Friday, December 19, 2014
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs
Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, to turn around the enormous yet floundering Internet company. It was July 21, 2014, almost exactly two years to the day since Mayer took over, arriving at Yahoo’s headquarters to an unfurled purple carpet and Shepard Fairey-style “HOPE” posters bearing her face. During those 24 months, Mayer eliminated dozens of products and rebooted others. She acquired 41 start-ups and even hired Katie Couric. But just one week earlier, Mayer announced the company’s lowest quarterly earnings in a decade. Jackson argued in his post that Yahoo no longer made sense as an independent entity. Instead, it might be a nice takeover target for one of the tech industry’s Big Four: Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google.
Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years.
A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. (...)
Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.”
Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.”
Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.
Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million.
To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.
But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets.
Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years.A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. (...)
Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.”
Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.”
Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.
Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million.
To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.
But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets.
by Nicholas Carlson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt Dorfman. Photographs by Getty Images
Open Bay Lets You Run Your Own Copy of The Pirate Bay
Legendary file-sharing site The Pirate Bay may have finally been forced offline, but that doesn’t mean that the less-than-legal file-sharing scene has slowed down—the shady BitTorrent hydra has many more heads to take The Pirate Bay’s place. In fact, if the folks at torrent site Isohunt have their way, there will very soon be many, many more heads: the site has released an open sourced "copy" of The Pirate Bay called "Open Bay" that anyone with access to a Web server can install and run.
The Open Bay project maintainers have set up a GitHub repository for the Open Bay application and written instructions covering how to get your very own Open Bay site up and running—complete with example configuration files. To make it work, you need at minimum a Web server running Apache or Nginx and PHP (either with mod_php or PHP-FPM or whatever other PHP method you prefer); since we’ve got one of those in our closet, we decided to take a crack at installing the application to see how it works.
What Open Bay is not
I was hoping that Open Bay would be a full-featured Bittorrent site wherein I could both search for and also add torrents; I’d planned on setting everything up and then offering out a complete set of Linux ISO torrent links to prove that it worked. However, it’s important to be clear at the outset that Open Bay’s primary purpose is to be a copy of The Pirate Bay.
The key word here is "copy," because to really make Open Bay work for you, you either need to use Isohunt’s remote torrent database—which makes Open Bay really just a self-hosted front end rather than a full featured torrent site—or you need to download an almost 900MB torrent database dump (which comes as a 441MB gzipped CSV file with about 8 million torrents and their associated magnet link hashes, sourced from The Pirate Bay as well as other torrent sites). The intent is that you first set up the Open Bay application, then either point it at Isohunt’s database or dump the CSV file into your own MySQL database. Once you’ve brought these two halves together, the resultant whole is a torrent search site with about 8 million working torrents you can search through and download.
What you can’t do is list your own torrents—at least, not without directly adding them to the MySQL database. This definitely helps keep the Open Bay application simpler both from a development perspective and also for would-be Open Bay administrators to install and configure, but it also limits the application’s usefulness. For right now, it’s really good for only one thing: running a static sort-of copy of The Pirate Bay.
I was hoping that Open Bay would be a full-featured Bittorrent site wherein I could both search for and also add torrents; I’d planned on setting everything up and then offering out a complete set of Linux ISO torrent links to prove that it worked. However, it’s important to be clear at the outset that Open Bay’s primary purpose is to be a copy of The Pirate Bay.
The key word here is "copy," because to really make Open Bay work for you, you either need to use Isohunt’s remote torrent database—which makes Open Bay really just a self-hosted front end rather than a full featured torrent site—or you need to download an almost 900MB torrent database dump (which comes as a 441MB gzipped CSV file with about 8 million torrents and their associated magnet link hashes, sourced from The Pirate Bay as well as other torrent sites). The intent is that you first set up the Open Bay application, then either point it at Isohunt’s database or dump the CSV file into your own MySQL database. Once you’ve brought these two halves together, the resultant whole is a torrent search site with about 8 million working torrents you can search through and download.
What you can’t do is list your own torrents—at least, not without directly adding them to the MySQL database. This definitely helps keep the Open Bay application simpler both from a development perspective and also for would-be Open Bay administrators to install and configure, but it also limits the application’s usefulness. For right now, it’s really good for only one thing: running a static sort-of copy of The Pirate Bay.
