20,000 Colleagues Under the Sea

[ed. Drones above, gliders below. The remote-sensing/surveillance industry is booming these days.]

Sailing the seven seas is old hat. The latest trick is to glide them. Sea gliders are small unmanned vessels which are now cruising the briny by the hundred. They use a minuscule amount of power, so they can stay out for months. And, being submarines, they are rarely troubled by the vicissitudes of weather at the surface. Their only known enemies are sharks (several have come back covered in tooth marks) and fishing nets.

Sea gliders are propelled by buoyancy engines. These are devices that pump oil in and out of an external bladder which, because it deflates when it is empty, means that the craft’s density changes as well. This causes the glider to ascend or sink accordingly, but because it has wings some of that vertical force is translated into horizontal movement. Such movement is slow (the top speed of most gliders is about half a knot), but the process is extremely efficient. That means gliders can be sent on long missions. In 2009, for example, a glider called Scarlet Knight, operated by Rutgers University, in New Jersey, crossed the Atlantic on a single battery charge, though it took seven months to do so. (...)

Skipping under the ocean

Ten years ago there were fewer than 30 gliders in the world, all built either by academic institutions or the armed forces. Now there are at least 400, and most are made by one of three firms: iRobot, whose product is called, simply, Seaglider; Teledyne Webb, which manufactures the Slocum Glider (named after Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail solo around the world); and Bluefin Robotics (the third member of the Massachusetts sea-glider cluster, based in Quincy), which sells the Spray Glider. Broadly speaking, these machines have three sorts of application: scientific, military and commercial.

At the moment, science rules the roost. For cash-strapped oceanographers, gliders are a blessing. Their running costs are negligible and, though buying one can cost as much as $150,000, that sum would purchase a mere three days of, say, a manned trip to the Southern Ocean.

Gliders, moreover, give a continuous view of what is going on, rather than the series of snapshots yielded by equipment lowered from a vessel at the surface. Besides tracking pollution, watching volcanoes and measuring icebergs, they are following fish around, monitoring changing temperatures in different layers of seawater and mapping the abundance of algae. The Ice Dragon, a modified Seaglider operated by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has explored under the Antarctic ice shelf, and another modified Seaglider, the Deepglider, can plumb the depths down to 6km (20,000 feet). Teledyne Webb’s Storm Glider, meanwhile, lurks in hurricane-prone areas, bobbing up to take readings during extreme weather.

Gliders are also quiet—so quiet that, as one researcher puts it, you can use them “to hear a fish fart”. This was demonstrated by a recent project run by the University of South Florida, in which a glider successfully mapped the locations of red grouper and toadfish populations on the West Florida Shelf from the noises the fish made.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Antoni Clave
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Five years after the iPhone, Carriers are the Biggest Threat to Innovation

Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple's phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and insisting that their use of valuable public spectrum remain free of any oversight. While the iPhone is a raging success, the wireless market is headed towards total failure.

The evidence is everywhere, starting with the iPhone itself: Verizon famously passed on the device at first, and if not for Steve Jobs personally convincing AT&T to sell his phone sight unseen, the iPhone may never have existed. Jobs was well aware that he couldn't reach the market of cellphone consumers without carrier support — at the D3 conference in 2005, he famously called the carriers "orifices" and offered this withering assessment of the industry as it then stood:

"It's even worse. The carriers now have gained the upper hand in terms of the power of the relationship with the handset manufacturers. And they're starting to tell the handset manufacturers what to build. And if Nokia and Motorola don't listen to them, well, Samsung and LG will. So the handset manufacturers are really getting these big thick books from the carriers, telling them "here's what your phone's gonna be."

"We're not good at that," Steve added. Two years later, he would ship the iPhone, turning the industry on its head. Apple had succeeded in building the phone customers wanted instead of the phone carriers wanted, and things would never be the same.

