Reputational Turbulence

You know a company is in deep trouble when comedians and stock analysts take similar jabs.

With almost every day bringing more negative headlines about the quality and airworthiness of its products, Boeing is both a punchline and a cautionary tale. In response, the company has made a series of moves to reassure nervous airline customers, investors and the flying public. Much of it has been deemed too little, too late.

Something bigger is in order — something to restore faith that the company is serious about reversing its slide, will restore the priority of safety over stock price, and treat its workers and partners well.

The opportunity for change is at hand.

As of March 7, Boeing opened contract talks with its largest labor union. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 represents more than 32,000 Boeing workers in Washington.

For Boeing, there is more at stake than what it pays for in salaries and benefits. It is no exaggeration to say the future of the 107-year-old manufacturer hangs in the balance.

Boeing must do right by its workforce. It must reinforce its commitment to the women and men who work in its local factories by making the unprecedented declaration that its next plane will be made in Washington. It must move its corporate headquarters from Virginia back to Seattle — a symbolic but meaningful return to the community that once made aerospace history, in a good way.

So far, Boeing’s attempts to manage the reputational turbulence after a piece of fuselage blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in January has not met the moment.

Last month, Boeing announced a management shake-up, including the creation of a new position of senior vice president for quality.

On a Feb. 25 podcast, aviation expert Richard Aboulafia was unimpressed. “I think there must be maybe 1% of the customer and investor community that thinks something has changed,” he said. “You’ve got to reverse decades of damage both to how they treat their workforce and their supply chain and their supply chain’s workforce. … So the idea that this couple of superficial changes means anything is just completely bizarre.”

Culture change is more than a new poster in the break room. It’s about changing the structure of the company and what it values above all else.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing was modifying its bonus pay, making safety and quality metrics a top priority. In the past, hitting financial targets earned the most rewards. (...)

Which brings us to the upcoming full contract negotiations, the first in 16 years.

Where once Boeing could take the entire state hostage and demand tax concessions and worker givebacks, the tide has turned.

Politically, one wonders: Who are Boeing’s allies? President Joe Biden has made his long support of big labor a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. Given his predilection for harboring grudges, former President Donald Trump is not likely to forget that onetime rival Nikki Haley once served on Boeing’s board of directors.

When he was running for president in 2019, Gov. Jay Inslee reflected on the $8.7 billion in tax breaks the state awarded to Boeing six years before. “If you’ve ever been mugged, you understand what it feels like,” he told “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah.

The goodwill is gone.

In a recent interview, Jon Holden, president of IAM, told the Times’ Dominic Gates that the union “must stand up and save this company from itself.” (...)

For decades, Boeing fought its unions, outsourcing work across the globe and opening a new factory in labor-unfriendly South Carolina. The results can fill business textbooks of what not to do.

Boeing’s top leadership is a rogue’s gallery of mistakes and malfeasance. Phil Condit left in 2003 during a Pentagon procurement scandal; Harry Stonecipher was forced to resign over an affair; James McNerney launched the 787 Dreamliner, which suffered from massive cost overruns associated with outsourcing production; Dennis Muilenburg drew condemnation for his handling of two 737 MAX crashes.

That leaves current CEO Dave Calhoun with a lot of responsibility and not much public confidence.

Since January, Boeing stock has tanked, losing about $45 billion of market value so far this year.

“Boeing needs a top-to-bottom change of culture, and it can start by rebuilding its relationship with its touch-labor union,” wrote Leeham News and Analysis, which follows aerospace.

It took a long time for Boeing to tumble to its reputational and financial depth. It will take a long time to return to respect and admiration, let alone assurance that the plane you’re about to board has been put through the most rigorous safety assessment and maintenance.

Boeing cannot do so with a cadre of bean-counters and Wall Street suck-ups leading the charge. It is the people who design and manufacture these technological marvels who ought to be valued above all others.

by Seattle Times Editorial Board |  Read more:

Image: Elizabeth Le via AP

The Cult of the Costco Surfboard

Earlier this summer, on a beach in Santa Cruz, the big-wave surfer Shawn Dollar took a swig from a magnum bottle of champagne and hoisted a trophy in the sun. Dollar has a couple of Guinness World Records to his name, which he got by paddling into monstrous waves over fifty-five feet tall, rides he pulled off on an ultra-stiff, hand-shaped, gun-style surfboard. But on this day in early July he was celebrating his victory in the Wavestorm World Championship, a contest he won in two-foot surf atop the Wavestorm Classic Longboard, a soft surfboard that sells for a hundred bucks at Costco.

Dollar founded the soft-top-surfboard-only contest with a couple of other surfers in 2015, as kind of a gag. Despite its name, the championship is not affiliated with AGIT Global, the company that manufactures Wavestorm boards, or with Costco. (It was formerly called the Kirkland Classic World Championships, in a kind of mocking honor to Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand that labels everything from vitamins to bacon to gasoline.)

There are no rules at the Wavestorm World Championship, which is part demolition derby, part beach party. (Dollar said that most of the hundred or so surfers were pretty buzzed.) It’s also a sendup of the surfers who tend to ride on Wavestorm boards—“kooks,” or surf newbies, who don’t necessarily know or follow the sport’s tacit codes. Really, though, the event gives experienced surfers an excuse to have a blast breaking those codes themselves. To win, Dollar said, he did everything you’re not supposed to do in a surf contest: steal waves, make contact with other surfers, and “create a general mess in the water.” In one heat, he pushed a surfer wearing angel wings into the whitewash. “No matter who you are, when you ride a Wavestorm, you’re a kook,” Dollar told me. “I don’t know, I kind of like being a kook.”

Though it has been nipped, tucked, and stiffened over the years, the Wavestorm eight-footer has existed in roughly the same form since 2006. That’s when Matt Zilinskas, a former manager of the Boogie Board brand, and the Taiwanese businessman John Yeh, of AGIT Global—Boogie Board’s manufacturer—tweaked AGIT’s sandwich of expanded polystyrene foam and plastic to create a board for a surfer’s “first standup experience.” The Wavestorm, a high-volume, low-profit-margin play, was priced at a third of what most starter surfboards cost. By 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that over half a million Wavestorms had been sold, and Costco was on pace to sell a hundred thousand that year alone. (Zilinskas calls those numbers “outrageous” but declined to provide more accurate figures.) In peak summer, they can be bought at nearly two hundred coastal Costco locations.

Though pro surfers like Jamie O’Brien have taken Wavestorms on some of the world’s most dangerous breaks—such as Oahu’s Pipeline—as a kind of humblebrag, the board is not perfect. Surfers note that it soaks up seawater with time. At high speed, its plastic fins chatter. Its leash is tangle-prone. Compared to the carbon-fibre-wrapped shortboards currently championed by surf shops and ridden in high-level competitions—boards that slash up and down a wave’s face, building speed like a Scuderia Ferrari—the Wavestorm moves more like a school bus. But it is very good at catching waves. Maybe too good. “It’s possible to get greedy on one,” Gary Linden, a surf shaper and co-founder of the Big Wave World Tour, a triannual contest held in thirty-foot-plus waves, told me. He cites the board’s float, its paddling ease, and its drive through the water.

