Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Monday, July 11, 2016
Nobody Says I Love You Anymore
I’ve spent my life complaining and arguing and telling stories about the city I came from. Then I changed—but it did, too.
When I moved from Manhattan back to my hometown of Dallas last June, people asked the same question: “Why?”
I was accustomed to New Yorkers taking broad swipes at my home state, but I was surprised to get the question from people in Dallas, too.
“You’ve moved back!” an acquaintance said when I ran into him at a party. “I’m sorry about that.”
Perhaps his assumption was that I had flamed out in the Big Apple—and in a way, I had. I was bone-tired by the time I boarded that plane from LaGuardia with my orange cat. Six years of crowded subways and jackhammers and fourth-floor walkups had ground me down to a bitter nub. But I suspected my friend was not teasing me for escaping the big city; he was teasing me for drag-assing back to the place I came from. He was taking a swing at Dallas, which I recognized because, well, I used to do it all the time.
Growing up, I did not like Dallas. To be fair, I did not like growing up, period, and I suspect that whatever city in which my adolescence unfolded would have taken the blame. My family rented a sweet, shabby little home in a privileged section of town, known for its excellent school system and status cars, and my most vivid memory of being 11 and 12 is simply the feeling of not belonging. That’s as unique as braces and bad skin among this age group, but the fact that I could not afford a $300 Louis Vuitton handbag or that my parents drove a dented silver station wagon felt like the worst thing that had happened to anyone, ever.
Going to college in Austin sharpened my knives. Every great city has a nemesis, a place against which they define themselves—New York refuses to be Jersey, San Franciscans despise Los Angeles—and in Austin, a city so hell-bent on quirkiness that it elevated a cross-dressing homeless man to the status of cult hero, the general consensus is that Dallas blows. (“Keep Austin weird,” the slogan says, to which there is also a response T-shirt, “Keep Dallas lame.”) This was back in the early ’90s, when the fault lines between the two cities were far easier to demarcate. Austin was the town of “Slacker,” a bohemian paradise for pot smokers and amateur philosophers, and Dallas was the birthplace of the outdoor mall. I began to embrace torn jeans and a natural curl in my hair. I stopped waking at 7:30 a.m. to do my makeup before class. It was a rite of passage for a college girl at that time to crank Tori Amos and give Banana Republic the double-fisted flip-off, but I understood this shift in stark geographic terms: Dallas was conformity, Austin was freedom.
Those storylines were so cemented in my mind that it jarred me when anyone disrupted them. I was visiting New York in my mid-20s when I met an editor who worked for the most impressive newspaper there is. When I found out he once wrote in Dallas, I offered my condolences.
“Actually, I loved living there,” he said.
Oof. How could someone so smart be so dumb? “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” I said. We left that conversation each feeling a little sorry for the other person.
At the time, I was traveling around the country in my Honda, enjoying the hit of admiration I got from strangers when I told them so. I had pried myself out of Austin, and was casting about for my next home, which I assumed would be a place like Portland or Oakland or Brooklyn. I never liked telling people I was from Dallas. They asked about the television show, or stared blankly and said something like, “Fun!” (Meanwhile, saying I lived in Austin elicited envy and cooing sounds. “That town is great!” people said, though they often had not been.) I had long phone conversations with my mom on the road, and she said, in that gentle voice reserved for mothers, “What about moving back to Dallas?”
No way. Absolutely not. What is the opposite of yes? That is my answer. A thousand-billion times no.
The knee-jerking was a little extreme. But when you construct your meaning from things outside of you—the cool job you have, the music and the movies you enjoy, the vintage brush of the funky corduroys you wear—then you are bound to live in cities on the Approved List, which Dallas certainly was not. If you had asked me what was so terrible about the place, I would have sneered that it was an image-based society. But the funny thing is that I was totally image-based at that time. I needed your admiration. I needed your approval. The image I wanted to project just had little to do with Mercedes-Benz and Neiman-Marcus and more to do with knowing the bands at SXSW.
But in a twist I did not see coming, I went to my 10-year high school reunion the following month, fell in love with a guy, and moved back to Dallas. So much for all that.
I complained about Dallas in those years, and it was a problem. No one wants to hear that the city they live in—the city they feel comfortable in and fairly thrive in and a city they have no desire to leave—is somehow inferior.
“I was thinking you might like San Francisco,” I said one night at dinner.
“Hmm.”
And that was pretty much the entire conversation. Well, there were tears (mine) and sighs (his) and dissatisfaction on both parts. I don’t feel proud that the subtext to many conversations he and I had during that time was that I wanted to get the hell out of Dallas. But in the two years I spent casting aspersions on the city, something unexpected happened: I came to really love it. At least, I really loved the people, who were funny and smart and bent in all the right ways, and loving the people in a city is a very, very short walk from loving the city itself. When my boyfriend and I broke up, and I decided to move to New York, no one was surprised. But I was taken aback by the pangs of remorse I felt leaving the cozy dive bars where I spent most nights and the ramshackle Tex-Mex restaurants where I’d nursed every hangover. I drove out of town in an old hatchback wearing one of those baby-Ts you buy at airport gift stores. It said “Dallas” in a cheesy, cursive font. It was so tacky. It was so fantastic.
It’s funny how living far away from a place can make you feel closer to it. Friends who moved to New York decorated their home in Texas kitsch we would have laughed at back home. Longhorn coat racks, cowboy hats on the mantelpiece. My keychain was a medallion in the shape of the state that doubled as a bottle opener, which is everything you need to know about me at this time. (...)
I never wanted to be one of “those people”—the ones who talk about New York all the time, who compare every single experience to Manhattan (like you care), who complain about the G train or the square footage of their studio apartment or tell war stories about the Whole Foods in Union Square. And I would like it on record that after moving back to Dallas, I was totally this person, and I know that, and I’m sorry.
When I moved from Manhattan back to my hometown of Dallas last June, people asked the same question: “Why?”
I was accustomed to New Yorkers taking broad swipes at my home state, but I was surprised to get the question from people in Dallas, too.“You’ve moved back!” an acquaintance said when I ran into him at a party. “I’m sorry about that.”
Perhaps his assumption was that I had flamed out in the Big Apple—and in a way, I had. I was bone-tired by the time I boarded that plane from LaGuardia with my orange cat. Six years of crowded subways and jackhammers and fourth-floor walkups had ground me down to a bitter nub. But I suspected my friend was not teasing me for escaping the big city; he was teasing me for drag-assing back to the place I came from. He was taking a swing at Dallas, which I recognized because, well, I used to do it all the time.
Growing up, I did not like Dallas. To be fair, I did not like growing up, period, and I suspect that whatever city in which my adolescence unfolded would have taken the blame. My family rented a sweet, shabby little home in a privileged section of town, known for its excellent school system and status cars, and my most vivid memory of being 11 and 12 is simply the feeling of not belonging. That’s as unique as braces and bad skin among this age group, but the fact that I could not afford a $300 Louis Vuitton handbag or that my parents drove a dented silver station wagon felt like the worst thing that had happened to anyone, ever.
