Mission Accomplished?
In the spirit of George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" proclamation, I'm claiming victory in my goal to improve my under-the-porch bike shed . . . it's not perfect and will probably require some tweaking, but I'm tired and I did some stuff: I laid down plenty of tar paper-- which should keep the cave crickets out-- and I built new slots on plywood for each of the bikes; it was much easier to build the slots on pieces of plywood outside the bike shed, and then insert the floor into the shed with the slots already built, a lesson that makes me recall George H.W. Bush and the first Iraq War: if I would have done things right the first time, I would have never needed to go back in and do all this labor a second time.
Vacation is Over (Cue the Cave Crickets)
No time for abstractions and bombast today, I'm back from vacation and battling a horde of cave crickets inside my beautifully designed but ill maintained bike shed . . . I've been flushing them out with our leaf blower and I now I've got a fan running int here so they won't return; I just got back from Home Depot with a big sheet of plywood for a new floor, tar paper to seal things up, pressure treated four by fours so there's no need for kickstands, and a waning supply of determination.
New York was an Oyster Town (and may be again)
Mark Kurlansky's book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell is the perfect beach read if you are at the Jersey Shore (which I am) and you don't want to escape and instead want to ponder just what has happened to our water-- especially the water and estuaries around New York City and New Jersey-- and the creatures that inhabit this water; Kurlansky writes a chronological and comprehensive history of New York City through the lens of the oyster, starting with the Dutch and the Lenape's interaction in New Amsterdam in the 1600's; then detailing Revolutionary Era Manhattan-- "a city of pirates, entrepreneurs, and the struggling poor,"; then Kurlansky focuses on New York in the 19th century, which was the golden age of oyster eating, oyster harvesting, oyster shipping and oyster bars; and finally, he ends with the inevitable: rapacious overharvesting, pollution, sewage, the end of edible oysters around the city and recognition that something needs to be done . . . it gets weird to read the word "oyster" so many times, but New York really was an oyster town-- the shellfish was abundant, delicious, cheap, and cooked in a variety of ways; the rich and the poor both ate oysters in vast quantities, and Kurlansky provides the recipes to prove this; the beds were everywhere: the East River, Jamaica Bay, the Gowanus, the Battery, City Island, Rockaway, way up the Hudson and the Long Island Sound and in Jersey as well, the Raritan Bay, Keyport, Newark Bay, etc . . . the processing plants and markets and barges and boats and harbors and seeding and tonging operations were all big business, fueling "oystermania" in the 1800's; it's hard to imagine, but the waters around New York City were incredibly rich in sea life: blue claw crabs and menhaden and shrimp and anchovies, mackerel, bluefish, enormous sea drum, stripers, sharks and sturgeon . . . and up the Hudson there were also freshwater species such as carp, pike, perch, bass and pickerel . . . and then it all came crashing down; first, it was the sewage and typhoid-- and by 1927 the oyster beds around New York were all considered inoperable, incredibly polluted, dangerous, and disgusting . . . and then things got even worse-- for the next fifty years or so, factories poured industrial waste-- heavy metals, dioxins, DDT, etc-- on top of the sewage sludge and silt that had already decimated the bays, rivers, and estuaries . . . and while the Clean Air and Water Act helped to change things, it will be a long long time before we can eat the oysters from around NYC again; environmental programs have started growing oysters in various locations (though not the Gowanus, it still doesn't have enough oxygen) and hopefully, despite the Trump EPA's plan to roll back standards, there is enough momentum to get oyster populations on the rise-- because even if you can't eat them, they filter the water-- and there has been a return of many fish species (but not the drum, because they eat oysters, or the sharks-- which live out past Sandy Hook and can still smell something wrong with the bay) and after doing all this reading about the state of oysters, I had to eat some, so last night at Mike's Dock, I ordered a dozen Cape May Salts, which I ate on the half-shell-- which means they were still living when I bit into them-- and they were absolutely delicious and typhoid free . . . anyway, there probably won't be edible oysters out of the East River in our lifetime, but if they do get established, they may filter the water enough to change things for our children . . . and the descriptions in the book of the golden age of oysters, when rich and poor, pirates and prostitutes, all congregated in basements to drink beer and consume massive quantities of oysters, is worth the price of admission, whether you're a fan of the bivalve or not.
They Accepted the Challenge!
