Friday, December 20, 2024
The Social Media Discourse of Engaged Partisans is Toxic Even When Politics are Irrelevant
Significance Statement
Political discourse on social media is infamously uncivil. Prevailing explanations argue that such incivility is driven by differences in ideological or social-identity conflict—partisans are uncivil because the political stakes are so high. This report considers a different (albeit not contradictory) possibility—that online political discourse tends to be uncivil because the people who opt into such discourse are generally uncivil. Indeed, people who opt into political discourse tend to be especially toxic, even when discussing nonpolitical topics in nonpartisan contexts. Such individuals disproportionately dominate political discourse online, thereby undermining the public sphere as a venue for inclusive debate.
Abstract
Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. This study—which analyzes the commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)—tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g. r/progressive, r/conservatives) than in nonpartisan contexts (e.g. r/movies, r/programming). Next, we analyzed hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million users and found robust evidence that: (i) the discourse of people whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts is also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts (i.e. people are not politics-only toxicity specialists); and (ii) when considering only nonpartisan contexts, the discourse of people who also comment in partisan contexts is more toxic than the discourse of people who do not. These effects were not driven by socialization processes whereby people overgeneralized toxic behavioral norms they had learned in partisan contexts. In contrast to speculation about the need for partisans to engage beyond their echo chambers, toxicity in nonpartisan contexts was higher among people who also comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts (bilaterally engaged users) than among people who also comment in only left-wing or right-wing contexts (unilaterally engaged users). The discussion considers implications for democratic functioning and theories of polarization. (...)
Discussion
Taken together, the results provide strong and consistent support for the troll hypothesis: (i) people who are especially toxic in partisan contexts are also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts, and (ii) engaged partisans (especially the bilaterally engaged) are more toxic than the nonengaged when discussing nonpolitical content in nonpartisan contexts. Such effects are specific to uncivil behaviors (rather than to negativity in general) and do not result from some sort of socialization process in partisan subreddits. They emerge regardless of political lean, and they apply to users whose partisan comments take place in contexts that are explicitly political or ostensibly nonpolitical—although they are especially strong for users with activity in explicitly political contexts. The effects, which emerge in virtually all nonpartisan subreddits, help to explain why political contexts tend to be more toxic than nonpolitical contexts. We conclude that just as people tend to be consistent in their online and offline political behavior, they are also consistent in their political and nonpolitical behavior.
Future research will be required to test how strongly these results generalize beyond Reddit. That said, a strength of the present study is that it investigates hundreds of millions of unique behaviors from millions of people across thousands of cultural contexts (subreddits). As such, the results are not subject to the typical concerns about a limited range of cultures or topics of discourse. In addition, social-media environments (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit) have become a core nexus for political discourse, increasingly functioning as democracy's public square. Reddit is a major context where political ideas get introduced and debated—where people of diverse backgrounds and ideologies discuss and argue about which ideas and policies are best.
The present findings have important implications for theories of political polarization. They suggest that discourse in partisan contexts is uncivil in large part because the people who opt into it are uncivil. This incivility distorts the public square. People's reluctance to contribute to political discourse—to contribute their views to the marketplace of ideas—is driven less by substantive disagreement than by the tenor of the discourse; they opt out when discourse gets heated. It is no wonder that people who are lower in trait hostility tend to opt out of online political discourse. The overrepresentation of dispositionally uncivil people in our political discourse is especially troubling because it promotes combative partisanship at the expense of deliberation and leads observers (those who also participate and those who do not) to conclude that the state of our politics is far more toxic than it really is.
There is little reason to believe that dispositionally uncivil people have better political ideas than those who are more dispositionally civil, and there is good reason to believe that the uncivil are less prone to compromise, to seek win–win solutions, or to assume that their interlocutors are people of goodwill. Consequently, the disproportionate representation of uncivil people in partisan contexts may be a significant contributor to the democratic backsliding afflicting the United States and many other nations in recent years. Theories of polarization must engage seriously with the fact that society has built a new megaphone that amplifies the voices of people whose discourse tendencies are disproportionally characterized by toxicity, moral outrage, profanity, anger, impoliteness, and low prosociality.
Past research has demonstrated that passive exposure to social-media posts from opposing partisans can exacerbate polarization, but the present study is the first to test whether people who opt into partisan discourse on one vs. both sides of the political divide tend to be especially toxic. Reddit offers its users the opportunity to join multiple communities across the political spectrum, and it gives space for constructive conversations on controversial topics. Nevertheless, our results suggest that this opportunity is exploited by people with especially uncivil tendencies. These findings contribute to an emerging sense of skepticism about whether breaking down echo chambers will reduce polarization or toxicity—at least in a straightforward way. The use of observational data allowed us to identify selection effects related to the behavior of the engaged, but further research is required to establish causal effects. (...)
Democracy requires conflict. People with differing ideological and policy preferences must compete in the marketplace of political ideas, seeking to persuade others that their own ideas are best. The present research suggests, however, that the voices that are most amplified on social media are dispositionally toxic, an arrangement that seems unlikely to cultivate the sort of constructive discussion and debate that democracies require. The incivility that the engaged partisans exhibit in contexts that are irrelevant to politics raises the concern that toxic behavior in partisan contexts might masquerade as righteousness or advocacy, but it is actually due in large part to these specific people's tendency to be uncivil in general. Consequently, an urgent priority for societies riven by polarization and democratic backsliding is to develop a means of making the public square a congenial environment not only for the dispositionally uncivil but also for people who would be willing to enter the debate if only the tenor of the discourse were less toxic.
Political discourse on social media is infamously uncivil. Prevailing explanations argue that such incivility is driven by differences in ideological or social-identity conflict—partisans are uncivil because the political stakes are so high. This report considers a different (albeit not contradictory) possibility—that online political discourse tends to be uncivil because the people who opt into such discourse are generally uncivil. Indeed, people who opt into political discourse tend to be especially toxic, even when discussing nonpolitical topics in nonpartisan contexts. Such individuals disproportionately dominate political discourse online, thereby undermining the public sphere as a venue for inclusive debate.
Abstract
Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. This study—which analyzes the commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)—tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g. r/progressive, r/conservatives) than in nonpartisan contexts (e.g. r/movies, r/programming). Next, we analyzed hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million users and found robust evidence that: (i) the discourse of people whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts is also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts (i.e. people are not politics-only toxicity specialists); and (ii) when considering only nonpartisan contexts, the discourse of people who also comment in partisan contexts is more toxic than the discourse of people who do not. These effects were not driven by socialization processes whereby people overgeneralized toxic behavioral norms they had learned in partisan contexts. In contrast to speculation about the need for partisans to engage beyond their echo chambers, toxicity in nonpartisan contexts was higher among people who also comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts (bilaterally engaged users) than among people who also comment in only left-wing or right-wing contexts (unilaterally engaged users). The discussion considers implications for democratic functioning and theories of polarization. (...)
Discussion
Taken together, the results provide strong and consistent support for the troll hypothesis: (i) people who are especially toxic in partisan contexts are also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts, and (ii) engaged partisans (especially the bilaterally engaged) are more toxic than the nonengaged when discussing nonpolitical content in nonpartisan contexts. Such effects are specific to uncivil behaviors (rather than to negativity in general) and do not result from some sort of socialization process in partisan subreddits. They emerge regardless of political lean, and they apply to users whose partisan comments take place in contexts that are explicitly political or ostensibly nonpolitical—although they are especially strong for users with activity in explicitly political contexts. The effects, which emerge in virtually all nonpartisan subreddits, help to explain why political contexts tend to be more toxic than nonpolitical contexts. We conclude that just as people tend to be consistent in their online and offline political behavior, they are also consistent in their political and nonpolitical behavior.
Future research will be required to test how strongly these results generalize beyond Reddit. That said, a strength of the present study is that it investigates hundreds of millions of unique behaviors from millions of people across thousands of cultural contexts (subreddits). As such, the results are not subject to the typical concerns about a limited range of cultures or topics of discourse. In addition, social-media environments (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit) have become a core nexus for political discourse, increasingly functioning as democracy's public square. Reddit is a major context where political ideas get introduced and debated—where people of diverse backgrounds and ideologies discuss and argue about which ideas and policies are best.
The present findings have important implications for theories of political polarization. They suggest that discourse in partisan contexts is uncivil in large part because the people who opt into it are uncivil. This incivility distorts the public square. People's reluctance to contribute to political discourse—to contribute their views to the marketplace of ideas—is driven less by substantive disagreement than by the tenor of the discourse; they opt out when discourse gets heated. It is no wonder that people who are lower in trait hostility tend to opt out of online political discourse. The overrepresentation of dispositionally uncivil people in our political discourse is especially troubling because it promotes combative partisanship at the expense of deliberation and leads observers (those who also participate and those who do not) to conclude that the state of our politics is far more toxic than it really is.
There is little reason to believe that dispositionally uncivil people have better political ideas than those who are more dispositionally civil, and there is good reason to believe that the uncivil are less prone to compromise, to seek win–win solutions, or to assume that their interlocutors are people of goodwill. Consequently, the disproportionate representation of uncivil people in partisan contexts may be a significant contributor to the democratic backsliding afflicting the United States and many other nations in recent years. Theories of polarization must engage seriously with the fact that society has built a new megaphone that amplifies the voices of people whose discourse tendencies are disproportionally characterized by toxicity, moral outrage, profanity, anger, impoliteness, and low prosociality.
Past research has demonstrated that passive exposure to social-media posts from opposing partisans can exacerbate polarization, but the present study is the first to test whether people who opt into partisan discourse on one vs. both sides of the political divide tend to be especially toxic. Reddit offers its users the opportunity to join multiple communities across the political spectrum, and it gives space for constructive conversations on controversial topics. Nevertheless, our results suggest that this opportunity is exploited by people with especially uncivil tendencies. These findings contribute to an emerging sense of skepticism about whether breaking down echo chambers will reduce polarization or toxicity—at least in a straightforward way. The use of observational data allowed us to identify selection effects related to the behavior of the engaged, but further research is required to establish causal effects. (...)
Democracy requires conflict. People with differing ideological and policy preferences must compete in the marketplace of political ideas, seeking to persuade others that their own ideas are best. The present research suggests, however, that the voices that are most amplified on social media are dispositionally toxic, an arrangement that seems unlikely to cultivate the sort of constructive discussion and debate that democracies require. The incivility that the engaged partisans exhibit in contexts that are irrelevant to politics raises the concern that toxic behavior in partisan contexts might masquerade as righteousness or advocacy, but it is actually due in large part to these specific people's tendency to be uncivil in general. Consequently, an urgent priority for societies riven by polarization and democratic backsliding is to develop a means of making the public square a congenial environment not only for the dispositionally uncivil but also for people who would be willing to enter the debate if only the tenor of the discourse were less toxic.
by Michalis Mamakos, Eli J. Finkel, PNAS/National Academy of Sciences | Read more:
[ed. Wherever they are, toxic people will always be toxic. I think we knew this.]
