Sunday, April 10, 2016
Robert Crumb Hates You
With this generation of overfed, spoiled-brat writers, every long, arduous journey into uncharted territories is called a Heart of Darkness—GPS and lack of war notwithstanding. The man that I’m looking for in the bowels of France is thankfully deprived of any irony. Robert Crumb has been living in a godforsaken medieval village, where cars are banned and spotty Wi-Fi has only been recently discovered. This true American has been locked up in self-exile—in an unlocked house—for the last 20 years.
There’s a direct line of salt-of-the-earth, irony-free, all-American icons, passing from the painters Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, the musicians Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, all the way to Crumb. America, for them, wasn’t its flag, but its dirt. They eluded political and religious affiliations and labels: Guthrie liked the K.K.K. in his youth and Dylan became an evangelical Christian, for instance, yet they all fought against the oppressive American conformist machine. The Kennedys slept with Marilyn Monroe; Crumb did Janis Joplin’s friend Pattycakes.
“Can I smoke?” I asked Robert Crumb, sure that he would say no in his studio, where we spoke off and on for more than three days.
“Yes, I don’t care,” he said.
There’s an extraordinary Crumb comic, 1988’s Memories Are Made of This, that made a lasting impression on anyone who read it. He takes a long bus ride under the rain to go to this attractive woman’s house. She is his type: stocky with big, fat calves. She doesn’t really seem interested at first, but she gets drunk and he ends up having destroying sex with her from behind. He then looks at us and tells us that from now on, no woman will want him because he copped to this story. The drawing is precise, sharp, simple, straight to the point—until it reaches the sex part, and all hell breaks loose. The eyes are popping, the tongues are erupting and the orgasm transforms the woman into a Cubist bull.
“That story is an extremely unromantic view of love and sex,” Mr. Crumb said. “Any normal, intelligent, college-type woman would find this story disgusting, would say look at how he’s portraying this woman. She gets drunk and then puts out, this guy is a creep, that’s just hateful to women. It’s very unromantic; they want romance. Some writers have a talent for seducing women through their work, you read their stuff and you know they are seducing women. It’s an art. Some men know how to talk to women and I just don’t have that.”
“Writers like Martin Amis or Christopher Hitchens are like that, you can tell that their writing is meant to bed women. They used to hit on everything that moves,” I told him.
“My publisher told me that women don’t buy my stuff,” Mr. Crumb said. “When I do book signings and I spot an attractive woman on the line I know she’s gonna ask me to sign the book for her husband or boyfriend, who is a big fan of my work. I tell you, it’s almost 100 percent predictable!”
“I know many women who like your work. Some women don’t care about romance; they know that the guy who gives them flowers, carries their shit and holds doors will end up cheating on them.”
“Yes, in private those are the guys who say the worst things about women,” Mr. Crumb said.
“I was in a restaurant with this very attractive woman once and I could tell I was losing her,” I said. “I was so intimidated, insecure and meek. I was broke but invited her to Nobu, just that in itself was ridiculous. I decided to flip the script and go for broke. I was getting weaker by the moment, she was sensing my weakness and probably saw me as this almost effeminate guy.”
“Yes, you were castrating yourself,” Mr. Crumb said.
“Exactly. I knew she would never see me again anyway, so when she came back from the bathroom I told her: you have the most beautiful ass, I would love to eat it—and it worked. In one of your comics, you say that women will always go for the most obnoxious guy.”
“They will protest and say, ‘I hate that kind of offensive, arrogant male,’ ” Mr. Crumb said. “Many women will tell you that what they really like in a man is a sense of humor. The two funniest men I know with the best sense of humor are these bitter, self-deprecating Jewish guys, with a very negative, ironic sense of humor. They are total losers with women. Women see the self-deprecating part—you point out a weakness about yourself; they might laugh, but they perceive the weakness. Even if it’s hard to generalize, if you make a joke about yourself that you are awkward or a failure, that’s what sticks in their mind.”
I responded, “I once asked a gorgeous guy if he had ever been rejected, and he told me, ‘All my life.’ He said what women don’t realize is that by the time we find one who says yes, we bring to her the 50 nos we got before, with all the angst, bitterness that comes with it, the prior rejections that destroyed our self esteem.”
“I have tried to talk to women about that very issue of male domination, power and feminism many times before to no avail. They don’t wanna hear about it. One rejection and that’s it for me. That just kills me,” said Mr. Crumb. “I couldn’t take all those nos so I don’t do anything. I’m just paralyzed. Women expect men to take the initiative, to be forceful, assertive; they expect to be courted and seduced. In spite of feminism, women still want to be the object of attraction, and the male’s confidence in courting her is a test that he must pass in order to win her.”
“So, before you became famous, how did you get laid?”
“I didn’t.”
by Jacques Hyzagi, Observer | Read more:
Image:Brill Ullstein/ Getty Images
There’s a direct line of salt-of-the-earth, irony-free, all-American icons, passing from the painters Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, the musicians Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, all the way to Crumb. America, for them, wasn’t its flag, but its dirt. They eluded political and religious affiliations and labels: Guthrie liked the K.K.K. in his youth and Dylan became an evangelical Christian, for instance, yet they all fought against the oppressive American conformist machine. The Kennedys slept with Marilyn Monroe; Crumb did Janis Joplin’s friend Pattycakes.“Can I smoke?” I asked Robert Crumb, sure that he would say no in his studio, where we spoke off and on for more than three days.
“Yes, I don’t care,” he said.
There’s an extraordinary Crumb comic, 1988’s Memories Are Made of This, that made a lasting impression on anyone who read it. He takes a long bus ride under the rain to go to this attractive woman’s house. She is his type: stocky with big, fat calves. She doesn’t really seem interested at first, but she gets drunk and he ends up having destroying sex with her from behind. He then looks at us and tells us that from now on, no woman will want him because he copped to this story. The drawing is precise, sharp, simple, straight to the point—until it reaches the sex part, and all hell breaks loose. The eyes are popping, the tongues are erupting and the orgasm transforms the woman into a Cubist bull.
