Transcript: Shame, Safety and Moving Beyond Cancel Culture

EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [ed. Podcast here.]

I always found myself in an uncomfortable place in the cancel culture debate. I think fights over the boundaries of acceptable speech aren’t just legitimate, but they’re actually needed and overdue, and I think the way they play out online leads to excesses, disproportionate punishments, oftentimes the wrong people being targeted for the wrong things, and then, over time, a crappy speech environment and a lot of political backlash for everyone.

So here I want to get beyond the cancel culture is it real or fake, is it good or bad debate. There’s something real that people are referring to when they talk about cancel culture, and it’s both good and bad. There are good parts, and there are bad parts. And so the deeper question is, what do we actually want to achieve here, and how do we go about achieving it? For me, and I’m the only person I can answer for, it’s a world in which we speak about each other more respectfully, in which we listen to each other more openly, and that becomes a foundation, and this part is important. (...)

So there’s a lot to talk about here, but I’m joined for it by, I think, the perfect two guests, Will Wilkinson and Natalie Wynn. Will is the former vice president for research at the Niskanen Center. He actually got canceled. He was fired from his job because a right-wing online mob grabbed a clearly satirical tweet of his and pushed Niskanen to fire him. If you think, by the way, that cancel culture or online cancellation is somehow a left-wing phenomenon, yeah, Will Wilkinson is proof that that is not true. He writes regularly for for Times Opinion and now has a great newsletter, Model Citizen, and a podcast of the same name.

Natalie Wynn is my favorite YouTuber where she makes these remarkable videos. It combines social theory and politics under the moniker ContraPoints. You’ll hear us reference a video she made on cancellation and J.K. Rowling in here, and I really do recommend looking them up. Both of them have had experience on both sides of this issue, and they’ve come out of it on the other end with, in my view, unusually complex, nuanced views of how this plays out and what it all means. So this is a great conversation, one I wanted to have for a long time, and I’m glad we did.

I want to start a bit in the experiences both of you have had with the thing that gets called cancel culture. And Will, I’ll with you. Describe what being cancelled was like for you, not necessarily exactly what happened, but how did it feel.

WILL WILKINSON: It was a shock. There was an immediacy to what happened. I had tweeted. The tweet created controversy. I tweeted my bad tweet a minute before I went to bed. And then first thing in the morning, I wake up too just like a world of shit. I’m just getting piled on by all sorts of opportunistic right-wingers who were taking my very funny joke out of context and claiming that I was really calling for the hanging the vice president of the United States, just the most ridiculous bad faith, but it was causing such a kerfuffle that I was immediately called into a meeting at work, and then my job was over.

It had a guillotine kind of quality to that initial aspect because I just woke up, experienced this terror, and then got my head chopped off, and then the rest of the day was just shock. I was literally, I think, in shock because I was just like, what the hell just happened?

EZRA KLEIN: I know the folks well who work at Niskanen, which was the think tank you were at. I don’t believe they misunderstood that your tweet was a joke. So what happened there? Why do you think you got fired?

WILL WILKINSON: I think generalizing from my individual case, and I think this is indicative of one of the issues that has become prevalent, is that anybody that works at your institution, if they say something that’s a little bit controversial or that is taken out of context, it can cause a huge, very temporary storm of controversy online that draws attention to the institution.

Your boss might start getting hundreds of emails. They might start getting phone calls from people they don’t know, and it just escalates to this point where they feel like they have this really urgent PR crisis on their hands, and they have to do something quickly to manage it. And I think that that’s often a misperception and that managers panic because this is something that hasn’t happened before.

It wasn’t the case that your employee would go to a restaurant and tell a racy joke, and then all of a sudden the phone at your office is inundated with 250 voicemails, right? That didn’t used to happen. So people, I don’t think, are acclimated to this climate where anybody who’s associated with your organization can create this little crisis situation, but I think these are actually like tempests in teacups, and they do just blow over.

And in one way, social media has the memory of a goldfish. In another way, it never forgets anything and can dredge things from many years ago, but these things just pass, and they don’t really actually have that much of a, I don’t think, effect on the reputation of these institutions for long. It’s just that the technology that we’ve had is enough to create an experience that managers don’t know how to handle, and they flip out. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah I do think one of the strange things about this kind of political action is people in it don’t realize what they’re doing. I think you had quoted, Natalie, the line from Jon Ronson that the snowflake doesn’t take responsibility for the avalanche. I’m paraphrasing that from memory, but there’s something in that where you’re on Twitter, something’s trending or everybody’s talking about something, and you’re just jumping in with a joke.

You’re just participating in the day’s online conversation, and it doesn’t mean a lot to you. And Will, to what you were saying, and the individual might not even mean a lot to the person you’re making fun of or you’re attacking or you’re criticizing, but it is the emergent scale helped along by algorithms that ends up making it meaningful.

WILL WILKINSON: It’s definitely true what you say that a lot of times people just want to pipe up and have their say. This thing starts trending, or they see other people that they follow complaining about a particular article or about the particular horrible thing that somebody did, and they just chip in their two cents just to feel like they’re involved, and sometimes that scales up to something that’s really traumatic for the person who’s on the receiving end of it. But I think, over time, the way things have evolved is that people actually do understand this dynamic pretty well, and I only get this from people on the right.

I my own case, I could feel the dynamic. I could feel that there are people on Twitter who are looking for openings that they can strike through. Somebody saw the opening in my tweet, threw the harpoon into it, the horn went off, [HORN SOUND], called all the troops, and then people started swarming, but then there’s another layer. There’s these reporters for Breitbart and the Federalist and Fox News who are looking for these controversies because the fact that it becomes a controversy online is what makes it a story.

So the people who are creating the controversy know that they’re making a story. So there’s a kind of symbiosis there, and then my own case got picked up as a story in The Washington Examiner and the Federalist and Fox News, and then the top level of it is if it makes it all the way up to cable news broadcast on Fox.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah. I had a line in my recent piece on this that Fox News isn’t anti-cancel culture. They just want to control the cancel culture, which I think is very much the right way to understand their prime time, but I want to start zooming out on this because I think a lot of what we end up talking about here is the purpose and utility of social shame. So Natalie, I ask this of you, what’s the case for and against in your view using social shame as a tool for social change?

NATALIE WYNN: Well, the for, the reason that people initially sort of were attracted to this, like the #MeToo movement, for example, I would say that it used social shaming often as a last resort against someone like Harvey Weinstein, who has used his position of power to abuse women for decades. In situations like that, it can be very good. It can attract a problem to an injustice or to someone who is abusing power.

The word accountability has kind of lost all meaning, but I think accountability is really just the left-wing word for punishment, but it can be used to punish people who seem immune to every other means of punishing and who, I suppose by most estimations, deserve it, but the negative is that, again, this is punishment administered without any kind of legal system. It’s pure mob justice.

And I think if you look at the history of mob justice, it’s pretty clear that that often can lead to witch trials and things like that where you basically have social resentments. People are being scapegoated. You have anger sort of directed almost arbitrarily at objects on whom all this kind of built up rage is unleashed. And oftentimes, the choice of target doesn’t make any sense.

by Ezra Klein with Natalie Wynn and Will Wilkinson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Natalie Wynn Parrott and, via Will Wilkinson

Richard Estes, Grand Luncheonette, Oil on Canvas, New York City, 1969

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[ed. Phot0-realistic paintings]

Kurt Cobain
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Daniel Kaminsky, Internet Security Savior, Dies at 42

Daniel Kaminsky, a security researcher known for his discovery of a fundamental flaw in the fabric of the internet, died on Friday at his home in San Francisco. He was 42.

