Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Sleeping Rough in the Mattress Economy
Microtargeting is a remarkable thing. Even casual podcast listeners, particularly those between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, can recite with minimal prompting the key design features of a Casper mattress. And it’s not just Casper—there are plenty of competitors with nearly as aggressive advertising campaigns: Leesa, BedInaBox, Lull, Nest, CloudSleep, Yogabed, Avocado, GhostBed, and more. Only one of these is made up.
Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener—a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter—is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.
How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.
And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a Casper Essential. (...)
The number of online, low-overhead boxed mattress hawkers certainly will undergo a period of sifting and winnowing in the near future, a battle for survival in which only the strong and nimble will survive. Casper was among the first to the battlefield, establishing both a dominant position and a slew of imitators ready to found a company with no employees, take your money, and have a mattress from some factory they have never seen drop-ship you the promise of deep sleep and the banishment of back pain to the land of wind and ghosts.
Young college-educated consumers are supposed to be aiming higher. In the 1980s or 1990s, for example, advertisers would have been throwing higher end, more Exclusive products at urban, cool younger people. These are society’s tastemakers, after all.
But a funny thing happened in the intervening years. Older generations began to salt the earth behind them, doing everything Wall Street and the MBA class could dream up to make labor less secure, jobs longer and harder, and wages lower. As long as only blue-collar employment was on the chopping block, the petit bourgeois was more than happy to play along. Think of the tax cuts! The raging Dow!
Then the reaper came for the rest of us. Slowly it became apparent that manual labor isn’t the only kind that can be outsourced; that unions can be broken in any segment of the economy; that vicious anti-government and -tax politics would coopt nativism to get the working class really enthusiastic about voting for its own destruction; that higher education would vomit enormous numbers of credentialed, debt-saddled people into the economy to drive down wages in what were once middle class professions.
Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.
by Ed Burmila, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Casper
Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener—a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter—is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.
And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a Casper Essential. (...)
The number of online, low-overhead boxed mattress hawkers certainly will undergo a period of sifting and winnowing in the near future, a battle for survival in which only the strong and nimble will survive. Casper was among the first to the battlefield, establishing both a dominant position and a slew of imitators ready to found a company with no employees, take your money, and have a mattress from some factory they have never seen drop-ship you the promise of deep sleep and the banishment of back pain to the land of wind and ghosts.
Young college-educated consumers are supposed to be aiming higher. In the 1980s or 1990s, for example, advertisers would have been throwing higher end, more Exclusive products at urban, cool younger people. These are society’s tastemakers, after all.
But a funny thing happened in the intervening years. Older generations began to salt the earth behind them, doing everything Wall Street and the MBA class could dream up to make labor less secure, jobs longer and harder, and wages lower. As long as only blue-collar employment was on the chopping block, the petit bourgeois was more than happy to play along. Think of the tax cuts! The raging Dow!
Then the reaper came for the rest of us. Slowly it became apparent that manual labor isn’t the only kind that can be outsourced; that unions can be broken in any segment of the economy; that vicious anti-government and -tax politics would coopt nativism to get the working class really enthusiastic about voting for its own destruction; that higher education would vomit enormous numbers of credentialed, debt-saddled people into the economy to drive down wages in what were once middle class professions.
Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.
by Ed Burmila, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Casper
This Drug Could Change Alcohol Addiction Treatment Forever
In the 1960s, an American scientist named John David Sinclair began to study the impact of alcohol on rats. Sinclair hypothesized that when rats were given alcohol for an extended amount of time and then cut off from alcohol for a few weeks, they would show less interest in drinking when alcohol was reintroduced. The opposite happened: Abstaining only made the rats want alcohol more. This, he suspected, was also true in humans, and it would explain why even long-term abstinence doesn't necessarily end cravings. Some recovering alcoholics battle their desire for alcohol forever.
This research eventually led Sinclair to Naltrexone, a drug that blocks endorphins from reaching the brain. If alcohol stopped producing a pleasurable effect, maybe the brain (and the person) would eventually lose interest, and the desire to drink would gradually cease, Sinclair thought, like Pavlov's ringing bell in reverse. The effect is called "extinction," and Sinclair found that it worked.
Sinclair died in 2015 at the age of 72, but Naltrexone has proven to be a solution for many people who struggle with alcohol. It's the treatment of choice in Finland, where Sinclair spent most of his career, and the success rate is an astounding 78 percent.
The Sinclair Method, as the protocol is known, is simple: You take Naltrexone one hour before you start drinking, each and every time you drink (and preferably not on an empty stomach). Instead of feeling that familiar euphoric buzz, drinking just makes you feel kind of sloppy and muddy-headed. (...)
Science backs this up. With Naltrexone, "alcohol becomes non-reinforcing," said Brian Noonan, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and the owner of Ballard Psychiatric Services. "With repeated trials of drinking without reward, the association of drinking with reward begins to extinguish." The patient starts drinking less and less often. Some eventually stop altogether.
Noonan practiced abstinence-based therapy for 12 years before he stumbled across the Sinclair Method in a book. He was interested immediately. Conventional therapy and giving his patients a list of nearby Alcoholics Anonymous meetings just wasn't working. The failure rate was high, and his patients often felt guilty when they'd relapse, perhaps in part because AA and other 12-step programs teach that taking even one drink is a broken promise to yourself. Who wouldn't feel guilty about that?
Noonan started introducing the idea to his patients. They were interested, too. For these patients, the idea of never drinking again—not today, not tomorrow, not ever—was unfathomable. It would be like never seeing a loved one again. Because Naltrexone doesn't require you to divorce yourself from drinking, it offered a way out of the cycle without doing something patients thought was impossible.
It's been three years since Noonan first learned about Naltrexone, and today his practice revolves around it. He's licensed to prescribe in 20 states, and he consults with patients all over the country via video chat, along with five other health-care providers working under him. (On the day I visited his office in Ballard, he'd just consulted with a man in Colorado who was out snowboarding.) Since making the switch, Noonan says he's personally prescribed Naltrexone to an estimated 1,000 patients, and about 80 percent of them, he says, have found success.
Unlike AA, where success is measured in the number of days sober, "The only marker for success I have is that the patient feels in control," Noonan said. "They can drink or not drink in a manner that is appropriate to them. Sometimes that's abstinence, or sometimes that's just drinking on the weekends, or sometimes it's just drinking on special occasions. I measure success by when people are happy about the way they are drinking or not drinking."
This idea, that some alcoholics can continue to drink, is anathema in conventional recovery circles, which argue that the only solution to alcohol dependence is complete and total sobriety. There is little evidence to support this claim, but still, the rhetoric of sobriety is widespread.
Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded in 1935 by an alcoholic named Bill Wilson, doesn't keep records (that's part of the promise of anonymity), but according to Gabrielle Glaser, the author of the 2013 book Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—And How They Can Regain Control, AA has an estimated success rate of just 5 to 8 percent. And yet, the organization, which says it has two million members worldwide, claims that if you just stick with the program, it will work.
Despite the lack of evidence that AA is effective for most people, there is one benefit: It's cheap, which means that many rehab centers—part of the $35 billion addiction treatment industry—take advantage of the 12-step model. These treatment centers are often under-regulated and frequently employ former addicts as counselors instead of paying high prices for doctors and experts. Rehab centers can charge up to $40,000 a month, but their counselors often have no training besides going through the program themselves. And drugs like Naltrexone don't really fit into this model. Not only does medication counter the idea that recovery is about willpower, it doesn't require much upkeep. You don't need daily meetings or weekly talk therapy; you just need a prescription. As far as rehab-related business models go, it won't get anyone rich. (...)
Still, Naltrexone isn't an instant fix. It can take 6 to 12 months to see a measurable effect. "People think it's going to take 15 days," Christian told me. "I tell them, 'It took decades to do this to your brain. It's going to take a little while to undo it.'" There can be side effects as well. Naltrexone can cause headaches and upset stomach, not unlike a hangover. There are ups and downs. Your drinking might decline for a while, then increase, then decline again, and then level out. And for around 20 percent of patients, it just doesn't work. No one knows why, Noonan said, although he thinks there's probably a genetic component.
This research eventually led Sinclair to Naltrexone, a drug that blocks endorphins from reaching the brain. If alcohol stopped producing a pleasurable effect, maybe the brain (and the person) would eventually lose interest, and the desire to drink would gradually cease, Sinclair thought, like Pavlov's ringing bell in reverse. The effect is called "extinction," and Sinclair found that it worked.Sinclair died in 2015 at the age of 72, but Naltrexone has proven to be a solution for many people who struggle with alcohol. It's the treatment of choice in Finland, where Sinclair spent most of his career, and the success rate is an astounding 78 percent.
The Sinclair Method, as the protocol is known, is simple: You take Naltrexone one hour before you start drinking, each and every time you drink (and preferably not on an empty stomach). Instead of feeling that familiar euphoric buzz, drinking just makes you feel kind of sloppy and muddy-headed. (...)
