How Pop Made a Revolution

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, Bob Stanley, W.W. Norton, 624 pages

I wish I could say that my love of pop music began when my middle school music teacher showed me a documentary called “The Compleat Beatles.” That would be the socially acceptable, hipster-sanctioned origin story. But truthfully, the affair began a couple years earlier in 1986, when I conspired with some friends to flood our local top 40 station with requests for the song “Rock Me Amadeus.” Dismayed that Falco’s masterwork had slipped in the charts, we resolved to do whatever we could to reverse its fate. This was either true love or something equally intense—a force that could drive a 12-year-old boy to cold-call a radio station and then sit next to the stereo for hours with finger poised over the tape-record button, enduring songs by Mister Mister and Starship, just waiting for that descending synth motif to issue forth from the speakers.

I’m not terribly surprised that “Rock Me Amadeus” receives no mention in Bob Stanley’s new book. While the song embodies the very essence of pop—it is quirky, flamboyant, goofily ambitious, yet so very of its moment—it was ultimately a failed experiment, a novelty hit. (Though, to be fair, it was no less kitschy than The Timelords’ “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” which does receive mention.) I listen to it now and wonder what the hell my 12-year-old self was thinking. But that’s love, right? It rarely makes sense after it has passed. Stanley clearly knows something about the fever dream of the besotted pop fan, and much of his book is written from that headspace.

What a joy it is to find a music writer who didn’t get the rock-critic memo—the one that says you’re supposed to worship at the altar of punk rock, praise Radiohead, and hate the Eagles. Stanley has plenty of nice things to say about the Eagles, the Bee Gees, Hall and Oates, and Abba. Conversely, he has nothing but contempt for The Clash, those self-anointed exemplars of punk rock. “The Clash set out parameters,” he writes, “and then squirmed like politicians when they were caught busting their own manifesto.” (Stanley prefers the more self-aware Sex Pistols.) Radiohead fare even worse; he describes these critical darlings as “dad rock.” Vocalist Thom York sings “as if he was in the fetal position.”

Of Bob Dylan, a figure as close to a saint as we get in the annals of rock lit, Stanley writes: “along with the Stones he sealed the concept of snotty behavior as a lifestyle, snarled at the conventional with his pack of giggling lickspittle dogs, and extended Brando’s ‘What have you got?’ one-liner into a lifelong party of terse putdowns.” For those of us who grew up reading far too many issues of Rolling Stone for our own good, this is bracing tonic indeed.

What gives Stanley the edge over so many other music journalists is the fact that he is a songwriter himself, and a fairly successful one at that: his band Saint Etienne had a string of UK Top 20 hits in the 1990s. It is easier for musicians than for non-musician critics, I believe, to see beyond genre boundaries and appreciate tunefulness wherever it may reside. Stanley, whom I’m pretty sure would rather be known as a “musician who writes” than a “writer who plays music,” takes a more expansive view of the term “pop” than a lot of other writers might do. In his view, pop simply means “popular.” It is not, as is typically imagined, a specific sound—say that of a Britney Spears or Katy Perry. Under Stanley’s definition, Nirvana qualifies as pop. So do Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, and Glen Campbell.

At 624 pages, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is a doorstop of a book, but Stanley’s enthusiasm for the material keeps the narrative moving briskly. He can get inside a song and describe its magic to outsiders like no one else I have ever come across. Consider the following highlights: Of the “clattering, drum-heavy” mix of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” he writes, “It sounded like jump blues, only with someone dismantling scaffolding in the studio.” On Abba: “No one musician stands out on any of their hits because they don’t sound like anyone played an instrument on them; they all sound like a music box carved from ice.” On the Police: “Singer Sting had a high, mewling voice that, appropriately, sounded a little like the whine of a police siren.” And, as is probably apparent already, Stanley is very effective with the terse putdown. My favorite concerns The Cure—a band that has spawned an entire cottage industry of mopey imitators: “It was all somehow powdery and a little slight,” he writes. “The Cure were more about stubbing your toe than taking your life.” Ouch.

Stanley’s two preoccupations throughout the book are innovation and craft, in that order. He gives a lot of space to sonic pioneers like Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and later the architects of early hip-hop and house music, detailing how each wave of experimentation inevitably made its way into the heart of the mainstream sound, eventually becoming calcified until the next upheaval came along to shake things up.

by Robert Dean Lurie, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image: The Beatles / Wikimedia Commons

War Porn

In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don't get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport departure gates. In the meantime, Americans are clearly finding it difficult to remain emotionally roiled up about our confusing wars in Syria and Iraq, the sputtering one in Afghanistan, and various raids, drone attacks, and minor conflicts elsewhere.

