06.17.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:50 pm by George Smith
I point you to a long piece in the New Yorker entitled “The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.”
It’s a point-by-point dissection of the narratives by Clayton M. Christensen. You could call him one of the biggest pushers of “disruptive innovation” in the American economy. And the New Yorker writer, Jill Lepore, informs his material, all based on stories of allegedly successful startups that engage in disruption against bigger, allegedly inferior competitors, has crept into all facets of business life.
In the hands of the Silicon Valley, it’s now trying to take over the public work of education and medicine, every service, even places where it’s profoundly unsuitable, or its immoral philosophy of blowing everything up for the sake of some small new business getting its pile, has grown toxic.
You face it virtually everywhere in American life. Disruption is the key to everything. If you can’t disrupt or deal with being disrupted, you’re just more splatter on the highway to the future. You can rule the world through your smartphone and twiddling fingers or die.
Upworthy comes in for a mention, as does another clickbait “news site,” Buzzfeed, for the way they are viewed, with fear, by the giants of real news.
It’s not encouraging:
It’s readily apparent that, in a democracy, the important business interests of institutions like the press might at times conflict with what became known as the “public interest.??? That’s why, a very long time ago, newspapers like the Times and magazines like this one established a wall of separation between the editorial side of affairs and the business side. (The metaphor is to the Jeffersonian wall between church and state.) “The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for decades,??? according to the Times’ Innovation Report, “allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers,??? as if this had been, all along, simply a matter of office efficiency. But the notion of a wall should be abandoned, according to the report, because it has “hidden costs??? that thwart innovation. Earlier this year, the Times tried to recruit, as its new head of audience development, Michael Wertheim, the former head of promotion at the disruptive media outfit Upworthy. Wertheim turned the Times job down, citing its wall as too big an obstacle to disruptive innovation. The recommendation of the Innovation Report is to understand that both sides, editorial and business, share, as their top priority, “Reader Experience,??? which can be measured, following Upworthy, in “Attention Minutes.??? Vox Media, a digital-media disrupter that is mentioned ten times in the Times report and is included, along with BuzzFeed, in a list of the Times’ strongest competitors (few of which are profitable), called the report “brilliant,??? “shockingly good,??? and an “insanely clear??? explanation of disruption, but expressed the view that there’s no way the Times will implement its recommendations, because “what the report doesn’t mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen’s research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully.???
That some of the corporate leadership at the Times would even be interested in hiring a former head of promotion from Upworthy is discouraging. It shows only that some leadership at newspapers is easily frightened by garbage, pure internet eyeball suckerbait, stuff that has no beneficial role at a publication like the NYT.
And make no mistake, as referenced last week, Upworthy is unreservedly daily dogshite, nicely wrapped and sugar-frosted for instantaneous eating, a business where its “contributors” or “curators” post viral swill. The only requirement is that it test well and come as hand-wringing 1-to-5 minute doses of mechanized sincerity delivered by smiling faces who profess to be able to change with world through their cheer, tireless effort, and the magic of Internet.
Two more numbing examples from today’s menu:
Trying To Follow What Is Going On In Syria And Why? This Comic Will Get You There In 5 Minutes.
Here’s the “contributor’s” lead: “Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, people you never heard of are killing each other on the evening news.”
The author, of course: “I love living in a purple city in a purple state (Virginia is for lovers!) because my neighbors represent a wide range of viewpoints, from libertarians to socialists, all striving to live with compassion. I want to bring that respectful tussling to the wild world of the Internet.”
When He Meets His First Child, I Cheer. When He Gets To His Second, I Almost Lose It.
The lead-in:It takes Andrew 13 minutes to tell you how many kids he has. Kudos to you if you can keep your eyes dry that whole time. And along the way, he meets a buxom necrophiliac (1:50), a doughnut dad (3:00), the love of his life, and the mother of his future childre [sic]…”
Naturally, roll the author’s changing-the-world-through-the-pitiless-optimism-of-the-web: “I’m working on big ideas and a small garden. I believe there’s plenty of planet, plenty of money, and plenty of love to go around. People are my passion, and while talk is cheap, conversation is priceless.”
Understanding Syria after five minutes and a cartoon. Crying your eyes out for the want of a copy editor to fix the word “childre” on a website that employs few, pays little, but gets millions of hits for “big ideas” and an endless click-stream of people who share, are pursuing their passion and changing the world through the wonder of social media technology and sunbeams.
On a fundamental level one understands why the lowest-common-denominator delivery of happiness and life lessons works. It impresses people who put no thought into anything but who intensely dislike complicated and often painfully depressing news.
But to think that harvesting an audience of that measure, of believing that you can carry out a valid news function catering to it, that it is disruptive and innovative and to adopt its way, is insane.
It is custom-made groupthink perfect only for the Culture of Lickspittle.
A link to the New Yorker, again, is here.
Related: MasturBaiter: The new web journalism.
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06.13.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:46 pm by George Smith
As if it isn’t big enough already, you can observe how large elements in the media and sources at the Pentagon wish to relight the American war machine, in at least two places.
The bombing theater of Iraq. And doing something about Russia’s slow re-annexation of the Ukraine.
Today, at TIME (no link):
The U.S. confirmed Friday that Russia sent tanks and military equipment to separatist fighters in Ukraine.
The delivery of military equipment threatens to further escalate tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Ukraine’s Western allies …
Someone at the State Department told the magazine, “We are highly concerned.”
At which point two things should occur to you. First: What you mean by we?
And, second, the State Department has been nothing more than a toady (or appendix) of the national security machine since the Vietnam War.
Getting involved in anything on the old battlefields of The Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet Union is an idea magnitudes worse than the epic fraud and disaster that was the invasion of Iraq.
But Americans don’t know this. Most of us probably think Uncle Sam actually beat the Wehrmacht and so, forever, the world owes us a big thank you.
The Soviet Army destroyed the majority of Nazi Germany’s war machine. Without the meat grinder of the Eastern Front, the Second World War might have been very different for Americans on the landing beaches of North Africa, France and Italy.
Russians have very strong feelings about the Patriotic War.
Want to relight a big war? One where you could be badly hurt here? One where drones and bombing the paupers won’t be jolly good and risk-free?
Go, go ahead, trying antagonizing Russians by picking a fight on what they consider to still be their bloody patriotic battlefields.
And what else can you say about Iraq? Nothing, that’s what. We should have the good grace to admit we pulverized the place for no damn good reason and the result is not surprising.
Again, because, some famous last words from 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …???
Heat-packin’ humanitarians, aren’t we all?
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06.12.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 11:52 am by George Smith
From a long time ago.
On the unfolding disaster, extract from the NYT today:
Iraq’s fracturing deepened on Thursday as Kurdish forces poured into the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled, while emboldened Sunni militants who seized two other important northern cities this week moved closer to Baghdad and issued threats about advancing into the heavily Shiite south and destroying the shrines there, the holiest in Shiism …
Militants aligned with the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria swept across the porous border from Syria on Tuesday to overrun Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. They have been driving toward the capital since then, capturing the town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, seizing parts of the oil refinery city of Baiji and threatening Samarra, a city sacred to Shiites just 70 miles north of Baghdad.
I have nothing to say except we did this.
Now unintentionally hilarious and black quote from Salon writer Wagner James Au, at Salon, in 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …”
And in honor, you can again download and listen to Iraq N Roll by Uncle Sam & the JDAMs. Here.
The old recommended donation, not obligatory, was three dollars and fifty cents.
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06.07.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:58 pm by George Smith
In the web environment made by Google and corporate America, clickbait reigns supreme. Working example, above, on the Yahoo news page, about 50 percent of which on any given day constitutes virtually fake news and useless career and lifestyle advice columns written by people, all of whom have smiling thumbnail photos in which they look almost exactly alike.
Has Russia banned the US from the International Space Station, tantamount to almost an act of war? No. But that’s the point of the weasel-worded headline, to get you to think so.
The link takes you to stock-picking advice column by Rich Smith who begins: Oh, no. Russia is mad at us again.
His bio is here but you don’t have to read it to know he’s a jerk off.
This week the Los Angeles Times held its yearly awards dinner. A friend of mine won one for copy editing. It’s a big deal.
Copy-editing and integrity still mean something, most of the time, at big newspapers. Someone caught writing a clickbait piece like the above would stand a good chance of being pulled off their beat and their career blighted in, at least, the short term.
And a copy editor would suffer for putting such a title on a piece, or waving it through.
But web news jerk-offs are now way more than a dime a dozen. It’s the economic model everyone is convinced is gold.
Let’s have a look at Upworthy today, to see what’s brewing at the pinnacle of click masturbaiting:
Haven’t Classic Children’s Stories Always Been About More Than What They’re About?
The author: “I’m a father, writer, and singer/songwriter (see label for actual order). I get it: Time is precious, every life is precious, this little blue marble is precious. We all want the same things, really. But, um, how do we do that? Let’s see if the Internet knows…”
A Pixelated Nietzsche Warns Us About The Danger Of Looking To Science For All The Answers
The author: “I was born in the hometown of Elvis and raised in the land of Mark Twain. I care about America, fairness, human beings, manners, and everyone’s right to be weird.”
This Illustration Of How Many Soldiers Died On D-Day Is Like A Kick To The Gut
The author: “By day I’m a transformative photographer and art therapist. At night, I sleuth the web for outrageously important stuff. I want you to be happier, smarter, healthier, and more generous.”
Oh Snap! The Government Just Got Put On Notice … By An 8th-Grader
The author: “I’m a poet and activist using my Internet unicorn powers for the greater good. I push myself and others to make a positive impact on their local and global communities. I believe the web is the one true equalizer in the world …”
If you look at all the writer bios on Upworthy, they have a common and numbing theme. Everyone is using all their power on the internet to make you, the nation and the world better and happier. They appear as little more than mannequins with smiley faces.
There’s another good way to characterize them: One note sincerity trolls.
“We see Upworthy as confirmation that the potential to have a broadly well-informed public still exists,??? Eli Pariser told New York Magazine back in March. You could have fooled me because I’ve never seen that potential.
The article goes on to explain Upworthy’s delivery is purposely like advertising, advertising specifically aimed at getting shares on social media, particularly Facebook. Pariser tells the interviewer he once worked for a college literary magazine, a model he then wished to avoid.
“Contributors,” or the writers aren’t just that. They’re also “curators” at Upworthy.
Curators of what? The best 3-second-to-minute-readable clickbait in hand-wringing sincerity, uplift and lessons for the day.
Moving along, we have Medium, the blogging platform started by the guy who made Twitter. Who then professed to have found that 140-character blurts don’t really constitute much in the way of information and journalism.
Roll it:
Holy shit, dude! How I accidentally lost 50 pounds in 8 months
The author: “Designer. Maker of things. Total weirdo. Husband to wife. Friend to startups. Avid fan: scary movies, loud music, lists.”
On Gradually Rebuilding My iTunes Library…
I wish I had an intern…
The author: “Bostonian/Independent A&R/Blogger/Writer @ Poisonous Paragraphs/Bastard Swordsman/Producers I Know/HipHop Wired/The Urban Daily/Killer Boombox & NPR”
“Somtimes i feel that Medium is like taking a sh*t???
Which is great value
The author: “UI/UX Designer.”
Listening to Russia’s State Media, It’s Hard to Tell Fact From Fiction
The Kremlin’s government-media complex spins the Ukraine crisis
Delivered without a hint of national self-recognition, one might add.
Two Weeks Ago, I Almost Died in the Deadliest Plane Crash Ever
The author: “Pittsburgher San Franciscan. Economic consultant and writer. Loves politics, economics, comedy, poetry, and Stanford football.”
Today I’m Going to Predict Your Future
Five important things that will happen to you before your 20-year college reunion
The author: “Head of @WebbmediaGroup, an emerging tech ideas + strategy agency.”
Finally, we turn to Henry Blodget, the CEO of Business Insider, a former stock-pumping fraud criminal, who re-invented himself as one of the web’s top MasturBaiters.
In a recent interview:
Henry Blodget is infamous for hyping dot-com stocks before the crash. Now he has one of his own Henry Blodget is enjoying an impressive second act. Eleven years ago, his career as a high-profile Wall Street analyst imploded with the collapse of the dot-com bubble, when he was accused of promoting stocks publicly and disparaging them privately. He was banned for life from the investment industry … Business Insider is loud and brash – a “scrappy upstart,??? as Mr. Blodget puts it, aimed at a young audience – with headlines that scream and content that roams well beyond a core business readership. It now claims more U.S. readers than The Wall Street Journal.
There are quite a few mainstream-media journalists gravitating toward start-ups, such as FiveThirtyEight and Vox. Is this a new era for journalism–and where is it headed?
Blodget: We are in a golden age for journalism. The digital medium is by far the richest, most flexible and most powerful medium ever developed, and it is creating amazing opportunities for entrepreneurs and journalists who embrace it.
Is the comparison to the Wall Street Journal valid? No.
Blodget claims the “editorial budget” of Business Insider is 10 million dollars. It employs 50 people as editorial staff.
The Wall Street Journal employs about 2,000 people worldwide, has 85 news bureaus and 26 printing plants, including one in southern California. It’s the country’s largest newspaper with a circulation of over 2 million, not including its website.
The newspaper is valued at around 5 billion dollars and has won over 30 Pulitzers. Business Insider and Henry Blodget will never win a Pulitzer.
If the web metric that Business Insider reaches more people than the Wall Street Journal is accurate, this only illustrates that the former is indeed, largely, just a mass of clickbait.
Being part of a story on Business Insider is virtually meaningless compared to the WSJ. Chances are high, too, it’s merely recycled and chopped content from somewhere else.
Jeff Bezos is a big fan and bank-roller of Henry Blodget, mostly for reasons having to do with the latter having hyped Amazon stock early on.
After Bezos bought the Washington Post, he sent Blodget to the paper to tutor its journalists in the ways of web news success. It would have been entertaining to see the rolling eyes, to hear the water-cooler talk after Blodget was no longer in earshot.
“We’re doomed,” somebody probably said.
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06.06.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 4:29 pm by George Smith
The still life of a thicket of Colt 45s grows more lush. At the very end, the hand makes an appearance.
The glitzy version, full rock band with swiped GE commercial, was made about three years ago.
Since then, not so amazingly, nothing has changed.
And Tapatio sells more at my neighborhood market than Sriracha (1) so it makes an appearance. The packets come in bags of potato chips from Mexico, not at all a bad idea.
As an existential question that falls naturally from the music: What is one to do when you’ve been locked out of everything you are able to do in American life?
Since it’s now a condition that affects millions, it’s of some importance.
My answer is that in choosing not to answer it, the country will be an historic and unique example of a corporate fascist state characterized of crushing poverty and small enclaves of well-being where the wealthy and their high-button servants live, sub-nations where the people are protected by the security infrastructure and the general national character of servile obedience to wealth.
Fed by workers who bring them their meals through TaskRabbit, they will be continually delighted by consumer electronics from Apple, always enhanced by apps which allow them to use simple finger motions to summon the help.
1. Town burghers decided they did not want to continue bad relations with the company, anyway. Two weeks after the national news fight, everyone made nice.
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06.04.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 12:18 pm by George Smith
Postcard from Tarrant County, TX, where the freedom farms of WhiteManistan are the most fertile and lush of all. Sadly, this cannot be seen here in LA County because we’re shackled in the chains of government tyranny. You can’t satirize or publicly shame us. The roots of the tree of democrazy and gun-demental rights are refreshed, watered and strengthened by those things. Molon labe!
And if you’ve been along for the ride, you know the blog did a short rock opera on it.
Always under-appreciated but ahead of the curve.
And earlier.
They also have absolutely the worst taste in looks.
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05.31.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:44 pm by George Smith
Apple, with regard to music (now almost everything, actually) is similar to a disease for which finding the cure is fiendishly difficult. It’s tech malaria, with the efficiency and presence of the common cold thrown in. (Amazon fits the bill, too, but I’ve already spent a lot of time on the Empire of Bezos.)
The pic above is Apple’s Eddie Cue, the architect of the company’s recent deal to acquire Beats, the streamed music and half-assed tech company of which Dre, record mogul Jimmy Iovine and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, are equity partners.
This is what Cue had to say, as reprinted from RockNYCLiveand Recorded:
“Music is dying???, says Apple executive Eddie Cue, the man responsible for the Apple buy out of Dre and Iovine’s beats …
It is hard to know where to begin with this stuff but let’s start by saying OK, music is dying, how the hell does Apple buying Beats change anything at all?
Eddie Cue is being silly. If he means that the music business is dying, well, welcome to 2002, now fuck off.
Cue’s worth the derision. And read the whole thing, The Apple/Beats Deal For Dummies,” here. It’s short but effectively captures the nut of it.
Apple felt the need for a streaming music service because those services, the most famous of which is Spotify, are cutting into iTunes’ lunch. Streaming music, as opposed to downloading files of it, left Apple out of the mix.
In terms of being good for music or artists, neither are. People get paid less and less, unto virtually nothing, courtesy of the technology. Only those who own the services make the piles.
However, in paying $3 billion dollars to get a really-not-that-good music streaming company that started as a maker of unremarkable name-branded headphones, you have a really good example of how gargantuan piles of money are made in the Culture of Lickspittle.
Our world, any part of it, music or otherwise, hardly required Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and will.i.am to be turned into tech billionaires for little more than being there.
It’s a working example of the central thesis of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, the one that says a big pile of money trumps everything, even world growth, because our social economic structure just makes big piles of cash bigger faster than everything else by dint of their nature as big piles.
So you can think you want about the latest scam as some kind of new tech coup of wonderfulness and disruption but if Iovine, Dre and company are the faces of innovation, I’m Ernest Hemingway.
An interview at Fortune with will.i.am underscores how nothing instantly becomes worth a billion dollars. The only thing necessary is to just be on the receiving end as the river of money goes sloshing by from A to B.
In the process people are seen to turn from human beings with good qualities, the making of music that has made millions happy, into model plutocrats. Someone already very wealthy is given another king’s ransom for, essentially, zip, a null that has only the most trivial social potential for good.
In one effortless step they’re catapulted into the realm of compensation of the maligned American corporate CEO, you know, the class that’s now the constant symbol of advancing inequality.
At Fortune, will.i.am is interviewed and extolled, for vesting into the billionaires club for just being himself. This is described as “tireless promotion.”
The quotes are fatuous. It’s remarkable anyone even sat still for them.
“This is the craziest rollercoaster I’ve ever been on,” will.i.am tells the interviewer of the couple of weeks it took to make the Apple/Beats deal.
In 2003, will.i.am tells the journalist he saw camera phones in the audience: “[And] I tell Jimmy, ‘We need to make hardware. The world has changed. Hardware, hardware, hardware, hardware.’ ”
So what’s world-changing hardware, hardware, hardware?
A headphone. That he didn’t make. Never mind the only reason the transaction occurred is because of Beats transition into a digital music service from one that sold unspectacular but high-priced headphones and speakers.
“It’s not just good for the company, it’s good for the culture,” continues will.i.am.
“You have to look at it like, How is it good for kids in inner cities first? How do kids in inner cities not only dream about being athletes and musicians, but now, entrepreneurs, and bringers of new, disruptive, cool, lifestyle products.”
I think we can be certain, new disruptive lifestyle products will not and do not solve impoverishment and zero opportunity in America.
It was Steve Jobs genius, well after Apple was virtually destroyed in the PC and corporate network business by Microsoft, to remake iStuff as “lifestyle products.”
And such lifestyle products they were and are, priced well more than what they’re worth, but which people have to own because they are the electronic convenience baubles of our age.
iStuff has certainly not increased opportunity or empowered everyone to be their own entrepreneur. Polls show, although hardly ever well-publicized, that the majority don’t even want to be “entrepreneurs.”
Live in the distressed section of Pasadena, like me, and everyone owns smartphones, many of them Apple “lifestyle products.” They act as sole connections to the global networks, one of the major conduits of entertainments, and the only phone service.
Although often hyped as modern Philosopher’s Stones, capable of transmuting your leaden life into gold, they are not. Ownership doesn’t make you a small businessman, a self-made man or woman, a maker of new and upcoming “products.”
What, the Fortune interviewer asks, did Jimmy Iovine “want [will.i.am] available for?”
Answer: “I still don’t know, to this day.”
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05.28.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 12:08 pm by George Smith
Because there’s no such thing as excess in the Free Republic of Douchebags. And they’ve been busy the last few days. (Yes, yes, click that link.)
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:47 am by George Smith
“What still doesn’t exist in the marketplace is a fantastic end-to-end user experience!”
“When we started working on this project we gave ourselves this provocation: What if you could send a 3D print to someone as easy as sending a text message?”
“We want to make this as easy as downloading an app to your phone. Having a curated library is important because everything on there [thousands of plans and renderings for plastic knick-knacks] is gonna be good!”
“You can add shapes to it. You can adorn it with your initials.”
I could go on. Near the end, encapsulated: Create meaningful relationships with plastic objects.
Count on people to throw half-a-million or more their way.
Gaily colored plastic things for setting on coffee tables, for the people who ride the Google bus, or whoever pass for them near you.
Last week, it was candy, cookies and pancakes.
Making abundant nothings for those who already have abundance.
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05.27.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:56 pm by George Smith
From Krugman, yesterday:
Our political discourse is dominated by reverse Robin-Hoodism — the belief that economic success depends on being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed, and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have no alternative. And according to this ideology, Europe — with its high taxes and generous welfare states — does everything wrong …
[But] Europe started doing much better, while America started doing much worse. France’s prime-age employment rate overtook America’s early in the Bush administration; at this point the gap in employment rates is bigger than it was in the late 1990s, this time in France’s favor. Other European nations with big welfare states, like Sweden and the Netherlands, do even better.
Krugman links to Portuguese economist Antonio Fatas, who in a blog post, shows how the labor market in the US is very poor for prime age works, in stark contrast to Europe and many other countries.
Fatas concludes: “In fact, with the exception of Portugal, Greece and Ireland, the US is the country with the worst labor market record for this age group if we compare the 2012 to the 2000 figures.”
Read it. Shown in charts, during the the past decade, the US has become the best at being almost the worst.
The ol’ American exceptionalism, again.
In honor of this, I whipped up the busking version of Rich Man’s Burden today.
Sing along for the sorrows of the Koch brothers, all the wealthy now feeling so persecuted. Drown the misery with some Colts.
And feel free (but not at all obligated) to toss a couple coins in the virtual guitar case, a half-six worth maybe.
Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters.
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