Saturday, April 6, 2013
First Person Shooter
You hear a click, like the sound of a light switch. Or a pencil being snapped.
You’re facing away from it, looking straight ahead, just as you were instructed. The click and the searing pain you feel are nearly instantaneous. But your mind tricks you into thinking that there’s a distinct period between the click and your first realization that something’s gone very wrong. Maybe that’s because your shooter — friendly and supportive as he may be; congratulatory, even, that you’re dumb enough to volunteer for this — has prepared you for it, warned you that a pain like no other pain is about to strike you in a way you’ve never been struck before.
So you just stand there, waiting for it, on the wrong side of target practice.
When it hits you, no matter how much you expect it, it comes as a surprise — a literal shock, like a baseball bat swung hard and squarely into the small of your back. That sensation — which is actually two sharp steel barbs piercing your skin and shooting electricity into your central nervous system — is followed by the harshest, most violent charlie horse you can imagine coursing through your entire body. With the pain comes the terrifying awareness that you are completely helpless. You cannot move. You lose control of almost everything and the only place you can go is down, face first to the floor.
For five full seconds — an eternity — this continues. Thousands of volts commandeer your body and leave you convulsing, screaming for your life, helpless.
And when it’s over, you want nothing but quiet and calm. You look down at your crotch to make sure you haven’t pissed or shit yourself (you were warned of this possibility) and you’re glad to be clean.
But you don’t want to talk. You don’t want to stand. You don’t want to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You just want to be still. You just want to lie there. Motionless. Happy you’re alive. Glad it’s over.
That’s what it feels like to be hit with a Taser. (...)
In 1993, two Scottsdale, Arizona brothers, Rick and Tom Smith, bought the Taser name and patent rights from Cover, who was then in his seventies. They worked with Cover to make the Taser a non-firearm and, by 1998, the Smiths sold their first police Tasers to the Orlando Police Department. By 2001, Taser was a NASDAQ publicly traded company. In three years, Taser’s market cap went from less than $25 million to over $1 billion — a 3,900 percent increase. (...)
In 2005 the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation after more than 40 lawsuits were filed claiming Tasers had severely — and unnecessarily — harmed or killed victims. The company’s stock crumbled, dropping 78 percent. When the SEC dropped its investigation in 2006, the stock rebounded to a little less than half its peak. The investigation and subsequent stock plunge showed just how dependant Taser’s fortunes were on a single, controversial product. The company could continue to improve its flagship device, but it also needed to explore new ways to make money.
You’re facing away from it, looking straight ahead, just as you were instructed. The click and the searing pain you feel are nearly instantaneous. But your mind tricks you into thinking that there’s a distinct period between the click and your first realization that something’s gone very wrong. Maybe that’s because your shooter — friendly and supportive as he may be; congratulatory, even, that you’re dumb enough to volunteer for this — has prepared you for it, warned you that a pain like no other pain is about to strike you in a way you’ve never been struck before.
So you just stand there, waiting for it, on the wrong side of target practice.When it hits you, no matter how much you expect it, it comes as a surprise — a literal shock, like a baseball bat swung hard and squarely into the small of your back. That sensation — which is actually two sharp steel barbs piercing your skin and shooting electricity into your central nervous system — is followed by the harshest, most violent charlie horse you can imagine coursing through your entire body. With the pain comes the terrifying awareness that you are completely helpless. You cannot move. You lose control of almost everything and the only place you can go is down, face first to the floor.
For five full seconds — an eternity — this continues. Thousands of volts commandeer your body and leave you convulsing, screaming for your life, helpless.
And when it’s over, you want nothing but quiet and calm. You look down at your crotch to make sure you haven’t pissed or shit yourself (you were warned of this possibility) and you’re glad to be clean.
But you don’t want to talk. You don’t want to stand. You don’t want to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You just want to be still. You just want to lie there. Motionless. Happy you’re alive. Glad it’s over.
That’s what it feels like to be hit with a Taser. (...)
In 1993, two Scottsdale, Arizona brothers, Rick and Tom Smith, bought the Taser name and patent rights from Cover, who was then in his seventies. They worked with Cover to make the Taser a non-firearm and, by 1998, the Smiths sold their first police Tasers to the Orlando Police Department. By 2001, Taser was a NASDAQ publicly traded company. In three years, Taser’s market cap went from less than $25 million to over $1 billion — a 3,900 percent increase. (...)
In 2005 the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation after more than 40 lawsuits were filed claiming Tasers had severely — and unnecessarily — harmed or killed victims. The company’s stock crumbled, dropping 78 percent. When the SEC dropped its investigation in 2006, the stock rebounded to a little less than half its peak. The investigation and subsequent stock plunge showed just how dependant Taser’s fortunes were on a single, controversial product. The company could continue to improve its flagship device, but it also needed to explore new ways to make money.
by Matt Stroud, The Verge | Read more:
Image uncredited, Design by Scott Kellum and James Chae. Special thanks to Josh Laincz
A Modest Masterpiece
[ed. One of my favorites (along with the soundtrack)]
"Local Hero", in which a Texan oil company's attempt to buy up a whole Scottish village is thwarted by a lone white-haired beachcomber, is 25 years old. Half the film was shot up the road in the tiny port of Pennan (above)--nowadays billed, on undiscoveredscotland.co.uk, as the home of "Scotland's most famous phone box". The anniversary is worth celebrating not just because of the happy recurrence of its plot. Bill Forsyth's film is a modest masterpiece.
