Flicker Fusion

[Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America] compares the advanced modeling and analytic techniques of his comrades and guys like Nate Silver to MP3s, thus making traditional pollsters and political “experts” akin to the music industry. They both had been going about their business for decades without competition, and they both reacted violently when their worlds were disrupted. However, these are smart people, and Reed expects they’ll come around in the next election cycles.

[Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America] compares the advanced modeling and analytic techniques of his comrades and guys like Nate Silver to MP3s, thus making traditional pollsters and political “experts” akin to the music industry. They both had been going about their business for decades without competition, and they both reacted violently when their worlds were disrupted. However, these are smart people, and Reed expects they’ll come around in the next election cycles.

—

The thing is, this was the lesson from 20081, not 2012, but like most disruptions, it took a while to go from being noticed to commonly held belief.

Analytics have changed just about everything, I expect they’ll change the news business very soon. I can’t imagine anyone will try to cover the next presidential race, let alone the next midterm election, without their own squads of Nate Silver wannabees churning out hyperactive collated poll aggregates. It’s a glorious time to be a news nerd.

buy me a beer sometime and I’ll regale you with tales of futilely trying to convince a major national news organization of the value of Nate Silver way back in 2009, after he correctly predicted 49 of 50 states but before he was a household name. It might take two beers. ↩︎

Winning the Election (Coverage)

Winning the Election (Coverage)

Last year, I started an awesome new job in San Francisco at Mule Design. It’s been going great, thanks.

It also meant leaving the world of online news, where I started and spent the subsequent decade of my career. I love news and media so I’m going to keep thinking and occasionally writing about it as an outsider on the Mule Design weblog. Should be fun.

My first post is about, what else, the election and who covered it best. Spoiler: it wasn’t FOX News.

Lifecaster Sarah got in a fight with Lady Brit about a perceived slighting at a previous year’s South by Southwest festival. They yelled at each other on a bed and then Lifecaster Sarah asked if Lady Brit was upset that she made out with Gentleman Brit. See? Weird.

Superbro drank too much, wore a toga, then drank too much again. He did pullups on a doorframe and then fell down.

Lifecaster Sarah got in a fight with Lady Brit about a perceived slighting at a previous year’s South by Southwest festival. They yelled at each other on a bed and then Lifecaster Sarah asked if Lady Brit was upset that she made out with Gentleman Brit. See? Weird.

Superbro drank too much, wore a toga, then drank too much again. He did pullups on a doorframe and then fell down.

—Dan Nosowitz watches and makes fun of Randi Zuckerberg’s awful, horrible, terrible reality show about Silicon Valley so you don’t have to.

The open web is a quaint notion that will soon be bludgeoned to death, mercilessly fragmented into private channels. Walled off and controlled by ever-fewer businesses whose primary interest isn’t in facilitating communications but in making a fucking dollar. The Internet of Things and cross-device tracking mean you’ll never have to tweet “Poopin’ ” again because ubiquitous ambient awareness will know when you visit the toilet and for how long, measuring your output by grams and pH level. (An ad will appear in your bathroom mirror reminding you to buy tampons.) Pockets of resistance, like app.net, will offer open options to a privileged few. But most will live in someone else’s world; we’ll be nothing more than data-generation mechanisms creating bits to be analyzed, packaged, and sold like goldfish in bags, swimming about in our own shit while we slowly run out of oxygen.

The open web is a quaint notion that will soon be bludgeoned to death, mercilessly fragmented into private channels. Walled off and controlled by ever-fewer businesses whose primary interest isn’t in facilitating communications but in making a fucking dollar. The Internet of Things and cross-device tracking mean you’ll never have to tweet “Poopin’ ” again because ubiquitous ambient awareness will know when you visit the toilet and for how long, measuring your output by grams and pH level. (An ad will appear in your bathroom mirror reminding you to buy tampons.) Pockets of resistance, like app.net, will offer open options to a privileged few. But most will live in someone else’s world; we’ll be nothing more than data-generation mechanisms creating bits to be analyzed, packaged, and sold like goldfish in bags, swimming about in our own shit while we slowly run out of oxygen.

—Mat Honan, who is as smart as he is articulate, on our dystopian very-near future.

But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

—

How Food Replaced Art as High Culture - NYTimes.com

It has been interesting to follow the changing position of food in culture the last 15 years. It’s a change driven by two things 1) the rise of food television; 2) the fact that, for all the Instagram’d photos of meals, food is still experienced in a specific time and place with parts of our bodies that can’t (yet) be fooled by an approximation constructed from binary numbers. Television and other media can only create the desire, fulfilling it requires a path of transmission that has nothing to do with the internet.

(via markrichardson)

I have a pet theory about this that, as young people’s budgets for printed/recorded media declined (just because their favorite magazines went online, they steal all their records online, etc) their budget for food increased just at the right moment — right when Americans of all ages were learning just how fucked the American diet really is. So now instead of blowing your paycheck at record store, you might do so at an expensive restaurant, having lost nothing in the way of feeling like you’re participating in Culture — in fact, overall, you’d be participating more, in ways that were previously unavailable to you.

I ran this by a friend, just now, and he reminded me about data plans and cable internet, which enable a young person to avoid paying for printed/recorded media, and which I’ll say costs an additional $100 a month they wouldn’t have been spending in the 90’s (assuming they split their internet with at least one other person and they would have already been paying for a phone/internet back then). And so maybe my theory is sunk. 

Still, I do think that food has supplanted something in pop- or low-culture rather than High Culture, as this essay suggests. It’s not as if young people in the 1980’s were all learning about Mozart in their spare time, and it’s also not as if innovative cuisine wasn’t part of the coastal lifestyle then — pick up a copy of American Psycho for great satire of Restaurant Bullshit, it was alive and well in the 80’s.

I’m more interested in How We Got Here than, you know, the idea that a growing interest in food might hurt the Cincinnati Opera’s season ticket sales. Besides, at least — misguided or not — the Food Movement has ethical underpinnings that go beyond aesthetics. We live in a post-industrial economy with a massive and repulsive and powerful industrial food system that causes untold amounts of suffering for laborers and animals alike. By seeking both a.) a craft to call one’s own in an economy that doesn’t reward craftspeople anymore and b.) a means to circumvent the ethical and ecological calamity that is the American Food System, we have inadvertently elevated food into Culture.

I look forward to cooking like I look forward to skateboarding. It’s the one part of the day I know I can completely detach myself from technology to just focus on making something with my hands. What I’m saying is, maybe we need to think about things other than Ivy League educations and fucking Mozart when we talk about food.

(via willystaley)

Willy’s remarks above are A+.

(via langer)

I like this very much.

Q: Have you ever read Ayn Rand?

Obama: Sure.

Q: What do you think Paul Ryan’s obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?

Obama: Well, you’d have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him. Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party

Q: Have you ever read Ayn Rand?

Obama: Sure.

Q: What do you think Paul Ryan’s obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?

Obama: Well, you’d have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him. Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party

—Right on, Mr. President