Paper Tigers

by Wesley Yang

Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. I’ve contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. It’s my face. I can’t disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?

Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.

Asian-American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-­achieving Asian-American students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian-American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?

Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I myself have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible?

A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my advice about “being an Asian writer.” This is how he described himself: “I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time, I’m the first person in my family to go to college, my parents don’t speak English very well, and we don’t own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, I’m proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I’m jumping the gun a generation or two too early.”

One bright, cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant.

Mao has a round face, with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame glasses. Since graduating, he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was 8 years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapist’s aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman who lives in Tribeca. And what he feels, sometimes, in the presence of that amiable young man is a pang of regret. Now he understands better what he ought to have done back when he was a Stuyvesant freshman: “Worked half as hard and been twenty times more successful.”

Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-­roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.

This year, 569 Asian-Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don’t believe in. They believe—and have ­proved—that the constant practice of test-taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find “cram schools,” or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. “Learning math is not about learning math,” an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in the New York Times as saying. “It’s about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.” Mao puts it more specifically: “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.”
.....
Somewhere near the middle of his time at Stuyvesant, a vague sense of discontent started to emerge within Mao. He had always felt himself a part of a mob of “nameless, faceless Asian kids,” who were “like a part of the décor of the place.” He had been content to keep his head down and work toward the goal shared by everyone at Stuyvesant: Harvard. But around the beginning of his senior year, he began to wonder whether this march toward academic success was the only, or best, path.

“You can’t help but feel like there must be another way,” he explains over a bowl of phô. “It’s like, we’re being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something—and if they’re decently intelligent and work decently hard in school …”

Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that explained why others were getting what he never had—“a high-school sweetheart” figured prominently on this list—and that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. “You realize there are things you really don’t understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.” I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had “sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble.” This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge “about social norms and propriety” had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.

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Runaway Money

by Joshua Prager

Albert Edward Clarke III sits shaded by maple trees on the back porch of his shabby house in South Salem, N.Y., flipping through a children's storybook. "I read it once about three years ago," he says, bent over the bright green, red and yellow pages. "And I forgot."

That happens a lot. "It could be Alzheimer's," the 57-year-old says. He chuckles. "It could be Parkinson's. It could be punch-drunk syndrome. It could be all three."

Mr. Clarke walks to his silver Jeep parked in the gravel drive and retrieves a black canvas bag. In it are the documents that give legal proof to a family and its means: birth certificates, child-custody papers and a photocopy of an eight-page will.

"I carry it around with me just about everywhere I go," he says.

He pulls out the will and flips to a familiar passage. "I give and bequeath," begins the will's fifth clause, "all of my right, title and interest of every kind and nature in and to all books written by me and published by D.C. Heath & Co., William R. Scott Inc., Harper & Bros., Simon & Schuster, Lothrop Lee & Shepard & Co. Inc., Cadmus Books Agency, Harvill Press and Thomas I. Crowell & Co., and in and to all contracts for the publication thereof, to Albert Clarke, if he survives me."

He did.

The benefactor he survived was Margaret Wise Brown, a midcentury bohemian who wrote dozens of children's books. Fifty years later, "The Runaway Bunny" and, most famously, "Goodnight Moon," sit alongside Dr. Seuss as classics of early-childhood literature.

A third generation of parents is now reading "Goodnight Moon" to its children. The rock-music trio Shivaree included a track titled "Goodnight Moon" on its recent debut CD. A racehorse in Washington state is named Goodnight Moon. Hospitals in California and South Dakota send newborns home with a copy. On a recent campaign stop, presidential candidate George W. Bush cited "Goodnight Moon" as one of his childhood favorites.

"It's the jewel in the crown," says Pat Buckley, director of subsidiary rights of children's books at HarperCollins, publisher of "Goodnight Moon."

