Sunday, September 7, 2014
An Afternoon Drink With Hannah Hart
Hannah Hart may have a YouTube show-turned-small media empire and brand new cookbook called My Drunk Kitchen, but over the course of a hour-long interview at Tom and Jerry’s bar in Soho, she wasn’t sipping anything. True to the ethos of her show, she may have looked like the biggest lush in the room, with two red-hot cocktails (because cocktail number one got spilled and the bartender made her another) and a ginger beer sitting in front of her. But she didn’t take a sip, and wasn’t particularly interested in the drink. She was too busy talking and joking.
She was stoked about the book, which she described as “self-help parody meets cookbook”: the joy on her face when she heard that My Drunk Kitchen was the #45 seller on Amazon was a sight to behold. Her recommendations for its best recipes were “whatever makes your heart feel light. I think they’re all edible. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re tested, I wouldn’t say they’re FDA approved.” But more than a cookbook, My Drunk Kitchen feels like a guide on How to Be an Adult and Figure Your Stuff Out, with lots of jokes and cute pictures. Food is a bit secondary, but always creative, à la the show it was based on. (There is one recipe you absolutely need to try, though: “Chocolate Chipz,” which is chips covered in melted chocolate. Do make that one.)
I had wanted to talk with the charming and warm 27-year-old Hart, a woman who can peel off quite a few jokes per second and a torrent of “you know what I means” in a single conversation, in a location where she could run into some fans. YouTube stardom is such a new classification of celebrity — it’s quantifiable online, yet it has a very specific sort of intimacy, as it’s a one-to-one experience between the video and the viewer. How does that translate into the outside world? Are you an anonymous regular Joe, or are people recognizing you and asking for selfies? The disarming thing about Hart in person is that her My Drunk Kitchen persona is not an act. She’s adorable, can pull off a snap-back baseball cap, and when she described a recent YouTube convention in Milan, she popped into a funny “Italiano” voice while discussing the awkwardness of an LBGT panel in a Catholic country.
by Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire | Read more:
Image: My Drunk Kitchen
Outlook: Gloomy
I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? If it’s bad news, you’re in good company – that’s what most people pick. But why?
Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.
Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one. Pessimists tend to assess their health more accurately than optimists. In our era of political correctness, negative remarks stand out and seem more authentic. People – even babies as young as six months old – are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but slower to pick out a happy one; in fact, no matter how many smiles we see in that crowd, we will always spot the angry face first. (...)
One of the first researchers to explore our negative slant was the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize, and best known for pioneering the field of behavioural economics. In 1983, Kahneman coined the term ‘loss aversion’ to describe his finding that we mourn loss more than we enjoy benefit. The upset felt after losing money is always greater than the happiness felt after gaining the same sum. (...)
It was the University of Washington psychologist John Gottman, an expert on marital stability, who showed how eviscerating our dark side could be. In 1992, Gottman found a formula to predict divorce with an accuracy rate of more than 90 per cent by spending only 15 minutes with a newly-wed couple. He spent the time evaluating the ratio of positive to negative expressions exchanged between the partners, including gestures and body language. Gottman later reported that couples needed a ‘magic ratio’ of at least five positive expressions for each negative one if a relationship was to survive. So, if you have just finished nagging your partner over housework, be sure to praise him five times very soon. Couples who went on to get divorced had four negative comments to three positive ones. Sickeningly harmonious couples displayed a ratio of about 20:1 – a boon to the relationship but perhaps not so helpful for the partner needing honest help navigating the world.
Other researchers applied these findings to the world of business. The Chilean psychologist Marcial Losada, for instance, studied 60 management teams at a large information-processing company. In the most effective groups, employees were praised six times for every time they were put down. In especially low-performing groups, there were almost three negative remarks to every positive one.
Losada’s controversial ‘critical positivity ratio’, devised with psychologist Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and based on complex mathematics, aimed to serve up the perfect formula of 3-6:1. In other words, hearing praise between three and six times as often as criticism, the researchers said, sustained employee satisfaction, success in love, and most other measures of a flourishing, happy life.
Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.
Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one. Pessimists tend to assess their health more accurately than optimists. In our era of political correctness, negative remarks stand out and seem more authentic. People – even babies as young as six months old – are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but slower to pick out a happy one; in fact, no matter how many smiles we see in that crowd, we will always spot the angry face first. (...)One of the first researchers to explore our negative slant was the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize, and best known for pioneering the field of behavioural economics. In 1983, Kahneman coined the term ‘loss aversion’ to describe his finding that we mourn loss more than we enjoy benefit. The upset felt after losing money is always greater than the happiness felt after gaining the same sum. (...)
It was the University of Washington psychologist John Gottman, an expert on marital stability, who showed how eviscerating our dark side could be. In 1992, Gottman found a formula to predict divorce with an accuracy rate of more than 90 per cent by spending only 15 minutes with a newly-wed couple. He spent the time evaluating the ratio of positive to negative expressions exchanged between the partners, including gestures and body language. Gottman later reported that couples needed a ‘magic ratio’ of at least five positive expressions for each negative one if a relationship was to survive. So, if you have just finished nagging your partner over housework, be sure to praise him five times very soon. Couples who went on to get divorced had four negative comments to three positive ones. Sickeningly harmonious couples displayed a ratio of about 20:1 – a boon to the relationship but perhaps not so helpful for the partner needing honest help navigating the world.