Last night, the LED placard on the side of the Springfield Inn advertised three special events:
1) $3 COORS LIGHT 4 PM to Close
2) $3 TWISTED TEA 4 PM to Close
3) TODAY ON THE DECK . . . CHALLENGE ACCEPTED;
and I imagine the band meeting where the guys (had to be guys, right?) decided on that moniker went something like this:
Dude #1: Dude, we should name ourselves the stupidest thing possible and see if we can still get gigs!
Dude# 2: Challenge Accepted!
Trump: What, Me Worry?
If you found some solace in the Manafort verdict and Cohen guilty plea, and you think now Trump and his followers are feeling the pressure, you're very wrong: Trump and his folks don't feel any pressure because they don't know, comprehend and/or acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary has even happened . . . Trump's carefully curated right-wing news feed is reflective of what a large part of the country sees and consumes as "news" and none of it has to do with the consequences and repercussions of yesterday's events . . . for Trump this is just another day of the left-wing rigged witch hunt that he fights "as a way of life!"
LeCompt Grants Us Two Wishes (But Not Without a Price)
Earlier in the summer, when I was on vacation with my family and my cousins, Catherine and I only made it through one set of LeCompt-- the band was great, of course-- but the song selection was kind of lame . . . they had already played a show in the afternoon and I think they were tired; this Sunday was a different story, however: it was the last show for long-time lead guitarist Jimmy Marchiano and the band wanted to send him off in style (Marchiano will now be devoting his time to Led Zeppelin cover band Get the Led Out) and this was a lucky coincidence, because we brought a couple of LeCompt newbies (Ann and Craig) and the band had a lot to live up to (according to us) and Ann is a big Prince fan (which is always the catalyst for an eternal debate because my feelings about Prince are: okay, he was very talented . . . but what was he doing for the thirty years after he released "Rasberry Beret"?) and so Connell and I buttonholed LeCompt before the show and I told him the deal and asked him if he could play a Prince song for Ann and he thought for a moment and then said, "Yeah . . . we can fake one, we can definitely fake one," and then-- as he was walking away and took a look at us and thought about our request-- he made an old-school comment about our sexuality that's not PC these days but was de riguer back in the 80's and we all laughed because it was the perfect comment for the situation . . . so then the band played two astounding sets (and thanks to Dom for taking notes on his phone so we have a complete list) and after set number two we found LeCompt at the outdoor bar and told him the band was killing it and then he told us he was going to do the Prince song and we said thanks and then Connell made another request-- we were pushing it-- and asked if he could do "Born to Run" and let me sing the 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 part after the bridge and LeCompt said sure and then we went back in and sat at the bar and as the band was plugging in-- and they play inside the oval bar-- so if you're at the bar, your a couple feet away from the band, LeCompt starting taunting Connell and I, getting meta about it, mouthing the words, "one two three four" but forgetting numbers or slowing down or questioning which number came next and then the band launched into "Born to Run" and, despite the taunting, I screamed "One Two Three Four" into the microphone at the appropriate moment in the appropriate Bruce voice and afterward LeCompt gave me a shout out and said I had been doing that bit for a long time and I looked back on the blog and I have been doing it for a long time, since 2010 . . . so that's pretty weird, and then they played "Little Red Corvette," thus granting all our requests-- but not without some appropriate taunting along the way; as a bonus, I crushed Ann's toenail with my Chaco sandal, those things are way too dense for small spaces-- I have to remember to wear sneakers to bar shows-- and we didn't get to sleep until 3 AM . . . yikes; here is the setlist:
Pinball Wizard
Pinball Wizard
Bargain
Hey Hey What Can I Do (Led Zeppelin)
Reason to Believe (Rod Stewart)
You're in My Heart
You are so Beautiful
Come Sail Away
Changes
Levon
Love Reign Over Me
Thunder Road
If I Fell (The Beatles)
You're So Vain
Forever Young
War Pigs
The Boys Are Back in Town (Thin Lizzy)
Band on the Run
Elton John New York City
Baba O'Riley
Born to Run
Little Red Corvette
Sweet Child O' Mine
Heroes
Maggie May
Go Your Own Way
Chain of Fools (Aretha Franklin)
Squeezebox
Can’t Buy Me Love
Hey Jude.
