurant had a sign outside with a very clear message: “White Trade Only — Please.”

It’s the kind of scene from the 1950s that’s so hard for many Americans to imagine happening outside of the Jim Crow South. How could a progressive, northern city like Portland have allowed a restaurant to exclude non-white patrons? This had to be an anomaly, right? In reality it was far too common in Oregon, a state that was explicitly founded as a kind of white utopia.•

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“The American Consciousness About Inequality Is Frozen In A Previous Era”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Life has always been, in some sense, a tale of two cities, those who have and those who have not–or at least much less. Even granting that, however, we’re living in a wildly unequal world. In a Factor-Tech piece, Lucy Ingham analyzes the conditions that have made it possible for the 1% to own most of the assets. She traces concentrated wealth in the U.S. back to the Ronald Reagan economic policies (tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, etc.) and a less sexy salvo, a change in law allowing companies to buy back large amounts of their own stock. The writer thinks financialization, more than automation, is the problem, and the result of a growing underclass has been a rising police state. An excerpt:

Inequality has always existed, and there is an argument to say it’s an inherent part of human society. However, the level of inequality is now far beyond what we perceive it to be, and that’s a big problem.

“The American consciousness about inequality is frozen in a previous era,” says [Les] Leopold, citing the US results of an international poll about the perceived gap between entry level workers’ and CEOs’ pay as an example.

In the poll, people from all walks of life and political affiliation were asked to state what they thought the average gap was between the lowest and highest earners at a typical company.

“By and large, no matter what their age or background or political affiliation was, it sort of came out to about 40:1 – for every one dollar to the entry-level worker, 40 to the CEO,” says Leopold. “That’s kind of what it was in 1970.”

The reality, according to The Labor Institute’s data about the top 100 CEOs, is 829:1, making the inequality gap around 20 times larger that people perceived it to be. In 2016 the Institute believes it will be worse still, projecting 859:1.

Yet when asked in the poll what the ratio should be, participants consistently said it should be even lower that the imagined rate of 40:1.

“Strong Republicans in this survey think it ought to be 12:1, strong Democrats say 5:1, the average is about 8:1,” adds Leopold.

So how have we not noticed that the reality is so very far from our perceptions?•

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“The Coming Together Of People I Find Obscene As A Principle. It Is Not Human.”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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So sad to hear of the death of David Bowie, one of the great creative minds of his era and a constant reader. Rolling Stone, the magazine that today publishes Sean Penn’s jungle flatulence, sat Bowie and William S. Burroughs down for a chat in 1974. The two artists may have arrived at a similar place, but they sure came to it from different angles, the rock star as the man who fell to Earth and the writer seemingly escaped from the planet’s core like a mole. In a section that begins with the Ziggy Stardust backstory, Bowie ultimately voices concerns about the Global Village in much the same way that Marshall McLuhan had. An excerpt:

William S. Burroughs:

Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.

David Bowie:

Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.

William S. Burroughs:

Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.

David Bowie:

Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!

William S. Burroughs:

Yes, I can believe that. The parallels are definitely there, and it sounds good.

David Bowie:

I must have the total image of a stage show. It has to be total with me. I’m just not content writing songs, I want to make it three-dimensional. Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

William S. Burroughs:

It’s the whole performance. It’s not like somebody sitting down at the piano and just playing a piece.

Bowie: A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.

William S. Burroughs:

The revolution will come from ignoring the others out of existence.

David Bowie:

Really. Now we have people who are making it happen on a level faster than ever. People who are into groups like Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, who are denying totally and irrevocably the existence of people who are into The Stones and The Beatles. The gap has decreased from twenty years to ten years.

William S. Burroughs:

The escalating rate of change. The media are really responsible for most of this. Which produces an incalculable effect.

David Bowie:

Once upon a time, even when I was 13 or 14, for me it was between 14 and 40 that you were old. Basically. But now it is 18-year-olds and 26-year-olds – there can be incredible discrepancies, which is really quite alarming. We are not trying to bring people together, but to wonder how much longer we’ve got. It would be positively boring if minds were in tune. I’m more interested in whether the planet is going to survive.

William S. Burroughs:

Actually, the contrary is happening; people are getting further and further apart.

David Bowie:

The idea of getting minds together smacks of the flower power period to me. The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.•

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Old Print Article: Enigmarelle The Automaton, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1904)

January 10, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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I don’t know if the 1904 “automaton” known as Enigmarelle qualifies, in retrospect, for the Uncanny Valley Effect, but one look at this creepbot will make you want to hide under a porch. Jesus H. Christ!

