Thursday, January 10, 2019
404 Page Not Found
The first time I can remember logging on to the net was around 1998, when I was five years old. My father was with me; I remember him working his magic, getting the modem to hum its infamous atonal tune. The purpose of this journey was to see if the internet had any answers to my persistent questions about how railroad crossings worked. We opened a search engine, probably AltaVista, and quickly found a Geocities webpage devoted to railroad crossings from around the world. I still remember the site’s black textured background, its grainy, white serif typeface, and the blinking gifs of railroad crossings positioned on either side of a slightly off-center text header.
I’m a digital native, older than most. Because my father worked for the federal government, our household was an early adopter of the internet. As I grew up, so did it. When I was a child, for example, the internet was still indexable; you generally found websites through directories and webrings. Favorites meant something, because finding what you were looking for often took quite a bit of time. When search engines became the norm, around the time I was in elementary school, this analog directory hunting was replaced with the ubiquitous Google search. Which is to say I witnessed it all, and as a particularly lonely child, I witnessed it rather closely: Neopets in elementary school, the birth of Myspace in middle school, the rise of Facebook in early high school, Instagram in late high school, the internet culture wars of infamy as a freshman in college, Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica in graduate school.
Writing in 2008, the new media scholar Geert Lovink separated internet culture into three periods:
Like many people my age and older, I miss the pre–social media internet. The new internet knows this, and it capitalizes on my nostalgia as it eats away at the old internet. It amounts to an unforeseen form of technological cannibalism.
Admittedly, the phenomenon of the self-eating internet may not be obvious when we think about it in the abstract; we need to break it down into its constituent operations. For example, I open my Instagram account to post on my Instagram Story feed that I’m writing this essay about internet nostalgia. There I can attach kitschy gifs to my story like fancy stickers—I look at my options, and the offerings remind me of various moments from my online past. There’s an image of sparkles that takes me back to the flash-based dress-up games I once played as a tween. There’s another gif with glitzy text that reads “Don’t hate me cuz I’m beautiful,” recalling the emotional trials of my Myspace days. And there is yet another gif that features a computer that bears a suspicious resemblance to the “My Computer” icon from Windows 95. These gifs come from Giphy, which has been integrated with Instagram for years. They’re lo-res, imperfect, and entirely decontextualized. These disembodied ghosts—ancient in computer years—blink back at me because tech companies know that, based on my age, I like them. And I do like them. I miss where they came from—it’s a place I’ve found is no longer there.
The Hell of Beautiful Interfaces
The internet is perhaps the most potent and active delivery system in history for the thesis “capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love”—online it happens in real time. Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.
The reason the tech literati don’t wring their hands more is obvious: the artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless. The persistent erasure of what are essentially frozen experiences, snapshots of our lives, nakedly demonstrates how tech monopolies value the human commonality and user experience so loftily promoted in their branding—they don’t. And this is especially true in an era where involuntary data mining, as opposed to voluntary participation, is king.
Of course, these same writers have devoted several books to the history and culture of what Lovink identifies as the “scientific period” of the web, the one populated exclusively by elite scientists, researchers, and geeks, and given over to the BBS days of early computing, before graphical user interfaces and web browsers made the net accessible to the lowly amateur. And countless hagiographies and histories have been written about the technology of the internet and its “inventors” hailing from the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). But the users of those technologies and services can only be found in the data point or the footnote, transformed into an anonymous bleating mass a world below the visionaries who built the platforms that now alchemize our consumer preferences into chunks of fool’s gold. Meanwhile, the genuine experiences of users are ignored, despite the fact that the internet has always been deeply and irrevocably personal.
I’m a digital native, older than most. Because my father worked for the federal government, our household was an early adopter of the internet. As I grew up, so did it. When I was a child, for example, the internet was still indexable; you generally found websites through directories and webrings. Favorites meant something, because finding what you were looking for often took quite a bit of time. When search engines became the norm, around the time I was in elementary school, this analog directory hunting was replaced with the ubiquitous Google search. Which is to say I witnessed it all, and as a particularly lonely child, I witnessed it rather closely: Neopets in elementary school, the birth of Myspace in middle school, the rise of Facebook in early high school, Instagram in late high school, the internet culture wars of infamy as a freshman in college, Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica in graduate school.Writing in 2008, the new media scholar Geert Lovink separated internet culture into three periods:
First, the scientific, precommercial, text-only period before the World Wide Web. Second, the euphoric, speculative period in which the Internet opened up for the general audience, culminating in the late 1990s dotcom mania. Third, the post-dot-com crash/post-9/11 period, which is now coming to a close with the Web 2.0 mini-bubble.For those my age, this tripartite history of the net begins at number two, with the anarchic, sprawling, ’90s net, followed by the post-9/11, pre-iPhone variety (including the blogosphere and the fulcrum moment that was Myspace), and ending with today’s app-driven, hyper-conglomerate social media net.
Like many people my age and older, I miss the pre–social media internet. The new internet knows this, and it capitalizes on my nostalgia as it eats away at the old internet. It amounts to an unforeseen form of technological cannibalism.
Admittedly, the phenomenon of the self-eating internet may not be obvious when we think about it in the abstract; we need to break it down into its constituent operations. For example, I open my Instagram account to post on my Instagram Story feed that I’m writing this essay about internet nostalgia. There I can attach kitschy gifs to my story like fancy stickers—I look at my options, and the offerings remind me of various moments from my online past. There’s an image of sparkles that takes me back to the flash-based dress-up games I once played as a tween. There’s another gif with glitzy text that reads “Don’t hate me cuz I’m beautiful,” recalling the emotional trials of my Myspace days. And there is yet another gif that features a computer that bears a suspicious resemblance to the “My Computer” icon from Windows 95. These gifs come from Giphy, which has been integrated with Instagram for years. They’re lo-res, imperfect, and entirely decontextualized. These disembodied ghosts—ancient in computer years—blink back at me because tech companies know that, based on my age, I like them. And I do like them. I miss where they came from—it’s a place I’ve found is no longer there.
The Hell of Beautiful Interfaces
The internet is perhaps the most potent and active delivery system in history for the thesis “capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love”—online it happens in real time. Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.
The reason the tech literati don’t wring their hands more is obvious: the artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless. The persistent erasure of what are essentially frozen experiences, snapshots of our lives, nakedly demonstrates how tech monopolies value the human commonality and user experience so loftily promoted in their branding—they don’t. And this is especially true in an era where involuntary data mining, as opposed to voluntary participation, is king.
Of course, these same writers have devoted several books to the history and culture of what Lovink identifies as the “scientific period” of the web, the one populated exclusively by elite scientists, researchers, and geeks, and given over to the BBS days of early computing, before graphical user interfaces and web browsers made the net accessible to the lowly amateur. And countless hagiographies and histories have been written about the technology of the internet and its “inventors” hailing from the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). But the users of those technologies and services can only be found in the data point or the footnote, transformed into an anonymous bleating mass a world below the visionaries who built the platforms that now alchemize our consumer preferences into chunks of fool’s gold. Meanwhile, the genuine experiences of users are ignored, despite the fact that the internet has always been deeply and irrevocably personal.
by Kate Wagner, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nichole Shinn
[ed. See also: Tumblr.]
[ed. See also: Tumblr.]
The Dark Forest
Why We Should Really Stop Trying to Contact Aliens
Experts are more and more convinced there’s probably intelligent life out there. Our first impulse, being friendly Earth types, is to reach out and say hi — from 1977’s Voyager to SETI@home, we can’t wait to meet the neighbors. Some scientists, like Stephen Hawking, caution that this may be a lethal mistake, and others say, “Naw, not to worry.” Yet here we are, scanning the night skies, visions of Close Encounters in our heads. A recent work of science fiction, though, contains a stunningly convincing argument that we should shut. The. Hell. Up. Hiding wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. The Fermi paradox, its author asserts, suggests that everyone else already is.
The book is The Dark Forest, the second volume in the unforgettable Three-Body trilogy by Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Cixin’s writing is beyond smart — it’s brilliant — and it's science fiction of the best kind, with mind-boggling ideas and perceptions, and characters you care about. His concept of the dark forest, though presented in a work of fiction, is chilling, and very real.
The Axioms of Social Cosmology
In The Dark Forest, a character suggests the creation of an area of study called “cosmic sociology.” She describes it as a means of understanding the interactions of distant civilizations who know each other only as dots of light, light years away. It's based on two simple, inarguable axioms that would be true of every civilization, regardless of the life forms it contains or where it is in the universe:
Welcome to the Woods
Cixin’s dark forest metaphor goes like this:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life — another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.
And here’s us with our desire for contact:
Experts are more and more convinced there’s probably intelligent life out there. Our first impulse, being friendly Earth types, is to reach out and say hi — from 1977’s Voyager to SETI@home, we can’t wait to meet the neighbors. Some scientists, like Stephen Hawking, caution that this may be a lethal mistake, and others say, “Naw, not to worry.” Yet here we are, scanning the night skies, visions of Close Encounters in our heads. A recent work of science fiction, though, contains a stunningly convincing argument that we should shut. The. Hell. Up. Hiding wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. The Fermi paradox, its author asserts, suggests that everyone else already is.
The book is The Dark Forest, the second volume in the unforgettable Three-Body trilogy by Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Cixin’s writing is beyond smart — it’s brilliant — and it's science fiction of the best kind, with mind-boggling ideas and perceptions, and characters you care about. His concept of the dark forest, though presented in a work of fiction, is chilling, and very real.
The Axioms of Social Cosmology
In The Dark Forest, a character suggests the creation of an area of study called “cosmic sociology.” She describes it as a means of understanding the interactions of distant civilizations who know each other only as dots of light, light years away. It's based on two simple, inarguable axioms that would be true of every civilization, regardless of the life forms it contains or where it is in the universe:- Survival is the primary need of civilization. This is the most basic desire of any life form, right?
- Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. There’s potentially competition for resources, including minerals, water, life-capable planets, etc.
- chains of suspicion
- technological explosion
Chains of Suspicion
When one civilization becomes aware of another, the most critical thing is to ascertain whether or not the newly found civilization is operating from benevolence — and thus won’t attack and destroy you — or malice. Too much further communication could take you from limited exposure in which the other civilization simply knows you exist, to the strongest: They know where to find you. And so each civilization is left to guess the other’s intent, and the stakes couldn't be higher.
You can’t assume the other civilization is benevolent, and they can't assume that about you, either. Nor can you be sure the other correctly comprehends your assessment of their benevolence or maliciousness. As one character tells another in the book:
When one civilization becomes aware of another, the most critical thing is to ascertain whether or not the newly found civilization is operating from benevolence — and thus won’t attack and destroy you — or malice. Too much further communication could take you from limited exposure in which the other civilization simply knows you exist, to the strongest: They know where to find you. And so each civilization is left to guess the other’s intent, and the stakes couldn't be higher.
You can’t assume the other civilization is benevolent, and they can't assume that about you, either. Nor can you be sure the other correctly comprehends your assessment of their benevolence or maliciousness. As one character tells another in the book:
Next, even if you know that I think you’re benevolent, and I also know that you think I’m benevolent, I don’t know what you think about what I think about what you’re thinking about me. It's convoluted, isn't it?
Does the other civilization see your opinion of them as a reason to relax, or to conquer you and take your resources? How can you possibly know what to make of each other with a certainty that satisfies your desire for survival? Inevitably, neither civilization can afford to trust the other, There’s just no way to discern another’s true intention from so very far away.
Technological Explosion
You do know that a civilization that contacts you is capable technologically of at least that much. But this is all you have to go on in your assessment of the threat level or their ability to defend themselves against an attack from you. You might think that a civilization that considers itself advanced could relax, secure in its military superiority at the moment of first contact. But contact with you could be just the impetus needed for the other civilization to shoot ahead technologically — progress is non-linear, as shown by our own tech explosion in just 300 years against the millions of years we’ve been around. By the time an invading force traverses the vast expanse of space — likely over the course of years, if not centuries — who can know what awaits them? No civilization can be confident of its power relative to the other.
The person listening to this in The Dark Forest responds, “So I have to keep quiet.” After a pause, he asks, “Do you think that will work?”
Nope. “To sum up,” says the first speaker, “letting you know I exist, and letting you to continue to exist, are both dangerous to me and violate the first axiom.” So, he continues, “If neither communication nor silence will work once you learn of my existence, you’re left with just one option.” Attack.
As if what’s already been argued isn’t scary enough, he reminds his listener, “Extrapolate that option out to billions and billions of stars and hundred of millions of civilization’s and there’s your picture. The real universe is just that black.”
You do know that a civilization that contacts you is capable technologically of at least that much. But this is all you have to go on in your assessment of the threat level or their ability to defend themselves against an attack from you. You might think that a civilization that considers itself advanced could relax, secure in its military superiority at the moment of first contact. But contact with you could be just the impetus needed for the other civilization to shoot ahead technologically — progress is non-linear, as shown by our own tech explosion in just 300 years against the millions of years we’ve been around. By the time an invading force traverses the vast expanse of space — likely over the course of years, if not centuries — who can know what awaits them? No civilization can be confident of its power relative to the other.
The person listening to this in The Dark Forest responds, “So I have to keep quiet.” After a pause, he asks, “Do you think that will work?”
Nope. “To sum up,” says the first speaker, “letting you know I exist, and letting you to continue to exist, are both dangerous to me and violate the first axiom.” So, he continues, “If neither communication nor silence will work once you learn of my existence, you’re left with just one option.” Attack.
As if what’s already been argued isn’t scary enough, he reminds his listener, “Extrapolate that option out to billions and billions of stars and hundred of millions of civilization’s and there’s your picture. The real universe is just that black.”
Welcome to the Woods
Cixin’s dark forest metaphor goes like this:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life — another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.
And here’s us with our desire for contact:
But in this dark forest, there’s a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing before it shouting, “Here I am! Here I am!”So the answer to the Fermi paradox may simply be this: Civilizations aware of the dark forest concept are wisely hiding.
by Robby Berman, The Big Think | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. A rebuttal, but perhaps in the end largely irrelevant re: global climate change, nuclear and biological weapons, gene editing, AI, politicians, and other existential threats - see also: The Great Filter (or, it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself).]
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Forgotten France Rises Up
December 15, place de l’Opéra, Paris. Three yellow vests read out an address ‘to the French people and the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron’ saying: ‘This movement belongs to no one and to everyone. It gives voice to a people who for 40 years have been dispossessed of everything that enabled them to believe in their future and their greatness.’
The anger provoked by a fuel tax produced, within a month, a wider diagnosis of what ails society and democracy. Mass movements that bring together people with minimal organisation encourage rapid politicisation, which explains why ‘the people’ have discovered that they are ‘dispossessed of their future’ a year after electing as president a man who boasts he swept aside the two parties that alternated in power for 40 years.
Macron has come unstuck. As did previous wunderkinder just as young, smiling and modern: Laurent Fabius, Tony Blair, Matteo Renzi. The liberal bourgeoisie are hugely disappointed. His French presidential election win in 2017 — whether it was a miracle or a divine surprise — had given them hope that France had become a haven of tranquillity in a troubled West. When Macron was crowned (to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy), The Economist, that standard-bearer for the views of the international ruling class, put him on its front cover, grinning as he walked on water.
But the sea has swallowed up Macron, too sure of his own instincts and too contemptuous of other people’s economic plight. Social distress is generally only a backdrop to an election campaign, used to explain the choice of those who vote the wrong way. But when old angers build and new ones are stirred up without consideration for those enduring them, then, as the new interior minister Christophe Castaner put it, the ‘monster’ can spring out of its box. And then, anything becomes possible.
France’s amnesia about the history of the left explains why there have been so few comparisons between the yellow vest movement and the strikes of 1936, during the Popular Front, which prompted similar elite surprise at the workers’ living conditions and their demand to be treated with dignity. Philosopher and campaigner Simone Weil wrote: ‘All those who are strangers to this life of slavery are incapable of understanding what has proved decisive in this situation. In this movement it is not about this or that particular demand, however important ... After always having submitted, endured everything, accepted everything in silence for months and years, it is about daring to straighten up, to stand up. To take your turn to speak’.
The tables had turned
Prime Minister Léon Blum, speaking about the subsequent Matignon agreements of 1936, which granted paid holidays, a 40-hour week and better wages, reported an exchange between the employers’ negotiators in which one said to another, when he saw the level of some salaries, ‘How is this possible? How did we let this happen?’ Was Macron similarly enlightened by hearing yellow vests describe their daily life? Tense, pale, his eyes riveted to the teleprompter, he did admit in his address to the nation that ‘the effort demanded of them was too great’ and ‘not fair’. The tables had turned and he was now the one learning a lesson.
How did we let this happen? Thanks to the yellow vests, everyone is more aware of the government’s injustices: €5 a month less in 2017 for housing benefit while the progressive rates of tax on capital were abolished; the wealth tax eliminated; pensioners’ purchasing power declining. The costliest measure was the replacement of the tax credit for competitiveness and employment (CICE, a corporate tax credit scheme for businesses) with a reduction in employers’ social security contributions, which mean that this year the Treasury will effectively pay a double bonus to Bernard Arnault, the richest man in Europe, owner of Carrefour, LVMH, Le Parisien and Les Echos. This policy will cost almost €40bn in 2019, 1.8% of GDP and more than 100 times the saving from housing benefit cuts. In the short, angry video, viewed 6.2m times, that helped launch the yellow vest movement, Jacline Mouraud, 51, a composer and hypnotherapist from Brittany, asked Macron three times, ‘What are you doing with the cash?’ Now we know.
A hefty fuel price rise and a stricter roadworthiness test for cars were enough to bring everything to the surface. Such as banks that grow fat on every loan, yet in the name of cost-saving ‘rationalise’, meaning close, their branches, as they do the accounts of customers who write a cheque that bounces to get through to the end of the month. A government that raids pensions, already too low, as if they were a treasure chest. Single mothers who have trouble getting child support from their former partners, equally poor. Couples who want to split up but are forced to stay together because they cannot afford two rents. The Internet, computers and smartphones which are now necessities that have to be paid for, not for leisure purposes but because service rationalisations by the post office, tax authorities and railways, and the disappearance of public phones, make it impossible to live without them. And everywhere there are maternity unit closures and shuttered shops while Amazon opens new warehouses. This universe of anomie, imposed technology, form filling, productivity tracking and loneliness can be seen in other countries too. It has arisen under very different political regimes and predates Macron’s election, but he seems in love with this new world and has made its accomplishment his social project — another reason why he is hated.
But not universally so. People who are doing well — graduates, the middle class, those in big cities — share Macron’s optimistic outlook. As long as the country is calm, or in despair, which amounts to the same thing, the world and the future are theirs.
The anger provoked by a fuel tax produced, within a month, a wider diagnosis of what ails society and democracy. Mass movements that bring together people with minimal organisation encourage rapid politicisation, which explains why ‘the people’ have discovered that they are ‘dispossessed of their future’ a year after electing as president a man who boasts he swept aside the two parties that alternated in power for 40 years.
Macron has come unstuck. As did previous wunderkinder just as young, smiling and modern: Laurent Fabius, Tony Blair, Matteo Renzi. The liberal bourgeoisie are hugely disappointed. His French presidential election win in 2017 — whether it was a miracle or a divine surprise — had given them hope that France had become a haven of tranquillity in a troubled West. When Macron was crowned (to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy), The Economist, that standard-bearer for the views of the international ruling class, put him on its front cover, grinning as he walked on water.But the sea has swallowed up Macron, too sure of his own instincts and too contemptuous of other people’s economic plight. Social distress is generally only a backdrop to an election campaign, used to explain the choice of those who vote the wrong way. But when old angers build and new ones are stirred up without consideration for those enduring them, then, as the new interior minister Christophe Castaner put it, the ‘monster’ can spring out of its box. And then, anything becomes possible.