“That story is an extremely unromantic view of love and sex,” Mr. Crumb said. “Any normal, intelligent, college-type woman would find this story disgusting, would say look at how he’s portraying this woman. She gets drunk and then puts out, this guy is a creep, that’s just hateful to women. It’s very unromantic; they want romance. Some writers have a talent for seducing women through their work, you read their stuff and you know they are seducing women. It’s an art. Some men know how to talk to women and I just don’t have that.”
“Writers like Martin Amis or Christopher Hitchens are like that, you can tell that their writing is meant to bed women. They used to hit on everything that moves,” I told him.
“My publisher told me that women don’t buy my stuff,” Mr. Crumb said. “When I do book signings and I spot an attractive woman on the line I know she’s gonna ask me to sign the book for her husband or boyfriend, who is a big fan of my work. I tell you, it’s almost 100 percent predictable!”
“I know many women who like your work. Some women don’t care about romance; they know that the guy who gives them flowers, carries their shit and holds doors will end up cheating on them.”
“Yes, in private those are the guys who say the worst things about women,” Mr. Crumb said.
“I was in a restaurant with this very attractive woman once and I could tell I was losing her,” I said. “I was so intimidated, insecure and meek. I was broke but invited her to Nobu, just that in itself was ridiculous. I decided to flip the script and go for broke. I was getting weaker by the moment, she was sensing my weakness and probably saw me as this almost effeminate guy.”
“Yes, you were castrating yourself,” Mr. Crumb said.
“Exactly. I knew she would never see me again anyway, so when she came back from the bathroom I told her: you have the most beautiful ass, I would love to eat it—and it worked. In one of your comics, you say that women will always go for the most obnoxious guy.”
“They will protest and say, ‘I hate that kind of offensive, arrogant male,’ ” Mr. Crumb said. “Many women will tell you that what they really like in a man is a sense of humor. The two funniest men I know with the best sense of humor are these bitter, self-deprecating Jewish guys, with a very negative, ironic sense of humor. They are total losers with women. Women see the self-deprecating part—you point out a weakness about yourself; they might laugh, but they perceive the weakness. Even if it’s hard to generalize, if you make a joke about yourself that you are awkward or a failure, that’s what sticks in their mind.”
I responded, “I once asked a gorgeous guy if he had ever been rejected, and he told me, ‘All my life.’ He said what women don’t realize is that by the time we find one who says yes, we bring to her the 50 nos we got before, with all the angst, bitterness that comes with it, the prior rejections that destroyed our self esteem.”
“I have tried to talk to women about that very issue of male domination, power and feminism many times before to no avail. They don’t wanna hear about it. One rejection and that’s it for me. That just kills me,” said Mr. Crumb. “I couldn’t take all those nos so I don’t do anything. I’m just paralyzed. Women expect men to take the initiative, to be forceful, assertive; they expect to be courted and seduced. In spite of feminism, women still want to be the object of attraction, and the male’s confidence in courting her is a test that he must pass in order to win her.”
“So, before you became famous, how did you get laid?”
“I didn’t.”
by Jacques Hyzagi, Observer | Read more:
Image:Brill Ullstein/ Getty Images
Friday, April 8, 2016
The Remains of the Day
"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler." (...)
The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)
Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?
Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.
The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.
In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.
Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.
by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Remains of the Day
[ed. Repost. See also: Never Let Me Go.]
The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?
Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.
The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.
In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.
Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.
by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Remains of the Day
[ed. Repost. See also: Never Let Me Go.]
The Yips
[ed. Here's Ernie Els experiencing the yips yesterday on the first hole of the first round of the Masters. Yips and shanks will drive you insane.]
Haney is tall and trim. He was an all-conference player at the University of Tulsa, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, but a few years after graduation he began having serious difficulty controlling his tee shots, which travelled unpredictable distances and were sometimes more than a hundred yards off-line. The problem became so severe, he told me, that between 1985 and 2002 he played fewer than ten rounds, even as he was building a national reputation as an instructor. “One morning, I went out alone with a carry bag and one of those eighteen-packs of cheap balls,” he wrote later. “I lost every one of them by the time I made the turn.” He studied videotapes of his swing, frame by frame, in the hope of discovering some fundamental flaw, and when no one was watching he hit hundreds of range balls, trying to straighten himself out. But the harder he worked the worse his problem became.
Haney was suffering from a much dreaded golf malady, which consists of an involuntary disruptive movement of the hands, wrists, or forearms. In the great majority of cases, it affects putting or chipping, both of which involve relatively small, relatively slow strokes, but, as in Haney’s case, it can infect full swings, too. Versions of it have been known over the years by many names, among them “freezing,” “the waggles,” “the staggers,” “the jerks,” “whiskey fingers,” and “the yips.” That last term is the one that’s used almost universally today. It was coined around the middle of the last century by the Scottish golfer Tommy Armour, a sufferer, who defined it as “a brain spasm that impairs the short game.” Bill Mehlhorn—a contemporary of Armour’s and a leading tour player in the nineteen-twenties—once had a short putt in a tournament in Florida, but he jabbed the ball so far past the hole that a competitor standing in the fringe on the far side of the green had to jump out of the way. Harry Vardon, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Tom Watson all developed the yips late in their careers. Johnny Miller, who was a tour superstar in the mid-nineteen-seventies and early eighties, developed such severe yips that watching him play was painful; a rebroadcast of a 1997 match between him and Jack Nicklaus included relatively few of his (many) putts, presumably because the producers had mercifully edited them out.
Golfers aren’t the only yippers. Cricket bowlers suffer a similar disability, which they also call the yips. In darts, the problem is “dartitis”; in snooker, “cueitis”; in archery, “target panic”; in gun shooting, “flinching”; in baseball pitching, “the creature,” “the monster,” and “Steve Blass disease” (after the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, who, in 1973, developed what turned out to be a career-ending inability to find the strike zone). In 1999, Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ second baseman, began flubbing routine plays to first base, and in one game threw a ball so far off target that it hit the mother of the ESPN sportscaster Keith Olbermann, in the stands. Knoblauch finished his career in left field, and what until that time had usually been called Steve Sax syndrome—after the Dodgers’ second baseman, who had the same problem for several years in the nineteen-eighties—became widely known as Knoblauch disease.
