The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness

As far as I know there aren't a lot of areas where feminists and pickup artists are natural allies, but I can think of one person they would both despise equally. And he has a special place in my heart.

I can't quite remember his name and Google doesn't help, but let's call him al-Fulani. al-Fulani was a classical Islamic poet. When he was a young man traveling the world, he stopped by an oasis town to gather water for his camel and there he passed by a young woman. They exchanged a Significant Look, but said nothing to one another, and in the morning he left the oasis and never saw her again. But he was so impressed by her beauty that he spent the rest of his life composing poems to and about her, which according to the story I heard became among the most exquisite works of Arabic literature even though Google turns up exactly zero of them and maybe I dreamt this entire thing.

The pickup artists would call this "one-itis" and say he had no "game" since he was obsessing over this one woman instead of "playing the field". The feminists would say he was a "rape-y creep". And actually, they're both right. al-Fulani's behavior was neither a healthy way to satisfy his own needs nor fair to the poor woman he fixated on. Rationally it's stupid and horrible. Rationally Dante was stupid and horrible for fixating on Beatrice, Romeo was stupid and horrible for fixating on Juliet, and pretty much every love affair in literature up until the 20th century when people switched to writing books where antiheros slept with a bunch of women but never felt anything for any of them until finally they Developed Ennui - rationally all those love affairs were stupid and horrible. They assume that romantic attraction by some crazy form of magic.

But sometimes the magic works. The first time future President Lyndon Johnson met Lady Bird he asked her out on a fancy date; she was shocked at the presumptousness but accepted, later saying she felt "drawn to him like a moth to a flame". On that first date, less than twenty-four hours after they met, he proposed marriage to her. When she said 'of course not are you crazy' he started calling her and writing letters to her practically nonstop; ten weeks later she finally agreed. LBJ tried to insist the wedding occur that same day; Lady Bird managed to bargain him down to "tomorrow". They were married the next day and then had a perfect idyllic relationship that lasted the next forty years until LBJ's death.

I am friends with several married people like LBJ. Sometimes both spouses just knew from the moment they saw each other that it was meant to be. Sometimes only one of them did, and certain amounts of pestering and wooing and opinion-changing were necessary. Sometimes those certain amounts were very high. Most of these couples tend to be older people. A few are my age but conservative Christians. A few are neither old nor old-fashioned but just awesome people.

I am also friends with Normal Proper People. If LBJ or his female equivalent tried to propose to them on the first date, they'd scream at him to get the hell away from them, then post about it on a "What Was Your Worst First Date Ever?" thread on Reddit. Then they'd go to a party, get drunk, make out with someone on the couch, realize a few weeks later that they were kind of sort of dating them and might as well continue, and after two to four years of "going steady" they'd get married because that's what you do after dating someone for two to four years. A few years later, they would have an affair with their personal trainer who was younger and better-looking. Plus or minus a marriage and personal trainer affair, these seem to be the majority of the people my age whom I know.

And what got me thinking about this was a comment on that Less Wrong thread that got me thinking about this whole gender thing to begin with. I want to make it clear I am not mocking or criticizing this comment and that it is a perfectly rational way to behave and actually much more rational than the way I am behaving. It says:

Actually, I have run into enough guys who treat me like I'm the last woman on earth because I'm a female nerd that I've developed an aversion to anything resembling that type of behavior. I was understanding about their enthusiasm at first, because I want a nerd, too, but it just doesn't work to date someone when they're acting like you're their last chance. They want to move too fast, they create expectations, they become biased and won't hear me when I talk about things that may be incompatibilities. That intensity throws a wrench into the process of getting to know someone. I grok their sense of necessity about being careful in how they present themselves, and I approve of this thread (There are a lot of things I wish I could say to guys - we need to communicate, and I have been wishing for an opportunity to do that), but on the individual level, I am easily spooked by signs of early attachment, overly optimistic probability estimates about us working out, and impatience to see signs of an established connection. I go on the alert for these signs of irrationality if a person treats me "like a celebrity" or similar.

I am pretty sure I have never met this particular woman, but I have certainly been the kind of guy she is talking about. I used to operate through Burning Life-Consuming Crushes, usually initiated in the first few days I met someone, and if I'd had LBJ's courage and awesomeness I would have asked any one of them to marry me and totally gone through with it if they said yes. Oddly enough (or not, if you've read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or the more reputable studies in the same genres) these first impressions were almost always correct, I found these people to be physically and mentally and emotionally compatible with me, I became good friends with most of them, and quite honestly I would probably still marry some of them after a few minutes' thought if they asked me tomorrow.

Eventually I was socialized into the Correct Way To Feel Attraction, which is "Huh, I guess this girl is pretty cute. I'll invite her out, and if she says no, then no big deal because that girl there is pretty cute too." This is what happened with my first girlfriend. She was a wonderful woman and I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about her, but I asked her out kind of knowing that the relationship would be enjoyable and then fizzle out, and sure enough the relationship was enjoyable and then fizzled out. This was probably exactly why she was my first girlfriend: it gave me the non-desperate-looking-ness that helped me seem attractive to her.

So this seems to be another Rule of Intergender Communication like the two I mentioned in the last post: "Don't come on too strong".

But if women make a policy of excluding guys who show strong feelings for them, then logically they will end up with either guys who have only a vague and temporary preference for them, or Machiavellian liars.

I've tried the Machiavellian liar routine a few times myself. "Oh, hey, you're Jennifer or Jessica or Julia or whatever, right? I appear to have totally by coincidence ended up at this table with you. Anyway, you seem kind of okay. Want to go out to dinner sometime? Saturday's no good because I have things to do that night." Meanwhile in my head I'm going over what we're going to name our children.

It's pretty hard to maintain and it's also really unpleasant and it also makes me feel like a horrible person and it also means that if I ever do get into a relationship with Jennifer or Jessica it will be based on deception and lies and probably continue that way ("It's our six month anniversary! Can I get her the beautiful personalized gift that will make her super-happy and so make me super-happy as a result, or would that be creepy and I should just get her some crappy half-dead flowers instead?"). Even if I pull it off, I will be doing an imperfect simulation of what a guy who really doesn't care much for her could do perfectly, and so I will be strictly inferior to him.

Probably most men know they can't manage it, don't even try, and end up independently re-inventing the courtly love tradition: admiring an unattainable woman from afar and showering her with presents as an expression of their transcendent yet hopeless love. Or, as we moderns call it, being a Nice Guy (TM) and therefore Worse Than Hitler (TM).

So I think these filters work and people who have a policy of rejecting suitors who really deeply desire them in a way that makes them not interchangeable with the next "prospect" to come along - they will, in fact, successfully eliminate suitors who really deeply desire them and consider them non-interchangeable. And then ten years later one night in bed they ask their personal trainer why their husband or wife is so frigid.

I know that the Official Narrative is that you're supposed to not get too obsessed with someone until you've been in a relationship with them a while, and you ask them out when you just have a vague preference for them but later you warm up to them and after a few months or years you're genuinely in love and then you can do all the stuff I want to do immediately like write them sonnets and sestinas and maybe some ruba'iyat.

But the Official Narrative doesn't take into account that actually when I like someone my brain tells me right away and goes into Full Obsession Mode. Maybe there are people who don't work like that. Maybe they're the ones who write Official Narratives, while the rest of us are wasting our time writing sestinas and exquisite works of Arabic literature.

Now, don't get me wrong. I know that True Love is really inconvenient. It might not be requited, and then it would be a huge mess and no one would have any idea what to do, because our culture tells us that True Love Must Always Conquer Everything. If some woman I didn't like expressed True Love for me, it would make me feel guilty and horrible.

And because I'm just as susceptible to the Just World Fallacy as anyone else, I would tell them it wasn't true love at all but just plain Creepiness. And that it makes her a bad person and she should be ashamed of herself and so rejecting her is not only okay but actively heroic. And all my neighbors would support me in this, because we all know that True Love is the most powerful thing in the universe, even more powerful than nuclear weapons, and so we can't just let random people go around having it any more than we would just let random people have the Bomb.

