photo: markk
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
Behind the AI Magic That Lets Amazon’s Prime Vision Show the NFL Like Never Before
Some viewers of Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos got a special experience: seeing what was going to happen on a play before it actually happened.
Viewers who watched the game in Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats, one of Amazon’s three broadcast options, saw the unveiling of a feature called Defensive Alert that is powered by artificial intelligence to identify potential blitzes before the snap. The model highlights players it believes have a high probability of blitzing (crossing the line of scrimmage to rush the passer) with a red circle that appears under them.
As Sam Schwartzstein, one of the minds behind the model with Prime Vision and the Amazon Machine Learning team, eagerly watched his model work its magic on every snap, on one play, he became confused at why his program was highlighting a nickel corner who wasn’t giving any indication that he was blitzing. “Why are we highlighting this guy?” Schwartzstein yelled in fustration.
Was this a flaw? Did the machine get this prediction completely wrong? Schwartzstein, a former offensive lineman who played at Stanford with Andrew Luck, prided himself on being able to identify potential blitzes. His years of experience as a player and analyst told him the nickel wasn’t much of a threat.
Right before the ball was snapped, the inside linebacker dropped to the nickel’s side and the nickel finally moved toward the line of scrimmage. The program sniffed out this blitzer well before Schwartzstein, watching the game from a wide-angle camera shot. The weirdest part about this is no one really knows how Defensive Alert did it. It’s a self-learning program that has analyzed thousands of plays and movement patterns to understand how defenses move as a whole when certain players blitz.
The model is trained not to identify the usual four down linemen that typically rush the passer. It’s trained to identify unique players who rush the passer on 60 percent or less of snaps. It’s being fed tracking data from Next Gen Stats, which is derived from RFID chips in every player’s shoulder pads. The data includes the players’ acceleration, their orientation and where they are facing. From all that data, the machine starts to understand familiar movement patterns from the defense as a whole, which helps it predict which player is going to blitz.
“We’re highlighting things, starting at line set,” Schwartzstein said. “It’s happening in real time as information is coming in from the shoulder pads. And so you can see all this data coming in and (the model) gets more confident the closer we get to the snap because defenders have to more clearly define their roles the closer they are to the timing of the snap. One of the coolest features for me is we’re not just highlighting it at one time and sticking with it. It is on and off based on where players are moving throughout the play on both offense and defense.” (...)
The goal is to get viewers to see the game as the quarterback does. The quarterback isn’t certain who is going to blitz, especially early on when the defense is showing its initial disguise. But as the snap nears, players start to move around to get close to where they have to, to execute their assignments. The initial alignment and movement help the quarterback figure out who is blitzing or not. The best quarterbacks are coming to conclusions from their wealth of experience or film watching. The machine is processing information the same way, but it has an abundance of data that has been fed into it to pull from in an instant.
Some skeptics believe Amazon is using a delay to see the blitzes coming and highlighting the player on the live feed. Though the processing required for Prime Vision to paint visuals does add some delay (usually three seconds or less), the model that powers Defensive Alert does not use that delay. The team has spent considerable effort to produce predictions as fast as possible — even installing dedicated hardware in Amazon’s state-of-the-art production trucks. There is no person or program trying to trick the audience about prediction capabilities.
by Ted Nguyen, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Amazon Prime
[ed. Feels like AI could transform football strategy into something similar to what we see with chess these days - more statistical probability, less imagination/intuition. Maybe there'll be transistors on every moveable part of a player's body at some point (soon?).]
Viewers who watched the game in Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats, one of Amazon’s three broadcast options, saw the unveiling of a feature called Defensive Alert that is powered by artificial intelligence to identify potential blitzes before the snap. The model highlights players it believes have a high probability of blitzing (crossing the line of scrimmage to rush the passer) with a red circle that appears under them.
As Sam Schwartzstein, one of the minds behind the model with Prime Vision and the Amazon Machine Learning team, eagerly watched his model work its magic on every snap, on one play, he became confused at why his program was highlighting a nickel corner who wasn’t giving any indication that he was blitzing. “Why are we highlighting this guy?” Schwartzstein yelled in fustration.
Was this a flaw? Did the machine get this prediction completely wrong? Schwartzstein, a former offensive lineman who played at Stanford with Andrew Luck, prided himself on being able to identify potential blitzes. His years of experience as a player and analyst told him the nickel wasn’t much of a threat.
Right before the ball was snapped, the inside linebacker dropped to the nickel’s side and the nickel finally moved toward the line of scrimmage. The program sniffed out this blitzer well before Schwartzstein, watching the game from a wide-angle camera shot. The weirdest part about this is no one really knows how Defensive Alert did it. It’s a self-learning program that has analyzed thousands of plays and movement patterns to understand how defenses move as a whole when certain players blitz.
The model is trained not to identify the usual four down linemen that typically rush the passer. It’s trained to identify unique players who rush the passer on 60 percent or less of snaps. It’s being fed tracking data from Next Gen Stats, which is derived from RFID chips in every player’s shoulder pads. The data includes the players’ acceleration, their orientation and where they are facing. From all that data, the machine starts to understand familiar movement patterns from the defense as a whole, which helps it predict which player is going to blitz.
“We’re highlighting things, starting at line set,” Schwartzstein said. “It’s happening in real time as information is coming in from the shoulder pads. And so you can see all this data coming in and (the model) gets more confident the closer we get to the snap because defenders have to more clearly define their roles the closer they are to the timing of the snap. One of the coolest features for me is we’re not just highlighting it at one time and sticking with it. It is on and off based on where players are moving throughout the play on both offense and defense.” (...)
The goal is to get viewers to see the game as the quarterback does. The quarterback isn’t certain who is going to blitz, especially early on when the defense is showing its initial disguise. But as the snap nears, players start to move around to get close to where they have to, to execute their assignments. The initial alignment and movement help the quarterback figure out who is blitzing or not. The best quarterbacks are coming to conclusions from their wealth of experience or film watching. The machine is processing information the same way, but it has an abundance of data that has been fed into it to pull from in an instant.
Some skeptics believe Amazon is using a delay to see the blitzes coming and highlighting the player on the live feed. Though the processing required for Prime Vision to paint visuals does add some delay (usually three seconds or less), the model that powers Defensive Alert does not use that delay. The team has spent considerable effort to produce predictions as fast as possible — even installing dedicated hardware in Amazon’s state-of-the-art production trucks. There is no person or program trying to trick the audience about prediction capabilities.
Again, Schwartzstein doesn’t know exactly how the model is making some of these predictions. It’s learning on its own as it keeps getting data, but don’t worry, football purists. The model is also getting input from a panel of actual football people that includes former players and coaches like Andrew Luck, Geoff Schwartz, David Shaw, David DeCastro, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andrew Whitworth, Nate Tice and Andrew Phillips.
The panel of experts reviews the film of the model making predictions and makes sure it’s identifying legitimate threats and not looking at players who could not be rushers to the well-trained eye. Some of their feedback, along with that of Schwartzstein, who provides feedback on every play, is fed back into the system. (...)
The panel of experts reviews the film of the model making predictions and makes sure it’s identifying legitimate threats and not looking at players who could not be rushers to the well-trained eye. Some of their feedback, along with that of Schwartzstein, who provides feedback on every play, is fed back into the system. (...)
Just to ease the minds of concerned fans, teams cannot use this model to their advantage in games. Communication with the quarterback is cut off after 15 seconds of the play clock has expired and there’s no way to get information to the quarterback fast enough. Also, coaches in the booth don’t have access to the Amazon broadcast. Technology usage is extremely restricted for teams. They don’t have access to tracking data during games, and even when they are looking at their tablets, they are looking at stills, not video.
by Ted Nguyen, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Amazon Prime
[ed. Feels like AI could transform football strategy into something similar to what we see with chess these days - more statistical probability, less imagination/intuition. Maybe there'll be transistors on every moveable part of a player's body at some point (soon?).]
Deer Are Everywhere, but We Barely Know Them
On June 4, 2013, Buck 8917 did something weird, for a deer: He took a long, purposeful walk.
Researchers from Penn State had captured and put a GPS collar on the adult male that spring in Bald Eagle State Forest, about 15 miles northeast of State College, Pa. Put a tracker on most deer and you’ll find they stick pretty close to their home range, which was true for 8917. He sauntered, stopped to forage or bedded down for a nap mostly within an undulating square mile of forest full of towering hemlock and tangled rhododendron. But on that June day, he made a one-mile beeline, hiking to the top of a rocky ridgeline, where he seemed to while away the afternoon before walking directly home.
Then, in 2015, after two mating seasons, two hunting seasons and thousands of laps around his home range, Buck 8917 died — unsurprising given he was about 4 years old. It was where he died that surprised the researchers: that same ridge he’d visited just once in the two years he’d been collared.
