Jared was his colleague with whom he DM'd on Twitter, but Jared then sent an anonymous (later easily discovered) comment about Keys' firing to the media.
Then they had a fight. (BTW, Keller's repeated reference to the line in the Godfather, "This is the business we have chosen," is awfully creepy.) I'm curious what group they were in. Is this Journo-List? Is this Paul Carr's NSF? What is it exactly? Anyone?
Keys then waited for weeks -- for reasons that aren't clear -- stewing in his spite and then exposed Cullen as the culprit for the leaked remark AND exposed his own disgruntled comments about his employer.
Needless to say, Bloomberg let him go the next day -- or he quit before he was fired?
Reuters should have done the same thing when they first discovered that Keys had decided to be defiant about his indictment, and not acknowledge the journalistic ethics involved.
Keys was said to be fired for violating Reuters ethics requirements -- but you have to wonder why he wasn't fired then on day one after his indictment not because he's "innocent until proven guilty" and his employer could in theory stand behind him, but because he simply failed to acknowledge that *yes*, there were ethical considerations involved in disguising his identity, hanging out in the IRC channel with the Anonymous hackers as they plotted hacks, and then not telling the authorities about this -- and even appearing to join in one "prank" against his own former employer -- and gloat about it.
Keys has never said "those acts were wrong" but instead has said "I didn't do it" -- and we're all waiting to see what rabbit he's going to pull out of which hat to make this lame claim -- likely it will be along the lines of "I wuz hacked" or perhaps even "I was depressed and taking medications". The font of hacker excuses is bottomless.
Do they teach ethics at Columbia School of Journalism any more?!
My comment on their website:
Does the Columbia School of Journalism still teach journalism ethics?
The Trust Principles are basic ethics like not misrepresenting yourself
to get a story, and that's what Keys acknowledges he did in the IRC
channel with Anonymous. Although he learned of crimes being planned and
executed and is even shown to participate in hacks of media outlets, he
didn't report the crimes to authorities and seemed to make himself part
of the story. He both admits he was the person in the account leading to
him and then implies his legal defense will somehow prove it wasn't
really him, that he was "hacked".
Then you have the obvious discrepancies in Keys' account of the
Boston police scanner story; elsewhere, he says he would have complied
and stop tweeting had he known authorities had made this request, but
got the notice hours after it was made -- but then complied with it.
Here, he implies you don't have to comply if you're a fabulous social
media editor.
Then, if you criticize Matthew Keys legitimately for his questionable
lack of morals, his defiant bragging of breaching journalistic ethics,
white-washing of Anonymous, he heckles you, as he has been doing to me:
Keys wasn't fired for tweeting a police scanner report that multiple
other journalists and bloggers tweeted, myself included, but because he
had already built up a record of nasty defiance of management and of
rules by then.
One shouldn't require "training" in basic principles that should be
part of your character before you are hired. When we see the gushing
treatment Keys gets in this piece, we can see where the problems are
rooted -- in journalism schools that in the rush to be part of the fad
of social media seem to have discarded their long-established
foundations for credibility.
***
I want to note again that I tweeted the exact same Boston police scanner information that Matthew did. THAT I don't see anything wrong with -- and not merely because I did it -- if these scanners are open to the public (and I'm not sure they should be, or least, not for every operation), then they have to be reported.
If they locked down the city of Boston while they were trying to capture this suspect in the bombings, why didn't they also cite public safety and block their scanners? Isn't that possible? Because it does affect their ability to capture someone if he has helpers listening to the scanner (it's not about him listening himself).
There's also the issue of Matthews changing his story -- which is definitely the case, as first he said on his open Facebook he didn't see the warning the BPD made to the public to stop tweeting the scanner, and claimed he would have heeded it if he had seen it in time -- and *did* hours later:
C) When people became upset, I said on Twitter I hadn't seen the CBS News report that everyone was sourcing in which the Boston Police supposedly asked people not to publish scanner traffic. With a focus on four different video streams, several Twitter lists and, yes, dispatch audio, it slipped by me. But once I became aware of it, I stopped. In fact -- having been awake well over 24 hours, with 10 of them covering the overnight event -- I closed the computer and went to bed.
But now for the CJR interview, he's doubling down and saying that it's okay to tweet it anyway:
As far as I’m aware, there was no request by law enforcement on social
media and no request by law enforcement by way of a press release or
media statement asking for people on Twitter to not tweet emergency
scanner traffic.
He's since deleted his tweets from the scanner.
When you see how Matthew contorts himself and gives two difference versions of his behaviour and beliefs about what is right on the Boston police scanner incident, you can see how untrustworthy he is on the Anonymous issue (where his story has also...morphed).
Cory Booker is insufferable -- I really don't care for him. He's a populist blowhard, always distracting from the hard questions with feel-goods. Right now he's using Twitter to fund-raise to run for the Senate. He's endlessly "leveraging" social media where he has gadzillion followers, many of them gushing fanboyz and fangirlz, and it always feels like a concoction.
He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat,
so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He
balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to
what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many
consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called
the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow
vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.
Honestly, Cory! Being mayor of Newark, NJ is hard enough -- you should just concentrate on that and do that right rather than exploit this poor town and its problems as a springboard to more power in the Senate!
In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state
have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard
revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the "Facebook money," as
it's called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish
several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at
moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted
community survey that had to be re-worked
by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a
foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent
included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. ("Yes, it's their money.
But it's Newark's kids," an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)
Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg's money went to pay for a new teacher's contract,
the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are
deemed as "highly effective." The contract offers up to $12,500 in
bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It's the
first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy
that's been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC,
the plan was so controversial that it might have cost
Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. "I think it helped—I know it helped—to be
on our side of the table and have deeper pockets," one school district
official said about the Newark negotiations.
Somehow, I'm not surprised that the teachers' unions got their hands on this to pay themselves more.
Hey, Booker may plan a run at the presidency some day so the stakes are higher -- who knows, perhaps he is the One Obama might annoint, as we know there will be *somebody* he will annoint and give the word to for Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for Action, that has all the coveted -- and locked-up -- data bases of drilled social media data that helped Obama win the elections, and will be turned over to his choice in 2016.
So....I was a bit surprised to see Bruce Sterling mention this -- and I don't know whether it was with a bit of archness because what amounts to the Alec Ross or Anne Marie Slaughter wing of the party is still likely to the right of him, where he's located, which is far more to the technocommunist extreme. I figured Bruce Sterling roots for the hackers, and therefore inevitably does Google's business.
But perhaps Google isn't close enough to its hacker roots for Bruce anymore, I don't know. His account is on private, so you can't tell. Rayne, an Empty Wheel blogger is one of the lucky ones (along with some 25,000 verified special persons) allowed to see his closed account, which is how he focused on this -- and seems to take a further response from Sterling (which we can't see) as meaning he still doesn't "get it" -- about oh, that evil Democratic Leadership Committee which "coopted" the party (even though Rayne himself seems to be fighting to interpret Booker on his side).
But keep that barf-bag handy, because here's what Rayne thinks Magical Cory produces for the People:
What both NYT missed, besides categorizing Booker as belonging to the “Googly-Facebook” portion of the Democratic Party:
— Booker’s efforts with regard to his one-on-one interactions with
constituents do not compare with a considerable portion of the party to
which he belongs;
— His actions are highly transparent, his words sync with his deeds right there in the public forum of Twitter;
— Booker uses “big data” to make and justify decisions; “big data” is
merely a contemporary expression of polling data used in the near-term
past and present.
Rayne seems unburdened by the need to prove any of these claims.
My comment on Empty Wheel (before Mother Jones!)
The extraordinary efforts put in to denying Sterling’s apt comment
about Booker and then Lanier’s valid critique let us know just how deep
the sickness is.
I marvel how you could get through this entire piece and never
mention Mark Zuckerberg’s huge gift of $100 million to the Newark
schools — a gift that Cory Booker no doubt benefits from in reputational
enhancement value and in having pots of money to manage as he wishes,
if not personally. Booker is essentially a fake, in my view. He uses the
“community managing” populist technique of appearing to be “down with
the people” on Twitter, but it’s highly selective. He does star turn
after star turn engineered for its retweet value, shovelling snow,
running into burning buildings, living on food stamps. But the big
picture issues he ducks.
Time and again I’ve asked him how that $100 million is doing, and if
we can get some serious report on the abysmal schools in Newark, and
whether any improvement is actually coming out of throwing all that cash
at them, and I never, ever get an answer. I ask whether it was in
Facebook stock and whether that is now devalued and there isn’t any $100
million and I never, ever get any answer. And he never talks about this
subject at all. As you don’t. Why? Of course he’s Googly and Facebooky —
I’d be Facebooky too, if I had $100 million to play with on the schools
from FB.
Then there’s the remarkable — eye-popping, really — refusal to here
to criticize Harper Reed and company and the huge, awful Obama data grab
that went on — which is now all locked up in a private nonprofit with
big spenders that is not the public political party that ran the
candidate, and is not available to that party — the DNC. That’s wrong.
That’s unethical. That’s been questioned by many including the Sunlight
Foundation.
