Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Death to the Internet! Long Live the Internet!
Net neutrality, cultural decay, the corporate web, classism, & the decline of western civilization — all in one convenient essay!
Even now it’s a struggle to clearly remember that ecstatic time of positive internet esprit de corps before money and narcissism utterly dominated the culture. Those ancient ‘90s to early oughts before endlessly aggressive advertising, encyclopedic terms of service, incessant tracking, the constant need to register everywhere, subversive clickbait, the legions of trolls, threats of doxxing, careers ended by a single tweet, and all those untiring spam bots which attempt to plague every digital inch of it.
Difficult to explain to anyone under twenty-five who did not directly witness the foundational times. Or anyone over twenty-five who did not participate. Or to anyone right now who uses only Facebook and Amazon. That lost age has become the Old West of the internet: a brief memory before once verdant lands were dominated and overrun by exploitative business interests and ignorant bumbling settlers. You can’t go back, and there’s no museum for an experience. That early culture was ineffable and fleeting. Not unlike, say: the concept of lifetime job security, which no longer even seems plausible.
Now, of course, plenty of happy and creative people still use the internet (at least, to like, buy an appliance or a book or something) but they don’t make up most of internet culture; that majority of online participation which sets the social standards, creates the original content, and is now broadly, inescapably corralled by social media. Those who spend more than 20 hours a week actively participating online (like me) who are forced into the corporate tide, or relegated to the sluggish unknown hinterlands. (...)
Need we wonder why the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” remains so relevant? Even thirty years after Steve Jobs commemorated the futuristic date by ironically pretending to destroy the entrenched corporate power structure. The same man who turned out to be one of the most proprietary-minded technologists ever to influence popular computing culture. The person who cemented the sale of style over utility, which continues to unendingly trick people. Selling the trappings of refined taste instead of core pragmatism. Like how the classic campaign to “Think Different” fetishized intellectual and artistic rebellion in order to ironically sell a massmarket consumer product. And it worked amazingly. People have been strongly influenced to desire a unique personal experience and an individualized version of success instead of a shared communal growth. So in this fragmented and increasingly de-localized culture, everyone becomes the protagonist of their own little narcissistic adventure instead of a powerful collective assisting each other for the greater good. And because not everyone can be that one-in-billion genius, much existential disappointment has been ingrained once it was set as the highest goal.
This is advantageous to business interests because unsatisfied people are more susceptible to the sale of solutions to combat unhappiness. And this emotional and cultural development also makes it easier to dehumanize others, to be jealous of their successes, and feel left out when not receiving high accolades. Creating the much lamented vicious cycle of kindergarten graduation ceremonies and participation trophies which has wrought themost egotistical generation ever recorded. It also has an oligarchic benefit of justifying power held in the small circles of the moneyed class, because success, even if born into, is often assumed to be deserved.
So it’s no coincidence that wealthy special interests have gained massive control over democracy by incentivizing and preaching the supremacy of individual gains over communal interests. Unlike a more simplistic fascism, this grants minority power to the upperclass by motivating the populace to work hard towards individual goals and individual distractions without requiring the classic top-down crushing social conformity which is more obvious and easier to fight. Instead, the insidious dreams of grand individual success, in spite of all contrary indications, keeps everyone’s broader rewards lowered. It’s like a lottery for human desires: many pay in and get essentially nothing while a tiny few win it all so as to demonstrate it is supposedly possible. Justified elite power is the cultural root of corruption, as Thomas Jefferson ironically understood, and must be fought with repeated revolution.
We all recognize a nebulous natural cynicism these days found not only in the post-apocalyptic and zombie fictions so symbolically appealing to our collective unconscious, but also in the simple facts of a historically deadlocked legislature, a rampantly scare-mongering media, the rise once again of an excessively wealthy upperclass, and the corruption of debt-based higher learning. That last being perhaps the most intellectually disheartening, as the ivory tower repeatedly demonstrates its moral bankruptcy by a reliance on horrific levels of tuition, exploitive wasteful sporting, shoddy oversight of publishing, general lack of moral center, and a scattered vision for the future (pigeon-holed rather correctly by conservatives as often out of touch). Much could perhaps be excused by the inevitable corruption of institutionalization, but where is the forethought of previous generations? Why must we rely on impulsive social media and a polarized profit-oriented mass media for our appraisals of the future?
If Obama’s unpredictable election proved anything it’s that positive ideological movements are so frightening to the moneyed establishment they’ll foster complete obstruction to thwart even the simple belief that hope and change are actually possible. Generating cynicism aids complacency, because it’s difficult for a person dealing with all their own daily struggles to constantly study the complex system and renew the idealism required to force political change, especially during periods of nominally acceptable economic stability. Revolutions are motivated by hunger and heavy oppression, generally years after the slow and determined rise of a stratified class system (a pattern which has plagued us since the dawn of civilization).
For thirty years now capitalism’s trickle-down variant has been systematically attempting to recreate an intransigent system of wealth and privilege. Conservative propaganda has assured us that if the rich succeed, everyone benefits. But how long must this ludicrous delusion be perpetuated? Is not the entire history of civil humanity a testament to the popular misery of allowing an upper class minority to rule? This should be especially poignant in a country which was designed to break hereditary dominance and unrepresentative power. Yet here we are again, watching civilization repeat its famous pattern, locking the populace into hard work and distraction without sharing in the full rewards. America chugs along with its bread and circuses, like a late-season Happy Days episode, where the original magic is gone but the characters continue acting out a hollow version of the thing we used to love and cherish. So goes sitcoms… so goes the world wide web… so goes civilization…
The rise of an entirely corporate internet is just one more idealistic casualty of allowing the amoral dollar to inform every aspect our lives. Market efficiencies, so touted by the right, can generate competition between otherwise possible monopolies, but function best only in fields of limited and uncoordinated resources. They are not necessitated to everything, and especially something as nearly immaterial and gigantic as cyberspace, where supply and demand do not function normally; a place where capitalism has often struggled to find what it can sell. Where demand has to be generated artificially with subtle and disguised viral marketing to trick and deceive us. The newest things you didn’t know you needed but all the cool kids have. Since wealth expands to dominate all emerging cultural forms, it works to control even the nearly limitless virtual environments formed of patterned energy and communal human consciousness.
In the same manner that liberty gets subsumed for security, creativity often dies upon the altar of sales. Advertising’s goal is convincing and deceiving, not compassion. It is the art of propaganda and should constantly be doubted. Excessive needs, worries, and calamities are fostered so that new cures and products can be sold. Just as rulers create fear to limit freedom, so corporations must generate the need for increased consumption.
Cultivating social anxiety can make warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, terrorist watchlists, illegal foreign prisons, preemptive perpetual war, pushbutton murder by drone, and being bathed in x-rays at every airport seem incrementally acceptable. If you pile on the impediments slowly, and each seems necessary at the time, they morph into those inevitable and accepted hassles of modern life. Such as how general anxiety generates the sale of status items, snake-oil cures, distracting entertainments, and self-help regimes — it’s the creep of supposed necessity. Just like websites becoming overrun with advertisements, click-bait, registering, tracking, profiling, and endless general noise. In return for which we get increasingly bland and controlled services. With all these small losses, the cultural whole is diminished.
by Nicholas Kerkhoff, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Even now it’s a struggle to clearly remember that ecstatic time of positive internet esprit de corps before money and narcissism utterly dominated the culture. Those ancient ‘90s to early oughts before endlessly aggressive advertising, encyclopedic terms of service, incessant tracking, the constant need to register everywhere, subversive clickbait, the legions of trolls, threats of doxxing, careers ended by a single tweet, and all those untiring spam bots which attempt to plague every digital inch of it.
Difficult to explain to anyone under twenty-five who did not directly witness the foundational times. Or anyone over twenty-five who did not participate. Or to anyone right now who uses only Facebook and Amazon. That lost age has become the Old West of the internet: a brief memory before once verdant lands were dominated and overrun by exploitative business interests and ignorant bumbling settlers. You can’t go back, and there’s no museum for an experience. That early culture was ineffable and fleeting. Not unlike, say: the concept of lifetime job security, which no longer even seems plausible. Now, of course, plenty of happy and creative people still use the internet (at least, to like, buy an appliance or a book or something) but they don’t make up most of internet culture; that majority of online participation which sets the social standards, creates the original content, and is now broadly, inescapably corralled by social media. Those who spend more than 20 hours a week actively participating online (like me) who are forced into the corporate tide, or relegated to the sluggish unknown hinterlands. (...)
Need we wonder why the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” remains so relevant? Even thirty years after Steve Jobs commemorated the futuristic date by ironically pretending to destroy the entrenched corporate power structure. The same man who turned out to be one of the most proprietary-minded technologists ever to influence popular computing culture. The person who cemented the sale of style over utility, which continues to unendingly trick people. Selling the trappings of refined taste instead of core pragmatism. Like how the classic campaign to “Think Different” fetishized intellectual and artistic rebellion in order to ironically sell a massmarket consumer product. And it worked amazingly. People have been strongly influenced to desire a unique personal experience and an individualized version of success instead of a shared communal growth. So in this fragmented and increasingly de-localized culture, everyone becomes the protagonist of their own little narcissistic adventure instead of a powerful collective assisting each other for the greater good. And because not everyone can be that one-in-billion genius, much existential disappointment has been ingrained once it was set as the highest goal.
This is advantageous to business interests because unsatisfied people are more susceptible to the sale of solutions to combat unhappiness. And this emotional and cultural development also makes it easier to dehumanize others, to be jealous of their successes, and feel left out when not receiving high accolades. Creating the much lamented vicious cycle of kindergarten graduation ceremonies and participation trophies which has wrought themost egotistical generation ever recorded. It also has an oligarchic benefit of justifying power held in the small circles of the moneyed class, because success, even if born into, is often assumed to be deserved.
