“I love nick [Brooks], but he wasn’t good for me. . . he holds me back. I’m always sad with him. He’s 24 for f sake . . . he wants porn sex! He wants to b drunk or stoned all the time . . . he doesn’t have any goals and stops me from mine.” […] The elder Brooks killed himself with a mail-order helium-tank suicide kit in 2011 at his Upper East Side apartment. He was under indictment for drugging and sexually assaulting 13 starlets during “auditions” for nonexistent films. [NY Post]

A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines. [10 News]

“Hasse” which was known in Ystad tavern circles, had a total of 146 wasp stings on the body including 54 on the genitals. He was so bloated that a neighbor thought it was a whale carcass lying on the lawn. [...] The autopsy and scene investigation revealed that “Hasse” tried to have sex with the wasp nest. They found semen on some of the dead wasps and a couple of “Hasse” pubic hair in the entrance of the nest. [...] Angry animal rights activists have reacted strongly to the event. [News Sweden | Thanks GG]

Florida Mayoral Candidate Boasts Endorsement from Jesus Christ.

Swaziland may in fact be the only country to have ever attempted to regulate witch air traffic. The new legislation stipulates that witches on broomsticks flying over Swaziland may not fly higher than 150 meters.

A Manhattan fortune teller will be jailed for a year after taking more than $650,000 in cash from an Upper East Side woman by promising to “cleanse” the money. Swindling soothsayer Janet Miller, 39, also tricked the wealthy victim into turning over paintings and jewelry as “sacrifices” to keep the devil away, and even conned her into buying and handing over a couple of Rolexes — all to exterminate “bad energy,” Manhattan prosecutors charged. [NY Post]

The blindfold is to minimize the shock which the flashlight could cause to the eyes of the medium, who is extremely sensitive during this stage of the phenomena.

You cannot be detained, arrested, or fined for going topless in public in New York. Earlier this year, the Do Not Arrest Topless Women memo was read aloud at NYPD roll calls for 10 straight days. [Thanks GG]

Max Planck’s conception of progress in science: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [Theory, Evolution and Games Group]

There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists. In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP’s statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes. “On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,” Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders. [The Observer]

Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods, and much more. But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression—even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells. It’s the first direct evidence of altered circadian rhythms in the brain of people with depression, and shows that they operate out of sync with the usual ingrained daily cycle. […] In severely depressed patients, the circadian clock was so disrupted that a patient’s “day” pattern of gene activity could look like a “night” pattern—and vice versa. [Futurity | Thanks Tim]

Do these startling longevity studies mean your lifespan could double?

Biological clue to why women live longer than men.

More sleep may decrease the risk of suicide in people with insomnia.

Recent research discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process.

There was no WiFi switched on during the experiment, and the headband antenna was a sham. Yet 82 of the 147 subjects—more than half—reported symptoms.

The effectiveness of placebo treatment for pain is related to personality traits.

A picture of a large pair of eyes triggers feelings of surveillance in potential thieves, making them less likely to break the rules.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that brains can produce rather complex behavior without consciousness. Studies in humans show that we perform so much of our complex behavior unconsciously – from driving a car to investing our savings. There’s every reason to believe that most – if not all – non-human animal behavior we see could be being produced by an otherwise intelligent mind that is not producing subjective experiences of its own decision making processes. […] Just because an animal behaves like a human, does this mean we should assume its mind functions in the same way? […] Banana-reaching via unconscious thought for the chimpanzee […] a computer might also be able to solve this problem, but we don’t suggest that computers are conscious. One of the main problems we’re dealing with here is that science does not really have a good definition of consciousness. Yes, it’s some form of subjective experience, but it might come in a variety of forms, and thus animals might be conscious in different ways to humans. […] Scientists have given dolphins the mirror self recognition (MSR) test. Having some kind of awareness of oneself – whether it’s awareness of one’s body or of one’s own mind – is certainly linked to the idea of consciousness. For these tests, dolphins were marked with a kind of dye on their bodies, and if they then swam over to inspect the mark in a mirror, we could conclude that the dolphins must know that it’s themselves they are seeing in the mirror. This then is some kind of self awareness. […] The problem is that being able to recognize one’s body in the mirror (that is, recognizing an external representation of one’s body) might not be the same thing as having a representation of one’s own mind (i.e., a sense of self). So passing the MSR test might not even be a sure test of self-awareness, let alone subjective experience. [Justin Gregg]

After a test showed that Kathleen didn’t have the BRCA breast cancer gene, her surgeon, Dr. Sonya Sharpless, suggested that environmental factors might be implicated. [...] Did a lifetime of using cosmetics cause or contribute to Kathleen’s breast cancer? We don’t know. But here are some facts that every American woman and her loved ones should absorb. The European Union bans nearly 1,400 chemicals from personal care products because they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. But in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration entrusts safety regulation of cosmetics to a private entity that is housed and funded by the industry’s trade association. To date, this entity has found only eleven chemicals to be “unsafe for use in cosmetics.” The FDA has no oversight of cosmetics products before they come on the market and, unlike the EU, leaves it to the cosmetics industry to determine which ingredients should be banned. [The Investigative Fund]

Disclosures reveal that corporations and lobbying firms award six-figure bonuses to staff who leave to take powerful positions on Capitol Hill.

Using the size of the CEO signature on annual SEC filings to measure CEO narcissism, we find that narcissism is positively associated with several measures of firm overinvestment.

In February 2012, a number of hedge fund traders noted one particular index–CDX IG 9–that seemed to be underpriced. It seemed to be cheaper to buy credit default protection on the 125 companies that made the index by buying the index than by buying protection on the 125 companies one by one. This was an obvious short-term moneymaking opportunity: Buy the index, sell its component short, in short order either the index will rise or the components will fall in value, and then you will be able to quickly close out your position with a large profit. But February passed, and March passed, and April rolled in, and the gap between the price of CDX IG 9 and what the hedge fund traders thought it should be grew. And their bosses asked them questions, like: “Shouldn’t this trade have converged by now?” “Have you missed something?” […] So the hedge fund traders began asking who their counterparty was. It seemed that they all had the same counterparty. And so they began calling their counterparty “the London Whale.” They kept buying. And the London Whale kept selling. And so they had no opportunity to even begin to liquidate their positions and their mark-to-market losses grew, and the risk they had exposed their firms to grew. So they got annoyed. And they went public, hoping that they could induce the bosses of the London Whale to force him to unwind his possession, in which case they would profit immensely not just when the value of CDX IG 9 returned to its fundamental but by price pressure as the London Whale had to find people to transact with. And so we had ‘London Whale’ Rattles Debt Market, and similar stories. The London Whale was Bruno Iksil [a trader working for the London office of JPMorgan Chase]. He had been losing, and rolling double or nothing, and losing again for months. His boss, Ina Drew, took a look at his positions. They found they had a choice: they could hold the portfolio and thus go all-in, or they could fold. They could hold CDX IG 9 until maturity–make a fortune if a fewer-than-expected number of its 125 companies went bankrupt, and lose J.P. Morgan Chase entirely to bankruptcy if more did. Or they could take their $6 billion loss and go home. What could they do if the bet went wrong and they had to eat losses at maturity? J.P. Morgan Chase couldn’t print money. So Drew stood Iksil down, and the hedge fund traders had their happy ending. […] “Why did the interest rate on the Ten-Year Treasury peak at 4%? And why has it gone down since then? And why won’t it go back to its 5%-7% fundamental.” And they looked around. And they found Ben Bernanke. The Washington Super-Whale. […] From my perspective, of course, the hedge fundies’ analogy between the London Whale and the Washington Super-Whale is all wrong. [Brad DeLong]

Is the Canadian Housing Market Falling Apart?

The least racially tolerant countries.

How to Mine Cell-Phone Data Without Invading Your Privacy.

Acxiom knows where you live, where you shop and what you like to do. But it’s not quite the evil data monolith you might expect. A peek inside one of the world’s largest data brokers.

Exploring the Boundaries of Photo Editing. Even top news photographers have their work digitally enhanced these days. Mounting competition in the market for news images is forcing photo-journalists to make their output as dramatic as possible.

Least efficient packing shapes.

Composite and 3-D-printed components will mean jet engines that use 15 percent less fuel.

Make your own invisibility cloak with a 3D printer.

Terahertz image reveals Goya’s hidden signature in old painting. Terahertz radiation occupies the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between the infrared and the microwave.

When Latin lost many of its inflectional exponents and morphed into what is now modern French, the pronouns of Latin, which were used for emphasis only, became obligatory. [Frontiers]
The Romance languages are all the related languages derived from Vulgar Latin. In 2007, the five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers were Spanish (385 million), Portuguese (210 million), French (75 million), Italian (60 million), and Romanian (23 million). The Romance languages developed from Latin in the sixth to ninth centuries. [Wikipedia]

Fuck You, a magazine of the arts (1962-1971). [via Sunday Reading]

Too much media is going to turn out like too many calories. No one who asks tough questions will ever get “access.” The news media is even worse than you think. 5 corrupting influences are keeping the public from the facts.

The story behind the viral Vine sensation “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal.” [Thanks Tim]

Beethoven’s hair.

Ten Things Romans Used for Toilet Paper.

Robbers target Bieber’s South Africa concert, steal $330,000.

There is a metal band in Brooklyn called Unlocking The Truth that is made up of three 11-year-olds.

Meet the new Google Maps.

Google Images Atari breakout

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011.

