Black Mirror

One of the most disturbing moments in the British TV series “Black Mirror” is what appears to be a passionate love scene. The episode takes place in a version of the future where most people have had small devices, called “grains,” surgically implanted in their heads that can record and replay their memories on demand. As the encounter progresses, it is revealed that the couple are actually having dull and mechanical sex, their eyes grayed out as they both tune into their grains to watch memories of their previous trysts, from an earlier, steamier time in their relationship.

Each episode of “Black Mirror” — named for the way our screens look while powered down — paints a different nightmarescape of a future gone technologically awry. In one episode, for example, a woman uses a mail-order kit to create a golem of her deceased boyfriend using his social-media profiles. Another follows an obnoxious cartoon character as he becomes a powerful political figure after performing a series of public stunts. Still another imagines a post-peak-oil future, wherein people generate energy and currency by pedaling on stationary bikes, and the only escape from the drudgery is reality-show fame. The show feels like required viewing for our always connected, device-augmented lives. (...)

That the show probably owes its American stature to social media is perfectly appropriate, because the series fixates on our codependent and contradictory relationship with technology and media. We love being able to share our inner monologues and the minutia of our lives with one another, until, that is, it all goes horribly wrong in ways previously unimaginable. Or even if it doesn’t, we still find ourselves annoyed, jealous, infuriated and even depressed by the behavior of others (and occasionally ourselves) online. And yet we keep logging on. (...)

In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of “Black Mirror” is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.

To that end, the gadgets in “Black Mirror,” including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show’s cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, “The Terminator.”) Most television shows and movies can’t even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.

by Jenna Wortham, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tom Gauld

Piotr Rosiński. Przejście (Passage)
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Hamlet and Ophelia, Andrej Dugin
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Basic Bitch

[ed. See also: Columbusing, and overanalyzing the term Basic]

Over the past year, we have arrived at an odd cultural and lexicographical moment: To dress “normal” is the height of chic, yet to call someone “basic” is the chicest put-down, one that shows no signs of disappearing. This is despite the increasing obviousness, with ever-more widespread usage, that basic isn’t an especially new or insightful insult. It’s just about the oldest one in the book.

Basic, according to the BuzzFeed quizzes and CollegeHumor videos that wrested the term from the hip-hop world and brought it into the realm of white-girl-on-white-girl insults, means someone who owns things like Uggs and North Face and leggings. She likes yogurt and fears carbs (there is an exception for brunch), and loves her friends, unless and until she secretly hates them. She finds peplum flattering and long (or at least shoulder-grazing) hair reliably attractive. She exercises in various non-bulk-building ways, some of which have inspired her to purchase special socks for the experience. She bought the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad’s wedding on the cover. She Pins. She runs her gel-manicured hands up and down the spine of female-centric popular culture of the last 15 years, and is satisfied with what she feels. She doesn’t, apparently, long for more.

The basic bitch — as she’s sometimes called because it’s funnier when things alliterate, and because you’re considered a poor sport if you don’t find it funny — is almost always a she. In more sophisticated renderings,her particularities vary by region and even neighborhood, but she is almost always portrayed as utterly besotted with Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is the setup to nearly every now-familiar punch line about a basic bitch, her love for the autumnal mass-market beverage. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are “mall.” They reveal a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet. They are sidewalk chalkboards announcing their existence in polka-dot bubble letters. They are from the mid-aughts. They are easy targets.

Basic rolls beautifully off the tongue. It’s a useful insult. Like trashy or gauche, it derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it. It also feels restrained, somehow. You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.

by Noreen Malone, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Three Feet by Six Feet by Three Feet

What sounded like a scream jolted me awake at 5:54 a.m. Less than two feet away, the man in the neighboring capsule had awakened from a nightmare, but the way he followed it with three quick sneezes made me wonder if his cry was actually the first in a series of predawn sneezes. There in my narrow capsule, at the top of two stacked rows of sleepers in a warren of hallways, I rolled on my side, my knees pressed against the tan plastic wall, and squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t fall back asleep.

