Sunday, February 22, 2015
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My Own Life
[ed. This has been circulating all over the internet the last week and I'm including here for future reference. It describes a graceful exit from life with a perspective that I hope I'll have when it's my time to go, mostly a feeling of gratitude. I'm reminded of Raymond Carver's epitaph, from his poem Late Fragment]
And did you get what
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. (...)
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
----
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. (...)
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
by Oliver Sacks, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Hanna Barczyk
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
[ed. Really loved this book (additional reviews here, here and here). See also: Please Don't Thank Me For My Service. Now Ang Lee has signed on to make it into a movie.]
The last word on football and violence has yet to be uttered, though George Will came close. “Football combines two of the worst things in American life,” wrote Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” Ben Fountain throws in a few other toxic ingredients - sex, politics, religion, show business, capitalism, and Texas. Fountain, who lives in Dallas and gave up a career in law in order to write fiction full-time, scored a literary touchdown at age 48 with his first book, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, a 2006 story collection that won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Fountain now sets his first novel in Texas Stadium, the gridiron shrine that was demolished in 2010 after being replaced, at a cost of $1.15 billion, by Cowboys Stadium. He describes the legendary arena as “basically a shithole. It’s cold, gritty, drafty, dirty, in general possessed of all the charm of an industrial warehouse where people pee in the corners.” Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk spans one frigid, rainy Thanksgiving Day in which eight members of Bravo Squad are guests of honor at a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bears. The Bravos, as they are called, are Army grunts who survived a fierce firefight with Iraqi insurgents. The encounter, which lasted three minutes and forty-three seconds, left one comrade dead and another permanently disabled.
Caught on video by Fox News, the skirmish turned the young soldiers - crude, irreverent kids - into American idols, ripe for exploitation by politicians, corporate executives, and other predatory patriots. Yanked out of Iraq, the Bravos are sent on a two-week “Victory Tour” throughout the United States. Their day in Texas Stadium, whose Jumbotron proclaims: “America’s Team Proudly Honors America’s Heroes,” caps a two-week itinerary that included a White House photo op with President George W. Bush and stops in half a dozen cities. After their propaganda mission in Texas, they will return to combat duty in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Bravos are packaged as an antidote to the national malaise caused by “nina leven.” A Hollywood hustler is lining up backers for a movie version of their ordeal, which a Texas tycoon describes as “a story of courage, of hope and optimism, love of freedom, all the convictions that motivated you young men to do what you did. . . .”
But 19-year-old Billy Lynn, the focus of the novel who received a Silver Star for acting out of instinct and fear, is confused by all the attention. “It is sort of weird,” he tells Faison Zorn, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who smites him at first sight. “Being honored for the worst day of your life.” It is through Billy’s virginal eyes and his boozy, migrained brain that we encounter the wretched excess of the Stadium Club buffet; the 3,000 pairs of shoes in the equipment room; and the bloated halftime extravaganza starring Destiny’s Child. In one bravura scene, the Bravos visit the Cowboys’ locker room, where scraggly soldiers and overfed gladiators sniff each other out. “So whas it like?” asks a Cowboy, as Sunday warriors face another kind. Though he barely graduated from high school (and then, after vandalizing the Saab convertible of his sister’s ex-fiancé, chose Iraq over prison), Billy is a perceptive fellow beset with “existential spasms,” “random seizures of futility and pointlessness that make him wonder why it matters how he lives his life.” He also wonders whether to go AWOL, exiting Texas Stadium under the protection of a war resisters group.
