We know this, of course, but it's nice to be reminded of the physical filaments that afford our digital connections. In an article in Fortune (which is, ironically, not online), the writer Andrew Blum and the graphic designer Nicolas Rapp joined forces with telecom data company GeoTel Communications to create a series of visualizations of the Internet. Not its content, but its infrastructure. "Most people have no clue what the world's communication infrastructure looks like," GeoTel CEO Dave Drazen told Mashable of the project. With the company's renderings -- based on data collected largely from carriers themselves -- "you're actually mapping the Internet right here."
The image above, as seen from the North Pole, offers the global view of the Internet's major cables. It depicts fiberoptic lines as they run between major cities, most of those cities also financial and trading hubs. The image below is a detail of the fiberoptic infrastructure of New York City, highlighting cable lines' revealing concentration in lower Manhattan. Inset is a picture of 60 Hudson, one of the city's carrier hotels.
Trains are slow. Planes are unwieldy. Cars are, er, pedestrian. What if there were another way -- a better way -- for people to travel over long distances?
Elon Musk, he of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX fame, thinks he has that way. And it is a notional vehicle that can carry people between Los Angeles and San Francisco ... in 30 minutes flat.
So, wait. Would this be "something like a Jetsons tunnel, you just get in and it whisks you away?" Lacey asked.
And you know what? Yes! Yes, it would!
The Hyperloop would be three or four times faster than a bullet train, Musk said, and twice as fast as an airplane. It would be powered by solar panels. It would be "immune to weather." It would be unable to crash.
Per Business Insider's transcript of the PandoDaily event:
This system I have in mind, how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train... it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There's a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.
Well, first of all: YES, PLEASE. Second of all, though: What? A cheap, faster-than-a-plane, weather-immune, crash-impervious people-mover? There's a pretty good reason we can't travel between LA and SF in 30 minutes, which is that we can't travel between LA and SF in 30 minutes. The challenges here are enormous. And what would the Hyperloop actually look like? Google's geektastic monorail capsules? A tunnel? A pod? A series of pods?
Those questions are for later, though. For now, it's the idea that counts. Musk might patent the Hyperloop concept, he said, and then open up its implementation to "anyone who can make a credible case that they can do it." So the Hyperloop really could be anything. [Though: fingers crossed for a series of pods.] Then again, Musk has a pretty great track record of turning the whimsical into the actual -- and of, in general, saying nay to the naysayers. SpaceX and Tesla and even PayPal are testaments to what can happen when you encounter limitations and -- quickly! cheaply! easily! -- whisk them away.
Today's picture is a marvel not only of astronomy, but of digital imagery. Stitched together from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and La Silia, the European Southern Obervatory's terrestrial telescope in Chile, the full mosaic is made up of a billion pixels.
Astronomically, the image captures the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's the closest star-forming cluster to Earth -- a mere 1,500 lightyears away. It seems particularly vibrant because some of the dust involved in star birth has been scattered. At full resolution, about 3,000 stars are visible.
The "simple innocent" drink is also useful for preventing gout, dropsy, miscarriage ...
British Museum via Boing Boing
In 1650, St. Michael's Alley, London's first coffee shop, placed an ad in a newspaper. That ad -- archived in the British Museum, and Internet-ed by the Vintage Ads LiveJournal -- extolled the many Vertues of the newly discovered beverage. Which "groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia," and which is -- despite and ostensibly because of its Vertues -- "a simple innocent thing."
What's amazing about the ad -- besides, obviously, its crazy claim that coffee can prevent Mif-carryings in Child-bearing Women -- is how flagrantly its copyrighters flung the Vertues they extol. Per these 17th-century Mad Men, coffee could be used to aid and/or prevent: indigestion, headaches, lethargy, drowsiness, arthritis, sore eyes, cough, consumption, "spleen," dropsy, gout, scurvy, and -- my personal favorite -- hypochondria. And they back up their claims by pointing out that Turkish people, those noted coffee imbibers, don't have scurvy, but do have nice skin. QED!
What's amazing as well, for better or for worse, is how familiar the ad feels. Sure, today we regulate our marketing claims; Starbucks wouldn't get very far were it to announce the miscarriage-prevention properties of the half-caf soy latte. But we're also, still, entirely familiar with ads that ramble on about the health benefits of particular products with a hilarious if occasionally dangerous disregard for reality -- particularly on the modern-day pamphlet that is the Internet. (With Product X, you'll be slimmer/bulkier/hairier/smoother/perkier/calmer ... in just one week!). The main difference is that the caveat of 1650 -- Made and Sold in St. Michaels Alley in Cornhill, by Pasqua Rosse, at the Signe of his own Head -- has been replaced by a caveat that is all too recognizable in its modernity: This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Here's the full, fantastic text of the St. Michael's notice, courtesy Vintage Ads:
It is a simple innocent thing, composed into a drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with Spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, fasting an hour before and not Eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured; the which will never fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any Blisters, by reason of that Heat.
The Turks drink at meals and other times, is usually Water, and their Dyet consists much of Fruit, the Crudities whereof are very much corrected by this Drink.
The quality of this Drink is cold and Dry; and though it be a Dryer, yet it neither heats, nor inflames more than hot Posset.
It forcloseth the Orifice of the Stomack, and fortifies the heat with- [missing text] its very good to help digestion, and therefore of great use to be [missing text] bout 3 or 4 a Clock afternoon, as well as in the morning.
[missing text] quickens the Spirits, and makes the Heart Lightsome.
[missing text]is good against sore Eys, and the better if you hold your Head o'er it, and take in the Steem that way.
It supresseth Fumes exceedingly, and therefore good against the Head-ach, and will very much stop any Defluxion of Rheumas, that distil from the Head upon the Stomach, and so prevent and help Consumptions and the Cough of the Lungs.
It is excellent to prevent and cure the Dropsy, Gout, and Scurvy.
It is known by experience to be better then any other Drying Drink for People in years, or Children that have any running humors upon them, as the Kings Evil. &c. It is very good to prevent Mis-carryings in Child-bearing Women.
It is a most excellent Remedy against the Spleen, Hypocondriack Winds, or the like.
It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for Busines, if one have occasion to Watch, and therefore you are not to drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.
It is observed that in Turkey, where this is generally drunk, that they are not troubled with the Stone, Gout, Dropsie, or Scurvy, and that their Skins are exceeding cleer and white.
It is neither Laxative nor Restringent.
Made and Sold in St. Michaels Alley in Cornhill, by Pasqua Rosee, at the Signe of his own Head.
Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept.
Alan Turing statue at Bletchley Park Museum (flickr/+DW+, Alexis Madrigal).
It's hard to overestimate Alan Turing's contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine's signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In computer science, he developed a theory of universal computation and an associated architectural design that forms the foundation for the computer on which you are now reading. His take on machine intelligence has been influential in both the philosophy of mind and as the foundation of the field of artificial intelligence. And his prosecution for homosexuality, along with his apparent resulting suicide has offered a pertinent reminder of one of the remaining barriers to social justice and equity.
