The Technium

A few weeks ago David Carr profiled Kevin Kelly on page 1 of the New York Times Business section. He wrote that Kelly's pronouncements were "often both grandiose and correct." That’s a pretty good summary of Kevin Kelly's style and his prescience.

For the thirty years I've known him, Kelly has been making bold declarations about the world we are crafting with new technologies. He first began to attract notice when he helped found Wired as the first executive editor. "The culture of technology, he notes, "was the prime beat of Wired. When we started the magazine 20 years ago, we had no intentions to write about hardware—bits and bauds. We wrote about the consequences of new inventions and the meaning of new stuff in our lives. At first, few believed us, and dismissed my claim that technology would become the central driver of our culture. Now everyone sees this centrality, but some are worried this means the end of civilization."

The biggest change in our lives is the rate of change and while for many, Facebook and Twitter are a fact of life today, it's interesting to note that this week marks only the 10th anniversary of the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg. When Forbes Magazine published their Billionaires List in 2004, it occured during the Edge Dinner in Monterey, California. Larry Page, present at dinner, made the list for the first time. When he showed me the Forbes headline, it was on his Blackberry pager. It wasn't until 2006 that Twitter was founded. If you got your news electronically at that time, most likely it was on a pager. "Sharing" was something you did at a Chinese restaurant.

Kelly recently successfully published an over-sized book based on his blog Cool Tools. He is one of the few actually making a living from a blog, while he is also reinstating print as a great publishing medium (Carr’s point). He doesn’t just pontificate; he innovates himself. He was one of the founders, for example, of the “quantified self” movement.

Kelly is well aware that his complete embrace of what he calls "The Technium", is a lightning rod for criticism. But, he points out that "we are still at the beginning of the beginning. We have just started to make a technological society. The technological changes in the next 20 years will dwarf those of the last 20 years. It will almost be like nothing at all has happened yet."

In the meantime Kelly is doing what he's been up to for decades, acting as a sensing and ruddering mechanism for the rest of us, finding his way through this new landscape.

How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?

The question that I'm asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we're going to stop sharing, and how far are we're going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there's no end to how much we can track each other—how far we're going to self-track, how much we're going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there's going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can't stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It's suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can't stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there's no tracking in a temporary basis. I don't know, but this is the question I'm asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?

by John Brockman, Edge |  Read more:

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Free of One’s Melancholy Self

When Jordan Belfort—played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting—wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Lamborghini that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to quaaludes (and money, and cocaine, and sex, and giving motivational speeches) has rendered him not just a metaphorical monster but a literal one. He lunges at his pregnant wife and his best friend, played by Jonah Hill, and equally high; he smashes everything in his path, both with his body and with the aforementioned Ferrari. He gurgles and drools and mangles even monosyllabic words. He’s Frankenstein in a polo shirt.

But what of the movie’s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun?

Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some?

* * *

Often prescribed to nervous housewives, a quaalude was something between a sleeping pill and a sedative. First synthesized in the late fifties, by 1965 ’ludes were being manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. The name “quaalude” is both a play on “Maalox,” another product manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., and a synthesis of the phrase “quiet interlude”—a concept so simple and often so out of reach. Just whisper “quiet interlude” to yourself a few times. Seductive, no? It’s the pill in the “take a pill and lie down” directive thousands of Don Drapers gave their Bettys.

Of course, housewives have children who grow into curious teenagers, and medicine-cabinet explorations led the children of boomers to discover a new use for the drug. Most sedatives are designed to take you away within fifteen minutes, but—as Belfort explains in a lengthy paean to ’ludes—fighting the high leads one into a state almost universally described as euphoria. “It was hard to imagine how anything could feel better than this. Any problems you had were immediately forgotten or irrelevant,” said one person who came of age when ’ludes were still floating around. “Nothing felt like being on quaaludes except being on quaaludes.”

by Angela Serratore, Paris Review | Read more:

Image: The Quaaludes featuring the DT’s album cover, 2011

Zoom, Hyper-realism of Rómulo Celdrán
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The Agony of Defeat

[ed. See also: Boooooooooom: The Year of the Seahawks]

The front page of the Denver Post website put it this way: “For Super Bowl starters, the Broncos suffered from a horrific case of stage fright. Jitters turned to panic. Panic leaked to disaster. Disaster became humiliation.” That’s a good start, but the Post’s list of sad Super Bowl nouns doesn’t quite capture the misery of Sunday night’s Broncos catastrophe. Humiliation turned into deep, unending despair. Deep, unending despair became profound emptiness. Profound emptiness transformed into convulsive sobs. Then the Seahawks scored again, and it was only the third quarter. Later, there were locusts.

