After the End of the Startup Era

There’s a weird feeling afoot these days, in the Valley, and in San Francisco. Across the rest of the world — Denver, Santiago, Toronto, Berlin, “Silicon Glen,” “Silicon Alley,” “Silicon Roundabout“, Station F — it seems every city still wants to be a startup hub, dreaming of becoming “the new Silicon Valley.” But in the Valley itself? Here it feels like the golden age of the startup is already over.

Hordes of engineering and business graduates secretly dream of building the new Facebook, the new Uber, the new Airbnb. Almost every big city now boasts one or more startup accelerators, modeled after Paul Graham’s now-legendary Y Combinator. Throngs of technology entrepreneurs are reshaping, “disrupting,” every aspect of our economy. Today’s big businesses are arthritic dinosaurs soon devoured by these nimble, fast-growing mammals with sharp teeth. Right?

Er, actually, no. That was last decade. We live in a new world now, and it favors the big, not the small. The pendulum has already begun to swing back. Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps.

The web boom of 1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Airbnb, etc., because the Internet was the new new thing, and a handful of kids in garages and dorm rooms could build a web site, raise a few million dollars, and scale to serve the whole world. The smartphone boom of 2007-2016 brought us Uber, Lyft, Snap, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, etc., because the same was true of smartphone apps.

Because we’ve all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones — we erroneously assume another one is around the corner, and once again, a few kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it.

But there is no such revolution en route. The web has been occupied and colonized by big business; everyone already has a smartphone, and big companies dominate the App Store; and, most of all, today’s new technologies are complicated, expensive, and favor organizations that have huge amounts of scale and capital already.

It is no coincidence that seed funding is down in 2017. It is no coincidence that Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have grown from “five big tech companies” to “the five most valuable public companies in the world.” The future belongs to them, and, to a lesser extent, their second-tier ilk.

It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the “Internet of Things.” These technologies are, collectively, hugely important and consequential — but they are not remotely as accessible to startup disruption as the web and smartphones were.

AI doesn’t just require top-tier talent; that talent is all but useless without mountains of the right kind of data. And who has essentially all of the best data? That’s right: the abovementioned Big Five, plus their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu.

Hardware, such as drones and IoT devices, is hard to prototype, generally low-margin, expensive to bring to market, and very expensive to scale. Just ask Fitbit. Or Jawbone. Or Juicero. Or HTC. (However, in fairness, software and services built atop newly emerging hardware are likely an exception to the larger rule here; startups in those niches have far better odds than most others.)

Self-driving cars are even more expensive: like biotech, they’re a capital-intensive battle between huge companies. A few startups may — will — be expensively acquired, but that’s not the same as having a realistic chance of actually becoming major competitors themselves.

AR/VR is already far behind its boosters’ optimistic adoption predictions, and is both an expensive hardware problem and a complex software problem. Magic Leap has raised almost two billion dollars without releasing a product (!), but is by most (admittedly sketchy) accounts struggling. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s HoloLens, Google’s Cardboard / Tango / ARCore, and Apple’s ARKit continue to build successfully on their existing platforms.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t about making startups valuable; they’re about the making the currencies themselves, and their decentralized ecosystems, valuable. The market capitalization of Bitcoin vastly exceeds that of any Bitcoin-based startup. The same is true for Ethereum. True believers argue that cryptocurrencies will overturn everything, in time, but read this Twitter thread and see if, like me, you can’t help but finding yourself nodding along, even if, like me, you truly want the Internet and its economy to be decentralized:

So where does all this leave tech startups? Struggling, and probably hoping to be acquired by a larger company, ideally one of the Big Five. While some breakout startups will still doubtless arise, they’ll be far rarer than they were during the boom years.

by Jon Evans, TechCrunch | Read more:

Image: Wikipedia Commons

Why I Support Longreads

People, often lament about lack of good journalism and diveristy in their information diet. I see that as a side effect of living inside the filter bubbles, a phenomenon exacerbated by the emergence of the social web. In reality, a lot of good journalism is happening all around us — we just don’t have the ability to find it easily, because of the information utilities — Facebook, Twitter and Google work.

And perhaps that is why, more than ever we need new ways to find, curate and disseminate good journalism, great writing, and diverse opinions. Email newsletters and specialist blogs are still an effective way to get more brain food. I won’t be able to go through a single day without my friend Jason Hirschhorn’s newsletters. My understanding of IOT would be a lot less if it was not for Stacey Higginbotham’s newsletter. And there is Techmeme, which has evolved with the times and become a great resource for technology news.

And then there is Longreads. It is an old-fashioned blog, that curates some of the best writing on the Internet. It is not for a quick hit, but instead, it is about taking time to consume good solid journalism. There are no advertisements. And the site is very mobile friendly. I typically save most of the stories in Pocket and then read them when enjoying my tea.

It is a great resource for non-obvious stories. They work hard to find great journalism worth reading from across the web. And that is not all — they are paying writers to create originals. That is why it is important for me to support them, both with my attention and my dollars. I am a long time supporter. They are currently running a fundraising drive of $25,000 — and each dollar they raised is matched by another $3 from their corporate benefactor, Automattic. If you love good reads, then it might be a great idea for you to support them — with as little as $5 or as much as you feel like.

From my vantage point, we need more of these curated and focused newsletters and websites. With smarter curation comes better information diet.

by Om Malik |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Hey, Om. Maybe you should get out a little more? Check out Duck Soup, it's only been going for what, five or six years now? With no advertisements (but you can donate if you want to). Tell your friends.]

North Korea Is Playing a Longer Game Than the U.S.

If we think through the North Korea nuclear weapons dilemma using game theory, one aspect of the problem deserves more attention, namely the age of the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un: 33. Because peaceful exile doesn’t appear to be an option -- his escaping the country safely would be hard -- Kim needs strategies for hanging on to power for 50 years or more. That’s a tall order, but it helps us understand that his apparently crazy tactics are probably driven by some very reasonable calculations, albeit selfish and evil ones.

It is very difficult to predict the world a half-century out. Fifty years ago, China was just coming out of the Cultural Revolution, and Japan’s rise was not yet so evident. North Korea was possibly still richer than the South, which in 1960 was one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s unlikely anyone had a reasonable inkling of where things would stand today.

So if you are a dictator planning for long-term survival under a wide range of possible outcomes, what might you do? You don’t know who your enemies and your friends will be over those 50 years, so you will choose a porcupine-like strategy and appear prickly to everyone.

We Americans tend to think of Kim as an irritant to our plans, but his natural enemy in the long run is China. It is easier for North Korea to threaten Chinese cities with weapons, and its nuclear status stands in China’s way of becoming the dominant regional power in East Asia. Chinese public opinion has already turned against North Korea, and leaders wonder whether a more reliable, pro-Chinese option to Kim might be installed. Since assuming power, Kim has gone after the generals and family members with the strongest ties to China.

One way to interpret Kim’s spat with U.S. President Donald Trump is that he is signaling to the Chinese that they shouldn’t try to take him down because he is willing to countenance “crazy” retaliation. In this view, Beijing is a more likely target for one of his nukes than is Seattle.

More radically, think of Kim as auditioning to the U.S., Japan, South Korea and India as a potential buffer against Chinese expansion. If he played his hand more passively and calmly, hardly anyone would think that such a small country had this capacity. By picking a fight with the U.S., he is showing the ability to deter just about anyone.

