Hippie Inc: How the Counterculture Went Corporate

Brian is telling a young Asian-American woman about the five-day workshop he’s here to attend. “It’s called ‘Bio-hacking the Language of Intimacy’,” he says. “Uh-huh,” says the Asian-American woman. She directs this less at Brian than at the kelp forest floating offshore. Brian presses on. What he particularly appreciates is the ability to talk about stuff he can’t talk about at work. Relationships and so forth. “You know,” he says, “really make that human connection.”

The Asian-American woman gives him the sort of bright, dead-eyed smile Californians deploy when they’re about to violently disagree with you. “I find I can make human connections in lots of different contexts.”

Brian goes quiet. In all but one sense it’s a typically, even touchingly American courtship ritual: the clean-cut young man, no less diffident nor deferential than his grandfather might have been; the young woman off-handedly wielding her power over him, yet to be impressed. The crucial difference is that both parties are naked – not only naked, in the woman’s case, but standing up in the water, exposing herself in full-frontal immodesty to Brian and the cool Pacific breezes.

We are in the outdoor sulphur springs that cling to the cliffside at the Esalen Institute, a spiritual retreat centre in Big Sur, California. Here naked sharing is commonplace and as sapped of erotic charge as it would be in a naturist campsite – which is just as well, as I’m naked too, the gooseberry in the hot tub, desperately aiming for an air of easygoing self-composure as I try not to look at Brian’s thighs.

It is thought that the hot springs on this rocky but beautiful stretch of the central Californian coast have been in ritual or therapeutic use, in one form or another, for at least 6,000 years, when the Esselen, the Native American tribe that inspired the institute’s name, migrated south from the Bay Area. They saw in the confluence of waters a fitting place to worship and bury their dead. In 1962 a local landowner, “Bunnie” MacDonald Murphy, agreed to lease the property – by then a down-at-heel resort frequented by gay men from San Francisco – to her grandson Michael Murphy. With his fellow Stanford psychology graduate, Dick Price, Murphy founded the Esalen Institute as a centre for the new “Human Potential Movement”. Their intention was to hold a series of gently countercultural seminars and “experiential sessions”.

The gentleness was short-lived. In 1963 Fritz Perls, a German-born psychoanalyst notorious for his wild and often traumatising group therapy, arrived at Esalen and began dismantling his subjects’ personalities, trait by trait. The institute developed a reputation for drugs, nude bathing and free sex. Hordes of hippies travelled down from San Francisco to camp and take vast quantities of psychedelics. George Harrison flew in by helicopter for a sitar session with Ravi Shankar. Sharon Tate was here the day before she was murdered. Esalen was a hippie proving ground, a focal point for the counterculture’s preoccupations with psychedelia, Eastern mysticism and self-actualisation. It was the mother church for the religion of no religion.

It seems an unlikely place, then, to find Brian. He is a financial adviser from Yuba City in northern California with tidy hair and a taste for J.Crew-type open-neck shirts. He looks like someone you might run into at a sports bar or an executive airport lounge, and spends much of his free time at his country club playing golf. But then Esalen is not quite what it was. In recent years the institute has been accused of selling out, of betraying the countercultural principles it helped to shape. The charge gathered new force when, in 2017, the institute appointed a former product manager at Google as its executive director.

Ben Tauber had worked on Hangouts, Chat and the ill-fated social network Google+. After his appointment, there was a subtle shift in Esalen’s programme from the numinous to the digital: the workshops now included “Conscious AI” and “Blockchain & Cryptocurrency”. This invited suspicions that Esalen had become the therapeutic wing of Silicon Valley, a corporate retreat that was about as countercultural as the newly installed Tesla charging stations in the parking lot. Book a private suite with a redwood deck, clawfoot tub and open fireplace, and a weekend at Esalen can set you back as much as $3,000. Come for the week and you’re looking at close to $7,000.

If corporate America has infiltrated the counterculture, the same could be said in reverse. Google, Apple, Facebook, Nike, Procter & Gamble and General Motors all offer programmes on mindfulness, a broad term for a number of Eastern-influenced practices designed to help you focus on the here and now. Employees at the headquarters of Cisco Systems in San Jose can attend the LifeConnections Health Centre, where they focus on the “four pillars” of wellbeing – body, mind, spirit and heart. Its senior integrated health manager for global benefits, Katelyn Johnson, is responsible for cultivating the Cisco ideal of the “corporate athlete” – ripped in body and mind. At Aetna, a giant American health-insurance company, more than a quarter of the 50,000-strong workforce have now attended at least one of the in-house mindfulness classes. According to the firm, the productivity per week of the average participant has increased by 62 minutes, and the resulting value to the company is in the region of $3,000 per employee each year. Alongside open-plan offices, ping-pong tables and informal dress codes, mindfulness in the workplace is an idea that took hold in Silicon Valley and subsequently took over the world. What was once the preserve of the retreat centre is now a sound business practice: mysticism with a measurable return on investment.

I had come to Esalen to reflect on an apparent paradox: the gradual absorption of the counterculture by capital. A few hours after our dip in the sulphur spring I bump into Brian again, leaning on a banister outside the main lodge. As he looks out beyond the uplit trees to the now indivisible blackness of sea and sky, he seems contented. “At my country club I’m the only guy asking if the soup is gluten-free,” he says. “I guess I’m a bit of a different drummer in some respects. But here I feel like, this is my tribe, you know?”

by Nat Signet, The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Ewelina Karpowiak

Tadanori Yokoo, Anniversary Performance of the Garumella Dance Company, 1970
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Rosalyn Drexler, The Winner, 1965
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Searching for the Perfect Comp

While recording the last, We Came As Strangers album, our bass player Tim Harries coined a marvellous phrase about the modern recording process, which was that the producer Owen was looking for ‘the perfect comp’ rather than ‘the perfect take’.

I was explaining this to some students at a workshop recently and was surprised to hear that most of them were not familiar with the process of ‘comping’ in a recording process, so I thought we might explore what it is, how it’s done and the pros and cons of the process and the ‘art’.

The term ‘comping’ is short for compiling and is selecting sections from various takes and making them into a single track, not to be confused with jazz ‘comping’ which is short for accompaniment. These comps would normally appear to the listener as one person playing a take, and usually, the engineer and producer would try to hide any editing or joining of takes that have been done.

It would be fair to think that this kind of editing was part of the computer generation, but I first experienced it as a teenager recording to tape. The singer sang four or five takes of the song, and then the engineer carefully timed muting and unmuting the tracks to select the best parts of each performance into one great vocal track.

