Archive: 2016

There are two primary things that background this, that are probably necessary to know.

The first is that this past year has been extraordinarily hard for me. The second is that it’s been very difficult to talk openly about.

I’ve always tried to be honest online – about what I’m going through, about what I’m wrestling with, and especially about mental illness, which I think is much less of a forbidden topic of conversation than it used to be but which I also think can still stand to be discussed more than it is, and especially in what we would probably call professional settings.

I’ve done this because I value vulnerability – or I want to. I feel like it’s something to aspire to, in no small part because I absolutely suck at pretending that everything is fine if I have to do so for more than five minutes at a stretch. It’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable no matter what I do, so generally I go with what I regard as the lesser of two evils. When I think I can.

And there’s also that I hope vulnerability might eventually help me.

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Even some of Silicon Valley’s biggest boosters will cop to the fact that they think technology can solve social problems and that big decisions should be left to meritocracy, not democracy. More subtly, it really does seem we are much more comfortable talking about new inventions more than new governmental structures. We’ve seen self driving cars and pocketable computers go from science fiction to everyday annoyance within less than a decade and yet when was the last time you heard of a revolutionary new democratic decision-making tool? The Shakers of 19th century New England operated on consensus so General Assemblies don’t count.

So-prevalent-they-are-invisible suppositions are rarely young and this one can be traced back to Plato who famously called for philosopher kings. The more modern vision of the technocratic ideal starts to reveal itself during the French revolution. It’s also easy to put the Republican primary in this tradition, where political acumen is less favorable than business experience. Here is Langdon Winner, in his 1977 book Autonomous Technology talking about the origins of technocratic western thought:

In many instances utopian and historical speculations have been combined. The demise of a political system is seen as an opportunity for the building of a technological society ruled by a technically competetnt aristocracy. This was the outlook of Henri Comte de Saint-Simon at a time when the ancien regime was being dismantled and a new system constsructed in its place. Saint Simon’s criticism of the French Revoltuion was that its efforts were overly poltical and did not take into account the realities of the new mode of social organization taking shape at the same time. “The men who brought about the Revoltuion,” he observed, “the men who directed it, and the men who, since 1789 and up to the present day, have guided the nation, have committed a great political mistake. They have all sought to improve the governmental machine, wehreas the y should have subordinated it and put administration in the first place.” True progress was located in the development of the new instruments of technology and techniques of governmental administration. This required, Saint-Simon argued, a system of expert management by industrialists, scientists, and technicians.

The precise form of the proposed government was one that now seems very traditional indeed. Saint-Simon placed the members of his technical elite in a parliment with three houses: the Chamber of Inventions, The Chambers of Review, and Chamber of Deputies. The Chamboer of Inventions, composed of two hundred engineers and a scattering of poets, painters, architects, and musicians, would decide the basic plan for all of France. The Chamber of Review, made up of mathematicians and pure scientists, would judge programs devised by the Chamber of Inventions and serve as a control over its policies. Completing the arrangement of checks and balances, the Chamber of Deputies, composed of practicing industrialists, would serve as an executive body to implent the plan. Notably absent from Saint-Simon’s scheme is any trace of equality or electoral democracy. The members of the parliment were to be chosen according to professional competence alone and not elected by the populace at large. The ascendance of scientific and industrial classes could take place only at the expense of a total neutralization of the political role of the majority of men and women, benighted souls, who did not possess higher knowledge and skill. “A scientist, my friends, is a man who predicts,” Saint-Simon announces. “It is because science has the means of prediction that it is useful, and makes scientists superior to all other men.”

“Are you a human?”

I asked this question when answering the phone in a bar the other day. Someone else in the bar did a double take. After I hung up, they asked “Did you just ask someone if they are human?”

“Well, no. I asked a robocall if they were human.” This is what I do when I suspect I’m getting a robocall. As a former telemarketer, I try not to hang up on sales calls and I’m polite to telemarketers so that, when I ask them to take me off their call list, they actually do it. But robots? Even better. No hurt feelings, no nastiness. Just “Are you a human?” Click.

So I wonder how people are responding to the new robocalls in Iowa urging them to support Donald Trump. I imagine for folks in early-voting states—people who are courted so amorously during presidential elections that it must be both flattering and exhausting—that they have one of two reactions: immediately hang up, or listen intently to see if this message will help them to decide who to vote for. And I wonder how Iowans felt about the message itself, which boils down to: I’m a white nationalist and I support Donald Trump. If you are also a racist, you should too.

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In the past few years, a subgenre of curiously self-referential feature stories and opinion pieces has begun to appear in many prominent magazines and newspapers. The articles belonging to this subgenre all respond to the same phenomenon – the emergence of natural language generation (NLG) software that has been composing news articles, quarterly earnings reports, and sports play-by-plays – but what they really have in common is a question on the part of the writer: “Am I doing anything that an algorithm couldn’t be doing just as well?” In some instances, titles like “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?” and “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?” place the author’s uniqueness in question from the outset; sometimes the authors of these pieces also force their readers to wonder whether the text they are reading was written by human or machine. In a New York Times Sunday Review essay from last year, for instance, Shelley Podolny subjects her readers to a mini-Turing Test, presenting two descriptions of a sporting event, one written by a software program and one written by a human, and asking us to guess which is which. (On the Times website, readers can complete an interactive quiz in which they deduce whether a series of passages were composed by automated or human authors.)

