The Tyranny of Convenience

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.

Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.

For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.

Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.

However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.

This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.

You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.

Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.

So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort. (...)

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

by Tim Wu, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hudson Christie
[ed. This reminds me of an earlier post (The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis) and the concept of "telic" and "atelic" activities: the "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 State of Informed Bewilderment

The question that I’ve been asking myself for a long time is, what kind of framing should we have for the dilemmas posed by the technology we’re living through at the moment? I’m interested in information technology, ranging widely from digital technology and the Internet on one hand to artificial intelligence, both weak and strong, on the other hand. As we live through the changes and the disturbances that this technology brings, we’re in a state of mind that was once admirably characterized by Manuel Castells as "informed bewilderment," which was an expression I liked.

We’re informed because we are intensely curious about what’s going on. We're not short of information about it. We endlessly speculate and investigate it in various ways. Manuel’s point was that we actually don’t understand what it means—that’s what he meant by bewilderment. That’s a very good way of describing where we are. The question I have constantly on my mind is, are there frames that would help us to make sense of this in some way?

One of the frames that I’ve explored for a long time is the idea of trying to take a long view of these things. My feeling is that one of our besetting sins at the moment, in relation for example to digital technology, is what Michael Mann once described as the sociology of the last five minutes. I’m constantly trying to escape from that. I write a newspaper column every week, and I've written a couple of books about this stuff. If you wanted to find a way of describing what I try to do, it is trying to escape from the sociology of the last five minutes.

In relation to the Internet and the changes it has already brought in our society, my feeling is that although we don’t know really where it’s heading because it’s too early in the change, we’ve had one stroke of luck. The stroke of luck was that, as a species, we’ve conducted this experiment once before. We’re living through a transformation of our information environment. This happened once before, and we know quite a lot about it. It was kicked off in 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of printing by movable type.

In the centuries that followed, that invention not only transformed humanity’s information environment, it also led to colossal changes in society and the world. You could say that what Gutenberg kicked off was a world in which we were all born. Even now, it’s the world in which most of us were shaped. That’s changing for younger generations, but that’s the case for people like me.

Why is Gutenberg useful? He’s useful because he instills in us a sense of humility. The way I’ve come to explain that is with a thought experiment which I often use in talks and lectures. The thought experiment goes like this:

I want you to imagine that we’re back in Mainz, the small town on the Rhine where Gutenberg's press was established. The date is around 1476 or ’78, and you’re working for the medieval version of Gallup or MORI Pollsters. You’ve got a clip slate in your hand and you’re stopping people and saying, "Excuse me, madam, would you mind if I asked you some questions?" And here’s question four: "On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is definitely yes and 5 is definitely no, do you think that the invention of printing by movable type will A) undermine the authority of the Catholic Church, B) trigger and fuel a Protestant Reformation, C) enable the rise of something called modern science, D) enable the creation of entirely undreamed of and unprecedented professions, occupations, industries, and E) change our conception of childhood?"

That’s a thought experiment, and the reason you want to do it is because nobody in Mainz in, say, 1478 had any idea that what Gutenberg had done in his workshop would have these effects, and yet we know now that it had all of those effects and many more. The point of the thought experiment is, as I said, to induce a sense of humility. I chose that day in 1478 because we’re about the same distance into the revolution we’re now living through. And for anybody therefore to claim confidently that they know what it means and where it’s heading, I think that’s foolish. That’s my idea of trying to get some kind of perspective on it. It makes sense to take the long view of the present in which we are enmeshed. (...)

I’m obsessed with the idea of longer views of things. In the area I know, which is information technology, the speed with which stuff appears to change has clearly outdistanced the capacity of our social institutions to adapt. They need longer and they’re not getting it.

A historian will say that’s always been the case, and maybe that’s true. I just don’t know. If you’re a cybernetician looking at this, cybernetics had an idea of a viable system. A viable system is one that can handle the complexity of its environment. For a system to be viable, there are only two strategies. One is to reduce the complexity of the environment that the system has to deal with, and that, broadly speaking, has been the way we’ve managed it in the past.

For example, mass production—the standardization of objects and production processes—was a way of reducing the infinite variety of human tastes. Henry Ford started it with the Model T by saying, "You can have any color as long as it’s black." As manufacturing technology—the business of making physical things—became more and more sophisticated, then the industrial system became quite good at widening the range of choice available, and therefore coping with greater levels of variety.

