I’m still working on automating this process — all of the RSS → WordPress plugins seem to be designed for producing SEO spam; Goodreads doesn’t offer reviews-only feeds; and so I think I’m gonna have to submit a patch — so for now I’ll just post ‘em manually.

Spoilers follow, but you should probably read them instead of this book. I’m not sorry to have read this — I did it for a book club, and look forward to discussing it — but it’s pretty bad.

This is an awful book. It’s funny: Kim Stanley Robinson uses the word “autistic” as a mild pejorative in the opening pages, but that might be the single best description of this book’s aesthetic. The author consistently ignores the things that make a novel worth reading — excitement, interesting characterization, original ideas — and instead hangs little essays filled with thoughts (by turns implausible and banal) about terraforming, economics, gender and governance onto a novel-like framework.

As Ben has noted, nearly all the action occurs outside the narrative, and is simply mentioned off-handedly as having occurred. This might be for the best, since the plot makes absolutely no sense: a seemingly low-stakes real estate dispute on Venus somehow accidentally gives rise to a multi-step mass-murder plot hatched by a new class of artificial beings? But it’s not clear that there’s any intentionality behind this–perhaps it’s just a screwup. Certainly the villain (if there’s a villain?) is barely named and never confronted, seemingly because the author is tired and wants to wrap things up. Then the perpetrators–a new race of beings, maybe, who are somehow detected, surveilled and rounded up from across the solar system in a massive police action that is mentioned but not even slightly described–are shipped into exile by the inspector who was working the case, who gets to declare judgment and sentence because…?

I would like to to bag on the characters, particularly the endless, hammer-it-into-your-head repetition of Wahram’s froggy eyes as his defining trait. But the truth is that I did find that Wahram and Swan eventually emerged as distinct entities. This was particularly true of Swan, whose pervasive neuroticism was both off-putting and fairly believable. This showed the way to the most promising potential theme in the book, I thought: the cultural claustrophobia and exhaustion faced by humanity as it finishes developing the solar system’s resources and realizes that what they’ve built is a prison. Alas, Robinson flirts with this idea briefly and and then abandons it. Instead he sprints toward ridiculous nostalgia, implying mystical spiritual renewal through communion with (wholly manipulated!) nature, along the way spewing a lot of bullshit about “our horizontal brothers.”

Still, though Wahram and Swan were decently developed, the idea of romantic chemistry between them seemed absurd, and the larger treatment of relationships in the context of massively extended lifespans felt superficial.

Absent a source of excitement (plot) or emotion (compelling character mechanics), we’re left with KSR’s thoughts about the evolution of human civilization.

His musings on speciation and blurring of gender are fine, but never really deployed in a way that made me squirm, which felt like a missed opportunity. It’s all reasonable enough, but kind of boring. When Wahram and Swan finally have their weird and unnecessarily graphic hermaphroditic sex, my reaction was less about alarm over the plumbing that KSR was so anxious to explicate and more a basic dismay at having to read about a boring nebbish (Wahram) sleeping with a sure-to-be-trouble headcase (Swan). Ick.

There is a LOT of time spent talking about terraforming. And there’s a place for that kind of hard sci-fi stuff. But KSR seems to expect to be allowed to waste my time with technical minutiae the way Clarke does in, say, Rendezvous with Rama. Sadly, he doesn’t have the chops. Randall Munroe has helpfully demonstrated the impossibility of one of KSR’s schemes — making Venus rotate faster through planetary bombardment — but there’s plenty more fishiness throughout the book when it comes to masses, energy levels, speeds, distances, problems related to acceleration and docking, venting waste heat and the quantity of astronomical objects in the solar system. I haven’t done the math, but it seems pretty obvious that the author hasn’t, either. He sure pretends like he has, though.

