Origins

Posted on June 14, 2013 by rbeairsto

Andrew Blum, in his new book Tubes, describes a scene taking place late in the summer of 1969—an excited group of grad students had gathered on an otherwise placid Saturday afternoon in the courtyard of Boelter Hall on the UCLA campus. This was the summer of Woodstock and, even though they were exclusively science geeks, no doubt a few of them wore bell bottom pants, and more than one moustache adorned an eager young face. Somebody clutched a bottle of champagne.

The occasion was the arrival of the very first “IMP”—interface message processor—a 900-pound behemoth costing $80,000 ($500,000 in today’s dollars) which was nevertheless referred to as a “minicomputer.” It had been air freighted from Boston by the engineering firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, who a few years earlier had signed a one million dollar contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop an impervious computer network to be called the ARPANET.

This celebratory event harkened directly back to 1957, when a Polish-born engineer named Paul Baron landed a new job at the RAND Corporation, where he soon became involved in a project to design a nuclear-attack-proof communications system for the U.S. military. Elvis Presley made his seventh and final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that year, and in November of 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first earth satellite, traumatizing the American psyche and prompting the federal government to call for the building of more backyard bomb shelters across the nation.

Baron began experimenting with different communication models, and soon fell upon the advantages of a ‘fishnet’ design, as opposed to the ‘star’ design employed by the then monopoly AT&T system. The AT&T model featured a focal hub through which nearly all information flowed, making it especially vulnerable to a nuclear attack. The fishnet model had no vulnerable centre; if one part of it was damaged or destroyed, any bit of sent information could still reach its final destination by flowing through an alternate set of nodes.

These occurrences in turn of course relate directly to the birth of computers connected via the internet, the single most disruptive technological transformation humankind has witnessed. Economists have labeled these kinds of innovations general purpose technology (GPT), that is technology which can be applied in a great many situations, work and play, thus resulting in far greater social and economic impact than any kind of industry-specific invention. Prior GPTs include steam power, electricity and the internal combustion engine.

Recent studies—Race Against the Machine, by MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee is a particularly apt and concise summation—have shown that, while productivity has grown with the onset of digital technology, employment has not. Median family income has stagnated in recent years, and the last decade is the first since the Great Depression which saw no overall net gain in job creation. We have the phenomenon of the ‘jobless recovery’ from the crash of 2008, and Brynjolfsson and McAfee are clear about a major contributing factor that’s often been ignored by both business and government:

“… there has been relatively little talk about the role of acceleration of technology. It may seem paradoxical that faster progress can hurt wages and jobs for millions of people but we argue that’s what’s been happening.”

The military origins of the internet are unmistakable, but I think we can safely assume that the Generals never foresaw that their nuke-proof system would one day be used by so many civilians in so many different circumstances. Similarly, we’ve done a poor job of foreseeing the economic consequences of rapidly evolving digital technologies, in part because this evolution has been so incredibly rapid.

Ned Ludd and his followers were wrong about the loss of jobs inherent in the steam-powered weaving machines they were smashing back in the early 1800s. As the industrial revolution progressed, more, not fewer jobs were created. Those new jobs were more often in the city, not the village or farm, but there were nevertheless more of them, and what’s more they often required more than just an able body. Sometimes they even required genuine creativity.

We’re living in a new post-revolutionary world, where again jobs are not what they used to be, and where right now there may be fewer of them. Whether we can adapt to, work with rather than against the new machines to create a new and better society is the question once again at hand.

Suicide Watch: the CBC in Crisis

Posted on June 5, 2013 by rbeairsto

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was effectively born a mixed-blood child back in 1929, taking over a series of radio stations first set up by the Canadian National Railway. Early CBC radio broadcasts included American programming, and, even in my day, as a kid growing up the late 50s, early 60s, CBC was ‘affiliated’ with many privately owned radio stations across Canada, replete with ads.

The breakthrough came in 1974, when the radio network stopped running commercial advertising. What followed was an unprecedented flowering of creativity and quality that saw CBC Radio become as good as any broadcast service that’s ever been offered, anywhere. In the wake of that 1974 decision, CBC went on to undoubtedly become the most important cultural institution in the country.

