The Internet of Things on Collision Course with Free Market Capitalism

Delacroix, slight revision

 

Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Zero Marginal Cost Society, wrote a sobering piece for The New York Times Week in Review (3/16/14) on how reduction of marginal costs spells the end of capitalism as we know it.  Competitive markets are bringing costs so far down that goods and services are nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces.  Economists never anticipated a technological revolution that would bring costs to near zero.

Napster started the trend with music sharing, newspaper and book publishing soon followed.  Popular belief holds that free products entice consumers to purchase higher end goods.  The Internet of Things is an example on steroids and will play out over next few decades.  Billions of sensors now monitor resources, the electricity grid, etc. and are implanted in homes. offices, and vehicles.  Productivity advances could affect 1/2 the global economy by 2025.

Rifkin believes that non-profit organizations will take over the economy.  Emerging collaborative commons will flourish alongside capitalist markets.  Shared access will trump private ownership.  Social media sites allow us to share cars, homes, and goods.  The impact on the labor market is profound with workerless factories, virtual retailing and automated logistics.  The new employment opportunities lie in the collaborative commons via non-profits.

A note on the painting: Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple) is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled King Charles X of France. A woman personifying Liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen, holding the flag of the French Revolution – the tricolor flag which is still France's flag today – in one hand and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne.

Did the Times Editor intend to imply that the depletion of the middle class would lead to another revolution ?

Yiren Lu's Brilliant View of Silicon Valley

 

 Yiren Lu nails it.  She brilliantly analyzes current Silicon Valley "app" culture and the collision between old school and new school.  Btw, yes, that is her on YouTube at age 12 playing Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu.  Verbatim highlights appear below:

·        I am a grad student in computer science at Columbia University — with several friends who will be working at Dropbox and Facebook this summer

·        The rapid consumer-ification of tech, led by Facebook and Google, has created a deep rift between old and new, hardware and software, enterprise companies that sell to other businesses and consumer companies that sell directly to the masses.

·        In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which all of Web 2.0 rests. Without a good router to provide reliable Wi-Fi, your Dropbox file-sharing application is not going to sync; without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh. The talent — and there’s a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps.

·        Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app.

·        The face of web tech today could easily be a designer, like Brian Chesky at Airbnb, or a magazine editor, like Jeff Koyen at Assignmint. Such entrepreneurs come from backgrounds outside computer science and are likely to think of their companies in terms more grandiose than their technical components.

·        And it followed what was for decades the highway that connected academia to industry: Grad students researched technology, powerful advisers brokered deals, students dropped out to parlay their technologies into proprietary solutions, everyone reaped the profits. That implicit guarantee of academia’s place in entrepreneurship has since disappeared. Graduate students still drop out, but to start bike-sharing apps and become data scientists.

·        Much of this precocity — or dilettantism, depending on your point of view — has been enabled by web technologies, by easy-to-use programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Node.js and by the explosion of application programming interfaces (A.P.I.s) that supply off-the-shelf solutions to entrepreneurs who used to have to write all their own code for features like a login system or an embedded map. Now anyone can do it, thanks to the Facebook login A.P.I. or the Google Maps A.P.I.

·        The sense that it is no longer necessary to have particularly deep domain knowledge before founding your own start-up is real; that and the willingness of venture capitalists to finance Mark Zuckerberg look-alikes are changing the landscape of tech products.

·        There’s a glass-half-full way of looking at this, of course: Tech hasn’t been pedestrianized — it’s been democratized.

·        Companies like Uber and Airbnb, while properly classified as interfaces and marketplaces, are really providing the most elevated service of all — that of doing it ourselves.

·        Recently, an engineer at a funded-to-the-gills start-up in San Francisco texted me to grumble about his company’s software architecture. Its code base was bug-ridden and disorganized — yet the business was enjoying tremendous revenue and momentum. “Never before has the idea itself been powerful enough that one can get away with a lacking implementation,” he wrote. His remark underscores a change wrought by the new guard that the old guard will have to adapt to. Tech is no longer primarily technology driven; it is idea driven.

·        increasingly short product cycles are things Jim attributes to the rise of Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.), a collection of servers owned and managed by Amazon that hosts data for nearly every start-up in the latest web ecosystem.

·        “But now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.”

homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto

Leslie Jamison submitted an essay regarding her tattoo quoting the Roman playwright Terence (195/185–159 BC) stating "I am human: nothing human is alien to me," which appeared in NYT Sunday (4/13/14).  It can be found in his play Heauton Timorumenos ("The Self-Tormentor").  Terence was the first Roman playwright of North African descent.  This may be the ultimate example of cultures in collision.  Jamison (b. 1985) attended Harvard and just released essays in "The Empathy Exams."  She got the tattoo to mark a break from her partner, to brand herself to mark a new era.  She was reclaiming her body, in a sense opposite from being pregnant, it was "the residue of intimacy."  The tattoo was to serve as epigraph for her new book.  While the article focuses on her need to explain the tattoo to observers, it is light on explaining what it really means. 

