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Aaron Haspel in Quotation Marks

by Ben Atlas on 03.3.2010.7:46am · 0 comments

The Fountain at the Met

Aaron Haspel is a master of aphorism. And the Twitter is not going to change this fact. Is there a Madrasa where one can memorize his verses? But I really wish Aaron would resume blogging.

  • “Real work ennobles the soul: fake jobs destroy it.
  • Ask if you do your job well, but first ask if it ought to be done at all.
  • Every party looks more attractive out of power.
  • Few human decisions are as well-considered as suicide.
  • Marital bliss and marital discord are equally inappropriate in public.
  • When you have an idea that runs against your ideology, don’t suppress the idea, suppress the ideology.
  • The businessman denounces government bureaucracy from the confines of a corporate bureaucracy that would shame an apparatchik.
  • The ideal work environment for a writer is jail.
  • Rather than spend time at work, spend the time you do spend at work working.
  • Real experts know exactly how good they are.
  • The most influential people in history have all spent entirely too much time by themselves.
  • Old people look absurd playing rock. We know what this says about the old people, but what does it say about rock?
  • A single arbitrary law can topple an entire code.
  • Why people do things is a less subtle and profound question than why they don’t.
  • Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.
  • J.D. Salinger has died, and the overgrown children who still read him will follow shortly.
  • Men are more ashamed of correcting themselves than of erring in the first place.
  • The laziest, loosest, and most popular organizing principle for prose is the list.
  • Occasionally the operation succeeds but the patient dies; far more often it fails but the patient survives.
  • Life may not be a game, but what works for one works for the other more often than you’d think.
  • If Blake were understood he would no longer be read.
  • If a rule is required, then its outcomes will be imperfect.
  • If you’re not in a band at 20 you have no heart; if you’re still in one at 30 you have no head.
  • The theory that genius and madness are ineluctably bound up has been responsible for most mad geniuses.
  • People defective in reason fancy themselves compensated in imagination — which is imaginative.
  • Professional courtesy merely props up the guild. It is professional rudeness that is in short supply.
  • From fear can come adequacy, but never greatness.
  • Attention begets all virtue, distraction all vice.
  • God would satisfy no one without His viciousness and caprice.
  • Most of what you think you have to do you don’t.
  • Some men, like Balzac’s Goriot, are made of money. When it ends so do they.
  • Because life has no meaning, a particular life can mean a great deal.
  • Scientists have usurped the prestige that properly belongs to science.
  • Movie-makers ought to restrict their budgets for the same reason poets used to write sonnets: constraint spurs creativity.
  • Freud wields more influence in America than Marx ever did in Russia, though many of his most slavish disciples barely know his name.
  • Living makes enormous demands on one’s time.
  • God is not merely dead but stillborn.
  • They laughed at Edison, they laughed at Fulton, and they laughed at every hopeless crackpot.”

Alain de Botton and Nassim Taleb in Quotation Marks

by Ben Atlas on 02.24.2010.8:44am · 0 comments

I don’t do Twitter or Facebook anymore but I keep an eye on selected tweets. Here are some from Alain de Botton:

  • “The dream of the modern individualist: to be famous. The dream of the pre-modern collectivist: to help sustain an institution.
  • Society continuously introduces us to new works of art and in the process prevents any one of them from assuming due weight in our minds.
  • A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
  • Office life would not be possible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
  • There should be a special circle in hell reserved for ‘friends’ who from a love of ‘honesty’ report the mean words of others back to us.
  • Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
  • Most of ‘wisdom’ boils down to the art of not letting things get to you.
  • Few architectural works would benefit most cities more than contemporary versions of the Wailing Wall – the name alone is a relief.
  • The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.
  • Authors write things down so as to have to think of them less.
  • Writing opens up the otherwise unusual prospect of being violently disliked by strangers & training oneself not to mind.
  • Writers have to go on working despite the increasing likelihood that they have already written their most important book.
  • Definition of a present: something you can’t get for yourself. As a child, that meant toys. In adulthood: reassurance, sympathy, forgiveness.
  • We cannot help but exaggerate our parents: their goodness, evil, significance…
  • To be flattered or insulted? ‘I enjoy your tweets much more than your books…”

