The Life of a Stolen Phone

Alex called AT&T, said he'd figured out who'd stolen his phone, and asked if the company could help get it back — perhaps by flagging the phone if the thief tried to register it in a new name. No dice. AT&T gave him two options: Either deactivate the phone and buy a new one, or find a cop willing to subpoena AT&T for information, file a lengthy police report, and go through a long bureaucratic process.

It was, Alex says, "the most B.S. story I've ever heard."

He called Apple and was invited to try the same "find my phone" app he'd already been using.

Alex realized that if he wanted the phone back, he'd have to get it himself. He got in his car and headed to Clayton.

It turns out the dismissive responses that Alex received in his quest to find the stolen iPhone were typical of telecom companies and service carriers. Apple and AT&T have little reason to help someone recover a device — even if it's within reach. Smartphone theft is a lucrative business, and not just for the small-time crooks who lift gadgets off of BART seats. The manufacturer profits by hawking a replacement phone; the carrier profits double, by locking the crime victim into a new contract, then opening an account with whomever ends up with the stolen phone. Telecom companies even profit from the specter of phone theft, by selling expensive insurance policies to protect their users.

"We've tried to blow the whistle on this for years," Capt. Jason Cherniss of the San Francisco Police Department says. "And these companies have had the ability to prevent it for years." In the meantime, he adds, people have been violently robbed — even killed — and millions of dollars have changed hands on the black market.

Alex would quickly find out that the entire smartphone industry functions as a protection racket. And culpability doesn't just lie with the unhelpful customer service representatives.

by Rachel Swan, SF Weekly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Documenting Darkness

How a Thug State Operates

Here, at least, is a place to start: intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June. Brace yourself: 1.7 million. At least they claim that as the number he or his web crawler accessed before he left town. Let’s assume for a moment that it’s accurate and add a caveat. Whatever he had with him on those thumb drives when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSA’s classified documents. Not by a long shot. He only downloaded a portion of them. We don’t have any idea what percentage, but assumedly millions of NSA secret documents did not get the Snowden treatment.

Such figures should stagger us and what he did take will undoubtedly occupy journalists for months or years more (and historians long after that). Keep this in mind, however: the NSA is only one of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community. Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all of them generate their own troves of secret documents, undoubtedly stretching into the many millions.

And keep something else in mind: that’s just intelligence agencies. If you’re thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include places like the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and the Pentagon. In other words, we’re talking about the kind of secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers, and historians wouldn’t have a hope of getting through, not in a century.

We do know that, in 2011, the whole government reportedly classified 92,064,862 documents. If accurate and reasonably typical, that means, in the twenty-first century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance. Of those, thanks to one man (via various journalists), we have had access to a tiny percentage of perhaps 1.7 million of them. Or put another way, you, the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen -- in what we still like to think of as a democracy -- are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name. That’s unless, of course, its officials decide to selectively cherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely and securely absorbing, or an Edward Snowden releases documents to the world over the bitter protests, death threats, and teeth gnashing of Washington officialdom and retired versions of the same.

Summoned From the Id of the National Security State

So far, even among critics, the debate about what to make of Snowden’s act has generally focused on “balance”; that is, on what’s the right equilibrium between an obvious governmental need for secrecy, the security of the country, and an American urge for privacy, freedom, and transparency -- for knowing, among other things, what your government is actually doing. Such a framework (“a meaningful balance between privacy and security”) has proven a relatively comfortable one for Washington, which doesn't mind focusing on the supposedly knotty question of how to define the “limits” of secrecy and whistle-blowing and what “reforms” are needed to bring the two into line. In the present context, however, such a debate seems laughable, if not absurd.

After all, it’s clear from the numbers alone that the urge to envelop the national security state in a blanket of secrecy, to shield its workings from the eyes of its citizens (as well as allies and enemies) has proven essentially boundless, as have the secret ambitions of those running that state. There is no way, at present, to limit the governmental urge for secrecy even in minimal ways, certainly not via secret courts or congressional committees implicated and entangled in the processes of a secret system.