The NFL’s postseason tournament doesn’t typically crown pro football’s best team. Last year, the ho-hum, 10-6 Ravens hoisted the Lombardi Trophy. The year before, it was Eli Manning’s 9-7 Giants, who barely scraped ho-humitude before a late-season surge. But the 2014 playoffs were not a crapshoot. They were a coronation. The Seattle Seahawks, 43-8 winners in Super Bowl XLVIII, are pro football’s best team. The Seahawks are so dominant, and so overpowering, that it’s not really fair to say that everybody else is playing for second. It’s more like the rest of the NFL is playing for 53rd, or 177th. All hail our neon-green-accented overlords.

On Sunday night in New Jersey, the Denver Broncos were definitely the best team wearing orange. Peyton Manning is a football genius. There is no defense he hasn’t seen before, no scheme he can’t outsmart. On the first play from scrimmage, Broncos center Manny Ramirez snapped the ball over Manning’s head. When the Broncos’ Knowshon Moreno fell on the prolate spheroid in the end zone, Seattle had a 2-0 lead after just 12 seconds. This, it turned out, would be one of the Denver offense’s best plays of the night: If Moreno hadn’t dived on the ball, Seattle would’ve had a touchdown instead of a safety. The best offense in NFL history, a team that scored a record 606 points this season, had been reduced to flailing around in its own end zone, desperately trying to abate its own ineptitude.

by Josh Levin, Slate | Read more:
Image: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Good Enough? That’s Great

What’s the best way to recalibrate a marriage as the years pass? I wish I had the answer, because clearly millions of us would like to know.

As the editor of the Modern Love column for nearly a decade, I have sifted through roughly 50,000 stories that have crossed my desk. I have noticed people wrestling with two questions above all others. From the young: “How do I find love?” And from those wallowing through marital malaise: “How do I get it back?”

Though it’s not really love they want back as much as attention, excitement and passion. No one doubts the enduring benefits of long-term relationships. But marriage can also get boring, punctuated with deadening routines, cyclical arguments and repetitive conversations.

In my own 21-year marriage, my wife has a habit of asking me to do something and then saying: “You’re not going to forget, are you? Just tell me now if you’re going to forget so I’ll know to do it myself.”

I’ll say (for the hundredth time): “I can’t know in advance if I’m going to forget. That’s not how forgetting works.”

“Just tell me,” she’ll say.

Among my 50,000 strangers, I’ve also heard from just a handful of couples who claimed to have maintained sexually charged marriages throughout the decades. The one story I published from this happier-than-thou crowd, by the writer Ayelet Waldman about her still-sexy marriage (with four children) to the Pulitzer-winning writer Michael Chabon, was met with jeers and hostility when she went on “Oprah” to talk about it, mostly because she dared to confess that she puts her marriage ahead of motherhood.

That alignment of priorities, she said, is part of what has allowed her to keep her marriage passionate. And she argued that doing so is also a healthier model for children, most of whom would be better off with a little less time in their parents’ spotlight. As she spoke, the studio audience seemed to regard her as if she were from another planet.

She might as well have been, given how rare that kind of marriage is these days.

So what to do about it? Sneak around, trying to get our needs met elsewhere? Resign ourselves to the limitations of marriage? Confront the issue head on and work together to try to reanimate our relationship? And ultimately, what does each approach entail?

by Daniel Jones, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Rea

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More Mindfulness, Less Meditation

Here’s the promise: Meditation – and mindfulness meditation, in particular – will reduce your cortisol level, blood pressure, social anxiety and depression. It will increase your immune response, resilience and focus and improve your relationships — including with yourself. It will also bolster your performance at work and provide inner peace. It may even cure psoriasis.