That's how I've always thought of it, anyway. I first saw "Local Hero" as a school leaver in 1983, and it has stayed in my head ever since, along with Mark Knopfler's bittersweet acoustic theme tune. At first, it seemed merely a comic gem. The joke was that the hicks are far cannier than they appear to MacIntyre, the cocksure emissary sent from Houston to negotiate. But the older you get, the more it looks like the darkest Nordic tragedy: having fallen for this bucolic paradise, the incomer is brutally exiled back to an inferno of skyscrapers and tailbacks.
It's a measure of how subversive a film it was that Forsyth got into trouble at the test screening in Seattle. "There was irritation", he recalls, "that this little upstart from Europe was having the gall to hint these things about the American way of life. MacIntyre was an everyman losing his personality in the glass tower of work. One guy got me against the wall and said, 'You don't have the right to play around with the American hero.'" (...)
"Local Hero" came about when the producer David Puttnam, who was about to win an Oscar for "Chariots of Fire", advised Forsyth that there would be studio money for a Scottish script with parts for a couple of American actors. One was the role of the star-gazing petro-mogul Felix Happer. "I wrote it with Burt Lancaster in my head from the very beginning," Forsyth says. "I'd read in an interview that he'd like to do some real comedy." He also drew on a recent deal struck with an oil consortium in Orkney. "The chief executive of the council realised he had a strong position and got the community a cut of the revenue and incredible things like care of libraries and community centres."
Thus was conceived the alluring figure of Gordon Urquhart, the savvy hotelier and accountant ("we tend to double up on jobs around here," as he explains). He was played, or beautifully underplayed, by Lawson. "Around that time it was quite hard to find a contemporary Scottish character who wasn't in wellies and a kilt or a Gorbals heavy," says Lawson. "I had hardly ever used my own voice. It's the most enjoyable experience I've ever had." The same endorsement comes from Riegert, who had to fight off Michael Douglas and half of Hollywood to land the part of MacIntyre. "If you could storyboard the best possible experience for an actor, this would be it," he says. "It was effortless. I recognised the material right off the page. My only question was how well could the director direct this movie?
by Jasper Rees, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Picture "Local Hero"
Seeing and Believing
UFO sightings reached their spate roughly within a decade of the release of Steven Spielberg’s spellbinding film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One good reason to believe there were never any UFOS is that nobody sees them any more. Once, the skies were refulgent with alien craft; now they are back to their primordial emptiness, returning only static to the radio telescopes, and offering the occasional meteor shower to the wondering eye.
It isn’t only flying saucers that have receded into history. They are being followed, more gradually to be sure, by a decline in sightings of ghosts, recordings of poltergeists, claims of psychokinesis and the rest, as is regularly attested by organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research in London and the UK-wide research group Para.Science. Many of those with a vested interest in the supernatural industry naturally resist this contention, but there is far less credulity among the public for tales of the extraordinary than there was even a generation ago. The standard explanation attributes this to growing scepticism. But, as is only fitting for the paranormal, it might be that there are more mysterious forces at work.
In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the foundational text of Parisian situationism, the French Marxist theorist Guy Debord argued that consumer culture had acquired the dimensions of an alternative reality: it had replaced the dull, grey world with its own, phantasmatic iridescence. It didn’t matter whether or not everybody genuinely could buy a part of the universal plenty. What mattered was the mythology, the illusion of bountiful possibility and limitless choice, wrapped up in a spectacularity borrowed from the film and television industries.
Debord was not the first to remark on this. When the social theorists of the Frankfurt School arrived in New York during their wartime exile in the 1930s, they found the giant billboard ads for toothpaste even more-nerve jangling than they had expected. Here was a culture entirely mortgaged to the secular spectacular. In previous centuries, what was visually remarkable stood for the other-worldly, the spiritual. The baroque façades and soaring spires of cathedrals, the carmines and cobalts of stained-glass windows with the sun streaming through them, devotional processions and carnival parades, gargoyles, misericords, miraculous relics — all attested that there was an intangible reality beyond the physical one, a reality that could at most be suggestively delineated in extraordinary sights. By the time of the European Enlightenment, the sublimity of nature, together with its representation in the bravura period of landscape painting, achieved the same effects. (...)
If the growing spectacularisation of media culture began to undermine belief in the spirit world, the widespread dissemination of video technology hastened its decline. Filming is now within the grasp of everybody with a smartphone. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) beadily observes the nothing that is all that seems to happen on deserted night-time streets. Video cameras used to be reserved for the signal events of a life (weddings, anniversaries, birthdays), but now scarcely anything is beneath the attention of YouTube. In the heyday of ghost stories, the elusive grail was a photograph or moving film of some spectral emanation. There should no longer be any technical obstacle to providing this, and yet all we see is the odd whitish blur that could as easily be a mark on the screen.
