Tomorrow’s Child

He did not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid. Peter Horn hadn’t planned it that way at all. Neither he nor his wife imagined that such a thing could happen to them. They had talked quietly for days about the birth of their coming child, they had eaten normal foods, slept a great deal, taken in a few shows, and, when it was time for her to fly in the helicopter to the hospital, her husband held her and kissed her.

“Honey, you’ll be home in six hours,” he said. “These new birth-mechanisms do everything but father the child for you.”

She remembered an old-time song. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me!” and sang it, and they laughed as the helicopter lifted them over the green way from country to city.

The doctor, a quiet gentleman named Wolcott, was very confident. Polly Ann, the wife, was made ready for the task ahead and the father was put, as usual, out in the waiting room where he could suck on cigarettes or take highballs from a convenient mixer. He was feeling pretty good. This was the first baby, but there was not a thing to worry about. Polly Ann was in good hands.

Dr. Wolcott came into the waiting room an hour later. He looked like a man who has seen death. Peter Horn, on his third highball, did not move. His hand tightened on the glass and he whispered: “She’s dead.”

“No,” said Wolcott, quietly. “No, no, she’s fine. It’s the baby.”

“The baby’s dead, then.”

“The baby’s alive, too, but—drink the rest of that drink and come along after me. Something’s happened.”

Yes, indeed, something had happened. The “something” that had happened had brought the entire hospital out into the corridors. People were going and coming from one room to another. As Peter Horn was led through a hallway where attendants in white uniforms were standing around peering into each other’s faces and whispering, he became quite ill.

“Hey, looky looky!” “The child of Peter Horn! Incredible!”

They entered a small clean room. There was a crowd in the room, looking down at a low table. There was something on the table.

A small blue pyramid.

“Why’ve you brought me here?” said Horn, turning to the doctor. The small blue pyramid moved. It began to cry.

Peter Horn pushed forward and looked down wildly. He was very white and he was breathing rapidly. “You don’t mean that’s it?”

The doctor named Wolcott nodded.

The blue pyramid had six blue snakelike appendages and three eyes that blinked from the tips of projecting structures.

Horn didn’t move.

“It weighs seven pounds, eight ounces,” someone said.

Horn thought to himself, they’re kidding me. This is some joke. Charlie Ruscoll is behind all this. He’ll pop in a door any moment and cry “April Fool!” and everybody’ll laugh. That’s not my child. Oh, horrible! They’re kidding me.

Horn stood there, and the sweat rolled down his face.

“Get me away from here.” Horn turned and his hands were opening and closing without purpose, his eyes were flickering.

Wolcott held his elbow, talking calmly. “This is your child. Understand that, Mr. Horn.”

“No. No, it’s not.” His mind wouldn’t touch the thing. “It’s a nightmare. Destroy it!”

“You can’t kill a human being.”

“Human?” Horn blinked tears. “That’s not human! That’s a crime against God!”

The doctor went on, quickly. “We’ve examined this—child—and we’ve decided that it is not a mutant, a result of gene destruction or rearrangement. It’s not a freak. Nor is it sick. Please listen to everything I say to you.”

Horn stared at the wall, his eyes wide and sick. He swayed. The doctor talked distantly, with assurance.

“The child was somehow affected by the birth pressure. There was a dimensional distructure caused by the simultaneous short-circuitings and malfunctionings of the new birth and hypnosis machines. Well, anyway,” the doctor ended lamely, “your baby was born into—another dimension.”

Horn did not even nod. He stood there, waiting.

Dr. Wolcott made it emphatic. “Your child is alive, well, and happy. It is lying there, on the table. But because it was born into another dimension it has a shape alien to us. Our eyes, adjusted to a three-dimensional concept, cannot recognize it as a baby. But it is. Underneath that camouflage, the strange pyramidal shape and appendages, it is yourchild.”

Horn closed his mouth and shut his eyes. “Can I have a drink?”

by Ray Bradbury, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Mark S. Fisher

Wood roses
photo: markk

Keomoku church
photo: markk

The Fang Playbook

Jim Cramer, who coined the “FANG” acronym as a descriptor for the high-flying Facebook, Amazon,Netflix, and Google group of tech stocks that have dramatically outperformed the market, made clear yesterday that his endorsement wasn’t necessarily connected to the underlying companies:

A note on these stocks. I picked them largely because over the years they have become anointed by a group of go-go managers, meaning managers who like to be affiliated with the stocks of companies with the most momentum. I by no means have said “buy these stocks” because they represent great value. What I have been saying is that because of the scarcity of actual high-growth stocks these have become default names that managers naturally gravitate to.

