Articles

CNN - Should Twitter Fear Saudi Prince?

2011-12-21T00:11:47Z

(CNN) -- The social media universe has been aghast this week after the revelation that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia has invested $300 million in Twitter. The shock and awe seems to center around the notion that Twitter has been at least partly responsible for the Arab Spring uprisings that directly threaten the Saudi royal family's grip on power. On the surface, anyway, this seems like a contradiction.

Why would the king's nephew be investing in the medium of his family's enemy? Will he attempt to influence the development of the network or try to make it more susceptible to censorship in a regime-threatening emergency? And what of Twitter?

Will the participation of a major investor widely considered to be the beneficiary of one of the world's most exploitative dynasties tarnish the company's otherwise net-friendly brand image? Why would Twitter accept such an investor, and why would he court them in the first place?

The answer, most simply, is for the money.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is no doubt aware of Twitter and Facebook's tremendous influence in his own and neighboring countries, and may even be personally concerned about what a revolution might do to his own and his family's sovereign rule. But why should that stop him from positioning himself to become the wealthiest deposed royal he can be? It's a win-win.

For its part, Twitter, which isn't even a public company, is not actually selling shares to a Saudi Arabian prince. It's Twitter's early investors who are selling $300 million of their own shares to the Prince's investing group, "Kingdom Holding Company." Of course, Twitter benefited by selling those shares initially, and now benefits indirectly as the resale of these shares puts the company's total valuation up to $8.4 billion.

The dismay and disillusionment associated with this transaction seems overblown to me, or at least misplaced. In short, we are looking at the wrong medium. We are not witnessing Twitter operate against its central, democratizing premise. We are witnessing money operate in perfect accordance with its own, highly abstracting premise. Money, by its very nature, launders.

This is exactly what money and the corporation were invented 700 years ago to do: provide kings and other members of the aristocracy with a way to invest at arm's length in projects they may or may not want to be associated with. The corporation gives people a way to invest passively in companies whose operations they might not want to know about, much less be known for.

Likewise, generic, central currencies give people who have done Lord-knows-what the very same access to markets as those who have earned their money through sweat or innovation. Once it's money, it is as clean as anyone else's money.

Similarly, once you sell your business to shareholders, they can do what they like with the shares. That's what is meant by shareholding. In the simplest language possible, when you sell your business, you have sold your business. (Maybe that's why so many top people have been leaving Twitter lately. Their shares have vested and they are less restricted about what they can do with them once they quit.)

This is the beauty and horror of investment capital. Just as a Saudi prince can invest in our revolution-inspiring Internet darlings, each of us is free to invest our own retirement savings in the likes of cigarette and liquor companies, weapons manufacturers, polluters, outsourcers and sweatshop exploiters.

We can put our kids through college by investing in the very oil companies through which the Saudi royals made their money in the first place. Then, hopefully, our kids can go on to become peace workers, revolutionaries or even Twitter employees. Or not.

If we're truly concerned about the long arm of international investing, we might best reconsider how we invest ourselves. Instead of relying on the anonymity of outsourced investing to the stock market, why not look around for who or what needs money in our towns and communities?

The Obama administration is already in the process of curtailing the regulations that prevent nonmillionaire investors from putting money into one anothers' businesses. This means we can begin to depend on local money to start-up our own ventures, and on local ventures to build our own savings.

And at that point, if we don't feel like having a Saudi Arabian prince participate, we can just say no.

Original at CNN.com

Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it

2011-10-05T19:17:38Z

(CNN) -- Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn't be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.

Consider how CNN anchor Erin Burnett, covered the goings on at Zuccotti Park downtown, where the protesters are encamped, in a segment called "Seriously?!" "What are they protesting?" she asked, "nobody seems to know." Like Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American History, the main objective seemed to be to prove that the protesters didn't, for example, know that the U.S. government has been reimbursed for the bank bailouts. It was condescending and reductionist.

More predictably perhaps, a Fox News reporter appears flummoxed in this outtake from "On the Record," in which the respondent refuses to explain how he wants the protests to "end." Transcending the shallow partisan politics of the moment, the protester explains "As far as seeing it end, I wouldn't like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue."

To be fair, the reason why some mainstream news journalists and many of the audiences they serve see the Occupy Wall Street protests as incoherent is because the press and the public are themselves. It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.

In fact, we are witnessing America's first true Internet-era movement, which -- unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign -- does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint.

Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system -- and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem.

Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Street's many teach-ins this morning. There were young people teaching one another about, among other things, how the economy works, about the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, the creation and growth of the derivatives industry, and about the Obama administration deciding to settle with, rather than investigate and prosecute the investment banking industry for housing fraud.

Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets banking's defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

That's because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken.

But unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It models a new collectivism, picking up on the sustainable protest village of the movement's Egyptian counterparts, with food, first aid, and a library.

Yes, as so many journalists seem obligated to point out, kids are criticizing corporate America while tweeting through their iPhones. The simplistic critique is that if someone is upset about corporate excess, he is supposed to abandon all connection with any corporate product. Of course, the more nuanced approach to such tradeoffs would be to seek balance rather than ultimatums. Yes, there are things big corporations might do very well, like making iPhones. There are other things big corporations may not do so well, like structure mortgage derivatives. Might we be able to use corporations for what works, and get them out of doing what doesn't?

And yes, some kids are showing up at Occupy Wall Street because it's fun. They come for the people, the excitement, the camaraderie and the sense of purpose they might not be able to find elsewhere. But does this mean that something about Occupy Wall Street is lacking, or that it is providing something that jobs and schools are not (thanks in part to rising unemployment and skyrocketing tuitions)?

The members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.

And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike.

You Are Not Facebook's Customer

2011-09-23T13:40:05Z

(CNN) -- The ire and angst accompanying Facebook's most recent tweaks to its interface are truly astounding. The complaints rival the irritation of AOL's dial-up users back in the mid-'90s, who were getting too many busy signals when they tried to get online. The big difference, of course, is that AOL's users were paying customers. In the case of Facebook, which we don't even pay to use, we aren't the customers at all.

Let's start with the changes themselves. Until now, the main thing that showed up on users' pages was a big list of "updates" from all the friends and companies and groups to which they were connected. It was a giant chronological list that made no distinction between an article (like this one) that may have been recommended by a hundred friends and the news that one person just changed his relationship status or had a funny dream.

Facebook has now prioritized that flow of stories into a news feed that puts "top stories" on top, and the more chronological list of everything down below. Top stories are selected by an algorithm of some sort that "knows" what will be important to the user based on past behavior and numbers of connections to those recommending the story, and so on.

Meanwhile, as if to make up for this violation of the what-just-happened-is-the-only-thing-that-matters ethos of the social net, Facebook added a live, Twitter-like stream of everything everyone else is doing or saying. It runs down the right side of the screen, almost like CNN TV's awfully distracting and wisely retired "news crawl."

