poi pounders
photo: markk
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Splain it to Me
[ed. Ugh, randos?]
How would you react?Everyone should have default heuristics. A simple set of rules you fall back on when you lack enough information to make a situation-specific judgment. It’s important to evaluate them for reliability and update as needed. Also important to remain aware of what they are and the fact that you are using them. The goal is to make reasonable guesses about the qualities of an unknown–just about the worst thing you can do, and what many people tend to do, is look up in memory the most similar known quantity and then handle the unknown as if it were that. This is the difference between thinking on one’s feet and hardly thinking at all.
Some heuristics are well-known and useful enough that we gives them names, a subset of which are the philosophical razors. Hanlon’s–“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”–is one of my favorites, but with the added qualification “or miscommunication.” There’s a line by Goethe roughly equivalent to this, in fact: “Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.” Assuming good faith and attempting to translate between disparate communication protocols has generally worked out pretty well for me. Good default.
So, New Yorkers tend to have a very high-engagement conversation style. What many from other places might think of as “good listening”–patient silence, thoughtful expressions that telegraph concentration–we see as rude. A listener should be talking along with the speaker, shouting their feelings about what they hear, finishing sentences, asking questions that they know will be answered by the next thing the speaker says anyway–not to alter the flow, but like setting them up for an alley-oop. Silence means you’re bored or distracted. What might cause speakers from other places to feel they’re being interrupted–say, for instance, yelling, “Get the fuck out of here!”–not only doesn’t break the conversation, but improves it. You’re demonstrating that you are fully engaged in their telling, and they ramp up their energy and excitement to match, encouraged they’re doing a good job.
To a “respectful silence == listening” speaker, the listener’s interjection would probably be seen as horribly rude, maybe even menacing. “I think you are lying to me and this makes me angry.” But to an “enthusiastic participation == listening” speaker, it means something along the lines of, “That’s amazing! Please keep going, I’m really enjoying this.” Any attempt to push state from one brain to another necessarily involves lossy compression, and one of the ways we try to save bandwidth is by implicitly referencing complex ideas that we take for granted the other person has in their head already. Whether the speaker concludes from the aforementioned interjection “This asshole thinks I’m dishonest” or “This person really loves my story” depends on shared culture–they just know what is meant, maybe without even knowing how they know–or on their heuristics leading them toward interpreting it as cooperative rather than combative.
Here’s a series of events that happens many times daily on my favorite bastion of miscommunication, the bird website. Person tweets some fact. Other people reply with other facts. Person complains, “Ugh, randos in my mentions.” Harsh words may be exchanged, and everyone exits the encounter thinking the other person was monumentally rude for no reason.
While some folks in some circles make hay over “well-actuallys” and being “splained to” by “randos,” seeing such replies as bad-faith social posturing or indicative of deep-seated bias, more often than not I chalk up the friction to, like our yelling New Yorker being taken for rude, cross-cultural communication breakdown. The dynamics at play behind “ugh, randos” are so pernicious because it isn’t a simple problem of definitions or message integrity, but different views on what communication is or is for. What it often comes down to is people with fundamentally different, perhaps totally irreconcilable, values systems assuming “malice or stupidity” where the real explanation is values mismatch and miscommunication.
by Alice Maz, Status 451 | Read more:
Image: Lucille Ball, I Love Lucy
The Physics of Traffic
Drivers are only too familiar with phantom traffic jams: those occasions when you slow to a complete standstill, which frustratingly appear to have no concrete cause. In fact, they do have a cause – just not an obvious one. Thanks to decades of scientific research, we now have theories that not only explain why jams happen but point to ways of preventing them.
Experiments on traffic flow date back to 1933 – just 25 years after Ford’s Model T went on sale. American traffic engineer Bruce Greenshields took a movie camera out to a section of highway to record how many cars passed along it, and how long it took them.
Greenshields’ results led him to come up with a simple, linear relationship between speed and traffic density. As the number of cars per mile goes up, the speed of the traffic decreases until a particular density when it stops altogether and a jam occurs.
The number of cars passing along a road per hour is the ‘flow’ of traffic, and if flow is plotted against density on a graph, the curve looks like an inverted ‘V’. As the density of traffic increases, more cars per hour pass down the road and the flow rate goes up. But beyond a particular density, cars have to brake to avoid the vehicle in front. Fewer vehicles pass along per hour, so the flow rate slows, resulting in congestion.
This was important because engineers needed to know how many cars a road could carry without clogging up. Greenshields put a number on it: “With traffic not exceeding 600 vehicles per hour, the two-lane road provides ample capacity to carry the traffic except when slow-moving traffic is encountered.”