Bottle opener.

Films include Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (‘bounty hunters track and kill witches all
over the world’), Side Effects (‘a psychiatric-meds melodrama about an NYC woman whose husband’s in prison’), and Warm Bodies (a zombie love story ‘with much of the world’s population now an undead horde’).

As documented by Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg.

The only winning move for some war games, it turns out, is to play alone

“There is no more dreary and deadening outlook than that for which the world and our life are the effect of pure chance, absolutely deprived of inner meaning,” —S.N. Bulgakov, Basic Problems in the Theory of Progress (1902)

At the dawn of the 20th century, Sergei Bulgakov was one of many Russian writers and thinkers who decried the unabashed positivism gaining popularity among elites and intellectuals. Stoked by the rapid advancements in chemistry and medicine, this positivism fuelled not only a naïve faith in scientific progress to bring a better society, but also the rise of a pitiless Social Darwinism. It gave people reason to believe that chance phenomena were not a spiritual matter left to providence but were a challenge to be conquered and placed under control of rational inquiries and procedures.

Positivism worked to diminish the role of chance, the feeling of being at fortune’s mercy, but it did little to provide inner meaning for many who lamented the ascendancy of rationalism over metaphysical or spiritual explanations. For Bulgakov, the “theory of progress” was a dangerous abstraction that gave “the whole solution to the mystery of being in mechanical causation.” His goal in articulating “basic problems in the theory of progress,” as one of his essays from 1902 was titled, was to find a middle ground between the rational and the metaphysical, between Enlightenment and religious ideals. To this end, Bulgakov proposed a system he called the “Metaphysics of History,” which gave rationality and metaphysics each their own sphere of influence and offered historians the ability to discover the “absolute in the relative” in the way these spheres interacted.

Bulgakov’s metaphysical history, with its syncopated cacophony of perspectives, can be seen in operation in a somewhat surprising and rather unassuming artifact: the solitaire war board game.

Solitaire play is nothing new to the war-gaming field. Aficionados of complex recreations of battles or entire wars frequently have trouble finding other players with both the time and dedication to see such games through to completion. Since most war games use an open or transparent design model for their execution — how rules and procedures lead to various game outcomes are not hidden from the player but openly displayed — a solitary player can play both sides of the conflict in a “schizophrenic” manner.  You wouldn’t enjoy playing Monopoly alone, but many war games, like Axis and Allies, feature a dynamic range of possible outcomes not solely based on chance but also a mix of strategy and tactics.

While the open information and open revelation of cause and effect found in many designs lends itself to oracle-like statistical prediction — a German Panzer tank often holds an advantage over the American Sherman in one-on-one combat — playing the war game yields enough variation that masterminding both sides can still be satisfying for those looking to explore counterfactual scenarios (what if Lee’s forces secured Cemetery Hill on the first day of Gettysburg?), as well as the more casual gamer looking to recreate famous battles from history.

But some war games are designed to be played as a true solitaire experience. One example is We Must Tell the Emperor: The Great Pacific War: 1941 to 1945, from Victory Point Game’s “States of Siege” series. In this game, the player controls the Japanese Imperial Armed forces against the algorithmically controlled Allies, who mount a relentless card-driven assault on the Japanese home islands. If, through fortunate dice rolling and careful marshaling of actions and resources, the player survives every card that turns up, he wins. More often than not, as with most solitaire war games, he loses.

We Must Tell the Emperor’s card deck represents key battles or decisions made on both sides during the conflict. The player can construct the deck by the war’s actual chronology, or he can opt to shuffle each deck and create a novel historical timeline. Once the cards are seeded, the player turns over a card that reveals how Allied fronts have progressed, what resources (oil, military, and prestige) the player has gained or lost, and how many actions and die-roll modifiers the player can use. If the player survives, they turn another card and repeat.

These basic design mechanics embody the rational, positivistic outlook. Cause and effect are completely visible to the player, who can master them through repeated play, which, if the player opts for chronological seeding of the card deck, yields a predictable rhythm. Each new game is a fresh opportunity to discover “the best of all possible worlds” where the Allies are either forced into inglorious defeat or have their will to fight sapped through bloody attrition. The player and card deck become cogs in a simple machine that grinds out the historical events in an altogether predictable manner.

The strict determinism of this seems to clash with the freedom of choice a player expects to enjoy. Instead of free will, the player finds only limited choice tightly bound by rational design.  Pure chance, in this view, is robbed of all inner meaning. But it would be a mistake to define the solitaire aesthetic in such rational hues. Looking deeper, there is more to the operation of the solitaire war game that demands attention.

While this sort of chance-driven 30-minute distraction would appear to embody the rationalistic attitude Bulgakov scorned —after all, isn’t prediction of cause and effect just another demonstration of rationalism’s supremacy? — it actually synthesizes the metaphysical and rational. We Must Tell the Emperor blends its game play’s machine-like rationality with metaphysical narratives about the Pacific war to provide a “bridge experience,” connecting historical understanding with the possibility of alternative outcomes. The game’s historically accurate chronology combines with player agency to produce an effect that is neither purely rational nor purely metaphysical.

In part, this is how all solitaire games work. The solitaire aesthetic in general is about taking rational content and form — apparent in the effort to model the range of a T-37 turret gun in the game’s structure — and giving it metaphysical expression and feeling in a game-play design. It is a constructed channel of experience, with clearly defined player operations, yet completely undefined in terms of how the player experiences it. Even though you are rolling a die and consulting a results table, you see the battle in terms beyond paper and dice; your mind creates a narrative in which the enemy is repulsed or surges forth, where a battle-scarred unit makes the break-through or where defeat is quickly assured when a leader is cut down in the opening hellfire of bullets. A string of successful rolls translates into cosmic kismet, failed rolls into a series of punches putting you on the ropes.

We Must Tell the Emperor embodies the solitaire aesthetic in a particularly fascinating way. Chance encounters, bound by tables and charts explaining outcomes, become imbued with meaning that goes beyond damage results or spending of resources and encroaches an information potential similar to that found in the operation of a quantum computer.

In the essay “Quantum Drift,” Miranda Trimmier writes: “When I look at the quantum computer, I see a logic that, directed carefully, could do more for us than crunch bigger numbers. It is an information processor with an associative imagination, an operating system whose modus operandi is delicate quirks and unpredictability, a machine that performs its best secrets away from the prying eyes of experts.”

Is there any more apt description of the solitaire war game than “an information processor with an associative imagination”? The player takes the boundaries of rationality and bends them toward an inner meaning. If a player is an expert seeking validated knowledge — if the player is a historian or philosopher searching for objective truth, or otherwise comes at the game seeking to pierce its veil — the solitaire aesthetic is compromised, just as a quantum qubit betrays its informational prospect if observed. But for less determined players, the solitaire aesthetic produces a crypto-schizophrenic, masked self and allows associative imagination full reign.

The Newtonian meets the Platonic at a threshold that only solitaire play can provide, with old, dualist concerns over the mind and body blurred into a sensorium where the rational and metaphysical can interact as equal partners. A results modifier manifests as battlefield heroism, your hand tossing the die indistinguishable from a grenade lobbed at oncoming infantry. The solitaire aesthetic leads us to believe in an oppositional, shadowy other, a projection of self onto the design in free the associative imagination. The chronology of the card deck may impose a deterministic flow, but the mind freely creates a narrative in which you are pitted against the other in a contest of wills. The solitaire aesthetic both constrains and frees the player; determinism of models leads to freedom of interpretations.

Bulgakov addressed the antagonism between determinism and free will by proposing a metaphysical synthesis: “Determinism must respectfully step aside in order to make way for the moral deed, but it must also constantly sustain a closed order of causation, for any break in causation annihilates experience. Directed toward the future, free will sees only ‘ought,’ but experience sees only causes and effects.”

The key to the solitaire aesthetic lies in understanding how it manifests this sense of “ought” in a system that appears to be a closed order of causation. We Must Tell the Emperor’s mechanistic card deck creates tension between deterministic outcomes and the limited responses afforded the player threatens the reign of associative imagination brought about through play. The “U.S. Carrier Raids” card gives the player three options to assuage the blow it deals, allowing some freedom of response. However, the player never escapes determinism; they can only keep it at bay through the mental assimilation of the solitaire aesthetic.

Though the player rationally knows they are pitting their intelligence against a low-complexity, repeating algorithmic system, the metaphysical feeling of being challenged by a shadowy other is part of what makes the solitaire design of We Must Tell the Emperor so successful. Constant pressure applied by Allied armies and the sense that you might reverse history lets you feel that you are not playing by yourself but against a constantly adaptive opponent — though that opponent is nothing more than an extension of yourself, of your metaphysical meaning projected onto a rational design.

This feeling is prompted not merely by the card deck but by the game’s artistic design. Its use of the Chop Suey-esque Bushido font for its cover design and for game-play materials helps buoy the sense of a shadowy other, which in turn fuels the associative imagination that blends deterministic operation with metaphysical interpretation.

In “Stereo Types,” an August 2008 Print magazine article, Paul Shaw discussed the evolution and impact of so-called ethnic fonts like Bushido. While ethnic fonts may seem inherently foreign or exotic, Shaw asserts that this perception “relies upon a viewers inchoate expectations of what a given culture’s type should look like,” built over time as the font is used on menus and posters and the like. The ethnic font is “a visual mnemonic device” that projects our own ethnocentrism.

