Friday, March 20, 2015
Turning Japanese
I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable.
I steel myself before landing, my mind tallying variables and unknowns: will my luggage land with me and emerge on the dingy carousel? Will the taxi service I booked online in advance arrive on time, at the right terminal, or at all? Will traffic be an impediment to my destination?
And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens on the way from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of the Los Angeles highway off-ramps by LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit.
Landing in Tokyo, though, is a breeze. All the travelators and escalators glide silently; the wall-mounted clocks, digital and analogue, tell the right time. When I reach the baggage carousel, my suitcase is already circling. Trains and buses depart punctually. I don’t have to pre-book because they’re scheduled merely minutes apart. I don’t have to think of anything beyond the last book I was reading upon touchdown, fishing out my passport at immigration, and what I might order for dinner that evening once I reach my apartment. Everything seems to be taken care of, and nothing is broken.
As I ease into town, usually via the limousine bus service, the sidewalks outside are teeming with well-dressed urbanites heading home from work or out to restaurants, everyone in motion with purpose and meaning.
But that’s not what the papers say. Japan has seen over two decades of a stagnant-to-recessionary economy since its 1989-90 juggernaut bubble burst. It has become the world’s economic whipping boy, described repeatedly as ‘the sick man of Asia’, incapable of revival, doddering off into the sunset.
Reports of Japan’s societal stagnation are no prettier. Stories about the country’s ageing population and plummeting birth rate abound – with the latter hitting a record low last year amid dire predictions of a disappearing Japan. At current rates, demographers estimate that the overall population will drop 30 million by 2050.
Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low.
“Much of the world is going Japan’s way,” says Pilling. “If Japan is doomed, so are many others.”
However, Pilling adds, the alternative isn’t necessarily better. “Can we really only conceive of a successful economy as one where the population increases year after year? By this measure Pakistan and many African countries should be screaming success stories. They’re not.” (...)
What makes one society hold together 'reasonably well', while others fail? You only have to look to the language for insight. Common words like ganbaru (to slog on tenaciously through tough times), gaman (endure with patience, dignity and respect), and jishuku (restrain yourself according to others' needs) convey a culture rooted in pragmatism and perseverance. (...)
Japan's stagnancy, pilloried by economists and analysts in the west, may turn out to be the catalyst for its greatest strengths: resiliency, reinvention and quiet endurance.
Until a couple of years ago, I lectured Japan's best and brightest at the University of Tokyo. My Japanese students were polite to a fault. They handed their essays to me and my teaching assistant with two hands affixed to the paper, like sacred artefacts. They nodded affirmatively when I asked if they understood what I'd said, even when they didn't . They were never late to class, and they never left early.
But when I pressed them on their future plans, they expressed a kind of blissful ambivalence. "I'd like to help improve Japan's legal system," Kazuki, a smart and trilingual student from Kyushu told me. "But if that doesn't work out, I just want to be a good father."
Sayaka, a literature major from Hokkaido, asked me if I understood her generation's dilemma. "We grew up very comfortable," she said. "We learned not to take risks."
No risk-taking – anathema to today’s 'fail-fast', Silicon Valley culture – would seem to indicate stagnation writ large. But what if it's a more futuristic model for all of us, even superior to Japan's sleek, sci-fi bubble-era iconography: all hi-tech and flashy yen, but no soul?
Waseda University professor Norihiro Kato, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, sees a radical example in Japanese culture that he describes as a model of 'de-growth', of returning to other measures of growth that transcend stagnancy, focused instead on quality of life.
"The shape of wisdom as well as self-worth has drastically changed,” he tells me at his office in Takadanobaba, north west Tokyo. "We can point to periods of change, the late 80s with Chernobyl, or early 90s with the end of the USSR and communism [the end of history, according to Francis Fukuyama], or the early 00s with September 11. And finally the early the early 10s, with March 11 and Fukushima Daiichi."
Kato sees our world as one of fundamental transition, from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite – a transformation Japan grasps better than most of us. "I consider younger Japanese floating, shifting into a new qualified power, which can do and undo as well: can enjoy doing and not doing equally."
I ask him if Japan's model – stagnancy as strength – can inform the rest of the world, educate us in the possibilities of impoverishment?
"Imagine creating a robot that has the strength and delicacy to handle an egg," he says. “That robot has to have the skills to understand and not destroy that egg. This is the key concept for growing our ideas about growth into our managing of de-growth."
Handling that egg is tricky. A spike in youth volunteerism in Japan post 3/11 suggests that young Japanese, despite the global hand-wringing over their futures, are bypassing the old pathways to corporate success in favour of more humble participation.
I steel myself before landing, my mind tallying variables and unknowns: will my luggage land with me and emerge on the dingy carousel? Will the taxi service I booked online in advance arrive on time, at the right terminal, or at all? Will traffic be an impediment to my destination?
And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens on the way from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of the Los Angeles highway off-ramps by LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit.Landing in Tokyo, though, is a breeze. All the travelators and escalators glide silently; the wall-mounted clocks, digital and analogue, tell the right time. When I reach the baggage carousel, my suitcase is already circling. Trains and buses depart punctually. I don’t have to pre-book because they’re scheduled merely minutes apart. I don’t have to think of anything beyond the last book I was reading upon touchdown, fishing out my passport at immigration, and what I might order for dinner that evening once I reach my apartment. Everything seems to be taken care of, and nothing is broken.
As I ease into town, usually via the limousine bus service, the sidewalks outside are teeming with well-dressed urbanites heading home from work or out to restaurants, everyone in motion with purpose and meaning.
But that’s not what the papers say. Japan has seen over two decades of a stagnant-to-recessionary economy since its 1989-90 juggernaut bubble burst. It has become the world’s economic whipping boy, described repeatedly as ‘the sick man of Asia’, incapable of revival, doddering off into the sunset.
Reports of Japan’s societal stagnation are no prettier. Stories about the country’s ageing population and plummeting birth rate abound – with the latter hitting a record low last year amid dire predictions of a disappearing Japan. At current rates, demographers estimate that the overall population will drop 30 million by 2050.
Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low.
“Much of the world is going Japan’s way,” says Pilling. “If Japan is doomed, so are many others.”
However, Pilling adds, the alternative isn’t necessarily better. “Can we really only conceive of a successful economy as one where the population increases year after year? By this measure Pakistan and many African countries should be screaming success stories. They’re not.” (...)
What makes one society hold together 'reasonably well', while others fail? You only have to look to the language for insight. Common words like ganbaru (to slog on tenaciously through tough times), gaman (endure with patience, dignity and respect), and jishuku (restrain yourself according to others' needs) convey a culture rooted in pragmatism and perseverance. (...)
Japan's stagnancy, pilloried by economists and analysts in the west, may turn out to be the catalyst for its greatest strengths: resiliency, reinvention and quiet endurance.