Mr. Clarke was a rascally nine-year-old when he inherited that jewel. Ever since, as "Goodnight Moon" has drifted toward the center of America's collective consciousness, he has floated on the fringes of society. No steady job. No fixed place of abode. Dozens of arrests. Rarely has his life traced a path through terrain even remotely resembling the world of Ms. Brown's stories. Over the years, that world has yielded to him nearly $5 million. Today, he has $27,000 in cash.

"I'm an inept bungler when it comes to business matters," Mr. Clarke says, as ash drops from his cigarette into the folds of his trousers. "If it wasn't for the fact that Margaret Wise Brown left me an inheritance, who knows? I could've been a homeless person. I could've been a poor, broken-down homeless person."

Mr. Clarke's family consists of himself and two of his children, Sharmaine, 10, and Albert, nine. They have moved seven times in the past five years, their household a jumble of cardboard boxes and photos taped to the walls. Mr. Clarke wears a gray button-down shirt so fresh from its plastic packaging that it still bears a symmetrical grid of creases. "I spend a lot of money on clothes for me and May and Aly," he says. "We wear them two or three times. When they get all wrinkly and funky, we throw them out."

The enduring constant is Ms. Brown's will, always close at hand to protect Mr. Clarke should someone try to wrest from him his inheritance. It is his ticket to flee the neighbors and real-estate agents who he says are prejudiced against his mixed-race children. Even his children's friends are suspect. Little Albert says his father "says they can come over if we want them to. But it's a better choice not to because they can get hurt and we can get sued. He's really smart." Most important, the will is Mr. Clarke's physical connection to a woman whose legacy -- he believes -- encompasses far more than money.

The lives of Ms. Brown and the Clarke family first entwined in 1935. That's when Ms. Brown met Albert's grandmother at what is now the Bank Street College of Education, a teacher-training institute in Manhattan. Soon, Ms. Brown and the woman's daughter, Joan MacCormick, both single and in their 20s, struck up a friendship, eventually summering together in Maine.

Mighty Uke

[ed,  Trailer for the documentary Mighty Uke, the Amazing Comeback of a Musical Underdog.  Looks fun!]

Lorraine Christie - Paris Remembered
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When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse

[ed.  My favorite topic these days: copyright - this time as it relates to quoting poetry.  Our copyright laws definitely need an overhaul, but would you trust this Congress, or any other in recent memory, to produce anything forward-looking and fair?  Yeah...me, neither.]

by David Orr

Copyright law is so often a matter of guesswork and loopholes, small print and obscure provisions. One such provision, dating from the ’70s, has recently come to the music industry’s attention. “Termination rights” allow musicians to reclaim the copyrights on their songs after 35 years — meaning songs from albums like Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” may soon be back in the hands of George Clinton and his funkified compatriots. Late last month, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called on Congress to clarify the statute in question in order to protect artists’ rights.

Would that the uncertainties of copyright law in my industry garnered so much attention.

American poetry criticism faces a major problem, one that has nothing to do with poetry, or readers, or anything remotely literary. The problem is that a critic who wants to quote a poem in a book has to face a permissions regime that ranges from unpredictable to plain crazy, as I discovered while working on a guidebook to modern poetry for general readers. The permissions took months to compile, and the initial estimate was nearly $20,000.

The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?

If you ask publishers, the answer varies — a lot. Some think a quarter of a short poem is appropriate, some think almost an entire poem can be acceptable in the right circumstances, and many others believe you should quote only three or four lines. If you want to play it safe — and that’s what your own publisher will most likely prefer — then you’ll find yourself adhering to the three- or four-line standard.

But that standard doesn’t make much sense. Poems, like excuses, come in all shapes and sizes. They range from single lines to book length. And individual lines range from one word to whatever will fit on the page. Consequently, three or four lines can be 3 words or 70. And what about poems that aren’t lineated at all? Or visual poems? George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is famously shaped like a pair of wings — if Herbert were alive today, could we quote a feather?

Nor does it help to say that the standard should be, say, 5 percent of a given poem. Here’s the entirety of Monica Youn’s poem “Ending”:

Freshwater stunned the beaches.

I could sleep.