But when we reach the point where letting it slip that you love someone is pretty much social suicide, that's...not good. 

by Scott Alexander, Livejournal |  Read more:

[ed. See also: Brújula: LBJ and Lady Bird’s Love Story (Medium).]

Where Loneliness Can Lead

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …
– From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt

‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself.’ The one oasis she found was in a dockworker-turned-philosopher from San Francisco, Eric Hoffer – but she wasn’t sure about him either: she told her friend Karl Jaspers that Hoffer was ‘the best thing this country has to offer’; she told her husband Heinrich Blücher that Hoffer was ‘very charming, but not bright’.

Arendt was no stranger to bouts of loneliness. From an early age, she had a keen sense that she was different, an outsider, a pariah, and often preferred to be on her own. Her father died of syphilis when she was seven; she faked all manner of illnesses to avoid going to school as a child so she could stay at home; her first husband left her in Berlin after the burning of the Reichstag; she was stateless for nearly 20 years. But, as Arendt knew, loneliness is a part of the human condition. Everybody feels lonely from time to time.

Writing on loneliness often falls into one of two camps: the overindulgent memoir, or the rational medicalisation that treats loneliness as something to be cured. Both approaches leave the reader a bit cold. One wallows in loneliness, while the other tries to do away with it altogether. And this is in part because loneliness is so difficult to communicate. As soon as we begin to talk about loneliness, we transform one of the most deeply felt human experiences into an object of contemplation, and a subject of reason. Language fails to capture loneliness because loneliness is a universal term that applies to a particular experience. Everybody experiences loneliness, but they experience it differently. (...)

For her, it was both something that could be done and something that was experienced. In the 1950s, as she was trying to write a book about Karl Marx at the height of McCarthyism, she came to think about loneliness in relationship to ideology and terror. Arendt thought the experience of loneliness itself had changed under conditions of totalitarianism:

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda. (...)

She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.

In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:

Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated.

Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.

by Samantha Rose Hill, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Self-Portrait in the Camp (1940), by Felix Nussbaum. Neue Galerie New York/Getty Images

Ball in Its Court: How Sports Media Needs to Evolve

Sports programming is to the rest of TV what the Golden State Warriors are to the rest of the NBA: seemingly unbeatable. In 2016, 92 of the 100 most watched broadcasts in the US were sports or sports-related. But as with the Warriors, who ended their 2015-16 season with a 73-9 record but were stunned by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, what seems a sure thing today may not be such a sure thing tomorrow.

The sports-media ecosystem is more unstable than it has ever been. As television engagement continues to decline, as new distribution technologies continue to emerge, our great love affair with sports is on the verge of a major shakeup. Sports content, long the life raft for the traditional media ecosystem, is approaching a turning point in which it will need to adapt in order to thrive, and in doing so it may upend much of the remaining stability in the TV ecosystem. While sports and television have been so intertwined as to effectively be synonyms, it is unlikely that the two will remain neck and neck in the near future.

Carrying the Team

No other content has been more popular, monetizable and lucrative. Americans watched more than 31 billion hours of sports content in 2015, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2016, 10,869 sports events were broadcast nationally, up 8% YoY. Twenty-seven of the top 50 broadcasts belonged to the NFL. Of the top 10 networks by affiliate fees, six had major sports rights (the NFL alone delivered more than 60% of Fox’s live and same day ratings points). Sports accounted for nearly 40% of total TV ad spending, according to Adage, and PwC estimates that networks’ 2016 revenue from sports was over $30bn.

The NFL’s TV contracts were worth more than $5bn per year, the NBA’s nearly $3bn and the Olympics nearly $1bn for the US rights alone. In total, leagues and teams received nearly $20bn in licensing fees. Sports programming is the most valuable audience cultivation tool for networks hoping to launch other content and a critical customer acquisition play for pay-TV distributors.

Down in the Count but Not Out

But this state of affairs is approaching its expiration date. As sports rights continue to grow in both value and length—the current NCAA basketball deal with CBS and Turner is 14 years long—the TV bundle is showing serious signs of fraying. Overall television viewing in 2016 was down among key audiences, with time spent watching down more than 40% from 2010 for 18-24s and more than 30% for 25-34s. Cable penetration has not dropped as precipitously but it, too, continues to decline In 2017, for the first time since the turn of the century, more than 25mm consumers are outside of the pay TV ecosystem.

While sports content has long been the lone ray of sunshine against this bleak backdrop, that sunlight is diminishing. ESPN is down to 88mm subscribers from its 100mm peak and its losses are accelerating. NFL viewing dropped 9% in 2016, with the league experiencing an alarming 12% dip across all windows before the presidential election and a softer but still worrisome 5% drop post-election, according to Recode. National windows performed particularly poorly, with ESPN’s Monday Night Football down 13% and NBC’s Sunday Night Football down 11%. This isn’t just an American, or football, blip. English Premier League viewing was down around 11% in the UK and similarly in the US.

Americans certainly love sports and we will not wake up tomorrow in a world that eschews football, basketball and the rest of the big American pastimes. The 2016 NFL season was still the third most-watched ever, the World Series enjoyed its biggest ratings in 25 years and game seven of the NBA Finals set a league viewership record. Unique among TV programming, sports has a built-in, deeply vested audience. And unlike other entertainment content, it’s nearly impossible to create a competitive product. You can’t create a new pro sports league as easily as you find a new script or come up with a reality concept.

But the media ecosystem is not as healthy as it once was and sports is no longer an invulnerable exception. It can’t weather shocks as it once did. Presidential elections historically have reduced football viewing by 2%, but in fall 2016 there was a double-digit dip. At REDEF, we’ve written about the dead cat bounce of the entire media ecosystem, and sports will not go unscathed. It has taken longer, but sports content will need to adapt to the realities of the digital age.

by Tal Shachar, REDEF |  Read more:

Image: Lukas Schulze/Bundesliga/Getty Images

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50 (Scientific American)

Image: Floriana Getty Images

“Thanks so much for coming to vote in person! Please, step right up.”

Emily Bernstein
via:

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Chapter One

Her name is Ana Alvarado, and she’s having a bad day. She spent all week preparing for a job interview, the first one in months to reach the videoconference stage, but the recruiter’s face barely appeared onscreen before he told her that the company has decided to hire someone else. So she sits in front of her computer, wearing her good suit for nothing. She makes a halfhearted attempt to send queries to some other companies and immediately receives automated rejections. After an hour of this, Ana decides she needs some diversion: she opens a Next Dimension window to play her current favorite game, Age of Iridium.

The beachhead is crowded, but her avatar is wearing the coveted mother-of-pearl combat armor, and it’s not long before some players ask her if she wants to join their fireteam. They cross the combat zone, hazy with the smoke of burning vehicles, and for an hour they work to clear out a stronghold of mantids; it’s the perfect mission for Ana’s mood, easy enough that she can be confident of victory but challenging enough that she can derive satisfaction from it. Her teammates are about to accept another mission when a phone window opens up in the corner of Ana’s video screen. It’s a voice call from her friend Robyn, so Ana switches her microphone over to take the call.

“Hey Robyn.”

“Hi Ana. How’s it going?”

“I’ll give you a hint: right now I’m playing AoI.”

Robyn smiles. “Had a rough morning?”

“You could say that.” Ana tells her about the canceled interview.

“Well, I’ve got some news that might cheer you up. Can you meet me in Data Earth?”

“Sure, just give me a minute to log out.”

“I’ll be at my place.”

“Okay, see you soon.” Ana excuses herself from the fireteam and closes her Next Dimension window. She logs on to Data Earth, and the window zooms in to her last location, a dance club cut into a giant cliff face. Data Earth has its own gaming continents—Elderthorn, Orbis Tertius—but they aren’t to Ana’s taste, so she spends her time here on the social continents. Her avatar is still wearing a party outfit from her last visit; she changes to more conventional clothes and then opens a portal to Robyn’s home address. A step through and she’s in Robyn’s virtual living room, on a residential aerostat floating above a semicircular waterfall a mile across.

