The New Age of Social Engineering

Why have so many online social networks failed to form healthy communities, and instead gained notoriety as hostile spaces? I argue that the reason these platforms have failed is because they didn’t learn the lessons taught by the High Moderns when humans were first faced with the challenge of engineering alongside systems that were built through millennia of natural evolution. In a chaotic environment such as human social relations, a different engineering approach is necessary to ensure that more good is done than harm. To gain the skills necessary to make these projects a success we need to learn from the history of social environments themselves, and of human engineering strategies. What follows is the story of social evolution becoming social engineering, how the meaning of both has changed radically in the last 20 years, and what this means for designers in the new Information Era.

Part 1 — Ten millenniums of social engineering

A key part of my thesis is that the way our social environment is formed has changed over the course of human history, and more rapidly in recent years. How do we know that to be true? Much of the work I’m building on comes out of the accounts provided by The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, as well as Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. There are many things that I disagree with in these works, but I think they both get to the core idea that there exist two main ways in which human society develops. One of those ways is via an evolutionary process, where some societies develop some technique that aids in survival and flourishing, pass it on, and end up growing and outcompeting other societies. The people practicing these traditions often don’t have concrete knowledge as to why they work, but they become enshrined as tradition because they help the group succeed. This goes from knowledge about what plants are edible, to complex ideas like how the group should be structured. On the other hand, there is social engineering. In social engineering, explicit models of human behavior are used to derive new social conventions and structures. Usually this doesn’t mean designing something new from whole cloth, but instead an effective synthesis of ideas that the culture has generated over time into a compelling ideological canon or into new distinct institutions.

For most of human history, we relied primarily on social evolution instead of social engineering. This was for good reason: social engineering when done poorly is very often worse than social evolution. A mother who breaks tradition and tries feeding new plants to their children because she doesn’t know of any reason those plants are harmful may discover unexpected side effects of their consumption. This reality is often referred to as Chesterton’s fence, and is often discussed as an argument in favor of traditionalism. However, much of the social and technological progress of the industrial era has through the rejection of tradition. How do we square these conflicting forces? I think that a key reason is simply because for a society to succeed in social engineering, a detailed historical record and careful specialists are usually necessary. Only in this way can new first principle knowledge be solidified and built-upon. It’s for that reason that the societies that appear the most engineered also in general tend to be those with more detailed historical records and information about other differing societies. When one is able to see the culture “from above”, that unique perspective can enable one to design an effective institutions.

One excellent example is perhaps one of the most successful early cultural engineers, Confucius. The Great Teacher developed his unique philosophy while travelling around China and seeing various social issues, their causes, and the variety of different social structures present in China at the time. By synthesizing these insights into a central canon, he created an enduring cultural institution that was central to Chinese administration for centuries. Of course it is true that Confucianism relies heavily on tradition, and can in some ways be considered no more than a collection of various preexisting traditions, but its success indicates that it must have some quality beyond that of the constituent parts. Ultimately, Confucianism and the society it created lost supremacy because while it itself was a result of synthesis, it became unable to assimilate or change at pace with the world it inhabited. What once created a powerful bureaucratic class capable of financing great discoveries, ended up as a chain that left the society unable to appreciate the possibility of learning from outside influences. Innovation became tradition, and tradition cannot change course by its very nature.

Part 2 — Modernity

We’re going to leave behind ancient societies, because although they are a rich source of insight, others have better studied those trends in depth than I. Instead we are going to turn to look at the relatively modern. I am going to focus for a minute on the United States. For all that American Exceptionalism is a real risk, I think there is something somewhat unique and interesting about the formation of the US. Specifically, the US is one of the best examples of what I consider full social engineering. A group of people sat down in a room and set out to design, in a written legal document, how its society would function. It was a group of what can only be called engineers who set out to design structures to improve upon the governments they were aware of. They didn’t just try and say “tyranny is bad so we won’t be tyrants,” they tried to engineer complex social structures that took advantage of human behavior in order to guide the behavior of the government — independent of any single political actor. The idea of applying contractual thinking to the structure of our nations and institutions didn’t start with the US, but the US can be seen as a culmination of those ideas. This project has had varied success to say the least, but it’s notable that so many modern institutions function in this way. A group of founders get together and try to set the community’s direction at both an object and meta-level. Just as the objects and tools we use have become increasingly engineered, so too have our institutions become influenced by engineering. The evolution and design of social norms is at the heart of what we call society. I would venture to say that it is the defining feature of the human species, and of intelligent species in general. TheMachiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis posits that intelligence arose, not to better use tools or better hunt prey, but instead to better compete in the social arena. Therefore, I think it’s fair to say the top down engineering in the world of social norms faces an uphill battle to outperform the metis of the traditional culture. However, this applies much less when we turn our eyes towards the engineering of the physical spaces our cultures occupy.

