Van Gogh was very crazy. Lust for Life understated it.

When Vincent van Gogh walked down the street, urchins screamed “nutter,” and their parents said, “The madman is at it again.” His father tried to have the young Vincent committed, and his mother later summed things up neatly: “I believe he has always been insane, and that his suffering and ours was a result of it.” Van Gogh himself ranted and raved, ate paint, drank turpentine—and slashed off a chunk of his ear. “I felt my own disease very deep within me,” he said in a moment of calm.

Free Will

In human freedom in the philosophical sense, free will,  I am definitely a disbeliever,  and  this has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'.

--- Albert Einstein 

Deacon Blue Lyrics

DEACON BLUE

My back to the wall
A victim of laughing chance


This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be


You call me a fool
You say it's a crazy scheme
This one's for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I'll make it this time
I'm ready to cross that fine line

I'll learn to work the saxophone
And I'll  play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
And I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blue

My back to the wall
A victim of laughing chance
This is for me
The essence of true romance

I'll rise when the sun goes down
Cover every game in town
A world of my own
I'll make it my home sweet home

Deacon Blue

This is the day of the expanding man
That shape is my shade
There where I used to stand
It seems like only yesterday
I gazed through the glass
At ramblers, wild gamblers
That's all in the past

You call me a fool
You say it's a crazy scheme
This one's for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I'll make it this time
I'm ready to cross that fine line

I'll learn to work the saxaphone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
And I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

My back to the wall
A victim of laughing chance
This is for me
The essence of true romance
Sharing the things we know and love
With those of my kind
Libations
Sensations
That stagger the mind

I crawl like a viper
Through these suburban streets
Make love to these women
Languid and bittersweet
I'll rise when the sun goes down
Cover every game in town
A world of my own
I'll make it my home sweet home

(refrain)
This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

Calvinism

"Unconditional election": This doctrine asserts that God has chosen from eternity those whom he will bring to himself not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people; rather, it is unconditionally grounded in God's mercy alone. God has chosen frometernity to extend mercy to those He has chosen and to withhold mercy from those not chosen. Those chosen enjoy, receive worldly success and   salvation through Christ alone. Those not chosen receive the just wrath that is warranted for their sins against God [8]
The grace of god in this world and the next... You don't earn it or deserve it.  In other words, Calvin insisted that the world, and hence God himself was simply unjust. No effort or care or goodness makes any difference.  Virtue, merit, faith, effort and good will do nothing.  No amount of "trying" will change any of this. You're doomed or blessed from birth.  Sad but so obviously true. Just look at the real world.  Those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps were gifted with the stamina to do so.  No arguments to the contrary have any standing.  It's the last word on success.  If you're not rich or employed it's not your fault.  It's because God hates you, for no reason.

Calcinism

"Unconditional election": This doctrine asserts that God has chosen from eternity those whom he will bring to himself not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people; rather, it is unconditionally grounded in God's mercy alone. God has chosen frometernity to extend mercy to those He has chosen and to withhold mercy from those not chosen. Those chosen enjoy, receive worldly success and   salvation through Christ alone. Those not chosen receive the just wrath that is warranted for their sins against God [8]
The grace of god in this world and the next... You don't earn it or deserve it.  In other words, Calvin insisted that the world, and hence God himself was simply unjust. No effort or care or goodness makes any difference.  Virtue, merit, faith, effort and good will do nothing.  No amount of "trying" will change any of this. You're doomed or blessed from birth.  Sad but so obviously true. Just look at the real world.  Those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps were gifted with the stamina to do so.  No arguments to the contrary have any standing.  It's the last word on success.  If you're not rich or employed it's not your fault.  It's because God hates you, for no reason.

The White Ship

The White Ship

I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the gray lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.

From far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores where warm suns shine and sweet odors linger about strange gardens and gay temples. The old captains of the sea came often to my grandfather and told him of these things which in turn he told to my father, and my father told to me in the long autumn evenings when the wind howled eerily from the East. And I have read more of these things, and of many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young and filled with wonder.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time. Sometimes at twilight the gray vapors of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the heavens. Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and silently over the sea. And whether the sea was rough or calm, and whether the wind was friendly or adverse, it would always glide smoothly and silently, its sails distant and its long strange tiers of oars moving rhythmically. One night I spied upon the deck a man, bearded and robed, and he seemed to beckon me to embark for far unknown shores. Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and never did he beckon me.

Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walked out over the waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who had beckoned now spoke a welcome to me in a soft language I seemed to know well, and the hours were filled with soft songs of the oarsmen as we glided away into a mysterious South, golden with the glow of that full, mellow moon.

And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of far lands, bright and beautiful, and to me unknown. Up from the sea rose lordly terraces of verdure, tree-studded, and shewing here and there the gleaming white roofs and colonnades of strange temples. As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of ocean. There too were forms and fantasies more splendid than any I had ever known; the visions of young poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they had seen and dreamed. But we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it is told that he who treads them may nevermore return to his native shore.

As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, we beheld on the distant horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded man said to me, “This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom.” And I looked again, at closer range, and saw that the city was greater than any city I had known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the spires of its temples reached, so that no man might behold their peaks; and far back beyond the horizon stretched the grim, gray walls, over which one might spy only a few roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes and alluring sculptures.

I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying, “Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.” So the White Ship sailed on past the walls of Thalarion, and followed for many days a southward-flying bird, whose glossy plumage matched the sky out of which it had appeared.

Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as far inland as we could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbors beneath a meridian sun. From bowers beyond our view came bursts of song and snatches of lyric harmony, interspersed with faint laughter so delicious that I urged the rowers onward in my eagerness to reach the scene. And the bearded man spoke no word, but watched me as we approached the lily-lined shore. Suddenly a wind blowing from over the flowery meadows and leafy woods brought a scent at which I trembled. The wind grew stronger, and the air was filled with the lethal, charnel odor of plague-stricken towns and uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the bearded man spoke at last, saying, "This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained.”

So once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm blessed seas fanned by caressing, aromatic breezes. Day after day and night after night did we sail, and when the moon was full we would listen to soft songs of the oarsmen, sweet as on that distant night when we sailed away from my far native land. And it was by moonlight that we anchored at last in the harbor of Sona-Nyl, which is guarded by twin headlands of crystal that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch. This is the Land of Fancy, and we walked to the verdant shore upon a golden bridge of moonbeams.

