Wednesday, October 4, 2017
’Round Midnight
I’m just here to make some music and help out with the fucking.
—Yank Lawson
Lawson had been asked to account for his presence in New York in 1954, at Eddie Condon’s on West Third Street, sitting in on trumpet with Ralph Sutton at the piano, Jack Teagarden on slide trombone. A joyful noise in Chicago and well regarded as a recording-studio instrumentalist, Lawson was unknown to a jazz-club reporter looking to compose a program note. Was Lawson come to town to make for himself bigger money and a brighter name? Cut a record with Tommy Dorsey? Climb the stairway to the stars?
Lawson’s answer didn’t see the light of print, but Condon delighted in the tempo and the phrasing, scrawled it on cards sometimes stuck in a lower corner of the mirror above the bar. Where at the age of twenty in 1955 I found it with a sense of thanksgiving and relief. The next day I was returning as a senior to Yale College, where for three years my undergraduate questions about the purpose and meaning of life had most of them come back marked address unknown or return to sender. All but one, and that one off the books, the assurance that when bound up in the embrace of music, I knew and felt as fact—as in other times and places I assuredly did not—that yes, Virginia, and if it please the court, I am a human being. And if to become a being at least in some part human is the object of the lessons taught by poets and philosophers, then why not and better yet the high note hit by Lawson? Why else is mankind here on earth if not to dance to the music of time, make a joyful noise unto Chicago or the Lord, help out with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation? (...)
Body and soul in unison is the news breaking from the stage of a Stones or Swift or Springsteen concert, but also, and these days probably as often, in reports from a hospital intensive-care unit or cancer ward. Vibroacoustic therapy alleviates the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease; Alzheimer’s patients recall familiar songs more easily and accurately than spoken words; music increases and improves immune-system function; the Mayo Clinic employs the playing of a harp to relax and lower the blood pressure of patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Cicero relies on Pythagoras for the assurance that the music of the spheres is at all times present in the human ear; he goes on to say it comes and goes unheard because humankind has “become completely deaf to its melody.” Modern authority begs to differ. NASA’s orbiting X-ray telescope in 2003 picked up on a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C, emitted by a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies and reverberating across a distance of 250 million light-years in the key characterized by late eighteenth-century poet and composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart as “cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspiration for a better world.”
And if a music of the spheres can be dimly heard by a machine, who’s to say the sweet unheard melodies imagined by John Keats cannot be heard by human beings born among us for whom everything is music? W.C. Handy, American composer known as the Father of the Blues, learned his notes by listening to the sounds of nature. No piano or organ in the District School for Negroes in Florence, Alabama, but in the nearby woods and fields there were robins carrying “a warm alto theme,” bobolinks singing counterpoint, mockingbirds trilling cadenzas, distant crows improvising “the jazz motif,” the moo-cow a saxophone, the whippoorwill a clarinet. (...)
In the winter of 1964, I was a contract writer for The Saturday Evening Post, allowed by its editor, Otto Friedrich, to chase rainbows likely to prove rewarding. I’d been listening to Monk live and recorded for ten years, knew he had influenced musicians as dissimilar as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, knew also he had suffered a siege of obscurity (time in jail, trouble with money, shunned by nightclub owners who thought him too sinister a shade of black) from which he had begun to reemerge into the limelight. Lulu was back in town, and probably a good story, his use of dissonance being taught in composition courses at the Juilliard School of Music. Friedrich agreed. He was himself a musician of no small means or consequence—“The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his no. 27, humbly, every six months or so”—and he suggested I take as much time as necessary to come up with something that didn’t read like a program note in DownBeat.
Monk at the time was appearing at the Five Spot Café in the East Village, his presence pictured in the trade press as “the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz” surfacing like the Loch Ness monster from the sloughs of despond, “the perfect hipster,” fond of wearing an Ottoman fez or a Chinese coolie hat, “high priest of bop” playing “zombie music” and given to whimsical and cryptic statement. To a disc jockey asking, “Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?” he had been quoted as saying, “Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.”
At the Five Spot, I introduced myself as a writer come to write about his music, said I was content to hang around and listen until it occurred to Monk to talk; it was three weeks before he stopped by the table to announce his opinion of critics. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man. A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”
An imposing figure elegantly dressed in a sharkskin suit, Monk carried himself with the dignity of a man who knows his own mind and doesn’t countenance fools. He wore a goatee, a purple shirt, a dockworker’s cap, and a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. I asked him if it was true he never left home without a hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the black silk sock on his left foot. He laughed, easily and good-naturedly. “Right foot,” he said, “you never know when you’re gonna run into a bargain.”
I hung around for the rest of the winter, never knowing if or when Monk might entertain questions. Most nights I arrived around midnight after completing the day’s lesson for Lipsky. Sometimes, when listening to Monk’s complex rhythms and the abrupt, far-fetched chord progressions, I could hear echoes of late Beethoven. Seated at the piano, Monk was utterly possessed by the music, his whole body following the rise and fall of the melodic line, the expression of openmouthed surprise on his kind and trusting face like that of a child watching a magician changing oranges into rabbits. When standing up to conduct his band, snapping his fingers, thrusting an open palm to call for a solo from Charlie Rouse on tenor sax or Butch Warren on bass, Monk never stopped moving. He looked like a man dancing on hot coals.
—Yank Lawson
Lawson had been asked to account for his presence in New York in 1954, at Eddie Condon’s on West Third Street, sitting in on trumpet with Ralph Sutton at the piano, Jack Teagarden on slide trombone. A joyful noise in Chicago and well regarded as a recording-studio instrumentalist, Lawson was unknown to a jazz-club reporter looking to compose a program note. Was Lawson come to town to make for himself bigger money and a brighter name? Cut a record with Tommy Dorsey? Climb the stairway to the stars?
Lawson’s answer didn’t see the light of print, but Condon delighted in the tempo and the phrasing, scrawled it on cards sometimes stuck in a lower corner of the mirror above the bar. Where at the age of twenty in 1955 I found it with a sense of thanksgiving and relief. The next day I was returning as a senior to Yale College, where for three years my undergraduate questions about the purpose and meaning of life had most of them come back marked address unknown or return to sender. All but one, and that one off the books, the assurance that when bound up in the embrace of music, I knew and felt as fact—as in other times and places I assuredly did not—that yes, Virginia, and if it please the court, I am a human being. And if to become a being at least in some part human is the object of the lessons taught by poets and philosophers, then why not and better yet the high note hit by Lawson? Why else is mankind here on earth if not to dance to the music of time, make a joyful noise unto Chicago or the Lord, help out with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation? (...)
Body and soul in unison is the news breaking from the stage of a Stones or Swift or Springsteen concert, but also, and these days probably as often, in reports from a hospital intensive-care unit or cancer ward. Vibroacoustic therapy alleviates the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease; Alzheimer’s patients recall familiar songs more easily and accurately than spoken words; music increases and improves immune-system function; the Mayo Clinic employs the playing of a harp to relax and lower the blood pressure of patients undergoing chemotherapy.Cicero relies on Pythagoras for the assurance that the music of the spheres is at all times present in the human ear; he goes on to say it comes and goes unheard because humankind has “become completely deaf to its melody.” Modern authority begs to differ. NASA’s orbiting X-ray telescope in 2003 picked up on a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C, emitted by a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies and reverberating across a distance of 250 million light-years in the key characterized by late eighteenth-century poet and composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart as “cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspiration for a better world.”
And if a music of the spheres can be dimly heard by a machine, who’s to say the sweet unheard melodies imagined by John Keats cannot be heard by human beings born among us for whom everything is music? W.C. Handy, American composer known as the Father of the Blues, learned his notes by listening to the sounds of nature. No piano or organ in the District School for Negroes in Florence, Alabama, but in the nearby woods and fields there were robins carrying “a warm alto theme,” bobolinks singing counterpoint, mockingbirds trilling cadenzas, distant crows improvising “the jazz motif,” the moo-cow a saxophone, the whippoorwill a clarinet. (...)
In the winter of 1964, I was a contract writer for The Saturday Evening Post, allowed by its editor, Otto Friedrich, to chase rainbows likely to prove rewarding. I’d been listening to Monk live and recorded for ten years, knew he had influenced musicians as dissimilar as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, knew also he had suffered a siege of obscurity (time in jail, trouble with money, shunned by nightclub owners who thought him too sinister a shade of black) from which he had begun to reemerge into the limelight. Lulu was back in town, and probably a good story, his use of dissonance being taught in composition courses at the Juilliard School of Music. Friedrich agreed. He was himself a musician of no small means or consequence—“The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his no. 27, humbly, every six months or so”—and he suggested I take as much time as necessary to come up with something that didn’t read like a program note in DownBeat.
Monk at the time was appearing at the Five Spot Café in the East Village, his presence pictured in the trade press as “the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz” surfacing like the Loch Ness monster from the sloughs of despond, “the perfect hipster,” fond of wearing an Ottoman fez or a Chinese coolie hat, “high priest of bop” playing “zombie music” and given to whimsical and cryptic statement. To a disc jockey asking, “Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?” he had been quoted as saying, “Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.”
At the Five Spot, I introduced myself as a writer come to write about his music, said I was content to hang around and listen until it occurred to Monk to talk; it was three weeks before he stopped by the table to announce his opinion of critics. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man. A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”
An imposing figure elegantly dressed in a sharkskin suit, Monk carried himself with the dignity of a man who knows his own mind and doesn’t countenance fools. He wore a goatee, a purple shirt, a dockworker’s cap, and a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. I asked him if it was true he never left home without a hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the black silk sock on his left foot. He laughed, easily and good-naturedly. “Right foot,” he said, “you never know when you’re gonna run into a bargain.”
I hung around for the rest of the winter, never knowing if or when Monk might entertain questions. Most nights I arrived around midnight after completing the day’s lesson for Lipsky. Sometimes, when listening to Monk’s complex rhythms and the abrupt, far-fetched chord progressions, I could hear echoes of late Beethoven. Seated at the piano, Monk was utterly possessed by the music, his whole body following the rise and fall of the melodic line, the expression of openmouthed surprise on his kind and trusting face like that of a child watching a magician changing oranges into rabbits. When standing up to conduct his band, snapping his fingers, thrusting an open palm to call for a solo from Charlie Rouse on tenor sax or Butch Warren on bass, Monk never stopped moving. He looked like a man dancing on hot coals.
by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: via
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner's Legacy, Trump's Masculinity and Feminism's Sex Phobia
With the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner on Sept. 27, cultural historian and contrarian feminist Camille Paglia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview on topics ranging from what Hef's choice of the bunny costume revealed about him to the current "dreary" state of relationships between the sexes.
Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?
No, I'm not a partygoer! (Laughs.)
So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
So let's dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy's cultural impact?
Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Hefner's new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father's side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.
But Hefner's worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
What could today's media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?
It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing. (...)
What do you think about the fact that Trump's childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?
Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.
But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.
I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!
My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! (Laughs.) World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women.
The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we're now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.
With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high-maintenance.
And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.
Trump has certainly steadily hired and promoted women in his businesses, but it has to be said that his vision of women as erotic beings remains rather retrograde. Part of his nationwide support seems to be coming from his bold defense of his own maleness. Many mainstream voters are gratified by his reassertion of male pride and confidence. Trump supporters may be quite right that, in this period of confusion and uncertainty, male identity needs to be reaffirmed and reconsolidated. (And I'm speaking here as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein!)
Ultimately every culture seems to return to sexual polarization because it may be in the best interest of human beings, whether we like it or not. Nature drives every species to procreate, although not necessarily when there's overpopulation!
Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?
What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I'm so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she's been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today. (...)
Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner's legacy?
We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner's passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.
Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny miniskirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?
Do men need a kind of Hefner for today to give an example of how to interact with women in a sophisticated manner?
Yes. Women's sexual responses are notoriously slower than men's. Truly sophisticated seducers knew that women have to be courted and that women love an ambiance, setting a stage. Today, alas, too many young women feel they have to provide quick sex or they'll lose social status. If a guy can't get sex from them, he'll get it from someone else. There's a general bleak atmosphere of grudging compliance.
Today's hook-up culture, which is the ultimate product of my generation's sexual revolution, seems markedly disillusioning in how it has reduced sex to male needs, to the general male desire for wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am efficiency, with no commitment afterwards. We're in a period of great sexual confusion and rancor right now. The sexes are very wary of each other. There's no pressure on men to marry because they can get sex very easily in other ways.
The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.
This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency.
Young women are being taught that men have all the power and have used it throughout history to oppress women. Women don't seem to realize how much power they have to crush men! Strong women have always known how to control men. Oscar Wilde said women are complex and men are simple. Is it society or is it nature that is unjust? This was the big question that I proposed in Sexual Personae, where I argued that our biggest oppressor is actually nature, not society. I continue to feel that my pro-sex wing of feminism, which does not see sexual imagery or men in general as the enemy, has the best and healthiest message for young women.
by Jeanie Pyun, Hollywood Reporter | Read more:
Image: Robert Mora/Getty Images; Courtesy of Subject
[ed. See also: Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner]
Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?
No, I'm not a partygoer! (Laughs.)
So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
So let's dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy's cultural impact?Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Hefner's new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father's side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.
But Hefner's worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
What could today's media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?
It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing. (...)
What do you think about the fact that Trump's childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?
Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.
But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.
I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!
My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! (Laughs.) World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women.
The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we're now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.
With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high-maintenance.
And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.
Trump has certainly steadily hired and promoted women in his businesses, but it has to be said that his vision of women as erotic beings remains rather retrograde. Part of his nationwide support seems to be coming from his bold defense of his own maleness. Many mainstream voters are gratified by his reassertion of male pride and confidence. Trump supporters may be quite right that, in this period of confusion and uncertainty, male identity needs to be reaffirmed and reconsolidated. (And I'm speaking here as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein!)
Ultimately every culture seems to return to sexual polarization because it may be in the best interest of human beings, whether we like it or not. Nature drives every species to procreate, although not necessarily when there's overpopulation!
Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?
What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I'm so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she's been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today. (...)
Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner's legacy?
We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner's passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.
Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny miniskirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?
Do men need a kind of Hefner for today to give an example of how to interact with women in a sophisticated manner?
Yes. Women's sexual responses are notoriously slower than men's. Truly sophisticated seducers knew that women have to be courted and that women love an ambiance, setting a stage. Today, alas, too many young women feel they have to provide quick sex or they'll lose social status. If a guy can't get sex from them, he'll get it from someone else. There's a general bleak atmosphere of grudging compliance.
Today's hook-up culture, which is the ultimate product of my generation's sexual revolution, seems markedly disillusioning in how it has reduced sex to male needs, to the general male desire for wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am efficiency, with no commitment afterwards. We're in a period of great sexual confusion and rancor right now. The sexes are very wary of each other. There's no pressure on men to marry because they can get sex very easily in other ways.
The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.
This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency.
Young women are being taught that men have all the power and have used it throughout history to oppress women. Women don't seem to realize how much power they have to crush men! Strong women have always known how to control men. Oscar Wilde said women are complex and men are simple. Is it society or is it nature that is unjust? This was the big question that I proposed in Sexual Personae, where I argued that our biggest oppressor is actually nature, not society. I continue to feel that my pro-sex wing of feminism, which does not see sexual imagery or men in general as the enemy, has the best and healthiest message for young women.
by Jeanie Pyun, Hollywood Reporter | Read more:
Image: Robert Mora/Getty Images; Courtesy of Subject
[ed. See also: Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner]
Tom Petty (1950-2017)
I'm watching the water. Watching the coast. Suddenly I know. What I want the most. And I want to tell you. Still I hold back. I need some time. Get my life on track. I know that look on your face. But there's somethin' lucky about this place. And there's somethin' good comin'. For you and me. Somethin' good comin'. There has to be. And I'm thinking 'bout mama. And about the kids. And the way we lived. And the things we did. How she never had a chance. Never caught a break. And how we pay for our big mistakes. I know so well the look on your face. And there's somethin' lucky about this place. There's somethin' good comin'. Just over the hill. Somethin' good comin'. I know it will. And I'm in for the long run. Wherever it goes. Ridin' the river. Wherever it goes. And I'm an honest man. Work's all I know. You take that away. Don't know where to go. And I know that look that's on your face. There's somethin' lucky about this place. There's somethin' good comin'. For you and me. Somethin' good comin'. There has to be.
[ed. Damn. Thanks for the music... Tom, Mike, all the Heartbreakers.]
[ed. Damn. Thanks for the music... Tom, Mike, all the Heartbreakers.]
What is 2,011km Long, Lasts 82 Days and Takes 20,093 Shots? Golf's Longest Hole
Adam Rolston squatted and measured his putt. The early evening sun at Mt Bogd Golf Club in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia still hadn’t quite dried the moisture off the green, and he approached the ball tentatively. Two hundred spectators surrounded the green, including locals, close friends and family as he holed a seven-foot putt perfectly. The longest hole in golf had finished after 82 days and 20,093 shots across Mongolia.
Rolston has played many rounds of golf in his life, but he knows he will never complete a more satisfying scorecard. A former rugby international for Hong Kong, Rolston and his caddie Ron Rutland played the longest hole ever completed across Mongolia, covering 2,011km of difficult terrain, playing through the desert, icy water, rocky ground and glaciers. The most obvious question remains: why?
“I was coming up to the end of my contract playing rugby for Hong Kong and was in Kenya playing a tournament,” Rolston said. “My friend Ron had previously done an incredible challenge where he cycled through every country in Africa, before arriving at the South Africa v Japan game in the 2015 World Cup. He was asked to do a talk in Kenya about this challenge and it got me thinking – could we do something together?”
Rutland and Rolston had both finished their rugby careers, and sat down at home in Hong Kong to think about what they could do next. They decided to try to break the world record for the longest hole in golf and chose Mongolia due to its wide expanses and nomadic heritage. Eight months later, after assiduous planning, they arrived in Mongolia, ready to tee off in aid of the Laureus Sport for Good and the South African Golf Development Board. If they were going to conquer this arduous hole, the two men wanted to raise money for causes they believe in.
Arriving at the first tee at the base of Khüiten Peak was not without difficulties. “We were in a rickety jeep for hours, then put our cart – with all of our equipment – on to a camel. Then had to get on horses until we reached basecamp,” Rolston explains.
“In my mind I was going to arrive at this stunning location with the sun shining, surrounded by glaciers to start the journey. In reality, we didn’t see the sun for four days and we were moving through freezing water pulling our equipment. In that first week, I was sometimes lying awake thinking: how are we going to complete this. Doubts crept in.” (...)
Beyond negotiating the difficult and relentless terrain, the two men were starting to face extreme physical difficulties. Rolston went through days of neck and back spasms, while his caddie suffered with a constantly inflamed hip dragging their cart through uncompromising surface. A chance encounter with a wild Mongolian dog they named UB helped to provide the perfect companion for the remaining 1,500km and lifted their spirits when they needed it most. Rolston said they couldn’t have asked for a better secondary caddie.
“We were followed by this beautiful wild dog, who stayed by our side and slept by our tents. This breed of dog is renowned in Mongolia as operating alone and at times fighting with wolves and coming off better than them, so we should have been apprehensive, but it became an incredible part of the trip. This dog was so loyal and protective to us throughout the trip. It really symbolised the nomadic spirit of this beautiful country and we were delighted to eventually leave him with a loving couple in Terelj national park.”
by Jonathan Drennan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Andrew King
Rolston has played many rounds of golf in his life, but he knows he will never complete a more satisfying scorecard. A former rugby international for Hong Kong, Rolston and his caddie Ron Rutland played the longest hole ever completed across Mongolia, covering 2,011km of difficult terrain, playing through the desert, icy water, rocky ground and glaciers. The most obvious question remains: why?
“I was coming up to the end of my contract playing rugby for Hong Kong and was in Kenya playing a tournament,” Rolston said. “My friend Ron had previously done an incredible challenge where he cycled through every country in Africa, before arriving at the South Africa v Japan game in the 2015 World Cup. He was asked to do a talk in Kenya about this challenge and it got me thinking – could we do something together?”Rutland and Rolston had both finished their rugby careers, and sat down at home in Hong Kong to think about what they could do next. They decided to try to break the world record for the longest hole in golf and chose Mongolia due to its wide expanses and nomadic heritage. Eight months later, after assiduous planning, they arrived in Mongolia, ready to tee off in aid of the Laureus Sport for Good and the South African Golf Development Board. If they were going to conquer this arduous hole, the two men wanted to raise money for causes they believe in.
