Rafi's shared items in Google Reader

Five short links

2013-05-25T01:48:25Z

CLAVIN - A very promising open source geotagging project that analyzes unstructured text and identifies geographic entities. It has some very neat tricks up its sleeve to disambiguate common names like 'Springfield' based on the context.

The Sokal Hoax: At whom are we laughing? - Post-modernism makes an easy target for hard scientists, but this is a good reminder that some of the giants of physics made even more meaningless pronouncements about fields they knew nothing about.

Name-cleaver - A scrumptious little project from Sunlight Labs that handles a lot of the messy data cleanup work around people and organization names.

altmetrics: a manifesto - On the topic of scientists being silly, the way we measure academic output is antiquated beyond belief, so it was great to see this from my friend Cameron Neylon. We can do way better than citations.

Improving the security of your SSH private key files - This is what happens when hackers (in the old-school sense) get interested in a topic. Martin's curiosity about how SSH works led him to find out some sub-par default settings that make a passphrase on your keys a lot less effective than you might think. I didn't know about those particular problems, but I've always followed my Apple and kept my keys on an encrypted DMG.

Alleged Moscow markets in everything

2011-10-29T06:42:43Z

Yet even they have nothing on the Moscow chef who killed his father-in-law and then allegedly served him to customers at his restaurant. According to police, the 54-year-old chef at the unnamed restaurant, well-known for its chebureki, or big meat-filled pastries, killed his 82-year-old father-in-law during a drunken brawl. Police refused to confirm or deny a report by tabloid Life News that the chef then ran his father-in-law’s body through a meat grinder in order to fill his chebureki – and serve them to customers for three days before being caught and sent to a psychiatric institution.

Here is more, oddly the article is on a different topic altogether, namely dealing with the snow in Moscow. For the pointer I thank Chug Roberts.

The Rage of a Privileged Class

2011-10-29T02:09:33Z

To get some sense of where we are with the police in New York, it's worth reading every single word of this stunning story from the Times:

A three-year investigation into the police's habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution.

As 16 police officers were arraigned at State Supreme Court in the Bronx, incensed colleagues organized by their union cursed and taunted prosecutors and investigators, chanting, "Down with the D.A." and "Ray Kelly, hypocrite." As the defendants emerged from their morning court appearance, a swarm of officers formed a cordon in the hallway and clapped as they picked their way to the elevators. Members of the news media were prevented by court officers from walking down the hallway where more than 100 off-duty police officers had gathered outside the courtroom.

The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward. The unsealed indictments contained more than 1,600 criminal counts, the bulk of them misdemeanors having to do with making tickets disappear as favors for friends, relatives and others with clout.

But they also outlined more serious crimes, related both to ticket-fixing and drugs, grand larceny and unrelated corruption. Four of the officers were charged with helping a man get away with assault. Jose R. Ramos, an officer in the 40th Precinct whose suspicious behavior spawned the protracted investigation, was accused of two dozen crimes, including attempted robbery, attempted grand larceny, transporting what he thought was heroin for drug dealers and revealing the identity of a confidential informant.

The case, troubling to many New Yorkers because of its implication that the police officers believed they deserved special treatment, is expected to have long tentacles. Scores of other officers accused of fixing tickets could face departmental charges. Some officers have already retired. Moreover, the indictments may jeopardize thousands of cases in which implicated officers are important witnesses and may be seen as untrustworthy by Bronx juries.

Read the whole story down to the rather stunning end...

On Friday morning, on the street outside the courthouse, some 350 officers massed behind barricades and brandished signs expressing sentiments like "It's a Courtesy Not a Crime."

When the defendants emerged, many in the crowd burst into raucous cheers. Once they had gone and the tide of officers had dispersed, the street was littered with refuse.

...it's a shocking look at a privileged class. Privileged we have awarded them.

MORE: This a department with one officer presently accused of rape, (again) and another caught on the radio saying falsified reports after falsely arresting and imprisoning a black man, bragging that he "fried another nigger."

Can We See Through Symbols?

2011-10-24T09:00:12Z

Sometimes there are no words, nor need there be. When I came across this image, I was instantly no longer reading a newspaper. A moment before, I had been habitually scanning for information, considering arguments, making judgments, and otherwise getting orientated for the day. And then I was in another place entirely: a place of suffering and consolation, and of both mortality and the possibility of something eternal.

I had entered a featureless room of earth tones and shadows, as if the anteroom to the underworld, only to see two sides of the human condition: one terribly exposed, and the other disturbingly dark. It seems an intensely personal moment and yet profoundly universal. One looks in vain for some way to reduce the terror lurking in the image, to learn enough so that it can be placed back into a sense of order, movement, resolution. But no face can be seen, and the light illuminating his body is absorbed completely by her black cowl.

The news was still there to be had by way of the caption: “A woman took care of a wounded relative on Saturday inside a mosque being used as a hospital by demonstrators against the government in the Yemeni capital.” The accompanying report added more. But I hadn’t seen merely a woman or a wounded relative. I had seen man’s naked, vulnerable flesh and his throat exposed as if for the slaughter. And I had seen a figure veiled in black holding the victim firmly, almost possessively, as if there were nothing else that could be done. And, of course, I had seen a pieta, the classic image in Christian iconography of Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding his broken body after it has been taken down from the cross.

The pieta is more Roman Catholic than Protestant, but though not Catholic I had no trouble seeing that artistic form as it is part of my cultural heritage. Whatever the unknown photographer may have intended, the comparison is there to be made and to motivate a powerful emotional and ethical response to the image. But should it matter that the two people in the photograph are almost certainly Muslim? Although Islam defines itself as the heir of Judaism and Christianity, the artistic traditions could not be farther apart at this point, for the suggestion that we might be looking at the image of god would be blasphemous. Worse yet, another reason the image is so powerful is that the black, hooded figure can also be seen as an angel of death claiming another soul. This demonic vision not only must be far from the truth of the scene, but also sits well with deep-set prejudice.

Thus, the dilemma: On the one hand, seeing the two figures through the cultural lens of the pieta may frame response in a manner that is profoundly appropriate. Doing so provides intense identification across cultural barriers to reach universal truths of human experience. On the other hand, transposing their experience into another culture’s symbolism can seriously distort the actual relationship of those in the photograph, while also suggesting a false universality on Christian terms precisely when one ought to be laying down such presumptions about how well people can understand one another on sight.

Thus, we need to see through symbols, but in both senses of the verb: to use them to see more than we might see otherwise, and to recognize and look past their limitations to see what they would distort or occlude. Nor is this double vision limited to matters theological.

“Libyan fighters regrouped Tuesday during the siege of Surt.” (The story is here.) Uh huh, and irregular troops taking a cigarette break is news? Once again, we are being taken somewhere else, to a place where a death’s head and the peace symbol are part of the same identity. Once again, darkness and light work together to feature two dimensions of human experience; if less complementary in principle, they are eased together by the global consumer economy. Culture in the digital age is all about mash ups, but this also could be a study in either irony or illegibility. You tell me.

Photographs by an unidentified photographer and Mauricio Lima for The New York Times.

Mourning the death of Google Reader's social features

2011-10-21T23:04:42Z

and again, only a week's notice to save everything? really?

Paradise Regained

2011-10-22T21:07:59Z

There are ~~(at least)~~ two different electronic editions of Paradise Lost on Project Gutenberg. The first, produced by Judy Boss and released in October 1991, was Project Gutenberg EBook #20. If you do an internet search for “project gutenberg paradise lost,” this is probably the edition you’ll find.

The second, Project Gutenberg EBook #26, was released in February 1992. This is a curiously short interval, particularly considering that there’d only been 25 ebooks encoded and released by Project Gutenberg in the 20+ years it had existed, and there are (when you stop to count them) many more books in the English language that were available. Even Milton fanatics would probably agree that this was a little early in a mass digitization project to start doubling up.

It turns out, though, that EBook #26 is special. In fact, it merits a special unsigned introduction by Project Gutenberg. By contrast, Boss’s 1991 edition doesn’t have an introduction. Instead, it has a totally charming disclaimer:

Disclaimer:

All persons concerned disclaim any and all reponsbility
that this etext is perfectly accurate. No pretenses in
any manner are made that this text should be thought of
as an authoritative edition in any respect.

This book was TYPED in by Judy Boss
eng003@zeus.unomaha.edu on Internet
eng003@unoma1 on Bitnet
(Judy now has a scanner)

Perfect, right? No authority, just a little signature of the scribe. “Judy made this.” Now she has a scanner.

Ebook #26 needs more context. Here’s the introduction:

This is the February 1992 Project Gutenberg release of:

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg (ca. 1964–1965)
(If you know of any older ones, please let us know.)

Introduction (one page)

This etext was originally created in 1964–1965 according to Dr.
Joseph Raben of Queens College, NY, to whom it is attributed by
Project Gutenberg. We had heard of this etext for years but it
was not until 1991 that we actually managed to track it down to
a specific location, and then it took months to convince people
to let us have a copy, then more months for them actually to do
the copying and get it to us. Then another month to convert to
something we could massage with our favorite 486 in DOS. After
that is was only a matter of days to get it into this shape you
will see below. The original was, of course, in CAPS only, and
so were all the other etexts of the 60’s and early 70’s. Don’t
let anyone fool you into thinking any etext with both upper and
lower case is an original; all those original Project Gutenberg
etexts were also in upper case and were translated or rewritten
many times to get them into their current condition. They have
been worked on by many people throughout the world.

