Month: January 2014

Her research for the book has involved hours upon hours of talk­ing with peo­ple about con­ver­sa­tion as well as eaves­drop­ping on con­ver­sa­tions: the kind of low-grade spy­ing that in acad­e­mia is known as “ethnog­ra­phy,” that in jour­nal­ism is known as “report­ing,” and that every­where else is known as “pay­ing attention.”

She advo­cates lim­it­ing our device usage in “sacred spaces” like the din­ner table, the places where phones and their entice­ments may impede inti­ma­cy and inter­ac­tion. She wants us to look into each other’s eyes as we talk. She wants us to read each other’s move­ments. She wants us to have con­ver­sa­tions that are supreme­ly human.

You can’t always tell, in a con­ver­sa­tion, when the inter­est­ing bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like danc­ing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems bor­ing, but all of a sud­den there’s some­thing, and whoa.

Because many slaves had their his­to­ry erased by their own­ers when they were brought to Amer­i­ca from Africa cen­turies ago, Afro­fu­tur­ism emerged in 20th-Cen­tu­ry music, film, art and lit­er­a­ture and point­ed this exiled cul­ture in a new direc­tion: the future. In this view, Africans are the alien ‘oth­er’ in West­ern soci­ety, stig­ma­tized as out­casts, who must build bridges in their imag­i­na­tions to a new utopia, pos­si­bly far removed geo­graph­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly from the world that is mar­gin­al­iz­ing them.

The direc­tion of social hous­ing pol­i­cy since 1979 has been grad­u­al­ly to remove the state from the busi­ness of build­ing hous­es, and now grad­u­al­ly to remove the state from the busi­ness of sub­si­dis­ing rent. You can imag­ine free mar­ke­teers believ­ing the mar­ket can house the poor in decent com­fort with­out the bet­ter-off being forced to chip in, although there is no evi­dence that it can. This is the benign view of the Thatcherites’ motive. But it is eas­i­er to believe that the actu­al inten­tion – not for­mal­ly designed in some con­spir­a­to­r­i­al way, and nev­er open­ly described as such – is to demon­e­tise that part of gen­er­al tax­a­tion on the well-off that goes towards evening things out for the poor and replac­ing it with a tax in kind, a tax on con­science. To per­mit the grad­ual re-emer­gence of slums, in oth­er words, in order to keep income and cor­po­ra­tion tax low, and to make the threat to the well-off an eas­i­ly ignored threat to their con­science, rather than to their wealth. To set­tle for his­to­ry as wheel rather than ascent, in which it will even­tu­al­ly be time for Dick­ens to come around again.

On the oth­er hand, no one — not even Yellin — is quite sure why there are so many alt­gen­res that fea­ture Ray­mond Burr and Bar­bara Hale. It’s inex­plic­a­ble with human log­ic. It’s just some­thing that hap­pened. I tried on a bunch of dif­fer­ent names for the Per­ry Mason thing: ghost, grem­lin, not-quite-a-bug. What do you call the some­thing-in-the-code-and-data which led to the exis­tence of these micro­gen­res? The vex­ing, remark­able con­clu­sion is that when com­pa­nies com­bine human intel­li­gence and machine intel­li­gence, some things hap­pen that we can­not under­stand. “Let me get philo­soph­i­cal for a minute. In a human world, life is made inter­est­ing by serendip­i­ty,” Yellin told me. “The more com­plex­i­ty you add to a machine world, you’re adding serendip­i­ty that you couldn’t imag­ine. Per­ry Mason is going to hap­pen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-prod­uct of the com­plex­i­ty. And some­times we call it a bug and some­times we call it a feature.”

We’re gonna tag how much romance is in a movie. We’re not gonna tell you how much romance is in it, but we’re gonna rec­om­mend it,” Yellin said. “You’re gonna get an action row and it may have more or less romance in it based on what we know about you.” […] They could have pure­ly used com­pu­ta­tion. For exam­ple, look­ing at peo­ple with sim­i­lar view­ing habits and rec­om­mend­ing movies based on what they watched. (And Net­flix does use this kind of data, too.) But they went beyond that approach to look at the con­tent itself. “It’s a real com­bi­na­tion: machine-learned, algo­rithms, algo­rith­mic syn­tax,” Yellin said, “and also a bunch of geeks who love this stuff going deep.

In a healthy medi­um you have artists push­ing the lim­its,” he says. “Most of them push in the wrong direc­tion and fail. Every now and again some­one push­es in an inter­est­ing direc­tion and every­one fol­lows. It’s not hap­pen­ing in games, apart from indies. Of course, most of their stuff is crap. But every now and again some­one comes along with some­thing that is new, dif­fer­ent and interesting.

There aren’t real­ly good lan­guages for non-com­mod­i­ty, non-sac­ri­fi­cial acts. A task of our time might be to free the aes­thet­ic from its com­plic­i­ty with com­mod­i­ty forms, even atten­u­at­ed ones, and prac­tice it again, in the every­day, as a sen­si­bil­i­ty of the gift. Art is Xmas. The art not of signs but of rit­u­als. The art of with­draw­ing the hand that gives and leav­ing just the gift as given.