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Short version: To counter the real threat of fake stories – e.g., “Right-Wingers Stand By Their Fabricated Mexican Drug Cartel Raid Story” – it’s not enough to expose a lie by replacing it with a rational proof. We must also require that the leaders who benefit from such lies renounce them publicly.

Long version: We’re not so modern, our society is not so transparent, our media are not so well trained and our networks not so efficient that we are not at constant risk of visiting death and destruction upon millions as a result of a single well-placed lie. Or, worse, the lack of a truth.

The Spanish American War was, at the very least, co-produced by the yellow press. The same could be said for the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. Dozens of modern-era conflicts around the world have been launched with the help of rumor mongers. Or, more precisely, with the help of their audiences.

In the U.S., the rise of online media has re-enforced a concurrent trend towards fragmentation. It is now possible to recreate the isolation that afflicted much of 18th and 19th century America using 21st century tools.

It’s not the rare community of Amish who live curiously out of touch with mainstream reality, but the millions of Americans in every city and state who choose to break away from the difficulties of reality – the paradoxes of being human, so frail and so noble – by immersing themselves in a stream of “perfect news,” where no revelation ever contradicts dogma.

We turn to news for information that is “new” and thus valuable. By definition, that which is news is a discontinuity in the state of things. (If the weather was 70°F every day and night of the year, if it never changed, there would be no interest in weather reports.) True news is challenging. It is a process by which we confront the external.

But orthodoxy does not tolerate change from without. Thus, “perfect news” must simulate the experience of encountering new-ness which, quite to the contrary, is old as it never challenges prejudices or held beliefs.

Perfect news – or propaganda – is thus a fantastic and especially pernicious trap. It’s the appearance of a rational process which disguises an ongoing flight into fancy. It’s the inspector who signs off on a building filled with empty fire extinguishers. The hospital pharmacy stocked with placebos. The emergency phone that has been unplugged from its jack.

Such entirely superficial arrangements inevitably fall apart. Idiots do not make effective leaders. Communities under the spell of crazed authoritarians or a collective delusion always collapse. (The emperor’s new clothes is an ancient and universal reminder.) But dupes play an indispensable role in every con. Even complex democracies such as our own, where there are myriad checks and balances to prevent such catastrophes, can host dangerous con games.

Well-informed, rational leaders can benefit tremendously from the support of constituents who have lost their grip on reality. History is rife with examples of leaders who have “shorted” their own clients (supporters) by making private deals that are contrary to their own public and/or their constituents’ positions. (The person selling the magic beans seldom believes they are magical – otherwise, why put them up for sale?)

These cons can only be carried out for as long as the constituents believe their leaders share their delusions. By forcing leaders who are playing a con to lay out their positions, these leaders are forced to take on the exposure inherent in that position. Live by the lie, die by the lie.

Side note
Whatever the short-term costs of news gathering may be, they are an essential “operating expense” for maintaining a transparent and thus efficient marketplace.

We’re not quite sure how we will pay to expose lies and replace them with rational proofs – i.e., journalism in the digital age – but I think we can be sure that we’ll find a way to cover this cost as long as we’re all invested in an efficient market.

Movies look like dreams because we make sense of movies the same way we make sense of dreams, ignoring the gaps between scenes, the discontinuity, the leaps in logic.

To make a movie about dreams is easy: tell the audience they are watching a dream. But to make a great movie about dreams is much harder: you have to inspire the audience to care about what happens after telling them, repeatedly, that none of what they are seeing is really happening.

Inception doesn’t rise to that challenge. It focuses its considerable energies not on why we dream or how we think but rather on its wind-up plot, a fascinating whirling mechanism that has captivated millions.

But who cares when this spinning top falls? No one in the movie appears to. I doubt the director does. Perhaps audience members who bought a large soda do, especially after a two and a half hour Parade of MacGuffins.

Had the director and writers chosen to be either less or more serious about dreams, viewers might be less likely to feel they’ve been taken for a ride.

