It’s a postfact world.

It’s a postfact world.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153786974752

postgraphics:The Pointer, the Delayer, the Includer: What ‘The...

postgraphics:

The Pointer, the Delayer, the Includer: What ‘The Donald’ is saying with his hands

Va’ a fare in culo

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153741783097

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

- Jorge Luis Borges

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153741369212

Do You Believe In Magic?

Robert Schiller, Nobel laureate in economics, equates Trump’s election to the tendency in business to seek out ‘charismatic, outsider’ CEOs, who have a less than stellar track record:

Robert Schiller, Trump, and Great Business Ideas for American

Mr. Trump’s background evidently appealed to voters, but he should be careful not to be overconfident. His election may be a culmination of a trend in society of lionizing business stars and expecting too much of them.

We’ve seen this phenomenon in the outlandish salaries paid to top chief executives and in the public enthusiasm for them. Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, described the trend eloquently in his book “Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic C.E.O.s” (Princeton, 2002). He discerned a long trend in American business toward choosing chief executives from outside a company and paying them handsomely for some presumed business flair despite their ignorance of the long-term internal issues facing a company.

Professor Khurana warned that expecting these people to perform acts of genius was asking for trouble. The charismatic outsider tends to become authoritarian, alienating others in the company. The executive’s desperate efforts to live up to their promise may sometimes result in wild gambles. There are grounds for concern that President Trump could be this kind of outsider chief executive.

Khurana also wrote The Curse of the Superstar CEO, the article behind the book, in which he states that two societal shifts position charismatic outsider CEOs to shake things up in the ‘80s when a decline in corporate profits annoyed investors:

The first was the emergence of an almost religious conception of business, exemplified by the appearance of words such as “mission,” “vision,” and “values” in the corporate lexicon. The second shift was the rise of so-called populist capitalism, whereby ordinary Americans made investing the country’s most popular participatory sport. To serve the public’s growing appetite for business news, the mass media greatly expanded coverage of corporate doings, focusing—as always—on personalities and easily comprehensible narratives.

The volatile mix between workism – the cultish obsession with work-as-the-center-of-the-universe – and populist capitalism have led to the perfect breeding ground for charismatic sociopaths in business. As Khurana puts it,

[…] the charismatic CEO was typically—though not invariably—either an entrepreneurial founder or someone who had been brought into the company from the outside. Far from being a predictable organization man, he was expected to offer a vision of a radically different future and to attract and motivate followers for a journey to the new promised land. In keeping with the religious conception of the CEO’s role, the charismatic leader was also supposed to have the “gift of tongues,” with which he could inspire employees to work harder and gain the confidence of investors, analysts, and the ever skeptical business press. Finally, in all too many cases, the charismatic leader was supposed to have the power to perform miracles—to bring a dying company back to life, for instance, or to vanquish much larger, more powerful foes.

But the downside can be devastating, because charisma can only do so much, and some of what it does is creating a ‘reality distortion field’. Again, Khurana:

The real problem, though, is that there is simply no correlation between leadership and corporate success, but they are rapidly fired in any downturn:

Studies show that various internal and external constraints inhibit an executive’s ability to affect a company’s performance. Most estimates, for example, attribute anywhere from 30% to 45% of performance to industry effects and 10% to 20% to year-to-year economic changes. Thus, the best anyone can say about the effect of a CEO on a company’s performance is that it depends greatly on circumstances.

The misguided assumption that CEOs are all-powerful is the main reason that the tenure of business leaders has grown ever briefer in recent years. If a CEO is responsible for a company’s successes, after all, he must also be responsible for its failures. My research clearly shows that directors automatically blame the incumbent CEO when a company performs poorly. Scapegoating is as old as human nature, of course, but my interviews strongly suggest that when corporate performance falters, directors come under enormous pressure to fire the CEO and hire a savior. This finding is consistent with the larger historical truth that while charismatic leaders (whether in religion, politics, or elsewhere) may appear at any time, they most often emerge—or are called into existence—during a crisis.

Khurana goes on to discuss the history of Kodak, where Kay Whitmore was pushed out in the early ‘90s, and replaced with George Fisher, who was then CEO of Motorola. However, by 2002, Kodak was still the ‘horse-and-buggy-whip’ company in the dot.com era, held back by intransigent middle management and slow-to-change policies. We know the rest: Kodak filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2012, and has continued to limp along, at best.