A celebration of the life and work of the pioneering computer scientist See full coverage
This year, the centennial of Turing's birth, we rightly celebrate Turing's life and accomplishments, the impact of which is difficult to measure sufficiently. But as we do so, we should also take a lesson from the major cultural figure whose centennial we marked last year: Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan teaches us to look beyond the content and application of inventions and discoveries in search of their structures, the logics that motivate them. For McLuhan, television was a collective nervous system pervading every sense, not a dead device for entertainment, education, or moral corruption.
If we look at Alan Turing's legacy through McLuhan's lens, a pattern emerges: that of feigning, of deception and interchangeability. If we had to summarize Turing's diverse work and influence, both intentional and inadvertent, we might say he is an engineer of pretenses, as much as a philosopher of them.
The most obvious example of this logic can be found in the now famous Turing Test, the name later given to the imitation game Turing proposed in the 1950 article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," published in the journal Mind. The paper ponders the question "Can machines think?", meditating at length on the difficulty in answering this question given the ambiguity of the terms "machine" and "think."
Turing suggests replacing thought or intelligence with imitation. He proposes an "imitation game" in which a human would be asked to interact by teletype with two parties hidden behind closed doors. The first would be another human, the second a machine. Each tries to convince the human judge that it is in fact the human.
In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very old question about what makes someone (or something) capable of thought. In fact, he really skirts the question of intelligence entirely, replacing it with the outcomes of thought--in this case, the ability to perform "being human" as convincingly and interestingly as a real human. To be intelligent is to act like a human rather than to have a mind that operates like one. Or, even better, intelligence--whatever it is, the thing that goes on inside a human or a machine--is less interesting and productive a topic of conversation than the effects of such a process, the experience it creates in observers and interlocutors.
This is a kind of pretense most readily found on stage and on screen. An actor's craft is best described in terms of its effect, the way he or she portrays a part, elicits emotion, and so forth. While it's certainly also possible to talk about the method by which that outcome emerges (the Stanizlavski method or the Meisner technique, for example) nobody would mistake those processes for the outcomes they produce. That is to say, an actor's performance is not reducible to the logic by which he or she executes that performance.
A computer, it turns out, is just a particular kind of machine that works by pretending to be another machine.
Turing did not invent the term "artificial intelligence," but his work has been enormously influential in that field. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence fails to learn Turing's lesson on intelligence: the processes by which thought takes place are not incidental, but they are also not primary. So-called "strong AI" hopes to make computers as intelligent as people, often by attempting to create models of human cognition, or even better to argue that the brain itself works like a computer. But Turing never claimed that computers can be intelligent nor that they are artificial. He simply suggested that it would be appealing to consider how computers might perform well at the imitation game -- how they might pretend to seem human in interesting ways.
As for the question of what sort of machines are the best subjects for the imitation game, it's obvious to us now that the digital machines we call computers are the best candidates for successful imitation. This wasn't so clear a choice in 1950, and Turing was responding to the long history of proposals for logical, mechanical, and calculating devices that could accomplish rational thought.
But the computer itself reveals another example of pretense for Turing, thanks to his own theory of abstract computation and its implementation in the device known as the Turing machine. In the form Turing proposed, this machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape. Through simple instructions like move forward, erase, write, and read, such a machine can enact any algorithm -- and indeed, the design of modern CPUs is based directly on this principle.
Unlike other sorts of machines, the purpose of a Turing machine is not to carry out any specific task like grinding grain or stamping iron, but to simulate any other machine by carrying out its logic through programmed instructions. A computer, it turns out, is just a particular kind of machine that works by pretending to be another machine. This is precisely what today's computers do--they pretend to be calculators, ledgers, typewriters, film splicers, telephones, vintage cameras and so much more.
If we combine Turing's ideas of thought and of machine, we find machines that convincingly pretend to be other machines. The Turing test doesn't apply just to human intelligence but to what we might call "device behavior," if we remember that intelligence is really just convincing action for Turing.
Over time, this relationship has become nested and recursive: computer hardware and software doesn't just mimic existing mechanical or physical machines, but also the various extant forms of computational machinery. If Lotus 1-2-3 simulates the ledger, then Microsoft Excel simulates Lotus 1-2-3. If the iPhone simulates the notepad, then the Samsung Galaxy Nexus simulates the iPhone. As computational machinery has developed, it has also mutated, and the job of today's software and hardware companies largely involves convincing us that the kind of machine a particular device simulates is one worthy of our attention in the first place.
Once you see pretense as an organizing principle for Turing, it's hard not to discover it in everything he touched. Computation means one machine acting like any another. Intelligence means doing so in an interesting way. In mathematics, his solution to the Entscheidungsproblem entails making the Turing machine halting problem act like it. Even cryptography for Turing amounted to pretense: making a British machine act like a German radio receiver.
In fact, recent evidence reveals that even Alan Turing's prosecution and death might be a kind of retroactive pretense. There's no doubt that he was subjected to chemical castration a a part of his sentence, a treatment that introduced female hormones into his male body in order to make his homosexual body act like an asexual one. But history has told us that Turing, afflicted by his unfair persecution, committed suicide shortly thereafter by ingesting a cyanide poisoned apple, an act that itself simulates the famous scene from Snow White. While indisputably tragic, Turing's suicide also partly facilitated his contributions to social justice--it was a machine that made a mathematician act like a martyr.
But on the occasion of his centennial, Turing expert Jack Copeland has argued that the evidence presented in the 1954 inquest into Turing's tragic end is insufficient to conclude that his death came at his own hand. Turing apparently took an apple regularly at bedtime, and according to Copeland, absent any evidence of premeditation or planning a suicide verdict cannot be substantiated.
As with the nested logic of computers, unlocking one pretense in Turing's life always reveals another. In 1954, Turing's death was sufficient to convince a coroner of suicide. Today, do we question that conclusion because we have higher evidentiary standards for legal conclusions, or because we have a different idea of what suicide looks like? Certainly a computer of the 1950s would be less likely to convince a modern user that it acts like a calculator than a computer of today--but then again, in 1950 "calculator" was a name for a profession, not for a handheld electronic device.
Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept. In the inquest on his death, Turing's coroner wrote, "In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next." It's easy to take this statement as a slight, an insult against a national hero whose culture took him as a criminal just for being a gay man. But can't you also see it differently, more generously? Everyone--everything--is one of his or her or its own type, its internal processes forever hidden from view, its real nature only partly depicted through its behavior. As heirs to Turing's legacy, the best we can do is admit it. Everyone pretends. And everything is more than we can ever see of it.
In a near-future science fiction novel, human intelligence evolves into a hivemind that makes people the violent cells of a collective being.
Slime mold network formation (Science).
New Model Army, a 2010 novel by the English writer Adam Roberts, concerns itself with many things: the intimacy shared by soldiers at war, the motivating powers of memory and love, the rival merits of hierarchical and anarchic social structures, the legitimacy of the polity known as Great Britain, the question of European identity. Also giants. (Roberts has a history of interest in giants -- they feature prominently in his imaginative and highly excremental novel Swiftly -- and, more generally, in the scale of being: how very small, very large, and in-between-sized beings experience the world differently. This is also a theme in his recent digital-only story "Anticopernicus".) But New Model Army is perhaps above all an immensely stimulating inquiry into what we light-heartedly call the "hive mind." And it raises a set of discomfiting questions: Are our electronic technologies on the verge of enabling truly collective human intelligence? And if that happens, will we like the results?
