Internet entrepreneurs have been trying for years to create "Yelp for people," a service that would take the practice of reductively quantifying other human beings beyond the rarefied realms of beauty contests and the National Football League draft.
In October 2015, the latest aspirant, Peeple, generated a backlash while still in the elevator pitch stage. When The Washington Post reported that the app, which didn't exist yet, would allow users to post both positive and negative reviews of anyone they interacted with, even if the reviewee hadn't opted in to the system, humanity responded with an emphatic thumbs-down.
"Since the interview with the Washington Post, I've received death threats and extremely insulting comments aimed at me, my investors, and my family on almost every social media tool possible," Peeple co-founder Julia Cordray wrote at LinkedÂIn. But don't look for Cordray to vindictively name names. "Peeple is a POSITIVE ONLY APP," she wrote, pivoting from earlier descriptions of the service. "We want to bring positivity and kindness to the world." It will be "100% OPT-IN" and "there is no way to even make negative comments." Presumably, even the sadface emoji will be persona non grata there.
China may not let its citizens off quite so easily. According to government documents that were translated by Oxford University China expert Rogier Creemers in June 2014, China is developing a "social credit system" that will create a numerical rating for individuals using information drawn from financial transactions, criminal records, and social media behavior. The system, the International Business Times concluded in an April 2015 article, will be designed to "hold all citizens accountable for financial decisions as well as moral choices."
But while China's vision may escalate the idea behind platforms like Peeple from the merely annoying and intrusive into the realm of oppressive and coercive, there is, in fact, a positive case to be made for the liberating virtues of reputation systems. One reason the "Yelp for people" dream remains so persistent is because Yelp for optometrists, life coaches, and laundromats has proven so useful. Instead of relying on marketing and other forms of branding, scattershot news media coverage, and government regulations designed to protect consumers (that may or may not succeed), we can now easily access detailed information about people's actual past experiences with businesses, products, services, places, and more. Yes, reviews that appear on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, and elsewhere may contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information, but these systems work so well on the whole that millions of people regularly consult them before making decisions about how to spend their time and money.
Just as important, millions of retailers, manufacturers, service providers, and commercial entities of other kinds now embrace reviews, too. In the early days of e-commerce, many businesses considered the prospect of uncontrollable consumer reviews threatening. Now, virtually every time you buy a sweater online or book a hotel room, you get an email from the merchant in the wake of the experience, asking for feedback and assessment. In the Internet era, the after-sell is often harder than the sell.
Merchants mass-nag their customers in this manner because they know people tend to provide positive feedback more often than negative feedback—numerous studies have shown that higher review volume correlates with higher overall ratings, and higher ratings lead to more sales.
In theory, individuals can also benefit from this new era of hyper-scrutiny, and to a certain extent, of course, they already do—at sites like RateMyTeacher.com, LinkedIn, eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Yelp itself, and many others. In fact, on transaction-oriented platforms such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb, reputation systems aren't just tolerated—they're embraced as the mechanism that provides the trust that helps these marketplaces function efficiently.
As Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey suggests in her coverage of Peeple, this kind of reputation assessment is generally considered permissible because it involves an economic transaction of some kind. "You paid thousands of dollars to take that class, so you're justified and qualified to evaluate that transaction," she writes.
But most existing reputation systems are also flawed from an individual's point of view, because the results can rarely if ever be transferred from one place to another. In the digital age, character may be capital, but the character capital you accrue through years of conscientious eBay transactions isn't fungible. It only, or at least primarily, has value on one website. (You could potentially highlight your high eBay global feedback score on your LinkedIn profile.)
Companies like Amazon and Uber have little incentive to make such information portable. The reputation scores you establish on their sites, and the benefits you accrue because of them—more potential transactions because people trust you, fewer problematic interactions because you know whom to avoid—help keep you locked in to these platforms.
But as the gig economy becomes a larger part of people's work lives, and as technologies like Bitcoin, telepresence, and instant translation expand the possibilities for how and with whom people do their jobs, broader forms of reputation will become increasingly attractive. While Julia Cordray may not have initially done a good job of assuring the world that Peeple is concerned with mitigating the potential for major abuses and with giving users at least some control over how their reputation is presented, the platform is, at least, a bid to establish a more all-encompassing and portable reputation system.
Her app will apparently incorporate only one form of information input—reviews from other users. Karma (havekarma.com), a Los Angeles-based site that launched a public beta version last spring without attracting the sort of backlash that greeted Peeple, also encourages user reviews (which it calls "vouches") but is primarily built around incorporating data from other digital platforms and marketplaces, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Etsy, eBay, DogVacay, Twitter, and Foursquare.
Your overall Karma score derives from the sum of your activity on these sites, some of which it weights differently. (For example, reviews from sites that require face-to-face interaction, like DogVacay or Airbnb, are weighted more heavily than reviews from eBay or Etsy.) While Karma is opt-in only, you might still end up with a low overall rating, because in part the site evaluates you on the degree to which you're participating on the platforms it monitors. (If your rating is low, it advises, it could be "because of lack of activity.")
In their 2010 book Building Web Reputation Systems, Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass point out that eBay feedback scores and other forms of web reputation are highly contextual, and note the dangers of trying to extrapolate a "global user reputation" that can be deployed anywhere from only a few primary values.
But while it's true, as they suggest, that someone who achieves a high eBay feedback score "may in fact also steal candy from babies, cheat at online poker, and fail to pay his credit card bills," that concern diminishes at least somewhat as platforms like Karma expand their scope. Chances are good they'll eventually be able to learn from, say, negative TaskRabbit reviews, that you actually are the kind of person who steals candy from babies, and ding you accordingly. And as they draw from a wider and wider range of sites, these services will eventually develop a genuinely thorough record of your actions and behaviors.
Of course, even Karma ultimately has its own economic interests and incentives, just like eBay and Uber. The site biases participation, because more participation makes its own service more accurate and thus valuable. And ultimately it may not be willing to tell users exactly how it arrives at its overall scores, because then competitors would have access to that information, too.
What would benefit individuals most is a global open-source system, a Bitcoin for reputation, outside the control of any corporation or government. Unlike a mandatory national system (e.g., China's proposed social credit system) or a corporate one with incentives that don't always align with users' best interests, an open source system would likely offer the greatest level of transparency and portability for individual users.
As our opportunities to interact and transact with more and more humans and machines proliferate, so too does the need for reputation systems that can tell us whom to trust and whom to avoid. In time, it will become less and less possible to opt out of this new world without suffering major economic and even social consequences. In such a world, the people need something better than Peeple, a system worth opting into, designed to serve individuals rather than governments or corporations. But that will only happen if people create it.
The post Yelp, But for People appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Millions of people now take it for granted that Netflix knows more about their specific tastes in gory revenge thrillers than they do themselves. When a woman starts buying unscented lotion and cotton balls, Target's analytics team will ensure she receives ads targeted at pregnant women.
Perhaps inspired by such feats of Holmesian deduction, police departments across the country are increasingly incorporating predictive algorithms into their law enforcement efforts. According to PredPol, a Santa Cruz, California, software developer that uses data about past crimes to predict, very specifically, the places and times in a given city where future crimes are most likely to occur, more than 60 police departments in the U.S. are now using its product.
In general, cops use new technologies to expand the scope of their power and the force with which they apply it. And with 3D face recognition cameras, drones, sensors, automated license plate readers, and similar innovations becoming more common, there's ample reason to believe we're on the verge of an oppressive new Light Age, where state-sanctioned info-warriors equipped with .44 caliber omniscience police our every move, and possibly even our thoughts.
But while this may be the fate we have in store, a more optimistic counternarrative about the impending panopticon exists as well. Imagine a future where every crime that is committed is time-stamped, geo-tagged, livestreamed, and retweeted in 3D high def to a nation of gig-economy stool pigeons and bounty hunters competing for instant bitcoin rewards. As law enforcement gets democratized, the thin blue line will inevitably grow even thinner. Individual privacy diminishes, but so too do arbitrary stop-and-frisks, heavy-handed interrogations, and unjustified use of lethal force.
Granted, a cop-free future isn't what PredPol is selling. "Our software is a tool that does not replace, but requires, the insights of veteran officers and crime analysts," its website advises. And while PredPol's software has potential appeal to a wide range of city agencies, private businesses, and even safety-conscious individuals, the company currently sells exclusively to police departments.
"What we're predicting here is human event patterning in space and time," says Jeff Brantingham, a University of California, Los Angeles, anthropology professor who is one of the researchers whose work ultimately evolved into the PredPol software. According to Brantingham, PredPol's algorithm uses only three data points to make its predictions—the type of crime, the crime's location, and the time of day when it occurred.
Equipped with as much as 10 years' worth of such data, PredPol evaluates it in light of history and certain basic rules. For example, if a crime occurs in a given location, similar crimes are likely to follow shortly thereafter, either in the exact same location or very nearby. Certain locations, like high schools or bars, may experience higher than average crime rates, and some locations may experience more crime during certain seasons or times of day. Essentially, predictive policing expands the hotspot policing that police departments have been practicing for more than two decades now. But instead of merely identifying, say, the handful of streets where 60 percent of all robberies in a given city take place, the software aims to predict what crimes will happen and where on any day.
With PredPol, each police officer is given a map of his city divided into 500-foot by 500-foot boxes at the start of every shift. PredPol highlights the boxes where, based on past patterns, it predicts crimes are most likely to happen that day. The officers, in turn, are encouraged to patrol these areas when they're not responding to service calls or performing other duties.
While many police departments using PredPol have credited it with drops in crime rates, few have engaged in the sort of randomized control trials that would better prove or disprove the software's efficacy. (Brantingham says a study he and his colleagues authored that draws upon a randomized control trial conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department is set to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Statistical Association.)
If crime drops statistically attributable to PredPol are occurring, though, it's not because police officers are suddenly breaking up scores of crimes in progress. "Most people think of the police as being in the right place at the right time to catch the bad guy in the act," Brantingham says. "But that is really rare. To the extent that policing impacts crime, it has to be through a deterrence mechanism."
Thus, the general premise that animates PredPol and other predictive policing software: Determine where crimes are likeliest to happen; focus resources in those places; and discourage the acts from even taking place.
But what if sworn police officers aren't the only or even the most effective resource to deploy in such situations? Maybe drones, robots, or citizens paying heightened but remote attention through fixed camera feeds might do the trick. Local business owners with access to PredPol's data could hire private security guards on days when their 500-by-500 section of the city appears on PredPol's hot list. Citizens aware of such data could take special care to avoid these areas, or show up in them en masse as members of ad hoc vigilante flash mobs.
Stretched thin by budget cuts and hiring freezes, police departments are already conducting experiments like this. According to Forbes, the cops in Modesto, California, reportedly park an armored truck equipped with four live camera feeds in one of the PredPol boxes each day. The Los Angeles Police Department's Pacific Division has publicized PredPol hotspots on its Facebook page. "You can simply walk with a neighbor, exercise, or walk your dog in these areas and your presence alone can assist in deterring would be criminals from committing crime in your neighborhood," it advised in March 2014.
"We're not really in the business of telling police departments how to use predictions," Brantingham says. "They already have all the tactics. Some use PredPol to direct non-police resources—drug intervention workers or even street clergy."
In other words, predictive policing might just as easily be called predictive social work or predictive evangelism. In the end, PredPol is simply spitting out data, which could be used to different effect by different people.
What seems most certain at this point is that access to such data is expanding. But it's not just the all-knowing state that has access to it. In Atlanta, a trio of teen sisters created an app called Five-O that aims to be a Yelp or RateMyTeacher.com for cops. In India, a map-based smartphone app called Safetipin encourages users to "record places, harassments, hazards, and audits in a fun way!" In February 2015, Uber announced that it was going to start helping Safetipin in its data collection efforts by mounting smartphones to car exteriors and taking photos at night.
Robocopp, an Oakland, California, startup, is developing a wearable wrist device that will sound a 120-decibel "security siren" and send your precise GPS coordinates to a dispatcher at the touch of a button; the dispatcher will then contact police and also "mobilize an independently contracted professional search team to come looking for you."
Such services will no doubt eventually incorporate predictive policing algorithms of their own, to better alert users to potential problems and more efficiently deploy those Uber-like search teams.
Brantingham is adamant that PredPol only uses data related to space and time, not individual perpetrators. "We don't work off any information about suspects, arrests, anything like that." But how long will it be before others combine predictive policing with face recognition capabilities, mugshot databases, and other criminal records resources to create consumer apps that can alert users to who or what in their vicinity represents the greatest potential threat?
That sort of omniscience, combined with ubiquitous cameras capturing events in real time and thus making long-term evasion extremely unlikely, will lead to major reductions in both privacy and crime. It will also make possible substantial reductions in law enforcement personnel. Not only will Orwell's Thought Police be less likely to emerge in tomorrow's unusually safe dystopia—in the face of peer-to-peer law enforcement, plain old cops are going to grow scarcer as well. They may still loom large in premium cable dramas and video games, but on the well-behaved streets of hyper-surveilled cities, they may soon find themselves scrambling for relevance, just like travel agents, journalists, music executives, and letter carriers.
The post A Surveillance State Doesn't Have To Be a Police State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Man cannot live by Tinder alone. "A ton of my male clients have said that it's really easy for them to find sex, but it's really hard for them to find someone to cuddle with," says Samantha Hess. Hess is the proprietor of Cuddle Up to Me, a Portland, Oregon, cuddling studio where Hess and three other comfortably but fully clothed women platonically embrace humanity for $1 a minute (with a 15-minute minimum).
Over the last half dozen years or so, professional cuddlers have been putting the squeeze on isolation and loneliness in San Francisco, London, Rochester, and many other cities. Hess herself started in 2013, first on an outcall basis, meeting clients at parks, movie theaters, and their homes, then opening up a retail storefront in November 2014.
While practitioners like Hess have received substantial media attention—she appeared on America's Got Talent in July, cuddling celebrity judge Neil Patrick Harris until the other judges gave her the cold shoulder—only a handful of individuals appear to be doing it in anything approaching a full-time, ongoing way. But professional cuddling is also perfectly situated for a high-stress, overstimulated, screen-dominated era that places an emphasis on self-care and efficiency. More tactile than psychotherapy, more explicitly nurturing than massage…who knows how big an industry it could become?
Professional cuddling can be misperceived as a PG-13 version of prostitution, with all the assumptions, prejudices, legal gray areas, and safety issues that that misperception creates. "Because the social norm around touch is that it's sexualized, most interactions you get as a new startup in this industry are just icky," Hess says. "I can't tell you how many times I got emails from people who were offering me absurd things. I had someone offer me $500 to make out on their couch for 15 minutes. I'm like, 'No, that's not even close to what I'm doing.'"
It's not just would-be clients who don't understand her business. "I had a hard time finding a retail space that would accept us," she says. "We got rejected by eight different places before we found this one. We have tons of massage places in Portland, but what I'm doing is definitely different. It freaked people out."
To help clarify its status as a professional and above-board industry with no connection to prostitution, the therapeutic massage industry emphasizes training and certification. Most states have massage therapy licensing boards that regulate practitioners. To obtain a license typically takes at least 500 hours of supervised, in-class training; in New York, you need 1,000 hours.
Such requirements help reinforce the idea that massage therapy is a skilled discipline practiced by experienced professionals who possess genuine medical knowledge and hard-to-acquire skills. But the pursuit of respectability comes at a price. Massage therapy isn't a particularly lucrative profession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry's mean annual wage was $41,790 in 2014. Obtaining the necessary training represents a significant investment, especially when many practitioners don't necessarily plan to pursue massage therapy as a lifelong career.
"It can cost 16 grand and take a year to 18 months just to get trained," says Joanna Robinson, founder of Lunar Massage, a chain of "affordable, no-frills" massage studios with four locations in Washington, D.C. "It should cost, like, six or eight grand and take no longer than six months."
Along with the training costs, some states or municipalities impose additional fees on therapeutic massage businesses. In D.C., for example, a basic business license for most retail operations costs around $190 for two years. To obtain a massage establishment license, the cost is $962.50.
Until 2012, the D.C. chief of police had to approve each massage establishment, and official city code actually made it "unlawful for any female to give or administer massage treatment or any bath to any person of the male sex, or for any person of the male sex to give or administer massage treatment or any bath to any person of the female sex" in such establishments. So you could say all the training, certification, and fees ultimately paid off.
But if professional cuddling attempts to go this route, an obvious issue arises. "There's only so much information you can give on teaching cuddling versus massage," says Evan Carp. "I'm not sure how much there is to teach."
Carp is the founder of TheSnuggleBuddies.com, a website that effectively functions as a kind of centralized cuddling marketplace. Carp hires independent contractors who offer cuddling services in 28 states. Their profiles appear on Carp's site, but potential customers can't contact them directly; they request appointments through a form that goes to Carp. Cuddling sessions ultimately take place on an in-call or out-call basis—i.e., not in a permanent retail location. Carp splits the fees with his cuddlers on a 50/50 basis: $40 an hour for him and $40 an hour for them. Currently, around 100 women and five men appear on the site.
Carp, who sought out advice from Hess when he was starting up, implements some of the same basic ground rules that she does. Customers are required to sign a waiver in advance asserting that they will not engage in any kind of sexual behavior. Cuddling sessions are fully clothed.
But overall, his is a more laissez faire operation. Customers aren't asked to provide as much personal information as Hess requires. Cuddlers aren't asked to complete any formal or even in-person training.
In Hess' opinion, this is both short-sighted and unsafe. "This isn't just about letting someone lay next to you," she says. "There's so much more to it than that. We have over 60 different cuddling positions that we use, because we see people who have disabilities and flexibility issues, or have experienced trauma," she says. "You have to know what positions are appropriate for which people, and how to create comfort and trust through the whole process."
In February 2015, Hess started offering certification workshops- $900 for a two-day course with some work to be completed in advance off-site, or $1,600 for a four-day course that's conducted entirely on-site. Those who successfully complete the workshop will eventually be listed on certifiedcuddlers.com.
"On a personal level, I don't really care about adding more laws. On a professional level, I will make my certification the gold standard of the industry," Hess says.
But however valuable the training Hess provides may be, the lack of regulation that currently characterizes professional cuddling is valuable too. Without any legal requirements in place, Hess herself was able to experiment and innovate and create a new livelihood for herself. The women and men who promote their services on Carp's site can give the profession a try with virtually no barriers to entry. At this point, when professional cuddling has a relatively tentative grip on the market, introducing a lot of requirements and regulations could impede progress rather than hasten it.
Nick Grossman, a general manager at the New York venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, has written extensively about the difference between traditional regulatory efforts and the "2.0" approach that Internet platforms like eBay and Uber employ.
Both are designed to promote trust, safety, and security. But while traditional regulation tries to do this through licensing, permits, inspection, and other top-down methods of restrictive control, platforms like eBay and Uber "freely [allow] users to act, but then hold them accountable through data and accumulated reputation." This, Grossman writes in a paper titled "Regulation, the Internet Way," creates marketplaces that are "massively scalable and also [allow] even the smallest actors to participate with minimal initial overhead."
In many ways, professional cuddling is a quintessential sharing-economy industry. It recognizes warm but platonic human contact as an asset with both underserved demand and underutilized supply, not unlike spare bedrooms and empty passenger seats. Similarly, TheSnuggleBuddies.com functions somewhat like Airbnb.com or Uber.com, creating a platform that connects cuddlers with customers. What the cuddle site lacks is a reputation system that lets parties on both sides of the transaction rate and review their interactions.
A system like that introduces privacy concerns. But it would also provide accountability on a very granular level while still welcoming any would-be professional cuddler with open arms. These practitioners would be free to innovate, iterate, and otherwise define their nascent profession in a flexible environment, unhampered by overly proscriptive rules and requirements but made safe through transparency and crowd-sourced assessment. Regulatory middlemen will likely find themselves feeling useless and unloved. Luckily for them, sympathetic shoulders will be easy to find.
The post Cuddles Incorporated appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a video posted this spring at Newsweek.com, a third-generation almond farmer in California's Central Valley explains how the state's longstanding drought has necessitated a shift in strategy. "We have land, we have lots of sunshine, but we have no water," he says. "So we better think of something else to use the asset for."
The answer he came up with was solar farming. As the camera pans a dusty array of photovoltaic (PV) panels, the man notes that almond orchards and solar farms have similar lifespans of around 20 to 25 years. "When it's up, you can pull it out," he says of the latter. "If we have water at that time, and an almond orchard is still viable, we can replant that, or some other kind of crop. Or we could put new-technology solar in."
With its lingering close-ups of parched soil and its sad-keyboards soundtrack, the video strikes an emphatically declinist note. The bounty of yore, it suggests, is a distant Eden, and our future is one of compromise and diminishing returns—not as fertile as the past, not as lucrative, not as fulfilling.
The farmer himself buys into this proposition: He presents a future of either crops or panels. But recent research suggests the choice may not be so clear-cut. That's because a new hybrid innovation called agrivoltaics is allowing farmers to raise crops on the same land that solar installations occupy.
The idea of doubling down in this manner was first proposed by a couple of German scientists in a 1982 research paper called "On the Coexistence of Solar Energy Conversion and Plant Conservation." In 2010, a French agronomist named Christian Dupraz decided to put the theory into practice.
Along with his colleagues at France's National Institute for Agricultural Research, Dupraz divided a small field in Montpellier into four plots. Two of the plots remain fully exposed to the sun; two others are covered by PV panel arrays. In one of these plots, the arrays were constructed at full density, or what Dupraz described as "optimal spacing for electricity production."
In the other, the arrays exhibit only "half-density." That is, there was more space between the panels to allow for greater sun exposure. In both instances, the arrays were mounted 13 feet above the ground via support pillars spaced approximately 20 feet apart—this way, farm machinery could still operate in the plots.
Dupraz's general hypothesis was that the lack of sun would inhibit crop production but that the shade provided by the PV panels might also increase water efficiency and thus make up for some of the reduced sun. In a series of experiments conducted over the course of several years, Dupraz, Helen Marrou, and others grew and carefully monitored a variety of crops at Montpellier, including wheat, cucumbers, and several kinds of lettuce.
What they have found to date is that crops grown under the full-density arrays fare less well than those receiving full exposure from the sun. But those grown under the half-density arrays do surprisingly well—essentially equaling the productivity of the control plants, and in some instances, even exceeding them.
One reason for this is because of the phenomenon Dupraz had hypothesized about: The shade created by the panels allowed the plants to utilize water more efficiently than those that were fully exposed to the sun. But as Marrou described in a 2013 research paper, the plants also increased their leaf area and altered the arrangement of their leaves. Faced with less sun exposure, they adapted to become more efficient light harvesters.
Courtney White, founder of the nonprofit Quivira Coalition, writes about agrivoltaics in his 2015 book, Two Percent Solutions for the Planet. "It was the Goldilocks principle at work again: Too much shade hurt the crops, too little hurt electricity generation. Everything had to be just right."
What makes agrivoltaics especially compelling is how this balancing act increases overall productivity. According to Dupraz's calculations, combining solar and farming can potentially make the land 60–70 percent more productive.
For that third-generation California almond farmer, agrivoltaics is not a viable option at the moment: His farm lost its access to water after a shift in federal policy earlier this year, and attempts to drill wells on his land came up dry. Thus, he currently lacks the ability to hydrate any kind of crops, even ones not quite as water-dependent as almonds.
But the idea behind agrivoltaics—that land need not be reserved for one use at a time—will be essential in coming decades. Over the next 35 years, global population is projected to grow from seven billion to nine billion. And around 2.5 billion people, mostly in China and India, will enter the middle class. This growth—in both population and wealth—will put even more pressure on scarce natural resources and already-straining social institutions.
And yet, in their 2014 book Resource Revolution, former McKinsey consultants Matt Rogers and Stefan Heck see opportunity where others see looming catastrophe. "While labor productivity has improved almost 100 percent over the last two decades," they write, "resource productivity has increased only 5 to 10 percent—and it's not because there isn't room for improvement."
In their estimation, the vast new coming market of global middle-class consumers gives entrepreneurs an incentive to use information and industrial technology to extract far more value from existing resources.
As the world urbanizes, many observers have come to believe in the virtues of increasing density. While cities were once equated with disease, crime, and vice, they're now associated with higher wages, more jobs, expanding innovation, and greater environmental sustainability.
"The average Vermonter…consumes more than four times as much electricity as the average New York City resident, has a larger carbon footprint, and generates more solid waste, backyard compost bins notwithstanding," writes David Owen in his 2009 book Green Metropolis. "In terms of sustainability, dense cities have far more to teach us than solar-powered mountainside cabins or quaint old New England towns."
Intensifying land productivity—especially by combining agricultural with industrial uses—goes against the vogue for free-range, organic farming practices. High-efficiency agriculture doesn't create the best optics for attracting well-heeled Whole Foods customers seeking heirloom tomatoes raised in 18th century–esque settings. But switching to agrivoltaics makes financial and environmental sense. Not only does it extract greater productivity from a given piece of land via multitasking, but these simultaneous uses are designed to complement each other in synergistic ways. In a world where water is only going to get scarcer, turning to growing environments with built-in shade is itself a form of conservation.
A Stanford research scientist named Sujith Ravi has noted another way agriculture and photovoltaics can complement each other. Currently, many California solar farms are located in desert habitat. But when dust and dirt accumulate on the PV panels, their efficiency can drop substantially. So operators often use water to both wash panels directly and to dampen the ground underneath them to mitigate dust. Ravi theorized that that water would go to better use if there were crops there to take advantage of it. Using computer models, he explored the feasibility of growing agave—a crop with low water requirements and the potential to be used as a biofuel (or to make tequila).
Ravi has yet to test this approach in the real world. And Dupraz's own experiments have been relatively small. But if agrivoltaics is feasible at scale, it could play an important role in California's economy in coming years. In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that California's public utilities must serve at least 33 percent of their load with renewable energy by 2020. Utility providers are looking for ways to reach this goal, and one possible route is through large-scale solar projects.
It's not necessarily that easy to find the land for such projects. Frequently, permits have to be procured and environmental analyses conducted before construction can begin on wild lands. In such instances, there are typically questions about displacement of sensitive species, objections over the loss of open spaces, and other similar concerns.
Agrivoltaics presents an opportunity to place large-scale solar installations on flat, sunny, privately owned land near existing electrical grid infrastructure. And increasing the productivity of land that's already in use gives farmers an added revenue stream while minimizing new development of wild spaces. It suggests a future where sustainability arises from innovation and the pursuit of plenty, not from privation. Let the carbon-neutral margaritas flow!
The post Harvesting the Sun appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>American corpulence hit new highs in 2014. According to a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey, 27.7 percent of all U.S. adults now qualify as obese, a gain of more than two percentage points since 2008.
Such metrics might suggest we're eating everything in sight, but nothing could be further from the truth. At every link in the industrial food chain, we're leaving perfectly edible fare on the table. Overplanted crops rot in fields. Disfigured cucumbers are culled at packaging facilities. Bunches of bananas, lost in the crowd, fail to make lasting connections with consumers in the highly competitive meat market of the Whole Foods produce section.
And even the butternut squash that makes it into your refrigerator or onto your plate at the Olive Garden is far from sure to make it down your gullet. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations all estimate that 30 to 40 percent of the food that gets produced is never actually consumed.
There's an upside to our profligacy. If we consumed every calorie we now produce, we'd have to start using shipping containers as coffins. Grocery store dumpsters spilling over with surplus pluots and still-edible hot dogs have emerged as an attention-getting symbol for muckrakers eager to illustrate the excesses of our broken corporate food industry. But that's not the only way to view these supersized horns o' plenty. They may be wasteful, they may be perverse, but they're also evidence of a system that is working so efficiently, it allows millions of people to essentially treat food like they treat water or electricity—as a resource that's always on tap and so cheap it's often deployed without much thought.
Unfortunately, not everyone is benefiting from this bounty. In 2013, the USDA reports, 14.3 percent of U.S. households experienced "food insecurity," meaning they "had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources." Obviously, there are opportunities to distribute surplus food more effectively.
Wasted food also has environmental costs. "Throwing out 1 pound of beef wastes as much water as taking a 5 hour shower," an ad from an Oakland, California, nonprofit called Food Shift advises. And it's not just that wasted food equals wasted water and wasted energy. The great majority of uneaten food ends up in landfills, where it ultimately turns into toxic greenhouse gas. According to an NRDC report from 2012, "the decomposition of uneaten food accounts for 23 percent of all methane emissions in the United States."
Composting produces less methane than landfill decomposition does, especially when increased aeration methods are employed. Thus some municipalities have begun to adopt policies to encourage it. San Francisco, for example, has ostensibly imposed mandatory composting on its residents since 2009, though it has yet to start actually fining scofflaws. This June, Seattle will reportedly do just that—single-family properties whose garbage "contains more than 10 percent recyclables or food waste by volume" will be fined $1. Commercial businesses that commit the same indiscretion will be fined $50.
While this seems like a pretty good scheme to incentivize littering, more ambitious ways to discourage food waste do exist—at least for those who still possess a healthy appetite for technology and marketing. Not everyone does, of course. We live in an era where local, organic, farm-to-fork food is privileged as "real" food, and everything else that does not meet that standard is suspect. In this milieu, food waste is typically characterized as a consequence of overzealous commercialism. Think of supersized portions, buy-two-get-one-free promotions, and aesthetic standards that require every piece of fruit to exhibit the unblemished complexion and symmetrical pulchritude of Kim Kardashian.
But ultimately food waste happens because there aren't really good, efficient markets for castoffs and leftovers.
Traditionally, some entrepreneurs and philanthropists have capitalized on the value of unwanted food by creating new venues in which to distribute it. Grocery Outlets, a chain that started in Berkeley, California, in 1946, specializes in purchasing closeouts, overruns, and other excess product from manufacturers and selling them at a significant discount to consumers. Food banks cultivate relationships with farmers, caterers, restaurants, and grocery stores that allow them to obtain surplus food for free or at greatly reduced costs, which they then distribute to their own clientele.
But these are mostly niche efforts. Grocery Outlets has 210 stores. Food banks depend heavily on volunteer labor and often lack the equipment and infrastructure (trucks, refrigerated storage space, etc.) that would allow them to collect and distribute surplus food efficiently. In the U.S. alone, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates, more than 35 million tons of food gets thrown out, because more efficient distribution is a significant logistical challenge. Items that sellers are offering are highly perishable and always changing. The needs of buyers are often ephemeral as well. A perfect match may exist only for a few hours and at a very specific price.
Now, however, modern technologies make it much easier to match disparate sellers with disparate buyers—think eBay, Airbnb, and Uber, all of which built huge new marketplaces around underutilized assets that were hard to sell at scale through traditional channels. But perhaps even more than spare bedrooms and empty passenger seats, unwanted food is a product category that is tailor-made for the kinds of decentralized and dynamic commerce that the Internet and smartphones can enable.
In the San Francisco Bay area, a website called CropMobster allows any supplier in the food chain to post alerts about excess food it's trying to sell or give away. The posts are immediately distributed to the free service's users through email, social media, a mobile app, and the website itself. In one recent posting, a farm-stand operator offered tomato plants for a $1 each. In another, a large egg operation sought a buyer who might have a monthly need for 200,000 "spent hens"—i.e., birds at the end of their productive egg-laying years but still potentially useful as food—at prices cheaper than chickens raised specifically for their meat would fetch.
In Washington, D.C., a for-profit startup called Food Cowboy bills itself as "Match.com meets Uber meets OpenTable." It's designed to help food banks, soup kitchens, and farmers—all of whom may have some use for imperfect foods—connect with truckers, distributors, wholesalers, and restaurants that need to unload food fast. When an intended recipient unexpectedly rejects a shipment because it fails to meet some specification, for example, the goods may nonetheless be edible.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists are not yet pouring millions into endeavors that hope to capture some of the value in the tens of billions of dollars of food we throw away each year. But ultimately sites like CropMobster and Food Cowboy will succeed, or not, based on their ability to scale—and that's what makes them so intriguing. For the most part, food system reformers have stressed a smaller-is-better doctrine. Family farms over factory farms. Modest portions over bottomless pasta bowls. Foods with five or fewer ingredients over more intensively processed fare.
But while marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb are intrinsically local phenomena, they're also global monoliths. An unwanted-food startup taking cues from small-batch, community-minded locavorists is unlikely to make much of a dent in the problem it hopes to solve. An aggressively ambitious platform for unwanted food that aspires to be Uber for leftovers and misshapen vegetables could connect huge numbers of buyers and sellers, though. And that increases the odds that the California egg farmer will find a customer somewhere in the world who can make use of 200,000 aging but potentially tasty spent hens each month.
In short, sometimes size correlates with thrift and stewardship. Many of the attributes that food system reformers have spent the last few decades decrying—speed, convenience, and a strong emphasis on the lowest possible price—are precisely what can lead to truly significant reductions in food waste. For anyone raised on a diet of heirloom sustainability, that will no doubt seem preposterous. But perhaps a few drops of organic maple syrup, diverted from a Trader Joe's dumpster and sold at a steep discount, will make the notion easier to swallow.
The post A New Life for Old Food appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Approximately 220 million Americans are eligible to vote, but only 130 million or so are likely to cast a ballot next November. While the 90 million who fail to make a trip to the polls will inspire hot takes and handwringing about the public's apathy and its deleterious impact on democracy, what about the apathy on the other side of the transaction?
The United States is a network of 330 million people, all with different interests, aptitudes, skills, and experience. Yet the primary way the government attempts to tap their collective brainpower on a regular basis is by asking them all the same simple questions at election time. Candidate A or Candidate B? Yes or No on Proposition X?
Over the last two decades, great efforts have been made to use technology to democratize campaign fundraising and help people become more engaged and informed voters. In contrast, little attention has been paid to a far more ambitious and potentially transformative quest: using technology to help people become more engaged and productive citizens, in ways that truly harness the full range of their skills and expertise.
One effort to do exactly that is Challenge.gov. Created in 2010 and run by the General Services Administration (GSA), it offers a common platform where federal agencies list prize competitions open to the public. In April, for example, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced that it's seeking a turbine engine with two or more times the fuel efficiency of current small turbines and three or more times the power-to-weight ratio of a standard aviation piston engine. And it will pay $2 million to the first person or team who successfully fulfills these requirements.
In its first five years of existence, Challenge.gov hasn't generated a huge amount of attention or activity. To date, approximately 70 federal agencies have posted around 400 competitions, eliciting responses from 50,000 or so "solvers" and awarding $90 million in prizes.
But even with this small data set, the versatility and potential usefulness of Challenge.gov is clear. Some agencies are simply using it as a kind of outreach or publicity tool. In one recent contest, for example, the Department of Consumer Safety challenged schoolkids to create posters that convey the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Others, however, are essentially using the website as a new form of procurement. In some instances, the goods or services they seek are fairly general. The National Institute on Drug Abuse is now offering $100,000 for "bold new ideas" on how to manage and improve the clinical quality of addiction treatment. Others are far more specific. NASA recently solicited designs for a 3D printable handrail clamp assembly for the International Space Station.
Traditionally, federal agencies engaged in procurement write very detailed specifications about what they're looking for, circulate requests for proposals in established channels like FBO.gov, then evaluate the proposals that come in.
This approach essentially encourages the agencies themselves to frame and shape potential solutions, and to determine which of these proposed solutions will provide the best result. Shifting the frameworks of procurement to a prize format, however, alters the process. Instead of trying to define and thus solve problems in advance, agencies define a more general outcome they're seeking to achieve without telling potential vendors exactly how to pursue it.
Jim Adams, NASA's acting chief technologist, addressed this dynamic in a May 2014 report on prizes published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "NASA is one of many organizations that follow a strict procedural approach to solutions," Adams exclaimed. "This is valuable, but has the potential to blind problem solvers to alternative solutions."
Like most crowdsourcing platforms, Challenge.gov shifts much of the risk and resource investment to potential creators. Federal agencies can describe what they're looking for in more general terms, then evaluate actual solutions, not just proposals. And ultimately, they only have to pay for outcomes, not development efforts. While various parties will attempt to deliver the more efficient turbine engine the DOD is hoping to find, the government will only pay the $2 million prize if someone does in fact build an engine that meets its specifications.
And it's not just that these kinds of platforms only reward positive outcomes. Typically, they also end up leveraging the incentive money they offer several times over. In the case of the NASA handrail clamp assembly challenge, the total prize money offered was just $2,000. But it attracted 474 entries. Had NASA been paying market rates to even just the top 10 percent of these entrants for the time they spent designing their submissions, its costs would have been far higher.
In general, crowdsourcing platforms inspire innovation by putting problems in front of more eyes. And Challenge.gov is already working in this fashion. Aaron Foss, who won a 2012 Federal Trade Commission challenge that sought new methods of helping consumers block telemarketing robocalls, told Forbes that he "never would have worked on the robocall problem if not for the challenge." Similarly, a NASA survey of approximately 3,000 challenge participants found that 81 percent had never previously responded to government requests for proposals.
In addition to more eyes, crowdsourcing platforms like Challenge.gov tend to attract fresh eyes—i.e., people with skills and knowledge that may be useful in a given domain, but who aren't specialists in that area. Because they aren't familiar with which types of approaches should yield potential solutions, they often pursue unconventional methods that turn out to also be effective.
In essence, then, crowdsourcing is a supremely democratic mechanism: It starts with the assumption that everyone has something potentially valuable to contribute. Voting, jury service, and other forms of civic engagement, like commenting on proposed government rules, make this assumption as well, but they're all far more proscriptive in the ways they permit individuals to perform those actions. When you vote, you must follow the same basic set of processes as everyone else.
What makes participating in a Challenge.gov contest so unique in terms of civic engagement is how much latitude it gives to participants. Like voting and jury service, it's an explicitly collective activity that can help instill a sense of being a part of something greater than oneself. But it's also explicitly geared to individuals. It asks people to identify areas of interest to them where they think their unique skills and attributes may help them provide a solution that will ultimately be of value to all. In this regard, it both plays to our growing preference for highly autonomous and narrowly tailored experiences and promotes comity as well. We're all in this together, America, trying to invent the wearable alcohol biosensor!
And of course there's the lure of cash prizes. On the one hand, market-based civic engagement may not seem like civic engagement at all. But the federal government already spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on procurement. Shifting some of that activity to a platform that is more open, transparent, and competitive than traditional channels will likely cost less, not more. And a greater number of participants will have a shot at the money that does get spent.
In the end, the democratic promise of Challenge.gov is so great it almost seems like a mistake to leave it in the hands of the government. What it needs is a Jeff Bezos or a Pierre Omidyar at the helm, someone with the expertise and the capital to take it from 100 challenges a year to 100 challenges a day. Or perhaps we should make it a self-directed contest: The first person who figures out how to triple Challenge.gov's traffic wins a million dollars.
Related: Should the Government Regulate Paid Dinner Parties?
The post Better Government Through Crowdsourcing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1935, the Supreme Court moved into its current home, a building designed to express as much majesty and unimpeachable authority as $3 million worth of marble could buy. (The overall budget for the project, in 1935 dollars, was $10 million.) According to a C-SPAN website devoted the Court, seven of the Court's nine justices immediately "refused to move into their new chambers." Frank Gilbert, grandson of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, has said his grandfather felt the plans for the building were "too grand." Harlan Fiske Stone, another Supreme Court justice at the time, remarked in a letter to his sons that the palatial structure was "almost bombastically pretentious."
But if the structure's deliberate magnificence struck many of its intended inhabitants as more fit for a king than a judge, its size also made the Court's proceedings far more accessible to the public than it had been in its previous digs. The new courtroom may have featured Italian marble columns reportedly procured with the assistance of Benito Mussolini. But it also included space for an audience of approximately 400. By contrast, the Old Senate Chamber, where the Supreme Court sat from 1860 to 1935, could only accommodate 150.
Alas, today's justices seem far more taken with their marble palace's heavy-handed stateliness than its accessibility. In early March, in anticipation of imminent Supreme Court hearings on cases involving the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, a group called Fix the Court bought airtime on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Comedy Central to promote a long-standing dream of open-government advocates: to make the Supreme Court's "biggest decisions" at least as accessible to the American public as Seinfeld reruns, Swiffer commercials, and weather forecasts. These activists want to televise the Supreme Court.
