This is Amazon Dating!
(No, it isn't real. Yet.)
by David Pescovitz, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: uncreditedTuesday, February 4, 2020
Amazon Dating
This is Amazon Dating!
(No, it isn't real. Yet.)
America: The Land of Make-Believe
If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale government surveillance of the public, the revoking of due process and having the world's largest prison population are liberty, we are the land of the free. If the president, an inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the leader of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and our enemies hate us for our values. If Jesus came to make us rich, bless the annihilation of Muslims by our war machine and condemn homosexuality and abortion, we are a Christian nation. If formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a peace plan, we are an honest international mediator. If a meritocracy means that three American men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, we are the land of opportunity. If the torture of kidnapped victims in black sites and the ripping of children from their parents' arms and their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses, along with the gunning down of unarmed citizens by militarized police in the streets of our urban communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar of human rights.
The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. (...)
The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction.
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism.
This destruction, which cuts across the political divide, leads us to place our faith in systems, including the electoral process, that are burlesque. It diverts our energy toward useless debates and sterile political activity. It calls on us to place our faith for the survival of the human species in ruling elites who will do nothing to halt the ecocide. It sees us accept facile explanations for our predicament, whether they involve blaming the Russians for the election of Trump or blaming undocumented workers for our economic decline. We live in a culture awash in lies, the most dangerous being those we tell ourselves.
Lies are emotionally comforting in times of distress, even when we know they are lies. The worse things get, the more we long to hear the lies. But cultures that can no longer face reality, that cannot distinguish between falsehood and truth, retreat into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," the merger of fact and fiction. This merger destroys the mechanisms for puncturing self-delusion. Intellectuals, artists and dissidents who attempt to address reality and warn about the self-delusion are ridiculed, silenced and demonized. There are, as Freud noted in "Civilizations and Its Discontents," distressed societies whose difficulties "will not yield at any attempt at reform." But this is too harsh a truth for most people, especially Americans, to accept.
America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia. The popular historical narrative is a celebration of the fictional virtues of white supremacy. The relentless optimism and reveling in supposed national virtues obscure truth. Nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity, along with accepting responsibility for the holocausts and genocides carried out by slaveholders, white settlers and capitalists, have never fit with America's triumphalism. "The illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people—they were the illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.
In decay, however, these illusions are fatal. Powerful nations have the luxury of imbibing myth, even if decisions and policies based on the myth inflict damage and widespread suffering. But nations whose foundations are rotting have little latitude. The miscalculations they make, based on fantasy, accelerate their mortality.
The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. (...)The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction.
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism.
This destruction, which cuts across the political divide, leads us to place our faith in systems, including the electoral process, that are burlesque. It diverts our energy toward useless debates and sterile political activity. It calls on us to place our faith for the survival of the human species in ruling elites who will do nothing to halt the ecocide. It sees us accept facile explanations for our predicament, whether they involve blaming the Russians for the election of Trump or blaming undocumented workers for our economic decline. We live in a culture awash in lies, the most dangerous being those we tell ourselves.
Lies are emotionally comforting in times of distress, even when we know they are lies. The worse things get, the more we long to hear the lies. But cultures that can no longer face reality, that cannot distinguish between falsehood and truth, retreat into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," the merger of fact and fiction. This merger destroys the mechanisms for puncturing self-delusion. Intellectuals, artists and dissidents who attempt to address reality and warn about the self-delusion are ridiculed, silenced and demonized. There are, as Freud noted in "Civilizations and Its Discontents," distressed societies whose difficulties "will not yield at any attempt at reform." But this is too harsh a truth for most people, especially Americans, to accept.
America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia. The popular historical narrative is a celebration of the fictional virtues of white supremacy. The relentless optimism and reveling in supposed national virtues obscure truth. Nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity, along with accepting responsibility for the holocausts and genocides carried out by slaveholders, white settlers and capitalists, have never fit with America's triumphalism. "The illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people—they were the illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.
In decay, however, these illusions are fatal. Powerful nations have the luxury of imbibing myth, even if decisions and policies based on the myth inflict damage and widespread suffering. But nations whose foundations are rotting have little latitude. The miscalculations they make, based on fantasy, accelerate their mortality.
by Chris Hedges, Salon | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
The Story of YouTube
April 2006: A video is uploaded to YouTube showing two boys in China lip-synching to American boy band the Backstreet Boys. Susan Wojcicki – YouTube’s current CEO who was in charge of Google’s acquisitions at the time – credits this video with convincing her that it would be worth it for Google to invest in user-generated content by purchasing YouTube.
[ed. Never gets old.]
Monday, February 3, 2020
The Curious Bond Between Arnold Palmer and Mister Rogers
Fred Rogers—“Mister Rogers” to us—grew up in a house 3.9 miles from Latrobe Country Club, where he learned to play golf by taking lessons from Deacon Palmer at the same time as the pro’s son. Fred and Arnie both attended Latrobe High School, a year apart, and went on to achieve worldwide fame while always remaining close to their hometown in Western Pennsylvania (pop. 8,338). “It’s with me wherever I am,” Fred once said; Arnie never left. Each became defined by their humility, warmth and empathy for others. Tom Hanks played one of them in the movies, but he could have played both.
LAY-trobe is the way the locals say it. Go into Arnie’s clubhouse and you’ve stepped back in time to his prime, the 1960s. It’s across the street from the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, where the best Italian restaurant in town, DeNunzio’s, is on the second floor of the airport terminal. Down the road is Saint Vincent College, where Arnie’s memorial was held in 2016 at the Benedictine basilica on the hill. I hadn’t made the connection between these two American heroes until I attended the reception at the Fred Rogers Center on campus.
Inspired by Tom Hanks’ movie, I returned to look for Arnie among Fred’s archives at the center last fall and spent the day with their mutual friend, the Benedictine Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, who oversees the college. Nowicki used to consult on Rogers’ television show and was there in the New York City subway when a group of teenagers noticed Fred and spontaneously broke out singing his theme song, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” one of the real-life scenes depicted in the film.
The archabbot, a nongolfer, recalled the time Palmer asked him to play golf. He demurred, but Arnie insisted. On the first hole, he took a huge clump of a divot and left the ball on the tee. “Maybe you better just drive the cart,” Arnie said. The archabbot was also with him when he died. Palmer had called that morning and asked, “Hey, Doug, don’t preachers come see their clients anymore?” They visited for an hour that day, said the Lord’s Prayer together, and 10 minutes later, Arnie was gone. Both Palmer and Rogers were Presbyterians, which I guess is only a club-length from Catholics. (I’m a Catholic, but my closest preacher is a rabbi—we all hedge our bets.)
Fred’s father owned a couple of manufacturing companies, and his mother was a beloved philanthropist and socialite in town. They had a reputation for looking out for their employees and making loans they knew would never be repaid. Fred was a victim of bullying as a child and suffered from asthma, spending summers indoors when his parents bought one of the first window air-conditioners. He studied music, married a concert pianist and came to believe that the Arts more than anything else spoke to humanity and gave access to our inner feelings.
“He pioneered child psychology based on social emotional development as opposed to cognitive behavioral theory,” Nowicki said. “That’s ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ versus ‘Sesame Street.’ Fred taught that people are open to learning when they feel affirmed and loved.”
Palmer’s parents came from the other end of the economic spectrum, forged in sports. Arnie learned to use the service entrance to the club until one day he owned it all. “Growing up, my father and Fred didn’t hang out together,” Amy Palmer Saunders said. “But as adults, they had a mutual respect and were family friends. When I was young, our families had gatherings at Christmas time.” On the same campus as the Fred Rogers Center is the 50-acre Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve, disparate symbols of their two families.
What they had in common was profound. Fred liked to recall advice he received from the old actor Gabby Hayes: “When I’m on the air, I see just one little buckaroo out there.” That was the sense Fred gave through the television set to generations of children. It was also the sense that Arnie gave to everyone in his gallery as we thought he was looking only at us. Rogers focused his life on children; Palmer founded two children’s hospitals that bear his family name.
In the Rogers Center, among hundreds of boxes of Fred’s papers, the archivist Emily Uhrin showed me a handwritten speech about local people who inspired characters in his productions; he cited Deke Palmer for giving him “a feel of golf and was glad to be able to pass it on to the children of the next generation” (1976). There were also letters asking Arnie to be profiled on his show “Old Friends... New Friends” (1979)—but it never worked out—and later an elegantly penned note to Winnie and Arnie that was signed, “Love to you both, as always, Fred” (1992).
LAY-trobe is the way the locals say it. Go into Arnie’s clubhouse and you’ve stepped back in time to his prime, the 1960s. It’s across the street from the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, where the best Italian restaurant in town, DeNunzio’s, is on the second floor of the airport terminal. Down the road is Saint Vincent College, where Arnie’s memorial was held in 2016 at the Benedictine basilica on the hill. I hadn’t made the connection between these two American heroes until I attended the reception at the Fred Rogers Center on campus.