Going to college in Austin sharpened my knives. Every great city has a nemesis, a place against which they define themselves—New York refuses to be Jersey, San Franciscans despise Los Angeles—and in Austin, a city so hell-bent on quirkiness that it elevated a cross-dressing homeless man to the status of cult hero, the general consensus is that Dallas blows. (“Keep Austin weird,” the slogan says, to which there is also a response T-shirt, “Keep Dallas lame.”) This was back in the early ’90s, when the fault lines between the two cities were far easier to demarcate. Austin was the town of “Slacker,” a bohemian paradise for pot smokers and amateur philosophers, and Dallas was the birthplace of the outdoor mall. I began to embrace torn jeans and a natural curl in my hair. I stopped waking at 7:30 a.m. to do my makeup before class. It was a rite of passage for a college girl at that time to crank Tori Amos and give Banana Republic the double-fisted flip-off, but I understood this shift in stark geographic terms: Dallas was conformity, Austin was freedom.
Those storylines were so cemented in my mind that it jarred me when anyone disrupted them. I was visiting New York in my mid-20s when I met an editor who worked for the most impressive newspaper there is. When I found out he once wrote in Dallas, I offered my condolences.
“Actually, I loved living there,” he said.
Oof. How could someone so smart be so dumb? “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” I said. We left that conversation each feeling a little sorry for the other person.
At the time, I was traveling around the country in my Honda, enjoying the hit of admiration I got from strangers when I told them so. I had pried myself out of Austin, and was casting about for my next home, which I assumed would be a place like Portland or Oakland or Brooklyn. I never liked telling people I was from Dallas. They asked about the television show, or stared blankly and said something like, “Fun!” (Meanwhile, saying I lived in Austin elicited envy and cooing sounds. “That town is great!” people said, though they often had not been.) I had long phone conversations with my mom on the road, and she said, in that gentle voice reserved for mothers, “What about moving back to Dallas?”
No way. Absolutely not. What is the opposite of yes? That is my answer. A thousand-billion times no.
The knee-jerking was a little extreme. But when you construct your meaning from things outside of you—the cool job you have, the music and the movies you enjoy, the vintage brush of the funky corduroys you wear—then you are bound to live in cities on the Approved List, which Dallas certainly was not. If you had asked me what was so terrible about the place, I would have sneered that it was an image-based society. But the funny thing is that I was totally image-based at that time. I needed your admiration. I needed your approval. The image I wanted to project just had little to do with Mercedes-Benz and Neiman-Marcus and more to do with knowing the bands at SXSW.
But in a twist I did not see coming, I went to my 10-year high school reunion the following month, fell in love with a guy, and moved back to Dallas. So much for all that.
I complained about Dallas in those years, and it was a problem. No one wants to hear that the city they live in—the city they feel comfortable in and fairly thrive in and a city they have no desire to leave—is somehow inferior.
“I was thinking you might like San Francisco,” I said one night at dinner.
“Hmm.”
And that was pretty much the entire conversation. Well, there were tears (mine) and sighs (his) and dissatisfaction on both parts. I don’t feel proud that the subtext to many conversations he and I had during that time was that I wanted to get the hell out of Dallas. But in the two years I spent casting aspersions on the city, something unexpected happened: I came to really love it. At least, I really loved the people, who were funny and smart and bent in all the right ways, and loving the people in a city is a very, very short walk from loving the city itself. When my boyfriend and I broke up, and I decided to move to New York, no one was surprised. But I was taken aback by the pangs of remorse I felt leaving the cozy dive bars where I spent most nights and the ramshackle Tex-Mex restaurants where I’d nursed every hangover. I drove out of town in an old hatchback wearing one of those baby-Ts you buy at airport gift stores. It said “Dallas” in a cheesy, cursive font. It was so tacky. It was so fantastic.
It’s funny how living far away from a place can make you feel closer to it. Friends who moved to New York decorated their home in Texas kitsch we would have laughed at back home. Longhorn coat racks, cowboy hats on the mantelpiece. My keychain was a medallion in the shape of the state that doubled as a bottle opener, which is everything you need to know about me at this time. (...)
I never wanted to be one of “those people”—the ones who talk about New York all the time, who compare every single experience to Manhattan (like you care), who complain about the G train or the square footage of their studio apartment or tell war stories about the Whole Foods in Union Square. And I would like it on record that after moving back to Dallas, I was totally this person, and I know that, and I’m sorry.
by Sarah Hepola, TMN | Read more:
Image: Gwendolyn Zabicki, Billboards, 2011
Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless
Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.
Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.
Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and AndrĂ© Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.” (...)
The wellbeing ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”
The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.
Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:
Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and AndrĂ© Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.” (...)
The wellbeing ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”
The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.
Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:
The biggest barrier to achieving the success you have defined for your life is never anyone else or the circumstances you encounter. Your biggest barrier is almost always you. . . . Dr Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics [ETA: sounds legit to me!], put it best when he said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can change your beliefs.This, of course, is a cyclopean lie—but it’s a seductive one nonetheless. It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of wellbeing and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.
by Laurie Penny, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Joanna Slodownik
Sunday, July 10, 2016
How Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them
The first image you see when you play the video is the face of a black woman. She is sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle. Then the camera turns to a black male in the driver’s seat, leaned over, eyes half-closed, T-shirt slick with blood.
The woman, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, is narrating the shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minn. Her 4-year-old daughter is in the back seat. A police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, stands outside, pistol drawn and aimed through the driver’s-side window, yelling obscenities.
“The police,” the woman says calmly, “they killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”
“Ma’am, keep your hands on the wheel!” the officer shrieks.
“I will, sir,” Reynolds reassures the officer. “No worries, I will.”
Castile is drawing his last breaths. Sickeningly, none of this feels jarring or unfamiliar. The true horror of the video is that there is a video at all, that Reynolds knows just what to do.
“I told him not to reach for it!” the officer shrieks.
“You told him to get his ID, sir,” Reynolds softly corrects. It isn’t until she’s handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser that she finally breaks down and sobs.
In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.
In a vacuum, the United States of America is not a war zone. Falcon Heights, Minn., is not a war zone. Dallas is not a war zone. The nation’s thruways are not war zones. In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force. You can see their training at work when an officer fires into a car with a 4-year-old child in it. You can see it when Reynolds is directed to get out of the car, lift her hands over her head and walk backward toward a group of officers: Her camera glimpses several guns aimed squarely at her back.
All of this is so routine, so imprinted through repetition, that despite Yanez’s panic, he was still drilled enough to keep his gun trained on a dying man. But Reynolds recognized a routine, too, and her actions showed how, just as in any war zone, the local population will eventually become trained as well.
“No worries.” Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.
The woman, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, is narrating the shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minn. Her 4-year-old daughter is in the back seat. A police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, stands outside, pistol drawn and aimed through the driver’s-side window, yelling obscenities.
“The police,” the woman says calmly, “they killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”“Ma’am, keep your hands on the wheel!” the officer shrieks.
“I will, sir,” Reynolds reassures the officer. “No worries, I will.”
Castile is drawing his last breaths. Sickeningly, none of this feels jarring or unfamiliar. The true horror of the video is that there is a video at all, that Reynolds knows just what to do.
“I told him not to reach for it!” the officer shrieks.
“You told him to get his ID, sir,” Reynolds softly corrects. It isn’t until she’s handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser that she finally breaks down and sobs.
In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.
In a vacuum, the United States of America is not a war zone. Falcon Heights, Minn., is not a war zone. Dallas is not a war zone. The nation’s thruways are not war zones. In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force. You can see their training at work when an officer fires into a car with a 4-year-old child in it. You can see it when Reynolds is directed to get out of the car, lift her hands over her head and walk backward toward a group of officers: Her camera glimpses several guns aimed squarely at her back.