Researchers from Penn State had captured and put a GPS collar on the adult male that spring in Bald Eagle State Forest, about 15 miles northeast of State College, Pa. Put a tracker on most deer and you’ll find they stick pretty close to their home range, which was true for 8917. He sauntered, stopped to forage or bedded down for a nap mostly within an undulating square mile of forest full of towering hemlock and tangled rhododendron. But on that June day, he made a one-mile beeline, hiking to the top of a rocky ridgeline, where he seemed to while away the afternoon before walking directly home.
Researchers don’t have a good explanation for Buck 8917’s odd visit, but it’s an example of the unexpected behaviors they observe while paying uncommonly close attention to the hoofed mammals, which are so frequently found across the North American landscape that we often take them for granted.
These discoveries are an outgrowth of the Deer-Forest Study, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry and Penn State. Now in its 10th year, the study has tracked more than 1,200 white-tailed deer around 100 square miles of Pennsylvania forest. It aims to be the most sweeping effort ever undertaken to understand North America’s most widespread large animals, as well as the impact they have on the vegetation and soil in our nation’s forests.
“It should be called the Forest-Deer Study because we’re really studying the forest,” said Duane Diefenbach, a Penn State ecologist and co-leader of the project.
On that front, Dr. Diefenbach and his colleagues have made some significant discoveries.
For example, the scientists have learned that Indian cucumber root, a flowering herb beloved by ungulates, won’t grow in soil high in manganese. That is a consequential finding because land managers often use the prevalence of the native plant as a way to measure deer population and set hunting quotas.
Research has revealed an interconnectedness between deer health and the fluctuating nutrients in forest vegetation. For instance, Canada mayflower makes up the bulk of a deer’s diet in the spring, when lactating does and antler-growing bucks need calcium and phosphorus and the plants contain extra doses of the nutrients.
But a decade of spying on deer has also yielded surprising revelations and quirky stories about the animals themselves. The scientists haven’t been shy about sharing this “serendipitous research,” as they call it, publishing more than 700 posts on the Deer-Forest Study blog. They’ve detailed everything from how much drool deer produce a day (two gallons) to what happens when a deer slinks back into the woods after a traffic collision (if it’s lucky, it limps but perseveres). Some entries, like Dr. Diefenbach’s account of Buck 8917’s mysterious death march, have attracted many readers.
“It just took off and we had no idea why,” said Jeannine Fleegle, a Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist who works with Dr. Diefenbach on the blog. “That’s when we realized this could really get a lot of attention on the project.”
Ms. Fleegle has blogged about one of the study’s most captivating characters, Doe 12866, in a series titled “The Real Does of the Deer-Forest Study.”
Like Buck 8917, this doe was remarkable for her get-up-and-go. Collared in Rothrock State Forest in January 2017, Doe 12866 was fitted with a vaginal implant transmitter that would notify the researchers when she gave birth, which she did the following May. To get to her “maternity ward,” as Ms. Fleegle called it, the very pregnant doe embarked on an all-night, six-mile hike to State College city limits, where she fawned in a patch of woods behind a housing development.
Does exhibit high birth-site fidelity — the tendency to return to locations where they had previous success raising their offspring — so it’s possible that Doe 12866 had given birth in State College before. It’s also possible that she left the woods for the city to avoid predators. The researchers saw Doe 16601 do something similar when she fawned near the intersection of two roads at the edge of a forest.
“Why would she choose to have her babies at the confluence of roads given the vast nothingness of the surrounding area?” Ms. Fleegle asked in a post. “Maybe 16601 is using us.” (...)
Deer hunters play an important role in the study. Their hunting in designated areas of the forest, while staying out of others, helps researchers see how the landscape responds. Each year, participating hunters are asked to fill out a survey describing their experiences and observations. Over a decade of research, the team has gleaned new insights about how deer make it (or don’t) through hunting season, including how attuned they are to hunting pressure.
Take Doe 8921, also known as Hillside Doe. On the afternoon before rifle season, as humans tramped around the forest scouting out their hunting spots, Hillside Doe was looking for a spot of her own. She settled on the steepest (you guessed it) hillside in her home range, an inhospitable stretch of terrain covered with “boulders the size of suitcases,” Dr. Diefenbach said.
By 4 a.m. on opening day, Hillside Doe was bedded down in her safe space, as if someone had “texted her a message deer season was about to get started,” Dr. Diefenbach later wrote on the blog.
In the days that followed, the deer retreated there again and again, her behavior reflecting the schedule of the hunters looking for her. While they sat still in their deer stands, she sat still in her hiding place. Once the forest emptied out, Hillside Doe wandered among the hunting camps, feeding or perhaps, as Ms. Fleegle suggested, “doing reconnaissance.”
by Ashley Stimpson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Barbara MacDonald/Alamy
These discoveries are an outgrowth of the Deer-Forest Study, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry and Penn State. Now in its 10th year, the study has tracked more than 1,200 white-tailed deer around 100 square miles of Pennsylvania forest. It aims to be the most sweeping effort ever undertaken to understand North America’s most widespread large animals, as well as the impact they have on the vegetation and soil in our nation’s forests.
“It should be called the Forest-Deer Study because we’re really studying the forest,” said Duane Diefenbach, a Penn State ecologist and co-leader of the project.
On that front, Dr. Diefenbach and his colleagues have made some significant discoveries.
For example, the scientists have learned that Indian cucumber root, a flowering herb beloved by ungulates, won’t grow in soil high in manganese. That is a consequential finding because land managers often use the prevalence of the native plant as a way to measure deer population and set hunting quotas.
Research has revealed an interconnectedness between deer health and the fluctuating nutrients in forest vegetation. For instance, Canada mayflower makes up the bulk of a deer’s diet in the spring, when lactating does and antler-growing bucks need calcium and phosphorus and the plants contain extra doses of the nutrients.
But a decade of spying on deer has also yielded surprising revelations and quirky stories about the animals themselves. The scientists haven’t been shy about sharing this “serendipitous research,” as they call it, publishing more than 700 posts on the Deer-Forest Study blog. They’ve detailed everything from how much drool deer produce a day (two gallons) to what happens when a deer slinks back into the woods after a traffic collision (if it’s lucky, it limps but perseveres). Some entries, like Dr. Diefenbach’s account of Buck 8917’s mysterious death march, have attracted many readers.
“It just took off and we had no idea why,” said Jeannine Fleegle, a Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist who works with Dr. Diefenbach on the blog. “That’s when we realized this could really get a lot of attention on the project.”
Ms. Fleegle has blogged about one of the study’s most captivating characters, Doe 12866, in a series titled “The Real Does of the Deer-Forest Study.”
Like Buck 8917, this doe was remarkable for her get-up-and-go. Collared in Rothrock State Forest in January 2017, Doe 12866 was fitted with a vaginal implant transmitter that would notify the researchers when she gave birth, which she did the following May. To get to her “maternity ward,” as Ms. Fleegle called it, the very pregnant doe embarked on an all-night, six-mile hike to State College city limits, where she fawned in a patch of woods behind a housing development.
Does exhibit high birth-site fidelity — the tendency to return to locations where they had previous success raising their offspring — so it’s possible that Doe 12866 had given birth in State College before. It’s also possible that she left the woods for the city to avoid predators. The researchers saw Doe 16601 do something similar when she fawned near the intersection of two roads at the edge of a forest.
“Why would she choose to have her babies at the confluence of roads given the vast nothingness of the surrounding area?” Ms. Fleegle asked in a post. “Maybe 16601 is using us.” (...)
Deer hunters play an important role in the study. Their hunting in designated areas of the forest, while staying out of others, helps researchers see how the landscape responds. Each year, participating hunters are asked to fill out a survey describing their experiences and observations. Over a decade of research, the team has gleaned new insights about how deer make it (or don’t) through hunting season, including how attuned they are to hunting pressure.
Take Doe 8921, also known as Hillside Doe. On the afternoon before rifle season, as humans tramped around the forest scouting out their hunting spots, Hillside Doe was looking for a spot of her own. She settled on the steepest (you guessed it) hillside in her home range, an inhospitable stretch of terrain covered with “boulders the size of suitcases,” Dr. Diefenbach said.
By 4 a.m. on opening day, Hillside Doe was bedded down in her safe space, as if someone had “texted her a message deer season was about to get started,” Dr. Diefenbach later wrote on the blog.