His aunt, Dr. Toby Maurer, said the cause was diabetes ketoacidosis, a serious diabetic condition that led to his frequent hospitalization in recent years.

In 2008, Mr. Kaminsky was widely hailed as a latter-day, digital Paul Revere after he found a serious flaw in the internet’s basic plumbing that could allow skilled coders to take over websites, siphon off bank credentials or even shut down the internet. Mr. Kaminsky alerted the Department of Homeland Security, executives at Microsoft and Cisco, and other internet security experts to the problem and helped spearhead a patch.

He was a respected practitioner of “penetration testing,” the business of compromising the security of computer systems at the behest of owners who want to harden their systems from attack. It was a profession that his mother, Trudy Maurer, said he first developed a knack for at 4 years old after his father gifted him a computer from Radio Shack. By age 5, Mrs. Maurer said, Mr. Kaminsky had taught himself to code.

His childhood paralleled the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a young child, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer. When Mr. Kaminsky was 11, his mother said, she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States. The administrator said someone at her residence was “monkeying around in territories where he shouldn’t be monkeying around.”

Without her knowledge, Mr. Kaminsky had been examining military websites. The administrator vowed to “punish” him by cutting off the family’s internet access. Mrs. Maurer warned the administrator that if he made good on his threat, she would take out an advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon’s security.

“I will take out an ad that says, ‘Your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it,’” Mrs. Maurer recalled telling the administrator, in an interview on Monday.

They settled on a compromise punishment: three days without internet.

Nearly two decades after he lost his access to the internet, Mr. Kaminsky wound up saving it. What Mr. Kaminsky discovered in 2008 was a problem with the internet’s basic address system, known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, a dynamic phone book that converts human-friendly web addresses like NYTimes.com and Google.com into their machine-friendly numeric counterparts. He found a way that thieves or spies could covertly manipulate DNS traffic so that a person typing the website for a bank would instead be redirected to an impostor site that could steal the user’s account number and password.

Mr. Kaminsky’s first call was to Paul Vixie, a longtime steward of the internet’s DNS system. The usually unflappable Mr. Vixie recalled that his panic grew as he listened to Mr. Kaminsky’s explanation. “I realized we were looking down the gun barrel of history,” Mr. Vixie recalled. “It meant everything in the digital universe was going to have to get patched.”

Mr. Vixie asked Mr. Kaminsky if he had a fix in mind. “He said, ‘We are going to get all the makers of DNS software to coordinate a fix, implement it at the same time and keep it a secret until I present my findings at Black Hat,’” Mr. Vixie said, referring to an annual hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Mr. Kaminsky, then the director of penetration testing at IOActive, a security firm based in Seattle, had developed a close working relationship with Microsoft. He and Mr. Vixie persuaded Microsoft to host a secret convention of the world’s senior cybersecurity experts.

“I remember calling people and telling them, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you what it is, but there’s this thing and you will need to get on a plane and meet us in this room at Microsoft on such-and-such date,’” Mr. Vixie said.

Over the course of several days, they cobbled together a solution in stealth, a fix that Mr. Vixie compared to dog excrement. But given the threat of internet apocalypse, he recalled it as being the best dog excrement “we could have ever come up with.”

By the time Mr. Kaminsky took the stage at Black Hat that August, the web had been spared. Mr. Kaminsky, who typically donned a T-shirt, shorts and flip flops, appeared onstage in a suit his mother had bought for him. She had also requested that he wear closed-toed shoes. He sort of complied — twirling onto the stage in roller skates.

When his talk was complete, Mr. Kaminsky was approached by a stranger in the crowd. It was the administrator who had kicked Mr. Kaminsky off the internet years earlier. Now, he wanted to thank Mr. Kaminsky and to ask for an introduction to “the meanest mother he ever met.”

While his DNS fix was Mr. Kaminsky’s most celebrated contribution to internet security, it was hardly his only contribution. In 2005, after researchers discovered Sony BMG was covertly installing software on PCs to combat music piracy, Sony executives played down the move. Mr. Kaminsky forced the issue into public awareness after discovering Sony’s software had infected more than 568,000 computers.

“He did things because they were the right thing to do, not because they would elicit financial gain,” his mother, Mrs. Maurer, said.

(When a reporter asked Mr. Kaminsky why he did not exploit the DNS flaw to become immensely wealthy, he said that doing so would have been morally wrong, and that he did not want his mother to have to visit him in prison.)

Silicon Valley’s giants often sought Mr. Kaminsky’s expertise and recruited him with lucrative job offers to serve as their chief information security officers. He politely declined, preferring the quiet yeoman’s work of internet security.

In a community known for its biting, sometimes misogynistic discourse on Twitter, Mr. Kaminsky stood out for his consistent empathy. He disdained Twitter pile-ons and served as a generous mentor to journalists and aspiring hackers. Mr. Kaminsky would often quietly foot a hotel or travel bill to Black Hat for those who could not otherwise afford it. When a mentee broke up with her boyfriend, Mr. Kaminsky bought her a plane ticket to see him, believing they were meant to be. (They married.) (...)

Security was always Mr. Kaminsky’s lifework, most recently as the chief scientist at White Ops, a security company he helped found that was recently renamed HUMAN. He was not above criticizing his own industry. In a 2016 keynote address at Black Hat, he said the industry had fallen far short of expectations. “Everybody looks busy, but the house still burns,” he said, before pitching the cyber equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

“The internet was never designed to be secure,” Mr. Kaminsky recalled in a 2016 interview. “The internet was designed to move pictures of cats. We are very good at moving pictures of cats.” But, he added, “we didn’t think you’d be moving trillions of dollars onto this. What are we going to do? And here’s the answer: Some of us got to go out and fix it.”

by Nicole Perlroth, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Paid in Full

Among the pillars of the creator economy is Patreon, a service that individuals with blogs or podcasts can use to administer subscriber paywalls and raise money from their audiences. Musician Jack Conte founded the company in 2013 after watching his YouTube ad revenue dwindle despite his massive audience. According to a 2019 Wired profile, Conte felt a “growing fury at the pittance” that YouTube paid. “In one 28-day period, during which his account generated 1,062,569 views, he received a measly $166.10 payout.”

Other platforms, including Twitch, Substack, and OnlyFans, have emerged as similar alternatives to big social media and the meager earning potential it offers. The rise of these alternative forms of monetization has pushed the centralized web to modify its own incentive structures. When, earlier this year, Twitter announced its Super Follow feature — a paywall for tweets — it represented the latest acknowledgement by a social network that Web 2.0 was over: If the platforms themselves did not provide adequate monetization tools, users would generate their content elsewhere.

Such features, Will Oremus argues, signal a departure from social media’s established model of holding users’ attention with algorithmically sorted feeds: “Users will deliberately choose to forge ongoing connections with their favorite creators rather than simply trusting an algorithm to surface engaging free content from a vast, impersonal reservoir.” This points to social media just becoming mass media again; instead of everyone making content for one another, an elite group of “creators” produce it for the mass of “users.” Of course, the creators who already amassed large followings during the “free” era of social media are best positioned to benefit from subscription platforms, paywalls, and collectible content, and they will continue to draw upon feed-powered social media to promote themselves and attract their paying customers. Those without followings, meanwhile, will have a harder time monetizing their output. The creator economy’s highly visible success stories conceal a huge population of users who cannot make a living from selling subscriptions any more than they could from YouTube ad money. In a 2018 piece for the Verge, Patricia Hernandez described the Twitch streamers who spend months or years broadcasting without an audience: “Many streamers actually remember the exact moment their view counter went from zero to one.”