And now few tweets from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

  • “You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
  • Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages.
  • If we are good, it is usually more from lack of opportunity for transgression than from intrinsic virtue.
  • The things people apologize to us about are almost never those that have upset us.
  • The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives.
  • Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget them.
  • I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
  • What they call philosophy, I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; and what they call journalism I call gossip.
  • Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.
  • Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.
  • A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer.
  • Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.
  • Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands.
  • They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
  • Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
  • In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”

Those are all pretty good, I though so. But note the two quotes I highlighted, amazingly alike. There is something liberating about “the need to write”, it releases you from the ownership of an idea. A written thought becomes the foundation for the building above while it recedes underground (some call it unconscious). Contrast this with people who take copious notes. I think note taking is a tick, the condition comes from the fear that you don’t have the ownership of an idea and you must write it down to remember, to cage the fleeting bird. A writer moves in the opposite directions, his words are born to reveal the internalized expression, to un-cage the rhyme, and like a child it must find its own unattached path.

The Social Media to Sharing is what Porn is to Love

by Ben Atlas on 02.13.2010.10:59am · 0 comments

We like to share, it’s in our DNA code, alas the Internet culture, especially the so-called Social Media interchangeably described as the “Web 2.0 religion”, takes this indispensable urge, hollows it out and displays it back to our species as a caricature of ourselves. As I wrote, we evolved due to our capacity to belong to a group as much as we did through the ruthless individual selection. We are the sharing animals, as in “my friend, I killed an elk today, let’s find some wood together so we can roast it” or “my friend, I saw a dream today, do you know how it explains the mythology of our tribe?” The key is not a “link” to the dream, but the shared interpretation. We are predisposed to sharing because that is how we construct the world or even survive physically. Fast forward to the dawn of the Internet when the idea of friendship is superseded with the “following” and the idea of sharing means spamming your “friends” with the links to the vapid Onion skits. The natural act of sharing is just a foreplay to a conversation. The sharing is unfulfilling and unfilled when it becomes a destination instead of a road.

And yes I am aware that in theory Web 2.0 is a conversational medium with the explicit feedback loop. But I am not talking theories here, I am talking the broadcast reality of how the tools are used. I am talking about the viral crap of the lowest common denominator, that literally spreads like a disease. Remember the warped phenomenon of the “dancing baby”? Well, it still endures in the literally and figuratively puke inducing Etrade commercials. Speaking of which,  this distortion burrows its way into the essence of the American consumerist ethos, even a cursory scan of this year’s Superbowl commercials will show a trend towards the cheap and the vulgar laughs at the expense of the creative and the imaginative. Turns out that that the millions of dollars invested in the production would rather buy a quickie, viral ready giggle than an emotional (let alone intellectual) response. Welcome to the “LOL generation” gone mainstream. Share alike and like!

The Death of the Big Blog Dream?

by Ben Atlas on 02.9.2010.10:53am · 0 comments

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.

George Packer Discovers Social Media is a Religious Cult

by Ben Atlas on 02.9.2010.9:52am · 0 comments

The internet encourages messianic rhetoric, the anonymity stimulates the mob gland, the disrespect towards authorship chokes individuality and where you have a mob, there is the hate of the infidels. This is especially true for people who pimp social media. To be sure George Packer lacks the “online street cred” but that doesn’t mean he can’t be right with his reactions in the New Yorker:

“Instead, the response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions.”

The Reasons I am Hanging Up on Twitter and Facebook

by Ben Atlas on 02.8.2010.11:19am · 0 comments

Communication by Soizick Meister

I am not deleting the accounts. I would still have the ambassadorships there so people can find me. But I do plan to minimize my visits to the sites, max out the privacy settings in Facebook including the exclusion from the search result. Un-follow the static Twitter noise. I have been actually doing this for a while as my dissatisfaction with the social media grew stronger but the final push was listening and reading Jaron Lanier, now I know I am not alone in my observations.