Their avatars hug. “So what’s up?” says Ana.

“Blue Gamma is up,” says Robyn. “We just got another round of funding, so we’re hiring. I showed your resume around, and everyone’s excited to meet you.”

“Me? Because of my vast experience?” Ana has only just completed her certificate program in software testing. Robyn taught an introductory class, which is where they met.

“Actually, that’s exactly it. It’s your last job that’s got them interested.”

Ana spent six years working at a zoo; its closure was the only reason she went back to school. “I know things get crazy at a startup, but I’m sure you don’t need a zookeeper.”

Robyn chuckles. “Let me show you what we’re working on. They said I could give you a peek under NDA.”

This is a big deal; up until now, Robyn hasn’t been able to give any specifics about her work at Blue Gamma. Ana signs the NDA, and Robyn opens a portal. “We’ve got a private island; come take a look.” They walk their avatars through.

Ana’s half expecting to see a fantastical landscape when the window refreshes, but instead her avatar shows up in what looks at first glance to be a daycare center. On second glance, it looks like a scene from a children’s book: there’s a little anthropomorphic tiger cub sliding colored beads along a frame of wires; a panda bear examining a toy car; a cartoon version of a chimpanzee rolling a foam rubber ball.

The onscreen annotations identify them as digients, digital organisms that live in environments like Data Earth, but they don’t look like any that Ana’s seen before. These aren’t the idealized pets marketed to people who can’t commit to a real animal; they lack the picture-perfect cuteness, and their movements are too awkward. Neither do they look like inhabitants of Data Earth’s biomes: Ana has visited the Pangaea archipelago, seen the unipedal kangaroos and bidirectional snakes that evolved in its various hothouses, and these digients clearly didn’t originate there.

“This is what Blue Gamma makes? Digients?”

“Yes, but not ordinary digients. Check it out.” Robyn’s avatar walks over to the chimp rolling the ball and crouches down in front of it. “Hi Pongo. Whatcha doing?”

“Pongo pliy bill,” says the digient, startling Ana.

“Playing with the ball? That’s great. Can I play too?”

“No. Pongo bill.”

“Please?”

The chimp looks around and then, never letting go of the ball, toddles over to a scattering of wooden blocks. It nudges one of them in Robyn’s direction. “Robyn pliy blicks.” It sits back down. “Pongo pliy bill.”

“Okay then.” Robyn walks back over to Ana.”What do you think?”

“That’s amazing. I didn’t know digients had come so far.”

“It’s all pretty recent; our dev team hired a couple of PhDs after seeing their conference presentation last year. Now we’ve got a genomic engine that we call Neuroblast, and it supports more cognitive development than anything else currently out there. These fellows here”—she gestures at the daycare center inhabitants—”are the smartest ones we’ve generated so far.”

“And you’re going to sell them as pets?”

“That’s the plan. We’re going to pitch them as pets you can talk to, teach to do really cool tricks. There’s an unofficial slogan we use in-house: ‘All the fun of monkeys, with none of the poop-throwing.’”

Ana smiles. “I’m starting to see where an animal-training background would be handy.”

“Yeah. We aren’t always able to get these guys to do what they’re told, and we don’t know how much of that is in the genes and how much is just because we aren’t using the right techniques.”

She watches as the panda-shaped digient picks up the toy car with one paw and examines the underside; with its other paw it cautiously bats at the wheels. “How much do these digients start out knowing?”

“Practically nothing. Let me show you.” Robyn activates a video screen on one wall of the daycare center; it displays footage of a room decorated in primary colors with a handful of digients lying on the floor. Physically they’re no different from the ones in the daycare center now, but their movements are random, spasmodic. “These guys are newly instantiated. It takes them a few months subjective to learn the basics: how to interpret visual stimuli, how to move their limbs, how solid objects behave. We run them in a hothouse during that stage, so it all takes about a week. When they’re ready to learn language and social interaction, we switch to running them in real time. That’s where you would come in.”

The panda pushes the toy car back and forth across the floor a few times, and then makes a braying sound, mo mo mo. Ana realizes that the digient is laughing. Robyn continues, “I know you studied primate communication in school. Here’s a chance to put that to use. What do you think? Are you interested?”

Ana hesitates; this is not what she envisioned for herself when she went to college, and for a moment she wonders how it has come to this. As a girl she dreamed of following Fossey and Goodall to Africa; by the time she got out of grad school, there were so few apes left that her best option was to work in a zoo; now she’s looking at a job as a trainer of virtual pets. In her career trajectory you can see the diminution of the natural world, writ small.

Snap out of it, she tells herself. It may not be what she had in mind, but this is a job in the software industry, which is what she went back to school for. And training virtual monkeys might actually be more fun than running test suites, so as long as Blue Gamma is offering a decent salary, why not?

#

His name is Derek Brooks, and he’s not happy with his current assignment. Derek designs the avatars for Blue Gamma’s digients, and normally he enjoys his job, but yesterday the product managers asked him for something he considers a bad idea. He tried to tell them that, but the decision is not his to make, so now he has to figure out how to do a decent job of it.

Derek studied to be an animator, so in one respect creating digital characters is right up his alley. In other respects, his job is very different from that of a traditional animator. Normally he’d design a character’s gait and its gestures, but with digients those traits are emergent properties of the genome; what he has to do is design a body that manifests the digients’ gestures in a way that people can relate to. These differences are why a lot of animators—including his wife Wendy—don’t work on digital lifeforms, but Derek loves it. He feels that helping a new lifeform express itself is the most exciting work an animator could be doing.

He subscribes to Blue Gamma’s philosophy of AI design: experience is the best teacher, so rather than try to program an AI with what you want it to know, sell ones capable of learning and have your customers teach them. To get customers to put in that kind of effort, everything about the digients has to be appealing: their personalities need to be charming, which the developers are working on, and their avatars need to be cute, which is where Derek comes in. But he can’t simply give the digients enormous eyes and short noses. If they look like cartoons, no one will take them seriously. Conversely, if they look too much like real animals, their facial expressions and ability to speak become disconcerting. It’s a delicate balancing act, and he has spent countless hours watching reference footage of baby animals, but he’s managed to design hybrid faces that are endearing but not exaggeratedly so.

by Ted Chiang, Subterranean Press |  Read more (pdf):
[ed. One of my favorite sci-fi stories by one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Ted Chiang. Here's an example from his stunning collection, Exhalation (it's a bit long - novella length - but mind-blowingly worth it). See also (by Ted Chiang): The Great Silence (Nautilus). From a review of Lifecycle:]

"The novella suggests that the only way to create true AI is by long-term, immersive interaction and teaching, just as one must mold the intelligence and capacities of a child. Cognition, in other words, cannot be programmed but is something that must develop and mature through experience. More centrally, this is a story of love and what true reciprocity demands of us and those we love. The relationships that trainers/owners develop with their digients are imagined as analogous to the combination of caring for a companion animal and raising a child: digients are dependents and how they mature is shaped by how they are treated, yet they also have the potential to surpass their guardians in at least some registers. This work remains one of the most nuanced explorations of the ethical challenges we face should we create a digital entity capable of sentience, one perhaps deserving of personhood."

Jack Mendenhall, Yellow Tulips, 1973
via:

The True Story of the Antifa Invasion of Forks, Washington

In a calmer spring—when facts weren't so slippery, social media so noxious, the country so ready to combust—what happened in Forks, Washington, on June 3 might have been a perfect plot for a farce. A giant white school bus known as Big Bertha puttered into a two-stoplight town far north on the Olympic Peninsula, in desperate need of a new battery, on the very day the town was on alert for a different bus, one full of violent antifa activists ready to riot.