I have to stress that these accolades belong rightly to CBC Radio, as opposed to CBC television, which began in 1958 with an impossible blend of commercial and public mandates, and has never been allowed to try flying without the debilitating weight of advertisers (and therefore the abiding incentive to seek higher ratings).

Last week the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (the CRTC) granted the CBC up to four minutes of advertising per hour on Radio 2, the music arm of the network, beginning what will surely be the death throes of CBC radio as we have known it. This coup de grâce comes after decades of brutal cutbacks to the Corporation, all while overall federal spending climbed steadily. The most recent will see a further 10% cut from CBC’s annual budget by 2014.

Thus you might lay the blame for its demise at the feet of CBC’s hostile patron in Ottawa, which has, over the years and despite it all, born the critical brunt of mostly exceptional CBC news services. But this latest blow has of course come at the behest of CBC management, desperate to maintain its own viability. It’s CBC staffers who have initiated their own suicide watch, in a mad attempt to stay alive by imitating the very private stations which threaten them.

CBC has one and only one viable future—as a distinct alternative to the private broadcasters. What possible justification for its taxpayer outlay can the CBC find in providing what the private stations are already providing? It should be but somehow isn’t dreadfully apparent to CBC executives that every inch closer to their commercial counterparts they step is an inch closer to their own oblivion.

It’s likely too late for CBC TV. For a nation as small as Canada, in today’s media marketplace, it’s likely just too expensive to produce quality television with taxpayer dollars. What’s more, CBC television was simply too cruelly compromised from the outset, never able to assume the robust communal role that might have won it unambiguous public approval. CBC TV’s only hope for survival now is as a PBS-style broadcaster focusing upon news, public affairs and other serious, not schlocky (i.e. Battle of the Blades) factual programming. That means no sports, and, like PBS, no original production of dramatic shows. (In anticipation of all those who would cry ‘elitist’ in the face of the reduced audience that such a content shift would entail, let me say that I and many others like me would gladly, immediately contribute their own personal monies to such a service, were it to be commercial free.)

As to CBC radio, it certainly isn’t as good as it used to be when bigger budgets meant a more international focus. But from AM’s The Sunday Edition, hosted by Michael Enright—who himself should be considered something of a national treasure—to Rich Terfry’s Radio 2 Drive, which, for my money, provides the best music programming anywhere on the dial, CBC Radio has, amazingly, been able to pretty much get it right. This formerly brilliant and still great national lead character must not be allowed to hang itself. Canadians everywhere should stand up and shout, as loudly as they possibly can, at both their MPs and at the frightened, misguided CBC managers, calling for the preservation of a genuinely public radio broadcaster, 100% government and listener-supported.

Otherwise we should just pull the plug right now, before it gets too painful to behold.

The Robots Are Coming! The Robots Are Coming!

Posted on May 31, 2013 by rbeairsto

“Technology will get to everybody eventually.”

Jarod Lanier said the above during an interview with a writer from Salon.com, the news and entertainment website; this during Lanier’s book tour for his latest publication: Who Owns the Future? Lanier is the internet apostate I wrote about earlier this year who once championed open-source culture, but who now suggests that digital technology is economically undermining the entire middle-class.

He offers this startling example of as much in the ‘Prelude’ to his new book:

“At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people.”

Lanier is suggesting that the musicians, video store clerks and journalists who have already seen their livelihoods erased or eroded by the internet are just the canaries in the coalmine, members of the first wave of economic casualties. Soon the driverless Google cars will be taking down taxi drivers, caregivers will be replaced by robots, and all diagnoses of illness will be arrived at online. The digital revolution is coming for us all, and it’s not a matter of if, but when.

The same chilling note is struck in a terrific article by Kevin Drum in the May/June 2013 issue of Mother Jones. Drum points out that the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been steady but not spectacular since the invention of the first programmable computer in 1940. That’s because the human brain is an amazingly complex processor, and even today, after more than seven decades of exponential increase in the power of computers, they are still operating at about one thousandth of the power of a human brain.

The thing is, exponential is the key word here. Anyone who has ever looked at an exponential growth curve plotted on a graph knows that for a long time the line runs fairly flat, but with the doubling effect that comes with exponential growth, the curve eventually begins a very steep climb. Many people believe that we’re now at the base of that sharp rise. Henry Markram, a neuroscientist working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne thinks he will be able to successfully model the human brain by 2020.