In the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death; and there I dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures, bright and fragrant the flowers, blue and musical the streams, clear and cool the fountains, and stately and gorgeous the temples, castles, and cities of Sona-Nyl. Of that land there is no bound, for beyond each vista of beauty rises another more beautiful. Over the countryside and amidst the splendor of cities can move at will the happy folk, of whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and unalloyed happiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I wandered blissfully through gardens where quaint pagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes, and where the white walks are bordered with delicate blossoms. I climbed gentle hills from whose summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with steepled towns nestling in verdant valleys, and with the golden domes of gigantic cities glittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by moonlight the sparkling sea, the crystal headlands, and the placid harbor wherein lay anchored the White Ship.

It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp that I saw outlined the beckoning form of the celestial bird, and felt the first stirrings of unrest. Then I spoke with the bearded man, and told him of my new yearnings to depart for remote Cathuria, which no man hath seen, but which all believe to lie beyond the basalt pillars of the West. It is the Land of Hope, and in it shine the perfect ideals of all that we know elsewhere; or at least so men relate. But the bearded man said to me, “Beware of those perilous seas wherein men say Cathuria lies. In Sona-Nyl there is no pain or death, but who can tell what lies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?” Nonetheless at the next full moon I boarded the White Ship, and with the reluctant bearded man left the happy harbor for untraveled seas.

And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars of the West, but this time the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my mind I would often picture the unknown Land of Cathuria with its splendid groves and palaces, and would wonder what new delights there awaited me. “Cathuria,” I would say to myself, “is the abode of Gods and the land of unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees flutter gay birds sweet with song.

On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of pink marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool fountains of silver, where purr with ravishing music the scented waters that come from the grotto-born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardens of these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds are of coral and amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the three-colored shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And the houses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing the waters of the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendor of the cities as blissful Gods view them from the distant peaks.

Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some say to be a demi-God and others a God. High is the palace of Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such carven figures of Gods and heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze upon the living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria.”

Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warn me to turn back to the happy shore of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is known of men, while none hath ever beheld Cathuria.

And on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basalt pillars of the West. Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond them or see their summits-- which indeed some say reach even to the heavens. And the bearded man again implored me to turn back, but I heeded him not; for from the mists beyond the basalt pillars I fancied there came the notes of singers and lutanists; sweeter than the sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine own praises; the praises of me, who had voyaged far from the full moon and dwelt in the Land of Fancy. So to the sound of melody the White Ship sailed into the mist betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And when the music ceased and the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land of Cathuria, but a swift-rushing resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some unknown goal. Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our eyes appeared on the far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a monstrous cataract, wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal nothingness.

Then did the bearded man say to me, with tears on his cheek, "We have rejected the beautiful Land of Sona-Nyl, which we may never behold again. The Gods are greater than men, and they have conquered." And I closed my eyes before the crash that I knew would come, shutting out the sight of the celestial bird which flapped its mocking blue wings over the brink of the torrent.

Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of things which were not men. From the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as I crouched on the slab of damp stone which had risen beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I opened my eyes and beheld myself upon the platform of that lighthouse whence I had sailed so many aeons ago. In the darkness below there loomed the vast blurred outlines of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out over the waste I saw that the light had failed for the first time since my grandfather had assumed its care.

And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I saw on the wall a calendar which still remained as when I had left it at the hour I sailed away. With the dawn I descended the tower and looked for wreckage upon the rocks, but what I found was only this: a strange dead bird whose hue was as of the azure sky, and a single shattered spar, of a whiteness greater than that of the wave-tips or of the mountain snow.

And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though many times since has the moon shone full and high in the heavens, the White Ship from the South came never again.

Buchanin on vulture capitalism

Undeniably, Americans cherish their economic freedom and respect the men who helped make America great, inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and industrialists such as Henry Ford.
       
But they do not revere the men who make millions and billions at the big casinos of capitalism. They do not admire a George Soros for winning his billion-dollar bet shorting the British pound.
       
They believe that a man's professional, as well as private, life should be guided by a conscience. And because they recoil from the teachings of Karl Marx does not mean they embrace the values of Ayn Rand.
       
Let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, economic Darwinism, is neither conservatism nor Americanism.

Weird Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon was so flagrantly indifferent to his wife that one of his aides, Roger Ailes, wrote in a memorandum, "I think it is important for the President to show a little more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he moves through the crowd. At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her." In Nashville, on her birthday, Nixon took the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and played "Happy Birthday" on the piano. The song complete, Pat ran to him with her arms outstretched in pleasure. Nixon spurned her embrace and signalled the master of ceremonies to resume the program.

Progressives

People die because of this hatred. I'm not going to be made to feel guilty because I don't respond to deadly antipathy with moderation.


It is marginalized people who most feel, in all aspects of their lives, the difference between the Left and the Right (monikers which are, btw, distinct from the Democrats and the Republicans, who are generally center-right and extreme right).

Women's bodily autonomy, right to value her own life over a fetus, right to be childless by choice, freedom from marginalizing bullying, harassment, and legislation, and access to legal medical procedures, rape kits, emergency contraception, equal pay, equal opportunity, and equal rights are not (generally) under attack from the Left.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer people's basic equality, fundamental rights of marriage, parenting, employment, housing, healthcare, inheritance, etc., freedom from marginalizing bullying, harassment, and legislation, and personal safety are not (generally) under attack from the Left.

People of color do not (generally) find their basic equality, fundamental rights of access and opportunity, freedom from marginalizing bullying, harassment, and legislation, and personal safety under attack from the Left.

Trans people's employment rights, healthcare equity, and personal safety are not (generally) under attack from the Left.

The social programs on which poor people depend to keep them from falling off the edge—foodstamps, housing programs, healthcare assistance—the things that can make the difference between homelessness and a roof over one's head, eating and starving, life and death, are not under attack from the Left.

Undocumented immigrants are (generally) not demonized and scapegoated and spoken about with the most vicious eliminationist language, while simultaneously being exploited in horrendous working conditions, by the Left.

People with physical and/or psychological disabilities do not (generally) find their basic equality, fundamental rights of access and opportunity, freedom from marginalizing bullying, harassment, and legislation, and personal safety under attack from the Left.

When women and their allies and their abortion providers are targeted for violence, it is by rightwingers. Dr. George Tiller was not killed by a leftist. When gay/bi women and men, people of color, trans people, people with disabilities are targeted for violence, victimized by hate crimes, it is not progressives who wield the weapons.

The most vulnerable people in our society, whose actual lives are at risk because of virulent, violent, unconstrained hatred, are not being targeted by the Left.

That matters!

And it matters not because I'm interested in bickering about "Precisely the Percentage of Blame to Be Doled Out to the Left and the Right for Our Problems," but because to gloss over that reality is to aid and abet with indifferent silence the extreme elements who would not merely see marginalized people indefinitely interred in their marginalization, but would see them DEAD, given half the chance.