Arriving at the first tee at the base of Khüiten Peak was not without difficulties. “We were in a rickety jeep for hours, then put our cart – with all of our equipment – on to a camel. Then had to get on horses until we reached basecamp,” Rolston explains.
“In my mind I was going to arrive at this stunning location with the sun shining, surrounded by glaciers to start the journey. In reality, we didn’t see the sun for four days and we were moving through freezing water pulling our equipment. In that first week, I was sometimes lying awake thinking: how are we going to complete this. Doubts crept in.” (...)
Beyond negotiating the difficult and relentless terrain, the two men were starting to face extreme physical difficulties. Rolston went through days of neck and back spasms, while his caddie suffered with a constantly inflamed hip dragging their cart through uncompromising surface. A chance encounter with a wild Mongolian dog they named UB helped to provide the perfect companion for the remaining 1,500km and lifted their spirits when they needed it most. Rolston said they couldn’t have asked for a better secondary caddie.
“We were followed by this beautiful wild dog, who stayed by our side and slept by our tents. This breed of dog is renowned in Mongolia as operating alone and at times fighting with wolves and coming off better than them, so we should have been apprehensive, but it became an incredible part of the trip. This dog was so loyal and protective to us throughout the trip. It really symbolised the nomadic spirit of this beautiful country and we were delighted to eventually leave him with a loving couple in Terelj national park.”
For weeks, as Rolston and Rutland stumbled slowly across Mongolia one shot at a time, they visualised the finish line in Ulaanbaatar. Dragging their by now battered clubs and cart, the pair were joined by friends as they made their way to their final destination in traditional Mongolian clothing. It has been said golf is a good walk spoiled but it helped Rolston and Rutland connect with a stunning country and do something many considered impossible.
by Jonathan Drennan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Andrew King
Two Dark Truths
Beyond the scores of people who have been killed and the hundreds who have been wounded in Las Vegas today, thousands of other people, though not visibly or directly injured, have had their lives changed forever. Children and parents. Husbands and wives. Brothers and sisters. Something is instantly and permanently gone from their lives. Co-workers and friends. Members of churches or sports leagues or the PTA. Customers and clients and students. Neighbors and casual acquaintances at the coffee shop or the bar. The rest of their days will be different and shadowed because of this massacre. “Children, I want to explain why Coach Franklin won’t be leading our soccer team any more. Something bad happened, and ...”
The dead and the wounded, and their family and friends, of course deserve most support and sympathy. But their fellow countrymen should reflect on two dark truths the episode underscores. I was going to end that sentence with “reveals,” but that’s not right: We know these things already.
The first is that America will not stop these shootings. They will go on. We all know that, which makes the immediate wave of grief even worse.
Five years ago, after what was the horrific mass shooting of that moment, I wrote an item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It was about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and after acknowledging the victims it said:
Decision? Yes. Other advanced societies have outbreaks of mass-shooting gun violence. Scotland, in 1996. Australia, in 1996 as well. Norway in 2011. But only in the United States do they come again and again and again. (...)
No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity.
Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether the killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name.
That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force. They are “troubled” youths, like the white teenaged boy who shot up classmates in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, or the two white teenaged boys who shot up classmates in Columbine, Colorado, two years later, or the white teenaged boy who carried out the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut. Or troubled older people, like the white man in his 60s who shot up the congressional baseball game this summer, or (on initial reports) the white man in his 60s who murdered so many people today. A report on the congressional-baseball shooter described his “descent into rage.”
These people are indeed deranged and angry and disturbed, and the full story of today’s killer is not yet known. It is possible that he will prove to have motives or connections beyond whatever was happening in his own mind (as Graeme Wood explains). But we know that if the killers were other than whites with “normal” names, the responsibility for their crime would not be assigned solely to themselves and their tortured psyches.
The dead and the wounded, and their family and friends, of course deserve most support and sympathy. But their fellow countrymen should reflect on two dark truths the episode underscores. I was going to end that sentence with “reveals,” but that’s not right: We know these things already.The first is that America will not stop these shootings. They will go on. We all know that, which makes the immediate wave of grief even worse.
Five years ago, after what was the horrific mass shooting of that moment, I wrote an item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It was about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and after acknowledging the victims it said:
The additional sad, horrifying, and appalling point is the shared American knowledge that, beyond any doubt, this will happen again, and that it will happen in America many, many times before it occurs anywhere else.That remains true now. I expect it to be true five years from now. I am an optimist about most aspects of America’s resilience and adaptability, but not about reversing America’s implicit decision to let these killings go on.
Decision? Yes. Other advanced societies have outbreaks of mass-shooting gun violence. Scotland, in 1996. Australia, in 1996 as well. Norway in 2011. But only in the United States do they come again and again and again. (...)
No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity.
Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether the killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name.
That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force. They are “troubled” youths, like the white teenaged boy who shot up classmates in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, or the two white teenaged boys who shot up classmates in Columbine, Colorado, two years later, or the white teenaged boy who carried out the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut. Or troubled older people, like the white man in his 60s who shot up the congressional baseball game this summer, or (on initial reports) the white man in his 60s who murdered so many people today. A report on the congressional-baseball shooter described his “descent into rage.”
These people are indeed deranged and angry and disturbed, and the full story of today’s killer is not yet known. It is possible that he will prove to have motives or connections beyond whatever was happening in his own mind (as Graeme Wood explains). But we know that if the killers were other than whites with “normal” names, the responsibility for their crime would not be assigned solely to themselves and their tortured psyches.
- If they had Arab-sounding names, this would be a new episode of jihad. How often has Donald Trump invoked “San Bernardino” in his speeches, as shorthand for the terrorist threat in our heartland.
- If they were Mexican, they would demonstrate the perils of immigration, and that Mexico is “not sending its best people.”
- If they had been illegal immigrants, they’d dramatize the need to crack down harder, right now.
- And if they had been black, I shudder to imagine the consequences.
by James Fallows, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: David Becker—Getty Images
Monday, October 2, 2017
Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?
Mark Zuckerberg had just returned from paternity leave, and he wanted to talk about Facebook, democracy, and elections and to define what he felt his creation owed the world in exchange for its hegemony. A few weeks earlier, in early September, the company’s chief security officer had admitted that Facebook had sold $100,000 worth of ads on its platform to Russian-government-linked trolls who intended to influence the American political process. Now, in a statement broadcast live on Facebook on September 21 and subsequently posted to his profile page, Zuckerberg pledged to increase the resources of Facebook’s security and election-integrity teams and to work “proactively to strengthen the democratic process.”
To effect this, he outlined specific steps to “make political advertising more transparent.” Facebook will soon require that all political ads disclose “which page” paid for them (“I’m Epic Fail Memes, and I approve this message”) and ensure that every ad a given advertiser runs is accessible to anyone, essentially ending the practice of “dark advertising” — promoted posts that are only ever seen by the specific groups at which they’re targeted. Zuckerberg, in his statement, compared this development favorably to old media, like radio and television, which already require political ads to reveal their funders: “We’re going to bring Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency,” he writes.
This pledge was, in some ways, the reverse of another announcement the company made earlier the same day, unveiling a new set of tools businesses can use to target Facebook members who have visited their stores: Now the experience of briefly visiting Zappos.com and finding yourself haunted for weeks by shoe ads could have an offline equivalent produced by a visit to your local shoe store (I hope you like shoe ads). Where Facebook’s new “offline outcomes” tools promise to entrap more of the analog world in Facebook’s broad surveillance net, Zuckerberg’s promise of transparency assured anxious readers that the company would submit itself to the established structures of offline politics.
It was an admirable commitment. But reading through it, I kept getting stuck on one line: “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend,” Zuckerberg writes. It’s a comforting sentence, a statement that shows Zuckerberg and Facebook are eager to restore trust in their system. But … it’s not the kind of language we expect from media organizations, even the largest ones. It’s the language of governments, or political parties, or NGOs. A private company, working unilaterally to ensure election integrity in a country it’s not even based in? The only two I could think of that might feel obligated to make the same assurances are Diebold, the widely hated former manufacturer of electronic-voting systems, and Academi, the private military contractor whose founder keeps begging for a chance to run Afghanistan. This is not good company.
What is Facebook? We can talk about its scale: Population-wise, it’s larger than any single country; in fact, it’s bigger than any continent besides Asia. At 2 billion members, “monthly active Facebook users” is the single largest non-biologically sorted group of people on the planet after “Christians” — and, growing consistently at around 17 percent year after year, it could surpass that group before the end of 2017 and encompass one-third of the world’s population by this time next year. Outside China, where Facebook has been banned since 2009, one in every five minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook; in countries with only recently high rates of internet connectivity, like Myanmar and Kenya, Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, the whole internet.
But, like the internet, Facebook’s vertigo-inducing scale, encompassing not just the sheer size of its user base but the scope of its penetration of human activity — from the birthday-reminder mundane to the liberal-democracy significant — defies comprehension. When I scroll through the news feed on my phone, it’s almost impossible to hold in my mind that the site on which I am currently considering joining a group called “Flat Earth—No Trolls” is the same one whose executives are likely to testify in front of Congress about their company’s role in a presidential election. Or that the site I use to invite people to parties is also at the center of an international controversy over documentation of the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize. In one context, it looks and acts like a television broadcaster, but in this other context, an NGO. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester argued that for all its rhetoric about connecting the world, the company is ultimately built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers. This may be true, but Facebook’s business model tells us only so much about how the network shapes the world. Over the past year I’ve heard Facebook compared to a dozen entities and felt like I’ve caught glimpses of it acting like a dozen more. I’ve heard government metaphors (a state, the E.U., the Catholic Church, Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets) and business ones (a railroad company, a mall); physical metaphors (a town square, an interstate highway, an electrical grid) and economic ones (a Special Economic Zone, Gosplan). For every direct comparison, there was an equally elaborate one: a faceless Elder God. A conquering alien fleet. There are real consequences to our inability to understand what Facebook is. Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year. In which case, how can we be assured that Facebook is really safeguarding democracy for us and that it’s not us who need to be safeguarding democracy against Facebook?
Nowhere was this confusion about Facebook’s and Zuckerberg’s role in public life more in evidence than in the rumors that the CEO was planning to run for president. Every year, Zuckerberg takes on a “personal challenge,” a sort of billionaire-scale New Year’s resolution, about which he posts updates to his Facebook page. For most Facebook users, these meticulously constructed and assiduously managed challenges are the only access they’ll ever have to Zuckerberg’s otherwise highly private personal life. Thousands of people cluster in the comments under his status updates like crowds loitering outside Buckingham Palace, praising the CEO, encouraging him in his progress, and drawing portraits of his likeness.