Another possible scenario from Kim’s perspective is that external pressures and sanctions rise, and North Korea can’t survive as a regional nuclear pariah. If this doesn’t seem likely today, remember we are talking about the next 50 years. So if Kim’s belligerence induces Japan or maybe South Korea to develop nuclear deterrents, that would take some of the pressure off him, as nuclear proliferation would become the regional default. Kim is probably more concerned with sheer survival than with managing other shifts in the balance of power.

by Tyler Cowan, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Korean Central News Agency

Debby Mason, Scad (Horse Mackerel)
via: 

The White-Minstrel Show

Ice-T never received an Academy Award, which makes sense inasmuch as his movies have been for the most part crap. But as an actor, you have to give the man credit: Along with other gangster rappers such as Ice Cube, he turned in such a convincing performance — amplifying negative stereotypes about black men and selling white people their own Reagan-era racial panic back to them in a highly stylized form — that people still, to this day, believe he was the guy he played on stage. One social-media critic accused him of hypocrisy for having recorded the infamous song “Cop Killer” before going on to a very lucrative career playing a police officer on television. Ice-T gave the man an honest answer: “It’s both acting, homie.”

Acting, indeed.

Pretty good acting, too, across the board in the rap world. Consider the strange evolution of Tupac Shakur, who went from the quiet, effeminate young man seen in this interview — a former acting and ballet student at the Baltimore School for the Arts apparently pointed like a rocket at a career in musical theater — to the “Thug Life” antihero persona that made him famous in a remarkably short period of time. He played tough-guy Roland Bishop in Juice and basically stayed in character for the rest of his public life. As with Ice-T, many of his fans assumed the stage persona was the real man. There’s a whole weird little racial dynamic in there waiting for some doctoral student to sort it out. Nobody expects Anthony Hopkins to eat a census worker.

A theater critic can’t really begrudge a performer for making a living, and Ice-T put on a great show. I do wonder how much damage those performers did by reinforcing and glamorizing criminal stereotypes of black men. And I do mean that I wonder — I do not know. Maybe the act is more obvious if you are the sort of person who is being dramatized or caricatured. (I experience something like that when I hear modern country songs on the radio, all that cheerful alcoholism and casual adultery and ridiculous good-ol’-boy posturing.) It would be weird to describe black men as “acting black,” but whatever they were up to was the opposite of “acting white.”

There’s a certain kind of conservative who loves to talk about “acting white,” i.e., about the legendary social sanction purportedly applied to African Americans who try too hard in school or who speak in an English that is too standard or who have interests and aspirations other than the ones that black people are stereotypically supposed to have. (“Acting white” isn’t a complaint exclusive to African Americans. My friend Jay Nordlinger relates a wonderful story about the American Indian educator Ben Chavis, who once was accused by a sister of “acting white.” His reply: “‘Acting white’ is not enough. I’m acting Jewish. Or maybe Chinese.”) Oh, how we love to knowingly tut-tut about “acting white,” with the obvious implication that black Americans corporately would be a good deal better off if they would do a little more acting white. That sort of thing is not entirely unique to conservatives, of course: Nine-tenths of all social criticism involving the problems of the American underclass consists of nice college graduates and policy professionals of many races and religions wondering aloud why they can’t be more like us, which is why so much social policy is oriented toward trying to get more poor people to go to college, irrespective of whether they want to do so or believe they would benefit from it.

Conservatives have a weakness for that “acting white” business because we are intellectually invested in emphasizing the self-inflicted problems of black America, for rhetorical and political reasons that are too obvious to require much elaboration. It’s a phenomenon that may or may not be exaggerated. John McWhorter argues that it is a real problem, and makes a pretty good case. So did President Barack Obama, who called on the nation to “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” I am not sure that a white man from Lubbock, Texas, has a great deal to add to President Obama’s argument there.

But I do have something to say about the subject of white people acting white.

We rarely used to put it in racial terms, unless we were talking about Eminem or the Cash-Me-Ousside Girl or some other white person who has embraced (or affected) some part of black popular culture. With the Trump-era emergence of a more self-conscious form of white-identity politics — especially white working-class identity politics — the racial language comes to the surface more often than it used to. But we still rarely hear complaints about “acting un-white.” Instead, we hear complaints about “elitism.” The parallels to the “acting white” phenomenon in black culture are fairly obvious: When aspiration takes the form of explicit or implicit cultural identification, however partial, with some hated or resented outside group that occupies a notionally superior social position, then “authenticity” is to be found in socially regressive manners, mores, and habits. It is purely reactionary.

The results are quite strange. Republicans, once the party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the bits where most of the people live — as “un-American.” Silicon Valley and California at large, New York City and the hated Acela corridor, and, to some extent, large American cities categorically are sneered at and detested. There is some ordinary partisanship in that, inasmuch as the Democrats tend to dominate the big cities and the coastal metropolitan aggregations, but it isn’t just that. Conservatives are cheering for the failure of California and slightly nonplussed that New York City still refuses to regress into being an unlivable hellhole in spite of the best efforts of its batty Sandinista mayor. Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion. God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts.

We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen from Duck Dynasty. Why?

American authenticity, from the acting-even-whiter point of view, is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home — the world John Mellencamp sang about but understandably declined to live in.

Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?

White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish, promiscuous, consumerist. The white working class has a very different ethic. Its members are, in the main, churchgoing, financially prudent, and married, and their manners are formal to the point of icy politeness. You’ll recognize the style if you’ve ever been around it: It’s “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” but it is the formality of soldiers and police officers — correct and polite, but not in the least bit deferential. It is a formality adopted not to acknowledge the superiority of social betters but to assert the equality of the speaker — equal to any person or situation, perfectly republican manners. It is the general social respect rooted in genuine self-respect.

Its opposite is the sneering, leveling, drag-’em-all-down-into-the-mud anti-“elitism” of contemporary right-wing populism. Self-respect says: “I’m an American citizen, and I can walk into any room, talk to any president, prince, or potentate, because I can rise to any occasion.” Populist anti-elitism says the opposite: “I can be rude enough and denigrating enough to drag anybody down to my level.” Trump’s rhetoric — ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. — has always been about reducing. Trump doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to duke it out with even the modest wits at the New York Times, hence it’s “the failing New York Times.” Never mind that the New York Times isn’t actually failing and that any number of Trump-related businesses have failed so thoroughly that they’ve gone into bankruptcy; the truth doesn’t matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kid’s lunch money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. That’s what all that ridiculous stuff about “winning” was all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives — and how “smart people” came to be a term of abuse.

This involves, inevitably, a good deal of fakery.

The man at the center of all this atavistic redneck revanchism is a pampered billionaire real-estate heir from New York City, and it has been something to watch the multi-millionaire populist pundits in Manhattan doing their best impersonations of beer-drinkin’ regular guys from the sticks. I assume Sean Hannity picked up his purported love for country music in the sawdust-floored honky-tonks of . . . Long Island.

As a purely aesthetic enterprise, none of this clears my poor-white-trash cultural radar. I’m reminded of those so-called dive bars in Manhattan that spend $150,000 to make a pricey spot in Midtown look like a Brooklyn kid’s idea of a low-rent roadside bar in Texas. (There’s one that even has Lubbock license plates on the wall. I wonder where they got them — is there some kind of mail-order dive-bar starter kit that comes with taxidermy, Texas license plates, and a few cases of Lone Star? Maybe via Amazon Prime?) The same crap is there — because the same crap is everywhere — but the arrangement isn’t quite right. 