That's why Fred Phelps carrying "God Hates Fags" signs and my using vulgar language and an indelicate tone to vociferously defend gay equality is not the bloody same. And, let's be honest: I wouldn't be screaming my fool head off all the time in defense of gay equality if assholes like Fred Phelps didn't go on the offensive against my family, friends, and fellow citizens.

You're goddamn right I yell. But it's because I HAVE TO.

People die because of this hatred. I'm not going to be made to feel guilty because I don't respond to deadly antipathy with moderation.

The shame belongs to someone so damned privileged that he doesn't feel obliged to yell, too.

Netflix

by John Seabrook
JANUARY 16, 2012

On TV, airtime is a scarce resource; on YouTube, it’s infinite.
n a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural transformation in YouTube’s seven-year history. Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience—twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music—and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands. “People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.”
Kyncl puts his whole body into his whiteboard performances, and you can almost see the champion skier he used to be. As a teen-ager in Czechoslovakia, he was sent to a state-run boarding school where talented young skiers trained for the Olympics. At eighteen, “I realized then that all I knew was skiing,” he told me. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, he applied to a program that placed Eastern Europeans in American summer camps as counsellors, and spent the summer in Charlottesville, Virginia. The following year, Kyncl went to SUNY, in New Paltz, where he majored in international relations.
People prefer niches because “the experience is more immersive,” Kyncl went on. “For example, there’s no horseback-riding channel on cable. Plenty of people love horseback riding, and there’s plenty of advertisers who would like to market to them, but there’s no channel for it, because of the costs. You have to program a 24/7 loop, and you need a transponder to get your signal up on the satellite. With the Internet, everything is on demand, so you don’t have to program 24/7—a few hours is all you need.”
For the past sixty years, TV executives have been making the decisions about what we watch in our living rooms. Kyncl would like to change that. Therefore YouTube, the home of grainy cell-phone videos and skateboarding dogs, is going pro. Kyncl has recruited producers, publishers, programmers, and performers from traditional media to create more than a hundred channels, most of which will début in the next six months—a sort of YouTV. Streaming video, delivered over the Internet, is about to engage traditional TV in a skirmish in the looming war for screen time.
Kyncl attacked the two-dimensional plane with his marker, schussing the media moguls, racing over and around them to the future. He drew a vertiginously plunging double-diamond run representing the dissolution of mass TV audiences as cable channels began to proliferate. Then he drew the bunny slope of Web-based channels that will further fragment audiences. According to Forrester Research, by 2016 half of all households will have Wi-Fi-enabled devices on their televisions, which will bring all those new channels into the living room, tempting people to cancel their pricey cable subscriptions. The only way for the networks and the cable companies to grow will be to buy Web-based channels.
Isn’t that more or less what happened thirty years ago? I asked. The networks, which had originally disparaged the new cable channels as cheap-looking and too narrowly focussed, ended up buying them when cable took off.
“Absolutely that’s what happened,” Kyncl said, with a slight Czech accent. “And it will happen again.”
He set the marker down on the conference-room table, and smiled. YouTube had won the gold.
ouTube was created by three former employees of PayPal, in a Silicon Valley garage, in early 2005. According to two of the founders, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, a graphic designer and a software engineer, respectively, the idea grew out of a dinner party at Chen’s home in San Francisco, in the winter of 2004-05. Guests had made videos of one another, but they couldn’t share them easily. The founders envisioned a video version of Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site. All the content on the site would be user-generated: “Real personal clips that are taken by everyday people,” as Hurley described his vision.
The third founder, Jawed Karim, also a software engineer, had an additional source of inspiration: Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” on CBS’s broadcast of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The incident spawned an enormous amount of commentary, an F.C.C. fine, and a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, but if you missed the live broadcast you were out of luck.
On the evening of April 23, 2005, Karim uploaded the first video to YouTube—an eighteen-second clip of him, standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, wearing an ill-fitting hiking jacket. He says, “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool,” smirks a little, and ends with “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.” Civilization would never be the same.
By the time a beta version of YouTube went live, in May, 2005, its archive held several dozen videos, supplied mostly by the founders and their friends; Chen contributed a couple of his cat, Stinky. Not surprisingly, traffic was light. YouTube was like “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” without the fun. The founders had no outside financing at the time, and they were paying for equipment and bandwidth with the payouts they had earned from PayPal when eBay bought the company, in 2002; some of the costs went on Chen’s credit card. The situation looked bleak. In a video shot that month in a garage, the founders discuss their predicament. Chen says, “I was getting pretty depressed toward the end of last week.” Someone says, “This is lame.” The founders decided that videos of good-looking babes might help, and they placed ads on Craigslist, offering attractive women a hundred dollars for ten videos. No one responded.
On June 20th, Karim wrote in an e-mail to Chen and Hurley, “If we want to sign up lots of users who keep coming back, we have to target the people who will never upload a video in their life. And those are really valuable because they spend time watching.” What the watchers wanted was music videos, skits from “Saturday Night Live,” and episodes of “South Park”—professional content. “And if they watch, then it’s just like TV, which means lots of value,” Karim added.
In e-mails that later became the centerpiece of a billion-dollar copyright-infringement suit brought by Viacom against YouTube, in 2007, both Karim and Chen advocated a laissez-faire response toward copyrighted content. If the content owners asked YouTube to take a video down, the site would comply; otherwise, the founders would leave it. Hurley presciently wrote, “OK man, save your meal money for some lawsuits.” But he, too, went along with the relaxed approach.
In June, the site incorporated a number of new features, including the ability to embed YouTube videos in other sites and links between videos, and traffic began to pick up. By December, YouTube had several million views a day. That month, “Lazy Sunday,” a skit from “Saturday Night Live,” in which Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap about eating cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and going to a Sunday matinée of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” was posted on YouTube, and viewed more than five million times before it was removed at NBCUniversal’s request.
I discovered the pleasures of YouTube around this time. Someone sent me a link to a music video, and I followed it to the site. The whimsical D.I.Y.-ness of the home page, with its clutter of clickable offerings, many sophomoric in nature, made the place feel like a college dorm. Adorable babies, angry cats, embarrassing falls, and child prodigies mingled with the music videos and great concert footage of bands I loved performing at their peak. I e-mailed links to my friends. One of them wrote back, “This is like public television was supposed to be!”
At the beginning, I used YouTube more as a radio. Almost every song I wanted to hear, from any era, was on it. (It never occurred to me that someone may have violated the owners’ copyright by uploading those videos; streaming seemed more like borrowing than stealing.) Before long, I was taking online Delta-blues guitar lessons from a guy who called himself BlindBoy, and whose face never appeared onscreen—it was just the guitar, his hands, and his Lennon-like Liverpudlian accent. BlindBoy was a talented teacher and a prolific poster, and soon I was spending more time watching this headless Englishman than, say, the “The Daily Show.” I was definitely one of the watchers: I would never have thought of uploading a video myself. But watching YouTube was nothing like watching TV. It was user-generated anarchy.
In October, 2006, Google bought YouTube, for $1.65 billion. (Hurley and Chen made the announcement in a YouTube video entitled “A Message from Chad and Steve”; Karim, who had left the company by that point, was nowhere to be seen, and henceforth all but disappears from official company history.) Within a year, Google had tamed the Wild West of copyright infringement that characterized YouTube’s pioneer days, both through licensing deals with major content providers and through a content-management program, called Content ID, that alerted copyright holders automatically whenever any part of their content went up on YouTube. Owners can choose to remove the content, sell ads against it and share the money with YouTube, or use it as a promotional tool. Content ID generates a third of YouTube’s revenue. (In June, 2010, Louis Stanton, the judge in the long-running Viacom v. YouTube case, granted summary judgment to YouTube. Viacom is appealing that ruling, and a decision is expected soon.)