This year, Zuckerberg’s challenge has been to meet people in all the states of the U.S. that he hadn’t yet visited. His first stop, in January, was Texas; since then, he’s been to 24 other states. Zuckerberg has adamantly denied that the trips are a trial run for the campaign trail, and, having spoken with many of the people he’s met with over the course of his journeys—not to mention stern Facebook publicists — I tend to believe him. He limits his tour activity to interactions in private groups or unannounced visits — no speeches, no barnstorms, no baby-kissing. He’s issued no policy prescriptions and inserted himself into political debates rarely and in limited ways. And yet, the road trip sure looks like a campaign — or at least the sort of “listening tour” that politicians sometimes stage to convince voters, before even announcing, that their hearts are in the right place.
To some extent, of course, the media curiosity is his own fault. (After all, he did choose to be professionally photographed while eating fried food and staring intently at machinery.) But it’s hard for me not to think that the incessant speculation is a function of our own incomplete view of Facebook. The Zuckerberg-for-president interpretation of his project understands Facebook as a large, well-known company, from which a top executive might reasonably launch a political career within the recognizable political framework of the U.S. electoral process.
But if Facebook is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere company, surely his trip is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere presidential run. Maybe he’s doing research and development, reverse-engineering social bonds to understand how Facebook might better facilitate them. Maybe Facebook is a church and Zuckerberg is offering his benedictions. Maybe Facebook is a state within a state and Zuckerberg is inspecting its boundaries. Maybe Facebook is an emerging political community and Zuckerberg is cultivating his constituents. Maybe Facebook is a surveillance state and Zuckerberg a dictator undertaking a propaganda tour. Maybe Facebook is a dual power — a network overlaid across the U.S., parallel to and in competition with the government to fulfill civic functions — and Zuckerberg is securing his command. Maybe Facebook is border control between the analog and the digital and Zuckerberg is inspecting one side for holes. Maybe Facebook is a fleet of alien spaceships that have colonized the globe and Zuckerberg is the viceroy trying to win over his new subjects.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this: If you run a business and want to improve it, you need to spend time talking to your customers. If you’ve created a hybrid state–church–railroad–mall–alien colony and want to understand, or expand, it, you need to spend time with your hybrid citizen-believer-passenger-customer-subjects.
To effect this, he outlined specific steps to “make political advertising more transparent.” Facebook will soon require that all political ads disclose “which page” paid for them (“I’m Epic Fail Memes, and I approve this message”) and ensure that every ad a given advertiser runs is accessible to anyone, essentially ending the practice of “dark advertising” — promoted posts that are only ever seen by the specific groups at which they’re targeted. Zuckerberg, in his statement, compared this development favorably to old media, like radio and television, which already require political ads to reveal their funders: “We’re going to bring Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency,” he writes.This pledge was, in some ways, the reverse of another announcement the company made earlier the same day, unveiling a new set of tools businesses can use to target Facebook members who have visited their stores: Now the experience of briefly visiting Zappos.com and finding yourself haunted for weeks by shoe ads could have an offline equivalent produced by a visit to your local shoe store (I hope you like shoe ads). Where Facebook’s new “offline outcomes” tools promise to entrap more of the analog world in Facebook’s broad surveillance net, Zuckerberg’s promise of transparency assured anxious readers that the company would submit itself to the established structures of offline politics.
It was an admirable commitment. But reading through it, I kept getting stuck on one line: “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend,” Zuckerberg writes. It’s a comforting sentence, a statement that shows Zuckerberg and Facebook are eager to restore trust in their system. But … it’s not the kind of language we expect from media organizations, even the largest ones. It’s the language of governments, or political parties, or NGOs. A private company, working unilaterally to ensure election integrity in a country it’s not even based in? The only two I could think of that might feel obligated to make the same assurances are Diebold, the widely hated former manufacturer of electronic-voting systems, and Academi, the private military contractor whose founder keeps begging for a chance to run Afghanistan. This is not good company.
What is Facebook? We can talk about its scale: Population-wise, it’s larger than any single country; in fact, it’s bigger than any continent besides Asia. At 2 billion members, “monthly active Facebook users” is the single largest non-biologically sorted group of people on the planet after “Christians” — and, growing consistently at around 17 percent year after year, it could surpass that group before the end of 2017 and encompass one-third of the world’s population by this time next year. Outside China, where Facebook has been banned since 2009, one in every five minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook; in countries with only recently high rates of internet connectivity, like Myanmar and Kenya, Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, the whole internet.
But, like the internet, Facebook’s vertigo-inducing scale, encompassing not just the sheer size of its user base but the scope of its penetration of human activity — from the birthday-reminder mundane to the liberal-democracy significant — defies comprehension. When I scroll through the news feed on my phone, it’s almost impossible to hold in my mind that the site on which I am currently considering joining a group called “Flat Earth—No Trolls” is the same one whose executives are likely to testify in front of Congress about their company’s role in a presidential election. Or that the site I use to invite people to parties is also at the center of an international controversy over documentation of the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize. In one context, it looks and acts like a television broadcaster, but in this other context, an NGO. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester argued that for all its rhetoric about connecting the world, the company is ultimately built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers. This may be true, but Facebook’s business model tells us only so much about how the network shapes the world. Over the past year I’ve heard Facebook compared to a dozen entities and felt like I’ve caught glimpses of it acting like a dozen more. I’ve heard government metaphors (a state, the E.U., the Catholic Church, Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets) and business ones (a railroad company, a mall); physical metaphors (a town square, an interstate highway, an electrical grid) and economic ones (a Special Economic Zone, Gosplan). For every direct comparison, there was an equally elaborate one: a faceless Elder God. A conquering alien fleet. There are real consequences to our inability to understand what Facebook is. Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year. In which case, how can we be assured that Facebook is really safeguarding democracy for us and that it’s not us who need to be safeguarding democracy against Facebook?
Nowhere was this confusion about Facebook’s and Zuckerberg’s role in public life more in evidence than in the rumors that the CEO was planning to run for president. Every year, Zuckerberg takes on a “personal challenge,” a sort of billionaire-scale New Year’s resolution, about which he posts updates to his Facebook page. For most Facebook users, these meticulously constructed and assiduously managed challenges are the only access they’ll ever have to Zuckerberg’s otherwise highly private personal life. Thousands of people cluster in the comments under his status updates like crowds loitering outside Buckingham Palace, praising the CEO, encouraging him in his progress, and drawing portraits of his likeness.
This year, Zuckerberg’s challenge has been to meet people in all the states of the U.S. that he hadn’t yet visited. His first stop, in January, was Texas; since then, he’s been to 24 other states. Zuckerberg has adamantly denied that the trips are a trial run for the campaign trail, and, having spoken with many of the people he’s met with over the course of his journeys—not to mention stern Facebook publicists — I tend to believe him. He limits his tour activity to interactions in private groups or unannounced visits — no speeches, no barnstorms, no baby-kissing. He’s issued no policy prescriptions and inserted himself into political debates rarely and in limited ways. And yet, the road trip sure looks like a campaign — or at least the sort of “listening tour” that politicians sometimes stage to convince voters, before even announcing, that their hearts are in the right place.
To some extent, of course, the media curiosity is his own fault. (After all, he did choose to be professionally photographed while eating fried food and staring intently at machinery.) But it’s hard for me not to think that the incessant speculation is a function of our own incomplete view of Facebook. The Zuckerberg-for-president interpretation of his project understands Facebook as a large, well-known company, from which a top executive might reasonably launch a political career within the recognizable political framework of the U.S. electoral process.
But if Facebook is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere company, surely his trip is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere presidential run. Maybe he’s doing research and development, reverse-engineering social bonds to understand how Facebook might better facilitate them. Maybe Facebook is a church and Zuckerberg is offering his benedictions. Maybe Facebook is a state within a state and Zuckerberg is inspecting its boundaries. Maybe Facebook is an emerging political community and Zuckerberg is cultivating his constituents. Maybe Facebook is a surveillance state and Zuckerberg a dictator undertaking a propaganda tour. Maybe Facebook is a dual power — a network overlaid across the U.S., parallel to and in competition with the government to fulfill civic functions — and Zuckerberg is securing his command. Maybe Facebook is border control between the analog and the digital and Zuckerberg is inspecting one side for holes. Maybe Facebook is a fleet of alien spaceships that have colonized the globe and Zuckerberg is the viceroy trying to win over his new subjects.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this: If you run a business and want to improve it, you need to spend time talking to your customers. If you’ve created a hybrid state–church–railroad–mall–alien colony and want to understand, or expand, it, you need to spend time with your hybrid citizen-believer-passenger-customer-subjects.
by Max Read, Select/All | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tom Petty Suffers Heart Attack
Singer-songwriter Tom Petty, famed for his songs about love and Los Angeles, has suffered a cardiac arrest. Initial reports that he had died were walked back by Los Angeles police after about an hour.
Petty was taken off of life support at a Los Angeles-area hospital on 2 October 2017 after being hospitalized following a heart attack. The gossip site TMZ stated that life support was pulled for Petty because of a lack of brain activity.
The Los Angeles Police Department said on Twitter that “initial information was inadvertantly [sic] provided to some media sources,” adding that it was not investigating Petty’s hospitalization. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the hospital declined to comment, and an e-mail to his publicist was not immediately returned. (...)
[ed. Hopefully this is all premature. Still, it sounds like a bad situation. See also: Report: Tom Petty Hospitalized After Cardiac Arrest.]
by Snopes.com | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I think Wildflowers was one of his best efforts (and, in a way, had a part in starting this blog). See also: Crawling Back to You.]
[ed. I think Wildflowers was one of his best efforts (and, in a way, had a part in starting this blog). See also: Crawling Back to You.]
Sunday, October 1, 2017
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Militant Groups Have Drones. Now What?
Militant groups have a new way to wage war: drone attacks from above. As recent news reports and online videos suggest, organizations like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have used commercially-available uninhabited aerial vehicles—better known as UAVs or drones—to drop explosives onto their adversaries in the battle for territory.