His soft-science ideas are worse. The Mondragon, a cybernetic economy run by AIs that perfectly allocate resources, is laughably utopian — particularly when he introduces a sudden real shock into the economy by destroying the city of Terminator, but never discusses how the system responds. The ideas about governance are incredibly vague. There are plenty of allusions to human civilization’s balkanization. But the only form of government that seems to exist outside of Earth consists of tiny, tiny oligarchies — say, a dozen people on Venus, and maybe a few dozen more throughout the rest of the system. Through robotic, exposition-filled meetings and the occasional conference call these groups are somehow able to organize resources sufficient to terraform planets or stage immensely complex logistical operations (the “reanimation” of Earth). This is all the more ludicrous when one considers how implausibly dependent on human labor much of this hi-tech future activity seems to be. Seriously: Wahram, that tedious milquetoast, would be among the humans with the most governing power in history if he could do what he’s described as doing. It makes absolutely zero sense.

So yeah, it’s just a complete mess. The thing is long and boring, and the ideas on offer are either bland or half-baked. Terrible.

Just one point: this is an app idea that has been executed many, many, many times before. I could find you a half-dozen other examples if I had more time for Googling “self-destruct message app” right now.

Nothing against SnapChat! If people like it, that’s great. But it’s a good example of software success clearly driven by cultural factors rather than the inherent attributes of the app itself*. This distinction is very rarely made when people write about software fads, but it’s important.

* Sure, you can tell a story about design/business model/whatever. I don’t think I buy it.

Michael Arrington is bored. About eight months ago, Alexis Madrigal was similarly bored. These guys are leaders in their field, and consequently I think their malaise is likely to spread. I suspect it has to — that it’s an inevitable consequence of the kind of mentality on display in this audio clip:

That’s from NPR’s “Best Apps of 2012” piece. I think it’s revealing: Brown picks an app in a done-to-death genre and *explicitly* says that novelty forms the basis of his excitement about it.

This statement can perhaps be dismissed as a Freudian slip, but I think it’s representative of a subtext underlying most popular writing and thinking about technology and startup culture — the elevation of “disruption” as an end in itself is just as emblematic of this focus.

And perhaps that’s fine: there’s nothing wrong with enjoying novelty. I know that I derive a lot of utility from it, and consistently base various consumption decisions on it (“What albums are on the 2012 year-end lists?” versus “Which of these albums are objectively better than my all-time favorites?”). And at Sunlight we know that novelty is of huge importance: we rely on the press and public to spread the technology we build. We know that people will only be driven to do so if it excites them, and we know that novelty is one of our best tools for achieving that end.

For aesthetic consumption industries in general, pursuing novelty seems just fine. It’s why books and music and movies and fashion organize themselves into trends and movements. It makes culture understandable and criticism rewarding. But, speaking as a software engineer, it can be an odd criterion to have to grapple with, and it has been slightly bizarre to watch its selection as the primary lens through which our culture perceives this discipline.

(It also seems like a pretty silly way to allocate financial resources when, unlike those other disciplines, reaching profitability is usually premised on a comfortably long product lifecycle, the idea of which is badly undercut by a focus novelty (though I suppose the possibility of hitting it rich as a fad does help with reaching scale). Then again, I don’t really know anything about investing.)

It might be that all of this is obvious, but hearing that report on the radio made something click for me. And I think it marks a useful dividing line for tech journalism. Was this story written because its subject is new, or because its subject is important? For me, outlets like Ars, Techdirt and MIT Tech Review immediately come to mind as publications that consistently choose the latter rationale, and I think that has a lot to do with why I prefer them.

Some people really enjoy fashion. More power to them! There’s no reason they can’t enjoy software on those terms. But I do think that this type of tech connoisseurship is ill-served by the story it currently tells itself about its true motivations, which are usually said to be about convenience, economic importance, or more far-fetched ideas about the transformation of society. The problem isn’t so much that these claims are incorrect (though they usually are) but that they ground what should be an artistic endeavor in a terminally boring bourgeois aesthetic. You are never going to get a punk rock photo app from someone who follows Fred Wilson on Twitter. In this respect, tech writers would be well-served to look to the indie gaming scene and hope that a similar miracle of independent taste and thinking can colonize the app store.

Anyway, you should give that NPR piece a listen. There might be some apps in it you enjoy. And it has some good news for Mr. Madrigal: his lightbulbs-as-a-platform startup idea seems to have come to pass.

Just wrapped it up, and posted some thoughts to Goodreads (I’m thinking of automating that process here — let me know if any of this blog’s few readers would find that irritating). The short version: it’s a great history that’s marred by a bunch of fairly silly futurist speculation. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has read this thing.