Even bad cases of the yips don’t always end sports careers—at least, not immediately. Miller won the 1976 British Open, at Royal Birkdale, even though he was afraid that, if he looked at his ball or at the head of his putter while making a stroke, he wouldn’t be able to putt at all, and so he placed a dab of red fingernail polish on the grip, below the position of his right thumb, and looked at that instead. Later, he sometimes putted with his eyes closed, or while looking at the hole instead of the ball. The German tour pro Bernhard Langer was able to control his yips by using his right hand to brace the shaft of his putter against his left forearm—and, when the problem returned, by switching to putters with longer shafts and anchoring them against his chest.
Hank Haney arrived at the peculiar swing I saw after deciding he needed to develop a technique that, while it might not be mechanically optimal, made him physically less able to hit the ball in the wrong direction. To reduce the mobility of his hands and wrists, he adopted an unconventional grip, holding the club mostly in his palms, rather than in his fingers. He had noticed that, on the few occasions when he couldn’t avoid demonstrating a shot with his driver, he was able to do so successfully if he looked at his audience, not the ball, while he swung—a feat that impressed his students but for him was an act of desperation. “That was something I discovered by trial and error,” he told me. “Focussing my eyes and my attention on something different—anything to not anticipate the hit, anything to not anticipate the moment of contact with the ball.” In his new swing, he glanced at the ball only briefly, at the very beginning of his routine; during the actual swing, he kept his eyes on the brim of his cap.
Athletes and sports fans have generally assumed that yipping and its variants are forms of performance anxiety, or choking. It’s true that nervous athletes often play poorly, and that yipping is most evident when the stakes are high, and that even serious sufferers are sometimes able to perform in practice or while playing alone. Yet many yippers are veterans of competition at the highest levels, who never showed a tendency to buckle under stress; many others are casual players who have trouble even when the pressure is low. Yipping also is usually extremely task-specific. Haney never stopped being a good putter. Knoblauch didn’t have a problem throwing from the outfield. Archers who can no longer hit a bull’s-eye often have no trouble shooting at bare bales of straw. If the yips and other sports-related movement problems are solely a matter of anxiety, why do they affect only certain motions? And how can a change of target, technique, or equipment sometimes make them go away?
by David Owen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Leo Espinosa
Thursday, April 7, 2016
Dox Populi: A Few Missing Links
What if they held a mammoth document leak and nobody came? That seems, with a slight allowance for hyperbole, the impact of the release of 2.6 terabytes of data from the inner sanctums of Mossack Fonseca, the high-rolling Panamanian law firm. Mossack Fonseca—which is, appropriately enough, the joint brainchild of a scion of an émigré Nazi family and a Panamanian lawyer-novelist—is maniacally dedicated to the instant incorporation of obliging shell companies for an elite clientele seeking to shelter their fortunes from revenue collectors in their economic homeland. More than 100 newsgathering outfits across the globe collaborated, under the aegis of the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to roll out the lead disclosures arising from the leak—a project that is still ongoing. But American news operations largely consigned these lurid revelations of how diligently the international political and economic power elite conceal their pelf from prying auditors to their back pages.
Indeed, the redoubtable hot-take maestros at Vox media leapt fearlessly into the fray to declare that, you know, when you really think about it, offshore tax shelters can be kind of cool—like when, for instance, wealthy dissidents in authoritarian countries use them to shield their fortunes from grasping strongmen! Of course, this enormously charitable view of things suffers a good deal from the actual material leaked about Mossack Fonseca’s enormous client base, which leans heavily toward authoritarian strongmen and their enablers, from Vladimir Putin to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Bashar al-Assad’s enterprising cousin-cum-financial fixer, Rami Makhlouf. It also didn’t help the slapdash case that Vox quisling—er, excuse me, “reporter”—Zack Beauchamp was hoping to make that he staked it largely on an interview with Yale political science professor Margaret Peters, who went out of her way to praise the transparent business climate of the authoritarian regime in Singapore, without bothering to disclose that Yale is partnering with the National University of Singapore in a glorified tax shelter of its own. (Indeed, Yale, like many an elite institution of higher learning, is a centuries-old master of tax dodging.) But hey, as Beauchamp cheerily assures us, “the relations between individuals, states, and offshore accounts isn’t as straightforward as we might think.”
The unexamined presumption in such recursive and rudderless counter-taking is that Beauchamp and his colleagues, or anyone else notionally tasked with reporting on the inner workings of wealth accumulation in our new millennial gilded age, thinks at all about offshore capital shelters. Far from being an exotic plaything of thuggish world leaders like Putin, or merely corrupt ones like Iceland’s ex-Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson (who laid the groundwork for his parliamentary exit on Tuesday in the wake of the news that he’d used Mossack Fonseca shell firms to conceal banking assets at the height of the global financial crisis), the phony incorporation trick is at the heart of America’s own decrepit, financialized, and top-heavy economic order.
That would be why, for example, Apple—which has surpassed merely industrial-age corporations like General Motors and Exxon as the most heavily capitalized company in the world—has routed sales through Ireland (while concertedly soaking its labor force in China). After depositing more than $200 billion in overseas accounts, the computer giant actually borrowed $17 billion in 2013 to finance a massive stock buyback to artificially spike its share prices—and thereby reap hundreds of millions for its lead shareholders to store in their tax-avoidant nest eggs. As finance scams go, the Apple ownership structure admittedly lacks the screwball ribaldry of Ukrainian President Poroshenko busily at work with Mossack Fonseca, worried about his private assets and providing a current utility billto document his home address, on the very day Russia was (again) invading Ukraine. But, structurally speaking, there’s no bright line to distinguish Tim Cook’s Cupertino tax dodges from the more downmarket variety east of the Black Sea.
Indeed, the reason that more American financiers and political figures aren’t named in the Panama Papers is that most of the elaborate ruses of Mossack Fonseca are perfectly legal within American borders, and indeed, the standard m.o., for the American financial sector. Nest-feathering American investors “mostly don’t go to Panama,” says Ken Silverstein, who published a major Mossack Fonseca expose for Vice in 2014. “Hey, Goldman Sachs has private banking systems all over the world.”
