I heard quite a remarkable story from a friend who goes by the name PhilipinNYC who posts on Talking Point Memo.
You know that cover of the New Yorker for August 5, with the failed, scandal-ridden mayor candidate Anthony Weiner astride the Empire State Building, the top of which serves as a phallic symbol? The artist is John Cuneo.
Weiner's got an i-phone in one hand and a glazed look in his eye and something in his right hand...you have to peer at it, but it's the slim top of the Empire State building -- the radio tower part -- snapped off. And the way it's drawn, it looks like a hypodermic needle.
So the message -- and it takes awhile to get it if you don't figure out right away that the snapped-off tower is a hypodermic needle -- is that Weiner suffers from sex addition over the Internet because he couldn't stop himself from sexting with young women even though it was costing him his career.
He had amazingly made a come-back that possibly he might have pulled off, given how cynical New Yorkers can be (and how much money was invested in his campaign chest already), but astoundingly, the news got out that he hadn't quit when he said he did. I guess he's cooked.
All well and good -- it's a great cover that really picks up the zeitgeist. Like a lot of good New Yorker art it has funny and serious elements -- that Empire-Building-as-phallic symbol, of course, and those police helicopters zooming in on him like he's King Kong. The funny bits contrast with that queasy feeling you get from thinking about someone being sex-addicted via their i-phone and unable to stop even if they were losing a chance at running the media capital of the world. Instead, Weiner had become the story...
Well, apparently, Apple found out about this art work in the making -- God knows how -- and acording to PhilipinNYC, hours before the magazine went to press, had their lawyers call the New Yorker's editors to complain about this widely-visible artistic setting for their product.
!!!
They didn't like the idea of their product being featured as something differing little a hypodermic needle -- although I think most people would have to admit that "addiction" is how they might describe their own constant handling and checking of their i-phone, even if they don't take pictures of their bits and tweet them around.
(You weren't going to mistake that syringe for a stylus on some old-fashioned Blackberry; although the smart phone could have been any brand...in fact it did look unmistakeably like an i-phone.)
This seems like an incredibly inappropriate thing for Apple to be doing, but they seem to be in crisis lately.
In any event, the New Yorker told Apple to fuck off, they were exercising their First Amendment right to put any damn cartoon they wanted to on the cover of their magazine.
My friend's post is behind some sort of TPM Prime wall, but in part he says about the cover:
In one hand Mr. Weiner is holding a cell phone, in the other he is holding the building's antenna, broken off of its perch. In his hand the antenna looks like a syringe, making clear that the root of the whole sad sexting story is Mr. Weiner's sex addiction.I have learned that in the final hours before going to press the New Yorker was contacted by Apple Computer. Yes, Apple.
Apple found the image problematic. This generated a flurry attorney action. In the end the New Yorker told Apple that its cover was none of the computer maker's damn business, and the cover ran.
My friend thinks this is about Silicon Valley becoming the new Spanish Inquisition, "Goodbye Rome, Hello Cupertino," he quips.
But, it's actually more complex than that. This is about a whole campaign that has gone on for the last 10-15 years -- a march through the institutions, if you will, or a demolition of the institutions -- of Silicon Valley against the East Coast establishment media. The need to control the media to control the politics, and they are no longer content to make the gadgets for power-holders, they want to hold power themselves. They want their agenda -- whether it's anti-CISPA, kill the NSA, impose net neutrality, good relations with China and Russia so they can keep supplying their companies with cheap labour overseas and migrant programmers who come here -- and so on.
The demolition of the old East Coast old boys' network of media establishments seems nearly complete -- the New York Times sold the Boston Globe but then we don't know what its next move might be to ensure its future.
Remember, Craigslist essentially destroyed an important part of the New York Times and other newspapers' revenue stream by offering free classified ads for everyone but charging for prostitutes' ads -- which the good newspapers wouldn't run. The Internet completely eroded the old newspaper media as we all know by moving news online where it could be easily copied and disseminated.
When you go back and look at that famous Youtube video of the 1981 TV newscast about the first newspaper printing out over the early Internet, you realize what's going on -- the coders had to make their own considerable costs as programmers, and the equipments' considerable cost, and the lines' considerable cost, go away somehow to get the whole Internet off the ground. Their costs had to be diguised or had to disappear. So the pressure then went on the content -- the newspaper itself. That had to be offered free, as a loss-leader to get people to start buying desktop computers (costly) and using them to download or read newspapers and other content. Voila...
More obviously, Silicon Valley is buying out the dying media. Facebook tycoon Chris Hughes bought out The New Republic, and made himself editor.
That's not usually done -- but it shows you the mad desire for control these people have. Ever since, it has not only lurched to the "progressive" left even further, it has taken obvious positions for net neutrality, against SOPA, sympathetic to Google issues and so on. No harsh critique of Edward Snowden there, just mild stuff from Julia Ioffe.
This was one of the major disappointments of my life -- the New Republic was always my intellectual home for decades, and now I am driven away.
Then of course we learned today that Citizen Bezos has bought out The Washington Post for only $250 million, a quarter of what Facebook paid for Instagram, the Instagram that Carlos Danger might have used to tart up his sexting.
I wonder why Pando Daily didn't get this story...why no one is following up...why the Apple-haters that are out in greater force now haven't retweeted it...and I guess it's because some stories just get a lot of help getting buried. I quizzed PhilipinNYC about the source and he would only say that the source was definitely unhappy about his leak to TPM...
In the past, I've found the anti-fanboyz hype about purported Apple "censorship" to always be less than meets the eye -- like Anil Dash's claim that Apple "censored journalism about religion" -- by which he meant the intifada app that incited hate against Israel. Or Rebecca MacKinnon's misleading claim of "censorship of Ulysses" in the app store -- which in the end was resolved by Apple anyway.
But this story is different, if Apple is going outside its own cyber-realm of product and content and now banging on old media...
Recent Comments