It’s not an unreasonable position: the demand for growth in a low-interest-rate environment flooded with capital, plus a healthy dose of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has certainly played a role in the rise of unicorns; it makes sense that the same dynamics would play out in the stock market as well. It’s also a position that has had the good fortune of being right: in 2015 the FANG group accounted for more than the entire return of the S&P 500.

In fact, though, Cramer was more right than he apparently knows: the performance of the FANG group is entirely justified because of the underlying companies, or, to be more precise, because the underlying companies are following the exact same playbook. Sometimes the market does get it right.

THE STATE OF FANG

Each of the FANG companies is in a similar position in their respective industries: they haven’t so much disrupted incumbents as they have subsumed them:

Facebook: The late David Carr, who first broke the news about Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative back in 2014, worried that “media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.” However, as I noted in The Facebook Reckoning, publishers already are.Facebook’s status as the Internet’s home page means that publishers have no choice but to accommodate themselves to the social network, whether that be Instant Articles or an increased focus on video.

Amazon: While the biggest driver of Amazon’s increased valuation has almost certainly been AWS, the e-commerce side of the business continues to grow like gangbusters as well, taking over half of every additional dollar spent by U.S. consumers online, and a quarter of all retail growth online or off. The vast majority of those sales are actually from 3rd-party merchants using Amazon as a discovery and fulfillment platform, but these merchants’ market power relative to Amazon is not unlike publishers relative to Facebook, because Amazon.com is where the buyers are.

From a certain perspective this paradigm applies to AWS as well: the reason why AWS’s profitability increases along with growth is that Amazon achieves economies of scale, which is another way to say that AWS’s suppliers have no choice but to be squeezed in order to indirectly serve the customers they used to sell to directly

Netflix: The Internet — and Netflix — made fun of an NBC executive who claimed that “The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.” Here’s the thing, though: he’s right, in part thanks to Netflix. According to this February 2015 list, 42 past and present NBC shows are streamable on Netflix, for which the latter is certainly paying a material amount. Indeed, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Netflix’s meteoric rise is the fact that the same content producers who are ultimately threatened in the battle for attention are increasingly unable to stop themselves from selling their content to Netflix: the streaming company has too many customers adding to a pile of content money that is too big to ignore.

Google: Google’s position is similar to Facebook’s: any business that wants to be discovered by potential customers has no choice but to follow the search company’s directives, whether that be cleaning up dubious SEO strategies, making their pages mobile-friendly, or soon, adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages. Every now and then someone, usually a set of publishers, tries to defy the search engine’s influence, only to come crawling back within weeks once traffic craters. The reality is that most people find most web pages through Google, which means Google calls the shots — and sells the most expensive advertising of all.

There is a clear pattern for all four companies: each controls, to varying degrees, the entry point for customers to the category in which they compete. This control of the customer entry point, by extension, gives each company power over the companies actually supplying what each company “sells”, whether that be content, goods, video, or life insurance.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

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Bill Belichick Visits Terminally Ill Fan

BOSTON—Stressing the importance of taking time to make such trips to local medical centers, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick reportedly visited Massachusetts General Hospital Thursday to watch terminally ill fan Brian Keller die. “Brian’s a big fan of the team, and as soon as I heard that he had taken a turn for the worse, I came right over to watch him struggle until the end,” said Belichick, who stood outside Keller’s room in the intensive care unit for over three hours and silently stared through the glass as the 28-year-old’s organs shut down and he went into cardiac arrest. “I try to make it out here as many weekends as I can. Sometimes I’ll be here for six or seven hours on a Saturday visiting fans in the cancer ward who are just hanging on by a thread. The look on their faces when they’ve lost consciousness for the last time—you can just see the life draining out of them. It means so much to me to be there in those moments.” Sources confirmed that Belichick stayed to take pictures with Keller for several minutes after doctors had pronounced him dead.

by The Onion

Image: uncredited

Side Effects May Include Anything

A couple of days ago a patient said he’d become depressed after starting Xolair, a new asthma drug I know nothing about.