And to think that elections aren’t decided by big data and its
drilling! Come now, we’re not children. The entire gambit with the 47%
is exactly an example of how social media (Youtube and Twitter) were
galvanized and manipulated to turn public opinion into a seething frenzy
of hate. In fact, there wasn’t factually anything untrue about the
statement Romney made, as louche as it was. In fact, the bartender who
taped him didn’t even focus on that remark, but thought the bigger
scandal was moving the factory to China. In fact, David Corn and other
“progressive” journalist operatives made hay with this often by not
really quoting the original statement accurately — Romney didn’t say
people were welfare mooches, he just said they were dependent. The
entire story then became a “story” pushed relentlessly through all the
social networks, emails, DMs on Tweets, etc. etc. It’s *that* use of
weaponized social media that is troublesome.
I've never gotten an answer about the Zuckerberg $100 million when I directly asked Mr. Transparency, and never heard from anyone. I figured it probably got pissed away buying computers, gadgets, ed-tech consultants, etc. etc. and probably had little or no effect. Now we're learning finally from the ACLU's probe and Mother Jones that it went to paying teachers' bonuses -- without sufficient community input to determine how effective that is.
The comments at Empty Wheel are filled with critiques of Booker, in fact, accusing him of corruption because he has "privatized" schools (i.e. gone with school vouchers) or he has ties with "private equity" which they find "evil," of course, being socialists. I don't know the facts here, but for me, Booker is largely a fraud -- there's nothing about him that's "transparent" just because he's tweeting inanities on Twitter, if he doesn't answer about the big questions -- and frankly, that $100 million is one of them (not to mention questions about how well the entire school system is doing, given the controversies over vouchers and such).
Now I can see more clearly the issues around Booker -- the leftist anti-corporate socialist wing of the Democratic Party doesn't like him and they will try to sink him around the $100 million and other issues. I questioned the same thing, but from the liberal center, where the more Googley-Facebooky Democrats are still to the left but not as left as Empty Wheel -- they are Hillaryland, not Obamaland, but I don't want them to become worse than they are. It's a terrible thing when your support of free enterprise in the Democratic Party has to hinge on these sorts.
Regardless of the outcome of the trial of Matthew Keys, the Reuters deputy editor for social media, the ethical issues will remain for "new journalism" with social media as a heavily politicized and manipulated tool.
Matthew Keys is heckling me now right on the pages of the once-defaced Los Angels Times about my legitimate blog posts questioning his innocence here, here and here. Speaking of journalistic ethics, it's okay for me to post that I don't buy his alibi, and it's okay for him to heckle, I suppose, although I think most employers would tell their employees not to heckle the customers. News is a business. That's okay, too. When it's a business, it has certain quality-control issues and standards to maintain that blogs are not burdened with.
WHY DO SOCIAL MEDIA WRANGLERS GET CALLED 'JOURNALISTS'?
And that's fine in an open society -- or should be, unless, of course, journalists of the new format intimidate bloggers who criticize them. Not for the first time. My challenges to Anthony de Rosa, Matthew Keys' boss (above) regarding his portrayal of the Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, led him to block me on Facebook -- which is a creepy function of Facebook that I find has a horrible effect on the "town hall" claims of these private platforms. But in my view, if Reuters is to be ethical, the public feed of Anthony de Rosa -- as a public figure, performing a public function casting the news from his "progressive" perspective for Reuters, really like a columnist -- should not be blocked from the literal view of members of the public who don't agree with them and have expressed dissent against the very process they are slyly engaging in. I don't buy the "in my living room" logic that these sly dogs invoke to keep the mindshare tilted their way.
It would be one thing if the owner of such a feed blocked *from commenting* someone he didn't like, who rained on his vanity parade. That would be irresponsible and also worthy of a call-out, but it would be something that the Facebook "social" notions would support -- Facebook is supposed to be for "friends" -- and only friends who "like" things (and that's why social-activist news corps love them). Friends who don't like things are unfriended. That's its devious premise, of course, which makes it unfit for political work -- or actually, very fit, for those who are adept at manipulating the public, as the Obama team has done in the last elections. But it's another thing when they block you as a person totally on Facebook, removing their *public* feed completely from view. That's really wrong -- but of course, the platform, also bent on social "progress", lets them do that.
I note that Twitter doesn't admit that kind of vanity manipulation of public figures. When Anthony de Rosa or Matthew Keys or other thin-skinned media geeks block me there, I can still look them up in search and read what they say, or use Google or Topsy.
Not so Facebook -- or I might add G+ -- which turn me and my statements into non-persons -- and makes those people who blocked me invisible to me as if they were non-persons, too -- an innovation on the old Stalinist airbrush trick -- so that we can all be cushioned in the cocoon of our same political beliefs with other "likers". Note that Anthony blocked me not for some kind of "TOS violation" -- there wasn't anything rude, hateful, racist, etc. There was just critical speech. But that's too much for them.
IS SOCIAL MEDIA WORK 'ANALYSIS' OR 'OPINION' OR POLITICAL PROPAGANDA?
The entire role of the social media manipulator that these news companies hire is to be questioned, which is the focus I took in first discussing the indictment of Matthew Keys. This post may be what he believes to be a "conspiracy" theory but it certainly isn't -- I've observed time and again how the person playing the social media maven at either nonprofits or news organizations or corporations (Andy Carver at NPR, Lara Kolodny at Fast Company and Alec Ross while at the State Department instantly come to mind) is used for political organizing. It's used to push one perspective -- the "progressive" line. It's not for the sake of real engagement as in "dialogue with the public" or "debate," but a way of purveying a line and getting massive cheers for it from a manipulated public -- or in some cases, an activist public that needs no manipulation as it is already subject to the propaganda flow of various cadre organizations like Moveon or Daily Kos.
I really think the people in these roles step out of all kinds of professional and ethical bounds as they perform them -- they should have a box around them labelled COLUMNIST -- but are forgiven for this under the guise of "innovation" and the ecstasy of "the new". And I constantly see it in operation. Matthew Keys describes himself as "breaking news," and believes he even provides professional tips about how to "break news" (i.e. this gem -- look up key words to find amateur videos on Youtube!). But the feed is always selective, beyond the very top stories that no news organization can afford to pass. It's always delivered with the snark on certain hate targets on the right, and with amplification of the left's own beloved story. It's worse than the liberal establishment media, however, precisely because it purports to be "of the people" and "authentic" and engaging -- yet blocks and mutes and ignores those that dissent from the left-of-center perspective. There's no letters section for the social media editor, you know? No op-ed column where you get to dispute his "authentic stream".
UNDERCOVER JOURNALISM OR UNDERHANDED ALIBI?
But of course, the ethical problems with Keys go far beyond the Twitter newscaster function, into consorting with a thuggish anarchist hacker collective, Anonymous, and pretending now that this was just news-gathering.
First of all, the question I had about this alibi was: which news organization gave the assignment to cover Anonymous? These events came before Matthew worked at Reuters, but certainly Fox TV didn't give him the assignment. He tells us on his Tumblr blog that in fact he did this in his capacity as a "freelancer". Some news corporations have strict rules about what their employees can do as freelancers, some don't; it's not clear if in fact Matthew was on a 1099 type contract relationship even when he did his social media chores for the Fox affiliate so that they may not have bound him with a clause that he couldn't write for other publications -- and they may not have even had a social media policy that would have provided some check on him as he went and cavorted in the IRC channels with Anonymous.
The sketchy freelance status of his original coverage of Anonymous as an "undercover journalist" is covered up by his later posting on the Reuters news site (while employed for Reuters) of a retrospective article about Anonymous featuring Sabu and his cooptation. Obviously, Reuters editors at that time didn't have any qualms about the nature of this piece, or that it was obtained by "undercover journalism" of the sort they should have had more questions about.
WITH ANONYMOUS, IN THE IRC CHANNEL
Second, I question the ethical implication of hanging with criminals for so long. By Matthews' own admission, he spent two months or more in the Anonymous interfeds IRC chat room -- an invitation-only chatroom that you would get to first by friending up the b/tards in other more open settings -- this is how their very rigid, hierarchical cadre organization in fact is structured. It is anything but the looseknit network over-eager liberal journalists -- and their lying propagandist sources in Anonymous -- always portray them to be.
During that time, he heard about operations even involving the theft of credit cards from people. Shouldn't he have reported that to the authorities? He didn't. If anything, in his statement on his own blog about this, he even amended what was apparently a typo in an early blog post to make it absolutely clear that he did not go to the authorities with what he heard in these chatrooms -- an act he took so that no one would start calling him a snitch, as they do Adrian Lamo, for reporting Bradley Manning's activities, or Sabu, a LulzSec operative who was turned by the FBI to cooperate with them -- and who may even now be the source for the indictment against Keys -- and maybe motivated to set him up or trash him after the fact, as we obviously realize.
Two months of pretending to be with the goons -- and then oops, telling us all it was "undercover journalism". Leave aside what this tells us about movement solidarity on the left. It's an ethical problem for journalists that since the Food Lion case really, really needs to be questioned. Since when do you get to hear about crimes and do nothing just to hang with the cool kids and burnish your story as...a freelancer? While working for Fox which you hate? Which is then later hacked?
06:31 PM on 03/20/2013 Really? So when Keys' changed Fox40's twitter handle to SacNewsWire and locked the rest of the station out of it as well as their Facebook page, he was acting as an "undercover journalist" too? Sorry, but I saw his behavior online right after he was fired and still have the emails (and screenshot of the Fox40/SacNewsWire stunt) between myself and a different Fox40 employee discussing his antics online.
Keys should be ashamed of himself for hiding behind the title of journalist and own up to what he did. Otherwise he is just cheapening the profession that right now isn't doing so well. Part of growing up is learning to admit when you screwed up and to make amends for it.