In the face of such boundlessness, perhaps the words “whistleblower” and “leaker” -- both traditionally referring to bounded and focused activities -- are no longer useful. Though we may not yet have a word to describe what Chelsea (once Bradley) Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden have done, we should probably stop calling them whistleblowers. Perhaps they should instead be considered the creations of an overweening national security state, summoned by us from its id (so to speak) to act as a counterforce to its ambitions. Imagine them as representing the societal unconscious. Only in this way can we explain the boundlessness of their acts. After all, such massive document appropriations are inconceivable without a secret state endlessly in the process of documenting its own darkness.

One thing is for certain, though no one thinks to say it: despite their staggering releases of insider information, when it comes to the true nature and extent of the NSS, we surely remain in the dark. In the feeling that, thanks to Manning and Snowden, we now grasp the depths of that secret state, its secret acts, and the secret documentation that goes with it, we are undoubtedly deluded.

by Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

"Laser Madness", 1980
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Solo in Paris

Some go to La Coupole, the 87-year-old Art Deco brasserie in Montparnasse, to commune with friends; others, to dine with ghosts — Picasso, Piaf, Sartre, all former patrons. I went alone, to live in the present.

I sliced through an oyster with my cocktail fork, loosening it from its shell. A pulpy Utah Beach, it was brimming with lemon juice and its own slightly salty liquor. I lifted it with a thumb and forefinger, and tilted it to my lips.

It was early spring in Paris. To my left, a white-haired woman with red lipstick disappeared behind a newspaper. To my right, a man and a woman flirted over starters. We were at the center of one of the last sprawling brasseries of the 1920s, where a large basin into which the artists’ model Kiki de Montparnasse used to climb has been replaced with a comparatively demure sculpture of a couple forming an orb with their outstretched limbs. A waiter paused at my table to rotate the platter of oysters so that the overturned shells faced the empty chair across from me.

“Voilà,” he said.

I leaned back against the banquette, bathed in the whir of nearby tête-à-têtes, sipping my Chablis.

It was easy in Paris to surrender to the moment. But why? What alchemy transmuted ordinary activities, be it a walk across a bridge or the unwrapping of butter, into a pleasure? My default speed in New York is “hurtle,” yet in Paris I dragged the edge of a fork across an oyster with a care better suited to sliding a bow across a violin.

This was not simply because I was in Paris, though it has long held a kind of magic for many Americans. It was because I was there on my own. In a city that has been perfecting beauty since the reign of Napoleon III, there are innumerable sensual details — patterns, textures, colors, sounds — that can be diluted, even missed, when chattering with someone or collaborating on an itinerary. Alone one becomes acutely aware of the hollow clack of pétanque balls in a park; the patina of Maillol’s bronze “Baigneuse se Coiffant” that makes her look wet even on a cloudless day in the Tuileries; how each of the empty wine bottles beside sidewalk recycling bins is the embodiment of someone’s good time. There is a Paris that deeply rewards the solo traveler.

Indeed, the city has a centuries-old tradition of solo exploration, personified by the flâneur, or stroller. Flânerie is, in its purest form, a goal-less pursuit, though for some it evolved into a purposeful art: Walking and observing became a method of understanding a city, an age. Baudelaire described the flâneur as a passionate spectator, one who was fond of “botanizing on the asphalt,” as the essayist Walter Benjamin would later put it. Typically, it was a man. No longer.

To be a sidewalk botanist, one must walk. But please, no sneakers. C’est Paris. A fashion journalist friend suggested I be slightly transgressive and don a men’s shoe. A nod to my predecessors. This is how I came to average 20 miles a day in bronze cap-toe oxfords.

by Stephanie Rosenbloom, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

ballet #157 (by chrisfriel)
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A Bleak Visit to San Francisco’s ‘Google Glass Bar’

Back in February, social media guru Sarah Slocum was allegedly attacked for wearing Google Glass in a bar in San Francisco. She called it a “hate crime.” After the story went viral, other people who were at the bar came forward offering conflicting accounts of what happened, saying that she instigated people by filming them without asking permission.