How many different models does Mercedes make? I don't know. Every time I see a Mercedes car, it’s got a different number on it. I used to think Mercedes made maybe twenty cars. My hunch is that they make probably several hundred varieties of particular cars. The same is true for Volkswagen, etc. Because manufacturing became so efficient, it was able to widen the range of choice.

Fundamentally, mass production was a way of coping with reducing the variety that the system had to deal with. Universities are the same. The way they coped with the infinite range of things that people might want to learn about was to essentially say, “You can do this course or you can do that course. We have a curriculum. We have a set of options. We have majors and minor subjects.” We then compress the infinite variety that they might have to deal with into much smaller amounts.

Most of our institutions, the ones that still govern our societies and indeed our industries, evolved in an era when the variety of their information environment was much smaller than it is now. Because of the Internet and related technologies, our information environment is orders of magnitude more complex than institutions had to deal with even fifty years ago, certainly seventy years ago. And what that means in effect is that in this new environment, a lot of our institutions are probably not viable in the cybernetic sense. They simply can’t manage the complexity they have to deal with now.

The question for society and for everybody else is, what happened? What will happen then? How will they evolve? Will they evolve? One metaphor that I have used for thinking about this is that of ecosystems. In other words, we now live in an information ecosystem. If you’re a scientist who studies natural ecosystems, then you can rank them in terms of complexity.

For example, at one level you could say that we have moved from an information environment, which was a simple ecosystem, rather like a desert, and is much closer to something that’s now like a rainforest. It's characterized by much more diversity, by much higher density of publishers and free agents, and of the interactions between them and the speed with which they evolve and change. Most of our social institutions have not evolved to deal with this metaphorical rainforest, in which case we can expect painful changes in institutions over the next fifty to 100 years as they have to reshape in order to stay viable. Universities are suffering from that already.​

by John Naughton, Edge | Read more:
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Mark Lanegan

Michel Keck
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Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.

Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again.

These obsessions had some of their roots in Dick’s complex and ever-evolving personal mythology (in which it was perfectly plausible that the “real” world was a fake, and that we were all living in Palestine sometime in the first century AD). Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” (...)

In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia. The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation, whether by the Russian government or others, may have nothing to do with its success as propaganda. Instead, it is that it sows an existential distrust. People simply do not know what or who to believe anymore. Rumors that are spread by Twitterbots merge into other rumors about the ubiquity of Twitterbots, and whether this or that trend is being driven by malign algorithms rather than real human beings.

Such widespread falsehood is especially explosive when combined with our fragmented politics. Liberals’ favorite term for the right-wing propaganda machine, “fake news,” has been turned back on them by conservatives, who treat conventional news as propaganda, and hence ignore it. On the obverse, it may be easier for many people on the liberal left to blame Russian propaganda for the last presidential election than to accept that many voters had a very different understanding of America than they do.

by Henry Farrell, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: NikiSublime
[ed. See also: It's the (Democratic-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech (Wired)] 

The Cone of Uncertainty: Parenting on the Edge of Climate Change

There’s a special kind of dread that breeds in the path of a hurricane.

They call it the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – that brightly coloured funnel on the weather map that traces the possible paths of a storm. It’s a statistical mishmash created from dozens of predictions of varying quality, and when you see the dark red centre touch your part of the map, you can almost feel the barometric pressure dropping. You might have days to prepare, days before you know whether it’ll really hit you and how badly. You might not have days to get out, not if the roads are clogged and the gas stations are mobbed; certainly not if you have to work and don’t have cash on hand. You hunker down as best you can, waiting for the first rainbands and the next, for the eye to pass over and the eyewall to return.

Two months before Hurricane Irma, I take my seven-year-old daughter down Alligator Alley: the stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the Everglades, the massive wetland that covers most of South Florida. It now spans only half the three million acres it once covered, thanks to the breakneck pace of agricultural development and suburban McMansions, but that’s still enough to make the maps look as though the Florida peninsula was dipped into a vat of green. Eight million people – a third of the state’s population – draw their drinking water from this wild and desolate place.

Travelers are advised to bring plenty of water, food, a canister of gas, and a first-aid kit, since there are no hospitals or restaurants and cellular coverage is minimal. Alligator Alley has only the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations and a few rest stops with bathrooms and vending machines. Flocks of turkey buzzards populate the picnic pavilions. A few feet from the parked cars, solid land drops off into sawgrass marsh. It would be easy to step out into the swamp and disappear: this is a protected reserve for the Florida panther, for birds and fish, and of course for alligators. Back when the Everglades was bigger, wilder, enslaved Africans escaped from sugarcane plantations and ran for their lives into those tall, sharp blades. Those who survived found aid and alliances with the local Seminole people.