Forging ahead anyway
But, what the heck, it’s Friday, so we set it up anyway—though without importing the large database dump needed to really fill out its functionality.
by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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Richard Sherman for President
[ed. Hilarious. Richard Sherman does seem to have a knack for getting into the heads of his opponents (I love the Harbaugh impression). See also: Thug Life, an excellent documentary about his upbringing in Compton, Calif. and the skills he brings to the game.]
Hackers Are Winning the Media War
[ed. See also: Hackers are going after the internet's very structure.]
The hackers are winning.
Something has shifted. This year, they didn't only steal credit cards numbers. They clear-cut through retailers records and broke into highly sophisticated systems. They stole celebrity photos that paparazzo only dream about. And now, we have something new, again: a widescale breach and control of a media narrative aimed at destroying a major company based in the United States.
For years, hacks were mostly about committing robbery -- slipping in and out unnoticed, with maybe a dropped calling card as a small-scale brag. Now Sony has canceled the Christmas Day release of "The Interview" -- the movie that apparently spurred the hacks into Sony Pictures Entertainment in the first place.
The tactics are similar to the renegade, total information freedom approach popularized by groups such as Wikileaks or Anonymous. Those leaks and attacks -- some serious, some just online vandalism -- were aimed specifically at getting publicity, but you can at least understand the pursuit of a higher motivation. When you take down the CIA Web site just "for the lulz," it may be goofy, but at least you're making a splash to prove a point.
But Sony is hardly the National Security Agency or a national government. These broad leaks aren't for a cause -- they're aimed at undermining the character of a company by exposing how it conducts its normal business. It's like "The Jungle," but for movies. And the threat of a violent, physical attack put Sony in the toughest position imaginable -- between losing a war of principles or putting lives in danger. Sony was set to lose either way.
The hacks of Home Depot, celebrity iCloud accounts and Sony were likely the work of different people. But taken together, they show a growing cockiness, ambition and media savvy within the hacker world.
And that's truly troubling, on a couple of levels.
by Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Frederic J. Brown
The hackers are winning.Something has shifted. This year, they didn't only steal credit cards numbers. They clear-cut through retailers records and broke into highly sophisticated systems. They stole celebrity photos that paparazzo only dream about. And now, we have something new, again: a widescale breach and control of a media narrative aimed at destroying a major company based in the United States.
For years, hacks were mostly about committing robbery -- slipping in and out unnoticed, with maybe a dropped calling card as a small-scale brag. Now Sony has canceled the Christmas Day release of "The Interview" -- the movie that apparently spurred the hacks into Sony Pictures Entertainment in the first place.
The tactics are similar to the renegade, total information freedom approach popularized by groups such as Wikileaks or Anonymous. Those leaks and attacks -- some serious, some just online vandalism -- were aimed specifically at getting publicity, but you can at least understand the pursuit of a higher motivation. When you take down the CIA Web site just "for the lulz," it may be goofy, but at least you're making a splash to prove a point.
But Sony is hardly the National Security Agency or a national government. These broad leaks aren't for a cause -- they're aimed at undermining the character of a company by exposing how it conducts its normal business. It's like "The Jungle," but for movies. And the threat of a violent, physical attack put Sony in the toughest position imaginable -- between losing a war of principles or putting lives in danger. Sony was set to lose either way.
The hacks of Home Depot, celebrity iCloud accounts and Sony were likely the work of different people. But taken together, they show a growing cockiness, ambition and media savvy within the hacker world.
And that's truly troubling, on a couple of levels.
by Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Frederic J. Brown
Thursday, December 18, 2014
When Castro Heard The News
It was around 1:30 in the afternoon, Cuban time. We were having lunch in the living room of the modest summer residence which Fidel Castro owns on magnificent Varadero Beach, 120 kilometers from Havana. For at least the tenth time, I was questioning the Cuban leader on details of the negotiations with Russia before the missile installations last year. The telephone rang, a secretary in guerilla garb announced that Mr. Dorticós, President of the Cuban Republic, had an urgent communication for the Prime Minister. Fidel picked up the phone and I heard him say: "Como? Un atentado?" ('What's that? An attempted assassination?") He then turned to us to say that Kennedy had just been struck down in Dallas. Then he went back to the telephone and exclaimed in a loud voice "Herido? Muy gravemente?" ("Wounded? Very seriously?")