Inspired by Tom Hanks’ movie, I returned to look for Arnie among Fred’s archives at the center last fall and spent the day with their mutual friend, the Benedictine Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, who oversees the college. Nowicki used to consult on Rogers’ television show and was there in the New York City subway when a group of teenagers noticed Fred and spontaneously broke out singing his theme song, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” one of the real-life scenes depicted in the film.The archabbot, a nongolfer, recalled the time Palmer asked him to play golf. He demurred, but Arnie insisted. On the first hole, he took a huge clump of a divot and left the ball on the tee. “Maybe you better just drive the cart,” Arnie said. The archabbot was also with him when he died. Palmer had called that morning and asked, “Hey, Doug, don’t preachers come see their clients anymore?” They visited for an hour that day, said the Lord’s Prayer together, and 10 minutes later, Arnie was gone. Both Palmer and Rogers were Presbyterians, which I guess is only a club-length from Catholics. (I’m a Catholic, but my closest preacher is a rabbi—we all hedge our bets.)
Fred’s father owned a couple of manufacturing companies, and his mother was a beloved philanthropist and socialite in town. They had a reputation for looking out for their employees and making loans they knew would never be repaid. Fred was a victim of bullying as a child and suffered from asthma, spending summers indoors when his parents bought one of the first window air-conditioners. He studied music, married a concert pianist and came to believe that the Arts more than anything else spoke to humanity and gave access to our inner feelings.
“He pioneered child psychology based on social emotional development as opposed to cognitive behavioral theory,” Nowicki said. “That’s ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ versus ‘Sesame Street.’ Fred taught that people are open to learning when they feel affirmed and loved.”
Palmer’s parents came from the other end of the economic spectrum, forged in sports. Arnie learned to use the service entrance to the club until one day he owned it all. “Growing up, my father and Fred didn’t hang out together,” Amy Palmer Saunders said. “But as adults, they had a mutual respect and were family friends. When I was young, our families had gatherings at Christmas time.” On the same campus as the Fred Rogers Center is the 50-acre Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve, disparate symbols of their two families.
What they had in common was profound. Fred liked to recall advice he received from the old actor Gabby Hayes: “When I’m on the air, I see just one little buckaroo out there.” That was the sense Fred gave through the television set to generations of children. It was also the sense that Arnie gave to everyone in his gallery as we thought he was looking only at us. Rogers focused his life on children; Palmer founded two children’s hospitals that bear his family name.
In the Rogers Center, among hundreds of boxes of Fred’s papers, the archivist Emily Uhrin showed me a handwritten speech about local people who inspired characters in his productions; he cited Deke Palmer for giving him “a feel of golf and was glad to be able to pass it on to the children of the next generation” (1976). There were also letters asking Arnie to be profiled on his show “Old Friends... New Friends” (1979)—but it never worked out—and later an elegantly penned note to Winnie and Arnie that was signed, “Love to you both, as always, Fred” (1992).
by Jerry Tarde, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Evening Standard/Getty Images
The Rise of Smart Camera Networks
The Rise of Smart Camera Networks, and Why We Should Ban Them (The Intercept)
Image: Brittany Greeson/The New York Times via Redux
A Book Recommendation: Catch and Kill
As I’ve noted before I seldom read books about contemporary politics or current affairs. When I open a virtual or physical book it’s almost always history and generally in the distant past. But I’ve been devoting a lot of time recently to reading a number of recent books for a project I’m planning. One of those I just finished is Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.
I wanted to recommend it to you because I found it exceptionally good.
Farrow is a fascinating person on our public landscape. Like many of you I first heard about him as the child of famous parents. Then there were various stories about how he graduated college at some ridiculously young age, was working at the State Department under Hillary Clinton at some equally nonsensical age. Then he had that show on MSNBC which rapidly crashed and burned. Then, since network morning TV is off my radar, I didn’t really hear much about him until he exploded back on to the scene in 2017 with his string of path-breaking exclusives on Harvey Weinstein and what we now know as the #MeToo movement.
The MSNBC show always struck me as an uncomfortably privileged exercise. Basically his first turn in journalism in his mid-20s and it’s his own show on a top cable news network. It seemed predictable and not entirely undeserved when it flopped. But that clearly wasn’t the whole story. Farrow seems to be that rare person who gets a lot handed to him and yet manages to live up to the billing and more. Investigative journalism, which usually turns on some mix of smarts, obsessiveness and charisma, was what he was meant for.
I say all of this because I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up the book. What got me to read it was my interest in and project about the culture of secrecy, extortion and private surveillance, to which the #MeToo movement is inextricably tied and yet distinct from. The core reporting on Weinstein and others, which won Farrow a Pulitzer, you likely know about. Most of that was in the original articles which began at NBC and were all published in The New Yorker. They’ve rippled out into numerous secondary accounts, news coverage and more. That’s in the book of course but again we mostly know that story.
The book is really about the process of reporting the story, which is a tale about NBC News and their on again, off again efforts to kill or declaw story and Weinstein’s army of lawyers, PR people, private investigators and private intelligence operatives effort to disrupt or kill the stories being written about him. This meant not only Farrow’s at NBC/New Yorker but also Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s at the Times. It is about the sheer power, resources and weapons an enormously wealthy and powerful person can bring to bear to prevent exposure.
Let’s be honest: most current affairs books aren’t good. Or to be a bit more generous they are serviceable and informational, which is generally fine because you want the information. You want to go deeper on some story you learned about in the daily press. If they’re cleanly written and organized you get that information. I decided to read this book looking for information. I was pleasantly surprised to find more.
One of the themes and plot elements of this book is Farrow’s feeling of paranoia about whether he’s being watched, surveilled; whether his bosses at NBC News are being straight with him or whether they’re furtively in contact with the people he’s pursuing. In part because we, the readers, probably know some of the final story the book is filled with a negative capacity – he’s paranoid but it’s actually much worse than he imagines. We know part of that future before he does, before the narrative confirms it. But not all of it.
Lisa Bloom, the crusading feminist lawyer (daughter of Gloria Allred), shows up to help in his work. He takes her partly into his confidence. She’s actually working for Harvey Weinstein. He really is being surveilled – not just with traditional tails and stakeouts. But his movements are being tracked electronically – probably illegally. (Another tantalizing part of the narrative is the number of operatives he’s eventually able to turn against the private intelligence firm.) Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s ur-accusers, was befriended by and took on as her confidante a woman who was actually working for the Israeli private intelligence firm (Black Cube) Weinstein had hired to kill stories about his predation. Through the writing he and those he’s talking to are being crowded around by people working for or controlled by Harvey Weinstein. But he and they don’t know it. As the reader you can feel their presence crowding around you – a weird mix of claustrophobia and second-guessing.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
Image: Brigitte Lacombe; Little, Brown and Company via
I wanted to recommend it to you because I found it exceptionally good.
Farrow is a fascinating person on our public landscape. Like many of you I first heard about him as the child of famous parents. Then there were various stories about how he graduated college at some ridiculously young age, was working at the State Department under Hillary Clinton at some equally nonsensical age. Then he had that show on MSNBC which rapidly crashed and burned. Then, since network morning TV is off my radar, I didn’t really hear much about him until he exploded back on to the scene in 2017 with his string of path-breaking exclusives on Harvey Weinstein and what we now know as the #MeToo movement.
The MSNBC show always struck me as an uncomfortably privileged exercise. Basically his first turn in journalism in his mid-20s and it’s his own show on a top cable news network. It seemed predictable and not entirely undeserved when it flopped. But that clearly wasn’t the whole story. Farrow seems to be that rare person who gets a lot handed to him and yet manages to live up to the billing and more. Investigative journalism, which usually turns on some mix of smarts, obsessiveness and charisma, was what he was meant for.I say all of this because I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up the book. What got me to read it was my interest in and project about the culture of secrecy, extortion and private surveillance, to which the #MeToo movement is inextricably tied and yet distinct from. The core reporting on Weinstein and others, which won Farrow a Pulitzer, you likely know about. Most of that was in the original articles which began at NBC and were all published in The New Yorker. They’ve rippled out into numerous secondary accounts, news coverage and more. That’s in the book of course but again we mostly know that story.
The book is really about the process of reporting the story, which is a tale about NBC News and their on again, off again efforts to kill or declaw story and Weinstein’s army of lawyers, PR people, private investigators and private intelligence operatives effort to disrupt or kill the stories being written about him. This meant not only Farrow’s at NBC/New Yorker but also Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s at the Times. It is about the sheer power, resources and weapons an enormously wealthy and powerful person can bring to bear to prevent exposure.
Let’s be honest: most current affairs books aren’t good. Or to be a bit more generous they are serviceable and informational, which is generally fine because you want the information. You want to go deeper on some story you learned about in the daily press. If they’re cleanly written and organized you get that information. I decided to read this book looking for information. I was pleasantly surprised to find more.
One of the themes and plot elements of this book is Farrow’s feeling of paranoia about whether he’s being watched, surveilled; whether his bosses at NBC News are being straight with him or whether they’re furtively in contact with the people he’s pursuing. In part because we, the readers, probably know some of the final story the book is filled with a negative capacity – he’s paranoid but it’s actually much worse than he imagines. We know part of that future before he does, before the narrative confirms it. But not all of it.