For every high-profile streamer earning millions, there are many others earning nothing; subscription services and Super Follows are unlikely to change this. But in the meantime, we’ll have normalized an internet where everything is increasingly for sale and content must embed its own marketing within itself, in order to maximize its financial return. That is, we will have the world of NFTs.

NFTs are among the most visible manifestations of what’s being called Web3, a transformation of the backend architecture of the internet in response to Web 2.0’s limitations and asymmetries. Its vision is a blockchain-based internet that works less like an open network circulating “free information” and more like an expansive matrix of built-in ownership and payment infrastructure.

As with Web 2.0, third-party applications will mediate most Web3 activity for ordinary users. These decentralized apps will not necessarily look and feel altogether different than traditional web apps but will likely incorporate functionality that blockchain technology specifically facilitates, allowing mechanisms like crowdfunding to be incorporated directly into works themselves. Interactions will become transactions, and more types of information will likely be traded in NFT-like marketplaces. As such transactions become more fundamental to the web, users will have to hold cryptocurrency in digital wallets to pay as they go.

Web3 replaces one starry-eyed vision of the internet with something seemingly more pragmatic, where creators are directly compensated for content they produce while users are never allowed to forget the true cost of information circulation. Web 2.0 has already demonstrated that information can’t be free; it can only be subsidized, most likely by entities with deep pockets and nefarious interests. Its “open network” largely consists of centralized servers owned by major corporations whose dominance grows with each passing year. Yes, the internet has generally been free for users, but ethereal metaphors like “the cloud” have concealed its increasingly proprietary nature, its ongoing consolidation into a few monopolies. That centralization has proceeded in tandem for the internet’s back-end hosting, which is increasingly handled by Amazon Web Services along with Microsoft and Google, just as much of the front end is handled by Google and Facebook. In the face of these giants, individual efforts to monetize content without their involvement can seem absurd: one’s own personal webpage vs. a billion-user site.

But with blockchains and built-in transactionality, the picture would presumably look different. Web3 is decentralized and inherently monetized at its core through tokenization: Users who contribute computing resources to the collective, peer-to-peer effort of storing the internet’s data and validating that data’s transfer (replacing the centralized servers that currently predominate) receive compensation in the form of bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. In her 2020 book The Token Economy, Shermin Voshmgir writes that blockchain “introduces a governance layer that runs on top of the current internet, that allows for two people who do not know or trust each other to reach and settle agreements over the web.” In other words, Web3 makes the internet’s traditional intermediaries — the centralized corporate platforms — less essential to its ongoing existence, both as providers of its backend capacity and as subsidizers of its content via ad revenue. The social platforms’ role as distribution channels might endure, but their overall importance to the web will have diminished. In a sense, technologist Jaron Lanier’s old idea of an internet based on micropayments has finally arrived, but it has been transformed into an internet of micro-ownership.

by Drew Austin, Real Life |  Read more:

Image: Chat (2021) by Viktor Timofeev

The Knock

Spending the first night in my 1995 GMC camper van, I lay awake for hours in my sleeping bag, watching the window shades glow — white, then red, over and over — as cars sped past in the dark. Is that one slowing down? I wondered. Can they see I’m in here? Will they call the cops?

Van dwellers had told me about “the knock” — usually three sharp raps at the door, often by the police. The risk of getting jolted awake and kicked off my patch of asphalt kept me uneasy and made it hard to sleep.

I was living in a van as a journalist, as research for my book “Nomadland.” Over the course of three years, I followed Americans who had been squeezed out of traditional housing and moved into vans, late-model RVs, even a few sedans. I drove more than 15,000 miles — from coast to coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border. And night after night, I bedded down in a new place, whether a truck stop or the Sonoran Desert. Sometimes I stayed on city streets or in suburban parking lots, which rattled me in ways I’d never expected.

For people whose only home is a vehicle, the knock is a visceral, even existential, threat. How do you avoid it? You hide in plain sight. Make yourself invisible. Internalize the idea that you’re unwelcome. Stay hypervigilant to avoid trouble. Apart from telling you to clear out, the police can harass you with fines and tickets or get your home-on-wheels towed away to an impound lot.

I think about “the knock” a lot these days. More people are moving into vehicles as shelters of last resort, and their ranks are likely to swell when Covid-19 eviction bans expire. Laws punishing the unhoused population have been appearing around the country in a wave of NIMBYism.

We are emerging from what may be the most introspective year in American history. The meditative film based on my book, which is up for six Oscars this weekend, fits that mood well. The pandemic has prompted much talk of interconnectedness and empathy, what we owe one another as a society. “Nomadland” reminds us that our bonds should extend to those who live in homes-on-wheels. No one should have to live in constant fear of the knock.

In the film, Fern, played by Frances McDormand, is startled by a knock that interrupts a quiet meal. She looks up with a start and swears. A face hovers at the window, and a fist pounds once, twice, three times on the door. Then comes a gruff voice. “No overnight parking! You can’t sleep here.”

Watching the character’s panic at the sudden sound of a fist hitting her van gave me anxious flashbacks. Then it made me sad. Then I felt angry, because that scene was just too accurate, and I wished it didn’t reflect the reality of how people treat one another.

Some of the nomads from my book play versions of themselves in the film. They know this phenomenon too well. Swankie, 76, told me she had nightmares about it while sleeping in her 2006 Chevy Express van.

“I have this strange, surreal dream of someone knocking,” she explained. “Usually happens if I am not 100 percent comfortable with where I am parking.”

Bob Wells, 65, has a popular video, “Avoiding the Knock,” and has been lecturing on the topic for ages. I first heard him talk about it seven years ago in the Sonoran Desert, at a gathering called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. He shared tactics for “stealth parking,” such as creating police-friendly alibis and making your van look like a contractor’s work vehicle.

At first listen, I thought about how clever and resourceful those strategies were. But after hearing them a few times, I reached a second conclusion: In a better world, people wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to stay out of sight.

The nonprofit National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty keeps tabs on over 180 urban and rural cities across America, more than half of which have enacted laws that make it hard or nearly impossible to live in vehicles.

Over the past decade, Tristia Bauman, an attorney at the center, has seen the regulations multiply. Some places forbid overnight parking. Others outlaw inhabiting a vehicle outright. Penalties can pile up fast. Unpaid, they lead to the cruelest punishment of all: towing. Failing to pay an impound fee means losing not just a car but a home.

by Jessica Bruder, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

Army of Pharmaceutical Lobbyists Descend on Washington to Block Generic Covid-19 Vaccines

The pharmaceutical industry is pouring resources into the growing political fight over generic coronavirus vaccines.

Newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021 show that over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver on intellectual property rights by the World Trade Organization that would allow generic vaccines to be produced globally.

Pharmaceutical lobbyists working against the proposal include Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.

Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.

The push has been followed by a number of influential voices taking the side of the drug lobby. Last week, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., released a letter demanding that the administration “oppose any and all efforts aimed at waiving intellectual property rights.” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chair, has similarly criticized the proposal, echoing many of the arguments of the drug industry.

Currently, only 1 percent of coronavirus vaccines are going to low-income countries, and projections show much of the world’s population may not be vaccinated until 2023 or 2024. In response, a coalition of countries, led by India and South Africa, have petitioned the WTO to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights on coronavirus-related medical products so that generic vaccines can be rapidly manufactured.