In the course of our searches for Professor Raben and his etext
we were never able to determine where copies were or which of a
variety of editions he may have used as a source. We did get a
little information here and there, but even after we received a
copy of the etext we were unwilling to release it without first
determining that it was in fact Public Domain and finding Raben
to verify this and get his permission. Interested enough, in a
totally unrelated action to our searches for him, the professor
subscribed to the Project Gutenberg listserver and we happened,
by accident, to notice his name. (We don’t really look at every
subscription request as the computers usually handle them.) The
etext was then properly identified, copyright analyzed, and the
current edition prepared.

To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and
what we have today: the original was probably entered on cards
commonly known at the time as “IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle
or Mutilate) and probably took in excess of 100,000 of them. A
single card could hold 80 characters (hence 80 characters is an
accepted standard for so many computer margins), and the entire
original edition we received in all caps was over 800,000 chars
in length, including line enumeration, symbols for caps and the
punctuation marks, etc., since they were not available keyboard
characters at the time (probably the keyboards operated at baud
rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to type slowly for
the keyboard to keep up).

This is the second version of Paradise Lost released by Project
Gutenberg. The first was released as our October, 1991 etext.

This is honest-to-goodness digital humanism, from start to finish. 113 baud keyboards. IBM punch cards. All caps and no punctuation — like a real Latin text! (In 1964, at least you had spaces between words and periods for the ends of sentences, I guess.) Tapping it out, in many hands, knowing that the number of people likely to even know what they’ve done is probably going to be limited to a handful.

Then in the early nineties, a new generation of digital humanists hears whispered rumors about this file and its editor. Then, after months of persuasion and conversion, “another month to convert to something we could massage with our favorite 486 in DOS.”

Meanwhile, the text itself has actually been recreated by a new editor/typist, working alone. But Project Gutenberg — probably Michael Hart himself — still recreates the text. To maintain that chain unbroken with the past.

When Michael Hart passed away in September, he was hailed as the “inventor of the ebook.” But Hart himself doubtlessly knew better.

He wasn’t the first to type a text into a computer. He didn’t even know who had been, if it was Joseph Raben and his typist(s) or someone else.

Hart didn’t invent the ebook. He invented something more: the place where these digital books and their editors’ names and stories could be preserved and shared. He invented a library; he invented an ark.

Super-Rich Super-Heroes Respond To #OccupyWallStreet

2011-10-20T03:24:00Z

David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet

2011-10-19T10:30:55Z

Yves here. I have to note that David DeGraw of Amped Status is widely credited as the originator of “We are the 99%.”

By David Graeber, who is currently a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to that he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon.

Just a few months ago, I wrote a piece for Adbusters that started with a conversation I’d had with an Egyptian activist friend named Dina:

All these years,” she said, “we’ve been organizing marches, rallies… And if only 45 people show up, you’re depressed, if you get 300, you’re happy. Then one day, 200,000 people show up. And you’re incredulous: on some level, even though you didn’t realize it, you’d given up thinking that you could actually win.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across America, and even the world, I am suddenly beginning to understand a little of how she felt.

On August 2, I showed up at a 7 PM meeting at Bowling Green, that a Greek anarchist friend, who I’d met at a recent activist get together at 16 Beaver Street, had told me was meant to plan some kind of action on Wall Street in mid-September. At the time I was only vaguely aware of the background: that a month before, the Canadian magazine Adbusters had put out the call to “Occupy Wall Street”, but had really just floated the idea on the internet, along with some very compelling graphics, to see if it would take hold; that a local anti-budget cut coalition top-heavy with NGOs, unions, and socialist groups had tried to take possession of the process and called for a “General Assembly” at Bowling Green. The title proved extremely misleading. When I arrived, I found the event had been effectively taken over by a veteran protest group called the Worker’s World Party, most famous for having patched together ANSWER one of the two great anti-war coalitions, back in 2003. They had already set up their banners, megaphones, and were making speeches—after which, someone explained, they were planning on leading the 80-odd assembled people in a march past the Stock Exchange itself.

The usual reaction to this sort of thing is a kind of cynical, bitter resignation. “I wish they at least wouldn’t advertise a ‘General Assembly’ if they’re not actually going to hold one.” Actually, I think I actually said that, or something slightly less polite, to one of the organizers, a disturbingly large man, who immediately remarked, “well, fine. Why don’t you leave?”

But as I paced about the Green, I noticed something. To adopt activist parlance: this wasn’t really a crowds of verticals—that is, the sort of people whose idea of political action is to march around with signs under the control of one or another top-down protest movement. They were mostly pretty obviously horizontals: people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of organization, non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy, and direct action. I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I remembered from some Food Not Bomb event, some college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, a Spanish couple who’d been involved with the indignados in Madrid… I found my Greek friends, an American I knew from street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, now turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist intellectual I’d known for years… My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her and we both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing: “Why are we so complacent? Why is it that every time we see something like this happening, we just mutter things and go home?” – though I think the way we put it was more like, “You know something? Fuck this shit. They advertised a general assembly. Let’s hold one.”

So we gathered up a few obvious horizontals and formed a circle, and tried to get everyone else to join us. Almost immediately people appeared from the main rally to disrupt it, calling us back with promises that a real democratic forum would soon break out on the podium. We complied. It didn’t happen. My Greek friend made an impassioned speech and was effectively shooed off the stage. There were insults and vituperations. After about an hour of drama, we formed the circle again, and this time, almost everyone abandoned the rally and come over to our side. We created a decision-making process (we would operate by modified consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach, action, facilitation) and then reassembled to allow each group to report its collective decisions, and set up times for new meetings of both the smaller and larger groups. It was difficult to figure out what to do since we only had six weeks, not nearly enough time to plan a major action, let alone bus in the thousands of people that would be required to actually shut down Wall Street—and anyway we couldn’t shut down Wall Street on the appointed day, since September 17, the day Adbusters had been advertising, was a Saturday. We also had no money of any kind.

Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to put on our first flyer. Adbusters’ idea had been that we focus on “one key demand.” This was a brilliant idea from a marketing perspective, but from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at all. We put that one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental questions to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to? Who did we represent? Someone—this time I remember quite clearly it was me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a half dozen others had equally strong memories of being the first to come up with it—suggested, “well, why not call ourselves ‘the 99%’? If 1% of the population have ended up with all the benefits of the last 10 years of economic growth, control the wealth, own the politicians… why not just say we’re everybody else?” The Spanish couple quickly began to lay out a “We Are the 99%” pamphlet, and we started brainstorming ways to print and distribute it for free.

Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape. The core of the emerging group, which began to meet regularly in Tompkins Square park, were very young people who had cut their activist teeth on the Bloombergville encampment outside City Hall earlier in the summer; aside from that there was a smattering of activists who had been connected to the Global Justice movement with skills to share (one or two of whom I had to drag out of effective retirement), and, as mentioned a number of New Yorkers originally from Greece, Spain, even Tunisia, with knowledge and connections with those who were, or had been, involved in occupations there. We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do was something like had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, or Madrid: occupy a public space to create a New York General Assembly, a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as “democracy” by the US government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone. Still, it was almost impossible to predict what would really happen on the 17th. There were supposed to be 90,000 people following us on the internet. Adbusters had called for 20,000 to fill the streets. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. But how many would really show up? What’s more, we were keenly aware that the NYPD numbered close to 40,000; Wall Street was, in fact, probably the single most heavily policed public space on the face of Planet Earth. To be perfectly honest, as one of the old-timers scrambling to organize medical and legal trainings, lessons on how to organize affinity groups and do non-violent civil disobedience, seminars on how to facilitate meetings and the like, for most of us, the greatest concern during those hectic weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldn’t turn out a total fiasco, with all the enthusiastic young people immediately beaten, arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, simply looked the other way.

We’d certainly seen it happen before.

This time it didn’t. True, there were all the predictable conflicts. Most of New York’s grumpier hard-core anarchists refused to join in, and mocked us from the sidelines as reformist; meanwhile, the more open, “small-a” anarchists, who had been largely responsible for organizing the facilitation and trainings, battled the verticals in the group to ensure that we did not institute anything that could become a formal leadership structure, such as police liaisons or marshals. There were also bitter battles over the web page, as well as minor crises over the participation of various fringe groups, ranging from followers of Lyndon LaRouche to one woman from a shadowy group that called itself US Day of Rage, and who we sometimes suspected might not have any other members, who systematically blocked any attempt to reach out to unions because she felt we should be able to attract dissident Tea Partiers. On September 17th itself, I was troubled at first by the fact that only a few hundred people seemed to have shown up. What’s more the spot we’d chosen for our General Assembly, a plaza outside Citibank, had been shut down by the city and surrounded by high fences. The tactical committee however had scouted out other possible locations, and distributed maps: around 3 PM, word went around we were moving to location #5—Zuccotti Park—and by the time we got there, I realized we were surrounded by at least two thousand people.

The real credit for what happened after that—within a matter of weeks, a movement that had spread to 800 different cities, with outpourings of support from radical opposition groups as far away as China—belongs mainly to the students and other young people who simply dug themselves and refused to leave, despite the endless (and in many cases, obviously illegal) acts of police repression designed to intimidate, and to make life so miserable in the park (refusing to allow activists to cover their computers with tarps during rainstorms, that sort of thing) that its inhabitants would simply become demoralized and abandon the project. And, as the weeks went on, against calculated acts of terrorism involving batons and pepper-spray. Still, dogged activists have held out heroically under such conditions before, and the world simply ignored them. Why didn’t it happen this time? After so many years of vain attempts to revive the fervor of the Global Justice Movement, and constantly falling flat, I found myself, like Dina, asking “what did we actually do right?”