Optical Delusions: Widows on the Prowl
The onslaught of holiday parties only makes me miss more than ever the matchless company of my husband and soulmate for four exuberant decades, the swashbuckling British newspaper editor Sir Harry Evans. In 2002, he was voted best newspaper editor of all time by his peers. (“What took them so long?” he wondered.) Now that he’s been gone for four years, friends have started to urge me with sly supportive smiles to “put myself out there” and find a romantic replacement. The trouble is, I honestly cannot think of anyone but Harry—a man who shared so many of my passions, my idiosyncrasies, and my absolute indifference to domestic life—who would be able to put up with me and always find me irresistible.
During the weeks in Manhattan, we lived in the full-flash intensity of the media arena, vibrating with a succession of salons and book parties at our apartment on East 57th Street. (Harry called his dinner jacket his “working clothes.”) But alone on winter weekends at our house in Quogue, we pulled up the drawbridge and vanished into our cocoon. As I ran through my magazine editorships and wrote my books, while Harry served as ringmaster of Random House and penned best-selling histories, the sounds of industry that emanated from our back-to-back studies—the whir of fax machines, the tap-tap of keyboards, the phone calls wrangling writers—were the music of our marriage.
Now that I’m solo, I wonder what other people do in their free time. After so long holed up in the word factory with Harry, I don’t have a clue who the neighbors are in Quogue. Harry never cared that I can’t cook. Nor could he. We were always too engrossed in discussing the day’s headlines to notice that we were dining, yet again, on a stuffed baked potato. Returning home after Park Avenue parties, he would crash around the kitchen, making himself sardines on toast and regaling me with the best gossip or the most preposterous highlights from his own circuit of the revelers. I have come to realize that our blissful, singular focus on writing and editing has made me eccentric. What, for instance, is a hobby?
Forays to dinner parties in the Hamptons this summer yielded age-appropriate geezers who bang on about their golf swings and congregate together with booming, bald-headed laughter. Couples talk about their elaborate travel plans, doing inconceivable things like motoring through Loire Valley vineyards or taking extended treks to see a pile of ruins in Tibet. Holidays with Harry were usually helter-skelter, last-minute trips to overpriced Caribbean resorts with an inconvenient layover somewhere that neither of us had noticed on the travel agenda.
I realize I have forgotten—and can't really be bothered to relearn—how to feign the eye-batting fascination that is the sine qua non of romantic appeal to late-stage widowers.
I am also a realist. I can’t help but note there’s a pileup around me of surgically enhanced, widowed blondes. The Times obituary page unleashes a new one every day: power wives who once swirled through Manhattan drawing rooms on the arm of some titan and now prowl affluent, Viagra-circuit cocktail receptions at the Council on Foreign Relations. They are battle-tested and battle-ready with one senses, unlike me, an infinite capacity and willingness to adapt. Captious, hostessy, and primed for action, they seem undaunted at the prospect of being jumped on for one last inning.
During the weeks in Manhattan, we lived in the full-flash intensity of the media arena, vibrating with a succession of salons and book parties at our apartment on East 57th Street. (Harry called his dinner jacket his “working clothes.”) But alone on winter weekends at our house in Quogue, we pulled up the drawbridge and vanished into our cocoon. As I ran through my magazine editorships and wrote my books, while Harry served as ringmaster of Random House and penned best-selling histories, the sounds of industry that emanated from our back-to-back studies—the whir of fax machines, the tap-tap of keyboards, the phone calls wrangling writers—were the music of our marriage.
Now that I’m solo, I wonder what other people do in their free time. After so long holed up in the word factory with Harry, I don’t have a clue who the neighbors are in Quogue. Harry never cared that I can’t cook. Nor could he. We were always too engrossed in discussing the day’s headlines to notice that we were dining, yet again, on a stuffed baked potato. Returning home after Park Avenue parties, he would crash around the kitchen, making himself sardines on toast and regaling me with the best gossip or the most preposterous highlights from his own circuit of the revelers. I have come to realize that our blissful, singular focus on writing and editing has made me eccentric. What, for instance, is a hobby?
Forays to dinner parties in the Hamptons this summer yielded age-appropriate geezers who bang on about their golf swings and congregate together with booming, bald-headed laughter. Couples talk about their elaborate travel plans, doing inconceivable things like motoring through Loire Valley vineyards or taking extended treks to see a pile of ruins in Tibet. Holidays with Harry were usually helter-skelter, last-minute trips to overpriced Caribbean resorts with an inconvenient layover somewhere that neither of us had noticed on the travel agenda.
I realize I have forgotten—and can't really be bothered to relearn—how to feign the eye-batting fascination that is the sine qua non of romantic appeal to late-stage widowers.
I am also a realist. I can’t help but note there’s a pileup around me of surgically enhanced, widowed blondes. The Times obituary page unleashes a new one every day: power wives who once swirled through Manhattan drawing rooms on the arm of some titan and now prowl affluent, Viagra-circuit cocktail receptions at the Council on Foreign Relations. They are battle-tested and battle-ready with one senses, unlike me, an infinite capacity and willingness to adapt. Captious, hostessy, and primed for action, they seem undaunted at the prospect of being jumped on for one last inning.
by Tina Brown, Fresh Hell | Read more:
Images: uncredited
[ed. How the other half lives (or, more precisely, the upper half of the upper 10 percent). I guess Tina Brown, former editor-in- chief at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker has a substack now, which I just stumbled upon. Wish her good luck, I'm sure she'll be fine.]
Thursday, December 19, 2024
These Feet Are Made For Nothing
With some people, the problem is always the back. With me it’s feet.
So I wasn’t really surprised during the past weekend when I suddenly found myself howling and hopping on one foot around my kitchen. The thought went through my mind: “It figures, it figures.”
The reason I was hopping on one foot was that I had been cooking some spaghetti. But instead of pouring the boiling water into the sink, I aimed badly and poured it on my bare foot.
The fact is, I dislike my feet. At times the feelings border on hatred. As far back as I can remember, they’ve been nothing but trouble.
You might wonder how a person can hate his own feet. I don’t think that’s unusual. Some people hate their own noses. Or their teeth.
At least they can go to a plastic surgeon and get a nose job, or get their teeth capped.
But when you hate your own feet, there’s not much you can do about it except try to ignore them or swear when you happen to see them.
And that’s one of the problems with feet. They’re hard to ignore. The first thing I see every morning are my feet, sticking up at the other end of the bed.
So I start each morning by saying: “Hello, you lousy, ugly, gnarled, painful b—-s. I hate both of you!”
That’s not the best way to begin the day, I suppose, but it does get me into the proper frame of mind for my job.
As I lie there looking at my feet, I’m always struck by how ugly they are.
Most feet aren’t very good looking. I can’t remember anybody being renowned for his or her stunningly attractive feet, although there are strange people whose pulses race at the sight of a toe. Or so they say when they write about their fantasies to Penthouse Forum.
But for ugliness, mine have always been in a class by themselves.
When I was born, the first thing my mother said to me was: “He takes after his father. Look at those feet.”
She was right. My father had size 12 feet. And so did I — on the day I was born.
And the doctor later said that I was the only infant he had ever seen come into the world with calluses and corns and cracked toenails.
My toes are longer than most people’s fingers. If the toes were extended, I’d probably wear a size 20 shoe. But they curl under about three times so they look more like large, clenched fists than feet.
They’re also very wide. They might be as wide as they are long, which has always made it difficult for me to find shoes that fit properly.
When I was a kid, we’d spend hours at the shoe stores looking for shoes that were wide enough. One salesman finally gave up and said:
“Lady, the only place you’ll find a shoe that fits this kid is at a blacksmith’s shop.”
We finally found something that fit perfectly. They were comfortable, but a lot of people looked twice when they saw someone walking around with two baseball gloves on his feet. (...)
You can learn to live with feet like mine, but you have to take certain precautions.
For example, I took a vacation at the seashore once. In the evening, I’d take long, barefoot walks along the beach.
One morning, I noticed a crowd of men studying my footprints in the sand. They were the police, the conservation department and the local zoo.
One of them shook his head and said: “I don’t know what kind of creature it is, but we better post some armed guards here at night.”
My feet have probably sensed how I’ve felt about them, and they’ve retaliated by getting themselves stubbed and stepped on every chance they get. I don’t even take it personally when someone steps on my foot anymore. I just say: “Don’t apologize, he had it coming. Step on the other one, too. He’s just as bad.”
And I wouldn’t have even gone to the hospital when I burned my foot, except that I have to live with it.
When the doctor came into the emergency room, he asked me what happened.
“I just poured a pot of boiling water on it.”
He shook his head and said: “Boy, it really does look awful.”
“Doc,” I said, “it’s the other one.”
So I wasn’t really surprised during the past weekend when I suddenly found myself howling and hopping on one foot around my kitchen. The thought went through my mind: “It figures, it figures.”
The reason I was hopping on one foot was that I had been cooking some spaghetti. But instead of pouring the boiling water into the sink, I aimed badly and poured it on my bare foot.
On the way to the hospital, I watched without sympathy as my foot changed colors.
If it hadn’t been for the pain, I might have pointed a finger at it and said: “Foot, you got exactly what you deserve.”
You might wonder how a person can hate his own feet. I don’t think that’s unusual. Some people hate their own noses. Or their teeth.
At least they can go to a plastic surgeon and get a nose job, or get their teeth capped.
But when you hate your own feet, there’s not much you can do about it except try to ignore them or swear when you happen to see them.
And that’s one of the problems with feet. They’re hard to ignore. The first thing I see every morning are my feet, sticking up at the other end of the bed.
So I start each morning by saying: “Hello, you lousy, ugly, gnarled, painful b—-s. I hate both of you!”
That’s not the best way to begin the day, I suppose, but it does get me into the proper frame of mind for my job.
As I lie there looking at my feet, I’m always struck by how ugly they are.
Most feet aren’t very good looking. I can’t remember anybody being renowned for his or her stunningly attractive feet, although there are strange people whose pulses race at the sight of a toe. Or so they say when they write about their fantasies to Penthouse Forum.
But for ugliness, mine have always been in a class by themselves.
When I was born, the first thing my mother said to me was: “He takes after his father. Look at those feet.”
She was right. My father had size 12 feet. And so did I — on the day I was born.
