A Critical Need

"Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof...

Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose."

Leon Wieseltier
an essay in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review

One Amazing Old Trick to Make Millions!

Shocking Top Ten of All Time Made Easy!
photo credit

Andrew Marantz in the New Yorker recently profiled young Emerson Spartz, crowning him King of Clickbait.  The Spartz new-media company made millions in ad revenue last year, and attracted even more millions in venture capital.  At 27, Spartz is widely admired, the article says, he's "inspiring," "awesome," "impressive."  One of his investors is quoted as calling him "a Steve Jobs kind of guy...I think his stuff is indicative of where digital media is heading."

If that's true it's heading in the direction of manipulation on the order of Orwellian cubed. And theft.  Theft is very old news, and apparently very new media.  For that seems to be how the Spartz sites make money.  They steal the work of others.

It's not just that Spartz is a self-righteous Philistine whose idea of how to make a great song is to get 40 people to record vocals, ask thousands of people to pick their favorite, then use the winner. "To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio, he says. "Art is that which science has not yet explained.”

Or even that his model for success is relentless cynicism, which is admittedly widely shared among those trying to get attention through the Internet.  His websites are all about attracting traffic, and learning what content and packaging attracts the most traffic at a given moment.

It's the same sort of technique that fills my inbox with email appeals for political donations that vary mostly by the subject line and the purported sender. (At least I hope President Obama isn't spending a lot of time drawing boxes for me to check beside the amount of my donation.)  The idea is to throw a lot of subject lines out there, see which ones succeed the best, take the top five or so and use them, throw out the rest, and invent another five to test tomorrow.  Or more likely, later today.

Similar techniques are used to test and select photos and copy, including the kind that appear as ads on just about every web site, and contribute to making otherwise substantive sites look and feel like the back pages of tabloid papers and cheap magazines.

But moron bait (and there's a moron lurking in all of us) is only part of it.  There's the content, and where it comes from.  One of Spartz Inc.'s sites, called Dose, publishes lists.  (Lots of sites do that these days, because as Spartz proclaims, "Lists just hijack the brain's neural circuitry." This is your brain.  This is your brain on the Internet.)  For example, “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.”  But all Spartz did was slightly repackage this information (as other similar sites had already done.)  They didn't do the research, and didn't even link to the guys who did, let alone pay them a fee or a cut of their winnings. On Dose, the list got 200,000 page views, very good for advertisers, and very good for Dose. The New Yorker:

'The Dose post, which received more Facebook shares than its precursors, briefly mentioned D’Aluisio and Menzel (though D’Aluisio’s name was misspelled). But their book, “What I Eat,” went unmentioned, and they certainly did not share in the advertising revenue. “This took us four years and almost a million dollars, all self-funded,” Menzel told me. “We are trying to make that money back by selling the book and licensing the images. But these viral sites—the gee-whiz types that are just trying to attract eyeballs—they don’t pay for licensing. They just grab stuff and hope they don’t get caught."'

But when you have no respect at all for content or for authorship, theft is probably not how you think about it.  Spartz admits that content is of no interest to him: "We considered making Dose more mission-driven,” he said. “Then I thought, rather than facing that dilemma every day—what’s going to get views versus what’s going to create positive social impact?—it would be simpler to just focus on traffic.”

As someone who creates "content" (i.e. writes stuff) on the Internet, I'm waiting for the argument that convinces me that making millions from somebody else's work isn't theft.  Sure seems like it to me.

Maybe it doesn't occur to them that real people have worked to gather information, judge its value, see patterns, check it, find where it fits in larger contexts, craft it into a story etc. or even a damn list.  Because most of their work is done by mindless algorithms.

But not even that charitable excuse will wash.  Spartz himself says why. On earlier sites they featured novel combinations of images, with text that reflected at least a few minutes of online research—but with Dose “we’ve stopped doing that as much because more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”

Right--stealing is so quick and easy! Let other people do the creative and actual work.  It's been the secret of success for generations of robber barons.  How inspiring!