On an Internet where everyone and everything are becoming "friended" to one another, such a division of the relevant "solid" bits from the topic stream of data points makes sense. After all, updates from your closest friends and favorite bloggers should take priority over those from some relative stranger you "friended" because he said he was in your fifth grade class and you didn't want to insult him. If everyone ends up connected to everyone, Facebook will have to make some distinctions or the service will be useless.

But users are bothered by all this. On the simplest level, they don't like change, particularly when it results in making their free time more complex and stressful. Facebook was always a lazy person's friend and time waster. Turning into a dashboard designed to increase productivity and relevancy turns it more into, well, work.

Of course, if they stopped and thought about it, they would realize that Facebook is work. We are not Facebook's customers at all. The boardroom discussions at Facebook are not about how to help little Johnny make more and better friendships online; they are about how Facebook can monetize Johnny's "social graph" -- the accumulated data about how Johnny makes friends, shares links and makes consumer decisions. Facebook's real customers are the companies who actually pay them for this data, and for access to our eyeballs in the form of advertisements. The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

Deep down, most users sense this, which is why every time Facebook makes a change they are awakened from the net trance for long enough to be reminded of what is really going on. They see that their "news feeds" are going to be prioritized by an algorithm they will never understand. They begin to suspect that Facebook is about to become more useful to the companies who want to keep "important" stories from getting lost in the churn -- and less useful for the humans.

Ultimately, they don't trust Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and are suspicious of his every move. By contrast, Apple founder Steve Jobs took away his customers' hard drives, Flash movies, keyboards and Firewire ports -- and yet consumers put up with the inconvenience and discomfort every step of the way because they believed that Steve knew best, and trusted that he was taking them somewhere better.

Apple users pay handsomely for the privilege of putting themselves in the company's hands. Facebook does not enjoy this same level of trust with its nonpaying subscribers.

That's because on Facebook we're not the customers. We are the product.

Hidden Architecture

2009-04-14T02:18:43Z

The real space of cyberspace.
Printed in Red Herring

Back in the late 20th century, at the dawn of the Internet Era, Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte told us that to be "digital," we would have to learn the difference between atoms - those tiny particles making up the stuff of the real world - and bits - the units of pure, binary information that define the landscape and content of cyberspace.

But, as these photographs reveal, atoms might best be thought of as units of pure information, and bits, well, bits are anything if not tiny particles with substance, mass, and motion.

Each time our fingers strike the keys on our laptops, the fundamental orientation of particles in our RAM chips is changed. Those changes are recorded for longer intervals on the magnetic media of our hard drives, and occasionally delivered through the electrons in copper wire, the glass filaments of fiberoptic cable, or ions in the air itself. Yet no matter how ethereal or invisible these particles seem, they are very real, indeed.

And the networks we have devised to transport and manipulate them are a physical infrastructure. Computer technology is really just a series of improvised Rube Goldberg conduits - aqueducts, pulleys, and shunts, patched together over time, respecting the legacy of their predecessors.

For however much we try to ignore it, we all still catch an occasional glimpse of DOS code - during a crash or particularly difficult start-up. We know it's still there, slaving away down there in the ship's boiler room while a spit-and-polish Windows strolls the upper decks for all to see. And we've all had that unnerving experience of accidentally picking up the extension phone while we were still online, and hearing the loud kshhh white noise of our computer conversing with its server, in a language that no human ear will ever be able to decipher.

We deny the reality of this unseen world the same way we deny the unseen hands of migrant workers who pick the grapes for our Merlot and Asian children who weave the patterns in our Bokara rugs. Bouquet and aesthetics might be thought of as bits; but grapes and looms are most certainly atoms. And they've found their delightful arrangements thanks to human hands.

But it is not guilt for the laboring electrons that compels us to shun them. It is fear.

We pretend to use the earplug extensions on our cell phones for the convenience, when we actually fear what the very real particles emitting from our Nokia may do when they collide with the gray matter in our skulls. We conduct stock trades on the Web while trying to deny the precarious path of routers, gateways, or even underwater cables through which our orders must travel before reaching their destination. We depend on our most intimate email correspondence reaching our loved ones intact, even though every message is broken down into dozens of components parts, all transmitted individually and tagged with identifying numerals, before being reassembled by the next server, and broken down again. Each time we install a program onto our hard drive, we inwardly acknowledge the possibility that it might prove incompatible with the almost living culture of programs already there, much in the way a transplanted organ is rejected by an organism's resident antibodies.

However independent of physical reality our technologies provoke us to imagine ourselves, the bits on which we base this dream have no less need of a hospitable environment than we do. Instead of denying their existence, let us marvel, instead, at the universe we have created for them.

What's Next

2009-04-14T02:09:34Z

Published in Upside, 1996

I generally hate to think about "what's next" because it implies that there's going to be a next "big thing." I prefer to avoid such predictions, because most big things are really just amalgamations of lots of little things. In fact, as I see it, the very best next big thing we could hope for would be to transcend big things, altogether. Who needs them, except marketers, Walmart, and business plan writers hoping to demonstrate how their brilliant schemes can "scale" to infinity and beyond?

But "what's next," well, maybe I can deal with a bit of that by projecting forward from "what's now."

As far as the Internet is concerned, what's next is not pervasive computing, cellular technology, or wireless solutions. Rather, it's the coming realization of the real role that content plays in our lives. Content may be king, but very few people understand just what content is, or function it serves to we very social beings. The constant flow of content into our lives may make all this a bit clearer.

Take a look back, for a moment, at some content of the past. When my father was growing up, for example, bubblegum companies competed by offering free trading cards inside their packages. Little pieces cardboard with the images of baseball players proved the most successful, and soon children were buying whole packs of baseball cards with only a single stick of bubble gum. Today, baseball cards are sold without any bubblegum at all.

Despite gum's textural attributes, baseball cards proved to be the "stickier" content. Why? Because they provide a richer media experience. Not only can collectors look at pictures, but they can also compare and analyze the statistics of each player as chronicled on the card's back.

More importantly, this depth of data allows the card to serve as what I've started to call "social currency." While children can debate the merits of one brand of gum over another for only so long, they can talk endlessly about the players' whose cards they've collected, trade them, or even just peruse one another's collections. See, the cards aren't really ends in themselves; they are the basis for human interaction. Johnny got some new cards, so the other kids come over to see them after school. The cards are social currency.

We think of a medium as the thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. Content is just a medium for interaction between people. The many forms of content we collect and experience online, I'd argue, are really just forms of ammunition -- something to have when the conversation goes quiet at work the next day. An excuse to start a discussion with that attractive person in the next cubicle: "Hey! Did you see that streaming video clip at streamingvideoclips.com?"

Social currency is like a good joke. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure, for a start. But they are also using content -- mostly unoriginal content that they've heard elsewhere -- in order to lubricate a social occasion. And what are most of us doing when we listen to a joke? Trying to memorize it so that we can bring it somewhere else. The joke itself is social currency. "Invite Harry. He tells good jokes. He's the life of the party."

