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MIT Technology Review, December 7th 2016

Mr. Robot Killed The Hollywood HackerCory Doctorow

Columbia Journalism Review, December 5th 2016

In a Time of Many Questions, Literary Journalism Provides an AnswerLee Siegel

Aeon, November 30th 2016

Nobody is HomeMarina Benjamin

Fast Company, December 7th 2016

A Short History Of The Most Important Economic Theory In TechRick Tetzeli

The Telegraph, December 8th 2016

When JRR Tolkien Bet CS Lewis: The Wager That Gave Birth to The Lord of the RingsJohn Garth

MIT Technology Review, December 2th 2016

Twitter May Have Predicted the ElectionNanette Byrnes

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ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org) Artist’s impression showing how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago.

Signals from the future carefully filtered from the depths of the information sea by monnik. You’re printer will love it.

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From the footloose networker to the exiled migrant, home has been displaced by an idea that’s both elusive and contested

The tiny home is one of the many oxymorons of our strange times. Thousands of people, mainly on the west coast of North America, have built small homes, little bigger than a garden shed, that they tow around on trailers. Since they first started appearing a few years ago, tiny homes have become an open-source ‘maker movement’ of thousands who share their designs for very small and often elabo-rate mini-mobile homes that cost as little as $5,000. It is one of the mutant social phenomena that spread in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and it’s uplifting, amazing and slightly shocking all at the same time.

Tiny homes evoke a frontier spirit of people trying to remake their lives after a catastrophe. The fact that these homes are on a trailer and don’t touch the ground can exempt their owners from property tax in states where they count not as homes but as a vehicle. That is part of what makes them affordable to run. Tiny-home owners often gather in impromptu sharing communities. Yet as proprietors of vehicles, they have to keep moving. It’s difficult to feel you have roots if your home is on wheels.

The tiny house is just one example of the lengths to which people will go to create a sense of home even when they lack the means for it. It’s just one symptom of a much wider and intensifying search for belonging, which makes home as important to politics as the idea of class or rights – especially now, when so many people feel displaced, both literally and figuratively, by life in innovation-driven, high-tech, networked capitalism. On top of that, the contest over where home is and who is entitled to live there, is – in the form of the current apparent crisis over migration – driving global political debate.

Aeon, November 30th 2016

Nobody is homeMarina Benjamin

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The wise man built his house upon the rock, in the middle of the Drina river in Serbia. Photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters

Home is where the heart is, and there is no place like home, yet a sense of being at home can come from many sources. Home can be a place of residence, where you go back to after work. It can mean the place you come from: where you grew up, and to which you return in your memories and for important family rituals. Feeling at home can come from an activity in which you feel at ease, in flow, in a landscape that’s familiar and uplifting. Doing satisfying work can evoke a sense of home, as can being with friends or walking along a beach with someone you love.

The common thread to all these meanings of home is that they provide us with a tethered sense of identity. Home matters so much just now because so many people feel the tether coming loose.

The philosopher who understood this search best is controversial: Martin Heidegger. A member of the Nazi Party, Heidegger never expressed remorse for the Holo-caust and was often an arrogant, duplicitous bully. Some critics argue that his philosophy is too contaminated by racism to admit rescue. His ideas are often dismissed as parochial, nostalgic and regressive. Even his advocates acknowledge that his prose is deliberately dense.

Yet, as the Australian scholar Jeff Malpas has shown in several thoughtful books and essays, studying Heide-gger helps to explain why we are now so preoccupied by feelings of displacement that are triggering a search for home. Given Heidegger’s Nazi leanings and the rise of the populist Right in many parts of the developed world, his work could repay study.

Heidegger detested René Descartes’s dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’ which located the search for iden-tity in our brains. There, it was secured by a rational process of thought, detached from a physical world that presented itself to the knowing subject as a puzzle to be solved. Descartes’s ideas launched a great inward turn in philosophy with the subject at the centre of the drama confronting the objective world about which he tries to gain knowledge.

Had Heidegger ever come up with a saying to sum up his philosophy it would have been: ‘I dwell, therefore I am.’ For him, identity is bound up with being in the world, which in turn means having a place in it. We don’t live in the abstract space favoured by philosophers, but in a parti-cular place, with specific features and history. We arrive already entangled with the world, not detached from it. Our identity is not secured just in our heads but through our bodies too, how we feel and how we are moved, lite-rally and emotionally.

Instead of presenting it as a puzzle to be solved, Heide-gger’s world is one we should immerse ourselves in and care for: it is part of the larger ‘being’ where we all belong. As Malpas puts it, Heidegger argues that we should release ourselves to the world, to find our part in its larger ebb and flow, rather than seek to detach ourselves from it in order to dominate it.

Heidegger has his own account of what dwelling meant: he spent much of his time writing in an austere mountain

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hut in the depths of the Black Forest. He felt at home in a clearing in the forest, sprung from the soil of the home-land and redolent with a nostalgic feel of German peasant life. He’s not arguing that we should all go to a forest clea-ring, but that we need our own equivalent: a place that makes us feel at ease with the world. One can find it lying under a tree in a city park, looking at the clouds above, or sitting in a café watching people all around.

Heidegger’s pessimistic diagnosis of the ills of a restless and rootless modern society, driven by science and tech-nology, is that it systematically robs people of this feeling of being at home in the world. It is set up to deny the very thing we most need for a sense of identity and purpose. For Heidegger, nostalgia – the unrequited longing to return home – is a necessary condition of being modern. Technology is a big factor in this.

When the technology of the home was more like a tool to augment human muscle power – a place for the washing machine, the fridge, the boiler – the home was as a private, bounded space. Now technology is breaking down those boundaries. When parents worry about where their children are going (metaphorically) and to whom they’re talking on social media, they’re acknowledging that people can be at home, in their bedrooms, and yet some-where else simultaneously. Young people seem to be most at home when they are on – or perhaps ‘in’ – their phones, flicking between apps, surfing their social networks.

Meanwhile, home, always a workplace for women, has become a place of work for many more people, at least those whose first action on waking is to check emails. The small kitchen table in my parents’ house was used only for breakfast. A table in the dining room was laid out for tea. Neither were used for work. In contrast, the table in our family house has to be cleared of an Apple store’s worth of equipment before we can eat.

Airbnb is one expression of this technological transforma-tion of the home. I wrote the first draft of this article in a Japanese tea house in someone’s garden in Berkeley, near San Francisco, rented through a website that allows us to share our homes with strangers as a commercial activity. A bedroom can become an income-earning asset when its role in our lives is reassigned by the click of a mouse on a digital platform.

As homes become more like flexible assets and workplaces, where we bank and shop, so contemporary workplaces are styling themselves as homes. Many people in cities seem to work in cafés. The most achingly trendy shared workspace in London is called Second Home. WeWork, the fast-growing US co-working provider, has now launched the sister company WeLive, through which young people can rent rooms barely large enough for a bed so they can be closer to their very small desks.

Yet this ambiguous domestication of work and commodi-fication of home is overshadowed by a more malevolent sense of displacement generated by technology. Much of the populist anger sweeping through advanced econo-mies comes from men who feel displaced because there is a dwindling supply of work that gives them meaning

or status. Judging by the outpouring of books about our bleak near future without work, this fear of losing our place in the world to the technologies we’ve created will overshadow the next few decades.