What these countervailing powers have brought about in postmodern society is the wrong kind of scepticism. A large element of rationalist doubt certainly accompanies the decline of interest in the paranormal, driven primarily by these cultural and, latterly, technological factors. Yet underlying that doubt itself is the growing incredulity with which people evaluate anything. Supermarket discounts appear to offer wines at half-price; products for smearing on your face purport to make you look younger — these are the all-too-evident mendacities. The homilies of party politicians at election time sound like the exclamatory drivel of PR companies. And the way this stuff has permeated culture as a whole has bred a widespread incurious scepticism. We now extend the same degree of undifferentiating refusal even to those phenomena that, while hard to credit, deserve to be heeded. Climate change might be the most obvious current instance but, at its most noxious, scepticism results in an unwillingness to believe in others’ suffering. The attitude of wholesale rejection, by which one might stand a chance of becoming impervious to fraud, is thus bought at the ever greater risk of nihilism.
by Stuart Walton, Aeon | Read more:
Image: oorka | Shutterstock via:
It isn’t only flying saucers that have receded into history. They are being followed, more gradually to be sure, by a decline in sightings of ghosts, recordings of poltergeists, claims of psychokinesis and the rest, as is regularly attested by organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research in London and the UK-wide research group Para.Science. Many of those with a vested interest in the supernatural industry naturally resist this contention, but there is far less credulity among the public for tales of the extraordinary than there was even a generation ago. The standard explanation attributes this to growing scepticism. But, as is only fitting for the paranormal, it might be that there are more mysterious forces at work.In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the foundational text of Parisian situationism, the French Marxist theorist Guy Debord argued that consumer culture had acquired the dimensions of an alternative reality: it had replaced the dull, grey world with its own, phantasmatic iridescence. It didn’t matter whether or not everybody genuinely could buy a part of the universal plenty. What mattered was the mythology, the illusion of bountiful possibility and limitless choice, wrapped up in a spectacularity borrowed from the film and television industries.
Debord was not the first to remark on this. When the social theorists of the Frankfurt School arrived in New York during their wartime exile in the 1930s, they found the giant billboard ads for toothpaste even more-nerve jangling than they had expected. Here was a culture entirely mortgaged to the secular spectacular. In previous centuries, what was visually remarkable stood for the other-worldly, the spiritual. The baroque façades and soaring spires of cathedrals, the carmines and cobalts of stained-glass windows with the sun streaming through them, devotional processions and carnival parades, gargoyles, misericords, miraculous relics — all attested that there was an intangible reality beyond the physical one, a reality that could at most be suggestively delineated in extraordinary sights. By the time of the European Enlightenment, the sublimity of nature, together with its representation in the bravura period of landscape painting, achieved the same effects. (...)
If the growing spectacularisation of media culture began to undermine belief in the spirit world, the widespread dissemination of video technology hastened its decline. Filming is now within the grasp of everybody with a smartphone. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) beadily observes the nothing that is all that seems to happen on deserted night-time streets. Video cameras used to be reserved for the signal events of a life (weddings, anniversaries, birthdays), but now scarcely anything is beneath the attention of YouTube. In the heyday of ghost stories, the elusive grail was a photograph or moving film of some spectral emanation. There should no longer be any technical obstacle to providing this, and yet all we see is the odd whitish blur that could as easily be a mark on the screen.
What these countervailing powers have brought about in postmodern society is the wrong kind of scepticism. A large element of rationalist doubt certainly accompanies the decline of interest in the paranormal, driven primarily by these cultural and, latterly, technological factors. Yet underlying that doubt itself is the growing incredulity with which people evaluate anything. Supermarket discounts appear to offer wines at half-price; products for smearing on your face purport to make you look younger — these are the all-too-evident mendacities. The homilies of party politicians at election time sound like the exclamatory drivel of PR companies. And the way this stuff has permeated culture as a whole has bred a widespread incurious scepticism. We now extend the same degree of undifferentiating refusal even to those phenomena that, while hard to credit, deserve to be heeded. Climate change might be the most obvious current instance but, at its most noxious, scepticism results in an unwillingness to believe in others’ suffering. The attitude of wholesale rejection, by which one might stand a chance of becoming impervious to fraud, is thus bought at the ever greater risk of nihilism.
by Stuart Walton, Aeon | Read more:
Image: oorka | Shutterstock via:
The Bad-Boy Brand
Late in February, in the Ryugyong Chung Ju-yung Indoor Stadium, in Pyongyang, North Korea, ten thousand stiff-looking spectators in gray Mao suits gathered to watch a basketball game. Vice Media, the Brooklyn-based company, had arranged to have members of the Harlem Globetrotters—Anthony (Buckets) Blakes, Will (Bull) Bullard, and Alex (Moose) Weekes—play with North Korea’s national team. The company’s cameramen were in the crowd, filming for a weekly news-magazine series, “Vice,” that will air this spring on HBO. Not long before the game started, the crowd, which included the state’s diplomatic and military élite, began to chant “Manse!”—the traditional invocation that means “Ten thousand years, so long live Korea!” The otherworldly roar announced the entrance of North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, who succeeded his father in 2011. He sat on a dais, where he was joined by his wife, the former singer Ri Sol-ju, and, a few moments later, an unlikely guest of honor: the onetime Chicago Bulls star and cross-dresser Dennis Rodman. Although almost all foreign media is blacked out in North Korea, basketball is a popular sport, and the country’s ruling family are N.B.A. fanatics.Rodman has a reputation for wild sartorial choices—pink hair, a wedding gown—but he was dressed with relative restraint. He wore a tuxedo jacket, black track pants, wraparound sunglasses, a black sequinned scarf, a black hat that said “USA,” and various lip and nose rings. At each dunk by a Globetrotter or three-pointer by a member of the North Korean team, the crowd erupted in screams. The game ended, as a basketball game cannot, in a tie, 110–110.