He may or may not be right in that prediction, but again, if he is wrong, it won’t be about if, only when. And when we combine that eventual reality with Lanier’s telling Kodak-to-Instagram employment factoid above, there appears to be grounds for genuine concern. Finally, after many years of dire (or celebratory) predictions, labor may be about to go into real oversupply. If these ideas are at all accurate, robots will soon be displacing human employment just about everywhere you look. Accountants, teachers, architects, the last of the assembly-line workers, even writers; we’re all vulnerable. As Drum sees it, capital, not labor will be the commodity in short supply in the near future, and that bodes well only for those folks who already have plenty of capital.

One of the conditions that follows from an oversupply of labor and an increased demand for capital is of course that wealth will flow from those earning salaries to those holding the capital. The proverbial rich will get richer, the poor poorer. And this condition is of course extant and growing, especially in the U.S.—an escalating income inequality between the 99 and 1 per cents.

History tells us that times of high unemployment are times dangerous to us all, often leading to unrest that in turn leads to illusory socio-economic solutions— communism, fascism, anti-immigration laws, etc. What to do? Well, anticipate the problem, first of all. Our leaders need to make some contingency plans.

A tax on capital? Not likely any time soon, certainly not in America. But if indeed the coming economic reality is that more and more people will be without work, while a select few citizens will be ever more wealthy, the concept of ‘income redistribution’ needs to come into play, one way or another. And orderly, democratic economic reform beats the hell out of rioting in the streets.

Oligarchs of the Internet

Posted on May 24, 2013 by rbeairsto

Steve Jobs had no use for philanthropy. There is no record of him having made any charitable donations during his lifetime, despite his immense wealth. Jobs never signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s ‘billionaire’s pledge,’ to give at least half of his fortune to charity, as have more than 100 other exceptionally wealthy individuals from around the globe. He also condoned sweatshop conditions—for children—at Apple manufacturing sites in China. Apple employs about 700,000 people via subcontractors, according to The New York Times, but almost none of them work in the U.S. Steve had no problem with any of this.

(His wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, has a better record than Steve when it comes to giving back, having emerged from his shadow after his death to contribute actively to a number of worthy causes, especially education.)

Mark Zuckerberg did sign Buffet’s pledge, but it’s also the case that last year Facebook spent nearly $2.5 million lobbying in Washington against tougher privacy laws, and for immigration reform that would allow the employment of immigrant IT workers at lower wages. Like Jobs, Zuckerberg is taxes-averse, and Facebook actually succeeded in paying no taxes last year, despite profits of more than a billion dollars.

How about Google, the ‘Don’t be evil’ corporation? Sergey Brin and his wife have been generous, particularly in giving to the battle against Parkinson’s disease (Brin carries the flawed Parkinson’s gene), but a recent article in Wired magazine strikes a disturbing note. The piece recounts how, in 2009, a low-life drug dealer named David Whitaker was looking for leniency from the US Food and Drug Administration after being busted for selling steroids and human growth hormones online from a base of operations in Mexico. He told the FDA that he had marketed his sometimes-phony drugs into the US using Google Adwords, something supposedly expressly prohibited by Google’s policies. All he had needed to do, it seems, was work directly with Google reps to tailor his website into something more ‘educational’—no ‘buy now’ buttons, no photos of drugs, that sort of thing—and, even though he made no attempt to conceal the true nature of his business, Google was happy to help. The Feds were initially skeptical, but set up Whitaker in a new, bogus operation as a sting, to test whether he was telling the truth. This time his venture would include sales of RU-486, the abortion pill, which is normally taken only under the supervision of a medical doctor.

A few months later it was abundantly clear that Whitaker was indeed being truthful. The feds took legal action, and in 2011, Google settled out of court, paying a $500 million fine. A brief statement from the company admitted that, “With hindsight, we shouldn’t have allowed these ads on Google in the first place.”

