The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis

When he was thirty-five, Kieran Setiya had a midlife crisis. Objectively, he was a successful philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had written the books “Practical Knowledge” and “Knowing Right from Wrong.” But suddenly his existence seemed unsatisfying. Looking inward, he felt “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”; looking forward, he saw only “a projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death.” What was the point of life? How would it all end? The answers appeared newly obvious. Life was pointless, and would end badly.

Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.

Setiya finds that the history of the midlife crisis is both very long and very short. On the one hand, he identifies a text from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, circa 2000 B.C., as the earliest description of a midlife crisis and suggests that Dante might have had one at the age of thirty-five. (“Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”) On the other, he learns that the term itself wasn’t coined until 1965, when a psychologist named Elliott Jaques wrote an essay called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” (Jaques quotes a patient’s eloquent lament: “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight.”) John Updike published “Rabbit Redux” in 1971. (“What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do.”) Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter” in 1986. (“You can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up.”) In between, Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” published in 1977, explored the midlife crisis from a psychological point of view. Sheehy, an accomplished investigative journalist—she also wrote “The Secret of Grey Gardens”—became an anthropologist of middle age. After interviewing many midlifers, she concluded that women, too, experienced midlife crises; they just had them earlier than men. “The years 35 to 39 are the infidelity years for women,” she told People, in 1976. Having “packed their last child off to school,” middle-aged women “want to restore illusions of youthful appearance, romantic love.”

After Sheehy’s book was published, everybody seemed to be having a midlife crisis. Perhaps, Setiya writes, people married too early during the conservative postwar decades, then reëvaluated their lives as the counterculture flowered. On the whole, though, research on the frequency of midlife crises tends to be equivocal. Many long-term studies of well-being show that people actually get happier as they age. (This lends credence, Setiya suggests, to Aristotle’s view that we grow into a “prime of life,” with the body achieving its fullest development at thirty-five and the mind at forty-nine.) Other studies show that there is a “U-shaped curve” to life satisfaction, such that we’re happiest when we’re young and old and unhappiest in between. (There are even studies of great apes, conducted by zoologists, which show that they get sad in middle age.) “Shit happens in midlife,” Setiya writes, “with kids and parents, work and health.” He is drawn to the work of the German economist Hannes Schwandt, which shows that “younger people tend to overestimate how satisfied they will be, while midlifers underestimate old age.” According to this theory, we could avoid midlife crises by calibrating our expectations.

If you’re a jerk, it’s useful to have a midlife crisis; it gives your irresponsible behavior an existential sheen. Almost certainly, the term is overused. Still, having experienced a midlife crisis himself, Setiya ends up convinced that they are an ordinary part of a well-lived life. He identifies a number of intellectual traps into which even the most levelheaded people can fall. Many have to do with the way we think about freedom and choice. Because the lives of middle-aged people have settled into more or less permanent shapes, for instance, people in midlife often become nostalgic for the feeling of choosing: they think, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills. With philosophical exactitude, Setiya explains the flaws in this kind of thinking. Suppose, he writes, that you can have just one of three desirable things—A, B, or C, in order of preference. Because there’s value in having a choice, there are situations in which a choice between B and C is actually preferable to A. Even so, the satisfaction offered by choice has a limit. Most of the time, the value of B or C plus the value of choosing won’t actually add up to the value of A. It’s exciting to choose a new career, but you’ll probably end up with an inferior job; it’s fun to date again, but your new spouse probably won’t be better than your current one.

Some middle-aged people wonder if they shoulda, coulda, woulda, or spend time wishing they could undo their worst mistakes; Setiya, for instance, wonders if he should’ve become a doctor rather than a philosophy professor. He urges the middle-aged to think in detail about what the alternative realities they contemplate would actually entail. Thanks to the “butterfly effect,” he argues, the alternative world in which you hadn’t made those mistakes would almost certainly exclude many of the things you currently value. (Had you chosen a different career, your children might not exist.) Setiya points out that the decisions that vex us most in retrospect also tend to be choices between “incommensurable goods.” Should you have worked on your novel or spent time with your family? Become a musician or an engineer? In Setiya’s view, regrets over such choices are good signs, since they reflect a healthy, multidimensional appreciation of life. “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it,” he writes. (Someone with a darker sensibility might have put it differently: there is no escaping loss, no matter how rich your life is.)

To many people, the increasing proximity of death is the worst thing about middle age. It doesn’t seem to bother Setiya very much: he points out that immortality would probably get frustrating after a while, and suggests getting over your own death in advance by imagining yourself coming to terms with the death of a friend. Instead, what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore. “Having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide,” he writes. There’s a sense in which all goal-directed behavior is ironic: “In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.” Setiya quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom”; according to Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of existence, we spend our days struggling, then are rewarded for struggle with emptiness. “This is the problem with being consumed by plans,” Setiya concludes. “They are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.”

In an effort to evade this conundrum, Setiya brings out the philosophical heavy artillery. He draws on an Aristotelian distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake.

The secret to avoiding Schopenhauerian ennui, Setiya argues, is either to do things that are complete and atelic or to find ways of engaging with your projects atelically. Setiya cautions against the “false allure of early retirement,” since “there is nothing inherently telic about work”; instead of quitting your job, you might find ways to engage with it atelically, as a practice rather than a project. Certain middle-aged habits—golf, yoga, gardening—can help to create an atelic mind-set. Setiya recommends mindfulness meditation; buying a sports car may also be permissible, if it includes “a switch in focus from the value of getting there to the value of being on the way.”

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Bernd Vogel / Getty

Nissan Embeds Self-Parking Tech in Pillows and Slippers

Nissan, like every other car manufacturer that doesn't want to be rendered mostly obsolete within the next few decades, has been gradually developing autonomous technology for its vehicles. They've been going about it very sensibly, introducing discrete modules like highway assist and parking assist, and they've managed to get the parking bit working well enough to take it beyond cars. One such attempt at an even more challenging and important self-parking application: slipper arrangements.

At first glance, the ProPILOT Park Ryokan looks like any other traditional Japanese inn, or ryokan. Slippers are neatly lined up at the foyer, where guests remove their shoes. Tatami rooms are furnished with low tables and floor cushions for sitting. What sets this ryokan apart is that the slippers, tables and cushions are rigged with a special version of Nissan's ProPILOT Park autonomous parking technology. When not in use, they automatically return to their designated spots at the push of a button.

For its primary application, Nissan's ProPILOT Park system uses an array of four cameras and twelve sonar sensors to wedge its host vehicle into even the smallest of parking spaces—whether it's nose-in parking, butt-in parking, or trickiest of all, parallel parking. It seems unlikely that the slippers use quite the same technology, although Nissan does suggest that the technology is at least similar, which would mean that the slippers are operating autonomously rather than relying on someone off-camera with a remote control. If you'd like to investigate further, Nissan is offering a free night for a pair of travelers at this particular ryokan, which located in Hakone, Japan—a lovely place that you should consider visiting even if self-parking slippers aren't on the amenities list.

Our only question now is, why limit this technology to cars, slippers, and pillows? I'd like my cereal bowls to be self parking. And my socks. And how about the toothpaste? Just think about how much more convenient it would be if all of these things were self-parking, too. So let's get going with this, Nissan. Make our lives better already.

by Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:

Image: Nissan

Holding On

I remember the first time I held my daughter’s hand. She was just minutes old, and I knew nothing about babies, so I was impressed to find that even a newborn could hold on. “Look, she’s holding my hand!” I exclaimed to myself, to the air, to anyone in the room. That she could cling to me and me to her was the most natural thing in the world, it turned out. It comes to us from the unknown depths of our biology, pre-birth. Our first skill is hanging on, no practice necessary. What I didn’t know yet was that learning to let go would also come easily, maybe naturally, to her. That she would master it quicker than me.

I know every time I’ve let go of Zelda, in fact, what’s actually happened is that she let go of me, and I simply allowed it, overcoming my natural inclinations to cling, to hold tight. I felt her pull away from me as she stood up on her fat wobbly legs to walk for the first time, and I worried that she would fall. She did, of course, fall down, and though she cried real tears of failure and frustration, and though she looked over at me, she didn’t reach for me. She didn’t need me, not right that second. She told me then what I didn’t want, couldn’t stand to hear, not yet, not yet: “Sometimes, I need you; sometimes I do not.”