The title New Model Army derives from the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, when Oliver Cromwell led armies raised by Parliament against supporters of King Charles. The New Model Army that arose at that time was "new" especially in that its soldiers were full-time professionals, ready to be deployed anywhere they were needed, even in Scotland or Ireland, whereas previous English armies had been little more than local militias. These soldiers were also deeply devoted to fairly extreme forms of Protestantism and despised the established Church of England.
With this background in mind, Adam Roberts asks us to imagine a near future when electronic communications technologies enable groups of people to communicate with one another instantaneously, and on secure private networks invulnerable, or nearly so, to outside snooping. Imagine that such groups arise -- not created but self-organized and (at first) self-funding -- and are devoted not to radical Protestant Christianity but rather to radical democracy. And imagine one more thing: that such New Model Armies (NMAs) arm themselves and fight on behalf of those who pay them. In short, imagine groups arising that resemble Anonymous, whose extemporaneous self-organizing projects have recently been brilliantly chronicled by Quinn Norton, but with better communications and an interest, not in hacking websites, but in fighting and killing for money. It's noteworthy that New Model Army was written just as Anonymous arrived in the public consciousness: Roberts's story therefore now seems like it could happen tomorrow, rather than twenty-five years from now (which is when the book is set).
All this would be fascinating enough, but Roberts takes the implications of the NMAs a step further than the reader expects. Again, each NMA organizes itself and makes decisions collectively: no commander establishes strategy and gives orders, but instead all members of the NMA communicate with what amounts to an advanced audio form of the IRC protocol, debate their next step, and vote. Results of a vote are shared to all immediately and automatically, at which point the soldiers start doing what they voted to do. Those who cannot accept group decisions tend to drift out of the NMA, but Roberts shows convincingly how powerfully group identity links the soldiers to one another -- how readily they accept the absorption of individual consciousness into a far greater one. They are proud of their shared identity, and tend to smirk when officers of more traditional armies want to know who their "ringleaders" are. They have no ringleaders; they don't even have specialists: everyone tends the wounded, not just some designated medical corps, and when they need to negotiate, the negotiating team is chosen by army vote. Each soldier does what needs to be done, with need determined by the NMA which each has freely joined. They take pride in fighting freely, as opposed to the soldiers in the British Army, whom they see as slaves to a feudal system.
The narrator of the story insists from the beginning that he is not the story's protagonist: that would be Pantagral, the NMA he belongs to, whose name echoes one of the giants in Rabelais's great sixteenth-century satire, Gargantua and Pantagruel. The really fascinating and, to the British Army, disturbing thing about Pantagral is its ability to change its shape and extent at will. Its soldiers can form into one enormous mass in order to attack a city -- acting for the time much like a traditional army -- but then at need dissolve into mist. Soldiers just go away and find shelter somewhere, bunking with friends or in abandoned buildings. They stay in touch with one another and when Pantagral decides to reform, they rise up to strike once more.
In short, they behave like a slime mold, which changes size, splits and combines, according to need, in such a way that it's hard to say whether the slime mold is one big thing or a bunch of little things. Slime molds and social insects behave with an intelligence that ought to be impossible for such apparently simple organisms, but, as Steven Johnson points out in his fascinating book Emergence, simple organisms obeying simple rules can collectively manifest astonishingly complex behavior.
New Model Army presents us with a question: What happens when human beings, not just slime molds or ants, submit themselves to collective will and become part of an immense shared intelligence? If complex behavior can simply "emerge" through the simple decisions of simple creatures, what might happen if much more complex creatures become absorbed into a collectivity?
The first answer that science-fiction fans are likely to give is: The Borg. Which is to say, the prospect of any single human intelligence being lost in a collective mind fills us with fear. We fear that the transcending of human intelligence will also mark the transcending of human feeling, that all of our familiar and deeply-treasured ideas about what constitutes human flourishing will be simply cast aside by a superior intelligence that has other and supposedly greater concerns.
New Model Army is not reassuring on this score. Roberts shows that we are fascinated by giants because they are more powerful than we are, and can do things that we but dream of doing; and yet we also know that when a certain degree of size-difference is exceeded, we lose perceptual contact. The Brobdingnagians of Gulliver's Travels would not know that the Lilliputians even existed, and could blindly crush their tiny cities. A minor character in New Model Army asks why people only fold themselves into a hive mind in order to pursue violence or other forms of destruction, and never to pick up litter. A provocative enough question; but differences in scale can enable wholly unwitting destruction. The Brobdingnagians could eliminate the Lilliputians while playing some giant's game.
What if this is the Singularity? Not simply our machines becoming smarter than we are, but the machines we use to communicate with one another enabling our own translation to a supposedly "higher" sphere of being? What if the "posthuman" isn't being a cyborg but instead being a cell in a giant's body, helping to enable a vast consciousness that you're never aware of and that is never aware of you? What if the price exacted by the Singularity is the elimination of human individuality altogether, either voluntarily or, if you happen to have retained your individuality at the moment when the playful giants come through, involuntarily? We tend to talk easily and happily about crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, the hive mind. New Model Army makes me think that we could benefit from a little more uneasiness.
Very few people are being promoted into the humble, hard-working positions which make Wikipedia work.
Flickr/Wikimedia Israel
Volunteer editing of Wikipedia is on a long decline. The number of editors peaked in 2007 and has been falling since. Lots of people know this.
But while attending Wikimania Friday in Washington, DC -- the conference for the entire Wikimedia movement -- I saw one chart that seemed more dire.
But first some context: In the world of Wikipedia, "administrators" (nicknamed admins or sysops) play the role of custodians. They can delete posts, block editors and protect pages that are in the news or being vandalized. To become a sysop, you must be nominated and undergo an application process. And even after being accepted, you, like the all the site's editors, remain a volunteer.
Now for the charts. In October 2005, Wikimedia promoted 67 people to become sysops. 2005 and 2006 were filled with months like this, where 40 or 50 people would become administrators -- but since then, their numbers have been dropping off. A few years ago, Wikipedia's oldest stewards started to worry: The number of administrators promoted every month was skidding in the high single digits. At the time that happened, this is what the chart of successful admin applications every month looked like:
In June 2010, six people became admins. March of that year saw only two promotions.
There are reasons for this. Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution and a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, told me the process by which new admins are promoted is arduous and extensive.
"The vetting process is akin to putting someone through the Supreme Court," he said. "It's pretty much a hazing ritual at this point."
In the early days of Wikipedia (Lih became an admin in October 2003), editors were promoted to admin-status almost as a perk: someone else would nominate you, others would affirm, and after about a week you'd have new privileges around the site. "If you proved you weren't a bozo," said Lih, the process was easy.
But the process has gotten more and more intense over the years. Applying to become an admin now involves answering questions about copyright law. You have to write essays about notability and explain how you would act in hypothetical situations. And other Wikipedia editors dig deep into your distant edit history, find any testy discussions you got in and grill you about them.
"It's a rejection of the commitment [Wikipedia editors] put into the project," said Lih. Adminships used to be conferred without much fanfare, but now, even if you seek the position, you're going to get a "gigantic amount of scrutiny."
