AI Machines Aren’t ‘Hallucinating’. But Their Makers Are

Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.

This is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or flat-out wrong. Like, for instance, when you ask a bot for a definition of something that doesn’t exist and it, rather convincingly, gives you one, complete with made-up footnotes. “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, told an interviewer recently.

That’s true – but why call the errors “hallucinations” at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches? Well, hallucination refers to the mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms. By appropriating a word commonly used in psychology, psychedelics and various forms of mysticism, AI’s boosters, while acknowledging the fallibility of their machines, are simultaneously feeding the sector’s most cherished mythology: that by building these large language models, and training them on everything that we humans have written, said and represented visually, they are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species. How else could bots like Bing and Bard be tripping out there in the ether?

Warped hallucinations are indeed afoot in the world of AI, however – but it’s not the bots that are having them; it’s the tech CEOs who unleashed them, along with a phalanx of their fans, who are in the grips of wild hallucinations, both individually and collectively. Here I am defining hallucination not in the mystical or psychedelic sense, mind-altered states that can indeed assist in accessing profound, previously unperceived truths. No. These folks are just tripping: seeing, or at least claiming to see, evidence that is not there at all, even conjuring entire worlds that will put their products to use for our universal elevation and education.

Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. These, I fear, are the real AI hallucinations and we have all been hearing them on a loop ever since Chat GPT launched at the end of last year.

There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.

And as those of us who are not currently tripping well understand, our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations – is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.

I’ll dig into why that is so. But first, it’s helpful to think about the purpose the utopian hallucinations about AI are serving. What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.

This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal. Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?

The painter and illustrator Molly Crabapple is helping lead a movement of artists challenging this theft. “AI art generators are trained on enormous datasets, containing millions upon millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history. Perpetrated by respectable-seeming corporate entities backed by Silicon Valley venture capital. It’s daylight robbery,” a new open letter she co-drafted states.

The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.

We saw it with Google’s book and art scanning. With Musk’s space colonization. With Uber’s assault on the taxi industry. With Airbnb’s attack on the rental market. With Facebook’s promiscuity with our data. Don’t ask for permission, the disruptors like to say, ask for forgiveness. (And lubricate the asks with generous campaign contributions.)

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff meticulously details how Google’s Street View maps steamrolled over privacy norms by sending its camera-bedecked cars out to photograph our public roadways and the exteriors of our homes. By the time the lawsuits defending privacy rights rolled around, Street View was already so ubiquitous on our devices (and so cool, and so convenient …) that few courts outside Germany were willing to intervene.

Now the same thing that happened to the exterior of our homes is happening to our words, our images, our songs, our entire digital lives. All are currently being seized and used to train the machines to simulate thinking and creativity. These companies must know they are engaged in theft, or at least that a strong case can be made that they are. They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time – that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all.

It’s also why their hallucinations about all the wonderful things that AI will do for humanity are so important. Because those lofty claims disguise this mass theft as a gift – at the same time as they help rationalize AI’s undeniable perils.

By now, most of us have heard about the survey that asked AI researchers and developers to estimate the probability that advanced AI systems will cause “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. Chillingly, the median response was that there was a 10% chance.

How does one rationalize going to work and pushing out tools that carry such existential risks? Often, the reason given is that these systems also carry huge potential upsides – except that these upsides are, for the most part, hallucinatory. Let’s dig into a few of the wilder ones.

Hallucination #1: AI will solve the climate crisis

Almost invariably topping the lists of AI upsides is the claim that these systems will somehow solve the climate crisis. We have heard this from everyone from the World Economic Forum to the Council on Foreign Relations to Boston Consulting Group, which explains that AI “can be used to support all stakeholders in taking a more informed and data-driven approach to combating carbon emissions and building a greener society. It can also be employed to reweight global climate efforts toward the most at-risk regions.” The former Google CEO Eric Schmidt summed up the case when he told the Atlantic that AI’s risks were worth taking, because “If you think about the biggest problems in the world, they are all really hard – climate change, human organizations, and so forth. And so, I always want people to be smarter.”

According to this logic, the failure to “solve” big problems like climate change is due to a deficit of smarts. Never mind that smart people, heavy with PhDs and Nobel prizes, have been telling our governments for decades what needs to happen to get out of this mess: slash our emissions, leave carbon in the ground, tackle the overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor because no energy source is free of ecological costs.

by Naomi Klein, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: LiliGraphie/Alamy

Official coronation photos released (Guardian)
Images: Hugo Burnand/Royal household 2023/PA Wire/PA
[ed. Seems weird. No?]

Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Holmes blends in with the other moms here, in a bucket hat and sunglasses, her newborn strapped to her chest and swathed in a Baby Yoda nursing blanket. We walk past a family of caged orangutans and talk about how Ms. Holmes is preparing to go to prison for one of the most notorious cases of corporate fraud in recent history.

In case you’re wondering, Ms. Holmes speaks in a soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice, no hint of the throaty contralto she used while running her defunct blood-testing start-up Theranos.

“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalize it in a deep way,” Ms. Holmes said as we stopped to look at a hissing anaconda.

Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes’s partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple’s 20-month-old son, William. William enjoys playing in the sand, “The Little Blue Truck,” dumplings and, like his mom, already speaks some Mandarin. But William especially loves the San Diego Zoo, which is why, on a recent Thursday afternoon, I found myself in the surreal situation of trying to make sense of Ms. Holmes’s version of her rise and fall, while watching a restless cheetah and buying a gorilla T-shirt at the gift shop.

“How would you spend your time if you didn’t know how much time you had left?” Ms. Holmes said, her impending prison report date top of mind, perhaps even more so given that we were surrounded by animals behind bars. “It would be the kind of things we’re doing now because they’re perfect. Just being together.”

Ms. Holmes has not spoken to the media since 2016, when her legal team advised she go quiet. And, as the adage goes, if you don’t feed the press, we feed on you. In Elizabeth Holmes, we found an all-you-can-eat buffet. It had everything: The black turtlenecks, the Kabuki red lipstick, the green juices, the dancing to Lil Wayne. Somewhere along the way, Ms. Holmes says that the person (whoever that is) got lost. At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

So, why did she create that public persona? “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”

Maybe?

Ten years ago, Ms. Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, worth $4.5 billion (on paper, in Theranos stock), and one of the most visible and celebrated female C.E.O.s on the planet, running a start-up with a $9 billion valuation. Then, in 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation into Theranos, calling into question whether its labs and technology — a sleek, boxy device called the Edison — actually worked as promised, testing for a wide range of illnesses with a tiny amount of blood collected with a rapid finger prick.

In 2016, federal inspectors from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found “deficient practices” in a Theranos lab that posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”

That began a saga that would eventually lead to Ms. Holmes being convicted of criminal fraud charges.

The 15-week trial began in 2021 and featured extensive testimony about troubling practices at Theranos. The jury heard from several patients, including one who said a Theranos blood test revealed she was having a miscarriage when, in fact, she had a healthy pregnancy. Ms. Holmes was not convicted on any counts related to patients. But the testimony was a stark reminder of the human stakes of choosing biotech as your start-up.