Surfers call the Wavestorm a Costco Cadillac, a sofa, or a bath toy. “If I’m in really good waves and someone paddles out on one, it means they most likely don’t know what they’re doing,” Dollar said. Such riders may endanger others by not knowing where to paddle out; they might ignore a break’s pecking order, “dropping in” on a wave where another surfer has priority. Matt Warshaw, the author of “The Encyclopedia of Surfing,” called the antagonism toward Wavestormers “just the latest misguided frustration for surfers, who are always pissed off,” and said that it resembled the scorn that surfers had in the eighties for bodyboarding, then experiencing a boom. “You saw prime breaks like Off the Wall, on the North Shore, become nearly overtaken by bodyboarders,” he said. “It was like the killer bees were coming. You’d think there was going to be a civil war.” A commenter on Surfer magazine’s Web site, meanwhile, recently promoted stoic forbearance. “The Wavestorm phenomenon will pass,” he wrote. “We lived through ‘Gidget.’ We’ll live through this.”

by Jesse Will, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Peter King

[ed. Fast forward a few years to the effects of democratization in both surfing and online discourse: Arguing Ourselves to Death:]

About ten miles south of San Francisco, there’s a public beach called Linda Mar. As far as Northern California beaches go, Lindy isn’t particularly pleasant or pretty; the sand is gross, the water’s cold and slate gray on account of the persistent fog that hangs around the area. The spot is best known for an oceanfront Taco Bell, which is great in theory, but in practice is plagued by a perpetual sogginess and the hundreds of surfers who clog its parking lot every weekend.

I’ve been surfing at Linda Mar on and off for about fifteen years now. At first, it was because I was a beginner, and Lindy is one of the few places you can surf within a short drive of San Francisco without being sucked out to sea. Now I go because I am older and the waves at the better beaches are sometimes too big and scary. (I won’t name the other spots here; perhaps the most illuminating thing I can say about Lindy is that I can break surfer taboo and publish its name because it’s already the most packed spot in the area.)

Linda Mar was always crowded, but it’s become much worse recently, thanks to three separate innovations. The first is the wide-scale production of cheap soft-top surfboards, which are floaty enough to catch pretty much every mushy wave that rolls through. The second is the ubiquity of surf-camera Web sites that live-stream the waves and provide constantly updating, color-coded reports on the conditions. The third is the popularity of short-form surf content on social media, which, like so much of what you find on the Internet, highlights little fights or asks stupid rhetorical questions aimed at inciting as much conflict as possible.

All this has undeniably changed Linda Mar. Some shifts are obvious. When the color-coded report is green, for example, the crowds arrive. When it’s yellow, you might find fewer than twenty people in the water, even if the actual waves are no different from supposedly green conditions. Other changes are more subjective and harder to parse. Since the widespread distribution of WorldStarHipHop-style surf videos—which show surfers screaming at one another over snaked rides and tussling on the beach—I have noticed a discomforting edge in the water. Before, a typical kook at Linda Mar would cut you off, fall, and apologize while laughing at himself. Most of the time, he wouldn’t even know the surf etiquette he had violated, and, if you explained it to him, he’d listen.

Today, it’s as though the kooks are replaying, in their heads, the hundreds of social-media videos they’ve watched. They have a vague but often errant understanding of surf ethics, and it rarely translates into politeness. If they feel like you cut them off or snaked their wave, they will transform, however fleetingly and unconvincingly, into the saltiest local they’ve seen on Instagram. (...)

If online content is reshaping the world of surfing—sending people to the same beaches while also making them belligerent and misinformed—who or what is to blame, and what can we do about it? Is it the responsibility of the people who run popular Instagram accounts to share more stoke and less disharmony? Should Surfline, the surf-camera and forecasting site, change the way it reports conditions, to more evenly distribute crowds? Do high-information surfers need to flag misinformation about who has priority on a wave?

Similar questions, of course, have been asked again and again, for the past decade or so, about American political life. Most Americans believe that we are in deeply polarized times; sixty-five per cent of respondents to a Pew survey last year said that they were “exhausted” when thinking about politics. Those of us who have appointed ourselves stewards of discourse have spent a great deal of energy trying to build some consensus, however imaginary and manufactured, but we are losing. Journalists have published fact-checks of politicians, government officials have created short-lived boards to combat disinformation, school systems have adopted media-literacy curricula to teach children how to take in what’s good and reject what’s bad. These efforts are largely driven by the hope that if we can control the inputs of the information ecosystem, and pump in a lot of truth and democracy, we might be able to save the country from irrevocable internal conflict. But what if the inputs don’t actually matter? What if it’s the technology itself?

Forty years ago, the late Neil Postman delivered a keynote address at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which, that year, had taken George Orwell and his works as its special topic, with particular reference to “1984.” The book’s dark prophecy of a world controlled by the censorious hand of Big Brother hadn’t come to pass, at least in a literal sense, but there were still many questions—as there are today—about where we might see Big Brother’s shadow. Postman, an education scholar at New York University, insisted that if we wanted to understand how the masses would be controlled, we shouldn’t look to Orwell but rather to his contemporary Aldous Huxley. Postman’s talk became a book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” In the foreword, he lays out the distinction between the two authors’ visions of the future: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” (...)

Postman, an acolyte of the influential Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, argued that if McLuhan’s most famous postulation was correct—that the medium is the message—then television was a uniquely destructive and obscurantist force that had already ruined American discourse. Politics had become a show dictated by ratings and the aesthetics of mass media; politicians were now judged by how they looked and performed on television. Under the totalitarian paradigm of television, Postman suggested, words and their associations no longer really mattered. He wrote:

What is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.

So what is the ideology of the Internet? An optimist might invoke the idea of democratization, pointing to the medium’s ability to amplify otherwise silent voices, in ways both good and bad. But the Internet is not so much a forum as a language unto itself, one with its own history, predilections, and prejudices.

by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker |  Read more:

Paul McCartney: The Songwriting Process

Martin Scorsese

[ed. This is how you make a good commercial.]

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The New Media Goliaths

One of the more remarkable artifacts of late-stage social media is the indelible presence of a particular character: the persecution profiteer. They are nearly unavoidable on Twitter: massive accounts with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, beloved by the recommendation engine and often heavily monetized across multiple platforms, where they rail against the corporate media, Big Tech and elites. Sometimes, the elites have supposedly silenced them; sometimes, they’ve supposedly oppressed you — perhaps both. But either way, manipulation is supposedly everywhere, and they are supposedly getting to the bottom of it.

Many of these polemicists rely on a thinly veiled subtext: They are scrappy truth-tellers, citizen-journalist Davids, exposing the propaganda machine of the Goliaths. That subtext may have been true in last century’s media landscape, when independent media fought for audience scraps left by hardy media behemoths with unassailable gatekeeping power. But that all changed with the collapse of mass media’s revenue model and the rise of a new elite: the media-of-one.

The transition was enabled by tech but realized by entrepreneurs. Platforms like Substack, Patreon and OnlyFans offered infrastructure and monetization services to a galaxy of independent creators — writers, podcasters and artists — while taking a cut of their revenue. Many of these creators adopted the mantle of media through self-declaration and branding, redefining the term and the industry. Many were very talented. More importantly, however, they understood that creating content for a niche — connecting with a very specific online audience segment — offered a path to attention, revenue and clout. In the context of political content in particular, the media-of-one creators offered their readers an editorial page, staffed with one voice and absent the rest of the newspaper.

The rise of a profitable niche media ecosystem with a reach commensurate with mass media has been a boon for creators and consumers alike. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have enabled sponsorships and ad-revenue sharing for quite some time — spawning a generation of influencers — but patronage opened additional paths to success. A tech blogger can start a podcast about Web3 with no infrastructural outlay, reaching their audience in a new medium. A Substack newsletter devoted to political history can amass thousands of subscribers, charge $5 a month, and deliver a salary up to seven figures for its author. Pop culture pundits can earn a living producing content on Patreon, and web-cam adult performers can do the same on OnlyFans. Even Twitter has launched subscriptions.

Whatever the kink — from nudes to recipes to conspiracy theories — consumers can find their niche, sponsor it and share its output. This ecosystem has given rise to people with millions of followers, who shape the culture and determine what the public talks about each day.