All of this is so routine, so imprinted through repetition, that despite Yanez’s panic, he was still drilled enough to keep his gun trained on a dying man. But Reynolds recognized a routine, too, and her actions showed how, just as in any war zone, the local population will eventually become trained as well.
“No worries.” Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.
by Greg Howard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Yana Paskova/Getty Images
What Media Companies Don’t Want You To Know About Ad Blockers
New York Times CEO Mark Thompson caused a minor stir a couple weeks ago when he gave a speech at an advertising conference declaring that “No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it.” He went on to say that while the Times is “not there yet,” the company may soon prevent users with ad blockers from accessing its site.
But newspaper executives like Thompson often focus exclusively on the drawbacks of ad blockers, leaving a big part of the story untold. Thompson did not say one word in his keynote address about the significant security benefits of ad blockers, which is ironic, because his paper was one of several news organizations that served its users ransomware—a particularly vicious form of malware that encrypts the contents of your computer and forces you to pay the perpetrators a ransom in bitcoin to unlock it—through its ad networks just a few months ago. Several major news sites—including the Times, the BBC, and AOL—had their ad networks hijacked by criminal hackers who attempted to install ransomware on readers’ computers.
Advertising networks have served malware onto the computers of unwitting news readers over and over in the past couple years. Ads on Forbes, for example, attacked their readers in January, right after the magazine forced readers to disable ad-blocking software to view its popular annual “30 Under 30” feature. As Engadget reported, “visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.” It wasn’t the first time this had happened at Forbes, either. And it’s not just in the US. A couple months ago, almost every major news site in the Netherlands served malware through its ads to its users.
You can bet this problem is only going to get worse. According to a 2015 study, malware served by advertising networks tripled between June 2015 and February 2015. So the longer people wait to install an ad blocker, the more vulnerable they become.
Even when malware infection is not a problem, advertisers’ pervasive tracking of users on news organization websites is really disturbing to any reader who cares about privacy. One Princeton study that looked at a million websites found that news sites were the most likely to feature trackers—even more than porn sites. The nonprofit research groupCitizen Lab surveyed the top 100 news sites last year and found that many had dozens of trackers running on their website, allowing advertisers to spy on visitors’ every move. Worse, most of the trackers were using unencrypted connections, which means malicious actors could more easily track users’ online movements, as well.
This isn’t just conjecture: The Washington Post revealed in 2013 that the NSA “is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using ‘cookies’ and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.”Edward Snowden himself recently said: “If the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response.”
by Trevor Timm, CJR | Read more:
But newspaper executives like Thompson often focus exclusively on the drawbacks of ad blockers, leaving a big part of the story untold. Thompson did not say one word in his keynote address about the significant security benefits of ad blockers, which is ironic, because his paper was one of several news organizations that served its users ransomware—a particularly vicious form of malware that encrypts the contents of your computer and forces you to pay the perpetrators a ransom in bitcoin to unlock it—through its ad networks just a few months ago. Several major news sites—including the Times, the BBC, and AOL—had their ad networks hijacked by criminal hackers who attempted to install ransomware on readers’ computers.
Advertising networks have served malware onto the computers of unwitting news readers over and over in the past couple years. Ads on Forbes, for example, attacked their readers in January, right after the magazine forced readers to disable ad-blocking software to view its popular annual “30 Under 30” feature. As Engadget reported, “visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.” It wasn’t the first time this had happened at Forbes, either. And it’s not just in the US. A couple months ago, almost every major news site in the Netherlands served malware through its ads to its users. You can bet this problem is only going to get worse. According to a 2015 study, malware served by advertising networks tripled between June 2015 and February 2015. So the longer people wait to install an ad blocker, the more vulnerable they become.
Even when malware infection is not a problem, advertisers’ pervasive tracking of users on news organization websites is really disturbing to any reader who cares about privacy. One Princeton study that looked at a million websites found that news sites were the most likely to feature trackers—even more than porn sites. The nonprofit research groupCitizen Lab surveyed the top 100 news sites last year and found that many had dozens of trackers running on their website, allowing advertisers to spy on visitors’ every move. Worse, most of the trackers were using unencrypted connections, which means malicious actors could more easily track users’ online movements, as well.
This isn’t just conjecture: The Washington Post revealed in 2013 that the NSA “is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using ‘cookies’ and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.”Edward Snowden himself recently said: “If the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response.”
by Trevor Timm, CJR | Read more:
Image: Citizen Lab
Topgolf: New Approach to the Driving Range
The creators of a new kind of driving range are betting that loud music, tons of booze, and an addictive point system will make golf cool again
On a warm, clear Sunday afternoon last April, Atlanta Hawks swing man Kent Bazemore stepped up to a turf-covered platform brandishing a five-iron. With Pitbull blaring in the background, Bazemore set his feet and purposefully unwound his six-foot-five frame to send a perfect shot downrange. “Best ball of the day,” he said, stepping back to admire the arc as it dropped, nearly 200 yards away, into a 15-foot-wide, spider-web-shaped target. As groups of golfers on either side of him plowed through pitchers of beer, a nearby screen flashed congratulations and awarded Bazemore nine points.
Clearly, this is not your grandfather’s good walk spoiled—it’s the Midtown Atlanta site of Topgolf, which has 23 locations across the country. The company transported the driving range into a three-story building, ditched the dress code, and added free-flowing drinks, hundreds of TVs, and pounding music.
Topgolf was invented in 2000 in England by twin brothers Steve and Dave Jolliffe, who were bored stiff with the usual bucket-of-balls approach to perfecting their golf swing. So they created an experience that was more like a video game. They equipped the balls with electronic tags, similar to a marathoner’s timing chip, and devised a point system based on shot distance and accuracy. When the ball hits one of the targets on the 215-yard range, sensors scan it and the score is added to a running tally.
The company opened its first U.S. location in Virginia in 2005 and has since brought on investors including Callaway. Topgolf has done something that traditional golf, as Topgolf employees call it, has struggled to do: attract new players, particularly young ones. This year’s Tiger-less Masters saw an 11 percent decline in final-round TV viewership, and according to the National Golf Foundation, course closures have outpaced openings for eight years running. Despite the ascendance of fresh faces like Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, the game is especially unpopular with young people—participation by those between 18 and 30 has declined 35 percent since 2006.
Of the 13 million people expected to visit Topgolf this year, more than two-thirds are under 35, according to company statistics. Half have never played before. The other half aren’t your typical white country clubbers, either. Though the company doesn’t track such data, the visitors I saw were more racially diverse and included more women than the local links. It’s not hard to see why: with greens fees at some courses reaching well over $100 per person for 18 holes, traditional golf is expensive and stuffy. Topgolf costs between $20 and $40 an hour for your entire group, and on Fridays and Saturdays the place is usually packed late into the night. (It’s open until 2 A.M. on weekends.)
On a warm, clear Sunday afternoon last April, Atlanta Hawks swing man Kent Bazemore stepped up to a turf-covered platform brandishing a five-iron. With Pitbull blaring in the background, Bazemore set his feet and purposefully unwound his six-foot-five frame to send a perfect shot downrange. “Best ball of the day,” he said, stepping back to admire the arc as it dropped, nearly 200 yards away, into a 15-foot-wide, spider-web-shaped target. As groups of golfers on either side of him plowed through pitchers of beer, a nearby screen flashed congratulations and awarded Bazemore nine points.