Until a couple of years ago, I lectured Japan's best and brightest at the University of Tokyo. My Japanese students were polite to a fault. They handed their essays to me and my teaching assistant with two hands affixed to the paper, like sacred artefacts. They nodded affirmatively when I asked if they understood what I'd said, even when they didn't . They were never late to class, and they never left early.
But when I pressed them on their future plans, they expressed a kind of blissful ambivalence. "I'd like to help improve Japan's legal system," Kazuki, a smart and trilingual student from Kyushu told me. "But if that doesn't work out, I just want to be a good father."
Sayaka, a literature major from Hokkaido, asked me if I understood her generation's dilemma. "We grew up very comfortable," she said. "We learned not to take risks."
No risk-taking – anathema to today’s 'fail-fast', Silicon Valley culture – would seem to indicate stagnation writ large. But what if it's a more futuristic model for all of us, even superior to Japan's sleek, sci-fi bubble-era iconography: all hi-tech and flashy yen, but no soul?
Waseda University professor Norihiro Kato, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, sees a radical example in Japanese culture that he describes as a model of 'de-growth', of returning to other measures of growth that transcend stagnancy, focused instead on quality of life.
"The shape of wisdom as well as self-worth has drastically changed,” he tells me at his office in Takadanobaba, north west Tokyo. "We can point to periods of change, the late 80s with Chernobyl, or early 90s with the end of the USSR and communism [the end of history, according to Francis Fukuyama], or the early 00s with September 11. And finally the early the early 10s, with March 11 and Fukushima Daiichi."
Kato sees our world as one of fundamental transition, from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite – a transformation Japan grasps better than most of us. "I consider younger Japanese floating, shifting into a new qualified power, which can do and undo as well: can enjoy doing and not doing equally."
I ask him if Japan's model – stagnancy as strength – can inform the rest of the world, educate us in the possibilities of impoverishment?
"Imagine creating a robot that has the strength and delicacy to handle an egg," he says. “That robot has to have the skills to understand and not destroy that egg. This is the key concept for growing our ideas about growth into our managing of de-growth."
Handling that egg is tricky. A spike in youth volunteerism in Japan post 3/11 suggests that young Japanese, despite the global hand-wringing over their futures, are bypassing the old pathways to corporate success in favour of more humble participation.
by Roland Kelts, The Long+Short | Read more:
Image: Keiko Shimoda
We'll All Eat Grasshoppers - Once We Know How to Raise Them
Go to any market in Mexico and you’ll see piles of grasshoppers—dusted with chile powder, roasted with garlic, sprinkled with lime juice. I’ve eaten grasshoppers ground up in salsas and semi-pulverized in micheladas, their intact legs floating in the refreshing mix of beer, lime juice, and hot sauce. If you’ve ever been served chile-dusted orange slices along with a shot of mezcal—surprise! That chile powder was actually ground up grasshoppers.
By now you’ve probably heard that entomophagy—insect eating—is in our dietary future, or at least should be. Put aside the yuck factor; insects are packed with protein, much less damaging to the environment than other livestock, and can even be killed humanely by popping them in the freezer. It’s all so crazy it just might work; the United Nations published a whole book in 2013 promoting edible insects as a solution to global food insecurity. With Earth looking down the barrel of a population of 9 billion humans, all of them hungry for protein, it makes sense to cultivate animals with 80 percent-edible bodies (crickets) instead of 40 percent (beef), and that don’t require 10 pounds of feed to get two pounds of meat (pigs). In theory.
In Mexico, that’s more than just an idea. With its longstanding tradition of eating grasshoppers—chapulines in Spanish—Mexico would seem perfectly poised to enter the coming age of entomophagy. (Ant eggs—escamoles—are another popular dish.) But there’s one problem: chapulines are expensive. They cost more than pork, or chicken, and sometimes as much as beef or shrimp. Far from being a distasteful last resort for people who don’t have the money for meat (think Snowpiercer), chapulines are an in-demand product more people wish they could afford. The problem isn’t that bugs are rare, obviously. A recent study led by René Cerritos, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimated that 350,000 tons of chapulines live on Mexican crops every year. But harvesting them is disorganized, often illicit, and just plain difficult. Only a few hundred tons of chapulines are collected for food annually, and from only a couple of regions in Mexico. Chapulines can be quite affordable if you manage to buy them close to where they are harvested, Cerritos says. But once middlemen get involved and the grasshoppers get shipped around the country, the price can as much as triple.
Some chapulín operations maintain their own fields of alfafa—the bug’s favorite food. But others fly completely under the radar, the catchers trespassing on whatever farms they can find. Chapulines are agricultural pests, so you’d think farmers would be happy to get rid of them. But the clandestine hunts can damage crops and pack down the earth in carefully managed fields, breeding ill will between famers and chapulín catchers instead of cooperation. In Oaxaca, for example, chapulín catchers gather before dawn on a farm—often without the farmer’s knowledge or permission—and run up and down the rows of crops, plucking chapulines from the plants one at a time. “That’s not an effective way to catch your lunch, let alone make an affordable product,” says Gabe Mott, co-founder of the company Aspire, which is working to develop insect culinary products in Mexico, Ghana, and the US. Just like the UN, Aspire thinks entomophagy can help address hunger and poor nutrition around the world; in 2013 the company won the Hult Prize, $1 million in start-up money to social entrepreneurship projects. But before Aspire or any other company can turn these bugs into a feature, edible insects are going to have to get cheaper.
By now you’ve probably heard that entomophagy—insect eating—is in our dietary future, or at least should be. Put aside the yuck factor; insects are packed with protein, much less damaging to the environment than other livestock, and can even be killed humanely by popping them in the freezer. It’s all so crazy it just might work; the United Nations published a whole book in 2013 promoting edible insects as a solution to global food insecurity. With Earth looking down the barrel of a population of 9 billion humans, all of them hungry for protein, it makes sense to cultivate animals with 80 percent-edible bodies (crickets) instead of 40 percent (beef), and that don’t require 10 pounds of feed to get two pounds of meat (pigs). In theory.In Mexico, that’s more than just an idea. With its longstanding tradition of eating grasshoppers—chapulines in Spanish—Mexico would seem perfectly poised to enter the coming age of entomophagy. (Ant eggs—escamoles—are another popular dish.) But there’s one problem: chapulines are expensive. They cost more than pork, or chicken, and sometimes as much as beef or shrimp. Far from being a distasteful last resort for people who don’t have the money for meat (think Snowpiercer), chapulines are an in-demand product more people wish they could afford. The problem isn’t that bugs are rare, obviously. A recent study led by René Cerritos, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimated that 350,000 tons of chapulines live on Mexican crops every year. But harvesting them is disorganized, often illicit, and just plain difficult. Only a few hundred tons of chapulines are collected for food annually, and from only a couple of regions in Mexico. Chapulines can be quite affordable if you manage to buy them close to where they are harvested, Cerritos says. But once middlemen get involved and the grasshoppers get shipped around the country, the price can as much as triple.