Social Engineering in the context of the physical is about the design of objects and spaces in the traditional engineering sense, but with a consideration to how that design influences the group rather than the individual. It’s obvious that a designer making a chair must consider how the chair interacts with the behaviors and preferences of the person who will eventually use the chair. This same thoughtfulness should be applied, and usually is, when dealing with objects and spaces that drive social interaction. Someone trying to build a successful bar will think carefully about the layout and decoration of the space and how that will influence their patrons. They may think about other layouts they’ve seen and how they might improve on those designs in order to give the space the mood they want.The pub is undeniably a social institution, and it is designed to both encourage and discourage certain types of social behavior. Every space you interact with, from the supermarket to the sidewalk, has generations of trial, error, and improvement. That doesn’t mean every space is perfect, but it’s easy to forget the marvel that is present all around us. However, it is the process of conscious engineering that has also introduced many institutions that are detrimental to healthy communities. (...)

Part 3 — The Internet

The internet has opened up a new frontier in the design of social institution. We are designing platforms that are used by wide masses of people, that grow more quickly than any historical analog, and that provide unprecedented levers of control over discourse. Facebook was founded in 2004; ten years later there were more monthly active Facebook users than Catholics. The ability to implement a new social institution with basically no startup cost and end up with this much influence is unprecedented, and thus it’s not surprising that we’ve seen so many instances of the new social internet having issues with healthy discourse. So much of the evolutionary work that went into shaping our meatspace social institutions has been ignored during the construction of these new online spaces. Platform designers often repeat the mistakes of the High Moderns. The users of the platforms are rarely given a voice in discussions, and are frequently treated as antagonists rather than stakeholders. Worst of all, centralized platforms have very little immediate incentives to improve the quality of discourse, as network effects prevent users from easily moving to a nicer competitor. Network operators are encouraged to gain users as fast as possible, keep them in the space as long as possible to view ads, and completely ignore the social well-being of the communities that form. Additionally, online platforms provide a nigh microscopic level of control over the interactions between users. Someone designing a bar can choose the layout of the tables and the lighting, but an online platform designer can run automated testing to determine what text, fonts, and layouts best guide the user into behaving in a desired way. In the case of platforms like YouTube, complex AI systems are constantly optimizing every nanometer of the system to maximize ad revenue.

In the early days of the internet there was a lot of optimism about the ability of the web to bring people together, to form new understanding between distant peoples, and to provide an escape from tyranny. It’s important to recognize some of the successes on these fronts. I regularly communicate with people from other nations, and that has helped give me a broader view of the world and of differing cultural norms. However, anybody can see that we have failed to live up to this early promise. Most of the social spaces online were driven in design by technological constraints and financial motives, not by a consistent dedication to building prosocial institutions. The rapid expansion of the internet has left engineers struggling to make their websites function at all, let alone spend resources on deep analysis of user behaviors. Such work is only done by established players with the goal of increasing revenue, and thus almost inevitably results in a worsening of user experiences because of misaligned incentives. To fix these issues we need both philosophical changes and technological changes.

by VivaLaPanda, LessWrong | Read more:
Image: Portrait of K’ung Fu-tzu (Latinised to Confucius).Copyright Bridgeman Images. via

Elliott Erwitt, Pink Panther parade, NYC 1988. 

via:

What Is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Afraid Of?

The great irony of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s television shows is that the dialogue gushes forth with the insistence of a burst hydrant, and yet the most beguiling moments are the ones in which no one speaks at all. Midway through the third season of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a man and a woman whose chemistry has smoldered almost since the show’s inception find themselves alone, in the early hours of the morning, at a hotel. They gaze at each other. They each glance meaningfully through the open door toward a bed. They say nothing. The energy is so heightened and so loaded with expectation that I couldn’t have stopped watching if the room around me had suddenly caught on fire.

