Category - commentary

Acerbic observations on the state of the world, art, politics, and culture.

Surf’s Up (and so is the camera)

January 19, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
commentary, personal, photography
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Do you remember the last verse of the last song on the Eagles’ album, “Hotel California”? It’s called The Last Resort, and the verse begins with:

We can leave it all behind
And sail to Lahaina
Like the missionaries did
So many years ago
They even brought a neon sign
Jesus is coming
Brought the white man’s burden down
Brought the white man’s reign

That’s the song that ends with the line “…call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye… Click here to refresh your memory…

I lived on the island of Maui for more than a dozen years, through the 1980s and part of the 1990s. I drove past that neon “Jesus is Coming” sign on Front Street in Lahaina a thousand times.

All of which came rushing to mind when I watched this video of surfers on the North Shore of Oahu catching the big waves. The footage is notable in part for the fact that it was shot with a drone, which provides a really breathtaking angle on Hawaii’s National Sport (FYI, the islands were a sovereign nation before the missionaries and pineapple and sugar growers decided to put an end to that…)

I enjoyed the few minutes it took to watch the whole thing – something I rarely do with online videos. Some of the footage in the first few minutes of the ‘barrel riding’ is spectacular: first the mist blasts out of the curl, then the surfer.

Dystopia Now Redux: Opportunistic Indignation and the Rush to Judgment

January 15, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
commentary, personal
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“…what if we all behaved as if we were being watched? It would lead to a more moral way of life. Who would do something unethical or illegal or immoral if they were being watched?” — David Eggers, The Circle

“Who am I to judge?” —Pope Francis I*

Our media effect us in unseen ways…

Who will watch the watchers?

Who will watch the watchers?

I think I liked the Internet more back when it was an unexplored wilderness of untapped potential. Now that it’s a fully domesticated homeland, umm… maybe not so much.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still love ordering merchandise from my lap instead of going to the mall. I do think that having instantaneous access to most of the world’s recorded music is a worthy marvel (even as the “content providers” continue to rail against the emerging business model). And I love having all of my documents synchronized so that I can open them anywhere, on any device – even if I know that means that the Corporate Intelligence Complex can also open and read them at will.

But I do try to tune my antennae to sub-surface effects and tendencies, and some of the things I think I’m detecting now are, well, a tad disturbing – even for an old guy who likes to humor himself that he is readily adaptable to new technologies.

So what follows is said, hopefully, with all the deference that a self-ware junkie should have for his own needle. These are the observations of somebody who has been “online” in one form or another more than thirty years. I have personally seen the digital universe evolve from 300 baud dial-up and a prehistoric service called “The Source” (that was before Compuserve, which was before AOL…), to the global network of networks at 25Mbps. So maybe I have some idea whereof I speak.

Now this network has woven itself inextricably into almost every facet of our modern lives. Indeed, at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show the dominant theme was “The Internet of Things,” which apparently means having the your computers connected to everything from your automobile to your shoes and socks.

But before our self-driven vehicles ferry us off to the Internet of Things, this is what seems to be happening: We are becoming insufferably judgmental. Amid all the LOL cats, cute kids doing funny things, “holy shit it’s winter!” apocalyptic weather commentary and everybody-is-a-political-pundit, etc., social media have given us all a medium by which we can mount our chariots of righteousness and hurl our flaming spears of judgment.

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I picked up on the reaction to an unfortunate pre-holiday incident at the Morton’s steakhouse here in Nashville.

What perplexed me about that whole scenario was the rush to pile-on — the branding of an entire institution with the inexplicable actions of a single individual. As I said at the time, somebody fucked up, and the infinite troll parade used that as an opportunity to chase the whole company off the bridge.

All kinds of people – most of whom, I’d wager, have never been to a Morton’s, would probably not think about going to a Morton’s, or give Morton’s a second thought – chimed in with their insistence that they would never go to a Morton’s.

You’re going to #boycottmortons? That was, literally, a hashtag meme. Well excuse me…do you even know the meaning of the word? Not feasting on an overpriced steak at Morton’s is not an act of civil disobedience.

What it is is a new form of public shaming that I’m calling “opportunistic indignation.” And it’s starting to show up a lot.

Shortly after the Morton’s incident, the whole “Duck Dynasty” thing erupted. I tried to avert my eyes from that one, it seemed so absurdly familiar, but it was hard to avoid; everybody had an opinion one way or another. Either Bill Robertson was a jerk for expressing his opinion, or his network acted capriciously for ‘suspending’ him from his show.