Here are the numbers today, of new administrators promoted by Wikipedia every month, from July 2002 to June 2012:
For the past few months of 2012, no more than one or two Wikipedia users have been promoted to admin status. This slow trickle of new talent means fewer people perform the encyclopedia's upkeep -- sorting, categorizing, correcting vandalism. And the arduous application process also fails to provide a little karmic reward for involved editors, which means they're less likely to devote time to improving the encyclopedia's structural weaknesses, like how, for example, to adapt the encyclopedia's sourcing to an age of social media.
And the drip-drip of incoming admins does signal a drip-drip of new editors of any kind, even if that tailing off is less dire. Here is total history of general Wikipedia editors per month:
Ignore the funky name: "EN.wp" just means the English-language version of Wikipedia. This chart graphs active editors of English Wikipedia -- wherein "active" means "more than five edits per month."
The encyclopedia isn't starving for stewardship or editorship yet. Last week's Wikimania conference filled rooms and rooms of George Washington University's student center with chipper, engaged Wikipedians (though they remain, alas, mostly male).
But the project worries about falling editors. The overarching organization that runs Wikipedia, Wikimedia, affirmed in its annual report for 2010-2011 that "declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects." Wikimedia is planning on beta-testing a new WYSIWYG text editor last this year, to make it easier for new authors to join the Wikipedia legion. And it's adjusting design elements to make it clearer to new visitors that Wikipedia can be edited: the site's ubiquity is such that many web users just don't know about its greatest feature.
It makes sense. Back in 2008, a study led by Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega found that there was great inequality between the number of people who edited Wikipedia and the number who read it. The study made headlines at the time; it initiated the first round of "Wikipedia is dying!" stories. But Ortega's team also found that the inequality between editors and readers would "trend to stable patterns of inequality in the long run."
We're now in the long run: the end of the first era of social media, Web 2.0's middle age. Among tech types, disruption tends to be the word. But what Wikipedia now requires is the careful, curatorial work of stewardship. We're about to see whether the web, so good at novelty, can also succeed at TLC.
The network's first day of news reporting involved Boris Yeltsin and Bob Dole.
Late yesterday, news broke that NBC and Microsoft would be parting ways. The erstwhile MSNBC.com now redirects to NBCNews.com -- a transition that signifies, The New York Times's Brian Stelter writes, "the end of a relationship between NBC and Microsoft that dates back to the earliest days of the commercial Web."
The separation has been a long time coming. And it makes sense: The partnership between the tech company and the news network, launched exactly sixteen years ago yesterday, has long been a source of brand confusion more than it's been one of brand cooperation. Every cable channel has a website -- and the innovative union, network + Internet, may simply have been ahead of its time. Early next year, MSNBC.com will re-emerge -- this time, as a stand-alone site for the cable channel MSNBC.
Still, the break-up marks, in a very real sense, the end of an era. When the MS/NBC merger was announced in late 1995, it represented "the blurring of lines between the computer industry and the media," a Baltimore Sun article put it. As Broadcast News Network Steve Rosenbaum noted at the time, "There's going to be some kind of marriage between television and computers, and here is the logical place to do it."
Some kind of marriage. That sense of simultaneous confusion and inevitability -- this is the future, let's figure it out -- permeates the first broadcast of MSNBC, the cable channel. The new network assumed that its television/Internet union represented something not just strategically valuable, but revolutionary; what that something was, however, wasn't entirely clear. Among the slogans the new network used to advertise itself in the weeks leading up to the launch:
The revolution begins here. From now on, the promise of the Internet and the power of television become one. Because from now on, NBC News and Microsoft will revolutionize the way you get news.
And:
The future of news, from the people you know. MSNBC.
And:
You're connected ... to MSNBC.
Connection! Revolution! Future! And yet the content of the first broadcast itself was ... pretty much like the content of any other news network, cable or otherwise. There was Matt Lauer. There was Katie Couric. There was their discussion of the upcoming Olympics -- held, that summer, in Atlanta. The day's lead news story, read by anchor Jodi Applegate, was that Boris Yeltsin had failed to attend a planned meeting with Vice President Gore -- leading to questions about the Russian president's health. (The second story? An MSNBC poll predicted a bleak finish for presidential candidate Bob Dole.)
The network also announced, however, the start of a new 10 pm show, "The Site," which would be hosted by Soledad O'Brien and which would -- over the course of an entire hour -- explore the issues of "new media" and, in general, "the impact of technology on our lives." (Its slogan: "Make the digital revolution work for you.") The show featured tech journalist Leo Laporte dressed as a computer avatar, and was weird and wacky and, actually, quite webby. The show ended in late August of 1997, when it was phased out in favor of something much more attuned to TV's traditions: the live coverage of the death of Princess Diana.
Our secular endeavor of space exploration is flush with religious observance. Why is that?
NASA
Before the launch this weekend of three human beings into the ether of space around the Earth, before they boarded their Soyuz spacecraft, and before the rockets were fired, precautions were taken. Not the humdrum checklists and redundancies of space exploration -- assessing the weather, the equipment, the math -- but a preparation with a more mystical dimension: the blessing, by a Russian Orthodox priest, of the spacecraft, as it sat on the launchpad on the Kazakh steppe.
The scene, as shown in NASA photographs such as the one above, presents a tableau that seems incongruent, but may just be fitting.
The discordance is obvious: Here we are, on the brink of a new expedition to space, a frontier of human exploration and research that is the capstone of our scientific achievement. "The idea of traveling to other celestial bodies reflects to the highest degree the independence and agility of the human mind. It lends ultimate dignity to man's technical and scientific endeavors," the rocket scientist Krafft Arnold Ehricke once said. "Above all, it touches on the philosophy of his very existence." His secular existence.
And yet here is a priest, outfitted in the finery of a centuries-old church, shaking holy water over the engines, invoking God's protection for a journey to near-earth orbit. That these two spheres of human creation co-exist is remarkable. That they interact, space agencies courting the sanction of Russian Orthodox Christianity, is strange.
For reasons both straightforward and opaque, the secular, scientific work of space exploration cannot shake religion, and over the last few decades of human space travel, astronauts of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith have taken their religious beliefs into orbit, praying out of duty, in awe, and for their safe return.
That latter reason -- risk -- is perhaps the most basic explanation for the religious appeals of space explorers. On the ground, people led by popes, presidents, and their own instincts pray for astronauts' safe deliverance. Is there any supplication more succinct than what astronaut Scott Carpenter radioed to John Glenn, as the rockets powered him off the ground? "Godspeed, John Glenn." The Book of Common Prayer includes astronauts in an optional line in its Prayer for Travelers: "For those who travel on land, on water, or in the air [or through outer space], let us pray to the Lord."
And of course, astronauts pray for their own safety. It's hard to imagine atheists in foxholes; it is at least as hard to imagine them in space shuttles. In his memoir, astronaut Mike Mullane recalled the night before launch, lying in bed wracked by fears. He checked his nightstand for a Bible and found that there wasn't one. But he writes, "I didn't need a Bible to talk to God. I prayed for my family. I prayed for myself. I prayed I wouldn't blow up and then I prayed harder that I wouldn't screw up."