The populist Right’s abandonment of principle has been accompanied by a repudiation of good taste, achievement, education, refinement, and manners — all of which are abominated as signs of effete “elitism.” During the Clinton years, Virtue Inc. was the top-performing share in the Republican political stock exchange. Fortunes were made, books were sold by the ton, and homilies were delivered. The same people today are celebrating Donald Trump — not in spite of his being a dishonest, crude serial adulterer but because of it. His dishonesty, the quondam cardinals of Virtue Inc. assure us, is simply the mark of a savvy businessman, his vulgarity the badge of his genuineness and lack of “political correctness,” and his pitiless abuse of his several wives and children the mark of a genuine “alpha male.” No less a virtue entrepreneur than Bill Bennett dismissed those who pointed out Trump’s endless lies and habitual betrayals as suffering from “moral superiority,” from people on “high horses,” and said that Trump simply is “a guy who says some things awkwardly, indecorously, infelicitously.”

Thus did the author of The Book of Virtues embrace the author of “Grab ’Em By the P***y.” (...)

Ludwig von Mises was as clear-eyed a social critic as he was an economist, and he noted something peculiar about the anti-Semitism of the Nazi era: In the past, minority groups were despised for their purported vices — white American racists considered African Americans lazy and mentally deficient, the English thought the Irish drank too much to be trusted to rule their own country, everybody thought the Gypsies were put on this Earth to spread disease and thievery. But the Jews were hated by the Nazis for their virtues: They were too intelligent, too clever, too good at business, too cosmopolitan, too committed to their own distinctness, too rich, too influential, too thrifty.

Our billionaire-ensorcelled anti-elitists take much the same tack: Anybody with a prestigious job, a good income, an education at a selective university, and no oxy overdoses in the immediate family — and anybody who prefers hearing the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center to watching football on television — just doesn’t know what life is like in “the real America” or for the “real men” who live there. No, the “real America,” in this telling, is little more than a series of dead factory towns, dying farms, pill mills — and, above all, victims. There, too, white people acting white echo elements of hip-hop culture, which presents powerful and violent icons of masculinity as hapless victims of American society.

by Kevin D. Williamson, National Review |  Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ernst

What Are We Doing Here?

There is a great deal of questioning now of the value of the humanities, those aptly named disciplines that make us consider what human beings have been, and are, and will be. Sometimes I think they should be renamed Big Data. These catastrophic wars that afflict so much of the world now surely bear more resemblance to the Hundred Years’ War or the Thirty Years’ War or the wars of Napoleon or World War I than they do to any expectations we have had about how history would unfold in the modern period, otherwise known as those few decades we call the postwar.

We have thought we were being cynical when we insisted that people universally are motivated by self-interest. Would God it were true! Hamlet’s rumination on the twenty thousand men going off to fight over a territory not large enough for them all to be buried in, going to their graves as if to their beds, shows a much sounder grasp of human behavior than this. It acknowledges a part of it that shows how absurdly optimistic our “cynicism” actually is. President Obama not long ago set off a kerfuffle among the press by saying that these firestorms of large-scale violence and destruction are not unique to Islamic culture or to the present time. This is simple fact, and it is also fair warning, if we hope to keep our own actions and reactions within something like civilized bounds. This would be one use of history. (...)

I am not speaking here of the usual and obvious malefactors, the blowhards on the radio and on cable television. I am speaking of the mainstream media, therefore of the institutions that educate most people of influence in America, including journalists. Our great universities, with their vast resources, their exhaustive libraries, look like a humanist’s dream. Certainly, with the collecting and archiving that has taken place in them over centuries, they could tell us much that we need to know. But there is pressure on them now to change fundamentally, to equip our young to be what the Fabians used to call “brain workers.” They are to be skilled laborers in the new economy, intellectually nimble enough to meet its needs, which we know will change constantly and unpredictably. I may simply have described the robots that will be better suited to this kind of existence, and with whom our optimized workers will no doubt be forced to compete, poor complex and distractible creatures that they will be still.

Why teach the humanities? Why study them? American universities are literally shaped around them and have been since their founding, yet the question is put in the bluntest form—what are they good for? If, for purposes of discussion, we date the beginning of the humanist movement to 1500, then, historically speaking, the West has flourished materially as well as culturally in the period of their influence. You may have noticed that the United States is always in an existential struggle with an imagined competitor. It may have been the cold war that instilled this habit in us. It may have been nineteenth-century nationalism, when America was coming of age and competition among the great powers of Europe drove world events. Whatever etiology is proposed for it, whatever excuse is made for it, however rhetorically useful it may be in certain contexts, the habit is deeply harmful, as it has been in Europe as well, when the competition involved the claiming and defending of colonies, as well as militarization that led to appalling wars.

The consequences of these things abide. We see and feel them every day. The standards that might seem to make societies commensurable are essentially meaningless, except when they are ominous. Insofar as we treat them as real, they mean that other considerations are put out of account. Who died in all those wars? The numbers lost assure us that there were artists and poets and mathematicians among them, and statesmen, though at best their circumstances may never have allowed them or us to realize their gifts. (...)

A great irony is at work in our historical moment. We are being encouraged to abandon our most distinctive heritage—in the name of self-preservation. The logic seems to go like this: To be as strong as we need to be we must have a highly efficient economy. Society must be disciplined, stripped down, to achieve this efficiency and to make us all better foot soldiers. The alternative is decadence, the eclipse of our civilization by one with more fire in its belly. We are to be prepared to think very badly of our antagonist, whichever one seems to loom at a given moment. It is a convention of modern literature, and of the going-on of talking heads and public intellectuals, to project what are said to be emerging trends into a future in which cultural, intellectual, moral, and economic decline will have hit bottom, more or less.

Somehow this kind of talk always seems brave and deep. The specifics concerning this abysmal future are vague—Britain will cease to be Britain, America will cease to be America, France will cease to be France, and so on, depending on which country happens to be the focus of Spenglerian gloom. The oldest literature of radical pessimism can be read as prophecy. Of course these three societies have changed profoundly in the last hundred years, the last fifty years, and few with any knowledge of history would admit to regretting the change. What is being invoked is the notion of a precious and unnamable essence, second nature to some, in the marrow of their bones, in effect. By this view others, whether they will or no, cannot understand or value it, and therefore they are a threat.

The definitions of “some” and “others” are unclear and shifting. In America, since we are an immigrant country, our “nativists” may be first- or second-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents were themselves considered suspect on these same grounds. It is almost as interesting as it is disheartening to learn that nativist rhetoric can have impact in a country where precious few can claim to be native in any ordinary sense. Our great experiment has yielded some valuable results—here a striking demonstration of the emptiness of such rhetoric, which is nevertheless loudly persistent in certain quarters in America, and which obviously continues to be influential in Britain and Europe.

Nativism is always aligned with an impulse or strategy to shape the culture with which it claims to have this privileged intimacy. It is urgently intent on identifying enemies and confronting them, and it is hostile to the point of loathing toward aspects of the society that are taken to show their influence. In other words, these lovers of country, these patriots, are wildly unhappy with the country they claim to love, and are bent on remaking it to suit their own preferences, which they feel no need to justify or even fully articulate. Neither do they feel any need to answer the objections of those who see their shaping and their disciplining as mutilation. (...)

What are we doing here, we professors of English? Our project is often dismissed as elitist. That word has a new and novel sting in American politics. This is odd, in a period uncharacteristically dominated by political dynasties. Apparently the slur doesn’t stick to those who show no sign of education or sophistication, no matter what their pedigree. Be that as it may. There is a fundamental slovenliness in much public discourse that can graft heterogeneous things together around a single word. There is justified alarm about the bizarre concentrations of wealth that have occurred globally, and the tiny fraction of the wealthiest one percent who have wildly disproportionate influence over the lives of the rest of us. They are called the elite, and so are those of us who encourage the kind of thinking that probably does make certain of the young less than ideal recruits to their armies of the employed.

