How Is YouTube Not the Greatest Art Project Ever?

Robin says,

The question just occurred to me: How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?

Imagine a slightly parallel dimension where Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim aren't web engineers from Silicon Valley but instead art scenesters from New York. They know the language of the art world; they know how to present work in that context.

But they also have tech chops -- NYU ITP grads, say -- so their project isn't a painting or an avante-garde video but a web app. It's a platform, a system.

And that project grows into YouTube -- one of the craziest, most kaleidoscopic reflections of humanity we've ever seen. It's beautiful. It totally encapsulates and embodies the spirit of the age. And, in our parallel dimension, as the YouTube guys struggle with servers and scalability, they're also submitting it to juried shows and, I don't know, biennials or whatever. They are framing it.

Isn't that high art? Isn't that incredibly successful, important art?

Now, forget the commercial objection, because for years YouTube didn't run a single ad. And let's push our parallel dimension even further and say that Google signs on not as the project's acquirer but as its patron. The Medici of Mountain View!

Am I missing some foundational idea or definition here? I don't actually know anything about art (though I will admit I am in this frame of mind b/c I just strolled through SFMOMA yesterday) -- what would the knee-jerk art-scholar reaction be?

And what do you think?

The Night They Clubbed the Deer

Matt says,

I'm not sure why this Texas Monthly story is so unsettling. The story itself is simple -- four high-school football stars, out goofing off one Friday night, capture and brutally slaughter two deer.

The characters are (for the most part) sympathetic, and aside from a possibly-superfluous Lord of the Flies reference, the author doesn't really stoke the drama at all. It might be the notion that four decent kids can do some completely inexplicable, violent thing, just out-of-the-blue. Or it might be the sensation of looking in on a place usually so far removed from the gaze of the world.

Nico Nico Douga

Robin says,

My mind is being blown in real-time.

Nico Nico Douga is sort of a Japanese YouTube, except it has a weird extra feature: You can write comments in real-time over the video. Hard to imagine; easier to see. Just watch the second video on this page (the one after the YouTube video) for a second.

Weird/cool, right?

Even better, a Goldsmiths team is dissecting and explaining the crazy characteristics of the Nico Nico Douga community in blog form. Insanely high-brow meta-theoretic blog form.

Why is this interesting? Two reasons:

1. Video is still so immature, and still changing so fast. Kevin Kelly thinks text is actually a big part of its future -- a sort of reunion of long-estranged formats, thanks mostly to computers and high-resolution screens. I agree, and Nico Nico Douga is a (spastic) data point in that direction.
   
   
2. The web is so not a global village. It's totally compartmentalized by region and, especially, by language. So it's cool to get a guided tour of something that would otherwise be incomprehensible or, worse, invisible.

I still have no idea what to make of this site. I'm almost afraid to click around. Any thoughts/reactions?

(Via the wax.)

Update: Great Wired article on the site's founder.

Restau-rant

Matt says,

Over at vita.mn, I'm ranting about how the practice of settling the tab at restaurants is woefully broken. It's launched me on a campaign to demand separate checks whenever dining with a group. Thought this was worthy of the Snarkmarket hive mind. Do you have any foolproof systems for handling checks that must be split? Are there any establishments you've been to that deal with this ingeniously?

Under Orders, Under Fire

Matt says,

Forgot where it was linked, but some blogger recently referred to a famous 1996 essay on the media by James Fallows that I had never read. The essay begins with a description of a public television broadcast called "Under Orders, Under Fire":

Most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from panelist to panelist asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school's famous Socratic style.

During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield. The man getting the roughest treatment was Frederick Downs, a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion. ...

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening's panel, better known even than Westmoreland. These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings, of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes and CBS.

Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading Jennings and his news crew got permission from the North Kosanese to enter their country and film behind the lines. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, he replied. Any reporter would—and in real wars reporters from his network often had.

But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners.

What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire?

Margaret Mead Among the Managers

Matt says,

Grant McCracken offers an anthropological take on the recently-ubiquitous corporate reinvention session.

Welcome, Kiosk

Robin says,

Your new favorite band: Kiosk!

It's an Iranian indie rock band (I mean... sort of) that recently made the movie to America. Here's the full story, written up by Talieh Rohani.

And here are some sample lyrics:

The power of love or love of power
Modernism versus tradition forever

Living in the evil axis
Speed freaks in jalopy taxis

LOVE. IT.

Just Because We Can ...

Matt says,

danah boyd writes a typically thought-provoking post on the prospect of exposing users' "Social Graphs," a meme that's been heating up recently. Quick backstory in case you didn't know: Google and a bunch of techy types want to make it so you can easily port your identity and contacts to any application on the Web. The advantages include easier sign-ups for different Web applications, no longer having to maintain the same information in a bunch of different places, quickly finding any contacts who are using an application you just signed up for, etc. Those of us with MySpace/Facebook/Friendster/LinkedIn/Flickr/vita.mn/etc. accounts are planning to be, for the most part, happy.

But danah makes the good point that those stumping for this move are all tech-savvy people who mostly have no idea of what the repercussions will be for some of the most vulnerable heavy users of the Web -- teens. A typical argument in favor of more open data refers to what Tim O'Reilly calls "security by obscurity" -- i.e. we have the illusion we're secure just because all our data is usually tucked out of the way, but this is patently false, as any reporter could tell you. Exposing public data more commonly means fewer people will harbor this false sense of security, ostensibly making them more directly conscious of how they manage their personal data. But as danah points out, it could be an awfully risky way to make a point.