Afterward, Rodman, with one hand in his pocket, delivered a speech. “First of all,” he said, his words echoing in the immense stadium, “I would like to say thank you. It’s been very good to be here. You guys have been very, very kind to me and to my compadres from America.” He paused as his North Korean translator struggled with “compadres.” Rodman continued, “I’m sorry that my country and your country are not on good terms, but for me and—the country . . .” Seeming to lose his train of thought, Rodman turned and bowed in the direction of the Supreme Leader, who had been watching him with a slightly nervous expression. With a flourish of his fingers, Rodman said, “Sir, you have a friend for life.”
This cheerful scene—billed as “basketball diplomacy”—was soon complicated by developments in U.S.-North Korean relations. After Rodman’s visit, North Korea, which had recently been hit with tighter U.N. sanctions, scrapped its 1953 armistice with South Korea and threatened a preëmptive nuclear attack on the United States. Last week, Kim said, “The time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists.”
What had seemed like a bold P.R. stunt by Vice now looked like cozying up to a dangerous dictator. This was not helped by a report from Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent, on Kim Jong-un’s hospitality: “Dinner was an epic feast. Felt like about ten courses in total. I’d say the winners were the smoked turkey and sushi, though we had the Pyongyang cold noodles earlier in the trip and that’s been the runaway favorite so far.” Rodman, speaking to reporters in Pyongyang, professed his admiration for the Supreme Leader: “Guess what! I love him.” He added, “The guy’s really awesome.”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” a flabbergasted Dan Rather said, on CNN. U.S. News & World Report called the episode “More ‘Jackass’ Than Journalism,” and pointed out that, in light of the regime’s abuses and recent reports of cannibalism among a starving population, “those remarks and current headline on the Vice Web site that ‘North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice’ seem a bit, well, tasteless.”
Vice has never been celebrated for good taste. The company started in Montreal, in the mid-nineties, as a free magazine with a reputation for provocation. Once, after its editors were accused of sexism for featuring nude porn stars in the magazine, they posed nude as well. Current articles combine investigative reporting with a sensibility that is adolescent, male, and proudly boorish. Vice’s most recent issue, the Cultural Atrocities Issue, reads like a combination of National Geographic, High Times, and Penthouse Forum. It includes a photo shoot, titled “Home Entertainment,” of topless women posing with remote controls over their breasts, and a travel piece about the remote Kalash Valleys of Pakistan: “It’s not a nice place to live, but, as I discovered, it is a great place to party.”
In recent years, Vice has been engaged in an energetic process of growing up—both commercially and in terms of journalistic ambition. It now has thirty-five offices in eighteen countries, from Poland to Brazil. It operates a record label, which, in 2002, began putting out albums by such of-the-moment bands as Bloc Party and the Raveonettes; book and film divisions (Vice recently helped market the R-rated “Spring Breakers,” directed by Harmony Korine); a suite of Web sites; and an in-house ad agency. These ventures are united by Vice’s ambition to become a kind of global MTV on steroids. According to Shane Smith, Vice’s C.E.O., “The over-all aim, the over-all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.” (...)
Vice executives sometimes refer to their company as “the Time Warner of the streets,” and in the financial press there is occasional discussion about the price a potential sale might bring. A source familiar with the company’s finances estimates last year’s revenues at a hundred and seventy-five million dollars. In 2011, Vice was valued at two hundred million dollars, and last year Forbes speculated that the company might someday be worth as much as a billion dollars.
Not long after Rodman’s trip, I went to see Smith at the company’s headquarters, a set of converted warehouses in Williamsburg. Smith met me in the Bear Room, a conference room decorated with a Persian rug and a grizzly bear, now stuffed, that had been shot after surprising Vice producers filming in Alaska. Smith defended Vice and its reporters against charges of journalistic recklessness. Talking about Kim Jong-un, he said, “Look, the fact that he came is a big deal. The fact that we’re the only people to meet him is a big deal. The fact that we went to his house was a really big deal.” He went on, “Is it journalism? It depends on what the definition of journalism is.”
by Lizzie Widdicombe, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Chris Buck.
Friday, April 5, 2013
The Web We Lost
Anil Dash is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk, titled “The Web We Lost.” He begins by pointing out that the title of his talk implies a commonality that at least once was.
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
Anil puts up an icon that is a symbol of privately-owned public spaces in New York City. Businesses create these spaces in order to be allowed to build buildings taller than the zoning requirements allow. These are sorta kinda like parks but are not. E.g., Occupy isn’t in Zuccotti Park any more because the space is a privately-own public space, not a park. “We need to understand the distinction” between the spaces we think are public and the ones that are privately owned.