But prayers for safety are basic. Astronauts' religious practice in space has played out in more beautiful and complicated ways. There is no more moving example of this than when the astronauts of Apollo 8 -- the first humans to orbit the moon and see the Earth rise over the moon's horizon -- read the first 10 verses of Genesis.
Here's the scene: It's Christmas Eve, 1968. The spaceship with three men on board had hurtled toward the moon for three days, and they have now finally entered the moon's orbit, a move requiring a maneuver so dicey that just a tiny mistake could have sent the men off into an unwieldy elliptical orbit or crashing to the moon's surface. But all went smoothly, and they are orbiting the moon. On their fourth pass (of 10), astronaut William Anders snaps the famous Earthrise shot that will appear in Life magazine. On their ninth orbit, they begin a broadcast down to Earth. Astronaut Frank Borman introduces the men of the mission, and, then, this:
"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and God said, 'Let there be light," Borman read.
And it was so.
Through this broadcast and this photograph, I think we can begin to taste the kind spiritual experience astronauts must have as they travel to distances, and perspectives, so few have known. As John Glenn said, "To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible. ... It just strengthens my faith. I wish there were words to describe what it's like."
This ultimate scientific endeavor does not answer the questions religion seeks to answer; it brings humans into a close encounter with their own smallness, the Earth's beauty, and the vastness of the cosmos. Faced with these truths, is it any wonder that some astronauts turn to religion? Some surely find comfort in the words of secular philosopher-scientists like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. But others will find that the ancient religions of Earth have some greater power, some deeper resonance, when they have traveled safely so far from their homes. Astronaut James Irwin put it this way: "As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God."
This is in part the sentiment Buzz Aldrin relays in his 2009 memoir as he recounts how he took communion in the minutes between when he and Neil Armstrong became the first humans on the moon's surface, and when Armstrong set his foot down on the dust. Aldrin says he had planned the ceremony as "an expression of gratitude and hope." The ceremony was kept quiet (un-aired) because NASA was proceeding cautiously following a lawsuit over the Apollo 8 Genesis reading, but it proceeded with a tiny vial of wine and a wafer Aldrin had transported to the moon in anticipation of the moment (personal items were strictly restricted by weight, so everything had to be small). He writes:
During those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me." I poured a thimblefull of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: "I would like to request a few moments of silence ... and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way." I silently read the Bible passages as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.
Neil watched respectfully, but made no comment to me at the time.
He continued, reflecting:
Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind -- be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God. It was my hope that people would keep the whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and technical achievements, a deeper meaning -- a challenge, and the human need to explore whatever is above us, below us, or out there.
I think in there, Aldrin gets at the heart of religious experience in space: This achievement is so momentous, so other-worldly (nearly literally), that the rituals and words of one's own religion become, as he says, "deeply meaningful." Other astronauts of other faiths -- Jewish and Muslim -- have also brought their religious practices into orbit, resulting in some thorny questions at the intersection of theology and practicality. For example, how often should a Jew who experiences 15 sunrises and 15 sunsets every 24-hour period observe the sabbath? Every seventh "day" -- which means every 11 hours or so -- for just 90-ish minutes? When Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon was on the Space Station, rabbis decided he could just follow Cape Canaveral time. Unfortunately, Ramon was killed during the space shuttle Columbia's re-entry, so we don't have his post-mission reflections on what that experience was like. At least in anticipation of his journey, he said that though he was not particularly religious, observing the sabbath in space was important because as a representative of Jewish people everywhere and the son of a Holocaust survivor, bringing those traditions into space, into the 21st century, represented a spirit of continuity. "I'm kind of the proof for my parents and their generation that whatever we've been fighting for in the last century is becoming true," he told the BBC.
Similarly, Muslim astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor had to figure out how, exactly, one faces Mecca during prayers when you are moving at about 17,000 miles per hour and its location relative to you is changing minute to minute, sometimes as much as 180 degrees in the course of one prayer. It was decided that Shukor, who was on the International Space Station during Ramadan, could do no more than the best of his abilities, in trying to face Mecca, kneel, and perform ritual washing. A video from the Space Station showed how this wound up working, and, in a way, just how hard and odd it is to bring religion into space exploration, in a way not unlike that of the Russian Orthodox priest preparing a spaceship for launch.
For many people, space represents its own religion, a spiritual experience on its own, secular terms, with no help from the divine or ancient rituals. But for those who believe and travel into space, the experience can endow their faith with greater significance. There is awe in science because, simply, there is awe in reality. We use science to discover that reality, and some use religion to understand it, to feel it deeply.
There is perhaps nothing more human than the curiosity that compels exploration. But paired with that curiosity is a search for meaning -- we don't want to know just what is out there, we want to turn it into something with a story, something with sense. We turn to the gods for that meaning, and we turn to them for our safety as we go. Same as it's always been, same as it ever was. As President Kennedy concluded his speech on our mission to the moon at Rice University in 1962, "Space is there and we're going to climb it, and the moon and planets are there and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
Mayer has been at Google since the get-go, but told The New York Times that the switch "was a reasonably easy decision."
Reuters
In a major tech-industry move, The New York Times is reporting that Google Marissa Mayer, one of the company's top executives, announced her resignation by phone today and will be taking over as CEO of Yahoo beginning tomorrow. The Times explains:
With her appointment as the president and chief executive of Yahoo, Ms. Mayer joins a short list of women in Silicon Valley to hold the top spot. The elite club includes Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, and Virginia Rometty, the head of IBM. Another senior woman in Silicon Valley, Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook's chief operating officer.
For Ms. Mayer, Google's first female engineer, the move to Yahoo is an opportunity to step out on her own and claim a bigger stage. Ms. Mayer has been one of the search giant's most visible and powerful executives, often tapped for keynotes at technology conferences and glamorous magazine spreads. Her life outside of Google, including her posh penthouse in the Four Seasons in San Francisco and her affinity for cupcakes, has also been popular Internet fodder.
In a sign of grander ambitions, Ms. Mayer, in recent months, has started to find success outside of Google. In April, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer tapped Ms. Mayer to join its board, her first seat at a public company. She is one of four women on Wal-Mart's 16-person board.
Still, at Google, Ms. Mayer did not have a clear path to the C-Suite.
Mayer has been at Google for 13 years. She was its 20th employee and first female hire. It seems that at Yahoo, Mayer's strategy will not be to bring the fallen tech-giant into direct competition with Google but to build a company off of Yahoo's remaining strengths, particularly in the areas of email, finance, and sports, according to The Times. They report, additionally, that "she also hopes to do more with its video broadband and its mobile businesses." But such aspirations are at best preliminary. During her short tenure at Yahoo, Carol Bartz never quite figured out what the company would be in the Google age. Perhaps a Google insider will have better insight into what Google *isn't* and will be able to guide Yahoo to plug in the gaps.
Last week, we met Corwin Hardham, the CEO of Makani Windpower, which is at work on a revolutionary airborne wind turbine. This week, I want you to actually see how the turbine works. Below, you'll find the final two installments of my interview with Hardham and some shots of the actual wing, as they call it.