He came back, sat down, and repeated three times the words: "Es una mala noticia." ("This is bad news.") He remained silent for a moment, awaiting another call with further news. He remarked while we waited that there was an alarmingly sizable lunatic fringe in American society and that this deed could equally well have been the work of a madman or of a terrorist. Perhaps a Vietnamese? Or a member of the Ku Klux Klan? The second call came through: It was hoped they would be able to announce that the United States President was still alive, that there was hope of saving him. Fidel Castro's immediate reaction was: "If they can, he is already re-elected." He pronounced these words with satisfaction.
This sentence was a sequel to a conversation we had held on a previous evening and which had turned into an all-night session. To be precise, it lasted from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning. A good part of the talk revolved about the impressions I recounted to him of an interview which President Kennedy granted me this last October 24, and about Fidel Castro's reactions to these impressions. During this nocturnal discussion, Castro had delivered himself of a relentless indictment of U.S. policy, adding that in the recent past WAshington had had ample opportunity to normalize its relations with Cuba, but that instead it had tolerated a CIA program of training, equipping and organizing a counter-revolution. He has told me that he wasn't in the least fearful of his life, since danger was his natural mileu, and if he were to become a victim of the United States this would simply enhance his radius of influence in Latin America as well as throughout the socialist world. He was speaking, he said, from the viewpoint of the interests of peace in both the American continents. To achieve this goal, a leader would have to arise in the United States capable of understanding the explosive realities of Latin America and of meeting them halfway. Then, suddenly, he has taken a less hostile tak: "Kennedy could still be this man. He still had the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. Other leaders have assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his re-election. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then too, in the last analysis, I'm convinced that anyone else would be worse." Then Fidel had added with a broad and boyish grin: "If you see him again, you can tell him that I'm willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy's re-election!"
This conversation was held on November 19th.
Now it was nearly 2 o'clock and we got up from the table and settled ourselves in front of a radio. Commandant Vallero, his physician, aide-de-camp, and intimate friend, was easily able to get the broadcasts from the NBC network in Miami. As the news came in, Vallero would translate it for Fidel: Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement: President Kennedy is dead. Then Fidel stood up and said to me: "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change. The United States occupies such a position in world affairs that the death of a President of that country affects millions of people in every corner of the globe. The cold war, relations with Russia, Latin America, Cuba, the Negro question...all will have to be rethought. I'll tell you one thing: At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter." (...)
We arrived at the granja de pueblo, where the farmers welcomed Fidel. At that very moment, a speaker announced over the radio that it was now known that the assassin is a "pro-Castro Marxist." One commentator followed another; the remarks became increasingly emotional, increasingly aggressive. Fidel then excused himself: "We shall have to give up the visit to the farm." We went on toward Matanzas from where he could telephone President Dorticós. On the way he had questions: "Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?" Finally and most important of all: "What authority does he exercise over the C.I.A.?" Then abruptly he looked at his watch, saw that it would be half an hour before we reached Matanzas and, practically on the spot, he dropped off to sleep.