Not Safe For ...

Matt says,

I watched this ad three times. (NSFW, via Reddit.)

Following Up

Matt says,

This Ask MetaFilter post from two years ago is like a short story unfolding in real time. I found the whole thing oddly moving -- the initial account of what happened, the swelling chorus of encouragement from other users (each ostensibly nursing a silent grief of her own), and the resolution. For me, it echoed again this passage from Roth. Getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.

'When Someone Beeps You, You Know the Reason'

Robin says,

The new issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication has a terrific paper on the rules of 'beeping'. That's when somebody calls your mobile phone, lets it rings once, and hangs up. It's a totally established mode of communication in places where airtime is still precious, most notably Africa.

It's a ping in the purest sense: Exactly one bit of information is conveyed. Ah, but what a bit! The article defines a taxonomy of beeps -- the callback beep ("call me back, because I'm out of airtime"), the relational beep ("I'm thinking of you"), and (get ready) the pre-negotiated instrumental beep ("yo, come pick me up now, as we agreed").

But really, it's all about the anecdotes. Because there are all sorts of interesting social dynamics involved. For instance:

Lillian's lunchtime customers at her restaurant beep her daily, demanding a callback. She explains, "Customers beep to check on whether there is food left. Some are customers who are going to bring me money. So, when I see a number that I know, I have to call back, so I use a unit or two. They are some whom I don't call back because they have nothing constructive [profitable] to tell me." Like Patrick, Lillian says she never beeps customers.

And of course:

If you are chasing after a lady, you cannot beep. You have to call. Beeping is for friends. When a girl you do not know well beeps you, you have to call back if you are interested. You cannot even text. She has to see that the effort is being made. Borrow a friends' phone if you do not have airtime.

What I love most about this is how contextual the information is. The beep means nothing -- nothing! -- without all the social understanding surrounding it. For instance:

As Immanuel explains, a beep can mean the exact opposite of the one before it. In his case, some of his dairy farmers beep to say, "there is no milk," others to say, "there is milk." The only difference in what Immanuel sees is the number on the missed call log; he uses his knowledge of the relational context and the meaning of past beeps to determine which beeps "mean" what.

This paper reads half like an academic study and half like an awesome, weird Wired or New Yorker article. Check it out. It's a big world out there.

Come, Join My Secret Underground Cultural Restoration Society

Robin says,

Headline: Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock.

Setup:

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

"The Untergunther"! I could not possibly love this more.

Asia, Brick by Brick

Robin says,

So check this out:

Architects from China, Japan and Thailand amongst others were given kits of white LEGO building blocks and told to have just fun. The results, from Asiatic temples to futuristic towers to sustainable old-and-new city plans are currently touring Asia.

Don't have time to paste in an image, but do click over -- the creations are quite cool. I love the mix of playfulness and seriousness on display. Also, the choice of all-white bricks was key.

Riot Cops of the World

Robin says,

Wow. Scary images here. I feel like these bug-eyed, glass-faced dudes are pretty key characters of the early 21st century.

192021

Robin says,

More city stuff: a big, global project on the city-state-centric 21st century led by Richard Saul Wurman, who did the terrific Understanding USA book.

That might actually be the best-executed Flash site I have ever seen -- no exaggeration.

City Life

Robin says,

FYI: I'm reading Witold Rybczynski's "City Life" on this chilly Saturday morning and it is lighting my brain on fire.

P.S. Yes, I am reading it today because I read that Steven Johnson interview last night.

P.P.S. WR's other books "Home" and "A Clearing in the Distance" also = cerebral conflagration.

Lenin Shot at Finland Station

Robin says,

Now that's a title!

From a couple of years ago, some ruminations on counterfactual from Slavoj Žižek. I don't agree with him on lots of things, but there are some interesting thoughts on the function of revolutions here. (Ha ha, I know what you're thinking: That's exactly what I've been looking for!)

He ends with this:

In the revolutionary explosion, another utopian dimension shines through, that of universal emancipation, which is in fact the 'excess' betrayed by the market reality that takes over on the morning after. This excess is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, as a dream waiting to be realised.

That makes me think of the closing scene of China Mieville's Iron Council, which I won't give away -- but I will say it is one of the best and most correct-seeming conclusions to a revolution ever put to page or screen. Wishlist-worthy.

Music and Movement

Robin says,

So true:

Some of the strongest bonds in our society are formed by people who march together in military units, as William McNeill, the historian, has pointed out. Members of orchestras and performing groups today likewise develop bonds. As Frank Zappa told me years ago, playing music with other people can be more intimate than any other activity. The turn-taking and accommodation involved call for great amounts of empathy and generosity.

Hmm. By this logic, the strongest bonds of all must be formed in... marching band!

The Way

Robin says,

The IHT's interview with one of the rebel monks of Burma, who's now in Thailand, is electrifying. This graf is not the most exciting, but it might be the most revelatory:

Ashin Kovida said he had led a week of daily protests, meeting with his group of organizers in the mornings and beginning the marches at noon. He heard reports on the Burmese-language service of the BBC about other monks who had organized themselves but he never met those groups.