Clearly, this is not your grandfather’s good walk spoiled—it’s the Midtown Atlanta site of Topgolf, which has 23 locations across the country. The company transported the driving range into a three-story building, ditched the dress code, and added free-flowing drinks, hundreds of TVs, and pounding music.Topgolf was invented in 2000 in England by twin brothers Steve and Dave Jolliffe, who were bored stiff with the usual bucket-of-balls approach to perfecting their golf swing. So they created an experience that was more like a video game. They equipped the balls with electronic tags, similar to a marathoner’s timing chip, and devised a point system based on shot distance and accuracy. When the ball hits one of the targets on the 215-yard range, sensors scan it and the score is added to a running tally.
The company opened its first U.S. location in Virginia in 2005 and has since brought on investors including Callaway. Topgolf has done something that traditional golf, as Topgolf employees call it, has struggled to do: attract new players, particularly young ones. This year’s Tiger-less Masters saw an 11 percent decline in final-round TV viewership, and according to the National Golf Foundation, course closures have outpaced openings for eight years running. Despite the ascendance of fresh faces like Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, the game is especially unpopular with young people—participation by those between 18 and 30 has declined 35 percent since 2006.
Of the 13 million people expected to visit Topgolf this year, more than two-thirds are under 35, according to company statistics. Half have never played before. The other half aren’t your typical white country clubbers, either. Though the company doesn’t track such data, the visitors I saw were more racially diverse and included more women than the local links. It’s not hard to see why: with greens fees at some courses reaching well over $100 per person for 18 holes, traditional golf is expensive and stuffy. Topgolf costs between $20 and $40 an hour for your entire group, and on Fridays and Saturdays the place is usually packed late into the night. (It’s open until 2 A.M. on weekends.)
by Chris Cohen, Outside | Read more:
Image: Melissa Golden
Friday, July 8, 2016
Would Donald Trump Quit if He Wins the Election? He Doesn’t Rule It Out
[ed. Remember folks, you heard it here first: The Greatest Politician to Never Hold Public Office]
The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.
Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.
Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.
“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race.
Early in the contest, his rivals, Republican operatives and many reporters questioned the seriousness of his candidacy. His knack for creating controversy out of thin air (this week’s edition: the Star of David Twitter post) and his inclination toward self-destructive comments did not instill confidence in a political culture that values on-message discipline in its candidates.
Those doubts dissipated after Mr. Trump vanquished his Republican opponents and locked up the nomination.
“I’ve actually done very well,” Mr. Trump said. “We beat 18 people, right?”
But as the race has turned toward the general election and a majority of polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton, speculation has again crept into political conversations in Washington, New York and elsewhere that Mr. Trump will seek an exit strategy before the election to avoid a humiliating loss.
Now he is refusing to rule out an even more dramatic departure, one that would let him avoid the grueling job of governing, return to his business and enjoy his now-permanent status as a news media celebrity.
The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.
Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.
Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.
“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race.
Early in the contest, his rivals, Republican operatives and many reporters questioned the seriousness of his candidacy. His knack for creating controversy out of thin air (this week’s edition: the Star of David Twitter post) and his inclination toward self-destructive comments did not instill confidence in a political culture that values on-message discipline in its candidates.
Those doubts dissipated after Mr. Trump vanquished his Republican opponents and locked up the nomination.
“I’ve actually done very well,” Mr. Trump said. “We beat 18 people, right?”
But as the race has turned toward the general election and a majority of polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton, speculation has again crept into political conversations in Washington, New York and elsewhere that Mr. Trump will seek an exit strategy before the election to avoid a humiliating loss.
Now he is refusing to rule out an even more dramatic departure, one that would let him avoid the grueling job of governing, return to his business and enjoy his now-permanent status as a news media celebrity.
by Jason Horowitz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ty Wright for The New York Times
Thursday, July 7, 2016
My Little Free Library War
Saturday mornings unsettle me. Especially when the weather’s good. There’s a lively farmers’ market just down the street from us, with a bluegrass band, homemade donuts and vegan tamales. It’s great, if you’re into that sort of thing.
But it means floods of the worst kind of foot traffic. Graying gardeners and aging hippies; Bernie-or-Bust types; millennial parents, tatted and pierced, shepherding toddlers with names like Arya — damn near every one of whom stops to check out my Little Free Library.
And after paying $18 for an heirloom tomato and a pair of zucchini, you can’t blame a person for grabbing a free book. Indeed, this kind of neighborly interaction was exactly what my wife Heidi was hoping for when she got me the library for Hanukkah. Heidi’s the sunny and optimistic type, yin to my cranky yang, which made her an easy mark for the Little Free Library Foundation and its stated mission of promoting “the love of reading and to build a sense of community.”
She and the kids did it up right, painting ours lilac to match the color of our Victorian house. The library makes a striking contrast with the verdant green that blankets our block in the spring. But idyllic as that sounds, when the marketeers, wagons in tow, stop to fiddle with the latch and peer inside, all I feel is dread.
Little Free Library originated in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009, when Todd Bol built a wooden box with a glass door, modeled on a one-room schoolhouse, in honor of his mother’s career as an educator. He nailed the box to a post in his front yard and stuffed it with books. The idea spread and in 2012 Little Free Library incorporated as a non-profit. By January of 2016, there were at least 36,000 Little Free Libraries across the globe.
They seem particularly popular in our town, Oak Park, a progressive suburb just west of Chicago. We’re a bookish community with a thriving independent bookstore, a showpiece library and a proud literary heritage that includes Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Hamilton and Ernest Hemingway.
It’s easy to see why Heidi imagined a Little Free Library would be a great gift for me. I’ve always enjoyed checking out other people’s books. Partly this is a party survival strategy. My misanthropy is such that at social gatherings I like to take a respite from small talk to peruse people’s bookshelves and CD cases, which gives me an excuse to turn my back on literally everybody. Sadly Spotify and Kindle have eliminated most of these analog escape hatches. But I’m still genuinely interested in what other people read. So the idea of curating my own selection was immensely appealing. I’m a history teacher and I dabble as a children’s literature critic, so, if I’m being honest, I flatter myself on my taste in books.
Heidi is even more of a book snob than I am. She’s from the librophile equivalent of old money — her late, beloved father Bill was an antiquarian and her childhood home brims with 18th century atlases and first editions of U.S. Grant’s memoirs. So we both turned up our noses at the castoff books that came bundled and shrink-wrapped with our purchase (an oddly eclectic group which included “Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images” and a set of Disney princess-themed board books). As Heidi put it, in what proved to be a wildly optimistic sentiment, “We’re better than that.”
Since our book collection had long outgrown our shelf space, it was easy to find the first offerings for our library. Our bookshelves, end tables and nightstands were stacked with medium-brow novels, chapter books that our kids had outgrown and, my guilty pleasure, Nordic-noir fiction.
I quickly took to the daily ritual of inventorying our stock to see what had gone into circulation. It was fun to see what sorts of title moved and which got passed over. But as the stacks on the nightstand shrank, a realization dawned on me. We were gonna run out of books. The math was daunting. Even before the spring strolling season had begun, we were losing two to three books a day. With warmer weather and the farmers’ market ahead of us, we could expect to bleed a thousand books a year.
Little Free Library has a seductive marketing slogan that’s carved into the top of every unit: “Take a Book; Return a Book.” Such a simple equation. And such wishful thinking. Take? Oh, absolutely. People are, in fact, really good at that part. For example there was the young mom who lifted her toddler up to the box, watching uncritically as he scooped up “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie’s collection of criticism and essays. Which I’m sure he enjoyed.