He came back, sat down, and repeated three times the words: "Es una mala noticia." ("This is bad news.") He remained silent for a moment, awaiting another call with further news. He remarked while we waited that there was an alarmingly sizable lunatic fringe in American society and that this deed could equally well have been the work of a madman or of a terrorist. Perhaps a Vietnamese? Or a member of the Ku Klux Klan? The second call came through: It was hoped they would be able to announce that the United States President was still alive, that there was hope of saving him. Fidel Castro's immediate reaction was: "If they can, he is already re-elected." He pronounced these words with satisfaction.This sentence was a sequel to a conversation we had held on a previous evening and which had turned into an all-night session. To be precise, it lasted from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning. A good part of the talk revolved about the impressions I recounted to him of an interview which President Kennedy granted me this last October 24, and about Fidel Castro's reactions to these impressions. During this nocturnal discussion, Castro had delivered himself of a relentless indictment of U.S. policy, adding that in the recent past WAshington had had ample opportunity to normalize its relations with Cuba, but that instead it had tolerated a CIA program of training, equipping and organizing a counter-revolution. He has told me that he wasn't in the least fearful of his life, since danger was his natural mileu, and if he were to become a victim of the United States this would simply enhance his radius of influence in Latin America as well as throughout the socialist world. He was speaking, he said, from the viewpoint of the interests of peace in both the American continents. To achieve this goal, a leader would have to arise in the United States capable of understanding the explosive realities of Latin America and of meeting them halfway. Then, suddenly, he has taken a less hostile tak: "Kennedy could still be this man. He still had the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. Other leaders have assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his re-election. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then too, in the last analysis, I'm convinced that anyone else would be worse." Then Fidel had added with a broad and boyish grin: "If you see him again, you can tell him that I'm willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy's re-election!"
This conversation was held on November 19th.
Now it was nearly 2 o'clock and we got up from the table and settled ourselves in front of a radio. Commandant Vallero, his physician, aide-de-camp, and intimate friend, was easily able to get the broadcasts from the NBC network in Miami. As the news came in, Vallero would translate it for Fidel: Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement: President Kennedy is dead. Then Fidel stood up and said to me: "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change. The United States occupies such a position in world affairs that the death of a President of that country affects millions of people in every corner of the globe. The cold war, relations with Russia, Latin America, Cuba, the Negro question...all will have to be rethought. I'll tell you one thing: At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter." (...)
We arrived at the granja de pueblo, where the farmers welcomed Fidel. At that very moment, a speaker announced over the radio that it was now known that the assassin is a "pro-Castro Marxist." One commentator followed another; the remarks became increasingly emotional, increasingly aggressive. Fidel then excused himself: "We shall have to give up the visit to the farm." We went on toward Matanzas from where he could telephone President Dorticós. On the way he had questions: "Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?" Finally and most important of all: "What authority does he exercise over the C.I.A.?" Then abruptly he looked at his watch, saw that it would be half an hour before we reached Matanzas and, practically on the spot, he dropped off to sleep.
by Jean Daniels, TNR | Read more:
Image: Alan Oxley/Getty
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Final Independence
Nobody wants a protracted, dehumanised death: why is it still so easy for doctors to ignore a dying patient's wishes?
Antibiotics, defibrillators, feeding tubes and ventilators are lifesaving tools that sometimes become weapons to prolong life against our will. None of us can escape death but some of us want to shape our final time on earth. We don’t want to live for years in a nursing home rendered unconscious by late-stage dementia; or brain-damaged by strokes; or on and off ventilators with recurring pneumonia, growing so frail we lose the choice of an unfettered death at home. We grow determined in our wishes. We formalise end-of-life plans asking for comfort care only, no heroic, invasive or futile medical procedures, no artificial food or hydration, minimal feeding. We assemble and legalise these plans. We calm our fears.
It sounds rational and safe. But in reality, the faith we place in legalised directives, or in the medical professionals charged with enforcing them, has proven unwise. Medical professionals ignore such directives, no matter how carefully we’ve crafted them, particularly if we end up in a hospital or nursing facility.
I’m not talking about assisted suicide. I’m talking about plans that specify withholding treatment, such as a ventilator, a feeding tube or antibiotics for pneumonia, for a person who won’t recover, prolonging death even over fierce objections from family members. This situation results, in part, because directives go against the culture of medicine, which focuses on healing, on doing everything possible even if what’s possible proves futile. Our wishes might be viewed as disrespecting life, and medical personnel can prevent us from dying, no matter how airtight our legalised directives are.
The terms ‘advance directive’ and ‘living will’ are used interchangeably, but they’re actually not the same, even though the intent of each is to prevent futile medical treatment. Advance directive is the generalised term for the legal documents spelling out our end-of-life wishes, should we become unable to express them at the time. There are three types of advance directives: living wills, healthcare power of attorney, and healthcare proxy. Living wills detail the type of medical treatment people might not want, such as artificial nutrition, antibiotics, dialysis, resuscitation, and so on. Both healthcare proxies and powers of attorney appoint another person to make medical decisions on our behalf. (...)