My first take on the question came when The Guardian asked me to write an oped on Occupy Wall Street a few days later. At the time I was inspired mainly by what Marisa Holmes, another brilliant organizer of the original occupation, had discovered in her work as a video documentarian, doing one-on-one interviews of fellow campers during the first two nights at Zucotti Square. Over and over she heard the same story: “I did everything I was supposed to! I worked hard, studied hard, got into college. Now I’m unemployed, with no prospects, and $50 to $80,000.00 in debt.” These were kids who played by the rules, and were rewarded by a future of constant harassment, of being told they were worthless deadbeats by agents of those very financial institutions who—after having spectacularly failed to play by the rules, and crashing the world economy as a result, were saved and coddled by the government in all the ways that ordinary Americans such as themselves, equally spectacularly, were not.

“We are watching,” I wrote, “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.” Three weeks later, after watching more and more elements of mainstream America clamber on board, I think this is still true. In a way, the demographic base of OWS is about as far as one can get from that of the Tea Party—with which it is so often, and so confusingly, compared. The popular base of the Tea Party was always middle aged suburban white Republicans, most of middling economic means, anti-intellectual, terrified of social change—above all, for fear that what they saw as their one remaining buffer of privilege (basically, their whiteness) might finally be stripped away. OWS, by contrast, is at core forwards-looking youth movement, just a group of forward-looking people who have been stopped dead in their tracks; of mixed class backgrounds but with a significant element of working class origins; their one strongest common feature being a remarkably high level of education. It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of the Wall Street Occupation, and so many others, is an impromptu library: a library being not only a model of an alternative economy, where lending is from a communal pool, at 0% interest, and the currency being leant is knowledge, and the means to understanding.

In a way, this is nothing new. Revolutionary coalitions have always tended to consist of a kind of alliance between children of the professional classes who reject their parents’ values, and talented children of the popular classes who managed to win themselves a bourgeois education, only to discover that acquiring a bourgeois education does not actually mean one gets to become a member of the bourgeoisie. You see the pattern repeated over and over, in country after country: Chou Enlai meets Mao Tse Tung, or Che Guevara meets Fidel Castro. Even US counter-insurgency experts have long known the surest harbingers of revolutionary ferment in any country is the growth of a population of unemployed and impoverished college graduates: that is, young people bursting with energy, with plenty of time on their hands, every reason to be angry, and access to the entire history of radical thought. In the US, the depredations of the student loan system simply ensures such budding revolutionaries cannot fail to identify banks as their primary enemy, or to understand the role of the Federal Government—which maintains the student loan program, and ensures that their loans will be held over their heads forever, even in the event of bankruptcy—in maintaining the banking system’s ultimate control over every aspect of their future lives.

Ordinarily, though, the plight of the indebted college graduate would not be the sort of issue that would speak directly to the hearts of, say, members of New York City’s Transit Worker’s Union—which, at time of writing, is not only supporting the occupation, but suing the New York Police Department for commandeering their buses to conduct a mass arrest of OWS activists blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. Why would a protest by educated youth strike such a chord across America—in a way that it probably wouldn’t have in 1967, or even 1990? Clearly, it has much to do with the financialization of capital. It may well be the case by now that most of Wall Street’s profits are no longer to be being extracted indirectly, through the wage system, at all, but taken directly from the pockets of ordinary Americans. I say “may” because we don’t really have the numbers. In a way this is telling in itself. For all the endless statistical data available on every aspect of our economic system, I have been unable to find any economist who can tell me how much of an average American’s annual income, let alone life income, ends up being appropriated by the financial industries in the form of interest payments, fees, penalties, and service charges. Still, given the fact that interest payments alone takes up between 15-17% of household income,[1] a figure that does not include student loans, and that penalty fees on bank and credit card accounts can often double the amount one would otherwise pay, it would not be at all surprising if at least one dollar out of every five an American earns over the course of her lifetime is now likely to end up in Wall Street’s coffers in one way or another. The percentage may well be approaching the amount the average American will pay in taxes. In fact, for the least affluent Americans, it has probably long since overtaken it.

This has very real implications for how we even think about what sort of economic system we are in. Back when I was in college, I learned that the difference between capitalism and feudalism—or what was sometimes called the “tributary mode of production”—is that a feudal aristocracy appropriates its wealth through “direct juro-political extraction.” They simply take other people’s things through legal means. Capitalism was supposed to be a bit more subtle.[2] Yet as soon as it achieved total world dominance, capitalism seems to have almost immediately begun shifting back into something that could well be described as feudalism.[3] In doing so, too, it made the alliance of money and government impossible to ignore. In the years since 2008, we’ve seen examples ranging from the comical—as when loan collection agencies in Massachusetts sent their employees out en masse to canvas on behalf of a senate candidate (Scott Brown) who they assumed would be in favor of harsher laws against debtors, to the downright outrageous—as when “too big to fail” institutions like Bank of America, bailed out by the taxpayers, secure in the knowledge they would not be allowed to collapse no matter what their behavior, paying no taxes, but delivering vast sums of culled from their even vaster profits to legislators who then allow their lobbyists to actually write the legislation that is supposed to “regulate” them. At this point, it’s not entirely clear why an institution like Bank of America should not, at this point, be considered part of the federal government, other than that it gets to keep its profits for itself.

Still, this might explain the outrage at government’s alliance with the financial sector—the fact that bribery has, effectively, been made legal in America, a country that nonetheless presumes to go around the world pretending it is some sort of beacon of democracy. It does not explain the comprehensive rejection of existing political institutions of any sort.

This is where I must admit my own position is particularly confusing. On the one hand, this is exactly the kind of attitude I have been arguing for for years. I like to describe myself precisely as a “small-a anarchist.” That is, I believe in anarchist principles—mutual aid, direct action, the idea building the new, free society in the shell of the old—but I’ve never felt a need to declare allegiance to any particular anarchist school (Syndicalists, Platformists, etc). Above all, I am happy to work with anyone, whatever they call themselves, willing to work on anarchist principles—which in America today, has largely come to mean, a refusal to work with or through the government or other institutions which ultimately rely on the threat of force, and a dedication to horizontal democracy, to treating each other as we believe free men and women in a genuinely free society would treat each other. Even the commitment to direct action, so often confused with breaking windows or the like, really refers to the refusal of any politics of protest, that merely appeals to the authorities to behave differently, and the determination instead to act for oneself, and to do what one thinks is right, regardless of law and authority. Gandhi’s salt march, for example, is a classic example of direct action. So was squatting Zuccotti Park. It’s a public space; we were the public; the public shouldn’t have to ask permission to engage in peaceful political assembly in its own park; so we didn’t. By doing so we not only acted in the way we felt was right, we aimed to set an example to others: to begin to reclaim communal resources that have been appropriated for purposes of private profit to once again serve for communal use—as in a truly free society, they would be—and to set an example of what genuine communal use might actually be like. For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

Small-a anarchists such as myself were at the core of the anti-nuclear movement in the ‘70s and the global justice movement between 1998-2001, and over the years, we have put much of our creative energy into developing forms of egalitarian political process that actually work. I should emphasize that this is not just an anarchist project. Actually, the development of consensus process, which is probably the movement’s greatest accomplishment, emerges just as much from the tradition of radical feminism, and draws on spiritual traditions from Native American to Quakerism. This is where the whole exotic language of the movement comes from: facilitation, “the people’s microphone,” spokescouncils, blocks; though in the case of Occupy Wall Street, augmented and transformed by the experience of General Assembly movements across the Mediterranean.

Obviously, what happened is exactly what we hoped would happen. The politics of direct action is based, to a certain degree, on a faith that freedom is contagious. It is almost impossible to convince the average American that a truly democratic society would be possible. One can only show them. But the experience of actually watching a group of a thousand, or two thousand, people making collective decisions without a leadership structure, let alone that of thousands of people in the streets linking arms to holding their ground against a phalanx of armored riot cops, motivated only by principle and solidarity, can change one’s most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that matter, human life, could actually be like. Back in the days of the Global Justice movement we thought we might expose enough people, around the world, to these new forms of direct democracy, these traditions of direct action, that a new, global, democratic culture would begin to emerge. Of course it didn’t quite happen that way. Certainly, the movement did inspire thousands, and played a major role in transforming how activist groups in Europe and North America conducted meetings and thought about politics; but the contagion was largely contained within pre-existing activist ghettos; most Americans never even knew that direct democracy was so much of what we were about. The anti-war movements after 2003 mobilized hundreds of thousands, but they fell back on the old fashioned vertical politics of top-down coalitions, charismatic leaders, and marching around with signs. Many of us diehard kept the faith. We kept looking for the moment of revival. After all, we had dedicated our lives to the principle that something like this would eventually happen. But, like my Egyptian friend, we had also, in a certain way, failed to notice that we’d stop really believing that we could actually win.

And then it happened. The last time I went back to Zuccotti Square, and watched middle aged construction workers and Latino hip hop artists using all our old hand signals in mass meetings, one of my old anarchist comrades—a one-time tree-sitter and inveterate eco-activist who used to go by the name Warcry, and was now established in the park as video documentarians—admitted to me, “every few hours I do have to pinch myself to make sure it isn’t all a dream.”