France’s amnesia about the history of the left explains why there have been so few comparisons between the yellow vest movement and the strikes of 1936, during the Popular Front, which prompted similar elite surprise at the workers’ living conditions and their demand to be treated with dignity. Philosopher and campaigner Simone Weil wrote: ‘All those who are strangers to this life of slavery are incapable of understanding what has proved decisive in this situation. In this movement it is not about this or that particular demand, however important ... After always having submitted, endured everything, accepted everything in silence for months and years, it is about daring to straighten up, to stand up. To take your turn to speak’.
The tables had turned
Prime Minister Léon Blum, speaking about the subsequent Matignon agreements of 1936, which granted paid holidays, a 40-hour week and better wages, reported an exchange between the employers’ negotiators in which one said to another, when he saw the level of some salaries, ‘How is this possible? How did we let this happen?’ Was Macron similarly enlightened by hearing yellow vests describe their daily life? Tense, pale, his eyes riveted to the teleprompter, he did admit in his address to the nation that ‘the effort demanded of them was too great’ and ‘not fair’. The tables had turned and he was now the one learning a lesson.
How did we let this happen? Thanks to the yellow vests, everyone is more aware of the government’s injustices: €5 a month less in 2017 for housing benefit while the progressive rates of tax on capital were abolished; the wealth tax eliminated; pensioners’ purchasing power declining. The costliest measure was the replacement of the tax credit for competitiveness and employment (CICE, a corporate tax credit scheme for businesses) with a reduction in employers’ social security contributions, which mean that this year the Treasury will effectively pay a double bonus to Bernard Arnault, the richest man in Europe, owner of Carrefour, LVMH, Le Parisien and Les Echos. This policy will cost almost €40bn in 2019, 1.8% of GDP and more than 100 times the saving from housing benefit cuts. In the short, angry video, viewed 6.2m times, that helped launch the yellow vest movement, Jacline Mouraud, 51, a composer and hypnotherapist from Brittany, asked Macron three times, ‘What are you doing with the cash?’ Now we know.
A hefty fuel price rise and a stricter roadworthiness test for cars were enough to bring everything to the surface. Such as banks that grow fat on every loan, yet in the name of cost-saving ‘rationalise’, meaning close, their branches, as they do the accounts of customers who write a cheque that bounces to get through to the end of the month. A government that raids pensions, already too low, as if they were a treasure chest. Single mothers who have trouble getting child support from their former partners, equally poor. Couples who want to split up but are forced to stay together because they cannot afford two rents. The Internet, computers and smartphones which are now necessities that have to be paid for, not for leisure purposes but because service rationalisations by the post office, tax authorities and railways, and the disappearance of public phones, make it impossible to live without them. And everywhere there are maternity unit closures and shuttered shops while Amazon opens new warehouses. This universe of anomie, imposed technology, form filling, productivity tracking and loneliness can be seen in other countries too. It has arisen under very different political regimes and predates Macron’s election, but he seems in love with this new world and has made its accomplishment his social project — another reason why he is hated.
But not universally so. People who are doing well — graduates, the middle class, those in big cities — share Macron’s optimistic outlook. As long as the country is calm, or in despair, which amounts to the same thing, the world and the future are theirs.
by Sergie Halimi, Le Monde Diplomatique | Read more:
Image: Lucas Barioulet · AFP · Getty
Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me
The Silicon Valley gospel of “disruption” has descended into caricature, but, at its core, there are some sound tactics buried beneath the self-serving bullshit. A lot of our systems and institutions are corrupt, bloated, and infested with cream-skimming rentiers who add nothing and take so much.
Take taxis: there is nothing good about the idea that cab drivers and cab passengers meet each other by random chance, with the drivers aimlessly circling traffic-clogged roads while passengers brave the curb lane to frantically wave at them. Add to that the toxic practice of licensing cabs by creating “taxi medallions” that allow businesspeople (like erstwhile Trump bagman Michael Cohen) to corner the market on these licenses and lease them to drivers, creaming off the bulk of the profits in the process, leaving drivers with barely enough to survive.
So enter Uber, an app that allows drivers and passengers to find each other extremely efficiently, that gives drivers realtime intelligence about places where fares are going begging, and which bankrupts the rent-seeking medallion speculators almost overnight.
Of course, Uber also eliminates safety checks for drivers (and allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities, people of color, and other marginalized groups); it used predatory pricing (where each ride is subsidized by deep-pocketed, market-cornering execs) to crush potential competitors, and games the regulatory and tax system.
Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They’re not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.
In 2016, the City of Austin played a game of high-stakes chicken with Uber and Lyft. Austin cab drivers have to get fingerprinted as part of a criminal records check, and Austin wanted Uber and Lyft drivers to go through the same process.
Uber and Lyft violently objected to this. They said it would add a needless barrier to entry that would depress the supply of drivers, and privately, they confessed their fear that giving in to any regulation, anywhere, would open the door to regulation everywhere. They wanted to establish a reputation for being such dirty fighters that no city would even try to put rules on them.
(Notably, Uber and Lyft did not make any arguments about criminal background checks perpetuating America’s racially unjust “justice system” in which people of color are systematically overpoliced and then railroaded into guilty pleas.)
Austin wasn’t intimidated. They enacted the rule, and Uber and Lyft simply exited the city, leaving Austin without any rideshare at all. All the drivers and passengers who’d come to rely on Lyft and Uber were out of luck.
But the drivers were undaunted. They formed a co-operative and in months, they had cloned the Uber app and launched a new business called Ride Austin, which is exactly like Uber: literally the same drivers, driving the same cars, and charging the same prices. But it’s also completely different from Uber: the drivers own this company through a worker-owned co-op. They take home 25% more per ride than they made when they were driving for Uber. Uber and Lyft drivers commute into Austin from as far away as San Antonio just to drive for Ride. That’s how much better driving for a worker co-op is. [Edit: RideAustin reached out to us to correct this information. RideAustin is not a driver co-op, and was not founded by drivers. Also, RideAustin did not launch “months” after Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, as the article states. RideAustin was founded within a week after the big guys left, and began rides less than a month later (first ride was on June 16, 2016). More information can be found at their site, RideAustin.com.]
I remember when the term “platform cooperativism” was first bandied about to describe this kind of thing. I was at a small, invitational tech conference where nerds, investors, activists, lawyers, SF writers and other technologically oriented types were gathered. I was on a panel about these platform co-ops and I said that I thought Uber would be really easy to replace with a co-op: the riders and the drivers valued the service, not the logo on the app, and plenty of people were happy about the convenience of Uber but unhappy about the creepy, rapacious nature of the company behind it.
An investor in the audience stood up to tell me how full of shit I was: I had no idea just how complicated Uber’s app and infrastructure were, and there was no way a bunch of grubby drivers would ever be able to match its expert coding and administration.
He was so wrong.
But there’s another, better argument against this kind of platform cooperativism: “discovery costs.” I first hailed a Ride car at South By Southwest, not long after Lyft and Uber had exited the city, and everyone going to the festival had been repeatedly warned that they would have to download the Ride app to get around the city (Austin’s taxi fleet hasn’t been up to the SXSW crowds for more than a decade, and never less so than now, having been crippled by Uber and Lyft).
So I was prepared. When I land in another city, the first app I try when I need to get around is Lyft, then Uber (Uber was a godsend in Shanghai, where we were repeatedly cheated by regular cab drivers, but where the Uber app kept everything aboveboard). Some or all of these cities might have co-op rideshares, but there’s no easy way to know about it, and without passengers, there’s no incentive for the drivers to drive for the co-ops, so even when you do try to hail a co-op, there won’t be any drivers available.
Lyft and Uber have moved back into Austin, and their drivers get fingerprinted. I just got my speaker-info package from SXSW for the 2019 festival, and the advice to download Ride before touching down is no longer the top of the checklist. I imagine that most of the attendees at SXSW will be getting around with Uber and Lyft, and 25% of the money they spend will go to those companies’ shareholders, not to the drivers.
But imagine a disruptive app that disrupted the disrupters.
Imagine if I could install a version of Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.
That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.
This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.
The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.
Could we do this?
Yes. Technically, this isn’t all that challenging. Create a service where drivers and passengers’ devices all register unique, per-ride codes, have the Meta-Uber check to see if the driver’s device has just posted a unique code that matches yours, and then use the built-in ride-cancelation tool that’s already incorporated into Uber and Lyft to tear down the old reservation and re-create it with Meta-Uber.
What about legal impediments, though?
That’s where the trouble starts. Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.
Take taxis: there is nothing good about the idea that cab drivers and cab passengers meet each other by random chance, with the drivers aimlessly circling traffic-clogged roads while passengers brave the curb lane to frantically wave at them. Add to that the toxic practice of licensing cabs by creating “taxi medallions” that allow businesspeople (like erstwhile Trump bagman Michael Cohen) to corner the market on these licenses and lease them to drivers, creaming off the bulk of the profits in the process, leaving drivers with barely enough to survive.
So enter Uber, an app that allows drivers and passengers to find each other extremely efficiently, that gives drivers realtime intelligence about places where fares are going begging, and which bankrupts the rent-seeking medallion speculators almost overnight.
Of course, Uber also eliminates safety checks for drivers (and allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities, people of color, and other marginalized groups); it used predatory pricing (where each ride is subsidized by deep-pocketed, market-cornering execs) to crush potential competitors, and games the regulatory and tax system.
Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They’re not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.