In 2007, the US physician Henry Perkins wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine that there are too many problems with advance directives for them to be useful, even when the directive is legally valid and precise. Perkins used this example. An elderly patient has frequent bouts of pneumonia that put him in hospital on ventilators, where his primary care physician suggests a formalised end-of-life plan. With their physician, the patient and his wife craft a directive that spells out treatments he would and would not want, including resuscitation or mechanical ventilation. The family’s doctor also has the foresight to ask who would likely be present in a medical crisis, and the couple mention their daughter, who would be apprised of her father’s wishes and given a copy of the directive.
Perkins’s example then illustrates how quickly an advance directive can unravel. Back home, the patient starts to have trouble breathing, his wife calls 911. An ambulance takes him to hospital. He has pneumonia again and is unresponsive. Their physician is out of town, but his wife has brought a copy of the directive and gives it to the hospital staff. Together they decide against antibiotics and choose to give only care that would make her husband comfortable. This is how advance directives can and should work.
But then the patient’s daughter arrives at the hospital, learns that her father is receiving comfort care only, and accuses her mother and the hospital staff of ‘murdering Daddy’, threatening lawsuits and to notify the press unless her father gets antibiotics and other forms of life support immediately. The daughter bullies her mother and the medical staff, and the patient receives antibiotics and life support. He dies anyway but Perkins emphasises that it’s a death the patient never wanted, and one he took time and care to avoid.
This could happen so easily in my family. Faced with the same scenario, I too would choose against antibiotics but in my heart I know that one of my sisters could well be the daughter in Perkins’s example, even though my sisters sat in the attorney’s office when my mother named me as her healthcare proxy and neither of them objected. I could be faced with honouring my mother and destroying my relationship with my sister, who might find she cannot let my mother go.
by Jeanne Erdmann, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Cory Hendrickson/Gallery Stock
Antibiotics, defibrillators, feeding tubes and ventilators are lifesaving tools that sometimes become weapons to prolong life against our will. None of us can escape death but some of us want to shape our final time on earth. We don’t want to live for years in a nursing home rendered unconscious by late-stage dementia; or brain-damaged by strokes; or on and off ventilators with recurring pneumonia, growing so frail we lose the choice of an unfettered death at home. We grow determined in our wishes. We formalise end-of-life plans asking for comfort care only, no heroic, invasive or futile medical procedures, no artificial food or hydration, minimal feeding. We assemble and legalise these plans. We calm our fears.It sounds rational and safe. But in reality, the faith we place in legalised directives, or in the medical professionals charged with enforcing them, has proven unwise. Medical professionals ignore such directives, no matter how carefully we’ve crafted them, particularly if we end up in a hospital or nursing facility.
I’m not talking about assisted suicide. I’m talking about plans that specify withholding treatment, such as a ventilator, a feeding tube or antibiotics for pneumonia, for a person who won’t recover, prolonging death even over fierce objections from family members. This situation results, in part, because directives go against the culture of medicine, which focuses on healing, on doing everything possible even if what’s possible proves futile. Our wishes might be viewed as disrespecting life, and medical personnel can prevent us from dying, no matter how airtight our legalised directives are.
The terms ‘advance directive’ and ‘living will’ are used interchangeably, but they’re actually not the same, even though the intent of each is to prevent futile medical treatment. Advance directive is the generalised term for the legal documents spelling out our end-of-life wishes, should we become unable to express them at the time. There are three types of advance directives: living wills, healthcare power of attorney, and healthcare proxy. Living wills detail the type of medical treatment people might not want, such as artificial nutrition, antibiotics, dialysis, resuscitation, and so on. Both healthcare proxies and powers of attorney appoint another person to make medical decisions on our behalf. (...)
In 2007, the US physician Henry Perkins wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine that there are too many problems with advance directives for them to be useful, even when the directive is legally valid and precise. Perkins used this example. An elderly patient has frequent bouts of pneumonia that put him in hospital on ventilators, where his primary care physician suggests a formalised end-of-life plan. With their physician, the patient and his wife craft a directive that spells out treatments he would and would not want, including resuscitation or mechanical ventilation. The family’s doctor also has the foresight to ask who would likely be present in a medical crisis, and the couple mention their daughter, who would be apprised of her father’s wishes and given a copy of the directive.