Forget flash mobs; how about moral mobs?

Read the story; it's amazing.

A Good Hour

Robin says,

So I've mentioned Larry Lessig's new ten-year project on corruption before. Now I just finished watching his inaugural "alpha" lecture on the topic and it was terrific. An hour long, but well worth it, both for a glimpse of Lessig's cool, patchwork presentation style -- I'd heard it was great but never actually seen Lessig-slides in action -- and also for the framework he provides. He is an A+ presenter and an A++ thinker, and this is an A+++ subject.

Domestic Monsters

Robin says,

Nick Carr waxes philosophical on vampiric business models and dark pools of self. Super good.

More Hungry Planet

Robin says,

ZOMG so busy busy busy. So is Matt, all re-launching a site and such. Snarkmarket will be quiet for a bit.

Accept this link as a meek offering.

Democratization of Manipulation, Part 4

Robin says,

Somehow this relates to the theme, but I'm not sure quite what to make of it yet. (Previously.) (Via.)

The Sign of the Bat

Robin says,

Via Kottke, a look at the Batman logo and typography over the years in five parts: one, two, three, four, five. Honestly I think this is interesting even if you're not a nerd. And a really wonderful example of a careful, long-form blog-vestigation -- the very opposite of most blog doodlings (mine included) and, therefore, very much an object of my admiration.

"Blog-vestigation?" I don't know, it just seemed right.

Pretty Little Mistakes

Matt says,

Firing an employee is a messy business. No small business likes to do it. There are the headaches — and risks — involved with losing that person, of course, but there’s also the trouble of finding somebody new. The cost of employee turnover is high, both in terms of time and money.

The thing that wrenches at my gut, though, is that this employee just called back in tears. “I’ve lost everything,” he told me. “If I lose this job, I’ll have literally lost everything.”

My heart was breaking for him, and as a person I wanted to say, “Come back, come back,” but I couldn’t do it. We’ve already given him a second chance. And a third. Instead I said, “I know. This sucks. It sucks for us. It really sucks for you. But we don’t have a choice.”

A sad little story I thought was worth sharing.

(The title of this post, by the way, comes from a pretty excellent Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book for adults.)

Ah Yes, One Global Culture

Robin says,

Ah hahahahahahahahahaha... ahhh... ah hahahahahahahaha.

Keep in mind that's FOUR FEET by SIX FEET big.

Measuring Development (Maybe Defining It First)

Robin says,

Apropos of a few email threads lately, here's a passage from Charles Mann (who wrote the book "1491") quoted by Matt Yglesias (emphasis mine):

David Aviles, Ian Ebert and Lauren Tombari all ask (to quote Mr Aviles), "If [Indians] had such a large population, why hadn't they developed as much as other countries?" The answer to this very important question is complicated, but part of it surely is that evaluating relative levels of technological development is not so easy, and that it isn't at all clear that native peoples were less developed in this area than Europeans or Asians. As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.

This is a really good point, and I am guilty as charged re: judging development in terms of the things we're good at.

But seriously, I am really guilty, and I can't even think of kinds of technology other than ours (computers, hybrid cars, plasma TVs, DNA sequencers, etc.) worth having or developing in the world today. The best I can muster is something about the ingenuity of the billion-or-so slum dwellers the world over -- e.g. they can make water purification systems out of rusty buckets and plastic tarps! -- but I don't really believe it deeply. Or rather, that stuff is cool, but I think they ought to (and do) ultimately aspire to computers and DNA sequencers too!

So whatcha got for me, Snarkmatrix?

The Internet is the New _____

Robin says,

Is the internet today's punk rock? So asks Wieden + Kennedy's global director of digital strategies.

Actually I totally agree with his opening sentiment --

Frankly, I don't know what Punk Rock is

-- but even so, there's something about the comparison that's appealing. His post is a good read, and not only because it's insanely optimistic about democracy and includes some hefty quotes from The Chairman.

Also: How can you not print-to-read-later an essay called The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head?

The Sheltered Star

Robin says,

Historian Daniel Aaron on America:

To a nation hitherto self-contained and confident, the new responsibilities do not come easily. We have never bothered to understand alien ideas ('isms' were something to fear or deride), and 'selling America' had simply meant dispensing American largesse. We now see the extent of our involvement and the vulnerability of our talismans: natural resources and 'know-how.' We see that world problems are not merely American problems writ large, that it will take more than a little common sense and a few 'man to man' talks with the Russians to solve them. Finally, we can appreciate the degree to which our strengths and weaknesses as a people have been conditioned by the American past, how we have been blessed and victimized by our history. Because of our wealth and isolation and our vast inland empire, because of the advantages we have enjoyed as a result of European rivalries, we did not develop some of the qualities and abilities we now so desperately need.

Written in 1952.

It's just one salient bit from the latest edition of David Warsh's Economic Principals -- definitely worth a read. The last two grafs in particular are pretty tremendous.

The Arc of the World

Robin says,

Dan just emailed me a link to this video of Hans Rosling from TED. I'd seen his Gapminder data visualizer before, of course -- but his actual talk is really really good, and made me want to go play with it again. Which I just did.

