In interviews, several high-level music executives said they operated in fear of Apple’s removing a label’s products from the iTunes store.

One result of the dicey relationship is the increasing search by the music industry for a future in which Apple is not so dominant. Many executives say they believe the future of music buying is over the mobile phone, not from buying individual songs but by paying a monthly subscription fee to hear a vast database of music.

Steve Jobs, in 2003:

"We told the record companies the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. People don't want to buy their music as a subscription."

From April 2004:

Subscription services have the potential to change the way you think about music. Not everyone is ready to face that possibility.

From April 2004:

Lessig asserts that over time, more and more people will opt to pay for music subscription services.

From February 2007:

Rhapsody, not iTunes, in my opinion, is the future of music.

From September 2007:

Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.

From last month:

The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.

Music Labels Still Fret

Emma Rothschild, in The New York Review of Books:

The present and impending disorder of the automobile companies is a reminder, even more than the decline of the housing and banking industries, of the desolation of the Great Depression.

A bailout that includes no more than a commitment to fuel efficiency, or to electric vehicles, would be a denial of the administration's commitments to respond to climate change. The idyll of plug-in hybrids is also the promise of a high-energy society, in which the auto-industrial organization of space, or of transport-intensive growth, is set in concrete for another generation, or longer. It is frightening in relation to the US, and a dystopia in relation to the world.

An enduring bailout, or a new deal for Detroit, would be different. It would be an investment in ending the auto-industrial society of the late twentieth century.

A year ago:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

Also, from a year ago:

China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates.

From the archive, Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Finally, Ed Burtynsky:

"I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?"

Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?

Norm Augustine on economic depression and Obamania.

Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.

Most projects start out slowly, and then sort of taper off.

Augustine's Laws

Some caution that President Obama’s proposals try to achieve too many objectives at the expense of focusing tax dollars on the core issue of job creation.

In April, the recession would become the longest since the 1930s.

“We are in the thick of it now,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist for ITG Investment Technology Group.

Regarding the public:

My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh,
I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.

Regarding Obama:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Recall Sequoia:

Get Real or Go Home.

Two quick reminders from Peter Schiff:

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things.

I think things are going to get very bad.

We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.

All Under the Umbrella of Job Creation

Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” on Thursday for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating and the government was spending billions to bail out some of the nation’s most prominent financial institutions.

Obama was reacting to a report by the New York State comptroller that found financial executives had received an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008, less than for the previous several years but the same level of bonuses as they received in 2004, when times were flush.

I find this justification puzzling. The implication is that the bonuses were justified in 2004. But the malpractice was going on all along. Why is it only now that the bonuses are shameful? Fraud is fraud. To even invoke these sorts of year-over-year comparisons is to accept the existence of a "reasonable" bonus total for 2008.

It's not like the earnings in 2004 were perfectly honest, and so bonuses were justified, but then starting in 2005, some people started to go rogue. The reason why "times were flush" in 2004 was because people were still foolishly pouring their money into the scheme. But it's been the same scheme all along. By 2004, the bubble was quite well inflated.

From the archive, Niall Ferguson:

This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part.

Finally, to clarify a point of usage. I would argue that Obama's use of "shameful" is misdirected. The bankers themselves are clearly shameless. It is their actions which are shameful. But only the naive could expect a public display of shame from bankers. Even Madoff did not apologize to his investors.

A recollection:

On August 5, 1981, President Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and banned them from federal service for three years. They were replaced initially with nonparticipating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some nonrated personnel, and in some cases by controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. Some military controllers were also used until replacements could be trained. The union was decertified on October 22, 1981.

Shame - NYTimes.com

The economic crisis doesn’t really scare the people who still practice haute couture, that small, vanishing world of embroiderers, dyers and feathermakers who serve the imagination of the few remaining couturiers. Asked if the economy was having an effect on the spring couture season, Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel said, “Only on the conversation.”

A decade ago, Pierre Bergé, the former chairman of Yves Saint Laurent, summed up the contemporary problem of couture when he called it “the opposite of a business.” Even though people recognize the marketing value of an extravagant couture show, they find it harder and harder to grasp its real value, which is to make exquisite, one-of-a-kind clothes using all the various needle crafts.

A decade from now, if there are more than two or three houses still producing twice-yearly haute couture collections, it will be surprising.

Mr. Lagerfeld is a complete antique in that he doesn’t use a word processor — and all the clothes were white or black and white. What made the show a rare pleasure was Mr. Lagerfeld’s supreme ability to concentrate on a single idea and find endless ways to express it.

He was like a fly that landed on a leaf and surveyed all. But the leaf told him everything.

From the archive:

The sheer amount of sewing done by gentlewomen in those days sometimes takes us moderns aback, but it would probably generally be a mistake to view it either as merely constant joyless toiling, or as young ladies turning out highly embroidered ornamental knicknacks to show off their elegant but meaningless accomplishments.

Look your best.

Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like.

A final thought:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Courage - NYTimes.com

RIP.

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of among American men of letters, died on Tuesday. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

“I like middles,” he said. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

From the archive, Teresa DiFalco:

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Carolyn Johnson:

Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Here are a few mentions of Updike on MemeStreams:

John Updike reviews Free Life

DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism. By John Updike, on the notable books list for 2007

Reviews of Updike's Terrorist in The Village Voice and LA Weekly

Check out his many contributions to the New York Review of Books, from 1973 up to October 2008.

John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary, Is Dead at 76

George Friedman analyzes the Uncoupling in his weekly report.

Most important, what is the relationship between the war against the Taliban and the war against al Qaeda? Does the United States need to succeed against the Taliban to be successful against transnational Islamist terrorists?

In contrast to Coll, he sees the Taliban as essentially Afghan:

It is important to remember that al Qaeda was separate from the Taliban; the former was a multinational force, while the Taliban were an internal Afghan political power.

He writes about the Taliban's hold on the people:

The tribes have long memories, and they know that foreigners don’t stay very long. Betting on the United States and Karzai does not strike them as prudent.

To anyone still harboring hopes of Victory, he is conclusive:

There is no conceivable force the United States can deploy to pacify Afghanistan.

The United States can exhaust itself attacking minor targets based on poor intelligence. It won’t get anywhere.

Needless to say Friedman is skeptical of the emerging Obama/Petraeus Afghan surge. Ultimately the only workable strategy is Uncoupling:

We expect that the United States will separate the two conflicts. The cost of failure in Afghanistan is simply too high and the connection to counterterrorist activities too tenuous for the two strategies to be linked.

Strategic Divergence: The War Against the Taliban and the War Against Al Qaeda

Last week, I commented on the following statement in Obama's inaugural address:

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.

On the same day, Steve Coll wrote:

It is not hard to imagine the marginalia that produced this slightly odd language. “To Speechwriting: No more ‘victories,’ please.”

Also, “peace” has a pleasing relationship with “stability,” which is emerging as the realist, scaled-down, but nonetheless daunting goal in Afghanistan among many foreign-policy types who, for one reason or another, believe that the United States ought to trim its ambitions in that country to match our resources and abilities.

Regarding the strategy of Uncoupling, Coll is critical:

This line of thinking has obvious appeal after the Bush Administration’s policies of operatic overreach, but it is erroneous for two reasons.

First, the Taliban are not indigenous to Afghanistan—their history and their present strength cannot be assessed in isolation from their relationship with the Pakistani state and other radical elements inside Pakistan. They are partially an Afghan problem and increasingly a Pakistani problem, too.

Second, the Taliban are now so large and diverse, and have been so much changed by the international environment in which they fight today, that to generalize about their strategic intentions is to, well, guess, as we did, unsuccessfully, in the run up to September 11th.

Steve Coll, on "Hard-Earned Peace" and the Uncoupling

Carl Zimmer, in Discover Magazine:

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

The mind is a store of knowledge you can dip into, an external repository of information.

The US Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover. The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies.

There’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections.

From the archive, Marshall McLuhan:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

McLuhan again:

In operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed.

Jeff Leeds, in conversation with Sasha Frere-Jones:

I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

WSJ, in 2007:

If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorstep of a Marshall McLuhan-meets-Milton Friedman world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren't the only empires at risk.

Howard Rheingold:

I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority.

Eric McLuhan:

The new media won't fit into the classroom. It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.

How Google Is Making Us Smarter