by Steven G. Kellman, Critical Mass/National Book Critics Circle | Read more:
The last word on football and violence has yet to be uttered, though George Will came close. “Football combines two of the worst things in American life,” wrote Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” Ben Fountain throws in a few other toxic ingredients - sex, politics, religion, show business, capitalism, and Texas. Fountain, who lives in Dallas and gave up a career in law in order to write fiction full-time, scored a literary touchdown at age 48 with his first book, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, a 2006 story collection that won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Fountain now sets his first novel in Texas Stadium, the gridiron shrine that was demolished in 2010 after being replaced, at a cost of $1.15 billion, by Cowboys Stadium. He describes the legendary arena as “basically a shithole. It’s cold, gritty, drafty, dirty, in general possessed of all the charm of an industrial warehouse where people pee in the corners.” Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk spans one frigid, rainy Thanksgiving Day in which eight members of Bravo Squad are guests of honor at a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bears. The Bravos, as they are called, are Army grunts who survived a fierce firefight with Iraqi insurgents. The encounter, which lasted three minutes and forty-three seconds, left one comrade dead and another permanently disabled.Caught on video by Fox News, the skirmish turned the young soldiers - crude, irreverent kids - into American idols, ripe for exploitation by politicians, corporate executives, and other predatory patriots. Yanked out of Iraq, the Bravos are sent on a two-week “Victory Tour” throughout the United States. Their day in Texas Stadium, whose Jumbotron proclaims: “America’s Team Proudly Honors America’s Heroes,” caps a two-week itinerary that included a White House photo op with President George W. Bush and stops in half a dozen cities. After their propaganda mission in Texas, they will return to combat duty in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Bravos are packaged as an antidote to the national malaise caused by “nina leven.” A Hollywood hustler is lining up backers for a movie version of their ordeal, which a Texas tycoon describes as “a story of courage, of hope and optimism, love of freedom, all the convictions that motivated you young men to do what you did. . . .”
But 19-year-old Billy Lynn, the focus of the novel who received a Silver Star for acting out of instinct and fear, is confused by all the attention. “It is sort of weird,” he tells Faison Zorn, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who smites him at first sight. “Being honored for the worst day of your life.” It is through Billy’s virginal eyes and his boozy, migrained brain that we encounter the wretched excess of the Stadium Club buffet; the 3,000 pairs of shoes in the equipment room; and the bloated halftime extravaganza starring Destiny’s Child. In one bravura scene, the Bravos visit the Cowboys’ locker room, where scraggly soldiers and overfed gladiators sniff each other out. “So whas it like?” asks a Cowboy, as Sunday warriors face another kind. Though he barely graduated from high school (and then, after vandalizing the Saab convertible of his sister’s ex-fiancé, chose Iraq over prison), Billy is a perceptive fellow beset with “existential spasms,” “random seizures of futility and pointlessness that make him wonder why it matters how he lives his life.” He also wonders whether to go AWOL, exiting Texas Stadium under the protection of a war resisters group.
by Steven G. Kellman, Critical Mass/National Book Critics Circle | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Dark Leviathan
The Hidden Wiki holds the keys to a secret internet. To reach it, you need a special browser that can access ‘Tor Hidden Services’ – websites that have chosen to obscure their physical location. But even this browser isn’t enough. Like the Isla de Muerta in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, the landmarks of this hidden internet can be discovered only by those who already know where they are.
Sites such as the Hidden Wiki provide unreliable treasure maps. They publish lists of the special addresses for sites where you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs or stolen credit card numbers, play strange games, or simply talk, perhaps on subjects too delicate for the open web. The lists are often untrustworthy. Sometimes the addresses are out-of-date. Sometimes they are actively deceptive. One link might lead to a thriving marketplace for buying and selling stolen data; another, to a wrecker’s display of false lights, a cloned site designed to relieve you of your coin and give you nothing in return.
This hidden internet is a product of debates among technology-obsessed libertarians in the 1990s. These radicals hoped to combine cryptography and the internet into a universal solvent that would corrupt the bonds of government tyranny. New currencies, based on recent cryptographic advances, would undermine traditional fiat money, seizing the cash nexus from the grasp of the state. ‘Mix networks’, where everyone’s identity was hidden by multiple layers of encryption, would allow people to talk and engage in economic exchange without the government being able to see.
Plans for cryptographic currencies led to the invention of Bitcoin, while mix networks culminated in Tor. The two technologies manifest different aspects of a common dream – the utopian aspiration to a world where one could talk and do business without worrying about state intervention – and indeed they grew up together. For a long time, the easiest way to spend Bitcoin was at Tor’s archipelago of obfuscated websites.
Like the pirate republics of the 18th century, this virtual underworld mingles liberty and vice. Law enforcement and copyright-protection groups such as the Digital Citizens’ Alliance in Washington, DC, prefer to emphasise the most sordid aspects of Tor’s hidden services – the sellers of drugs, weapons and child pornography. And yet the effort to create a hidden internet was driven by ideology as much as avarice. The network is used by dissidents as well as dope-peddlers. If you live under an authoritarian regime, Tor provides you with a ready-made technology for evading government controls on the internet. Even some of the seedier services trade on a certain idealism. Many libertarians believe that people should be able to buy and sell drugs without government interference, and hoped to build marketplaces to do just that, without violence and gang warfare.
