by jenks

The Cyberpunk Future of… Now

The 7.0 peak from the Haiti earthquake indicated by a seismic analyst at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

On Tuesday, January 12, I went into a meeting at 3:00pm PST, and when I came out, about an hour and a half later I quickly discovered that something had happened in Haiti during those 90 minutes of radio internet silence. As everyone in the connected world now knows, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake (the worst in 200 years) hit Port-au-Prince, the capital of the small Caribbean country. Twelve aftershocks greater than magnitude 5.0 followed, destroying basically a third of the entire city, displacing millions, and killing possibly thousands more.

From the Boston Globe photo essay on the aftermath of the quake:


(Tequila Minsky for The New York Times)



(LISANDRO SUERO/AFP/Getty Images)



The badly damaged presidential palace – the center portion formerly 3 stories tall. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)



Displaced residents sleeping in the street after the earthquake.
(REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)



People looking at earthquake victims lying on the street, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

And those are some of the less disturbing images of what’s going on.

Scrolling through the photo essay I know I got just a small inkling of the immense devastation in the already impoverished country, but then came shots of something that struck me as even more profound:


Venezuelan rescuers loading medical equipment onto a plane heading to Port-au-Prince, on January 13, 2010 at the Simon Bolivar international airport in Caracas. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images)



British Search and Rescue teams preparing to leave Gatwick airport, West Sussex to provide assistance to relief and rescue teams in Haiti. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images).



Taiwan rescue teams standing by at the fire department in Taipei as they prepare to head to Haiti. (SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)



Los Angeles County Fire Department urban search and rescue team loading equipment before traveling to Haiti to help with rescue efforts (REUTERS/Gus Ruelas)



Rescue dogs awaiting departure for Haiti at the Torrejon military airbase in Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

It’s like stills from the third act of a Roland Emmerich movie, except it’s not. This is the future, now. Decry globalization all you want, but to me this is the true significance of the word. A tragedy in a place of no real political or economic interest, can literally overnight mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world. According to TechCrunch, within just a few hours of the earthquake the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the relief effort. By January 14th, 2 days after the earthquake, the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, with donations said to be coming in at the rate of $200,000 each hour. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation has also been running its own text donation drive, and by Thursday had raised another $1 million, According to ABC News. Albe Angel, founder and CEO of Give On the Go, the company helping process the Yele Haiti donations, said, “Never has so much money been raised for relief so soon after a disaster. This is a watershed moment. It’s historic.”

It’s also intensely futuristic. Six years ago, when natural disaster struck Indonesia, what’s happening in 2010, in the support effort for Haiti simply did not exist. Even by 2008, text donations raised by charities only amounted to $1 million total. Yele Haiti got that in one day.

If what’s happening in the Haiti relief effort is accelerated, then the current situation between Google and China is basically prophetic. At almost the same time as the earthquake struck, the following was posted on the Official Google Blog:

A new approach to China

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

So basically, after discovering a Chinese security breach, Google, a multinational corporation, is now essentially sanctioning the Chinese government either with the threat of uncensored access to information for its citizenry, or otherwise, with a withdrawal from the market altogether. Not to be left behind, the Secretary of State of an actual government, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has issued the following statement:

We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy. I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.

Once again, Cyberpunk predicts the future, one in which multinational corporations replace governments as centers of political and economic power. Though in this case, in a particularly literary twist of cyberpunk fate, the multinational corporation in question (which is, itself, actually made up of hackers — the erstwhile anti-establishment protagonists of the genre), whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil,” is wielding its might by imposing a threat of increased access to information against a totalitarian regime. It’s enough to make William Gibson suddenly seem like a contemporary satirist rather than a science fiction writer. But, then again, Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet, describing a global communications network long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, and that hasn’t necessarily led us into a dark dystopia…. yet.