My first feeling was that this kind of editing was ‘cheating’, but there was no doubt in this case that the comped vocal was in fact much better than any of the individual takes and that the listener would never know. Should the singer have gone back and sung it over and over until it was ‘perfect’? There are certainly a finite number of takes a singer can do in one sitting before the voice gets tired. And isn’t it all about expressing a feeling anyway? There was one verse that was really great, expressive and powerful, but one held note was pretty flat. The engineer managed to mute the main track for that one note and unmute another at precisely the right time, and the problem was solved. Had that not been possible, then the singer would have had to do it again and perhaps never captured that same vibe again. But maybe it would have been fine with the slightly flat note?

It’s something that is worth giving some thought too if you are getting into recording. It’s very trendy these days to record to tape which makes comping a lot more difficult to do - although it’s not unheard of these days to record to tape, dump the tracks into Pro Tools for some comping (and even pitch correction) and then put it back to tape! And while tape certainly has a certain retro-cool sound, the idea of laying down music to tape is usually to capture a performance as a whole, warts and all.

Recording ‘live’ and aiming for a perfect take has some interesting ramifications that can impact on the music a number of ways, some positive and some negative. I found that when recording in a live situation, especially with the whole band playing at once, that I’m a little less likely to really push out and explore crazy ideas unless I’m confident they’re going to work… but that also seems to make me listen to my ‘musical mind’ more and try to ‘hear in advance’ how it’s going to work, which I think is better. Other times when the whole band has been exploring together, it’s taken me on fascinating musical journeys that I would have never taken on my own playing take after take.

That said, I really enjoy working out parts and will often spend a few hours playing a part over and over and exploring different ideas, sounds, effects and guitars and very often I’ll record them all and comp my favourite bits along the way! Sometimes I’ll keep the bits and layer them up, and other times I might learn and replay the comp and play it again and get a perfect take of the comped part!

Comping for guitarists often comes up when it comes to solos, and speaking personally, most of the favourite solos that I’ve recorded myself have been single takes – however, there has almost always been a journey behind them.

I remember really struggling to record a solo I was happy with for a song called Freefall (from The We Came As Strangers album Eyedom). The song was modern and wanted something a bit outside and crazy but still rock n roll and after spending an afternoon trying different guitars and effects, slides, ebow and getting myself more and more frustrated I took a break and tried to ‘imagine’ a solo in my mind. A Rage Against The Machine style thing appeared, so I grabbed by Whammy pedal, set up a tone I liked, hit record and gave it all I could and nailed it in one take.

Which leads me to think about many of the great recordings that were done without comping (as far as I’m aware) and how it got to be that most records made these days use tools like this and why ‘back in the good old days’ they didn’t seem to need it. I’m thinking out loud here at 30,000 feet and realizing that perhaps back then guitar players just played guitar… these days the vast majority of guitar players I know are doing a lot more than just playing; teaching, social media promo, recording and production, maybe filming and video editing, web site maintenance and probably accounting too! Back in the day, people sold more records, made more money (perhaps?) and had other people to deal with the periphery tasks and could just spend their days playing and creating. Maybe.

Or maybe it was because bands played live more and spent more time preparing to go to the studio – used to be a lot more expensive to record and it wasn’t like these days where everyone has a home studio – so musicians worked harder. I’ve heard stories from older friends saying they would work on a song for a few weeks trying to nail the parts before even thinking about recording it!

Or perhaps it’s just a time thing? If I’m doing a session for someone, it will be a lot faster to comp a few takes together than play it over and over until I get it down in one. Or maybe I’m just lazy?

There are extremes, of course, I have a great producer friend who played the guitar on a number of chart hits but could hardly play. He’d slowly get his fingers around a chord and strum it a few times and then comp them into a track, it was background parts in predominantly electronic pop, but still, it worked and made music that a lot of people liked. Oh the ethical dilemma, more on that another time I think…

So next time you’re recording yourself, try doing a few takes and comping them together and see how you feel about it (if you’re not already!). It’s interesting food for thought, and it’s worth taking note of how you ‘feel’ about individual takes and the energy they have vs the comped track which might be ‘better’. Happy trails to you!

by Justin Sandercoe, JustinGuitar |  Read more:

Image: Steely Dan, Ed Caraeff via:

The Gig Economy

“But it is my firm conviction that the ‘Hell of England’ will cease to be that of ‘not making money;’ that we shall get a nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven!” — Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present

I.

Lately, I have not been feeling quite myself. I live on the internet, which is to say, I am a NEET [ed. Not in Education, Employment or Training] living in my parents’ basement. In my online persona I pretend that I am ironically pretending to be a NEET living in my parents’ basement, but I am one in actual fact. I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.

We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads. Corporations are organisms, not city-states; they signal to each other via markets; they build interfaces into human social protocols through brand identities; they occupy slots in our Dunbar rings.

The internet is an ocean that we invent as we explore it. The deeper we dive, the more we become cryptozoologists, or crypto-ichthyologists, or even crypto-theologists. In the murky darkness of virtual places, there could be dragons, shoggoths, leviathans; invisible creatures that will prey on us, devour us, or colonize us. Certainly, I have heard voices on the web who say we will discover or build a god when we reach the cyber-ocean floor. That god will save us by authoring an age of post-scarcity economics. It will commodify us, allowing us to be fungible with capital. Amen.

I apologize if this seems fragmented. My brain has been addled by the casino reward schedule of social media. It is both a cliche and a fact that I cannot focus on anything for more than three minutes. That’s half true, I read pdfs of outlandish philosophers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications. My hobbies include speculating on cryptocurrency and shitposting, which is where you put in minimal effort in creating your online presence so that you aren’t culpable when it’s bland.

By now I think almost everyone has heard of so-called “dayjob” contracts. Most people have probably received one, and many have even fulfilled them. I have personally executed over a thousand. The euphemism “dayjob” refers to the relatively low payout of these types of contracts, as in “don’t quit your day job.” I never intended this to be my career, and the truth is I still think of myself as unemployed. I don’t want to talk numbers but let’s just say if I had to pay rent this wouldn’t work.

Still, there is something addictive about the feedback loop of getting a contract, fulfilling it, and watching my wallet get an anonymous transfer. The immediacy and the tangibility of it are very satisfying. It’s like making money: the video game. A direct feedback loop with a variable payout is all it takes to turn a moment of reward into a habit. You get a little receipt after each fulfillment.

Most of the actual jobs are simple. In one, I was told to go to a certain address and take a photograph of a building at a particular time. In another, I was supposed to go to a vendor in an open air market, find a tourist of middle eastern descent wearing a green military jacket, and tell him the numbers: 75, 53, 168.7, 55, 13, 804. I was unable to find him.