Lisa Bloom, the crusading feminist lawyer (daughter of Gloria Allred), shows up to help in his work. He takes her partly into his confidence. She’s actually working for Harvey Weinstein. He really is being surveilled – not just with traditional tails and stakeouts. But his movements are being tracked electronically – probably illegally. (Another tantalizing part of the narrative is the number of operatives he’s eventually able to turn against the private intelligence firm.) Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s ur-accusers, was befriended by and took on as her confidante a woman who was actually working for the Israeli private intelligence firm (Black Cube) Weinstein had hired to kill stories about his predation. Through the writing he and those he’s talking to are being crowded around by people working for or controlled by Harvey Weinstein. But he and they don’t know it. As the reader you can feel their presence crowding around you – a weird mix of claustrophobia and second-guessing.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
Image: Brigitte Lacombe; Little, Brown and Company via
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Linda Shaw, Horned puffins on Round Island, AK
via:
[ed. Almost had my finger bitten off by one of these guys. Razor-sharp beaks.]
Saturday, February 1, 2020
Pure Magic
The Oral History of Prince’s Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show
On February 4, 2007, heavy rain fell over Miami—and for those planning the Super Bowl XLI halftime show, so did a sense of dread. It’s one thing to play a football game in a storm. It’s another to put on an intricately staged concert in one.
“It was the most scared I was in my life,” says executive producer Charles Coplin, then the NFL’s head of programming. “And I’m sure I wasn’t alone.”
The man scheduled to perform was nervous, too. Yes, even Prince saw the potential for disaster. “People are like, ‘He gets nervous?’” says his musical director and keyboardist, Morris Hayes. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, he’s not nervous for himself. He’s nervous for us.’ He’s trying to make sure that we’re in the right places at the right parts. What’s gonna happen when it starts raining and the floor’s slick?”
By that point, the Super Bowl halftime show was in dire need of the Purple One’s energy. Over the course of 40 years, the event had gone from a marching band showcase to an Up With People residency, to a Disnified pageant with occasional drop-ins by pop stars like Michael Jackson, to an MTV-produced, superficially edgy spectacle that bottomed out in 2004 when Justin Timberlake infamously exposed Janet Jackson’s breast to a worldwide audience of 144.4 million. A course correction followed, as the NFL turned to baby boomer–friendly acts Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. And while they may have been rock legends with countercultural roots, by the aughts they’d become safe entertainment.
Prince was different. Even after decades of fame, the sex symbol hadn’t toned down his genre-defying music or his envelope-pushing persona. Just three years prior, on the night that he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” stole the show from a handful of less-otherworldly legends. Unlike his big-game predecessors, Prince refused to trot out a handful of his hits and call it a night. For the intermission, the icon designed a unique 12-minute set. After all, he wasn’t about to allow himself to be overshadowed by the biggest damn sporting event of the year.
Flanked by Australian dancers Nandy and Maya McClean—the Twinz—Prince stepped up to the microphone in a salmon-colored suit, thanked Mischer, and addressed the reporters sitting in front of him. “We hope we don’t rock your ears too much,” he said. “Contrary to rumor, I’d like to take a few questions right now.” At that moment, someone in the crowd blurted out, “Prince, how do you feel about performing …”
Adande: I think it was a plant.
Gongaware: It was one of the sportswriters.
Adande: Before he could even finish [the question], Prince just breaks into “Johnny B. Goode.” (...)
Coplin: That was typical Prince: I’m gonna fuck with you, but I’m gonna make you happy.
Adande: It was labeled a press conference, so people weren’t in concert mode. There was a smattering of applause, because journalists don’t applaud at press conferences. Folks stayed in their seats. Maybe he didn’t go all out, but Prince’s floor is so high that it still was evident we were watching a virtuoso at work. We didn’t deserve that performance.
by Alan Siegel , The Ringer | Read more:
Images: Getty/YouTube
[ed. Full halftime show performance here (Vimeo).]
On February 4, 2007, heavy rain fell over Miami—and for those planning the Super Bowl XLI halftime show, so did a sense of dread. It’s one thing to play a football game in a storm. It’s another to put on an intricately staged concert in one.
“It was the most scared I was in my life,” says executive producer Charles Coplin, then the NFL’s head of programming. “And I’m sure I wasn’t alone.”
The man scheduled to perform was nervous, too. Yes, even Prince saw the potential for disaster. “People are like, ‘He gets nervous?’” says his musical director and keyboardist, Morris Hayes. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, he’s not nervous for himself. He’s nervous for us.’ He’s trying to make sure that we’re in the right places at the right parts. What’s gonna happen when it starts raining and the floor’s slick?”
By that point, the Super Bowl halftime show was in dire need of the Purple One’s energy. Over the course of 40 years, the event had gone from a marching band showcase to an Up With People residency, to a Disnified pageant with occasional drop-ins by pop stars like Michael Jackson, to an MTV-produced, superficially edgy spectacle that bottomed out in 2004 when Justin Timberlake infamously exposed Janet Jackson’s breast to a worldwide audience of 144.4 million. A course correction followed, as the NFL turned to baby boomer–friendly acts Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. And while they may have been rock legends with countercultural roots, by the aughts they’d become safe entertainment.Prince was different. Even after decades of fame, the sex symbol hadn’t toned down his genre-defying music or his envelope-pushing persona. Just three years prior, on the night that he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” stole the show from a handful of less-otherworldly legends. Unlike his big-game predecessors, Prince refused to trot out a handful of his hits and call it a night. For the intermission, the icon designed a unique 12-minute set. After all, he wasn’t about to allow himself to be overshadowed by the biggest damn sporting event of the year.
“It was one of those instances where you dread something might happen and then when it does,” says executive producer Don Mischer, “suddenly it turns around and almost becomes a blessing.” (...)
Part III: “I Don’t Do Interviews”
Prince’s Super Bowl week was booked solid. In between a full show at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Wednesday and an appearance with Latin funk outfit Grupo Fantasma at a private party for CBS on Friday, he made time for the halftime act and national anthem singer’s customary press conference at Miami Beach Convention Center.
Mischer: When we said, “You’ll have to have a press conference. They would like to interview you,” Prince point blank said, “I don’t do interviews.”
Coplin: There were just a few things where he was like, “I’m not gonna do that.” We’re like, “We’re not gonna break the deal over this.”
Mischer: He said, “I’m just gonna play for them.” And we said “OK.”
J.A. Adande (Los Angeles Times and ESPN columnist): Colts-Bears, 2007. I was at one of the team’s media availabilities and I just remember somebody coming up to me and saying, “Prince is gonna do a mini concert at his press conference.” Really? The anthem singer and halftime act traditionally do a news conference. And Prince didn’t talk to the media. So I thought, “Wow, if Prince comes it’s gonna be cool enough.” And then they said, “No, it’s gonna be a performance.” I said, “OK, I have to be there.” (...)
Hayes: Once again, Prince being a master of just stirring the pot and really doing something different, he had said, “We’re gonna have this press conference, but just be ready for anything.” And so we was like, “OK.” We knew that he knew that he was gonna do something.
Meglen: I just remember being back there with all these pipes and draped-off rooms. We were there for the longest fuckin’ time. It’s not easy to keep him there long. We just wanted to get it over with so we could get the hell out of there.
Shelby J.: As we’re walking to the stage I’m like, “I think I’m gonna be sick.” All I can see ahead of me is all these cameras. And so there were these doors over to my left, I didn’t say a word to anybody. I just kindly excused myself for a moment. There were bushes outside. I literally got sick, stood back up, and was like, “OK.” And people were [there] in their Super Bowl garb, but they don’t know me from a can of paint, so I was cool with that. I shut the door and came back in.
Adande: Prince and all his people come out and kind of pick up their instruments, and take their positions.
Part III: “I Don’t Do Interviews”
Prince’s Super Bowl week was booked solid. In between a full show at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Wednesday and an appearance with Latin funk outfit Grupo Fantasma at a private party for CBS on Friday, he made time for the halftime act and national anthem singer’s customary press conference at Miami Beach Convention Center.
Mischer: When we said, “You’ll have to have a press conference. They would like to interview you,” Prince point blank said, “I don’t do interviews.”
Coplin: There were just a few things where he was like, “I’m not gonna do that.” We’re like, “We’re not gonna break the deal over this.”
Mischer: He said, “I’m just gonna play for them.” And we said “OK.”
J.A. Adande (Los Angeles Times and ESPN columnist): Colts-Bears, 2007. I was at one of the team’s media availabilities and I just remember somebody coming up to me and saying, “Prince is gonna do a mini concert at his press conference.” Really? The anthem singer and halftime act traditionally do a news conference. And Prince didn’t talk to the media. So I thought, “Wow, if Prince comes it’s gonna be cool enough.” And then they said, “No, it’s gonna be a performance.” I said, “OK, I have to be there.” (...)
Hayes: Once again, Prince being a master of just stirring the pot and really doing something different, he had said, “We’re gonna have this press conference, but just be ready for anything.” And so we was like, “OK.” We knew that he knew that he was gonna do something.
Meglen: I just remember being back there with all these pipes and draped-off rooms. We were there for the longest fuckin’ time. It’s not easy to keep him there long. We just wanted to get it over with so we could get the hell out of there.
