The Post-Productive Economy

Take a look at these farm houses which I saw under construction in remote areas of Yunnan province China. They were not unusual; farmsteads this size were everywhere in rural China. Note the scale of these massive buildings. Each support post is cut from a single huge tree. The massive earth walls are three stories high and taper toward the top. They are homes for a single extended family built in the traditional Tibetan farmhouse style. They are larger than most middle-class American homes. The extensive wood carvings inside and outside will be painted in garish colors, like this family room shown in a finished home. This area of Yunnan is consider one of the poorer areas in China, and the standard of living of the inhabitants here would be classified as "poor."

Part of the reason is that these homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don't even have outhouses.

But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.

This is important because a recent thought-provoking article by a renowned economist argues that the US economy has not been growing during the internet boom and probably will not grow any more than it has already because computers and the internet are not as productive as the last two industrial revolutions.

You can read the article here: Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? (PDF) by Robert Gordon.

Gordon answers his own question with: Yes, US economic growth is over for a while. I think Robert Gordon is wrong about his conclusion, but I wanted to start with one of the bits of evidence he offers for his view. He is trying to argue that the consequences of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, which bought to common people electricity and plumbing, was far more important than the computers and internet which the 3rd Industrial Revolution has brought us. (Gordon's 1st Industrial revolution was steam and railroads.) As evidence of this claim he offers this hypothetical choice between option A and option B.

With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

Gordon then goes on to say:

I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for Option A is so obvious.

But as I just recounted, Option A is not obvious at all.

The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers' homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don't have a toilet because I've stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.

Most of the poor of the world don't have such access to resources as these Yunnan farmers, but even in their poorer environment they still choose to use their meager cash to purchase the benefits of the 3rd revolution over the benefits of the 2nd revolution. Connection before plumbing. It is an almost universal choice.

This choice may seem difficult for someone who has little experience in the developing world, but in the places were most of the world lives we can plainly see that the fruits of the 3rd generation of automation are at least as, and perhaps more, valuable than some fruits of the 2nd wave of industrialization.

So if people value the benefits of computers and internet so much why don't we see this value reflected in the growth of the US economy? According to Gordon growth has stalled in the internet age. This question was first asked by Robert Solow in 1987 and Gordon's answer is that there are 6 "headwinds," six negative, or contrary forces which deduct growth from the growth due to technology in the US (Gordon reiterates he is only speaking of he US). The six "headwinds" slowing down growth are the aging of the US population, stagnant levels of education, rising inequality, outsourcing and globalization, environmental constraints, and household and government debt. I agree with Gordon about these headwinds, particularly the first one, which he also sees as the most important.

Where Gordon is wrong is his misunderstanding and underestimating of the power of technological growth before it meets these headwinds.

by Kevin Kelly, The Technium |  Read more:

Viviane Sassen. Parasomnia. Testament.
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Mira Graham
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The Power of Positive Publishing

How-to writers are to other writers as frogs are to mammals,” wrote the critic Dwight MacDonald in a 1954 survey of “Howtoism.” “Their books are not born, they are spawned.”

MacDonald began his story by citing a list of 3,500 instructional books. Today, there are at least 45,000 specimens in print of the optimize-everything cult we now call “self-help,” but few of them look anything like those classic step-by-step “howtos,” which MacDonald and his Establishment brethren handled only with bemused disdain. These days, self-help is unembarrassed, out of the bedside drawer and up on the coffee table, wholly transformed from a disreputable publishing category to a category killer, having remade most of nonfiction in its own inspirational image along the way.

Many of the books on Amazon’s current list of “Best Sellers in Self-Help” would have been unrecognizable to MacDonald: Times business reporter Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a tour of the latest behavioral science; Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist, a fable about an Andalusian shepherd seeking treasure in Egypt; Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a journalistic paean to reticence; publisher Will Schwalbe’s memoir The End of Your Life Book Club, about reading with his dying mother; and A Child Called “It,” David Pelzer’s recollections of harrowing and vicious child abuse. And these are just the books publishers identify as self-help; other hits are simply labeled “business” or “psychology” or “religion.” “There isn’t even a category officially called ‘self-help,’ ” says William Shinker, publisher of Gotham Books. Shinker discovered Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and now publishes books on “willpower” and “vulnerability”—“self-help masquerading as ‘big-idea’ books.”