So it’s no coincidence that wealthy special interests have gained massive control over democracy by incentivizing and preaching the supremacy of individual gains over communal interests. Unlike a more simplistic fascism, this grants minority power to the upperclass by motivating the populace to work hard towards individual goals and individual distractions without requiring the classic top-down crushing social conformity which is more obvious and easier to fight. Instead, the insidious dreams of grand individual success, in spite of all contrary indications, keeps everyone’s broader rewards lowered. It’s like a lottery for human desires: many pay in and get essentially nothing while a tiny few win it all so as to demonstrate it is supposedly possible. Justified elite power is the cultural root of corruption, as Thomas Jefferson ironically understood, and must be fought with repeated revolution.
We all recognize a nebulous natural cynicism these days found not only in the post-apocalyptic and zombie fictions so symbolically appealing to our collective unconscious, but also in the simple facts of a historically deadlocked legislature, a rampantly scare-mongering media, the rise once again of an excessively wealthy upperclass, and the corruption of debt-based higher learning. That last being perhaps the most intellectually disheartening, as the ivory tower repeatedly demonstrates its moral bankruptcy by a reliance on horrific levels of tuition, exploitive wasteful sporting, shoddy oversight of publishing, general lack of moral center, and a scattered vision for the future (pigeon-holed rather correctly by conservatives as often out of touch). Much could perhaps be excused by the inevitable corruption of institutionalization, but where is the forethought of previous generations? Why must we rely on impulsive social media and a polarized profit-oriented mass media for our appraisals of the future?
If Obama’s unpredictable election proved anything it’s that positive ideological movements are so frightening to the moneyed establishment they’ll foster complete obstruction to thwart even the simple belief that hope and change are actually possible. Generating cynicism aids complacency, because it’s difficult for a person dealing with all their own daily struggles to constantly study the complex system and renew the idealism required to force political change, especially during periods of nominally acceptable economic stability. Revolutions are motivated by hunger and heavy oppression, generally years after the slow and determined rise of a stratified class system (a pattern which has plagued us since the dawn of civilization).
The rise of an entirely corporate internet is just one more idealistic casualty of allowing the amoral dollar to inform every aspect our lives. Market efficiencies, so touted by the right, can generate competition between otherwise possible monopolies, but function best only in fields of limited and uncoordinated resources. They are not necessitated to everything, and especially something as nearly immaterial and gigantic as cyberspace, where supply and demand do not function normally; a place where capitalism has often struggled to find what it can sell. Where demand has to be generated artificially with subtle and disguised viral marketing to trick and deceive us. The newest things you didn’t know you needed but all the cool kids have. Since wealth expands to dominate all emerging cultural forms, it works to control even the nearly limitless virtual environments formed of patterned energy and communal human consciousness.
In the same manner that liberty gets subsumed for security, creativity often dies upon the altar of sales. Advertising’s goal is convincing and deceiving, not compassion. It is the art of propaganda and should constantly be doubted. Excessive needs, worries, and calamities are fostered so that new cures and products can be sold. Just as rulers create fear to limit freedom, so corporations must generate the need for increased consumption.
Cultivating social anxiety can make warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, terrorist watchlists, illegal foreign prisons, preemptive perpetual war, pushbutton murder by drone, and being bathed in x-rays at every airport seem incrementally acceptable. If you pile on the impediments slowly, and each seems necessary at the time, they morph into those inevitable and accepted hassles of modern life. Such as how general anxiety generates the sale of status items, snake-oil cures, distracting entertainments, and self-help regimes — it’s the creep of supposed necessity. Just like websites becoming overrun with advertisements, click-bait, registering, tracking, profiling, and endless general noise. In return for which we get increasingly bland and controlled services. With all these small losses, the cultural whole is diminished.
by Nicholas Kerkhoff, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Dimming of the Light
With its revolutionary heat and rational cool, French thought once dazzled the world. Where did it all go wrong?
There are many things we have come to regard as quintessentially French: Coco Chanel’s little black dress, the love of fine wines and gastronomy, the paintings of Auguste Renoir, the smell of burnt rubber in the Paris Métro. Equally distinctive is the French mode and style of thinking, which the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke described in 1790 as ‘the conquering empire of light and reason’. He meant this as a criticism of the French Revolution, but this expression would undoubtedly have been worn as a badge of honour by most French thinkers from the Enlightenment onwards.
Indeed, the notion that rationality is the defining quality of humankind was first celebrated by the 17th-century thinker René Descartes, the father of modern French philosophy. His skeptical method of reasoning led him to conclude that the only certainty was the existence of his own mind: hence his ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’). This French rationalism was also expressed in a fondness for abstract notions and a preference for deductive reasoning, which starts with a general claim or thesis and eventually works its way towards a specific conclusion – thus the consistent French penchant for grand theories. As the essayist Emile Montégut put it in 1858: ‘There is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, and whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies.’
The French way of thinking is a matter of substance, but also style. This is most notably reflected in the emphasis on rhetorical elegance and analytical lucidity, often claimed to stem from the very properties of the French language: ‘What is not clear,’ affirmed the writer Antoine de Rivarol in 1784, somewhat ambitiously, ‘is not French.’ Typically French, too, is a questioning and adversarial tendency, also arising from Descartes’ skeptical method. The historian Jules Michelet summed up this French trait in 1974 in the following way: ‘We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects.’ A British Army manual issued before the Normandy landings in 1944 sounded this warning about the cultural habits of the natives: ‘By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point.’
Yet even this disputatiousness comes in a very tidy form: the habit of dividing issues into two. It is not fortuitous that the division of political space between Left and Right is a French invention, nor that the distinction between presence and absence lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion.
Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission. This is a feature of all exceptionalist nations, but it is rendered here in a particular trope: that France has a duty to think not just for herself, but for the whole world. In the lofty words of the author Jean d’Ormesson, writing in the magazine Le Point in 2011: ‘There is at the heart of Frenchness something which transcends it. France is not only a matter of contradiction and diversity. She also constantly looks over her shoulder, towards others, and towards the world which surrounds her. More than any nation, France is haunted by a yearning towards universality.’
This specification of a distinct French way of thinking is not rooted in a claim about Gallic ‘national character’. These ideas are not a genetic inheritance, but rather the product of specific social and political factors. The Enlightenment, for example, was a cultural phenomenon which spread rationalist ideas across Europe and the Americas. But in France, from the mid-18th century, this intellectual movement produced a particular type of philosophical radicalism, which was articulated by a remarkable group of thinkers, the philosophes. Thanks to the influence of the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, the French version of rationalism took on a particularly anti-clerical, egalitarian and transformative quality. These subversive precepts also circulated through another French cultural innovation, the salon: this private cultural gathering flourished in high society, contributing to the dissemination of philosophical and artistic ideas among French elites, and the empowerment of women.
This intellectual effervescence challenged the established order of the ancien régime during the second half of the 18th century. It also gave a particularly radical edge to the French Revolution, compared, notably, with its American counterpart. Thus, 1789 was not only a landmark in French thought, but the culmination of the Enlightenment’s philosophical radicalism: it gave rise to a new republican political culture, and enduringly associated the very idea of Frenchness with novelty and resistance to oppression. It also crystallised an entirely original way of thinking about the public sphere, centred around general principles such as the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, the civic conception of the nation (resting on shared values as opposed to blood ties), the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the notions of the general interest and popular sovereignty.
One might object that, despite this common and lasting revolutionary heritage, the French have remained too diverse and individualistic to be characterised in terms of a general mind-set. Yet there are two decisive reasons why it is possible – and indeed necessary – to speak of a collective French way of thinking. Firstly, since the Enlightenment, France has granted a privileged role to thinkers, recognising them as moral and spiritual guides to society – a phenomenon reflected in the very notion of the ‘intellectual’, which is a late-19th-century (French) invention. Public intellectuals exist elsewhere, of course, but in France they enjoy an unparalleled degree of visibility and social legitimacy.
Secondly, to an extent that is also unique in modern Western culture, France’s major cultural bodies – from the State to the great institutions of secondary and higher education, the major academies, the principal publishing houses, and the leading press organs – are all concentrated in Paris. This cultural centralisation extends to the school curriculum (all high-school students have to study philosophy up to the baccalauréat), and this explains how and why French ways of thought have exhibited such a striking degree of stylistic consistency.
by Sudhir Hazareesingh, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir having lunch at the "La Coupole" Brasserie, December 1973. Photo by Guy Le Querrec/Magnum
Ryan Adams
[ed. Ryan Adams reimagines Taylor Swift's 1989.]
People like you always want back the love they gave away
And people like me wanna believe you when you say you've changed
The more I think about it now
The less I know
All I know is that you drove us off the road
Stay
Hey, all you had to do was stay
Had me in the palm of your hand
Man, why'd you have to go and lock me out when I let you in
Stay, hey, now you say you want it
Back, now that it's just too late
Well could've been easy, all you had to do was stay
All you had to do was stay
more...
And people like me wanna believe you when you say you've changed
The more I think about it now
The less I know
All I know is that you drove us off the road
Stay
Hey, all you had to do was stay
Had me in the palm of your hand
Man, why'd you have to go and lock me out when I let you in
Stay, hey, now you say you want it
Back, now that it's just too late
Well could've been easy, all you had to do was stay
All you had to do was stay
more...
Let's Sell Some Shit To These Millennials
Welcome, everyone, and thanks for choosing Market 2 Millennials Co. I’m thrilled to be working with you all from Hardwick Sandwich Bags. In front of each seat at this conference table is a cheese sandwich, in a bag, with a name written on it. Please, find yours. And as you do, I just have to say, and I’m speaking from the heart here: You folks make great bags. It was a joy bagging those sandwiches for you. So baggable.