In the meantime, though, what it has done, is allow us to become more united as humans, on a global scale. Jay Smooth articulated the underlying sentiment driving the response behind the Haiti relief effort on his Illdoctrine vlog: “We, as human beings, have a responsibility to act.” A century ago, the situation in Haiti would have been considered a Haitian crisis. A decade ago it would have been an “international” crisis. Now, it is simply, immediately, instinctively a human crisis.

Welcome to the future.

Ways to help Haiti:

Donate $5 to Wyclef’s Yele Foundation by texting YELE to the number 501501

Donate $10 to the American Red Cross by texting HAITI to the number 90999

Or donate online to:

UNICEF

Doctors Without Borders

UN Foundation

Partners In Health

    



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by jenks

Agrosexual

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs48/f/2009/222/d/a/The_Icecreamists_ad_2_by_andreaperrybevan.jpg

During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like your shirt,” she said. “I was wondering, can I have it?” The running joke about New Moon, of course, is the extent of the shirtlessness perpetrated by Lautner’s character and his werewolf brethren. (It’s gone so far, in fact, that Lautner, who beefed up special for the role, has vowed to never appear shirtless in a movie ever again.) As Lautner struggled in response to keep from losing his shirt and his dignity, Kimmel, possibly the oldest person in the entire studio at that moment, interjected, “You know, I think people would look down on men for demanding the shirt off a woman.” Yet that this interaction seemed totally acceptable and par for the course to the otherwise teenage audience struck me as an indication of a potentially far lager trend a few days later, when I saw “The Christian Side Hug” video.

If you’re wondering what on earth is that?? The “Christian Side Hug” is a rap performed by a group of white kids at a Christian youth gathering, about a way of hugging while standing side by side with someone as opposed to facing one another and putting your arm around their shoulders or waist, because, “front hugs be too sinful.” Despite ultimately turning out to have been intended as insider “satire” (though not before passing very convincingly as both 1. A typically “ass-backwards” — to employ a Palin-ism — move from the abstinence movement of promoting celibacy while sexualizing even mundane forms of human contact, as well as, 2. A reason to weep quietly for the final, ignominious death — like a sad toothless crack-addict in an abandoned alley — of hip hop), I happened to see the Christian Side Hug video on the same day as the fallout from Adam Lambert’s American Music Awards performance, and to me there was a certain similarity between the two.

In case you happened to have missed it, or hearing about it, Lambert put on a rather racy, sexually scandalizing live performance at the awards show.

http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/b6/68/3368c59c46f69ba79aa50a2519c9.jpeg

Perhaps confusing the AMA’s with the MTV Movie Awards, which have no problem rewarding male makeouts, or, more likely, shrewdly pushing the envelope hard on the night before his debut album release, in his first televised performance since the finale of American Idol, Lambert “shocked” the audience at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre and the millions watching live on ABC by closing the show with a risqué rendition of “For Your Entertainment,” the first single of his album of the same name. Highlights from the controversial performance included simulated oral sex from a male backup dancer, a make-out session with his male keyboardist, and a giant mirrored prop set up on the stage so the audience could see the looks on their own shocked faces.

According to Rolling Stone, the producers of the show weren’t informed about the guy-on-guy kiss in advance, and after the show, Lambert told the magazine the musician he kissed is a straight man. In the aftermath, ABC canceled Lambert’s Good Morning America appearance slated for the next day, which of course only helped generate even more attention and fanfare for the artist, who has clearly become an expert at navigating the myriad controversies he’s racked up. To me, what connects Lambert’s performance and the Christian Side Hug and the Kimmel incident, as well as endless other examples from our current pop culture, extends beyond any particular sexual orientation and includes even abstinence itself. It’s an underlying aggressiveness to sexuality in general: agro-sexuality.

To be clear, I’m not talking about aggression enacted through sex, but rather about a militancy in the display of one’s approach to sexuality. The past decade’s proliferation of online profiles, digital cameras, and all manner of social technologies has demanded we approach basically every other aspect of our modern identities as a performative display. It only makes sense that sexuality wouldn’t be exempt.

