I think originality is a word of praise for things that have been expressed in a marvelous way and that make points of origin for any particular element beside the point. When you read Saul Bellow or listen to Bob Dylan sing, you can have someone point to various cribbings and it won’t matter, because something has been arrived at which subsumes and incorporates and transcends these matters. In that way, sourcing and originality are two sides of the same coin, they’re a nested partnership.
I don’t think originality has any value as a description of process. In that regard it’s as meaningless a process word as beauty is. No artist says, “Let me sit down and do some beauty now.”
Jonathan Lethem
But something about love? No way. All the big love stories have already been used, and the lesser ones have no literary use.
What did I tell those kids who wrote and asked how one becomes an author? It was something like write about what you’ve lived, about what you know …But I’ve done that. I’ve squeezed my middle age dry, and when I got seriously old, I did what I could with that, too, but then I tried to write about really young people, and that didn’t work out so well. And the kids wrote again and asked, And what do we do now, and I said write about your fears, and they did it, at once, and wanted feedback as soon as possible.
And what do I fear above all? To be a sore loser, to be second best. But this is not something one writes about.
Tove Jansson on Writer’s Block
Metrics, Taxes, Faith and More
Some morning reads.
1) File this into the “There are 1,572,864 ways to order hash browns at Waffle House” folder:
5 add texts (number 1, above), * 5 pictures (#2) * 5 image texts (#3) * 5 Buttons (#4), 5 headlines (#6) * 5 URLs (#7)(n.b. realistically, you may only have one or two options here, but let’s just go with five for argument’s sake) * and 5 calls to action (#8) (again, you have fewer options here). After all of that, you end up with 5 raised to the 8th power, which is…
390,625 Facebook ad variants, using just with five options for each of eight variables.
Unlike the consumption of hash browns, you can more or less automate this process just by uploading the variables into Facebook and letting its algorithm do its work. Your mileage may vary, but when campaigns like Kamala Harris for President boast about running 25,000 ad variants just know that it’s not really as impressive as it sounds.
The resulting expensing provisions lower their tax liabilities, in some cases down to zero or near-zero. That is in fact the kind of incentive our tax system is supposed to create, and does so only imperfectly, noting that many economists have suggested moving to full expensing.
Amazon pays plenty in terms of payroll taxes and also state and local taxes. Nor should you forget the taxes paid by Amazon’s employees on their wages. Not only is that direct revenue to various levels of government, but the incidence of those taxes falls somewhat on Amazon, which now must pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees.
3) “Many of these Chinese workers are returning home, and they’re bringing their newfound religion with them.”
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens have gone to work in Africa, where they have encountered foreign cultures that leave many of them feeling alienated. For some of these disaffected Chinese workers, a source of comfort has come from religion, most notably the Evangelical Christianity that pervades much of sub-Saharan Africa. Evangelicalism prioritises conversion of non-believers, and the Chinese, heavily discouraged from practicing religion at home, are attractive potential converts.
Many local African churches have reached out to Chinese workers, including incorporating Mandarin into services. A number of Chinese, in turn, have welcomed the sense of community and belonging that these Christian churches offer. And a small but growing number of ethnically Chinese missionaries from Taiwan and other countries are specifically targeting Chinese nationals in Africa, preaching to them with a freedom they’d never be allowed in the People’s Republic.
How Africa is Converting China
4) Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
We shouldn’t be surprised. Blockchains are particularly attractive to thieves because fraudulent transactions can’t be reversed as they often can be in the traditional financial system. Besides that, we’ve long known that just as blockchains have unique security features, they have unique vulnerabilities. Marketing slogans and headlines that called the technology “unhackable” were dead wrong.
That’s been understood, at least in theory, since Bitcoin emerged a decade ago. But in the past year, amidst a Cambrian explosion of new cryptocurrency projects, we’ve started to see what this means in practice—and what these inherent weaknesses could mean for the future of blockchains and digital assets.
There’s a difference between being “unhackable” and “ignored” and as crypto and blockchains becomes more lucrative (not just as currency but as a platform), the eyes of hackers are going to turn to it.
5) Neighborhood Golf Association
6) “At first I was scoring it like an operatic. I was treating it like a Goodfellas-type thing. And Mike’s like, “No, no.” He always intended the Geto Boys.”
Willie D (Geto Boys): [“Still”] makes you want to destroy something. And to mesh that together in that particular scene, it caught a lot of people off guard. You expect to take your coworker outside. These motherf**kers took a printer outside and murdered a printer. Like, this is the coolest s**t ever. I loved it.
An oral history of ‘Office Space’ as it turns 20.
7) NDW Soundsystem is a new podcast from Jericho Villar. You should be listening to it on your favorite podcasting platform.