We find out about these when we transgress rules. We expect to be able to transgress in public spaces, but in these privately-owned spaces we cannot. E.g., Improv Everywhere needs to operate anonymously to perform in these spaces. Anil asks us to imagine “a secretive, private ivy league club.” He is the son of immigrants and didn’t go to college. “A space even as welcoming as this one [Harvard Berkman] can seem intimidating.” E.g., Facebook was built as a private club. It welcomes everyone now, but it still doesn’t feel like it’s ours. It’s very hard for a business to get much past its origins.
One result of online privately-owned public spaces is “the wholesale destruction of your wedding photos.” When people lose them in a fire, they are distraught because those photos cannot be replaced. Yet everyday we hear about a startup that “succeeds” by selling out, and then destroying the content that they’d gathered. We’ve all gotten the emails that say: “Good news! 1. We’re getting rich. 2. You’re not. 3. We’re deleting your wedding photos.” They can do this because of the terms of service that none of us read but that give them carte blanche. We tend to look at this as simply the cost of doing business with the site.
But don’t see it that way, Anil urges. “This is actually a battle” against the values of the early Web. In the mid to late 1990s, the social Web arose. There was a time when it was meaningful thing to say that you’re a blogger. It was distinctive. Now being introduced as a blogger “is a little bit like being introduced as an emailer.” “No one’s a Facebooker.” The idea that there was a culture with shared values has been dismantled.
He challenges himself to substantiate this:
“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that shows where drone strikes have been.
Less visibly, the laws is being bent “to make our controlling our data illegal.” All the social networks operate as common carriers — neutral substrates — except when it comes to monetizing. The boundaries are unclear: I can sing “Happy Birthday” to a child at home, and I can do it over FaceTime, but I can’t put it up at YouTube [because of copyright]. It’s very open-ended and difficult to figure. “Now we have the industry that creates the social network implicitly interested in getting involved in how IP laws evolve.” When the Google home page encourages visitors to call their senators against SOPA/PIPA, we have what those of us against Citizens United oppose: we’re asking a big company to encourage people to act politically in a particular way. At the same time, we’re letting these companies capture our words and works and put them under IP law.
A decade ago, metadata was all the rage among the geeks. You could tag, geo-tag, or machine-tag Flickr photos. Flickr is from the old community. That’s why you can still do Creative Commons searches at Flickr. But you can’t on Instagram. They don’t care about metadata. From an end-user point of view, RSS is out of favor. The new companies are not investing in creating metadata to make their work discoverable and shareable.
At the old Suck.com, hovering on a link would reveal a punchline. Now, with the introduction of Adlinks and AdSense, Google transformed links from the informative and aesthetic, to an economic tool for search engine optimization (SEO). Within less than 6 months, linkspam was spawned. Today Facebook’s EdgeRank is based on the idea that “Likes” are an expression of your intent, which determines how FB charges for ads. We’ll see like-spammers and all the rest we saw with links. “These gestural things that were editorial or indicators of intent get corrupted right away.” There are still little islands, but for the most part these gestures that used to be about me telling you that I like your work are becoming economic actions.
Anil says that a while ago when people clicked on a link from Facebook to his blog, FB popped up a warning notice saying that it might be dangerous to go there. “The assumption is that my site is less trustworthy than theirs. Let’s say that’s true. Let’s say I’m trying to steal all your privacy and they’re not.” [audience laughs] He has FB comments on his site. To get this FB has to validate your page. “I explicitly opted in to the Facebook ecology” in part to prove he’s a moderate and in part as a convenience to his readers. At the same time, FB was letting the Washington Post and The Guardian publish within the FB walls, and FB never gave that warning when you clicked on their links. A friend at FB told Anil that the popup was a bug, which might be. But that means “in the best case, we’re stuck fixing their bugs on our budgets.” (The worst case is that FB is trying to shunt traffic away from other sites.)
And this is true for all things that compete with the Web. The ideas locked into apps won’t survive the company’s acquisition, but this is true when we change devices as well. “Content tied to devices dies when those devices become obsolete.” We have “given up on standard formats.” “Those of us who cared about this stuff…have lost,” overall. Very few apps support standard formats, with jpg and html as exceptions. Likes and follows, etc., all use undocumented proprietary formats. The most dramatic shift: we’ve lost the expectation that they would be interoperable. The Web was built out of interoperability. “This went away with almost no public discourse about the implications of it.”
The most important implication of all this comes when thinking about the Web as a public space. When the President goes on FB, we think about it as a public space, but it’s not, and dissent and transgression are not permitted. “Terms of Service and IP trump the Constitution.” E.g., every single message you put on FB during the election FB could have transformed into its opposite, and FB would be within its ToS rights. After Hurricane Sandy, public relief officials were broadcasting messages only through FB. “You had to be locked into FB to see where public relief was happening. A striking change.”
What’s most at risk are the words of everyday people. “It’s never the Pharaoh’s words that are lost to history.” Very few people opt out of FB. Anil is still on FB because he doesn’t want to lose contact with his in-laws. [See Dan Gillmor's talk last week.) Without these privately-owned public spaces, Anil wouldn't have been invited to Harvard; it's how he made his name.