Twenty years ago, when Chicken Soup for the Soul was published, everyone knew where to find it and what it was for. Whatever you thought of self-help—godsend, guilty pleasure, snake oil—the genre was safely contained on one eclectic bookstore shelf. Today, every section of the store (or web page) overflows with instructions, anecdotes, and homilies. History books teach us how to lead, neuroscience how to use our amygdalas, and memoirs how to eat, pray, and love. The former CEO of CNN writes the biography of an ornery tech visionary and it becomes a best seller on the strength of its leadership lessons. The Nobel-laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes a subtle analysis of our decision-making process and soon finds his best seller digested and summarized in M.B.A. seminars across the country. Philosophical essayist Alain de Botton launches a series of self-help books called “The School of Life,” whose titles will all begin with “how to.” Even before books are written, their advances are often predicated on strong “takeaways” targeted to proven demographics. More like a virus than MacDonald’s frogs, self-help has infiltrated and commandeered other fields in its drive to reproduce. This plague of usefulness has burrowed its way into the types of books that were traditionally meant to enlighten, or entertain, or influence policy, but not exactly to build better selves. It’s generally led to better self-help, more grounded in the facts and narratives that drive the other genres, but also to a nonfiction landscape in which every goal is subjugated to the self-­improvement imperative.

This new kind of self-help could never thrive in a vacuum. Or rather, it thrives in a particular vacuum—the one left behind by the disappearance of certain public values that once fulfilled our lives. Strains of self-help culture—entrepreneurship, pragmatism, fierce self-­reliance, gauzy spirituality—have been embedded in the national DNA since Poor Richard’s Almanack. But in the past there was always a countervailing force, an American stew of shame and pride and citizenship that kept these impulses walled off, sublimating private anxiety to the demands of an optimistic meritocracy. That force has gradually been weakened by the erosion of all sorts of structures, from the corporate career track to the extended family and the social safety net. Instead of regulation, we have that new buzzword, self-regulation; instead of an ambivalence over “selling out,” we have the millennial drive to “monetize”; and instead of seeking to build better institutions, we mine them in order to build better selves. Universities now devote faculty to fields (positive psychology, motivation science) that function as research arms of the self-help industry, while journalists schooled in a sense of public mission turn their skills to fulfilling our emotional needs. But since self-help trails with it that old shameful stigma, the smartest writers and publishers shun the obvious terminology. And the savviest readers enjoy the masquerade, knowing full well what’s behind the costume: self-help with none of the baggage.

It was in the seventies that we began to shed that baggage, starting with the outer layer of self-help: common sense. Children of the postwar middle class were weaned on the mass paperbacks of Dr. Spock, and their parents learned how to win friends and think positively from Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. But in the late sixties, that gray-flannel-suit howtoism gave way to the reemergence of an older, more mystical strain, part bootstrapping and part magical thinking. The New Age was really a revival of what had once been called New Thought: a religious movement spawned in the primordial soup of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and William James that preached the flip side of the Protestant work ethic: faith above works and a belief in one’s unlimited capacities on Earth. The new New Thought was the perfect religion for the Me Decade, a ­reality-show version of spirituality in which the meaning of life is to unleash the inner superstar.

by Boris Kachka, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Photo: Paul Ruscha/© Ed Ruscha/Courtesy of Ed Ruscha and Gagosian Gallery (“Me”, 2001)

Semi-Charmed Life

Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties, and the question that tends to crop up in them, explicitly or not, is: Well, whose twenties? Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings is a grim conspectus of temperate gatherings and winded adultery), and yet few comprise such varied kinds of life. Twentysomethings spend their days rearing children, living hand to mouth in Asia, and working sixty-hour weeks on Wall Street. They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand. Maybe your life gained its focus in college. Maybe a Wisconsin factory is where the route took shape. Or maybe your idea of adulthood got its polish on a feckless trip to Iceland. Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called “sharp corners.”

Allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference, then, it’s worth noting that much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference. Able-bodied middle-class Americans in their twenties—the real subject of these books—are impressionable; they’re fickle, too. Confusion triumphs. Is it smart to spend this crucial period building up a stable life: a promising job, a reliable partner, and an admirable assortment of kitchenware? Or is the time best spent sowing one’s wild oats? Can people even have wild oats while carrying smartphones? One morning, you open the newspaper and read that today’s young people are an assiduous, Web-savvy master race trying to steal your job and drive up the price of your housing stock. The next day, they’re reported to be living in your basement, eating all your shredded wheat, and failing to be marginally employed, even at Wendy’s. For young people with the luxury of time and choice, these ambiguities give rise to a particular style of panic. (...)