Contingency and Counterfactual

Robin says,

Dani Rodrik, in the closing of a post on historical determinism and development:

This may seem discouraging if you are interested not only in understanding the world, but also in changing it. On closer look, though, [Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson]'s historical determinism leaves plenty of room for human agency and policy choices to make a difference, as I have argued here. Statistically, plenty is left unexplained by historical factors.

Ha. Neat. I sort of like that: We get to be the error term.

Related: My train reading these days is Virtual History, a collection of counterfactuals edited by Niall Ferguson. Fun discovery: To spin an even mildly convincing counterfactual, you have to make sure the fundamental facts leading up to your branch-point are really solid. So oddly it's in the fake-history book that I'm learning about all these real events (a lot of World War II stuff, etc.) in more detail than I ever have before. I think Ferguson and other fans of counterfactual would say yes, that's the point.

Just discovered: Philip Tetlock, the terrific Berkeley researcher I saw give a Long Now talk on experts and forecasting earlier this year, also has a book of counterfactuals! Why was I not told of this earlier??

Psst: Any favorite what-if scenarios?

Beijing Traffic Lesson

Robin says,

Henry B. diagrams the Beijing left. You really need to see this. Excerpt:

[B] proceeds to swerve right, cutting off [C], a tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs glued on. Since [B] is just accelerating, and [C] is now decelerating, this has created a low-density 'dead space' in the intersection. [D], a strange blue tricycle dumptruck carrying what appear to be 40 of the world's oldest propane tanks, sees this and makes a move.

But it's nothing without the visuals.

Via Tim Johnson.

'Having Ideas Is Not Very Parallelizable'

Robin says,

It's a powerful observation if you can make your way through the context (which is computer programming):

In fact, if you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas.

Hypercity Novo

Robin says,

Wait, seriously, São Paolo has 20 million people? And no ads? And it's a real city, not a character in a William Gibson novel?

P.S. Okay, I admit it: I just wanted to steal the title "Hypercity Novo." It sounds like an anime series, doesn't it?

Enaalso

Robin says,

Enaalso:

"Enaalso," he said in Iraqi slang. It's a new Iraqi word, a phrase used to explain being turned in by an informant to a militia and then being killed. Literally it means he was "chewed up."

Gah.

William Gibson and the New Baroque

Robin says,

Terrific interview with William Gibson over at The Onion A.V. Club -- it includes this bit:

I don't know what constitutes "noir" in 2007. I mean, would The Wire be noir? I don't think so. Actually, noir -- I was taught in college -- is a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism. Anyway, that's the way some critics have looked at it. I think that a show like The Wire is the closest we come these days to naturalism. It's a genuine, authentic attempt at naturalism. I've never really attempted naturalism before, but I value it a lot, so all of its more baroque forms have been very valuable to me. One of them, I think, is noir.

I haven't thought about stuff like that since I was an undergraduate. [Laughs.] I'm amazed I can still do it.

Not to get too undergraduate myself here, but I am finding "baroque" a more and more useful concept these days. What is The Postal Service if not baroque? What is The Arcade Fire if not chamber pop?

Any more nominations for modern baroque in any medium? Or, jeez, good definitions? I feel like I know what it means but can't necessarily articulate it with any great precision.

Catacombs Are Rad

Robin says,

BLDGBLOG (who lives in my neighborhood now! Yes!) on underground cities. As always the key thing is that he writes about this stuff with such glee:

Today's city planners need to read more things like this! How exciting would it be if you could visit your grandparents in some small town somewhere, only to find that a door in the basement, which you thought led to a closet... actually opens up onto an underground Home Depot? Or a chapel. Or their neighbor's house.

Via Design Observer, which is so worth subscribing to.

Chance and Will

Robin says,

Nassim Taleb says nobody can predict anything, so:

Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it -- thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

Note however that the corollary is not that life is random; it's that success must therefore come through the recognition of amazing accidents and lucky breaks, and the grabbing hold of them with both hands.

Pragmatism, Politics, and God

Matt says,

Stop reading this post right now and go read Mark Lilla's stunning NYT Mag article adapted from his forthcoming book. The past year has seen a horde of devout atheists -- Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris -- gathering arms against religion and its place in the civic sphere. But no matter how they title their books, Harris et al aren't speaking to a Christian nation, but to a small subset of fellow thinkers. Lilla's scholarship as summarized in this article feels like the scaffold for a bridge between the staunch secularists and the political theologists. Put him in a room with Reza Aslan, and you have the makings of a serious conversation, one that might begin to answer the question, "How do we live together?" Much better than this beautiful-but-doomed dialogue, at least.

Are you really still reading my rambling? GO READ LILLA. Then read No god but God. (Then read Rousseau's "Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," which I'd never heard of until reading Lilla's piece. It's fantastic.) Then get into a conversation with an open-minded person on the opposite side of the secularist/theologist divide.

The Global Warming Gold Rush

Robin says,

Alun Anderson at Edge.org:

Still, I am excited by the prospect that there might be winners from climate change. The Arctic contains vast reserves of gas and oil (25% of the world's undeveloped hydrocarbons), minerals and even diamonds. A new gold rush is already beginning. Norway is just completing its huge "Snow White" gas development off northern Norway. Russia will ship oil in new ice-breaking tankers out of the top of Siberia and has just begun work on the enormous Shtokman field, 350 miles off its Arctic coast and a technological challenge beyond anything so far attempted in the Arctic. As the ice melts, the Northern Passage around Siberia will open to commercial shipping, cutting costs off the voyage to Europe from Japan and China. An even shorter direct route close to the North Pole may follow and then the Northwest Passage around Canada. Fish will provide another treasure. Most of the world's commercial fish come from the colder waters away from the tropics. Already the retreating ice is opening up seas that have potential as rich, new fishing grounds. The people who see a new frontier in the Arctic are some of the most remarkable men and women I've met, prepared to make huge financial gambles and push technology to new limits. Environmentalists may not like them but they are part of the story of climate change too.