Tor’s anonymity helps criminals by making it harder for the state to identify and detain them. Yet this has an ironic side-effect: it also makes it harder for them to trust each other, because they typically can’t be sure who their interlocutors are. To make money in hidden markets, you need people to trust you, so that they will buy from you and sell to you. Having accomplished this first manoeuvre, the truly successful entrepreneurs go one step further. They become middlemen of trust, guaranteeing relations between others and taking a cut from the proceeds.
To this end, entrepreneurs have found it necessary to create and maintain communities, making rules, enforcing them, punishing rule-breakers, and turning towards violence when all else fails. They have, in effect, built petty versions of the very governments they are fleeing. As the US sociologist Charles Tilly argued, the modern state began as a protection racket, offering its subjects protection against outsiders and each other. The same logic is playing out today on the hidden internet, as would-be petty barons and pirate kings fight to tax and police their subjects while defending themselves against hostile incursions.
by Henry Farrell, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Alex Makoli/Magnum Photos
Sites such as the Hidden Wiki provide unreliable treasure maps. They publish lists of the special addresses for sites where you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs or stolen credit card numbers, play strange games, or simply talk, perhaps on subjects too delicate for the open web. The lists are often untrustworthy. Sometimes the addresses are out-of-date. Sometimes they are actively deceptive. One link might lead to a thriving marketplace for buying and selling stolen data; another, to a wrecker’s display of false lights, a cloned site designed to relieve you of your coin and give you nothing in return.This hidden internet is a product of debates among technology-obsessed libertarians in the 1990s. These radicals hoped to combine cryptography and the internet into a universal solvent that would corrupt the bonds of government tyranny. New currencies, based on recent cryptographic advances, would undermine traditional fiat money, seizing the cash nexus from the grasp of the state. ‘Mix networks’, where everyone’s identity was hidden by multiple layers of encryption, would allow people to talk and engage in economic exchange without the government being able to see.
Plans for cryptographic currencies led to the invention of Bitcoin, while mix networks culminated in Tor. The two technologies manifest different aspects of a common dream – the utopian aspiration to a world where one could talk and do business without worrying about state intervention – and indeed they grew up together. For a long time, the easiest way to spend Bitcoin was at Tor’s archipelago of obfuscated websites.
Like the pirate republics of the 18th century, this virtual underworld mingles liberty and vice. Law enforcement and copyright-protection groups such as the Digital Citizens’ Alliance in Washington, DC, prefer to emphasise the most sordid aspects of Tor’s hidden services – the sellers of drugs, weapons and child pornography. And yet the effort to create a hidden internet was driven by ideology as much as avarice. The network is used by dissidents as well as dope-peddlers. If you live under an authoritarian regime, Tor provides you with a ready-made technology for evading government controls on the internet. Even some of the seedier services trade on a certain idealism. Many libertarians believe that people should be able to buy and sell drugs without government interference, and hoped to build marketplaces to do just that, without violence and gang warfare.
Tor’s anonymity helps criminals by making it harder for the state to identify and detain them. Yet this has an ironic side-effect: it also makes it harder for them to trust each other, because they typically can’t be sure who their interlocutors are. To make money in hidden markets, you need people to trust you, so that they will buy from you and sell to you. Having accomplished this first manoeuvre, the truly successful entrepreneurs go one step further. They become middlemen of trust, guaranteeing relations between others and taking a cut from the proceeds.