Pulling this discussion back to Schiller’s piece on Trump, Khurana’s exploration of the mystique of the outsider comes down to this:

Whether in religious, governmental, or business contexts, charisma is much more a social product than an individual trait. In primitive societies, leaders often wore special clothing, masks, and ornaments that conferred on them a larger-than-life appearance that helped create perceptions of their charisma. In monarchies, kings and queens assume charisma through their family heritage, buttressing it with such potent symbols as palaces, robes, and crowns. Large offices, private planes, expensive suits, and other trappings of corporate power perform the same function for CEOs.

In addition to relying on such external markers, charismatic CEOs acquire their hold over others by meeting certain socially constructed criteria about what constitutes a great leader. One of the most powerful of these constructs is the idea that outsiders are particularly well qualified to lead.

And what distinguishes them from insiders? Their willingness to ‘lay waste’ to their own organizations, to destabilize them. This may begin in the pursuit of much needed changes, and can lead to a corporate rebound, but in Khurana’s research, at Jacques Nasser’s Ford this led to rather more downside that upside, and at Jeff Skilling’s Enron it was catastrophic.

We can hope that Trump turns out to be a Jobsian figure, a visionary that can turn around a crisis, and become a savior in a very difficult time. But, as Khurana notes,

Today’s extraordinary trust in the power of the charismatic CEO resembles less a mature faith than it does a belief in magic.

And that, I believe, best summarizes the wild optimism of those who voted for Trump, and the investors that are driving the stock market to an all-time high. Trump, the hand-waving, fast-talking tycoon in the ten thousand dollar suit, living in the penthouse with gold bathroom fixtures, and the trophy wife and private jet, appeals to his followers at the glandular, hypnotic level. They’ve been mesmerized by his vision of a simpler, whiter, old-timey America – and the acceptance, if not eagerness, that such a change may require partial destruction to bring it into existence.

America apparently believes in magic and folklore, rejecting science and any rational examination of the past, and ignoring the track record of self-appointed outsider saviors.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153731410297

"Perhaps the single philosophical consensus of our time is that the key to contentment lies in living..."

“

Perhaps the single philosophical consensus of our time is that the key to contentment lies in living fully mentally in the present. The idea that we should be constantly policing our thoughts away from the past, the future, the imagination or the abstract and back to whatever is happening right now has gained traction with spiritual leaders and investment bankers, armchair philosophers and government bureaucrats and human resources departments. Corporate America offers its employees mindfulness training to “streamline their productivity,” and the United States military offers it to the Marine Corps. Americans now spend an estimated $4 billion each year on “mindfulness products.” “Living in the Moment” has monetized its folksy charm into a multibillion-dollar spiritual industrial complex.

[…]

What differentiates humans from animals is exactly this ability to step mentally outside of whatever is happening to us right now, and to assign it context and significance. Our happiness does not come so much from our experiences themselves, but from the stories we tell ourselves that make them matter.

But still, the advice to be more mindful often contains a hefty scoop of moralizing smugness, a kind of “moment-shaming” for the distractible, like a stern teacher scolding us for failing to concentrate in class. The implication is that by neglecting to live in the moment we are ungrateful and unspontaneous, we are wasting our lives, and therefore if we are unhappy, we really have only ourselves to blame.

This judgmental tone is part of a long history of self-help-based cultural thought policing. At its worst, the positive-thinking movement deftly rebranded actual problems as “problematic thoughts.” Now mindfulness has taken its place as the focus of our appetite for inner self-improvement. Where once problems ranging from bad marriages and work stress to poverty and race discrimination were routinely dismissed as a failure to “think positive,” now our preferred solution to life’s complex and entrenched problems is to instruct the distressed to be more mindful.

This is a kind of neo-liberalism of the emotions, in which happiness is seen not as a response to our circumstances but as a result of our own individual mental effort, a reward for the deserving. The problem is not your sky-high rent or meager paycheck, your cheating spouse or unfair boss or teetering pile of dirty dishes. The problem is you.

”

-

Ruth Whippman, Actually, Let’s Not Be In The Moment

Whippman casts mindfulness as ‘a neo-liberalism of the emotions’, in which you unmake your own happiness: the problem is you.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153727443087

"Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and..."

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.”

-

Gautama Buddha

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153726863417

Ida Auken offers us a great postcard from the future in Welcome...