Science backs this up. With Naltrexone, "alcohol becomes non-reinforcing," said Brian Noonan, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and the owner of Ballard Psychiatric Services. "With repeated trials of drinking without reward, the association of drinking with reward begins to extinguish." The patient starts drinking less and less often. Some eventually stop altogether.
Noonan practiced abstinence-based therapy for 12 years before he stumbled across the Sinclair Method in a book. He was interested immediately. Conventional therapy and giving his patients a list of nearby Alcoholics Anonymous meetings just wasn't working. The failure rate was high, and his patients often felt guilty when they'd relapse, perhaps in part because AA and other 12-step programs teach that taking even one drink is a broken promise to yourself. Who wouldn't feel guilty about that?
Noonan started introducing the idea to his patients. They were interested, too. For these patients, the idea of never drinking again—not today, not tomorrow, not ever—was unfathomable. It would be like never seeing a loved one again. Because Naltrexone doesn't require you to divorce yourself from drinking, it offered a way out of the cycle without doing something patients thought was impossible.
It's been three years since Noonan first learned about Naltrexone, and today his practice revolves around it. He's licensed to prescribe in 20 states, and he consults with patients all over the country via video chat, along with five other health-care providers working under him. (On the day I visited his office in Ballard, he'd just consulted with a man in Colorado who was out snowboarding.) Since making the switch, Noonan says he's personally prescribed Naltrexone to an estimated 1,000 patients, and about 80 percent of them, he says, have found success.
Unlike AA, where success is measured in the number of days sober, "The only marker for success I have is that the patient feels in control," Noonan said. "They can drink or not drink in a manner that is appropriate to them. Sometimes that's abstinence, or sometimes that's just drinking on the weekends, or sometimes it's just drinking on special occasions. I measure success by when people are happy about the way they are drinking or not drinking."
This idea, that some alcoholics can continue to drink, is anathema in conventional recovery circles, which argue that the only solution to alcohol dependence is complete and total sobriety. There is little evidence to support this claim, but still, the rhetoric of sobriety is widespread.
Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded in 1935 by an alcoholic named Bill Wilson, doesn't keep records (that's part of the promise of anonymity), but according to Gabrielle Glaser, the author of the 2013 book Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—And How They Can Regain Control, AA has an estimated success rate of just 5 to 8 percent. And yet, the organization, which says it has two million members worldwide, claims that if you just stick with the program, it will work.
Despite the lack of evidence that AA is effective for most people, there is one benefit: It's cheap, which means that many rehab centers—part of the $35 billion addiction treatment industry—take advantage of the 12-step model. These treatment centers are often under-regulated and frequently employ former addicts as counselors instead of paying high prices for doctors and experts. Rehab centers can charge up to $40,000 a month, but their counselors often have no training besides going through the program themselves. And drugs like Naltrexone don't really fit into this model. Not only does medication counter the idea that recovery is about willpower, it doesn't require much upkeep. You don't need daily meetings or weekly talk therapy; you just need a prescription. As far as rehab-related business models go, it won't get anyone rich. (...)
Still, Naltrexone isn't an instant fix. It can take 6 to 12 months to see a measurable effect. "People think it's going to take 15 days," Christian told me. "I tell them, 'It took decades to do this to your brain. It's going to take a little while to undo it.'" There can be side effects as well. Naltrexone can cause headaches and upset stomach, not unlike a hangover. There are ups and downs. Your drinking might decline for a while, then increase, then decline again, and then level out. And for around 20 percent of patients, it just doesn't work. No one knows why, Noonan said, although he thinks there's probably a genetic component.
by Katie Herzog, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Levi Hastings
Monday, December 24, 2018
Lagrange Points: Parking Places in Space
A Lagrange point is a location in space where the combined gravitational forces of two large bodies, such as Earth and the sun or Earth and the moon, equal the centrifugal force felt by a much smaller third body. The interaction of the forces creates a point of equilibrium where a spacecraft may be "parked" to make observations.
These points are named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an 18th-century mathematician who wrote about them in a 1772 paper concerning what he called the "three-body problem." They are also called Lagrangian points and libration points.
Structure of Lagrange points
There are five Lagrange points around major bodies such as a planet or a star. Three of them lie along the line connecting the two large bodies. In the Earth-sun system, for example, the first point, L1, lies between Earth and the sun at about 1 million miles from Earth. L1 gets an uninterrupted view of the sun, and is currently occupied by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Deep Space Climate Observatory.
L2 also lies a million miles from Earth, but in the opposite direction of the sun. At this point, with the Earth, moon and sun behind it, a spacecraft can get a clear view of deep space. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is currently at this spot measuring the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope will move into this region in 2018.
The third Lagrange point, L3, lies behind the sun, opposite Earth's orbit. For now, science has not found a use for this spot, although science fiction has.
“NASA is unlikely to find any use for the L3 point since it remains hidden behind the sun at all times,” NASA wrote on a web page about Lagrange points. “The idea of a hidden 'Planet-X' at the L3 point has been a popular topic in science fiction writing. The instability of Planet X's orbit (on a time scale of 150 years) didn't stop Hollywood from turning out classics like 'The Man from Planet X.'”
L1, L2 and L3 are all unstable points with precarious equilibrium. If a spacecraft at L3 drifted toward or away from Earth, it would fall irreversibly toward the sun or Earth, "like a barely balanced cart atop a steep hill," according to astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Spacecraft must make slight adjustments to maintain their orbits.
Points L4 and L5, however, are stable, "like a ball in a large bowl," according to the European Space Agency. These points lie along Earth's orbit at 60 degrees ahead of and behind Earth, forming the apex of two equilateral triangles that have the large masses (Earth and the sun, for example) as their vertices.
Because of the stability of these points, dust and asteroids tend to accumulate in these regions. Asteroids that surround the L4 and L5 points are called Trojans in honor of the asteroids Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector (all characters in the story of the siege of Troy) that are between Jupiter and the Sun. NASA states that there have been thousands of these types of asteroids found in our solar system, including Earth’s only known Trojan asteroid, 2010 TK7.
L4 and L5 are also possible points for a space colony due to their relative proximity to Earth, at least according to the writings of Gerard O'Neill and related thinkers. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group called the L5 Society promoted this idea among its members. In the late 1980s, it merged into a group that is now known as the National Space Society, an advocacy organization that promotes the idea of forming civilizations beyond Earth.
Benefits of Lagrange points
If a spacecraft uses a Lagrange point close to Earth, there are many benefits to the location, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Amy Mainzer told Space.com.
Mainzer is principal investigator of NEOWISE, a mission that searches for near-Earth asteroids using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft that orbits close to our planet. While WISE is doing well with its current three-year mission that concludes in 2016, Mainzer said, a spacecraft placed at a Lagrange point would be able to do more.
Far from the interfering heat and light of the sun, an asteroid-hunting spacecraft at a Lagrange point would be more sensitive to the tiny infrared signals from asteroids. It could point over a wide range of directions, except very close to the sun. And it wouldn't need coolant to stay cool, as WISE required for the first phase of its mission between 2009 and 2011 — the location itself would allow for natural cooling. The James Webb Space Telescope will take advantage of the thermal environment at the sun-Earth L2 point to help keep cool.
L1 and L2 also “allow you to have enormous bandwidth” because over conventional Ka-band radio, the communication speeds are very high, Mainzer said. “Otherwise, the data rates just become very slow,” she said, since a spacecraft in orbit around the sun (known as heliocentric orbit) would eventually drift far from Earth.
by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com | Read more:
Image:NASA / WMAP Science Team
[ed. I've been reading the second installment of Cixin Liu's trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past, more commonly known as the Three Body Problem series. My local bookseller mentioned Lagrange Points today so I did some google searching. Mostly they sound like interstellar gravitational tidal rips or something..]
These points are named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an 18th-century mathematician who wrote about them in a 1772 paper concerning what he called the "three-body problem." They are also called Lagrangian points and libration points.
Structure of Lagrange points
There are five Lagrange points around major bodies such as a planet or a star. Three of them lie along the line connecting the two large bodies. In the Earth-sun system, for example, the first point, L1, lies between Earth and the sun at about 1 million miles from Earth. L1 gets an uninterrupted view of the sun, and is currently occupied by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Deep Space Climate Observatory. L2 also lies a million miles from Earth, but in the opposite direction of the sun. At this point, with the Earth, moon and sun behind it, a spacecraft can get a clear view of deep space. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is currently at this spot measuring the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope will move into this region in 2018.
The third Lagrange point, L3, lies behind the sun, opposite Earth's orbit. For now, science has not found a use for this spot, although science fiction has.
“NASA is unlikely to find any use for the L3 point since it remains hidden behind the sun at all times,” NASA wrote on a web page about Lagrange points. “The idea of a hidden 'Planet-X' at the L3 point has been a popular topic in science fiction writing. The instability of Planet X's orbit (on a time scale of 150 years) didn't stop Hollywood from turning out classics like 'The Man from Planet X.'”
L1, L2 and L3 are all unstable points with precarious equilibrium. If a spacecraft at L3 drifted toward or away from Earth, it would fall irreversibly toward the sun or Earth, "like a barely balanced cart atop a steep hill," according to astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Spacecraft must make slight adjustments to maintain their orbits.