In the days that followed, the deer retreated there again and again, her behavior reflecting the schedule of the hunters looking for her. While they sat still in their deer stands, she sat still in her hiding place. Once the forest emptied out, Hillside Doe wandered among the hunting camps, feeding or perhaps, as Ms. Fleegle suggested, “doing reconnaissance.”
by Ashley Stimpson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Barbara MacDonald/Alamy
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
‘Stop Making Sense’: Concert Doc Hasn’t Aged a Day
Demme filmed “Stop Making Sense” over several performances at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre in December 1983, as a pure caught-in-the-act documentary (there are, appropriately, no talking heads interrupting the flow), and it’s magical. The opening is tiny and hypnotic: a single beam of light, a skinny young man (Talking Heads leader and singer David Byrne) in a light suit and white sneakers, a guitar, a cassette deck playing a drum track. And slowly, things grow: bassist Tina Weymouth joins Byrne for the next song, then drummer Chris Frantz, and more — keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison, guitarist Alex Weir, percussionist Steve Scales, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, backup singers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry.
We see the crew moving set pieces on stage, and we watch as a world is created, one in which people find giddy joy in making music together. Watch Byrne and Weir, in “Burning Down the House,” wildly jogging side by side as if they suddenly, happily became one person. Watch Weymouth’s perfect, tiny pointed-toe prances, adding soft punctuation to the beat. Watch Frantz, looking very non-rock-star in his blue polo, mouthing the lyrics as he drives the rhythm. And watch Holt and Mabry, two beaming beacons of energy, playfully interacting with everyone else on stage; they’re like our guides on a musical pleasure cruise. Demme’s cameras don’t just capture this, sweat and all, but become part of it — dancing, interacting (Scales playfully sticks out a tongue at the camera; Byrne at one point offers it a microphone), bringing us onto that stage, letting us live the music with them.
And Byrne, looking both impossibly youthful and ageless, gives a performance of staggering confidence and charisma, whether dancing with a lamp (it seems to magically float) in “This Must Be the Place,” running endlessly in “Life During Wartime” or unblinkingly staring at the camera as he malevolently drones “Swamp.” At one point, he seems to become a marionette: the vertical line of the microphone stand dividing him in two, with gyrating arms and legs seemingly independent of each other. It’s as if the music possesses him — and us.
For a lot of us, this music is the soundtrack of our very young adulthood; you may find yourself unable to stop grinning at the shimmery, deliciously endless intro to “Girlfriend Is Better,” or bouncing up and down in your seat along with Holt and Mabry, or realizing that, despite the passage of time, you still know every word of each song. Watching it last week, I couldn’t always tell whether the applause and cheers were coming from the movie or from the live audience. It was as if the line separating life and art had blurred, and we were all happily caught within it.
by Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Talking Heads/Stop Making Sense
Ticketmaster Torment: Who Can Fix It?
Today’s ticketing landscape is like a disorienting video game.
When tickets for a hotly anticipated show go on sale, set your alarm. Queue for hours online. When the floodgates open, watch out: A chunk of tickets are already being sold at marked-up prices, as artists try to undercut scalpers and reclaim revenue. Careful! Bots and bad actors appear, hoarding tickets to resell for a profit on websites like StubHub and SeatGeek.
Failed on the primary market? Start over: Avoid fraudulent sites. Fend off bots that swarm social media sites. Remember: Fees will cost you.
Few are winning this game, particularly for shows anywhere larger than a midsize club. In Seattle, most large venues have exclusive deals with Ticketmaster or AXS, or are operated by Live Nation or AEG, AXS’ owner. Fans have little choice but to submit to increasingly hefty fees. Tickets sold on the primary and secondary markets have fees averaging 27% and 31% of the ticket price, respectively, per the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Fans are fed up.
Michelle Sterioff, of Kirkland, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment in California in December.
Sterioff accuses the companies of “anticompetitive and misleading conduct” in their handling of pre- and general sales for the Eras Tour, criticizing exorbitant ticket prices, excessive service fees and a failure to block bots and scalpers from depleting inventories.
The suit alleges the company has a tight grip on the secondary market, and has eliminated competition on the primary by “coercing major concert venue operators to enter into long-term exclusive contracts.” (...)
Concerns over the company’s dominance go back decades.
In the mid-1990s, Seattle’s Pearl Jam claimed Ticketmaster threw its weight around to scoop up astronomical service fees and demand exclusivity from venues and artists. The hubbub triggered a federal investigation. But the band’s Ticketmaster-boycotting Vs. Tour was a logistical nightmare, the antitrust criticism died down, and the investigation was closed. By 1998, the band agreed to play some Ticketmaster venues.
Seattle booking agent Ali Hedrick doesn’t think Live Nation is “the evil enemy that the general public thinks they are.” The real culprits, she said, are the unscrupulous resellers, who can make more money than artists or promoters on a ticket resold for double or triple face value.
And it’s not just about revenue.
Promoters and the prominent indie acts represented by Hedrick and her agency, Arrival Artists, have limited ways of combating resellers who snag tickets and can’t flip them, leaving “sold-out” shows 17-20% under capacity. No-shows hurt the artists and clubs, who depend on merchandise and bar sales, while fans miss their favorite bands.
Even efforts to beat back resellers can shut fans out.
One of Hedrick’s artists has an upcoming two-night stand at a 5,500-capacity room in Boston. After a “scalper scrub,” an analysis of ticket buyers designed to weed out resellers, she and the artist found more than 425 tickets went to likely resellers who made multiple purchases.
They used to automatically void the tickets, which is still the most likely recourse. But even then, it’s fans who bought on the secondary market who may be left without tickets.
Hedrick said trying to tamp down on resales is “a huge pain in the ass.” For a tour on which she has a supporting act, Hedrick said a “huge portion” of the total ticket count went to brokers — with set limits on ticket prices, in an attempt to control the secondary market.
Speculative ticketing is another issue.
Jim Brunberg, a Portland venue owner based in Washington, said “a million” of these tickets were listed online for an upcoming Devo concert before real tickets went on sale. “Seats” at the show were selling for $140-$415. Face-value tickets were $89.
Brunberg said his employees turn away patrons with speculative tickets at nearly every show. Beyond lost profits at the bar and merch tables, fans scream at security when they realize they don’t have tickets. That erodes trust, said Brunberg, a musician himself, making “the entire industry feel like an unsafe place to spend money.” (...)
Onetime Washingtonian Zach Bryan has emerged as a vocal critic. Naming his recent live album “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster,” the Navy-man-turned-country/folk-rock-star plotted a tour avoiding all Ticketmaster-affiliated stages. He’s working with AXS to establish a face-value ticket-exchange similar to one Pearl Jam has with Ticketmaster, capping ticket prices and pledging to invalidate tickets sold by third-party resellers.
“I have met kids at my shows who have paid upwards of 400 bucks to be there and I’m done with it,” Bryan wrote on Instagram last year. “I believe working class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows. … I am so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopolies sit there stealing money from working class people.” (...)
Ticketmaster and indie venues agree: The multibillion-dollar resale market is out of control. A recent watershed moment was the COVID-19 pandemic, when cybersquatters and bots sharpened their methods as the live music scene was silent.
Indie music halls are fighting back. Some use systems that weed out bots by selling a maximum of four to six tickets per buyer. But it’s like cutting the heads off a Hydra.
The bots are too sophisticated. Mimicry websites use the logo, name and photo of real venues — cybersquatting — to sell fake or secondary market tickets.
When tickets for a hotly anticipated show go on sale, set your alarm. Queue for hours online. When the floodgates open, watch out: A chunk of tickets are already being sold at marked-up prices, as artists try to undercut scalpers and reclaim revenue. Careful! Bots and bad actors appear, hoarding tickets to resell for a profit on websites like StubHub and SeatGeek.
Failed on the primary market? Start over: Avoid fraudulent sites. Fend off bots that swarm social media sites. Remember: Fees will cost you.
Fans are fed up.
Michelle Sterioff, of Kirkland, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment in California in December.
Sterioff accuses the companies of “anticompetitive and misleading conduct” in their handling of pre- and general sales for the Eras Tour, criticizing exorbitant ticket prices, excessive service fees and a failure to block bots and scalpers from depleting inventories.
The suit alleges the company has a tight grip on the secondary market, and has eliminated competition on the primary by “coercing major concert venue operators to enter into long-term exclusive contracts.” (...)
Though the AG’s office pushed legislation to ban the use of ticket bots in 2015, it has only enforced the law once, against two Massachusetts-based companies. Similar federal legislation, the 2016 BOTS Act, also has rarely been enforced.
Enforcement is challenging, said the AG’s office. In order to bring cases forward, ticket sellers need to provide evidence of bots. If ticket scams are committed by entities or individuals abroad, prosecution is even more difficult. (...)
The country’s largest events promoter and venue operator, Live Nation, merged with ticketing giant Ticketmaster in 2010. As one company, it controls over 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. Though the company posted a record $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023’s first quarter, Ticketmaster maintains it has lost market share since the merger as the secondary ticket market exploded.