Jay Gould

Great success brings great size, and with size comes a kind of corporate momentum that inevitably stresses sales over principles. It’s not an across-the-board phenomenon—the post-CEO Bill Gates being the obvious exception—but it’s clear that many of today’s internet lords are not necessarily cut from cloth any different than were the notorious robber barons of the past, men like Jay Gould, who in 1869 attempted to corner the market in gold, hoping that the increase in price would increase the price of wheat, such that western farmers would then sell, causing a great amount of shipping of bread stuffs eastward, increasing freight business for the Erie railroad, which Gould was trying to take control of. The ploy may have been complex, even ingenious, but it also brought Gould infamy, eventually forcing him out of an ownership position with the Railroad.

Today’s web oligarchs enjoy much higher approval ratings than did their 19th century corporate predecessors. It’s been reported that some members of Occupy Wall Street stopped to mourn at the impromptu memorial site set up outside the Apple Store in Manhattan, following Steve Jobs’ death.

We serfs of the imperial internet realm can do better. Great product does not always mean a worthy producer, and the ends never justify the means. We can demand more from the web-based corporations and corporation heads who profit so handsomely from our purchases and our use of their services. We can, at the very least, expect generosity.

Luddites Unite!

Posted on May 17, 2013 by rbeairsto

‘Luddite’ has in recent years come to function as a generic pejorative, describing an unthinking, head-in-the sand type afraid of all new forms of technology. It’s an unfair use of the term.

‘Luddite’ originates with a short-lived (1811 to 1817) protest movement among British textile workers, men who went about, usually under cover of darkness, destroying the weaving frames then being introduced to newly emerging ‘factories.’ These were the early days of the industrial revolution, and the new manufacturing facilities being attacked were supplanting the cottage-based industry the Luddites were a part of, leading to widespread unemployment, and therefore genuine hardship. It was an age long before the existence of any kind of social safety net, times when employers were free to hire children, and they did so, at reduced wages, since the new machines were much easier to operate, requiring little of the skill possessed by the adult artisans being left behind. (Just as causative in the sufferings of these newly unemployed were the prolonged Napoleonic wars that the British government was incessantly engaged in back then, at great economic expense.) My point being that the Luddites were not opposed to technology per se; they were simply striking back at machinery which was making their lives well and truly miserable. People were literally starving.

The term ‘Neo-Luddite’ has emerged in our day, referring, in author Kirkpatrick Sale’s words, to “a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age.” The vast majority of the people involved in this modern-day movement eschew violence, counting among their members prominent academics like the late Theodore Roszak, and eminent men of letters like Wendell Berry. Again, the movement is not anti-technology per se, only anti-certain-kinds-of-technology, that is technology which might be described as anti-community.

Back in the 1970s, I read, quite avidly I might add, Ivan Illich’s book Tools for Conviviality, which from its very title, you might construe to be Neo-Luddite in its intent. And you’d be largely right. Illich condemned the use of machines like the very ones the British Luddites were smashing back in the 19th century—factory-based, single-purpose machines meant first of all for greater generation of the owner’s monetary profit. The interesting thing is that Illich considered the then-ubiquitous pay phone as a properly convivial tool. Anyone could use it, as often or seldom as they chose, to their own end, and the phone facilitated communication between individuals, that is community.

It’s not hard to see where all this is going. Illich’s book was directly influential upon Lee Felsenstein, considered by many to be father of the personal computer. Felsenstein was a member the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, which first met in Silicon Valley in 1975, spawning various founders of various microcomputer companies, including Steve Wozniak of Apple. The original ethos espoused by members of the Club stressed peer-to-peer support, open-source information, and the autonomous operation of an individually owned machine.

Were he still alive, Ivan Illich would undoubtedly think of the personal computer, and of the smart phone as convivial tools. But Illich had another concern associated with current technology—the rise of a managerial class of experts, people who were in a position to co-opt technical knowledge and expertise, and eventually control industries like medicine, agriculture and education. Would the Lords of the computer age—those who control Google, Facebook, Apple—be considered by Illich to be members of a new managerial elite?

It’s not easy to say. I suspect Illich would indeed think of the CEOs of companies like Toyota, General Electrics, and Royal Dutch Shell as members of a managerial elite, ultimately alienating workers from their own employment. But Larry Page, the CEO of Google, who claims the company motto as, “Don’t be evil?”; is he too one of the new internet overlords?

The Neo-Luddites are right in saying that what we must all do is carefully discriminate among new forms of technology. We must consider the control, the intent, the final gain associated with each type. Convivial technology adds to our independence, as well as our efficiency. It informs and empowers the user, not an alternate owner, nor the cloud-based controller of the medium. If we could all make the distinction between convivial and non-convivial technology, it might make Luddites of us all.