In We Must Tell the Emperor, the use of Bushido serves similarly as a design shortcut that helps the player readily, even subconsciously, summon the presence of a shadowy other, even when the only place that other could come from is ourselves. The different fonts, so clearly aligned to opposing viewpoints in the mind’s eye of the player, eases one into projecting a conflict between themselves and the other. The stark contrast between Bushido and the stenciled Allied font immediately allows players to demarcate their actions from the algorithmic other, who is really the illusory extension of the player’s own ethnocentric viewpoint. This is a metaphysical response, much like the quantum computing experience. You’re playing by yourself, but the ease with which associative imagination is summoned helps your mind construct an experience in which you are pitting your will against a clearly identifiable ‘other’.

Your Imperial army pressures Nimitz to retreat, but his ‘Carrier Raids’ has him roaring back and putting you on the defensive.  In the last, desperate days of the war, the Allies mercilessly launch B-29 raids, but your Kamikaze attacks force them to reconsider the cost of an island invasion. With the solitaire aesthetic in full effect, associative imagination transcends boundaries of the rational and integrates metaphysical narrative perspective. Without this associative imagination, there is no longer the imposition of ought or moral wanting, merely the experience of cause and effect leading to what Bulgakov qualified as “pure chance, absolutely deprived of inner meaning.”

What’s going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Photos by Stephanie Chunoo and Tabitha Poeze

From Head…

Getting lippy: Love this roundup of lipstick trivia, culled from our race’s 5,000 years with the stuff. My personal favorite: Cleopatra followed the “lipstick corollary.” (Which, btw, hasn’t failed me yet.)

…To Toe…

Strays: The best essay about socks you’ll ever read.

…And Everything In Between:

Boxed in: “Beauty box” services like Birchbox are proving to be in it for the long-term in North America and Europe. Is it sustainable in markets with developing internet infrastructure and a lower per capita income?

Oh, the irony: What does the toxicity-conscious makeup consumer in China do? Get products manufactured in the safety-aware United States, as some lipsticks manufactured in China carry above 20 ppm of lead. But joke’s on them! 

Like life, the best games might be unwinnable

Watching someone play a video game can seem like a Groundhog Day of looped death and rebirth, of losing over and over and over. “Press R to reload. Press R to reload. Press R to reload.” Anyone who’s played Call of Duty or Hotline Miami knows that most of the game is spent failing to survive. But while this is an element of game mechanics, it’s also an element woven into the plot of the game — a hallucinatory murderer is compelled to kill, and the quick repetition of appearing and dying pushes that hallucination onto the viewer. While it’s often lamented that video games have yet to have their Citizen Kane, we may at least be determining what we can do with the medium that films and books can’t: We can let the protagonist lose and force them to try again. The cycle of dying and starting the level over forces players to empathize with the character who toils in spite of certain failure.

For many books and films, the limitations of linear storytelling undermine the experience of failure, leaving room for doubt over whether anyone else could have made a difference. Writers and directors can make characters see their best efforts fail, but their works are hampered by how little time and how few alternatives we can see. For instance, a film like Chinatown can give its viewers an experience of a protagonist’s inescapable defeat — its famous final line, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” invokes unwritten rules that can’t be broken, no matter how determined he is to reform them. But it can’t keep us from wondering whether a better detective might have found a way. After all, Jake is disrespectful to people who can help him and stubbornly focuses on one crime when a greater tragedy is unfolding right under his bloodied nose. We wonder what could have happened if Jake was given another two hours to try again.

Video games don’t face this constraint. They have a singular ability to depict how many ways it is possible for things to go wrong. As a player, you are forced to inhabit the skin of a character who strives and fails over and over again. Seeing how hard it is for a character to get by lets us experience another person’s life at a deeper level than traditional media forms permit. The character’s experience and the players’ are not identical, but drawing them down similar paths creates new kinds of empathy.

Failure is built into the video game in ways that are only recently becoming clear. The canniest games take advantage of that respawn-play-die loop to drive the emotional and narrative arcs. In 1992, a small French game company made KGB, a small French video game about the twilight of the Soviet Union. Within the circles of people who talk about these things, KGB was renowned as one of the hardest games ever made. It is a game where you can’t possibly figure out how to win without losing in the process. The number of endgames where the player dies or gets sent to Siberia is overwhelming. You are beaten to death by a pair of thugs because you accept their invitation to a party. You are demoted and sent to Siberia for figuring out an intra-government conspiracy against the prime minister. And so on. The game is a relentless drumbeat of failure.

At first you’re mad that you’ve died for the 30th time in an hour, but then you start to change your behavior to match the risks being presented to you. You realize that the game won’t tell you when you’ve fucked up; you have to feel it out carefully, stepping slowly forward along the cliff’s edge. In most games, you are fundamentally unstoppable — you will murder hundreds of soldiers by the end. But when success is redefined as “not getting mugged,” the character you are playing as becomes more fully fleshed out. You inhabit the role in a way no movie or book can allow you to, both because of the first-person perspective and because of the way you can see the consequences of decisions.

Experiencing so many ways to lose complicates the how one expects being the hero of a story should feel. The hero repeatedly fails to live up to heroic expectations. Once you realize that you can lose either by behaving like an overly hardline KGB officer or insufficiently communist, there’s drama in even the most mundane in-game conversations. You start out by simply lying (“I’m here as part of the anti-crime initiative comrade Little Old Ladyovna!”), but soon you’re doubling and tripling your deceptions, trying to figure out how you should seem to act — all to avoid the next death, while realizing that death is inevitable. Rather than omnipotent wish fulfillment, your behavior as agent is so shaped by the number of ways you can lose that you begin, without necessarily intending it, to play the role of suspicious spy in a totalitarian state.

Forcing the player to merge with the identity of the character they play as and to confront its limitations: This is what games can do that other storytelling techniques can’t. Last July, a game called Spec Ops: The Line addressed this head-on. The publisher, 2K Games, presented it as a low-rent Call of Duty–alike, from its walking-talking-jawline of a main character to its meaninglessly macho title. But as the game progresses, generic Arab bad guys are replaced with American soldiers and sometimes civilians. The load screens — most commonly seen after the player dies — explicitly question the values of the player. “DO YOU FEEL LIKE A HERO YET?” they ask, as you wait to jump back in and shoot dozens more digital soldiers.

One’s motives for playing the game are openly called into question: The decision to keep playing instead of walking away from the game is likened directly to the in-game character’s refusal to give up on his mission and stop killing. Many players (me included) quit the game in disgust at a certain point, when you drop white phosphorous mortars onto civilians being evacuated from Dubai in order to keep playing. In an interview with Polygon, Walt Williams, who designed Spec Ops: The Line, said, “This is where the characters have to look at the consequences of their actions and say: ‘Should we have gone further? Should we have left? Should we leave now? Is it right to keep going?’ …  And if the player is thinking about seriously putting down the controller at this point, then that’s exactly where we want them to be emotionally.”

Another game that has attracted attention in recent years is Dwarf Fortress, famous for its motto that “losing is fun.” In the game, you work to oversee an entire fortress of alcoholic dwarves, each with his or her own appearance, emotions, relationships, desires, skills, beard-grooming standards, and – eventually – gruesome deaths. In an e-mail interview, Dwarf Fortress’s creator, Tarn Adams, told me, “It’s important that people learn to embrace loss, or the world can’t be enriched by their passing.” Only by seeing how easy it is to accidentally drive a dwarf mad, leading them to throw themselves down a well, or how easily a poorly planned fort leads to war-wounded dwarf veterans dying without medical care, can you come to value their individual lives. The death of a dwarf is both tragic and common, which makes a dwarf’s survival against the odds worth celebrating. At the same time, if they live long enough to gain titles and to name their weapons, it is that much worse when the inevitable dragon attack cuts their life short.

In such games as these, the difference between “winning” and “losing” is obliterated. All you can do is find the bright and momentary successes or noble failures – repelling a goblin invasion, killing a rampaging demon with your last remaining militiamen, accidentally letting your vampire mayor murder your best engraver. It turns individual dwarves’ lives into something meaningful, an opportunity to make the most of their limited time. The repetition of loss, the repetition of ending, the repetition of death enables the player to experience the story not as one of maximizing characters’ levels but of experiencing the multitude of ways the story can go wrong.

By separating games from winning and losing, we are forced to confront the personal experiences of the characters involved – the protagonist who is drawn forwards into killing innocents despite what they say are their best intentions, the ultimately meaningless but still beautiful life of the dwarf who dies for no good reason. The drive to compete, to reach the “last level” is crushed out of you by the drumbeat of failure. Instead of using the addiction of seeing a score go up to propel you forward, you are forced to experience a life that remains in stasis, or even backslides, leaving the characters taking part no better than when you started. Gamification has received a lot of attention for its ability to motivate people to drive themselves forward, but this quest for bigger numbers is a distraction from the ability of gaming narrative to force the player to accept that failure is both a part of life, and a necessary aspect of empathizing with others.

Chinatown tells us to believe Jake’s failure was unavoidable, but better would be to show us all those other things he could have done that still would have led to a tragic end, and better still would be to let us experience trying to unravel the betrayals and corruption ourselves and letting us fail and fail again. Letting loss and failure sluice over the viewer until they know there is nothing else that could be done.

A representative from Jerry’s support committee, David Silverberg, said Koch supported “activists, OWS protesters and all kinds of political dissidents. He did this not just for his friends, but also for strangers. He spent hundreds of hours waiting in court and gathering bail money to get people out of jail, even those he did not ideologically agree with.”