Having dealt with YouTube’s copyright problems, Google’s C.E.O., Eric Schmidt, turned to the issue of monetization. YouTube’s expenses—mainly the bandwidth costs of streaming all those videos—exceeded its revenues, which, like Google’s, came from ad sales. The general impression among advertisers at the time was that YouTube was not “brand safe,” because its streets “were not clean and well lit,” as David Cohen, an executive vice-president at the ad agency Universal McCann, put it to me. YouTube needed to devise a strategy similar to Google’s paid search. But although YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world, many people are searching for entertainment, which is different from searching for information and harder to match ads with; “lol” is one of the most popular search terms on the site. Keyword searches are confined to the “metadata”—the labels and titles of the videos; search can’t go inside the videos themselves. Often, videos are poorly labelled, and, if they come straight from cell phones, as many do, they may not be labelled at all.
f anyone at Google could solve the monetization problem, it was Salar Kamangar. Born in Iran in 1976, Kamangar came to the United States with his parents shortly before the Iranian Revolution. He got a degree in biology from Stanford, and stayed in Palo Alto to work on a degree in economics. In 1999, he attended a job fair on campus, where he met Sergey Brin, who was manning the booth for Google, a start-up that he and Larry Page had founded a year earlier. Kamangar became Google employee No. 9. Steven Levy, in his recent book about Google, “In the Plex,” describes Kamangar as having “a glow of success around him . . . as a result of his work in developing Google’s ad system.” That glow, however, does not translate into physical presence. Kamangar is slight of build, soft-spoken, and shy, especially around reporters. He brought his laptop to our meeting, and looked at it from time to time while we talked. His eyes relaxed whenever they hit the screen.
In the fall of 2008, at Schmidt and Hurley’s request, Kamangar began working at YouTube headquarters, in San Bruno, California. (Hurley remained at YouTube, but he ceded day-to-day management to Kamangar, and left altogether in October, 2010.) The airy, light-filled offices were originally designed for the Gap. There is a putting green in the atrium, with garden gnomes placed around it; red helium balloons float above the desks of new employees; the downstairs conference rooms are named for well-known video games; and a very large, triple-chute slide, also in YouTube red, is installed in the two-story central workspace. Underlying these whimsical touches is a seriousness of purpose that one encounters in small start-ups but only rarely in companies the size of YouTube (more than seven hundred employees and growing fast, to judge by all the red balloons).
Under Kamangar’s leadership, YouTube has continued to grow. Today, it has eight hundred million unique users a month, and generates more than three billion views a day. Forty-eight hours of new video are uploaded to the site every minute. According to Nielsen, it drew eight times more video viewers last year than Hulu, which is jointly owned by NBCUniversal, News Corporation, and the Walt Disney Company, among others. It is the first truly global media platform on earth.
YouTube’s Partner Program, begun in 2007, has also flourished. YouTube sells advertising against popular channels created by homegrown YouTube stars—vloggers, sit-down comedians (a form of comedy unique to YouTube), mashup artists, bedroom auteurs, Mr. Fix-Its—and shares the revenues with the channels’ creators. For most of YouTube’s thirty thousand partners, this means a few hundred dollars a month, but the top five hundred partners earn more than a hundred thousand a year, and in some cases—Real Annoying Orange, a socially inept talking citrus who converses with other pieces of fruit; Shane Dawson, a madcap twenty-three-year-old sketch comedian; and Michelle Phan, a Vietnamese-American beauty guru, among them—they earn much more. Tweens are more familiar with these “welebrities” than they are with the stars on TV, a grim augury for the future of traditional television.
As YouTube has grown, Kamangar and his team have struggled to keep its algorithm up to speed. The algorithm is that secret software machine that determines which videos the home page suggests for you, based on your watch history, trending videos, and the most popular videos on the site. Weighting each of those factors properly, while maintaining a sense of serendipity—those stumble-upon videos that are one of the delights of YouTube—has been a challenge. When the top hits become overly dominant, the algorithm is tweaked to encourage greater diversity. Too much diversity, however, and you get seemingly random suggestions on the home page, and you stop watching.
But there is one category in which YouTube has made little progress. The average ’Tuber spends only fifteen minutes a day on the site—a paltry showing when compared with the four or five hours the average American spends in front of the TV each day. The standard block of programming on TV lasts twenty-two minutes; on YouTube, it’s three minutes. As Rick Klau, a former YouTube product manager who is now a partner at Google Ventures, said, “We give people seven or eight opportunities in the course of a half hour to opt out.” People tend to watch YouTube on their computers at work. A three-minute break every couple of hours isn’t really goofing off; it’s more like a trip to the virtual water cooler. On TV, programmers bracket certain shows together in the hope that you won’t change the channel, and channels promote upcoming shows during commercial breaks. But on YouTube you’re the programmer, and every time a video ends you have to make a programming decision: what should you watch next? All too often, the algorithm isn’t much help.
If YouTube could get people to stay on the site longer, it could sell more advertising, and raise the rates it charges advertisers for each thousand views, which are known in the industry as C.P.M.s. (In spite of the fact that YouTube has a much larger number of users, it lags behind Hulu in C.P.M. rates, possibly because Hulu’s longer-format programming keeps viewers from leaving the site as quickly, and because advertisers prefer to be associated with the made-for-broadcast content that Hulu offers.) Advertisers spend some sixty billion dollars a year on television; they spend only about three billion on online video.
Clearly, YouTube would benefit from premium content, the kind of stuff you could watch on Netflix and Hulu. But the owners of that content were reluctant to license it to YouTube, either because they could make more money selling it elsewhere or because they didn’t trust YouTube/Google. Kamangar needed someone who would make content owners realize how valuable YouTube’s audience could be to them.
obert Kyncl started his career in entertainment in the mailroom of a talent agency, J. Michael Bloom, in Los Angeles, and later worked for HBO in New York before returning to the West Coast to join a dot-com start-up called ALFY, a Web site for kids. In 2003, Netflix recruited Kyncl to help secure movies for its thriving DVD-by-mail business.
In 2005, Kyncl volunteered to look into the business of streaming video. At that time, the usual method of obtaining music as well as video over the Internet was to download the file. Apple’s iTunes store, which launched in 2003, sold downloads. Streaming video, which enables the viewer to play a file that resides on a remote server, was believed to be a less desirable method of delivery, because the picture quality was often inferior. “Every single company was focussed on downloading at that time,” Kyncl told me. “And then one day I saw this thing called YouTube, and I thought, Wow, a lot of people are watching grainy videos on this; obviously they’re willing to trade fidelity for utility. That was a revelation.”
The streaming service débuted on Netflix in 2007, offering movies and television programs, and it quickly caught on with subscribers. For the price of a subscription to Netflix, which was about ten dollars a month, you could watch as many movies as you wanted; if you didn’t like one, you could start another. “It brought channel-surfing to movies,” Kyncl says. For many people, Netflix was the first glimpse of a kind of content holy grail: limitless choice, all on demand, and available on any Internet-connected device. By 2010, streaming had become a major part of Netflix’s business. Its stock price soared.
But, big as the streaming-video business became for Netflix, its potential was even greater. Computers were already beginning to change the experience of watching TV, by allowing viewers to access programs and movies on laptops, phones, and gaming devices. The next phase would be televisions that connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi, which would allow users to stream Web-original content on the TV. Netflix, with one foot in the old world of DVD delivery—the world of atoms, not bits—might not fully realize the new medium’s potential. (Indeed, in September, 2011, when Reed Hastings, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Netflix, tried to separate the DVD-by-mail side of the company from the streaming side, and to charge customers more if they wanted both services, subscribers were outraged.) But someone was going to figure it out.