Well, their public, anyway.

 
The Rise Of Niche Propaganda

Like the media, the public has increasingly fragmented. The internet enabled the flourishing of a plethora of online subcultures and communities: an archipelago of bespoke and targetable realities. Some of the most visible are defined by their declining trust in mass media and institutions. Recognizing the opportunity, a proliferation of media-of-one outlets have spun up to serve them.

In fact, the intersection of a burgeoning niche media ecosystem and a factionalized public has transformed precisely the type of content that so concerns the persecution profiteers: propaganda. Propaganda is information with an agenda, delivered to susceptible audiences to serve the objectives of the creator. Anyone so inclined can set up an account and target an audience, producing spin to fit a preferred ideological agenda. Those who achieve a degree of success are often increasingly cozy with politicians and billionaire elites who hold the levers of power and help advance shared agendas. In fact, the niche propagandists increasingly have an advantage over the Goliaths they rail against. They innately understand the modern communication ecosystem on which narratives travel and know how to leverage highly participatory, activist social media fandoms to distribute their messages; institutions and legacy media typically do not.

Although the mechanics of who can spread propaganda, and how, has shifted significantly over the last two decades, public perception of the phenomenon has not. People discussing concerns about propaganda on social media frequently reference the idea of a powerful cabal composed of government, media and institutional authorities, manipulating the public into acquiescing to an elite-driven agenda. This misperception comes in large part from popular understanding of a theory presented by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their 1988 book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.”

“Manufacturing Consent” proposed a rather insidious process by which even a free press, such as that of the United States, filters the information that reaches the public by way of self-censorship and selective framing. Even without the overt state control of media present in authoritarian regimes, Chomsky and Herman argued, American media elites are influenced by access, power and money as they decide what is newsworthy — and thus, determine what reaches the public. Chomsky and Herman identified five factors, “five filters” — ownership, advertising, sourcing, catching flak, and fear — that comprised a system of incentives that shaped media output.

by Renee Diresta, Noema |  Read more:

Image: Hvass & Hannibal/FORESIGHT

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Gary Larson

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Rolling Stones

How Do You Define Who’s an Alaskan?

“Alaska calls to those who crave solitude and adventure, and have a deep respect for nature’s power.” — John McPhee, “Coming into the Country”

In deciding a court case about a Legislature seat, the Alaska Supreme Court waded into one of the most contentious debates in our state: How do you define “Alaskan” — and how long does it take to qualify?

In the lawsuit, the court ruled that Rep. Jennie Armstrong qualified as an Alaska resident for the purposes of her candidacy for the Legislature in 2022, if only barely. Alaska law states that candidates must have been residents of Alaska for three years and must have lived in the district they seek to represent for a year prior to filing. Armstrong met that bar by a matter of days, having come to visit in 2019 and making plans to return permanently after traveling Outside to move her belongings.

The squishiness of the residency requirement points to the difficulty of defining intent — and nods to deeper, potentially insoluble questions: What makes a person an Alaskan? Is it a matter of time spent here? Is it a state of mind? Is there a physical or psychological entrance exam, so to speak?

Even when looking only at the state’s legal residency definitions that most of us agree are woefully insufficient in defining whether a person is an Alaskan, there’s a surprising amount of variability. The requirement of three years in Alaska to run for the Legislature is on the long end, even if (as the state Supreme Court found) it permits for trips Outside to tie up the loose ends of the incorrect lives that prospective Alaskans formerly maintained. When it comes to that other famous marker of Alaskan-ness, the Permanent Fund dividend, the residency requirement is a calendar year in the state before filing your first application; woe betide those who arrive here on Jan. 2.

Other residency definitions get progressively looser. The Department of Fish and Game requires Alaskans to have lived here for 12 consecutive months — a year, though not necessarily a calendar one — before they can purchase a resident hunting, fishing and/or trapping license. When it comes to resident tuition at the University of Alaska, a year in the state will qualify you — but there are a number of shortcuts allowed too, such as being an active military member, spouse or dependent. And the bar for getting an Alaska driver’s license is perhaps the lowest of any of the government residency markers — an Alaska mailing address, as established by paperwork such as a utility bill.

In defining what makes a person an Alaskan, however, the conversation often steers away from some precise duration of residency and toward a host of subjective and sometimes intangible metrics. Some people say you have to live here for a winter (or 10 of them) before you’re an Alaskan, so that you prove you can stick it out. Some people say you have to live outside Anchorage, or Fairbanks, or even off the road system altogether. Some people say you have to see 20 below, or 40 below (the days of colder standards are fleeting, though they do still come around occasionally).

And there’s something more, too. Most of us know people who have been in Alaska for a long time — in some cases, their whole lives — and never do anything particularly Alaskan. On the flip side, there are people who are Alaskans in their temperament, interests and sense of place from the day they arrive. It’s worth betting that there are Alaskans out there who never actually make it here — theirs is the saddest lot, never knowing that their place in the world exists and they just haven’t found it yet.

Even though what makes a person a “real Alaskan” isn’t strongly correlated with the duration of their habitation, Alaskans have a decided tendency to “pull rank” by introducing their opinions with a preamble: “I’ve been here for 35 years,” “I came up before the pipeline,” “I’m a fourth-generation Alaskan,” and so forth. We would probably all be wise to stay humble when it comes to that kind of imagined credibility, given that Alaska’s Native people have all of us new arrivals beat by hundreds — even thousands — of generations. When you consider that some of the state’s people have been here since prehistoric times, the braggadocio over having once stood in front of a bank sign at 40 below seems pretty silly. Who among us could credibly claim to be able to make our way without electricity, imported food or even forged-metal hand tools?

So when it comes to what constitutes a real Alaskan, perhaps a better set of criteria is needed: Does a person respect the land and all we get from it? Do they work to keep this a place where their children and grandchildren can grow up and experience the same ineffable wonder as those who came before them? Will they stop to help a neighbor in distress when it’s cold out?

by The Editors, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Bill Roth/ADN
[ed. I was a biologist with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game for 30 years - probably the most Alaskan of all Alaskan institutions (existing before statehood). My son was raised in a log home, heated by 6-7 cords of wood a winter. I had a pilot's license and a couple of planes. We snowshoed, hiked, skied, fished, camped, and did all the Alaskan things Alaskans do. I wouldn't have traded it for any other life. But, as this article suggests, being an Alaskan isn't necessarily about the years you reside in the state but about your commitment to the Alaskan ethic (also mentioned in this article). Which is: help your neighbors, appreciate and experience this beautiful country to the best of your abilities, and however you experience it, keep its wild essence alive for future generations.] 

Just Win, Baby

The transactional politics that destroyed a country and its legal system. [ed.]

The convergence on 28 February of Mitch McConnell’s retirement announcement as the Republican Senate leader with the supreme court’s order to accept Donald Trump’s appeal to consider his immunity from prosecution was a bitter irony for McConnell and triumph for Trump. It is a telltale subplot in Trump’s theater of humiliation in which the supreme court is playing a starring role as his best supporting actor. (...)

McConnell, the partisan architect of the partisan supreme court majority, could, if he wished to boast, rightly claim credit for those justices staging the timely rescue of his nemesis. Putting in place justice after justice, breaking precedent after precedent, he is the father of this court’s majority. He considers it his greatest accomplishment.

McConnell’s cold arrangement with Trump was strictly business: McConnell protected Trump in exchange for Trump packing the court. While few truly deeply loathe Trump more than McConnell, nobody has been a more consequential enabler or fatally miscalculated the spread of his stain. But their unholy alliance cannot be mistaken for a Faustian bargain; neither was selling his soul.

McConnell made plain the purely transactional basis of the relationship when he endorsed Trump after Super Tuesday, citing how “we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people … a generational change of our federal judiciary – most importantly, the supreme court”. (...)