I tell my daughter about this as we drive from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami to my parents’ house near Clearwater. We watch towering thunderheads sweep across the sea of grass, pouring furiously on us and then retreating into darkness, leaving a rainbow in the rear-view mirror. I want to take her to the Seminole reservation, to skim across the water in a noisy fan-powered airboat so she will remember this place. There is a museum there, too, with recreated houses on stilts, connected by little bridges. It’s a testament to human adaptation, to learning how to live in three feet of alligator-infested water. These are things I want her to learn – but the sun is brutal and the mosquitoes already have the taste of our blood, so we stay in the car. With no way to stream music, we sing our way through endless hours of the same view: water, sawgrass, power lines strung along the horizon, straight road ahead.

I remember what my cousin Ross, an Orlando comedian, told me about deciding to home-school his sons: ‘I want them to see Florida while it’s still here.’ I tell my daughter to remember, remember this. I want her to tell her grandchildren about it – as though it isn’t the height of arrogant optimism to imagine her grandchildren.

‘I want to go to space,’ she tells me. Seven-year-olds have a way of changing the subject abruptly, so I go with it. She’s always wanted to be a veterinarian. Why this sudden shift? ‘So we can still be alive even when the earth burns up.’

The impending planetary catastrophe is often on her mind. She thinks about death a lot. This is normal, of course – children ask the most important questions, especially at funerals, and God help the adults who don’t answer them seriously. She declares her desire to be buried, not cremated; she wants her beloved companion Doggy Pillow buried with her, so no one can bother it. ‘What kind of species will take over the earth after we’re gone?’ she asks. I admit I don’t know. ‘I don’t want them to mess with Doggy Pillow.’

If it has occurred to her that I will probably die before she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But the planet will die before she does, that much seems clear – the planet as we know it, at any rate, the one that supports us and feeds us and slakes our thirst.

Her love of animals makes her a natural conservationist, and in the Anthropocene even books for children must address what is going on. Do you like sharks? Did you know that sharks can displace their jaws to snap at prey? Did you know that sharks are disappearing at an astonishing rate? My daughter declares that she will save the oceans by putting up signs telling people not to litter. It sounds no less effective than carbon offset trading.

She is surprised when I tell her about the icy, snowy Pennsylvania winters of my 1980s childhood. Her Pennsylvania winters are not like that. This February the ice-cream truck came by and we ate our cones on the back porch in the sunshine. Her friend’s ice-skating birthday party was cancelled due to a lack of ice.

Why, she asks, don’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be freaking out?

We read a book about second-graders who want to fight global warming. ‘What really freaks grown-ups out is not being in charge,’ the characters say. ‘If grown-ups weren’t scared of nature, they’d probably try harder to save it from global warming.’

We are freaking out, of course: quietly, while the oligarch-in-chief dismantles what little inadequate infrastructure might even notionally allow us do something on any major scale. We perform our anger, our disbelief, but the world is too busy ending to witness our performance. We go to work with an extra layer of sunscreen or an inhaler for the allergic asthma that flares when the trees, jarred from their seasonal rhythm, release their pollen all at once. We are scared of nature. We are most definitely not in charge.

At the end of June, a news conference: prominent figures from the UN and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, with an urgent message. Runaway irreversible climate change, the headlines read.

The Paris Accords, from which President Trump has made an undignified exit, were never enough, never even intended to be enough. They aimed for a rise of no more than 1.5° Celsius – but research indicates that this is unlikely, given that ‘average global temperatures were already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38°C in February and March’ in 2016. ‘Sharp and permanent’ reductions to carbon emissions are needed in the next three years if we are even to mitigate the consequences. Chris Field of Stanford University, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, comments that ‘the 1.5°C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.’ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is blunt: ‘The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.’

Three years. We thought we had twenty.

In July 2017, climate change seems imminent but still more or less distant. It’s possible, especially if you are a politician, to ignore something that is three years away. We inhabit the deep red centre of the cone of uncertainty, but the skies are still clear. We are the doomed Russian aristocrats who spent the summer of 1917 partying with wild abandon, their ears popping with the pressure of a brewing revolution. It’s not the proletariat or peasantry rising up to relieve us of our luxuries, though: it’s the earth itself, sea and sky working in coalition, trees and air conspiring.