But you have a problem. We conducted a survey for you, and, listen, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to be upfront: While millennials are Snapchatting, they are ninety-seven percent less likely to be bagging lunch. Less than one tenth of one percent of all tweets are about sandwich bags. Let that sink in. Nobody is tweeting about bags.
This won’t turn itself around. Millennials weren’t raised the way we were, with a passion for sandwich bags. To instill it in them, I’ve developed a customized, four-step plan that I call B.A.G.S. Let’s go through it.
Step “B”: Build The Base! First, we need millennials to understand sandwich bags. We need to make them relevant. The kids, they don’t eat sandwiches. They’ve never seen one. But their iPhone? That fits inside a bag. And the bag is clear. Do you see where I’m going with this? If you were all 24 years old, you would. Kids can take a selfie… with the phone… inside the bag! So fun, right? So we’ll get them started, and have them call it a baggie. They’ll hashtag it: #baggie. All the love millennials have for selfies will be transposed onto bags, and then it’s time for…
Step “A”: Activate! It’s off to the races. Millennials will do literally anything you ask, so long as it involves a catchy hashtag. We’ll tweet out #MyBagBrag, inviting millennials to show off their brand-new bags. We’ve got #FlyTheBagFlag, where a kid ties the corner of a bag to his finger, waves it around and Vines it. And you’ve got to go edgy, of course, so we’ll do #ShagBag, where the kids are encouraged to have sex with a bag. Don’t worry about logistics. They’ll figure it out.
Making you hungry yet? Feel free to open those bags in front of you. God, I love that sound of crinkly plastic.
Step “G”: Galvanize! Once we’ve shown millennials what a bag can do, they’ll need a bag of their own. This generation loathes anything from before 1997. Just look at the briefcase industry—absolutely murdered by millennials. And that’s why it’s critical, right now, that you launch a new line of sandwich bags very explicitly for young people. They need to feel involved. Catered to.
Here’s the rollout: First, we hire YouTube stars to walk into bars in New York and L.A., order beer, and pour it all directly into a bag. But not just any bag: a gold-tinted bag that says SWAG BAG in big, bold letters. All the millennials in the bar will crowd around and Instagram it. Everyone will want to know: What’s this bag, and where can I get it? Great buzz there. And then we announce the product with a big, splashy, sponsored content post on BuzzFeed called 14 Things You Can Put In Bags. By week’s end, millennials will be lining up overnight outside of supermarkets like they’re buying the Apple Watch.
But you have a problem. We conducted a survey for you, and, listen, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to be upfront: While millennials are Snapchatting, they are ninety-seven percent less likely to be bagging lunch. Less than one tenth of one percent of all tweets are about sandwich bags. Let that sink in. Nobody is tweeting about bags.This won’t turn itself around. Millennials weren’t raised the way we were, with a passion for sandwich bags. To instill it in them, I’ve developed a customized, four-step plan that I call B.A.G.S. Let’s go through it.
Step “B”: Build The Base! First, we need millennials to understand sandwich bags. We need to make them relevant. The kids, they don’t eat sandwiches. They’ve never seen one. But their iPhone? That fits inside a bag. And the bag is clear. Do you see where I’m going with this? If you were all 24 years old, you would. Kids can take a selfie… with the phone… inside the bag! So fun, right? So we’ll get them started, and have them call it a baggie. They’ll hashtag it: #baggie. All the love millennials have for selfies will be transposed onto bags, and then it’s time for…
Step “A”: Activate! It’s off to the races. Millennials will do literally anything you ask, so long as it involves a catchy hashtag. We’ll tweet out #MyBagBrag, inviting millennials to show off their brand-new bags. We’ve got #FlyTheBagFlag, where a kid ties the corner of a bag to his finger, waves it around and Vines it. And you’ve got to go edgy, of course, so we’ll do #ShagBag, where the kids are encouraged to have sex with a bag. Don’t worry about logistics. They’ll figure it out.
Making you hungry yet? Feel free to open those bags in front of you. God, I love that sound of crinkly plastic.
Step “G”: Galvanize! Once we’ve shown millennials what a bag can do, they’ll need a bag of their own. This generation loathes anything from before 1997. Just look at the briefcase industry—absolutely murdered by millennials. And that’s why it’s critical, right now, that you launch a new line of sandwich bags very explicitly for young people. They need to feel involved. Catered to.
Here’s the rollout: First, we hire YouTube stars to walk into bars in New York and L.A., order beer, and pour it all directly into a bag. But not just any bag: a gold-tinted bag that says SWAG BAG in big, bold letters. All the millennials in the bar will crowd around and Instagram it. Everyone will want to know: What’s this bag, and where can I get it? Great buzz there. And then we announce the product with a big, splashy, sponsored content post on BuzzFeed called 14 Things You Can Put In Bags. By week’s end, millennials will be lining up overnight outside of supermarkets like they’re buying the Apple Watch.
by Jason Feifer, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Prismpak
Amazon Cuts Price of Prime Subscription For One Day Only
Amazon Prime is reducing the cost of a new membership, but you'll only have one day to sign up.The retail giant announced on Tuesday that it's trimming the cost of Amazon Prime to $67 for one year from the usual $99. The one-day price cut will start Friday, September 25 at 12:00 a.m. ET and end at 11:59 p.m. PT. The deal is good only for new subscribers (sorry, all you existing Prime members) and will available at the Amazon Prime sign-up page. (...)
Normally $99 a year, a Prime membership offers subscribers Prime instant video, free two-day shipping, unlimited music streaming with Prime Music, unlimited photo storage with Prime Photos and a Kindle Owner's Lending Library with more than 800,000 e-books.
by Lance Whitney, CNET | Read more:
Image: via:
Monday, September 21, 2015
Why a VR Game About Flirting is as Scary as a Horror Game
On the surface, the two PlayStation VR games on display at Sony’s Tokyo Game Show booth couldn’t be any more different. One is a horror scenario that drops you into a gruesome, terrifying predicament. The other puts you on a beautiful seaside next to an attractive young lady.
But after playing both, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played the same demo twice. The sheer intimacy of these experiences—the feeling of having one’s personal space invaded, if you will—was unmistakeable, and I can still feel it now, at a distance.
A long line stretches to the back of Sony’s Tokyo Game Show stand, people patiently awaiting their turn on the 20 or so demo stations of PlayStation VR (nee Project Morpheus), Sony’s upcoming virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4. There were many different demos, but those that left the deepest impression on me were Capcom’s horror demo Kitchen and Bandai Namco’s romance sim Summer Lesson. (...)
My reaction to fake scary things, I have discovered by going to a few of those crazy haunted houses, is to laugh nervously. I was cracking up during Kitchen because Kitchen was some no-holds-barred scary stuff. At one point, I am ashamed to say, some part of the VR rig slipped down and tapped me on the shoulder, making me gasp quite loudly and reach around ready to kill whatever it was.
Then the ghoul left the room. And nothing happened for a while.
This was the scariest thing of all, because I knew something was going to jump out at me. But where? When? In a PlayStation VR demo, when time is of the essence because you move people through as soon as possible, Sony let this go on for a while. Nothing was happening—nothing—and I was as riveted as I’ve ever been in a game. When I died, following another very up close and personal encounter from which I could not look away, it came as something of a relief.
I didn’t expect to feel similarly uncomfortable during Summer Lesson, the pitch for which is you are a teacher providing a private tutoring session to an attractive female student.
Things started off fairly benign, with the student appearing and sitting down next to you, reading from a textbook. You could choose to teach English to a Japanese student in her bedroom, or Japanese to an American student at a beach house. At one point, and this happens in either scenario, the student leans in very close and asks, “Sensei, how do you read this word?” Then she places the book in front of your face, leaning into you in what can only be described as an extremely intimate manner.
But after playing both, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played the same demo twice. The sheer intimacy of these experiences—the feeling of having one’s personal space invaded, if you will—was unmistakeable, and I can still feel it now, at a distance.A long line stretches to the back of Sony’s Tokyo Game Show stand, people patiently awaiting their turn on the 20 or so demo stations of PlayStation VR (nee Project Morpheus), Sony’s upcoming virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4. There were many different demos, but those that left the deepest impression on me were Capcom’s horror demo Kitchen and Bandai Namco’s romance sim Summer Lesson. (...)
My reaction to fake scary things, I have discovered by going to a few of those crazy haunted houses, is to laugh nervously. I was cracking up during Kitchen because Kitchen was some no-holds-barred scary stuff. At one point, I am ashamed to say, some part of the VR rig slipped down and tapped me on the shoulder, making me gasp quite loudly and reach around ready to kill whatever it was.
Then the ghoul left the room. And nothing happened for a while.
This was the scariest thing of all, because I knew something was going to jump out at me. But where? When? In a PlayStation VR demo, when time is of the essence because you move people through as soon as possible, Sony let this go on for a while. Nothing was happening—nothing—and I was as riveted as I’ve ever been in a game. When I died, following another very up close and personal encounter from which I could not look away, it came as something of a relief.
I didn’t expect to feel similarly uncomfortable during Summer Lesson, the pitch for which is you are a teacher providing a private tutoring session to an attractive female student.
Things started off fairly benign, with the student appearing and sitting down next to you, reading from a textbook. You could choose to teach English to a Japanese student in her bedroom, or Japanese to an American student at a beach house. At one point, and this happens in either scenario, the student leans in very close and asks, “Sensei, how do you read this word?” Then she places the book in front of your face, leaning into you in what can only be described as an extremely intimate manner.
by Chris Kohler, Wired | Read more:
Image: Bandai Namco
Perfect Genetic Knowledge
Genomics is about to transform the world.
In case you weren’t paying attention, a lot has been happening in the science of genomics over the past few years. It is, for example, now possible to read one human genome and correct all known errors. Perhaps this sounds terrifying, but genomic science has a track-record in making science fiction reality. ‘Everything that’s alive we want to rewrite,’ boasted Austen Heinz, the CEO of Cambrian Genomics, last year.
