Saturday, May 2, 2015
The Rage of the Jilted Crowdfunder
“Thank you all very much,” Update 57 concluded, by way of goodbye. “Working on this project was the most ambitious and meaningful undertaking any of us have ever attempted. Getting to know all of you, and working to create some seriously cool technology, was one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done. We are deeply and truly sorry that despite our best efforts, we were not able to get this machine across the finish line. Love, Gleb, Igor and Janet, Team ZPM.”
It had been three long years of gradual disappointment since the 1,500 or so supporters of ZPM Espresso — otherwise known as the PID-Controlled Espresso Machine project on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter — each put a few hundred dollars, or some $370,000 in total, into the campaign, and eight months since the last communiqué from the project’s creators. Now, with Update 57 in January, ZPM Espresso announced that it was winding itself down. For the backers who expected a ZPM machine for their pledge, there would be neither fulfillment nor refunds. All accumulated moneys, the update said, were dispersed on the nonrecoverable engineering costs involved in ZPM’s failed attempt to manufacture an inexpensive commercial-grade espresso machine for the home market.
Ian Woodhouse, the 44-year-old director of operations for a Toronto real estate developer, was one of ZPM’s earliest and most ardent backers. Three years on, though, no new blow could surprise him. The update represented exactly what he had long come to expect from the creators. It was evasive and opaque. There was no clear explanation for the company’s insolvency. Woodhouse was especially nettled by that valediction: “love.” What he wanted, he told me later, was not another update “signed ‘love.’ They always signed their updates ‘love.’ ” He could see that it seemed like a peculiar fixation, but the word was so disingenuous and cloying, and it made him angry. “Notice,” he instructed me, “how I keep bringing up the ‘love’ thing.” It reminded him that what ought to have been a straightforward financial transaction had somehow left him feeling taken advantage of and betrayed.
Powerless to act individually, the backers began, in Update 57’s wake, to organize. Their first step was a Facebook group, “Ripped off by ZPM Espresso,” but Woodhouse feared it wasn’t private: The principals of ZPM, who seemed to him at once inept and robust in their malfeasance, might easily monitor the activity there. So Woodhouse, along with a few others among the more persistent backers, instead set up a private forum on the messaging service Slack, where they shared their sense of affliction and pondered legal or moral redress. The legal options were limited. Although Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulate that any creators unable to satisfy the terms of their agreement with their backers might be subject to legal action, no sane attorney would initiate a class-action suit on a contingency-fee basis against insolvent creators, and no sane backer would ante up the necessary legal fees.
The other alternative was a consumer-protection suit filed by a state attorney general, but for that to proceed, the backers would need evidence of actual fraud, which they spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to uncover. As Woodhouse, who speaks in the tone of a reasonable man drawn hopelessly against his will into a vast conspiracy, put it to me, “We found out a whole bunch of interesting information.” He ticked off the names of four lawyers, an unpaid accountant and two Silicon Valley investors. He delved into what he dug up in the corporate-filings section of the State of Georgia’s website, and on a shady-seeming portal seeking to bundle Chinese angel investments. By his estimations, ZPM had ultimately raised $1.2 million, all of it gone and unaccounted for. The ZPM founders, the backers discovered in their attempt to serve up (at the very least) a small-claims action, were lying low; they had left Atlanta and absconded for San Francisco. (...)
Since Kickstarter’s debut in 2009, campaigns on the platform have raised $1.4 billion for the creators of more than 80,000 projects. In the process, the company and its crowdfunding competitors have invented a new sort of economic relationship, and a corresponding frontier of Internet acrimony. Disgruntled crowdfunders are not your typical Internet-commenting degenerates: In ZPM’s case, they are affluent, well-educated professionals, working in New York and Los Angeles as systems analysts, TV directors, research physicians specializing in adrenal pathology — the sorts of people you would expect to write off their $250 donation as a gamble gone sour. Yet they found, for reasons that weren’t always clear to them, that they couldn’t. A professor in Columbia’s graduate school of architecture wrote, on the private Slack forum, that he considered Polyakov to have “neither humility nor shame.” He continued, “I also think it entirely appropriate that he never work in technology, finance, consulting or the coffee fields (sorry, that kills the barista career) again.”
The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never; Kickstarter is constantly reminding its patrons that the platform is not a store. (On some level, backers must already know this, or else they wouldn’t be backers; if Ian Woodhouse had just wanted an inexpensive espresso machine, the top seller on Amazon retails for $86 and has thousands of five-star reviews.)
On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.
It had been three long years of gradual disappointment since the 1,500 or so supporters of ZPM Espresso — otherwise known as the PID-Controlled Espresso Machine project on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter — each put a few hundred dollars, or some $370,000 in total, into the campaign, and eight months since the last communiqué from the project’s creators. Now, with Update 57 in January, ZPM Espresso announced that it was winding itself down. For the backers who expected a ZPM machine for their pledge, there would be neither fulfillment nor refunds. All accumulated moneys, the update said, were dispersed on the nonrecoverable engineering costs involved in ZPM’s failed attempt to manufacture an inexpensive commercial-grade espresso machine for the home market.Ian Woodhouse, the 44-year-old director of operations for a Toronto real estate developer, was one of ZPM’s earliest and most ardent backers. Three years on, though, no new blow could surprise him. The update represented exactly what he had long come to expect from the creators. It was evasive and opaque. There was no clear explanation for the company’s insolvency. Woodhouse was especially nettled by that valediction: “love.” What he wanted, he told me later, was not another update “signed ‘love.’ They always signed their updates ‘love.’ ” He could see that it seemed like a peculiar fixation, but the word was so disingenuous and cloying, and it made him angry. “Notice,” he instructed me, “how I keep bringing up the ‘love’ thing.” It reminded him that what ought to have been a straightforward financial transaction had somehow left him feeling taken advantage of and betrayed.
Powerless to act individually, the backers began, in Update 57’s wake, to organize. Their first step was a Facebook group, “Ripped off by ZPM Espresso,” but Woodhouse feared it wasn’t private: The principals of ZPM, who seemed to him at once inept and robust in their malfeasance, might easily monitor the activity there. So Woodhouse, along with a few others among the more persistent backers, instead set up a private forum on the messaging service Slack, where they shared their sense of affliction and pondered legal or moral redress. The legal options were limited. Although Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulate that any creators unable to satisfy the terms of their agreement with their backers might be subject to legal action, no sane attorney would initiate a class-action suit on a contingency-fee basis against insolvent creators, and no sane backer would ante up the necessary legal fees.
The other alternative was a consumer-protection suit filed by a state attorney general, but for that to proceed, the backers would need evidence of actual fraud, which they spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to uncover. As Woodhouse, who speaks in the tone of a reasonable man drawn hopelessly against his will into a vast conspiracy, put it to me, “We found out a whole bunch of interesting information.” He ticked off the names of four lawyers, an unpaid accountant and two Silicon Valley investors. He delved into what he dug up in the corporate-filings section of the State of Georgia’s website, and on a shady-seeming portal seeking to bundle Chinese angel investments. By his estimations, ZPM had ultimately raised $1.2 million, all of it gone and unaccounted for. The ZPM founders, the backers discovered in their attempt to serve up (at the very least) a small-claims action, were lying low; they had left Atlanta and absconded for San Francisco. (...)
Since Kickstarter’s debut in 2009, campaigns on the platform have raised $1.4 billion for the creators of more than 80,000 projects. In the process, the company and its crowdfunding competitors have invented a new sort of economic relationship, and a corresponding frontier of Internet acrimony. Disgruntled crowdfunders are not your typical Internet-commenting degenerates: In ZPM’s case, they are affluent, well-educated professionals, working in New York and Los Angeles as systems analysts, TV directors, research physicians specializing in adrenal pathology — the sorts of people you would expect to write off their $250 donation as a gamble gone sour. Yet they found, for reasons that weren’t always clear to them, that they couldn’t. A professor in Columbia’s graduate school of architecture wrote, on the private Slack forum, that he considered Polyakov to have “neither humility nor shame.” He continued, “I also think it entirely appropriate that he never work in technology, finance, consulting or the coffee fields (sorry, that kills the barista career) again.”
The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never; Kickstarter is constantly reminding its patrons that the platform is not a store. (On some level, backers must already know this, or else they wouldn’t be backers; if Ian Woodhouse had just wanted an inexpensive espresso machine, the top seller on Amazon retails for $86 and has thousands of five-star reviews.)
On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.
by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Mahaney 
Friday, May 1, 2015
In Praise of Vulgar Feminism
Just prior to the publication of Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, a characteristic controversy broke out on the internet. Among the people disparaged in the book is the young singer Lana Del Rey. “Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey,” Gordon writes, in summing up the fallen state of things (since the ’90s), “who doesn’t even know what feminism is, who believes it means women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross older men or being a transient biker queen. . . . Naturally, it’s just a persona. If she really truly believes it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, why doesn’t she just off herself?” Del Rey’s fans got wind of the insult and duly commenced to trash Gordon on Twitter, whom they had clearly never heard of. Gordon, for her part, retweeted the worst of the abuse.
Faced with a choice between the bassist of Sonic Youth and the nihilist nymphet Lana Del Rey and her army of Twitter defenders, the highbrow music fan knows whose side she’s on. And it’s not as if Gordon is wrong about Del Rey, whose embrace of American rock and roll myths, shot through with a cartoonish sense of female desire, really is infantile. The appeal of Kim Gordon is completely different. She came from the New York art world of the early ’80s, co-founded one of the most admired bands of all time with her boyfriend and eventual husband Thurston Moore, and has now written an honest memoir about the whole thing. She’s one of the most respected personalities in rock music, who somehow obtained a license in the world of male-dominated culture to combine the impossible—to be both sexy and smart, mature and attractive, a mother and an artist, confrontational and political and also eternally “cool.” How many women are able to do this in music or pop culture, or at all? Not many.
Which makes me think: Isn’t Del Rey, precisely through her disturbing, masochistic fantasies of rape, mental abuse, and violent sex, and on top of that her adolescent rejection of feminism (“feminism doesn’t interest me as an idea,” she’s told interviewers on several occasions), a better icon for our time? Don’t her words and lyrics say more about the contemporary position of women than the mature, self-confident, and in the end somewhat commonplace pronouncements of Kim Gordon?
Feminism and class (and taste) are interesting categories through which to approach Gordon’s memoir. The book, which describes in detail her acrimonious breakup with Moore and the disbanding of Sonic Youth, must have been very hard to write. The beginning and the end, especially, are full of details of the brutal breakup, with the band carrying on for several months of touring after the fact. This makes for disturbing reading, and Gordon handles it with a wry sense of humor. But I can’t let go of a feeling that everything falls into place rather too easily, and feminism, class, and taste have a lot to do with it. Again: Gordon’s memoir is compelling—even gripping—and well-written, with atmospheric images and disarming honesty. But throughout something feels not quite right. Gordon writes with an absolute sureness of self that enables her to reminisce with the same confidence about her art and musical output as the artistic circles she has lived in for the last thirty-odd years, and also to rebuke the likes of Del Rey, Courtney Love, and several other women, including Lydia Lunch and Madonna. The women Gordon likes and admires are Kathleen Hanna, Kim Deal, her friend and Free Kitten bandmate and fashion label co-founder Julie Cafritz, Chloe Sevigny, and Sofia Coppola—a classy, laconic bunch.
While I was reading Girl in a Band, I was also reading a new book in the33 1/3 series on Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This, by an Australian author Anwen Crawford. Crawford hasn’t a negative thing to say about her subject and the album’s creator, Courtney Love. She challenges the persistent public hatred of Love and the accusation that she “killed” her husband and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. She furthermore makes a formidable case for the album itself, presenting it as a manifesto of positive, alternative, grassroots feminism, a feminism that has nothing to do with positive adjustment, good taste, or middle-class-ness, and in which self-confidence is born of exclusion—for being a woman, for being queer, for living on the periphery. Given the mutual history of Gordon and Love, whose paths crossed constantly in the early ’90s, it’s tempting to use the coincidence of these two books’ publication to talk about that specific moment in history, a moment crucial for Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Hole, and for the whole accession of “alternative” music to the mainstream in the United States. (...)
The differences of perception between Courtney Love and Kim Gordon were, and remain, profoundly a matter of taste, which is to say of class. Courtney Love never said that she came from a working class or poor background, and stressed a few times that she didn’t. (Love’s mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the first manager of the Grateful Dead.) But she was kitschy, exhibitionistic, shameless, and at the same time vulnerable and ready to show it. Love came from a “complicated” family background. She grew up without much attention, and was passed from relative to relative, and traveled as a teenager to the UK to follow around Liverpool bands Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. In the ’80s she worked as a jobbing actress and a stripper. Side by side, Gordon and Love represent mirror images of the Nineties—of music, femininity, feminism, and politics. If Gordon was tastefully highbrow, Love was lowbrow, “distasteful”: the disgraced widow, widely regarded as someone who was, if not directly responsible for her husband’s death, then at least insufficiently “helpful,” who was too mad, too freakish, too much of a selfish junkie careerist to look after her suffering husband. But that’s not how her fans saw her. (...)
In the end Gordon created a space in her music, where irony toward her own experiences or masks could protect her from her fears. Love confronted her traumas in the opposite way. Her act wasn’t to hide before the menace, it was to become that menace herself. Her voice is not one of beauty, but it’s powerful: she’s giving everything she has, until she can’t speak anymore. It’s funny how Gordon dismisses Courtney as somebody exploiting suffering (like in “Doll Parts,” where Love compares herself to a dismembered, killed doll, yet the one “with the most cake”), as if it was impossible for a woman to fake it and get away with it. But at the same time, Courtney lived through it, through the hate and contempt of the people around her, and still managed to create compelling music. If she often seemed like an attention-craving jackass, it’s because she actually refused to think she should behave any different from the way men in rock behave.
Faced with a choice between the bassist of Sonic Youth and the nihilist nymphet Lana Del Rey and her army of Twitter defenders, the highbrow music fan knows whose side she’s on. And it’s not as if Gordon is wrong about Del Rey, whose embrace of American rock and roll myths, shot through with a cartoonish sense of female desire, really is infantile. The appeal of Kim Gordon is completely different. She came from the New York art world of the early ’80s, co-founded one of the most admired bands of all time with her boyfriend and eventual husband Thurston Moore, and has now written an honest memoir about the whole thing. She’s one of the most respected personalities in rock music, who somehow obtained a license in the world of male-dominated culture to combine the impossible—to be both sexy and smart, mature and attractive, a mother and an artist, confrontational and political and also eternally “cool.” How many women are able to do this in music or pop culture, or at all? Not many.Which makes me think: Isn’t Del Rey, precisely through her disturbing, masochistic fantasies of rape, mental abuse, and violent sex, and on top of that her adolescent rejection of feminism (“feminism doesn’t interest me as an idea,” she’s told interviewers on several occasions), a better icon for our time? Don’t her words and lyrics say more about the contemporary position of women than the mature, self-confident, and in the end somewhat commonplace pronouncements of Kim Gordon?
Feminism and class (and taste) are interesting categories through which to approach Gordon’s memoir. The book, which describes in detail her acrimonious breakup with Moore and the disbanding of Sonic Youth, must have been very hard to write. The beginning and the end, especially, are full of details of the brutal breakup, with the band carrying on for several months of touring after the fact. This makes for disturbing reading, and Gordon handles it with a wry sense of humor. But I can’t let go of a feeling that everything falls into place rather too easily, and feminism, class, and taste have a lot to do with it. Again: Gordon’s memoir is compelling—even gripping—and well-written, with atmospheric images and disarming honesty. But throughout something feels not quite right. Gordon writes with an absolute sureness of self that enables her to reminisce with the same confidence about her art and musical output as the artistic circles she has lived in for the last thirty-odd years, and also to rebuke the likes of Del Rey, Courtney Love, and several other women, including Lydia Lunch and Madonna. The women Gordon likes and admires are Kathleen Hanna, Kim Deal, her friend and Free Kitten bandmate and fashion label co-founder Julie Cafritz, Chloe Sevigny, and Sofia Coppola—a classy, laconic bunch.
While I was reading Girl in a Band, I was also reading a new book in the33 1/3 series on Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This, by an Australian author Anwen Crawford. Crawford hasn’t a negative thing to say about her subject and the album’s creator, Courtney Love. She challenges the persistent public hatred of Love and the accusation that she “killed” her husband and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. She furthermore makes a formidable case for the album itself, presenting it as a manifesto of positive, alternative, grassroots feminism, a feminism that has nothing to do with positive adjustment, good taste, or middle-class-ness, and in which self-confidence is born of exclusion—for being a woman, for being queer, for living on the periphery. Given the mutual history of Gordon and Love, whose paths crossed constantly in the early ’90s, it’s tempting to use the coincidence of these two books’ publication to talk about that specific moment in history, a moment crucial for Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Hole, and for the whole accession of “alternative” music to the mainstream in the United States. (...)
The differences of perception between Courtney Love and Kim Gordon were, and remain, profoundly a matter of taste, which is to say of class. Courtney Love never said that she came from a working class or poor background, and stressed a few times that she didn’t. (Love’s mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the first manager of the Grateful Dead.) But she was kitschy, exhibitionistic, shameless, and at the same time vulnerable and ready to show it. Love came from a “complicated” family background. She grew up without much attention, and was passed from relative to relative, and traveled as a teenager to the UK to follow around Liverpool bands Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. In the ’80s she worked as a jobbing actress and a stripper. Side by side, Gordon and Love represent mirror images of the Nineties—of music, femininity, feminism, and politics. If Gordon was tastefully highbrow, Love was lowbrow, “distasteful”: the disgraced widow, widely regarded as someone who was, if not directly responsible for her husband’s death, then at least insufficiently “helpful,” who was too mad, too freakish, too much of a selfish junkie careerist to look after her suffering husband. But that’s not how her fans saw her. (...)
In the end Gordon created a space in her music, where irony toward her own experiences or masks could protect her from her fears. Love confronted her traumas in the opposite way. Her act wasn’t to hide before the menace, it was to become that menace herself. Her voice is not one of beauty, but it’s powerful: she’s giving everything she has, until she can’t speak anymore. It’s funny how Gordon dismisses Courtney as somebody exploiting suffering (like in “Doll Parts,” where Love compares herself to a dismembered, killed doll, yet the one “with the most cake”), as if it was impossible for a woman to fake it and get away with it. But at the same time, Courtney lived through it, through the hate and contempt of the people around her, and still managed to create compelling music. If she often seemed like an attention-craving jackass, it’s because she actually refused to think she should behave any different from the way men in rock behave.
by Agata Pyzik, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Album art Hole's Live Through This
Twitter at the Crossroads
Twitter as we know it is over. While the early release of ugly revenue numbers sent the company’s stock spiraling Tuesday, the actual quarterly earnings report that followed that afternoon was even worse. Twitter is acquiring users more slowly, particularly on mobile. It is failing to monetize these users as well as expected. And it is tapping other companies like Google, with whom it will partner to take advantage of its DoubleClick ad-serving platform, for lifelines. As a consequence, the ultimate value of the social network’s nearly 300 million users is looking significantly lower than previously thought. Twitter is well aware of these factors. Its recent actions signal that it is trying to redefine its business, not as a service that monetizes its users, but as a crowdsourced media platform and advertising agency—a dangerous bet that is unlikely to pay off.
Twitter’s strength is being the pulse of the Internet, the place where news gets broken in 140-character messages, where important topics start trending the second they enter the collective hivemind, and where politicians and celebrities and thinkers of all stripes can make announcements without the bother of a press release or the filter of the media. Yet this has always made Twitter Janus-faced: Is it a real-time news aggregator or a social network? More importantly, how will it make money? The conventional wisdom was once that Twitter would monetize its users by showing them ads that are extremely relevant to them. It is now obvious that Twitter’s future does not lie in a Facebook-like model, but in something else entirely. Twitter sees its user base, whose growth is flattening, not as customers but as content producers. In which case, who are its customers?
On the earnings call, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo specifically attributed the quarter’s revenue shortfall ($436 million, short of a projected $440 million to $450 million) to the underperformance of some of Twitter’s new “direct response” advertising products that have not performed as well as expected. Examples include Twitter’s “mobile-app install” ads, which offer a direct link to install an advertiser’s app. While Twitter hasn’t mentioned any new direct-response strategies, Costolo said it hopes to boost its advertising revenue by acquiring TellApart, “a leading marketing technology company providing retailers and e-commerce advertisers with unique cross-device retargeting capabilities.” This is a bad omen. When Google bought DoubleClick, it was buying DoubleClick’s utter dominance in the advertising sector, not its technology. TellApart doesn’t have that kind of dominance; Twitter’s purchase will get it TellApart’s technology and consumer profiles. Neither merits a headline announcement in an earnings report.
But the acquisition of TellApart does tell us something:, that Twitter is now trying to monetize nonusers, people who don’t have Twitter accounts but might read it anyway. That’s because Twitter is running up against the limitations of its interface, which makes monetizing active Tweeters difficult. For starters, Twitter can’t collect useful data about its users the way Facebook can; its 140-character limit hampers it. And because Twitter is public, people keep less of their lives on it. Tweets are less valuable as a key to profiling users than they are as an attractor of eyeballs. I’ve previously discussed the unique advantages and disadvantages of the public-private hybrid discourse produced on Twitter, but the flip side is what that unique hybrid amounts to in terms of monetization: It’s mostly a downside.
by David Auerbach, Slate | Read more:
Image: Natalie Matthews-Ramo
Twitter’s strength is being the pulse of the Internet, the place where news gets broken in 140-character messages, where important topics start trending the second they enter the collective hivemind, and where politicians and celebrities and thinkers of all stripes can make announcements without the bother of a press release or the filter of the media. Yet this has always made Twitter Janus-faced: Is it a real-time news aggregator or a social network? More importantly, how will it make money? The conventional wisdom was once that Twitter would monetize its users by showing them ads that are extremely relevant to them. It is now obvious that Twitter’s future does not lie in a Facebook-like model, but in something else entirely. Twitter sees its user base, whose growth is flattening, not as customers but as content producers. In which case, who are its customers?On the earnings call, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo specifically attributed the quarter’s revenue shortfall ($436 million, short of a projected $440 million to $450 million) to the underperformance of some of Twitter’s new “direct response” advertising products that have not performed as well as expected. Examples include Twitter’s “mobile-app install” ads, which offer a direct link to install an advertiser’s app. While Twitter hasn’t mentioned any new direct-response strategies, Costolo said it hopes to boost its advertising revenue by acquiring TellApart, “a leading marketing technology company providing retailers and e-commerce advertisers with unique cross-device retargeting capabilities.” This is a bad omen. When Google bought DoubleClick, it was buying DoubleClick’s utter dominance in the advertising sector, not its technology. TellApart doesn’t have that kind of dominance; Twitter’s purchase will get it TellApart’s technology and consumer profiles. Neither merits a headline announcement in an earnings report.
But the acquisition of TellApart does tell us something:, that Twitter is now trying to monetize nonusers, people who don’t have Twitter accounts but might read it anyway. That’s because Twitter is running up against the limitations of its interface, which makes monetizing active Tweeters difficult. For starters, Twitter can’t collect useful data about its users the way Facebook can; its 140-character limit hampers it. And because Twitter is public, people keep less of their lives on it. Tweets are less valuable as a key to profiling users than they are as an attractor of eyeballs. I’ve previously discussed the unique advantages and disadvantages of the public-private hybrid discourse produced on Twitter, but the flip side is what that unique hybrid amounts to in terms of monetization: It’s mostly a downside.
by David Auerbach, Slate | Read more:
Image: Natalie Matthews-Ramo
The Saudi Royal Family Shakeup
The House of Saud, one of the world’s largest and richest royal families, experienced a quiet coup within its ranks shortly before dawn on Wednesday. King Salman canned his Crown Prince and appointed a tough security official as the new heir. He named as second-in-line to the throne a young son with limited experience. And he removed the world’s longest serving foreign minister, who was responsible for building the alliance between Riyadh and Washington under seven American Presidents since 1975.A longer list of abrupt royal decrees was announced in an early-morning television bulletin. Senior princes were then assembled at a Riyadh palace to pledge loyalty to the new order of succession. The shakeup, which concentrates power in a conservative wing of the vast royal family, could shape policy in the world’s largest oil exporter for decades.
The apparent goal was to signal renewed vigor amid deepening turmoil in and around the country. Last month, Saudi Arabia mobilized a ten-nation coalition to intervene in neighboring Yemen’s war, to the south. That has not gone well. To the north, the Kingdom is also part of the U.S.-led coalition running daily air strikes against the Islamic State, which has defiantly held on to huge chunks of Iraq and Syria. And this week the government announced the arrests of ninety-three militants who were allegedly plotting against security targets, foreign residential compounds, and the U.S. Embassy. Most are Saudis.
The decrees were all the more startling because the Kingdom just went through a big transition in January, when King Abdullah died, after two decades in power. Usually, the Saudis move slowly and with consensus. Usually, age takes precedence, no matter the ailments of the senescent first generation of princes sired by the Kingdom’s founder, the warrior Abdulaziz Al-Saud. Sequence was honored even when lining up at royal events.
King Salman instead removed his youngest half-brother and turned the Kingdom decisively over to the next generation of princes, the founder’s grandsons. He also skipped over hundreds who had seniority among them. (The royal family has somewhere around seven thousand princes and princesses.) Salman turns eighty this year. The question is whether the new precedent of forsaking promises and leap-frogging royals might, in turn, be used against Salman’s appointees after he dies—annd whether it might end up generating more uncertainty than stability.
by Robin Wright, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters via Landov
Why Girls Love the Dadbod
In case you haven't noticed lately, girls are all about that dad bod. I hadn't heard about this body type until my roommate mentioned it. She used to be crazy over guys she claimed had the dad bod. After observing the guys she found attractive, I came to understand this body type well and was able to identify it. The dad bod is a nice balance between a beer gut and working out. The dad bod says, "I go to the gym occasionally, but I also drink heavily on the weekends and enjoy eating eight slices of pizza at a time." It's not an overweight guy, but it isn't one with washboard abs, either.
The dad bod is a new trend and fraternity boys everywhere seem to be rejoicing. Turns out skipping the gym for a few brews last Thursday after class turned out to be in their favor. While we all love a sculpted guy, there is just something about the dad bod that makes boys seem more human, natural, and attractive. Here are a few reasons that girls are crazy about the dad bod:
by Mackenzie Pearson, The Odyssey | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, April 30, 2015
The Future of College?
On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily populated with winos and vagrants, and whose buildings host hip new businesses, many of them tech start-ups. In a small room, I was flanked by a publicist and a tech manager from an educational venture called the Minerva Project, whose founder and CEO, the 39-year-old entrepreneur Ben Nelson, aims to replace (or, when he is feeling less aggressive, “reform”) the modern liberal-arts college.
Minerva is an accredited university with administrative offices and a dorm in San Francisco, and it plans to open locations in at least six other major world cities. But the key to Minerva, what sets it apart most jarringly from traditional universities, is a proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
Nelson and Kosslyn had invited me to sit in on a test run of the platform, and at first it reminded me of the opening credits of The Brady Bunch: a grid of images of the professor and eight “students” (the others were all Minerva employees) appeared on the screen before me, and we introduced ourselves. For a college seminar, it felt impersonal, and though we were all sitting on the same floor of Minerva’s offices, my fellow students seemed oddly distant, as if piped in from the International Space Station. I half expected a packet of astronaut ice cream to float by someone’s face.
Within a few minutes, though, the experience got more intense. The subject of the class—one in a series during which the instructor, a French physicist named Eric Bonabeau, was trying out his course material—was inductive reasoning. Bonabeau began by polling us on our understanding of the reading, a Nature article about the sudden depletion of North Atlantic cod in the early 1990s. He asked us which of four possible interpretations of the article was the most accurate. In an ordinary undergraduate seminar, this might have been an occasion for timid silence, until the class’s biggest loudmouth or most caffeinated student ventured a guess. But the Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
Bonabeau led the class like a benevolent dictator, subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange. He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked. After a representative from each group gave a brief presentation, Bonabeau ended by showing a short video about the evils of overfishing. (“Propaganda,” he snorted, adding that we’d talk about logical fallacies in the next session.) The computer screen blinked off after 45 minutes of class.
The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the video lagged—but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic. (...)
Nelson’s long-term goal for Minerva is to radically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
The paradox of undergraduate education in the United States is that it is the envy of the world, but also tremendously beleaguered. In that way it resembles the U.S. health-care sector. Both carry price tags that shock the conscience of citizens of other developed countries. They’re both tied up inextricably with government, through student loans and federal research funding or through Medicare. But if you can afford the Mayo Clinic, the United States is the best place in the world to get sick. And if you get a scholarship to Stanford, you should take it, and turn down offers from even the best universities in Europe, Australia, or Japan. (Most likely, though, you won’t get that scholarship. The average U.S. college graduate in 2014 carried $33,000 of debt.)Some claim education is an art and a science. Nelson has disputed this: “It’s a science and a science.”
Financial dysfunction is only the most obvious way in which higher education is troubled. In the past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budged. The easiest way to picture what a university looked like 500 years ago is to go to any large university today, walk into a lecture hall, and imagine the professor speaking Latin and wearing a monk’s cowl. The most common class format is still a professor standing in front of a group of students and talking. And even though we’ve subjected students to lectures for hundreds of years, we have no evidence that they are a good way to teach. (One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.) (...)
Minerva is an accredited university with administrative offices and a dorm in San Francisco, and it plans to open locations in at least six other major world cities. But the key to Minerva, what sets it apart most jarringly from traditional universities, is a proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.Nelson and Kosslyn had invited me to sit in on a test run of the platform, and at first it reminded me of the opening credits of The Brady Bunch: a grid of images of the professor and eight “students” (the others were all Minerva employees) appeared on the screen before me, and we introduced ourselves. For a college seminar, it felt impersonal, and though we were all sitting on the same floor of Minerva’s offices, my fellow students seemed oddly distant, as if piped in from the International Space Station. I half expected a packet of astronaut ice cream to float by someone’s face.
Within a few minutes, though, the experience got more intense. The subject of the class—one in a series during which the instructor, a French physicist named Eric Bonabeau, was trying out his course material—was inductive reasoning. Bonabeau began by polling us on our understanding of the reading, a Nature article about the sudden depletion of North Atlantic cod in the early 1990s. He asked us which of four possible interpretations of the article was the most accurate. In an ordinary undergraduate seminar, this might have been an occasion for timid silence, until the class’s biggest loudmouth or most caffeinated student ventured a guess. But the Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
Bonabeau led the class like a benevolent dictator, subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange. He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked. After a representative from each group gave a brief presentation, Bonabeau ended by showing a short video about the evils of overfishing. (“Propaganda,” he snorted, adding that we’d talk about logical fallacies in the next session.) The computer screen blinked off after 45 minutes of class.
The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the video lagged—but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic. (...)
Nelson’s long-term goal for Minerva is to radically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
The paradox of undergraduate education in the United States is that it is the envy of the world, but also tremendously beleaguered. In that way it resembles the U.S. health-care sector. Both carry price tags that shock the conscience of citizens of other developed countries. They’re both tied up inextricably with government, through student loans and federal research funding or through Medicare. But if you can afford the Mayo Clinic, the United States is the best place in the world to get sick. And if you get a scholarship to Stanford, you should take it, and turn down offers from even the best universities in Europe, Australia, or Japan. (Most likely, though, you won’t get that scholarship. The average U.S. college graduate in 2014 carried $33,000 of debt.)Some claim education is an art and a science. Nelson has disputed this: “It’s a science and a science.”
Financial dysfunction is only the most obvious way in which higher education is troubled. In the past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budged. The easiest way to picture what a university looked like 500 years ago is to go to any large university today, walk into a lecture hall, and imagine the professor speaking Latin and wearing a monk’s cowl. The most common class format is still a professor standing in front of a group of students and talking. And even though we’ve subjected students to lectures for hundreds of years, we have no evidence that they are a good way to teach. (One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.) (...)
The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone. What’s left will be leaner and cheaper. (Minerva has already attracted $25 million in capital from investors who think it can undercut the incumbents.) And Minerva officials claim that their methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices, unlike the methods used at other universities and assumed to be sound just because the schools themselves are old and expensive. Yet because classes have only just begun, we have little clue as to whether the process of stripping down the university removes something essential to what has made America’s best colleges the greatest in the world.
Minerva will, after all, look very little like a university—and not merely because it won’t be accessorized in useless and expensive ways. The teaching methods may well be optimized, but universities, as currently constituted, are only partly about classroom time. Can a school that has no faculty offices, research labs, community spaces for students, or professors paid to do scholarly work still be called a university?
If Minerva fails, it will lay off its staff and sell its office furniture and never be heard from again. If it succeeds, it could inspire a legion of entrepreneurs, and a whole category of legacy institutions might have to liquidate. One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
Minerva will, after all, look very little like a university—and not merely because it won’t be accessorized in useless and expensive ways. The teaching methods may well be optimized, but universities, as currently constituted, are only partly about classroom time. Can a school that has no faculty offices, research labs, community spaces for students, or professors paid to do scholarly work still be called a university?
If Minerva fails, it will lay off its staff and sell its office furniture and never be heard from again. If it succeeds, it could inspire a legion of entrepreneurs, and a whole category of legacy institutions might have to liquidate. One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
by Graeme Wood, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adam Vorhees
Who Gets to Wear Shredded Jeans?
Recently I scanned the statement of authenticity on a brand-new pair of good old bluejeans. Printed on the inside of the left pocket, beneath an equine insignia, an 1873 patent date and a boast of its status as “an American tradition, symbolizing the vitality of the West,” Levi Strauss & Company reissued its ancient invitation to inspect the dry goods: “We shall thank you to carefully examine the sewing, finish and fit.” The fit was slim, the sewing sound, the finish glamorously traumatized, as if intending homage to clothes Steve McQueen might have worn home from a bike crash.
A ragged extravagance of fraying squiggled from each knee, where an irregular network of holes was patched from behind by a white-cotton rectangle stretchier than sterile gauze. Knotted to a belt loop was a paper tag headed “Destruction,” explaining that these Levi’s, shredded to resemble “the piece you just can’t part with,” merited gentle treatment: “Be sure to take extra care when wearing and washing.” The process of proving the denim tough had endowed it with the value of lace.
These jeans sent a dual message — of armor, of swaddling — in the accepted doublespeak of distressed denim. Pre-washed bluejeans are now sold already on their last legs: ripped, blasted, trashed, wrecked, abused, destroyed, sabotaged, devastated and, in what may be a borrowing of aerospace jargon for drones obliterated by remote control, destructed. Below this disaster-headline language, the fine print babbles smoothly about the soft comfort of deep familiarity, as the textile historian Beverly Gordon observed in a paper titled “American Denim.” These are clothes that suit the Friday-evening needs of Forever 21-year-olds buttressing their unformed selves with ceremonial battle scars, and they also meet the Saturday-morning wants of grown-ups who, arrayed as if to hint at having been out all night, enliven the running of errands by wearing trousers that look and feel like an opiated hangover.
The mass clique of distressed denim exists in polar opposition to another school of bluejean enthusiasm: the dye-stained cult of raw denim. The denim purists — looking professional in unsullied indigo fresh off the shuttle loom, in their natural habitat of bare brick walls and old gnarled wood and other textures invested with magical thinking — are likely to meet the approval of strict good taste. As opposed to people who buy their jeans prefaded and abraded, with a thumb-wide key punch in the watch pocket and the sham phantom of a wallet’s edge in back. But sometimes good taste goes on holiday, to a music festival, for example, turned out in acid-streaked, bleach-stained, chaotically nasty cutoffs. This is the order of things. One point of beat-up bluejeans is to bother good taste, which is a muscular aesthetic stance, a canny market footing and an ambiguous moral position.
Some distressed denim is beauty-marked with subtle scuffs amounting to off-duty signs. Some is lavishly slashed into canvases for abstract craft work, with a fleeciness of bare threads asymmetrically outlined by stubby blue tufts, a kind of plumage for people treating a humble fiber as a vehicle for expressing splendor. There are bluejeans serially slit up the front, space striped as if by the shadows of window blinds in a film noir, and sometimes they are sold by shop assistants wearing jeans sliced to bare hamstrings, as if everyone’s bored of the old ways of constraining the sight and shape of the body. There is a place in Paris that gathers old bluejeans as raw material for reassembled jeans that will cost $1,450 a pair. Which would be a bargain if you believed the piece worthy of framing as a collage deconstructing aperture and entropy and the tensions of a labor-class fabric reworked as universal playwear. (...)
“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord wrote in “Society of the Spectacle.” He was describing a phenomenom now exemplified by new denim marketed as having been “aged to mimic look and feel of 11-year-old denim.” The product lets its buyers slip into the approximation of a lived-in skin and by proximity, to enhance their own personal histories.
The insolence of indecent denim has evolved into a prefab mannerism, a marker of “punk chic” or “grunge cool.” The holes can still reify a generation gap, I think, having heard a 35-year-old banker say that she cannot put on such jeans without imagining her parents’ disapproval: “You should have worn those dungarees all day long until you wore them out yourself.” But that purist’s objection misses the point. The patent insincerity of distressed denim is integral to its appeal. What to make, glancing around the waiting room, of the precision-shredded knees of a pair of plainly expensive maternity jeans promoted for their “rock ’n’ roll appeal”? No one supposes that a woman wearing an elasticized waistband to accommodate the fullness of her third trimester wiped out on her skateboard. The lie is not a lie but a statement of participation in a widespread fantasy. Contentedly pretending to be a dangerous bohemian, she is simply exercising the right to be her own Joey Ramone. We put on jeans with ruined threading in a self-adoring performance of annihilation.
A ragged extravagance of fraying squiggled from each knee, where an irregular network of holes was patched from behind by a white-cotton rectangle stretchier than sterile gauze. Knotted to a belt loop was a paper tag headed “Destruction,” explaining that these Levi’s, shredded to resemble “the piece you just can’t part with,” merited gentle treatment: “Be sure to take extra care when wearing and washing.” The process of proving the denim tough had endowed it with the value of lace.These jeans sent a dual message — of armor, of swaddling — in the accepted doublespeak of distressed denim. Pre-washed bluejeans are now sold already on their last legs: ripped, blasted, trashed, wrecked, abused, destroyed, sabotaged, devastated and, in what may be a borrowing of aerospace jargon for drones obliterated by remote control, destructed. Below this disaster-headline language, the fine print babbles smoothly about the soft comfort of deep familiarity, as the textile historian Beverly Gordon observed in a paper titled “American Denim.” These are clothes that suit the Friday-evening needs of Forever 21-year-olds buttressing their unformed selves with ceremonial battle scars, and they also meet the Saturday-morning wants of grown-ups who, arrayed as if to hint at having been out all night, enliven the running of errands by wearing trousers that look and feel like an opiated hangover.
The mass clique of distressed denim exists in polar opposition to another school of bluejean enthusiasm: the dye-stained cult of raw denim. The denim purists — looking professional in unsullied indigo fresh off the shuttle loom, in their natural habitat of bare brick walls and old gnarled wood and other textures invested with magical thinking — are likely to meet the approval of strict good taste. As opposed to people who buy their jeans prefaded and abraded, with a thumb-wide key punch in the watch pocket and the sham phantom of a wallet’s edge in back. But sometimes good taste goes on holiday, to a music festival, for example, turned out in acid-streaked, bleach-stained, chaotically nasty cutoffs. This is the order of things. One point of beat-up bluejeans is to bother good taste, which is a muscular aesthetic stance, a canny market footing and an ambiguous moral position.
Some distressed denim is beauty-marked with subtle scuffs amounting to off-duty signs. Some is lavishly slashed into canvases for abstract craft work, with a fleeciness of bare threads asymmetrically outlined by stubby blue tufts, a kind of plumage for people treating a humble fiber as a vehicle for expressing splendor. There are bluejeans serially slit up the front, space striped as if by the shadows of window blinds in a film noir, and sometimes they are sold by shop assistants wearing jeans sliced to bare hamstrings, as if everyone’s bored of the old ways of constraining the sight and shape of the body. There is a place in Paris that gathers old bluejeans as raw material for reassembled jeans that will cost $1,450 a pair. Which would be a bargain if you believed the piece worthy of framing as a collage deconstructing aperture and entropy and the tensions of a labor-class fabric reworked as universal playwear. (...)
“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord wrote in “Society of the Spectacle.” He was describing a phenomenom now exemplified by new denim marketed as having been “aged to mimic look and feel of 11-year-old denim.” The product lets its buyers slip into the approximation of a lived-in skin and by proximity, to enhance their own personal histories.
The insolence of indecent denim has evolved into a prefab mannerism, a marker of “punk chic” or “grunge cool.” The holes can still reify a generation gap, I think, having heard a 35-year-old banker say that she cannot put on such jeans without imagining her parents’ disapproval: “You should have worn those dungarees all day long until you wore them out yourself.” But that purist’s objection misses the point. The patent insincerity of distressed denim is integral to its appeal. What to make, glancing around the waiting room, of the precision-shredded knees of a pair of plainly expensive maternity jeans promoted for their “rock ’n’ roll appeal”? No one supposes that a woman wearing an elasticized waistband to accommodate the fullness of her third trimester wiped out on her skateboard. The lie is not a lie but a statement of participation in a widespread fantasy. Contentedly pretending to be a dangerous bohemian, she is simply exercising the right to be her own Joey Ramone. We put on jeans with ruined threading in a self-adoring performance of annihilation.
by Troy Patterson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mauricio Alejo
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
The Embattled First Amendment
Can free speech wreck the American experiment? The question at first seems crazy: Free speech is almost universally regarded as the heartbeat of democracy. (...)
However sacred the idea of free speech remains for us today, we should recognize that its most fervent champions are not standing up for mistrusted outliers, such as Holmes had in mind, or for the dispossessed and powerless. Today’s advocates do the bidding of insiders—the super-rich and the ultra-powerful, the airline, drug, petroleum, and tobacco industries, all the winners in America’s winner-take-all society. In a country where the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown so extreme that both political parties now pay lip service to populism, the haves have seized free speech as their cause—and their shield.
The landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case in 2010, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban so-called independent spending by corporations in elections, is often described as being about campaign finance law, since it dealt with a statute intended to boost confidence in the political system by reducing the role of big money in elections. But to the justices in the majority (Roberts, Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr.), the case was about free speech. The principle, Kennedy wrote, is that “the Government lacks the power to restrict political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity.” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United ruling, public-interest organizations issued reports that, as a result of it, corporations, unions, and individuals have spent more than a billion dollars on political campaigns, with the Center for Responsive Politics estimating that contributions from business dwarf those from labor by about 15-to-one.
Citizens United was about political speech, but it was built on principles established for commercial speech—the kind of solicitation that a business makes to potential customers. The Supreme Court initially treated commercial speech as having less importance than political speech. But the protection of commercial speech is now a formidable tool for American enterprise—and Citizens United shows how far the Court has taken the concept.
In 1976, in a case about whether pharmacists had the right to advertise prices for prescription drugs, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the First Amendment covers commercial speech. Unless an ad for a drug is false or misleading or promotes something illegal, the Court held, government must let a business make its pitch and trust that consumers will make good use of the information.
The new ruling gave commercial speech enough importance to come under the First Amendment’s coverage, but Justice Harry Blackmun noted “common sense differences” between commercial and political speech and said that it was “less necessary to tolerate inaccurate statements” in commercial speech because of its lower political and social value. The ruling seemed to strike a balance between the interest of a business in touting its lower prices and the interest of the government in ensuring that commercial information flows, as Blackmun put it, “cleanly as well as freely.”
For the past decade, however, corporations have used the idea of commercial speech as a basis for sweeping claims about what the First Amendment entitles them to. With it, they have persuaded courts to strike down a broad range of well-founded regulations, from health warnings on cigarette packs to bans against pharmacies selling data about prescriptions for marketing. Spirit Airlines, joined by other carriers, argued that the government violated its First Amendment rights by requiring it to prominently list the total price of a ticket, to avoid confusing customers with separate lists of the base fare, taxes, and other charges. Reflecting the new libertarian outlook of businesses about free speech, Spirit insisted it had a right to tell its customers about “the huge tax burden that the federal government imposes on air travel.” The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled against the airlines, by two to one, but the dissent embraced their libertarian argument: “if discourse regarding these charges results in the government lessening the financial burden it imposes, airfares would become more affordable and people would fly more often.”
The decision in Citizens United was even more aggressive. It took a central concept of the Court’s rulings in commercial speech cases and twisted it drastically, viewing the matter not from the viewpoint of the consumer—its original intention—but from the viewpoint of the corporation.
In his 2014 book Citizens Divided, Yale Law School’s dean, Robert C. Post, who specializes in the First Amendment, explained what the Court got wrong: “the speech of an ordinary commercial corporation possesses constitutional value only because it provides information to auditors”—that is, it provides consumers with truthful information by removing government restrictions that kept them from getting it. Or so the Court said four decades ago, when it extended First Amendment coverage to commercial speech. (...)
Nothing in the text or history of the amendment says exactly what the freedom of speech means—or abridging, for that matter. The Supreme Court has explicitly identified five categories of speech that the First Amendment doesn’t cover: lewd, obscene, profane, and libelous expressions, plus face-to-face insults that trigger a violent response, known as “fighting words.” Ronald K. L. Collins of the University of Washington has counted “at least 43 other additional types of unprotected expression,” ranging from blackmail and bribery to perjury and harassment in the workplace; from plagiarism and child pornography to some kinds of panhandling; from telemarketing to lying to government officials. And free speech in public schools, courtrooms, prisons, the military, and other public institutions may be limited—from the government’s viewpoint, to help them function effectively.
Rather than developing a unified theory about free speech, the Supreme Court has taken an issue-by-issue approach, explains Geoffrey Stone. The Court has been mindful of three recurring problems that the law must guard against: the chilling effect, the pretext effect, and the crisis effect.
However sacred the idea of free speech remains for us today, we should recognize that its most fervent champions are not standing up for mistrusted outliers, such as Holmes had in mind, or for the dispossessed and powerless. Today’s advocates do the bidding of insiders—the super-rich and the ultra-powerful, the airline, drug, petroleum, and tobacco industries, all the winners in America’s winner-take-all society. In a country where the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown so extreme that both political parties now pay lip service to populism, the haves have seized free speech as their cause—and their shield.
The landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case in 2010, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban so-called independent spending by corporations in elections, is often described as being about campaign finance law, since it dealt with a statute intended to boost confidence in the political system by reducing the role of big money in elections. But to the justices in the majority (Roberts, Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr.), the case was about free speech. The principle, Kennedy wrote, is that “the Government lacks the power to restrict political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity.” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United ruling, public-interest organizations issued reports that, as a result of it, corporations, unions, and individuals have spent more than a billion dollars on political campaigns, with the Center for Responsive Politics estimating that contributions from business dwarf those from labor by about 15-to-one.Citizens United was about political speech, but it was built on principles established for commercial speech—the kind of solicitation that a business makes to potential customers. The Supreme Court initially treated commercial speech as having less importance than political speech. But the protection of commercial speech is now a formidable tool for American enterprise—and Citizens United shows how far the Court has taken the concept.
In 1976, in a case about whether pharmacists had the right to advertise prices for prescription drugs, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the First Amendment covers commercial speech. Unless an ad for a drug is false or misleading or promotes something illegal, the Court held, government must let a business make its pitch and trust that consumers will make good use of the information.
The new ruling gave commercial speech enough importance to come under the First Amendment’s coverage, but Justice Harry Blackmun noted “common sense differences” between commercial and political speech and said that it was “less necessary to tolerate inaccurate statements” in commercial speech because of its lower political and social value. The ruling seemed to strike a balance between the interest of a business in touting its lower prices and the interest of the government in ensuring that commercial information flows, as Blackmun put it, “cleanly as well as freely.”
For the past decade, however, corporations have used the idea of commercial speech as a basis for sweeping claims about what the First Amendment entitles them to. With it, they have persuaded courts to strike down a broad range of well-founded regulations, from health warnings on cigarette packs to bans against pharmacies selling data about prescriptions for marketing. Spirit Airlines, joined by other carriers, argued that the government violated its First Amendment rights by requiring it to prominently list the total price of a ticket, to avoid confusing customers with separate lists of the base fare, taxes, and other charges. Reflecting the new libertarian outlook of businesses about free speech, Spirit insisted it had a right to tell its customers about “the huge tax burden that the federal government imposes on air travel.” The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled against the airlines, by two to one, but the dissent embraced their libertarian argument: “if discourse regarding these charges results in the government lessening the financial burden it imposes, airfares would become more affordable and people would fly more often.”
The decision in Citizens United was even more aggressive. It took a central concept of the Court’s rulings in commercial speech cases and twisted it drastically, viewing the matter not from the viewpoint of the consumer—its original intention—but from the viewpoint of the corporation.
In his 2014 book Citizens Divided, Yale Law School’s dean, Robert C. Post, who specializes in the First Amendment, explained what the Court got wrong: “the speech of an ordinary commercial corporation possesses constitutional value only because it provides information to auditors”—that is, it provides consumers with truthful information by removing government restrictions that kept them from getting it. Or so the Court said four decades ago, when it extended First Amendment coverage to commercial speech. (...)
Nothing in the text or history of the amendment says exactly what the freedom of speech means—or abridging, for that matter. The Supreme Court has explicitly identified five categories of speech that the First Amendment doesn’t cover: lewd, obscene, profane, and libelous expressions, plus face-to-face insults that trigger a violent response, known as “fighting words.” Ronald K. L. Collins of the University of Washington has counted “at least 43 other additional types of unprotected expression,” ranging from blackmail and bribery to perjury and harassment in the workplace; from plagiarism and child pornography to some kinds of panhandling; from telemarketing to lying to government officials. And free speech in public schools, courtrooms, prisons, the military, and other public institutions may be limited—from the government’s viewpoint, to help them function effectively.
Rather than developing a unified theory about free speech, the Supreme Court has taken an issue-by-issue approach, explains Geoffrey Stone. The Court has been mindful of three recurring problems that the law must guard against: the chilling effect, the pretext effect, and the crisis effect.
by Lincoln Caplan, American Scholar | Read more:
Image: David Herbic
How Have We Got Education So Disastrously Wrong?
As we read of the open letter signed by more than 1,200 teachers complaining that stress is destroying the profession, it might be worth pausing to ask what has happened to make teaching, once the most rewarding and satisfying of jobs, so deeply frustrating and unfulfilling?
How have we allowed so many initiatives done in the name of ‘improving standards’ to wreck havoc on our schools? How, in the interests of trying to improve the quality of the education, have we got it so disastrously wrong?
When it comes to compiling a charge list, where to begin? Perhaps with the extension of schools into their extended role as providers of wrap-round care and the extra pressures that has placed upon teachers?
Perhaps with the amount of time required to be given over at inset days and staff meetings to topics as diverse as child protection, safeguarding, e-safety, inspections, changes in legislation, health and safety updates, risk assessments and compliance, all valid in themselves, but leaving no room left to discuss the education of children?
Perhaps in encouraging parents to act as champions for their children without any account of their own responsibilities in raising and disciplining them? Or in society’s expectations that schools are where all social problems should be dealt with?
Perhaps with the quite unreasonable demands placed on teachers to constantly record evidence, work to targets and be subject to endless monitoring, appraisal and inspections?
Perhaps with the ever changing regulations for inspections and compliance designed to keep us on our toes?
However well-intended, each initiative, each change, has exacted a cost, and the cumulative effect on the profession has made it almost untenable.
How have we allowed so many initiatives done in the name of ‘improving standards’ to wreck havoc on our schools? How, in the interests of trying to improve the quality of the education, have we got it so disastrously wrong?When it comes to compiling a charge list, where to begin? Perhaps with the extension of schools into their extended role as providers of wrap-round care and the extra pressures that has placed upon teachers?
Perhaps with the amount of time required to be given over at inset days and staff meetings to topics as diverse as child protection, safeguarding, e-safety, inspections, changes in legislation, health and safety updates, risk assessments and compliance, all valid in themselves, but leaving no room left to discuss the education of children?
Perhaps in encouraging parents to act as champions for their children without any account of their own responsibilities in raising and disciplining them? Or in society’s expectations that schools are where all social problems should be dealt with?