So the social scientist in me has to ask: Why? Why now? Why did it actually work?

Again, I think the answer is generational. In politics, too, as in education, we are looking at a generation of young people who played by the rules, and have seen their efforts prove absolutely fruitless. We must remember that in 2008, the youth vote went overwhelmingly to Barrack Obama and the Democrats. We also have to remember that Obama was running, then, as a candidate of “Change”, using a campaign language that drew liberally from that of radical social movements (“yes we can!”, “be the change!”), and that as a former community organizer, he was one of the few candidates in recent memory who could be said to have emerged from a social movement background rather than from smoke-filled rooms. This, combined with the fact that Obama was Black, gave young people a sense that they were experiencing a genuinely transformative moment in American politics.

All this happened in a country where there was such a straightjacket on acceptable political discourse in the US—what a politician or media pundit can say, without being immediately written off as lunatic fringe—that the views of very large segments of the American public simply are never voiced at all. To give a sense of how radical is the disconnect between acceptable opinion, and the actual feelings of American voters, consider a pair of polls conducted by Rasmussen, the first in December 2008, right after Obama was elected, the second in April 2011. A broad sampling of Americans were asked which economic system they preferred: capitalism, or socialism? In 2008, 15% felt the USA would be better off adopting a socialist system; now, three years later, the number has gone up, to one in five. Even more striking was the breakdown by age: the younger the respondent, the more likely they were to reject a capitalist system. Among Americans between 15 and 25, a thin plurality still preferred capitalism: 37%, as opposed to 33% in favor of socialism (the rest were unsure). But think about what this means here. It means that almost two thirds of America’s youth think it might be a good idea to jettison the capitalist system entirely! This in a country where most have never seen a single politician, TV pundit, or mainstream “expert” use the term “socialism” as anything but a term of condescension and abuse. Granted, for that very reason, it’s hard to know exactly what young people who say they prefer “socialism” actually think they’re embracing. Presumably not an economic system modeled on that of North Korea. What then? Sweden? Canada? It’s impossible to say. But in a way it’s also beside the point. Most Americans might not be sure what socialism is supposed to be, but they do know a great deal about capitalism, and if “socialism” means anything to them, it means “something, pretty much anything, other than that!”

In 2008, young Americans preferred Obama to McCain by a rate 68% to 30[4]—again, an approximately 2/3 margin.

How, then, do you expect a young American voter to feel, after casting a vote for a fundamental change to our political and economic system, on discovering that in fact, they have elected a man who twenty years ago would have been considered a moderate conservative?

I mean that word, “conservative,” in its literal sense by the way. This literal sense is now rarely used. Nowadays, in the US, “conservative” has come to mean “right-wing radical,” but it used to mean someone whose main political imperative is to conserve existing institutions, more or less exactly as they are—and this is precisely what Obama has turned out to be. Almost all his greatest political efforts have been aimed in one way or another at preserving some institutional structure under threat of radical transformation: the banking system, the auto industry, even the health insurance industry, since Obama’s main argument in pushing for health care reform was that the US health care system, based on for-profit, private insurers, was not economically viable over the long term, and indeed, what he ended up doing was preserving exactly that for-profit system in a way that it might endure for at least another generation. Considering the state of the US economy in 2008, it required genuinely heroic efforts not to change anything. Yet Obama did expend those heroic efforts, and the result was no structural change in existing institutions of any kind at all.

I am a frequenter of the liberal blog Daily Kos. Reading it regularly is probably the best way to get a sense of what the “progressive community” in the US—left-leaning voters and activists who still believe in acting through the Democratic Party—are currently thinking. Over the last two years, the level of hatred directed against Obama is extraordinary. He is regularly accused of being a fraud, a liar, a secret Republican who has intentionally flubbed every opportunity for progressive change presented to him in the name of “bipartisan compromise” with a rabid and uncompromising Right. Others suggest he is a well-meaning progressive whose hands are tied; or, alternately, blame progressives for not having mobilized to provide sufficient pressure to his Left. The latter seem to forget the way the grassroots activist groups created during the campaign, which were expected to endure afterwards for just this purpose, were rapidly dismantled once Obama was in power and handing the economic reigns of the US over to the very people (Geithner, Bernanke, Summers) responsible for the crisis, or how liberal groups that actually try to mount campaigns against such policies are regularly threatened with defunding by White-House friendly NGOs. But in a way, this feeling of personal betrayal is pretty much inevitable. It is the only way of preserving the faith that it’s possible for progressive policies to be enacted in the US through electoral means. Because if Obama was not planning all along to betray his Progressive base, then one would be forced to conclude any such project is impossible. After all, how could there have been a more perfect alignment of the stars than happened in 2008? That year saw a wave election that left Democrats in control of both houses of congress,[5] a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Change” coming to power at a moment of economic crisis so profound that radical measures of some sort were unavoidable, and at a time when popular rage against the nation’s financial elites was so intense that most Americans would have supported almost anything. If it was not possible to enact any real progressive policies or legislation at such a moment, clearly, it would never be. Yet none were enacted.[6] Instead Wall Street gained even greater control over the political process, and, since Republicans proved the only party willing to propose radical positions of any kind, the political center swung even further to the Right. Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.

Say what you will about Americans, and one can say many things, this is a country of deeply democratic sensibilities. The idea that we are, or are supposed to be, a democratic society is at the very core of what makes us proud to be Americans. If Occupy Wall Street has spread to every city in America, it’s because our financial overlords have brought us to such a pass that anarchists, pagan priestesses, and tree-sitters are about the only Americans left still holding out for the idea that a genuinely democratic society might be possible.
————-
[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/housedebt/default.htm.

[2] Similarly, Max Weber argued that the “irrational political capitalism” of “military adventurers … tax farmers, speculators, money dealers, and others” of, say, the Roman world, was an historical dead end, since it was ultimately parasitical off the state, and had nothing in common with the rational investment of production of modern industrial capitalism. By Weber’s logic, contemporary global capitalism, which is dominated by speculators, currency traders, and government contractors, has long since reverted to the dead-end irrational variety.

[3] See http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/underlying-ideology-of-the-99/ for a nice essay on Occupy Wall Street and “neo-feudalism.”

[4] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27525497/ns/politics-decision_08/t/youth-vote-may-have-been-key-obamas-win/

[5] The conventional response to this was to insist that the Democrats didn’t really control both houses because the Senate rules had changed, irresponsible use of the Filibuster meant that a 60-vote majority was required. This only makes sense if one assumes that any minority party, at any previous period of American history, could have gotten rid of majority rule and moved to a 60% system had they really wanted to, but somehow chose not to do so—which is obviously absurd. If the Republicans got away with it in 2008 it’s because the Democrats decided not to make a major issue an unprecedented opposition policy of systematically violating all previous tacit Senate rules.

[6] Obama’s health care legislation, I will repeat, does not count since it is not comprehensive and effectively reproduces Bob Dole’s Republican health plan of 2006.

Web 2.0 Summit 2011: Chris Poole, "High Order Bit" - YouTube

2011-10-19T22:12:52Z

Shared by Rafi
identity is not a mirror, it's prismatic

William Gibson Interview – Boing Boing

2011-10-19T20:23:02Z

Illo: Rob Beschizza. Photo: Frederic Poirot

Author William Gibson discusses Victorians, John Shirley and the early days of his career. A longer version of this interview appeared in the 197th issue of Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

Do you think fiction should be predictive?

GIBSON

No, I don’t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we’ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.

GIBSON

There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.

There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.

Of course, we might be Victorians, too.

INTERVIEWER

The Victorians invented science fiction.

GIBSON

I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.

But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”

Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steam-punk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.

++++++++++++++++++

INTERVIEWER

You wrote your first story for a class, didn’t you?

GIBSON

A woman named Susan Wood had come to UBC as an assistant professor. We were the same age, and I met her while reconnoitering the local science-fiction culture. In my final year she was teaching a science-fiction course. I had become really lazy and thought, I won’t have to read anything if I take her course. No matter what she assigns, I’ve read all the stuff. I’ll just turn up and bullshit brilliantly, and she’ll give me a mark just for doing that. But when I said, “Well, you know, we know one another. Do I really have to write you a paper for this class?” She said, “No, but I think you should write a short story and give me that instead.” I think she probably saw through whatever cover I had erected over my secret plan to become a science-fiction writer.

I went ahead and did it, but it was incredibly painful. It was the hardest thing I did in my senior year, writing this little short story. She said, “That’s good. You should sell it now.” And I said, “No.” And she said, “Yeah, you should sell it.” I went and found the most obscure magazine that paid the least amount of money. It was called Unearth. I submitted it to them, and they bought it and gave me twenty-seven dollars. I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least nobody will ever see it, I thought. That was “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.”

INTERVIEWER

How did you meet John Shirley?

GIBSON

Shirley was the only one of us who was seriously punk. I’d gone to a science-fiction convention in Vancouver, and there I encountered this eccentrically dressed young man my age who seemed to be wearing prison pajamas. He was an extremely outgoing person, and he introduced himself to me: “I’m a singer in a punk band, but my day job is writing science fiction.” I said, “You know, I write a little science fiction myself.” And he said, “Published anything?” And I said, “Oh, not really. This one story in this utterly obscure magazine.” He said, “Well, send me some of your stuff, I’ll give you a critique.”