Shelby J.: As we’re walking to the stage I’m like, “I think I’m gonna be sick.” All I can see ahead of me is all these cameras. And so there were these doors over to my left, I didn’t say a word to anybody. I just kindly excused myself for a moment. There were bushes outside. I literally got sick, stood back up, and was like, “OK.” And people were [there] in their Super Bowl garb, but they don’t know me from a can of paint, so I was cool with that. I shut the door and came back in.
Adande: Prince and all his people come out and kind of pick up their instruments, and take their positions.
Flanked by Australian dancers Nandy and Maya McClean—the Twinz—Prince stepped up to the microphone in a salmon-colored suit, thanked Mischer, and addressed the reporters sitting in front of him. “We hope we don’t rock your ears too much,” he said. “Contrary to rumor, I’d like to take a few questions right now.” At that moment, someone in the crowd blurted out, “Prince, how do you feel about performing …”
Adande: I think it was a plant.
Gongaware: It was one of the sportswriters.
Adande: Before he could even finish [the question], Prince just breaks into “Johnny B. Goode.” (...)
Coplin: That was typical Prince: I’m gonna fuck with you, but I’m gonna make you happy.
Adande: It was labeled a press conference, so people weren’t in concert mode. There was a smattering of applause, because journalists don’t applaud at press conferences. Folks stayed in their seats. Maybe he didn’t go all out, but Prince’s floor is so high that it still was evident we were watching a virtuoso at work. We didn’t deserve that performance.
by Alan Siegel , The Ringer | Read more:
Images: Getty/YouTube
[ed. Full halftime show performance here (Vimeo).]
Friday, January 31, 2020
Book Review: Human Compatible
Clarke’s First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he’s a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.
I’m only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what’s inside, the two defy easy comparison.
S:PDS was unabashedly a weird book. It explored various outrageous scenarios (what if the AI destroyed humanity to prevent us from turning it off? what if it put us all in cryostasis so it didn’t count as destroying us? what if it converted the entire Earth into computronium?) with no excuse beyond that, outrageous or not, they might come true. Bostrom was going out on a very shaky limb to broadcast a crazy-sounding warning about what might be the most important problem humanity has ever faced, and the book made this absolutely clear.
HC somehow makes risk from superintelligence not sound weird. I can imagine my mother reading this book, nodding along, feeling better educated at the end of it, agreeing with most of what it says (it’s by a famous professor! I’m sure he knows his stuff!) and never having a moment where she sits bolt upright and goes what? It’s just a bizarrely normal, respectable book. It’s not that it’s dry and technical – HC is much more accessible than S:PDS, with funny anecdotes from Russell’s life, cute vignettes about hypothetical robots, and the occasional dad joke. It’s not hiding any of the weird superintelligence parts. Rereading it carefully, they’re all in there – when I leaf through it for examples, I come across a quote from Moravec about how “the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria”. But somehow it all sounds normal. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, I believe Stuart Russell could report on it in a way that had people agreeing it was an interesting story, then turning to the sports page. As such, it fulfills its artifact role with flying colors.
How does it manage this? Although it mentions the weird scenarios, it doesn’t dwell on them. Instead, it focuses on the present and the plausible near-future, uses those to build up concepts like “AI is important” and “poorly aligned AI could be dangerous”. Then it addresses those abstractly, sallying into the far future only when absolutely necessary. Russell goes over all the recent debates in AI – Facebook, algorithmic bias, self-driving cars. Then he shows how these are caused by systems doing what we tell them to do (ie optimizing for one easily-described quantity) rather than what we really want them to do (capture the full range of human values). Then he talks about how future superintelligent systems will have the same problem. (...)
If you’ve been paying attention, much of the book will be retreading old material. There’s a history of AI, an attempt to define intelligence, an exploration of morality from the perspective of someone trying to make AIs have it, some introductions to the idea of superintelligence and “intelligence explosions”. But I want to focus on three chapters: the debate on AI risk, the explanation of Russell’s own research program, and the section on misuse of existing AI. (...)
Chapters 7 and 8, “AI: A Different Approach” and “Provably Beneficial AI” will be the most exciting for people who read Bostrom but haven’t been paying attention since. Bostrom ends by saying we need people to start working on the control problem, and explaining why this will be very hard. Russell is reporting all of the good work his lab at UC Berkeley has been doing on the control problem in the interim – and arguing that their approach, Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning, succeeds at doing some of the very hard things. If you haven’t spent long nights fretting over whether this problem was possible, it’s hard to convey how encouraging and inspiring it is to see people gradually chip away at it. Just believe me when I say you may want to be really grateful for the existence of Stuart Russell and people like him.
Previous stabs at this problem foundered on inevitable problems of interpretation, scope, or altered preferences. In Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s classic “paperclip maximizer” scenario, a human orders an AI to make paperclips. If the AI becomes powerful enough, it does whatever is necessary to make as many paperclips as possible – bulldozing virgin forests to create new paperclip mines, maliciously misinterpreting “paperclip” to mean uselessly tiny paperclips so it can make more of them, even attacking people who try to change its programming or deactivate it (since deactivating it would cause fewer paperclips to exist). You can try adding epicycles in, like “make as many paperclips as possible, unless it kills someone, and also don’t prevent me from turning you off”, but a big chunk of Bostrom’s S:PDS was just example after example of why that wouldn’t work.
Russell argues you can shift the AI’s goal from “follow your master’s commands” to “use your master’s commands as evidence to try to figure out what they actually want, a mysterious true goal which you can only ever estimate with some probability”. Or as he puts it:
Or: suppose the AI starts trying to convert my dog into paperclips. I shout “No, wait, not like that!” and lunge to turn it off. The AI interprets my desperate attempt to deactivate it as further evidence about its hidden goal – apparently its current course of action is moving away from my preference rather than towards it. It doesn’t know exactly which of its actions is decreasing its utility function or why, but it knows that continuing to act must be decreasing its utility somehow – I’ve given it evidence of that. So it stays still, happy to be turned off, knowing that being turned off is serving its goal (to achieve my goals, whatever they are) better than staying on.
Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he’s a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.
I’m only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what’s inside, the two defy easy comparison.S:PDS was unabashedly a weird book. It explored various outrageous scenarios (what if the AI destroyed humanity to prevent us from turning it off? what if it put us all in cryostasis so it didn’t count as destroying us? what if it converted the entire Earth into computronium?) with no excuse beyond that, outrageous or not, they might come true. Bostrom was going out on a very shaky limb to broadcast a crazy-sounding warning about what might be the most important problem humanity has ever faced, and the book made this absolutely clear.
HC somehow makes risk from superintelligence not sound weird. I can imagine my mother reading this book, nodding along, feeling better educated at the end of it, agreeing with most of what it says (it’s by a famous professor! I’m sure he knows his stuff!) and never having a moment where she sits bolt upright and goes what? It’s just a bizarrely normal, respectable book. It’s not that it’s dry and technical – HC is much more accessible than S:PDS, with funny anecdotes from Russell’s life, cute vignettes about hypothetical robots, and the occasional dad joke. It’s not hiding any of the weird superintelligence parts. Rereading it carefully, they’re all in there – when I leaf through it for examples, I come across a quote from Moravec about how “the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria”. But somehow it all sounds normal. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, I believe Stuart Russell could report on it in a way that had people agreeing it was an interesting story, then turning to the sports page. As such, it fulfills its artifact role with flying colors.
How does it manage this? Although it mentions the weird scenarios, it doesn’t dwell on them. Instead, it focuses on the present and the plausible near-future, uses those to build up concepts like “AI is important” and “poorly aligned AI could be dangerous”. Then it addresses those abstractly, sallying into the far future only when absolutely necessary. Russell goes over all the recent debates in AI – Facebook, algorithmic bias, self-driving cars. Then he shows how these are caused by systems doing what we tell them to do (ie optimizing for one easily-described quantity) rather than what we really want them to do (capture the full range of human values). Then he talks about how future superintelligent systems will have the same problem. (...)
If you’ve been paying attention, much of the book will be retreading old material. There’s a history of AI, an attempt to define intelligence, an exploration of morality from the perspective of someone trying to make AIs have it, some introductions to the idea of superintelligence and “intelligence explosions”. But I want to focus on three chapters: the debate on AI risk, the explanation of Russell’s own research program, and the section on misuse of existing AI. (...)
Chapters 7 and 8, “AI: A Different Approach” and “Provably Beneficial AI” will be the most exciting for people who read Bostrom but haven’t been paying attention since. Bostrom ends by saying we need people to start working on the control problem, and explaining why this will be very hard. Russell is reporting all of the good work his lab at UC Berkeley has been doing on the control problem in the interim – and arguing that their approach, Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning, succeeds at doing some of the very hard things. If you haven’t spent long nights fretting over whether this problem was possible, it’s hard to convey how encouraging and inspiring it is to see people gradually chip away at it. Just believe me when I say you may want to be really grateful for the existence of Stuart Russell and people like him.