America has conspicuously refrained from adopting automated data-sharing protocols promulgated by the OECD to crack down on offshore tax havens—for the simple reason that more robust enforcement of global tax laws would impair the bottom line of the U.S. financial sector.
Indeed, the redoubtable hot-take maestros at Vox media leapt fearlessly into the fray to declare that, you know, when you really think about it, offshore tax shelters can be kind of cool—like when, for instance, wealthy dissidents in authoritarian countries use them to shield their fortunes from grasping strongmen! Of course, this enormously charitable view of things suffers a good deal from the actual material leaked about Mossack Fonseca’s enormous client base, which leans heavily toward authoritarian strongmen and their enablers, from Vladimir Putin to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Bashar al-Assad’s enterprising cousin-cum-financial fixer, Rami Makhlouf. It also didn’t help the slapdash case that Vox quisling—er, excuse me, “reporter”—Zack Beauchamp was hoping to make that he staked it largely on an interview with Yale political science professor Margaret Peters, who went out of her way to praise the transparent business climate of the authoritarian regime in Singapore, without bothering to disclose that Yale is partnering with the National University of Singapore in a glorified tax shelter of its own. (Indeed, Yale, like many an elite institution of higher learning, is a centuries-old master of tax dodging.) But hey, as Beauchamp cheerily assures us, “the relations between individuals, states, and offshore accounts isn’t as straightforward as we might think.”The unexamined presumption in such recursive and rudderless counter-taking is that Beauchamp and his colleagues, or anyone else notionally tasked with reporting on the inner workings of wealth accumulation in our new millennial gilded age, thinks at all about offshore capital shelters. Far from being an exotic plaything of thuggish world leaders like Putin, or merely corrupt ones like Iceland’s ex-Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson (who laid the groundwork for his parliamentary exit on Tuesday in the wake of the news that he’d used Mossack Fonseca shell firms to conceal banking assets at the height of the global financial crisis), the phony incorporation trick is at the heart of America’s own decrepit, financialized, and top-heavy economic order.
That would be why, for example, Apple—which has surpassed merely industrial-age corporations like General Motors and Exxon as the most heavily capitalized company in the world—has routed sales through Ireland (while concertedly soaking its labor force in China). After depositing more than $200 billion in overseas accounts, the computer giant actually borrowed $17 billion in 2013 to finance a massive stock buyback to artificially spike its share prices—and thereby reap hundreds of millions for its lead shareholders to store in their tax-avoidant nest eggs. As finance scams go, the Apple ownership structure admittedly lacks the screwball ribaldry of Ukrainian President Poroshenko busily at work with Mossack Fonseca, worried about his private assets and providing a current utility billto document his home address, on the very day Russia was (again) invading Ukraine. But, structurally speaking, there’s no bright line to distinguish Tim Cook’s Cupertino tax dodges from the more downmarket variety east of the Black Sea.
Indeed, the reason that more American financiers and political figures aren’t named in the Panama Papers is that most of the elaborate ruses of Mossack Fonseca are perfectly legal within American borders, and indeed, the standard m.o., for the American financial sector. Nest-feathering American investors “mostly don’t go to Panama,” says Ken Silverstein, who published a major Mossack Fonseca expose for Vice in 2014. “Hey, Goldman Sachs has private banking systems all over the world.”
America has conspicuously refrained from adopting automated data-sharing protocols promulgated by the OECD to crack down on offshore tax havens—for the simple reason that more robust enforcement of global tax laws would impair the bottom line of the U.S. financial sector.
by Chris Lehman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: David McLimans
A Corporate Tax Dodge Gets Harder
[ed. See also: Pfizer Faces Limited Options After Its Dead Deal With Allergan]
Pfizer never tried to hide the fact that its proposed $152 billion merger with Allergan, based in Ireland, would cut its tax bill in the United States. But even as it rushed to complete the biggest tax-avoidance deal in the history of corporate America, it continued to promote the strategic and economic benefits of the merger.
Any pretense to a motivation other than dodging taxes has now been wiped away. On Wednesday, just two days after the Obama administration introduced new rules to narrow the loopholes that the drug companies were exploiting, Pfizer announced that the deal with Allergan was off.
The new Treasury Department rules take aim at “inversions,” in which an American company merges with a foreign company in a low-tax nation to pass itself off as foreign and in that way cut its American taxes. Inverted companies are often described as having “moved abroad” or “renounced their citizenship.” But the only tie that an inverted company really cuts with the United States is the one that binds it to the Internal Revenue Service.
Such companies almost invariably keep their headquarters, officers and much of their business in the United States. Some 40 American companies have become inverted over the past five years, while tax laws have failed to keep pace with tax-avoidance strategies made possible by a complex mix of corporate offshore accounts and global capital flows.
The Treasury had to act to stop inversions because Congress, still in the grip of an anti-tax Republican majority, won’t. One of the new rules effectively denies tax benefits in new mergers that involve companies that have recently inverted. That scotches the Pfizer and Allergan deal because Allergan, when it was still known as Actavis, an American company, inverted to Ireland in 2013.
The new rules will also clamp down on a practice known as earnings stripping, in which a multinational reduces its American tax bill by having its American subsidiary borrow money from a foreign parent company and then deduct the interest on that loan against its earnings, which cuts its tax bill.
Worse, cash can also be lent to a foreign parent from American profits stashed abroad that are supposed to be taxed when they are repatriated to the United States. Such loans essentially allow foreign-held profits to be used tax-free. American companies could avoid tax on as much as $1 trillion in foreign-held profits by this strategy.
Pfizer never tried to hide the fact that its proposed $152 billion merger with Allergan, based in Ireland, would cut its tax bill in the United States. But even as it rushed to complete the biggest tax-avoidance deal in the history of corporate America, it continued to promote the strategic and economic benefits of the merger.