On the one hand, lots of things that mess with the immune system can cause depression. On the other, patients are notorious for blaming drugs for any random thing that happens around the same time they started taking them. So I did what any highly-trained competent medical professional would: I typed “does xolair cause depression?” into Google.

The results seemed promising. The first site was called “Can Xolair cause depression?”. The second was “Is depression a side effect of Xolair?”. Also on the front page were “Could Xolair cause major depression?” and “Xolair depression side effects”. Clearly this is a well-researched topic that lots of people cared about, right?

Let’s look closer at one of those sites, EHealthMe.com. It says: “Major depression is found among people who take Xolair, especially for people who are female, 40-49 old, also take medication Singulair, and have Asthma. We study 11,502 people who have side effects while taking Xolair from FDA and social media. Among them, 14 have Major depression. Find out below who they are, when they have Major depression and more.” Then it offers a link: “Join a support group for people who take Xolair and have Major depression”.

First things first: if there were actually 11502 people taking Xolair, and only 14 of them had major depression, that would be a rate of 0.1%, compared to 6.9% in the general population. In other words, Xolair would be the most effective antidepressant on Earth. But of course nobody has ever done an n=11502 study on whether a random asthma medication causes depression, and EHealthMe is just scraping the FDA databases to see how many people reported depression as a side effect to the FDA. But only a tiny percent of people who get depression report it, and depression sometimes strikes at random times whether you’re taking Xolair or not. So this tells us nothing.

And yet a patient who worries that Xolair might be causing their depression will Google “can xolair cause depression?”, and she will end up on this site that says “major depression is found among people who take Xolair”, which is one of the worst examples of weasel words I’ve ever heard. Then she will read that there are entire support groups for depressed Xolair sufferers. She will find all sorts of scary-looking information like that Xolair-related depression has been increasing since 2008. And this is above and beyond just the implications of somebody bothering to write an entire report about the Xolair-depression connection!

In case you haven’t guessed the twist – no one’s ever investigated whether Xolair causes depression. EHealthMe’s business model is to make an automated program that runs through every single drug and every possible side effect, scrapes the FDA database for examples, then autopublishes an ad-filled web page titled “COULD $DRUG CAUSE $SIDE_EFFECT?”. It populates the page by spewing random FDA data all over it, concludes “$SIDE_EFFECT is found among people who take $DRUG”, and offers a link to a support group for $DRUG patients suffering from $SIDE_EFFECT. Needless to say, the support group is an automatically-generated forum with no posts in it.

And it’s not just EHealthMe. This is a whole market, with competitors elbowing their way past one another to the top of the Google search results. Somebody who doubts EHealthMe and seeks an online second opinion will probably just end up at PatientsVille, whose page is called “Xolair Depression Side Effects”, which contains the same FDA data, and which gets the Google description text “This opens a possibility that Xolair could cause Depression”. Or Treato, whose page claims to contain 56 reader comments on Xolair and depression, but which has actually just searched the Web for every single paragraph that contains “Xolair” and “depression” together and then posted garbled excerpts in its comment section. For example, one of their comments – and this is not at all clear from Treato’s garbled excerpt – is from a tennis forum, where a user with the handle Xolair talks about how his tennis serve is getting worse with age; another user replies “Xolair, I read this and get depressed, I just turned 49.” But if you don’t check whether it came from a tennis forum or not, 56 reports of a connection between a drug and a side effect sounds convincing!

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

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poi pounders
photo: markk

Morris Day and The Time

Splain it to Me

[ed. Ugh, randos?]

Imagine you’re telling a story. Great story, unbelievable story. A series of events that if you saw them in a movie you’d roll your eyes and groan, but they actually happened, and you were there to witness them. While you’re in the middle of the story, just as you get to a particularly interesting twist, the person listening to you scrunches up their face and shouts, “Get the fuck out of here!”

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’.

by Graham Southorn, Here 360 | Read more:
Image: uncredited

photo: markk

photo: markk

photo: markk

Brandyn Burnette

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:
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[ed.  Sorry, have to take another short break. Enjoy the archives and see you next week.]
[ed.  Well, that took a little longer than expected but nice to have an internet break for a week.]

Koury Angelo
via:

via:

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.

by David A. Banks and Britney Sumiit-Gil, The New Inquiry |  Read more:

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