It was another 20 years before the next breakthrough in understanding traffic, and this time it came from pure theory. Theories are vital for describing known facts and predicting new phenomena. For example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity held that massive objects can bend the path of rays of light, a prediction that was only verified four years later.
For traffic, it was mathematicians James Lighthill and Gerald Whitham who came up with a theory to predict the properties of a highway. Inspired by “theories of the flow about supersonic projectiles and of flood movement in rivers”, it used the physics of kinematic waves, treating traffic like particles in a liquid.
The theory introduced the idea of shock waves in traffic. In places where cars slow up or accelerate, a traffic wave ripples back down the road. Waves, they said, were “likely to occur on any stretch of road where the traffic is denser in front and less dense behind.”
This was demonstrated in a 2008 experiment by Nagoya University’s Yuki Sugiyama and colleagues, who filmed cars travelling at 30km/h around a circular track. Before long, slight variations in speeds caused clusters to appear and a shockwave travelled backwards around the ring at 20km/h.
In the 1980s and 1990s, new technology enabled more accurate traffic measurements to be made on roads like the Tomei expressway in Japan. For free-flowing traffic, the graph matches Greenshields’ simple curve, but for congested flow the speed and density vary widely.
Theories to explain the experimental data began to develop around the idea that traffic behaved like a gas. Molecules in a gas travel at the same speed until they hit another molecule; cars would move until they reach a safe distance from the car in front. When flowing gas encounters a bottleneck, it creates a shockwave moving away from the blockage.
The gas theory had another consequence – phase transitions. A gas changing into a liquid is said to undergo a ‘phase change’ in its state of matter, and that’s exactly what Boris Kerner and his colleagues put into their theories in the 1990s. Kerner’s theory said there were in fact three phases of traffic: free flowing and two congested phases – synchronized flow, in which traffic in adjacent lanes moves at the same speed, and ‘wide moving jam’.
Experiments on traffic flow date back to 1933 – just 25 years after Ford’s Model T went on sale. American traffic engineer Bruce Greenshields took a movie camera out to a section of highway to record how many cars passed along it, and how long it took them.
Greenshields’ results led him to come up with a simple, linear relationship between speed and traffic density. As the number of cars per mile goes up, the speed of the traffic decreases until a particular density when it stops altogether and a jam occurs.
The number of cars passing along a road per hour is the ‘flow’ of traffic, and if flow is plotted against density on a graph, the curve looks like an inverted ‘V’. As the density of traffic increases, more cars per hour pass down the road and the flow rate goes up. But beyond a particular density, cars have to brake to avoid the vehicle in front. Fewer vehicles pass along per hour, so the flow rate slows, resulting in congestion.This was important because engineers needed to know how many cars a road could carry without clogging up. Greenshields put a number on it: “With traffic not exceeding 600 vehicles per hour, the two-lane road provides ample capacity to carry the traffic except when slow-moving traffic is encountered.”
It was another 20 years before the next breakthrough in understanding traffic, and this time it came from pure theory. Theories are vital for describing known facts and predicting new phenomena. For example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity held that massive objects can bend the path of rays of light, a prediction that was only verified four years later.
For traffic, it was mathematicians James Lighthill and Gerald Whitham who came up with a theory to predict the properties of a highway. Inspired by “theories of the flow about supersonic projectiles and of flood movement in rivers”, it used the physics of kinematic waves, treating traffic like particles in a liquid.
The theory introduced the idea of shock waves in traffic. In places where cars slow up or accelerate, a traffic wave ripples back down the road. Waves, they said, were “likely to occur on any stretch of road where the traffic is denser in front and less dense behind.”
This was demonstrated in a 2008 experiment by Nagoya University’s Yuki Sugiyama and colleagues, who filmed cars travelling at 30km/h around a circular track. Before long, slight variations in speeds caused clusters to appear and a shockwave travelled backwards around the ring at 20km/h.
In the 1980s and 1990s, new technology enabled more accurate traffic measurements to be made on roads like the Tomei expressway in Japan. For free-flowing traffic, the graph matches Greenshields’ simple curve, but for congested flow the speed and density vary widely.
Theories to explain the experimental data began to develop around the idea that traffic behaved like a gas. Molecules in a gas travel at the same speed until they hit another molecule; cars would move until they reach a safe distance from the car in front. When flowing gas encounters a bottleneck, it creates a shockwave moving away from the blockage.
The gas theory had another consequence – phase transitions. A gas changing into a liquid is said to undergo a ‘phase change’ in its state of matter, and that’s exactly what Boris Kerner and his colleagues put into their theories in the 1990s. Kerner’s theory said there were in fact three phases of traffic: free flowing and two congested phases – synchronized flow, in which traffic in adjacent lanes moves at the same speed, and ‘wide moving jam’.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
The Political Scientist Who Debunked Mainstream Economics
“Picture a pasture open to all.”