What's really amazing is that Spartz got started at the age of 12 by creating a Harry Potter fan site.  He got to meet J.K. Rowling.  Does he now think that the way to create a Harry Potter saga is to propose alternative plot points, and choose what happens by vote?  Not that plot is the only factor in the saga's success--there's characters and their characteristics, descriptions, pacing, chapter order, chapter content, right down to the individual words. Not to mention the values, morality and emotion within it all. Got algorithms for that?  And if you did, do you really think the whole Potter thing would have happened, including inspiring a 12 year old in Chicago to create a fan site?

And how do you suppose Jo Rowling feels about somebody appropriating somebody else's creative work--say, Harry Potter?  Maybe let her lawyers answer that for you, although she's been known to show up in court herself to defend her intellectual property.

The New Yorker article mentions an internal study at the New York Times lamenting that their Internet site isn't creating these viral blizzards.  What's scary about this memo is that journalism in its various forms and functions is talked about only in the argot that Spartz and his ilk own.  When you define what you are doing by the premises and terminology of those whose mission sees yours as irrelevant, and they're out to destroy you or just suck you dry, you've pretty much lost already.

The New Yorker article ends with Spartz' ultimate solution: “The lines between advertising and content are blurring,” he said. “Right now, if you go to any Web site, it will know where you live, your shopping history, and it will use that to give you the best ad. I can’t wait to start doing that with content. It could take a few months, a few years—but I am motivated to get started on it right now, because I know I’ll kill it.”

I'm guessing that Marantz, with some old media skills, didn't end the piece with "kill it" by accident.

Spartz begins his canned speeches by proclaiming that he wants to change the world.  Apparently he is doing so.  He's helping to make it way way worse.

News Week: Lows and Highs

The news quite often causes us to wonder just how low human beings can go, and how insane elements of our culture can become.  "Curiosity" about these is likely a big reason the internet is what it is these days.  I'm not generally in sympathy with this obsession for the darkest and most bizarre to tweet and tsk tsk about.  And as farcical as it gets, I don't look for my laughs there either.

But sometimes such evidence is unavoidable, as in the aftermath of the death by suicide of Robin Williams.  Based on very early reporting, the internet and its established news sites (including those associated with long established if now desperate print publications) were flooded with analyses and especially first person comparisons, opinions, etc. of all kinds.  All based, as it turned out but not surprisingly, on incomplete information.  Thursday his wife revealed that he had known he was in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, of which depression is a common symptom.

But the usual range of opportunism and self-aggrandizement (along with sincere remembrances) were utterly innocent in comparison with the hateful and hate-filled comments by rabid right extremists, including so-called leaders and so-called Christians.  I won't dignify their repulsive and cynical and corrupt commentary by repeating any of it or identifying any of them, especially since their primary goal is to get named.

On top of this, the tendency of internet sites and social media to attract those most twisted with hate, ego and myriad delusions, culminating in one of Robin Williams' daughters being so bullied and abused that she quit all of her social media accounts.

Yet the news also provides us with contrasts, which may be straws to grasp but definitely are loci of hope.  This past week provided at least these:

The Fields Medal, widely regarded as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, was won for the first time in history by a woman:  Maryam Mirzakhani, a Stanford University professor who was born in Iran.  Her work is called boldly original and it appears to cross boundaries between traditional mathematical disciplines.  To somebody who couldn't understand trig, it sounds as if it can be significant beyond academic math.

The victory of course is as well for all the women who were told, and all the girls who still are told one way or another, that girls aren't good at math, it's for males only.  For them this is the academic equivalent of  Lisa Leslie's first WNBA slam dunk.  And that's before the significance of her work itself can be evaluated in the future.

Then there's the Little League World Series, and the victory of Jackie Robinson West of Chicago in their first game, sparked by three--count 'em, three--home runs (plus a triple) by leadoff batter Pierce Jones.  Representing Great Lakes Region as the Illinois state champs, Jackie Robinson West from the South Side of Chicago is the first all-black team to make it to the LLWS in "over a decade" (according to this ESPN report) and the first Chicago team since the 80s.  The team is part of the league's urban initiative program begun 15 years ago.  

Best of all perhaps, they are the toast of Chicago.  The Jackie Robinson West team doesn't know, said their coach, how big they are back in Chicago.  Another ESPN piece quotes: Gabe Bump, fiction writer and Chicago resident, said of this JRW run for the right to do something seldom seen by any Little League team from Chicago, "It's important because they are the kids Chicago wants to forget about. These are the kids that get their schools closed. I'm rooting for them because they're South Side kids, but it's much more to it than that."