One of the correction officers at Manhattan central booking even mistook Jerry for an attorney because he was there so much, often dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase full of paperwork and bail money, Silverberg recalled.

It is this prominence, his support committee argues, that lead to the State’s interest in him. At the grand jury, he can be asked about his political affiliations and the nature of their political beliefs. Even if he were to talk, he risks federal perjury charges if he withholds the truth or makes some other misstep. Essentially, all the information gained in Jerry’s nearly half-decade of legal support in New York will become an open book for prosecutors.

“If you don’t say anything, it’s civil contempt, and they can imprison you if they think it will make you talk,” Silverberg said. “It’s meant to be coercive, not punitive.“

Read More | “Double Jeopardy: New York Activist Subpoenaed For Grand Jury – Again” | A.M Gittlitz | ᔥTruthout

In an interview with Interiors, writer and director Sean Durkin spoke about the use of space and the function of these locations in his directorial debut film:

“There’s no past, there’s no future, there’s only the present and there’s no time, and that basically becomes the state of mind for Martha’s point of view. That’s why I never thought of them as flashbacks. I just thought of them from Martha’s point of view that it’s all just happening at the same time.”

Excerpted from Interiors Volume 17. Find out more about the journal at their new site here.

The MOOC phenomenon has happened very quickly, to put it mildly. Last November, the New York Times declared 2012 to be “the Year of the MOOC,” and while it feels (at least to me) like we’ve been talking about MOOCs for years now, the speed by which the MOOC has become the future of higher education is worth thinking carefully about, both because it’s an important way to frame what is happening, and because that speed warps the narrative we are able to tell about what is happening. Coursera, Udacity, and edX are all less than a year old, and while the first two—which are silicon valley startups out of Stanford, essentially—have already enrolled millions of students, the non-profit consortium edX has grown just as prodigiously. Beginning as a partnership between Harvard and MIT, it now includes a dozen different universities, and that number will surely grow.

The MOOC phenomenon is also a shift in discourse, a shift that’s happened so quickly and so recently, that it fills up our mental rear-view mirror. When the word “MOOC” was first coined in 2008, by a set of Canadian academics who needed a term to describe the experiment in pedogogy they were putting together, the word itself was a niche term that most people in higher education would not hear about, or need to. In the last year, it’s gone from a rather singular experiment in connectivist and distributed learning to a behemoth force that we are told and retold is reshaping the face of higher education. And whether MOOCs are disrupting education through innovation—as Clay Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation in business would have it—or simply representing the disruption of education as it is embedded in the market, the phenomenon under discussion has changed quite dramatically as it has mgrated from Canada to Silicon Valley.

This is why it’s interesting to note that Inside Higher Education’s new booklet of essays, “The MOOC moment,” introduces its subject by writing that:

“The acronym MOOC (for massive open online course) first appeared in Inside Higher Ed in December 2011, in reference to a course offered by a Stanford University professor. These days, the acronym is omnipresent and – to many – needs no definition.”

I would say, in response, that this apparent lack of a need for a definition is exactly why we need to slow things down and figure out what the heck we’re talking about. For one thing, when we start the story in 2011, we forget about the 2008 MOOCs, and if the MOOCs are the future and the future is now, then it tends to have little to do with what was happening at the University of Manitoba in 2008, or why.

The MOOC that debuted in IHE in December 2011 was Sebastian Thrun’s “Artificial Intelligence” MOOC, a course that was offered at Stanford but opened up to anyone with a broadband. The way this story is usually told is that his incredible success—160,000 students, from 190 countries—encouraged Thrun to leave Stanford to try the new mode of pedagogy that he had stumbled upon. He had seen a TED talk given by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, and when he decided to give it a whirl and it was a huge success, the rest is history. In January, 2012, he would found the startup Udacity.

However, another way to tell the story would be that Thrun was a Google executive—who was already well known for his work on Google’s driverless car project—and that he had already resigned his tenure at Stanford in April 2011, before he even offered that Artifical Intelligence class. Ending his affiliation with Stanford could be described as completing his transition to Silicon Valley proper. In fact, despite IHE’s singular “a Stanford University professor,” Thrun co-taught the famous course with Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.

It’s important to tell the story this way, too, because the first story makes us imagine a groundswell of market forces and unmet need, a world of students begging to be taught by a Stanford professor and Google, and the technological marvels that suddenly make it possible. But it’s not education that’s driving this shifting conversation; as the MOOC became something very different in migrating to Silicon Valley, it’s in stories told by the New York Times, the WSJ, and TIME magazine that the MOOC comes to seem like an immanent revolution, whose pace is set by necessity and inevitability.

For example. When the president of UVA was abruptly fired last June, it would be an exaggeration to say that a David Brooks column and a few articles in the WSJ were the cause of it, but it would not be that much of an exaggeration. As we can now roughly reconstruct—from emails which were FOIA-ed by the UVa student paper—UVa’s rector and vice rector essentially engineered Teresa Sullivan’s resignation because they decided she was moving too slowly on online education. And what you get from reading these emails is an overwhelming sense of speed, which they are repeating, verbatim, from the articles they are emailing and forwarding to each other. The rector emailed a WSJ column “Higher Education’s Online Revolution” with the subject line “good piece in WSJ today — why we can’t afford to wait,” for example, an article she had gotten from a major donor, who suggested that it was “a signal that the on-line learning world has now reached the top of the line universities and they need to have strategies or will be left behind.” She immediately replied: “Your timing is impeccable — the BOV is squarely focused on UVa’s developing such a strategy and keenly aware of the rapidly accelerating pace of change.” At a meeting of UVa deans and vice presidents, UVa’s rector said:

“The board believes this environment calls for a much faster pace of change in administrative structure, in governance, in financial resource development and in resource prioritization and allocation…We do not believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of incremental, marginal change. The world is simply moving too fast.”

Where does such a person get this kind of conviction? You find the best examples of this kind of rhetoric in the New York Times; a few months ago, for example, Thomas Friedman argued that the “MOOCs revolution…is here and is real” and remarked on “how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M.” This kind of comparison has become a common sense. MOOCs are a “campus tsunami,” to use columnist David Brook’s term, one that we all need to pay attention to, before it’s too late.

Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education is changing how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times.

The first thing I want to do, then, is slow us down a bit, and go through the last year with a bit more care than we’re usually able to do, to do a “close reading” of the year of the MOOC, as it were. Not only because I have the time, but because, to be blunt, MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much, if you’re in too much of a hurry to go deeply into the subject.

I mean that in two different ways. On the one hand, I would put it to you that the logic of the MOOC is a function of shallow thinking, of arguments that go no deeper than a David Brooks or Thomas Friedman column. But they also valorize and reward that level of depth, even make it compulsory. MOOC’s are literally built to cater to the attention span of a distracted and multi-tasking teenager, who pays attention in cycles of 10-15 minutes. This is not a shot at teenagers, however, but an observation about what the form anticipates (and therefore rewards and reproduces) as a normal teenager’s attention span. In place of the 50 minute lectures that are the norm at my university, for example, MOOCs will break a unit of pedagogy down into youtube-length clips that can be more easily digested, whenever and wherever. Much longer than that, and it falls apart; the TED talk is essentially the gold standard. But I want to suggest that the argument in favor of MOOC’s can’t handle all that much complexity either; it makes sense at the speed of a TED talk, or the length a NY Times column, but starts to come apart very quickly if you go any deeper or longer than that.

I’m evoking two kinds of time here. On the one hand, there is the belated temporality where we’re already always behind the times, which is necessary to make the MOOC seem like the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy it has become: if Harvard, Stanford, and MIT are making MOOCs, then anyone who doesn’t jump on board the bandwagon will be left behind. We don’t have to understand why it’s happening, where it’s going, or where it came from; the fact that it’s happening there is all the reason we need. Framed by this temporality, the MOOC becomes a kind of fetish object: because we treat its existence as self-evident fact—or to the extent that we treat its existence as a kind of self-evident fact—its objective reality obscures the contingencies of its production and the ideological formations that make it seem to exist. Why are Harvard, Stanford, and MIT making MOOCs? It doesn’t matter. Only the fact that they are making them is important.

This is a logic that particularly appeals to universities like the University of Virginia, University of Texas, or the University of California, by the way; schools that aren’t in the Ivy league, but who see themselves at the forefront of higher education. But it’s also an argument that only works at the depth (or non-depth) of a David Brooks column, maybe a 6 minute reading time, because its claims only work if you don’t interrogate their foundational premises too much.

For example. On May 3rd of last year, David Brooks began his column “The Campus Tsunami” this way:

“Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007. But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.”

This is a sophisticated piece of discourse, in its way. By acknowledging that “online education is not new,” Brooks is working to distinguish the thing that is not new (online education) from the form of online education that is new, the MOOC. To re-brand online education—which has generally had a well-deserved bad reputation—he has to conjure forth this distinction, creating space between the old kind of online education (the University of Phoenix) and the new kind, which, because it is new, can shed that baggage. He therefore opens by acknowledging online education’s lack of novelty so he can then re-situate our perspective in a different place, just ahead of the cutting edge: if the University of Phoenix’s online program is decades old—and therefore not cutting edge—the kind of online education that he’s interested in discussing, which is different than the University of Phoenix, IS cutting edge. And the difference is a shift from the bottom to the top, from low prestige to high prestige: “over the past few months, something has changed…The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet.”