And the doctor later said that I was the only infant he had ever seen come into the world with calluses and corns and cracked toenails.
My toes are longer than most people’s fingers. If the toes were extended, I’d probably wear a size 20 shoe. But they curl under about three times so they look more like large, clenched fists than feet.
They’re also very wide. They might be as wide as they are long, which has always made it difficult for me to find shoes that fit properly.
When I was a kid, we’d spend hours at the shoe stores looking for shoes that were wide enough. One salesman finally gave up and said:
“Lady, the only place you’ll find a shoe that fits this kid is at a blacksmith’s shop.”
We finally found something that fit perfectly. They were comfortable, but a lot of people looked twice when they saw someone walking around with two baseball gloves on his feet. (...)
You can learn to live with feet like mine, but you have to take certain precautions.
For example, I took a vacation at the seashore once. In the evening, I’d take long, barefoot walks along the beach.
One morning, I noticed a crowd of men studying my footprints in the sand. They were the police, the conservation department and the local zoo.
One of them shook his head and said: “I don’t know what kind of creature it is, but we better post some armed guards here at night.”
My feet have probably sensed how I’ve felt about them, and they’ve retaliated by getting themselves stubbed and stepped on every chance they get. I don’t even take it personally when someone steps on my foot anymore. I just say: “Don’t apologize, he had it coming. Step on the other one, too. He’s just as bad.”
And I wouldn’t have even gone to the hospital when I burned my foot, except that I have to live with it.
When the doctor came into the emergency room, he asked me what happened.
“I just poured a pot of boiling water on it.”
He shook his head and said: “Boy, it really does look awful.”
“Doc,” I said, “it’s the other one.”
by Mike Royko, Chicago Sun Times | Read more:
Image: Stock image
What is Shelf-Sharing? In Japan, You Can Rent a Shelf to Sell Your Books
At Tokyo's Honmaru Jimbocho bookstore, a shelf-sharing book rack captures the spirit of a growing literary marketing trend.
The concept brings back the joy of browsing real books to communities where many bookstores have shut, and gives readers more eclectic choices than those suggested by algorithms on online sellers, its proponents say.
"Here, you find books which make you wonder who on earth would buy them," laughs Shogo Imamura, 40, who opened one such store in Tokyo's bookstore district of Kanda Jimbocho in April.
"Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don't sell well," Imamura, who also writes novels about warring samurai in Japan's feudal era, told AFP.
"We ignore such principles. Or capitalism in other words," he said. "I want to reconstruct bookstores."
His shop, measuring just 53 square metres, houses 364 shelves, selling books – some new, some used – on everything from business strategy and manga comics to martial arts.
The hundreds of different shelf renters, who pay 4,850-9,350 yen (US$32-US$61, RM140-RM267) per month, vary from individuals to an IT company to a construction firm to small publishers.
"Each one of these shelves is like a real version of a social media account, where you express yourself like in Instagram or Facebook," said Kashiwa Sato, 59, the store's creative director. (...)
Crowd-pullers
Rokurou Yui, 42, said his three shelf-sharing bookstores in the same Tokyo area are filled with "enormous love" for shelf owners' favourite books,
"It is as if you're hearing voices of recommendations," Yui told AFP.
Owners of regular bookstores put books on their shelves that they have to sell to stay in business, regardless of their personal tastes, he said.
"But here, there is no single book that we have to sell, but just books that someone recommends with strong passion and love for," he said.
Yui and his father Shigeru Kashima, 74, a professor of French literature, opened their first shelf-sharing bookstore, called Passage, in 2022.
They expanded with two others and the fourth opened inside a French language school in Tokyo in October.
Passage has 362 shelves and the sellers help attract customers with their own marketing efforts, often online.
That is in contrast to conventional bookstores that often rely on owners' sole sales efforts, he said.
On weekends, Yui's store sometimes "looks as if it were a crowded nightclub with young customers in their 10s, 20s, 30s" with edgy background music playing, he said.
Customers and shelf-owners visit the bookstore not only to sell and buy books, but to enjoy "chatting about books", he said.
"I'm holding an illustrated book of cheeses," says a delighted Tomoyo Ozumi, a customer at a growing kind of bookshop in Japan where anyone wanting to sell their tomes can rent a shelf.
The concept brings back the joy of browsing real books to communities where many bookstores have shut, and gives readers more eclectic choices than those suggested by algorithms on online sellers, its proponents say.
"Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don't sell well," Imamura, who also writes novels about warring samurai in Japan's feudal era, told AFP.
"We ignore such principles. Or capitalism in other words," he said. "I want to reconstruct bookstores."
His shop, measuring just 53 square metres, houses 364 shelves, selling books – some new, some used – on everything from business strategy and manga comics to martial arts.
The hundreds of different shelf renters, who pay 4,850-9,350 yen (US$32-US$61, RM140-RM267) per month, vary from individuals to an IT company to a construction firm to small publishers.
"Each one of these shelves is like a real version of a social media account, where you express yourself like in Instagram or Facebook," said Kashiwa Sato, 59, the store's creative director. (...)
Crowd-pullers
Rokurou Yui, 42, said his three shelf-sharing bookstores in the same Tokyo area are filled with "enormous love" for shelf owners' favourite books,
"It is as if you're hearing voices of recommendations," Yui told AFP.
Owners of regular bookstores put books on their shelves that they have to sell to stay in business, regardless of their personal tastes, he said.
"But here, there is no single book that we have to sell, but just books that someone recommends with strong passion and love for," he said.
Yui and his father Shigeru Kashima, 74, a professor of French literature, opened their first shelf-sharing bookstore, called Passage, in 2022.
They expanded with two others and the fourth opened inside a French language school in Tokyo in October.
Passage has 362 shelves and the sellers help attract customers with their own marketing efforts, often online.
That is in contrast to conventional bookstores that often rely on owners' sole sales efforts, he said.
On weekends, Yui's store sometimes "looks as if it were a crowded nightclub with young customers in their 10s, 20s, 30s" with edgy background music playing, he said.
Customers and shelf-owners visit the bookstore not only to sell and buy books, but to enjoy "chatting about books", he said.
by Agency, The Star | Read more:
Image: AFP
[ed. This is a great idea and sounds similar to staff recommendations, but one step further. Books don't have to be in-store stock to be displayed, but I imagine there's a spill-over effect for normal inventory. Plus, there's the shelf rental fee (and possibly a small commission on sales). Another innovative idea: Bookstores You Can Rent For Date Nights and More (Book Riot).]
American Values, American Election, 2024
[ed. Exactly. Whatever conservatives feverishly think liberals want - this is it. Question: How is this guy not making a living doing real media commentary?]
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Design: Self-Driving Cars
After a few disappointing years, these are finally coming into their own. The expert I talked (EDIT: I try to mostly preserve anonymity in this post, but this person has kindly allowed me to identify him as Andrew Miller of Changing Lanes) to said Tesla had made some bad decisions and was no longer in the top tier, but that companies like Waymo and [I can’t remember which other ones he named] were near the finish line. They’re already safer than humans in most situations and operating successfully in several cities. The remaining challenges to scaling up are mostly regulatory, not technical. Here the regulatory challenges are less about specific laws than general nervousness on the corporations’ part to be seen expanding too quickly. They want to build a strong record in friendly cities before venturing further.
The most interesting new claim I heard was that self-driving cars could help the environment by encouraging carpools. The UberShare carpool program hasn’t taken off, but that’s mostly because people are reluctant to share a car with a stranger. Self-driving cars have more design flexibility, and you might be able to turn them into a series of private pods. You could sit in your own private pod while your robotaxi made a two-block detour to pick up a second passenger.
Here the person I talked to wasn’t as concerned about fighting destructive regulation (which mostly has yet to materialize) as using legislation to guide the technology on the right path. Self-driving taxis have a big advantage over self-driving self-owned-cars: they can operate 24-7 and never have to park. If you can switch half the car-using population to robotaxis, you can convert half the parking lots into green space or homes. Nobody wants to ban self-driving car ownership, but some people do want to nudge the marginal commuter into robotaxis so they can reclaim slightly-more-than-half of the parking lots instead of slightly-less.
The most interesting new claim I heard was that self-driving cars could help the environment by encouraging carpools. The UberShare carpool program hasn’t taken off, but that’s mostly because people are reluctant to share a car with a stranger. Self-driving cars have more design flexibility, and you might be able to turn them into a series of private pods. You could sit in your own private pod while your robotaxi made a two-block detour to pick up a second passenger.
Here the person I talked to wasn’t as concerned about fighting destructive regulation (which mostly has yet to materialize) as using legislation to guide the technology on the right path. Self-driving taxis have a big advantage over self-driving self-owned-cars: they can operate 24-7 and never have to park. If you can switch half the car-using population to robotaxis, you can convert half the parking lots into green space or homes. Nobody wants to ban self-driving car ownership, but some people do want to nudge the marginal commuter into robotaxis so they can reclaim slightly-more-than-half of the parking lots instead of slightly-less.
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | (Notes From The Progress Studies Conference) - Read more:
Image: Amazon/Zoox
[ed. The Zoox website is really something. Check it out.]
The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive. When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.
It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.
The Short Answer
Paper One: Bankruptcies
We start with discussion of one of several new working papers studying the financial consequences of legalized sports betting. The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).
Paper Three: Increased Domestic Violence
The Product as Currently Offered is Terrible
Meanwhile, frankly, the product emphasis and implementation sucks. Almost all of the legal implementations (e.g. everyone I know about except Circa) are highly predatory. That’s what can survive in this market. Why? Predation is where the money is. There is no physical overhead at an online casino, but after paying for all the promotions and credit card payments and advertisements and licenses and infrastructure, the only way to make all that back under the current laws and business models is the above-mentioned 10%-style hold that comes from toxic offerings. Thus high prices even on the main lines, even higher ones on parlays and in-game betting. Whenever I see lines on the TV I usually want to puke at how wide the prices are. In game odds are beyond obnoxious. (...)
All this is complemented by a strategy centered around free bet promotions (which makes the bonuses sound a lot bigger than they are), advertisements, promotional texts and emails and especially a barrage of push notifications. Anyone showing any skill? They are shown the door.
It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.
The Short Answer
Joe Weisenthal: Why is it that sports gambling, specifically, has elicited a lot of criticism from people that would otherwise have more laissez faire sympathies?This full post is the long answer. The short answer is that it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors. That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people. This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.
Paper One: Bankruptcies
We start with discussion of one of several new working papers studying the financial consequences of legalized sports betting. The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).