The Storytelling Arc

Posted on May 10, 2013 by rbeairsto

Storytelling may be the most ancient art of all. Before we as a species even had language, before we smeared charcoal goop on the palms of our hands and pressed them against the cave wall, we told one another stories. I’ve written about this in a book entitled The Tyranny of Story, describing a scene where our cave-dwelling ancestors related the events of the day’s hunt while they sat around the fire that evening. In the morning the men had set off as a hunting party, leaving the old, the women and the children behind. Later that day they returned, carrying a large, now dead, formerly very dangerous beast; this while also carrying one of their own party, seriously injured. Another man limped behind the others, less seriously wounded.

Is there any way that those who remained behind didn’t want to hear exactly how it all happened? Who first saw the brute? Who struck the first blow? Who struck the killing blow? How were the men injured? I can’t imagine that, in those days before words, never mind a written language, the men of the hunting party didn’t act out the critical moments of the successful hunt, leaping about, gesturing, uttering grunts not so far removed from words; there with the others of their tribe watching, transfixed, while the fire cast exaggerated shadows of their ‘acting’ upon the cave walls. How else was theatre, that is to say storytelling born?

And so we’ve been at it, telling one another stories, for so long that it may well now be in our genes, as some sort of ancestral memory, making us all story experts, at least as members of the audience. We now don’t hesitate to pass judgment on any story. It’s one of those things—like the proper functioning of the public school system, or the correct treatment for the common cold—that we are all unquestioned authorities on.

Until the Internet, for most storytellers, the audience hardly expanded beyond those other members of the tribe seated around the fire. Once you chose a medium more complex than the air between you and a live audience, whether it was a newspaper, book, television show or movie, there were gatekeepers who held it as their job to judge whether your story was worthy of an expanded audience. It would, after all, cost money to print, publish, broadcast or project your story, other people’s money, and it was to be determined that your story would garner an audience sufficiently broad to return a profit upon the investment of those folks’ money, before you the wannabe storyteller were to be granted access to that larger audience.

It is perhaps the single best thing about the coming of the web that these gatekeepers can now be effectively circumvented. As Robert Tercek has observed in a 2011 TEDx talk, for decades now, “we’ve outsourced our storytelling to professionals.” We’ve had little choice in the matter; we’ve been obliged to allow professional storytellers in the book, television and movie industries to tell our stories for us. But no more. With the coming of the Internet, we’ve all been given the opportunity ‘to reclaim the power of the personal narrative.’

This is no small thing. Telling stories is how we try to lend meaning to our lives, how we attempt to make sense of the random chaos of experience, then pass along any insights we have gained in that attempt. As filmmaker Hal Hartley has said, “When people tell stories to one another, they really want to talk about the meaning of life.” I tell my students, when I can, to celebrate this opportunity, to seize it, to tell their own stories however and whenever they can, whether it be with animated drawings, words, video images or sounds.

Let me tell you too. Grab a camera, pick up your laptop, plug in a microphone. Tell a story, then share it, potentially, with me and millions of other people. Take advantage of the new, truly wonderful and interactive opportunity now available to us all to share our stories. If you do, you’ll be celebrating not only this new, marvelous opportunity; you’ll also be celebrating yourself. As you might expect, you’ll never feel better.

Surfing the Information Sea

Posted on May 3, 2013 by rbeairsto

Not long ago I was online looking for a pair of waterproof sandals. My family was heading off to Costa Rica for a wedding the following week, and I’d read that the hiking trails through many of the national parks in that tropical country could get wet and muddy. I didn’t buy or order anything in the end, but, sure enough, whenever I was online during the next few days, there were ads staring back at me for just that kind of footwear. God bless the folks at Google.

This is nothing terribly new. The change began back in December of 2009, when Google, quietly, unceremoniously, began customizing our search results according to whatever information they can garner about us by tracking our online activities. We’re talking everything here from our social media pursuits, to our political leanings, to our ‘window’ shopping. It’s a whole new era where the giants of the online world—Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft—are all engaged in a furious race to gather as much data as they can on us, so that they can then sell it to advertisers.