Ms. Holmes was found guilty in January 2022 on four of 11 charges that she defrauded Theranos investors out of more than $100 million. Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit.

During the closely followed proceedings, a prosecutor, Robert Leach, said this was a case “about fraud, about lying and cheating,” alleging that Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by misleading them about its blood-testing technology’s capabilities.

Lance Wade, a lawyer for Ms. Holmes, said that his client “made mistakes, but mistakes are not crimes.”

By the time I met Ms. Holmes and Mr. Evans, they were counting the days until April 27, when she had been required to report to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, for 11.25 years. (Shortly before she was due at prison, Ms. Holmes made a last-minute request to remain free pending an appeal, which automatically delayed her report date by an undetermined amount of time.)

Day 44: the afternoon we ordered in Mexican food at their quaint rental home near the Pacific.

Day 43: the morning we went for breakfast and Ms. Holmes breastfed her baby, Invicta (Latin for “invincible”) and sang along to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” on the loudspeakers (“This is the first album I ever owned.”).

Day 42: the time we had croissants and berries and Mr. Evans made coffee and we walked the couple’s 150-pound Great Dane-mastiff mix, Teddy, on the beach.

On the second day we spent together, Mr. Evans asked me what the most surprising part of spending so much time with Ms. Holmes was. I told him it’s that I didn’t expect her to be so … normal?

If you didn’t know she was that Elizabeth, whose trajectory launched a cottage industry of podcasts, TV shows, Halloween costumes and groupies who sold blonde wigs outside her trial, then you might sit next to her at the Lucha Libre taco shop in Mission Hills without thinking twice.

This is when Billy puts on the deep voice. The guttural one that the world heard in Ms. Holmes’s TED Talk and CNBC appearances and in the actress Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-award-winning turn as Ms. Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout.”

If you hate Elizabeth Holmes, you probably think her feigned perma-hoarseness was part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors. If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously. If you spend time with Ms. Holmes, as I did, then you might come away like me, and think that, as with many things about Elizabeth Holmes, it was both. Either way, even Mr. Evans agrees, the voice was real weird.

He was driving the family’s Tesla. Ms. Holmes climbed in, after strapping the babies, calm and happy, into their carseats. I rode shotgun. “That would be crazy, if she answered the door and said, ‘Hi. I’m Elizabeth Holmes,” Mr. Evans said, imitating the voice. Ms. Holmes let out the slightest of giggles from the back seat.

by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Philip Cheung for The New York Times

[ed. Puff piece. See also: The Continuing Frauds of Elizabeth Holmes (Motley Fool)]

Kavel Rafferty
via:

Dancing Robots (Boston Dynamics)

Image via:

The New New Reading Environment

After Twitter

For a decade and a half, Twitter held true utility for the contemporary reader. At its best, the site offered brisk access to the news and the figures responsible for it, to the wide-ranging commentary and often terrible opinions of interesting people, and to surprising encounters with previously unencountered knowledge. Until the past year’s insipid Musk-related shenanigans, the platform functioned as an efficient information delivery system that made it unique among its social media rivals — and unique, for that matter, among the media organs that depended on it for readers and ideas.

Despite its fatuous new CEO’s fondness for describing the site as a “town square,” Twitter’s appeal was never its egalitarianism. Rather, as Max Read has argued, Twitter’s centrality to the last decade’s information economy owed much to its widespread adoption by “politicians and their staffers, entertainment creators and executives, tech investors and programmers, academics, and an annoyingly high number of lawyers.” No technology in human history has ever offered better access to the inner thoughts of the ruling class—or at least to its prejudices and frequent acts of self-humiliation. This was Twitter’s great unintentional innovation.

But Elon Musk’s obsession with conspiracy, his piecemeal algorithmic tweaks, his desperate desire to monetize everything — all this has undermined the features that made Twitter useful and occasionally enjoyable for even the nonruling class. The site is glitchier than ever, hobbled by mass layoffs, mass rehirings, mass outages, and mass attention-seeking viral events. Above all the reading experience has gotten much worse: one’s feed is now filled with so many unknown users and cut-rate ads that even the lawyers are barely visible.

Will the whole thing simply go away, disappearing into the internet’s unforgiving past tense? This is the fate one occasionally longs for, but it won’t happen anytime soon. Twitter, in the end, has proven simply too dumb to fail. Instead it seems poised to survive indefinitely, albeit in corroded form — forever catering to hucksters and marks, the passive and the desperate. The self-respecting reader might feel like it’s time to search elsewhere for new ideas. But where? (...)

Punchbowl News costs $30 a month. Air Mail goes for $79.99 a year, though students and educators get the first year free — a kind but deeply strange discount that suggests a longing for details about the sex lives of aging restaurateurs not typically seen among students or educators. An annual membership in Puck’s Inner Circle is $250 and offers readers the chance to “break the 4th wall with direct access to Puck’s elite talent” and receive “exclusive access to signature Puck merch collabs.” The new Gabriel Snyder venture the Fine Print, which unlike Puck publishes serious media reporting, is $99 a year and is signature merch collab–free. This is the next thing one notices about reading on the internet now: it costs a lot of money. 

And there is no way to avoid paying. After a long and glorious spell of underpolicing, the modern paywall has attained its final, fortress-defending form. For years the illicit pleasure of an incognito tab often exceeded the actual reading experience. Today’s paywalls, however, are hostile and impenetrable. Might they be sentient too? Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are crushed by rocks and catapults. Punchbowl News will never let the rabble in. Merely thinking about reading one too many Bloomberg Businessweek pieces now carries with it a substantial fine. If you attempt to access anything beyond your three monthly allotted Atlantic pieces, Jeffrey Goldberg will pay a personal visit to your home and do krav maga on you.

In the good old porous days, paywalls had the quality of a suggestion. Now they are binding contracts with strong personalities. The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, which log readers out much more reliably than they keep them logged in, are aggressive bouncers averse to bribes and persuasion. Contra its gloomy disposition and intense commitment to Courier, which give it the appearance of a bomb threat, Leon Wieseltier’s Liberties is more like a generous (if creepy) uncle, offering two free articles in exchange for an email address. The twisted minds at the New York Review of Books have perfected the length of their preview text, guaranteeing cut-off at the point of maximal tantalization. (...) But alas: what follows is a subscription offer.