It was only in 2010 that Craig Venter’s team in Maryland led us into the era of synthetic genomics when they created Synthia, the first living organism to have a computer for a mother. A simple bacterium, she has a genome just over half a million letters of DNA long, but the potential for scaling up is vast; synthetic yeast and worm projects are underway. (...)
Commensurate with their power to change biology as we know it, the new technologies are driving renewed ethical debates. Uneasiness is being expressed, not only among the general public, but also in high-profile articles and interviews by scientists. When China announced it was modifying human embryos this April, the term ‘CRISPR/Cas9’ trended on the social media site Twitter. CRISPR/Cas9, by the way, is a protein-RNA combo that defends bacteria against marauding viruses. Properly adapted, it allows scientists to edit strings of DNA inside living cells with astonishing precision. It has, for example, been used to show that HIV can be ‘snipped’ out of the human genome, and that female mosquitoes can be turned male to stop the spread of malaria (only females bite).
But one of CRISPR’s co-developers, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California in Berkeley, has ‘strongly discouraged’ any attempts to edit the human genome pending a review of the ethical issues. Well, thanks to China, that ship has sailed. Indeed, now the technology appears to be finding its way into the hands of hobbyists: Nature recently reported that members of the ‘biohacker’ sub-culture have been messing around with CRISPR, though the enthusiast they interviewed didn’t appear to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do with it.
Given that our genetic abilities appear to be reaching a critical threshold, it is worth taking a fairly hard-headed look at what the next few years promise. For instance, could DNA solve some of our pressing energy issues? One project hopes to engineer trees that glow in the dark. You can sign up to preorder one now – at least the weed version of it; trees take too long to mature to be good prototypes. Perhaps the day is not far off when our streets are lined with bioluminescent foliage. This would presumably drive electric streetlamps into obsolescence, like so many other energy-hungry ‘old-fashioned’ technologies.
But this is hardly the only potentially revolutionary project that aims to play out in the next five to 10 years. Venter is working on re-engineering pig lungs so that they can be used in human transplants. This could have a much larger impact than is immediately obvious: about one in 10 deaths in Europe is caused by lung disease. Farther afield, Venter is in the race to find life on Mars with DNA sequencers, and is developing methods of ‘biological teleportation’ – the idea is that you sequence microbial DNA on Mars and then reconstruct the genomes on Earth using 3D printing. The process could work the other way around, too. Venter and Elon Musk are talking of using this technology to terraform Mars with 3D-printed earthly microbes. The whole thing boggles the imagination, of course, but Venter and Musk do have form for pulling off amazing feats. Nevertheless, perhaps we should start our tour of the horizon closer to home.
By 2020, many hospitals will have genomic medicine departments, designing medical therapies based on your personal genetic constitution. Gene sequencers – machines that can take a blood sample and reel off your entire genetic blueprint – will shrink below the size of USB drives. Supermarkets will have shelves of home DNA tests, perhaps nestled between the cosmetics and medicines, for everything from whether your baby will be good at sports to the breed of cat you just adopted, to whether your kitchen counter harbours enough ‘good bacteria’. We will all know someone who has had their genome probed for medical reasons, perhaps even ourselves. Personal DNA stories – including the quality of the bugs in your gut– will be the stuff of cocktail party chitchat.
By 2025, projections suggest that we will have sequenced the genomes of billions of individuals. This is largely down to the explosive growth in the field of cancer genomics. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, became one of the early adopters of genomic medicine when he had the cancer that killed him sequenced. Many others will follow. And we will become more and more willing to act on what our genes tell us.
In case you weren’t paying attention, a lot has been happening in the science of genomics over the past few years. It is, for example, now possible to read one human genome and correct all known errors. Perhaps this sounds terrifying, but genomic science has a track-record in making science fiction reality. ‘Everything that’s alive we want to rewrite,’ boasted Austen Heinz, the CEO of Cambrian Genomics, last year.
It was only in 2010 that Craig Venter’s team in Maryland led us into the era of synthetic genomics when they created Synthia, the first living organism to have a computer for a mother. A simple bacterium, she has a genome just over half a million letters of DNA long, but the potential for scaling up is vast; synthetic yeast and worm projects are underway. (...)Commensurate with their power to change biology as we know it, the new technologies are driving renewed ethical debates. Uneasiness is being expressed, not only among the general public, but also in high-profile articles and interviews by scientists. When China announced it was modifying human embryos this April, the term ‘CRISPR/Cas9’ trended on the social media site Twitter. CRISPR/Cas9, by the way, is a protein-RNA combo that defends bacteria against marauding viruses. Properly adapted, it allows scientists to edit strings of DNA inside living cells with astonishing precision. It has, for example, been used to show that HIV can be ‘snipped’ out of the human genome, and that female mosquitoes can be turned male to stop the spread of malaria (only females bite).
But one of CRISPR’s co-developers, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California in Berkeley, has ‘strongly discouraged’ any attempts to edit the human genome pending a review of the ethical issues. Well, thanks to China, that ship has sailed. Indeed, now the technology appears to be finding its way into the hands of hobbyists: Nature recently reported that members of the ‘biohacker’ sub-culture have been messing around with CRISPR, though the enthusiast they interviewed didn’t appear to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do with it.
Given that our genetic abilities appear to be reaching a critical threshold, it is worth taking a fairly hard-headed look at what the next few years promise. For instance, could DNA solve some of our pressing energy issues? One project hopes to engineer trees that glow in the dark. You can sign up to preorder one now – at least the weed version of it; trees take too long to mature to be good prototypes. Perhaps the day is not far off when our streets are lined with bioluminescent foliage. This would presumably drive electric streetlamps into obsolescence, like so many other energy-hungry ‘old-fashioned’ technologies.
But this is hardly the only potentially revolutionary project that aims to play out in the next five to 10 years. Venter is working on re-engineering pig lungs so that they can be used in human transplants. This could have a much larger impact than is immediately obvious: about one in 10 deaths in Europe is caused by lung disease. Farther afield, Venter is in the race to find life on Mars with DNA sequencers, and is developing methods of ‘biological teleportation’ – the idea is that you sequence microbial DNA on Mars and then reconstruct the genomes on Earth using 3D printing. The process could work the other way around, too. Venter and Elon Musk are talking of using this technology to terraform Mars with 3D-printed earthly microbes. The whole thing boggles the imagination, of course, but Venter and Musk do have form for pulling off amazing feats. Nevertheless, perhaps we should start our tour of the horizon closer to home.
By 2020, many hospitals will have genomic medicine departments, designing medical therapies based on your personal genetic constitution. Gene sequencers – machines that can take a blood sample and reel off your entire genetic blueprint – will shrink below the size of USB drives. Supermarkets will have shelves of home DNA tests, perhaps nestled between the cosmetics and medicines, for everything from whether your baby will be good at sports to the breed of cat you just adopted, to whether your kitchen counter harbours enough ‘good bacteria’. We will all know someone who has had their genome probed for medical reasons, perhaps even ourselves. Personal DNA stories – including the quality of the bugs in your gut– will be the stuff of cocktail party chitchat.
By 2025, projections suggest that we will have sequenced the genomes of billions of individuals. This is largely down to the explosive growth in the field of cancer genomics. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, became one of the early adopters of genomic medicine when he had the cancer that killed him sequenced. Many others will follow. And we will become more and more willing to act on what our genes tell us.
by Dawn Field, Aeon | Read more:
Image: rett Baker/UTMSI/Cameron Thrash (LSU) /Olivia Mason (FSU)
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Saturday, September 19, 2015
I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago
[ed. Brilliant.]
Hi! Today seems like a good day to answer some frequently asked questions.
Q: Are you marking any significant anniversaries today?
A: Yes, yes I am! Today is the second anniversary of Steve’s death.
Q: Who is Steve?
A: Steve was my husband uh DOI.
Q: Urm, now I feel bad for not knowing that.
A: It’s fine. At the two year point I find myself having to make more and more choices about whether or not I immediately blurt out HEYDIDYOUKNOWI’MAWIDOWTHAT’SMYFUNFACT!!!!!!! People in my life are less likely to have been around then and more likely to need to be briefed on this backstory. This is extremely annoying because after two years, I still don’t have a better way to relate this information than all caps-no spaces shouting.
But beneath that, it’s actually a super awesome thing, because it means that my world has gotten so much bigger in these two years. I’ve met a lot of people, and done a lot of things that I maybe only mildly imagined doing before.
Q: Dude, that sort of makes it sound like you’re glad Steve died.
A: I’m not, and that’s kind of a dick thing to say.
Q: I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY!
A: Ha ha, SIKE! I’m just fucking with you. I’m not glad Steve died, not even a little. He has missed SO MUCH COOL SHIT. He missed the opening with Cuba, which he would have been really stoked about. He’s missing an equality revolution in spaces around gender and sexual identity, race, police power, capital, and class. He’s missing whatever they’re doing with Hine over at Eastern Market. He’s missing our cat Claudia’s turbulent adolescence. He’s missing BERNIE SANDERS ELIZABETH WARRREN AND LAWRENCE LESSIG ‘NUFF SAID.
Also, I’m missing him. Obviously. A lot. BUT: I have a cousin who’s also a widow, and she told my sister that she’s not sure if she’d bring her husband back. Which sounds TOTALLY CRAZY to other people, BUT: When you experience a loss like this, you get to see a really wild new amount of life. Suddenly the range of the type of sad you can feel, to the type of happy you can feel, is busted open. The spectrum from happy to sad isn’t a foot wide anymore — it’s as far as your arms can stretch and then to the edges of the room and then up the block and over into the next neighborhood.