We look at the numbers: If we cut all carbon emissions to net zero in the next twenty years – a feat that would require the overthrow of capitalism – we might, might, escape with a sea-level rise that is only catastrophic, with only mass migrations and hunger and thirst, with only a drastic reduction in our species instead of extinction.

Three years for a change so drastic as to be completely incompatible with capitalism. It feels impossible – but then, what changes felt impossible in 1914? In 1932? We laugh now at Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we had reached the ‘end of history’. Yet climate change presents, if not an end to history’s course, then a sharp and dangerous corner around which we cannot see. History’s pace quickens as the climate warms, events piling onto one another with disorienting speed, norms changing irreversibly. We will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.

by Sarah Grey, Salvage |  Read more:

Image: NOAA

Bulletproof Backpacks

The Unique Horror of a Bulletproof Backpack

Image: Guard Dog Security

A Reading on Collective Angst

Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she could sense how high the general tension level was. She didn’t go on at great lengths why, but it was clear that at least some of it came from the success the press was having at whipping up outrage over Trump, and often not for the right reasons, such as over his mainly ineffective executive orders as opposed to his success in getting hard core conservative judges confirmed. It’s not hard to add to the list of topics that go beyond the usual media “If it bleeds, it leads” rule: the risk of nuclear war (even though those supposedly nutcase North Koreans appear to have diffused that with some Olympic diplomacy), Rooskies, #MeToo, more open hostility towards “out” groups ranging from immigrants to the white working class to Muslims. And that’s before we get to listing sources of stress: way too many people with student debt, older people with little to no likelihood of being able to afford retirement unless they leave the US, upper middle class parents spending and pulling strings to make sure their kids wind up in the right social stratum.

Because Lambert and I read so much of this sort of thing on a daily basis, we’re somewhat desensitized. But we’ve both noticed and regularly discussed in the last few weeks that the news flow has become, for lack of a more precise word, weird. The big stories somehow don’t seem that big, perhaps because they more and more seem like variants on shopworn themes. For instance, there is still news and jousting coming out of the Mueller investigations, but the media’s default posture of This Is Really Big and Will Finally Bring Trump Down has come to have a “Boy that cried ‘wolf'” flavor to it. Yet we both find the secondary stories, which ought to be more interesting and relevant in light of the “too much attention on Washington” orientation of the press, seem flatter than usual.

In other words, even though we’ve been cranking out articles, both Lambert and I have been struggling to find things that we deem to be interesting and postworthy. It may be that we’re overstimulated and our calibration is a bit off. For instance, I couldn’t get very worked up about the stock market tsuris of last week. Wake me up if it might endanger something that matters, like the financial system or the real economy.

With that as background, I have an odd confession to make. Even though I am a moody creature, I am able to trace precisely what has got me in the state I am in, whether good or bad. But all day, I’ve been very agitated, when absolutely nothing unusual happened, not even a dustup in the comments section.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. Exactly. It feels like something terrible is coming (and needs to happen), some cathartic form of resolution. See also: The Second Coming.]

As one commenter put it:

The economy is ambling a drunkard’s walk climbing a knife’s edge. The Corporations remain hard at work consolidating and building greater monopoly power, dismantling what remains of our domestic jobs and industry, and building ever more fragile supply chains. The government is busy dismantling the safety net, deconstructing health care, public education and science, bolstering the wealth of the wealthy, and stoking foreign wars while a tiff between factions within those who rule us fosters a new cold war and an arms build-up including building a new nuclear arsenal. In another direction Climate Disruption shows signs of accelerating while the new weather patterns already threaten random flooding and random destruction of cities. It already destroyed entire islands in the Caribbean. The government has proven its inability and unwillingness to do anything to prepare for the pending disasters or help the areas struck down in the seasons past. The year of Peak Oil is already in our past and there is nothing to fill its place. The world populations continue to grow exponentially. Climate Disruption promises to reduce food production and move the sources for fresh water and the worlds aquifers are drying up. It’s as if a whole flock of black swans is looking for places to land.

and another:

I’m starting to think that what we are experiencing is the realization that we’ve spent way too much time expecting that explaining our selves, our diverse grievances, and our political insights would naturally result in growing an irresistible movement that would wash over, and cleanse our politics of the filth that is the status quo. 

It is sobering to realize that it took almost four decades for the original Progressive Era organizers to bring about even the possibility of change. 

I think it’s dawning on us that we’re not re-experiencing the moment before the election of Franklin Roosevelt, and the beginning of the New Deal, we’re actually just now realizing the necessity of the daunting task of organizing, which makes our times resemble 1890 more than 1935. 

