[ed. Jackson Browne's Love Is Strange album. Great songs, great performances, crystal clear audio. I can't recommend it highly enough. See also: Looking East and Sit Down Servant.]
Thursday, May 25, 2017
Outsmarted
Way back in 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald figured out something very shrewd about right-wingers. He discovered, and described, an emerging social type: the reactionary pedant.
It comes in Chapter One of The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald introduces his dramatis personae. Our narrator, Nick Carraway, is chatting away aimlessly with his sophisticated cousin Daisy Buchanan and her equally sophisticated friend, Jordan Baker. Embarked upon his second glass of a “corky but rather impressive claret,” Nick remarks that the conversation has grown a bit too recherché for his taste: “You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy. Can’t you talk about crops or something?” He “meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way”—by Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, whom Nick had known when both attended Yale.
However, contemporary readers don’t have to boast familiarity with the contents of 1920s bookstores to grasp that this guy is a clown—or to recognize the type. Think Spiro Agnew, braying about the downfall of America at the hands of “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” in speeches scripted for him by William Safire. (Safire dropped out of college to take a job with a gossip columnist. He later got a job as the resident conservative op-ed sage at the New York Times, and also published an “On Language” column in the Times magazine. In both capacities, he never let the world forget he knew a lot of six-syllable words.) Or William F. Buckley, whose rebarbative vocabulary conned a generation of liberals into believing conservatism was a “movement of ideas.”
Liberals want to make you feel stupid, but—na na na!—it’s actually liberals who are stupid: this trope is a commonplace of conservative rhetoric. If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans: that’s the title of a 2007 book by Ann Coulter. Rush Limbaugh boasts that he performs his program “flawlessly with zero mistakes” with “half my brain tied behind my back.” “We outnumber the stupid people” was one of the slogans of Herman Cain, the pizza magnate who ran for the Republican presidential nomination on a “9-9-9 plan” that sought to replace all federal taxes with a 9 percent personal income tax, 9 percent corporate income tax, and 9 percent national sales tax. Then there is Donald J. Trump, whose favorite word, besides “sad,” is “smart,” and who explains he doesn’t need to attend to intelligence briefings because, “You know, I’m, like, a smart person.” (...)
The Great Gatsby finds that sort of cognitive narcissism risible too. In that dialogue in which Tom Buchanan dresses up his racism in scientific raiment, all of us, because we know ourselves to be sophisticated and smart, identify with Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald had also figured out something shrewed about such—but how shall we put it—cultural sophisticates? Effete snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals? Elite liberals?
Grant me this liberty. I can’t guess whether, in the 1924 presidential election, Daisy Buchanan would have voted for the Democrat John W. Davis, the Republican Calvin Coolidge, or the Progressive Party’s Robert M. La Follette. But I can recognize the kind of person who mockingly agrees with someone who issues a racist rant by not just winking, but winking “ferociously”—ferociously enough, that is, so that everyone around them could not possibly miss that they know who is and who is not an intellectually vacant ass. No less than in the case of the reactionary pedant, her greatest fear is that others will see her as dumb.
These days, the person who does that sort of thing would almost certainly be a liberal—the kind of person, say, who the weekend before the 2010 congressional elections attended Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart’s massive rally in Washington, D.C., dedicated to pointing and laughing at conservatives while winking ferociously. The signs they carried were along the lines of “ANYONE FOR SCRABBLE LATER?” and “USE YOUR INSIDE VOICE” and “I SEE SMART PEOPLE.” (I’m referring here to a collection from the website Funny or Die called “The 53 Funniest Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” which received nineteen thousand “likes” on Facebook.)
That was the very weekend when the Tea Partying objects of their scorn were out knocking on doors to get out the vote for the following Tuesday’s election. Thereupon, the Democratic Party lost control of Congress. I see stupid people.
What does it mean to be “smart,” and why does it matter to us so much?(...)
“Smart” is an identity. “Smart” has a politics. “Smart” can be a road to authenticity, or “smart” can be a con. (Think of Elizabeth Holmes, who founded the biotech startup Theranos after studying Mandarin as a child, launching a company during college at Stanford, and then dropping out; she gulled George Shultz and Henry Kissinger into serving on her new company’s board of directors, becoming “America’s youngest self-made female billionaire in the world,” according to Forbes, even though the technology she was selling apparently didn’t even work.) “Smart” carries within it its own logic of domination, resistance, resentment—the logic that produces both reactionary pedants and ferociously winking liberal elites.
I’ve been quietly obsessing over all of this ever since my intellectually melodramatic childhood, never quite able to figure it out or put much of it into words. One important conclusion I’ve been able to reach, however, is exactly Nick Carraway’s: whatever “smart” actually is, it bears no necessary relation to fundamental decency. But that’s a psychological, or even spiritual, lesson, not an intellectual one. (There’s a distinction it took me an awfully long time to be able to make—one of the things that landed me in therapy.) The intellectual lesson is something I’m still groping toward. It has something to do with understanding how, more and more with each passing year, in American culture and politics, “smart” has become a dangerous stand-in for judgments concerning self-evident moral worth.
by Rick Perlstein, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Zipeng Zhu
It comes in Chapter One of The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald introduces his dramatis personae. Our narrator, Nick Carraway, is chatting away aimlessly with his sophisticated cousin Daisy Buchanan and her equally sophisticated friend, Jordan Baker. Embarked upon his second glass of a “corky but rather impressive claret,” Nick remarks that the conversation has grown a bit too recherché for his taste: “You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy. Can’t you talk about crops or something?” He “meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way”—by Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, whom Nick had known when both attended Yale.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”In a novel that precisely deploys status markers, every detail here matters. Nick, blithe, ironic, and self-possessed, is perfectly comfortable making light of his preference for intellectually uncluttered chitchat. Tom Buchanan, not so self-possessed, has to rush in to demonstrate that he is smart too—though 1925 readers would immediately understand he is actually stupid, because he’s biffed the names of two real-life thinkers: Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), and the eugenicist Madison Grant, inventor of “Nordic theory” and author of the equally alarmist The Passing of the Great Race (1916).
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently.
“This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.
However, contemporary readers don’t have to boast familiarity with the contents of 1920s bookstores to grasp that this guy is a clown—or to recognize the type. Think Spiro Agnew, braying about the downfall of America at the hands of “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” in speeches scripted for him by William Safire. (Safire dropped out of college to take a job with a gossip columnist. He later got a job as the resident conservative op-ed sage at the New York Times, and also published an “On Language” column in the Times magazine. In both capacities, he never let the world forget he knew a lot of six-syllable words.) Or William F. Buckley, whose rebarbative vocabulary conned a generation of liberals into believing conservatism was a “movement of ideas.”Liberals want to make you feel stupid, but—na na na!—it’s actually liberals who are stupid: this trope is a commonplace of conservative rhetoric. If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans: that’s the title of a 2007 book by Ann Coulter. Rush Limbaugh boasts that he performs his program “flawlessly with zero mistakes” with “half my brain tied behind my back.” “We outnumber the stupid people” was one of the slogans of Herman Cain, the pizza magnate who ran for the Republican presidential nomination on a “9-9-9 plan” that sought to replace all federal taxes with a 9 percent personal income tax, 9 percent corporate income tax, and 9 percent national sales tax. Then there is Donald J. Trump, whose favorite word, besides “sad,” is “smart,” and who explains he doesn’t need to attend to intelligence briefings because, “You know, I’m, like, a smart person.” (...)
The Great Gatsby finds that sort of cognitive narcissism risible too. In that dialogue in which Tom Buchanan dresses up his racism in scientific raiment, all of us, because we know ourselves to be sophisticated and smart, identify with Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald had also figured out something shrewed about such—but how shall we put it—cultural sophisticates? Effete snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals? Elite liberals?
Grant me this liberty. I can’t guess whether, in the 1924 presidential election, Daisy Buchanan would have voted for the Democrat John W. Davis, the Republican Calvin Coolidge, or the Progressive Party’s Robert M. La Follette. But I can recognize the kind of person who mockingly agrees with someone who issues a racist rant by not just winking, but winking “ferociously”—ferociously enough, that is, so that everyone around them could not possibly miss that they know who is and who is not an intellectually vacant ass. No less than in the case of the reactionary pedant, her greatest fear is that others will see her as dumb.
These days, the person who does that sort of thing would almost certainly be a liberal—the kind of person, say, who the weekend before the 2010 congressional elections attended Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart’s massive rally in Washington, D.C., dedicated to pointing and laughing at conservatives while winking ferociously. The signs they carried were along the lines of “ANYONE FOR SCRABBLE LATER?” and “USE YOUR INSIDE VOICE” and “I SEE SMART PEOPLE.” (I’m referring here to a collection from the website Funny or Die called “The 53 Funniest Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” which received nineteen thousand “likes” on Facebook.)
That was the very weekend when the Tea Partying objects of their scorn were out knocking on doors to get out the vote for the following Tuesday’s election. Thereupon, the Democratic Party lost control of Congress. I see stupid people.
What does it mean to be “smart,” and why does it matter to us so much?(...)
“Smart” is an identity. “Smart” has a politics. “Smart” can be a road to authenticity, or “smart” can be a con. (Think of Elizabeth Holmes, who founded the biotech startup Theranos after studying Mandarin as a child, launching a company during college at Stanford, and then dropping out; she gulled George Shultz and Henry Kissinger into serving on her new company’s board of directors, becoming “America’s youngest self-made female billionaire in the world,” according to Forbes, even though the technology she was selling apparently didn’t even work.) “Smart” carries within it its own logic of domination, resistance, resentment—the logic that produces both reactionary pedants and ferociously winking liberal elites.