Then Slocum released a longer video, in which she called people at the bar white trash, and it became clear that the whole story was—at the very least—way more complicated than she originally let on.

After the incident, and to respond to the anti-tech backlash that’s swept the city, a few bars in San Francisco banned Google Glass. Taking the opposite approach, the Stanford Court Hotel—a former Marriott that remodeled itself in 2013 to coddle to the booming tech industry after almost going bankrupt a few years prior—started offering free drinks to anyone wearing the superfluous $1,500 face computer.

“The complimentary drink is geared toward the local tech crowd who own a pair, and might feel like an outcast or nuisance due to the recent string of negative press,” explained a hotel spokesperson to SF Gate. “[We] want them to feel at home.”

I figured this bar would offer a bleak glimpse of what the world might look like in 5-10 years, should “wearables” invade. I headed over at happy hour on a Thursday.

The Stanford Court Hotel sits castle-like on the apex of Nob Hill. The castle metaphor isn’t a hyperbolic stretch: On the high-walled south side of the place there’s actually a defensive tower. I wondered if those standing guard would dump boiling oil on any non-tech peasants, should they storm the fortress demanding breadcrumbs.

The entrance is concrete and cavernous, like a parking garage, or to extend the castle metaphor, it functions sort of like a barbican. At first I wasn’t sure if it was the correct entrance, but noticed a cement fountain in the center, and some bored valets, so I moseyed in. I was initially worried they’d stop me—I had biked there, uphill, from my apartment in the Mission, and had sweat through my shirt.

Walking in the door, there was a welcome mat with #GDBYE, which stands for either “goodbye” or “god boye.” If the former is true, then it was facing the wrong way, saying “goodbye” to everyone entering. There were iPads at the front desk, sitting vertically in stands, that read “#hello.” I thought these were odd design touches that fundamentally misunderstood the point of hashtags.

The lobby was crowded with pilots and flight attendants. Above, there was a faux-stained glass dome—the glass was painted different primary colors. Toto’s “Hold The Line” played over the lobby’s speakers. An electric motorcycle was parked next to a sign that read “take charge.” There were Macs lined up along a window that looked out into the entrance area, their screensavers flashing images of the hotel rooms, I suppose in case guests forgot what their rooms looked like.

I walked to the bar, passing a couch with pillows that read CTRL, ALT, DEL. I wondered what these pillows signify—perhaps the couch freezes often?—and snapped a photo. I briefly considered flipping the pillows out of order, to see if anyone noticed.

The bar was quiet. Nobody was wearing Google Glass. A Warriors game was ending on a flatscreen TV at the far end of the bar. In front of it sat a 50-something tourist couple. Three chairs up from them a 30-someting guy pecked at his laptop, and on the other end two women sat drinking white wine and talking loudly but incomprehensibly. The only thing I could make out was when one of them said, “Have you ever watched ‘Devil Wears Prada’?”

I sat down between the tourist couple and the guy on his laptop, who was apparently locked out. He kept trying different passwords, hitting enter, watching the screen shake to say “no,” and then letting out a long sigh.

I ordered a beer from a tired, middle-aged bartender, a Big Daddy, which cost $7.61. In my neighborhood you could get it for $5 outside of happy hour. As he filled the glass I noticed they had Vodka on tap.

The tourist couple next to me sat quietly, definitively not the kind of people the hotel was hoping to draw, digging through the dish of assorted nuts in front of them with their fingers, picking out the M&Ms. The wife—dressed like a mannequin from Chicos—sipped her red wine, as the husband—sneakers with high athletic socks, jeans and a windbreaker—waited for her to finish, empty beer glass in front of him.

He spoke to me after I ordered, in a Sam Elliott baritone. “Big Daddy, huh? Ever had that before?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Where’s it from?”

“Here.”

He thought about this for a moment, then looked as his wife, satisfied. “Must be a local or something.”

A long moment passed.

“Big Daddy,” he repeated to himself.

The guy to my left suddenly slammed his MacBook shut, and crossed the bar to the CTRL-ALT-DEL couch, where he was charging his phone at a nearby outlet.