To this end, entrepreneurs have found it necessary to create and maintain communities, making rules, enforcing them, punishing rule-breakers, and turning towards violence when all else fails. They have, in effect, built petty versions of the very governments they are fleeing. As the US sociologist Charles Tilly argued, the modern state began as a protection racket, offering its subjects protection against outsiders and each other. The same logic is playing out today on the hidden internet, as would-be petty barons and pirate kings fight to tax and police their subjects while defending themselves against hostile incursions.
by Henry Farrell, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Alex Makoli/Magnum Photos
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Creepiness: Nice to Meat You
Beginning in the mid-2000s, the fast food chain Burger King began running a series of deeply disturbing advertisements. They star a revamped version of the company’s mascot, The King, who has left the world of animated children’s advertisements and is now played by an actor wearing a large plastic mask featuring a crown, a beard, and an alarming perpetual smile. One typical ad features a man waking up in the morning to find The King in bed with him, staring at him inches away from his face. The man is initially alarmed, but becomes calm when The King hands him a breakfast sandwich. As he eats, he and The King become friendlier, joking, laughing, and even briefly brushing hands—and then they both flinch away and face forward in the bed. In another, a man wakes up, opens the blinds, and finds The King standing there staring at him. He starts to become agitated until he notices that The King is holding a plate with a breakfast sandwich.
These ads, whose mascot was widely called the “Creepy King” in the press and among viewers, generated considerable word-of-mouth attention for Burger King, and in a sense, they could be viewed as one of the most successful “viral marketing” campaigns of all time. Unfortunately for Burger King, the attention was almost uniformly negative. In light of the public’s revulsion, the firm’s advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, tweaked the formula slightly. In one later ad, The King crashes through an office window in a relentless quest to replace a woman’s microwaved lunch with a huge hamburger, while in another, he engages in a “reverse pick-pocketing” scheme wherein he sneaks money into people’s pockets, apparently symbolizing his commitment to saving customers money.
The shift to surrealism was not enough to shake the “Creepy King” image, and ultimately the mascot was retired. Yet The King lives on, seared into the American cultural consciousness as an enduring archetype of creepiness. I’ve been researching the topic for years, primarily by asking people what they think of creepiness. Every definition I attempted was rejected as inadequate, and every creepy pop cultural character seemed open to other interpretations—except for one. The King is the one example that always receives unanimous consent.
Doubtless a big part of the character’s impact is the simple shock that such an off-putting theme would be part of an advertisement. It’s rare enough to have an aggressively creepy character on television, and even then the writers will normally make some effort to make the character somehow relatable or sympathetic. Yet The King has no back-story, no mitigating factors. He is sheer creepiness embodied, all the more so given his unexpected irruption into a genre that normally makes every effort to pander to the viewer.
How could this happen? On a practical level, one can see how a space for such an unprecedented campaign could open up precisely at Burger King. A perpetual also-ran in the fast food industry, Burger King is a frequent target for private equity companies eager to snatch up ailing firms and apply their cost-cutting magic to return them to profitability. Hence it is also a chronically mismanaged firm, lurching from one contrived strategy to the next. In that context, an advertising campaign that used shock value to generate cheap publicity could easily sound like a plausible option.
It seems to me, however, that there is a deeper truth at work in the “Creepy King” campaign. This truth emerges in one of the least creepy King ads, which portrays him breaking into McDonald’s headquarters to steal the recipe for the Egg McMuffin so that Burger King can produce a copycat sandwich. Here we have a company openly admitting to its own redundancy, its lack of any mandate for existence. Maybe Burger King can give you slightly more food, or give it to you cheaper—but at the end of the day, it’s not contributing anything distinctive, original, or even particularly desirable. The commercials in fact exacerbate this sense of providing a generic food substance by referring to Burger King’s food primarily as “meat,” rather than naming the particular type of meat involved. Finally, the use of the mascot only highlights the contrast with McDonald’s: while we might imagine people being nostalgic about characters like Ronald McDonald or the Hamburglar, literally no one has fond memories of the old Burger King mascot that this ad is reviving.
There’s no reason for me to have any emotional connection with Burger King beyond the minimal investment it takes to prefer a Whopper to a Big Mac—and yet these commercials are manipulating me into a very strong (if negative) emotional response. As unprecedented as this ad campaign is on one level, though, is it really anything more than an intensification of what has been latent in Burger King all along? Haven’t all of its ads made disproportionate emotional demands on us, asking us to feel some kind of loyalty or affection for a McDonald’s knock-off? Burger King has nothing to offer us, and yet it has been demanding our attention and shoving itself at us nonetheless. In the last analysis, there was always something creepy about Burger King, and for a brief, uncanny moment, they were honest about it.