Other researchers applied these findings to the world of business. The Chilean psychologist Marcial Losada, for instance, studied 60 management teams at a large information-processing company. In the most effective groups, employees were praised six times for every time they were put down. In especially low-performing groups, there were almost three negative remarks to every positive one.
Losada’s controversial ‘critical positivity ratio’, devised with psychologist Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and based on complex mathematics, aimed to serve up the perfect formula of 3-6:1. In other words, hearing praise between three and six times as often as criticism, the researchers said, sustained employee satisfaction, success in love, and most other measures of a flourishing, happy life.
by Jacob Burak, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Springer Collection/Corbis
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Full-Metal Dress
Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht has taken fashion to a shocking new level: She recently donned a custom-built metallic dress and zapped herself with nearly half a million volts of electricity. The stunt came about when she met ArcAttack, a band that makes music with giant Tesla coils. Together they decided to craft a shockproof costume for an upcoming show. Wipprecht built a spiked helmet and plate-metal dress and secured them over a head-to-toe suit of chain mail. For extra flair, she hacked toy plasma balls into shoulder ornaments.
Jessie Geoffray, Popular Science | Read more:
Image: Kyle Cothern
Steve'n'Seagulls
[ed. Finnish band Steve'n'Seagulls plays AC/DC's awesome song 'Thunderstruck'. Original version here.]
Work It
It is six AM. I am in an industrial warehouse in Bushwick. Instead of thin plastic cups of Old Crow and Rolling Rock, the cute, amicable bartenders are serving boutique coffee and nine dollar organic pressed juices. The clientele looks eminently employable. A man wearing face paint is hanging from a rope swing over a foam pit. I am attending my first-ever sober rave. There’s the muffled groove of house music bouncing off of empty brick buildings; there’s the bouncer at the door checking wrist stamps; there’s the high, industrial ceiling with its exposed beams. But instead of ambling past the K-holed zombie waste-oids and afterhours addicts double-fisting Red Bull cans, I’m being greeted by the event’s anointed “hugger” who drapes a plastic lei around my neck and wishes me a good morning.
The dance floor is spring-loaded and a group of scruffy, possible startup consultants sweating in their unbuttoned pinstripe shirts, are bouncing and giggling, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. A couple of wiry thirtysomethings wearing prayer beads and colorful athleticwear are upside down, challenging each other to duration handstands (they must be vegan; I don’t know how else you get that skinny). The dance movement therapists by the DJ booth see me looking out of place and invite me to express myself through free-form improvisational movement; I politely decline.
It turns out there’s an international network of Yoga Raves™ that spans Argentina, Lithuania, and South Africa, plus plenty of general purpose early morning sober parties in cities like London, New York, and Sydney. There are hour-long lunchtime dance parties in Midtown Manhattan, so you can goof off in between shifts. There is a whole world of un-inebriated clubbing to be done out there, a parallel dimension of party populated by the affluent professional class and New Age disciples.
As someone whose average Saturday morning begins with a few hours of chest-rattling techno followed by a daylight stroll home from some forgotten warehouse district, I naturally balked at the idea of white collar health nuts stepping onto my turf. At the parties I prefer to haunt, half the attendees can barely hold down their bike messenger jobs, let alone handle an administrative gig for some socially-minded non-profit. But, masochist that I am, I knew I had to see it for myself before all the burners left town.
“I have a really crazy mind,” said Scotty Lavella, a frequent morning raver, volunteer hugger, self-described health nut, and part-time anesthesia engineer who is currently producing a web-based comedy cooking show. I had gone out for a cigarette and found him leaning against the back of the warehouse, savoring a breather and watching the sun rise over barbed wire fences and cinder block buildings. “My mind can’t be silenced by sitting in a corner sniffing Yohimbe root and sage-ing myself; I have to dance; I have to run. I dance—and my mind slows down.” Like most of the party’s attendees, mindfulness and self care is central to his lifestyle. He doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t do hard drugs; he drinks only occasionally. “I’m totally being present,” he says. “It’s like meditation.” (...)
Hardcore party culture has always had an ambiguous relationship to labor. In the New York City discotheques of the 1970s, where club culture as we know it first flourished, hard work permeated every membrane of the city’s sprawling pleasure complex. “They completely worked on their bodies like a temple just to fuck it up on the weekend,” DJ Ian Levine told author Peter Shapiro in Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. His description of the culture at the time captures its ambivalent relationship to the looming presence of labor and its successor, death. “Monday to Saturday in the gym, every day, eating healthy, zero body fat,” he says, describing the exhaustive effort that preceded, followed, and in many ways pervaded Saturday night out at the club. (...)
Even now, the pleasure-seeking class of full-time partiers in Berlin will tell you that all of this leisure time is actually a lot of work. Ask one of the gaunt, leather-harnessed demi-gods at Berghain for advice on how to keep partying for 14 hours and they’ll likely provide some variation on the following: bring a backpack with snacks and toiletries, dress sensibly, space your drug use out at a reasonable pace, and most importantly, when that moment comes where you hate yourself and you feel poisoned and scared and you just want to go home, power through it and you may come out the other side to reach unprecedented heights. And if you’re really fading, taking a nap for an hour or two in the corner of the club, then get up and keep going. It sounds like workplace advice for a new hire.