Think of this the next time you curse that onslaught of email jokes cluttering up your inbox. The senders think they've given you a gift, but all they really want is an excuse to interact with you. If the joke is good enough, this means the currency is valuable enough to earn them a response.

That's why the most successful TV shows, web sites, and music recordings are generally the ones that offer the most valuable forms of social currency to their fans. Sometimes, like with mainstream media, the value is its universality. Right now, the quiz show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" is enjoying tremendous ratings because it gives its viewers something to talk about with one another the next day. It's a form of mass spectacle. And, not coincidentally, what is the object of the game? To demonstrate one's facility with a variety of forms of social currency! Contestants who can answer a long stream of questions about everything from sports and movies to science and history, are rewarded with a million dollars. They are social currency champions.

Content on the Web is no different. Sure, the Internet allows people to post their own content or make their own web sites. But what do most people really do with this opportunity? They share the social currency they have collected through their lives, in the form of Brittney Spears fan sites or collections of illegally gathered MP3's of popular songs. The myth of the Internet -- and one I believed for a long time -- is that most people really want to share the stories of their own lives. The fact that "content is king" proves that they don't. They need images, stories, ideas, and sounds through which they can relate to one another. The only difference between the Internet and its media predecessors is that the user can collect and share social currency in the same environment.

Those of you who think you are creating online content, take note: your success will be directly dependent on your ability to create excuses for people to talk to one another. For the real measure of content's quality is its ability to serve as a medium.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the next big thing for the Internet and humanity alike is the realization that our media has served as little more than excuse to interact with one another. And once we make that leap, we will most likely come to wonder what it's all for. Why do we have this overwhelming urge to interact by any means (or medium) available?

Because, my friends - and this is where I'll venture into the deep end of the pool - we are attempting nothing less than the construction of a global brain. A shared consciousness.

Like virtually every one of our evolutionary predecessors - from the multi-part cell to the first multi-cellular organisms - human beings will most likely learn to function as a coordinated being. Before you dismiss this as new age optimism, remember that the alternative to such a strategy is, most likely, rapid extinction. Unless we come to understand the nature of our potential interdependency, we will surely go the way of the many bacteria that never learned how to exploit the benefits of teamwork and good communication.

My sense is that the underlying purpose of the Internet was to provide us with a test run of global consciousness. It's a dry, safe, electronic way of experiencing just a hint of what it might be like to participate in an instantaneous, all-encompassing social reality.

Our natural resistance to such a scenario is our fear of losing our cherished sense of individuality - itself, most likely, an illusion broadcast by the genetic materials that depend on our instinct for "self" preservation for their survival and replication. But if our very survival as a species comes to hinge on our relating to one another in a more organismic fashion, you can bet these same genes will compel us towards much more cooperative models of what we now think of as society.

What's next? Probably a few more interim steps like the Internet - cellular networks, wireless communities, and other ways to experience the exchange of content in increasingly effortless ways. But then, and most likely within just a couple of generations, we'll find ourselves working like the best trapeze artists: without a net.

I believe we're on the verge of discovering (or, through genetic engineering, enhancing) as-yet untapped cerebral and emotional resources, like empathy, compassion, and even telepathy. Instead of going online to communicate, we'll accept the fact that we human beings are pretty much "online" all the time, anyway. We've simply refused to acknowledge or develop such an awareness because it means admitting that those people starving over in Africa aren't really "over there" at all. They're right here with us. They are us.

What we are working to get over is the false notion that increased interdependency necessitates a subversion of the individual. If we see ourselves as little more than consumers, it's hard to work through the seeming paradox. But if we come to understand that our access to social currency only increases the more open we are to its exchange (I'll begrudgingly take a lesson from the free market libertarians on that one) then "ownership" itself will be revealed as a booby-prize.

For the time being, the Internet and our other developing technologies give us a way to experiment with impending social intimacy. Imagine the privacy issues associated with global consciousness! The Internet provides an opportunity to model strategies a bit more subtle than copyright and encryption. Carrying a cell phone around with us challenges us to develop ways of coping with a lifestyle in which we are accessible to everyone else, all the time. Likewise, as component parts of a community consciousness, we'll need a way to incentivize ourselves with something other than personal profit motives. Perhaps the swelling population of Internet millionaires will start to share with us what it is that gets them out of bed in the morning.

So, as I see it, "what's next" is the thing that we are so industriously preparing for right now: the dissolution of the boundaries that keep us from evolving into something much greater than the sum of our parts.

We Are the Programmers

2009-04-14T02:02:24Z

It all began with the remote control.

The little plastic device empowered us to change the pictures on our screens with the tiniest effort of a single finger. From the comfort of the living room couch, we could exchange Walter Cronkite's mug for David Brinkley's, or reject Angie Dickinson in favor of Suzanne Pleshette. Not to mention how easily we could click away from the latest annoying cereal spokesanimal or hamburger huckster. Thanks to the remote control, the "channel surfer" was born. But it was only the beginning.

A new arsenal of interactive devices promises to change our relationship to TV, forever. Thanks to the videogame joystick, the computer mouse, and the wireless keyboard -- television is now an activity. Something we do, rather than something being done to us. With more interactive opportunities being packed into our set-top boxes every day, our experience of the tube will never be the same.

Think back to the first time you ever encountered a videogame. It was probably some version of "Pong": two white squares on a black background, hitting a tiny white dot back and forth. Now, remember the exhilaration you felt at discovering this new way to enjoy a television set. Were you thinking, "what a great way to practice ping-pong?" Of course not. You were simply thrilled to be able to move something around on the TV set! Just being able to shift that little white box up and down on the screen meant more than winning the game. It launched a media revolution.

That little joystick gives us control of the pixel for the first time. As a result, we don't look at the stuff on television with the same reverence. That screen is no longer the exclusive province of the TV programmers, the news anchors, or the sitcom stars. Its' a place where we can play, as well.

Now, as the computer mouse and keyboard find their way into the culture of the couch, email and web browsing turn the television from a mere monitor into a portal. We can communicate with other people through that box! Within a few years, we will be no more likely to be watching someone else do something on TV than expressing ourselves through the TV set.

Just as reading takes on a whole new significance once we learn how to write, TV takes on a whole new dimension when we can travel through its imagery ourselves, or even create our own.

Even our way of experiencing drama will be changing, as more of us learn how to navigate through worlds like Doom and Tomb Raider. We may no longer be satisfied with the kinds of decisions that Xena makes when battling an army of ghouls - not when we've fought that same battle ourselves the night before in a Playstation game.

Ultimately, the opportunity to use a television set in any number of ways turns passive TV viewing into a conscious choice. We will no longer have to ask "what's on?" and submit to whatever the networks have in store. For we will be television programmers, ourselves.

