Cuttings November 2014

Couch potatoes have killed the internet dream - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "Earlier this year engineer Dr Craig Labovitz testified:....'Whereas internet traffic was once broadly distributed across thousands of companies,... we found that by 2009 half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies. By May of 2014, this number had dropped by a factor of five. Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all internet traffic in the United States during prime-time hours.' To those of us who were accustomed to thinking of the internet as a glorious, distributed, anarchic, many-to-many communication network in which anyone could become a global publisher, corporate gatekeepers had lost their power and peer-to-peer sharing was becoming the liberating norm, Labovitz’s brusque summary comes as a rude shock....What we failed to appreciate was the passivity of most of humanity and its inexhaustible appetite for consumption, entertainment and 'infotainment'. The spread of high-speed broadband connections did not liberate human creativity but instead created Couch Potato 2.0, a creature that sees the internet mostly as zillion-channel TV. In that sense, it’s no accident that the corporations which now dominate network traffic are outfits like Google and Netflix, beaming YouTube and movies to you in the comfort of your own settee."

How Made in Chelsea and Gogglebox make sure they don’t miss a beat - article by Stuart Kemp in The Guardian. "A beat is ... a scriptwriting technique originally developed in feature films: the use of dramatic pauses, or the timing of key events, decisions, discoveries. Constructed reality series on American TV mimicked the movies by adopting them, and now beats are being used by the makers of similar UK shows such as The Only Way Is Essex (Towie), Geordie Shore and Made in Chelsea. British producers are increasingly familiar with the US term 'beat sheet', outlining what they want to achieve from each scene. 'You’ve got four or five key points to get to in the episode, then in the edit you beat out each scene again,' says Derek McLean, head of non-scripted programming at Lime Pictures and executive producer of Towie and Geordie Shore, of the US practice. At the moment in the UK, he says, it’s more about beats in the edit. 'You say "give that a beat". It’s about pausing to highlight the key points,' he explains. 'With Towie, if you’re filming and there’s a breakup, we know we have to follow that story over three parts of a show. So what we do is make sure the highlight or conclusion happens in part three rather than at the beginning.'"

Want to succeed? You need systems not goals - Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "As anyone whose employer foists 'performance targets' upon them already knows, a fixation with goal-setting has many downsides. But Adams [Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonst] adds one more: when you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure”. Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose – so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again. A system, by contrast, is 'something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run', regardless of immediate outcome. Drawing one cartoon a day is a system; so is resolving to take some kind of exercise daily – rather than setting a goal, like being able to run a marathon in four hours. One system that’s currently popular online goes by the name 'No Zero Days': the idea is simply not to let a single day pass without doing something, however tiny, towards some important project."

We're Sexist Toward Robots - article on Motherboard website, cited in MindHacks blog. "What’s weirder than our insistence on assigning gender to non-sentient machines is that we then sometimes treat them differently as a result. We’re sexist to robots. It would be funny in its absurdity, if it didn’t so harshly reflect the prejudices already ingrained in human society, and risk entrenching them even further. Take for instance a study published last year that asked participants to interact with a robot security guard, a stereotypically male occupation in the human world. Half of the participants met a robot that was given the typically male name 'John,' and the other half met a robot with the typically female name 'Joan.' John had a male text-to-speech voice, and Joan a female voice, but otherwise the robot remained identical. After doing some security tasks, like detecting an intruder on CCTV, the participants rated the robots. They rated John higher than Joan. He was considered more useful and more acceptable as a security bot than his female twin. It’s a curious experiment, and the results are rage-inducingly reminiscent of past findings that have shown a similar gender bias when we judge male and female humans."

There are two ways to read this novel - interview with Ali Smith about her new novel in The Guardian. "How to Be Both consists of two parts, one set in the present day, concerning George, a teenage girl whose mother has died suddenly, the other imagining a life for the 15th-century Italian fresco painter Francesco del Cossa, of whose actual biography little is known. But here's the twist: the novel exists in two editions, one with George's story first, the other with Del Cossa's. Each narrative contains references to the other, but they can be read separately, and in either order. Whether you are in the bookshop or ordering an ebook (in which case, both versions will be delivered to your device), you get to choose, or to abandon yourself to chance." See also Ali Smith on the story behind How to be Both: "[It] started with the structure of painting and the notion of time and the notion, too, of the time we take (or don't take) to use our eyes."