In a third, I was asked to watch a brief video on YouTube and then email a description of its contents to an incomprehensible address, something like ak38eja2pf8hap@fpwyg.af. Just over ten percent of my contracts have been to summarize news articles or passages out of books. Apparently the shadowy digital cabal of crypto microjobs wants us to do our damn homework. I have even completed jobs that felt like problems on standardized tests, in which I had to read a short body of text and then answer questions about it.

Ever since the first one I have wondered how they work and where they come from. Each time I complete one it feels like another clue, like watching a tv serial; each episode they give you two minutes of exposition on the protagonist’s shadowy past. Though if I am honest, I know only slightly more than when I started, and I frequently deny this when I talk to myself in my own head. “This next job will teach me something,” I whisper to myself over and over. When the contract issuer—which I assume is routing through some kind of bot—tells me of a job, I sometimes talk back. I used to confess things, or make up lies, or tell stories. Now I just say “why?”

Tweet this news story, @all of these accounts.
“Why?”
Go to this address, face these coordinates, take a photo at six pm.
“Why?”
“Count the number of people who cross this intersection on foot in three hours”
“Why?”
“Put on a bright red T-shirt and go to this location. To anyone who greets you, say these words”
“Why?”
“Of the faces in this picture, how many are afraid?”
“4”
“What are they afraid of?”*
“Why?”
(*it didn’t pay me for this one. That will teach me, I guess.)

Posters on the the dayjob reddit talk about being asked to make a series of binary choices, or to give their best guess about the probabilities of hypothetical future events. I haven’t had too many like that, and I wonder if the system thinks I am bad at predicting the future. Based on my informal online research, the most common contracts appear to be for verification of other jobs; if one man is asked to visit a certain location at a certain time, there will be two more to visit the same location and upload a photo that shows him to be there. Each of those will in turn be followed by another contractor whose job is to verify the identity of the man in the photo, and perhaps even another to verify the verification.

The jobs come to their executors through a variety of channels; text message, social media, email, and anonymous robot dialers. They are always executed on the blockchain and they pay out in cryptocurrency. I personally use an aggregator app that is able to login to all of my accounts and scrape them for contracts. You cannot ask for a dayjob. They can only come to you, like an unbidden thought or memory, (like all thoughts and memories?) like the call of the void. The more you complete, the more frequently they will come.

Their origin is a mystery, but speculations and conspiracy theories abound. The usual suspects are all represented: dayjobs are being used to coordinate black or grey market operations by organized crime syndicates. Dayjobs are part of a psyop or a social experiment being conducted by the CIA. They’re part of a Russian plot to affect some sinister geopolitical purpose. They’re being used by Islamic terrorists to undermine American institutions, and the seeming banality of many of the contracts is just a smokescreen to disguise their true intent.

You should not believe anything you read on 4chan of course, but the below makes for compelling speculation.

If this is true, then certainly the authors of these contracts have taken some pains to obscure their identities. I’m not a cryptocurrency wonk, but I was under the impression there were easier ways. (...)

The internet is an ocean but for some reason we call it a cloud, as if it were above us, ethereal, transcendent. It’s a warehouse full of servers, many such warehouses. And yet the cloud is not the servers that run it, any more than a mind is a brain. Through the miracle of virtualization, a new parallel universe arises with its own ontology and its own phenomenology. A brain computes a mind and a server computes a cloud, you see? They are analogs, but one is digital.

A program without a visible interface is called a process, and such a program is said to be “headless”. The engineers who invented modern computing paradigms referred to processes as daemons. To me, it’s a macabre image: invisible demons, swarming through the cloud, bodies without heads: they manipulate us for inscrutable alien purposes.

The internet is an ocean and who knows what swims beneath its surface? Virtual predators, incorporeal, dangling (sex|porn|friendship|fame|money) in front of us maybe, like an angler fish using bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. And why not? The information-dense ecosystem of our internet could be a kind of primordial soup. The heat and light from our activities there could be a catalyst for virtual abiogenesis.

by Zero HP Lovecraft |  Read more:

[ed. Yikes. All I can say is... nice to find sites (and writing) like this still on the internet. Reminds me of the old days (in a good way). See also: God-Shaped Hole.]

OKHII studio

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Tumblr Year in Review

We lost a billion dollars and drove away most of our interesting original content, but Nazis and bots remained!

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[ed. See also: Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner (The Verge).]

What Does Socialism Look Like?

There is an increasing recognition that we are now living in a “socialist moment,” a period where socialism has reemerged as a popular idea in American political life. There’s just one problem: Everyone seems to have a different definition of what it means. For liberals tired of being mislabelled socialists by the right, the term has come to mean any government policy aimed at providing public goods, from food stamps to the Air Force. For the progressives who have embraced the term, it means a social democratic program to aggressively confront inequality. For conservatives and libertarians, it represents anything from Soviet Marxism-Leninism to Venezuelan left-populism. And, as has always been the case, different factions of self-identified socialists argue vigorously among one another for the term’s one true meaning. As Nathan Robinson and Rob Larson noted in their recent article, “if you ask 10 socialists what [socialism] means you’ll get 12 or so different definitions.”

Even putting aside the numerous abuses of the term in mainstream American politics, socialism has always been a broad concept, adopted by hundreds of political movements all over the world to mean a wide variety of different things for almost two centuries. While this has allowed for a diverse body of thought to flourish, it has also had the effect of confusing millions of people as to what socialists actually believe.

The ascendant strain of socialism in America today is democratic socialism. Commonly confused with its more modest sibling of social democracy, democratic socialism is a strain of thought which traces its roots to late 19th-century movements in America and Europe which advocated for popular control over both government and business through democratic means. The U.S.’ largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, define the idea as the belief “that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few.”

Even for many skeptics, this sounds nice conceptually. But if these socialists explicitly reject the models of the USSR or communist China, then what is their alternative? If not a bureaucratic command economy, does democratic socialism exist as anything other than an abstract daydream in the minds of the young and the pages of a few magazines? (...)

What separates socialism from left-liberalism and social democracy is the emphasis placed on ownership: Wealth and income are not simply redistributed by the government, but are predistributed among the broad community that makes such wealth possible, rather than an elite few. In an institutional setting, the socialist ethos is represented by the idea of common ownership, that powerful institutions should be owned and controlled by those with a stake in them. Michael Walzer expresses this principle in the form of a classic maxim: “what touches all should be decided by all.” But “the state is not our only common enterprise… The capitalist economy proliferates what are plausibly called private governments” (in the form of hierarchically organized firms) with “outcomes that seriously affect thousands and hundreds of people… that can only be opposed or ignored by the members only at risk of penalties.”