Every sound was magnified in the polite, labored silence of the capsule hotel: a humming fan; a rattling curtain; a strange mechanical whoosh, whoosh. As time passed and the Tokyo sky lightened outside, the sound of rousing sleepers filled the hall. Men cleared their throats. One crinkled a plastic bag. Others coughed and sniffled. When a guest lowered a piece of luggage from his capsule, it hit the carpeted floor with a reverberating thud. This hotel contained 630 capsules spread throughout its many floors in what entomologists might describe as a human hive. In the neighboring cell, a man’s ring tapped the wall, rattling my ears with a clank. Seconds passed. Then some other part of his body bumped as he turned over in bed, his skin making the familiar rubbing sound as it pulled against the stiff cotton sheets. I wore earplugs, but earplugs could only filter so much.

The Green Plaza Capsule Hotel in Kabukichō, central Tokyo’s red light district, occupies a nondescript white tower on a narrow side street north of bustling Yasukuni-dori. Train tracks run beside it, diverting cross-town traffic to opposite blocks and creating a secluded section of this otherwise sleepless neighborhood of bars, love hotels, and barely concealed prostitution. What the capsule hotel calls a “room” costs 4,300 yen a night, or $36, and runs six feet long by three feet wide and three feet high. Those dimensions feel like a doghouse. Pickup trucks have bigger beds. Despite the red light location, the hotel is a respectable operation. It houses businessmen mostly, often drunk, and it segregates the sexes. Women and men stay on different floors; each group has its own traditional onsen bath and dining areas on other floors. On an upper level, men can pay half the price of a capsule to sleep side-by-side in a shared, open “napping” room, separated by dividers. A capsule is challenging; shared group space would be hell.

When I told my friends in Oregon that I’d be sleeping inside a fiberglass pod, they thought I was nuts, but my logic was simple: Small lodging meant a small bill, and in Tokyo, where budget hotels charge between $55 and $130 per night, capsules meant I could stretch my limited budget enough to stay in Japan for three weeks. If you booked in advance online, you could stay at a capsule hotel for $353.79 for 13 days. I considered it. Capsule-style hotels are coming to the US, and they’re cheap. My girlfriend swore she wouldn’t last a night. “Our closet is bigger than that,” she pointed out; we lived in a studio and stored clothes under our bed. But the time to reconsider had passed. “Thank you for booking with Expedia!” the confirmation email said.

In a capsule nearby, a man hacked, and, as I turned onto my stomach, I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping anymore that day. (...)

When traveling, I sleep in rental cars and on couches. I’ve spent the night on airport floors, in poolside chaise lounges, and in a hammock in Mt. Rainer National Park. I assumed I could handle a capsule.

Kabukichō, where Green Plaza is located, is the largest red-light district in Asia. Set inside central Tokyo’s neon intestines, bright vertical signs climb the sides of buildings and pedestrians fill the streets. Women in sequined dresses click by on high heels, long slits showing their calves, even in winter. Although prostitution isn’t legal in Japan, the law’s language makes non-coital acts permissible, so the sex trade thrives.

People come to Kabukichō to drink, to fuck, to throw up on their shoes. When they’re done, they spend the night in a capsule for the price of a fancy dinner and sweat out their hangovers in a bath the next day before catching a train home. I spent the night among them.

by Aaron Gilbreath, TMN | Read more:
Image: Matt Eshleman

The Ventures

Willi Baumeister, Runner (Läuferin II), 1925
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Comcast Renames Man ‘Asshole Brown’ After He Tries to Cancel Cable

Comcast probably doesn’t relish being one of those companies that many Americans love to hate. But sometimes, the cable giant makes this way too easy.

Consider the case of Ricardo Brown. After Brown’s wife had a disagreement with the cable company recently, Comcast started sending him monthly statements under the name “Asshole Brown.”

The disagreement happened when Brown’s wife Lisa tried to cancel her cable. She got referred to one of the company’s dreaded “retention specialists,” who apparently didn’t like being told “no,” as Lisa Brown told the blogger Christopher Elliott, who first reported the story.