Modernity, as Heidegger contended, condemns us to a painful, usually thwarted and often nostalgic search for a sense of home in a world set up to make it difficult to achieve. Of course, implicit in Heidegger’s account is a tension and a risk. It is easy for us to imagine that our particular version of home, at a certain time, should be fixed as a universal ideal – as if home has an unchangeable essence that needs protecting at all costs.

This is how the largely university-educated generation who entered the UK’s labour market after the 2008 finan-cial crisis feels. As wages flatline and inner-city property prices rise, young millennials struggle to afford a home. ‘Generation Rent’, who grew up in London and the south-east in particular, feels betrayed because their childhood homes are now well beyond them. They complain of being infantilised by having to stay at home with their parents for longer than they’d like, or ending up with shared kitchens and bathrooms in soulless short-term lets, like students. Generation Rent’s righteous anger stems in part from a thwarted search for something deeply conventi-onal: a place to call home, recognisable from their own childhoods.

Yet the lengths to which Millennials have to go in search of home pale in comparison with the struggles faced by most economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Their search for home has become the stuff of a much angrier politics.

We are in the midst of a refugee crisis with 65 million people on the move around the world. In Europe, they have been met by many ordinary citizens willing to offer them their homes: in Germany, thousands have taken in refu-gees as an act of hospitality. But that has been matched by a rising populist backlash against unwanted outsiders who are cast as infiltrators intent on messing up and taking advantage of ‘our’ home, siphoning off state benefits, and abusing public services.

The Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of the Danish People’s Party, the Alternative for Germany party and the Nati-onal Front in France are all symptomatic of this easily provoked fear of an imaginary pristine national home being ruined by outsiders. In Canada, a society with a deliberate approach to encourage immigration, the prime minister Justin Trudeau is one of the few politicians to make a popular pitch based on welcoming diverse stran-gers. Virtually everywhere else, from Australia to Austria, politicians are running scared of the populist Right whip-ping up a fear that your home is about to be lost, or trans-figured beyond recognition.

It’s not just a question of populism, though. The rootless fluidity of globalisation so recently celebrated by many young, educated urbanites feeds a new division between those who want the cosmopolitan city and those who prefer the settled provincial life; between those who think airports are part of daily life and those who go there only

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for their holidays; those that like the provisional, digital, networked economy and those who want the certainty of living in the same place, with the same people and follo-wing the same routines.

Heidegger maintained that modernity makes us feel homeless much of the time. Indeed, one reason large companies are so distrusted is that they seem to relish exactly what we recoil from: being homeless, a ‘citizen of nowhere’, as Theresa May, the new British Prime Minister, recently put it in a speech to the Conservative Party. Corporations manage to get away with paying minimal tax because they can threaten to relocate at the drop of a hat. The jobs on which our homes depend appear to be hostage to people who regard rootlessness as an optimal state. Heidegger’s point is that such tensions can only intensify as modernity accelerates.

An even larger movement than refugees are the almost 740 million people a year who migrate within their own country to a city. These people and the cities they move to, especially in China, is where the real struggle for home will be played out over the next 40 years. The recipes that the urbanist Jane Jacobs developed while creating a sense of home in downtown Manhattan – low-rise mixed neighbourhoods with an active and convivial street life – will have little place in the extreme urban conditions of the many cities that China is planning to build under the One Belt, One Road plan for a new Silk road into Asia and Europe. These cities will never figure on Monocle maga-zine’s list of the world’s most liveable places. Marvels of rapid development, they threaten to become social nightmares unless their citizens’ appetites for consumer goods for their homes are satiated.

Overlaying all of that is the shared existential threat of climate change and rising sea levels that could displace many millions of mainly poor people from their homes. More than 100 major cities worldwide are on coast-lines that will be affected by rising sea levels: Miami is the canary in the mine, a city that’s booming as fast as it’s sinking. Largely unchecked carbon emissions mean we risk making our shared planetary home inhospi-table. We are just coming to terms with our own crea-tion, the Anthropocene, when everywhere on the planet is touched by human action and truly wild nature exists only in pockets. The world is ours – the question is, will we treat it like a resource to be exploited or like a shared home? To achieve that will require not only better science and clean technologies but also more frugal lifestyles and perhaps a return to ideas cherished in indigenous cultures that revolve around a deep interdependence with nature.

Across these issues – from technology to immigration, urbanisation and climate change – the idea of home is central. Fears that we are losing our place are rife. We live in a restless, rootless world that prompts nostalgia, a yearning for an impossible return to an imagined home. Perhaps that’s why there are so many books in English about the Danish idea of hygge, how to make everything cosy and warm. (It involves blankets, fires, sitting in circles, chatting and not breaking out on your own.)

The clues to what people yearn for are hiding in plain sight in popular culture: television series such as Downton Abbey about a British aristocratic family trying to hang on to a home that supports an entire social order; or The Great British Bake Off, now fran-chised across the globe: what more homely activity is there than baking? Even I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! is about whether a group of fairly annoying people can create a home together in the Australian jungle: the winners are invariably those who make sacrifices to get food, tend fires, put up hammocks and provide a shoulder to cry on.

True, not all our dilemmas about home are due to tech-nology-charged mobile capitalism. Our sense of home is also being profoundly unsettled, for example by ageing. All over the world, adult children are struggling with the painful dilemma of whether their elderly, infirm parents should go ‘into a home’. To most, that’s a death knell because it means the very opposite of what it says.

The spread of dementia – soon to become a global epidemic – will sharpen this unease. Old people are most vulnerable when displaced from their homes: they lose the props they need to keep everything in order. As people with dementia lose their short-term memory, so longer-term memories of where they grew up and their lives in childhood become more important. One woman I know with dementia now anchors her identity in repe-ated wartime stories of sleeping in an Anderson shelter with her mother. Those are among the few memories she can still conjure up. Home is a place long ago, as much as it is the flat she now lives in, which holds almost no meaning for her.

Tensions over the meaning of home will only inten-sify; if people feel thwarted in finding their place in the world, they can become angry, depressed, defeated and sad. Many of them will support measures to exert greater control over their homes, to build walls, erect gates and keep at bay unruly forces that threaten to take their homes from them. They will want to restore an orderly home, however imaginary. At the moment, politically, only the populist Right seems to fully under-stand the power of this idea, when what we need is a creative, shared response to remake our sense of home.

It could be too much to hope that we might have a homely capitalism, with homely capitalists but, in a sense, that is what people are asking for: an economic system that helps them build a shared sense of home. After all, that’s exactly what far-sighted 19th-century capitalists did in the days of Robert Owen’s New Lanark Mills and the Cadbury factory at Bournville. In the wake of the Second World War, modern capitalism was at its most successful and productive when it built not just factories but millions of homes, from Dagenham to Detroit; homes that were filled in an orderly fashion with consumer durables brought by a capitalism orga-nised around national democracies. Capitalism needs once again to give people an orderly sense of home, rather than pitching them into insecurity, as if anything they have might be taken from them in a moment.

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Equally, the progressive Left will renew itself only if it comes up with a more optimistic, pluralistic and demo-cratic account of how people can create a shared sense of home together. Perhaps the lead will come from places such as Canada and Denmark; or from cities that grow and yet remain liveable; even from new approa-ches to caring for the elderly, from shared housing and from new technologies for building homes cheaply using 3D printing.