The principle of common ownership can take a number of forms. The most common way to split common ownership is between public and cooperative ownership. In the case of public ownership, an institution is put under the control of a democratic government on the local, regional, or federal level. In a sufficiently democratic government, this serves as an indirect conduit for common ownership, with popular input via elections and any other mechanisms designed specifically for stakeholder involvement. Cooperative ownership is the more direct form of common ownership, involving the members of a neighborhood, the employees of a company, or those in some other group jointly possessing and overseeing an enterprise. Each has their advantages and disadvantages.

Because of its Cold War connotations, most Americans think of socialism solely as inefficient and bureaucratic public ownership through a powerful central government. But actual public ownership need not be either centralized or wasteful. The state of North Dakota owns both a public bank and the nation’s largest flour mill, each providing reliable services to state residents while also being accountable to and returning their profits to the state government rather than to private shareholders. Indeed, in order to ensure that everyone had access to basic banking services, the U.S. ran a highly successful basic public banking program through the post office from 1911 to 1967 (139 countries still offer at least some financial services through their post office).

While private internet service providers ignore rural consumers and systematically overcharge the customers they do have, more than 500 cities across 40 states have established cable internet networks owned and operated by municipal governments, with great results: The municipal networks for Longmont, CO and Chattanooga, TN are both among the 10 fastest internet service providers in the nation.

As private utilities have been busy starting wildfires and poisoning rivers to protect their profits, 16 percent of Americans already get their electricity from public utilities (and another 13 percent from cooperatives). Nebraska, the only state to exclusively use public and cooperative energy utilities, has some of the cheapest and greenest energy in the country, and sends most of its excess revenue into state coffers. Every citizen can elect the members of their utility’s board and attend public meetings to provide direct input. In one of the most conservative states in the country, socialism is already thriving in one sector.

Though it’s common to mistake any form of government program as socialism by itself, scholars like Thomas Hanna help clarify the issue by pointing out exactly how much of our collective wealth is already owned and operated for the public good through the government: the vast majority of water utilities, hundreds of airports and marine ports, 20 percent of community hospitals, and a number of city-owned hotels and convention centers. Insofar as programs like Medicare and Medicaid are public replacements for insurance companies, they can serve as an example as well.

Natural resources are another interesting example, as they are a textbook example of a resource belonging to the commons. Many nations simply have nationally-owned companies for their natural resources sectors, with state companies producing 55 percent of the world’s oil and gas. Though this isn’t the case in the U.S., a number of states do maintain some modified form of a public “sovereign wealth fund” that collects income from these resources to be used for the public’s benefit, whether through handing it out to citizens or spending it on public projects. Alaska collects part of the revenue earned from oil production every year and puts it directly into the hands of every citizen in the form of a universal check generally worth around $1,000, an arrangement which has helped manage income inequality and poverty in the state without reducing employment. Texas and Wyoming have similar funds, but instead put the revenue into their education budget and general state coffers, respectively.

While profit can be a powerful incentive to provide many goods and services, institutional arrangements which are solely reliant on it can also produce inequality, corruption, pollution, exploitation, criminality, or even just neglect when much-needed services aren’t profitable enough to provide. Well-managed municipalization and nationalization in select sectors can serve as one way to bring complex and large-scale enterprises under the control of the public, providing better services in a more accountable way.

by Brett Heinz, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Socialism As a Set of Principles (Current Affairs).]

Uber Self-Driving Crash

A year and a half ago an Uber self-driving car hit and killed Elaine Herzberg. I wrote at the time:

The dashcam video from the Uber crash has been released. It's really bad. The pedestrian is slowly walking their bike left to right across a two lane street with streetlights, and manages to get to the right side of the right lane before being hit. The car doesn't slow down at all. A human driver would have vision with more dynamic range than this camera, and it looks to me like they would have seen the pedestrian about 2s out, time to slow down dramatically even if not stop entirely. But that doesn't matter here, because this car has LIDAR, which generates its own light. I'm expecting that when the full sensor data is released it will be very clear that the system had all the information it needed to stop in time. 

This is the sort of situation where LIDAR should shine, equivalent to a driver on an open road in broad daylight. That the car took no action here means things are very wrong with their system. If it were a company I trusted more than Uber I would say "at least two things going wrong, like not being able to identify a person pushing a bike and then not being cautious enough about unknown input" but with Uber I think they may be just aggressively pushing out immature tech.

On Tuesday the NTSB released their report (pdf) and it's clear that the system could easily have avoided this accident if it had been better designed. Major issues include:

• "If we see a problem, wait and hope it goes away". The car was programmed to, when it determined things were very wrong, wait one second. Literally. Not even gently apply the brakes. This is absolutely nuts. If your system has so many false alarms that you need to include this kind of hack to keep it from acting erratically, you are not ready to test on public roads.

• "If I can't stop in time, why bother?" When the car concluded emergency braking was needed, and after waiting one second to make sure it was still needed, it decided not to engage emergency braking because that wouldn't be sufficient to prevent impact. Since lower-speed crashes are far more survivable, you definitely still want to brake hard even if it won't be enough.

• "If I'm not sure what it is, how can I remember what it was doing?" The car wasn't sure whether Herzberg and her bike were a "Vehicle", "Bicycle", "Unknown", or "Other", and kept switching between classifications. This shouldn't have been a major issue, except that with each switch it discarded past observations. Had the car maintained this history it would have seen that some sort of large object was progressing across the street on a collision course, and had plenty of time to stop.

• "Only people in crosswalks cross the street." If the car had correctly classified her as a pedestrian in the middle of the road you might think it would have expected her to be in the process of crossing. Except it only thought that for pedestrians in crosswalks; outside of a crosswalk the car's prior was that any direction was equally likely.

• "The world is black and white." I'm less sure here, but it sounds like the car computed "most likely" categories for objects, and then "most likely" paths given their categories and histories, instead of maintaining some sort of distribution of potential outcomes. If it had concluded that a pedestrian would probably be out of the way it would act as if the pedestrian would definitely be out of the way, even if there was still a 49% chance they wouldn't be.