Living in the Aftermath . . . Fun To Read, Not So Much To Live
I often have a sinking sensation-- when I am stuck in traffic or taking a hot shower on a cold day or eating take-out food with disposable cutlery-- that this modern life of convenience and technological wonder is not sustainable . . . we just can't keep living this way, it's all going to come to an end and the people in the future will look back upon us with awe and envy; Jeff Vandermeer explores this premise with great relish in his new novel Borne, which is set in a dystopian future where biotech has gone wrong: biotech-- which was supposed to be the answer to food, disease, clean air and water, mental illness-- turns out to be catalyst for the collapse of civilization; Rachel and Wick scavenge among the ruins of a city devastated by the experiments of a biotech company (which still exists in some sort of skeletal form) and Rachel discovers and "raises" a piece of biotech which attempts to become a person but is actually something else entirely . . . the book centers on the complex relationship between Rachel, her lover Wick and the sentient biotech creature Borne, and all this takes place in a surreal and vividly rendered survivalist nightmare . . . a good pick if you're looking for some sci-fi written with literary flair.
I Was Cold Today!
Best day of vacation ever: cold, windy and cloudy at the beach . . . I had to wear a sweatshirt for the first time in months.
Second Hand News to Me
Fleetwood Mac is good music to listen to while driving to the beach, so I played "Rumours" for my kids earlier in the summer and then I played some of the songs on my guitar and I'm loath to admit that I recently learned that the lyrics to "I Don't Want Know" are not "I don't want to know the reason why you love me" . . . they are the more inscrutable " I don't want to know the reasons why/ Love keeps right on walking on down the line" and now that I know, I can hear it but for the past thirty-five years, I've been singing it wrong (and I just asked my buddy Dom to sing the song and he got it wrong as well . . . so I told him the actual lyrics and we both decided that the internet is amazing).
The Test 113: Who Brings the Bacon?
This week on The Test, match wits and financial acumen with the ladies as I test them on the net worth of various wealthy (and not so wealthy) individuals; this is a good one, the sound quality is excellent, the format is compelling, and Cunningham explains just how much she should be compensated for her tug-of-war prowess.
Who is Culpable? The Fates? Or Dave?
Tuesday night just before soccer practice began, Carl-- our visitor from the Bronx (through the Fresh Air Fund)-- fell and skinned his knee, so my wife came and picked him up and brought him home and administered some first aid, and then thirty minutes later, Ian got stepped on, and-- unfortunately-- it was right on the toenail he had half-ripped earlier in the day when he stubbed his toe (because he was wearing slides on concrete) and so my wife had to come back to soccer practice and take him home, so when I was leaving practice at 8:30 PM, I was responsible for no children and decided to jump in a pick-up game with some former players and some other young men-- which I would never had done normally-- and a few minutes into the game, I caught a hard shot on the tip of my outstretched toe, but my ankle was loose and awkward and the ball turned my ankle a weird direction and now it's all swollen and sprained and this never would have happened if both the boys didn't get hurt . . . dammit.
Last Time I Listen to Him . . .
My son Alex told me a few weeks ago-- after a debacle with a used Chinese cell-phone-- that I should not offer him any options, I should just tell him the right thing to do and he promised he would listen to me; now I did warn him about buying a used cell-phone from China and I suggested he just purchase one from our provider (Cricket) but I didn't forbid him from buying a phone from China-- I thought it might be an interesting experiment and it was a good deal on a cool phone-- but the phone didn't work properly and though the seller issued a refund, it still cost us a bunch to ship the broken phone back to China (because of this crazy secretive system) but I told Alex that I couldn't just tell him the right thing to do because most of the time I had no clue what was right, so all I could do was offer suggestions . . . which drives him crazy; anyway, nearly a month ago we returned from our first summer trip to Sea Isle City and when we arrived back in Highland Park, Alex suggested that we just leave the car packed and drive it like that for a month so we wouldn't have to pack for our second trip down to the beach; while this wasn't feasible for the entire car, I did take his advice as far as the giant bag on top of the car was concerned: I left it up there, packed full of umbrellas and beach chairs and the beach cart and buckets and nets, but a few days ago I started wondering just what was happening inside that rubber sack-- especially since it rained pretty much every day since our last vacation, and when it wasn't raining, it was humid as all fuck . . . so today-- the first sunny day in weeks-- I got up there and unzipped the sack and I'm sorry to say that it was gross, lots of water, and the beach chairs were moldy and the beach cart smelled and the standing water was putrid and gross, so I took everything out and dried it in the sun so that it's ready for our ensuing beach vacation and that's the last time I'm going to take advice from someone who buys a used phone from China on Ebay.