Points L4 and L5, however, are stable, "like a ball in a large bowl," according to the European Space Agency. These points lie along Earth's orbit at 60 degrees ahead of and behind Earth, forming the apex of two equilateral triangles that have the large masses (Earth and the sun, for example) as their vertices.
Because of the stability of these points, dust and asteroids tend to accumulate in these regions. Asteroids that surround the L4 and L5 points are called Trojans in honor of the asteroids Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector (all characters in the story of the siege of Troy) that are between Jupiter and the Sun. NASA states that there have been thousands of these types of asteroids found in our solar system, including Earth’s only known Trojan asteroid, 2010 TK7.
L4 and L5 are also possible points for a space colony due to their relative proximity to Earth, at least according to the writings of Gerard O'Neill and related thinkers. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group called the L5 Society promoted this idea among its members. In the late 1980s, it merged into a group that is now known as the National Space Society, an advocacy organization that promotes the idea of forming civilizations beyond Earth.
Benefits of Lagrange points
If a spacecraft uses a Lagrange point close to Earth, there are many benefits to the location, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Amy Mainzer told Space.com.
Mainzer is principal investigator of NEOWISE, a mission that searches for near-Earth asteroids using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft that orbits close to our planet. While WISE is doing well with its current three-year mission that concludes in 2016, Mainzer said, a spacecraft placed at a Lagrange point would be able to do more.
Far from the interfering heat and light of the sun, an asteroid-hunting spacecraft at a Lagrange point would be more sensitive to the tiny infrared signals from asteroids. It could point over a wide range of directions, except very close to the sun. And it wouldn't need coolant to stay cool, as WISE required for the first phase of its mission between 2009 and 2011 — the location itself would allow for natural cooling. The James Webb Space Telescope will take advantage of the thermal environment at the sun-Earth L2 point to help keep cool.
L1 and L2 also “allow you to have enormous bandwidth” because over conventional Ka-band radio, the communication speeds are very high, Mainzer said. “Otherwise, the data rates just become very slow,” she said, since a spacecraft in orbit around the sun (known as heliocentric orbit) would eventually drift far from Earth.
by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com | Read more:
Image:NASA / WMAP Science Team
[ed. I've been reading the second installment of Cixin Liu's trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past, more commonly known as the Three Body Problem series. My local bookseller mentioned Lagrange Points today so I did some google searching. Mostly they sound like interstellar gravitational tidal rips or something..]
All is Well
[ed. Well, that went well didn't it. Nothing like calling an emergency meeting then declaring there's nothing to worry about. Certainly no need to... panic! The existence of the so-called Plunge Protection Team (PPT) - a coordinated effort among banks and regulators to manipulate markets - has always been suspected but never formally acknowledged. This compliments the Greenspan/Bernanke "Puts", and market circuit breakers (or trading curbs) that actually do exist to halt market trading during a crash. All are manipulations to keep the market propped up rather than finding its normal level of value (at the pace it would like to find it). The casino is definitely rigged.]
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Machine Politics
The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip,” Ronald Reagan said in 1989. He was speaking to a thousand British notables in London’s historic Guildhall, several months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reagan proclaimed that the world was on the precipice of “a new era in human history,” one that would bring “peace and freedom for all.” Communism was crumbling, just as fascism had before it. Liberal democracies would soon encircle the globe, thanks to the innovations of Silicon Valley. “I believe,” he said, “that more than armies, more than diplomacy, more than the best intentions of democratic nations, the communications revolution will be the greatest force for the advancement of human freedom the world has ever seen.”
At the time, most everyone thought Reagan was right. The twentieth century had been dominated by media that delivered the same material to millions of people at the same time—radio and newspapers, movies and television. These were the kinds of one-to-many, top-down mass media that Orwell’s Big Brother had used to stay in power. Now, however, Americans were catching sight of the internet. They believed that it would do what earlier media could not: it would allow people to speak for themselves, directly to one another, around the world. “True personalization is now upon us,” wrote MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 bestseller Being Digital. Corporations, industries, and even whole nations would soon be transformed as centralized authorities were demolished. Hierarchies would dissolve and peer-to-peer collaborations would take their place. “Like a force of nature,” wrote Negroponte, “the digital age cannot be denied or stopped.”
One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them. The same technologies that were meant to level the political playing field have brought troll farms and Russian bots to corrupt our elections. The same platforms of self-expression that we thought would let us empathize with one another and build a more harmonious society have been co-opted by figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and, for that matter, Donald Trump, to turn white supremacy into a topic of dinner-table conversation. And the same networked methods of organizing that so many thought would bring down malevolent states have not only failed to do so—think of the Arab Spring—but have instead empowered autocrats to more closely monitor protest and dissent. (...)
At the time, most everyone thought Reagan was right. The twentieth century had been dominated by media that delivered the same material to millions of people at the same time—radio and newspapers, movies and television. These were the kinds of one-to-many, top-down mass media that Orwell’s Big Brother had used to stay in power. Now, however, Americans were catching sight of the internet. They believed that it would do what earlier media could not: it would allow people to speak for themselves, directly to one another, around the world. “True personalization is now upon us,” wrote MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 bestseller Being Digital. Corporations, industries, and even whole nations would soon be transformed as centralized authorities were demolished. Hierarchies would dissolve and peer-to-peer collaborations would take their place. “Like a force of nature,” wrote Negroponte, “the digital age cannot be denied or stopped.”One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them. The same technologies that were meant to level the political playing field have brought troll farms and Russian bots to corrupt our elections. The same platforms of self-expression that we thought would let us empathize with one another and build a more harmonious society have been co-opted by figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and, for that matter, Donald Trump, to turn white supremacy into a topic of dinner-table conversation. And the same networked methods of organizing that so many thought would bring down malevolent states have not only failed to do so—think of the Arab Spring—but have instead empowered autocrats to more closely monitor protest and dissent. (...)
Today, that sense of utopian mission persists throughout Silicon Valley. A month after Trump took office, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his social vision in a Facebook post entitled “Building Global Community.” Though only a few thousand words long, the document is every bit as ambitious as Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings. Like Wiener, Zuckerberg envisions a world in which individuals, communities, and nations create an ideal social order through the constant exchange of information—that is, through staying “connected.” “Our greatest opportunities are now global—like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science,” he wrote, sounding much like a representative of the Cold War–era State Department. “In times like these,” he continued, “the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”
For Zuckerberg, as for much of the left today, the key to a more egalitarian society lies in the freeing of individual voices, the expression of different lived experiences, and the forming of social groups around shared identities. But Facebook has tried to enable this kind of society by creating privately owned, for-profit digital technologies. As Zuckerberg put it, echoing the goals of the Whole Earth Catalog fifty years before, “Our commitment is to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience.” Engineers like Zuckerberg or, for that matter, Wiener, have little interest in party politics: if you want to change the world, you don’t lobby or vote; you build new technologies.
This view has proved enormously profitable across Silicon Valley. By justifying the belief that for-profit systems are the best way to improve public life, it has helped turn the expression of individual experience into raw material that can be mined, processed, and sold. The big social-media companies, which often began with a dream of making WELL-like virtual communities at scale, have now become radically commercialized and devoted to surveillance at every level. On the WELL, users listened to each other, trying to get a feel for what kinds of people they were and how they might work together. Now user data is optimized and retailed automatically, to advertisers and other media firms, in real time. Computers track conversations and extract patterns at light speed, rendering them profitable. In 2017, Facebook reported annual revenue of more than $40 billion.
Social media’s ability to simultaneously solicit and surveil communication has not only turned the dream of individualized, expressive democracy into a fountain of wealth. It has turned it into the foundation of a new kind of authoritarianism. Fascists used to be distinguished by their penchant for obedience, submission, and self-erasure, with the power of public emotional expression reserved for the dictator. That is why both Wiener and the Committee stressed the qualities of independence and self-awareness in the democratic personality. And it was against the background of fascism that, during and after the 1960s, Vietnam protestors, civil-rights activists, feminists, queer-rights activists, and other members of the myriad communities who drove the rise of identity politics asserted their individual, lived experience as the basis of their right to political power. If the essence of totalitarianism was collective self-effacement, the foundation of democracy would have to be the assertion of collective individuality.
Today, radio and television talk shows, podcasts, blogs, and, of course, social media are part of a new media ecosystem that has rendered the voicing of one’s experiences so easy and powerful as to turn it into an appealing tool for the right as well as the left. (...)
Pundits on the left are fond of reminding us of how Trump storms and fulminates, the White House itself unable to contain his petulance and rage. Those same pundits then marvel that around 40 percent of the American people still think he is doing a good job. What they fail to understand is that Trump has mastered the politics of authenticity for a new media age. What mainstream analysts see as psychological weakness, Trump’s fans see as the man just being himself. What’s more, his anger, his rants, and his furious narcissism act out the feelings of people who believe they have been dispossessed by immigrants, women, and people of color. Trump is not only true to his own emotions. He is the personification of his supporters’ grievances. He is to his political base what Hitler was to many Germans, or Mussolini to Italians—the living embodiment of the nation.
