Jonathanperrine

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Read this if you want to stay out of jail.

When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he'd been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn't the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely -- even though the website didn't want to press the matter -- the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to "exceed your authorization" on any online service.

The DoJ reasoned that if the law said that doing anything "unauthorized" was a crime, and if the long, gnarly hairball of legalese that no one reads before clicking "I agree" set out what you were allowed to do, then violations of that "agreement" were a felony.

Aaron's death galvanized some Congresscritters to do something about this oversight. The ancient CFAA predated the widespread use of terms of service in everyday activities like hanging out with your friends, reading the newspaper, getting an education or signing up for a dating service. Congress did not intend to create a situation where companies that provided services could put any unreasonable condition they wanted into an "agreement" you might never see ("By using this website, you accept all terms and conditions") and then ask the DoJ to put people in prison for decades if they violated them.

The reform to CFAA was welcome and long overdue. But the DoJ has asked some members of the House Judiciary Committee to make it worse.

Under the amendments, which might be voted on as early as April 10, violating terms of service could be defined as racketeering -- so that you could be prosecuted as though your violation of terms of service made you into a mobster.

They also add "conspiring" to violate terms of service to the list of offenses that are a felony under the CFAA. So you can be thrown in jail just for talking about ways to violate terms of service.

The amendments also make it a felony to obtain information that you are entitled to obtain, if you do so in a way that violates terms of service. My wife and I share some online accounts, including our "family" airmiles account with British Airways, which we both contribute to and use, but only my wife can see the details of them (she signed up for the service, so it's linked to her login). We're both entitled to see those details, but poor service design makes it impossible to do this without sharing a login and password. No problem, except that BA's terms of service forbid this. So looking up my own airmiles, which I earned, and which I'm entitled to see and use, would be a felony under these amendments because I was looking at them in a way that violates BA's terms.

The amendments also include increased powers for seizure of property, which will enable the Feds to take away the assets you might use to defend yourself against a CFAA claim.

This is a trainwreck. It will allow the DoJ to put every single American Internet user in prison at their discretion, because we all violate terms of service every day. For example, Seventeen magazine's terms of service forbid you from visiting its website if you're under eighteen (!), and that means that its 4.5 million underage readers would all be felons under the CFAA, and liable to decades in prison.

The fact that Congress is contemplating this is a testament to its awful authoritarian venality. The fact that they're doing it as part of a reform triggered by Aaron's death is a fucking travesty.

Aaron helped design the widgets that put through 8,000,000 phone calls to Congress about the awfulness of SOPA and killed legislation that everyone on the inside considered unstoppable. Now, Demand Progress -- the group Aaron helped found -- has got another "Tell Congress" widget, which we've embedded for today. You can (and should) embed it too. You can get your own at FixTheCFAA.com, along with a cute tool to put your social media profile photo behind bars and let your friends know what's going on.

Today, we save the Internet. Again.

Demand Justice for Aaron Swartz

Well, that escalated quickly. First, Japanese schoolgirls started uploading photos of faux Dragon Ball moves. Then, Westerners replied with Star Wars style Force Grips. And now?

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The cities of River Rouge, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, have been unable to find the source of a mysterious hum emanating from Zug Island. One documentary filmmaker is picking up the reins on the investigation, if he can get a little funding help. You can also help fund a LEGO artist this week, a man on a mission to sculpt a futuristic vision of peace and alien contact in the medium of interlocking plastic bricks.

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A new ACLU report called The Outskirts of Hope (PDF) documents the rise of illegal debtors prisons in Ohio. A majority of municipal and mayors' courts (an unregulated and rare system of courts only permitted in two states) surveyed by the ACLU routinely imprison people for their inability to pay fines, a practice banned in both the US and state constitution. 20 percent of the bookings in the Huron County Jail are "related to failure to pay fines."

Taking care of a fine is straightforward for some Ohioans — having been convicted of a criminal or traffic offense and sentenced to pay a fine, an affluent defendant may simply pay it and go on with his or her life. For Ohio’s poor and working poor, by contrast, an unaffordable fine is just the beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines.

The U.S. Constitution, the Ohio Constitution, and Ohio Revised Code all prohibit debtors’ prisons. The law requires that, before jailing anyone for unpaid fines, courts must determine whether an individual is too poor to pay. Jailing a person who is unable to pay violates the law, and yet municipal courts and mayors’ courts across the state continue this draconian practice. Moreover, debtors’ prisons actually waste taxpayer dollars by arresting and incarcerating people who will simply never be able to pay their fines, which are in any event usually smaller than the amount it costs to arrest and jail them.

The report documents heartbreaking cases, like Samantha Reed and John Bundren, a couple with a nine-month-old who were both ordered to pay fines they can't afford. John diverts whatever seasonal/part time wages he earns to Samantha's fines so she can look after their baby, while he goes to jail for ten-day stretches for failure to make payments. They are effectively indigent, but are not given access to counsel when they appear in court over their debts.

(via Reddit)

Polish leatherworker MK makes some very nice wrist-straps for pocket-watches and car-watches. He's not the only one making these, but I find them particularly handsome, and rather nice retro-modern take on the massive wristwatch phenomenon.

Wristbands for pocket watches. (Thanks, Nic!)

Other than distracting evildoers, skimpy outfits just don't work well in combat. So, artist Michael Lee Lunsford has taken it upon himself to create costumes for "reasonably dressed" superheroines:

Point of this: An exercise in character design, attempting to clothe the heroines nearly all the way and not making them painted-on, while still keeping the look of their original costumes in some way. Hopefully keeping them looking as iconic as the originally were. Just showing what can be done with a costume breaking outside the barrier of the norm.

NOT the point of this: some moral code I’m trying to push on you

Link - via core77

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Last day at Skeptech! Come see me!

Thomas Homer-Dixon has a must-read op-ed in the NY Times today, “The Tar Sands Disaster.”

The Canadian author and scholar argues, “stopping Keystone XL would be a major step toward stopping large-scale environmental destruction, the distortion of Canada’s economy and the erosion of its democracy.”

Here’s why almost 42% of Canadians oppose the pipeline, why many “want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy”:

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.

Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.

There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.

Everyone knows the tar sands are an eco-disaster (see “New Analysis Shows Simple Math: Keystone XL Pipeline = Tar Sands Expansion = Accelerated Climate Change“).

But Canada is becoming like a petro-state? Homer-Dixon explains how “the tar sands industry is undermining Canadian democracy”:

Countries with huge reserves of valuable natural resources often suffer from economic imbalances and boom-bust cycles. They also tend to have low-innovation economies, because lucrative resource extraction makes them fat and happy, at least when resource prices are high.

Canada is true to type. When demand for tar sands energy was strong in recent years, investment in Alberta surged. But that demand also lifted the Canadian dollar, which hurt export-oriented manufacturing in Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Then, as the export price of Canadian heavy crude softened in late 2012 and early 2013, the country’s economy stalled.

Canada’s record on technical innovation, except in resource extraction, is notoriously poor. Capital and talent flow to the tar sands, while investments in manufacturing productivity and high technology elsewhere languish.

But more alarming is the way the tar sands industry is undermining Canadian democracy. By suggesting that anyone who questions the industry is unpatriotic, tar sands interest groups have made the industry the third rail of Canadian politics.

The current Conservative government holds a large majority of seats in Parliament but was elected in 2011 with only 40 percent of the vote, because three other parties split the center and left vote. The Conservative base is Alberta, the province from which Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his allies hail. As a result, Alberta has extraordinary clout in federal politics, and tar sands influence reaches deep into the federal cabinet.

Both the cabinet and the Conservative parliamentary caucus are heavily populated by politicians who deny mainstream climate science. The Conservatives have slashed financing for climate science, closed facilities that do research on climate change, told federal government climate scientists not to speak publicly about their work without approval and tried, unsuccessfully, to portray the tar sands industry as environmentally benign.

The federal minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, has attacked “environmental and other radical groups” working to stop tar sands exports. He has focused particular ire on groups getting money from outside Canada, implying that they’re acting as a fifth column for left-wing foreign interests. At a time of widespread federal budget cuts, the Conservatives have given Canada’s tax agency extra resources to audit registered charities. It’s widely assumed that environmental groups opposing the tar sands are a main target.

This coercive climate prevents Canadians from having an open conversation about the tar sands. Instead, our nation behaves like a gambler deep in the hole, repeatedly doubling down on our commitment to the industry.

Gosh, that sounds familiar. Guess there are two petro-states in North America.

Related Posts:

• Must-See Video On The True Cost of Tar Sands
• Study Finds Tar Sands Has Higher CO2 Emissions Than Thought, Calls Land Restoration Pledge ‘Greenwashing’

 

Rob Fan, CTO of Sharethrough, recently gave a great talk at the Lean Startup Circle on “Sustaining Disruption: How to Balance Innovation & Early Growth“. Rob spoke about the difference between sustainable and disruptive innovation and the importance of maintaining a balance of both in the progression of a company of any size.

Today’s startups are challenging many traditionally established companies with a healthy dose of disruptive innovation. Larger organizations cannot often effectively respond since it requires diverting resources from their established products, markets and customers. If unable to find ways to continually innovate and improve their offerings, established companies run the risk of flat lining their revenue streams as doing what they already do offers less and less bang for the buck over time.

Sharethrough has already developed a successful business by finding an innovative approach to native placements for online video advertising and is proactively looking at new ways to innovate in their market. Given the need to support their existing successful offering and the difficulties of moving resources and altering revenue streams, an über lean team of one started a skunk works project that quickly gained internal support. Sharethrough asked Carbon Five to help turn their fledgling prototype into a working Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

We formed a small team consisting of a UX designer, a pair of developers from Carbon Five and a product manager from Sharethrough. The small, balanced team team, external to both the main product offering of Sharethrough as well as any organizational processes, allowed for an extremely nimble and creative approach to product definition and development. Design could run in parallel to development processes and was integrated organically based on priorities expressed by the user and then set by the product manager.

Using a combination of Lean UX and Agile development practices, our weekly iteration cycle ran like this:

• Monday mornings consisted of a retrospective and discussions of our findings from customer feedback and user testing.
• This meeting would always produce an idea or feature set based on needs or pain points we had heard voiced by our users
• A use case, hypothesis, or metric would be agreed upon by the group to be tested in our user interviews at the end of our iteration (usually that Friday)
• A story writing session would follow.
• Tuesday through Thursday would involve an agile process that blended design exercises with code development to ensure everyone was working together toward the shared objective for Friday’s test sessions.
• On Friday, users were brought in for testing and each session recorded. Team members could discuss the results of the test and then had the weekend to mull over their findings.

Over the course of the project, we had moments where our attempts at meeting users’ needs failed miserably and we went back to the drawing board (check back for a future blog post on this). During some of these initial flops, we made use of the time we had with our captive audience and grabbed printed out paper icons and a white board and ran through quick and dirty prototypes with them. We had several ah-ha moments using this method which directly led us to our final successful feature set that then tested positively with users. These failures and our learnings from them, is what ended up leading directly to our successes.

The skunk works project has now come home to roost and has been transferred back to an internal Sharethrough team. They will be running the weekly iteration process we developed to take the product to its next level. Eventually it will be integrated into the existing offerings of the company.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some very innovative and smart early stage startups which have benefitted from their ability to be flexible and to respond quickly to changes seen in their customer base and markets. Larger companies generally have a much harder time switching up projects and initiatives for fear of cannibalizing their own revenue streams. Even if a rogue project gets an approval, internal pressures and multiple stakeholders can weigh down the efficiency of the development team.

Kudos to Sharethrough for curating a yin-yang balance of sustainable and disruptive innovation. I’d love to hear more stories about larger brands doing the same. Anyone have any personal experience with this? I’m also curious as to how companies manage integrating their skunk work projects into their existing brands. If the future is inherently uncertain, and our systems need to be as 
flexible as possible, why not use the methods proven in agile development and lean ux to keep our systems innovative and resilient?

Prince Rupert's Drops are unusual glass objects made by dripping molten glass into water. The exterior is very compressed while the interior is under great tension. You can hammer on the head of a drop and it won't break but if you barely wiggle the tail, the whole thing explosively shatters. It's particularly amazing in super-slow motion.

 

• Curious property of Prince Rupert's Drop glass - Boing Boing

Pat Robertson scores a "Christ, what an asshole" prize here, in which he explains that the reason that "simple, humble" Africans and other foreigners experience miracles is that they are free from the sin of over-education. As Charles Johnson has it, this is "the wingnut trifecta... anti-intellectual, anti-science and patronizingly racist."

Pat Robertson: Simple Africans More Likely to Experience Miracles Than Over-Educated Americans (via Skepchick)

Ursula shall meet her match now that Ariel has her voice back and the skills of a Jedi knight. Ralph Sevelius recast Ariel and Rapunzel as Jedi. Snow White, however, chose the dark side. Let us not be surprised. You can find images of Rapunzel and Snow White at the link.

Link -via Nerd Approved

A second trailer for Toei's phenomenal-looking Space Pirate Captain Harlock movie has arrived, and man, I cannot wait until this movie arrives in Japanese theaters this fall so someone can license the damn thing and bring it to America. Hey, if loving a spaceship with a giant skull on the front ramming into another spaceship is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

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Squee! Spotter: Unknown (via Reddit)

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Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

The most significant finding is that most of the problem — a little over $1 trillion worth — is the failure to properly price carbon pollution. Global warming is the ultimate example of a “negative externality” — a market failure in which one market actor enjoys the benefits of an exchange while another actor pays the costs.

When we burn gasoline to power our cars or coal-fired electricity to run our homes, we enjoy the benefits of that energy use. But someone else — a farmer facing increased drought, coastal populations facing rising seas, or the global poor facing food supply disruptions — shoulders the burden of the added carbon pollution we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It’s the global ecological equivalent of tapping into your neighbor’s electrical wiring so that they wind up paying your utility bill.

The world’s advanced economies consume huge levels of fossil fuels, so the failure to properly build pollution costs into the consumer price of fossil fuel use — through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade-style system, or some other policy — is what makes these economic giants the biggest contributors to worldwide fossil fuel subsidies. Emerging and developing economies in Asia (which mainly means China) come in a decent second. “Pre-tax” subsidies, which are breaks built into the tax code along with other policies, contributed another $480 billion, mostly from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The pre-tax subsidies of the advanced countries were negligible.

Finally, lots of countries have a national consumption tax called a VAT (or value added tax), and often offer breaks through it for energy purchases. The IMF had to calculate those separately for methodological reasons, and found they contributed several hundred billion dollars more, again largely from the advanced countries.

It’s worth noting that western Europe has an (admittedly troubled) carbon pollution reduction program, so the big externality subsidy created by the advanced economies can likely be blamed mostly on the United States.

In calculating the value of the externalities subsidy, the IMF assumed the global warming damages of carbon emissions at $25 per ton. They then went through the policies of various countries to see who is and isn’t making an attempt to work that price back in through taxation, and to what extent. But the report notes that various studies have pegged the price as high as $85 per ton — and other studies have put it much higher than that — in which case the size of the externality subsidy would be much larger. Beyond global warming, the IMF also attempted to account for other externalities, particularly the pollution and health effects of coal burning.

All told, the analysis found that eliminating all externality subsidies entirely would reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 13 percent, along with having lots of positive ripple effects by reducing fossil fuel demand and increasing investment and jobs in clean energy.

As for pre-tax” subsidies, they run the gamut from actual tax breaks for purchasing energy, to entire countries that, because they’re big oil exporters, sell petroleum to their own citizens at artificially low prices. The IMF compared the international price for petroleum products (adjusted for transport and retail costs) to the domestic consumer price in 176 countries between 2000 and 2011. The gap between the two was the effect of the subsidies. They did the same for natural gas, using 37 countries, and for coal, using 39 countries, between 2007 and 2011. Various other methods were used to fill in the gaps and do the same for electricity prices.

All told, these policies subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of $480 billion in 2011. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa contributed nearly half of that, with Central and Eastern Europe and the emerging and developing countries in Asia making up most of the rest.

What’s especially damaging is that a lot of the major contributors here spend more on pre-tax subsidies to fossil fuels, as a share of their economy, than they spend on their public health systems or public education. Brad Plumer at the Washington Post notes that Egypt “regularly spends up to 8 percent of its GDP subsidizing fossil fuels – more than it spends on education and public health combined – while running budget deficits of around … 8 percent of GDP.” Since many of these countries are developing with large impoverished populations, that kind of crowding out of public health spending and investments is a big deal.

The IMF also calculated that if pre-tax subsidies in all non-OECD countries were phased out, prices for crude oil, natural gas, and coal would drop 8 percent, 13 percent, and one percent in 2050, respectively. Removing all pre-tax subsidies worldwide would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as two percent.

One last thing to note is how this problem plays out in terms of global inequality. The IMF found that most of these subsidies benefit the upper class: In low and middle income countries, the richest 20 percent of households captured 43 percent of the subsidy benefits, on average. For gasoline subsidies specifically, they captured a whopping 61 percent.

That doesn’t mean eliminating these subsidies won’t hurt poorer households. Because their incomes are so much lower, losing those subsidies can take a significant bite out of their resources, even if the share of the benefits they’re getting is a small portion of the total value of those subsidies. What it does mean is that these countries could help the poor much more efficiently by eliminating the energy subsidies and then just providing direct assistance to people in need.

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This fantastic piece was created by Imagine Designs for the 2013 MOCathlon, a yearly online Lego tournament organized by MOCpages. The Reaper statue is fully poseable, with movable faceplates that reveal its laser. You know, for added realism. And terror.

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600 hours. Over 200,000 bricks. That's what it cost Mike Doyle to build this enormous LEGO city, called Odan.

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Here are a couple different perspectives on the big news out of Washington this afternoon — an ambitious Obama Administration proposal to appropriate $100 million to begin a project to "map the brain". What's that mean? We have a lot of good data on single neurons. We have a lot of good data on what happens in the brain, as a whole, during certain tasks. What we don't really understand is how those individual neurons work together as networks or what activity in the brain really means on the level of causality and processing. That's what this project would be aimed at understanding. At LiveScience, Stephanie Pappas puts the project into scientific (and financial) context. At Nature News, Meredith Wadman writes about why some scientists are wary of this plan.

In The Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding, authors and game designers gather together to show you how realms are wrought from the shimmering nectar of pure imagination.

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Over twenty years, ten books, and multiple PBS documentaries bOING bOING pal and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has proven himself to be a provocative pattern seeker with a mastery at connecting the dots between popular culture, technology, and the complex underpinnings of modern society. Inspired by the likes of Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Robert Anton Wilson, and Neil Postman, Doug's message has always been about the empowerment of the individual. He is a quintessential happy mutant. Whether he's writing about social contagions, video games, advertising, religion, or the Occupy Movement, his focus is on how narrative can be used by Control to coerce, and as a tool of resistance. William S. Burroughs once wrote, "Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes." And therein lies the secret to undermining it. Doug's new book is Present Shock, about how everything is happening now. Right now. As Doug said, "It is kind of panicked, untethered sensation that comes with living a real-time, always-on existence without past or a future, origins or goals. Just the present."

BB: The book's title is a riff on Alvin Toffler's classic 1970 book "Future Shock." He used that phrase to describe the feeling of "too much change in too short a period of time." What is present shock?

Rushkoff: Present Shock is what happens when the future Toffler described finally arrives. It's the initial human reaction to living in a world where everything is happening now…

In one sense it's the first response to a digital media environment - or, more specifically, the digital temporal environment. While analog time (itself just one kind of representation) had a continuous, almost narrative quality as the second hand swept through one minute and into the next, digital time just sits there poised at 3:23, 3:24. We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day. But a digital second is less a part of greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.

In the other, bigger sense, though, it's about reaching the end of the millennium. We spent the latter part of the 20th Century leaning towards the year 2000, almost obsessed with the future, the dot com boom, the long boom and all that. It was a century of movements with grand goals, wars to end wars, and relentless expansionism. Then we arrived at the 21st, and it was as if we had arrived. People stopped thinking about what their investments might be worth in the future, band began to consider what they were worth right now. And the market crashed. We came to realize the expansion was over - at least in the colonialist way we understood it. Obama told us we are the change we had been waiting for.

So between those two related shifts, we arrived in a present. Only instead of seizing this new "now," we tend to get disoriented. Instead of using digital technology to time shift our schedules to our real preferences, we respond to the insistent pings of our devices as if we were 911 operators or air traffic controllers. We chase the moment they offer, and forget that we are the ones in real time, and the devices (and the corporations behind them) are chasing us.

But "present shock" is also as simple as the botox addicts on Real Housewives of Orange County, desperate to lock in the moment when they were 29 years old. All succeed in doing is paralyzing their faces in a poor imitation of that moment, and making themselves unavailable to the social moment in which they are living. They can't register emotions on their faces, which is why they never believe one another. They are "overwinding" the present moment.

The book is broken up into five "symptoms" of present shock? Can you give an example of each?

Narrative collapse is what happens when we no longer have time to tell a traditional story. Whether it's remote controls or DVRS that allow us to break the trance of a story, or simply our inability to grasp a story when we no longer have linear time in which to tell it. In one way it's great thing, because it disables the kinds of stories that were used to pull us out of the moment, and fix our eyes on some future goal. We can't be fooled into destructive, ends-justify-the-means battles because we don't do things for the ends, anymore. It wreaks havoc on brand mythologies and origin stories, alike.

At first, the response was television like The Simpsons and MST3k, which seemed less about whatever story was being told, and more about the individual associations we make along the way, comparing a scene with some other moment in media. The satisfaction wasn't getting to the end, but making all those connections.

Then we see video games as an even more presentist response, giving the user a real-time experience of making choices instead of watching some character move through a story that already happened. We get "infinite" games, where we play not to win and end the play, but in order to keep the play going.

Digiphrenia is a digitally induced mental confusion. I've never had a problem with information overload. Where I think we run into trouble with digital technology is its ability to make copies. Human beings don't copy well - but I've got i don't know how many "instances" of myself functioning independently at any moment. My Twitter account, my email inbox, my Facebook profile (well, I surrendered that one), all act on my behalf, sometimes when I'm not even there. Especially when Zuckerberg decides to market something using my likeness, or that of someone who has chosen to "like" me.

The promise of digital technology was that it would give us more authority over our time. Remember those early conversations on the Well? We got to sound smarter than we were in real life, because we had all the time in the world to respond. They were asynchronous conversations, fully consonant with the asynchronous character of digital technology. When we strap this stuff to our bodies and respond to each vibration, we are turning them into something very different.

Digiphrenia is also simply mistaking digital clock time, and its seemingly generic quality, to the very contoured and specific qualities of human time. Biologically, psychologically, and culturally, we are guided by all sorts of cycles that make one time different from another. Emerging research (cited in the book) seems to indicate that we are collectively biased toward a different neurotransmitter during each week of the lunar cycle. No, it's not new age weirdness (though I bet most aboriginal cultures knew this - the early Jews certainly did). Digiphrenia is a disconnection and devaluing of these underlying rhythms for the illusion of chronologically equivalent pulses. We lose our coherence, because we're no longer in synch with our most basic biological clocks.

Overwinding is trying to shove really big time scales into tiny little presentist moments. When I read Stewart Brand's The Long Now I was inspired by the idea of thinking of things in 10,000 year spans. But for me, that experience felt less like a long now than a short forever. It was just too big a scale, too big a sense of responsibility to throw onto each moment. At the very least, it was a hard argument to make in a presentist culture with no sense of long-term goals and impacts.

Overwinding is the effort to get long-term effects out of immediate actions. It's happening most clearly on the stock market, where people want to make money not by investing, but on the trade itself. They buy Facebook in the morning of the IPO and are disappointed when they haven't made a profit fifteen minutes later. It's the ultra-fast trading algorithms that make money by trading in your future.

Fractalnoia is when we try to make sense of things in the present moment, rather than having a cause-and-effect chain of events through which to understand how something happened. It's making sense of a static picture. Like CSI. Drawing connections and making equivalencies between things that are essentially unconnected and definitely not equivalent.

I took the term from fractals, of course, because so many of us seem to make the error of mistaking self-similarity for being exactly the same. We need to develop pattern recognition, which is a softer and less exact skill than finding true congruence. Fractalnoia is also the panic at trying to parse feedback. Our feedback cycles have gotten so tight in a presentist society that it's really hard to parse causes from effects. All we hear is the screech of the microphone in the speaker.

Finally, Apocalypto is our intolerance for living in an interminable present. We are so used to beginnings and endings, that many of us would rather imagine a zombie apocalypse or human-obsolescing singularity than try to carry on sustainably into the future.

When you started writing this book, you told me you thought it was your most important one. I've never heard you say that before. Do you still feel that way now that it's done? Why?

In some ways I feel like it's my last book. (Don't applaud - that's not polite.) It certainly brings me to the end of the journey I began with Cyberia in 1994 (a book that got canceled by its commissioning publisher because they thought the net would be "over" by the original 1993 publication date). I wrote that "time was speeding up" and that we were "on the event horizon of the strange attractor." It was heady and optimistic, but it was also Mondo and Boing Boing.

It didn't seem to me I was writing about something that was coming, but something that had arrived. This was it. The tools were in our cyberpunk hands, and we could create what we wanted, exchange it directly, build a peer-to-peer culture and economy, and liberate ourselves from centuries of time-is-money industrial corporatism. The digital age seemed to be the great release from the yuppie nightmare, and the ultimate generator of slack.

But then Wired got ahold of it, and all of sudden the digital age wasn't something with us, to celebrate; it was something on the horizon. Louis Rosetto wrote in the editorial to the first issue of Wired that we were facing a "Bengali Typhoon." Like it was this big wave that was about to happen and you better watch out. And you better read this magazine (and hire some digitally inspired futurists) to do some scenario planning so you don't' get wiped out.

And from then, digitally seemed less about transcending the industrial age economy, and more about preserving it. Internet companies were going to save the Nasdaq. And, sure enough, we used digital technology largely to make us into better consumers. And our applications - the way so many of them take our time instead of free it, make us work round the clock instead of when we want, or convince us that we have to tend to them night and day - they exacerbate the worst sorts of time-is-money principles of industrialism.

So when I started this book, I realized I had (at least for me) come upon the essence of our relative power in this situation: Time. We are witnessing yet another iteration of the age old interplay between Chronos, or clock time, and Kairos, which really means timing. Timing is the human part - the indefinable aspect of time. A kind of readiness. What's the best time to tell dad you crashed the car? 5:02? No, that's chronos. It's not a time on the clock. It's after he's had his drink but before he's opened the bills. Kairos.

And all my work has really been about this - from Playing the Future, which was about the breakdown of cause and effect narrative, to Nothing Sacred, which was about Jewish continuity as less of a thread to some historical past and more about the willingness to engage with fresh eyes today.

So this book is less about a particular thing, and more about the whole thing.

For years, you and I joked that you were like an "optimism engine," always able to find the brighter side of any negative situation. I'm not sure if you've become less optimistic, but you are certainly less positive about the present. Why?

Well, I'm still really hopeful. And I play the optimism game to this day - where I take an awful phenomenon and try to recast it in a positive frame. It's a bit harder now that I have a kid and I think about the world she'll inherit. But I'm still hopeful.

The only negative side of Present Shock is that we're mostly in shock rather than true presentism. But that's to be expected because this is brand new, and we have a good five hundred years to go before presentism becomes something else. These things last millennia. And there are some great example in the book of people and groups who are embracing presentist, steady-state models. From Occupy to time dollars, Makerbots to spiritually inspired social activism, we see the emergence of some terrifically, post-industrial post-narrative approaches to life. We are finally ready to look at less climactic, more sustainable solutions to the world's problems.

Contending with a society biased toward the present is just going to take some time.

One of the most soundbitey bits in the book is the statement "I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people than what people are choosing to do to one another through technology.” What does that mean?

I accept that technology has biases. Guns don't kill people, but they are much more biased toward killing people than pillows. Digital technology has biases, too, but I don't think they are biased toward taking our time, fracturing our awareness, and making us anxious. I think they are more biased toward doing the opposite. The thing that gets me anxious is not the email piling up in the inbox - it's the expectations of the people on the other end of those emails. It's the expectation that I'm supposed to respond in seconds or minutes. It's the boss who thinks a computer is a good enough reason to watch every one of his worker's keystrokes.

But you see, the only reason the boss thinks that is because he's back in the industrial age mentality of believing that he has bought your time. Digital technology should be giving the worker more choice of how he uses his time, not the boss more authority over that time.

Since at least 1998, and most recently in your Good post, you've ranted that "futurists suck." As you know, I'm a card-carrying futurist myself with Institute for the Future, an organization that you've expressed a desire to associate with more closely. So I need to ask, how do you define "futurist"?

Well, "why futurists suck" was a bad headline on an otherwise heartfelt little piece. I've gone and apologized for it on my blog. It's no excuse - particularly for me - but I was in a bit of present shock, myself, when I was going back and forth about it (typing on a smart phone during an NPR station break on publication day, correcting for a snafu that had delayed the piece) and I wasn't paying proper attention to how it was going to be framed.

The title actually came back from the past - a talk I gave at SXSW in 1997 (you were there!) called "Renaissance Now!" (satirically subtitled, "or why futurists suck"). It was meant as a humorous swipe against the long-boom-boosters I saw turning the internet from a real-time, p2p2, Maker phenomenon into the poster child for NASDAQ. It was aimed at a particular, digerati-style of consultants who I believed weren't genuinely looking to figure out what might happen; they were propagandizing the net as a market phenomenon in order to extend the lives of the corporations to whom they were consulting. Their purpose was not to usher in the digital age, but to perpetuate the industrial age by digital means.

And then they necessarily went off in really dehumanizing directions, envisioning information's inevitable transcendence beyond humans in its own quest toward greater complexity. People were only valuable to the extent they could enable information's evolution. To me, this has the medium and the message reversed.

Writing Present Shock finally taught me what it was I was ranting about back in 1997 but not fully understanding. This really isn't about the future; it's about the now - in more ways than one.

As for real futurists - and science fiction writers - I love them. I'm probably one, myself. But futurism today means being truly grounded in the present, and then building possibilities from there. Those are the only possibilities that are bound by nothing but the human imagination.

Douglas Rushkoff will talk about Present Shock at San Francisco's City Lights Books on April 4 at 7pm and Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore on April 11 at 7pm.

Superhero Women in pants?! *GASP*. Artist Michael Lee Lunsford has created a line of fully dressed female superheroes; while Lunsford protests on his website that his creation was not drawn as some sort of moral lesson, we have to say, we love Zatanna in pants.

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There's so much astonishing science fiction and fantasy coming your way this month, we can barely list it all. Including the new Evil Dead, Oblivion and tons of other movies. There are brand new books by Neil Gaiman, Paul Cornell, C.J. Cherryh and Robin Hobb. Plus Warehouse 13 and Defiance! Here's your ultimate guide to April's science fiction and fantasy.

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From Wikipedia: "English: A large wheeled Assyrian battering ram with an observation turret attacks the collapsing walls of a besieged city, while archers on both sides exchange fire. From the North-West Palace at Nimrud, about 865-860 BC; now in the British Museum."

File:Assyrian battering ram.jpg (Thanks, Justin!)

A Nebula cloud controller. Nebula

Private clouds are all the rage for businesses seeking to recreate the capabilities of Amazon's infrastructure-as-a-service cloud within their own data centers. One of the first organizations to build its own private cloud was NASA, which started working on the "Nebula" cloud in 2008. Now the people who built that cloud will sell you one very much like it.

Founded by the architects of NASA's Nebula project (now called OpenStack), the appropriately named vendor Nebula today announced general availability of its first product, Nebula One.

Nebula (the company) is headed by ex-NASA Chief Technology Officer for IT Chris Kemp and ex-NASA engineer Devin Carlen, who both helped create and build the Nebula technology. Kemp is Nebula's CEO and Carlen is Nebula's CTO.

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Dear Pa,

I know you care deeply about many issues, especially social justice. You’re tired of wars, you’re ashamed of the attempts to destroy social programs in this country, you hate seeing the unions that helped you as a worker provide for our family get dismantled by wealthy CEOs whose only goal is to make themselves and their cronies more wealthy. These are noble things to believe in, and values that you’ve instilled in your children.

But you probably don’t often consider how you select and digest (and frequently, share on Facebook) the stories that you’ll accept as true. This is called cognitive bias–sorry, that’s a terrible article for a layman, but I’d be happy to discuss next time I’m home. Anyway, the bottom line is that the beliefs you already hold prime you to accept certain types of information, and reject others–and it’s something everyone should be aware of when reading anything on the Internet, especially. You don’t investigate how the authors of articles and videos you read and view came to their conclusions, or what data they may have overlooked (I’m being generous here–in most of the things you post, it’s not a matter of “overlooking” contradictory evidence on the case of the authors, it’s flat-out denial that it even exists). And you’re not an expert on health issues like fluoride or vaccines, so I don’t expect you to go back to the journal articles and try to figure out if these people you’re listening to are telling the truth. That’s what I do, but it took years of training to get me to this point, as you probably remember.

You repeatedly caution, “follow the money.” Often this is the case, and no one disagrees that many times people or companies do some nasty shit in the name of profit. However, you have to look at this on a case-by-case basis. Let’s look at vaccines, for instance. Sure, pharmaceutical companies make money off of vaccines. However, this money is a fraction of what they make for drugs that treat chronic conditions or “lifestyle” medicines, like cholesterol meds and Viagra. Indeed, many pharmaceutical companies have gotten out of the vaccine game altogether because it’s not particularly profitable, and because of lawsuits directed against them (which, in most cases, aren’t based in science but on fear and misunderstanding of cause and effect). This leaves us with fewer and fewer options when we need new vaccines quickly, like for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

So, we’re agreed that vaccines are potential money-makers for pharmaceutical companies (though, comparatively, not a lot). Let’s look now at those who started the most recent iteration of vaccine panic, including Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield is the British doctor whose study first drew an association between the measles/mumps/rubella (“MMR”) vaccine and autism. Except, first of all, it really didn’t if you look at the original article. And, you might note that article has a big “RETRACTED” notice at the top. This means that the journal took away its support of the paper–it shows that it never should have been published. That’s because, for that study and several others, Wakefield lied about data, unethically recruited test subjects, and/or just outright made shit up. Why might he do this? Well, a British lawyer had paid him to find evidence of this connection between MMR and autism, so that the lawyer could sue on behalf of the parents. Oh, and did I mention that Wakefield stood to make money for a replacement for the MMR vaccine as well? Follow the money indeed–though in this case, it didn’t lead to the pharmaceutical companies. Wakefield was tried in England and stripped of his medical license, but has since moved to the United States and still spreads misinformation about vaccines.

What about other anti-vaccine players? Jenny McCarthy has made millions selling books about how she “cured” her son Evan of his autism. Joseph Mercola makes millions selling dietary supplements (untested and largely unregulated, by the way), and lives in a two million dollar mansion. I know you’ve criticized creationists; well, these people are the creationists of the medical field. They distort, they cherry-pick their evidence, and they cause the public to lose confidence in credentialed scientists because of their writings. Credentialed scientists like myself, who carry out the vast majority of this research but certainly don’t live in million-dollar homes.

And you’re helping the Mercolas of the world–every time you post something like your “Italian court rules MMR vaccine causes autism” picture. Guess what “evidence” that court used? Andrew Wakefield’s discredited study. In science, this is an error even a first-year PhD student would be embarrassed to make. Not surprisingly, the decision is being appealed. But in the meantime, every parent who (wrongly and unscientifically) believes that vaccines caused their child’s autism is being buoyed by this court, whose decision is being trumpeted by people like Mercola and Mike Adams at Natural News (another supplement-pusher like Mercola, with no medical expertise or training). Every time someone buys into their anti-vaccine line and chooses to buy their supplements instead of vaccinating their child, it puts other children in danger. And you’re helping them.

Know the results of this vaccine backlash? Research dollars are diverted away from real causes of autism and other conditions. And kids are dying. Just in the U.S., there have been more than 1000 vaccine-preventable deaths in the last 6 years, and over 100,000 vaccine-preventable illnesses. Freaking whooping cough has made a huge comeback in the U.S. A big reason for the resurgence of these diseases is because anti-vaccine myths and scares spread so easily between acquaintances–in person, and on social media; scares that you’re now perpetuating with your own posts. Sure, it’s a free country and you have every right to share these pictures and memes, but have you thought about the possible harm it might do to others when you click “share”?

I know how crazy it drives you when Republican politicians (and friends and relatives) post pictures and stories that are flat-out wrong, about the deficit, the economy, “Obamacare,” and more. It makes you nuts how uncritically they quote Fox News. They don’t examine their own biases; they don’t stop and think why they accept that Obama is the anti-Christ and that everything associated with him is evil, even if the facts clearly contradict their belief. Sure, they may know a lot, but it’s all from the same sources and it reinforces their pre-existing belief that Obama is Satan. Here’s the kicker: you’re doing the same thing. Yes, I know you’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on vaccines, and fluoride, and other health issues, but the ones you watch–and accept–are the ones that already appeal to the beliefs you’ve accepted. This isn’t how science works, or how evidence is fairly weighed. I know this can get messy, because again, you’re not one of those trained scientists and you don’t know how to navigate the literature and determine which studies are well-conducted and which ones are crap. So sometimes, you have to accept that there are people out there who have taken the time to do this in an unbiased fashion, and decide to trust them (y’know, people like your daughter, perhaps? Or thousands of other scientists and journalists who have studied these fields for many, many years?), and look skeptically upon people like Mercola et. al. (Follow the money!)

I will be sending along some books I hope you’ll read with an open mind: The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin, and Deadly Choices by Paul Offit. Both come into this from different backgrounds–Mnookin is a journalist and new parent who was investigating vaccines, while Offit is a research scientist like myself who has worked in vaccines and infectious diseases his whole life. Both come to the same conclusions: vaccines are safe, and critical for public health. And before you google Offit and find that he holds a vaccine patent, ask yourself–if I were to work on a vaccine at some point in my career, would you dismiss my authority and expertise for that reason? Or would you be willing to look at the science behind it before making a judgement?

Next discussion: the Illuminati. Baby steps.

Love,

Tara