Josh Poehlein:

Modern History is a series of collages assembled exclusively from screen grabs of Youtube videos.

See also:

One person called me “Jesus of YouTube.” I don’t think that’s right but it’s a good feeling.

From the archive:

Feedback is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.

Modern History

Howard Gossage:

It is so strange that billboards exist at all that the current controversy about whether outdoor advertising should be allowed along federal highways achieves the unreality of a debate on whether witch burning should be permitted in critical fire areas. Apparently no one has thought to wonder just what in the hell billboards are doing anywhere.

The automobile: the very thing that made possible outdoor advertising’s greatest prosperity also contained the germ of its certain doom. The billboard, you might say, is dying of success. If only the horse had never been replaced, outdoor advertising, in modest flower, might have been tolerated indefinitely.

Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter.

See also:

This odious billboard appears in my town, encouraging me to rat on my neighbours because I don't understand what they throw away.

Two from the archive:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important!

EyeTap technology comprises eyeglasses or contact lenses that cause the eye itself to function, in effect, as if it were both a camera and a display.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

How To Look At Billboards

Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, and Carole Lucock:

During the past decade, rapid developments in information and communications technology have transformed key social, commercial, and political realities. Within that same time period, working at something less than Internet speed, much of the academic and policy debate arising from these new and emerging technologies has been fragmented. There have been few examples of interdisciplinary dialogue about the importance and impact of anonymity and privacy in a networked society. Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society fills that gap, and examines key questions about anonymity, privacy, and identity in an environment that increasingly automates the collection of personal information and relies upon surveillance to promote private and public sector goals.

This book has been informed by the results of a multi-million dollar research project that has brought together a distinguished array of philosophers, ethicists, feminists, cognitive scientists, lawyers, cryptographers, engineers, policy analysts, government policy makers, and privacy experts. Working collaboratively over a four-year period and participating in an iterative process designed to maximize the potential for interdisciplinary discussion and feedback through a series of workshops and peer review, the authors have integrated crucial public policy themes with the most recent research outcomes.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

David Barrett:

A European Union directive will require all internet service providers to retain information on email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls made over the internet, for 12 months.

Lessons From the Identity Trail

Benjamin Wayne:

YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back to earth. Despite massive growth, ubiquitous global brand awareness, presidential endorsement, and the world’s greatest repository of illegally-pirated video content, Google’s massive video folly is on life-support, and the prognosis is grave.

Rattle:

I think Decius and I should start to practice claiming that MemeStreams is worth four billion while keeping a straight face.

Be advised:

We should probably tell you that the full title of this game is Zombies! Apocalypse - Massive Multiplayer Online Zombies Massacre, even though that's basically given away the point of it all.

Decius:

Ultimately, content is not king, and filters are not king. Bandwidth, and the money that funds it, is king. There will be as many social frameworks as there are societies. There will be many content producers, a small number of which will make money. But the market will only sustain a few free video hosting systems. Its not about production cost or end user value. It's about marginal cost. You can copy a floppy but you can't copy a server.

YouTube Is Doomed

Kacie Kinzer:

In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

From the archive:

Is possibly noteworthy possibly a bot?

I always assumed he was a grad student.

Either the most prolific grad student ever, or possibly the single greatest purveyor of procrastination known to man.

We are all going to die. And for some of us ... it's the damned robots that are going to do it.

Oh how silly. The obvious application for this technology is robots that eat people. Duh.

Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future.

Feedback is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.

It is a short step from discovering that the world we know is a fake or a cheat to discovering that human beings are themselves factitious: that we are robots, ‘simulacra’ (the title of one of Dick’s novels), ‘just reflex machines’, ‘repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over’ in accordance with biological or economic ukases. Where other SF asks whether made-up entities (aliens, androids, emoting computers etc) deserve the respect we give real human beings, Dick more often asks whether we ought to view ourselves as fakes or machines.

Tweenbots

Phillip Swagel:

This paper reviews the events associated with the credit market disruption that began in August 2007 and developed into a full-blown crisis in the fall of 2008. This is necessarily an incomplete history: the paper is being written in the months immediately after I left Treasury, where I served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy from December 2006 to the end of the Bush administration on January 20, 2009.

The focus here is on key decisions made at Treasury with respect to housing and financial markets policies, and on the constraints faced by decision makers at Treasury and other agencies over this period. I will focus on broad policy matters and economic decisions and not go into the financial details of transactions such as with the GSEs and AIG. A key point of emphasis is to explain constraints on the policy process -- legal, political, and otherwise -- that were perhaps not readily apparent to outsiders such as academic economists or financial market participants.

Some steps that are attractive in principle turn out to be impractical in reality -- with two key examples being the notion of forcing debt-for-equity swaps to address debt overhangs and forcing banks to accept government capital. These both run hard afoul of the constraint that there is no legal mechanism to make them happen. A lesson for academics is that any time the word "force" is used as a verb ("the policy should be to force banks to do X or Y"), the next sentence should set forth the section of the U.S. legal code that allows such a course of action -- otherwise, the policy suggestion is of theoretical but not practical interest.

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.

From Decius, last November:

If we have a bunch of people waltzing into the whitehouse who do not appreciate the full implications of the use of the word "require" by a policy maker, we are in very serious trouble.

The Financial Crisis: An Inside View

Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith explain why the housing crash ruined the financial system but the dot-com collapse did not:

Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system.

It appears that both the Great Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consumer debt -- especially mortgage debt -- that was transmitted into the financial sector during a sharp downturn.

It appears that we're witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.

How can one crash that wipes out $10 trillion in assets cause no damage to the financial system and another that causes $3 trillion in losses devastate the financial system?

In the equities-market downturn early in this decade, declining assets were held by institutional and individual investors that either owned the assets outright, or held only a small fraction on margin, so losses were absorbed by their owners. In the current crisis, declining housing assets were often, in effect, purchased between 90% and 100% on margin.

From last November, Decius:

It seems to me that something, and I don't know what, happened around 1995 that vastly increased the rate of investment in the stock market. I'd really like to know exactly what that was.

From the archive:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

What Marge really wanted to try was to sell real estate. Her propensity for honesty proved to be her downfall.

From Bubble to Depression?

Margaret Atwood:

These are not lectures about how to get out of debt; rather, they’re about the debtor/creditor twinship in the broadest sense – from human sacrifice to pawnshops to revenge. In this light, what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.

From the archive, Alberto Manguel's Massey Lectures:

The end of ethnic nationalism, building societies around sets of common values, seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong.

Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood | CBC Radio | Ideas | Massey Lectures

Jacob Weisberg riffs on Dyson:

A lot of our premises have turned out to be wrong lately.

Those who challenged the groupthink tended to be dismissed as provocateurs, wackos, or worse.

So at a moment when everything we once assumed seems suddenly up for discussion, it may be worth asking the question: What other big stuff could we be wrong about?

Freeman Dyson:

I beseech you, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible you may be mistaken.

Paul Graham:

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it.

From a discussion here last month:

I don't mean to agitate, but it's interesting how the public demand for honesty and realism appears to be inversely proportional to the performance of the major indexes. In 2007, when the Dow first broke 12600, I doubt many people were saying: "after a fifty percent increase in the 'value' of the economy it's about damn time these people stopped blowing smoke and come clean about what the situation is so that the rest of us can make informed decisions." And the few people who asked such questions found themselves the laughingstock of Wall Street and Main Street alike.

What Else Are We Wrong About?

Ashby Jones:

How do social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace fit within the world of privacy law? Are such sites private rooms in which one can pen his or her internal thoughts without fear of others misappropriating such thoughts? Or are such sites really just bulletin boards for the world?

An appellate court in California weighed in on the issue on Friday, and basically sided with the bulletin-board position.

This case seems pretty cut-and-dry, so the verdict is unsurprising. A more interesting test case would involve the public redistribution of content that the author/creator did not make generally available.

From the archive, Decius:

In my view the combined effect of the third-party doctrine, which states that what you tell Google you've told the government, and the notion that machines cannot violate your privacy, will enable the rise of a total surveillance society in which everyone is watched by law enforcement all the time.

MySpace a Bulletin Board, Not Private Room, Says California Court