“I was never rude,” she told Elliott. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”

Like many phone companies and ISPs, Comcast makes it frighteningly difficult to cancel an account. The company retains an army of retention specialists whose sole job is to keep you from signing off. Last year, the journalist Ryan Block recorded a Kafkaesque conversation he had with a Comcast retention specialist from hell. That call has been listened to nearly 6 million times.

by Robert McMillan, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Shape of the App Store

Every developer knows how tough it can be to make a living on the App Store. There’s a lot of money being made there, but it’s not spread very evenly. Those at the top of the charts make the lion’s share of revenue, while the vast majority are left to fight over the scraps. But exactly how lopsided is it? And how does that affect an indie developer’s chances of finding success? For a long time, I was resigned to never really knowing the answers to these questions, because although there’s wide consensus that the distribution of revenue in the App Store is best represented by a power law, I had no way of knowing how sharply or gently the graph of that power law curved. My own apps haven’t spent enough time on the Top Grossing list to collect the data I would need to make a prediction, and Apple sure isn’t sharing it.

And then on January 15, Marco Arment gave me (well, all of us) a belated Christmas present. In his piece titled Overcast’s 2014 Sales Numbers, Marco shared the financial performance of his podcast player, Overcast, through a series of statistics and graphs. Because the information he shared was so detailed, and because Overcast has been so successful, I realized that Marco’s post could provide some insight into how an app’s rank on the U.S. Top Grossing list correlates with its daily revenue. (...)

To provide some context to the results, you may be familiar with the Pareto distribution. It’s the origin of the classic “80-20 rule” that’s used to explain so many phenomena that obey a power law. “Twenty percent of the people in an organization do eighty percent of the work.” “Twenty percent of the population control eighty percent of the wealth.” You hear these types of statistics a lot, but they’re usually not very accurate. Often, they are useful as a first estimate at best. So I didn’t actually expect App Store revenue to obey the 80-20 rule. In fact, I expected it to be a much sharper curve, representing even greater disparity in the distribution of revenue than the 80-20 rule would suggest – maybe a 90-10 split, or even a 95-5 split. As it turns out, the revenue distribution curve of the App Store is even sharper than I imagined.

I expected a “hockey stick” curve that’s characteristic of power law models, but I didn’t expect one like this. The hockey stick breaks upwards at around position 870 on the U.S. Top Grossing list. With about 1.2 million apps in the App Store at the time the data was collected, that arguably puts 99.93% of apps in the “long tail” of the App Store. The “head” of the App Store, those 870 top grossing apps that make up 0.07% of the App Store population, collect over 40% of the App Store revenue that’s paid out.

Luckily, there’s a lot of money to be made in that long tail. At the top of the long tail, in position 871 on the U.S. Top Grossing list, an app still makes over $700 in revenue per day. That’s almost $260,000 per year. Even number 1,908 on the U.S. Top Grossing list makes over $100,000 per year. In fact all apps above number 3,175 on the U.S. Top Grossing list produce enough revenue to at least make its developer the United States household median income for 2014 ($53,891). And this is just for a single app. Most indies I know develop more than one app simultaneously. Developers who can put together a collection of apps that rank at about 6000 on the U.S. Top Grossing list (about $25,000 in revenue per year) stand a good chance of building an app business that can sustain them and their families.

by Charles Perry, Metakite Software |  Read more:

Image: Metakite Software

Everybody Loves Marshawn Lynch

Has any nickname ever fit any human better than “Beast Mode” fits Marshawn Lynch?

Sometimes he’ll be running and it’ll seem like he’s cornered, and then he’ll just run right through whatever defenders looked like a problem. He finds cutback lanes that shouldn’t exist, he almost always falls forward for an extra few yards when he goes down, and as the game unfolds and the defense gets tired, he only gets better. Beast Mode.

On any given play, he can go from a regular running back to some kind of hulked-out superhero flying into the end zone. Beast Mode.

It’s not just your imagination if it feels like Marshawn Lynch never gets brought down by just one guy. As Danny Kelly wrote for SB Nation this week, Lynch broke 101 tackles in 2014, the most since Pro Football Focus started tracking that stat eight years ago. In the NFC Championship Game against the Packers, he was the most dominant player on either team. He forced a playoff-record 15 missed tackles, and 110 of his 157 yards came after contact. (...)

Now let’s talk about what he’s like off the field. What’s amazing about anyone complaining about Lynch’s media boycott is that nobody in the NFL has given us better quotes than Beast Mode.

“I’m just ’bout that action, boss,” he said at last year’s media day. “I ain’t never seen no talking win me nothing.”