And indeed, things are different — they've gotten dramatically worse. Instead of seeing the benefits of free competition at the consumer level, the carriers are now exerting more control than ever before as demand for mobile devices skyrockets. Getting a device on a major carrier can take up to 15 months and cost millions of dollars; carriers are notorious for demanding custom devices in order to create customer lock-in. "Exclusivity is the bane of my existence," says one source at a major phone manufacturer. "But it's the only way business gets done."

by Nilay Patel, The Verge |  Read more: 
Photo: via Wikipedia

Raphael De Soto
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Professors Without Borders

Lecturing to a camera was worlds apart from lecturing to an auditorium. Weaving together drawings, voiceovers and head shots was a perfectionist’s nightmare. A single class often took ten or 15 hours to record, “to the detriment of my marriage and my family life and my sleep.” Thrun asked Stavens to help design the course’s software, and the team began working, some without pay, out of Thrun’s tiny guesthouse in Los Altos Hills, five miles south of Stanford’s campus.

By the time classes began, enrolment had swelled to 158,000, with students from every country in the world except North Korea. Then, on campus, something bizarre happened. “On day one, we had this full class of 200 students. And just two or three weeks in, the class was empty. There were only 30 students showing up.” He asked around. “And they all said, they actually preferred me on video. They can rewind me on video.”

The internet programme also allowed students to be quizzed and marked automatically, on a scale never before possible. Twenty-three thousand students eventually “graduated” from Thrun’s computer science course. Just over one per cent of them got perfect scores. None of those were Stanford students.

At the end of his Digital Life Design talk in January, Thrun confirmed that he had resigned his tenure at Stanford. Instead, he was throwing his energy into a new venture, going live that day, called Udacity. The site would offer “massive online open courses” (MOOCs) free of charge to the global 99 per cent, to the tech-savvy and web-illiterate alike. With student debt at $1 trillion in the United States alone—greater than credit card debt—the current education system, with its barriers, privileges, and vast inequalities, was no longer defensible, he said.

“I always felt, I was at Stanford, the world’s best university, and I was a great teacher,” he said. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again. It’s impossible. I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to the classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill. And I’ve seen wonderland.”  (...)

I mentioned this to Evans when we spoke in April. “One way to keep more students in the class is to reduce the effort required and water things down more,” he said. “We didn’t want to do that.” Indeed, of the more than 100,000 students who first signed up for CS101, just 30,000 completed the first lesson, and even fewer, 10,000, hacked their way through the final exam. A 90 per cent drop-out rate doesn’t look great on paper, but then, Udacity’s only admission requirement is an email address.

Evans was sympathetic. “Just keeping up with the course requires a tremendous amount of effort. Lots of people are excited by the idea and happy to provide their email address, but once it comes time to actually spend ten hours a week to keep up with the course, it’s pretty hard for people with real jobs and families and commitments and other things to do.”

So who is Udacity for, exactly? Basement-dwelling teenagers and unemployed bachelors? I logged on to the discussion forum to find out. There, I met Azzam, from Saudi Arabia; Paveoliu, from Romania; Kerbaï, from Cameroon; Hafiz, from Pakistan; and Svyatoslav, from Moscow, who invited any Russian speakers to join his study group.

“It turns out that two-thirds of our students are from outside the United States,” Stavens, now the CEO of Udacity, said. “It’s about a third US, a third from ten other countries you might expect—western Europe, Brazil, east Asia, Canada—and then about a third from 185 other countries. We have 500 students in Latvia. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually means more students take our classes in Latvia than take them on Stanford’s campus.”

And that’s just it: Stavens and his co-founders aren’t evangelists out to convert the unwashed masses. They simply minister to those who show up, looking to be saved. “Learning is a process a lot like exercise. It has great results, but takes a lot of effort. And maintaining that effort is really hard.” If you don’t want to learn Python, or how the smartphone game Angry Birds works, fine. There are 500 Latvians who do.

by Kevin Charles Redmon, Prospect |  Read more:

Hearing the Voice of God

On a spring Sunday evening, around 50 members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula in Palo Alto gathered for a special event in a rented room above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion officially got under way, the conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone's car trouble, the problem of demons. Alex Van Riesen, lead pastor of the church and former team leader of Stanford's InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, is a tall, informal, open-faced man who eventually got everyone settled and quiet. For those of you who haven't been to our church, this is the way it is," Van Riesen, '84, began cheerfully. "Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside."

There was a burst of appreciative laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. "Have people been asking you about the book?" he asked the group. "I've been getting lots of email about it."

The book in question is When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God (Knopf), published to plenty of fanfare in religious, academic and mainstream circles. Terry Gross interviewed the author, Stanford anthropology professor T. M. Luhrmann, on NPR's Fresh Air. Stellar reviews included ones in the New Yorker and the New York Times.