In the first video, Hardham describes the "transformational" turbine, but I think it's worth retracing how far they've come from the original vision. Makani was founded by windsurfers, so their initial designs were modeled on the kites that they knew. They had soft bodies and were very, very light. But as they got farther along the innovation path, they found that a rigid body wing was the only way that they could generate consistent power. So, instead of making a kite, they essentially had to build a plane. But that plane had to be able to do vertical takeoffs and landings all by itself, like a drone.
But Makani's team stuck with it because, as you see in the final segment of my interview with Hardham, they believe they have two key advantages in the long renewable energy future. First, their wing takes far less material than do traditional wind turbines. That means they have a hedge against materials costs in a world that could experience constraints in future years. Second, their wing could be deployed more easily and cheaper in offshore installations, allowing humanity to tap the terawatts of wind energy that blow off our shores.
To paraphrase many people's reactions to this news, in general chronological order:
1. What?
2. Why?
3. Why not?
And though we don't yet know why Mayer is leaving Google for the colder climes of Yahoo, what we do know is that Mayer will have a lot to work with in her new job. Like, a lot. Yahoo may be in need of some direction; it has, however, a fairly mind-boggling array of assets. And that's not even counting the firm's insistently ubiquitous exclamation mark, which will be catalogued below. Yahoo is one of the few Silicon Valley firms -- and, in fact, one of the few national firms -- big enough to have a disruptive effect on the current tech infrastructure, in the Valley and elsewhere. Which means that Mayer may be in a position not just to buck cultural trends, but also to do something real and interesting with the company. Exclamation point.
Yahoo! Mail; Yahoo! Messenger; Yahoo! Groups; Yahoo! Answers; Flickr; Connected TV; and social properties tailored to users in specific international markets, including sites like Wretch in Taiwan and Meme in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.
Search:
Yahoo! Search, including sponsored search results; and Yahoo! Local, which offers users local and hyperlocal news, business listings, events, and deals and is tightly integrated with Yahoo! Maps. "We generate revenue," the report explains, "from listing fees and premium location targeted display advertising."
Marketplaces:
Yahoo! Shopping; Yahoo! Travel; Yahoo! Real Estate; Yahoo! Autos; and Yahoo! Small Business.
"On these properties," Yahoo! explains, "users can research specific topics, products, services or areas of interest by reviewing and exchanging information, obtaining contact details or considering offers from providers of goods, providers of services, or parties with similar interests. We generate revenue from listing fees, transaction fees, and display and search advertising on many of these properties, as well as from the subscription fees that we charge for hosting Websites for our customers, fees that we charge for registering domains, and fees that we charge for services we provide to small businesses seeking to maintain a Website. We also have properties tailored to users in specific international markets, primarily our Asian markets, which allow prospective buyers and sellers to enter into an online auction for goods for which we earn a posting and transaction fee."
Media Assets:
Yahoo! Homepage, a "navigation hub and starting point for entering into Yahoo! Properties and the Internet, via a PC or mobile device"; Yahoo! News, which "provides stories from the major news agencies that are aggregated by our editorial team and augmented by in-house generated content focused on up-to-the-minute news coverage with video, text, photos, and audio"; Yahoo! Sports, which "offers free fantasy games, original editorial content, real-time statistics, scores and game updates, broadcast programming, integrated shopping, online sports communities, and mobile appls like Yahoo! Fantasy Football"; Yahoo! Finance, which "provides a comprehensive set of financial data, information, and tools that helps users make informed financial decisions, and includes MarketDash, a mobile app"; My Yahoo!, a "personalized start page that gives registered users the ability to customize their pages with information that interests them most from around the Web"; Yahoo! Toolbar, "a Web browser add-on that conveniently enables users to access and preview"; Yahoo! Properties; Yahoo! Entertainment & Lifestyles; Yahoo! Movies; Yahoo! Music; Yahoo! Games; and Yahoo! TV, including the recap program "Prime Time in No Time," which "provides quick recaps of the previous evening's prime time television shows."
Media assets also include Yahoo! Health; Yahoo! Education; Yahoo! Weather; celebrity news site omg!; women's lifestyle site Shine; Livestand from Yahoo!, "a personalized living magazine application for the iPad that Yahoo! launched in November 2011"; and original content sites like Yahoo! Scene (Entertainment), In the Money (Finance), Yahoo! Today (homepage), Shine from Yahoo! (women's lifestyles), and The Thread (Fashion). There's also the mobile app IntoNow, which "makes watching TV more engaging, social, and fun" by personalizing viewing recommendations and enabling discussions with friends; and, finally, the Yahoo! Contributor Network, "a platform allowing users to publish their creative content on Yahoo!" and which "we expect will bring contributions from writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet's largest media destinations, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and even the Yahoo! Homepage."
Yahoo! also has distribution partnerships with close to 100 carriers, original equipment manufacturers, and publishers around the world.
Developer Tools and Platform Offerings:
Yahoo! Developer Network, which aims "to be the hub for the digital media developer community"; Yahoo! APIs, tools, documentation, support, and resources; Cocktails, Yahoo!'s development platform (made up of Yahoo!'s Mojito and Yahoo!'s Manhattan) for connected devices, which offers a "cross-platform programming environment allows a new class of multi-screen applications with native-like performance"; and Yahoo! User Interface, "a free, open source JavaScript and CSS framework for building richly interactive Web applications."
Trademarks:
Yahoo! Inc. and its subsidiaries referred to herein include, but are not limited to, Yahoo!, Y!, IntoNow, interclick, Livestand, Flickr, Right Media, omg!, Shine, Sportacular, Prime Time in No Time, Behind Enemy Lines, Ready Set Dance, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wretch, Meme from Yahoo!, Citizen Sports, Associated Content and their respective logos
Physical Assets:
Yahoo! has offices in more than 30 countries, regions, and territories.
Employees:
Yahoo! had approximately 14,100 full-time employees as of the end of 2011. (It has many fewer, alas, at the present moment.) "Our future success is substantially dependent on the performance of our senior management and key technical personnel," the report notes, "as well as our continuing ability to attract, maintain the caliber of, and retain highly qualified technical, executive, and managerial personnel."
Today, it doubled down on that ability. Enter Mayer.
Now this, this is interesting. The Internet giant of yore, Yahoo, has hired Marissa Mayer, a key executive at the company's archnemesis, Google. Mayer was Google employee number 20 and has been with the company since the beginning. She oversaw Google's most successful product (Search) for years and was in charge of Google's local and mobile efforts until today when she resigned. She starts *tomorrow* as Yahoo's CEO. That's the kind of engineer-executive we're talking about here.
I'll say it: Yahoo could not have made a better pick in all of Silicon Valley.
Mayer, on the other hand, probably could have.
Yahoo's been in a holding pattern since Mark Zuckerberg was still in college. Google's market cap blew past Yahoo's in December of 2004, just a few months after GOOG went public, and Marissa, Larry, Eric, Sergey, and the gang never looked back.
Google's now worth close to $200 billion ($187) while Yahoo's looking up at the $20 billion mark. Different startups have lopped chunks off of Yahoo's business as Google's body punched the company's core advertising business. CEOs have come and gone. Morale has come and gone. It's a mess.
"That people turn to example of Apple turnaround [with regard to a possible] Yahoo turnaround tells you the data set of successful such turnarounds is 1," Paul Kedrosky noted on Twitter,
So, Mayer's job is cut out for her. Enact the most successful business transformation this side of Steve Jobs. Good luck.