What’s 5 percent of that? “Fr”?

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Andrew Wyeth, Love in the Afternoon, 1992
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Chet Baker

Friday Book Club - Deep in a Dream

[ed.  I haven't read this yet but plan on ordering it today.  Curious to see how it compares to Art Pepper's autobiography, Straight Life.]

by Greil Marcus, Barnes and Noble Review

James Gavin's book about Chet Baker, the jazz singer and trumpeter who first gained fame in the early fifties and who, only a few years later -- and for the rest of his life -- was better known as a heroin addict as unregenerate as any in the history of the music, was first published in 2002, fourteen years after Baker's death in Amsterdam, at fifty-eight, almost certainly by suicide; it has only now appeared in paperback. This long lag is hard to fathom. As evidenced most strikingly in the portraits of Baker in Geoff Dyer's 1995 "But Beautiful" and Dave Hickey's 1997 "Air Guitar," and in the response to Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary film "Let's Get Lost," released just after Baker's death, and screened in a restored version at the Cannes film festival only three years ago, there has always been a Chet Baker cult.

But more than that, "Deep in a Dream" -- named for a particularly affecting, cloudlike Baker recording from 1959 -- is not an ordinary biography, though there is nothing unusual about its form (from birth to death and aftermath) or style (direct and clear). It is a singular work of biographical art that makes most studies of, as Hickey's essay on Baker is so wonderfully titled, "A Life in the Arts," seem craven, compromised, or dishonest, with the writer falling back before the story he or she has chosen to tell, for whatever reasons offering excuses or blame in place of a frank embrace of the unresolved story each of us leaves behind, producing less any sort of real entry into the mysterious country of another person's life than a cover-up.

To put it another way: except in the rare cases of those strange creatures who, like T. E. Lawrence, create themselves to such a degree that it becomes nearly impossible to imagine that they ever experienced a trivial or even workaday moment, the dramatic sweep we find in novels or movies is not really the stuff of anyone's life. No matter how the writer may try to have it otherwise, most biographies are simply one thing after another. The life of a junkie is not just one thing after another, it is the same one thing after another -- and yet there is not a page in "Deep in a Dream" that is not engaging, alive, demanding a response from a reader whether that be a matter of horror or awe, making the reader almost complicit in whatever comes next, even when, with the story less that of a musician who used heroin to play than that of a junkie who played to get heroin, it seems certain that nothing can.

Born in Oklahoma in 1929, Chet Baker grew up in Los Angeles. He had a deep and instinctive ear for music, playing trumpet in high school, army, and junior college bands; in 1949, when he heard the Miles Davis 78s that would later be collected as "The Birth of the Cool," Baker "connected with that style so passionately that he felt he had found the light." That same year he was present at all-night sessions in L.A. to hear Charlie "Bird" Parker, and was shot up with heroin for the first time. He sat in with Dave Brubeck in San Francisco; in 1952 in L.A. he was called in with others to make up a group to back a wasted Parker.

That gave Baker an instant credibility in jazz. Ruined or not, Charlie Parker, with Dizzy Gillespie the progenitor of bebop, was the genius, the savant, the seer, the stumbling visionary who heard what others could not and could translate what he heard into a new language that others could immediately understand, even if they could never speak it themselves. If Parker said that Baker's playing was "pure and simple," that it reminded him of the Bix Beiderbecke records he heard growing up in Kansas City, that made the perhaps apocryphal story of Parker telling Gillespie and Davis, "There's a little white cat on the coast who's gonna eat you up" almost believable. But it was Baker's face -- as much or more than his joining in a new L.A. quartet with Gerry Mulligan, the baritone saxophonist and junkie who had played on the "Birth of the Cool" sessions, or Baker forming his own group and then headlining at Birdland in New York with Gillespie and Davis below him on the bill -- that made many people want to believe it.