But there it was again, the opportunistic indignation: “I’ve never watched an episode of Duck Dynasty, I was never gonna watch an episode of Duck Dynasty, but now that this furry serial mallard assassin has said something I don’t agree with, I’m really never gonna watch his stupid show….”

For a week or so, we all got to express our outrage one way or another. And then we moved on to the next social atrocity.

That would be poor Justine Sacco – a PR operative from England who tweeted something ostensibly racist before leaving on a business trip to South Africa. When she arrived at her destination she discovered she’d set the world afire with her remark; her plane was greeted by virtual torches and pitchforks.

That’s how the world works now: You publicly reveal some half-formed thought, and then you get off an airplane and discover that the greeting party is a lynch mob.

Has anybody thought for a fleeting moment, “boy I’m glad I didn’t say that”? Whatever happened to “There but for the grace of God….”

By now my antennae are tuned in, and I’m starting to see it all over the place. And then just before Christmas I found myself in the middle of a scene that could have come straight out of The Circle:

The Friday before Christmas — in a rare instance of poor planning — I decided that was the day to venture off to the Green Hills Mall. Apparently everybody in Nashville had the same idea. There was no place to park at the mall. There may have been no place to park in all of Nashville.

After driving around the parking lot for about 20 minutes I finally decided to park in a space that was big enough for my car but not really a parking space. I went inside, bought the gift I came for, and left. Total time in the mall: roughly equal to the 20 minutes I’d spent looking for a parking space.

When I returned to my — admittedly, inappropriately parked — vehicle, I saw that the car in the — yes, actual — parking space next my mine was occupied by its driver, who was doing something with his cell phone. When he started his engine, I presumed he was about to leave.

I needed into get to the back seat of my car, and didn’t want to trigger an unwanted encounter between my car’s door and his moving vehicle. So I waited a minute or so while he sat in the car, still fiddling with his phone, the engine running. Finally I gestured to him to get his attention. He rolled down the window and I asked,

“Are you about to pull out?”

To which he replied, “You know that’s not a parking space, right?”

“Yes, I know. So I’m leaving.” What else could I do at that point but vacate the space?

“Well, I’m in a parking space, so I’m not in any hurry…”

OK, fine. Whatever. So I wrestled my parcel onto the floor in the back seat, and got in the driver’s seat.

That’s when things got really bizarre: I looked up and noticed that Mr. Parking Lot Vigilante was pointing his cell phone at me. He was video recording me as I settled into my car and got ready to leave the garage. And then he continued to film me as he followed me out of the garage.

Suddenly I was a character in a scene in “The Circle” and I’m wondering if the guy is going to use my license plate to track me down and post a video of my egregious holiday parking transgression on the Internet for all to see and condemn. I wondered what the hashtag would be… #parkingviolator? #evildriver? #holidaymiscreant? I don’t think any of those are trending…

So that’s what I’m starting to see: opportunistic indignation and judgment in every comment. Does it look like that to you? See if you can tune your own antennae. Let me know if you think we’re becoming a culture of socially-mediated judgement, constantly watching others with the expectation that the watching will produce a more “acceptable” form of behavior like “The Circle” imagines.

Just please, don’t judge me for being so judgmental.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

*I never thought I’d live to see the day that I’d be quoting a pope in one of these missives, but…. there it is. We live in interesting times.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

This post is a sequel to an earlier post entitled “Dystopia Now.”

Why?

December 23, 2013
Paul Schatzkin
commentary, personal
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flanneryThis is strictly for the benefit of the few dozen people who actual subscribe to this blog/site.

You may have noticed starting last month that you now receive notifications from an email service called MailChimp whenever I’ve posted something new to this site. That was a conversion from the Feedburner RSS feed I’d been using previously. I probably committed some kind of ethical transgression by subscribing you all to a mailing list without your explicit permission, but I figured you were subscribed already; I was just changing the means of distribution so didn’t think that would require another opt-in.

I hope that’s OK, and if not, the “unsubscribe” link should be pretty easy to find at the bottom of the emails. Conversely, if you’ve serendipitously found your way here by some other means and might want to follow along, use the signup form on the home page.

Since I made the switch to MailChimp, I have been making a fairly concerted effort to gather some thoughts and post some observations to this space about once a week. I hope to continue doing that for the foreseeable future.

I have been keeping a fairly consistent journal for the past year or so. To the extent that it’s a habit now, it started when Ann and I were in Scotland together in October 2012. It might have had something to do with the time difference between Tennessee and Scotland, or maybe it was the changes in latitude… Whatever it was, I started waking up before the sun rose and typing notes and observations – and the occasional complete sentence – into my laptop.