I let her arms disentangle from my own in a swimming pool, her confidence in the floaters strapped to her was so much stronger than my own. She floated; she floats.

I remember almost nothing of the first day I took her to school, at 16 months old, beyond the image of her little turquoise dress fluttering in the wind as she took her teacher’s hand and walked away from her father and me without a word of goodbye. The rest of the day, beyond her walking away, the gate banging shut, closing me off, sending me home, is a blur. Many of my best and most acute memories of her are this: she turned away from me.

Just this morning I took her to school a few minutes early, had a conference with her teacher while she played with her friends in the other room. “Come say goodbye, don’t leave without saying goodbye,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me as we split up. Twenty minutes later, armed with the overwhelming joy of her progress report, I wandered across the hall, to where she was now seated with 10 other children, doing a puzzle, where the goal was to put together a bear, only five pieces, dressed in a tutu. She had the head and the feet already locked in, and was puzzling over the middle section when I came to her. “I came to say goodbye,” I knelt down to her, touching her face. I saw her little shoulder shrug me away, her concentration has improved: just last year, her teacher told me in the conference, any interruption broke her away from her work. Now, she is focused, she was focused on the bear, not me. What she requested just minutes before—to see me once more before I left—she no longer wanted or needed. Only I needed it.

by Laura June, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Erasing History

The Honolulu Advertiser doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to publish a regular “Health Bureau Statistics” column in its back pages supplied with information from the Hawaii Department of Health detailing births, deaths, and other events. The paper, which began in 1856 as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, since the end of World War II was merged, bought, sold, and then merged again with its local rival, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, to become in 2010 The Honolulu Star Advertiser. But the Advertiser archive is still preserved on microfilm in the Honolulu State Library. Who could have guessed, when those reels were made, that the record of a tiny birth announcement would one day become a matter of national consequence? But there, on page B-6 of the August 13, 1961, edition of The Sunday Advertiser, set next to classified listings for carpenters and floor waxers, are two lines of agate type announcing that on August 4, a son had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway.

In the absence of this impossible-to-fudge bit of plastic film, it would have been far easier for the so called birther movement to persuade more Americans that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But that little roll of microfilm was and is still there, ready to be threaded on a reel and examined in the basement of the Honolulu State Library: An unfalsifiable record of “Births, Marriages, Deaths,” which immeasurably fortified the Hawaii government’s assertions regarding Obama’s original birth certificate. “We don’t destroy vital records,” Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo says. “That’s our whole job, to maintain and retain vital records.”

Absent that microfilmed archive, maybe Donald Trump could have kept insinuating that Barack Obama had in fact been born in Kenya, and granting sufficient political corruption, that lie might at some later date have become official history. Because history is a fight we’re having every day. We’re battling to make the truth first by living it, and then by recording and sharing it, and finally, crucially, by preserving it. Without an archive, there is no history.

For years, our most important records have been committed to specialized materials and technologies. For archivists, 1870 is the year everything begins to turn to dust. That was the year American newspaper mills began phasing out rag-based paper with wood pulp, ensuring that newspapers printed after would be known to future generations as delicate things, brittle at the edges, yellowing with the slightest exposure to air. In the late 1920s, the Kodak company suggested microfilm was the solution, neatly compacting an entire newspaper onto a few inches of thin, flexible film. In the second half of the century entire libraries were transferred to microform, spun on microfilm reels, or served on tiny microfiche platters, while the crumbling originals were thrown away or pulped. To save newspapers, we first had to destroy them.

Then came digital media, which is even more compact than microfilm, giving way, initially at least, to fantasies of whole libraries preserved on the head of a pin. In the event, the new digital records degraded even more quickly than did newsprint. Information’s most consistent quality is its evanescence. Information is fugitive in its very nature.

“People are good at guessing what will be important in the future, but we are terrible at guessing what won’t be,” says Clay Shirky, media scholar and author, who in the early 2000s worked at the Library of Congress on the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Project. After the obvious—presidential inaugurations or live footage of world historical events, say—we have to choose what to save. But we can’t save everything, and we can’t know that what we’re saving will last long. “Much of the modern dance of the 1970s and 1980s is lost precisely because choreographers assumed the VHS tapes they made would preserve it,” he says. He points to Rothenberg’s Law: “Digital data lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first,” which was coined by the RAND Corporation computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg in a 1995 Scientific American article. “Our digital documents are far more fragile than paper,” he argued. “In fact, the record of the entire present period of history is in jeopardy.”

On the other hand, says archivist Dan Cohen, “One of the good developments of our digital age is that it is possible to save more, and to provide access to more.” Fifteen years ago, he began work on Digital History, a book co-authored with Roy Rosenzweig. “There was already a good sense of how fragile born-digital materials are,” he explains, stressing that most archivists’ concerns aren’t new. “Historians have always had to sift through fakes and half-truths. What’s gotten worse is the sheer ease of creating fake documents and especially of disseminating them far and wide. People haven’t gotten any less gullible.”

In the 21st century, more and more information is “born digital” and will stay that way, prone to decay or disappearance as servers, software, Web technologies, and computer languages break down. The task of internet archivists has developed a significance far beyond what anyone could have imagined in 2001, when the Internet Archive first cranked up the Wayback Machine and began collecting Web pages; the site now holds more than 30 petabytes of data dating back to 1996. (One gigabyte would hold the equivalent of 30 feet of books on a shelf; a petabyte is a million of those.) Not infrequently, the Wayback Machine and other large digital archives, such as those in the care of the great national and academic libraries, find themselves holding the only extant copy of a given work on the public internet. This responsibility is increasingly fraught with political, cultural, and even legal complications.

by Maria Bustilllos, CJR |  Read more:

Image: Shannon Freshwater

Inside T-Mobile's Big, Brash Comeback

The crowd in the ballroom at the Westin New York at Times Square on this February afternoon is in a partying mood well before sundown. They’re enjoying the buzz of being an elite crew: some 200 employees handpicked by managers as top performers. They’re nodding their heads to a pounding soundtrack (Beck’s “Wow,” “Havana” by Camila Cabello and Young Thug, some Coldplay). They’re competing in cheering contests. And they’re antsy for the big moment when they’ll pull the triggers that set off a fusillade of confetti cannons.

This is definitely not what most companies do on quarterly earnings day. But the company hosting this bash is T-Mobile (TMUS, +0.96%), the formerly downtrodden wireless carrier—where rebounding employee morale and rising revenue are almost inextricably linked.

After one last cheer-off, the star of the show arrives. John Legere, T-Mobile’s tirelessly trash-talking, 59-year-old CEO, stalks in with a phalanx of senior execs, to the beat of a standing ovation. He quickly gets to the point: “Rowdy crowd? There’s a good reason to be rowdy … We announced results today that were just phenomenal, the best financial results since I’ve been CEO here.”

It’s true: Despite a year marked by a major disappointment—merger talks with rival Sprint broke down in November, with no deal—the numbers T-Mobile has just announced are formidable. Its 2017 revenue was $40.6 billion, up 8% from 2016, and more than double its total in 2012, the year Legere took over; net income, meanwhile, reached a record $4.54 billion. While it remains far behind Verizon (VZ, -0.44%) and AT&T (T, +0.66%) in number of subscribers, T-Mobile, which makes its debut on the Fortune Best Companies list this year, has undeniable momentum. It’s intent on shaking up both the wireless world—it has its eye on other acquisitions—and the cable industry, with a tantalizing move into mobile video.

That success, insiders and industry experts agree, is fueled by rah-rah rallies like this one. The crowd chants “Are you with us?,” a slogan from the diversity-themed ad T-Mobile unveiled during the Super Bowl. The confetti cannons do indeed fire confetti. And then it’s question time: For 30 minutes, Legere and his team field inquiries from employees in the ballroom and others watching via webcast. Legere keeps the pace rapid and the tone solicitous, doling out cash rewards (peeled off a stash of rolled-up $20 bills) for those brave enough to query him. Some questions are jokey (Have we bought stock in confetti cannons?), but others are sincere and probing. Afterward, dozens of employees line up to shake hands with the CEO and pose with him for pictures. Legere hangs around for almost half an hour until the entire line gets through.