In essence, the book and the hoopla around it are about the people in this very room. On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat Tanya Luhrmann, certainly no stranger to the attendees. Having spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church in Chicago, she knows these believers well.

In the name of research, Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews and "tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate." So real, in fact, that members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings and getting God's advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.

After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on "theory of mind," how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God's voice.

"I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human mind," she explained. "As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about the social, cultural and psychological features of what that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism? That is fascinating to me."

Luhrmann's provocative theory is that the church teaches pray-ers to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they'd have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune into sounds, images and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.

And because Luhrmann knows this evening's audience so well, she made sure to answer the question that was, no doubt, on the minds of most of them: After all the time she spent in their church, after trying to tune into the voice of God, did she finally hear it, too?

by Jill Wolfson, Stanford Magazine |  Read more:
Illustration: Kathleen Kinkopf

Talking Heads

The Hobbies Section of My Résumé

I enjoy reading, travel, and the outdoors. Let’s see, I do vision boarding, I like housesitting for people more successful than me, I’m an avid fan of winter sports (snow wandering, sad phone calls). I search eBay for cut-rate mascot costumes, and I laugh at them then get sad. Rattlesnake videos on YouTube, I enjoy magazines and cigarettes, watching television is still a big thing with me. I also do a hobby sometimes where I can see the truth about everything, it’s hard to explain, but I picture a situation, like the movie business, and I can see the truth of the whole thing; I just stand and stare and think about something until I can see the whole truth of it. This started after I did something like three grams of mushrooms in one night in the late ’90s; I’m probably literally retarded from that night. I’ve never sailed, but I feel like maybe I would like that. I like photography; I tried to take a picture of this pimp on 10th Avenue who has a tarantula that he’s always got walking around on his arm, but he physically threatened me so I just turned a little bit and acted like I was trying to take a picture of something to the left of him, and then he called me a quiet little bitch, whatever that was supposed to mean. Softball, camping. I know a guy named Tic Tac who was a martial arts assassin for the Marines, like a freelance killer basically. My main hobbies involve high stakes situations, motherfucker. LOL!—just kidding around, a little. Let’s see, I don’t know, how long is this section supposed to be? I guess I have the same hobbies everyone else has; fishing, jogging, whatever, you name it, I’ll do it. I’ve been pretty lonely, so lately I’ll try just about anything—if someone says they love to go antiquing, I’m like, “Not so fast, when are you going next, because I’m coming with you so I stop climbing the fucking walls over here.” Anyway, I have tons of hobbies. I’ll put eating candy on here, just because, you know what, why not? You’ve probably seen weaker shit than eating candy in the hobbies section of someone’s résumé. Certainly someone has put something like “Spending time with my kids” or something like that, so I’m playing the candy card, chief. You know what, I’ll tell you what my biggest hobby is, my biggest hobby right now is getting my shit back on track. So, let’s get real about how we’re going to make that happen, because I’ve been on a lonely stretch of medium luck for about six months. Also, I am bankrupt and not allowed to trade stocks, securities, futures, or annuities for twenty-five years in North America and its territories, including Guam. I can make sleeping pills and bottle rockets. Those last two aren’t really hobbies, I guess, more like special skills.

by Dan Kennedy, McSweeny's

War

[ed. Beautiful day today.]

Probation Fees

[ed. Profit-driven private prisons, profit-driven probation services. Incarceration has become one of our biggest growth industries (Wall St. bankers exempt, of course).] 

Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.

When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.

For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence.

It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.

“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”

Half a century ago in a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled that those accused of crimes had to be provided a lawyer if they could not afford one. But in misdemeanors, the right to counsel is rarely brought up, even though defendants can run the risk of jail. The probation companies promise revenue to the towns, while saying they also help offenders, and the defendants often end up lost in a legal Twilight Zone.

by Ethan Bronner, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Cary Norton

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You’re Addicted to What?

When people refer to themselves or others as “sex addicts,” what are they actually talking about? More than anything, simple narcissistic character structure: the familiar “I guess I thought I could get away with it,” “Deep down, I don’t really believe the rules apply to me,” or “When I hurt, I want relief, and I don’t care so much about breaking promises or hurting others.”