This is incredibly bad, applying "quick, get it working even if it's kind of a hack" programming in a field where failure has real consequences. Self-driving cars have the potential to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, but this sort of reckless approach does not help.

by jkaufman, LessWrong |  Read more:

The Quiet Protests of Sassy Mom Merch

I don’t have kids, but I do have a fascination with sassy mom merch. This may date back to the many post-church Sunday afternoons I spent in my childhood, in Texas, hanging around the Cracker Barrel store, perusing wooden placards about how “if mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy,” or how coffee is actually salad—bean salad. Before social media, these cheerfully harried memes offered a collective construction of maternal identity; now, thanks to Pinterest and Instagram and Etsy, they populate countless online shops, where, in simple block letters or in the flouncy faux-handwriting script that Vox termed “bridesmaid font,” you can find the old quips—and a seemingly infinite number of variations—on mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, and other items. There are gender-specific quasi-laments, like “Support Wildlife, Raise Boys” and “Mama of Drama #GirlMom.” One popular slogan proclaims, “Just a regular mama trying not to raise assholes.” The “Thou Shall Not Try Me: Mood 24:7” shirt uses both block lettering and bridesmaid font. Sometimes, bridesmaid font is combined with rap vernacular to indicate that the mother is busy and capable, as with the tees that say “Domestic Gangsta” or “Mother Hustler.” (Sassy mom merch of this sort seems to be a mostly white phenomenon; its wearers generally lean conservative, at least in their instincts about the centrality of caregiving to female identity.)

My favorite genre of mom merch broadcasts desire and dependence: “Mamacita Needs a Margarita,” for instance. There’s an entire subcategory that specifies what “mama runs on”: caffeine, chaos, and cuss words, or Jesus and Chick-fil-A, or Starbucks and pixie dust. Lately, as best I can tell, the most common set of helpmeets are the slant-rhyming trio of coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime. The origins of this meme are murky—it evokes Dunkin’s wildly successful “America Runs on Dunkin” ad campaign, which was launched in 2006, though the meme doesn’t appear to date back much earlier than 2017. Amazon Prime was launched in 2005; in exchange for an annual fee, the service gave members free two-day shipping on a vast array of items. Since it was first offered, the company has periodically sweetened the deal, adding perks like free video streaming, which, judging from Google Trends, may have caused a spike in interest, in 2011. By 2016, nearly half of U.S. households reportedly had Prime subscriptions. As health care, child care, housing, and education got more expensive and harder to manage, Amazon got easier to use, and its discounts remained steep—it could minimize errand-running hours, giving people more time to do various forms of paid and unpaid work. For people with chronic illnesses or disabilities, in particular, Prime can feel like a dedicated helper. And for mothers, who are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic labor whether or not they work outside the home, Prime—or, more specifically, Amazon’s hidden chain of underpaid warehouse workers and delivery drivers, who often endure dangerous conditions to keep up with the company’s demands—can function almost as a second self, or a sister wife: saving money, remembering toilet paper, getting birthday presents just in time.

On Etsy, as of this writing, there are more than five hundred listings that mention Amazon Prime. A few are starter kits for people who’ve signed up as delivery drivers with Amazon Flex, an Uber-esque contract gig that promises a minimum of eighteen dollars per hour but often nets its workers less than minimum wage. But most are mom merch, and most of these items directly allude to survival. Prayer, dry shampoo, Amazon Prime; caffeine, Target, Amazon Prime: this, the shirts and doormats and wall hangings say, is how moms get it done. Kristia Rumbley, a mother of three in Alabama who runs an online store called the Tiger’s Trunk, told me that “This mom runs on coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime” was the first mom-themed T-shirt that she designed and sold, in 2017. At the time, she was new to the Etsy world—she’d worked for a long time as a school counsellor, but had quit to take care of her newborn twins. She’d seen the Amazon Prime meme on Facebook and liked it. “I had no idea that smartass mom shirts were really a thing,” she told me. “I sort of thought I was inventing it.” The shirt sold “really, really well,” she said, as did all the other sassy mom merch.

Rumbley recently pulled the shirt from her store, fearing that Amazon would see it as a trademark violation—she’d written to the company to see if she could get permission to use the wording, but it never replied. (Amazon does not seem terribly concerned about such products, judging from how widely available they are.) Rumbley told me that she often has online conversations with her customers, who are mostly other mothers. “We’ll talk for a bit, we’ll find that we’re like-minded,” she said. “There’s so much Pinterest-y mom stuff out here. Everyone’s trying to put on a show. When you put out a little signal on a shirt, like, ‘I’m struggling too,’ it starts a conversation. Anytime I wear something like that, I always have people comment, or I get those random smiles. It’s sort of like when you’re nursing in public: someone gives you a smile and a thumbs-up, and you know you’re O.K.”

Social media exacerbates two competing impulses in the performance of one’s everyday self: aspiration and honesty. Women, in particular, find these impulses rewarded on the Internet, where the ever-present cultural interest in female desirability and failure—in encouraging women to balance atop pedestals in part because it is satisfying to watch them fall off—is codified in the form of public comments and likes. My colleague Carrie Battan recently wrote about the rise of the “getting real” moment for Instagram influencers, in which women who have built their public identities on meeting an ideal version of womanhood offer a moment of catharsis to their audience: all of this is constructed, they say, and it’s anxiety-inducing, and there’s so much that you don’t see. But this form of expression doesn’t seem to cut back on aspiration so much as complicate it—women are now encouraged to be both very perfect and very honest at once.

The mom-centric Internet has been working out this tension for almost two decades: so-called mommy bloggers turned aspirational honesty into a profitable genre long before Instagram existed. (Quite a few of the best-known mommy bloggers have since upended the lives that looked so perfectly-imperfect-but-mostly-really-perfect, getting divorced, or leaving their religion, or both.) Social media and smartphones have brought motherhood real talk to minimally hierarchical online spaces, such as Facebook groups and messaging apps like Marco Polo. “People ask for support, people talk about things that might be embarrassing elsewhere,” Heather Plouff, an Etsy seller in New Hampshire and a mother of three, told me. “The hashtag #momlife is this big community, where we’re all a little sassy, and we love our children, but we also know that children can be a real pain in the ass.” (...)

In March, Molly Langmuir wrote a profile for Elle of the women behind Unicorn Moms, a community of mothers who are attempting to resist judgment in a way that nonetheless seems to be extremely judgment-conscious. The “Unicorn Moms” Instagram page, which has about ninety thousand followers, declares that the Unicorn Mom is “not perfect, enjoys alcohol, has a sense of humor & couldn’t care less what you think. Also, Beautiful; Boss Bitch & Zero F#&Ks Given.” Many of the memes on the Unicorn Mom page are joking complaints about husbands, children, housework, and conventional expectations. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton noted in the Cut, the Unicorn Moms reflected a new phase in the mom-centric Internet: the construction of “the #perfectlyimperfect mom.” This mother “may not be perfect, but she has tried very, very hard to be—and is making peace with her ‘limitations.’ ” Perfection, in other words, still provides the vocabulary and sets the tone. What’s missing from this dialogue, as Langmuir wrote in Elle, “is the larger context, this system in which there’s no way to win, not for any of us.”

by Jia Tolentino, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Erika Smith / Connie Pierce / Hand Made Plus Lovely

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Helmut A. P. Grieshaber (German, 1909–1981) - Darbietung, Woodcut in colors, 66,4 x 85,9 cm (1954)

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How to Have a True Hobby, Not a Side Hustle

It’s Monday, you’ve just gotten home from work, and you’re blessedly free from social obligations for the night. You heat up some takeout, plop down on the couch clutching your phone … and start to scroll through Instagram. Then you switch over to Facebook. Then you power up your laptop and look for something good to watch on Hulu.