Only two photographs of the Supreme Court in session exist, and both of those were taken in the 1930s by photographers who'd smuggled cameras into the courtroom. According to Sonja West, a law professor who wrote about these incidents for Slate in 2012, the first unauthorized shutterbug "faked a broken arm and hid a camera in his sling." The second concealed a small camera in her handbag; its lens protruded through a hole the woman had fashioned to look like "an ornament."
Both photos ended up in print, the first in Fortune, the latter in Time. At the time they were taken, there was apparently no formal law against photographs in the courtroom—but that changed in 1946, with the implementation of Federal Rule 53. Applicable to all federal courts, this states that "except as otherwise provided by a statute or these rules, the court must not permit the taking of photographs in the courtroom during judicial proceedings or the broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom."
In 1972, this prohibition was explicitly extended to television broadcasting. But eventually some courts began to experiment with TV. A 2012 CNN report notes that the Illinois Supreme Court started allowing cameras "as early as 1983" and New York's highest court "first authorized TV coverage in 1987." Even some federal courtrooms have included cameras on a trial basis. Currently, 14 federal courts are participating in a pilot program that began in 2011 and is scheduled to run through July 2015. Collectively, they've televised at least a portion of the proceedings from more than 140 cases to date, all of which are archived at the federal judiciary's Cameras in Courts website.
But in the Supreme Court, even the most obsolete Instamatic is viewed as an emphatically prohibited device capable of disrupting the institution's stately decorum. And a Sony Handycam is apparently a kind of death ray capable of disintegrating delicate judicial sternums and pelvic girdles on contact. "The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body," now-retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter boasted in 1996.
In an era when the possibility of body-camming every police enforcement of local jaywalking laws is in play, the Supreme Court's refusal to allow greater public access to its proceedings is increasingly at odds with contemporary standards and expectations of government openness. Televising oral arguments would afford the general public greater insight into how the Court operates and allow it to participate more fully in the decisions that end up shaping life in the U.S.
What could we lose by curtailing this very public institution's carefully guarded right to privacy? One argument posits that regular TV exposure might, as a 2006 Congressional Research Service report put it, "result in increased threats against judges, lawyers, and other participants in the courtroom." More often, cameras' opponents worry that their presence will erode the Court's carefully cultivated atmosphere of seriousness, dispassion, and non-partisanship.
"We don't want to become entertainment," Justice Antonin Scalia exclaimed in October 2005, when Maria Bartiromo asked him about the issue on The Today Show. "There's something sick about making entertainment out of real people's legal problems." Scalia has also worried that broadcasting the proceedings in full might allow video clips to be taken out of context in ways that could ultimately misinform the public rather than inform it.
But what seems to concern justices the most are neither security issues nor the possibility of media manipulation. It's how the lure of the cameras might exacerbate their own inner Judge Judys. "I think the temptation to grandstand in front of a camera is so huge," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said at a sold-out luncheon and book signing that took place in West Palm Beach, Florida, earlier this year.
Justice Anthony Kennedy struck a similar note in 2007. "If you introduce cameras, it is human nature for me to suspect that one of my colleagues is saying something for a soundbite," he said at a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. "Please don't introduce that insidious dynamic into what is now a collegial court."
What such declarations fail to acknowledge is that the Supreme Court is already playing to an audience when it hears oral arguments—a live audience of approximately 400 journalists, members of the Supreme Court bar, elected officials, friends of the Court, and everyday U.S. citizens who react audibly in moments of high drama or comic relief. Indeed, at least two academic studies of Supreme Court laughter frequency have been published in the last decade. If the justices truly believe their operations can't withstand the disruptive influence of a few barely visible and remotely operated cameras, shouldn't they ban the hundreds of living and breathing distraction devices who pack the courtroom during oral arguments?
Granted, this would mean each justice would no longer get highly sought-after tickets—"about nine apiece" according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal article—to distribute to friends, family, and well-connected insiders each session. And the practice of allowing unconnected citizens to enter in groups of 30 for three-minute viewing sessions would end as well, thus robbing the Court of a tradition that lends a touch of Disneyland-like gravitas to the proceedings. The air of sober and equally applied justice that arises when spectators have paid as much as $6,000 to obtain a seat would also disappear.
The Court is by design and tradition an intensely theatrical spectacle. And in reality, its long-standing ban on cameras and TV broadcasting is its grandest piece of theater. It helps perpetuate the conceit that the Court operates with supreme impartiality, sequestered from democracy and all its partisan corruptive influences and attachments, functioning as a kind of abstract mechanism that proceeds methodically and comprehensively through cases to arrive at logical, dispassionate, and carefully considered conclusions.
To reveal the wrinkled and hairy wizards in the heart of Oz would jeopardize this grand conceit. And if this amounts to trading one form of theater for another, at least the new one would promote transparency and inclusiveness over pomp and cronyism.
The post Cameras in the Court appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>No one has ever called Milwaukee "the Silicon Valley of the Midwest." Or even "the Silicon Valley of Wisconsin." And they're not likely to any time soon, especially if state regulators get their way.
In November 2014, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that the city would be getting its first intensive computer coding school, a.k.a. "computer boot camp" or "coding academy," at the beginning of 2015. That didn't happen. In January the Journal-Sentinel reported that the Global Entrepreneurship Collective, the nonprofit organizer behind the proposed Ward 5 Code Camp, would be postponing its debut to address regulatory requirements imposed by a state agency, the Educational Approval Board (EAB).
The EAB oversees private postsecondary education institutions in Wisconsin that are vocational in nature and not licensed or regulated by any other agency or public board. To comply with state regulations, Ward 5 must complete a lengthy application, pay the EAB a $2,000 fee, and buy a $25,000 surety bond. Unable to complete these tasks by its January start date, Ward 5 refunded tuition fees to students who had signed up for its $6,500 program, and said it would try to open at a later date.
What exactly is the EAB trying to protect the citizens of Wisconsin from—besides the possibility of obtaining a high-paying job in the tech industry?
Coding academies are a relatively new phenomenon. Typically, they offer immersive programs that teach students how to code in JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and other in-demand languages in just 9 to 12 weeks. Classes are held on a daily basis, generally from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and many programs tell students they should expect to devote at least 20-40 more hours a week beyond classroom time to complete their assignments. Ward 5's $6,500 tuition is on the low end of the coding academy spectrum. Dev Bootcamp, located in San Francisco, charges $13,950; Hack Reactor, another San Francisco coding academy, charges $17,780.
For the sake of comparison, tuition for a 12-week quarter at Stanford University runs around $15,000 these days. But if these coding academy upstarts are charging as much as our most elite institutions of higher learning, they're also promising extremely favorable outcomes for students who complete the accelerated programs. On its website, Hack Reactor claims a "99 percent graduate hiring rate," with average starting salaries at $105,000. Zipfian Academy says that 91 percent of its graduates get jobs at companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Tesla within six months of completing the program, with an average base salary of $115,000. App Academy says that 98 percent of its graduates "have offers or are working in tech jobs," and that 2014 graduates from its San Francisco program "received an average salary of $105,000."
Regulators have shown an interest in these California-based academies as well. In January 2014, the state's Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) sent warning letters to at least a half dozen local coding programs. According to VentureBeat, which first reported on the letters, the coding academies were given two weeks to "start coming into compliance" with BPPE regulations. If they didn't, they risked $50,000 fines and forced closure.
Like the EAB, the BPPE operates under the mantle of consumer protection. On its website, it explains that California was known as the "diploma mill capital of the world" in the 1980s. And presumably its mandate is to weed out institutions that consist of little more than a charlatan with a post office box and a stack of fancy-looking certificates he's willing to dole out for a few thousand bucks. The BPPE demands that schools submit building plans and campus maps as part of their application process, as well as asking for evidence that all instructors have a college degree and at least three years of teaching experience. The regulators say they wants to make sure that any private postsecondary institution that is charging $2,500 or more in tuition to students, and promising some vocational benefit, is offering actual instruction. (Institutions that charge less than $2,500 total in tuition, or offer only avocational or recreational instruction, are exempt from the BPPE's purview.)
But how can you be a diploma mill if you don't actually issue diplomas? Unlike the shady operations the BPPE is designed to prevent-or the thousands of accredited U.S. colleges and universities that grant degrees—the coding academies are not in the business of selling certification. All they offer students is instruction and a shot at a high-paying tech job. And in turn, that's all that students can buy from them.
If you graduate from Harvard, Stanford, or even some little-known state college and you are not crazy about the education you got, well, at least you've got a sheepskin that gets your foot in the door in situations where a bachelor's degree exists as the default filter. If you graduate from Hack Reactor or Dev Bootcamp, you better hope you've learned something about making calls to an API because your skills are all you leave with.
On the flipside, coding academies have a strong incentive to teach their students. By removing certification from their offerings and tying their value so closely to their ability to produce graduates who are able to find six-figure tech jobs with their new coding skills, the academies make themselves far more accountable than traditional universities. When was the last time that you saw even Harvard promising that 98 percent of its graduates emerge with an average starting salary of $105,000?
To make sure they can produce students who can help them achieve such high job placement rates, the coding academies don't just accept anyone who has the ability to pay tuition. Most are selective—Hack Reactor reportedly accepts fewer than 10 percent of its applicants. In addition, many require students to successfully complete preliminary programs remotely before they actually come to the boot camp portion of the curriculum. And some, like App Academy, defer payment until students complete the program and land a position.
The kind of oversight that regulatory agencies like the EAB and the BPPE want to exercise over coding academies has some value. Information about graduation rates and job placement rates can help aspiring students choose which programs to pursue.
But the supervision these agencies provide also comes with signification costs. More than a year after the BPPE sent letters to the coding academies, none of them are licensed yet. "Licensing is a lengthy process for schools," says Russ Heimerich, deputy director of communications for California's Department of Consumer Affairs. In addition to all the paperwork the academies must complete, there will be financial obligations as well: A $5,000 application fee, plus 0.75 percent of their annual tuition revenues, capped at $25,000.
General Assembly, one of the institutions the BPPE targeted last year, reports on its website that it submitted an application and is waiting to hear back. App Academy echoes this experience. "We do not have a license from the BPPE, but we are working toward it," an App Academy spokesperson says. "Unfortunately it is a multi-year process."
Of course, now that the Internet exists, oversight is a far more abundant commodity than it once was. While the BPPE has yet to post any information about these schools for the benefit of prospective students, Yelp.com has nearly 100 reviews of Hack Reactor alone. Quora.com has more than 50. And Course Report, a site that specifically bills itself as a resource for individuals in the process of choosing a coding academy, already has a placeholder page for Milwaukee's Ward 5. If the program ever makes it past the barriers imposed by 20th century regulators, the real scrutiny and assessment will begin.
The post Helpful Hackers vs. College Regulators appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1979, a robot killed a human for the first time. It happened at a Ford facility in Flat Rock, Michigan, in an elaborate five-level structure called a core stacker where 10 robots continuously stored and retrieved large metal castings. Litton Industries, which built the core stacker and the robots that toiled there, described it as an "unattended system." But according to a 1984 Omni feature about the incident, the machines actually required a great deal of intervention in practice—people had to tweak alignments and pick up dropped objects on a regular basis.
But the robots, which glided along rail-like tracks in near silence, continued operating even when fragile, fleshy human beings were nearby. And one day in 1979, one of those machines, which was equipped with sensors that allowed it to "see" some components of the system but apparently not people, rolled up behind Robert Williams and struck his head, killing him. A jury instructed Litton Industries to pay $10 million in damages to Williams' family. Presumably, the robot got off scot-free.
No account of the incident suggests the robot acted with deliberate malice, or even recklessness, but the incident set the stage for future dystopias nonetheless. We had begun to create a new category of machines that were capable of killing us—and unlike, say, cars, guns, or roller coasters, these new machines were deliberately imbued with a degree of autonomy that could potentially make their behavior somewhat unpredictable. That autonomy would only increase over time.
Thirty-six years later, the worldwide robot population has exploded, and the bots are increasingly sophisticated. Their designers have gotten more sophisticated too, and that helps mitigate some of their potential danger. The Litton Industries robots weighed 2,500 pounds and issued no warning noises when they moved. Today's robots boast sensors that help them avoid collisions with humans, they're often built out of light-weight and forgiving materials, and they're often designed to be easy to shut off.
But as artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems—including bots that exist as nothing more than lines of code—become increasingly pervasive and autonomous, it's only natural to assume that their potential for unexpected and unwanted behavior is going to increase too. In short, some robots are going to commit crimes.
Take a recent project by a couple of Swiss artists. They created an automated shopping bot, gave it a budget of $100 in bitcoin per week, and instructed it to go on a buying spree at a darknet market that offered thousands of items for sale—some legal, others not.
The bot bought a variety of items, including 10 ecstasy pills. In the wake of its buying spree, various observers entertained the notion of whether or not the artists might be criminally liable for the bot's actions. But while the potential liability of the artists was indeed interesting, another possibility emerged that was even stranger than arresting human beings for something a bot did without the explicit instruction or knowledge of its creators or operators. The authorities could arrest the bot.
In this particular instance, we know a crime was committed: Ecstasy pills were purchased. And if whatever local laws are in play suggest the artists aren't criminally liable for that purchase, then who is, except the bot that committed the act?
Charging robots and other A.I. systems with crimes may seem absurd. And locking up, say, an incorrigibly destructive Roomba in solitary confinement sounds even more preposterous. How exactly do we punish entities whose consciousness arises from computer code?
These are the kinds of questions the law professor Gabriel Hallevy addresses in his 2013 book When Robots Kill: Artificial Intelligence Under Criminal Law.
Hallevy, who teaches law at Israel's Ono Academic College, argues that there are both social benefits and a legal precedent to applying criminal liability to A.I. systems when they misbehave.
There's certainly a rationale for this perspective. The coming proliferation of robots is creating a fair amount of anxiety, at least among the human punditocracy. Many of their concerns are economic in nature-they're worried that robots are on the verge of putting everyone out of work. But robot anxiety is broader than that. There are concerns about drones and privacy, concerns about how self-driving cars will make snap decisions when lives are at stake, concerns about what happens when we unleash millions of intelligent entities that have the capacity to make autonomous decisions instead of just following predictable preprogrammed routines. Decades of sci-fi stories have primed us to imagine the worst.
Perhaps our legal system can assuage these fears somewhat. "Criminal law plays an important role in giving people a sense of personal confidence," Hallevy writes. "If any individual or group is not subject to the criminal law, the personal confidence of the other individuals is severely harmed because those who are not subject to the criminal law have no incentive to obey the law." But if we understand that drug-buying bots and self-driving cars must abide by the same rules we all follow, and face similar punishments when they transgress, perhaps some of our anxieties about their potential behavior will dissipate.
Is this perspective fair to robots, though? Essentially, it puts them on the same level as people, even though they're clearly not human. The robot that killed Robert Williams in 1979 had no conception of morality. Neither did the ecstasy-buying bot.
In Hallevy's estimation, such concerns are unfounded. "Criminal liability does not require that offenders possess all human capabilities, only some," he writes. "If an AI entity possesses these capabilities, then logically and rationally, criminal liability can be imposed whenever an offense is committed."
What matters, Hallevy suggests, is not moral accountability or an A.I. system's ability to grasp concepts like good and evil, but rather culpability. If any entity—human or robot—intentionally engages in actions that are prohibited by law, then criminal liability may be imposed. (Sometimes, of course, failure to act, a.k.a. negligence, is also grounds for criminal liability.)
Conversely, robots that are sophisticated enough to be held criminally liable for their actions may also obtain protections under the law that go beyond those your lawnmower may enjoy. "This situation is similar to corporations, which are non-human legal entities," Hallevy explained in an email. "Corporations are subject to criminal liability, and part of that 'deal' is that they have certain basic rights. Consequently, corporations have the right to sue humans, corporations and even their 'owners' (the stock-holders). If we think of AI entities similarly as corporations, we would not see a significant difference."
In his book, Hallevy elaborates on the notion of corporations as a precedent regarding our potential treatment of robots. They're not individuals, and they have no moral sentiments or thoughts or feelings of any kind; yet we often find them guilty of crimes and impose punishments on them, independently of specific corporate employees who may also be involved in a crime's commission.
While A.I. systems may indeed be criminally liable for acts they commit in certain situations, that doesn't mean they're easily or effectively punishable. As satisfying as it might be to deliver 50 lashes to a robot butler who cuts in line in front of you at Walgreen's, that form of justice would be meaningless to the unfeeling machine.
But as Hallevy writes in his book, some traditional functions of punishment, like rehabilitation and incapacitation, are applicable to A.I. entities. A robot that commits some criminal act and doesn't learn on its own that such acts are prohibited could potentially be "rehabilitated" through reprogramming. And if reprogramming is ineffective, incapacitation for A.I. systems is largely analogous to incarceration for human beings: A killer robot that's locked up or disabled simply won't be able to kill again, regardless of its rehabilitative capacity.
In one light, the notion of heavily manacled Roombas suggests a police state run amok, a totalitarian future where the government's appetite for discipline and punishment extends to whole new classes of beings. What's compelling about Hallevy's perspective is that it involves neither pre-emption of new technologies nor expansion of the law. Instead of banning advances in robotics before they're even implemented or insisting we need to draft a wide range of new regulations, he argues that "the current criminal law is adequate to cope with AI technology." Whatever brave new worlds are coming, perhaps we're already equipped to handle them.
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]]>In 1992, when The Man from Hope established a new standard for campaign trail empathy, there were no smartphones, no wireless activity wristbands, no life-tracking apps, no cloud. Bill Clinton felt our pain, but couldn't do much about it. In contrast, today's government caregivers have a vast new arsenal of tools at their disposal. They can feel our pain, aggregate it, analyze it, and implement policies that will reduce it by at least 10 percent. Or at least they can aspire to such grand ambitions.
"There's this pretension that everything that's of importance to human beings can be measured," says Mark D. White, chair of the philosophy department at the College of Staten Island. "This whole trend toward digitizing human life and quantifying it. And if something can be measured, it can also be influenced, manipulated, engineered."
Granted, the power to perform such feats is typically presented as the domain of technology companies, not the Department of Health and Human Services. In the reigning narrative, Silicon Valley is an anti-government force, a haven for techno-libertarian disruptors who want to gut licensing commissions, review boards, and all the other safeguards of the regulatory state and replace them with citizen-bureaucrats who maintain order through one-star Yelp reviews and below-average Uber ratings.
But whatever Silicon Valley has done so far to dismantle Big Taxi, it has also popularized and normalized a mind-set that the writer Evgeny Morozov calls "solutionism"-the idea that all human systems can be improved through the judicious application of sensor networks, commodity computing clusters, and other technologies that amplify our ability to track, say, the length of our morning showers or the number of milk cartons we throw in the trash instead of recycling.
Solutionism isn't just for start-ups. As pioneer solutionist Bill Gates suggested in a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed, it's highly extensible. "In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition," he wrote. "You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal."
Or to put it another way: What's good for the software mogul is good for the philanthropist. And, by extension, the policy maker.
The idea that slow-moving and largely unaccountable government agencies can increase their efficiency and impact by adopting the goal-setting discipline of private enterprise is a central tenet of the solutionist vision. But it also shifts the business of governance from processes to outcomes. It imposes an imperative not to create laws and institutions that make it possible for people to safely and freely pursue their own paths through life, but rather to achieve specific results.
In his book The Manipulation of Choice, published in 2013, Mark White examined the political ramifications of choice architecture, a.k.a. "nudging" or "libertarian paternalism," the practice of making a "good" choice the easy choice. In his book The Illusion of Well-Being, published in 2014, and in a recent paper authored for George Mason University's Mercatus Center called "The Problems with Measuring and Using Happiness for Policy Purposes," White addresses our increasing faith in quantification. There is obviously a great deal of overlap between these two subjects; the more relentlessly you measure people's behavior and begin to understand their actions and behavior, the greater the temptation to steer that behavior in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways.
In The Illusion of Well-Being, White focuses on efforts to enhance gross domestic product (GDP) and other measures of economic output "with more direct measures of people's actual well-being-in simple terms, their happiness." For decades, economists, behavioral psychologists, and the occasional benevolent despot have argued that merely toting up economic gains from year to year does not give us a complete enough picture of a country's aggregate well-being. We need more wide-ranging and sophisticated data to help guide our policy makers.
In 1972, the fourth Dragon King of Bhutan pioneered the idea of a "Gross National Happiness Index." Since then, the idea that we might express such qualitative phenomena as "happiness" or "life satisfaction" in quantitative ways has gained a surprising degree of credence. In 2011, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced that it was considering how various forms of happiness measurement might help improve "regulatory policy in ways that promote the goals of economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation."
But as White argues, the sense of precision such quantification produces is largely illusory. How do we arrive at a single definition of "happiness" or "well-being" that we can apply to people of widely divergent temperaments and living situations? And even if we could agree on a definition, how do we then accurately translate highly subjective feelings and perceptions into actionable data?
Typically, happiness surveys ask respondents to choose from a selection of potential phrases to describe how they are feeling, then convert these answers into numerical amounts. "We know the spaces between inch or centimeter markings on a ruler are the same, as are the spaces between degrees on a thermometer," White observes in his book. "But we shouldn't have any confidence that the difference between zero as 'utterly unhappy' and one as 'fairly unhappy' has any particular meaning, much less the same meaning as the difference between one as 'fairly unhappy' and two as 'neither happy nor unhappy.'"
As arbitrary as these transmutations may be, they offer the appearance of precision. And that precision-and the seeming knowledge and insight it implies-legitimates intervention. If we can determine that banning all car traffic for one day each month in a given test city leads to a 0.5 percent uptick in Average Regional Happiness, aren't we compelled, and perhaps even morally obligated, to implement this tactic on a national scale?
Alas, the quantified state's interventionist mandate remains just as presumptuous in cases where the data is more solid—say Gross National Electrodermal Response or Aggregate Shower Hours. "All measures-including [gross national product]-are outcome-oriented measures that in my view are irrelevant to proper governance," White declares. "Government should be guaranteeing just and fair and free processes for people to make choices and live lives of their own choosing, without harming anyone else. Even with GDP-let's say that GDP falls by 2.1 percent one quarter. If you take the viewpoint that that decline was the result of decisions made voluntarily, under relatively good information, what does it matter if it fell? What right does the government have to say, 'This collective mass of decisions people made weren't good enough, so we're going to fix that'?"
But how likely is it that government policy makers at any level will decide to check their ambitions when it's getting easier and easier to collect and/or manufacture data that legitimizes increasingly proactive behavior? If anything, the idea that government should adopt such tactics will only become more commonplace. After all, it's what Google does. It's what Facebook does. If the Department of Health and Human Services is going to pour millions into combatting obesity, why not measure outcomes? And once we understand what influences those outcomes, shouldn't we deploy tactics that help deliver the intended results?
The problem is that such thinking imposes a viewpoint about what's "right" or what's "best" upon myriad individual lives. A state that emphasizes processes over outcomes is a pluralist state, whose citizens have the freedom to define and pursue happiness in their own particular fashion. A quantified state optimizes outcomes by narrowing possibilities—and establishing "efficiency and uplift for all" as the new national mandate. You don't need a sophisticated sensor network to register that as a step backward.
The post The Quantified Citizen appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Taking candy from a baby is easy. Taking sugar from a senator? Not so much. For decades, economists, free market think tanks, good-government advocates, newspaper columnists, and even the occasional elected official have decried the special treatment enjoyed by the American sugar industry.
Under current policies, U.S. sugarcane and sugar beet farmers receive minimum price guarantees regardless of market conditions. In addition, the federal government allots 85 percent of the U.S. sugar market to domestic producers, and it imposes quotas and tariffs on the 40 countries that are allowed to export sugar to America.
In 1993, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) estimated that such policies were costing U.S. consumers $1.4 billion a year because they resulted in "higher prices for domestic sugar." Twenty years later, the University of Michigan–Flint economist Mark J. Perry estimated that this annual cost had grown to $3 billion by 2012, and that consumers and U.S. sugar-using businesses had paid "more than twice the world price of sugar on average since 1982."
In other words, sugar producers are getting a sweet deal, while consumers are getting screwed.
Alas, it's not just the nation's 3,913 sugar beet farms and 666 sugarcane farms that crave the sugar program's artificially sweetened revenues. The program also persists because it offers a steady source of money to elected officials.
In a June 2014 report, Bryan Riley, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, noted that while sugar constitutes just 2 percent of the total value of U.S. crop production, the nation's sugar farmers account for 35 percent of the crop industry's total campaign contributions and 40 percent of its lobbying expenditures.
Over the years, major sugar companies such as American Crystal Sugar and Florida Crystals have donated millions of dollars to individual candidates and political action committees. According to OpenSecrets.org, the industry as a whole has donated $41.7 million since 1990. Traditionally it has contributed more to Democrats than Republicans, but in the 2012 election cycle it split its contributions 50/50.
The industry's aggressive lobbying gets results. In 2008, for example, the U.S. sugar trade got somewhat less regulated, when provisions that were drafted as part of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement finally kicked in and gave Mexican producers the ability to export unlimited amounts of duty-free sugar to the U.S. In March 2014, however, the U.S. sugar industry accused Mexican producers of dumping their crops on the U.S. market—i.e., selling it for less than the cost of its production, or for less than its domestic price—and asked the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce to take corrective action.
In October, Commerce announced an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that will "prevent imports from being concentrated during certain times of the year, limit the amount of refined sugar that may enter the U.S. market, and establish minimum price mechanism to guard against undercutting or suppression of U.S. prices." So don't expect a price cut on Snickers bars any time soon.
Perhaps because the extra $3 billion we spend on sugar each year is amortized over a few hundred billion cans of soda and other sugar-laden treats, consumers don't seem to mind it much.
And yet if we're truly in the midst of a "libertarian moment," when everyday Americans are supposedly fed up with politics as usual and corporate cronyism, how does sugar protectionism remain as American as apple pie? If there ever was a cause that might still inspire comity amongst the highly polarized populous, surely it's sugar.
Indeed, while 11 other countries consume more sugar per capita than the U.S. does, the average American still enjoys around 75 pounds of sugar a year. (This figure doesn't include high fructose corn syrup, zero-calorie artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose, or zero-calorie naturally derived sweeteners such as stevia.) Our appetite for the stuff cuts across all demographics: Whether you're a progressive elitist snapping up $5 Cronuts in Manhattan or a red-state value shopper buying club packs of Little Debbie Nutty Bars at Costco, you stand to gain from lower sugar prices.
Naturally, sugar farming lobbyists insist this isn't the case. "Sure, cheap subsidized foreign sugar might sound great," exclaims an American Sugar Alliance (ASA) promotional video that alludes to the fact that sugar farmers in Brazil, Mexico, and other countries benefit from their own homegrown subsidy programs. "But depending on others for food never works out as expected."
If we lose our strategic capacity to plant sugar crops, the video suggests, we'll compromise our food security, putting ourselves at the mercy of foreign sugar overlords able to increase prices when global supplies tighten. In October 2013, Tom Giovanetti, president of a Dallas-based research organization called the Institute for Policy Innovation, elaborated on this theme in an essay that argues against unilateral U.S. sugar subsidy disarmament. "Eventually," he concluded, "foreign producers would take advantage of a decimated U.S. domestic sugar industry and would raise prices on U.S. consumers."
But could Brazil—"the OPEC of sugar," according to the ASA—really jack up prices until even those club packs of Little Debbie bars become a rare delicacy only the 1 percent can afford?
"Why on earth wouldn't another producer come and try to take some market share if he sees a monopolist raking in the money?" asks Ike Brannon, formerly chief economist of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and now a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, in a May 2014 editorial that appeared in USA Today.
Indeed, in a U.S. market free of price supports, allotments, tariffs, and quotas, Brazil wouldn't just be competing with domestic producers for America's business. It'd be competing with the hundred other countries where sugar farming occurs. And as the American Sugar Alliance and various other sugar farming advocates have themselves pointed out, scores of additional countries are just as willing as Brazil or Mexico to subsidize their crops. So if one country even started flirting with the idea of raising prices to non-competitive levels, others would jump at the opportunity to gain a foothold in the large U.S. market by offering more attractive prices.
The truth is that America's food security would in no way be jeopardized by the loss of a domestic sugar industry. Even America's Ding Dongs security would remain intact. "Sugar is a global commodity, with hundreds of thousands of producers all over the world," Perry explains. "This weakens the possibility that one could ever have market power over the U.S. Also there are close substitutes for sugar, like high fructose corn syrup and honey, which further weakens the case that the U.S. could ever be at the mercy of one country, or even a small group of them."
To bolster his argument, Perry points to coffee and bananas, two other commodity crops which we do not produce domestically in appreciable quantities and yet somehow manage to consume without having to pay monopoly prices to whoever the "OPEC of bananas" is.
Another case in point: TVs. U.S.-based TV manufacturing all but disappeared by the mid-1990s, but when was the last time you heard anyone complaining about the dearth of affordable flat-screens?
"Except for rare cases that involve national security or national defense, there is never any economic or logical reason to protect a domestic industry against foreign competition, and sugar is no exception," Perry concludes. Of course, sometimes all you need to keep a bad policy is a political reason. For many elected officials, the sugar program makes perfect sense: They enrich sugar farmers, then the sugar farms sweeten their campaign coffers.
It's a pretty small-stakes racket, but that's exactly what makes it so symbolically significant. Sugar reform should be easy. It would not require millions of Americans to give up cherished entitlements. It would not put any national interests at risk. (The worst case scenario: We'd have to change Sugar Babies' name to High Fructose Corn Syrup Babies.) If we genuinely have any interest in scaling back the kind of regulatory overreach that invariably promotes cronyism, sugar reform is the sweetest, lowest-hanging fruit on the tree.
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]]>In the 20th century, flying cars expressed the ultimate dream of personal autonomy, the power to propel yourself anywhere. In the 21st century, the stuff we want comes to us. For customers in a handful of cities who pay an annual $299 fee, Amazon promises same-day delivery of 500,000 items-everything from groceries to office equipment. "Place your order by 10 AM and have it by dinner," Amazon's website advises.
Soon you might only have to wait until lunch. In January 2014, Amazon patented a process it calls "anticipatory package shipping." Essentially, this involves predicting what items specific customers might buy, shipping those goods to nearby fulfillment centers, and possibly even loading them onto AmazonFresh delivery trucks before an actual order has been placed. This way, they'll be near at hand when the last remaining bottleneck in the company's increasingly efficient distribution chain-the slow-witted customer-finally realizes he has an urge to obtain a digital bath scale post-haste.
What Amazon is moving toward with such capabilities, Wired recently suggested, is a "21st-century version of the milkman and the mail carrier combined." And perhaps when it attains that status, it will attempt an even grander feat: Equaling the convenience of the 20th-century ice-cream truck.
In 1926, the citizens of YoungsÂtown, Ohio, could get a Good Humor bar delivered to them without lifting a finger. In the tradition of 19th-century peddlers, ice cream entrepreneur Harry Burt introduced a new technology of predatory retail, equipping a dozen Ford trucks with freezers and going out in search of customers wherever he could find them. A few decades later, the Good Humor fleet had grown to 2,000 trucks and was generating the bulk of the company's sales.
Rising gas prices and a shift toward the less dense suburbs ultimately undermined the power of this mobile distribution network. In the 1970s, Good Humor sold its vehicles to individual private operators. But conditions are shifting again. Our cities are packed with consumers who believe that atoms should arrive on their doorsteps nearly as fast as bits. Pick-up and delivery services proliferate in these places, and bulky and costly physical retail storefronts are beginning to feel like printing presses-obsolescing infrastructure that often adds little value.
Traditional retail won't disappear completely. In a bit of sales theater, Amazon itself is opening a bricks-and-mortar store in New York City that will give its customers there an opportunity to engage in heritage shopping. But if customers still do appreciate the instant gratification you can get at 7-Eleven, not to mention the opportunity to comprehensively assess a peach before purchase, why not combine such functionality with the convenience of mobile?
Amazon has yet to travel this particular last mile. Uber hasn't either. Over the last couple of years, the ridesharing service has dispatched local ice cream trucks to its customers one day each summer. While these events are intended to promote the convenience of Uber, they also complicate the traditional ice cream truck experience in a couple of ways. First the customer has to place an order to initiate a delivery. Then he has to stay chained to a specific address until the truck shows up. This is a step backward from the ultra-convenient approach Harry Burt pioneered in 1926, not a bold leap forward.
Imagine if Amazon's growing fleet of delivery vehicles functioned like true mobile retail units. With its deep knowledge of what people in various neighborhoods are buying, it could turn its trucks into rolling, demographically tailored convenience stores. If you were on the street as one was making its daily rounds through your neighborhood, you could hail it like a cab and purchase the latest model of its Fire Phone with a click of your old Fire Phone. If you were inside your house as a truck approached, your phone would alert with you with a signature jingle (or a well-timed SMS) and you could go outside to greet it.
It's not just that most delivery trucks don't act like truly mobile retailers these days. Most mobile retailers don't either. In the wake of the food truck vogue, other forms of truck-based entrepreneurism are starting to show up in cities around the country. There are flower trucks, dog-grooming trucks, skincare studios, clothing boutiques, even a mobile cigar lounge.
For budding entrepreneurs, the appeal of a truck is obvious. Because these other forms of mobile retail don't need kitchen equipment, they're generally much cheaper than a food truck-operators pay an average of around $20,000, according to a poll conducted by the American Mobile Retail Association (AMRA). A lease does not have to be secured. With only 50 to 200 square feet of floor space to fill at any one time, you don't need much inventory either. A mobile retail truck offers micro-entrepreneurs an inexpensive and flexible way to test new concepts and to determine where demand for such goods and services is strongest.
But like food trucks, most mobile retailers aren't that mobile. They drive to a designated spot, stop, and wait for customers. And in the current regulatory landscape, even this limited mobility is problematic. As soon as you start engaging in commerce on a truck, most municipalities require licensing of one sort or another-one reason why Amazon might be happy just to stick with delivery for now.
In addition, the rules and regulations for how mobile retailers can operate vary from city to city. "In Los Angeles, mobile boutique businesses are restricted to operate on private property," says AMRA president Stacey Jischke-Steffe. "Other cities, such as Santa Monica, have a peddler's permit which allows mobile boutiques to operate on public streets."
Jischke-Steffe says she has only heard of a few cases where cities do not allow mobile retailers to operate at all. "I just talked to a mobile boutique owner in South Florida that said some of the smaller towns in south Florida have denied allowing her to operate in any capacity."
Complying with multiple municipal codes undermines some of the flexibility and convenience that makes mobile retail an attractive venue for micro-entrepreneurism. "Here in the Bay Area, you could have an entrepreneur who's trying to sell in five different municipalities as they go to different festivals and outdoor markets," says Sarah Filley, executive director of Popuphood, a small business incubator based in Oakland, California. "As much as they would like to comply, they can't."
To make it easier for California's mobile retailers to operate more mobile-ly, Popuphood advocated for something it calls Standard Popup Regulations Zones, or SPURZ. A bill introduced in the state's legislature last year would have created model guidelines that cities across the state could adopt to regulate mobile retailers and other forms of temporary retail in a more streamlined way. But Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill in September 2014, so now Filley is trying to fund the development of a model ordinance through private sources, then encourage cities to adopt it once it exists.
In the meantime, technology is blurring the lines between retail and delivery in intriguing ways. If the transactions that occur on a truck are consummated by phone, with no actual cash changing hands, is it delivery or mobile retail?
In Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, a food company called Spoonrocket is now offering something that almost qualifies as a 21st century ice cream truck. Every day, its central facility produces a small number of meal choices, and these meals are loaded onto its cars, where they're stored in heating units. Then the cars simply head out to various neighborhoods and wait for customers to order. This way, there's always a car nearby in the areas that Spoonrocket serves, which allows it to deliver orders in 10 minutes or less.
Customers are expected to go out to the curb to complete the meal hand-off. Payments occur in advance online, so there's no other business to slow down the transaction. You just grab your food and go. The service has an app as well-and while you have a default address, you can enter others as well. So if you're walking down the street and you see a Spoonrocket car, you can place an order, provide a local address, and potentially get your meal in seconds rather than minutes.
For the moment, such functionality is limited to Mac & Cheese Italiano with Creamy Pesto or Grilled Chicken Apple Sausage with Chipotle BBQ Sauce. But imagine if Amazon were to embrace this approach. Suddenly, we'd be able to make hundreds, maybe thousands, of staple items appear at our curbs, at speeds that would even make George Jetson jealous.
The post Stop Complaining About That Flying Car. You Have Amazon. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For more than two decades, America's bank deserts have been afflicted by convenient access to payday loans. As alluring as giant bottles of soda pop, this consumer-friendly form of credit may look refreshing, its critics contend, but it leaves a bitter aftertaste of misery and exploitation. And sometimes these critics have a point.
Take the alleged actions of two Kansas City firms. According to separate complaints filed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission in September, both companies were pursuing a similar scheme-depositing money into the bank accounts of thousands of people who had provided personal information to payday loan comparison websites but hadn't actually solicited loans from the firms in question.
After making the initial deposits, the companies extracted hefty interest fees on a regular basis. In short order, some victims found they had paid hundreds of dollars to service loans they didn't even know about. Talk about predatory.
Yet despite such egregious tactics—and despite persistent calls for stricter regulation of the industry—consumer demand for short-term, high-interest, uncollateralized credit remains strong. Every year, approximately 12 million people take out payday loans, and many find significant value in the ability to do so. In a 2013 poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, 48 percent of respondents said that payday loans "mostly help" borrowers like themselves, 56 percent said the loans had "relieved stress and anxiety" in their lives, and 62 percent said they would use the service again if they found themselves in a financial bind. Imagine how much Congress would pay for approval ratings that high!
Of course, outperforming Capitol Hill is hardly a reason to brag. (In June 2014, Gallup found that just 15 percent of Americans think Congress3 is doing a good job.) And although the Pew poll respondents had good things to say about payday loans, they expressed some dissatisfaction with the industry, too. But while legislators and bureaucrats have interpreted that ambivalence as a mandate for more regulatory intervention, it could also be viewed as a cry for more entrepreneurial innovation. Millions of people use and value payday loans -they just want better ones.
Entrepreneurial reform is happening across all sectors of the financial services industry as tech-driven startups work to meet consumer demand for lower fees, better rates of return, clearer policies, and more holistic and personalized underwriting processes. As Austen Head, the founding data scientist at Earnest-an online lending institution targeting millennials-put it in a recent blog post, the traditional credit industry "functions as an investment tool for organizations that lend," rather than a system designed to help individuals achieve financial mobility. As a result, banks charge high interest rates to borrowers, offer low rates of return to depositors, and leave huge numbers of people poorly served.
Now, however, a wave of consumer-oriented lending institutions is starting to hit critical mass. Peer-to-peer platforms like Prosper.com and LendingClub.com offer lower interest rates to borrowers than credit cards and higher yields to investors than savings accounts. In September, Earnest introduced what it calls "merit-based interest rates." Instead of simply reviewing a loan applicant's credit score, it looks at her education history, employment background, LinkedIn profile, current income, and various other metrics-then offers loans at rates as low as 4.25 percent. Affirm, a startup from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin that finances online purchases, takes a similar approach, looking at a person's Facebook profile, his cellphone account, and other non-traditional information sources to help determine creditworthiness.
Opportunities to better serve payday loan users exist as well. One company hoping to capitalize on those opportunities is a startup called LendUp. In a best-case scenario, a person can apply for a LendUp account, obtain approval, and have money deposited into his bank account within 15 minutes. And with its elaborate dashboard, snazzy loan calculation sliders, and multiple user status levels, the whole LendUp experience feels deliberately gamified-probably owing to co-founder Jacob Rosenberg's history as a high-level executive at Zynga, the company that brought a thousand digital "FarmVille" chickens to your Facebook feed.