The five hours or so that preceded it, though, had mostly the opposite effect, where any scenes without Rachel Brosnahan’s unsinkable comic Midge Maisel—and even a few with her—were either inert or insufferable. What used to feel like Sherman-Palladino trademarks now come across as tics: the barrage of inane chatter; the superficial stereotyping; the overreliance on spectacle without substance, like a dinner composed entirely of cake pops. More vexing than anything, though, is how defiantly The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel refuses to have stakes. Everything plays out in the same major key. Everything—lost children, homelessness, divorce, social injustice—is just a joke, bedazzled and glib and gorgeous. This is a series so vacantly uplifting, it’s managed to transfigure Lenny Bruce into Prince Charming.

While the show has always been this way, previous seasons have always had something specific to elevate them: Midge’s talent. Over the first eight episodes, Midge evolved from serene housewife to jilted single parent to accidental comedian to blacklisted talent with breathtaking velocity. Her discovery—after her weaselly husband’s departure prompts her to take a drunken subway ride to a downtown comedy club—that she could make rooms of people laugh was the kind of fairytale moment that was easy to believe in, because Brosnahan’s performance was so entrancing. Onstage, Midge dazzles, even when she bombs. And in the first two seasons, the show seemed to suggest that Midge wasn’t satisfied being merely funny; she had the kind of ambition that can change the world she inhabits, redefining the way people think about women, comedy, and especially the two together.

But great comedy has to acknowledge darkness, which Mrs. Maisel has always resisted. The presence of Bruce as a character (played in magnetic, Emmy-winning style by Luke Kirby) seemed to suggest that Midge’s comedy might skirt the edges of propriety. But apart from a wine-soaked interlude in Episode 1 where she bared her breasts onstage and was arrested, her routine has played it safe, rarely advancing beyond the subjects of sex, failure, and men having the privilege of comfortable shoes. (...)

It’s frustrating, because the show keeps hinting that it’s edging toward more substantial fare, only to back out at the last minute. The running joke wherein strangers mistake Susie for a man wasn’t funny to begin with—now it only draws attention to how timidly the show avoids the subject of Susie herself, and her desires. When Midge accepted in Season 2 that pursuing greatness in comedy would mean sacrificing personal happiness and stability, I thought the show might be going somewhere groundbreaking. Instead, Midge dispatched with her fiancé, Benjamin (Zachary Levi), as carelessly as if she were throwing out leftovers—offscreen, and with no apparent sense of loss. Midge’s chemistry with Bruce is a potent force, but the more the series leans into it, the more I have questions about how a show this ebullient is going to eventually deal with a man who died of a morphine overdose in a Hollywood bathroom.

by Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Amazon
[ed. Love the show, she does have a point.]

WTF is Grammar?

Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing, By Gretchen McCulloch

This is quite a jolly academic book written by a linguist for the general reader about internet language. It has already had considerable success in America. The curious thing is that it’s a book at all. Hasn’t the internet killed off books? Why isn’t it a podcast or a live download or whatever?

What is the language of the internet? Most of us have probably heard of LOL (or lol), omg, emojis and even memes, and come face to face with unconventional confections of exclamation marks, repeated letters and novelty punctuation. For people like us, top-end book lovers, the language of the internet might seem, well, rather ghastly: illiterate, limited, debased, invasive like Japanese knotweed, a frightful triffid threatening to obliterate decent standards of communication. They, the internet lovers, if they even bother to glance in our direction, will think: omg!!!!11!!! sad lol.

I recently heard of somebody who no longer laughs. Instead she says ‘lol’, which might be a new internet way of laughing. An urban myth, perhaps, but there’s a common assumption that too much online activity transforms people into zombies in ‘real’ life. As is perhaps inevitable, linguists like Gretchen McCulloch take a different view.

The internet has turned millions of people into writers. On Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and so on, the medium to some extent dictates the message, which is casual, colloquial and nonstandard. The idea that dialect and deviations from ‘correct’ grammar and vocabulary are not ‘wrong’ but deliberate, efficient and possibly even creative is hardly new. All the same, it’s encouraging that McCulloch repeats it. Take lol, for instance. Research reveals a certain sophistication in its use. It occurs only at the beginning or end of an utterance, never both and never in the middle. For example, in ‘got a lot of homework lol’, the addition of lol removes any sense of whining and self-pity; in ‘what are you doing out so late lol’, it makes the message less demanding or reproving. Repeated letters often occur in emotive words: ‘yayyyy’, ‘nooo’. McCulloch thinks it’s brilliant that silent letters are sometimes repeated too, as in ‘dumbbb’, because this creates a ‘form of emotional expression that now has no possible spoken equivalent’.