“He’s like an amazing person, different from everyone I’ve ever seen as a CEO,” Donald Smith, who works in a T-Mobile store in the Bronx, says after snapping a selfie with Legere. “He seems like he actually cares.”

Legere certainly cares about making a ruckus. Famously brash and competitive, he’s best known for castigating his competitors (he routinely dismisses AT&T and Verizon as “dumb and dumber”), uttering public profanities, and engaging in the occasional Twitter war—including with then-candidate Donald Trump, in 2015, in a spat over tweets in which Trump criticized mixed-martial-arts star Ronda Rousey. (After the election, Legere said he had “got way past” the feud and was optimistic about the impact of a less restrictive regulatory climate.) Still, there is method to Legere’s madness, and it has helped T-Mobile become the fastest-growing and best performing wireless company during his tenure.

Legere came on as CEO at the end of 2012, a low point for the company. T-Mobile, then a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, was shedding customers as it waited to be acquired by AT&T—only to see regulators block the $39 billion deal. Legere quickly shored up the business with savvy moves. T-Mobile got a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone. It bought more spectrum rights to improve its network. And in 2013 it went public, so its stock could be used for dealmaking. (Deutsche Telekom remains the majority owner.)

Just as key to T-Mobile’s success was its decision to make an enemy of its own industry, launching a messaging war in which Legere’s f-bomb-throwing was central to the assault. (Its opponents’ flacks used to respond with indignation; now they rarely take the bait.) The strategy: Get rid of typical plans and prices. Embrace customer desires and eliminate their pain points. That meant no more two-year contracts, no more roaming fees, no more incomprehensible charges at the bottom of every bill. Most significantly, T-Mobile was far ahead of AT&T and Verizon in 2016 in scrapping monthly data limits and the annoying overage charges they generated—forcing its bigger rivals to follow suit.

The numbers show how well it all worked: Boosted by its 2013 acquisition of MetroPCS, T-Mobile’s subscriber base has grown faster than any other carrier’s, to 73 million. Since going public as part of that deal, its stock has soared, trouncing its rivals. Perhaps most important, its customers are loyal: According to a recent survey by Business Insider’s BI Intelligence, almost one-quarter of T-Mobile’s customers say they would never switch to a competitor for any reason, vs. 16% of AT&T’s customers, 15% at Verizon, and just 7% at Sprint. (...)

Legere’s first CEO stints, at the Asian unit of telecom-services company Global Crossing and then at the parent company, were anything but fun. As the Internet and telecom bubbles burst, Global Crossing careened into bankruptcy, and Legere laid off thousands of employees. The company’s Asian unit also paid to settle two sexual discrimination complaints during Legere’s tenure, after female employees alleged that Legere made belittling remarks and behaved aggressively in the company’s offices. (Legere did not comment on the settlements at the time; T-Mobile declined to comment for this story.) Managing the company’s decline took years, and Legere stayed on until he engineered its sale in 2011.

At T-Mobile he got to start over, at one of the biggest brands in a fast-growing industry—one with a major image problem among consumers. His first move as CEO was to draft a manifesto which began, “We’re not like the other carriers … we are unapologetically the un-carrier,” and included lines like, “We will give customers new phones right now instead of later.” Early on, Legere had a line installed in his office to listen in on customer service conversations, which he would do for hours, often late into the night. Most of his “un-carrier” ideas, like getting rid of contracts or dumping fees, came from listening to customers talk with staffers. “My entire strategy that I coined early on,” he says, “was listen to employees, listen to customers, shut the fuck up, and do what they tell you.”

T-Mobile is doubling down on “do what they tell you” under an effort called “Team of Experts,” which has given call-center employees unprecedented authority. Under the plan, which launched last year, T-Mobile divided its customers into blocks of about 120,000, who are each assigned to a specific group of a few dozen employees at a specific call center. When customers call for support, they are routed to their assigned team, instead of being assigned to a random rep at the least busy center in the country, as is typical in the industry. There’s no transferring of calls elsewhere in a frustrating ducking of accountability. Reps are held responsible for the outcomes of their customer group, measured by metrics such as how frequently customers defect to another carrier or how often they call support, and reps and their managers are empowered to hand out service credits or alter bills.

“People in the industry told us we were crazy to do non-randomized routing,” says Callie Field, T-Mobile’s executive vice president in charge of customer care. But T-Mobile’s cost to serve customers has dropped by 9% overall since it was implemented, while customer satisfaction scores increased by 20 percentage points, Field says. Legere says that the customer-care team’s new responsibilities give them even more data they can use to assess how promotions are going or whether customers understand new plans. “These people talk to 20 customers a day; that’s your gold mine.” (...)

At an event in Nashville in early February for retail-store employees, Legere made a surprise appearance. “He walked in the door, and you would have thought it was Snoop Dogg,” says attendee Lindsay Carter, a store manager from Atlanta who was recently promoted to a regional sales job. In a Q&A session, Carter had a big question for the CEO. You completely dominated this industry in five years, she asked; in your next five years, are you going to run for President? “Uh, no,” Carter says he replied, as he handed her a $100 bill.

Support for the frontline staff goes far beyond the freebies. All employees get tuition assistance and paid time off. T-Mobile started offering spousal benefits and insurance coverage for gay couples even when it wasn’t legally required to, and it enforces a nondiscrimination policy that protects LGBTQ employees. The company was the lead sponsor for last June’s NYC Pride, one of the largest LGBTQ events in the country. “It’s not about trying to sell phones,” says Chris Frederick, managing director at NYC Pride, of T-Mobile. “It’s creating an inclusive culture year-round.”

by Aaron Pressman, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Ian Allen

David Byrne

Can Washington Be Automated?

Washington, D.C. - It’s a brisk late November afternoon in an 8th-floor office overlooking downtown Washington’s Thomas Circle. The White House is an easy five block walk; the Hart Senate Office Building, a 15-minute cab ride. Outside, the streets are filled with people bustling about, protected against the chill in dark suits and authoritative shoes, moving between power centers with the confidence of essential players in the workings of the American government. Here, in his office, Tim Hwang is walking me through a piece of software that is already shaking the ground beneath their feet, even if they’ve yet to feel the rumbling.

Hwang is the CEO of a four-year-old firm called FiscalNote, which makes a kind of technology that is quickly raising questions about who—or what—is still an essential player in Washington. Hwang, in sharp-edged glasses and a blue blazer, taps on his MacBook Air, and what appears on the screen is a full assessment of the legislative record of Senator Orrin Hatch, the 83-year-old Utah Republican.

Hatch’s varied career is the longest ever for a Senate Republican; he’s been a video-game critic and an advocate for the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and in his four decades on Capitol Hill he has championed hundreds of bills and taken thousands of votes both obscure and important. Figuring out Orrin Hatch isn’t a trivial job, even for a seasoned D.C. hand. But FiscalNote has all that data distilled, analyzed and weaponized. The display tells us that Hatch is formidable not just for his seniority, but because he’s in the top 3 percent of all legislators when it comes to effectiveness—or at least he was, before he announced his impending retirement. When he throws his weight behind a bill, it’s likely to become law. What’s more, his effectiveness varies: It’s high when the topic is health, but drops some on tech issues.

The software drills deeper. One immediate surprise it delivers is that the lawmaker most similar to Hatch’s interests and patterns is Louisiana’s John Kennedy, a 66-year-old Republican who’s been on Capitol Hill all of 11 months. Then, with a few more clicks, it’s crunching the woeful record of a shall-remain-nameless member of Congress who occupies the bottom third of legislators in the house, and who, the software dryly notes, is “fairly ineffective as a primary co-sponsor.”

There’s more. Much more. Hwang’s system analyzes interests, not just people, and quickly summarizes everything knowable about who is trying to pass what kind of rules about the most obscure topic I can come up with on the spot: “dairy.” A couple more clicks after that, and we’re looking at a summarized version of a bill tackling cybersecurity that the software has considered and rendered a judgment on, when it comes to the probability that it will become law. We’re not talking a rough estimate. There’s a decimal: 78.1 percent.