In 2016, the City of Austin played a game of high-stakes chicken with Uber and Lyft. Austin cab drivers have to get fingerprinted as part of a criminal records check, and Austin wanted Uber and Lyft drivers to go through the same process.Uber and Lyft violently objected to this. They said it would add a needless barrier to entry that would depress the supply of drivers, and privately, they confessed their fear that giving in to any regulation, anywhere, would open the door to regulation everywhere. They wanted to establish a reputation for being such dirty fighters that no city would even try to put rules on them.
(Notably, Uber and Lyft did not make any arguments about criminal background checks perpetuating America’s racially unjust “justice system” in which people of color are systematically overpoliced and then railroaded into guilty pleas.)
Austin wasn’t intimidated. They enacted the rule, and Uber and Lyft simply exited the city, leaving Austin without any rideshare at all. All the drivers and passengers who’d come to rely on Lyft and Uber were out of luck.
But the drivers were undaunted. They formed a co-operative and in months, they had cloned the Uber app and launched a new business called Ride Austin, which is exactly like Uber: literally the same drivers, driving the same cars, and charging the same prices. But it’s also completely different from Uber: the drivers own this company through a worker-owned co-op. They take home 25% more per ride than they made when they were driving for Uber. Uber and Lyft drivers commute into Austin from as far away as San Antonio just to drive for Ride. That’s how much better driving for a worker co-op is. [Edit: RideAustin reached out to us to correct this information. RideAustin is not a driver co-op, and was not founded by drivers. Also, RideAustin did not launch “months” after Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, as the article states. RideAustin was founded within a week after the big guys left, and began rides less than a month later (first ride was on June 16, 2016). More information can be found at their site, RideAustin.com.]
I remember when the term “platform cooperativism” was first bandied about to describe this kind of thing. I was at a small, invitational tech conference where nerds, investors, activists, lawyers, SF writers and other technologically oriented types were gathered. I was on a panel about these platform co-ops and I said that I thought Uber would be really easy to replace with a co-op: the riders and the drivers valued the service, not the logo on the app, and plenty of people were happy about the convenience of Uber but unhappy about the creepy, rapacious nature of the company behind it.
An investor in the audience stood up to tell me how full of shit I was: I had no idea just how complicated Uber’s app and infrastructure were, and there was no way a bunch of grubby drivers would ever be able to match its expert coding and administration.
He was so wrong.
But there’s another, better argument against this kind of platform cooperativism: “discovery costs.” I first hailed a Ride car at South By Southwest, not long after Lyft and Uber had exited the city, and everyone going to the festival had been repeatedly warned that they would have to download the Ride app to get around the city (Austin’s taxi fleet hasn’t been up to the SXSW crowds for more than a decade, and never less so than now, having been crippled by Uber and Lyft).
So I was prepared. When I land in another city, the first app I try when I need to get around is Lyft, then Uber (Uber was a godsend in Shanghai, where we were repeatedly cheated by regular cab drivers, but where the Uber app kept everything aboveboard). Some or all of these cities might have co-op rideshares, but there’s no easy way to know about it, and without passengers, there’s no incentive for the drivers to drive for the co-ops, so even when you do try to hail a co-op, there won’t be any drivers available.
Lyft and Uber have moved back into Austin, and their drivers get fingerprinted. I just got my speaker-info package from SXSW for the 2019 festival, and the advice to download Ride before touching down is no longer the top of the checklist. I imagine that most of the attendees at SXSW will be getting around with Uber and Lyft, and 25% of the money they spend will go to those companies’ shareholders, not to the drivers.
But imagine a disruptive app that disrupted the disrupters.
Imagine if I could install a version of Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.
That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.
This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.
The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.
Could we do this?
Yes. Technically, this isn’t all that challenging. Create a service where drivers and passengers’ devices all register unique, per-ride codes, have the Meta-Uber check to see if the driver’s device has just posted a unique code that matches yours, and then use the built-in ride-cancelation tool that’s already incorporated into Uber and Lyft to tear down the old reservation and re-create it with Meta-Uber.
What about legal impediments, though?
That’s where the trouble starts. Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.
by Cory Doctorow, Locus | Read more:
Image: Paula Mariel Salischiker
Thin Ice
"We’re coming into campaign season for 2020, the last presidential campaign, in my estimation, that can elect a candidate who can make a real difference in the trajectory of the nation, and indeed the species. Those alive today will see what comes as we read the start of the last chapter of the final book most of us will be characters in.
Welcome to the New Year, all. It could be a bumpy ride."
Image: Gifak.net
The Real Crisis
... is that Trump has no idea what he’s doing.
Donald Trump campaigned on the absurd lie that the United States could construct a large concrete wall across the entire US-Mexico border and coerce the Mexican government into paying for its construction. The government is currently shut down because Trump refuses to admit that his absurd lie was, in fact, an absurd lie.
Since he won’t own up to it, lie has begun to pile upon lie like a sitcom farce, to the point where Trump on Tuesday night delivered an address on the subject of an entirely fake “crisis” at the southern border. The crisis, supposedly, is the reason that we not only need a wall but need it so badly that it’s worth shutting down the government to get one.
It’s an absurd situation only heightened by the larger absurdity that the fundamentals of Trump-era America are good. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing. Unauthorized immigration is low. Funds are flowing to further enhance border security, and a halfway competent president would be able to secure more without much muss or fuss. But Donald Trump doesn’t do anything without muss or fuss. So he’s now mired in a historically low approval rating, and we as a country are mired in the overlapping fake security crisis at the border and the very real crisis of a shutdown of much of the federal government.
And the realest crisis of all is the fact that in Donald Trump, we have a president who has no idea what he’s doing.
Trump’s wall of nonsense
Whether or not it’s a good idea, at the end of the day, a president who wanted to get Congress to appropriate some extra money to build some extra steel fencing would be able to get that done.
Not everyone in Congress would agree that it’s a good idea, but the federal budget is full of line items that not everyone likes. But if something is important to the White House, they find a way to get it done by making concessions on other fronts.
There are, however, two huge problems for Trump with that approach.
One is that immigration hawks themselves do not believe that the marginal value of additional fence-building is high, largely because the United States already has a lot of border fences, which means the most valuable fencing is already in place. Consequently, immigration restrictionists in Congress and in the White House have been unwilling to strike a deal that offers Democrats anything of value — hence the need to try to extort the money from Democrats with the shutdown.
The other is that the key premise of Trump’s campaign was that all the wonky kvetching about the impossibility of his absurd border wall was just excuse-making by feckless politicians. That was the central political premise of his campaign — that he, Trump, would get tough in a unique way. To admit that actually, his critics were right all along and the smartest thing to do is simply to continue what the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations were already doing would be politically devastating.
So Trump is asking Democrats to help him out of a political jam that he created by lying, and in exchange, he’s offering them nothing. Not surprisingly, they are not taking the deal. (...)
Catastrophe keeps us together
What we witnessed Tuesday night was not a president addressing the nation about a crisis, but a president flailing.
Simply put, he can’t even begin to put together a coherent argument for why this funding dispute about fence construction justifies a government shutdown. At the end of the day, there is literally nothing more banal in American political history than the president having a proposal he can’t get the opposition party to agree to. If every policy standoff ended in a government shutdown, we couldn’t have a country at all.
by Matthew Yglesias, Vox | Read more:
Image: misplaced
Donald Trump campaigned on the absurd lie that the United States could construct a large concrete wall across the entire US-Mexico border and coerce the Mexican government into paying for its construction. The government is currently shut down because Trump refuses to admit that his absurd lie was, in fact, an absurd lie.
Since he won’t own up to it, lie has begun to pile upon lie like a sitcom farce, to the point where Trump on Tuesday night delivered an address on the subject of an entirely fake “crisis” at the southern border. The crisis, supposedly, is the reason that we not only need a wall but need it so badly that it’s worth shutting down the government to get one.It’s an absurd situation only heightened by the larger absurdity that the fundamentals of Trump-era America are good. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing. Unauthorized immigration is low. Funds are flowing to further enhance border security, and a halfway competent president would be able to secure more without much muss or fuss. But Donald Trump doesn’t do anything without muss or fuss. So he’s now mired in a historically low approval rating, and we as a country are mired in the overlapping fake security crisis at the border and the very real crisis of a shutdown of much of the federal government.
And the realest crisis of all is the fact that in Donald Trump, we have a president who has no idea what he’s doing.
Trump’s wall of nonsense
Whether or not it’s a good idea, at the end of the day, a president who wanted to get Congress to appropriate some extra money to build some extra steel fencing would be able to get that done.
Not everyone in Congress would agree that it’s a good idea, but the federal budget is full of line items that not everyone likes. But if something is important to the White House, they find a way to get it done by making concessions on other fronts.
There are, however, two huge problems for Trump with that approach.
One is that immigration hawks themselves do not believe that the marginal value of additional fence-building is high, largely because the United States already has a lot of border fences, which means the most valuable fencing is already in place. Consequently, immigration restrictionists in Congress and in the White House have been unwilling to strike a deal that offers Democrats anything of value — hence the need to try to extort the money from Democrats with the shutdown.
The other is that the key premise of Trump’s campaign was that all the wonky kvetching about the impossibility of his absurd border wall was just excuse-making by feckless politicians. That was the central political premise of his campaign — that he, Trump, would get tough in a unique way. To admit that actually, his critics were right all along and the smartest thing to do is simply to continue what the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations were already doing would be politically devastating.
So Trump is asking Democrats to help him out of a political jam that he created by lying, and in exchange, he’s offering them nothing. Not surprisingly, they are not taking the deal. (...)
Catastrophe keeps us together
What we witnessed Tuesday night was not a president addressing the nation about a crisis, but a president flailing.