Paywalls, of course, keep publications in business, even if an online subscription can never replicate the pleasures of print. But even the most passionate faith in the system’s logic is liable to be shaken by regular encounters with the draconian paywalls of local news sites. An attempt to read even a single article in the Houston Chronicle or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or any number of other newspapers slams the reader against an unforgiving prompt for a one-time micropayment followed by a weekly rate somewhere down the line. Pay nothing, read nothing — beyond a lede or a dateline. On their own, these fees are small and even reasonable. Still, the situation is clearly counterproductive: Who is going to subscribe when it’s impossible to know exactly what one is subscribing to? There are stories in these papers about the depravities of local cops, state legislatures, and transnational landlords that could provide an essential service, and nothing quite literalizes the tragedy of local news like the obvious fact that, in the face of such discouragement, the vast majority of people simply won’t read their local reporting at all. In a recent piece for NiemanLab, Joshua Benton noted that the ailing newspaper chain Gannett, whose properties include the Arizona Republic and the Detroit Free Press, among many others, spent more in the fourth quarter of 2022 on debt service than it brought in from digital subscriptions across the entire company. “You can debate the direction of causation,” Benton wrote: “how much [Gannett’s budget] cuts were driven by declining revenues, versus how much the declining revenues were driven by the cuts.” Either way, militantly keeping newspapers away from their readers did them no favors. At least some newspapers present the option to subscribe “maybe later.” Barring that, one sometimes finds oneself in the debased position of opening a new article, immediately selecting all, and pasting the results into an unformatted Google Doc before the paywall finishes loading. This kind of subterfuge can only generate sheepishness — but then again, how many subscriptions can one person handle?

This is the question posed by Substack. Whenever things on Twitter feel especially dire, writers remind their followers of their new Substacks, or their newly reactivated Substacks: “If this place goes down, follow me here.” (In recent weeks this has become harder to do, after Twitter effectively banned tweeting about Substacks.) Could Substack be the future? It certainly felt that way a few years ago. Its emergence in 2017 was greeted by the kind of Silicon Valley hype typically reserved for AI solutions to pied-à-terre management, and the kind of skepticism typically reserved for the wholesale elimination of the public commons. But Substack’s VC funders were never going to fully bring down writers and editors and their employers. Undercompensation, despair, and cultural marginalization will take care of that! The panic provoked by Substack’s emergence — and by its cheerleaders’ deterministic confidence — thus always felt overstated in its intensity.

But not in its particulars. From the beginning, the skeptics pointed out that even the most compelling self-curated bouquet of newsletters could never add up to anything more than its own kind of walled garden. Unlike generalist operations such as newspapers, TV news, and, well, magazines, Substack effectuates a radical dispersal of expertise and curiosity — a Substack in every pot (and about every pot). For readers, both finances and attention suffer. How many Substacks can we possibly pay for? And how many do we have time to read? It already feels like we spend more time in our email inbox than anywhere else. Must our leisure reading happen there, too?

It’s clear that Substack (and its functionally similar alternatives, like Ghost) has provided a steady income to a large and politically diverse group of people, some of whom were facing down uncertain futures before the newsletter infrastructure came along. Many of these writers are irritating, even malevolent. Many of them produce important reporting, rigorous criticism, and delightful esoterica that they are unable to publish anywhere else. But it is hard to be one’s own publisher. All Substackers, whether honest or self-dealing, are incentivized to iterate. By outsourcing the work of publishing — the editing, the marketing, the fundraising — onto authors, Substack has only accelerated a long-running trend toward universal basic freelancerization: more exhausting self-promotion, more money (maybe), more nominal autonomy and less actual autonomy, and above all more risk. [ed. See also: Judgment Day Has Arrived for the Journalism Business (Honest Broker).]

For larger publications, the upside of newsletters is obvious. Email-bound readers can seamlessly swipe over from their Zocdoc appointment notification to their health insurance bill payment notification to their student loan payment notification to their local mass shooting notification to a Washington Post opinion newsletter about the biggest threat facing the nation (still, somehow, cancel culture). Supplemental newsletter programming can expand publications’ reach, develop themes, help collect data, and offer a degree of plausible deniability if the writers get a little overheated: they’re independent contractors — they’re just riffing! But whether one is reading Vulture’s hourly MILF Manor recap or a roundup of A. J. Liebling’s most memorable zingers from the New Yorker archives, publications’ newsletters too often feel like semi-redundant monuments to segmentation. At least Jeffrey Goldberg won’t beat you up if you forward one to a friend.

Of course, no one has pursued newsletters as zealously as the legaciest legacy-media operation of them all: the New York Times. The Times’ expansionist tendencies speak less to the paper’s interest in newsletters than to its interest in everything. During the Trump presidency, with democracy at constant risk of dying in darkness, the Times was an epicenter of liberal mass media production, its swirl of push notifications and daily Maggie Haberman pieces generating a shared sense that all the news that was fit to print had to be consumed in its entirety, hungrily and constantly. Now, with the national emergency depersonalized, the Times has become the news industry’s Amazon, a miniconglomerate that specializes in international reporting and podcasting and sports commentary and product reviews (the latter two, respectively, via the Athletic and Wirecutter, both standalone sites acquired after demonstrating category dominance). The Times seems able to forge entire new empires faster than smaller publications can go through their bankruptcy proceedings. For millions of home cooks it is a recipe website with a news division; for Spelling Bee addicts it is a game website that also happens to contain non-game content.

With its Stakhanovite publication regimen and its massive reach, could the Times simply replace the Twitter experience outright? Perhaps the entirety of political argument and cultural commentary one encounters on Twitter already exists inside the newspaper: in the articles, the newsletters, the aggrieved comments sections, and the opinion pages, which publish columns by some of America’s most dim-witted opinion-havers and also the visionary Jamelle Bouie, alongside a formidably diverse roster of contributors who have challenged Times readers on everything from student debt relief to prison abolition. Anarchists for DeSantis, horny teens against sex scenes, tradcaths against guilt, communists for feudalism — these are the characters one found on Twitter, and increasingly one is likely to find them in the Times, too.

So then why, given all this power and reach, does the most important and lavishly funded newspaper in the United States present itself to the world with the jittery paranoia of a terrorist cell facing defeat — paralyzed in its mountain hideout, bickering with itself, and treating everyone like an opponent that wishes it existential harm? In 2003, following the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal and also the one where it helped start a catastrophic and illegal war, the Times made an uncharacteristic step in the direction of self-critique and hired a public editor. The best and most rigorous of these public editors, Margaret Sullivan, left in 2016, and the position was eliminated soon after. Since then, the paper’s response to readers’ criticisms has grown increasingly guarded. In her memoir, Sullivan devotes a chapter titled “But Her Emails . . .” to the most egregious recent example of the paper’s willful defensiveness, citing a report in the Columbia Journalism Review by the researchers David Rothschild and Duncan Watts. Rothschild and Watts found that “the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the sixty-nine days leading up to the election.” (...)

The news industry’s major shifts since the height of the Twitter era have mostly been technological (new distribution platforms for new websites with new and ever-crazier ways to scroll) and material (new funding models with new volatile cash flows and new precarities). The Times has assimilated many of these shifts, but its most important recent innovations have been thematic.

by The Editors, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Paul Chan, die Galerie. 2020, ink on paper. 49 7/8 x 38 3/8". Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

The Cheapo Stuff Wins

“Why Is Everything So Ugly?” (Issue 44) was a pleasingly dyspeptic essay about something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately: the unremitting ugliness of life in early 2020s America. But since the editors were more preoccupied with describing the ugliness than explaining it (a few references to supply chains and global capital aside), I thought I’d try to actually answer their rhetorical question by looking at the economic transformations of the post–New Deal era that led us here. I see us as the victims of four interlocking phenomena, tackled below in no particular order.