From a regulator's perspective, such attributes might serve as red flags: They're making credit too easy! Too fun! Addictive! But while LendUp amplifies the convenience and immediacy that made storefront payday lenders popular in the first place, it also makes transparency and consumer education core components of its service. "We want to make credit accessible and convenient," says LendUp Public Affairs Director Leslie Payne. "But we also want people to understand that this is an expensive form of credit."
Thus, when you use LendUp's loan calculator, it makes very clear how much interest you'll have to pay under different scenarios and what the ultimate annual percentage rate (APR) of that interest will be. In California, for example, a 15-day $250 loan will cost you $38.60 in interest and result in a total repayment of $288.60, with an APR of 375 percent. (Rates vary by state.)
These are fairly standard rates for the payday loan industry. What most differentiates LendUp is how it treats its customers over time. Payday lending is often characterized as a form of entrapment because many lenders allow or even encourage borrowers to "roll over" loans. Instead of paying the full amount of the loan-that is, the principal plus any fees and interest that have accrued-borrowers are given the option to only pay interest. In this way, a borrower can shell out $45 in interest payments for months on end without ever reducing the principal of the original loan.
LendUp, however, doesn't allow rollovers. "When folks can't pay us back, we work with them," Payne says. "We set up a plan where every dollar they send us goes against the original balance and the original fee at no cost to them." Failure to pay back a LendUp loan can still have negative consequences—the company's FAQ says that it may eventually refer deadbeats to collection agencies or take legal action against them. But LendUp borrowers will never spend hundreds of dollars in interest fees to service a $250 loan.
In addition to eliminating one of the most widely criticized aspects of payday lending—that ability to lock borrowers into an endless cycle of rollover payments—LendUp also addresses a payday loan shortcoming that even the industry's harshest critics tend to overlook: its failure to reward customers who pay off their loans on time. "If you pay back your credit card bill on time, you get rewarded with lower rates, a larger limit, and better credit scores," says Payne. "But with [traditional] payday loans, nothing ever changes. You still only have access to the same products, at the same rates."
As its name suggests, LendUp aims to offer customers a path out of the payday loan world. It has created a tiered platform it calls the "lending ladder." New customers are granted Silver status, which allows them to borrow a maximum of $250 at rates of around $17 per $100 in California. To move up the ladder to Gold, Platinum, or Prime status, you must acquire points, which you can do by paying back loans on time or watching educational videos and taking quizzes.
Ultimately, this approach facilitates what might be dubbed a benevolent form of lock-in. While customers aren't trapped into doing business with LendUp through loan rollovers, the ladder approach does encourage repeat business: Obtaining Prime status, for example, would likely require taking out, and paying off, anywhere from eight to 10 loans.
But there's also an extremely tangible reward at the end of this process. When you attain Prime status, you can borrow up to $1,000 at APRs between 19 percent and 29 percent. More importantly, LendUp will start reporting your payment behavior to the credit bureaus so that you can potentially qualify for even better credit options from other vendors. "Our thesis is that if you let people onto the platform, they can de-risk themselves by paying back loans on time and taking credit education courses," says Payne.
To ardent regulators, this may seem overly optimistic, a reckless means of permitting high-risk borrowers to potentially subvert their own financial destinies. But perhaps it's time to give such consumers a little more credit than that.
The post Meet the New Warm Fuzzy Payday Lenders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The 1979 movie Jesus features an English actor you've probably never heard of in the title role. Its special effects are amateurish. But in the 35 years since it made its debut, Jesus has achieved an impact far greater than other more celebrated 1979 releases, such as Alien and Apocalypse Now. The secret to its success? Two years after an initial run in theaters, its producer, a former gourmet food entrepreneur named Bill Bright, had the movie translated into Tagalog.
Other translations followed, and soon missionaries were lugging portable generators and projectors to remote African villages and screening the movie on bed sheets in India. Jesus has now been translated into more than 1,100 languages, and because of this accessibility, it has been viewed an estimated 6 billion times.
Evangelists aren't the only ones who have long recognized the virtues of cross-lingual engagement. By the end of World War II, the U.S.-funded Voice of America radio network was producing more than 1,000 different programs for worldwide broadcast in over 40 languages. In the late 1950s, the CIA had thousands of copies of a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago printed, which it then surreptitiously distributed to Soviet citizens.
And then there was Hollywood. While Tinseltown earned a reputation as the 20th century's greatest manufacturer of soft power, even its arsenal was relatively limited. As recently as 2001, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that studios generally dubbed films for distribution in just 10 major markets and subtitled copies for around 40 smaller ones. Just two local companies, it said, handled "most of Hollywood's subtitling work."
These days, you no longer need missionaries with bed sheets or CIA operatives to connect with audiences in far-flung locales. Anyone with a webcam and an Internet connection can do it. But as the story of Jesus and its myriad translations attests, the physical distribution of media is just one aspect of accessibility. Your grout-cleaning tutorial may be easily viewable in Sri Lanka now—but will viewers there truly comprehend it? To take full advantage of global video distribution platforms like YouTube, it's best to be a cat. Failing that, you need your work translated into lots of foreign languages.
As video content creators with global aspirations proliferate, subtitling services proliferate as well. But subtitling can still be somewhat pricey, particularly for amateurs on a shoestring budget. "A 3 minute video with two speakers and average speech density (100-150 spoken words per minute) will cost about $200-300 to subtitle for the first language," a service bureau called subtitleyourvideo.com advises. "Translation subtitling cost for additional languages will be lower."
There are alternatives, however. "Our goal is to help make all of the world's video accessible to anyone," says Dean Jansen, executive director of Amara.org, a website that aims to be "the Wikipedia of subtitling." An offshoot of a nonprofit called the Participatory Culture Foundation, Amara has developed a Web-based editor that makes it easy to subtitle videos in multiple languages. Content creators can do the work themselves or allow others to help. "There's a full history of every edit that happens in every language," says Jansen. "People who are working on a specific project can be notified if there's a new addition or change of some sort."
The basic service is free, but Amara also offers paid services for organizations that need more functionality. One early Amara adopter was a popular YouTube series called Epic Rap Battles of History, which features hip hop showdowns between such pairings as Pablo Picasso and PBS painting instructor Bob Ross. (Sample lyric from the latter: "You're a moody little genius, always so serious. I know, you must be on your Blue Period.")
"When the creators heard about the potential for doing crowd translation, they were really interested in it, but they were nervous too," says Jansen. "They were wondering if it was a good idea to turn the show's fans loose on content."
Indeed, if you were setting out to test the potential for verbal pranks and sabotage in the realm of collaborative subtitling, you'd be hard-pressed to identify a better test case than a venue for outlandish satire that targets young males. "They started with an internal test," says Jansen. "They put some videos in an unlisted channel and did one tweet about it."
According to Jansen, the show's creators were surprised both by the number of people who ended up participating in the test and by the number of language translations they created. The quality pleased them as well. "They had some people on staff who spoke some of the languages, and they found that the fans were really doing spot-on translations. They got the tone right and the humor right, because they knew the content so well."
To date, nearly 4,000 volunteers have added subtitles to two-dozen Epic Rap Battle videos. An episode starring Rasputin and Stalin has been translated into 59 languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Estonian, Korean, Icelandic, and Norwegian Bokmal.
Volunteer armies offer a clear economic advantage over other potential solutions, but they arguably offer a performance advantage as well. "Speech-to-text is one of the hardest artificial intelligence problems in the world and it's been that way for decades," says Roger Macdonald, who heads up the television division at the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library. "It's gotten better, but our lead engineer still describes most speech-to-text as 'craptioning.' And it really is. With captioning, the best way to do it is still human."
Even with human beings at the helm, the potential for error remains high when trying to reduce wordy soliloquies into caption-friendly soundbites, or when translating highly localized idioms from one language to another. That's why fans are such a valuable resource. A professional translator may have sufficient mastery of Estonian but lack the fluency in Epic Rap Battle's brand of humor. Not so the site's army of fans.
In other words, collaborative, fan-driven subtitling doesn't just promise cheaper and more ubiquitous subtitling—it promises better subtitling, subtitling that more accurately conveys the unique tones and meaning of the source material. And that, in turn, could lead to greater cross-cultural engagement.
As the parable of Jesus shows, massive global audiences await those who make the effort to make their content more accessible through translation. TED, the annual "ideas" confab, has embraced this notion whole-heartedly. The conference started encouraging volunteers to translate TED Talk videos in 2009, and began using Amara as its platform for doing so in 2012. During this time, approximately 27,000 volunteers have provided translations for more than 33,000 videos in more than 100 languages.
But the most profound effects of ubiquitous, crowd-sourced subtitling may derive not from content providers who are large enough to dream of international audiences that number in the millions or billions, but from those who amass audiences in the dozens or hundreds. Fifty-eight years ago, at the height of the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower convened a gathering dubbed the People to People Conference. "If we are going to take advantage of the assumption that all people want peace," he said, "then the problem is for people to get together and to leap governments—if necessary to evade governments—to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other."
The president was hoping to usher in a new age of democratized, peer-to-peer diplomacy, but he was ahead of his time—all he had at his disposal were sister city programs, pen pal exchanges, and book drives. Now our tools for leapfrogging governments and making direct personal contact with others around the globe are far more powerful. Services like Amara, which make our most immediate and personal medium even more immediate and personal, are just one more sign that we're heading toward a utopia of connectedness and greater understanding, where little is lost in translation.
The post The Surprising Power of Subtitles appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Remember when the planet's young people-or at least its youth-oriented jingle writers-almost convinced us that a bottle of Coca-Cola could play a pivotal role in achieving global harmony? While the "real thing" may have been a balm against the stings of Vietnam and other afflictions of the era, today's youthful idealists understand it will take a lot more than proprietary sugar-water and some attractive teenagers singing on a hilltop to combat melting polar ice caps, rising income inequality, and everything else that ails us. We need a genuine miracle elixir, not just a pause that refreshes.
Enter Soylent, the gulp that sustains. Its primary components are a powder made from maltodextrin, rice protein, oat flour, and more vitamins and minerals than mid-century food scientists ever managed to pack into a loaf of Wonder Bread, plus a liquid blend of canola oil and fish oil. Mix the powder with the oil, add water, and that's it. Soylent is almost as easy to prepare as a glass of Coca-Cola, and yet it is designed to function as a "staple meal" that offers "maximum nutrition with minimal effort."
Soylent, in other words, is simultaneously an antidote to both Monster Thickburgers and locavorist gospel. Similar products, such as Ensure and Slim-Fast, have been on the market for years, but they're filled with objectionable Big Food ingredients like sugar and sucralose and targeted at geriatrics, dieters, and other specialty audiences. Soylent pairs optimized molybdenum uptake with a message of low-impact environmental sustainability. ("I almost forgot to mention, when everything going in to your body is diffused into the bloodstream, you don't poop," advises Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart in a blog post. "I only have to remove a few grams of fiber from my system per week.") And yet while processed food prohibitionists like Michael "Mostly Plants" Pollan demonize convenience, affordability, and technology, Soylent supersizes these attributes in ways that might even scare Ronald McDonald fiberless.
Weaned on Go-Gurt and home-butchered urban chickens, millennials came of age amidst the ever-present specters of the "obesity epidemic" and climate change. They're inundated with food choices, and yet constantly reminded that the food choices they make have political, economic, nutritional, environmental, aesthetic, ethical, and social consequences. Is that hamburger destroying wetlands somewhere? Oppressing migrant labor? Is it interesting enough to post on Instagram?
"What if you never had to worry about food again?" Soylent's website asks. For an idealistic, overachieving, and incredibly harried generation, a bland, nutritionally complete slurry that promises effortless waste-free consumption at a manageable price point just may be the ultimate comfort food. Soylent only costs around $3 per meal. It can be purchased in bulk online and prepared in seconds. You don't have to idle in drive-through lines to sustain yourself, and you sure don't have to source and chop organic carrots. Soylent renders microwave ovens, refrigerators, stoves, forks, knives, plates, dishwashers, and apparently even toilet paper as unnecessary as turntables and bookshelves. Say goodbye to shopping, prepping, clean-up, even chewing. A cup is your kitchen. Molars are little more than decorative heritage utensils from a bygone era.
Rob Rhinehart conceived of Soylent while living in San Francisco, a realm where gastronomical Luddites grow as thick as Iowa corn. But Rhinehart was a member of the city's other major cash crop-he's a 25-year-old techie. A crowdfunding campaign that raised over $1.5 million underwrote Soylent's initial development. Four venture capital firms, including Andreesen HoroÂwitz, have provided an additional $1.5 million in seed capital. To date, demand for the product has exceeded expectations. New customers, according to Soylent's website, should currently expect to wait 10-12 weeks to receive their first shipment. If you're really hungry, in other words, you may be able to get a table at the hottest restaurant in your city more easily than you can get your hands on some Soylent. Or if you really can't wait, look to eBay, where Soylent speculators are flipping their supplies to the highest bidder. In June, a one-month supply with a retail price of $300 fetched $555.
So much for convenience and affordability, at least in the near term. In the long term, however, Soylent takes its utopianism past TV jingles, past farmers markets, even past solar-powered tractors. Because of its origins in the high-tech start-up world, Soylent has been characterized as a gimmicky product primarily designed to serve a narrow and privileged niche. And it does work wonderfully on this level. If you're an ambitious tech entrepreneur who wants to signal to peers and potential funders that you're way too busy disrupting tomorrow to break for lunch in the Google food court, a Soylent shake gives you almost robot-like efficiency-in mere seconds, you can recharge and lubricate your moving parts with 600 meticulously tuned calories. If you're a globe-trotting gourmand who wants everyone to know that you've consumed so many caramelized milk and monkfish liver cronuts that you're over flavor and texture, Soylent makes for impressive statement sludge.
Still, Soylent functions much differently than traditional status brands, and even differently from premium commodities like Coca-Cola. Indeed, while the latter keeps the formula that supposedly gives it a proprietary advantage in a vault in Atlanta, Rhinehart nods to the values and conventions of the open-source movement, sharing information about his ingredient mix, encouraging others to conduct their own experiments and offer feedback, etc. Now, even after Soylent has started to offer its product commercially, it continues to promote the concept of DIY Soylent on its website. While Rhinehart and his backers undoubtedly hope you'll buy a lot of Soylent, they also seem to be perfectly OK with the idea that you might make it yourself, or buy a similar product from a competitor, or occasionally turn to chicken, potatoes, and other forms of legacy sustenance.
In the foodie universe, no tomato is considered truly viable unless it is spawned by a desirable heirloom seed and harvested by a certifiably small-scale farmer. While locavorism rejects the industrialization and commercialization of food, it is itself an intensely commercial endeavor, characterized by emphatic branding, extreme exclusivity, status, and tastefulness. If food is too cheap, too easy to purchase and consume, then it is part of the problem. "To eat well takes a little bit more time and effort and money," Pollan told The Wall Street Journal in 2010.
Food can't be good food, locavorism implies, unless it is scarce. Rhinehart, in contrast, couples a locavore-like interest in sustainability with an old-fashioned faith in technological innovation and the positive attributes of abundance. The resources it takes to produce the main ingredients in Soylent-maltodextrin and rice protein-are minimal compared to the resources required to produce meat and dairy products. And Soylent may ultimately become far more efficient to produce than it is now. According to The New Yorker, Soylent is currently testing ways to obtain the omega-3 oil it uses from algae instead of fish. And Rhinehart is already speculating about designing an algae-based "superorganism" that "pumps out Soylent all day." If he succeeds at this, add farms and factories to the list of things that Soylent makes superfluous.
While Soylent takes its name from a dystopian science fiction movie where the food supply has grown so limited that a giant corporation manufactures its product line out of the most plentiful resource left-people-the 21st century's Soylent is a more optimistic endeavor. In the Soylent future, traditional food production may no longer be viable at large scale. And many of the ancillary benefits of food-food as a sensory pleasure, food as a way to create community and enact ritual, food as a form of entertainment and emotional distraction-may contract or disappear altogether. But calories, nutrients, and thus health will all persist. And not just for the tiny overclass that can afford to get organic dapple dandy pluots from Frog Hollow Farm delivered to their door via Goodeggs.com. By mixing nutrition, sustainability, affordability, and convenience in perfect harmony, Soylent dares to imagine a world where bountiful beige beverages flow as copiously as Coca-Cola at a Texas picnic. We can get there, Soylent suggests, as long as our appetite for technology and innovation remains as strong as our appetite for foraged wood sorrel pesto.
The post Soylent Cuisine appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Health care costs in the U.S. have been rising so steadily for so long that containment barely seems possible. Even optimists don't dream of cutting the price tag. As its official name-the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act-suggests, Obamacare aims for affordability, not radical reduction.
But at a time when we're all walking around with more computing power in our pockets than NASA used to send Apollo 11 to the moon, perhaps we should be setting our expectations higher. Is it really so hard to imagine, in 10 years or so, the advent of advertising-sponsored health care? Or at the very least, bulk-purchased cardiology readings for a Netflix-like $8.99 monthly subscription?
The device that could potentially enable such scenarios already exists. The Alivecor Heart Monitor, approved for over-the-counter use by the Food and Drug Administration in February 2014, is a shell that fits over iPhones and Android devices. It converts electrical impulses from a user's fingertips into ultrasound signals, which are then picked up by the phone's microphone and processed using Alivecor's app. Users can email the single-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) produced by the Heart Monitor to their physicians, or they can pay a small fee to Alivecor directly through the app for analysis by a cardiac technician or board-certified cardiologist within 24 hours.
Currently, the heart monitor costs $199. The ECG analysis ranges from $2 to $12 a pop. In comparison, two researchers who published a study in the February 2014 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine queried 20 Philadelphia area hospitals about the fee they charged for an ECG-and found prices ranging from $137 to $1,200.
So Alivecor's fees are already quite nominal. But imagine if, say, Google or Amazon decide to incorporate such functionality more seamlessly into their devices. ECG analysis would likely be offered for free or near-free, in return for opt-in consent to share this information with advertisers and other third parties. When you have a heart attack in the future, the beta-blocker coupons will arrive faster than the ambulance.
In 1997, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of "disruptive innovation," the process by which a "simplifying technology" combined with a "disruptive business model" upsets established markets and radically broadens access to goods or services. The Model T is a classic disruptive innovation. The PC is another. In a September 2013 white paper published by the Clayton Christensen Institute (CCI), Ben Wanamaker, executive director of CCI's health practice, and Devin Bean, a research associate at CCI, examine the disruptive potential of the Affordable Care Act.
In their estimation, some aspects of Obamacare encourage disruptive innovation, at least theoretically. To accommodate the millions of new consumers that the individual mandate has created, the "already-burdened" health care system will potentially turn to "new care delivery models that leverage less-credentialed practitioners to deliver care for more routine health concerns." Similarly, employers who are mandated to provide care for their employees will look for the least expensive options available, creating "opportunities for new and disruptive entrants" to offer cheaper alternatives to traditional forms of coverage from established providers.
But while Obamacare creates new health care consumers, it also dictates the kind of health care these consumers must purchase, which severely inhibits innovation. As the CCI white paper suggests, minimum "essential" benefits that can only be purchased through tightly regulated insurance exchanges "put a floor on the low end of coverage." Because of these policies, Obamacare simultaneously "overshoots the needs of many customers while preventing innovation that could fundamentally lower the cost of care by requiring that insurance plans mimic the legacy state insurance markets."
Obamacare, in short, puts the weight of law behind the status quo. To illustrate this fact, Wanamaker and Bean offer an historical hypothetical. If Obamacare had existed in the 1940s, insurers would have had to offer sanitarium care for tuberculosis treatment, because that was the standard level of care back then. And even when antibiotics emerged as a cheaper, more effective form of treatment, health care options that didn't include sanitariums would not have been permitted-at least until legislators got around to removing that service from its mandated package of minimum essentials.
In addition to "lock[ing] customers into outdated, expensive treatment options," Wanamaker and Bean maintain, Obamacare-compliant health plans will, "by virtue of the benefits they cover," funnel most care into "traditional venues of care-the hospital and doctor's office." So ultimately all the entities that have been in charge as health care costs have soared achieve further entrenchment via Obamacare. Washington loves an incumbent!
"When you are young and healthy, you may not think you need health insurance. But life is unpredictable," goes an Obamacare recruiting pitch at NYC.gov. "Health care is expensive. Making sure that you are covered is very important." Granted, even one percenters who can afford concierge genetic sequencing can't foretell car crashes or autoerotic asphyxiation mishaps. But new technologies are making our medical destinies far more predictable than they once were. And the high price of health care isn't nearly as predestined as the Obamacare pitch insists.
In reality, we are heading toward a world of highly distributed and comparatively cheap diagnostic tools that will allow patients to self-collect health data more assiduously than a team of ICU nurses. The Cellscope Oto turns your smartphone into a digital otoscope for viewing the inside of a person's ear. The Scanadu Scout, a small, puck-shaped device scheduled to hit the consumer market in 2015 with an estimated retail price of $199, is an attempt to approximate the tricorder of Star Trek fame-a sensor-rigged device that can quickly monitor your temperature, blood oxygenation, respiratory rate, and more, then make an automated diagnosis using intelligent algorithms.
In addition, simple but ingenious innovations, such as "smart pill bottles" that track whether or not you've taken your medication, or predictive analytics programs that identify which patients are least likely to stick to drug therapy regimens and thus need more intervention from caregivers, promise to significantly improve outcomes.
Eventually, all of the data that devices like the Scanadu Scout produce will be stored, shared, and compared as never before, producing more accurate patient histories, more closely tailored diagnoses, and better predictive insights. The transition to this new world won't always go smoothly, of course. Making powerful diagnostic tools available to people who remain completely stymied by the self-checkout line at CVS promises to be a recipe for both comedy and tragedy.
But health care is on the verge of becoming far more individualized, far more contextualized and collaborative, and most of all, far more ubiquitous. And as this happens, the Affordable Care Act will start to look more and more anachronistic, a 20th century solution imposing itself onto a rapidly shifting set of 21st century conditions.
Indeed, imagine if, in the late 1990s, the federal government decided to ensure our right to affordable music by making every American purchase a monthly subscription to the Columbia House Music Club or Tower Records. That would have been great for the Columbia House Music Club, Tower Records, and, say, Sisqo, but would it have been great, in the long run, for the American people?
If you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a traditional ECG, many health care providers will accommodate your desires. But as the Alivecor Heart Monitor suggests, cheaper alternatives exist.
Obamacare doesn't prohibit consumers from pursuing these new cheap alternatives. Nor does it prohibit companies from offering products and services that could radically reduce prices. But unfortunately it will be a long time before you can expect an iPhone a day to keep doctors and insurance agents completely at bay.
As long as those $2 ECGs from Alivecor can detect a pulse, you're going to have to keep paying substantial premiums to Aetna or Blue Cross each month. Essentially, Obamacare establishes an obsolescing way of doing business as a pre-existing condition.
The post Smart Apps vs. Obamacare appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Dream with me for a moment," psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel wrote in his 1989 magnum opus, Intoxication. "What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants?" In Siegel's estimation, the desire to alter one's consciousness is a "fourth drive," a "natural part of our biology" that influences human behavior as much as hunger, thirst, and sex.
And if we can't suppress our desire to get high any more effectively than we can suppress our desire for breakfast, the University of California, Los Angeles, researcher reasoned, we should be trying to develop the safest intoxicants possible. A "perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air" is one variant Siegel imagined. A mood enhancer that is "more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine" is another.
Pipe dream? Certainly innovation has never been a part of the federal government's drug policy mandate. In 1986, in response to "designer drugs" intended to mimic the effects of heroin and other illegal drugs, Congress passed legislation making it illegal to produce substances that are "substantially similar," or chemical "analogues," to Schedule I and Schedule II drugs. Two years ago, in response to the growing popularity of widely available "legal highs" like Spice and K2, Congress got more specific, categorizing 26 synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones as Schedule I substances. (Cathinone is an amphetamine-like alkaloid that is found in the Khat shrub.)
Even in times of low innovation, federal efforts to discourage the use of intoxicants have been an unmitigated disaster, costing billions, imprisoning millions, and doing little to diminish humanity's fundamental desire to alter its consciousness. And now that clandestine chemists are introducing new products nearly as fast as the craft-brewing industry-the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) says it identified 158 "new synthetic substances" in 2012 alone-the government's traditional suppress-and-control mind-set is beginning to look increasingly ineffective, wasteful, obsolete, and misguided.
But what if the federal government embraced Dr. Siegel's utopian vision? Imagine if, instead of trying to thwart the entrepreneurs behind products like "Bomb Marley Jungle Juice" and "AK-47 Cherry Popper," the ONDCP tried to actively incentivize them, by offering a billion-dollar prize to the first manufacturer who successfully produces the kind of safely domesticated mood enhancer that Dr. Siegel envisioned 25 years ago. Under the current regulatory environment, manufacturers are only rewarded for creating substances that are different enough from existing Schedule I drugs to claim, at least temporarily, shelf space in head shops, gas stations, and cyberspace. A billion-dollar prize for a safer intoxicant would give them a tangible reason to aim much higher.
Twenty-five years ago, in its first official policy paper, the newly created ONDCP described America's appetite for drugs as "a crisis of national character." In using such rhetoric, the agency simultaneously amplified the scope of the problem while narrowing the range of potential solutions. America's appetite for drugs was not just a medical issue. It was a moral one, and thus one that resisted mere utilitarian fixes like safer drugs or saner laws.
To solve "a crisis of national character" requires even more than better behavior. It requires better desires, a nation-wide commitment to psychoactive abstinence, and zero tolerance for illicit intoxicants of any kind. As President Bill Clinton put it in 1995 when signing legislation designed to preserve five-year mandatory minimum sentences for selling five grams of crack cocaine, "We have to send a constant message to our children that drugs are illegal, drugs are dangerous, drugs may cost you your life, and the penalties for drug dealing are severe."
Not only is this constant message expensive to broadcast-the ONDCP and the 49 other federal agencies whose efforts it coordinates spend a collective $25 billion a year on drug control now-it also stifles scientific progress. In theory, Big Pharma is well-equipped to pursue the holy grail of safer intoxicants; companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly have substantial resources they could invest in the extensive research, product testing, and quality control processes a breakthrough product might require. But while many of these companies have developed synthetic cannabinoids and similar substances for potential medical uses, they've expressed little interest, at least publicly, in the recreational possibilities. Indeed, even Siegel suggested that his dream intoxicants would have to be marketed as "medicines, treatments for the human condition."
By limiting the long-term upside of any viable pleasure drug with its zero-tolerance mindset, the federal government has helped create an environment where expedience and opacity rule the day. Manufacturers simply design substances that are technically not illegal, label them as "not intended for human consumption," and present little or no additional information about their ingredients, dosage levels, or potential effects.
While these new synthetics have, like most new drugs, been sensationalized in the media as even more uniquely dangerous than previous drug scourges, it is true they lack the easy-to-track provenance of Extreme Doritos and other convenience-store fare. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has introduced legislation that would make it easier for the government to prosecute such products, but in New Zealand, officials have chosen a different route. Instead of simply trying to create laws that pre-emptively criminalize pharmacological innovation, they're establishing a new government agency, the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority, to test products at manufacturer expense before approving them for sale at licensed retail outlets. To gain approval, manufacturers must demonstrate that their products pose "no more than a low risk of harm to a consumer."
While this approach imposes financial burdens on manufacturers-application fees to initiate testing will reportedly cost $180,000, and the costs of the actual testing phases will run between $1 and $2 million per product-it will theoretically reduce the role that New Zealand's government plays in the lives of its citizens, downgrading it from moral engineer to commercial bureaucrat. Instead of trying to get people to resist their essential human nature, it will simply try to establish the relative safety of newly designed intoxicants.
America could learn from this pragmatism and ideally expand on it. In addition to offering manufacturers a clear path to market, why not expedite innovation by offering a huge reward for the creation of some miracle high that even Mr. T might yet say "yes" to.
Such an intoxicant-or even a half dozen of them-won't eradicate illegal drugs or drug abuse. But the $25 billion a year we spend on border checks, public service announcements, and other forms of drug control don't either. Reduction and safety, not eradication and dangerous black markets, should be our goal.
It wouldn't cost much to finance this moonshot effort either. Over the last five years, the federal government has turned to prizes as a low-cost way of spurring innovation. The Department of Energy, for example, has sponsored contests to build a better light bulb and develop a car that gets 100 miles per gallon. NASA has sponsored multiple million-dollar challenges to create the new technologies it desires.
As a 2012 report on prizes from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy notes, these kinds of government challenges are unusually efficient because you "pay only for success." And not only do you pay for outcomes rather than efforts, you substantially leverage the cost of your investment. In many contests, the entities who participate collectively invest far more time and money into pursuit of the prize than the total bounty offered.
To fund the safe-high prize, the ONDCP could simply earmark a sliver of its annual budget for a rolling prize fund-say $250 million a year. In other words, funding this effort would simply mean not funding other efforts that we already know are ineffective. And only upon the creation of a truly breakthrough product would a payout occur.
For the ONDCP, of course, this shift in mindset would not be easy. For 25 years, it has engaged in a quixotic battle to fix our national character. Moving forward, it would have to settle for merely striving to deliver workable solutions.
But imagine if, after swallowing this bitter pill, the government actually spurred the creation of a mood enhancer that met Siegel's utopian specs, combining the rush of cocaine with the manageability of caffeine. Think of the lives a drug like that could divert from prison. Think of the billions we would no longer have to spend on battering rams and motivational posters. In the long run, the social good a drug like that could create would be mind blowing.
The post The DIY Drug Prize appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the old days, you couldn't combat global hunger just by buying an imaginary vegetable. Back then, if you wanted to make a trivial but virtuous gesture of pop-culture consumerism you had to make a trip to Tower Records and purchase a copy of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" or "We Are the World." Casual philanthropy required at least some effort.
Today, it's a different story. Log in to FarmVille, shell out $5 for some cartoon corn seeds that you can plant in your virtual field, and a genuine 3D family in Haiti may get a chicken, goat, or micro-loan from one of several nonprofit organizations that are partnering with FarmVille developer Zynga.
Zynga, the San Francisco-based game developer that popularized social gaming on Facebook in 2007 with Texas Hold 'Em Poker, introduced its first in-game charitable campaign in FarmVille in 2009. Since then, the company has run nearly 150 of the fundraisers in such games as FarmVille 2, ChefVille, and Half the Sky: The Game. Some of the campaigns have been organized around events, such as World Water Day. Others arose in response to natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.
Over the course of five years, Zynga players have contributed more than $18 million to approximately 50 nonprofit organizations around the world. The company established an independent nonprofit called Zynga.org in 2012 to further promote its altruistic endeavors.
Zynga's players aren't exactly close to knocking Bill Gates or Larry Ellison from The Chronicle of Philanthropy's top 50 donors list yet, but $18 million is still around $18 million more than anyone ever suspected gamers might give to charity in the course of their play. And what makes this kind of philanthropy worth watching isn't the amounts being raised: It's the way video games are repositioning philanthropy into an extremely casual, extremely public consumer habit.
In recent years, a number of writers have provided a persuasive counternarrative to the idea that video games are little more than operant conditioning for future mass murderers. In his 2006 book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson points out that many games are incredibly demanding endeavors that promote problem-solving, decision making, persistence, empiricism, and other desirable traits and habits of mind.
In her 2011 book Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that hardcore gamers invest so much time into their alternate environments not because they are disaffected slackers filled with ennui but because they want more purpose and challenges than they are offered in the real world.
Because video games are so good at providing clear-cut challenges, outcomes, and rules for engaging in their realms, they create remarkable engagement in users, especially at a time when media choices are proliferating and attention spans are supposedly shortening. A wide range of consultants have noticed this fact and hope to apply the techniques and dynamics of games to business organizations, educational institutions, education, news consumption, and so on.
Others hope to make games themselves more socially productive. In a 2011 TED Talk, McGonigal estimated that gamers worldwide invested around 3 billion hours a week in their toils. Like solar power before the emergence of photovoltaic cells, they exist as a kind of untapped resource. With the right mechanisms in play, McGonigal and other advocates have argued, their energy could be applied toward tangible, real-world efforts to make the world a better place.
Infusing games with philanthropic elements is one obvious way to do this. Precisely because games often require so much effort from their players-compared to, say, watching The Bachelor or even reading Proust-they can lead to what critic Clive Thompson has called "gamer regret," the idea that you should be doing more with your life than spending 20 hours a week playing World of Warcraft. But blending opportunities for philanthropy into games with heroic themes and a grand sense of purpose, or even more casual games like FarmVille, can effectively deepen the meaning of the experience. You didn't just waste two hours tending virtual crops. You also sent a Haitian family a goat!
Zynga is not the only company trying to align games with philanthropy. Events such as Desert Bus for Hope and Extra Life allow participants to engage in marathon bouts of gaming to raise money for various organizations. And Gramble World, an emerging mobile social gaming network, makes in-game payments to charities an ongoing feature of its platform. In other words, the network is betting that persistent philanthropic activity-rather than just launching the occasional campaign, as Zynga does-will prove an attractive lure to customers.
Traditionally, low-stakes philanthropy has been a fairly opaque activity. If people don't bother to declare their charitable donations on their tax forms, it often doesn't get tracked. And while many forms of low-impact philanthropy have a public component-buying tickets to pancake breakfasts, wearing cause bracelets or benefit T-shirts-a lot of small-dollar philanthropy flies under the radar. The Chronicle of Philanthropy doesn't run an annual list of the most generous low-income philanthropists. People who donate $25 to support their local high school band do not get auditoriums named after them. Even getting a line on the Thank You page of the local theater group usually takes a contribution of $500 or more.
At Zynga, however, when you make a $5 donation to buy sweet corn for Haiti or candy canes for a San Francisco children's hospital, you generally get a donor flag or some other kind of reward. Sometimes even your game neighbors get flags, so they know you made the donation.
"Communities of participation," researchers have shown, are an important predictor of charitable giving. If you're a member of a church or a civic organization where philanthropy is a common endeavor, your own philanthropic efforts are likely to increase. Now platforms like Zynga are emerging as virtual communities of participation. And because the signals of participation are so apparent and so persistent in such realms-everyone who sees your farm after you've made a donation will see your flag-they may prove especially effective at creating cultural norms that encourage philanthropic behavior.
How far might developers take game-based philanthropy? Imagine a game that promises to unlock some new level or facet of game-play to users if they collectively donate $1 million to a particular cause. For players who can't afford to donate money in these instances, they could complete real-world actions to earn powers that might otherwise only be for sale.
For example, if you spent 10 hours working at a local branch of Habitat for Humanity, you might get a new virtual tool. If you donated blood at the Red Cross, you could earn virtual blood transfusions that would keep you going even as you get torn apart by alien zombies. Because heroic quests and the cultivation of community are both core elements in gaming environments, the opportunities to integrate philanthropic components are vast.
So are the opportunities to use gaming platforms to generate insight into charitable trends and behavior. Zynga knows which cities give the most through its games. (In the U.S., it's Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix.) It knows which types of charities receive the most support (kids and animals). Presumably, over time, gaming platforms will develop Amazon-like abilities to know exactly how to present increasingly relevant philanthropic opportunities to players. They'll know precisely when players are most likely to respond to such offers. If your past behavior shows that you tend to purchase philanthropic items during extended bouts of game-play, for example, you may not actually see such offers until you've been playing for five consecutive hours.
Game developers, in short, have an opportunity to make philanthropy more contextual, more efficient, and ultimately more productive. In time, even the bloodiest crime sprees in Grand Theft Auto may be spattered with faint halos of altruism. For diehard sociopaths, the future is looking darker every day.
The post Gaming for Good appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In early December, President Barack Obama delivered a major speech at a packed $27 million arts-and-culture complex in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation's capital. His subject? The American Dream, whose future, to hear the president tell it, was even more uncertain than that of Popcorn and Caramel, the two Thanksgiving turkeys he'd pardoned six days earlier.
Addressing an audience that included members of Congress, the mayor of D.C., and various other Beltway bigwigs, Obama decried the nation's "diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years." As the president continued-the speech lasted 49 minutes-he used a wide variety of adjectives to illustrate the problem. Mobility was "decreasing," "reduced," and "declining." For the wonks in the audience, "less mobility between generations" got a shout-out as well.
The president is hardly alone in considering this an urgent American problem. In November 2013, Gallup found that only 52 percent of the 1,000 adults it surveyed believed that there is "plenty of opportunity" to get ahead in today's United States. In 2011, that number was 57 percent; in 1998, it was a whopping 81 percent. "Many political leaders and other observers believe economic mobility in the United States is declining," the Gallup researchers noted. "It would appear that a significant portion of the population agrees."
Yet a month after Obama's speech, two Harvard economists, two Berkeley economists, and one U.S. Treasury economist failed to find decreasing economic mobility in a working paper they jointly published via the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.
"Contrary to the popular perception," the authors wrote, "we find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971-1993 birth cohorts." According to their research, a child born into the bottom quintile of income distribution in 1971 had an 8.4 percent chance to reach the top quintile as an adult. For a child born in 1986, that chance had risen to 9 percent. If anything, they concluded, "mobility may have increased slightly in recent cohorts."
To anyone who has been following the work of the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project (EMP), this conventional wisdom-shattering conclusion wasn't particularly surprising. "The evidence shows that patterns in Americans' income changes have been similar [from 1967 through 2004] and that the economy propelled most Americans upward, setting them back temporarily, if at all," the EMP concluded in 2009. "Eighty-four percent of Americans have higher family incomes than their parents had at the same age, and across all levels of the income distribution, this generation is doing better than the one that came before it," the project reported in 2012.
The fact that America is as economically mobile now as it was in the days when the top marginal federal income tax rate was 70 percent doesn't mean that the country is as economically mobile as it can or should be. Nor does the extremely stable nature of U.S. economic mobility negate the fact that individuals on the high end of the income spectrum are getting richer faster than anyone else.
But Obama's widely shared misconception also misses the greater cultural context. Economic mobility is not the sole measure of national well-being or progress. It's not even the sole measure of mobility.
In the American cosmos, mobility is indeed important, because mobility is freedom of action, the way that we exercise our ability to plot our own courses, to choose this path over that path, to reverse direction when need be, to associate with whomever we want wherever we want. Along with economic mobility there is cultural mobility that provides entrance to various institutions, goods, services, and practices. Social mobility gives us access to specific people and groups.
And of course there's plain old physical mobility. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, America added approximately 1.1 million miles of paved roads between 1970 and 2008. In that same time frame, the Interstate Highway System expanded from 30,000 miles to 47,182 miles. In 1990, there were 17.6 million passenger departures from U.S. airports. By 2006, that number had risen to 31.4 million.
But while our capacity for physical mobility has improved dramatically over the last half-century, physical mobility is actually less important than ever. FedEx, UPS, Amazon Prime, and a wide array of other delivery services bring the physical world to our doorsteps. The Internet has turned us all into information nomads, able to traverse vast oceans of data in a single evening. Social networks are providing detailed maps of power and influence across formerly opaque realms of American life, making it easier for anyone to navigate its myriad industries, institutions, subcultures, and demographics.
What's the value of being able to track Alec Baldwin's meltdowns in real-time? Of choosing from 300 different models when you need a new coffeemaker, or having every syllabus of every class that MIT offers in one convenient directory? Today, most Americans have access to resources that were once inconceivable, and that access lets us cover more cultural and social ground than humans had ever previously been able to manage.
In a matter of decades, our mobility has increased by orders of magnitude, but the increases we enjoy are often hard to measure, at least using standard econometrics. The idea that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other economic indicators of well-being don't tell the whole story has become increasingly popular. New tools for assessment-like Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index, or the Genuine Progress Indicator-are being championed as ways to present more accurate and holistic portraits of human progress.
For one thing, GDP does a poor job of capturing the negative externalities of increased industrial output and commerce. It says nothing about the Amazon rainforests that are destroyed to ensure a steady supply of Big Macs, or the individual misery that comes along with higher gaming industry revenues.
But it isn't only the negative effects that aren't being sufficiently measured by GDP. In the last 20 years especially, the market has begun to generate an increasing number of positive effects that go uncounted by traditional economic measures. GDP can assess Google's ability to sell ads, but it has never put a dollar amount to the collective gain in well-being that results from YouTube's ever-growing stockpile of cat videos. It makes no attempt to figure out how much happier we all are now that we can read The New York Times for free or pre-qualify potential soulmates by height, educational status, alcohol consumption patterns, and smartphone operating system preferences.