Previous stabs at this problem foundered on inevitable problems of interpretation, scope, or altered preferences. In Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s classic “paperclip maximizer” scenario, a human orders an AI to make paperclips. If the AI becomes powerful enough, it does whatever is necessary to make as many paperclips as possible – bulldozing virgin forests to create new paperclip mines, maliciously misinterpreting “paperclip” to mean uselessly tiny paperclips so it can make more of them, even attacking people who try to change its programming or deactivate it (since deactivating it would cause fewer paperclips to exist). You can try adding epicycles in, like “make as many paperclips as possible, unless it kills someone, and also don’t prevent me from turning you off”, but a big chunk of Bostrom’s S:PDS was just example after example of why that wouldn’t work.
Russell argues you can shift the AI’s goal from “follow your master’s commands” to “use your master’s commands as evidence to try to figure out what they actually want, a mysterious true goal which you can only ever estimate with some probability”. Or as he puts it:
The problem comes from confusing two distinct things: reward signals and actual rewards. In the standard approach to reinforcement learning, these are one and the same. That seems to be a mistake. Instead, they should be treated separately…reward signals provide information about the accumulation of actual reward, which is the thing to be maximized.So suppose I wanted an AI to make paperclips for me, and I tell it “Make paperclips!” The AI already has some basic contextual knowledge about the world that it can use to figure out what I mean, and my utterance “Make paperclips!” further narrows down its guess about what I want. If it’s not sure – if most of its probability mass is on “convert this metal rod here to paperclips” but a little bit is on “take over the entire world and convert it to paperclips”, it will ask me rather than proceed, worried that if it makes the wrong choice it will actually be moving further away from its goal (satisfying my mysterious mind-state) rather than towards it.
Or: suppose the AI starts trying to convert my dog into paperclips. I shout “No, wait, not like that!” and lunge to turn it off. The AI interprets my desperate attempt to deactivate it as further evidence about its hidden goal – apparently its current course of action is moving away from my preference rather than towards it. It doesn’t know exactly which of its actions is decreasing its utility function or why, but it knows that continuing to act must be decreasing its utility somehow – I’ve given it evidence of that. So it stays still, happy to be turned off, knowing that being turned off is serving its goal (to achieve my goals, whatever they are) better than staying on.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. AI Friday, inspired by this post. See also:]
Moravec's Paradox
Moravec's paradox is the observation by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning (which is high-level in humans) requires very little computation, but sensorimotor skills (comparatively low-level in humans) require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".
Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly".
The biological basis of human skills
One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.
As Moravec writes:
Some examples of skills that have appeared more recently: mathematics, engineering, human games, logic and scientific reasoning. These are hard for us because they are not what our bodies and brains were primarily evolved to do. These are skills and techniques that were acquired recently, in historical time, and have had at most a few thousand years to be refined, mostly by cultural evolution.
Historical influence on artificial intelligence
In the early days of artificial intelligence research, leading researchers often predicted that they would be able to create thinking machines in just a few decades (see history of artificial intelligence). Their optimism stemmed in part from the fact that they had been successful at writing programs that used logic, solved algebra and geometry problems and played games like checkers and chess. Logic and algebra are difficult for people and are considered a sign of intelligence. Many prominent researchers assumed that, having (almost) solved the "hard" problems, the "easy" problems of vision and commonsense reasoning would soon fall into place. They were wrong, and one reason is that these problems are not easy at all, but incredibly difficult. The fact that they had solved problems like logic and algebra was irrelevant, because these problems are extremely easy for machines to solve.
Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence."
This would lead Brooks to pursue a new direction in artificial intelligence and robotics research. He decided to build intelligent machines that had "No cognition. Just sensing and action. That is all I would build and completely leave out what traditionally was thought of as the intelligence of artificial intelligence." This new direction, which he called "Nouvelle AI" was highly influential on robotics research and AI.
Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly".
The biological basis of human skills
One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.
As Moravec writes:
Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.A compact way to express this argument would be:
- We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.
- The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.
- Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse-engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.
Some examples of skills that have appeared more recently: mathematics, engineering, human games, logic and scientific reasoning. These are hard for us because they are not what our bodies and brains were primarily evolved to do. These are skills and techniques that were acquired recently, in historical time, and have had at most a few thousand years to be refined, mostly by cultural evolution.
Historical influence on artificial intelligence
In the early days of artificial intelligence research, leading researchers often predicted that they would be able to create thinking machines in just a few decades (see history of artificial intelligence). Their optimism stemmed in part from the fact that they had been successful at writing programs that used logic, solved algebra and geometry problems and played games like checkers and chess. Logic and algebra are difficult for people and are considered a sign of intelligence. Many prominent researchers assumed that, having (almost) solved the "hard" problems, the "easy" problems of vision and commonsense reasoning would soon fall into place. They were wrong, and one reason is that these problems are not easy at all, but incredibly difficult. The fact that they had solved problems like logic and algebra was irrelevant, because these problems are extremely easy for machines to solve.
Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence."
This would lead Brooks to pursue a new direction in artificial intelligence and robotics research. He decided to build intelligent machines that had "No cognition. Just sensing and action. That is all I would build and completely leave out what traditionally was thought of as the intelligence of artificial intelligence." This new direction, which he called "Nouvelle AI" was highly influential on robotics research and AI.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.
Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.
While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
by Kashmir Hill, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Clearview
[ed. See also: Facing Up to Facial Recognition (IEEE Spectrum).]
Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.
While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
by Kashmir Hill, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Clearview
[ed. See also: Facing Up to Facial Recognition (IEEE Spectrum).]
Why You Should or Shouldn't Fear Slaughterbots
Why You Shouldn't Fear “Slaughterbots” (IEEE Spectrum)
Why You Should Fear “Slaughterbots”—A Response (IEEE Spectrum)
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Brad Pitt and the Beauty Trap
The meaning of Brad Pitt — as actor, star and supreme visual fetish — can be traced to the moment in the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise” when the camera pans up from his bare chest to his face like a caress. William Bradley Pitt was born 1963, but Brad Pitt sprung forth in that 13-second ode to eroticized male beauty, initiating a closely watched career and life, dozens of movies, and libraries of delirious exaltations, drooling gossip and porny magazine layouts.
The delirium has resumed with Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Pitt plays the Pitt-perfect role of Cliff Booth, a seasoned stunt man and coolest of cats. Everything about Cliff looks so good, so effortlessly smooth, whether he’s behind the wheel of a Coupe de Ville or strolling across a dusty wasteland. The novelist Walter Kirn once wrote that Robert Redford “stands for the [movie] industry itself, somehow, in all its California dreaminess.” In “Once Upon a Time,” Tarantino recasts that idea-ideal with Cliff, exploiting Pitt’s looks and charm to create another sun-kissed, golden and very white California dream.
So of course Tarantino being Tarantino has Cliff-Pitt doff his shirt, in a scene that both nods to the actor’s foundational “Thelma & Louise” display and offers another effusive paean to masculine beauty. It’s a hot day; Cliff is scarcely working. So he grabs his tools and a beer and scrambles on a roof to fix an antenna, wearing pretty much what Pitt first wears in “Thelma & Louise.” Then Cliff strips off his Hawaiian shirt and the Champion tee underneath it and once again, Brad Pitt stands bare-chested, soaring above both Hollywood and our gaze, the already porous line between actor and character blurring delectably further.
On Feb. 9, Oscar night, our gaze will again fix on Pitt, who has been nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “Once Upon a Time.” It’s nice that his peers bothered because they’ve been reluctant to honor him in the past. Despite his years of service and critically praised roles, Pitt has won just one Oscar: a best picture statuette for helping produce “12 Years a Slave.” As an actor, he has been nominated three previous times: once for supporting (“12 Monkeys”) and twice for lead (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Moneyball”). As a reminder, Rami Malek, Eddie Redmayne and Roberto Benigni have all won best actor. (...)
Critics could be unkind (guilty), but as the bad movies gave way to good, the notices improved. Soon, it became a favorite cliché to write that he was a character actor trapped in the body of a star (guilty again). Some of this, I think, stems from a suspicion of beauty, that it can’t be trusted, is “merely” superficial and silly, which makes the beautiful one also superficial and maybe even worthy of contempt that can lurk under obsession. There’s nothing new about how we punish beauty. The history of movies is filled with the victims of this malignant love-to-love and love-to-hate dynamic, not all of them women. (...)
Pitt should have been nominated this year for best actor for his delicate, deep work in James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” a meditation on the unbearable weight of masculinity set largely in outer space. The film was praised as was Pitt’s turn, but neither found awards momentum. The performance was too good and certainly too subtle and interiorized for the academy. It has a historic weakness for showboating — the more suffering the better — which is why Joaquin Phoenix (often otherwise worthy) and his jutting rib cage in “Joker” seem like a lock. But Pitt has time. It took seven nominations for Paul Newman to win best actor; Redford has been nominated only once for acting (he lost).