Wow. Visions of Lord Asriel readying his fleet...

(Via 3qd.)

Deep History (in 160 Characters or Less)

Robin says,

Went to the Long Now talk tonight and took my parents. Unfortunately: way longer than the normal (snappy) Long Now talk. Fortunately: totally awesome subject, and loads of interesting details. The presenter was Alex Wright, an information architect. He's written a book called Glut about the history of information systems -- the deep history. Like, all the way back to bacteria.

My new habit of notetaking is to text messages to myself. Thus you can gauge the interestingness of a Long Now talk by the pile of weird short emails that's waiting for me when I get back home. Here's what I'm looking at now:

(Okay, actually, one of them is a note about a dream I remembered during the talk. I'll leave it to you to guess which.)

Update: Stewart Brand recaps Alex Wright's talk.

Democratization of Manipulation, Part 3

Robin says,

Hey, speaking of democracy... this set of Photoshop tutorials that shows you how to do effects from movies, besides being rad and fun, is also totally subversive.

Seriously! It's one thing to vaguely understand that all images presented by the entertainment industry are massively processed... it's another to learn how to do it yourself.

Previously: Real Beauty, and the follow-up.

'Titrating Anxiety'

Robin says,

Have not finished this weekend's NYT Mag article on marriage counseling, so do not know if it's recommendation-worthy, but I do know that I liked this paragraph enough to blog it immediately:

One of her basic tasks, she told me, is "titrating anxiety," challenging people enough so that they'll feel the pressure to change but not so much as to send them spinning off in alarm or confusion. As she put it another time: "Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form."

So applicable to so many things beyond counseling!

They Should Probably Just Call it Coruscant

Robin says,

Masdar, the zero-carbon, zero-waste city planned in Abu Dhabi, looks like something out of science fiction. Because it is. A 3.5-mile-wide walled city in the Middle East? Hello? Totally the setting for Blade Runner 2. (Via Buzzfeed.)

Jan in Rio

Robin says,

Jan Chipchase, the on-the-ground design ethnographer mentioned here before, is in Rio: uno, dos, tres, cuatro (rad), cinco (also rad). What an awesome job.

Break the Sword

Robin says,

The madness in Minneapolis renders any potential blog-item inevitably trite and lame, but I guess if it's going to be anything, it could be this. From J. Glenn Gray's "The Warriors," via The American Scene:

It was one of the most discouraged thinkers who wrote the most hopeful of all paragraphs about a future warless world. His prophecy ought to be regarded as recognition of man's power to alter the course of events by undergoing an inner change. I refer, curiously enough, to Friedrich Nietzsche and to the following paragraph from The Wanderer and His Shadow:

"And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, 'we break the sword,' and will smash its military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best armed, out of a height of feeling -- that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared -- this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth."

There's a bit of satygraha in there, and a bit of Frodo, too. Also echoes of The Unconquerable World, which I never did write about. Maybe soon.

Economics Education

Robin says,

Nick Kristof and Greg Mankiw talk about the need for better economics education. But I scowled at Mankiw's invocation of textbooks. You know what'd be a great place to teach economics and statistics in a new, more effective way? A game school!

Liberals, Progressives, and the Future

Robin says,

Noah Millman on the temperamental difference between liberals and progressives over at the new American Scene. I interpret it thusly: Liberals like poetry; progressives like science fiction.

The State of San Francisco

Robin says,

There's a new article in The Economist about San Francisco -- it's succinct and, I think, mostly correct. This is a fun line:

Yet Kevin Starr, the state's premier historian and a San Francisco native, says that it should really be compared with a more distant place: Monte Carlo.

The Design of Social Life

Robin says,

Why should we train kids to think like game designers? James Paul Gee says:

[G]ame design is a core way of thinking about the world, because, in fact, social policy is exactly the same thing, how to get certain effects when you combine objects and actions under certain assumptions about goals [...]

Indeed, in our daily lives, when we are thinking proactively, we look at the world as if we could design the objects and actions around us to achieve certain goals, we "game" it. Game design is, thus, akin to the design of social life.

I mostly just like that last line.

Closely related: That new game school in NYC.

And closely related to that: Gamestar Mechanic. Here is part one of the FAQ: "Players do not just take part in a game that was made for them. Instead, they create their own games to play and share, all within a larger MMO experience." Go read about it -- it sounds totally nuts, in the best possible way.

Finally: One of the people working on Gamestar Mechanic is named Alex Games. That is awesome.

Infographica

Robin says,

From a tipster: Peripheral Landscapes, an exposition -- in hot motion graphics format -- of Mexico City's recent history and informal economics. Starts out better than it ends, but pretty rad all the same.

Compare/contrast: the Pulp Fiction typography video.