I’ve been quietly obsessing over all of this ever since my intellectually melodramatic childhood, never quite able to figure it out or put much of it into words. One important conclusion I’ve been able to reach, however, is exactly Nick Carraway’s: whatever “smart” actually is, it bears no necessary relation to fundamental decency. But that’s a psychological, or even spiritual, lesson, not an intellectual one. (There’s a distinction it took me an awfully long time to be able to make—one of the things that landed me in therapy.) The intellectual lesson is something I’m still groping toward. It has something to do with understanding how, more and more with each passing year, in American culture and politics, “smart” has become a dangerous stand-in for judgments concerning self-evident moral worth.
by Rick Perlstein, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Zipeng Zhu
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
The Secret Life of Urban Crows
On a blustery overcast morning this past April, Kaeli Swift walked across the campus of the University of Washington toting a weathered, purple-and-white plastic shopping bag. This bag, if found by some unsuspecting student or grounds person, would almost certainly trigger a campuswide panic. Inside Swift had stowed a rubber mask of a grotesque, exaggerated male face—large ears, bulbous nose, silver-whiskered soul patch—a guise that would not look out of place in a 1980s horror film. Also inside: a corpse. That the corpse was only that of a bird hardly made the tattered bag’s combined payload any less creepy.
She tromped through the wet grass in calf-high Sorel snow boots and made her way to the university’s Center for Urban Horticulture, where she’s a teaching assistant for an undergraduate natural history class. Near the Dumpsters and trash cans parked behind the center, Swift found a perfect spot for what she was about to do: perform a ritual that, depending how you look at it, is a couple of years old or a couple million.
Swift, a PhD candidate, is a member of UW’s nationally acclaimed Avian Conservation Lab. If you’ve heard or read a news story in the last decade about Corvus brachyrhynchos—aka, the American crow—and what science has to say about its confounding habits and aptitude, there’s a good chance it was thanks to the work conducted by the lab, led by a man named John Marzluff. The UW professor and wildlife biologist is the author of numerous popular books on the subject. In 2008, Marzluff and his fellow researchers made national headlines when they tested a hypothesis—that crows recognize individual human faces—by donning Dick Cheney masks. That led to another revelation: Crows teach other crows to detest specific people (and sometimes attack them).
Today Swift, 30, would repeat an experiment that uncovered one of the team’s more staggering revelations. And she conducted it with the ceremony of an undertaker.
From the old shopping bag she unsheathed the dead crow and turned it in what little sunshine strained through the fibrous clouds. The black feathers sparkled in the light, and close inspection revealed iridescent blues and purples. She covered it back up with a tan cloth and, with the draped bird lying breast down on her two upturned palms, stepped gingerly onto a patch of grass. She tore the linen away and unveiled the corpse to the gray heavens.
There was nothing at first, just an empty sky. Then, a caw. A crow appeared on a nearby power line. Then another caw and another crow. Suddenly crows flew in from all directions. Their plaintive entreaties soon combined into a chorus. New arrivals joined what quickly grew into a cacophonous dervish of black silhouettes swirling directly above Swift.
It was like sorcery. Conjuring dozens of birds from thin air by simply removing fabric from a body.
This, according to Swift, is what its like to attend a crow funeral—an instinctive ritual that evolved generations ago and was just discovered by humans; Swift coauthored an article on her findings in the journal Animal Behaviour in 2015. The gist: Upon spotting one of its dead, the flock attends to the fallen bird en masse with loud shrieking. Given enough time the throng will mob any predator it thinks is responsible, like say, a human in a Dick Cheney mask, or in a mask like the one Swift had in her bag (the lab affectionately refers to that be-soul-patched fellow as Joe).
Because she had decided to leave Joe out of today’s repeat of her groundbreaking experiment, she had to take precautions. Early during this gathering tsunami of sound, once the crows became particularly agitated, Swift pulled the hood of her rain jacket over her face, lest the birds, days later, recognize that face—elfin features, sometimes sharpened with rectangular-framed eyeglasses, and bracketed by a cascade of brown curls.
It’s no accident that Swift and the Avian Conservation Lab are based here. Seattle is unique among U.S. cities for what its human citizens have unwittingly fashioned over the past century or so, a habitat ideal for these ebon-winged aviators. It’s also a city obsessed. Crows figure into local iconography, they occupy our art, and, last year, they were at the center of a $200,000 lawsuit.
For now, up above, the birds Kaeli Swift had stirred into a squawking horde were just getting started. She gave one more tug on her jacket hood, pulling it down tight. It was going to be a wild ride.
by James Ross Gardner, Seattle Met | Read more:
Image: Mike Kane
She tromped through the wet grass in calf-high Sorel snow boots and made her way to the university’s Center for Urban Horticulture, where she’s a teaching assistant for an undergraduate natural history class. Near the Dumpsters and trash cans parked behind the center, Swift found a perfect spot for what she was about to do: perform a ritual that, depending how you look at it, is a couple of years old or a couple million.Swift, a PhD candidate, is a member of UW’s nationally acclaimed Avian Conservation Lab. If you’ve heard or read a news story in the last decade about Corvus brachyrhynchos—aka, the American crow—and what science has to say about its confounding habits and aptitude, there’s a good chance it was thanks to the work conducted by the lab, led by a man named John Marzluff. The UW professor and wildlife biologist is the author of numerous popular books on the subject. In 2008, Marzluff and his fellow researchers made national headlines when they tested a hypothesis—that crows recognize individual human faces—by donning Dick Cheney masks. That led to another revelation: Crows teach other crows to detest specific people (and sometimes attack them).
Today Swift, 30, would repeat an experiment that uncovered one of the team’s more staggering revelations. And she conducted it with the ceremony of an undertaker.
From the old shopping bag she unsheathed the dead crow and turned it in what little sunshine strained through the fibrous clouds. The black feathers sparkled in the light, and close inspection revealed iridescent blues and purples. She covered it back up with a tan cloth and, with the draped bird lying breast down on her two upturned palms, stepped gingerly onto a patch of grass. She tore the linen away and unveiled the corpse to the gray heavens.
There was nothing at first, just an empty sky. Then, a caw. A crow appeared on a nearby power line. Then another caw and another crow. Suddenly crows flew in from all directions. Their plaintive entreaties soon combined into a chorus. New arrivals joined what quickly grew into a cacophonous dervish of black silhouettes swirling directly above Swift.
It was like sorcery. Conjuring dozens of birds from thin air by simply removing fabric from a body.
This, according to Swift, is what its like to attend a crow funeral—an instinctive ritual that evolved generations ago and was just discovered by humans; Swift coauthored an article on her findings in the journal Animal Behaviour in 2015. The gist: Upon spotting one of its dead, the flock attends to the fallen bird en masse with loud shrieking. Given enough time the throng will mob any predator it thinks is responsible, like say, a human in a Dick Cheney mask, or in a mask like the one Swift had in her bag (the lab affectionately refers to that be-soul-patched fellow as Joe).
Because she had decided to leave Joe out of today’s repeat of her groundbreaking experiment, she had to take precautions. Early during this gathering tsunami of sound, once the crows became particularly agitated, Swift pulled the hood of her rain jacket over her face, lest the birds, days later, recognize that face—elfin features, sometimes sharpened with rectangular-framed eyeglasses, and bracketed by a cascade of brown curls.
It’s no accident that Swift and the Avian Conservation Lab are based here. Seattle is unique among U.S. cities for what its human citizens have unwittingly fashioned over the past century or so, a habitat ideal for these ebon-winged aviators. It’s also a city obsessed. Crows figure into local iconography, they occupy our art, and, last year, they were at the center of a $200,000 lawsuit.
For now, up above, the birds Kaeli Swift had stirred into a squawking horde were just getting started. She gave one more tug on her jacket hood, pulling it down tight. It was going to be a wild ride.
by James Ross Gardner, Seattle Met | Read more:
Image: Mike Kane
Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters
Retirement Savings Is a Bigger Crisis Than Health Care
Everyone talks about how health care is the biggest crisis facing retirees, but unfortunately that crisis takes a distant second to another, far more serious issue.
Most retirees don't have any money.
A 2015 National Institute on Retirement Security study found that the median working-age household has just $14,500 in retirement savings -- woefully short of the hundreds of thousands in savings truly needed to retire in the first place.
That's not to say that health care isn't a retirement crisis in and of itself -- it is. But when comparing and contrasting the two, it's clear which one is more pressing, and it isn't soaring drug prices.
by John Divine, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: via
Most retirees don't have any money.
A 2015 National Institute on Retirement Security study found that the median working-age household has just $14,500 in retirement savings -- woefully short of the hundreds of thousands in savings truly needed to retire in the first place.
That's not to say that health care isn't a retirement crisis in and of itself -- it is. But when comparing and contrasting the two, it's clear which one is more pressing, and it isn't soaring drug prices.
One of the authors of the 2015 NIRS study, Ilana Boivie, agrees that the $14,500 figure is startlingly low. But why?
"Forty-five percent of all households, and 41 percent of near-retirement households, do not have a retirement account at all. So, when you take all of these people into account (who essentially have $0), the median balance is very low," Boivie says.
But even when you only consider those people with retirement accounts, the average person near retirement age has just $104,000 in investments saved up.
"Even this is far less than what people need for a secure retirement. Converted to an annuity, it would only bring in a few hundred dollars per month," Boivie says.
By the time someone is 67, experts recommend having anywhere from five to eight times your annual income saved up for your golden years. Seeing as most employed Americans make far more than $13,000 to $20,800 in their final years of employment, you can see how devastatingly low that $104,000 figure is.
Considering many Americans have traditional IRAs and 401(k)s, that means they'll have to pay tax on their earnings when they withdraw their funds, further diminishing the size of their investments.
That said, health care costs are also on the rise, and that remains one of the most prominent, concerns facing soon-to-be retirees.