Like Newman and Redford, Pitt has always seemed born to the screen, a natural. He has a palpable physical ease about him that seems inseparable from his looks, that silkiness that seems, at least in part, to come from waking up every day and going through life as a beautiful person. This isn’t to say that good-looking people don’t have the same issues, the neuroses and awkwardness that plague us mortals. But Pitt has always moved with the absolute surety you see in some beautiful people (and dancers), the casualness of movement that expresses more than mere confidence, but a sublime lack of self-consciousness and self-doubt about taking up space, something not everyone shares. This isn’t swagger; this is flow. (...)
by Manohla Dargis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Cooper/Columbia via
The delirium has resumed with Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Pitt plays the Pitt-perfect role of Cliff Booth, a seasoned stunt man and coolest of cats. Everything about Cliff looks so good, so effortlessly smooth, whether he’s behind the wheel of a Coupe de Ville or strolling across a dusty wasteland. The novelist Walter Kirn once wrote that Robert Redford “stands for the [movie] industry itself, somehow, in all its California dreaminess.” In “Once Upon a Time,” Tarantino recasts that idea-ideal with Cliff, exploiting Pitt’s looks and charm to create another sun-kissed, golden and very white California dream.
So of course Tarantino being Tarantino has Cliff-Pitt doff his shirt, in a scene that both nods to the actor’s foundational “Thelma & Louise” display and offers another effusive paean to masculine beauty. It’s a hot day; Cliff is scarcely working. So he grabs his tools and a beer and scrambles on a roof to fix an antenna, wearing pretty much what Pitt first wears in “Thelma & Louise.” Then Cliff strips off his Hawaiian shirt and the Champion tee underneath it and once again, Brad Pitt stands bare-chested, soaring above both Hollywood and our gaze, the already porous line between actor and character blurring delectably further.On Feb. 9, Oscar night, our gaze will again fix on Pitt, who has been nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “Once Upon a Time.” It’s nice that his peers bothered because they’ve been reluctant to honor him in the past. Despite his years of service and critically praised roles, Pitt has won just one Oscar: a best picture statuette for helping produce “12 Years a Slave.” As an actor, he has been nominated three previous times: once for supporting (“12 Monkeys”) and twice for lead (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Moneyball”). As a reminder, Rami Malek, Eddie Redmayne and Roberto Benigni have all won best actor. (...)
Critics could be unkind (guilty), but as the bad movies gave way to good, the notices improved. Soon, it became a favorite cliché to write that he was a character actor trapped in the body of a star (guilty again). Some of this, I think, stems from a suspicion of beauty, that it can’t be trusted, is “merely” superficial and silly, which makes the beautiful one also superficial and maybe even worthy of contempt that can lurk under obsession. There’s nothing new about how we punish beauty. The history of movies is filled with the victims of this malignant love-to-love and love-to-hate dynamic, not all of them women. (...)
Pitt should have been nominated this year for best actor for his delicate, deep work in James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” a meditation on the unbearable weight of masculinity set largely in outer space. The film was praised as was Pitt’s turn, but neither found awards momentum. The performance was too good and certainly too subtle and interiorized for the academy. It has a historic weakness for showboating — the more suffering the better — which is why Joaquin Phoenix (often otherwise worthy) and his jutting rib cage in “Joker” seem like a lock. But Pitt has time. It took seven nominations for Paul Newman to win best actor; Redford has been nominated only once for acting (he lost).
Like Newman and Redford, Pitt has always seemed born to the screen, a natural. He has a palpable physical ease about him that seems inseparable from his looks, that silkiness that seems, at least in part, to come from waking up every day and going through life as a beautiful person. This isn’t to say that good-looking people don’t have the same issues, the neuroses and awkwardness that plague us mortals. But Pitt has always moved with the absolute surety you see in some beautiful people (and dancers), the casualness of movement that expresses more than mere confidence, but a sublime lack of self-consciousness and self-doubt about taking up space, something not everyone shares. This isn’t swagger; this is flow. (...)
In the years since “Fight Club,” the film has been embraced without irony and apparently without humor by men’s rights partisans. I wonder if they think Tyler is hot, and what exactly they see when they look at his body. Movies have always banked on the audience’s love of male violence. Throughout their history, they have exploited male beauty, tapping the passion it inspires. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant,” said, well, Cary Grant.
But the beautiful man can make us nervous, partly because he complicates gender norms. George Clooney is more than a pretty face, more than one writer has insisted. Yes, but he is also pretty. Some of this anxiety reeks of gay panic and misogyny.
But the beautiful man can make us nervous, partly because he complicates gender norms. George Clooney is more than a pretty face, more than one writer has insisted. Yes, but he is also pretty. Some of this anxiety reeks of gay panic and misogyny.
by Manohla Dargis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Cooper/Columbia via
The Truth About "Dramatic Action"
"As far as I know, trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science.” This was how Dr. Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization’s country representative in China, described the situation facing the city of Wuhan when asked late last week for his update on the coronavirus outbreak.
It was clear from Galea’s remarks that the total containment of Wuhan, the city where I have lived for the past few decades, was not a course of action the WHO had recommended. Nor did the organization have any clear view on whether such an action would prove effective in limiting the spread of the disease. “It has not been tried before as a public health measure,” he said, “so we cannot at this stage say it will or will not work.”
I am now one of 11 million people in Wuhan who are living through this grand experiment, a measure that, Galea also said, shows “a very strong public health commitment and a willingness to take dramatic action.” From inside the curtain that now encloses my city, I wish to offer my thoughts on this “dramatic action,” and to judge what we have actually seen and experienced in terms of commitment to public health.
Closing Up the Cities
At 2AM on January 23, authorities in Wuhan suddenly issued the order to close off the city. According to the order, from 10AM that same day, all public buses, subways, ferries, long-distance buses and other transport services would be suspended; the airport and train stations would be shuttered. At this point, the WHO might have had reservations about the necessity and effectiveness of this strategy – but in any case, is was irreversible, and it would soon extend to neighboring cities as well.
In less than two days, up to noon on January 24, a total of 14 cities in Hubei province would be brought into the quarantine zone. These cities, with a population of around 35 million, include: Huanggang (黄冈) and E’zhou (鄂州), were quickly brought under the order for closure. More cities followed: Chibi (赤壁), Xiantao (仙桃), Zhijiang (枝江), Qianjiang (潜江), Xianning (咸宁), Huangshi (黄石), Enshi (恩施)、Dangyang (当阳), Jingzhou (荆州), Jingmen (荆门) and Xiaogan (孝感).
This was no longer a city under lockdown, but effectively an entire province under quarantine.
Galea and other foreign experts have expressed a sense of awe about the boldness of the quarantine in Hubei province. Over the weekend, the New York Times quoted Dr. William Schaffner, an expert on infectious disease from Vanderbilt University, as saying that the lockdown is a “public health experiment, the scale of which has not been done before.” Schaffner was clearly astonished: “Logistically, it’s stunning, and it was done so quickly.”
China’s capacity to impress with such grand gestures calls to mind talk of the “Chinese miracle,” often used to describe the performance of the country’s economy over four decades. But is it fair to regard this case of large-scale quarantine also as a “Chinese miracle” in public health?
Shutting People’s Mouths
Everyone must understand, first of all, that this epidemic was allowed to spread for a period of more than forty days before any of the abovementioned cities were closed off, or any decisive action taken. In fact, if we look at the main efforts undertaken by the leadership, and by provincial and city governments in particular, these were focused mostly not on the containment of the epidemic itself, but on the containment and suppression of information about the disease.
The early suppression of news about the epidemic is now fairly common knowledge among Chinese, and many people view this failure to grapple openly with the outbreak as the chief reason why it was later seen as necessary to take the “dramatic action” of closing down my city and many others.
The direct cause of all of this trouble is of course the new coronavirus that has spread now from Wuhan across the globe and has everybody talking. Up to January 24, in Hubei province alone, there were 549 admitted cases of the virus. Among these there have been 24 deaths. But the real numbers are still unknown.
According to reports from Caixin Media, one of China’s leading professional news outlets, the entire situation began on December 8, with the discovery of the first known case of an infected patient in Wuhan, a stall operator from the Huanan Seafood Market. The Huanan Seafood Market is a large-scale wet market, with an area about the size of seven football pitches and more than 1,000 stalls. The market has a constant flow of customers, making it the ideal place for the spread of infectious disease. A seafood market only in name, it sells a wide array of live animals, including hedgehogs, civet cats, peacocks, bamboo rats and other types of wild animals. At this market, the nearly inexhaustible appetite, and insatiable greed and curiosity of Chinese diners is on full display.
The number of infected people rose rapidly, reaching 27 people within a short period of time. Health professionals in Wuhan began suspecting in early December that this was an unknown infectious disease, not unlike the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that emerged in southern China in 2003. The ghost of SARS seemed to wander Wuhan in December, and rumors spread farther and farther afield of a new disease on the prowl.
China is a society closely monitored by the government, and the shadow of Big Brother is everywhere. Social media in particular are subject to very close surveillance. So when the authorities detected chatter about the re-emergence of SARS, or of a similar unknown outbreak, they took two major steps initially. First, they tried to ensure that this new outbreak remained a secret; second, they put the stability preservation system into effect (启动稳控机制). On December 30, the Wuhan Health Commission (武汉市卫建委) issued an order to hospitals, clinics and other healthcare units strictly prohibiting the release of any information about treatment of this new disease. As late as December 31, the government in Wuhan was still saying publicly that there were no cases of human-to-human transmission, and that no medical personnel had become infected.
by Da Shiji, China Media Project | Read more:
Image: uncredited
It was clear from Galea’s remarks that the total containment of Wuhan, the city where I have lived for the past few decades, was not a course of action the WHO had recommended. Nor did the organization have any clear view on whether such an action would prove effective in limiting the spread of the disease. “It has not been tried before as a public health measure,” he said, “so we cannot at this stage say it will or will not work.”