Rayner Teo in a 2009 blog opines on the second line "nothing human is alien to me."  It alludes to a universal quality that we all share - humanity.  It is an embracement of everything human.  It implies that one is familiar with all the joy and suffering that is the human condition.  Perhaps we can strive for this as the culmination of a lifetime of experience.  It is a worthy goal without passing oral judgement.  Teo is sympathetic to sinners who writer difficult literature or make gritty movies, rather than moralising self-righteous preachers who repress their own humanity in pursuit of false goodness.

Jamison does say it's about empathy and camaraderie, a denial of singularity and exceptionality.  The implication is that we're all in this together, but do we need to discount exceptionality ?  Jamison feels her tattoo is not yet true for her but it establishes a goal, an asymptote, a horizon, in line with Teo's vision.  Jamison recalls a drugstore clerk saying "you will leave a little piece of yourself with everyone you imagine."  Is this what Terence had in mind ?

Haifaa al-Mansour Triumphs in Wadjda

 

 

 

 

This is the first feature film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, and by a woman no less !  Ten-year-old Wadjda (Waad Mohammed) enters a Koran-recitation contest to win a cash prize that will enable her to buy a bicycle.  The audience is exposed to Saudi life in a way rarely seen.  The film was partially funded by German producers.  Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns a majority share in Rotana (the Arab world's largest entertainment conglomerate) was also instrumental in funding the film. 

 

There is no movie production infrastructure in Saudi.  There is television production, but their methodology is very different.  Segregation forced Mansour to direct outdoor scenes with a walkie-talkie from inside a van !

The film exudes great sensitivity between Wadjda and the mother (the beautiful Reem Abdullah) as well as Wadjda and her male playmate (Abdullrahman al-Gohani).  In fact, the tender love and respect between Wadjda and the boy is so refreshing yet counter intuitive in a segregated misogynist society.

In an example of life imitating art, Waad Mohammed’s family has said they will only allow her to act until she’s 16, and then marry her off—female actors are generally shunned in Saudi.
 

Kechiche's Blue is More About Cultural Chasms than Sexual Preference

 

 

 

This film is based on Julie Maroh's graphic novel "Le bleu est une couleur chaude."  Watching this 2013 film (Blue is the Warmest Color) is like drinking water from a fire hose !  There is so much to take in on the first viewing.  Be it the mesmerizing yet sloppy beauty of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulus), who was encouraged by the director to improvise lines.  Be it the extraordinarily sensual nature of the film in endless close-ups.  Be it the 10-minute long sex scene that is so un-Hollywood (1 minute max is typical formula) in its mimicry of real life, it is not choreographed (which typically desexualizes the act).  Be it the rich French literary references to Sartre, Francis Ponge and Pierre de Marivaux.  Be it the uncanny improbable ability of a French-Tunisian male director (Abdellatif Kechiche) to explore the nuances of a same-sex relation transpiring over 3 hours.  Be it the ambivalent final scene, with implications that heterosexuality is better (or not).   

 

Unusually, the director and both actresses each were awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May, 2013.  They were the only women (besides Jane Campion for The Piano, 1993) to win this award, based on their role as "auteurs" (see Sullivan in Agnesfilms.com).  The film is replete with controversy.  Women claim that Kechiche betrays a fetishism in his male gaze, it is a male view of "lesbian" sex.  Kechiche titled his adaption "La Vie d'Adèle" in France, rather than the title of Maroh's graphic novel "le bleu est une couleur chaude."  Some claim he was obsessed with the actress and her buttocks, a frequent subject of the camera.  And sexism is alive in the butch-femme relation as Adèle plays housewife to Emma.  Also the media obsession with prosthetic vulvas on the actresses, was it real sex or not ?  Does the homophobia exhibited by Adèle's classmates elevate the film's message to one of militant lesbianism ?

 

The Life of Marianne by Marivaux is significant as it is about the anticipation of desire.  Marianne own experience of love at first sight becomes the object lesson in the classroom scene.  Adèle takes it to heart.  Adèle's unsatisfying heterosexual effort with Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte, who became her real-life boyfriend) and her encounter with a female classmate represent transitional steps in an awakening.  Sartre's Being & Nothingness can inform the debate: are these two women just lovers or are they Lesbians ?  Sullivan opines that being lesbian has its own negation, its own "nothingness."  Kechiche prefers to consider the pair as simply "being."  To name the women lesbians would be making a militant statement.  It is like any other love story with no sexual politics.  The actresses share this philosophy with the director.  Note that during the shoot, France was experiencing violent gay rights protests.  Same-sex marriage became legal in France May, 2013.  An historical antecedent is in the film: note Louise Brooks in a silent film playing at Léa's party: Brooks was well known for her bisexual dalliances, including Greta Garbo.