If there is a point where the two meanings overlap, it would be in the fact that the teaching we do is what in America we have always called liberal education, education appropriate to free people, very much including those old Iowans who left the university to return to the hamlet or the farm. Now, in a country richer than any they could have imagined, we are endlessly told we must cede that humane freedom to a very uncertain promise of employability. It seems most unlikely that any oligarch foresees this choice as being forced on his or her own children. I note here that these criticisms and pressures are not brought to bear on our private universities, though most or all of them receive government money. Elitism in its classic sense is not being attacked but asserted and defended.

If I seem to have conceded an important point in saying that the humanities do not prepare ideal helots, economically speaking, I do not at all mean to imply that they are less than ideal for preparing capable citizens, imaginative and innovative contributors to a full and generous, and largely unmonetizable, national life. America has known long enough how to be a prosperous country, for all its deviations from the narrow path of economic rationalism. Empirically speaking, these errancies are highly compatible with our flourishing economically, if they are not a cause of it, which is more than we can know. The politicians who attack public higher education as too expensive have made it so for electoral or ideological reasons and could undo the harm with the stroke of a pen. They have created the crisis to which they hope to bring their draconian solutions.

by Marilynne Robinson, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Alexis de Tocqueville; portrait by Théodore Chassériau, 1850

Durand Jones & The Indications

Breaking News: Trump Resigns! (Well, Not Yet)

It’s been a bleak decade since President Donald J. Trump put his hand on the Bible eight months ago. After the Charlottesville debacle, former Vice President Al Gore offered Trump a one-word piece of advice: “Resign.” Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, claimed resignation would come before the end of the year. And Steve Bannon reportedly thinks Trump has just a 30 percent chance of finishing out his term.

While we wait for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into money laundering, bank fraud, foreign influence, election rigging, and hotel-mattress wetting, I asked eight TV and screenwriters and astute observers of human behavior to come up with two scenarios of how Trump will leave the Oval Office. I offered these examples: (...)

Danny Zuker: [Executive producer, Modern Family, five-time Emmy Award winner. The president of the United States once tweeted at him: “Danny—you’re a total loser.”]

Plausible scenario:

I don’t think he’ll leave over collusion, conflicts of interest, or even the release of the pee-pee tape. (Although one can dream.) I think he will ultimately resign because the job is harder than he thought. He’s discovering that he can’t simply put a TRUMP sign on the White House and pretend to be president the way he puts one on a building and pretends to be a builder. He’ll say something like, “Over the last nine months, I took a country where the streets were literally full of sewage and crime and people with accents and turned it into a paradise kingdom that rivals heaven itself. Better than heaven, because we all have guns. So tremendous is my creation that it basically runs itself. No president can rule for more than eight years, and I’ve already squozen a decade’s worth of achievements into my first year—and it’s not even Thanksgiving. So, I’m leaving office to spend more time with my son . . . (Melania whispers in his ear) Barron.”

Writer-enhanced scenario:

Fade in: intelligence briefing. We are close on Trump’s bloated, porcine face, the kind of face that would immediately disqualify a person from judging others’ appearances. He yawns, wipes some KFC extra-crispy batter from his most northern chin. Then he gets an idea. A light-bulb moment. Not a bright light bulb—more like the bulb in that emergency flashlight you find buried in your junk drawer. He stands up and exclaims . . .

TRUMP: I quit.
INTELLIGENCE OFFICER: Wah wah wah wah wah?
TRUMP: I SAID, I QUIT!

He races out of the briefing room and makes his way outside, where we see a HELMETED FIGURE on a motorcycle.
TRUMP: I did it! I QUIT.
The helmeted figure takes off the helmet and we see SARAH PALIN
SARAH PALIN: Good boy. Hop on.

Trump hops on the back of the hog and the two quitters drive off into the sunset. FADE OUT:

Parting shot:

I’m moving outta here like a bitch. (...)

Megan Amram: [Writer for The Good Place and Silicon Valley]

Plausible scenario:

Donald Trump will be impeached after evidence surfaces that he met with Russians clandestinely on multiple occasions specifically to sabotage Hillary’s run for president. This will occur approximately one week before the election in 2020. By then, cities won’t exist, and the average temperature in America will be 130 degrees Trump (the new nomenclature for Fahrenheit).

Writer-enhanced scenario:

Donald Trump will resign after a secret Russian sex tape surfaces, one that involves Trump sexually harassing his daughter Ivanka. He will then brag that he was the “fastest president ever,” and that he can resign since he’s brought back “all of the jobs. Literally all of them. Look at them—they’re all back now.” He will spend the rest of his days doing exactly what he did in the presidency, playing golf and pretending to drive fire trucks.

Parting shot:

“Ffffffffpllllplplplplplplplppppluuuuuuuuuuugggffffffff.” (This is the sound of Donald Trump publicly shitting himself at a rally, then trying to cover his butt with Mike Pence’s sweater, but the sweater isn’t big enough to cover his big butt, so he slips and falls and can’t get up ’cause he’s covered in his own shit, so he’s pulled off by the Secret Service, never to be seen again.)

Andy Bobrow: [Executive producer, The Last Man on Earth]

Plausible scenario:

I remember learning that when L. Ron Hubbard died, they announced to the rank-and-file Scientologists that he had merely “discarded his body” so he could continue his work on other planes of existence. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say I believe this is how Trump’s impeachment and resignation will go. I think he’ll call it something else, and Congress will happily play along. An impeachment will be called a “Constitutional Hearing,” or a “Congressional Adjustment,” or an “Unholy Witch Hunt.” A resignation will be called an “Executive Realignment,” or a “Presidential Ascension,” or simply a “Nothingburger.” So my most plausible scenario is that something happens that’s not an impeachment, and he does something that’s not a resignation. And he lives many more years acting like he is still president, and the whole country silently agrees to never talk about that one time we had a constitutional crisis and pretended we didn’t.

Writer-enhanced scenario:

A second White House will be built a few blocks from the official White House, and Trump will stay there three days a week. This new White House will be a full replica, but five-times bigger and gold.

Parting shot:

This one’s easy. The quote will be “I’m still president.”

I mean, that’s what the NYT headline will be. The full quote will not be so pithy.

“Am I resigning? No. Where did you hear that, by the way? That’s, if you believe that, I’ll sell you a bridge on top of the World Trade Center. Which, terrible deal by the way. Whoever built that, I like buildings that don’t collapse, O.K.? Terrible deal. They got a lot of things (garbled). It’s nuts. And I hear everyone asking “is he resigning, is he impeaching?” I’m not impeaching, O.K.? I’m president. They still call me president, don’t they? Everybody calls me President Trump. You hear it everywhere you go, President Trump this, President Trump that, President Trump, I love you, President Trump, don’t go. So I’m president. It’s silly. It’s dumb (garbled). Mike Pence is a helluva guy. Mike Pence, President Pence if you wanna call him that. Great guy, terrific guy. I also heard there’s gonna be a new vice president, which you can do. A lot of people don’t know that. You can bring the vice president up to president, I just learned this, a lot of people don’t know. And then he can bring up a guy. I don’t know who they’ll choose, but it should be my daughter. Not the ugly one. (Large applause). No, come on. Come on. You’re nasty. So I’m gonna travel and do great things. Dubai. Russia. China. And wherever I go, I’m the president there, too, they love me there and we’re only gonna make it bigger. Maybe I’ll do another TV show, would you like that? I’ll do a TV show, “where’s Hillary?” Has anyone seen her? She’s gone, maybe she’s in jail, I don’t know. They tell me (garbled) and all of this and that. But she’s not in jail and I’m gonna put her in jail. Maybe she’s with ISIS (huge applause). I beat ISIS. ISIS is no longer a threat because of me. But they’re still a threat and I’ll continue to beat them. But as to the question, who’s president? I’m president. They call Obama president and he was never even president. So believe me, I’m still president.” (...)

by Nell Scovell, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Mathieu De Muizon

[ed. See also: "I Hate Everyone in the White House!" Trump Seethes as Advisers Fear the President is "Unraveling". Assuming he was ever raveled in the first place.]