If that sounds like normal people—if that sounds like you—it’s not surprising. Narcissism is a common human condition. So here’s my evaluation of almost everyone who is diagnosed as a sex addict—by themselves, their loved ones, or an addictionologist: it’s someone who is unhappy with the consequences of their sexual choices, but who finds it too emotionally painful to make different choices. You know, the way some of us are with cookies, new sweaters, or watching the Kardashians on TV.

Which is to say, it’s not about the sex. It’s about the immature decision-making.

The rest of the people who are in pain about their sexual decision-making are generally struggling with one or more of the following: compulsivity, impulsivity, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder. An idiosyncratic response to medication can even be a factor.

So when people talk about sex addiction, they’re really talking about all of these, and more. When someone says, “sexually, I’m out of control,” that doesn’t tell us very much. When we know someone has affair after affair; or that someone regularly masturbates to the point of pain; or that someone constantly pressures his wife for sex regardless of how unrealistic it is (she’s post-partum, she has the flu, his parents are in the next room, they had a big fight just a few hours ago); or that someone is pursuing anonymous sex in public parks in a way that’s begging for jail time and loss of career; or that someone watches three hours of porn per night, we simply don’t know very much about the person.

On the other hand, anyone who says “sexually, I’m out of control” is automatically welcomed into the fellowship of sex addicts—without any attempt to evaluate that person’s mental state. Sex therapists generally don’t get distracted by the sexual part of patients’ stories. Those without training in sexuality—like so-called sex addiction counselors—often do. (...)

How do you treat the thing?

Heroin addiction treatment programs never suggest that the addict cut down to 3 or 4 injections per week. “You’re an addict, so you can never use heroin—or alcohol—ever again” is far closer to what we’d expect.

Then how about using the same model for treating sex addicts: “You’ll just have to give up sex altogether,” or “You can never masturbate again.” No? If the model works for other “addictions,” why not for sex? Two answers come to mind: (1) the whole sex addiction model doesn’t have nearly that much theoretical rigor, and (2) the market for a treatment plan that aims toward complete sexual abstinence is, well, rather limited.

by Marty Klein, The Humanist |  Read more:

George Nelson sunburst clock
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via:

Imperfect Pitch

Invented as an afterthought, the by-product of research in a related field, Auto-Tune was developed by Harold Hildebrand, a one-time engineer for Exxon, as an outgrowth of his research in the analysis of seismic data for the purpose of finding oil. The quasi-accidental nature of Auto-Tune’s origin makes for a cute story, one that puts the invention broadly in the company of Teflon, the microwave oven, and the Frisbee, while offsetting any suspicion of Machiavellian intent on the part of Hildebrand, who left Exxon to start the company that introduced and still markets Auto-Tune. (Founded as Jupiter Systems in 1990, the firm is now called Antares Audio Technologies.)

Hildebrand, an amateur flutist who got his undergraduate education on a music scholarship and later earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, goes by the nickname Andy and likes to be called “Dr. Andy,” in the manner of a self-help author or a pediatric dentist. In interviews he gives Auto-Tune a sagely public face, talking with non-critical affection for both music and technology, shrugging off ethical questions with folksy humor. “Well, I don’t know if it’s bad or good,” Hildebrand said in an interview with The Seattle Times. “I’m not a judge of that. It’s very popular, so in that sense it’s good. I don’t place value judgments on things like that.... Someone asked me at one point in time if I thought that Auto-Tune was evil. I said, ‘Well, my wife wears make-up. Is that evil?’ And yeah, in some circles that is evil. But in most circles, it’s not.”

To the extent that use is a measure of popularity, Hildebrand is correct about Auto-Tune. (Attitudes are a different kind of measure, of course, since users of things can have mixed feelings about the things they use.) Auto-Tune is a fixture in popular music today, employed far more widely than most people realize. There are no hard statistics to quantify the use of digital pitch correction; Antares declines to release its sales figures, and so does its main competitor, the German company Celemony, which calls its software Melodyne. In recording studios, pitch correction tends to be employed discreetly, if not surreptitiously, to preserve the reputation of singers. Each day, meanwhile, less and less pop recording takes place in the foam-padded studios of the old-paradigm record industry, and more and more is done in private, at home, with laptop software. Pitch-correction plug-ins are all but standard accessories for home recording, as the old lines between professionalism and amateurism, vocation and avocation, dissolve. The physics are simple: the lower the singers’ levels of skill, experience, or talent, the higher the value of Auto-Tune. The fact that one can or cannot sing no longer has much bearing on whether one will or will not sing. (...)