The dance floor is spring-loaded and a group of scruffy, possible startup consultants sweating in their unbuttoned pinstripe shirts, are bouncing and giggling, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. A couple of wiry thirtysomethings wearing prayer beads and colorful athleticwear are upside down, challenging each other to duration handstands (they must be vegan; I don’t know how else you get that skinny). The dance movement therapists by the DJ booth see me looking out of place and invite me to express myself through free-form improvisational movement; I politely decline.It turns out there’s an international network of Yoga Raves™ that spans Argentina, Lithuania, and South Africa, plus plenty of general purpose early morning sober parties in cities like London, New York, and Sydney. There are hour-long lunchtime dance parties in Midtown Manhattan, so you can goof off in between shifts. There is a whole world of un-inebriated clubbing to be done out there, a parallel dimension of party populated by the affluent professional class and New Age disciples.
As someone whose average Saturday morning begins with a few hours of chest-rattling techno followed by a daylight stroll home from some forgotten warehouse district, I naturally balked at the idea of white collar health nuts stepping onto my turf. At the parties I prefer to haunt, half the attendees can barely hold down their bike messenger jobs, let alone handle an administrative gig for some socially-minded non-profit. But, masochist that I am, I knew I had to see it for myself before all the burners left town.
“I have a really crazy mind,” said Scotty Lavella, a frequent morning raver, volunteer hugger, self-described health nut, and part-time anesthesia engineer who is currently producing a web-based comedy cooking show. I had gone out for a cigarette and found him leaning against the back of the warehouse, savoring a breather and watching the sun rise over barbed wire fences and cinder block buildings. “My mind can’t be silenced by sitting in a corner sniffing Yohimbe root and sage-ing myself; I have to dance; I have to run. I dance—and my mind slows down.” Like most of the party’s attendees, mindfulness and self care is central to his lifestyle. He doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t do hard drugs; he drinks only occasionally. “I’m totally being present,” he says. “It’s like meditation.” (...)
Hardcore party culture has always had an ambiguous relationship to labor. In the New York City discotheques of the 1970s, where club culture as we know it first flourished, hard work permeated every membrane of the city’s sprawling pleasure complex. “They completely worked on their bodies like a temple just to fuck it up on the weekend,” DJ Ian Levine told author Peter Shapiro in Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. His description of the culture at the time captures its ambivalent relationship to the looming presence of labor and its successor, death. “Monday to Saturday in the gym, every day, eating healthy, zero body fat,” he says, describing the exhaustive effort that preceded, followed, and in many ways pervaded Saturday night out at the club. (...)
Even now, the pleasure-seeking class of full-time partiers in Berlin will tell you that all of this leisure time is actually a lot of work. Ask one of the gaunt, leather-harnessed demi-gods at Berghain for advice on how to keep partying for 14 hours and they’ll likely provide some variation on the following: bring a backpack with snacks and toiletries, dress sensibly, space your drug use out at a reasonable pace, and most importantly, when that moment comes where you hate yourself and you feel poisoned and scared and you just want to go home, power through it and you may come out the other side to reach unprecedented heights. And if you’re really fading, taking a nap for an hour or two in the corner of the club, then get up and keep going. It sounds like workplace advice for a new hire.
by Max Pearl, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited via:
The End of the End of History?
Since Fukuyama wrote his essay, he has been considered primarily a free-market ideologist seizing an early chance to declare the dismantling of the Soviet Union as the definitive moral victory of Western capitalist democracy—a kind of master ideology to end all ideologies. But those who once disregarded him should now look more closely at his essay, because it is absolutely prophetic. Of course, Fukuyama was not only writing as an intellectual, but also as a senior policymaker at the US State Department and a former analyst at the RAND Corporation. And while his essay did not officially reflect the views of the American state, it was nevertheless written by a man who was not only close to power, but also possessed the means to implement his declarations. So if it comes across as prophetic, it wouldn’t be a coincidence. The essay now reads as a crystal-clear blueprint for a peculiarly murky apolitical nonideological condition that has proven to be incredibly difficult to work from—particularly for artists.
And yet what rescues Fukuyama’s intellectual integrity from those who prefer to set him up as a free-market huckster is how he so beautifully expresses reservations about the very posthistorical condition he professes. He closes the essay by writing:
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.History is coming back, but not in the way we understood it in the idealist tradition. If Kojève’s universal homogenous state (which is probably also the EU) is characterized by unbearable boredom and stagnation, it starts to make sense that the only political horizon available to not only the wishy-washy centrists of electoral democracies, but also to the uprisings and Occupy movements of recent years, was liberal democracy in its present form. And yet we are increasingly bumping up against the utter failure of liberal democracy to account for the bankers and corrupt regimes who commit their worst crimes from within the logic of economic freedom and electoral democracy. So even as we feel the people around us becoming more comfortable making racist remarks, we also start to sense our political consciousness shifting, because it seems clear that the consolidation of free-market democracy is starting to buckle completely. It might be that we are only now seeing how it was a Ponzi scheme all along. History is not beginning again, because it never really ended. Rather, the idea of a homogenous system built on idealism has become unsustainable and has given way to the many identitarian battles that it has had to suppress in order to keep itself going. Only the end of history is ending.
by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, e-flux | Read more:
Image:Nicola Costantino, “Nicola and Her Double. In Front of the Television"
Exotics
It was mid-June and north Texas was a smoking hotplate. In the cotton fields outside of town farmers were doing something to raise the dust. There was nothing to see and you couldn’t see it if there was.
In the late evening James sat on the back porch drinking a beer, half reading a newspaper, sweat dampening the pages. He watched the sun turn red as it sunk through the dust. The houses and roofs and backyards of the neighbourhood were cast in a blood-dusk glow. A Martian suburb awash with the smell of a thousand barbecues being lit.