Some chapulín operations maintain their own fields of alfafa—the bug’s favorite food. But others fly completely under the radar, the catchers trespassing on whatever farms they can find. Chapulines are agricultural pests, so you’d think farmers would be happy to get rid of them. But the clandestine hunts can damage crops and pack down the earth in carefully managed fields, breeding ill will between famers and chapulín catchers instead of cooperation. In Oaxaca, for example, chapulín catchers gather before dawn on a farm—often without the farmer’s knowledge or permission—and run up and down the rows of crops, plucking chapulines from the plants one at a time. “That’s not an effective way to catch your lunch, let alone make an affordable product,” says Gabe Mott, co-founder of the company Aspire, which is working to develop insect culinary products in Mexico, Ghana, and the US. Just like the UN, Aspire thinks entomophagy can help address hunger and poor nutrition around the world; in 2013 the company won the Hult Prize, $1 million in start-up money to social entrepreneurship projects. But before Aspire or any other company can turn these bugs into a feature, edible insects are going to have to get cheaper.
by Lizzie Wade, Wired | Read more:
Image: Getty
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Grateful Dead
[ed. Bob Weir's probably one of just a few people in the world that can actually remember all the lyrics.]
Ivy League Admissions Are a Sham: Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper
I graduated from Harvard in 2006, and have spent eight of the last nine years working as an admissions officer for my alma mater. A low-level volunteer, sure, but an official one all the same. I served as one of thousands of alumni volunteers around the world—a Regional Representative for my local Schools Committee, if you want to get technical. And, as a Regional Rep, my duties fell somewhere between Harvard recruiter and Harvard gatekeeper.
But now I'm done with all that. For a long time, I believed in the admissions process. I thought that I could use my position to help regular smart people with great test scores and impressive extracurriculars break into an elitist system. After eight years, though, I've learned that modest goal is more or less unreachable. Ivy League admissions are a complete racket, rigged in favor of the privileged and completely impervious to change. So I'm quitting the business.
And because I'm quitting, that means I can tell you, the reader, all the secrets of being a Harvard admissions representative, and what it really takes to get in. (...)
Every single applicant to Harvard is supposed to get an interview. My most recent regional committee had about a hundred active interviewers for three hundred applicants every year. The others where I worked have had closer to two hundred interviewers for nearly a thousand applicants. So everyone could expect between three to six interviews per person per year, split between the fall (early action) and winter (regular applications).
Each of these interviews lasted for about an hour of in-person time. To prep, I would contact the applicant for their basic info: GPA, test scores, and any additional material they want to send. Most people sent me a resume and a sample application essay or two. Toward the end of my tenure, I also started to see more exotic types of supplements: headshots, scripts and short stories, musical recordings.
The end goal of each interview was to rate the prospective in each of three areas: academics, extracurriculars, and personal qualities, plus an overall rating to judge the candidate's overall "suitability for admission." These ratings were "absolutely superior," "strong candidate," "acceptable but perhaps not competitive," or "not recommended."
But distilling a developing young mind into four numbers was an impossibly cruel task. And an increasingly difficult one. They were there to be evaluated for one of the most important opportunities of their lives. How could you possibly hope to get at the genuine person when there's so much pressure?
Which is why the interview process has devolved into more of a pageant.
First, in the purest sense. Seven years ago, most students would opt to wear something dressy but tasteful to the interview. In the last two years, though, I've seen the entire spectrum of fashion paraded in front of me. From the students who opt for shutter shades and muscle T's to the ones who wear bow ties and (exactly once) Louboutin pumps.
After the formalwear portion of the evening, we moved on to Q&A. Which was where each candidate launched into their prepared speech to show that they personally bucked the popular image of the Millennial as a smartphone-obsessed, Ritalin-addicted egomaniac with no work ethic. In fact, they mostly went on to question whether such people even existed outside the minds of East Coast media commentators. Sure, each of them liked their iPhones and maybe they did struggle a bit to understand other people's worldviews, but that's also why they needed to take that trip to Tanzania or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or take a field trip to an inner city school or…
But now I'm done with all that. For a long time, I believed in the admissions process. I thought that I could use my position to help regular smart people with great test scores and impressive extracurriculars break into an elitist system. After eight years, though, I've learned that modest goal is more or less unreachable. Ivy League admissions are a complete racket, rigged in favor of the privileged and completely impervious to change. So I'm quitting the business.And because I'm quitting, that means I can tell you, the reader, all the secrets of being a Harvard admissions representative, and what it really takes to get in. (...)
Every single applicant to Harvard is supposed to get an interview. My most recent regional committee had about a hundred active interviewers for three hundred applicants every year. The others where I worked have had closer to two hundred interviewers for nearly a thousand applicants. So everyone could expect between three to six interviews per person per year, split between the fall (early action) and winter (regular applications).
Each of these interviews lasted for about an hour of in-person time. To prep, I would contact the applicant for their basic info: GPA, test scores, and any additional material they want to send. Most people sent me a resume and a sample application essay or two. Toward the end of my tenure, I also started to see more exotic types of supplements: headshots, scripts and short stories, musical recordings.
The end goal of each interview was to rate the prospective in each of three areas: academics, extracurriculars, and personal qualities, plus an overall rating to judge the candidate's overall "suitability for admission." These ratings were "absolutely superior," "strong candidate," "acceptable but perhaps not competitive," or "not recommended."
But distilling a developing young mind into four numbers was an impossibly cruel task. And an increasingly difficult one. They were there to be evaluated for one of the most important opportunities of their lives. How could you possibly hope to get at the genuine person when there's so much pressure?
Which is why the interview process has devolved into more of a pageant.
First, in the purest sense. Seven years ago, most students would opt to wear something dressy but tasteful to the interview. In the last two years, though, I've seen the entire spectrum of fashion paraded in front of me. From the students who opt for shutter shades and muscle T's to the ones who wear bow ties and (exactly once) Louboutin pumps.
After the formalwear portion of the evening, we moved on to Q&A. Which was where each candidate launched into their prepared speech to show that they personally bucked the popular image of the Millennial as a smartphone-obsessed, Ritalin-addicted egomaniac with no work ethic. In fact, they mostly went on to question whether such people even existed outside the minds of East Coast media commentators. Sure, each of them liked their iPhones and maybe they did struggle a bit to understand other people's worldviews, but that's also why they needed to take that trip to Tanzania or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or take a field trip to an inner city school or…
by Anonymous, Gawker | Read more:
Image: Jim Cooke
Popcorn Time
Popcorn Time was an instant hit when it launched just over a year ago: The video streaming service made BitTorrent piracy as easy as Netflix, but with far more content and none of those pesky monthly payments. Hollywood quickly intervened, pressuring Popcorn Time’s Argentinian developers to walk away from their creation. But anonymous coders soon relaunched the copyright-flouting software. Today, Popcorn Time is growing at a rate that has likely surpassed the original, and the people behind it say they’re working on changes designed to make the service virtually impervious to law enforcement. (...)