Numbers from PwC, the international auditor and professional services firm, shows the troublesome reason health care continues to become more unaffordable: Reliably each year, health care costs rise by more -- far, far more, in fact -- than inflation.
In 2007, health care costs rose by 11.9 percent. Though that growth rate has been declining, coming down to 6.5 percent in 2016, it's still light years higher than inflation. The pace of inflation in 2007 and 2016, respectively, was 2.8 percent and 1.3 percent.
While rising drug prices certainly contribute to this issue, another problem for many retirees is the cost of places like retirement homes.
"Almost 70 percent of people over age 65 will require long-term care services at some point, and more than 40 percent will need nursing home care," says Pamela Yellen, a two-time New York Times bestselling author and financial security expert.
"Based on the average cost of a private nursing home and the average length of stay, you would need about $255,000 to cover a stay," Yellen says.
In other words, average nursing home costs alone are more than 2.5 times what the typical retiree has saved up.
So why isn't health care the central part of the retirement savings crisis? Because of this sad truth: The debate on soaring health care costs is totally irrelevant if you have no savings to begin with. It doesn't matter how cheap something is or how much you plan in your later years if you can't afford it at almost any price.
"Forty-five percent of all households, and 41 percent of near-retirement households, do not have a retirement account at all. So, when you take all of these people into account (who essentially have $0), the median balance is very low," Boivie says.
But even when you only consider those people with retirement accounts, the average person near retirement age has just $104,000 in investments saved up.
"Even this is far less than what people need for a secure retirement. Converted to an annuity, it would only bring in a few hundred dollars per month," Boivie says.
By the time someone is 67, experts recommend having anywhere from five to eight times your annual income saved up for your golden years. Seeing as most employed Americans make far more than $13,000 to $20,800 in their final years of employment, you can see how devastatingly low that $104,000 figure is.
Considering many Americans have traditional IRAs and 401(k)s, that means they'll have to pay tax on their earnings when they withdraw their funds, further diminishing the size of their investments.
That said, health care costs are also on the rise, and that remains one of the most prominent, concerns facing soon-to-be retirees.
Numbers from PwC, the international auditor and professional services firm, shows the troublesome reason health care continues to become more unaffordable: Reliably each year, health care costs rise by more -- far, far more, in fact -- than inflation.
In 2007, health care costs rose by 11.9 percent. Though that growth rate has been declining, coming down to 6.5 percent in 2016, it's still light years higher than inflation. The pace of inflation in 2007 and 2016, respectively, was 2.8 percent and 1.3 percent.
While rising drug prices certainly contribute to this issue, another problem for many retirees is the cost of places like retirement homes.
"Almost 70 percent of people over age 65 will require long-term care services at some point, and more than 40 percent will need nursing home care," says Pamela Yellen, a two-time New York Times bestselling author and financial security expert.
"Based on the average cost of a private nursing home and the average length of stay, you would need about $255,000 to cover a stay," Yellen says.
In other words, average nursing home costs alone are more than 2.5 times what the typical retiree has saved up.
So why isn't health care the central part of the retirement savings crisis? Because of this sad truth: The debate on soaring health care costs is totally irrelevant if you have no savings to begin with. It doesn't matter how cheap something is or how much you plan in your later years if you can't afford it at almost any price.
by John Divine, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: via
Paris Hilton Invented Everything You’re Doing in 2017, and She Knows It
No one but Paris Hilton knows the exact location of her old Sidekick cell phone.
Upon request one afternoon in April, she disappeared into the depths of one of the many closets in her Beverly Hills mansion and returned minutes later with not one, but two of the early Aughts T-Mobile artifacts, as well as her bedazzled Blackberry with a pink ‘P’ on it, a gold Razr flip phone—also bedazzled in a cheetah pattern—and two more recent Blackberry models.
As she presented me with over a decade’s worth of technology, it became clear that while fellow 2000s icon Kim Kardashian may claim to “remember everything,” Paris Hilton hangs on to it, too.
In the present day, Hilton has a total of five iPhones, and when we first met she was toggling between two of them, one open to an article on Buzzfeed deeming her the “Queen of Coachella,” and the other ready to share the post on Instagram with her 6.9 million followers.
When asked if she had fun at Coachella, she replied in a startlingly low-octave: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
Despite Hilton’s longtime dependency on various cellular devices, it is perhaps visionaries like Steve Jobs who are indebted to her, seeing that it was Hilton who took their creations beyond their wildest expectations, inventing along the way the maligned but ubiquitous selfie.
“If a beeper had a camera, I would have taken a selfie with it,” said Hilton later, agreeing that she was truthfully the matriarch of the modern phenomenon. “I think I have a selfie from when I was a little kid, like on a disposable camera.”
Selfies aren’t the only thing Paris Hilton did first: The heiress turned the stuffy New York social scene upside-down in the early 2000s, setting not only every fashion and lifestyle trend at the time, but also defining what it meant to be an ‘influencer’ before we even had a word for it.
“We started a whole new genre of celebrity that no one had ever seen before,” said Hilton.
At the age of 19, Hilton was signed to Donald Trump’s modeling agency, T Management, becoming one of the first signed scions long before her Millennial protégés, Paris Jackson, Sofia Richie, and a whole crew of celebrity children parlayed their last names into full-time careers.
Hilton then went on to have one of the first successful reality TV careers with Nicole Richie on The Simple Life, the premiere for which attracted a staggering 13 million viewers, according to Nielsen. (That’s more than the all-time highest ratings of The Hills and Keeping Up with the Kardashians combined.) This also coincided with her (non-consenting) starring role one of the earliest viral sex tapes, 1 Night in Paris.
Finally, Hilton took her influence and built a personal brand before personal brands were commonplace, publishing best-selling books and putting her name and face on everything from canine apparel to a German sparkling wine called “Rich Prosecco.” Her now-famous catchphrase, “That’s hot,” is also legally trademarked.
This year, Hilton will release her 23rd perfume since 2004—an estimated $2 billion business, according to Women’s Wear Daily. She’s also currently touring the world as a highly-paid DJ, taking up residence in Ibiza for her “Foam & Diamonds” night in the months of July and August. Her mother taught her to never talk money, but it’s been reported that Hilton makes approximately $347,000 an hour DJing, or around $1 million a night.
In sum, Paris Hilton proved that you can get paid to be yourself, and that ‘yourself’ can be a multi-hyphenated entity. And in the beginning, she did this all without a publicist, a stylist, glam squad, or social media.
“Nowadays, I feel like it’s so easy becoming famous,” said Hilton, with a shrug. “Anybody with a phone can do it.”
In the year 2017, with a Trump in the White House, the phrase “celebrity entrepreneur” no longer a laughable sobriquet, and the Kardashians firmly ensconced in the highest echelons of American society, it’s starting to look and feel a lot like the 2000s again. As a result, nostalgia is running rampant in popular culture, and Paris Hilton is shaping up to be a pioneer and prophet of the zeitgeist as we know it.
by Emilia Petrarca, W | Read more:
Image: Mayan Toledano
Upon request one afternoon in April, she disappeared into the depths of one of the many closets in her Beverly Hills mansion and returned minutes later with not one, but two of the early Aughts T-Mobile artifacts, as well as her bedazzled Blackberry with a pink ‘P’ on it, a gold Razr flip phone—also bedazzled in a cheetah pattern—and two more recent Blackberry models.
As she presented me with over a decade’s worth of technology, it became clear that while fellow 2000s icon Kim Kardashian may claim to “remember everything,” Paris Hilton hangs on to it, too.In the present day, Hilton has a total of five iPhones, and when we first met she was toggling between two of them, one open to an article on Buzzfeed deeming her the “Queen of Coachella,” and the other ready to share the post on Instagram with her 6.9 million followers.
When asked if she had fun at Coachella, she replied in a startlingly low-octave: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
Despite Hilton’s longtime dependency on various cellular devices, it is perhaps visionaries like Steve Jobs who are indebted to her, seeing that it was Hilton who took their creations beyond their wildest expectations, inventing along the way the maligned but ubiquitous selfie.
“If a beeper had a camera, I would have taken a selfie with it,” said Hilton later, agreeing that she was truthfully the matriarch of the modern phenomenon. “I think I have a selfie from when I was a little kid, like on a disposable camera.”
Selfies aren’t the only thing Paris Hilton did first: The heiress turned the stuffy New York social scene upside-down in the early 2000s, setting not only every fashion and lifestyle trend at the time, but also defining what it meant to be an ‘influencer’ before we even had a word for it.
“We started a whole new genre of celebrity that no one had ever seen before,” said Hilton.
At the age of 19, Hilton was signed to Donald Trump’s modeling agency, T Management, becoming one of the first signed scions long before her Millennial protégés, Paris Jackson, Sofia Richie, and a whole crew of celebrity children parlayed their last names into full-time careers.
Hilton then went on to have one of the first successful reality TV careers with Nicole Richie on The Simple Life, the premiere for which attracted a staggering 13 million viewers, according to Nielsen. (That’s more than the all-time highest ratings of The Hills and Keeping Up with the Kardashians combined.) This also coincided with her (non-consenting) starring role one of the earliest viral sex tapes, 1 Night in Paris.
Finally, Hilton took her influence and built a personal brand before personal brands were commonplace, publishing best-selling books and putting her name and face on everything from canine apparel to a German sparkling wine called “Rich Prosecco.” Her now-famous catchphrase, “That’s hot,” is also legally trademarked.
This year, Hilton will release her 23rd perfume since 2004—an estimated $2 billion business, according to Women’s Wear Daily. She’s also currently touring the world as a highly-paid DJ, taking up residence in Ibiza for her “Foam & Diamonds” night in the months of July and August. Her mother taught her to never talk money, but it’s been reported that Hilton makes approximately $347,000 an hour DJing, or around $1 million a night.