As soon as he got home he sent me a draft of a short story he had written perhaps an hour beforehand: “This is my new genius short story.” I read it—it was about someone who discovers there are things that live in bars, things that look like drunks and prostitutes but are actually something else—and I saw, as I thought at the time, its flaws. I sat down to write him a critique, but it would have been so much work to critique it that instead I took his story and rewrote it. It was really quick and painless. I sent it back to him, saying, “I hope this won’t piss you off, but it was actually much easier for me to rewrite this than to do a critique.” The next thing I get back is a note—“I sold it!” He had sold it to this hardcover horror anthology. I was like, Oh, shit. Now my name is on this weird story.

People kept doing that to me, and it’s really good that they did. I’d give various friends stuff to read, and they’d say, “What are you going to do with this?” And I’d say, “Nothing, it’s not nearly there yet.” Then they’d Xerox it and submit it on my behalf, to places I would have been terrified to submit to. It seemed unseemly to me to force this unfinished stuff on the world at large.

INTERVIEWER

Do you still consider that work unfinished?

GIBSON

I had a very limited tool kit when I began writing. I didn’t know how to handle transitions, so I used abrupt breaks, the literary equivalent of jump cuts. I didn’t have any sense of how to pace anything. But I had read and ad- mired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.

INTERVIEWER

What was the effect?

GIBSON

A more genuine kind of future shock. I wanted the reader to feel constantly somewhat disoriented and in a foreign place, because I assumed that to be the highest pleasure in reading stories set in imaginary futures. But I’d also read novels where the future-weirdness quotient overwhelmed me and simply became boring, so I tried to make sure my early fiction worked as relatively solid genre pieces. Which I still believe is harder to do. When I started Neuromancer, for instance, I wanted to have an absolutely familiar, utterly well-worn armature of pulp plot running throughout the whole thing. It’s the caper plot that carries the reader through.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of Neuromancer today?

GIBSON

When I look at Neuromancer I see a Soap Box Derby car. I felt, writing it, like I had two-by-fours and an old bicycle wheel and I’m supposed to build something that will catch a Ferrari. This is not going to fly, I thought. But I tried to do it anyway, and I produced this garage artifact, which, amazingly, is still running to this day.

Even so, I got to the end of it, and I didn’t care what it meant, I didn’t even know if it made any sense as a narrative. I didn’t have this huge feeling of, Wow, I just wrote a novel! I didn’t think it might win an award. I just thought, Phew! Now I can figure out how to write an actual novel.

company hierarchy | gapingvoid

2011-10-19T13:37:42Z

Shared by Rafi
also applying to the 1%/9%/90% via john robb

nezua: isnobueno: langer: Because I know you needed it,...

2011-10-18T20:34:50Z

nezua:

isnobueno:

langer:

Because I know you needed it, internet, I made you this reaction gif of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West hearing the news from Bill O’Reilly that nobody on Wall St. committed any crimes.

YYYYAAASSSS!!!

GIF Solid Gold.

In my Tavis & Cornell = Bert & Ernie theory, I guess Bill O’Reilly is Oscar the Grouch here?

This Talking Is Only Bravado

2011-10-14T19:49:07Z

Shared by wayneandwax
gal a bleach

Have you guys heard about this cool white woman named Rihanna?

Platforms, Not Products: A Googler’s Hot-Mic Sound-Off On G+

2011-10-12T21:37:55Z

Google engineer Steve Yegge apologizes for accidentally making his G+ rant public.

Last night, a Google engineer learned first-hand that Google+’s strength — the privacy-controlled circles that allow you to use the network for public posts and private workgroups — is also its weakness, if you accidentally cross the streams.

But if Steve Yegge’s highly critical, accidentally public rant about Google+ were just embarassing to him or Google, I wouldn’t really care much about it, and neither should you. Instead, you should read it because it truly is, as G+er Rip Rowan says, possibly “the best article I’ve ever read about architecture and the management of IT.”

For instance, with respect to Google+, Yegge writes:

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call…

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

So yay Facebook, boo Google+, right? No! There’s a bigger lesson here; these are just high-stakes instances. Here is how Yegge spells it out:

“A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.” Google’s trying to fight this by going in the opposite direction. Facebook had a product and built a platform; Google+ is taking everything that makes Google a platform and turning it into a product, like Search or Gmail. Or, they’re trying to recapitulate Facebook’s evolution, forgetting that Google already has everything it needs to be a platform without reinventing the social network part first.
In an ideal universe, Google+ would be more like Maps or even Wave, or Microsoft Office; externally scriptable platforms that users and developers could build upon. Instead, Yegge writes, “The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.”You can’t do that,” he adds. “Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.” When Google tries to act like it can deliver a product in this way, it risks earning the reputation for arrogance that Yegge says the company doesn’t really deserve. Google, he says “does everything right,” except this one thing. But it’s a big one.
“The problem is that we’re a Product Company through and through,” Yegge says — starting from its origin. “We built a successful product with broad appeal — our search, that is — and that wild success has biased us … it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up.”

This part fascinates me, because it’s not an issue of product strategy or internal organization or building up the right number of APIs. It’s a problem at the root. Google tried to shake up the entire company by tying every division’s success to the success of its social product, when it should have — if the logic Yegge’s advancing here is right, and I think it is — tied every division’s success to its ability to build platforms, with Google+ as the flagship platform that tied all those efforts together.

So it’s not that Google “doesn’t get social,” in the sense of misunderstanding what users expect from a service and what they want to use it to do. Not really. It’s that Google doesn’t get why Facebook and Twitter have (so far) emerged from the Giant Social Network Graveyard, or even why Google emerged from the Giant Search Engine Graveyard — because it built platforms that could go anywhere and serve as utilities in instances they couldn’t anticipate.

This failure to get this high-order lesson not just of social, but software, is endemic to Google: “Even if individuals [get it], even if YOU do, it doesn’t matter one bit unless we’re treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can’t keep launching products and pretending we’ll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We’ve tried that and it’s not working.” That’s a pretty big admission/lesson to drop on a hot mic.

I’ll add three additional lessons from this, as a postscript:

Yegge came to Google from Amazon, and he points to Amazon as an example of a company that successfully made the switch from product to platforms. Mostly, they did this because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos scared the living shit out of everyone. Seriously, Yegge’s portrait of “the Dread Pirate Bezos” is worth reading for its own sake; it’s been one of the highlights of my day.
Ironically, Yegge’s post puts to rest the risible argument advanced by Mashable’s Ben Parr that high-level Googlers don’t use Google+, so ordinary users shouldn’t either. I wrote then that the problem with this argument (like almost all arguments about Google+) is that it doesn’t meaningfully distinguish between private and public posts. What I share on Google+ with my coworkers at Wired, my close friends, or my special circles, like “Dads,” is very different from what I share with the world, and that’s true for people at Google too. Yegge’s lesson isn’t that Googlers aren’t eating their own dog food. It’s that they’re not doing it very well — whether in terms of how they execute simple things like sharing posts or — more meaningfully — how they’re designing the products to be widely used inside and outside the company.
Yegge deleted his post on his own discretion, noting that it was really intended as an internal discussion among Googlers. He wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t representing Google or the company’s opinions: “I mean, I was kind of taking them to task for not sharing my opinions. :)”

Yegge mentions that he consulted with Google’s PR team, who did not try to censor him in any way. “I love working at Google” he writes, “and I especially love the fact that I’m comfortable posting something as inflammatory as my post may have been. The company is super open internally, and as I said several times in my post, they really try hard to do everything right.”

That’s good news for Google, and good news for Yegge. Let’s hope it stays that way. Here endeth the lesson.

The contribution conundrum: Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed?

2011-10-12T16:00:47Z

The guys behind Wikipedia weren’t the first to experiment with creating a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia. They were just the first ones to do it successfully, on a worldwide scale.

There were seven collaborative encyclopedias that aspired to Wikipedia-like dimensions before Wikipedia itself came along in early 2001: Interpedia, which ran from late 1993 to mid-1994; The Distributed Encyclopedia (1997-1998); Everything 2 (1998-present); h2g2 (1999-present); The Info Network (2000-2003); Nupedia (2000-2003); and GNUpedia (founded in 2001, and later merging with Nupedia).

So why did Wikipedia become a worldwide phenomenon, while those others did not?

Wikipedia succeeded in part because, revolutionary as it was, it also felt familiar.

In a talk yesterday afternoon at Harvard’s Berkman Center, Berkman fellow (and MIT Media Lab/Sloan School of Management researcher) Benjamin Mako Hill presented his research into that question, focusing on what seems to be the key distinguishing success factor: the fact that Wikipedia was able to attract legions of contributors while the others stayed decidedly niche. The encyclopedias were all collaborative efforts built on what Yochai Benkler has called commons-based peer production; so why, ultimately, was Wikipedia able to attract so many more peers to do so much more production?

One answer, which seems obvious only in retrospect: Wikipedia attracted contributors because it was built around a familiar product — the encyclopedia. Encyclopedias aren’t just artifacts; they’re also epistemic frames. They employ a particular — and, yet, universal — approach to organizing information. Prior to Wikipedia, online encyclopedias tried to do what we tend to think is a good thing when it comes to the web: challenging old metaphors, exploding analog traditions, inventing entirely new forms.

“I don’t think I conceived of it as like, ‘Let’s just put an encyclopedia online,’” one encyclopedia’s founder told Hill. The attitude, instead, was “this is going to be an exploration, and we’re going to figure out what a reference work online looks like.”