Here, the identity-centered liberalism that has dominated so much of public life since the Second World War has come full circle. Its victories have been many, from civil rights to legalized abortion and gay marriage, and they have dramatically changed American life for the better. But in the form of people like Trump and Spencer, the performance of individualism—the revelation of the whole person in the context of public debate that was meant for so long to be a bulwark against totalitarianism—has also allowed today’s authoritarians to claim a new legitimacy. Fifty years ago, the New Left marched on the Pentagon, hoping to undermine the military-industrial complex behind the Vietnam War. Today, Trump attacks the FBI and the Justice Department, hoping to undermine a fantastical Minotaur called “the deep state.” Fifty years ago, the counterculture hoped to bring about a world in which individuals could be more authentically themselves, and in which the hierarchies of organizations and states would disappear. Today, those hierarchical institutions are all that stand between us and a cult of personality. (...)
The new authoritarianism represented by Spencer and Trump is not only a product of who owns today’s media. It’s also a product of the political vision that helped drive the creation of social media in the first place—a vision that distrusts public ownership and the political process while celebrating engineering as an alternative form of governance. Since the Second World War, critics have challenged the legitimacy of our civic institutions simply on the grounds that they were bureaucratic and slow to change. Yet organizations such as hospitals demonstrate the value of these features. They remind us that a democracy must do more than allow its citizens to speak. It must help them live. Above all, it must work to distribute our wealth more equably and to ensure that every member of society has both independence and security. This is work that requires intense negotiation among groups with conflicting material interests, and, often, deep-seated cultural differences. It requires the existence of institutions that can preserve and enforce the results of those negotiations over time. And it requires that those institutions be obliged to serve the public before tending to their own profits.
Today’s social media will never be able to do the difficult, embodied work of democracy. Computer-supported interconnection is simply no substitute for face-to-face negotiation, long-term collaboration, and the hard work of living together. The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have taught us that social media can be a powerful force for liberating us from the fiction that all is well just as it is. But the attention these activists have brought to their causes will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws. Even though the American state can be inefficient, unfair, corrupt, and discriminatory, the logic of representation that underlies it remains the most effective engine we have for ensuring the equable distribution of our collective wealth.
For Zuckerberg, as for much of the left today, the key to a more egalitarian society lies in the freeing of individual voices, the expression of different lived experiences, and the forming of social groups around shared identities. But Facebook has tried to enable this kind of society by creating privately owned, for-profit digital technologies. As Zuckerberg put it, echoing the goals of the Whole Earth Catalog fifty years before, “Our commitment is to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience.” Engineers like Zuckerberg or, for that matter, Wiener, have little interest in party politics: if you want to change the world, you don’t lobby or vote; you build new technologies.
This view has proved enormously profitable across Silicon Valley. By justifying the belief that for-profit systems are the best way to improve public life, it has helped turn the expression of individual experience into raw material that can be mined, processed, and sold. The big social-media companies, which often began with a dream of making WELL-like virtual communities at scale, have now become radically commercialized and devoted to surveillance at every level. On the WELL, users listened to each other, trying to get a feel for what kinds of people they were and how they might work together. Now user data is optimized and retailed automatically, to advertisers and other media firms, in real time. Computers track conversations and extract patterns at light speed, rendering them profitable. In 2017, Facebook reported annual revenue of more than $40 billion.
Social media’s ability to simultaneously solicit and surveil communication has not only turned the dream of individualized, expressive democracy into a fountain of wealth. It has turned it into the foundation of a new kind of authoritarianism. Fascists used to be distinguished by their penchant for obedience, submission, and self-erasure, with the power of public emotional expression reserved for the dictator. That is why both Wiener and the Committee stressed the qualities of independence and self-awareness in the democratic personality. And it was against the background of fascism that, during and after the 1960s, Vietnam protestors, civil-rights activists, feminists, queer-rights activists, and other members of the myriad communities who drove the rise of identity politics asserted their individual, lived experience as the basis of their right to political power. If the essence of totalitarianism was collective self-effacement, the foundation of democracy would have to be the assertion of collective individuality.
Today, radio and television talk shows, podcasts, blogs, and, of course, social media are part of a new media ecosystem that has rendered the voicing of one’s experiences so easy and powerful as to turn it into an appealing tool for the right as well as the left. (...)
Pundits on the left are fond of reminding us of how Trump storms and fulminates, the White House itself unable to contain his petulance and rage. Those same pundits then marvel that around 40 percent of the American people still think he is doing a good job. What they fail to understand is that Trump has mastered the politics of authenticity for a new media age. What mainstream analysts see as psychological weakness, Trump’s fans see as the man just being himself. What’s more, his anger, his rants, and his furious narcissism act out the feelings of people who believe they have been dispossessed by immigrants, women, and people of color. Trump is not only true to his own emotions. He is the personification of his supporters’ grievances. He is to his political base what Hitler was to many Germans, or Mussolini to Italians—the living embodiment of the nation.
Here, the identity-centered liberalism that has dominated so much of public life since the Second World War has come full circle. Its victories have been many, from civil rights to legalized abortion and gay marriage, and they have dramatically changed American life for the better. But in the form of people like Trump and Spencer, the performance of individualism—the revelation of the whole person in the context of public debate that was meant for so long to be a bulwark against totalitarianism—has also allowed today’s authoritarians to claim a new legitimacy. Fifty years ago, the New Left marched on the Pentagon, hoping to undermine the military-industrial complex behind the Vietnam War. Today, Trump attacks the FBI and the Justice Department, hoping to undermine a fantastical Minotaur called “the deep state.” Fifty years ago, the counterculture hoped to bring about a world in which individuals could be more authentically themselves, and in which the hierarchies of organizations and states would disappear. Today, those hierarchical institutions are all that stand between us and a cult of personality. (...)
The new authoritarianism represented by Spencer and Trump is not only a product of who owns today’s media. It’s also a product of the political vision that helped drive the creation of social media in the first place—a vision that distrusts public ownership and the political process while celebrating engineering as an alternative form of governance. Since the Second World War, critics have challenged the legitimacy of our civic institutions simply on the grounds that they were bureaucratic and slow to change. Yet organizations such as hospitals demonstrate the value of these features. They remind us that a democracy must do more than allow its citizens to speak. It must help them live. Above all, it must work to distribute our wealth more equably and to ensure that every member of society has both independence and security. This is work that requires intense negotiation among groups with conflicting material interests, and, often, deep-seated cultural differences. It requires the existence of institutions that can preserve and enforce the results of those negotiations over time. And it requires that those institutions be obliged to serve the public before tending to their own profits.
Today’s social media will never be able to do the difficult, embodied work of democracy. Computer-supported interconnection is simply no substitute for face-to-face negotiation, long-term collaboration, and the hard work of living together. The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have taught us that social media can be a powerful force for liberating us from the fiction that all is well just as it is. But the attention these activists have brought to their causes will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws. Even though the American state can be inefficient, unfair, corrupt, and discriminatory, the logic of representation that underlies it remains the most effective engine we have for ensuring the equable distribution of our collective wealth.
by Fred Turner, Harper's | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Saturday, December 22, 2018
A Man Lost His Job to a Rape Joke. Are You Cheering?
Hooray for our side: another privileged old white guy chopped down, career in tatters. Hear us roar! Speak truth to power! In this case the malfeasant was film critic David Edelstein, who made a stupid, quickly deleted, misfired “joke” on his private Facebook page, regarding the death of Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci. Posted Edelstein: “Even grief is better with butter,” accompanied by a still of Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando from the film – yes, the infamous and now controversial anal rape scene.
Edelstein had been doing movie reviews for the last 16 years on the National Public Radio syndicated show Fresh Air, hosted by the much revered Terry Gross. He’s also the chief film critic for New York magazine and appears on the CBS Sunday Morning show. He’s what you might call “an influencer”, and his 2,091 Facebook friends include many well-known feminists. One of them apparently took a screenshot of the post and circulated it or, as another of his Facebook friends put it, “narced to the universe”. (Disclosure: I’m among those friends, though have taken no screenshots.)
What was Edelstein thinking? You can hear him straining and failing to find the joke, a condition that afflicts many who spend too much time on social media and get addicted to those endorphin-boosting likes. You need another fix and “edgy humor” is a good way of maximizing your response rate – as technology critics have lately informed us, Facebook’s algorithms favor posts that produce the most “emotional engagement”, positive or negative.
In this case, actress Martha Plimpton, herself an occasional NPR host (on the New York affiliate WNYC) and in receipt of the screenshot, quickly tweeted it to her 196,000 followers along with the demand: “Fire him. Immediately.” Which happened the next day: Fresh Air and NPR announced that they were cutting ties with Edelstein because the post had been “offensive and unacceptable, especially given Maria Schneider’s experience during the filming of Last Tango in Paris”.