It’s no bother to be dropped off exactly where you started if you know you are boarding a roller coaster with its closed loop and mechanical thrills.

But to be told you’re on a journey to deep insights and then get spun around for a while before being dropped off, only to realize, as your inner ear settles, that you’re none the wiser, is a let down.

Synecdoche, New York | Being John Malkovich – genuine feelings + awesome action sequences = Inception.

The New York Times:

“[The Gulf of Mexico] has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years.”

Mother Jones:

Last week, the emcee that accompanies the [female] oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, “Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!” The workers—part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots—the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered.

I recently came across a restaurant on Yelp.com, Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco, with nearly two thousand reviews.

I guess the average number of reviews for a restaurant in San Francisco — or in that neighborhood, at least — is more like 20. So nearly 2,000 reviews is something else.

This business has been line-out-the-door popular for decades. Is some secret of its success hidden inside its customer reviews on Yelp?

Would analysis of these reviews tell us anything about the vendor or, more likely, what its customers have in common?

Can those consumer insights shed any light on how that business has excelled?

To be clear: the best way to investigate a business’ success is to patronize it: to go to it, observe its service and sample its product. Over time. But if you also wanted to survey its customers, a service like Yelp could be data rich. For a low research cost.

Related
Previously on Yelp.

Can the price of homes tell you anything about who will gravitate to a neighborhood; will they be young or old? With or without children? Double or single income?

Perhaps if home prices over time are combined with Census data you could peg the movements of families to price changes and see what prices stimulate what migrations.

Maybe.

corner #2 by ron gilad

LA tall table by Faktura

Dave Pell:

When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.

That model works for some incoming data. I only need a few seconds to come up with my official response to much of what is shared by way of the realtime web: Farmville update (hide), Foursquare Check-in (ignore), Mel Gibson tape (email link to Rabbi), Kid in a watermelon (retweet).

Other news and information doesn’t necessarily fit into the new instant-response model. But as everything merges into a single stream, it’s getting more difficult to turn off the reflex and the sense of urgency long enough to identify the data that requires a little more consideration.

via Jon Gruber.

AutoSummarize by Jason Huff: “The top 100 most downloaded copyright free books summarized using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function and organized alphabetically.”

Remission by Katja Mater: “…I take a picture of the complete content of a book, shooting all pages on one negative…A summary, ending up in a book shaped blur.”

A few weeks ago I wrote that market crashes are a form of feedback, but also a very inefficient one. I suggested that a more transparent financial marketplace where consumers could use technologies like the web to become more informed and involved would allow for less painful adjustments in asset prices, expectations, etc.

I’m now reading an essay by Paul Woolley titled “Why are financial markets so inefficient and exploitative – and a suggested remedy” which makes a similar case but, of course, does a much, much better job as its author actually knows a great deal about the topic:

The principals in this case are the end-investors and customers who subcontract financial tasks to agents such as banks, fund managers, brokers and other specialists. Delegation creates an incentive problem insofar as the agents have more and better information than their principals and because the interests of the two are rarely aligned…Since bubbles, crashes and rent capture are caused by principal/agent problems, the solution lies in having the principals change the way they contract and deal with agents.

(Or, as was said earlier by Bill Stensrud, it’s not the investment banks’ fault, it’s the investment bankers.)

Woolley’s essay is available for free and is part of the new anthology The Future of Finance and the theory that underpins it.

It would be somewhat ironic if web technologies helped “disintermediate” the financial sector given the role the tech stock boom played in the chain of events that triggered the financial meltdown.

My friend Matisse E. taught me a great trick: when you’re carrying something heavy and you are going to hand it over to someone else, you don’t let go until you hear the recipient say “got it.”

Like other great techniques, it seems like an obvious thing to do but isn’t. (Groups of people drop things all the time.)