Enforcement is challenging, said the AG’s office. In order to bring cases forward, ticket sellers need to provide evidence of bots. If ticket scams are committed by entities or individuals abroad, prosecution is even more difficult. (...)
The country’s largest events promoter and venue operator, Live Nation, merged with ticketing giant Ticketmaster in 2010. As one company, it controls over 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. Though the company posted a record $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023’s first quarter, Ticketmaster maintains it has lost market share since the merger as the secondary ticket market exploded.
In the mid-1990s, Seattle’s Pearl Jam claimed Ticketmaster threw its weight around to scoop up astronomical service fees and demand exclusivity from venues and artists. The hubbub triggered a federal investigation. But the band’s Ticketmaster-boycotting Vs. Tour was a logistical nightmare, the antitrust criticism died down, and the investigation was closed. By 1998, the band agreed to play some Ticketmaster venues.
Seattle booking agent Ali Hedrick doesn’t think Live Nation is “the evil enemy that the general public thinks they are.” The real culprits, she said, are the unscrupulous resellers, who can make more money than artists or promoters on a ticket resold for double or triple face value.
And it’s not just about revenue.
Promoters and the prominent indie acts represented by Hedrick and her agency, Arrival Artists, have limited ways of combating resellers who snag tickets and can’t flip them, leaving “sold-out” shows 17-20% under capacity. No-shows hurt the artists and clubs, who depend on merchandise and bar sales, while fans miss their favorite bands.
Even efforts to beat back resellers can shut fans out.
One of Hedrick’s artists has an upcoming two-night stand at a 5,500-capacity room in Boston. After a “scalper scrub,” an analysis of ticket buyers designed to weed out resellers, she and the artist found more than 425 tickets went to likely resellers who made multiple purchases.
They used to automatically void the tickets, which is still the most likely recourse. But even then, it’s fans who bought on the secondary market who may be left without tickets.
Hedrick said trying to tamp down on resales is “a huge pain in the ass.” For a tour on which she has a supporting act, Hedrick said a “huge portion” of the total ticket count went to brokers — with set limits on ticket prices, in an attempt to control the secondary market.
Speculative ticketing is another issue.
Jim Brunberg, a Portland venue owner based in Washington, said “a million” of these tickets were listed online for an upcoming Devo concert before real tickets went on sale. “Seats” at the show were selling for $140-$415. Face-value tickets were $89.
Brunberg said his employees turn away patrons with speculative tickets at nearly every show. Beyond lost profits at the bar and merch tables, fans scream at security when they realize they don’t have tickets. That erodes trust, said Brunberg, a musician himself, making “the entire industry feel like an unsafe place to spend money.” (...)
Onetime Washingtonian Zach Bryan has emerged as a vocal critic. Naming his recent live album “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster,” the Navy-man-turned-country/folk-rock-star plotted a tour avoiding all Ticketmaster-affiliated stages. He’s working with AXS to establish a face-value ticket-exchange similar to one Pearl Jam has with Ticketmaster, capping ticket prices and pledging to invalidate tickets sold by third-party resellers.
“I have met kids at my shows who have paid upwards of 400 bucks to be there and I’m done with it,” Bryan wrote on Instagram last year. “I believe working class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows. … I am so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopolies sit there stealing money from working class people.” (...)
Ticketmaster and indie venues agree: The multibillion-dollar resale market is out of control. A recent watershed moment was the COVID-19 pandemic, when cybersquatters and bots sharpened their methods as the live music scene was silent.
Indie music halls are fighting back. Some use systems that weed out bots by selling a maximum of four to six tickets per buyer. But it’s like cutting the heads off a Hydra.
The bots are too sophisticated. Mimicry websites use the logo, name and photo of real venues — cybersquatting — to sell fake or secondary market tickets.
by Margo Vansynghel and Michael Rietmulder, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Luke Johnson/Taylor Swift
Image: Luke Johnson/Taylor Swift
[ed. I recently checked out the process for buying some Olivia Rodrigo tickets for an upcoming concert in Seattle. You have to apply to a lottery (which quickly closed) and be selected there before even being eligible to jump into the scrum of actual ticket sales the minute they're available. What a screwed up process.]
Monday, October 16, 2023
Alabama Shakes
[ed. Am I making myself clear?... (Brittany Howard). See also: Gimme All Your Love (Official Audio)]
Better Science/Better Apple: Cosmic Crisp
"In the late-90s Washington state's apple industry was on the brink of collapse. That's because over a hundred thousand acres of trees grown were for an apple that was losing it's popularity - the Red Delicious. (...) By the end of the decade farmers lost about $760 million dollars in about three years."
[ed. Cosmic crisp. A hands-down favorite. Now I know why.]
[ed. Cosmic crisp. A hands-down favorite. Now I know why.]
The Inland Empire
Warehousing, Supply & Logistics, the Environment and Jobs
The growth of the logistics industry is a point of contention in the region, with economic development in constant tension with public health and environmental degradation. The sector has created tens of thousands of jobs, although the median wages are relatively low: $18.57 an hour for warehouse workers and $24.93 for truck drivers. Meanwhile, the diesel truck traffic has meant that counties in the Inland Empire have some of the worst air quality in the US. This 2022 video features a high school in Fontana, California that is flanked by warehouses, spurring community concern for students’ health; last month, the city blocked a warehouse development adjacent to another school. Communities in the Inland Empire pushed for a regional moratorium on warehouse development earlier this year, but the bill was unsuccessful.
by Hillary Predko, Scope of Work | Read more:
Images: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
[ed. Coming to a community near you soon. See also: Warehouse boom transformed Inland Empire. Are jobs worth the environmental degradation? (LA Times); also, the video referenced above - How online shopping is polluting California’s Inland Empire (YT):
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Israelis Gird for a Deeper War Amid a Crisis of Trust in the Government
On the ninth day after Hamas overran more than 20 Israeli pastoral communities and army bases, killing more than 1,300 people and taking 150 hostages back to Gaza, Israel was a country on edge.
Israelis were girding with grim determination for what they widely see as a war of no choice after the attack on Oct. 7 — the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history and, officials say, since the Holocaust. They were awaiting an imminent ground invasion into the Palestinian enclave controlled by Hamas even as tensions escalated on the northern border with Lebanon, threatening a long and devastating conflict on several fronts.
All this is happening amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on. Initial assessments point to an Israeli intelligence failure before the surprise attack, the failure of a sophisticated border barrier, the military’s slow initial response and a government that seems to have busied itself with the wrong things and now appears largely absent and dysfunctional.
“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an author in Tel Aviv. “All the time you said to yourself, ‘I am paying half of what I earn in taxes, but it is for security, national security, at least that.’”
“We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there,” she added, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
After months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy, shocked and grieving Israelis have come together to fight the battle and volunteer on the home front in hopes of eliminating the threat from Hamas on their doorstep and emerging stronger.
But on Sunday, the start of the workweek, the streets of Israel’s major cities were ominously quiet. Supermarkets in Jerusalem had run out of bottled water. Some of the last of the 30,000 residents of Sderot were fleeing the long-suffering city that lies two miles from the Gaza border.
In a country of nine million people, where most Jews serve in the army, everybody appears to know somebody who was caught up in the Hamas massacre or who is now on the front line. “Your hands tremble each time you answer your phone,” Ms. Rabinyan said, for fear of bad tidings.
The military high command has apologized for failing in its mission. Along with the so-called people’s army of conscripts, the military has mobilized 360,000 reservists, some of whom have continued to volunteer into their 50s.
A few months ago, at the height of the antigovernment protests over the judicial overhaul, thousands of reservists were threatening to quit, and many disillusioned Israelis were discussing leaving the country. Now, the few planes still landing in Israel over the past week have been filled with thousands of reserve soldiers returning for duty.
Public fury at the government has been compounded by Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster. He has made brief, televised statements but has not taken reporters’ questions. On Sunday, he met with families of hostages for the first time. (...)
Around the country, the atmosphere has been bleak as funeral after funeral has taken place. Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, continued firing rockets deep into Israel and the military has retaliated, pounding Gaza with punishing airstrikes. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization, has also kept up a steady drumbeat of provocations in the north.
At dusk one day this past week, a ghostly silence had fallen over the center of Nahariya, a normally lively seaside town in Israel near the border with Lebanon. Most of the residents of the villages in the area had left for safer parts of the country.
And in the pastoral farmland along the border with Gaza, rows of tanks and armored vehicles were lined up this weekend in dusty fields among the cotton crops and orchards. The soldiers there said the mission was clear.
“To restore honor to Israel,” said Shai Levy, 37, a tank driver who in civilian life is a rabbi and teacher in a seminary. “The citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all,” he said, while stationed in a makeshift camp outside the gate of Be’eri, one of the worst-hit villages, where more than 100 people were killed.