Robert Bowen, Lucky strike - 7- Reef baby
via:

The Social Life of Opioids

In the story of America’s opioid crisis a recent tripling in prescriptions of the painkillers is generally portrayed as the villain. Researchers and policy makers have paid far less attention to how social losses—including stagnating wages and fraying ties among people—can increase physical and emotional pain to help drive the current drug epidemic.

But a growing body of work suggests this area needs to be explored more deeply if communities want to address the opioid problem. One study published earlier this year found that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment in the U.S., opioid overdose death rates rose by nearly 4 percent.

Another recent study from researchers at Harvard University and Baylor College of Medicine reported U.S. counties with the lowest levels of “social capital”—a measure of connection and support that incorporates factors including people’s trust in one another and participation in civic matters such as voting—had the highest rates of overdose deaths. That review of the entire U.S. mined data from 1999 through 2014 and showed counties with the highest social capital were 83 percent less likely to be among those with high levels of overdose. Areas with low social capital, in contrast, were the most likely to have high levels of such “deaths of despair,” with overdose alone killing at least 16 people per 100,000

Overdose is now the nation’s leading cause of death for people in the prime of life. And suicide- and alcohol-related deaths have also risen—most dramatically in regions with the highest levels of economic distress. “It will be hard to address the addiction and overdose crisis without better understanding and addressing the neurobiology linking opioids, pain and social connectedness," says Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorder Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Connecting opioid use to social stress is not a new idea. Forty years ago the late neuroscience pioneer Jaak Panksepp first proposed the now widely accepted hypothesis that our body’s naturally produced opioids—endorphins and closely related enkephalins—are critical to the nurturing bonds that develop between parents and offspring and also between monogamous mates in mammals. Panksepp’s work and that of others showed that blocking one opioid system in the brain—which relies on the mu-opioid receptor—increased the distress calls of infants separated from their mothers in species as varied as dogs, rats, birds and monkeys. Giving an opioid drug (in doses too low to produce sedation) reduced such cries.

Panksepp also observed similarities between maternal love and heroin addiction. In each situation animals would persist in a behavior, despite negative consequences, in order to gain access to solace from the partner—or the drug. But, as Panksepp (who died in April) said in an interview several years ago, major journals rejected his paper in the 1970s because editors said the idea that motherly love was similar to heroin addiction was “too hot to handle.”

Since then, however, data supporting the link between opioids and bonding has only grown. It has been expanded on by researchers including Thomas Insel, former head of the National Institute on Mental Health; Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford; and Larry Young, professor of psychiatry at Emory University.

Young showed that oxytocin, a hormone previously linked mostly with labor and nursing, is crucial to the formation of pair bonds as well as bonds between parents and infants. “The feelings that infants or adults feel when being nurtured—warmth, calmness and peacefulness—come from a combination of opioids and oxytocin,” he says. “These are the same feelings that people who take opioids report: a feeling of warmth and being nurtured or loved.” When a social bond is formed, oxytocin reconfigures the mu-opioid system so that a loved one’s presence relieves stress and pain—and that person’s absence, or a threat to the relationship, increases distress. (...)

Recent human studies have specifically found that a partner’s presence can reduce pain, and supportive touching such as hugging is linked to activation of mu-opioid receptors in the brain. In addition, a studypublished last year found that administering an opioid blocker decreased people’s feelings of social connectedness—both when they were in the lab receiving e-mails of support from close friends or relatives and when they were at home during the four days they took the drug—compared with when they took a placebo. And, whereas the drug reduced overall levels of positive emotion, it had a larger effect on positive emotions related to feeling connected and loved.

All of this suggests that recognizing the connections between bonding, stress and pain could be critical to effectively addressing the opioid crisis. “Understanding the biology and commonalities between trusting social relationships and the opioid system can change the way we think about treatment,” Young says, noting that neither the punitive approach of the criminal justice system nor harsh treatment tactics are likely to increase connectedness. In essence, if we want to have less opioid use, we may have to figure out how to have more love.

by Maia Szalavitz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Anita Hernadi Getty Images

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Silent Republicans Have Their Reasons. They Don't Have an Excuse.

Whatever his impact may be on the country or the world, Donald Trump’s presidency imperils the future of his party, and there isn’t a serious-minded Republican in Washington who would tell you otherwise, privately.

In the short term, Trump’s determination to upend the health care market, his vague tax plan that’s already unpopular, an approval rating that can’t crack 40 percent, his exhausting and inexhaustible penchant for conflict — all of it threatens to make a massacre of the midterm elections, if you go by any historical marker.

In the longer term, it’s plausible to think that Trump’s public ambivalence toward white supremacists, along with his contempt for immigrants and internationalism, could end up rebranding Republicans, for generations, as the party of the past.

Trump doesn’t care what happens to Republicans after he’s gone. The party was always like an Uber to him — a way to get from point A to point B without having to find some other route or expend any cash.

Which leads to the question I hear all the time these days. Why aren’t more Republicans separating themselves from Trump? And why aren’t they doing more with the power they have to get in his way?

Sure, you have a senator like Bob Corker, a party pillar and notorious straight shooter, who publicly worried that an unrestrained Trump might bumble his way into World War III. That should have been sobering.

But barely a week later, here’s Mitch McConnell, the majority leader whom Trump has repeatedly demeaned, standing in the Rose Garden, smiling thinly and making hollow sounds about unity, allowing himself to be used for another weird Trump selfie.

It’s actually not hard to understand why McConnell and his fellow lawmakers don’t stand up and declare independence from this rancid mess of a presidency.

It’s just increasingly hard to justify.

I don’t read a ton of opinion pieces online, unless they happen to concern the Yankees, but there was one on CNN.com last weekend that caught my attention. It was written by Steve Israel, who until this year was a senior Democrat in Congress, serving Long Island.

Responding to Corker’s sudden eruption of candor, Israel explained that retiring politicians like Corker, who has announced this will be his last term in the Senate, have the luxury of dispensing with political calculation.

“Many of us who’ve left elective life feel a sense of liberation, as if our tongues are no longer strapped to the left or right side of our mouths,” Israel wrote, with admirable flair.

“It’s wonderful to speak your mind without worrying about the next campaign, or parsing every word knowing that some opponent could twist an errant phrase against you out of context.”

We get it. It isn’t news that politicians have to be, you know, political. Or at least politicians not named Trump.

And these days, as I’ve noted many times, the real fear for most elected officials in Washington isn’t that they may say something to offend persuadable voters, whose existence no one really believes in anymore, like Bigfoot or Bill O’Reilly.

No, the fear now, if you’re sitting on either end of the Capitol, is that some no-name activist will decide to primary you, because you’ve somehow run afoul of extremists with followings on Twitter and Facebook, and you’ll have to spend all your time and money holding onto a job that you might very well lose, since it takes only one fringe group or millionaire and a few thousand angry voters to tip the balance in your average congressional primary.

The fact that Israel is the one writing about this dilemma should tell you that this isn’t simply a Republican phenomenon. Yes, Republicans are more tightly wedged between conscience and job security right now, because the president is constantly putting both in jeopardy.

But Democrats, too, often find themselves pinned between reason and reflexive ideology, mouthing mantras of economic populism that aren’t all that different from what Trump believes, and that most of them know to be painfully simplistic. Serving in Congress now, on either side of the aisle, often means hearing from a tiny slice of loud activists first, and everyone else where you can fit them in.