Ida Auken offers us a great postcard from the future in  Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better:

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

When you start with the assumption of free clean energy, conjectures of a protopian future are easier to swallow. Still, there seems to be something missing in this scenario: whatever happened to capitalism, and the entrenched authority of the neoliberal economy? Did it disappear? Wouldn’t that have led to a collapse?

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153726691732

365filmsbyauroranocte: The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la...

365filmsbyauroranocte:

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (a.k.a. Ensayo de un crimen) (Luis Buñuel, 1955)

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153726271322

"Since very few people school themselves in the use of reason beyond the calculation of self-interest..."

“Since very few people school themselves in the use of reason beyond the calculation of self-interest encouraged by the regime, They need help on a vast number of issues. … some kind of authority is often necessary for most men and women. In the absence of anything else, it is not the case. This is just where tradition is used. …The active presence of a tradition in a man’s soul gives him a resource against the ephemeral, the kind of resource that only the wise can find simply within themselves. The paradoxical result of the liberation of reason is greater reliance on public opinion for guidance, a weakening of independence.”

- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153724509927

Benedict Evans, Cameras, ecommerce and machine learning

Benedict Evans, Cameras, ecommerce and machine learning:

Mobile means that, for the first time, pretty much everyone on earth will have a camera, taking vastly more images than were ever taken on film (‘How many pictures?’). This feels like a profound change on a par with, say, the transistor radio making music ubiquitous.

[…]

We should expect that every image ever taken can be searched or analyzed, and some kind of insight extracted, at massive scale. Every glossy magazine archive is now a structured data set, and so is every video feed. With that incentive (and that smarthome supply chain) far more images and video will be captured. 

[…]

Now, suppose you buy the last ten years’ issues of Elle Decoration on eBay and drop them into just the right neural networks, and then give that system a photo of your living room and ask which lamps it recommends? All those captioned photos, and the copy around them, are training data. And yet, if you don’t show the user an actual photo from that archive, just a recommendation based on it, you probably don’t need to pay the original print publisher itself anything at all. (Machine learning will be fruitful grounds for IP lawyers.) We don’t have this yet, but we know, pretty much, how we might do it. We have a roadmap to recognize some kind of preferences, automatically, at scale. 

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153682884087

Astra Taylor, Serfing the Net

Astra Taylor, Serfing the Net:

Astra Taylor delicately finds a way through the minefields of ‘free’ – as in ‘information wants to be free’ – and winds up in a paradoxical DMZ, where the end result may be a cult of drones whose ‘sharing’ and ‘art’ makes others into billionaires. 

Here she triangulates, using the terms provided, but at the same time deconstructing them [all emphasis mine]:

And so we have our conversation about the enormous cultural restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless vocabulary where “content” takes the place of “art” and “information” substitutes for “culture,” “knowledge,” “literature,” “music,” “cinema” and “meaning.” All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened: the fickle nature of the muse, the idiosyncrasies of scholarship, and the tenacity required to compose a novel. All are reduced to nothing by analogies derived from the logic of computer code, data processing and high-tech business models.

But a deeper problem arises when the idiom of technology supplants traditional social criticism. The “freedom” promoted by the software community always turns out to be the libertarian version. It’s about freedom of information: the desire to see how something is made, to tinker, and to pass those insights and innovations along. Copyleft, as the advocates of this all-purpose transparency call it, is not “left” in any traditional sense; it has nothing to say about entrenched systems of economic privilege or limits on profitability. Likewise, the open-source movement does not provide the blueprint for a fairer social order. Techno-utopians, wonderstruck by the latest in programming geekery, project insights about software development onto the broader social sphere, and the rest of us mistake technology’s gee-whiz factor for theoretical sophistication.

Meanwhile, the most hyped solutions for survival in a free economy always turn out to be anathema to those who care about art. Make a video that goes viral and lands you a gig directing commercials, we’re advised. Check out a cool app that embeds advertising in your film or song or book. For artists who have spent years resisting corporate values, it is galling to constantly hear that advertising is to be the only viable source of sustenance in the emerging order of total freedom.

Maybe “free” will soon become just another way of saying “service economy.” People won’t pay for music, books or film any longer? The trick, we are told, is to find the “fee” in “free.” Perhaps people will part with their money for the privilege of getting things quickly and with less hassle, kind of like how we buy bottled water when there’s a tap down the hall. Or maybe artists can “add value” to their creations by making themselves into desirable products their audiences can “connect” with. There was a time when the work took the spotlight and the artist receded into the background—no longer: In a world of digital super-abundance, the makers themselves are auto-generating precious scarcity. After all, when you’re working for reputational currency, to use one of Anderson’s stock phrases, you are your most valuable commodity. Celebrity will become even more essential to creative survival, and the cultivation of friends, fans and followers will be a full-time job.