Beauty Happens . . . It Really Does
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum is one of those books like Guns, Germs, and Steel . . . it's so well argued and supported and compelling and significant that it might change everyone's brain; I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so it was easy enough for me to buy Prum's theory-- but apparently there are some old school hold-outs that aren't done with their holding out (I guess if you die while still holding out, you never have to acknowledge you were wrong) but basically Prum argues that Darwin theorized about two kinds of selection and one of them has been tragically long neglected and ignored:
1) everyone knows about natural selection . . . the grinding statistical journey that a species embarks on in order to survive in an ecosystem . . . if you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins then you know how this works: the goal isn't necessarily to be "red in tooth and claw" but simply to do anything as an organism that makes your genes get to the next generation-- you can be a shark or a lichen or an ant or human, cooperate or kill, hide or clone yourself, become parasitic or symbiotic, whatever works;
2) then there is sexual selection . . . and Prum argues that-- for various reasons, some cultural, some intellectual, some political, some uglier-- sexual selection has been conflated with natural selection, and hard-core natural selection advocates argue that mate choice is always connected to fitness, but Prum-- an renowned ornithologist-- sees it differently (or more like Darwin) and argues that sexual selection is often aesthetic and totally disconnected from a species fitness, and the ornamental physical features and mating displays (of which the peacock's tail is the most famous) are the result of a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection and can be contrary or detached from the fitness of the species to survive;
the old way to interpret this is the handicap system-- if a male peacock can support a big crazy tail and survive then "wow!" this bird must be really really fit and females are choosing the big tail based on that criteria but this handicap idea just doesn't hold up-- creatures would then have costlier and costlier ornaments, that would cancel out fitness-- he uses the "With a Name Like Flucker's, It's Got to Be Good" SNL skit to illustrate the logical problem with the handicap system of selection . . . but you could also imagine that a trait like acne would then be sexually attractive in humans, because it does indicate hormonal fitness to mate and it is a handicap but it's not selected for sexually-- the peacock's tail is on a separate loop from fitness, and it is based on female choice-- which was the big political problem with Darwin's theory of sexual selection-- it gives females autonomy and a decent amount of control in how a species evolves . . . folks were able to swallow one part of Darwin's idea-- male vs. male mating rituals . . . because when a couple of elk butt heads you can imagine that they are demonstrating physical fitness, a trait that could be significant to survival, but when a female bowerbird peruses the male's blue bedecked bower and decides that it seems safe to investigate, that's giving the female too much power in an aesthetic pathway that is rather arbitrary and not linked precisely to genetic fitness . . . many many years ago I made a terrible choice for a presentation topic at a job interview-- the evolution of the wing-- this always fascinated me: what good is half a wing? but the theories that were prevalent in the early 90's said that each step of the way the wing was naturally selected-- there were heat collecting benefits to half a wing and gliding potential and the possibility of looking bigger than you were . . . but now there is evidence that feathers preceded the wing on the evolutionary timescale and that they might have been selected for-- as happens with the Argus pheasant--
because they are beautiful and the wing evolved from there-- so it started as a sexually selected trait and then became genetically useful to the species and thus naturally selected for . . . this is a lot to think about, especially since evolutionary biology was developed in a period where Prum claims "every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler" but we now know that people certainly don't make their mating choices based on genetic fitness-- sturdy women with wide hips and strong ankles and wrists are what the eugenic proponents recommended-- in fact, mating choices changes with the times and the place and the context: so you can have "heroin chic" European models and nearly obese Khoisan women and both are considered incredibly attractive in their culture . . . we're not doing eugenic calculation in our brain, we simply find someone or something beautiful, and Prum believes the birds he observes operate in the same manner, and then when you've found something beautiful and you mate with it, your children will have a genetic predilection to find the same things beautiful and increase the likelihood of that trait being propagated, even if it's not the most utilitarian thing for the genetic survival of the species as a whole . . . and a few million years of this arbitrary wackiness and you've got the peacock's tail (which was so absurd that it made Darwin sick) but the same could be said about human female breast tissue-- humans are the sole animals that keep this tissue year-round-- and it drives some men wild . . . but really offers no genetic fitness, it's much more convenient to just have temporary breast tissue (as women with big boobs who play sports must know all too well) and that's how the rest of the mammals do it, but this isn't a "mistake," it's a trait that has been sexually selected for and offers nothing but attraction and beauty . . . and this theory also explains why we find art beautiful and music, because we have the capacity to find things beautiful, and so do animals, and that choice-- which is politically charged and intellectually difficult-- is what fuels this other type of selection: Prum explains that it was easier to just have one method of selection, and think about everything through that lens, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of behaviors and traits . . . so I highly recommend this book, it's a big one and it will change how scientists view the world, there are detailed descriptions of bird mating rituals that you can skim, but it's generally an easy and compelling read and the ideas are ground-breaking.