In sum, Paris Hilton proved that you can get paid to be yourself, and that ‘yourself’ can be a multi-hyphenated entity. And in the beginning, she did this all without a publicist, a stylist, glam squad, or social media.
“Nowadays, I feel like it’s so easy becoming famous,” said Hilton, with a shrug. “Anybody with a phone can do it.”
In the year 2017, with a Trump in the White House, the phrase “celebrity entrepreneur” no longer a laughable sobriquet, and the Kardashians firmly ensconced in the highest echelons of American society, it’s starting to look and feel a lot like the 2000s again. As a result, nostalgia is running rampant in popular culture, and Paris Hilton is shaping up to be a pioneer and prophet of the zeitgeist as we know it.
by Emilia Petrarca, W | Read more:
Image: Mayan Toledano
What Trump and Duterte Said Privately About the North Korean Nuclear Threat
President Donald Trump repeatedly addressed the possibility of a U.S. nuclear attack on North Korea in a private call last month with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Intercept.
“We can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let on the loose like that. We have a lot of firepower, more than he has times 20, but we don’t want to use it,” Trump told Duterte. (In fact, the U.S. has 6,800 nuclear warheads and North Korea is thought to have about 10.) “You will be in good shape,” he added.
“We have a lot of firepower over there. We have two submarines — the best in the world — we have two nuclear submarines — not that we want to use them at all,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like they are, but we don’t have to use this, but he could be crazy so we will see what happens.”
The call took place on April 29. The transcript, an official Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs document, contains numerous typographical errors. Multiple government sources contacted by the Philippine news outlet Rappler, which collaborated with The Intercept on this story, confirmed its authenticity.
During the call, Trump echoed his publicly stated position that he wants China to take the lead in addressing potential threats from North Korea. “I hope China solves the problem. They really have the means because a great degree of their stuff come [sic] through China,” Trump said. “But if China doesn’t do it, we will do it.”
Duterte then volunteered to call Chinese President Xi Jinping, adding, “The other option is a nuclear blast which is not good for everybody.” Both leaders expressed a preference for avoiding a nuclear confrontation, but nonetheless, Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a leading expert on nuclear weapons, was alarmed by the exchange.
“Trump has a disturbing tendency to talk very cavalierly about nuclear weapons — as if he is an impulse away from using them,” Cirincione said. “He doesn’t seem to understand the vast destructive nature of these weapons and the line he would be crossing by using them.”
by Jeremy Scahill, Alex Emmons, Ryan Grim, The Intercept | Read more:
“We can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let on the loose like that. We have a lot of firepower, more than he has times 20, but we don’t want to use it,” Trump told Duterte. (In fact, the U.S. has 6,800 nuclear warheads and North Korea is thought to have about 10.) “You will be in good shape,” he added.
“We have a lot of firepower over there. We have two submarines — the best in the world — we have two nuclear submarines — not that we want to use them at all,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like they are, but we don’t have to use this, but he could be crazy so we will see what happens.”
The call took place on April 29. The transcript, an official Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs document, contains numerous typographical errors. Multiple government sources contacted by the Philippine news outlet Rappler, which collaborated with The Intercept on this story, confirmed its authenticity.
During the call, Trump echoed his publicly stated position that he wants China to take the lead in addressing potential threats from North Korea. “I hope China solves the problem. They really have the means because a great degree of their stuff come [sic] through China,” Trump said. “But if China doesn’t do it, we will do it.”
Duterte then volunteered to call Chinese President Xi Jinping, adding, “The other option is a nuclear blast which is not good for everybody.” Both leaders expressed a preference for avoiding a nuclear confrontation, but nonetheless, Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a leading expert on nuclear weapons, was alarmed by the exchange.
“Trump has a disturbing tendency to talk very cavalierly about nuclear weapons — as if he is an impulse away from using them,” Cirincione said. “He doesn’t seem to understand the vast destructive nature of these weapons and the line he would be crossing by using them.”
by Jeremy Scahill, Alex Emmons, Ryan Grim, The Intercept | Read more:
[ed. Part 1: Here]
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
In the US, Voting is Not for Poor People
In 2016, I voted at my kitchen table. I made a mug of tea, splashed a small amount of bourbon into it, and sat, by low light, and bubbled in the seemingly endless series of questions about taxes, transit, the minimum wage, and yes, the next President of the United States.
I skimmed through my phone, Googling various initiatives and candidates at my leisure, taking a break to snap an Instagram photo and pet my dog.
When I was finished, I neatly folded the ballot itself, placed it inside the privacy envelope, signed the document where I was prompted to sign, put a stamp on it, and then skipped across the street to plop it into the blue mailbox. Total cost: Whatever a stamp costs. I don’t remember.
Voting by mail is all I’ve ever known; before I was a voter in Washington, I was a voter in Oregon. I have a vague memory of my mother going to my elementary school gym to cast a ballot at one point, but aside from that, I’ve never had an experience with a polling place.
Which also means I’ve never had to take time off work to vote. I’ve never had to figure out a series of connecting buses or trains to vote. I’ve never had to wait in line or worry that there wouldn’t be materials in my native language available when I got to the booth. I’ve never had to produce a photo ID to vote, or worry that when I arrived at the polling place, I’d have been purged from the ranks.
In short: Voting has always been easy for me—and it’s remarkable that, in this, the year 2017, it’s not so easy for everyone else, even though it definitely could be.
Washington voters often complain about the need for stamps on ballots here, and in a lot of ways, they’re correct to do so; just about every year, we collectively try to determine whether or not a stamp is technically a poll tax, if you need a stamp, or whether it’s worth the risk to try mailing it without. A lot of ballots get returned without postage. And while stamps may not break the bank for a lot of us, they do require a person to purchase something in order to vote by mail.
Ballot boxes which don’t require a stamp are scattered throughout the region and in the week leading up to an election, it’s common to see a line of families and individuals, each stopping to take a photo of themselves as they slip the envelope into the big metal box.
Democrats in the legislature have submitted proposals to pay for postage in order to reduce the barrier to voting even further. The estimated cost is fairly low (about $2.7M over two years) and, in counties where paid postage has been tried, it’s increased voter turnout noticeably.
But while voters grapple over 49 cents in Washington, the rest of the nation is dealing with the real cost of voter suppression. In addition to, you know, the election of the 45th President—who promptly attacked immigrants, refugees, the lowest-earners, and anyone with any kind of ailment; who has proven to be entirely untrustworthy with matters of national security, and who’s threatened to undermine the rule of law—the fallout of voter suppression is far-reaching.
In cities and counties and parishes and townships across the country, voter numbers are slipping and falling as more and more people give up on participating in our democracy—in large part because laws and policies and enforcements have made it clear to them that their votes don’t count, aren’t wanted, or aren’t important.
Despite the promise of the United States—this paragon of democracy—we have ruthlessly low voter turnout. On purpose.
Much of this is strictly racial; at least one recent voter suppression effort was determined to have targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” Gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and other age-old techniques for keeping People of Color away from the ballot have proven successful for decades.
But many of the barriers to voting—barriers that aren’t so egregious, aren’t so specific, aren’t so surgical—in almost every state in the union also impact poor folks of other races. In fact, the very nature of in-person voting disproportionately benefits white-collar workers and the very wealthy.
Let’s do the math:
First, you have to factor in the cost of taking as much as an entire day off work. Ironically, voting on a Tuesday in November was originally determined because it was the easiest for workers to get off, not completely inconvenient as it is now. NPR’s Domenico Monanaro explains:
Even if you don’t work, but you’ve got underage kids who won’t be in school on Tuesday, you’ll probably need childcare; waiting for five to seven hours in a line is going to require a LOT of coloring books. So either way, taking a full day off is probably a loss of cash upfront; the average cost for an hour of childcare hovers around $10–20, meaning dropping $70–100 just to stand in the cold without a toddle to juggle.
by Hanna Brooks Olsen, Medium | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
I skimmed through my phone, Googling various initiatives and candidates at my leisure, taking a break to snap an Instagram photo and pet my dog.
When I was finished, I neatly folded the ballot itself, placed it inside the privacy envelope, signed the document where I was prompted to sign, put a stamp on it, and then skipped across the street to plop it into the blue mailbox. Total cost: Whatever a stamp costs. I don’t remember.
Voting by mail is all I’ve ever known; before I was a voter in Washington, I was a voter in Oregon. I have a vague memory of my mother going to my elementary school gym to cast a ballot at one point, but aside from that, I’ve never had an experience with a polling place.Which also means I’ve never had to take time off work to vote. I’ve never had to figure out a series of connecting buses or trains to vote. I’ve never had to wait in line or worry that there wouldn’t be materials in my native language available when I got to the booth. I’ve never had to produce a photo ID to vote, or worry that when I arrived at the polling place, I’d have been purged from the ranks.
In short: Voting has always been easy for me—and it’s remarkable that, in this, the year 2017, it’s not so easy for everyone else, even though it definitely could be.
Washington voters often complain about the need for stamps on ballots here, and in a lot of ways, they’re correct to do so; just about every year, we collectively try to determine whether or not a stamp is technically a poll tax, if you need a stamp, or whether it’s worth the risk to try mailing it without. A lot of ballots get returned without postage. And while stamps may not break the bank for a lot of us, they do require a person to purchase something in order to vote by mail.
Ballot boxes which don’t require a stamp are scattered throughout the region and in the week leading up to an election, it’s common to see a line of families and individuals, each stopping to take a photo of themselves as they slip the envelope into the big metal box.
Democrats in the legislature have submitted proposals to pay for postage in order to reduce the barrier to voting even further. The estimated cost is fairly low (about $2.7M over two years) and, in counties where paid postage has been tried, it’s increased voter turnout noticeably.