Perkins’s example then illustrates how quickly an advance directive can unravel. Back home, the patient starts to have trouble breathing, his wife calls 911. An ambulance takes him to hospital. He has pneumonia again and is unresponsive. Their physician is out of town, but his wife has brought a copy of the directive and gives it to the hospital staff. Together they decide against antibiotics and choose to give only care that would make her husband comfortable. This is how advance directives can and should work.
But then the patient’s daughter arrives at the hospital, learns that her father is receiving comfort care only, and accuses her mother and the hospital staff of ‘murdering Daddy’, threatening lawsuits and to notify the press unless her father gets antibiotics and other forms of life support immediately. The daughter bullies her mother and the medical staff, and the patient receives antibiotics and life support. He dies anyway but Perkins emphasises that it’s a death the patient never wanted, and one he took time and care to avoid.
This could happen so easily in my family. Faced with the same scenario, I too would choose against antibiotics but in my heart I know that one of my sisters could well be the daughter in Perkins’s example, even though my sisters sat in the attorney’s office when my mother named me as her healthcare proxy and neither of them objected. I could be faced with honouring my mother and destroying my relationship with my sister, who might find she cannot let my mother go.
by Jeanne Erdmann, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Cory Hendrickson/Gallery Stock
Mass Effect
Two hours east of Los Angeles, three hours west of Las Vegas, and many miles from the nearest traffic light or roadside diner lies a single boulder in the Mojave Desert claimed to be the largest rock in the world—at least until 2000, when a large chunk broke off, neatly and without provocation. Now split in two, it is still called Giant Rock. Graffiti blackens the lower surface and ATVs roar nearby. There is an occasional tourist.
For two eccentric Californians, Frank Critzer and George Van Tassel, the immense girth of Giant Rock was not simple geological happenstance but a sign portending mystical significance. In the hands of these two men, Giant Rock became the locus of a strange episode in the twentieth-century history of the American West. Like all Western heroes, Critzer and Van Tassel felt themselves poised between worlds, and at the threshold of civilization. Both felt vitalized and validated by the rock, and both saw it as a natural hub, laboring for decades to make it a gathering place. Absolutely inert and yet fecund, Giant Rock was less a rock than a destiny. (...)
The area surrounding Giant Rock at the time was untrammeled, uninhabited government land, marked on maps as “unsurveyed.”Critzer was a squatter, and his closest neighbor, Charles Reche, a long five miles away. No more than half a dozen men had seen Giant Rock in the last two decades, Reche told Critzer, and Critzer, motivated by entrepreneurial ambition, loneliness, or the pioneer’s sense of duty to domesticate the landscape, took that as a challenge. Giant Rock sits beside an ancient lakebed, flat and firm, which Critzer transformed into an airplane runway, dragging a leveler behind his 1917 automobile. Tacking up a windsock and whitewashing a nearby boulder—Giant Rock is only the largest of many towering rocks in the vicinity—Critzer opened Giant Rock Airport for business. Then he turned to the terrain, using his car to clear thirty-three miles of road that eventually connected Giant Rock to two mines, Reche’s home, and, finally, the nearest paved street. A 1937 article about Critzer in the Los Angeles Times admiringly described these homemade roads as “the straightest desert road that anybody ever saw,” reckoning that Critzer held the world record for one-man road building. (...)
There is little record of Van Tassel’s life other than his own words. He dropped out of high school in Ohio and emigrated to southern California, joining the World War II-era aeronautics industry at a time of unparalleled growth and expansion. Though he later glorified his career, describing himself as a flight test engineer, test pilot, or even personal pilot to Howard Hughes, he told the 1940 census-takers he was a tradesman, a tool and die maker. At the time, he was working for the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica and living in a modest home with his wife and children, as well as his mother-in-law and his wife’s three younger siblings. He moved from Douglas to Hughes Aircraft, and then to Lockheed, leaving the factories for good in 1947, a year of massive layoffs as aeronautics production recalibrated to peacetime. The vacancy of Giant Rock must have presented itself as a golden opportunity.