1) everyone knows about natural selection . . . the grinding statistical journey that a species embarks on in order to survive in an ecosystem . . . if you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins then you know how this works: the goal isn't necessarily to be "red in tooth and claw" but simply to do anything as an organism that makes your genes get to the next generation-- you can be a shark or a lichen or an ant or human, cooperate or kill, hide or clone yourself, become parasitic or symbiotic, whatever works;
2) then there is sexual selection . . . and Prum argues that-- for various reasons, some cultural, some intellectual, some political, some uglier-- sexual selection has been conflated with natural selection, and hard-core natural selection advocates argue that mate choice is always connected to fitness, but Prum-- an renowned ornithologist-- sees it differently (or more like Darwin) and argues that sexual selection is often aesthetic and totally disconnected from a species fitness, and the ornamental physical features and mating displays (of which the peacock's tail is the most famous) are the result of a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection and can be contrary or detached from the fitness of the species to survive;
the old way to interpret this is the handicap system-- if a male peacock can support a big crazy tail and survive then "wow!" this bird must be really really fit and females are choosing the big tail based on that criteria but this handicap idea just doesn't hold up-- creatures would then have costlier and costlier ornaments, that would cancel out fitness-- he uses the "With a Name Like Flucker's, It's Got to Be Good" SNL skit to illustrate the logical problem with the handicap system of selection . . . but you could also imagine that a trait like acne would then be sexually attractive in humans, because it does indicate hormonal fitness to mate and it is a handicap but it's not selected for sexually-- the peacock's tail is on a separate loop from fitness, and it is based on female choice-- which was the big political problem with Darwin's theory of sexual selection-- it gives females autonomy and a decent amount of control in how a species evolves . . . folks were able to swallow one part of Darwin's idea-- male vs. male mating rituals . . . because when a couple of elk butt heads you can imagine that they are demonstrating physical fitness, a trait that could be significant to survival, but when a female bowerbird peruses the male's blue bedecked bower and decides that it seems safe to investigate, that's giving the female too much power in an aesthetic pathway that is rather arbitrary and not linked precisely to genetic fitness . . . many many years ago I made a terrible choice for a presentation topic at a job interview-- the evolution of the wing-- this always fascinated me: what good is half a wing? but the theories that were prevalent in the early 90's said that each step of the way the wing was naturally selected-- there were heat collecting benefits to half a wing and gliding potential and the possibility of looking bigger than you were . . . but now there is evidence that feathers preceded the wing on the evolutionary timescale and that they might have been selected for-- as happens with the Argus pheasant--
because they are beautiful and the wing evolved from there-- so it started as a sexually selected trait and then became genetically useful to the species and thus naturally selected for . . . this is a lot to think about, especially since evolutionary biology was developed in a period where Prum claims "every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler" but we now know that people certainly don't make their mating choices based on genetic fitness-- sturdy women with wide hips and strong ankles and wrists are what the eugenic proponents recommended-- in fact, mating choices changes with the times and the place and the context: so you can have "heroin chic" European models and nearly obese Khoisan women and both are considered incredibly attractive in their culture . . . we're not doing eugenic calculation in our brain, we simply find someone or something beautiful, and Prum believes the birds he observes operate in the same manner, and then when you've found something beautiful and you mate with it, your children will have a genetic predilection to find the same things beautiful and increase the likelihood of that trait being propagated, even if it's not the most utilitarian thing for the genetic survival of the species as a whole . . . and a few million years of this arbitrary wackiness and you've got the peacock's tail (which was so absurd that it made Darwin sick) but the same could be said about human female breast tissue-- humans are the sole animals that keep this tissue year-round-- and it drives some men wild . . . but really offers no genetic fitness, it's much more convenient to just have temporary breast tissue (as women with big boobs who play sports must know all too well) and that's how the rest of the mammals do it, but this isn't a "mistake," it's a trait that has been sexually selected for and offers nothing but attraction and beauty . . . and this theory also explains why we find art beautiful and music, because we have the capacity to find things beautiful, and so do animals, and that choice-- which is politically charged and intellectually difficult-- is what fuels this other type of selection: Prum explains that it was easier to just have one method of selection, and think about everything through that lens, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of behaviors and traits . . . so I highly recommend this book, it's a big one and it will change how scientists view the world, there are detailed descriptions of bird mating rituals that you can skim, but it's generally an easy and compelling read and the ideas are ground-breaking.