Brett Hollenbeck: *Working Paper Alert*: “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling” by Poet Larsen, @dade_us and myself. We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health. In 2018, SCOTUS ruled that states cannot be prohibited from allowing sports betting, and 38 states have since legalized sports gambling. This has led to a large new industry and a large increase in gambling accessibility. Roughly $300 billion has been bet and is growing fast. (...)Paper Two: Reduced Household Savings
Paper Three: Increased Domestic Violence
The Product as Currently Offered is Terrible
All this is complemented by a strategy centered around free bet promotions (which makes the bonuses sound a lot bigger than they are), advertisements, promotional texts and emails and especially a barrage of push notifications. Anyone showing any skill? They are shown the door.
Things Sharp Players Do
I don’t think this is central to the case that current legal sports betting is awful, but it is illustrative what pros do in order to disguise themselves and get their wagers down. That to do that, they make themselves look like the whales. Which means addicts. I’m used to stories like this one, that’s normal:
People Cannot Handle Gambling on Smartphones
Vices and other distractions are constant temptations. When you carry a phone around with you, that temptation is ever present. Indeed, I recently got a Pixel Watch, and the biggest benefit of it so far is that I can stay connected enough to not worry, and not be tempted to check for things, without the pull of what a phone can do. And we have repeatedly seen how distracting it is for kids in school to have the smartphone right there in their pocket. I have learned to be very, very careful with mobile games, even ones with no relevant microtransactions. Putting gambling in your pocket makes the temptation to gamble ever-present. Even for those who can resist it, that is a not so cheap mental tax to pay, and likely to result in the occasional impulse bet, even without the constant notifications. First hit’s free. Constant offers that adjust to your responses, to get you to keep coming back. Now consider that at least several percent of people have an acute gambling addiction or vulnerability. For them, this is like an alcoholic being forced to carry a flask around in their pocket 24/7, while talk of what alcohol to choose and how good it would be to use that flask right now gets constantly woven into all their entertainment, and they by default get notifications asking if now is a good time for a beer. You can have the apps back up and running within a minute, even if you delete them. It was plausible that this was an acceptable situation, that people could mostly handle that kind of temptation. We have now run the experiment, and it is clear that too many of them cannot.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image: uncredited
I don’t think this is central to the case that current legal sports betting is awful, but it is illustrative what pros do in order to disguise themselves and get their wagers down. That to do that, they make themselves look like the whales. Which means addicts. I’m used to stories like this one, that’s normal:
Ira Boudway (Bloomberg): If I open an account in New York, maybe for a few weeks I just bet the Yankees right before the game begins,” says Rufus Peabody, a pro bettor and co-host of the Bet the Process podcast. If this trick works, the book sees these normie, hometown bets as a sign that it’s safe to raise his limits.It seems players have upped their game.
One pro bettor I know set up a bot which logs in to his accounts every day between 2 and 4 a.m., to make it seem like he can’t get through the night without checking his bets. Another withdraws money and then reverses those withdrawals so it looks like he can’t resist gambling. Simulating addictive behavior, says Peabody, is an effective way to get online sportsbooks to send you bonus money and keep your accounts open. This isn’t necessarily because operators are targeting problem bettors, he says; they’re simply looking to identify and encourage customers who are likely to spend—and lose—the most. This just happens to be a good way to find and enable addicts, too.The rest of the post is filled with the usual statistics and tragic stories. What I find interesting about these examples is that they are very level-1 plays. As in, this is exactly what someone would do if they thought they were up against a system that was looking for signs of what type of player you are, but only in the most mechanical and simple sense. For this type of thing to work, the book must not be looking at details or thinking clearly or holistically. If you had tried this stuff on me when I was watching customers, to the extent I noticed it at all, I am pretty sure I would if anything have caught you faster.
People Cannot Handle Gambling on Smartphones
Vices and other distractions are constant temptations. When you carry a phone around with you, that temptation is ever present. Indeed, I recently got a Pixel Watch, and the biggest benefit of it so far is that I can stay connected enough to not worry, and not be tempted to check for things, without the pull of what a phone can do. And we have repeatedly seen how distracting it is for kids in school to have the smartphone right there in their pocket. I have learned to be very, very careful with mobile games, even ones with no relevant microtransactions. Putting gambling in your pocket makes the temptation to gamble ever-present. Even for those who can resist it, that is a not so cheap mental tax to pay, and likely to result in the occasional impulse bet, even without the constant notifications. First hit’s free. Constant offers that adjust to your responses, to get you to keep coming back. Now consider that at least several percent of people have an acute gambling addiction or vulnerability. For them, this is like an alcoholic being forced to carry a flask around in their pocket 24/7, while talk of what alcohol to choose and how good it would be to use that flask right now gets constantly woven into all their entertainment, and they by default get notifications asking if now is a good time for a beer. You can have the apps back up and running within a minute, even if you delete them. It was plausible that this was an acceptable situation, that people could mostly handle that kind of temptation. We have now run the experiment, and it is clear that too many of them cannot.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Home of Tomorrow. Yesterday
Walter Cronkite in the Philco-Ford home of tomorrow, 1967: “Meals in this kitchen of the future are programmed, the menus given to an automatic chef via typewriter or punched computer cards.”
via:
via:
The Weird Surprise of Growing Old
If there’s anything that should not surprise us, it’s growing old. Everyone we have ever known has always been growing older. We have known this since we were small, and at first we loved the idea. Toddlers are excited to turn 3. Adolescents are thrilled to turn 16 or 18. Adults celebrate turning 30 and 40, although we’re often less happy with 50 and 60. And upon turning 70—well, we can no longer claim “late middle age.” We have passed “midlife”; we are, at least chronologically, old.
“Part of the surprise lies in the gradual nature of aging—years pass, but day-to-day life often feels static. Days blur into weeks, and before we know it, decades have passed. This phenomenon creates a feeling of disconnect between our internal sense of self (which may feel youthful) and the external markers of age (grey hair, slower movement).”
(That sage philosopher is Chat GPT4, which—whom?—I sometimes consult and always credit.)
I think it’s like inflation. The price of eggs isn’t that high compared to last year’s price, but we also unconsciously measure it against some average price eggs have cost throughout our lives. This average is maybe $2.49—so $5.99 for a dozen eggs now seems exorbitant.
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten,” says the Bible. For millennia, 70 was considered a good long lifespan, but now it’s just the relocated portal to old age. Today, a 70-year-old woman in the US can expect to live, on average, to 85-87 years, while a 70-year-old US man can expect to live to 83-85 years. [ed. If you make it to 70.]
At 70, then, we have plenty of time ahead of us to be old. And before that, we’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being old. Plenty of time to understand that how we feel and how we look may not be perfectly aligned. Plenty of time to read books about preventing aging—as well as books about embracing aging.
So why at 70 are we surprised to find ourselves cast upon the shore of old age? Surprise is surely ridiculous yet . . .
I don’t know a single person of 70 or older who is not astonished that they, too, have grown old. At 78, I’m still absorbing this idea myself, and I announce my age a lot, in sheer disbelief. (I’ll confess it’s gratifying when people feign shock at the number.)
“The most common emotion people feel about getting old is surprise,” wrote sociologist and author Martha Beck on her website in 2022. “I remember reading this in my 30s and finding it hilarious. Surprise? About the single most predictable thing in life? Oh, those old folks, I thought. Those doddering darlings! How silly they are! I’m pretty sure that was last week. Except now I’m about to turn 60.”
So why at 70 are we surprised to find ourselves cast upon the shore of old age? Surprise is surely ridiculous yet . . .
I don’t know a single person of 70 or older who is not astonished that they, too, have grown old. At 78, I’m still absorbing this idea myself, and I announce my age a lot, in sheer disbelief. (I’ll confess it’s gratifying when people feign shock at the number.)
“The most common emotion people feel about getting old is surprise,” wrote sociologist and author Martha Beck on her website in 2022. “I remember reading this in my 30s and finding it hilarious. Surprise? About the single most predictable thing in life? Oh, those old folks, I thought. Those doddering darlings! How silly they are! I’m pretty sure that was last week. Except now I’m about to turn 60.”
We age year by year, inexorably—so what is the source of our bizarre and irrational surprise at becoming old?
One sage philosopher explains it as follows:
One sage philosopher explains it as follows:
(That sage philosopher is Chat GPT4, which—whom?—I sometimes consult and always credit.)
I think it’s like inflation. The price of eggs isn’t that high compared to last year’s price, but we also unconsciously measure it against some average price eggs have cost throughout our lives. This average is maybe $2.49—so $5.99 for a dozen eggs now seems exorbitant.
Similarly, we are not comparing age 70 to age 69 but to some sort of average age we vaguely feel ourselves to be. I call it the Law of Personal Averaging: the tendency to blend past and present in how we perceive our age. If we see ourselves as, say, 45, it feels completely insane that at our next birthday, 70, we are in the category old! (...)
Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.” What, then is 70? The middle of old age? A man on Quora opines, “If 70 isn’t old age, then what the fuck do you think it is?” Yet demographers distinguish between the “young old” of 70-80, the old of 80-90, and the “old-old” of 90-100. After that there’s the glory of being a centenarian, of which there are some 100,000 in the USA today, a group that is expected to triple in the next 30 years. Most are probably as surprised to be 100 as I am to be 78.
The disconnect is real. One friend says, “It’s this weird feeling when you look in the mirror—as if you don’t belong in that body.”
Surprise! You do! You’re old!
Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.” What, then is 70? The middle of old age? A man on Quora opines, “If 70 isn’t old age, then what the fuck do you think it is?” Yet demographers distinguish between the “young old” of 70-80, the old of 80-90, and the “old-old” of 90-100. After that there’s the glory of being a centenarian, of which there are some 100,000 in the USA today, a group that is expected to triple in the next 30 years. Most are probably as surprised to be 100 as I am to be 78.
The disconnect is real. One friend says, “It’s this weird feeling when you look in the mirror—as if you don’t belong in that body.”
Surprise! You do! You’re old!
by Catherine Hiller, Oldster | Read more:
Images: Gerald Cotts/Sonia Pilcer
[ed. Yes, and while some memories seem ancient, others feel like just last week. Another thing... I was raised to always respect my elders since the accumulated years were supposed to bring wisdom. That depends on how you define wisdom. Mostly people just become more distilled versions of themselves, and actually more intractable. So, if you're not careful in cultivating positive qualities in your life, "what were once vices, now become habits".]
Images: Gerald Cotts/Sonia Pilcer
[ed. Yes, and while some memories seem ancient, others feel like just last week. Another thing... I was raised to always respect my elders since the accumulated years were supposed to bring wisdom. That depends on how you define wisdom. Mostly people just become more distilled versions of themselves, and actually more intractable. So, if you're not careful in cultivating positive qualities in your life, "what were once vices, now become habits".]