Fortunately, we have just the ticket, one that has been punched again and again for close to a century: Hollywood war movies (to which the Pentagon is always eager to lend a helping hand). American Sniper, which started out with the celebratory tagline “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history” and now has the tagline “the most successful war movie of all time,” is just the latest in a long line of films that have kept Americans on their war game. Think of them as war porn, meant to leave us perpetually hyped up. Now, grab some popcorn and settle back to enjoy the show.

There’s Only One War Movie

Wandering around YouTube recently, I stumbled across some good old government-issue propaganda. It was a video clearly meant to stir American emotions and prepare us for a long struggle against a determined, brutal, and barbaric enemy whose way of life is a challenge to the most basic American values. Here's some of what I learned: our enemy is engaged in a crusade against the West; wants to establish a world government and make all of us bow down before it; fights fanatically, beheads prisoners, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of its followers in inhuman suicide attacks. Though its weapons are modern, its thinking and beliefs are 2,000 years out of date and inscrutable to us.

Of course, you knew there was a trick coming, right? This little U.S. government-produced film wasn’t about the militants of the Islamic State. Made by the U.S. Navy in 1943, its subject was “Our Enemy the Japanese.” Substitute “radical Islam” for “emperor worship,” though, and it still makes a certain propagandistic sense. While the basics may be largely the same (us versus them, good versus evil), modern times do demand something slicker than the video equivalent of an old newsreel. The age of the Internet, with its short attention spans and heightened expectations of cheap thrills, calls for a higher class of war porn, but as with that 1943 film, it remains remarkable how familiar what’s being produced remains.

Like propaganda films and sexual pornography, Hollywood movies about America at war have changed remarkably little over the years. Here's the basic formula, from John Wayne in the World War II-era Sands of Iwo Jima to today's American Sniper:

*American soldiers are good, the enemy bad. Nearly every war movie is going to have a scene in which Americans label the enemy as “savages,” “barbarians,” or “bloodthirsty fanatics,” typically following a “sneak attack” or a suicide bombing. Our country’s goal is to liberate; the enemy's, to conquer. Such a framework prepares us to accept things that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster. Racism naturally gets a bye; as they once were “Japs” (not Japanese), they are now “hajjis” and “ragheads” (not Muslims or Iraqis). It’s beyond question that the ends justify just about any means we might use, from the nuclear obliteration of two cities of almost no military significance to the grimmest sort of torture. In this way, the war film long ago became a moral free-fire zone for its American characters.

*American soldiers believe in God and Country, in “something bigger than themselves,” in something “worth dying for,” but without ever becoming blindly attached to it. The enemy, on the other hand, is blindly devoted to a religion, political faith, or dictator, and it goes without saying (though it’s said) that his God -- whether an emperor, Communism, or Allah -- is evil. As one critic put it back in 2007 with just a tad of hyperbole, “In every movie Hollywood makes, every time an Arab utters the word Allah… something blows up.”

*War films spend no significant time on why those savages might be so intent on going after us. The purpose of American killing, however, is nearly always clearly defined. It's to “save American lives,” those over there and those who won’t die because we don't have to fight them over here. Saving such lives explains American war: in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, for example, the main character defuses roadside bombs to make Iraq safer for other American soldiers. In the recent World War II-themed Fury, Brad Pitt similarly mows down ranks of Germans to save his comrades. Even torture is justified, as in Zero Dark Thirty, in the cause of saving our lives from their nightmarish schemes. In American Sniper, shooter Chris Kyle focuses on the many American lives he’s saved by shooting Iraqis; his PTSD is, in fact, caused by his having “failed” to have saved even more. Hey, when an American kills in war, he's the one who suffers the most, not that mutilated kid or his grieving mother -- I got nightmares, man! I still see their faces!