8) The NYTimes expose on Ryan Adams and his treatment of women still weighs on my mind. Tough to read about an artist I’ve enjoyed for more than two decades now. Maybe there’s a longer piece to come on this and the #MeToo movement, but for now it’s a lot of heartache for those he hurt.
Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.
Margaret Atwood
The amount of time invested in an idea has no relation to its usability. It’s worth spending time to find out something doesn’t work.
Rick Rubin
“Why Wasn’t I Consulted?”
WWIC as a question is the foundation of townhall meetings that invite public discourse on community topics. Only now the Internet exists as a virtual townhall for the entire world on every topic big and small.
“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.
Paul Ford – “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium”
Paul Ford’s entire piece from 2011 is an interesting observation on the web as a medium and how newspapers and others have failed to truly utilize it. I’m going to have to file away Gutenbourgeois for later use.
Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don’t just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you’ll sell things.
He’s essentially talking about the democratization of news and information, citing Wikipedia and MetaFilter as examples of the wisdom of the crowds, but with filters and guide rails in place that reward good and limit bad to an extent.
In each of these, the audience participates in what is essentially the final product and ultimately determines its value.
The challenge for the press and the internet in general is to make sure there are those “one or two smart people” who can help manage these communities. Otherwise you get the firehose that is Facebook and we’ve already established what a poor job Facebook does as gatekeeper of information.
A larger conversation could be had about this piece and how well it holds up in time in an era of Trump, Russian meddling, “Fake News,” and other real world consequences of how information is spread and believed. I’ll admit that in 2009 I was dismissive of Andrew Keen’s sounding the alarm on the consequences of Virtual Democracy:
Keen displays a complete lack of faith not only in individuals to make right and rational decisions, but also in communities to do the same. But this also smacks of a fear from those in power in empowering those without power, an argument that has been made against Keen for a while as he has argued that there is a need for “gatekeepers” for information. When gatekeepers merely fact check this is not a problem. But if they seek to limit access to information, you deny people the right to be fully informed (or even mis-informed, such is life).
How quaint.
But what does stand the test of time from Paul Ford’s piece is the view that the fundamental question of the web is “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?” (WWIC).
Look around. Entire websites are devoted to people who feel their voice should be heard. Twitter exits because people have opinions and snark and memes to share that they feel should be entered as legitimate points within a larger debate.
Heck, I’ve been blogging on and off for nearly 18 years because no one asked for my opinion on these things.
There’s that saying about what opinions are like and everyone having one after all.
WWIC as a question is the foundation of townhall meetings that invite public discourse on community topics. Only now the Internet exists as a virtual townhall for the entire world on every topic big and small.
The good and bad of the Internet is that it presents the ability for all opinions to have a chance at equal platforms, while in reality not all opinions are necessarily equal. There is no technical difference between a tweet from an account created a week ago with two followers than one from, say, Barack Obama. Technically speaking, one has the same opportunity to germinate and blossom and be found and read as the other. And sometimes, that random tweet from an account that still has an egg as a profile picture, will blow up into something significant, even if it has no foundation in truth, and find its way into the public consciousness far quicker and deeper than the truth might later on.
Lacking some sort of editorial oversight, those “one or two smart people” or even the Gutenbourgeois, there’s little to stop bad ideas from changing our understanding of something in ways that is no longer true, but now becomes “reality” because the wisdom of the crowd wants it to be.
Keeping WWIC in mind and even appending it to a viewpoint you find online is useful because it can help put some of these random voices into a context. Is that voice shouting out because it comes from a place of informed opinion that has true value? Or is it simply looking for attention like an angry uncle on the front lawn yelling at the sky?
The caution I’d advise is against using WWIC to dismiss what is an otherwise valid yet opposing viewpoint. Just because someone wasn’t consulted doesn’t mean they can’t add value to a topic. And we should want to embrace opposing viewpoints to have a more well rounded understanding of the world. It’s just becoming more important that we strive to become our own fact checkers, because in a world of democratized information there’s no one to check it for is.
Somewhat related sidenote:Remember the fanfare when Facebook was partnering with the Associate Press and Snopes to fact check stories on the social network and help combat fake news? Yeah, those guys are out.
What were the algorithmic criteria that generated the lists of articles for us to check? We never knew, and no one ever told us.
There was a pattern to these repeat stories though: they were almost all “junk” news, not the highly corrosive stuff that should have taken priority. We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list. I could never figure it out why, but perhaps it was a feature, not a bug.
Brooke Binkowski – “I Was A Facebook Fact-Checker. It Was Like Playing A Doomed Game Of Whack-A-Mole.”
*screams internally*
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
*eyeroll*
Eyerollers are not naysayers. They’re not constantly cynical or skeptical or negative about your work. They don’t keep you down. They keep you in check. They’re editors.