We need a new kind of shared home economics, of home-making and building. The route to power to change society starts at home.

Link: https://aeon.co/essays/why-theres-no-place-like-home-for-anyone-any-more

MIT Technology Review, December 7th 2016

Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood HackerCory Doctorow

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The popular portrayal of computers as magic boxes capable of anything has done real societal harm. Now one TV show wants to save us.

For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in

denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a universal key, and e-mails whose text arrives one letter at a time, all in caps. “Hollywood hacker bullshit,” as a character named Romero says in an early episode of Mr. Robot, now in its second season on the USA Network. “I’ve been in this game 27 years. Not once have I come across an animated singing virus.”

Mr. Robot marks a turning point for how computers and hackers are depicted in popular culture, and it’s happe-ning not a moment too soon. Our thick- headedness about computers has had serious ramifications that we’ve been dealing with for decades.

Following a time line of events from about a year before the air date of each episode, Mr. Robot references real-world hacks, leaks, and information security disasters of recent history. When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking. This kind of dialogue should never have been hard to produce: hacker presentations from Black Hat and Def Con are a click away on YouTube. But Mr. Robot marks the first time a major media company has bothered to make verisimilitude in hacker-speak a priority.

The show excels not only at talk but also at action. The actual act of hacking is intrinsically boring: it’s like watching a check-in clerk fix your airline reservation. Someone types a bunch of obscure strings into a terminal, frowns and shakes his head, types more, frowns again, types again, and then smiles. On the screen, a slightly different menu prompt represents the victory condition. But the show nails the anthropology of hacking, which is fascinating as all get-out. The way hackers decide what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it, is unprecedented in social history, because they make up an underground movement that, unlike every other under-ground in the past, has excellent, continuous, global communications. They also have intense power struggles, technical and tactical debates, and ethical conundrums—the kind of things found in any typical Mr. Robot episode.

Mr. Robot wasn’t the first technically realistic script ever pitched, but it had good timing. In 2014, as the USA Network was deliberating over whether to greenlight Mr. Robot’s pilot for a full season, Sony Pictures Entertainment was spectacularly hacked. Intruders dumped everything—prerelease films, private e-mails, sensitive financial docu-ments—onto the Web, spawning lawsuits, humiliation, and acrimony that persists to this day. The Sony hack put the studio execs in a receptive frame of mind, says Kor Adana, a computer scientist turned screenwriter who is a writer and technology producer on the series. Adana told me the Sony hack created a moment in which the things people actually do with computers seemed to have quite enough drama to be worthy of treating them with dead-on accuracy.

It’s about time. The persistence until now of what the geeks call “Hollywood OS,” in which computers do impos-sible things just to make the plot go, hasn’t just resulted in bad movies. It’s confused people about what computers

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can and can’t do. It’s made us afraid of the wrong things. It’s led lawmakers to create a terrible law that’s done tangible harm.

Worst law in technology

In 1983, Matthew Broderick had his breakout role as David Lightman, the smart, bored Seattle teen who entertains himself in WarGames by autodialing phone numbers with his computer’s primitive modem, looking for systems to hack into and explore. When he connects to a myste-rious system—seemingly an internal network for a game development company—he nearly starts World War III, because that “game company” is actually the Pentagon, and the “Global Thermonuclear War” game he’s initiated is the autonomous nuclear retaliatory capability designed to launch thousands of ICBMs at the USSR.

WarGames inspired many a youngster to scrounge a 300-baud modem and experiment with networked communications. Linguistically, it gave us “war dialing” (dialing many phone numbers in sequence), which begat “warwalking” and “wardriving” (hunting for open Wi-Fi networks). The film wasn’t a terrible approximation of how a misfit kid might have tried to hack in, although WarGames did make it seem as if the system had fewer fail-safes than it actually did. (Still, it also appears to be true that in real life the launch code for all the missiles was set to “00000000.”)

The worst thing about WarGames—and its most profound legacy—was the reaction of panicked lawmakers.

Passed by Congress in 1984 and broadened in 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was a sweeping anti- hacking bill inspired by the idea that America’s Matthew Brodericks could set off Armageddon. Before CFAA’s passage, prosecutions against hackers had invoked a hodgepodge of legal theories. Crooks who broke into sensitive databases were charged with theft of the electri-city consumed in the transaction.

CFAA’s authors understood that even if they explicitly banned the hacking techniques of the time, these prohi-bitions would swiftly be overtaken by advances in techno-logy, leaving future prosecutors scrounging for legal theo-ries again. So CFAA took an exceptionally broad view of what constitutes criminal “hacking,” making a potential felon out of anyone who acquires unauthorized access to a computer system.

It sounds simple: you can legally use a computer only in ways its owner has permitted. But CFAA has proved to be a pernicious menace—what legal scholar Tim Wu has called “the worst law in technology.” That’s because companies (and federal prosecutors) have taken the view that your “authorization” to use an online service is defined by its end-user license agreement—the thousands of words of legalese that no one ever reads—and that violating those terms is therefore a felony.

This is how a young entrepreneur and activist named Aaron Swartz came to be charged with 13 felonies after using a script to automate his downloads of articles from

JSTOR, a scholarly repository on MIT’s networks. Swartz was legally permitted to download these articles, but the terms of service forbade using a script to fetch them in bulk. What Swartz did was no accident—he made multiple attempts to get around JSTOR’s download limits over a period of months, and ultimately entered a basement wiring closet to tap into a network switch directly. But because of CFAA he was facing up to 35 years in prison when he hanged himself in 2013.

After WarGames, Hollywood made a trickle of “hacker movies,” many much beloved by actual hackers. There was 1992’s Sneakers, which took some of its inspiration from real-world phone phreaks John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper and Josef “Joybubbles” Engressia. There was 1995’s Hackers, which referenced the 2600: Hacker Quarterly meetups and Operation Sundevil, the Secret Service’s notorious 1990 hacker raids (which resulted in the founding of the Elec-tronic Frontier Foundation).

But even these movies wanted for much in the way of tech-nical accuracy. Sneakers ridiculously featured a universal key that can break all crypto; Hackers featured the graphi-cally elaborate virus mocked by Romero in Mr. Robot. The films featured the kinds of musical viruses and absurd user interfaces that are the desperate hallmarks of a visual medium trying to make a nonvisual story interesting.

It only got worse. As cryptography crept into the public eye—first through the mid-1990s debate over the Clipper Chip, which would have put a backdoor in essentially all computers, then through subsequent political fights that rage on to this day—it became a frequent source of plot points and groans of dismay from actual hackers and security experts. Like the moment in the fifth Mission Impossible movie when hackers replace the contents of an encrypted file with 0s without first decrypting the file, or the way in Skyfall that encrypted data is visualized as a giant moving sphere. Crypto in movies works just like crypto in the minds of lawmakers: perfectly, until it needs to fail catastrophically.

Fan noise

Kor Adana is largely responsible for giving Mr. Robot the technological rigor that sets the show apart. The

Rami Malek plays Elliot on Mr. Robot, a show that marks the first time a studio has bothered to prioritize accuracy in how it portrays hacker culture.