But while voters grapple over 49 cents in Washington, the rest of the nation is dealing with the real cost of voter suppression. In addition to, you know, the election of the 45th President—who promptly attacked immigrants, refugees, the lowest-earners, and anyone with any kind of ailment; who has proven to be entirely untrustworthy with matters of national security, and who’s threatened to undermine the rule of law—the fallout of voter suppression is far-reaching.
In cities and counties and parishes and townships across the country, voter numbers are slipping and falling as more and more people give up on participating in our democracy—in large part because laws and policies and enforcements have made it clear to them that their votes don’t count, aren’t wanted, or aren’t important.
Despite the promise of the United States—this paragon of democracy—we have ruthlessly low voter turnout. On purpose.
Much of this is strictly racial; at least one recent voter suppression effort was determined to have targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” Gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and other age-old techniques for keeping People of Color away from the ballot have proven successful for decades.
But many of the barriers to voting—barriers that aren’t so egregious, aren’t so specific, aren’t so surgical—in almost every state in the union also impact poor folks of other races. In fact, the very nature of in-person voting disproportionately benefits white-collar workers and the very wealthy.
Let’s do the math:
First, you have to factor in the cost of taking as much as an entire day off work. Ironically, voting on a Tuesday in November was originally determined because it was the easiest for workers to get off, not completely inconvenient as it is now. NPR’s Domenico Monanaro explains:
In order to understand the day chosen, you need to understand 19th century America. Most Americans were farmers, devoutly Christian and needed time to travel, because roads weren’t paved, and polling locations weren’t widespread like today.
Sundays were out because of church. People had to get to the county seat to vote, and automobiles weren’t an option — they weren’t a factor until the early 20th century. The Interstate Highway System wasn’t authorized until the mid-1950s.
As for why November — spring was planting season, summer was taken up with working the fields and tending the crops, but by November, the fall harvest was over. And in most of the country, the weather was still mild enough to permit travel over those unpaved roads.So, while the time and day of voting was initially built around the working person, it’s now a way to keep workers away from the polls. Assuming you make just over the federal minimum wage—let’s say $8 per hour—and you can’t take a sick day to vote (which you probably can’t in a lot of areas) your day of voting will cost you upwards of $64.
Even if you don’t work, but you’ve got underage kids who won’t be in school on Tuesday, you’ll probably need childcare; waiting for five to seven hours in a line is going to require a LOT of coloring books. So either way, taking a full day off is probably a loss of cash upfront; the average cost for an hour of childcare hovers around $10–20, meaning dropping $70–100 just to stand in the cold without a toddle to juggle.
by Hanna Brooks Olsen, Medium | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Testing News Paywalls: Which Are Leaky, Which Are Airtight?
It's widely known but rarely acknowledged: Most news paywalls are full of holes.
Publishers aren’t just offering a few free articles per month. They’re building in sweeping exceptions that allow tech-savvy readers—and often simply those entering through search or social media—to access most or all of what subscribers pay for.
It’s easy to understand why subscription outlets want to keep people out. But, even as the so-called “Trump bump” drives up new subscriptions, many also see powerful reasons for letting a lot of people in: from promotion, to data collection, to greater impact on public discourse.
We tested the paywalls at eight prominent subscription news outlets, three daily newspapers and five magazines—The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Nation, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and The Information—and found that all but one of those were “soft” to one degree or another, and six of eight allowed for some form of unlimited exception, allowing non-subscribers to read widely.
Paywalls have been a part of online news since The Wall Street Journal’s launched in 1996. The Journal’s approach, from that time until last year, largely mimicked its print subscription model: the “hard” paywall, paying customers only.
The New York Times pioneered the alternative “soft,” or “leaky” model in 2011. It allowed non-subscribers to read 20 articles per month (since reduced to 10). And, it created mechanisms for unlimited access.
The exceptions worked like this: When a reader arrived at a story through a search engine or by clicking a link on social media, that story wasn’t counted toward the free allotment. The meter would kick in only if the reader clicked on another article on the site.
Non-subscribers could also subvert the mechanism entirely by manipulating “cookie” files, a common marketing tracker stored on readers’ computers. Deleting cookies restarts the counter tracking how many stories a user has read, and the “private” mode built into most browsers prevents cookies from being saved in the first place.
Since then, paywalls have become much more common, and—with steep, long-term declines in print and digital display ad revenues across the industry— far greater contributors to publishers’ bottom lines.
Times2020, a planning document released by the publisher in January, identified the Times as a “subscription-first business.” Over the past year, digital subscriber numbers have shot up around the industry, a phenomenon referred to as the “Trump bump.” The Times added 755,000 new subscribers in the year ended on March 26, 2017, a 65 percent increase, according to its most recent quarterly report.
The Wall Street Journal signed up around 300,000 in roughly the same time period, representing growth of about 33 percent, Robert Thompson, CEO of the Journal’s corporate parent, said on an earnings call. Digital subscriptions now make up 53 percent of the subscriptions at the company, up from 38 percent just two years ago.
Overall, paywalls and paywall policies are more important for publishers than ever before. And, in general, it’s the Times’s “soft” model, unlimited exceptions and all, that has prevailed.
by Ariel Stulberg, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Publishers aren’t just offering a few free articles per month. They’re building in sweeping exceptions that allow tech-savvy readers—and often simply those entering through search or social media—to access most or all of what subscribers pay for.
It’s easy to understand why subscription outlets want to keep people out. But, even as the so-called “Trump bump” drives up new subscriptions, many also see powerful reasons for letting a lot of people in: from promotion, to data collection, to greater impact on public discourse.We tested the paywalls at eight prominent subscription news outlets, three daily newspapers and five magazines—The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Nation, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and The Information—and found that all but one of those were “soft” to one degree or another, and six of eight allowed for some form of unlimited exception, allowing non-subscribers to read widely.
Paywalls have been a part of online news since The Wall Street Journal’s launched in 1996. The Journal’s approach, from that time until last year, largely mimicked its print subscription model: the “hard” paywall, paying customers only.
The New York Times pioneered the alternative “soft,” or “leaky” model in 2011. It allowed non-subscribers to read 20 articles per month (since reduced to 10). And, it created mechanisms for unlimited access.
The exceptions worked like this: When a reader arrived at a story through a search engine or by clicking a link on social media, that story wasn’t counted toward the free allotment. The meter would kick in only if the reader clicked on another article on the site.
Non-subscribers could also subvert the mechanism entirely by manipulating “cookie” files, a common marketing tracker stored on readers’ computers. Deleting cookies restarts the counter tracking how many stories a user has read, and the “private” mode built into most browsers prevents cookies from being saved in the first place.
Since then, paywalls have become much more common, and—with steep, long-term declines in print and digital display ad revenues across the industry— far greater contributors to publishers’ bottom lines.
Times2020, a planning document released by the publisher in January, identified the Times as a “subscription-first business.” Over the past year, digital subscriber numbers have shot up around the industry, a phenomenon referred to as the “Trump bump.” The Times added 755,000 new subscribers in the year ended on March 26, 2017, a 65 percent increase, according to its most recent quarterly report.
The Wall Street Journal signed up around 300,000 in roughly the same time period, representing growth of about 33 percent, Robert Thompson, CEO of the Journal’s corporate parent, said on an earnings call. Digital subscriptions now make up 53 percent of the subscriptions at the company, up from 38 percent just two years ago.
Overall, paywalls and paywall policies are more important for publishers than ever before. And, in general, it’s the Times’s “soft” model, unlimited exceptions and all, that has prevailed.
by Ariel Stulberg, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Image: NYT
Monday, May 22, 2017
Brand New Congress
The Republican party wasn’t always an organization dominated by the ultra-wealthy. While today most of its federal representatives in Congress are trying to pass a gigantic tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill, it was once a party that liberated American slaves, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and broke up enormous business monopolies.
That’s the GOP that 42-year-old Arkansas pastor Robb Ryerse is trying to revive. He is the first Republican to be endorsed by Brand New Congress, a grassroots group started by former Bernie Sanders staffers to encourage Democrats and Republicans who have never served in office before to run for Congress.
Ryerse is running in the primary to unseat incumbent GOP Rep. Steve Womack, who has served in Congress since 2011. The district is heavily Republican; in 2016 Womack won with 77 percent of the vote. That makes the district essentially a one-party state: All of the serious political competition happens within the Republican Party.
In an interview with The Intercept, Ryerse explained why he is trying to unseat Womack and how the Republican Party needs to change to become relevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.
“I grew up as a third-generation pastor and after pastoring in churches up North for about 10 years I went through kind of a spiritual crisis and needed to be part of a church that was welcoming of all people, a church that accepted that people have doubts and questions and that’s not a threat to faith. So my wife and I moved our family to northwest Arkansas where we started a church called Vintage Fellowship,” he explained. “I’m the kind of person who believes in big ideas that are daring enough that they might work and starting a new kind of church was kind of a new kind of idea. The reason I’m running for Congress is because I’ve had this kind of big daring idea that I can’t get out of my head. And that’s that we’ve gotta change the way we do politics in America.”
To Ryerse, the current Republican Party isn’t living up to the legacy of the historic one. “The Republican Party used to be known for who it was for, and now it’s known for who it’s against,” he lamented.
But he believes that Republicans can get back on the right track if they look to their past. “You could look at President Reagan signing immigration reform, you could look at Richard Nixon helping establish needed environmental protections, you could talk about Dwight Eisenhower talking about the military-industrial complex, I think there’s lots of examples if you kind of look back at Republicans who really were on the right side of history in a number of ways.”
He described his opponent Congressman Womack as a “good man” but said he has failed to represent the district adequately. He cited a letter Womack wrote to former Secretary of State John Kerry suggesting Syrian refugees were a threat to the people of Arkansas as one of the things that pushed him to run.