Here is a fun thought experiment: if you could do anything, be anyone, or have any power, what would you want to do? Fly? Swim to the bottom of the ocean? Be an officer on a starship and explore space? Make love to a beautiful or handsome man or woman? How far down the list is the fantasy of killing someone?

It’s healthy, and important, to discuss our culture of video game violence after a tragedy

Being the crotchety old man that I am, the time I spent this evening on my gym’s treadmill left me feeling cantankerous. I had been watching Jeopardy, and all of the categories seemed horrible, dagnabit. Back in my day we didn’t have questions about sitcoms! No, it was all Latin, and poetry, and similarly high-minded pursuits.

Then I got home and remembered I had a bunch of code left over from when we built this thing. See, there is a terrifying website called j-archive.com. It’s maintained by former players, and it comprehensively chronicles every game of Jeopardy.

It’s possible to scrape this site to reconstruct games, which is what I did for the Cordray infographic. With this as a starting point, figuring out the percentage of categories devoted to television versus weightier topics was a relative cinch. I was absolutely confident that I would find a line snaking smoothly upward. Here are the regular expressions I used:

And here’s the graph that resulted (normalized by total number of categories in a season):

Gotta say, I didn’t see this one coming. I guess the nerds are (mostly) all right after all. Alex Trebek’s still kind of a supercilious asshole, though.

Anyway, I’m open to other suggested analyses. Lay ‘em on me.

Matt has a post up arguing that today’s debut of a seemingly-great Google Maps iOS app represents a strategic success for Apple. The basic idea is that Google used its head-start on mapping to artificially retard the iOS maps experience, in an attempt to give Android a competitive advantage. Now, with Apple competing, they’ve been forced to deliver a first-class, free maps experience to Apple customers.

I think this is a valid description of the present dynamic, but not of how we got here — the account of the underlying strategy is a bit too 7-dimensional-chess-y for my tastes.

What really crystallized my thinking on the maps issue was a conversation with Eric Gundersen of Development Seed/Mapbox. Over beers at Townhouse, I asked him and his colleague Alex Barth what the hell was up with Apple’s maps strategy. Why set up a gigantic and difficult new internal practice? Their lack of expertise meant they had low odds of success, it would be horribly expensive, and Google’s model of offering free computing services to keep users in their ad ecosystem seemed like it was pretty compatible with Apple’s needs.

Eric’s response was pretty simple: “The future is mobile, right? Mobile’s about location. If you want to own that, you need to own the map layer.”

I think that’s right. This mapping fight isn’t about iOS or Android specifically, but rather a play to avoid dependence/achieve dominance over an increasingly vital (and potentially expensive) informational asset. If your software giant steps into the ubiquitous computing/augmented reality era wholly dependent on a mapping provider with monopoly power — which Google was on track to be — you’d be pretty well boned.

So they made an investment (though a rather chintzy one, by some accounts), took a reputational hit, and have their fingers crossed that iOS’s popularity will subsidize the development of their mapping stack into a competitive informational asset.

Google, meanwhile, is facing its own headaches.  It’s only in the last year that they’ve tried to monetize GMaps in a big way, and almost immediately they were forced to drop their prices due to credible competition from upstarts like the aforementioned Mapbox (which is pretty awesome, by the way, and deserving of a lot more fawning profiles than I’ve seen so far — if you want a DC software startup with a credible plan for world domination, they’re the ones you should be talking to, not the guys selling coupons).

So Google’s clinging to its vision of a consumer mapping monopoly, I think, by focusing on the quality of their offerings. It’s a credible approach: OpenStreetMap still has licensing problems, everyone hates Apple Maps, and Google’s privileged access to oceans of information about consumers’ preferences and desires really does give them a competitive advantage. They have geographic information that no one else seems to have, and ambitious engineering projects that are going to be very, very difficult for competitors to replicate without paying Google for GIS privileges.  So they’re working to build an unapproachably awesome map stack, and retaining users is part of that — as Apple Maps have amply demonstrated, there’s no substitute for users using your product and slowly helping to refine it.