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Elijah Wood (right) and Sean Astin as Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings CREDIT: ALLSTAR/CINETEXT/NEW LINE CINEMA

The Telegraph, December 8th 2016

When JRR Tolkien bet CS Lewis: the wager that gave birth to The Lord of the RingsJohn Garth

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Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603045/mr-robot-kil-led-the-hollywood-hacker/

32-year-old Michigan native once worked at an automo-tive company, attempting to punch holes in the security of the computers in cars heading into production.

Adana told me that when he threw away his lucra-tive cybersecurity career to work in Hollywood, he was gambling that his background in information security would be an asset rather than an odd quirk. That paid off thanks to the trust of show creator Sam Esmail, who gave Adana the authority to argue with production designers over seemingly minor details. He ensures that the correct cable connects a PC tower to its monitor, or that the network card’s activity lights are actually blin-king when the shot comes out of post-production. Adana gives sound engineers fits by insisting that scenes set in rooms full of powerful PCs must have the correct level of accompanying fan noise.

Adana also battles the legal department over his commit-ment to technical rigor in the hacking attacks depicted on the show, knowing that hackers will go through the episode frame by frame, looking at the command-line instructions for accuracy and in-jokes. Those hackers are a minority of the show’s audience, but they’re also the show’s cheerleaders, and when an incredulous informa-tion civilian asks a clued-in hacker buddy whether the stuff on Mr. Robot could really happen, the hacker can nod vigorously and promise that it’s all true.

Another promising show is Black Mirror, created by the British satirist Charlie Brooker and now streaming on Netflix. It’s not rigorous in the same way as Mr. Robot, because it projects into the future rather than describing the technical details of the recent past. But its depiction of user interface elements and product design reflect a coherent understanding of how the technologies of today work, and thus where they may be tomorrow. Clicks on computers in the show call forth menus that have options we can recognize; the opacity of the error messages is all too plausible; even the vacant facial expressions of people lost in their technology have a plausibility that other shows rarely achieve.

My own 2008 young adult novel Little Brother, whose plot turns on the real capabilities of computers, has been under development at Paramount for a year now. The story features a teenage hacker army that uses GPS to send private e-mails and exploits software-defined radios in game consoles to create mesh networks protected by strong crypto. The one thing everyone in the meetings agrees on is that the technical rigor of the story needs to be carried over onto the screen.

This isn’t trivial. It’s not just about better entertainment. When information security is the difference between a working hospital and one that has to be shut down (as was the case with the ransomware attacks on hospitals across America in 2016) and when server break-ins can affect the outcomes of U.S. elections, it’s clear that we all need a better sense of what computers can do for us and how they can burn us. Adana says he is gratified when he meets information security noncombatants who have no interest in being IT nerds but who are interested in the security and privacy implications of the technologies

they use—something heretofore believed to be impos-sible.

Information security is one of those problems whose very nature can’t be agreed upon—and the lack of technolo-gical smarts in the halls of power is compounded by the lack of technological understanding in the body politic. Decades ago, WarGames inspired a legacy of stupid tech-nology law that we still struggle with. Mr. Robot and the programs that come after it might just leave behind a happier legacy: laws, policies, and understanding that help us solve the most urgent problems of our age.

Eighty years ago JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis dared each other to write a sci-fi novel. It was a challenge that would lead to the creation of The Lord of the Rings.

Once upon a time two friends made a wager. “Tollers,” one said to the other, “there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” At this time CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were “like two young bear cubs... just happily quipping with one another”, in the words of an Oxford contemporary.

Their historic wager to write about space- and time-travel was a vital step on the road to their most famous fantasy works – yet it has never been pinpointed more precisely than 1936–37. Now, however, we can reveal that the germ of the idea emerged during a few days precisely eighty years ago.

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about 1930 as a bedtime story for the Tolkien children, set in some vague era long after the overthrow of Morgoth.

Myth was no mere antiquarian interest. In 1931, Tolkien had persuaded the sceptical Lewis that ancient myths contained glimpses of the “true myth”, Christ’s incarna-tion. Lewis had since published The Pilgrim’s Regress, a heavily allegorical account of his conversion, with charac-ters such as Wisdom, Mother Kirk, and Mr Humanist.

The science-fiction wager was a step onto common ground with Tolkien, who loathed allegory. They agreed to write adventure stories in which the fiction could be taken at face value, rather than as a code. But each adventure would lead to the discovery of the literal truth behind a well-known myth – the destruction of Atlantis and the fall of Satan.

Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet centres on a plan cooked up by a dastardly scientist, Weston, to invade and exploit a paradisal Mars. All is witnessed by Elwin Ransom, a man kidnapped and brought along to be a sacrifice to the Martians. But these turn out not to be coldly cruel Well-sian aliens. Instead, three benign intelligent species live

The year 1936 had seen the two Oxford English dons hit their academic zenith with works that still shape medieval literary studies today: Lewis’s The Allegory of Love and Tolkien’s Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Yet they were also wannabe authors – Lewis, 38, was an unsucces-sful poet, and Tolkien, almost 45, an unpublished myth-maker.

Both had grown up reading science fiction classics such as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and HG Wells’s The Time Machine. In the Thirties the genre was explo-ding, ranging from the monster-bashing gee-whizzery of US pulp magazines to serious speculation, especially in Britain.

To Tolkien and Lewis, Olaf Stapledon’s future histories of human evolution and the supernatural Christian thrillers of Charles Williams offered both a challenge and entice-ment. They realised genre fiction might offer a wider audi-ence for their own ideas – ideas that centred on myth.

Tolkien’s myth-cycle, The Silmarillion, begun in 1916 but still in progress, recounted how deathless Elves and their mortal human allies overthrew the satanic Morgoth after agelong war. Lewis had become an avid fan – first the love story of Beren and Lúthien (to be published as a standa-lone book in May next year) and then The Hobbit, begun

Gollum in the film of The Lord of the Rings

Skandar Keynes as Edmund Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe CREDIT: ALAMY

JRR Tolkien in his study at Merton College, Oxford CREDIT: HAYWOOD MAGEE/GETTY IMAGES

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deep in the lush canyons of the planet, which they call Malacandra.

In his cosmic trilogy – continuing with Venus-based Pere-landra and earthbound That Hideous Strength – Lewis’s big idea was that the solar system pulses with divine life. “The very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance,” thinks Ransom. “Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens.” Spirits flit freely between planets that are each ruled by a guardian angel. But the “silent planet” is Earth, a prison for a satanic fallen angel – referred to only as “the Bent One” because the interplanetary lingua franca, Old Solar, has no word for evil.

One symptom of the Bent One’s malign influence is the materialist madness of the scientist Weston. He is a Lewisian parody of geneticist JBS Haldane, who in the Twenties and Thirties popularised the notion that entire galaxies lay within the grasp of a human race willing to adapt through eugenics and genetic engineering.

Usefully, Ransom is a philologist – a version of Tolkien, in fact – so he quickly picks up Old Solar. Lewis, probably the only friend who knew of Tolkien’s voluminous works on his invented Elvish languages, must have chuckled when he described Ransom’s first close encounter with an alien.

CS Lewis at Oxford in 1950 CREDIT: JOHN CHILLINGWORTH/GETTY

“In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be facing instant death, his imagi-nation had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar.”

Another fictionalised JRRT appears in Tolkien’s The Lost Road: Alboin Errol, whose Germanic first name (like Elwin) means “Elf-friend”. Alboin and his son time-travel via dream from the present day back to lost Atlantis – called Númenor in one of Tolkien’s invented languages.

