Technoccult

Sorry I’m a little late with this one everyone, but there’s plenty of reading for you in this one…

Journalism

The long read of the week has to be Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” It’s so long, in fact, that I’m only about 40% of the way through it, but I’ve already learned a lot.

This week’s other “must read” of the week was, of course, Laurie Penny’s essay about Isla Vista killings . But the media event of the week for me was The Baffler‘s essay on neoreaction.

Elsewhere: by now you’ve probably heard of the rock star economist Thomas Piketty. Of course the right disgrees with his policy suggestions, but no one has quibbled with quality of his data research. Until this week, that is, when Financial Times economics editor Chris Giles claimed that Piketty made serious errors that undercut his work. But The Economist isn’t sure there are actually any errors in the data, and says that even if there are, they probably aren’t important enough to undermine Piketty’s conclusions.

This week in tech: Quinn Norton told us that everything is broken and I was like just wait until the Internet of Broken Things, and then Michael Rogers and Eleanor Saitta were like hey, we’re trying to fix it. Actually the chronology of that was competely different but you might as well read it in that order anyway.

I also read that in an alternate universe the Internet of Things debuted around 2001 in the form of a keychain thingy that connected you to your web portal of choice. Instead we got the Danger Hiptop (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick), one of the first smart phones on the market (I got one of the original models the day it came out. Long-time readers may remember me complaining about it). Fun aside: The founder of Danger, Andy Rubin, also founded Android which was acquired by Google and, well, you know the rest. Danger itself was acquired my Microsoft and became the basis of the doomed Kin.

And speaking of broken things, Wikipedia may also be broken, but historian Stephen W. Campbell has a plan to fix it.

This week in stuff from the depths of my Pocket: How Tyrants Endure, from the New York Times in 2011.

Music

Warning: if you have epilepsy or any other condition where rapid blinky things affect you do NOT watch this vid:

I’ve watched the new M.I.A. video almost every day this week. And if you thought I was done throwing stuff to read at you, you were wrong because here’s Adam Rothstein’s essay about the video.

Film

I finally saw the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary this week, which was amazing (just like Tim Maughan said). I also watched the Milius documentary, which is on Netflix, which was good but not quite amazing, but maybe that’s just because I’m comparing it to Dune.

Mutation Vectors is my weekly round-up of what media I’ve been consuming.

Journalism

One highlight of the week was this interview with Peggy McIntosh, the women’s studies scholar who popularized the term “privilege” in the context of social justice. This part was heartbreaking:

The right wing wanted to paint it as craziness. But there were so many people saying it wasn’t crazy that I was able to put them aside. David Horowitz named me one of America’s ten wackiest feminists; that used to get to me. Now I think, If you’re going to do work for racial justice, you’re going to get attacked.

Have those reactions changed much? It’s been more than twenty-five years.

The truth is that it hasn’t changed much, except in the universities.

I’d like to think this isn’t actually true, but I’m really afraid that it is.

Meanwhile:

• Twitter won’t ban users who make rape threats against women, unless the threats are very specific. That’s an awful policy. I can’t find a good to contact them to tell them this is a horrible policy, other than @ messaing @twitter on Twitter, besides maybe sending them an old fashioned postal letter in the snail mail. If you want to do that, their address is here.
• The New York Times: A pay gap between men and women exists within jobs, not just from women choosing low-paying jobs
• Ashe Dryden: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
• Art Brodsky: FCC Proves Yet Again That It’s Out to Kill Net Neutrality

Every so often I like to order my Pocket reading list by oldest-to-newest. I’m still working through articles I saved during the first half of 2011. Here’s a couple interesting things I read recently:

• Rolling Stone: The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders
• The Atlantic: The Myth of Japan’s ‘Lost Decades’

Also, this Washington Post story from about a year ago floated up into Pocket’s “highlights,” so I read it: “Maximizing shareholder value: The goal that changed corporate America“. Here’s the most important part:

Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate and business law at Cornell University Law School, traces the transformation to the rise of the “Chicago school” of free-market economists.

In 1970, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine in which he famously argued that the only “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

Then in 1976, economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling published a paper saying that shareholders were “principals” who hired executives and board members as “agents.” In other words, when you are an executive or corporate director, you work for the shareholders.

Stout said these legal theories appealed to the media — the idea that shareholders were king simplified the confusing debate over the purpose of a corporation.

More powerfully, it helped spawn the rise of executive pay tied to share prices — and thus the huge rise in stock-option pay. As a result, average annual executive pay has quadrupled since the early 1970s.

TV

I started watching Orphan Black this week and like it so far.

Music

I haven’t heard their albums, but I came across these videos by White Lung and dig the ’90s nostalgia aethstetic: