Thursday, August 20, 2015
Love in the Age of Big Data
Once upon a time, in the Pony Expresso cafe in Seattle, a man and a woman began to experience the long-mysterious but increasingly scientifically investigated thing we call love. The first stage is called "limerence." This is the spine-tingling, heart-twisting, can't-stop-staring feeling, when it seems as though the world stops whirling and time itself bows down and pauses before the force of your longing. The man, a then-44-year-old University of Washington research psychologist named John Gottman, was drawn to the woman's wild mane of black curly hair and her creativity: She was an amateur musician and painter as well as a psychologist like himself. The woman, a then-35-year-old named Julie Schwartz, who'd placed a personal ad in the Seattle Weekly that John had answered, was turned on by John's humble little car—voted the ugliest vehicle in the University of Washington faculty parking lot—and his expansive curiosity. He read physics and math and history and kept a little spiral-bound notebook in his pocket that he used to jot down things his companions said that captivated him.
They talked avidly; it felt as if they'd known each other forever. Over the following months they drew closer and closer, proceeding through subsequent stages of building a fulfilling love relationship. John learned about the unhappy home life growing up in Michigan that had driven Julie to spend so much time in the forest by herself, and Julie learned about John's desire to understand deeply earth's biggest mysteries, like the nature of time. Although they were afraid—they'd both been divorced before—they confided their admiration for each other, John's for the courage Julie showed in her therapy practice by helping the “sickest of the sickest,” schizophrenics and Vietnam veterans on Skid Row, and Julie's for John's absurdist sense of humor. They kayaked together. They joined a synagogue. They married and had a daughter, fulfilling one of John's longtime dreams, and bought a house on a forested island three hours north of Seattle, fulfilling a dream of Julie's. They fought. They attended couples therapy. Through their conflict they came to love each other more.
Twenty-nine years after that first date, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman stood on a black stage in a ballroom of the Seattle Sheraton in front of about 250 other couples, young and old, straight and gay. The intense intimacy of their relationship was on full display: They finished each other's sentences, bantered with each other and talked candidly about how their struggles had made them stronger. Julie wept. John held Julie, caressing her hair. The rest of us, seated in chairs that had been hooked together in sets of twos, watched them with yearning.
We'd come to see the Gottmans because the pair has spent the last 20 years refining a science-based method to build a beautiful love partnership yourself. They reveal it over a two-day, $750-per-pair workshop called "The Art and Science of Love." “It turns out Tolstoy was wrong," John told the crowd in an opening lecture. "All happy relationships are similar and all unhappy relationships are also similar. … Is there a secret? It turns out, empirically, yes, there is a secret."
They talked avidly; it felt as if they'd known each other forever. Over the following months they drew closer and closer, proceeding through subsequent stages of building a fulfilling love relationship. John learned about the unhappy home life growing up in Michigan that had driven Julie to spend so much time in the forest by herself, and Julie learned about John's desire to understand deeply earth's biggest mysteries, like the nature of time. Although they were afraid—they'd both been divorced before—they confided their admiration for each other, John's for the courage Julie showed in her therapy practice by helping the “sickest of the sickest,” schizophrenics and Vietnam veterans on Skid Row, and Julie's for John's absurdist sense of humor. They kayaked together. They joined a synagogue. They married and had a daughter, fulfilling one of John's longtime dreams, and bought a house on a forested island three hours north of Seattle, fulfilling a dream of Julie's. They fought. They attended couples therapy. Through their conflict they came to love each other more.Twenty-nine years after that first date, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman stood on a black stage in a ballroom of the Seattle Sheraton in front of about 250 other couples, young and old, straight and gay. The intense intimacy of their relationship was on full display: They finished each other's sentences, bantered with each other and talked candidly about how their struggles had made them stronger. Julie wept. John held Julie, caressing her hair. The rest of us, seated in chairs that had been hooked together in sets of twos, watched them with yearning.
We'd come to see the Gottmans because the pair has spent the last 20 years refining a science-based method to build a beautiful love partnership yourself. They reveal it over a two-day, $750-per-pair workshop called "The Art and Science of Love." “It turns out Tolstoy was wrong," John told the crowd in an opening lecture. "All happy relationships are similar and all unhappy relationships are also similar. … Is there a secret? It turns out, empirically, yes, there is a secret."
by Eve Fairbanks, Huffington Post | Read more:
Image: Jun Cen
Plain White T-Shirts, Ranked
In case you momentarily forgot which website you were reading, let me say right here up at the top that I am not a textile expert. I’m actually not even particularly fashionable. To me, obsessing about fashion is silly. There are better things to obsess about, such as the optimal marinade for skirt steak. The fact that I’m not qualified to opine about fashion, however, makes me absolutely well qualified to opine on something that symbolizes its opposite: the white T-shirt.
The white T-shirt is my kind of garment. It is utilitarian by design. Extensive research has taught me that its origin dates back to the Spanish-American War, when the Navy issued them as part of the standard uniform. “The word T-shirt became part of American English by the 1920s,” says a website I read. This makes it even better: Not only is the white T the garment of choice for those of us who despise having to choose garments, but it’s also quintessentially American.
In Amazon, there are 2.6 million results that come up when you search “Men’s White T-Shirt,” and while those get pretty interesting pretty fast (“Konflic NWT Men’s Giant Cross Graphic Designer MMA Muscle T-shirt”), reviewing all of them would take more time and effort than anyone has. Here, along with my research assistant (pictured at left), I’ve done my best to compile a range of recognizable brands at various price points, with some curveballs thrown in as well, because if you’re going to write about white T-shirts, you need to buy at least one of the outlandishly expensive ones, just to see how the other half lives. And actually, since that particular shirt is far and away the worst garment of the 14 brands I tried, we might as well just start there. Here is the definitive ranking of white T-shirts, from worst to best, with at-press-time prices from Amazon, plus a few from the brands’ sites themselves.
Price: $70 for a single damn shirt
These guys have one of those websites where everything is in black and white and the sexless models stare back at you like failed AI experiments (which actually sums up the Swiss in general, I’ve found). The shirt itself is made from a blend of cotton and “elastane” (aka spandex) and stretches like a pair of pantyhose. You’re not supposed to put it in the dryer. Now, I believe that if a T-shirt makes you feel like $70 worth of awesome when you wear it, then go right ahead and spend that money (you overpaid social-media marketing whiz, you). This shirt, however, makes me feel like a robot’s penis sheathed in a polymer condom. Knowing that there are people are out there actually wearing this somehow makes me feel both superior and inferior at the same time.
Price: $29.50 for a two-pack
I had high hopes for Levi’s. I have at least two pairs of their 511 jeans in heavy rotation at all times, and a lot of their flannels and jackets are the male equivalent of yoga pants, in that they’re basically designed like pajamas you can wear outside. But this “reengineered” V-neck blows. It’s not soft, it rides up in the armpits, and there’s an obnoxious square of red stitching sewn into the lower-right flank. White T-shirts should be white, period—no branding, no subtle flourish that whispers, “Dude, check it out, I’m wearing Levi’s.” Even the Swiss Robot Condom people know better.
by Garrett Kamps, Adequate Man | Read more:
Image: Jim Cooke
Welcome To Larry Ellison’s Cat Island
Like a cat, an island is a funny thing to own. But Ellison is far from the first person to have this much control over the well-being and employment of the people who made their homes on Lana’i. The island has, at times, served as King Kamehameha I’s favorite fishing village, ranch lands for a cattle company, a pineapple plantation for what eventually became Dole foods, and a quaint resort town in service of two Four Seasons hotels.
Lana’i has the sort of worn-in, authentic-feeling vibe that would make developers in the Florida Keys or North Carolina’s Outer Banks flip out. In Lana’i City, the 3,100-resident town that serves as the island’s commercial and cultural center, nearly every one of the single-story, plantation-style houses has a porch. You can tell who’s a tourist because they all drive the same late-model Jeep Wrangler rented from the local gas station. Down on the beach at Hulopo’e, next to the pristine luau grounds at the Four Seasons, there’s a boarded-up snack bar where packs of local teens like to vape. There are two golf courses and no stoplights. There’s a pizza place with a bar in the back and a bustling takeout business.
And there are cats, hundreds and hundreds of them — many in the sanctuary, many still roaming free around the island. They, like the deer and sheep that still attract hunters to Lana’i today, were originally brought here for someone’s amusement, before they were eventually abandoned and left to fend for themselves. Mooallem was concerned with how Ellison would take care of an island that has a long history of booms and busts at the hands of foreign entrepreneurs. I want to know who’s taking care of all these cats.
by Andrew Dalton, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Andrew Dalton
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Ad Blockers and the Nuisance at the Heart of the Modern Web
The great philosopher Homer Simpson once memorably described alcohol as “the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Internet advertising is a bit like that — the funder of and terrible nuisance baked into everything you do online.
Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, not least this very newspaper and its handsome, charming technology columnist; as I’ve argued before, many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast, hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet.
Now, more and more web users are escaping the daily bombardment of online advertising by installing an ad blocker. This simple, free software lets you roam the web without encountering any ads that shunt themselves between you and the content you want to read or watch. With an ad blocker, your web browser will generally run faster, you’ll waste less bandwidth downloading ads, and you’ll suffer fewer annoyances when navigating the Internet. You’ll wonder why everyone else in the world doesn’t turn to the dark side.
Well, everyone may be catching on. Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply, at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking. Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.
But in the long run, there could be a hidden benefit to blocking ads for advertisers and publishers: Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive, and are far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or risk getting blocked forever if they fail.
“It’s clear to us that the ads ecosystem is broken,” said Ben Williams, a spokesman for Eyeo, the German company that makes Adblock Plus, the most popular ad-blocking software. “What we need is a sea change in the industry to get to a place where we have a good amount of better ads out there, ads that users accept.”
The industry may not have much time to wait. In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. Nearly 200 million people worldwide regularly block ads, the report said, and the number is growing fast, increasing 41 percent globally in the last year.
Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, not least this very newspaper and its handsome, charming technology columnist; as I’ve argued before, many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast, hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet.Now, more and more web users are escaping the daily bombardment of online advertising by installing an ad blocker. This simple, free software lets you roam the web without encountering any ads that shunt themselves between you and the content you want to read or watch. With an ad blocker, your web browser will generally run faster, you’ll waste less bandwidth downloading ads, and you’ll suffer fewer annoyances when navigating the Internet. You’ll wonder why everyone else in the world doesn’t turn to the dark side.
Well, everyone may be catching on. Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply, at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking. Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.
But in the long run, there could be a hidden benefit to blocking ads for advertisers and publishers: Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive, and are far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or risk getting blocked forever if they fail.
“It’s clear to us that the ads ecosystem is broken,” said Ben Williams, a spokesman for Eyeo, the German company that makes Adblock Plus, the most popular ad-blocking software. “What we need is a sea change in the industry to get to a place where we have a good amount of better ads out there, ads that users accept.”
The industry may not have much time to wait. In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. Nearly 200 million people worldwide regularly block ads, the report said, and the number is growing fast, increasing 41 percent globally in the last year.
by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stuart Goldenberg
Writers and Their Favorite Tools
In seventh grade, I started hanging out with a girl who wore thick, dark eyeliner and convinced me to shoplift. We’d walk to Main Street after school. One of my favorite shops was the office supply store—no surprise to anyone who knew my nerdy self. I spent a long time in front of the pens, trying each one out on the Post-It notes on display. I’d uncap a Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen (turquoise ink) and write SMILE! with a Super S, one of those strange blocky S’s that was popular in the 1990s. One day, my friend encouraged me to just stuff a bunch of pens into the pocket of my monogrammed eggplant-purple L.L. Bean bag. I caved to peer pressure, but immediately regretted it. It was too late. The cashier noticed.
“Give the pens back immediately, and we won’t call the police.”
Panicking, I unzipped my bag and grabbed the fistful of stolen loot, dropping them on the counter in one guilty gesture.
As a teenager, I got a job at Staples. I’ve always loved office supplies. I have fond memories of going back-to-school shopping with my mother, picking out a Lisa Frank trapper keeper, a planner (maybe this would be the year I’d finally get organized!), journals with college-ruled lines so I could write tiny, bold letters with my Bic mechanical pencils, which I coveted even though the thin lead constantly broke.
Nowadays, I sometimes write by hand in my Moleskine journals with the same pens I obsessively used throughout high school and college: Pilot P-700 Rollerball Stick Gel Pens, preferably in blue or purple.
I am not alone in my intense relationship to the tools of the writing trade, so I thought I’d ask some writers I deeply admire about their favorite pens and pencils. The first person who came to mind was Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and a copy editor for The New Yorker.
“I have a lot of nerve, as a non-artist, being so precious about pencils,” Norris says. “But when I copy-edit with Blackwings I think of something a friend’s mother once said as she bought underwear for her daughter who was going off to nursing school: ‘As long as you have to wear that uniform, you might as well feel fancy underneath.’”
by Michele Filgate, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
“Give the pens back immediately, and we won’t call the police.”Panicking, I unzipped my bag and grabbed the fistful of stolen loot, dropping them on the counter in one guilty gesture.
As a teenager, I got a job at Staples. I’ve always loved office supplies. I have fond memories of going back-to-school shopping with my mother, picking out a Lisa Frank trapper keeper, a planner (maybe this would be the year I’d finally get organized!), journals with college-ruled lines so I could write tiny, bold letters with my Bic mechanical pencils, which I coveted even though the thin lead constantly broke.
Nowadays, I sometimes write by hand in my Moleskine journals with the same pens I obsessively used throughout high school and college: Pilot P-700 Rollerball Stick Gel Pens, preferably in blue or purple.
I am not alone in my intense relationship to the tools of the writing trade, so I thought I’d ask some writers I deeply admire about their favorite pens and pencils. The first person who came to mind was Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and a copy editor for The New Yorker.
“I have a lot of nerve, as a non-artist, being so precious about pencils,” Norris says. “But when I copy-edit with Blackwings I think of something a friend’s mother once said as she bought underwear for her daughter who was going off to nursing school: ‘As long as you have to wear that uniform, you might as well feel fancy underneath.’”
by Michele Filgate, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Was the Ashley Madison Database Leaked?
[ed. What's more concerning to me (other than a bunch of adulterers being outed) is that businesses such as Netflix are using tools like Scumbler to scour the web, presumably to enforce copyright, defamation and other corporate interests. Scary.]
Update, 11:52 p.m. ET: I’ve now spoken with three vouched sources who all have reported finding their information and last four digits of their credit card numbers in the leaked database. Also, it occurs to me that it’s been almost exactly 30 days since the original hack. Finally, all of the accounts created at Bugmenot.com for Ashleymadison.com prior to the original breach appear to be in the leaked data set as well. I’m sure there are millions of AshleyMadison users who wish it weren’t so, but there is every indication this dump is the real deal.
Original story:
A huge trove of data nearly 10 gigabytes in size was dumped onto the Deep Web and onto various Torrent file-sharing services over the past 48 hours. According to a story at Wired.com, included in the files are names, addresses and phone numbers apparently attached to AshleyMadison member profiles, along with credit card data and transaction information. Links to the files were preceded by a text file message titled “Time’s Up” (see screenshot below).
From taking in much of the media coverage of this leak so far — for example, from the aforementioned Wired piece or from the story at security blogger Graham Cluley’s site — readers would most likely conclude that this latest collection of leaked data is legitimate. But after an interview this evening with Raja Bhatia — AshleyMadison’s original founding chief technology officer — I came away with a different perspective.
Bhatia said he has teamed up with an international team of roughly a dozen investigators working seven days a week, 24-hours a day just to keep up with all of the fake data dumps claiming to be the stolen AshleyMadison database that was referenced by the original hackers on July 19. Bhatia said his team sees no signs that this latest dump is legitimate.
“On a daily basis, we’re seeing 30 to 80 different claimed dumps come online, and most of these dumps are entirely fake and being used by other organizations to capture the attention that’s been built up through this release,” Bhatia said. “In total we’ve looked at over 100GB of data that’s been put out there. For example, I just now got a text message from our analysis team in Israel saying that the last dump they saw was 15 gigabytes. We’re still going through that, but for the most part it looks illegitimate and many of the files aren’t even readable.”
The former AshleyMadison CTO, who’s been consulting for the company ever since news of the hack broke last month, said many of the fake data dumps the company has examined to date include some or all of the files from the original July 19 release. But the rest of the information, he said, is always a mix of data taken from other hacked sources — not AshleyMadison.com.
“The overwhelming amount of data released in the last three weeks is fake data,” he said. “But we’re taking every release seriously and looking at each piece of data and trying to analyze the source and the veracity of the data.”
Bhatia said the format of the fake leaks has been changing constantly over the last few weeks.
“Originally, it was being posted through Imgur.com and Pastebin.com, and now we’re seeing files going out over torrents, the Dark Web, and TOR-based URLs,” he said.
To help locate new troves of data claiming to be the files stolen from AshleyMadison, the company’s forensics team has been using a tool that Netflix released last year called Scumblr, which scours high-profile sites for specific terms and data. (...)
I should be clear that I have no idea whether this dump is in fact real; I’m only reporting what I have been able to observe so far. I have certainly seen many people I know on Twitter saying they’ve downloaded the files and found data from friends who’d acknowledged being members of the site.
Nearly every day since I first reported the exclusive story of the Ashley Madison hack on July 19, I’ve received desperate and sad emails from readers who were or are AshleyMadison users and who wanted to know if the data would ever be leaked, or if I could somehow locate their information in any documents leaked so far. Unfortunately, aside from what I’ve reported here and in my original story last month, I don’t have any special knowledge or insight into this attack.
by Brian Krebs, Krebs on Security | Read more:
Image: Unknown
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Could the FDIC Seize Bank Deposits During a Crisis?
As we noted last week, one of the biggest problems for the Central Banks is actual physical cash.
The financial system is predominantly comprised of digital money. Actual physical Dollars bills and coins only amount to $1.36 trillion. This is only a little over 10% of the $10 trillion sitting in bank accounts. And it’s a tiny fraction of the $20 trillion in stocks, $38 trillion in bonds and $58 trillion in credit instruments floating around the system.
Suffice to say, if a significant percentage of people ever actually moved their money into physical cash, it could very quickly become a systemic problem.
Indeed, this is precisely what caused the 2008 meltdown, when nearly 24% of the assets in Money Market funds were liquidated in the course of four weeks. The ensuing liquidity crush nearly imploded the system.
Because of this, Central Banks and the regulators have declared a War on Cash in an effort to stop people trying to get their money out of the system.
One policy they are considering is to put a carry tax on physical cash meaning that your Dollar bills would gradually depreciate once they were taken out of the bank. Another idea is to do away with actual physical cash completely.
Perhaps the most concerning is the fact that should a “systemically important” financial entity go bust, any deposits above $250,000 located therein could be converted to equity… at which point if the company’s shares, your wealth evaporates.
Indeed, the FDIC published a paper proposing precisely this back in December 2012. Below are some excerpts worth your attention.
So… if a large bank fails in the US, your deposits at this bank would either be “written-down” (read: disappear) or converted into equity or stock shares in the company. And once they are converted to equity you are a shareholder not a depositor… so you are no longer insured by the FDIC.
So if the bank then fails (meaning its shares fall)… so does your deposit.
by Phoenix Capital Research, Zero Hedge | Read more:
Image: Rick Wilking
The financial system is predominantly comprised of digital money. Actual physical Dollars bills and coins only amount to $1.36 trillion. This is only a little over 10% of the $10 trillion sitting in bank accounts. And it’s a tiny fraction of the $20 trillion in stocks, $38 trillion in bonds and $58 trillion in credit instruments floating around the system.
Suffice to say, if a significant percentage of people ever actually moved their money into physical cash, it could very quickly become a systemic problem.
Indeed, this is precisely what caused the 2008 meltdown, when nearly 24% of the assets in Money Market funds were liquidated in the course of four weeks. The ensuing liquidity crush nearly imploded the system.Because of this, Central Banks and the regulators have declared a War on Cash in an effort to stop people trying to get their money out of the system.
One policy they are considering is to put a carry tax on physical cash meaning that your Dollar bills would gradually depreciate once they were taken out of the bank. Another idea is to do away with actual physical cash completely.
Perhaps the most concerning is the fact that should a “systemically important” financial entity go bust, any deposits above $250,000 located therein could be converted to equity… at which point if the company’s shares, your wealth evaporates.
Indeed, the FDIC published a paper proposing precisely this back in December 2012. Below are some excerpts worth your attention.
This paper focuses on the application of “top-down” resolution strategies that involve a single resolution authority applying its powers to the top of a financial group, that is, at the parent company level. The paper discusses how such a top-down strategy could be implemented for a U.S. or a U.K. financial group in a cross-border context…
These strategies have been designed to enable large and complex cross- border firms to be resolved without threatening financial stability and without putting public funds at risk…
An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company into equity. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities.
…Insured depositors themselves would remain unaffected. Uninsured deposits would be treated in line with other similarly ranked liabilities in the resolution process, with the expectation that they might be written down. (ed. http://www.fdic.gov/about/srac/2012/gsifi.pdf)In other words… any liability at the bank is in danger of being written-down should the bank fail. And guess what? Deposits are considered liabilities according to US Banking Law. In this legal framework, depositors are creditors.
So… if a large bank fails in the US, your deposits at this bank would either be “written-down” (read: disappear) or converted into equity or stock shares in the company. And once they are converted to equity you are a shareholder not a depositor… so you are no longer insured by the FDIC.
So if the bank then fails (meaning its shares fall)… so does your deposit.
by Phoenix Capital Research, Zero Hedge | Read more:
Image: Rick Wilking
The Calm Before the Storm
Even as protests spread across the Middle East in early 2011, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria appeared immune from the upheaval. Assad had ruled comfortably for over a decade, having replaced his father, Hafez, who himself had held power for the previous three decades. Many pundits argued that Syria’s sturdy police state, which exercised tight control over the country’s people and economy, would survive the Arab Spring undisturbed. Compared with its neighbor Lebanon, Syria looked positively stable. Civil war had torn through Lebanon throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, and the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 had plunged the country into yet more chaos.
But appearances were deceiving: today, Syria is in a shambles, with the regime fighting for its very survival, whereas Lebanon has withstood the influx of Syrian refugees and the other considerable pressures of the civil war next door. Surprising as it may seem, the per capita death rate from violence in Lebanon in 2013 was lower than that in Washington, D.C. That same year, the body count of the Syrian conflict surpassed 100,000.
Why has seemingly stable Syria turned out to be the fragile regime, whereas always-in-turmoil Lebanon has so far proved robust? The answer is that prior to its civil war, Syria was exhibiting only pseudo-stability, its calm façade concealing deep structural vulnerabilities. Lebanon’s chaos, paradoxically, signaled strength. Fifteen years of civil war had served to decentralize the state and bring about a more balanced sectarian power-sharing structure. Along with Lebanon’s small size as an administrative unit, these factors added to its durability. So did the country’s free-market economy. In Syria, the ruling Baath Party sought to control economic variability, replacing the lively chaos of the ancestral souk with the top-down, Soviet-style structure of the office building. This rigidity made Syria (and the other Baathist state, Iraq) much more vulnerable to disruption than Lebanon.
But Syria’s biggest vulnerability was that it had no recent record of recovering from turmoil. Countries that have survived past bouts of chaos tend to be vaccinated against future ones. Thus, the best indicator of a country’s future stability is not past stability but moderate volatility in the relatively recent past. As one of us, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote in the 2007 book The Black Swan, “Dictatorships that do not appear volatile, like, say, Syria or Saudi Arabia, face a larger risk of chaos than, say, Italy, as the latter has been in a state of continual political turmoil since the second [world] war.”
The divergent tales of Syria and Lebanon demonstrate that the best early warning signs of instability are found not in historical data but in underlying structural properties. Past experience can be extremely effective when it comes to detecting risks of cancer, crime, and earthquakes. But it is a bad bellwether of complex political and economic events, particularly so-called tail risks—events, such as coups and financial crises, that are highly unlikely but enormously consequential. For those, the evidence of risk comes too late to do anything about it, and a more sophisticated approach is required.
Thus, instead of trying in vain to predict such “Black Swan” events, it’s much more fruitful to focus on how systems can handle disorder—in other words, to study how fragile they are. Although one cannot predict what events will befall a country, one can predict how events will affect a country. Some political systems can sustain an extraordinary amount of stress, while others fall apart at the onset of the slightest trouble. The good news is that it’s possible to tell which are which by relying on the theory of fragility.
Simply put, fragility is aversion to disorder. Things that are fragile do not like variability, volatility, stress, chaos, and random events, which cause them to either gain little or suffer. A teacup, for example, will not benefit from any form of shock. It wants peace and predictability, something that is not possible in the long run, which is why time is an enemy to the fragile. What’s more, things that are fragile respond to shock in a nonlinear fashion. With humans, for example, the harm from a ten-foot fall in no way equals ten times as much harm as from a one-foot fall. In political and economic terms, a $30 drop in the price of a barrel of oil is much more than twice as harmful to Saudi Arabia as a $15 drop.
For countries, fragility has five principal sources: a centralized governing system, an undiversified economy, excessive debt and leverage, a lack of political variability, and no history of surviving past shocks. Applying these criteria, the world map looks a lot different. Disorderly regimes come out as safer bets than commonly thought—and seemingly placid states turn out to be ticking time bombs.
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton, Foreign Affairs | Read more:
But appearances were deceiving: today, Syria is in a shambles, with the regime fighting for its very survival, whereas Lebanon has withstood the influx of Syrian refugees and the other considerable pressures of the civil war next door. Surprising as it may seem, the per capita death rate from violence in Lebanon in 2013 was lower than that in Washington, D.C. That same year, the body count of the Syrian conflict surpassed 100,000.
Why has seemingly stable Syria turned out to be the fragile regime, whereas always-in-turmoil Lebanon has so far proved robust? The answer is that prior to its civil war, Syria was exhibiting only pseudo-stability, its calm façade concealing deep structural vulnerabilities. Lebanon’s chaos, paradoxically, signaled strength. Fifteen years of civil war had served to decentralize the state and bring about a more balanced sectarian power-sharing structure. Along with Lebanon’s small size as an administrative unit, these factors added to its durability. So did the country’s free-market economy. In Syria, the ruling Baath Party sought to control economic variability, replacing the lively chaos of the ancestral souk with the top-down, Soviet-style structure of the office building. This rigidity made Syria (and the other Baathist state, Iraq) much more vulnerable to disruption than Lebanon.
But Syria’s biggest vulnerability was that it had no recent record of recovering from turmoil. Countries that have survived past bouts of chaos tend to be vaccinated against future ones. Thus, the best indicator of a country’s future stability is not past stability but moderate volatility in the relatively recent past. As one of us, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote in the 2007 book The Black Swan, “Dictatorships that do not appear volatile, like, say, Syria or Saudi Arabia, face a larger risk of chaos than, say, Italy, as the latter has been in a state of continual political turmoil since the second [world] war.”
The divergent tales of Syria and Lebanon demonstrate that the best early warning signs of instability are found not in historical data but in underlying structural properties. Past experience can be extremely effective when it comes to detecting risks of cancer, crime, and earthquakes. But it is a bad bellwether of complex political and economic events, particularly so-called tail risks—events, such as coups and financial crises, that are highly unlikely but enormously consequential. For those, the evidence of risk comes too late to do anything about it, and a more sophisticated approach is required.
Thus, instead of trying in vain to predict such “Black Swan” events, it’s much more fruitful to focus on how systems can handle disorder—in other words, to study how fragile they are. Although one cannot predict what events will befall a country, one can predict how events will affect a country. Some political systems can sustain an extraordinary amount of stress, while others fall apart at the onset of the slightest trouble. The good news is that it’s possible to tell which are which by relying on the theory of fragility.
Simply put, fragility is aversion to disorder. Things that are fragile do not like variability, volatility, stress, chaos, and random events, which cause them to either gain little or suffer. A teacup, for example, will not benefit from any form of shock. It wants peace and predictability, something that is not possible in the long run, which is why time is an enemy to the fragile. What’s more, things that are fragile respond to shock in a nonlinear fashion. With humans, for example, the harm from a ten-foot fall in no way equals ten times as much harm as from a one-foot fall. In political and economic terms, a $30 drop in the price of a barrel of oil is much more than twice as harmful to Saudi Arabia as a $15 drop.
For countries, fragility has five principal sources: a centralized governing system, an undiversified economy, excessive debt and leverage, a lack of political variability, and no history of surviving past shocks. Applying these criteria, the world map looks a lot different. Disorderly regimes come out as safer bets than commonly thought—and seemingly placid states turn out to be ticking time bombs.
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton, Foreign Affairs | Read more:
Image: Rami Zayat
Women Shift Gears in Motorcycle Culture
[ed. Last year there were more women than men in my MSF course.]
But, organically and spontaneously through social media – especially Instagram – a new generation of female bikers is finding and inspiring each other with a shared set of ideals: adventure, companionship and the freedom of the road.“I think we’re seeing a kind of onset of a kind of powerful women being trendy,” said Lanakila “Lana” MacNaughton. She and four more female riders were handpicked by Harley-Davidson and given motorcycles to ride 9,000 miles across the country, re-creating a 1915 ride pioneered by the mother and daughter team Avis and Effie Hotchkiss.
“I don’t think that’s really ever been seen,” said MacNaughton. “For us it’s about, for us – being on the front of the bike rather than being on the back of the bike, and establishing ourselves as strong women instead of in the background.” {...}
MacNaughton said: “This ride is a representation of shifting perspectives of women in society right now ... Definitely there’s a nod to feminism, but I think, for me, at the root it’s about sharing it with the motorcycle community.”
Truly, it’s the sharing that brought female motorcyclists across the country together and into loosely bound groups such as the Litas or Brooklyn’s Miss-Fires. Female-only riding and camping events, such as Babes in MotoLand in north-west Illinois and Dream Roll in Washington state, are cropping up.
“I started it back in December, so recently, and it’s crazy – like, there are so many girl riders that just came out of the woodwork,” said Haggett. She, like many other female motorcyclists the Guardian interviewed, rode alone until recently. “I’ve been riding for six years, and then I rode alone for four, and then I met guys who ride, and rode with them, and just in the past year started riding with other girls.
“Instagram was part of it, which sounds so stupid. It’s just social media, but at the same time the visibility into who’s doing what – six years ago I wasn’t really on Instagram, didn’t post any bike photos, and so honestly I didn’t see girls around riding, and I didn’t know girls riding, and so I didn’t really have a choice,” Haggett said.