Out of technology and global commerce a kind of Commons 2.0 has arisen, a vast, market-driven ecosystem where an astounding proliferation of information resources, services, and even hard goods are free or nearly free, improving our lives in mostly uncharted but increasingly substantive ways. Surely it is a mark of genuine progress that we no longer have to buy a $50 classified ad to sell a $40 couch. Surely we are both economically and psychologically richer because we can Skype with friends and family in distant continents for hours on end without racking up four-figure phone bills.
Perhaps what's most encouraging about America's mobility renaissance is how widely distributed it is. You don't have to negotiate your way past a series of velvet ropes to catch Donald Trump's eye on Twitter. Facebook didn't stay a privilege of the Harvard elite for long-128 million Americans use it on a daily basis. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 56 percent of American adults now have smartphones.
And yet in the midst of all these developments, our reigning preoccupation is a false narrative about dwindling economic mobility. Apparently the breakthroughs and benefits accrue in such dizzying but routine fashion now that even our most fervent potentates of hope and change have trouble keeping track of our progress.
The post The Myth of Economic Immobility appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last May, Cody Wilson produced an ingeniously brief but nuanced manifesto about individual liberty in the age of the ever-encroaching techno-state-a single shot fired by a plastic pistol fabricated on a leased 3D printer. While Wilson dubbed his gun The Liberator, his interests and concerns are broader than merely protecting the Second Amendment. As Senior Editor Brian Doherty documented in a December reason profile, Wilson is ultimately aiming for the "transcendence of the state." And yet because of the nature of his invention, many observers reacted to his message as reductively as can be: "OMG, guns!"
Local legislators were especially prone to this response. In California, New York, and Washington, D.C., officials all floated proposals to regulate 3D printed guns. In Philadelphia, the city council successfully passed a measure prohibiting their unlicensed manufacture, with a maximum fine of $2,000.
But if armies of Davids really want to transcend the state, there are even stronger weapons at their disposal: toothbrush holders, wall vases, bottle openers, shower caddies, and tape dispensers. All these consumer goods and more you either can or will soon be able to produce using 3D printers.
Imagine what will happen when millions of people start using the tools that produced The Liberator to make, copy, swap, barter, buy, and sell all the quotidian stuff with which they furnish their lives. Rest in peace, Bed, Bath & Beyond. Thanks for all the stuff, Foxconn, but we get our gadgets from Pirate Bay and MEGA now.
Once the retail and manufacturing carnage starts to scale, the government carnage will soon follow. How can it not, when only old people pay sales tax, fewer citizens obtain their incomes from traditional easy-to-tax jobs, and large corporate taxpayers start folding like daily newspapers? Without big business, big government can't function.
3D printing is a painstaking process, with extruders or lasers methodically building up objects one layer at a time. Most consumer-level devices currently only print in plastic, and only in one color. At online platforms such as Thingiverse.com, where 3D printing enthusiasts share open-source design files and post photos of their wares, the final products often look a little rough around the edges, without the spectacular gloss and streamlining we've come to expect from, say, a Dollar General toilet bowl scrubber.
In many ways, 3D printing barely seems ready to disrupt the monochromatic knick-knacks industry, much less the world. When it takes hours to produce a pencil cup, transcending the state may prove to be a tall order.
And yet in the industrial realm, where 3D printing has been around for decades and goes by the name "additive manufacturing," companies such as Boeing and General Electric are using much more sophisticated machines to produce parts for jet engines. Medical device companies use them to custom-manufacture hearing aids, replacement knees, and designer prosthetics. In time, Cornell University professor Hod Lipson predicts in the 2013 book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Wiley), 3D printers will be capable of constructing houses with plumbing and wiring in place, and printing "vanity organs" for people who want new or improved athletic abilities.
Inevitably, such technologies and capabilities will trickle down, and probably faster and more radically than many people anticipate. While MakerBot Replicators may still look a little too DIY for those of us who have yet to fully exploit the capacities of our microwave ovens, ease of use is evolving rapidly.
In January, Adobe announced that it is adding 3D printing capabilities to Photoshop, giving users the ability to design three-dimensional objects and send them to their own printers or 3D printers in the cloud. A California startup called AIO Robotics is developing a machine that points the way toward a future where the goods in the picture frame aisle at Target become just as easy to duplicate and manipulate as Metallica's back catalog. It's called Zeus. It looks like an unusually stylish kitchen appliance, and its creators, who met as students at the University of Southern California, describe it as the "world's first 3D copy machine."
Place an object in its central chamber, then push a button. Zeus scans the object in 3D. Push another button, and Zeus uses the 3D file it has created to reproduce an exact plastic replica of your object. In essence, Zeus makes "making" even easier than consuming. If you decide you really, really like the pasta bowl your mom gave you for Christmas, you don't even have to go to the mall, or surf Amazon.com to get another. Just throw it in Zeus and push a button!
In almost all visions of the 3D printed future, manufacturing changes dramatically. If a high-end 3D printer can fabricate a pistol or a panini press on demand, why bother with huge production runs, global distribution networks, warehoused inventories, and the cheap human labor that only under-regulated developing nations can provide? While it will still make sense to produce some goods in large quantities using traditional methods, manufacturing is poised to become a far more local, just-in-time, customized endeavor.
But if the nature of manufacturing is poised to change dramatically, what about the nature of consumption? In many ways, it's even harder to imagine a city of, say, 50,000 without big-box retailers than it is to imagine it without a daily newspaper. So perhaps 3D printing won't alter our old habits that substantially. We'll demand locally made kitchen mops, but we'll still get them at Target. We'll acquire a taste for craft automobile tires, but we'll obtain them from some third party that specializes in their production. Commercial transactions will still occur.
But if history is any guide, more and more of us will soon be engaging in all sorts of other behaviors too. Making our own goods. Sharing, swapping, and engaging in peer-to-peer commerce. Appropriating the ideas and designs of others and applying them to our own ends. Combining resources and collaborating on extremely large and ambitious projects we couldn't hope to accomplish alone. And over time these new behaviors will have consequential impacts on scores of products, companies, and industries.
Already, according to a study authored by Michigan Technological University engineering professor Joshua Pearce and six others, there are significant economic incentives for consumers to pursue 3D printing. According to Pearce's calculations, a person who constructs an open-source 3D printer called the RepRap at a cost of around $575 for parts can theoretically avoid paying between $290 and $1,920 a year to retailers simply by using the device to print 20 common items (iPhone case, shower curtain rings, shoe orthotics, etc.).
If you are willing to invest some time in its construction-Pearce estimates that the RepRap takes around 24 hours to build-the printer can quickly pay for itself, even if you don't use it all that often. If you start making orthotics for your neighbors, who knows, it could even turn into a profit center.
Soon, we'll begin to see the rise of manufacturing Matt Drudges and printer-sharing Reddits. So many different producers will be producing so many different products that it will become harder and harder for even well-established and trusted brands to charge for anything but the scarcest and most coveted goods. In a bid to survive, places like Walmart and Best Buy will begin to offer stuff as a subscription-you'll get 200 lbs. of goods per year for a monthly fee of $19.99.
But maybe even that will seem too steep to you, or just not as autonomous as you'd like. Ultimately, 3D printers and the distributed manufacturing they enable will democratize and mainstream survivalism. You won't need five remote acres, heavy equipment, and a lot of practical know-how to live off the grid. In the realm of your commercial life, at least, you'll be able to DIY in New York City.
Be prepared, however, to expect some pushback from your local regulators. Over the past decade or so, as newer technologies and fewer opportunities for traditional employment have prompted more people to act in entrepreneurially innovative ways, government's response has been the same: Consumers must be protected against strawberry balsamic jam made in home kitchens. Tourists must be protected against immaculately maintained carriage houses that can be rented on a daily basis for below-hotel rates. Travelers must be protected from cheap rides from the airport.
When government realizes that self-produced plastic shower curtain rings are far more potentially disruptive than self-produced plastic pistols, it'll be more than libertarian entrepreneur-iconoclasts at risk.
The post The 3D Economy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Online higher education won't achieve its full promise until Olivia Munn is teaching courses with titles such as "Optimizing Google for Mobile Web Performance." But at least the field is moving in the right direction.
While traditional colleges and universities have played a primary role in the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the online pedagogical innovation that has garnered the most media attention over the last few years, at least one company is showing that educators can have names like Google, Intuit, and Salesforce as well as Harvard and MIT.
That company is Udacity, a Silicon Valley start-up that was founded in 2011 by Sebastian Thrun, a moonlighting Google employee and former Stanford professor who pioneered the technology behind driverless cars.
In November, Fast Company reported that Udacity was "abandoning academic disciplines in favor of more vocational-focused learning." This was something of an overstatement-Udacity had never embraced purely academic learning enough to suggest that it was now somehow abandoning it. Reflecting Thrun's background, Udacity's first two courses were "Building a Search Engine" and "Programming a Robotic Car," both of which had more than a little vocational focus. And as early as October 2012, Udacity had announced its intention to partner with companies like Google and Autodesk on courses such as "HTML5 Game Development" and "Interactive Rendering."
This, it turns out, is a promising approach. As Fast Company explained, "The companies pay to produce the classes and pledge to accept the certificates awarded by Udacity for purposes of employment." And while MOOCs have traditionally been open to anyone who wants to take them, at no cost, Udacity is increasingly encouraging students to pay for its courses. While it still offers open access to all its courseware for free, it also now offers students a chance to "enroll" in a handful of classes. These students will get personalized coaching and detailed feedback on assignments and projects, plus a "verified certificate of accomplishment" upon their successful completion.
With an early registration discount of 30 percent, the price for "Introduction to Salesforce App Development," for example, is $105 per month. You complete courses at your own pace. A class might take you two weeks to finish, or it might take you two months or more. (If it's the former, you've still got to pay for a full month.)
Udacity is offering these new services to combat MOOCs' greatest perceived weakness: their low completion rates. In many cases, fewer than 10 percent of the people who register for a MOOC successfully complete it.
These changes were largely borne from a partnership the company pursued with San Jose State University (SJSU) in early 2013. Udacity offered online versions of three SJSU math classes. SJSU students could take these classes, for credit, for a substantially lower fee than they would have had to pay for SJSU's real-world versions of the classes (which the university also offered the same semester).
At the end of the semester, the Udacity students fared worse than the students who took the conventional courses. For the three classes, the pass rates for the former ranged from 23.8 percent to 50.5 percent, while the pass rates for the latter ranged from 45.5 percent to 76.3 percent.
This outcome delighted Old Education loyalists. "Sebastian Thrun has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that real higher education can't be automated," exclaimed the Colorado State historian Jonathan Rees at his blog More or Less Bunk. Rebecca Schuman, an education writer at Slate, dubbed Udacity's effort an "embarrassing failure."
But while the completion rates for these three MOOCs were lower than the completion rates of the on-campus classes, they were, in the greater landscape of MOOCdom-where, remember, completion rates tend to hover under 10 percent-fairly impressive. By past standards, UdaÂcity was doing something right.
What it was doing, essentially, was cribbing from traditional colleges and universities. For all their faults, these institutions are quite adept at getting students to pass their classes. But it's not their superior pedagogy that facilitates these positive outcomes. It's their superior incentives.
First, they charge a substantial amount of money. While high tuitions serve as a barrier to entry to many, those who can pay have an increasingly strong incentive, in the form of sunk costs, to get a return on their investment. Second, universities offer something of high value for those who complete their course of studies: a college degree that promises access to a lifetime of higher wages. Finally, they're extremely selective about whom they teach: the schools with the strongest reputations for academic excellence are also the schools that take the greatest pains to ensure that only the most motivated, talented, and intelligent students have access to their curriculums.
In the San Jose experiment, Udacity emulated some of these tactics, charging a fee and offering credit. In return, it got better results. Now it's incorporating these methods into the fare it offers everyone.
Compared to current college tuition, the $140 that Udacity is charging for a month's worth of support while taking "Data Wrangling with MongoDB" is nothing. On the Web, anyone who forks over $140 for content of any kind pretty much qualifies as an unusually engaged user, so even modest user fees will likely boost a course's completion rates. (As Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, has pointed out, one reason MOOCs have such low completion rates is that these figures typically include anyone who interacts with a given course, including the thousands of people who register but never actually make it to the first lesson.)
More importantly, Udacity is also now going beyond mere college credit and offering "certificates of completion" that actual companies will purportedly use as the basis for hiring decisions. If Udacity can eventually show that companies like Salesforce.com, Intuit, and others are regularly hiring its graduates, on the basis of their Udacity coursework alone, the company's completion rates will start soaring. In turn, MOOCs will finally start democratizing higher education in a real and dramatic way.
To truly live up to their potential, MOOCs can't just exist as a way for colleges and universities to replace the sage on the stage with a sage on the screen, and thus reduce their costs a bit. Instead, they should be used to liberate learning from campuses altogether. They should be used to eliminate multi-year tuitions, four-year degrees, and all the other centuries-old artifacts that higher education's traditional providers currently rely on to keep their services exclusive and their rates high.
The really good news is that MOOCs are just getting started. In the same way that HTML eventually went way beyond the blink tag and user-generated content evolved from bookmark lists to Wikipedia, digital courseware will continue to improve at a remarkably rapid rate.
We're already beginning to see the end of the auteur era of higher education, where a single expert develops a course, presents it to students, and is also largely responsible for offering guidance, motivation, and feedback to the students who take it, even if he or she is not especially gifted in all of these various functions. (At most, he'll have some harried grad students to pick up some of the slack.)
With MOOCs, the lone expert now needs collaborators, if only to operate the video camera. Eventually, more and more courses will be created by teams, just as movies and video games are now. Subject experts will supply the content. Teaching experts will devise courses that are customizable and highly responsive to your individual learning style. Hollywood actors will present the material.
And, finally, pedagogical Siris, more present, patient, supportive, and astute than any flesh-and-blood instructor angling for tenure can ever hope to be, will be there to hold your hand all the way through "Optimizing Google for Mobile Web Performance." "Our records indicate that students with your demographic characteristics score 10 percent better on assignments and quizzes when the material is presented by Adam Sandler rather than your first choice for instructor, Olivia Munn," your course's dedicated intelligent assistant will pleasantly advise you. "Would you like me to change your instructor to Adam Sandler?"
For those who believe that higher education should be personalized, inexpensive, as accessible to working mothers as it is to third-generation Yalies, and geared toward helping students acquire skills that employers actually desire, utopia is on the horizon.
The post Online Higher Education Retools appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The middle class is struggling," the longtime left-wing economics wonk Robert Reich notes in the 2013 documentary Inequality for All. Why? Because billionaires and corporations are bulk-purchasing congresspeople like tube socks at Target, undermining democracy and turning America's once-vital middle class into disenfranchised, exploited exurban serfs, trapped in a downward spiral. "If you don't have a voice, if you don't have power, you are vulnerable economically in society," Reich says. "You don't have anybody to protect you."
But even as the former secretary of labor paints this bleak portrait of contemporary American life, the movie that was constructed to showcase his argument provides a curious counternarrative. Inequality for All was partially funded by Kickstarter. In November 2012, its producers took to the revolutionary crowdfunding platform to ask for money to pay the film's editors, purchase archival footage, and compose an original score. A full 1,015 people came to their aid, contributing a collective $83,392. And thus, for a few weeks in the fall of 2013, Robert Reich's economically vulnerable voice rang out in select theaters nationwide.
The theater where I watched Inequality for All-the Balboa in San Francisco-was also a recent beneficiary of a Kickstarter campaign. This past September, 1,063 people contributed $101,957 to help the place purchase new digital projectors and a new sound system. When Reich explained that we are "losing equal opportunity in America," he sounded crisp, humane, vivid-and also a little dated, as if perhaps he hasn't changed his stump speech much since, oh, 1985.
"I've been saying much of the same thing for 30 years," Reich notes at one point. In that time, technology has been on a bit of a roll. First we got spreadsheets. Then we could obtain every song ever recorded for free. In the last few years, from a personal empowerment perspective, things have really been getting interesting. Airbnb helps you turn your couch into a profit center. Etsy and Shopify let you take on Walmart even if you have trouble calculating sales tax.
Finally, there are Kickstarter, Indiegogo, LendingClub, RocketHub, and countless other radically democratic platforms of alternative finance. Surely it's worth mentioning, somewhere among the lamentations over rigged games and middle-class voicelessness, that you can now get a home improvement loan, raise capital for your organic vegan food truck business, and in a few months, when changes in security regulations take effect, even recruit equity investors for your startup, all without ever rubbing shoulders with the dreaded 1 percent.
Crowdfunding, in short, is a big deal. It is also profoundly political. As a September report from a progressive think tank called the Roosevelt Institute notes, crowdfunding has its roots in the non-profit sector. One pioneer, DonorsChoose.org, raises money for school projects. Another, Kiva.org, provides microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries (and now in the U.S. as well).
Kickstarter explicitly aims to depoliticize its platform, with its official guidelines explaining that the site "cannot be used to raise money for causes." Even so, it has evolved into a marketplace of considerable political expression, a place where aspiring entrepreneurs routinely stake their dreams on finding constituencies that are eager to support sustainable charcoal or upcycled messenger bags manufactured by U.S. military veterans.
Consumers have always voted with their wallets. But in a post-Kickstarter world, the crowd doesn't just dictate what gets bought. It dictates what gets made. And all it takes to be a part of this new powerful cabal is a few spare dollars.
To see the political implications of this in action, consider Mosaic, an Oakland, California, crowdfunding platform that relies on individual investors, rather than colorful signs held aloft at rallies, to bring power to the people. Mosaic was co-founded by Billy Parish, a climate-change activist who identified a lack of financing as one of the main factors impeding solar power's growth in the U.S.
While solar photovoltaic systems remain costly to install, solar leases, which have grown increasingly popular over the last decade, allow customers to purchase sun-generated power on a monthly basis from companies that cover the costs of setting up and maintaining the equipment.
Of course, these companies still need capital to install their systems, especially on commercial-scale projects designed to generate between 100 KW and 3 MW of power. "There's a gap in financing this size of solar project because virtually no small banks are familiar with solar and therefore do not offer financing," says Greg Rosen, Mosaic's chief information officer. "And most big banks with some knowledge of solar have high overhead costs and third-party diligence fees, and therefore focus on large financings greater than $25 million to cover their expenses."
Capitalizing on this gap in the market, Mosaic makes loans to solar providers seeking capital and generates capital itself by attracting individual investors online. Investors can loan as little as $25 to a project, and if everything works out as planned, loan repayment occurs on a monthly basis, along with annual interest rates ranging from 4.5 to 7 percent.
Mosaic makes money because it charges the solar providers a loan origination fee and 1 percentage point more interest than it pays to its crowdfunders. Once an installation is up and running, the solar provider begins charging its customers for the energy they consume. It uses this money to pay off its loan.
After beta-testing its platform with a handful of zero-interest loans in 2012, Mosaic began offering interest-bearing loan opportunities to investors in January 2013. By November, it had fully funded 18 projects, raising amounts ranging from $25,500 to power four units of senior housing in Novato, California, to $815,000 to power a bee farm in Red Bluff, California. All told, approximately 2,600 individuals have invested a collective $5.6 million in these projects.
Those numbers probably won't make polar bears breathe any easier, but Mosaic is only getting started. And even at this nascent stage it's a remarkable development. If you fervently believe that accelerating solar adoption is crucial to mitigating climate change, you can now vault past petitions and donations and go straight into building infrastructure, maybe even making a few bucks in the process. (Mosaic loans are unsecured. If a project runs into trouble, your investment could convert to unplanned philanthropy.)
Because of federal regulations, only residents of California and New York-or individuals who meet the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's definition of an "accredited investor"-can invest in Mosaic. (To qualify as an accredited investor, you must have $1 million in net assets excluding your home, or annual income of $200,000 or more.) But even with these limits on potential participants-which may soon change, as the commission is developing new rules for crowdfunding-Mosaic's current challenge involves finding enough viable projects to meet user demand. "Half our projects sell out within one week of posting them," says Katie Ullman, Mosaic's communications manager.
Traditionally, the wealthiest members of society have had little trouble leveraging their resources. Those resources are highly concentrated and thus easy to strategically deploy when necessary. For the 99 percent, government provided a way to accomplish this too. Everyone pays taxes, and as a result, we get streetlights and Yellowstone National Park.
But taxation is a pretty crude form of crowdfunding. You don't get to choose the size of your contribution. You can't directly specify its intended use. And even though our tax system lacks the functionality of Kickstarter, participation is mandatory. When some senator-of-a-friend-of-a-friend decides he wants to follow his bliss and finally build that $2.2 billion dream dam he's been talking about all these years, you've got to chip in whether you like it or not.
Crowdfunding, in contrast, privileges hands-on, voluntary democracy. If you think the United States needs more solar infrastructure sooner rather than later, crowdfund it. If you think that service-sector jobs that pay livable wages are the key to widespread prosperity, crowdfund businesses that pay such wages.
For the allegedly disenfranchised 99 percent, it has never been easier to seek common cause with like-minded souls, to pool your resources, and to exert influence in strategic and tangible ways. You might even call this a shining age of middle-class empowerment. If anyone ever decides to make a documentary about it, the financing should be fairly easy to swing.
The post Kickstarting Utopia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last September the Washington State Liquor Control Board published a 43-page list of proposed guidelines for the sale of recreational marijuana. A few days later, Colorado issued an even longer set of rules, 136 densely packed pages in all.
In the realm of legal, commercialized cannabis, a new age is upon us: the age of pungent regulatory skunk. To prove how committed they are to freedom, personal choice, and the pursuit of herbally induced happiness, Washington and Colorado are imposing consumer purchase ceilings, retail sign limits, mandatory packaging requirements, and taxes.
What about California? Seventeen years after deciding that marijuana should be at least as permissible as Vicodin, California still has no statewide regulations governing the production and distribution of medical marijuana. Since the U.S. Department of Justice has suggested it will not meddle with pot legalization in states with "strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems," California is increasingly characterized as a dysfunctional laggard.
The onetime medical marijuana trailblazer, concluded a September article in the SF Weekly, is "being left behind, stalled out while other states innovate and attract entrepreneurship." In The Huffington Post that same month, Diane Goldstein, a spokesperson for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, voiced similar concerns: "In California, it's been the wild, wild west. The laws have been too vague, and when the laws are too vague, it allows people to undermine the law-both the bad apples in the industry and law enforcement."
But how accurately does a phrase like "the wild, wild west" describe what has taken place in California? A previously forbidden sector of commerce has evolved into an increasingly professionalized multibillion-dollar industry, complete with a robust retail infrastructure, a lucrative trade in equipment and supplies, trade shows, media outlets, educational institutions, and a surprisingly vast supply of entrepreneurial stoners who seem to get at least as buzzed by marketing, product innovation, and event management as they do by a few puffs of Platinum Skywalker. All without any regulatory hand holding from Sacramento.
Recently I visited CW Analytical, a commercial laboratory located in an industrial part of Oakland, across the street from a Mother's Cookies factory. Inside the lab, a technician in a white lab coat hovered intently over a table adorned with an array of small plastic vials partially filled with green liquid. CW Analytical offers voluntary quality assurance services to dispensaries, edibles producers, growers, and consumers who want to analyze the potency and safety of their cannabis. It tests products for microbiological contamination and pesticide exposure, and it offers a range of other services designed to bring transparency, consistency, and reliability to the industry.
In 2007 another Oakland-based lab, Steep Hill, pioneered this aspect of the pot trade. Today there are enough labs spread throughout the state to support a trade organization, the Association of Commercial Cannabis Laboratories. According to Robert Martin, who co-founded CW Analytical and heads the association, only around 20 percent of the state's dispensaries currently get their product tested at facilities like his. There have been some questions regarding the accuracy, competence, and impartial status of the labs that have set up shop. Yet the laboratories are another example of the industry's gravitational drift toward order-and another indication of medical marijuana's exceptional status in our current hyper-regulatory climate.
We live in an age of pervasive government intervention. The Code of Federal Regulations has added 43,504 pages since California first passed Proposition 215 in 1996. Yet while this bureaucratic bulwark was growing as thick as the Great Wall of China, our nation's largest state, which doubles as the world's eighth-largest economy, was permitting the sale of a substance that had been illegal for 60-plus years. In theory, this wild, wild west should have exploded into chaos, or at least something a little more raucous than a bunch of entrepreneurial Ph.D.s monitoring the fungus levels of freshly cultivated Lemon Kush.
Yes, there has been drama over the years: NIMBY complaints, dispensary bans, and, of course, federal raids. But the most visible manifestations of California's medical marijuana industry have been hydro stores in strip malls, advertisements in alternative weeklies, and $12,000 trim machines. While the threat of federal intervention and city-wide regulations have played significant roles in the industry's evolution, capitalism arguably has been its most functional regulator.
Take the labs. In California provenance is king: Any heirloom radish without a pedigree is suspect. Consumers want to know where it was grown, who grew it, and the nutritive profile of its mulch. With cannabis, the value of detailed information is even greater than it is for most crops. THC levels can vary greatly depending on growing conditions and techniques. Cannabis is susceptible to mold and fungi, and growers often use pesticides and other potential contaminants.
This uncertainty created a business opportunity for entrepreneurs such as Martin. Somewhat surprisingly, consumer demand for more comprehensive information about the latest harvest of Sour Diesel is not yet particularly strong. If it were, then surely more than one in five dispensaries would be regularly testing their products. But the demand for detailed information about heirloom radishes-not to mention Napa Valley cabernets-wasn't always so great either. Over time, organic evangelists and entrepreneurial farmers created that demand. That's the same path the cannabis industry is following today.
To make CW Analytical's service attractive to dispensaries, Martin, who previously held executive-level quality assurance and food development positions at Kraft Foods and Dreyer's Ice Cream, is doing everything he can to make it affordable. According to Martin, CW Analytical will run all the tests necessary to determine a sample's potency and safety for $120 a pound, or roughly 25 cents per gram. (In dispensaries, the retail price of a gram generally ranges between $10 and $20.)
The labs have a strong incentive to standardize testing methodologies, share best practices, and continue expanding the range of services they offer. Unless they can make themselves crucial to consumers and dispensaries, they won't survive.
"In the beginning, all of the edibles were wrapped up in cellophane and sold to you just like that," Martin notes. "There were no allergen statements, no caloric impact statements, nothing but a brownie full of pot. God knows how much pot, though, so you only better eat a little bit. If you ate too much, you could be very uncomfortable. It could send you to the emergency room with an anxiety attack."
After decades of working in the food industry, Martin places a strong emphasis on uniformity and clarity. "This started out as a cottage industry, and cottage industries sometimes stick with what works over what's best," he says. "We're trying to get our clients to put the milligrams [of THC] per dosage on their labels. We're trying to get everyone to think in terms of serving sizes, and making their products the same way every time. People need to know that when they buy a certain product, it's going to produce the same effects every time."
Now the cellophane packaging of the late 1990s has given way to labels that resemble those of any supermarket food item. Legalization opened the door for more aggressive marketing and easier information sharing, and these forces naturally foster a more standardized environment.
Over time, even if California maintains its semi-resigned commitment to laissez faire, market forces will eventually drive more dispensaries to engage the services of third-party services such as testing laboratories. "When liability becomes a real issue for all these businesses, they'll be testing everything like every food company does today," Martin says. "They want to make sure that they have data in-house to prove that their product was leaving their shelves clean."
Government regulation would surely hasten this process. But the move toward greater transparency, more information, and an emphasis on product safety and consumer empowerment has been animating California's medical marijuana industry since its inception. As legislators and industry advocates alike insist that legal marijuana requires detailed codes and regulations and high-level governmental coddling, California's experience suggests otherwise. In the wild, wild west, at least, reefer madness proved no match for the domesticating influence of capitalism.
The post The Benefits of Unregulated Pot appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How many U.S. citizens end up pleading guilty in a courtroom each year without ever getting access to an attorney? In which counties are pre-trial detainees least likely to obtain release through bail? Even know-it-all leaker Edward Snowden may not have the answers to these questions.
As federal operatives eye-grope our metadata and local law enforcement agencies increasingly establish "reasonable suspicion" based on computer algorithms that predict where crimes might happen, our constitutional protections regarding the right to counsel and due process grow even more important.
And yet how effectively can we assess the strength of these protections if we have little or no information on which to base our assessments? If you want to know how the latest Shafer Vineyards cabernet compares within the larger universe of California reds, Wine Spectator is there to give you an authoritative, easy-to-comprehend ranking. If you want to determine which Ivy League school has the best faculty/student ratio, U.S. News & World Report makes that easy.
A similar resource for our court system doesn't exist. "There is no way to compare how counties are performing basic legal services all across America," the journalist and attorney Amy Bach writes in an email. "While [some] organizations attempt to monitor courts, they do so in isolation for intra-court use only."
Bach hopes to change that. Three years ago, after writing Ordinary Injustice, a calmly reported polemic of how expedience, lax adversarialism, and other institutional lapses are systematically eroding the quality of American courts, Bach founded a nonprofit called Measures for Justice. Its mandate: to develop a Justice Index, a standardized set of measures that will make it easier to assess how well courts are performing, both on an individual basis and in relation to their peers.
Many organizations, including the American Bar Association, issue guidelines designed to help courts operate in a fair and accessible manner. And courts do compile substantial information about themselves, some of which they publicize. For example, the National Center for State Courts, an independent, nonprofit court improvement organization, has developed a set of performance measures called CourTools. They include what a given court's cost per case is, what percentage of the people it summons for jury duty end up serving, and similar measurements. But only a handful of states use CourTools to disseminate information about their courts to the public. And currently they do so on an individual basis-there's no one central repository where courts can be evaluated in relation to their peers.
There are 3,143 counties in the U.S., and each one has a state criminal trial court. To start, Measures for Justice is focusing on such courts, where approximately 21 million cases are considered each year. "Unless you've committed a federal crime or your case has been appealed, this is where justice happens for most people in the U.S," notes Bach.
One reason a resource like the Justice Index doesn't yet exist is because our court system is so decentralized. Laws and procedures vary from state to state, courts are given a fair degree of latitude in establishing how they conduct business on a daily basis, and there are no common standards regarding the sorts of information they are mandated to collect and report. So over the last three years, Bach and her colleagues have been drafting and testing potential "illustrative measures"—a set of indicators, based on publicly available data, that aim to communicate in a data-driven snapshot a given court's fairness, accuracy, cost efficiency, and ability to improve public safety.
In a white paper that Measures for Justice plans to publish soon, it describes eight of these performance measures more fully and details some of what it found when using them across different courts. (*) For example, if you're planning to commit a crime but you're on a budget, go to Northern California's Contra Costa County, which has the most affordable median bail amount out of the 39 counties Measures for Justice assessed-under $3,000. The median bail amount in Los Angeles, in contrast, is closer to $50,000. The major reason for the difference: Los Angeles County uses a standard bail schedule, rather than judicial discretion, to impose bail, and automatically assigns a bail of at least $20,000 to almost every felony.
In the realm of pretrial detention for felony defendants, it's Honolulu that's the outlier, duration-wise. While more than a dozen counties in the survey released such detainees within an average of 10 days from their arrest, the average pre-trial stay in Honolulu was closer to 50 days, almost twice as long as any other county in the survey. That, the report concludes, suggests "considerable inefficiencies in processing the release."
How many similar patterns are our courts hiding? And who will fully investigate their import? Measures for Justice has a small staff and a modest budget. At the moment, it gets its funding from a handful of private foundations and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, a federal agency that helps develop criminal justice policies for local and state administrations. Measures for Justice is currently refining its methods of data collection and assessment via a pilot program located in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, and over the next four years it hopes to expand its coverage to hundreds of counties in over 15 states. (**) In other words, it would have to scale considerably to become a comprehensive, one-stop watchdog overseeing our court system.
What Measures for Justice illuminates already is the scattershot way newspapers have traditionally taken up that monitoring role. While pulp-and-ink loyalists lament the darkness that is destined to descend upon America when the last old-fashioned courthouse reporter takes his early retirement buyout, the truth is that most newspapers have historically devoted far more staff, editorial space, and even wonkish number-crunching to covering what goes on inside sports stadiums than courthouses. Was there ever any daily in the land, even when newspapers were at their fattest and most profitable, that published, day in and day out, for months on end, the prosecutorial batting averages of the local district attorneys?
Even today, as data-driven journalism becomes more commonplace, most newspapers still spend far more time presenting courtroom malfeasance through the lenses of novelty, drama, and shock value-the rogue judge who bullies defendants into waiving their rights, the poor wretch who spends a year in jail after being arrested on loitering charges because he slips through administrative cracks-than they do engaging in the sort of mundane pattern analysis that can illuminate system-wide problems and form the basis for potential reform.
On its website, Measures for Justice positions itself in part as a tool "to defend against austerity measures being implemented nationwide." Courts that are given high rankings on the Justice Index can use it as a justification for maintaining their budgets, the organization advises. And even courts that score low can use their poor performance to "lobby for an increased budget."
That's an understandable pitch, as the data that Measures for Justice seeks would be nearly impossible to collect without significant cooperation from the courts themselves. But budget increases are only one potential outcome. If the Justice Index reveals that County A is prosecuting murder charges with a 20 percent higher success rate than County B, while only spending 60 percent as much per case, the taxpayers who live in County B are going to want to know why. The Justice Index should spur competition and innovation, and thus potentially lower court costs. Courts whose policies and procedures are generating positive outcomes will emerge as models for others to emulate. Courts that are performing poorly will face pressure to adapt.
If citizens and private organizations embrace Measures for Justice, and help it grow into an aggressive, independent watchdog, it will also serve as a reminder to our government that intensive surveillance is now a two-way street. Instead of simply relying on whistleblowers or settling for sporadic narrative-driven oversight, it's now possible to monitor and assess government behavior using the same sort of sweeping and perpetual omniscience with which it monitors us. Ideally, we'll eventually bring this attention to all facets of state power. The court system, where it routinely exerts its greatest influence over the citizenry, is an apt place to start.
* This article originally stated that Measures for Justice has been drafting and testing a set of eight preliminary illustrative measures. Measures for Justice founder Amy Bach clarifies that the organization has actually tested more than eight measures to date, and she notes that the organization may ultimately include more than that in its final Index. In its white paper, Measures for Justice presents eight of the measures it has tested so far.
** This article originally stated that Measures for Justice hopes to expand its coverage to 50 counties over the next four years. That statement was based on outdated information taken from the organization's website.
The post Number-Crunching the Courts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At the Oregon Public House, every sip of barrel-aged imperial stout and apricot-tinged hard cider takes the edge off a cold, harsh world. And not just because many of the craft brews served by the recently opened Portland pub boast a higher alcohol content than a bottle of Budweiser.
This establishment is a "philanthropub." Along with the brews, a variety of non-profits are on tap here, too. When you place your order at the bar, you don't just choose beer, wine, or food. You also choose an organization such as Friends of the Children or Friends of Trees, which gets the profit from your order. In its first six weeks of operation after opening in May 2013, the Oregon Public House donated a total of $3,842.80 to eight local charities. Other philanthropubs have been established in Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas.
These days, halos of virtue are poised to enlighten virtually any consumer impulse. A new pair of ivory linen strappy wedges from Toms can help reduce footborne parasitic diseases in Ethiopia. Your new hipster eyewear from Warby Parker mitigates astigmatism in Paraguay. The Oregon Public House takes this 21st century feel-goodism to an intoxicating new level-you can literally get hammered while you down yet another lager on behalf of Habitat for Humanity.
For anyone who believes that social justice cannot truly be effective unless it's painful, complicated, and compulsory-not to mention highly dependent on government bureaucrats operating outside the realm of market forces-enterprises like the Oregon Public House are no doubt anathema. But for anyone who sees the virtue in making efforts to improve the world accessible, enjoyable, and culturally embedded in the most pervasive and quotidian ways, philanthropubs are yet another sign that consumer autonomy and grassroots democracy are thriving these days. In the span of a few hours at the Oregon Public House, you can help a tiny sapling reach its full potential as an American Yellowwood Tree, fight child sex trafficking, catalyze economic development in Oregon's low-income communities, and underwrite microloans for people living in a Nicaraguan garbage dump. And all you have to do is lift your glass. Prosit!
Consumer charity mainstreams the lavish fundraising dinners that have long been a staple dish in the rarified realms of Big Philanthropy. That a neighborhood pub is the setting for such democratization is especially fitting. In general we tend to overmeasure the social ills associated with alcohol consumption and underestimate the community-building bonds of neighborhood imbibery.
Consider the backstory of the Oregon Public House. Several years ago, when Ryan Saari and his friends were brainstorming about how to get more involved in their neighborhood, Saari hit upon the notion of a nonprofit pub that would contribute its excess to local charities. Given Portland's reputation for craft beer and progressive altruism, the idea was a natural. And yet some of Saari's would-be collaborators wondered if the venue in question had to be a pub. Why not a coffeehouse? Or a brewpub specializing in craft root beer?
The fact that Saari is a minister at a church called Oregon Community apparently did little to mitigate their doubts about virtue emanating from a public house of potential sin. This attitude is hardly uncommon, of course. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Christine Sismondo notes in her 2011 book America Walks into a Bar, a rider attached to Congress's original relief bill "excluded bars from applying for aid or tax breaks on the grounds that they contributed nothing to the community."
But as Sismondo shows in her instructive and entertaining book, bars have played a crucial role in the evolution of American democracy. In colonial times, they often doubled as courthouses, lecture halls, and even churches. They were so integral to early Massachusetts that the state actually levied fines on towns that had not established a tavern of their own.
Whether it was disgruntled colonists planning to gain their independence-Boston's Green Dragon was known as the "headquarters of the American Revolution"-or 19th-century immigrant anarchists planning demonstrations, groups "denied access to legitimate and sanctioned forms of political representation" found safe harbor and sympathetic allies in the nation's saloons. Emboldened by alcohol, enlivened by the freedom to associate in a realm that was less formal and thus more naturally democratic than a courtroom, church, classroom, or workplace, "the bar was where the public proved itself…capable of economic and political self-determination."
In our own era, bars no longer play as primary a role as they once did -especially if their chief draws are beer, booze, and conversation rather than food, music, and giant flat screens showing a half-dozen baseball games. As early as 1989, The New York Times was announcing that the "corner bar was falling victim to new values." In 2012, the Chicago Tribune reported that the number of establishments with tavern licenses in Chicago had dwindled from around 6,400 in 1900 to only 1,000 or so. USA Today attributed this decline to "the economy, gentrification, changing tastes and city regulations that make it more difficult to operate in residential areas."
The once-ubiquitous corner bar has been replaced by cafes, fast food outlets, and bars that offer more ambitious fare than a handful of ashtrays filled with sugar-encrusted peanuts. Consumers enjoy a greater range of choices than they once did. In addition to boozy domains of promiscuous conviviality where everyone knows your name, we now have dens of placid sobriety where you can type on your laptop for hours without ever being disturbed by a strident, half-sloshed anarchist.
In many ways, this represents progress. And yet in a metropolis the size of Chicago, or even smaller cities like Portland, is it enough just to have a thousand or so locations where the primary appeals are a well-poured stout and the possibility of freeform discourse with your neighbors?
The Oregon Public House is hardly a note-for-note throwback to a midcentury corner bar filled with factory workers coming off the graveyard shift to knock back a few Miller High Lifes at the crack of dawn. It opens at 11:30 a.m. and last call comes before 11 p.m. on weeknights. Its menu features things like butternut squash ravioli, gluten-free chocolate tortes, and arugula and quinoa salads that "can be made vegan by request." There's a large play area for children.
It's family-friendly and foodie-friendly, and yet, like the taverns of centuries past, it envisions itself as a cauldron of community, an essential neighborhood gathering place where, thanks to the alchemy of fermented hops, passing familiarities deepen into friendship and slightly lubricated discourse blossoms into civic engagement. "We get customers who come in who have no idea what we're doing here," says Saari. "I love watching their eyes light up when we explain the concept. As much as we're a fundraising place for these charities, we're also a mouthpiece. We want our customers to get involved with them outside the pub experience too."