Well before the end of his life, after he had lost most of his teeth in a drug-related beating in San Francisco, after he had turned into as charming, self-pitying, manipulative, professional a junkie as any in America or Europe, where for decades he made his living less as a musician than a legend, Baker wore the face of a lizard. In some photographs he barely looks human. But at the start he was, as so indelibly captured in William Claxton's famous photographs, not merely beautiful, not merely a California golden boy -- in the words of the television impresario and songwriter Steve Allen, someone who "started out as James Dean and ended up as Charles Manson." He was gorgeous, he seemed touched by an odd light, and he did not, even then, look altogether human -- but in a manner that was not repulsive but irresistibly alluring.

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image credit: last.fm

Linda Kim
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The Lairds of Learning

by George Monbiot

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a Keep Out sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges Eur34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.

Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can’t publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.

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Photo: Creative Commons License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Feral Houses

Nothing I have ever done has resonated as much as the photos of what I called "feral houses" last summer. A quickly dashed-off blog post written while children tugged at my sleeves ended up capturing the attention of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and I still get hundreds of hits to that post every day. Even Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, e-mailed me about them. With a new summer here, I am tempted to add to the typology. Here we even have a feral church:

Living in Detroit, you can easily grow numb to the things that seem remarkable to people who live elsewhere. With so many journalists and photographers parachuting in over the past few years, we have allowed outsiders to document these things and define them. Detroiters are, after all, used to all the abandoned shit. We drive past the grand ruins without a second thought. It can also be easy to avoid the parts of the city where these "feral houses" are because there is little reason to go there: nature is taking them over because nothing else wants to be there. It is often easier to just travel the web of depressed freeways than it is to drive through depressing neighborhoods. But I'll always prefer a side road I've never seen to a rut I've been in a thousand times. Seeing these feral houses is a part of our daily life in this city, and I feel compelled to document them.

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Personalizing Your Hotel Search

by Michelle Higgins

Searching for a hotel online has long been limited to plugging in your travel dates and destination and then sifting through star ratings and prices. But there are other factors involved. Is the hotel in a convenient location? Is it child friendly? Will the room have a view of a brick wall or the sea?

Now, a number of Web sites are attempting to answer these questions with tools including photo-based searches and maps that show where a town’s hot spots are.
 
Google.com/Hotelfinder

Google’s experimental hotel search site, which started in July, focuses on where to stay and finding a good deal. After entering your destination, dates and price range, HotelFinder delivers its top recommendations (for cities within the United States) in a list or on a Google Map. A blue perimeter delineates the area, with less-popular zones shadowed in gray.

In addition to the current price of a hotel, the site offers the hotel’s historical average so you can tell if you are getting a deal or not. For example, a $144 nightly rate for the Latham Hotel in Washington in early September was 11 percent less than usual.

Clicking on a hotel brings up a collage of images, reviews by Google users and basic hotel information so you do not have to leave the page to do more research. You can also create a list of hotels you would like to compare further.
 
Best feature: You can redraw the perimeters on the map to narrow your search. So if you want to look at hotels only in, say, the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, you can manipulate the blue lines to home in on it.
 
Worst feature: The so-called “tourist spotlight” designed to shine a light on popular zones isn’t very enlightening. In a search for New York City hotels, for instance, practically all of Manhattan (with the exception of parts of Harlem and the Lower East Side, where few hotels are located) was highlighted.

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Computer Games Explore Social Issues

by Kara Platoni

Social studies teachers Karl Atkins and Scott Deckelmann take on a very serious subject by giving their students a very amusing challenge: Win a computer game. In fact, students have to win PeaceMaker, a simulation of the Middle East peace process, twice -- once while playing as the Israeli prime minister and once as the Palestinian president.

In both cases, students must respond to a rapidly evolving political situation by choosing which actions -- building settlements, launching rockets, making speeches -- are most likely to broker peace. The Scappoose, Oregon, teachers have played PeaceMaker with more than a dozen sections of their freshman global-studies and junior international-relations classes, and they say gaming is an effective way to explore intricate political issues. Indeed, PeaceMaker is at the forefront of a movement -- often called serious games or social-issues games -- in which educators use games to illustrate complex social issues, from immigration to climate change.