Before that, prior efforts at keeping a journal were done mostly longhand. I thought I was doing something pure and simple writing with pen on paper. When I started doing it on a computer instead, I discovered that I could much more readily keep up with my own thoughts.

And every once in a while whole thoughts emerge, as they started to do with some regularity over the past couple of months, starting with Dystopia Now back in mid-November. I’ve adopted a model of sorts – about 800-1200 words, or 2-3 pages of typed text in a Pages document. That’s about how many words you’ll find in your typical newspaper op-ed column. It’s also – hopefully – a quantity that doesn’t unnecessarily tax our digitally-fragmented attention spans.

So I sit down several times a week and just start to type, and after I’ve been at it for a while, I start to get a grip on the lightning flashes that light up my brain during a typical day. If I stay with it a little longer I will often arrive at what a writing coach I studied with back in the 90s called “the transformation line” — when suddenly out of all the errant thoughts and jibberish an actual point begins to emerge.

That’s when what Flannery O’Connor says in the quotation above becomes operative. I write to figure out what I’m thinking.

I’d like to think that somewhere amid all these snapping synapses there is the occasional unique and original observation. I am quite certain that we are at a pivotal point in human evolution. We are in the midst of a massive transition that is dictated by new technologies, and I don’t think we’ve really got a firm grasp on what these new technologies portend. And I think about that a lot.

This new environment does not come with an operating manual – and even if it did, I doubt very many people would actually RTFM. In the absence of a comprehensible overview, we tend to think of new things in old ways, wrap new technologies in old terminology, and try to do old things with new tools. Until suddenly the lights go on – and we find ourselves in a cage of our own making.

It is probably a stretch to think that I have anything useful to add to the copious – and at times quite strident – dialog that is emblematic of this new environment. I don’t really know if I’m adding any meaningful signal that might rise above the noise – but I’m going to try.

I’m doing it anyway, so I may as try to be coherent about it, right?

That’s why I’ve been posting these occasional missives, and why I hope to continue doing so with some degree of regularity in the new year ahead.

I seem to be thinking something, and by writing, I have a better chance of figuring out what exactly that is.

And with some degree of diligence and consistency, maybe I can shed some actual light – and unlock the cage before we lose the key.

– – – – – –

I posted the Flannery O’Connor quote to my Facebook page last night, I’m getting more comments and “Like”s there than I am here – but apparently the notion does resonate with others.

Also, a nod to Jeff Goins, who first posted the Flannery O’Connor quote on his blog.

 

@Morton’s

December 17, 2013
Paul Schatzkin
commentary
3 Comments

no_tobogganI woke up this morning thinking about Morton’s. Yes, the steakhouse chain.

No, I was not lying in bed like some condemned prisoner dreaming of his last meal.

This was more like an object lesson in “be careful what you read before going to bed.” Because what I read just before the lights went out last night was this item about an incident last week at the Morton’s in Nashville:

How quickly can the insensitive actions of an employee destroy a restaurant’s reputation in the social media era? In the case of the Nashville outpost of Morton’s Steakhouse, it took about 48 hours.

I’d seen at least one reference to this incident earlier in the day; Morton’s was in the news — i.e. my “news feed” – which is decidedly not the same thing. I pretty much sloughed it off as more of the usual daily noise/distraction until it showed up again in, literally, the eleventh hour.

When I woke up, with the light of the full moon pouring through my bedroom window, this ridiculous business kept running around in my addled semi-consciousness: Something is not quite right here…

Now, I really don’t have any skin in this game. I’ve been to a Morton’s maybe twice in my life. In the almost 20 years I have lived here, I’ve been to the Morton’s in Nashville once, though I’ve probably driven by it hundreds of times. I guess it’s part of my landscape, but as much as I am a healthy red-blooded American beefeater, I don’t tend to frequent high-end steak joints. I”m more a “weekly cheeseburger” kind of guy.

The facts – to the extent they are readily discernible – are these: a large-ish party (16 people) availed themselves to Morton’s for a seasonal feast, running up a tab in the neighborhood of $2,000. Near the end of the evening one of the guests, a cancer patient whose chemotherapy treatments cause some body temperature regulation issues (he gets cold), put some kind of wool cap on his chemo-induced, hairless head.

And then all hell broke loose.

If Zac Brown can appear in public all the fucking time wearing a wool beanie, what’s the harm in one patron with a medical condition wearing one in a restaurant? There’s a dress code? Oh, please.

Well, once the story hit the Internets, you’d think that John Lennon had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, or that poor Natalie Maines had questioned George Bush’s senseless march to an unjustifiable war.