But that approach, web-native and admirable as it was in theory, ended up hindering early encyclopedias’ ability to attract contributors, Hill speculates. Newness isn’t always inviting; Wikipedia succeeded in part because, revolutionary as it was, it also felt familiar. (“If you understand how encyclopedias are written, you basically understand Neutral Point of View,” Hill pointed out.) So a crucial aspect of mobilization is also the most basic: simply getting people on the same page. And common, familiar frames can help with that, Hill said.

Another intriguing finding: Wikipedia focused on substantive content development instead of technology. Wikipedia was the only project in the entire sample, Hill noted, that didn’t build its own technology. (It was, in fact, generally seen as technologically unsophisticated by other encyclopedias’ founders, who saw themselves more as technologists than as content providers.) GNUpedia, for example, had several people dedicated to building its infrastructure, but none devoted to building its articles. It was all very if you build it, they will come.

“I had this notion that my job was to provide the platform,” one founder told Hill. The assumption, said another, was that “content was the community’s job. But there was no community.”

Using the simple technology of the wiki allowed Wikipedia’s founders to focus on the encyclopedia’s content — on getting article contributions rather than building technology. Instead of acting as technologists, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger could instead act as evangelists, Hill pointed out, seeding Wikipedia with content they solicited from contributors — which, in turn, led to more content, and more contributors. There are lots of convincing arguments suggesting that peer production projects succeed because of technology; in encyclopedias’ case, though, it seems that technology actually became a distraction. Leaders needed to be able to take their infrastructure for granted so they could focus on the content that would populate it.

There are two other key contributors to Wikipedia’s success with attracting contributors, Hill’s research suggests: Wikipedia offered low transaction costs to participation, and it de-emphasized the social ownership of content. Editing Wikipedia is easy, and instant, and virtually commitment-free. “You can come along and do a drive-by edit and never make a contribution again,” Hill pointed out. And the fact that it’s difficult to tell who wrote an article, or who edited it — rather than discouraging contribution, as you might assume — actually encouraged contributions, Hill found. “Low textual ownership resulted in more collaboration,” he put it.

Editing Wikipedia is easy, instant, and virtually commitment-free.

And that could well be because Wikipedia’s authorless structure lowers the pressure some might feel to contribute something stellar. The pull of reputation can discourage contributions even as it can also encourage them. So Wikipedia “took advantage of marginal contributions,” Hill noted — a sentence here, a graf there — which, added up, turned into articles. Which, added up, turned into an encyclopedia.

There’s some good food for thought for news organizations in those findings. If you want user contributions, build platforms that are familiar and easy. Lower the barriers to participation; focus on helping users to understand what you want from them rather than on dazzling them. Though gamification — with incentives that encourage certain user behaviors, complete with individual rewards (badges! titles! mayors!) — certainly has a role to play in the new news ecosystem, Hill’s findings suggest that the inverse of game dynamics can be a powerful force, as well. His research highlights the value of platforms that invite rather than challenge — and the validity of contributions made for the collective good rather than the individual.

Image by Jiheffe used under a Creative Commons license.

Benford's Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms

2011-10-12T19:25:19Z

Shared by Rafi
via Noah Brier

A few months ago I came upon an old episode of Radiolab, one of my favorite podcasts whose host Jad Abumrad just won a Macarthur Fellowship. The episode was about numbers. It made me nostalgic for my youthful enthrallment with the pristine world of mathematics, before I succumbed to the gritty reality of the financial world. Among the episode's astounding revelations was that babies count on a logarithmic scale.

A second earth-shattering fact is that there are more numbers in the universe that begin with the digit 1 than 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9. And more numbers that begin with 2 than 3, or 4, and so on. This relationship holds for the lengths of rivers, the populations of cities, molecular weights of chemicals, and any number of other categories. What a blow to any of us who purport to have mastered the basic facts of the world around us!

This numerical regularity is known as Benford's Law, and specifically, it says that the probability of the first digit from a set of numbers is d is given by

In fact, Benford's law has been used in legal cases to detect corporate fraud, because deviations from the law can indicate that a company's books have been manipulated. Naturally, I was keen to see whether it applies to the large public firms that we commonly study in finance.

I downloaded quarterly accounting data for all firms in Compustat, the most widely-used dataset in corporate finance that contains data on over 20,000 firms from SEC filings. I used a standard set of 43 variables that comprise the basic components of corporate balance sheets and income statements (revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities, etc.).

And lo, it works! Here are the distribution of first digits vs. Benford's law's prediction for total assets and total revenues.

Next, I looked at how adherence to Benford's law changed over time, using a measure of the sum of squared deviations of the empirical density from the Benford's prediction.

where ^P(d) is the empirical probability of the first digit d.

Deviations from Benford's law have increased substantially over time, such that today the empirical distribution of each digit is about 3 percentage points off from what Benford's law would predict. The deviation increased sharply between 1982-1986 before leveling off, then zoomed up again from 1998 to 2002. Notably, the deviation from Benford dropped off very slightly in 2003-2004 after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform act in 2002, but this was very tiny and the deviation resumed its increase up to an all-time peak in 2009.

So according to Benford's law, accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what's really going on inside of companies. The major reform that was passed after Enron and other major accounting standards barely made a dent.

Next, I looked at Benford's law for three industries: finance, information technology, and manufacturing. The finance industry showed a huge surge in the deviation from Benford's from 1981-82, coincident with two major deregulatory acts that sparked the beginnings of that other big mortgage debacle, the Savings and Loan Crisis. The deviation from Benford's in the finance industry reached a peak in 1988 and then decreased starting in 1993 at the tail end of the S&L fraud wave, not matching its 1988 level until … 2008.

The time series for information technology is similarly tied to that industry's big debacle, the dotcom bubble. Neither manufacturing nor IT showed the huge increase and decline of the deviation from Benford's that finance experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s, further validating the measure since neither industry experienced major fraud scandals during that period. The deviation for IT streaked up between 1998-2002 exactly during the dotcom bubble, and manufacturing experienced a more muted increase during the same period.

While these time series don't prove anything decisively, deviations from Benford's law are compellingly correlated with known financial crises, bubbles, and fraud waves. And overall, the picture looks grim. Accounting data seem to be less and less related to the natural data-generating process that governs everything from rivers to molecules to cities. Since these data form the basis of most of our research in finance, Benford's law casts serious doubt on the reliability of our results. And it's just one more reason for investors to beware.

As noted by William Black in his great book on the S&L crisis The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, the most fraudulent S&Ls were the ones that looked most profitable on paper. That was in fact an inherent part of the scam. So perhaps, instead of looking solely at profitability, we should also consider this more fundamental measure of a firm's "performance." And many questions remain. What types of firms, and what kind of executives drive the greatest deviations from Benford's law? Does this measure do well in predicting known instances of fraud? How much of these deviations are driven by government deregulation, changes in accounting standards, and traditional measures of corporate governance?

Stay tuned to find out.

Red Ink

2011-10-12T13:37:35Z

If you can’t handle the people’s microphone version, Impose has a transcript of Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street, serving up some of his favorite dishes:

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink…

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare.

Mad Men

2011-09-19T09:00:41Z

"Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness." - Don Draper

A shadowed figure enters his office, sets down his briefcase, and the room collapses around him. As he tumbles through a chasm of diamond rings, happy families, and women in pantyhose, the glossy veneer of advertising gives way, revealing the rough humanity of a man lost. RJD2’s jazzy “A Beautiful Mine” conducts the viewer through the parallel worlds of the philandering, chain-smoking Madison Avenue boys' club and the idyllic nuclear family, introducing us to some of the themes underpinning the Emmy award-winning show, Mad Men.

Art of the Title spoke with Cara McKenney, Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller about the brainstorms and battles that went into this refined and cryptic opening title sequence, produced by Imaginary Forces.

INTERVIEW

A discussion with Producer Cara McKenny and Creative Directors Steve Fuller and Mark Gardner.

Art of the Title: Tell us about the initial development of this project.

Cara McKenney: This was a new show, and a period drama at that, with no-name actors, on a network with no success in developing original content—wow, it’s so crazy to think that I am talking about AMC, right? But remember, this was in 2007! Mad Men wasn’t on billboards in Times Square and doing multi-million dollar cross-promotions with Banana Republic....

There were tons of red flags in terms of the first information I received about this project and I was wary until, of course, I saw the pilot and read up about Matthew Weiner. The show was gripping and emotional, complex and funny—it took my breath away. By the closing I knew there wasn’t a creative instinct in me that could have turned it down.

Matthew had a distinct point of view and came to us with a compelling brief: A man walks into an office building, enters his office, places his suitcase down and jumps out the window.* But that never makes it simple to push through.

My two leads to work out the pitch were Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller, both creative directors. Mark and Steve have different sensibilities, but I knew they would both bring something meaningful. And they came back to me as amped about the pilot as I was. Then it was a matter of making it work with their schedules, working with them to strategize, to create an open dialogue between Matthew and them about the design.

Mad Men logo (Click to Enlarge)

Steve Fuller: Mark and I had collaborated before on other projects and when we heard about the show—that it was being created by one of the head writers of The Sopranos—we were both really interested. During our first call with Matthew Weiner, Mark and I both felt like, “This guy really knows what he’s doing.”

Mark Gardner: This was the script that got him hired on The Sopranos, so he’d been living this thing for years and years, before The Sopranos ever came around. He lived and breathed it. For him, those years around the end of the ‘50s and the beginning of the ‘60s were the most important in 20th century American history and that enthusiasm is infectious. We also saw the pilot. We see a lot of pilots and usually they’re pretty bad, but this is one of the few where we thought, “This is really good.”