The waiver requests a suspension of IP enforcement under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, treaty. If granted, local pharmaceutical plants could be granted compulsory licenses to produce coronavirus vaccines without the threat of being sued by the license holder.

The proposal has gained traction globally, with hundreds of members of the European Parliament, dozens of American lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and increasingly vocal voices in the public health community expressing support.

But the waiver petition has encountered fierce opposition from leading drug companies, who stand to lose profit and who fear that allowing a waiver would lead to less stringent IP enforcement in the future. (...)

But global public health activists remain skeptical.

“The drug company lobbyists are saying the TRIPS waiver won’t increase the supply of vaccines, but if that’s true, why do they oppose it? Because they think it will in fact expand production,” noted James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a group that supports the waiver petition.

“The waiver itself, from a legal point of view, is most important for eliminating two restrictive provisions on the TRIPS, both dealing with exports,” added Love. “From a political point of view, it is more important, giving a green light to use existing compulsory licensing authority and putting pressure on vaccine manufacturers to do more voluntary agreements.”

by Lee Fang, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group via Getty Images

[ed. Even as hundreds of thousands die in India. See also: Maintaining Intellectual Property Amid Covid-19 (The Economist).]

In the Mood

You are reading this in a café, the steam wafting gently off your coffee, a soft rain pattering on the window outside. You are in an old library late at night, with the creak of old chairs and the scratching of a pencil from a writer immersed in their thoughts. You are in a dense, foggy forest in the shadow of a mountain where your party has set up temporary camp, hoping no belligerent creatures wander through during the night. Hours tick by as these atmospheres spool out from your computer screen and speakers. Before moving to your next piece of business, you glance at your browser window to confirm: The coffee is still hot; the monsters have yet to arrive. The scene is set for your everyday activities, but only within the frame of the platform itself.

These “ambience videos,” each streaming on YouTube, epitomize a transformation in mood-regulating media: Where ambient media once intervened in the mood of an existing space, newer forms promise instead an atmospheric escape from wherever you find yourself. (...)

Today’s ambience videos share many of the same basic aesthetic principles as the earlier ambient works. They invite audiences to let them play while attending to other things, and they are designed to accompany everyday activities like studying, reading, and sleeping. However, ambience videos break decisively with the earlier focus on augmenting existing locations, aiming instead to act as an immersive perceptual substitute for the immediate physical environment. They provide not just an accompaniment but an alternative space within which everyday activities can take place. Like Kotler’s in-store atmospherics, these ambiences are both branded and self-contained.

Both ambient and ambience approaches aim to make everyday life more atmospherically controllable through media, but ambience shifts the locus of this control away from those in the local environment and toward more fully commodified ambience channels. By reframing everyday mood regulation as an escapist activity, ambience videos bring it more completely within the walled-garden logic of platform capitalism. Rather than a person curating their own local ambience, YouTube ambience channels situate moods as accessible via the platform alone, just as long as the browser tab stays open. (...)

In 2017, taking advantage of YouTube’s then-novel streaming features, channels began popularizing “live” ambiences that audiences could tune into anytime they like. The most famous among these is the 200+ million view “lo-fi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to” (launched in February 2017), which depicts a girl studying in front of a large window looking out on an atmospheric cityscape. Throughout the day, that landscape shifts to feature soft glowing city lights and, at times, rain falling softly just beyond the glass. A cat on the windowsill keeps continuous watch over what is happening outside, providing both the girl and stream audiences reassurance that it is safe to look away and return to our work. Neither the girl nor the cat pay any attention to the rest of the room, including the open laptop nearby and the wide range of physical media visible around the edges of the scene. In this way, the lo-fi girl models the new approach to ambience as entirely contained by the frame: Pay no mind to the cluttered room in which you find yourself; seek to draw your mood instead entirely from the scene streaming in through a nearby window.

The YouTube ambience videos emerging in lo-fi girl’s wake take a cue from this frame-within-a-frame format, deploying on-screen windows to hint at an external world of atmospheric weather while simultaneously providing reassurance this larger world won’t intrude on the cozy space the viewer is ensconced within. Channels like Calmed by Nature that had provided more generic relaxation videos (“Calming Wave Sounds,” “Mountain Creek”) began adopting the out-the-window ASMR ambience with videos like “Winter Snowstorm Ambience in Fire Lookout Tower with cracking fire, wind, & blizzard sounds” (April 2017).

Eventually the virtual café emerged as a favored place to situate these cozy moods, particularly after actual cafes became inaccessible amidst the 2020 pandemic lockdown. Calmed by Nature’s “Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience with Relaxing Jazz Music and Rain Sounds – 8 Hours” (March 2020) provides a typical example. The visual aesthetic is heavy on the hygge: soft pools of light, hot beverages, and colors that one ambience video creator describes as “warm, buttery hues” are conspicuous in an otherwise empty coffee shop. These interior designs are paired with a steady evening rain dripping from the eaves just outside the large street-facing windows. Candles flicker and mugs steam next to an open book and an open journal, as if their owners had just stepped away briefly (for eight hours). Smooth jazz lies low in the audio mix underneath the rain and the slightest hint of people talking somewhere offscreen. The attached hashtag #coffeeshopambience currently appears on over 650 videos across 168 different YouTube channels, each a variation on this basic style.

As Eliza Brooke notes in a recent New York Times piece, the pandemic appeal of these videos is pronounced: Their focus on the threshold of indoors and outdoors signals protection in the face of environmental exposure while simultaneously offering a warm and compensatory — yet never distracting — sense of community and spatial belonging for the socially distanced. But the focus on a specifically retail atmospherics is also far from accidental, echoing Kotler’s earlier promotion of the atmospheric in-store brand. Much like a latte purchase now often serves as a ticket to dwell for a few hours in a well-curated, comfortably franchised space, these videos situate ambience as an on-demand branded experience. If after eight hours you still want more, channels like ASMR Rooms and Calmed by Nature have in-platform stores with the usual mugs, T-shirts, and tote bags.

by Paul Roquet, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Cozy Coffee Shop (YouTube)

How Bad Is Our Pandemic Drinking Problem? (NYT)

Image: Ori Toor

Recommended Readings

Prologue

When I finished writing “Some things I’ve learned in college,” I thought it was one of my least interesting posts to date. Surprisingly, it was one of my most viewed and has generated the most discussion of all (as measured by Reddit comments, here).

As has been noted by many a wise sage, page views and comments are not a perfect measure of a piece of writing’s quality, or overall value. However, the value of writing to someone who never sees it is zero, so the two do have something to do with each other.

In hindsight, this shouldn’t have been so surprising. Of course I already know what I’ve learned in college, so I’m not going to find it particularly interesting to write down. On the other hand, I often learn quite a bit by writing blog posts, both through object-level research and simply by spending time thinking about a topic.

But, of course, no one else knows I learned in college. So, I am currently trying to consider which aspects of my own life, despite being “obvious” to me, others might find interesting. The lowest hanging fruit is media recommendations. Tons of blogs have lists of favorite books, articles, or other blogs, and, as I’ve noted before, I spend a little too much time listening to audiobooks and podcasts.

So, here are some things I recommend you read or listen to. But first, how to listen to them:

Programs

Pay especially close attention if, like me, you prefer listening to reading.