I sat and drank.

The bartender replaced the peanut dish in front of the tourists with another full container.

“That’s just what we need,” the guy said sardonically.

It suddenly occurred to me that the bartender never offered me a dish of nuts. I thought about complaining—what, you think I’m too sweaty for some assorted nuts?

The laptop guy returned, opened his computer, furiously tried a few more passwords, and then angrily asked the bartender to change the TV channel. The game had ended, and players were being interviewed.

“What do you want to watch?”

“Anything, I don’t care, just a game. As much as I love watching interviews,” he said.

Only a few seconds after the channel was changed for him, he closed his laptop, and wandered off to one of the Macs in the lobby. He sat in one of the awkward spherical beanbag chairs, that were too low to the ground and made him look like a 6-year-old at the wheel of a large automobile. He immediately visited Espn.com and scrolled through, bored.

I texted my friend: “This bar is the opposite of fun.”

A fly circled and then landed in my beer.

by Joe Viex, deathandtaxes |  Read more:

Image: SF Gate

Raquel Zimmermann in “Heat Wave” by Josh Olins for Vogue UK, June 2011
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How to Shop for the Apocalypse

An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse. The conventional house would be mirrored below ground with pretty much identical living quarters that would be completely secure and so self-contained that there would be facilities to hydroponically grow plants and vegetables without soil.

‘Americans shouldn’t believe they’re immune to social unrest’ was all the prospective client would offer by way of explanation. He primarily wanted the house as a refuge for his own family but also, he revealed magnanimously, saw it as a possible rallying point for humanity in the event of some future catastrophe.

The strange thing was that when my friend rang a mechanical engineer for advice on a few technical details, rather than be gobsmacked, the engineer said he’d been working on pretty much the same brief for another Wall Street titan. Only he wanted a moat, too. ‘What do they know that we don’t?’ the architect asked me. (...)

There have been doomsday cults in the US since the off, and survivalist militias in combat gear were charging around the woods preparing to fight government baddies during the Clinton presidency. But that’s nothing on the cynical mood now. The chief reason has been Barack Obama winning a second term — many preppers believe he will start trying to separate citizens from their guns, sparking civil war. For the very rich, there is the added paranoia caused by the growing wealth gap and widespread predictions that it could lead eventually to serious social unrest. Drive along the East River into Manhattan’s financial district and you can’t miss a huge billboard advertising a storage warehouse. ‘The French aristocracy never saw it coming either,’ it reads. Endearingly cryptic … unless you’re a twitchy banker and then the threat is fairly obvious. A well-known Wall Street financial adviser, David John Marotta, recently told investors they should prepare for a financial apocalypse by carrying around an emergency ‘bug-out bag’ containing food, a gun and ammunition.

According to James Stevens, alias Doctor Prepper, who is the guru of a movement he prefers to call ‘family preparedness’, most preppers are white, middle-class and affluent. Black people aren’t interested, he says. Read prepper online forums and you’ll pick up on a definite elitism, a view that they’re the chosen few and that some people’s lives are too frivolous to be worth saving. One has to ask how many of these people are simply fantasising about an alternative world in which they are the hero.

Being that hero doesn’t come cheap. America’s ‘disaster preparedness’ economy is estimated to be worth some annual $500 million in sales to ordinary punters — several billion dollars when you include sales to businesses and the government. That’s just the stuff you fit in a backpack. If you have $2 million to spare, you can have your own decommissioned nuclear missile bunker as an end-of-the-world getaway. When a developer converted a 1960s-era missile silo in Kansas into a 174ft deep apartment complex, some sniggered but he quickly sold all 14 of the 1,820 sq ft units. There’s a long waiting list for further silo conversions that he plans. Survival Condo will have enough supplies of site-grown food, and purified well and rain water, to accommodate 70 people indefinitely, says the developer. The flats boast large HDTV panels simulating windows (giving views of a world that no longer exists). The silo also boasts a cinema, spa, classrooms, bar and pool. Zombies and other non-members will be kept out with ground-level security cameras, electric fences and the lethal contents of an onsite armoury.