When Popcorn-Time.se started responding to WIRED’s questions in November, Pochoclin said the reborn project already had 4 million users. But it had taken a serious hit a few months earlier, when Brussels-based domain registrar EURid revoked its website domain, Time4Popcorn.eu. At its new Swedish domain, it’s only recently returned to that earlier adoption rate. (Pochoclin wouldn’t reveal the size of its current user base for fear of drawing more attention from law enforcement or copyright holders.) “[EURid’s domain seizure] was just a small setback … a small but painful kick to the balls,” the spokesperson says. “We’ve grown this project tremendously since we picked it up … The numbers just keep rising.”
For any other year-old startup, those numbers would seem ludicrous. But Popcorn Time is giving away Hollywood’s most valuable content for free, and making that piracy easier than ever. Download Popcorn Time’s app and in seconds you’re offered a slick menu of streaming TV shows and movies at least as easy to navigate as Netflix or Hulu—but with higher-quality video and hundreds of recent movies and TV shows paid services don’t offer.
Popcorn Time isn’t a new kind of piracy so much as an inviting new front-end interface for the BitTorrent underground. The software collects and organizes popular files from existing BitTorrent sources like the Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, Isohunt, and YTS. “We’re like Google,” Pochoclin says, “scraping for new content all over the internet.” By integrating its own video player and prioritizing its downloads from the first chunk of the video file to the last, it makes those sites’ files immediately streamable. With Popcorn Time, the complexity of BitTorrent search engines, trackers, clients, seeds, decompression, playback, and storage is reduced to a single click. That’s made this BitTorrent-for-dummies the virtually undisputed future of video piracy.
Pochoclin says Popcorn-Time.se offers this streaming service pro bono. It doesn’t charge for downloads, and neither its app nor its website display ads. “We just did it for the love of this project,” Pochoclin writes. “It was something we believed in. And once it started taking off … as it did from the start, all the love that we were getting from Popcorn Time users made us just keep on going without really stopping to think where this road is taking us.” (...)
Pochoclin says the service doesn’t do anything illegal: It merely organizes preexisting BitTorrent files hosted on other sites. “It’s all automated and all working on existing open source technologies and existing websites online. Therefore, it’s legal. Or better … not illegal,” Pochoclin says. “We all live in a free society, where what is not forbidden is allowed.”
That’s not a defense that’s likely to succeed in an American court. An MPAA spokesperson pointed out in an email to WIRED that previous software like Napster, Grokster, isoHunt, and Limewire didn’t directly host content either, but courts ruled that all of them were infringing on copyrights. Even though it merely helps users stream video files made available elsewhere, Popcorn Time could be accused of “contributory liability,” says University of Richmond intellectual property law professor Jim Gibson. A service whose primary, intended function is aiding copyright infringement doesn’t need to host any files to be illegal. “If they know that they’re actually facilitating the downloading or streaming of copyrighted movies and they continue to do it, they’re in trouble,” Gibson says.
With legal threats looming, Popcorn-Time.se is working on new defenses.
by Andy Greenberg, Wired | Read more:
When Popcorn-Time.se started responding to WIRED’s questions in November, Pochoclin said the reborn project already had 4 million users. But it had taken a serious hit a few months earlier, when Brussels-based domain registrar EURid revoked its website domain, Time4Popcorn.eu. At its new Swedish domain, it’s only recently returned to that earlier adoption rate. (Pochoclin wouldn’t reveal the size of its current user base for fear of drawing more attention from law enforcement or copyright holders.) “[EURid’s domain seizure] was just a small setback … a small but painful kick to the balls,” the spokesperson says. “We’ve grown this project tremendously since we picked it up … The numbers just keep rising.”For any other year-old startup, those numbers would seem ludicrous. But Popcorn Time is giving away Hollywood’s most valuable content for free, and making that piracy easier than ever. Download Popcorn Time’s app and in seconds you’re offered a slick menu of streaming TV shows and movies at least as easy to navigate as Netflix or Hulu—but with higher-quality video and hundreds of recent movies and TV shows paid services don’t offer.
Popcorn Time isn’t a new kind of piracy so much as an inviting new front-end interface for the BitTorrent underground. The software collects and organizes popular files from existing BitTorrent sources like the Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, Isohunt, and YTS. “We’re like Google,” Pochoclin says, “scraping for new content all over the internet.” By integrating its own video player and prioritizing its downloads from the first chunk of the video file to the last, it makes those sites’ files immediately streamable. With Popcorn Time, the complexity of BitTorrent search engines, trackers, clients, seeds, decompression, playback, and storage is reduced to a single click. That’s made this BitTorrent-for-dummies the virtually undisputed future of video piracy.
Pochoclin says Popcorn-Time.se offers this streaming service pro bono. It doesn’t charge for downloads, and neither its app nor its website display ads. “We just did it for the love of this project,” Pochoclin writes. “It was something we believed in. And once it started taking off … as it did from the start, all the love that we were getting from Popcorn Time users made us just keep on going without really stopping to think where this road is taking us.” (...)
Pochoclin says the service doesn’t do anything illegal: It merely organizes preexisting BitTorrent files hosted on other sites. “It’s all automated and all working on existing open source technologies and existing websites online. Therefore, it’s legal. Or better … not illegal,” Pochoclin says. “We all live in a free society, where what is not forbidden is allowed.”
That’s not a defense that’s likely to succeed in an American court. An MPAA spokesperson pointed out in an email to WIRED that previous software like Napster, Grokster, isoHunt, and Limewire didn’t directly host content either, but courts ruled that all of them were infringing on copyrights. Even though it merely helps users stream video files made available elsewhere, Popcorn Time could be accused of “contributory liability,” says University of Richmond intellectual property law professor Jim Gibson. A service whose primary, intended function is aiding copyright infringement doesn’t need to host any files to be illegal. “If they know that they’re actually facilitating the downloading or streaming of copyrighted movies and they continue to do it, they’re in trouble,” Gibson says.
With legal threats looming, Popcorn-Time.se is working on new defenses.
by Andy Greenberg, Wired | Read more:
Image: Popcorn Time
The Meteoric Rise of Totchos
If you've heard of totchos, it was probably only in the past few months. If you haven't yet run across this modification of the classic nachos, using middle-school favorite tater tots in place of tortilla chips, you likely will soon. In the last six months, they've gone from slipping in at the occasional dive bar to showing up at every trendy spot in town.