They’ve created what MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser calls a “filter bubble” around each of us, and the implications of this process are profound. You’d like to think that there’s an element of objectivity involved when you search for any particular information online. You’re looking to discover the best electric lawnmower, or the dates for the War of the Roses, or how to make yogurt at home, and you assume that Google will simply bring you unbiased info from the most popular, or the most authenticated sites. Don’t be too sure. We are all increasingly living within our own unique information bubble, as determined by the Google algorithm, and that determination is made with money in mind.

It’s an unsettling prospect, especially when combined with what Nicholas Carr first suggested back in 2008 in an article in The Atlantic magazine—that Google is also making us stupid. Carr feels that online reading has essentially become an ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) experience, one where we skim, multitask, skip from one information bit to another, all in a disorderly process very different from the “deep reading” we used to do in the past. Feeling guilty? I confess. I think I may have developed an online reading technique which has me reading mostly just the opening sentence of the paragraph in each article or post I arrive at on the net. ’Surfing’ may be an old but still perfect descriptor of the process—staying up on the surface of the article, moving fast, perhaps enjoying the ride, but rarely stopping to ponder or examine what lies beneath.

Carr quite rightly points out that science has in recent times proven that our brain is not a static entity, even in adulthood. It regularly rewires itself according to the stimuli or exercise we give it. Therefore the likelihood that, when reading online the way I do, I am training my brain to be skittish, incapable of sustained attention, and very easily bored. The intellectual laziness made possible by the web means that my knowledge base remains shallow, if fairly diverse.

When the Internet first arrived in our lives, it seemed too good to be true, and I guess it was. At least it was too good to last. A medium that originally seemed entirely open and accessible, free of central control, there to simply accommodate the free flow of ideas and information, has since those heady days steadily closed in upon itself. And it has done so under the sustained pressure of commercial capitalism, with all its many rewards and penalties. Alas, just like the days before cyberspace, it seems there is no free surfboard ride. As we skim the surface of the information sea, just like the surfer riding toward both rocks and sand, we should keep our head up. Maybe we should even consider jumping off, into the deeper water, before we hit the shore.

Eggs and Scam

Posted on April 26, 2013 by rbeairsto

“Egg and Bacon;
Egg, sausage and Bacon;
Egg and Spam;
Spam Egg Sausage and Spam;
Egg, Bacon and Spam;
Egg, Bacon, sausage and Spam;
Spam, Bacon, sausage and Spam;
Spam, Egg, Spam, Spam, Bacon and Spam;
Spam, Spam, Spam, Egg and Spam;
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam;
Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam.”

The above is the menu bawled out by Terry Jones playing a waitress in a 1970 Monty Python restaurant sketch while speaking to ‘Mrs. Bun,’ a customer played by Graham Chapman—who emphatically retorts, “I DON’T LIKE SPAM!” It seems that Spam, a canned meat product of dubious biological origins, was readily available in Britain during World War II, when rationing meant that many other less processed meats were not; thus the derogatory comment about the unwanted ubiquity of ‘spam.’

The term has of course subsequently come to mean any unwelcome, permeating internet messaging. Although no one is quite sure precisely where that morphed usage began, its Pythonesque source is undisputed.

I mention this curious bit of etymology because this blog was brought down by a ‘brute force’ onslaught of spam two weeks ago, and the blitz continues even now, despite various efforts by myself and the good people at myhosting.com, where this blog ephemerally resides. These messages are cloaked in language meant to convince me that the writer has actually read and much admired my post. They are also riddled with links, and apparently poorly translated from Chinese, if the number of surviving Chinese characters is any indication.

It’s a new, and infinitely more pervasive form of scam that in the past would have manifest simply as, say, a ‘contractor’ knocking on your front door to offer a spiffy new surface for your crumbling driveway, or a well-dressed man accosting you downtown one night, telling an elaborate tale of losing his car, then his wallet. I’m invariably given to wonder just what it is that motivates these obviously very capable, skilled people to pursue these nefarious practices, at such laborious length?

‘Money’ is of course the answer, that greatest of all motivators within a society where money may not always buy happiness, but where it most certainly buys status, power, creature comforts and pleasure, but then I’m given to note that people as determined and accomplished as these perpetrators could obviously earn money in less objectionable pursuits. So why do they choose the scam as employment, why a vocation with only negative consequences for the ordinary, often less able scammee?