She has some things going for her, though. For one, Google's grown mighty big, so big that its users might like an alternative set of services to provide some healthy competition. Two, Google's employees may be getting a little restless. Earlier today, an email startup called Streak posted a poaching call to Google's employees that gave the following reasons for leaving the company:
Googlers: We have nothing against Google, in fact, Streak's founders are ex-Google/ex-startup people, but we think you should take the plunge and join Streak because you can:
Launch stuff faster - No PM bureaucracy. No exec approvals. No insanely complex and interdependent infrastructure. Just listen to users and launch stuff as fast as you can build it.
Innovate on Gmail, not just maintain it - ever wished you could make email better? You can, without being on the Gmail team. We've built infrastructure to easily build on top of Gmail.
Feel more connected to the end user - your work will have a direct impact on making users lives better. You won't be 3 or 4 levels of indirection removed from users
Think Mayer has a few ideas that Schmidt, Page, or sheer bureaucracy made impossible? Guess where she might get a chance to implement them.
To make Yahoo really work, though, Mayer's got to do more than win some incremental tech and talent wars with her main rival. Yahoo's got to find an identity and to do that, maybe Yahoo's got to do something seriously radical. Something like: 1) Embrace its role as the preeminent media company of the Internet age. Yahoo already gets more traffic to its content than most websites could ever dream of. But it's never really embraced its potential as a serious competitor to every single media business. With its scale, it could completely reinvent the online display advertising business, which would be great for everyone. (Hey, she did once say her childhood dream was to be CEO of Disney!)
2) Go mobile first. You know how in media, everyone talks about being digital first. What if Yahoo just bet the house on mobile? After all, "Mobile Is Where the Growth Is." 3) Build a Facebook competitor with your huge audience, Flickr, a dash of Instagram, and a whole lot of privacy. Media sharing is what drives social media. Take that lesson to heart and double down on Flickr, using it as a social (and mobile!) play instead of trying to build or acquire a better social presence. Offer people a $3 a year data tracking opt out plan. (Bonus! Now you have their credit card information.)
4) Take on Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters. Google might be tough to take on in the early going, so maybe Mayer should lead her company into battle against these two information giants.
5) Buy Twitter. Hey, why not? You're the world's portal the web; so's Twitter, actually.
6) Actually come up with a new product. At this point, we're kind of used to the idea that only Apple comes up with new stuff. Create and launch a completely new product.
Often do we hear about Soyuz, but rarely do we see it: This craft is space flight's present. ISS-bound (and now ISS-docked), Expedition 32 held Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko, NASA Flight Engineer Sunita Williams and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Flight Engineer Akihiko Hoshide. It launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday.
A 1992 speech takes on new meaning as Marissa Mayer announces her pregnancy.
Twitter
Nearly twenty years ago, in October of 1992, Lawrence Perlman gave a speech. The Ceridian Corporation CEO focused his presentation, later published in the Christian Science Monitor, on creating work environments that would be friendly to women and families. Perlman titled his speech "A Pregnant CEO: In Whose Lifetime?" The implication being, ostensibly: probably not ours.
I mention this because news broke last night that Silicon Valley's newest CEO -- Marissa Mayer, who starts her new role at Yahoo today -- also happens to be an expectant mom. Mayer is due with her first child in early October.
This, on the one hand, should really be none of our business. And on whatever level the news may be even a tiny bit our business -- the human family, the public eye -- it should be worth a congratulations to Mayer and her husband, nothing more. On the broader level, though -- of the human family, of the public eye -- Mayer's pregnancy means something. How she handles it, publicly, will mean something. "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I'll work throughout it," Mayer said in announcing the news. And that, too, will mean something.
Because here, finally, is Perlman's "pregnant CEO." A female chief executive who was hired while she was pregnant -- and who will give birth just a few months into her tenure -- is a symbolic turning point. As The Verge's Tim Carmody put it of the pregnancy news, "This is big. This is about our families, our values, our commitment to the people who work in our industry, about what's said and whispered."
Mayer certainly isn't the first to join the club, obviously. Nor is she exactly -- which is to say, at all -- representative of the average working woman. As Anne-Marie Slaughter pointed out last night, Mayer is "superhuman, rich, and in charge" -- all of which make her exceptional, both as a person and as an expectant mom. Mayer will, however, be a person and an expectant mom and a chief executive in notoriously male-dominated Silicon Valley. In that she will be, whether she wants to or not, a role model. Her choices, just like those of Sheryl Sandberg and of Anne-Marie Slaughter, will take on the weight of archetype. Not for all women, but for women who aspire to tenures and C-Suites.
So it's worth, today, returning to Perlman's "pregnant CEO" speech. His argument was an early-'90s version of Slaughter's, and he framed leadership parity, fascinatingly, not just as a matter of cultural justice, but of business competitiveness. "We have to look within our companies and ourselves to identify the problems and find ways to unlock the strengths that will allow us to compete and win," Perlman declared.
This issue is not just a feminist issue, a liberal issue, a fairness issue. Ultimately it is a question of American business competitiveness. To the extent that we in the United States deny women the opportunity to develop in business to their full potential, we are ruling out contributions from some of the most capable people in the work force.
Women, whose contributions are more than equal to those of their male counterparts, still must manage a career, childbearing, and child care with little support from the society and their companies. We should be encouraging men to participate more fully in the care of children and families. Instead, we continue policies that encourage women to drop out of work and men to drop out of family ...
In a 1990 Catalyst study of women in corporate management, most CEOs surveyed perceived women as equally prepared or even better prepared than male counterparts in terms of education, technical training, management skills, and interpersonal skills. But women were not considered to be equal to men in career commitment, risk-taking, and initiative. "Career commitment" is a euphemism for "What if she has a baby?"
Well, what if she has a baby? Surprise: Work goes on. Women executives redistribute the work among colleagues, stay in touch by phone, fax, and modem. It is very much the same as when a male CEO becomes ill, or breaks his leg skiing, or has an accident and is out of the office. If CEOs (male or female) have not built depth and quality into their management team so that they are not indispensable, then we should all suspect there is a terminal case of the "CEO disease" at work.
If women must choose between having children and being a significant part of their care, or being paid 65 percent of what a male counterpart is earning (who is also 20 times more likely to be promoted into a top job), it is not difficult to see why women might leave their companies to seek better opportunities elsewhere. If companies want stronger career commitment from women, they should hasten to correct pay inequities and create equal opportunities for promotion.
Yahoo, to its credit, has made a role model of Mayer. What will be really nice, though, is when someone like Mayer won't have to be a role model. What will be really, really fantastic is when someone like Mayer can be just a pregnant CEO -- rather than, you know, A Pregnant CEO.
The first light of the beloved app was a picture of, what else, someone's cute dog.
Instagram
Two years ago yesterday a start-up with an app called Codename uploaded the test picture above, the first ever photo on the app that would become Instagram. In the time since, more than 50 million people have shared more than a billion such images.