The Eurekronomicon

Robin says,

Tell me this has never happened to you waiting for a red light:

Like me, you probably don't associate the traffic lights on Southampton Row with the end of the world. But it was while waiting there in 1933 that the Hungarian polymath Leo Szilard conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the creation of the atomic bomb.

In the Telegraph, Tibor Fischer continues:

The car contains Szilard and his de facto chauffeur, Wigner (only Szilard would use a future Nobel Laureate as his taxi service). They are trying to find Albert Einstein to convince him of the need to urge the US government to start building an atomic bomb before the Nazis do.

When they finally locate Einstein and outline how chain reactions can be achieved, Einstein comments: "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht" (I hadn’t thought of that). The resulting letter from Einstein to Roosevelt triggers the Manhattan Project. It’s an eerie example of how profoundly one man can influence history.

Someone write this book immediately: a compendium of eureka moments. It should include not just the canonical -- Archimedes in the bath, etc. -- but also the less-famous and, best of all, hitherto-unknown moments. Quantity would be the goal: an epiphany per page, hundreds of them in total, some big, some small.

The goal wouldn't be so much to infer patterns or derive some big Law of Lightbulbs (although you might end up doing both along the way) as it would be to simply create a storehouse of stories about insight... a book that, when browsed, might even generate some new ones as well.

No Caption Needed

Robin says,

No Caption Needed is a new blog about "iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy." Am super-excited about the prospect of a continuing stream of stuff like this. First time I've seen the phrase "visual public sphere" and I love it.

Via Eszter.

Institutions: They Came from Somewhere!

Robin says,

Think about this:

Institutions such as the school, the family, the joint stock company, the political party, the state and its bureaucracy owe their robustness and proclaimed timelessness to the fact that we cannot tell who 'invented' them. In that sense, 'fatherlessness' is an asset, as is the myth of parthenogenesis in the case of the founder of Christianity. Similarly, human reason itself, rather than some personal founder, is held to be... the source of the state as an institution.

The corporation (nee joint stock company) has actually not quite achieved that kind of timelessness yet, I don't think, but it's getting close. There's a short, sharp book called The Company by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge that describes its development from the earliest, lamest incarnations to present day multinationals, and when you see it all laid out it seems anything but inevitable. Micklethwait and Wooldridge are Economist writers and unabashed fans of the corporation, but their telling of its tale is fair.

Anyway, I'd love to see comparable books for some of those other institutions: The School, The Family, The Party, etc.

I actually do know one of at least one other, which I've plugged here before: Home: A Short History of an Idea, by Witold Rybczynski.

P.S. The link is to the blog I read that somewhere, a new favorite.

School of Games

Robin says,

One of the coolest things I've read in a while:

The nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today announced that it has awarded a grant of $1.1 million to assist in the development of a New York City public school aimed at teaching literacy and other skills through game design and game-inspired methods to children in grades 6-12.

The project is being led by the Gamelab Institute of Play. Gamelab is the insanely cool indie game developer in NYC. Loads of reading on their site, but here's the choice nugget:

All players in the school -- teachers, students, parents and administrators -- will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces.

Okay, that actually manages to make it sound less cool... but seriously, come on, think about it. This is 100% the future.

Families and Their Food

Robin says,

The best part of TIME's website is the photo essays, hands-down. Here's a new one: portraits of families around the world, along with the food they eat. They're by Peter Menzel -- they're from his book -- and they're beautiful.

Via the excellent Eyeteeth.

P.S. For some reason I was particularly charmed by the Melander family of Bargteheide.

The Layabout's Tale

Robin says,

All those people just hanging out in the middle of the day... who are they? It is the indispensable job of the reportorial class to actually find answers to questions the rest of us pose idly. Chris Colin does just that over in the Chronicle.

Unrepresentative, but awesome, quote:

"John," who is 18 and was strolling through Yerba Buena Gardens one Thursday morning, laid out his typical itinerary: "Watch the grass grow, get high, hit on the ladies."

How does he pay rent? "If you ask 100 girls for $10, that's $1,000, that's rent," he explained logically.

Ah. Right.

Via the Globe's Ideas section.

Maybe the Horse Isn't So Dead After All

Robin says,

Ooh -- Cog Daily blogs a depressing finding:

Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.

Sounds totally plausible to me. There's this line later on: "The repetition effect observed in this research can help us to understand how our own impressions are influenced by what we perceive to be the reality of others."

I think about this phenomenon a lot in one particular context: It's amazing how fame and notoriety are so (and so increasingly?) local and subjective. Like, I think William Langewiesche is totally famous; you probably do not. I think The Shins are totally famous; if you are the blog-reading type you might agree, but it is not that widely-held a belief.

I understand that the realization that things are awfully subjective is not, like, a new thing, but come on! This is supposed to be fame! The whole point is to actually be famous!

A Delicate Poke to the Body Politic

Robin says,

The NYT Mag has a great story on Curitiba and its former mayor Jaime Lerner (who Matt has mentioned before), but I'm only blogging it because this one particular line caught my eye:

From blueprint drafts to opening night, the Wire Opera House took about two months to complete. Lerner refers to such projects as "urban acupuncture" that energizes the development process.

Urban acupuncture! As a turn of phrase alone it's genius, but the underlying idea is pretty great as well.