But this was not a calmer spring. A week had passed since a Black man named George Floyd died while a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. People who had been trapped at home during a tense pandemic spilled into the streets, first in Minneapolis and then in other cities and even tiny towns. They marched and carried signs and chanted that Black Lives Matter. A much smaller number looted liquor stores and burned police precincts. The president tweeted threats—“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—and smeared all protesters, including millions of peaceful Americans, as the Radical Left, “thugs,” or, most menacingly, antifa, an ideology ascribed to a diffuse group of antifascists who sometimes stoke chaos and aren't opposed to fighting the far right with violence. Twitter, Facebook, and Nextdoor crackled with claims that antifa was coming to suburbs and rural towns. They were coming on buses, on planes, wearing black, coming, always, from somewhere else.

On the night of May 31, a Sunday, a new Twitter account styled @Antifa_Us issued a call to arms: “Tonight's the night, Comrades. Tonight we say ‘Fuck The City’ and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours …#BlacklivesMaters #FuckAmerica.” A brown hand emoji raised a middle finger. Donald Trump Jr. posted it to his Instagram. “Absolutely insane,” he remarked.

If the tweet sounded just a little on the nose, like shark chum tossed to a certain kind of white person, it was. The next day, Twitter deleted @Antifa_Us; it was not, as advertised, an antifa account, but rather one secretly run by a US-based white-supremacist group called Identity Evropa, one of the organizers of the infamous 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Seth Larson didn't notice Twitter's fact check. The 45-year-old manager of Freds Guns, a firearms store 70 miles east of Forks in the town of Sequim, had already reposted the tweet on his Facebook. A few days later, when he saw a notice for a Black Lives Matter demonstration planned in his hometown, he worried that antifa rioters would come. Someone had to be on the alert.

On the day of the march, June 3, just hours before Big Bertha would roll into Forks in need of a battery, Larson cued up his Facebook Live. He walked by shops downtown, narrating the scene of people striding down the sidewalk carrying Black Lives Matter signs. “Sequim just got a busload of people ... They're not breaking windows yet.” He also claimed to see out-of-towner antifa, 25 to 30 of them, pointing to people with skateboards and training his phone's camera on an occasional bicyclist whizzing by. “Head to Sequim, boys!” he told his followers. “All patriots, call to arms right now!” Over the next 50 minutes, he kept ringing the alarm. “The fuckery is here!” “It looks like Clallam County is going to get hit tonight.” “There's the antifa group. You can totally smell the wanting-to-break-shit-up off of their body. They look sketchy as shit.”

He told his viewers to buy bear mace and “less lethals” at Freds Guns. He said to fetch their gear, their long guns, and meet him at City Hall. A dozen followers showed up at the Sequim protest with pistols, some asking protesters for ID. At least one was carrying an assault rifle. Rumors about buses spread across the county—a guy called 911 about seeing a yellow bus at a gas station between Sequim and Forks, “all of them in black,” cutting off the call frantically with “I gotta meet people!”

Dan Larson (no relation to Seth), a retired logger who lives in Forks, heard the rumor from a text. A friend had seen on social media that antifa was near; the citizenry needed to be warned. It was like the ride of Paul Revere, except on Facebook, and Larson thought he better light a lantern. He posted about busloads of rioters in Sequim and said that “Forks could be next.” A former prison guard in town joined the cry. “Forks, let's get ready to rumble. Lock and load.”

Facebook shares spiked. A City Hall staffer relayed that her husband had heard from truckers on CB radio that busloads of rioters were speeding their way. People called the True Value, urging the owner to batten down its inventory. Some doubted the chatter. The town of 3,500 people was known for two things: logging and as the moody backdrop for the Twilight vampire-romance novels and films. What would antifa want in Forks? To loot sultry Edward and Jacob posters from the souvenir shop?

But then Big Bertha lumbered into the Thriftway parking lot, proof, it seemed, that the rumor was true. Pickups, SUVs, and an ATV circled the 36-foot Trojan horse. A few men approached to talk with the driver, a young brown-skinned man who introduced himself as Tyrone Chevall. He was wearing a black T-shirt and red pants and told them that he and his family had come to camp. A white woman wearing a dark sweatshirt and capri pants stepped off the bus and walked into the grocery store. People loitered in groups, leaned on their car hoods, pistols on hips, watching.

When the woman returned to the bus, it pulled out onto the town's main street. Trucks in the lot followed. A police officer studied the rare sight of a bona fide bottleneck in Forks: 20 vehicles, heading north to the city line.

The officer had heard the antifa rumors and stopped to talk to one of the men who had peeled off from the caravan following the bus. The officer told the man that no antifa were coming, that the rumor was false, but the man sniped, “Bullshit, I've got Three Percenters that posted video of buses dropping off antifa in Sequim for the exact bus that was here.” He insisted that 50 people were on board, but the dark windows made it hard to know for sure. (Three Percenters are a national far-right militia that arose after Barack Obama was elected; the organization says it is pro-government, “so long as the government abides by the Constitution.”) The man couldn't find the video for the officer, but he did show him the Facebook profile of Tyrone Chevall, the driver who'd introduced himself earlier in the parking lot. Another man told the officer that the bus had headed out to the A Road, an old logging byway north of town that leads into a federal forest. He said that the locals were “watching it.”

by Lauren Smiley, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Ian Allen

[ed. Why would anyone be against anti-fascism in America (unless you're a fascist)? I don't get it.]

The Raw Roots of Tom Petty’s ‘Wildflowers,’ Revealed at Last

One day in 1993, Tom Petty opened his mouth, and a new song came out, fully formed.

“I swear to God, it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word ‘go,’” he later told the writer Paul Zollo of the title track from his melancholic and masterful second solo album, “Wildflowers.” “I turned on my tape-recorder deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish.”

The extraordinary new collection “Wildflowers and All the Rest” lets listeners experience that mystical, intimate moment: The first home-recorded demo of “Wildflowers” is among the five-disc release’s many spoils. (There are also 14 more home recordings, a live album, a disc of alternate takes and unreleased recordings of the 10 other tracks that would have made the cut had “Wildflowers” become the double album that Petty initially intended.) In a murmured vocal, Petty sounds like a man fumbling for a light switch and never quite finding it, though a quick flash of luminescence brings a lyric that expresses something simple and true: “Far away from your trouble and worry,” he sings in his tender drawl, “You belong somewhere you feel free.”

Like a lot of great songwriters, Petty believed he channeled his music from somewhere else, so it wasn’t like him to immediately consider exactly who or what a new song was “about.” (“I hesitate to even try to understand it,” he said of his gift in Peter Bogdanovich’s 2007 documentary, “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” “for fear that that might make it go away.”) But some time later, Petty’s therapist floated his own theory: “That song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.”

That analysis, Petty recalled to his biographer, Warren Zanes, “kind of knocked me back. But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.”

From the outside, in the early ’90s, it would have been surprising to hear that Tom Petty needed reassurance from trouble and worry: The wryly grinning rock star appeared to have the Midas touch. Petty was then entering his second decade with the Heartbreakers, the tight, rollicking band that he and some fellow North Floridian pals had formed in the early 1970s; in the years since, they had put out a long, consistent string of hit albums that seemed to hover somewhere above the music industry’s passing trends.

By the late ’80s, and his late 30s, Petty had not only met his heroes (Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne) but formed a band with them, the Traveling Wilburys. He and Lynne had also recently recorded “Full Moon Fever” (1989), Petty’s first solo album, which they captured quickly with charmed and refreshing ease. His record label almost didn’t put it out because it didn’t think it was commercially viable, despite its first two tracks being “Free Fallin’” (!) and “I Won’t Back Down” (!!). Instead, it became his biggest seller yet.