I am now one of 11 million people in Wuhan who are living through this grand experiment, a measure that, Galea also said, shows “a very strong public health commitment and a willingness to take dramatic action.” From inside the curtain that now encloses my city, I wish to offer my thoughts on this “dramatic action,” and to judge what we have actually seen and experienced in terms of commitment to public health.Closing Up the Cities
At 2AM on January 23, authorities in Wuhan suddenly issued the order to close off the city. According to the order, from 10AM that same day, all public buses, subways, ferries, long-distance buses and other transport services would be suspended; the airport and train stations would be shuttered. At this point, the WHO might have had reservations about the necessity and effectiveness of this strategy – but in any case, is was irreversible, and it would soon extend to neighboring cities as well.
In less than two days, up to noon on January 24, a total of 14 cities in Hubei province would be brought into the quarantine zone. These cities, with a population of around 35 million, include: Huanggang (黄冈) and E’zhou (鄂州), were quickly brought under the order for closure. More cities followed: Chibi (赤壁), Xiantao (仙桃), Zhijiang (枝江), Qianjiang (潜江), Xianning (咸宁), Huangshi (黄石), Enshi (恩施)、Dangyang (当阳), Jingzhou (荆州), Jingmen (荆门) and Xiaogan (孝感).
This was no longer a city under lockdown, but effectively an entire province under quarantine.
Galea and other foreign experts have expressed a sense of awe about the boldness of the quarantine in Hubei province. Over the weekend, the New York Times quoted Dr. William Schaffner, an expert on infectious disease from Vanderbilt University, as saying that the lockdown is a “public health experiment, the scale of which has not been done before.” Schaffner was clearly astonished: “Logistically, it’s stunning, and it was done so quickly.”
China’s capacity to impress with such grand gestures calls to mind talk of the “Chinese miracle,” often used to describe the performance of the country’s economy over four decades. But is it fair to regard this case of large-scale quarantine also as a “Chinese miracle” in public health?
Shutting People’s Mouths
Everyone must understand, first of all, that this epidemic was allowed to spread for a period of more than forty days before any of the abovementioned cities were closed off, or any decisive action taken. In fact, if we look at the main efforts undertaken by the leadership, and by provincial and city governments in particular, these were focused mostly not on the containment of the epidemic itself, but on the containment and suppression of information about the disease.
The early suppression of news about the epidemic is now fairly common knowledge among Chinese, and many people view this failure to grapple openly with the outbreak as the chief reason why it was later seen as necessary to take the “dramatic action” of closing down my city and many others.
The direct cause of all of this trouble is of course the new coronavirus that has spread now from Wuhan across the globe and has everybody talking. Up to January 24, in Hubei province alone, there were 549 admitted cases of the virus. Among these there have been 24 deaths. But the real numbers are still unknown.
According to reports from Caixin Media, one of China’s leading professional news outlets, the entire situation began on December 8, with the discovery of the first known case of an infected patient in Wuhan, a stall operator from the Huanan Seafood Market. The Huanan Seafood Market is a large-scale wet market, with an area about the size of seven football pitches and more than 1,000 stalls. The market has a constant flow of customers, making it the ideal place for the spread of infectious disease. A seafood market only in name, it sells a wide array of live animals, including hedgehogs, civet cats, peacocks, bamboo rats and other types of wild animals. At this market, the nearly inexhaustible appetite, and insatiable greed and curiosity of Chinese diners is on full display.
The number of infected people rose rapidly, reaching 27 people within a short period of time. Health professionals in Wuhan began suspecting in early December that this was an unknown infectious disease, not unlike the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that emerged in southern China in 2003. The ghost of SARS seemed to wander Wuhan in December, and rumors spread farther and farther afield of a new disease on the prowl.
China is a society closely monitored by the government, and the shadow of Big Brother is everywhere. Social media in particular are subject to very close surveillance. So when the authorities detected chatter about the re-emergence of SARS, or of a similar unknown outbreak, they took two major steps initially. First, they tried to ensure that this new outbreak remained a secret; second, they put the stability preservation system into effect (启动稳控机制). On December 30, the Wuhan Health Commission (武汉市卫建委) issued an order to hospitals, clinics and other healthcare units strictly prohibiting the release of any information about treatment of this new disease. As late as December 31, the government in Wuhan was still saying publicly that there were no cases of human-to-human transmission, and that no medical personnel had become infected.
by Da Shiji, China Media Project | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
The Little Man on the Big Screen
In the early 1940s, there was a cinematic battle raging between two populist filmmakers — Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. If you watch their movies today, you’re almost certain to like Preston Sturges’s better. They’re wild, chaotic, hilarious films that assume all governing officials are ridiculously corrupt and pretty much all ordinary citizens are scrambling and hustling and stuttering and screeching and flailing in their mad slapstick efforts to succeed in America.
It’s telling that the Coen brothers, the contemporary filmmakers most overtly engaged with conveying the American experience, cite Sturges frequently. One of their most popular films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), was directly inspired by Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), in which a successful Hollywood director of comedies, John L. Sullivan, yearns to make a serious, socially conscious drama entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a movie Sullivan explicitly sees as his own Capra picture. And The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), perhaps the Coens’ least popular film, was directly inspired by Capra’s film Meet John Doe (1941). Though the plotting is Capraesque, the tone of the film is far closer to Sturges — hectic and satirical. The combination was an uneasy one.
Sturges himself had better luck taking on Capra. In the 1930s, when Sturges arrived in Hollywood, Capra had reached the dizzying peak of his career, directing hit after hit with It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Capra was the Spielberg of his day — world-famous, revered, loaded up with Academy Awards, and celebrated on the cover of Time magazine. He rivaled director John Ford in presenting America to itself in instantly mythologizing terms that the public loved. Decades later, actor and independent filmmaker John Cassavetes would say, “Maybe there really wasn’t an America. Maybe there was only Frank Capra.”
It was this towering patriotic mythology that Sturges riotously satirized in a series of frenetic screwball comedies such as The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. For Sturges, American life was the experience of being whipsawed around by unseen forces of corruption and incompetence. Kicking the slats out from under meritocracy by showing the ways sky-high success and abject failure result from a fundamentally insane system are signature Sturges moves. (...)
Among cinephiles, the reputation of Sturges grows shinier every year, even as Capra’s becomes more tarnished. Both directors were conservatives who fundamentally distrusted politics. Both were also enamored of their own ideas about America and its people, and both were egomaniacal auteurs, film “authors,” long before that term came into use.
But beyond those similarities, the two directors could hardly have seemed more at odds. Capra was the driven child of impoverished immigrant Sicilian laborers. Like many people who come up the hard way, he grew to love the idea of its hardness, and to romanticize the lone individual struggling for success as the figure that should be at the center of American society, a moral paragon setting the bootstrapping standards for others to emulate.
Sturges, on the other hand, came up the soft way. He was the son of a bold American self-creationist named Mary Dempsey, who changed her name to D’Este and convinced herself she truly was the daughter of Italian nobility until one of the real D’Estes sued her for using the family name on her line of cosmetics. She altered the name to Desti and found some success as an entrepreneur, able to spend most of her time lounging around the Continent having affairs with a wide range of fringe characters including occultist Aleister Crowley and participating in art happenings with her idol and best friend, Isadora Duncan, the modern dance pioneer. Desti gave Duncan the dramatically long scarf that caught on the back wheel of Duncan’s convertible and snapped her neck, a perfect bohemian death.
Preston “got dragged through every museum in Europe” by his art-addled mother and came to hate anything smacking of pretentious high culture. Instead, he adored his stepfather, Solomon Sturges, a Chicago stockbroker whose mild, stable, plainspoken character came as a refreshing change. Though Preston was often broke, making and losing several fortunes in his lifetime, he was never poor. He had tremendous cultural capital: he spoke fluent French, wore custom-made suits, and had gone to boarding schools with the sons of dukes and prime ministers.
His vision of America was of a chaotic but protean place where the next person you met might be the key to either dizzying success or total disaster. Sturges attempted to forge a career as a cosmetics tycoon, an inventor, a songwriter, and (reluctantly) the kept husband of a wealthy wife, failing at everything until he tried his hand at being a playwright. Finally, his erratic energies and brilliant facility with language found a home and a hit with Strictly Dishonorable, a title he got from his own line to a date who asked what his intentions were that evening. He loved America, with its fast pace, high risk, and popping energy.
It was an altogether different America that Capra loved. Capra, unlike Sturges, was generally and erroneously regarded as a highly political, left-wing populist, always bravely willing to court controversy in order to make “significant” films celebrating the common man and exposing the ways the system didn’t work. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was considered borderline seditious by members of Congress, who raised a ruckus over its portrayal of a US Senate rotten with corruption. The Daily Worker even praised Capra for his “notable progressive films in the 1930s.”
And the French public, given the chance by the Vichy government to vote on which Hollywood movie they’d like to see before the Nazis ended the import of American films, chose Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as an inspirational representation of a still-thriving democracy that can speak truth to power.