Simply put, he can’t even begin to put together a coherent argument for why this funding dispute about fence construction justifies a government shutdown. At the end of the day, there is literally nothing more banal in American political history than the president having a proposal he can’t get the opposition party to agree to. If every policy standoff ended in a government shutdown, we couldn’t have a country at all.
by Matthew Yglesias, Vox | Read more:
Image: misplaced
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Kiss What Is Left of Your Medical Data Privacy Goodbye
[ed. See, the trouble is the computer can collect a lot of information and regurgitate it in many different ways, and people are fascinated by that. Controlling and measuring everything. … We’re all ranked. And who’s it for? Now, if it’s for the academics, they’re relatively harmless. But then it’s going to ultimately be used, at some point, and it has kind of a smell of eugenics, that we want to purify this kind of motley race called human beings and if we can measure all the different attributes, we can then make normative the right path and the right way to be. I think that is the absence of diversity and the absence of freedom.]
~ Governor Jerry Brown
Matt Stoller warned back in 2012 that insurers would increasingly induce, then force, customers to agree to surveillance. But a Wall Street Journal story tonight describes how insurers and medical providers, meaning your doctor’s employers, are actively cooperating, so as among other things, to help Big Pharma peddle more drugs to you.
Stoller warned that over time, insurance companies would make it prohibitive and eventually impossible to refuse to agree to intensive monitoring:
And even though far too many people are perfectly happy to wear devices that monitor some health measures on an ongoing basis, at least they chose for the data to be collected and hopefully have some appreciation that promises about privacy too often aren’t what they appear to be.
But the Wall Street Journal describes what amounts to a full bore war on individual medical privacy, including linking medical histories to credit records. And the author puts a big smiley face on this effort by depicting it as breaking down silos. “Silos” is a dog-whistle word in Corporate America. Silos are bad! Sharing is good! From the article:
Some issues:
There’s an even more immediate possible use for this information, as Wall Street Journal reader Michael Heinzmann pointed out:
Matt Stoller warned back in 2012 that insurers would increasingly induce, then force, customers to agree to surveillance. But a Wall Street Journal story tonight describes how insurers and medical providers, meaning your doctor’s employers, are actively cooperating, so as among other things, to help Big Pharma peddle more drugs to you.
Stoller warned that over time, insurance companies would make it prohibitive and eventually impossible to refuse to agree to intensive monitoring:
Profit-driven surveillance does not start and stop with young adults. It is, in fact, becoming pervasive. The main theme of a recent IBM consulting document on the future of the insurance industry is how much more money an insurance company can make if it tracks and tags its customers. This is particularly true for auto insurance companies, some of whom like Allstate and Progressive are experimenting on new technologies. For instance, IBM suggests that “A “pay-as-you-live” product would trade some location and time-of-day privacy data for lower insurance bills overall.”
IBM is recommending these companies stick a sensor in your car, measure where you go and when, your speed, acceleration and deceleration, etc. The progression over time could be to withdraw traditional insurance products, so that you won’t be able to get an insurance product without sensors attached. As this presentation offers, “The aforementioned rising tide of technology also empowers insurance underwriters to bring their products closer to realtime interaction via sensor networks and enlightened privacy regulations.”…Now at least this progression has the appearance of being consensual. First you are paid for giving up your privacy, then over time, the positioning changes so that customers have to pay a premium for non-monitored products, and then as their usage falls (and you get a lot of adverse selection), the insurer can pretend to be justified in getting rid of the privacy products, having set them up to fail.
And even though far too many people are perfectly happy to wear devices that monitor some health measures on an ongoing basis, at least they chose for the data to be collected and hopefully have some appreciation that promises about privacy too often aren’t what they appear to be.
But the Wall Street Journal describes what amounts to a full bore war on individual medical privacy, including linking medical histories to credit records. And the author puts a big smiley face on this effort by depicting it as breaking down silos. “Silos” is a dog-whistle word in Corporate America. Silos are bad! Sharing is good! From the article:
Although technology exists to make AI a potent tool, there is a snag. Data relevant to answering specific questions often reside in various locations, from hospitals to diagnostic labs to pharmaceutical companies. These information silos are typical in the health-care field, leaving scientists and other medical professionals at a disadvantage to harness the full predictive power of AI.
Small businesses such as PatientMatters LLC and Prognos Health Inc. are overcoming the data-gathering obstacles to provide insights to medical customers including health plans. “For Prognos to do what we do, you need to have large data sets,” said Sundeep Bhan, co-founder and chief executive of Prognos, which helps insurers predict their members’ disease risks.Lovely. So now we have medical pre-crime, since these data-diggers are making it sound as if they are doing more than projecting out the typical trajectory of pre-existing conditions. Again from the article:
Prognos…has teamed up with diagnostic labs to accumulate diagnostic data on 200 million patients, which it marries with information from health plans to answer questions such as which members are likely to develop a specific condition.
Diagnostic labs, which hope their data will be used to solve medical problems, share the entrepreneur’s dreams of seeing medicine take a leap forward, Mr. Bhan said. “At the end of the day, in health care, that’s what we care about,” he added.If you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you, as the story itself demonstrates: (...)
Some issues:
How much of this will wind up being a garbage-in, garbage out exercise? Most of this data is presumably from electronic health records. We’ve regularly published cross posts from Health Care Renewal on this topic, describing in depth what a train wreck they are. The short version is that EHRs were designed for billing purposes, not with medical care in mind. Two of many examples: Health Care Information Technology: A Danger to Physicians and to Your Health and How Electronic Health Records Degrade Care and Endanger Patients.
How much has Obamacare with its neoliberal shopping imperative, undermined this data gathering and mining? In theory, if you have opted to be in an HMO, all of your records ought to be under the same roof. But what if thanks to Obamacare, you switched HMOs, or went from an HMO to a PPO and then back, or even went without coverage? Your medical records are supposed to go from your old provider to the new ones, but how often does that happen well? I know of people who insist on getting copies of all of their blood and other major tests to carry with them to doctor visits, since they’ve found too often the doctor either doesn’t have all of the information or doesn’t have ready access to it.How much will this effort be used to further corporatize care and reduce doctor input? It is a safe bet this sort of data will be used to advance the corporatiation of medicine, which we first discussed in a 2013 post, citing Dr. David Edelberg at Whole Health Chicago (emphasis original):
• The health industry hopes that individual medical practices and small medical groups will ultimately disappear from the landscape by being financially absorbed into larger groups owned by hospital systems.…
Physicians are expected to spend a limited amount of time with each patient, and are encouraged to see as many patients as possible during a workday. The insurance companies, sometimes with the token cooperation of a few physician-employees, create vast books of patient-care guidelines to which they believe their physicians must be “accountable” (remember this word, it will crop up again). These guidelines might mean documented Pap smear and mammogram frequency, weight management and exercise, colonoscopies for patients over 50, and getting that evil LDL (bad cholesterol) below 99 by any means possible…
If the chart audit system discovers that a physician, for whatever reason, is an “outlier”–that she’s either not following the guidelines exactly or not getting the results anticipated for her patient population—she’ll be financially penalized. A quick example of what might occur: if your LDL is 115, you may be on the receiving end of a statin sales pitch from your doctor, not because bringing it down to 99 will improve your longevity, but because your refusal to do so will impact her financial bottom line….
…the subtext of “standardized” always includes the unspoken “spend less money on the patient.” Thus, a doctor might be financially penalized for recommending nutritional counseling to lower cholesterol (“counseling is expensive”) instead of writing a generic statin drug (cheap). Or recommending psychotherapy (“therapy is very expensive”) instead of generic Prozac (cheaper than M&M’s). Or referring patients for massage, acupuncture, or even chiropractic (“expensive, expensive, expensive!”) instead of pushing an over-the-counter antiinflammatory (free to the insurance company, as it’s OTC).And the connection to credit data is cringe-making. Just wait for the articles saying that a better credit score means better health, when if there is any causality, it almost certainly runs the other way.
There’s an even more immediate possible use for this information, as Wall Street Journal reader Michael Heinzmann pointed out:
With the GOP hell-bent on eliminating protections for patients with preexisting conditions from guaranteed access to health insurance – any leakage of personal/private healthcare data would have devastating effects upon millions of patients. Healthcare organizations have a very poor track record on protecting their customers’ data (and none have suffered any significant sanctions).
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
[ed. See also: 23andMe's Pharma Deals Have Been the Plan All Along (Wired) Quote via: .]
Monday, January 7, 2019
How to Hand Out Free Money
On a gray afternoon in Juneau, 36-year-old Kristen Hemlock sat on her bed picking at a cold McDonald’s chicken sandwich, waiting for the checks to arrive. Her four-year-old son, Eli, chubby and dimpled, lay on his stomach on a bottom bunk two feet away, distracting himself with YouTube cartoons. Six-year-old Mason wasn’t home from school yet, permitting a fleeting truce in the brothers’ perennial war over her phone. In a home the size of a dorm room, it was a more reliable source of entertainment than their toy trucks and guns. Broken drawers spilled out of a chipped wicker dresser, and fleece blankets, one patterned with the phrase “I love you to the moon and back,” blocked light from the lone window.
The boys’ father, 35-year-old Daniel Varner, sat at a tiny table in khaki overalls and work boots, jiggling his leg.
“It’s delivery mail, isn’t it?” he asked Hemlock.
“Yeah, so it might be tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah, it’s not coming. I was thinking post office box.”
“It could.” Hemlock emitted the nervous laugh she reserves for her saddest stories. “I’m hopeful.”
Most of the family’s 52 neighbors at St. Vincent de Paul Society’s transitional housing shelter, a faded blue building on the outskirts of town, were also waiting for money.
It was October 4, and pretty much everyone in Alaska was expecting it, with varying degrees of impatience—$1,600 for every man, woman, and child. For nearly four decades, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program, designed to share revenue from the state’s oil wealth, has made flat annual payouts to anyone who has lived there for at least one calendar year, barring those with certain criminal convictions. While the program’s architects didn’t use the term, it’s the closest thing today to a universal basic income program that has durably existed anywhere in the world. (...)
Inadvertently, red-leaning and fiercely independent Alaska has become a global model for advocates of doling out “free money.” After visiting the state in July 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, a vocal basic-income booster, wrote in a Facebook post that the dividend provides “good lessons for the rest of our country.” The dividend has been a third rail in Alaskan politics for nearly four decades. But just as the hype around basic income is growing, the program is facing an existential threat. Plummeting oil revenue has left the resource-dependent state—the only one with no sales or personal income tax—with multibillion-dollar deficits. Even after dramatic spending cuts, savings reserves are dwindling. The local GOP establishment, with backing from wealthy corporate interests, has blocked virtually all attempts to generate new revenue through taxes. With money running out, elected officials have slashed annual checks in half, despite their popularity. In May, lawmakers voted for the first time to divert $1.7 billion away from dividends to pay directly for government spending. While imposing income taxes would affect the richest Alaskans most, smaller dividend checks, and the program’s uncertain future, are hitting low-income families hardest. (...)
The dividend’s origins are rooted less in idealism than in greed. In 1968, nearly a decade after Alaska joined the Union, the largest oil field in North America was discovered on its northern coast at Prudhoe Bay. Lease sales filled the young state’s coffers with $900 million, more than five times its annual budget. Within five years, the entire windfall was gone. Much of it paid for education and transportation projects, but some politicians and members of the public felt that spending had overinflated the bureaucracy. Jay Hammond, a trapper and fisherman elected governor in 1974, declared that the “nest egg” had been “scrambled.” He and other leaders decided the state ought to safeguard some oil revenue for future generations. In 1976, voters approved a constitutional amendment creating the Permanent Fund, a savings account that would be managed by a semi-independent, state-owned corporation and would take in at least a quarter of oil royalties and related income and invest it.
The fund’s principal could never be touched, barring a constitutional amendment, but Hammond strongly believed the earnings should go directly to residents. The self-styled “bush rat governor” had no interest in charity or wealth redistribution. Rather, influenced by consultants like Milton Friedman who advocated a federal basic income, he viewed recipients as shareholders that should benefit equally from ownership in “Alaska, Inc.” and could spend money more efficiently than the government. Hammond reasoned individual distributions would give the public a personal stake in keeping the fund safe—were politicians to fritter away or mismanage the savings, it would hit every resident right in the pocketbook. If oil was, in the words of OPEC’s founder, “the devil’s excrement,” breeding waste and corruption, Hammond argued a dividend would “at least halfway pin a “diaper'” on it.
As the young fund slowly built up principal, lawmakers debated how to spend the earnings. Most of them strongly opposed dividends, preferring to fund infrastructure or loans to small businesses. Many feared handouts would attract “freeloaders” to the state, or that people would stop working or waste money on frills and vices. But when oil prices soared after the Iranian revolution, there seemed to be enough revenue to go around. In 1980, legislators repealed individual income taxes and put the fund to use, enacting a dividend that would give every adult Alaskan $50 for each year they’d been a resident since statehood. The US Supreme Court ruled the seniority provision unconstitutional, so legislators replaced it with flat annual payouts, extending them to children and adding provisions that prevented recipients from losing federal public assistance because of any windfall. In 1982, Alaskans received their first checks of $1,000. It was the first time in contemporary history that a government had sent money to people just for living in its jurisdiction. (...)
Less than 150 miles from mainland Russia, the Iñupiaq village of Teller, population 228, sits at the base of a tiny sandspit on the edge of a bay bordering the Bering Sea. Unlike many Alaska Native villages, which are only accessible by plane or boat, Teller can be reached by a gravel road that winds through rust and ocher tundra meadows, interrupted by creeks and trampled by herds of reindeer and musk oxen. Beyond the beached skiffs and the sliced salmon draped over wooden racks, on Whale Street (if you hit Walrus Street or Sled Way, you’ve gone too far), a hand-painted sign marks the Teller Native Store, the only place in town selling groceries.
Inside on a Sunday afternoon, Albert Oquilluk lifted a freezer lid. Nothing but reindeer meat, at $14.49 a pound. “Usually, we just go out and get our own,” he said. Trailed by his six-year-old son, Urijah, he moved to a pair of refrigerators and peered at the racks. “No sausage, no bacon.” He threw a can of Spam in his shopping basket.
Most autumns, Oquilluk would have had stores of dried salmon at home, or he’d be out shooting ducks and geese. This year, he’d been lucky enough to land a temporary job as a heavy-equipment operator helping build a new dumping ground for the sewage that villagers collect in “honey buckets.” (Most homes don’t have plumbing or running water.) Normally, his only steady pay was a $125 monthly stipend for sitting on the tribal council, with some money on the side from plowing snow or driving people to clinic appointments. Oquilluk’s wife, Carolyn, works for the local government, but some years the family ends up on food stamps. The construction wages were a welcome boon, but he’d been working 10 hours a day, six days a week, since June. That left no time for fishing and hunting, which most villagers still do to supplement their diets.
Oquilluk is 48 with a round face and salt-and-pepper hair. He tossed a quart of ultra-pasteurized milk into the basket, then Krusteaz pancake mix, Sailor Boy Pilot Bread Crackers, Sun-Maid FruitBits, grape Kool-Aid, and 27 Otter Pops. Canned sweet potatoes, pickles, and pickled beets went in, too. There were no fresh fruits and vegetables—those had to be hauled or shipped from Nome, a small city about two hours away, or foraged in the form of wild berries or “beach greens.” Urijah sneaked some Goldfish crackers into the basket, and his father threw in a tin of beef jerky. The total for 11 items and the mess of Otter Pops came to $81.22.
The family’s dividends had arrived two days earlier and were paying for the groceries. All together, Oquilluk, his wife, and their four kids had gotten $9,600 after the cuts. Even given their flush year, that sum made up about 15 percent of their income. In leaner times, they needed the dividend to survive. Rural Alaska is expensive, with gas for their truck and boat costing more than $700 a month. Groceries top $1,000. This year, the money helped them buy things beyond the basics. Oquilluk and his wife had already spent about $2,000 on Amazon. They bought raw honey, kids’ clothing, boots, a boot dryer, a burger press, tongs, bowls, a come-along for hauling boats or marooned four-wheelers, a jigsaw for carving a traditional crescent-shaped knife called an ulu, a bucket seat cushion, a smartphone attachment for their spotting scope, and eight pounds of lard. They were thinking of splurging to send one of their daughters to attend tribal conferences in Anchorage.
Most importantly, they paid off some of the $5,000 plus late fees remaining on their loan for an 18-foot skiff and motor, which Oquilluk had bought so he could fish. “We’re almost three years overdue on payments. When they started cutting our PFDs, that’s when we couldn’t make a payment.”
The Oquilluks are better off than many of their neighbors in Teller, where almost 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line and income per capita is less than half the national median income. For some, the dividend is the only cash they get all year besides public assistance. Dividend checks play an amplified role in rural Alaska, with its isolation, lack of jobs, high living costs, and less reliable public services. Researchers at the University of Alaska-Anchorage estimate that eliminating dividends would increase the number of Alaska Natives living below the poverty line by about a third and boost poverty among elderly Native people in rural areas by 72 percent. Thanks to his job and the dividend, Oquilluk said, “we’re making ends meet.”
In some ways, the role the dividend plays in rural Alaska is similar to what advocates say a universal basic income could do: fill the gaps when there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Alaska’s dividend is not high enough to represent what advocates call a full basic income, defined as being enough to survive on and escape poverty, either on its own or combined with social services. But given that its payments are regular, unconditional, and doled out to virtually everyone, the Permanent Fund Dividend is the closest thing to an institutionalized universal basic income in the world today. For proponents of expanding the idea, the lessons are clear: Universal direct cash distributions work. And they become wildly popular once enacted, with beneficiaries even in an individualistic, conservative state finding ways to justify a government entitlement elsewhere embraced by radicals and leftists.
The boys’ father, 35-year-old Daniel Varner, sat at a tiny table in khaki overalls and work boots, jiggling his leg.
“It’s delivery mail, isn’t it?” he asked Hemlock.“Yeah, so it might be tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah, it’s not coming. I was thinking post office box.”
“It could.” Hemlock emitted the nervous laugh she reserves for her saddest stories. “I’m hopeful.”
Most of the family’s 52 neighbors at St. Vincent de Paul Society’s transitional housing shelter, a faded blue building on the outskirts of town, were also waiting for money.
It was October 4, and pretty much everyone in Alaska was expecting it, with varying degrees of impatience—$1,600 for every man, woman, and child. For nearly four decades, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program, designed to share revenue from the state’s oil wealth, has made flat annual payouts to anyone who has lived there for at least one calendar year, barring those with certain criminal convictions. While the program’s architects didn’t use the term, it’s the closest thing today to a universal basic income program that has durably existed anywhere in the world. (...)
Inadvertently, red-leaning and fiercely independent Alaska has become a global model for advocates of doling out “free money.” After visiting the state in July 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, a vocal basic-income booster, wrote in a Facebook post that the dividend provides “good lessons for the rest of our country.” The dividend has been a third rail in Alaskan politics for nearly four decades. But just as the hype around basic income is growing, the program is facing an existential threat. Plummeting oil revenue has left the resource-dependent state—the only one with no sales or personal income tax—with multibillion-dollar deficits. Even after dramatic spending cuts, savings reserves are dwindling. The local GOP establishment, with backing from wealthy corporate interests, has blocked virtually all attempts to generate new revenue through taxes. With money running out, elected officials have slashed annual checks in half, despite their popularity. In May, lawmakers voted for the first time to divert $1.7 billion away from dividends to pay directly for government spending. While imposing income taxes would affect the richest Alaskans most, smaller dividend checks, and the program’s uncertain future, are hitting low-income families hardest. (...)
The dividend’s origins are rooted less in idealism than in greed. In 1968, nearly a decade after Alaska joined the Union, the largest oil field in North America was discovered on its northern coast at Prudhoe Bay. Lease sales filled the young state’s coffers with $900 million, more than five times its annual budget. Within five years, the entire windfall was gone. Much of it paid for education and transportation projects, but some politicians and members of the public felt that spending had overinflated the bureaucracy. Jay Hammond, a trapper and fisherman elected governor in 1974, declared that the “nest egg” had been “scrambled.” He and other leaders decided the state ought to safeguard some oil revenue for future generations. In 1976, voters approved a constitutional amendment creating the Permanent Fund, a savings account that would be managed by a semi-independent, state-owned corporation and would take in at least a quarter of oil royalties and related income and invest it.
The fund’s principal could never be touched, barring a constitutional amendment, but Hammond strongly believed the earnings should go directly to residents. The self-styled “bush rat governor” had no interest in charity or wealth redistribution. Rather, influenced by consultants like Milton Friedman who advocated a federal basic income, he viewed recipients as shareholders that should benefit equally from ownership in “Alaska, Inc.” and could spend money more efficiently than the government. Hammond reasoned individual distributions would give the public a personal stake in keeping the fund safe—were politicians to fritter away or mismanage the savings, it would hit every resident right in the pocketbook. If oil was, in the words of OPEC’s founder, “the devil’s excrement,” breeding waste and corruption, Hammond argued a dividend would “at least halfway pin a “diaper'” on it.
As the young fund slowly built up principal, lawmakers debated how to spend the earnings. Most of them strongly opposed dividends, preferring to fund infrastructure or loans to small businesses. Many feared handouts would attract “freeloaders” to the state, or that people would stop working or waste money on frills and vices. But when oil prices soared after the Iranian revolution, there seemed to be enough revenue to go around. In 1980, legislators repealed individual income taxes and put the fund to use, enacting a dividend that would give every adult Alaskan $50 for each year they’d been a resident since statehood. The US Supreme Court ruled the seniority provision unconstitutional, so legislators replaced it with flat annual payouts, extending them to children and adding provisions that prevented recipients from losing federal public assistance because of any windfall. In 1982, Alaskans received their first checks of $1,000. It was the first time in contemporary history that a government had sent money to people just for living in its jurisdiction. (...)
Less than 150 miles from mainland Russia, the Iñupiaq village of Teller, population 228, sits at the base of a tiny sandspit on the edge of a bay bordering the Bering Sea. Unlike many Alaska Native villages, which are only accessible by plane or boat, Teller can be reached by a gravel road that winds through rust and ocher tundra meadows, interrupted by creeks and trampled by herds of reindeer and musk oxen. Beyond the beached skiffs and the sliced salmon draped over wooden racks, on Whale Street (if you hit Walrus Street or Sled Way, you’ve gone too far), a hand-painted sign marks the Teller Native Store, the only place in town selling groceries.
Inside on a Sunday afternoon, Albert Oquilluk lifted a freezer lid. Nothing but reindeer meat, at $14.49 a pound. “Usually, we just go out and get our own,” he said. Trailed by his six-year-old son, Urijah, he moved to a pair of refrigerators and peered at the racks. “No sausage, no bacon.” He threw a can of Spam in his shopping basket.
Most autumns, Oquilluk would have had stores of dried salmon at home, or he’d be out shooting ducks and geese. This year, he’d been lucky enough to land a temporary job as a heavy-equipment operator helping build a new dumping ground for the sewage that villagers collect in “honey buckets.” (Most homes don’t have plumbing or running water.) Normally, his only steady pay was a $125 monthly stipend for sitting on the tribal council, with some money on the side from plowing snow or driving people to clinic appointments. Oquilluk’s wife, Carolyn, works for the local government, but some years the family ends up on food stamps. The construction wages were a welcome boon, but he’d been working 10 hours a day, six days a week, since June. That left no time for fishing and hunting, which most villagers still do to supplement their diets.
Oquilluk is 48 with a round face and salt-and-pepper hair. He tossed a quart of ultra-pasteurized milk into the basket, then Krusteaz pancake mix, Sailor Boy Pilot Bread Crackers, Sun-Maid FruitBits, grape Kool-Aid, and 27 Otter Pops. Canned sweet potatoes, pickles, and pickled beets went in, too. There were no fresh fruits and vegetables—those had to be hauled or shipped from Nome, a small city about two hours away, or foraged in the form of wild berries or “beach greens.” Urijah sneaked some Goldfish crackers into the basket, and his father threw in a tin of beef jerky. The total for 11 items and the mess of Otter Pops came to $81.22.
The family’s dividends had arrived two days earlier and were paying for the groceries. All together, Oquilluk, his wife, and their four kids had gotten $9,600 after the cuts. Even given their flush year, that sum made up about 15 percent of their income. In leaner times, they needed the dividend to survive. Rural Alaska is expensive, with gas for their truck and boat costing more than $700 a month. Groceries top $1,000. This year, the money helped them buy things beyond the basics. Oquilluk and his wife had already spent about $2,000 on Amazon. They bought raw honey, kids’ clothing, boots, a boot dryer, a burger press, tongs, bowls, a come-along for hauling boats or marooned four-wheelers, a jigsaw for carving a traditional crescent-shaped knife called an ulu, a bucket seat cushion, a smartphone attachment for their spotting scope, and eight pounds of lard. They were thinking of splurging to send one of their daughters to attend tribal conferences in Anchorage.
Most importantly, they paid off some of the $5,000 plus late fees remaining on their loan for an 18-foot skiff and motor, which Oquilluk had bought so he could fish. “We’re almost three years overdue on payments. When they started cutting our PFDs, that’s when we couldn’t make a payment.”
The Oquilluks are better off than many of their neighbors in Teller, where almost 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line and income per capita is less than half the national median income. For some, the dividend is the only cash they get all year besides public assistance. Dividend checks play an amplified role in rural Alaska, with its isolation, lack of jobs, high living costs, and less reliable public services. Researchers at the University of Alaska-Anchorage estimate that eliminating dividends would increase the number of Alaska Natives living below the poverty line by about a third and boost poverty among elderly Native people in rural areas by 72 percent. Thanks to his job and the dividend, Oquilluk said, “we’re making ends meet.”
In some ways, the role the dividend plays in rural Alaska is similar to what advocates say a universal basic income could do: fill the gaps when there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Alaska’s dividend is not high enough to represent what advocates call a full basic income, defined as being enough to survive on and escape poverty, either on its own or combined with social services. But given that its payments are regular, unconditional, and doled out to virtually everyone, the Permanent Fund Dividend is the closest thing to an institutionalized universal basic income in the world today. For proponents of expanding the idea, the lessons are clear: Universal direct cash distributions work. And they become wildly popular once enacted, with beneficiaries even in an individualistic, conservative state finding ways to justify a government entitlement elsewhere embraced by radicals and leftists.
by Katia Savchuk, Mother Jones | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
[ed. I was initially against the PFD and thought about framing my first check instead of cashing it back in 1982. That idea didn't last long (like, before I could even buy a picture frame). I do think the PFD has had a big effect on the state's diversity bringing in lots of Samoans, Filipinos and other cultures with extended close-knit families. What was really crazy though was the near simultaneous abolishment of a state income tax.]
[ed. I was initially against the PFD and thought about framing my first check instead of cashing it back in 1982. That idea didn't last long (like, before I could even buy a picture frame). I do think the PFD has had a big effect on the state's diversity bringing in lots of Samoans, Filipinos and other cultures with extended close-knit families. What was really crazy though was the near simultaneous abolishment of a state income tax.]
Jerry Brown’s Midnight in America
Nearly a half-century on the national stage surely entitles a leader to some valedictory words, and if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician one could easily imagine what those words might be:
Though the sun is setting on my time of public service, it will always be rising for this great state et cetera, et cetera, and though we face daunting challenges let me assure you that I have never been more optimistic about the endless promise of blah, blah, blah.
But if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician he would never have been on the national stage for a half-century. He would have been shooed off it several decades ago, to a chorus of mockery about his supposedly eccentric style and mournful commentary about faded promise and what might have been.
Instead, at age 80, Brown is leaving the governorship of the nation’s largest state in a few hours, at noon on Monday. If this departure seems a bit reluctant—he pauses slightly, before demurring when I ask him if he wishes he could keep his job—it is emphatically on his own terms. A leader who at times has been treated as a figure of ridicule has vindicated his place as one of the most serious people in American life across two generations.
During an interview with POLITICO at the governor’s mansion here in late December, Brown was indeed serious. He is not full of warm words about the native wisdom of the people: They strike him as scared, easily prone to distraction and cynical manipulation. He is not more optimistic than ever: He is worried the planet is hurtling toward catastrophe.
How does he see the world in 2019? “Dangerous—and we’re lucky to be alive,” Brown said, his voice rising. “Humankind has created—certainly since the invention of the atomic bomb, but also biological breakthroughs, cyber capacities—humankind has the capacity of vast, vast destruction, even the elimination of human beings themselves, all over the planet. That could be in a matter of days, certainly with the nuclear.”
And yet, as he sees it, America’s entire political culture—elected officials, the news media, intellectuals—seems blithely disengaged from the magnitude of the peril, endlessly distracted by trivia. On climate change, nuclear proliferation and the new awareness that technology can be an instrument of oppression as well as individual empowerment, he continued: “The threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small.”
Brown has been reading lately about World War I and sees contemporary parallels between the inability of that generation’s elites to comprehend or control the forces thrusting civilization toward disaster: “I find the metaphor most congenial to describing this problem is sleepwalking.”
Brown may be the most brooding of any major figure in American life, as arresting in its own way as President Donald Trump and his jeremiads about “American carnage.” He regards Trump as a dangerous fraud but also “a symptom” of “widespread estrangement” of people from institutions and leaders they no longer trust—a phenomenon he has observed and often agreed with for decades. He wasn’t surprised that Trump stood out from the “pabulum and predictability” that conventional candidates were offering in 2016.
The message is not “Morning in America,” to borrow the phrase of Brown’s immediate predecessor. Ronald Reagan, of course, after winning the governorship in 1974, went on to a job that Brown very much wanted.