It reminds me of the difference between technique and technology. I was recently reading an entry by Ben Wheeler about the late 90′s when master chess players not only played against computers but also with them, in “cyborg doubles” matches against other human-computer pairs.

It turns out the team with decent players but the best human-computer relationship (i.e., the best teamwork) beat the teams with the best individual human and computer players. Technology requires technique. Or, relationships matter.

I’m being tailed by a Google AdSense agent. Everywhere I go, the agent is there, hiding behind a billboard or a kiosk poster, reminding me of questions I’ve recently asked.

What if I get bored by this slow-moving game of cat and mouse? What if I want to be surprised?

Maybe most of us won’t mind the loss of anonymity in this augmented future world, a Mall of America by way of Monaco where there’s an electronic eye on everyone.

But surely many will rebel against the constant drag of interacting with dumb if obsequious agents; interlocutors who address us personally but can’t respond when confronted directly. A politeness bordering on inanity.

If we’re going to spend most of our time online, with an electronic shadow, couldn’t we have a shadow that, from time to time, entertains us? A Cato to our Inspector Clouseau?

Update
The wonderful Google Alarm plug-in; don’t miss the video!

Putting up posters all over town that say your concert is sold out.

Hairstyles don’t just frame faces, they frame facial gestures. I wonder if having a shaved head – as I often do – doesn’t have a subtle but lasting effect on my social interactions?

We tend to read faces very quickly. It’s a handy skill (or weakness) from more chaotic days when human society was, well, savage.

A face without hair probably invites more focus on its gestures. I suppose this could be tested by having an actor, disguised with and then without hair, deliver the same lines and make the same facial gestures for test subjects.

Do clearer facial gestures simply amplify the signal or shift it?

In retail, the last mile, the human touch, is the most important. Especially when you’re trying to launch a new kind of product, one that requires consumers to change their habits:

This isn’t the first time we could have made [this coffee], but this is the first time we could sell it. We finally have the places that not only have the technical expertise and make good shots, but that have the staff who can make it accessible to the man on the street.”

The best way to share information is still the personal exchange. Could Apple have launched two new kinds of computers without its Apple stores and their well trained staff?

Which is not to say that the human touch is inherently a physical one – though eye contact helps. Social networks, abstract and mediated, also yield the benefits of one-on-one, personalized interactions. (The prized “customer service.”)

Both the iPad and the iPhone, the two devices which have done the most to revolutionize the popular use of computers in the last decade, were shipped with only one universally popular tool: the App Store.

The App Store is not just computer code, it’s also a system of business decisions (legal, financial, marketing) that allow Apple to shift to third parties the burden of making its platform relevant to the widest possible spectrum of consumers, while retaining for itself enough leverage to make sure these third parties are competitive and focused on the consumer.

By insisting on a more transparent marketplace where innovations can rise quickly to the top through popular feedback, Apple keeps vendors in check and consumers satisfied – having fulfilled the promise of a distinctly personal computer.

From a corporate standpoint, the App Store is an ingenious organization of resources: a massive outsourcing or crowd-sourcing project whereby Apple can tap into the marketplace of ideas to address what is likely the greatest challenge any consumer-oriented company faces today: diversity.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of a killer app:

any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, gaming console, software, or an operating system. A killer app can substantially increase sales of the platform on which it runs.

If Apple’s goal was to sell computers to designers, it could rely on a company like Adobe to make the killer app. But Apple’s goal is to sell computers to everyone: designers, doctors, Dads, dance instructors, etc. It has confronted the challenge of providing an endless variety of killer apps to a diverse marketplace by creating a massive, decentralized factory of ideas.

Already it appears this market is diverse enough to support dozens of calculators, not only because personal software is becoming increasingly tied to personal style but also because mobile computing requires a greater diversity in applications.

As the space of human-computer interactions becomes almost anywhere (from club to Church, from bank to beach), the need for context-aware and context-specific applications ensures there will be more such diversity in the future, not less.