Any pretense to a motivation other than dodging taxes has now been wiped away. On Wednesday, just two days after the Obama administration introduced new rules to narrow the loopholes that the drug companies were exploiting, Pfizer announced that the deal with Allergan was off.
The new Treasury Department rules take aim at “inversions,” in which an American company merges with a foreign company in a low-tax nation to pass itself off as foreign and in that way cut its American taxes. Inverted companies are often described as having “moved abroad” or “renounced their citizenship.” But the only tie that an inverted company really cuts with the United States is the one that binds it to the Internal Revenue Service.Such companies almost invariably keep their headquarters, officers and much of their business in the United States. Some 40 American companies have become inverted over the past five years, while tax laws have failed to keep pace with tax-avoidance strategies made possible by a complex mix of corporate offshore accounts and global capital flows.
The Treasury had to act to stop inversions because Congress, still in the grip of an anti-tax Republican majority, won’t. One of the new rules effectively denies tax benefits in new mergers that involve companies that have recently inverted. That scotches the Pfizer and Allergan deal because Allergan, when it was still known as Actavis, an American company, inverted to Ireland in 2013.
The new rules will also clamp down on a practice known as earnings stripping, in which a multinational reduces its American tax bill by having its American subsidiary borrow money from a foreign parent company and then deduct the interest on that loan against its earnings, which cuts its tax bill.
Worse, cash can also be lent to a foreign parent from American profits stashed abroad that are supposed to be taxed when they are repatriated to the United States. Such loans essentially allow foreign-held profits to be used tax-free. American companies could avoid tax on as much as $1 trillion in foreign-held profits by this strategy.
by Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Heads of State
A Programming Language For Living Cells
MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.
Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."
Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.
The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.
No experience needed
Over the past 15 years, biologists and engineers have designed many genetic parts, such as sensors, memory switches, and biological clocks, that can be combined to modify existing cell functions and add new ones.
However, designing each circuit is a laborious process that requires great expertise and often a lot of trial and error. "You have to have this really intimate knowledge of how those pieces are going to work and how they're going to come together," Voigt says.
Users of the new programming language, however, need no special knowledge of genetic engineering.
"You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That's what's really different about this," Voigt says. "You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence."
by Anne Trafton, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Janet Iwasa
Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.
The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.
No experience needed
Over the past 15 years, biologists and engineers have designed many genetic parts, such as sensors, memory switches, and biological clocks, that can be combined to modify existing cell functions and add new ones.
However, designing each circuit is a laborious process that requires great expertise and often a lot of trial and error. "You have to have this really intimate knowledge of how those pieces are going to work and how they're going to come together," Voigt says.
Users of the new programming language, however, need no special knowledge of genetic engineering.
"You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That's what's really different about this," Voigt says. "You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence."
by Anne Trafton, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Janet Iwasa
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
The Shark's Collapse, 20 Years Later
[ed. It's Master's week! So many great memories, but Greg Norman's collapse in 1996 still ranks as one of the most painful sporting events I've ever witnessed in my life (his loss to Larry Mize in 1987 on an unbelievable chip-in was one of the saddest). The extraordinary class he exhibited after that loss is still the thing I remember the most, though.]
“Your grandfather was a wonderful golfer,” she said to me.
My dad, who had played the most with Grandpa, remembered differently.
“He was terrible,” he whispered. “He could never get the ball in the air.”
It was only in college that I started to dabble in the game, occasionally stealing off with my roommates with one set of clubs among us. We would drive 20 minutes off campus in New Hampshire to play a dinky nine-hole course named Rockingham, where no hole back then measured more than 300 yards, there were only a handful of trees, and where even in my earliest tear-up-the-turf days as a golfer, it was hard not to break 50. You could get around Rockingham in little more than an hour, so one April afternoon in our senior year, still groggy from whatever damage we had incurred the night before, we agreed we’d sneak in a round before dark. Until then the Masters was on TV, and Greg Norman had a six-shot lead, so we settled into the couches of our grungy apartment, nursed our hangovers, and prepared to watch the man nicknamed the Great White Shark cruise to his first green jacket.
I had no particular attachment to Greg Norman, or really any golfer at that point. But Norman was an inviting figure—chiseled and confident, with an unabashed swagger—and I had paid enough attention to golf to know that the Masters was something that had narrowly eluded him for years. I was looking forward to watching him finally break through—right up until the point it was apparent he wouldn’t. It’s probably strange to admit that the moment that truly sold me on golf was one defined by someone else’s misery. We all have a dark side. But the enjoyment for me was not so much derived from Norman’s collapse. In fact, if at one point we thought we were going to wait until after the CBS telecast to head to the golf course, we eventually deemed his public writhing too painful to witness. When Norman splashed his tee shot in the water on the par-3 16th, all but assuring the Masters title for Nick Faldo, we decided we’d had enough; my roommate Sully clicked the TV off in disgust, and four of us filed out the door and headed to Rockingham. I was disappointed for Norman, but I remained fascinated, my head spinning like it is when you walk out of a movie filled with so many plot twists you need to confirm with others everything that happened.
Until then I was unaware golf could do that. It hadn’t occurred to me that the golf swing was essentially a living organism that could get up and leave you at a time of its choosing, or that someone who had navigated a course so skillfully one moment could flail helplessly the next.
But that, I learned later, was Greg Norman. There were times when he appeared unflappable, looking, as Dan Jenkins wrote in Golf Digest, “like the guy you send out to kill James Bond.” You wouldn’t cast a character like Norman, broad-shouldered and blond, with that Australian accent, to play the victim. And yet on so many occasions even before that Sunday, he was.
To say no golfer lost more than Norman is imprecise, because there are scores of professional golfers who don’t even sniff a chance to win major tournaments. And besides, Norman won plenty—90 times around the world, including two Open Championships. Before Tiger Woods, Norman’s 331 weeks atop the world ranking was a record. We should all be such losers.