James finished his beer and finally, mercifully, it was dark. A few degrees cooler, maybe. There were fireflies blinking on and off in the yard. He hadn’t seen a firefly in a long time. There were none in Montana as far as he knew. Maybe it was too cold. Years ago he’d been camped next to an old hippie couple in Yellowstone and they’d told him that once, in Iowa, they’d dropped acid and went out and gathered a whole jar of fireflies and then rubbed them all over their naked bodies and then had luminescent sex in a moonlit cornfield. Their obvious happiness at relaying this story gave him a shiver. He saw, in them, all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things past. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines running on memories?
After a week of loafing at Casey’s, the dust and feedlot smell of Amarillo started to wear on him. Casey worked long hours at his office. Being in the house all day with Linda – she did yoga in the living room, she constantly wanted to feed him sandwiches – was making James uncomfortable. The probing questions from Casey at the dinner table made him feel like an underachieving son, stalled out after college, living in his old bedroom.
James found himself a job. An unlikely one at that. It was a ranch-hand position at an outfit outside of Austin, in the hill country. The job description in the classifieds was succinct.
by Callan Wink, Granta | Read more:
In the late evening James sat on the back porch drinking a beer, half reading a newspaper, sweat dampening the pages. He watched the sun turn red as it sunk through the dust. The houses and roofs and backyards of the neighbourhood were cast in a blood-dusk glow. A Martian suburb awash with the smell of a thousand barbecues being lit.
James finished his beer and finally, mercifully, it was dark. A few degrees cooler, maybe. There were fireflies blinking on and off in the yard. He hadn’t seen a firefly in a long time. There were none in Montana as far as he knew. Maybe it was too cold. Years ago he’d been camped next to an old hippie couple in Yellowstone and they’d told him that once, in Iowa, they’d dropped acid and went out and gathered a whole jar of fireflies and then rubbed them all over their naked bodies and then had luminescent sex in a moonlit cornfield. Their obvious happiness at relaying this story gave him a shiver. He saw, in them, all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things past. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines running on memories?After a week of loafing at Casey’s, the dust and feedlot smell of Amarillo started to wear on him. Casey worked long hours at his office. Being in the house all day with Linda – she did yoga in the living room, she constantly wanted to feed him sandwiches – was making James uncomfortable. The probing questions from Casey at the dinner table made him feel like an underachieving son, stalled out after college, living in his old bedroom.
James found himself a job. An unlikely one at that. It was a ranch-hand position at an outfit outside of Austin, in the hill country. The job description in the classifieds was succinct.
WANTED: Seasonal ranch labourer.
No experience necessary.
Beautiful location. Remote. HARD WORK.
Fair pay.
James called. He talked to a man who occasionally let out clipped groans, as if he was in pain. Their brief conversation was punctuated several times by loud birdcalls. In less than fifteen minutes he was hired. He had two days before he was to start and he’d forgotten to ask about pay.
When James left Amarillo, Casey shook his hand and wished him luck, as if he were shipping off to basic training. Linda gave him a hairspray-scented hug. ‘Y’all take care now darlin’,’ she said.
He pointed his car south once more into the fiery bowels of the Summertime Republic of Texas.
No experience necessary.
Beautiful location. Remote. HARD WORK.
Fair pay.
James called. He talked to a man who occasionally let out clipped groans, as if he was in pain. Their brief conversation was punctuated several times by loud birdcalls. In less than fifteen minutes he was hired. He had two days before he was to start and he’d forgotten to ask about pay.
When James left Amarillo, Casey shook his hand and wished him luck, as if he were shipping off to basic training. Linda gave him a hairspray-scented hug. ‘Y’all take care now darlin’,’ she said.
He pointed his car south once more into the fiery bowels of the Summertime Republic of Texas.
by Callan Wink, Granta | Read more:
Image: Edward Tuckwell
Friday, September 5, 2014
Postcards from Another Planet
Here, for instance, is an automated comment from “geniadove”:
If you give it your name it will call you by it when you start up the GPS. These incidences come about quite normally, showing that Peter dislikes his daughter. A huge clue that your ex boyfriend still has feelings for you. —geniadoveThat swerve at “Peter dislikes his daughter”—whoa! Dissertations have been written about less. And to see a clinical phrase like “These incidences come about quite normally” next to a casual one like “A huge clue”: What does it all mean? The mind searches restlessly, somewhat desperately, for connective tissue, some semblance of conventional narrative. Like autostereograms, these comments always verge on resolving into a discernible whole; unlike autostereograms, they never do.
Here’s another, from “getfave.com,” with the original spelling and punctuation preserved:
The Helmet Communicator is currently available in three different configurations - the HBC 100 Moto, the HBC 120 Snow, and the HBC 130 Bike. Nellie enjoyed playing bingo, going to the Caymans dead or alive. Cheap Sympathy Flowers can be ordered online, or by telephone, you must be a registereed menber and loggedd in. Mr Nicelli responded hat Mr. These memorial timber are planted by the name of the particular items and services you offer and where they can get tooo vague. Frankly, if they are willing to do violate the family’s privacy that way?The best spam coalesces—with its typos, its competing voices, and its gloriously infelicitous phrasings—into a sort of nauseous goulash. Reading it is roughly akin to parsing the overlapping fragments of dialogue in a Robert Altman movie or sorting through the polyphony in certain works of high modernism: Gaddis’s J. R., maybe, or William Carlos Williams’s Paterson.