At a time when America is often cast as a deeply polarized place where unchecked capitalism is concentrating wealth and power into the hands of the ruling 1 percent and everyone else is disenfranchised and bereft of resources, places like the Oregon Public House tell a strikingly different story.
Nat West, the founder of Reverend Nat's, the hard cider brand featured at the Oregon Public House, started out using a retrofitted garbage disposal and other jerry-rigged equipment to produce the stuff in his basement. Ryan Saari thought it'd be cool to open a non-profit neighborhood pub, and after four years of development efforts it exists, with no corporate loan officers or deep-pocketed investors calling the shots. (Funding came through individual givers making relatively small contributions, donated labor and materials, and a couple of redevelopment grants from the city of Portland.)
Now the citizens of Portland have a lively resource for generating revenue to help other ventures with noble purposes achieve a greater measure of sustainability. But the Oregon Public House will only persist if it delivers experiences its customers find rewarding enough to support on a regular basis. It is, in short, a supremely democratic mechanism, an experiment in economic and political self-determination to which the drunken patriots and soon-to-be revolutionaries crowding the bar at the Green Dragon would have no doubt raised a toast.
The post Drinking for Charity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How many do-it-yourself bioengineering enthusiasts does it take to change a light bulb? Apparently 8,433. That's how many individuals backed the Glowing Plant Project on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter earlier this year.
Spearheaded by two biologists and a former Bain & Company management consultant, the Glowing Plant Project has at least two goals. Long-term: creating trees that glow so powerfully through bioluminescence that they can function as street lights. Short-term: promoting grassroots innovation within the realm of synthetic biology. You no longer have to be Monsanto to hack Mother Nature.
The quest for irrigatable illumination has been going on since the mid-1980s, when researchers first successfully transplanted a gene present in fireflies into tobacco plants. By now you'd expect to see phosphorescent Marlboros casting an eerie glow in what few dive bars still allow smoking, but progress has been slow.
Things sped up last year after former Bain consultant Antony Evans watched biologist Omri Amirav-Drory give a presentation on the possibilities of using living organisms to produce energy, fuel, plastics, and fertilizers. Evans was inspired by Amirav-Drory's suggestion that armchair tinkerers, utilizing sophisticated but easy-to-use software and a "biological app store," might one day assemble the genetic material for producing a "renewable, self-assembled, solar-powered, sustainable street-lamp"—in other words, a bioluminescent oak tree.
While glowing oaks currently exist only in the imaginations of visionary scientists, lesser life forms have already gone through a couple of tangible upgrades. In 2010, for example, a group of U.S. scientists created a tobacco plant that produced light autonomously. (The 1980s version required the exogenous application of a compound called luciferin.) That same year, in England, another group of scientists produced bacteria that glowed with enough intensity to read by or function as emergency signage.
The technology, in short, was ripe for further investigation. So when Evans encountered Amirav-Drory at another event, the two men started talking about using the biologist's Genome Compiler software to develop an actual product instead of merely hinting at the possibility in Power Point presentations. It would be something less ambitious than a luminous oak, but ideally brighter than glow-in-the-dark tobacco.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are 26.5 million street lights in the United States. There's an additional 26.1 million highway fixtures. Small cities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the electricity their street lights consume; big cities spend millions. While Los Angeles, Boston, and many other municipalities have been moving from lights that use high-pressure sodium (HPS) and metal halide (MH) bulbs to ones that use LEDs, which consume less energy, generate fewer carbon emissions, and require less maintenance, millions of the older-style street lights are still in operation. And even the LED versions require about half as much energy as the HPS and MH ones do, and they continue to emit carbon.
Trees, on the other hand, sequester carbon. They can also help reduce urban air temperatures. And they are relatively cost-effective to maintain. A report published in the December 2005 Journal of Forestry involving five cities found that they spent $13 to $65 per tree per year on maintenance. In contrast, Los Angeles spent $264 per street light in 2007 on maintenance costs alone (i.e., not including energy usage).
Glowing trees are "a very simple idea," Evans told me in a phone interview. "People have seen it in Avatar." With its paradigm-shifting sci-fi environmentalism and eye-catching visuals, turning plants into mood lighting is also the sort of project that seems genetically engineered for the highly viral domain of online fund raising. "We were thinking Kickstarter right from the beginning," Evans said. "We knew we needed money and that seemed like a good way to raise it."
They asked for $65,000. They got $484,013, from 8,433 backers. Eventually, around 6,000 of those backers, each of whom pledged at least $40 toward the project, will receive 50 to 100 genetically engineered seeds they can use to grow their own glowing plants. Another 210 backers, who pledged at least $250 apiece, will receive instructions and ingredients that will allow them to conduct further experiments and "transform [their] own plant at home, in [their] lab or at school."
This high-profile effort to democratize bioengineering has not sat well with environmental advocacy organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, which tried to get Kickstarter to remove the Glowing Plant Project from its site and publicly lambasted "the widespread and unregulated distribution of over half a million extreme-bioengineered seeds" to "6,000 random locations across the USA."
But Evans, at least, appears to maintain a fairly centrist perspective on the prospects of regulating this sector. "Agrobacteria is a plant pest," he said of the pathogen biologists often use in genetic engineering work, noting that it can transfer DNA between itself and other organisms. "If you were to release your plants and they still had bacterium on them, you could contaminate other people's plants. That would be a bad thing. That is something that should be regulated. But if we don't use that agrobacterium, then there's a much lower risk of causing damage to agriculture."
For their prototypes in the lab, Evans, Amirav-Drory, and their partner, biologist Kyle Taylor, are using agrobacterium to transfer newly designed DNA sequences into arabidopsis, a small plant belonging to the mustard family. But once they determine which new DNA sequences are most effective at increasing the plant's bioluminescence—a process that will likely take several months—they'll transfer the DNA to the seeds they'll be distributing to their backers via something called a "gene gun," a process that involves no agrobacterium.
That's why the seeds are unregulated: The Department of Agriculture doesn't believe they constitute a threat of any sort. "Regarding synthetic biologics, if they do not pose a plant risk, APHIS does not regulate it," a spokesperson from the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service explained to Nature in June 2013.
For now, legacy street light manufacturers seem safe from the prospect of glowing trees. In June, Evans estimated that his team would have its first prototype plants by October. "Then, we'll start tinkering with different [DNA] designs, to see what gets the best glowing effects." That process will also last several months. According to Evans, the project will likely begin to produce the seeds it has promised to its backers around the end of January 2014.
As the costs of genetic engineering decrease and the tools get easier to use, some tinkering with federal laws may be in order as well. "The regulations are quite opaque," Evans said. "It took us a lot of work to figure out what you can and can't do, and even with that research, there are people who say we've interpreted the rules wrong. So the government could do some work in making the processes you have to go through clearer." He also suggested that having multiple federal agencies oversee this domain creates bottlenecks. "I think it might make more sense to have a dedicated single regulator who looks at the whole space as one."
The biggest bottleneck is likely to be nature itself, which often moves more slowly than even regulators. "It takes a long time for a tree to grow," Evans says. "When you can only do one experiment per tree growth cycle, that is obviously a pretty slow process!"
To accelerate the rate of experimentation will require new tools. "One thing that would help is better simulation technologies," Evans notes. If scientists could simulate all the different cell types for a tree, they wouldn't have to wait for trees to grow to know if their experiments were working. Evans also imagines bio-printers that could print mature leaves, and gene therapy techniques that would allow them to adjust the DNA of already-mature trees.
As hundreds, then thousands of people begin to use Genome Compiler and related tools to design and produce their own new organisms, the rate of innovation will likely accelerate. In a few years' time, 2014's glowing plants may be thought of the way we now see 1974's personal computers—more proof of concept than useful product, a dim beacon lighting the way forward for thousands of innovators intent on creating some dazzling future we are only just beginning to imagine. Christmas tree light manufacturers, you have been warned.
The post Replacing Street Lights With Glowing Trees appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At the Belcampo Meat Company in Larkspur, California, the primary merchandise is presented almost as fetishistically as the iPhones at an Apple store. Sirloin tip cutlets, whole rabbits, Chateaubriands, and a dozen or so other varieties of raw meat rest on white platters lined with brown butcher paper. Lemons and bundles of rosemary serve as understated but striking visual sidekicks. The intended effect: plenitude, judiciously curated.
In the meat department of the average supermarket, by contrast, plastic-wrapped packs of econo-beef are herded onto crowded shelves, pressed up indiscriminately against giant value-sacks of boneless chicken. It's cruel and unappetizing. But at Belcampo, the tenderloin filets have room to roam.
In addition to Belcampo's Larkspur location, which includes a casual restaurant along with the meat boutique, the company operates its own farm and slaughterhouse about 300 miles to the north, near the Oregon border. There, on rolling grasslands with a view of Mt. Shasta, future cutlets and filets grow to certified organic maturity in an environment that sounds nearly as nurturing as a top-flight preschool. "We practice low-stress animal handling techniques, respecting each species' innate mental and emotional characteristics," Belcampo's website advises. "We pay special attention to each breed's ability to thrive in Northern California, creating homes for our swine and poultry that allow them to be both comfortable and stimulated."
Belcampo, in other words, is a carefully crafted antidote to meat's image as a highly industrialized foodstuff with no provenance whatsoever, a.k.a. pink slime. It owns and operates every link in its production chain and thus can exercise maximum control over its processes and ensure customers maximum transparency as it aims to deliver pink prime—healthier, kindlier, more sustainable meat.
Respecting the innate mental and emotional characteristics of the highly sensitive Northern California consumer, Belcampo regularly trucks in its farmers to Larkspur for lunchtime eat-and-greets, where they are subjected to intensive but ostensibly humane grilling from ethical carnivores hungry for a deeper connection to their burgers.
Such tactics are hardly novel at this point, at least in Marin County. What distinguishes Belcampo is the seamlessness and ambitious reach of its vision. Founder Anya Fernald, a veteran foodie who has worked as a baker, chef, and cheesemaker and spent four years at Italy's Slow Food International, wants to take ethical and sustainable animal husbandry beyond farmers markets and community-supported agriculture programs, to make it as mainstream as McDonald's (if not quite so widespread). Over the next six months, Fernald plans to open five more retail outlets throughout California.
"Right now, 80 percent of my target consumers are shopping in mainstream channels," she says. "Our business is about making it easier and easier for someone to switch from Costco to our store."
The location of Belcampo's initial Larkspur outlet clearly reflects this ambition—it's set in an outdoor shopping mall, in close proximity to a Bed, Bath & Beyond. But this progressive ideal does not come cheaply. At Belcampo's butcher shop, the tenderloin filet goes for $39 per pound—roughly $32 more per pound than what USDA Choice sirloin steak averages in U.S. supermarkets, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates for April 2013.
For most of the 20th century a juicy steak represented a more populist ideal. Just as surely as a Cadillac in the driveway and a pool in the backyard, it embodied increasingly widespread prosperity. It was a luxury, yes, but it was egalitarian and broadly accessible, the fat of the land commoditized for easy, generic purchase in supermarkets everywhere. Beef required no great expertise to prepare. It demanded no sophisticated connoisseurship to fully appreciate.
It was a meal fit for suburban kings, and for a while there our appetite for the stuff was as insatiable as our demand for gasoline and television. In 1952, annual beef consumption per capita was 61.2 pounds. By 1975, it had reached 88.5 pounds. In 1976—helped in part, no doubt, by millions of bicentennial barbecues—beef consumption hit its highest level ever, at 94.4 pounds.
But that was it, peak sirloin. In 2012, we ate only 57.3 pounds of beef per person. By 2014, forecasters suggest, we're likely to be down to 53 pounds.
What happened? In part, beef consumption is driven by beef supply, and for various reasons supply went down. Today, beef industry pundits attribute slumping sales to higher production costs, growing exports, and drought, among other factors.
But consumer preferences clearly shifted as well. In 1976, obesity rates were starting their rapid ascent, but we were also beginning to pay considerable attention to our cholesterol counts. Cheaper alternatives such as chicken and pork claimed a larger share of the market. Add E. coli outbreaks, mad cow disease, and a growing awareness over the ethical ramifications and environmental consequences of factory farming, and eventually the industry faced a massive marketing challenge.
In the heyday of the American steak, innovations in production and distribution drove the beef industry. It developed ways to grow cattle faster and increase meat yields per animal. It streamlined supply chains by shifting slaughterhouse operations from urban centers to rural locations nearer to feedlots. Most of the branding the industry did, however, involved a red-hot iron.
At precisely the same time Americans started losing their appetite for beef, they started expressing an interest in connoisseurship, novelty, authenticity, exclusivity. A nation raised on iceberg lettuce and Budweiser acquired a taste for arugula and Carneros District Cabernets. Beef desperately needed a new story, and yet for the most part, beef stayed beef: abundant, uniform, a stubborn holdover from an era when TVs had a dozen channels and potato chips came in one flavor.
In recent years, the four packers that dominate the industry have attempted to create more proprietary marketing for their products, especially for Angus beef, the one breed that has achieved what might be called varietal status. In general, though, beef has yet to shake its mass-market past.
That's a bit surprising, because in many ways beef should be the ultimate artisanal heritage product. It's rustic. It's bound in leather. Bearded people are frequently involved in its production. And yet instead of embracing ways to make cow meat more exclusive and tasteful, the beef industry mostly wants to keep it cheap and plentiful. "We can't let beef turn into lobster," Ed Greiman, president of the Iowa Cattlemen's Association, lamented to the Des Moines Register in February.
Enter Belcampo. "The style of production that I'm committed to, from an ethical and environmental perspective, is definitely the most expensive style of production out there," Fernald says. "But doing the right thing for the animals also yields a higher taste quality."
This is a point of contention. The grain-based finishing diets that cattle eat in feedlots is what gives today's beef its marbled texture and tender juiciness, and this, many traditionalists insist, is what consumers want (even as they buy less and less beef).
In contrast, pastured, grass-fed beef is sometimes described as gamey. "We've been taught to think of meat as the tofu of the land," Fernald counters. "It's a flavorless substrate for satay sauce or teriyaki marinade. The only beef we eat straight up is steak, and even it's got butter on it, or steak sauce. At Belcampo, we're trying to get people to rediscover the flavor of meat. Our beef is very flavor-forward."
Not so long ago, the beer aisles of America's supermarkets were filled with little more than a handful of bland, homogenous brands. The same was true of the bread aisles. Then brewers and bakers began making declarations similar to Fernald's. Beer could be more flavorful. Bread could be healthier and more complex. Over time, as America's consumers developed easier and more widespread access to cream stouts and sprouted whole grain breads, they embraced these options. Their expectations grew.
Today's most demanding shoppers don't just want tasty food. They want tasteful food. Jam that's so beautiful it's worthy of an Instagram close-up. Politically enlightened pickles. Statement broccoli that serves as a medium for self-expression as well as sustenance.
Belcampo charges more for its beef (in some cases, a lot more). But it also expands consumer options in new and intriguing ways. If you're in the mood for a burger topped with environmental sustainability and ethical slaughter, there is now a place at the mall where you can have it your way.
The post Beef Goes Upscale appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In America, our justice system is designed to be slow, methodical, a little boring. This is especially true in the sentencing phase. Even-tempered bureaucrats in bland black uniforms consult elaborately detailed guidelines to ensure that punishment is applied in consistent fashion across similar cases.
Occasionally, though, our black-clad functionaries break out of the mold. In November 2012, for example, Cleveland Municipal Judge Pinkey Carr compelled a 32-year-old woman to stand on a street corner for two hours, holding a hastily scribbled sign that said "Only an idiot would drive on the sidewalk to avoid a schoolbus."
The case received tremendous media attention, and apparently Judge Carr was pleased enough with the results to make public shaming a standard part of her repertoire. In March 2013, she sentenced a 58-year-old man who had called 911 and threatened to kill police officers to 90 days in jail, plus a hefty chaser of humiliation. This offender, Carr ruled, would be required to stand outside Cleveland's Second District Police Department building for one week, three hours each day, holding a sign that reads "I was being an idiot and it will never happen again."
Carr's sentencing sentiments are not an anomaly. These days, public shaming is our favorite brand of small-batch artisanal justice. Evoking the authentic no-nonsense morality of our Puritan forebears, while also seeming quirky and novel, creative punishment is what today's most discerning consumers of hand-crafted, state-sanctioned vengeance demand.
Last year, the National Institute of Justice released a report showing that in 59 percent of the 826 cities included in its study, police departments, local media outlets, and other parties publicize the identities of prostitution clients, often before they've been convicted of a crime. In Arlington, Texas, the preferred delivery system for disgrace is a highway billboard. In Fresno, California, the police department maintains a webpage it calls "Operation Reveal," where it posts photos of individuals who've been arrested on prostitution-related charges.
In Ohio, if you're convicted of drunk driving, you may be required to place a bright yellow license plate on your car. In January 2013, Montana legislators introduced a bill that would mandate orange plates for people with a DUI conviction. "Those in favor of the bill say people with DUI's need to be put on display so they can be embarrassed by their crime," a local ABC affiliate, KFBB, reported on its newscast.
The public, too, loves public shaming. Landlords take to Craigslist to complain about tenants who haven't paid rent. Outraged deliverymen post photographs of miserly tippers on their Tumblr sites. Jilted maître d's tweet the names of customers who bailed on their reservations. Frustrated pug owners humiliate serial carpet-poopers at dogshaming.com.
In 1979, when New York City Mayor Ed Koch ordered radio station WNYC, then owned by the city, to broadcast the names of nine men convicted of soliciting prostitutes, an unsigned New York Times editorial described his actions as a "mighty misuse of government power." In another article, Times columnist William Safire dubbed Koch the "Mayatollah," and chastised him for "reaching back three centuries" to dredge up this archaic tactic.
But what struck the chattering classes of 1979 as astonishingly regressive seems strikingly commonplace in 2013. As connoisseurs of Malibu mug shots can attest, ceremonial humiliation via electronic media now stands as a widely practiced antidote to celebrity-style above-it-all transgression. Public shaming also takes the most coveted value of our age—publicity—and turns it on its head. Any form of publicity so unpleasant that it qualifies as punishment must be severe indeed, worse even than jail time, house arrest, fines, or community service.
Koch's regressive "John Hour" was only slightly ahead of its time. Though it lasted just one episode, and that episode undersold its title by about 58 minutes, the ensuing years produced new green shoots of humiliation across the country.
In 1983, a judge in Fort Bend County, Texas, had 250 red, white, and blue bumper stickers printed up to identify people on probation for driving while intoxicated. By 1985, he'd gone through approximately a third of his supply and judges in Oklahoma and Florida had adopted the practice as well.
In 1984, a judge in Tennessee offered a car thief a chance to avoid incarceration by publicizing his crime for 30 days via a 5'x4′ sign posted in his front yard. In 1986, prosecutors in Lincoln County, Oregon, offered plea bargains to nonviolent offenders if they paid for an ad in a local newspaper featuring their mug shot and an apology. "It's somewhat reminiscent, I suppose, of the public stockade, where you were publicly put on display for your indiscretion," a Lincoln County district attorney told a UPI reporter. The intent, the reporter elaborated, was to "bring embarrassment or fear to criminals."
Lincoln County started its public shaming program in part because of a shortage of jail space—it needed a cheaper way to deal with criminals than incarcerating them. In addition to being economical, public shaming is, in many practical ways, a less severe and disruptive form of punishment than being locked up for a given period of time, and thus potentially a good alternative for less serious crimes, especially for first offenders.
But public shaming these days is obviously different than it was in the 1600s, or even the trailblazing 1980s. In an essay that appeared in the Spring 1996 issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, the legal scholar Dan Kahan explained how public shaming in early America began to fall out of favor in part because America was becoming more populous and impersonal. "In a society of strangers," Kahan wrote, "the bare deprivation of status no longer resonated as a symbol of the community's moral disapproval."
In a post-1996 society of highly connected social networks and online forums, community moral disapproval is one of the world's most abundant resources. But it's also unpredictable.
In early incarnations, public shaming was a relatively fixed form of punishment. It could be long (you're literally branded with a letter signifying your adulterous transgression), or it could be short (you have to spend 48 hours in the town-square stockade), but either way it was fixed. Punishments were assigned, executed, and then they were over.
Today, public shaming exercises haphazardly mix the real world with virtual reality. Judge Pinkey Carr sentences you to three hours of public sign-holding, but it's impossible to predict how many photos and videos the news media and random passersby may produce. Nor can you predict how much notice this imagery will attract. Maybe it will hit the Web but die with little fanfare. Maybe it will become a viral sensation.
Given that the whole point of public humiliation is to turn attention into punishment, an audience of one million is a more severe punishment than an audience of one thousand. What this means, effectively, is that when a judge orders a person to stand with a sign, or even when a police station publishes the mug shot of a prostitution client, they don't really know what degree of punishment they're sanctioning. The reason that one photograph goes viral and another does not often has nothing to do with the crime being punished, but rather on what the person being punished looks like, or what kind of news day it is, or which particularly influential blogger or tweeter decides to note the case.
Judges have the power to create their own unique sentences. And courts have ruled that sentences involving public shaming are constitutional as long as they aspire to some other goal, such as deterrence or retribution.
But equal application of the law is a crucial element of our justice system. It's one of the reasons we have sentencing guidelines. And quirky punishments designed to go viral don't just fail to meet this standard of the law; they actively subvert it. Their primary goal is to court publicity, and that publicity can't be accurately anticipated or controlled.
Public shaming may make for good YouTube content. And perhaps it can help end the scourge of restaurant reservation non-compliance. (No studies have been conducted yet measuring its efficacy in this regard.) In the end, though, it's a tool best left to furious maître d's and frustrated pet-owners. The allegedly impartial men and women who oversee our courtroom aren't tasked with meting out novelty and entertainment. They're tasked with meting out justice, and justice works best when it's delivered in uniform, predictable fashion.
The post The Shame of Public Shaming appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Compared to, say, the slat-armored fighting vehicles commandeered by the U.S. Army's 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Google's expanding fleet of autonomous Prii hardly seems threatening. (Yes, for the record, Prii is the official plural of the Toyota Prius.)
The Google self-driving cars, of which there are now a dozen or so, have the company's familiar, friendly logo plastered on their doors. Their roofs sport laser scanners rotating on spoilers so clunky they seem purpose-built to make the cars seem less technologically disruptive than they really are. "That thing?" you can't help but ask when you look at one. "That's the thing that's going to make Mothers Against Drunk Driving as pointless as a radiator in a Tesla factory?"
Remember, however, what company we're talking about. This is the Google that was recently fined $7 million by 38 states and the District of Columbia for collecting email messages, passwords, and other personal information that had been transmitted over unprotected Wi-Fi networks. (Google says it never looked at the information.) This is the Google that agreed to pay a $22.5 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 for bypassing privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser and that already maintains a massive dossier about your interests and social ties using data obtained through its dozens of disparate services.
"Our cars have sensors with which they magically can see everything around them," Google engineer Sebastian Thrun exclaimed in a 2011 TED talk. And yet no one ran out of the room screaming. That's because Google has done such an excellent job of positioning self-driving cars as an unmitigated social good that the privacy implications of these lumbering, 3,000-pound tablets have barely been acknowledged, much less discussed. Instead, the discourse has focused on the thousands of annual traffic deaths self-driving cars will prevent, the billions of gallons of gas they will save, and the carbon emissions they will reduce.
Along with Google, more than two dozen car manufacturers and other entities are currently at work on driverless automobiles. But it's Google that is piloting us toward the radical new transportation reality just around the bend. Earlier this year, in a presentation to the Society of Automotive Engineers, Google product manager Anthony Levandowski said the company "expect[s] to release the technology in the next five years."
Already a blind person can safely operate the vehicles, which use a laser scanner, radars, GPS, cameras, and high-resolution maps to determine where they are in the world, what else is nearby, and what they need to do to arrive safely at their ultimate destination. Presumably, drunk people can operate them too, not to mention 8-year-olds, 80-year-olds, narcoleptics, problem texters, and possibly even high-functioning border collies.
Even with this expanded driving pool, driving will ostensibly get safer, because of the car's ability to eliminate human error while assessing and reacting to the world around it. Accidents could drop by as much as 90 percent. And while more drivers will take an increasing number of trips, we'll actually spend less overall time in transit because driverless cars can travel at higher speeds safely. Plus, once you hit your destination you can bail and let your car find a parking space.
Of course, when Google presents its vision of a future where traffic jams have gone the way of pay phones and road rage consists of exchanging angry tweets with strangers about last night's episode of Celebrity Apprentice, an unspoken presumption underlies the narrative: Everyone is just as jazzed about driverless cars as Google is. In this vision there are no congested lanes caused by Luddites putt-putting down the highway at 80 miles an hour in their 2013 Porsche Boxsters. There are no daredevil pranksters gunning their old-school Camaros through standing red lights and laughing uproariously as all the robo-cars slam on their brakes in precise, automatic deference. Everyone has gotten with the program, thus enabling the attainment of maximum safety, efficiency, and energy conservation.
But is everyone really so eager to see the automobile, which stands as one of history's great amplifiers of personal autonomy and liberty, evolve into a giant tracking device controlled by a $250 billion corporation that makes its money through an increasingly intimate and obtrusive knowledge of its customers?
Granted, we already use our phones and tablets to tell a growing scrum of data snoops where we go and what we do when we're not in front of our computers. At this point, however, we can still temper our disclosures fairly easily. We can disable the GPS. We can turn devices off completely or even leave them at home on occasion.
Boot up a Google car, however, and it's not so easy to cut the connection with the online mothership. If you use it as intended—i.e., in driverless mode—you immediately start sending great quantities of revealing information to a company that's already hoarding every emoticon you've ever IMed. Even if it were possible to operate the car in some kind of "manual" mode, you would likely still be sending information back to headquarters.
In time, Google will know when you arrive at work each morning, how many times a week you go to Taco Bell, how long you spend at the gym. As illuminating as our searches and other online behavior might be, there's still some room for ambiguity. Maybe you're doing all those searches on "brain tumor" because a relative is sick, or you're doing some sort of report, or you're simply curious. Combine that info with the fact that you start visiting the hospital every week, however, and Google knows you've got cancer.
The driverless car, in short, is a data detective's dream, a device that can discern when you get a new job, how many one-night stands you have, how often you go to the dentist. As demarcation lines between the real world and the virtual world continue to blur, autonomous cars will function not so much as browsers but links, the way we get from one appointment or transaction opportunity to the next. In theory, Google will determine the route to your desired destination based on distance, available infrastructure, and current traffic conditions. But what if Google, which already filters cyberspace for you, begins choosing routes as a way of putting you in proximity to "relevant content"?
Many people will no doubt love such new functionality. Others will opt out, or refuse to opt in. Others, however, will simply want to stay as far away from self-driving cars as possible.
Another class of users who may not share Google's vision of the future is those who like the old-fashioned kinetic pleasures of driving. A third consists of people whose professions depend on traditional, human-piloted cars: cabbies, truckers, bus drivers, car insurance salesmen, etc. (UPS drivers and maybe even pizza delivery guys should be fine; someone has to carry the goods from the curb to the door.)
At Forbes.com, business consultant Chunka Mui characterizes the coming driverless revolution as a potential $2 trillion disruption. Car design will change, with less emphasis on steel and airbags. Overall car sales may drop substantially as car sharing becomes far more convenient. (No more will you have to figure out how to get to the car sharing lot. Your car will automatically come to your house.) Auto financing companies, personal-injury lawyers, and emergency medical personnel will all likely see a decline in business. Local governments will lose major sources of revenue because of reduced moving violations and parking citations.
Currently it is legal to operate a driverless car only in Nevada, California, and Florida. But as these vehicles become commonplace, demand for a regulatory U-turn will increase. So Mothers Against Drunk Driving will morph into Mothers Against Driving, a crusading organization determined to get America's deadliest assault weapon off the streets for good by advocating legislation that makes it illegal to operate traditional vehicles. It will be joined by countless other organizations whose interests are served best by mandatory driverlessness.
Granted, legislation mandating self-tracking vehicles is not likely to pass quickly. But give credit where it's due. Years before anyone else had even realized what was at stake, Google was mapping out the coming discourse, paving the way for a future in which driverless cars are a virtuous and inevitable mark of progress, and traditional cars are, like cigarettes and military-style semi-automatic rifles, dangerous goods whose legal status is up for debate. Buckle up, America! We're in for a safe, efficient, and oppressively intrusive ride.
The post Google's Driverless Future appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Every day in America, the personal liberty of thousands rests upon a technology originally created in the Middle Ages. No, not semi-automatic sporting rifles, those came later. I'm talking about bail.
As early as the 11th century, Anglo-Saxon courts began letting persons accused of a crime avoid pre-trial detention in return for putting up some security—typically money or property—meant to guarantee their attendance when the court date finally arrives. More than 1,000 years later, the practice persists.
At a time when GPS-enabled ankle monitors can do the work of a hundred paparazzi hot on the scent of Kim Kardashian, we're paradoxically using bail more than ever. While pretrial release figures for state and local courts aren't regularly aggregated on a national level, the Bureau of Justice Statistics did release a report in 2007 based on a study that analyzed data for state court felony defendants in the 75 largest U.S. counties between 1990 and 2004. In 1990, this report showed, 53 percent of these defendants had financial conditions imposed as a requirement of their pre-trial release. By 2004, that number had risen to 68 percent.
And it's not just that bail is being used more frequently than it was 20 years ago. The Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a nonprofit pushing for bail reform, notes in Bail Fail, a report it published in September 2012, that average and median bail amounts are rising too. Between 1992 and 2006, the average bail amount increased from $36,497 to $55,500 (in 2006 dollars). In 2006, the median bail amount for felony defendants in the nation's 75 largest counties was $10,000.
Historically, financially secured bail has been an important tool in our justice system, a way to give genuine heft to the notion that persons accused of crimes enjoy a presumption of innocence. Likewise, the commercial bail bond industry, which helps defendants obtain release without having to put up their full bail amounts themselves, has also played a key role in the preservation of individual liberty.
Indeed, according to the American Bail Coalition (ABC), a trade industry group, the nation's 15,000 bail bond agents "transact an estimated 3 million court appearance bonds annually." Unfortunately, a much higher number of people, closer to 12 million, get booked into the nation's city and county jails now. (City and county jails are used to hold persons awaiting trial along with others serving sentences on misdemeanor charges. Persons who've been convicted on felony charges usually complete their sentences in state or federal prisons.)
That works out to around 735,000 or so inmates at any one time. Because 60 percent of them are simply awaiting trial, this means that right now there are roughly 441,000 people in America, equivalent to the population of Atlanta, who are stuck in jail even though they haven't been convicted of a crime.
Some of these people are not eligible for pre-trial release. Others who can afford to pay their bail amounts typically get out in a few days or less. Those who can't, and who can't obtain release through other means, can be kept behind bars for weeks or even months.
To make pre-trial release more equitable, JPI wants to "eliminate money bail" altogether. Failing that, it advocates "ban[ning] for-profit bail bonding companies." In either scenario, it wants to expand the usage of government-funded pre-trial agencies that release defendants on their own recognizance, often with conditional measures, such as wearing an electronic monitor or participating in a substance abuse program.
Naturally, the commercial bail bond industry opposes such suggestions. "Whether consumers realize it or not, there is currently a war being waged in the criminal justice system: a war being waged by government funded programs on a private industry," the ABC charged in a rebuttal to the JPI's reform efforts in a report entitled The War on Public Safety. In the ABC's estimation, pre-trial services that help "violent career criminals" obtain release "on nothing but a promise to return for their court dates" are "adversely impact[ing] our communities' public safety interests."
What such rhetoric conveniently sidesteps is that bail bond agents exist primarily to get defendants out of jail, too. For more than a century, they've been helping people retain their pre-trial freedom for nickels on the dollar. (Typically, bail bond agents charge a fee that equals 10 to 15 percent of a person's total bail amount.)
Now, however, with rising bail amounts, a large portion of the market cannot afford bondsmen. Either that, or the industry isn't interested in serving lower-dollar customers. Say you're stuck in jail on charges so minor that a 10 percent cut of your bail will yield only $20. Say your dear devoted mother lacks sufficient collateral to secure your bond. In such cases, many bail agents will likely take a pass.
When markets go underserved, innovators inevitably step in to offer solutions. In this instance, there are compelling reasons to do so. For one thing, the cost of supervised pre-trial release programs is much cheaper than the cost of keeping inmates in jail—approximately $2 a day versus $50 to $150 a day. Equally important is the fact that there's no legal reason to tie pre-trial release to a person's financial status: What's at issue is whether or not a defendant poses a danger to the community if released, and to what degree he's a flight risk.
Granted, financially secured bail is a mature technology with a long track record of relative effectiveness. According to the 2007 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 26 percent of the defendants it tracked from 1990 through 2004 who were released on their own recognizance failed to appear in court when due. In comparison, only 18 percent of those who were released via surety bond (i.e., a bond administered by the commercial bail bond industry) skipped bail.
But rival technologies are evolving rapidly. The electronic monitoring devices of 1990 can't compare to the electronic monitoring devices of today. The risk assessments that judicial officials can use to predict how defendants will respond if released on their own recognizance are far more sophisticated than the questionnaires of old.
We're in a transitional moment, akin to the period in the 1980s when email was edging its way into the mainstream but not yet ready or able to replace the U.S. Postal Service. Certainly it's far too early to conclude that money bail is obsolete. Indeed, as a conditional form of pre-trial release, money bail is a relatively hands-off way to preserve one's freedom: Pay it and your obligations have mostly been met. Just remember to show up in court when summoned!
In other forms of pre-trial release, where behavioral conditions replace financial ones, that's not always the case. In a July 2012 op-ed that appeared in The New York Times, law professors Dan Markel and Eric J. Miller noted how judges made one defendant write daily book reports and another purchase flowers for his wife as conditions for their pre-trial releases. In such instances, the professors concluded, the judges were essentially applying "punishments or moral education techniques" before the defendants had been convicted of a crime.
In other words, if you can afford bail, it might be your first choice—at least until mechanisms are put in place that keep judges from engaging in moments of premature adjudication. And if you can't afford bail, you should have other options.
That the traditional bail bond industry seems uninterested in expanding or improving those options hardly seems surprising—that's standard operating procedure for any legacy industry with a proven business model to protect. But its preference for the status quo is no reason to ban it or other commercial parties from the domain of pre-trial release. Instead, bail reformers should be encouraging additional private competition. After all, the primary purpose of pre-trial release is to place checks on government power. Fostering companies whose profits come from keeping people out of jail is a great way to do that.
The post Bailing out the Bail System appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the last 20 years, law enforcement officials, criminologists, journalists, and other cultural observers have attempted to solve the mystery of the nation's declining crime rates. Was the post-1990 drop in murders and other serious crimes due to new police tactics that concentrated resources in unsafe neighborhoods? Maybe. Was it longer prison sentences? The waning crack trade? Increased availability of abortions? Maybe, possibly, perhaps.
Bucking the trend, New York City in 2012 experienced its first overall increase in major crimes in 20 years. But this time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have decisively fingered the culprit: It was Steve Jobs. Or, rather, the devices Apple produced under his watch.
According to New York Police Department (NYPD) statistics, there were 3,484 more major crimes in 2012 than there were in 2011. (These numbers compare the first 51 weeks of each year.) The rise in the total number of Apple-related thefts —which occurred during burglaries, robberies, and grand larcenies —exceeded that number. (The NYPD keeps track of seven categories of crime that it deems "major." They are murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto. It keeps track of three categories of crime that it deems "minor." They are petit larceny, misdemeanor assault, and misdemeanor sex crimes.)
"If you took out thefts of Apple products—not Galaxies, Samsungs—just Apple products, our total [major] crime rate would be lower than it was last year," Bloomberg told the New York Post.
Presumably New York City's criminals are snapping up iPods, iPhones, and iPads not because they prefer Apple's battery life management over that of its competitors but because the resale market for Apple devices is robust and predictable. According to The Wall Street Journal, high tariffs in countries like Brazil can drive up the price of a new entry-level iPhone 4s to $1,000, so used ones go for as much as $400 there. Here in the U.S., secondhand dealers buying in bulk on Craigslist pay as much as $500 for a used iPhone 5. Demand is strong. Resale prices are high. There are millions of iPhones out there, but unlike so many other products in our age of plenty, they have not yet become too abundant to steal.
With other brands, theft is an iffier proposition. That snatchable seven-inch non-Apple tablet could have an initial retail price anywhere between $99 and $499, and there may not be much of a secondhand market. This magnifies crime's inherent risks: No one wants to be the chump who earns a stretch in the Big House for strong-arming some cheapskate out of what upon closer inspection turns out to be a Nook Simple Touch.
Can New York City's Apple- picking epidemic tell us something about crime in general? Most theories about America's long-term crime trends share a common characteristic: They attribute the drop to some factor that has depleted the nation's supply of criminals. One theory, for example, holds that because individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 tend to commit crimes at higher rates than people in other age groups, crime started dropping when the country's median age began to rise, thus leaving fewer young people per capita to commit crimes. Another theory stresses the correlation between crime and high levels of lead in the bloodstream. When leaded gas was banned, this theory suggests, childhood exposure to high lead emissions began to drop as well, which eventually led to fewer adults with the sort of neurological damage that is associated with criminal behavior.
None of the major crime hypotheses pays much attention to the ways in which the material landscape of America has changed. Yet such changes obviously have at least some impact on crime.
Car theft wasn't a problem until cars were invented. Apple theft barely existed in New York City a decade ago; according to Ray Kelly, the police department recorded just 86 Apple-related crimes in all of 2002. Since then, the company has made its products so portable they're nearly ubiquitous in public, thus prompting New York City's criminals to thug different. (On a more positive note, subway thefts involving boomboxes, Sony Walkmen, and evening editions of the New York Post are doubtlessly on the wane.)
But if a new, highly desirable product can lead to a dramatic increase in crime, perhaps the opposite is true as well. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "there was a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States from 1990 through 2010," exactly the same time in which the country began to experience a dramatic decrease in crime rates. Like the drop in crime, the rise in obesity has provoked many hypotheses but few definitive answers. One credible notion, however, is that waistlines have grown out of increasing affluence and abundance. Food got cheaper and far more accessible. Entertainment options and labor-saving devices proliferated. Life got easier, more convenient, and in many ways, far more pleasurable—so much so that we tend to opt for seconds of everything (more pizza, more video games, more social networking) as long as it doesn't require much exertion.
Think about the ways life has changed since 1990, and specifically about the ways these changes affect young men, who historically have been the cohort most likely to commit crimes. TV sports programming has expanded exponentially. Video games have become far more plentiful and immersive. Hip-hop evolved into a multibillion-dollar lifestyle industry encompassing music, fashion, and more. The Internet provided free universal porn. The rise of big-box retailers like Walmart and Target made a wide range of goods increasingly affordable.
Given that millions of well- paying jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors have been lost during the last 20 years, and that this loss has its greatest impact on the prospects of young men, these consolations may seem meager. Yet look at how young men are expressing their discontent. Murder rates have dropped. Rape rates have dropped. Property crimes have dropped.
Maybe this is all because of lower lead levels. Or maybe, in the same way that technologically driven abundance has made us fatter, it has also made us more content, giving us more opportunities for self-expression, more opportunities to develop meaningful social connections, and more material goods that are so easily obtainable that they blunt the economic imperatives of crime.
Consider what's happening in New York City with all those non-Apple devices. Physically, they're no harder to steal than Apples, and there are plenty of them to be found on New York subways. Yet because many non-Apple devices are so inexpensive, they are relatively easy to replace (or perhaps easy to live without), undermining the gadgets' value from the thief's perspective. So even as these items proliferate, the rate at which they get stolen is actually dropping.
Apple, meanwhile, is an ironic outlier. The creative tools with which it equipped the world's designers, developers, and media producers played a crucial role in enabling our new world of super-affordable material wealth. Yet despite the increasing ubiquity of iPhones and iPads, worldwide demand for these products remains so strong that they're still not universally accessible. As a result, they're still worth stealing.