This kind of data-crunching might sound hopelessly wonky, a kind of baseball-stats-geek approach to Washington. But if you’ve spent years attempting to make sense of the Washington information ecosystem—which can often feel like a swirling mass of partially baked ideas, misunderstandings and half-truths—the effect is mesmerizing. FiscalNote takes a morass of documents and history and conventional wisdom and distills it into a precise serving of understanding, the kind on which decisions are made. Here, the software is telling us that if we’re looking for an up-and-coming Republican to get on board a health bill Hatch is pushing, Kennedy’s a good bet. Want it bipartisan? The system will suggest likely Democratic backers, too.

If you’re an aide, one of the people walking on the street outside from a power breakfast to a meeting on the Hill, there’s another way to think about what FiscalNote is doing: It’s doing your job. Washington, D.C., is a notoriously imprecise place, trading on memory and relationships and gut. And a huge amount of what people do in the city, the way they make their living, is guiding others through the morass. The things FiscalNote is doing—sifting through murky bills and votes and patterns of behavior—is precisely why you hire an experienced staffer. Without much in the way of human involvement, says Hwang, the system can “enable the top attorney at McDonald’s to immediately understand every single law and regulation pertaining to their industry.”

That’s tremendous power, the kind that threatens to rattle the bedrock of the capital. If there’s one central cog in the modern city of Washington, with its bustle of influence and steakhouses and exorbitant home prices, it’s the in-the-know lobbyist or staffer or government-affairs liaison. There are thousands of them here, paid, often quite well, for that know-how. This machine handily replaces much of that, and without running up huge bills at Brasserie Beck.

Could the swamp really be automated? The question feels almost alien. At the moment, if “automation” and “Washington” are used in the same sentence, it’s usually to decry how behind the curve policymakers are on a transformative economic issue like industrial robots or self-driving cars. In its own workings, Washington seems almost a uniquely un-automatable place, a constitutionally erected edifice of institutions and people driven by irreplaceable experience and relationships.

Hwang is demonstrating that’s not true. FiscalNote isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, grad-school project. The firm employs 160 people today, with 1,300 clients and upward of $28 million in backing from hugely prominent tech industry investors (Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Steve Case). Toyota and the National Institutes of Health use FiscalNote to keep tabs on the political realm. Hwang’s also got a healthy client roster among world governments, which need to understand D.C. for their own reasons: FiscalNote is used by the foreign ministries of Canada, Mexico and South Korea. He has a competitor, a bootstrapped firm called Quorum in nearby Dupont Circle, that specializes in giving clients the ability to respond instantaneously to what the political world’s talking about right now.

For all the anxiety about modern robots, Washington has been automating itself for generations. Harry Truman is believed to have been the first president to regularly use the autopen, a machine that reproduces a human signature on documents. Since then, it has become routine for government officials to use the autopen on everyday transactions and promotional materials, and Barack Obama made history in 2011 when he signed a bill into law with it for the first time.

FiscalNote sits at the front edge of a change that goes far beyond the lobbying world. “Washington” writ large is a dense entanglement of politics, rulemaking, legal work, journalism and jurisprudence—all fields that have seen significant, if often quiet, incursions from machines. Washington’s law firms, a linchpin of the local economy, have already automated much of their paralegal work. Journalism, another mainstay here, is more of a challenge to automate, but that’s happening too: The Washington Post experimented with machine-written coverage during the 2016 Rio Olympics, and is now trying to do the same thing with House, Senate and gubernatorial races in every state in the Union. Stranger still are attempts to inject automation into the judicial branch, inspired by those who argue that computers are better and fairer at some kinds of decision-making jobs than human beings in black robes.

As quickly as technological change is coming to Washington, the profound questions it raises about both ethics and economics—what is “democracy” if it has machines at its core? whither the United States’ capital city if there are far fewer people left?—are lagging behind. It might be time for us to take them seriously. “We’re still going to need a lot of them,” Hwang says of those professionals hustling down the streets outside, “but I don’t think we’re going to need them at the scale at which Washington operates today.” When it comes to the nation’s capital, he says, “People vastly, vastly underestimate what automation is going to do.”

by Nancy Scola, Politico |  Read more:

Image: André Chung

Brenda Cablayan, Weke Road
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New Study Finds Sea Level Rise Accelerating

Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.

This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise projected by 2100 when compared to projections that assume a constant rate of sea level rise, according to lead author Steve Nerem. Nerem is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and a member of NASA's Sea Level Change team.

If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100 -- enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities, according to the new assessment by Nerem and colleagues from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; CU Boulder; the University of South Florida in Tampa; and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The team, driven to understand and better predict Earth’s response to a warming world, published their work Feb. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is almost certainly a conservative estimate," Nerem said. "Our extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we are seeing in the ice sheets today, that's not likely."

Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere increase the temperature of air and water, which causes sea level to rise in two ways. First, warmer water expands, and this "thermal expansion" of the ocean has contributed about half of the 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) of global mean sea level rise we've seen over the last 25 years, Nerem said. Second, melting land ice flows into the ocean, also increasing sea level across the globe.

These increases were measured using satellite altimeter measurements since 1992, including the Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3 satellite missions, which have been jointly managed by multiple agencies, including NASA, Centre national d’etudes spatiales (CNES), European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the U.S. portion of these missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The rate of sea level rise in the satellite era has risen from about 0.1 inch (2.5 millimeters) per year in the 1990s to about 0.13 inches (3.4 millimeters) per year today.

"The Topex/Poseidon/Jason altimetry missions have been essentially providing the equivalent of a global network of nearly half a million accurate tide gauges, providing sea surface height information every 10 days for over 25 years," said Brian Beckley, of NASA Goddard, second author on the new paper and lead of a team that processes altimetry observations into a global sea level data record. "As this climate data record approaches three decades, the fingerprints of Greenland and Antarctic land-based ice loss are now being revealed in the global and regional mean sea level estimates."

by Katie Weeman and Patrick Lynch, NASA |  Read more:

Image: NASA

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Financial Markets Have Taken Over the Economy

Ours is, without a doubt, the age of finance—of the supremacy of financial actors, institutions, markets, and motives in the global capitalist economy. Working people in the advanced economies, for instance, increasingly have their (pension) savings invested in mutual funds and stock markets, while their mortgages and other debts are turned into securities and sold to global financial investors (Krippner 2011; Epstein 2018). At the same time, the ‘under-banked’ poor in the developing world have become entangled, or if one wishes, ‘financially included’, in the ‘web’ of global finance through their growing reliance on micro-loans, micro-insurance and M-Pesa-like ‘correspondent banking’ (Keucheyan 2018; Mader 2018). More generally, individual citizens everywhere are invited to “live by finance”, in Martin’s (2002, p. 17) evocative words, that is: to organize their daily lives around ‘investor logic’, active individual risk management, and involvement in global financial markets. Citizenship and rights are being re-conceptualized in terms of universal access to ‘safe’ and affordable financial products (Kear 2012)—redefining Descartes’ philosophical proof of existence as: ‘I am indebted, therefore I am’ (Graeber 2011). Financial markets are opening ‘new enclosures’ everywhere, deeply penetrating social space—as in the case of so-called ‘viaticals’, the third-party purchase of the rights to future payoffs of life insurance contracts from the terminally ill (Quinn 2008); or of ‘health care bonds’ issued by insurance companies to fund health-care interventions; the payoff to private investors in these bonds depends on the cost-savings arising from the health-care intervention for the insurers. Or what to think of ‘humanitarian impact bonds’ used to profitably finance physical rehabilitation services in countries affected by violence and conflict (Lavinas 2018); this latter instrument was created in 2017 by the International Red Cross in cooperation with insurer Munich Re and Bank Lombard Odier.

Conglomerate corporate entities, which used to provide long-term employment and stable retirement benefits, were broken up under pressure of financial markets and replaced by disaggregated global commodity-chain structures (Wade 2018), operating according to the principles of ‘shareholder value maximization’ (Lazonick 2014)—with the result that today real decision-making power is often to be found no longer in corporate boardrooms, but in global financial markets. As a result, accumulation—real capital formation which increases overall economic output—has slowed down in the U.S., the E.U. and India, as profit-owners, looking for the highest returns, reallocated their investments to more profitable financial markets (Jayadev, Mason and Schröder 2018).