What does it mean to say that someone “can sing”?

My wife, the cabaret singer Karen Oberlin, is a third-generation musician. Her parents met at Tanglewood when they were playing in a youth orchestra under Leonard Bernstein. Her paternal grandparents were vaudeville performers who sang and played light classics and comedy songs on the Chautauqua circuit. Karen and I have a nine year-old son, and since he was in pre-school, his teachers have been telling us that the kid has musical talent. But what are they saying, exactly?

As I just suggested by relaying that family history, it is natural to think of musical ability as naturally ingrained, a gift—something endowed, if not by genetic inheritance, then by God. There is evidence of the inheritability of artistic talent in gene research, and there is a case for the divine in every concert review that describes a piece of music as transcendent or miraculous. Not that no one believes that creative skills (in music or any of the arts) cannot be learned, to some degree, or developed through training and experience. Without such a faith, where would the MFA industry be? Still, the Nietzschean conception of talent as a natural endowment—and more than that, a supernatural one—persists, only bolstered and gussied up now in DNA lingo.

This line of thinking underlies the widespread contempt for Auto-Tune as an extra-natural method of accomplishing what should supposedly come naturally, and it helps preserve our enduringly romantic conception of artists as special creatures, anointed or made differently than the rest of us. We resent Auto-Tune not so much because it is non-human—we put our faith (and, increasingly, our affection) in electronic devices every day—but more because the power it applies, in providing a way to sing in perfect intonation, seems superhuman and, in practice, indiscriminate. Auto-Tune defies the myth of the creative gift.

by David Hajdu, TNR |  Read more:

Click Here for an Offbeat Experience

A new generation of travel-sharing Web sites matches travelers with knowledgeable locals for offbeat, authentic and mostly very economical experiences — across the globe or across town.

Witness, for example, Kieren Wuest, a business analyst from Sydney, Australia, who was in San Francisco not long ago for work. On his one morning off, Mr. Wuest, an amateur photographer, was looking for something slightly grittier than riding cable cars and shooting Victorian painted ladies. An Internet search led him to Vayable.com, where he found a $37 walking tour led by an author and artist who had spent 15 years documenting the city’s street art scene.

The guide, Russell Howze, is one of a growing number of artists, chefs, biologists, college students, authors, urban beekeepers, expats or hobbyists of one kind or another who are using travel-sharing platforms like CanaryHop, Gidsy, SideTour and Vayable to market their particular brand of expertise.

For the package-tour averse, this means a vastly expanded menu of opportunities. Want to take a private lesson with a Mongolian circus contortionist in Las Vegas? Learn about New York City’s garment district with a costume and wardrobe stylist? Fish a private bay off Qamea Island with Fijian royalty?

“Each experience is as unique as the person offering it and the person taking it,” said Jamie Wong, who co-founded Vayable last year. “It’s the way we all want to travel but haven’t been able to until now.”

These new services rely on free listings to fill out their catalogs. Some (SideTour, Vayable) put considerable effort into curating their offerings, vetting guides to be sure that they can deliver what they offer. Others (CanaryHop) leave it to peer reviews and the judgment of its users. Each handles online transactions between the parties, often charging travelers a small service fee and taking a 10 to 20 percent commission from guides on confirmed bookings.

Below, an overview of four travel-sharing services.  (...)

Sample Experiences: Hookah and tea tour in Istanbul (three hours, $45); fly-fishing with the mayor of Kenai, Alaska (two days, $1,350; includes lodging and jet); dining with a Fijian king ($250 for up to six people). Also, a tour of East London street food ($48); a midnight street-food crawl in Queens (three hours, $48); a Harley-Davidson motorcycle tour of Versailles and Rambouillet (six hours, $310).

by David Page, NY Times |  Read more: 
Illustration: André Letria

Kenne Gregoire
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Reason

The Gospel of Consumption

Private cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

by Jeffery Kaplan, Orion Magazine |  Read more:
Photograph: Brian Ulrich