When it comes to returning, people mean well. For example, I don’t doubt the sincerity of that young mom when she told her greedy little urchin, “We have to remember to come back soon and give them some books.” The problem is that, to borrow my favorite report card phrase, remembering, for most people, “remains an area of growth.” It’s not that I blame my (mooching) neighbors. Indeed, I, myself, seldom return books to the public library on time. And they fine you if you don’t. But since I don’t punish people (unless you count silent, withering judgment), I’ve got no leverage. The truth is laziness is just part of human nature. It’s what separates us from the beavers.
But the lesson was clear. I wasn’t running a library. Libraries are built around the idea of circulation. And circulation implies a circle. What I had, aside from the contributions of a few kind neighbors on my block, was a one-way street of literary handouts. So it wasn’t long before I concluded that if I was going to stay in business, I had to reduce the outgoing volume.
Luckily I had an ace in the hole.
But it means floods of the worst kind of foot traffic. Graying gardeners and aging hippies; Bernie-or-Bust types; millennial parents, tatted and pierced, shepherding toddlers with names like Arya — damn near every one of whom stops to check out my Little Free Library.
And after paying $18 for an heirloom tomato and a pair of zucchini, you can’t blame a person for grabbing a free book. Indeed, this kind of neighborly interaction was exactly what my wife Heidi was hoping for when she got me the library for Hanukkah. Heidi’s the sunny and optimistic type, yin to my cranky yang, which made her an easy mark for the Little Free Library Foundation and its stated mission of promoting “the love of reading and to build a sense of community.”She and the kids did it up right, painting ours lilac to match the color of our Victorian house. The library makes a striking contrast with the verdant green that blankets our block in the spring. But idyllic as that sounds, when the marketeers, wagons in tow, stop to fiddle with the latch and peer inside, all I feel is dread.
Little Free Library originated in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009, when Todd Bol built a wooden box with a glass door, modeled on a one-room schoolhouse, in honor of his mother’s career as an educator. He nailed the box to a post in his front yard and stuffed it with books. The idea spread and in 2012 Little Free Library incorporated as a non-profit. By January of 2016, there were at least 36,000 Little Free Libraries across the globe.
They seem particularly popular in our town, Oak Park, a progressive suburb just west of Chicago. We’re a bookish community with a thriving independent bookstore, a showpiece library and a proud literary heritage that includes Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Hamilton and Ernest Hemingway.
It’s easy to see why Heidi imagined a Little Free Library would be a great gift for me. I’ve always enjoyed checking out other people’s books. Partly this is a party survival strategy. My misanthropy is such that at social gatherings I like to take a respite from small talk to peruse people’s bookshelves and CD cases, which gives me an excuse to turn my back on literally everybody. Sadly Spotify and Kindle have eliminated most of these analog escape hatches. But I’m still genuinely interested in what other people read. So the idea of curating my own selection was immensely appealing. I’m a history teacher and I dabble as a children’s literature critic, so, if I’m being honest, I flatter myself on my taste in books.
Heidi is even more of a book snob than I am. She’s from the librophile equivalent of old money — her late, beloved father Bill was an antiquarian and her childhood home brims with 18th century atlases and first editions of U.S. Grant’s memoirs. So we both turned up our noses at the castoff books that came bundled and shrink-wrapped with our purchase (an oddly eclectic group which included “Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images” and a set of Disney princess-themed board books). As Heidi put it, in what proved to be a wildly optimistic sentiment, “We’re better than that.”
Since our book collection had long outgrown our shelf space, it was easy to find the first offerings for our library. Our bookshelves, end tables and nightstands were stacked with medium-brow novels, chapter books that our kids had outgrown and, my guilty pleasure, Nordic-noir fiction.
I quickly took to the daily ritual of inventorying our stock to see what had gone into circulation. It was fun to see what sorts of title moved and which got passed over. But as the stacks on the nightstand shrank, a realization dawned on me. We were gonna run out of books. The math was daunting. Even before the spring strolling season had begun, we were losing two to three books a day. With warmer weather and the farmers’ market ahead of us, we could expect to bleed a thousand books a year.
Little Free Library has a seductive marketing slogan that’s carved into the top of every unit: “Take a Book; Return a Book.” Such a simple equation. And such wishful thinking. Take? Oh, absolutely. People are, in fact, really good at that part. For example there was the young mom who lifted her toddler up to the box, watching uncritically as he scooped up “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie’s collection of criticism and essays. Which I’m sure he enjoyed.
When it comes to returning, people mean well. For example, I don’t doubt the sincerity of that young mom when she told her greedy little urchin, “We have to remember to come back soon and give them some books.” The problem is that, to borrow my favorite report card phrase, remembering, for most people, “remains an area of growth.” It’s not that I blame my (mooching) neighbors. Indeed, I, myself, seldom return books to the public library on time. And they fine you if you don’t. But since I don’t punish people (unless you count silent, withering judgment), I’ve got no leverage. The truth is laziness is just part of human nature. It’s what separates us from the beavers.
But the lesson was clear. I wasn’t running a library. Libraries are built around the idea of circulation. And circulation implies a circle. What I had, aside from the contributions of a few kind neighbors on my block, was a one-way street of literary handouts. So it wasn’t long before I concluded that if I was going to stay in business, I had to reduce the outgoing volume.
Luckily I had an ace in the hole.
by Dan Greenstone, Salon | Read more:
Image: Jim Mone/AP
Will the Internet Make Most Languages Go Extinct?
If you ever find yourself at an Internet cafe in the Middle East, you may be surprised to find that you can read the letters on people’s screens—even if you don’t know Arabic.
It’s not just that many young people write in English. It’s that they often text and email in Arabic using latin characters. Rather than write مبروك, which means congratulations, they’ll write “mabrook.” They simply transliterate every word, writing Arabic in the same alphabet that English uses. Many shop signs in capital cities like Cairo and Amman do the same.
Observing this while living in Cairo, this author wondered whether the use of Arabic script would decline, like cursive writing in the United States.
A number of nonprofits and scholars are devoted to studying and protecting the world’s linguistic diversity. They focus on languages with dwindling numbers of native speakers, and try to preserve a record of tongues that die out.
The case of Arabic teenagers texting with the latin alphabet, however, raises another question. How many languages do we use on our computers and phones? And how many fail to enter the digital age?
In 2013, AndrĂ¡s Kornai, a Hungarian “mathematical linguist,” published a research paper on this topic. His research found that the digital future of Arabic is secure. But thousands of other languages may never make the leap into the digital age.
A full 96% of the world’s 6,000+ languages appear to be dead when it comes to use on cell phones, laptops, and tablets, meaning that the Internet could be to languages what a certain comet was to the dinosaurs.
How Languages Evolve—and Die
The term “evolution” is used to describe the changes to everything from football teams to presidencies. But when academics describe the evolution of languages, they literally mean that languages parent distinct offshoots, compete for usage, and die out like biological organisms.
For this reason, UNESCO maintains an atlas of endangered and extinct languages that resembles the Endangered Species List. If only grandparents speak a language, it is severely or critically endangered. If there are no speakers of a language left alive, it is considered extinct.
The fate of an extinct language is distinct from the fate of latin and Ancient Greek—languages that evolved into languages people speak today. An extinct language is a dead end, like the dodo. And just as environmentalists try to protect the endangered burrowing owl, linguists work with speakers of endangered languages by documenting their languages, training language teachers, and helping to create teaching materials in their languages.