But there are a number of literary antecedents here: found poetry, Dadaist ready-mades, collage and bricolage, cutups, aleatoric poems, various Oulipo shenanigans. Most especially, there’s spoetry, spam lit, and flarf, similar movements from the past two decades that have made poetic hay from the Internet’s endless detritus. Flarf descends from Gary Sullivan, who collaborated with other poets online, constructing abhorrently bland poems from the results of random Google searches, workplace memos, Associated Press stories, and the like. (“awe yea You see, somebody’s done messed up / my latvian women’s soccer team fantasy REAL bad, / oh pagers make of cheese,” goes a representative sample.) As the flarfist Sharon Mesmer told Poets & Writers in 2009,
There’s this idea that juxtaposition creates a little pop in your mind to take you out of your immediate, mundane reality. When we do these crazy things with Google, a lot of times we’re putting something beautiful together with something ugly, and it makes this third thing that is completely delightful and unexpected.And in 2008, the Guardian ran a piece on spam lit and its practitioners, especially Ben Myers and Lee Ranaldo, both of whom have published volumes of work derived from spam:
These instances of found poetry—often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty—seemed, in Myers’s words, like “scriptures from the future” or “postcards from another planet.” Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau’s Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.That sense of private discovery, of trespassing, is key to the somewhat vertiginous feeling you get from reading a quality piece of spam: you’ve gone past the edge of something, and you’re not supposed to be there, but there you are, enjoying the vista.
by Dan Piepenbring, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Jay Ward Productions via:
All Roads Lead to Willie Nelson
Today, Nelson is wearing a black hoodie, sunglasses and dirty New Balance sneakers, his semibraided hair tumbling out of a black baseball cap that says ZEKE'S SOCIAL CLUB. He steers his Chevy through the property with sharp, jagged turns, occasionally lighting up a burned-out joint in a cup holder. At one point, he stops the truck and singles out a stable: "I have a sick horse in there – we tried to isolate him from the herd a little bit," he says. "This is just old, rough country. A lot of room to drive around, a lot of privacy. I like Texas." (...)
He fires up his coffee maker, then reaches into a 1950s-style Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox packed with loose green pot and pulls out a tightly wrapped, torpedoshaped joint. He takes a slow hit, holding it in as he looks at a mounted cow's skull near the fireplace. Next, he produces a vaporizer pen. "Do you ever smoke these?" he asks. "It's just pot – no smoke, no heat. You can smoke 'em on the plane!"
Nelson has been arrested at least four times on marijuana offenses. In Waco, Texas, in 1994, police found him asleep in his Mercedes on the side of the road, a joint on him, after a late poker game. In Louisiana in 2006, en route to Texas Gov. Ann Richards' funeral, Nelson's bus was pulled over and police seized 1.5 pounds of weed and two ounces of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Four years later, he was driving back from Thanksgiving in California when the border patrol arrested him in Sierra Blanca, Texas. ("He feels great – he said he lost six ounces!" joked his harmonica player Mickey Raphael at the time.) "They mostly want autographs now," Nelson says of the law. "They don't really bother me anymore for the weed, because you can bust me now and I'll pay my fine or go to jail, get out and burn one on the way home. They know they're not stopping me.
"Weed is good for you," he says. "Jesus said one time that it's not what you put in your mouth, it's what comes out of your mouth. I saw the other day that [medical] weed is legal in Israel – there's an old-folks home there, and all these old men were walking around with bongs and shit. Fuck! They got it figured out before we did!"
Abruptly, he changes the subject. "Wanna ride around a bit?"
Nelson turned 81 in April. He can be forgetful – in concert, he sometimes needs to look over at Raphael, a veteran of his band for more than 30 years, to see if they've played "Georgia on My Mind" or some other song yet ("But I think that's the dope more than anything," says Raphael). His hearing is shot, and he no longer signs as many autographs as he used to. But he still practices tae kwon do and sleeps on the Honeysuckle Rose, his 40-foot-long biodiesel-fueled tour bus, while the rest of the band check into hotels. At one point on the ranch, when he stops to show off his favorite paint horse, Billy Boy, he easily hoists himself up to the secondhighest fence rung, balancing about four feet off the ground. (...)
Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He's an uncanny vocal phraser: "The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson," said the late producer Jerry Wexler. "The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they're going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It's some kind of musical miracle."
In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. "The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers," says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, "Oh, why does a guy write? I don't know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it." Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, "a bit of a mystery." "He's really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you're talking about," says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. "You're like, 'Fuck, Willie, answer the question!' There's a lot of exterior there. That's why you'll never quite fully get that picture."
"You never get to know him like you should, but you know there's more there than what you're seeing," says Loretta Lynn. "I know there's more there because of how he writes. He can't fool me!"
"He's a hard man to know," Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. "He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn't talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him."
He fires up his coffee maker, then reaches into a 1950s-style Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox packed with loose green pot and pulls out a tightly wrapped, torpedoshaped joint. He takes a slow hit, holding it in as he looks at a mounted cow's skull near the fireplace. Next, he produces a vaporizer pen. "Do you ever smoke these?" he asks. "It's just pot – no smoke, no heat. You can smoke 'em on the plane!"Nelson has been arrested at least four times on marijuana offenses. In Waco, Texas, in 1994, police found him asleep in his Mercedes on the side of the road, a joint on him, after a late poker game. In Louisiana in 2006, en route to Texas Gov. Ann Richards' funeral, Nelson's bus was pulled over and police seized 1.5 pounds of weed and two ounces of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Four years later, he was driving back from Thanksgiving in California when the border patrol arrested him in Sierra Blanca, Texas. ("He feels great – he said he lost six ounces!" joked his harmonica player Mickey Raphael at the time.) "They mostly want autographs now," Nelson says of the law. "They don't really bother me anymore for the weed, because you can bust me now and I'll pay my fine or go to jail, get out and burn one on the way home. They know they're not stopping me.