For those who need to prepare on a tighter budget for D-day (preppers call it TSHTF, or ‘the shit hits the fan’), there are cheaper options such as a 40 ft long, 10 ft diameter corrugated steel tube that can house six and be buried in your back garden. It’s a snip at $72,000, although the fake tree or rock to conceal the air vent is extra. Early buyers were offered a free ten acres at a secret prepper settlement in Arizona so they could bury their tube near like-minded neighbours.

by Tom Leonard, The Spectator |  Read more:

Image: Castro

Too Big to Fail. Not Too Strong.

From Andrew Mellon’s nearly 11 years as Treasury secretary under Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover to our time, when Timothy Geithner went from financial regulator at the New York Federal Reserve to Treasury secretary to investment executive, journalists have often employed the image of a revolving door to describe the flow of bankers between Wall Street and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. But few know that the White House and the Treasury are, arguably, a single building. A tunnel connects 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue with 1600. Presidents use this passageway to slip visitors in and out of the Oval Office.

Nomi Prins, in her new history All the Presidents’ Bankers, does not say it in so many words. But she shows that the tunnel from the White House to the Treasury extends, metaphorically, for 226 miles to Lower Manhattan. Prins digs into presidential libraries and national archives and mines a shelf of books. She also knows Wall Street from the inside. Equipped with degrees in mathematics and statistics, she worked at Chase, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and finally Goldman Sachs, where she was a managing director. Prins created something of a sensation eight years ago with one of her earlier books, Other People’s Money: TheCorporate Mugging of America.

Prins’s story begins in the ’80s—the 1880s. Science, engineering, and mass production were transforming what had been an agricultural nation into an industrial one, creating private fortunes that would have been beyond imagining before the Civil War. Rivers of cash flowed to titans of the Gilded Age. (...)

Prins notes that the bankers who mattered a century and more ago and the bankers who matter today have consistently numbered six, a group small enough to cooperate or collude during a crisis. On the overcast Thursday morning of October 24, 1929, the day of the crash that launched the Great Depression, Charles Mitchell of National City Bank, Al Wiggin of Chase, Seward Prosser of Bankers Trust (later bought by Deutsche Bank), and William Potter of Guaranty Trust (now part of JPMorgan) strolled to 23 Wall Street to meet with Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan and George Baker of First National Bank (later Citi), who had come in through a side door to avoid reporters. In 20 minutes, the six agreed to prop up the collapsing market; Lamont, standing in for J.P. Morgan Jr., who was in Europe, announced the plan.

In the 2008 banking collapse near the end of the George W. Bush administration, it was again the Big Six banks that set the terms. They met on September 12 and soon wrested from Congress more cash than the Defense Department spent that year. The banks’ champion was Bush’s Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, who before serving in that office had run Goldman Sachs, the country’s biggest investment bank. (...)

In the 35 years from 1960 to 1995, fewer than 10,000 bank mergers took place. In the last half of the 1990s, when Clinton was occupied with impeachment, more than 11,000 bank mergers were consummated. Lobbyists ran up invoices, corporations and executives poured in campaign contributions, and most journalists accepted the meme that Glass-Steagall was outdated. The loophole that allowed Travelers and Citi to merge required the killing of Glass-Steagall by 1999. The inherent conflicts of interest Glass-Steagall had prevented, which few lawmakers or journalists understood, were now enabled. This in turn, Prins shows, fueled the unsound banking practices that were later to sink Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the whole economy. Meanwhile, in the early aughts Geithner proved a sightless sheriff at the New York Fed, ignoring accounting tricks, falsified warranties on mortgage securities, and weakened underwriting standards. He was told in 2005 that Fed supervision of Citigroup was inadequate but did nothing to strengthen it.

In late summer 2008, banking practices that Glass-Steagall would have barred combined with lax regulation to produce the worst financial disaster since 1929. Citigroup ended up getting a bailout of almost half a trillion dollars. The sum of money required to make good on all the bad bets and misconduct came to $12.8 trillion, Bloomberg News calculated—not much less than the output of the entire economy in 2009. (...)

