What a weird lie that out-of-office auto-responses must always speak of one “having very limited access to email,” as if everyone spends their vacations in Patagonia or something. Is “I will be checking my email rarely, if ever, and certainly not responding” just too much Truth?
Most dispiriting aspect of the Amanda Knox case: Apparently her false confession/accusation was a matter of not having a proper police translator, which she needed despite her enrollment in the local (and global) Italian immersion program, and being a “languages major” at the University of Washington. Four years of Umbrian Lady’s Prison later, and she was able to deliver her clinching closing plea in fluent Italian. So that’s all it takes to become civilized. : (
Does the iPhone voice thing seem like a crazy gable? Maybe not. I suppose no one ran off to by TouchPads because Ping was a big dud. Still, it seems like this has the potential to be a disaster. If any other handset maker announced voice control I feel like they’d be dismissed as totally…
Read FiatL’s thing… It’s kind of like this was timed to specifically to burnish Jobs’ legacy (things fall apart!) even though, of course, development times would mean he had no more or less responsibility for this than the iP 4 non-S, basically.
It’s interesting that the one place where voice-activation seems to have (finally, after at least a decade) made in-roads is in cars, where of course no one can hear you talk to the machine, and your hands are busy controlling a really deadly device. The leader in this is, from what I’ve read, Ford’s SYNC, which is a big Microsoft project. Ominous…
Coincidence?
#OccupyMadisonAvenue?
For the last three or four months now, every time i’ve tried to watch a streaming documentary from any semi-legitimate site (PBS, SnagFilms, etc.), which is very often, I’ve been forced to watch this horrific ad campaign about all the good Goldman Sachs is doing in “the community.” This is so embarrassing for all involved: the incredibly targeted micro-audience identified as knowledgeable, yet swayable, about the means and ends of GS by its interest in television programs with facticity, etc.; the implicit apology from Goldman itself (I feel like the non-distinction between an “image problem” and an “ontology problem” is the 2011 version of 2008’s “liquidity” v. “solvency”); the poor creatives who had to find examples of Goldman money spent on things besides the creation of more money. Thus far, they’ve only found three very, very attenuated things, making the campaign that much more glaringly, repetitively ineffectual: this one (you’ll have to click screenshot, obviously no embedding allowed!) is about the University of Louisville getting financing for a basketball arena! (You know there’s trouble when you have to bathe in the hometown-authenticity goodwill glow of big-time college sports—and, my god, Kentucky college sports, at that.) The next one is about helping the Yankees set up the YES Network, absurdly told as an underdog story! (“Progress is…When a regional broadcasting network rewrites the sports entertainment playbook.”) And, of course, something rather imprecise about post-Katrina rebuilding. http://www2.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/progress/
The problem, of course, is when it comes down to it, people want to be nice. This is the basically counter-revolutionary aspect to social media and all it’s wrought, right?—it’s made explicitly to mask any view of the systemic or hierarchical or even organizational with faux/fantasy networks of feelings. I—a private citizen, etc, etc.—can now retweet and reappropriate, immediately, things that famous people, even corporations, say (“say”), which kind of demonstrates the banality of discourse. What makes the Wall Street protesters in fact like Cairo, Tunis, etc. is their basic belief, generational no doubt, that the problem is the world isn’tmore like the everyone-talking-to-everyone social-network utopia that, for want of a better word, college was like.
Of course, slightly luckier or slightly more craven college colleagues of the angry people are probably filming/making up episode 4 of the Goldman Sachs campaign as they “march.” They are just as nice—everyone is—as when they were dormmates! It is alarming to me, though I’ve certainly not thought about this long enough to say why, that investment banks would (or could, sentiently) want to be perceived as nice—you know, good-natured and above all, conversational—and citizens would perceive that the problem with investment banks is that they are mean.
today, in between discussing the Yankees with a deplorably unknowledgeable/unmanly interlocutor and heading down for a lunch meeting at the NYSE, expressed great sympathy and interest in Occupy Wall Street, making explicit claims of its world-historical coherence with the Year of Revolutions, etc. As my boss is generally a good bellwether for when things I’ve tried desperately not to think about are about to become to-do list items I can no longer avoid, here are some thoughts:
Yeah, i’ll believe it when I see al-Awlaki’s long-form birth certificate, thanks.
Had, desperately, to buy socks and a brown (that is to say, not-black) belt. Went to H&M. Is there anything more depressing about late capitalism than the shoppers and jostlers at the column of jeans cut in “boyfriend” style?
Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad has been named a MacArthur Genius. How many .wav sound effects can you get for $500,000?
[I told you so?]
This was a very disconcerting email to get, in light of “Is Barack Obama Depressed?” Turns out, it is about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Still, what a scare! It’s easy to laugh, it’s easy to hate; it takes guts to be gentle and kind. : (