The way we communicate digitally is growing more complex. A lot of people these days send a string of separate text messages, with no punctuation whatsoever: ‘hey’ (new message) ‘how’s it going’ (new message). The break between one message and another is the equivalent of a row of dots in old-fashioned offline writing, so it’s easy-going, not insistent, and there’s a space in which the other person might reply (but doesn’t). Now, if you write ‘hey.’ it’s a TOTALLY DIFFERENT THING. Full stops are aggressive. As are capital letters.

Then we come to emojis. McCulloch’s idea is that emojis are the internet equivalent of gestures and facial expressions, many of them indeed being pictures of hands or faces. This explains why they got so popular in about five minutes and stayed that way. Millions use emojis every second. Smiley face is the one we all know. Apparently if you’re a teenager and you send a declaration of love to someone heart emoji, heart emoji, heart emoji and they come back smiley face, that’s the worst. It means not interested in a nice way. Well, that gets that over and done with. I’ve sometimes stumbled on the emoji catalogue on my phone. I can’t make head or tail of a lot of them – all those yellow heads with different patches of blue, and the one with heart sunglasses. Does it signify something different to the plain red heart? One ought to know, of course. McCulloch keeps referring to the aubergine emoji (or eggplant, actually), which is apparently rude, but what you’re supposed to do with it I’ve no idea.

by Thomas Blaikie, Literary Review | Read more:
Image: via

Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture

The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.” Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture.

Take the Tour Montparnasse, a black, slickly glass-panelled skyscraper, looming over the beautiful Paris cityscape like a giant domino waiting to fall. Parisians hated it so much that the city was subsequently forced to enact an ordinance forbidding any further skyscrapers higher than 36 meters.

Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs. The John F. Kennedy Building, for example—featurelessly grim on the outside, infuriatingly unnavigable on the inside—is where, among other things, terrified immigrants attend their deportation hearings, and where traumatized veterans come to apply for benefits. Such an inhospitable building sends a very clear message, which is: the government wants its lowly supplicants to feel confused, alienated, and afraid.

The fact is, contemporary architecture gives most regular humans the heebie-jeebies. Try telling that to architects and their acolytes, though, and you’ll get an earful about why your feeling is misguided, the product of some embarrassing misconception about architectural principles. One defense, typically, is that these eyesores are, in reality, incredible feats of engineering. After all, “blobitecture”—which, we regret to say, is a real school of contemporary architecture—is created using complicated computer-driven algorithms! You may think the ensuing blob-structure looks like a tentacled turd, or a crumpled kleenex, but that’s because you don’t have an architect’s trained eye.

Another thing you will often hear from design-school types is that contemporary architecture is honest. It doesn’t rely on the forms and usages of the past, and it is not interested in coddling you and your dumb feelings. Wake up, sheeple! Your boss hates you, and your bloodsucking landlord too, and your government fully intends to grind you between its gears. That’s the world we live in! Get used to it! Fans of Brutalism—the blocky-industrial-concrete school of architecture—are quick to emphasize that these buildings tell it like it is, as if this somehow excused the fact that they look, at best, dreary, and, at worst, like the headquarters of some kind of post-apocalyptic totalitarian dictatorship. (...)

Let’s be really honest with ourselves: a brief glance at any structure designed in the last 50 years should be enough to persuade anyone that something has gone deeply, terribly wrong with us. Some unseen person or force seems committed to replacing literally every attractive and appealing thing with an ugly and unpleasant thing. The architecture produced by contemporary global capitalism is possibly the most obvious visible evidence that it has some kind of perverse effect on the human soul. Of course, there is no accounting for taste, and there may be some among us who are naturally are deeply disposed to appreciate blobs and blocks. But polling suggests that devotees of contemporary architecture are overwhelmingly in the minority: aside from monuments, few of the public’s favorite structures are from the postwar period. (When the results of the poll were released, architects harrumphed that it didn’t “reflect expert judgment” but merely people’s “emotions,” a distinction that rather proves the entire point.) And when it comes to architecture, as distinct from most other forms of art, it isn’t enough to simply shrug and say that personal preferences differ: where public buildings are concerned, or public spaces which have an existing character and historic resonances for the people who live there, to impose an architect’s eccentric will on the masses, and force them to spend their days in spaces they find ugly and unsettling, is actually oppressive and cruel. (...)