Presumably he knows what the feds know, given the confidence they feel in bringing their case -- that Matthew Keys -- or his account that he's now later after the fact going to tell us "wuz hacked" -- was involved in these email exchanges involved in stealing email addresses, including some of government contacts that this TV station had in their files.
They read the Gawker piece, then contacted Keys directly, and got this damning statement from him:
"I chose to allow myself to be credited as the source of a piece of information in the Gawker article only to lend credibility to their story, but did so fully understanding the risks," he told me in an email.
As for that downside, he says, "During my two month engagement with their group, I witnessed a lot of what Anonymous can do, from harvesting emails of Amazon.com employees to gaining access to jailbroken iPhones to stealing credit card numbers ... From what I've heard, Anonymous hackers have already gained access to my address and phone number."
So what was the risk he thought he took -- firing or arrest? And...two months!
Here's what one of the anonymous commenters has to say under the handle Jerm Deeks:
Jerm Deeks a year ago Also, what's going to happen to the people who turned these chats over to the authorities? If these people in the logs are guilty of what Anonymous has taken credit for, aren't they just as guilty? Not for the things that happened after they left, but everything before? That chatroom was by invite-only, meaning post-HBGary hack, they were still members of the Anonymous "leadership", will they get hit with criminal charges as well? After all, they didn't say they left because the group started committing criminal acts, they left because the group was using kids and other complaints.
Paging Ashera Research for comment...
WHAT WILL KEYS' ALIBI BE?
Matthew Keys denial is categorical -- he says he did not give an account name and password (Parmy Olsen also says he made that statement to her back when she questioned him while writing her book about Anonymous -- but she then didn't use this material and reported on it later on Forces). I have to wonder if this is going to turn out to be word salad -- what he will actually mean is that he gave an account name and password that he was convinced was deactivated after his departure, or even had proof was deactivated, and was then surprised later to discover wasn't. That would be my guess about how this cunning little maneuver will play out. Or he will simply say he was hacked, and who knows, gosh, those IP addresses are so dynamic and variable you just never know....
Keys may even brazenly say that he gave the authentic log on credentials knowing that all they'd do is a minor defacement that took 30 minutes to correct, merely to establish his bona fides in his "undercover journalism" caper. Hmmm. Well, that may be just like, um, helpfully "checking" AT&T's security for them with the i-Pads, and the judge and jury just may not buy it.
And even if Matthew Keys wriggles out of this case, or gets some kind of suspended sentence for something minor, I'll hardly be convinced. Not merely because he seems to have been an online thug for years before that, but because he's crossing the street to harass me merely for expressing my opinion that he's guilty -- and doesn't have a case, because no undercover job merits this amount of consorting with criminals, and the consorting was not necessary to cover the story anyway.
I'm not alone in my concerns about Matthew Keys --even Huffington Post in its headline about "rogue employees" implies Matthew Keys was one when he seemingly turned against his employer. Sure, they put in the word "allegedly," but the headline lets us know what they think about it. The Washington Post, even while clucking about the purported long sentence -- one that will come nowhere near him and is the usual hysterical take on the charges which isn't the same as the sentence -- still says Keys "is no Aaron Swartz".
Interestingly, although Orin Kerr, the former DOJ official and lawyer who writes for Volokh.com, did not take up Matthew Keys case, although on the scale of the trolldom where Keys inhabited for years, he's less of a nasty character than Weev, the hacker Kerr has decided to defend against the CFAA. Here's what the Post says:
But while it’s easy to see the CFAA as one monolithic relic, Kerr says, the law actually has several parts, and Keys was charged under the least controversial one. That’s because the CFAA’s biggest problem lies in its use of the phrase “unauthorized access” — a vague, only loosely defined term that has left prosecutors and courts to their own interpretations. Keys’s part of the law doesn’t mention that term. Swartz’s does.
Aside from the difference in their alleged crimes, there’s also a split in apparent motives. As many of Swartz’s defenders have pointed out on social media, Swartz was a documented Internet activist who fought publicly for freedom of information.
On the other hand, in chat room transcripts released by the Department of Justice, the user alleged to be Keys urges an Anonymous hacker to “go f--- some s--- up.” That isn’t just a public-relations issue: motives can factor into sentencing, too, Kerr says.
“For example, acting with an intent to profit can turn a misdemeanor into a felony,” he says. “Also, acting as part of a broader criminal scheme can lead to a sentencing enhancement.”
Kerr and the Washington Post -- like me -- took the indictment on good faith as the government's belief that it has a case. Of course, the defendant and his lawyers and the geek public are entitled to take a different view. But they didn't see fit to say "but Keys denies all this" (and maybe it was a timing issue, but there isn't an update).
Poynter also asks some questions.Even the lefty Atlantic has suggested that Keys' lawyers should tell him to shut his yap, he may incriminate himself further or make contempt-of-court type of statements showing lack of remorse that could get him a longer sentence, as it seems to have done for Weev. Yet Keys -- and his Anonymous-defending lawyers -- have brazened this out, in the mistaken belief that Keys, as a social media manipulator for Reuters, is expert at handling the media, whereas their other clients they tell to keep quiet are incapable of handling media.
Hmmm.... And imagine this, Ashera Wolf, community journalist for Anonymous that has turned in some loving profiles of their heroes, has asked questions about journalistic ethics around Keys. Naturally, she'll do that because he's harmed her friends and perhaps helped them go to jail.
I wonder....Is the difference the over-enthusiastic tech and liberal mainstream press is showing for Matthew Keys, "progressive" hipster social media wrangler for Reuters who exposed Anonymous, refused to cooperate with authorities, and Sabu, poor unemployed Hispanic programmer with kids to support, did? Did Matthew expose Anonymous for the sake of a news story (for which he had no assignment) or because they humiliated him by kicking him out of the chatroom once they cottoned to his treachery?
The Anonymous-defending lawyers think that you shouldn't go to jail for just a prank. Well, some of us beg to differ that it's just a prank, and we don't know if at trial, only the defacement of the LAT will be at issue. BTW, I'm calling out the lawyers here not because I don't think that people don't deserve legal defense, and the best they can get, or that people can't be viewed as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law -- of course they deserve defense and the benefit of the doubt as far as the court is concerned.
But these are partisan, vocally biased crusaders -- lawfarers trying to change law they don't like. They aren't even nonprofit advocacy lawyers; they are private lawyers with practices where they can pick and chose their clients -- and pick these ones to make their crusading point. Why, in a free society, would they get to advocate through lawfaring, but bloggers like me not get to say we don't buy their story line?
I won't be "apologizing" as Matthew Keys says I will be, as I haven't written anything that's wrong or that I regret. He's the kind of person who might start papering me with warnings of libel suits from his lovely pro-Anonymous lawyers, too -- once lawyers like this start lawfaring, they will stop at nothing to get their way. Hey, see you in court guys. Your clients are thugs.
Tina Rosenberg at the New York Times has a piece about the, well, less-than-fabulous results from apps and programs and such for mobile phones and health care delivery.
The world now has 5 billion mobile phones – one for every person over
15. Africa has a billion people and 750 million phones, and mobile is
growing so fast there that in a few years there will be more phones than
people. In some countries this is already true — South Africa has 47
million people, but 52 million SIM cards.
The mobile phone is
doing more than revolutionizing communication. It has the potential to
improve many aspects of life in poor countries: commerce, health,
agriculture, education. As we say repeatedly in Fixes, there are a lot
of great new products that poor people can use to improve their lives.
The problem is that it’s very difficult to get those out to people who
need them. The same is true with information. It’s there, but people
can’t get it, because they lack Internet service and electricity and the
electronics that require these things. Delivery is the problem. It’s
almost always the problem.
So, my comment:
I think it's fitting that Tina Rosenberg, who has done so much over the
years to write thoughtfully exposing communism or Nazism, has taken on
this area of the fake Cargo Cult of the Better Worlders of Silicon
Valley.
The Internet and smart phones aren't going to help people
that don't have the infrastructure for them, but more to the point,
they aren't really democratically designed with the people to be "saved"
having input about what they really need. Maybe they'd rather have
better salaries, with doctors getting better salaries, and if they need
to buy some technical trinket, they can buy it themselves. Just laying
it on them is really like an external Cargo Cult.
I saw this with
all the crazy app engineers around the Haiti earthquake, with Google
also cashing in on it, trying to "help humankind" by having "maps of
clean water". Of course, if someone was to the technical point and
physical stability point to have a smart phone to hold in their hand,
and the leisure to pull up a Google map to find water, they'd already be
in the one hotel for foreigners with the limited clean water. Real
people in the real world are going to be drinking dirty watcher from
ditches and using word of mouth or older technology like radio or
thorayas.
And gamification! Good Lord, that's nuts. I don't want
computer engineers handling my health care, and I don't want strangers
seeing if they can guess the disease I have using the law of averages. I
want real doctors. And that means costs.
***
Of course, it's hard to be heard over the din there in the comments, from people like:
Delia (Boylan) Lloyd Senior Policy Manager, BBC Media Action (once of ODC)
-- because media is media action, you see, when you start from the premise of socialism. She insists that mobile phones have saved lives. So don't you dare argue.
Maybe they have. Look, I'm not going to "go there". I'm not going to link to "Obama phones".