Perhaps with the quite unreasonable demands placed on teachers to constantly record evidence, work to targets and be subject to endless monitoring, appraisal and inspections?
Perhaps with the ever changing regulations for inspections and compliance designed to keep us on our toes?
However well-intended, each initiative, each change, has exacted a cost, and the cumulative effect on the profession has made it almost untenable.
by Peter Tait, Telegraph | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
The New New Museum
... museums have changed — a lot. Slowly over the past quarter-century, then quickly in the past decade. These changes have been complicated, piecemeal, and sometimes contradictory, with different museums embracing them in different ways. But the transformation is visible everywhere. Put simply, it is this: The museum used to be a storehouse for the art of the past, the display of supposed masterpieces, the insightful exploration of the present in the context of the long or compressed histories that preceded it. Now — especially as embodied by the Tate Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, and our beloved MoMA — the museum is a revved-up showcase of the new, the now, the next, an always-activated market of events and experiences, many of which lack any reason to exist other than to occupy the museum industry — an industry that critic Matthew Collings has called “bloated and foolish, corporatist, ghastly and death-ridden.”
The list of fun-house attractions is long. At MoMA, we’ve had overhyped, badly done shows of Björk and Tim Burton, the Rain Room selfie trap, and the daylong spectacle of Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case. This summer in London you can ride Carsten Höller’s building-high slides at the Hayward Gallery — there, the fun house is literal. Elsewhere, it is a little more “adult”: In 2011, L.A.’s MoCA staged Marina Abramovic’s Survival MoCA Dinner, a piece of megakitsch that included naked women with skeletons atop them on dinner tables where attendees ate. In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art paid $70,000 for a 21-foot-tall, 340-ton boulder by artist Michael Heizer and installed it over a cement trench in front of the museum, paying $10 million for what is essentially a photo op. Last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago mounted a tepid David Bowie show, which nevertheless broke records for attendance and sales of catalogues, “limited-edition prints,” and T-shirts. Among the many unfocused recent spectacles at the Guggenheim were Cai Guo-Qiang’s nine cars suspended in the rotunda with lights shooting out of them. The irony of these massively expensive endeavors is that the works and shows are supposedly “radical” and “interdisciplinary,” but the experiences they generate are closer, really, to a visit to Graceland — “Shut up, take a selfie, keep moving.”In this way, an old museum model has been replaced by another one. Museums that were roughly bookish, slow, a bit hoity-toity, not risk-averse but careful, oddly other, and devoted to reflection, connoisseurship, cultivation, and preservation (mostly of the past but also of new great works) — these museums have transformed into institutions that feel faster, indifferent to existing collections, and at all times intensely in pursuit of new work, new crowds, and new money. We used to look at these places as something like embodiments and explorations of the canon — or canons, since some (MoMA’s and Guggenheim’s modernism collections) were narrower and more specialized than others (the Met’s, the Louvre’s). But whatever long-view curating and collecting museums do now — and many of them still do it well — the institutions that are sucking up the most energy are the ones that have made themselves into platforms for spectacle, as though the party-driven global-art-fair feeding frenzy had taken up residence in one place, and one building, permanently. Plus, accessibility has become everything. More museums are making collections available online — sad to say, art is sometimes better viewed there than in the flesh, thanks to so much bad museum architecture and so little actual space to display permanent collections. Acoustiguides have become more and more common, and while there’s much good they can do, it often seems their most important function is crowd control — moving visitors through quickly to make room for the next million.
The museums of New York can already feel alien with this new model taking over. And we’re really at the beginning rather than the end of the transformation. All four of Manhattan’s big museums — the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim — have undertaken or are involved in massive expansion, renovation, and rebuilding. These are more than just infrastructure updates: We are witnessing a four-way competition for supremacy in the new art-museum universe...
What makes this all so startling is that these museums have never been all-out competitors before. Until now, they had distinct missions, collections, and curatorial identities: The Met specialized in 5,000 years of art; the Whitney was about American art; MoMA was modernism’s Francophile Garden of Eden; and the Guggenheim — well, the Guggenheim has always been a bit confused, mostly distinguished by its incredible building. But now, all of a sudden and for the first time, it is not unusual for curators to speak of being unable to do shows because “that artist is already taken.”
Each of these museums still preserves, collects, and exhibits the art of the past. But with the action and big money centered on contemporary art, galleries, auctions, art fairs, and biennials, each is more committed than ever before to the art of the now and the cult of the new. I love the new. I am a member of that cult, in part because the art world has become my surrogate family of gypsies and dreamers (yes, I’m a mush). But that cult, and the ascendance of spectacle, may be the end of museums as we know them and has been the subject of countless conversations I’ve had over the past year with curators, artists, gallerists, and collectors, all of whom acknowledge a major shift under way. “The problem is museums trying to be as up-to-date with contemporary art as galleries are,” says painter and critic Peter Plagens. “The cultural distance between what a museum preserves (Cézanne, Joan Mitchell, etc.) and how it spotlights the present (Björk, interactive art, etc.) is greater than ever.” As former Venice- and Whitney-biennial curator Francesco Bonami puts it, “They’re like those in the fashion world who only follow the last collection and are content to have their shows look like those of other museums.” Plagens says that a few years ago, ex–L.A. MoCA director and impresario Jeffrey Deitch told him that “museums needed young audiences and that what young audiences wanted to see is events, whether the events are fashion shows, rock concerts, or exhibition openings.” And now? “I mean, fucking James Franco is everywhere,” Plagens says. “Miley Cyrus is on art-world tongues, curators are courtiers, museums are the runway.” Of course, he acknowledges, “museums will survive. But in what form?”
by Jerry Saltz, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Nic Lehoux
What to Say When Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them
First of all, they shouldn’t ask.
“As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union and a 21-year veteran on the force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”
“What you don’t have a right to do is interfere,” he says. “Record from a distance, stay out of the scene, and the officer doesn’t have the right to come over and take your camera, confiscate it.”
Officers do have a right to tell you to stop interfering with their work, Burton told me, but they still aren’t allowed to destroy film.
Yet still some officers do. Last week, an amateur video appeared to show a U.S. Marshal confiscating and destroying a woman’s camera as she filmed him.
“Photography is a form of power, and people are loath to give up power, including police officers. It’s a power struggle where the citizen is protected by the law but, because it is a power struggle, sometimes that’s not enough,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Stanley wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Among these: Photographers can take pictures of anything in plain view from public space—including public officials—but private land owners may set rules for photography on their property. Cops also can’t “confiscate or demand to view” audio or video without a warrant, and they can’t ever delete images.
The ACLU’s guide does caution that “police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations.”
What if that happens, and you disagree with the officer?
“As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union and a 21-year veteran on the force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”
“What you don’t have a right to do is interfere,” he says. “Record from a distance, stay out of the scene, and the officer doesn’t have the right to come over and take your camera, confiscate it.”Officers do have a right to tell you to stop interfering with their work, Burton told me, but they still aren’t allowed to destroy film.
Yet still some officers do. Last week, an amateur video appeared to show a U.S. Marshal confiscating and destroying a woman’s camera as she filmed him.
“Photography is a form of power, and people are loath to give up power, including police officers. It’s a power struggle where the citizen is protected by the law but, because it is a power struggle, sometimes that’s not enough,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Stanley wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Among these: Photographers can take pictures of anything in plain view from public space—including public officials—but private land owners may set rules for photography on their property. Cops also can’t “confiscate or demand to view” audio or video without a warrant, and they can’t ever delete images.
The ACLU’s guide does caution that “police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations.”
What if that happens, and you disagree with the officer?
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