“It was one of those fearmongering kind of ‘We don’t want those people in our town’ kind of letters. And that was one of those things that really kind of planted a seed for me, like, ‘Wow, here’s someone who’s not representing the really just and generous things that are happening in our district,'” Ryerse reflected. “And I think Arkansans deserve someone who will listen to them and represent them better and who will be an independent voice on their behalf.”
Ryerse wants to see a Republican Party that strikes a more accepting tone on immigration. “I think the wall is both a terrible waste of money as well as a symbol that just does not reflect what America’s values are. Ronald Reagan talked about our country being a shining city on a hill. The wall doesn’t communicate that kind of optimism that kind of welcoming. I think in terms of helping Republicans see that, I think Republican leadership who are really passionate on the immigration issue really need to dial back the fearmongering and the dehumanizing of people,” he stated.
On health care, Ryerse thinks that Republicans have faltered by coalescing around a health care bill with approval ratings barely over 20 percent.
“It would’ve taken just three more independent Republicans in Congress to stop the bill that passed the House a couple of weeks ago. And I would’ve voted against it. I would’ve been one of those independent Republicans that would have voted against that bill,” he explained. “In terms of what we need going forward, I think we need a plan that provides health coverage for all people. I think Obamacare was in some ways a step in the right direction but at the same time it kind of offends my Republican sensibilities to have people being forced to buy insurance to be punished in their taxes if they don’t. I think it’s far better to just have a public option that makes affordable health insurance available to all people. We’ve got to make sure that everybody in the country is covered.”
While it would be hard to find a single Republican in Congress who endorses a public option, it’s actually fairly popular among Republican voters, 51 percent of whom told a Kaiser poll last year that they support offering such a plan to Americans. Part of the reason for this gap between public opinion and public policy is the influence of money in the party, which Ryerse wants to tackle.
“I think the influx of so much money has helped to really cause the toxic nature of our system and has really worked to corrupt the party establishment,” he told us. “I am working with Brand New Congress and we’re not taking special interest money, we’re not taking big PAC money, corporate money. We are being supported, my campaign is being supported, by average citizens who believe and who donate. I think that’s the way it needs to be. I think when we’ve got politicians who are beholden to big corporations and big donors, is what happens is the very thing we have, whether Republicans or Democrats they put party ahead of people and we end up with the mess we’ve got now.”
by Zaid Jilani, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Brand New Congress
That’s the GOP that 42-year-old Arkansas pastor Robb Ryerse is trying to revive. He is the first Republican to be endorsed by Brand New Congress, a grassroots group started by former Bernie Sanders staffers to encourage Democrats and Republicans who have never served in office before to run for Congress.
Ryerse is running in the primary to unseat incumbent GOP Rep. Steve Womack, who has served in Congress since 2011. The district is heavily Republican; in 2016 Womack won with 77 percent of the vote. That makes the district essentially a one-party state: All of the serious political competition happens within the Republican Party.In an interview with The Intercept, Ryerse explained why he is trying to unseat Womack and how the Republican Party needs to change to become relevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.
“I grew up as a third-generation pastor and after pastoring in churches up North for about 10 years I went through kind of a spiritual crisis and needed to be part of a church that was welcoming of all people, a church that accepted that people have doubts and questions and that’s not a threat to faith. So my wife and I moved our family to northwest Arkansas where we started a church called Vintage Fellowship,” he explained. “I’m the kind of person who believes in big ideas that are daring enough that they might work and starting a new kind of church was kind of a new kind of idea. The reason I’m running for Congress is because I’ve had this kind of big daring idea that I can’t get out of my head. And that’s that we’ve gotta change the way we do politics in America.”
To Ryerse, the current Republican Party isn’t living up to the legacy of the historic one. “The Republican Party used to be known for who it was for, and now it’s known for who it’s against,” he lamented.
But he believes that Republicans can get back on the right track if they look to their past. “You could look at President Reagan signing immigration reform, you could look at Richard Nixon helping establish needed environmental protections, you could talk about Dwight Eisenhower talking about the military-industrial complex, I think there’s lots of examples if you kind of look back at Republicans who really were on the right side of history in a number of ways.”
He described his opponent Congressman Womack as a “good man” but said he has failed to represent the district adequately. He cited a letter Womack wrote to former Secretary of State John Kerry suggesting Syrian refugees were a threat to the people of Arkansas as one of the things that pushed him to run.
“It was one of those fearmongering kind of ‘We don’t want those people in our town’ kind of letters. And that was one of those things that really kind of planted a seed for me, like, ‘Wow, here’s someone who’s not representing the really just and generous things that are happening in our district,'” Ryerse reflected. “And I think Arkansans deserve someone who will listen to them and represent them better and who will be an independent voice on their behalf.”
Ryerse wants to see a Republican Party that strikes a more accepting tone on immigration. “I think the wall is both a terrible waste of money as well as a symbol that just does not reflect what America’s values are. Ronald Reagan talked about our country being a shining city on a hill. The wall doesn’t communicate that kind of optimism that kind of welcoming. I think in terms of helping Republicans see that, I think Republican leadership who are really passionate on the immigration issue really need to dial back the fearmongering and the dehumanizing of people,” he stated.
On health care, Ryerse thinks that Republicans have faltered by coalescing around a health care bill with approval ratings barely over 20 percent.
“It would’ve taken just three more independent Republicans in Congress to stop the bill that passed the House a couple of weeks ago. And I would’ve voted against it. I would’ve been one of those independent Republicans that would have voted against that bill,” he explained. “In terms of what we need going forward, I think we need a plan that provides health coverage for all people. I think Obamacare was in some ways a step in the right direction but at the same time it kind of offends my Republican sensibilities to have people being forced to buy insurance to be punished in their taxes if they don’t. I think it’s far better to just have a public option that makes affordable health insurance available to all people. We’ve got to make sure that everybody in the country is covered.”
While it would be hard to find a single Republican in Congress who endorses a public option, it’s actually fairly popular among Republican voters, 51 percent of whom told a Kaiser poll last year that they support offering such a plan to Americans. Part of the reason for this gap between public opinion and public policy is the influence of money in the party, which Ryerse wants to tackle.
“I think the influx of so much money has helped to really cause the toxic nature of our system and has really worked to corrupt the party establishment,” he told us. “I am working with Brand New Congress and we’re not taking special interest money, we’re not taking big PAC money, corporate money. We are being supported, my campaign is being supported, by average citizens who believe and who donate. I think that’s the way it needs to be. I think when we’ve got politicians who are beholden to big corporations and big donors, is what happens is the very thing we have, whether Republicans or Democrats they put party ahead of people and we end up with the mess we’ve got now.”
by Zaid Jilani, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Brand New Congress
[ed. I've only voted for one Republican in my life, but I'd vote for this guy.]
In Wreckage of the Fyre Festival, Fury, Lawsuits and an Inquiry
A few days after the spectacular collapse of the Fyre Festival, just as federal investigators began to circle the wreckage, the event’s would-be mastermind, Billy McFarland, was still making promises.
His failed event was sold on social media by the likes of Kendall Jenner as an ultraluxurious musical getaway in the Bahamas. Scheduled for two weekends starting in late April, it was supposed to up the ante in the competitive festival market. Instead, Fyre had become a punch line for its aborted opening, with reports of panicked millennials scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach.
Yet, speaking on May 2 with unnerved employees at his TriBeCa office — with its $30,000 sound system and frequent fashion-model visitors — Mr. McFarland deflected blame and vowed that Fyre would survive to mount another festival next year. The coverage had been “sensationalized,” he insisted, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. (Fyre has attributed its cancellation to a combination of factors, including the weather.)
Ja Rule, the rapper and Mr. McFarland’s celebrity business partner, looked on the bright side. “The whole world knows Fyre’s name now,” he said. “This will pass, guys.”
Their company, Fyre Media, however, was already facing the first of more than a dozen lawsuits seeking millions and alleging fraud, breach of contract and more.
The endeavor has also become the focus of a criminal investigation, with federal authorities looking into possible mail, wire and securities fraud, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it. The investigation is being conducted by the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the F.B.I.; it is being overseen by a prosecutor assigned to the complex frauds and cybercrime unit. (A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office and a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.)
There are many potential victims: ticket buyers, investors and businesses small and large, spread across the United States and the Bahamas. Blink-182, a planned headliner, can’t get its equipment out of customs limbo. Fyre’s employees have not been paid. MaryAnn Rolle, a restaurant owner in the Bahamas who catered daily meals and rented villas to the festival crew, says she is owed $134,000.
“I’m struggling” and feeling taken advantage of, Ms. Rolle said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Ja Rule was Fyre’s famous face, but at the center of the controversy is Mr. McFarland, a brash, 25-year-old entrepreneur with a gift for networking and buzzy social media. In his short career, he has persuaded people, over and over, to buy or invest in whatever he was selling, leaving behind a trail of aggrieved customers and business partners. He could be the Wolf of Wall Street for the selfie set, or Gatsby run through an Instagram filter.
Mr. McFarland and his lawyers declined to address specific allegations. But in a statement, he said: “I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal,” adding, “I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend.”
Stacey Richman, a lawyer for Ja Rule, said that he “would never participate in anything fraudulent; it’s simply not in his DNA.”
But interviews with more than two dozen people associated with Mr. McFarland or the festival, many of whom requested anonymity because of pending legal issues, turned up few who were surprised by the ruins in the Bahamas and beyond.
“The lies didn’t start with the Fyre Festival, let’s make that clear,” said Patrick McMullan, the veteran party photographer who came to regret his trust in Mr. McFarland’s business savvy.
His failed event was sold on social media by the likes of Kendall Jenner as an ultraluxurious musical getaway in the Bahamas. Scheduled for two weekends starting in late April, it was supposed to up the ante in the competitive festival market. Instead, Fyre had become a punch line for its aborted opening, with reports of panicked millennials scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach.