For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline.
“The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” wrote Hardin, proposing to his readers that they envision an open pasture:
It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible in the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”
The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd with- out limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
The tragedy of the commons is one of those basic concepts that is drilled into the minds of every undergraduate, at least in economics courses. The idea is considered a basic principle of economics—a cautionary lesson about the impossibility of collective action. Once the class has been escorted through a ritual shudder, the professor whisks them along to the main attraction, the virtues of private property and free markets. Here, finally, economists reveal, we may surmount the dismal tragedy of a commons. The catechism is hammered home: individual freedom to own and trade private property in open markets is the only way to produce enduring personal satisfaction and social prosperity.
Hardin explains the logic this way: we can overcome the tragedy of the commons through a system of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.” For him, the best approach is “the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance.” He concedes that this is not a perfectly just alternative, but he asserts that Darwinian natural selection is ultimately the best available option, saying, “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” We put up with this imperfect legal order, he adds, “because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”
Such musings by a libertarian-minded scientist have been catnip to conservative ideologues and economists (who are so often one and the same). They see Hardin’s essay as a gospel parable that affirms some core principles of neoliberal economic ideology. It affirms the importance of “free markets” and justifies the property rights of the wealthy. It bolsters a commitment to individual rights and private property as the cornerstone of economic thought and policy. People will supposedly have the motivation to take responsibility for resources if they are guaranteed private ownership and access to free markets. Tragic outcomes—“total ruin”—can thereby be avoided. The failure of the commons, in this telling, is conflated with government itself, if only to suggest that one of the few recognized vehicles for advancing collective interests, government, will also succumb to the “tragedy” paradigm. (That is the gist of Public Choice theory, which applies standard economic logic to problems in political science.)
Over the past several decades, the tragedy of the commons has taken root as an economic truism. The Hardin essay has become a staple of undergraduate education in the US, taught not just in economics courses but in political science, sociology and other fields. It is no wonder that so many people consider the commons with such glib condescension. The commons = chaos, ruin and failure.
There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy parable. It does not accurately describe a commons. Hardin’s fictional scenario sets forth a system that has no boundaries around the pasture, no rules for managing it, no punishments for over-use and no distinct community of users. But that is not a commons. It is an open-access regime, or a free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource. Hardin was confusing a commons with “no-man’s-land”—and in the process, he smeared the commons as a failed paradigm for managing resources.
To be fair, Hardin was following a long line of polemicists who projected their unexamined commitments to market individualism onto the world. As we will see later, the theories of philosopher John Locke have been widely used to justify treating the New World as terra nullius—open, unowned land—even though it was populated by millions of Native Americans who managed their natural resources as beloved commons with unwritten but highly sophisticated rules.
Hardin’s essay was inspired by his reading of an 1832 talk by William Forster Lloyd, an English lecturer who, like Hardin, was worried about overpopulation in a period of intense enclosures of land. Lloyd’s talk is notable because it rehearses the same line of argument and makes the same fanciful error—that people are incapable of negotiating a solution to the “tragedy.” Instead of a shared pasture, Lloyd’s metaphor was a joint pool of money that could be accessed by every contributor. Lloyd asserted that each individual would quickly deplete more than his share of the pool while a private purse of money would be frugally managed.
I mention Lloyd’s essay to illustrate how ridiculous yet persistent the misconceptions about the “tragedy” dynamic truly are. Commons scholar Lewis Hyde dryly notes, “Just as Hardin proposes a herdsman whose reason is unable to encompass the common good, so Lloyd supposes persons who have no way to speak with each other or make joint decisions. Both writers inject laissez-faire individualism into an old agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead. From the point of view of such a village, Lloyd’s assumptions are as crazy as asking us to ‘suppose a man to have a purse to which his left and right hand may freely resort, each unaware of the other’.” (...)
Paradoxically enough, the heedless quest for selfish gain— “rationally” pursued, of course, yet indifferent toward the collective good—is a better description of the conventional market economy than a commons. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, such a mindset propelled the wizards of Wall Street to maximize private gains without regard for the systemic risks or local impacts. The real tragedy precipitated by “rational” individualism is not the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the market.
by David Bollier, Evonomics | Read more:
Image: via:
For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline.