Something Uplifting for the Young People
I've been spinning my wheels lately in my digital music studio, working on lots of projects but never quite finishing anything, but I wrote this song last week and was determined to get it done before going on vacation-- it's a motivational piece designed to inspire all the young people to achieve great things in their collective lives (before they decay into senescence and senility).
Donald Trump Needs to Clean My Toilet
The married couple from Nicaragua that cleans our house, who sought political asylum here in 2005 and have been issued yearly work permits for the last 13 years, were recently told that their permit would not be renewed this year and they must leave the country by September (despite the fact that they have three children enrolled in the New Brunswick school system and one set of in-laws that are US citizens).
Every Thundercloud Has a Silverish Lining
For the past month, the weather in Jersey has been hideous: a damp, hot subtropical mess, but I keep telling myself: wildfires are worse than humidity, wildfires are worse than humidity.
Gene Hackman Needs to Coach My Kids (on How to Enjoy Hoosiers)
We watched Hoosiers this afternoon-- my kids just completed a week of basketball camp, so I thought it would be the perfect flick . . . plus it streams free on Amazon-- but I think I waited too long to show it to them; all the things that I find moving in the film: the scrub making his free throws, the town drunk rising to the challenge, the coach's unorthodox methods, the last second heroics in every game-- my kids, jaded and ironic teenagers that they are, found these tropes cliched and hackneyed, and were constantly predicting the next beat, instead of appropriately enjoying the cheese (and while even my annoying children agreed that the basketball is shot fairly well . . . it almost looks like they let the kids play and then cherry-picked the best moments for the movie, the music is atrocious 80's synth-pop, which does not fit the 50's timeframe whatsoever).
The Subtle Art of Naming a Canine (part II)
My son Alex and his friend Jack decided they approve of dogs with human names-- so our dog Lola and Jack's dog Walter fit the bill-- but the human name should be old school and not particularly common: you can't have a dog named "Michael," for instance . . . that's weird; every time you called for the dog people would think you lost a child.
Facebook Doesn't Want You To Read This (or Does It?)