Which One of These Sneakers is Me?

2009-04-14T01:51:58Z

How Marketers Outsmart Our Media-Savvy Children
London Times

I was in one of those sports "superstores" the other day, hoping to find a pair of trainers for myself. As I faced the giant wall of shoes, each model categorized by either sports affiliation, basketball star, economic class, racial heritage or consumer niche, I noticed a young boy standing next to me, maybe 13 years old, in even greater awe of the towering selection of footwear.

His jaw was dropped and his eyes were glazed over - a psycho-physical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment. It's a phenomenon known to retail architects as "Gruen Transfer," named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.

Having finished several years of research on this exact mind state, I knew to proceed with caution. I slowly made my way to the boy's side and gently asked him, "what is going through your mind right now?"

He responded without hesitation, "I don't know which of these trainers is _me_." The boy proceeded to explain his dilemma. He thought of Nike as the most utilitarian and scientifically advanced shoe, but had heard something about third world laborers and was afraid that wearing this brand might label him as too anti-Green. He then considered a skateboard shoe, Airwalk, by an "indie" manufacturer (the trainer equivalent of a micro-brewery) but had recently learned that this company was almost as big as Nike. The truly hip brands of skate shoe were too esoteric for his current profile at school - he'd look like he was "trying." This left the "retro" brands, like Puma, Converse and Adidas, none of which he felt any real affinity, since he wasn't even alive in the 70's when they were truly and non-ironically popular.

With no clear choice and, more importantly, no other way to conceive of his own identity, the boy stood their, paralyzed in the modern youth equivalent of an existential crisis. Which brand am I, anyway?

Believe it or not, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of youth culture marketers who have already begun clipping out this article. They work for hip, new advertising agencies and cultural research firms who trade in the psychology of our children and the anthropology of their culture. The object of their labors is to create precisely the state of confusion and vulnerability experienced by the young shopper at the shoe wall - and then turn this state to their advantage. It is a science, though not a pretty one.

Yes, our children are the prey and their consumer loyalty is the prize in an escalating arms race. Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes. The revolutionary impact of a new musical genre is co-opted and packaged by a major label before it reaches the airwaves. The ability of young people to deconstruct and neutralize the effects of one advertising technique are thwarted when they are confounded by yet another. The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

The battle in which our children are engaged seems to pass beneath our radar screens, in a language we don't understand. But we see the confusion and despair that results - not to mention the ever-increasing desperation with which even three-year-olds yearn for the next Pokemon trading card. How did we get in this predicament, and is there a way out? Is it your imagination, you wonder, or have things really gotten worse?

Alas, things seem to have gotten worse. Ironically, this is because things had gotten so much better.

In olden times - back when those of us who read the newspaper grew up - media was a one-way affair. Advertisers enjoyed a captive audience, and could quite authoritatively provoke our angst and stoke our aspirations. Interactivity changed all this. The remote control gave viewers the ability to break the captive spell of television programming whenever they wished, without having to get up and go all the way up to the set. Young people proved particularly adept at "channel surfing," both because they grew up using the new tool, and because they felt little compunction to endure the tension-provoking narratives of storytellers who did not have their best interests at heart. It was as if young people knew that the stuff on television was called "programming" for a reason, and developed shortened attention spans for the purpose of keeping themselves from falling into the spell of advertisers. The remote control allowed young people to deconstruct TV.

The next weapon in the child's arsenal was the video game joystick. For the first time, viewers had control over the very pixels on their monitors. A terrain that was formerly the exclusive province of the BBC presenter was now available to anyone. The television image was demystified.

Lastly, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed the TV receiver into a portal. Today's young people grew up in a world where a screen could as easily be used for expressing oneself as consuming the media of others. Now the media was up-for-grabs, and the ethic, from hackers to camcorder owners, was "do it yourself."

Of course, this revolution had to be undone. Television and internet programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly liberated, began to call our mediaspace an "attention economy." No matter how many channels they had for their programming, the number of "eyeball hours" that human beings were willing to dedicate to that programming was fixed. Not coincidentally, the channel surfing habits of our children became known as "attention deficit dissorder" - a real disease now used as an umbrella term for anyone who clicks away from programming before the marketer wants him to. We quite literally drug our children into compliance.

Likewise, as computer interfaces were made more complex and opaque - think Windows 98 - the do-it-yourself ethic of the Internet was undone. The original Internet was a place to share ideas and converse with others. Children actually had to use the keyboard! Now, the World Wide Web encourages them to click numbly through packaged content. Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.

But young people had been changed by their exposure to new media. They constituted a new "psychographic," as advertisers like to call it, so new kinds of messaging had to be developed that appealed to their new sensibility.

Anthropologists - the same breed of scientists that used to scope out enemy populations before military conquests - engaged in focus groups, conducted "trend-watching" on the streets, in order to study the emotional needs and subtle behaviors of young people. They came to understand, for example, how children had abandoned narrative structures for fear of the way stories were used to coerce them. Children tended to construct narratives for themselves by collecting things instead, like cards, bottlecaps called "pogs," or keychains and plush toys. They also came to understand how young people despised advertising - especially when it did not acknowledge their media-savvy intelligence.

Thus, Pokemon was born - a TV show, video game, and product line where the object is to collect as many trading cards as possible. The innovation here, among many, is the marketer's conflation of TV show and advertisement into one piece of media. The show is an advertisement. The story, such as it is, concerns a boy who must collect little monsters in order to develop his own character. Likewise, the Pokemon video game engages the player in a quest for those monsters. Finally, the card game itself (for the few children who actually play it) involves collecting better monsters - not by playing, but by buying more cards. The more cards you buy, the better you can play.

Kids feel the tug, but in a way they can't quite identify as advertising. Their compulsion to create a story for themselves - in a world where stories are dangerous - makes them vulnerable to this sort of attack. In marketers terms, Pokemon is "leveraged" media, with "cross-promotion" on "complementary platforms." This is ad-speak for an assault on multiple fronts.

Moreover, the time a child spends in the Pokemon craze amounts to a remedial lesson in how to consume. Pokemon teaches them how to want things that they can't or won't actually play with. In fact, it teaches them how to buy things they don't even want. While a child might want one particular card, he needs to purchase them in packages whose contents are not revealed. He must buy blind and repeatedly until he gets the object of his desire.

Worse yet, the card itself has no value - certainly not as a play-thing. It is a functionless purchase, slipped into a display case, whose value lies purely in its possession. It is analogous to those children who buy action figures from their favorite TV shows and movies, with _no intention of ever removing them from their packaging!_ They are purchased for their collectible value alone. Thus, the imagination game is reduced to some fictional moment in the future where the will, presumably, be resold to another collector. Children are no longer playing. They are investing.