“If I do [talk on the field],” he said in 2012, “only thing I tell them is, ‘You know where I’m at: seven yards deep. I ain’t too hard to find.’”

Last year, Deion Sanders asked him, “You don’t like podiums, do you?”

Lynch: “Nah, it ain’t my thing.”

Deion: “What is your thing?”

Lynch: “Lay back, kick back, mind my business, stay in my own lane.”

What does his dog do during Seahawks games? Does he watch him play?

Lynch: “No. He’s out doing his doggie dog thing, living in his doggie dog world. You feel me?”

Yesterday, he showed up to face thousands of reporters and said, “I’m here so I won’t get fined,” 29 times in a row. Anyone who can read that sentence without smiling is taking all this far too seriously.

The only real downside of Lynch’s silence turning into media day’s biggest story is that it obscures his actual story. It’s one of the more incredible tales we probably won’t hear this week.

by Andrew Sharp, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty

Architect and surfer David Hertz's Golden Means Eco-Board, with graphics taken from Le Corbusier’s Modular Man abstracted to represent the sine wave patterning of natural proportions found in the wave form.
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Raising Elvis

I am a real New Jersey housewife. I tell my girlfriends that we could start our own show, the Real Tired Housewives. A show without huge earrings or catfights but with a lot of driving and packing of lunches. A lot. I have five children. When I say this (actually, mumble it) people’s mouths drop open, and some mixture of awe and repulsion twitches across their faces. Wow, they say. I can feel them calculating. They do not know whether to bow down in reverence or call for a psych exam. And then comes the part that I really hate. Four girls and one boy, I say.

I wait.

“Is the boy last?” they always ask.

They get this hopeful smirk on their faces, like they have caught me. Like I kept on having kids, until I got a boy. As though the girls were obstacles on my way to getting it right. The Holy Grail, a son. “No,” I answer, with a thrust of my chin. “He’s the fourth.”

That boy, my fourth, is now twelve. His name is Henry. He loves me. Oh no, he hates me. Loves me, hates me. He’s twelve.

* * *

It’s been an eye-opening twelve years. A time to examine some preconceived—literally—notions regarding the raising of boys and girls. Especially my own. I had been stunned and hurt by the comments I heard after the birth of our daughters. The nurses at the hospital told me that they hear a lot of women apologize to their husbands after giving birth to girls. Seriously. Right in the labor room. One nurse said, “Don’t they realize that it is the man who determines the sex of the baby?” Another quipped, “So maybe the men should apologize.”

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when visitors would say, “Maybe next time,” with a dismissive wave at our little pink bundles of joy. Or, “How soon are you going to try again?”

My brother-in-law actually said, “Three girls. That’s the pits.”

He’s lucky to be alive.

“Another girl? Is Hank mad at you?” a neighbor asked.

And when I answered, “Yeah, my husband’s furious, he’s kicking me out next week,” she didn’t even flinch.

And yet: No one was as shocked or as happy as I was when the doctor held up that baby boy in the hospital.

“I feel like I won the lottery,” I said to Hank.

I’d had three miscarriages after my three girls and before Henry’s birth. I had been flush with grief. I was delighted with my family but had wanted more children—not necessarily a boy or a girl, just another baby. When my body didn’t cooperate, I was stunned, but also ashamed. It’s a feeling my obstetrician said that many women confessed to, but that he couldn’t understand. It had been a terrible time, trying to mother my three daughters with the joy they deserved while being sick with the loss of those unborn babies. Finally having a healthy baby made me gleeful.

But still something nagged at me. People were now treating me like I had finally done something correctly. Did I secretly agree? Was I that big of a jerk?

“It’s about time,” I heard again and again. “Oh, your husband must be thrilled.”

So even while I was telling myself that I was just happy to have a healthy baby, I was thrilled to have a son. Finally. A small voice inside me yelled, You patriarchal hypocrite, as I floated and gloated through the aftermath of his birth.

by Allison Gehlhaus, Brain, Child | Read more:
Image: uncredited

EFF’s Game Plan for Ending Global Mass Surveillance

We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance.

The entity that's conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world's communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law.

That's good news for Americans. U.S. law and the Constitution protect American citizens and legal residents from warrantless surveillance. That means we have a very strong legal case to challenge mass surveillance conducted domestically or that sweeps in Americans' communications.