And, a bit dumbly, I can't help but think of something almost literally like an acupuncture needle: a thin spike of mirrored steel, maybe about twenty stories tall, built on on a movable platform that you could wheel around to different points in a city. One week it'd be in the richest neighborhood, then in the poorest, then at the geographical center of the city, then at the spot where the city was founded, etc.

History Games

Robin says,

Historian Niall Ferguson loves simulation games. The piece (by Clive Thompson, natch) is so tightly-written that it resists blockquoting... so just go read it.

Okay, one blockquote. This is a pretty rad statement coming from a Harvard historian:

"Serious games are the next big platform," he says.

I've been reading "The End of History and the Last Man" to get ready for Francis Fukuyama's fast-approaching Long Now talk and now I'm wondering what the End of History game would look like...

I think it might involve holding down for two seconds, then pressing up and the A button to make Hegel do a lightning kick.

A Matrix of Cost/Benefit Analyses, i.e., a Parking Lot

Robin says,

Short, weird, awesome post on parking lots from Jan Chipchase. Love his jotted-journal-notes-to-self style.

Fantomas

Robin says,

Paul Pope traces the history of the masked super-villain to France:

Decades before Lex Luthor, The Joker, Diabolik, Satanik, Catwoman, Fu Manchu, Doctor Mabuse and all the rest, there was Fantomas, arguably the first costumed super-criminal ever, who terrorized Paris in his monthly magazine appearances.

I've mentioned it before, but Pope's blog is a gem -- full of fun insights and sketches.

Sunday of Wonders

Robin says,

I. Jan Chipchase is a kind of design ethnographer, traveling the world to see how people actually use things in their everyday lives. He takes wonderful pictures along the way -- always with unusual perspectives. He's in Turkey now:

II. I am not entirely clear on the nature of this competition, but I like the winners, especially John Klein, whose work reminds me of Zaha Hadid's:

III. Apparently, we've found the Fortress of Solitude -- note the tiny, tiny person in the lower left:

IV. French kids in free fall -- literally:

(Via Photojojo.)

V. Finally: All that is solid melts into, er, a mess. It'll be slow going in the Bay Area for a while:

'But Faith Is Like a Pickpocket'

Robin says,

A blogalogue (ack!) between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan is wrapping up over on the terrific Beliefnet. Here's a bit of Harris:

You want to have things both ways: your faith is reasonable but not in the least bound by reason; it is a matter of utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt; you are still searching for the truth, but your belief in God is immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. I trust you will ascribe these antinomies to the paradox of faith; but, to my eye, they remain mere contradictions, dressed up in velvet.

If God loves the world, he has a terribly noncommittal way of showing it.

Sullivan's reply is yet to come. Suspense!

21 Solutions

Robin says,

Have not even begun to dig into this Foreign Policy feature yet, but it looks promising: "21 Solutions to Save the World." I'm going to read it tonight but if you get there before me tell me what's good.

The Other Jane Jacobs

Robin says,

Sure sure, you've heard all about Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of American Cities. It's been totally absorbed by the Conventional Wisdom and, in its way, made harmless: Oh look, a little old lady writing about neighborhoods.

3quarksdaily writes up Jacobs' other books -- the ones that make much larger, and much more radical, macroeconomic claims.

It's no mere recitation, and 3qd writer Alon Levy doesn't let Jacobs go uncriticized. His summation:

Jacobs' policy suggestions span the entire gamut from politically insane to extremely cogent.

I like the sound of that!

Since 578

Robin says,

Lots of people have been pointing to the demise of Kongo Gumi, a Japanese temple builder. It was the world's oldest business, started in 578.

Wow, there are seriously just three digits in that year.

Here is a list of some other extremely old companies.

What's the world's oldest college? Oldest government (i.e. no revolutions)?

Everybody's on the Internet

Robin says,

Has anybody out there been to South Korea? Is it actually the future? It sure seems like it.

P.S. Been loving the IFTF blog (that's where this link points) lately. Definitely subscription-worthy.

Religion vs. Atheism Cage Match

Matt says,

I'm finding this Beliefnet exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan delectable. Just the juicy, metaphor-happy game of Pong alone would be enough to make me happy. But the real fun of it is watching these two completely irreconcilable worldviews in two supremely intelligent heads honestly, respectfully clashing, striving for reconciliation. The thing is, you know that this debate isn't going to solve or change anything, or even end in any reasonably cathartic way, and I don't think I walked away from reading it with a single additional nugget of wisdom in my head. Except maybe that this is the way all hard questions in life should be fought over and decided.

Cape Town Living

Robin says,

More photos! PingMag writes up The Beautiful Struggle, a big ol' book of photos taken in Cape Town, South Africa. Even if you don't read the interview with the book's creator, scroll down the page and read the photo captions. Really cool stuff.

Shanghai Living

Robin says,

There are only a few photos on this page, but they are really phenomenal: apartments in Shanghai.

Living spaces -- real ones, not the Dwell-worthy -- are so interesting. Anybody know of any projects to document and share them?

(Via.)

MMORPG Sociology

Robin says,

Weird finding: MMORPG players are more likely to be first-born than middle, youngest, or only children.

Also: They are areligious and left-leaning. But,

Players who preferred to be play Paladins in WoW tended to be more conservative and religion tended to play a bigger role in their lives.

I love this stuff.

All from the Nick Yee's incomparably cool Daedalus Project.