Meanwhile, older kids have attempted to opt out of aspiration, altogether. The "15-24" demographic, considered by marketers the most difficult to wrangle into submission, have adopted a series of postures they hoped would make them impervious to marketing techniques. They take pride in their ability to recognize when they are being pandered to, and watch TV for the sole purpose of calling out when they are being manipulated. They are armchair media theorists, who take pleasure in deconstructing and defusing the messages of their enemies.

But now advertisers are making commercials just for them. Soft drink advertisements satirize one another before rewarding the cynical viewer: "image is nothing," they say. The technique might best be called "wink" advertising, for its ability to engender a young person's loyalty by pretending to disarm itself. "Get it?" the ad means to ask. If you're cool, you do.

New magazine advertisements for jeans, such as those created by Diesel, take this even one step further. The ads juxtapose imagery that actually makes no sense - ice cream billboards in North Korea, for example. The strategy is brilliant. For a media-savvy young person to feel good about himself, he needs to feel he "gets" the joke. But what does he do with an ad where there's obviously something to get that he can't figure out? He has no choice but to admit that the brand is even cooler than he is. An ad's ability to confound its audience is the new credential for a brand's authenticity.

Like the boy at the wall of shoes, kids today analyze each purchase they make, painstakingly aware of how much effort has gone into seducing them. As a result, they see their choices of what to watch and what to buy as exerting some influence over the world around them. After all, their buying patterns have become the center of so much attention!

But however media-savvy kids get, they will always lose this particular game. For they have accepted the language of brands as their cultural currency, and the stakes in their purchasing decisions as something real. For no matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being.

The more they interact with brands, the more they brand themselves.

Playing With Fractals

2009-04-14T01:35:37Z

An introdution to the art of Sarah Sze
(from an upcoming book on her work)

I first encountered Sarah Sze - whom I hadn't yet heard of - at a cocktail party in New York. She was about to leave for Paris to do an installation "with ladders."

"Ladders you can climb?"I asked. "Like a jungle gym?"

She smiled, politely. No, one couldn't climb them. Not physically, anyway. For Sze's sculptural works are, indeed, playgrounds. Monkey bars for the mind. Invitations to play, and, in doing so, to comprehend the nature of play in an entirely new context. These are seductive and deceptively unthreatening vehicles for transformation. They force to re-evaluate the role of play in the evolution of species, culture, and spirit.

We can't reckon with the implications of Sze's transformative energy by getting abstract or exploring historical precedents. No, we'd just get lost in the morbidly retrograde cartography that passes for contemporary art criticism these days - a booby prize if ever there was one. Instead, we have to go inside, to our own experience, and trust that what we're feeling and thinking actually matters. And when we go there - to that place Sze's work takes us if we let it, something remarkable happens.

Sarah Sze's work helps us make sense of the world in which we live through the fanciful celebration of the utilitarian. Her pieces allow the manufactured objects of our everyday reality to transcend their intended contexts, and find a new, organismic relationship to one another, and to us. Sze is both discovering and developing the kinds of repetitive patterns that give human beings the reference points they need to resonate playfully rather than strategically with the material and visual world.

Or, to put it much more simply, Sarah is recreating nature out of the unnatural - and beholding these natural systems - these imaginative playscapes - changes us forever.

Perhaps the best metaphor I can use to explain the odd reassurance I feel on encountering one of Sze's installations is that of a fractal. Fractals are the computer-generated graphic representations of non-linear equations. Unsatisfied with the over-determined and oversimplified techniques of traditional linear math and reductive calculus, new math theorists sought to find ways of representing the genuine complexity of our physical world in the perfect language of numbers. They found that by representing the fractional dimensionality of the real world, they could reckon with the roughness of reality.

Of course the billions of calculations required to iterate fractals must be accomplished using a computer. They are products of the computer age. Yet, surprisingly, they yield forms that exemplify the most natural of living systems.

Fractals are self-similar. This means at one level of magnification, you will be able to see certain shapes that are repeated again at much higher levels of magnification. Just as the shapes of veins in a leaf reflect the shapes of branches in a tree or trees in the forest, computer-generated fractals reflect the self-similarity of numbers. As above, so below. The networked systems that fractals represent also tend to have what are known as "remote high leverage points."Although these systems might be extremely stable, profound change can come from extremely remote places, if conditions are right.

My own work in cultural analysis has been largely informed by these discoveries and intuitions. Like the ocean and the weather, our society has been networked together through the media, economic, and telecommunications infrastructures. We experience ourselves in a kind of fractal, with our television screens displaying images of television screens with television screens. And our interconnectedness allows for remote high leverage points: a single, tiny media event in a remote location - like a camcorder capturing the beating of a black man by white Los Angeles cops - can lead to full-scale rioting in 12 American cities.

A fractal sensibility helps one orient to the modern, mediated and non-linear landscape. As humans, we strive to find patterns in the world around us - especially in the seeming chaos. Just as the regularity of waves turns a threatening ocean into a reassuring rhythm, our ability to perceive patterns and self-similarity in the manufactured world of cities and objects helps us understand that there is an order to our existence. A plan. A design.

Sze introduces these sensibilities to all who encounter her work. Our only choice is whether to revel in them, or reel back in horror - our critical presumptions about the shortcomings of the man-made forever altered.

For Sze's pieces are, themselves, fractal in nature. She takes a common household object - something known more for its high frequency than its scarcity - and iterates it with others, thousands of times. Dozens of cotton balls, lined in little rows. Matchsticks, glued together in strands like ladders - no, like DNA helixes, the component codes of cellular reproduction - the genome-based time machines that nature uses to communicate the qualities of her creations through the eons.

Sarah serves as the computer. Instead of churning numbers through equations, however, she arranges objects in sequences. In an ode to obsession that would make HAL proud, Sze constructs fractals out of mankind's most plastic and mass-produced objects - and then these constructions take on the qualities of natural phenomena.

Consider Still Life with Flowers(1999) Swirling ladders of matchsticks and rulers, interspersed with photos of sharks, mice, monkeys and other species, living twigs, and the tiniest components of artificial plants. We can't look at the piece without thinking about the artist herself, repeatedly breaking the heads of matchsticks and gluing them together - those hours, days, maybe weeks of cyclical, repetitive tasks.

The result of her toil mirrors the DNA molecule - an evolutionary tree explicated by photos of the various species along its branches. Yet this genomic map is only secondary to fractal, natural, and fertile quality of the installation's overarching form. This is the primary fruit of Sze's labor: no matter how manufactured these objects may be, when they are iterated enough times they produce natural meta-forms. Fractals. In a nod to remote high leverage points, Sze places C-clamps or spring clips at critical junctures. These tiny and quite deliberately disclosed lynchpins are what hold the whole world together.

Or take a look at her studio piece, Untitled, 1996. A stepladder-as-skyscraper overlooks an urban grid of everything from Hershey's Kisses and Lifesavers to photo slides and tennis shoes. Again, chain ladders of matchsticks and toothpicks grow upward from the two-dimensional grid as if groping for three-dimensionality. Climbing up the stepladder and through the air, like creeping ivy.

This delicate, dynamic, and fractional dimensionality; this teetering at the brink between worlds of factory-made and spontaneously alive - this is what we get when we push through chaos to the other side of order.

And, most strikingly, this new order is utterly unrecognizable to those who refuse to play. A cartographer, who can only understand the ocean as a series of longitude and latitude lines, cannot even converse with a young surfer who understands this same water as a pattern of waveforms. In fact, he will assume the surfer is hopelessly lost. Yet the surfer, by immersing in the water, experiencing the waves, and turning this interaction into a game of balance and motion, ends up with a much more intimate and lasting understanding of the ocean's very personality - its life.

As an artist teasing us into re-examining our relationship to the manufactured physical world, Sze surfs her materials in much the same way. Like a skateboarder re-contextualizing the curbs, banisters, and benches of the urban terrain as an obstacle course, Sze uses the multitude of objects passing through our hands each day as Tinkertoy. And her play - I mean, her work - yields forms that exhibit the repetitive, self-similar, and networked properties of nature. Manufactured objects + iterated play = fractals.

Part automaton, part god, Sarah is both a slave to her taskmaster vision, and the human hand intervening in its mechanized execution. She is the delightfully autonomous being who dares to create worlds within worlds, and the autistic match-gluer who churns out the sorts of iterations most suited to a Pentium chip. As our eyes dance over the results of her labors, forced to retrace the swirling lines and self-similar visual echoes manifesting at every possible level of detail, our only choice is to play along. We are engaged in the interdimensional game, incapable of maintaining our objective vantagepoints, yet rewarded in our surrender with something so much greater: the reassurance of pattern recognition - of nature - in a realm where we'd least expect it.

This is what makes Sarah's new work on the Bard campus so very compelling. The three excavations sneak up on you, disguised as little work zones marked with cones and protected by disheveled tarps. Yet once you approach and peer inside, you find multi-tiered cities of plastic, wood, tubing, and water. Entire worlds, and worlds within worlds - a seeming infinity of detail, and in each detail, yet another world, and another world still.

No matter how microcosmic these craters of infinitesimal plastic civilizations, it is still impossible for the viewer to stand outside them. For to look down into one of them is to be surrounded by the others. There are three of these tiny meta-cities, each throbbing, pulsing, and gurgling in its own corner of the grassy knoll. Seemingly linked -- networked to one another and in constant communication - the replicated plastic galaxies challenge our arbitrarily superior vantage points. Who is the artificial stranger, here, and which is the life form?

Sze's latest works most directly explore the relationship of the fabricated to the natural, and the utility to the toy. By inverting one for the other, she demonstrates how the manufactured object reaches the realm of the natural when utility is exchanged for play. Play is portal from the lower, survival-based levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs , to the romantic, nurturing, and spiritual realms at its top.

It is play that fuels the marathon iterations of Sze's labor-intensive creations. Play that transforms matter into life. Play that leads life forms to reproduce, create their cultures, as well as the many artificial and manufactured forms within it. Finally, it is play that - when taken too seriously - recedes from our view as surely as God himself has withdrawn from human affairs. And it is play that returns when we topple the tyranny of utilitarian survival with the dangerously revolutionary spirit of fun. Jokes are what bring down holy empires, because they let everyone see what's really going on. Playful humor serves as a fractal, adding dimensional perspective - drawing a proscenium arch around a social construction that seemed so very real, and turning it into a divine comedy. Play is the source of life.

Sarah's hand-made fractals allow us to experience the cogs of our highly artificial culture as the seeds of an entirely natural system. They make us question the foundations of this very distinction. For what, ultimately, is not natural? Bees make honey, beavers make dams, and people make plastic. Why should our structures have any less geometric intention than a honeycomb? Or any less right to a place in the ecosystem of physical reality? Is human culture any different, fundamentally, from a yogurt culture? If there is a difference, it lies in our human ability to see the similarities - to recognize the patterns.

Sze's creations are not imitations of life, but living forms. Not metaphors, but self-organizing and artfully contagious thought structures. Sze's work is alive.

Suicide Jews

2009-04-14T01:06:47Z

NEWS & COLUMNS
Vol 16 - Issue 25 - June 11-17, 2003

The self-imposed death of institutional Judaism.
By Douglas Rushkoff

I’m a Jew. Or, at least I was last time I checked.

But New York’s official institutions of Judaism would say that I’m not, and, most likely, neither are you. No, it’s not because my mom’s not Jewish (the usual, racist, excuse), but because–like so many other intelligent, engaged people on this bagel-fueled island–I don’t happen to belong to a synagogue. As a result, they label me "lapsed" or, in the optimistic language of the market researchers charged with saving Judaism, "a latent Jew."

Actually, these days they’re calling me an atheist, an Israel hater and an anti-Semite. Not because I’m saying anything bad about God, Israel or Judaism, but merely because I’m asking that we be allowed to discuss these ideas, together.

We all know that there are some sticking points to being Jewish in America today–particularly with what’s going on in Israel. Luckily, Judaism has a wealth of built-in mechanisms for confronting the lure of fundamentalism, nationalism and tribalism. But in my effort to show Jews some of what is so very progressive and relevant about their dwindling religion, I have instead provoked their most paranoid, regressive wrath.

What I’m learning is that today’s Jewish institutions have more to fear from Judaism than they have to gain. That’s why they’re going out of their way to keep Judaism from actually happening.

I’ve written about media and culture for the past ten years. Interactivity has always been my passion–especially the way the internet turned a passive mediaspace into a freewheeling conversation. Instead of depending on the newscaster or sponsor for our stories, we were free to tell our own. I wrote eight well-received books about what was happening to our culture, and how to navigate its new "do-it-yourself" terrains.

Then, just a few years ago, it occurred to me that Judaism had attempted to do the same thing to religion. The mythical Israelites of the Torah left their idols behind in order to forge a new way of life–one in which they weren’t dependent upon the gods to do everything for them. Judaism abstracted God so that people could become thinking, active adults. What made Judaism so radical–so sacrilegious in its day–was the proclamation that people can actually make the world a better place. God may have given us great hints on how to be holy people, but the rest is up to us.

The reason Jews have such a hard time explaining Judaism, "the religion," is that we aren’t about beliefs. All we really have is a process–an ongoing conversation. You get initiated, a bar or bat mitzvah, by proving you can read the Torah and speak somewhat intelligently about it. No statements of faith required–just literacy and an opinion about what you’ve read earn you a place at the table. Then you get to argue with the old guys.

That’s right: Judaism boils down to a 3500-year-old debate about what happened on Mount Sinai and what we’re supposed to do about it. Judaism is not set in stone; it is to be reinterpreted by each generation. All that’s required is a continual smashing of your false idols (iconoclasm), a refusal to pretend you know who or what God is (abstract monotheism) and being nice to people (social justice). In a sense, Judaism isn’t a religion at all, but a way human beings can get over religion and into caring about one another.