“The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” wrote Hardin, proposing to his readers that they envision an open pasture:
It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible in the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd with- out limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
The tragedy of the commons is one of those basic concepts that is drilled into the minds of every undergraduate, at least in economics courses. The idea is considered a basic principle of economics—a cautionary lesson about the impossibility of collective action. Once the class has been escorted through a ritual shudder, the professor whisks them along to the main attraction, the virtues of private property and free markets. Here, finally, economists reveal, we may surmount the dismal tragedy of a commons. The catechism is hammered home: individual freedom to own and trade private property in open markets is the only way to produce enduring personal satisfaction and social prosperity.
Hardin explains the logic this way: we can overcome the tragedy of the commons through a system of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.” For him, the best approach is “the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance.” He concedes that this is not a perfectly just alternative, but he asserts that Darwinian natural selection is ultimately the best available option, saying, “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” We put up with this imperfect legal order, he adds, “because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”
Such musings by a libertarian-minded scientist have been catnip to conservative ideologues and economists (who are so often one and the same). They see Hardin’s essay as a gospel parable that affirms some core principles of neoliberal economic ideology. It affirms the importance of “free markets” and justifies the property rights of the wealthy. It bolsters a commitment to individual rights and private property as the cornerstone of economic thought and policy. People will supposedly have the motivation to take responsibility for resources if they are guaranteed private ownership and access to free markets. Tragic outcomes—“total ruin”—can thereby be avoided. The failure of the commons, in this telling, is conflated with government itself, if only to suggest that one of the few recognized vehicles for advancing collective interests, government, will also succumb to the “tragedy” paradigm. (That is the gist of Public Choice theory, which applies standard economic logic to problems in political science.)
Over the past several decades, the tragedy of the commons has taken root as an economic truism. The Hardin essay has become a staple of undergraduate education in the US, taught not just in economics courses but in political science, sociology and other fields. It is no wonder that so many people consider the commons with such glib condescension. The commons = chaos, ruin and failure.
There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy parable. It does not accurately describe a commons. Hardin’s fictional scenario sets forth a system that has no boundaries around the pasture, no rules for managing it, no punishments for over-use and no distinct community of users. But that is not a commons. It is an open-access regime, or a free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource. Hardin was confusing a commons with “no-man’s-land”—and in the process, he smeared the commons as a failed paradigm for managing resources.
To be fair, Hardin was following a long line of polemicists who projected their unexamined commitments to market individualism onto the world. As we will see later, the theories of philosopher John Locke have been widely used to justify treating the New World as terra nullius—open, unowned land—even though it was populated by millions of Native Americans who managed their natural resources as beloved commons with unwritten but highly sophisticated rules.
Hardin’s essay was inspired by his reading of an 1832 talk by William Forster Lloyd, an English lecturer who, like Hardin, was worried about overpopulation in a period of intense enclosures of land. Lloyd’s talk is notable because it rehearses the same line of argument and makes the same fanciful error—that people are incapable of negotiating a solution to the “tragedy.” Instead of a shared pasture, Lloyd’s metaphor was a joint pool of money that could be accessed by every contributor. Lloyd asserted that each individual would quickly deplete more than his share of the pool while a private purse of money would be frugally managed.
I mention Lloyd’s essay to illustrate how ridiculous yet persistent the misconceptions about the “tragedy” dynamic truly are. Commons scholar Lewis Hyde dryly notes, “Just as Hardin proposes a herdsman whose reason is unable to encompass the common good, so Lloyd supposes persons who have no way to speak with each other or make joint decisions. Both writers inject laissez-faire individualism into an old agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead. From the point of view of such a village, Lloyd’s assumptions are as crazy as asking us to ‘suppose a man to have a purse to which his left and right hand may freely resort, each unaware of the other’.” (...)
Paradoxically enough, the heedless quest for selfish gain— “rationally” pursued, of course, yet indifferent toward the collective good—is a better description of the conventional market economy than a commons. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, such a mindset propelled the wizards of Wall Street to maximize private gains without regard for the systemic risks or local impacts. The real tragedy precipitated by “rational” individualism is not the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the market.
by David Bollier, Evonomics | Read more:
Image: via:
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Meat Market
Chef-turned media personality Anthony Bourdain has made a career of bringing far-flung food culture onto our most closely held screens. He has built his brand by articulating the anti–Olive Garden for viewers anxious about the authenticity of their culinary practices. The hidden treasures he reveals on his shows—the best Vietnamese street vendor’s pho or delicate Colombian arepas—are difficult to access, the menus of the restaurants to which he treks look intimidating to his anglophone audience, and the food itself often doesn’t even seem appetizing—all the better to foment his brand’s air of exclusivity, always the handmaiden to authenticity.