What he’s not saying, of course—what he’s working very hard to un-say—is that Harvard is actually struggling to get where the University of Phoenix already was in 1989. You have to read him against the grain to draw that out, but it’s there: he’s essentially observing the way that Harvard is emulating the University of Phoenix. But, of course, that can’t be, can it? After all, by definition, Harvard, Stanford, MIT are cutting-edge, while the University of Phoenix—a for-profit, low prestige university that markets to non-traditional students and employs a no-name teaching staff—well, they can’t be the cutting edge, by definition.

These definitional “facts” allow Brooks to finesse a truly jaw-dropping rhetorical move: though he began with the statement that “online education is not new,” he manages, in only four sentences, to write the words: “Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments.”

How does he get from “online education is not new” (old hat, established, conventional) to the line “Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments”? How does online education go from something older than most of our students to a temporality where it’s just on the cusp of being developed, where in very recent memory, it was pure speculative futurity, where it’s the future we hurtling backwards into?

The key to this piece of rhetorical alchemy is that you can’t over-think it, in the way I just have. Brooks is taking something that lacks prestige and cultural capital—a mode of education that is not valuable, only expensive, not innovative or exciting—and placing the name “Harvard” around it makes it into something that suddenly is both valuable and worthwhile, as a function of Harvard’s symbolic role in American higher education, to define the new cutting edge. And when he writes “Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures,” he means that because these schools are envisioning it—because attached to that brand—online education is now the future we must emulate and pursue. Because it’s at Harvard, it’s “now” instead of being where the University of Phoenix already was the year the Berlin Wall fell, before our students were born.

II.

If I have one overarching takeaway point in this talk, it’s this: there’s almost nothing new about the kind of online education that the word MOOC now describes. It’s been given a great deal of hype and publicity, but that aura of “innovation” poorly describes a technology—or set of technological practices, to be more precise—that is not that distinct from the longer story of online education, and which is designed to reinforce and re-establish the status quo, to make tenable a structure that is falling apart.

If you read the people that were creating MOOCs in 2008, by contrast—as I’ve been doing—you’ll actually see a lot of thinking that’s kind of out there, as far as how we conceptualize what education is for, and what it does. But the innovations in pedagogy that produced the first MOOC in 2008, at the University of Manitoba, had to be forgotten and erased from the historical timeline if the MOOCs that we’re talking about were to become the standard bearer for “cutting edge.” When Inside Higher Education writes about the MOOC moment, after all, that moment has to begin not in 2008, but in December 2011, and in Silicon Valley where and when the hype machine really gets into gear.

Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actually happened yet: it’s still speculative in the sense that we’re all speculating about what it will look like. This means that the MOOC can be all things to all people because it is, literally, a speculation about what it might someday become.

To put my cards on the table, the 2012 MOOC seems to me like a speculative bubble, a product which is being pumped up and overvalued by pro-business legislators, overzealous administrators, and by a lot of hot air in the media. But like all speculative bubbles—especially the ones that originate in Silicon Valley—it will eventually burst; the only question is what things will look like when it does. But if 2012 has been “the year of the MOOC” because it’s been the year of MOOC-hype, 2013 is already something different; so far, a great deal of the MOOC news has been the backlash against it.

Last week, for example, the philosophy department at San Jose State University wrote an open letter to Thomas Friedman’s good friend Michael Sandel, informing him why they were refusing to use his MOOC, a survey course on Justice given at Harvard, and offered through edX. I can’t say it half as well as they did, so I’m going to quote this open letter:

“Anant Agarwal, edX President, has described the standard professor as basically just “pontificating” and “spouting content,” a description he used ten times in a recent press conference here at SJSU. Of course, since philosophy has traditionally been taught using the Socratic method, we are largely in agreement as to the inadequacy of lecture alone. But, after all the rhetoric questioning the effectiveness of the antiquated method of lecturing and note taking, it is telling to discover that the core of edX’s JusticeX is a series of videotaped lectures that include excerpts of Harvard students making comments and taking notes. In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.”

Let me just underscore this point: in order to create the illusion of engagement, Sandel’s MOOC contains footage of Harvard students asking questions, which their Harvard professor answers. But as the open letter from SJSU pointed out,

“what kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard? Our very diverse students gain far more when their own experience is central to the course and when they are learning from our own very diverse faculty, who bring their varied perspectives to the content of courses that bear on social justice…should one-size-fits-all vendor-designed blended courses become the norm, we fear that two classes of universities will be created: one, well- funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant. Public universities will no longer provide the same quality of education and will not remain on par with well-funded private ones. Teaching justice through an educational model that is spearheading the creation of two social classes in academia thus amounts to a cruel joke.”

San Jose State is the ground zero for the MOOC tsunami, in several senses. It’s literally located in Silicon Valley, but it’s also part of the Cal State system, the largest university system in the country, with almost half a million students. Along with the partnership with edX, SJSU also has a partnership with Udacity to offer slightly lower cost online courses to its own students—and also to local high school and community college students—and they say they hope to eventually replace 20% of the curriculum with online courses from universities like Harvard and MIT. They explicitly hope to do so in a way which can serve as a model for the rest of the Cal State system to follow.

SJSU’s president, by the way, might be the most market-minded university administrator I’ve ever come across, and his contempt for his own university faculty is astonishing; when he was asked about the quality of SJSU’s online courses, for example, he just quipped that “It could not be worse than what we do face to face.” He says that kind of thing regularly enough that it’s not a fluke. It’s one thing when you have the President of edX or Thomas Friedman condemning professors as boring pontificators spouting content, but when the calls are coming from inside the building, you have a real problem.

Another tidbit: his Cal State profile page describes “his more than 30 years of experience in the service of higher education and industry,” which is a conflation you rarely here put quite so bluntly. Such a conflation does, however, make a lot of sense in Silicon Valley, where the educational-industrial complex is the foundation on which the valley rests, where it’s pretty normal for a Stanford professor to also be an executive at Google, and for a university president to see his duty as split between working for education and working for industry. But things get weird if that model starts to be the basis from which to transform a public system of higher education. Which is what’s now happening.

III.

Let me turn now to talk about what should be the elephant in the room, Senate Bill 520. This is a bill, which, if it passes, will require all three sectors of California’s public university system to accept MOOCs from a certain approved list as course credit. The details are yet to be determined, and it seems most likely that the final bill will be something different than what was originally introduced. But the assumptions and ambitions of SB520 are a useful way to frame what direction the MOOC tsunami is taking: the capture of public education.

For the 20 Million Minds foundation, one of the drivers behind the bill, SB520 is all about options, opportunity, and choice for students. The bill’s sponsor, Senate Pro-Tem President Darrell Steinberg, cites the very real problems of access to over-enrolled courses—and the fact that students are failing to graduate on time, because they cannot get required courses for their majors—and uses this as a rhetorical wedge to argue that MOOCs should actually be acceptable as replacements for normal college classes. As he put it:

“We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed.”

But the irony of his formulation is that even he admits that instead of solving a problem which has a very simple definition—which is basically reducible to a number, the fact that there are more students than there are chairs and classrooms—they are simply redefining the problem, imagining into existence a chairless classroom. The problem is real: years of consistent budget cuts have left the public universities without the money to buy “chairs” (and everything that represents), so public universities have shifted the financial burden onto the backs of individual students, whose tuition now pays much more of the cost. Since educating fewer students would therefore cost money, in effect—and it would also cost money to fully staff the necessary courses—there is no solution to the problem that does not require spending more money on chairs, classrooms, and teachers to teach them. MOOCs enter the picture, then, as a kind of fantasy solution to this unsolvable problem: instead of addressing the problem by either admitting fewer students or adding more courses, we will define the problem differently: chairless classrooms! Everyone is happy.

In this case, the cliche that California is where everything happens first has some truth to it: if SB520 passes, it will define the shape of things to come, not only by creating a model for other states to follow, but by creating a kind of market value for MOOCs that didn’t exist before, and which wouldn’t exist otherwise. By making certain selected MOOC’s convertible into course credit—at CCC’s, CSU’s, and the UC system—the California legislature will quite literally create value where it didn’t exist before, by making MOOCs a thing that are worth paying for. This shift is important. But mandating that a MOOC is the same thing as college—that it can be literally credited as a college class—not only changes what a MOOC is, it changes what college is.

After all, if a MOOC is simply a free educational resource that you can find on the web—which is what MOOCs presently are—then there’s nothing to object to in them, and everything to like. Such a MOOC is an almost wholly good addition to the universe: other than opportunity costs and the costs of a computer—which are not nothing, but they are also not that much—it’s simply a free and useful thing, available to those that want it. But the moment that such a use value becomes legible as a market value, when it becomes something that can be exchanged for the kinds of course credits that students pay very high tuition for, MOOCs become a radically different beast, with a radically different kind of economic value. It’ll be much easier to charge for them, on the one hand, and almost unthinkable that associated costs won’t rise, as they did with the once free California public universities (especially since Udacity and Coursera are literally for-profit enterprises). And on the other hand, they will radically devalue the resource that they can now be used to replace: if you can replace “chairs” (by which I mean, the brick and mortar campus) with a chair-less university—if those things are literally exchangeable—then the market value of “chairs” goes down, at the same time as its actual costs stay the same. If we can’t fully staff our classrooms now, how will we staff them in the future, when they have to compete with free?