There have, after all, been moments in the history of socialism—like the Arts & Crafts movement in late 19th-century England—where the creation of beautiful things was seen as part and parcel of building a fairer, kinder world. A shared egalitarian social undertaking, ideally, ought to be one of joy as well as struggle: in these desperate times, there are certainly more overwhelming imperatives than making the world beautiful to look at, but to decline to make the world more beautiful when it’s in your power to so, or to destroy some beautiful thing without need, is a grotesque perversion of the cooperative ideal. This is especially true when it comes to architecture. The environments we surround ourselves with have the power to shape our thoughts and emotions. People trammeled in on all sides by ugliness are often unhappy without even knowing why. If you live in a place where you are cut off from light, and nature, and color, and regular communion with other humans, it is easy to become desperate, lonely, and depressed. The question is: how did contemporary architecture wind up like this? And how can it be fixed?

For about 2,000 years, everything human beings built was beautiful, or at least unobjectionable. The 20th century put a stop to this, evidenced by the fact that people often go out of their way to vacation in “historic” (read: beautiful) towns that contain as little postwar architecture as possible. But why? What actually changed? Why does there seem to be such an obvious break between the thousands of years before World War II and the postwar period? And why does this seem to hold true everywhere? (...)

This paranoid revulsion against classical aesthetics was not so much a school of thought as a command: from now on, the architect had to be concerned solely with the large-scale form of the structure, not with silly trivialities such as gargoyles and grillwork, no matter how much pleasure such things may have given viewers. It’s somewhat stunning just how uniform the rejection of “ornament” became. Since the eclipse of Art Deco at the end of the 1930s, the intricate designs that characterized centuries of building, across civilizations, from India to Persia to the Mayans, have vanished from architecture. With only a few exceptions, such as New Classical architecture’s mixed successes in reviving Greco-Roman forms, and Postmodern architecture’s irritating attempts to parody them, no modern buildings include the kind of highly complex painting, woodwork, ironwork, and sculpture that characterized the most strikingly beautiful structures of prior eras.

The anti-decorative consensus also accorded with the artistic consensus about what kind of “spirit” 20th century architecture ought to express. The idea of transcendently “beautiful” architecture began to seem faintly ludicrous in a postwar world of chaos, conflict, and alienation. Life was violent, discordant, and uninterpretable. Art should not aspire to futile goals like transcendence, but should try to express the often ugly, brutal, and difficult facts of human beings’ material existence. To call a building “ugly” was therefore no longer an insult: for one thing, the concept of ugliness had no meaning. But to the extent that it did, art could and should be ugly, because life is ugly, and the highest duty of art is to be honest about who we are rather than deluding us with comforting fables.

This idea, that architecture should try to be “honest” rather than “beautiful,” is well expressed in an infamously heated 1982 debate at the Harvard School of Design between two architects, Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander. Eisenman is a well-known “starchitect” whose projects are inspired by the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and whose forms are intentionally chaotic and grating. Eisenman took his duty to create “disharmony” seriously: one Eisenman-designed house so departed from the normal concept of a house that its owners actually wrote an entire book about the difficulties they experienced trying to live in it. For example, Eisenman split the master bedroom in two so the couple could not sleep together, installed a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. In his violent opposition to the very idea that a real human being might actually attempt to live (and crap, and have sex) in one of his houses, Eisenman recalls the self-important German architect from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline  and Fall, who becomes exasperated the need to include a staircase between floors: “Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? The problem of architecture is the problem of all art: the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”

Alexander, by contrast, is one of the few major figures in architecture who believes that an objective standard of beauty is an important value for the profession; his buildings, which are often small-scale projects like gardens or schoolyards or homes, attempt to be warm and comfortable, and often employ traditional—what he calls “timeless”—design practices. In the debate, Alexander lambasted Eisenman for wanting buildings that are “prickly and strange,” and defended a conception of architecture that prioritizes human feeling and emotion. Eisenman, evidently trying his damnedest to behave like a cartoon parody of a pretentious artist, declared that he found the Chartres cathedral too boring to visit even once: “in fact,” he stated, “I have gone to Chartres a number of times to eat in the restaurant across the street — had a 1934 red Mersault wine, which was exquisite — I never went into the cathedral. The cathedral was done en passant. Once you’ve seen one Gothic cathedral, you have seen them all.” Alexander replied: “I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.”

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Atomic Gardening

Atomic gardening is a form of mutation breeding where plants are exposed to radioactive sources, typically cobalt-60, in order to generate mutations, some of which have turned out to be useful.