Prins notes that the six big banks agreed to $80 billion in fines following the 2008 disaster. That sounds like a lot. She points out that the amount equals eight-tenths of 1 percent of their assets, the kind of insignificant penalty that The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson dismisses as the equivalent of a rounding error. (...)

America has nearly 7,000 banks. Just two of the biggest—Citigroup and Chase—hold $4.3 trillion in assets, or more than 30 cents out of every banking dollar.

by David Cay Johnson, American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Christer Ehrling
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Cressida Campbell
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Finnish Man Invents a Better Wood-Splitting Ax

[ed. Damn, I wish I had one of these when I was heating my house with seven cords of wood each winter. Not only that, why didn't anyone tell me about the tire deal?!]

A Finnish woodcutter has designed an ax that could make a significant difference in the lives of some northerners.

Many people in the far north heat their homes year-round with wood.

Heikki Karnä says his “eccentric” ax, the Vipukirves in Finnish, makes splitting logs for firewood simpler, safer and a lot easier.

What makes his axe different?

“Everything,” Karnä says.

The design, which has been on the market for eight years in Europe, replaces the traditional straight-edge blade with a curved one.

When the ax head strikes the log, the blade is forced to the right and pulls the wood apart.

Karnä says the ax also adds more torque, so you don’t have to use as much force to get through the wood.

“All the kinetic energy turns to the left and the energy pushes the piece of wood away from the block, and then the ax head stops on top of the block. There’s no way it could continue on to your foot.”

by Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Heikki Karnä

Milan, Italy
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Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in New York. "People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert," he said. But, he conceded, "The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert."

Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.

Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.

It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.

"These were exactly like fortune cookies," she said. "They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes."

The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Nakamachi's long research mission began. (...)

The bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo's fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, "To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga."

by Jennifer 8. Lee, NY Times | Read more:
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No Purchase Necessary

Campbell SOUP Company
CAMDEN 1, NEW JERSEY
May 19, 1964

Mr. A. Warhol
1342 Lexington Avenue
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Warhol:
I have followed your career for some time. Your work has evoked a great deal of interest here at Campbell Soup Company for obvious reasons. 

At one time I had hoped to be able to acquire one of your Campbell Soup label paintings – but I’m afraid you have gotten much too expensive for me.

I did want to tell you, however, that we admired your work and I have since learned that you like Tomato Soup. I am taking the liberty of having a couple of cases of our Tomato Soup delivered to you at this address.

We wish you continued success and good fortune.

Cordially,
William P. MacFarland
Product Marketing Manager

Here comes a whole shipping palette stacked high with Tomato Soup into Warhol’s apartment on 94th and Lex (10 cents a can), while down at the Stable Gallery, there goes box after box painted Campbell’s, each one $400 a pop, tucked under the arms of finely tailored suits and furs. The whole thing is a giant alchemical conveyor belt, turning mass-market dross into high-culture gold. Of course MacFarland admires Warhol’s work—at 36 cans a case, what’s that, a 11,000% markup? That makes the artist the most successful brand manager in the history of the profession. And what’s more, he’s doing it all for free. Pro-­bono ad work. MacFarland could weep with joy. Like tomato soup?—the man must love it!

What Warhol liked about these products was at a level of abstraction once removed from what MacFarland’s gesture of sending free soup implied. “I wanted to paint nothing,” the artist confided to his friend Bert Greene about his reasons for choosing the Campbell’s can in 1962. “I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.” A fellow ad-man should have known better than anyone: A brand doesn’t sell a thing, it sells a feeling, an image of a way of being.

Warhol had spilled advertising’s eternal secret: no purchase necessary. That little begrudging bit of legal fine print on every mail-in rebate and contest was, in fact, the most basic truth of the whole commercial universe. The tomato soup MacFarland gave Warhol could feed his silk-screening speed freaks or go straight into the trash. The point is, it didn’t matter; no one actually wanted the thing, what they wanted was all there on the surface, free for the taking to anyone with eyes and an imagination. Buying the product was never going to let you inside the fantasy because there was no inside—beneath the label was nothing but watery tomato paste. In this way, Pop Art was an experiment with the mass-marketed mechanics of surfaces—a glib extension of the Modernists’ high-concept “flatness” into the dimensionless field of advertising and taste. (...)