Sounds good, anyway.

But like so many latent Jews in America today (we account for more than 50 percent of the total), I had a hard time finding places where this sort of Judaism is still practiced. They exist, but more likely in an apartment living room or school basement than a sanctuary. The vast majority of messages coming out of mainstream Judaism concern post-Holocaust issues such as the dangers of intermarriage, the threat of assimilation and the need to protect Israel.

Worst of all, as I’m learning, these subjects are not up for discussion.

Jewish philanthropies spend millions of dollars and hours counting Jews and conducting marketing research on how to get young people to stop marrying goys and start supporting Israel. If they were to spend even half this effort actually doing Judaism, they might find that they’d attract a whole lot more people to their cause. In an era in which spirituality is about breaking the illusion of self, who wants to be part of a religion or a people that is turned so inward? Judaism’s greatest concern, these days, is itself.

Most of my friends abandoned Judaism as soon as they were allowed to for precisely these reasons. Having found some useful truths in there, however, I was loath to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I figured I owed it to myself, and to Judaism, to revive the conversation. "Can we talk?" I’ve been asking in my lectures, articles and even a book. Apparently not.

Don’t get me wrong: A great majority of the people to whom I’ve been speaking in synagogues and bookstores around the nation agree with what I have to say. Even the rabbis.

"If that’s Judaism," I’ve been told many times, "then count me in!"

A half dozen Torah discussion groups have formed among people who met at my bookstore appearances. But the people running Judaism’s more established institutions–the philanthropies, federations and periodicals that speak for the Jewish people in America today–are so threatened by the notion of an open conversation about Judaism that they can’t help but go on the attack.

"Along comes Douglas Rushkoff," announced one of my intellectual role models, Anne Roiphe, after I wrote a New York Times op-ed about organized Judaism’s self-defeating obsession with race and numbers. Treating Jews as an endangered species in dire need of a breeding program, I argued, was hardly a good strategy for attracting more young, successful and universal-minded people into the fold, if that’s even the object of the game.

She called me "silly" and cited the existence of Tay Sachs disease as evidence of a Jewish "race" that requires protection. Why couldn’t she have spoken to one geneticist before making such an unfounded remark, in print, no less? (Throw a few thousand people in a ghetto for a few dozen centuries and they’ll develop some diseases. Most scientists have abandoned the concept of race altogether.) She went on to cite the Jewish concern with "the degree of Jewishness of one’s parents" as proof that Judaism is a race.

I’ve been amazed as I’ve watched otherwise rational, well-spoken people revert to childlike circularity when confronted by the inconsistencies in their own religious outlooks. I know, I know: That’s why they call it religion. Judaism was supposed to be a smarter solution, a thinking person’s answer to religiosity. A conversation. That’s why, more than their inane remarks or beliefs, what disturbs me about the reaction of Judaism’s gatekeepers is their refusal to make a place for me–and the majority of American Jewry–at the Jewish table.

I do feel for these people, and can understand the wish to believe that we are direct descendents of the mythical characters described in the Torah. But, 42 years circumcised, I refuse to be treated as an outsider for seeing the great benefits of contending otherwise–as Judaism, itself, suggests we do.

They’re not budging. The first major review of my book in a Jewish publication, the Bronfman Philanthropy-funded Jerusalem Report, called me a "yoga-practicing atheist Jew from New York’s East Village," right in the lead paragraph! I’m an atheist because, like most thinking adults, I don’t believe in an all-powerful creature with the white beard who rejoices in animal sacrifice. I get that. But the yoga-practicing and East Village part? Is that supposed to be evidence of how far I’ve strayed–in neighborhood and exercise regime–from the Upper West Side where Jews belong?

Just two weeks ago, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York–headquarters of the biggest, most central Jewish organization in America–yanked an interview that one of their writers conducted with me from their website, along with all mention in their calendar of a benefit I’m doing in their auditorium for a Jewish social justice charity. All because, according to the editor, "a heightened sensitivity to some of the topics we discussed emerged here at UJA-Federation once it was actually posted."

Gotta love the internet: The entire interview was immediately reposted to a webzine called Jewsweek, along with an account of the whole fiasco. A week later, the excised text reappeared on the UJA site, albeit with a new title and a framing paragraph about how "Douglas Rushkoff likes to sound off." A UJA representative now says that the only problem with the original interview was the title.

I’m not the only one who is facing such knee-jerk reactions from the institutions dominating public Jewish discourse. Rabbi David Wolpe, a respected and published rabbinic scholar now on the pulpit at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, made the headlines for daring to suggest to his congregation that the Exodus may not really have happened the way it was described in the Bible. Or at all. Though this question has been pondered out loud by rabbis ever since there were rabbis, today it is too dangerous a topic, and Wolpe is decried as a "silver-tongued devil."

Why?

Because Jews are afraid, and the institutions that should be helping them conquer their ignorance are instead stoking it to further solidify their grasp on Judaism’s future. The darker picture they paint of Judaism’s plight–the further synagogue membership dwindles, the greater Israel’s peril–the more money they raise. Every suicide attack on Israel and each negative report on intermarriage statistics lead to a surge in donations.

So it’s in the fundraisers’ interest to foster panic instead of discussion, and to turn their agendas into inviolably sacred truths. Yet they are not entirely to blame. It is we who must challenge these holy assumptions if we’re going to break free from top-down religion and start to think for ourselves again–the way Judaism demands.

The first forbidden topic is race. The Jews’ crucial error has been accepting our enemies’ contention that we are a race. We are not. The first character in the Torah to mention an "Israeli people" was Pharaoh, and he was looking for an excuse to kill off those he feared wouldn’t support him in a war. The
concept of "Jewish blood" was invented during the Spanish Inquisition, so that they would still have an excuse to slaughter former Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Best yet, it was Hitler, gently reworking a bit of Jung, who claimed that Jews’ "genetic memory" would keep them from ever fully
accepting the natural German order.

Two millennia of being treated as a despised race might convince any people that it’s true. Ironically, Jews were being persecuted, at least in part, for their very refusal to accept such false boundaries. Local gods, ethnic purity and national religions meant nothing to this amalgamation of formerly disparate tribes. Moses’ wife was black, for God’s sake. How much clearer can the story get about race not being the issue here?

By hanging on to racehood, Jews get to hang on to an immature understanding of chosenness. ("I like knowing that God loves us the best," a woman told me after a recent talk.) Along with being God’s chosen people, however, come the racism and elitism that undermine our ethics, but empower our central authorities. If Judaism is not a race, then who exactly are we not supposed to intermarry with? They won’t tell you that this whole matrilineal descent business isn’t part of Judaism, at all, but a remnant of the Roman census conducted in the second century. Assimilation has always been the Jews’ best strategy. Our mandate in Torah is not to protect ourselves from others, but to "share our light" with them.