Many liberals believe we need the government to protect us from the power of corporations and corporate lobbying, and many conservatives believe we need corporations, capitalism, and competition to protect us from unchecked government power-- and, in modern America, whether you think the corporations or the government is winning this battle is often determined by your political persuasion; Republicans are desperate to repeal Obamacare and end this heinous government intrusion into our personal lives and the Trump administration has given corporations a healthy tax cut, meanwhile Democrats lament the death of the EPA and how corporations will now be able to pollute with impunity, no check on externalities such as lead, carbon emissions, toxic air pollutants such as benzene and dioxin, and the return of invasive coal mining and believe the government is the only referee who can prevent greedy business and lobbying interests from destroying our air and water . . . and obviously there is truth to both sides and-- ideally-- there will be checks and balances between the two (although conservative economist Luigi Zingales argues that big corporations and the government are one and the same in America now, especially under Trump, who is running America the same way corrupt business tycoon Silvio Berlusconi ran Italy) but Franklin Foer, in his ominously titled new book World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech believes that in the realm of technology, the scale has irrevocably tipped towards the giant corporations (referred to as GAFA in Europe . . . we all know them: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) and their power and consequence is unlimited and while these companies promote a utopian ideal of efficient networks and unfettered information-- and argue that monopoly is the only way to realize this-- they are actually moving us towards a drone-like existence in a hive-mind, where there is no individual genius; here are a few of his points and rhetorical methods:
1) he compares the industrialization of the internet to the industrialization of the food industry-- while the technology of convenience produced wonder and efficiency, it also contributed to obesity, diabetes, our sedentary lifestyle, and a terrible environmental toll . . . Nabisco and Kraft and such food conglomerates studied us the way Facebook and Google do now, figured out how to create processed foods that would never sate our appetite and sold them to us for next to nothing (for a great book on this subject that will totally freak you out, read The Dorito Effect) and these companies essentially created food that was not nutritious but pandered to the taste of the masses; Foer sees the content of GAFA, especially in journalism, as analogous to this and worries their dominance and monopolistic tendencies will squash diversity and create homogenization . . . think about how hard it is to buy actual free-range tasty chicken now, it's impossible . . . chicken flesh has become an industrialized homogenized hormone laced water filled nutritionless fungible commodity . . . and he is worried that the same is happening to our arts and culture;
2) he also sees hope in this metaphor . . . the counter-culture food movement, which has now pervaded much of middle-class America (or at least around here) and lauds organic, local, home-grown, slow-food and encourages people to really think about and understand what they are eating offers an alternative to the industrialized food industry . . . he hopes the same can happen with the internet;
3) he worries about the power of algorithms and the fact that "data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear"
4) he points out that the "Victorian Internet," otherwise known as the telegraph, followed a similar pattern as today's internet; Abe Lincoln was obsessed with commanding his armies in the Civil War by telegraph-- the Union army strung 15,000 miles of wire, to the rebels paltry 1000 miles, and this proved to be an enormous tactical advantage . . . Western Union was best positioned to privatize this network and did so, swallowing "the weaker firms" and becoming an "implacable behemoth" that dominated for the next hundred years;
5) Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon want the same sort of monopoly and they are lobbying hard to do so . . . they barely pay taxes, they are monopolies, the government does not seem interested in breaking them apart, they own our data, they own the media, they produce the journalism that most people read on a daily basis, they have pushed the value of the written word down to free, they don't particularly care about intellectual property or copyright law, and their hope is to produce AI that denies us our autonomy . . . but they sure are easy to consume;
6) Foer certainly has his own axe to grind-- he witnessed the demise of print journalism first-hand, from the inside, and he laments this; he notes that the New Republic paid $150 dollars for a book review during the Great Depression, and it still pays the same amount today for the same length review for the Web Site; in 1981, the average author made 11,000 dollars a year (35,000 when adjusted for inflation) and by 2015 that amount dipped to 17,500 a year . . . and he blames the big companies that run the internet and promote small news stories written for free and push anything that is behind a pay-wall down the search list . . . who has the time for that?
7) his solutions are fairly simple and practical, though they may never happen . . . the government needs to enforce anti-trust laws again; we need a new agency to protect us from these monopolies-- we got one after the 2008 crisis (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect us from rapacious banks determined to make a profit in any way possible) and while this can't happen under this administration-- for some reason, Republicans hate consumers and the rights of citizens to be protected from corporations (just look at what's happened with the EPA) but perhaps it will happen soon enough, it will just take a big enough hack, or enough foreign meddling in our news and elections, and it will have the political impetus to move forward;
8) his final solution is one I espouse-- the refuge of print on paper; Americans are still reading books-- and the Kindle has not supplanted the actual book-- and when you're reading an actual book, the big companies can't get to you . . . you are alone with your thoughts, without advertisement, distraction, and consumer agenda; he hopes that perhaps this can happen again with journalism, that Americans will find room for long-form, intelligent, paid journalism . . . with intelligent gatekeepers, lots of gatekeepers, not just four big ones, some method of vetting and editing, and some moral purpose behind the print . . . so stop reading my stupid, poorly edited blog and pick up a copy of the New York Times or a good book and sit down and think your thoughts, without the all-knowing eye of GAFA watching your thoughts . . .
9) Franklin Foer also wrote How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, which I recommend.