The story concludes: "here's almost a feeling that what is happening now has nothing to do with sports. It's something much bigger. At least, that's the way it is being taken in; that is how it is being embraced. Basically, calling this a feel-good story is underselling the true nature of the weight this story carries at this moment."

Update: On the second day of the Little League World Series, Pennsylvania team pitcher Mo'Ne Davis threw a two-hitter to become the first female pitcher to win a LLWS game.  She's also black.  Apart from the extra-sports significance, these stories are big deals for baseball because the proportion of African American MLB players has been diminishing.  

Internet Dystopia

Someone left behind a copy of Wired magazine at the Post Office, so I picked it up.  It's a big thick issue with a story headlined on the cover that sounded interesting.  I paged through it, while searching for the table of contents or at least the article, and I was amazed.  Ad after glossy ad, mostly for men's luxury products.  There were half a dozen ads just for high-end wristwatches.  So much advertising, and I never did find the table of contents or the article.  (This isn't the issue, but the cover says alot, especially in contrast to the cover below.)

I remember Wired when it was thin and new, publishing articles by Kevin Kelley about how the Internet was going to create an automatic egalitarian Utopia.  Now it resembles nothing so much as an issue of GQ in the 1980s.  Granted that this particular issue was an old one in the holiday gift-giving season.  But even so.

With the maturation of internet-related corporations, and all the money involved, comes the same sort of excesses as previous rich businesses, like the Google executive who took and overdose (or maybe poisoned) heroin provided by an unhappy hooker on his party boat.   Kind of doesn't fit the revolutionary image.

The most conspicuous difference on the net is the nature and amount of increasingly intrusive advertising.  I've been reading Josh Marshall's site since it was a one-person blog called Talking Point Memo at least a decade ago.  Since then he's been building it as a political news and opinion site, employing a number of others.  Recently he's been pumping up a membership model with extra access while the public site is so clotted with ads in the form of video, banners, and (clearly marked) faux news that the site takes forever to load on both the browsers I use.  Extra incentive to buy the membership I guess.  But the content has itself moved to the most politically sensational, finding every right wing outrage that's easy to describe in a paragraph.  It seems to be all about the eyeballs, but this particular combination of  predictable content and intrusive advertising is losing mine.  It's not a site I check every day anymore.

The struggle for viable economic models, mostly so far involving a geometric increase in advertising, is probably one reason nobody I know of talks about the internet Utopia anymore.  Even universal access to the internet is threatened by proposed new rules that will allow different tiers of service (though in fact, providers are already doing this.) The move from desktops to new devices with very pricey service fees is creating an internet for the well-to-do and nobody else. But it's worse than that--the internet threatens to become a dystopia.

It is already a dictatorship, when users have the choice of "agreeing" to various forms of spying if they want access and services at all.  There was a kerfuffle over a "study" done at Facebook that did more than study--it changed information on individual sites.  Today there's a story based on another study that uses Google accumulated data on searches to determine what Republicans and Democrats search for during extreme weather.  If that's not an actual First Amendment violation, it should be.  But it's business as usual on the internet, where information is what these companies have to sell.

  

Clouds of Unknowing

Cloud computing, sold to a tech-drunk citizenry as the latest heavenly benefit of the corporate gods of cyberspace, is perhaps the biggest environmental blind spot left. Because, as this NPR report points out, these clouds aren't puffy white spirits smiling from the sky.  They're acres of machines on earth, needing and ravenously eating power in rapidly increasing quantities.

Right now, Greenpeace estimates that if the cloud were a country it would rank sixth in the world in power consumption, just before the actual country of Germany.  The New York Times figures it would take 30 nuclear power plants to supply it.  It also needs constant air conditioning and enormous amounts of water to keep all those fevered machines cool.

And the cloud is getting bigger all the time.  For now, most of the electricity is generated by clean energy methods, mostly wind and water power.  But how long can that last?  It may even be that so much clean energy is being soaked up by servers that a lot less is being used for the normal grid than otherwise might be the case.