For now, however, the vast majority of artists struggle for sustainability, not profit—and in our rush to “free” we make them canaries in the coal mine of virtual capitalism. There are many self-reliant creators who, even though they appear successful enough, subsist humbly off the proceeds of their work. There are people who spend years toiling to produce something significant before persuading their audience to give them—for an album, a book or a film—perhaps $10 or $20 dollars in return. Why not have those who are so eager to sever this meager source of sustenance make the first foray into the land of free? Imagine the savings to society if computer programmers or venture capitalists were paid in beer.

Obviously we must balance our desire for free stuff with a concern for work. But the open-source software tradition, our final authority on all social questions these days, has little to say about labor, oppression, compensation or collective bargaining. The supposed liberation heralded by those who promote free culture is winner-take-all; exploit or be exploited, as long as you share your code. Anderson concedes this point, acknowledging that if we “measure success in terms of the creation of vast sums of wealth spread among more than a few people, Free can’t yet compare to Paid.” Unless artists and their allies organize themselves, it never will. Until then, those who have dreamed up a way to cheat an entire category of workers and call it democracy will get to pose as political radicals, happily cashing their paychecks while telling others to work for nothing.

(h/t )

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153682282792

Google AI creates ‘Interlingua’

Using AI to translate across three languages has led to the observation that the AI has created – without direct help – an interlingua: an artificial language that – this case – is constructed to make translation easier, based on richer and broader semantics than are found in any of the natural languages.

Matt Burgess, Google’s AI just created its own universal ‘language

However, the most remarkable feat of the research paper isn’t that an AI can learn to translate languages without being shown examples of them first; it was the fact it used this skill to create its own 'language’. “Visual interpretation of the results shows that these models learn a form of interlingua representation for the multilingual model between all involved language pairs,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

An interlingua is a type of artificial language, which is used to fulfil a purpose. In this case, the interlingua was used within the AI to explain how unseen material could be translated.

“Using a 3-dimensional representation of internal network data, we were able to take a peek into the system as it translated a set of sentences between all possible pairs of the Japanese, Korean, and English languages,” the team’s blogpost continued. The data within the network allowed the team to interpret that the neural network was “encoding something” about the semantics of a sentence rather than comparing phrase-to-phrase translations.

“We interpret this as a sign of existence of an interlingua in the network,” the team said. As a result of the work, the Multilingual Google Neural Machine Translation is now being used across all of Google Translate and the firm said multilingual systems are involved in the translation of 10 of the 16 newest language pairs.

Soon, we may be speaking an interlingua that encompasses English, Swahili, Mandarin, and a hundred other languages. Perhaps we could wire it in such a way that people would innately find more kinship with others, and intuitively follow the golden rule. I propose we call it ‘Ish’, and start teaching the kindergartners.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153641062182

"The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles."

“The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.”

-

Oren Harari

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153640305867

Pole-dancing robotic thing by Giles Walker. This is a video from...

Pole-dancing robotic thing by Giles Walker. This is a video from 2008, but he’s on the circuit.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153640254672

"Brands can seem like a way to add a phony value to an otherwise undifferentiated commodity. But they..."

“Brands can seem like a way to add a phony value to an otherwise undifferentiated commodity. But they also mark the entry point for consumers into some vicarious fantasy, some idea tangential to consumption. The potential value of a brand rests in the conflation of compulsion and the desire to believe. It must make you feel as though you are choosing and also have no choice.”

-

Rob Horning, Consistency through adulteration

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153558677342

Tara Isabella Burton, Cult of One — Real Life

Tara Isabella Burton, Cult of One — Real Life:

Tara Isabella Burton explores personal identity, public identity, and the ways living a public live on social media – publicy, in my dogma – can impart a duality of the self:

Playing a public role on social media, presenting ourselves as a “character” (the “fun one,” the workaholic, the gleeful bohemian, the “good friend,” the liberal do-gooder, and so forth), is to commit to being that person in the social sphere: to enter into an informal contract with those that witness us to “be that person.” It’s an argument similar to that of the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman, who understood the self as a constant performer, narrating and navigating its selfhood in direct response to its audience. But Ricoeur’s “audience,” as it were, goes beyond the horizontal — the social present — and into the realm of the literary and the mythic. We are creating ourselves not merely “before” others but also “before” the cultural and historical characters we want to be and “before” an imagined future audience: part of a (perhaps unconscious) chain of discourse that links us, in terms of our significance, to an Achilles or an Arthur.