*Our soldiers are human beings with emotionally engaging backstories, sweet gals waiting at home, and promising lives ahead of them that might be cut tragically short by an enemy from the gates of hell. The bad guys lack such backstories. They are anonymous fanatics with neither a past worth mentioning nor a future worth imagining. This is usually pretty blunt stuff. Kyle’s nemesis in American Sniper, for instance, wears all black. Thanks to that, you know he’s an insta-villain without the need for further information. And speaking of lack of a backstory, he improbably appears in the film both in the Sunni city of Fallujah and in Sadr City, a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad, apparently so super-bad that his desire to kill Americans overcomes even Iraq's mad sectarianism.

by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch |  Read more:

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Underwater Road (Wild West), Brad Hamers on Flickr
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We're All Gonna Die

[ed. As my generation ages I'm beginning to see more articles like this. It's a good sign. The concept of what constitutes a good death needs to be radically redefined. See also: As I Lay Dying.]

I’m writing this after hearing an apparently innocuous and encouraging snippet of news – that a new lung cancer treatment is capable of giving sufferers a possible “extra 200 days” of life. Another morning, another “battle against cancer” fought, and in this case won – sort of.

Yet I find myself rather in sympathy with the one in five Dutch doctors who, it was reported this week, would consider helping someone die even if they had no physical problems but were “tired of living”. Because these doctors have the maturity to face the fact that life has a natural end.

The wearying truth is, there are just so many “battles”, and they appear to be multiplying all the time. A new drug to treat strokes. A breakthrough in the “war” against heart disease. A promising initiative on Alzheimer’s. We are fed, daily, the hopeful news: fatal disease is slowly on the retreat. But there’s always one more, and sooner or later we all lose.

Which brings me back to the news item that got me thinking in the first place. An extra 200 days for lung cancer sufferers. I found myself wondering – what kind of days? Of course, all days may seem worth living when you are faced with your imminent demise. But sometimes the endless quest to extend our days has the smack of futility about it.

For it seems to me that in the constant narratives of “triumphs” over this disease or that illness, we are not engaged so much in a struggle against disease, but death itself. We are only partially rational beings – and at the non-rational level, we believe medicine will save us from our fates.

Of course we all “know” that we are going to die – but that order of knowledge, for most of us, is of the same kind that tells us we are all made of stardust, or that at the core of the atoms in our bodies and brains there is only a void. In other words, our imagination can’t grasp it. It’s just a rumour, in this case a nasty one.

And good job too, you may say. There is an argument that strong denial mechanisms are essential in order to survive our existential plight. The endless jogging and fitness regimes, the constant struggle to find out what “superfood” it is this week that will reduce the chance of this or that threat to our health; even the dangerous sports that convince us that we can outmanoeuvre mortality. Maybe the maintenance of such delusions is the secret of a happy life.

Yet for many the thought won’t quite go away. Thus, we are never quite at peace, because we are always working so hard to keep our eyes from staring at the sun. We immerse ourselves in trivial distractions – shopping, loud music, flashing lights. As the existential psychologist Rollo May observed: “Anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something.” That is to say, anxiety about nothing-ness.

I watch the runners on Hampstead Heath every day puffing and panting – suffering – in order to put off the big event, and while I admire them, I wonder if it isn’t all in vain. As a recent study on cancer at Johns Hopkins University revealed, lifestyle is somewhat overrated as a panacea for extending life. Researchers found that more than two-thirds of cancers are driven by random mistakes in cell division that are completely outside our control. And beyond that, there are genetic predispositions, also outside our control.

Furthermore, only this month it was discovered that 50% of people will get cancer – as opposed to one in three, the previous estimate. So perhaps, rather than being at constant battle stations, we should get used to the idea, especially as a former editor of the BMJ, Richard Smith, said it was probably the best way to go: “Nature taking its course.” All that straining and sweating, all those nasty Lycra outfits, all those dreary stalks of broccoli – they may be there not to help us to prolong our lives so much as safeguard our illusions.

by Tim Lott, The Guardian |  Read more:

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Cold, Dark, and Happy: Alaska Is the New Leader in Well-Being

[ed. As a former Alaskan (35 yrs.) I can see why this survey might be valid. First, there's the awesome beauty of the state, which anyone can experience, even if they live in Anchorage. How much of it they experience depends on the time, money and effort they're willing to expend to get "out there", but it's a young population in general and everyone is pretty active (to keep from going nuts). Second, 'individuality' is celebrated (if not enshrined in the state's constitution) so no one feels like anyone is looking over their shoulder, or that they have to conform to any overiding community values or standards. So there's a lot of room for people to express themselves (and, in the process, find association with other like-minded micro-communities). Finally, Alaskans just like being thought of as "Alaskan". It implies a sort of hardiness and apptitude that you can't find anywhere else*. And yes, there are bears in the backyard and moose on the doorstep, but those things just add to the enjoyment and mystique of being in a place so completely different than anywhere else. The mindset is: the harder it gets, the more invigorated people feel (to get through whatever it is they have to get through). That's really the Alaskan ethos.]