Suddenly, it seems like totchos are everywhere, conquering menus with a furor usually reserved for kale salad, pork belly, and bacon-wrapped anything. Thinking perhaps it was just me, I checked in with the Seattle-based food website Allrecipes. Julie Mumford, who works on consumer insights for the site, not only affirmed a dramatic spike in searches for tater tot nachos in January, she noted that, so far in 2015, people in Seattle are twice as excited about totchos as the rest of the country. (...)
J. Kenji López-Alt, who writes the Food Lab column on Serious Eats, spends a lot of his time figuring out how to perfect dishes like this. "There are some mash-ups so gut-wrenchingly glorious, so decadently delicious, so damn greasy that they deserve to be tasted, tested, improved, written about, modified, expanded, contracted, broken down, reassembled, broken down again, and possibly reassembled (after lunch) until they've finally emerged in their ultimate form," he wrote in a 2013 post. He considers totchos to be in this category. He also has some insight into what makes them so good: "Just like you can make or break a sandwich depending on how you stack it, proper layering is essential in constructing the perfect tray of totchos." (...)
It's easy to see the appeal, looking through the thick layers of cheddar that top most versions of the dish: It's affordable, gluten-free (as long as the tater tots aren't deep-fried in oil where gluten-y items were), and indulgent. It harks back to childhood, with the base of nostalgia-inducing tater tots. They're crispy and melty, and if you don't agree that those are the two most appealing textures in bar food, it's probably been dry below that rock you're living under. (...)
For all their gooey indulgence, not everyone loves totchos. Aside from the usual complaints of heaviness and unhealthiness, spirits portfolio ambassador Rocky Yeh, whose job brings him to many Seattle bars on a daily basis, says, "Totchos change the nachos from a shareable group snack to a less social, knife-and-fork food."
Suddenly, it seems like totchos are everywhere, conquering menus with a furor usually reserved for kale salad, pork belly, and bacon-wrapped anything. Thinking perhaps it was just me, I checked in with the Seattle-based food website Allrecipes. Julie Mumford, who works on consumer insights for the site, not only affirmed a dramatic spike in searches for tater tot nachos in January, she noted that, so far in 2015, people in Seattle are twice as excited about totchos as the rest of the country. (...)J. Kenji López-Alt, who writes the Food Lab column on Serious Eats, spends a lot of his time figuring out how to perfect dishes like this. "There are some mash-ups so gut-wrenchingly glorious, so decadently delicious, so damn greasy that they deserve to be tasted, tested, improved, written about, modified, expanded, contracted, broken down, reassembled, broken down again, and possibly reassembled (after lunch) until they've finally emerged in their ultimate form," he wrote in a 2013 post. He considers totchos to be in this category. He also has some insight into what makes them so good: "Just like you can make or break a sandwich depending on how you stack it, proper layering is essential in constructing the perfect tray of totchos." (...)
It's easy to see the appeal, looking through the thick layers of cheddar that top most versions of the dish: It's affordable, gluten-free (as long as the tater tots aren't deep-fried in oil where gluten-y items were), and indulgent. It harks back to childhood, with the base of nostalgia-inducing tater tots. They're crispy and melty, and if you don't agree that those are the two most appealing textures in bar food, it's probably been dry below that rock you're living under. (...)
For all their gooey indulgence, not everyone loves totchos. Aside from the usual complaints of heaviness and unhealthiness, spirits portfolio ambassador Rocky Yeh, whose job brings him to many Seattle bars on a daily basis, says, "Totchos change the nachos from a shareable group snack to a less social, knife-and-fork food."
by Naomi Tomky, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Kelly O
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Microsoft Drops Internet Explorer Brand
[ed. This just in from the 'who cares' desk. Explorer has always been terrible, right from the get go. They should just kill it. Instead, it's going to be updated and "rebranded".Yay.]
Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser that is almost 20 years old, is to be killed off and replaced by a new operating system.
Microsoft has confirmed that its new browser, code-named Project Spartan, that is due to be unveiled later this year, will not use the familiar Internet Explorer name.
How Microsoft 10 can divide up the screen
"We’re now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10," the company's marketing chief Chris Capossela told a conference.
Internet Explorer once dominated the market and had more than one billion users but it could not compete when Firefox and Google’s Chrome launched with faster technology and slicker design.
Microsoft is thought to be dropping the brand in a bid to shed “negative perceptions" gathered since its 1995 launch.
The software is known to be slow and has had various security problems.
The company has often talked about changing the browsers’ name to rejuvenate its reputation.
Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, then-head of the Internet Explorer business, is said to have told an industry conference: “We messed up.”
Windows 10 will feature a stripped down, faster browser more suited to multiple devices.
Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency, said the Internet Explorer brand was past its sell-by date.
“In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he told the Financial Times. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”
Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser that is almost 20 years old, is to be killed off and replaced by a new operating system.
Microsoft has confirmed that its new browser, code-named Project Spartan, that is due to be unveiled later this year, will not use the familiar Internet Explorer name.How Microsoft 10 can divide up the screen
"We’re now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10," the company's marketing chief Chris Capossela told a conference.
Internet Explorer once dominated the market and had more than one billion users but it could not compete when Firefox and Google’s Chrome launched with faster technology and slicker design.
Microsoft is thought to be dropping the brand in a bid to shed “negative perceptions" gathered since its 1995 launch.
The software is known to be slow and has had various security problems.
The company has often talked about changing the browsers’ name to rejuvenate its reputation.
Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, then-head of the Internet Explorer business, is said to have told an industry conference: “We messed up.”
Windows 10 will feature a stripped down, faster browser more suited to multiple devices.
Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency, said the Internet Explorer brand was past its sell-by date.
“In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he told the Financial Times. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”
by Victoria Ward, Telegraph | Read more:
Image: EPA
The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous
[ed. See also: Welcome to Moderation Management.]
The debate over the efficacy of 12-step programs has been quietly bubbling for decades among addiction specialists. But it has taken on new urgency with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which requires all insurers and state Medicaid programs to pay for alcohol- and substance-abuse treatment, extending coverage to 32 million Americans who did not previously have it and providing a higher level of coverage for an additional 30 million.
Nowhere in the field of medicine is treatment less grounded in modern science. A 2012 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University compared the current state of addiction medicine to general medicine in the early 1900s, when quacks worked alongside graduates of leading medical schools. The American Medical Association estimates that out of nearly 1 million doctors in the United States, only 582 identify themselves as addiction specialists. (The Columbia report notes that there may be additional doctors who have a subspecialty in addiction.) Most treatment providers carry the credential of addiction counselor or substance-abuse counselor, for which many states require little more than a high-school diploma or a GED. Many counselors are in recovery themselves. The report stated: “The vast majority of people in need of addiction treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-based care.”