Linguists who study endangered languages have identified a few early warning signs. One is when a prominent language like English or French replaces a native language for a specific function like literature or commerce. Another is when a native language is seen as dated by younger generations.
The result is that use of the language degrades by generation until it disappears.
by Alex Mayyasi, Pricenomics | Read more:
It’s not just that many young people write in English. It’s that they often text and email in Arabic using latin characters. Rather than write مبروك, which means congratulations, they’ll write “mabrook.” They simply transliterate every word, writing Arabic in the same alphabet that English uses. Many shop signs in capital cities like Cairo and Amman do the same.
Observing this while living in Cairo, this author wondered whether the use of Arabic script would decline, like cursive writing in the United States. A number of nonprofits and scholars are devoted to studying and protecting the world’s linguistic diversity. They focus on languages with dwindling numbers of native speakers, and try to preserve a record of tongues that die out.
The case of Arabic teenagers texting with the latin alphabet, however, raises another question. How many languages do we use on our computers and phones? And how many fail to enter the digital age?
In 2013, AndrĂ¡s Kornai, a Hungarian “mathematical linguist,” published a research paper on this topic. His research found that the digital future of Arabic is secure. But thousands of other languages may never make the leap into the digital age.
A full 96% of the world’s 6,000+ languages appear to be dead when it comes to use on cell phones, laptops, and tablets, meaning that the Internet could be to languages what a certain comet was to the dinosaurs.
How Languages Evolve—and Die
The term “evolution” is used to describe the changes to everything from football teams to presidencies. But when academics describe the evolution of languages, they literally mean that languages parent distinct offshoots, compete for usage, and die out like biological organisms.
For this reason, UNESCO maintains an atlas of endangered and extinct languages that resembles the Endangered Species List. If only grandparents speak a language, it is severely or critically endangered. If there are no speakers of a language left alive, it is considered extinct.
The fate of an extinct language is distinct from the fate of latin and Ancient Greek—languages that evolved into languages people speak today. An extinct language is a dead end, like the dodo. And just as environmentalists try to protect the endangered burrowing owl, linguists work with speakers of endangered languages by documenting their languages, training language teachers, and helping to create teaching materials in their languages.
Linguists who study endangered languages have identified a few early warning signs. One is when a prominent language like English or French replaces a native language for a specific function like literature or commerce. Another is when a native language is seen as dated by younger generations.
The result is that use of the language degrades by generation until it disappears.
by Alex Mayyasi, Pricenomics | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Girl With the Augmented Body and DIY Manufacturing Habit
[ed. "... does not really run on bare metal." I love that.]
Reddit user SexyCyborg is a web developer who lives and works in Shenzhen, China. She is also a 3D printing enthusiast whose projects include a wrist mount for her tiny drones and a hot-pink replica of her own body. As her username implies, SexyCyborg has body modifications, the most prominent being her breasts. She explains in her Pastebin FAQ:
Again from the FAQ:
Exolymph: Do you resent the amount of curious attention that your body mods get? Some of it is pretty abusive, from what I’ve read in various Reddit threads, and then there’s a lot of ambiguous attention that could be interpreted positively or negatively. For example, I probably wouldn’t know about you if it weren’t for your body and style of dress, and I’m sure there are a bunch of other 3D printing hobbyists who I theoretically could be interviewing, but they don’t intrigue me like you do because the way you present yourself is perceived as provocative by Americans. You’ve said that you like attention and that you like being aesthetically unique, but I wonder if it ever feels like a burden, or just plain gets annoying.
SexyCyborg: Well, resent like, “My eyes are up here!”? No, of course not, that would be ridiculous. But as with tattoos, piercings, scarification, etc, there’s a line between, “Huh, not really my thing, but okay,” or even, “OMG you look so freaky!” and forming a circle around someone and screaming abuse.
If someone says, “Sooo, you know in the West we associate this style with sex workers, right?” I know they are not deliberately trying to get a rise out of me or be hurtful. If it’s more like, “Fuck you, whore, you should be ashamed of yourself,” as is very common, there’s no real discussion or curiosity. It’s about, “What can I say to hurt this person?”
Lots of comment threads for my projects or pictures start to look like what hackers call fuzzing, almost random combinations of epithets, references to sex work, to promiscuity, to rape, to my parents, to my culture — to see when something or some combination of things has an effect. I have a better firewall than most people, though. None of it is in my mother tongue, so it does not really run on bare metal, as it were.
I still feel I need to respond because if I don’t their narrative of “oh she dresses this way and then complains about attention” gets repeated elsewhere as if it were truth. So it’s more a question of using up bandwidth that could better be devoted to talking about the project, having a laugh about the silliness of it all, or working on more interesting things.
So yeah, it’s annoying, but what you guys consider “the internet” is just “the English internet” to me. The Chinese one is almost as large and they like me just fine. If a bunch of people in, say… Japan hated you, after a certain point it’s pretty easy to just not visit Japanese websites.
So when the “oh that’s fun” to “die in a fire, whore” ratio gets too unfavorable, I just stop posting. That’s what I did last year and I’m sure I’ll do the same again at some point. That’s just me, though. Obviously online harassment is a really complicated discussion in the West and not one that I can really comment on.
by Exolymph | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Reddit user SexyCyborg is a web developer who lives and works in Shenzhen, China. She is also a 3D printing enthusiast whose projects include a wrist mount for her tiny drones and a hot-pink replica of her own body. As her username implies, SexyCyborg has body modifications, the most prominent being her breasts. She explains in her Pastebin FAQ:
“I could not get longer legs (height is most important in China) so I decided a big chest was the next best thing for looking better (or at least more interesting). I am a transhumanist with an interest in any kind of human augmentation. Any robot parts I can get I would — that’s why ‘Cyborg’.”She tends to dress in very short crop-tops, tight denim skirts, and stripper heels. Because she combines technical prowess and unusual aesthetics, SexyCyborg has gotten copious attention — some of it admiration, but most of it slut-shaming. (Just look at the comments she’s responded to on Reddit.) She maintains that the norms are different in Shenzhen, and the puritanical reactions come from Westerners.
Again from the FAQ:
“I live in a city of 12 million and not a single other person has my style [of] clothing or my body mods. I don’t know a person in my profession who looks like me. As a creative person that is a source of pride, as person living in a society [where] we are taught from an early age to value conformity above all else it is also very challenging.”Given all of this context, I reached out to SexyCyborg for an interview. We messaged back on forth on Reddit. As usual, the following exchange is lightly edited for readability. (...)
Exolymph: Do you resent the amount of curious attention that your body mods get? Some of it is pretty abusive, from what I’ve read in various Reddit threads, and then there’s a lot of ambiguous attention that could be interpreted positively or negatively. For example, I probably wouldn’t know about you if it weren’t for your body and style of dress, and I’m sure there are a bunch of other 3D printing hobbyists who I theoretically could be interviewing, but they don’t intrigue me like you do because the way you present yourself is perceived as provocative by Americans. You’ve said that you like attention and that you like being aesthetically unique, but I wonder if it ever feels like a burden, or just plain gets annoying.SexyCyborg: Well, resent like, “My eyes are up here!”? No, of course not, that would be ridiculous. But as with tattoos, piercings, scarification, etc, there’s a line between, “Huh, not really my thing, but okay,” or even, “OMG you look so freaky!” and forming a circle around someone and screaming abuse.