Similarly, the United States Congress is elected by American voters. That means Congressional representatives are beholden to the American people for their jobs, so public pressure from constituents can help influence future laws that might check some of the NSA's most egregious practices.

But what about everyone else? What about the 96% of the world's population who are citizens of other countries, living outside U.S. borders. They don't get a vote in Congress. And current American legal protections generally only protect citizens, legal residents, or those physically located within the United States. So what can EFF do to protect the billions of people outside the United States who are victims of the NSA's spying?

For years, we've been working on a strategy to end mass surveillance of digital communications of innocent people worldwide. Today we're laying out the plan, so you can understand how all the pieces fit together—that is, how U.S. advocacy and policy efforts connect to the international fight and vice versa. Decide for yourself where you can get involved to make the biggest difference.

This plan isn't for the next two weeks or three months. It's a multi-year battle that may need to be revised many times as we better understand the tools and authorities of entities engaged in mass surveillance and as more disclosures by whistleblowers help shine light on surveillance abuses.

(If you'd like an overview of how U.S. surveillance law works, check out our addendum.)

Intro: Mass Surveillance by NSA, GCHQ and Others

The National Security Agency is working to collect as much as possible about the digital lives of people worldwide. As the Washington Post reported, a former senior U.S. intelligence official characterized former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander's approach to surveillance as "Collect is all, tag it, store it… And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it."

The NSA can't do this alone. It relies on a network of international partners who help collect information worldwide, especially the intelligence agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (collectively known, along with the United States, as the "Five Eyes.") In addition, the United States has relationships (including various levels of intelligence data sharing and assistance) with Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and potentially a number of other countries worldwide. There are also other countries—like Russia, China, and others—engaging in surveillance of digital communications without sharing that data with the NSA. Some of those governments, including the U.S. government, are spending billions of dollars to develop spying capabilities that they use aggressively against innocent people around the world. Some of them may do so with even less oversight and even fewer legal restrictions.

Although whistleblowers and journalists have focused attention on the staggering powers and ambitions of the likes of the NSA and GCHQ, we should never assume that other governments lack the desire to join them. Agencies everywhere are hungry for our data and working to expand their reach. Read about international surveillance law reform and fighting back through user-side encryption.

We focus here on the NSA because we know the most about its activities and we have the most legal and political tools for holding it to account. Of course, we need to know much more about surveillance practices of other agencies in the U.S. and abroad and expand our work together with our partners around the world to confront surveillance as a worldwide epidemic.

Mass surveillance is facilitated by technology companies, especially large ones. These companies often have insufficient or even sloppy security practices that make mass surveillance easier, and in some cases may be actively assisting the NSA in sweeping up data on hundreds of millions of people (for example, AT&T). In other cases, tech companies may be legally compelled to provide access to their servers to the NSA (or they may choose to fight that access). Read more about how tech companies can harden their systems against surveillance.

The NSA relies on several laws as well as a presidential order to justify its continued mass surveillance. Laws passed by Congress as well as orders from the U.S. President can curtail surveillance by the NSA, and the Supreme Court of the United States also has authority to put the brakes on surveillance.

The Game Plan

Given that the American legal system doesn't adequately protect the rights of people overseas, what can we do in the immediate future to protect Internet users who may not be Americans?

Here's the game plan for right now. Note that these are not consecutive steps; we're working on them concurrently.

by Rainey Reitman, Electronic Frontier Foundation | Read more:
Image: EFF

[ed. World Penguin Awareness Day - Jan. 20, 2015]
Ben the Illustrator, SSC
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Winter Barn by Aaron Shaver
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Roadie

[ed. Finally, an app that actually makes sense. I'd sign up if it paid for my gas.]

Roadie — an app that connects people who want to ship an item with drivers who are going in the same direction — launched publicly in several states this morning, with the goal of turning existing automobiles already on the road into an ad hoc network of cargo vehicles.

Marc Gorlin, the company’s founder and CEO, wants to tap into the existing supply of passenger vehicles already on the road to make it easier to send anything — even things that can’t be sent through the postal system affordably because of size or shape — quickly. Users just have to post details and pictures of the item they want delivered and the pickup and drop-off locations and “Roadies,” or the drivers, can choose the delivery that is most convenient for them or along the routes they plan to take. Gorlin previously co-founded Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Kabbage Inc., VerticalOne, and a number of other companies.