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Steely Dan: Aja
Aja produced three excellent singles (“Peg,” “Josie,” and “Deacon Blues”) and sold millions of copies, becoming the group’s most commercially successful release. But it was a perplexing bestseller. Steely Dan spent the 1970s getting progressively more esoteric: jazzier, groovier, weirder. Even now, mapping the album’s melodic and harmonic shifts is impossible to do with confidence. Its songs are sprawling and fussy, populated by oddball characters with inscrutable backstories, like “Josie,” from the song of the same name (“She’s the raw flame, the live wire/She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”) or “Peg,” an aspiring actress headed who-knows-where, who’s “done up in blueprint blue.” “Blueprint blue”! It’s the kind of simple, perfect description prose writers pinch themselves over.
Outside of the studio, Becker and Fagen reveled in being a little rascally. They took long breaks from touring, and when they conceded to an interview, they often appeared self-satisfied, if not antagonistic. Their disdain for the record business occasionally bled into a disdain for their fans, itself a kind of merciless, punk-rock pose. When they did tour—like, say, in 1993, when, after a decade-long hiatus, they booked a few weeks of U.S. dates—they did not pretend to enjoy it. That year, when a reporter from The Los Angeles Times asked Becker how the tour was going, he said, “Well, not too good. It turns out that show business isn’t really in my blood anyway, and I’m looking forward to getting back to working on my car.”
Because the production on Aja is so expert—whole stretches are perfect, impenetrable, like the first 31 seconds of “Black Cow,” when that creeping bass line cedes passage to guitar and electric piano, and the backing vocals pipe up for “You were high!”—it’s easy to ignore the sophistication of its architecture. Becker and Fagen used obscure chords (like the mu major, a major triad with an added 2 or 9) and custom-built their own equipment (for 1980’s Gaucho, they paid $150,000 to build a bespoke drum machine). What they were doing was so particular and new, it was often difficult for critics to even find a vocabulary to describe it. On the title track, the verse shifts and dissolves as Fagen croons, “I run to you.” His voice thins as he finishes the line, a little gasp of tenderness. The minute-long drum solo that closes “Aja,” performed by the virtuosic session man Steve Gadd, is dressed with horns and synthesizers, and makes a person briefly feel as if they are being transported to a different dimension. Steely Dan reveled in making technical choices that would have hobbled a less ambitious outfit. That they succeeded still feels like some kind of black magic.
By 1977, it is possible that some corners of the culture had become desperate for music that was intellectually challenging but not exactly arduous to consume—something less predictable than Top 40, but not quite as hyperbolic or gnashing as punk. By the end of the 1960s, rock had been relentlessly and breathlessly defined as a frantic, bloody, all-consuming practice, for both performers and fans. Aja, though, doesn’t necessarily require any sort of deep emotional entanglement or vulnerability from its listeners. In that way, the record works as an unexpected balm, a break—a little bit of pleasure just for pleasure’s sake.
by Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork | Read more:
Image: Aja
Because the production on Aja is so expert—whole stretches are perfect, impenetrable, like the first 31 seconds of “Black Cow,” when that creeping bass line cedes passage to guitar and electric piano, and the backing vocals pipe up for “You were high!”—it’s easy to ignore the sophistication of its architecture. Becker and Fagen used obscure chords (like the mu major, a major triad with an added 2 or 9) and custom-built their own equipment (for 1980’s Gaucho, they paid $150,000 to build a bespoke drum machine). What they were doing was so particular and new, it was often difficult for critics to even find a vocabulary to describe it. On the title track, the verse shifts and dissolves as Fagen croons, “I run to you.” His voice thins as he finishes the line, a little gasp of tenderness. The minute-long drum solo that closes “Aja,” performed by the virtuosic session man Steve Gadd, is dressed with horns and synthesizers, and makes a person briefly feel as if they are being transported to a different dimension. Steely Dan reveled in making technical choices that would have hobbled a less ambitious outfit. That they succeeded still feels like some kind of black magic.
By 1977, it is possible that some corners of the culture had become desperate for music that was intellectually challenging but not exactly arduous to consume—something less predictable than Top 40, but not quite as hyperbolic or gnashing as punk. By the end of the 1960s, rock had been relentlessly and breathlessly defined as a frantic, bloody, all-consuming practice, for both performers and fans. Aja, though, doesn’t necessarily require any sort of deep emotional entanglement or vulnerability from its listeners. In that way, the record works as an unexpected balm, a break—a little bit of pleasure just for pleasure’s sake.
by Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork | Read more:
Image: Aja
[ed. All their albums were great, including their muchly under-appreciated (and one of my all-time favorites) Two Against Nature. For some reason they don't seem to get enough credit for being the exceptional lyricists/songwriters that they were. For more SD samples see: here and here. Who writes lyrics like this anymore?:]
"I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong, I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that." ~ Almost Gothic.
"I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong, I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that." ~ Almost Gothic.
On Blankfaces
For years, I’ve had a private term I’ve used with my family. To give a few examples of its use:
The longer I live, the more I see blankfacedness as one of the fundamental evils of the human condition. Yes, it contains large elements of stupidity, incuriosity, malevolence, and bureaucratic indifference, but it’s not reducible to any of those. After enough experience, the first two questions you ask about any organization are:
Some people will object that the term “blankface” is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what’s right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason.
With many other human evils and failings, I have a strong inclination toward mercy, because I understand how someone could’ve succumbed to the temptation—indeed, I worry that I myself might’ve succumbed to it “but for the grace of God.” But here’s the thing about blankfaces: in all my thousands of dealings with them, not once was I ever given cause to wonder whether I might have done the same in their shoes. It’s like, of course I wouldn’t have! Even if I were forced (by my own higher-ups, an intransigent computer system, or whatever else) to foist some bureaucratic horribleness on an innocent victim, I’d be sheepish and apologetic about it. I’d acknowledge the farcical absurdity of what I was making the other person do, or declaring that they couldn’t do. Likewise, even if I were useless in a crisis, at least I’d get out of the way of the people trying to solve it. How could I live with myself otherwise?
The fundamental mystery of the blankfaces, then, is how they can be so alien and yet so common.
But no, that’s not it at all.
Rules can be either good or bad. All things considered, I’d probably rather be on a plane piloted by a robotic stickler for safety rules, than by someone who ignored the rules at his or her discretion. And as I said in the post, in the first months of covid, it was ironically the anti-blankfaces who were screaming for rules, regulations, and lockdowns; the blankfaces wanted to continue as though nothing had changed!
Also, “blankface” (just like “homophobe” or “antisemite”) is a serious accusation. I’d never call anyone a blankface merely for sticking with a defensible rule when it turned out, in hindsight, that the rule could’ve been relaxed.
Here’s how to tell a blankface: suppose you see someone enforcing or interpreting a rule in a way that strikes you as obviously absurd. And suppose you point it out to them.
Do they say “I disagree, here’s why it actually does make sense”? They might be mistaken but they’re not a blankface.
Do they say “tell me about it, it makes zero sense, but it’s above my pay grade to change”? You might wish they were more dogged or courageous but again they’re not a blankface.
Or do they ignore all your arguments and just restate the original rule—seemingly angered by what they understood as a challenge to their authority, and delighted to reassert it? That’s the blankface.
No, I never applied for that grant. I spent two hours struggling to log in to a web portal designed by the world’s top blankfaces until I finally gave up in despair.
No, I paid for that whole lecture trip out of pocket; I never got the reimbursement they promised. Their blankface administrator just kept sending me back the form, demanding more and more convoluted bank details, until I finally got the hint and dropped it.
What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.No, my daughter Lily isn’t allowed in the swimming pool there. She easily passed their swim test last year, but this year the blankface lifeguard made up a new rule on the spot that she needs to retake the test, so Lily took it again and passed even more easily, but then the lifeguard said she didn’t like the stroke Lily used, so she failed her and didn’t let her retake it. I complained to their blankface athletic director, who launched an ‘investigation.’ The outcome of the ‘investigation’ was that, regardless of the ground truth about how well Lily can swim, their blankface lifeguard said she’s not allowed in the pool, so being blankfaces themselves, they’re going to stand with the lifeguard.
Yeah, the kids spend the entire day indoors, breathing each other’s stale, unventilated air, then they finally go outside and they aren’t allowed on the playground equipment, because of the covid risk from them touching it. Even though we’ve known for more than a year that covid is an airborne disease. Everyone I’ve talked there agrees that I have a point, but they say their hands are tied. I haven’t yet located the blankface who actually made this decision and stands by it.
The longer I live, the more I see blankfacedness as one of the fundamental evils of the human condition. Yes, it contains large elements of stupidity, incuriosity, malevolence, and bureaucratic indifference, but it’s not reducible to any of those. After enough experience, the first two questions you ask about any organization are:
- Who are the blankfaces here?
- Who are the people I can talk with to get around the blankfaces?
Some people will object that the term “blankface” is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what’s right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason.
With many other human evils and failings, I have a strong inclination toward mercy, because I understand how someone could’ve succumbed to the temptation—indeed, I worry that I myself might’ve succumbed to it “but for the grace of God.” But here’s the thing about blankfaces: in all my thousands of dealings with them, not once was I ever given cause to wonder whether I might have done the same in their shoes. It’s like, of course I wouldn’t have! Even if I were forced (by my own higher-ups, an intransigent computer system, or whatever else) to foist some bureaucratic horribleness on an innocent victim, I’d be sheepish and apologetic about it. I’d acknowledge the farcical absurdity of what I was making the other person do, or declaring that they couldn’t do. Likewise, even if I were useless in a crisis, at least I’d get out of the way of the people trying to solve it. How could I live with myself otherwise?
The fundamental mystery of the blankfaces, then, is how they can be so alien and yet so common.
***
Update (Aug. 3): Surprisingly many people seem to have read this post, and come away with the notion that a “blankface” is simply anyone who’s a stickler for rules and formalized procedures. They’ve then tried to refute me with examples of where it’s good to be a stickler, or where I in particular would believe that it’s good.But no, that’s not it at all.
Rules can be either good or bad. All things considered, I’d probably rather be on a plane piloted by a robotic stickler for safety rules, than by someone who ignored the rules at his or her discretion. And as I said in the post, in the first months of covid, it was ironically the anti-blankfaces who were screaming for rules, regulations, and lockdowns; the blankfaces wanted to continue as though nothing had changed!
Also, “blankface” (just like “homophobe” or “antisemite”) is a serious accusation. I’d never call anyone a blankface merely for sticking with a defensible rule when it turned out, in hindsight, that the rule could’ve been relaxed.
Here’s how to tell a blankface: suppose you see someone enforcing or interpreting a rule in a way that strikes you as obviously absurd. And suppose you point it out to them.