If someone says, “Sooo, you know in the West we associate this style with sex workers, right?” I know they are not deliberately trying to get a rise out of me or be hurtful. If it’s more like, “Fuck you, whore, you should be ashamed of yourself,” as is very common, there’s no real discussion or curiosity. It’s about, “What can I say to hurt this person?”
Lots of comment threads for my projects or pictures start to look like what hackers call fuzzing, almost random combinations of epithets, references to sex work, to promiscuity, to rape, to my parents, to my culture — to see when something or some combination of things has an effect. I have a better firewall than most people, though. None of it is in my mother tongue, so it does not really run on bare metal, as it were.
I still feel I need to respond because if I don’t their narrative of “oh she dresses this way and then complains about attention” gets repeated elsewhere as if it were truth. So it’s more a question of using up bandwidth that could better be devoted to talking about the project, having a laugh about the silliness of it all, or working on more interesting things.
So yeah, it’s annoying, but what you guys consider “the internet” is just “the English internet” to me. The Chinese one is almost as large and they like me just fine. If a bunch of people in, say… Japan hated you, after a certain point it’s pretty easy to just not visit Japanese websites.
So when the “oh that’s fun” to “die in a fire, whore” ratio gets too unfavorable, I just stop posting. That’s what I did last year and I’m sure I’ll do the same again at some point. That’s just me, though. Obviously online harassment is a really complicated discussion in the West and not one that I can really comment on.
by Exolymph | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Modern China is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre
The first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by “chaohuan,” which we are rendering in English as “ultra-unreal.” The literal meaning of “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal” or “surpassing the imaginary.” It is a word that a friend and I made up about a year ago during a conversation about contemporary Chinese reality. Not long after, I used the word in remarks I made at a conference in Hainan province. The conference was organized by the Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and recently the institute’s journal, the influential Literary Review, published an article that uses our coinage in its title. The word “ultra-unreal” is young; it’s a newborn baby. I confidently submit, however, that it is going to live a long, healthy life. China’s been pregnant with the word for at least 30 years. Maybe 50 years. Maybe even 100 years.
So, what has happened in China over the last 100 years? Well, let’s leave aside the more distant past and limit ourselves to just the last decade, during which much of Chinese reality has seemed like a hallucination. Some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness. Let me give a few minor examples that reveal something of the current Chinese reality.
There is a major anti-corruption campaign underway in China as I speak, and all the examples I am about to give were made public by the official Chinese media. In China, corrupt officials like to keep huge amounts of cash in their homes. In the past, investigators might find a stash of one million or ten million, but these days such an amount would be nothing. Early in 2015, a department head at the National Development and Reform Commission was investigated for corruption. In his apartment they found more cash than they could count by hand. They got currency-counting machines so they could zip right through the counting, but they burned out four of the machines before they got a final tally, which was more than 200 million Renminbi, which is about 31 million US dollars.
Second example. Guo Boxiong is a retired general in the People’s Liberation Army. When Guo was investigated for corruption, they found so much cash in his home that they couldn’t even try to count it with a currency-counting machine. They had to weigh it by the ton. They needed a truck to haul it all away.
Guo was a very high-ranking military official, but my next example of somebody amassing enough ill-gotten cash to fill a truck involves a man who was just a low-ranking, very ordinary government official. When this guy was on the run he pretended to be a farmer going to market with a truck load of vegetables. When inspectors pulled back the canvas cover over the back of his truck, they didn’t find cabbage, they found millions in cash. All this cash comes out of the collection plate that is passed among the congregation of ordinary people who come to worship at the altar of power. The glint from all the gold paid in bribes sheds some light on China’s very peculiar reality.
There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you hold power. A deputy chief justice in the Hebei provincial supreme court met a sudden, unfortunate end in a traffic accident. Four women came forward to argue over his corpse. All four were legally married to the late deputy chief justice; he had secured for himself four different marriage licenses, all perfectly legal. This had been going on for many years, but not one of the four women knew of the others’ existence. How had he managed to keep the fact that he had four wives a secret? I write fiction, and I tell you truthfully, I can’t imagine how this could be done. This man was one of the top judicial officers in a provincial supreme court, but he treated the law like a joke.
When events occur that exceed our imagination, the world can start to seem unreal. The most shocking tale is, of course, that of Wang Lijun. In 2012, Wang Lijun was the vice-mayor of Chongqing and head of the city’s public security bureau. He ran into trouble with his colleague Bo Xilai, the secretary of the Chongqing branch of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang was a man of considerable power, but when he was on the run, he decided that the safest place for him in all of China was in the city of Chengdu in the consulate of the United States. What does it tell us when the director of the public security bureau in one of the most important municipalities in China decides that the safest place for him is inside a foreign consulate? And his decision did, in fact, save his life. Rumor has it that by the time Wang reached the US consulate in Chengdu, armed police from Chongqing had already followed him there and were preparing to storm the consulate and seize him. Wang reportedly had information that would incriminate Bo Xilai, and therefore the Chongqing armed police wanted to stop Wang and protect Bo. But the Sichuan provincial armed police, which was doing the bidding of the Party Central Committee, had also arrived in Chengdu. These entirely separate detachments of armed police were in a very tense standoff that seemed ready to become violent at any moment. Finally, the Sichuan provincial armed police escorted Wang Lijun away from the consulate. It turns out the Party Central Committee was after Bo Xilai, and it wanted Wang Lijun because he could incriminate Bo. Eventually Wang did testify against Bo. Wang was sentenced to 15 years in prison whereas Bo got life. This all really happened. It is not from a novel. It is not from a movie. But it is wilder than any movie.
These examples I’ve mentioned might seem to have nothing to do with ordinary folk, who are just spectators to these goings on, but there is actually a very close connection between these stories about the abuse of power and ordinary people. As you all know, in China food safety is a matter of urgent concern for ordinary people. There are toxins in our rice; there are toxins in our vegetables; there are toxins in our pork. There are toxins in our baby formula. Restaurants cut costs by recovering and reusing cooking oil that has been used and thrown out, and this oil has toxins in it too. Air pollution is out of control; everybody knows about the smog in Beijing. China faces a mountain of such difficulties, an Everest of difficulties, and they are the direct result of the misuse or abuse of power. Yet, despite these difficulties, China has been rising. Over the past 30 years the speed of development in China and the scale of China’s accomplishments have been every bit as extraordinary as the magnitude of the problems China faces. A few years ago China’s GDP surpassed that of Japan to become the second highest in the world, and many people say that before too long China’s GDP will surpass that of the United States, becoming first in the world. No one even remembers when China passed Great Britain, France, or Italy, and when China passed Germany it made only a faint impression. Before we really knew what was happening, China became the world leader in high-speed rail, the world leader in highway construction, the world leader in number of cars on the road, and the world leader in cell phone usage. China now has the world’s largest economy. All this is “ultra-unreal” too. Everything is happening in China at great speed, and this speed brings with it all sorts of problems. This is a phenomenon captured in a very old Chinese saying in the Daodejing: “Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks. Disaster is that whereon good fortune depends.”* (...)
There are several points that distinguish China’s “ultra-unreal” from the “magical real” of Latin America. First, the history is different. Chinese civilization has an unbroken history of five thousand years. There is no other civilization like it on the planet. This in itself is “ultra-unreal.” At the heart of China’s civilization has always been someone with absolute power. In China, the way in which rulers come to power and wield power ensures that their power reaches everywhere and encompasses everything. In “The Eye of Power,” Foucault discusses the mechanisms by which power surveils and controls. His reference to the “eye” of power is apt. In Chinese history huge eyes of power appear again and again. In some sense, Chinese history is a monster covered with multiple eyes of power. Latin American “magic realism” is concerned with the eye of power too, of course, but it is a much smaller eye.