Nation-states are important, even necessary fictions. But they are fictions. (For example, the U.S.A. is nearly a century older than Italy.)

David Rothkopf asks should the nation state of Haiti exist?

But what if the concept of Haiti is the problem? Haitians speak French and Creole as a vestige of a colonial era that began its decline over two centuries ago. That the island is divided between French and Spanish speaking halves is yet another consequence of European historical caprice. The country’s people are descendants of slaves who were torn from Africa and subjected to inhumane treatment as a consequence of a despicable and fundamentally immoral economic model that was recognized as intolerable and unsustainable also decades before the country’s founding.

In other words, the country has been shaped in many important ways by conditions that are virtually irrelevant to the modern world. Which raises the question: When does the statute of limitations run out on the idea behind a country’s existence?

Superficial by Michel de Broin




Tree hotel by Tham & Videgård Hansson Arkitekter

I’d bet my house that if more Americans knew and accepted this fact, we’d have more rational identity politics:

“We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”

So much of our politics is a defense of a mistaken definition of self, an ignorance about the systems we inhabit and a tendency to “dumb down” what is always, inherently a complex web of relationships that are seldom apparent or what we believe them to be.

Unintended Consequence #824,357 of humans “filtering” nature (aka, how evolution happens), from KingEdRa, a commenter at MetaFilter:

First there’s a few geeses and everyone’s all “Awww, how cute!” Many children, old people and young lovers on old-timey dates have magical moments interacting with nature by feeding them. Soon, the word gets out to other geeses, and those geeses tell even MORE geeses, “Hey man, free food!” Soon, you have a couple hundred geese milling about Prosopect Park, pooping all over everything and acting like TOTAL jerks to other birds, people and small, useless dogs. Next thing you know, the geeses are flying around over the skies in NYC, not migrating and shit because of all the AWESOME free food and BANG! a plane flies right into a whole flock of geeses and next thing you know, you’re making emergency landings on the Hudson River and Sully Sullenburger is all over my TV, writing books and shit. Now they’re dead, and everyone’s all “BOO! Parks Dept. BOO!”

In short, nothing good ever comes of feeding geese.

Earlier in the same thread, another commenter, effugas, writes:

In a hundred year’s time, I am convinced all life on Earth will be:

1) Too cute to kill
2) Too delicious to allow to go extinct
3) Too numerous to be threatened with extinction

These are the things we evolutionarily select for.

With the important qualification that “we” is not a uniform bunch. What’s cute but not delicious to someone in one economy may be the opposite to someone elsewhere. So the selections – and survivors – may seem that much more capricious or “autochthonous”.

If life on Earth has a purpose, we are certainly carrying it out. History is a sculpture of matter and energy wrought in the fourth dimension.

recently: more geese.

My second favorite soccer movie of the last two years. If Rudo y Cursi is an “A+”, The Damned United is a solid “A”. Michael Sheen’s smile should get its own credit.

Teens crossing the border for survival. To China.

North Korea, perhaps because of its proximity, physically and culturally, to more successful nations, has got to be an instance of some of the worst we humans can do to ourselves.

A deep discovery:

The public’s distrust of the cloistered art world helps to explain why a forger, or a swindler, is so often perceived as a romantic avenger, his deceptions exposing the deeper fraudulence of the establishment.

From the much celebrated New Yorker investigation of art authenticator Peter Paul Biro.

Most everyone curses but some people do it really well. For example, we all know how to liken someone we don’t like to a specific body part but only some people know exactly which body part to cite in order to describe a personality to a “t”.

I can think of cursers who are famous for their timing, and/or the creativity of their epithets but I can’t remember someone whose insults proved them a wise judge of character. And, yet, I’m sure such experts exist.

what i’m making: tortilla española and shaved brussel sprouts with fresh walnuts and pecorino. spanish wine and belgian beer to accompany.

Bersuit Vergarabat “Toco y me voy” on iTunes.