I do have to say that I went to a new doctor, or rather my old clinic had a new doctor, and she had the latest phone with the altest apps. She must have taken an extra 10 minutes struggling with her iphone (as distinct from a computer terminal with the Internet right next to her on her desk) to try to pull up some list of medications and their different side effects and costs. I was like "Hey, I gotta go, I'll just ask the pharmacist" or "look, I'll look it up later" or "Why don't you just check online over there on the computer" but no, she had to have that app load and work as her "sidekick" -- or else! And this isn't in Africa. This is in Manhattan. Hey, stop looking at the screen. Look at me! Do I look a bit feverish and peaked, like I might have strep throat after all? And so on...
When we get the nanobots, as Ray Kurzweil has always assured us, I'm sure it will be all fine...
Economist Bryan Caplan has referred to Communism
as "the largest cargo cult the world has ever seen", describing the
economic strategy of the 20th-century Communist leaders as "mimicking a
few random characteristics of advanced economies", such as the
production of steel.[8]
It was then that I realized that the entire Internet is a cargo cult!
Alec Ross, State Department's
"innovation" guy and Tweeter-in-chief, speaking at the "The Project
[R]evolution Digital and Social Media Conference" (*gag*) in New
Zealand. Photo by US Embassy in NZ, 2012.
And he's taking his 300,000+ followers with him. After all, his Twitter account formed more than two years ago is just in his own name, it's not the name of a generic office.
And that's wrong. I think that private persons shouldn't be able to privatize social capital that they gained while performing a government job. For that matter, the same applies whether they were in a corporate or nonprofit job. In fact, that's a good reason for institutions to stop letting these big stars who drag all the attention to themselves make and maintain these private reputation-builders that they can't then control.
Sure, those same followers can dump him and then go follow the new guy. But he's got them now to blast out huge messages of lobbying industrial strength to enhance his new position -- at Google, or a Mitch Kapor nonprofit, or some other third-world-go-gooding collectivist operation like the NGO that languished after he went to take up his government job.
The State Department should make an account called @StateInnovator or whatever (@innovator is taken by some goof who wants Ross' job) and then have the picture of the person in that office for now on it, but not enable that person to make an entire fiefdom with his followers that he can then take away.
I first noticed this phenomenon of tribal leaders attracting all the attention to themselves with one-way broadcast accounts and numerous followers when I first came on Twitter five years ago (I joined in 2007 on my account Prokofy and 2008 on my accout catfitz). Some people would gain enormous amounts of followers -- the early adapters like Scoble did it with automatic scripts, in part scripts that automatically followed back other people or automatically said thank you or started conversations.
Twitter banned some of these resource-eating automatic scripts later, but the advantage was clear -- as it still is. When you join Twitter today, just as in the past, it forces on you a list of recommended people that you must chose among to make your "friends" before you can move on to using Twitter -- it's quite coercive and you can't seem to escape out of it. In fact, it forces on you the number of five friends before it lets you out of its clutches. The friends to pick from include Lady Gaga but also a lot of those tech friends of the Twitter devs -- Alec Ross is on there if I'm not mistaken and so is Human Rights Watch and Anne Marie Slaughter and other "progressives" who get a significant boost by having every new member of Twitter (I don't know if it is localized) have to pick from these enforced "friends". The only Republican leader on there is Mario Rubio although there is the now out-of-date Mitt Romney account.
A position at the State Department is not a place for you merely to build your personal resume and gain connections to use in corporate lobbying jobs later. You're supposed to build the institution while serving the public, you know. Serve the public?
Another thing that the rules should stipulate is that people making or operating social media accounts on behalf of the US government should not block critical members of the public on those services. If the services themselves have not found reason to block them for spam, incitement of hatred, or harassment with excessive @ posting etc. then those government officials should not block them merely because they are egomaniacs with thin skins.
Alec Ross muted and blocked me -- meaning he entirely disappeared from the view! -- on Facebook, where he maintains not a personal account to share pictures of his kids and cats, but continues his public, government influence-making.
That is too much power for government officials to have.
He had no business doing that. Any judge in the land would throw it out as a violation of the First Amendment by the state, not only censoring speech but blocking even the view of government speech from the public that is otherwise open to all.
It's no good hiding behind the fact that Facebook is a private company and it can do what it wants -- public officials can't do what they want and have to uphold the Constitution. It's not upholding the Constitution to hold town halls and block people who merely ask questions -- and it's not about swearing, or heckling or disrupting, that in a real-life town hall might bring the security guards or cops. It's about pasting a one-line disagreement on to the high-view page of an ego-infused influencer and arrogant "thought-leader" who is entirely full of himself and unable to take even the slightest mar of his propaganda campaign.
If officials went around behaving like this with the real press in real life, or went around behaving like this in town halls in real life, they'd be criticized severely. Oh, they've started doing that. Look at the ruckus over Woodward and pressure from the White House.
Officials gone wild on social media -- our Russian ambassador Michael McFaul comes to mind -- should be tethered more to their public service functions. And they are getting tethered, as Alec Ross found himself reined in, when State finally decided to do Twitter clearance and make people submit tweets before they blasted them to their huge audiences of 300,000 plus their massive network effect of re-tweeting.
When you see this, you can't help wondering if these accounts will finally be removed all together:
Michael McFaul @McFaul
23:35 in Moscow RT @robbirgfeld Ambassador @McFaul spends a couple of hours a night responding and reading social media. #smwdiplomacy
Ross' feed has always tended toward the anodyne, to the point that you wondered if it was some kind of Aesopian message:
@AlecJRoss
1,476 years ago today, the Ostrogoths began the first siege of Rome. It lasted for a little over a year.
@AlecJRoss
This has long been a key to America's success. We must attract brilliant innovators like Tesla & allow them to make America their home (2/2)
@AlecJRoss
212 year ago today, America's 1st Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated as President of the United States.
Er, what made him think of barbarians at the gates?
And...sucking up to his new boss, implying that he, too, could become president?
Funny that Kerry comes in, and this guy goes out. Why? Just a new broom sweeps clean?
Alec follows slavishly the "progressive" line and the Google line for all the issues. And I suspect Kerry will be no different, but I just don't know yet.
Ross has always dutifully retweeted the line du jour, which is exemplified by a recent one about how "we must all oppose cell phone jailbreaking" and retweet of this link -- and yes, retweets ALWAYS mean endorsement with this gang. The president answered this tekkie flashmob and Ross revelled in it.
Google pushes this line effectively through all its networks and lobbying active measures and agents of influence. Why? Because it wants to erode the power of telecoms, and have people be able to directly use Google and the Internet in general more for communicating.
Hackers and copyleftists who make up the some 7 million people who jailbreak their phones are lobbying to have this wrongful act legalized.
Why is it a wrongful act? Well, because it is a violation of the user's agreement. Why do these mean telecoms want to "lock you in" to their services? Well, because they gave you a ridiculously low-priced loss-leader -- your smart phone itself. Those things are expensive to make. They should cost more than they do. But no one would buy them if they did. So they drop the price of the phone, then tuck that cost into a binding two-year agreement to use a phone service like Verizon or AT&T. You pay ahead something on this contract, then have to keep paying, and if you default, you are billed with a heavy fine that the companies zealously collect.
Well, aren't these telecoms just being greedy? Well, no, they have real costs -- the kind of costs Susan Crawford never calculates in her jihad against them applauded by Google -- capital costs.
When you jailbreak the phone and start using Internet VOIP or various other things like Skype only for calls or free wifi, then you defeat the plan that subsidizes your phone.
This criminality doesn't trouble Alec Ross, Mashable, or the White House, as it responded to a massive engineered outpouring with smug approval. I can only hope the courts will push back. Because it isn't fair or just to the telecoms. How will they get the cost of the phone and its use covered in a world where hackers rampantly engage in theft of services and "liberate" the device?
When I get a cable TV box, I don't "jailbreak" it to get more channels I don't pay for; I don't "liberate" my Verizon modem box to get more broadband or even some other service. Why should I get to do this to my phone?
Apple wants to go on disguising the cost of these phones -- they can be $400 and that doesn't reflect either its real cost or the cost it should be if it had better labour conditions -- to sell more of them and get people hooked then on the apps and other products. They don't like jailbreaking, but I don't know that they are going to lobby that hard against it.
It's wrong of the president to take a position on what amounts to a *business dispute about costs and how to cover them* and weigh in on the side of some businesses and not others. Doing that is not proper to free enterprise and a liberal and democratic state. It's the sort of thing that begins to happen in socialist states with cronyism and state capitalism or oligarchy.
Alec Ross is delighted to be part of that. His entire career as "innovator" exemplifies my constant refrain about the Wired State, that a group of radicals and corporate copyleftists have harnessed their social media inventions to take power and ram through their agenda.
While Ross ignored my question on Twitter, where he doesn't block me for some reason, he confirmed in answer to another person's question on Facebook (which I got a friend to check as he has me blocked) that the position at State is going to remain open.
Who will take over this position?
Probably someone who will travel less -- after all, if the Sequester has to stop Co-dels (Congressional delegations) from going to some of their favourite haunts like Vienna or Paris, then it makes sense that the Innovator guy should stop going to Australia and places like that to boost the copyleftist cause.
At one point I read that Anonymous was planning a demonstration on February 23, which happens to be Soviet Army day, but now I see they seem to have put the demonstrations for the first week in March around the time of a trial hearing -- February 23 was some other "day of rage" about 2nd amendment rights or something.
This is the comment I put at Cleveland.com:
I
hope that justice will be served and that those who assaulted the
victim will be prosecuted. Rape is a serious matter and "rape culture"
is indeed an issue that has to be challenged.
But justice is not served nor victims vindicated and protected by promoting vigilantism. And that's what we're seeing with the hackers' collective Anonymous and some of the celebratory press coverage of this destructive movement that seems to have only tuned into them yesterday and haven't followed their exploits over the years.
First of all, Anonymous
is merely engaged in reputational laundering with their action
#JusticeSec, as their roots are in 4chan, some of the most horrendous
violent porn against women, and they have a long history of years of
tormenting particularly young girls and women on the Internet. So
they're hardly the people to be claiming to be wearing any white robes
here in a crusade against rapists. It sure doesn't diminish support for
real-life rape victims to point out that Anonymous hackers have engaged
in online virtual sexual assault -- neither should be endorsed.
The
Anonymous operatives also replicate the same vicious logic of "rape
culture" when they say that if they disagree with someone, or someone
doesn't share their views about this case, or they suspect someone of
involvement or cover-up, that they're entitled to hack and dox and
harass and embarass them "just because they can" because it is possible
to do.
When someone like me or other bloggers or journalists
question their behaviour, they go after them like junkyard dogs and then
you really see how they talk to women:
I
think the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the other local press needs to
report the antics of Anonymous in harassing and bullying anyone who
tells the truth about their roots and their other hacking and harassment
antics. They do not get to launder their reputation in Steubenville,
and distract from their poster boy, Julian Assange, who refuses to
appear before Swedish police to answer questions on rape charges.
You do not want to live in a world where Anonymous runs your "justice" -- they will come for you next.
And
while some journalists seem to think these amateurs have accomplished
some sort of investigative feats here, real reporters should be the ones
checking the stories and how they are gotten, and they shouldn't
celebrate bullying and vigilantism from these "justice-seekers". And
the real justice system needs to function to bring durable justice.
Chief among our civil rights is the right to face your accuser before a
court of law before a jury of your peers, with an adversarial defense.
When you deal with men in masks, you are unable to do that.
* * *
The appalling treatment meted out to be by gangs of JusticeSec operatives and cutaways has been documented and hopefully serves as a deterrent. I will be interested to see how both justice is served in Steubenville, and how the local media covers or doesn't cover the problem of Anonymous and their harassment of actors in the local drama.
It used to be that some townships forbade demonstrations by people in masks or who had covered their faces -- this was their way of preventing demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, we can recall the famous case of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK to march in the suburb of Chicago, Skokie, IL. There's a book by Aryeh Neier, then head of the ACLU, called Defending My Enemy. In any event, I will be interested to see if there are counter demonstrations, better coverage by the press, etc.
I don't have the capacity to research the story itself as Lee Stranahan of Breitbart News and others have done. I realize they are taking up the issue of whether the story is even true, whether the girl was even raped in the legal sense, whether there were even more than two football players and all the rest. I can't get into these aspects of the case, which the conservative press has taken up because I don't have the ability to do the research from here for free as a blogger and no one needs me to do it, it's not my expertise. Just looking at what I've read in the trustworthy media, like the New York Times, I would take the side of the victim. Yes, I may have been duped by the liberal media, but I don't think so. The rape video of the young man boasting about his comrades raping the girl is an appalling artifact of modern Internet life. It's hard to know even where to put such an awful thing. "This girl is as dead as Caylee Anthony?" What to say of such a horror?!
But for a student of Russian culture and world fairy tales and epic poetry, you can see where the bawdy tale takes its place in literature so to speak, if you can prevent from vomiting, and you can see that it is like a faint echo of the rituals of some ancient peoples. I thought for example the Meryans, a native people of Russia, about whom a film was made; after the beloved dies, the widower spends time describing in epic and obscene form the sexual exploits of the woman -- as a form of ritual. Again -- a rough approximation, a flailing effort to try to find the genre for this modern MIPS breakout...
The only redeeming feature of that otherwise horrendous piece of humilitaing phone-video porn is that during the young man's recounting of just how dead the girl is -- "as dead as OJ's wife" and so on -- some of the other boys in the room, admittedly, not very robustly, say, "Hey, don't say that, she could have been your sister". Or, "Hey, that's wrong, you shouldn't say that". It's weak, but even that glimmer of conscience coming from today's Internet-bred youth is still, well, something. What those modern knights of the smart phone should have done, if they were chivalrous -- or just plain decent human beings -- is call the police, as the girl was in danger -- and rape is wrong. Some raise the issue of "where were the girl's parents". Well, where were the boys' parents, too?
If you are the ACLU, however, you'd be compelled to say, if you weren't preoccupied with government snooping or CISPA or anti-bullying (a curious thing for the ACLU to have picked up, given its history as a maxed-out civil libertarian group defending the rights of tobacco companies to advertise -- and taking their money) -- is that as awful as the rape video is, it's protected speech. You can't show that it incites imminent violence -- it is made after the unfortunate girl is taken away by their peers and she is not there. Otherwise, there might be a case.
And isn't that like so much of social media criminality? Otherwise, there might be a case. The speech against me, doxing me, harassing me, revealing private information, speaking obscenely to me, threatening me -- this is all protected speech. Interestingly, Lee Stranahan is now trying to take to court one of his serial, persistent persecutors -- and I wonder if it will get to court, given the great protections for free speech in this country.
When will the Steubenville story get the ProPublica treatment?
I've been thinking today of a word I thought I was inventing when I made a typo on a comment "playment," which I wish would become like "Kleenex" in ten years and enable us to effortlessly, with one click, pay for content online and get creators paid and end the regime of deliberate, engineered Internet copyleftism that has crippled the web for over a decade.
As I've said in the debate on piracy, the copyleftists are concern-trolling when they claim they're trying to get ways for artists to be paid, they just don't want them to involve "ineffective" or "futile" DRM or "prosecutorial overreach" or "chill on speech". Nonsense. They aren't serious, of course, because they don't really believe in capitalism to start with, and you can usually flush that out of them after a few rounds of debate. But they pretend that their entrepreneurial Big IT capitalism exploiting the open source cult is "capitalism" and they pretend that university- or government-funded open source work is entrepreneurial and capitalistic, too, especially if they get consulting fees. It's not a real economy for the rest of us.
CC supporters keep saying that you can't mix "licensing" and "implementation". Of course you can. The Internet mixes things all the time. That's how it gets ahead, routing around.
Google Play isn't playment yet, because you still have to click a few times and still click through to a "shopping card" and credit card information.
But eventually we'll have one-click consumption and payment -- playment.
Right now the closest thing I see to playment is Loren Feldman's site where Tinypass comes up with a 50 cents charge to see a video. This takes you to either your TinyPass account or PayPal which is faster than to Mastercard. Once you make the TinyPass account which is dirt simple, that will speed it up to make your own balance/wallet and then draw it down. This experience is better for the consumer than Google Play.
My only beef with the whole site as it is now is that it kicks up too many emails, in part because Wordpress lets you click to follow, then instead of just accepting that you really wanted to follow, then asks for a confirmation email -- I don't like Wordpress for this and other reasons but I can understand why developers use it because it has all these little modules to plug in.
Tinypass kicks up multiple emails too and this gets annoying, but likely a lot of people want payment confirmation from the payment system AND the pass system. Again, all of this has to get tighter, smoother -- it has to become PLAYMENT. ENJOYMENT.
Playment could operate off your phone and be a wallet, maybe even that Google wallet that never seems to get working and get uptake. The key is micropayments -- a view of a Youtube has to be almost microscopic, but the rewards of tipping a blogger have to be tangible -- and I'm not sure how, except with leader boards and reputational systems that always get gamed. That can be worked on.
Unfortunately, the MIT group come out of the whole "share" mentality" as you can tell right off the bat when they demand "the opening up of walled gardens". Why? People like walled gardens -- that's why Facebook has a billion members and Diaspora has a team whose member committed suicide and who took a lot of Kickstarter cash and didn't do much with it.
If the site is quoting Tim Berners-Lee on "grassroots innovation" as a solution to the Internet's "universality", we're in trouble. This is not the droid we're looking for, because Tim Berners-Lee is the fellow who welded three deep flaws into the Internet:
o failure to protect privacy
o failure to secure intellectual property
o failure to encourage commerce
It's in spite of TBL that the Internet has thrived, not because of him.
Here's why we know we're in trouble with this version of "playment":
The MIT "playment" people are likely to jealously guard their interpretation of this concept.
Playment is establishing a way for consumers *and* sound recording
copyright holders (including both established record companies and
independent recording artists) to share and profit from high quality
digital music and media distributed via internet websites and
peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms as well as via physical media like CD-Rs
and DVD-Rs and portable storage devices like external harddrives and pen
drives.
Playment aims to be the first and defacto standard implementation of the Open Music Model
(OMM) developed at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Playment has
adopted and refined the five fundamental requirements of the OMM and is
working to clearly define aspects pertaining to content metadata
validation (Semantec Web stuff) to facilitate compensation for copyright
owners.
In brief, the key concepts of the OMM are:
Open File Sharing
Open File Formats
Open Membership
Open Payment
Open Competition
But that doesn't mean the rest of the world can't route around them.
Playment shouldn't require open systems or open standards or open anything which actually slow down innovation and put it in the hands of a cranky few code dictators. There can be a thousand walled gardens and different implementation of different standards or even different standards. You don't need Facebook, Twitter, and G+ to talk to each other, you just need them to talk to the third-party payment system that more seamlessly welds in with their system, the way Seamless is now welding in with restaurants so you can order online more easily.
I think one of the problems for why no third-party payment system ever seems to become ubiquitous, except for Paypal, is that none of these giants like Google or Twitter want to enable a third-party payment system to become bigger than them by serving all three or four.
Metadata validation is the problem that the IETF virtual worlds group that was going to make Second Life and There and the Open Sims all "interoperable". That group failed miserable and got occupied and taken over by the US military, a disastrous development that no one except me has protested. People who need simulations of Afghan villages are just more driven and more resourced than people merely toying with virtual worlds with their own money. I constantly objected on the mailing list for this group that they were leaving out the engineering of copy/mod/transfer which they could easily do just as it had been done in SL, and that only ideology was stopping them. There were ways to address the problem of trusted servers and certificates and engineered as well as organic community solutions. The ideological default against them was too great, however.
Real playment has to start with a robust sense of property, not openness; of law, not code; of community, not collectivization.
My hope is that while the MIT technocommunists are tinkering away with their Playment -- they are still looking for seed investors and evidently Mitch Kapor hasn't become interested -- some real business with a real profit motive and not funded professors and students will have the hunger to make this happen.
Playment is going to have to be about wallets and about in a sense a phone meter but one that doesn't seem to drain the pocketbook and doesn't make the consumer feel that he has yet another high gadget/Internet bill coming in -- it has to have a lot of choice to it.
I'm encouraged by the way I saw Facebook log-on for comments appear everywhere on blogs and become almost the industry standard until TechCrunch went back on this very good way to do things and put in Livefyre, which I've criticized deeply.
TC did this because their comments -- and traffic -- fell off when they had identity. They tried to be noble about it and make it seem like they were willing to gut it out while a better sort of people came to the site (and I would add, especially more women, which is a demographic that won't comment in an environment with tekkie assholes being anonymously nasty).
But they weren't really noble because AOL needed the traffic, so they've now let in Lifefyre which takes Twitter and Disqus log-ons which can be anonymous.
I still think Disqus is good if you have anonymous because it builds up a record you can see with a click and it's very easy to use and manage.
Anyway, the appearance of third-party commenting platforms lets me hope there will be third-party payment solutions that seamlessly -- like Seamless -- get us to real playment, not like the MIT Playment.
Obviously, the "new thing" in advertising, just as the "new thing" in virtual worlds and video games ten and even fifteen years ago, is interactive story-telling and cross-media performances.
About seven years ago during the public relations boom in Second Life, we saw a burst of these "cross-media" ad attempts. The movie "The Nines" made a set inside the virtual world and had scavenger hunts and even the author's appearance, and then other activities online. Coca Cola even made a Second Life ad, one of the old "big six" metaversal development companies Rivers Run Red produced it.
And even ten or twelve years or more before that, I remember in The Sims Online, I made Living Soap Opera at Flamingo Court, Motel of Last Resort, where some of us would appear as the living characters of a story created before that, in the offline Sims, and would improvise the parts of people living in a motel, with anyone who happened to come to the lot that evening. I always thought Second Life would have great potential for this type of improvisation as well, but griefing if not lag always made it nearly impossible, although I think there are some who have tried it.
And of course the MUDs and all that had interactive story telling practically before the Internet was born. The first MUD was in 1975, and not surprisingly the lore includes a group of MIT students in 1975 making something called "Zork". Of course, it would be incredibly uncool if it turned out that MUDs originated not in computer culture, but in the culture of suburban housewives who read R.D. Laing's Knots (1970s). Wouldn't it completely upset the world of all those fanboyz if they discovered their beloved and sacrosanct MUDs came not from computers or their geeky in-groups but from something more mundane in suburban California. Oh, but wait. Before that, there were the narratives of all the cultures of all the world throughout human history LOL. At what point did each one of them jump the synapse and go from the dominant narrator or bard to become interactive with the audience?
I was never at all into MUDS, but the funny thing is, in about 1970, certainly long before computers/the Internet/the officially-recogized MUDs, I remember staying at our family friends' house in suburban Delaware, and our friend telling me a MUD-type story where there were choices, and then different outcomes. "You are in a big field. Ahead of you, you see a wall. On the wall is a ladder. Do you climb the ladder? To the right is a large lake with a boat on the docks." and so on. The story was supposed to reveal some psychological truths about you. This was a suburban parlour game of the time. I remember thinking of it as a kind of game, but also a kind of mystical story, and a special social interaction that involved a respected family friend taking the time to introduce me into the mysterious world of this psychological story.
In any event, now you can see the "interactive story telling" meme play out with the Lincoln ad, just as it played out with the Coke ad.
What I find hilarious is that when I first noticed this ad on the side of my screen among the belly fat clickables, there was a camel's nose, so I almost mistook it for the Coke ad. Then I saw it was a Lincoln ad.
I watched it and discovered about half-way through, the female protagonist on the quintessential road trip not only runs across a herd of alpacas in an "alpacalypse" *snort*, and a herd of giant turtles, but also barges into a director on a movie set in the desert who becomes exasperated because she's ruined his shooting of a film about aliens.
Of course, this meme is borrowed from lots of places, but most notably "Argo," the Ben Affleck flick where a bunch of Canadian hostages in Iran during the ayatollahs' revolution in the 1970s manage to escape from Iran by pretending to be a bunch of film-makers filming a science fiction movie about aliens in the desert. It's a pretty good film with John Goodman who I liked in "Roseanne" and is funny in this part as well as the producer.
When Coke rolled out its inter-active story ad, the Muslim community organizations got mad at "stereotypes" although everybody in the whole ad was stereotyped -- that's what interactive stories *are*, they are wooden, heavily distilled memes capable of being manipulaetd and absorbed by masses in "interactivity".
Coke mollified the Muslims by telling them while they seemed to have been left out of the race and slighted in this first episode for the superbowl, they were going to get an epic part later as the racers would stumble on the Arabs making a movie in the desert.
Whoops, Lincoln has now stolen the "making a movie in the desert" theme.
Except, "Lawrence of Arabaia" did that.
I was predicting the other day that if piracy got worse and worse, and the Kim Dotcoms of the world continued to enjoy flamboyant impunity, the content providers would get less and less and fewer and fewer would bother to go into the business because it's expensive and intensive and time-consuming. Then they would replace content of this sort of the driven narrative with the "crowd sourced" narrative where they would get thousands of people to work for free writing the script and supplying the walk-ons. It's one of the exciting "crowd-sourced business" opportunities where many people get to work for free and a few get to make a fortune for harvesting these sheeple.
There's a problem with all this, however, is that people don't find it that entertaining precisely because it gets memified, dumbed down, and predictable. I mean, how many ads can we see with the road trips, the turtles, the show girls leaving Las Vegas...before it will get very dull? And it's not like the crowd can really participate -- really only ten or twenty people can get their tweets in out of the many who might try to get noticed...
Loren Feldman of 1938 media had a good video the other day in which he made you pay 50 cents at least to explain to you why he was blogging on his own address, i.e. instead of dissipating himself across Facebook or Twitter or G+ -- so that he had a "home" -- and to reiterate that content making is hard and expensive and should be valued. Hello!
I was watching the entire experiment that Will Wright did on Current TV, which was just bought by Arabs, speaking of Arabs (Al Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, which is in the oil business, bought it out from green-planet Al Gore, in one of the funnier narratives of our time.)
It ran for about a year. It was called Bar Karma. It was about "interactive webisodes". Who knows, maybe Will Wright remembered that I had Flamingo Court in the Sims Online and before that, the offline Flamingo Court stories with the bar, motel, and pool. That is, he didn't need me to come up with this story line, but it was the sort of thing floating in the environment. The iconic road trip i the American imagination has to have the caravan-serai where you stop to rest, and that's the iconic Flamingo motel. Flamingos were an essential icon of the 1950s tongue-in-cheek kitsch of the Sims Online.
I remember when I first read about Bar Karma, I was all excited, because I thought it would be a better version of the Sims Online, interactive, yet on TV and therefore "more real" and with a bigger audience. But Current TV itself never had more than 20,000 concurrent viewers, it was a bust because of its heavy leftist and didactic tilt, in my view, it was really in a horrible bubble.
Will's show at first seemed promising, but then it turned out that to participate, it was just a little too hard, at least for people like me. You couldn't just easily upload a screenshot from Second Life or Paint or some other easy medium with your story idea. There wasn't an easy Family Album kind of thing the way there was in the Sims Online. The barrier was set just above that -- I went to the site a few times and it was too many steps and a tad too complicated to justify having to spend hours to study, and I gave up. So when you lose people like me, you lose your 10% and get only 2% of viewers in the interactive space. Surely there were geeks who had no trouble with "The Story-Maker Engine" and they would only snort at anyone who snagged or lagged on it. Too bad. You failed. The show died. Because you were too elitist. If you are too elitist, don't pretend you're doing massively multiple-player story-telling but just in fact reiterating Hollywood.
Salon kind of panned it: "So far, the sales pitch is more intriguing than the product. Semi-philosophical and quasi-mystical, Bar Karma has a premise like a Tom Waits song adapted into a British sci-fi series." I remember that I just couldn't sit still when I watched it because it felt like it was cliches from somebody else's shared science fiction meme sharing cult in Silicon Valley and I grew bored.