“We’ve trained for years for this,” he said. (...)
There is no telling how it will end. But the strong sentiment is that the Israel after Oct. 7 will not be the same as the Israel before.
by Isabel Kershner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Israelis were girding with grim determination for what they widely see as a war of no choice after the attack on Oct. 7 — the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history and, officials say, since the Holocaust. They were awaiting an imminent ground invasion into the Palestinian enclave controlled by Hamas even as tensions escalated on the northern border with Lebanon, threatening a long and devastating conflict on several fronts.
“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an author in Tel Aviv. “All the time you said to yourself, ‘I am paying half of what I earn in taxes, but it is for security, national security, at least that.’”
“We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there,” she added, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
After months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy, shocked and grieving Israelis have come together to fight the battle and volunteer on the home front in hopes of eliminating the threat from Hamas on their doorstep and emerging stronger.
But on Sunday, the start of the workweek, the streets of Israel’s major cities were ominously quiet. Supermarkets in Jerusalem had run out of bottled water. Some of the last of the 30,000 residents of Sderot were fleeing the long-suffering city that lies two miles from the Gaza border.
In a country of nine million people, where most Jews serve in the army, everybody appears to know somebody who was caught up in the Hamas massacre or who is now on the front line. “Your hands tremble each time you answer your phone,” Ms. Rabinyan said, for fear of bad tidings.
The military high command has apologized for failing in its mission. Along with the so-called people’s army of conscripts, the military has mobilized 360,000 reservists, some of whom have continued to volunteer into their 50s.
A few months ago, at the height of the antigovernment protests over the judicial overhaul, thousands of reservists were threatening to quit, and many disillusioned Israelis were discussing leaving the country. Now, the few planes still landing in Israel over the past week have been filled with thousands of reserve soldiers returning for duty.
Public fury at the government has been compounded by Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster. He has made brief, televised statements but has not taken reporters’ questions. On Sunday, he met with families of hostages for the first time. (...)
Around the country, the atmosphere has been bleak as funeral after funeral has taken place. Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, continued firing rockets deep into Israel and the military has retaliated, pounding Gaza with punishing airstrikes. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization, has also kept up a steady drumbeat of provocations in the north.
At dusk one day this past week, a ghostly silence had fallen over the center of Nahariya, a normally lively seaside town in Israel near the border with Lebanon. Most of the residents of the villages in the area had left for safer parts of the country.
And in the pastoral farmland along the border with Gaza, rows of tanks and armored vehicles were lined up this weekend in dusty fields among the cotton crops and orchards. The soldiers there said the mission was clear.
“To restore honor to Israel,” said Shai Levy, 37, a tank driver who in civilian life is a rabbi and teacher in a seminary. “The citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all,” he said, while stationed in a makeshift camp outside the gate of Be’eri, one of the worst-hit villages, where more than 100 people were killed.
“We’ve trained for years for this,” he said. (...)
There is no telling how it will end. But the strong sentiment is that the Israel after Oct. 7 will not be the same as the Israel before.
by Isabel Kershner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Saturday, October 14, 2023
The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time
The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (Rolling Stone)
Rolling Stone published its original list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists in 2011. It was compiled by a panel of musicians, mostly older classic rockers. Our new expanded list was made by the editors and writers of Rolling Stone. This one goes to 250.
Guitar players are often as iconic as the lead singers for the bands they play in. But mythic guitar gods like Jimmy Page, Brian May, and Eddie Van Halen are only one part of the story. We wanted to show the scope of the guitar’s evolution. The earliest entrant on the list (folk music icon Elizabeth Cotten) was born in 1893, the youngest (indie-rock prodigy Lindsey Jordan) was born in 1999. The list has rock, jazz, reggae, country, folk, blues, punk, metal, disco, funk, bossa nova, bachata, Congolese rumba, flamenco, and much more. There are peerless virtuosos like Pat Metheny, Yvette Young, and Steve Vai, as well as primitivists like Johnny Ramone and Poison Ivy of the Cramps. There are huge stars like Prince, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, and behind-the-scenes masters like Memphis soul great Teenie Hodges and smooth-rock assassin Larry Carlton. (...)
In making the list, we tended to value heaviness over tastiness, feel over polish, invention over refinement, risk-takers and originators more than technicians. We also tended to give an edge to artists who channeled whatever gifts god gave them into great songs and game-changing albums, not just impressive playing.
Guitar players are often as iconic as the lead singers for the bands they play in. But mythic guitar gods like Jimmy Page, Brian May, and Eddie Van Halen are only one part of the story. We wanted to show the scope of the guitar’s evolution. The earliest entrant on the list (folk music icon Elizabeth Cotten) was born in 1893, the youngest (indie-rock prodigy Lindsey Jordan) was born in 1999. The list has rock, jazz, reggae, country, folk, blues, punk, metal, disco, funk, bossa nova, bachata, Congolese rumba, flamenco, and much more. There are peerless virtuosos like Pat Metheny, Yvette Young, and Steve Vai, as well as primitivists like Johnny Ramone and Poison Ivy of the Cramps. There are huge stars like Prince, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, and behind-the-scenes masters like Memphis soul great Teenie Hodges and smooth-rock assassin Larry Carlton. (...)
In making the list, we tended to value heaviness over tastiness, feel over polish, invention over refinement, risk-takers and originators more than technicians. We also tended to give an edge to artists who channeled whatever gifts god gave them into great songs and game-changing albums, not just impressive playing.
[ed. An improvement.]
Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio
Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a full-length fake baseball game. There is no yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes. Fans call it "baseball radio ASMR".
It is the perfect podcast for sleeping or relaxing, if you're into that kind of thing.
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
"You don't listen to it, you listen through it"
[ed. What a world. See also: The Rapture of Listening to a Fake Baseball Game (New Yorker); and, these other sleep-inducing podcasts: Village of Nothing Much; and Normal Gossip.]
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Image via: Context:
"The image is open to many interpretations, all of which are based on the context which surrounds (both literally and pictorially) them.
What we see is a relationship/interaction between a man and a woman. Beyond that the image can tell us nothing, everything else is supposition. The publications mentioned above use this picture, in one to illustrate or support an article about the evils of alcohol, and another to fortify an article about prostitution. It is easy to read either or both scenarios into this image, and many more besides. And so we begin to get an idea about how fragile the perception, or intended perception of an image can be, solely based on the paraphernalia contained within & surrounding that image and how context is added whether it is overtly deliberate or covertly subliminal."
"The image is open to many interpretations, all of which are based on the context which surrounds (both literally and pictorially) them.
What we see is a relationship/interaction between a man and a woman. Beyond that the image can tell us nothing, everything else is supposition. The publications mentioned above use this picture, in one to illustrate or support an article about the evils of alcohol, and another to fortify an article about prostitution. It is easy to read either or both scenarios into this image, and many more besides. And so we begin to get an idea about how fragile the perception, or intended perception of an image can be, solely based on the paraphernalia contained within & surrounding that image and how context is added whether it is overtly deliberate or covertly subliminal."
Rethinking the Liberation Pledge
The Failure of the Pledge and a Better Way Towards Vegan Tables
In 2015, animal advocates with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) launched an inspired new campaign among their members. It took courage, required sacrifice, and greatly backfired. This three-part series examines what the movement learned from the Liberation Pledge, how we might energize the intention behind the Pledge in a better way, and a piece to share with friends and family to do just that.
What We Learned From the Liberation Pledge
How It Started
The Liberation Pledge was a fascinating idea and a bit of a disaster. Instead of energizing supporters’ social networks to create change, as its creators intended, it often had the opposite effect- to isolate advocates from their closest relationships.
In this piece, you’ll learn
The Liberation Pledge was a three-part public pledge to
Before we had the Pledge, many of us felt alienated from friends and family who continued to eat animals. We were forced to choose between two options: speaking up and risking being seen as obnoxious, angry, and argumentative, or keeping the peace with painful inauthenticity, swallowing our intense discomfort at watching our loved ones eat the bodies of animals.
The pledge gave us hope that there was another way: being honest with those around us while continuing to spend time with them. And, on a larger scale, we hoped that if we all joined together, we could create a world where eating meat is stigmatized: a world where someone would ask, “Does anyone mind if I get the steak?” before making an order at a restaurant (or maybe even one in which restaurants would think twice before putting someone’s body on the menu).
Some people took it a step further, arguing it was immoral not to take the pledge, saying, “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?” According to this view, it was our duty not to sit idly by while violence was committed in our presence.