All of a sudden, you’ve been on the couch for three hours. Your shoulders are stiff and your vision is a little blurry. You feel oddly stressed out, having essentially done nothing since you got home.

But the next time you reach for your smartphone or tablet out of habit — or boredom — consider a more fulfilling alternative: find a hobby, or an activity that you do purely for pleasure and relaxation, not for work or necessity.

When unexpectedly facing free time, many of us choose a path of low resistance, maybe by throwing in a load of laundry, slathering on a face mask, and streaming the latest episode of Succession. It’s no wonder, with so many obligations, people, and social platforms vying for our attention. Most of us now spend our waking hours sitting at desks plugged into a computer, squeezing in time for exercise — making that a job, as well — and packing our schedules with “required” social activities, like team-building exercises, networking events, and school fundraisers.

We might want a hobby, but we just don’t feel like we have enough time. But we may have more time than we think: According to the 2019 Bureau of Labor and Statistics Survey, Americans have roughly five hours of leisure hours per day that they use to socialize, relax, or engage in activities — with men reporting 49 more minutes each day than women. Still, watching TV takes up more than half of those hours.

When we do make use of those leisure hours, our hustle culture leaves us with no moment unaccounted for — because we feel that even our “free” moments must involve the pursuit of excellence, money, self-improvement, and “growth.” So our leisure activities often turn into a race to see who can do it the best — running becomes about completing marathons, or knitting turns into a quest to become a crafting influencer. As Tim Wu wrote for the New York Times, “We’re afraid of being bad at [hobbies]. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time.”

Selin A. Malkoc, a marketing professor at Ohio State University who studies how leisure can contribute to our overall happiness, echoes this sentiment. The problem with finding a hobby, she says, is compounded when so many of us “do yoga because we want to be a yoga master.” Instead, Malkoc says, it’s perfectly fine to do it just because we want to relax.

But making time for non-essential activities is, in fact, essential. Challenging leisure activities — such as hobbies — improve mental and physical wellbeing, foster learning, and build communities. Oh — and it’s fun!

Here are five ways to find, and keep, a fulfilling hobby.

by Hope Reese, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Zac Freeland/Vox
[ed. I took up the motorcycle at 60. It's never too late.]

Did We Ever Know the Real Kamala Harris?

Just as California is so often viewed from afar as either glittering paradise or dystopian disaster, so Kamala Harris was crowned as the perfect Democrat for 2020.

Like her state, Senator Harris’s story up close is both more prosaic and more nuanced than the shiny image built in part on misperceptions about California. Now that she has dropped out of the presidential race, the legacy of her campaign may be what the candidacy illustrates about the complexity and reality of politics in the Golden State. (...)

California has had, by design, weak political parties, epitomized by the current system that replaced traditional primaries with an election in which voters choose the “top two” candidates, who then face off on the November ballot. San Francisco is an anomaly, the one metropolis where politics is a sport. Political machines have flourished in the city since the late 19th century, when Christopher Buckley, known as the Blind Boss, consolidated power from the back room of his saloon by establishing a patronage system. A century later, Kamala Harris rooted herself in the political establishment and forged connections with help from her longtime mentor and onetime boyfriend Willie Brown, the powerful Assembly speaker and then San Francisco mayor.

Those connections helped the young prosecutor become a boldface name in the society pages and in the copy of the legendary columnist Herb Caen. Ms. Harris won her first race in 2003, unseating the incumbent district attorney, with support from law enforcement unions, The San Francisco Chronicle and the political and social elite of San Francisco.

From the small city with outsize visibility, she built a national profile. In 2008, Ms. Harris was California co-chairwoman for her friend Barack Obama; within days of his historic victory, she announced her candidacy for California attorney general, a race still two years away. Oprah Winfrey put her on O magazine’s “Power List.” A column in USA Today pronounced her “the female Barack Obama,” “destined to become a commanding presence in the political life of this country.”

Perhaps one of the greatest fallacies about California politics is the assumption that its Democratic leaders are by definition die-hard liberals. By necessity, Democrats who win statewide have actually been moderates. That remains true even in an era when no Republican has won statewide since 2006. Last year, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein trounced her liberal opponent, despite his endorsement by the state Democratic Party.

Even Gavin Newsom, the most liberal governor in decades, got his start in San Francisco by defeating a Green Party candidate for mayor, the same year Ms. Harris unseated the city’s progressive district attorney by running a tough-on-crime campaign. In her 2010 race for attorney general she arguably ran to the right of her Republican opponent on some issues. He championed efforts to ease the state’s three-strikes law and later supported a successful ballot initiative to that end; Ms. Harris, by then attorney general, declined to take a position.

As attorney general, she disappointed California liberals through both actions and the lack of action. That did not hamper her ability to burnish her national credentials. She addressed the 2012 Democratic National Convention in a prime-time slot. Her name was floated as a potential United States attorney general, even a Supreme Court justice.

Yet she remained largely unknown in California — a function of the staggering size of a state of almost 40 million where the principal way to gain exposure requires television ads in a dozen media markets, at a cost of upward of $4.5 million a week. When Ms. Harris ran for the United States Senate in 2016, six out of 10 registered voters had no impression of her, although she had been attorney general for almost six years. In recent polls, about a quarter of voters still had no opinion.

That reality undercut a key argument cited by pundits who labeled her an instant front-runner when she entered the presidential race. Their scenarios assumed she would do well in the delegate-rich California primary, moved up to March to have more impact on the race. (...)

And then there is the role of California in the age of President Trump. His victory coincided with Ms. Harris’s election to the Senate and fueled a sense of inevitability about her candidacy. She was the prosecutor who could take on the president. From the state that had become the heart of the resistance came the candidacy fueled by anti-Trump anger and California glitter.

At her January kickoff in Oakland, a huge crowd of all ages and races waved flags, pumped fists, teared up. They cheered her passion, her toughness and her rhetoric. But above all they were cheering for a woman who would take on the man whose name she never mentioned.