A Short Chain of Lives

Robin says,

It was a beautiful summer* night here in San Francisco, so what better to do now than ponder the shape of history?

Here is a hint: It is something like a dime sitting on top of the Empire State Building.

And here is a treat: There is a commenter on Daily Kos who was born in 1929! Oh, how I pledge to prowl the holo-grid when I'm 78...

*I know, weird, right?

Giant Transforming Architecture

Robin says,

Zaha Hadid's design for a performing arts center in Abu Dhabi looks like it could transform into a Neon Genesis Evangelion-style giant robot. Or travel in outer space.

Either one is fine by me.

(Via Archinect.)

Natural Social Networks

Robin says,

This seems smart: social networking sites run by airlines. Of course, the target isn't people like me, who always just grab the cheapest fare on Orbitz; it's business travelers, e.g. the Southwest devotees who fly from San Francisco to LA twice a week. I mean, I feel like these folks have a thin, oh-it's-you-again social network built already.

What other businesses regularly convene groups of people in the same space who might have something in common?

Here's my nomination: grocery stores! What if Whole Foods set up a social networking site? I actually think it could become like the best dating site in the world pretty quickly. Either that or the most awkward. Maybe both.

A New Axis to Grind

Robin says,

Prospect did a very Edge-y thing and asked a hundred smart people what the big important axis of the 21st century is going to be -- think left/right except, you know, futuristic. I liked this one from Mark Cousins:

By the end of the 21st century, politicians and the idea of the executive will have disappeared entirely. As everyone will be connected to some evolved form of the internet, all political decisions will be made by daily and weekly referendums. Right and left will still be underlying polarities, but will disperse into the hundreds of decisions a citizen will make annually. There will be no political class to pillory. Instead, the new dilemma will be how to delineate a constituency. By nation? Supranational region? Continent?

Note that I do not actually think this is true. But, I like it.

I have to say, as with the Edge question-fests, I really appreciate the people who engage honestly with the question, instead of using it to simply describe how they think the world ought to be.

So my favorite answer might be Michael Ignatieff's:

Everything that happens to us will be unexpected. There is no reason to be discouraged about this. Practical political life is the art of managing the unexpected, just as life itself is a matter of rising to the occasion.

(Via 3qd. Check out the second reply they highlight. Eep!)

'Livable Utopian Subsets of the World'

Robin says,

Short interview with Jonathan Lethem in the Boston Globe's great Ideas section this week:

IDEAS: You allude to autism often in your work. In the new novel, you just about declare Carl to be a high-functioning autistic. Why so much interest in autism and Asperger's syndrome?

LETHEM: It's evocative for me. I'm enticed by it.

IDEAS: Not that I'm diagnosing you.

LETHEM: But don't be afraid of diagnosing me. I see Asperger's as a defining property in a lot of areas where it is denied by the participants. So I don't want to be denying it in myself.

And when I think about Asperger's syndrome I think about communities and subcultures, for example, the science fiction subculture, and science fiction conventions. What kind of people go there, to feel they have a people? When I go, it feels to me that they are bound by a thinly coded, super high-functioning Asperger's affiliation. And there's the Internet, which is a kind of autistic Greenwich Village, a place where people wander around trying to figure out whether they fit.

There are subcultures in a lot of my work. I see them as places where people try to make livable utopian subsets of the world.

That is awesome.

Recommended: Lethem's early (and not-that-well-known) book "Gun, With Occasional Music" is weird and terrific.

Random Race-Related Reflections

Matt says,

The "Society/Culture" category on Snarkmarket is getting ridiculous.

1) This one really isn't about race, per se, but it's about Barack Obama, for whom race will be the designated press narrative pretty much through the duration of the 2008 election. And it's less a reflection than a question: I know Timothy Noah's been doing the Obama Messiah Watch, tracking Obama hype through the pressosphere, but is anyone doing an Obama backlash watch? I feel like every campaign reporter in America has gotta want to be the author of the Obama Controversy. Someone with a sharper attention span than me should totally be keeping track of the attempts. Wonkette, meanwhile, has a list of valid reasons for a Baracklash.

2) I'm slowly catching up on the first season of the Boondocks, and it's super-smart. Much higher and more consistent quality than the strip. The cast of characters is just brilliant -- unconventional configurations of familiar racial archetypes. And I love the texture of the show, like the recurrent 'Gangstalicious' single "Thuggin' Luv" you hear from episode to episode. Favorite moments?
- The alternate-history Martin Luther King, Jr., episode, where he survives his assassination and awakes from a 40-year coma to witness 9/11. When his response includes an appeal to non-violence, civic leaders immediately distance themselves from the legend, saying, "That's not the Martin Luther King, Jr., I know!"
- The courtroom party at the end of the R. Kelly episode.
- The news footage of the Gangstalicious fight at the Grammys.

Philosophers and Webcams

Robin says,

Have you seen BloggingHeads.tv? It's a vlog show that's sort of defiantly lo-fi, and spectacularly weird and cerebral -- but often too inside-baseball for me. I really enjoyed bits of two recent episodes, though: Robert Wright's chat with Francis Fukuyama (Francis Fukuyama!) and with Joshua Cohen. Fukuyama you know; Cohen is a prof at Stanford and editor of the awesome Boston Review.

P.S. Did you know Fukuyama has a blog? I love 2007.