An overabundance of (cash) finance is used primarily to fund a proliferation of short-term, high-risk (potentially high-return) investments in newly developed financial instruments, such as derivatives—Warren Buffet’s ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ that blew up the global financial system in 2007-8. Financial actors (ranging from banks, bond investors, and pension funds to big insurers and speculative hedge funds) have taken much bigger roles on much larger geographic scales in markets of items essential to development such as food (Clapp and Isakson 2018), primary commodities, health care (insurance), education, and energy. These same actors hunt the globe for ‘passive’ unearthed assets which they can re-use as collateral for various purposes in the ‘shadow banking system’—the complex global chains of credit, liquidity and leverage with no systemic regulatory oversight that has become as large as the regulated ‘normal’ banking system (Pozsar and Singh 2011; Gabor 2018) and enjoys implicit state guarantees (Kane 2013, 2015).

Pressed by the international financial institutions and their own elites, states around the world have embraced finance-friendly policies which included reducing cross-border capital controls, promoting liquid domestic stock markets, reducing the taxation of wealth and capital gains, and rendering their central banks independent from political oversight (Bortz and Kaltenbrunner 2018; Wade 2018; Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2018). What is most distinctive about the present era of finance, however, is the shift in financial intermediation from banks and other institutions to financial markets—a shift from the ‘visible hand’ of (often-times relationship) regulated banking to the axiomatic ‘invisible hand’ of supposedly anonymous, self-regulating, financial markets. This displacement of financial institutions by financial markets has had a pervasive influence on the motivations, choices and decisions made by households, firms and states as well as fundamental quantitative impacts on growth, inequality and poverty—far-reaching consequences which we are only beginning to understand.

Setting the Stage

... This view of the superiority of a ‘market-based’ financial system rests on Friedrich von Hayek’s grotesque epistemological claim that ‘the market’ is an omniscient way of knowing, one that radically exceeds the capacity of any individual mind or even the state. For Hayek, “the market constitutes the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the market converts them into prices, or objective facts” (Metcalf 2017). After his ‘sudden illumination’ in 1936 that the market is the best possible and only legitimate form of social organisation, Hayek had to find an answer to the dilemma of how to reformulate the political and the social in a way compatible with the ‘rationality’ of the (unregulated) market economy. Hayek’s answer was that the ‘market’ should be applied to all domains of life. Homo œconomicus—the narrowly self-interested subject who, according to Foucault (2008, pp. 270-271), “is eminently governable ….” as he/she “accepts reality and responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment—had to be universalized. This, in turn, could be achieved by the financialization of ‘everything in everyday life’, because financial logic and constraints would help to impose ‘market discipline and rationality’ on economic decision-makers. After all, borrowers compete with another for funds—and it is commercial (profit-oriented) banks and financial institutions which do the screening and selection of who gets funded. (...)

This Hayekian legacy underwrites, and quietly promotes, neoliberal narratives and discourses which advocate that authority—even sovereignty—be conceded to (in our case: financial) ‘markets’ which act as an ‘impartial and transparent judge’, collecting and processing information relevant to economic decision-making and coordinating these decisions, and as a ‘guardian’, impartially imposing ‘market discipline and market rationality’ on economic decision-makers—thus bringing about not just ‘socially efficient outcomes’ but social stability as well. This way, financialization constitutes progress—bringing “the advantages enjoyed by the clients of Wall Street to the customers of Wal-Mart”, as Nobel-Prize winning financial economist Robert Shiller (2003, p. x) writes. “We need to extend finance beyond our major financial capitals to the rest of the world. We need to extend the domain of finance beyond that of physical capital to human capital, and to cover the risks that really matter in our lives. Fortunately, the principles of financial management can now be expanded to include society as a whole.”

Attentive readers might argue that faith in the social efficiency of financial markets has waned—after all, Hayek’s grand epistemological claim was falsified, in a completely unambiguous manner, by the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 which brought the world economy to the brink of a systemic meltdown. Even staunch believers in the (social) efficiency of self-regulating financial markets, including most notably former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, had to admit a fundamental ‘flaw in their ideology’.

And yet, I beg to disagree. The economic ideology that created the crash remains intact and unchallenged. There has been no reckoning and no lessons were learned, as the banks and their shareholders were rescued, at the cost of about everyone else in society, by massive public bail-outs, zero interest rates and unprecedented liquidity creation by central banks. Finance staged a major come-back—profits, dividends, salaries and bonuses in the financial industry have rebounded to where they were before, while the re-regulation of finance became stuck in endless political negotiations. Stock markets, meanwhile, notched record highs (before the downward ‘correction’ of February 2018), derivative markets have been doing rather well and under-priced risk-taking in financial markets has gathered steam (again), this time especially so in the largest emerging economies of China, India and Brazil (BIS 2017; Gabor 2018). In the process, global finance has become more concentrated and even more integral to capitalist production and accumulation. The reason why even the Great Financial Crisis left the supremacy of financial interests and logic unchallenged, is simple: there is no acceptable alternative mode of social regulation to replace our financialized mode of co-ordination and decision-making.

‘Really-Existing’ Finance Capitalism

Financialization underwrites neoliberal narratives and discourses which emphasize individual responsibility, risk-taking and active investment for the benefit of the individual him-/herself—within the ‘neutral’ or even ‘natural’ constraints imposed by financial markets and financial norms of creditworthiness (Palma 2009; Kear 2012). This way, financialization morphs into a ‘technique of power’ to maintain a particular social order (Palma 2009; Saith 2011), in which the delicate task of balancing competing social claims and distributive outcomes is offloaded to the ‘invisible hand’ which operates through anonymous, ‘blind’ financial markets (Krippner 2005, 2011). This is perhaps illustrated clearest by Michael Hudson (2012, p. 223):

“Rising mortgage debt has made employees afraid to go on strike or even to complain about working conditions. Employees became more docile in a world where they are only one paycheck or so away from homelessness or, what threatens to become almost the same thing, missing a mortgage payment. This is the point at which they find themselves hooked on debt dependency.”

Paul Krugman (2005) has called this a ‘debt-peonage society’—while J. Gabriel Palma (2009, p. 833) labelled it a ‘rentiers’ delight’ in which financialization sustains the rent-seeking practices of oligopolistic capital—as a system of discipline as well as exploitation, which is “difficult to reconcile with any acceptable definition of democracy” (Mann 2010, p. 18).

In this regime of social regulation, income and wealth became more concentrated in the hands of the rentier class (Saith 2011; Goda, Onaran and Stockhammer 2017) , and as a result, productive capital accumulation gave way before the increased speculative use of the ‘economic surplus of society’ in pursuit of ‘financial-capital’ gains through asset speculation (Davis and Kim 2015). This took the wind out of the sails of the ‘real’ economy, and firms responded by holding back investment, using their profits to pay out dividends to their shareholders and to buy back their own shares (Lazonick 2014). Because the rich own most financial assets, anything that causes the value of financial assets to rise rapidly made the rich richer (Taylor, Ömer and Rezai 2015).

In the U.S., arguably the most financialized economy in the world, the result of this was extreme income polarization, unseen after WWII (Piketty 2014; Palma 2011). The ‘American Dream’, writes Gabriel Palma (2009, p. 842), was “high jacked by a rather tiny minority—for the rest, it has only been available on credit!” Because that is what happened: lower- and middle-income groups took on more debt to finance spending on health care, education or housing, spurred by the deregulation of financial markets and changes in the tax code which made it easier and more attractive for households with modest incomes to borrow in order to spend. This debt-financed spending stimulated an otherwise almost comatose U.S. economy by spurring consumption (Cynamon and Fazzari 2015). In the twenty years before the Great Financial Crash, debts and ‘financial excess’—in the form of the asset price bubbles in ‘New Economy’ stocks, real estate markets and commodity (futures) markets— propped up aggregate demand and kept the U.S. and global economy growing. “We have,” Paul Krugman (2013) concludes, “an economy whose normal condition is one of inadequate demand—of at least mild depression—and which only gets anywhere close to full employment when it is being buoyed by bubbles.”