Now, as Stephen Werther, Bourdain’s business partner, told the New York Times, “people want Tony’s show to come to life.” Never mind the fact that Bourdain does go to real places with live people in his show. What Werther is describing as “coming to life” is not any single thing from a Bourdain show but the relationship between subjects of the show and Bourdain’s seal of approval that holds it all together. Bourdain Market, set to open in about two years on Pier 57 in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district, purports to deliver exclusivity and democracy at the same time by putting remarkable food vendors all under one roof, thus consolidating all the hard work of curation and discovery and saving consumers from having to do any of it.
Up until his decision to open a market, Bourdain’s entire business had been capturing exotic dining experiences for television. Bourdain Market, like the World’s Fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, will invert this business model by bringing people from around the world to a humongous food court so that they may “do” culture. It will provide what Bourdain calls a “democratic space open to and used by all,” a place where “wealthy and working class alike” can congregate in what promises to be the largest food hall in the city. Patrons will munch on prepared foods from both world-renowned and obscure restaurateurs on common tables and select the finest meats from butchers and fisheries. “Think of an Asian night market,” Bourdain tells New York Eater, as if that is a stable and widely understood reference for Americans, before clarifying that it means “eating and drinking at midnight”—something that could just as easily be said about a TGI Fridays. It will be a place that is “transparent and authentic”—unlike, presumably, the nearby Chelsea Market, once a public market by and for New Yorkers, now mainly a tourist destination. (...)
Authenticity is, for marketers and some cultural commentators, what objectivity is for scientists. It masquerades as an absolute, ascertainable quality inherent in situations when in fact it is a function of many contingencies, including subject position, social structure, historical happenstance, economic forces, and cultural norms. While objectivity relies on the expertise and training of scientists who follow certain procedures, authenticity is a product of cultural expertise with its own set of semi-arbitrary rules. Cultural experts are ordained with the power of finding and selling authenticity on the assumption that it exists somewhere, outside the self, and with the right training it can be discovered.
Just as adherence to objectivity is a necessary prerequisite for scientific “truth,” authenticity can seem to anchor taste judgments in some pure transcendent realm beyond the influence of social strategy or economic expediency. Though the aura of authenticity may seem like a matter of the aggressively unique thing in its “real” place, as when Bourdain boasts of tasting exotic foods that “you can’t find anywhere else in the world,” it is actually created in the space between the consumer and the consumed. For Walter Benjamin, aura is born of our desire to bring things closer, to experience the original outside the bounds of technological reproducibility. This desired closeness is two-fold: spatial and emotional, measured in distance and human connection. (...)
Pier 57, the future home of Bourdain Market, is a strange place to anchor a multimillion-dollar argument for the absolute existence of authenticity. The market will be connected to the High Line, a park built on the raised railroad tracks that once carried freight around the docks and shipping piers of the Meatpacking District. The High Line represents a new kind of fun complex that preserves past industrial history as a quaint tourist destination, in which the pieces of decommissioned track compliment the native flora. Bourdain himself, in his latest show The Layover, gives the High Line a minute-long commercial where he calls it “distinctly strange and beautiful,” but he says it with none of the passion and romance he reserves for a well-constructed hot dog. The High Line, through plaques and tour guides, informs visitors that what they are seeing is simultaneously a conscious selection of flora that was endemic to Manhattan Island prior to urbanization and the nostalgic preservation of an industrial infrastructure prior to New York’s latest wave of gentrification. Both of these combine in a mise-en-scène of New York City through different scales of time. There is even a small amphitheater suspended above the street, so that visitors can stare at unfolding city life as if it were theater.
This is all antithetical to Bourdainian authenticity, which he frames as a matter of direct accessibility and individuated distinction. In his shows Bourdain has nothing but disdain for the carefully posed and self-consciously displayed. Everything that, for him, is contained in “the hipster” is a profane act of showmanship, not craftsmanship. To have a truly authentic experience one must identify something as authentic and then take the leap of faith to literally consume it. You put your trust in a local with whom you can imagine you have some sort of noncontractual relationship. Those relations are authentic; tour guides are irredeemable.
But what is Bourdain to his shows’ audiences and the patrons of his future food market, if not their contractually hired tour guide? If Bourdain Market is supposed to make the content of his show—the authenticity of hard-to-access food—“come alive,” then what it will sell is more about the proximity between products (I get to sample elk meat right before finding out what a papaya tastes like) than the food itself. Yet if this is the case, then anything in Bourdain Market must lose a portion of its aura, as papaya and elk are not endemic to the same region, nor the hinterlands of Manhattan. The authenticity of any particular product is negated in favor of sustaining the authority of Bourdain as judge, jury, and executioner of authenticity.
By making it physically possible to access foods from around the world, Bourdain Market will let you choose the scenarios for your own food-centered reality TV show. And just like a reality TV show, Bourdain Market will run roughshod over particulars in its restaging of the real. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the New York Times article that announced the project, a short writeup that required three corrections, including one for the artist’s rendering of the future market that contained fake Chinese characters.