Relieved of his nine-to-five job and invigorated by the desert environs, Van Tassel began a flurry of activity—writing, meditating, publishing, and building. He founded a religious non-profit, the Ministry of Universal Wisdom, and an associated college, and began mass mailing its official organ, the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom. In a few short years, Van Tassel emerged as a central figure in atomic-era ufology. His first book, I Rode a Flying Saucer (1952), was a diary of alien messages “radioned” by otherworldly intelligences to Van Tassel’s telepathic mind; shortly after, he met aliens in the flesh, whom he described as “white people with a good healthy tan,” all measuring exactly five feet six inches. The leader, Solganda, spoke excellent English “equivalent to [actor] Ronald Colman,” and through thought transference conveyed to Van Tassel directions for building a time machine, the Integratron. The Integratron was to become Van Tassel’s lasting monument.
Relieved of his nine-to-five job and invigorated by the desert environs, Van Tassel began a flurry of activity—writing, meditating, publishing, and building. He founded a religious non-profit, the Ministry of Universal Wisdom, and an associated college, and began mass mailing its official organ, the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom. In a few short years, Van Tassel emerged as a central figure in atomic-era ufology. His first book, I Rode a Flying Saucer (1952), was a diary of alien messages “radioned” by otherworldly intelligences to Van Tassel’s telepathic mind; shortly after, he met aliens in the flesh, whom he described as “white people with a good healthy tan,” all measuring exactly five feet six inches. The leader, Solganda, spoke excellent English “equivalent to [actor] Ronald Colman,” and through thought transference conveyed to Van Tassel directions for building a time machine, the Integratron. The Integratron was to become Van Tassel’s lasting monument.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Too Fast, Too Furious
For more than two centuries, time has been felt to be passing more and more quickly. Scholars tell us that since the twin revolutions of the 18th century — industrial and political — a general sense of time speeding up has been recorded with regularity in documents of all kinds. Political and technical progress somehow meant that people were always losing ground, unable to keep up, out of breath. Rousseau spoke in Émile of the encroaching tourbillon social irresistibly overtaking everything, and the enduring popularity of Walden no doubt owes something to its condemnation of the way we squander rather than savor our time. Marx’s bourgeoisie, of course, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production,” and toward the end of the century, Nietzsche diagnosed the malady of the modern age in “the madly thoughtless shattering and dismantling of all foundations, their dissolution into a continual evolving that flows ceaselessly away, the tireless unspinning and historicizing of all there has ever been by modern man, the great cross-spider at the node of the cosmic web” — lines that come from the aptly titled Untimely Meditations. (...)
If one’s leisure time feels like work that one doesn’t have time for, work itself increasingly feels like work one doesn’t have time for. From the Amazon warehouses that track employees’ speed to the call centers that monitor times and keystrokes to the work that follows you home, a sense of speedup has obliterated, as in a lightning war, the time-saving promise of the technologies of the past. Entire industries disappear with uncanny speed: textiles gradually left New York over the course of forty years, starting in the 1950s, but American steel production, the world’s largest, fully collapsed within five years in the 1980s. Even the stock trading floor has been replaced by nanosecond-responsive computerized trading systems, with brokers seeking ever finer time-advantages over competitors, reflective in turn of a corporate world ever more concerned to deliver quick dividends to shareholders. These shareholders enjoy the spectacle of trigger-happy CEOs mowing down workers in mass layoffs. According to one estimate, the white-collar workers in these companies once switched jobs an average of four times over the course of their careers; now they can expect to switch more than a dozen times. These jobs are increasingly self-managed, with workers expected to approach their jobs with a “self-employed mind-set,” in the words of one management theorist. The loosening of the nine-to-five workday and the granting of more “flexibility” has resulted in workers feeling the need to give themselves wholly to their companies.