 

Some may view the film as a tale of obsession.  Swedish pop star Lykke Li's club hit "I Follow Rivers" is featured in the birthday party scene.  On an interview this is what she said about the song 'I Follow Rivers'..."It's about lust and obsession and infatuation. Infatuation is something very different from love, it's a craving, it's very animalistic so it's about you crave something whether its drugs or it's this love that is really bad for you, it's gonna hurt you but you still want to go there so it's like 'I'll follow you wherever you may take me' and it's a very dark, doom place.. you know it's like a river, like you can't hold back once you jump in."

 

In the final analysis,  Adèle cannot sustain her lustful relation with Emma (Léa Seydoux, granddaughter of the Chairman of Pathé) because of irreconcilable class differences, Adèle from a blue collar family in Lille and Léa a sophisticated intellectual and artist.  It is telling that her voluptuous mouth is featured eating junk food and pasta, not just kissing.  The differences that at first were points of attraction soon polarize the relation.  In fact, Emma becomes very exploitative in the relation.  The film ends years later as Adèle visits Emma at a gallery opening and bumps into her Arab buddy Samir.  The two reunited working class heroes exchange bios.  In the final scene Samir goes after Adèle without finding her.  Ironically, the final shot features Samir, suggesting a political awakening in a film sequel.

 

Kechiche accumulated more than 700 hours of film.  The film was shot chronologically, in order to capture more realistically the growing passion and tension between the actresses.  French Unions revealed that the film violated French labor laws with more than 8-hour days.  Kechiche was prepared to drop sex scenes for the censors, but the distributor Wild Bunch wouldn't have it.

 

Brooklyn Castle Cerebral Mr. Holland's Opus

 

Mr. Holland's Opus (1995) is presented as a biography of the 30-year career of the eponymous lead character, Glenn Holland, a music teacher at the fictional John F. Kennedy High School in Portland, Oregon.

 

Brooklyn Castle (2012) is a documentary film about Intermediate School 318 (101 Walton St.), an inner-city public school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, where an after-school chess program, having both dedicated educators and a supportive community, has triumphed over deep budget cuts to build the most winning junior high school chess team in the country, and the first middle school team to win the United States Chess Federation's national high school championship.

 

The similarities of these two films are striking and are a testimonial to the human spirit.

Jep has "More Than a Feeling" in The Great Beauty

 

Neapolitan director Paolo Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty (2013) is about a wealthy sybarite, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a city (Rome), and a country (Italy).  It is also a tribute to Italian cinema.  The unflattering and grotesque characters lack a sense of purpose.  Yet they populate a city with extraordinary beauty, which they could not replicate today. 

 

The occasion is Jep's 65th birthday.  He learns that his first love has died.  While hoofing around Rome he has numerous flashbacks including a scene where Elisa (Annaluisa Campasa) confronts him as a young man near the beach, exposing her teenage breasts and walking away. 

 

This film is loaded with beautiful music, sacred and profane.  Sacred includes:

 

1) the opening vocal "I Lie" composed by David Lang, performed by Torino Vocalesemble, with lyrics in Yiddish by Joseph Rolnick, at the church of San Pietro on the Janiculum hill. 

 

2) John Tavener and William Blake's "The Lamb," performed by the Choir of the Temple Church is also noteworthy. 

 

3) Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 known as "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," III Movement called the Lento - Cantabile Semplice which features a soprano.

 

4) "Dies Irae" by Zbigniew Preisner

 

5) "Beata viscera," c. 1200 - Magister Perotinus & Jan Garbarek

 

Profane includes Bob Sinclar & Raffaella Carra "Far L'Amore," which opens the party.

 

Yet the music that filled my head was the glorious vocal by Brad Delp (no falsetto he), lead singer for the band Boston, remembering Marianne, walking away in "More Than a Feeling."  Yes Jep, this is the tune that should be the voice inside your head !

 

 

Brad Delp is an amazing singer and his ever rising tenor in "More Than a Feeling" is legendary, ultimately hitting E (660 Hz) above high C (tenor C or C₅ is 525 Hz) on the line ending in "slipped away."

More Than a Feeling

I looked out this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away

It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walkin' away

So many people have come and gone
Their faces fade as the years go by
Yet I still recall as I wander on
As clear as the sun in the summer sky

It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walkin' away

When I'm tired and thinking cold
I hide in my music, forget the day
And dream of a girl I used to know
I closed my eyes and she slipped away
She slipped away

It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Till I see Marianne walk away