50 Cent meditates. So do Lena Dunham and Alanis Morissette.Steven P. Jobs meditated, and mindfulness as a practice is sweeping through Silicon Valley. A week from Saturday, 2,000 technology executives and other seekers will gather for a sold-out conference called Wisdom 2.0, suddenly a must-attend event for the cognoscenti.

Even Rupert Murdoch has tried meditating, summing up its appeal in a haikulike tweet: “Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything.”

Really? For what it’s worth, I don’t think so.

I first learned to meditate 25 years ago, built a daily practice in mindfulness and spent hundreds of hours sitting with my eyes closed and my legs crossed. I also interviewed dozens of meditators, including the most prominent teachers, for a book I wrote in 1995 called “What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America.”. But the more time I spent meditating, the less value I derived from it. Which is not to say I think it has no benefits at all.

The simplest definition of meditation is learning to do one thing at a time. Building the capacity to quiet the mind has undeniable value at a time when our attention is under siege, and distraction has become our steady state. Meditation – in the right doses — is also valuable as a means to relax the body, quiet the emotions and refresh one’s energy. There is growing evidence that meditation has some health benefits.

What I haven’t seen is much evidence that meditating leads people to behave better, improves their relationships or makes them happier.

Consider what Jack Kornfield has to say about meditation. In the 1970s, after spending a number of years as a monk in Southeast Asia, Mr. Kornfield was one of the first Americans to bring the practice of mindfulness to the West. He remains one of the best-known mindfulness teachers, while also practicing as a psychologist.

“While I benefited enormously from the training in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practiced,” he wrote, “I noticed two striking things. First, there were major areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear that even very deep meditation didn’t touch.

“Second, among the several dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during my time in Asia, with a few notable exceptions, most were not helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Meditation and spiritual practice can easily be used to suppress and avoid feeling or to escape from difficult areas of our lives.”

So how to use meditation to best effect?

by Tony Schwartz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eric Michael Johnson

Winslow Homer, Hurricane, Bahamas (1898-99) watercolor
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It’s a Services World

With the announcement of Nest’s acquisition by Google for $3.2 billion last week, the entire technology industry was thrown into hypergear deliberating why there was such a high price placed on something that appeared to be so simple.

It’s only a thermostat after all, right? Wrong.

Nest helps consumers control the most energy-guzzling aspects of your home – heating and air conditioning – which accounts for 56 percent of the average home’s energy consumption. What made the Nest acquisition so appealing was its ties to this mandatory service. It provides a product that is so closely embedded into the consumer’s life that it was an appealing acquisition for any mega corporation that wants to take advantage of the thing that powers everything – electricity.

Now add $1.99 per month subscription to connect Nest to Google services, and you’ve opened a lot more consumers to replacing their “ugly” thermostat, rather than paying the upfront $249 Nest one-off purchase cost. Which could allow Nest to work its way into millions of homes; this means that 56% of all electricity used, the monthly service that we all are forced to pay, will largely be monitored and controlled by one of the most powerful companies in the world: Google.

Google has done extensively well to take expensive products and turning them into a service, often for free. For example, Google’s acquisition of analytics company Urchin Software Corporation in 2005 turned a very high-dollar offering to a free service for website owners. Google is transforming an industry formerly dominated by Microsoft with the launch of Google Drive, free for most and offered at a low monthly fee for businesses, replaces the need for Word, Excel and the rest of the antiquated one-off software offerings.

This is indicative of a shift from one-off product sales to services that will become essential to our everyday lives, things that we will pay for over and over again. In an age when consumers would balk at being forced to pay $120 for a year’s worth of music streaming, they are happy to have their money taken away dollar-by-dollar at a $10 a month clip. Whether it’s more than $1,200 a year on an iPhone plan or a monthly subscription for home delivered products and services, it’s time for Silicon Valley to realize we have reached the age of leasing, not buying things.

Welcome to the age of services. With every new app and product that debuts, entrepreneurs now more than ever need to take into consideration the value proposition of getting consumers quickly on the “titty” (as a great quote from the TV series “House of Cards” so bluntly put it). (...)