First, though Tolkien wrote a brief mythic account of The Fall of Númenor. That story – just a few pages long – released what Tolkien once called his “Atlantis complex”, a “terrible recurrent dream… of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields”. He had suffered from it all his life, and would wake up at the point of drowning.

The Fall of Númenor opens straight after The Silmarillion and Morgoth’s defeat. Mortal men who fought him are awarded a utopian home, Númenor or “Westernesse”. But they bitterly envy the immortality of their elvish allies. This is the cue for Thû, former servant of Morgoth, to corrupt the king and become an éminence grise, imposing tyranny and human sacrifice to Morgoth. The king leads an armada to seize immortality in the westward paradise where the elves live alongside the godlike angelic powers who govern the earth.

An undersea rift appears in the ocean “and into this chasm the great seas plunged, and the noise of the falling waters filled all the earth and the smoke of the cataracts rose above the tops of the everlasting mountains… But Númenor being nigh upon the East to the great rift was utterly thrown down and overwhelmed in the sea, and its glory perished”. The elves’ paradise is removed to a plane apart, and the flat world of Tolkien’s old mythology is changed into the sphere we know.

The only survivors of Númenor are the uncorrupted “Elf-friends” who build new mainland kingdoms – and Thû. As Tolkien tinkered with the story, he gave Thû a new name, Sauron, and made him the Dark Lord of Mordor.

The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where Tolkien and Lewis would meet to discuss their work CREDIT: JEREMY MOERAN/ALAMY

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Tolkien’s Fall of Númenor is the key to the date of the wager; as is a piece of publicity blub that Tokien wrote for the jacket of The Hobbit, for which he signed a publication contract on December 2 1936. Many years later he told a correspondent: “In a ‘blurb’ I wrote for The Hobbit, I spoke of the time between the Elder Days and the Dominion of Men. Out of that came the ‘missing link’, the Downfall of Númenor, releasing some hidden ‘complex’.” Though this appears in the now-venerable Letters of JRR Tolkien, no one seems to have noticed its significance. The Hobbit publishers requested the blurb in question on December 4. Tolkien posted it just four days later.

The eureka moment was pure Tolkien – the realisation that the Elvish word-root he had invented to mean “fall” (“talat”) would generate a name nearly matching Atlantis. His language notes abruptly give way to frantic narrative scrawl: “Atalantë legendary name … of Númenórë that fell into a rift made by the Gods / that fell back / that was drown—”. Drafting the Hobbit blurb had set Tolkien thin-king about the end of the “age of Faërie” or myth. That epochal moment would be marked by the writing of The Fall of Númenor, his own version of Plato’s fable of the island civilisation destroyed by hubris.

The writers’ wager surely came next, and quickly – Lewis completed Out of the Silent Planet by the following September. Tolkien began The Lost Road, but never finished it (it was edited posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher in his multi-volume History of Middle-earth).

A timeslip thriller, The Lost Road sees Alboin and son dream themselves back to Númenor at the height of Sauron’s tyranny. We may now perform an imaginative timeslip of our own to December 1936. What rising fury inspired Tolkien’s story of tyranny, schism and cata-clysm? What surging fear awoke his lifelong Great Wave ‘complex’?

On 30 November the Crystal Palace fire struck an ominous blow. For a week from 3 December, the Abdication Crisis split the nation as Edward VIII sought to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. The Catholic Tablet raged that the last king to try and alter the royal marriage rules – Henry VIII – had made England apostatise from Rome. Can it be coincidence that at this very point the staunchly Catholic Tolkien conceived his story of a king betraying both nation and divine order?

Tolkien later rightly refuted misreadings of his stories as a crude allegorical code. But he also said privately that his instinct was to “cloak … under mythical and legendary dress” his criticisms of life. Dramatising what he believed were universal and immutable rights and wrongs, like any good artist he drew from life. And 1936 had wrongness in abundance to fuel his fire.

The year was described in the Telegraph as one “despera-tely charged with fate… which seemed to bring catastrophe near”. Fascist Italy annexed Ethiopia, and Nazi Germany

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Twenty years ago, W. Brian Arthur popularized a concept that forever changed Silicon Valley—with a little help from Cormac McCarthy.

This summer marked the 20th anniversary of one of the Harvard Business Review’s most influential articles ever, “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business,” by theoretical economist W. Brian Arthur, who was and remains a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. The summer of 1996 was a propitious moment for such an article to arrive. Netscape had gone public the previous summer, launching Internet 1.0, whose startups heartily embraced the idea. Even now, the theory of increasing returns is as important as ever: It’s at the heart of the success of companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb.

Back then, much more had been written about decreasing returns than increasing ones. In Arthur’s words, “The old way of thinking about the economy was, ‘Well, we have a pretty good product, and if we look after our costs and we manage to execute pretty well, we’ll get our 15% of the market.’ That’s true, maybe, for beer brewers and gas stations and barber shops.” Arthur, however, recognized that as we moved further and further away from a purely industrial economy, a different mechanism became para-mount. It’s worth quoting the entire second paragraph of his essay:

Increasing returns are the tendency for that which is ahead to get further ahead, for that which loses advantage to lose further advantage. They are mechanisms of positive feedback that operate—within markets, businesses, and industries—to reinforce that which gains success or aggra-vate that which suffers loss. Increasing returns generate not equilibrium but instability: If a product or a company or a technology—one of many competing in a market—gets ahead by chance or clever strategy, increasing returns can magnify this advantage, and the product or company

reoccupied the Rhineland – death knells to the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles. The Spanish Civil War erupted, a tragedy acutely felt by Tolkien, who had been raised from the age of 12 by an Anglo-Spanish priest.

Conservative Catholics smelt Stalin behind the Republican “Red Terror” which massacred clergy. Yet by December, it was clear that Franco’s Nationalists were backed in force by Hitler, a dictator who (among other evils) sought to strangle German Catholicism. Cruelty, moral compromise, and barbarism were on all sides.

The Númenóreans of The Lost Road bear archaic witness to peculiarly modern horrors. Númenor’s armaments, “multi-plied as if for an agelong war”, include self-propelled metal ships with long-range firepower. The king’s displeasure “falleth on men … and in the morning they are not” – dispatched to torture or the grave. Informers lurk “even by the heart of the house”. As Christopher Tolkien comments, in the Númenórean era his father discovered “an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own”.

When The Lost Road was being written, Christopher had just turned 12 and his brothers Michael and John were 16 and 19. When JRR Tolkien was 19, the Great War that killed so many of his friends had been just three years away. The Lost Road’s several father-and-son pairings hint at a paternal anxiety absent from the bachelor Lewis’s work.

The time-travel story was doomed by the success of The Hobbit. In late 1937 Tolkien offered both the unfinished The Lost Road and his older mythology The Silmarillion to his publisher, who demanded more on hobbits instead. And so reluctantly, Tolkien embarked on The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion, complete with Tolkien’s fullest account of Númenor, was only published posthumously, through Christopher’s efforts.

Yet the Atlantis story, which owed so much to the crises of 1936, was in Tolkien’s words the “missing link” to The Lord of the Rings. It underpins the whole epic history of war between mortal men and Sauron. When at the climax the valiant, troubled Faramir recalls Númenor and his own dream of “the great dark wave climbing over the green lands … darkness unescapable”, it is an exorcism of Tolkien’s nightmare.

