Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out

“Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out” is the title of something I wrote for New York Magazine's website.

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Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley

When I first joined the People of the Red Valley all those years ago I was glad to share water. I had been in Fathers of the Blue Sky and Sons of the Lion but I did not feel welcome in either family and I could tell that the People of the Red Valley were serious about creating a tribe that would provide me with a high quality of food, shelter, and opportunities for mating. And for a long time I was happy in the Red Valley. I ate of the food and would partake of the shelter, and married well more than once.

Yes, for a long time it was good. During the hunt for the Great Fox, five chiefs and twenty warriors—including myself—traveled for six days towards the night sun. There we found the sleeping Great Fox and encircled him in silence and woke him all at once with our roar, and pierced his side with our spears, and where the blood touched the ground there will grow a mountain. I felt that we had truly built an effective community that could accomplish anything, a community where my contributions were valued.

I remember a time when we respected each other. Recall when Rain-on-Winter-Grass wrestled a ghost bear by the Five Trees River and had to be pulled away by all of us before the Woman in the River could turn him to tears and take him as a husband. That night I wiped his tears with my war shirt, until the Woman in the River gave him back to us.

But then things began to change.

First, when I proposed that we go to war against the Fathers of the Blue Sky I expected there to be a discussion, but I didn't expect the Five Chiefs to insist that I retract my proposal. Yes, I understand that the laws of the People of the Red Valley say that we will raise arms against no other people, but who gets to decide those laws? If no one questions the Five Chiefs are we any better than slaves?

Then, few seasons later I saw that some of the chiefs had taken too many wives. Some of the mother-chiefs even took more than two husbands! And yet when I wanted a third wife and a larger cave, the Five Chiefs took pains to point out that I was not born a Red Valley Person and made so bold as to say that I had not earned the “large” cave in which I lived—not only that but I had not shared a deer in three moons. Now, that would have been fine and fair if I had known the policy on deer-sharing, but nowhere was it clear how many deer I would have needed to share in order to move to a larger cave.

Finally (and this was the last straw) in the fall, when there was the smell of snow, we allowed six men and a girl-child of the Waterfall People to enter our home, all seven hungry and weak, and I was asked if I could shelter two of the men in my already very-crowded cave, as if it was suddenly my job to teach strangers the ways of the Red Valley People, and asked to share my smoked deer meat—even though it was never made clear to me exactly how much smoked deer I should be giving to the People. That's when I began to wonder exactly why I had come to the Red Valley.

And now the famine has come and the crone who tends the heart-hearth has been eaten by lions in the night. And don't get me started on the council's attempts to find the next crone, which was proof of the fact that our chiefs don't care about anything but themselves. Yes, there was a time when I was very proud to say that I was a Red Valley Person. But that time is over. There was a time when I would have shared my smoked deer meat with all of you, but that time is gone. I hope one day the People can regain their communion with the Sun, but I doubt it.

Goodbye, People of the Red Valley. I guess I'm once again a Father of the Blue Sky.

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Welcome to the Company

Recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") puts forth that incubating humans act out evolution as they grow from zygote to baby. This was a popular idea a century ago, but it's turned out the science isn't that simple. Yet the principle holds that the dividing fetal cells are engaged in a kind of performance of all of evolution—from simple to complex, from general form to specific form. The developing human loses its tail early, gains a cerebrum later.

Thus newborns are time boiled down, and every ounce gained is another 20 or 30 million years of life; they compress the three billion years since abiogenesis into a nine- or ten-month performance that runs from conception to birth. By the time they arrive they have gone for rides on comets, teased dinosaurs with sticks, come down from the trees, and run across the savannah.