The fullest guide through this territory, as it happens, avoids pointedly prescriptive claims. In “Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?” (Hudson Street), Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig provide a densely researched report on the state of middle-class young people today, drawn from several data sources and filtered through a comparative lens. Robin Marantz Henig is a baby boomer and a veteran magazine journalist focussing on science. Samantha Henig, her daughter, is in her late twenties, with a twenty-first-century version of the same career. (She has worked as a Web editor and writer at several publications, including this one, and is now the online editor of the New York Times Magazine.) Together, trading the writing in tag-team fashion, they assess the key departments of twentysomething life—school, careers, dating, family-making, and so forth—and try to discern how much has actually changed. They are interested not so much in the Mark Zuckerbergs of the demographic as in the parental-basement dwellers; they believe that people in their twenties have been getting a bad rap and want to know whether concern is justified.

Their answer, which should not come as a surprise, is: it depends. “Twentysomething” has its origins in a much discussed Times Magazine article that Robin Marantz Henig published, in 2010, called “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” That piece had a narrow and provocative frame—the psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s idea that the twenties make up a distinct life stage, a kind of second adolescence—which the book broadens in subject and style. From Samantha Henig, we get chatty, slangy, personal writing, often trimmed, in the manner of the genre, with quirky specifics. (“We painted and decorated, and bought a sectional couch on Craigslist, each piece light enough that we could transport it entirely on our own in Katie’s Honda CRV. Katie called it the No-Boyfriend Couch. We were single grown-up ladies, doin’ it on our own.”) From her mother, we get intergenerational reality checks, which help us to weigh each topic according to two standards: “Now Is New” and “Same as It Ever Was.”

Among the alleged crimes of twentysomethings these days is hiding out in school (or in various far-flung places, like Iceland), thus deferring adult life, or being fickle in the job market once they get there. Yet the Henigs dismiss the idea that insane tuition costs and rival opportunities have made education a bad investment—if nothing else, median salaries rise with every new degree. And they wonder whether the Wanderjahr truly offers much escapism. “Doors do eventually close—sometimes because of things you did, sometimes because of things you didn’t do,” Robin Marantz Henig notes.

As for professional fickleness: there seems to be a bad kind and a good kind. The bad kind is when you change professions entirely, several times—financial consultant, graphic designer, dog walker, academic. Two-thirds of career wage growth (and, presumably, the responsibilities that go with it) happens in the first ten years, so repeatedly resetting the counter makes it likely you’ll end up uncomfortably behind your cohort. The good kind, Henig tells us, has to do with how you use that ten-year span. Fifty years ago, one might have planned to join a large, stable company at twenty-three and to rise through the ranks until retirement. Try that now, though, and there’s a good chance you’ll fall behind your more restless peers, who get a salary and a status bump with every sideways leap—an entrepreneurial style for which the build and bail cycles of Silicon Valley are an influential template. Flightiness is the new aggression.

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photos: Flickr/Getty

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Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. "It is," says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, "the ultimate bait-and-switch."

The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

How to Pick a Husband if You Want to Have Kids

[ed. Whether you agree with the author's premise or not, there are a lot of good links worth checking out.]

You cannot pick a husband to have kids with until you know if you want to work full-time while you are raising them. Some women will say they know for sure that they do want to work full-time. Most women will say that they don’t know for sure. But there are actually only two choices: be a breadwinner or marry a breadwinner. Then, within those two choices, there are a few strategies you could use.

Scenario 1: Be a Breadwinner

If you want to work full-time when you have kids then you had better plan on having a huge job that you love. Because nothing else will seem worth it to put yourself and your family through what they will have to go through.

If you are on the fence about this, here’s a good way to get off the fence: if you’re not an INTJ or an ENTJ you probably won’t be able to compartmentalize enough at work to choose this scenario. You will feel bad about not being with your kids. You cannot control this. It’s how women are wired. I’m sorry. INTJ is the most uncommon score for a woman. ENTJ is the second most uncommon. You can look around at all the big job, high-powered women and see that almost all of them have one of these scores. Sometimes an ENFJ slips in, but they are tortured and don’t last. The F kills them. They feel bad that they are not fulfilling their duty as parents. It’s not peer pressure, it’s internal pressure. It’s how an ENFJ is wired.