Not so Wired, which gushed about "the thousands of ways it could go right" even conceding the hundreds of ways it could go wrong. Sigh. It did go wrong; it failed. It was cancelled even by this heavily subsidized hipster TV.
So Will Wright, who is on the board of Linden Lab now, is back with making a new product for the Lab, which now styles itself as making "shared creative spaces" by rolling out several other products besides the legacy (the term of art to mean "failing") virtual world product (as we were taught by Ginsu Yoon to see "your world, your imagination" eventually.
This new thing is called Dio (and I couldn't help thinking of a long ago abandoned campaign of the Lindens' called Dia de Liberacion which was supposed to enable the ability to play different versions of Second Life on the servers so you didn't have to constantly patch).
Dio seems nice and all, but bored me to teeth-gritting pain in about 20 minutes. There seems to be a MUD-like software for this platform to enable you to upload photos and write captions quickly and make layers of them in "rooms". So I should love it, right? Except, it didn't spread out like a comic book strip, and that's maybe what would be better, really like the Sims Family Album which was a wonderful narrative tool.
The pages seem to take some time to load, maybe just due to the beta. And I was trying to figure out how to upload a video clip to it and then gave up somewhere. Maybe I will come back to it but it just seemed so flat to me. What, they were trying to attract aging MUDsters or live out their MUD youths themselves?! When they have an interactive dynamically-updating 3D virtual world?! Why didn't they want to get that right, and instead retreated to this 2d space? I don't get it.
Forbes is gushing that Dio will let you "gamify" your social media. I don't see where you make it a game. But apparently as Forbes says, it is -- although this wasn't instantly visible:
And in case your visitors become confused in the maze of twisty little
passages all alike, they can inspect the menus on the left-hand side of
the page for their next options. It also supports objects you can pick
up and take with you and use elsewhere.
No, I didn't watch the videos. I hate videos with instructions. I hate the thought of clicking on a Linden Lab and hearing the awful "Friendly Greetings!" of Torley. Cringe.
I went crazy with boredom on something like Colossal Cave which I'm supposed to worship as the first MUD. Too many clicks. Too many slow-loading pages. Too much text. Too -- something. How unsatisfying after Second Life, where the click/action is instantaneous. You don't click "go south" and then click on "go south" *again* -- you just go south.
I backed out of there after about 10 boring screens where I couldn't pick up or do anything because it was just so friggin' boring and stupid. Myst-like. I went over to try the "Wasp" one mentioned in the Forbes review. But this was flat and unsatisfying too, after a real virtual world, so to speak, because you didn't really have any satisfying sense of "picking up inventory," instead, you just clicked -- doubly, each time, which really seems uber annoying -- to get more text, and often of the snarky insulting kind, like this: "What are you, a neanderthal? You can't turn on a TV without a remote." When you finally get out of the room by clicking almost randomly on a lot of texts, none of which animates, you don't feel any sense of virtual satisfaction.
Eventually, I will find the time to go back and try to build out my own story idea there -- it feels a little like Google's failed virtual world experiment where you could link some of the rooms to other things. Naturally, I love the idea that you can sell your rooms, the Lindens are hooking this up to the LindEx and to Lindens, and you can monetarize it all although they will take a cut.
And maybe it will catch on and big PR companies will buy little segments from amateurs, or more likely, the Rivers Red Run sort of "big six metaversals" will appear and suck all the revenue out of the rooms by scooping up the best builders as they did in Second Life -- before they sell out to old media and then they all die. Cue up c3 with some words of wisdom here from the 1990s, and then the 2000s...
But...it was just a little too hard and confusing with way too many clicks. The "object" to "pick up" is merely a picture, that you click on to go to another picture...How flat!
BTW, LL will alienate their fan base by having Facebook sign-up with real names, but there may be a way around this.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt has published a tentative post about the WikiLeaks claim that Swartz was a source just to make sure he isn't behind the curve or anything like that, even though you can tell that he wishes it would just go away. He's also doing the well-worn Internet trick of seeing "if anything comes out in the comments" to flush out what is known.
He summarizes Empty Wheel and some other sources on the claims, so it's a short form of this whole discussion.
I'll tell you what other clams are not opening up to fishing expeditions and are tighter than the clams in the federal government -- the hacker community in MIT. They know more than they are telling; they aren't talking. They are scared.
I've studied all the blogs and chat and tweets on this and thought about it a lot, and my question now is this:
Did Aaron Swartz help Bradley Manning download all those quarter of a million cables and other files illegally by helping create for him a scraper script and/or helping him move and store the files?
After all, Swartz really got to be an expert at that sort of "movement" work -- he dl'd the Library of Congress, PACER, and JSTOR files in record time and efficiently, although he did get caught. Even so, he was an expert.
Or did Swartz help Danny Clark do that, and Danny Clark helped Manning? Or some other MIT hacker?
The feds were absolutely right to fish in these waters, because Bradly Manning, who is properly arrested and will be appropriately tried, regardless of any issues with his mistreatment, did go to the MIT hacker community in 2010 with his then-boyfriend while on leave during his service in the Iraq war, and did then eventually reach Assange at WikiLeaks and did from all accounts leak the files he had obtained. I always thought he had to have had help.
The narratives at Empty Wheel and other sites where people ask a lot of questions to try to prove their case that the "feds are overreaching" in fact help create the plausible set of suppositions that Swartz and/or others helped WikiLeaks. Certainly Jacob Appelbaum was front and center helping WikiLeaks and was properly questioned by the grand jury.
Once you suspend the hagiography, there really are a lot of questions to ask about Swartz, and you could sadly conclude that he killed himself precisely because he realized that he had either inadvertently or deliberately helped prosecute Manning, or sent someone else to the grand jury, or worse. We'll never know. But it's more likely he committed suicide over the despair and shame of such a thing, than fear of serving a mere six months in jail, in the plea bargain. That's never been a persuasive reason for his suicide. (Naturally, his suicide could be completely unrelated to his Internet causes and his hacking case, but based on sheer depression or personal matters.)
You have to ask what it was that his ex-girlfriend told the grand jury as well, she's mentioned in the court documents.
My operating theory is that WikiLeaks, with this accusation that Swartz was their source, was hoping to act quickly to pin the blame that might accrue to any hacker at MIT or anywhere else in the Manning loop on a dead man who wouldn't talk. I also assume they'd like to distract attention from Jacob Appelbaum -- again, to a dead man. They are opportunistic thugs. This is in keeping with their character.
One of the things that is tripping you up here is your certitude that the Feds "drew a blank" back then on these connections. You don't know that because the trial hasn't taken place. That's just something some prosecutor or other party leaked to the Wall Street Journal and which you reported because it fit your theories of fishing and overreach. You don't know that they leaked that as a false flag operation or just because there are wars among them on the theories of the case. It means nothing.
There is nothing to say that the Lamo chat logs published in Wired in fact will be used in the trial. They don't quite rise to the test of "trial truth," in my view, but this is a court martial. Furthermore, investigators said they found further proof of Manning's contact with Assange during the hearings, and we haven't seen that this was somehow "thrown out," or "countered" by the lawyer, who actually hasn't really made much of a robust defense on "I am a political prisoner!" grounds, preferring to lurch from "my transgender made me do it!" to procedural wrangles and admissiblity wrangles that haven't worked -- to simply gutting out his client's time in solitary so he can book it against his sentence to have him serve less time. What a strategy! 900 days! That's like the Siege of Leningrad. He should have been holding press conferences daily on the court house steps. He wasn't.
Remember David House? He wouldn't talk to the grand jury. But he published his notes. His notes let us know that the grand jury asked House whether Danny Clark had breakfast on the morning following the BUILDS open house with Bradley Manning at the Oxford Spa. So that means there is testimony about that or an allegation about that or something. He pleaded the fifth. But David House got mugged on Twitter and accused of all kinds of Bradsploitation by bloggers, and he seems rather quiet lately. The grand jury wanted to know about the girl with the purple hair, too. Who *is* the girl with the purple hair?
I think you nervously posted this blog because you think there might be something to it and you just want to be on the record as admitting it in case it comes out later. But you and Empty Wheel and other leftwing bloggers want to convert your analysis of "the fishing expedition" into a "prosecutorial overreach" narrative, even if in fact it may have been justified. You all want to liberate stuff and hack stuff, but committing treason big time, you might want to stop short there, and begin to mumble piously about "crossing a line" as Lessig has been doing about his dead protege.
Swartz's FOIAs were made not out of concern for Manning -- he didn't really campaign for Manning. They were made for concern about what Bradley told House in the brig in Quantico during his visit, to see what in fact House may have given them or may have said that they monitored or something.
Bradly Manning is going to allocute (confess). That means he might name names. There may be no way to get those people he named because maybe the feds can't pin it on people. Maybe it's not a crime for you as a script kiddie to give scraping tips to Bradass87. But maybe if you did you might want to consider moving to Canada now.
***
Elsewhere in the news, I asked Adrian Lamo, the chat log hacker guy who is viewed as a snitch by his hacking community (to me, he was merely doing his proper duty to his country), what he thought about these WikiLeaks "revelations".
@6@aaronsw was likely rustling up those FOIAs to see what @VoxVictoria heard/said in the brig from Manning about the MIT hackers.
So far Heather's story is the most damning, because it in fact places Swartz in Boston and in contact with these people who met with Manning. He doesn't seem to say he met with Branning, and he does seem surprised about the connections and even begins demanding Mako explain why both Manning and Clark are on his LinkedIn; Mako said he didn't know him, Swartz objects and finds him with quick sleuthing. (Like reading the balloons in the Sims Online in 1999, you know? That's where it all began...)