"The main reason this shift happened in the social web is the arrogance of the people who cared about the social web in the early days...We did sincerely care about enabling all these positive things. But the way we went about it was so arrogant that Mark Zuckerberg's vision seemed more appealing, which is appalling." An Ivy League kid's software designed for a privileged, exclusive elite turned out to be more appealing than what folks like Anil were building. "If we had been listening more, and a little more open in self-criticism, it would have been very valuable."
by David Weinberger, Joho the Blog | Read more:
Photo: via:
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.Anil puts up an icon that is a symbol of privately-owned public spaces in New York City. Businesses create these spaces in order to be allowed to build buildings taller than the zoning requirements allow. These are sorta kinda like parks but are not. E.g., Occupy isn’t in Zuccotti Park any more because the space is a privately-own public space, not a park. “We need to understand the distinction” between the spaces we think are public and the ones that are privately owned.
We find out about these when we transgress rules. We expect to be able to transgress in public spaces, but in these privately-owned spaces we cannot. E.g., Improv Everywhere needs to operate anonymously to perform in these spaces. Anil asks us to imagine “a secretive, private ivy league club.” He is the son of immigrants and didn’t go to college. “A space even as welcoming as this one [Harvard Berkman] can seem intimidating.” E.g., Facebook was built as a private club. It welcomes everyone now, but it still doesn’t feel like it’s ours. It’s very hard for a business to get much past its origins.
One result of online privately-owned public spaces is “the wholesale destruction of your wedding photos.” When people lose them in a fire, they are distraught because those photos cannot be replaced. Yet everyday we hear about a startup that “succeeds” by selling out, and then destroying the content that they’d gathered. We’ve all gotten the emails that say: “Good news! 1. We’re getting rich. 2. You’re not. 3. We’re deleting your wedding photos.” They can do this because of the terms of service that none of us read but that give them carte blanche. We tend to look at this as simply the cost of doing business with the site.
But don’t see it that way, Anil urges. “This is actually a battle” against the values of the early Web. In the mid to late 1990s, the social Web arose. There was a time when it was meaningful thing to say that you’re a blogger. It was distinctive. Now being introduced as a blogger “is a little bit like being introduced as an emailer.” “No one’s a Facebooker.” The idea that there was a culture with shared values has been dismantled.
He challenges himself to substantiate this:
“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that shows where drone strikes have been.
Less visibly, the laws is being bent “to make our controlling our data illegal.” All the social networks operate as common carriers — neutral substrates — except when it comes to monetizing. The boundaries are unclear: I can sing “Happy Birthday” to a child at home, and I can do it over FaceTime, but I can’t put it up at YouTube [because of copyright]. It’s very open-ended and difficult to figure. “Now we have the industry that creates the social network implicitly interested in getting involved in how IP laws evolve.” When the Google home page encourages visitors to call their senators against SOPA/PIPA, we have what those of us against Citizens United oppose: we’re asking a big company to encourage people to act politically in a particular way. At the same time, we’re letting these companies capture our words and works and put them under IP law.
A decade ago, metadata was all the rage among the geeks. You could tag, geo-tag, or machine-tag Flickr photos. Flickr is from the old community. That’s why you can still do Creative Commons searches at Flickr. But you can’t on Instagram. They don’t care about metadata. From an end-user point of view, RSS is out of favor. The new companies are not investing in creating metadata to make their work discoverable and shareable.
At the old Suck.com, hovering on a link would reveal a punchline. Now, with the introduction of Adlinks and AdSense, Google transformed links from the informative and aesthetic, to an economic tool for search engine optimization (SEO). Within less than 6 months, linkspam was spawned. Today Facebook’s EdgeRank is based on the idea that “Likes” are an expression of your intent, which determines how FB charges for ads. We’ll see like-spammers and all the rest we saw with links. “These gestural things that were editorial or indicators of intent get corrupted right away.” There are still little islands, but for the most part these gestures that used to be about me telling you that I like your work are becoming economic actions.
Anil says that a while ago when people clicked on a link from Facebook to his blog, FB popped up a warning notice saying that it might be dangerous to go there. “The assumption is that my site is less trustworthy than theirs. Let’s say that’s true. Let’s say I’m trying to steal all your privacy and they’re not.” [audience laughs] He has FB comments on his site. To get this FB has to validate your page. “I explicitly opted in to the Facebook ecology” in part to prove he’s a moderate and in part as a convenience to his readers. At the same time, FB was letting the Washington Post and The Guardian publish within the FB walls, and FB never gave that warning when you clicked on their links. A friend at FB told Anil that the popup was a bug, which might be. But that means “in the best case, we’re stuck fixing their bugs on our budgets.” (The worst case is that FB is trying to shunt traffic away from other sites.)