Government by the people, and for the people has been drowned in the bath-tub, and the murderers have not only taken the reigns of power, but have convinced half the population that their murderous act represents a political correction that will return America to greatness. 

It remains to be seen whether we will find it in our hearts to embrace both the hard, and un-glamorous work of relieving the pain inflicted by the regime that has engulfed us, and the necessity of embracing as brothers and sisters those who haven’t yet realized that it is the rich and powerful who are the problem, and not all the other poor and oppressed.

Blue Cross Of Idaho Takes The Plunge To Sell Non-ACA-Compliant Plans

On February 13, 2018, Blue Cross of Idaho filed five new individual market plans that will not comply with federal law under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These new “Freedom Blue” plans were filed in response to an executive order signed by Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter and implementing guidance issued by the Idaho Department of Insurance (DOI) in January 2018. Because the plans do not comply with the ACA, insurers that offer them are opening themselves up to significant legal risk and generating additional uncertainty for the market. To avoid this (and attempts by other states that to replicate Idaho’s path), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could step in to enforce the ACA’s consumer protections, as the agency is required to do so under the Public Health Service Act and federal regulations.

What’s In The New Plans?

Gov. Otter’s executive order and the bulletin issued by the DOI essentially authorize a state-level version of the “Cruz amendment,” which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) offered to the Better Care Reconciliation Act during efforts to repeal the ACA last year. The amendment—which would have allowed insurers to offer non-ACA-compliant plans in the individual market so long as they offered plans through the marketplace—was criticized for its potential to increase premiums in the ACA-compliant market and erode protections for consumers with preexisting conditions.

Idaho’s approach—which creates an uneven playing field of market rules—and the decision by Blue Cross of Idaho to offer these non-ACA-compliant “state-based plans” is likely to have similar effects on the Idaho market. Blue Cross will continue to offer marketplace plans that comply with the ACA through Your Health Idaho, the Idaho marketplace. However, they will also sell new “Freedom Blue” plans which are currently under review by the DOI. Blue Cross of Idaho hopes to begin selling the new plans in early March, with coverage going into effect in early April. These plans would be available on a year-round basis (rather than offered during an open enrollment period like ACA plans) and sold directly from Blue Cross.

Some media outlets are reporting that the state-based plans are similar to Blue Cross’ marketplace plans, but this is very misleading. The plans are quite dissimilar. They must be, or else the average rate for these plans would not be 25 to 50 percent lower than the rate of Blue Cross of Idaho’s bronze marketplace plans. These differences may not be immediately apparent from Blue Cross marketing materials; however, if they follow the DOI’s guidance, consumers who enroll in these plans may find themselves paying higher premiums based on health status, facing preexisting condition exclusions and benefit caps, and needing to pay much more money out-of-pocket before being protected financially.

The first major difference is that Blue Cross would take health status into consideration before calculating a consumer’s final premium—a significant return to the pre-ACA era. Under the DOI guidance, Blue Cross could charge individuals with a personal or family medical history up to 50 percent more in premiums based solely on health status. These plans could also exclude coverage for preexisting conditions unless a consumer had continuous coverage (meaning they were enrolled in health insurance before they enrolled in this policy without more than a 63-day break). Older Idahoans could also be charged more relative to the ACA and those who use tobacco could face heftier surcharges as well.

Some additional differences are highlighted in Blue Cross marketing materials; consumers could see significant increases in their medical costs thanks to dollar caps on benefits and caps on annual out-of-pocket expenses that are nearly twice as high as under the ACA. The state-based plans have an annual benefit cap of $1 million and dollar caps on certain benefits such as physical therapy, both of which are prohibited under the ACA. The state-based plans also have significantly higher annual out-of-pocket maximums relative to ACA plans: up to $12,000 for an individual and $24,000 for a family. There is also what appears to be a separate annual out-of-pocket maximum of $6,500 for prescription drugs. These changes alone could more than double the cost of medical care for an individual or family. And, although some press reports suggest that most plans will cover maternity care, there is no detail in the Blue Cross marketing materials and nothing to suggest that other benefit categories that are missing under state law (such as pediatric vision and dental care) would be covered.

by Katie Keith, Health Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. "Freedom Blue"(...as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted). I guess if you name anything Freedom someone will buy it. Want some Freedom fries with that?]

Magnus Åström

via:

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.

With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.

Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today because he wrote them down.)

“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.

It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.

People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”

Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.” (...)

Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”

by Julie Beck, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: John Frederick Peto/Getty

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