I am not the first commentator to be drawn almost involuntarily into the territory of creepiness. Most notably, Sigmund Freud beat me to it by nearly a century, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” The term “uncanny” is a translation of the German word unheimlich (literally “unhomely”), which refers to a wide range of phenomena associated with fear and dread. Freud detects an ambivalence in the term, which etymologically seems to refer to what is unfamiliar (what we are not at home with) but experientially most often involves something that is all too familiar, something that fits too well.
These ads, whose mascot was widely called the “Creepy King” in the press and among viewers, generated considerable word-of-mouth attention for Burger King, and in a sense, they could be viewed as one of the most successful “viral marketing” campaigns of all time. Unfortunately for Burger King, the attention was almost uniformly negative. In light of the public’s revulsion, the firm’s advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, tweaked the formula slightly. In one later ad, The King crashes through an office window in a relentless quest to replace a woman’s microwaved lunch with a huge hamburger, while in another, he engages in a “reverse pick-pocketing” scheme wherein he sneaks money into people’s pockets, apparently symbolizing his commitment to saving customers money.The shift to surrealism was not enough to shake the “Creepy King” image, and ultimately the mascot was retired. Yet The King lives on, seared into the American cultural consciousness as an enduring archetype of creepiness. I’ve been researching the topic for years, primarily by asking people what they think of creepiness. Every definition I attempted was rejected as inadequate, and every creepy pop cultural character seemed open to other interpretations—except for one. The King is the one example that always receives unanimous consent.
Doubtless a big part of the character’s impact is the simple shock that such an off-putting theme would be part of an advertisement. It’s rare enough to have an aggressively creepy character on television, and even then the writers will normally make some effort to make the character somehow relatable or sympathetic. Yet The King has no back-story, no mitigating factors. He is sheer creepiness embodied, all the more so given his unexpected irruption into a genre that normally makes every effort to pander to the viewer.
How could this happen? On a practical level, one can see how a space for such an unprecedented campaign could open up precisely at Burger King. A perpetual also-ran in the fast food industry, Burger King is a frequent target for private equity companies eager to snatch up ailing firms and apply their cost-cutting magic to return them to profitability. Hence it is also a chronically mismanaged firm, lurching from one contrived strategy to the next. In that context, an advertising campaign that used shock value to generate cheap publicity could easily sound like a plausible option.
It seems to me, however, that there is a deeper truth at work in the “Creepy King” campaign. This truth emerges in one of the least creepy King ads, which portrays him breaking into McDonald’s headquarters to steal the recipe for the Egg McMuffin so that Burger King can produce a copycat sandwich. Here we have a company openly admitting to its own redundancy, its lack of any mandate for existence. Maybe Burger King can give you slightly more food, or give it to you cheaper—but at the end of the day, it’s not contributing anything distinctive, original, or even particularly desirable. The commercials in fact exacerbate this sense of providing a generic food substance by referring to Burger King’s food primarily as “meat,” rather than naming the particular type of meat involved. Finally, the use of the mascot only highlights the contrast with McDonald’s: while we might imagine people being nostalgic about characters like Ronald McDonald or the Hamburglar, literally no one has fond memories of the old Burger King mascot that this ad is reviving.
There’s no reason for me to have any emotional connection with Burger King beyond the minimal investment it takes to prefer a Whopper to a Big Mac—and yet these commercials are manipulating me into a very strong (if negative) emotional response. As unprecedented as this ad campaign is on one level, though, is it really anything more than an intensification of what has been latent in Burger King all along? Haven’t all of its ads made disproportionate emotional demands on us, asking us to feel some kind of loyalty or affection for a McDonald’s knock-off? Burger King has nothing to offer us, and yet it has been demanding our attention and shoving itself at us nonetheless. In the last analysis, there was always something creepy about Burger King, and for a brief, uncanny moment, they were honest about it.
I am not the first commentator to be drawn almost involuntarily into the territory of creepiness. Most notably, Sigmund Freud beat me to it by nearly a century, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” The term “uncanny” is a translation of the German word unheimlich (literally “unhomely”), which refers to a wide range of phenomena associated with fear and dread. Freud detects an ambivalence in the term, which etymologically seems to refer to what is unfamiliar (what we are not at home with) but experientially most often involves something that is all too familiar, something that fits too well.
by Adam Kotsko, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Future of Virtual Sex
Today’s sex robots are so rudimentary that they are essentially unusable. But as sex-robot enthusiasts are quick to point out, the shoebox-sized cellphones of the 1970s were nearly useless—but they were the first prototypes for today’s ubiquitous smartphones. Eventually, sex robots will have reasonably humanlike facial expressions, limb movements, voices and even odors. The futurist Stowe Boyd has predicted that by 2025, “robotic sex partners will be…commonplace, although the source of scorn and division.”