Christopher Lee as Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring CREDIT: REX/MOVIESTORE

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/jrr-tolkien-bet-cs-lewis-wager-gave-birth-lord-rings/

Fast Company, December 7th 2016

A Short History Of The Most Important Economic Theory In TechRick Tetzeli

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W. Brian Arthur during an interview with IdeaLabs in 2012.[Photo: courtesy of IdeasLab]

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or technology can go on to lock in the market. More than causing products to become standards, increasing returns cause businesses to work differently, and they stand many of our notions of how business operates on their head.

These concepts sound familiar to us now, at a distance of two decades. At the time, however, they were not widely understood outside of Silicon Valley. “People in Silicon Valley,” says Arthur, “knew a lot about this phenomenon intuitively. But nobody had really written about it clearly.”

Back then, the primary example of increasing returns at work in the high-tech industry was Microsoft’s successful effort to turn Windows into the standard operating system for well over 90% of the world’s personal computers. With considerable help from Intel CEO Andy Grove, Gates used increasing returns to wrest control of the entire PC archi-tecture from its inventor, IBM.

With its history of dominating the mainframe computing market, IBM believed that hardware mattered more than software. Gates, however, understood that this was not true for personal computers, so he held onto the right to license Microsoft’s operating system to other manufac-turers. The result: The more people used Windows (and DOS, its predecessor), the more Windows benefitted users, manufacturers, and even other software vendors. Users gained from compatibility with other users. PC manu-facturers did not have to create unique software for each of their new hardware offerings. PC makers could simply follow the road map created by Microsoft and Intel. And while other software vendors envied and decried Micro-soft’s power—power that was ultimately challenged in a 2001 U.S. antitrust law case—they too benefitted from being able to write software for a single, dominant opera-ting system.

In the mid- to late 1990s, one tech company after another sought to replicate the way Microsoft had triggered and taken advantage of increasing returns. Online service AOL sent out hundreds of millions of disks to build a huge user base. Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and others used increasing returns to their advantage. Soft-ware has high costs up front but minimal ones later (deve-loping software requires much time and money; printing and mailing diskettes with code was inexpensive, and deli-vering code over the internet is even cheaper). This made it a business with great potential for increasing returns.

A shallow understanding of the way these companies had exploited increasing returns led to a form of abuse. “The only thing I would change about that article is the way the whole thing was viewed,” says Arthur, a Belfast-born, Berkeley-trained economist. “In 1999, 2000, and 2001, we had a tech bubble. People were talking about network effects and waving that article around a lot. Startups were going in front of venture capitalists and saying, ‘All we need to do is fan the flames a bit and everything will take off. It’s winner-take-all, so we’re going to get a huge amount of the market.’

“But if they’d understood the idea a bit better, they’d have realized that out of the 20 startups rushing into one field, 18 or 19 were likely to fail. The chances of being that

winner-take-all would have been 1 in 20, which isn’t a very good bet for a startup.” Webvan, eToys.com, and Pets.com are just three of the many examples of companies that fizzled out after promising increasing-returns-fueled dominance.

“The terms ‘Network effects and increasing returns’ are used often, many times without clearly understanding them,” says Bill Gurley, a respected venture capitalist at Benchmark. “But just because some people overuse a meme doesn’t mean that it’s not important or powerful. This one is.”

The concept proved more robust than the frenzy it had inspired. In the last decade, one company after another has succeeded by fomenting increasing returns and then doing everything it could to make the most of them. Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Snapchat, and Uber have all done this brilliantly. Each has rapidly gained customers with continually updated products that become more valuable with more users. These companies then use that foundational strength to offer new, linked services to their customers, further strengthening their relationship. Google is perhaps the best example of all, by tying an advertising element to its ability to attract eyeballs.

The power of increasing returns is not infinite, however. The experience of Airbnb and Uber illustrates some of the limits. Both companies have exploited markets with incre-asing returns. The more apartments go up on Airbnb, the more customers the service attracts. The more customers it attracts, the more owners want to list their homes. The more drivers who sign up with Uber, the faster Uber can get to a customer. The faster Uber gets to a customer, the more customers want to sign up. The more customers sign up, the more attractive Uber becomes to drivers. But that cycle doesn’t go on forever. “It kind of plateaus out,” says Arthur. “Once you get a certain density of drivers, if you double the density it’s not going to make that much diffe-rence when I call for an Uber.” The same could be said of Airbnb, which says it has over 2 million listings; 4 million wouldn’t make the service twice as good.

Furthermore, both Uber and Airbnb have run up against another limiting factor: regulators. Uber lost billions of dollars trying to win in the Chinese market, often butting heads with regulators who seemed to favor homegrown Didi Chuxing. And like Airbnb, it has battled repeatedly with local and state officials seeking to protect businesses threatened by its arrival and enforce existing standards and rules, for instance around safety and worker compen-sation. But getting regulation right is difficult.

“If you don’t allow companies the potential prize of locking in a market,” says Arthur, “you might stymie innovation.” On the other hand, deregulation can backfire—precisely because of increasing returns.

“I remember reading in the early 1980s that the Reagan Administration had decided to deregulate the airline industry in the U.S.,” says Arthur. “Competition was supposed to work miracles. But under the hub-and-spoke system, the more you can expand your hub-and-spoke network, the more you can lock out other airlines. I

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Link: https://www.fastcompany.com/3064681/most-creative-peop-le/most-important-economic-theory-in-technology-brian-arthur

thought, ‘This doesn’t make any sense to me.’ But the idea that you’d get good competition from deregulation did make sense to people who thought in terms of constant returns. Well, amazingly enough, my initial thought turned out to be true, and we now have three or four major airlines that have a kind of quasi-monopoly on certain parts of the country and certain routes. Prices went down, comfort went down, airlines and airports got jammed. Maybe it was all worth it, I don’t know.”

Taking advantage of increasing returns is much, much harder than people commonly believe. When I ask him what kind of CEO is best equipped to take advantage of the increasing returns that might exist in his or her industry, he tells me, “You need an awareness of the ecology you are in. If you think of different firms and products as being different species, then you have to be very aware of how that entire network of different companies operates, even if they are quite peripheral to you.” He cites Steve Jobs as someone who had a feel for this, a clear vision of the tech industry’s ecology and dynamics. “Whether he ever read my articles on the stuff, I have no idea,” he adds, “but I think he did understand this stuff.”

Arthur, now 70, maintains a wry and modest sensibility. “I think the ideas hold up,” says Arthur. “It’s not a fad, I’d say.”

As we are wrapping up the interview, he tells me an anecdote about the creation of that Harvard Business Review article. “I don’t know if you know the writer Cormac McCarthy,” he begins, “but I was very good friends with him at the time. I mailed the draft down to Cormac, who was in El Paso or somewhere like that. When I didn’t hear from him, I called him up and said, ‘Did you like my increasing returns article? It’s for the Harvard Business Review.’ There was kind of a silence on the line. And then he said, ‘Would you be interested in some editing help on that?’ Next time he’s in Santa Fe we spent four days on that piece. He took apart every single sentence, deleted every comma he could find. I said, ‘You can add that piece to your Collected Works, it will be somewhere in between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses.’