While Goffman allows for a “backstage” — a place where we can be ourselves without theatrical presentation — [20th century philosopher Paul] Ricoeur’s model allows for no such place. There is nowhere beyond language and narrative, and so there is nowhere we are not in dialogue with the stories that have shaped and will continue to shape our self-understanding. For Ricoeur, ethics lies in internal consistency — in “keeping one’s word” in future encounters. So our performances publicly may help us shape who we are privately as well.

Our narrative identities and their refiguring power to shape both our own personal stories and the stories of others are integral to our ability to better ourselves: which is to say, to create versions of ourselves more in line with the values we hold, and the people we most want to be. If sin, for Saint Augustine as for a long line of theologians and philosophers alike, lies in the chasm between who we are and who we want to be, self-improvement can be a matter of closing of that gap in the successful enactment of the narratives that shape us.

Are we who we say we are? 

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153557694477

The Challenge of Consciousness

The Challenge of Consciousness:

Tim Parks discusses consciousness with Riccardo Manzotti:

Parks: I remember David Chalmers, a philosopher we’ll no doubt be talking about at some point, defining consciousness as an internal flow of images, “a movie playing inside your head,” and probably a lot of people would agree with him. But you want to stick to something more basic.

Manzotti: A definition like that suggests that we know a lot more than we do: that there are images in our heads, that they move forward in sequence, that there is some kind of split between the image and someone (who?) observing the image. It’s all very problematic. The truth is that we do not know what consciousness is. That’s why we’re talking about it as a problem. What we do know is that the way we experience reality, I mean that we feel the things that happen to us, does not really match up with our current scientific picture of the physical world.

Parks: In what respect?

Manzotti: Well, consider this: If we didn’t know that human beings experience the world, that they feel things, would we be able to deduce it from what we know about neurophysiology? Really, no. There is nothing about the behavior of neurons to suggest that they are any different with respect to consciousness than, say, liver cells or red blood cells. They are cells doing what cells do best, namely, keeping entropy low by generating flows of ions such as sodium, potassium, chloride, and calcium and releasing neurotransmitters as a consequence. All of that is wonderful but far removed from the fact that I experience a light blue color when I watch the morning sky. That is, it’s not easy to see how the physical activity of the neurons explains my experience of the sky, let alone a process like thinking.

Parks: So we might say that consciousness is the word we use to refer to the fact that rather than just physiological activity, mute like any other physical event—the sky in the morning, a cloud crossing the sun—we have experience, we have a feeling of that event?

Manzotti: Exactly. Instead of a world where we merely interact with external occurrences—the way a flower opens in the sun, or water freezes in the cold—we also have experience of the occurrence, the sun, the icy weather, and so on. This addition of experience (or in future we may want to suggest that experience and occurrence are one!) would be puzzling enough in itself. But it is even more puzzling that experience is usually described as experience of something else, of something that is not me. I experience a red apple. You experience a piece of music. Ruth experiences a landscape. How is this possible since, if we leave aside quantum mechanics (for the moment), our traditional view of nature tells us that an object is what it is and nothing more? William James put this very clearly when he asked, How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We still have no answer to that question.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153557299917

Brief, That Place in the Year by Les Murray

Brief, that place in the year
when a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into electronic snow city.

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153556989292

clavierm: micdotcom: 3 ways Donald Trump promised to bring back...

clavierm:

micdotcom:

3 ways Donald Trump promised to bring back jobs — that won’t work

The scam is now blatant. The Trumpsters are going to learn a hard lesson: don’t believe a liar and incompetent scam artist…

And I thought that was one area where GOP and Dems could agree. But he’s going to treat the election as a way to distribute the spoils to gazillionaires. 

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153556594677

clavierm: the-future-now: 100 Million Goddamn Trees Are...

clavierm:

the-future-now:

100 Million Goddamn Trees Are Dead

California drought update: It’s still bad. How bad? According to the U.S. Forest Service, 102 million goddamn trees have now died in the state since 2010, including 62 million trees in this year alone.

This is a disaster…

The west will become treeless. 

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153556540817