Reasons to hang up on Twitter:

  • I might be interested in what my real friends are doing; I am certainly not interested in a stranger’s itinerary.
  • I initially though that Twitter is a good service to get to know people but I found a grid full of self promotion and little incentive in making a real contact.
  • Twitter gravitated towards the broadcast model, if I want to listen without being able to respond I might as well listen to a radio.
  • 140 characters are inadequate to express anything coherent.
  • People who pimp Twitter for marketing and promotion strike a religious tone that in itself should be enough of a turn off.
  • There are many users who tweet obsessively. I rarely find any value in their stream and links, but I am often concerned for their sanity, what else they might be missing in life?
  • The so called “real time search” is a sham.
  • The most annoying parade of Twitter/marketing experts and consultants. How stupid you need to be not to be able to figure out the f-ing 140 characters on your own?
  • Twitter management is in over their heads (I met one and wasn’t impressed). The “suggested users list” killed this service for good.

Reasons to hang up on Facebook:

  • All Facebook Apps are intrusive and stupid, grownups should know better.
  • I am not interested in becoming a fan of any pages. I might be interest in what an actual person has to say. They way to make me to subscribe is to show some worthwhile content that resonates. Not to subject me to the spam links. I get this “fan” email from people whom I barely know, or friended because I didn’t want to offend them. And instead of taking this as an opportunity to get to know a person they want me to become a fan of some silly page, how rude.
  • I think it’s dim to commit an original content to Facebook, without any control on how the content is displayed. This devalues the expression and lets Facebook monetize your ideas with cheap and inappropriate ads.
  • No one is listening on the Facebook. Everyone is pimping something all the time so people just tune everything out.
  • There is noting more idiotic that the “likes”. I actually seen recently someone “liking” a status update announcing being sad about a friend’s suicide.
  • There is a certain indignity in using the Facebook.
  • Most importantly there is no evidence of a deepened connection with Facebook friends. In fact there is nothing that has done a bigger damage to the real, lasting, face time friendships than the social media.

P.S. Jaron Lanier addresses specially the distorted peer pressure on teens who grew up with Facebook, the only collective, social form of life that they know. I can’t say it any better than Jaron.

Virtual Conversation is an Oxymoron

by Ben Atlas on 01.17.2010.12:38am · 0 comments

James Hague – No Comment:

“Here’s a lesson I learned very early on after I started working full-time as a programmer (and that’s a peculiar sentence for me to read, as I no longer program for a living). I’d be looking at some code at my desk, and it made no sense. Why would anyone write it like this? There’s an obvious and cleaner way to approach the same problem. So I’d go down the hall to the person who wrote it in the first place and start asking questions…and find out that I didn’t have the whole picture, the problem was messier than it first appeared, and there were perfectly valid reasons for the code being that way. This happened again and again. Sometimes I did find a real flaw, but even then it may have only occurred with data that wasn’t actually possible (because, for example, it was filtered by another part of the system). Talking face to face changed everything, because they could draw diagrams, pull out specs, and give concrete examples.”

“Social Media” is a crock. Comments and online interactions only make sense as an introduction (or a follow up) to a real conversation. Talmud or Plato were notes of the real conversations. Online comments, especially comments without authorship is a bitter molasses. On my old blog I had regular readers and regular commentators. I patiently waited for some of them to take the conversation off line. When I realized that they wanted to remain distant and anonymous the conversations became empty. Human culture will always be defined by live forums and I mean “live” and then there is the opposite of “live”.

Twitter Retweets

by Ben Atlas on 01.11.2010.10:08pm · 0 comments

The 140 character format lends itself to quotes, rather than a conversation. Here are some I fished out of my Twitter stream:

  • @alaindebotton Most of us still in jobs unthinkingly chosen for us by our sixteen year old selves.
  • @ahaspel Moral progress is only economic progress: men in the mass have the ethics they can afford.
  • @CTK1 NEVER date a person who doesn’t like your art. Your art is YOU. Don’t sell yourself short. You’ll regret it.
  • @cdixon “if Gawker bloggers are barbarians, they’re Visigoths, who sacked Rome, but were themselves refugees from the more vicious Huns” -N Denton
  • @alaindebotton A quick way to judge character: imagine how much you’d like to be a given person’s child.

  • @alaindebotton The frought client-architect relationship: like asking someone else to write your book or to scratch your back.

Facebook bans the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

by Ben Atlas on 01.4.2010.10:42am · 0 comments

The year of the social backlash – LA Times:

“The Suicide Machine is a clever Web site out of the Netherlands that was designed to free users from their social network lives on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. You just pick one of the networks, start up the machine, and it graphically shows you unfriending your contacts, one by one, and eliminating all your other contacts with your profile. Forever. Although the now-friendless profile actually survives, the Suicide Machine is designed not to allow you ever to sign on to it again.”