Capra created heroes who are idealists full of small-town American values, brave and adventuresome in their Boy Scout–ish endeavors, generally tongue-tied except when quoting their role models Jefferson and Lincoln. They’re often played by tall, lanky, all-American actors like Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart. They go to the big city and meet the cynical, self-serving representatives of financial and state power and are almost undone by the depths of their corruption. But then, at the climactic point, they come back strong and show that the individual can go up against the capitalist forces of darkness and save American democracy.
This last-ditch triumph always occurs with the crucial help of a tough, brainy, and cynical career woman typically played by Jean Arthur or Barbara Stanwyck, who actually has the know-how to fight the system she learned from the inside, once she’s won over to the hero’s cause.
One idealistic man saving American democracy, aided by one formidable woman, can still only do it by inspiring the people to action, starting with that man’s hordes of friends. Like the angel says in It’s a Wonderful Life, “No man is a failure who has friends.” Especially friends who show up with money when the shit hits the fan, as occurs at key points in It’s a Wonderful Life and You Can’t Take It with You, defying the machinations of the rich and powerful with heartwarming hatfuls of crumpled dollar bills. And don’t think you won’t be moved by these scenes either — they still work like magic. (...)
The suicidal urges of a desperate working-class man who can see no other way out was a specialty of theirs in both Meet John Doe (1941) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the latter of which was a notable financial failure when it came out. It was right after the end of World War II, when Americans were in no mood for the film’s bleak look at an unhappy life consumed by relentless money troubles, capped by watching the despairing Jimmy Stewart plunge off a bridge into icy black water on the night before Christmas, even if an intervention from heaven makes it all turn out fine in the end. The 1940s public probably saw the film more clearly than we do now, when it’s considered a cornball Christmas classic.
Capra’s reputation has suffered badly over the course of several decades, as his films came to represent populism’s supposedly slippery slope to fascism. It was shrewd of Capra to obscure his actual politics during the 1930s and ’40s, when most people were fooled by his films into believing the director was “quite liberal,” as Katharine Hepburn did when she agreed to star in State of the Union. Capra was, in fact, an open admirer of both Mussolini and Franco. During the McCarthy era, he served as an FBI informer, helping to persecute his fellow film industry professionals as a way of making sure his own history of working with left-wing writers didn’t come back to bite him.
But as corny as Capra looks today, Sturges relied on his films. He couldn’t help but pay tribute even as he wrestled with Capra’s idea of the American experience.
It’s telling that the Coen brothers, the contemporary filmmakers most overtly engaged with conveying the American experience, cite Sturges frequently. One of their most popular films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), was directly inspired by Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), in which a successful Hollywood director of comedies, John L. Sullivan, yearns to make a serious, socially conscious drama entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a movie Sullivan explicitly sees as his own Capra picture. And The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), perhaps the Coens’ least popular film, was directly inspired by Capra’s film Meet John Doe (1941). Though the plotting is Capraesque, the tone of the film is far closer to Sturges — hectic and satirical. The combination was an uneasy one.
Sturges himself had better luck taking on Capra. In the 1930s, when Sturges arrived in Hollywood, Capra had reached the dizzying peak of his career, directing hit after hit with It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Capra was the Spielberg of his day — world-famous, revered, loaded up with Academy Awards, and celebrated on the cover of Time magazine. He rivaled director John Ford in presenting America to itself in instantly mythologizing terms that the public loved. Decades later, actor and independent filmmaker John Cassavetes would say, “Maybe there really wasn’t an America. Maybe there was only Frank Capra.”It was this towering patriotic mythology that Sturges riotously satirized in a series of frenetic screwball comedies such as The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. For Sturges, American life was the experience of being whipsawed around by unseen forces of corruption and incompetence. Kicking the slats out from under meritocracy by showing the ways sky-high success and abject failure result from a fundamentally insane system are signature Sturges moves. (...)
Among cinephiles, the reputation of Sturges grows shinier every year, even as Capra’s becomes more tarnished. Both directors were conservatives who fundamentally distrusted politics. Both were also enamored of their own ideas about America and its people, and both were egomaniacal auteurs, film “authors,” long before that term came into use.
But beyond those similarities, the two directors could hardly have seemed more at odds. Capra was the driven child of impoverished immigrant Sicilian laborers. Like many people who come up the hard way, he grew to love the idea of its hardness, and to romanticize the lone individual struggling for success as the figure that should be at the center of American society, a moral paragon setting the bootstrapping standards for others to emulate.
Sturges, on the other hand, came up the soft way. He was the son of a bold American self-creationist named Mary Dempsey, who changed her name to D’Este and convinced herself she truly was the daughter of Italian nobility until one of the real D’Estes sued her for using the family name on her line of cosmetics. She altered the name to Desti and found some success as an entrepreneur, able to spend most of her time lounging around the Continent having affairs with a wide range of fringe characters including occultist Aleister Crowley and participating in art happenings with her idol and best friend, Isadora Duncan, the modern dance pioneer. Desti gave Duncan the dramatically long scarf that caught on the back wheel of Duncan’s convertible and snapped her neck, a perfect bohemian death.
Preston “got dragged through every museum in Europe” by his art-addled mother and came to hate anything smacking of pretentious high culture. Instead, he adored his stepfather, Solomon Sturges, a Chicago stockbroker whose mild, stable, plainspoken character came as a refreshing change. Though Preston was often broke, making and losing several fortunes in his lifetime, he was never poor. He had tremendous cultural capital: he spoke fluent French, wore custom-made suits, and had gone to boarding schools with the sons of dukes and prime ministers.
His vision of America was of a chaotic but protean place where the next person you met might be the key to either dizzying success or total disaster. Sturges attempted to forge a career as a cosmetics tycoon, an inventor, a songwriter, and (reluctantly) the kept husband of a wealthy wife, failing at everything until he tried his hand at being a playwright. Finally, his erratic energies and brilliant facility with language found a home and a hit with Strictly Dishonorable, a title he got from his own line to a date who asked what his intentions were that evening. He loved America, with its fast pace, high risk, and popping energy.
It was an altogether different America that Capra loved. Capra, unlike Sturges, was generally and erroneously regarded as a highly political, left-wing populist, always bravely willing to court controversy in order to make “significant” films celebrating the common man and exposing the ways the system didn’t work. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was considered borderline seditious by members of Congress, who raised a ruckus over its portrayal of a US Senate rotten with corruption. The Daily Worker even praised Capra for his “notable progressive films in the 1930s.”
And the French public, given the chance by the Vichy government to vote on which Hollywood movie they’d like to see before the Nazis ended the import of American films, chose Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as an inspirational representation of a still-thriving democracy that can speak truth to power.
Capra created heroes who are idealists full of small-town American values, brave and adventuresome in their Boy Scout–ish endeavors, generally tongue-tied except when quoting their role models Jefferson and Lincoln. They’re often played by tall, lanky, all-American actors like Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart. They go to the big city and meet the cynical, self-serving representatives of financial and state power and are almost undone by the depths of their corruption. But then, at the climactic point, they come back strong and show that the individual can go up against the capitalist forces of darkness and save American democracy.
This last-ditch triumph always occurs with the crucial help of a tough, brainy, and cynical career woman typically played by Jean Arthur or Barbara Stanwyck, who actually has the know-how to fight the system she learned from the inside, once she’s won over to the hero’s cause.
One idealistic man saving American democracy, aided by one formidable woman, can still only do it by inspiring the people to action, starting with that man’s hordes of friends. Like the angel says in It’s a Wonderful Life, “No man is a failure who has friends.” Especially friends who show up with money when the shit hits the fan, as occurs at key points in It’s a Wonderful Life and You Can’t Take It with You, defying the machinations of the rich and powerful with heartwarming hatfuls of crumpled dollar bills. And don’t think you won’t be moved by these scenes either — they still work like magic. (...)
The suicidal urges of a desperate working-class man who can see no other way out was a specialty of theirs in both Meet John Doe (1941) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the latter of which was a notable financial failure when it came out. It was right after the end of World War II, when Americans were in no mood for the film’s bleak look at an unhappy life consumed by relentless money troubles, capped by watching the despairing Jimmy Stewart plunge off a bridge into icy black water on the night before Christmas, even if an intervention from heaven makes it all turn out fine in the end. The 1940s public probably saw the film more clearly than we do now, when it’s considered a cornball Christmas classic.
Capra’s reputation has suffered badly over the course of several decades, as his films came to represent populism’s supposedly slippery slope to fascism. It was shrewd of Capra to obscure his actual politics during the 1930s and ’40s, when most people were fooled by his films into believing the director was “quite liberal,” as Katharine Hepburn did when she agreed to star in State of the Union. Capra was, in fact, an open admirer of both Mussolini and Franco. During the McCarthy era, he served as an FBI informer, helping to persecute his fellow film industry professionals as a way of making sure his own history of working with left-wing writers didn’t come back to bite him.
But as corny as Capra looks today, Sturges relied on his films. He couldn’t help but pay tribute even as he wrestled with Capra’s idea of the American experience.
by Eileen Jones, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: A still from Sullivan's Travels (1942)
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