Of course, if theft of Apple devices increases so much that their air of exclusivity begins to seem like a design flaw, a solution is readily at hand. By flooding the market with bargain-bin iPhone knock-offs, the company could instantly protect its marquee products in ways that anti-theft apps like "Find My iPhone" would be hard-pressed to match. In the end, abundance is the most powerful form of security.
The post The iPhone Crime Wave appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two days later, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene decided the packaging wasn't enough: It wanted the city's 10,000 or so licensed tobacco retailers to "prominently display point-of-sale warnings and cessation messages" – i.e., poster-sized versions of the theatrical, highly stylized warning images.
Tobacco companies contested the 2009 law, and in August 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that the warning images portion of it was unconstitutional. In the words of the Court, many of the images failed to "convey any warning information at all, much less make an 'accurate statement' about cigarettes," and were instead "unabashed attempts to evoke emotion (and perhaps embarrassment) and browbeat consumers into quitting."
Unable to inhibit cigarette sales through brazen, horror-show imagery, public health officials are now retreating to Victorian-era discretion. Earlier this week, Mayor Bloomberg introduced legislation that, if passed, will require tobacco retailers to sequester their products in "cabinets, drawers, under the counter, behind a curtain or in any other concealed location." Only during the act of purchase or restocking will such bounty be legally visible.
Believe it or not, the rationale behind this measure appears to be a videogame of sorts. A study funded by the New York State Department presented 1,216 teen participants, aged 13 to 17, with one of six simulated convenience stores. In two of the stores, cigarettes were openly displayed behind the counter. In the other four, the cigarettes were hidden behind solid cabinet doors that bore a logo identifying them as the store's "Cigarette Center." (In these four stores, varying degrees of cigarette advertising were present as well.)
Participants were told to buy four items, including two from the counter area. You don't need a degree in retail merchandising to guess how this played out: In the two stores where cigarettes were openly displayed, teens purchased cigarettes more often than they did when the cigarettes were hidden.
Now, it may be that all this study really proves is that teens are logical virtual shoppers. Participants were incented with the promise of $6.50 in e-Rewards dollars upon completion of their task, and they conducted the exercise in comparatively rapid fashion, finishing in an average of 172.3 seconds. (In real life, the study states, the average teen spends around 16 minutes in a typical visit to a convenience store.) Perhaps, in an effort to maximize their efficiency, they simply focused their attention on items that seemed most readily available.
What we can more certainly conclude from this study – or at least from the legislation that has followed in its wake – is that Mayor Bloomberg is determined to bend the city's appetites to his will through the supposedly benevolent mechanism of choice architecture.
Choice architecture is the practice of designing environments in ways that are meant to incite or at least favor specific actions and behaviors, without actually forcing outcomes on anyone. Putting cigarettes and candy near cash registers, where the possibility of an impulse buy is high, is one form of it. So is designing casinos in ways that encourage you to lose track of time. (In most casinos, windows and clocks are rarer than royal flushes).
In recent years, the idea that choice architecture can encourage positive behaviors as well as negative ones has grown increasingly popular, as has the idea that governments should engage in the practice. For example, if you use multiple, socialized garbage containers to help you separate your coffee grounds from your Budweiser empties, you're participating in government-mandated choice architecture. If you balk at ordering a cranberry orange scone at Starbucks with your morning coffee because there's a tiny sign next to it reminding you it contains 490 calories, thank the nearest bureaucrat.
If you don't like the way a casino implements choice architecture, you don't have to patronize it. If you don't like the way the government implements choice architecture, well, just give it a little more consideration and maybe you'll see the light.
Certainly the encomiums to government-mandated choice architecture have been growing increasingly fervent. In 2010, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced his plans to purge candy and soda from school cafeterias and fill vending machines with "nutritious offerings" as part of a campaign to "make the healthy choice the easy choice." In Feburary 2012, Michelle Obama, whose Let's Move! campaign is ostensibly devoted to giving people "access to a wide range of choices," successfully lobbied for Snickers Bar control. More recently, Mayor Bloomberg tried to make 12 oz. Pepsis the (legislatively constrained) choice of a new generation, and now, on the heels of that unsuccessful effort, he wants to put cigarettes under lock and key, or at least hide them behind some sufficiently thick drapes.
In response, a New York Daily News op-ed insists that "putting the cigarettes behind the counter actually increases liberty." It does this, its author, Carnegie Mellon professor George Loewenstein, explains, because the open display of cigarettes in shops confronts smokers "head-on with temptation, [making] it more difficult for them to implement the choice to quit that so many want to make."
In essence Loewenstein is saying that if we just had fewer options, we'd make better choices! Throughout history, no temperance advocate has ever said otherwise.
In New York City, the adult smoking rate is 14 percent. In the nation at large, it's 19.3 percent. But the city hasn't achieved this public health victory through the expansion of liberty. Instead, it has substantially curtailed personal choice. It's illegal to light up a cigarette in restaurants, bars, plazas, parks, and beaches. In December 2012, the New York Post reported that the city's Health Department was planning to offer $10,000 payments to community groups that convinced property managers to adopt smoke-free policies in their apartment buildings. And because of taxes imposed at the state and city level, a single pack of cigarettes costs anywhere from $10 to $13. In comparison, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center, a bag of heroin could be purchased in New York City for between $5—$12 as recently as 2008.
Alas, making tobacco nearly as illegal and expensive as a Schedule I drug doesn't just result in impressive public health gains – there are social costs as well. According to one recent study, New York City smokers with an annual income of less than $30,000 now spend 23.6 percent of that income on cigarettes! That's more than double the amount they were spending ten years ago, and yet smoking rates of the city's lowest-income residents have only declined a few percentage points in that time.
Meanwhile, in an effort to subvert New York City's alleged expansion of liberty, smokers have adopted numerous methods for getting cigarettes more cheaply. Nearby Indian reservations do a brisk trade selling tax-free cigarettes. Roll-your-own shops, which weren't subject to the same taxes as packaged cigarettes until new federal legislation was enacted last year, offered another alternative. And thousands of shops in New York City simply sell smuggled cigarettes. According to the city's Finance Commissioner David Frankel, 46 percent of the 1,900 retailers that were inspected over the last 18 months were "selling unstamped or untaxed product."
Here we see choice architecture at work in insidious fashion: By making a legal but unhealthy product increasingly unaffordable, Mayor Bloomberg and his confederates have effectively nudged thousands of smokers and shopkeepers into criminal behavior. Now, he wants to raise the stakes by increasing the penalties for the behaviors he's induced. A second new piece of legislation he's initiating, the "Sensible Tobacco Enforcement" bill, will, if passed, increase financial penalties for selling untaxed cigarettes and give the Department of Finance the power to shut down repeat violators. Light up and inhale the cool liberating flavor of Prohibition Lite.
The post Mayor Bloomberg Is Trying to Create Prohibition Lite appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If one were to set out how to teach children to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault, and break into candy stores, no more insistent method could be devised," he wrote. And they were so perniciously persuasive, they were corrupting the nation's youth with startling speed, even making bad seeds worse. "Even psychotic children did not act like this fifteen years ago," he concluded after listing a series of gruesome crimes allegedly inspired by comic books.
The evil spell that comic books were capable of casting apparently got to Werthem as well. While his campaign against brightly inked mayhem inspired a U.S. Senate hearing that led to industry self-regulation and the demise of hundreds of crime and horror titles, Carol Tilley, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, has discovered evidence that suggests Dr. Wertham bent the truth to fit his theories in Seduction of the Innocent.
Tilley details her finding in the November/December 2012 issue of Information & Culture. Comparing the actual transcripts of the cases studies that Wertham purported to describe in his book—involving youth he'd counseled in a Harlem clinic he founded—Tilley found that he frequently omitted, amended, and recontexualized information in ways that "change[d] the kids' arguments or change[d] their viewpoints."
In light of Tilley's revelations, one can't help but wonder: Why didn't the senators who were giving the third degree to comic industry bigwigs like Bill Gaines question Dr. Wertham a little more assiduously about his work habits?
Government Issue: Comics for the People, a 2011 anthology compiled by Richard Graham, an associate professor and media services librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, suggests an answer: If there was any entity that believed in the power of comic books to indoctrinate and instruct as Wertham did, it was the U.S. government.
In 1931, Graham notes, media research pioneer George Gallup published an analysis of newspaper readers in Des Moines, Iowa, that "showed that the least popular comic strip in the Sunday funnies was more widely read than the lead news story in the paper, and that adults as well as children were avid readers of the Sunday comics section."
In short order, advertisers began presenting their pitches in the form of comic strips. A decade later, in the wake of an Advertising Research Foundation study that echoed Gallup's findings, the U.S. Army started publishing comic books designed to impart various lessons to its troops.
Over the next decade, as critics like Wertham ramped up their campaign against the increasingly popular medium of comic books, the U.S. government itself published dozens of comics, a practice it continues to engage in, even today. (The most recent comic that Graham highlights, Squeaks Discovers Type, was published in 2010.)
To see complete versions of more than 200 titles that the U.S. Government Printing Office, the U.S. Department of Labor, and countless other federal and state agencies have published over the years, see the online collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's website.
Here are 5 notable titles the government published during the Wertham era.
1. The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States
Artist/Writer: Unknown
Date published: 1943
Government agency: Office of War Information, U.S. Government Printing Office
"It's time for us to stop bureaucratic organizations from using public funds in such a way," charged Congressman John Taber (R-NY) in 1943 when, in the midst of World War II, the Office of War Information issued this 16-page cartoon biography of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Accurately noting the publication's lack of information that would be useful to soldiers on a fighting front, Taber characterized the effort as "purely political propaganda…designed entirely to promote a fourth term and dictatorship." According to him, it looked as if it were created by the artist "who gets up Tarzan for the funny papers."
Certainly it presents Roosevelt, who in addition to being paralyzed from the waist down, was then suffering from high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and a range of other ailments, with Tarzan-like vigor. Kicking off with a panel that illustrates Roosevelt's shooting prowess as a young lad, the comic book presents Roosevelt as a rugged and dynamic presence, playing football at Harvard, sailing the high seas, restoring American prosperity with giant public works projects, and earlier in his life, sort of licking some mysterious malady that left him unable to be depicted standing up: "Roosevelt's determined fight amazed physicians. His recovery became almost complete…"
On November 7, 1944, President Roosevelt convincingly won his fourth presidential election. Score one for Wertham?
2. United States Marines #3: A Leatherneck Flamethrower
Artist: Mart Bailey, Wood Cowan, Ogden Whitney, Ray McGill
Writer: Milburn McCarty
Date published: 1944
Publisher: Government Enterprises
This commercial title, available at newsstands alongside the crime and horror comics that would cause such a national uproar during the late 1940s and early 1950s, was intermittently published by a private corporation but reviewed and cleared by the U.S. Marine Corp. Unlike government titles charged with turning sewage treatment processes or Social Security benefits into the stuff of page-turning drama, this title featured government work in all its two-fisted, action-packed glory, with page after page of machine-gun strafing, saber disembowelings, and other vividly rendered war-time carnage. Issues like this one also featured dozens of actual black-and-white photographs of Marines in combat—hanging out in foxholes, poking enemy dead with bayonets, carrying their wounded brethren on stretchers.
In Government Issue, Richard Graham notes that while many commercial newspaper comic strips featured content depicting the war, including depictions of "Nazis as Teutonic buffoons and the Japanese as blood-drooling torturers," the Office of War Information worried that such depictions were "too simplistic and could lead to over overconfidence" because they portrayed "the enemy as lazy and posing little threat."
Perhaps that's why on the cover of this Marine-approved comic, Prime Minister Tojo is depicted as a lively eight-legged sea-monster.
3. Foxhole on Your Front Lawn
Writer: Charles Biro
Date published: 1951
Government agency: U.S. Treasury
If you suspect it might be hard to base a gripping comic tale on defense bond interest rates, you're correct. What makes this comic interesting is who created it—Charles Biro, the man behind the comic book series Crime Does Not Pay, which is credited with launching the crime comic genre. By the time Biro was helping the Treasury Department stave off the Red menace by illustrating the virtues of government bonds, Crime Does Not Pay was no longer quite as blood-soaked as it had been in the early 1940s. Nonetheless, the title was still going strong in 1951, and filled with fare like "Book of Sins" and "You'll Never Live to Tell." If Dr. Wertham was right about the influential power of comic books, then Biro can take credit for singled-handedly creating a generation of ruthless, patriotic, bond-buying thugs.
4. Chic Young's Blondie in "Scapegoat"
Writer: Chic Young
Date published: 1952
Government agency: State of New York Department of Mental Hygiene
In the crime and horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the henpecked milquetoast who slaughters his boss or mutilates his wife in some fiendish fashion—only to ultimately suffer some even more gruesome fate himself—was a recurring character.
In "Scapegoat," Dagwood Bumstead seems poised to go down this route. First, he fantasizes about choking out Mr. Dithers with a ferocity that makes the Hillside Stranglers look like Homer Simpson. Then, while trying to nap away his seething contempt for the world, he explodes at his family. Luckily, Blondie saves the day by teaching Dagwood how to manage his murderous outbursts by brutally assaulting a dusty rug. If this title ever inspired the nation's tots to go on a tidy rampage of therapeutic room-cleaning, Dr. Wertham never caught wind of it.
5. Johnny Gets the Word
Writer: Unknown
Date published: 1957 (original version), 1965 (revised version)
Government agency: New York City Department of Health
In the late 1940s, as public sentiment against crime comics intensified, the comic book industry turned to romance titles as a source of less objectionable material. According to David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague, the industry was publishing 148 romance titles in 1950. In comparison, only 30 crime titles were being published at that time.
While Dr. Wertham worried that the close relationship enjoyed by Batman and Robin—not to mention their "sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases" and "beautifully landscaped" house—was instilling the nation's youth with homoerotic urges, Johnny Gets the Word suggests all those romance comics of the early 1950s might have had more impact. Published by the New York City Department of Health, it depicts the Big Apple as an extremely active matrix of heterosexuality, where pretty much every teen, even that "nice kid" Gloria, has got "the siff."
The post How the Government Turned Comic Books Into Propaganda appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Forget the prestigious college degree. Skip the unpaid internship at a respected company. Those things are headed the way of fancy résumé paper. In the future, whether or not you land your dream gig will depend more on how often your retweets get retweeted, how far you live from the office, or how you answer multiple-choice questions designed to assess your empathy, sociability, and ability to deal with repetitive tasks in highly regulated environments.
Companies such as Xerox, The Wall Street Journal recently reported, now pay more attention to a candidate's "personality" than they do to his work experience—at least when they're looking for people to staff their customer service call centers. Such screenings are not only about temperament. Employers are also evaluating how a worker's commute might affect his loyalty and which social networks he participates in. With mountains of data at their fingertips, work force analytics consultants can now determine what attributes and propensities are associated with success in a given position. If you possess those attributes and propensities, congratulations, you start on Monday.
This is not an entirely new development. In 1830 George Combe, one of England's most prominent phrenologists, explained that he could tell if a prospective servant was conscientious or untrustworthy by examining the bumps and bulges on his head. Nearly a century later, advocates of deterministic skull measurement continued to tout its potential as a human resources tool, with a letter writer in The Phrenological Journal describing it as an efficiency tool on par with typewriters and telephones. "It seems but a short time in the future," the correspondent suggested hopefully, "when our favorite Science will have the confidence of business men to such an extent that an applicant will be asked, 'Have you a scientific description of your Mental and Physical qualities?'?"
Given contemporary harassment laws, extended head fondling as a means of assessing potential hires should probably be avoided. But while phrenology never caught on in the workplace, the desire to take a quick, quantitative, predictive measure of would-be workers never died. As Annie Murphy Paul documents in her 2004 book The Cult of Personality Testing, psychometric visionaries throughout the 20th century invented instruments such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in their efforts to map the human psyche. Business interests saw the utility of these tools, which sort disparate individuals into more general stock-keeping categories that are easier to track and manage.
Like George Combe, commercial outfits that adopted tests like the MMPI and MBTI hoped to divine the intrinsic nature of potential employees. Were they honest or deceitful? Were they dependable, obedient, outgoing? Or would they take a lot of sick days, spend too much time at lunch, and steal company property?
While critics have repeatedly challenged the efficacy of these tests, today's advocates say the evaluation process has fundamentally changed because so much more data are available. Imagine, for example, a database of 10,000 individuals who have proven themselves to be effective call-center employees. A company might have access to their personality test results, their training records, the performance metrics that are kept on them each month as they go about their jobs, and so on. Data scientists analyze this information in myriad ways, eventually detecting useful trends.
Employees who live within 10 minutes of the office may be 20 percent likelier to stay at the company at least six months than ones who live 45 minutes away or further. Employees who have a college degree may be less inclined to stick with a call-center job than those who do not. According to The Wall Street Journal, Evolv, the company assisting Xerox in its recruitment efforts, determined that the ideal candidate to staff the company's call centers "uses one or more social networks, but not more than four."
As more companies adopt this approach to recruitment, expect a parallel push to expand employee protection laws. Not getting a job because your car is 12 years old or because you live 40 miles away from the office may not seem as unjust as not getting a job because of your race, sex, or religious beliefs, but it's still untethered to performance and comportment.
Yet ultimately what this approach represents is a move away from the white-collar shamanism that informs traditional hiring practices—the ritual of the firm handshake, the incantatory power of résumé action verbs like iterate and prioritize. In contrast, work force analytics aims to scrutinize call-center employees as closely as post-Moneyball general managers scrutinize shortstops, using as many quantifiable characteristics as possible. "The hourly workforce is tremendous in the richness of data available to evaluate," an Evolv white paper reads. "For a given hourly employer there are billions and sometimes trillions of data points that can be systematically evaluated to understand and then optimize the workforce."
While surveillance of such magnitude may conjure grim visions of intrusively, oppressively optimized cubicle serfs desperately trying to meet call quotas, there are liberating, empowering aspects to this kind of data analysis. For example, by analyzing thousands of work histories, Evolv determined that there is "very little relationship between the number of jobs an employee has held and their current tenure," and that "companies that screen out job hoppers and the unemployed have been needlessly limiting their candidate pool." Even more strikingly, Evolv suggests that while many companies refuse to hire applicants who have criminal records, including some who have only been arrested, its analysis shows that "crimes committed before a person entered the workforce had no predictive value for any counterproductive workplace behaviors," and that "people with records who stay arrest-free for four to five years are only as likely as the average person to be arrested again."
While Evolv specializes in hourly workforces, other companies are applying similar techniques to other sectors. SHL, a London-based firm that specializes in "talent management solutions," used data "from almost 4 million assessments in close to 200 countries" to determine what characteristics define employees with top-level leadership potential and where the greatest reserves of such individuals can be found. Among its conclusions: Mexico, Turkey, and Egypt "have the greatest source of potential future leaders." In addition, SHL found that while the "difference in leadership potential for women and men is less than 1 percent, men hold senior positions 3 to 1 over women."
In this new world of data-driven hiring practices, Ivy League degrees and résumés that boast stints at marquee companies won't matter as much as new metrics that have been designed to show a person's fundamental attributes and abilities over time. In theory, at least, more people will have more opportunities as Big Data reveals that talent can come from anywhere.
Of course, as the Moneyballization of the workplace proceeds, what this also means is that soon we'll no longer be able to hide our career .290 on-base percentage with an artfully worded résumé. Our proficiencies and weaknesses will be far more transparent, just as they've been for professional athletes ever since baseball card publishers started routinely printing statistics on the backs of cards in the early 1950s.
While such transparency will punish employees who aren't quite living up to their reputations, it will benefit those who are truly providing value. More important, it will help companies operate more efficiently, which will in turn provide benefits to us all.
The post <em>Moneyball</em> in the Workplace appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It was a typical Thursday night on Twitter. Mid-December, 6 p.m. Pacific Time. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was riffing on why the GOP should endorse over-the-counter birth control. Jenna Haze, two-time winner of the FAME Dirtiest Girl in Porn award, was posting an Instagrammed photo of storm clouds lit by the setting sun. Whole Foods Markets wanted to let everyone know that groceries make thoughtful Christmas gifts. And the hip hop artist The Game and scores of his fans were jawing at the conservative pundit Michelle Malkin.
Malkin's website Twitchy.com, whose brand of sustainable post-peak journalism feasts on foraged tweets to produce a timely stream of snarky outrage, had published an item about the cover artwork on The Game's new album, Jesus Piece. Even The Game had described this artwork as "controversial." It shows Jesus with a teardrop tattoo on his cheek and a red bandanna covering the lower half of his face, the Lamb of God as gangsta Messiah.
Twitchy harvested reactions the image had inspired on Twitter—some positive, some negative—and appended a parting shot: "Would The Game dare to do to Allah what he did to Jesus Christ? Just asking, though we already know the answer. Peace out."
The Game did not peace out. "#BOYCOTT @michellemalkin NOW!," he Tweeted. "She's racist, & makin racial & blasphemist comments about my album. Same b!$&% said Obama isnt AMERICAN RT."
That such charges were baseless did nothing to deter loyal Game fans, who started peppering Malkin with ugly tweets. "fuck that racist Asian looking hoe!" exclaimed one. Another threatened to rape her. A third suggested she needed to be hit in the head with a Louisville Slugger. Malkin, whose career is based on courting confrontation rather than routing around it, struck back quickly, sometimes with sarcasm ("You need TwitterViagra"), sometimes with Biblical verse ("Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.")
Her fans entered the fray too, and for the next several hours, in an awesome display of Twitter's capacity to inspire unlikely convergence, dozens of disparate individuals, many of them operating under pseudonyms, found common ground in their quest to see how much contempt for one another they could pack into the 140 characters Twitter allots per post.
As the drama unfolded, Twitter did what it generally does in such situations: nothing. Maintaining order on the micro-publishing platform is the responsibility of Twitter's Trust & Safety department, which, despite its Orwellian moniker and intimations of bland bureaucratic intrusiveness, is more free-range parent than helicopter mom. Until a user proactively files a complaint about another user's behavior, Trust & Safety stays on the sidelines. And even when complaints are filed, it often takes no action.
This strategy appears to be paying off. In a little over a year, Twitter's user base doubled, going from 100 million monthly active users in September 2011 to 200 million monthly active users in December 2012.
Trust & Safety
If you want to talk with a Twitter employee in person, prepare to be vigorously authenticated. In the small, ground-floor entryway of the downtown San Francisco building where the social media company is headquartered, a security guard behind the front desk demands picture ID from all visitors. Once you are matched against a list of expected guests and sign in, you can proceed to the elevator, where another security guard punches in the floor you have been cleared to visit. (The interior of the elevator has no control panel, so it's impossible to reroute your trip on the fly.) The elevator opens onto Twitter's 9th floor lobby, where you sign in one more time and receive a name badge. Then a PR person will emerge to escort you to your designated appointment.
Mine was with Del Harvey, director of Trust & Safety. In October 2008, when Twitter had only a couple dozen employees and approximately 6 million monthly users (according to the market research firm eMarketer), it hired Harvey to head up the standards department. Harvey had a good friend who was an engineer at the company, and when Twitter decided it needed to do something about the increasing number of spam and abuse complaints that were arising with the service's exponential growth, Harvey's friend suggested her for the job. "My friend was like, 'I know somebody who is super, super obsessive-compulsive, she'd be fantastic at this,'?" Harvey recalls. "My interview was like a 20-minute phone call, and then I was hired."
Before joining Twitter, Harvey worked for five years at Perverted-Justice.com, a nonprofit that targets online predators by posing as underage teens in chatrooms. When Harvey joined Twitter, she wasn't just the head of Trust & Safety; she was the entire department. Today she oversees a staff of around three dozen, who monitor the excesses of the estimated 500 million Tweets per day. As the Daily Dot noted in August 2012, when Twitter was averaging 340 million daily tweets, a five-second manual review of each one would "take the equivalent of 35,416 eight-hour shifts." At a half-billion per day, subjecting just 1 percent of Twitter's output to such cursory human discretion would take approximately 868 eight-hour shifts, absorbing the attention of roughly all of Twitter's current staff.
Those impossible figures help explain one of the company's core mantras: "We don't mediate content," Harvey says. "We don't proactively go out and do stuff that frankly wouldn't be scalable." Instead, Twitter simply explains what users can and cannot say and do in the Terms of Service (TOS) and Rules that it posts on the site. Other Internet juggernauts do the same, but what makes Twitter stand out in this field is the extent to which its house rules embrace laissez faire.
Consider, for example, some statements that appear in the user policies of other sites. "You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence," Facebook commands. "Colorful language and imagery is fine, but there's no need for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, and other displays of bigotry," Yelp says. Flickr "is not a venue for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we'll send you a warning or delete your account."
Twitter, in contrast, governs in much less proscriptive fashion. "All Content, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content," its TOS reads. "We may not monitor or control the Content posted via the Services and, we cannot take responsibility for such Content. Any use or reliance on any Content or materials posted via the Services or obtained by you through the Services is at your own risk." In its Rules section, Twitter reaffirms this hands-off policy: "We do not actively monitor user's content and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances."
Those limited circumstances mostly involve impersonating other people or disclosing their private and confidential information, committing trademark violations or copyright infringement, and posting "direct, specific threats of violence against others." Harvey elaborates: "You cannot say to a specific person, 'I'm coming over to your house right now with a baseball bat to kill you.'?"
Twitter's TOS wasn't always so circumscribed. In the spring of 2008, the site was growing rapidly but still radiated a utopian feel. There wasn't a lot of spam yet. There weren't a lot of celebrities yet either—technology pundit Leo Laporte was the most popular figure on Twitter then, with just under 29,000 followers—so there wasn't a lot of vicious heckler venom.
But of course there were exceptions. In June 2007, a "social-media insights consultant" named Ariel Waldman started receiving disparaging tweets from another user. She reported the tweets to Twitter, but the problem persisted. By May 2008 Waldman was fed up with the company's reluctance to take significant action. In a detailed post on her personal blog, she explained how this person had publicly called her a "crack-whore" and worse, along with tweeting her full name and email address.
In Waldman's estimation, these tweets clearly violated the TOS Twitter was operating under then, which stated that users "must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate, or intimidate other Twitter users." While Waldman believed her antagonist's tweets qualified as "harassment," she reported on her blog that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had told her in a phone conversation that he felt Twitter's TOS was "up for interpretation."
In fact, the company eventually decided its TOS was up not just for interpretation but for outright revision. Instead of banning the user that had been targeting Waldman, Twitter eventually rewrote its TOS to clarify its position on the sorts of behavior it would and would not tolerate.
'The Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party'
Changing the rules in the wake of Waldman's complaint wasn't exactly ideal timing from a public relations perspective. As Waldman pointed out in one of her posts on the matter, Twitter's Web 2.0 peers, such as Flickr and Digg, were far more proactive about banning users who engaged in objectionable behavior.
Twitter, on the other hand, seemed content to let users fend for themselves. "Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals," company co-founder Biz Stone explained on a message board where people were discussing the matter. "Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter, nor a crowd, would do well."
While this may have been true, it was also true that Twitter could have insisted that users create profiles using their real identities. It could have implemented more rigorous authentication requirements, such as providing a credit card number. Instead it chose a path that seemed to involve the least amount of company effort.
But if Twitter's newly articulated policy failed to protect its users from other users, it also effectively protected users from Twitter itself. Though the company "reserve[s] the right at all times (but will not have an obligation) to remove or refuse to distribute any Content" and "suspend or terminate users," it constrains its ability to exercise these powers by characterizing itself in the way it does. Indeed, when you proclaim that you're "the free speech wing of the free speech party," as CEO Dick Costolo often does, that creates certain expectations. When you regularly assert that you do not mediate content, users will assume that you do not mediate content, even in cases when that content is highly objectionable.
This doesn't mean Twitter never censors. During the 2012 Summer Olympics, for example, when the company had a partnership deal with NBC, it temporarily suspended the account of the British journalist Guy Adams after he critiqued an NBC executive and tweeted the executive's NBC email address, an alleged violation of Twitter's prohibition against tweeting another user's private information. Because this action contradicted the company's loudly professed values, however, Twitter suffered major fallout in the court of public opinion and acted quickly to make amends, reinstating Adams' account within 48 hours and apologizing to him.
Far more common than incidents like this are ones where the free speech wing of the free speech party gives such free rein to its charges that the neighbors complain. In May 2011, the South Tyneside Council, a municipal government body in the U.K., obtained a court order in California that compelled Twitter to help identify a user known as "Mr. Monkey" who'd been using Twitter to disseminate allegedly libelous material about several members of the council. According to The Guardian, it was "believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users." Twitter reportedly disclosed email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and IP addresses associated with the account to the Council's attorneys.
Since then, requests like this have become increasingly common. In 2012, every month brought new high-profile cases of judges, law enforcement agencies, foreign governments, human rights organizations, and private citizens who wanted Twitter to identify users accused of wrongdoing, to delete offensive posts, and to ban objectionable accounts.
Over time, Trust & Safety and Twitter's legal department (which now oversees Trust & Safety) have developed policies that allow Twitter to comply with country-specific free speech laws and yet still put users at the forefront. "Our mission statement within Trust & Safety is to ensure user trust, protect user rights, and craft and enforce policies to reduce legal risk," Harvey says. "And that's legal risk for Twitter and for users."
Thus, when the company receives a court order or subpoena to disclose user information, it alerts the user in question, so that he or she has an opportunity to contest the disclosure before it happens. When local laws compel Twitter to delete posts or ban accounts in a given country, it does so in a narrow, transparent fashion, blocking the material locally rather than globally, and replacing the blocked material with a grayed-out alert box indicating that an act of officially mandated government censorship has taken place.
And when third parties aren't armed with subpoenas, court orders, or other valid legal processes, Twitter typically does not take action. In September 2012, for example, Al-Shabaab, a Somali-based affiliate of Al Qaeda, tweeted photos showing the corpses of several Kenyan soldiers it took credit for killing in combat. A few weeks later, seven Republican members of Congress sent a letter to the FBI urging it to make Twitter remove Al-Shabaab's account and those of various other "Specially Designated Global Terrorist entities." As of early January, the five accounts the lawmakers complained about continue to function on Twitter. A letter to the FBI, even by influential types on Capitol Hill, does not carry the force of a court order. Twitter was unmoved.
Dissidents and Dilettantes
In a November 2006 Washington Post column, just a few months after Twitter was launched, Michael Kinsley described the site as "the ultimate in solipsism." A few months later, Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist James Lileks concluded that the platform was "as banal as it [was] addictive," a "useless productivity-destruction mechanism" that he couldn't stop reading. In those early days, even fans of the service were mostly struck by its technologically enforced shallowness.
Perhaps the first person to truly recognize—or at least demonstrate—Twitter's revolutionary power was the actor Ashton Kutcher, who joined the service in early 2009 and, in a matter of months, became its first user to attract more than a million followers. Beating out CNN for that honor in a closely watched battle, Kutcher showed that Twitter was a full-fledged broadcast medium that could push content to huge numbers of people in a single instant, and that you did not need to own a broadcast network to get your message out. A few months later, in Iran, dissidents jumped on the bandwagon, using Twitter to help publicize their efforts to hold their government accountable during a contested election. At one critical juncture, the U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance to ensure that the protesters had uninterrupted access to the outside world.
Iran's dissidents and others throughout the Islamic world demonstrate the flip side of lawmaker complaints about terrorists using Twitter. Enabling pseudonymity gives cover both to bad actors and those trying to evade repressive governments. Forcing disclosure would expose the good guys along with the bad guys. That said, true anonymity is extremely hard to achieve online, and dissidents who are in real danger of retribution should take greater efforts to conceal their identities than a simple Twitter pseudonym.
Twitter's pseudonymity functions as a liberating force in far less noble cases as well. For anyone with a more casual interest in maintaining a low profile, Twitter is an oasis in the post-Zuckerbergian world of pervasive disclosure. Sure, it wants to know what you're doing every second, just like Facebook and Google+ do. But while Facebook orders experience around identity, and Google+ really, really wants you to use "the name your friends, family, or coworkers call you" when you sign up, Twitter doesn't blink an eye if you submit a ridiculous alias and a throwaway email address.
Fifteen years ago, the entire online world pretty much worked like this, and the multiplicity of selves that cyberspace permitted was generally considered a feature rather than a bug. Indeed, it's one reason the early Web was such a liberating place, where kindergarten teachers could freely discuss their passion for medical marijuana without alerting their superiors, or Buffy fans could dissect the latest episode without exposing their digital necks to armies of vampire marketers who would feast on the knowledge for eternity. There are still plenty of places in cyberspace that accommodate anonymity or pseudonymity, but that's less and less true for centralized platforms such as Facebook.
But Twitter is just as mainstream as Facebook, just as central to the culture, and its easy pseudonymity offers a small degree of shelter from the Panopticon. The Geek Feminism Wiki has compiled a list of the various sorts of users who are harmed by a "real names" policy. The list is lengthy, filled with both broad and narrow classes of users, including LGBT people, people with disabilities, stalking victims, ex-convicts, local government whistleblowers, etc. As much as explicit identity engenders accountability, it can also prohibit candor and discourse that would otherwise benefit individuals and the culture at large.
There is, in short, a huge market for pseudonymity, not just in specialized or obscure realms but on mass-market platforms that make it easy to connect instantly with millions of other users. "We're not wedded to pseudonyms," Dick Costolo stated at a Twitter press conference in September 2011. "We're wedded to people being able to use the service how they see fit." But as services like Facebook and Google+ demand increasing degrees of disclosure from their users, the counter-market for platforms that offer more opacity and autonomy will simultaneously expand. Twitter is the pseudonymity wing of the pseudonymity party.
Free Speech: The "Competitive Advantage"
In the summer of 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt intimated that "absolute anonymity" was going the way of floppy disks and answering machines, and that eventually governments would implement some sort of mandatory identity verification program in cyberspace. In July 2011, at a social media round table sponsored by Marie Claire, Randi Zuckerberg, who was then Facebook's marketing director (and is still Mark's sister), exclaimed that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away" in order to promote better user behavior.
Twitter has developed into a major hub for mainstream discourse in large part because millions of people tweet under their real names, including thousands of celebrities and other prominent people whose accounts have been explicitly verified by Twitter. This high degree of disclosure leads to a high degree of trust. Twitter offers substantial opportunities to interact with immediately identifiable people, and that makes it a good place for strengthening real-world social ties and business relationships, and also for keeping track of Donald Trump's latest feuds ("Dummy Graydon Carter doesn't like me too much…great news. He is a real loser!") and what Kim Kardashian thinks of Atlantic City ("Atlantic City!!!!!!").
But as much as Twitter benefits from users who tweet under their real names—especially from verified celebrities—it hasn't seen any need to prohibit fake personas. Its combination of authenticated identity and easy pseudonymity, with no barriers to access between these two very distinct classes of users, is a pretty unique attribute, and potentially quite volatile. Indeed, if you asked the average crazed fan to develop an ideal stalking application, he'd probably come up with something pretty close to Twitter.
Twitter gives its users a great degree of latitude. It lets them determine how explicitly or covertly they want to present themselves. It places comparatively few limits on the types of permissible speech. Some users persistently abuse this tolerance, and others unfortunately pay the price. Eliminating pseudonymity on Twitter would surely reduce its supply of unpleasant discourse, as would taking a more proscriptive stance on what kinds of speech Twitter explicitly prohibits. As Twitter seeks to satisfy the investors who have poured more than $1 billion into the company over the last several years, it might lose its tolerance for corpse-tweeting terrorists in the name of creating a better advertising climate.
But so far, Twitter's laissez-faire attitude toward online discourse has been its greatest business proposition, so much so that Twitter's chief legal counsel, Alex Macgillivray, told The New York Times that he views Twitter's commitment to free speech as a "competitive advantage." The trust that Twitter places in users creates complications, but it also creates a place for people who appreciate the convenience and efficiency of contemporary social networks but would still like a little bit of the freedom and autonomy that animated the first-generation Web.
In 2012, the privately held Twitter generated an estimated $250–$350 million selling "promoted tweets" to advertisers who are eager to reach the company's millions of users. Those users are drawn to the service in large part because of its relatively unregulated nature. By 2014, industry observers predict, Twitter's ad revenues could top $1 billion a year. But what if those predictions are actually short-changing our appetite for robust, unfettered discourse?
Consider the cultural landscape now. At college campuses across the nation, highly restrictive speech codes are the norm. Anonymous political speech, once the province of our Founding Fathers, is now viewed as a scourge upon the land. An increasing number of states have adopted anti-bullying laws that potentially make it a crime to "torment or embarrass" a person simply for sending them a "lewd" or "obscene" electronic message. Such measures arise out of our expressed desires for more civility, more accountability, more tightly controlled speech zones. And yet every month, the least regulated mainstream communications platform on the planet draws millions of new users. They come for Twitter's immediacy, for its simplicity, and for the way it so easily connects them to The Game and Michelle Malkin. Free speech, it turns out, is popular.
The post Twitter: Free Speech in 140 Characters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>From the looks of the crowd, there were few if any museum curators in attendance. Also seemingly unrepresented: Gallery owners, art book publishers, art critics, advertising agency creatives, collectors, American Studies graduate students, and all the other cultural tastemakers who have helped position graffiti as a glamorous means of grassroots resistance against the encroachments of the state and its corporate overlords. Instead, it was mostly just cops, city workers, concerned citizens, and sales reps hawking environmentally friendly graffiti barrier coatings.
At this point, the ways in which graffiti has trespassed its way into the world of mainstream culture and high art are well-documented. Artists like San Francisco's own Barry McGee get commissions from Vanity Fair and Cadillac to confer institutionally sanctioned street authenticity on prime urban real estate. Shepard Fairey merchandises dissent more doggedly than McDonald's merchandises hamburgers. Institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston mount graffiti exhibitions. A few days before the Zero Graffiti conference took place, the National Park Service paid at least two people to repaint graffiti at Alcatraz Island that had originally been applied by Indian activists in 1969, when they were occupying the island in an effort to reclaim it from the federal government several years after it had shut down the prison that once operated there.
What gets much less attention than the business of graffiti is the business of anti-graffiti. And yet it's quite impressive in its own right. Most estimates put annual spending on graffiti abatement in the U.S. at $15 to $20 billion. Drew Lindner, chairman of Stop Urban Blight, the non-profit group that organized the Zero Graffiti conference, put the total at $17 billion in 2009. On a more local basis, Mohammed Nuru, Director of the San Francisco Department of Public Works (SFDPW), exclaimed in a speech at the conference that the city spends $20 million each year cleaning up unauthorized graffiti.
Few $17 billion industries strive to get smaller. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Drew Lindner is not just the chairman of Stop Urban Blight but also the president of This Stuff Works, a company that manufactures a line of graffiti abatement products. Or that the conference's speakers and attendees consistently expressed the belief that the War on Graffiti is a battle that requires constant vigilance and an increasingly proactive mindset.
And who, really, would argue with this? As oppressive as a city with zero graffiti would undoubtedly be, imagine its opposite, a city with zero graffiti abatement. Picture every doorway defaced with the artless scrawls of talent-free 12-year-olds. Picture every humble warehouse wall uplifted with bubble hearts and giraffes.
Like any form of creative expression, graffiti is characterized by the fact that the great majority of it is mediocre or worse. Indeed, perhaps because so much of it is done in the dark, under difficult conditions, quality control is a particular challenge for graffiti—it has probably unleashed more bad art on America than open-mike poetry slams, every incarnation of The Gong Show, and the NEA combined.
That makes the good stuff all the more amazing—but what to do about all the bad stuff? If graffiti went unchecked, eventually there'd be no space in the built environment for advertisements, no space for plain brick walls, no space for anything except aesthetically homogeneous amalgamations of riotous form and color. Talk about oppressive.
A bad poem is easy to ignore. A bad tag on the doorway of your favorite Starbucks is a daily assault on your sense of aesthetic well-being. The proliferation of such stuff gives city governments a credible rationale for creating graffiti abatement programs, and it gives entrepreneurs an opportunity to cater to these programs. Thus, a cycle of escalation begins: A city spending millions of dollars a year to reduce graffiti will inevitably demand stiffer penalties for transgressors and deploy more aggressive technologies to catch them in the act.