That ISIS would weaponize drones shouldn’t be surprising. Militant groups often use the latest consumer technology to make up for capability gaps and level the fight against regular military forces. ISIS broadcasts propaganda through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and plans attacks using encrypted communication platforms like Telegram. This embrace of innovation extends to the way militant groups use military force. Over the last year or so, they have begun to use modified commercial drones for offensive strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. These new tools of war provide a way to conduct terror attacks against civilians, and can also pose a threat to ground forces. Stopping drone proliferation is not an option because of the ubiquity of the technology. That means government forces will have to learn to counter drones operated by militant groups, just as they are now training to counter drones used by national militaries.
Already a “daunting” threat. The threat posed by militant groups flying drones is as much about where the threat is coming from—the sky—as it is about the munitions being launched. Militaries fighting militant groups have enjoyed air superiority for decades. US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, have rarely, if ever, feared attacks from the air. Civilians and humanitarian groups in Syria worry about air strikes from Assad’s regime, but not from militant groups like ISIS. The adoption of drones by militant groups is therefore generating a novel challenge. Speaking at a conference in May, Gen. Raymond Thomas, head of the US Special Operations Command, called commercial drones the “most daunting problem” his troops had faced over the previous year. At one point, he said, the anti-ISIS campaign “nearly came to a screeching halt, where literally over 24 hours there were 70 drones in the air.” (...)
To be clear, commercial drones and IEDs are not the same—one is a platform and the other is a munition, and drones rely more on repurposing technology available to the retail market. But there are similarities as well. First, both technologies are inexpensive, especially compared to the cost of defending ground forces against them. Second, both technologies can be modified in various ways, placing the onus on the defender to adapt to the various configurations militant groups might construct. These two features make both jury-rigged drones and IEDs a concern for any armed force facing a militarily inferior adversary.
Drone wars of the near future. One worrisome potential source of growing drone capacity might seem benevolent at first: the commercial sector itself. As commercially available technology develops at a rapid pace, the variety of military applications is increasing as well. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that between 2016 and 2020, buyers will spend about $100 billion on drones. Defense spending by militaries will account for about $70 billion of that total, but the remaining $30 billion will be made up by consumers, businesses, and civilian government bodies buying commercially-available products.
Within the drone market, the sensor component segment is forecasted to grow the fastest. Sensors can perform a variety of functions, such as transmitting images or detecting heat signatures. Sensors are built for commercial purposes like search-and-rescue operations and crop analysis, but can also be adapted for military purposes. For example, today it is easy to acquire infrared cameras adapted for use on UAVs. It is plausible to imagine a near future in which militant groups program short- or medium-range drones equipped with these sensors to seek and destroy anything with a heat signature. Furthermore, as the drone market grows, more shapes and sizes will become available for purchase. As drones get both bigger and smaller, the variety of military applications expands. Bigger drones can carry larger payloads; for militant groups, this means dropping larger munitions. On the flipside, smaller drones are harder to detect. Militant groups can use them to their advantage by striking targets with minimal warning.
Advances in autonomous systems that enable coordinated behaviors—such as swarming—could also increase the lethality of commercial drones. Swarming robotics lets multiple drones coordinate to achieve a desired behavior, such as turning in formation or attacking a target simultaneously. The US military is testing swarm principles to conduct aerial surveillance, and there are potential applications for strike missions. Commercially, swarm robotics technology has a number of promising applications, from detecting cancer (using swarming nanoparticles) to finding rescue victims. As swarming robotics is mastered and brought to market, the potential applications for militant groups are numerous. For example, militant groups could use the technology to more comprehensively surveil large portions of the battlefield, or attack targets in bombing raids. (...)
What to do. As drones grow in significance on the battlefield, policy makers are thinking about how to effectively counter the threat. Commercial drones are readily accessible and easily purchased, making it nearly impossible to stem the flow of cheap drones into the hands of militant groups. Moreover, targeting the experts who can jury-rig simple drones might soon be irrelevant as well. As advanced technologies—like swarming robotics—are mastered and more artificial intelligence is built into even simple commercial systems, “plug and fly” could become the norm for many types of operations. The market will pre-package and directly provide the technical knowledge militant groups need to augment their drones’ capabilities. The engineering skill a particular group needs to effectively use drones will decline. In short, it is not possible to prevent militant groups from getting and using drones. That means nations trying to thwart this threat should focus on defeating it militarily, in particular by detecting, neutralizing, and mitigating the effects of drones in militant hands.
Currently, countries and businesses around the world are grappling with how to best address the challenge in a variety of ways. In Japan, the Tokyo police are using drones equipped with nets to stop potentially hostile drones. The French military and Dutch police are breeding golden eagles to destroy small drones. For its part, the US military tested a “drone-killing laser” and solicited proposals for other solutions to counter unmanned aerial systems. The private sector is developing devices that hack other drones mid-flight, “guns” that jam electromagnetic waves and disrupt enemies’ ability to control their own drones, and compressed-gas-powered launchers that capture targets in a net. To be sure, the Tokyo and Dutch police are unlikely to face off against militant groups, but progress countering drones in one domain is potentially transferable to others. That is why a collective effort by law enforcement, the military, and private sector actors is necessary to mitigate the threat of modified commercial drones used by militant groups or others. It is too early to determine which anti-drone technologies are most promising. However, given the rate at which new drones are entering production, and the many ways militant groups can adapt them for battle, governments should relentlessly pursue any promising lead.
by Itai Barsade and Michael C. Horowitz, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: uncredited
That ISIS would weaponize drones shouldn’t be surprising. Militant groups often use the latest consumer technology to make up for capability gaps and level the fight against regular military forces. ISIS broadcasts propaganda through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and plans attacks using encrypted communication platforms like Telegram. This embrace of innovation extends to the way militant groups use military force. Over the last year or so, they have begun to use modified commercial drones for offensive strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. These new tools of war provide a way to conduct terror attacks against civilians, and can also pose a threat to ground forces. Stopping drone proliferation is not an option because of the ubiquity of the technology. That means government forces will have to learn to counter drones operated by militant groups, just as they are now training to counter drones used by national militaries.Already a “daunting” threat. The threat posed by militant groups flying drones is as much about where the threat is coming from—the sky—as it is about the munitions being launched. Militaries fighting militant groups have enjoyed air superiority for decades. US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, have rarely, if ever, feared attacks from the air. Civilians and humanitarian groups in Syria worry about air strikes from Assad’s regime, but not from militant groups like ISIS. The adoption of drones by militant groups is therefore generating a novel challenge. Speaking at a conference in May, Gen. Raymond Thomas, head of the US Special Operations Command, called commercial drones the “most daunting problem” his troops had faced over the previous year. At one point, he said, the anti-ISIS campaign “nearly came to a screeching halt, where literally over 24 hours there were 70 drones in the air.” (...)
To be clear, commercial drones and IEDs are not the same—one is a platform and the other is a munition, and drones rely more on repurposing technology available to the retail market. But there are similarities as well. First, both technologies are inexpensive, especially compared to the cost of defending ground forces against them. Second, both technologies can be modified in various ways, placing the onus on the defender to adapt to the various configurations militant groups might construct. These two features make both jury-rigged drones and IEDs a concern for any armed force facing a militarily inferior adversary.
Drone wars of the near future. One worrisome potential source of growing drone capacity might seem benevolent at first: the commercial sector itself. As commercially available technology develops at a rapid pace, the variety of military applications is increasing as well. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that between 2016 and 2020, buyers will spend about $100 billion on drones. Defense spending by militaries will account for about $70 billion of that total, but the remaining $30 billion will be made up by consumers, businesses, and civilian government bodies buying commercially-available products.
Within the drone market, the sensor component segment is forecasted to grow the fastest. Sensors can perform a variety of functions, such as transmitting images or detecting heat signatures. Sensors are built for commercial purposes like search-and-rescue operations and crop analysis, but can also be adapted for military purposes. For example, today it is easy to acquire infrared cameras adapted for use on UAVs. It is plausible to imagine a near future in which militant groups program short- or medium-range drones equipped with these sensors to seek and destroy anything with a heat signature. Furthermore, as the drone market grows, more shapes and sizes will become available for purchase. As drones get both bigger and smaller, the variety of military applications expands. Bigger drones can carry larger payloads; for militant groups, this means dropping larger munitions. On the flipside, smaller drones are harder to detect. Militant groups can use them to their advantage by striking targets with minimal warning.
Advances in autonomous systems that enable coordinated behaviors—such as swarming—could also increase the lethality of commercial drones. Swarming robotics lets multiple drones coordinate to achieve a desired behavior, such as turning in formation or attacking a target simultaneously. The US military is testing swarm principles to conduct aerial surveillance, and there are potential applications for strike missions. Commercially, swarm robotics technology has a number of promising applications, from detecting cancer (using swarming nanoparticles) to finding rescue victims. As swarming robotics is mastered and brought to market, the potential applications for militant groups are numerous. For example, militant groups could use the technology to more comprehensively surveil large portions of the battlefield, or attack targets in bombing raids. (...)
What to do. As drones grow in significance on the battlefield, policy makers are thinking about how to effectively counter the threat. Commercial drones are readily accessible and easily purchased, making it nearly impossible to stem the flow of cheap drones into the hands of militant groups. Moreover, targeting the experts who can jury-rig simple drones might soon be irrelevant as well. As advanced technologies—like swarming robotics—are mastered and more artificial intelligence is built into even simple commercial systems, “plug and fly” could become the norm for many types of operations. The market will pre-package and directly provide the technical knowledge militant groups need to augment their drones’ capabilities. The engineering skill a particular group needs to effectively use drones will decline. In short, it is not possible to prevent militant groups from getting and using drones. That means nations trying to thwart this threat should focus on defeating it militarily, in particular by detecting, neutralizing, and mitigating the effects of drones in militant hands.