In the spring of 2010, a recruiter called Kyncl at Netflix and asked him if he would be interested in meeting Kamangar. Although the two men seem miles apart in temperament—Kyncl is outgoing and personable; Kamangar is introverted and intense—they hit it off.
The senior vice-president of YouTube wanted Kyncl to help chart YouTube’s future. “Because YouTube is focussed on a lot of different types of content at the same time,” Kyncl told me, “it has many opportunities, and the hardest thing is to figure out which ones you shouldn’t do, and focus on the ones you should.”
Kyncl’s relationships in Hollywood would help in securing premium content; and, more important, he understood entertainment culture. He brought “the skill set of being able to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood—an information culture and an entertainment culture,” he told me. The crucial difference is that one culture is founded on abundance and the other on scarcity. He added, “Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it. Entertainment works by withholding content with the purpose of increasing its value. And, when you think about it, those two are just vastly different approaches, but they can be bridged.”
In TV, airtime is a scarce resource, and quality programming is scarcer still, and expensive to create. Writers spend months or years developing an idea, which they then pitch to network and cable executives, who make decisions based, at least in part, on their “gut.” The majority of the ideas never get produced. If a project is green-lighted, the networks or cable channels buy it and fund its production, and the creators have to give up some or all of their control over the material.
But on YouTube “airtime” is infinite, content costs almost nothing for YouTube to produce, and quantity, not quality, is the bottom line. “YouTube green-lights everything,” as Tim Shey, the director of the site’s division for coaching content creators, YouTube Next Lab, told me. It’s up to the audience, not the executive gut, to decide what’s worth watching. “I’ve worked in TV, and I’ve been the one green-lighting projects,” Shey went on. “Believe me, the YouTube way works much better.” Kyncl told me that at Google it makes no sense to bring “a gut-based decision-making process to a culture that is based on numerically quantifying everything. Ultimately, that kind of decision-making gets rejected, as if it were a foreign body.”
When I met Kamangar, in California, he told me he thought that screen time in general was going to expand, so the battle for eyeballs wasn’t a zero-sum game. “Our data suggests TV watching is on the rise,” he said. “It seems to have increased from four to five hours in recent years, and we think it will keep increasing. Screen time in general will increase. I wake up with a Droid next to my bed, and I immediately look into the screen for my instructions.” At the mention of a screen, his eyes stole a longing glance back toward his laptop. “That’s the trend—more screen time—and we think that will benefit YouTube.”
Kyncl sees the situation in more absolute terms. He showed me a bar graph depicting the enormous advantage that TV has over YouTube in screen time. “We’re absolutely nothing compared to TV,” he said. “And this is why I came to YouTube. I want to take this”—he pointed to YouTube’s screen time—“up, and in a big way, because I think we can. And, if we do, this industry”—TV—“is worth three hundred billion dollars, worldwide, and we hope to see value shifting hands.”
n his first months on the job, Kyncl concentrated on beefing up YouTube’s streaming-movie-rental business—the company’s first foray into paid content—which, at that point, had mostly indie titles. He helped negotiate deals with Warner Bros., Sony, and NBCUniversal, among others. In May, 2011, the new service went live, heralded by a rare posting on the YouTube blog from Kamangar himself, entitled “Welcome to the future of video. Please stay a while.” More than three thousand titles were available for rent, at prices comparable to iTunes movie rentals. But, since most of the same films were already available for instant streaming on Netflix, for a flat monthly fee, the new service was something of a non-starter.
And popular TV shows like “Mad Men,” which Netflix also offered, were notably lacking on YouTube. When I spoke to Kamangar about this during my visit to company headquarters in July, he said that the deals were taking longer than expected to work out because so many shows were tied up in syndication and ancillary-rights deals that had been negotiated back when “no one thought that content would be watched on the Internet at this volume.” He added that making broadcast-content owners comfortable putting their stuff on YouTube “would require an attitudinal shift,” from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking, but that “there are signs this is happening.”
While Kamangar and Kyncl were expanding YouTube’s movie titles, they were also exploring a more radical idea. What if YouTube could get professional writers, directors, and producers to create original content for the site? As Kyncl put it, “YouTube already had many channels, but they were used more as a way for content creators to set up their relationship with YouTube and upload videos, rather than as a discovery mechanism for the viewer.” YouTube would not want to own or develop the content. “We’re a technology company, and that’s not in our DNA,” Kyncl said. “The focus would be on developing channels, and brands, rather than individual shows.” He added, “There is a fundamental difference between the way AOL and Yahoo behave and the way we behave. They commission individual pieces of content. What we do is commission channels. We don’t tell people how to program the channels. We have certain volume requirements”—for instance, channels would be required to supply a minimum number of hours of programming each week—“but we are not making show-by-show decisions.”
Early in 2011, Kyncl began meeting content creators in a variety of media—film, TV, music, print—whiteboarding the future of television, and inviting them to participate in it by creating new YouTube channels. He offered several million dollars in funding, in the form of advances against future ad revenues, to be used as development money. Once the advances are earned back, YouTube will share ad revenues with the creators. YouTube will have an exclusive right to the content for a year, but the creators will retain ownership. YouTube will be responsible for selling ads but will not invest in promoting or marketing the channels in the way that traditional television channels do. (There will be no lavish premiere parties, and no billboards in Times Square.)
Michael Hirschorn was among the people who heard Kyncl’s presentation. Hirschorn began his career in print but made his name in television, at VH1, where, as the head of programming, he oversaw hits like “Flavor of Love” and “Celebrity Rehab.” He now runs an independent production company called Ish Entertainment. Larry Aidem, the former president of the Sundance Channel, knew Robert Kyncl, Hirschorn told me, and he said he thought they should meet. “None of the stuff Robert described was happening yet, of course, but I felt, having been late to several revolutions previously, that we needed to go all out for this,” Hirschorn said. “I called Larry and said, ‘We need to start a company now.’ ”
In all, Kyncl received more than a thousand proposals for new YouTube channels. He and his staff heard more than five hundred pitches, and winnowed them down to just over a hundred channels that would be awarded advances. Hirschorn attended more than twenty meetings. The winning proposals—branded “YouTube Original Channels”—were announced late on the Friday evening just before Halloween, at a time usually reserved for scandals and resignations, signalling that the third age of television, whatever it might be, would not be show business as usual.
Hirschorn and Aidem’s company, IconicTV, has been given advances for three channels: Life and Times, which will focus on Jay-Z’s cultural and artistic interests; 123UnoDosTres, an urban channel for Latin American young adults; and myISH, a channel for scouting musical talent. Madonna and her longtime manager, Guy Oseary, are developing a dance channel called Dance On. Amy Poehler is creating a channel called Smart Girls at the Party. Shaquille O’Neal is behind the Comedy Shaq Network, and there is a skateboard channel, RIDE, from Tony Hawk. Brian Bedol, who started the Classic Sports Network in the nineteen-nineties, and his partner Ken Lerer, the co-founder of the Huffington Post, got funds for four channels: Network A, an action-sports channel; KickTV, featuring soccer; Official Comedy, a standup-comedy showcase; and Look TV, a fashion-and-beauty channel. The Onion, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal are also creating channels, as are Hearst and Meredith. Even Disney, which had not made its films available to YouTube until November, agreed to partner with the company.
Although most of the entertainment channels fall into the variety-show format (a staple of the early years of television), some creators are attempting long-form dramas. Anthony Zuiker, who created the crime show “C.S.I.” for CBS, got a deal, along with his colleagues, to develop a channel called BlackBoxTV, a “Night Gallery”-like chiller theatre. When I asked him what attracted him to the opportunity, he said, “This world of online video is the future, and for an artist you want to be first in, to be a pioneer. And that time is now. We’ve had amateur content on the Web, and we’ve had network shows rebroadcast on the Web, but now we are combining those two into a bigger game.” He added, “You know, even with a hit show like ‘C.S.I.’ there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen. There is a lot of interference and a lot of rules. With YouTube I will have a very small crew, and we are trying to keep focussed on a single voice. There aren’t any rules. There’s just the artist, the content, and the audience.”