So while graffiti advocates present graffiti as a liberating force that allows individuals and communities to reclaim public space, graffiti has also given local governments a pretext to expand their coercive powers. In California, simply carrying a felt-tip marker can get you six months in jail if a prosecutor can prove you had "intent to commit vandalism or graffiti." Parents of minors who commit graffiti are liable for up to $10,000 in damages. More and more cities are beginning to use graffiti tracking apps and databases, in an effort to tie multiple instances of graffiti to taggers and thus increase their potential fines and sentences if they're caught.
But it's not just taggers and writers who bear the brunt of increasingly onerous surveillance and regulation. Ordinances that compel property owners to remove graffiti that appears on their property or face fines are now in effect in hundreds of cities throughout the U.S. If someone tags your house or business and you don't remove it in a specified amount of time after receiving a violation—sometimes as little as 48 hours—you can be fined hundreds of dollars. If you remove the graffiti and taggers hit you again, the process starts anew.
As graffiti spread from city to city in the 1980s and 1990s, so too did Graffiti Abatement Officers, Graffiti Task Forces, Graffiti Management Programs. Now, every time a tagger scribbles his name on the back of a bus seat, he may be reclaiming a few tiny inches of worn plastic for The People, but he's also empowering the expanding apparatus of the state.
The post How Graffiti Empowers Big Government appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A half-dozen years ago, when the growing complexity of shows like Lost and 24 was making great swathes of prime time all but indecipherable to casual viewers, YouTube emerged as TV for dummies, a gloriously dependable source of old-fashioned cathode idiocy. In front of the boob tube, you may have needed CliffsNotes to follow the exploits of Jack Shephard and company. Online, there was always a comforting array of farting babies, ironic cats, and awesome car crashes to entertain you.
Today YouTube still mainlines a vast and indispensable stream of brainless, throwaway entertainment into our culture, but it also has become more focused and ambitious. Bedroom ranters discovered the audience-building virtues of production values and consistent programming schedules. YouTube began supporting the efforts of its most popular content creators through an invitation-only revenue-sharing program. Companies such as Big Frame and Revision3 began to identify, develop, publicize, and otherwise support emerging YouTube talent for a cut of their earnings.
In October 2011, YouTube announced that it was partnering with dozens of premier content creators—everyone from Ashton Kutcher to The Wall Street Journal—to create 96 new channels of original programming. Instead of merely giving them a cut of the advertising revenues once their shows were up and running, YouTube reportedly fronted them as much as $5 million each to develop their programming; in total, it pledged $100 million to the initiative. A few months ago, the company announced it was partnering with more creators to produce an additional 60 shows.
Such developments set the stage for obvious narratives about idealism lost and the dissolution of authentic grassroots culture: "YouTube Alienates Amateur Users by Courting Pros," an October Reuters headline declared. But the ensuing article sidestepped the central irony informing the story. The so-called amateurs were upset because shifts in YouTube's promotional efforts meant they were no longer getting as much traffic on the platform, which meant they were no longer generating as much income from YouTube's revenue-sharing program.
That "amateurs" have been making enough money on YouTube to complain about changes on the platform only underscores how much YouTube has empowered—and continues to empower—independent content creators. While many Internet companies have made it easy for individuals to distribute their creative work in ways that traditional broadcasting and publishing models never allowed, few actually compensate users for their help in toppling old media dynasties and creating fortunes anew. Google, which owns YouTube, does. And while Google is notoriously reluctant to provide specific financial information about YouTube, a company spokesperson reports via email that YouTube is currently paying "hundreds of millions of dollars a year to partners" and that "thousands of channels are making six figures a year." Not bad for amateurs!
"Even to this day, I'm amazed that places like Facebook don't share ad revenue with you," says Rafi Fine, who with his brother Benny has been creating online video since the early 2000s. "Google and YouTube could have totally done the same thing." Instead, YouTube implemented a revenue-sharing program in 2007. In doing so, it expedited its evolution from a haven for home movies and copyright infringement to a place where creators had a real incentive to produce increasingly ambitious content and the means to keep doing so as their work found an audience.
The Fine Brothers exemplify the process. After graduating from high school in the late 1990s, they started submitting shot-on-video feature films to festivals around the country. Fairly quickly, however, they realized the Internet offered a potential path to greater exposure, and they began posting video clips to their own website. When YouTube came along, they jumped at the chance to let someone else host their work; those were the days when bandwidth was so expensive that a hit video could be a problematically costly success.
Around 2008, the Fine Brothers started earning some money from the revenue-sharing program. In 2010, when they created a breakout series called Kids React, which features precocious tots adorably crucifying viral videos and other pop culture phenomena, they began making enough to pay all their living expenses from YouTube earnings. In 2011, when YouTube tapped them to be part of the original channels initiative, the advance they received to create MyMusic, a sitcom about a fictional music infotainment channel, allowed them to rent an office in North Hollywood and hire 10 full-time employees.
Along the way, the Fine Brothers experienced none of the meddling that network TV executives are famous for. Instead, YouTube provided them with an increasingly robust platform on which to distribute their programming and an increasingly large potential audience to tap.
YouTube's hands-off approach means there are terabytes of tedious programming on the site. But it is also what has made YouTube so innovative, a spawning ground for concepts that no network programming executive on earth would have ever green-lit.
Take Food Wishes, a cooking series that never shows host John Mitzewich's face. Instead, the camera stays focused on his hands for the duration of each episode, as he methodically shows every step it takes to make a miso-glazed skirt steak or Israeli couscous and cheese. Or how about Michelle Phan, a Florida-based "beauty guru" whose videos on how to achieve a "hippie princess" look or use kitty litter to make a facial mask have been viewed nearly 700 million times in the five years that she's been posting them?
The videos that Mitzewich and Phan produce may be substantially shorter than your average TV show, but they're far more comprehensive and definitely not designed for limited attention spans. While traditional food shows tend to emphasize the chef's personality at least as much as the cooking, and traditional makeover shows never spend more than a minute or two documenting how a small arsenal of makeup can transform an exhausted middle-aged marketing manager into a vibrant supermodel, YouTubers like Mitzewich and Phan aim to instruct as much as entertain. Watching their videos requires a kind of focus not necessary for TV but offers a payoff that TV doesn't deliver. YouTube has yet to become an official degree-granting institution, but if you want a Ph.D.-caliber education in how to achieve everything from a "cyber gothic anime" look to "candy cane eyes," just watch 50 or so of Phan's 200-plus videos.
What characterizes YouTube most in 2013 is not how it is making the vast wasteland of TV even vaster but how it is making it smarter. Even a broad-strokes comedy like MyMusic plays out in complex ways. While the hub of the Fine Brothers' MyMusic channel is a sitcom about people who create entertainment media for a living, à la 30 Rock or The Larry Sanders Show, the channel also features the programming these fictional characters create as standalone episodes. So you can watch them interview real bands and deliver real music news, and you can follow them on social media as well.
"Every character has a Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest account," says Benny Fine. "We even have things hidden on LinkedIn and a character who does Yelp reviews. It's a very deep, immersive reality. Viewers can write to the characters, and nine times out of 10, they will write you back."
Investing in creators like the Fine Brothers has paid off in a big way. In August 2010, according to the audience measurement firm Comscore, the average visitor to Google's sites watched 269.5 minutes of video, primarily on YouTube. By 2012 the average Google visitor's monthly video habit had grown to 443 minutes.
YouTube continues to claim a greater and greater share of our attention—not just through videos of women doing yoga in miniscule bikinis but also through introductory Latin lessons and other fare that taps our desire for depth and immersive engagement. In 2005, this was a plot twist few observers saw coming.
The post How YouTube Saved TV appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Home Depot and Whole Foods—they have a lot of business. They need to understand that the Christmas tree business in the city is a little bit different than wholesale items from China," 26-year-old tree-seller Diana Marmolejo told the Post. Translation: Christmas is about more than moving units at the lowest possible price. It's about family. (Marmolejo's tree lot is "family-owned.") And family. (The tree she sells are from "mom-and-pop" farms located in North Carolina.) And, you know, family. Corporations may be people, but do you really want to buy your Christmas tree from one?
There's another wrinkle in the story—New York's fire code prohibits the indoor storage of Christmas trees for sale. In fact, New York retailers can't even display Christmas trees indoors. So presumably the corporate giants will either need to set up shop outside or abandon this facet of their businesses.
Keep your fingers crossed it's the former. In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, New Yorkers could use the comforts of an old-fashioned Christmas. And as it turns out, entrepreneurs aggressively peddling trees in bulk is about as old-fashioned as you can get.
In his 1996 book The Battle for Christmas, historian Stephen Nissenbaum, writes that Christmas trees "first became widely known in the United States during the mid-1830s." But while German immigrants are generally credited with introducing the custom here, Nissenbaum explains that widespread knowledge of old Tannenbaum came not through first-hand experience but rather through literary channels. According to Nissenbaum, progressive reformists, largely upper class, Unitarian, and based in New England, saw in the German tradition of the Christmas tree a means of counteracting the "crass materialism" and general sense of unrestrained indulgence that had already begun to characterize the way Americans were celebrating Christmas.
The reformists wrote stories featuring Christmas trees—sometimes true accounts, sometimes fictional—and in these stories the Christmas tree minimized or mitigated the holiday's crass materialism in a number of ways. First, it confined gift exchange to a specific place and a specific time. Second, it used ritual—and authentic immigrant folk ritual at that—to shift emphasis from the gifts themselves to the act of gift-giving. Finally, it demanded obedience and patience from children, who weren't allowed to see the tree or their gifts until a designated time.
While popular stories like "The Christmas Tree" helped spread the idea of Christmas, Christmas trees themselves did not immediately become a widespread phenomenon, especially in cities like New York. Apparently the residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn in the mid-19th century were not quite as self-sufficient as today's DIY urbanites—there were no rooftop farms in Williamsburg growing organic heirloom balsam firs.
Getting a tree was manual labor. Back then, city-slickers preferred shopping. This, at least, is what Catskills farmer Mark Carr discovered in 1851, when, in a last-ditch effort to raise funds for his next year's crop after a poor harvest, he decided to chop down some of the trees that were growing on his property and try to sell them in New York. A New York Times account published in 1880 reports that Carr paid a "silver dollar for the use of a strip of sidewalk on the corner of Greenwich and Vesey streets." A more recent article, published by writer Ed Mues in 2007, adds that Carr sold three dozen trees for what one newspaper at the time described as "exorbitant prices."
Other entrepreneurs followed in his wake. According to an 1900 article in the New York Times, a "party of sportsmen" returning by yacht from an excursion in Newfoundland in 1892 made a stop at Maine, where one of them decided to purchase 500 balsam firs and sell them in Boston, transforming what had previously been "looked upon as a nuisance" into a new cash crop. In 1896, the Times reported, a half dozen men from Maine formed "a syndicate with a capital of $25,000," bought up the stock of trees at prices higher than the traditional New York dealers were accustomed to paying, then set up shop in an unregulated area of the city near the public docks that allowed them to start selling trees on December 1st. In contrast, a Mayoral decree meant the traditional sellers could not start selling their trees until December 19th. "These men come to New York only once a year; they have no heavy rents to pay, they hire the space they want for, perhaps, $50, and have their goods out for nearly three weeks before we do," one of the traditional sellers complained.
But of course the citizens of New York benefited from their efforts: They had more time to buy trees, and more trees to choose from. A 1902 issue of Country Life magazine puts the annual trade in New York City at around 400,000 trees. Seven years later, the Times reported that approximately one out of every four families had a tree in the U.S., and that the trade was especially strong in New York City and New England, which accounted for approximately two million out of the five million trees that were sold that year.
While the Christmas tree had been introduced as a means to dampen the holiday's commercialism, it instead did the opposite. It gave retailers a new item to sell, and that item in turn prompted additional spending. Once you had a tree, you need ornaments and, of course, a vast array of presents. Once you were decorating inside, why not outside too? The tree helped furnish the holiday, and the increasing number of furnishings associated with Christmas gave people more and more ways to make Christmas a larger and more significant part of their lives.
And the tree would not have caught on it as it did had it not been for the efforts of entrepreneurs determined to increase its availability and affordability. However "exorbitant" Mark Carr's prices were, buying a tree from him must have been cheaper than going to the Catskills to get one. The next year he brought more and sold out again. Once a family affair limited to a relatively small number of practitioners, the ritual of the Christmas tree had been conveniently commercialized and was on its way to becoming a beloved mainstream tradition.
The post How Capitalism Made the Christmas Tree Better appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before Facebook, there was Babylon. Before Twitter, Rome. Cities have always served as social networks, exciting places with an abundance of venues in which to cultivate new ties over lattes and shots of tequila.
And then there's downtown Las Vegas, miles away from the glitzy strip. Tacky and outdated, a little bit scary, largely abandoned, you might call the Fremont Street area of Vegas the MySpace of urban America.
But just as there are those who believe MySpace can regain its former glory, so too downtown Las Vegas has its boosters. For the last two years, one of the most passionate has been Internet entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, the online shoe and apparel retailer.
In December 2010, Hsieh announced that Zappos.com was planning to move its thousand-plus employees from an office park in Henderson, Nevada, to the old Las Vegas City Hall, a transition that will happen sometime later this year. When it does, Hsieh won't be commuting. In 2011, he leased 50 units in a luxury high-rise in the neighborhood, and he and some of his Zappos.com co-workers moved in. He's hoping more will follow—Zappos.com employees and anyone else who wants to live in a lively, community-oriented urban neighborhood near his eight-acre worksite. It's something he calls The Downtown Project.
Primarily bankrolled by Hsieh, The Downtown Project plans to invest $350 million in up to 200 small businesses, dozens of tech start-ups, and a diverse mix of other public resources and amenities. The ultimate goal: To create the sort of dense, walkable, mixed-used Shangri-La championed by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Put another way, Hsieh would like to make downtown Las Vegas a more compelling social network, a feature-rich platform that encourages frequent chance encounters, fruitful knowledge exchange, and over the long term, greater innovation and productivity. Where abandoned liquor stores now fester, yoga studios shall one day bloom.
In a town where development typically takes the form of another massive casino resort, Hsieh's dream is a fairly radical vision. But Las Vegas has already replicated Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the New York skyline, so why not thriving urban neighborhoods like San Francisco's Mission District or Brooklyn's Williamsburg?
Call it a venture-capital take on urban locavorism. Hsieh and his cohorts in The Downtown Project are trying to catalyze and accelerate enough hip and artsy small businesses—and maybe the next Instagram—to attract a critical mass of highly skilled residents who will further fuel the city's economic and cultural growth.
"Instead of these traditional development efforts, where they clear an entire neighborhood and then put in a stadium or a convention center, what Tony is doing is working with the coffee shop people and the bookstore people and trying to help them expand. It's a very market-based, very trial-and-error approach," says urbanist Richard Florida, a professor at both the University of Toronto and New York University, whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class was instrumental in shaping Hsieh's vision of downtown Las Vegas—so much so that Hsieh sought him out for consulting advice early in the project.
Hsieh has also drawn inspiration from the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of the 2011 book The Triumph of the City. But while both Florida and Glaeser have long been bullish on the benefits of urban density and the increasing value of cities in the Information Age, Hsieh himself is a somewhat unlikely advocate for urban dynamism.
In fact, Hsieh spent most of the last decade proving that serendipitous encounters with transvestite hookers or hedge fund managers on their way to the opera aren't actually necessary for building a multi-billion-dollar e-commerce company. In early 2004, when Zappos.com was a growing but not yet spectacularly successful business, Hsieh moved its 60 or so employees from San Francisco's most centrally located neighborhood to a cul de sac in a suburban office park in Henderson, a place so creatively barren that the arts and culture district pretty much consists of the DVD aisle at Best Buy.
The draw was low taxes, cheap office space and housing, and a large labor pool of people willing to view call center work as a career rather than a temp job. The move paid off beautifully for Hsieh and Zappos. When Amazon purchased the company for $1.2 billion in 2009, his take was reportedly $400 million.
And yet at precisely the same time Zappos left the city for the suburbs, cities started growing more desirable. While Craigslist and Match.com had offered early indicators that urban density would play an important role in how the Internet functions, social networks were making this emphatically clear by 2004. After all, what good was Yelp if there was only one vegan restaurant in your county to review? How many knitting fanatics could you aggregate at a small-town Meetup meeting? By the time Facebook, Foursquare, and Groupon came along, urban density had grown as important to high-tech performance as bit rates and processor speeds. If you don't live in San Francisco or New York, your iPhone isn't living up to its true potential.
This is why Google, Apple, and other tech giants now operate private corporate shuttles that ferry thousands of their San Francisco–dwelling employees to their Silicon Valley campuses each day. And why, according to The Wall Street Journal, Google's New York City workforce has grown from around 70 in 2002 to nearly 2,800 in 2012.
But as the apps that make city living more compelling grow more innovative, cities themselves often tend toward stasis and homogeneity. Excessive codes and regulations make it hard to open small businesses. High taxes and high rents further inhibit bricks-and-mortar innovation.
In recent years, entrepreneurs have tried to route around such obstacles in novel ways. Food trucks give aspiring chefs more flexibility than a traditional restaurant. Pop-up boutiques allow entrepreneurs to rapidly prototype and debug new retail concepts. The Downtown Project has similar aims: It's an attempt by people who aren't urban planners to inject urban planning with the radical configurability that characterizes software design.
Witness Hsieh's plans for Central Container Park, an outdoor mall whose buildings will be fashioned from shipping containers and thus allow entrepreneurs to test ideas before investing in costly build-outs and long-term leases. Or his notion of creating a dorm-like building that offers 100-square foot studios (with shared bathrooms) for as little as $100 a month.
Already, Hsieh is discovering that building a real-life metropolis is more complicated than playing Sim City. "I come from a tech background and I'm used to being able to go from idea to launch in 24 hours," Hsieh recently told Pando Daily editor Sarah Lacy in a video interview. "And you just can't do that with city regulations and permits and so on."
But according to The New York Times, the Downtown Project has persuaded "around 15 tech start-ups" to set up shop in Las Vegas and initiated at least 16 construction projects. It's purchased multiple properties and jump-started a new restaurant and a co-working facility. Along with the shipping container park, a pre-school, a newsstand, another co-working facility, and a venue for TED-like public talks are also in the works.
"As someone who works in this field, I'm shocked at how fast he's been able to organize and move," says Florida. "It shows what entrepreneurs can do versus what governments can do."
And perhaps it also points a way toward a more dynamic future, where urban planning is defined at least as much by new ideas and experimentation as it is by zoning codes and preservation groups. As flexibility, novelty, and rapid change increasingly characterize our lives, we want more and more of these things, from our neighborhoods as well as our smartphones.
The post Urban Renewal, Corporate-Style appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a quainter, more hidebound America, the America of 2002, we didn't celebrate Black Friday until the sun had set on Thanksgiving and risen the next morning.
If you couldn't wait for the festivities to start, you camped, huddling with your loved ones in big-box parking lots, forming strategic alliances with those ladies in the matching T-shirts who seemed hellbent on seizing control of the Xbox aisle. Commerce is always the cornerstone of community.
But as Black Friday grew more popular, retailers began to expand its province. First, 5 AM openings became fashionable. Soon thereafter, the 5 AM openings turned into midnight openings.
Last year, Toys 'R Us offered Black Friday deals at 9 PM on Thanksgiving evening. This year, The Washington Post reports, retailers are annexing even greater chunks of the day we've traditionally reserved for high-calorie gratitude. Kmart will offer Black Friday door-busters at 6 AM on Thursday. Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, and other retailers will all offer Black Friday deals on Thursday too, albeit not quite so early as Kmart.
This tactic—dubbed "Black Friday Creep"—has proven controversial. Workers at Target and Wal-Mart are introducing petitions at Change.org, asking their employers to let them spend the holiday at home. Thanksgiving loyalists complain that retailers are ruining a day that is meant for "food, families, and traditions," not shopping.
But if the sanctity of Thanksgiving is in question, so too is the sanctity of Black Friday. And in many ways, that's actually a rarer and more culturally valuable asset to protect.
Think, for a moment, about Black Friday's ascension. According to the National Retail Federation, at least 71 million U.S. citizens are planning to shop this weekend. Even with the premature openings, many shoppers simply can't wait and are already staking out their places in line.
When was the last time you heard of anyone who was so eager for Easter to arrive they spent seven days sleeping in a church parking lot just so they could commandeer the first pew? How many people design proprietary t-shirts to celebrate their love for the Fourth of July?
Black Friday has no federal sanction. It draws upon no centuries-old tradition. The Hallmark Channel has yet to sentimentalize its virtues in dozens of made-for-TV movies about the way the pursuit of deeply discounted toaster ovens can mend old family wounds. And yet millions of people celebrate Black Friday now, some casually, others with great ardor, because it stirs them in some way.
Like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Black Friday celebrates bounty and benevolence. With Thanksgiving, however, you might suddenly wonder: Are you gorging yourself on your fifth piece of Mile-High Caramel Apple Pie with the proper degree of deferent reflection? With Christmas, the pressures to craft the perfect doily table runners, go caroling with orphans, and successfully navigate all the other expectations and obligations of the day that it's no wonder so many folks need a steady drip of Holiday Nog to make it through the season.
Black Friday lacks the nobler pretenses of its forebears. It's the St. Patrick's Day of shopping, a day devoted to explicitly performative consumption. On Black Friday, buying four big-screen TVs you don't need isn't stupid, it's epic. Waiting in line for a few hours isn't a nuisance, it's the way we show gratitude that we live in a country where we have heated mattress toppers—mattresses for our mattresses, with soothing, highly targetable and granular temperature control! Blessed with such abundance, is it any wonder we sometimes descend upon a stack of $2 waffle makers like a pack of starving piranhas?
Because Black Friday is so deliberately bacchanalian, a suburban Mardi Gras where the beads have been upsized into brightly colored boxes filled with children's toys and the goal is to test the absolute load-bearing capacity of today's all-plastic shopping carts, it's natural to focus on its most negative aspects—the deaths that have occurred when crowds got out of hand, the lesser acts of mayhem that sometimes take place as shoppers get swept up in the scrum of the housewares aisle.
Ultimately, though, Black Friday is more about accord than chaos—witness the increasingly common matching t-shirts, the frequent invocations about Black Friday as a cherished "family tradition." In addition, Black Friday's not just a highly inclusive holiday that draws participants from all creeds, colors, classes, and political persuasions—it's a holiday that does so in shared public spaces. And outside of jury duty and events like St. Patrick's Day and Mardi Gras, where the vomit quotient and general chaos are much higher, where does that happen anymore? Thanksgiving and Christmas are largely private affairs, celebrated at home with only select invitees in attendance. Black Friday is for anyone who wants to show up.
That so many do—especially when websites like Gilt and Groupon have made 50 percent off the new normal—suggests our hunger for moments of comity, the solace we derive from affirming that at least the common pursuit of next-generation iPads at near-wholesale prices still binds us as a nation.
Like all holidays, however, Black Friday derives its power in large part from its ephemeral nature. It only happens once a year. The best deals go quickly. You spend weeks recruiting team members, scouting store layouts, devising the route plans and nutritional strategies that competitive endurance shopping requires, and then, poof, after all that anticipation and rehearsal, the whole thing's over, just 24 short hours after it began.
Cannibalizing Thanksgiving in the name of Black Friday is a grand humanitarian gesture and probably good business practice as well. At least in theory, longer Black Friday hours and more enduring specials should result in less crowding, fewer confrontations, a safer holiday, smoother commerce.
But less time waiting in lines will also mean less time for family bonding. Deals that last longer will reduce the need for extensive strategizing and planning, which will also likely reduce the excitement and satisfaction that Black Friday's most diehard adherents derive from the day. And when $100 flat-screens become absolutely easy to acquire, $100 flat-screens will no longer be magic wands that transform mere friends into comrades for life. The true value of hardcore consumerism can't be measured in dollars and cents alone.
The post In Defense of Black Friday Shopping appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In America today, an expanding network of surveillance cameras tracks our bank deposits, our shopping expeditions, and our workplace trysts in the supply closet. When we venture online, hundreds of companies diligently note the websites we consume, the files we download, and the comments we make. Our smartphones are even worse stool pigeons than our computers, constantly keeping tabs on our precise geographic coordinates. If you grow weary of such oppressive attention, if you long for a little Waldenesque solitude outside the crosshairs of our panoptic culture, there is still one place you can go to get away from it all: the borderlands of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
That situation is ironic, of course. Long before Google Street View existed, long before we started sending out alerts every time we breached the perimeter of Starbucks, the U.S. government embarked on an epic quest to establish a "virtual" fence along the Mexican border. The year was 1997. And while the U.S. Border Patrol's surveillance technology then consisted primarily of sunglasses, border hawks and bureaucrats dreamed of a thin technological line of motion sensors, infrared cameras, and video-driven command centers producing the same sort of omniscience we now exert over 7-Eleven parking lots. To realize this bold but improbable vision, Congress approved funds for a pilot project called the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or ISIS.
Thus began a long stretch of failure: cameras that wilted from the heat when thermometers hit a relatively temperate 70 degrees, ground sensors that could not tell a native cactus from an illegal intruder, inept project management, insinuations of fraud and corruption. Periodically, the quest would be canceled and then revived under a different brand name. ISIS begat America's Shield Initiative, which begat the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBINet. In January 2011, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano officially pulled the plug on this latest incarnation, thereby ushering in what arguably has been the project's most successful two-year run. Zero functionality was added during this time, but at least spending came to a standstill too.
Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ready to give the virtual fence still another go. According to the trade publication Defense News, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a division of DHS, has earmarked $91.8 million in its fiscal 2013 budget for the construction of what it calls "integrated fixed towers." In April 2012, CBP issued a request for proposal to build a single tower near Nogales, Arizona, and more than 100 companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics, expressed interest in pursuing the project. CBP was scheduled to choose a vendor in the fall of 2012.
If the federal government and its various contractors have learned anything during the last 15 years, it's that building a fence, especially a virtual one, over terrain that spans desolate mountains, wind-swept deserts, and meandering rivers, is no easy task. According to Robert Lee Maril, an East Carolina University sociologist who has written two books about the border, much of the equipment that was installed during the ISIS era is now "rotting in the West Texas wind." SBINet fared similarly. While initial plans called for a series of 1,800 towers deployed across the entire length of the southern border, Boeing, the project's primary contractor, built just 28 of them in a 53-mile section of Arizona, at a total cost of approximately $1 billion.
After these experiences, CBP is proceeding with the sort of plaintive foreboding more commonly seen in a gun-shy Match.com veteran than a major federal agency. "In all cases, CBP will seek strong confirmation that each offeror's system is truly non-developmental," its request for proposal advised. "Offerors must provide strong assurance that the proposed system is now ready, deployable and will not require additional engineering development if they hope to receive favorable consideration." Translation: It doesn't need all the latest bells and whistles. In fact, the agency will totally settle for a balding, nondescript, not particularly sexy surveillance system, just as long as it actually works.
The CBP (which was itself rebranded as part of DHS in 2003, uniting functions from two divisions of the Justice Department) wants to take things very slowly. If whatever vendor it chooses can deliver one tower whose associated cameras, radar, and sensors are capable of detecting a "single, walking, average-sized adult" within a range of 7.5 miles, and then transmitting this information in real time to a command post staffed by Border Patrol agents, then maybe, just maybe, it will think about building up to five more of them.
While CBP is terrified of another crushing disappointment, what is perhaps even scarier is the prospect of success. The agency's failure to construct a viable surveillance system has had at least one tactical advantage: It has kept people from questioning the value of a functional virtual fence. Any attention the project has attracted has focused mainly on diagnosing its immediate shortcomings rather than assessing its long-term utility as a means of deterring illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and terrorists seeking entrée to the U.S.
Building dozens of towers that don't really work as advertised has been somewhat costly, but how much would it cost if we had hundreds or even thousands of towers that do work as advertised? In the wake of 9/11, the Border Patrol has grown tremendously. In fiscal year 2000, it had 9,212 agents and an annual budget of $1 billion. Ten years later, the Border Patrol boasted 21,444 agents and a budget of $3.5 billion. A virtual fence, and the monitoring and maintenance it would require, will no doubt ensure a well-staffed, well-budgeted future for the CBP. But what impact would it have on the security of America?
"The main problem the Border Patrol faces isn't just seeing drugs or illegal aliens coming through," says Maril, the East Carolina University sociologist. "It's getting to wherever that's happening before the people are gone." While a more functional system may cut down on calls prompted by suspicious agaves, it won't help agents traverse harsh and often inaccessible terrain any faster. "You can't just get in a squad car and be there in 10 minutes," Maril notes.
In any case, there is no guarantee this iteration of a virtual fence will work any better than earlier ones. Tom Barry, a senior analyst at the Center for International Policy who focuses on border issues, notes that a retired Air Force major general testifying at a 2010 congressional hearing confessed that 12 out of 15 sensor activations are caused by wind. "They're spending many millions of dollars responding to weather events," Barry exclaims.
Yet the virtual fence continues to attract bipartisan support. The Obama administration has funded it for 2013. Mitt Romney's official campaign website promises to "complete a high-tech fence to enhance border security."
Such consensus derives at least partly from the virtual nature of the fence. In its earliest days, it was so ethereal, so magical, that its creators chose fantastical, almost child-like names to describe it (ISIS, America's Shield.) Now, after 15 years of costly growing pains, its latest moniker is the more pedestrian Arizona Border Technology Plan.
But even with the more utilitarian name and the new emphasis on humble pragmatism, longtime border watchers like Maril and Barry suggest that the ultimate costs and benefits of a virtual fence remain largely undefined, a hazy, constantly shifting mirage of heightened security glimmering in the farthest reaches of the Arizona desert.
The post Big Brother's Border Blindness appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his 2012 book Going Solo, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg argues that America is in the midst of a significant demographic shift, especially in urban areas. People living alone now make up 43 percent of all households in Minneapolis, 45 percent in Atlanta, and 48 percent in Washington, D.C. Nationwide, Klinenberg says, "28 percent of all households now consist of just one person—the highest level in U.S. history."
Roam any grocery store, and you can see how effectively the nation's frozen pizza manufacturers have accommodated this shift. Building codes and zoning laws are another story. The situation is particularly acute in New York City, where, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, 46 percent of all households are singletons.
"New York City's housing codes have not kept up with its changing population, and currently do not allow an entire building of micro-units," declared a press release issued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office in July. Not to worry; the mayor has a plan: Developers have been invited to submit proposals for new residential construction on a Manhattan parking lot owned by the city. For this particular project, the city will waive zoning regulations that require all new apartments be at least 400 square feet. The new development will consist mainly of "micro-units"—studio apartments that combine general living space, a kitchenette, and a bathroom into a total footprint of just 275 to 300 square feet.
"We're looking for creativity, affordability, imaginative design and responsiveness to the needs of real New Yorkers," said Mathew Wambua, Commissioner of New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, at a July press conference announcing the project. "Show us something we haven't seen before that is ingenious, sustainable, replicable and practical, and we will work with you to make it a reality." This, alas, may be a mandate that no developer can meet. But that does not mean New York can't have a wider range of housing stock than it has now. It just means it will have to go back to the past to get it.
In the days before extensive housing codes and zoning laws, when developers had relatively free rein to meet the needs of the market, New York City's housing stock, like those of many other metropolitan centers in the U.S., was far more diverse. At the lowest end of the market, in the Bowery's notorious flophouses, consumer choice was remarkably (if depressingly) robust. According to Jacob Riis' 1890 muckraking classic How the Other Half Lives, one quarter per day bought prospective lodgers the pretense of privacy in a partitioned room with just enough space to hold a cot and a chair. Fifteen cents netted a bunk in an open room with a locker for one's clothes. One thin dime delivered the bunk minus the locker. And for 7 cents, you could get the budget bunk or, as Riis described it, "an apology for a bed" that consisted of "a strip of canvas strung between rough timbers."
But the flophouses represented just one segment of a surprisingly vital residential hotel market that flourished in the United States during the late 1800s and first decades of the 20th century. As U.C.-Berkeley architectural historian Paul Groth documents in his 1994 book Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (University of California Press), this market largely served "young men and women recently arrived" to the city who wanted to live by themselves rather than board with families in tenement buildings or single-family dwellings.
For the wealthiest citizens, there were "palace hotels." White-collar workers lived in "midpriced mansions." Working-class laborers occupied "cheap lodging houses." At the very bottom of the market were the flophouses.
At all income levels, residential hotels shared certain traits. They were convenient, with a variety of commercial services incorporated into their structures or at least located nearby. They encouraged sociability and mobility, and they made efficient use of resources and space. Perhaps most important, they made autonomy and independence possible not just for society's elites but for people of all ages and incomes. Residential hotels permitted 18-year-old laborers and 22-year-old waitresses to live by themselves for the very first time in the history of the world. They didn't have to live at home under the watchful eyes of their parents, or board with strangers, or live with multiple roommates in a shared apartment. They didn't have to save up for a down payment, sign a lease or a mortgage, or even invest in a set of bed sheets. They could purchase a foothold in the city a night or a week or a month at a time.
Residential hotels were liberating, tolerant enclaves, and as such they found adherents not just among booze-pickled tramps but also among cosmopolitan elites, young urban strivers of both genders who were more interested in establishing careers than families; actors, artists, prostitutes, criminals, and runaways. Consequently, when Progressive Era housing reformers began advocating on behalf of more comprehensive building codes and zoning regulations, it wasn't just to eliminate insufficient window space and appalling occupant-to-toilet ratios.
"Many of the [housing] conditions of the first half of the 20th century were horrific," says Jerilyn Perine, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a New York–based nonprofit that aims to improve housing options in the city and helped persuade Mayor Bloomberg to experiment with micro-units. "The goal was to improve these conditions, but there was also a larger social objective, which was to encourage and support single-family homes and the nuclear family as the basis of society."
Cities and states started implementing codes and regulations that privileged single-family residences and planned public spaces over the dense, mixed architecture that had formed organically to serve the needs of urban inhabitants. "When reformers elevated the ideal of the privately owned American home as the single goal of national policy, the idea grew dramatically in power," Groth writes in Living Downtown.
"All three levels of government have some regulatory framework that affects the shape of housing and who gets to live in it," says Perine. "A lot of it makes sense, but over the years, regulations get left on the books that then don't really keep up with how people are actually living. At this point, we're just trying to educate people about how these rules essentially inhibit the market from providing more housing choice."
Indeed, while architects and designers are eager to explore new possibilities, regulations regarding building materials, density calculations, and other factors continue to stifle the innovation that once arose naturally. Waiving minimum footprint size requirements to create micro-units is a good start. But as efficient and affordable as 300-square-foot domiciles may be, they're full of redundancies too. This is, after all, the age of Zipcar, the urban-oriented car-sharing company, and of digital networks that, in theory at least, allow us to allocate resources in flexible, easy-to-track ways.
In such an environment, where urban space is scarce and sustainability is in vogue, yesteryear's residential hotels seem remarkably relevant, especially if updated with today's consumers in mind. Imagine, for example, a building where each unit is even smaller than Bloomberg's micro-apartments. But along with one's own space, one could use a variety of shared spaces. Some of these spaces (restaurants, laundry room, gym) would serve the whole building. Others would serve a smaller number of users. For every four units, say, there might be a private media room or luxurious spa, which residents could utilize privately, by reservation, à la Zipcar.
If the micro-unit experiment goes well, the mayor's office has suggested, the city may consider waiving other regulations. With a little luck, there's a good chance that the residents of New York City in 2020 will have almost as many housing options as their predecessors had in 1920.
The post Bring Back the Flophouse appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wide open plains of central Texas, a new addition to State Highway 130 opened for business this week with a compelling marketing hook: Its speed limit of 85 MPH is the highest in America. The 41-mile toll road connects Seguin to Mustang Ridge. The former is a distant exurb of San Antonio that calls itself "the pecan capital of the world." The latter, population 861, is a notorious speed trap. So if you've been dying to go nowhere fast, it just got a tiny bit easier. At 85 MPH, the journey between these two burgs takes just 28 minutes and 56 seconds.
At 65 MPH, the trip would take almost nine full minutes longer—an eternity in an era when we have come to expect instant access to everything. Thus, the new 85 MPH limit is both an attempt to keep small towns relevant in the face of increasing urbanization, and also an acknowledgement of how people actually drive when there are endless miles to traverse and few natural impediments to higher rates of travel. As long ago as 1954, a Texas law enforcement officer told The New York Times that "it was nothing unusual to see strings of cars traveling at 90 to 100 miles an hour" on some Texas roads.
There were 32,310 traffic fatalities in 2011, the fewest there have been since 1949. More importantly, fatality rates per 100 million vehicle miles traveled have dropped substantially over the years, falling from 24.09 in 1921 to 1.09 in 2011. In addition, while interstate highway speed limits have risen since Congress repealed all federally imposed speed limits in 1995, fatalities categorized as "speeding-related" by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have declined since then. Specifically, there were 13,414 speeding-related fatalities in 1995 and 10,591 in 2011. Of the 10,591 speeding-related fatalities in 2011, just 964 occurred on interstate highways with speed limits "over 55 MPH."
So even as critics contend that an 85 MPH speed limit will increase fatalities, it's no surprise that Texas is implementing the higher limit: Driving in America has never been safer than it is now.
And if State Highway 130 proves popular with motorists, expect other states to increase their top speed limits too. Seguin and Mustang Ridge aren't the only small towns that would like to be a few minutes closer to larger metro regions that aggregate jobs, schools, and other opportunities.
But is Texas's bold speed limit move bold enough? In one of the most convincing proofs ever that the medium is the message, the speed limit signs of the early 20th century quickly solidified the notion that a single designated top speed could adequately govern traffic in a given area regardless of all other factors—not because this was in any way logical, but rather because that's what was technologically and economically feasible at the time. In the early 1900s, it would have been costly and time-consuming to create signs that changed in accordance with congestion levels, road surface conditions, and the current state of the weather.
Now, however, we have signs that can display whatever limit is most appropriate to the current conditions. More importantly, we have the ability to closely monitor how motorists actually drive specific roads as conditions change—and we can use that information to determine the most appropriate speed limits. Imagine, for example, a highway where the speed limit bumps up to 85 MPH on days when it's sunny and windless and there are few cars on the road. Or drops down to 55 MPH on Saturday nights between midnight and 3 AM, because that's when a high number of fatal accidents occur.
Next, imagine that the speed limit on that highway is designed to encourage positive behavior rather than penalize bad behavior. In June 2012, NPR reported that researchers funded in part by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) conducted a test in which they offered drivers a weekly $25 reward to comply with speed limits. Every time drivers exceeded a posted speed limit by five to eight miles per hour, they lost 3 cents from their potential prize money. Every time they exceeded a posted speed limit by nine or more miles per hour, they lost six cents. "We found that the incentive system was incredibly effective in getting drivers to reduce their speeding," NHTSA researcher Ian Reagan told NPR.
Toll roads—like State Highway 130 in Texas—would make ideal labs for further experimentation. With users already paying mileage fees for access, compliance incentives could come in the form of discounts rather than explicit payments. In the case of State Highway 130, passenger cars and pickup trucks must pay 15 cents a mile to access the road. For daily commuters, such charges can add up quickly—so much so that, say, a 12-cent per mile discount rate for users who faithfully observe the speed limit might prove compelling. Or perhaps rather than a discount, a portion of the road's weekly usage fees could be set aside for a lottery that only the non-speeders would be eligible for.
In either scenario, the increasingly omniscient surveillance technologies that are already being deployed on roadways across the U.S. no longer seem quite so unilaterally oppressive. Motorists are closely monitored, but in a way that potentially benefits rather than penalizes them. Combine that with speed limits that are nuanced, flexible, and determined by how motorists are actually using roads under variable conditions and suddenly we'd have speed limits that no longer looked quite so much like relics from the Model T era.