While some beautiful and inspiring stories were detailed on a Facebook group for the Pledge, it seemed to me that there were many more instances of total disaster: people experiencing huge ruptures in their oldest relationships around the Pledge while often lamenting that those they had just discarded “care more about eating dead animals than they care about me.”
From where I stood, the biggest effect of the Pledge was for advocates to lose relationships with family members who didn’t comply. Upon taking the Pledge, a close friend at the time experienced a years-long estrangement from their family, including those who were already vegan while many others decided to skip birthdays, weddings, and holidays with family. It’s possible that all of this added stigma around eating animals. With these relationships broken down, we don’t know.
My Liberation Pledge
I believe the pledge was so popular because it politicized something that we desperately wanted for our own comfort–no animals on the table while we were there–and I took it pretty much as soon as it launched.
The Pledge certainly contributed to my alienation from nonvegans, though I neither experienced the best nor the worst of it. My immediate family accommodated a request for vegetarian tables at holiday dinners, but I’m sure that there were many invitations I would have received if not for it. While my overall immersion in the animal rights community during that time certainly deserves some of the credit for the fact that I didn’t develop many new relationships with nonvegans during the following several years, the effect of the Pledge can’t be discounted.
A website was created with advice for taking the pledge, which is still online as of this writing. It suggested that pledge-takers write a public statement (a model announcement is provided) to inform their friends and family about their new commitment. It also offered some logistical suggestions for getting together with friends and family who aren’t willing to cooperate with the rules of the Pledge. Most importantly, it laid out the reasoning for why we must, together, participate in the Liberation Pledge (to stigmatize eating animals) and directs the reader to “stay firm and nonviolent in the face of conflict.”
This was the right kind of advice, but it fell far short. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the founders of the Liberation Pledge underestimated just how difficult an undertaking they were proposing. In fact, the pledge in practice often had the opposite of its intended effect, an outcome that profoundly undermined DxE’s central theory of change. DxE believed in the power of social networks to create change. That is, by taking bold actions and making personal sacrifices, activists would present a model to their communities and inspire friends and family members to reconsider their views on animals. However, while the pledge was meant to spark this process, in practice, it resulted more often than not in the disconnection of activists from their social networks. Instead of creating change by leveraging their personal relationships (the most important resource activists have, according to the social movement theory of change), the pledge weakened and sometimes even severed these relationships.
I believe these problems were mostly a matter of inadequate training. Pledge-takers were sent to the front lines of a fiery struggle for social change (their family dinner table) with nothing but a template letter. In contrast, tactics that involved legal risk or personal safety were only encouraged with plenty of training. While the Pledge wasn’t a matter of life and death, freedom or prison, it was a risk to members’ closest and most important relationships. With 20/20 hindsight, it seems that it was unwise to encourage pledge-takers to risk these relationships with so little training.
In 2015, animal advocates with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) launched an inspired new campaign among their members. It took courage, required sacrifice, and greatly backfired. This three-part series examines what the movement learned from the Liberation Pledge, how we might energize the intention behind the Pledge in a better way, and a piece to share with friends and family to do just that.
What We Learned From the Liberation Pledge
How It Started
The Liberation Pledge was a fascinating idea and a bit of a disaster. Instead of energizing supporters’ social networks to create change, as its creators intended, it often had the opposite effect- to isolate advocates from their closest relationships.
- What it was
- Why it was a good idea
- Why it failed
The Liberation Pledge was a three-part public pledge to
- live vegan,
- refuse to sit at tables where animals’ bodies are being eaten, and
- encourage others to do the same.
Before we had the Pledge, many of us felt alienated from friends and family who continued to eat animals. We were forced to choose between two options: speaking up and risking being seen as obnoxious, angry, and argumentative, or keeping the peace with painful inauthenticity, swallowing our intense discomfort at watching our loved ones eat the bodies of animals.
The pledge gave us hope that there was another way: being honest with those around us while continuing to spend time with them. And, on a larger scale, we hoped that if we all joined together, we could create a world where eating meat is stigmatized: a world where someone would ask, “Does anyone mind if I get the steak?” before making an order at a restaurant (or maybe even one in which restaurants would think twice before putting someone’s body on the menu).
Some people took it a step further, arguing it was immoral not to take the pledge, saying, “You wouldn’t sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?” According to this view, it was our duty not to sit idly by while violence was committed in our presence.
While some beautiful and inspiring stories were detailed on a Facebook group for the Pledge, it seemed to me that there were many more instances of total disaster: people experiencing huge ruptures in their oldest relationships around the Pledge while often lamenting that those they had just discarded “care more about eating dead animals than they care about me.”
From where I stood, the biggest effect of the Pledge was for advocates to lose relationships with family members who didn’t comply. Upon taking the Pledge, a close friend at the time experienced a years-long estrangement from their family, including those who were already vegan while many others decided to skip birthdays, weddings, and holidays with family. It’s possible that all of this added stigma around eating animals. With these relationships broken down, we don’t know.
My Liberation Pledge
I believe the pledge was so popular because it politicized something that we desperately wanted for our own comfort–no animals on the table while we were there–and I took it pretty much as soon as it launched.
The Pledge certainly contributed to my alienation from nonvegans, though I neither experienced the best nor the worst of it. My immediate family accommodated a request for vegetarian tables at holiday dinners, but I’m sure that there were many invitations I would have received if not for it. While my overall immersion in the animal rights community during that time certainly deserves some of the credit for the fact that I didn’t develop many new relationships with nonvegans during the following several years, the effect of the Pledge can’t be discounted.
A website was created with advice for taking the pledge, which is still online as of this writing. It suggested that pledge-takers write a public statement (a model announcement is provided) to inform their friends and family about their new commitment. It also offered some logistical suggestions for getting together with friends and family who aren’t willing to cooperate with the rules of the Pledge. Most importantly, it laid out the reasoning for why we must, together, participate in the Liberation Pledge (to stigmatize eating animals) and directs the reader to “stay firm and nonviolent in the face of conflict.”
This was the right kind of advice, but it fell far short. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the founders of the Liberation Pledge underestimated just how difficult an undertaking they were proposing. In fact, the pledge in practice often had the opposite of its intended effect, an outcome that profoundly undermined DxE’s central theory of change. DxE believed in the power of social networks to create change. That is, by taking bold actions and making personal sacrifices, activists would present a model to their communities and inspire friends and family members to reconsider their views on animals. However, while the pledge was meant to spark this process, in practice, it resulted more often than not in the disconnection of activists from their social networks. Instead of creating change by leveraging their personal relationships (the most important resource activists have, according to the social movement theory of change), the pledge weakened and sometimes even severed these relationships.
I believe these problems were mostly a matter of inadequate training. Pledge-takers were sent to the front lines of a fiery struggle for social change (their family dinner table) with nothing but a template letter. In contrast, tactics that involved legal risk or personal safety were only encouraged with plenty of training. While the Pledge wasn’t a matter of life and death, freedom or prison, it was a risk to members’ closest and most important relationships. With 20/20 hindsight, it seems that it was unwise to encourage pledge-takers to risk these relationships with so little training.
The Alienating Aspects of the Framing
Instrumentalizing Relationships
Framing the Pledge as a political action instrumentalized our closest relationships, communicating to those closest to us that we thought of them as objects to be used for the cause.
I Matter to You, but You Don’t Matter to Me
By framing the Pledge as a pledge or oath, it was presented as a promise to people who weren’t present. Exasperated by the custom and direction to make a public statement before having private conversations with those affected, the Pledge had an unnecessary effect of communicating to our loved ones that they didn’t really matter to us, at least not in comparison to this new thing we were doing. By not including our loved ones in a decision that would greatly affect our future interactions, we communicated something that was often taken as profound disrespect.
At the same time as it communicated that we didn’t particularly care about our loved ones, it explicitly appealed to their care for us, creating a heartbreaking competition about who loves the other less, and therefore gets the accommodation. Some of our loved ones must have felt that they’d be showing disproportionate care for us by agreeing to vegan tables, and so they attempted to call our bluff by serving meat.
Of course, not every Pledge conversation went this way, and many included affirmations of how much the relationships meant to us. Some relationships truly were deepened by the pledge, but it seems that they were the exception.
Unnecessary Escalation
Even if you plan to hold a boundary around sitting at such a table, framing it as such in initial conversations is confrontational to an antisocial degree. Rather than inviting others to understand our experiences, the explicit focus on integrity (I wouldn’t sit if a dog were being eaten) unnecessarily created an adversarial dynamic.
One Size Fits None
By being all or nothing, the Pledge puts us in a position where we are de facto excluded from many large events or gatherings with people who don’t know us well. In these cases, it won’t make sense to accommodate us by inconveniencing so many others, especially if our hosts don’t know us well.
Instrumentalizing Relationships
Framing the Pledge as a political action instrumentalized our closest relationships, communicating to those closest to us that we thought of them as objects to be used for the cause.
