38 year old Anastasi Calatzis jumped to his death pretending to be a potential renter in a new Long Island City highrise. Anastasi Calatzis was distraught about his mother illness and his dire financial condition – NY Post: “I can’t take it anymore”.
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recession
Is the Google page rank algorithm redirecting our culture? At the end of last year Fred Wilson wrote a post – People First, Machines Second. Fred was saying that the page algorithm elevates linking and anchoring of information, a human action. But there is a peculiar omission from the logic, machines or uncaring humans can link and anchor many times faster, and they do to the tune of billions of pages and millions of dollars. More importantly they poison the well of knowledge by cluttering the “super highway” with the clunkers or should we call them drones. For sure Google is aware that this has the enormous impact on the search results quality. But there is the deep apprehension that Google in fact prefers quantity over quality. Google is an advertising supported business, they need the inventory to distribute the ads, they would rather monetize point of purchase not the point of information (see Chris Dixon on the massive misallocation of online advertising dollars) and they don’t particularly mind the drones because that can multiply page views by the millions (see Aaron Wall – Spam vs. Mahalo).
Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam report page, “help us maintain the quality of Google search results”. If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no difference between a splog and a blog than what is? We know that Gmail spam filer works pretty well but then it relies on the reporting benefit of the huge installed base of the darn humans. And it doesn’t look like the usability of the search results will improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social media clutter is now integrated into the pages. Tweets might be a human signal but if the disjointed bits of information, mostly click-through links to the 3rd party sites is not a spam than what is? Inevitably signal to noise ratio in relationship to a particular search is dismal. In short the search no longer gives you the aha “buzz”…
This commentary would remain academic if not for the fact that the “setup” is detrimental to writers and content originators. The machines don’t emote to art, poetry, heck they don’t even properly recognize the significant technical or scientific writing. The bots are not very good at detecting copyright. The robots are way too busy selling the washer dryers and the quantifiable viral amusement. If you think this has nothing to do with the punishing grip of this great recession than you really might be a machine.
TNR – Washington Diarist: The New Proles:
“Lately, however, I have been observing a high incidence of indecent poverty. Many young writers and journalists I meet are close to penniless. They have almost not a hope of supporting themselves in the pursuit of their calling. A garret is no longer affordable. Jobs are disappearing. Internships are unpaid or barely paid, which has the consequence of corrupting a meritocratic system with the inequities of social class, as the fortunately born become the fortunately hired. And when they publish what they write–well, now we leave the honorable tradition of the struggling young writer for the unprecedented enchantments of the digital revolution.”
The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.
On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:
- Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
- A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
- Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.
Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.
And what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.
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Two events last week should put all users of Google services on notice. First was the so called “Musicblogocide” as described in the Guardian – Google shuts down music blogs without warning, as years of archives are wiped off the internet. We have seen before similar actions from Google and this one seem to fit the pattern. Google denies service in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, there is usually no warning and most importantly there is virtually no recourse, no innocent until proven guilty, no reasonable possibility to appeal or appease the lawyered up machine.
Similarly on the same week Google announced that they are discontinuing FTP service to the Blogger blogs, a serious disruption to thousands of users. Google’s excuse is that they are spending too much on the resources for the FTP based blogs is laughable. But back to the Musicblogocide.
There is a vast problem on the Internet with the copyright, especially as it relates to music but not only music. Google itself contributes to the ambiguity on this issue if not pushes people away from the admittedly digitally outdated copyright interpretations. The Google Internet as it exist today leads people in a certain direction. Specifically the Internet is viewed as an advertising page inventory with the following dire consequences:
- Quantity trumps quality, keywords trump coherent sentences. This leads to millions of Splogs and the entire Affiliate Marketing industry.
- Original authorship is diluted, share alike and mashups culture is encouraged. This leads to the proliferation of the aggregators (borderline Splogs really).
- The common “share alike” practices encourage republishing or even outright stealing of content (the borders are blurred again).
- There is still no micro payment system to deliver any value to the content originators, the so called “creative class”. You don’t have to look far to see the result of this, even in the current great recession.
Google is in the unique position to change this poisonous climate. But there is an impression that all they care about in the end is the display ads inventory. Today Google presides over the Internet that is anti authorship and anti intellectual property. But instead of tackling the root causes of this decrepit culture Google prefers to pick on the bloggers who only blindly follow where the system created and blessed by Google leads them. One way to solve this is to create a micro payment app to drive the value to the writers and the artists. You want to embed anything, pay the micro price. Shift the value proposition on the Internet from the DJs to the creators and composers. And don’t blame the DJs for the direction you Google yourself googled for them.