To put it slightly differently, pumping up the value of MOOCs in this way—declaring, by legislative fiat, that MOOCs are now convertible with “real courses”—actually does have an important cost. If the platonic ideal of the classroom experience is the gold standard, then declaring that a bunch of other unrelated metals are also gold will lower its value, especially if those metals are freely available, in infinite supplies. Why would someone pay a teacher to give one-on-one attention to students when those students could get the same formal credential from an online course? You can point out that there is an actual and effective difference between a student to professor of 17 to 1 (in the gold standard class) and a ratio of 10,000 to 1, where a student will effectively never have a personalized interaction with the professor. But once market equivalency has entered the equation, once the market recognizes an equivalence between a MOOC and an in-person class, pointing out the difference that is experienced by the student will be trumped by the equivalence of market logic, which will dictate paying the cheaper of the two. An in-person education will become a unnecessary luxury: like gold itself, it will no longer be the “gold standard,” the basis of educational value, but rather, simply, an ornamental marker of elite status.

To Darrel Steinberg, MOOCs can seem like a win-win solution to an otherwise intractable fiscal crisis. Students who are locked out of over-enrolled required courses can complete their degrees by taking those classes with an online provider, possibly even at a lower cost and at no extra cost to the state. Meanwhile, allowing Silicon Valley start-ups like Coursera and Udacity to offer courses that will transfer into the California State and University of California systems will give those companies a legitimacy in the education marketplace that they have never had before. When you see that Sebastian Thrun is one of the people who helped write the bill, and when Darrell Steinberg held his press conference announcing the bill on “Google Hangout” a lot of things become clearer.

If this bill passes, the winners will be Silicon Valley along with the austerity hawks in the California legislature: while the former will have privileged access to the largest student market in the state, the latter will be relieved of the burden of having to educate the state’s young people. And the losers will be teachers and students.

IV.

MOOC boosters live in the future; actually-existing MOOCs are a far cry from what their champions promise they will someday become, which allows us to gloss over any troubling trends in their present day iteration. After all, MOOC boosters like to brag about the thousands of students—even hundreds of thousands—who sign on to learn from super-professors like Harvard University’s Michael Sandel or Sebastian Thrun. But completion rates for these courses consistently hover in the mid single-digits. A Software Engineering MOOC taught by UC Berkeley professor David Patterson in May 2012, for example, may have enrolled over 50,000 students, but less than 4,000 actually completed the course, and this is typical. What’s more, as Patterson himself was quick to observe, his MOOC was a “cheating-rich environment”; it is safe to assume that the number of students who actually completed the course is somewhat lower than even the 7% that received a completion certificate.

This doesn’t mean that MOOCs are without value, of course; just because most of Patterson’s students didn’t complete his course doesn’t mean they didn’t benefit from taking it, and it seems reasonable to assume that many online learners are not interested in completion certificates. Patterson observed, for example, that many of his students already had degrees, and that some were instructors themselves; for learners wishing to brush up skills or keep abreast of new pedagogy, a MOOC might be just the thing. In applied fields like software engineering, where the ability to code is a valuable enough skill that course credit becomes almost irrelevant—and where the material lends itself naturally to online instruction—the free availability of high-quality course materials is an almost pure social good.

It does, however, demonstrate what the technology is not good at: accreditation and mass education. It rewards self-directed learners who have the resources and privilege to allow them to pursue learning for its own sake. But if you want it to function as a gate-keeping mechanism, which is one of the things that universities do, it’s not very good at that; a MOOC is almost designed to make cheating even easier that ever before. And if you want to use it to make educational resources available to underserved and underprivileged communities—which has been the historical mission of public education—MOOCs are also a really poor way to do that. Historically, public systems like California’s provided high quality education to citizens of the state who could not have gotten the equivalent anywhere else. MOOCs promise to see to it that what the public universities are able to provide is not, in every sense, the equivalent of what rich people’s kids get.

The irony is that when the term was first coined in 2008, this was all quite well understood; the MOOC came into existence as something that, by its very nature, could never be used to replace a normal college class. The point of it was that it was something fundamentally different than a college class.

Dave Cormier originally suggested the name for an experiment in open courseware that George Siemens and Stephen Downes were putting together at the University of Manitoba, a class of 25 students that was opened up to over 1,500 online participants; for them, this MOOC was part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education, the idea that we learn best when we learn collaboratively, in networks, because the process of learning is less about acquiring new knowledge—the commodified “content” that a Udacity or edX MOOC tries to reify and market—and much more about building the social and neural connections that will allow knowledge to circulate, be used, evolve, and to grow. A class that’s animated by a contractual agreement, which spells out the costs, requirements, and credential that are to be acquired is one thing, and it may even be a good thing; but the goal of these original MOOCs was to foster an educational process that was something totally different: it would be as exploratory and creative as its participants chose to make it, it was about building a sense of community investment in a particular project, a fundamentally socially-driven enterprise, and its outcomes were to be fluid and open-ended. I would argue that getting a “Grade” for such a thing—or charging money for it—would be to fundamentally change what it is.

I could go on; for those of us who first heard of MOOCs in 2012, reading a document like “The MOOC Model for Digital Practice” from 2010, is a strange experience; the things they said about MOOCs in 2010 are hard to square with what people have been saying about them since “the MOOC moment” happened, and it went mainstream.

The MOOC of 2012 looks very different, starting with the central narrative of “disruption” and “un-bundling”: instead of building social information networks, the neoliberal MOOC is driven by a desire to liberate and empower the individual, breaking apart actually-existing academic communities and refocusing on the individual’s acquisition of knowledge. The MOOC being praised by utopian technologists in the New York Times might be the diametric opposite of what Siemens, Downes, and Cormier said they were trying to create, in this sense, even though it deploys some of the same idealistic rhetoric. Rather than transferring course content from expert to student, the original MOOCs stemmed from a connectivist desire to decentralize and de-institutionalize education, creating fundamentally open and open-ended networks of circulation and collaboration. But the MOOCs which are being developed by Silicon Valley startups Udacity and Coursera, as well as by non-profit initiatives like edX, aim to do exactly the same thing that traditional courses have done—transfer course content from expert to student—only to do so massively more cheaply and on a much larger scale.

This is why, instead of de-institutionalizing education or making learning less hierarchical, we see some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world treating the MOOC as a lifeline in troubled economic waters, leveraging the figure of the “super-professor” to maintain their position of excellence atop the educational field, and even to create new hierarchical arrangements between universities. These MOOCs are just a new way of maintaining the status quo, of re-institutionalizing higher education in an era of budget cuts, sky-rocketing tuition, and unemployed college graduates burdened by student debt. If the MOOC began in the classroom as an experimental pedagogy, it has swiftly morphed into a process driven from the top down, imposed on faculty by university administrators, or even imposed on administrators by university boards of trustees and regents. From within academia, the MOOC phenomenon is all about dollars and cents, about doing more of the same with less funding. And while MOOC-boosters like to deride the “sage on the stage” model of education-delivery—as if crowded lecture halls are literally the only kind of classroom there is—most of the actually-existing MOOCs being marketed are not much more than a massive and online version of that very same “sage on a stage” model. And what could be more hierarchical than a high prestige university like Harvard lecturing to a less prestigious institution like SJSU?

V.

I’ve titled my talk “The End of Reform” because I had to call it something; I couldn’t just say that the MOOCification of Higher Education is a Terrible No Good Very Bad Thing, although I think you have a sense of what I think about it.

But I mean two things by that title. On the one hand, MOOCs are more like an end of something than a beginning. Instead of a transition between old and new, they represent the end of a process of constant change that has defined Higher Education for as long as it has existed. At the micro level, MOOCs are cheap because you record them once and then reuse them. They don’t grow and evolve, and they don’t require the hiring of academic faculty, whose intellectual lives keep intellectual inquiry moving forward. This is what makes them cheap, but it’s also what will make them solidify hierarchy by placing a pantheon of academic superstars at the center of pedagogical practice, reifying knowledge into a commodity which, because it has value, cannot be allowed to change. If academic life is anything, it’s a devotion to endless process: the scientific method tells you how to take the next step, not where to stop. MOOCs are structurally devoted to pinning knowledge down like a butterfly, putting it on file, putting a price on it, and floating it on the market.

It also represents the end of reform at the macro level. The University of California, for example, is a profoundly recent creation; it was basically a two campus university until the 1950’s; today there are eleven campuses; online education dates back to the 80’s, well, this university dates back to the 60’s. Same is true with CSU’s and CCC’s; between 1957 and 1965, California established eight new CSUs—out of an eventual twenty-four—while more than half its present complement of 112 community colleges was built in the period between 1957 and 1978. California’s public university system is, in many ways, the biggest and best expression of a moment in time when futurity was incredibly important and possible; it represented a massive investment of public funds in the state’s collective future. The 1960 Donahoe Act, better known as the Master Plan for Higher Education, was a complex piece of legislation, but at its heart, quite simple, a blanket commitment from the state to educate all the California students who wanted an education. And as society grew, the university was to grow with it, adapting to changing needs by staying in a permanent state of reformulation.

Even though Darrel Steinberg’s SB520 begins by citing the Master Plan, his legislation represents a refusal of futurity: because the future is now, there is nothing to plan for; the only reality is the economic reality that a funding shortfall must be dealt with. And instead of solving this problem, he seeks to institutionalize it, render it permanent. We solve the problem of frustrating ambitions by foreswearing ambition, refusing to have desires that can be frustrated.

What makes the global culture industry fall for some countries and not others?