So I am not happy that Steve died. But I am happy a lot of the time, which I didn’t really anticipate on this day two years ago.
Q: What happened on this day two years ago?
A: Good question! While many people know that I am a widow, probably not a ton know what went down. Pretty much no one knows exactly what went down, because I don’t even know what happened.
What I do know is that for a couple of weeks, Steve had what we thought was a summer cold. Some coughing, some sneezing. Then he started a new job, and felt like that stress was compounding the illness — but it didn’t occur to either of us that this was a thing that was more than just something passing. He certainly didn’t think it was worth taking a sick day during his first week of work.
That Friday he came home from work REALLY REALLY sick. He’d barely been able to drive. I made him get up off the couch and go to an urgent care. The doctor there prescribed him an antibiotic and said “it’s either the flu or it’s not, so this will either work or it won’t.” We went to CVS and got the scrip filled right as they were closing. I had to pull a cry face to get them to fill it, and when I got back to the car I was pretty proud of myself for badgering them into doing it — I told Steve that “bitches get shit done.” Tina Fey went on to steal this line from me. (Right? I’m pretty sure that’s how this went down, but my memory isn’t great.)
Steve didn’t sleep very well that night. Around 5 a.m. he couldn’t sleep, so we woke up and watched some 30 Rock together. (The degree to which Tina Fey figures into this story is only being revealed to me now, two years later.) I went back to sleep. Around 9 a.m. I made my way up to Eastern Market to get groceries, and when I got back, Steve came down the stairs, carrying a bunch of his sick dude things — probably some Kleenexes, his thermometer, a seltzer can. I joked about him doing a Rachael Ray carry. Then he started coughing.
I don’t remember the sequence of events very well. He was sitting on the couch at one point and I encouraged him to cough it up, whatever it was. At one point he went into the kitchen and looked out the glass door to the patio, and said “Oh fuck.”
He started coughing up blood. I went to get him a bowl to cough into, and then said “that’s it, I’m calling 911.” And then he collapsed onto his knees, and fell on the ground.
The 911 operator wasn’t super helpful. I kept asking if I should do CPR and she kept asking if he was responsive, if he was breathing. I was surprised by how hard it was to tell. At one point I pulled on his ear to see if he would respond. I turned him on his side and tried to clear his airway. I cajoled the 911 operator, but weirdly, in the moment, I was really focused on being polite. Like, using a ton of please and thank you, as if that would make the fire truck get up Florida Avenue faster. Finally, after a couple of minutes, I heard the sirens and the operator said to me “well, let me just make sure that’s for you.” Because, Welcome to Washington, D.C., District Slogan: Those Sirens Might Not Be For You.
The EMTs cut off his shirt and intubated him, but they didn’t shock him. They used a machine to tell them whether or not to do it, and the machine said “don’t.” I don’t know if it was “don’t bother” or “you don’t need to.” I don’t know if they knew this wasn’t going to end well or not. They asked me how old he was, which I assume was to gauge whether to keep working or not.
Once we were in the ambulance, I asked where we were going and one of the EMTs just sort of nodded “no” to me, and indicated I should hold on. It felt like we sat there for a long time, trying to figure out what was happening. I struggled to call my parents with my cellphone — which was, ironically a recurring nightmare for me. That something was happening to Steve and I’d have to dial 911 and I wouldn’t be able to unlock my phone or dial the right number. Eventually I got my dad, who was in North Carolina, and he sent my sister over, who luckily was already down in the city helping a friend move.
Then I had to call Steve’s parents, which was horrible. Steve’s mom was excited to hear from me, since on their end, it was just a normal Saturday morning. And I had to say, no, turn down, your son’s in the back of an ambulance and the EMT just gave me a “no” nod.
Eventually we took off for Howard University Hospital, which was the closest ER. They took me into a tiny little room that wasn’t square, so all of the furniture was crammed in at weird angles. A chaplain came in and said some very anatomically specific prayers, which even as they were cutting Steve open and trying to resuscitate his heart directly, I thought was funny. My sister Sarah showed up, and they called a Catholic chaplain so he could give Steve last rites. I don’t know how the last rites went, but in terms of dealing with the non-dying, that guy was fucking terrible. I wish I could remember his name so I could pan him on Yelp.
Doctors would come in pretty frequently to update me, but only one or two of those times were they hopeful. Apparently his heart caught a couple of times, but it never stayed working. When the doctor came in to tell me that they’d declared a time of death, I made him tell it to Steve’s parents on the phone.
Sarah and I saw him at least twice, once while they were still working on him, and once after they’d cleaned him up. As they led me out of the ER, I told the nurse that I was conflicted about whether or not I should take a photo of his body. She told me I’d see him again, at the funeral, and that I should just focus on sleeping and eating. And then I said “I can’t believe it, he was such a good husband.”
And she said, “Yeah, but he did a shitty thing today.”
And that was the first time I laughed after Steve died.
Ultimately what seems to have happened is that an infection developed in his heart. This is probably related to the surgery he’d had around Christmas, to repair an aneurysm in a valve in his heart. I don’t have better clarity than this, and to some extent, the facts I did dig up, I’ve forgotten. It’s impossible to overstate what a hit your memory takes when you lose someone. It’s also impossible to overstate what a bureaucratic clusterfuck it is. GUYS, I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH: IF YOU SHARE A PHONE PLAN WITH SOMEONE, MAKE SURE EVERYONE’S AN AUTHORIZED USER.
Q: Um damn, I’m like, a little overwhelmed now.
A: Yeah, me too. I’ve been that way for two years. So if you sent me an email and I didn’t respond to it, that’s what happened. I couldn’t respond to your query about a story pitch because my husband coughed to death.
Q: So how are you doing in general?
Hi! Today seems like a good day to answer some frequently asked questions.
Q: Are you marking any significant anniversaries today?
A: Yes, yes I am! Today is the second anniversary of Steve’s death.Q: Who is Steve?
A: Steve was my husband uh DOI.
Q: Urm, now I feel bad for not knowing that.
A: It’s fine. At the two year point I find myself having to make more and more choices about whether or not I immediately blurt out HEYDIDYOUKNOWI’MAWIDOWTHAT’SMYFUNFACT!!!!!!! People in my life are less likely to have been around then and more likely to need to be briefed on this backstory. This is extremely annoying because after two years, I still don’t have a better way to relate this information than all caps-no spaces shouting.
But beneath that, it’s actually a super awesome thing, because it means that my world has gotten so much bigger in these two years. I’ve met a lot of people, and done a lot of things that I maybe only mildly imagined doing before.
Q: Dude, that sort of makes it sound like you’re glad Steve died.
A: I’m not, and that’s kind of a dick thing to say.
Q: I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY!
A: Ha ha, SIKE! I’m just fucking with you. I’m not glad Steve died, not even a little. He has missed SO MUCH COOL SHIT. He missed the opening with Cuba, which he would have been really stoked about. He’s missing an equality revolution in spaces around gender and sexual identity, race, police power, capital, and class. He’s missing whatever they’re doing with Hine over at Eastern Market. He’s missing our cat Claudia’s turbulent adolescence. He’s missing BERNIE SANDERS ELIZABETH WARRREN AND LAWRENCE LESSIG ‘NUFF SAID.
Also, I’m missing him. Obviously. A lot. BUT: I have a cousin who’s also a widow, and she told my sister that she’s not sure if she’d bring her husband back. Which sounds TOTALLY CRAZY to other people, BUT: When you experience a loss like this, you get to see a really wild new amount of life. Suddenly the range of the type of sad you can feel, to the type of happy you can feel, is busted open. The spectrum from happy to sad isn’t a foot wide anymore — it’s as far as your arms can stretch and then to the edges of the room and then up the block and over into the next neighborhood.
So I am not happy that Steve died. But I am happy a lot of the time, which I didn’t really anticipate on this day two years ago.
Q: What happened on this day two years ago?
A: Good question! While many people know that I am a widow, probably not a ton know what went down. Pretty much no one knows exactly what went down, because I don’t even know what happened.
What I do know is that for a couple of weeks, Steve had what we thought was a summer cold. Some coughing, some sneezing. Then he started a new job, and felt like that stress was compounding the illness — but it didn’t occur to either of us that this was a thing that was more than just something passing. He certainly didn’t think it was worth taking a sick day during his first week of work.
That Friday he came home from work REALLY REALLY sick. He’d barely been able to drive. I made him get up off the couch and go to an urgent care. The doctor there prescribed him an antibiotic and said “it’s either the flu or it’s not, so this will either work or it won’t.” We went to CVS and got the scrip filled right as they were closing. I had to pull a cry face to get them to fill it, and when I got back to the car I was pretty proud of myself for badgering them into doing it — I told Steve that “bitches get shit done.” Tina Fey went on to steal this line from me. (Right? I’m pretty sure that’s how this went down, but my memory isn’t great.)
Steve didn’t sleep very well that night. Around 5 a.m. he couldn’t sleep, so we woke up and watched some 30 Rock together. (The degree to which Tina Fey figures into this story is only being revealed to me now, two years later.) I went back to sleep. Around 9 a.m. I made my way up to Eastern Market to get groceries, and when I got back, Steve came down the stairs, carrying a bunch of his sick dude things — probably some Kleenexes, his thermometer, a seltzer can. I joked about him doing a Rachael Ray carry. Then he started coughing.
I don’t remember the sequence of events very well. He was sitting on the couch at one point and I encouraged him to cough it up, whatever it was. At one point he went into the kitchen and looked out the glass door to the patio, and said “Oh fuck.”
He started coughing up blood. I went to get him a bowl to cough into, and then said “that’s it, I’m calling 911.” And then he collapsed onto his knees, and fell on the ground.