But it is not just the U.S. economy: the whole world has become addicted to debt. The borrowings of global households, governments and firms have risen from 246% of GDP in 2000 to 327%, or $ 217 trillion, today—which is $70 trillion higher than 10 years ago. It means that for every extra dollar of output, the world economy cranks out more than almost 10 extra dollars of debt. Forget about the synthetic opioid crisis, the world’s more dangerous addiction is to debt. China, which has been the engine of the global economy during most of the post-2008 period, has been piling up debt to keep its growth process going—the IMF (2017) expects China’s non-financial sector debt to exceed 290% of its GDP in 2022, up from around 140% (of GDP) in 2008, warning that China’s current credit trajectory is “dangerous with increasing risks of a disruptive adjustment.” China’s insatiable demand for debt fueled growth, but also led to a property bubble and a rapidly growing shadow banking system (Gabor 2018)—raising concerns that the economy may face a hard landing and send shockwaves through the world’s financial markets. The next global financial catastrophe may be just around the corner.

by Servaas Storm, Naked Capitalism via: Institute for New Economic Thinking | Read more:
Image: uncredited (INET)

How to Die

You may complain, “But he was snatched away when I didn’t expect it.” Thus all are deceived by their own trust and a willed forgetfulness of mortality in the case of things they cherish. Nature promised no one that it would make an exception to necessity. Every day there pass before our eyes the funerals of the famous and the obscure, yet we are busy with other things, and we find a sudden surprise in the thing that, our whole life long, we were told was coming. It’s not the unfairness of the fates, but the warped inability of the human mind to get enough of all things, that makes us complain of leaving that place to which we were admitted as a special favor. How much more just was he who, having learned of his son’s death, spoke a word worthy of a great man: “I knew then, when I fathered him, that he would die.” … His son’s death came as no news to him; for what news is it that someone has died whose whole life was nothing else than a journey toward death? “I knew then, when I fathered him, that he would die.” Then he added something of even greater sagacity and insight: “And it was for that that I raised him.” It’s for that that we are all brought up; whoever is brought into life is destined for death. Let’s rejoice in what will be given, but let’s return it when we’re asked for it back. The fates will seize hold of one person now, another later, but they will overlook no one. Let the soul stand girded for battle; let it never fear what must be, let it always expect what’s unknown. … There’s no single end fixed for all; for one, life departs in mid-course, but abandons another at its very beginning, and barely dispatches a third who is already worn out with extreme old age and longing to go. Each in his or her own time, we all bend our course to the same place. Is it more stupid to ignore the law of mortality, or more impudent to reject it? I don’t know.

by Seneca via: Charlotte Smalley, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: The Death of Seneca by Manuel Domínguez Sánchez, 1871

Kicking the Table: Populism or Capitalist De-Modernization at the Semi-Periphery: The Case of Poland

Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of fascism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat. 

—Bertolt Brecht, “Five Difficulties of Writing the Truth” (1935)

It was in autumn 1990 that Poland experienced a pivotal moment in its modern political history—for the first time the president of the country was to be elected by a popular vote. The top job was finally claimed by Lech Wałęsa, the iconic leader of Solidarność trade union and Peace Nobel Prize winner. As is often the case with fundamental breakthroughs, however, there was something much darker and disturbing lurking in the background. Wałęsa’s victory did not happen without a fight. He was challenged by another prominent center-right politician with a long history of anti-Soviet activism: Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The latter got the support of elite intellectual circles, marking the final cleavage in the previously united opposition that throughout the 1980s had fought under the banner of Solidarność. It hardly was a surprising course of events as it closely followed class divisions: Wałęsa, a simple worker turned revolutionary, enjoyed the support of Polish liberal intellectuals as long as he was useful, even crucial, in the fight against Soviet domination. Once that fight was won, class divisions, especially those dictated by cultural capital, reemerged as an important—even if not the only—line of political division. But what wassurprising and shocked all pundits was the fact that it wasn’t Mazowiecki whom Wałęsa had to face in the run-off ballot. Another candidate claimed second place: Stan Tymiński, an obscure and completely unknown figure.

Tymiński only appeared in Polish public life right before the election, coming back from decades of emigration spent in Canada and South America. He presented himself as the anti-establishment candidate of “the people.” He had no support from either ex-communists or Solidarność and he underlined his independence. He also advertised his personal material success: a Polish-Canadian businessman, well-travelled and experienced in the mythical West, doing business across North and South America. He campaigned against the entire political establishment, maintaining that all politicians were corrupt and controlled by the secret service and claiming to possess many proofs of this collaboration, which, however, he never revealed. He also passionately denounced the suffering of the poorer part, who had been deeply harmed by vicious neoliberal reforms undertaken with the support of IMF and the World Bank a year earlier (reforms devised, as it happens, by no less a figure than the famous neoliberal prophet himself, Jeffrey Sachs). To these impoverished masses, Tymiński promised material prosperity and symbolic dignity, and, despite the fact that he had zero political experience and was unanimously lambasted by intellectual establishment, he managed to secure the second place in the first round of the elections, winning 23% of the votes, more than Tadeusz Maowiecki who had served as Polish prime minister from 1989 and was probably the best qualified candidate to ever run for the office of president in Poland.

A reader following the 2016 US election—and who has not?—may start to see an uncanny resemblance: yes, Stan Tymiński was, toutes proportions gardées, Polish Donald Trump and he defeated the politician who was the closest equivalent of Hilary Clinton in Polish political life: a very well educated and well prepared political professional (a lawyer for that matter) discredited for many voters by his links to the elite of neoliberal establishment. Tymiński did not win the presidency, but the shock that followed his victory over Tadeusz Mazowiecki was very similar to what the US experienced in 2016.

This is a fact worth remembering given the more recent populist turn in Polish—and not only Polish—politics: populism did not appear in the last years solely as the result of the 2008 financial crisis. In the Polish context at least, it is as old as neoliberalism and constitutes its somber counterpart. Despite Tymiński’s defeat in 1990, it has remained a constant element of our political life, enjoying in various institutional forms between 15 and 20 percent of electoral support. Tymiński disappeared from Polish politics as quickly as he entered it, but just a year later, in 1991, another popular figure was born: Andrzej Lepper. A home-grown, rural populist, he rallied farmers to oppose the government after a wave of bankruptcies and unrest provoked by the shock of neoliberal therapy applied to Polish society after the fall of the Soviet bloc. This time a political organization was born: Samoobrona (meaning “Self-defence”), first as a movement, then a political party. After more than a decade of lurking in the shadows, Lepper entered government in 2005, becoming deputy prime-minister in the cabinet of…Jarosław Kaczyński, the well-known leader of the Law and Justice party that currently holds power in Poland. At that time they only ruled for two years, falling victims to their own infighting and intrigues; however, that coalition, as well as the early developments that I sketched above, is crucial to understanding the present political situation in Poland. Before it happened Law and Justice was just an ordinary neo-conservative party: they affirmed nationalism (labeled “patriotism” according to the rules of political correctness), opposed women’s emancipation and gay rights, proclaimed their religious faith etc. When it came to the economy, they were just as neoliberal as the liberals: they lowered not only the taxes for the rich, but also mandatory contributions to healthcare and social security that companies are supposed to pay and they completely scrapped the inheritance tax. But in the course of these two years of coalition government, Law and Justice devoured Samoobrona, which never rose to power again, and they captured its electorate, slowly turning from a standard conservative to the populist-conservative party that they are today. What helped this development was, of course, the success of Hungary’s Victor Orbán who provided a blueprint of how to legally bypass the law in order to construct the bizarre hybrid of authoritarian parliamentarism that we are experiencing today.

Many Polish liberals are disgusted by the fact that so many Polish voters “betrayed the values of democratic society” and “sold” their allegiance to Constitutional Court or the separation of powers for $150 a month child bonus introduced by the Law and Justice government. This is, however, a fundamental misconception. Celebrations of democratic values come very easily to those who do not need to worry about how to feed their kids and whose class egoism has been ruthless during the last three decades of neoliberal rule. (...)