Frederick J. Ireland’s supposedly motorized brainchild didn’t talk, but it could simulate the way a human writes, dances, rides a bicycle, etc. The catch? It apparently wasn’t a robot at all but a fauxbot, a convincing hoax in which a human was made to look like an intelligent machine. Nonetheless, it was a longtime hit at the Hippodrome in London and at vaudeville halls in the U.S. The writer of an article in the August 28, 1904 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was taken in by the ruse.

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“Did This Mean We Were Nearing The Man?”

January 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Sean Penn screen performances often depend on quantity as much as quality–not the best acting, but the most acting–so it’s no surprise his attempt at gonzo journalism, a Rolling Stone feature he wrote about his facacta jungle interview of Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (or “El Chapo” as he’s known to his business associates) is logorrheic. The short Q&A embedded within the long article is deeply unsatisfying and the piece as a whole is a mess, though not one without interest. It’s more fascinating, though, for allowing a close-up of the actor-director’s staccato brain droppings and the technological logistics of securing a clandestine meeting with Mexico’s most-wanted man than for any insight into the cartel kingpin. It only takes two paragraphs for Penn to describe his very own Oscar Zeta Acosta in this way: “Espinoza is the owl who flies among falcons.” Bless his editor.

Penn, unsurprisingly, has deep sympathy for El Chapo despite his beheadings of those he wanted to eliminate and murders of priests who refused extortion demands, arguing that American drug users are complicit in these crimes. In that case, Penn’s nose should be arrested for multiple homicide. Galling that the lightweight inquisition allows the subject to downplay his horrific violence and an odd way to protest the U.S. War on Drugs, which is an undoubtedly stupid thing. An excerpt:

It’s been about two hours of flight, when we descend from above the lush peaks to ward a sea-level field. The pilot, using his encrypted cellphone, talks to the ground. I sense that the military is beefing up operations in its search area. Our original landing zone has suddenly been deemed insecure. After quite a bit of chatter from ground to air, and some unnervingly low altitude circling, we find an alternate dirt patch where two SUVs wait in the shade of an adjacent tree line, and land. The flight had been just bumpy enough that each of us had taken a few swigs off a bottle of Honor tequila, a new brand that Kate is marketing. I step from plane to earth, ever so slightly sobering my bearings, and move toward the beckoning waves of waiting drivers. I throw my satchel into the open back of one of the SUVs, and lumber over to the tree line to take a piss. Dick in hand, I do consider it among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.

Espinoza had recently undergone back surgery. He stretched, readjusted his surgical corset, exposing it. It dawns on me that one of our greeters might mistake the corset for a device that contains a wire, a chip, a tracker. With all their eyes on him, Espinoza methodically adjusts the Velcro toward his belly, slowly looks up, sharing his trademark smile with the suspicious eyes around him. Then, “Cirugia de espalda [back surgery],” he says. Situation defused.

We embark into the dense, mountainous jungle in a two-truck convoy, crossing through river after river for seven long hours. Espinoza and El Alto, with a driver in the front vehicle, myself and Kate with Alonzo and Alfredo in the rear. At times the jungle opens up to farmland, then closes again into forest. As the elevation begins to climb, road signage announces approaching townships. And then, as it seems we are at the entrance of Oz, the highest peak visibly within reach, we arrive at a military checkpoint. Two uniformed government soldiers, weapons at the ready, approach our vehicle. Alfredo lowers his passenger window; the soldiers back away, looking embarrassed, and wave us through. Wow. So it is, the power of a Guzman face. And the corruption of an institution. Did this mean we were nearing the man?

It was still several hours into the jungle before any sign we were getting closer. Then, strangers appear as if from nowhere, onto the dirt track, checking in with our drivers and exchanging hand radios. We move on. Small villages materialize from the jungle; protective peasant eyes relax at the wave of a familiar driver. Cellphones are of no use here, so I imagine there are radio repeaters on topographical high points facilitating their internal communications.

We’d left Los Angeles at 7 a.m. By 9 p.m. on the dash clock we arrive at a clearing where several SUVs are parked. A small crew of men hover. On a knoll above, I see a few weathered bungalows. I get out of the truck, search the faces of the crew for approval that I may walk to the trunk to secure my bag. Nods follow. I move. And, when I do…there he is. Right beside the truck. The world’s most famous fugitive: El Chapo.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

January 10, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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

  1. andrew offutt pulp sex books
  2. hollywood producer jerry weintraub
  3. freeman dyson hubble telescope photography
  4. history of the old pony express
  5. dieter rams discussing his designs
  6. horse to human blood transfusions
  7. who will be the first trillionaire?
  8. article about altman’s california split
  9. did ernest hemingway run for president?
  10. margaret atwood on human extinction

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 9, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

Before descending on Oregon, the Bundy militia defended our borders from a bearded intruder.