So the speedup is real. But why do we have it? “Capitalism” is the obvious and grating answer, and there’s no question that the need to increase not only productivity, but also circulation and distribution (what Marx saw as the need to cut down on “turnover time”), have driven ever faster cycles of accumulation. But acceleration at the heart of production doesn’t immediately explain acceleration in society, or the feeling that life itself has accelerated. The need to consume more, and consume better and faster — to be first in line for the bendy iPhone 6 — doesn’t give a human being a competitive advantage the way producing a phone without human beings, and delivering that phone all over the planet, does. And of course most of the cultural presuppositions that girded speedup, such as the “Protestant work ethic” and secularization, which led to emphasis on accumulating “this-worldly” achievements (rather than waiting for the “sacral time” after death), preceded the actual acceleration in production.
Nor does it follow that we should have less time as a result of the speedup of production. In fact, the problem may be that we have finally ended up with more free time — and yet don’t feel that we have more time. The centrality of this feeling to our age, and to the ages that preceded it, has received its most comprehensive treatment in the recent work of German theorist Hartmut Rosa and his concept of an “acceleration society.” For Rosa, the sense of speedup created by labor-saving is one of the major paradoxes of modernity, and one of the exemplary versions of this paradox is that “the dramatic rise in feelings of stress and lack of time” in our epoch has been “accompanied by an equally significant increase in free time.” For nearly every population group, even working women, the amount of time free from remunerated labor, obligatory household activities, and bodily self-care actually rose from the 1960s to the 1990s, with working women (who nonetheless continue to serve the much-despised “second shift”) gaining at least 3.7 hours a week. Though the gains have been unevenly distributed — with declining welfare payments for the poor and stagnant wages for working classes leading people to work several jobs — labor-saving technologies have mostly saved us time. But every surveyed group over that period feels we have lost it.
The key is that a society undergoing acceleration gets caught in a feedback loop it cannot escape, whereby acceleration in production, circulation, and distribution (in Rosa’s terms, “technical acceleration”) drives social change. The institutions of society no longer guarantee stable life paths. If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms — say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family — in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one’s life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the “pace of life,” the psychological feeling of always being out of breath — which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change. There have been world-historical short-circuits in this loop — the 1930s, which spelled forced leisure for thousands, and the 1970s, when advances in technical change and the rate of profitability they promised seemed to meet a historic limit — but overall the pressure hasn’t slackened. For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed.
by Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Speed
Millennials in Adulthood
Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends
The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 331, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry— and optimistic about the future.
They are also America’s most racially diverse generation. In all of these dimensions, they are different from today’s older generations. And in many, they are also different from older adults back when they were the age Millennials are now.
Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.
At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues, ranging from a belief in an activist government to support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. (For more on these views, see Chapters 1 and 2.)
The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 331, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry— and optimistic about the future.
They are also America’s most racially diverse generation. In all of these dimensions, they are different from today’s older generations. And in many, they are also different from older adults back when they were the age Millennials are now.Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.
At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues, ranging from a belief in an activist government to support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. (For more on these views, see Chapters 1 and 2.)
Millennials have also been keeping their distance from another core institution of society—marriage. Just 26% of this generation is married. When they were the age that Millennials are now, 36% of Generation X, 48% of Baby Boomers and 65% of the members of the Silent Generation were married. (See box on page 10 for demographic portraits of America’s four adult generations). Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.
Digital Natives
Adults of all ages have become less attached to political and religious institutions in the past decade, but Millennials are at the leading edge of this social phenomenon. They have also taken the lead in seizing on the new platforms of the digital era—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to construct personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups.
They are “digital natives”—the only generation for which these new technologies are not something they’ve had to adapt to. Not surprisingly, they are the most avid users. For example, 81% of Millennials are on Facebook, where their generation’s median friend count is 250, far higher than that of older age groups (these digital generation gaps have narrowed somewhat in recent years).
Digital Natives
Adults of all ages have become less attached to political and religious institutions in the past decade, but Millennials are at the leading edge of this social phenomenon. They have also taken the lead in seizing on the new platforms of the digital era—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to construct personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups.
They are “digital natives”—the only generation for which these new technologies are not something they’ve had to adapt to. Not surprisingly, they are the most avid users. For example, 81% of Millennials are on Facebook, where their generation’s median friend count is 250, far higher than that of older age groups (these digital generation gaps have narrowed somewhat in recent years).
by Pew Research Center | Read more:
Image: Pew Research Center
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