(More specifically, in the case of modern-day spam, it seems the goal is more links, with the attendant increase in search engine profile, which is of course to say the goal is money.)

‘Easy money’ might be the next answer; it’s a pursuit with greater payoff-per-hour than other less damaging endeavors. It’s an essentially sociopathic activity, taken up by individuals who simply don’t care about the consequences for others, so long as it means money flowing to their own pockets. And I don’t think the practice is then pursued by only those inherently conscience-free; I suspect there’s an incremental opportunity-reward process at work in the corruption of these scammers. These folks simply find themselves one day in a position where they know they are doing no good for anyone, but where retreat to moral legitimacy is now difficult and costly.

As a younger man I aspired to making the world a better place, in the long term if not daily. These days my ambitions may have retreated to a position best articulated by a wise friend of mine: “Do no harm.” If each of us could simply get up each morning, then manage our day without causing any damage to others or the planet, the world would immediately be a far, far better place. If the spammers would just change the menu, the internet café would be so much more enjoyable for all us customers. Sadly, as another less wise but no less accurate friend of mine likes to say, “It ain’t happenin’.”

The Social Good

Posted on April 19, 2013 by rbeairsto

Aaron Sorkin‘s screenplay for The Social Network is, for my money, the very best of recent years. Nothing better has been written (or at least circulated in movie form) since its release in 2010, and, prior to that, it’s the best since 2004’s Sideways. Moreover, Sideways was able to operate freely within the unrestricted field of fiction, building upon more overt, invented characters. The Social Network takes real people and history as its starting points, and turns a story without much visual dynamism, or exciting events for that matter, into a tale with great resonance for our age.

It begins with a scene between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend from his Harvard College days, setting up what I think is the central question of the entire movie: ‘Is Mark Zuckerberg an asshole?’ I don’t mean to be flip or personally demeaning with this articulation, since I think the question encompasses far broader implied questions, all the way out to, ‘Is Facebook an evil force?’, or even, ‘Is the internet of overall benefit to humankind?’

Some have suggested that Zuckerberg so ardently pursued development of ‘The Facebook,” as it was then called, in a piteous attempt to overcome his nerdish status with his college coeds. I don’t see this; Zuckerberg may not have been the Brad Pitt of the 2003 Harvard campus, but the screenplay is after a more nuanced, moral examination of his motivations and character. As it adroitly points out in its final evocation of the Beatles tune, “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” Zuckerberg saw the commercial and power payoffs possible in the expansion of Facebook from the get-go, and he so vigorously pursued expansion above-all—forgoing numerous opportunities for any early cash-in—because of that.

He and his Facebook honchos would disagree of course. They had more altruistic goals in mind all along, they would claim, although no one should object to a hardworking entrepreneur seeing eventual financial gain from his efforts. No, Facebook set out to positively change the world, to make our society more transparent and open, more supportive of the individual citizen. The cause continues even today, with various Facebook campaigns purporting to ‘end loneliness,’ an admirable aim indeed. As Charlie Chaplin once wrote, loneliness is “the theme of everyone.”

And in many ways Facebook has succeeded in changing the world. For all intents and purposes, it’s a new medium now, serving almost one sixth of the world’s population, becoming the equivalent of what the telephone was to my generation. My parents were never so generous, but I remember well the clichéd image from the 60s of the teenage daughter who had to have her own telephone line, such were the extended hours she spent in phone conversation with her friends each evening.

Zuckerberg has said that, “You only have one identity,’ and that may be true now, but it wasn’t always so. In the past, it was far easier to reinvent oneself, if one needed to, by simply leaving town. As others have pointed out, unlike the teenage girl’s phone conversation, your Facebook profile is neither passing nor private; there’s no more leaving the past behind if you’ve been a regular updater over the years.

But the change has not of course been evenly or fairly applied. Just as with the industrial revolution, the accumulation of capital in the hands of the leading entrepreneurs of the day has occurred concurrent with many people losing their jobs just as many others land new ones. One telling example pointed out by Jarod Lanier is Google Translate which has steadily poached from the work of air-breathing translators, progressively improving itself on the backs of these labourers, to the point where many of them are now obsolete. And we may be sure no royalties were paid for the millions of translation samples pilfered silently, anonymously.