Do they say “I disagree, here’s why it actually does make sense”? They might be mistaken but they’re not a blankface.
Do they say “tell me about it, it makes zero sense, but it’s above my pay grade to change”? You might wish they were more dogged or courageous but again they’re not a blankface.
Or do they ignore all your arguments and just restate the original rule—seemingly angered by what they understood as a challenge to their authority, and delighted to reassert it? That’s the blankface.
by Scott Aaronson, Shtetl-Optimized | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. So, I learned a new term today. We've all experienced (and probably worked) with people like this.]
Monday, December 16, 2024
You Can't Rebrand a Class War
This week, a federal judge blocked the largest proposed grocery merger in history, between Albertson’s and Kroger. The merger, which would have further consolidated the industry, raised prices for consumers, and hurt the power of workers, was strenuously opposed by unions. It was brought down by a lawsuit filed by Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s crusading FTC chair, who fought against the consolidation of corporate power harder than any of her predecessors. Khan said that it was “the first time the FTC has ever sought to block a merger not just because it’s gonna be bad for consumers, but also for workers.”
Also this week, the Trump administration announced the Khan would be fired and replaced with Andrew Ferguson, a Republican FTC commissioner. In Ferguson’s own pitch for the job, he wrote that his goal would be to “Reverse Lina Khan’s Anti-Business Agenda,” “Stop Lina Khan’s war on mergers,” “Protect Freedom of Speech and Fight Wokeness,” and “Fight back against the trans agenda.”
Also this week, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—two real pieces of shit—blocked an effort to reconfirm Lauren McFerran to the National Labor Relations Board, which would have ensured that the board had a Democratic majority for the first two years of Trump’s term, which would have served to hold off the Trump administration’s incoming efforts to roll back all of the progress on worker-friendly labor regulation that has been made over the past four years. Now, thanks to these two scumbags, Trump will not only replace NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abbruzzo—the single most pro-union official in the federal government—with an anti-union crusader; he will also be able to ensure that the entire agency is actively weaponized against union power. Because changing regulations takes time, those extra two years will be critical for the Republican effort to erase the Biden administration’s gains in making the government friendly to the task of union organizing, rather than hostile.
Also this week, the world’s richest man, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to on the president-elect’s campaign, and who has threatened to fund primary challengers to any Republicans who oppose the president-elect’s agenda, saw his net worth hit $447 billion, on the strength of the rising value of his company SpaceX, a government contractor that stands to gain thanks in part to the fact that the president-elect just appointed a SpaceX-loving billionaire as the next head of NASA. Elon Musk is confident enough to publicly taunt the SEC’s ongoing attempts to regulate his activity, which is probably safe, since the president-elect that he got elected has ensured that the SEC chair who is trying to regulate him is on the way out. Though Musk is not formally a member of the president-elect’s cabinet, at least nine other billionaires are. They and their fellow members of the plutocracy will soon be rewarded with a tax cut of more than $4 trillion. The corporations that made a big deal about cutting ties with Trump’s allies after January 6 are about to break their arms patting Trump on the back as he slashes the corporate tax rate to 15%.
The first and most obvious thing to be said about all of this is: If you are one of the many analysts seduced by the idea that the Trump administration would be in some way friendly towards the “working class” or would in some way advance the concept of antitrust enforcement in the public good, you are a god damn idiot. Please stop analyzing politics for the general public. Horseshoe theory has poisoned your brains and blinded you to reality. The total melding of the federal government with the interests of the ultrarich and a strongman leader who conducts federal policy in service of only those who bow to him is not “populism.” It is fascism. I would love to stop entertaining this charade so that I do not have to periodically rewrite this for the next four years. “Hey, Lina Khan’s replacement has vowed to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies!” Yes and his motivations are not “economic equality” or “the public good” but the fact that he and other right wingers are pissed that their accounts got censored and that big tech companies are too “woke” and so the tech companies will take exaggerated steps to cancel their DEI programs and what not in order to placate the right wing and we will ultimately get neither true antimonopoly enforcement or trivial social progress. Oh, he’s against “big tech?” I wonder why big tech’s richest megabillionaire Elon Musk would be copacetic with him, then? Could it be because the government is going to be run not according to philosophical principles but instead in the way that a thin-skinned mob boss runs his empire, so that everyone will be able to buy their way out of everything with flattery and legalized bribery? Great stuff. What a victory for The People.
Yelling at pundits, unfortunately, is not going to fix the downward spiral that we are in. This is not just some minor issue of policy preference. America’s grand situation is this: Fifty years of rising economic inequality has sapped the public trust (for good reason!) and destroyed faith in our institutions and consolidated political and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer rich people. Turning around this long-term trend of inequality will require A) the strengthening of organized labor, in order to pull more of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of workers, and balance out the ability of the rich to purchase political influence, and B) aggressive work by the federal government and the courts to restrict corporate power and break up monopolies and create a friendly atmosphere for the large scale labor organizing that will be necessary. As demonstrated by the handful of items above, and by common sense, the Trump administration is going to the opposite of those things.
The problem with this is not just an “aw shucks I would prefer if we went the other way” type of thing. The problem is that the long-term trends—inequality, concentration of wealth and power, and the resulting inability of the political system to reflect the interests of regular people—is destroying America. It means the nation is not, in a very straightforward sense, working. If democracy is a machine meant to ensure that the government serves the will and the interests of the people, ours is broken, and instead of fixing it, it is being further stripped for parts. The fact that people across the political spectrum reacted with glee to the murder of an evil health insurance CEO is a big tell. If there is great inequality, and great unfairness, and power is too concentrated, and instead of opening the system up to regular people so that they can reverse those things, you come in and make the system operate more towards the interests of the rich and well-connected, the people will, inevitably, get more angry. Crazy things happen when many people get very angry and have no legitimate political outlets for their legitimate rage. If we, collectively, do not want more crazy things to happen, we must reform the system. The Trump administration is not going to do that. So consider what is left.
The Democratic Party is such a dispiriting collection of careerists that it can be frustrating to continually speak about what they should be doing, while watching them always choose to instead continue the things that serve the careerists. But let us speak rationally here, regardless. We have a two-party system and the Democratic Party is the opposition. We know what needs to be done and we know that the Republicans are going to do the opposite. The only move for the Democratic Party—the rational move, the reasonable move—is to get more radical. Pundits will call this “going further left” but really what we are talking about is pulling harder in the direction of where the nation needs to go, in response to a Republican Party that is pulling harder towards plutocracy. If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs. (...)
When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today.
Also this week, the Trump administration announced the Khan would be fired and replaced with Andrew Ferguson, a Republican FTC commissioner. In Ferguson’s own pitch for the job, he wrote that his goal would be to “Reverse Lina Khan’s Anti-Business Agenda,” “Stop Lina Khan’s war on mergers,” “Protect Freedom of Speech and Fight Wokeness,” and “Fight back against the trans agenda.”
Also this week, the world’s richest man, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to on the president-elect’s campaign, and who has threatened to fund primary challengers to any Republicans who oppose the president-elect’s agenda, saw his net worth hit $447 billion, on the strength of the rising value of his company SpaceX, a government contractor that stands to gain thanks in part to the fact that the president-elect just appointed a SpaceX-loving billionaire as the next head of NASA. Elon Musk is confident enough to publicly taunt the SEC’s ongoing attempts to regulate his activity, which is probably safe, since the president-elect that he got elected has ensured that the SEC chair who is trying to regulate him is on the way out. Though Musk is not formally a member of the president-elect’s cabinet, at least nine other billionaires are. They and their fellow members of the plutocracy will soon be rewarded with a tax cut of more than $4 trillion. The corporations that made a big deal about cutting ties with Trump’s allies after January 6 are about to break their arms patting Trump on the back as he slashes the corporate tax rate to 15%.
The first and most obvious thing to be said about all of this is: If you are one of the many analysts seduced by the idea that the Trump administration would be in some way friendly towards the “working class” or would in some way advance the concept of antitrust enforcement in the public good, you are a god damn idiot. Please stop analyzing politics for the general public. Horseshoe theory has poisoned your brains and blinded you to reality. The total melding of the federal government with the interests of the ultrarich and a strongman leader who conducts federal policy in service of only those who bow to him is not “populism.” It is fascism. I would love to stop entertaining this charade so that I do not have to periodically rewrite this for the next four years. “Hey, Lina Khan’s replacement has vowed to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies!” Yes and his motivations are not “economic equality” or “the public good” but the fact that he and other right wingers are pissed that their accounts got censored and that big tech companies are too “woke” and so the tech companies will take exaggerated steps to cancel their DEI programs and what not in order to placate the right wing and we will ultimately get neither true antimonopoly enforcement or trivial social progress. Oh, he’s against “big tech?” I wonder why big tech’s richest megabillionaire Elon Musk would be copacetic with him, then? Could it be because the government is going to be run not according to philosophical principles but instead in the way that a thin-skinned mob boss runs his empire, so that everyone will be able to buy their way out of everything with flattery and legalized bribery? Great stuff. What a victory for The People.
Yelling at pundits, unfortunately, is not going to fix the downward spiral that we are in. This is not just some minor issue of policy preference. America’s grand situation is this: Fifty years of rising economic inequality has sapped the public trust (for good reason!) and destroyed faith in our institutions and consolidated political and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer rich people. Turning around this long-term trend of inequality will require A) the strengthening of organized labor, in order to pull more of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of workers, and balance out the ability of the rich to purchase political influence, and B) aggressive work by the federal government and the courts to restrict corporate power and break up monopolies and create a friendly atmosphere for the large scale labor organizing that will be necessary. As demonstrated by the handful of items above, and by common sense, the Trump administration is going to the opposite of those things.
The problem with this is not just an “aw shucks I would prefer if we went the other way” type of thing. The problem is that the long-term trends—inequality, concentration of wealth and power, and the resulting inability of the political system to reflect the interests of regular people—is destroying America. It means the nation is not, in a very straightforward sense, working. If democracy is a machine meant to ensure that the government serves the will and the interests of the people, ours is broken, and instead of fixing it, it is being further stripped for parts. The fact that people across the political spectrum reacted with glee to the murder of an evil health insurance CEO is a big tell. If there is great inequality, and great unfairness, and power is too concentrated, and instead of opening the system up to regular people so that they can reverse those things, you come in and make the system operate more towards the interests of the rich and well-connected, the people will, inevitably, get more angry. Crazy things happen when many people get very angry and have no legitimate political outlets for their legitimate rage. If we, collectively, do not want more crazy things to happen, we must reform the system. The Trump administration is not going to do that. So consider what is left.