Still, if you define losing as standing alluringly close to a prize and failing to capture it, then Norman lost. If losing is when the prevailing emotion afterward is regret, then Norman was in a class of his own.
by Sam Weinman, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How Reporters Pulled Off the Panama Papers, the Biggest Leak in Whistleblower History
When Daniel Ellsberg photocopied and leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, those 7,000 pages of top secret Vietnam War documents represented what was then the biggest whistleblower leak in history—a couple dozen megabytes if it were contained in a modern text file. Almost four decades later, WikiLeaks in 2010 published Cablegate, a world-shaking, 1.73 gigabyte collection of classified State Department communications that was almost a hundred times bigger.
If there’s some Moore’s Law of Leaks, however, it seems to be exponential. Just five years have passed since WikiLeaks’ Cablegate coup, and now the world is grappling with a whistleblower megaleak on a scale never seen before: 2.6 terabytes, well over a thousandfold larger.
On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, released stories on the Panama Papers, a gargantuan collection of leaked documents exposing a widespread system of global tax evasion. The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets.
“This is pretty much every document from this firm over a 40-year period,” ICIJ director Gerard Ryle told WIRED in a phone call, arguing that at “about 2,000 times larger than the WikiLeaks state department cables,” it’s indeed the biggest leak in history.
Neither the ICIJ nor any of the reporters it’s worked with have made the leaked data public. But the scandal resulting from their reporting has already touched celebrities, athletes, business executives and world leaders. The documents trace $2 billion of hidden money tied to Vladimir Putin through accounts held in the names of family members and his celebrated musician friend Sergei Roldugin. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson is facing demands from the previous Icelandic prime minister that he resign after the Mossack Fonseca documents showed that Gunnlaugsson may have failed to disclose ownership of a stake in certain Icelandic banks under the government’s rules for officials. And the leaks drag FIFA officials back into the news, showing that even an ethics lawyer for the world soccer body hadfinancial ties to another FIFA official already accused of corruption.
But beyond those revelations—and there will likely be more as the reporting around the Panama Papers continues—the leak represents an unprecedented story in itself: How an anonymous whistleblower was able to spirit out and surreptitiously send journalists a gargantuan collection of files, which were then analyzed by more than 400 reporters in secret over more than a year before a coordinated effort to go public.
If there’s some Moore’s Law of Leaks, however, it seems to be exponential. Just five years have passed since WikiLeaks’ Cablegate coup, and now the world is grappling with a whistleblower megaleak on a scale never seen before: 2.6 terabytes, well over a thousandfold larger.On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, released stories on the Panama Papers, a gargantuan collection of leaked documents exposing a widespread system of global tax evasion. The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets.
“This is pretty much every document from this firm over a 40-year period,” ICIJ director Gerard Ryle told WIRED in a phone call, arguing that at “about 2,000 times larger than the WikiLeaks state department cables,” it’s indeed the biggest leak in history.
Neither the ICIJ nor any of the reporters it’s worked with have made the leaked data public. But the scandal resulting from their reporting has already touched celebrities, athletes, business executives and world leaders. The documents trace $2 billion of hidden money tied to Vladimir Putin through accounts held in the names of family members and his celebrated musician friend Sergei Roldugin. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson is facing demands from the previous Icelandic prime minister that he resign after the Mossack Fonseca documents showed that Gunnlaugsson may have failed to disclose ownership of a stake in certain Icelandic banks under the government’s rules for officials. And the leaks drag FIFA officials back into the news, showing that even an ethics lawyer for the world soccer body hadfinancial ties to another FIFA official already accused of corruption.
But beyond those revelations—and there will likely be more as the reporting around the Panama Papers continues—the leak represents an unprecedented story in itself: How an anonymous whistleblower was able to spirit out and surreptitiously send journalists a gargantuan collection of files, which were then analyzed by more than 400 reporters in secret over more than a year before a coordinated effort to go public.
by Andy Greenberg, Wired | Read more:
Image: Naqiewe/Getty Images
Money For Nothing
In a single night, Scott Disick—the runt of the Kardashian litter, the fuckup father of Kourtney's three children—makes more money doing nothing than most Americans earn in an entire year. Disick is a man routinely mocked on national television for being the one without any skills in a family of people who are famous for not really having any skills. But in 2016, he represents both the luckiest beneficiary and the most tragicomic casualty of the booming club-appearance economy. All he has to do to earn his check is walk through the door at 1OAK in Las Vegas and not leave for one hour.
And yet the club-appearance gig is a giant knot in Disick's life that seems to only tangle and tighten like a noose. He began booking these appearances a few years back, presumably so he could gain some agency beyond the grip of Kris Jenner and have something to call his “job.” For a while, this was working out nicely for him. He was gaining enough notoriety thanks to Keeping Up with the Kardashians that his appearance fee rose to impressive numbers: He could pull $70,000 or $80,000 a night in the U.S. At one high point, he scored a $250,000 deal for a series of appearances in the UK.
But in Disick's case, all that time spent in nightclubs exacerbated his already-problematic drinking and alleged drugging habits, which put him on shaky ground with his family. This made him come off like even more of a loser on the show, which in turn probably made him even more desperate for validation outside of the E! network. Hence, more club appearances, more bad behavior, more humiliation on national TV, more need for outside validation… This is the extended EDM remix of the song that never ends.
Eventually Disick's petulant shenanigans started to get old, and everyone realized that he was deeply troubled. And so the bad press has knocked his appearance fee down a notch. Although not so low that Disick is conflicted about doing the work: His new 1OAK contract requires him to appear eight times at the club in 2016. (...)
You may not think that hanging out in a nightclub four nights a week qualifies as work, but it does, at least as far as the IRS is concerned. “They have to go to the airport, get on a plane, go to the hotel, get ready,” says Sujit Kundu of SKAM Artist, a Los Angeles-based company that brokers club appearances for its celebrity clients. “Sometimes an hour-long club appearance can take two whole days.”