Breadwinner option 1: Marry a stay-at-home dad. Let’s say you’re sure you want a big job while you have kids. The first thing is that you will need a stay-at-home husband. The reason for this is if you leave your kids every day for a full-time job, it’s because you love work. And if you love work, you will want to keep advancing. High-powered jobs leave little time for kids. And people who advance past the age of 35 have a stay-at-home spouse supporting them. If you have kids, the top-tier jobs in the business world are two-people jobs. People who have kids and a stay-at-home spouse advance at a much, much higher rate than people who don’t.

Breadwinner option 2: Nannies. If you don’t have a stay-at-home spouse and you want to advance past age 35, you will need round-the-clock nannies. Women who have kids and a big job and no stay-at-home husband have two nannies, and a household staff, because you need to be covered every second of every day because you don’t know what work will need. (Remember: this is from day one of having kids.) And if you don’t have a spouse who is tied to home then you can’t risk having to leave when your spouse isn’t there.

Okay. So would you rather work and have two nannies or work and have a husband home? There is no right answer, but you need to decide that when you are picking a husband.

How to pick a husband who will co-exist with a breadwinner and nannies. If you are picking the two-nanny route, you will need to find a husband who earns more than you. Statistically your marriage is high risk if you and your husband are both in the workforce and you earn more than him because surveys show that you will resent him. This is not logical, or social, it is primal. Statistically, you will marry a guy who does not make as much as you and then you will have kids and get a divorce. Becausewomen hate the feeling of out-earning their husbands.

To be clear: there is no scenario where you have a big job but do not work long hours.That does not happen. There are not those jobs in this world. And that is fair: why should you get a big important job and be home all evening for your kids when everyone else has to work twelve hour days to have big important jobs? You give something up to get something. Always.

by Penelope Trunk |  Read more:

Painting by Roy Lichtenstein

Whomping and Whapping

[ed. We're back -- blogging from Duck Soup's Hawaiian branch office on Lanai. I saw something today I've never seen before - a pod of humpback whales deep in the bay where I go swimming (about six, maybe eight whales with babies in tow), just a couple hundred yards offshore. That's pretty unusual, seeing them in that close (I've never seen it before, anyway), but even more unusual, there seemed to be a lesson in progress. A couple of the adults kept slapping their tails on the water -- not just a whap here and there, but a Whomp, Whomp Whomp...every 5 seconds or so, for about ten minutes. Then the babies tried, except they kind of just went pwack, pwack, pwack. The force of the whomping echoed throughout the bay like cannon fire. After a while the adults rolled onto their backs and began whapping their flukes back and forth (with the babies trying, but ending up looking like they were just waving). Amazing. What a nice way to end the day.]

Photos: markk

Charles W. Bartlett, 1919 Honolulu Academy of Arts

A Note to Readers

I'll be taking a short break and be back soon. Check out the Archives if you haven't had the chance.

~ markk 

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Diana Adams, River’s Reach, 2010.
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Juan Gris (March 23, 1887 – May 11, 1927) - Still Life with Newspaper ,1916
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What’s Inside America’s Banks?

The financial crisis had many causes—too much borrowing, foolish investments, misguided regulation—but at its core, the panic resulted from a lack of transparency. The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, was that no one could understand the banks’ risks. It was impossible to tell, from looking at a particular bank’s disclosures, whether it might suddenly implode.

For the past four years, the nation’s political leaders and bankers have made enormous—in some cases unprecedented—efforts to save the financial industry, clean up the banks, and reform regulation in order to restore trust and confidence in the American financial system. This hasn’t worked. Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash.

Consider JPMorgan’s widely scrutinized trading loss last year. Before the episode, investors considered JPMorgan one of the safest and best-managed corporations in America. Jamie Dimon, the firm’s charismatic CEO, had kept his institution upright throughout the financial crisis, and by early 2012, it appeared as stable and healthy as ever.

One reason was that the firm’s huge commercial bank—the unit responsible for the old-line business of lending—looked safe, sound, and solidly profitable. But then, in May, JPMorgan announced the financial equivalent of sudden cardiac arrest: a stunning loss initially estimated at $2 billion and later revised to $6 billion. It may yet grow larger; as of this writing, investigators are still struggling to comprehend the bank’s condition.