Bill Wasik makes some interesting observations in response to Nick Carr and George Packer, yet unlike Jaron Lanier Bill just diagnosed the symptoms, not the disease. Bill Wasik writes in Twitter and the Big Blog Dream:
“When people talk about how the Internet is killing the mainstream media, they’re really thinking about blogs, specifically blogs circa 2004. The sudden rise of blogs held out a tantalizing vision of the future, where amateurs would reliably attract an audience to rival that of the mass media. In the Big Blog Dream, there would still be a single media conversation, as it were, but there would be a leveling in that conversation whereby amateurs could join, often as quasi-equals, alongside the professionals.
This is the storyline that still basically dominates discussion of the Internet — and yet the Big Blog Dream has largely died. First, the mainstream media muscled in on it, using their storehouses of experience and talent to launch scores of their own high-traffic blogs. (Where they didn’t build their own, they hired the best amateurs to join their staffs.) Second, the Internet-native media that did survive are now hardly amateur by any definition: they’re places like TPM, Gawker, and the Huffington Post, that have built bare-bones business models that create tons of original content by leveraging young and/or unpaid/low-paid writers. And third, between these two groups (the big-media blogs and the Internet-native blogs), most of the readers no longer have the time or inclination to bother with any actual amateurs. Really, for the past three years or so, there’s been almost no hope for new bloggers who don’t quickly find their way underneath the umbrella of some established site. And so blogging (at least among the non-elderly, as Nick Carr recently pointed out) has come to seem far less vital.”
Everything Bill writes in the preceding paragraphs is true, but this is one of the effects, not the cause, specifically not the cause of the decline in journalism. Google is the God of the Internet. Whats is written on the internet is done to worship and please the Deity. The Google ethos is advertising and this has the far-reaching consequences. Google needs to maximized the inventory of pages to display the ads. The model is the incremental small display ads payments spread over millions of pages. The online content only gravitates in the direction where the monetization model leads it. Hence if you take the Huffington Post (and Gawker for sure) you will find that the quantity trumps quality. Certainly at some point the Huffington Post had the high brow aspirations and there is still plenty of decent content there but overall they moved in the direction where the monetization model leads them, namely a heavy dose of aggregation and the general style of news DJing, instead of the expensive investigative reporting.
The other aspect of the Google worship is that people start writing for a bot, not a human. A computer naturally favors words over coherent sentences. Enter the spam plague of the “affiliate marking”. A “cut & paste” article about a washing machine is more valuable for a bot than a Shakespeare’s sonnet. This encourages the wanton plagiarizing, the mash-ups and devalues an individual authorship. To make matters worse, the anonymity built-in the blog comments by design, degrades the online conversation, even leads to the raging mob and hate. And only then came the Facebook and the Twitter to finish off what was left of the intelligible conversation. So blogs didn’t kill the journalism but the underlying internet advertising monetization model did kill both the traditional journalism and the blogs.
There is this peculiar impression that till the enraged voters in Massachusetts sent a Republican to the Senate, no one, except the unemployed, remembered about the devastating structural changes in the economy. I am not talking about the Jews here specifically; perhaps this is a metaphor for any group. But I always wondered how the Holocaust or the Gulag happened in plain view of humanity but more importantly in plain view of the indifferent world Jewry.
First the layoffs, the crushing cleansing, when many firms cut people they would never dare to, if not for the fact that “everyone was doing it”. This is the middle class depression, more than a half of all jobs lost disappeared permanently. Jews are predominantly middles class and it’s natural that the community is hit particularly hard. Add to this the reality that many of the “working orthodox” feed off the economic margins that are now cut to the bone. For many families this is an unimaginable disaster and speaking of Holocaust, virtually no one is talking about this with the required urgency.
My friend tells me that perhaps the economic realm is not longer within the expertise of the communal organizations. But if this true than what is the rationale for a community that doesn’t have a charter for the mutual support? The communal institutions in service of the oligarchy unelected and permanently detached from the rank and file, accountable only to super rich. Occasionally easing their conscience by fundraising drives for the faraway lands from Haiti to Haifa, the further from home, the better.
Anecdotally many of my friends, who find themselves in the financial distress, tell me that if they try to share their misfortune with others there is a quick comeback and cutoff: “everyone is unemployed, everyone is losing a home, etc.” To be sure, not “everyone”, but there is callousness to this response as if no compassion, never mind a real help, is required, as if you are supposed to die in a plague.
Most people I know are traumatized more by the apathy than by the actual economic downfall. We expect and accept the financial risks and stumbles but the complete indifference by the people who claim a kinship is a life long trauma. And just like with the Great Depression there will be a new generation that doesn’t care and doesn’t remember. The life goes on but our connections to the fellow human beings will never be the same.