I’m about halfway through Inglourious Basterds and spent some time yesterday thinking about the forthcoming Machete. Both are perfectly wrought genre pictures, of so-called Jewsploitation and Mexploitation, respectively. With an important difference: the former is set in another time and place and the latter is set right here, right now.

The historical pulp or -sploitation genres are intended as cathartic entertainment, as a way of remembering and thus healing a past violence, rather than as propaganda that aims to incite future violence. (Blaxploitation could not have preceded the Civil Rights movement and less so the Black Panther Party.)

Given the broader historical narrative in which these revenge fantasies unfold, they are also incapable of escaping irony. Even when its producers and/or audiences cling to its surface meaning, like someone suffering from nightmares might pull up a blanket, the subtext remains: a festering wound that will not be healed by being dressed up.

For this reason, the most beloved pulp films are seldom naive: to balance the scales of justice, everyone must pay, including the audience.

Consider, for example, the Westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. Among other pleasures, the Pilgrim-sploitation movies gave the descendants of the dirt-poor immigrants who conquered the American West a chance to take their final revenge on both nature and the Native American nations they had to battle – and often lost to. But while making a gesture of healing old wounds, such movies often opened new ones.*

Which makes me wonder: is America ready for Mexploitation? I hope so.

*Sadly, America is still waiting for the Native American-sploitation flick. To the victor go the spoils. Casinos notwithstanding.

There’s two kinds of lawyers: those who care deeply about what the law is and those who care deeply about what the law is and also care deeply about what it should be.

There are crafts worth doing for the process alone, never mind the product. Weaving together the different strands of our lives is one such process which is rewarding in and of itself – and, let’s face it, once that product is shipped the lights in the factory get turned off.

Weaving is how we create rich art. A blind focus on one thread can make for a bigger splash of color but not necessarily a bold one.

Choreography, weaving, uniting and synthesizing: these are the master crafts. The ones that bring together disparate threads, movements, thoughts. This is not just a concern for personal growth but for organizational growth and competitive success.

Ultimately any company that is not in pursuit of the truth is not in pursuit of excellence in their craft. Consider the world’s most profitable businesses. I can think of no exception to the claim that they are the most focused on capturing and incorporating the best insights of their diverse workforce as well as the needs of their clients and suppliers.

Case in point, most of us are familiar with the monolithic plastic exterior of Apple products. But underneath that candy coated shell is a teeming ecosystem of companies that produce very distinct and carefully crafted components. Each its own complex ecosystem of workers, suppliers, aspirations, conflicts, etc.

These seemingly fractal organizations made up of organizations made up of organizations are the cutting edge of our civilization. A form of weaving and collective wisdom unprecedented for its richness.

Does anyone know what’s on YouTube? What percentage movies from the 80s, what percentage footage of kittens vs cats, what percentage action movies vs comedies, hip hop vs rock songs, etc? What television does it reflect? What “frequencies” are in the feedback loop?

LA today (63° F) feels as cold as an SF summer – where it’s not much colder (58°F).

if temperature impacts culture (amount of outdoor seating at restaurants, use of parks, fashion, average caloric value of typical lunch), how long would it take for the culture of los angeles to change given a 5° F degree cooling over 25 years?

we have computers, software and data to calculate that, right?

Radiolab has produced a startlingly beautiful story of hope and the awesome complexity of life. It involves abandoned mines, toxic waste and geese. It should be told at Easter.

Ted Kaczynski, The Unambomber, was once a 17 year-old test subject in a sadistic psychological study performed at Harvard at the bequest of the precursor to the CIA.

I’m surprised this hasn’t been brought up more often in recent years.

From Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber as discussed by the recent Radiolab episode “Oops”.

because it was released on iTunes as an album-only purchase, i’d not heard Mastodon’s The Last Baron until today.

it is by far one of the most ridiculously well executed songs of the genre. whatever that genre might be.

previously: jesus christ pose by soundgarden. and, i’m told, rush. also, meshuggah and the raymond scott quintette.

bonus: tap dancing in native american drag

what is irony but a private channel? requiring context is a way of filtering your audience, for whatever reason.