Truly, it’s the sharing that brought female motorcyclists across the country together and into loosely bound groups such as the Litas or Brooklyn’s Miss-Fires. Female-only riding and camping events, such as Babes in MotoLand in north-west Illinois and Dream Roll in Washington state, are cropping up.
“I started it back in December, so recently, and it’s crazy – like, there are so many girl riders that just came out of the woodwork,” said Haggett. She, like many other female motorcyclists the Guardian interviewed, rode alone until recently. “I’ve been riding for six years, and then I rode alone for four, and then I met guys who ride, and rode with them, and just in the past year started riding with other girls.
“Instagram was part of it, which sounds so stupid. It’s just social media, but at the same time the visibility into who’s doing what – six years ago I wasn’t really on Instagram, didn’t post any bike photos, and so honestly I didn’t see girls around riding, and I didn’t know girls riding, and so I didn’t really have a choice,” Haggett said.
by Jessica Glenza , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: via:
The Time is Now for Competitive Gaming
[ed. See also: The future of sports is streamimg.]
Fast-forward to 2015. The biggest esports tournament of the year hands out more than $18 million in cash prizes to its competitors. Each member of the winning team, playing a game called Dota 2, becomes an overnight millionaire. Over 4 million viewers tuned in to watch the final. And that number pales in comparison to the more than 32 million who followed the race for the Summoner’s Cup in another esport, League of Legends.These aren’t a few local gaming phenoms who’ve spent too many hours with an NES controller in hand. These competitors train day in, day out, like any other athletes. They’re backed by rich organizations and sponsored by billion-dollar companies. Their exploits play out not in dusty ballrooms but in major stadiums and arenas. The game has changed, and there’s no going back.(...)
Sure, comparing sports like football and basketball to popular video games like Counter-Strike or League of Legends might seem silly. But they’re not so different. Ultimately, they’re all made-up games based on an arbitrary set of rules that are dictated within a particular venue for competition. The point isn’t the presence or lack of physicality. It’s in allowing us to challenge one another.
Nowadays, it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about business. No commodity is hotter in the modern media landscape than sports. In an era of DVR and DVDs, where commercials can be skipped with the click of a button, live content is king. And no media product is better suited for live consumption than sports. Fans want to be part of moments as they unfold, not a few days later. That adds immense value to live sports programming in the eyes of media broadcasters. The NFL will cumulatively collect $27 billion by the end of the 2022 season with its current network broadcasting contracts with media companies including CBS Corp., 21st Century Fox, and NBC Universal.
This isn’t limited to football. Across the world, sporting leagues are making bank with pricey contracts. It’s something that esports stands to benefit from as much as any other competitive avenue.
In fact, esports may well be on the cutting edge of the future of sports broadcasts. With a few exceptions, competitive gaming has always lived exclusively on the Internet. Esports broadcasting has evolved alongside online streaming platforms. The biggest of these, Twitch, launched as a direct result of game streaming’s sudden popularity.
Once a mere spinoff of the groundbreaking streaming platform Justin.tv, Twitch soon found its niche among gamers interested in sharing their favorite hobby with other like-minded users. Twitch surpassed Justin.tv in popularity after only two years. The company has since grown into an online powerhouse, notably being gobbled up by Amazon for $970 million. The ever-growing streaming platform serves more than 100 million unique viewers per month. By the end of 2014, those users were consuming more than 16 billion minutes of live and original content on a monthly basis. And the foundation of that success is esports.
For all of its money, the NFL is struggling to acclimate itself to the dawning era of online streaming. Streaming content is the unquestioned future, and while many of the biggest players in traditionally televised sports struggle to understand it, the esports industry has already mastered it.
In fact, esports and Twitch’s successes have come completely independent of the traditional media landscape. That’s led some in esports to actively campaign against the industry expanding to traditional channels. Sure, some longtime proponents of competitive gaming might crave vindication from the mainstream, like when ESPN broadcast a collegiateHeroes of the Storm tournament earlier this month. But what’s the long-term benefit? Esports are at the cutting edge of the future of broadcasting. So why step backward just to be seen in the same light as other sports?
by Jared Wynn, The Kernal | Read more:
Image: J. Longo
Monday, August 17, 2015
Donald Trump Through the Ages
The ancestry of Donald Trump stretches back to the Ancient World. Listen, as several of Trump’s forebears recount some of the most famous moments in history.
So this is, maybe, a week after the Ides of March. I’m in Rome. I got a new coliseum there. Great coliseum. I build a lot them. Make a lot of money. Very successful.
So I’m in Rome. And Brutus and his cabal ask me to say a few words about Caesar. Really, begging me to say something about him. And Brutus is an honorable guy. So, I’m like, “Sure. Whatever.”
But then right before my speech, Brutus comes up to me — he’s real nervous, Brutus — and he says, “Whatever you do in your speech, don’t blame me for Caesar’s death.”
I think, “That’s odd.” But, whatever. Brutus is an honorable guy.
So I deliver this speech. Great speech. Tremendous speech. It’s about Caesar. He’s dead. Lot of emotions. Really brings down the house. I get rave reviews for the speech. Rave reviews. Everybody loves it.
But then, weeks later, the media is saying I said these things that I never said. Awful things.
I’ll give you an example: The New Rome Times, which is losing money left and right. Unreadable. Total trash. Hates the empire. But the New Rome Times says that I came to praise Caesar, which is totally false.
What I said was — and this is a direct quote — “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” Not to praise him. How they get the exact opposite out of that, I don’t know. But that’s the media for you. (...)
I would have people come up to me all the time and say, “Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump, you should lead our troops. You should have lead.” And I should have, because I would have ended the war, Day One.
I would have gone up to King George III, whom I know. I would have said, “Georgie, we’re leaving.”
He’d cry, he’d beg, he’d try to convince us to stay. I’d say, “No, no, no. Here’s the way it works: We leave, you get nothing, that’s the deal” And then I’d turn to the French, and I’d say, “And you … Thanks for the help. Now give us a statue. A woman. But not an ugly one.”
Papers would be signed the next morning.