Much of this shift has to do with up-and-coming generations that have a bent for instant gratification at a bargain price (or even free). They want the $1.99 a month subscription for music, with on-demand video for $9.99. The Internet has made it possible to lease rather than buy, which large companies have done for decades to better balance their books. Depreciation on large equipment (cars, planes, buildings, etc.) is better if you can match it with consumption. Now technology has made it feasible for the average Joe to do the same.

This generation may never really own a thing in their life. Long gone are days of saving up to buy something when you have credit cards and layaway plans await. Instant consumerism is the driving force, and subscription services lead the way.

by Manu Rekhi, PandoDaily |  Read more:

Image: Thinkstock

Klaus Fussmann (German, b. 1938), Marguerites, 2010.
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How to Escape the Community College Trap

When Daquan McGee got accepted to the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the spring of 2010, he was 19 and still finding his footing after a two-year prison sentence for attempted robbery. He signed up for the standard battery of placement tests in reading, writing, and math; took them cold; and failed two—writing and math. Steered into summer developmental education (otherwise known as remediation), he enrolled in an immersion writing course, which he passed while working full-time at a Top Tomato Super Store. Then McGee learned of a program for which a low-income student like him might qualify, designed to maximize his chances of earning a degree. At a late-summer meeting, he got the rundown on the demands he would face.

McGee would have to enroll full-time in the fall, he was told; part-time attendance was not permitted. Every other week, he would be required to meet with his adviser, who would help arrange his schedule and track his progress. In addition to his full course load, McGee would have to complete his remaining remedial class, in math, immediately. If he slipped up, his adviser would hear about it from his instructor—and mandatory tutoring sessions would follow. If he failed, he would have to retake the class right away. Also on McGee’s schedule was a non-optional, noncredit weekly College Success Seminar, featuring time-management strategies, tips on study habits and goal setting, exercises in effective communication, and counsel on other life skills. The instructor would be taking attendance. If McGee complied with all that was asked of him, he would be eligible for a monthly drill: lining up in one of the long hallways in the main campus building to receive a free, unlimited MetroCard good for the following month. More important, as long as he stayed on track, the portion of his tuition not already covered by financial aid would be waived.

In a hurry to make up for his wasted prison years, McGee signed up. The pace, as he’d been warned, was fast from the start, and did not ease up after the fall. Through the spring semester and on into his second year, his course load remained heavy, and the advisory meetings continued, metronomically. He was encouraged to take winter- and summer-term classes, filling in the breaks between semesters. McGee, a guy with a stocky boxer’s build, doesn’t gush—he conveys low-key composure—but when I met him in October of 2012, early in his third year, he had only praise for the unremitting pushiness, and for the array of financial benefits that came along with it. The package was courtesy of a promising experimental initiative that goes by the snappy acronym ASAP, short for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs. Last winter, McGee graduated with an associate’s degree in multimedia studies. It had taken him two and a half years.

In the community-college world, McGee’s achievement is a shockingly rare feat, and the program that so intently encouraged him to accomplish it is a striking anomaly. The country’s low-cost sub-baccalaureate system—created a century ago to provide an open and affordable entry into higher education to an ever more diverse group of Americans—now enrolls 45 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, many of them part-time students. But only a fraction ever earn a degree, and hardly anyone does it quickly. The associate’s degree is nominally a two-year credential, and the system is proud of its transfer function, sending students onward to four-year schools, as juniors, to pursue a bachelor’s degree—the goal that 80 percent of entrants say they aspire to. Reality, however, typically confounds that tidy timeline. In urban community colleges like the Borough of Manhattan Community College, the national three-year graduation rate is 16 percent. Nationwide, barely more than a third of community-college enrollees emerge with a certificate or degree within six years.

Behind these dismal numbers lie the best of intentions. Community colleges have made it their mission to offer easy access, flexibility, and lots of options to a commuter population now dominated by “nontraditional” students. That’s a catchall label for the many people who don’t fit the classic profile of kids living in dorms, being financed by their parents. Nearly 70 percent of high-school graduates currently pursue some kind of postsecondary schooling, up from half in 1980. The surge is hardly surprising: higher education, over the past three decades, has become a prerequisite for a middle-class life. But of course, as the matriculation rate has climbed, so has the number of students who enter college with marginal credentials and other handicaps. The least academically prepared and most economically hard-pressed among them are typically bound for community college, where low-income students—plenty of them the first in their family to venture beyond high school—outnumber their high-income peers 2-to-1. Many of these students are already juggling jobs and family commitments by their late teens (McGee and his longtime girlfriend had a baby daughter in the fall of his freshman year). This could hardly be a more challenging population to serve.