The day before we were scheduled for our Caesarean I told the Internet that I was packing for a very long trip and wasn't sure what to bring. People—friends and strangers—wrote with suggestions: Spare pants. A suitcase filled with books. Your wife. Extra underwear and camping detergent; a hoodie and a flask. The head and <3. Can organic mixed nuts, first aid kit, cash hidden in wallet belt, an extra pair ultra comfortable shoes. Carseats. Toothbrush. Multiple chargers. Take less. Pillows and a blanket for you, easy snacks, every kind of memory-recording device. Bring a sandwich. Music. And patience. Half the clothes and twice the money, and lots and lots of gin.

So a few days ago we packed everything and went to the hospital. And a few hours after we arrived the clock—our clock—reset from 3.5 billion to zero.

Hello little girl. And two minutes later: Hello little boy.

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“Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”

Forgot to tell you about this.

Continuing my theme of writing things every now and then I wrote a piece about how social media sees the publishing industry, which is now published to the New York website.

It was much helped along by its editor.

It was a sort of companion piece to this list of people in new media, which, well, when you read the list you realize, it's basically "media" now. We're probably only a year or two away from dropping the "new" forever.

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“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

An essay for TheMorningNews.org.

This morning TheMorningNews.org unveiled a gorgeous new design—the happy result of months of hard work by many people.

I feel privileged that a new essay, “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is the first feature to be published in the relaunch.

It's about some things that happened.

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Woods+

People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately.

I know it's confusing. But this is their competitor to Facebook basically. Except you can list your friends. That's the circles. But it's easier to remember if you call them holes. Like I could have a friend hole and an acquaintance hole and a K-hole. And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats. One of the things that can happen, according to the press, is that you can, if you are very lucky, talk with one of the founders of Google, because he's hanging out using the service too. And you can ask him about user experience, and show him your cat. Which sounds horrifying, like having to pee next to Steve Jobs or playing touch football with Arnold Schwarzenegger. People rich enough to place phone calls to order body organs, people who can afford to hide families, make me nervous. The only thing they could want me for is harvesting.

Anyway, the new thing from the Gootch makes it really easy to sort people into the holes, which is good, because this lets you divide people into clusters and lie to each group in different ways, which makes it easier to preserve the fictions that make up our polite racist society. And it looks pretty sweet and works well so far, which probably means that there will be a huge battle-in-earnest between the Gootch and the Books, between Circles and Friends. For example, I don't know if you saw this but according to the New York Times Mark Zuckerberg is taking walks in the woods with people he'd like to hire. If he really wants you to work for him he takes you for a walk in the woods. It's gotten that serious. And this is a responsibility of a well-educated American, to think about Mark Zuckerberg taking walks in the woods with multiple unnamed sources.

First, this means that there is a class of employees who were taken for walks in the woods and class that wasn't. That's how that stuff shakes out. “Haha,” someone texts or comments, “sure we went for a walk in the woods, it's amazing that someone is thinking to talk about that in a national newspaper,” but in their secret heart they are thinking, “I am woodsworthy.”

No one has yet come forth and said that they have not taken a walk with Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps because they are ashamed--but there is also the distinct possibility that it is Zuckerberg's goal in life to take a walk with absolutely everyone on earth, and that's all that Facebook (which now has nearly 43 times as many users as there are unemployed people in the USA) is actually for.

Now that this article has appeared there will have to be even more thought given at Facebook HQ as to who gets a walk in the woods, because now everyone knows that a walk in the woods is a thing. I plugged the current scenario into the spreadsheet I use to determine things and came up with two likely outcomes: (1) People will go back in the woods and build a cave just out of phone reception range and install a hermit, and everyone will go back and look at the hermit, who is not connected to anything, from time to time, and say, “Makes you think, doesn't it?” Or (2) Most Dangerous Game. In this scenario one sunny day you're working on low-level NoSQL projects at the Gootch or wherever, and you get an email from Facebook and you go for the interview and Zuckerberg is talking about scaling PHP and suddenly pauses, gets this look in his eye, pulls his hoodie over his head and says “You have sixty seconds. You should be running.” Because engineers, as we are often reminded, are the ultimate prey.