Libby

• A gem of the internet: tens of thousands of free books and audiobooks, and not just boring old ones in the public domain.
• You need a library card, but it took me about five minutes to get for someone else when helping him set up the app.
• Digital copies are limited for most books, so the popular ones can take a while. But there are always quite a few good nonfiction audiobooks available,and some have unlimited copies so there is never a wait.
• Also, it lets you adjust the reading speed in 5% increments (1x, 1.05x, 1.1x, …), which is surprisingly useful. Any app that still limits you to 1.25x or 1.5x speed needs to learn this lesson.
• Most of the books below I listened to on Libby, so I won’t bother finding the link to them. Search for “Libby” in the App Store, and then search for the book there.

I have no idea why more people don’t know about this. Spread the word!

LibraryThing

• Super clunky 90s-looking website that makes up for aesthetics with utility.
• Input a list of books you like, and get an instant list of recommendations.

Pocket

• There are a million programs for saving links that you want to (i.e. will probably never) read later.
• But its secondary function is awesome: the iPhone iOS app automatically generates an audio recording of any article you save. Not ideal for pages with lots of graphics or important formatting, but super convenient for walls of text.
• For some reason, the mac version of the app doesn’t have this feature. Damn.
• This is my go-to text-to-voice program for miscellaneous articles I don’t need to focus on super well.

Speechify

• Nice, free text-to-voice software.
• The Good: super fine-grained speed adjustment up to incomprehensibly fast, pretty good automated reading voice, highlights words as it reads them.
• The bad: kinda glitchy, for me anyway. Just stops reading once in a while and sometimes hard to edit copy-and-pasted text.
• I use this one for longer texts (long articles, entire books) that don’t have important graphics. Will often read and listen at the same time if it is important.

NaturalReader Chrome extension

• My go-to text-to-speech for reading shorter webpages or those with important graphics.
• The good: reads directly from a webpage so you don’t have to switch into another program; much better for pages with important graphics. Highlights sentences as they are read.
• The bad: the fastest reading speed isn’t that fast. It’s ok, but I could see someone with a better-oiled brain than my own unsatisfied. Also kinda glitchy - sometimes takes me back to the top of the article after I pause for more than a few seconds.

Books

Cream of the crop: my strongest recommendations

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Ian McGilchrist.

• Perhaps my strongest recommendation on the list. Completely worldview-shifting, with implications for every facet of human life, psychology, culture, and society, not to mention philosophy and artificial intelligence. Deserves a careful read by virtually everyone.
• Central claim: our two brain hemispheres process information in fundamentally different ways, which correspond to competing worldview, conscious experiences, ontologies and epistemologies.
• Fair warning: a very dense book. I did not listen to this one, and doubt that I could have. Listening < reading << careful reading with notes.

The Precipice by Toby Ord

• A last-minute addition to the list, I started reading after beginning to write this post and am now nearly finished.
• Basic claim: humanity could have an awesome future, but there’s a substantial chance (around one in six, according to Ord) we’ll suffer an “existential catastrophe” — basically extinction or something similar — within the next century.
• Ord is meticulous and rigorous, considering natural risks like supervolcano explosions, existing anthropogenic risks like nuclear war, and risks from future technologies like artificial intelligence. He considers weird anthropic principle observational biases, what conclusions we can draw from our past survival, the implications of risks being correlated or anti-correlated, and more.
• It’s worth a read if only as an exemplar of what a really earnest (and IMO successful) effort to answer one particular question (namely, determining the probability of humanity losing its potential in the next century) looks like.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

• Written pre-internet and around the peak of television’s cultural dominance, the book is an unapologetic diatribe against TV as a source of information.
• Main claim: whereas the written word is a medium optimized for transmission of a particular set of ideas, or “rational argumentation,” TV encourages information—including news and ‘educational’ programming—to be packaged as entertainment. The result is a culture with lower quality discourse and shorter attention spans.
• Although TV has ceded its hegemony to the internet, the larger point remains as valid as ever: a medium of communication (writing, speaking, TV, Twitter) has not only first-order consequences on the information being transmitted, but far-reaching second-order consequences on society at large.
• The most memorable part of the book is Postman’s description of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Not that the politicians debated for 3 hours using complex sentence structures and forms of argumentation, but that completely normal people voluntarily and enthusiastically watched the whole thing! Not scholars or elites - just regular old farmers and blacksmiths or whatever. Not going to lie, this made me jealous. Like many of us in the internet age, I wish my attention was stronger and more robust. Despite being more educated than most of the debate audience, random 1860s farmers apparently had much stronger attention spans than my own.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells

• I don’t usually read books that are preaching to the choir (i.e. just convincing me of what I already believe), but even us follow-the-science liberals or progressives probably tend to underrate the importance of climate change. However bad you think it is going to be, it will probably be worse.
• Also, Wallace-Wells’ writing itself is off-the-charts eloquent and poetic. Even if you think climate change is a Chinese hoax, this book is valuable if only as an exemplar of poetic prose.

by Aaron Bergman, Aaron's Blog | Read more:

College Math

via:

[ed. Good point.]

Why Are Glasses So Expensive?

It’s a question I get asked frequently, most recently by a colleague who was shocked to find that his new pair of prescription eyeglasses cost about $800.

Why are these things so damn expensive?

The answer: Because no one is doing anything to prevent a near-monopolistic, $100-billion industry from shamelessly abusing its market power.

Prescription eyewear represents perhaps the single biggest mass-market consumer ripoff to be found.

The stats tell the whole story.

• The Vision Council, an optical industry trade group, estimates that about three-quarters of U.S. adults use some sort of vision correction. About two-thirds of that number wear eyeglasses.
• That’s roughly 126 million people, which represents some pretty significant economies of scale.
• The average cost of a pair of frames is $231, according to VSP, the leading provider of employer eye care benefits.
• The average cost of a pair of single-vision lenses is $112. Progressive, no-line lenses can run twice that amount.
• The true cost of a pair of acetate frames — three pieces of plastic and some bits of metal — is as low as $10, according to some estimates. Check out the prices of Chinese designer knockoffs available online.
• Lenses require precision work, but they are almost entirely made of plastic and almost all production is automated.

The bottom line: You’re paying a markup on glasses that would make a luxury car dealer blush, with retail costs from start to finish bearing no relation to reality. (...)

I reached out to the Vision Council for an industry perspective on pricing. The group describes itself as “a nonprofit organization serving as a global voice for eyewear and eyecare.”

But after receiving my email asking why glasses cost so much, Kelly Barry, a spokeswoman for the Vision Council, said the group “is unable to participate in this story at this time.”

I asked why. She said the Vision Council, a global voice for eyewear and eyecare, prefers to focus on “health and fashion trend messaging.”

And because it represents so many different manufacturers and brands, she said, it’s difficult for the association “to make any comments on pricing.”

Which is to say, don’t worry your pretty head.

What the Vision Council probably didn’t want to get into is the fact that for years a single company, Luxottica, has controlled much of the eyewear market. If you wear designer glasses, there’s a very good chance you’re wearing Luxottica frames.

Its owned and licensed brands include Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.

Italy’s Luxottica also runs EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical.

Just pause to appreciate the lengthy shadow this one company casts over the vision care market. You go into a LensCrafters retail outlet, where the salesperson shows you Luxottica frames under various names, and then the company pays itself when you use your EyeMed insurance.

A very sweet deal.

by David Lazarus, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. Repost. I bought some sunglasses last week and wondered why nothing ever changed after this exposé. See also: this 60 Minutes segment on Luxottica.]