“Let’s say the piece was better for all the hours Cormac and I spent poring over every sentence. The word got back to my editor at Harvard Business Review. She called me up, in a slight panic, and says, ‘I heard your article’s getting completely rewritten.’ And I said, ‘Yeah!’ She says, ‘By Cormac McCarthy? What did he do to it?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, you know, pretty much what you’d expect. It now starts out with two guys on horseback in Texas, and they go off and discover increasing returns.’ And for a couple of seconds she was aghast.”

Columbia Journalism Review, December 5th 2016

In a Time of Many Questions, Literary Journalism Provides an AnswerLee Siegel

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If ever there was a time for the speculations, generalizations, and associative leaps of literary journalism, it is now, in this unimaginable moment that has become our everyday reality. Where the hard facts of reportorial and investigative journa-lism end, and where the fact-based judgments of opinion jour-nalism reach their boundary, literary journalism—the rational application of the imagination to facts and events—begins.

You might start here, for instance: In front of Port Authority Bus terminal on Eighth Avenue, just across the street from The New York Times, there is a large statue of Ralph Kramden, The Honeymooners’s fractious, lovable, hapless hero, who lives in Brooklyn and drives a New York City bus for a living. Seeing the photographs, and reading the transcript, of Donald Trump’s meeting at the Times a couple of weeks ago, I thought not of the looming madness of the wealthy reality-TV star as President of the United States, but of the similarity between the lowly public servant and the soon-to-be exalted one.

There is a mannerism exhibited by certain men who have had their pride hurt and have felt themselves humiliated by more powerful men, or by circumstances that they could not master. I used to see it in my father. They jut their chin out, move their neck as if making themselves more comfortable around the

Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage/Getty

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collar, and lift and stiffen their lower lip. That was what Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden did, the more he realized that his impossible schemes and dreams for a bigger and better life were coming to naught. And that is what Donald Trump did, time and again, during the various debates and at public appearances.

Trump utterly lacks Ralph Kramden’s tenderness and humanity, but the Queens-born billionaire (or not) is a creature of the old neighborhood, circa 1951. For all his wealth and the cosmopolitan circles he travels in, he is struck dumb by men who are better educated and more cultivated and articulate than he. Face to face, at last, with The Enemy during his meeting at the Times, he was spectacularly tongue-tied and accommodating. And when he encounters a commanding wit and intelligence in a woman (“To the moon, Alice!”), fuggedaboutit.

Trump’s fraudulence has elevated him to the highest echelons of business and, now, politics, but his fraudu-lence is what makes him so aggressive the minute the slightest resistance to him reminds him that he is a fraud. That is why, at the end of his first day in Washington after winning the election, he fled from master politicians like Ryan and McConnell and, above all, Obama, to the comfor-ting sanctuary of his Manhattan penthouse. That is why he has not held a single press conference since the election, preferring to communicate to an apprehensive country via video on YouTube. That is why he seems determined to spend half his time as president living not in the White House, but in his penthouse.

Trump flees to his tower the way Kramden ensconced himself in his tenement apartment, both figures—the little man with his wounded ego and his big heart, and the big man with his wounded ego and his shriveled heart—only truly at home with their fantasies.

Literary Journalism that takes up social and political issues seems to flourish in times of great crisis or ferment. Think of Joan Didion’s essays on the counterculture of the ’60s and early ’70s; Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, about the 1967 march on the Pentagon, and Mailer’s accounts of the 1968 Democratic and Republican conven-tions; James Baldwin on the Civil Rights era; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which appeared in 1965 and captured the anxiety and apprehen-sion of an atmosphere of impending upheaval.

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It is hard to deny that we are in the midst of a crisis and a ferment. Perhaps it is only with the license of literary journalism that one can hope to grasp our astounding new circumstances.

Trump flees to his tower the way Kramden ensconced himself in his tenement apartment, both figures—the little man with his wounded ego and his big heart, and the big man with his wounded ego and his shriveled heart—only truly at home with their fantasies.

Trump is not an ideologue whose hatred is arid and abstract. He hates out of vanity. You insult him or stand in his way and he excoriates you. You stroke his ego and he embraces you—maybe he’ll even put you in the cabinet. There is a psychiatric term for Trump’s rapid transitions from hatred to undying affection and back again. It’s called “splitting,” and it is the essence of a gangster’s persona-lity. Think Tony Soprano, who one minute is hugging an associate and declaring his love for him, and the next is beating him to death with a baseball bat after the man stands up to him in business.

Yet Trump is no gangster. He is a sybarite. He responds to whatever stimulates his centers of pleasure. Like his mentor Roy Cohn, he enjoys unilateral aggression, but he has no taste for prolonged conflict. By all accounts, Cohn was a lousy litigator whose success as a lawyer, such as it was, consisted of bursts of bullying bluster on the telep-hone and working his social connections. When it came to actual confrontation, Cohn withdrew. Even Trump once described him as someone who rarely followed through for his clients.

Tearing someone down on Twitter from the solitude of his tower, insulting an opponent in a debate with whom he is not interacting beyond one-sided mockery and invective, Trump can indulge the illusion of being king of his realm. Things change when he steps outside. After claiming that Obama was not an American citizen and subjecting the President to all manner of derision, Trump appeared next to Obama at the White House after the election falling all over himself as he praised the former object of his anger and contempt. There Trump was, jutting out his chin, adjusting his neck and stiffening his lower lip as Obama smoothly displayed his mastery of the crowded room. Trump immediately shrank back into the unintelligent, unwitty, barely articulate schlub from Queens.

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The pleasure of unilateral aggression was gone. Now he had to engage another man and a crowd of journalists, politicians, and others with conversation. And he couldn’t do it. He fell back onto his usual bombast of superlatives—something is either great or it stinks—and muttered an incoherent fragment of a sentence about “high-flying assets,” which might have been a reference to drones, cele-brity supporters, or beautiful—a woman is either beautiful or a fat pig—flight attendants.

It is the way businessmen talk, their conversation consis-ting not so much of words as of verbal merchandise—“s-mall talk,” simple exchanges of superficial facts that fill up the spaces of time between making money, rather than words that occupy their own worlds of meaning irrelevant to the pursuit of profit. When Trump told the Pakistani leader that he lived in a “fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people,” he was admitting that he had nothing rational, intelligent, or even interes-ting in the most basic sense to say.

Superlatives are the lingua franca of this discourse because superlatives are commodity words, tokens of value, measurements of worth, exact correlatives to the world of buying and selling. Trump, with his great this and great that, his big, beautiful wall, his sudden weak knees in the presence of his erstwhile bogeyman, Barack Obama, the best and greatest political product on the market, is the absurd creation of this world, a kind of Frankenstein patched together with all the disparate parts of the marketplace.

Beyond quantified expressions laden with value—I love you, I hate you, he’s great, she’s a disaster—he cannot express himself.

Unlike other citizens, journalists use two languages when writing or talking about public events. The first is the language of their profession, expressed within still firmly fixed parameters of judgment, taste, and discre-tion. The second is the language they use in private, filled with everything they know, think, intuit, and feel that they cannot express within the boundaries of their professional discourse.

Trump is now bursting the parameters of both the jour-nalist’s private and public language. What journalists think, feel, and intuit about this entirely original and unpredictable figure is, to a great degree, the most signi-ficant journalistic response to him. The challenge of the next few years will be to discover new ways to balance or perhaps integrate journalists’ two linguistic worlds.

Literary journalism, however, does not have to worry about the propriety or ethics of balancing public and private journalistic expression. Its very essence is the fusion of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions that would be unassi-milable in a more bounded journalistic context. Plunging into Trump’s psyche is, in the context of literary journa-lism, as appropriate as supporting your conclusions with facts and evidence in a reported piece.

Consider the nature of Trump’s ego. There are figures who are more comfortable as politicians than as statesmen—

Bill Clinton is a fine example—and figures who are better equipped to conduct themselves as statesmen than to play politics, i.e., Obama.

Both roles, however, that of politician and that of state-sman, require engagement with other people using the tools of intelligence, charm, guile, and wit. They require a certain leap of confidence into complex social worlds away from the reassuring confines of ego.

Plunging into Trump’s psyche is, in the context of literary journalism, as appropriate as supporting your conclusions with facts and evidence in a reported piece.

But Trump does not feel comfortable away from the tower of his ego, and that is why he only feels comfortable in the tower that he constructed as a testament to himself, a place in which he finds his greatest freedom speaking only the language of his ego: denunciation of his enemies, praise of his friends. Taking their cosmic importance for granted, politicians have a pathological need to be loved. Indifferent to or perhaps incapable of love, Trump has a pathological need to be affirmed as someone important.

This is perhaps the reason that this recent member of the Democratic Party, with his cosmopolitan mores and his countless social connections among Manhattan’s liberal establishment, now finds himself the more or less contented tool of the extreme right wing of the Repu-blican Party.

As he selects, in banana-republic style, one cabinet secre-tary after another who seems to be committed to destro-ying the very departments they are supposed to lead—the Attorney General given to racist remarks and homophobic outbursts, the Education Secretary dedicated to priva-tizing public education, the Health Secretary bent on turning healthcare over to market forces, and on and on—it is clear that Trump is in no intellectual or emotional position to negotiate with the Republican leadership.

He has struck his most inventive deal. He will give them what they want. They will let him play the role of Presi-dent and agree to leave their hands off the question of who he really is. They want him to be their Ronald Reagan, stripping the country bare behind the appearance of avun-cular gravitas as he rules from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He wants to dance around his living room high above Manhattan wearing a Mussolini Halloween mask. Done. He’ll commute.

Given Trump’s time-bomb of financial conflicts of interest, not to mention his faulty judgment and total ignorance of world affairs, he serves at the whim of the Republican-controlled Congress, which would just as soon impeach him if he continues to breach the big, beautiful wall separating sanity from insanity, thus demonstrating their integrity and installing a more reliable and genial extremist, Mike Pence, in the White House. Behind his performance of scary volatility, Trump has to tread carefully and defer to his handlers.

From The Beginning, money possessed an unreality for him. He grasped viscerally that, as a Roman emperor

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once put it, money has no odor. It can be wielded with absolute amorality without stigma. Trump saw his father bend the world to his will with the right check here and the right check there to New York City’s Democratic establishment. Money in this sense was not a medium of material exchange. It was an emana-tion of personality, like charm, or wit, or intelligence, all of which qualities money could efficiently replace.

People are valuable when he is in possession of them—when they flatter him or serve his purpose—worthless when they fail to yield a profit—when they criticize him or refuse to accede to his demands.

In the latter case, he walks away from them as from a business or a loan and heaps scorn on them as on a bad investment from which he has severed himself. Enter Twitter, a creation of money culture if there ever was one. There in the privacy of your own screen, feed, and head, the outer world acquires the abstract fungibility of money. It dissolves into stick figures marching to the tune of your imagination.

He has struck his most inventive deal. He will give them what they want. They will let him play the role of President and agree to leave their hands off the ques-tion of who he really is

One minute Trump is flattering an adversarial jour-nalist in person, thus gratifying himself by witnessing the journalist’s gratified expression; the next minute he is gratifying himself in the privacy of his own head by attacking the journalist on Twitter. In this way, Trump restructures—as though it were an onerous debt—every human relationship into a simple trans-action.

Trump will eventually fall, in one degree or another, into the chasm between business culture and poli-tical culture. In the former, you either make a profit or you don’t. In the latter, you derive your gratification from the power you feel when you have successfully concluded an arduous set of negotiations, trade-offs, and compromise for the sake of some policy that will yield you, personally, nothing. Trump goes haywire in the area of nothing material to be gained.

In business, Trump could simply throw up his hands and walk away from situations that brought him no gain. In politics, he cannot walk away from anything. Even if he managed to, he would walk into another part of politics.

Though the media has anointed and mystified Trump as an “enigma,” he is about as mysterious as Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. Without the medium of money, his inherited oxygen and language, Trump will not be able to function in politics. That is why, to the extent that he engages in politics, he will try to make it as much about money as he can.

In the meantime, as he finds himself in one different world after another, and among people speaking one different idiom or professional dialect after another, he will keep

blustering and boasting, speaking either in silver dollars or bad checks, jutting out his chin, adjusting his neck, stif-fening his lower lip.

Kramden: “I’ve got a big mouth!”

Trump: “It’s gonna be great.”

Link: http://www.cjr.org/special_report/literary_journalism_trump_pre-sident.php

MIT Technology Review, December 2th 2016

Twitter May Have Predicted the ElectionNanette Byrnes

The votes for Brexit and Donald Trump contradicted pollsters, but some researchers say Twitter was sending accurate signals all along.

Just how useful is Twitter as a measure of broad sentiment?One group’s study of Brexit and the U.S. presidential election claims that for those looking at the right signals, the surprising outcomes of a number of recent elections were not so surprising at all.

“Our analysis was showing something, but our beliefs were different,” says Vishal Mishra, CEO of Right Relevance, which sells a research platform focused on influence. “We thought, how is Trump going to win? But our analysis kept showing us.”

Leading up to the U.S. election, the company was raising the possibility of a surprise outcome.

Among the signals they tracked was the number of supporters on Twitter associated with each side, adjusted for bots. Just as important is a follower’s influence, measured in part by retweets, mentions, and replies, as well the quality of their network of connections and whether they bridge different communities.

In both the Brexit vote and the presidential contest, these signals looked better ahead of the vote for the side that eventu-ally won, Mishra says.

Deb Roy, a professor at MIT and chief media scientist at Twitter who has been closely tracking the election on Twitter as well, agrees that there were signals on Twitter, but resists the temp-tation to label them as “clear.”

In an e-mail response to questions from MIT Technology Review, Roy wrote, “We have entered new territory over the past year in terms of media dynamics” among social media networks, mainstream media sources, and fringe sources. He also wrote that there are “unique elements” to the events that “make it very difficult to claim clear interpretability of Twitter signals.”

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A visualization and analysis of retweets during the 48 hours leading up to the start of the first U.S. presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

On issues, there has been a long-term divergence between what mainstream media tweets about and what others do. In early November, the Right Relevance analysis found the trending terms on Twitter to be increasingly anti-Clinton, with “FBI,” “Podesta emails,” and “Comey” among the most discussed and shared terms.

This wasn’t true among the Twitter accounts from large media sources.

A visualization and analysis of retweets on Twitter from June 20 to June 22 leading up to the June 23 Brexit vote, in which the United Kingdom determined to leave the European Union.

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603010/twitter-may-ha-ve-predicted-the-election/

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