When I was a teenager in the late 90’s the general approach to sexuality could easily have been described as “come as you are.” Kurt Cobain had died the year before I started high school, Britney Spears’ first album wouldn’t come out until I was halfway through, and in between there was a lot of Green Day, Jewel, Fugees, and REM. Rap was still busy beefing between the coasts to have gotten fully pornified yet. Heroin Chic, an aesthetic glamorizing a drug that destroys sex drive, was all the rage. Even Madonna was, by this time, more interested in acting and electronica than vogueing or kink. And AIDS was huge. People were still dying of AIDS then. As opposed to now, when people are living with it. Kids were obviously still having sex, but since there was some semblance of sex education going on under the Clinton administration they were getting pregnant a lot less than in the “abstinence-only” Bush era. Basically, aside from the effort pushing the word “safe” in front of it, sex in the 90’s was not something to get particularly militant about.

Of course, there was the gay rights movement, but by the time Ellen Degeneres was making the cover of Time for admitting, yep, she’s gay, it had already long been transmogrified from Activism to Pride. And perhaps it’s this shift from social justice to self-expression that is the root of Agrosexuality in general. After all, what are purity rings if not emblems of Abstinence Pride? And in some basic way, even the demand for the shirt off Lautner’s back was as much a performance of sexuality as was Lambert’s on the AMA’s.

In a 2006 New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.”

Even the nouveau-celibacy of the abstinence movement is an option on this spectrum, its appeal (if not necessarily its effectiveness) one kind of response to all these overwhelming new choices. As alternative sexuality has become more mainstream, and sexuality moves from self definition to self expression, what has emerged is a new agrosexual attitude that really wasn’t there 10 years ago. There’s an expectancy of an in-your-face show of sexuality — whatever yours may be — as part OF sexuality itself. It’s by no means anything new, but it used to be employed by those who’d followed alternative sexual paths, flying their freak flags as a social statement, or for deliberate shock value, now, however, as the sexual mainstream is fragmenting along with the cultural one being agrosexual is par for everyone’s course.

In her LA Times article on Lady Gaga — likely as close to the embodiment of agrosexuality as a generation could hope for — Ann Powers writes:

Having gotten her start in the bohemian enclaves of downtown New York City, Gaga is deeply indebted to Warhol’s “Superstar”-oriented Factory scene and its aftermath, which produced drag performers like Candy Darling, artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and streetwise rock stars including Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

“The idea is, you are your image, you are who you see yourself to be,” she said. “It’s iconography.”

Warhol supported and exploited a coterie of outsiders who likely would never have emerged from their corners without his help. Gaga takes control but also shows herself losing it; she blurs the lines between self-realization and self-objectification, courting the dangers of full exposure for a generation of kids born with camcorders in their hands.

Though she talks nonstop about liberation, Gaga’s work abounds with images of violation and entrapment. In the 1980s, Madonna employed bondage imagery, and it felt sexual. Gaga does it, and it looks like it hurts.

She says she wants her fans to feel safe in expressing their imperfections. “I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”

Trendwatching.com calls this “Maturialism,” one of its “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010:”

Let’s face it: this year will be rawer, more opinionated, more risqué, more in your face than ever before. Your audiences (who are by now thoroughly exposed to, well, anything, for which you can thank first and foremost the anything-goes online universe) can handle much more quirkiness, more daring innovations, more risqué communications and conversations, more exotic flavors and so on than traditional marketers could have ever dreamed of….We’ve dubbed this MATURIALISM (mature materialism),

In fact, the image at the top of this post is an ad for UK ice cream brand The Ice Creamists, mentioned in the Trendwatching post as an example of Maturialism in action:

http://trendwatching.com/img/briefing/2009-11/image21.jpg

Trendwatching suggests that if they want to keep up with culture, brands need to mirror the current societal norms that are “about anything but being meek.” In other words, this isn’t just for teenagers and pop stars; brands need to get in on the agrosexual action, too.