The bet public community colleges have made—that the best way to meet the needs of their constituents is by offering as much flexibility and convenience as possible—makes a certain intuitive sense in light of such complications. So does a commitment to low cost. Give students a cheap, expansive menu, served up at all hours; don’t demand a specific diet—that’s not a bad metaphor for the community-college experience today.

by Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Mike McQuade

U.S. Spying at Copenhagen Climate Talks Spark Anger

[ed. But, but... they told us it was just for terrorism, they don't actually read the metadata!]

Developing countries have reacted angrily to revelations that the United States spied on other governments at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored communication between key countries before and during the conference to give their negotiators advance information about other positions at the high-profile meeting where world leaders including Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel failed to agree to a strong deal on climate change.

Jairam Ramesh, the then Indian environment minister and a key player in the talks that involved 192 countries and 110 heads of state, said: "Why the hell did they do this and at the end of this, what did they get out of Copenhagen? They got some outcome but certainly not the outcome they wanted. It was completely silly of them. First of all, they didn't get what they wanted. With all their hi-tech gizmos and all their snooping, ultimately the Basic countries [Brazil, South Africa, India and China] bailed Obama out. With all their snooping what did they get?"

Martin Khor, an adviser to developing countries at the summit and director of the South Centre thinktank, said: "Would you play poker with someone who can see your cards? Spying on one another like this is absolutely not on. When someone has an upper hand is very disconcerting. There should be an assurance in negotiations like this that powerful players are not going to gain undue advantage with technological surveillance.

"For negotiations as complex as these we need maximum goodwill and trust. It is absolutely critical. If there is anything that prevents a level playing field, that stops negotiations being held on equal grounds. It disrupts the talks," he said. (...)

The document shows the NSA had provided advance details of the Danish plan to "rescue" the talks should they founder, and also had learned of China's efforts to coordinate its position with India before the conference.

The talks – which ended in disarray after the US, working with a small group of 25 countries, tried to ram through an agreement that other developing countries mostly rejected – were marked by subterfuge, passion and chaos.

Members of the Danish negotiating team told the Danish newspaper Information that both the US and Chinese delegations were "peculiarly well-informed" about closed-door discussions. "They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document," one source told Information.

by John Vidal and Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images

[ed. Vermeer selfie]
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David Jonason, Toast & Coffee 2004
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The Largest Free Transit Experiment in the World

Last January, Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, did something that no other city its size had done before: It made all public transit in the city free for residents.

City officials made some bold predictions about what would result. There would be a flood of new passengers on Tallinn’s buses and trams — as many as 20 percent more riders. Carbon emissions would decline substantially as drivers left their cars at home and rode transit instead. And low-income residents would gain new access to jobs that they previously couldn’t get to. As Mayor Edgar Savisaar likes to say, zeroing out commuting costs was for some people as good as receiving a 13th month of salary.

One year later, this city of 430,000 people has firmly established itself as the leader of a budding international free-transit movement. Tallinn has hosted two conferences for city officials, researchers and journalists from across Europe to discuss the idea. The city has an English-language website devoted to its experiment. And promotional materials have proclaimed Tallinn the "capital of free public transport."

The idea has been very popular with Tallinners. In an opinion poll, nine out of ten people said they were happy with how it’s going. Pille Saks is one of them. "I like free rides," says Saks, a 29 year-old secretary who goes to work by bus. "I have a car, but I don’t like to drive with it, especially in the winter when there is a lot of snow and roads are icy."

Different Reads on Ridership

What’s less clear on the first anniversary of free transit in Tallinn is whether it has actually changed commuting behavior all that much.