Second, the sense of time is different. China has changed from being a country that moved too slowly into a country that moves too fast—so fast it’s as if China has escaped gravity. Whether it is the economy, fashion, popular culture, entertainment, or sports, in just thirty years China has gone through what took several hundred years in the West. In a very short time, China has made extraordinary achievements. It is as if time in China has been compressed. This compression not only folds into the current moment a few hundred years of Western history but also several thousand years of Chinese history. Because time is going too fast, China’s cities are now strange things. They all look exactly alike, as if they were a series of exact computer copies. The transformation of China’s villages is equally astounding. Thirty years ago a lot of China’s villages looked pretty much just like they did in antiquity. These days in many of China’s villages there are only old folks and children. Or villages have become ghost towns, which are a little spooky to visit.
So, what has happened in China over the last 100 years? Well, let’s leave aside the more distant past and limit ourselves to just the last decade, during which much of Chinese reality has seemed like a hallucination. Some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness. Let me give a few minor examples that reveal something of the current Chinese reality.
There is a major anti-corruption campaign underway in China as I speak, and all the examples I am about to give were made public by the official Chinese media. In China, corrupt officials like to keep huge amounts of cash in their homes. In the past, investigators might find a stash of one million or ten million, but these days such an amount would be nothing. Early in 2015, a department head at the National Development and Reform Commission was investigated for corruption. In his apartment they found more cash than they could count by hand. They got currency-counting machines so they could zip right through the counting, but they burned out four of the machines before they got a final tally, which was more than 200 million Renminbi, which is about 31 million US dollars.Second example. Guo Boxiong is a retired general in the People’s Liberation Army. When Guo was investigated for corruption, they found so much cash in his home that they couldn’t even try to count it with a currency-counting machine. They had to weigh it by the ton. They needed a truck to haul it all away.
Guo was a very high-ranking military official, but my next example of somebody amassing enough ill-gotten cash to fill a truck involves a man who was just a low-ranking, very ordinary government official. When this guy was on the run he pretended to be a farmer going to market with a truck load of vegetables. When inspectors pulled back the canvas cover over the back of his truck, they didn’t find cabbage, they found millions in cash. All this cash comes out of the collection plate that is passed among the congregation of ordinary people who come to worship at the altar of power. The glint from all the gold paid in bribes sheds some light on China’s very peculiar reality.
There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you hold power. A deputy chief justice in the Hebei provincial supreme court met a sudden, unfortunate end in a traffic accident. Four women came forward to argue over his corpse. All four were legally married to the late deputy chief justice; he had secured for himself four different marriage licenses, all perfectly legal. This had been going on for many years, but not one of the four women knew of the others’ existence. How had he managed to keep the fact that he had four wives a secret? I write fiction, and I tell you truthfully, I can’t imagine how this could be done. This man was one of the top judicial officers in a provincial supreme court, but he treated the law like a joke.
When events occur that exceed our imagination, the world can start to seem unreal. The most shocking tale is, of course, that of Wang Lijun. In 2012, Wang Lijun was the vice-mayor of Chongqing and head of the city’s public security bureau. He ran into trouble with his colleague Bo Xilai, the secretary of the Chongqing branch of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang was a man of considerable power, but when he was on the run, he decided that the safest place for him in all of China was in the city of Chengdu in the consulate of the United States. What does it tell us when the director of the public security bureau in one of the most important municipalities in China decides that the safest place for him is inside a foreign consulate? And his decision did, in fact, save his life. Rumor has it that by the time Wang reached the US consulate in Chengdu, armed police from Chongqing had already followed him there and were preparing to storm the consulate and seize him. Wang reportedly had information that would incriminate Bo Xilai, and therefore the Chongqing armed police wanted to stop Wang and protect Bo. But the Sichuan provincial armed police, which was doing the bidding of the Party Central Committee, had also arrived in Chengdu. These entirely separate detachments of armed police were in a very tense standoff that seemed ready to become violent at any moment. Finally, the Sichuan provincial armed police escorted Wang Lijun away from the consulate. It turns out the Party Central Committee was after Bo Xilai, and it wanted Wang Lijun because he could incriminate Bo. Eventually Wang did testify against Bo. Wang was sentenced to 15 years in prison whereas Bo got life. This all really happened. It is not from a novel. It is not from a movie. But it is wilder than any movie.
These examples I’ve mentioned might seem to have nothing to do with ordinary folk, who are just spectators to these goings on, but there is actually a very close connection between these stories about the abuse of power and ordinary people. As you all know, in China food safety is a matter of urgent concern for ordinary people. There are toxins in our rice; there are toxins in our vegetables; there are toxins in our pork. There are toxins in our baby formula. Restaurants cut costs by recovering and reusing cooking oil that has been used and thrown out, and this oil has toxins in it too. Air pollution is out of control; everybody knows about the smog in Beijing. China faces a mountain of such difficulties, an Everest of difficulties, and they are the direct result of the misuse or abuse of power. Yet, despite these difficulties, China has been rising. Over the past 30 years the speed of development in China and the scale of China’s accomplishments have been every bit as extraordinary as the magnitude of the problems China faces. A few years ago China’s GDP surpassed that of Japan to become the second highest in the world, and many people say that before too long China’s GDP will surpass that of the United States, becoming first in the world. No one even remembers when China passed Great Britain, France, or Italy, and when China passed Germany it made only a faint impression. Before we really knew what was happening, China became the world leader in high-speed rail, the world leader in highway construction, the world leader in number of cars on the road, and the world leader in cell phone usage. China now has the world’s largest economy. All this is “ultra-unreal” too. Everything is happening in China at great speed, and this speed brings with it all sorts of problems. This is a phenomenon captured in a very old Chinese saying in the Daodejing: “Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks. Disaster is that whereon good fortune depends.”* (...)
There are several points that distinguish China’s “ultra-unreal” from the “magical real” of Latin America. First, the history is different. Chinese civilization has an unbroken history of five thousand years. There is no other civilization like it on the planet. This in itself is “ultra-unreal.” At the heart of China’s civilization has always been someone with absolute power. In China, the way in which rulers come to power and wield power ensures that their power reaches everywhere and encompasses everything. In “The Eye of Power,” Foucault discusses the mechanisms by which power surveils and controls. His reference to the “eye” of power is apt. In Chinese history huge eyes of power appear again and again. In some sense, Chinese history is a monster covered with multiple eyes of power. Latin American “magic realism” is concerned with the eye of power too, of course, but it is a much smaller eye.
Second, the sense of time is different. China has changed from being a country that moved too slowly into a country that moves too fast—so fast it’s as if China has escaped gravity. Whether it is the economy, fashion, popular culture, entertainment, or sports, in just thirty years China has gone through what took several hundred years in the West. In a very short time, China has made extraordinary achievements. It is as if time in China has been compressed. This compression not only folds into the current moment a few hundred years of Western history but also several thousand years of Chinese history. Because time is going too fast, China’s cities are now strange things. They all look exactly alike, as if they were a series of exact computer copies. The transformation of China’s villages is equally astounding. Thirty years ago a lot of China’s villages looked pretty much just like they did in antiquity. These days in many of China’s villages there are only old folks and children. Or villages have become ghost towns, which are a little spooky to visit.
by Ning Ken, Literary Hub | Read more:
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