This disconnect is well exemplified in the discussions surrounding Poland’s position and membership in the European Union. Polish liberals fear some kind of Polexit—either by choice or by expulsion due to the undemocratic policies of the populist government. So they point to the fact that the European Union with the Schengen Zone agreement gave us an incredible freedom of movement in Europe. Of course, factually it is true. Being born in 1976 I’m old enough to remember what it meant to live behind the Iron Curtain. We were not allowed to keep our passports at home and we had to apply for them every time we intended to leave the country. We needed a visa to enter any Western state. Visas were difficult to obtain, cost a lot and covered short periods of time like two weeks or a month. Crossing the border was a stressing and humiliating experience for us: we were suspected of being spies or smugglers, interrogated and checked for hours. Today all I have to do is take my national ID, a driving license and a credit card and I can go three and a half thousand kilometers from Warsaw to Lisbon crossing half a dozen national borders without being checked even once. What used to be border checkpoints are now parking lots on the side of highways. Police booths I remember from my teenage years are turned into hot-dog stands. As citizens of a EU country I am entitled to live, work and buy real-estate in any member country. It really is great, but with one caveat: you need to have resources to be able to profit from this exceptional and remarkable freedom. What good is the ability to travel to Lisbon to a person who can hardly afford a train ticket to the nearest town? Even worse: there may be no train to the nearest town because Polish neoliberals decided that public transportation is passé, that it belongs to the old and obsolete socialist past, so they neglected a lot of local connections in favor of promoting car ownership. If you cannot buy a car? Well, it is your fault, because you are not entrepreneurial enough. So you get stuck in some grey, crumbling and aging peripheral town or hamlet. The only thing you can afford is a TV, where you watch the lavish lifestyle of cosmopolitan elites. And, suddenly, here’s this populist government which does not tell you that you are a savage and maladjusted Homo sovieticus who lacks “civilizational competence”, but rather treats you as a dignified subject who deserves attention and—what a formidable turn of events!—they give you a child bonus, so your kids can go for holidays for the first time in their lives. What would you say to the liberals who come nagging you about how much you betrayed democratic values and how urgently we need to defend the freedom and civil society we were so desperately fighting for in Soviet times? And these are the very same people who ruled your country for eight years, denying you both dignity and welfare while constantly bragging about fabulous GDP growth and the incredible economic miracle that they created.

Well, if you have any brains left, you would say just one thing: “Fuck off!” And this is precisely what Law and Justice supporters are saying. Contrary to the liberal narration their support for populism is not an irrational eruption of barbarism and resentment, but rather the opposite: a proof of their rationality and sober thinking. A quick glance at the opinion polls shows that almost none of the most controversial policies enacted by the Polish populist government enjoys widespread public support, even among Law and Justice voters. Two thirds of Poles do not like what is happening with Constitutional Court, an overwhelming majority is against logging in the primordial forest in Białowieża and does not support the government’s obsession with keeping the Polish economy addicted to coal. The conspiracy theory, advanced by some prominent politicians of the ruling party, that the airplane crash in Smoleńsk in 2010, where Lech Kaczyński (the twin brother of Jarosław Kaczyński and the President of Poland at the time) died along with 100 other prominent politicians was an orchestrated attack, is believed by only 14% of the population. The reasons why people support the government have little to do with all those ridiculous and harmful policies. Parliamentary politics in a bourgeois state is very much like cooking with limited supplies: you may have a bowl of hot oil and you may think that tempura would be a great treat, but if all you have are potatoes, you will most likely settle for fries.

But, wait, isn’t it a dangerous normalization of right-wing populism that I’m advocating here? After all we saw what happened in Warsaw on November the 11th this year, when the Independence Day parade turned into a neo-fascist festival of hatred, xenophobia and racism. Shouldn’t we be more concerned or even alarmed? There are for sure, reasons for concern and alarm, but if it is ever going to be politically fruitful, we need to have a good understanding of what is going on. To understand does not mean to justify let alone praise or support. Polish conservative populism is not fascism. Only a small minority of people who marched on November the 11th in Warsaw were actual fascists. But, of course, there is a risk of sliding towards fascism. The government is turning a blind eye to the fascist excesses, because they do not want to have a more radical right-wing formation emerging on the right side of the political spectrum. So they are keen on letting the right-wing extremists know that they somehow include them under their political patronage. This surely is playing with fire and should never take place. An outright ban on any kind of fascism is the only acceptable way to go and the only way to avoid a repetition of horrors that Central-Eastern Europe experienced in the past century. What is, however, equally urgent is addressing the root of fascism and countering the force behind the fascist awakening. Just to denounce right-wing populism and the drift towards fascism it entails is going to get us nowhere unless we understand the reason why they are occupying a place closer and closer to the mainstream of political life.

It’s here again, that we encounter the basic flaw of liberal common sense, with its fixation on cultural factors and the importance of ethos. What they neglect is an element that was entirely wiped out of both public and academic discourse in Poland as well as elsewhere, for example, in the US: the issue of class and its indelible materialist component. Populism is a kind of displaced and perverted class revolt. It derives from an oppression of double kind: material for the poor and symbolic for the lower-middle class. The former strives for material redistribution, the latter—for symbolic recognition, for something to be proud of and for the feeling of dignity they are deprived of. Polish populists have found a way to cunningly combine the support of the two into a coherent political force and it has allowed them to win elections. Now, fulfilling their electoral promises grants them the ongoing legitimacy that they clearly enjoy in the eyes of a large group of Polish society.

Looking from the other side of the Atlantic, I would venture a hypothesis that the same is at least partially true for the American society. Walter Benn Michaels has talked for more than a decade about how much the US political orthodoxy has been the politics of identity and recognition above material redistribution. What this means is not just that a great many people have become the victims of growing inequality but that a large group of them—white people and especially straight white men—have come to understand themselves as doubly victimized. They have very little resources as they get nothing from material redistribution (because there is virtually none), and they get nothing from symbolic redistribution (since that goes precisely to people who are not straight and white). One may say: rightly so, why should they? Given the racist and patriarchal society that we live in, this is the group that does not deserve recognition for what they are. But as true as this diagnosis may be, it does not change an obvious political consequence: this is the group that occupies the position that Ernesto Laclau called pure heterogeneity; or caput mortuum, using the Lacanian-alchemist term—a leftover, a sedimentation on the walls of the sample tube where the chemical reaction is taking place. This is the most unstable and dangerous element as it does not take part in the normal political game, but being exotic (i.e. positioned outside) to the system it only disrupts the process. Laclau describes it with a metaphor: as we sit around a table playing a board game, they are those who were pushed aside—thus they are heterogenous to the very process of the game—and they cannot be a player in the ongoing match. This is an utterly painful and humiliating position and it can hardly be enjoyed by anyone who happens to occupy it. These people may not have any means to enter the game, but they can do a different thing: kick the table, so there will be no more playing for anyone. This is what they did in many places around the world in 2015 and 2016. And, as long as they remain in the position of pure heterogeneity, they’ll keep on doing it, no matter how much we denounce and demonize them. As a matter of fact, the more the liberals whine about the destruction of state institutions and irreparable harm done to political order by those actions, the more enjoyment the supporters of populism will get from kicking the table. After all, this is what the so-called protest voting is all about. (...)

Throughout a good part of 20th century, academic development studies were dominated by what was called modernization theory. It claimed that all countries move along the same trajectory of social change, where some—mainly the West—are more advanced than the others. It had a right-wing and a left-wing version and culminated in the (in)famous declaration of the end of history made by Francis Fukuyama in the early 1990s. What we are witnessing right now is a precise reversal of this alleged pattern: the peripheries of capitalist world-system have become some sort of perverse avant-garde of reaction. What we have experienced in Poland since early 1990s, as I showed at the beginning of this text, has not been a glitch provoked by cultural factors but a reaction to neoliberal austerity. It took neoliberalism some time to destroy core societies to the same level, but when it started to get there, strikingly similar formations appeared first in the UK and the US, precisely the most neoliberal countries in the center of the capitalist world-system. It should not come as surprise that France is the place where politics may still seem “business as usual”: Emanuel Macron looks like another Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder or Bill Clinton. France is, after all, the number one public spender in the OECD and still maintains one of the most generous and inclusive welfare mechanisms on the planet. What the liberals fascinated by Macron do not get is that the neoliberal reforms he is undertaking are destroying the very status quo on which he got elected. The advancement of the Front National in France, just like the electoral success of Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, are visible signs of what we may very well face in a not very distant future. I would dub the phenomenon “de-modernization” as it is reversing both the conquests of liberal modernity (not only in the political sphere, the same is true when it comes to secular state or labor conditions) as well as the relation between the center and the periphery postulated by the modernization theory. The future of Berlin, Paris or Washington is in Warsaw and Budapest, not the other way around.