This, too, was not quite what it seemed. It was easy to conflate antipathy to Mr. Trump with support for Ms. Harris. By the time she appeared in Oakland eight months later at a low-key event to open her campaign office, the questions were about polls that showed her running a distant fourth in her home state, fourth even in the Bay Area, where they knew her best.

by Miriam Pawel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

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Billie Eilish

The Best Albums of 2019 (The Ringer)

“Duh,” as the kids say. (Do the kids really say “duh”? Are they using “duh” ironically to further mock doddering old people? Shit.) No young artist screams THE FUTURE louder, or whispers YOU ARE PROBABLY NOT THE FUTURE with more alluring malice than this actual teenager on this actual postapocalyptic pop masterpiece.

[ed. Uhmm, well... okay, I guess. We all need to keep up (over 650 million views in 8 months!). See also: Billie Eilish Doesn’t Know Van Halen (Rolling Stone).]

Cookie-Cutter Suburbs Could Help Spread Sustainable Yards

Yards in Austin, Tex., look like most across the country: sprawling expanses of short, uniform grass. But when intense Texas droughts set in, dead brown patches deface the Kelly green monochrome. Instead of repeatedly replanting these patches with the typical sod, the homeowner association of one Austin neighborhood, Travis Country, offers another option: filling in the brown spots with less-thirsty native species. As Cynthia Wilcox, the association’s grounds committee chair, puts it: “When your grass gets big dead spots, stop fighting it.” About 750 homeowners—half of the subdivision—have taken this advice. Roughly 500 of those homes have gone even further, landscaping much of their property with drought-tolerant native species such as long-bladed buffalo grass, slender salvia stalks and mountain laurel trees, which drip with purple blossoms that some people think smell like grape soda.

With homeowner associations often focused on projecting a uniform, ideal suburban image, it is rare for one to suggest—let alone allow—such a landscape shift. But precisely because these groups (usually called HOAs) establish and enforce aesthetic rules for millions of American yards, they could be a way to spread sustainable practices promoted by conservationists—while also helping subdivisions tackle problems ranging from unsightly lawn splotches to polluting fertilizer runoff. Some conservation programs are testing ways to overcome sociological and economic hurdles to get HOAs to embrace such changes, or at least not oppose them.

Residential lawns in the U.S. suck up a lot of water. EPA data show that, on average, 15 percent of residential water use involves lawns—which cover three times more land than crops irrigated for agriculture, according to NOAA and NASA research. Furthermore, grass fertilizer can run off into nearby streams, ponds or other water bodies, sometimes fueling algae blooms. And using homogenous flora such as commercial lawn grass species across many geographic zones dilutes local biodiversity; the practice has been linked to at least one native species decline, as introduced plants replace the native vegetation to which local wildlife has long adapted.

Conservationists have argued that some of these problems could be avoided if people made more diverse landscaping choices that support native species. In arid parts of the West, for example, landscaping a yard with local, drought-tolerant species and opting for mulch over grass can cut household water use by 30 percent. Native turfgrasses (which can replace typical lawn grass species) sprout fewer weeds and grow more slowly, reducing the need for mowing and its associated carbon emissions. Susannah Lerman, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also found that lawns mowed less frequently supported more bees.

These changes can be hard sells for some residents, though, sometimes because they belong to homeowner associations with strict rules on yard appearance. HOAs are usually run by a handful of elected residents of a subdivision or neighborhood, but long-standing rules—such as grass being kept below a certain height—can come to be at odds with residents’ changing desires. In new subdivisions HOA rules may actually be established by developers, not the residents who ultimately move in. And sometimes, residents within an HOA are surprised by how strict landscaping rules are, or may disagree on yard upkeep standards. HOAs can fine people found in violation of rules, and conflicts over lawn care sometimes escalate to lawsuits. About 80 percent of new U.S. subdivision residents belong to an HOA, according to a July 2019 study in the Journal of Urban Economics.

“It is a little alarming for those of us who work in landscapes and sustainability to know that HOAs have a lot of influence and power over how a lot of our urban areas look,” says Gail Hansen, a professor of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida. But she and others are trying to turn that dynamic of enforced uniformity into an advantage by prodding HOAs to broaden their definition of what an acceptable yard looks like, in order to boost native-friendly landscaping across a community rather than rely on piecemeal efforts by environmentally minded homeowners. Sometimes that includes creating government programs, enacting state or local laws—or simply speaking with HOAs and residents themselves.

For over 30 years, a state government program has encouraged Florida residents to switch to sustainable landscapes with plants that are pest-resistant, drought-tolerant and thrive in most conditions, Hansen says. In northern Florida that could include the silvery pineapple guava shrub, while in the south an evergreen called natal plum can be kept trimmed low serve as groundcover. State law dictates that HOAs cannot prevent residents from planting these “Florida-Friendly” options. However, HOAs can still push back if homeowners choose plants or designs that do not meet neighborhood aesthetic standards. Hansen speaks with residents about how the initiative can work within HOA rules, and she also sometimes persuades board members to rewrite their mandates to accommodate the program. There are about 500 yards certified with the program, with still more properties practicing at least some of the recommended conservation measures. Last year a majority of the more than 220,000 attendees of water conservation workshops taught by University of Florida extension faculty reported scaling back their lawn watering afterwards.

Leslie Nemo, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Getty

SNAP Judgement

President Trump, a very rich guy who promised to help not-rich people get ahead but so far hasn’t, is pushing rules that would place new limits on a program that helps poor people buy food.

The push isn’t new, but it’s getting new attention due to an Urban Institute study that concluded the rules, if they’d been in place last year, would have reduced the main federal food aid program’s rolls by 3.7 million people — as well as cut food stamp spending by about $4.2 billion. Remember that number for later.

There’s a lot of wonkery in exactly how the administration’s rules would affect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — “SNAP” in policy-circle shorthand and “food stamps” for just about everyone else. But the gist is that they would require more people to work a certain number of hours in order to get food stamps, place limits on how long some people can remain on the program, and change the rules for enrollment. There are also a lot of experts arguing over whether the people losing benefits really deserved to have them to begin with.

But if you have your own work to do and life to live and don’t have time for a policy deep dive, here are the basics of the situation: Some, probably very small fraction of the people who would lose food stamps probably don’t need need them. Instead, they are getting small payments that help them get enough to eat in the richest country on earth while also paying rent and maybe even (horrors!) buying some stuff that wasn’t absolutely necessary. But some of the people — likely a far greater number of people — who’d lose food stamp payments really do need those benefits to get themselves and their families enough to eat. Without those benefits, they’ll either go hungry or make other, painful sacrifices that rich people have never thought about in their lives.

There are two main arguments conservatives have marshalled in support of food stamp cuts, and they’re both dishonest. Work requirements are often touted as an effort to nudge (starve) people into self-sufficiency. This is based on the assumption that people are sitting contentedly on their food stamp payments and skipping out on all sorts of employment opportunities that would vault them into prosperity. That’s not a great assumption. National unemployment may be low, but that doesn’t mean all these people have the required experience for jobs that they can find, and get to, and afford adequate childcare while they attend.