McConnell had many reasons for declaring he has reached the twilight of his career, even though the Republicans may gain control of the Senate after the election and he would be leader again. His health, after all, is fragile. He froze speechless twice in press conferences. He has suffered a terrible personal tragedy, the accidental drowning of his wife’s sister. But approaching the promised land once more, which might be his culmination, he restrained himself from entering. He announced he would relinquish the enormous power he has accumulated over a lifetime because he could see it ebbing away to his worst enemy. That very worst enemy is not Joe Biden, who he likes and would destroy out of cold partisanship, but Trump, who he hates with a white-hot passion, but whom he has safeguarded and would help become “dictator for a day”.

“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular time,” said McConnell in his Senate speech announcing his retirement. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.” Believe him, he can count. (...)

McConnell’s enforcement of the party line made him appear like Senate leaders before him. His acolytes praise him as an “institutionalist”. He basks in presenting himself as a “constitutionalist”. But to build his power McConnell has subverted constitutional norms and standards, corroded and corrupted checks and balances, and drastically weakened the Senate through his explosive abuse of filibusters to transfer power to the federal courts, which he stuffed with Federalist Society cadres. He has been more than a great anti-institutionalist; he has been an anti-constitutionalist.

McConnell’s great crusade was to tear down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the so-called McCain-Feingold bill) and open the sluice gates for dark money. The year after its passage he filed his opposition in a case that made its way to the supreme court, McConnell v Federal Election Commission, which he lost in a 5-4 ruling upholding the bill. Still, he persisted.

In 2006, far-right Samuel Alito was nominated to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the court. She was a moderate Republican of the old school, who upheld abortion rights and campaign finance reform. When 25 Democrats attempted a symbolic filibuster against Alito, McConnell took the floor to denounce the effort as unconstitutional: “Mr President, we stand today on the brink of a new and reckless effort by a few to deny the rights of many to exercise our constitutional duty to advise and consent, to give this man the simple up or down vote he deserves. The Senate should repudiate this tactic.”

In 2010, with Alito on the court, it ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v FEC that restrictions on independent campaign funds – dark money – were violated free speech. “So, all Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech,” said McConnell. It was his emancipation proclamation; he freed the dark money.

In 2014, McConnell filed an amicus brief in McCutcheon, et al v FEC, a case he inspired that was backed by the Republican National Committee, challenging aggregate limits on campaign contributions as “a severe infringement on the rights of speech.” The supreme court ruled for McCutcheon in a 5-4 decision.

With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, McConnell laid down the Republican line. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he ordered. His tactic was the filibuster that he had decried. During the Obama presidency, McConnell held up 517 Senate debates through filibusters. The Senate Republicans successfully filibustered 79 Obama federal judicial nominees during his first five years, compared to 68 in entire previous history. After the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they blocked 50 of 70 nominations to federal judgeships.

Through dark money and filibusters, servicing corporate interests, McConnell built a new political machine at the expense of paralyzing and diminishing the Senate. He capped his obstructions after the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. If Obama were to succeed in seating his appointment on the supreme court the majority would tilt 5-4 against the conservatives.

McConnell refused to allow even a single committee hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a highly regarded judge of the most moderate temperament on the DC district court. McConnell asserted a novel doctrine that a nomination to the supreme court could not be considered in a president’s last year and that the vacancy must be filled by the next president. He dubbed his gambit “a constitutional right”. “One of my proudest moments,” he said after killing the Garland nomination, “was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr President, you will not fill the supreme court vacancy.’” When Sean Hannity later asked McConnell wondered why Obama left so many vacancies on the federal courts, McConnell replied: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”

In the 2016 campaign, McConnell backed Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, an acolyte, in the primaries. After Trump bulldozed his way to the nomination, McConnell expected him to be a dead weight on Republican Senate candidates. He suggested that they could separate themselves by running negatives ads against him. “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” he said.

McConnell remained complacent that he was the enduring Republican standard and Trump the blip. “My view is that Trump will not change the Republican party,” he said. “If he brings in new followers, that’s great, and well worth the effort, but he will not change the Republican party … I think he’d be fine.” He added as an additional note of reassurance that the constitution “constrains all of us, members of Congress and the president as well”.

Watching Trump’s win on election night, McConnell said: “The first thing that came to my mind was the supreme court.” He was soon in touch with Leonard Leo, chairman of the Federalist Society, who described McConnell as his “vigilant and irrepressible” partner in gaining control of the federal courts. Leo was an octopus of dark money operations, his tentacles reaching far and wide. After Citizens United, he sat atop hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars to promote his causes and McConnell’s candidates.

A week after the election, Leo carried a list of court nominees into a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower. Trump’s first supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was on the list. His second and third nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were on Leo’s next list. Leo sent more lists to the White House, rubber-stamped by White House counsel Don McGahn, a Federalist Society stalwart, and McConnell would process them through the Senate. Eighty-five per cent of Trump’s court appointees were Federalist Society members. He was entrenching conservative power in the courts for a generation to come. Trump remarked privately, “Mitch McConnell. Judges. Judges. Judges. The only thing he wants is judges.” McConnell told Trump: “Mr President, when are you going to thank me for that?”

Six weeks before election day, on 18 September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. As soon as McConnell heard the news he called Trump: “First, I’m going to put out a statement that says we’re going to fill the vacancy. Second, you’ve got to nominate Amy Coney Barrett.” McConnell’s doctrine that a president could not fill a supreme court vacancy in an election year suddenly evaporated. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Barrett was sworn in on 26 October. McConnell’s relationship with Trump got him what he wanted. The conservative majority on the court was now seven to three. (...)

McConnell has a decades-long history in the Senate from intern to dinosaur, from minion to overlord, but his overweening pride in his shrewdness, his inner hackery, has prevented him from learning any larger lessons of history that explain his fall. He cannot dispense with his ingrained belief that he remains the true Republican and that there is an invisible Republican party that belongs to him, not Trump.

by Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mariam Zuhaib/AP
[ed. Nice thumbnail sketch of Mitch's greatest hits. A real statesman of the lowest order.]

North Sentinel Island: Stay Away

North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island. It is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous tribe in voluntary isolation who have defended, often by force, their protected isolation from the outside world. The island is about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) long and 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) wide, and its area is approximately 60 square kilometres (23 sq mi).

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956 prohibits travel to the island, and any approach closer than 5 nautical miles (9.3 km), in order to protect the remaining tribal community from "mainland" infectious diseases against which they likely have no acquired immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian Navy.

Nominally, the island belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In practice, Indian authorities recognise the islanders' desire to be left alone, restricting outsiders to remote monitoring (by boat and sometimes air) from a reasonably safe distance; the Indian government will not prosecute the Sentinelese for killing people in the event that an outsider ventures ashore. The island is a protected area of India. In 2018, the Government of India excluded 29 islands – including North Sentinel – from the Restricted Area Permit (RAP) regime, in a major effort to boost tourism. In November 2018, the government's home ministry stated that the relaxation of the prohibition on visitations was intended to allow researchers and anthropologists (with pre-approved clearance) to finally visit the Sentinel islands.

The Sentinelese have repeatedly attacked approaching vessels, whether the boats were intentionally visiting the island or simply ran aground on the surrounding coral reef. The islanders have been observed shooting arrows at boats, as well as at low-flying helicopters. Such attacks have resulted in injury and death. In 2006, islanders killed two fishermen whose boat had drifted ashore, and in 2018 an American Christian missionary, 26-year-old John Chau, was killed after he illegally attempted to make contact with the islanders three separate times and paid local fishermen to transport him to the island. (...)