People ask me all the time, because I love women so much. They say, “Mr. Trump, what do we need to do to help women?” Because we have to protect their health, we have to. So I say, “Two words … Wandering. Uteruses.” Because they’re everywhere. Everywhere. Wandering over here, wandering over there. Even mention it and women go into hysterics. If I were in charge, I would bring back the uteruses. I would bring them all back. From China. From Mexico. From Japan. From wherever they wander. “Making Uteruses Great Again”, that would be my motto.
The Death of Julius Caesar
So this is, maybe, a week after the Ides of March. I’m in Rome. I got a new coliseum there. Great coliseum. I build a lot them. Make a lot of money. Very successful.
So I’m in Rome. And Brutus and his cabal ask me to say a few words about Caesar. Really, begging me to say something about him. And Brutus is an honorable guy. So, I’m like, “Sure. Whatever.”But then right before my speech, Brutus comes up to me — he’s real nervous, Brutus — and he says, “Whatever you do in your speech, don’t blame me for Caesar’s death.”
I think, “That’s odd.” But, whatever. Brutus is an honorable guy.
So I deliver this speech. Great speech. Tremendous speech. It’s about Caesar. He’s dead. Lot of emotions. Really brings down the house. I get rave reviews for the speech. Rave reviews. Everybody loves it.
But then, weeks later, the media is saying I said these things that I never said. Awful things.
I’ll give you an example: The New Rome Times, which is losing money left and right. Unreadable. Total trash. Hates the empire. But the New Rome Times says that I came to praise Caesar, which is totally false.
What I said was — and this is a direct quote — “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” Not to praise him. How they get the exact opposite out of that, I don’t know. But that’s the media for you. (...)
The American Revolution
I would have people come up to me all the time and say, “Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump, you should lead our troops. You should have lead.” And I should have, because I would have ended the war, Day One.
I would have gone up to King George III, whom I know. I would have said, “Georgie, we’re leaving.”
He’d cry, he’d beg, he’d try to convince us to stay. I’d say, “No, no, no. Here’s the way it works: We leave, you get nothing, that’s the deal” And then I’d turn to the French, and I’d say, “And you … Thanks for the help. Now give us a statue. A woman. But not an ugly one.”
Papers would be signed the next morning.
19th-Century Medical Science
People ask me all the time, because I love women so much. They say, “Mr. Trump, what do we need to do to help women?” Because we have to protect their health, we have to. So I say, “Two words … Wandering. Uteruses.” Because they’re everywhere. Everywhere. Wandering over here, wandering over there. Even mention it and women go into hysterics. If I were in charge, I would bring back the uteruses. I would bring them all back. From China. From Mexico. From Japan. From wherever they wander. “Making Uteruses Great Again”, that would be my motto.
by John Flowers, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: Gage Skidmore, Wikipedia
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Don't Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone
One of the ironies of modern life is that everyone is glued to their phones, but nobody uses them as phones anymore. Not by choice, anyway. Phone calls—you know, where you put the thing up to your ear and speak to someone in real time—are becoming relics of a bygone era, the “phone” part of a smartphone turning vestigial as communication evolves, willingly or not, into data-oriented formats like text messaging and chat apps.
The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When asked, people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especially given alternative methods of contact that don’t make unbidden demands for someone’s undivided attention. In response, some have diagnosed a kind of telephoniphobia among this set. When even initiating phone calls is a problem—and even innocuous ones, like phoning the local Thai place to order takeout—then anxiety rather than habit may be to blame: When asynchronous, textual media like email or WhatsApp allow you to intricately craft every exchange, the improvisational nature of ordinary, live conversation can feel like an unfamiliar burden. Those in power sometimes think that this unease is a defect in need of remediation, while those supposedly afflicted by it say they are actually just fine, thanks very much.
But when it comes to taking phone calls and not making them, nobody seems to have admitted that using the telephone today is a different material experience than it was 20 or 30 (or 50) years ago, not just a different social experience. That’s not just because our phones have also become fancy two-way pagers with keyboards, but also because they’ve become much crappier phones. It’s no wonder that a bad version of telephony would be far less desirable than a good one. And the telephone used to be truly great, partly because of the situation of its use, and partly because of the nature of the apparatus we used to refer to as the “telephone”—especially the handset. (...)
Today, the industrial design of mobile phones has only exacerbated the unreliability and awkwardness of telephony. But there was a time when phone design was central to the feeling of intimacy and warmth and comfort we once associated with the telephone.
The Western Electric model 500 was the most popular telephone model of the 20th century, issued by Bell System and its subsidiaries from 1950 until the breakup of the Bell monopoly in 1984. It’s the phone you think of when you think of telephones, and its silhouetted handset shape remains the universal icon for “phone”—even on your iPhone’s telephone app. Like its predecessors and successors in the Bell System, the 500 was designed by Henry Dreyfuss, the mid-century industrial designer also responsible for the Honeywell T87 thermostat, the J-3 Hudson locomotive, and the Polaroid SX-70—all icons of their eras and well beyond.
The 500 wasn’t the first telephone to use the basic handset shape; versions existed since the 1870s, and by the 1930s, the combined design had replaced the “candlestick” style that preceded it, with its separated mouthpiece and receiver. Initially, the handset was considered too heavy and awkward for home use, where the delicate but light candlestick offered more facile and welcoming handling. But over time, the combined handset’s convenience and stability made it central to the experience of telephony. The Western Electric 500 did (and still does) hold the laurel for this achievement.
The 500 handset is solid and hefty while not being too heavy to lift and hold for long periods. That it could be held at all, and that we would enjoy holding it—this is an unsung virtue of the handset. Whether grasped at its center like a handle, cradled at the rounded mouthpiece base with the thumb and forefinger, or wedged between the ear and the shoulder to allow the use of both hands freely, the 500 handset conforms to the ergonomics required for listening and speaking.
It sounds like an idiotic tautology of an observation, until you think about cell phones by comparison. The mobile phone in general and the smartphone in particular are designed to be carried first, and spoken into second. Some versions over the decades have been more adept as telephone handsets. 1983’s Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was large and square, almost too large to be easily held or carried. By 1996, the Motorola StarTAC (the first clamshell “flip” phone) offered a thoughtful compromise between portability and usability. And the 1998 Nokia 5110, the most popular “candybar” phone, still had enough heft and form to feel like a phone handset while also being pocketable, to a point.The handset made telephony a tactile activity as much as an auditory one.