The backstory: in a 2006 interview Schneider said that the filming of the scene had left her feeling humiliated and “a little raped”. The rape itself was in the script, but the butter wasn’t; Bertolucci and Brando had manipulated her by springing it on her to get a more spontaneous performance, or that was their line. (There seems to have been confusion in the social media response to Edelstein’s firing about whether Schneider was actually raped; she wasn’t.) The butter reappears in a later scene where Schneider’s character Jeanne uses it to anally penetrate Brando’s character. Jeanne also tricks him into getting an electric shock and later shoots him. At the time the film was regarded as a masterpiece; Bertolucci and Brando were both nominated for Academy Awards.
These are, of course, different times. Very different! In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution, prompted, of course by #MeToo, along with the fact that more women are in positions of cultural and institutional power, or certainly cultural influence – vestigial patriarchal elements are being weeded out and replaced with new values. Sexual scumminess is one of those elements, though arguments remain about what is and isn’t scummy.
One part of me cheers – bring the clueless fuckers down, let heads roll. Men: stop being gross! Another part of me wonders about the expansion of employers’ power over workers’ leisure time, among other qualms. So let’s briefly pause and examine some of the tacit assumptions and values that Edelstein’s firing brings to light, especially regarding conditions of employment and inadvertent offense-causing.
As I read it, the first unstated rule would be that there’s nothing inadvertent about inadvertent offense: jokes and flubs will be treated as diagnostic instruments, like those personality tests sometimes administered to prospective employees, and revelatory of the true character of the flubber. Corollary: a clear soul will be required to remain employed.
The second unstated rule is that causing offense is a permanent mark against you, however apologetic you might be. One flub and you’re out. An unthinking social media post will outweigh a 16-year track record. Corollary: there’s no “off the clock” – it’s company time all the time.
A third unstated rule is that men need to prove and re-prove that they understand rape is bad, and take it seriously, not unlike signing a loyalty oath to demonstrate you’re not a communist. Failure to keep re-proving it implicates you in crimes against women. Edelstein was clearly insensitive about rape – well, not rape per se, but Schneider’s account of feeling a little raped. He said he was unaware of Schneider’s interview, but that was either not believed or didn’t matter. Corollary: men are not to be believed, they will say anything.
It was once argued, among a certain style of feminist, that when women came to power the world would be a more humane place because women’s style of rule would be different than men’s – more peaceable, more fair and collaborative, perhaps even a more moral style of power. To some extent this may prove to be true: certainly there will be less transactional sex in post-patriarchal times; likely less groping and leering. But will there be a more humane treatment of the workforce?
No doubt many will see the evolution of gendered management styles from “Give me a blow job or I’ll fire you” to “Don’t tell a joke I don’t like or I’ll fire you” as preferable. Personally, I think they’re both encroachments. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
[ed. Richard Pryor must be rolling in his grave. See also: It's the year that celebrities were held to account. Are we outraged too easily? (The Guardian)]
Edelstein had been doing movie reviews for the last 16 years on the National Public Radio syndicated show Fresh Air, hosted by the much revered Terry Gross. He’s also the chief film critic for New York magazine and appears on the CBS Sunday Morning show. He’s what you might call “an influencer”, and his 2,091 Facebook friends include many well-known feminists. One of them apparently took a screenshot of the post and circulated it or, as another of his Facebook friends put it, “narced to the universe”. (Disclosure: I’m among those friends, though have taken no screenshots.)
What was Edelstein thinking? You can hear him straining and failing to find the joke, a condition that afflicts many who spend too much time on social media and get addicted to those endorphin-boosting likes. You need another fix and “edgy humor” is a good way of maximizing your response rate – as technology critics have lately informed us, Facebook’s algorithms favor posts that produce the most “emotional engagement”, positive or negative.In this case, actress Martha Plimpton, herself an occasional NPR host (on the New York affiliate WNYC) and in receipt of the screenshot, quickly tweeted it to her 196,000 followers along with the demand: “Fire him. Immediately.” Which happened the next day: Fresh Air and NPR announced that they were cutting ties with Edelstein because the post had been “offensive and unacceptable, especially given Maria Schneider’s experience during the filming of Last Tango in Paris”.
The backstory: in a 2006 interview Schneider said that the filming of the scene had left her feeling humiliated and “a little raped”. The rape itself was in the script, but the butter wasn’t; Bertolucci and Brando had manipulated her by springing it on her to get a more spontaneous performance, or that was their line. (There seems to have been confusion in the social media response to Edelstein’s firing about whether Schneider was actually raped; she wasn’t.) The butter reappears in a later scene where Schneider’s character Jeanne uses it to anally penetrate Brando’s character. Jeanne also tricks him into getting an electric shock and later shoots him. At the time the film was regarded as a masterpiece; Bertolucci and Brando were both nominated for Academy Awards.
These are, of course, different times. Very different! In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution, prompted, of course by #MeToo, along with the fact that more women are in positions of cultural and institutional power, or certainly cultural influence – vestigial patriarchal elements are being weeded out and replaced with new values. Sexual scumminess is one of those elements, though arguments remain about what is and isn’t scummy.
One part of me cheers – bring the clueless fuckers down, let heads roll. Men: stop being gross! Another part of me wonders about the expansion of employers’ power over workers’ leisure time, among other qualms. So let’s briefly pause and examine some of the tacit assumptions and values that Edelstein’s firing brings to light, especially regarding conditions of employment and inadvertent offense-causing.
As I read it, the first unstated rule would be that there’s nothing inadvertent about inadvertent offense: jokes and flubs will be treated as diagnostic instruments, like those personality tests sometimes administered to prospective employees, and revelatory of the true character of the flubber. Corollary: a clear soul will be required to remain employed.
The second unstated rule is that causing offense is a permanent mark against you, however apologetic you might be. One flub and you’re out. An unthinking social media post will outweigh a 16-year track record. Corollary: there’s no “off the clock” – it’s company time all the time.
A third unstated rule is that men need to prove and re-prove that they understand rape is bad, and take it seriously, not unlike signing a loyalty oath to demonstrate you’re not a communist. Failure to keep re-proving it implicates you in crimes against women. Edelstein was clearly insensitive about rape – well, not rape per se, but Schneider’s account of feeling a little raped. He said he was unaware of Schneider’s interview, but that was either not believed or didn’t matter. Corollary: men are not to be believed, they will say anything.
It was once argued, among a certain style of feminist, that when women came to power the world would be a more humane place because women’s style of rule would be different than men’s – more peaceable, more fair and collaborative, perhaps even a more moral style of power. To some extent this may prove to be true: certainly there will be less transactional sex in post-patriarchal times; likely less groping and leering. But will there be a more humane treatment of the workforce?
No doubt many will see the evolution of gendered management styles from “Give me a blow job or I’ll fire you” to “Don’t tell a joke I don’t like or I’ll fire you” as preferable. Personally, I think they’re both encroachments. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
by Laura Kipnis, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images[ed. Richard Pryor must be rolling in his grave. See also: It's the year that celebrities were held to account. Are we outraged too easily? (The Guardian)]
The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Bikini
The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Bikini (NY Times)
Image: Maria Solange Ferrarini.CreditCreditDado Galdieri for The New York Times
Toward the Wiki Society
Wikipedia is now so good that we don’t tend to think about how good it is. It’s just there, and it feels as if it’s always been there. “Oh yes, the vast free repository of human knowledge, what about it?” But Wikipedia is remarkable. Astonishing, really. It’s built on a model that exists almost nowhere else online. It’s like nothing else in existence. And it gives us a bit of insight into how we might reform other platforms, even society itself.
First, let’s remember just how “top-down” almost all of the largest web services are. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter. Each a multi-billion dollar company, each run for profit and owned by private investors, each controlled by a powerful CEO. Facebook, Twitter, and Google make money almost entirely through advertising: Companies pay them to put products in front of users’ eyeballs, and the platforms alter the user experience accordingly. Each of these companies operates exactly the way you’d expect of a corporation seeking monopoly power. They crush tiny competitors, they buy politicians (Google and Facebook give more money to Republicans than Democrats), and they are extremely secretive about their internal decision-making process. They do not tell you the algorithms that determine what they will show you, or the experiments they are using to figure out how to manipulate users’ psychology. (Facebook had a brief scandal in 2014 when it was revealed to have tested different ways to mess with people’s emotions, seeing if it could bump users toward happiness or sadness with the display of positive or negative news. Over 700,000 news feeds had been tampered with. It also, even more creepily, kept track of status updates that people had typed and deleted without posting.)
There is nothing even beginning to resemble “democracy” at these companies. Like most corporations, they are dictatorships internally. Amazon workers are infamously mistreated, and Jeff Bezos’ wealth increases by $215 million per day, meaning that he makes the median annual Amazon salary once every nine seconds. Amazon workers have had to fight hard just to reach $15 an hour base pay, which in many places is still far short of a living wage.
Users do not have any voice in company policy. Their only input comes in the form of a binary market choice: Use the service or don’t. If you don’t like the way Facebook’s ads work, go find some other social media network. But because there is no other social media network like Facebook, there is no online shopping portal like Amazon, and there is no bottomless pit of short-form blather like Twitter, it’s not clear where else there is to go. You can get the internet out of your life completely, which might be good for many people’s mental health. But some of us actually rely on these companies for our livelihoods. Current Affairs articles, for instance, are distributed primarily through Facebook and Twitter shares. If these companies were to, say, block our accounts, or even bump our material downward so that fewer users saw it, we’d take a significant hit to our revenue. And if we did incur the ire of one of the tech monoliths, if Amazon stopped selling our books or Google stopped displaying our pages in search results, there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. They don’t have to give us an appeals process. Nobody votes on it. If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and decides he’d like to put Current Affairs out of business, he could probably do it. We are reliant entirely on maintaining the good will of a benevolent overlord.
Wikipedia is something else. It has no advertisements, it seeks no profits, it has no shareholders. It’s incredible to think of the amount of money Wikipedia has given up by steadfastly refusing to publish even the most unobtrusive promotions. In the early days, when there was still a live debate about whether the site should have ads, even just ads for nonprofits, there were those who thought it insane to insist on keeping the site absolutely pure. And yet the purists won.
Being a nonprofit among the profit-seeking monopolies distinguishes Wikipedia. But what makes it like absolutely nothing else in the world is its governance structure. It’s a genuine democratic platform, its rules controlled by its users. There is nothing else quite like that anywhere.
Let’s consider the radicalism of the Wikipedia model. It’s a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” as we know. It has well over 5 million articles in English (40 million total in 301 languages), all of which are put together through the collective effort of volunteers. Readers write a paragraph here, fix a date there, add a citation or two, and over time a vast compendium of human knowledge emerges. It has been stunningly successful, and is one of the most visited sites on the web, with over 18 billion page views.
But Wikipedia is not just edited by users. Its policies themselves are stored in wiki pages, and can be modified and updated by user-editors. The governance of the site itself, the processes that determine what you see, are open to revision by the Wikipedia community, a community that anyone can join. Not only that, but every change to Wikipedia is transparent: Its changes, and the debates over them, are fully available in a public record.
One of Wikipedia’s core rules is: “Wikipedia has no firm rules.” That does not mean “anything goes.” It means “the rules are principles, not laws” and they “exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles.” But the ethic of Wikipedia is that everything is subject to revision, open to discussion, and that anyone can discuss it.
This has meant that Wikipedians have had to, over time, figure out how to govern themselves. Political philosophers have long been infatuated with the concept of the “state of nature,” the condition humankind would find itself in before it had designed governing institutions, and much political theory is concerned with examining how the people in this hypothetical world should construct a state. Or, if humankind suddenly finds itself stranded on a desert island, what procedures ought we to set up to keep everybody from eating each other? The course of Wikipedia’s development has been one of the few real-world examples of such a scenario.
First, let’s remember just how “top-down” almost all of the largest web services are. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter. Each a multi-billion dollar company, each run for profit and owned by private investors, each controlled by a powerful CEO. Facebook, Twitter, and Google make money almost entirely through advertising: Companies pay them to put products in front of users’ eyeballs, and the platforms alter the user experience accordingly. Each of these companies operates exactly the way you’d expect of a corporation seeking monopoly power. They crush tiny competitors, they buy politicians (Google and Facebook give more money to Republicans than Democrats), and they are extremely secretive about their internal decision-making process. They do not tell you the algorithms that determine what they will show you, or the experiments they are using to figure out how to manipulate users’ psychology. (Facebook had a brief scandal in 2014 when it was revealed to have tested different ways to mess with people’s emotions, seeing if it could bump users toward happiness or sadness with the display of positive or negative news. Over 700,000 news feeds had been tampered with. It also, even more creepily, kept track of status updates that people had typed and deleted without posting.)
There is nothing even beginning to resemble “democracy” at these companies. Like most corporations, they are dictatorships internally. Amazon workers are infamously mistreated, and Jeff Bezos’ wealth increases by $215 million per day, meaning that he makes the median annual Amazon salary once every nine seconds. Amazon workers have had to fight hard just to reach $15 an hour base pay, which in many places is still far short of a living wage.Users do not have any voice in company policy. Their only input comes in the form of a binary market choice: Use the service or don’t. If you don’t like the way Facebook’s ads work, go find some other social media network. But because there is no other social media network like Facebook, there is no online shopping portal like Amazon, and there is no bottomless pit of short-form blather like Twitter, it’s not clear where else there is to go. You can get the internet out of your life completely, which might be good for many people’s mental health. But some of us actually rely on these companies for our livelihoods. Current Affairs articles, for instance, are distributed primarily through Facebook and Twitter shares. If these companies were to, say, block our accounts, or even bump our material downward so that fewer users saw it, we’d take a significant hit to our revenue. And if we did incur the ire of one of the tech monoliths, if Amazon stopped selling our books or Google stopped displaying our pages in search results, there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. They don’t have to give us an appeals process. Nobody votes on it. If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and decides he’d like to put Current Affairs out of business, he could probably do it. We are reliant entirely on maintaining the good will of a benevolent overlord.
Wikipedia is something else. It has no advertisements, it seeks no profits, it has no shareholders. It’s incredible to think of the amount of money Wikipedia has given up by steadfastly refusing to publish even the most unobtrusive promotions. In the early days, when there was still a live debate about whether the site should have ads, even just ads for nonprofits, there were those who thought it insane to insist on keeping the site absolutely pure. And yet the purists won.
Being a nonprofit among the profit-seeking monopolies distinguishes Wikipedia. But what makes it like absolutely nothing else in the world is its governance structure. It’s a genuine democratic platform, its rules controlled by its users. There is nothing else quite like that anywhere.
Let’s consider the radicalism of the Wikipedia model. It’s a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” as we know. It has well over 5 million articles in English (40 million total in 301 languages), all of which are put together through the collective effort of volunteers. Readers write a paragraph here, fix a date there, add a citation or two, and over time a vast compendium of human knowledge emerges. It has been stunningly successful, and is one of the most visited sites on the web, with over 18 billion page views.
But Wikipedia is not just edited by users. Its policies themselves are stored in wiki pages, and can be modified and updated by user-editors. The governance of the site itself, the processes that determine what you see, are open to revision by the Wikipedia community, a community that anyone can join. Not only that, but every change to Wikipedia is transparent: Its changes, and the debates over them, are fully available in a public record.
One of Wikipedia’s core rules is: “Wikipedia has no firm rules.” That does not mean “anything goes.” It means “the rules are principles, not laws” and they “exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles.” But the ethic of Wikipedia is that everything is subject to revision, open to discussion, and that anyone can discuss it.
This has meant that Wikipedians have had to, over time, figure out how to govern themselves. Political philosophers have long been infatuated with the concept of the “state of nature,” the condition humankind would find itself in before it had designed governing institutions, and much political theory is concerned with examining how the people in this hypothetical world should construct a state. Or, if humankind suddenly finds itself stranded on a desert island, what procedures ought we to set up to keep everybody from eating each other? The course of Wikipedia’s development has been one of the few real-world examples of such a scenario.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Naomi Ushiyama
Friday, December 21, 2018
Amazon Prime's Promise of Two-Day Delivery Is Dying
Having a baby in 2018, as my wife and I just did, means becoming an Amazon household. We’re not proud of this. We know that Amazon treats its workers terribly. We know that the company has extorted billions of taxpayer dollars out of our home city of New York in exchange for turning our neighbors into terribly treated employees. But babies need a lot of stuff, and they need it quickly. Diapers on demand are a very tempting prospect. So we bought our diapers on Amazon. And then they didn’t come when Amazon said they would come.
One of the foundations of Amazon’s brand is its guaranteed two-day delivery, “free” to Prime subscribers. The company has taught America to rely on this instant gratification. Sometimes this reliance seems soft, or self-indulgent, like when we get mad that a pair of Bluetooth earbuds took three whole days to arrive. You can go an extra day without earbuds. A newborn cannot, generally, go an extra day without diapers.
We asked our friends where they get diapers. “Amazon,” they said. Great. On Day 3, customer service couldn’t even keep its story straight on when our diapers would arrive, or whether they’d even shipped. Of course, this wasn’t a real emergency. We live three blocks from a Walgreens—also a bad company!—so I popped over, bought a pack, problem solved. I’m lucky. But it finally made me realize that two-day shipping is a sham.
It’s a sham because overworked employees and delivery contractors like UPS can’t possibly fulfill all the orders on time. Rather than lose their most powerful client, they lie about whether packages got delivered.
But it’s also a sham because Prime no longer means two-day delivery. As Fast Company describes, Prime delivery times are often listed as three or even five days. The site offers no easy way to filter for two-day Prime shipping. (You can filter by free Prime shipping, but that includes items that take longer to ship. You can filter by two-day shipping, but that includes third-party items with an extra shipping charge.) And because Amazon lets third-party sellers clutter up results pages, you need to comb through results.
None of this is the worst ordeal in the world! It’s just very different than the rapid, no-hassle experience Amazon promised. It’s the promise that helped Amazon muscle out bookstores, threaten Wal-Mart, fleece cities, avoid taxes, bully suppliers, and make its owner the richest man alive. We let Amazon suck the world dry because in return, we could get anything delivered, for free, in a couple of days.
And now that’s gone too. Amazon pulled the old predatory pricing trick on us, got us hooked on an unsustainable shipping speed, then eased up on the delivery once it had pushed its competitors to the margins. So it’s time to suck it up and buy something from a real store—before they buy that too.
[ed. No kidding. I ordered a book for a friend in Santa Cruz, CA and it'll take two weeks to get there with Prime (what would it be without it?). See also: Amazon Prime is getting worse, and it’s making me question the nature of reality.]
One of the foundations of Amazon’s brand is its guaranteed two-day delivery, “free” to Prime subscribers. The company has taught America to rely on this instant gratification. Sometimes this reliance seems soft, or self-indulgent, like when we get mad that a pair of Bluetooth earbuds took three whole days to arrive. You can go an extra day without earbuds. A newborn cannot, generally, go an extra day without diapers.We asked our friends where they get diapers. “Amazon,” they said. Great. On Day 3, customer service couldn’t even keep its story straight on when our diapers would arrive, or whether they’d even shipped. Of course, this wasn’t a real emergency. We live three blocks from a Walgreens—also a bad company!—so I popped over, bought a pack, problem solved. I’m lucky. But it finally made me realize that two-day shipping is a sham.
It’s a sham because overworked employees and delivery contractors like UPS can’t possibly fulfill all the orders on time. Rather than lose their most powerful client, they lie about whether packages got delivered.
But it’s also a sham because Prime no longer means two-day delivery. As Fast Company describes, Prime delivery times are often listed as three or even five days. The site offers no easy way to filter for two-day Prime shipping. (You can filter by free Prime shipping, but that includes items that take longer to ship. You can filter by two-day shipping, but that includes third-party items with an extra shipping charge.) And because Amazon lets third-party sellers clutter up results pages, you need to comb through results.
None of this is the worst ordeal in the world! It’s just very different than the rapid, no-hassle experience Amazon promised. It’s the promise that helped Amazon muscle out bookstores, threaten Wal-Mart, fleece cities, avoid taxes, bully suppliers, and make its owner the richest man alive. We let Amazon suck the world dry because in return, we could get anything delivered, for free, in a couple of days.
And now that’s gone too. Amazon pulled the old predatory pricing trick on us, got us hooked on an unsustainable shipping speed, then eased up on the delivery once it had pushed its competitors to the margins. So it’s time to suck it up and buy something from a real store—before they buy that too.
by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker | Read more:
Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images[ed. No kidding. I ordered a book for a friend in Santa Cruz, CA and it'll take two weeks to get there with Prime (what would it be without it?). See also: Amazon Prime is getting worse, and it’s making me question the nature of reality.]
How This All Happened
This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II.
That’s a lot to unpack in 5,000 words, but the short story of what happened over the last 73 years is simple: Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad, then really good, then really bad, and now here we are. And there is, I think, a narrative that links all those events together. Not a detailed account. But a story of how the details fit together.
Since this is an attempt to link the big events together, it leaves out all kinds of detail of what happened during this period. I’m likely to agree with anyone who points out what I’ve missed. My goal isn’t to describe every play; it’s to look at how one game influenced the next.
If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.
Here’s how this all happened.
1. August, 1945. World War II ends.
Japan surrendering was “The Happiest Day in American History,” the New York Times wrote.
But there’s the saying, “History is just one damn thing after another.”
The joy of the war ending was quickly met with the question, “What happens now?”
Sixteen million Americans – 11% of the population – served in the war. About eight million were overseas at the end. Their average age was 23. Within 18 months all but 1.5 million of them would be home and out of uniform.
And then what?
What were they going to do next?
Where were they going to work?
Where were they going to live?
Those were the most important questions of the day, for two reasons. One, no one knew the answers. Two, if it couldn’t be answered quickly, the most likely scenario – in the eyes of many economists – was that the economy would slip back into the depths of the Great Depression.
Three forces had built up during the war:
In 1946 the Council of Economic Advisors delivered a report to President Truman warning of “a full-scale depression some time in the next one to four years.”
They wrote in a separate 1947 memo, summarizing a meeting with Truman:
2. So we did something about it: Low interest rates and the intentional birth of the American consumer.
That’s a lot to unpack in 5,000 words, but the short story of what happened over the last 73 years is simple: Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad, then really good, then really bad, and now here we are. And there is, I think, a narrative that links all those events together. Not a detailed account. But a story of how the details fit together.
Since this is an attempt to link the big events together, it leaves out all kinds of detail of what happened during this period. I’m likely to agree with anyone who points out what I’ve missed. My goal isn’t to describe every play; it’s to look at how one game influenced the next.
If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.Here’s how this all happened.
1. August, 1945. World War II ends.
Japan surrendering was “The Happiest Day in American History,” the New York Times wrote.
But there’s the saying, “History is just one damn thing after another.”
The joy of the war ending was quickly met with the question, “What happens now?”
Sixteen million Americans – 11% of the population – served in the war. About eight million were overseas at the end. Their average age was 23. Within 18 months all but 1.5 million of them would be home and out of uniform.
And then what?
What were they going to do next?
Where were they going to work?
Where were they going to live?
Those were the most important questions of the day, for two reasons. One, no one knew the answers. Two, if it couldn’t be answered quickly, the most likely scenario – in the eyes of many economists – was that the economy would slip back into the depths of the Great Depression.
Three forces had built up during the war:
- Housing construction ground to a halt, as virtually all production capacity was shifted to building war supplies. Fewer than 12,000 homes per month were built in 1943, equivalent to less than one new home per American city. Returning soldiers faced a severe housing shortage.
- The specific jobs created during the war – building ships, tanks, bullets, planes – were very suddenly not necessary after it, stopping with a speed and magnitude rarely seen in private business. It was unclear where soldiers could work.
- The marriage rate spiked during and immediately after the war. Soldiers didn’t want to return to their mother’s basement. They wanted to start a family, in their own home, with a good job, right away.
In 1946 the Council of Economic Advisors delivered a report to President Truman warning of “a full-scale depression some time in the next one to four years.”
They wrote in a separate 1947 memo, summarizing a meeting with Truman:
We might be in some sort of recession period where we should have to be very sure of our ground as to whether recessionary forces might be in danger of getting out of hand … There is a substantial prospect which should not be overlooked that a further decline may increase the danger of a downward spiral into depression conditions.This fear was exacerbated by the fact that exports couldn’t be immediately relied upon for growth, as two of the largest economies – Europe and Japan – sat in ruins dealing with humanitarian crises. And America itself was buried in more debt than ever before, limiting direct government stimulus.
2. So we did something about it: Low interest rates and the intentional birth of the American consumer.
by Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Prime and Punishment
Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as if they’d been cut and pasted from elsewhere. “I didn’t know what was going on, whether it was a glitch or whether somebody was trying to mess with us,” Plansky says.
As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. “You have manipulated product reviews on our site,” an email from Amazon read. “This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site.”
A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon’s bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read “appeal decision.”
When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren’t buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company’s third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail itself, according to Marketplace Pulse, making the seller platform alone the largest e-commerce business in the US.
For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal.
Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. “Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”
Amazon is far from the only tech company that, having annexed a vast sphere of human activity, finds itself in the position of having to govern it. But Amazon is the only platform that has a $175 billion prize pool tempting people to game it, and the company must constantly implement new rules and penalties, which in turn, become tools for new abuses, which require yet more rules to police. The evolution of its moderation system has been hyper-charged. While Mark Zuckerberg mused recently that Facebook might need an analog to the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes and hear appeals, Amazon already has something like a judicial system — one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.
Amazon’s judgments are so severe that its own rules have become the ultimate weapon in the constant warfare of Marketplace. Sellers devise all manner of intricate schemes to frame their rivals, as Plansky experienced. They impersonate, copy, deceive, threaten, sabotage, and even bribe Amazon employees for information on their competitors.
And what’s a seller to do when they end up in Amazon court? They can turn to someone like Cynthia Stine, who is part of a growing industry of consultants who help sellers navigate the ruthless world of Marketplace and the byzantine rules by which Amazon governs it. They are like lawyers, only their legal code is the Amazon Terms of Service, their court is a secretive and semiautomated corporate bureaucracy, and their jurisdiction is an algorithmically policed global bazaar rife with devious plots to hijack listings for novelty socks and plastic watches. People like Stine are fixers, guides to the cutthroat land of Amazon, who are willing to give their assistance to the desperate — for a price, of course. (...)
She calls the scheme that got Plansky a “dirty seller trick,” and she’s seen it before. As Amazon has escalated its war on fake reviews, sellers have realized that the most effective tactic is not buying them for yourself, but buying them for your competitors — the more obviously fraudulent the better. A handful of glowing testimonials, preferably in broken English about unrelated products and written by a known review purveyor on Fiverr, can not only take out a competitor and allow you to move up a slot in Amazon’s search results, it can land your rival in the bewildering morass of Amazon’s suspension system.
And Stine’s team had bad news: the only way back from suspension is to “confess and repent,” she says, even if you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. “Amazon doesn’t like to see finger-pointing.”