First peaceful contact

The first peaceful contact with the Sentinelese was made by Triloknath Pandit, a director of the Anthropological Survey of India, and his colleagues on 4 January 1991. Although Pandit and his colleagues were able to make repeated friendly contact, dropping coconuts and other gifts to the Sentinelese, no progress was made in understanding the Sentinelese language, and the Sentinelese repeatedly warned them off if they stayed too long. Indian visits to the island ceased in 1997.

Indian Ocean earthquake and later hostile contact

The Sentinelese survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and its after-effects, including the tsunami and the uplifting of the island. Three days after the earthquake, an Indian government helicopter observed several islanders, who shot arrows and threw spears and stones at the helicopter. Although the tsunami disturbed the tribal fishing grounds, the Sentinelese appear to have adapted.

In January 2006, two Indian fishermen, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, were fishing illegally in prohibited waters and were killed by the Sentinelese when their boat drifted too close to the island. There were no prosecutions.

In November 2018, a 26-year old American missionary named John Allen Chau, who was trained and sent by Missouri-based All Nations, was killed during an illegal trip to the restricted island where he planned to preach Christianity to the Sentinelese. The 2023 documentary film The Mission discusses the incident. Seven individuals were taken into custody by Indian police on suspicion of abetting Chau's illegal access to the island. Entering a radius of 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) around the island is illegal under Indian law. The fishermen who illegally ferried Chau to North Sentinel said they saw tribesmen drag his body along a beach and bury it. Despite efforts by Indian authorities, which involved a tense encounter with the tribe, Chau's body was not recovered. Indian officials made several attempts to recover the body but eventually abandoned those efforts. An anthropologist involved in the case told The Guardian that the risk of a dangerous clash between investigators and the islanders was too great to justify any further attempts.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: NASA

[ed. No tourist problems here. See also: Escape From Simulation Island (3QD).]

2024 Academy Award Music Performances

Some excellent performances at the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony:

Ryan Gosling's "I'm Just Ken"

Clearly a tribute to Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"

André 3000

Here’s how a photoshoot with a global celebrity typically goes. The star, aka “the talent,” arrives accompanied by a team — basically a military assault unit of publicist, manager, personal assistant or two, personal stylist or two (plus their assistants), and then various hangers-on who each carry two iPhones for no good reason. The unit is carried to the shoot’s location in black SUVs driven by men with earpieces. The group proceeds to an air-conditioned motorhome hired for the occasion, and it’s here that the talent spends their time between photographs looking at their phone(s) while the rest of the team finds reasons to complain about something on-set not being quite right. A friend of mine directs Super Bowl commercials; he told me the best “talent” he ever worked with was Lil Wayne — extremely professional, extremely punctual, where the only complication was a request for a small skate park to be constructed next to his trailer.

What the global celebrity never does is arrive alone with a dozen instruments and spend the day wandering the shoot location playing flute.

***

On this afternoon, André 3000, one of the most singular and best-dressed musicians of all time, is only days away from releasing New Blue Sun, a solo album of flute music — flutes being so much his thing at the moment, he’s brought one to Gjelina, one of Venice’s more hyped restaurants, where we are having lunch. It is carved from dark wood, the length of his arm, ancient-looking. Only a couple minutes later, he starts playing a string of soft notes, in the manner of a breathy bird. Soon, diners’ heads are swiveling to locate the sound, maybe to see if Pan, the Greek god of shepherds, has joined us for upscale pizza. This is probably obvious, but no one else in the restaurant is playing flute over their upscale pizza.

André has on what he describes as his daily uniform: vintage overalls, a beanie, and clean Nikes. His sunglasses are brown, lightly tinted. Under his overalls, he wears a long-sleeved camouflage shirt. “I have 40 of these shirts. I wake up in the morning and put the same thing on.” The look is duck hunter meets farmhand meets sneakerhead. Have you ever met someone and wanted to buy their look in entirety and throw it on right there? I ask if such a thing were possible. He explains he’s just gotten back from Amsterdam where he was developing a new brand of his own, of similar workwear, coming soon. (André had a line in the late aughts called Benjamin Bixby, with clothes that recalled early Ivy League prep.) “Whenever I’m on the street, at least for a month, whenever I see someone with overalls on, they’re going to get a free pair,” André says. “Because I know they’re overall lovers. It takes a certain person to wear overalls. They’re like grown-people baby clothes. They feel very comfortable — that’s why I love them.”

If anybody was comfortable in their own skin, it’s André 3000. Over the years, just going by style alone, André has dressed like a Gatsby dandy, a Scottish lord, and a streetwear prince. Recently he had been on the street a lot, playing the flute while wandering the globe — so much that a meme grew around it, like Bill Murray being spotted at frat parties, where somebody would take a picture of André playing flute in a coffee shop or in an airport security line. “I was in Philadelphia,” he says, “and someone came up to me. He was like, ‘You know, it’s a game now.’” A game asking not only where in the world was André 3000 these days, à la Where’s Waldo, but what the hell was this famous rapper doing walking around with a flute?

An hour earlier, driving to lunch and listening to an advance copy of New Blue Sun in my car, I’d been wondering the same thing. I hadn’t known what to expect; I didn’t have any context. (“No context?” André says, when I confess as much, and starts laughing. “No context? Wow.”) If anything, I expected a rap album because that’s what André 3000 was known for: being half of OutKast, the Atlanta duo, the legendary hip-hop group. I mean, I wondered if I’d been sent the wrong record. Just a few minutes into it, all shimmering cymbals and keyboard tones, then a warbling, digital flute, my mind was floundering, stretching hard for comparisons. Was this jazz or New Age? Was it what shamans played during ayahuasca ceremonies or what they piped into massage chambers at the Maui Four Seasons?

Were these songs or something else?

“I don’t even call them songs,” André says, smiling at my confusion. “They’re almost like formations, like you’re hearing something as it’s happening. It’s a living, breathing, sound exploration.”


He stares at me intently across the table, and I remember the first track’s title: “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.” The sub-text suggests: Put aside your preconceived notions and listen closely, I’ll tell you exactly where I’m at.

So, I start to listen.

In 2003, André 3000 had the world at his feet. He and his OutKast partner, Big Boi, born Antwan André Patton, had produced four albums that defined a style — precise lyricism meets updated funk meets Afrofuturism meets avant-soul — and basically launched Southern hip-hop at a time when any rap that wasn’t from New York or Los Angeles was dismissed. And then, with their fifth album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, they created a global juggernaut: the best-selling rap album in history, a record that went 13 times platinum and won three Grammys in 2004 (Album of the Year, Best Rap Album, and Best Urban/Alternative Performance) on the back of two number-one singles, “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move,” which have been played at half the world’s weddings ever since.

At that Grammy Awards ceremony, André performed onstage in fluorescent green (buckskin leggings?), but he could’ve worn anything. He could’ve done anything.

What he did was basically disappear from the public eye, except for occasional moments when people posted snapshots of him on social media.

And now, 20 years later, he is back — with a woodwind album.

André 3000 doesn’t read music, he doesn’t know keys, he doesn’t know chords — but he knows what he’s doing. He was born André Lauren Benjamin in 1975, in Atlanta, Georgia. As a kid, he thought he’d become a visual artist. “And then I discovered rap videos.” He met Big Boi in high school. OutKast’s debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, came out in 1994 and went on to establish Atlanta as a viable alternative to the East Coast/West Coast rivalry — based partly on André’s extremely studied, meticulously composed verses. “I’m not a freestyle rapper, right?” he says. “I architecturally made those verses bar by bar.” (...)