I Matter to You, but You Don’t Matter to Me
By framing the Pledge as a pledge or oath, it was presented as a promise to people who weren’t present. Exasperated by the custom and direction to make a public statement before having private conversations with those affected, the Pledge had an unnecessary effect of communicating to our loved ones that they didn’t really matter to us, at least not in comparison to this new thing we were doing. By not including our loved ones in a decision that would greatly affect our future interactions, we communicated something that was often taken as profound disrespect.
At the same time as it communicated that we didn’t particularly care about our loved ones, it explicitly appealed to their care for us, creating a heartbreaking competition about who loves the other less, and therefore gets the accommodation. Some of our loved ones must have felt that they’d be showing disproportionate care for us by agreeing to vegan tables, and so they attempted to call our bluff by serving meat.
Of course, not every Pledge conversation went this way, and many included affirmations of how much the relationships meant to us. Some relationships truly were deepened by the pledge, but it seems that they were the exception.
Unnecessary Escalation
Even if you plan to hold a boundary around sitting at such a table, framing it as such in initial conversations is confrontational to an antisocial degree. Rather than inviting others to understand our experiences, the explicit focus on integrity (I wouldn’t sit if a dog were being eaten) unnecessarily created an adversarial dynamic.
One Size Fits None
By being all or nothing, the Pledge puts us in a position where we are de facto excluded from many large events or gatherings with people who don’t know us well. In these cases, it won’t make sense to accommodate us by inconveniencing so many others, especially if our hosts don’t know us well.
by Eva Hamer, Effective Altruism Forum | Read more:
Image: Liberation Pledge
[ed. How not to win friends and influence people. Alienating everyone you're trying to influence just seems dumb from the get go.]
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
via: here/here
[ed. Smell diffusion. Hmm. Ok. See also: The Principles of Retrograde Audio Design Inform a Cult Perfumer (Surface).]
Essentially, the device applies acoustic horn loading theories from speaker design to smell diffusion, resulting in a state-of-the-art bottle. Somewhat humorously called the “BYOJ-01 Biradial Controlled Directivity Scent Dispersion Device” and resembling an alien gramophone, it can distribute smells more efficiently than ever before.
Gorham and Turnbull, who both share childhood experiences at Hindu temples and meditation halls, also created a custom scent inspired by wooden structures to go inside. The fragrance evokes a temple-like experience while listening to music on a high-fidelity sound system and helps facilitate the transition between states of consciousness.
[ed. Smell diffusion. Hmm. Ok. See also: The Principles of Retrograde Audio Design Inform a Cult Perfumer (Surface).]
Essentially, the device applies acoustic horn loading theories from speaker design to smell diffusion, resulting in a state-of-the-art bottle. Somewhat humorously called the “BYOJ-01 Biradial Controlled Directivity Scent Dispersion Device” and resembling an alien gramophone, it can distribute smells more efficiently than ever before.
Gorham and Turnbull, who both share childhood experiences at Hindu temples and meditation halls, also created a custom scent inspired by wooden structures to go inside. The fragrance evokes a temple-like experience while listening to music on a high-fidelity sound system and helps facilitate the transition between states of consciousness.
My Astounding And Yet Not At All Unusual Day In Culture
9:00 a.m.: Wake from a dream in which François Villon and I are sharing a dream about Susan Sontag making out with Simone Weil. Hot. Yawn artfully. Make vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath the slumbering bosom of “Marguerite,” whom I met last night at a party in Soho for a Hungarian rotogravure artist/DJ. No success.
9:02 a.m.: Ask my wife if she could perhaps assist. Merci!
9:25 a.m.: Post toilette, began my morning perusal of the Berlin papers. Sigh over inadequate coverage of my friend Gerhard’s production of Michel de Ghelderode’s Red Magic, which he has staged entirely in ecru. Philistines, the Germans. I will have to write stern letters to several editors. Possibly using my ostrich quill.
10:15 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then beignets.
10:30 a.m.: Prepare to enter my “writing mode.” Place one hand on a dictionary originally owned by T.S. Eliot (a fortune at auction, but worth it!). Place the other hand on a bathrobe belonging to Hart Crane. Place my feet in a laundry hamper thought to have been briefly in the possession of James Merrill’s dentist. Soak it in.
11:00 a.m.: Begin sketching thoughts about John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud into moleskin notebook. Ostrich quill? Oui. Oui indeed.
12:30 p.m.: Gaze poetically heavenward while sharing a light lunch of organic pearl onions and filet of local cassowary with James Franco and Harold Bloom at the Yale Club. Franco gets a little tipsy and punches a waiter while shouting something about “Twitter” (possibly “water” or “mother"; his enunciation was suffering). Waiter out cold. I cover waiter with my favorite made-to-measure ascot and flee.
2:35 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then petit-fours.
3:00pm: Drinks in Alphabet City with Greta, a Norwegian tea sculptor and amateur horticulturist whose great-grandfather invented the meatball. We agree that the state of Danish cinema is dire. Adrien Brody is seated beside us, and I deliberately order a Stella while smirking.
4:00 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then meatballs.
4:20 p.m.: Realize I’m a bit drunk. Decide to call on my friend Laurence, a philosopher cum structural engineer whose father invented the ounce. We debate the merits of capitalism in light of Dior’s recent scandals and the existence of Canada. I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.
6:30 p.m.: Realize that I am still a bit drunk. Realize that realizing that one is drunk is… banal? Yet what is banality but the infinite white space of sobriety? Write this down in Moleskine notebook for possible publication in N+1.
6:39 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review: “heymrfancyshrts.”
6:40 p.m.: Immediately regret text.
6:41 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein: “sorry mrfancyshrts.”
6:42 p.m.: Throw phone away.
6:43 p.m.: Retrieve phone and send text to James Franco that reads, in its entirety, “what.”
6:46 p.m.: Pre-prandial drinks with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke. Both wearing black.
8:00pm: Dinner with Jonathan Franzen in his private arboretum. Franzen sporting blindfold again, has trouble with fork. Awkward scene involving prawns.
9:30 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then slightly bloody shrimp cocktail.
10:00 p.m.: Attend Wallace Shawn’s latest play, Yes, I Was in ‘The Princess Bride’ but my Dad Edited The New Yorker and My Plays are Huge in Europe, Also Remember ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ Which You Probably Haven’t Seen But Feel Vaguely that You Should Have, and Yes, You Should Have.
12:00 a.m.: Participate in standing ovation.
12:05 a.m.: Standing ovation still going on.
12:08 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then leg cramps.
1:00 a.m.: Post-play drinks with two matadors, Gore Vidal, a team of Belgian weightlifters, the last man to see John Berryman alive, and Peter Singer. Tense moment between matadors and Singer is rescued when Vidal challenges weightlifters to justify Flemish.
2:30 a.m.: Home at last. Fall into a dream in which Villon and I are having a dream about Susan Sontag having a dream about Edmund Wilson’s cat making out with Simone Weil. Wake in terror.
2:35 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then… repose.
by David Orr, The Awl | Read more:
Image: T.S. Elliot, Wikimedia Commons
[ed. Saw a mention of beignets this morning and thought of this. : )]
9:02 a.m.: Ask my wife if she could perhaps assist. Merci!
9:25 a.m.: Post toilette, began my morning perusal of the Berlin papers. Sigh over inadequate coverage of my friend Gerhard’s production of Michel de Ghelderode’s Red Magic, which he has staged entirely in ecru. Philistines, the Germans. I will have to write stern letters to several editors. Possibly using my ostrich quill.
10:15 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then beignets.
 |
| T.S Elliot |
11:00 a.m.: Begin sketching thoughts about John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud into moleskin notebook. Ostrich quill? Oui. Oui indeed.
12:30 p.m.: Gaze poetically heavenward while sharing a light lunch of organic pearl onions and filet of local cassowary with James Franco and Harold Bloom at the Yale Club. Franco gets a little tipsy and punches a waiter while shouting something about “Twitter” (possibly “water” or “mother"; his enunciation was suffering). Waiter out cold. I cover waiter with my favorite made-to-measure ascot and flee.
2:35 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then petit-fours.
3:00pm: Drinks in Alphabet City with Greta, a Norwegian tea sculptor and amateur horticulturist whose great-grandfather invented the meatball. We agree that the state of Danish cinema is dire. Adrien Brody is seated beside us, and I deliberately order a Stella while smirking.
4:00 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then meatballs.
4:20 p.m.: Realize I’m a bit drunk. Decide to call on my friend Laurence, a philosopher cum structural engineer whose father invented the ounce. We debate the merits of capitalism in light of Dior’s recent scandals and the existence of Canada. I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.