Supporters of the requirements often claim to be helping poor people access “the dignity of work,” meaning that it’s inherently more satisfying to get paid for work than to depend on public support. That may well be true, provided your boss isn’t abusive and your work conditions are safe and, at the end of the month, your paycheck covers your expenses and maybe even leaves a bit left to save for the future. But you won’t hear those people talking about the “dignity of work” when it comes to organizing workers into unions that protect them from abusive management or unsafe conditions. Nor do they pipe up in favor of the “the dignity of a living wage.” In fact, the people who favor work requirements near universally oppose unions and minimum wage hikes. Go figure.

The other argument for making it harder for poor people to buy food is somehow even flimsier. And that’s the need for fiscal responsibility when it comes to the federal budget. The United States government this year will spend nearly $1 trillion more than it takes in, financing the rest by borrowing money. By now, all that borrowing has added up to, by most calculations, something north of $20 trillion. And so to deal with that debt, many conservatives say, we need to cut spending on “entitlements” — a term for helping people buy food or make ends meet or access health care through Medicaid.

This isn’t a particularly credible argument, given that the deficit could be shrunk by raising taxes on the wealthy and upper middle class, or on the corporations whose poverty wages leave millions of working Americans dependent on government programs. But it’s revealed to be a comically disingenuous argument once you remember the Trump administration’s signature domestic “achievement”: tax breaks that will add at least $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, according to Congress’s official, nonpartisan accounting agency. The tab will actually be far higher if, as Republicans promise, Congress extends tax cuts for individuals that are currently set to expire. But at a baseline, that works out to about $150 billion annually, which, if math isn’t your thing, is approximately a fuckton more than the $4.2 billion they want to “save” on food stamps.

by Patrick Reas, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: John Moore/Getty
[ed. Or they could cut the military's $750 billion annual budget by about half of one percent. See also: New SNAP Rules Will Cause a National Public Health Crisis (Jacobin). Update: Yes, they did it (NY Times).]

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Why Can’t Internet Companies Stop Awful Content?

For the first two decades of the commercial Internet, we celebrated the Internet as one of society's greatest inventions. After all, the Internet has led to truly remarkable outcomes: it has helped overthrow repressive political regimes, made economic markets more efficient, created safe spaces for otherwise marginalized communities to find their voices, and led to the most exquisite cat videos ever seen.

But in the last few years, public perceptions of the Internet have plummeted. We've lost trust in the Internet giants, who seem to have too much power and make missteps daily. We also are constantly reminded of all of the awful and antisocial ways that people interact with each other over the Internet. We are addicted to the Internet—but we don't really love it any more.

Many of us are baffled by the degradation of the Internet. We have the ingenuity to put men on the Moon (unfortunately, only men so far), so it defies logic that the most powerful companies on Earth can't fix this. With their wads of cash and their smart engineers, they should nerd harder.

So why does the Internet feel like it's getting worse, not better? And, more importantly, what do we do about it?

It was always thus

Let's start with the feeling that the Internet is getting worse. Perhaps this reflects an overly romantic view of the past. The Internet has always had low-value content. Remember the Hamster Dance or the Turkish "I Kiss You" memes?

More generally, though, this feeling reflects our overly romantic view of the offline world. People are awful to each other, both online and off. So the Internet is a mirror of our society, and as the Internet merges into everyday life, it will reflect the many ways that people are awful to each other. No amount of nerding harder will change this baseline of antisocial behavior.

Furthermore, the Internet reflects the full spectrum of human activity, from great to awful. With the Internet's proliferation—and with its lack of gatekeepers—we will inevitably see more content at the borders of propriety, or content that is OK with some audiences but not with others. We've also seen the rise of weaponized political content, including from state-sponsored entities, designed to propagandize or to pit communities against each other.

There is no magical way to eliminate problematic content or ensure it reaches only people who are OK with it. By definition, this content reflects edge cases where mistakes are most common, and it often requires external context to properly understand. That context won't be available to either the humans or the machines assessing its propriety. The result is those infamous content moderation blunders, such as Facebook's removal of the historic "Napalm Girl" photo or YouTube's misclassification of fighting robot videos as animal abuse. And even if the full amount of necessary context were available, both humans and machines are susceptible to biases that will make their decisions seem wrong to at least one audience segment.

There's a more fundamental reason why Internet companies can never successfully moderate content for a mass audience. Content moderation is a zero-sum game. With every content decision, the Internet companies make winners and losers. The winners get the results they wanted; the losers don't. Hence, there's no way to create win-win content-moderation decisions. Internet companies can—and are trying to—improve their content moderation efforts. But dissatisfaction with that process is inevitable regardless of how good a job the Internet companies do.

So given that Internet companies can never eliminate awful content, what should regulators do?

The downside of “getting tough”

One regulatory impulse is to crack down harder on Internet companies, forcing them to do more to clean up the Internet. Unfortunately, tougher laws are unlikely to achieve the desired outcomes for three reasons.

First, because of its zero-sum nature, it's impossible to make everyone happy with the content moderation process. Worse, if any law enables lawsuits over content moderation decisions, this virtually ensures that every decision will be "litigation bait."

Second, tougher laws tend to favor incumbents. Google and Facebook are OK with virtually any regulatory intervention because these companies mint money and can afford any compliance cost. But the companies that hope to dethrone Google and Facebook may not survive the regulatory gauntlet long enough to compete.

Third, some laws expect Internet companies to essentially eliminate antisocial behavior on their sites. Those laws ignore the baseline level of antisocial behavior in the offline world, which effectively makes Internet companies liable for the human condition.

The logical consequence of "tougher" Internet laws is clear but chilling. Google and Facebook will likely survive the regulatory onslaught, but few other user-generated content services will. Instead, if they are expected to achieve impossible outcomes, they will shut down all user-generated content.

In its place, some of those services will turn to professionally generated content, which has lower legal exposure and is less likely to contain antisocial material. These services will have to pay for professionally generated content, and ad revenue won't be sufficient to cover the licensing costs. As a result, these services will set up paywalls to charge users for access to their databases of professionally licensed content. We will shift from a world where virtually everyone has global publication reach to a world where most readers will pay for access to a much less diverse universe of content.

In other words, the Internet will resemble the cable industry circa the mid-1990s, where cable subscribers paid monthly subscription fees to access a large but limited universe of professionally produced content. All of the other benefits we currently associate with user-generated content will just be fond memories of Gen Xers and millennials.

by Eric Goldman and Jess Miers, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Aurich Lawson/Getty