Anytime between Warhol’s exchange with Campbell’s and the arrival of social media, if you wanted to build a personality with brands, that meant spending money on something like a T-shirt with a big swoosh on it. But sometime in the 2000s, it was as if digital consumers everywhere had collectively gotten the equivalent of MacFarland’s letter to Warhol: We admire your work and we wish you continued success and good fortune. On social-media platforms, brands were disconnected from their presence qua products that needed buying, suddenly skinned à la Pop Art, and made available on the house.

To its champions, social media means greater connectivity among people and perhaps souls—it grows social life horizontally and enables revolutions. Maybe. Whatever the case, our current FacebookTwitterGoogle universe is materially based on the insight that a new digital advertising model could be extracted from a culture already obsessed with representing itself through brand affiliations. It implicated an entire generation of people who already gladly paid for the privilege of adorning themselves with logos and ads in what amounted to a long con. The mystique that once came attached to stuff would now be free—you could choose Nike, Louis Vuitton, Ferrari with a costless click. What’s more, you could forget the wan aura of belonging you could cop from “liking” some brand in public by flaunting goods they sold; now you could show off that a brand liked you.

by A.E. Benenson, TNI |  Read more:
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A Eulogy for Twitter

[ed. I don't use Twitter so can't judge whether the service should be 'eulogized' or not. Maybe it's just evolution. Hasn't everybody been predicting the death of FB for like... forever?]

We've been trying to figure out the moment Twitter turned, retracing tweets to see whether there was something specific that soured the platform.

Something is wrong on Twitter. And people are noticing.  (...)

Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms—about any publishing platforms—is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?

But maybe there's a better question to ask first: Which Twitter did we lose?

Looking back, 2013 Twitter was basically a hangover to 2012 Twitter, when we could imagine leaving the platform some day but not anytime soon. Or maybe we're chasing the ghost of 2011 Twitter. It was a hectic feed then, a staticky mess of affiliate notifications, manual retweets, and Foursquare checkins. Remember 2010 Twitter? The year it seemed everyone had finally caved and signed up. The Arab Spring made people optimistic about the platform as a transformative force. Roger Ebert and Rob Delaney ruled. 2009 Twitter is a blur and the disjointedness of 2008 Twitter is hard to remember at this point. Before that, people weren't even having conversations on the platform. Not really.

It's funny that we delineate Twitter eras by the year, or that we even can, because the platform is so fixated on the "right now." Describing Twitter by year can feel like counting raindrops in the ocean.

Besides, the Twitter worth talking about transcends all those other Twitters. When it was good—when it is good—Twitter created an environment characterized by respect and jokes so funny you wanted to show the person sitting next to you in real life. Not agreeing could be productive, and could happen without devolving into histrionics. The positive feedback loop of faves and interactions didn't hurt, either.

As such, the idea that Twitter's 140-character format precludes it from being a place for depth has always been a red herring. But there are legitimate questions about how the format can scale. Sometimes it helps to picture Twitter as a network of overlapping concentric circles—made bigger by retweets, modified tweets, interactions, faving, hate-faving, subtweeting, snarking, trolling, etc., etc., until they get so big and the network gets so crowded that you can't see the circles themselves anymore.

For a long time, we would’ve told people that if they weren't having a good time on Twitter, they weren't following the right people. This was code for you haven’t found the right network yet. And there are still great accounts on the platform, even great networks, but many of them are becoming more fragmented than ever—even as Twitter has changed functionalities in ways that seem designed to prompt interactions and conversations. Maybe this was inevitable. Fragmentation is a fundamental part of how people interact with information online; it's how we socialize offline, too.

People are still using Twitter, but they’re not hanging out there.

by Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Matthias Töpfer/flick

The defense ministers of Norway (Ine Eriksen Søreide), Sweden (Karin Enström), Netherlands (Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert), and Germany (Ursula von der Leyen).
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