In conclusion, Groupon.

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Reading Tonight

Reading!

I am giving a reading tonight in New York City. New material that I never plan to put on Ftrain or publish. Tonight only. See you!

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Recorded Entertainment #2

By Paul Ford

So in 1993, BoingBoing tells us, a group called Mondo Vanilli made an art-prank album on Trent Reznor's Nothing label, but it was not released until now. The members of the group were “RU Sirius, founder of Mondo 2000 magazine, composer Scrappi DuChamp, and performance artist Simone Third Arm.”

After listening to a few songs (the album itself sounds a great deal like Meat Beat Manifesto) I decided to find out more about Simone Third Arm and found this article from 1995. It opens with a skink voiding on Simone's chest. Then:

Fortunately, cleaning up piss and poop is nothing new for Simone. It is her business. For the past eight years, her performance art and videos have featured the timeless, classic elements of urine and feces--peeing into buckets, shooting cranberry enemas onto a canvas. Somebody's got to do it.

The only clue to her bizarre trade in the apartment, however, is a toilet seat mounted on the wall, with stirrups wired on either side. On a shelf, another toilet seat boasts circuit boards glued all over it.

“That's the commodem,” says Simone.

Emphasis added; also, oh no. And that is where the trail ends. I had two thoughts: (1) It's really good to have an “art name,” like “Third Arm,” especially if you ever plan to date online or deal with general population; and (2) How do you make a living when your poo art days are over? Like if you are going, perhaps gently, perhaps not, into your early thirties, followed by your middle-early thirties, then your middle thirties, early-later thirties, and finally later thirties? (People really slice up their thirties even though younger people don't care and older people just laugh.) Then I remembembered: You work as a project manager at a web development firm. I've met a lot of people who recognize in me a certain comfort level with weird personal histories and say things like, hah, yes, I used to work in blood porn, and I say, let's keep going with these wireframes.

Actually no I totally don't; I go, let's talk about that.

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Recorded Entertainment #1

By Paul Ford

• There's this episode of the Jack Benny show, recorded during WWII and rationing, where they go to a butcher shop and take a tour of the freezer for 5 cents. Everyone sighs and oohs when they hear about the prime rib.
• Jack Benny started in Vaudeville, then went to radio and television. Later he helped Jack Paar get his start; Paar ended up hosting the Tonight show and people still talk about how interesting he was, and how unpredictable. He was a magnetic loon. There's a chapter in one of his books where he rails against the fairies who were ruining the entertainment industry. It's bad. Jack Benny also boosted Johnny Carson's career. One stage Benny occupied is where Conan O'Brian's version of the Tonight Show was hosted.
• Benny's fake-nemesis was a guy named Fred Allen. Allen's radio show doesn't hold up as well as Benny's—it's zaaany, whereas Benny has a sort of slow-burn goof that goes on for 20-plus years and evolved into about half of the likeable-but-exasperating-protagonist sitcoms that continue today(Seinfeld; 30 Rock; etc.) But Allen was a genius writer. His life in Vaudeville ( Much Ado About Me ) is one of my favorite books.
• Sylvester “Pat” Weaver produced the Fred Allen show. He was the father of Sigourney Weaver. Who appeared on Saturday Night Live, which some say owes a debt to the Fred Allen program. (Years ago a friend told me that she was working at a pizza shop and a familiar-looking woman came in. “Do you play bridge with my mother?” asked my friend. “I'm Sigourney Weaver,” said the woman.)
• Vaudeville was a kind of network. You had booking offices for hubs and the telegraph to manage the flow of entertainment, and the railroad to move the performers from city to city. It was an extraordinarily advanced and cost-effective for the time—a way to bring an enormous amount of entertainment to a very large country. Of course, the broadness that made it so appealing to lots of Americans began to look goofy when the sophistication of radio and movies showed up. Instead of bringing your act to the world you could bring the world to your act.

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