"Weed is good for you," he says. "Jesus said one time that it's not what you put in your mouth, it's what comes out of your mouth. I saw the other day that [medical] weed is legal in Israel – there's an old-folks home there, and all these old men were walking around with bongs and shit. Fuck! They got it figured out before we did!"
Abruptly, he changes the subject. "Wanna ride around a bit?"
Nelson turned 81 in April. He can be forgetful – in concert, he sometimes needs to look over at Raphael, a veteran of his band for more than 30 years, to see if they've played "Georgia on My Mind" or some other song yet ("But I think that's the dope more than anything," says Raphael). His hearing is shot, and he no longer signs as many autographs as he used to. But he still practices tae kwon do and sleeps on the Honeysuckle Rose, his 40-foot-long biodiesel-fueled tour bus, while the rest of the band check into hotels. At one point on the ranch, when he stops to show off his favorite paint horse, Billy Boy, he easily hoists himself up to the secondhighest fence rung, balancing about four feet off the ground. (...)
Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He's an uncanny vocal phraser: "The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson," said the late producer Jerry Wexler. "The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they're going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It's some kind of musical miracle."
In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. "The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers," says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, "Oh, why does a guy write? I don't know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it." Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, "a bit of a mystery." "He's really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you're talking about," says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. "You're like, 'Fuck, Willie, answer the question!' There's a lot of exterior there. That's why you'll never quite fully get that picture."
"You never get to know him like you should, but you know there's more there than what you're seeing," says Loretta Lynn. "I know there's more there because of how he writes. He can't fool me!"
"He's a hard man to know," Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. "He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn't talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him."
by Patrick Doyle, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: LeAnn Mueller
The Dying Russians
Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the receptionist say, “But he is dead, don’t you know?” I didn’t. I’d seen the man a week earlier; he was thirty and apparently healthy. The receptionist seemed to think I was being dense. “A helicopter accident,” she finally said, in a tone that seemed to indicate I had no business being surprised.
The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.
Back in the United States after a trip to Russia, I cried on a friend’s shoulder. I was finding all this death not simply painful but impossible to process. “It’s not like there is a war on,” I said.
“But there is,” said my friend, a somewhat older and much wiser reporter than I. “This is what civil war actually looks like. “It’s not when everybody starts running around with guns. It’s when everybody starts dying.”
My friend’s framing stood me in good stead for years. I realized the magazine stories I was writing then were the stories of destruction, casualties, survival, restoration, and the longing for peace. But useful as that way of thinking might be for a journalist, it cannot be employed by social scientists, who are still struggling to answer the question, Why are Russians dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war?
In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.
The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.Back in the United States after a trip to Russia, I cried on a friend’s shoulder. I was finding all this death not simply painful but impossible to process. “It’s not like there is a war on,” I said.
“But there is,” said my friend, a somewhat older and much wiser reporter than I. “This is what civil war actually looks like. “It’s not when everybody starts running around with guns. It’s when everybody starts dying.”
My friend’s framing stood me in good stead for years. I realized the magazine stories I was writing then were the stories of destruction, casualties, survival, restoration, and the longing for peace. But useful as that way of thinking might be for a journalist, it cannot be employed by social scientists, who are still struggling to answer the question, Why are Russians dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war?
In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.
by Masha Gessen, NYR | Read more:
Image: Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos
Athleisure
[ed. See also: Jeans Face an Uncertain Future Amid Yoga Wear Rage]
Looking at the number of companies that have since announced they are getting into the game, with clothes that are described as “après sport” or “gym-to-the-office,” it’s fairly clear that athleisure is becoming bigger than a trend. This has also been evidenced by the number of people who seem to think it appropriate to wear leggings or yoga pants practically anywhere, but I digress. There is clearly an overwhelming desire for leisure and sport clothes that are designed well and stylish, given the amount of interest this month in the introduction of Net-a-Sporter, a new channel from the online retailer Net-a-Porter that is dedicated to “sportswear that is as chic as everything else in your closet.” This includes both basic Nike tanks for $30 and luxury items like a Karl Lagerfeld sweatshirt for $235, or cashmere and linen track pants from The Elder Statesman for $600.
by Eric Wilson, InStyle | Read more:
Image:Courtesy of Lou & Grey; Courtesy of Without Walls
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Life Outside the Lab: The Ones Who Got Away
When Soroosh Shambayati left his organic-chemistry lab, he didn't leave chemical synthesis behind. As a chemist PhD turned investment banker, he started working in the derivatives market in the 1990s. The transactions involved arranging a complex series of trades in a precise order, and it reminded him of synthesizing an organic compound, reaction by reaction.
As a graduate student, Shambayati had excelled at synthesis, just as he did at everything he turned his hand to. He was “other-worldly brilliant”, says his former adviser Stuart Schreiber. He juggled three distinct projects during his PhD, one in organic synthesis, one in theoretical physical chemistry and a third in biochemistry and immunology. He was also calm, thoughtful and well read: his bookshelf spans science philosophy, evolutionary biology and physics. Schreiber, a biochemist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, knew that if Shambayati wanted to become an academic scientist, he was sure to succeed. “It was very clear to me that he was going to become a star,” he says. But Shambayati chose the financial world — and excelled there instead: he is now chief executive at Guggenheim Investment Advisors (Suisse) in Geneva, Switzerland, a firm that manages billions of dollars for wealthy families and foundations.