Our primary system wasn’t designed for an age when social media could supplant institutional loyalties, and at the moment it’s skewing the entire political process. So Israel offers a pretty fair explanation for why his former colleagues remain so maddeningly reticent.

by Matt Bai, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: Bill Clark/Getty

How Social Media Endangers Knowledge

Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis.

This has nothing to do with money. A couple of years ago, the site launched a panicky fundraising campaign, but ironically thanks to Donald Trump, Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. American liberals, worried that Trump’s rise threatened the country’s foundational Enlightenment ideals, kicked in a significant flow of funds that has stabilized the nonprofit’s balance sheet.

That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger. (...)

As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. In an image-centered and pleasure-driven world, Postman noted, there is no place for rational thinking, because you simply cannot think with images. It is text that enables us to “uncover lies, confusions and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another.”

The dominance of television was not contained to our living rooms. It overturned all of those habits of mind, fundamentally changing our experience of the world, affecting the conduct of politics, religion, business, and culture. It reduced many aspects of modern life to entertainment, sensationalism, and commerce. “Americans don’t talk to each other, we entertain each other,” Postman wrote. “They don’t exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

At first, the Internet seemed to push against this trend. When it emerged towards the end of the 80s as a purely text-based medium, it was seen as a tool to pursue knowledge, not pleasure. Reason and thought were most valued in this garden—all derived from the project of Enlightenment. Universities around the world were among the first to connect to this new medium, which hosted discussion groups, informative personal or group blogs, electronic magazines, and academic mailing lists and forums. It was an intellectual project, not about commerce or control, created in a scientific research center in Switzerland.

Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text-based advertising model. And so were blogs, which valued text, hypertext (links), knowledge, and literature. They effectively democratized the ability to contribute to the global corpus of knowledge. For more than a decade, the web created an alternative space that threatened television’s grip on society.

Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—‘like’ buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly performing. (It’s telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates’ appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment’s motto of ‘Dare to know’ has become ‘Dare not to care to know.’

It is a development that further proves the words of French philosopher Guy Debord, who wrote that, if pre-capitalism was about ‘being’, and capitalism about ‘having’, in late-capitalism what matters is only ‘appearing’—appearing rich, happy, thoughtful, cool and cosmopolitan. It’s hard to open Instagram without being struck by the accuracy of his diagnosis.

by Hossein Derakhshan, Wired | Read more:
Image: Alan Schein

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
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[ed. My default condition]

The Deep Unfairness of America’s All-Volunteer Force

As far as we know, the phrase “all-recruited force” was coined by Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, a book that provides vivid insight into the U.S. Marines who fought in that conflict. Mr. Marlantes used the expression to describe what’s happened to today’s allegedly “volunteer” force, to say in effect that it is no such thing. Instead it is composed in large part of people recruited so powerfully and out of such receptive circumstances that it requires a new way of being described. We agree with Mr. Marlantes. So do others.

In The Economist back in 2015, an article about the U.S. All-Volunteer Force (AVF) posed the question: “Who will fight the next war?” and went on to describe how the AVF is becoming more and more difficult to field as well as growing ever more distant from the people from whom it comes and for whom it fights. The piece painted a disturbing scene. That the scene was painted by a British magazine of such solid reputation in the field of economics is ironic in a sense but not inexplicable. After all, it is the fiscal aspect of the AVF that is most immediate and pressing. Recruiting and retaining the force has become far too costly and is ultimately unsustainable.

When the Gates Commission set up the rationale for the AVF in 1970, it did so at the behest of a president, Richard Nixon, who had come to see the conscript military as a political dagger aimed at his own heart. One could argue that the decision to abolish conscription was a foregone conclusion; the Commission simply provided a rationale for doing it and for volunteerism to replace it.

But whatever we might think of the Commission’s work and Nixon’s motivation, what has happened in the last 16 years—interminable war—was never on the Commission’s radar screen. Like most crises, as Colin Powell used to lament when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this one was unexpected, not planned for, and begs denial as a first reaction.

That said, after 16 years of war it is plain to all but the most recalcitrant that the U.S. cannot afford the AVF—ethically, morally, or fiscally.

Fiscally, the AVF is going to break the bank. The land forces in particular are still having difficulties fielding adequate numbers—even with lowered standards, substituting women for men (from 1.6 percent of the AVF in 1973 to more than 16 percent today), recruitment and reenlistment bonuses totaling tens of millions of dollars, advertising campaigns costing billions, massive recruitment of non-citizens, use of psychotropic drugs to recycle unfit soldiers and Marines to combat zones, and overall pay and allowances that include free world-class health care and excellent retirement plans that are, for the first time in the military’s history, comparable to or even exceeding civilian rates and offerings.

A glaring case in point is the recent recruitment by the Army of 62,000 men and women, its target for fiscal year 2016. To arrive at that objective, the Army needed 9,000 recruiting staff (equivalent to three combat brigades) working full-time. If one does the math, that equates to each of these recruiters gaining one-point-something recruits every two months—an utterly astounding statistic. Additionally, the Army had to resort to taking a small percentage of recruits in Mental Category IV—the lowest category and one that, post-Vietnam, the Army made a silent promise never to resort to again.

Moreover, the recruiting and retention process and rich pay and allowances are consuming one half of the Army’s entire annual budget slice, precluding any sort of affordable increase in its end strength. This end strength constraint creates the need for more and more private contractors on the nation’s battlefields in order to compensate. The employment of private contractors is politically seductive and strategically dangerous. To those enemies we fight they are the enemy and to most reasonable people they are mercenaries. Mercenaries are motivated by profit not patriotism—despite their CEOs’ protestations to the contrary—and place America on the slippery slope towards compromising the right of sovereign nations to the monopoly of violence for state purposes. In short, Congress and the Pentagon make the Army bigger than the American people believe that it is and the American people allow themselves to be convinced; thus it is a shared delusion that comforts both parties.

A more serious challenge for the democracy that is America, however, is the ethical one. Today, more than 300 million Americans lay claim to rights, liberties, and security that not a single one of them is obligated to protect and defend. Apparently, only 1 percent of the population feels that obligation. That 1 percent is bleeding and dying for the other 99 percent.

Further, that 1 percent does not come primarily or even secondarily from the families of the Ivy Leagues, of Wall Street, of corporate leadership, from the Congress, or from affluent America; it comes from less well-to-do areas: West Virginia, Maine, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and elsewhere. For example, the Army now gets more soldiers from the state of Alabama, population 4.8 million, than it gets from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined, aggregate metropolitan population more than 25 million. Similarly, 40 percent of the Army comes from seven states of the Old South. As one of us has documented in his book, Skin in the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots, this is an ethically poisonous situation. And as the article in The Economist concludes, it’s dangerous as well.

The last 16 years have also generated, as wars tend to do, hundreds of thousands of veterans. The costs of taking care of these men and women are astronomical today and will only rise over the next decades, which is one reason our veterans are already being inadequately cared for. Without the political will to shift funds, there simply is not enough money to provide the necessary care. And given the awesome debt America now shoulders—approaching 20 trillion dollars and certain to increase—it is difficult to see this situation changing for the better.

In fact, when one calculates today’s U.S. national security budget—not simply the well-advertised Pentagon budget—the total expenditure of taxpayer dollars approaches $1.2 trillion annually, or more than twice what most Americans believe they are paying for national security. This total figure includes the costs of nuclear weapons (Energy Department), homeland security (Homeland Security Department), veteran care (Veterans Administration), intelligence needs (CIA and Defense Department), international relations (State Department), and the military and its operations (the Pentagon and its slush fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations account). The Pentagon budget alone is larger than that of the next 14 nations in the world combined. Only recently (September 2016), the Pentagon leadership confessed that as much as 50 percent of its slush fund (OCO) is not used for war operations—the fund’s statutory purpose—but for other expenses, including “military readiness.” We suspect this includes recruiting and associated costs.