nd the advertisers. Like television itself, the business of TV advertising has had to learn to cope with audience fragmentation. Through the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was not unusual for the three major networks to capture eighty-five to ninety per cent of the available prime-time audience. That made it possible for advertisers to create national brands. In the eighties, as cable caught on, with channels like CNN, TBS, MTV, and Lifetime, it began to chip off pieces of the audience from the networks. “The Cosby Show” was the last TV series to command a mass following. During the 1985-86 season, more than thirty per cent of all households with televisions tuned in. (Last year, “American Idol,” the most popular show on TV today, pulled in fewer than nine per cent of all television viewers in the U.S.) On any given day, most viewers are watching niche programming, from Rachel Maddow to Rachael Ray. The niches deliver fewer people to advertisers, which isn’t good, but in theory they also deliver a more engaged and more quantifiable audience, which might be good if it means that you can efficiently target the people who are especially receptive to your message. Nevertheless, many of the biggest brands continue to pursue what remains of the mass audiences of old, which is why ad time during the Super Bowl is so expensive.
On YouTube, the niches will get nichier, and the audiences smaller still. But those audiences will be even more engaged, and much more quantifiable. Advertisers have to rely on ratings and market research to get even a rough approximation of who’s watching which show. Because YouTube is delivered over the Internet, the company will know exactly who is watching—not their names but their viewing histories, their searches, their purchases, their rough location, and their online social connections. As Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s head product manager, explained to me, “Advertising will be done at the level of the audience rather than at the level of the show. Content is no longer proxy for an audience—we know who the audience is. We know what your preferences are, the types of shows you like to watch.” If you posted a video of your trip to Hawaii on YouTube, chances are YouTube is going to advertise airfare to Honolulu to you. Advertising can therefore be highly focussed, not the blunt instrument it is now.
That’s the theory, anyway. But audience-based buying is kind of creepy, privacy-wise, and it has alarming demographics-as-class implications. Would the one per cent watch Mercedes ads during the Super Bowl, while the rest of us watched ads from Walmart? Is audience-based advertising even practical? An agency would have to make thirty ads for thirty sub-niches. Say that a client wants to target the twenty-one thousand people who currently subscribe to Vegan Black Metal Chef’s YouTube channel. “So you’d have to hire a media buyer who was an expert in Vegan Black Metal,” David Cohen, of Universal McCann, said. “From a human-resources standpoint, that doesn’t make sense, unless you can figure out how to automate it.” According to Cohen, that’s beginning to happen.
everal weeks after YouTube announced the arrival of YouTube Original Channels, it held a training program at Google’s New York headquarters. Some sixty people, of varying ages, were in attendance, most with jobs at the production companies that would write, shoot, and edit the videos. They packed into conference rooms (which, like those at YouTube, are themed) for thirty-minute presentations from experienced YouTube creators on best practices. Sometimes people fanned out for breakout sessions around the vast Google floors that run the entire block from Eighth to Ninth Avenues, and which Google workers use scooters to navigate. The sessions I attended, in a room called Brass Monkey (the theme was New York bars), had the aspect of a nerdy summer camp.
Ben Relles, an employee at YouTube Next Lab and the creator of the Barely Political channel on YouTube, who had an early success with his 2007 “Obama Girl” video, featuring the actress Amber Lee Ettinger as a young Obama groupie, led off the first session. His subject was why certain videos go viral, and whether it was possible to study the data and deduce techniques that all producers can use to increase traffic. “It’s not true that viral videos are always accidents,” he said. Although people tend to think that viral videos are serendipitous, in fact, Relles said, six of the top ten most-viewed YouTube videos in 2010 were scripted and produced just like TV shows. The difference is that the poetics of YouTube favors authenticity over production values. But what looks good enough on your desktop may look cheap in your living room.
The day’s second session, on Audience Development, was led by Next Lab’s Andres Palmiter and Ryan Nugent. “The point is to bring people back on a daily basis,” Nugent said. “How do you leverage one viewer into many?” He reminded the participants to study the habits of their audience. Thanks to YouTube Analytics, the traffic-analysis program that YouTube makes available to everyone who puts up a video, creators can know both the size of their viewership and where people are watching—by country and state—as well as when they watch and how long they spend watching. If your audience is young, you want to post your video around 3 P.M., when kids are getting home from school. “Find out what it’s like to be a user,” Nugent advised.
Everybody took lots of notes, but I sensed a disconnect between the information people and the entertainment people. Familiar concepts from television, like “comedy” and “act structure” were spoken of with vocal quotation marks around them. During the Q. & A. period, someone asked, “What do you mean by ‘a show’?”
“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean by “a show”?’ ” Nugent replied.
“Well, can you talk about the difference between shows, playlists, and channels?”
oward the end of the year, Kyncl came to New York for various meetings, and I went back to Google to see him. This time, I went to the eleventh floor, which Google has recently taken over. These conference rooms are themed according to both famous painters (an iconic work of each room’s namesake is rendered in glass around the door) and hit television shows from the past and the present. We met in the “Cosby Show” room, a nice touch.
Kyncl was excited about the new YouTube home page, which represents a major change to the interface. The cluttered old home page has been replaced by a sleek and streamlined menu of categories against a luscious black background on the left side of the screen. Not surprisingly, the redesign has been unpopular with some of the old-time users.
Most of the new content, Kyncl said, would begin “rolling out” in the first half of 2012. “I think it’s fair to say we spread our bets wide, and we can watch how things develop and decide which areas we want to go deep in.”
A number of people I had spoken to about the channel initiative were having trouble defining what exactly it is. Is Kyncl building a Web-based Comcast or Time Warner? Some believe that to be the case, but Jim Louderback, the C.E.O. of Revision3, an Internet video network, told me, “I don’t think he’s building a cable-TV competitor. I think he’s building the flip side of the cable business—a bundle of premium content that viewers just can’t live without. I see them more focussed on creating and nurturing new original properties similar to HBO, Showtime, and Comedy Central.” Is YouTube attempting to seize the means of production from Hollywood? James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research, thinks so. “They’re saying, Fine, you don’t want to sell us your content, you want to tie everything up in distribution deals—fine, we’re going to make our own deals. Not just U.S. deals but global-rights deals, because YouTube is the largest video platform on the globe, and we’re going to sign Madonna and Amy Poehler, and guess what, this train is leaving the station, get on it or not.”
A prominent Hollywood insider told me, with a note of nostalgia in his voice, “I can tell you what YouTube is not going to do—generate shows like ‘Friends,’ ‘24,’ and ‘C.S.I.’ The world of TV I grew up with, where hit shows threw off hundreds of millions for the creators and networks—that’s not going to happen.” But others think it will; all it takes is a hit.
I wondered if there was any danger to the brand, in moving so decisively from the user-generated anarchy of the old YouTube to YouTV, where control and surveillance are centralized in the heart of the Googleplex. In its attempt to increase watch time, attract more viewers, and provide advertisers with as customized a customer as possible, YouTube risks alienating its core constituency—Chad Hurley’s “everyday people.” MySpace suffered steep reductions in traffic when it altered the user experience with redesigns and increased ads. Netflix lost more than half its value in the stock market and provoked a customer revolt after announcing its plan to separate the streaming and the DVD sides of the business. It’s possible that YouTube could make a similar mistake, by offering bigger, more professional niches than its amateur-niche audience wants right now. For all the information that new-media companies have about their customers, they can still fundamentally misjudge when those customers are ready for change.