Matt’s right that this dynamic is good for iOS users and consumers in general. It’s competition! But I think the competition is happening over the map layer, not the handset OS layer. Geographic information isn’t just a handset feature, it’s a potential monopoly. These guys legitimately want to crush each other; it’s not just brinksmanship in service of preserving a cross-firm subsidy.

Still, the lingering shreds of my 14 year-old self couldn’t help wasting a few hours writing a convenience utility for extracting snippets from the Simpsons for throwaway-gag social media use. I did this despite realizing that, yes, quotation is a low and basically irritating form of humor — it’s basically the same as the bully with the audio-playing jacket in Back to the Future II . Still, if you’ve got a library of video you want to pull snippets from, perhaps you’ll find it useful.

Important notes/caveats to this important work:

• Having to upload to an FTP endpoint sucks. Using a video service would be great, not least because they’d handle the tedious ffmpeg tweaking I wasted a bunch of time on. And, in fact, I had this working with YouTube. But their copyright infringement detection algorithms are too good. It’s a shame; I feel that quotation of this kind is fair use.
• Quicktime is a real jerk, and ffmpeg is a mystery. For an embarrassingly long time I couldn’t get Apple’s default OS X codecs to play the H.264 file I was making (VLC played it no matter how badly I mangled the parameters, of course). Using the .mov contained was the trick. Bah.
• Is there really no URL shortener that will work without an API key? Weird. Weird and stupid.

Mostly this saves me a minor amount of trouble — the command line is faster and more flexible than the VLC/SimpleMovieX/CyberDuck workflow I used to employ. But my real motivation has more to do with a pie-in-the-sky featureset I’ve daydreamed about for a while:

1. Enter text phrase
2. Search database of extracted subtitles for timestamps and surrounding text.
3. Select desired quotations.
4. Search for moments of audio silence surrounding the window indicated by the rough subtitle timestamping.
5. Potentially repeat the process with video scene transition data.
6. Plug results into today’s script, automating the gap from remembering a line to pulling the video for it.

Again, a huge waste of time. I don’t even have a torrent with subtitles yet! And I have a ton of projects I ought to get to before then, not least of all my mom’s website. But if I were a collective of infinite monkeys, I’d certainly tackle this. Hell, one could conceivably connect it to work, if you ignored C-SPAN’s copyright and pulled all their video and transcription.

A more tractable next-step is probably adding animated GIFs as an output option.

This:

Yesterday’s urbanism tantrum has folks writing to id selves as “market urbanists”. Satisfying. Guess that’s what trolling feels like?

— Ryan Avent (@ryanavent) November 20, 2012

Reminds me that I was only sort of kidding about this:

it’s getting so I can’t remember when journalism was anything *except* trolling slate.com/articles/arts/…

— Tom Lee (@tjl) November 15, 2012

An exaggeration, sure. And I should acknowledge that the article that prompted Ryan’s tweet is a poor example of the form I’m about to discuss. But I do think that journalistic trolling is ascendant. And I think there are three trends that have led to this:

• First, there’s an obvious glut of written material on the web thanks to technologically-lowered barriers to entry, an expanding tail of digitally-accessible archival content, and the continued desirability of writing as an occupation (whether professional or not, largely thanks to non-financial considerations).
• Second, as Yglesias has repeatedly noted, there are a bunch of new forms of leisure (videogames, social media) that are competing for a pool of consumer time that’s only growing slowly (and which will ultimately hit physical and/or biological limits).
• These first two trends lead to fierce competition, and combine with a third phenomenon: A/B testing and other forms of analytic instrumentation that make it easy to quantify which kinds of content are most profitable to produce.

Pornography, cat pictures and aggregation are all known to fit the bill, but I think that direct, strategic assaults on readers’ self-conception have only recently become a deliberate technique. To me, Slate’s “You’re Doing It Wrong” cooking columns are the epitome of the trend (“you make pumpkin pie with condensed milk? you’re an asshole”), and represent a more dramatic divergence than one might first think from the counterintuitivism the brand is known (and gently teased) for. But examples are everywhere.