André, over time, has resisted such calcification. After OutKast, he helped to produce and voice Class of 3000, an animated show for Cartoon Network. He’s acted in dozens of films and TV episodes, including the starring role in 2013’s Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side; a scene-stealing turn in French auteur Claire Denis’ 2018 sci-fi High Life; and a critically lauded part, alongside Michelle Williams, in 2022’s Showing Up. Still, there’s also been rapping: appearing on remixes, covering Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” with Beyoncé, and doing a guest verse for Drake. The point is, the longer we speak, it seems as though André’s part in OutKast is a figment of a former life.

His present life, at least until recently, hadn’t necessarily been easy. In 2019, André appeared on the podcast Broken Record with super-producer Rick Rubin and talked about being diagnosed as an adult with anxiety and hypersensitivity. “Any little thing I put out, it’s instantly attacked, not in a good or bad way. People nitpick it with a fine-tooth comb. ‘Oh, he said that word!’ And that’s not a great place to create from and it makes you draw back. Maybe I don’t have the confidence that I want, or the space to experiment like I used to.” But that was four years ago. And clearly, releasing his first solo album — no bars, all flute — hints that his confidence has been re-discovered. I suggest to André the new album points toward a new direction, particularly since it isn’t — different from his rap work — carefully planned or composed. “Freedom is happening,” he says. “We listened to each other. Sometimes the melodies you’re hearing, I was making them up on the spot or I was responding on the spot. That’s the value of this album, that it’s fully alive. It wasn’t planned.” If anything, he worried how the spontaneity would be received by listeners. “I’m scared. I don’t want to troll people. New André 3000 album coming out! And you play it — like, man, what the fuck? On the packaging, there’s a graphic that says ‘Warning: no bars.’ So it completely lets you know what you’re getting into before you get into it. I don’t want people to feel like I’m playing with them. That could ruin the whole thing.”

A moment later, he says, “It’s very intimate. With rap, with an OutKast song, people know the beat, and I can hide behind the beat. With this, you can’t hide behind anything.” (...)

So, where is André 3000 now, literally at this present moment? I mean, other song titles on the album suggest what he’s been up to during his time away from rap — “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild,” or “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina . Do You Agree?” Maybe the more interesting question is what is André now? He’s a meme, he’s a man, he’s a musician. He’s a rapper, he’s a flautist, he’s a style star. I put it to him: Does he miss rapping? “I do,” he says. “I would love to make a rap album. I just think it’d be an awesome challenge to do a fire-ass album at 48 years old. That’s probably one of the hardest things to do! I would love to do that.” Maybe that’s what’s coming next, I offer. “Possibly! That’s the cool thing about my whole ride. It really is a ride.”

by Rosecrans Baldwin, Highsnobiety |  Read more:

Image: Djeneba Aduayom

[ed. New Blue Sun album in full here.]

via:

The Surprising Genius of Sewing Machines

[ed. I wasn't aware of Veritasium's channel until reading the Pueyo interview below. Check out his many great videos.]

More Pathfinding With Thomas Pueyo

Sotonye: On the future of the AI consumer market

Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about artificial intelligence. You’ve written comprehensively about the subject and present a compelling case about its dangers, the most compelling case I’ve read so far. I’ve been pretty interested in but still largely unconvinced by the perspectives of the most vocal opponents of strong general AI like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Geoffrey Hinton, but you’ve been able to bring a tempered clarity here that’s squared some circles around the matter for me. And so I’ve been wanting to ask something further:

Before we get AGI we’re likely to see more progress in the areas with the most commercial potential, but what this progress could and should look like is a hugely important but still unanswered question. What are your perspectives on the way the AI market will shape up in the near term? Will we see vertical integration with companies like OpenAi making fully AI powered phones? Or will sex bots become common? And what kind of products would you expect or like to see as a high-level creator?

Tomas:

I don't have fully formed opinions on the topic, so this might be a good time to think out loud.

It's not clear to me that there will be huge companies like Facebook or Google in AI.

These companies were the result of network effects, where the more users you had, the better the service became. This is true of all marketplaces, but I don't see it in AI. I see a big cost of entry to train the models, but it doesn't look like it's big enough to eliminate competition. There's already half a dozen competitors close to the cutting edge, with OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Meta... And odds are the training will get cheaper with better algorithms and training techniques. It also looks like Gemini Advanced is close to ChatGPT 4 in terms of performance, which suggests intelligence is an emerging quality of neural networks rather than something unique OpenAI did.

If you think about it, that makes sense. There are very few differences in our genetic code between other primates and humans. Odds our the differences are mostly just more layers of neurons, and maybe a few tweaks on how they work. But the basis is the same, so it looks like we live in a universe where intelligence is an emerging property of neural networks. I'm simplifying tremendously here, but all of this seems consistent.

If this is true, it will have lots of consequences we can foresee.

One is that we will reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) soon enough. Just looking at computing power, we should reach AGI in one to three decades.

It might be that we already have the necessary components, but we just didn't connect them properly. ChatGPT is extremely powerful, but it's just one module that takes words in and spits words out. It doesn't have modules for things like deciding its own goals or acting on them. So of course the intelligence it will show will appear limited! That's why I believe exploring AI agents is a heavily underestimated approach to reach AGI.

If it's true that AGI will be reached in our lifetimes, odds are the singularity will come around that time, and we'll get a superintellgence. We can't see beyond the singularity, so it's impossible to predict anything. But we can speculate what might happen afterwards, assuming the AGI is aligned and doesn't try to kill us all.

First, nothing else really matters.

The fertility issue? Solved by the singularity, since a superintelligence (let's call it ASI) can understand the problem (and solve it), design devices to make babies, educate them better than humans would do, build robots to take care of their needs...

Wars? Most of them are due to resource scarcity, but most of it disappears after ASI. Not enough food? Increase productivity. Not enough energy? Do nuclear fission or fusion or beam solar energy from space. Not enough raw materials? Mine them from space or transmute them.

Humans tend to focus on what mattered in the past, but that is becoming obsolete pretty fast.

Then there's the question of the interim. What will happen between now and ASI? I think productivity will explode, but it might not be seen in GDP data, because a lot of the explosion will be deflationary: Things that used to take lots of resources to make will suddenly take substantially less. In the short term, it will increase demand, but supply (productivity improvements) will be driven by AI while demand is mostly driven by human decisions, so odds are supply will outstrip demand and prices will shrink and industries will shrink.

The counterbalance will be that now it's much cheaper to create new companies and new markets, but those won't require as much resources to be built. We will see the first billionaire solopreneurs and many unemployed people. Of course, this means inequality will increase. But wealth will be geographically spread unlike in the past, and yet billionaires will be extremely mobile. The world has never seen this before. Odds are tax bases will crumble, there will be tax competition for these people, and they will be able to coordinate to influence politics in an advantageous way. I wonder if new city-states won't be built on the basis of catering to them.

Another thing that I assume will happen is that the fight for attention will increase several notches, so we will need AIs to buffer us. We already have AIs that protect us from spam. Soon, our personal AIs will filter the content we get exposed to, to only show what's most relevant. At the same time, we will be able to reach more people at a scale never seen before, so we will need filters for that. The cost of litigation might drop, so we might develop AIs that sue, countersue, and protect us from litigation without us even realizing it. Our AIs might crawl the Internet to learn about people we might be interested in meeting, contact them, or filter these contacts. In other words, the information overload will only be manageable with AI buffers between us and the world of information.

This is, assuming AIs can't build great robots. Odds are they will be able to, at which points humans won't be much different from AIs, and we'll get into a Blade Runner world where we won't know whether a person is human or robot. In such a world, most of our social needs will have an option to be solved by robots, and human experiences will just be a special version of that—special because it will remain scarce, not because it will be better.