Before descending on Oregon, the Bundy militia defended our borders from a bearded foreign invader.

I brought toys for everyone.

I brought toys for everyone.

I'll get him!

I’ll get him!

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  • The populist energy of Occupy has been reawakened by Bernie Sanders.
  • IBM’s Watson is either a great victor or a stunning disappointment.
  • Paul La Farge doesn’t believe e-book have endangered the art of reading.
  • VR will allow cagefighting with Genghis Khan and sex with promiscuous ghosts.

“We Might Wonder Whether We Have Any Hope Of Predicting How It Will Be 10, 20 Or 50 Years From Now”

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

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Extremely long-term predictions are the safest bets we can make, not only because we’ll be long gone by the hour of reckoning (unless immortality becomes possible, which some predict), but because pretty much anything we can dream up–and lots we can’t–will come to pass should we snake our way through the Anthropocene and carry on for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

Prognostications aimed a few decades in the future are the most fraught, yet we have no choice but to continually forecast since we have to set policy for not only now but for several generations. In a Financial Times review of a slate of books about predicting tomorrow, philosopher Stephen Cave asserts that “rarely can the future be predicted by simply extending current trajectories,” while acknowledging that we must at least try to envision what’s possibly next. His opening:

As a boy, I enthusiastically read the British comic 2000 AD. It told sci-fi tales set in the far future — which at that point meant any date after 1999. Judging by its stories, it seemed obvious back then that at the dawn of the next millennium we would be riding our hover-boards to engage in laser battles with rogue robots — though only, of course, if we survived the coming nuclear apocalypse.

Now it is 2016, a date so far into the future that it gives me vertigo. But it is not the future of my teenage imaginings. We were spared the apocalypse; the cold war ended as suddenly as a computer game switched off by a bored child. Instead of rogue robots, we are battling religiously motivated terrorists. And in place of a laser gun, I have an internet-enabled smartphone — a far more wondrous device that is transforming many aspects of our lives but which was entirely unforeseen by anyone in the 1980s.

Given no one a few decades ago successfully predicted how the world would be today, we might wonder whether we have any hope of predicting how it will be 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Yet we are compelled to try. We are not passive observers of an unfolding drama, but actors shaping the story — and with a strong interest in how it turns out. Every time we take a new job or make a decision about our children’s education, we are speculating about how events will unfold. This makes us all both forecasters and visionaries, attempting to read the trends and at the same time to create the future that we want for ourselves.•

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“Things Like Memory And Engagement Are Not Just Like Computers Loading And Unloading Data”

January 8, 2016 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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Tom Chatfield, an uncommonly thoughtful commenter on the technological world we’ve built for ourselves, is interviewed by Nigel Warburton of Aeon about staying human in a machine age. In the seven-minute piece, Chatfield notes that games in the Digital Age have become more meaningful than work in many instances because the former builds skills in players while the latter looks to replace the messy human component. 

A much more exiting model of human-machine interaction, Chatfield offers, is one where we maximize what people and AI are each good at. That would be great and is doable in the short run if we choose to approach the situation that way, but I do believe that ultimately, whatever tasks that both humans and machines can do will be ceded almost entirely to silicon. A freestyle-chess system to production will have a short shelf life in most applications. We may be left to figure out brand new areas in which we can thrive and define why we exist.

At any rate, smart stuff about automated systems. Watch here.

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“These Particular Views Could Almost Have Come From The Mouth Of Bernie Sanders”

January 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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If you’d asked me what Charles Koch eats for lunch, I would have guessed pulled pork or jerk chicken. The billionaire industrialist and right-wing benefactor opted for the former when he sat down to dine and talk with Stephen Foley of the Financial Times for an interesting interview. Funny that Koch now regrets many of the policies he’s spent elephantine sums supporting in the new century. (Of course, it’s not the first time he’s voiced opinions at odds with the think-tanks, projects and politicians he bankrolls.) Something tells me he’ll be regretting the beliefs he currently supports in another decade.

An excerpt about the current slate of GOP 2016 hopefuls:

I ask about the rhetorical turn the race has taken when it comes to dealing with Islamist terror, and about Trump’s assertion that the US could require all Muslims in the country to register with the government.

“Well, then you destroy our free society,” Koch says of the idea. “Who is it that said, ‘If you want to defend your liberty, the first thing you’ve got to do is defend the liberty of people you like the least’?”

He then expounds on the war on terror. “We have been doing this for a dozen years. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Has that made us safer? Has that made the world safer? It seems like we’re more worried about it now than we were then, so we need to examine these strategies.”