And this is true for all things that compete with the Web. The ideas locked into apps won’t survive the company’s acquisition, but this is true when we change devices as well. “Content tied to devices dies when those devices become obsolete.” We have “given up on standard formats.” “Those of us who cared about this stuff…have lost,” overall. Very few apps support standard formats, with jpg and html as exceptions. Likes and follows, etc., all use undocumented proprietary formats. The most dramatic shift: we’ve lost the expectation that they would be interoperable. The Web was built out of interoperability. “This went away with almost no public discourse about the implications of it.”
The most important implication of all this comes when thinking about the Web as a public space. When the President goes on FB, we think about it as a public space, but it’s not, and dissent and transgression are not permitted. “Terms of Service and IP trump the Constitution.” E.g., every single message you put on FB during the election FB could have transformed into its opposite, and FB would be within its ToS rights. After Hurricane Sandy, public relief officials were broadcasting messages only through FB. “You had to be locked into FB to see where public relief was happening. A striking change.”
What’s most at risk are the words of everyday people. “It’s never the Pharaoh’s words that are lost to history.” Very few people opt out of FB. Anil is still on FB because he doesn’t want to lose contact with his in-laws. [See Dan Gillmor's talk last week.) Without these privately-owned public spaces, Anil wouldn't have been invited to Harvard; it's how he made his name.
"The main reason this shift happened in the social web is the arrogance of the people who cared about the social web in the early days...We did sincerely care about enabling all these positive things. But the way we went about it was so arrogant that Mark Zuckerberg's vision seemed more appealing, which is appalling." An Ivy League kid's software designed for a privileged, exclusive elite turned out to be more appealing than what folks like Anil were building. "If we had been listening more, and a little more open in self-criticism, it would have been very valuable."
Photo: via:
Horace Silver
(via:)
The Patent Protection Racket
It’s a great business model.
Step one: buy a software patent. There are millions of them, and they’re all quite vague and impossible to understand.
Step two: FedEx a carefully crafted letter to a few thousand small software companies, iPhone app developers, and Internet startups. This is where it gets a tiny bit tricky, because the recipients of the letter need to think that it’s a threat to sue if they don’t pay up, but in court, the letter has to look like an invitation to license some exciting new technology. In other words it has to be just on this side of extortion.
Step three: wait patiently while a few thousand small software companies call their lawyers, and learn that it’s probably better just to pay off the troll, because even beginning to fight the thing using the legal system is going to cost a million dollars.
Step four: Profit!
What does this sound like? Yes, it’s a textbook case of a protection racket. It is organized crime, plain and simple. It is an abuse of the legal system, an abuse of the patent system, and a moral affront.
In the face of organized crime, civilized people don’t pay up. When you pay up, you’re funding the criminals, which makes you complicit in their next attacks. I know, you’re just trying to write a little app for the iPhone with in-app purchases, and you didn’t ask for this fight to be yours, but if you pay the trolls, giving them money and comfort to go after the next round of indie developers, you’re not just being “pragmatic,” you have actually gone over to the dark side. Sorry. Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.
Civilized people don’t pay up. They band together, and fight, and eliminate the problem. The EFF is launching a major initiative to reform the patent system. At Stack Exchange, we’re trying to help with Ask Patents, which will hopefully block a few bad patents before they get issued.
by Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software | Read more:
Photo: Seven Samurai (uncredited)
anyone lived in a pretty how town
“…and noone stooped to kiss his face…”
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” Hemingway observed in his short and stirring 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag sighed. “Learn to be alone,” Tarkovsky advised young people. And yet the art of being alone comes with a dark side, the loneliness of a nonconformist amidst the herd mentality of society — something e. e. cummings captures poignantly in his poem“ [anyone lived in a pretty how town],”originally published in the 1940 edition of Poetry Magazine and later included in E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (public library). Tucked inside it is one of the most beautiful poetry lines of all time: “down they forgot as up they grew.”
On May 28, 1953, while lecturing as a visiting professor at Harvard, cummings recorded this mesmerizing reading of the poem — let his voice sweep you away:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings | Read more:
[ed. See also: 'A Critical Interpretation of E. E. Cummings' "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town"]
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” Hemingway observed in his short and stirring 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag sighed. “Learn to be alone,” Tarkovsky advised young people. And yet the art of being alone comes with a dark side, the loneliness of a nonconformist amidst the herd mentality of society — something e. e. cummings captures poignantly in his poem“ [anyone lived in a pretty how town],”originally published in the 1940 edition of Poetry Magazine and later included in E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (public library). Tucked inside it is one of the most beautiful poetry lines of all time: “down they forgot as up they grew.”
On May 28, 1953, while lecturing as a visiting professor at Harvard, cummings recorded this mesmerizing reading of the poem — let his voice sweep you away:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings | Read more:
[ed. See also: 'A Critical Interpretation of E. E. Cummings' "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town"]
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Thank You T-Mobile: Breaking Free of the Cellphone Carrier Conspiracy
Would you speak up if you were overbilled for a meal? Would you complain if you paid for a book from Amazon.com that never arrived?
Or what if you had to keep making monthly mortgage payments even after your loan was fully repaid?
Well, guess what? If you’re like most people, you’re participating in exactly that kind of rip-off right now. It’s the Great Cellphone Subsidy Con.