And yet Petty was, throughout all the ostensible highs, outrunning some internal demons that overtook him the minute he slowed down. His two-decade marriage was failing. (His wife, Jane Benyo, had been with him since “the age of 17” — a fact that Petty’s friend Stevie Nicks had once misheard because of Benyo’s Florida accent; you can fill in the rest of the story from there.) Petty’s stormy relationship with the Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch was threatening the band’s future. And there were all sorts of intrusive memories that he’d been trying to bat away since leaving Florida, of a childhood with a sick, saintly mother and an abusive father whose version of Southern masculinity he could never quite live up to. In the respite after the Heartbreakers released the Lynne-produced “Into the Great Wide Open” in 1991, Petty entered the most searching and fertile creative period of his career.

“There was definitely tension in his life,” the “Wildflowers” producer Rick Rubin recalled of the album’s sessions in Zanes’s biography, adding that it “seemed he didn’t really want to leave the studio. Like he didn’t want to do anything else in his life. I think he wanted to take his mind off whatever was going on at home.”

But of course that all spilled out in the songs he was writing, which were at turns raw, funny, hopeful and, just below the surface, throbbing with an almost constant ache. “In the middle of his life, he left his wife, and ran off to be bad — boy, it was sad,” Petty sings atop the richly textured acoustic guitar and a lightly shuffling beat of “To Find a Friend.” (Ringo Starr just happened to swing by the studio one day and obliged to sit in.) By the chorus, though, Petty’s jokey, I-know-a-guy facade has fallen away and revealed a confession of startling first-person vulnerability: “It’s hard to find a friend.”

Petty had long proven himself to be a writer of incisive economy — a rock ’n’ roll Hemingway in tinted shades. He had a knack for assembling simple, everyday words into spacious and evocative phrases: Even on the page, to say nothing of all he brings to the recorded vocal, there’s an entire short story in the five words, “And I’m free/Free fallin’.”

One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers and All the Rest” is observing Petty at the absolute peak of his songwriting powers, making small, intelligent tweaks to these songs in progress. Sometimes it’s a single world, a few letters. During the sessions, the guitarist and longtime collaborator Mike Campbell had brought Petty a driving riff around which he wrote a song he called “You Rock Me” — tentatively, because he knew that was an awful title. In the collection’s liner notes, Campbell recalls Petty keeping the problem of that lyric on the back burner for months, then one day he arrived at the studio with a monosyllabic eureka: wreck. “You Rock Me” is a cliché. “You Wreck Me” is a whole vibe. (...)

Sometimes the songs arrive at certain truths before their singer does. “I’ve read that ‘Echo’ is my ‘divorce album,’” Petty told his biographer, referring to his 1999 effort, “but ‘Wildflowers’ is the divorce album. That’s me getting ready to leave. I don’t even know how conscious I was of it when I was writing it.” By that time table, then, “Wildflowers” is also prelude to the darkness to come: Petty’s debilitating depression, and a mid-90s heroin addiction he kept hidden from almost everyone in his life.

by Lindsay Zoladz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ron Bull/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

[ed. 'Wildflowers' has always been my favorite TP album (in fact, it's referenced in the first post on this blog). Still can't believe he's gone.]

The Way I See It

'It was worth giving up my anonymity': how Obama's photographer became a star (The Guardian).

Image: THE WAY I SEE IT - Official Trailer [HD] - In Theaters September 18

Total Collapse Of Democracy So Horrifying America Decides It Hasn’t Happened Yet

WASHINGTON—As citizens across the nation sought to insulate themselves from mounting evidence to the contrary, several reports indicated Monday that the idea of the total collapse of democracy was so horrifying that America decided it hadn’t happened yet. “We can’t let them take away our democracy,” said Prescott, AZ insurance agent Daniel Cross, echoing the concerns of a terrified American populace that imagined a future in which the nation’s democratic ideals were hopelessly compromised, and determined that in the meantime, the Electoral College, U.S. Senate, unelected Supreme Court, increased power concentrated in the presidency, lack of universal suffrage, frequent executive overrides of decisions that had majority support of the American populace, the manipulation of voting boundaries on the federal, state, and local levels, a strict two-party system that used legislative means to effectively prevent additional parties from gaining traction, widespread voter suppression, corporate control of the media, massive lobbying sector, outsourcing of public services to profit-driven private firms, concentration of power among a few wealthy individuals, complex legal labyrinths designed to prevent regular people from exercising their basic rights, deregulation that led to widespread health, environmental, and economic hardship, unfettered campaign donations, effective legal immunity on the basis of status, wealth, or membership in a state police force, legal and economic obstacles to free assembly and free speech, poor education in both critical thinking and democratic ideas, unelected local councils and boards with significant influence over the distribution of public resources without fair notice or inclusion of the general populace, and the repeated efforts by the United States to undermine democracy in foreign countries at the expense of undermining its own democratic processes at home didn’t currently exist. “This election is a make-or-break moment for our democracy. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes.” Additional reports suggested that the prospects of a badly compromised political system in the United States were so disturbing to contemplate that Americans decided that real democracy had at some point actually existed.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: Uncredited

Why the George Floyd Protests Succeeded Where Others Failed

Yves here. This post describes some of the factors that pushed the Black Lives Matter protests past a tipping point. Recall that Black Lives Matter looked about to achieve a break-out into national consciousness after the killing of Eric Garner. “Die-ins” in high-profile places like Grand Central, which regularly had substantial non-black participation, were getting traction. Lambert was tracking Black Lives Matter intensely at the time and saw how Democratic party operatives moved quickly to try to assume leadership or at least influential positions and succeeded often enough to co-opt the movement. The tactically brilliant die-ins inexplicably stopped.

The reason for featuring this post is to look at an example of activism/movement building that made headway. But having said that, I am not enthusiastic about the author’s claims about the supposed effectiveness of the “defunding the police” demand. It was taken too literally by opponents as a push for no police at all, and some supporters even backed that idea. That demand has generated pushback from the Dems, with Biden promising to increase police budgets (and I don’t buy the idea that embedding social workers will produce more judicious policing; look at how embedding journalists in military forces is a deliberate strategy by governments to generate friendly accounts).

It would have been more persuasive to give concrete examples of what “defunding” would mean, like entirely reconstituting the police force, as was done successfully in Camden, NJ, or getting rid of the budget for military toys and related training. Note that the Pentagon recently confirmed that giving military equipment to local police forces was unproductive, save that some sold it for real money to other police units.

Although correlation is not causation, the transfer of military equipment to police parallels change in police training to a paramilitary approach. From a June Atlantic article:

To be sure, federal military-surplus transfers like those through the Defense Department’s 1033 Program do little good, and much harm: Police departments obtaining used Army filing cabinets at cost isn’t cause for concern, but there’s no earthly reason for small-town cops to wear military fatigues, ride around in mine-resistant Humvees, or carry bayonets. Studies suggest that police departments that receive such equipment see no measurable improvement in officer safety or crime rates, but greater quantities do seem to correlate with higher rates of officer-involved shootings and reduced public trust.

By Nara Roberta Silva, a sociologist with a Ph.D. from the State University of Campinas, Brazil. She is a Core Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she researches and teaches on social movements and democracy, global Marxism, post/anti-colonialism, and social theory. Originally published at openDemocracy

Grievances are commonly pointed out as great protest and movement sparkers. When protests erupted after George Floyd’s death, it was common to hear in news analyses and protesters’ testimonials that Floyd’s fate was “the last straw”. But while blatant racism certainly inspired the protests, it is crucial to consider other elements for a more accurate picture of their rise.

The “last straw” argument is based on two factors. First, Minneapolis diligently adopted the Obama-era reform playbook following other high-profile police killings, including Jamar Clark’s in 2015 and Philando Castile’s in 2016. For five years, the city has implemented a range of measures including training officers in de-escalation tactics, the hiring of more African-American cops and early-warning systems to identify problem officers. But none of that prevented a white officer with a record of complaints from placing his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Second, by late May, it was evident that the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic was distributed unequally. African Americans and Latinos are getting sick and dying at higher rates, even in areas where they make up a smaller portion of the population. In this context, the death of George Floyd was a strong symbolic representation of the scandalous disposal of racialised bodies in the current United States.