Free will

THE MYTH OF FREE WILL can be used to justify  radical economic inequality by promoting the foolish idea of the ultimately self-made self which deeply deserves riches or poverty.  Everyone should know in their heart that success is never earned or deserved. 

Nothing is free except the grace of God. You don't "deserve"  it or earn it. 

---- John Calvin

Read on if that doesn't ring true. Otherwise, the lecture is over.  



We have goals, instilled in us by natural selection as well as by experience and introspection. And we use our cognitive powers to choose behaviors that advance those goals. That’s what it means to “do what you want”.

COIN TOSS. ALWAYS NICE TO SEE GREAT MINDS FAIL. HERES COYNE GETTING IT WRONG.

“A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.” — Jerry Coyne.

NOPE.  COIN TOSS DIFFERENT EACH TIME BUT NEVER A CHOICE. WE MAKE CHOICES, BUT NOT FREE CHOICES. THEY ARE GUESSES.  CHECK AND MATE. ARGUMENT OVER. NO CONTEST. FOLLOW THE LAW. 

EASY CHOICES STAND TO REASON, DILEMMAS (GUESSES) ARE SETTLED BY CHANCE. 

I can’t find a seconder usually when I propose this but I don’t care. I don’t need a seconder. My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, anytime.”

I was just wondering, as often as this quote turns up, might we just call it Hitchens’ Law? I could say, for example, “You don’t like it? Follow the law! 


Yes we do make choices.  But they are not free choices...They are guesses.  The closest we come to quote free will is coin tossing. And yes my dears, the outcome of a coin toss is random.  Don't confuse randomness with  freedom. 

Sociological studies show that if people’s belief in free will is undermined, they perform fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial behaviors.”