As Benjamin and Baudrillard warn, it is impossible to consciously create an authentic experience. The friction between Chelsea Market, the High Line, the conceit of Bourdain’s own shows, and his new market reveals the hypocrisy of the entire project: Bourdain Market is as authentic, transparent, democratic, and open as basic cable TV.
Now, as Stephen Werther, Bourdain’s business partner, told the New York Times, “people want Tony’s show to come to life.” Never mind the fact that Bourdain does go to real places with live people in his show. What Werther is describing as “coming to life” is not any single thing from a Bourdain show but the relationship between subjects of the show and Bourdain’s seal of approval that holds it all together. Bourdain Market, set to open in about two years on Pier 57 in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district, purports to deliver exclusivity and democracy at the same time by putting remarkable food vendors all under one roof, thus consolidating all the hard work of curation and discovery and saving consumers from having to do any of it.Up until his decision to open a market, Bourdain’s entire business had been capturing exotic dining experiences for television. Bourdain Market, like the World’s Fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, will invert this business model by bringing people from around the world to a humongous food court so that they may “do” culture. It will provide what Bourdain calls a “democratic space open to and used by all,” a place where “wealthy and working class alike” can congregate in what promises to be the largest food hall in the city. Patrons will munch on prepared foods from both world-renowned and obscure restaurateurs on common tables and select the finest meats from butchers and fisheries. “Think of an Asian night market,” Bourdain tells New York Eater, as if that is a stable and widely understood reference for Americans, before clarifying that it means “eating and drinking at midnight”—something that could just as easily be said about a TGI Fridays. It will be a place that is “transparent and authentic”—unlike, presumably, the nearby Chelsea Market, once a public market by and for New Yorkers, now mainly a tourist destination. (...)
Authenticity is, for marketers and some cultural commentators, what objectivity is for scientists. It masquerades as an absolute, ascertainable quality inherent in situations when in fact it is a function of many contingencies, including subject position, social structure, historical happenstance, economic forces, and cultural norms. While objectivity relies on the expertise and training of scientists who follow certain procedures, authenticity is a product of cultural expertise with its own set of semi-arbitrary rules. Cultural experts are ordained with the power of finding and selling authenticity on the assumption that it exists somewhere, outside the self, and with the right training it can be discovered.
Just as adherence to objectivity is a necessary prerequisite for scientific “truth,” authenticity can seem to anchor taste judgments in some pure transcendent realm beyond the influence of social strategy or economic expediency. Though the aura of authenticity may seem like a matter of the aggressively unique thing in its “real” place, as when Bourdain boasts of tasting exotic foods that “you can’t find anywhere else in the world,” it is actually created in the space between the consumer and the consumed. For Walter Benjamin, aura is born of our desire to bring things closer, to experience the original outside the bounds of technological reproducibility. This desired closeness is two-fold: spatial and emotional, measured in distance and human connection. (...)
Pier 57, the future home of Bourdain Market, is a strange place to anchor a multimillion-dollar argument for the absolute existence of authenticity. The market will be connected to the High Line, a park built on the raised railroad tracks that once carried freight around the docks and shipping piers of the Meatpacking District. The High Line represents a new kind of fun complex that preserves past industrial history as a quaint tourist destination, in which the pieces of decommissioned track compliment the native flora. Bourdain himself, in his latest show The Layover, gives the High Line a minute-long commercial where he calls it “distinctly strange and beautiful,” but he says it with none of the passion and romance he reserves for a well-constructed hot dog. The High Line, through plaques and tour guides, informs visitors that what they are seeing is simultaneously a conscious selection of flora that was endemic to Manhattan Island prior to urbanization and the nostalgic preservation of an industrial infrastructure prior to New York’s latest wave of gentrification. Both of these combine in a mise-en-scène of New York City through different scales of time. There is even a small amphitheater suspended above the street, so that visitors can stare at unfolding city life as if it were theater.
This is all antithetical to Bourdainian authenticity, which he frames as a matter of direct accessibility and individuated distinction. In his shows Bourdain has nothing but disdain for the carefully posed and self-consciously displayed. Everything that, for him, is contained in “the hipster” is a profane act of showmanship, not craftsmanship. To have a truly authentic experience one must identify something as authentic and then take the leap of faith to literally consume it. You put your trust in a local with whom you can imagine you have some sort of noncontractual relationship. Those relations are authentic; tour guides are irredeemable.