The 911 operator wasn’t super helpful. I kept asking if I should do CPR and she kept asking if he was responsive, if he was breathing. I was surprised by how hard it was to tell. At one point I pulled on his ear to see if he would respond. I turned him on his side and tried to clear his airway. I cajoled the 911 operator, but weirdly, in the moment, I was really focused on being polite. Like, using a ton of please and thank you, as if that would make the fire truck get up Florida Avenue faster. Finally, after a couple of minutes, I heard the sirens and the operator said to me “well, let me just make sure that’s for you.” Because, Welcome to Washington, D.C., District Slogan: Those Sirens Might Not Be For You.
The EMTs cut off his shirt and intubated him, but they didn’t shock him. They used a machine to tell them whether or not to do it, and the machine said “don’t.” I don’t know if it was “don’t bother” or “you don’t need to.” I don’t know if they knew this wasn’t going to end well or not. They asked me how old he was, which I assume was to gauge whether to keep working or not.
Once we were in the ambulance, I asked where we were going and one of the EMTs just sort of nodded “no” to me, and indicated I should hold on. It felt like we sat there for a long time, trying to figure out what was happening. I struggled to call my parents with my cellphone — which was, ironically a recurring nightmare for me. That something was happening to Steve and I’d have to dial 911 and I wouldn’t be able to unlock my phone or dial the right number. Eventually I got my dad, who was in North Carolina, and he sent my sister over, who luckily was already down in the city helping a friend move.
Then I had to call Steve’s parents, which was horrible. Steve’s mom was excited to hear from me, since on their end, it was just a normal Saturday morning. And I had to say, no, turn down, your son’s in the back of an ambulance and the EMT just gave me a “no” nod.
Eventually we took off for Howard University Hospital, which was the closest ER. They took me into a tiny little room that wasn’t square, so all of the furniture was crammed in at weird angles. A chaplain came in and said some very anatomically specific prayers, which even as they were cutting Steve open and trying to resuscitate his heart directly, I thought was funny. My sister Sarah showed up, and they called a Catholic chaplain so he could give Steve last rites. I don’t know how the last rites went, but in terms of dealing with the non-dying, that guy was fucking terrible. I wish I could remember his name so I could pan him on Yelp.
Doctors would come in pretty frequently to update me, but only one or two of those times were they hopeful. Apparently his heart caught a couple of times, but it never stayed working. When the doctor came in to tell me that they’d declared a time of death, I made him tell it to Steve’s parents on the phone.
Sarah and I saw him at least twice, once while they were still working on him, and once after they’d cleaned him up. As they led me out of the ER, I told the nurse that I was conflicted about whether or not I should take a photo of his body. She told me I’d see him again, at the funeral, and that I should just focus on sleeping and eating. And then I said “I can’t believe it, he was such a good husband.”
And she said, “Yeah, but he did a shitty thing today.”
And that was the first time I laughed after Steve died.
Ultimately what seems to have happened is that an infection developed in his heart. This is probably related to the surgery he’d had around Christmas, to repair an aneurysm in a valve in his heart. I don’t have better clarity than this, and to some extent, the facts I did dig up, I’ve forgotten. It’s impossible to overstate what a hit your memory takes when you lose someone. It’s also impossible to overstate what a bureaucratic clusterfuck it is. GUYS, I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH: IF YOU SHARE A PHONE PLAN WITH SOMEONE, MAKE SURE EVERYONE’S AN AUTHORIZED USER.
Q: Um damn, I’m like, a little overwhelmed now.
A: Yeah, me too. I’ve been that way for two years. So if you sent me an email and I didn’t respond to it, that’s what happened. I couldn’t respond to your query about a story pitch because my husband coughed to death.
Q: So how are you doing in general?
by Rachel Ward, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Hello Elo
[ed. Plug your favorite team into Elo's calculator here.]
Check out win and loss projections and playoff odds for all 32 NFL teams.
How do our Elo work? FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote a detailed FAQ about the formula before the 2014 season, and almost all of it still applies.
by Neil Paine, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image: Timothy A. Clary
Friday, September 18, 2015
We're on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants
Voice interfaces have been around for years, but let’s face it: Thus far, they’ve been pretty dumb. We need not dwell on the indignities of automated phone trees (“If you’re calling to make a payment, say ‘payment’”). Even our more sophisticated voice interfaces have relied on speech but somehow missed the power of language. Ask Google Now for the population of New York City and it obliges. Ask for the location of the Empire State Building: good to go. But go one logical step further and ask for the population of the city that contains the Empire State Building and it falters. Push Siri too hard and the assistant just refers you to a Google search. Anyone reared on scenes of Captain Kirk talking to theEnterprise’s computer or of Tony Stark bantering with Jarvis can’t help but be perpetually disappointed.
Ask around Silicon Valley these days, though, and you hear the same refrain over and over: It’s different now.
One hot day in early June, Keyvan Mohajer, CEO of SoundHound, shows me a prototype of a new app that his company has been working on in secret for almost 10 years. You may recognize SoundHound as the name of a popular music-recognition app—the one that can identify a tune for you if you hum it into your phone. It turns out that app was largely just a way of fueling Mohajer’s real dream: to create the best voice-based artificial-intelligence assistant in the world.
The prototype is called Hound, and it’s pretty incredible. Holding a black Nexus 5 smartphone, Mohajer taps a blue and white microphone icon and begins asking questions. He starts simply, asking for the time in Berlin and the population of Japan. Basic search-result stuff—followed by a twist: “What is the distance between them?” The app understands the context and fires back, “About 5,536 miles.”
Mohajer rattles off a barrage of questions, and the app answers every one. Correctly.
Then Mohajer gets rolling, smiling as he rattles off a barrage of questions that keep escalating in complexity. He asks Hound to calculate the monthly mortgage payments on a million-dollar home, and the app immediately asks him for the interest rate and the term of the loan before dishing out its answer: $4,270.84.
“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?” he asks. Hound figures out that Mohajer is fishing for the population of Washington, DC, faster than I do and spits out the correct answer in its rapid-fire robotic voice. “What is the population and capital for Japan and China, and their areas in square miles and square kilometers? And also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” Mohajer would keep on adding questions, but he runs out of breath. I’ll spare you the minute-long response, but Hound answers every question. Correctly.
Hound, which is now in beta, is probably the fastest and most versatile voice recognition system unveiled thus far. It has an edge for now because it can do speech recognition and natural language processing simultaneously. But really, it’s only a matter of time before other systems catch up.
After all, the underlying ingredients—what Kaplan calls the “gating technologies” necessary for a strong conversational interface—are all pretty much available now to whoever’s buying. It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real—and ubiquitous.
But it’s not just that conversational technology is finally possible to build. There’s also a growing need for it. As more devices come online, particularly those without screens—your light fixtures, your smoke alarm—we need a way to interact with them that doesn’t require buttons, menus, and icons.
At the same time, the world that Jobs built with the GUI is reaching its natural limits. Our immensely powerful onscreen interfaces require every imaginable feature to be hand-coded, to have an icon or menu option. Think about Photoshop or Excel: Both are so massively capable that using them properly requires bushwhacking through a dense jungle of keyboard shortcuts, menu trees, and impossible-to-find toolbars. Good luck just sitting down and cropping a photo. “The GUI has topped out,” Kaplan says. “It’s so overloaded now.”
That’s where the booming market in virtual assistants comes in: to come to your rescue when you’re lost amid the seven windows, five toolbars, and 30 tabs open on your screen, and to act as a liaison between apps and devices that don’t usually talk to each other.
You may not engage heavily with virtual assistants right now, but you probably will soon. This fall a major leap forward for the conversational interface will be announced by the ding of a push notification on your smartphone. Once you’ve upgraded to iOS 9, Android 6, or Windows 10, you will, by design, find yourself spending less time inside apps and more chatting with Siri, Google Now, or Cortana. And soon, a billion-plus Facebook users will be able to open a chat window and ask M, a new smart assistant, for almost anything (using text—for now). These are no longer just supplementary ways to do things. They’re the best way, and in some cases the only way. (In Apple’s HomeKit system for the connected house, you make sure everything’s off and locked by saying, “Hey Siri, good night.”)
At least in the beginning, the idea behind these newly enhanced virtual assistants is that they will simplify the complex, multistep things we’re all tired of doing via drop-down menus, complicated workflows, and hopscotching from app to app. Your assistant will know every corner of every app on your phone and will glide between them at your spoken command. And with time, they will also get to know something else: you.
Ask around Silicon Valley these days, though, and you hear the same refrain over and over: It’s different now.
One hot day in early June, Keyvan Mohajer, CEO of SoundHound, shows me a prototype of a new app that his company has been working on in secret for almost 10 years. You may recognize SoundHound as the name of a popular music-recognition app—the one that can identify a tune for you if you hum it into your phone. It turns out that app was largely just a way of fueling Mohajer’s real dream: to create the best voice-based artificial-intelligence assistant in the world.
The prototype is called Hound, and it’s pretty incredible. Holding a black Nexus 5 smartphone, Mohajer taps a blue and white microphone icon and begins asking questions. He starts simply, asking for the time in Berlin and the population of Japan. Basic search-result stuff—followed by a twist: “What is the distance between them?” The app understands the context and fires back, “About 5,536 miles.”Mohajer rattles off a barrage of questions, and the app answers every one. Correctly.
Then Mohajer gets rolling, smiling as he rattles off a barrage of questions that keep escalating in complexity. He asks Hound to calculate the monthly mortgage payments on a million-dollar home, and the app immediately asks him for the interest rate and the term of the loan before dishing out its answer: $4,270.84.
“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?” he asks. Hound figures out that Mohajer is fishing for the population of Washington, DC, faster than I do and spits out the correct answer in its rapid-fire robotic voice. “What is the population and capital for Japan and China, and their areas in square miles and square kilometers? And also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” Mohajer would keep on adding questions, but he runs out of breath. I’ll spare you the minute-long response, but Hound answers every question. Correctly.