The post Raise the Speed Limit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In February 2012, Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan, published a chart on his blog that plots the U.S. newspaper industry's annual advertising revenues from 1950 to 2011, using revenue data compiled by the Newspaper Association of America. The first 50 years show a prosperous ascent from a little less than $20 billion in total revenues in 1950 to $63.5 billion in 2000 (in 2011 dollars). Then, in 2001, a catastrophic plunge begins. Within a decade, total revenues have plummeted to the general territory where they started in 1950.
While the death of the newspaper industry is extremely well-trod ground at this point, rarely has anyone told the story so concisely, with such dramatic, statistical precision. But even as Perry's chart evokes images of fortunes lost and cultural power dispersed, it also stands as powerful evidence that the future of news, if not newspapers, is more promising than ever. Just 30 years ago, compiling a chart like Perry's would have been an act of journalism so tedious only well-paid professionals would have bothered to attempt it.
Now citizen journalists bang out such fare for extracurricular kicks. What once would have required trips to the library, long-distance phone queries, T-squares, rulers, erasers, diligence, and patience now mostly needs just a flash of inspiration, a sense of the story buried in the data. Meanwhile, the data proliferate in astonishing fashion, and the tools to manipulate them grow ever more powerful. Even professionals barely scratch the surface of what data-driven journalism makes possible.
As a comprehensive new volume from Taschen makes clear, the challenges that face tomorrow's news creators and consumers are ones of abundance, not scarcity. At close to 500 oversized pages, Information Graphics is a coffee table book that's more solidly constructed than most coffee tables. Its pages are filled with beautiful, meticulous, and, at their best, revelatory visualizations of worldwide oil consumption, the most frequent causes of death, household spending, the national debt, wealth distribution, etc.
In 1982, when USA Today debuted and first began to present its data-driven "Snapshots" as a key component of its editorial mix, these perky charts and graphs (no one called them infographics yet) were often derided as a primary symptom of journalism's decline, a way to make trivial information significant, important enough for inclusion on the front page. Now we look to infographics not as a way to dumb down stories but rather as a means of smartening them up. "At a time when everyone is swamped by information it is necessary firstly to subject data to precise analysis and secondly to prepare it in an intelligent and appealing way," exclaims Information Graphics editor Sandra Rendgen in one of the book's four introductory essays.
Not every infographic lives up to this directive, of course; many of them place far more emphasis on aesthetics than analysis. In recent years, infographics have become a favorite tool of online marketers looking to arrest the attention of restless Web surfers with eye candy that offers the promise and at least the general shape of fast, numbers-driven epiphany. But a good infographic doesn't just pair interesting statistics with fun illustrations. Instead, it concretizes otherwise inscrutable connections and causes and thus makes context, nuance, and complexity easier to digest. What is the association between fast food restaurant prevalence and community obesity rates? How does education level correlate with life span? A well-constructed infographic can answer such questions in vivid and concise fashion.
In the past, professional journalists functioned as low-tech search engines. They combed city budgets, attended school board meetings, and generally did their best to aggregate and analyze the data that our major institutions produced but did little to make accessible to the general public. Now, as GuardianEditor Simon Rogers points out in an essay he contributed to Information Graphics, the U.S. government makes more than 1,500 data sets available via its data.gov site. In England, Rogers writes, "every local authority…will have published every individual item of spending over £500" very soon.
Professional news organizations can still add value to such information by building interfaces to access it and by reporting on specific stories that it engenders. But news organizations no longer need to deploy as much manpower as they did when data gathering was a less automated endeavor. Instead, institutions that newspapers once monitored will increasingly engage in "self-reporting" by making their data easily accessible to the masses. And individual readers, using interfaces created by news organizations, will do much of the analysis themselves.
For now, however, most news organizations tend to conceptualize infographics more as stories than apps. Consider an example showcased in Information Graphics that The New York Times created in 2009. Entitled "The Jobless Rate for People Like You," it's an interactive chart that allows you to apply up to four demographic filters to unemployment rates, including race, gender, age, and education. Thus you can see the unemployment rate for white, college-educated men over 45 or the rate for Hispanic females aged 15 to 24 without a high school degree.
It's a fantastic chart, but the Times created it in 2009, using a static set of data, and now it's years out of date. This is exactly how traditional newspaper stories live and die, but why should such limitations be placed on infographics? A version of the chart that automatically taps into the latest unemployment data released by the federal government could become an evergreen feature of the Times' website. And why aren't news organizations like the Times doing more to curate and present vast repositories of infographics that are up to date, searchable, and organized to shed light on complex, ongoing stories like the federal budget, health care, and climate change?
A book like Information Graphics, which is meant to inspire potential infographic creators, is a nice addition to one's design library. A Wikipedia-like collection of online infographics aimed at informing news consumers could change the world.
The post The Age of the Infographic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For the last several years, the universe has been kicking journalists. In 2012, they started kicking themselves. There was Jonah Lehrer and his fake Dylan quotes. There was Fareed Zakaria and his purloined paragraph. There was a series of other offenses, so many that the Poynter Institute's Craig Silverman ultimately dubbed these last few months journalism's "summer of sin." It was happening, many suggested, at least in part because journalism's traditional quality control mechanisms were in deep institutional decline; the fact-checkers had left the building.
At The New York Times, columnist David Carr invoked that bygone era when wayward cub reporters learned the finer points of news media ethics via "come-to-Jesus moments" where editors "put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would soon not be part of it."
At Slate, New York University journalism professor Charles Seife, who reviewed 18 of Jonah Lehrer's Wired.com blog posts and identified issues in 17 of them, concluded that Lehrer's transgressions were "inexcusable," but also that the news industry shared "some of the blame for his failure" because it no longer subjects its novices to "layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word [gets] published."
At Big Think, David Berreby called Lehrer "the product of a business model that is good for media corporations and bad for you, the media consumer," and suggested that today's news outlets have largely abandoned journalism's "supporting machinery," thus creating a climate where "the temptation to cheat will get to be too much for some people."
But the "summer of sin" didn't happen because fact-checking doesn't take place as much as it once did. It happened because fact-checking got democratized. True, it now largely occurs at a different and potentially problematic point in the process—after an article has been published. But fact-checking also happens far more transparently than it once did, and overall, it occurs more frequently too. Now, a single reader in his home office can do in 15 minutes what it might have taken the New Yorker's entire squadron of legendary fact-checkers days to accomplish in, say, 1992.
Take Jonah Lehrer's books. After reading Reason contributing editor Michael C. Moynihan's story in Tablet about how Lehrer had fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in Imagine, I decided to take a look at the book myself. In the midst of its second chapter, I came across a paragraph that felt oddly familiar: It seemed to be a paraphrase of a paragraph that I had written in a piece about Post-It Notes that I'd published in 2005 at a now-defunct magazine called The Rake. Then, I realized that while Lehrer quotes Post-It Notes inventor Art Fry three times in Imagine, he didn't include any sources for these quotes in the book's Notes section, nor did he mention that he'd interviewed Fry. (In multiple other instances in Imagine, Lehrer includes a citation in the Notes section when he interviews someone first-hand.) Ultimately, I realized that one of the quotes was quite similar to one that appears in my piece, and another one was identical to one that appears in a Wired article from 2008 that Lehrer did not write.
When I emailed Lehrer to ask him about the provenance of these quotes, he didn't directly reply to me. Instead, Andrew Wylie, his agent, contacted me, and explained that Lehrer had interviewed Art Fry in 2008 and that Lehrer had "no memory" of ever reading my article. (Wylie also stated that the Wired piece had not been properly cited in the book.) In a follow-up email, Wylie said that Lehrer would be happy to cite my article in a corrected version of Imagine but repeated the assertion that Lehrer had "no memory" of reading it.
This and other aspects of the exchange seemed less than straightforward to me, and made me wonder exactly how inclined Lehrer was to the sort of fabrications Moynihan had discovered. In an effort to assess this, I started reading both Imagine and How We Decide. What I found was similar to what Seife found. Throughout both books, there are instances where Lehrer alters quotes, exaggerates statistics, omits key details that appears in his source materials, or otherwise commits journalistic misdemeanors.
What also struck me was how rich an information environment the Web has evolved into over the last decade or so. In December 2001, when Ken Layne famously declared, "It's 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass," hundreds of news media outlets had come online and it was becoming increasingly easy to see how they all cribbed from each other, how reporters at the same press conference quoted the same sources in slightly different ways, etc. And yet we were still in the Dark Ages then. Google Books didn't exist. YouTube didn't exist. Amazon's Look Inside! feature was just a couple months old. Most newspaper archives were still extremely expensive to access. In those days, journalists gaming the facts still benefited from the relative opacity of information.
Today, things are far more transparent. For example, when I started reading How We Decide via Google Books, I immediately noted a sentence in the book's first chapter in which Lehrer purports to depict a snap count Tom Brady exclaims in the midst of Super Bowl XXXVI, which took place in 2002:
Brady reads the Ram defense and calls out a series of coded commands: "White twenty! Ninety-six is the Mike! Omaha go!"
While such vivid, you-are-there bonbons of authenticity are the stuff best-sellers are made of, where exactly had it come from, I wondered. Did Lehrer watch a tape of Super Bowl XXXVI with the volume turned up really loud? Did he track down Tom Brady years after the fact and quiz him on what he'd shouted at the line of scrimmage during that particular moment?
A quick Google search pointed me toward an answer: Similar language is featured in a 2007 article in the Boston Globe that in part reads:
NBC's telecast included clear audio of Brady at the line of scrimmage, authoritatively barking out various instructions to his teammates. "White 20!" "96 is the mike!" "White 18!" "57 is the will!" "Set!"…
"Hey Jab!" he yelled out with urgency to his left, in the direction of receiver Jabar Gaffney. "Omaha! Go!"
So it appears that Lehrer spliced together two snippets of dialogue from 2007, added value by transforming the somewhat clinical "20" and "96" into the more poetic "twenty" and "ninety-six," then transported the whole shebang back to 2002.
Chapter 2 of How We Decide yields another example that shows how easy it has become to fact-check a writer's work now. In it, Lehrer describes how a British military officer, Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley, issued orders to shoot down an unidentified object during the Gulf War.
As Lehrer explains, one major way officers like Lt. Riley identify objects that appear on their radar screens is by altitude. While Iraqi Silkworm missiles typically fly at around 1,000 feet, U.S. A-6 fighter jets fly at around 3,000 feet. To detect altitude, Riley's ship used something called a 909 radar.
In this instance, however, Riley couldn't immediately establish the identity of the blip on his screen through this or other standard protocols. And with the object speeding toward a U.S. battleship, Riley had to act quickly, decisively, dramatically—and somehow his dopamine neurons knew that that was an enemy blip. Here's how Lehrer recounts the action:
Unfortunately, the 909 radar operator had entered an incorrect tracking number shortly after the blip appeared, which meant that Riley had no way of knowing the altitude of the flying object. Although he'd now been staring at the radar blip for almost a minute, its identity remained a befuddling mystery.
The target was moving fast. The time for deliberation was over. Riley issued the order to fire; two Sea Dart surface-to-air missiles were launched into the sky.
The Notes section of How We Decide includes a source for this information: A 1998 book called Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Its author is Gary Klein, a senior scientist at an engineering firm called Applied Research Associates.
In the old days, tracking down this book at the library or a bookstore would probably have taken at least an hour in the best-case scenario, and possibly days or weeks in the worst. In 2012, Amazon's Look Inside! feature makes it instantly accessible, and thus Lehrer's work is easy to check. Here's how Klein tells the story:
It takes about thirty seconds to get altitude information after the 909 radar is turned on….Maddeningly, the Gloucester's weapons director failed in his first two attempts to type in the track number….As a result, it was not until forty-four seconds into the incident that the 909 informed Riley that the target was flying at 1,000 feet. Only then did he issue orders to fire missiles at the track.
So the mysterious blip wasn't quite as befuddling as Lehrer made it out to be when Riley decided to act. Instead, the 909 radar had "informed Riley that the target was flying at 1,000 feet." According to Klein, this helped Riley "confirm his intuition" that the blip was an Iraqi missile rather than an U.S. fighter jet.
Today, thanks to the web and features like Amazon Look Inside!, books, research studies, and information of all kinds can essentially "talk back" if a reporter misrepresents them. And so of course can actual living beings. A generation ago, when thuggish editors kept the nation's newsrooms in check with their heavy-handed enforcement of journalism's fundamentals, this wasn't necessarily the case. Unless you were, say, a major celebrity, how effectively could you get the word out when some scribe made up quotes and attributed them to you? Blogs didn't exist. Twitter didn't exist. Until the advent of the Web, the only way to publicize such journalistic shenanigans to large numbers of people was through the news media itself.
Now, you don't even have to be alive to register your complaint. Advocates may do so on your behalf, as happened with W.H. Auden and Edward Mendelson, president of the W.H. Auden Society. In chapter 3 of Imagine, Lehrer ostensibly quotes Auden on the virtues of Benzedrine:
"The drug is a labor-saving device," Auden said. "It turns me into a working machine."
But according to Mendelson, "no evidence seems to exist that Auden said or wrote" the latter half of the quote. Instead, he suggests, it appears to be inspired by a passage from a 1947 Auden essay called "Squares and Oblongs." Here again, Google Books is helpful. It makes the essay easily accessible and reveals that Auden's intention was to portray Benzedrine (and alcohol, coffee, and tobacco) in a much more complicated fashion than Lehrer's "quote" suggests. Here's the relevant passage:
In the course of many centuries, a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen—alcohol, coffee, tobacco, benzedrine—but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down. Writing poetry in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything still has to be done by hand.
As Auden presents it, Benzedrine (and alcohol, coffee, and tobacco) really aren't labor-saving devices. While they may offer a temporary and/or illusory payoff, they're ultimately so problematic that poets in Auden's time function essentially as they did in the Bronze Age: "Nearly everything still has to be done by hand."
In the Web Age, alcohol and tobacco have new utility—reporters, if not poets, need something to help mitigate the stress that comes with knowing how powerfully their work might be scrutinized at any moment. Indeed, however effective the internal journalistic beatdowns of old were in getting reporters to toe the line, it's hard to imagine Lehrer would not have chosen, say, a private slap on the wrist from the New Yorker's David Remnick over the very public drubbing he has received since Michael Moynihan reported on his dissembling. And it's equally hard to imagine that journalists everywhere aren't noting Lehrer's travails and subsequently taking solemn, self-inflicted oaths to pursue their craft with enough honesty, accuracy, and transparency to make an angel squirm.
All in all, this technologically driven drift toward ever-increasing accountability is a pretty sobering development for a profession that has historically served as a haven to a vast menagerie of hucksters, con artists, and truth-stretchers.
But if Lehrer serves as a terrifying example of how harsh the penalties can be for journalistic malfeasance these days, he also proves that misinformation can lodge itself pretty firmly in the public record even in the current environment of near-instantaneous verifiability and ubiquitous access to information. Take, for example, his efforts to convince the world that Pixar's Emeryville headquarters only has two bathrooms.
This story has its genesis in Steve Jobs' out-of-the-box notion that forcing Pixar's entire staff to poop in the same place would ultimately lead to incredibly profitable children's movies. In a book called The Second Coming of Steve Jobs that was published before Pixar had even moved into its new building, Alan Deutschman reported on Jobs' unique team-building vision:
Then Steve dropped the real bomb: he said that there would be a single bathroom in the new complex. Only one bathroom for four hundred people. That way, it would serve as the central meeting place, the locus for informal discussions.
Alas, the men and women of Pixar weren't quite ready to think that different!
The company's main building actually features eight bathrooms. There are four on the first floor—two near the front of the building's atrium and two further back. On the second floor, this set-up repeats itself. In his 2011 book Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson makes this pretty clear. He writes:
Jobs even went so far as to decree that there be only two huge bathrooms in the building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium…They reached a compromise: there would be two sets of bathrooms on either side of the atrium on both of the two floors.
But just to be sure, I emailed a Pixar publicist. I asked if there were eight total bathrooms in the building. I also asked if these bathrooms were all part of the building's original construction, or if some had been added at a later time. "To my knowledge all eight bathrooms were in place when the building was built," the publicist replied.
The earliest instance I could find of Lehrer mentioning Pixar's bathrooms occurs in the June 2010 issue of Wired, in a passing reference that simply notes that the "building's essential facilities [are] centrally located." In a January 2012 issue of the New Yorker, he offers more detail:
Finally, he decided that the atrium should contain the only set of bathrooms in the entire building. (He was later forced to compromise and install a second pair of bathrooms.)
If this parenthetical was an attempt by the New Yorker's legendary fact-checkers to police Lehrer, their victory was only temporary. In his book Imagine—which was published after the New Yorker article appeared but possibly printed beforehand—there is no reference to a second pair of bathrooms:
But that still wasn't enough, which is why Jobs eventually decided to locate the only set of bathrooms in the atrium.
And when talking to reporters and addressing live audiences, Lehrer often goes into more inaccurate detail than he did in Imagine, insisting that Pixar has just two bathrooms. Here, for example, is how he tells the story on NPR's All Things Considered in March 2012:
[Jobs] insisted there be only two bathrooms in the entire Pixar Studios, and that these would be in the central space. And of course, this is very inconvenient; no one wants to have to walk 15 minutes to go to the bathroom. And yet Steve insisted that this is the one place everyone has to go, every day.
According to the May 2001 issue of Modern Steel Construction, the Pixar building has a footprint of 240ft. x 480 ft. With the bathrooms centrally located, what this suggests is that no one inside Pixar is ever more than eighty yards or so away from a commode. Even Wall-E's sad endomorphs could cover that distance in substantially less than 15 minutes. And most actual Pixar employees, I'm betting, could break the 30-second mark if really pressed.
Of course, even when news media outlets were as lavishly staffed as road construction crews, it would have been impractical to fact-check every utterance of interview guests. Now, that's out of the question, and thus, along with NPR, the Economist has also inadvertently helped Lehrer spread the Pixar bathrooms myth. So has U.S. News & World Report, British GQ, Inc. magazine, and Australia's Radio National, amongst others. And obviously it's not just traditional news outlets that are creating this chorus of misinformation. The NEA, the California Thoracic Society, the Covenant Presbyterian Church, and the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce have lent their voices to the cause too. So have numerous individual bloggers and tweeters.
By now, the myth of insufficient bathrooms as creative laxative is so entrenched in the minds of the world's thought leaders that disaster seems imminent. In just a few short years, creativity may reach all-time highs, but unoccupied stalls will be as scarce as people who still pay for newspaper subscriptions. In sleek corporate headquarters everywhere, weak-bladdered project managers will be marking territory on elevator walls. Interface designers will be defecating in broom closets.
If you think that such apocalyptic scenarios only underscore the need for old-fashioned internal fact-checking, well, sure. But what the Pixar bathrooms myth also illustrates is how little influence our most heralded journalism franchises really wield now. The New Yorker's legendary fact-checkers can't police every Google gathering where Lehrer puts his "two bathrooms" spin on the story—and it can't stop Google from turning his presentation into media too. They can't stop the nation's preteen ministers from referencing Lehrer's Pixar bathrooms myth in their online curriculums. But if the Internet makes it easy to spread dubious information near and far, it also puts Pixar publicists and old copies of Modern Steel Construction close at hand. The truth is that we're living in a golden age of fact-checking. Readers, rejoice! Journalists, beware!
The post Welcome to the Golden Age of Fact-Checking appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On a recent afternoon in one of San Francisco's hilliest neighborhoods, I experienced what it must be like to be a world-class cyclist doped to the gills on high-oxygen blood and testosterone. Streets with mild upward slopes felt like child's play. Even double-digit grades suddenly seemed manageable. Heart pounding, I'd summit one peak and then quickly set out for another.
The secret to my new prowess was not pharmacological but mechanical: I was riding a Focus Jarifa Speed, a $3,399 German-engineered bicycle equipped with a small lithium-ion battery pack and a 350-watt motor.
Remember when our car-free future was supposed to be powered by jet packs, transporters, and family-sized flying saucers? That happy postwar vision has long since devolved from Jetsonian utopia to post–peak oil apocalypse, a new Mad Max era of economic collapse and medieval brutishness. But while electric bikes can't quite match the autonomy and convenience that yesteryear's imminent dream machines once promised, they do suggest a future marked by technological progress and greater individual freedom.
Automobiles, those long-maligned gas guzzlers, are incredible freedom machines. Their ability to cover great distances in relatively short amounts of time, in all kinds of weather, on schedules we largely determine ourselves, greatly expands our ability to choose where we live, where we work, and with whom we socialize.
Unlike buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation frequently proposed as an alternative to mitigate rising petroleum costs and the environmental impact of cars, bikes feature many of the same characteristics that have made car travel so popular. You can come and go on your own timetable. You're free to choose your ideal route and can modify it on the fly. Like car travel, bike travel permits spontaneity and promotes autonomy.
But there are also many ways in which bikes aren't nearly as convenient. First and foremost, they require physical effort. And even for fit individuals, peak sustainable speeds on a bike are relatively modest. Choosing to make a trip via car usually just involves looking for your keys. Choosing to make a trip via bike typically involves a series of questions: Do you have the time it will take to get there? Do you have the energy? How much stuff do you have to lug around with you? Does it matter if you're sweaty and disheveled when you arrive at your destination?
With an electric bike, which federal regulations currently define as a pedal-driven vehicle with a maximum motor-assisted speed of 20 miles per hour, bike travel becomes a little more like car travel, which is to say, a little more spontaneous and convenient. That minor shift may be just enough to make bike travel practical for a much wider range of individuals. A five-mile trip at 12 miles per hour takes 25 minutes. A five-mile trip at 20 mph takes just 15. Traveling by bike even when you're pressed for time, covering long distances, carrying lots of cargo—all of this becomes much more feasible if you're riding a bike equipped with a small electric motor.
Fifteen years ago, electric bikes were strictly for hobbyists. They had a range of just five to 10 miles. Their sealed lead-acid batteries took eight hours to charge and were environmentally undesirable. Today's electric bikes are still a relatively immature technology, but they're improving rapidly. The Focus Jarifa Speed claims a range of up to 80 miles. Pi Mobility, a Sausalito, California, manufacturer, sells a model, the PiCycle Limited, that can attain a top speed of 30 mph. (When electric bikes exceed the 20-mph federal standard, licensing regulations vary from state to state.)
Right now, the PiCycle Limited costs $5,995, but according to Pi founder Marcus Hays that price could decrease substantially as the company ramps up production from its current level of around 500 units a year. "When lithium batteries get cheaper, when we bring a new manufacturing process online that allows for more automation, $1,995 at the retail level is possible," he says. "But that's still three to five years away."
Compared to traditional bikes, electric bikes, which typically weigh between 45 and 80 pounds, are heavy. Compared to a 3,500-pound Nissan Leaf, they're light as a feather. As sustainability advocate Alan Durning put it in a 2010 Grist article, "most e-bikes' battery charge can be spent moving the mass of the rider," while "most of electric cars' charge must be spent moving the bulk of the car itself."
Furthermore, while zero-emissions cars fueled by solar, hydroelectric, or other forms of clean energy can theoretically eliminate their carbon footprints, even they do little to address how overbuilt traditional automobiles are for many purposes. Although the ample passenger space, cargo space, and driving range of gas-powered cars all contribute to their extraordinary utility and convenience, we habitually underuse our automobiles. According to the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, the average vehicle occupancy for trips to and from work was 1.13 persons. The average vehicle occupancy for all purposes (e.g., shopping, socializing, schlepping the kids to soccer practice) was 1.67 persons. At best, our cars are perpetually half full.
Shifting at least some of our transportation to electric bikes addresses this phenomenon in a way that shifting to electric cars does not. Electric bikes require fewer resources to manufacture. They consume less energy and take up less space on roads and parking lots. Best of all, they cost a fraction of what electric cars cost and are cheaper to maintain.
So while an electric bike at first glance may seem like a product borne out of scarcity, dwindling resources, diminishing possibilities, and the politics of limits, the opposite is actually true. Electric bikes allow people to harness the power and convenience of private transportation while letting them deploy their comparative savings elsewhere. They expand consumer choice and personal autonomy and remind us that while tomorrow's transportation challenges are often posited as an insurmountable uphill slog, we're actually already well on our way to a more mobile, liberating, and affordable transportation future.
Yet it's still not as easy as it should be to buy an electric bike. Car dealers—and also motorcycle and scooter dealers—offer low-interest financing, rebates, and various other incentives that make buying a car seem more like a windfall than a burden. With bikes, traditional or electric, that isn't usually the case. "The lifetime cost of an electric bike is really low," says Brett Thurber, owner of The New Wheel, a San Francisco shop that specializes in electric bikes. "But the upfront cost can be significant. That's something that we had to figure out a way to overcome."
His solution? "We have a partnership with GE Capital," he says. "It's basically a credit card with deferred interest. People fill out an application, they get an instant credit decision from GE, and if they're approved they can spend that on the bike." Thus a bike that would otherwise cost $3,499 upfront can be had for no money down and 12 monthly payments of about $300 each. Or to put it another way: Even if you can't really afford an electric bike, you can afford it! At least for 12 months.
While it may seem odd to apply such unbridled salesmanship to a product typically associated with low-impact consumption, few products ever go mainstream because they're hard to buy. A dealer's $1,000 cash-back incentive on a new electric bike may not make it quite as enticing as your own personal hovercraft, but it will certainly help narrow the gap between an enhanced bicycle and an old-fashioned car.
The post Bike to the Future appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While the terrifyingly soothing pod-person narrator in Red Pepper's promo video does his best to create a mood of resistance-is-futile compliance, the thin line between consumer paradise and totalitarian nightmare isn't just a 10 percent discount on a new sweater that algorithmically correlates with your digital thumbs-up for Ruby Sparks. At least not yet. Facedeals will only try to authenticate you if you've opted in for the service.
Still, if Facedeals mostly just streamlines check-ins while letting you extract value from the dossier you're already willingly amassing on yourself at Facebook, its biometric, real-world deployment adds a visceral dimension to the ongoing discourse about the way Big Data is transforming our lives. It may be opt-in only for now, and opt-in vaporware at that, but it certainly seems like one step closer to that oppressively transparent future when, whether we've opted in or not, every billboard, cash register, point-of-sale display, hang tag, and shelf talker functions like God crossed with a T-Mobile mall kiosk salesman: all-knowing, all-seeing, and determined to make us a deal. How closely are we really willing to be watched? How much time are we prepared to spend keeping abreast of 45,000 word privacy policies and toggling profile preferences?
Around the same time Red Pepper was unveiling Facedeals, a service called App.Net was making news too. Billed as a "real-time social feed without the ads," App.Net is a lot like Twitter circa 2006—if Twitter circa 2006 had been charging $50 to $100 a year for access.
Back then, of course, the only way to get users to pay $50 a year for Web content was to give them hardcore financial data or a beach house filled with lots of 18-year-old models and very few shower curtains. In 2012, however, App.Net convinced more than 12,000 people to contribute $803,000 in less than a month to fund the service's development.
At App.Net, the goal is to create a platform where the temptation to undermine the needs of users and developers in favor of serving advertisers better will never occur; advertisers are banned from this Eden. While privacy doesn't really seem to be a big part of the pitch, it's a natural byproduct of this approach. At most websites these days, job one is monetizing personal data by making it more useful to advertisers, data aggregators, and the like. At App.Net, pleasing developers and users will come first, at least in theory.
So does this mean at last, in 2012, a market for privacy is finally developing? Two years ago, on the world's first-ever Data Privacy Day, CNET's Declan McCullagh pointed to an Atlantic Monthly article from 2001 that documented the "surging" privacy industry of that era. One company had developed "disappearing" email. American Express had a plan to generate "a random, unique card number for each online purchase." Zero-Knowledge, a start-up that raised $75 million in venture capital, was pitching an annual $49.95 service it called Freedom 2.0. "An impenetrable online cloaking device" according to the Atlantic, it utilized "the strongest encryption available" and allowed users to create "as many as five untraceable pseudonymous digital identities."
Six months after the Atlantic article appeared, Zero-Knowledge dumped Freedom due to almost non-existent sales. (McCullagh reports that it generated just $400,000 from Freedom that year.) Selling privacy to Internet users in 2001 was like trying to sell bacon cheeseburgers to vegans. Indeed, as it turned out, the masses were much more interested in sharing photos of their lunches with strangers than they were in cryptography. And, as Napster and others were proving beyond all doubt in that era, the price point that really resonated with Internet users wasn't $49.95. It was "free."
Thus begat the "attention economy" and the idea that we'd "pay" for the services we used and the media we consumed by tolerating and maybe even occasionally clicking on ads. This sort of thing wasn't new, of course—except on the Web the "attention economy" quickly evolved into the "personal data economy." Radio stations and TV networks had been letting us pay them with attention for decades, but they'd never been able to compile 1,400-page dossiers on our viewing habits or tell third-party marketers exactly how many minutes we spend watching yoga instruction shows each month.
Living publicly online, promiscuously over-sharing our lives, has great benefits, of course: At any given moment now, we know where the nearest pizza place is and what 473 other pizza lovers think of it. Power like that comes at a cost though. In her 2012 book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did, Illinois Institute of Technology law professor Lori Andrews, details numerous cautionary tales: The school teacher who got fired for posting a vacation photo that showed her drinking a beer. The Fitbit users who posted details about their sexual activity without realizing they were making such information public. The businessman who had his credit limit lowered because other customers who'd shopped where he'd recently shopped hadn't paid their bills on time.
With every tale like that, with every new news story about the hundreds of companies that now track our online behavior, the realities of the personal data economy grow clearer. And yet it's one thing to be confronted by them on your trusted tablet or smartphone—oh, look, that L.L. Bean ad is following me around the Web again—and another when random billboard at bus stations start bringing up Google searches in 2002. "Hey, buddy, if you're still looking for Valtrax, that store on the corner's got it for half off!"
Of course, at this point, it's already too late to really turn back. Twitter has made having electronic conservations with people in private—i.e., what we used to call email—seem paranoid and conspiratorial. Amazon doesn't ?just keep track of the books we buy now—thanks to Kindle, it knows exactly what parts of them we underline.
And yet as old-fashioned anonymity and privacy grow all but impossible to attain, their value becomes increasingly apparent. Four million people have downloaded Ghostery, a browser extension that helps users block web trackers on the sites they visit. Another 750,000 have downloaded Disconnect and Collusion, which offer similar functionality. Perhaps we'll even begin to see social networks where posts only last for a certain amount of time before they're permanently deleted; start-ups in the vein of iPrivacy.com, which aimed to facilitate private online buying via fictitious identities, coded postal addresses, and disposable credit card numbers; and most importantly, services of all kinds whose business model is based on charging customers rather than selling them.
At the very least, expect the fetish value of privacy to flourish. Next month, for example, encryption pioneer Phil Zimmermann is introducing Silent Circle, an app that will offer encrypted email, texts, and calls on mobile phones, for $20 a month. So while we may never again know what it's like to walk through a mall without being faceprinted, analyzed, aggregated, and marketed to in real-time, we will at least have the power to engage in retro moments of vintage discretion.
The post Privacy for Sale appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Nearly 20 years later, the world of high art finally got its revenge—by giving Clowes a museum show of his own. Earlier this year, the Oakland Museum premiered Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes. (A companion monograph, The Art of Daniel Clowes, is available too.) The show, which features 100 works that Clowes created between 1989 and 2011, is eventually headed to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and Washington D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery. For the next two weeks, you can still catch it in Clowes' adopted hometown of Oakland. (The show closes August 14.)
Entering the gallery in which the show is staged feels a little bit like walking into an issue of Eightball. The walls are painted a very Clowesian bluish-gray. The major furnishings in the room—the bench and the café tables and two large kiosks—are so stylized they hover between actual furniture and geometric abstraction, just like the background furnishings in a Clowes panel. As deftly executed as the exhibition is, however, a central paradox informs it. It celebrates Clowes' work by presenting it exactly as what it was not intended to be: Hand-made originals tastefully displayed in the rarified space of a museum.
This paradox has an upside. You get to see Clowes' works at the scale they were created. You get to see the faint rules he penciled in to line up his text, and the instances where he used tiny masks of paper to add a new set of eyes to a character's face or make edits to dialogue and narration after an image had already reached a stage of near-completion. (The eponymous town in Ice Haven, for example, apparently went by some other name up until the very last minute.)
In addition, the show makes an effort to address the fact that Clowes' work was originally designed to be read rather than viewed. It features many of Clowes's one-page strips—and even some multi-page ones—in full. When it excerpts from lengthier works, it often excerpts generously. Drafting stools positioned around the room give visitors an opportunity to sit down in front of a particular piece for awhile and give it extended scrutiny. There's also a long bench too, and a number of tiny café tables running alongside it, and on top of the café tables there are copies of Ghost World and other Clowes titles that visitors can peruse at length.
Even with such touches, though, what gets lost in the exhibition is the fundamentally populist nature of Clowes' art, its existence as a rejection of, or at least an alternative to, the high art world Clowes found so contemptible.
Read "Art School Confidential," an autobiographical, four-page strip that Clowes published in 1991 about his time as an undergrad at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute in the early 1980s, and you might get the impression that the high art world had absolutely no use for cartoonists in that era. In the final panel of the strip, we see an instructor casually extinguishing a crushed-looking student's cartoon dreams: "I was really hoping for something more substantial from you!"
But if the classrooms at Pratt were tough terrain for would-be cartoonists to conquer, that wasn't necessarily true for the rest of the New York art world. In his strip, "The Truth," for example, Clowes tells the story of an artist who wins acclaim for spray-painting portraits of Fred Flintstone and other cartoon characters, just as real-life artist Kenny Scharf did in the early 1980s. In the strip "Blue Italian Shit," which Clowes explicitly sets in 1979, the same year he moved to New York, a 19-year-old newcomer to the city walks through empty, trash-strewn urban landscapes that are liberally ornamented with graffiti. In the story's splash panel, two readily identifiable pieces are included. The first is one of Keith Haring's radiant babies. The second is the word "SAMO," which is the tag that Jean-Michel Basquiat was using (in collaboration with his friend Al Diaz) when he began to attract attention from the New York art world.
By 1983, the pictographic populism that artists like Haring and Scharf had been cultivating through their user-friendly imagery and more accessible modes of presentation had achieved such cachet that the Whitney Museum produced "The Comic Art Show," which has subsequently been described as the "first art exhibition produced by a major New York art museum to display comic art, graffiti, pop art and the post-modern art of the East Village art scene together as equal works of art."
It was, in short, a great time for someone with a facility in cartooning to at least try to storm the gates of the high art world. Clowes, however, apparently made no attempt to do that. Instead, he marketed himself to magazines and other potential clients as an illustrator and eventually began producing his own comic books. It was as if he realized that the world of commercial art—and especially the world of comic books, where the end product was a cheap commodity that was far more resistant to the sort of variations in price that made assigning value in the high art so capricious—was the best domain for the serious pursuit of art.
Alas, the high art world failed to completely appreciate the radical nature of Clowes's approach—then and now. But compare his cultural impact to, say, Haring's or Scharf's. The latter ostensibly made art more accessible by bringing it to the streets, the subways, and the Mudd Club. But they still mostly trafficked in one-offs certified by cultural elites and underwritten by well-heeled collectors.
Clowes, in contrast, wasn't interested in making art more accessible. He was interested in making that which was already highly accessible—the comic book—more artful. Not out of any utopian sentiments—Clowes has always come off as a cultural snob of the highest order—but rather just because he really, really believed in the artistic possibilities of the comic book.
In many ways, of course, the traditional comic book stands as the antithesis of art—or at least the heroicized, romanticized definition of art, in which artworks exist as totems of creative expression unsullied by the corrupting influences of commerce, produced by sole practitioners inspired by some fundamental human impulse to create truth and beauty. Comics are typically collective efforts. A writer writes the story, a penciller draws it, an inker inks it, etc., in an assembly-line process that was devised to manufacture the end product as efficiently and predictably as toasters or chocolate bars.
In 1969, however, Robert Crumb published the first issue of Zap and showed that an individual could create a comic on a solo basis. By the mid-1980s, Harvey Pekar, the Hernandez brothers, and Peter Bagge had all helped establish the notion that comic books were just as suited to idiosyncratic personal expression as they were to corporate content factories churning out superhero fare. Following their leads, Clowes adopted an auteur's approach as well, introducing his comic book series, the short-lived Lloyd Llewellyn , in 1986.
Comic books, Clowes would later declare in Modern Cartoonist, a 16-page manifesto he published in 1997, "were the ultimate domain for the artist who seeks to wield absolute control over his imagery." Novels, he explained, depend on "visual collaboration" from their readers. Movies are group projects limited by all sorts of practical considerations regarding what can or cannot be filmed.
Comic books were also a relatively new medium whose artistic possibilities had barely been tapped. They were relatively cheap to create and distribute. They didn't cost much. They held little cultural cachet, and all of these factors helped make them a medium conducive to innovation, experimentation, and artistic ambition.
As it turned out, Clowes' early years as a comic book auteur coincided with the advent of desktop publishing. All over America, individuals and small groups of people started using personal computers and photocopy shops to produce publications that mirrored those that had once been the province of professional organizations. In their pursuit of authenticity, the personal over the corporate, these new publishers often favored the kind of spontaneous, slapdash, deliberately rough-hewn aesthetics that informed punk and indie rock.
Clowes, however, brought a different sensibility to his comics: An obsessive compulsive commitment to craftsmanship. An issue of Eightball was emphatically personal—Clowes literally produced every element of every page by hand, with no assistance from Illustrator, Pagemaker, or any other tool more high-tech than a ruler—and yet there was nothing slapdash about it.
Instead, Clowes strove to make the comic book as artful as possible, a complex but organic object that was perfect in all its parts. "Think in terms of the entire package, the structural cohesion of every component (from page numbers to indicia, etc.)" he would eventually advise in his Modern Cartoonist manifesto, and Eightball was the medium where he put such ideas into action. Issue by issue, his storylines grew more complex, his emotional palette more expansive, his draftsmanship more meticulous. Over time, he upgraded the paper Eightball was printed on from newsprint to coated stock. He added more interior color. He even improved the aesthetics of the staples that bound each issue—early efforts featured flimsy ones that tended to bend in unbecoming ways, but later issues use more substantial ones that stayed flat against the page.
By the mid-1990s, artists like Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Burns, to name just a few, had joined Clowes in regularly producing comic books characterized by their virtuoso craftsmanship. Like craft brewers and artisanal bakers, they helped pioneer the idea of the exquisitely over-crafted commodity—the everyday object which, in the hands of mass-market manufacturers, had devolved into "good enough status," transformed by aesthetic prowess and hyper-meticulous labor into an object of stunning utilitarian beauty. Those $198 plain but inexplicably gorgeous blue jeans constructed from narrow selvage denim made on vintage shuttle looms? Those $8 single-estate chocolate bars hand-wrapped in packaging that could moonlight as wallpaper in Zoe Deschanel's bathroom? Eightball is their spiritual father.
One important factor distinguished Eightball from much of today's super-deluxe commodities, however. While the cost of an issue nearly tripled over time, with #1 originally going for $2 in 1989 and Issue #22 going for $5.95 in 2001, the price was so low to begin with that it never became an elite version of a mass market product that only the elite could afford. At $5.95 for a 36-page, full-color issue, it was still an eminently affordable consumer commodity, an elite version of a mass market product that the mass market could actually afford.
Unfortunately, the mass market didn't respond with quite enough enthusiasm. Clowes began to spend some of his time pursuing better-paying (if less controllable) Hollywood writing projects. And when he did create cartoon stories, he published them as graphic novels rather than comic books, a decision that allowed for higher price points and better distribution.
This evolution made artistic sense too, as Clowes' increasingly complex tales grew to dimensions that could no longer fit in the pages of a single 36-page comic book. And yet seeing every issue of Eightball arranged in a long glass display case at his Oakland exhibition, as stunning as a row of perfect dead butterflies, as unfathomable as a collection of Egyptian funerary jewelry, it was hard not to feel a pang of nostalgia for that era when you could walk into a comic book shop and, for the price of a burrito, get a piece of museum-caliber art. It was one of life's great bargains and great pleasures.
Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San Francisco.
The post Turning Comic Books Into Art appeared first on Reason.com.
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