"Alaskans are the best in the nation in terms of exercise," explained Dan Witters, a research director at the polling agency Gallup, in making the case that Alaska is the nation's new bastion of well-being. "Which just goes to show you that you don't need year-round good weather to demonstrate good exercise habits."

Even if I remain unconvinced on that front, the fact that people manage to exercise more in Alaska than people in any other state—somehow—is just one of the many metrics that landed the state the number-one spot in a massive study of health and well-being across America, released this week.

Alaskans also reported the lowest stress levels of any population in the country over the past year, and the state had the lowest rate of diabetes. Maybe most surprisingly, despite the cold and darkness, Alaskans also had the second lowest rate of depression diagnoses in the country.

Witters, who oversaw the 2014 Gallup-Healthways study of 176,702 Americans, seemed to find genuine excitement in the ascension of Alaska—more than once calling it "really neat" and suggesting that it is a model that other states would do well to emulate. Indeed, the state's victory is a realization of longer-term trends, Witters explained, that he has been measuring and observing in Alaska for a while now.

The state has actually been in the top 10 multiple times since the first annual well-being rankings in 2008—Hawaii and Colorado are the only states to have made the top 10 every year—though Alaska has never before been number one. Other rural, colder states seem to score highly in well-being, too: South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and Utah all made the top ten.

These rankings have made little news in past years, in part because they are based entirely on self-reported surveys, which scientists are quick to dismiss. (Maybe Alaskans don't actually exercise more; they're just part of a statewide culture of lying about exercising. Maybe they don't have diagnoses of depression because doctors aren't recognizing symptoms, or people don't feel comfortable talking about it in a telesurvey. Et cetera.) But seven years and 2.1 million surveys in, the longitudinal trends seem too substantial to dismiss outright. And if people are lying, Witters concedes, at least they are most likely lying in the same ways regularly. (...)

And in community involvement, Alaska leads the nation, too. There, for example, the survey asks people whether they've received recognition in the last year for helping to improve their community. "That's a tough nut to crack nationally," Witters said. But among Alaskans, 28 percent say they have—which is actually the best rate in the country. They are also, despite (because of?) the bear population, fifth in the country in terms of feeling safe and secure.

"Another really good one that I love about Alaska, within the purpose element, is learning something new and interesting every day," Witters explained, "which is an important psychological need." That metric is a reason that college towns tend to score highly on the well-being index. And there, too, Alaska is number one in the nation, with 72 percent of residents feeling daily intellectual stimulation.

The state is held in stark contrast to the opposite end of the spectrum, the cases of Kentucky and West Virginia. If nothing else, the two states attest to the validity of the ranking system in that there is consistency in its results: The pair has managed to hold down spots 49 and 50 for six consecutive years.

"Kentucky and West Virginia are really in bad shape," said Witters. There diagnoses of depression are perennially among the highest in the nation, as are stress levels and high blood pressure. Nearly a third of West Virginians smoke tobacco, compared to 19 percent of people nationwide.

Behind those disheartening numbers is another particularly important metric: having someone in your life who encourages you to be healthy. There West Virginia also ranks last in the country. "That is a really good leverage point that they could take advantage of, that cultural change of encouraging accountability to one another," said Witters, when I asked them how West Virginia could learn from Alaska. "It's about having someone who has fundamental expectations of you, in how you live your life."

by James Hamblin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Gallup/Healthways

* "In theory it's not impossible to live like that, and of course there are people who do. But nature is actually kind of unnatural, in a way. And relaxation can actually be threatening. It takes experience and preparation to really live with those contradictions."

                                                                     ~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat" - Lily Tomlin.
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Paysage Hivernal, Valerius de Saedeleer. Belgian (1867 - 1942).
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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 

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.

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:

Image: Amazon

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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

Chinatown

Bilal Bağcı
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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.

by Adam Kotsko, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Julien Legrand, Unusual Banality series
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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

[ed. ahhh.. good to be home again. No more boring, old beaches to put up with.]
photo: markk