Somehow lots of people decide the excruciating toll is worth it. Not just reality-TV stars, but also DJs, rappers, Insta-famous models, fledgling socialites, and a select group of actors. Some of the club-appearance economy's biggest draws, like DJ/rapper/party personality Lil Jon, fall into a hazy, lucrative middle ground (appearing and briefly performing). Jon even works weekends. On one Saturday night in early December, he heads down from his suite at the Wynn in Las Vegas and strolls into Surrender, one of the casino's many nightclubs, where he takes his customary perch at a VIP table. He partied a little too hard last night, so he'll need a minute to morph into the Lil Jon who has been paid handsomely to be here tonight. He still hasn't taken off his sunglasses. Over the din, his road manager gestures to him with a bottle of tequila, doing a little Let's party dance. Jon smiles, brings his palms together, and holds them next to his face like a contented baby: I'm sleepy. No thanks.
I am here to watch Lil Jon do his job. His job is to party.
And yet the club-appearance gig is a giant knot in Disick's life that seems to only tangle and tighten like a noose. He began booking these appearances a few years back, presumably so he could gain some agency beyond the grip of Kris Jenner and have something to call his “job.” For a while, this was working out nicely for him. He was gaining enough notoriety thanks to Keeping Up with the Kardashians that his appearance fee rose to impressive numbers: He could pull $70,000 or $80,000 a night in the U.S. At one high point, he scored a $250,000 deal for a series of appearances in the UK.But in Disick's case, all that time spent in nightclubs exacerbated his already-problematic drinking and alleged drugging habits, which put him on shaky ground with his family. This made him come off like even more of a loser on the show, which in turn probably made him even more desperate for validation outside of the E! network. Hence, more club appearances, more bad behavior, more humiliation on national TV, more need for outside validation… This is the extended EDM remix of the song that never ends.
Eventually Disick's petulant shenanigans started to get old, and everyone realized that he was deeply troubled. And so the bad press has knocked his appearance fee down a notch. Although not so low that Disick is conflicted about doing the work: His new 1OAK contract requires him to appear eight times at the club in 2016. (...)
You may not think that hanging out in a nightclub four nights a week qualifies as work, but it does, at least as far as the IRS is concerned. “They have to go to the airport, get on a plane, go to the hotel, get ready,” says Sujit Kundu of SKAM Artist, a Los Angeles-based company that brokers club appearances for its celebrity clients. “Sometimes an hour-long club appearance can take two whole days.”
Somehow lots of people decide the excruciating toll is worth it. Not just reality-TV stars, but also DJs, rappers, Insta-famous models, fledgling socialites, and a select group of actors. Some of the club-appearance economy's biggest draws, like DJ/rapper/party personality Lil Jon, fall into a hazy, lucrative middle ground (appearing and briefly performing). Jon even works weekends. On one Saturday night in early December, he heads down from his suite at the Wynn in Las Vegas and strolls into Surrender, one of the casino's many nightclubs, where he takes his customary perch at a VIP table. He partied a little too hard last night, so he'll need a minute to morph into the Lil Jon who has been paid handsomely to be here tonight. He still hasn't taken off his sunglasses. Over the din, his road manager gestures to him with a bottle of tequila, doing a little Let's party dance. Jon smiles, brings his palms together, and holds them next to his face like a contented baby: I'm sleepy. No thanks.
I am here to watch Lil Jon do his job. His job is to party.
by Carrie Battan, GQ | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Millennials Are Being Dot.Conned by Cult-Like Tech Companies
Tech startups love millennials. Tasty, tasty millennials who get underpaid, overworked, churned up and turned into nourishment for venture capitalists. Millennials are the Soylent Green of the tech world.
As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books).
Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.” Today he’s a writer for HBO’s brilliant tech comedy “Silicon Valley,” but in between he blogged for a Boston tech company called HubSpot and wrote this book about it.
How worried was HubSpot about what secrets would emerge in the book? Very. At the company, three top execs were implicated in a scheme to suppress the book, which led to an FBI investigation of alleged extortion and email hacking. The FBI closed its investigation with no charges filed. But two lost their jobs and a third, the CEO, was reprimanded. In a press release, HubSpot said the personnel actions were taken “in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript of a book involving the company.”
HubSpot comes across as a kind of kindergarten cult that plies its young charges with parties, toys, naps, playtime — and not much pay. A huge chunk of potential compensation at tech startups comes in the form of stock options, which could turn out to be worth nothing but are certainly worth nothing if employees get so burned out that they leave before the options vest.
This is part of the plan. Tech firms basically operate like South African gold-mining operations, with confident young Tame Impala fans being the bodies thrown into the pit to break their backs digging up nuggets. All of the IPO gold, though, goes straight into the pockets of their masters topside. (...)
“HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes,” says Lyons, “but rather sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that has still never turned a profit.”
Inside HubSpot’s colorful offices — orange, the official color, is everywhere, as is the company logo, which to Lyons looks like a sprocket with three phalluses sticking out of it — fun is mandatory. Workers, many in shorts and flip-flops, are inordinately proud of the “candy wall” where they can fill up on free snacks. Dogs roam the halls. Occasionally, amid a slave-ship galley of workers hunched over laptops, a Nerf-ball war breaks out. Conference rooms contain beanbag chairs. (...)
Yet HubSpot and many similar tech startups have certainly found a winning formula: a handful of founders and venture capitalists get rich — HubSpot, after its 2014 IPO, sports a value of $1.5 billion — without making a dime in profit.
As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books).
Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.” Today he’s a writer for HBO’s brilliant tech comedy “Silicon Valley,” but in between he blogged for a Boston tech company called HubSpot and wrote this book about it.
How worried was HubSpot about what secrets would emerge in the book? Very. At the company, three top execs were implicated in a scheme to suppress the book, which led to an FBI investigation of alleged extortion and email hacking. The FBI closed its investigation with no charges filed. But two lost their jobs and a third, the CEO, was reprimanded. In a press release, HubSpot said the personnel actions were taken “in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript of a book involving the company.”HubSpot comes across as a kind of kindergarten cult that plies its young charges with parties, toys, naps, playtime — and not much pay. A huge chunk of potential compensation at tech startups comes in the form of stock options, which could turn out to be worth nothing but are certainly worth nothing if employees get so burned out that they leave before the options vest.
This is part of the plan. Tech firms basically operate like South African gold-mining operations, with confident young Tame Impala fans being the bodies thrown into the pit to break their backs digging up nuggets. All of the IPO gold, though, goes straight into the pockets of their masters topside. (...)
“HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes,” says Lyons, “but rather sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that has still never turned a profit.”
Inside HubSpot’s colorful offices — orange, the official color, is everywhere, as is the company logo, which to Lyons looks like a sprocket with three phalluses sticking out of it — fun is mandatory. Workers, many in shorts and flip-flops, are inordinately proud of the “candy wall” where they can fill up on free snacks. Dogs roam the halls. Occasionally, amid a slave-ship galley of workers hunched over laptops, a Nerf-ball war breaks out. Conference rooms contain beanbag chairs. (...)
Like the show “Silicon Valley,” “Disrupted” nails the workings of spastic, hypocritical, delusional tech culture, notably:
• Ridiculously grandiose claims. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Lyons was told in training. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives.”
An exec claims that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are jealous and that HubSpot has the best marketing team in the world. Lyons notes, “I’ve spent years covering Silicon Valley, and before coming to HubSpot I’d never heard of the company.” Cheerleaders inside the company keep calling its products “magical.”
The product, Lyons says, is a chunk of buggy marketing software for businesses that HubSpot has yet to turn a profit selling. “Our customers,” Lyons notes dryly, “include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers.”
Every month, he notes, HubSpot’s customers send out more than 1 billion email pitches. More spam = changing the world! Join the spamolution! At HubSpot conferences, attendees are taught tricks like using misleading subject lines in spam to trick people into opening the message — lines like, “fwd: your holiday plans.” (...)
• An all-pervading sinister air. Calling HubSpot a “startup cult” and comparing it to Scientology, Lyons notes that employees have to wear rubber bracelets containing transponders, which are needed to lock and unlock doors when moving around HQ. Which means, of course, that the Company is tracking you at all times. The Company also gives employees a lengthy, pseudoscientific, entirely scary-sounding personality test (devised by a crackpot whose claim to fame was creating the Wonder Woman comics). All of this sounds kinda like the bizarre questionnaire Scientologists take while grasping tin cans.
So eager are innocent young bunnies to comply with the unique language, rituals and culture of this happy-face corporate police state that “drinking the Kool-Aid,” while a trite phrase in Silicon Valley, is scarily apposite. “What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?” asks Lyons. “Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults.”
A 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that describes HubSpot culture (one slide says “team > individual”) describes “a kind of corporate utopia . . . where people don’t worry about work-life balance because work is their life.” No one, Lyons emphasizes, ever jokes about any of this stuff.
• Unyielding death-grip on childhood. The company’s chief technology officer announces he’s bringing a teddy bear to meetings and invites everyone else to do the same. On Halloween, everyone comes to work in a wacky costume so the company can do a group photo captioned, “We dare to be different.”
To convey the feeling that life means carrying on campus goofiness indefinitely, training sessions are held by “marketing professors” and “faculty” belong to “HubSpot Academy.” Beer taps are installed in the kitchen. The worst thing you can say is that “at my last company, we used to do it this way,” because that implies you’re a grownup with experience instead of a peppy little lamb seeing the world with fresh, dewy eyes.
After serving as technology editor for Newsweek, and with decades’ experience, Lyons finds his intern-age boss is a guy with only one previous job (an entry-level gig doing sales for Google). (...)
• Ridiculously grandiose claims. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Lyons was told in training. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives.”
An exec claims that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are jealous and that HubSpot has the best marketing team in the world. Lyons notes, “I’ve spent years covering Silicon Valley, and before coming to HubSpot I’d never heard of the company.” Cheerleaders inside the company keep calling its products “magical.”
The product, Lyons says, is a chunk of buggy marketing software for businesses that HubSpot has yet to turn a profit selling. “Our customers,” Lyons notes dryly, “include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers.”
Every month, he notes, HubSpot’s customers send out more than 1 billion email pitches. More spam = changing the world! Join the spamolution! At HubSpot conferences, attendees are taught tricks like using misleading subject lines in spam to trick people into opening the message — lines like, “fwd: your holiday plans.” (...)
• An all-pervading sinister air. Calling HubSpot a “startup cult” and comparing it to Scientology, Lyons notes that employees have to wear rubber bracelets containing transponders, which are needed to lock and unlock doors when moving around HQ. Which means, of course, that the Company is tracking you at all times. The Company also gives employees a lengthy, pseudoscientific, entirely scary-sounding personality test (devised by a crackpot whose claim to fame was creating the Wonder Woman comics). All of this sounds kinda like the bizarre questionnaire Scientologists take while grasping tin cans.
So eager are innocent young bunnies to comply with the unique language, rituals and culture of this happy-face corporate police state that “drinking the Kool-Aid,” while a trite phrase in Silicon Valley, is scarily apposite. “What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?” asks Lyons. “Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults.”
A 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that describes HubSpot culture (one slide says “team > individual”) describes “a kind of corporate utopia . . . where people don’t worry about work-life balance because work is their life.” No one, Lyons emphasizes, ever jokes about any of this stuff.
• Unyielding death-grip on childhood. The company’s chief technology officer announces he’s bringing a teddy bear to meetings and invites everyone else to do the same. On Halloween, everyone comes to work in a wacky costume so the company can do a group photo captioned, “We dare to be different.”
To convey the feeling that life means carrying on campus goofiness indefinitely, training sessions are held by “marketing professors” and “faculty” belong to “HubSpot Academy.” Beer taps are installed in the kitchen. The worst thing you can say is that “at my last company, we used to do it this way,” because that implies you’re a grownup with experience instead of a peppy little lamb seeing the world with fresh, dewy eyes.
After serving as technology editor for Newsweek, and with decades’ experience, Lyons finds his intern-age boss is a guy with only one previous job (an entry-level gig doing sales for Google). (...)
Yet HubSpot and many similar tech startups have certainly found a winning formula: a handful of founders and venture capitalists get rich — HubSpot, after its 2014 IPO, sports a value of $1.5 billion — without making a dime in profit.
by Kyle Smith, NY Post | Read more:
Image: Getty
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” – Albert Camus
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