“There’s this transportation heat map that exists of the people, the places they go and patterns,” Gorlin said. “Whether it’s going to work every day, going on vacation, whether you’re the sales rep that covers the same territory every week, you have a more powerful transportation heat map than UPS, FedEx, and USPS combined. Imagine what can you do with that system. Roadie is going to reveal that transportation heat map.”

Roadie will also roll out a route recognition feature called Roadie Route Learning using the opt-in location service on the app, though this will only become available to people after they become frequent users of the app.

“Once we build a heat map based on initial density, we’ll slowly start to turn this feature on,” Gorlin said. “We’ll get there, and when we do, it will be absolutely transformative for the shipping industry.” (...)

Though there are existing players in the sharing economy like Shyp, for instance, that focus on the shipping industry, Roadie is a fundamentally different service. For one, the item being shipped does not need any kind of packaging since the driver can simply stow the item in their trunk or available seats. Additionally, the Roadies deliver the packages themselves and can therefore be tracked in real time using the app, whereas Shyp packs the item and sends it through a postal service that they get consolidated rates for.

“Shyp is essentially a luxury concierge service,” Gorlin said. “Maybe they’re more champagne; we’re more beer and more people drink beer.”

In addition to receiving 80%of fares, which are a combination of a base fare plus a fee based on mileage as well as urgency, drivers receive an end-of-year email with all the miles they drove, which can be written off as business deductions. As an added benefit, in the next few weeks, Roadie will also partner with several businesses to provide a series of rest stops where drivers can stop and get food and other supplies at discounted prices. Drivers also can access roadside assistance in the case of maintenance issues or emergencies which will connect them with tow trucks or other assistance even if they’re not in the middle of a delivery.

by Johana Bhuiyan, Buzz Feed | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Curtis Mayfield

Keep YouTube Weird

In 2013, Jason Calacanis wrote a post titled, “I ain’t gonna work on YouTube’s farm no more.” In it, the media entrepreneur detailed how, despite being one of the top funded YouTube creator partners, he turned down the platform’s money when it was time to renew his contract.

Many thought he was crazy to reject cash from the largest online video distributor on the planet. But if the claims made about YouTube’s new partner agreement in a blog post by cellist Zoe Keating are true, it may have been a smart move after all.

First, some background on Keating’s post: YouTube is launching a subscription streaming music service not unlike Spotify or Rdio called “Music Key.” Last summer, the Google-owned video platform took heat for allegedly bullying independent labels and artists into agreeing to below-market royalty rates, with the threat that their content would otherwise be removed from YouTube’s previously free, open platform. YouTube rightly reversed course on that decision, but the new agreement it’s now offering to YouTube Partners is even worse.

The terms of the new agreement, while logical from YouTube’s perspective, place huge restrictions on where and how a musician can host their music on both YouTube and other platforms. And the bullying hasn’t stopped. Keating wrote that, if she refused to sign the new YouTube music services agreement, her channel, which has over a half a million views and close to 5,000 followers, would be blocked from the monetization portions of the platform.

According to the new agreement, anything Keating uploads to Youtube will be automatically included in the Music Key subscription service. And it’s not just Keating’s uploads. If she chooses to withhold anything from YouTube, but a third party subsequently uploads it, including her name in the description, it will also be added to Music Key. Not that Keating would have much incentive to withhold music — anything she releases on another platform, like Bandcamp or iTunes, must be uploaded to YouTube at the same time, per the terms of the new contract. (...)

The agreement also states that all of Keating’s videos, along with any third-party uploads of her songs, will be “monetized,” meaning there will be pre-roll ads placed ahead of them — or as she describes them, “Doritos ads.” This is hardly in the spirit of artist control nor YouTube’s ContentID feature, which spots when an artist’s song has been used in somebody else’s video. Normally, when an artist discovers their work has been uploaded by somebody else, they have three choices: Issue a DMCA notice to have the video taken down, monetize the video by allowing ads, or do nothing. ContentID is a reasonable, if imperfect, system that prioritizes artist control over all else. But going forward, if Keating doesn’t feel it’s right to force ads onto, say, a mother’s video mashup of her son’s sporting achievements set to Keating’s work, she has no choice.