An interesting analogy might be art. Up until the mid-1800s, paintings became more and more realistic. Then we invented photography, realism became completely devalued, and suddenly we have impressionism, cubism, and the like. A lot of their value is not as much the creativity, as the fact that a human did that art and not a machine. Something similar might happen with relationships, with the added complexity that impressionism might be creative, but odds are AIs will be more creative than humans.

Put in another way, we're entering a strange world.

Sotonye: On whether gains in business efficiency means a loss of creativity

So this is pretty huge. This has clarified a lot or the ambiguity over what AI “is” for me. If I’m understanding this the right way, the simplest way to think about AI is as a tool for adding gains to general efficiency. The past is a good leading indicator here and I think pretty much confirms this, we’ve seen the use-case of “dumb ai” follow this exact sort of efficiency promoting pattern. That pattern rarely gets mapped onto the future when we normally think about AI interestingly, maybe because current AI is so seamlessly diffused throughout the business process it’s sort of the air we breathe, no one sees it! But this future makes a lot of sense to me.

I’m wondering now about whether our future efficiency gains spell boon or bust for creative innovation and progress, and I’m trying to sort of reason about it through analogy: For example there’s a case to be made that the reason we get 1,000 Batman remakes everyday before sunrise and a new Apple tablet mini everyday after sunset may be less about a spiritual or other kind of Spenglerian decline, and more about businesses just working better, becoming extremely efficient. 90s Hollywood and 2000s Apple, without big efficient databases, may have left industry executives with only vague insight into the day to day of internal operations and finer details of outward markets, and product ideas may have been greenlit that would otherwise seem too risky. Does efficiency create a stagnant culture, or is Spengler right about a dearth of transcendent vision creating such conditions? I am seriously desperate for good new movies and I’m worried that the age of quality is behind us!

Tomas:

I fear your analogy might be misleading, and I'll tell you why in a moment. Instead, I would use the analogy of what you and I are doing now.

30 years ago, it would have been impossible, because creators like us were extremely rare. Why? Because bringing insights to the market had high production, transaction, and distribution costs.

To get distribution, you needed to physically print a paper and distribute it with vans, or emit a radio or TV signal. Since that's expensive, only a few did it, and they controlled the content.

The content itself was expensive too, because the production values required equipment and humans supporting the shows, or research and trips and phone calls from journalists and producers.

You needed agreements with payment processors, rev share agreements with different partners in the stack...

The result was that there was little content. Supply was lower than demand.

But now all these costs have been eliminated. Creating an article just takes one person's time with Substack. Creating a video takes one person's time with Tiktok or Youtube. And they can live off of that.

The result has been an explosion of supply. That's what reducing the marginal cost of production does.

With the explosion in supply, a few things have happened:

Now supply outstrips demand, and we're hitting a limiting factor that we had never hit before as a species: our attention. It's now precious. It's scarce. We have to be very cautious about how to use it, and this is not something we've evolved naturally to do.

When you create so much supply, the vast majority will be shit. But some will be amazing. It's the wild west, with lots of bad things happening but also gold rushes. In other words, the distribution of content quality will change, from something narrow but reasonably high quality, to a much broader distribution that includes lots of duds and a few pieces of gold. This is how you get people like Ben Thompson or Veritasium.

Social media fulfills a double function of crushing distribution costs but also as a filter for content quality

AI is going to follow this trend further. We are going to drown on supply, and most of it will be bad, but some of it will be exceptional.

This means we will need means to filter content quality. Social Media already fulfills that, but it's about to get attacked by this AI-generated content. Will we need other tools?

It also means we're about to enter a world full of weird content, where most of it is trash, but some of it will be the best content ever.

by Sotonye, Neo Narrative |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'm adding a bit more from Pathfinding With Tomas Pueyo: An Interview (below) because the topics covered were so wide-ranging.]

Miles Davis and the Recording of a Jazz Masterpiece

Amid the tobacco and reefer fumes and beer reek of that tiny, dark saloon (a glass of gin cost fifty cents; a pitcher of beer, a dollar), the members of the Crazy Couple Club of Manhasset might have found themselves sitting shoulder to shoulder with (though they almost certainly would have failed to recognize) such Five Spot habitués as the painters Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko; the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara; and the young jazz titans Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans.

The Five Spot was closed on Mondays, but on that March Monday Davis, Coltrane, and Evans had other business anyway: in Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio, they were joining the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb to begin making, under Miles’s leadership, what would become the bestselling, and arguably most beloved, jazz album of all time, Miles’s Kind of Blue. March 2 and April 22: three tunes recorded on the first date (“So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” and “Blue in Green”), two on the second (“All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”). Every complete take but one (“Flamenco Sketches”) was a first take, the process similar, as Evans later wrote in the LP’s liner notes, to a genre of Japanese visual art in which black watercolor is applied spontaneously to a thin stretched parchment, with no unnatural or interrupted strokes possible, Miles’s cherished ideal of spontaneity achieved.

The quiet and enigmatic majesty of the resulting record both epitomizes jazz and transcends the genre. The album’s powerful and enduring mystique has made it widely beloved among musicians and music lovers of every category: jazz, rock, classical, rap. This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music—how they rose up in the world, came together like a chance collision of particles in deep space, produced a brilliant flash of light, and then went on their separate ways to jazz immortality.

No musician ever goes into a record date expecting to make history; every man in Miles’s band had recorded dozens of times before. “Professionals,” Bill Evans said, “have to go in at 10 o’clock on a Wednesday and make a record and hope to catch a really good day.” On the face of it, there was nothing remarkable about Project B 43079. (...)

Outside the 30th Street Studio, Manhattan was Manhattaning: rounded buses and big yellow cabs grinding up and down the avenues; car horns and scraps of radio music and pedestrians’ voices echoing in the deep-shadowed side streets. Outside, the everyday clamor and clash of a city afternoon in late-winter 1959; inside, the densest quiet as a passage outside of time proceeded: the recording of CO 62291, the number that would come to be titled “So What,” leading off the album soon to be known as Kind of Blue.

The first take began. There was a false start of four seconds, followed by an incomplete take of forty-nine seconds. Townsend interrupted from the booth: something was interfering with the song’s profound hush. “Hold it,” the producer said. “Sorry—listen, we gotta watch it because, ah, there’s noises all the way through this. This is so quiet to begin with, and every click—watch the snare too, we’re picking up some of the vibrations on it—”

Miles, ever on the lookout for meaningful accidentals, demurred. “Well, that goes with it,” he said. “All that goes with it.”

“All right,” Townsend allowed. “Not all the other noises, though . . .”

Another false start, seventeen seconds. An incomplete take, a minute eleven. A telephone rang in the control booth. Once quiet was restored, three more false starts, of sixteen, seven, and fifteen seconds.

Then, history. (...)

The full Take 3 was nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of musical transcendence. Miles’s solo, an impromptu composition in itself, would gain its own immortality: generations of musicians would memorize it note for note. Miles is talking to you in that solo, playing in the middle sonic range of the human voice, and he’s got all kinds of things to say, in brief and at length. He starts and stops; he starts again and goes on. And we’re freshly astonished at how very much he can express, in so few notes, in the moment.

The richness each of the soloists was able to create improvising over just two chords, D and E♭ Dorian, vindicates Miles’s modal concept. Coltrane was in exploratory rather than loud and fast form, traveling up and down each scale to find astringent delights. Cannonball was no less seeking, but lush toned as always, and unable not to find melodies and tuneful fillips, even in this minimalist frame. And Evans’s solo was perhaps most in sync with the tune’s hushed simplicity: playing quiet arpeggios and complex chords a little shyly at first, but then growing more assertive—and surprising: “I’m thinking of the end of Bill’s solo on ‘So What,’” Herbie Hancock told the writer Ashley Kahn. “He plays these phrases, a second apart. He plays seconds.” Still filled with wonderment forty years after the fact, Hancock was talking about an interval on the piano that’s barely an interval—two adjacent keys played simultaneously. By itself, the sound is dissonant; in this context it’s startlingly expressive. “I had never heard anybody do that before,” Hancock said. “He’s following the modal concept maybe more than anybody else. That just opened up a whole vista for me.”(...)