Amazon calls them “appeals,” which suggests that there’s a possibility of having the verdict overturned. In reality, they’re more like a plea bargain crossed with a business memo, the core of which is a “plan of action” — an explanation of how you’ll make things right. And to make things right, you need to admit to having done something wrong. So Plansky sat down with Stine’s team and looked for something, anything, to confess to. In his appeal, he admitted to providing discounts for reviews before Amazon banned the practice, and to sending customers emails about printing out shooting targets that the algorithm might have mistaken for bribes.
“It was crazy,” he says. “I felt like I was in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, and the only way out was to plead guilty.”
In a way, Plansky had it easy. He at least knew what he had to confess to, even if he hadn’t done it. Many sellers can’t even figure out what Amazon is accusing them of. A suspension message will typically list an item along with a broad and tangentially related category of an infraction, like “used sold as new.” Understandably, sellers respond by sending invoices that show that the items are, in fact, new. Actually, Stine says, the suspension usually has nothing to do with the item being used, but with something like a peeling label on the box. “The thing Amazon wants you to fix is the buyer perception,” Stine says. “Just proving to Amazon that your goods are new is not good enough because Amazon wants you to address why the buyers thought they were used.” One seller described the typical process as Amazon saying, “I’m putting you in jail but not telling you what you did, now give me a justification for why I should let you out and you won’t do it again.”
The appeals process is so confounding that it’s given rise to an entire industry of consultants like Stine. Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee, set up shop in 2014. CJ Rosenbaum, an attorney in Long Beach, New York, now bills himself as the “Amazon sellers lawyer,” with an “Amazon Law Library” featuring Amazon Law, vol. 1 ($95 on Amazon). Stine’s company deals with about 100 suspensions a month and charges $2,500 per appeal ($5,000 if you want an expedited one), which is in line with industry norms. It’s a price many are willing to pay. “It can be life or death for people,” McCabe says. “If they don’t get their Amazon account back, they might be insolvent, laying off 10, 12, 14 people, maybe more. I’ve had people begging me for help. I’ve had people at their wits’ end. I’ve had people crying.”
Much of Stine’s work involves translating Amazon’s cryptic suspension messages and then digging through every review, metric, and message in a seller’s account just to find the infraction she needs to design a remedy for. Sitting at her workstation, she clicks around the seller interface like a mechanic fiddling under the hood, talking mostly to herself. She looks at a warning message. “Amazon mad.” She sees a listing for dog toys that people complained were too chewy for their dogs. “This right here is going to trigger Amazon’s freak-o-meter real soon.”
The actual infraction can be as slight as the indictment is broad. Stine has a client whose listing for a rustic barn wood picture frame was deemed unsafe and taken down; it turned out the offense was a single customer review that mentioned getting a splinter. (The customer had actually given it five stars.) The seller was allowed back when he promised to add “wear gloves when installing” to his listing. Another seller was suspended for selling Nike shoes that were “not as described.” After he’d filed appeal after appeal proving the shoes were genuine Nikes, Stine’s team figured out the problem: some buyers complained the shoes were too small. That seller was let back on after promising to add a line to the listing recommending customers wear thin socks.
“That’s what we call ‘speaking Amazon,’” Stine says. “In my mind, I imagine a checklist, and it doesn’t even have to make sense. It’s just that the previous appeals hadn’t included this all-important proactive step they were going to take to prevent the complaint that the shoe was too tight.”
by Josh Dzieza, The Verge | Read more:
As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. “You have manipulated product reviews on our site,” an email from Amazon read. “This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site.”
A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon’s bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read “appeal decision.”When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren’t buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company’s third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail itself, according to Marketplace Pulse, making the seller platform alone the largest e-commerce business in the US.
For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal.
Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. “Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”
Amazon is far from the only tech company that, having annexed a vast sphere of human activity, finds itself in the position of having to govern it. But Amazon is the only platform that has a $175 billion prize pool tempting people to game it, and the company must constantly implement new rules and penalties, which in turn, become tools for new abuses, which require yet more rules to police. The evolution of its moderation system has been hyper-charged. While Mark Zuckerberg mused recently that Facebook might need an analog to the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes and hear appeals, Amazon already has something like a judicial system — one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.
Amazon’s judgments are so severe that its own rules have become the ultimate weapon in the constant warfare of Marketplace. Sellers devise all manner of intricate schemes to frame their rivals, as Plansky experienced. They impersonate, copy, deceive, threaten, sabotage, and even bribe Amazon employees for information on their competitors.
And what’s a seller to do when they end up in Amazon court? They can turn to someone like Cynthia Stine, who is part of a growing industry of consultants who help sellers navigate the ruthless world of Marketplace and the byzantine rules by which Amazon governs it. They are like lawyers, only their legal code is the Amazon Terms of Service, their court is a secretive and semiautomated corporate bureaucracy, and their jurisdiction is an algorithmically policed global bazaar rife with devious plots to hijack listings for novelty socks and plastic watches. People like Stine are fixers, guides to the cutthroat land of Amazon, who are willing to give their assistance to the desperate — for a price, of course. (...)
She calls the scheme that got Plansky a “dirty seller trick,” and she’s seen it before. As Amazon has escalated its war on fake reviews, sellers have realized that the most effective tactic is not buying them for yourself, but buying them for your competitors — the more obviously fraudulent the better. A handful of glowing testimonials, preferably in broken English about unrelated products and written by a known review purveyor on Fiverr, can not only take out a competitor and allow you to move up a slot in Amazon’s search results, it can land your rival in the bewildering morass of Amazon’s suspension system.
And Stine’s team had bad news: the only way back from suspension is to “confess and repent,” she says, even if you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. “Amazon doesn’t like to see finger-pointing.”
Amazon calls them “appeals,” which suggests that there’s a possibility of having the verdict overturned. In reality, they’re more like a plea bargain crossed with a business memo, the core of which is a “plan of action” — an explanation of how you’ll make things right. And to make things right, you need to admit to having done something wrong. So Plansky sat down with Stine’s team and looked for something, anything, to confess to. In his appeal, he admitted to providing discounts for reviews before Amazon banned the practice, and to sending customers emails about printing out shooting targets that the algorithm might have mistaken for bribes.
“It was crazy,” he says. “I felt like I was in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, and the only way out was to plead guilty.”
In a way, Plansky had it easy. He at least knew what he had to confess to, even if he hadn’t done it. Many sellers can’t even figure out what Amazon is accusing them of. A suspension message will typically list an item along with a broad and tangentially related category of an infraction, like “used sold as new.” Understandably, sellers respond by sending invoices that show that the items are, in fact, new. Actually, Stine says, the suspension usually has nothing to do with the item being used, but with something like a peeling label on the box. “The thing Amazon wants you to fix is the buyer perception,” Stine says. “Just proving to Amazon that your goods are new is not good enough because Amazon wants you to address why the buyers thought they were used.” One seller described the typical process as Amazon saying, “I’m putting you in jail but not telling you what you did, now give me a justification for why I should let you out and you won’t do it again.”
The appeals process is so confounding that it’s given rise to an entire industry of consultants like Stine. Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee, set up shop in 2014. CJ Rosenbaum, an attorney in Long Beach, New York, now bills himself as the “Amazon sellers lawyer,” with an “Amazon Law Library” featuring Amazon Law, vol. 1 ($95 on Amazon). Stine’s company deals with about 100 suspensions a month and charges $2,500 per appeal ($5,000 if you want an expedited one), which is in line with industry norms. It’s a price many are willing to pay. “It can be life or death for people,” McCabe says. “If they don’t get their Amazon account back, they might be insolvent, laying off 10, 12, 14 people, maybe more. I’ve had people begging me for help. I’ve had people at their wits’ end. I’ve had people crying.”
Much of Stine’s work involves translating Amazon’s cryptic suspension messages and then digging through every review, metric, and message in a seller’s account just to find the infraction she needs to design a remedy for. Sitting at her workstation, she clicks around the seller interface like a mechanic fiddling under the hood, talking mostly to herself. She looks at a warning message. “Amazon mad.” She sees a listing for dog toys that people complained were too chewy for their dogs. “This right here is going to trigger Amazon’s freak-o-meter real soon.”
The actual infraction can be as slight as the indictment is broad. Stine has a client whose listing for a rustic barn wood picture frame was deemed unsafe and taken down; it turned out the offense was a single customer review that mentioned getting a splinter. (The customer had actually given it five stars.) The seller was allowed back when he promised to add “wear gloves when installing” to his listing. Another seller was suspended for selling Nike shoes that were “not as described.” After he’d filed appeal after appeal proving the shoes were genuine Nikes, Stine’s team figured out the problem: some buyers complained the shoes were too small. That seller was let back on after promising to add a line to the listing recommending customers wear thin socks.
“That’s what we call ‘speaking Amazon,’” Stine says. “In my mind, I imagine a checklist, and it doesn’t even have to make sense. It’s just that the previous appeals hadn’t included this all-important proactive step they were going to take to prevent the complaint that the shoe was too tight.”
by Josh Dzieza, The Verge | Read more:
Image: BloodBros
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