Trouble in Paradise and Absolute Recoil by Slavoj Žižek - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "[Žižek] ... sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism – in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, Žižek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, 'they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave'. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy."

Horrific pictures of dead bodies won’t stop wars - Paul Mason column in The Guardian. "The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90 years since [Ernst] Friedrich’s book [War Against War] came out [full of horrific war images], we’ve developed coping strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.... [Martin] Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces. Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing absurdity is more important than showing injury."

Superheroes and Star Wars get a 16th-century makeover - picture sequence in The Guardian. "Photographer Sacha Goldberger has reimagined comic-book heroes and Star Wars characters in the style of old masters, in his photo series ‘Super Flamands’."

Wizardry is artistry - interview with Ursula Le Guin by Hari Kunzru. "I have rarely gone to visit a writer bearing so many messages of love and admiration. People want to thank Le Guin. Many readers discover her young, through her Earthsea sequence, now acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th-century fantasy.... One of my friends, a Le Guin fan of great depth and seriousness, remembers being nine years old, in pain and distress as he recovered from open heart surgery. 'Reading the Earthsea trilogy saved my life,' he wrote to me. I don’t think he was being altogether rhetorical. Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, 'escapism' the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. You need to get out of the surgical ward. You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat."

The Peripheral by William Gibson – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered.... The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. The only real money in the economy comes from 'building' (a perfect Gibsonian tweak) drugs. 'Homes' (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get 'fabbed' at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job. The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future after a hazily described apocalypse known as 'the Jackpot' has wiped out 80% of the population. The streets are all but deserted – though there are androids amusing tourists in bleak Dickensian cosplay zones – and power resides in the hands of unimaginably wealthy Russian oligarchs, or 'klepts', while the police don’t like to talk about terrorism because 'terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state'.... The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called 'continua enthusiasts', that allows people to reach into the past.... The plot whirrs off: after beta-testing what she thinks is a new video game, Flynne witnesses a murder. She wasn’t, as it turns out, playing a drone-piloting simulation game: she was piloting a real drone in this divergent future."

William Gibson webchat – on The Guardian website.
[On the technology he didn't predict.] "Cellphones. If I were a smart 12-year-old reading Neuromancer for the first time, I would decide that the mystery must hinge on where all the cellphones have gone. Why are there payphones in the background?"
[On immersive Virtual Reality.] "I've tried Oculus Rift, the latest developers' version, and I found it very impressive....it did what the 90s Sunday supplements advertised VR as doing. But I'm still in doubt as to whether very many people will want to do it. We already attain full immersion with flat screens, simply by being very interested in the content."
[On new technologies.] "Whenever I'm shown something, like Google Glass... [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a thrift [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do."

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner - review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In an extended opening image, as beautiful as it is useful, Marina Warner asks us to imagine the history of fairytale as a world map. The two beacons – and the term is used properly here, rather than as a hyperbolic adjective – are Charles Perrault in Paris and the Grimms in Saxony.... Perrault may have picked up the kernel of his stories from various Mother Gooses gabbling away in cottage kitchens, but the tales’ polished delivery, complete with references to contemporary events and places, was entirely down to him. Something similar happened but in reverse with the Grimms more than 100 years later. Setting out to record the true voice of the people, the scholar brothers found themselves sifting through stories that sounded suspiciously as though they had started life in a French salon or even a Persian souk. The young researchers’ first solution was to purge their tales of anything that might fix them in a particular place or moment – a named battle, city or king. The second was to create a narrative voice that sounded as if it had bubbled up from a collective unconscious as old as the hills of Westphalia. Shorn of anything like modern psychology or social logic, the tales as told by the Grimms now took on their characteristically creepy power...."

Evidence-based debunking - post on MindHacks blog. "We all resist changing our beliefs about the world, but what happens when some of those beliefs are based on misinformation? Is there a right way to correct someone when they believe something that’s wrong? Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook set out to review the science on this topic, and even carried out a few experiments of their own. This effort led to their “Debunker’s Handbook“, which gives practical, evidence-based techniques for correcting misinformation about, say, climate change or evolution. The first thing their review turned up is the importance of “backfire effects” – when telling people that they are wrong only strengthens their belief.... What you must do, they argue, is to start with the plausible alternative (that obviously you believe is correct). If you must mention a myth, you should mention this second, and only after clearly warning people that you’re about to discuss something that isn’t true."