Steve: Yeah. Matthew said, “You know, it’s not just a show about advertising in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it’s about American life and culture.” He loved the idea of this main character selling the American Dream, but also being totally confused by it. He’s trying to find himself throughout the show—to define himself. Matthew wanted to touch on that and he wanted something that was going to catch people’s attention.

Mark: He wanted the sequence to sum up the ideas of the show. We managed to find something that combined both, making it look cool and sophisticated while still showing that there are actually two stories: the one that you see, but also the real story that you only get glimpses of.

Steve: Yeah, one thing that Matthew said kept echoing in my head. He said, “This is an era of guys wanting to be the head of the PTA but also drink, smoke, and get laid as much as possible.” That was the kind of dual life these guys were leading and that’s what was interesting.

Art of the Title: How did it progress after that?

Mark Gardner: There were a few people here at Imaginary Forces that had already worked on it, each with different directions, but Steve really started getting the look down. The first few frames of a semi-silhouetted guy running and being chased—those were frames that Steve was playing with and they had a great look to them. They had pared-down color so that it was almost a monochrome world...

Initial Fuller concept (Click to Enlarge)

Steve: I was hovering around these ideas and I saw this nice, precise calendar in one of my books with a horse jumping over numbers, and it had this great 3D thing and that led me to the idea of skyscrapers made out of graph paper. I was also thinking that the character could be trapped in the ads, being chased by a small VW Beetle for example, but I couldn't figure out how to bring it all together.

VW Beetle chase (Click to Enlarge)

Then, I had to go to the hospital because my son was being born! While my wife was in labor, I was talking to Mark and Cara about this idea. Mark took that initial mood and some of the ideas and simplified it to have it all happen in one fall... a fall through a skyscraper canyon... that was when it all started making sense.

Mark: Yeah, AMC had all kinds of issues with having someone falling from a skyscraper. I have seen some blog posts written about this, arguing whether or not it’s exploitative for the show to use a figure falling. Some people saw references to 9/11 and all of that, and in the beginning AMC were totally against the idea. So Matthew had to do a lot of selling to them. I think where we got away with it was because we ended up with a question that is, “Is this a dream? Which part of it is actually real? Is the pose at the end real, or is the helpless fall real?”

Steve: Yeah, Mark put in the moment at the end when the “falling guy” snaps out of it and is totally composed. That made it all come together so that we could get away with having a guy falling out of a skyscraper.

Also, there were issues with the cigarette being in the shot. The characters smoke throughout the whole first show and the first conversation that Don Draper has is about cigarettes. I think Apple and iTunes took the cigarette out or something.

Mark: Yeah, they took it out for the first season, but then I think it came back. It was interesting.

Storyboard (Click to Enlarge)

Art of the Title: Where did everything go after the boards?

Steve: After we were awarded the job, we started gathering our favorite scenes from films of guys falling past skyscrapers... so many movies climaxed with a guy falling. We wanted it to be the way a real DP would shoot it for a film. We wanted the fall not to have the continuous CGI camera move that you often see nowadays, so we decided to put cameras—all different kinds of cameras—on the surrounding buildings... just like if we were to really shoot it. We’ve got super wide shots, medium shots, and telephoto lens shots. That made it more sophisticated.

Mark: Yeah, the camera hardly moves which is not what usually happens when you have something entirely built in CG. Like Steve said, normally people think, “We can do anything with the camera” and so they do... but it’s not always best.

Graph paper skyscrapers (Click to Enlarge)

[RSS & email readers: see full post for video]

Wireframe skyscrapers (Click to Watch)

Steve: If you’re going to do something with illustration and a black silhouetted figure, you need to counteract that in order to keep it looking like a cartoon. We’ve seen stuff go badly because people misuse the camera in 3D. I’m a huge Saul Bass fan, but Matthew Weiner said, “I don’t want it to look like the ‘60s.” I like to think that it’s kind of an update of Saul Bass.

The styling, the production design of the show... it works on its own. The graph paper skyscraper idea, and the ‘60s architecture inside the agency, it all feels very geometric... very right angle. The skyscrapers were ultimately done in After Effects 3D. The falling guy was done using Softimage, but I think everything else is After Effects.

The Fall (Click to Enlarge)

Cara: A key part of this was the animatic—it was the step where we realized that the pacing and the tone were working with the shots Mark and Steve wanted to use. We decided we wanted Caleb Woods to work with us on getting the timing—he is really talented, with a great ear and a pared down sensibility—I knew he would get the tone and he was an asset to this part of the process.

One of my favorite moments was pretty far down the road when we had a solid animatic and the iconic RJD2 song that Matthew had chosen. Mark and I were on the phone with Matthew getting notes from the network. We played the sequence and there was a bit of silence and then came a comment from the network conference room far, far away saying, “I don’t know Matthew, this whole thing is kinda off—it’s weird. It reminds me of the opening to The Twilight Zone.” It was priceless! One of those instances where things become totally clear—to us, this comment, though negative, was actually a positive. The title sequence had created a tone that was unique, enigmatic and maybe a touch peculiar. To someone else, it was just weird and creepy—something that made them uncomfortable. Needless to say, we moved forward.

Art of the Title: The adverts that we see in the finished opening, did you consider fabricating them completely or had you always wanted them to be real ads from that time period?

Mark: We wanted to use real ads, but we assumed that we couldn’t, so we did start fabricating some. That was really, really hard (particularly when you've got to fabricate ads with images that you have licensed).

Cara: We had to be building these ads at the same time as we were developing the landscape since the geometry the guys were putting in place was very specific—the only way you could tell if an image was going to work was to try it out in the environment. Building these proved really challenging—it was very time-consuming and tricky to build ads that looked genuine to that time period. We had to be resourceful by both working directly with the show and sourcing family photographs.

Classic ads (Click to Enlarge)

Mark: We wanted them to be those gray, early ‘60s photographs that almost looked like illustrations. It saved us in the end when they were able to do some deals and get rights to the ads.

Cara: Once we got our hands on images I got them to the design team who would work with them and the geometry we had going for the buildings—it was important to get them as many options as possible. Mark and Steve are incredible designers—they could have made that environment look beautiful with very few images—but what they managed to do was create a space that was both visually beautiful and thematically meaningful for the show. My role was to supply them with the ammunition and freedom to do so.

Mark: We had some great ones in there that we had to get rid of too, which was heartbreaking. We had a Sophia Loren image, where our guy was literally falling through her cleavage, and it was just brilliant. Sophia Loren’s agent said that there was “absolutely no way that we could have that in a TV title sequence."

Ad examples (Click to Enlarge)

Art of the Title: What was your time-frame for this?

Mark: We were on it for quite a while and we had a lot of people working with us. We had a couple of people purely working on the falling figure. Then we had three people working on the rest of the environment. The music changed and then Matthew found this track that he really liked, so that changed things as well. I can’t remember exactly how long the project was, but I get the feeling it was a couple of months of work.

Cara: We had about four months from pitch to delivery.

Office comparison (Click to Enlarge)

Art of the Title: When did the idea of the office falling apart come in?

Mark: It was something that Matthew wanted. In the original storyboards, we start on the guy’s back as he falls away from the camera. The fall went all the way through until the very end. For a while, I was really pushing to keep that. I wanted it to be purely about the fall... so you don’t know where it begins and where it ends. It took me a while to come around. Obviously, we didn’t have any choice because Matthew didn’t want that and he was the client.

He wanted to have some sense of the office, but he didn’t really know what he wanted so we had to come up with the idea where the guy puts his briefcase down. We needed a trigger. In some ways, that was the toughest bit of the whole project. “How do you make the office fall apart? Do you really feel like it’s falling apart?” There’s no ground plane or sky... The room is just defined by a few lines. Getting it so that you really knew what was going on and felt a sense of the guy and his room crumbling around him.... that was the most complicated bit of the process to get right.

Logo explorations (Click to Enlarge)

Another thing that was a very practical problem was that AMC had done this deal where everyone in the show got a name card, which is unusual. It was a real issue trying to fit them all into the amount of time because, at one point, the title sequence was going to be a minute long. AMC was like, “There’s no way... it’s going to be twenty seconds.” We felt like it couldn't be done in less than thirty. In the end, it was maybe thirty-eight or forty seconds, but even then if you watch it, the title cards are on for barely long enough to be legible and then on top of that, they had to be placed so they weren't being affected by camera movement. There are all kinds of rules about how long credits should be on, and how they all have to be equal in size and everything, but when Saul Bass was doing titles, he'd put the whole list up! Another part of the titles was the typeface and I think what we went with was probably the first typeface that I was playing with.

It was, and they made us do a lot of changes to try a lot of different things. In the end, they just came back to the one that Steve had done first, which was better than everything else.

Steve: Yeah, we messed around with some sort of art deco styles at one point.

Mark: ...and they looked terrible! Some of them were just awful. I mean some were not too bad, but most of them were awful. I just couldn't imagine them in there now.

Logo explorations (Click to Enlarge)

Art of the Title: When did it start to solidify in terms of the final piece?

Mark: Pretty quickly. Matthew was very hands-on. He is very visually literate and he understands it all which is crazy considering that he's a writer. Virtually all of his comments and suggestions were good. We talked him out of a couple of things, but there were other things that he wouldn't budge on.