The practice of plant irradiation has resulted in the development of over 2000 new varieties of plants, most of which are now used in agricultural production. One example is the resistance to verticillium wilt of the "Todd's Mitcham" cultivar of peppermint which was produced from a breeding and test program at Brookhaven National Laboratory from the mid-1950s. Additionally, the Rio Star Grapefruit, developed at the Texas A&M Citrus Center in the 1970s, now accounts for over three quarters of the grapefruit produced in Texas. (...)

Despite the initial enthusiasm, the Atomic Gardening Society declined by the mid 1960s. This was due to a combination of a shifting political climate away from atomic energy and a failure on the part of the crowd sourced Society to produce noteworthy results. In spite of this, large-scale gamma gardens remained in use, and a number of commercial plant varieties were developed and released by laboratories and private companies alike.

Gamma gardens were typically five acres in size, and were arranged in a circular pattern with a retractable radiation source in the middle. Plants were usually laid out like slices of a pie, stemming from the central radiation source; this pattern produced a range of radiation doses over the radius from the center. Radioactive bombardment would take place for around twenty hours, after which scientists wearing protective equipment would enter the garden and assess the results. The plants nearest the center usually died, while the ones further out often featured "tumors and other growth abnormalities". Beyond these were the plants of interest, with a higher than usual range of mutations, though not to the damaging extent of those closer to the radiation source. These gamma gardens have continued to operate on largely the same designs as those conceived in the 1950s.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. "Ruby-red grapefruit, rice, wheat, pears, cotton, peas, sunflowers, bananas and countless other produce owe their present-day heartiness to the genetic modification afforded by atomic gardening." See also: Atomic gardening in the 1950s (Ripley's).]

ICE Creates Fake University in Michigan

A total of about 250 students have now been arrested since January on immigration violations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of a sting operation by federal agents who enticed foreign-born students, mostly from India, to attend the school that marketed itself as offering graduate programs in technology and computer studies, according to ICE officials.

Many of those arrested have been deported to India while others are contesting their removals. One has been allowed to stay after being granted lawful permanent resident status by an immigration judge.

The students had arrived legally in the U.S. on student visas, but since the University of Farmington was later revealed to be a creation of federal agents, they lost their immigration status after it was shut down in January. The school was located on Northwestern Highway near 13 Mile Road in Farmington Hills and staffed with undercover agents posing as university officials. (...)

Attorneys for the students arrested said they were unfairly trapped by the U.S. government since the Department of Homeland Security had said on its website that the university was legitimate. An accreditation agency that was working with the U.S. on its sting operation also listed the university as legitimate.

There were more than 600 students enrolled at the university, which was created a few years ago by federal law enforcement officials with ICE. Records filed with the state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) show that the University of Farmington was incorporated in January 2016.

Many of the students had enrolled with the university through a program known as Curricular Practical Training (CPT), which allows students to work in the U.S through a F-1 visa program for foreign students. Some had transferred to the University of Farmington from other schools that had lost accreditation, which means they would no longer be in immigration status and allowed to remain in the U.S.

Emails obtained by the Free Press earlier this year showed how the fake university attracted students to the university, which cost about $12,000 on average in tuition and fees per year.

The U.S. "trapped the vulnerable people who just wanted to maintain (legal immigration) status," Rahul Reddy, a Texas attorney who represented or advised some of the students arrested, told the Free Press this week. "They preyed upon on them."

The fake university is believed to have collected millions of dollars from the unsuspecting students. An email from the university's president, named Ali Milani, told students that graduate programs' tuition is $2,500 per quarter and the average cost is $1,000 per month.

"They made a lot of money," Reddy said of the U.S. government. (...)

Attorneys for ICE and the Department of Justice maintain that the students should have known it was not a legitimate university because it did not have classes in a physical location. Some CPT programs have classes combined with work programs at companies.

"Their true intent could not be clearer," Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Helms wrote in a sentencing memo this month for Rampeesa, one of the eight recruiters, of the hundreds of students enrolled. "While 'enrolled' at the University, one hundred percent of the foreign citizen students never spent a single second in a classroom. If it were truly about obtaining an education, the University would not have been able to attract anyone, because it had no teachers, classes, or educational services." (...)

Reddy said, though, that in some cases, students who transferred out from the University of Farmington after realizing they didn't have classes on-site, were still arrested.

by Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press | Read more:
Image: Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press
[ed. Your tax dollars at work.]

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.]