The opposite dynamic seems to work nearly as well: people love to be told that they’re great just the way they are. I think this is the lens through which one should view much of Gawker Media’s output, from their shaming of racist teens on Twitter to their outing of Violentacrez the Reddit troll. The moral judgments underlying these articles aren’t wrong, which makes them very hard to argue against. But the public performance of those values is clearly about flattering the sensibilities of the audience — “gawker” is exactly the right word for it. When the formula works, there’s an element of triumphalist mob mentality to the proceedings. To me, at least, this often seems more odious than the pathetic and easily-dismissed troll’s gambit.

In some cases, a single article can benefit from both strategies, simultaneously trolling and flattering. Usually this involves an attack on a cliched straw-man — the NYT’s recent piece on hipsterism fits the bill, as does this Philippic by Jill, er, Fillipovic. You can count on some portion of the audience to angrily recognize themselves as the ones being caricatured, and another portion of the audience to pat themselves on the back for participating in the shaming of that imagined subclass. Everybody wins, except for the part where they’ve just demonstrated themselves to be petty, provincial rubes.

Not *everything* will descend to these forms. We will continue to see various kinds of content, even from outlets that embrace these strategies, thanks to editors’ nostalgia, imperfect rationality, deliberate cross-subsidization strategies, and responsiveness to prestige-related incentives that allow them to deploy their position in a principal-agent dynamic for personal gain.

But I do think that this gaming of human psychology is likely to remain ascendant, and to find new forms — online journalism is, if nothing else, a rapidly evolving system. Still, as an audience member, I really dislike feeling like I’m being manipulated. I suppose all one can do is try to develop mental defenses to this kind of conceptual lure, and quietly pine for the simpler, more dignified days of nip-slip galleries.

A quick observation. To me, the most interesting subtext of the pundit/quant pissing match that erupted in the late days of the campaign is the similarity it bears to the hoary aggregator/reporter handwringing we’re all so used to.

Nate Silver is heavily dependent on publicly available polling data, much of which is funded by media organizations. Those organizations engage in polling both to allocate resources and — probably more importantly — to generate grist for stories. Attracting attention to stories written about the back-and-forth of individual poll results is an important part of how these polls are paid for. Silver’s work not only implicitly and explicitly tells us that such stories are a waste of time, but offers a substitute product that can be consumed more efficiently (and which, for the time being, has the benefit of novelty).

In both this and the familiar “oh no Buzzfeed/HuffPo/DCist/whatever” case, readers are being offered a distilled, intensified information product that has been created from more basic inputs. Those inputs are paid for by the value that their creators — media companies — derive from advertising. Aggregators capture some of that value for themselves. To the extent that all of this is zero-sum, the producers of the inputs feel that the aggregators are free-riding and endangering the entire ecosystem. I think that this explains a lot of the animus directed toward Silver.

In the case of content aggregation, we seem to have reached an uneasy truce. And good for us! But this is more reflective of the media’s admirable commitment to openness than it is of a sustainable equilibrium being figured out — though of course the increasing amounts of original reporting done by the aggregators is encouraging.

Perhaps poll aggregators will follow a similar route and begin collecting their own data, though this seems somewhat unlikely given the startup costs involved. Perhaps more plausibly, one could imagine a growing dependence on data gathered by universities. Everyone wants to be a research institution, after all — prestigious new polling operations seem like a viable destination for ballooning tuition fees, shifting the source of Silver’s received subsidy from media to the education sector. It also seems likely that polling will increasingly find ways to use the huge amounts of data that voters now accidentally generate on a continuous basis, and aggregators like Silver might be able to do some of this themselves thanks to the problem’s amenability to automation. (Notably, the price that this data’s owners will set still seems unclear.)

So I think we’ll be fine — to the extent that we need polls, I suspect that our need will be satisfied. (Though that extent is unclear — campaigns will continue to pay for private polls to guide strategy, of course, but I suspect that poorer information for election-watchers might be utility-enhancing, since uncertainty is entertaining.) But I do think it’s interesting to view the current, superficially inexplicable animus toward Silver through the more familiar lens of what’s been happening elsewhere.

UPDATE: Another perspective. I think a preference for simplistic accounts is made possible by structural factors like those discussed above, though.

ALSO: Seems like Henry Farrell wrote something very similar just after midnight this morning — I’ve only just read his post now (11PM) but it’s certainly worth a look. I swear I’m not just ripping him off! Simultaneous invention! Zeitgeist! Etc!