    



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by jenks

today’s awesome ad award goes to:

Note: This is actually way better if you’re first seeing it during a Dollhouse commercial break on Hulu, without the spoilers of the youtube video title and static screen (below) giving away what you’re about to see.

In the course of just 30 seconds the ad takes you on a ride of intrigue and suspense that manages to tell a whole epic saga (literally) in a highly entertaining, insightfully modern way. No wonder the campaign is called “Search Stories.” It’s like “Hamlet: (Facebook News Feed Edition)” meets The Usual Suspects. And just as you’ve put the pieces together, and it’s dawning on you who the Kaiser Soze behind these searches is, it’s over.

.
Makes you want to watch it a second time.

Search Stories is such a smart response to the Microsoft’s “It’s time to Bing and decide” campaign earlier this year for their new search engine. Because the truth about how we search for things online, is the truth about how we think about and live our lives — as exemplified here by Bruce Wayne’s. Life is an ongoing story we create. It’s not simply a string of isolated queries and decisions, it’s a series of searches and discoveries.

    



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by jenks

“Good Times Roll”

http://b6.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/00842/61/55/842065516_l.jpg

A friend of mine, pro skater Patrick Melcher (significant other to SkinGraft‘s Katie Kay, and 2nd place Moustache World Champion), just completed the pilot for an action sports / reality show concept he co-concocted called “Good Times Roll.” The gist is: Melcher and his BMX buddy Jon Peacy get dropped down in a random city, meet up with their homies, go scope out some spots to skate and ride, engage in some friendly competition, and, as the title would suggest, let the good times roll. A little bit The Amazing Race meets Shaq Vs. meets huckjam, the pilot was shot in Vegas last month and shopped around the traditional network way but didn’t get any concrete commitment. So, last week the trailer got *(cough)* “leaked” online, covered on ESPN, viewed like 19 thousand times, and now networks are hitting them up. Like you do in the digital age.

The show looks absolutely sweet. Excited to see where it lands!

    



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by jenks

Why Limited Commercial Interruption Works

hulu

To the extent that any advertising works, the model in place at websites like Hulu and Fancast, that offer commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies, is pretty damn effective. Unlike the 3-minute average TV commercial break, which most people Tivo past or click away for or simply go to the bathroom during, the 30-second “limited commercial interruption” on your online machine gets you to pay attention. 30 seconds isn’t enough to walk away for, after all. Sure, you can pause to answer nature’s call or email’s or SMS’s or whatever, but the remainder of the ad will play when you unpause. You can, at most, surf over to another browser tab, but nevertheless you’re still listening to the ad’s audio, and on several occasions I’ve gotta admit this was intriguing enough unto itself to get me to tab back. (The lazer-bassy sounding Asics ad with the Asian male model dude running through psychedelic milk formations is coming to mind).

At the same time, because the commercial interruption really IS limited — one ad per break — and often Hulu even offers a choice as to which ad you’d prefer to see and in what sort of format (a long-form ad before the program starts, with no breaks later on is also an option), it doesn’t feel nearly as offensive and imposing as the ads that you DO have time to walk away from on the teevee. The one thing that’s missing is a feature to click to see the ad directly, replay it, and embed or share it. Right now you still have to go over to youtube or elsewhere if you want to find the ad you just saw on Hulu (counter intuitive, no?) and sometimes you can’t even find the ad anywhere (the Timberland Earthkeepers ad where the sole of the shoe keeps morphing into all sorts of things like an eagle and a tire, etc, is coming to mind. I STILL can’t find that shit, and it was hella cool.)

As Hulu’s brand keeps growing — it overtook the big broadcast networks that own shares of it (ABC, NBC and Fox) in web traffic for the first time this past June — less, it turns out, really is more, paricularly when it comes to commercials. Now, how long until Hulu starts producing its own original content, you think? Let’s just hope Netflix (whose Red Envelope Entertainment division, responsible for licensing and distributing films such as Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby expanded to produce its own original content in 2006 only to close down just 2 years later in part to avoid competition with its studio partners) isn’t necessarily a permanent precedent.

    



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