Yet, speaking on May 2 with unnerved employees at his TriBeCa office — with its $30,000 sound system and frequent fashion-model visitors — Mr. McFarland deflected blame and vowed that Fyre would survive to mount another festival next year. The coverage had been “sensationalized,” he insisted, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. (Fyre has attributed its cancellation to a combination of factors, including the weather.)Ja Rule, the rapper and Mr. McFarland’s celebrity business partner, looked on the bright side. “The whole world knows Fyre’s name now,” he said. “This will pass, guys.”
Their company, Fyre Media, however, was already facing the first of more than a dozen lawsuits seeking millions and alleging fraud, breach of contract and more.
The endeavor has also become the focus of a criminal investigation, with federal authorities looking into possible mail, wire and securities fraud, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it. The investigation is being conducted by the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the F.B.I.; it is being overseen by a prosecutor assigned to the complex frauds and cybercrime unit. (A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office and a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.)
There are many potential victims: ticket buyers, investors and businesses small and large, spread across the United States and the Bahamas. Blink-182, a planned headliner, can’t get its equipment out of customs limbo. Fyre’s employees have not been paid. MaryAnn Rolle, a restaurant owner in the Bahamas who catered daily meals and rented villas to the festival crew, says she is owed $134,000.
“I’m struggling” and feeling taken advantage of, Ms. Rolle said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Ja Rule was Fyre’s famous face, but at the center of the controversy is Mr. McFarland, a brash, 25-year-old entrepreneur with a gift for networking and buzzy social media. In his short career, he has persuaded people, over and over, to buy or invest in whatever he was selling, leaving behind a trail of aggrieved customers and business partners. He could be the Wolf of Wall Street for the selfie set, or Gatsby run through an Instagram filter.
Mr. McFarland and his lawyers declined to address specific allegations. But in a statement, he said: “I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal,” adding, “I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend.”
Stacey Richman, a lawyer for Ja Rule, said that he “would never participate in anything fraudulent; it’s simply not in his DNA.”
But interviews with more than two dozen people associated with Mr. McFarland or the festival, many of whom requested anonymity because of pending legal issues, turned up few who were surprised by the ruins in the Bahamas and beyond.
“The lies didn’t start with the Fyre Festival, let’s make that clear,” said Patrick McMullan, the veteran party photographer who came to regret his trust in Mr. McFarland’s business savvy.
by Joe Coscarelli, Melena Ryzik and Ben Sisario, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Scott McIntyre
How to be a Vlogger: A Guide for Wannabe YouTubers
A survey of 1,000 people has revealed that three-quarters would consider a career in vlogging. But is there a viable market for YouTubers, and how do you even get started? Here’s a career guide.
1. Entry requirements
YouTubing has an abnormally low entry threshold. So long as you have a laptop with a webcam, a YouTube account and a flair for endless insincere grinning that barely masks the swirling vortex of abject nothingness that consumes your every waking moment, you’re ready to take your first steps.
2. Skills required
You’ll need:
• An amiable manner.
• A cool haircut.
• Enough time on your hands to believe that filming yourself opening a box isn’t a grotesque waste of the precious life you’ve been given.
• Decent lighting.
3. What you’ll do
• Create a bubbly two-dimensional persona that’s both cheeky and inspiring.
• Document your entire life in a series of well-edited videos.
• Review products that you’re sent, being careful to avoid saying anything critical.
• Back up your brand with endless Instagram and Snapchat posts that show your young followers just how cool your entire life is.
• Be slightly vague about who sponsors you.
• Convince an out-of-work journalist to spend three days listlessly ghostwriting a book for you, then watch their face as it goes on to outsell all the important work they have ever cared about.
• End all of your sentences with the phrase: “Thanks guys, don’t forget to subscribe!”
4. Salary
Starter: Literally nothing.
Image: Maskot/Getty Images/Maskot
Even If You Don't Have Student Loans, You Should Want Them to be Forgiven
I graduated in 1996 with a masters’ degree, approximately $27,000 in debt, and a burning desire to do good in the world at a nonprofit. My idealism was quickly replaced with a gnawing, constant worry about making ends meet: An entry-level nonprofit salary and a $300 monthly loan payment made for uneasy budgetary bedfellows in Washington, D.C. I lasted six months as a penny-watching idealist then fled for a higher salary in the private sector.
The world has moved on without my services as a professional idealist, but society as a whole needs people willing to bend their time and talent to public service. Enter the 2007 Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and its subsequent expansion by the Obama administration in 2010, 2012 and 2015. The fundamentals of the program were simple: Did you have a federal student loan? Were you employed in public service? Then you could cap your payments at a fixed percentage of your monthly income and after ten years of qualified public service, the government would forgive the remaining balance on your federal student loans.
This was not a “get out of all student loans” ticket—thanks to federal student loan limits, the amount of money a student can borrow from the government may not cover tuition, room and board, so a lot of students have to fill in the rest with private loans. But the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) could and did help people manage their federal student loan debt.
The current administration is proposing to eliminate this program. As the Washington Post reports:
If “professional competence” and “higher quality applicants” and “better employees, therefore better public service” aren’t sufficiently compelling reasons, consider this one: Student loans are throttling some sectors of the U.S. economy.
Approximately 44 million people in the U.S. have borrowed for student loans, with outstanding student loan debt standing at approximately $1.3 trillion today. Around seven in 10 newly-minted college graduates leave school with debt. They are carrying, on average, around $37,000 in student loans. In 2014, Pew Research estimated that college graduates aged 25-32 were earning $45,500 annually. That’s not too shabby—the median annual income for that age group as a whole is estimated at $25,000 or so—but throw in those $300-a-month loan payments on top of other fixed expenses like rent and it’s no wonder young people aren’t buying anything.
In addition to eliminating any public-service loan forgiveness programs, the current administration also wants to hike loan repayment for income-based repayment plans, end subsidized federal student loans, eliminate more than $700 million in Perkins loans for disadvantaged students, and cut $490 million from undergraduate work-study programs. The upshot is the current administration just said it’s not the government’s job to broaden access to education to people below the middle class.
by Lisa Schmeiser, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: democracynow.org
The world has moved on without my services as a professional idealist, but society as a whole needs people willing to bend their time and talent to public service. Enter the 2007 Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and its subsequent expansion by the Obama administration in 2010, 2012 and 2015. The fundamentals of the program were simple: Did you have a federal student loan? Were you employed in public service? Then you could cap your payments at a fixed percentage of your monthly income and after ten years of qualified public service, the government would forgive the remaining balance on your federal student loans.This was not a “get out of all student loans” ticket—thanks to federal student loan limits, the amount of money a student can borrow from the government may not cover tuition, room and board, so a lot of students have to fill in the rest with private loans. But the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) could and did help people manage their federal student loan debt.
The current administration is proposing to eliminate this program. As the Washington Post reports:
The loan forgiveness program, enacted in 2007, was designed to encourage college graduates to pursue careers as social workers, teachers, public defenders or doctors in rural areas. There are at least 552,931 people on track to receive the benefit, with the first wave of forgiveness set for October. It’s unclear how the proposed elimination would affect those borrowers… There were no estimates on how much the government would save by eliminating public-service loan forgiveness.So what? Yanking away programs that help young adults with student loans build a future is remarkably short-sighted. Several key components of a functioning society—law, medicine, education, social services—do better when there is a wide, deep pool of qualified aspirants. And if dedicating a decade or more to a public service job doesn’t ruin an adult financially, then the fields of law, education, etc. benefit from having passionate, committed veterans. Never underestimate the bargain that a long-time employee represents, in terms of both institutional knowledge and reduced employee overhead.
If “professional competence” and “higher quality applicants” and “better employees, therefore better public service” aren’t sufficiently compelling reasons, consider this one: Student loans are throttling some sectors of the U.S. economy.
Approximately 44 million people in the U.S. have borrowed for student loans, with outstanding student loan debt standing at approximately $1.3 trillion today. Around seven in 10 newly-minted college graduates leave school with debt. They are carrying, on average, around $37,000 in student loans. In 2014, Pew Research estimated that college graduates aged 25-32 were earning $45,500 annually. That’s not too shabby—the median annual income for that age group as a whole is estimated at $25,000 or so—but throw in those $300-a-month loan payments on top of other fixed expenses like rent and it’s no wonder young people aren’t buying anything.
In addition to eliminating any public-service loan forgiveness programs, the current administration also wants to hike loan repayment for income-based repayment plans, end subsidized federal student loans, eliminate more than $700 million in Perkins loans for disadvantaged students, and cut $490 million from undergraduate work-study programs. The upshot is the current administration just said it’s not the government’s job to broaden access to education to people below the middle class.
by Lisa Schmeiser, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: democracynow.org
Ancestry.com Takes Ownership of Your DNA Forever
Don’t use the AncestryDNA testing service without actually reading the Ancestry.com Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. According to these legal contracts, you still own your DNA, but so does Ancestry.com.
The family history website Ancestry.com is selling a new DNA testing service called AncestryDNA. But the DNA and genetic data that Ancestry.com collects may be used against “you or a genetic relative.” According to its privacy policies, Ancestry.com takes ownership of your DNA forever. Your ownership of your DNA, on the other hand, is limited in years.
It seems obvious that customers agree to this arrangement, since all of them must “click here to agree” to these terms. But, how many people really read those contacts before clicking to agree? And how many relatives of Ancestry.com customers are also reading?
There are three significant provisions in the AncestryDNA Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to consider on behalf of yourself and your genetic relatives: (1) the perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide license to use your DNA; (2) the warning that DNA information may be used against “you or a genetic relative”; (3) your waiver of legal rights. (...)