Shambayati is among the hundreds of thousands of scientists who train in academia but then leave to follow a different career. According to the latest survey of doctorate recipients conducted by the US National Science Foundation, nearly one-fifth of employed people with science and engineering PhDs were no longer working in science in 2010. This is partly due to a lack of room at the top. In the United States, the number of PhDs entering the workforce has skyrocketed but the number of stable academic jobs has not. In 1973, nearly 90% of US PhDs working in academia held full-time faculty positions, compared with about 75% in 2010.
A common perception is that the weaker science students are forced out of a competitive field, leaving the brightest stars to secure the desirable academic positions. But as Shambayati's story shows — and as most mentors know — this is not the full picture: sometimes the scientists who move on are the ones with the most promise. Their motivations are diverse: some want more money, or more time with family; others are lured by opportunities elsewhere. To get a better sense of why talented scientists are leaving academia and how their training influences their lives, Nature contacted group leaders recognized for mentoring and asked: “Who was the one who got away?”
As a graduate student, Shambayati had excelled at synthesis, just as he did at everything he turned his hand to. He was “other-worldly brilliant”, says his former adviser Stuart Schreiber. He juggled three distinct projects during his PhD, one in organic synthesis, one in theoretical physical chemistry and a third in biochemistry and immunology. He was also calm, thoughtful and well read: his bookshelf spans science philosophy, evolutionary biology and physics. Schreiber, a biochemist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, knew that if Shambayati wanted to become an academic scientist, he was sure to succeed. “It was very clear to me that he was going to become a star,” he says. But Shambayati chose the financial world — and excelled there instead: he is now chief executive at Guggenheim Investment Advisors (Suisse) in Geneva, Switzerland, a firm that manages billions of dollars for wealthy families and foundations.Shambayati is among the hundreds of thousands of scientists who train in academia but then leave to follow a different career. According to the latest survey of doctorate recipients conducted by the US National Science Foundation, nearly one-fifth of employed people with science and engineering PhDs were no longer working in science in 2010. This is partly due to a lack of room at the top. In the United States, the number of PhDs entering the workforce has skyrocketed but the number of stable academic jobs has not. In 1973, nearly 90% of US PhDs working in academia held full-time faculty positions, compared with about 75% in 2010.
A common perception is that the weaker science students are forced out of a competitive field, leaving the brightest stars to secure the desirable academic positions. But as Shambayati's story shows — and as most mentors know — this is not the full picture: sometimes the scientists who move on are the ones with the most promise. Their motivations are diverse: some want more money, or more time with family; others are lured by opportunities elsewhere. To get a better sense of why talented scientists are leaving academia and how their training influences their lives, Nature contacted group leaders recognized for mentoring and asked: “Who was the one who got away?”
by Ewen Callaway, Nature | Read more:
Image: Señor Salme
The New Luddites: Why Former Digital Prophets Are Turning Against Tech
Very few of us can be sure that our jobs will not, in the near future, be done by machines. We know about cars built by robots, cashpoints replacing bank tellers, ticket dispensers replacing train staff, self-service checkouts replacing supermarket staff, telephone operators replaced by “call trees”, and so on. But this is small stuff compared with what might happen next.
Nursing may be done by robots, delivery men replaced by drones, GPs replaced by artificially “intelligent” diagnosers and health-sensing skin patches, back-room grunt work in law offices done by clerical automatons and remote teaching conducted by computers. In fact, it is quite hard to think of a job that cannot be partly or fully automated. And technology is a classless wrecking ball – the old blue-collar jobs have been disappearing for years; now they are being followed by white-collar ones.
Ah, you may say, but human beings will always be better. This misses the point. It does not matter whether the new machines never achieve full human-like consciousness, or even real intelligence, they can almost certainly achieve just enough to do your job – not as well as you, perhaps, but much, much more cheaply. To modernise John Ruskin, “There is hardly anything in the world that some robot cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this robot’s lawful prey.” (...)
“Luddite” has, in the past few decades, been such a routine term of abuse for anybody questioning the march of the machines (I get it all the time) that most people assume that, like “fool”, “idiot” or “prat”, it can only ever be abusive. But, in truth, Luddism has always been proudly embraced by the few and, thanks to the present climate of machine mania and stagnating incomes, it is beginning to make a new kind of sense. From the angry Parisian taxi drivers who vandalised a car belonging to an Uber driver to a Luddite-sympathetic column by the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in the New York Times, Luddism in practice and in theory is back on the streets. (...)
In 1992, Neil Postman, in his book Technopoly, rehabilitated the Luddites in response to the threat from computers: “The term ‘Luddite’ has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naive opposition to technology. But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naive. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.”
Underpinning such thoughts was the fear that there was a malign convergence – perhaps even a conspiracy – at work. In 1961, even President Eisenhower warned of the anti-democratic power of the “military-industrial complex”. In 1967 Lewis Mumford spoke presciently of the possibility of a “mega-machine” that would result from “the convergence of science, technics and political power”. Pynchon picked up the theme: “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.”
The possibility is with us still in Silicon Valley’s earnest faith in the Singularity – the moment, possibly to come in 2045, when we build our last machine, a super-intelligent computer that will solve all our problems and enslave or kill or save us. Such things are true only to the extent to which they are believed – and, in the Valley, this is believed, widely. (...)