I’m skeptical. Even by 2025 it seems unlikely that sex robots will have much appeal for male or female users. The reason is that simulating human interaction for such a multisensory experience as sex is a very complex engineering problem. Our brains have evolved to be very good at picking up on tiny social cues, like the direction of another’s gaze, the social intent of a brief touch or the shadings of vocal tone. In this interpersonal domain, we’re not so easily tricked.
Though the engineering challenges of simulating human sexual interaction are difficult, there’s no reason to believe that they are impossible to solve. Sex that entirely lacks human feeling and attachment may sound unappealing or even repugnant to many people, but at some point in the future, sex robots will become viable. A central question is whether that arc of progress will take so long that they will be leapfrogged by a different technology: neural virtual reality.
Rather than activating the body’s senses naturally, like a sex robot would, neural virtual reality simulates experience by artificially activating nerve cells. Until recently, the most common way to do this involved sticking an electrode (a thin metal needle) into tissue and passing electrical current to activate neurons at the tip. For example, if I were to stick an electrode into a sensory nerve in your arm, I could activate a single nerve fiber that might give you the sensation of vibration in a patch of skin on your palm.
More recently, scientists have developed a new and improved way to activate neurons. First, using genetic engineering, they create a virus that can only infect certain cell types (like the nerve cells with endings in the skin that respond to caresses). When the virus infects the target cell, it commands that neuron to produce a protein that sends out an electrical signal only when activated by blue light. Then, if someone shines a blue light on your skin, you will feel a caress. That perceived caress could be modified by flashing the blue light in different patterns all over the body. The sex robot of the future may well be a catsuit with inward-facing flashing blue LEDs embedded in it, linked via Bluetooth to an app on your phone. The sexual application of this technique, called optogenetics, could be just decades away.
by David Linden, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Facebook Will Soon Be Able to ID You in Any Photo
Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
Catapulting the California-based company beyond other corporate players in the field, Facebook's DeepFace system is now as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks. The intention is not to invade the privacy of Facebook's more than 1.3 billion active users, insists Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City who directs Facebook's artificial intelligence research, but rather to protect it. Once DeepFace identifies your face in one of the 400 million new photos that users upload every day, “you will get an alert from Facebook telling you that you appear in the picture,” he explains. “You can then choose to blur out your face from the picture to protect your privacy.” Many people, however, are troubled by the prospect of being identified at all—especially in strangers' photographs. Facebook is already using the system, although its face-tagging system only reveals to you the identities of your “friends.”
DeepFace isn't the only horse in the race. The U.S. government has poured funding into university-based facial recognition research. And in the private sector, Google and other companies are pursuing their own projects to automatically identify people who appear in photos and videos.
Exactly how automated facial recognition will be used—and how the law may limit it—is unclear. But once the technology matures, it is bound to create as many privacy problems as it solves. “The genie is, or soon will be, out of the bottle,” says Brian Mennecke, an information systems researcher at Iowa State University in Ames who studies privacy. “There will be no going back.” (...)
But DeepFace's greatest advantage—and the aspect of the project that has sparked the most rancor—is its training data. The DeepFace paper breezily mentions the existence of a data set called SFC, for Social Face Classification, a library of 4.4 million labeled faces harvested from the Facebook pages of 4030 users. Although users give Facebook permission to use their personal data when they sign up for the website, the DeepFace research paper makes no mention of the consent of the photos' owners.