Suddenly Morton’s, a company that has quietly gone about its business for 35 years – has become the pariah of the social media universe.

Hundreds of angry posts to Yelp. A deluge on the company’s Facebook page. A firestorm on Twitter.

Most, obviously, from people who had no direct connection to the actual event.

Which leads me to conclude that this particular uproar has little to do with the unfortunate, zealous, and dispassionate conduct of one corporate employee whose governing principal was probably something along the lines of “I don’t want to lose my job.”

It is, rather, a disturbing illustration of the pernicious, unforgiving, mob-rule quality of “social” media.

This wasn’t just “that was a bad call.”

This was “Hey, somebody fucked up. Let’s pile on!”

In a culture where the robber barons who 86’d the global economy all live free, we demand the head of a restaurant manager who thought she was doing her job.

It now appears that Morton’s corporate establishment has swept in and offered amends: they have made a contribution in the amount of the party’s check (~$2,000) to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital (Marlo Thomas, feel free to weigh in…) and are revisiting their policies with regard to suitable attire and appropriate local management response to transgressions therefrom.

More to the point: The patron whose haberdashery selection caused the furor in the first place has accepted the company’s apology and, in the spirit of the season, has expressed his sincere desire that nobody lose their job over the incident. I hope the company accedes to the man’s request as a condition of their rehabilitation.

Yes, the manager who objected to the patron wearing a beanie in her establishment should probably reconsider her priorities. Some kind of sensitivity training is probably in order.

But the people who have gone ballistic over a subject about which they have no actual connection… they should be ashamed of themselves.

For whatever it’s worth, this is precisely the kind of environment that David Eggers forewarns us about in The Circle. It’s not in the future. It’s now.

Apparently, in the age of “social media,” the expression “it’s none of your business” is no longer operative.

And I’m going back to sleep now.

 

 

 

Wither Bitcoin?

December 4, 2013
Paul Schatzkin
commentary
2 Comments
Nice token, but it's not really a "coin"

Nice token, but it’s a “coin” in name only.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, the word “bitcoin” has probably shown up on your radar.

With bitcoin, the Internet is now attempting to redefine the very concept of money. And why not? The Internet has redefined just about everything else in the past 15+ years. Why shouldn’t the greatest technological innovation of the past millennium aim its Howitzers of disruption at one of the fundamental pillars of the human experience?

What exactly is “bitcoin?” Well, it’s really several things. Its advocates like to call bitcoin a “crypto-currency” – which is to say, it’s a medium of exchange based on a highly sophisticated block of computer code that can be used to buy and sell things over the Internet. At last measure, just getting set-up to acquire or hold bitcoins starts with downloading a block of code in excess of six gigabytes. That’s a lotta code. It’s like an operating system for the future of Internet commerce.

Much of the appeal of bitcoin stems from its inherent nature as an open-source ‘currency without a country.’ Unlike dollars or yen or pounds or marks or francs (or whatever the Chinese call their currency), bitcoin lives outside of the authority of national governments and central banks. It is the ultimate form of ‘crowd funding’ – the collective creation of the funds themselves. This stateless existence makes bitcoin a high ideal among the digital libertarian and anarchists in our midst.

It also makes bitcoin the currency of choice among liars and thieves, but that’s a different story altogether.

Bitcoin has been flipping on and off my own radar for well over a year now, though I hadn’t really paid it much heed until earlier this fall when I caught the tail end of Luke Stokes’ presentation at Barcamp, “Could Bitcoin Be More Disruptive than the Internet?’ That’s the sort of title that gets my attention. After his presentation, talking to people in the hallway, I heard Luke use a phrase that in nearly 20 years I have never heard uttered by a single soul in this city: “Fiat money.”

Finally, somebody in this town is thinking about the underpinnings. At that point my radar became more fully engaged.

In the investment world, a chart like this is what's known as "going parabolic." It usually doesn't end well.

In the investment world, a chart like this is what’s known as “going parabolic.” It usually doesn’t end well.

Bitcoin gets a fair amount of attention in the mainstream media when its price as measured against conventional dollars goes through one of its periodic, parabolic run-ups to stratospheric new all-time highs. It got some attention last spring when the price ran up to about $500. More recently it has been in the news as the price has exceeded $1,000, and several of the earliest adopters who acquired their stash of bitcoins for single digits have cashed out to become millionaires – in good, old-fashioned, red-blooded American greenbacks.

Unfortunately, this speculative fervor for bitcoins is probably its least savory feature.