William Safire Club

by Ben Atlas on 01.2.2010.12:05pm · 0 comments

I have been “sitting” on this link for a while. Perhaps now is the right time for an aspirational resolution and a small memorial to William Safire who founded a club that is really what true networking is all about. And it’s a pretty simple formula – you meet the same people regularly (decades) and you share meals and conversations. WSJ – What Facebook Can’t Give You:

“In 1957, as men in their late 20s, they began meeting—initially over breakfast, then over dinners held at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel or at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. Few were born to means. Many were sons of immigrants. Most went on to become luminaries in their fields—presidents of television networks, partners at banks, editors of magazines.

On occasion, they shared their influence with one another. When member Mort Janklow made a career switch from corporate attorney to literary agent, a fellow member, columnist William Safire, offered himself as a famous first client. When Robert Menschel, a senior director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was considering deals involving large consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble, he would pick the brain of fellow club member Ed Meyer, the former chief executive of Grey Advertising.”

So as far as the fad of the online social networks or even the socially retarded religious gatherings, the litmus test is pretty simple. It’s only worth it if leads to regular meetings around food and conversations (with the emphasis on conversation not the food). Oh yes, you need to get invited. But then William Safire was a scribbler with no college degree, may be the way to get invited is to found a club?

How did the present get erased from our existential psyche?

by Ben Atlas on 11.9.2009.10:47am · 0 comments

Paul Carr writes in Techcrunch – After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth. Paul describes that during the Fort Hood news blackout, Twitter updates contributed to the disinformation. Basically everything that was reported was totally wrong. Paul Carr looks at the story as an opportunity to reflect about the role of the social media:

“Two weeks ago, I wrote here about how the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. How we’re increasingly seeing people at the scene of major accidents grabbing their cellphones to capture the dramatic events and share them with their friends, rather than calling 911.”

To illustrate his point Paul links to This American Life clip. The suburban “Lord of the Flies”: ►►►read more

How Twitter and Facebook are Antisocial

by Ben Atlas on 09.18.2009.8:31pm · 0 comments

Sir David Wilkie, R.A. Study for 'Reading the News', c. 1821

Sir David Wilkie, R.A. Study for 'Reading the News', c. 1821

Ok, I admit I had high hopes for the social media. I have high hopes for everything, a perfect self inflicted set up.

But really it takes time to develop friendships. Most genuine friendships are with people from the same school, sports team, platoon or your work colleagues. Translation – a friendship develops after you spend hours, perhaps years with a person; it also involves working together on a project, having a common goal. The original Facebook was really a good fit for classmates. If you already nurtured a friendship than it makes sense to send a 140 character message as a subtitle to the familiar thread in your relationship, the original SMS idea behind Twitter. Indeed I would like to see a photo from a friend on vacation. But I don’t really care seeing some sunny side up Twitpic from a dude in Australia. Just when I am falling asleep, he is having tomorrow’s breakfast… Twitter and Facebook are the new “mixer dance”, they say. So I though and asked for a follow up meetings with people friended on the networks, to “really to get to know each other”. That’s the whole point I thought, how naïve of me.

Now here comes the nuevo marketing crowd and it’s only natural when a medium appears people are trying to apply old ideas to the new toy on the block. A marketer sees a rapidly scalable distribution network with zero entry cost. In other words, it’s like a TV broadcast, only free. Your send out a signal and let people passively consume it, perhaps even retweet (rebroadcast) the message on your behalf, again for free. Well, nothing “social” about that. There are some legitimate OCD people on Twitter at the rate of one tweet every 5 minutes; the ones that are selling at least got an excuse. And like with any of these internet mushrooms there is a cult element, in other words, after one invests significant time and effort, the investment itself gives value to the service, not matter the rationale or the results.

And when the reach is free and scalable, there is a multiplier profit at the point of a spigot. And everyone figures out that there are no barriers of entry and it quickly turns into a massive spam machine. People tune out and the worst thing analogues to the good old email, is that amongst the constant bombardment of messages people start to tune out even the few real friends they have on the networks. And then it’s no longer about the new connections but often about poisoning the well of your real, precious friendships.

Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts.

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