But what is Bourdain to his shows’ audiences and the patrons of his future food market, if not their contractually hired tour guide? If Bourdain Market is supposed to make the content of his show—the authenticity of hard-to-access food—“come alive,” then what it will sell is more about the proximity between products (I get to sample elk meat right before finding out what a papaya tastes like) than the food itself. Yet if this is the case, then anything in Bourdain Market must lose a portion of its aura, as papaya and elk are not endemic to the same region, nor the hinterlands of Manhattan. The authenticity of any particular product is negated in favor of sustaining the authority of Bourdain as judge, jury, and executioner of authenticity.
By making it physically possible to access foods from around the world, Bourdain Market will let you choose the scenarios for your own food-centered reality TV show. And just like a reality TV show, Bourdain Market will run roughshod over particulars in its restaging of the real. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the New York Times article that announced the project, a short writeup that required three corrections, including one for the artist’s rendering of the future market that contained fake Chinese characters.
As Benjamin and Baudrillard warn, it is impossible to consciously create an authentic experience. The friction between Chelsea Market, the High Line, the conceit of Bourdain’s own shows, and his new market reveals the hypocrisy of the entire project: Bourdain Market is as authentic, transparent, democratic, and open as basic cable TV.
by David A. Banks and Britney Sumiit-Gil, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Addressing 4 billion People In Three Words
Last week in New York, at the Next Billion conference organized by Quartz, Chris Sheldrick, the CEO of What3Words, captured his audience with strong arguments: 75% of the earth population, i.e. four billion people, “don’t exist” because they have no physical address. This cohort of “unaddressed” can’t open a bank account, can’t deal properly with an hospital or an administration, let alone get a delivery. This is a major impediment to global development.
Governments, the Word Bank and various NGOs have poured millions of dollars to launch addressing programs. A country like Ghana tried four times without success. In Brazil, this portion of Rio de Janeiro with its its sparse network of roads and streets looks like an empty land:
Adding the satellite layer, you discover this:
This is one of the world’s largest slums in the world, the Rocinha favela: 355 acres (143 hectares) of intertwined sheds hosting 70,000 people. Translated into density, this amounts to a staggering 120,000 persons per square mile (48,000 per km2). Go figure how to deliver a package or simply how to provide the most basic administrative assistance such as monitoring health or education.
The developing world is not the only one to suffer from poor addressing.
Decades or urbanizations are have not necessarily been associated with discipline when it comes to building a reliable address system. This blog, maintained by a British computer scientist named Michael Tandy, compiles an outstanding series of absurd occurrences in global addressing systems. Here is just one example, an address in Tokyo.
〒100-8994 (zip code), 東京都 (Tokyo-to, i.e. Tokyo prefecture or state) 中央区 (Chuo-ku, i.e. Chuo Ward) 八重洲一丁目 (Yaesu 1-chome, i.e. Yaesu district 1st subdistrict) 5番3号 (block 5 lot 3), 東京中央郵便局 (Tokyo Central Post Office).
Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world’s largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.
One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block. Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum.
In his previous job, Chris Sheldrick (now 33) had his epiphany when organizing large musical events around the world. Tons of material had to be shipped at a specific location and date/time. After several mishaps, he too tried using GPS coordinates to make dozens of flight cases converge at the right time and place. But people got confused with lat/long, sometimes mixing ones and sevens, etc. After a dramatic mistake that almost ruined a large wedding party in the Italian countryside, he vented his frustration to a mathematician friend who then suggested the following: why not replacing GPS coordinates with actual words that anyone can understand and memorize? Sheldrick’s mathematician pal came up with a simple idea: a combination of three words, in any language, could specify every 3 meters by 3 meters square in the world. More than enough to designate a hut in Siberia or a building doorway in Tokyo. Altogether, 40,000 words combined in triplets label 57 trillion squares. Thus far, the system has been built in 10 langages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and, starting next month, Arabic… All together, this lingua franca requires only 5 megabytes of data, small enough to reside in any smartphone and work offline. Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another. The dictionaries have been refined to avoid homophones or offensive terms, short terms being reserved for the most populated area. And, unlike the GPS lat/long system, What3Words has an autocorrect feature that proposes the right terms if words are misspelled, or even mispronounced since the system is to be used in a voice-recognition navigation system.
by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note | Read more:
Governments, the Word Bank and various NGOs have poured millions of dollars to launch addressing programs. A country like Ghana tried four times without success. In Brazil, this portion of Rio de Janeiro with its its sparse network of roads and streets looks like an empty land:
Adding the satellite layer, you discover this:
This is one of the world’s largest slums in the world, the Rocinha favela: 355 acres (143 hectares) of intertwined sheds hosting 70,000 people. Translated into density, this amounts to a staggering 120,000 persons per square mile (48,000 per km2). Go figure how to deliver a package or simply how to provide the most basic administrative assistance such as monitoring health or education.