One of the more interesting moral questions posed in The Social Network script is whether or not Zuckerberg was guilty of stealing the idea for Facebook from that inherent in a software scheme brought to him by the Winklevoss twins, a couple of his Harvard cohorts. The courts eventually said he was, and those cohorts too were then set for life, but Zuckerberg’s stated defense against the charge is particularly revealing: “I didn’t use any of their code!” If only the moral question involved can be that narrowly defined.

The digital revolution has brought many benefits to many people, but again, just like the industrial revolution, there are painful adjustments involved, and those capitalists at the top of the new economic order will not be easily swayed to ensuring that they always do the greater good. They will need to be restrained at times, on issues of privacy for instance, and no matter how fervent Mark Zuckerberg is in his belief that he is changing the world for the better, the change is neither guaranteed nor uniform.

Rich and Famous

Posted on April 6, 2013 by rbeairsto

Back in 1968, Andy Warhol notably said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Back then, the gates to fame were securely guarded by the sober keepers of what was referred to as ‘mass media.’ Few had access to any form of media beyond a ‘photocopier,’ and so it took great skill or achievement, or spectacularly bad luck or choices to gain a remote audience of more than a handful.

I think of Michael James Brody Jr., who in 1970 announced he would be giving away one million dollars, and who was then of course immediately engulfed in media attention, including an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, where he prophetically sang a less than distinguished version of Bob Dylan’s, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” (Proving that opportunistic might be a more accurate descriptor for the mass media of the day than discriminating.) Indeed, Brody quickly faded from the public eye, committing suicide in 1973; his life a sad comment on Warhol’s original pronouncement.

These days anyone who can turn on a computer has access to an international medium, and the average teenager on Facebook has more than 500 ‘friends’ providing an instant audience. The average 22-year-old in Britain has more than 1000 Facebook friends. Certainly it amounts to a ‘network’ of sorts, encompassing plenty of people who can’t be considered friends in any genuine sense, but who nevertheless, as the YouTube slogan formerly suggested, allow the individual to resemble a minor-league ‘broadcaster.’

Numbers still count of course. Google Adsense does not come sniffing around any blog without a serious number of daily clicks. (Google makes searching for an accurate take on this number remarkably unproductive.) So when it comes to money, big dogs still rule the kennel, and in that sense not much has changed. But in other important ways nearly everything has changed. Now any ordinary mortal can ‘share’ everything from the breakup of her most recent relationship to, famously, unwisely, his participation in last night’s riot. And with these changes, the very conception of privacy seems to have morphed for current 20somethings. (The average 50something has roughly 50 times fewer Facebook friends than the 20something.) Any smart phone now knows precisely where we are at all times, and, if we wish, it will happily notify all our friends of as much whenever they happen to be in the neighbourhood. More ominously, if Eli Pariser in The Filter Bubble is right, facial recognition technology will soon advance to the point where whomever—the government, your employer, your husband—will be able to search for you wherever security cameras may have observed you, which is just about everywhere, isn’t it? The prospect represents a virtual paradigm shift in our public/private lives. As Pariser, writes, “The ability to search by face will shatter many of our illusions about privacy and anonymity.”

Personally, I’ve never quite grasped the attraction of fame, at any scale, whether it be via The New York Times or Facebook. Money, sure; it’s highly convenient. Power, again sure, if you’re able to contend with its corrupting capacity. Fame can obviously facilitate these other, more ostensibly desirable ends, but fame in the sense that you won’t be able to go out in public without being recognized, that strangers might approach you, looking for some sort of buzz of interaction—the very idea that anonymity will be gone for you—I just don’t see the payoff in that.

In June of 1968, Valerie Solanas, a marginal figure in Andy Warhol’s notorious ‘Factory’ scene, tried to kill him. She very nearly did, and Warhol had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. Maybe it’s just my perverse take on things, but the attempt seems to be the apogee of the dark side of fame. A murder attempt is obviously not the sort of attention anyone needs, but then, the need for widespread attention seems to me to be something all of us should regard with suspicion. As David Bowie has suggested, “Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.”

Ten Seconds of Silence

Notes From a DeAccelerated Isle by Ric Beairsto