The loss emanated from a little-known corner of the bank called the Chief Investment Office. This unit had been considered boring and unremarkable; it was designed to reduce the bank’s risks and manage its spare cash. According to JPMorgan, the division invested in conservative, low-risk securities, such as U.S. government bonds. And the bank reported that in 95 percent of likely scenarios, the maximum amount the Chief Investment Office’s positions would lose in one day was just $67 million. (This widely used statistical measure is known as “value at risk.”) When analysts questioned Dimon in the spring about reports that the group had lost much more than that—before the size of the loss became publicly known—he dismissed the issue as a “tempest in a teapot.”

Six billion dollars is not the kind of sum that can take down JPMorgan, but it’s a lot to lose. The bank’s stock lost a third of its value in two months, as investors processed reports of the trading debacle. On May 11, 2012, alone, the day after JPMorgan first confirmed the losses, its stock plunged roughly 9 percent.

The incident was about much more than money, however. Here was a bank generally considered to have the best risk-management operation in the business, and it had badly managed its risk. As the bank was coming clean, it revealed that it had fiddled with the way it measured its value at risk, without providing a clear reason. Moreover, in acknowledging the losses, JPMorgan had to admit that its reported numbers were false. A major source of its supposedly reliable profits had in fact come from high-risk, poorly disclosed speculation.

It gets worse. Federal prosecutors are now investigating whether traders lied about the value of the Chief Investment Office’s trading positions as they were deteriorating. JPMorgan shareholders have filed numerous lawsuits alleging that the bank misled them in its financial statements; the bank itself is suing one of its former traders over the losses. It appears that Jamie Dimon, once among the most trusted leaders on Wall Street, didn’t understand and couldn’t adequately manage his behemoth. Investors are now left to doubt whether the bank is as stable as it seemed and whether any of its other disclosures are inaccurate.

The JPMorgan scandal isn’t the only one in recent months to call into question whether the big banks are safe and trustworthy. Many of the biggest banks now stand accused of manipulating the world’s most popular benchmark interest rate, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), which is used as a baseline to set interest rates for trillions of dollars of loans and investments. Barclays paid a large fine in June to avoid civil and criminal charges that could have been brought by U.S. and U.K. authorities. The Swiss giant UBS was reportedly close to a similar settlement as of this writing. Other major banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank, are under civil or criminal investigation (or both), though no charges have yet been filed.

Libor reflects how much banks charge when they lend to each other; it is a measure of their confidence in each other. Now the rate has become synonymous with manipulation and collusion. In other words, one can’t even trust the gauge that is meant to show how much trust exists within the financial system.

by Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisenger, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Jacqueline Martin/AP

The Coolest Place in the Universe

The Higgs boson is a fundamental subatomic particle whose existence was predicted in a series of papers in 1964 by a group of theoretical physicists including Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs and Tom Kibble. The prediction was made partly on aesthetic grounds – by which I mean it was introduced to make the equations that describe how subatomic particles interact with each other more elegant. (...)

Its job is to give mass to the other fundamental particles, including the electrons and quarks out of which we are made. It does this by interacting with them, and the strength of the interaction determines the mass of the particle; electrons are less massive than top quarks because they interact more weakly with Higgs particles. The Higgs particles fill all of space. Every cubic meter of the room in front of you is crammed with Higgs particles. They occupy all of the space inside your body, outside your body, and throughout and between every galaxy in the observable universe.

How did the Higgs particles get there? The answer is not yet known but it is thought that they “condensed out” into the universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang as the universe expanded and cooled. This is a process not dissimilar to ice crystals forming on a cold window on a frosty morning. Water vapour in the air undergoes what physicists call a phase transition when it comes into contact with the cool glass. The symmetry of the vapour state is broken and the intricate structural forms of ice crystals spontaneously emerge. This happens because it is energetically favourable; at low enough temperatures, water molecules can release energy by bonding together into clumps, rolling down a metaphorical hill and settling into a valley floor. Similarly, the “empty” vacuum of space has a lower energy when filled with a condensate of Higgs particles, which is ultimately the explanation for why there is any large-scale structure in the universe at all.