"Games are largely misunderstood in our society. They aren't necessarily trivial or sophomoric. Gaming is just a young medium," says Suzanne Seggerman, president and cofounder of Games for Change, a resource and support clearingouse for game developers, nonprofit organizations, and educators. "They're a great way for people to explore serious issues."

Better yet, they make that exploration fun, even addicting, according to Scapoose sophomore Ashley Amick, who played PeaceMaker at school last year. "I never wanted to go to my next class, because I hadn't won yet, and I wanted to see what would happen when I did," she explains. "We usually learn from textbooks or worksheets, but because you automatically learn while you play it, even my classmates that don't like school had fun." 

Modeling the Real World

Social issues are by their nature complex and dynamic. Understanding them involves analyzing cause and effect, multiple viewpoints, and rapidly shifting scenarios. Games easily mirror this fluidity.

"The thing we get with games that is different from what we get with books or other media is that we are able to actually build models of relationships between the different moving parts of a system and let people mess around with them, let people experience what happens when they change one variable or when they introduce a different kind of behavior," says Ian Bogost, an associate professor of computational and digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Bogost is also an adviser to the Serious Games Summit at the annual Game Developers Conference, and he wrote the book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games.)

"Understanding something such as war or poverty or immigration demands understanding a whole range of different kinds of inputs and outputs," he adds. In other words, if you take an action in PeaceMaker, you'll soon find out what the other side thought of your input.

"It is very clearly active, not passive," says Deckelmann of the way his students use the game. "They are part of the game. They are helping determine the end of the story. They don't get to determine the end of a documentary. It's about them deciding what's important, as opposed to us telling them what is important. And it's allowing them to fail in a safe place where no one can shame them." Games teach almost entirely through trial and error, with few real-world consequences; if you mess up, you can always restart.

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Slavko Krunic Instructor
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Rick Lawrence, fairhaven 02

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Tamara de Lempica (1898-1980)
Succulent and Flask, 1941
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Are jobs obsolete?

[ed.  Interesting thought piece.  However, it seems whatever direction we take it will have to come from the intersection of capitalism and politics, and at this point that suggests anarchy rather than enlightenment.]

by Douglas Rushkoff

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

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[ed. Update:  As a bookend, here's an interesting non-thought piece:  Rush Limbaugh on Doug Rushkoff.]

Sextortion

by Nate Anderson

In the spring of 2009, a college student named Amy received an instant message from someone claiming to know her. Certainly, the person knew something about her—he was able to supply details about what her bedroom looked like and he had, improbably, nude photos of Amy. He sent the photos to her and asked her to have "Web sex" with him.

Instead, Amy contacted her boyfriend Dave, who had been storing the naked photos on his own computer. (Note: victim names have been changed in this story). The two students exchanged instant messages about Amy's apparent stalker, trying to figure out what had happened. Soon after the exchange, each received a separate threat from the man. He knew what they had just chatted about, he warned, and they were not to take their story to anyone, including the police.

Amy, terrified by her stalker's eerie knowledge, contacted campus police. Officers were dispatched to her room, where they took down Amy's story and asked her questions about the incident. Soon after, Dave received more threats from the stalker because Amy had gone to the police—and the stalker knew exactly what she had said to them.

Small wonder that, when the FBI later interviewed Amy about the case, she was "visibly upset and shaking during parts of the interview and had to stop at points to control her emotions and stop herself from crying." So afraid was Amy for her own safety that she did not leave her dorm room for a full week after the threats.

As for Dave, he suffered increased fear, anxiety, confusion, and anger; he later told a court that even his parents "had a hard time trusting anyone or even feeling comfortable enough to use a computer" after the episode.

Due in large part to the stress of the attack, Dave and Amy broke up.

But who had the mysterious stalker been? And how did he have access both to the contents of Dave's computer and to private discussions with police that Amy conducted in the privacy of her own room?

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Toshiaki Kato, Rapunzel
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