Currently, countries and businesses around the world are grappling with how to best address the challenge in a variety of ways. In Japan, the Tokyo police are using drones equipped with nets to stop potentially hostile drones. The French military and Dutch police are breeding golden eagles to destroy small drones. For its part, the US military tested a “drone-killing laser” and solicited proposals for other solutions to counter unmanned aerial systems. The private sector is developing devices that hack other drones mid-flight, “guns” that jam electromagnetic waves and disrupt enemies’ ability to control their own drones, and compressed-gas-powered launchers that capture targets in a net. To be sure, the Tokyo and Dutch police are unlikely to face off against militant groups, but progress countering drones in one domain is potentially transferable to others. That is why a collective effort by law enforcement, the military, and private sector actors is necessary to mitigate the threat of modified commercial drones used by militant groups or others. It is too early to determine which anti-drone technologies are most promising. However, given the rate at which new drones are entering production, and the many ways militant groups can adapt them for battle, governments should relentlessly pursue any promising lead.
by Itai Barsade and Michael C. Horowitz, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: The effects of a single terrorist nuclear bomb]
The Sideways Curse Has Lifted: Merlot Is Having a Comeback
Merlot was once the fan-favorite red grape and wine. Then came 2004 hit movie Sideways, in which Miles, the pinot-noir-loving main character, trashes the varietal before heading into a bar: “If anyone orders merlot, I’m leaving,” he explodes. “I am not drinking any f---ing merlot.”
Interest in pinot skyrocketed, while the reputation of merlot tanked. In California, growers pulled out more than 10,000 acres of merlot grapes.
Such is the power of Hollywood.
But wine fashions are fickle, and now velvety merlot is experiencing a comeback. (...)
Don’t thank hip sommeliers for this reputation rehab. Most are in love with every grape but merlot—for the wine-geek Instagram crowd, the more obscure the better.
To me, the reason merlot was bound to return to favor was simple: It’s very often delicious. Its silky, cherry fruit and round texture give it an immediate appeal that tannic cabernet, its nearest wine rival, doesn’t have.
Merlot malaise was due to a lot more than Miles’s Sideways rant. Many California vintners responded to its popularity in the 1990s by rushing to plant more, often in places with the wrong soil and climate. A lot of those wines were simple and boring, or the opposite—too sweet, or amped up like flavor-bomb cabernets, with so much oomph and alcohol that drinking them was like getting a punch in the mouth.
John Williams, winemaker and owner of Napa’s Frog’s Leap, is convinced Sideways actually saved merlot, as those who had jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on the trend ended up pulling out bad vineyards.
At its peak in California, merlot accounted for nearly 60,000 acres of vines; now it’s down to a little more than 44,000. In recent years vintners have swapped in more popular cabernet vines, since those grapes and wines sold for more; others dumped their merlot into mass market brands and basic red blends.
But wineries that had long been devoted to high-quality merlot doubled down on cool clay soils, gentler winemaking, and less aging in new oak barrels to preserve subtler aromas and silkier textures. They worked hard to make and market the good stuff.
by Elin McCoy, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Sideways and uncredited
Friday, September 29, 2017
In Proof We Trust
The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was still being used to settle land disputes as late as the 1960s. Today there is a new system of digital record-keeping. Its impact could be equally large. It is called the blockchain.
Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.
All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest. The collective power of all these computers is greater than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.
New information is added to the record every few minutes, but it can be added only when all the computers signal their approval, which they do as soon as they have satisfactory proof that the information to be added is correct. Everybody knows how the system works, but nobody can change how it works. It is fully automated. Human decision-making or behaviour doesn’t enter into it.
If a company or a government department were in charge of the record, it would be vulnerable – if the company went bust or the government department shut down, for example. But with a distributed record there is no single point of vulnerability. It is decentralised. At times, some computers might go awry, but that doesn’t matter. The copies on all the other computers and their unanimous approval for new information to be added will mean the record itself is safe.
This is possibly the most significant and detailed record in all history, an open-source structure of permanent memory, which grows organically. It is known as the blockchain. It is the breakthrough tech behind the digital cash system, Bitcoin, but its impact will soon be far wider than just alternative money.
Many struggle to understand what is so special about Bitcoin. We all have accounts online with pounds, dollars, euros or some other national currency. That money is completely digital, it doesn’t exist in the real world – it is just numbers in a digital ledger somewhere. Only about 3 per cent of national currency actually exists in physical form; the rest is digital. I have supermarket rewards points and air miles as well. These don’t exist physically either, but they are still tokens to be exchanged for some kind of good or service, albeit with a limited scope; so they’re money too. Why has the world got so excited about Bitcoin?
To understand this, it is important to distinguish between money and cash.
If I’m standing in a shop and I give the shopkeeper 50 pence for a bar of chocolate, that is a cash transaction. The money passes straight from me to him and it involves nobody else: it is direct and frictionless. But if I buy that bar of chocolate with a credit card, the transaction involves a payment processor of some kind (often more than one). There is, in other words, a middle man.
The same goes for those pounds, dollars or euros I have in the accounts online. I have to go through a middle man if I want to spend them – perhaps a bank, PayPal or a credit-card company. If I want to spend those supermarket rewards points or those airmiles, there is the supermarket or airline to go through.
Since the early 1980s, computer coders had been trying to find a way of digitally replicating the cash transaction – that direct, frictionless, A-to-B transaction – but nobody could find a way. The problem was known as the problem of ‘double-spending’. If I send you an email, a photo or a video – any form of computer code – you can, if you want, copy and paste that code and send it to one or a hundred or a million different people. But if you can do that with money, the money quickly becomes useless. Nobody could find a way around it without using a middle man of some kind to verify and process transactions, at which point it is no longer cash. By the mid 2000s, coders had all but given up on the idea. It was deemed unsolvable. Then, in late 2008, quietly announced on an out-of-the-way mailing list, along came Bitcoin.
By late 2009, coders were waking up to the fact that its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, had cracked the problem of double spending. The solution was the blockchain, the automated record with nobody in charge. It replaces the middle man. Rather than a bank process a transaction, transactions are processed by those 8,000-9,000 computers distributed across the Bitcoin network in the collective tradition of open-source collaboration. When those computers have their cryptographic and mathematical proof (a process that takes very little time), they approve the transaction and it is then complete. The payment information – the time, the amount, the wallet addresses – is added to the database; or, to use correct terminology, another block of data is added to the chain of information – hence the name blockchain. It is, simply, a chain of information blocks.
Money requires trust – trust in central banks, commercial banks, other large institutions, trust in the paper itself. On a dollar bill you will see the words: ‘In God we trust.’ Bitcoin aficionados are fond of saying: ‘In proof we trust.’ The blockchain, which works transparently by automation and mathematical and cryptographic proof, has removed the need for that trust. It has enabled people to pay digital cash directly from one person to another, as easily as you might send a text or an email, with no need for a middle man.
So the best way to understand Bitcoin is, simply: cash for the internet. It is not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that, as some of the diehard advocates will tell you, but it does have many uses. And, on a practical level, it works.
Testament to this is the rise of the online black market. Perhaps £1 million-worth of illegal goods and services are traded through dark marketplaces every day and the means of payment is Bitcoin. Bitcoin has facilitated this rapid rise. (I should stress that even though every Bitcoin transaction, no matter how small, is recorded on the blockchain, the identity of the person making that transaction can be hidden if desired – hence its appeal). In the financial grand scheme of things, £1 million a day is not very much, but the fact that ordinary people on the black market are using Bitcoin on a practical, day-to-day basis as a way of paying for goods and services demonstrates that the tech works. I’m not endorsing black markets, but it’s worth noting that they are often the first to embrace a new tech. They were the first to turn the internet to profit, for example. Without deep pools of debt or venture capital to fall back on, black markets have to make new tech work quickly and practically.
But Bitcoin’s potential use goes far beyond dark markets. Consider why we might want to use cash in the physical world. You use it for small payments – a bar of chocolate or a newspaper from your corner shop, for example. There is the same need online. I might want to read an article in The Times. I don’t want to take out an annual subscription – but I do want to read that article. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system where I could make a micropayment to read that article? It is not worth a payment processor’s time to process a payment that small, but with internet cash, you don’t need a processor. You can pay cash and it costs nothing to process – it is direct. This potential use could usher in a new era of paid content. No longer will online content-providers have to be so squeezed, and give out so much material for nothing in the hope of somehow recouping later, now that the tech is there to make and receive payment for small amounts in exchange for content.
We also use cash for quick payments, direct payments and tipping. You are walking past a busker, for example, and you throw him a coin. Soon you will able to tip an online content-provider for his or her YouTube video, song or blog entry, again as easily and quickly as you click ‘like’ on the screen. Even if I pay my restaurant bill with a card, I’ll often tip the waiter in cash. That way I know the waiter will receive the money rather than some unscrupulous employer. I like to pay cash in markets, where a lot of small businesses start out because a cash payment goes directly to the business owner without middle men shaving off their percentages. The same principle of quick, cheap, direct payment will apply online. Cheap processing costs are essential for low-margin businesses. Internet cash will have a use there, too. It also has potential use in the remittance business, which is currently dominated by the likes of Western Union. For those working oversees who want to send money home, remittance and foreign exchange charges can often amount to as much as 20 per cent of the amount transferred. With Bitcoin that cost can be removed. (...)
Just as the blockchain records where a bitcoin is at any given moment, and thus who owns it, so can blockchain be used to record the ownership of any asset and then to trade ownership of that asset. This has huge implications for the way stocks, bonds and futures, indeed all financial assets, are registered and traded. Registrars, stock markets, investment banks – disruption lies ahead for all of them. Their monopolies are all under threat from blockchain technology.
Land and property ownership can also be recorded and traded on a blockchain.(...) The ownership of vehicles, tickets, diamonds, gold – just about anything – can be recorded and traded using blockchain technology – even the contents of your music and film libraries (though copyright law may inhibit that). Blockchain tokens will be as good as any deed of ownership – and will be significantly cheaper to provide.
Whether it is the initial agreement, the arbitration of a dispute or its execution, every stage of a contract has, historically, been evaluated and acted on by people. A smart contract automates the rules, checks the conditions and then acts on them, minimising human involvement – and thus cost. Even complicated business arrangements can be coded and packaged as a smart contract for a fraction of the cost of drafting, disputing or executing a traditional contract.
One of the criticisms of the current legal system is that only the very rich or those on legal aid can afford it: everyone else is excluded. Smart contracts have the potential to disrupt the legal profession and make it affordable to all, just as the internet has done with both music and publishing.
This all has enormous implications for the way we do business. It is possible that blockchain tech will do the work of bankers, lawyers, administrators and registrars to a much higher standard for a fraction of the price.
by Dominic Frisby, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. A friend and I were discussing bitcoins last night and he seemed a little confused about the whole technology so I thought I'd repost this article.]
Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.