The Democratic Party is such a dispiriting collection of careerists that it can be frustrating to continually speak about what they should be doing, while watching them always choose to instead continue the things that serve the careerists. But let us speak rationally here, regardless. We have a two-party system and the Democratic Party is the opposition. We know what needs to be done and we know that the Republicans are going to do the opposite. The only move for the Democratic Party—the rational move, the reasonable move—is to get more radical. Pundits will call this “going further left” but really what we are talking about is pulling harder in the direction of where the nation needs to go, in response to a Republican Party that is pulling harder towards plutocracy. If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs. (...)
When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: Getty
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things
Image: via
[ed. In theme with a couple of recent posts below, (Sitting Ducks; and Buying a New TV), here's a good rant. Mostly about social networks, but applicable to every corporate and political entity that's principally engaged in fleecing, punking, manipulating and ultimately forcing every individual into using products that eventually degrade over time and are contrary to their best interests.]
***
It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed. (...)
***
And we’ve seen very clearly this year that even progress that seems obvious and settled 50 years down the track is always vulnerable to people who confuse the ignorance of their own childhoods with the absence of societal problems.
But ultimately, what happens to our places and what happens to liberal democratic culture is only somewhat about money. If you think that’s not true, that it’s only capitalism that curdles the milk, ask yourself whether you think, even with all the money in the world, you ever could pay Amy Coney Barrett or Marjorie Taylor Green or Lindsey Graham or Josh Hawley or Andrew Tate or Brett Kavanaugh or Jim Jordan enough to become a progressive feminist eco-warrior activist.
There isn’t enough money printed to change who they are. Elon Musk is (or was) the richest man on Earth. He’s losing money like a teenage nosebleed every time he goes further to the right. This is just the shape of his soul, it’s not a feint for profit. It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option."
But ultimately, what happens to our places and what happens to liberal democratic culture is only somewhat about money. If you think that’s not true, that it’s only capitalism that curdles the milk, ask yourself whether you think, even with all the money in the world, you ever could pay Amy Coney Barrett or Marjorie Taylor Green or Lindsey Graham or Josh Hawley or Andrew Tate or Brett Kavanaugh or Jim Jordan enough to become a progressive feminist eco-warrior activist.
There isn’t enough money printed to change who they are. Elon Musk is (or was) the richest man on Earth. He’s losing money like a teenage nosebleed every time he goes further to the right. This is just the shape of his soul, it’s not a feint for profit. It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option."
On Buying a New TV: Be Prepared For Ad Hell
On Buying a New 'Smart' TV set: "This is an advertising/e-commerce-driven market, not a consumer-driven market. TV content is just the bait in the trap."
Today's TV selection has a serious dependency on advertisements and user tracking. In 2025, we expect competition in the TV industry to center around TV operating systems (OSes) and TVs' ability to deliver more relevant advertisements to viewers.
That yields a complicated question for shoppers: Are you willing to share your data with retail conglomerates and ad giants to save money on a TV?
Vizio is a Walmart brand now
One of the most impactful changes to the TV market next year will be Walmart owning Vizio. For Walmart, the deal, which closed on December 3 for approximately $2.3 billion, is about owning the data collection capabilities of Vizio’s SmartCast OS. For years, Vizio has been shifting its business from hardware sales to Platform+, “which consists largely of its advertising business" and "now accounts for all the company’s gross profit,” as Walmart noted when announcing the acquisition.
Walmart will use data collected from Vizio TVs to fuel its ad business, which sells ads on the OSes of its TVs (including Vizio and Onn brand TVs) and point-of-sale machines in Walmart stores. In a December 3 statement, Walmart confirmed its intentions with Vizio: [ed. Gotta love corporate speak]
“Roku is at grave risk”
Further, Walmart has expressed a goal of becoming one of the 10 biggest ad companies, with the ad business notably having higher margins than groceries. It could use Vizio, via more plentiful and/or intrusive ads, to fuel those goals. (...)
There are also potential implications related to how Walmart decides to distribute TVs post-acquisition. As Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at Omdia, told Ars:
With Walmart set to challenge Roku, some analysts anticipate that Roku will be acquired in 2025. In December, Guggenheim analysts predicted that ad tech firm The Trade Desk, which is launching its own TV OS, will look to buy Roku to scale its OS business.
Needham & Company’s Laura Martin also thinks an acquisition—by The Trade Desk or possibly one of Walmart's retail competitors—could be on the horizon.
‘’Walmart has told you by buying Vizio that these large retailers need a connected television advertising platform to tie purchases to,” Martin told Bloomberg. "That means Target and other large retailers have that reason to buy Roku to tie Roku’s connected television ad units to their sales in their retail stores. And by the way, Roku has much higher margins than any retailer.’”
She also pointed to Amazon as a potential buyer, noting that it might be able to use Roku's user data to feed large language models.
Roku was already emboldened enough in 2024 to introduce home screen video ads to its TVs and streaming devices and has even explored technology for showing ads over anything plugged into a Roku set. Imagine how using Roku devices might further evolve if owned by a company like The Trade Desk or Amazon with deep interests in ads and tracking.
TV owners accustomed to being tracked
That said, there's a fine line.
"Companies have to be careful of... finding that line between taking in advertising, especially display ads on the home screen or whatnot, and it becoming overwhelming [for viewers]," Wolk said.
One of the fastest-growing ad vehicles for TVs currently and into 2025 is free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels that come preloaded and make money from targeted ads. TCL is already experimenting with what viewers will accept here. It recently premiered movies made with generative AI that it hopes will fuel its FAST business while saving money. TCL believes that passive viewers will accept a lot of free content, even AI-generated movies and shows. But some viewers are extremely put off by such media, and there's a risk of souring the reputation of some FAST services.
by Scharon Harding, Ars Technica | Read more:
That yields a complicated question for shoppers: Are you willing to share your data with retail conglomerates and ad giants to save money on a TV?
Vizio is a Walmart brand now
One of the most impactful changes to the TV market next year will be Walmart owning Vizio. For Walmart, the deal, which closed on December 3 for approximately $2.3 billion, is about owning the data collection capabilities of Vizio’s SmartCast OS. For years, Vizio has been shifting its business from hardware sales to Platform+, “which consists largely of its advertising business" and "now accounts for all the company’s gross profit,” as Walmart noted when announcing the acquisition.
Walmart will use data collected from Vizio TVs to fuel its ad business, which sells ads on the OSes of its TVs (including Vizio and Onn brand TVs) and point-of-sale machines in Walmart stores. In a December 3 statement, Walmart confirmed its intentions with Vizio: [ed. Gotta love corporate speak]
The acquisition… allows Walmart to serve its customers in new ways to enhance their shopping journeys. It will also bring to market new and differentiated ways for advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery, helping brands achieve greater impact from their advertising investments with Walmart Connect—the company’s retail media business in the US.In 2025, buying a Vizio TV won’t just mean buying a TV from a company that’s essentially an ad business. It will mean fueling Walmart’s ad business. With Walmart also owning Onn and Amazon owning Fire TVs, that means there’s one less TV brand that isn’t a cog in a retail giant’s ever-expanding ad machine. (...)
“Roku is at grave risk”
Further, Walmart has expressed a goal of becoming one of the 10 biggest ad companies, with the ad business notably having higher margins than groceries. It could use Vizio, via more plentiful and/or intrusive ads, to fuel those goals. (...)
There are also potential implications related to how Walmart decides to distribute TVs post-acquisition. As Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at Omdia, told Ars:
One of the possibilities is that Walmart could make use of the Vizio operating system a condition for placement in stores. This could change not only the Onn/Vizio TVs but may also include the Chinese brands. The [Korean] and Japanese brands may resist, as they have premium brand positioning, but the Chinese brands would be vulnerable. Roku is at grave risk.Roku acquisition?
With Walmart set to challenge Roku, some analysts anticipate that Roku will be acquired in 2025. In December, Guggenheim analysts predicted that ad tech firm The Trade Desk, which is launching its own TV OS, will look to buy Roku to scale its OS business.
Needham & Company’s Laura Martin also thinks an acquisition—by The Trade Desk or possibly one of Walmart's retail competitors—could be on the horizon.
‘’Walmart has told you by buying Vizio that these large retailers need a connected television advertising platform to tie purchases to,” Martin told Bloomberg. "That means Target and other large retailers have that reason to buy Roku to tie Roku’s connected television ad units to their sales in their retail stores. And by the way, Roku has much higher margins than any retailer.’”
She also pointed to Amazon as a potential buyer, noting that it might be able to use Roku's user data to feed large language models.
Roku was already emboldened enough in 2024 to introduce home screen video ads to its TVs and streaming devices and has even explored technology for showing ads over anything plugged into a Roku set. Imagine how using Roku devices might further evolve if owned by a company like The Trade Desk or Amazon with deep interests in ads and tracking.
TV owners accustomed to being tracked
TV brands have become so dependent on ads that some are selling TVs at a loss to push ads. How did we get to the point where TV brands view their hardware as a way to track and sell to viewers? Part of the reason TV OSes are pushing the limits on ads is that many viewers seem willing to accept them, especially in the name of saving money.
Per the North American Q2 2024 TiVo Video Trends Report, 64.3 percent of subscription video-on-demand users subscribe to an ad-supported tier (compared to 48 percent in Q2 2023). And users are showing more tolerance to ads, with 77.8 percent saying they are "tolerant" or "in favor of" ads, up from 74 percent in Q2 2023. This is compared to 22.2 percent of respondents saying they're "averse" to ads. TiVo surveyed 4,490 people in the US and Canada ages 18 and up for the report.
“Based on streaming services, many consumers see advertising as a small price to pay for lower cash costs," Horner said.
The analyst added:
Per the North American Q2 2024 TiVo Video Trends Report, 64.3 percent of subscription video-on-demand users subscribe to an ad-supported tier (compared to 48 percent in Q2 2023). And users are showing more tolerance to ads, with 77.8 percent saying they are "tolerant" or "in favor of" ads, up from 74 percent in Q2 2023. This is compared to 22.2 percent of respondents saying they're "averse" to ads. TiVo surveyed 4,490 people in the US and Canada ages 18 and up for the report.
“Based on streaming services, many consumers see advertising as a small price to pay for lower cash costs," Horner said.
The analyst added:
While some consumers will be sensitive to privacy issues or intrusive advertising, at the same time, most people have shown themselves entirely comfortable with being tracked by (for example) social media.Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at the TVREV TV and streaming analyst group, agreed that platforms like Instagram have proven people's willingness to accept ads and tracking, particularly if it leads to them seeing more relevant advertisements or giving shows or movies better ratings. According to the analyst, customers seem to think, "Google is tracking my finances, my porn habits, my everything. Why do I care if NBC knows that I watch football and The Tonight Show?" (...)