Apart from the ramifications for the environment and the climate crisis, there's the issue of vulnerability.  Consumers are only too eager to cede control to corporations that store an increasing proportion of what we've learned to call information.   So photos, music and reading material as well as important documents are increasingly being stored nowhere but in some cloud somewhere.  And it takes electricity all along the way from there to you in order for it to, well, exist.

So what happens when the cloud blows up or the power goes off long enough to erase everything in the cloud? Or you lose your electricity and therefore your access for part or all of the time?  And you look around to find no photo albums, no recorded music, not even CDs or DVDs, let alone magazines or books.  Just your multiple "platforms" now connecting you to nothing.

But even without an electric Armageddon, none of this stuff (which is no longer "stuff" but digits) is actually yours anymore.  It belongs to the company that holds the cloud.  You're only renting access to it, if you accept the terms and conditions and how the hell could you not?

Though several people in my life have tried to buy me a Kindle or similar device, I've resisted.  At first it was until the devices were improved and more versatile.  And maybe until prices of books etc. came down (which is never going to happen now that so many people are hooked on the devices.)

Then this weekend I saw at TPM that subscribers (i.e. paid subscribers) were going to be discussing "the transformation from reading paper books to digital books," and proprietor Josh Marshall admitted that he switched to digital three years ago, and is now unable to read paper books anymore.  

That scared me straight.  No digital drugs for me.  When I buy a book, or borrow one from a library, it's mine.  I can hold it, carry it wherever, but most of all, it's mine.  It doesn't sit in some cloud where Amazon is always watching, and sending me emails asking me how I like it.  Or more to the point, where Amazon can always take it away from me.  Amazon, the cloud, or the grid.

"As Someone Once Said:" Jung, Martin Luther King and Quotations

"That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate."
C.G. Jung

It's a great quote, right?  It's certainly a penetrating thought, succinctly expressed.  But is it really a quote?
Did Jung really say or write it--those exact words?

A lot of sites on the Internet think so, or at least they unquestionably accept it as a true quote.  Try it yourself--do a search on the quote.  I just did again--5 out of the first 6 sites at the top use these exact words, attributed to Jung, but without a source named.  One of the top six however varies it a bit: "Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate."

To be fair, this last site was quoting a book, or rather a review of a book: a Washington Post Book Review "where it was noted to be the epigraph to Craig Nova's new novel, Cruisers..."

And I first happened on it in a actual physical book as well, in the exact form quoted up top.  It's one of three quotations at the top of an essay ("Flying Rabbits: Denizens of Distant Space") by Margaret Atwood, in her recent collection In Other Words: SF and the Human Imagination.  Atwood is a careful writer and scholar, who noted in a footnote that the quotation came from another book, Meeting the Shadow by Abrams and Zweig.

It happens that I have that book, too. It's a collection of essays by various authors, including Jung.  Eager for an exact citation, I checked it. It's not in the Jung essay, nor in the many footnoted passages from Jung's work in other essays.  The quote is again one of several on the very first page, without source.

By source or citation or attribution I mean, exactly where in Jung's work does it appear?  Nobody seems to know.  And nobody seems to care.  Because it just keeps getting repeated--and thanks to the Internet, over and over. It's even been perpetuated by multiple tweets.  If it's on the Internet it must be true, right?  It's like the quote has been friended about a million times.

Instead we get "as Carl Jung once said..."

 That it appears in slightly different form--always without attribution--is perhaps telling.  The Psyche Wizard quotes it:“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And he calls it "one of the most important quotes ever!"
 
Another site: "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Though this site does attribute some quotes, it doesn't link for this one (though as we'll see, we may be getting warmer...)

For finally, someone does have an attribution to a statement that carries the sense of this one: "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves." The citation is to Jung's Collected Works Vol. 9.  The book's title is Aion, and this quote is taken from "126" which is a paragraph number I guess.  In the paperback edition it's on p. 72.  (This site comes up earlier if you search Jung and the quotation.)

So what's the point? We know by now that some famous quotes weren't said by the person credited with them, or said at all.  We know that many are not exact.  So people have different attitudes about what constitutes a quotation.  Close still gets a cigar.

On the other hand, we're seeing at the moment a consequence of the inaccurate or paraphrased quotation--namely the one that is being sandblasted off the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue in Washington.  Right now it's touch and go whether the work will be done in time for the 50th anniversary of his speech at the March on Washington.