The picture in some ways captures that particular Instagram zeitgeist -- a filter that makes images look old, loved, and classic; a subject (a dog in this case and many others) that is charming; and, of course, that distinctly square shape. It's interesting, even paradoxical, that in this era of rapid change we can point to the first Instagram and find it "Instagrammy" and the first photo ever posted to the web and find it to be in some ways "webby." Underneath the constant tumult we observe, there is some technological and aesthetic stability. Contrast that with the long haul: The first photograph ever gives few hints of the medium to come.
Some years ago Stewart Brand, of The Whole Earth Catalog fame, wrote a fascinating book called How Buildings Learn, which was later made into a BBC series that, wonderfully enough, can now be seen on YouTube. My question is: If buildings can learn, why not books? And why not think of the rise of electronic publishing and reading as a stage in the education of books?
How Buildings Learn is a kind of predecessor to, or maybe a founding document of, the movement that has recently come to be called object-oriented ontology, or OOO. The key question of OOO is summed up in the subtitle of Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology: What It's Like to Be a Thing. Stewart Brand was asking: What's it like to be a building? You get built for certain people but then get used, as a working space or living space, for other people. You have certain functions early in your life and very different ones later on: maybe you're a warehouse converted into lofts, or an elegant family home remade into a dentist's office. Brand says that very few buildings adapt well because they're not built to adapt; but adaptation happens anyway, because people come and go and human needs change. It must be strange to be a building.
Books are very different objects than buildings, because they embody human purposes in very different ways. We see the hand of the architect in a building, and discern her mind, but books seem, to many of us anyway, to have a more intimate relation to human consciousness. We are usually more sensitive to authors' intentions than to those of architects. (Whether that should be the case is another story.) All that said, books had to learn too and always have. Homer's epics had to learn Roman ways: Virgil taught them. Sophocles' Antigone had to realize, during World War II, that it was fundamentally about the French Resistance. The novels of Jane Austen, written as popular entertainment, have been shoehorned into academic contexts, and have been recalcitrant and slow learners, always insisting on being sources of delight. And don't get me started on the Bible and Shakespeare.
Viewed in this context, electronic reading is simply another stage in the education of books, and maybe not one of the more eventful ones. Of course, that will depend on what we mean by "book."
There's the book as a physical object, which might share a grave with a saint for a few centuries, only to end up in a museum, or live a boring and uneventful life, perhaps not even read, until transformed into a work of art.
But as the previous paragraph shows, I mean "book" in different sense, a sense not attached to a unique objectification, in the way that many people can say that they have read Middlemarch even when the various objects answering to that name resemble one another only generally.
Consider, in this light, the Iliad. It began life as a song, a very long song composed and then chanted by a Greek bard. It came to life through the ears of audiences gathered in firelit courtyards or the plazas of Ionic towns. Surely the transition to written form -- some scribe trying to scribble fast enough on his sheets of papyrus to keep up with the bard's chant, being forced repeatedly to stop the poor man, drag him out of his half-conscious trance, to make sure of a word or a line -- was a traumatic one for the poem. Indeed, would any future event be as traumatic? The absorption into Roman culture, the strange reinterpretations that then emerged, were jarring in their own way, but surely not as dramatic as that first translation to the page.
After that, the long slow process of becoming a classic couldn't have been so stressful to the Iliad: though it surely felt odd to be told that it was a Christian allegory, it had been prepared for that when it was co-opted by the Pax Romana idea. The development of print was memorable, but the disorientation stemming from that event brought more pleasure than fear: to be so widely copied and distributed was thrilling, and the poem had never looked so beautiful as in the editions made by Aldus Manutius. So many people treasured it now, which helped compensate for all the curses it received from schoolboys who got caned for failing to distinguish the second declension from the third. But the poem never really adjusted to other languages: Latin, French, English -- none of them sounded right, ever, though in certain moments . . . There was a man called Pope, for instance. . . .
In light of this long, long history, during which the poem has had to learn so much, adapt to so many circumstances, how could it be intimidated by the rise of electronic reading? "Why should I concern myself with bits and pixels? I remember the harried scribe with his papyrus sheets. I was once a song."
The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.
Even the notion of Flickr as an archive--as the place where you store all your photos as a backup--is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.
The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.
As an epilogue, and as an elegy, Honan's piece was powerful in part because of how familiar it felt: The commercial subsuming the communal is not a new story. For Yahoo, though, a new CEO means a new chance to turn things around -- not just for its business, but for its users. And though Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO as of a couple of hours ago, will start her new job with a lengthy to-do list ... the Internet has a suggestion for what she might put at the top of her agenda.
And that is: Fix Flickr. Or, more specifically, MAKE FLICKR AWESOME AGAIN.
And, actually! It's a request that may well align with Mayer's own desires for her tenure as CEO. "My focus at Google has been to deliver great end-user experiences, to delight and inspire our end users," Mayer notes. "That is what I plan to do at Yahoo, give the end user something valuable and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day."
And you know what was valuable and delightful and kept people coming back for more? Yep: Flickr.
As my mother would surely say: He's definitely going to have back problems if he doesn't already. I mean, one laser pointer sure, but multiple laser pointers?!
AirPort Express and MacBook Pro 85W magsafe adapter
bluetooth mouse (this, Wozniak says, doesn't get very much use -- implying that everything else does)
binoculars
multiple Gameboy Lights (a Gameboy sold in Japan but never in the U.S.)
foreign AC adapters
prism glasses for watching movies in bed
sunglasses
earplugs for concerts, separate earplugs for flights
pencils, pens, Sharpies, etc.
laser pointers (red, blue, purple, yellow, and green)
Square
cigarette lighter dual USB adapter
toiletries
eyedrops
batteries of all types
And this is a pared-down selection! A picture of just some of the contents laid out on a table, in addition to the list in toto, is available on the Gizmodo site. Wozniak says this all comes to about 50 pounds, and, needless to say, airport security is a nightmare.
The shift in perspective activates our media, not animal, vision.
'Ruin porn,' as it has rightly been called, is a staple of Tumblr culture. Broken down buildings catching the light just so. Stacks of tires artfully arranged by the fates and the poor. Golden ratios of trash to light, of humanbuilt to humans, of what was to what is.
The frisson of ruin porn derives, in part, by how actually scary it would be to find oneself among the sublime decay. IRL, finding yourself in a blight-filled neighborhood surrounded by decaying buildings, only the sound of trash swirling around your ankles, is not actually a good thing. Not to get too evo-psych on you, but I think a certain level of animal instinct kicks in. It might pay to stand on alert while you hold a $2,000 camera next to a crumbling building in a burned-out area of Detroit. And, of course, "terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime," Edmund Burke wrote in 1757. As was true for the wilderness of the 18th century is true for the rewilded of the 21st. Sometimes, the place where you're scared also feels closer to where the truth may be revealed.
With this kind of analysis of ruin porn in hand, I was intrigued by a series of videos of Detroit that showcase the city's decrepit buildings from a camera mounted on a homemade drone. In my mind, this footage does not have the same effect as the on-the-ground perspective. The swoops and zooms recall not our time on the savannah, but a bygone era of filmmaking. I don't see the fear of a falling city or the complex reasons for its decline, but the opening of Psycho, Hitchcock's sweeping shot over Phoenix, and Orson Welles magisterial opening to Touch of Evil. We are above the city. We are not subject to the fears of the beings below.
It is not a criticism of the work, but this is not a human perspective.
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