6:30 p.m.: Realize that I am still a bit drunk. Realize that realizing that one is drunk is… banal? Yet what is banality but the infinite white space of sobriety? Write this down in Moleskine notebook for possible publication in N+1.
6:39 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review: “heymrfancyshrts.”
6:40 p.m.: Immediately regret text.
6:41 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein: “sorry mrfancyshrts.”
6:42 p.m.: Throw phone away.
6:43 p.m.: Retrieve phone and send text to James Franco that reads, in its entirety, “what.”
6:46 p.m.: Pre-prandial drinks with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke. Both wearing black.
8:00pm: Dinner with Jonathan Franzen in his private arboretum. Franzen sporting blindfold again, has trouble with fork. Awkward scene involving prawns.
9:30 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then slightly bloody shrimp cocktail.
10:00 p.m.: Attend Wallace Shawn’s latest play, Yes, I Was in ‘The Princess Bride’ but my Dad Edited The New Yorker and My Plays are Huge in Europe, Also Remember ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ Which You Probably Haven’t Seen But Feel Vaguely that You Should Have, and Yes, You Should Have.
12:00 a.m.: Participate in standing ovation.
12:05 a.m.: Standing ovation still going on.
12:08 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then leg cramps.
1:00 a.m.: Post-play drinks with two matadors, Gore Vidal, a team of Belgian weightlifters, the last man to see John Berryman alive, and Peter Singer. Tense moment between matadors and Singer is rescued when Vidal challenges weightlifters to justify Flemish.
2:30 a.m.: Home at last. Fall into a dream in which Villon and I are having a dream about Susan Sontag having a dream about Edmund Wilson’s cat making out with Simone Weil. Wake in terror.
2:35 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then… repose.
by David Orr, The Awl | Read more:
Image: T.S. Elliot, Wikimedia Commons
[ed. Saw a mention of beignets this morning and thought of this. : )]
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
The New Reading Environment
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. (...)
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. (...)
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.
The New New Reading Environment (The Editors, N+1) Read more:Image: Paul Chan, die Galerie. 2020
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.
***
For the most part, nonprofit journalism—once a novel phenomenon, now a critical node in the news infrastructure—has avoided the paywall trap. National institutions like ProPublica and the Marshall Project, and local ventures like New York Focus and the Texas Tribune, publish essential investigative reporting and make it widely available to readers. The American Prospect’s editor David Dayen, who has been explicit in his antipathy for the paywall model, wrote last year that “the greatest threat to democracy as it relates to the media is not the spread of disinformation, but the spread of paywalls. The information that an informed citizenry needs to make choices about who governs them and what is happening underneath the surface has been privatized, gated, and kept from those with an inability to pay.The New New Reading Environment (The Editors, N+1) Read more:
Human_Fallback
The recruiter was a chipper woman with a master’s degree in English. Previously she had worked as an independent bookseller. “Your experience as an English grad student is ideal for this role,” she told me. The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate. They had developed a product called Brenda, a conversational AI that could answer questions about apartment listings. Brenda had been acquired by a larger company that made software for property managers, and now thousands of properties across the country had put her to work.
Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda twenty-four hours a day. When Brenda went off script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realize the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. Because Brenda used machine learning to improve her responses, she would pick up on the operators’ language patterns and gradually adopt them as her own. (...)
Many of the properties that used Brenda were similar in a way that unnerved me: blocky, polychrome behemoths located near transit hubs and composed entirely of glass and vinyl siding, their facades as flat as iPhone screens. There was something heedless about these constructions. They didn’t seem aware of what cities they were in. No matter the culture or the clime, there they were, with their keyless locks, pet spas, and smart appliances, each one like a candy-colored app icon the size of a monument. As I clicked through virtual tours, I encountered variations on the same minimalist fever dream: gray sectionals, gray laminate floors, a fiddle-leaf fig tree that cast no shadow. The kitchens had islands, the islands had barstools, the rugs looked like they had been drawn with the polygon tool in Microsoft Paint. I suspected that like Brenda herself, these images were hybrids, cobbled together from real and simulated elements.
I was intrigued by the property names. The older complexes imparted old-fashioned domestic comfort with gerunds and a grab bag of pastoral morphemes (The Crossing at Hillcrest, The Landings at Meadowood), while others conveyed prestige with manorial resonances (Foxchase, Hunt Club, Pheasant Run). The newer complexes, in contrast, had vaporous, nonmaterial names—Continuum, Prism, Vivo, Axiom, Radius, Verge, Spark, Spectra, Ascend—names I found more reminiscent of medical equipment than the tech products they were meant to suggest. Then there were names that spelled out the street address in an unusual way (One One Six, Off Broadway, 2900 On First), and names that incorporated the word Lofts. There were properties with human names (The Seymour, The Ashley) and names that sounded like brunch spots (Harper House, Palmer House, The Outpost). After hundreds of hours with Brenda, the names rattled around in my head like psychic junk. They cleaved apart and collided to form new chimeras. The Chimneys at Carriage Crossing, The Cradles at Crossing Pointe, Vitamin Lofts, The Ether, Parallelogram @ Prospect, Parq Malaise. Sometimes I would jolt awake at night, my heart racing, with no thought at all but Legacy Lofts on Main.
Who were these apartments for? They seemed tailored to a certain kind of tenant, a tenant surely derived from repeated focus groups. This tenant spent more time at work than at home, but when they were home, they were emphatically indoors. They had voice-controlled light switches and ice machines connected to the internet. At the end of the day, they pulled their luxury vehicles into underground garages, picked up their packages from the on-site Amazon Hub locker, ran in place at the fitness center, then ordered delivery from a restaurant endorsed by online reviews. In the same way that algorithms tell us what they think we want, and do so with such tenacity that the imagined wants become actual, these buildings seemed intent on shaping a tenant’s aspirations. They seemed to tell the tenant they should not care about regional particularities or the idea of a neighborhood. The tenant should not even desire a home in the traditional sense, with hand-me-down furniture, hand-built improvements, and layers of multigenerational memory. This tenant was a renter for life, whose workplace was their primary address, and who would nevertheless be unable to afford property for as long as they lived. No matter: their job might take them to Omaha one year and to El Paso the next, but they would always find a home just like this one, as frictionless as the internet, which means that it wasn’t a home somewhere, but everywhere, which was nowhere at all.
[ed. See also: Why Is Everything So Ugly? (N+1)]
I was intrigued by the property names. The older complexes imparted old-fashioned domestic comfort with gerunds and a grab bag of pastoral morphemes (The Crossing at Hillcrest, The Landings at Meadowood), while others conveyed prestige with manorial resonances (Foxchase, Hunt Club, Pheasant Run). The newer complexes, in contrast, had vaporous, nonmaterial names—Continuum, Prism, Vivo, Axiom, Radius, Verge, Spark, Spectra, Ascend—names I found more reminiscent of medical equipment than the tech products they were meant to suggest. Then there were names that spelled out the street address in an unusual way (One One Six, Off Broadway, 2900 On First), and names that incorporated the word Lofts. There were properties with human names (The Seymour, The Ashley) and names that sounded like brunch spots (Harper House, Palmer House, The Outpost). After hundreds of hours with Brenda, the names rattled around in my head like psychic junk. They cleaved apart and collided to form new chimeras. The Chimneys at Carriage Crossing, The Cradles at Crossing Pointe, Vitamin Lofts, The Ether, Parallelogram @ Prospect, Parq Malaise. Sometimes I would jolt awake at night, my heart racing, with no thought at all but Legacy Lofts on Main.
Who were these apartments for? They seemed tailored to a certain kind of tenant, a tenant surely derived from repeated focus groups. This tenant spent more time at work than at home, but when they were home, they were emphatically indoors. They had voice-controlled light switches and ice machines connected to the internet. At the end of the day, they pulled their luxury vehicles into underground garages, picked up their packages from the on-site Amazon Hub locker, ran in place at the fitness center, then ordered delivery from a restaurant endorsed by online reviews. In the same way that algorithms tell us what they think we want, and do so with such tenacity that the imagined wants become actual, these buildings seemed intent on shaping a tenant’s aspirations. They seemed to tell the tenant they should not care about regional particularities or the idea of a neighborhood. The tenant should not even desire a home in the traditional sense, with hand-me-down furniture, hand-built improvements, and layers of multigenerational memory. This tenant was a renter for life, whose workplace was their primary address, and who would nevertheless be unable to afford property for as long as they lived. No matter: their job might take them to Omaha one year and to El Paso the next, but they would always find a home just like this one, as frictionless as the internet, which means that it wasn’t a home somewhere, but everywhere, which was nowhere at all.
by Laura Preston, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Rochelle Goldberg, Consent (detail). 2022; photo by Roberto Marossi
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