Hound, which is now in beta, is probably the fastest and most versatile voice recognition system unveiled thus far. It has an edge for now because it can do speech recognition and natural language processing simultaneously. But really, it’s only a matter of time before other systems catch up.
After all, the underlying ingredients—what Kaplan calls the “gating technologies” necessary for a strong conversational interface—are all pretty much available now to whoever’s buying. It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real—and ubiquitous.
But it’s not just that conversational technology is finally possible to build. There’s also a growing need for it. As more devices come online, particularly those without screens—your light fixtures, your smoke alarm—we need a way to interact with them that doesn’t require buttons, menus, and icons.
At the same time, the world that Jobs built with the GUI is reaching its natural limits. Our immensely powerful onscreen interfaces require every imaginable feature to be hand-coded, to have an icon or menu option. Think about Photoshop or Excel: Both are so massively capable that using them properly requires bushwhacking through a dense jungle of keyboard shortcuts, menu trees, and impossible-to-find toolbars. Good luck just sitting down and cropping a photo. “The GUI has topped out,” Kaplan says. “It’s so overloaded now.”
That’s where the booming market in virtual assistants comes in: to come to your rescue when you’re lost amid the seven windows, five toolbars, and 30 tabs open on your screen, and to act as a liaison between apps and devices that don’t usually talk to each other.
You may not engage heavily with virtual assistants right now, but you probably will soon. This fall a major leap forward for the conversational interface will be announced by the ding of a push notification on your smartphone. Once you’ve upgraded to iOS 9, Android 6, or Windows 10, you will, by design, find yourself spending less time inside apps and more chatting with Siri, Google Now, or Cortana. And soon, a billion-plus Facebook users will be able to open a chat window and ask M, a new smart assistant, for almost anything (using text—for now). These are no longer just supplementary ways to do things. They’re the best way, and in some cases the only way. (In Apple’s HomeKit system for the connected house, you make sure everything’s off and locked by saying, “Hey Siri, good night.”)
At least in the beginning, the idea behind these newly enhanced virtual assistants is that they will simplify the complex, multistep things we’re all tired of doing via drop-down menus, complicated workflows, and hopscotching from app to app. Your assistant will know every corner of every app on your phone and will glide between them at your spoken command. And with time, they will also get to know something else: you.
by David Pierce, Wired | Read more:
Image: Francesco Muzzi
Thursday, September 17, 2015
On Walden Pond
It is one of the great American sententiae, as sonorous and moving as the Gettysburg Address. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, living for two years and two months in a cabin he had built on the north shore of Walden Pond. The book resulting from his experiment in simplicity was published in 1854, to lukewarm reviews. A century and a half later, however, “Walden” is a fundamental text of the ecological movement, and the pond, a crucial topos of American history, has become a place of pilgrimage.
I come to the woods in a taxi from Logan Airport, leaving Boston on Route 2. My taxi driver is a young Ethiopian woman with a printed headscarf wound around her head, nervous on her first day of work. We leave the highway at the turn-off for Lincoln, and up there on the exit sign I see the name in big letters: Walden Pond. It has become a destination in itself.
The pond lies a few miles out of Concord village in the state of Massachusetts. The pond isn’t really a pond, at least not in the English sense of a small body of standing water, often found at the bottom of a garden. It’s a roundish lake surrounded by forest, with a patch of boggy meadow at its western end. The water in this kettle lake or pothole lake (as geographers variously define it), tinged benignly blue-green at the edges and scarily black towards the middle where it plunges to a depth of 33 metres, is filtered as it pushes up through the sandy soil around it, and has a mesmerising clarity I’ve never seen in any English pond. (...)
The first shock is how close this place, so peaceful in Thoreau’s description, now lies to the seething city, to gas stations and roadside fast-food joints and roaring highways like the one we have just exited to join a county road, sliding past the pond on its way to the small town of Lincoln. The second is how busy I find it on this first Sunday in September. Yellow sandwich boards announce that the pond car park is now full up and officially closed to further traffic; barriers block off access roads to left and right. Families pad along the roadside with blow-up floaters, folding chairs and other beach equipment. A woman stands by the zebra crossing, shaking the forest sand out of her shoes.
The afternoon carries a charge of accumulated summer, a weary hangover heat passed on from earlier in the day and the season. From the taxi window I glimpse the lake for the first time, gleaming through a fringe of high trees in the low, late light. I never expected it to look this inviting. I had stored up the pond in that part of my brain reserved for ideals, for places long imagined, and was used to thinking of it, not bright and Brighton-beachy, but in wintry chiaroscuro, leafless and cheerless.
Thoreau’s Walden B&B, where I am lodged, turns out to be the only construction within sight of the pond. It’s a blowsy suburban house that must have been built just before Walden Pond, and the forest around it, became a State Reservation managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
“You’ll want a towel,” says the landlady, Barbara, almost accusingly. She is assuming that I won’t waste time before heading for the water.
She’s right: I can’t put off the moment. Across the street and into the trees and down the steps to a small grey beach where the scent of coconut oil hangs in the warm air. Children shrieking and running, parents sitting and calling – it could be a scene on any beach anywhere in the world at any point in the summer.
Under the high trees there is shade and dappled light. Against a background rumble of traffic, an old-fashioned ice-cream vendor with a tinny fairground melody echoes somewhere in the woods.
by Paul Richardson, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Michelle McCarron
Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, living for two years and two months in a cabin he had built on the north shore of Walden Pond. The book resulting from his experiment in simplicity was published in 1854, to lukewarm reviews. A century and a half later, however, “Walden” is a fundamental text of the ecological movement, and the pond, a crucial topos of American history, has become a place of pilgrimage.
I come to the woods in a taxi from Logan Airport, leaving Boston on Route 2. My taxi driver is a young Ethiopian woman with a printed headscarf wound around her head, nervous on her first day of work. We leave the highway at the turn-off for Lincoln, and up there on the exit sign I see the name in big letters: Walden Pond. It has become a destination in itself.The pond lies a few miles out of Concord village in the state of Massachusetts. The pond isn’t really a pond, at least not in the English sense of a small body of standing water, often found at the bottom of a garden. It’s a roundish lake surrounded by forest, with a patch of boggy meadow at its western end. The water in this kettle lake or pothole lake (as geographers variously define it), tinged benignly blue-green at the edges and scarily black towards the middle where it plunges to a depth of 33 metres, is filtered as it pushes up through the sandy soil around it, and has a mesmerising clarity I’ve never seen in any English pond. (...)
The first shock is how close this place, so peaceful in Thoreau’s description, now lies to the seething city, to gas stations and roadside fast-food joints and roaring highways like the one we have just exited to join a county road, sliding past the pond on its way to the small town of Lincoln. The second is how busy I find it on this first Sunday in September. Yellow sandwich boards announce that the pond car park is now full up and officially closed to further traffic; barriers block off access roads to left and right. Families pad along the roadside with blow-up floaters, folding chairs and other beach equipment. A woman stands by the zebra crossing, shaking the forest sand out of her shoes.
The afternoon carries a charge of accumulated summer, a weary hangover heat passed on from earlier in the day and the season. From the taxi window I glimpse the lake for the first time, gleaming through a fringe of high trees in the low, late light. I never expected it to look this inviting. I had stored up the pond in that part of my brain reserved for ideals, for places long imagined, and was used to thinking of it, not bright and Brighton-beachy, but in wintry chiaroscuro, leafless and cheerless.
Thoreau’s Walden B&B, where I am lodged, turns out to be the only construction within sight of the pond. It’s a blowsy suburban house that must have been built just before Walden Pond, and the forest around it, became a State Reservation managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
“You’ll want a towel,” says the landlady, Barbara, almost accusingly. She is assuming that I won’t waste time before heading for the water.
She’s right: I can’t put off the moment. Across the street and into the trees and down the steps to a small grey beach where the scent of coconut oil hangs in the warm air. Children shrieking and running, parents sitting and calling – it could be a scene on any beach anywhere in the world at any point in the summer.
Under the high trees there is shade and dappled light. Against a background rumble of traffic, an old-fashioned ice-cream vendor with a tinny fairground melody echoes somewhere in the woods.
by Paul Richardson, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Michelle McCarron
The War of the Hoverboards
The war of the hoverboards began in earnest in mid-February, in New York City, in the rainbow-colored halls of the 2015 Toy Fair. That much we know. Beyond that — where exactly in the Javits Center the first skirmish occurred, who the aggressor was, whether there were injured parties on the ground — that depends who you talk to.
Ask Shane Chen — holder of United States Patent No. 8,738,278B2, for “a two-wheel, self-balancing personal vehicle” — and he’ll tell you that things first heated up outside his booth. That’s where John Soibatian, the president of IO Hawk, the leading American distributor of the newly popular “personal mobility devices” (they’re all made in China) zoomed up to him aboard what Chen immediately recognized as a 2-foot-long knockoff. Chen’s lawyers had notified Soibatian at the Consumer Electronics Show the month prior that the IO Hawk violated Chen’s patent, and now Soibatian had come down to Chen’s booth — where he was showing off his device, the Hovertrax — to ask him to back off, to think about dropping it.
“I’ve had this idea since I was a kid,” Soibatian pleaded with Chen.
“Many people had this idea when they were a kid,” Chen responded firmly. “But they didn’t patent it.”
Ask Soibatian, who disputes most of Chen’s account, and you’ll get a different story. According to him, things got testy when Chen rolled over to the IO Hawk booth aboard a Solowheel, a kind of unicycle version of the hoverboard, which Chen has also patented. Chen informed Soibatian that he held the patent on devices of the type, and that this was how he made a living: by filing patents and waiting for other companies to violate them. Now that someone had built a salable version of his idea, he wanted to make a deal. Soibatian thought Chen sounded like a patent troll, like a scumbag. He told Chen he would have his lawyers look at the patent.