Buried in the “Informed Consent” section, which is incorporated into the Terms of Service, Ancestry.com warns customers, “it is possible that information about you or a genetic relative could be revealed, such as that you or a relative are carriers of a particular disease. That information could be used by insurers to deny you insurance coverage, by law enforcement agencies to identify you or your relatives, and in some places, the data could be used by employers to deny employment.”
This is a massive red flag. The data “you or a genetic relative” give to AncestryDNA could be used against “you or a genetic relative” by employers, insurers, and law enforcement.
For example, a young woman named Theresa Morelli applied for individual disability insurance, consented to release of her medical records through the Medical Information Bureau (a credit reporting agency for medical history), and was approved for coverage. One month later, Ms. Morelli’s coverage was cancelled and premiums refunded when the insurer learned her father had Huntington’s disease, a genetic illness.
Startlingly, the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) used Morelli’s broad consent to query her father’s physician, a doctor with whom she had no prior patient relationship. More importantly, the applicant herself wasn’t diagnosed with Huntington’s carrier status, but she suffered exclusion on the basis of a genetic predisposition in her family.
The family history website Ancestry.com is selling a new DNA testing service called AncestryDNA. But the DNA and genetic data that Ancestry.com collects may be used against “you or a genetic relative.” According to its privacy policies, Ancestry.com takes ownership of your DNA forever. Your ownership of your DNA, on the other hand, is limited in years.It seems obvious that customers agree to this arrangement, since all of them must “click here to agree” to these terms. But, how many people really read those contacts before clicking to agree? And how many relatives of Ancestry.com customers are also reading?
There are three significant provisions in the AncestryDNA Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to consider on behalf of yourself and your genetic relatives: (1) the perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide license to use your DNA; (2) the warning that DNA information may be used against “you or a genetic relative”; (3) your waiver of legal rights. (...)
Buried in the “Informed Consent” section, which is incorporated into the Terms of Service, Ancestry.com warns customers, “it is possible that information about you or a genetic relative could be revealed, such as that you or a relative are carriers of a particular disease. That information could be used by insurers to deny you insurance coverage, by law enforcement agencies to identify you or your relatives, and in some places, the data could be used by employers to deny employment.”
This is a massive red flag. The data “you or a genetic relative” give to AncestryDNA could be used against “you or a genetic relative” by employers, insurers, and law enforcement.
For example, a young woman named Theresa Morelli applied for individual disability insurance, consented to release of her medical records through the Medical Information Bureau (a credit reporting agency for medical history), and was approved for coverage. One month later, Ms. Morelli’s coverage was cancelled and premiums refunded when the insurer learned her father had Huntington’s disease, a genetic illness.
Startlingly, the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) used Morelli’s broad consent to query her father’s physician, a doctor with whom she had no prior patient relationship. More importantly, the applicant herself wasn’t diagnosed with Huntington’s carrier status, but she suffered exclusion on the basis of a genetic predisposition in her family.
by Joel Winston, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sunday, May 21, 2017
How Facebook Is Making Membership a Prerequisite to Everyday Existence
In mid-February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published his “Building Global Community” manifesto, in which he called for “supportive,” “safe,” “informed,” “civically engaged” and “inclusive” communities.
Which sounds lofty and benevolent, yet if you read between the lines, the message is: we want to own all the data of all the interpersonal/community interactions in the world and profit off of them through advertising and other as-yet-unveiled value-added propositions. (Facebook Bucks, anyone?)
Facebook launched a few years after I graduated from college, so I guess this makes me an old fuddy-duddy—an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want a corporation like Facebook owning my most sensitive personal info. Somehow, this sentiment not only puts me in the minority of the connected world, but also it increasingly marginalizes me in my everyday interactions.
I was OK with missing the occasional baby announcement. I was fine with missing the occasional warehouse party. But last month the Zuckerberg Mafia finally hit me where it hurts: I got kicked off of car sharing because I don’t have (and won’t have) a Facebook account.
If you haven’t and/or won’t join Facebook, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.
Paradise Lost
One of the most glorious things about living in the Bay Area is that I don’t have to own a car. For nearly 10 years, I’ve been a member of City CarShare, a local nonprofit car-sharing service with vehicle stations all around the Bay Area. I built my life around the service. I love biking to a Prius parked in some random garage, tossing my bike into the hatch and launching off to my next adventure. I’m a believer in the vision of the Internet and smartphones helping us share stuff and get the most value out of our assets. City CarShare was an early real-world example of how technology might help facilitate/streamline people living together better and more efficiently.
However, City CarShare was recently bought by a corporation, Getaround. And Getaround built its platform on top of Facebook. So when I went to migrate my account over to them, I found that there’s literally no way to do it as a non-Facebook user. If I want to share cars with my fellow city dwellers, I’m compelled to strike a Faustian bargain.
To access the services of Getaround, one must authenticate their identity through Facebook.
For comparison: Airbnb allows multiple verification options — including, but not limited to, Facebook. If I’m going to share my car or house with someone, I sure as heck want to know if that person is who they say they are. But saying that Facebook is the sole conduit toward this goal is treading into scary, Black Mirror–esque territory.
I know that for you Facebook-having people, this is no big deal. You have resigned yourself to the idea of Facebook owning your data. But if you don’t, haven’t and/or won’t resign to this fate, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.
Customer Disservice
I wrote to the nice folks at Getaround to let them know that I’ve been a loyal customer for over 10+ years and said I’d happily verify myself in any manner they see fit besides Facebook. But since the very architecture of their site is integrated unto Facebook, technically, they have no way to do this (short of redesigning the entire service). And there doesn’t seem to be any awareness of why this might even be an issue. It would take me just a minute to open an account, so why shouldn’t I do it?
A careful reading of Getaround’s privacy statement makes it clear that the data they are compiling will be shared with other companies. In the case of car sharing, that includes GPS tracking of where and when I’m driving (OMG, Facebook would love to get their tentacles on those juicy profile nodes). (...)
Social Credit
You have a credit score if you want to get a mortgage—soon you’ll have a social-credit score that people can check to see if you fit the bill for their service/community/etc.
Potential landlords, employers, car-share companies and dates will scan your social-credit score to see if you fit the bill. We’re facing a world in which you’ll be a social outcast if you don’t regularly grant access to your Facebook profile. Facebook is becoming our de facto social-credit system.
by Jason Ditzian, The Bold Italic | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. I've run into the same problem (with other apps). It's an irritant. But if businesses want to alienate a segment of their potential customer base, that's up to them. See also: Facebook wants to use your brain activity as an input device.]
Which sounds lofty and benevolent, yet if you read between the lines, the message is: we want to own all the data of all the interpersonal/community interactions in the world and profit off of them through advertising and other as-yet-unveiled value-added propositions. (Facebook Bucks, anyone?)
Facebook launched a few years after I graduated from college, so I guess this makes me an old fuddy-duddy—an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want a corporation like Facebook owning my most sensitive personal info. Somehow, this sentiment not only puts me in the minority of the connected world, but also it increasingly marginalizes me in my everyday interactions.I was OK with missing the occasional baby announcement. I was fine with missing the occasional warehouse party. But last month the Zuckerberg Mafia finally hit me where it hurts: I got kicked off of car sharing because I don’t have (and won’t have) a Facebook account.
If you haven’t and/or won’t join Facebook, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.
Paradise Lost
One of the most glorious things about living in the Bay Area is that I don’t have to own a car. For nearly 10 years, I’ve been a member of City CarShare, a local nonprofit car-sharing service with vehicle stations all around the Bay Area. I built my life around the service. I love biking to a Prius parked in some random garage, tossing my bike into the hatch and launching off to my next adventure. I’m a believer in the vision of the Internet and smartphones helping us share stuff and get the most value out of our assets. City CarShare was an early real-world example of how technology might help facilitate/streamline people living together better and more efficiently.
However, City CarShare was recently bought by a corporation, Getaround. And Getaround built its platform on top of Facebook. So when I went to migrate my account over to them, I found that there’s literally no way to do it as a non-Facebook user. If I want to share cars with my fellow city dwellers, I’m compelled to strike a Faustian bargain.
To access the services of Getaround, one must authenticate their identity through Facebook.
For comparison: Airbnb allows multiple verification options — including, but not limited to, Facebook. If I’m going to share my car or house with someone, I sure as heck want to know if that person is who they say they are. But saying that Facebook is the sole conduit toward this goal is treading into scary, Black Mirror–esque territory.
I know that for you Facebook-having people, this is no big deal. You have resigned yourself to the idea of Facebook owning your data. But if you don’t, haven’t and/or won’t resign to this fate, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.
Customer Disservice
I wrote to the nice folks at Getaround to let them know that I’ve been a loyal customer for over 10+ years and said I’d happily verify myself in any manner they see fit besides Facebook. But since the very architecture of their site is integrated unto Facebook, technically, they have no way to do this (short of redesigning the entire service). And there doesn’t seem to be any awareness of why this might even be an issue. It would take me just a minute to open an account, so why shouldn’t I do it?
A careful reading of Getaround’s privacy statement makes it clear that the data they are compiling will be shared with other companies. In the case of car sharing, that includes GPS tracking of where and when I’m driving (OMG, Facebook would love to get their tentacles on those juicy profile nodes). (...)
Social Credit
You have a credit score if you want to get a mortgage—soon you’ll have a social-credit score that people can check to see if you fit the bill for their service/community/etc.
Potential landlords, employers, car-share companies and dates will scan your social-credit score to see if you fit the bill. We’re facing a world in which you’ll be a social outcast if you don’t regularly grant access to your Facebook profile. Facebook is becoming our de facto social-credit system.
by Jason Ditzian, The Bold Italic | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. I've run into the same problem (with other apps). It's an irritant. But if businesses want to alienate a segment of their potential customer base, that's up to them. See also: Facebook wants to use your brain activity as an input device.]
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