In a few years, if technology and media companies continue to innovate at their current breakneck pace, entertainment will finally be as interactive as it was in 1599, when the Globe theater was built.

I was reminded of just how much we misplace the past while watching a YouTube clip of Andy Kaufman performing his Great Gatsby bit on live television and in front of a live studio audience in 1978.

It’s a routine which cannot work without a live studio audience and one which would be much less effective were it not also broadcast live to an even larger television audience. Yet neither could it be done without recorded media.

In a way, it’s still state of the art interactive television. (What difference would IPTV make other than allowing the viewers at home to groan and heckle along with the studio audience? I’m sure they did when this show was first televised.) The skit’s lasting effect comes from its script which requires audience participation in order to affirm the almost tyrannical power of the broadcaster: she or he who controls the stage. Both the studio and television audiences are trapped.

The ways we can transmit information today are certainly different and its these technical permutations – of one one to one, one to many, many to one and many to many – which we often mistake for the cutting edge of media. (Especially within the confines of consumer capitalism, where changing business models have very serious implications for the political economy.)

But the real novelty is and always has been who can say what to whom.

Consider the true story of a husband and wife who were born into slavery and escaped by her playing the role of a white man (free) and he her slave. Their escape lasted several days. Can you imagine that performance?

Our modern freedoms are rooted in ancient rituals of performance. Who commands the nation’s attention, what is permissible speech, these are the questions which change society. Whether we interact via papyrus or electronic packet is almost immaterial.

We hope for liberation from the past via increased access to an ever widening stage, perhaps longing for a play without distinction between audience and performer. But freedom for all depends on who gets to play what role not the dissolution of roles altogether. The laughter at the end of Kaufman’s bit is proof positive that we are bound to role playing the passive and active.

New scripts will change the media industry far more than new set top boxes.

you, the protagonist, are accidentally emailed the login / confirmation email intended for someone who is quite famous. you become his/her doppelganger. it’s your choice whether you become the celebrity’s guardian angel or a shadowy trickster. you can alternate between both poles.

the objective is to interact with the celebrity’s environment (his/her business contacts, press, friends, family) just enough to create changes but not so much as to get caught. perhaps, to reunite the celebrity with their true love. (e.g., you can be a Cyrano de Bergerac.) or to be cast in the right movie.

you monitor the impact of your moves over time by following the popular / celebrity press. if you’re caught, the game is over. there is no restart.

alternately, you are emailed the the login / confirmation for the account of a celebrity’s manager. thus, you are given the role of his/her adviser. but thousands of other players are emailed the same access. the game aggregates all of your input, providing an actual celebrity with either the average input or the ranked input of those players whose choices have been most valued / successful in previous rounds. the crowd sourcing of choices.

some people express their freedom via clever movements. the player or dancer who makes a great move. others express their freedom by what they build. a great play, a great house.

architect randy brown’s own house in nebraska.

to think that the money spent to build this space could have been used to build an approximation of a traditional mansion; a fortress that directs the inhabitant’s eye inward, to furnishings. a giant price tag writ in the architectural language of pre-democratic societies.

instead, Brown, like other contemporary architects, has created a series of spaces that engage the inhabitant’s sense of place and of what it is possible. it’s like being inside a movie rather than a mausoleum.

the longest con is usually the legal one.

background: the art of grift or the big con.

David Carr for the NYT tears into Time and Politico for posting the PDF of Rolling Stone’s explosive profile.

The last graph starts with this protest:

“This is not about our slow-footedness on the Web, but our right to publish on a schedule we chose. To me, this was really a transitional moment,” said Mr. Bates of Rolling Stone.

Biologist Roger Payne’s conclusion must be proven wrong, whether by altering the status quo or funding multiple independent studies that find the truth is less horrifying.