Nancy Wilson Tribute to Eddie Van Halen "4 Edward"

"Sleepminting" Exposes Vulnerability of the NFT Market (and Other Insights)

In the opening days of April, an artist operating under the pseudonym Monsieur Personne (“Mr. Nobody”) tried to short-circuit the NFT hype machine by unleashing “sleepminting,” a process that complicates, if not corrodes, one of the value propositions underlying non-fungible tokens. His actions raise thorny questions about everything from coding, to copyright law, to consumer harm. Most importantly, though, they indicate that the market for crypto-collectibles may be scaling up faster than the technological foundation can support.

Debuted as part of an ongoing project titled NFTheft, sleepminting serves as a benevolent but alarming crypto-counterfeiting exercise. It aims to show that an artist can be made to unconsciously assert authorship on the Ethereum blockchain just as surely as a sleepwalking disorder can compel someone to waltz out of their bedroom while in a deep doze.

Remember, to “mint” an NFT means to register a particular user as its creator and initial owner. Theoretically, this becomes the first link in a verified, unbreakable chain of custody tethered to an NFT for the life of the underlying blockchain network. Thanks to this perfectly complete, perfectly secure, and eternally checkable data record, the argument goes, potential buyers can trust non-fungible tokens without necessarily having to trust their owners or sellers. These traits add a valuable layer of security that traditional artworks could never rival with their eternally dubious off-chain certificates of authenticity and provenance documents.

Personne may have found a way to dynamite this argument for much of the art NFT market. Sleepminting enables him to mint NFTs for, and to, the crypto wallets of other artists, then transfer ownership back to himself without their consent or knowing participation. Nevertheless, each of these transactions appears as legitimate on the blockchain record as if the unwitting artist had initiated them on their own, opening up the prospect of sophisticated fraud on a mass scale.

To prove his point, on April 4, Personne sleepminted a supposed “second edition” of Beeple’s record-smashing Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, the digital work and accompanying token that sold for a vertigo-inducing $69.3 million via Christie’s less than a month earlier. (My emails to Beeple and his publicist about the situation went unanswered.)

In our ensuing email exchange, Personne claimed he then gifted the sleepminted Beeple (Token ID 40914, for the real crypto-heads) to a user with the suspiciously appropriate handle Arsène Lupin, an homage to the famous “gentleman thief” created by Maurice Leblanc and recently reincarnated in a hit Netflix show. (Personne denied he was Lupin to the blog Nifty News.) Lupin then turned around and offered the sleepminted Beeple for sale on Rarible and Opensea, two of the largest NFT marketplaces—both of which eventually deactivated the listings. (Neither Rarible nor Opensea replied to my emails seeking comment.)

Why publicize any of this, you ask? Personne essentially sees himself as a so-called white hat hacker, meaning an ethics-driven coder who exploits technological flaws strictly to demonstrate how they can be fixed. He is a staunch believer in the potential of NFTs and crypto. However, he believes major “security issues and vulnerabilities” in smart contracts have been glossed over to make way for the gold rush. He also claimed to have launched the NFTheft project only after the crypto-community largely ignored or derided his attempts to spark earnest conversation.

“The goal I want to achieve with this is to take the most expensive and historic NFT, and show that if it is not protected, how can we guarantee that any NFT is safe from intentional malice, fraud, forgeries, theft, etc.?” he wrote.

Although the sleepminting saga is hairier than a Haight-Ashbury commune, I think we can chop through the overgrowth using two questions with serious stakes for different participants in the NFT market.

1. What does sleepminting tell us about the technological vulnerabilities of art-related NFTs?

Short Answer

The main smart contract driving the market might not be smart enough to secure the frenzied level of buying and selling we’ve seen in 2021.

Longer Answer

What’s clear is that Personne is exploiting a flaw in the standard ERC721 smart contract, which is used by the overwhelming majority of art-related NFTs transacting on the Ethereum blockchain. But it is not an easy-to-see flaw, and the effect is not being faked by Photoshop wizardry or some other non-crypto chicanery; the sleepminted Beeple really is minted in Beeple’s wallet, it really is transferred elsewhere afterward—and both of those transactions are memorialized forever on the blockchain.

by Tim Schneider, ArtNet | Read more:
Image: Beeple, Everydays – The First 5000 Days NFT

Maggie Cheung with Tony Leung - Wong Kar Wai
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The Journalist Who Fell Asleep on Prince

I remember when Neal Karlen was invited to interview Prince, the most famous rock star on the planet, for a Rolling Stone cover story in 1985. Neal had been invited by Prince himself, who at that point had maintained a three-year media silence, a veritable epoch in rock ’n’ roll time. The era began with the release of Prince’s first top 10 hit, “Little Red Corvette,” followed by “When Doves Cry,” the first No. 1 single from the movie Purple Rain, then the release of the movie itself, whose soundtrack took only eight days to reach No. 1, where it stayed for an astonishing 24 weeks. It continued with another No. 1 hit from the movie, “Let’s Go Crazy,” by Prince and The Revolution, and if that weren’t enough, shortly after Prince picked up his Oscar for best original soundtrack for Purple Rain, his seventh album, Around the World in a Day, featuring “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life,” also went to No. 1 in the United States.

By then, press was possibly beside the point. After all, in 1980, Robert Christgau, in his review of Prince’s Dirty Mind for the Village Voice, declared: “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”

In any event, the reason I knew about Neal’s summoning by “the dynamic funk enigma that is Prince” is that we were both then toiling at Newsweek, cub reporters who had tumbled out of our respective college dorm rooms and into the skyscraper offices at 444 Madison Ave., where we were variously biding our time over savagely tedious tasks and battling the fires of Friday-night closings. Moreover, we had formed an exclusive club of two as the only Newsweekers who had just written cover stories for the far groovier Rolling Stone, eight blocks north on Fifth Avenue but 100 million cosmic miles away. Mine had been a story on the genre-busting TV show Miami Vice. And Neal had written about Jamie Lee Curtis, then starring alongside John Travolta in Perfect, the ‘80s self-referential paean to Rolling Stone, love, and gym life.

But, this. This was big, even for the glitzoid, over-the-top ’80s. The story that would emerge, “Prince Talks: The Silence is Broken,” would be Neal’s first of three cover stories for Rolling Stone about Prince. And it would mark the beginning of a friendship that would last 31 years until Prince’s death alone in an elevator in Paisley Park, his compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota, in a manner that Prince had predicted in that very first interview, while speaking about the tunes and tones in his head that caused him to make music all night, sometimes for 20 hours straight, with the help of studio engineers who worked in shifts. “‘One of my friends worries that I’ll short-circuit. We always say I’ll make the final fade on a song one time and ...’” stretching out on a recording console, as Karlen wrote: “limbs awkwardly splayed like a body ready to be chalked by the coroner, he crossed his eyes and stuck his arm out.”

Which is pretty much what happened, give or take a few details.

And now, Neal has published a memoir, This Thing Called Life, a compulsively readable reconstruction of the relationship between the two Minneapolis natives, alternately middle-of-the-night confessional, hysterical, and athletic. “You want to play ping pong?” Prince would ask during lulls in the action. On one side of the ring was “the universally acclaimed genius” and “personification of hip” to whom other “intergalactic hipsters offered unashamed gush.” Prince was the “cultural icon who defied and cross-bred genres from fashion to funk … and whose death made the Eiffel Tower, the cover of the New Yorker, the front-page above-the-fold headline picture of the New York Times, and all of downtown Minneapolis glow purple.”