There is still another dimension of the AVF that goes basically unmentioned and unreported. The AVF has compelled the nation to transition its reserve component forces from what they have been since colonial times—a strategic reserve—into being an operational reserve. That’s military-speak for our having used the reserve components to make up for deeply felt shortages in the active force. Nowhere is this more dramatically reflected than in the rate of deployment-to-overseas duty of the average reservist, now about once every 3.8 years.

by Dennis Laich and Lawrence Wilkerson, The American Conservative |  Read more:
Image: U.S. Army photo by Spc. Advin Illa-Medina

The Only Job a Robot Couldn't Do

The gig economy is depressing. Crowdtap is worse.

About 8 percent of U.S. adults earn money by doing contract work through so-called “gig economy” employers like Uber, Favor, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, according to the Pew Research Center; if the trend continues, one-third of Americans will support themselves this way by 2027.

The gig economy is growing rapidly, but it’s also changing how we think about what it means to work. Uber and other online platforms are making the case for a future in which work happens in little on-demand bursts — you need a ride, and someone appears to give you that ride. Instead of a salary and benefits like health insurance, the worker gets paid only for the time they’re actually driving you around.

I’m a researcher who studies how people work and I have a hard time endorsing this vision of the future. When I see Favor delivery drivers waiting to pick up a to-go order, I imagine a future in which half of us stand in line while the other half sit on couches. And then I imagine a future in which all these mundane tasks are automated: the cars drive themselves, the burritos fly in our windows on drones. And I wonder how companies are going to make money when there are no jobs and we can’t afford to buy a burrito or pay for a ride home from the bar.

To understand the answer to that question, you have to scrape the very bottom of the barrel of gig work. You have to go so far down that you don’t even call it work anymore. You have to go to Crowdtap.

Crowdtap pitches itself as a place where anyone can “team up” with their “favorite brands” and “get rewarded for your opinions” by completing “missions,” such as filling out surveys and posting product promotions to social media. These actions earn points that can be traded in for gift cards.

Along the way, you might also get a few free samples or coupons. There are also occasional contests where members can win additional gift cards or larger prizes. A lot of what Crowdtappers do is post brand promotions to social media. As I’m writing this, for example, I’m looking at someone who has tweeted, in the last ten minutes, about Febreze (“Would totally use Febreze to fight persistent odors in my basement”), squeezable apple sauce (“Great deal, just in time for the new school year!”), Splenda (three times), cheese snacks, LensCrafters (twice), Suave (twice), and McDonalds.

A cynical view of Crowdtap is that it’s just another form of social media marketing — people being paid to tell their friends to buy things. But then you realize that these people don’t have large social media followings (in fact, Crowdtap users I interviewed said they create throwaway social media accounts to use exclusively for Crowdtap). And sharing content on social media isn’t even required — the default option is to share, but you get your points either way. Crowdtap passes members’ responses on to brands, but otherwise nobody is listening to what they say. No one is responding. There’s very little about this that might be called social. Imagine someone wandering alone in a giant desert, shouting “I love Big Macs!” into the sky. That’s Crowdtap.

So here’s an even more cynical view: Crowdtap isn’t social media marketing. Instead, it’s a form of work that rewards people for selling products to themselves. And if we imagine a future in which more people work in the gig economy, in which income inequality continues to increase, and in which brands need new ways to stimulate consumption, it might give some hints about what’s coming after Uber.

In the summer of 2016, I interviewed twelve people who use Crowdtap and similar online platforms. I compensated the interviewees, as is standard in academia, in order to get a more diverse sample and also because it seemed like the ethical thing to do given the fact that they could have spent that time Crowdtapping. I offered $5 Amazon gift cards and explained that the interview was for labor research. In exchange, I asked them what their lives are like and why they do what they do.

The people I talked to generally don’t have standard jobs. Seven referred to themselves as stay-at-home moms. Two are retired. One described herself as disabled, and two told me they have disabled children. Two said that they rarely leave the house, and several others described similarly isolating daily routines. Almost all of them said, unprompted, that they use the gift cards they earn to buy Christmas presents for family members. But they talk about the free products they receive, too, which Crowdtap sends them in order to complete tasks — how helpful it is to get shampoo, pain killers, tampons, or dog food, for the small price of answering surveys about their mustard purchase habits or commenting on an Instagram photo of a redesigned Splenda bottle.

One of the dark sides of Crowdtap and similar platforms is how little participants end up making. Crowdtap doesn’t advertise itself as a kind of work (although its Membership Agreement makes clear that participants are classified as independent contractors), and members typically don’t see Crowdtap as an employer, either. But people I talked to said they spend an average of 15 hours a week on these platforms, and, when I asked how much they end up making based on the value of the free products, coupons, and gift cards, the answers ranged from 25 cents an hour to about $11, with an average of $2.45.

But beyond the far-below-minimum-wage payments, the more insidious side of this kind of work is that it masquerades as something it’s not. Crowdtap says it’s about letting people share their opinions with brands and with other consumers, but the flow of information actually goes the other way. Crowdtap isn’t about letting people speak to brands; it’s about letting brands speak to people.

I didn’t fully understand this until I decided to spend an afternoon using Crowdtap. During that time, here’s what I did:

• Picked a list of my favorite brands.
• Answered questions such as “What are the benefits of aloe in a facial skin care product?”
• Visited pages that provided information about various cheese products.
• Filled in prompts about these cheese products such as “Think my fam will love ______.”
• Tweeted these responses, being sure to include hashtags such as #HorizonCrowd and links to product pages.
• Wrote a short response about why I was “hoping to try out a delicious variety” of cheese snacks. I was reminded to “mention both what kind of occasions you envision your family snacking … and which aspects of the snack pack appeal to you most.”

Answering a survey question usually earns two points. Posting something to social media usually earns 20. Uploading a photo earns 30. To get your first two $5 Amazon gift cards, you need 500 points; after that, it takes 1,000 points for each gift card. As I wrote short tweets and answered survey question after question, I felt myself pulled in two directions — between getting through the rote tasks as quickly as possible and putting enough effort into my responses that I wouldn’t get kicked off the platform. As one woman told me, “A lot of times it gets really repetitive. You're looking at the same links over and over again so you just fly through it.” But flying through can feel a little unsettling when you’re not sure if anybody is checking your work and you know you’re an independent contractor who can be dismissed at any time.

Regardless of whether we call it work or “connecting with brands,” these repetitive tasks are a pretty intense form of consumer education. And when you repeat these activities hour after hour, spending enough time to actually earn a $5 gift card, you probably pick up some habits that brands are happy about. Such as:

• Good consumers have favorite brands.
• Good consumers are knowledgeable about the products produced by those brands. Specifically, they can list features that make those products better than others.
• Good consumers think about buying and using products in the future, and they tell people about their plans.
• Good consumers include brand hashtags when they talk about products online.

There’s a further level of education built into these activities as well, in that you often have to already have bought certain items before you can earn your points. For example, a lot of the tasks are intended to be completed on a smartphone with a camera. A mother of two told me her family had recently purchased a smartphone with their tax refund so she could participate in these tasks. Another, an unemployed single mother, told me that she couldn’t complete all the tasks offered because she just couldn’t afford to: “They want you to take a picture of you eating lobster. I don't eat lobster and I can't afford lobster, which is why I'm getting Amazon gift cards from Crowdtap.”