Obviously, if neo-Luddism is conceived of in psychotic or apocalyptic terms, it is of no use to anybody and could prove very dangerous. But if it is conceived of as a critical engagement with technology, it could be useful and essential. So far, this critical engagement has been limited for two reasons. First, there is the belief – it is actually a superstition – in progress as an inevitable and benign outcome of free-market economics. Second, there is the extraordinary power of the technology companies to hypnotise us with their gadgets. Since 1997 the first belief has found justification in a management theory that bizarrely, upon closer examination, turns out to be the mirror image of Luddism. That was the year in which Clayton Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma, judged by the Economist to be one of the most important business books ever written. Christensen launched the craze for “disruption”. Many other books followed and many management courses were infected. Jill Lepore reported in the New Yorker in June that “this fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: ‘The degree is in disruption,’ the university announced.” And back at Forbes it is announced with glee that we have gone beyond disruptive innovation into a new phase of “devastating innovation”. (...)
Meanwhile in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote a very neo-Luddite column that questioned the consoling belief that education would somehow solve the probem of the destruction of jobs by technology. “Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labour is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.”
In other words – against all the education boosters from Tony Blair onwards – you can’t learn yourself into the future, because it is already owned by others, primarily the technocracy. But it is expert dissidents from within the technocracy who are more useful for moderate neo-Luddites. In 2000, Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a huge figure in computing history, broke ranks with an article for Wired entitled “Why the future doesn’t need us”. He saw that many of the dreams of Silicon Valley would either lead to, or deliberately include, termination of the human species. They still do – believers in the Singularity look forward to it as a moment when we will transcend our biological condition.
“Given the incredible power of these new technologies,” Joy wrote, “shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?”
Nursing may be done by robots, delivery men replaced by drones, GPs replaced by artificially “intelligent” diagnosers and health-sensing skin patches, back-room grunt work in law offices done by clerical automatons and remote teaching conducted by computers. In fact, it is quite hard to think of a job that cannot be partly or fully automated. And technology is a classless wrecking ball – the old blue-collar jobs have been disappearing for years; now they are being followed by white-collar ones.Ah, you may say, but human beings will always be better. This misses the point. It does not matter whether the new machines never achieve full human-like consciousness, or even real intelligence, they can almost certainly achieve just enough to do your job – not as well as you, perhaps, but much, much more cheaply. To modernise John Ruskin, “There is hardly anything in the world that some robot cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this robot’s lawful prey.” (...)
“Luddite” has, in the past few decades, been such a routine term of abuse for anybody questioning the march of the machines (I get it all the time) that most people assume that, like “fool”, “idiot” or “prat”, it can only ever be abusive. But, in truth, Luddism has always been proudly embraced by the few and, thanks to the present climate of machine mania and stagnating incomes, it is beginning to make a new kind of sense. From the angry Parisian taxi drivers who vandalised a car belonging to an Uber driver to a Luddite-sympathetic column by the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in the New York Times, Luddism in practice and in theory is back on the streets. (...)
In 1992, Neil Postman, in his book Technopoly, rehabilitated the Luddites in response to the threat from computers: “The term ‘Luddite’ has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naive opposition to technology. But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naive. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.”
Underpinning such thoughts was the fear that there was a malign convergence – perhaps even a conspiracy – at work. In 1961, even President Eisenhower warned of the anti-democratic power of the “military-industrial complex”. In 1967 Lewis Mumford spoke presciently of the possibility of a “mega-machine” that would result from “the convergence of science, technics and political power”. Pynchon picked up the theme: “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.”
The possibility is with us still in Silicon Valley’s earnest faith in the Singularity – the moment, possibly to come in 2045, when we build our last machine, a super-intelligent computer that will solve all our problems and enslave or kill or save us. Such things are true only to the extent to which they are believed – and, in the Valley, this is believed, widely. (...)
Obviously, if neo-Luddism is conceived of in psychotic or apocalyptic terms, it is of no use to anybody and could prove very dangerous. But if it is conceived of as a critical engagement with technology, it could be useful and essential. So far, this critical engagement has been limited for two reasons. First, there is the belief – it is actually a superstition – in progress as an inevitable and benign outcome of free-market economics. Second, there is the extraordinary power of the technology companies to hypnotise us with their gadgets. Since 1997 the first belief has found justification in a management theory that bizarrely, upon closer examination, turns out to be the mirror image of Luddism. That was the year in which Clayton Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma, judged by the Economist to be one of the most important business books ever written. Christensen launched the craze for “disruption”. Many other books followed and many management courses were infected. Jill Lepore reported in the New Yorker in June that “this fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: ‘The degree is in disruption,’ the university announced.” And back at Forbes it is announced with glee that we have gone beyond disruptive innovation into a new phase of “devastating innovation”. (...)
Meanwhile in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote a very neo-Luddite column that questioned the consoling belief that education would somehow solve the probem of the destruction of jobs by technology. “Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labour is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.”
In other words – against all the education boosters from Tony Blair onwards – you can’t learn yourself into the future, because it is already owned by others, primarily the technocracy. But it is expert dissidents from within the technocracy who are more useful for moderate neo-Luddites. In 2000, Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a huge figure in computing history, broke ranks with an article for Wired entitled “Why the future doesn’t need us”. He saw that many of the dreams of Silicon Valley would either lead to, or deliberately include, termination of the human species. They still do – believers in the Singularity look forward to it as a moment when we will transcend our biological condition.
“Given the incredible power of these new technologies,” Joy wrote, “shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?”
by Bryan Appleyard, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Ikon Images
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