The chart shows different categories amongst currently unemployed. The light blue on the bottom represents the lost jobs that are lost permanently die to an economic structural change. You can see that it grew from about 25% in the 60s and suddenly jumped during this recession to 55% of lost jobs (Jan. 2009 data, must be much higher now). NYT – The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever.
Propublica – Unemployment Insurance Tracker:
“The unemployment insurance system is in crisis due to a combination skyrocketing unemployment and – in some cases – poor planning. A record 20 million Americans collected unemployment benefits last year, and twenty-six states have run out of funds and been forced to borrow from the federal government, raise taxes, or cut benefits. In many other states the situation is deteriorating fast.”
Speaking of bankers. The “international superstar” Erin Burnett does a segment for the MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ about the Citigroup’s earnings, the $1.5 billlion loss last year, plus (or is it minus) 100K layoffs globally. The usual “executive bonuses” jive follows. The metrosexual moron Donny Deutsch starts yapping about the bankers showing some good PR by sending cash to Haiti. Without disputing the gesture Erin Burnett politely asks what would they do with all the money in Haiti? But no one asks the obvious question. Didn’t you just report on the loss of the hundred thousands jobs!? At some point you will need the jobs to send money anywhere, even, gasp, your next door neighbor.
MSNBC lists only the losses for the three quarters of 2009 (the available data). For the total year loss, add approximately a quarter to all numbers. The aggregate for the recession is not available (some of my notes included).
- Architects – 17.8% decline, 189K jobs lost (in 3 quarters of 2009 all figures) (as with all construction related professions the downturn started in 2008, the housing crash preceded the financial crisis and the general recession. So the aggregate number for all construction related losses is actually much higher, perhaps double).
- Carpenters – 17% decline, 1.3m jobs lost.
- Production supervisors and assembly workers – 16% decline, 754K supervisors jobs lost and 876K assembly workers jobs lost (the continuing decline of the American manufacturing, plus the collapse of the automobile industry).
- Pilots – 30.5% decline, 96K jobs lost (didn’t know there were that many pilots. The drastic decline of business travel, plus the industry still reeling from the hikes in gas prices).
- Computer software engineers – 10% decline, 970K jobs lost (despite the demand for the “high end geeks”, the rank and file (pun intended) of the programmers jobs continue to be downloaded overseas, the programming is a harbinger of outsourcing yet awaiting other professions).
- Mechanical engineers – 18% decline, 247K jobs lost.
- Construction workers – 14% decline, 1.56m jobs lost (in addition to 1.8m lost in 2008)
- Tellers – 12% decline, 407K josb lost (the first to go during a banking crisis).
- Bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks – 13% decline, 1.25m jobs lost.
This seems like an oxymoron, yet Noam Scheiber asks in the New Republic - Why Do German and Japanese Manufacturers Innovate More?
“The logic of this comes from the Harvard Business Review piece by Robert Hayes and William Abernathy that I cite. Hayes and Abernathy basically make two points. First, because the Europeans and Japanese rely so heavily on overseas markets, where the prices of their products can fluctuate owing to factors beyond their control, like exchange rates and tariffs, their manufacturers are forced to focus on quality and technological superiority. Technological advantages remain even when an exchange rate cuts against you. By contrast, American companies have always had a huge domestic market, so they could afford to mostly compete in terms of price. (They certainly don’t have to, but they can get away with it, whereas the Japanese can’t and the Europeans couldn’t for decades.) As a result, managers at American industrial companies have tended to think a bit more in terms of short-term costs–ways to undercut the other guy rather than outperform him.
Second, because labor markets tend to be less flexible and hourly labor costs tend to be higher in Europe and Japan (consider Germany’s famously powerful industrial unions), manufacturers there couldn’t traditionally cut costs very easily even if they wanted to. Whereas American manufacturers could often lower costs simply by lowering wages or axing employees, the Germans and Japanese had to either make their workers productive or have them produce more valuable products. It’s not that American manufacturers never did the latter, of course. But some of our foreign competitors simply had no choice, and they were very good at making virtue of necessity.”
I am not familiar with the automobile industry but I can speak about the construction industry. America is much more sensitive to risk and litigation. Today most innovative construction materials come from Europe. There is less litigation and regulation in Europe. For example there is a short cycle for the approvals of the experimental drugs. In order to innovate you need to have a high tolerance for the mistakes and failures. Risk aversion is the avoidance of experimentation and innovation. Especially if you don’t have a job security, like they do in Europe. If you feel secure about your job you are can be inclined to innovate and to experiment. The picture is actually reversed in the High Tech field, compared to the manufacturing. I think this is due to the fact that the startup category is a “financial allocation” in America, etc.