Swartz seems surprised and then curious and persist -- Heather says this was part of his personality -- which I think he wouldn't have been if he had been at the same meeting with Clark and Manning. But...it's hard to tell. Maybe he was feigning ignorance to try to see what Mako would say.
BTW, if Mako gives a lecture on the work of the FSF and future enemy of the state Bradley Manning is in the audience eagerly taking notes, he hasn't committed a crime. I mean, it could be just like Greenglass' "Fat Man" sketch or something...
My ancestors spun looms at home or dug potatoes or peet in Ireland. In this country, they either worked their small family farms in Virginia or Kentucky or they ran a small tavern and inn on the wrong side of the tracks, where the whole family worked, serving the rail workers and traveling salesmen in Corry, Pennsylvania. One grandfather took care of horses and then cars at the Hotel Quebec.
Today, I often think that while a century or even two centuries separates us from our ancestors, we're not really substantively different. I still have to spin my Internet loom late into the night to write news copy for websites or translate articles or books; my aunt prepares book indexes; my brother fixes people's websites and servers. How different is it taking care of somebody's horse or car and taking care of somebody's web site or server? How different is working your fingers on a loom to spin thread or typing on a keyboard to spin words? My great uncle Ray died from a mule kick to the head on the family farm. When the power was knocked out for two weeks during Hurricane Sandy, I wondered what we would do if it stretched weeks -- our family farm of computers and a router burned out in the blackout were all we had to sustain us. A FEMA worker asked me if I had lost any "tools for work". "My router," I explained.
I've seen the nonprofit and news industry, where I used to readily find jobs, shrink to a fraction of its size. I don't whine about this because I've always adapted and done other kinds of consulting and of course translation. But I don't glamourize the new "work at home" online businesses and Internet-ized "sharing" businesses involving homes and cars and errands because I see they are never going to be a decent living. Only some people with already pre-existing assets are going to benefit, and the managers of them benefit most of all, with a huge discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of their Internet minions. Shouldn't all those Occupy Wall Streeters who couch-surf care more about this 1%?
Whimsley has had a very interesting discussion challenging the whole unregulated -- and unethical -- area of the Air BnB type of Internet-ized services and has even written an open letter challenging Timothy Wu who was touting them at the New York Times.
Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism is exactly the right title for this blog. Whimsley is more of a socialist or "progressive" than I am, certainly, so he approaches the problem of the Silicon Valley hustle from the perspective of the regulated social state -- what horrifies him more than the collectivization of private property involved in these entrepreneurial escapades is that the democratic state cannot properly control them so that people are not harmed. I agree regulation is needed, and I don't mind if the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which people regard as crooked because it charges huge fees for medallions, is the entity to regulate -- and therefore ban -- Uber. Uber was unconscionable during Sandy, gouging prices for rides like common Russian mafia karservisy. Disgraceful.
Paul Carr has a really great series of articles calling out these Internet thugs in Uber and the other businesses here,here and here. He calls out their Randian "Atlas Shrugs" attitude -- one blog is delightfully called "Asshole Shrugs". Myself, I call out their technocommunism. I don't favour Randianism at all, I just think the Leninist NEP that these entrepreneurs are hawking isn't an improvement over traditional free enterprise in a marketplace that in fact doesn't have to be over-regulated to still be under the rule of law and the courts. That's what bothers Whimsley as well.
Now comes Tomio Geron at Forbes touting "AirBnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy". The comments are filled with predictable snots who tell others to be disrupted and die while they make their fortunes, and Brazilian third-world sharers who sneer that those who can't accept sharing must "adapt". Ho hum, this is an old story played out in the Russian Revolution and lots of other revolutions.
So here's my intervention at Forbes:
Look, we are not glamorous, we Internet subsistence farmers, and
trying to pretend that the jobs that are going away for good are going
to be replaced by our Internet subsistence farming doesn’t impress us.
I might make my income each month by translating something online
from Russian for somebody in Vladivostok or an international agency in
another country, or copy-editing somebody’s film script within an hour
turn-around, or re-renting my Second Life servers and selling digital
furniture for avatars, or taking in revenue from Google from my blog
ads. The Future is Here! the Future is Now! Except, the future is
unevenly distributed. Whoop-de-doo. I’m poor.
I don’t have a car; I live in New York. I can’t rent out part of my
apartment — I’d lose my lease in a building where the landlord zealously
polices sublets and enforces them by video camera surveillance and
electronic card-entry to the building with cards that can only be issued
to paying tenants and approved residents. This Air bnb stuff is not a
plan for the third world; hell, it’s not even a plan for Rochester, MN
or Rochester, NY. It’s *just* a plan for sunny California where hipsters
have houses in Malibu and Prius cars that they can chop up,
collectivize and let the new oligarchs sell for them under this
technocommunist regime. The rest of us are going to be scratching in the
digital dust.
We can’t be unionized even by the freelancers’ unions — they require
letters from employers, and what, I’m supposed to get 100 letters a
month from people I did two pages of translation for or 20 minutes of
errands picking up an item they need or re-renting 1024 square meters of Second
Life server space for US $1.50 a month? Please. I’m all for
micropayments and Mechanical Turks, but you need to look at the nature
of the work and jobs on all these task rabbity sites — they are very,
very marginal and the only people who really make decent wages are
*coders*. Once again we are seeing geeks pretend that they are making a
Better World.
I’m not complaining — I chose my Internet subsistence farming after
the nonprofit I worked for failed with loss of funding after 9/11; I
chose it after my conventional media companies downsized because the
Internet killed them. I could be working at Home Depot and have health
insurance; instead, I chose this. It’s all good.
The most disturbing thing about this new collective farm where we
pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, however, are these new
oligarchs who make billions why we make 17 cents from somebody maybe
clicking on a belly fat ad.
Hey, when they’re ready to get out of the way and let their systems
be run by robots and in fact people like us, and get the tycoons and VCs
out of the way, maybe we can believe in their revolution. I don’t think
that will happen any time soon. Collectivization isn’t going to work in
the virtual world any better than it did in real life. I’m for free
enterprise. That’s not what this Brave New Internet World is. It’s
“capitalism for me, communism for thee”. It’s not just.
***
Then there's one person who thinks that the resistance to the "sharing economy" is about traditional "phobia" in America against communism and socialism and that technological advances will make this go away.
Nonsense. There’s a good reason for the ‘phobia’ about socialism and
communism in America — a lot of the people among the immigrant
populations know first hand about the horrors of mass murder under
communism and suppression of entrepreneurialism and human rights under
socialism. So they came here. They are telling the truth about communism
— she isn't.
In fact, the worst aspects of the collectivization we knew in real
life are in these digital services — the lack of accountability, the
lack of transparency, the ability of a few to exploit the labour of many
fervent collectivized believers who don’t have union benefits or
retirement plans but just get to chop up their personal property into
more and more time or space slivers.
Work on the Internet collective farm is not everything that it has cracked up to be. Write when you get work.
Some of the commenters at Forbes point out to the reputation management aspect and the "curation" or -- once again, the customer service state which would have to supervise that "curation" by the lovely commuuuuunity.
Here's the problem with having collective brow-beating to manage the collective. Group-think kicks in and fanboyz and the "community managers" -- not elected or accountable, but just corporate drones -- then become harsher and harsher trying to maintain order. We've all seen this in the virtual worlds and the game worlds -- this is going to be awful to watch as it leeches out into real life! Ugh...
Imagine if someone doesn't think the thread count on your Egyptian sheets or the view from your urban window is as wonderful as they thought seeing the picture, and they downrate you. Now you've gone from having a thrilling and fun sort of Internet hobby like that B 'n B you always dreamed of, to having some Internet dickwad threaten your livelihood because they arbitrarily leave a bad comment. You have nowhere to go for adjudication or fairness because the company will not care or have the resources to manage these things. It will be like "Rate my Professor" on steroids. Your only hope, like on Amazon or ebay, is that after enough sales, you could right the bad rep some thin-skinned nerd has given you.
The worst thing I saw at the beginning of Air BnB was that when a woman wanted to protest the horrible thing that happened to her, where lowlifes who rented her place set up a meth lab and stole and wrecked her stuff, was that Robert Scoble told her she was whining and to shut up -- the company was just getting its next round of VC cash and this was more important to nurture than responding to the complaints of one disgruntled customer. The company at first ignored her. She had to shout and shout and scream and put up with the nastiness of the Internet boys on TechCrunch and such until she finally started to get normal mainstream press attention and the company had to turn around on her case and make it good. They did, to their credit, but you got a sense of just how hard it is to challenge these Silicon Valley favourites and their horrid fanboyz with high traffic and views in the tech blogosphere. It was impossible to be heard above the noise when I tried to criticize Uber in New York -- I was hated on and drowned out on TechCrunch. It took Paul Carr from the alternative Pando Daily to get heard with these same kinds of obvious concerns anyone would have.
Meanwhile, without a car or a rentable apartment what assets do I have to rent out timeshares on? Would anyone like a dilapidated pepper plant half-eaten by a cat to grace their home temporarily and give it that lived-in look? How about a shelf of do-gooder and idealistic books that will make you seem intellectual? Say, need two well-mannered and drug-free teenagers that wash their own dishes and actually pick up their rooms? Okay just kidding.
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