I have seen a couple of instances this week where those earliest adopters are now telling the next round of adopters that they, too, can be “early adopters.” After, there’s still like 7-billion people on the planet, and most of them are not even on the Internet yet, right?

In conventional investing circles, this is sometimes known as the “greater fool” theory – in which any price paid for an investment is rationalized with the expectation that there will always be another buyer at a still higher price. Hallelujah, it’s not too late to “get in at the bottom!”

Unfortunately, the final destination of the “greater fool” theory is usually the “bag holder” theory – in which some poor shlub finally pays the highest-ever price for the investment, and is thus left “holding the bag” once the price has peaked and regresses to the mean.

The likelihood of future fools and bag holders aside, these recent, spectacular fluctuations in the market value of bitcoin illustrate the challenge in understanding its potential. Is it a digital currency, a virtual commodity (oxymoron alert), or a security? Is it a medium of exchange — or an outright speculation? It is all of these things. And, I suspect… none of them.

Here I must confess that I have no personal experience with bitcoin (yet?). I’m not in any particular hurry, either. I may not be Warren Buffett, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is that you do not “chase” a rising price. Besides, I don’t really need a new “virtual currency” it at this point. I can still buy all the crap I need/want from Amazon and B&H with the conventional virtual currency – aka “dollars” – currently at my disposal.

What interests me about bitcoin is what might be lurking within the actual technology. I suspect that there is really much more to bitcoin than meets the virtual eye, and that our preoccupation with its surface utility – and its speculative windfalls – is concealing much more disruptive possibilities.

Here is where we have to put on our ‘Marshall’s X-Ray Specs’ – the goggles that let you see through the windshield instead of the rear-view mirror – and try to see: what’s really going on here?

Amid all the reading I’ve done on the keyword ‘bitcoin’ in the past couple of months, I think the first clue showed up in this blog post by Naval Ravikant, who writes under the nom-de-plume of “Startupboy:

Most people are only familiar with (b)itcoin the electronic currency, but more important is (B)itcoin, with a capital B, the underlying protocol, which encapsulates and distributes the functions of contract law.

“…distributes the functions of contract law??” Whoa, Nelly. Forget about central banks and sovereign governments… have the lawyers heard about this yet??

If you, too, are intrigued by the prospect of an “open source currency,” there are several ways to get on the bitcoin bandwagon. The simplest is to set up an account (better start downloading that 6GB now…) and just buy the ‘things’ at whatever price they’re going for today.

This 500-GHz/sec dedicated "Bitcoin Miner" can be yours for a mere $22k. I'm thinking the brand label should say "Levi Strauss."

This 500-GHz/sec dedicated “Bitcoin Miner” can be yours for a mere $22k. I’m thinking the brand label should say “Levi Strauss.”

But what really intrigues me is this notion that you can get a dedicated (and expensive) computer that can crunch the code in order to “mine” for bitcoins. WTF?

What is most curious to me though is not the technology, but the vocabulary that is being used to describe it. With this notion of “mining” – which invokes visions of picks and shovels and holes in the ground – we see old terminology being used to grasp an understanding of new technology. And that’s while the new technology itself (digital ‘currency’) is being used to do the work of the old (facilitate commerce). A classic McLuhan moebius.

For the past 15+ years, the Internet has proven massively disruptive to the world of commerce. Now the beast has turned its attention to money itself. The ultimate disruption is at hand. And yet, here we are, putting this powerful new tool to use to do the same old things.

Is there any truly trans-formative, cultural potential for a ‘crypto currency’? Or is just another way to buy more stuff?

As mentioned at the outset, part of the appeal of bitcoin lies in its potential to circumvent the power and authority of central banks and the governments that sponsor them.

What central banking has given us over the past century amounts to a new Gilded Age, with most of the wealth of the world concentrated in a tiny sliver of its population.

What I want to know is: By virtue of its decentralized, stateless foundations, is bitcoin – or any virtual, open-source ‘currency’ – sufficiently disruptive to equalize the distortions in the global economy? Can it alter the 99% -v- 1% equation that has become the world’s dominant economic/cultural reality over the past 40 years?

My hunch is that this bitcoin revolution is real, but it is not what we presently think it is. And there will be a lot of wreckage strewn along its path as we stumble into the realization of its real potential.

As with the Internet itself after the crash of 2000, I suspect that it will not be until after the initial bubble of speculation has burst that we will begin to see the true potential of bitcoin.

Point of reference: the NASDAQ Composite - after 13 years, almost back to it's all time high just before the Internet bubble burst.

Point of reference: the NASDAQ Composite – after 13 years, almost back to it’s all time high just before the Internet bubble burst.