1) he compares the industrialization of the internet to the industrialization of the food industry-- while the technology of convenience produced wonder and efficiency, it also contributed to obesity, diabetes, our sedentary lifestyle, and a terrible environmental toll . . . Nabisco and Kraft and such food conglomerates studied us the way Facebook and Google do now, figured out how to create processed foods that would never sate our appetite and sold them to us for next to nothing (for a great book on this subject that will totally freak you out, read The Dorito Effect) and these companies essentially created food that was not nutritious but pandered to the taste of the masses; Foer sees the content of GAFA, especially in journalism, as analogous to this and worries their dominance and monopolistic tendencies will squash diversity and create homogenization . . . think about how hard it is to buy actual free-range tasty chicken now, it's impossible . . . chicken flesh has become an industrialized homogenized hormone laced water filled nutritionless fungible commodity . . . and he is worried that the same is happening to our arts and culture;
2) he also sees hope in this metaphor . . . the counter-culture food movement, which has now pervaded much of middle-class America (or at least around here) and lauds organic, local, home-grown, slow-food and encourages people to really think about and understand what they are eating offers an alternative to the industrialized food industry . . . he hopes the same can happen with the internet;
3) he worries about the power of algorithms and the fact that "data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear"
4) he points out that the "Victorian Internet," otherwise known as the telegraph, followed a similar pattern as today's internet; Abe Lincoln was obsessed with commanding his armies in the Civil War by telegraph-- the Union army strung 15,000 miles of wire, to the rebels paltry 1000 miles, and this proved to be an enormous tactical advantage . . . Western Union was best positioned to privatize this network and did so, swallowing "the weaker firms" and becoming an "implacable behemoth" that dominated for the next hundred years;
5) Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon want the same sort of monopoly and they are lobbying hard to do so . . . they barely pay taxes, they are monopolies, the government does not seem interested in breaking them apart, they own our data, they own the media, they produce the journalism that most people read on a daily basis, they have pushed the value of the written word down to free, they don't particularly care about intellectual property or copyright law, and their hope is to produce AI that denies us our autonomy . . . but they sure are easy to consume;
6) Foer certainly has his own axe to grind-- he witnessed the demise of print journalism first-hand, from the inside, and he laments this; he notes that the New Republic paid $150 dollars for a book review during the Great Depression, and it still pays the same amount today for the same length review for the Web Site; in 1981, the average author made 11,000 dollars a year (35,000 when adjusted for inflation) and by 2015 that amount dipped to 17,500 a year . . . and he blames the big companies that run the internet and promote small news stories written for free and push anything that is behind a pay-wall down the search list . . . who has the time for that?
7) his solutions are fairly simple and practical, though they may never happen . . . the government needs to enforce anti-trust laws again; we need a new agency to protect us from these monopolies-- we got one after the 2008 crisis (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect us from rapacious banks determined to make a profit in any way possible) and while this can't happen under this administration-- for some reason, Republicans hate consumers and the rights of citizens to be protected from corporations (just look at what's happened with the EPA) but perhaps it will happen soon enough, it will just take a big enough hack, or enough foreign meddling in our news and elections, and it will have the political impetus to move forward;
8) his final solution is one I espouse-- the refuge of print on paper; Americans are still reading books-- and the Kindle has not supplanted the actual book-- and when you're reading an actual book, the big companies can't get to you . . . you are alone with your thoughts, without advertisement, distraction, and consumer agenda; he hopes that perhaps this can happen again with journalism, that Americans will find room for long-form, intelligent, paid journalism . . . with intelligent gatekeepers, lots of gatekeepers, not just four big ones, some method of vetting and editing, and some moral purpose behind the print . . . so stop reading my stupid, poorly edited blog and pick up a copy of the New York Times or a good book and sit down and think your thoughts, without the all-knowing eye of GAFA watching your thoughts . . .
9) Franklin Foer also wrote How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, which I recommend.
Meta-tears
Once again, the season finale of GLOW got me all choked up . . . which is ridiculous, considering I was watching a completely fictitious representation of a real women's wrestling league from the '80's . . . which was itself fabricated, of course . . . and so the wedding/battle royale in the final episode was not only contrived and plotted within the show but it was also plotted by the writers of the show; despite all this meta-manipulation, the underdog story still got the better of me (plus there are some amazing plot twists) and so whether it's South Korea knocking Germany out of the World Cup or (spoilers ahead) a chick in a weird leotard with a fake Russian accent and a broken leg cruising into the ring on a zip-line, it still gets me teary-eyed.
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