The word “timeless” has become a cliché, a selling tool for luxury goods. And yet Kind of Blue is a timeless album, and “So What” arguably its signature number. What is this about? For sixty years and more, jazz and popular music had consisted of songs that told stories, either explicitly—in lyrics—or in their construction. The most common song framework in both genres was known as AABA: two choruses followed by a bridge (aka channel, release, or middle eight), followed by an out-chorus. (Popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century also typically began with a verse: a brief, explanatory introduction that might or might not be included in performance or on recordings.) The sound of tunes made this way was a satisfying blend of exposition and resolution. (...)

But with Miles, in life and in art, it was always the thing withheld. And the essence of modal music—the essence of “So What”—was that you had no idea how it turned out, or if it turned out. Which was pretty much the way the world was looking at that moment, and maybe the way (you had to think) it was going to look from then on.

by James Kaplan, Esquire |  Read more:
Images: Michael Ochs Archives; David Redfern/Getty Images

Donald Fagen

Riddle of the Sands: Dune Part Two

The great superpower of Dune is its prescience. In 1959, Frank Herbert walked the sand dunes of Florence, Oregon, and saw the future: aridity and riches, sand and spice. Strong coastal winds were pushing the dunes east, towards the city, and the US Department of Agriculture decided to intervene, planting sedge and beach grass to halt the sand’s advance. This battle for the environment captured Herbert’s imagination. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Herbert had been writing for local magazines and papers for twenty years. He intended to cover the dunes story as a journalist, even hiring a small aircraft to track their movements, but his research into deserts and desert cultures led elsewhere. He wrote a pair of stories that were serialised in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, then expanded them into something much greater: the nine-hundred-page epic Dune, published in 1965. Now one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Dune is set on the desert planet of Arrakis, or Dune, where the great houses of Harkonnen and Atreides fight for control of ‘spice’ – a byproduct of giant sandworms which enables safe faster-than-light travel. The planet’s indigenous people, the Fremen, have meanwhile been forced into hiding.

The novel foreshadowed the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the rise in religious fundamentalism and terrorist violence, the dissolution of those ‘great houses’ we might call the Western and Eastern blocs and the desert wars of the 1990s and 2000s. It seems likely that these historical resonances have played a role in its long and busy afterlife, which encompasses twenty-two sequels (five by Herbert, seventeen by his son Brian and the science fiction author Kevin J Anderson), a failed 1974 adaptation by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a disavowed David Lynch film of 1984 and a television miniseries broadcast in 2000.

Dune: Part Two is the second instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation. The Harkonnens are led by Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgård) and operate from a monochrome metropolis on their heavily industrialised home planet. Where they once might have been seen as symbols of the Soviet empire (Herbert took the name ‘Härkönen’ from a phone book, thinking it sounded Soviet), in this film they signal a kind of capitalist excess built on slavery and sadism. Theirs is a patriarchal, pearly white ruling class; the baron himself is too fat to move.

In the first film, which adapts the first half of Herbert’s original novel, Baron Vladimir and the Emperor of the Known Universe (Christopher Walken) conspire to destroy House Atreides (coded as European via bullfights and bagpipes). They assassinate Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and slaughter his people, effectively ending the Atreides dynasty in a single night. Leto’s son, Paul (Timothée Chalamet), and widow, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), are sent scrambling towards the desert, where they encounter the Fremen and win some favour – partly because of Jessica’s ‘weirding ways’, her witchlike powers, and partly because Paul exhibits signs of being the messianic Mahdi, or Lisan al Gaib. The film ends with him joining the Fremen while making eyes at one of their soldiers, a young woman named Chani (Zendaya). In the second film, we learn what the Fremen desire most: to free their planet from industrial extraction and make it a green paradise once more.

Herbert never intended his novels to provide a commentary on conflict in the Middle East or to critique our addiction to petrochemicals (spice notably doubles as a drug). He was more interested in the idea of ecological manipulation – that human intervention could alter those Oregon dunes for the better. That the Fremen are Arab-coded is incidental. Herbert read Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960) prior to writing Dune and apparently quite enjoyed its depiction of Russia’s wars in the Caucasus, cribbing from it names, objects and even phrases, including niche terms like ‘Chaksoba’ (a Caucasian language) and ‘kanly’ (a vendetta). In the novel, the Fremen wear ‘bourkas’, fear ‘Shaitan’ and talk of a ‘jihad’ (in the script, cowritten by Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, the phrase ‘holy war’ is preferred). Herbert also read T E Lawrence’s war memoirs, and Paul much resembles the white saviour of the Bedouin.

Herbert was also prompted to reflect on the problems inherent in messianic thinking. As he wrote in a 1980 essay, ‘Heroes are painful. Superheroes are a catastrophe.’ The new film depicts Paul exploiting his own messianic status to ensure his and his mother’s survival among the Fremen. The cabal of psychic witches to which Jessica belongs has spread prophecies of what they call the Kwisatz Haderach, a super being intentionally bred through the careful manipulation of bloodlines. But none can be certain that Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach. He performs the many miracles foretold of the Mahdi, and with each one the Fremen break out in chanting: ‘Lisan al Gaib!’ These miracles are good fun and suit Villeneuve’s style of thoughtless spectacle well enough. (The entire film was shot using IMAX cameras, presumably to fit in more sand.) Paul first helps to destroy a spice harvester, then crosses the desert on his own. Later, he rides a sandworm – and all are impressed by the size of Paul’s worm.

The many raids on the Harkonnens make for happy times, and the portrayal of Paul living among the Fremen is one of the film’s great pleasures. The design of their culture – they form an egalitarian fraternity of brave desert ninjas – likely owes to Herbert’s own libertarian fantasies. With the desert planet Arrakis, Herbert imagines the world as inherently cruel, a near-uninhabitable environment full of dangers where only the fittest survive. In Villeneuve’s rendering, only the trace of religious fanaticism in Fremen culture comes in for censure. We are not invited to dwell on the barbarism of their rites – to become leader, you must kill the leader – because it is part of the film’s fantasy of power, which caters to both sides of the political spectrum: the Fremen are both a brutish warrior class for whom might is right and a revolutionary underclass hoping to overthrow their masters. Despite Paul’s philosophising in the desert, what wins out in Villeneuve’s vision is crudely emblematic: each film ends with a knife fight. Herbert called his story ‘coital’, but ‘phallic’ suits Villeneuve’s films better. They rely too much on scale.

Is there anything interesting to say about Villeneuve’s direction? Herbert’s son recently called Villeneuve’s two efforts ‘by far the best film interpretation’ of his father’s novel, but what he most likely meant by this is ‘faithful’. In his aborted adaptation, Jodorowsky made sweeping changes to the story presented in the book, which he claimed he never finished reading: at the end of his proposed twelve-hour film, Paul would be beheaded and immediately gain omnipotence, greening the planet and bringing peace to the universe. Villeneuve wouldn’t dare. There is nothing so audacious in his cinema. All the highlights of his filmmaking stem from mere competency: his is a literal approach to the words laid out on the page. Here is a big desert with big worms and big machines – see it all on the big screen. Hundred-million-dollar budgets pay for such simplicity.

But what does it cost to be innovative? The ‘weirding ways’ that make the novel interesting are at odds with Villeneuve’s unimaginative style. 

by James Wham, Literary Review |  Read more:

Image: Dune uncredited/via

[ed. See also: The world of Dune, briefly explained (Vox).]