Early in his career Brown was widely seen as an interesting figure but too young to be president. Then for a time he was seen as interesting but too weird. Now he is undeniably still an interesting figure—and, in key respects, at last powerfully in synch with the politics of the moment—but too old.
After years as a second-tier issue, climate change is finally moving to a central place in the Democratic debate; Brown has been a prominent voice on energy and environmental matters since the 1970s. Mistrust of big money and corrupt elites is now shaping the politics of both major parties; Brown has been offering a similar critique and promoting citizen empowerment for decades. At the same time, his emphasis on fiscal discipline has sometimes put him at odds with California liberals.
A couple hours before our interview, at an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club, Brown said it was a mistake to run for president three times—“one too many times,” he lamented, of his bids in 1976, 1980 and 1992—and acknowledged a nugget of political wisdom he first learned from another governor, his father Pat Brown: “Everything is timing.” (...)
Brown belongs with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy as figures who shaped American politics in recent decades more than anyone who did not actually achieve the Oval Office.
It is a rare politician who could generate enthusiasm for offices so much lower than ones he has already held. Why was Brown not too proud for that? “Well, because I’m practical,” he told me. “My skills lie in the political domain. So, outside of office I have less to accomplish and less to do. … I never saw my father work on a car. I never saw him pick up a hammer. I never saw him pick up a broom. But I did hear him talk. I did see him go to meetings. And so I learned the skills of the political and that’s why I pursued it.”
When he returned as governor eight years ago, Brown resolved that he would not be confined narrowly to state issues, and instead would use the office as a platform for existential issues affecting the planet, like climate change and the nuclear peril. He speaks often with former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, for instance, and once burrowed away reviewing a book by Perry arguing that the nuclear catastrophe remains much more probable than people realize.
But Brown says he is not expecting these efforts to loom large in history. My colleagues have noted that Brown is allergic to the word “legacy,” a point he proved in the interview. “Who can remember the legacy?” he said, bristling at my question. “Presidents have legacies in ways that governors don’t. They don’t write the history of governors.”
What follows are excerpts of POLITICO’s conversation with outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Though the sun is setting on my time of public service, it will always be rising for this great state et cetera, et cetera, and though we face daunting challenges let me assure you that I have never been more optimistic about the endless promise of blah, blah, blah.
But if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician he would never have been on the national stage for a half-century. He would have been shooed off it several decades ago, to a chorus of mockery about his supposedly eccentric style and mournful commentary about faded promise and what might have been.
Instead, at age 80, Brown is leaving the governorship of the nation’s largest state in a few hours, at noon on Monday. If this departure seems a bit reluctant—he pauses slightly, before demurring when I ask him if he wishes he could keep his job—it is emphatically on his own terms. A leader who at times has been treated as a figure of ridicule has vindicated his place as one of the most serious people in American life across two generations.During an interview with POLITICO at the governor’s mansion here in late December, Brown was indeed serious. He is not full of warm words about the native wisdom of the people: They strike him as scared, easily prone to distraction and cynical manipulation. He is not more optimistic than ever: He is worried the planet is hurtling toward catastrophe.
How does he see the world in 2019? “Dangerous—and we’re lucky to be alive,” Brown said, his voice rising. “Humankind has created—certainly since the invention of the atomic bomb, but also biological breakthroughs, cyber capacities—humankind has the capacity of vast, vast destruction, even the elimination of human beings themselves, all over the planet. That could be in a matter of days, certainly with the nuclear.”
And yet, as he sees it, America’s entire political culture—elected officials, the news media, intellectuals—seems blithely disengaged from the magnitude of the peril, endlessly distracted by trivia. On climate change, nuclear proliferation and the new awareness that technology can be an instrument of oppression as well as individual empowerment, he continued: “The threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small.”
Brown has been reading lately about World War I and sees contemporary parallels between the inability of that generation’s elites to comprehend or control the forces thrusting civilization toward disaster: “I find the metaphor most congenial to describing this problem is sleepwalking.”
Brown may be the most brooding of any major figure in American life, as arresting in its own way as President Donald Trump and his jeremiads about “American carnage.” He regards Trump as a dangerous fraud but also “a symptom” of “widespread estrangement” of people from institutions and leaders they no longer trust—a phenomenon he has observed and often agreed with for decades. He wasn’t surprised that Trump stood out from the “pabulum and predictability” that conventional candidates were offering in 2016.
The message is not “Morning in America,” to borrow the phrase of Brown’s immediate predecessor. Ronald Reagan, of course, after winning the governorship in 1974, went on to a job that Brown very much wanted.
Early in his career Brown was widely seen as an interesting figure but too young to be president. Then for a time he was seen as interesting but too weird. Now he is undeniably still an interesting figure—and, in key respects, at last powerfully in synch with the politics of the moment—but too old.
After years as a second-tier issue, climate change is finally moving to a central place in the Democratic debate; Brown has been a prominent voice on energy and environmental matters since the 1970s. Mistrust of big money and corrupt elites is now shaping the politics of both major parties; Brown has been offering a similar critique and promoting citizen empowerment for decades. At the same time, his emphasis on fiscal discipline has sometimes put him at odds with California liberals.
A couple hours before our interview, at an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club, Brown said it was a mistake to run for president three times—“one too many times,” he lamented, of his bids in 1976, 1980 and 1992—and acknowledged a nugget of political wisdom he first learned from another governor, his father Pat Brown: “Everything is timing.” (...)
Brown belongs with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy as figures who shaped American politics in recent decades more than anyone who did not actually achieve the Oval Office.
It is a rare politician who could generate enthusiasm for offices so much lower than ones he has already held. Why was Brown not too proud for that? “Well, because I’m practical,” he told me. “My skills lie in the political domain. So, outside of office I have less to accomplish and less to do. … I never saw my father work on a car. I never saw him pick up a hammer. I never saw him pick up a broom. But I did hear him talk. I did see him go to meetings. And so I learned the skills of the political and that’s why I pursued it.”
When he returned as governor eight years ago, Brown resolved that he would not be confined narrowly to state issues, and instead would use the office as a platform for existential issues affecting the planet, like climate change and the nuclear peril. He speaks often with former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, for instance, and once burrowed away reviewing a book by Perry arguing that the nuclear catastrophe remains much more probable than people realize.
But Brown says he is not expecting these efforts to loom large in history. My colleagues have noted that Brown is allergic to the word “legacy,” a point he proved in the interview. “Who can remember the legacy?” he said, bristling at my question. “Presidents have legacies in ways that governors don’t. They don’t write the history of governors.”
What follows are excerpts of POLITICO’s conversation with outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
by John F. Harris, Politico | Read more:
Image: Stephen Lam/Getty
Must Writers Be Moral? Their Contracts May Require It
When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you’re likely to think that they’re on the same side — the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas.
In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don’t like scandals that might threaten their bottom line — or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie?
One answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”
That’s reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn’t ask authors to return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even more hard-nosed.
This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.
Agents hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation” are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many don’t read the small print. (...)
Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Condé Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: “No way. I’m not signing that.” Ms. Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine’s liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations. When I called Ms. Gersen in November, she said, “No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.”
It’s not that a company should have to keep on staff a murderer or rapist, she added. But when the trigger for termination could be a Twitter storm or a letter-writing campaign, she said, “I think it would have a very significant chilling effect.”
Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer, also said she wouldn’t sign her new contract, at least not as it was originally worded. Ms. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who won the 2017 National Book Award for “The Future Is History,” about the return of totalitarianism in post-Communist Russia, has spent her career challenging prevailing nostrums.
Last year, as prominent men fell like bowling pins after being accused of sexual misconduct, Ms. Gessen published columns on the New Yorker website describing the #MeToo movement as an out-of-control “moral panic” bent on policing sexual behavior by mob justice. Needless to say, many readers did not agree.
“I’m extremely uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Gessen said about the contract, “because I have in the past been vilified on social media.” Having once been fired from a job as the director of Radio Liberty in Russia after what she called a disinformation campaign, she added, “I know what it’s like to lose institutional support when you most need it.” (...)
Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing $1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Mr. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials, but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.
Today the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising. Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You can’t condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called “The Ridiculously Good Marriage” after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologized for a “sexual incident.”) Children’s publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children’s book written by a pedophile. (...)
The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.
In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don’t like scandals that might threaten their bottom line — or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie?
One answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”That’s reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn’t ask authors to return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even more hard-nosed.
This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.
Agents hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation” are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many don’t read the small print. (...)
Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Condé Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: “No way. I’m not signing that.” Ms. Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine’s liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations. When I called Ms. Gersen in November, she said, “No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.”
It’s not that a company should have to keep on staff a murderer or rapist, she added. But when the trigger for termination could be a Twitter storm or a letter-writing campaign, she said, “I think it would have a very significant chilling effect.”
Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer, also said she wouldn’t sign her new contract, at least not as it was originally worded. Ms. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who won the 2017 National Book Award for “The Future Is History,” about the return of totalitarianism in post-Communist Russia, has spent her career challenging prevailing nostrums.
Last year, as prominent men fell like bowling pins after being accused of sexual misconduct, Ms. Gessen published columns on the New Yorker website describing the #MeToo movement as an out-of-control “moral panic” bent on policing sexual behavior by mob justice. Needless to say, many readers did not agree.
“I’m extremely uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Gessen said about the contract, “because I have in the past been vilified on social media.” Having once been fired from a job as the director of Radio Liberty in Russia after what she called a disinformation campaign, she added, “I know what it’s like to lose institutional support when you most need it.” (...)
Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing $1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Mr. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials, but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.
Today the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising. Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You can’t condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called “The Ridiculously Good Marriage” after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologized for a “sexual incident.”) Children’s publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children’s book written by a pedophile. (...)
The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.
Northwest Angle
Petition calls for U.S. to give Northwest Angle to Canada (CBC)
[ed. See also: Northwest Angle (Atlas Obscura)]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)