Good consumers keep their personal electronics up to date. And they eat lobster (or at least aspire to).

by Daniel Carter, The Outline | Read more:
Image: Rune Fisker

Is Democracy in Europe Doomed?

On the morning of April 23, 2017, as the polls opened in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, an old man with a cane positioned himself in front of a bright yellow mailbox and began to scrape. After a few minutes, he sauntered away toward the markets of the rue des Martyrs, leaving a torn and scratched relic of the modified hammer-and-sickle logo of the hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise (“Rebellious” or, literally, “Unsubmissive France”).

The old man, evidently no fan of Mélenchon’s anticapitalist, anti-NATO, pro-Russian rhetoric, had reason to worry. In neighborhoods like this, the epicenter of Paris hipsterdom, Mélenchon polled well. Everyone from student protesters to academics and the well-to-do scions of one of the city’s wealthiest families told me they were voting for the ex-communist firebrand. (...)

Le Pen and Mélenchon together drew nearly 50 percent of the youth vote in the first round, splitting the 18-34 age bracket evenly. Unlike in Britain’s Brexit referendum, the young did not support the status quo; they voted for extremists who want to leave the EU.

Those who believe millennials are immune to authoritarian ideas are mistaken. Using data from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have painted a worrying picture. As the French election demonstrated, belief in core tenets of liberal democracy is in decline, especially among those born after 1980. Their findings challenge the idea that after achieving a certain level of prosperity and political liberty, countries that have become democratic do not turn back.

In America, 72 percent of respondents born before World War II deemed it absolutely essential to live in a democracy; only 30 percent of millennials agreed. The figures were similar in Holland. The number of Americans favoring a strong leader unrestrained by elections or parliaments has increased from 24 to 32 percent since 1995. More alarmingly, the number of Americans who believe that military rule would be good or very good has risen from 6 to 17 percent over the same period. The young and wealthy were most hostile to democratic norms, with fully 35 percent of young people with a high income regarding army rule as a good thing. Mainstream political science, confident in decades of received wisdom about democratic “consolidation” and stability, seemed to be ignoring a disturbing shift in public opinion.

There could come a day when, even in wealthy Western nations, liberal democracy ceases to be the only game in town. And when that day comes, those who once embraced democracy could begin to entertain other options. Even Ronald Inglehart, the celebrated eighty-three-year-old political scientist who developed his theory of democratic consolidation more than four decades ago, has conceded that falling incomes, rising inequality, and the abject dysfunction of many governments—especially America’s—have led to declining support for democracy. If such trends continue, he wrote in response to Foa and Mounk, “then the long-run outlook for democracy is indeed bleak.” Part of voters’ disillusionment stems from the political establishment’s failure to confront very real tensions and failures of integration, opening the door for a web-savvy army of right-wing propagandists who put forth arguments that are both offensive and easily digestible.

Others have been more nuanced. Christopher Caldwell’s provocative 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, stood out from the chorus of shrill, alarmist writers who warned that mass migration posed a fundamental threat to European culture and stability. His was a serious and carefully argued book. The central question he posed was, “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” He held that the erosion of old Christian values and a strong sense of national pride in much of Western Europe weakened the cultural identity of countries to the point that they were no match for the all-encompassing identity offered by Islam.

This account seemed prescient when it was published, but it was premature. The rhetoric of anti-immigration parties and right-wing propagandists has propelled the rise of a powerful countervailing form of extremism: white identity politics. In France, this movement was not strong enough to put Marine Le Pen in power, but it did garner over one-third of valid votes cast in France’s presidential runoff. And like fundamentalist Muslims, white nationalists idealize a pure, imagined past. Both extremist visions feed off one another, and they have the power to tear Europe apart.

The nagging question today is which Europe will ultimately win. In the wake of Macron’s victory in the French election, it is tempting to think that the plague of populist nationalism has been banished. That would be naive.

Within minutes of Macron’s win on May 7, 2017, the triumphalism began across the world. Macron defeats radicalism, proclaimed Spain’s El País. France stems tide of populist revolution, Britain’s Independent cheered. White nationalism gets thumped, declared David Leonhardt in The New York Times the next morning. The euphoria that greeted Macron’s victory is understandable but dangerous. Le Pen’s FN won over 10.5 million votes, double the number her father received in 2002, drawing in supporters from both the far left and center right. She ran a serious and competent campaign, unlike other far-right figures. As with Holland, where Geert Wilders’s weaker-than-expected showing in the March 2017 election was interpreted as a signal that populism’s march had been halted, there is no cause for celebration, as the strong showing of Austria’s right-wing populist Freedom Party in Sunday’s election proved.

Wilders performed poorly because the few times he did campaign, he was surrounded by a phalanx of armed guards in small villages filled with supporters. Le Pen, by contrast, stumped all across the country and braved crowds throwing eggs at her in staunchly anti-FN Brittany. She even tried to upstage Macron in his hometown, Amiens, where he waded into a hostile crowd of striking Whirlpool workers and, rather than pandering, told them he wouldn’t make any “airy promises” to avert the closure of their factory. When Le Pen heard he was going to visit, she descended on the site with her entourage first, seeking to bolster her credentials with workers whom she knew would not be receptive to Macron’s free-market message. It was a bold move akin to Trump’s visit to an Indiana air conditioner factory a few weeks after the election, where he sought to show that he was already saving American jobs.

Even in Paris, where Le Pen’s posters were routinely defaced with the word “SATAN,” there was no unanimity about how to fight her. Unlike in 2002, the front républicain that had battered Le Pen the elder did not materialize this time. Macron’s victory, with 66 percent of the vote, was a convincing one, but it was nowhere near Jacques Chirac’s 82 percent score—a testament to what Marine Le Pen has achieved. After the FN’s loss, Le Pen gave a concession speech that sounded more like a campaign rally for the upcoming legislative elections. If the FN finally abandons its name and the baggage that comes with it, new leaders, like Le Pen’s young and telegenic niece, Marion-Maréchal, may be able to de-demonize the party in a way that Marine could not.

Too many people on the European left scoff at nationalism, mistaking their own distaste for evidence that the phenomenon no longer exists or is somehow illegitimate. If 2016 and 2017 have proven anything, it is that this sort of visceral nationalism, or loyalty to one’s in-group, still exists and is not going away. Those who dismiss this sort of national sentiment as backward and immature do so at their own peril.

What the globalists of the transnational elite miss is that not everyone has the luxury of leaving. Those who don’t have the education and skills to travel abroad often resent those who do. To compensate, they identify strongly with the place they come from and support politicians who promise to protect them from both genuine and imaginary threats. They do not have the luxury of voting with their feet, but their protest is felt at the polls.

To dismiss the populist impulse as something completely alien is to miss the point and to preemptively lose the political debate. With or without actual control of the government, they have proved they can exert influence and shape debates without ever wielding formal power.

The first step in any coherent political project to counter right-wing populists is to reject the fear that fuels their popularity and resist the temptation to adopt their policies. Very few leaders have done this. In Holland and Denmark, the center right and the social-democratic left have largely caved and adopted planks from the populists’ platform. The left has lost much of its old base by appearing to care only about free trade, technological progress, and limitless diversity. This scares many people who used to vote for the Democratic Party, British Labour, or European Social Democrats.

Nativist politicians like Trump or Holland’s Geert Wilders are not particularly concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and their economic policies aren’t terribly helpful to workers and the poor. But because there is often no class-based counterargument coming from the left, it is easy for right-wing populists to seize that political terrain; it is an open space. Once the old economic battle lines disappear, realignment becomes very easy. The challenge for today’s left is to acknowledge these voters’ fears and offer policies that help address their grievances without making the sort of moral concessions that lead toward reactionary illiberal policies.

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters