For this week’s resource post, see the page Stand-alone code for numerical computing. It points to small, self-contained bits of code for special functions (log gamma, erf, etc.) and for random number generation (normal, Poisson, gamma, etc.).
The code is available in Python, C++, and C# versions. It could easily be translated into other languages since it hardly uses any language-specific features.
I wrote these functions for projects where you don’t have a numerical library available or would like to minimize dependencies. If you have access to a numerical library, such as SciPy in Python, then by all means use it (although SciPy is missing some of the random number generators provided here). In C++ and especially C#, it’s harder to find some of this functionality.
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More than 100 homeless people are “living” in the terminals of Heathrow airport this winter, according to official figures – a new and shameful record. Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have warned that homelessness in London is rising significantly faster than the nationwide average, and faster than official estimates. And yet, we don’t see as many people sleeping rough as in previous economic downturns. Have our cities become better at hiding poverty, or have we become more adept at not seeing it?
Last year, there was great public outcry against the use of “anti-homeless” spikes outside a London residential complex, not far from where I live. Social media was set momentarily ablaze with indignation, a petition was signed, a sleep-in protest undertaken, Boris Johnson was incensed and within a few days they were removed. This week, however, it emerged that Selfridges had installed metal spikes outside one of its Manchester stores – apparently to “reduce litter and smoking … following customer complaints”. The phenomenon of “defensive” or “disciplinary” architecture, as it is known, remains pervasive.
From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.
We see these measures all the time within our urban environments, whether in London or Tokyo, but we fail to process their true intent. I hardly noticed them before I became homeless in 2009. An economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown were all it took to go from a six-figure income to sleeping rough in the space of a year. It was only then that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter and the city’s barbed cruelty became clear.
I learned to love London Underground’s Circle line back then. To others it was just the rather inefficient yellow line on the tube network. To me – and many homeless people – it was a safe, dry, warm container, continually travelling sometimes above the surface, sometimes below, like a giant needle stitching London’s centre into place. Nobody harassed you or moved you on. You were allowed to take your poverty on tour. But engineering work put a stop to that.
Next was a bench in a smallish park just off Pentonville Road. An old, wooden bench, made concave and smooth by thousands of buttocks, underneath a sycamore with foliage so thick that only the most persistent rain could penetrate it. Sheltered and warm, perched as it was against a wall behind which a generator of some sort radiated heat, this was prime property. Then, one morning, it was gone. In its place stood a convex metal perch, with three solid armrests. I felt such loss that day.
Hostile architecture on the former Coutts Bank, Fleet Stree, London. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
“When you’re designed against, you know it,” says Ocean Howell, who teaches architectural history at the University of Oregon, speaking about anti-skateboarding designs. “Other people might not see it, but you will. The message is clear: you are not a member of the public, at least not of the public that is welcome here.” The same is true of all defensive architecture. The psychological effect is devastating.
There is a wider problem, too. These measures do not and cannot distinguish the “vagrant” posterior from others considered more deserving. When we make it impossible for the dispossessed to rest their weary bodies at a bus shelter, we also make it impossible for the elderly, for the infirm, for the pregnant woman who has had a dizzy spell. By making the city less accepting of the human frame, we make it less welcoming to all humans. By making our environment more hostile, we become more hostile within it.
Defensive architecture is revealing on a number of levels, because it is not the product of accident or thoughtlessness, but a thought process. It is a sort of unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass. It reveals how corporate hygiene has overridden human considerations, especially in retail districts. It is a symptom of the clash of private and public, of necessity and property.
Pavement sprinklers have been installed by buildings as diverse as the famous Strand book store in New York, a fashion chain in Hamburg and government offices in Guangzhou. They spray the homeless intermittently, soaking them and their possessions. The assertion is clear: the public thoroughfare in front of a building, belongs to the building’s occupant, even when it is not being used.
Setha Low, a professor in environmental psychology, and urban geographer Neil Smith, in their book The Politics of Public Space, describe the phenomenon as a creeping encroachment that has “culminated in the multiple closures, erasures, inundations and transfigurations of public space at the behest of state and corporate strategies”. They contend that the very economic and political revolutions that freed people from autocratic monarchies also enshrined principles of private property at the expense of a long tradition of common land.
Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the “pay bench”, an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province.
Concrete spikes under a road bridge in Guangzhou city, Guangdong, China. Photograph: Imaginechina/REX
The architecture of our cities is a powerful guide to behaviour, both directly and in its symbolism. One of the very first acts of the newly elected Syriza government in Greece was to remove the metal barriers between the Hellenic parliament and Syntagma Square. The effect on the centre of Athens of the removal of this barricade – which represented the strife of the last few years – was almost magical, as if an entire city breathed a sigh of relief. The symbolism of a government saying that they were a part of the people, rather than apart from the people, was understood by all.
Artist Nils Norman has been documenting the phenomenon of defensive architecture since the late 90s with thousands of photographs. This “vernacular of terror”, as he calls it, has its roots in leftover space or “gap sites”: plots that are too small to develop but large enough to encourage loitering. He sees the loss of public space as directly related to a loss of public life. “City space is quietly altered to maximimise its control and circulation,” he says. “Benches become bum-free, which in turn become ‘perches’, which are in turn removed. As city spaces become cleaner and more symbolically ‘safe’, defensive design becomes more abundant and paranoid.”
Recently, as I walked into my local bakery, a homeless man (whom I had seen a few times before) asked whether I could get him something to eat. When I asked Ruth – one of the young women who work behind the counter – to put a couple of pasties in a separate bag and explained why, her censure was severe: “He probably makes more money than you from begging, you know,” she said, bluntly.
He probably didn’t. Half his face was covered with sores. A blackened, gangrenous-looking toe protruded from a hole in his ancient shoe. His left hand looked mangled and was covered in dry blood from some recent accident or fight. I pointed this out. Ruth was unmoved by my protestations. “I don’t care,” she said. “They foul in the green opposite. They’re a menace. Animals.”
It’s precisely this viewpoint that defensive architecture upholds. That the destitute are a different species altogether; inferior and responsible for their demise. Like pigeons to be shooed away; urban foxes disturbing our slumber with their screams. “Shame on you,” jumped in Libby, the older lady who works at the bakery. “That is someone’s son you’re talking about.”
We curse the destitute for urinating in public spaces with no thought about how far the nearest free public toilet might be. We blame them for their poor hygiene without questioning the lack of public facilities for washing. It costs £5 to take a shower at King’s Cross station. Wilful misconceptions about homelessness abound. For instance, that shelters are plentiful and sleeping rough is a lifestyle choice. Free shelters, unless one belongs to a particularly vulnerable group, are actually extremely rare. Getting a bed often depends on a referral from a local agency, which, in turn, depends on being able to prove a local connection. For the majority of homeless people, who have usually graduated from a life as itinerant sofa-surfers, it is impossible to prove.
This tripartite pressure of an increasingly hostile built environment, huge reduction in state budgets, and a hardening attitude to poverty can be disastrous for people sleeping rough, both physically and psychologically. Fundamental misunderstanding of destitution is designed to exonerate the rest from responsibility and insulate them from perceiving risk. All of us are encouraged to spend future earnings through credit. For the spell to be effective, it is essential to be in a sort of denial about the possibility that such future earnings could dry up. Most of us are a couple of pay packets from being insolvent. We despise homeless people for bringing us face to face with that fact.
Poverty exists as a parallel, but separate, reality. City planners work very hard to keep it outside our field of vision. It is too miserable, too dispiriting, too painful to look at someone defecating in a park or sleeping in a doorway and think of him as “someone’s son”. It is easier to see him and ask only the unfathomably self-centred question: “How does his homelessness affect me?” So we cooperate with urban design and work very hard at not seeing, because we do not want to see. We tacitly agree to this apartheid.
Spikes installed outside Selfridges in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian.
A homeless man, Pawel Koseda, was found dead last year; bled out, impaled on the six-inch spikes of the metal fence that surrounds St Mary Abbots in Kensington, the Camerons’ chosen place of worship. He had high levels of alcohol in his blood and was wearing hospital pyjamas under his clothes. Koseda used to be a university lecturer in Poland. Ed Boord, who found the body, said that several people walked by and didn’t even notice. “It upset me that someone like that spends their life not being noticed,” he said, “and even in their last moments people still walk past.”
Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s research says that UK homeless numbers have increased by a third in the last five years. Benefit sanctions are cited as the main reason. In this context of depressed wages and soaring living costs, reduced services and lack of housing, we are facing a humanitarian disaster. The Red Cross is involved in food aid in the UK for the first time since the second world war. Can our response as a civilised society really be limited to moving people on from our doorsteps?
This, more than anything else, will determine our future as a species. Our ability to share will be key to our survival. The rough sleeper’s bad fortune is intricately connected to someone else’s good fortune. The person sleeping outside the expensive Bond Street boutique is part of the same nexus as the person inside spending £500 on a pair of socks.
Resources are scarce. Infinite wealth creation is a fairytale. Real wealth – land, food, water, fuel – has physical limitations. If some take more than they need, others go without. We obsessively focus on the external: carbon emissions, recycling, charity work, social security, saving the snow leopard – all of them excellent goals – while doggedly refusing to look inwards and make the adjustments that might allow us to coexist more equitably.
A ray of hope from Vancouver – benches that unfold into shelters and read “This is a bench” during the day, but light up to reveal “This is a bedroom” at night. Perhaps a small step on what David Harvey, author of Social Justice and the City, calls the “path from an urbanism based on exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species”.
Defensive architecture acts as the airplane curtain that separates economy from business and business from first class, protecting those further forward from the envious eyes of those behind. It keeps poverty unseen and sanitises our shopping centres, concealing any guilt for over-consuming. It speaks volumes about our collective attitude to poverty in general and homelessness in particular. It is the aggregated, concrete, spiked expression of a lack of generosity of spirit.
Ironically, it doesn’t even achieve its basic goal of making us feel safer. There is no way of locking others out that doesn’t also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.
Then again, nothing in Megan’s life was normal that year. There had been a bad breakup that triggered a deep depression. Her doctor had prescribed pills, her mother had prescribed time away from New York, and she had tried both. Now, several months later, she was back on the Upper East Side, walking down Second Avenue to meet a friend for dinner. She wasn’t exactly cured, but she was getting there. And then she stepped off the curb, crossed over to 77th Street and walked straight into a woman named Velvet.
Harbingers of disaster are supposed to look ominous, but the most ghoulish thing about Velvet was her bad dye job; other than that she looked utterly unremarkable.
“There’s something wrong with you,” said Velvet, extending a hand, stopping Megan in her tracks. “I see darkness surrounding you.” She repeated variants of this as she tried to usher Megan into a psychic’s office nearby. “A dark aura” ... “Something wrong” ... “We can help.” Megan made excuses but accepted a flyer from Velvet, and told her she might be back.
Tarot cards: the trappings of a typical psychic.
Photograph: Joe Pepler/Rex/Joe Pepler
Megan had never seen a psychic before. She was a thirtysomething professional with a master’s degree. She didn’t believe in that kind of stuff! But all through dinner the flyer sat ticking at the bottom of her bag like a bomb about to go off. “How could she tell there was a problem?” Megan thought, picking at pasta. The question niggled at the back of her mind and wouldn’t go away.
A few days later, curiosity got the better of her. Megan fished the flyer out of her handbag and went to the address specified. There, Velvet ushered her in to meet the head honcho of the establishment: Betty Vlado.
And so began a series of unfortunate and very expensive events that turned into private investigator Bob Nygaard’s sixth supernatural scam case: the Incident of the Fraudulent Meteorite.
Bob Nygaard, hardboiled hero
You could say that it was fate or an auspicious alignment of the stars that propelled Nygaard, a bulky and somewhat bashful ex-cop, into the unusual role of psychic-crime-fighting private investigator. But, really, it was Bacardi and Coke. It all started, as a great many things do, after a couple of drinks.
It was late 2008, and Bob was at a neighbourhood bar for a Wednesday afternoon happy hour. He had retired early from the New York police force and moved to Florida. After decades spent busting prostitute rings and “fighting the war on crack”, he wanted to sit out the rest of his days on the beach, lounging around tiki bars. To occupy himself in between beach time and bar time, he got a PI’s license and did some run-of-the-mill investigative work: tracking down unclaimed funds, catching cheating spouses, that sort of thing.
Bob wasn’t married; an adult life spent chasing “bad guys” hadn’t been conducive to dating. But his circumstances were different now and, that evening, he got chatting to a couple of attractive women at the bar, regaling them with war stories about his time as a street cop and his interest in “bunco” investigations. These are crimes of persuasion, scams usually perpetrated on elderly and vulnerable people. Fascinating stuff, but perhaps a bit of a downer if you’re trying to chat someone up. Eventually, he gave both women a business card and they went their separate ways.
Or so he thought. Shortly after he left the bar he got a call from one of the women, a doctor, asking if they could meet at the nearby Mobil station. It seemed a strange place for a romantic assignation, but he drove up to the gas station anyway. The doctor proceeded to unburden herself of an embarrassing secret: a psychic had defrauded her out of over $12,000 and she didn’t know what to do. And so began Bob’s first major foray into the world of spiritual scamming.
... but can you really?
It turned out the doctor hadn’t been defrauded by just any fortuneteller, but by a celebrity of sorts. Gina Marie Marks was a notorious southern Florida psychic who had co-authored a memoir under the name Regina Milbourne – Miami Psychic: Confessions of a Confidante.
The doctor didn’t seek out Marks for her literary skills, however. A friend had recommended her, thinking it might help the doctor with her anxiety. Although the doctor initially thought the source of her stress might be the opaque workings of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and her immigration status, Marks disagreed. She said a jealous co-worker had put a curse on her by burying a piece of meat, and the rotting meat was causing the doctor’s life to disintegrate. If she didn’t get rid of this curse through cleansing rituals, she could be deported.
Distressed, the doctor agreed to the cleansing rituals. She rubbed an egg and chanted. She wrapped up thousands of dollars in a handkerchief and gave it to Marks to get blessed at a sacred altar in Hollywood, Florida. She handed over her credit card details for the purchase of special candles. And so on, until she finally realized she was being scammed. At that point she was too embarrassed to go to the police and had no idea what to do next. Bob, however, seemed like he might be able to help.
Bob took the job pro bono and started building a case against Marks. A process involving no mystical rituals – just routine, rather dull detective work. While some of his work involves stakeouts and covert surveillance, much of being a PI is simply piles of paperwork: collecting testimony from witnesses and victims, establishing evidence of financial transactions and creating detailed timelines of events. Bob’s investigations soon uncovered four more victims, all of whom frequented the same nail salon. Marks had extracted small fortunes from these women by telling them they were cursed, then performing elaborate, expensive rituals to get rid of these curses. This dynamic of “invent a problem only your product can solve” is the standard backbone of the psychic scam. In that sense, it operates much like modern marketing.
Fortune-telling: illegal but rarely punished
Unless you are a particularly empathetic person, you might be struggling to understand how anyone but a dimwit could hand over money to a psychic and expect something of value in return. On the surface, the idea of fortunetelling fraud sounds like a tautology, or a punchline. But this is precisely why it is often overlooked and its perpetrators left unpunished, free to exploit more vulnerable people.
Bob gets very emotional about this, and his face gets noticeably red as he describes the way in which police departments and district attorney offices tend to shrug off psychic crime and dismiss it as a “civil problem”. Although he gets paid for his work, usually around $5,000 a case and sometimes a 20% cut of recovered funds, Bob seems to treat what he does as a sort of mission. Some people want to save the whales; he wants to get the American justice system to take fraudulent psychics seriously. According to his calculations, he has recovered over $3m for 21 victims across 12 cases.
There are a few ways a psychic can be charged with breaking the law. In New York state, an archaic fortune-telling law makes professing to tell the future a class B misdemeanor. While rarely enforced, this means that pretty much any sidewalk psychic you pass in New York City could automatically be charged with up to three months in jail and a $500 fine. The more serious charge is grand theft or grand larceny, which carries up to 25 years in state prison.
In order for these charges to be pressed, the district attorney needs to be convinced that there is a case worth pursuing. Bob managed to do just that in Gina Marks’s case, leading to $65,000 worth of grand theft charges against the celebrity clairvoyant. These charges led to more of Marks’s victims stepping forward, and she was eventually found guilty of swindling people out of more than $500,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Bob would have celebrated this first victory, but the day after Marks’s arrest he woke up with his left eye so severely swollen that he couldn’t see. The swelling lasted a couple of days, and his friends joked that he had probably been cursed. Bob is about as unflappable a guy as you can find, dismissive of the sort of danger you can’t shoot with a gun; but for a couple of days he was, he admits, rattled.
The $14,500 ‘meteorite’ now sitting in Nygaard’s living room.
But if Marks had put a curse on him, it certainly hadn’t affected his business. Her arrest drew press attention and Bob suddenly found himself inundated with calls from other people who had been defrauded by psychics.
One of those calls was from Megan, who had found Bob through a Google search: “Psychic + Scam + Help”, or something like that. It was 2013, almost two years after her run-in with Velvet on the Upper East Side, and in that time she had lost her entire life’s savings – more than $50,000 – to Vlado.
It started, as it always does, with a diagnosis of the curse that was causing Megan’s depression. There followed a series of purification baths and the purchase of two Rolexes, which were submerged in a mystical lake in Pennsylvania so as to “turn back time” and undo Megan’s curse. According to Vlado, only a Rolex was able to handle the complex mechanics of reversing time, as “cheap materials would lead to cheap results”.
The Rolex was small fry compared to the next purchase, however: a meteorite that had supposedly been smuggled from outer space by one of Vlado’s friends, an “insider” at Nasa. It would cost $14,500 but it would be worth it; Betty assured her that Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump used “meteorites” to be successful. Megan bought the meteorite but started to lose faith in Vlado’s abilities and, seeing no change in her circumstances, took it to be valued. It turned out to be a lump of quartz worth at most $350.
‘They take advantage of your deepest insecurities’
Today the meteorite sits in Nygaard’s living room and Vlado sits in jail, although she is due to be released this month after serving less than a year behind bars. Meanwhile, Megan is in a much better place.
Bob put me in touch with her, and as we chatted it was hard for me to reconcile this assertive New Yorker, someone who “argued with a checkout guy if he overcharged me 50 cents”, with the Megan who had paid $14,500 for a fake meteorite. “They terrify you,” said Megan. “That’s what these ‘psychics’ do. They take advantage of your deepest insecurities and then they tell you you’re cursed. Nobody who goes in one of those places is ever told they’re doing well.”
I decided to test this out for myself, and went to a fairly upmarket clairvoyant in Greenwich Village for a crystal ball reading. I won’t name the place, but Bob told me he had his eye on it for a while. Lo and behold, the woman I saw followed the psychic scam playbook to the letter.
As it turns out, my actions in a previous life have resulted in “bad karma”, meaning I will never find true love with a man. Which perhaps has more to do with being gay than “bad karma” – but hey, how was she to know? The psychic went on to tell me that I didn’t have to suffer in this life. If I performed all the rituals suggested and paid her $500, she could 95% guarantee results.
A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.
Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”
Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
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How Silicon Valley’s counterculture went corporate and ruined everything
Studio20profile BY DAVID HOLMES ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015
tech-hippies-of-old
January 14, 1992: Tens of thousands of artists, techies, politicians, and counterculture icons converged in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for a Silicon Valley event unlike anything the industry has seen, before or since.
Organizers called it the “Digital Be-In” — a play on 1967’s “Human Be-In,” which featured Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in what was one of the highwater marks for the hippie movement. Described at the time by Soledad O’Brien as where “90s cyberculture meets 60s counterculture,” attendees of the Digital Be-In dropped acid, danced to bad techno, dropped more acid, and witnessed the latest in digital innovation: from virtual reality booths to a strange new form of information technology known as the Internet.
The guestlist was wild. Famed psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Leary teleconferenced in from Hawaii. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown made an appearance. Rockers Todd Rundgren and Graham Nash of Crosby Stills Nash & Young were supposedly hanging around somewhere. And among the high-profile corporate sponsors was none other than Apple Computers.
“Most people are not really aware of this era because, when the Internet hit, that was pretty much the beginning of the digital age for most of the world,” said Digital Be-In organizer and Verbum Magazine founder Michael Gosney at Pando’s Don’t Be Awful event. “But it was a very fertile time. And, as have many of the phases of technology evolution, it was influenced greatly by the Bay Area culture. And the whole history here of the counterculture was very relevant to the early emergence of the whole cyberculture movement. And our Digital Be-In event was kind of an embodiment of that connection.”
With its marriage of drugs, dancing, and tech, perhaps the closest point of comparison to the Digital Be-In is Burning Man. But Burning Man is more like an expensive faux-spiritual vacation for Silicon Valley elites — a much-needed break from fixing wages, spying on Americans, and other ho-hum drudgeries of modern tech CEO life.
The Digital Be-In, however, didn’t cost attendees $1,500 for a scalped ticket nor twice that in camping equipment — it was truly inclusive, bringing together corporate squares, aging hippies, programming nerds, and fiery activists all under one banner. And most importantly, the Be-In was not an escape from the modern, digital world; it was a spiritual celebration of that world’s potential. People go to Burning Man to hook-up, recharge, and blow off steam before returning to the reality of the corporate tech machine. But at the Be-In, guests emphatically believed in the power of technology — and technology companies — to bring people together, to enhance human consciousness, and to promote empathy. Sure, it sounds a little cheesy and naive — the dream of the 90s is alive in Golden Gate Park. But compared to modern tech events like the Crunchies, which is dripping in sexism and dreary exclusivity, the Be-In is a breath of fresh, THC-saturated air.
“The inspiration and the focus at that time was that the Internet would connect people more,” says Laird Archer, a street party organizer in San Francisco who worked at most of the Digital Be-In events. Fun fact about Archer: He once ran for mayor of San Francisco on the “Fun, Sex, and Music” platform.
“I remember,” Archer went on, “being in the basement of Love on Mission Street, and that’s where I met Timothy Leary in the basement. I think it’s a Denny’s now. But there was this hope that [digital technology] would draw people together in a way.”
Politicians, entrepreneurs, artists, activists, hippies, and corporations all working together to make the world a better place? In 2015, that arrangement seems unthinkable. So where did the dream of tech-powered togetherness go wrong?
Tech loses the hippies
They beat Fran down and smashed her face into dirt They slowly bent her over, ripping off her skirt
- Candace Roberts, “Not My City Anymore”
In late 2013, as a bus rolled down the streets of West Oakland shuttling Google employees to the search giant’s campus in suburban Mountain View, its route was blocked by activists throwing rocks and holding up signs that read, “FUCK OFF GOOGLE” and “TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here.” One of the rocks smashed the rear window of the bus.
google
[photo by Craig Frost]
Throughout 2013 and 2014, it became almost routine for protesters to block corporate shuttle buses like this one, which use public bus stops to ferry tech workers — many of whom are recent transplants to the city — to their suburban workplaces. So what prompted these activists, who twenty years earlier would have partied at the Digital Be-In, to turn against the tech industry so violently?
The reasons are legion, but let’s start with the buses specifically. By offering this luxury, Google and other big tech firms had made it more convenient than ever for their middle-to-upper-class tech workers to live in the exciting, cultural hub of San Francisco, as opposed to the boring little boxes of Silicon Suburbia where these firms are headquartered. Adding insult to injury, these companies had until recently been using the city’s public bus stops free of charge — though in the wake of widespread protests the companies now pay taxes for the privilege of using Muni stops.
This influx of techie squares would under normal circumstances be, at worst, an annoyance to counterculture types. But the hard mathematical truth of this migration is that, as highly paid workers flood a city that is already dramatically limited in housing, rents have inevitably gone up. A lot.
As of last November, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $3,350. As a result, many longtime residents have been priced out of their homes. As for the “luckier” tenants who live in rent-controlled rooms, landlords are using increasingly creative — and sometimes blatantly illegal — methods to remove them from their apartments.
So contrary to Gosney’s and Archer’s dream of a techno-utopia that benefits every slice of San Francisco’s population, the tech boom — along with various city statutes that limit residential housing — have made it harder than ever for artists and other members of the counterculture to live in the city. These are the very people, mind you, who helped spark the region’s technological revolution. And that’s saying nothing of the struggles felt by teachers, social workers and other non-tech workers struggling to stay afloat as housing prices skyrocket.
Many argue this so-called “anti-tech movement” is beginning to fizzle out, citing diminished turnouts at demonstrations and a wider public acceptance that, contrary to the facile narrative put forth by blogs like Valleywag, city officials and outdated statutes are as much to blame as tech companies for the ballooning cost of living. But even if public demonstrations have waned, the disgust and anger felt by many toward major Valley firms has not. In “Not My City Anymore,” singer/songwriter Candace Roberts likens the tech industry’s takeover to sexual assault:
But they rode into town with their dollars and bling They were promised the sky, this was more than just a fling They beat Fran down and smashed her face into dirt They slowly bent her over, ripping off her skirt
For some, the animosity directed at tech workers by the rest of the city is mutual. In 2013 there were not one but two indefensible posts written by young startup founders taking aim at the city’s less “upstanding” citizens (read: non-tech workers). Peter Shih, who created a payments website called Celery, wrote a Medium post that ridiculed the city’s homeless population and referred to women in San Francisco by the misogynist term “49ers”: “Girls who are obviously 4’s and behave like they are 9’s.”
Then there was Greg Gopman who wrote a Facebook post calling homeless people “degenerates” that shouldn’t be allowed to breathe the same air as him. Meanwhile, Gopman’s most significant contribution to society is organizing some hackathons nobody remembers.
By attacking the city’s homeless population, Gopman and Shih not only revealed a sick, sociopathic lack of empathy; they also made light of the city’s very serious and growing gap between rich and poor, which according to a recent study was about on par with Rwanda.
And finally, there are the less region-specific yet equally troubling ways in which today’s tech corporations betray the sector’s countercultural roots. Here are just a few examples:
Apple, Google, and a host of other Silicon Valley firms colluded to drive down the wages of over one million tech workers, as reported by Pando’s Mark Ames.
Google has for many years held close ties with contractors and federal agencies that work on behalf of America’s surveillance and military apparatuses — not to mention Google’s and other tech firms’ roles in conducting for-profit surveillance.
And where to begin with San Francisco’s tech company du jour Uber? Smearing journalists? Promoting a culture of sexism? Putting riders at risk thanks to misrepresentations of less-than-stringent driver background checks?
The ideals of empathy, togetherness, and responsibility embraced by the early counterculture figures of the tech movement have given way to old-fashioned corporate capitalism. And the effects of sacrificing these ideals trickle all the way down to consumers and how they use these products. The ultimate ambition of Facebook, for example, isn’t to bring people closer together — although that’s occasionally an accidental side-effect of its product. It’s to hold hostage as much of a user’s attention (and demographic and interest data) as possible so the company can more effectively serve advertisements to its captive audience. And while yes, as a utility, Facebook might help you reconnect with an old friend, let’s be real: Most of a user’s time on Facebook is spent spying on exes, hitting “like” on sponsored listicles, and begging for Candy Crush lives.
“I just consider it to be pretty strange,” says Gosney, “that we’ve had this incredible innovation of social media, which is all about our relationships and our personal identities, and for that to be managed by a public company is just pretty weird to me.”
Idealism vs Profits
So what spurned this shift from a tech scene informed by psychedelics, activism, and community to one dominated by corporate greed?
The answer is mind-numbingly obvious: Money.
It’s easy to forget that for a long time nobody knew if the Internet would make anybody rich. At best, some thought, it might mint a handful of millionaires who were smart enough to get out before the tech boom’s bottom dropped out, as it did in the early 2000s. Without any guarantee of fame or fortune, the Internet and digital technology sectors attracted the kind of creatively-minded misfits who cared more about inventing the future than making money. Lofty ideals, which owed more to Allen Ginsberg than Andrew Carnegie, were put forth with little worry that they would ever come into direct conflict with profit because, well, nobody thought they would make much money off this Internet thing anyway.
“Counterculture is concerned with small and subtle things,” said James Currier*, an advisor to PayPal and the CEO/Founder of the advisory and investment firm Ooga Labs. He’s also been building companies in Silicon Valley since the early 90s.
“25 years ago, 20 years ago, the subtle sounds of product design and geekery would attract a narrow personality band. Certain people were called here and their personality types were similar: Their ability to absorb new ideas, their ability to deal with ambiguities… Their power over others low. Their desire for fascinating creative acts high. And the new language that is so much about the money is attracting a certain different kind of personality types.”
We’re seeing the same thing play out now in blogging — or to use its unfortunate modern moniker, “Internet content creation” — which has suddenly become massively lucrative. This week, the Awl’s Alex Balk, one of the earliest adopters of Writing Stuff On The Internet, immortalized this evolutionary cycle in a post called “My Advice To Young People.” He recommends that youngsters find a field (like blogging in the early 21st century) that nobody respects or cares about — that way, you can invent the rules and rituals to your liking. Just don’t be surprised when the same people who ridiculed you a decade earlier come in and ruin everything you helped build because they finally figured out how to make money off it.
But is it the money alone that corrupted Silicon Valley’s countercultural roots? Isn’t it true that an invention can still change the world for the better even if its creator was primarily motivated by money? And what’s wrong with making money, anyway? Look at how much Mark Zuckerberg donates to charity!
These questions have been on Mitch Altman’s mind throughout his decades-long career as a hacker in Silicon Valley. Speaking at Don’t Be Awful, Altman, who invented a product that can disable any television set in a public place, says that profit in and of itself is not a bad thing. In fact, the profit he made off the TV-B-Gone is the only money he’s earned since 2004. That said, over and over again throughout his career, “profit” has a way of coming into direct conflict with “doing the right thing”:
My first summer job was at a cool company that made computer games with Apple II computers. It was a long time ago. I had a lot of fun there. But the US military came along and wanted to use our game, modifying it, paying us well to modify it, to change it into a killer helicopter training simulator. The people I worked for thought that was a fine idea because it would make them a lot of profit. I didn’t think that and I quit. Before I created TV-B-Gone, I was the founder of a Silly Valley, uh, Silicon Valley startup company that made hard drive controller cards. And we called them RAID controllers and they increased storage capacity and performance. The US Military came and the secret service wanting to use these storage systems to store all of the data they were collecting from us by spying on us. They were willing to pay us huge amounts of money and the VCs that took over the company that I founded thought that was a fine idea because it made them a lot of profit. I didn’t. And I quit.
Regardless of whether you agree with Altman’s estimation of the US Military, you have to admire his conviction, which is a rare thing in any industry. But as rare a trait as moral conviction is in individuals, it’s nearly nonexistent in corporations. For corporations, “profit” is not some kind of pleasant side-effect that occasionally arises out of building cool things. It’s their entire reason for existence — and that can be a scary thing, Altman says.