Phenomenon 1: state capture. Five-over-one construction has become ubiquitous in new multifamily developments, leading one popular TikTok to describe a five-over-one building as the paradigmatic “gentrification building.” I have mixed feelings about five-over-one buildings. I live in one; it’s fine. In general, I approve of more multifamily construction, especially in high-cost, high-opportunity, transit-rich areas. The fact that some new construction is relatively ugly troubles me less than the fact that we don’t have enough housing of any type.

It would be nice if we could build something else every once in a while. However, five-over-ones have taken over in no small part because they satisfy the legal requirements we’ve imposed on multifamily construction in the United States. Compare the five-over-ones to the handsome multifamily apartment blocks found in most (if not all) major European cities, which have no parking garages, no ground-floor retail, and (judging by their width) only one staircase per building. None of these architectural elements would fly in the US: providing ample subsidized parking for residents is usually mandatory, cities often impose a ground-floor retail requirement as a condition of getting permitted, and single staircases are a big no-no under the standard building codes in American cities. And this is to say nothing of design review, which the editors mention.

Some of these regulations are well-intentioned, but many are not, and their cumulative impact is disastrous. They drive up the cost of construction, which in turn pushes housing prices even higher. They reinforce residential segregation and car supremacy. And by imposing arbitrary limits on a city’s organic evolution — the ability of its residents to experiment with different built forms, different modes of transportation, and different architectural styles — they make our urban spaces uglier, less vibrant, and more sclerotic.

Phenomenon 2: “the shareholder revolution.” As the economist J. W. Mason writes, “For most of the 20th century, rentiers did not play an active role in the governance of ‘their’ corporations. But since the 1980s, there has been a dramatic power shift within US corporations, to the extent that the old managerial firm has been mostly replaced by the rentier-dominated firm.”

One critical difference between managers and rentiers is that managers have traditionally tied their careers to a specific industry, whereas rentiers are more likely to own a little bit of a number of companies spread out across the entire economy. This tendency to be involved in a little bit of everything has become even more pronounced during the era of asset-manager capitalism, and it means that the people who own, say, a publicly traded entertainment company often have no specific interest in the production of entertainment — let alone any specific knowledge of how and why entertainment gets produced.

The companies that manufacture our aesthetic universe are now almost wholly governed by people with no extra-economic investment in the businesses they oversee. If the line goes up, great; if the line goes down, they can simply liquidate their stake and move on to something else. Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, and all the rest are not businesses that make discrete cultural products; they are lines that are always either going up or going down. (...)

Phenomenon 4: the asset economy. In the 1970s, the glue that held the New Deal compact together — a rapidly expanding economy that could underwrite both high wages and high corporate profits — fell apart, resulting in a wage-price inflation spiral. As Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings tell it in their book on the subject, the major states of the Anglosphere (America, the United Kingdom, and Australia) tamed stagflation by transitioning to an “asset economy” characterized by wage stagnation, consumer price stability, and rapid asset price inflation — the latter of which, it was hoped, would offset the wage stagnation through broadly available investment vehicles like homeownership.

In addition to the promise of asset democratization, part of the bargain with workers was that everyday consumer goods would become cheaper even as wages stagnated for the next forty-odd years. But an interesting thing has happened over that time: while the American market has been flooded with cheap goods from all over the world, the price of many actual necessities has continued to rise drastically. The costs of housing, education, and health care all have gone into the stratosphere; labor income, of course, has not kept up. The low cost of a pair of Skechers hardly seems compensatory.

This bargain has made it near impossible for people without inherited wealth to become full-time artists. But there’s another dynamic that I think is worth exploring: the consumption behavior of people who can barely afford housing and health care but whose dollar goes further than ever when it comes to hoovering up low-cost cultural output. As fixed costs have come to eat up more and more of household budgets, is it any wonder that a larger share of any remaining disposable income has gone toward low-quality consumables?

My own experience in that regard is somewhat typical of my generation and class. When I lived in Washington DC, circa 2017, I remember paying an exorbitant sum to live in a pretty nice apartment. I loved that apartment. I also furnished it pretty much exclusively with the most economical IKEA crap I could find. What was I supposed to do? After paying for the apartment itself, I didn’t exactly have a robust couch budget.

Make no mistake, I was in no sense deprived; I was a senior editor making a solid white-collar salary and living (as I said) in an apartment I really liked. But that’s exactly my point: when some of the basic elements of a professional-managerial-class lifestyle start to cost a lot more, members of the PMC are going to adjust by spending less on other elements. Some of them may develop the expertise and commitment to hunt out bargains on quality goods, but many more will default to what the market is most intent on serving them. Thus my IKEA and Amazon Prime furniture, my Uniqlo wardrobe and Warby Parker glasses.

Of course, it’s even more perverse than that. Because if the people with even a little bit of disposable income are spending it on fast fashion and fiberboard furniture, that’s going to further erode the economic basis for doing anything higher quality or more ambitious. The cheapo stuff wins.

by Editors/Ned Resnikoff, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia/Sk5893 
[ed. See also: On Political and Cultural Boredom (Christian Lorentzen):]

"The outrage that was so evident in the summer of 2020 during the uprising after the murder of George Floyd was not only a response to police brutality but to the sitting president himself. That it was structurally encouraged by lockdown and work-at-home policies is obvious but not explanatory: it was simply convenient that people didn’t have to be in the office. At the virtual Democratic National Convention, the Biden campaign coopted images of the protests and set them to the tune of a corny late-period Bruce Springsteen song to make them palatable to the aging and provincial electorate. Kamala Harris insisted that Americans needed to “do the work” but indicated nothing about what that meant aside from voting for Biden. That protests have not continued during the Biden administration isn’t hard to understand. He has been given the benefit of the doubt. Liberal horror at the prospect of a Trump restoration is real. Yet the uprising could kick off again any day, and I bet if the GOP sweeps the midterms, it probably will. Until then we have political boredom, punctuated by random mass murders and regressive state legislation to do with reproduction and education. [ed. emphasis added]

Hand in hand with political boredom comes cultural boredom. Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring. All of these industries are averse to risk and chase trends mindlessly. They ignore difficulty. They are humorless. Occasionally they try to make a buck by ginning up controversies, which are also deeply boring and highly repetitive."

And: Why Culture Sucks (Unpopular Front):]

"Max Read, also responded to this problem on his Substack, asking “Did the internet ruin culture?” and responding somewhat skeptically to the premise that culture is just wallowing in boredom—after all many people are happily consuming what’s being created today and any boredom just might represent the tastes of the bored cohort—but maintaining in so far as the notion has merit it has something to do with the way money is currently being made through cultural production. On the political right, Ross Douthat describes the present situation as “decadence,” a perennial complaint from conservatives that makes things sound lot more fun and sexy than they really actually are. A friend offered, “decadence without glamor,” which sounds about right. Another friend calls it “zero swag,” meaning a total lack of charisma or coolness.

My premise is that something is wrong. There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it. There are refreshing exceptions, of course, but they seem to quickly get counterfeited or compromised. Even mediocre genre movies that would’ve seemed unremarkable in past ages can seem like monuments of a lost civilization today. It often feels like we’re being fed the cultural equivalent of Soylent, a kind of nutrient-rich goo that we’re supposed to believe does the same thing as food. Enthusiasm about “vibe shifts” or the possible birth of a new avant-garde comes partially from the hope that something might actually change.