The developing world is not the only one to suffer from poor addressing.
Decades or urbanizations are have not necessarily been associated with discipline when it comes to building a reliable address system. This blog, maintained by a British computer scientist named Michael Tandy, compiles an outstanding series of absurd occurrences in global addressing systems. Here is just one example, an address in Tokyo.
〒100-8994 (zip code), 東京都 (Tokyo-to, i.e. Tokyo prefecture or state) 中央区 (Chuo-ku, i.e. Chuo Ward) 八重洲一丁目 (Yaesu 1-chome, i.e. Yaesu district 1st subdistrict) 5番3号 (block 5 lot 3), 東京中央郵便局 (Tokyo Central Post Office).
Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world’s largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.
One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block. Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum.
In his previous job, Chris Sheldrick (now 33) had his epiphany when organizing large musical events around the world. Tons of material had to be shipped at a specific location and date/time. After several mishaps, he too tried using GPS coordinates to make dozens of flight cases converge at the right time and place. But people got confused with lat/long, sometimes mixing ones and sevens, etc. After a dramatic mistake that almost ruined a large wedding party in the Italian countryside, he vented his frustration to a mathematician friend who then suggested the following: why not replacing GPS coordinates with actual words that anyone can understand and memorize? Sheldrick’s mathematician pal came up with a simple idea: a combination of three words, in any language, could specify every 3 meters by 3 meters square in the world. More than enough to designate a hut in Siberia or a building doorway in Tokyo. Altogether, 40,000 words combined in triplets label 57 trillion squares. Thus far, the system has been built in 10 langages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and, starting next month, Arabic… All together, this lingua franca requires only 5 megabytes of data, small enough to reside in any smartphone and work offline. Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another. The dictionaries have been refined to avoid homophones or offensive terms, short terms being reserved for the most populated area. And, unlike the GPS lat/long system, What3Words has an autocorrect feature that proposes the right terms if words are misspelled, or even mispronounced since the system is to be used in a voice-recognition navigation system.
by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Snapchat 101: Learn to Love the World’s Most Confusing Social Network
[ed. This was very helpful. Now I know I will never use Snapchat.]
How old? Well, when a 20-something tried to explain to me how to add a friend in the app, he began talking loudly and slowly. “YOU…PRESS…HERE…OK?”
I’m 31 and a professional technology reviewer. Not exactly Betty White.
Attention everyone born before 1986: It’s not you, it’s Snapchat. The app, now used daily by 100 million people, requires the same initial concentration as assembling IKEA furniture. There are mysterious icons that look like ancient hieroglyphs, a maze of menus not even Pac-Man could maneuver, secret finger presses. And I haven’t even gotten to the fact that many of the messages on the service self-destruct after you look at them.
But we can’t keep shooing Snapchat off our lawns. It’s about to have its Facebook moment. Most of the leading 2016 candidates are posting Snapchat videos and photos from the campaign trail, and the White House just got on board. Celebrities and news outlets are sharing up-to-the-minute updates. The Wall Street Journal launched its own Snapchat Discover channel last week.
So why Snapchat, when there are already three massive social networks to choose from? Because awesome. Well, that’s how millennials would answer. Facebook is for major life updates. (Your friend from third grade just had her 10th baby!) Twitter is for keeping up with news and live events. ( Taylor Swift released a new video…again.) Instagram is for jealousy-inducing photos. (Bora Bora is beautiful; your cubicle is not.)
Snapchat is for bearing witness—telling stories in raw, often humorous, behind-the-scenes clips or messages. If an 80-year-old can climb Everest, we can conquer—and even learn to love—Snapchat. Here’s how I did.
How to Understand Snapchat
Part of what makes understanding Snapchat so difficult are the many different ways of communicating inside the vertical screen. But remember these three elements:
Part of what makes understanding Snapchat so difficult are the many different ways of communicating inside the vertical screen. But remember these three elements:
- Snaps—Snaps are self-destructing photos or quick videos (up to 10 seconds) you send to one or multiple friends. Users send these expiring messages because they allow for more intimate and personal conversations. You’ll find sent and received snaps hiding to the left of the home screen.
- Story—Increasingly, people are broadcasting their snaps for everyone to see in what’s called a story—a series of moments that won’t self-destruct for 24 hours. You’ll find your friends’ stories to the right of the home screen.
- Chat—Snapchat also has one-to-one text chatting. You chat back and forth in the typical way, but when you navigate away from the chat screen, you lose the thread forever. Chats, like snaps, appear to the left of the home screen.
by Joanna Stern, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Carlo Giambarresi
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)