Alcoholics Anonymous was established in 1935, when knowledge of the brain was in its infancy. It offers a single path to recovery: lifelong abstinence from alcohol. The program instructs members to surrender their ego, accept that they are “powerless” over booze, make amends to those they’ve wronged, and pray.
Alcoholics Anonymous is famously difficult to study. By necessity, it keeps no records of who attends meetings; members come and go and are, of course, anonymous. No conclusive data exist on how well it works. In 2006, the Cochrane Collaboration, a health-care research group, reviewed studies going back to the 1960s and found that “no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or [12-step] approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.”
The Big Book includes an assertion first made in the second edition, which was published in 1955: that AA has worked for 75 percent of people who have gone to meetings and “really tried.” It says that 50 percent got sober right away, and another 25 percent struggled for a while but eventually recovered. According to AA, these figures are based on members’ experiences.
In his recent book, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, looked at Alcoholics Anonymous’s retention rates along with studies on sobriety and rates of active involvement (attending meetings regularly and working the program) among AA members. Based on these data, he put AA’s actual success rate somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. That is just a rough estimate, but it’s the most precise one I’ve been able to find.
I spent three years researching a book about women and alcohol, Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—And How They Can Regain Control, which was published in 2013. During that time, I encountered disbelief from doctors and psychiatrists every time I mentioned that the Alcoholics Anonymous success rate appears to hover in the single digits. We’ve grown so accustomed to testimonials from those who say AA saved their life that we take the program’s efficacy as an article of faith. Rarely do we hear from those for whom 12-step treatment doesn’t work. But think about it: How many celebrities can you name who bounced in and out of rehab without ever getting better? Why do we assume they failed the program, rather than that the program failed them?
When my book came out, dozens of Alcoholics Anonymous members said that because I had challenged AA’s claim of a 75 percent success rate, I would hurt or even kill people by discouraging attendance at meetings. A few insisted that I must be an “alcoholic in denial.” But most of the people I heard from were desperate to tell me about their experiences in the American treatment industry. Amy Lee Coy, the author of the memoir From Death Do I Part: How I Freed Myself From Addiction, told me about her eight trips to rehab, starting at age 13. “It’s like getting the same antibiotic for a resistant infection—eight times,” she told me. “Does that make sense?”
She and countless others had put their faith in a system they had been led to believe was effective—even though finding treatment centers’ success rates is next to impossible: facilities rarely publish their data or even track their patients after discharging them. “Many will tell you that those who complete the program have a ‘great success rate,’ meaning that most are abstaining from drugs and alcohol while enrolled there,” says Bankole Johnson, an alcohol researcher and the chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Well, no kidding.”
Alcoholics Anonymous has more than 2 million members worldwide, and the structure and support it offers have helped many people. But it is not enough for everyone. The history of AA is the story of how one approach to treatment took root before other options existed, inscribing itself on the national consciousness and crowding out dozens of newer methods that have since been shown to work better.
by Gabrielle Glaser, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image:Dan Saelinger
The debate over the efficacy of 12-step programs has been quietly bubbling for decades among addiction specialists. But it has taken on new urgency with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which requires all insurers and state Medicaid programs to pay for alcohol- and substance-abuse treatment, extending coverage to 32 million Americans who did not previously have it and providing a higher level of coverage for an additional 30 million.
Nowhere in the field of medicine is treatment less grounded in modern science. A 2012 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University compared the current state of addiction medicine to general medicine in the early 1900s, when quacks worked alongside graduates of leading medical schools. The American Medical Association estimates that out of nearly 1 million doctors in the United States, only 582 identify themselves as addiction specialists. (The Columbia report notes that there may be additional doctors who have a subspecialty in addiction.) Most treatment providers carry the credential of addiction counselor or substance-abuse counselor, for which many states require little more than a high-school diploma or a GED. Many counselors are in recovery themselves. The report stated: “The vast majority of people in need of addiction treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-based care.”
Alcoholics Anonymous was established in 1935, when knowledge of the brain was in its infancy. It offers a single path to recovery: lifelong abstinence from alcohol. The program instructs members to surrender their ego, accept that they are “powerless” over booze, make amends to those they’ve wronged, and pray.Alcoholics Anonymous is famously difficult to study. By necessity, it keeps no records of who attends meetings; members come and go and are, of course, anonymous. No conclusive data exist on how well it works. In 2006, the Cochrane Collaboration, a health-care research group, reviewed studies going back to the 1960s and found that “no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or [12-step] approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.”
The Big Book includes an assertion first made in the second edition, which was published in 1955: that AA has worked for 75 percent of people who have gone to meetings and “really tried.” It says that 50 percent got sober right away, and another 25 percent struggled for a while but eventually recovered. According to AA, these figures are based on members’ experiences.
In his recent book, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, looked at Alcoholics Anonymous’s retention rates along with studies on sobriety and rates of active involvement (attending meetings regularly and working the program) among AA members. Based on these data, he put AA’s actual success rate somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. That is just a rough estimate, but it’s the most precise one I’ve been able to find.
I spent three years researching a book about women and alcohol, Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—And How They Can Regain Control, which was published in 2013. During that time, I encountered disbelief from doctors and psychiatrists every time I mentioned that the Alcoholics Anonymous success rate appears to hover in the single digits. We’ve grown so accustomed to testimonials from those who say AA saved their life that we take the program’s efficacy as an article of faith. Rarely do we hear from those for whom 12-step treatment doesn’t work. But think about it: How many celebrities can you name who bounced in and out of rehab without ever getting better? Why do we assume they failed the program, rather than that the program failed them?
When my book came out, dozens of Alcoholics Anonymous members said that because I had challenged AA’s claim of a 75 percent success rate, I would hurt or even kill people by discouraging attendance at meetings. A few insisted that I must be an “alcoholic in denial.” But most of the people I heard from were desperate to tell me about their experiences in the American treatment industry. Amy Lee Coy, the author of the memoir From Death Do I Part: How I Freed Myself From Addiction, told me about her eight trips to rehab, starting at age 13. “It’s like getting the same antibiotic for a resistant infection—eight times,” she told me. “Does that make sense?”
She and countless others had put their faith in a system they had been led to believe was effective—even though finding treatment centers’ success rates is next to impossible: facilities rarely publish their data or even track their patients after discharging them. “Many will tell you that those who complete the program have a ‘great success rate,’ meaning that most are abstaining from drugs and alcohol while enrolled there,” says Bankole Johnson, an alcohol researcher and the chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Well, no kidding.”
Alcoholics Anonymous has more than 2 million members worldwide, and the structure and support it offers have helped many people. But it is not enough for everyone. The history of AA is the story of how one approach to treatment took root before other options existed, inscribing itself on the national consciousness and crowding out dozens of newer methods that have since been shown to work better.
by Gabrielle Glaser, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image:Dan Saelinger
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Permanent Recorder
[ed. See also: The Algorithmic Self.]