But over the first decade of the new millennium, the BlackBerry, the Treo, the RAZR, the iPhone, and the various Android handsets shrunk and thinned the smartphone into the flat, rectangular standard we know today. It’s perfect for carrying and tapping and pocketing, but it’s awful for talking through. (...)
Today, we have an alternative for long-distance intimacy: the capacitive touch screen. On your iPhone or your Galaxy, tactility can be achieved directly, by touching the cool screen to warm it, by swiping or stroking through a text chat. Your fingers can linger even if not for functional reasons. True, iMessage and Facebook Messenger might seem more aloof and impersonal than calling by voice, but today’s smartphone user is right to identify those experiences as the sensual, tactical successors to the telephone handset with its duplex of truncated 3 kHz voices echoing inside.
That time has ended, it seems. As for its replacement? I can’t deny that your touchscreen is private and alive and responsive. It’s where rapport and affection now live, for better and worse. Perhaps my chagrin in making this concession doesn’t come from a nostalgic regret for the end of the telephone’s life as a technology of intimacy, but out of lament that so few of the engineers and designers working on its replacement seem to deploy the deliberateness and care of Henry Dreyfuss or Bernard Oliver. Instead of the next PCM or Western Electric 500 handset, we get a thousand startups trying to flip their derivative chat app, or a cloying, hackneyed method for sending pictures of hearts from your new smartwatch, or a baby-faced billionaire’s dubious promise to “connect us” while reselling our attention.
The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When asked, people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especially given alternative methods of contact that don’t make unbidden demands for someone’s undivided attention. In response, some have diagnosed a kind of telephoniphobia among this set. When even initiating phone calls is a problem—and even innocuous ones, like phoning the local Thai place to order takeout—then anxiety rather than habit may be to blame: When asynchronous, textual media like email or WhatsApp allow you to intricately craft every exchange, the improvisational nature of ordinary, live conversation can feel like an unfamiliar burden. Those in power sometimes think that this unease is a defect in need of remediation, while those supposedly afflicted by it say they are actually just fine, thanks very much.But when it comes to taking phone calls and not making them, nobody seems to have admitted that using the telephone today is a different material experience than it was 20 or 30 (or 50) years ago, not just a different social experience. That’s not just because our phones have also become fancy two-way pagers with keyboards, but also because they’ve become much crappier phones. It’s no wonder that a bad version of telephony would be far less desirable than a good one. And the telephone used to be truly great, partly because of the situation of its use, and partly because of the nature of the apparatus we used to refer to as the “telephone”—especially the handset. (...)
Today, the industrial design of mobile phones has only exacerbated the unreliability and awkwardness of telephony. But there was a time when phone design was central to the feeling of intimacy and warmth and comfort we once associated with the telephone.
The Western Electric model 500 was the most popular telephone model of the 20th century, issued by Bell System and its subsidiaries from 1950 until the breakup of the Bell monopoly in 1984. It’s the phone you think of when you think of telephones, and its silhouetted handset shape remains the universal icon for “phone”—even on your iPhone’s telephone app. Like its predecessors and successors in the Bell System, the 500 was designed by Henry Dreyfuss, the mid-century industrial designer also responsible for the Honeywell T87 thermostat, the J-3 Hudson locomotive, and the Polaroid SX-70—all icons of their eras and well beyond.
The 500 wasn’t the first telephone to use the basic handset shape; versions existed since the 1870s, and by the 1930s, the combined design had replaced the “candlestick” style that preceded it, with its separated mouthpiece and receiver. Initially, the handset was considered too heavy and awkward for home use, where the delicate but light candlestick offered more facile and welcoming handling. But over time, the combined handset’s convenience and stability made it central to the experience of telephony. The Western Electric 500 did (and still does) hold the laurel for this achievement.
The 500 handset is solid and hefty while not being too heavy to lift and hold for long periods. That it could be held at all, and that we would enjoy holding it—this is an unsung virtue of the handset. Whether grasped at its center like a handle, cradled at the rounded mouthpiece base with the thumb and forefinger, or wedged between the ear and the shoulder to allow the use of both hands freely, the 500 handset conforms to the ergonomics required for listening and speaking.
It sounds like an idiotic tautology of an observation, until you think about cell phones by comparison. The mobile phone in general and the smartphone in particular are designed to be carried first, and spoken into second. Some versions over the decades have been more adept as telephone handsets. 1983’s Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was large and square, almost too large to be easily held or carried. By 1996, the Motorola StarTAC (the first clamshell “flip” phone) offered a thoughtful compromise between portability and usability. And the 1998 Nokia 5110, the most popular “candybar” phone, still had enough heft and form to feel like a phone handset while also being pocketable, to a point.The handset made telephony a tactile activity as much as an auditory one.
But over the first decade of the new millennium, the BlackBerry, the Treo, the RAZR, the iPhone, and the various Android handsets shrunk and thinned the smartphone into the flat, rectangular standard we know today. It’s perfect for carrying and tapping and pocketing, but it’s awful for talking through. (...)
Today, we have an alternative for long-distance intimacy: the capacitive touch screen. On your iPhone or your Galaxy, tactility can be achieved directly, by touching the cool screen to warm it, by swiping or stroking through a text chat. Your fingers can linger even if not for functional reasons. True, iMessage and Facebook Messenger might seem more aloof and impersonal than calling by voice, but today’s smartphone user is right to identify those experiences as the sensual, tactical successors to the telephone handset with its duplex of truncated 3 kHz voices echoing inside.
That time has ended, it seems. As for its replacement? I can’t deny that your touchscreen is private and alive and responsive. It’s where rapport and affection now live, for better and worse. Perhaps my chagrin in making this concession doesn’t come from a nostalgic regret for the end of the telephone’s life as a technology of intimacy, but out of lament that so few of the engineers and designers working on its replacement seem to deploy the deliberateness and care of Henry Dreyfuss or Bernard Oliver. Instead of the next PCM or Western Electric 500 handset, we get a thousand startups trying to flip their derivative chat app, or a cloying, hackneyed method for sending pictures of hearts from your new smartwatch, or a baby-faced billionaire’s dubious promise to “connect us” while reselling our attention.
by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ian Bogost
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