Mayor Savisaar says it has. He points to numbers from early last year, showing that traffic on the biggest crossroads had decreased by 14 percent compared to a week shortly before the policy started. He has also cited substantial increases in transit riders. "We are frequently asked … why we are offering free-of-charge public transport," Savisaar told a gathering of officials from Europe and China in August. "It is actually more appropriate to ask why most cities in the world still don’t."

by Sulev Vedler, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Vallo Kruuser

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The Botmaker Who Sees Through the Internet

In the recent Spike Jonze film “Her,” a lonely man buys a futuristic Siri-style computer program designed to interact fluently with humans. The program’s female voice speaks intimately to its owner through an earpiece, while also organizing his e-mails and keeping track of his appointments, until eventually he falls in love with it. Watching it happen is unsettling because of how well the program works on our human protagonist—how powerfully this computerized, disembodied simulation of a woman affects him.

The piece of software at the heart of “Her” only exists within a work of science fiction, of course—one set in a comfortably vague point in the future. While today’s smartphones and computers do “talk” to their users, they do so without the emotionally potent and slightly unpredictable qualities that might make a machine feel human.

But in certain quarters, automated beings with that exact set of qualities have already started to emerge. For the past few years, tiny computer programs have been telling jokes, writing poems, complaining, commenting on the news, and awkwardly flirting—on the Web and through the medium of Twitter, where their messages live side by side with those composed by the carbon-based life-forms who take daily delight in their antics.

One of the most prolific makers of these little programs—or bots, as they’re known—is 30-year-old Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer who lives in Somerville and works at a technology company called Bocoup, while devoting himself to the veritable petting zoo of autonomous digital creatures he has invented in his free time.

Chances are you haven’t heard of Kazemi. But over the past two years, he has emerged as one of the most closely watched and pioneering figures at the intersection of technology, cultural commentary, and what feels to many like a new kind of Web-native art. (...)

Kazemi’s dozens of projects have won him admirers among a range of people so wide it suggests the world doesn’t quite have a category for him yet. His work is tracked by video game designers, comedians, philosophers, and fellow bot-makers; an English literature professor named Leonardo Flores has written about the output of his bots in an online journal devoted to electronic poetry. Web designer Andrew Simone, who follows Kazemi’s work, calls him “a deeply subversive, bot-making John Cage.”

Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.

By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi’s bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they’re more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation—ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free.

by Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe |  Read more:

Image: Lane Turner

Fast Food, Slow Customers

[ed. See also: Old McDonalds]

With its low coffee prices, plentiful tables and available bathrooms, McDonald’s restaurants all over the country, and even all over the world, have been adopted by a cost-conscious set as a coffeehouse for the people, a sort of everyman’s Starbucks.

Behind the Golden Arches, older people seeking company, schoolchildren putting off homework time and homeless people escaping the cold have transformed the banquettes into headquarters for the kind of laid-back socializing once carried out on a park bench or brownstone stoop.

But patrons have also brought the mores of cafe culture, where often a single purchase is permission to camp out with a laptop. Increasingly, they seem to linger over McCafe Lattes, sometimes spending a lot of time but little money in outlets of this chain, which rose to prominence on a very different business model: food that is always fast. And so restaurant managers and franchise owners are often frustrated by these, their most loyal customers. Such regulars hurt business, some say, and leave little room for other customers. Tensions can sometimes erupt.

In the past month, those tensions came to a boil in New York City. When management at a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens, called the police on a group of older Koreans, prompting outrage at the company’s perceived rudeness, calls for a worldwide boycott and a truce mediated by a local politician, it became a famous case of a struggle that happens daily at McDonald’s outlets in the city and beyond.

Is the customer always right — even the ensconced penny-pincher? The answer seems to be yes among the ones who do the endless sitting. (...)

McDonald’s is not alone in navigating this tricky territory. Last year, a group of deaf patrons sued Starbucks after a store on Astor Place in Lower Manhattan forbade their meet-up group to convene there, complaining they did not buy enough coffee. Spending the day nursing a latte is behavior reinforced by franchises like Starbucks and others that seem to actively cultivate it, offering free Wi-Fi that encourages customers to park themselves and their laptops for hours.

There is a social benefit to such spots, some experts said.

“As long as there have been cities, these are the kind of places people have met in,” said Don Mitchell, a professor of urban geography at Syracuse University and the author of “The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space.”

“Whether they have been private property, public property or something in between,” he said, “taking up space is a way to claim a right to be, a right to be visible, to say, ‘We’re part of the city too.’ ”

by Sarah Maslin Nir, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times