Every few years, a new country grips the public imagination, spawning a morass of food trends, fashion trends, and dance moves. We are seduced not just by bands or designers, but by entire foreign nations that rise out of obscurity into the forefront of popular culture.

Why are some countries more attractive than others — and how do they do it?  The ascent of Korea and Denmark — current darlings of the East and West — can give us some clues. Their rise onto the global stage may seem like happy accidents or good fortune, but like most “cool” things, were actually the results of concentrated, and very deliberate, efforts.

II. Everyone Is Eating Ash And Dancing To Psy

Danophilia and the Korean Wave are just the most recent versions of a persisting phenomenon that has existed ever since we’ve had the technology to learn about the “others” across the horizon. In the 19th century, European artists collectively creamed themselves over japonisme. And, as Tolstoy so effectively lampooned in his novels, aristocrats in Tsarist Russia just loved parler en français.

Today, the speed at which culture is propagated and consumed has increased dramatically: We consume more, connect more, and get bored of things more quickly. And, as the New Yorker — a leading propagator of country-crushes in the U.S. — documented last year, Denmark is quite literally the flavor of the month.

Ever since a group of Danish chefs drew up an influential New Nordic Cuisine Manifesto, stating their mission of only using local ingredients in 2004, restaurants and some households all over the world have adopted the Nordic mantra of using local and seasonal ingredients, sometimes to an obsessive degree. But none have been able to surpass the world’s top-rated restaurant (at least according to Restaurant magazine) for three years in a row: Noma in Copenhagen, where foodies salivate over actual volcanic ash and moss. In some circles, the “I went foraging with René Redzepi!” story is akin to hanging out with Jesus.

Then there’s the Danish brand of noir-drenched TV shows like The Killing, which everyone, from British housewives to Turkish hipsters is hopelessly hooked on. Factor in the popularity of Denmark’s minimalist design, and it becomes clear that “Scandi-fever” is a global epidemic. Even its politics are in vogue. The Economist jumped on the super-fan bandwagon with a February feature on Denmark’s successful model of social democracy. It noted: “Development theorists have taken to calling successful modernization ‘getting to Denmark.’” The story went viral.

Meanwhile,   Korean culture’s sweeping popularity — or hallyu, as the locals call it — has been propelled throughout the Eastern hemisphere by the slick sweetness of Korean soap operas, movies, and pop music. These three industries have collectively boosted Korea’s reputation as Asia’s “it” country of the moment. Teenagers in Bangkok are ripping off their bedrooms’ posters of Tokyo’s shaggy-haired idols, replacing them with Seoul’s androgynous heartthrobs. Even my grandmother, who lives in Singapore, religiously tunes in every single afternoon to her favorite Korean drama — dubbed over in Cantonese.

Of course, Korea has already been on the global map thanks to the dominance of Korean tech brands like Samsung and LG. But it wasn’t until a certain galloping, pot-bellied K-pop star became 2012’s biggest meme that the world started falling for Korean pop culture’s sugar-coated charm. When I asked Monocle’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Tuck, if he thought Korea could break into the Western hemisphere, he told me, “Psy was just the tip of the iceberg.” I took that as a yes.

III. The Three Stages Of Popularity

Before examining how Korea and Denmark have been so effective at winning the public’s admiration, it’s important to note that their trendiness is not quite the same as “soft power” — a concept coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who defined it as “the ability to get what you want through attraction and not coercion.” This basically means flashing your boobs instead of punching someone in the face to get what you want — a relatively marginal strategy for the official American foreign policy establishment (the U.S. spends about 500 times more on its military that it does on public diplomacy efforts like broadcasting and exchange programs) but one that’s been at work for as long as America has been a country thanks to its pop-culture exports.

Countries with soft power have been able to channel their appeal into a more permanent type of clout; thus, trendiness is a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of amassing soft power, which then allows countries to go about spreading their ideology to the world. America’s soft power, for example, played an integral role during the Cold War, when Hollywood movies helped cast American values in a glamorous light — while hostile Martians and nuclear war-spawned monsters warned of communism’s dangers.

Today, America’s glossy, gum-smacking culture is hard to avoid abroad. If Korea and Denmark are like the cool indie band about to make it big, America is… well, Justin Bieber. Even McDonald’s is considered a “cool hangout” in some countries, simply by virtue of being American. Tokyo party girls don’t bat a crystal-encrusted eyelid over picking at McFlurries.

Soft power isn’t easy to measure, but every year, Monocle magazine tries to do exactly that. In 2012, Britain topped the list (much to the glee of the British media), thanks to a myriad of factors, from the London Olympics to Skyfall. Joining it at the apex were other giants like the U.S., France, Germany and Japan—who form a nice little circle of hegemony over the rest of the world’s cultural consumption. Denmark and Korea aren’t there yet. According to Tuck, the countries that topped the list have “soft powers that are deeply rooted, and it’ll be a long time before anyone overtakes them. It’s not a snapshot of hipness.”

But this “snapshot of hipness” opens up a third kind of cultural popularity that Monocle’s list ignores (but that the magazine itself indulges liberally.)  Call it niche appeal: This category belongs to the countries that grab international attention, but only briefly, among select groups of people. For example, if you’d asked your film buff friend what the coolest country in the world was in 2007, the answer would most likely be Romania — which swept the international film festival circuit in the mid-aughts with homegrown hits like Police, Adjective, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. But the “Romanian New Wave” never spilled outside of the film industry, and the world remains just as ignorant about Romanian cuisine — which may or may not be a good thing.

A second example is Singapore. The “garden city” has been billed as the next Monaco — a paradisiacal wonderland for the ultrarich where nightclubs are packed with billionaires, skin-tight Herve Leger dresses are practically a uniform, and every other chair is swathed in ostrich skin.

But even though Singapore has been successful in attracting in a certain type of taxavoiding young billionaires, like Romania, it has (so far) failed to produce a seductive local culture that plays well on the global stage. The average American’s knee-jerk response when posed the question, “What do you think of Singapore?” is, “That’s the place where you can’t chew gum, right?” Ouch.

IV. How Denmark and Korea Did It

Despite the obvious differences between them, Denmark and Korea’s road to trendiness merge at several key points. Both countries began as underdogs; in fact, Denmark was barely a blip on Europe’s radar. In Britain—where the Danish delirium is now the strongest—“people’s perceptions of Denmark were quite limited and clichéd,” said Guardian journalist Patrick Kingsley, author of How To Be Danish. “We saw Denmark as this vague place that had Vikings hiding there, Gunther, and… nice tables, probably,” he said, “And in the rest of Scandinavia, I’ve heard it joked that Danes are the slightly more oafish ones who don’t properly enunciate.” Fast forward a few years, and that “oafishness” is now perceived as “rustic charm” and a rugged form of authenticity—a counterpoint to the glossy trappings of our overcommercialized capitalism.

Korea’s relationship with its neighbors is more strained. Open wounds left behind by the Korean War, Japanese colonialism, and ongoing disputes over shared territory still sting. In Japan, where anti-Korean hostility is arguably the strongest, comic books with hateful portrayals of Koreans became bestsellers in 2005.

John Seabrook noted in the New Yorker, “hallyu has erased South Korea’s regional reputation as a brutish emerging industrial nation where everything smelled of garlic and kimchee, and replaced it with images of prosperous, cosmopolitan life.” He continued, “Korean ancestry used to be a stigma… now it’s trendy.” While this might not be completely true (deep-seated mistrust and economic competition can’t be swept away by the flash of a pop star’s thighs), what is remarkable is how far Korea has risen on the cultural totem pole despite this ugly babel of hateful racism.

A second similarity lies in their finances: Both Seoul and Copenhagen are extremely well-developed cities — “small-scale, wealthy, wired, educated, high-output, secretly very competitive places,” as Robert Bound, the culture editor of Monocle put it when asked if he thought these two popular cities had a certain X-factor. Poor cities attract artists for the cheap rent — but rich cities have the right infrastructure to incubate artistic talent.

“There are at least 15 years of hard work behind their bright plumage,” Bound continued, “Not in a horrible twatty-banker way, but in the unfancy bedrock beneath the illuminated dance floors — investments in talent in music, art, fashion, film, and TV by which to proliferate it.”

It’s also worth noting that financial support of both Denmark and Korea’s biggest cultural industries comes from just a few giant organizations that profit handsomely from their countries’ appeal abroad   One of the biggest investors in Danish culture is a company called DR — a hugely influential public service broadcaster that’s the local equivalent of the BBC.

When Lauren Collins delved into its dayto-day operations for her New Yorker piece on Scandinavian TV’s widespread popularity, she found that DR’s centralization was key to its success, because it “allows its employees to exploit decades’ worth of accumulated institutional knowledge. A showrunner can float a plot point by a specialist on the news desk. A producer can get a backdrop made in minutes in the downstairs workshop.” It’s no coincidence that Borgen, The Bridge, and The Killing — all three of Denmark’s most popular TV programs — were created and produced in-house.

This “hit factory” system works just as well in Korea. Three music agencies, S.M., J.Y.P. and Y.G. (all named after their founders’ initials) dominate Korea’s music scene, and are responsible for churning out Korea’s flawless-trained and impeccably groomed idols year after year. Almost every hyper-polished Korean star goes through rigorous training before making their public debuts; this idolmaking process can take up to a decade, and each wannabe star is trained not only to sing and dance, but also to act, speak several foreign languages (Chinese and Japanese are key), and deal with the emotional pressure of intense media scrutiny.