“Just as creepy as it sounds,” blared the headline of an article in The Huffington Post describing DeepFace a week after it came out. Commenting on The Huffington Post's piece, one reader wrote: “It is obvious that police and other law enforcement authorities will use this technology and search through our photos without us even knowing.” Facebook has confirmed that it provides law enforcement with access to user data when it is compelled by a judge's order.
by John Bohannon, Science | Read more:
Image: William Duke
Catapulting the California-based company beyond other corporate players in the field, Facebook's DeepFace system is now as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks. The intention is not to invade the privacy of Facebook's more than 1.3 billion active users, insists Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City who directs Facebook's artificial intelligence research, but rather to protect it. Once DeepFace identifies your face in one of the 400 million new photos that users upload every day, “you will get an alert from Facebook telling you that you appear in the picture,” he explains. “You can then choose to blur out your face from the picture to protect your privacy.” Many people, however, are troubled by the prospect of being identified at all—especially in strangers' photographs. Facebook is already using the system, although its face-tagging system only reveals to you the identities of your “friends.”DeepFace isn't the only horse in the race. The U.S. government has poured funding into university-based facial recognition research. And in the private sector, Google and other companies are pursuing their own projects to automatically identify people who appear in photos and videos.
Exactly how automated facial recognition will be used—and how the law may limit it—is unclear. But once the technology matures, it is bound to create as many privacy problems as it solves. “The genie is, or soon will be, out of the bottle,” says Brian Mennecke, an information systems researcher at Iowa State University in Ames who studies privacy. “There will be no going back.” (...)
But DeepFace's greatest advantage—and the aspect of the project that has sparked the most rancor—is its training data. The DeepFace paper breezily mentions the existence of a data set called SFC, for Social Face Classification, a library of 4.4 million labeled faces harvested from the Facebook pages of 4030 users. Although users give Facebook permission to use their personal data when they sign up for the website, the DeepFace research paper makes no mention of the consent of the photos' owners.
“Just as creepy as it sounds,” blared the headline of an article in The Huffington Post describing DeepFace a week after it came out. Commenting on The Huffington Post's piece, one reader wrote: “It is obvious that police and other law enforcement authorities will use this technology and search through our photos without us even knowing.” Facebook has confirmed that it provides law enforcement with access to user data when it is compelled by a judge's order.
by John Bohannon, Science | Read more:
Image: William Duke
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Secret of the Bro
According to recent descriptions, the bro is a straight white man who is between fifteen and thirty-five years old, “an adult male whose social life revolves around collegiate homosocial bonding,” or simply a guy who says “bro.” He is “boisterous and uncouth” and “the worst guy ever.” He wears a backwards baseball cap, a light blue oxford or femsports team shirt, cargo shorts, mandals or boat shoes, and region-specific accessories like knit caps in LA or puffer vests in the Colorado. He drinks beer. Most of these articles focus on signifiers of the bro because their authors haven’t seized on the essential truth of brodom: A bro is just a man who primarily hangs out with other men and lacks consistent taste. The absence of taste is crucial: It’s not just that he wears cargo pants, it’s that he has the audacity to mix oxfords with athletic gear.
Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency—which is not limited to his wardrobe—is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.
“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.” (...)
Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste—a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.
The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because—correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions—the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:
In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.
by Johannah King-Slutzky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Manuel Paul
Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency—which is not limited to his wardrobe—is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.” (...)
Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste—a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.
The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because—correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions—the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:
The only way to be a real man is to be a real man as ferociously as humanly possible. He goes all-in; he gets shredded and ripped and defines his life by aggression and competitions. He buys the hamburgers that comes with two other hamburgers and a chicken cutlet on top of it. Why? Because it’s three hamburgers with a chicken cutlet on top of it.But the bro didn’t “become” toxic. Ironically, our awareness of his toxicity seems to be inversely proportional to his actual behavior. In the early aughts, he seemed fun when he was at his most violent, in Jackass style pranks and frat-bro foreign policy. Now, our bros are more like Andy Samberg than Ashton Kutcher—they’re not violent, they just think with the right wrapping paper, their dicks make a good birthday present. (Then again, maybe this signals only a shift in violence from the physical to sexual.) The hipster has replaced the bro as the dominant lampoonable masculinity; Bush is out, Obama is in. (...)
In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.
by Johannah King-Slutzky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Manuel Paul
The Great SIM Heist
How spies stole the keys to the encryption castle
[ed. The NSA is completely out of control and no one seems capable of doing anything about it, including our President and Congress. It's like the Matrix.]
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. (...)
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.” (...)
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.” (...)
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
[ed. The NSA is completely out of control and no one seems capable of doing anything about it, including our President and Congress. It's like the Matrix.]
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. (...)
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.” (...)
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.” (...)
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
by Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Thursday, February 19, 2015
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