Part of the reason we don’t know any of this is that we’ve relegated our Judaism to our authorities. The Reform movement was a great idea when it arose in the 1800s in Germany. Judaism was built to be reformed. Problem is, some of the reforms were designed for little purpose other than to make Jewish worship look less weird to any Christians who might happen to drop by. So a spirited, participatory free-for-all was turned into Jewish church: Rabbis put on robes, stood on a stage in front of the room and engaged in boring, monotone responsive readings with the congregation. All the atrophied dullness of Christianity, only without the salvation.

Worse, this induced what Freud would call "regression and transference." The audience of spectators regressed to a childlike state and transferred parental authority onto their rabbis, who became more like priests administering the religion to their congregants.

No matter. Reform Jews figured someone wearing a black hat, probably somewhere in Israel, was doing the "real thing." And so checkbook Judaism was born, through which Americans could practice their religion by proxy. Little did they know their money was going to some of the most stridently Zionist sects around and forcing the Israeli government to cow even further to their bizarre demands.

Which brings us to the real reason we can’t talk about Judaism today: Israel. Note–I’m not suggesting that Israel shouldn’t exist, but many readers will already think I’ve just said that. They cannot even see these words that say otherwise. Our problem is not with the Israelis, but our insistence–as Americans–in justifying a nation’s existence with our religion. By forcing the Torah to serve as an accurate historical chronicle of the Jewish claim to disputed territories, Jews turn themselves into fundamentalists who have no choice but to interpret their texts literally. "Abraham got this piece from God in Genesis, and Jacob got this piece from the Pharaoh…" The transdimensional nature of Jewish myth–as profound as that of any Eastern religion–is reduced to a real estate deed.

This literalism is a problem. Fundamentalists believe that Jews must be in control of the entirety of biblical Israel in order for the messiah to return to Earth. This is why orthodox extremists from Brooklyn race–guns in hand–to settle the West Bank. It is also why the American Christian fundamentalists are responsible for funding a majority of Jewish immigration from Russia to Israel. They want to bring on the End of Days and get to Armageddon already.

But because many Jews refuse to look a gift horse in the mouth, everyone from Bush to Falwell becomes our allies. Fear, desperation and a history of persecution make for strange bedfellows.

To free ourselves from this self-defeating conundrum, American Jews must understand our unwitting complicity in this pact with, well, the devil. We must entertain the possibility that Israel, the nation, may not be the ultimate realization of Jewish ideals as much as a necessary compromise. Israelis get this; New Yorkers seem to have a little more trouble because we insist on seeing Jerusalem as somehow more sacred than Manhattan.

There are better arguments to be made for a Jewish homeland than the assertion that the "one and true God" gave it to us. (That’s not what abstract monotheism was invented for, anyway. She’s not just our God–she’s everyone’s.) After centuries of exile or worse by nation states with their own official religions, one Jewish strategy was to create our own nation, with its own official religion. Although long characterized by an independence from territory and local gods, Judaism might not be completely wrecked by the temporary suspension of these values for the greater priority.

Israel may indeed be important to the Jewish people and, as a potential laboratory in ethical nation-building, to the whole world, but its current and inappropriate centrality to the Jewish faith makes it a topic that cannot be approached or discussed openly. Like the synagogue and the Jewish bloodline, Israel has become an idol.

As a result, many American Jews feel that to question the religious or political authority of Israel–to suggest, as I have, that God might not have invented the nation state–is akin to blaspheming Judaism or forgetting the Holocaust. So, as the Jewish authorities have made abundantly clear to me, we are to remain silent.

Life for Jews in New York in 2003 is as good as it has ever been–anywhere. Only by reviving the inquiry and activism that are truly central to Judaism can we serve as antagonists rather than passive supporters of everything from blind fundamentalism to the Bush regime’s designs on the Middle East and the world. Just because the Jews will inevitably be blamed for provoking these crusades doesn’t mean we have to make the accusation true.

Resistance is our tradition, and it’s worth fighting for. At this point, it’s more important to me that I do Judaism than that I get to call myself Jewish.

Rushkoff is the author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism (Crown, 2003).

Microsoft Marches On

2009-04-12T22:43:13Z

The New York Times - Op-Ed, June 25 1998

The state and Federal officials accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive practices have found themselves in a precarious battle with two fronts. The Federal courts, as evidenced by Tuesday's appellate decision freeing Microsoft to bundle its Web browsing software with the Windows operating system, will need to be convinced that the company's newly integrated products violate any antitrust laws at all. And the court of public opinion will soon want proof that this enforcement of free-market capitalism will somehow make for a better digital future.
More important, the prosecutors do not realize they have been drawn into a phantom battle. While they think they are preventing Microsoft from using its Windows monopoly to gain control over other areas, they are merely fighting for concessions that soon won't matter to Bill Gates at all.
In the name of competition and consumer choice, the Government wants to make it illegal for Microsoft to demand that computer makers include Internet Explorer or any other software application as a condition for distributing Windows. It also wants assurance that Microsoft's competitors will have ample opportunity to write and distribute their own Windows software.
But what happens when there is no such thing as software? Thanks to rivals like Netscape, which were threatening to expand their programs into entire operating systems, Microsoft got the bright idea of expanding its operating system into programs. In the Windows future, users will no longer open a separate program for word processing, spreadsheet calculations or Internet browsing. The same system window will do all those things. Only the menu bar might change.
In other words, the operating system will not be the platform from which a computer user launches software; it will be the software. Instead of buying new programs, people will simply add functionality to the system, much in the way they now download plug-ins like video players. What we think of as software packages will no longer be "launched" with a mouse click, but will be called up automatically when needed.
That's why Microsoft has nothing to fear in the unlikely event that it loses its battle with the Justice Department. The Internet Explorer icon is merely a placeholder for the program's impending absorption by Windows -- a way to keep Netscape from setting its own Web browsing standards while Microsoft integrates the Internet into its overall system. And the company will apply this same strategy to cable television, palmtop devices and anything else that can be run on a Windows platform.
Microsoft is simply hoping that the current lawsuit takes long enough for the synergy between its different frontiers to take effect. Once that happens, Microsoft will have won the war -- even if it had to lose a few meaningless battles along the way.
It is unlikely the Justice Department will be able to head off such a future. Worse, the approach is misguided; it makes Government into the enemy of every kid shouting, "I want my digital MTV."
Instead, we might best treat Microsoft, Intel or any other company in a position to develop our digital future the way we did cable television providers in the 1970's. If they want to become the architects of our information infrastructure, then they will have to demonstrate their willingness to promote the public interest.
For cable television, that meant public access programming and reasonable rates for basic services. For systems architects, it could mean on-line libraries, educational provisions or open coding standards. What will serve the public interest is not greater competition between information architects, but greater cooperation and greater accountability.
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of "Media Virus" and the forthcoming "Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say."