These agencies control every aspect of their idols’ careers by simultaneously taking on the roles of manager, agent and promoter — and the rigor of their self-created system nullifies the likelihood of mistakes. Yes, Korea’s factory-made idol system may be a backbreaking process for all involved — but there’s no doubt that its success derives, in part, from its remarkably efficient centralization.

The success of Danish and Korean culture abroad, then, is not just a happy coincidence, but rather the effect of concentrated corporate efforts to develop, propagate, and monetize their products. Their governments’ roles in helping these efforts, as a form of good PR, should not be downplayed. The Islamic cartoons crisis of 2006 presented a spectacularly embarrassing debacle for Denmark, which it was eager to wash away. “After the crisis,” Kingsley said, “Denmark has made a point of trying to create a different image of itself, exporting its cultural capital to create a different kind of image.”

Similarly, when Korean culture started gaining traction in the early aughts, “fear that the Wave will fade like a fad inspired frequent discussions about the need for state support and appropriate state policies,” wrote Korean scholar Sue Jin Lee.

Mark Russell, the author of Pop Goes Korea, is staunchly opposed to giving the Korean government too much credit. “[It] likes to take credit for things, and detractors of Korean pop culture sometimes claim it is just a government-pushed PR mirage, but neither is remotely true…only after Korean music was established and significant did the government get interested.”

And yet, one cannot ignore the invisible helping hands of organizations like the government-sponsored Korean Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA), which was supplied with an annual budget of $90 million to do everything it could to support Korean culture’s global dissemination. To wit: In March of this year, KOCCA began paying for expenses like airfare and accommodations when top Korean artists perform in music festivals around the world.

When I asked Seabrook what distinguished K-pop from J-pop, its cultural predecessor, he replied, “Korean cultural products are made specifically for export, whereas Japanese cultural products only happened to become popular abroad…partly because their domestic market was large enough to absorb most of their cultural production. Not true in Korea.” Creating culture that can be marketed overseas was therefore part of the plan from the start.

V. We Want What We Don’t Have

Peeling back the curtain to examine the catalysts to Korea and Denmark’s meteoric rise reveals several key factors, none of which are particularly sexy. Behind the veneer of effortless cool, highly concerted financial assistance and well-thought-out strategizing by both corporate and government bodies have been instrumental to these two countries’ success.

While it is important to acknowledge the talent and hard work of their artists, it would also be naïve to think that Denmark and Korea’s cultural ascent was an entirely serendipitous, bottom-up movement. Certain key factors such as corporate centralization, economic stability, a sharp eye for marketability, and generous government assistance enriched the soil in which the seeds of talent could take root, and blossom into their fully realized potential.

However, fostering conditions for cultural growth is very different from a top-down approach of trying to squeeze out creativity. Obviously, a government cannot command its citizens to innovate any more than it can force them to have sex (although Singapore’s government has certainly tried, in many awkward and embarrassing ways). Providing structural and financial support without infringing on creative freedom is a tricky balancing act, and that is the linchpin for both Korea and Denmark’s success.

But one final factor, perhaps the most vital, remains: both of these cultures are especially seductive because they show us an alternative way of life that is somehow better than our own — but at the same time, familiar enough that we can envision a bridge between our world and this vision of utopia.

The forest-foraged mentality of Denmark’s culinary scene, the rugged pragmatism of their crime-solving TV shows (and their heroines’ home-spun sweaters), the large safety net of their politics: All of this looks extremely comforting from afar, a welcome respite from capitalism’s soulless gloss. In times of recession, the desire to return to our roots, to a simpler time when everything worked as it should, can be overwhelming.

On quite the opposite side of the spectrum, Korea’s air-brushed soap opera and pop music stars are ambassadors of the polished sophistication that its neighbors are striving to achieve. Confident, stylish and wired, these superstars reflect their home country’s successful modernization — but still retain their Confucian values. “You can wear Margiela and still be a good Korean daughter,” the dancing baby dolls of Girls Generation, Korea’s most successful pop group, seem to be saying. For countries like Vietnam and Thailand that are still trying to figure out how to reconcile the forces of westernization, modernity and tradition, this call is also impossible to resist.

Tapping into what others find strange yet familiar — exotic, yet accessible — seems to be a key ingredient in winning a country mass appeal. In the end, it’s not so different from any other commodity. The pleasure of pop is also the pleasure of recognition.

A schoolmaster’s kindness spared Henry Mayhew from a night spent under the stars. The 19th-century British journalist had been traveling through Germany in search of “principal Lutheran localities,” as he put it, and found himself in the Thuringian town of Möhra, ancestral home of that confession’s founder. Road-weary and famished, Mayhew arrived at the town’s lone inn only to learn that traveling bookbinders and visiting land surveyors had claimed all beds. His search for lodgings led him to the schoolmaster, who might have a room to let.

As it happened, the schoolmaster did have a room. The accommodations proved less than ideal. Where Mayhew should have found a washstand stood a piano; where he should have found a wardrobe, another piano. Determined to keep a stiff upper lip, he reasoned, “A wise man can live anywhere.”

Whether a wise man can eat anywhere was another question. Having made himself at home, Mayhew approached the schoolmaster’s wife to learn what was to be served for dinner. He was told: “Here gives liver-sausage, and red-sausage, and Savoyard-sausage, and hard sausage –.” This recitation Mayhew interrupted by stating he would like ham. Sadly, there gave no ham. Nor did there give chicken, the village’s last capon eaten by the surveyors. As with the chicken so it was with eggs, vanished down those same gullets. To an exasperated Mayhew’s query, “Well, then, what can you let us have?,” came the reply: “Here gives liver-sausage, and red-sausage, and Savoyard-sausage, and hard sausage….”

And so sausage was Mayhew given, along with sauerkraut and pickled plums. Though he “couldn’t have been less partial to sausage-meat,” he admitted, “the infinite variety of sausages made and consumed in the land” commanded his admiration.

There was much to admire: sausage egg-shaped and sausage round-barreled, sausage blond and sausage gray, sausage flecked white with fat and sausage blue-black with blood. “Indeed with the sausage alone,” one Englishman noted, “Germany might form a rampart round the world.” These defenses might consist of the ample Cervelat of Braunschweig, the diminutive Lübecker Saucisschen, the velvety Strassburger Truffelwurst, the coarse-grained Frankfurter Bratwurst, or any number of other plump links. Sausage in its local distinctiveness betokened something of the patchwork quality of the region itself, with its many states, palatinates, cities and towns.

Constant among such variety was the butcher, his Metzgerei, or butcher shop, the laboratory in which he performed his prodigies of pork. A magic hand at meat-dressing generally, he was revered and often asked to preside over riotous celebrations. Once or twice a year he and others of his trade paraded behind a flower-bedecked bullock, waving knives and cleavers, dancing and jumping. To these capers townsfolk assigned great importance: the higher the butchers’ leaps, the higher that year’s grain.

Of uncommonly great importance were Nuremberg’s butchers. Thanks to a privilege granted them by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV for their loyalty and protection during a revolt of the city’s artisans, they presided over the Shrovetide festival. Very much a feast of fools, it inspired its lords to attempt great feats. One such feat, attempted in 1658, came in the form of a 300 foot long, 700 pound black sausage. Beribboned and hoisted aloft on poles, this monstrous tube of meat served as the standard for its makers’ guild. This standard was struck later that evening and eaten at a public banquet. To the delight of stomachs throughout Nuremburg, each year saw the city’s butchers vying to top the previous year’s effort.

The life of a butcher wasn’t all fun and games. Among other privileges accruing to a him were license to carry a sword and authority to set meat prices. His trade often summoning him to the countryside, he offered to carry written correspondence for a fee. He and his fellows thus became Germany’s first mail carriers. This service they rendered became known as “butcher post” (Metzgerpost).

Responsible townsmen to the letter, butchers appeared to do no wrong. In their uprightness they garnered the esteem even of great artists. A butcher surprising Joseph Haydn at home one day with a request for a minuet for his daughter’s wedding had his wish granted. The Austrian composer told him to come back the next day to claim his piece.

The butcher did so. Moments after handing the him the score and bidding him farewell, Haydn heard faint music outside. He went to his balcony and saw the butcher accompanied by a wandering orchestra and a large ox. The animal wore gilt horns and bright colors. “Sir, you have done me a very great favour,” said the song’s claimant, “and I thought a butcher could not better express his thanks for so beautiful a composition as your minuet, than by presenting you with the finest ox in his possession.” Whether Haydn made sausage of the butcher’s gift has gone unrecorded, but the gift did make history. So touched was the composer by the gesture that he called his composition “The Minuet of the Ox,” the title by which it is known today.

Titles and privileges enjoyed for centuries came under assault in the mid-19th century, when industry and government conspired to push venerable butchers from their pedestal. The Schlachtzwang law of 1868, which permitted municipalities to build public slaughterhouses, opened the meat trade to official scrutiny. Any meddling butchers thwarted by keeping their sausage recipes secret and moving their abbatoirs beyond city limits. Their resistance they managed to sustain for decades. As late as 1920 American butchers remarked that their German brethren “are mostly butchers of the old school, proud of their ‘independence’ and disinclined to deal with any large corporations.” This resistance proved futile. In Germany as in the United States, man surrendered to machine, and large corporations uprooted small proprietors. As the 20th century wore on the butcher who slaughtered his own meat and made his own sausage became a rare sight. Yet he better than anyone likely understood that such was the way of all flesh.