Later that day, after Chen wheeled away, one of the models Soibatian hired to scoot alluringly around trade shows reported that she had hovered by Chen’s booth and beheld a fiasco: people falling off the Hovertrax, lying on the floor. Soibatian mounted his IO Hawk and, model at his side, sped down to Chen’s booth, where he asked if he could give Hovertrax a try. Chen consented. Soibatian stepped aboard.
“I thought, Holy moly, what are you doing here, buddy?” Soibatian recalls. “It was garbage.” Why would he make a deal with the guy who built this piece of junk?
Chen, as you might expect, recalls the encounter differently. He stresses that Soibatian initially came to his booth, not the other way around. One person did fall down, but he was riding Orbit Wheels, another one of Chen’s inventions, one with a much steeper learning curve. And Chen says Soibatian never dismounted his IO Hawk. It was the model who tried Hovertrax, and she stayed upright the entire time. Chen agrees that he rode up to Soibatian’s booth, but not to make a deal; he went there to give the guy a break and offer him a few extra days to get patent-compliant.
Whatever the sequence of events, after the show, Soibatian says he showed Chen’s patent to his lawyers. “They told me I’d be crazy to pay him anything,” he says.
Four months later, Chen filed a lawsuit against Soibatian for patent infringement. The stakes of the war of the hoverboards had been set, and set high. Who had the right to profit off the future: the guy who patented the idea, or the guy who imported it in bulk from China?
And that was before Mark Cuban decided to get involved.
The 2-foot-long, two-wheeled, twin-motored plastic board that glided to the forefront of American popular culture this summer could be the skateboard of the young century. The similarities are there. It’s a zeitgeisty short-distance ride that has started to yield its own, self-sustaining viral culture. And you can definitely draw a line from the amateur videos that helped skate culture conquer America to the sudden tide of Vines and Instagram videos that have made the boards a phenomenon. Then again, the so-called hoverboards could simply be the Tickle Me Elmos of 2015 — ubiquitous, overpriced trinkets with a single holiday-season half-life. Time and the collective attention span of America’s teenagers will tell.
This much is certain: For some weeks or years to come, these devices will be part of the future. Celebrity endorsements on television and social media, enthusiastic word of mouth, and a sudden crop of internet distributors that can barely import the things fast enough to mark them up and meet demand have seen to that.
Unlike most of the toy crazes of the past 20 years, however, hoverboards aren’t simply a case of a major brand developing a product followed by a rash of cheap imitators. Their popularity is weirder and harder to trace. Hoverboards have been part of the American popular imagination since at least 1989, when Michael J. Fox snapped the handle off of a little girl’s levitating scooter to escape from a gang of future toughs in Back to the Future Part II. Since then, like jetpacks and flying cars, levitating skateboards have been something between an expectation and a punchline, a time-capsule agreement that the future has arrived. The past 25 years have seen an intermittent series of viral pranks, garage-bound failures, and science projects that have made good headline fodder, but done little to bring Robert Zemeckis’s dream to the consumer masses.
This year, that changed. An army of stodgy literalists is quick to point out that today’s hoverboards don’t hover. But they do glide satisfyingly, and they’re easy to use, and most important, they’re mass-produced. As Wired reported earlier this summer, all of the dozen or so tiny American companies that sell the devices, including IO Hawk, buy from Chinese manufacturers like Hangzhou Chic Intelligent Technology (Chic) and make changes to the boards, typically cosmetic, before selling them in the States. Chic likely sold the first scooters directly, last summer, in Asia. But that doesn’t mean Chic invented them.
And it certainly doesn’t mean Chic, or any of the companies that sell Chic-manufactured boards, have anything like brand recognition in America. Confusion over the name of the product class — are they hoverboards? are they scooters? — bespeaks the fact that none of the brands is strong enough to become a household catchall for the boards, like, say, Jet Ski for personal watercraft. Commercial frenzies around toys patented by individual creators aren’t unique; both Furby and Super Soaker were patented by entrepreneurs who sold exclusive licenses to large companies that marketed them skillfully. But the difference here is the frenzy and the patent fight are happening at the same time. Money is flying thanks to the unparalleled marketing power of social media, but without a giant corporation to pull it all down.
by Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Image: Alex Eben Meyer
Ask Shane Chen — holder of United States Patent No. 8,738,278B2, for “a two-wheel, self-balancing personal vehicle” — and he’ll tell you that things first heated up outside his booth. That’s where John Soibatian, the president of IO Hawk, the leading American distributor of the newly popular “personal mobility devices” (they’re all made in China) zoomed up to him aboard what Chen immediately recognized as a 2-foot-long knockoff. Chen’s lawyers had notified Soibatian at the Consumer Electronics Show the month prior that the IO Hawk violated Chen’s patent, and now Soibatian had come down to Chen’s booth — where he was showing off his device, the Hovertrax — to ask him to back off, to think about dropping it.
“I’ve had this idea since I was a kid,” Soibatian pleaded with Chen.“Many people had this idea when they were a kid,” Chen responded firmly. “But they didn’t patent it.”
Ask Soibatian, who disputes most of Chen’s account, and you’ll get a different story. According to him, things got testy when Chen rolled over to the IO Hawk booth aboard a Solowheel, a kind of unicycle version of the hoverboard, which Chen has also patented. Chen informed Soibatian that he held the patent on devices of the type, and that this was how he made a living: by filing patents and waiting for other companies to violate them. Now that someone had built a salable version of his idea, he wanted to make a deal. Soibatian thought Chen sounded like a patent troll, like a scumbag. He told Chen he would have his lawyers look at the patent.
Later that day, after Chen wheeled away, one of the models Soibatian hired to scoot alluringly around trade shows reported that she had hovered by Chen’s booth and beheld a fiasco: people falling off the Hovertrax, lying on the floor. Soibatian mounted his IO Hawk and, model at his side, sped down to Chen’s booth, where he asked if he could give Hovertrax a try. Chen consented. Soibatian stepped aboard.
“I thought, Holy moly, what are you doing here, buddy?” Soibatian recalls. “It was garbage.” Why would he make a deal with the guy who built this piece of junk?
Chen, as you might expect, recalls the encounter differently. He stresses that Soibatian initially came to his booth, not the other way around. One person did fall down, but he was riding Orbit Wheels, another one of Chen’s inventions, one with a much steeper learning curve. And Chen says Soibatian never dismounted his IO Hawk. It was the model who tried Hovertrax, and she stayed upright the entire time. Chen agrees that he rode up to Soibatian’s booth, but not to make a deal; he went there to give the guy a break and offer him a few extra days to get patent-compliant.
Whatever the sequence of events, after the show, Soibatian says he showed Chen’s patent to his lawyers. “They told me I’d be crazy to pay him anything,” he says.
Four months later, Chen filed a lawsuit against Soibatian for patent infringement. The stakes of the war of the hoverboards had been set, and set high. Who had the right to profit off the future: the guy who patented the idea, or the guy who imported it in bulk from China?
And that was before Mark Cuban decided to get involved.
The 2-foot-long, two-wheeled, twin-motored plastic board that glided to the forefront of American popular culture this summer could be the skateboard of the young century. The similarities are there. It’s a zeitgeisty short-distance ride that has started to yield its own, self-sustaining viral culture. And you can definitely draw a line from the amateur videos that helped skate culture conquer America to the sudden tide of Vines and Instagram videos that have made the boards a phenomenon. Then again, the so-called hoverboards could simply be the Tickle Me Elmos of 2015 — ubiquitous, overpriced trinkets with a single holiday-season half-life. Time and the collective attention span of America’s teenagers will tell.
This much is certain: For some weeks or years to come, these devices will be part of the future. Celebrity endorsements on television and social media, enthusiastic word of mouth, and a sudden crop of internet distributors that can barely import the things fast enough to mark them up and meet demand have seen to that.
Unlike most of the toy crazes of the past 20 years, however, hoverboards aren’t simply a case of a major brand developing a product followed by a rash of cheap imitators. Their popularity is weirder and harder to trace. Hoverboards have been part of the American popular imagination since at least 1989, when Michael J. Fox snapped the handle off of a little girl’s levitating scooter to escape from a gang of future toughs in Back to the Future Part II. Since then, like jetpacks and flying cars, levitating skateboards have been something between an expectation and a punchline, a time-capsule agreement that the future has arrived. The past 25 years have seen an intermittent series of viral pranks, garage-bound failures, and science projects that have made good headline fodder, but done little to bring Robert Zemeckis’s dream to the consumer masses.
This year, that changed. An army of stodgy literalists is quick to point out that today’s hoverboards don’t hover. But they do glide satisfyingly, and they’re easy to use, and most important, they’re mass-produced. As Wired reported earlier this summer, all of the dozen or so tiny American companies that sell the devices, including IO Hawk, buy from Chinese manufacturers like Hangzhou Chic Intelligent Technology (Chic) and make changes to the boards, typically cosmetic, before selling them in the States. Chic likely sold the first scooters directly, last summer, in Asia. But that doesn’t mean Chic invented them.
And it certainly doesn’t mean Chic, or any of the companies that sell Chic-manufactured boards, have anything like brand recognition in America. Confusion over the name of the product class — are they hoverboards? are they scooters? — bespeaks the fact that none of the brands is strong enough to become a household catchall for the boards, like, say, Jet Ski for personal watercraft. Commercial frenzies around toys patented by individual creators aren’t unique; both Furby and Super Soaker were patented by entrepreneurs who sold exclusive licenses to large companies that marketed them skillfully. But the difference here is the frenzy and the patent fight are happening at the same time. Money is flying thanks to the unparalleled marketing power of social media, but without a giant corporation to pull it all down.
by Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Image: Alex Eben Meyer
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
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