I’ve tried before to get at what exactly feels off a couple times, one time identifying the problem as “formlessness” and another calling it the Age of Blah, and associating it with the rise of content-mongering tech-bores like Elon Musk and Andrew Yang. I’ve called this “the general glut of the human spirit,” occasioned by overproduction of crap."

What is Krav Maga?

Krav Maga is a self-defense system developed by the Israel Defense Forces for training military personnel in hand-to-hand combat. Krav Maga uses instinctive movements aggressive counter attacks and a no-holds-barred mentality without the ceremonial elements of traditional martial arts.

Krav Maga will teach you to use punches, kicks, knees, elbows, and grappling techniques to defend yourself. It is a unique and practical system because it was designed to bring people to a high level of proficiency in hand-to-hand combat and self-defense in a very short period of time.

Krav Maga by design stresses efficiency, aggression and, above all, survival. This design philosophy resulted in traditional elements of martial arts practice like forms, katas, and rules for competition, being omitted from Krav Maga training, so in addition to the previously mentioned striking and grappling techniques, Krav Maga also teaches techniques like headbutts, groin strikes, strikes to the back of the head, eye gouges, and throat strikes. All of which would be considered illegal in a sanctioned sport fight or martial arts competition.

To get a little deeper into answering the question “what is Krav Maga”, it’s important to look at why Krav Maga was developed to begin with. That starts with Krav Maga’s creator, Imi Lichtenfeld.

Imi Lichtenfeld was born in Hungary in 1910 and grew up in Hungary where he practiced boxing and grappling his whole life under the tutelage of his father, Samuel. Imi joined Nazi resistance groups in Europe during WWII and fought back against Nazi oppression until the end of the war when he and thousands of others could immigrate to the newly formed nation of Israel. Imi’s hand-to-hand combat skills became the foundation of the Israel Defense Forces training, known today as Krav Maga.

Imi’s expertise in multiple aspects of hand-to-hand combat as well as the pressure of training people to defend their newly formed nation in a very short period of time lead to the distillation of technique and tactics. This in turn lead to the development of what is Krav Maga’s no-holds-barred mentality. There are no rules on the battlefield, thus there is no consideration for rules or “fairness” in Krav Maga. The only “rule” is to win. The only success is survival. 

by Krav Maga, Krav Maga Worldwide |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Makes sense. Not a lot of stylized positions, just brutal (almost reflexive) take down moves. See also: Krav Maga (Wikipedia). And, videos with Itay Gil here and here.]

Pharoah Sanders ft. Lonnie Liston Smith

See also: The return of jazz-funk keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith (Guardian)

Toyota’s 2023 Prius: Lamborghini Looks Meet Fuel-Sipping Economy

Toyota’s 2023 Prius: Lamborghini looks meet fuel-sipping economy (Ars Technica)

Images: Jonathan Gitlin
[ed. Libs rejoice. $27,450 base price.]

Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023)

[ed. So many tributes. Here's one.]

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands; the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.

So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across different meanings of the term “A.I.” If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? Alternatively, if you imagine A.I. as a semi-autonomous software program that solves problems that humans ask it to solve, the question is then: how do we prevent that software from assisting corporations in ways that make people’s lives worse? Suppose you’ve built a semi-autonomous A.I. that’s entirely obedient to humans—one that repeatedly checks to make sure it hasn’t misinterpreted the instructions it has received. This is the dream of many A.I. researchers. Yet such software could easily still cause as much harm as McKinsey has.

Note that you cannot simply say that you will build A.I. that only offers pro-social solutions to the problems you ask it to solve. That’s the equivalent of saying that you can defuse the threat of McKinsey by starting a consulting firm that only offers such solutions. The reality is that Fortune 100 companies will hire McKinsey instead of your pro-social firm, because McKinsey’s solutions will increase shareholder value more than your firm’s solutions will. It will always be possible to build A.I. that pursues shareholder value above all else, and most companies will prefer to use that A.I. instead of one constrained by your principles.

Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism? Just to be clear, when I refer to capitalism, I’m not talking about the exchange of goods or services for prices determined by a market, which is a property of many economic systems. When I refer to capitalism, I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others. So, in the context of this discussion, whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work. And, more specifically, I’m criticizing the ever-growing concentration of wealth among an ever-smaller number of people, which may or may not be an intrinsic property of capitalism but which absolutely characterizes capitalism as it is practiced today.

As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor. There isn’t really anything like a labor-consulting firm that furthers the interests of workers. Is it possible for A.I. to take on that role? Can A.I. do anything to assist workers instead of management?

Some might say that it’s not the job of A.I. to oppose capitalism. That may be true, but it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism, either. Yet that is what it currently does. If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one. (...)

You may remember that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the actress Susan Sarandon—who was a fervent supporter of Bernie Sanders—said that voting for Donald Trump would be better than voting for Hillary Clinton because it would bring about the revolution more quickly. I don’t know how deeply Sarandon had thought this through, but the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said the same thing, and I’m pretty sure he had given a lot of thought to the matter. He argued that Trump’s election would be such a shock to the system that it would bring about change.

What Žižek advocated for is an example of an idea in political philosophy known as accelerationism. There are a lot of different versions of accelerationism, but the common thread uniting left-wing accelerationists is the notion that the only way to make things better is to make things worse. Accelerationism says that it’s futile to try to oppose or reform capitalism; instead, we have to exacerbate capitalism’s worst tendencies until the entire system breaks down. The only way to move beyond capitalism is to stomp on the gas pedal of neoliberalism until the engine explodes.

I suppose this is one way to bring about a better world, but, if it’s the approach that the A.I. industry is adopting, I want to make sure everyone is clear about what they’re working toward. By building A.I. to do jobs previously performed by people, A.I. researchers are increasing the concentration of wealth to such extreme levels that the only way to avoid societal collapse is for the government to step in. Intentionally or not, this is very similar to voting for Trump with the goal of bringing about a better world. And the rise of Trump illustrates the risks of pursuing accelerationism as a strategy: things can get very bad, and stay very bad for a long time, before they get better. In fact, you have no idea of how long it will take for things to get better; all you can be sure of is that there will be significant pain and suffering in the short and medium term.

I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

by Ted Chiang, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Berke Yazicioglu

[ed. Ted's one of the smartest and most inventive writers I know, and this sounds completely plausible. Inevitable almost. See also: We’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is it’s not for us’ (The Guardian):]

"A “biological intelligence” such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, “just 30 watts, even when you’re thinking”, and “every brain is a bit different”. That means we learn by mimicking others. But that approach is “very inefficient” in terms of information transfer. Digital intelligences, by contrast, have an enormous advantage: it’s trivial to share information between multiple copies. “You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for us.”

Once he accepted that we were building intelligences with the potential to outthink humanity, the more alarming conclusions followed. “I thought it would happen eventually, but we had plenty of time: 30 to 50 years. I don’t think that any more. And I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things – at least, not since Biden got elected." (...) [ed. Ouch!]