This sounds odd and it gets odder. If we naively calculate the energy locked up in the Higgs condensate, it is bordering on the absurd. In every cubic meter of space the condensate stores 1037 joules, which is more energy than the sun outputs in 1,000 years. This should blow the universe apart but it doesn’t, for reasons that nobody understands.

The discovery of the Higgs is more than a profound vindication of advanced mathematics and its application in theoretical physics. It is also a surprising engineering and political achievement. No single nation is prepared to invest in a project as technically difficult and high-risk as the Large Hadron Collider. The machine itself is 27 kilometres in circumference and is constructed from 9,300 superconducting electromagnets operating at -271.3°C. There is no known place in the universe that cold outside laboratories on earth; in the 13.75 billion years since the Big Bang occurred, the universe is still roughly 1° warmer than the LHC. This makes it by far the largest refrigerator in the world; it contains almost 120 tonnes of liquid helium.

Buried inside the magnets are two beam pipes, which, at ultra-high vacuum, contain circulating beams of protons travelling at 99.9999991 per cent the speed of light, circumnavigating the ring 11,245 times every second. Up to 600 million protons are brought into collision every second, and in each of these tiny explosions, the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang are re-created. Four giant detectors, known as ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE, diligently observe each collision, searching for new physical phenomena such as the Higgs, searching for a needle in a thousand haystacks.

In order to construct and operate this group of complex, interdependent machines, more than 10,000 physicists and engineers from 608 institutes in 113 countries collaborate with each other for the sole purpose of enhancing our knowledge of the universe.

by Brian Cox, New Statesman | Read more:
Illustration by Ralph Steadman

Jackson Pollock
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Technology and Society

[ed. I've been off on a Robert Moses tangent this morning. Here are two articles that reference his influence in shaping society and our views of technology:]

“Smart Parking” and the Robert Moses Mistake

Operating an automobile in an urban area is often quite frustrating. When you want to be driving, you’re often parked in traffic; when you want to be parked, you’re often driving around for a spot. Of course, there are apps for that: real-time traffic mapping apps from Google and others, and now we are also seeing so-called “smart parking” apps that display open parking spots by way of small sensors built in or near the parking space itself, fed into a network and then to a smartphone screen. A recent New York Times story on “smart parking” states that,

Smart-parking technology for on-street spaces is expensive, and still in its early stages [...] Cities are marketing the programs as experiments in using demand-based pricing to reduce traffic congestion

The goal of “smart parking” is to give the city and individuals real time visualized data on which of those scarce city parking spots are occupied or not. Proponents hope this will mean easier parking and less traffic jamming. The idea of always knowing where those open parking spots are could be a huge relief. But, as the article above points out, these apps might not be so smart after all. The “smart” sensors will also make it much easier for law enforcement to ticket you when you’ve only been in your parking space moments too long. Also, new spaces are often taken as soon as they are available, and an app can’t help you much in that scenario.

To add to this, I’d like to briefly point out a different potential problem with “smart parking”: by focusing on making parking easier, we might also be encouraging more people to try to park. Like many tech-solutions-to-tech-problems, this answer could exacerbate the dilemma it is trying to solve when a better route may be to incentivize public transportation, biking, and other forms of transportation that don’t require looking for parking spaces in the first place. The logic that more parking information will lead to easier parking and less traffic congestion only holds, at best, if the number of cars looking for parking stays the same. The “smart parking” logic puts us in dangerous Robert Moses territory.

by Nathan Jurgenson, Cyborgology |  Read more:

Do Artifacts Have Politics? (pdf)

No idea is more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of  power and authority. Since ideas of this kind are a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention. (...)

The theory of technological politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to the ways human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means. This perspective offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of modern material culture. Its starting point is a decision to take technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, the theory of technological politics suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics. A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for, theories of the social determination of technology, this approach identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.

In what follows I will outline and illustrate two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily under stood. Second are cases of what can be called “inherently political technologies,” man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term “politics” I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements. For my purposes here, the term “technology” is understood to mean all of modern practical artifice, but to avoid confusion I prefer to speak of “technologies” plural, smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware of a specific kind.

by Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology |  Read more (pdf)

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement.

Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr.

Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.

Even the notion of Flickr as an archive—as the place where you store all your photos as a backup—is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn't share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

Here's how it all went bad.

by Mat Honan, Gizmodo |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock/Vince Clements