When you buy a cellphone — an iPhone or Android phone, let’s say — you pay $200. Now, the real price for that sophisticated piece of electronics is around $600. But Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are very thoughtful. They subsidize the phone. Your $200 is a down payment. You pay off the remaining $400 over the course of your two-year contract.
It’s just like buying a house or a car: you put some cash down and pay the rest in installments. Right?
Wrong. Here’s the difference: Once you’ve finished paying off your handset, your monthly bill doesn’t go down. You keep reimbursing the cellphone company as though you still owed it. Forever.
And speaking of the two-year contract, why aren’t you outraged about that? What other service in modern life locks you in for two years? Home phone service? Cable TV service? Internet? Magazine subscriptions? Baby sitter? Lawn maintenance? In any other industry, you can switch to a rival if you ever become unhappy. Companies have to work for your loyalty.
But not in the cellphone industry. If you try to leave your cellphone carrier before two years are up, you’re slapped with a penalty of hundreds of dollars.
If you’re not outraged by those rip-offs, maybe it’s because you think you’re helpless. All of the Big Four carriers follow the same rules, so, you know — what are you gonna do?
Last week, the landscape changed. T-Mobile violated the unwritten conspiracy code of cellphone carriers. It admitted that the emperors have no clothes. John J. Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, took to the stage not only to expose the usurious schemes, but to announce that it wouldn’t be playing those games anymore.
It was a Steve Jobs moment: when somebody got so fed up with the shoddy way some business is being run (say, phone design or selling music) that he reinvented it, disruptively.
by David Pogue, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
This Is Your Ocean on Acid
Working on the mudflats, often with his son and dog in tow, is the fulfillment of a dream for Dewey, a shellfish farmer for more than 30 years who is also the public policy and communications director for Taylor Shellfish Company. Taylor’s operations—which include growing oysters, clams, mussels and geoduck (giant clams whose necks can reach more than three feet long)—span some 1,900 acres of the same tidelands. All told, there are about 47,000 acres of oceanic land that have that special designation in the state, and, he says, “It’s fundamental as to why Washington leads the country in farmed shellfish production. In other parts of country, you typically have to lease the land from the state. Banks are less apt to loan money to businesses that have to lease.”
Commercial shellfishing makes up the lion’s share—two-thirds—of the nation’s aquaculture industry. So reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Fisheries Service which makes a case for boosting domestic seafood production, noting that Americans eat a lot of seafood, and import 86% of it, creating a U.S. seafood trade deficit that now exceeds $10.4 billion annually, second only to oil when it comes to natural resources. In the Pacific Northwest, the shellfish industry contributes $270 million per year to the regional economy and employs more than 3,200 people. And when oyster cultivation fails at the top Northwest hatcheries and farms, the effects on the industry are devastating.
For centuries, shellfish farmers have cultivated oysters in Washington’s Willapa Bay, a massive, shallow estuary separated from the Pacific Ocean by the Long Beach Peninsula. The bay’s warm waters are particularly suited for growing Pacific oysters, identified by their rough, fluted shells marked with purple streaks, and a white interior bearing “a single muscle scar that is sometimes dark, but never purple or black,” according to a Biological Report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The oyster was imported from Japan to the western U.S. coast in 1903. “Puget Sound and Washington waters are a little bit cold compared to what the oyster had in Japan,” says Dewey. “So it doesn’t reproduce particularly well here. Except for a few areas—Willapa Bay is one of them. There’s dependable natural reproduction from one year to the next. The water basically has to get up to 72 degrees and stay there for three weeks for the oysters to spawn.”
Beginning in 2005, these oysters in the bay, known as natural sets, stopped reproducing. They have never successfully reproduced since. In 2006, the hatchery-produced Pacific oysters followed suit. In the hatcheries, spawning happens year-round in conditioning tanks where water temperature and algae levels (for food) are closely controlled.
Both Taylor Shellfish and Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Tillamook, Oregon, witnessed oyster larvae die-offs that they couldn’t explain and that continued for years. Initially, they suspected a bacteria known as Vibrio tubiashii was to blame. But even after Whiskey Creek installed an expensive filtration system, the oyster larvae continued to die. By 2008, Whiskey Creek, which alone accounts for 75% of all oyster seedlings used by West Coast oyster farmers, had lost 80% of its oyster larvae. Taylor Shellfish had lost 60%. Despite the controlled environment, the ocean water they were pumping into their hatcheries was corrosive. Upwelling—or deep ocean water rising to the surface following north winds off the Washington coast—was carrying acidic water to the surface. The shellfish farmers were experiencing the devastating impacts of ocean acidification sooner than researchers had anticipated. With support from Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ocean acidification sensors were set up in 2010 near Washington’s hatcheries. Combined with Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) buoys from NOAA measuring wind velocity, they track ocean acidity—and predict the upwelling events that cause increased acidity—in real time.
Mark Wiegardt, co-owner of Whiskey Creek said: “Putting an IOOS buoy in the water is like putting headlights on a car.” Adds Dewey: “All of a sudden we could see all aspects of this water that was coming in our intake pipes. And it was quite eye-opening. We were seeing pH levels down as low as 7.5. Normally it’s 8.2.” To oyster larvae, it’s the difference between life and death.
by Britta Belli, EMagazine | Read more:
© Photo By David Kline
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