I don’t want to rule things like that out – I think people who are confident in this situation are crazy.” Nonetheless, he says, the right way to think about the odds of disaster is closer to a simple coin toss than we might like.

This development, he argues, is an unavoidable consequence of technology under capitalism.

***

Update: Even Snoop Dog is weighing in: 

"Well I got a motherf*cking AI right now that they did made for me. This n***** could talk to me. I'm like, man this thing can hold a real conversation? Like real for real? Like it's blowing my mind because I watched movies on this as a kid years ago. When I see this sh*t I'm like what is going on? And I heard the dude, the old dude that created AI saying, "This is not safe, 'cause the AIs got their own minds, and these motherf*ckers gonna start doing their own sh*t. I'm like, are we in a f*cking movie right now, or what? The f*ck man? So do I need to invest in AI so I can have one with me? Or like, do y'all know? Sh*t, what the f*ck?" I'm lost, I don't know."

In the ChatGPT Age, Prompting Is the Language to Learn

Everyone should be learning to prompt. You, me, your kids, your neighbor — everyone. Prompting is the language of generative AI, enabling instruction from human to machine, and is therefore perhaps the most useful tongue you could possibly master in today’s world.

On ChatGPT, the text-based tool from OpenAI that brought about the recent explosion in excitement around AI, some examples of basic prompts would be: “Explain how photosynthesis works” or “write a summary of Hamlet.”

Impressive, yes, but these queries only scratch the surface. This tech is capable of so much more, and it’s the art of prompting that will help you unlock it. More sophisticated AI users are having it produce complex answers based on millions of texts. Others use it to build apps or automate much of their workday. They do this with effective prompting, taking care to choose words and their order.

The good news is, unlike coding, prompts are written in natural language. Most of us should take to it like a duck to water.

In the very near future, employees working in just about every industry imaginable will need to know how to prompt chatbots such as ChatGPT effectively and efficiently. “Using AI models to generate things is expensive, and the outputs can vary massively,” said Ben Stokes, the creator of PromptBase, a marketplace for good AI prompts. “A good prompt engineer can create prompts that produce consistent, high-quality outputs (e.g. images, text or code) at low costs (either API costs or images credits etc.).”

Already, prompt engineering is a lucrative profession for those who have smartly gotten ahead. Some startups are advertising prompt engineering jobs with salaries upwards of $300,000 a year, and the breadth of industries looking for such talent is growing. This week in the UK, there are vacancies for prompt engineers at law firm Mishcon De Reya and luxury clothing store Italic, which is looking for a prompt “artist” who can use Stability AI’s image generation tool Stable Diffusion.

What makes a good prompt? Look at the image at the top of this article and consider how you might describe it. “A smiling man in a suit giving a thumbs up”? “A man with great teeth, thumbs up, speech bubble with super written on it”? It’s a start — but you’d be letting the AI tool, in this case Open AI’s DALL-E 2, loose on its datasets with all kind of assumptions about what you actually want.

Describe it again, with more detail. You might come up with some other words for the picture, like “clean cut,” “Caucasian” or even “handsome.” You might recognize the “vintage” and “pop art” styling. If you did, well done — those words were all in the prompt for the image.

A better prompt engineer could still improve it considerably — DALL-E 2 spat out several distinct variations, many with imperfections that wouldn’t pass muster for a professional project. To refine prompting further, and to stretch the capabilities of AI tools beyond their creators’ own imaginations, people have begun exploring the art of the super prompt, instructions that can run to many hundreds of words and are designed to force the AI to delve deep into its dataset.

Often, this can involve a little role play: telling ChatGPT to “pretend” it is something else. “You are an interviewer for a job at a multinational bank,” you might say, followed by a detailed description of the role and requesting they give you a grilling. You might ask it to play the role of an app designer writing specifically for Apple’s iOS and have it spit out code to your specifications. Like a good journalist, who might ask a similar question in different ways to elicit a more thoughtful response from a subject, the specific words and structure can provoke the AI to behave in a certain manner. It’s not just what you say, but the way you say it.

The more complex the prompt, and the more strict the guardrails of your directions, the better the result. Setting out a scenario in a chatbot’s “mind” works just as it does for us humans, encouraging us to think outside our normal perspectives.

You could also, it’s well worth acknowledging, tell ChatGPT to be a prompt engineer. Given what I have written above, this might seem more than a little awkward. Why learn to prompt if the AI can do it itself? Isn’t it an obsolete skill already? No. Despite premature and often alarmist headlines suggesting AI is about to go rogue and leave behind its human creators, most applications of AI will for a long time rely heavily on the “human in the loop,” providing instruction, refining outputs, pushing the technology into new directions. Reminding it who’s boss.

by Dave Lee, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Open AI. Photographer: Bloomberg/DALL-E 2/DALL-E 2
[ed. Define "long time". I've posted about prompt engineering before, which is likely to be one of the most ephemeral job classes ever. It's AI. It'll eventually prompt you on how to be clearer.] 

The Art of the Shoe

As I enter the job market, I am reconsidering the staple of the white sneaker. I love the comfort and universality of my white Converse and Air Force 1’s, but is it time to ditch their deceptively high-maintenance nature in favor of something more official? If I wear sneakers, will people take me seriously? — Sophie, Washington, D.C.

It’s a good question. Recently, during Episode 5 of the final season of “Succession,” Shiv Roy dismisses her estranged husband, Tom, by dismissing the shiny white sneakers he chose to wear to a deal-making off-site, saying: “This is why people don’t take you seriously.”

It made for striking TV. But in the real world, is she right?

Consider the fact that Bryce Young recently took his place on the N.F.L. draft stage as the No. 1 pick in a pink Dior suit and white kicks and looked all the cooler for them. Or that the filmmaker Chloé Zhao wore Hermès white sneakers with her gown when she won an Oscar back in 2021. Once you start thinking about white sneakers, you start seeing them everywhere. Which suggests that the right move is not to abandon them but to consider, perhaps, exactly what they mean to you.

British Esquire called the white sneaker “the blank canvas upon which any modern look can be built.” Harper’s Bazaar crowed, “The best white sneakers can do it all.”

The fact is, more than 100 years after Keds introduced its white sneaker, almost 90 years since Chuck Taylor popularized the style with Converse and more than half a century since Stan Smith changed the game — and amid all the color-crazed mayhem of endlessly mutating sneaker culture — white sneakers remain the Platonic ideal of a shoe: eternal, versatile, comfortable. They suggest walking on clouds. They are normcore to the max.

But because they go with pretty much everything — maxi-dresses and minidresses, suits, khakis and blazers — how you wear them matters.