The current struggle for racial justice does not imply that racism has gotten worse – even in light of the atrocious state-of-affairs. Floyd’s murder and the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths among African Americans could be considered sparkers, but what made the spark become a fire?

by Nara Roberta Silva and Yves Smith, openDemocracy via Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

School Is a Form of Child Care

This summer, as debate raged among lawmakers, school districts and parents about whether it was safe to send kids back to school, something strange happened in Howard County, Md.

The Howard County school system decided to remain remote for at least the first semester. But to help parents deal with the lack of in-person care for their children, the county offered elementary school students a spot in parks and recreation programs, which provide “support for virtual learning assignments” along with “work sessions” and “crafts, physical activities, and games” — activities not totally unlike, say, school.

Little mention was made of the adults who will supervise the children during this child care. There was no hand-wringing about classroom configurations or safety guidelines. The catch? Unlike regular public school, which is guaranteed and free, the spots were limited — and cost $219 each week for a full day.

Similar programs have been created in places such as Texas, Vermont, Boston and New York City. Even before the school year began, child care providers never shut down in many places and were mostly left on their own to figure out how to keep their doors open while keeping everyone safe.

What is going on? Why would we endlessly debate the safety of putting children in classrooms, but put them in day care settings without anyone batting an eye — and certainly with no national debate?

In reality, there is no magical distinction that leaves children and adults immune to the coronavirus in a child care setting but not in a school. And yet throughout the pandemic we’ve operated as if there is.

It has taken a once-in-a-lifetime crisis to reveal what was always true: School is — whisper it — a form of child care; child care, at its best, fosters children’s development.

We have long drawn a sharp distinction where there shouldn’t be one. School is, first and foremost, about education. But it is also a safe place for parents to send their children while they’re at work. That fact became torturously clear as school was yanked away, throwing families into chaos. At the same time, while child care allows parents of young children to go to work, the early years are also critical for children’s development, making the educational aspects crucial.

The dichotomy we’ve set up between the two doesn’t serve anyone now, but it didn’t work under normal circumstances, either. Separating child care from the larger K-12 educational system forces many of us to live with an expensive, patchwork, private system for children up to age 5. And ignoring the fact that school is a place where children both learn and are kept safe while their parents work means we haven’t reconciled short school days and academic calendars with a typical working parent’s schedule.

How did we ever let such a bifurcated system grow so established in the first place? The story begins, for a University of Pennsylvania education historian, Jonathan Zimmerman, when formal school was first established in this country. In the 1800s, school was transformed state by state from a few weeks of instruction by a teenage girl in a one-room house into a system of formal classrooms with grades and professional teachers. Educational reformers like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard insisted that children needed more formal schooling in order to be informed citizens upholding democracy.

But that same reform push also excluded the nation’s youngest children. When “school” still meant a one-room schoolhouse, working mothers were happy to send babies along with their siblings — which doesn’t mean that this was a good outcome. “They would park the babies in front of the fireplace and the babies would fall asleep and fall backward,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “Kids were injured.” Horace Mann insisted that babies ought to remain at home, to allow the other children to get a better shot at a real education.

“Nobody’s wrong here,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “Mom’s right that we need a place for the 6-month-old, and Horace Mann is right that kids don’t actually belong in the schoolhouse.”

But no one swooped in to help Mom get what she needed — even as a broad consensus formed across the country that all children above the age of 6 had a right to a publicly financed education. “Public support for education starting in grade 1 has never really been a question,” Mr. Zimmerman said, even if we’ve frequently — and vehemently — fought over the particulars of how it’s carried out. School was never about alleviating a burden for parents. It was, for a new republic, based on the idea that the country needed an educated population to make democracy function. It was a civic service.

Child care, on the other hand, was guided by an entirely different logic. “There’s a common thread that runs through the history of child care in this country,” said Chris Herbst, an Arizona State University associate professor who studies child care policy. “And that’s employment.”

Mothers have always worked outside the home. During Mann’s time, they were in mills and factories alongside men. Their presence in the workplace then was controversial, as it remains today. Convincing the public that there should be a service available to take care of their kids while they worked was “a really heavy lift,” Mr. Zimmerman said.

In fact, mothers didn’t get any help from the government until the government needed them to work. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration operated a network of child care centers aimed at helping unemployed mothers get jobs. Then, in the midst of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt built a network of centers across the country. By then, men were fighting abroad and the ranks of childless women were running thin. But without child care, the nation was subjected to an array of horror stories about what happened when mothers went to work, such as children locked in cars near factories or chained to trailer homes.

And so, between 1943 and 1946, the country had a publicly funded, universal child care system built on the idea that women needed to leave the home to keep America running. It was “one of the earliest examples of child care policy in this country,” Mr. Herbst said. And it sprung directly from an economic need. “It was not designed specifically with education goals or child development goals in mind,” Mr. Herbst said. “It was all about parent employment.”

The centers shut down when the war ended, and the country has yet to create a universal child care program since. It has barely even invested public resources in it. But the few times it has, work has nearly always been the driving priority. In the 1990s, the federal government created programs like the Child Care & Development Block Grant and child care subsidies in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program with the goal of “quickly moving mostly unmarried mothers with young children from welfare to work,” Mr. Herbst said. “These were employment programs.”

So child care has always by default been ensnared in the thicket of debate over the role women are meant to play at home and in public. School has rarely come into conflict with that debate. The basic premise that children deserve to learn — and that education is important for the country as a whole — hasn’t been disputed.

And yet the two suffer from being divided from each other. “In both realms, we’re only having half the necessary conversation,” Mr. Herbst said.

by Bryce Covert, NY Times | Read more:
Image: FatCamera/E+, via Getty Images

The Big Boys Are Back: Financializing Single-Family Houses

In many parts of the country, house buying has turned into a drunken land rush. Sales of new houses in August jumped 45% from a year ago, after having jumped 50% in July, to the highest sales rate since 2006, which was the end of the prior housing bubble. Sales of existing homes jumped to the highest rate since early 2007, particularly concentrated on single family houses.

This land rush has been ascribed to different factors, including people leaving rental apartments in big cities to move to the suburbs or exurbs; people suddenly deciding to start families; people – especially those that benefited from the crisis and made a killing with the Fed’s schemes – buying a second home outside the city; and people buying a home in a hurry without selling their old home first, hoping for a higher price later.

And this is happening during a massive unemployment crisis; a time when 7% of all mortgages have been moved into forbearance; a time when 17% of the FHA-insured mortgages are 30 days or more delinquent, though many of those loans have also been moved into forbearance and put on ice.

Clearly the housing market has split into two, with one part being red hot, and the other part crumbling before our eyes.

But there is something else going on too: A surge in big money into single family houses as an asset class.

This is now taking different forms: There are the buy-to-rent companies that grew out of the Financial Crisis. And there are companies that are now building new houses specifically as rental houses; and there are the iBuyers – companies that buy houses to then sell them, a business model that is intended to replace the brokerage model though it has done nothing but lose money, but no problem. And then there are companies buying houses and leasing them back to the former homeowners so that they can resolve a mortgage delinquency without having to move.

And these companies have raised many billions of dollars since April in the capital markets that have gone totally nuts.

Homebuilder ResiBuild was set up specifically to build houses as rental properties. The Atlanta-based company is now raising $1.2 billion, including $400 million in equity and $800 million in debt, to build 5,000 houses with three or four bedrooms and a two-car garage that rent for about $1,850 a month. And it plans to manage those rentals.

Co-founder Jay Byce comes out of Colony Capital, which got into the buy-to-rent business that the Fed so hotly encouraged during the mortgage crisis in 2011 and 2012, where these companies with cheaply borrowed billions of dollars swooped in and bought tens of thousands of houses out of foreclosure to then rent them out.