All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest. The collective power of all these computers is greater than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.New information is added to the record every few minutes, but it can be added only when all the computers signal their approval, which they do as soon as they have satisfactory proof that the information to be added is correct. Everybody knows how the system works, but nobody can change how it works. It is fully automated. Human decision-making or behaviour doesn’t enter into it.
If a company or a government department were in charge of the record, it would be vulnerable – if the company went bust or the government department shut down, for example. But with a distributed record there is no single point of vulnerability. It is decentralised. At times, some computers might go awry, but that doesn’t matter. The copies on all the other computers and their unanimous approval for new information to be added will mean the record itself is safe.
This is possibly the most significant and detailed record in all history, an open-source structure of permanent memory, which grows organically. It is known as the blockchain. It is the breakthrough tech behind the digital cash system, Bitcoin, but its impact will soon be far wider than just alternative money.
Many struggle to understand what is so special about Bitcoin. We all have accounts online with pounds, dollars, euros or some other national currency. That money is completely digital, it doesn’t exist in the real world – it is just numbers in a digital ledger somewhere. Only about 3 per cent of national currency actually exists in physical form; the rest is digital. I have supermarket rewards points and air miles as well. These don’t exist physically either, but they are still tokens to be exchanged for some kind of good or service, albeit with a limited scope; so they’re money too. Why has the world got so excited about Bitcoin?
To understand this, it is important to distinguish between money and cash.
If I’m standing in a shop and I give the shopkeeper 50 pence for a bar of chocolate, that is a cash transaction. The money passes straight from me to him and it involves nobody else: it is direct and frictionless. But if I buy that bar of chocolate with a credit card, the transaction involves a payment processor of some kind (often more than one). There is, in other words, a middle man.
The same goes for those pounds, dollars or euros I have in the accounts online. I have to go through a middle man if I want to spend them – perhaps a bank, PayPal or a credit-card company. If I want to spend those supermarket rewards points or those airmiles, there is the supermarket or airline to go through.
Since the early 1980s, computer coders had been trying to find a way of digitally replicating the cash transaction – that direct, frictionless, A-to-B transaction – but nobody could find a way. The problem was known as the problem of ‘double-spending’. If I send you an email, a photo or a video – any form of computer code – you can, if you want, copy and paste that code and send it to one or a hundred or a million different people. But if you can do that with money, the money quickly becomes useless. Nobody could find a way around it without using a middle man of some kind to verify and process transactions, at which point it is no longer cash. By the mid 2000s, coders had all but given up on the idea. It was deemed unsolvable. Then, in late 2008, quietly announced on an out-of-the-way mailing list, along came Bitcoin.
By late 2009, coders were waking up to the fact that its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, had cracked the problem of double spending. The solution was the blockchain, the automated record with nobody in charge. It replaces the middle man. Rather than a bank process a transaction, transactions are processed by those 8,000-9,000 computers distributed across the Bitcoin network in the collective tradition of open-source collaboration. When those computers have their cryptographic and mathematical proof (a process that takes very little time), they approve the transaction and it is then complete. The payment information – the time, the amount, the wallet addresses – is added to the database; or, to use correct terminology, another block of data is added to the chain of information – hence the name blockchain. It is, simply, a chain of information blocks.
Money requires trust – trust in central banks, commercial banks, other large institutions, trust in the paper itself. On a dollar bill you will see the words: ‘In God we trust.’ Bitcoin aficionados are fond of saying: ‘In proof we trust.’ The blockchain, which works transparently by automation and mathematical and cryptographic proof, has removed the need for that trust. It has enabled people to pay digital cash directly from one person to another, as easily as you might send a text or an email, with no need for a middle man.
So the best way to understand Bitcoin is, simply: cash for the internet. It is not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that, as some of the diehard advocates will tell you, but it does have many uses. And, on a practical level, it works.
Testament to this is the rise of the online black market. Perhaps £1 million-worth of illegal goods and services are traded through dark marketplaces every day and the means of payment is Bitcoin. Bitcoin has facilitated this rapid rise. (I should stress that even though every Bitcoin transaction, no matter how small, is recorded on the blockchain, the identity of the person making that transaction can be hidden if desired – hence its appeal). In the financial grand scheme of things, £1 million a day is not very much, but the fact that ordinary people on the black market are using Bitcoin on a practical, day-to-day basis as a way of paying for goods and services demonstrates that the tech works. I’m not endorsing black markets, but it’s worth noting that they are often the first to embrace a new tech. They were the first to turn the internet to profit, for example. Without deep pools of debt or venture capital to fall back on, black markets have to make new tech work quickly and practically.
But Bitcoin’s potential use goes far beyond dark markets. Consider why we might want to use cash in the physical world. You use it for small payments – a bar of chocolate or a newspaper from your corner shop, for example. There is the same need online. I might want to read an article in The Times. I don’t want to take out an annual subscription – but I do want to read that article. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system where I could make a micropayment to read that article? It is not worth a payment processor’s time to process a payment that small, but with internet cash, you don’t need a processor. You can pay cash and it costs nothing to process – it is direct. This potential use could usher in a new era of paid content. No longer will online content-providers have to be so squeezed, and give out so much material for nothing in the hope of somehow recouping later, now that the tech is there to make and receive payment for small amounts in exchange for content.
We also use cash for quick payments, direct payments and tipping. You are walking past a busker, for example, and you throw him a coin. Soon you will able to tip an online content-provider for his or her YouTube video, song or blog entry, again as easily and quickly as you click ‘like’ on the screen. Even if I pay my restaurant bill with a card, I’ll often tip the waiter in cash. That way I know the waiter will receive the money rather than some unscrupulous employer. I like to pay cash in markets, where a lot of small businesses start out because a cash payment goes directly to the business owner without middle men shaving off their percentages. The same principle of quick, cheap, direct payment will apply online. Cheap processing costs are essential for low-margin businesses. Internet cash will have a use there, too. It also has potential use in the remittance business, which is currently dominated by the likes of Western Union. For those working oversees who want to send money home, remittance and foreign exchange charges can often amount to as much as 20 per cent of the amount transferred. With Bitcoin that cost can be removed. (...)
Just as the blockchain records where a bitcoin is at any given moment, and thus who owns it, so can blockchain be used to record the ownership of any asset and then to trade ownership of that asset. This has huge implications for the way stocks, bonds and futures, indeed all financial assets, are registered and traded. Registrars, stock markets, investment banks – disruption lies ahead for all of them. Their monopolies are all under threat from blockchain technology.
Land and property ownership can also be recorded and traded on a blockchain.(...) The ownership of vehicles, tickets, diamonds, gold – just about anything – can be recorded and traded using blockchain technology – even the contents of your music and film libraries (though copyright law may inhibit that). Blockchain tokens will be as good as any deed of ownership – and will be significantly cheaper to provide.
Whether it is the initial agreement, the arbitration of a dispute or its execution, every stage of a contract has, historically, been evaluated and acted on by people. A smart contract automates the rules, checks the conditions and then acts on them, minimising human involvement – and thus cost. Even complicated business arrangements can be coded and packaged as a smart contract for a fraction of the cost of drafting, disputing or executing a traditional contract.
One of the criticisms of the current legal system is that only the very rich or those on legal aid can afford it: everyone else is excluded. Smart contracts have the potential to disrupt the legal profession and make it affordable to all, just as the internet has done with both music and publishing.
This all has enormous implications for the way we do business. It is possible that blockchain tech will do the work of bankers, lawyers, administrators and registrars to a much higher standard for a fraction of the price.
by Dominic Frisby, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. A friend and I were discussing bitcoins last night and he seemed a little confused about the whole technology so I thought I'd repost this article.]
Will Capitalism and Democracy Survive?
Systems of governance, and both capitalism and democracy are such systems, can run cycles of success, failure and renewal for a long time. Consider Imperial Confucian China, with dynasties failing, sometimes with interregnums, then new dynasties arising. Dynasties would tend to be vigorous to start, corrupt and sclerotic at the end.
Or Dark Ages and Medieval Europe, with forms of feudalism and monarchy surviving crises over many centuries.
Let’s consider the dynamic in a bit of detail.
A system survives when it gives power to those who support it AND are capable of continuing it.
This seems obvious, but it’s a little more tricky than it seems.
Take capitalism: capitalism runs thru greed. It gives power to those who do whatever it takes to make the most money The more money you have, the more power you have. Money is the ability to decide what other people do, not just the ones you hire directly but thru purchasing power. Apple decides what Foxconn does, and heck of a lot of other people it doesn’t hire directly.
Capitalism’s prime directive is “do whatever makes the most money”. Whoever does that successfully also receives the most power.
In a capitalist society people who do not respond to capitalism’s prime direct, do whatever makes the most money, do not get power. Since they have no power, they cannot challenge capitalism.
The catch here is part two of the prime directive, “and are capable of continuing it.”
Capitalism must also run the actual real economy, which consists of people and things: houses, food, sewer systems, airports and so on.
If capitalism fails to run that system effectively, that has real effects which having more money cannot manage.
You see this in the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany. You see this in the Great Depression. You see this now, in America, where parts of the population are seeing absolute declines in life expectancy.
In Capitalism, there is supposed to be a transmission between the real economy and how much money powerful people have: you should get your vast wealth by giving people what they want, and that should be good for the economy, and if it isn’t, you should go bankrupt.
People who pursue money but cannot actually mange the real economy should lose that money, and therefor the power.
This happened in the Great Depression. The rich took their losses, and lost their power (not all of them). The ones who remained were the smarter or luckier ones: the more capable ones.
Still, the magnitude of the disaster was such that Capitalism was in some danger. As many have observed, FDR rescued capitalism.
What happened in 2008 is that a large portion of capitalists lost all their money (and more than all their money). If the capitalist transmission system had been allowed to work, there would not have been a single solvent major bank or brokerage in the United States.
They had fucked up.
BUT they had also bought the politicians and regulators, and were bailed out.
The real economy, which is not GDP, then shifted into a lower state of activity.
This process has been going on for a long time now, since 1980 really. The rich have been getting richer and worse at managing the actual economy.
What should have happened in 2008 was the rich take their losses and power moves to democratically elected officials, as it did in the 30s. But democratically elected officials, handed said power on a platter, refused to take it. (Yes, the Fed, but the Fed can be brought to heel any time either Congress of the President chooses to.)
Democracy, thus, also failed.
A system must give power to those who want to continue it. It must also run the actual society well enough to avoid being overthrown.