As part of a daily uniform, they serve as a generic punctuation mark, a subconscious suggestion of both practicality (easy to wear) and attention to detail (if you keep them clean). As a counterpoint to a more serious outfit, like a tuxedo or trouser suit, they offer a bit of energy and bounce. Paired with a floaty dress (maxi or mini), they add a bit of power and oomph. Material matters: Leather is more formal; canvas more casual. The appeal is in the contrast — and the key is the state of the shoe.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Karwai Tang/WireImage

[ed. See also: Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags (NYT/Amy X. Wang):]

"Not long ago, I found myself wandering through Paris with a fake Celine handbag slung over my shoulder. In France, a country that prides itself on originating so much of the world’s fashion, punishments for counterfeiting are severe, to the point that I technically risked three years in prison just by carrying my little knockoff around. But the bag’s fraudulence was undetectable to human eyes. I was toting around a delicious, maddening secret: Like a ship remade with identical wood, the bag on my arm had been built on the same plan, with seemingly the same gleaming materials, as the “original.” Yet it was considered inauthentic, a trick, a cheat.

My plunge into the world of fantastically realistic counterfeit purses — known as “superfakes” to vexed fashion houses and I.P. lawyers, or “unclockable reps” to their enthusiastic buyers — began a couple of years earlier, in what I might characterize as a spontaneous fit of lunacy. (...)

Having grown up a first-generation immigrant whose family’s idea of splurging was a monthly dinner at Pizza Hut, I refused to be the type of person who lusted over luxury handbags. I had always understood that these artifacts were not for me, in the way debutante balls or chartered Gulfstreams were not for me. But, days later and still mired in the quicksand of quarantine, I found myself cracking my laptop and Googling “buy Celine Triomphe cheap.” This led me to a Reddit community of replica enthusiasts, who traded details about “trusted sellers” capable of delivering a Chanel 2.55 or Loewe Puzzle or Hermès Birkin that promised to be indistinguishable from the original, and priced at a mere 5 percent or so of the M.S.R.P. (...)

Untangling the problem of duplication in the fashion industry is like trying to rewrap skeins of yarn. Designer houses spend billions fighting dupes, but even real Prada Cleos and Dior Book Totes are made with machines and templates — raising the question of what, exactly, is unique to an authentic bag. Is it simply a question of who gets to pocket the money?"

Jack vs. Nicklaus

The inside story of Jack Nicklaus' legal battle against his own company. How did the game's greatest champion become embroiled in a lawsuit against the company he founded?

In a threadbare courtroom in lower Manhattan, the 82-year-old defendant took care to avoid the power cords taped to the floor as he mounted the witness stand. The clerk asked him to state his name and provide his business address.

“Jack William Nicklaus,” he said, “I don’t even know a business address.” He gave his home address instead.

That, in a way, was the whole case right there. As his subsequent testimony made clear, Nicklaus still has a sharp memory, so he may have chosen to forget his business address, which would have been understandable under the circumstances. The plaintiff in the case is, in fact, Nicklaus’ own business, and the case is captioned, improbably enough, Nicklaus Companies, LLC v. Jack W. Nicklaus. The lawsuit was filed in May 2022, and it’s very much ongoing. The case raises a variety of complex legal issues, but the most important is this: What the hell is going on here?

Nicklaus’ demeanor can be as revealing as his words on the record. That was apparent when I recently visited him at what’s known in Nicklaus’ world as the “family office,” which is about three miles from the “business” office—the one he couldn’t remember—in Palm Beach County, Florida. Now 83, Nicklaus is a bit stooped, and his golfing days are, alas, behind him. “I don’t play golf anymore,” he told me. “I played four times last year, all in May—twice at Augusta, and I shot 88, 87, and twice at Muirfield Village on the weekend before the tournament, and I shot 86, 84, and I said, ‘That’s enough.’ ” But despite the end of his playing career, even for fun, Nicklaus was in buoyant spirits. I asked him how he felt about his court appearance, which included two days of cross-examination. “I’ll give you two phrases to describe the trial,” he said. "One, I didn’t want to do it, and two, it was a pleasure. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel—that I might get rid of this and might be able to go live a life. If I end up doing nothing other than not working for him, that would be worth it.”

“This guy” is Howard Milstein, a New York real estate and banking magnate and Nicklaus’ erstwhile business partner. They joined forces under Nicklaus’ corporate banner in 2007, and their divorce has taken place like a bankruptcy once described by Ernest Hemingway: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

For the ultimate control freak on the golf course, whose relentless, risk-averse style propelled him to 18 professional majors and arguably the greatest record in the history of the game, Nicklaus has had a surprisingly tumultuous business career, and the Milstein conflagration is the latest chapter. (...)

Throughout these chapters, Nicklaus enjoyed several advantages. His integrity and honesty were never challenged. His reputation as a golfer flourished as he continued winning tournaments during the 1990s on the senior tour. His clothing lines remained popular, especially in Asia. Most importantly, despite his other business reverses, his career as a golf-course designer thrived. In the first decade of the new century, the Nicklaus Companies appeared to be on a healthy trajectory, and his chief financial officer at the time came to Nicklaus with an idea. “He says, ‘You’re not getting any younger,’ ” Nicklaus told me. “Maybe it’s time to pass to my kids, let them monetize something, so they don’t have to wait for me to kick the can to have any kind of money.” The company hired an investment bank that valued the Nicklaus Companies at nearly $300 million and started looking for investors. Revenues for 2006 were $77 million and projected to be $100 million by 2009; profits, in theory, would go from $23 million to $43 million a year.

The company had a variety of suitors, but one put in a bid early and never changed it. Howard Milstein said he would invest $145 million in the company—predicting it could eventually be sold for a billion—and Nicklaus accepted the offer. Nicklaus promptly gave $20 million (after taxes) to each of his five children. In our conversation, Nicklaus called these gifts to his children “not a huge amount of money, but in this day and age, pretty good,” an observation that reveals the rarefied circles in which he travels. By this point, Jack and Barbara Nicklaus had created the template for charitable giving by golf superstars, which Tiger Woods, most notably, has chosen to follow. The Milstein investment allowed the Nicklauses to expand their philanthropic interests, which have amounted to more than $200 million raised for children’s health over the past two decades.

As of 2007, Nicklaus now had a business partner, though he retained ultimate control of the company. “I’m very unsophisticated,” he told me. “I was a golfer, just retired from tournament golf. I knew nothing about business. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what all that stuff is. I wish I did because I probably wouldn’t have gotten into what I got into. I never knew what the word ‘vet’ meant. If I did, I probably never would have wound up with Howard Milstein.”

Who is Howard Milstein? For starters, Howard is a Milstein, which is a big deal in New York City. In 1919, Morris Milstein, a Russian immigrant, founded a company that joined in the city’s real estate boom by installing the flooring in skyscrapers, including, eventually, the World Trade Center. From flooring, the family moved into real estate, building and owning residential and office towers in Manhattan and elsewhere. In 1986, the family bought Emigrant Savings Bank and built it into the country’s largest privately owned, family-run bank. The Milstein family is now worth an estimated $5 billion.

The Milsteins, including Howard, are also litigious, including among themselves.

by Jeffrey Toobin, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

AI Makes Paul McCartney’s Voice Youthful

AI can imitate voices. This has been used both to rejuvenate Paul McCartney’s voice on his new songs, and to hear songs by others performed by Paul. Here is the Beach Boys’ song “God Only Knows” in Paul’s voice:

Then there are some songs with Paul’s older voice that has been altered with the help of artificial intelligence to sound like a young Paul singing. (...)