Jay Byce told Bloomberg: “We were already seeing both boomers and millennials move to rental communities because they wanted more room and a low-maintenance lifestyle. Covid has accelerated the shifts that were already happening.”

The theory is that people want more space and live in the suburbs but want to rent instead of owning. (...)

Despite the malaise in the big-city rental apartment sector, the buy-to-rent companies, such as Invitation Homes, have reported record high occupancy rates and on-time rent collections that are roughly in line with pre-Covid averages.

Invitation Homes said in an investor presentation in September that it would be getting into the sale-leaseback market – buying single-family houses from homeowners and leasing them back to the former homeowners, who would do this to cash out without having to move.

The sale-leaseback method of raising cash has been practiced for a long time by owners of commercial property, airplanes, equipment, etc. But in terms of single-family houses, it’s fairly new.

But now there is a different angle to the sale-leaseback model, that is totally new: 7% of the mortgages are in forbearance and others are delinquent but are at the moment protected by a moratorium on foreclosures. These homeowners will eventually have to deal with reality, which could mean a forced sale or foreclosure.

But with a sale-leaseback, they could sell the home and lease it back, so they’d become renters and wouldn’t have to move. Startups are getting into this deal, raising lots of money to do this.

In other words, companies are lining up to take advantage of the mess that will ensue when the forbearance period and the foreclosure moratorium end, which is when these mortgages become officially delinquent and face foreclosure – and it will produce another wave of homes being taken over by investors and becoming an asset class.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks

As we head into the most consequential, contentious election in our history, it’s time to fix some of the structural problems that led us to this moment.

Let’s face it: Our digital public sphere has been failing for some time. Technologies designed to connect us have instead inflamed our arguments and torn our social fabric.

It doesn’t have to be this way. History offers a proven template for how to build healthier public spaces. As wild as it sounds, part of the solution is no further than your nearest public park.

For my family, that’s Fort Greene Park, a 30-acre square of elm trees, winding paths, playgrounds and monuments in Brooklyn. The park serves as an early-morning romper room, mid-day meeting point, festival ground and farmstand. There are house-music dance parties, soccer games during which you can hear cursing in at least five languages, and, of course, the world-famous Great Pupkin Halloween Dog Costume Contest. In short, the park allows very different people to gather, see each other, and co-exist in the same space. When it’s all working, Fort Greene Park can feel like an ode to pluralistic democracy itself.

That’s not a coincidence—it’s by design. In 1846, Walt Whitman envisioned Fort Greene park to serve this precise purpose. New York City had no public parks at the time—only walled commercial pleasure gardens for those who could afford to enter. Whitman, then an up-and-coming newspaper editor, used the Brooklyn Eagle’s front page to advocate for a space that would accommodate everyone, especially the working-class immigrants crowded into shanty towns along nearby Myrtle Avenue.

Whitman saw public spaces as critical elements of the new American democracy. They were spaces to celebrate individuality and build collective identity. Public parks, he argued, could help weave a greater, more egalitarian “we.”

In Fort Greene Park, this project—the building of a collective identity, the weaving of a social fabric—is ongoing. That the Park was the rallying point for one of New York’s first major Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder is not incidental. Conflict and contestation are important parts of how healthy democracies progress, as long as there are structures that facilitate it. Functional public spaces are central to this work. They allow us to assemble, to share common experiences, and to demonstrate that what might have seemed like individual struggles are actually the result of unjust systems that demand correction.

Now, accelerated by the pandemic, we spend much of our time living and conversing with others in a different location: digital space. But social media and messaging platforms weren't designed to serve as public spaces. They were designed to monetize attention. (...)

Private spaces and businesses are critical for a flourishing digital life, just as cafes, bars and bookstores are critical for a flourishing urban life. But no communities have ever survived and grown with private entities alone. Just as bookstores will never serve all the same community needs as a public library branch, it’s unreasonable to expect for-profit corporations built with “addressable markets” in mind to accommodate every digital need.

Alongside and between the digital corporate empires, we need what scholars like Ethan Zuckerman are calling “digital public infrastructure.” We need parks, libraries, and truly public squares on the Internet.

by Eli Pariser, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Getty

The Best Movies on Amazon Prime Video Right Now

The Best Movies on Amazon Prime Video Right Now (NY Times)

[ed. Placeholder, to remember which one's to check out.]

Record Subsidies to Farmers Ahead of Election Day

Trump Funnels Record Subsidies to Farmers Ahead of Election Day (NY Times):

Federal payments to farmers are projected to hit a record $46 billion this year as the White House funnels money to Mr. Trump’s rural base in the South and Midwest ahead of Election Day.

The gush of funds has accelerated in recent weeks as the president looks to help his core supporters who have been hit hard by the double whammy of his combative trade practices and the coronavirus pandemic. According to the American Farm Bureau, debt in the farm sector is projected to increase by 4 percent to a record $434 billion this year and farm bankruptcies have continued to rise across the country. (...)

The breadth of the payments means that government support will account for about 40 percent of total farm income this year. If not for those subsidies, U.S. farm income would be poised to decline in 2020. 

(Image: Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times)

[ed. Socialism? No, just bribery. Buying votes, pure and simple.]

Kafka in Pieces

The unfinished draft of The Castle, Franz Kafka’s third and final novel, ends mid-sentence. But when the manuscript made its initial entree into the world, the text had been edited into completion. Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, who prepared the original 1926 edition, later reflected that his “aim was to present in accessible form an unconventional, disturbing work which had not been quite finished: thus every effort was made to avoid anything that might have emphasized its fragmentary state.” To accomplish this obfuscation of the novel’s incomplete form, Brod redacted nearly a fifth of the text. He eventually thought better of the choice, and in the second edition restored most of what he’d cut—but by then, his success at attracting interest in Kafka’s work had led to its placement on the Nazis’ “List of Harmful and Undesirable Literature.” This prevented the more faithful edition from reaching a wide German audience until the fall of the Reich. Meanwhile, Kafka’s readership grew abroad thanks to the 1930 English translations by Willa and Edwin Muir, who based their rendering of The Castle on Brod’s original edition—presenting the novel not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.

The state in which Kafka left The Castle is representative of the condition of his entire oeuvre. During his life, he published a few stories in periodicals, released one collection of fiction, and prepared another that appeared only posthumously. But he left behind the vast majority of his work incomplete—infamously, with a note beseeching Brod to burn every word. Brod approached the other novels he declined to destroy much as he did The Castle, omitting unfinished chapters from The Trial and altering the ending of Kafka’s first novel, The Man Who Disappeared, which he renamed Amerika. As for the reams of stories and aphorisms, Brod bestowed titles on many pieces that lacked them and amended aborted conclusions.

Over the intervening decades, generations of scholars and translators have contested the comparatively polished Kafka that Brod constructed. (...) Poet and translator Michael Hofmann has been another advocate of the rougher-edged Kafka, through his version of Kafka’s first novel, given the compromise title Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (2004); a collection of Kafka’s stories, Investigations of a Dog: And Other Creatures (2017); and now The Lost Writings.

This new volume collects seventy-four short pieces—few longer than two pages, many unconcluded—curated by Reiner Stach, author of the definitive three-volume biography of Kafka. In his afterword, Stach argues that, though “the fragile, fragmentary quality” of Kafka’s work has been extremely influential, even “caus[ing] us to begin to take the literary fragment seriously,” the writer’s most fragmentary material has remained hidden from view: rarely translated, often out of print, barely read, and thus, even if not completely absent, still fundamentally “lost.” (...)

Though Stach does admit to certain Brodian concessions—he writes that the “selection seeks above all to be accessible,” presenting “highly approachable, ‘readable’ pieces”—The Lost Writings thrillingly foregoes any organizational infrastructure that might help us orient ourselves, from titles to sections to a table of contents. Besides the selections themselves and the afterword, there is only an index of first lines. This minimalist approach submerges readers immediately into Kafka’s world. The very first page fixes us in one of his classic traps: “I lay on the ground at the foot of a wall, writhing in agony, trying to burrow down into the damp earth.”