It’s a view that also contrasts with that of another Republican frontrunner; Ted Cruz’s plan to carpet-bomb Isis strongholds is anathema to Koch. “I’ve studied revolutionaries a lot,” he says. “Mao said that the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims. Not that we don’t need to defend ourselves and have better intelligence and all that, but how do we create an unfriendly sea for the terrorists in the Muslim communities? We haven’t done a good job of that.” With about 1.6bn Muslims worldwide “in country after country. What,” he asks, “are we going to do: go bomb each one of them?”

These particular views could almost have come from the mouth of Bernie Sanders, the socialist challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and a regular basher of the Kochs.•

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“We Can Make An Animal Without A Heart”

January 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It’s usually better to worry too soon than too late about an ethical quandary, but the National Institute of Health is thinking far in advance when it expresses concern about scientists attempting to grow human organs in lab animals. It’s not that the NIH believes such experiments are bad for the creatures–that would be understandable–but the agency wants to halt the research because it feels injecting human cells into other species may invest them with a human level of understanding. It’s really difficult to believe that’s happening anytime soon.

In a MIT Technology Review report, Anthony Regalado reports that numerous American labs are pushing forward on this front despite threats of funding being pulled. An excerpt:

The experiments rely on a cutting-edge fusion of technologies, including recent breakthroughs in stem-cell biology and gene-editing techniques. By modifying genes, scientists can now easily change the DNA in pig or sheep embryos so that they are genetically incapable of forming a specific tissue. Then, by adding stem cells from a person, they hope the human cells will take over the job of forming the missing organ, which could then be harvested from the animal for use in a transplant operation.

“We can make an animal without a heart. We have engineered pigs that lack skeletal muscles and blood vessels,” says Daniel Garry, a cardiologist who leads a chimera project at the University of Minnesota. While such pigs aren’t viable, they can develop properly if a few cells are added from a normal pig embryo. Garry says he’s already melded two pigs in this way and recently won a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Army, which funds some biomedical research, to try to grow human hearts in swine.

…

The worry is that the animals might turn out to be a little too human for comfort, say ending up with human reproductive cells, patches of people hair, or just higher intelligence. “We are not near the island of Dr. Moreau, but science moves fast,” NIH ethicist David Resnik said during the agency’s November meeting. “The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people.”•

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A Brief Note From 1893 About Heavyweights

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

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From the October 30, 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Critics Fear That Digital Technology Has Put This Gift In Peril”

January 7, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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From Socrates to Snapchat, technology has been feared as a threat to human intelligence and memory, though it usually ends up making us better. In a smart Paul La Farge Nautilus essay, the writer argues the Internet and e-books will not be the ruination of us, particularly our ability to read.

For someone like myself who was raised on printed matter, there’s a special joy in devouring paper books, but I don’t think a complete transition from that media would be a disaster. I’m also not overly concerned about the absolute flood of information now available to all of us. I do think the brain can rewire to accommodate such a challenge, even if memory isn’t particularly elastic.

The medium is the message and our tools shape us after we shape them, sure, but I don’t think human learning is that simple, either. We seem awfully adept at choosing the information we want, regardless of the vehicle that delivers it. That process appears more internal than anything, for better or worse. We’re not bad now where we used to be good. We’ve always been a mix of those things and probably always will be.

La Farge’s opening:

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,

… the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.

A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril.•

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“They Would Build Structures Using Mars’ Soil As A Material”

January 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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There’s likely nothing theoretically impossible about terraforming a planet, but it would sure be complicated and the unintended consequences would be too many to count. That won’t stop the plans from proliferating, however, as the idea that we must become a multi-planet species has taken hold. Young Spanish architect Alberto Villanueva has dreamed up an elegant scheme, and one that doesn’t rely on explosions, to repurpose Mars’ natural resources to remake its environment. From 3tags.org:

Choosing Mars as “the hardest scene,” Villanueva created a concept that would use the planet’s newly discovered frozen water and soil as building materials.

3D printers could be sent to selected craters that hold water beneath the surface, where they would build structures using Mars’ soil as a material. These could then collect energy from electromagnetic fields in the surrounding areas to melt the crater ice. Over a period of six months the towers would disintegrate, and be replaced by new bio-luminescent structures that could be printed using fungi and bacteria feeding off the newly melted water.

These towers would then convert the planet’s carbon dioxide into oxygen. The architect estimates that enough will have accumulated after two months to “form and give consistency to the small atmospheric layer of the planet.” After this period, Villaneuva believes there will be enough oxygen for future inhabitants to breathe on the planet.

“In this case the building as an organic element fades after about five years, deleting any footprint on the planet and maintaining a living atmosphere,” he said.•

MARS UTOPIA (Teaser) from Alberto Villanueva on Vimeo.

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