Looking at this uncanny development from the perspective of the Polish semi-periphery I cannot but marvel at an incredible irony of the situation. I grew up in the last years of Soviet regime and I remember quite well the dreams and aspiration that followed the system change in 1989. The key ambition of liberal elites was for Poland to come back to the mainstream of Western politics and to become “a normal, European country.” And it was firstly and mainly the Anglo-Saxon political world that captured the imagination of Polish liberal elites as a noble example to follow. When I look today at the chaos and indolence of the Trump administration or the mess that Brexit generates in the UK I cannot help but think of it as a bizarre “polonization” of world politics. I’ve seen this before! Steve Bannon looks, talks and acts (including the red nose and generally alcoholic look) as if he were an advisor to the Polish right-wing government of Jan Olszewski in 1992 not to the US president in 2017. Poland—and the entire region of Central-Eastern Europe—is undeniably in the mainstream of European and world politics. Even more: we are a kind of avant-garde! Not because we have advanced so high, but because capitalism in its neoliberal incarnation has brought politics so low.

by Jan Sowa, Nonsite.org |  Read more:

They Only Look Casual

There she goes, strutting that strut. Her outfit is arranged just so. She’s got the bag with the umpteen-person wait list, not yet available in stores. The cameras flash. It’s a fashion moment. It’s a watershed. It’s a marketing opportunity.

It’s the 15-foot catwalk that runs from the hotel door to the S.U.V. door.

For fashion houses looking to leverage the star power of celebrities, the holy grail had long been the red carpet, the bigger an event the better. Special teams at major labels might court actresses, their reps and their stylists for years to dress their top clients, and spend tens of thousands of dollars or more to make custom outfits for them. A hit could make a brand, or cement its status, paying dividends for years to come as the moment was fondly recalled in Best Of lists and debated by carpet pundits.

That was then.

With social media ascendant, there is a new, and increasingly important, runway for the stars, and a rising guard of stylists working to dress them for it. It’s the sidewalk. It’s the airport. It’s the Starbucks run.

For those women whose followers feverishly track their every move and every selfie — your Hadids (Gigi and Bella); your Kaia Gerbers (Cindy Crawford’s look-alike model daughter); your Emily Ratajkowskis; Selena Gomez, your Instagram queen (the platform’s most followed person) — any moment can be a moment. Their presence is an event. They need no carpet; they are the carpet.

“Five years ago it was all about the red carpet moment,” said Christian Classen, 31, a stylist for Ms. Gomez and young celebrities including the Disney star Dove Cameron, the singer Banks, the Instagram poet Rupi Kaur and the actress Zazie Beetz. “Less now. An Instagram selfie on some people can be 10 times more important.”

Mr. Classen does style many of his clients for formal appearances, but he has made a specialty of casual off-carpet looks. When he struck out on his own as a stylist in 2015, labels tightly guarded their stores, lending clothes only for specific red carpet occasions. “Now, if it’s for a street style or an airport, they’re going to give it to me right away,” Mr. Classen said.

Not that the red carpet has disappeared. It remains, ready when needed, for the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys, the premieres. And so remain, at the ready, the legion of red carpet stylists. But joining them are a new wave of “day stylists” whose forte is the casual, tossed-off, this-old-thing look of street style: what the stars would throw together on their own (but often don’t have to).

Even the most casual of looks — the jeans, beanie and pap-proof goggle shades the star may wear to scurry to the gate of her departing flight — may well take a village. (The highest-profile stars may have separate stylists to work on their biggest red carpet events. Ms. Gomez, for example, also works with the stylist Kate Young.)

“A lot of people probably think that they choose on a daily basis from their own closets,” said Mimi Cuttrell, 26, a stylist who works with Gigi Hadid, Ms. Gerber and Ms. Hadid’s mother, Yolanda Hadid. “Sometimes there are outfits that are completely planned out from head to toe. I’m really particular with tailoring, too. There’s a lot of pieces and back work that goes into getting one street style look ready.” (...)

The point of such styling is to look effortless, natural and, in one of fashion’s favorite terms, “authentic” — even when that authenticity is mediated by an on-hand stylist to offer up the glossiest version of your authentic self. So much so that many of the millions of fans watching along on social media may not realize they’re looking at a tailor-made ensemble.

by Matthew Schneier, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Backgrid

Max Ernst, The Phases of the Night, 1946
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Daido Moriyama, Record No.35 (2017)
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The Autonomous Selfie Drone Is Here

Autonomous drones have long been hyped, but until recently they’ve been little more than that. The technology in Skydio’s machine suggests a new turn. Drones that fly themselves — whether following people for outdoor self-photography, which is Skydio’s intended use, or for longer-range applications like delivery, monitoring and surveillance — are coming faster than you think.

They’re likely to get much cheaper, smaller and more capable. They’re going to be everywhere, probably sooner than we can all adjust to them.

Most consumer drones rely on some degree of automation in flight. DJI, the Chinese drone company that commands much of the market, makes several drones that can avoid obstacles and track subjects.

But these features tend to be less than perfect, working best in mostly open areas. Just about every drone on the market requires a pilot.

“Our view is that almost all of the use cases for drones would be better with autonomy,” said Adam Bry, Skydio’s chief executive.

Skydio was founded by Mr. Bry and Abe Bachrach — who met as graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later started Google’s drone program, Project Wing — along with Matt Donahoe, an interface designer.

In 2014, with funding from the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, the company began working on what would become the R1. Skydio has since raised $70 million from Andreessen and several other investors, including Institutional Venture Partners, Playground Global and the basketball player Kevin Durant.

Skydio’s basic goal was a drone that requires no pilot. When you launch the R1 using a smartphone app, you have your subject stand in front of the drone, then tap that person on the screen — now it’s locked on. You can also select one of several “cinematic modes,” which specify the direction from which the drone will try to record its subject. (It can even predict your path and stay ahead of you to shoot a selfie from the front.)

After takeoff, it’s hands off. The drone operates independently. In the eight-minute flight I saw — through a wooded trail sparsely populated with runners and dogs — the R1 followed its target with eerie determination, avoiding every obstacle as naturally as an experienced human pilot might, and never requiring help. It lost its subject — me — only once, but I had to really work to make that happen. (...)

What this means is ubiquity. As I watched the R1 tail Mr. Bry, I played the scene forward in my mind: What happens when dozens or hundreds of runners and bikers and skiers and hikers and tourists begin setting out their own self-flying GoPros to record themselves? Our society has proved in thrall to photography; if you can throw up a camera and get a shot of you reaching the summit, who’s not going to do it?

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Laura Morton for The New York Times

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California Launches Aetna Probe

California's insurance commissioner has launched an investigation into Aetna after learning a former medical director for the insurer admitted under oath he never looked at patients' records when deciding whether to approve or deny care.

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones expressed outrage after CNN showed him a transcript of the testimony and said his office is looking into how widespread the practice is within Aetna.

"If the health insurer is making decisions to deny coverage without a physician actually ever reviewing medical records, that's of significant concern to me as insurance commissioner in California -- and potentially a violation of law," he said.

Aetna, the nation's third-largest insurance provider with 23.1 million customers, told CNN it looked forward to "explaining our clinical review process" to the commissioner.

The California probe centers on a deposition by Dr. Jay Ken Iinuma, who served as medical director for Aetna for Southern California from March 2012 to February 2015, according to the insurer.

During the deposition, the doctor said he was following Aetna's training, in which nurses reviewed records and made recommendations to him.

Jones said his expectation would be "that physicians would be reviewing treatment authorization requests," and that it's troubling that "during the entire course of time he was employed at Aetna, he never once looked at patients' medical records himself." (...)

Members of the medical community expressed similar shock, saying Iinuma's deposition leads to questions about Aetna's practices across the country.

"Oh my God. Are you serious? That is incredible," said Dr. Anne-Marie Irani when told of the medical director's testimony. Irani is a professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the Children's Hospital of Richmond at VCU and a former member of the American Board of Allergy and Immunology's board of directors.

"This is potentially a huge, huge story and quite frankly may reshape how insurance functions," said Dr. Andrew Murphy, who, like Irani, is a renowned fellow of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. He recently served on the academy's board of directors. (...)

"This is something that all of us have long suspected, but to actually have an Aetna medical director admit he hasn't even looked at medical records, that's not good," said Murphy, who runs an allergy and immunology practice west of Philadelphia.

by Wayne Drash, CNN |  Read more:

Image: Wayne Drash/CNN