“If a corporation makes more profit paying fines and lawsuits rather than creating a car that doesn’t blow up when impacted from the rear, then the Ford Motor Company will make a Pinto that sometimes does this, as they did in the 1970s. And they’ll pay the families and victims the lesser amount from the lawsuits rather than redesigning and making a proper car.”
But contrary to what Mitt Romney thinks, corporations aren’t autonomous beings. They are made up of individuals — some of whom may even possess a moral compass like Altman.
“All of those organizations are collections of individuals. They are all individuals making choices. These individuals can, if they choose, decide not to do things that make their lives and the lives of those around them worse. They can. It might mean losing their job. That wouldn’t be an easy choice. But it is a choice worth considering at times.”
Travis Kalanick should drop acid
So how do we bring the ideals of the counterculture — inclusiveness, empathy, connectedness — back to tech? And, just as importantly, how do we ensure that people outside the tech community — artists, activists, and workers of all stripes — can, if they choose, be involved again in shaping the future?
Not to pat our own backs, but events like Pando’s 24-hour Don’t Be Awful fest are a good start. We agreed to let virtually anybody with skin in the game speak for thirty minutes, from anti-eviction activists like Erin McElroy, venture capitalists like David Hornik, hippie inventors like Mitch Altman, journalists like Jose Antonio Vargas, longtime members of the Silicon Valley establishment like Tim O’Reilly, entrepreneurs from fields as diverse as ride-sharing (Nick Allen) and dating (Amanda Bradford), and we even invited our own brutal Internet commenters to speak, like the man, the myth Richard Bottoms.
Facilitating dialogue between these disparate stakeholders won’t guarantee a return of idealism to the tech industry. But it’s the first step. The rest of the work, as Altman says, must be done by individuals; tech workers who are willing to risk their career to stand up for what’s right, like the whistleblowers who spoke out against Apple’s wage collusion scandal; journalists, activists, and artists with the courage to call out giant tech companies for their misdeeds, and the cleverness to get the public to care; and developers and decision-makers who refuse to let the promise of quick profits and venture cash blind them from building products and companies that value the safety and sanity of their community, both online and off.
In the meantime, studies have shown that the counterculture’s drug of choice, LSD, helps improve empathy. With “asshole culture” running rampant in Silicon Valley, maybe entrepreneurs should stop washing smart drug cocktails down their throat with Soylent and take a different kind of trip. Can you imagine what a better world it would be if Travis Kalanick dropped acid?
*James Currier is a personal investor in Pando
[illustration by Brad Jonas]
inShare 25 Studio20profile David Holmes David Holmes is Pando's East Coast Editor. He is also the co-founder of Explainer Music, a production company specializing in journalistic music videos. His work has appeared at FastCompany.com, ProPublica, the Guardian, the Daily Dot, NewYorker.com, and Grist. You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm
who invented a product that can disable any television set in a public place
A Boise woman is facing felony charges after police say she beat, kicked, and stomped on the neck of a Jewish woman in an attempt to convert her to Jesus, KTVB reports.
Calling it a hate crime, prosecutors have charged Margurite Dawn Haragan, 58, with two counts of malicious harassment for beating the woman identified in court documents as “A.G.”
Describing Haragan an acquaintance of the victim, authorities said she showed up at the home of A.G. on Feb. 5 and began banging on her window.
“The defendant was banging on the front window yelling at her that she better believe in Jesus and she was not going to leave until she did believe in Jesus,” Ada County Prosecutor Dave Rothcheck said.
According to Rothcheck the victim opened her door to tell Haragan to go away and to write down her license plate number, only to have Haragan slap her in the face and drag her to the ground by her hair.
“The defendant began kicking the victim in the stomach and thigh area,” he said. “During this time the defendant was screaming at the victim that she better accept Jesus or she would not let up.”
Prosecutors say Haragan then stepped onto A.G.’s neck as she lay on the ground, pressing down with her foot while pulling up on the woman’s head and hair.
In an effort to stop Haragan, the victim said she would convert and Haragan then reportedly let her go and left.
According to court documents, Haragan returned to the victim’s home two days later and carved “death bin bond” into her mailbox before cutting up her mail.
On Thursday Haragan told a judge that she didn’t know what she was being charged with, refused a public defender, and said she didn’t want a lawyer, telling the judge, “I am a sworn-in deputy of Ada County and I also give my oath that what I say is legal and binding.”
According to authorities, there is no record of Haragan working as a deputy in Ada or any of the other surrounding counties.
Judge John Hawley appointed a public defender to Haragan, telling her, “These are serious charges and you really do need an attorney to assist you.”
Haragan faces up to five years in prison for each of the two counts.