One thing that became a big deal was animating the falling guy and how much he moved. At one point we had somebody rigging just the clothing alone. The animation was very realistic, as if someone really was flying past skyscrapers with his clothing billowing. We initially thought that was what we wanted. We even had his hair moving and we had to take all that out—it was too much. It just wasn't working with the background and it needed to feel dreamier. It needed to feel surreal... much more dreamlike.

Art of the Title: That seems to tie in more with some of the earlier treatments where you have VW Beetles chasing the guy, and in the completion of the fall where he actually hits the ground and shatters.

Steve: That’s me starting, but not reigning in an idea. I was going everywhere with it: “Is he running? Is he falling? Is he going through these ads somehow?” I had a vision in my head but sometimes you don't have all the puzzle pieces in the right place yet. The fact that my wife was about to give birth was also a bit of a distraction!

Fuller initial concepts (Click to Enlarge)

The initial boards are kind of stream of consciousness... just throwing things down, establishing a look and style because I didn't really have the idea formed yet. We needed to get going, so sometimes when forming ideas you go wide, then edit and narrow down. Normally we have tons of sketches, but on this project it came together pretty cleanly and once it went into production it stayed true to our boards. The experience goes such a long way.

Art of the Title: Are jobs usually started by one person and then continued by another?

Cara: No, it was an unusual situation and one that ended up working out really well. It is not ideal to have a project started by one creative lead and then continued and finished by another, for many, many reasons. My concern was that the creative dialogue we had established with Matthew from the beginning be uninterrupted and that nobody lose confidence in the process. I was happy to be a consistent reference point and to ensure that the transition went as smoothly as possible. I like to be both Joan and Peggy.

Steve: Yeah, this was just a case of me having to run to the hospital right when I was starting. I was on other jobs, but I also oversaw Mad Men. This is common in any design company. I do think that ideas get better when they have two brains and with Mark and I, we've become friends. It's nice working like that because when you get stuck, the other person can help you.

Gardner alternate storyboard (Click to Enlarge)

Mark: Particularly when it comes to ideas. it gets better when you have to argue it and defend it. Style can be an individual thing and sometimes it's better when it's one person's vision, but I definitely think for working on concepts and ideas, collaboration is better.

It works with us because we're friends and respect each other's work. You've got to respect the opinion of the person who's critiquing your work otherwise there's nothing there. The simpler and the purer the concept, the better... but it doesn't usually start out like that. It gets there by talking about it and rationalizing it and getting rid of the bits that aren't necessary and don't work, and then you’re left with the core concepts.

Steve: I think overall the reason that people really responded to the sequence was that it's ballsy to just have a guy falling. It's ballsy of Matthew Weiner to even accept that approach and it's ballsy for us to take him seriously.

End frame (Click to Enlarge)

Mark: It's a sign of somebody who has a huge amount of drive and belief in his own opinion. There are so many things in that show that are only there because of him, and everyone who works on the show that we've met says that it’s all his vision and he had to fight battles on the title sequence with AMC and Lionsgate. I'm sure that he battled every day until that show became what it is now. I don't think a sequence like this would have happened if we'd been dealing with marketing people (which we all too often are). Not dealing with the creators and writers leads to everything getting washed out and watered down. These opportunities don’t come along very often.

Steve Fuller, Director; Cara McKenney, Producer; and Mark Gardner, Director. (Click to Enlarge)

Cara: And one of the great things AMC did was let us create the network packaging for the show. I’m not sure if this was out of necessity as at that point their in-house design resources were most likely not as robust as they are now. This is always something I have to sniff out and try to push through—it helps create a strong brand for the show and assures that the graphic language is pushed through to other platforms—that it’s not interpreted and watered down. It was fun to take what we established in the title to a graphic framework for on-air promotions and packaging. It’s less and less common that title design work can be parlayed into network branding, but this was an example of how that was hugely successful and helped make the show so iconic. It’s nice to see the title work live on in other mediums.

Steve: And a lot of other companies had the opportunity to pitch on the sequence—the kind of companies that do a lot of this work—but they all passed on the job because it was for a pilot and a lot of people thought it wasn’t going to be successful at all. Now it’s a cult thing.

Full details for our Mad Men post are available at Art of the Title.

On Wall Street’s Private Police in NYPD Uniforms

2011-10-11T04:47:17Z

We reported a bit more than a week ago on how JP Morgan had given a troublingly large donation of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. As we recounted, that foundation was established in 1971, which was when the city was sliding into its fiscal crisis, as a way for companies and individuals to bolster the NYPD’s budget. And even though in theory contributions go into a general coffer, one has to suspect in practice that big donors will get more attention from the cops. Even though this donation was the biggest the police foundation had ever received, it was still peanuts relative to the total NYPD budget. Nevertheless, as Richard Kline pointed out, the gesture was significant:

To me, the telltale with the JippyMo ‘donation’ is that it was _publicly_ announced. Jamie the Demon and his top heads want the public to know that the banksters LIKE the police, as opposed to those daft, sloppy, protestors.

The bankster/Kochster assault on unions was excruciatingly badly timed. It aims directly at public service unions. At their pensions. At their staffing levels. At their equipment. One of the most cogent remarks coming out of the intitial Wisconsin action (before the org-heads diverted it into failing to elect more Democrats) came from the police there, to the effect that lower staffing levels threatened _their_ safety. The local police were markedly sympathetic to the capitol building occupation in Madison. Some of this has clearly been whispered in the ear of the financial oligarchs by their paid consultants to the effect that alienating the police is not in the interests of the 1%. I don’t think that the sum of money is especially relevant or substantial. What matters is that it is a public demonstration that the banksters _like_ the police, with the implication that they will be prepared to drop a little more loose change on them if they’ll clap the rabble into Rikers like good fellows.

And it turns out that big financial service firms have also been buying protection via the NYPD. Literally.

Pam Martens in Counterpunch (hat tip reader 1sk) describes a program which allows private firms to pay the city to put a cop on the street to police for them. I am not making this up. Oh, and the white shirted cops that seem to be more aggressive in going after protestors (most notably, the one that infamously maced a group of women?) The assumption has been that they are supervisors. Martens suggests they are in the employ of businesses:

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.

If you assume a policeman works 48 weeks a year, that equates to 166 private goons masquerading as law enforcement. And remember, the corporate sponsors don’t pay for any benefits. The rule of thumb I’m used to is 25% to 30% of cash comp. And that’s before, as Marten stresses, training and litigation costs.

Lehman failed and owed the NYPD for 21 Paid Detail policemen. Goldman, the New York Stock Exchange, and the World Financial Center have all used Paid Detail. Martens points out that the New York Stock Exchange used its force to act under its direction (rather than the city’s):

On September 8, 2004, Robert Britz, then President and Co-Chief Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, testified as follows to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services:

“…we have implemented new hiring standards requiring former law enforcement or military backgrounds for the security staff…We have established a 24-hour NYPD Paid Detail monitoring the perimeter of the data centers…We have implemented traffic control and vehicle screening at the checkpoints. We have installed fixed protective planters and movable vehicle barriers.”

Military backgrounds; paid NYPD 24-7; checkpoints; vehicle barriers?..In his testimony, the NYSE executive Britz states that “we” did this or that while describing functions that clearly belong to the City of New York.

Martens also describes how the suit over the arrest of 700 OWS protestors on Brooklyn Bridge 30 members of the NYPD and 10 “law enforcement officers not employed by the NYPD”.

I found this report to be very troubling. Even though I’ve written how the US is moving towards becoming a Mussolini-style corpocracy, we are further down that path than I realized.

A Little Deception Helps Push Athletes to the Limit

2011-09-20T04:00:00Z

A look at why most people run or ride or swim faster in a race than they can ever manage to do in practice.

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Alleged Moscow markets in everything

The Rage of a Privileged Class

Can We See Through Symbols?

Mourning the death of Google Reader's social features

Paradise Regained

Super-Rich Super-Heroes Respond To #OccupyWallStreet

David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet

Web 2.0 Summit 2011: Chris Poole, "High Order Bit" - YouTube

William Gibson Interview – Boing Boing

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company hierarchy | gapingvoid

nezua: isnobueno: langer: Because I know you needed it,...

This Talking Is Only Bravado

Platforms, Not Products: A Googler’s Hot-Mic Sound-Off On G+

The contribution conundrum: Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed?

Benford's Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms

Red Ink

Mad Men

Mad Men logo (Click to Enlarge)

Initial Fuller concept (Click to Enlarge)

VW Beetle chase (Click to Enlarge)

Storyboard (Click to Enlarge)

Graph paper skyscrapers (Click to Enlarge)

Wireframe skyscrapers (Click to Watch)

The Fall (Click to Enlarge)

Classic ads (Click to Enlarge)

Ad examples (Click to Enlarge)

Ad examples (Click to Enlarge)

Office comparison (Click to Enlarge)

Logo explorations (Click to Enlarge)

Logo explorations (Click to Enlarge)

Fuller initial concepts (Click to Enlarge)

Gardner alternate storyboard (Click to Enlarge)

End frame (Click to Enlarge)

Steve Fuller, Director; Cara McKenney, Producer; and Mark Gardner, Director. (Click to Enlarge)

WRITER/EDITOR: Lola Landekic INTERVIEW: Ian Albinson LAST UPDATE: September 19, 2011 © Art of the Title, 2011

On Wall Street’s Private Police in NYPD Uniforms

A Little Deception Helps Push Athletes to the Limit

WRITER/EDITOR: Lola Landekic
INTERVIEW: Ian Albinson
LAST UPDATE: September 19, 2011
© Art of the Title, 2011