On the other, pencil ever behind his ear, was the “flamboyantly engaging” motor mouth, Brown graduate, and former bar mitzvah tutor (Hebrew name Natan Shmuel), whose Yiddish-speaking grandfather made Shabbos wine under special governmental dispensation during Prohibition for his local Minneapolis synagogue. As a special Christmas gesture, he carried Mason jars of the runoff—“let’s be honest, several illegal batches”—to neighbors in his mostly Black neighborhood of North Minneapolis. This earned him the moniker “the Wine Jew,” a designation that “guaranteed my grandmother and him, both octogenarian foreigners, safety and popularity in the neighborhood.” Years later, a check of his grandfather’s logs revealed that one regular recipient of the Yuletide wine was Prince’s father, John Nelson.

The magna carta of the tale is the initial RS interview, birthed out of the same sorts of betrayals, double-crosses, and acts of true faith that characterized post-WWII international agreements—and most of Prince’s life, which Karlen followed and participated in, to a degree, until the musician’s death from a fentanyl overdose five years ago today.

In the summer of 1985, Neal was already working on a story about Prince’s women—Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman—his musical collaborators and bandmates in The Revolution. Eager for a vehicle to promote his new album, Around the World in a Day, since he would not tour it, Prince had agreed to speak to Rolling Stone through Wendy and Lisa, and to appear on the cover with them. But the two apparently liked Neal and mentioned this to Susannah Melvoin, Wendy’s identical twin sister and Prince’s then fiancée, who apparently recommended that Prince come out of his cone of silence and speak as well.

And suddenly, the cover interview would feature the man himself.

“By recommending to Susannah Melvoin (and perhaps positing the idea to Prince personally) that the Little Big Man talk to me,” Neal writes, “Wendy and Lisa did the unthinkably generous: They gave up their own cover story. True, they would make it the following year [a story Neal also wrote], but they didn’t know that, and once you give up the cover of any major magazine, it’s always doubtful that the wheel will come around again. People in rock and roll just don’t give up being on the cover of Rolling Stone.”

Shockingly, not more than a year later, after the galaxy of hits that had put Prince and The Revolution on a par with the Beatles, Prince would disband the group, forever affecting his relationship with the two women. Yet Prince could also express unshakable loyalty. When Neal arrived in Minneapolis to meet Prince for the interview, he was shocked to learn that Rolling Stone planned to yank the rug out from under him and send the music editor to poach the blockbuster interview with Prince for himself. But Prince whispered nyet and shut that idea right down.

Neal wrote: “Prince lived a life where nobody—nobody!—knew more than 15 percent of what was going on in his life and brain. Still, that 15 percent could encompass a lot of surprises.”

For two days after Neal arrived for the interview, (“Just get enough,” Jann Wenner had told him, “that we can put ‘Prince Talks’ on the cover,”) Prince observed him, but wouldn’t speak to him. Neal gamely sweated out this further indignity, until, finally, Prince greeted the reporter and invited him to go for a spin in his car. Before turning on the ignition, Prince stared straight ahead through the windshield of his 1965 bone-white Thunderbird, murmuring, “I’m not used to this, I really thought I’d never do interviews again.”

by Emily Benedek, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Neal Karlen

[ed. See also: Karlen's 1985 Rolling Stone interview - Prince Talks: The Silence Is Broken]

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PGA's Player Impact Program Rewards Most Popular Players

There are 244 players listed in the current FedEx Cup points standings. The PGA Tour’s new $40 million bonus pool for high-profile players, dubbed the Player Impact Program, will impact only 10 of them. It is, in theory, a way to reward the biggest movers of the proverbial needle without taking anything away from the “other” 234 players in the tour ecosystem.

“It doesn’t really matter to me,” said one top-50 player of the program, details of which were first reported on Tuesday by Golfweek. “Good for the big guys, doesn’t matter to the little guys. Maybe if I win a major, I’ll have a chance.”

This, essentially, is the best reaction the tour could hope for. But the highly unusual formula to determine the players who will receive the money, and the unprecedented nature of the tour paying members for what is only tangentially related to their on-course results, drew mixed reactions from players across the Q-score and Meltwater Mention spectrum.

Those terms, by the way? Get used to them. They’re part of an algorithm the tour will use to rank players on their “Impact Score.” The goal, a PGA Tour spokesman told Golf Digest, is to “recognize and reward players who positively move the needle.”

The five criteria to identify these players are as follows:

• Popularity on Google search
• Nielsen Brand Exposure rating, which measures the value a player delivers to sponsors via his total time featured on broadcasts
• Q-rating, a metric of the familiarity and appeal of player’s brand
• MVP rating, a measure of how much engagement a player’s social media and digital channels drive
• Meltwater mentions, or the frequency with which a player is mentioned across a range of media channels.

Noticeably absent from the criteria is any direct measure of on-course success. The initial report mentioned FedEx Cup standing would be incorporated into the calculations, but the PGA Tour confirmed it was not actually part of the formula.

A program of this kind had been in discussion for multiple years, and the Player Advisory Council always understood the value in rewarding the tour’s highest-profile players.

“I had no issue with it,” Billy Horschel, a PAC member, told Golf Digest. “When you look at it, there’s maybe 10 to 30 guys that really push the tour and bring in the money, have a transcendent personality, get a lot of attention. They’re the reason we play for as much as we do. We don’t reward mediocrity.”

The actual implementation of the program is widely seen as a response to the Premier Golf League, a potential rival to the PGA Tour that garnered significant attention in early 2020 with the promise of offering a guaranteed-money structure to entice away top players. But the upstart venture, which was backed by Saudi Arabian financiers, lost steam when several stars—led by current PAC chairman Rory McIlroy, the first marquee player to publicly denounce the PGL—pledged loyalty to the PGA Tour.

“There's a little bit of envy [among the rank and file membership],” said one multiple-time PGA Tour winner about the program, which has been in place since January. “That it's not fair, that it's using $40 million not to better our game or our sport or the tour, that they're just giving $40 million to the top 10 players to prevent them from playing in another league, which is the absolute worst reason to do it. If you want to give it to them because they deserve it that’s one thing. To do it to prevent them from making an irrational decision, I feel like is the wrong reason to do it."

by Daniel Rapaport, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: WL

[ed. Bad idea. Everything's becoming transactional these days.]

Lesson From the Old New Deal: What Economic Recovery Might Look Like in the 21st Century

When the Green New Deal reemerged into headlines in November 2018, unemployment in the US sat at 3.7 percent. Even supporters of the program voiced warranted skepticism about its viability. Sure, the climate crisis is important, but the government hardly ever spends huge sums on big social programs anymore—least of all when the economy appears to be doing relatively well, by conventional accounting. The window for a massive stimulus opens when there’s a recession, and we weren’t in one. Times have obviously changed since then, although the path to an ambitious climate response remains far from certain.

Joe Biden will be the president by the time this book is released, having won decisively in an election that should have been by all accounts—given the blood on Trump’s hands—a blowout. Instead, Trump collected ten million more votes than in 2016, Democrats lost seats where they were expected to gain them. After run-off elections in Georgia, the party managed to win back control of the Senate, held by the narrowest of margins. Biden was pushed by movements during his campaign to adopt a climate platform more ambitious than the one he ran on in the primary. But his administration will be hard-pressed to get any of that through Congress, left mainly to find creative uses for the executive branch—that is, if he decides to treat his $2 trillion commitment to a green-tinted stimulus as anything more than lip service to progressives and isn’t completely shut down by the 6-3 right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. Democrats’ underwhelming performance in 2020, moreover, doesn’t bode well for winning back more power in upcoming elections. If anything, there’s much more to be lost.