It used to be easy to mock reality TV for having nothing to do with actual reality — the scenarios were contrived and pre-mediated, the performances were semi-scripted, the performers were hyper-self-conscious. These shows were more a negation of reality than a representation of it; part of their appeal seemed to be in how they helped clarify for viewers the genuine “reality” of their own behavior, in contrast with the freak shows they were seeing on the screen. To be real with people, these shows seemed to suggest, just don’t act like you are on television.
But now we are all on television all the time. The once inverted anti-reality of reality TV has turned out to be prefigurative. In a recent essay for the New York Times, Colson Whitehead seizes on the reality TV conceit of a “loser edit” — how a shows’ editors pare down and frame the footage of certain participants to make their incipient failure seem deserved — and expands it into a metaphor for our lives under ubiquitous surveillance.
You could draw a similar conclusion from Facebook’s Timeline, and the year-in-review videos the company has taken to making of one’s raw profile data. These aren’t intrusive re-scriptings of our experience but instructional videos into how to be a coherent person for algorithms — which, since these algorithms increasingly dictate what others see of you, is more or less how you “really” are in your social networks. Facebook makes the winner’s edit of everybody, because everyone supposedly wins by being on Facebook. Everyone gets to be connected and the center of the universe simultaneously. So why not bequeath to it final-cut rights for your life’s edit?
Tech consultant Alistair Croll, in post at O’Reilly Radar, is somewhat less complacent about our surrendering our editing rights. He makes the case that since everyone henceforth will be born into consolidated blanket surveillance, they will be nurtured by a symbiotic relationship with their own data timeline. “An agent with true AI will become a sort of alter ego; something that grows and evolves with you … When the machines get intelligent, some of us may not even notice, because they’ll be us and we’ll be them.”
In other words, our cyborg existence will entail our fusion not with some Borg-like hive mind that submerges us into a collective, but with a machine powered by our own personal data that represents itself as already part of ourselves. The algorithms will be learning how to edit our lives for us from the very start, and we may not recognize this editing as stemming from an outside entity. The alien algorithms ease themselves into control over us by working with our uniquely personal data, which will feel inalienable because it is so specifically about us, though the very fact of its collection indicates that it belongs to someone else. Our memories will be recorded by outside entities so thoroughly that we will intuitively accept those entities as a part of us, as an extension of the inside of our heads. Believing that something that is not us could have such a complete archive of our experiences may prove to be to unacceptable, too dissonant, too terrifying.
Croll argues that this kind of data-driven social control, with algorithms dictating the shape and scope of our lives for us, will be “the moral issue of the next decade: nobody should know more about you than you do.“ That sounds plausible enough, if you take it to mean (as Croll clearly does) that no one should use against you data that you don’t know has been collected about you. (Molly Knefel discusses a similar concern here, in an essay about how kids will be confronted by their permanent records, which reminds me of the “right to be forgotten” campaign.) But it runs counter to the cyborg idea — it assumes we will be able to draw a clear line between ourselves and the algorithms. If we can’t distinguish between these, it will be nonsensical to worry about which has access to more data about ourselves. It will be impossible to say whether you or the algorithms “knew” some piece of information about you first, particularly when the algorithms will be synthesizing data about us and then teaching it to us.
In that light, the standard that “no one should know more about you than you do” starts to seem clearly absurd. Outside entities are producing knowledge about us all the time in ways we can’t control. Other people are always producing knowledge about me, from their perspective and for their own purposes, that I can never access. They will always know “more about me” than I do by virtue of their having a point of view on the world that I can’t calculate and replicate.
Because we find it hard to assign a point of view to a machine, we perhaps think they can’t know more about us or have a perspective that isn’t fully controllable by someone, if not us. Croll is essentially arguing that we should have control over what knowledge a company’s machines produce about us. That assumes that their programmers can fully control their algorithms, which seems to be less the case the more sophisticated they become — the fact that the algorithms turn out results that no one can explain may be the defining point at which data becomes Big Data, as Mike Pepi explains here. And if the machines are just proxies for the people who program them, Croll’s “moral issue” still boils down to a fantasy of extreme atomization — the demand that my identity be entirely independent of other people, with no contingencies whatsoever.
The ability to impose your own self-concept on others is a matter of power; you can demand it, say, as a matter of customer service. This doesn’t change what those serving you know and think about you, but it allows you to suspend disbelief about it. Algorithms that serve us don’t allow for such suspension of disbelief, because they anticipate what service we might expect and put what they know about us into direct action. Algorithms can’t have opinions about us that they keep to themselves. They can’t help but reveal al all times that they “know more about us” — that is, they know us different from how we know ourselves.
Rather than worry about controlling who can produce information about us, it may be more important to worry about the conflation of data with self-knowledge. The radical empiricism epitomized by the Quantified Self movement is becoming more and more mainstream as tracking devices that attempt to codify us as data become more prevalent — and threaten to become mandatory for various social benefits like health insurance. Self-tracking suggests that consciousness is a useless guide to knowing the self, generating meaningless opinions about what is happening to the self while interfering with the body’s proper responses to its biofeedback. It’s only so much subjectivity. Consciousness should subordinate itself to the data, be guided more automatically by it. And you need control of this data to control what you will think of yourself in response to it, and to control the “truth” about yourself.
It used to be easy to mock reality TV for having nothing to do with actual reality — the scenarios were contrived and pre-mediated, the performances were semi-scripted, the performers were hyper-self-conscious. These shows were more a negation of reality than a representation of it; part of their appeal seemed to be in how they helped clarify for viewers the genuine “reality” of their own behavior, in contrast with the freak shows they were seeing on the screen. To be real with people, these shows seemed to suggest, just don’t act like you are on television.But now we are all on television all the time. The once inverted anti-reality of reality TV has turned out to be prefigurative. In a recent essay for the New York Times, Colson Whitehead seizes on the reality TV conceit of a “loser edit” — how a shows’ editors pare down and frame the footage of certain participants to make their incipient failure seem deserved — and expands it into a metaphor for our lives under ubiquitous surveillance.
The footage of your loser edit is out there as well, waiting … From all the cameras on all the street corners, entryways and strangers’ cellphones, building the digital dossier of your days. Maybe we can’t clearly make out your face in every shot, but everyone knows it’s you. We know you like to slump. Our entire lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to be recut and reviewed at a moment’s notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit. Any time the producers decide to raise the stakes.Whitehead concludes that the important thing is that everyone gets an edit inside their own head, which suggests that the imposition of a reality TV frame on our lives has been clarifying. “If we’re going down, let us at least be a protagonist, have a story line, not be just one of those miserable players in the background. A cameo’s stand-in. The loser edit, with all its savage cuts, is confirmation that you exist.” Reality TV models for us what it is like to be a character in our own life story, and it gives us a new metaphor for how to accomplish this — we don’t need to be a bildungsroman author but instead a savvy cutting-room editor. Accept that your life is footage, and you might even get good at making a winner’s edit for yourself.