The controversy there was not so much accuracy as the inaccuracy gave a false impression of King's point.  A lot of the problem was context.  And in some sense that's true of lots of quotations.  For instance, Jung's.  In Aion he's making a very specific point about western civilization, and the split in Christian consciousness.  (The chapter is called "Christ, A Symbol of the Self.")

But of course Jung may well have said something very similar in another context.  He may actually have written or said the exact words of this "famous" quotation.  (I noted it because it is brilliantly expressed, and seemed familiar.  My hunch is that someone paraphrased Jung in just this way--Hillman maybe, or William Irwin Thompson, or Bly.)  But if so, nobody I've seen who quotes it has given any location in his writing where he wrote it--or even an interview where he said it.

What truly bothers me is that nobody seems to care where he said it, in what context, or whether he said it at all.    

On It

For the first couple of years of the Obama administration, the complexities of ongoing policy, administrative and legislative efforts to turn this ship of state around from the Bush years and to respond to the Great Recession sometimes meant that issues that arose suddenly didn't get addressed before they mushroomed into bigger problems.  But that's not happening anymore.

President Obama directly and forcefully addressed the question of gasoline prices on Thursday.  This I expect will be just the opening salvo in a spirited counter-offensive to the disingenuous efforts of GOPers to make political hay.  Gas prices are literally where the rubber meets the road for many people, and one of the few topics that gets discussed by people who don't like to talk politics.  Where I think GOPers misread the situation is in regards to alternative energy. My touchstone here is western PA, where a local supermarket chain literally saved itself from possible bankruptcy by offering an incentive of free gas indexed to the grocery bill.  I visited there during the last gas price jump--during the Bush administration--and was surprised to hear people talking about alternative fuels.  People are interested in what works, and despite emotions they are aware of larger problems that don't have simplistic solutions, and are likely caused by international politics, financial manipulations and the agendas of oil companies. 

The McCain campaign made fun of candidate Obama's suggestion that properly inflated tires help gas mileage, yet that's precisely what people want to hear: solutions they can implement.  It can be a delicate dance--it didn't work so well for Jimmy Carter--but especially when U.S. oil production is significantly higher than under Bush (and when the government has approved more drilling than oil companies are willing to do),  the simplistic "bumper sticker" solution of drill more may not wash anymore.  And people are even more suspicious of oil companies than the government.  GOPer politicians lie just as outrageously about Obama administration policies and actions on energy as they do on--well, everything else.  So the pushback has to continue, with the facts.

For a perhaps different constituency, the Obama administration is addressing the hot topic of privacy on the Internet with a privacy Bill of Rights that the major players have signed on to.  This comes as there's more controversy among users, and concern from state attorneys-general.

Meanwhile, I expect President Obama is having urgent if off the radar meetings on Syria, where the situation is worsening, especially in the area where three journalists were killed, including a Syrian and an American who both pleaded for the outside world to pay attention to what is happening there.  Now the survivors are surrounded, and government tanks and troops are going in for the total kill.  Secretary of State Clinton is currently involved in meetings seeking international action.

Avatar, Baby

I don't usually do "weird news" here, but I clipped this story a few weeks ago and it still says something about the strange new world we're entering, as cyberspace meets real space, and both are real life.

A 43-year old woman in Japan, a piano teacher, was a devoted player in an interactive game called "Maple Story," with its virtual world, where she had met and married a 33 year old man, an office worker in another Japanese city. That is, her avatar married his avatar within that virtual world. As part of their online marriage, they exchanged log-in information.

Then one day the teacher logged on to find that he had divorced her. "Without a word of warning," she said. "That made me so angry." Angry enough for her to use his ID and password to get access to his avatar-- and to destroy it. In revenge for the virtual divorce, she committed virtual murder.

Enter the police. The real world police. They arrested her, and transported her 620 miles to another city, where the office worker lived and where, in their terms, the crime was committed. She was jailed, on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data.

The office worker victim had apparently also been upset to find his avatar dead, and called the police.

The AP story I saw (in a real newspaper, so I have no online link) said she hadn't actually been charged yet, but the penalty for a conviction was up to five years in prison. Her real self, in a real prison, for five real years.