The two major companies involved in the development of algorithmic writing, Automated Insights and Narrative Science, have been around since 2007 and 2010, respectively. Narrative Science’s flagship software product is called Quill, while Automated Insights’s is called Wordsmith: quaint, artisanal names for software that seems to complete the long process that has severed the act of writing from the human hand over the past century and a half. The two companies initially developed their programs to convert sports statistics into narrative texts, but quickly began offering similar services to companies and later started expanding into data-driven areas of journalism. Such data-based reporting is what NLG software does well: it translates numerical representations of information into language-based representations of the same information. And while NLG programs have existed for several decades, they were mostly limited to producing terse reports on a limited range of subjects, like weather events and seismic activity. According to Larry Birnbaum, one of Quill’s architects, “Computers have known how to write in English for years. The reason they haven’t done so in the past is they had nothing to say, lacking access to a sufficient volume of information.”

As Birnbaum explains it, the new natural language generation software has been made possible – or rather, necessary – by the advent of Big Data. The prior limitations on the topics software programs could write about are disappearing, as all realms of human activity become subject to data processing. Joe Fassler notes in The Atlantic that “the underlying logic that drives [algorithmic writing] – scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts – is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data . . . software can generate a prose analysis that’s robust, reliable, and readable.” Hence, automated journalism will continue to expand into less obviously data-driven realms of reporting as new sources of data become available for processing. Meanwhile, the Associated Press and Forbes, to name a few, are already publishing thousands of software-written articles. more...

“Aren’t you glad you’re not there right now?” This is, if personal experience is any indication, the state-mandated response Floridians must give to anyone that claims to be visiting from anything north of the state line. It doesn’t matter the context —a bartender on Hollywood beach, an emergency room physician in North Miami— they are all very happy that you found your way to Florida this winter. The phrase has a wide range of registers though, that go from outright smugness to a thinly veiled request to validate one’s decision to settle down in 2,300 square feet of something called Flamingo Palisades. “Please,” they seem to say, “tell me this is as good as it gets.”

I grew up just north of Miami and even though I have little desire to live on whatever is left of it after the seas rise to their predicted heights, I value the perspective it has given me. Florida sensitizes you to the effort humans put in to turning spaces into places. Florida’s economy is based on the constant re-invention of its own brand, always changing for different demographics and markets. Florida’s cities are the sociocultural equivalents of GMO corn: equal parts science and marketing, growing out of an artificial substrate of designer chemicals and excrement. They are bland and immensely profitable by design. They don’t conform to existing economies of scale, they make their own.

The Sunbelt, that stretch of Post World War II development that became desirable for modern, full-time habitation only after the advent of the air conditioner, isn’t so much a geographic feature as it is an historic anomaly. It is undergirded by cheap fossil fuels, leisure time, a guaranteed (for some) retirement age, and modern architecture. The winters are warm and prices for goods are generally kept at a libertarian low but the car-based transportation system doesn’t really let most people enjoy either of these qualities. Most of your time is spent burning expensive gas in an air-conditioned Hyundai on a gridlocked highway.

Living in one’s car, albeit among a very different set of conditions, was the focus of a recent essay in Fusion by Malcolm Harris. In exploring his titular question “Where Should a Good Millennial Live?,” he reveals that some of the more trendy alternative housing options pitched to younger generations are substantial reductions in the quality of life: houses not much bigger than a box truck or actually living in a box truck in the parking lot of your employer, are being marketed to young adults as the American Dream of the 21^st Century. In addition to living in tiny houses and cars, Millennials are also being encouraged to rehab the leftovers of the post-industrial economy. If you’re not willing to live in something impossibly small, you can always own lots of property laced with lead and asbestos.

Unlike tiny houses or a truck in the parking lot however, the Rustbelt may hold some liberatory potential. Before we get to that though, I would like to sort out all of the promises and fanfare that has surrounded Rustbelt living and describe why the most publicized reasons for moving to the Rustbelt are not what makes it so interesting. more...

As a rule, parents tend to experience concern about their children’s wellbeing. With all of the decisions that parents have to make, I imagine it’s near impossible not to worry that you are making the wrong ones, with consequences that may not reveal themselves for years to come. This is why recommendations from professional organizations are so important.  They offer the comfort of a guiding word, based presumably in expertise, to help parents make the best decisions possible.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is one such organization, and they have some things to say about children and screen time. However, what they have to say about children and screen time will be revised in the next year, and no doubt, many parents will listen intently. NPR interviewed David Hill, chairman of the AAP Council on Communications and Media and a member of the AAP Children, Adolescents and Media Leadership Working Group. Although Hill did not reveal what the new recommendations would advise, the way he talked about the relationship between screens and kids did reveal a lot about the logic that drives recommendations.  The logic that Hill’s interview revealed made clear, once again, the need for theory to inform practice. More specifically, those who make practical recommendations about technology should consult with technology theorists. more...

2015 was full of trends that we loved to hate: the dress, minions, vaping, hoverboards… it has been a veritable cornucopia of listicles and memes bemoaning the sad state of popular culture. But one stands out to me as particularly partisan, capable of tearing families apart, more controversial than the pumpkin spice lattes or Crocks of years past. That’s right—I’m talking about the man bun. more...