We might divide the pieces collected in The Lost Writings into gems and shards—the former seemingly conceptually complete, the latter obviously broken-off—each with their own particular kinds of obscurity. Within that scheme, this first text would be a gem; the few sentences that comprise the rest of the tale briefly sketch the scene, unfurling the plight contained in the opening. There’s the narrator as prey, a coach equipped with a driver and dogs already bored with the kill, and a hunter “greedily pinching [the narrator’s] calves.” Most startlingly, there is also a brutal expression of desire thwarted: “athirst, with open mouth, I breathed in clouds of dust.”

This opening parable of doomed impotence stutters into the next—another gem, in which the circumstances and mode are completely transformed, but the essential dynamics of predator and prey are unchanged. Here the narrator assumes the cruel, empowered position occupied by the hunter’s retinue in the first piece. He addresses the ensnared:

So, you want to leave me? Well, one decision is as good as another. Where will you go? Where is away-from-me? The moon? Not even that is far enough, and you’ll never get there. So why the fuss? Wouldn’t you rather sit down in a corner somewhere, quietly? Wouldn’t that be an improvement? A warm, dark corner? Aren’t you listening? You’re feeling for the door. Well, where is it? So far as I remember, this room doesn’t have one.

Absent exits recur throughout the collection, as do impassable doorways, the portal’s useless presence only heightening the atmosphere of entrapment. In a later fragment, a shard, a pack of beasts return home from stealing a drink of water from a pond, only to be chased by punishers wielding whips into “the ancestral gallery, where the door was slammed shut, and we were left alone.” In another, a gem, the narrator inexplicably paces “an averagely large hall softly lit by electric light.” “The room had doors,” he reports, “but if you opened them, you found yourself facing a dark wall of sheer rock barely a hand’s breadth from the threshold, and running straight up to either side, as far as one could see. There was no way out there.”

This same quietly suffocating phrase, “no way out”—a Kafkan fragment in itself—appears in another text, a dialogue between an unnamed interlocutor and a chimpanzee named Red Peter who has been seized from his jungle home by humans and eventually learns to behave like one. The ape is also the narrator of “A Report to an Academy,” one of the few stories Kafka finished and published in his lifetime. In the full story, Red Peter expresses his desire for a “way out” and devotes some time to glossing the meaning of the phrase: “I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by ‘way out,’” he tells his audience in Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation. “I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom.’ I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides”—leaving us to deduce what sort of comparatively inhibited liberty he seeks instead. In the version in The Lost Writings, a dejected Red Peter recounts the story of his capture, before which, he says, he “hadn’t known what that means: to have no way out.” He goes on to explain that he was contained not in “a four-sided cage with bars”; rather, “there were only three walls, and they were made fast to a chest, the chest constituted the fourth wall.” Everything hinges, it seems, on this fourth wall. In the Kafkan cosmology, three walls are presumed. The frightening tragedy is the way one’s own existence constitutes the final barrier.

The specter of this absent fourth wall haunts The Lost Writings. It returns explicitly in one other fragment, in which the narrator describes the space in which he’s held captive. “It was no prison cell, because the fourth wall was completely open,” he tells us in the first line. Here self-obstruction is expressed not in the character’s actual physical predicament, but in his interpretation of it: the fourth wall’s openness serves only to accentuate that he doesn’t even attempt to break free. In fact, the narrator says it’s for the best that his nudity prevents him from fashioning an escape rope out of garments; given the possible “catastrophic results,” it’s “better to have nothing and do nothing.”

Elsewhere, Kafka finds other ways to represent the structure of self-defeat. In one fragment, the narrator tells of being mysteriously unable to stay with a girl he loves. “It was as though she was surrounded by a ring of armed men who held out their lances in all directions,” he claims at first, but then revises this account: “I too was ringed by armed men, though they pointed their lances backward, in my direction. As I moved toward the girl, I was immediately caught in the lances of my own men and could make no further progress.” Another piece draws the self-abnegation deeper into the speaker, and exhilaratingly accelerates the velocity of its expression. “I can swim as well as the others,” the narrator says, “only I have a better memory than they do, so I have been unable to forget my formerly not being able to swim. Since I have been unable to forget it, being able to swim doesn’t help me, and I can’t swim after all.”

by Nathan Goldman, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Colin Laurel

Louise Glück Should Refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature

I don't know what the American poet Louise Glück said when the Swedish Academy informed her that she won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, but I know what she should have said: “Thanks, but no thanks.”

October is the season of the Nobel Prizes, when a handful of people are catapulted into fame and fortune due to the philanthropic legacy of the inventor of dynamite. Four of the six prizes named after Alfred Nobel are generally uncontroversial — physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics — but the peace and literature prizes arouse passions. There is good reason to be dubious of the peace prize, which has gone to some great people and organizations but also went to Henry Kissinger and Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet it’s the literature prize that, in its current form, has definitely outlived its usefulness and caused great damage.

Last year, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Peter Handke, an Austrian writer who created a set of impressive literary works in the first part of his career but since the 1990s fell into a morass of genocide denial. In recent decades, Handke wrote at least a half-dozen books and plays that downplayed and denied the genocide committed by Serbs against Muslims during Bosnia’s war. Handke even attended the funeral, and delivered an eulogy, for the former leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, who died while on trial for war crimes. (...)

The Swedish Academy is a strange organization. It has just 18 members who are appointed for life and who select new members by secret ballot — and the country’s king must approve them. The decision to give the 2019 prize to Handke is not the only evidence of the organization’s unfitness to manage the literature prize. The Academy had to postpone the 2018 award because of revelations that for decades it had abetted sexual harassment and rape by the husband of one of its members. Once that scandal broke open, thanks to the investigative work of journalist Matilda Gustavsson of Dagens Nyheter, the dismal response of the male-dominated Academy included forcing out a female member, Sara Danius, who was pushing for sweeping reforms in its ranks.

In a way, we can be thankful for these scandals because they are reminders of the need to implement a root-and-branch reform of the Nobel literature prize. For much of its existence, the prize generally served as a referendum on the best in Western literature. For that task, the 18 members of the Swedish Academy were a serviceable jury. But more than ever, the reach and aspiration of the Nobel literature prize is truly global. It is laughable and tragic that an award of such influence should be controlled by a tiny and secretive group of Swedes, let alone ones who have shown themselves to be abettors of sexual assault and genocide denial.

by Peter Maass, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Robin Marchant/Getty Images

Jack White

Jack White Gives A Thrilling Performance On 'SNL' — On 2 Days' Notice (NPR)

This week's Saturday Night Live musical guest was supposed to be Morgan Waller, before the country singer got himself disinvited. On Friday morning, SNL creator Lorne Michaels announced that Jack White — whose best-known band, The White Stripes, releases a greatest-hits album in December — would show up to perform in Waller's place.

Though we're only two episodes into Season 46, it's hard to imagine that White's turn won't come out near the top when it's time to rank SNL's 2020-21 musical guests. Unencumbered by new material to promote, White cranked out a few scorching career highlights, including 2014's solo hit "Lazaretto" — which he performed with a guitar designed for him by the late Eddie Van Halen — and kicking off with a fantastic medley.

The earlier performance fused unexpected pieces in remarkable ways, kicking off with "Don't Hurt Yourself" — the song he co-wrote and performed on Beyoncé's Lemonade — before shifting into a version of The White Stripes' "Ball and Biscuit" that incorporated lyrics from Blind Willie Johnson's "Jesus Is Coming Soon." So, on two days notice, we got an Eddie Van Halen tribute, Beyoncé, The White Stripes, a Jack White solo song and Blind Willie Johnson. Not bad!

It was the sort of performance SNL could stand to showcase more often: a veteran star without much to promote or prove, popping by with the sole objective of putting on the best show humanly possible.

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