That said, there's a fine line.
"Companies have to be careful of... finding that line between taking in advertising, especially display ads on the home screen or whatnot, and it becoming overwhelming [for viewers]," Wolk said.
One of the fastest-growing ad vehicles for TVs currently and into 2025 is free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels that come preloaded and make money from targeted ads. TCL is already experimenting with what viewers will accept here. It recently premiered movies made with generative AI that it hopes will fuel its FAST business while saving money. TCL believes that passive viewers will accept a lot of free content, even AI-generated movies and shows. But some viewers are extremely put off by such media, and there's a risk of souring the reputation of some FAST services.
Image: Getty
[ed. No wonder Enshittification was selected the word of the year in 2024. See also: here and here (or just do a Google search to experience enshittification in real-time).]
Sunday, December 15, 2024
F1 Goes Small
Just for Fun
Images: (first image) via; F1 images Claudia Gori for The Washington Post
***
"Julian and Alessandro were walking to the starting line, trying their best not to look at each other. They wore child-size racing uniforms and tiny driving gloves. Behind them, mechanics pushed their 160-pound cars with a list of corporate sponsors on the hood. The team’s name was emblazoned on the side: Baby Race.The two boys were Baby Race’s star drivers, among the favorites to win the World Series of Karting championship that was minutes away. In theory, they could work together to secure a team victory. But Alessandro Truchot and Julian Frasnelli had been fierce competitors since they were 9 and 10. Now they were 11 and 12, respectively, and the rivalry had grown violent, culminating in high-speed crashes that caused a roaring crowd to hold its breath.
As its popularity has boomed, Formula One has faced a problem: how to identify future champions who can’t yet drive a car. Karting is the sport’s best approximation, a birthday party diversion that has been bankrolled and professionalized into a series of miniature Grand Prix races. Every current F1 driver started in a go-cart."
Review: A Complete Unknown
Walking out of A Complete Uknown and into the streets of New York City, not far from where Bob Dylan tramped about in his vagabond days of the 1960s, I felt empty and unsatisfied. Far from unlocking the secrets of the widely heralded singer-songwriter's heart, co-writer/director James Mangold's biographical drama keeps the man behind the legend and lyrics a mystery. But as I've gotten distance from that night, I've come to appreciate in reflection that this was precisely Mangold's purpose.
Dylan's lyrics in songs like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" spoke to his generation and generations to follow. Now 83, he is still a massive influence, not just on folk music but also rock and American music as a whole. Because so many relate to his lyrics, we like to think we could relate to him. As we do with all celebrities whose work we admire or whose personas we envy, we yearn to confirm that they are who we imagine, and in some way are like us. And yet, they don't owe us this interiority. Dylan, even in his decades of fame, even as he chaotically tweets, is still — after 60 years in the spotlight — an unknown in many ways.
The title of this film, pulled from Dylan's lyrics for "Like a Rolling Stone," warns audiences at the outset. A Complete Unknown, despite its immersive and rigorous re-creation of the 1960s folk era and a star-studded cast committed to capturing the specifics of luminaries like Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez, refuses to play by the expectations of a standard Hollywood biopic by demystifying its subject. From the first scene to the finale, Dylan (as portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) is a man who is of the people and yet apart from them. He refuses to be held down by social norms, romantic obligations, genre conventions, or community pressures. Perhaps he is sincere. Perhaps his mystique is a pose. Perhaps we don’t really want to know.
Adapted from Elijah Wald's book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, Mangold's movie begins in 1961 New York City, where a scrawny, scraggly man struts through Manhattan's downtown streets, a newspaper clipping in his hand. Bob Dylan (Chalamet) is seeking out the hospice where his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), idles, partially paralyzed and voiceless but not alone. Tracing him to Jersey, Dylan comes upon another folk star, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who not only walks the walk of singing political songs but also defends them against a government terrified of the voice of its people.
The three become fast friends, the thrumming of their connection as instant and enchanting as the song Dylan plays to impress his heroes. Soon, he'll find not only his place in the folk scene and Greenwich Village but also in the bed of a beautiful artist and activist called Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). (She is based on Dylan's ex Suze Rotolo, who is pictured along the musician on 1963's album cover for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.) But once Dylan hits his groove, the film launches forward several years to 1965, when he's an established megastar whose emerging interest in electric guitar threatens to outrage his fanbase at the Newport Folk Festival, and his early allies.
Timothée Chalamet is perfectly earnest yet irritating as Bob Dylan.
This, too, is the point. Whether flirting with Sylvie or playing for Woody, young Bob is devotedly constructing his own mythology. To his fellow male musicians, this is easily accepted; the construction of his stage persona is as valid as his scribbling lyrics or building his band. However, Dylan's female lovers suffer the friction where fiction meets real life. (...)
Because Mangold's script binds his audience to a protagonist who willfully distances himself from everyone, it's essential that the supporting players erupt with the emotions Bob could never dare express. Norton, Fanning, and Barbaro do so in a symphony of feelings, which carry the film. (...)
Each of these performances masterfully fleshes out these figures so they exist beyond their connection to Dylan. You can see how they tie together, how it hurts when he cuts that tie, but also that each is a tapestry even without him. This, above all else, makes A Complete Unknown remarkable, setting it apart from countless dramas about an abusive (and always male) creative genius whose bad behavior is effectively shrugged off as the cost of art.
Mr. Dylan has been a gnomic figure for so long that it’s sometimes hard to recollect the Chaplinesque aspect that characterized him in his youth. His boundless enthusiasm proved a delight for the more reserved Ms. Rotolo. For his part Mr. Dylan soaked up her passion for the likes of William Blake, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud; he inscribed a paperback edition of Byron’s poems to her “Lord Byron Dylan.” Equally important, her political activism, particularly in the civil rights movement, spurred his thinking and writing about those issues. (...)
Their romance, then, began on the basis of an equality that became impossible to sustain. She would soon feel overwhelmed by the obsessive attention the world focused on Mr. Dylan. Having made the symbolic journey across the East River to discover herself and what she might become, she felt lost once again, reduced to being Mr. Dylan’s chick and urged even by her most well-intentioned friends to accommodate her life in every way to his genius.
In approaching Ms. Rotolo about doing the book, Gerry Howard, an editor at Broadway Books, mentioned “Minor Characters,” a memoir by Joyce Johnson, who had been Jack Kerouac’s lover at a similar stage in his career. “I’m a great fan of ‘Minor Characters,’ and I thought Suze stood in exact relation to Dylan as Joyce Johnson did to Kerouac,” Mr. Howard said. “They were present at liftoff and then had to live in the backwash of all that.”
The title of this film, pulled from Dylan's lyrics for "Like a Rolling Stone," warns audiences at the outset. A Complete Unknown, despite its immersive and rigorous re-creation of the 1960s folk era and a star-studded cast committed to capturing the specifics of luminaries like Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez, refuses to play by the expectations of a standard Hollywood biopic by demystifying its subject. From the first scene to the finale, Dylan (as portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) is a man who is of the people and yet apart from them. He refuses to be held down by social norms, romantic obligations, genre conventions, or community pressures. Perhaps he is sincere. Perhaps his mystique is a pose. Perhaps we don’t really want to know.
Adapted from Elijah Wald's book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, Mangold's movie begins in 1961 New York City, where a scrawny, scraggly man struts through Manhattan's downtown streets, a newspaper clipping in his hand. Bob Dylan (Chalamet) is seeking out the hospice where his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), idles, partially paralyzed and voiceless but not alone. Tracing him to Jersey, Dylan comes upon another folk star, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who not only walks the walk of singing political songs but also defends them against a government terrified of the voice of its people.
Timothée Chalamet is perfectly earnest yet irritating as Bob Dylan.
This, too, is the point. Whether flirting with Sylvie or playing for Woody, young Bob is devotedly constructing his own mythology. To his fellow male musicians, this is easily accepted; the construction of his stage persona is as valid as his scribbling lyrics or building his band. However, Dylan's female lovers suffer the friction where fiction meets real life. (...)
Because Mangold's script binds his audience to a protagonist who willfully distances himself from everyone, it's essential that the supporting players erupt with the emotions Bob could never dare express. Norton, Fanning, and Barbaro do so in a symphony of feelings, which carry the film. (...)
Each of these performances masterfully fleshes out these figures so they exist beyond their connection to Dylan. You can see how they tie together, how it hurts when he cuts that tie, but also that each is a tapestry even without him. This, above all else, makes A Complete Unknown remarkable, setting it apart from countless dramas about an abusive (and always male) creative genius whose bad behavior is effectively shrugged off as the cost of art.
by Kristy Puchko, Mashable | Read more:
Image: Searchlight Pictures; Wikipedia
[ed. Don't know about Chalamet as Dylan (although he did spend five years preparing for the role), but always had an interest in Suze Rotollo, who died in 2011. Very complex woman. See also: Memoirs of a Girl From the East Country (O.K., Queens) (NYT); and, Bob and Suze: Words of meeting, words of parting (Peter White).]
***
"They lived together in a small apartment on West Fourth Street and fed each other’s ravenous hunger for meaning. “We created this private world,” Ms. Rotolo recalled over lunch in an Italian restaurant on Waverly Place. “We were searching for poetry, and we saw that in each other. We were so ultrasensitive, both of us. That’s why it was a good relationship, but also why it was difficult.”Mr. Dylan has been a gnomic figure for so long that it’s sometimes hard to recollect the Chaplinesque aspect that characterized him in his youth. His boundless enthusiasm proved a delight for the more reserved Ms. Rotolo. For his part Mr. Dylan soaked up her passion for the likes of William Blake, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud; he inscribed a paperback edition of Byron’s poems to her “Lord Byron Dylan.” Equally important, her political activism, particularly in the civil rights movement, spurred his thinking and writing about those issues. (...)
Their romance, then, began on the basis of an equality that became impossible to sustain. She would soon feel overwhelmed by the obsessive attention the world focused on Mr. Dylan. Having made the symbolic journey across the East River to discover herself and what she might become, she felt lost once again, reduced to being Mr. Dylan’s chick and urged even by her most well-intentioned friends to accommodate her life in every way to his genius.
In approaching Ms. Rotolo about doing the book, Gerry Howard, an editor at Broadway Books, mentioned “Minor Characters,” a memoir by Joyce Johnson, who had been Jack Kerouac’s lover at a similar stage in his career. “I’m a great fan of ‘Minor Characters,’ and I thought Suze stood in exact relation to Dylan as Joyce Johnson did to Kerouac,” Mr. Howard said. “They were present at liftoff and then had to live in the backwash of all that.”
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