Or Dark Ages and Medieval Europe, with forms of feudalism and monarchy surviving crises over many centuries.
Let’s consider the dynamic in a bit of detail.A system survives when it gives power to those who support it AND are capable of continuing it.
This seems obvious, but it’s a little more tricky than it seems.
Take capitalism: capitalism runs thru greed. It gives power to those who do whatever it takes to make the most money The more money you have, the more power you have. Money is the ability to decide what other people do, not just the ones you hire directly but thru purchasing power. Apple decides what Foxconn does, and heck of a lot of other people it doesn’t hire directly.
Capitalism’s prime directive is “do whatever makes the most money”. Whoever does that successfully also receives the most power.
In a capitalist society people who do not respond to capitalism’s prime direct, do whatever makes the most money, do not get power. Since they have no power, they cannot challenge capitalism.
The catch here is part two of the prime directive, “and are capable of continuing it.”
Capitalism must also run the actual real economy, which consists of people and things: houses, food, sewer systems, airports and so on.
If capitalism fails to run that system effectively, that has real effects which having more money cannot manage.
You see this in the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany. You see this in the Great Depression. You see this now, in America, where parts of the population are seeing absolute declines in life expectancy.
In Capitalism, there is supposed to be a transmission between the real economy and how much money powerful people have: you should get your vast wealth by giving people what they want, and that should be good for the economy, and if it isn’t, you should go bankrupt.
People who pursue money but cannot actually mange the real economy should lose that money, and therefor the power.
This happened in the Great Depression. The rich took their losses, and lost their power (not all of them). The ones who remained were the smarter or luckier ones: the more capable ones.
Still, the magnitude of the disaster was such that Capitalism was in some danger. As many have observed, FDR rescued capitalism.
What happened in 2008 is that a large portion of capitalists lost all their money (and more than all their money). If the capitalist transmission system had been allowed to work, there would not have been a single solvent major bank or brokerage in the United States.
They had fucked up.
BUT they had also bought the politicians and regulators, and were bailed out.
The real economy, which is not GDP, then shifted into a lower state of activity.
This process has been going on for a long time now, since 1980 really. The rich have been getting richer and worse at managing the actual economy.
What should have happened in 2008 was the rich take their losses and power moves to democratically elected officials, as it did in the 30s. But democratically elected officials, handed said power on a platter, refused to take it. (Yes, the Fed, but the Fed can be brought to heel any time either Congress of the President chooses to.)
Democracy, thus, also failed.
A system must give power to those who want to continue it. It must also run the actual society well enough to avoid being overthrown.
by Ian Welsh | Read more:
Image: TW Collins
The Harrowing World of a Trauma Cleaner
Dorothy’s front door wouldn’t open. So they took it off its hinges.
“[We] were confronted immediately by a wall of garbage, decades upon decades of accumulated detritus,” says Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner. Dorothy’s impenetrable house was in a wealthy suburb, not far from a cafe that made raw almond milk. Krasnostein had arrived there with Sandra Pankhurst, the 63-year-old owner and operator of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.
“The floor wasn’t the floor, it started three or four feet up the wall, and through her rooms was the solid glacial mass of garbage fused together.”
In the four years Krasnostein spent writing and researching her book, she trailed Pankhurst to more than 20 grotesque and garbage-filled sites in suburban Melbourne. “People think ‘cleaning’ and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,” Pankhurst told her as they stood together in the midst of Dorothy’s house. “We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer.”
Pankhurst is portrayed as a remarkable woman: a goddess in white sneakers, marching through decrepit homes and commanding staff in hazmat suits on the correct chemicals for bodily fluids. Her genius lies in the kind and delicate way she speaks to her clients, bizarre characters hiding from the outside world in caves of filth.
Originally an essay published online, Krasnostein’s playful yet heartfelt debut is one of the most arresting works of biography you will read in a long time. Guardian Australia spoke to the writer about shit stains, bed bugs, cleaning and compassion.
Guardian Australia: What is a trauma cleaner?
Sarah Krasnostein: A trauma cleaner cleans crime scenes. But what I didn’t know was that they also deal with many living clients. Sandra’s business involves going to the home of hoarders. She encounters both “wet squalor” – things that you would flush down a toilet – and “dry squalor”, garbage that has collected over time.
How would you describe the smell of death?
Once it hits you, it’s both intimate and alien at the same time. An awful, awful smell. At the first job I went on, a woman who was my age at the time, 35, had died of a heroin overdose; her body was discovered after two weeks. When you reduce a human to just carbon matter decaying over time, it’s profoundly disturbing.
What sort of scenes were you going into?
In Marilyn’s house, the foyer was densely covered by about 40 grocery bags, full of rotting food. There was fruit liquefying on her bed, where she slept. The bathroom was … she couldn’t always make it to the toilet.
Marilyn was witty and well-read, but her world was falling in on her. She did have cancer, she was probably alcoholic. This was the physical manifestation of the pain and isolation in which she was living. In each of the jobs was the unsettling sense of pain and mental illness.
by Lou Heinrich and Sarah Krasnostein , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Caird/Newspix
[ed. Do read the essay, The Secret Life of a Crime Scene Cleaner.]
“[We] were confronted immediately by a wall of garbage, decades upon decades of accumulated detritus,” says Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner. Dorothy’s impenetrable house was in a wealthy suburb, not far from a cafe that made raw almond milk. Krasnostein had arrived there with Sandra Pankhurst, the 63-year-old owner and operator of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.
“The floor wasn’t the floor, it started three or four feet up the wall, and through her rooms was the solid glacial mass of garbage fused together.”In the four years Krasnostein spent writing and researching her book, she trailed Pankhurst to more than 20 grotesque and garbage-filled sites in suburban Melbourne. “People think ‘cleaning’ and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,” Pankhurst told her as they stood together in the midst of Dorothy’s house. “We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer.”
Pankhurst is portrayed as a remarkable woman: a goddess in white sneakers, marching through decrepit homes and commanding staff in hazmat suits on the correct chemicals for bodily fluids. Her genius lies in the kind and delicate way she speaks to her clients, bizarre characters hiding from the outside world in caves of filth.
Originally an essay published online, Krasnostein’s playful yet heartfelt debut is one of the most arresting works of biography you will read in a long time. Guardian Australia spoke to the writer about shit stains, bed bugs, cleaning and compassion.
Guardian Australia: What is a trauma cleaner?
Sarah Krasnostein: A trauma cleaner cleans crime scenes. But what I didn’t know was that they also deal with many living clients. Sandra’s business involves going to the home of hoarders. She encounters both “wet squalor” – things that you would flush down a toilet – and “dry squalor”, garbage that has collected over time.
How would you describe the smell of death?
Once it hits you, it’s both intimate and alien at the same time. An awful, awful smell. At the first job I went on, a woman who was my age at the time, 35, had died of a heroin overdose; her body was discovered after two weeks. When you reduce a human to just carbon matter decaying over time, it’s profoundly disturbing.
What sort of scenes were you going into?
In Marilyn’s house, the foyer was densely covered by about 40 grocery bags, full of rotting food. There was fruit liquefying on her bed, where she slept. The bathroom was … she couldn’t always make it to the toilet.
Marilyn was witty and well-read, but her world was falling in on her. She did have cancer, she was probably alcoholic. This was the physical manifestation of the pain and isolation in which she was living. In each of the jobs was the unsettling sense of pain and mental illness.
by Lou Heinrich and Sarah Krasnostein , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Caird/Newspix
[ed. Do read the essay, The Secret Life of a Crime Scene Cleaner.]
I Asked Tinder for My Data
At 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since that day I’ve fired up the app 920 times and matched with 870 different people. I recall a few of them very well: the ones who either became lovers, friends or terrible first dates. I’ve forgotten all the others. But Tinder has not.
The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.
With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.
Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.
“I am horrified but absolutely not surprised by this amount of data,” said Olivier Keyes, a data scientist at the University of Washington. “Every app you use regularly on your phone owns the same [kinds of information]. Facebook has thousands of pages about you!”
As I flicked through page after page of my data I felt guilty. I was amazed by how much information I was voluntarily disclosing: from locations, interests and jobs, to pictures, music tastes and what I liked to eat. But I quickly realised I wasn’t the only one. A July 2017 study revealed Tinder users are excessively willing to disclose information without realising it.
“You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”
Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. Tinder knows me so well. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569; who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them.
“What you are describing is called secondary implicit disclosed information,” explains Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “Tinder knows much more about you when studying your behaviour on the app. It knows how often you connect and at which times; the percentage of white men, black men, Asian men you have matched; which kinds of people are interested in you; which words you use the most; how much time people spend on your picture before swiping you, and so on. Personal data is the fuel of the economy. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising.” (...)
The trouble is these 800 pages of my most intimate data are actually just the tip of the iceberg. “Your personal data affects who you see first on Tinder, yes,” says Dehaye. “But also what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan.
“We are leaning towards a more and more opaque society, towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected.”
by Judith Duportail, The Guardian | Read more:
The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.
With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.
“I am horrified but absolutely not surprised by this amount of data,” said Olivier Keyes, a data scientist at the University of Washington. “Every app you use regularly on your phone owns the same [kinds of information]. Facebook has thousands of pages about you!”
As I flicked through page after page of my data I felt guilty. I was amazed by how much information I was voluntarily disclosing: from locations, interests and jobs, to pictures, music tastes and what I liked to eat. But I quickly realised I wasn’t the only one. A July 2017 study revealed Tinder users are excessively willing to disclose information without realising it.
“You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”
Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. Tinder knows me so well. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569; who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them.
“What you are describing is called secondary implicit disclosed information,” explains Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “Tinder knows much more about you when studying your behaviour on the app. It knows how often you connect and at which times; the percentage of white men, black men, Asian men you have matched; which kinds of people are interested in you; which words you use the most; how much time people spend on your picture before swiping you, and so on. Personal data is the fuel of the economy. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising.” (...)
The trouble is these 800 pages of my most intimate data are actually just the tip of the iceberg. “Your personal data affects who you see first on Tinder, yes,” says Dehaye. “But also what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan.
“We are leaning towards a more and more opaque society, towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected.”
by Judith Duportail, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alarmy
Thursday, September 28, 2017
[ed. One of my favorite beach walks (I'll be there next week). I wonder if this guy'll still be laying around? I hope not, dead whales smell almost beyond dead.]
Images: Marc Lester / Alaska Dispatch News
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
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