You could draw a similar conclusion from Facebook’s Timeline, and the year-in-review videos the company has taken to making of one’s raw profile data. These aren’t intrusive re-scriptings of our experience but instructional videos into how to be a coherent person for algorithms — which, since these algorithms increasingly dictate what others see of you, is more or less how you “really” are in your social networks. Facebook makes the winner’s edit of everybody, because everyone supposedly wins by being on Facebook. Everyone gets to be connected and the center of the universe simultaneously. So why not bequeath to it final-cut rights for your life’s edit?
Tech consultant Alistair Croll, in post at O’Reilly Radar, is somewhat less complacent about our surrendering our editing rights. He makes the case that since everyone henceforth will be born into consolidated blanket surveillance, they will be nurtured by a symbiotic relationship with their own data timeline. “An agent with true AI will become a sort of alter ego; something that grows and evolves with you … When the machines get intelligent, some of us may not even notice, because they’ll be us and we’ll be them.”
In other words, our cyborg existence will entail our fusion not with some Borg-like hive mind that submerges us into a collective, but with a machine powered by our own personal data that represents itself as already part of ourselves. The algorithms will be learning how to edit our lives for us from the very start, and we may not recognize this editing as stemming from an outside entity. The alien algorithms ease themselves into control over us by working with our uniquely personal data, which will feel inalienable because it is so specifically about us, though the very fact of its collection indicates that it belongs to someone else. Our memories will be recorded by outside entities so thoroughly that we will intuitively accept those entities as a part of us, as an extension of the inside of our heads. Believing that something that is not us could have such a complete archive of our experiences may prove to be to unacceptable, too dissonant, too terrifying.
Croll argues that this kind of data-driven social control, with algorithms dictating the shape and scope of our lives for us, will be “the moral issue of the next decade: nobody should know more about you than you do.“ That sounds plausible enough, if you take it to mean (as Croll clearly does) that no one should use against you data that you don’t know has been collected about you. (Molly Knefel discusses a similar concern here, in an essay about how kids will be confronted by their permanent records, which reminds me of the “right to be forgotten” campaign.) But it runs counter to the cyborg idea — it assumes we will be able to draw a clear line between ourselves and the algorithms. If we can’t distinguish between these, it will be nonsensical to worry about which has access to more data about ourselves. It will be impossible to say whether you or the algorithms “knew” some piece of information about you first, particularly when the algorithms will be synthesizing data about us and then teaching it to us.
In that light, the standard that “no one should know more about you than you do” starts to seem clearly absurd. Outside entities are producing knowledge about us all the time in ways we can’t control. Other people are always producing knowledge about me, from their perspective and for their own purposes, that I can never access. They will always know “more about me” than I do by virtue of their having a point of view on the world that I can’t calculate and replicate.
Because we find it hard to assign a point of view to a machine, we perhaps think they can’t know more about us or have a perspective that isn’t fully controllable by someone, if not us. Croll is essentially arguing that we should have control over what knowledge a company’s machines produce about us. That assumes that their programmers can fully control their algorithms, which seems to be less the case the more sophisticated they become — the fact that the algorithms turn out results that no one can explain may be the defining point at which data becomes Big Data, as Mike Pepi explains here. And if the machines are just proxies for the people who program them, Croll’s “moral issue” still boils down to a fantasy of extreme atomization — the demand that my identity be entirely independent of other people, with no contingencies whatsoever.
The ability to impose your own self-concept on others is a matter of power; you can demand it, say, as a matter of customer service. This doesn’t change what those serving you know and think about you, but it allows you to suspend disbelief about it. Algorithms that serve us don’t allow for such suspension of disbelief, because they anticipate what service we might expect and put what they know about us into direct action. Algorithms can’t have opinions about us that they keep to themselves. They can’t help but reveal al all times that they “know more about us” — that is, they know us different from how we know ourselves.
Rather than worry about controlling who can produce information about us, it may be more important to worry about the conflation of data with self-knowledge. The radical empiricism epitomized by the Quantified Self movement is becoming more and more mainstream as tracking devices that attempt to codify us as data become more prevalent — and threaten to become mandatory for various social benefits like health insurance. Self-tracking suggests that consciousness is a useless guide to knowing the self, generating meaningless opinions about what is happening to the self while interfering with the body’s proper responses to its biofeedback. It’s only so much subjectivity. Consciousness should subordinate itself to the data, be guided more automatically by it. And you need control of this data to control what you will think of yourself in response to it, and to control the “truth” about yourself.
by Rob Horning, Marginal Utility, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, March 16, 2015
Love & Mercy
[ed. I've wondered why no one ever made a movie about Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' troubled genius. Now they have. I hope it doesn't suck. (God only knows)]
h/t Boing Boing
Oregon is the First State to Adopt Automatic Voter Registration
[ed. The shape of things to come. How did this take so long? (Wait, I think I know).]
Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill that puts the burden of registration on the state instead of voters.
Under the legislation, every adult citizen in Oregon who has interacted with the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division since 2013 but hasn't registered to vote will receive a ballot in the mail at least 20 days before the next statewide election. The measure is expected to add about 300,000 new voters to the rolls."It just changes expectations for who's responsible for making elections work," said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and director of the Elections Research Center. "In every other state it's the responsibility for the voters to make sure it happens."
Some other states have considered such legislation but none has gone as far as Oregon.
Minnesota nearly implemented automatic voter registration in 2009 before the plan was vetoed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who said "registering to vote should be a voluntary, intentional act."
Similar concerns were raised by Oregon's minority Republicans.
"Simply because it makes us unique or makes us first does not necessarily mean that it actually improves on what we're doing," said state Sen. Jackie Winters, a Republican from Salem.
Oregon Republicans also voiced worry about potential voter fraud, the cost of implementing the measure, and whether the DMV can ensure personal information remains secure.
Information the DMV has on file, such as age, residential information, signature and citizenship status, will be transferred to the secretary of state, who will then automatically update registration information.
When it came up for a vote in the state Senate last week, all Republicans and one Democrat voted against it. The Democrats hold a 18-12 advantage in the Senate so the bill easily passed. (...)
People eligible to vote will get a postcard saying they've been registered and have three weeks to opt out. They'll be automatically registered as unaffiliated but can select a political party from the postcard and return it to election officials through the mail.
Automatic registration is not uncommon in other countries. A 2009 report by the Brennan Center for Justice says nations where the government takes the lead in enrolling voters have much higher registration rates. Argentina has a 100 percent registration rate, while Sweden, Australia and Canada all have registration rates over 90 percent.
by Sheila Kumar, AP | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Don Ryan
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