So it remains to be seen what happens, will the artists themselves or their lawyers react to this? It is, after all, taking the hated “auto tuning” technology a quantum leap further. Maybe Paul himself will rejuvenate his voice on his next album?

by Admin, The Daily Beatle |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube

[ed. ft. Joe Walsh. See also: New AI Music if you want to hear, for example, Stevie Wonder singing Nirvana's Teen Spirit; and, 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney (The Ruffian).]

Militarized Dolphins Protect Almost a Quarter of the US Nuclear Stockpile

Situated just 20 miles from Seattle, Naval Base Kitsap houses America's most powerful and secret deterrents, a weapon that is the first line of defense for U.S. national security: U.S. Navy dolphins.

Since 1967, the Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions (and probably other marine life) for military applications such as mine clearing, force protection and recovery missions. The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program deployed military dolphins as early as the Vietnam War and as recently as the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

When protecting harbors and ships from mines, as they do at Naval Base Kitsap, the dolphins use their extraordinary biological sonar to detect hazards beneath the surface, whether tethered to the sea floor or buried beneath sediment.

If a mine or other weapon is detected, the dolphin returns to its handler, who gives the animal a buoy to mark the location of the device on the surface. Passing ships know to avoid these markers while Navy explosives ordnance disposal divers neutralize the threat below.

For protection against enemy divers, dolphins will swim up to the infiltrator, bump into them and place a buoy device on their back or a limb, using their mouth. The buoy then drags the outed diver to the surface for easy capture. When trained sea lions perform the same maneuver, they use a kind of handcuff with their mouths to attach the buoy.

Since Bangor, Washington, now houses the largest single nuclear weapons site in the world, it needs protection from all sides, including the seaward side. That's where the Navy's dolphin pods and sea lions come in. Navy spokesman Chris Haley says the animals have been defending the waters around the stockpile, holding roughly 25% of the United States’ 9,962 nuclear warheads, since 2010.

by Blake Stilwell, Military.com | Read more:
Image: U.S. Navy
[ed. What?]

The Wager

The Wager review: David Grann’s magnificent shipwreck epic (The Guardian)

Image: Doubleday/AP

[ed. See also: David Grann’s new book takes to the high seas (LA Times)]

Private Equity Delivers Death Panels

Remember "death panels"? Sarah Palin promised us that universal healthcare was a prelude to a Stalinist nightmare in which unaccountable bureaucrats decided who lived or died based on a cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to keep you alive versus how much your life was worth.

Palin was right that any kind of healthcare rationing runs the risk of this kind of calculus, where we weight spending $10,000 to extend a young, healthy person's life by 40 years against $1,000 to extend an elderly, disabled person's life by a mere two years.

It's a ghastly, nightmarish prospect – as anyone who uses the private healthcare system knows very well. More than 27m Americans have no health insurance, and millions more have been tricked into buying scam "cost-sharing" systems run by evangelical grifters:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/health/christian-health-care-insurance.html

But for the millions of Americans with insurance, death panels are an everyday occurrence, or at least a lurking concern. Anyone who pays attention knows that insurers have entire departments designed to mass-reject legitimate claims and stall patients who demand that the insurer lives up to its claim:

The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends. The ideal insurance customer pays their premiums without complaint, and then pays cash for all their care on top of it.

All that was true even before private equity started buying up and merging whole swathes of the US healthcare system (or "healthcare" "system"). The PE playbook – slash wages, sell off physical plant, slash wages, reduce quality and raise prices – works in part because of its scale. These aren't the usual economies of scale. Rather the PE strategy is to buy and merge all the similar businesses in a region, so customers, suppliers and workers have nowhere else to turn.

That's bad enough when it's aimed at funeral homes, pet groomers or any of the other sectors that have been bigfooted by PE: (...)

But it's especially grave when applied to hospitals: (...)

Or emergency room physicians: (...)

And if you think that's a capitalist hellscape nightmare, just imagine how PE deals with dying, elderly people. Yes, PE has transformed the hospice industry, and it's even worse than you imagine.

Yesterday, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published "Preying on the Dying: Private Equity Gets Rich in Hospice Care," written by some of the nation's most valiant PE slayers: Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt and Emma Curchin: (...)

Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours' worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It's just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.

As Appelbaum told Maureen Tkacik for her excellent writeup in The American Prospect: "Why anybody commits fraud is a mystery to me, because you can make so much money playing within the guidelines the way the payment scheme operates."

In California, it's very, very easy to set up a hospice. Pay $3,000, fill in some paperwork (or don't – no one checks it, ever), and you're ready to start caring for beloved parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles as they depart this world. You do get a site inspection, but don't worry – you aren't required to bring your site up to code until after you're licensed, and again, they never check – not even if there are multiple complaints. After all, no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the job of tracking complaints.

This is absolute catnip for private equity – free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can't complain. What's not to like? No wonder PE companies have spent billions "rolling up" hospices across the country. There are 591 hospices in Van Nuys, CA alone – but at least 30 of them share a single medical director: (...)

Medicare caps per-patient dispersals at $32,000, which presents an interesting commercial question for remorseless, paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring private equity ghouls: do you take in sick patients (who cost more, but die sooner) or healthy patients (cost less, potentially live longer)?

In Van Nuys, the strategy is to bring in healthy patients and do nothing. 51% of Van Nuys hospice patients are "live discharged" – that is, they don't die. This figure – triple the national average – is "a reliable sign of fraud."

There are so many hospice scams and most of them are so stupid that it takes a monumental failure of oversight not to catch and prevent them. Here's a goodun: hospices bribe doctors to "admit" patients to a hospice without their knowledge. The hospice bills for the patient, but otherwise has no contact with them. This can go on for a long time, until the patient tries to visit the doctor and discovers that their Medicare has been canceled (you lose your Medicare once you go into hospice).

Another scam: offer patients the loosest narcotics policy in town, promising all the opioids they want. Then, once their benefits expire, let them die of an overdose (don't worry, people who die in hospice don't get autopsies):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

You can hire con artists to serve as your sales-force, and have them talk vulnerable, elderly people into enrolling in hospice care by convincing them they have nothing to live for and should just die already and not burden their loved ones any longer.

Hospitals and hospices also collude: hospitals can revive dying patients, ignoring their Do Not Resuscitate orders, so they can be transfered to a hospice and die there, saving the hospital from adding another dead patient to their stats.

CMS's solution is perverse: they're working with Humana to expand Medicare Advantage (a scam that convinces patients to give up Medicare and enrol in a private insurance program, whose private-sector death panel rejects 13% of claims that Medicare would have paid for). The program will pay private companies $32,000 for every patient who agrees to cease care and die. As our friends on the right like to say, "incentives matter."

by Cory Doctorow, Pleuralistic |  Read more:

Image: Seydelmann, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified

[ed. What good hospice care looks like: President Jimmy Carter and the benefits of early hospice care (Seattle Times). Then, there's this: Born to Die (American Prospect); and, How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle (New Yorker).]