Understanding what the road toward anything like a Green New Deal looks like now, when all manner of crises are boiling over, means taking its namesake seriously. The New Deal—in all its deep flaws and contradictions—was more than just a big spending package that helped to drag the US out of the Great Depression. It reimagined what the US government could do, what it was for, and who it served. To effect such a drastic sea change in this country’s politics, it did something climate policy in the US has historically struggled with: it made millions of people’s lives demonstrably better than they would have been otherwise. That, in turn, helped solved the other big dilemma facing a Green New Deal and just about any major progressive legislative priority: the tangible mark New Deal programs left in nearly every county in the US helped to build a sturdy Democratic electoral coalition that could bat off challenges from the right and endure for decades. Even as many of its gains have been clawed back by a revanchist right, hallmarks like Social Security remain so broadly popular that even the GOP has stopped trying to go after them. A Green New Deal should aim even higher.

Like today, the bar for successful leadership some 90 years ago was pretty low. A very rich man with even richer friends, Herbert Hoover was mostly blind to the effects of the Great Depression on working people and for a while denied there was any unemployment problem at all. Before becoming president, Hoover had made his fortune in mining, transforming himself from poor Quaker boy to lowly engineer to magnate. He gave away large chunks of his fortune to charity and fancied himself both a man of the people and a magnanimous captain of industry. Hoover assumed his fellow businessmen were philanthropic types, too. As he would find out in the waning days of his administration, America’s businessmen might fund libraries and museums, but they had neither the will nor the ability to fix the problem they had helped create. The Depression defined and destroyed his administration and nearly took down the whole concept of liberal democracy with it.

In May 1930—with an unemployment rate screeching past 20 percent—Hoover assured the US Chamber of Commerce that “I am convinced we have now passed the worst. The depression is over.” That December, his State of the Union address promised that “the fundamental strength of the Nation’s economic life is unimpaired,” blaming the Depression on “outside forces” and urging against government action.

“Economic depression,” he said then, “can not be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body—the producers and consumers themselves.” Ideologically opposed to the idea of state intervention in business, Hoover that year had convened a compromise: the Emergency Committee for Employment, to gently nudge the private sector into putting 2.5 million people back to work through local citizens’ relief committees, comprised mostly of local officials and business executives. After several months it hadn’t worked; members of the committee could point to no evidence that it had created any jobs at all. Committee head Arthur Woods petitioned the White House to create a public works program with federal funding instead. Hoover refused, and the committee withered away shortly afterward as unemployment continued to skyrocket. Its replacement was an advertising campaign coaxing individuals to give to charity. Announcing the plan via radio address, Hoover bellowed that “no governmental action, no economic doctrine, no economic plan or project can replace that God-imposed responsibility of the individual man and woman to their neighbors.” Just before the 1932 election, Hoover warned that a New Deal—what Franklin Roosevelt was campaigning on—would “destroy the very foundations of our American system” through the “tyranny of government expanded into business activities.”

Hoover had a relatively successful career up until the crash, with a well-regarded run as secretary of commerce that included his successful management of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 by marshaling public and private resources toward recovery. That Hoover is widely remembered as a loser is thanks mostly to who and what he lost to. Roosevelt’s blowout victory in the 1932 election—where he won 42 of 48 states—ushered in a profound change in American life. With it came 14 years of uninterrupted, one-party control over the White House and both chambers of Congress, secured not by the kinds of authoritarianism that were common through that era, and which well-heeled American elites mused might be needed, but by democratically elected Democratic majorities. Accounting for two brief interruptions just after the end of World War II, Democratic control would extend on for a total of 44 years in the Senate and 58 years in the House.

Until he left office, Hoover refused to budge on his overall approach, as he would through the rest of his life. He pleaded with Roosevelt to denounce the agenda he had just run on, which included such things as widespread unemployment insurance, a job guarantee for the unemployed, tackling soil erosion, and putting private electric utilities into public hands. As the financial system collapsed, the unemployment rate floated around 25 percent, and fascism was on the march in Europe, Hoover did nothing. Federal Reserve chairman Eugene Meyer begged him to reconsider and declare the bank holiday he knew that Roosevelt was already planning as president-elect. “You are the only one with the power to act. We are fiddling while Rome burns,” he told Hoover. The president was unmoored: “I have been fiddled at enough and I can do some fiddling myself.”

Hours after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt and his top advisers embarked on a marathon session to save and restore faith in a banking system on the verge of collapse. Within 36 hours, the administration declared a nationwide bank holiday. Before it ended, on the afternoon of March 9, Roosevelt spent two hours presenting one of the earliest New Deal programs to his closest advisers. It would be a jobs program, he explained, that would “take a vast army of these unemployed out to healthful surroundings,” doing the “simple work” of forestry, soil conservation, and food control. By that evening, the program’s final report explains, the proposal was drafted “into legal form” and placed on the president’s desk. At ten, he convened with congressional leaders who brought it to Congress on March 21. It was signed into law on March 31, and the first recruits of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were taking physicals by April 7 before being bused from their homes in New York City to Westchester County, freshly issued clothes in hand.

By July, the program had established 1,300 camps for its 275,000 enrollees. Between 1933 and its end in 1942, the CCC’s workers—average age 18.5, serving between 6 months and 2 years—built 125,000 miles of road, 46,854 bridges, and more than 300,000 dams; they strung 89,000 miles of telephone wire and planted 3 billion trees. Among the most expansive and maligned of New Deal programs, the Works Progress Administration—derided as full of boondoggles and government waste—built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, and 125,000 civilian and military buildings; WPA workers served 900 million hot lunches to schoolchildren, ran 1,500 nursery schools, and put on 225,000 concerts. They produced 475,000 works of art and wrote at least 276 full-length books. From 1932 to 1939, the size of the federal civil service grew from 572,000 to 920,000.

The WPA’s predecessor, the Civil Works Administration, created 4.2 million federal jobs over the course of a single winter. Much of that work was in construction, but the program also employed 50,000 teachers so that rural schools could remain open, rewilded the Kodiak Islands with snowshoe rabbits, and excavated prehistoric mounds, the results of which ended up in the Smithsonian. In the first year of its operation, 1939, the Civil Aeronautics Board built 300 airports. They did it all without so much as a cell phone or computer.

Like the original, a Green New Deal won’t—if it’s successful—be a discrete set of policies so much as an era and style of governance. It will be the basis of a new social contract that sets novel terms for the relationship between the public and private sector and what it is that a government owes its people. Likewise, the New Deal was designed—learning as it went—to solve a problem the United States had no blueprint for: creating a welfare state capable of supporting millions of people essentially from scratch and with a wary eye toward those countries abroad that were handling a catastrophic economic meltdown in very different, far crueler ways. The New Deal might be best described by a spirit of what Roosevelt referred to as “bold, persistent experimentation”: flawed, contradictory, ever-evolving, and very, almost impossibly big. “It is common sense,” he said in the same speech, “to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” More than giving bureaucrats carte blanche to move fast and break things, the New Deal crafted a container in which innovation and experimentation could take place, providing a combination of ample public funds and rigorous standards, all to be overseen by a set of dogged administrators. As Paul Krugman would write some 75 years later, the “New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption,” well aware of the hostility its new order would face from those invested in continuing on with business as usual.

by Kate Aronoff, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Pascal Verzijl, ‘Little Things’ Analogue collage 2021
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