Moreover, the contract lasts five years, which is long by industry standards — the Musicians Union recommends not signing any contract that lasts over three years.

But perhaps the worst element of the contract is that, unless she signs, not only will Keating lose the free promotion and analytics that she currently receives as a YouTube partner, but she won’t be able to monetize through ContentID at all. Even if this “monetization” is only pennies for many artists, and even if they have to share those pennies with YouTube, the notion that artists will be paid literally nothing for their work unless they sign an onerous contract is egregious. Hell, I could upload a song I wrote to that most-despised service Spotify right now through a service like TuneCore and theoretically make money off it without signing an insanely restrictive contract. (The number of listens would likely be so low that the royalty amount would be less than the cost of the paper check it was written on, but that isn’t the point).

And again, if Keating refuses to comply with any of these stipulations, her channel, and the audience she’s spent years building and who expect to see her work on YouTube, will be eliminated, per YouTube’s latest demand. With this, YouTube has gone from the most artist-friendly major music platform on the planet to the least.

by David Holmes, Pando Daily |  Read more:

Image: Brad Jonas

Do Happy Couples Masturbate?

“I have an important question about married life, which remains incomprehensible to me, but I am trying to understand,” I Gchatted my childhood friend Vanessa last week. She’s been with her husband for a decade. “When the hell do you masturbate?”

If a hobby is an activity pursued for pleasure, then masturbation is perhaps the hobby most of humanity shares. Though the prevalence of masturbation varies by age, most men and women in all age groups say they do it, and the majority of Americans of both genders continue to indulge at least up to age 60. But contrary to what you might think about handsy adolescents, today’s most frequent masturbators are between the ages of 25 and 29 — a group very much in the relationship stage of their lives. Born not long after Betty Dodson published her revolutionary masturbation how-to Sex for One (the 85-year-old leads female-masturbation workshops to this day), they were raised solidly in an age of sex-positive feminism, easily accessible erotica, and general sexual openness and transparency.

Not that the role of masturbation in a sex-positive relationship is entirely clear. On the one hand, pioneers like Dodson have helped to align sexuality with self-empowerment, which has taught us to think of masturbation as a healthy element of a diverse sexual menu as opposed to a shameful, inadequate substitute for sex — even from day one in a fulfilling relationship. Most studies find that a big majority of married Americans report masturbating (and since it’s self-reporting, that probably undersells it). “Even if I had all the men in the world that I wanted in my bed, even if I had Ryan Gosling, I would still masturbate with sex toys,” French sex columnist Maïa Mazaurette recently told me. “I don’t want to go back to a world without plastic!”

On the other hand, well, masturbation is sort of inherently antisocial. Within the bounds of a relationship defined, in part, by both partners’ willingness to devote sexual energy to one another, it can be downright rude. Can we ever really get over the embarrassment of purely personal indulgence? Or take the indulgence of your partner as anything other than a rejection of you? Even if we want to be open, practically and emotionally, exposing deeply private habits to anyone — even the one you love — is reflexively uncomfortable. And hearing your girlfriend rev up her vibrator after saying she’s going to sleep early can be hard to shake. Just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean that the negotiations won’t be awkward or that the concessions will be easy to get used to. (...)

But — what kind of index of relationship happiness is masturbation? The relative importance is actually unclear. A 1991 study in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy found that women who masturbate report better “marital satisfaction” than those who don’t, perhaps because women are less likely to orgasm from intercourse. Meanwhile, a 2014 study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy found that married men who are bored with or distant from their wives report masturbating more than their happily married peers. As is the case with most sexual behaviors, the question is not what is happening but how (and many researchers point out that masturbation can be crucial in balancing partners’ occasionally disparate sex drives). In part, that’s because it’s as much a sexual exploration of autonomy as it is an autonomous sex act — a highly refined personal craft, honed and reinvented incrementally over the course of decades. How much can a routine that started before you learned to shave really say about adult relationships? Especially since, after a lifetime of solitary craftsmanship, masturbation can get, well, bizarre.

by Maureen O'Connor, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: John Wesley, Untitled (1991)

Waterdam, Marathon, Greece, 1934, Alfred Eisenstaedt. (1898 - 1995)
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