WELL, THE SAME IS PROBABLY TRUE OF PEOPLES BELIEF IN HEAVEN AND HELL.  THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE OR ACCEPTABLE. BELIEF IN FREE WILL IS BELIEF IN A FALSEHOOD. THE ANSWER... DON'T TELL PEOPLE THERE IS NO GOD OR FREE WILL OR THERE MIGHT BE MORE CRIMINALS. PEOPLE LIKE THAT DON'T NEED TO KNOW THEY ARE FREE TO RUN RIOT. 

seeing we don’t have free will – what the Buddha taught, essentially – is a good route to self-compassion and self-control, http://www.naturalism.org/therapy.htm




… inasmuch as anticompatibilists resemble hard-core Calvinists (i.e., belief in predestination).

EXACTLY.  SUCCESS. YOU DON'T EARN IT AND YOU DON'T DESERVE IT.  

Congrats Jerry, and thanks for drawing out the policy implications for criminal justice of seeing that we don’t have contra-causal free will: it’s very difficult to justify retribution. 



The same considerations apply when it comes to radical economic inequality: it’s much harder to justify without the myth of the ultimately self-made self which deeply deserves riches or poverty,http://www.naturalism.org/progressivepolitics.htm








Reply

sleeprunning
Posted January 2, 2012 at 12:18 pm |Permalink
try acting on your POV next time your child goes to the doctor or you fly on an airplane.



sleeprunning
Posted January 2, 2012 at 10:47 am | Permalink
actually behavior is pretty predictable in animals and humans, however it doesn’t track self-reports or verbal self-talk.

animal, yes humans are animals, behavior is fairly limited.

Reply

Dr. Coyne also writes of the seemingly nihilistic view that one might take when examining the criminal justice system devised by humans. If a criminal does commit a person to person crime, and that criminal is acting out the physics of his existence, then why do we incarcerate and/or execute these people for these acts? The answer is simply that this is how it plays out.  How it has to play out, for safety's sake. 

AS EINSTEIN SAID, NOT TO PUNISH BUT TO PROTECT OURSELVES.

THE TRUTH AGAIN, 

I can’t find a seconder usually when I propose this but I don’t care. I don’t need a seconder. My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, anytime.”

Democracy

A democracy, which they detested, empowers majorities to tyrannize minorities. "In questions of power," Jefferson admonished, "let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."

Liar of the Century

Rick Santorum in Sioux City: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money“; Santorum on CNN: I didn’t say “black,” I said “blah”; giving Santorum the benefit of the doubt,


Benefit of the doubt?  No, he's a horrible man. What a dreadful lie. 

He didn't say blah. Nobody says "blah people." Santorum is insane!  You have to be insane to try a lie like that. 

Five hour day

Russ Roberts once told me that when he lived in Asia he felt reluctant to hire a maid, even though they were very cheap there, and well worth the price. This makes sense to me — I suspect he felt that people would blame him for the poverty of his maid, even if he paid above market wages. It is sad that such feelings discourage beneficial trades.

I recently noted that we mainly limit work hours for low status workers, leaving doctors, lawyers, managers, financiers, artists, writers, athletes, academics, and software engineers to work crazy hours. Responses reminded me of how eager folks are to blame non-poor associates of the poor. Many said that only low status workers need protecting from employer “exploitation”:

Doctors are unlikely to be exploited the same way mine workers are. (more)

If you are a peon subject to the whims of a boss, he has little incentive to acquiesce in your desires. (more)

“White collar” … employees were considered able to drive their own bargains better than the government could bargain for them. (more)

I am a software engineer … working 13-hour shifts. … My employer has had ten or more open positions for the past five years … This means I negotiate with my employer from a position of strength. … My brother-in-law has part-time employment plowing snow. A couple days ago he worked a 13-hour shift. … If he were to object, his employer would have no trouble finding someone else to plow the same snow. So he negotiates with his employer from a position of weakness. (more)

Many people who live paycheck to paycheck are not in a position to decline additional required work – if the boss says you need to work over the weekend, and it is extremely costly for you to find a new job, you have little choice but to agree. … Skilled workers are more costly to replace, expect to be working extensive hours, and are likely to be wealthier and more capable of credibly threatening to quit. (more)

Labor markets are complex, and vary greatly by industry and location. Job design must trade task productivity, worker dislikes, and risk tolerances on both sides. Workers and employers must search for a good match of skills, flexibility, and style. Co-worker and family member preferences must be taken into account. One must anticipate changing outside options, the chance of betrayal and detection, and relationship specific investments. Negotiations vary with private info, temperament, and commitment devices. Industries and locations vary in their degree of competition and collusion among employers, and among employees.

The many ways in which labor markets can vary would seem to offer a wide scope for the regulation of such markets to vary with industry, location, and demographics. This scope is hardly infinite, however. A plausible efficiency justification for some regulation and how it varies with circumstances should come with a plausible story about how a factor like those listed above induces inefficiency, how some regulation reduces this problem, and how that inefficiency-inducing factor varies with context in a way that explains how the regulation varies with context.

Economists don’t understand everything about labor markets, but we do understand a lot, enough to make it noteworthy when we say: we economists just don’t see a plausible efficiency justification for applying work hour limits mainly to low status jobs. Yes, worker signaling and status competition can lead to excess work hours. Yes, reducing the quantity of available labor can increase wages. Yes, longer work hours tend to hurt associated family members. But these all apply similarly to high vs. low status jobs.

Yes, employees with worse outside options give in more to increased employer demands, but ex ante competition makes employers offer ex ante compensation for such an ex post advantage. Also, increased demands should mainly take the form of lower compensation, rather than distorting job details such as work hours away from their efficient values. Furthermore, since high skilled workers actually tend to stay on their jobs longer, they are less familiar with and prepared to lose a job, and being fired sends a worse signal to outsiders.

While economists don’t see a plausible efficiency rationale for work hour limits that exclude high status work, we do see a quite plausible non-efficiency rationale: people like both to show their concern about the “downtrodden,” and their dislike and defiance of big corporations. And they can signal both these things by blaming the plight of the low status on their employers, and then claiming to help by regulating employer choices about work details, such as work hours and safety.

Note that this can function as a signal of caring about low status workers even if it actually hurts them – signal observers need only think that these signalers believe that it helps. And the plausibility of this story is increased by the fact that we commonly regulate low status folks more than high status folks, supposedly to help them. For example, we and our regulations show more concern about recreational drugs (e.g., crack) favored by the low status, about alcohol availability to the low status, and about teen mothers more than 40+ moms.

Given the lack of a plausible efficiency rationale and a quite plausible non-efficiency rationale, I tentatively conclude that we mainly limit low status worker hours as a way to signal care and defiance, rather than to address a labor market inefficiency.