Running for Your Life: Facebook? Izzat You?

Trust The New York Times to dig deep for the truth … well, that is if you read the book review.

This week’s issue (Feb. 3) outdid itself in writing the truth about one corporate newsmaker that you’d think would be deserving of similar attention in the Times' news columns. Not to say it doesn’t happen, mind you, but given the threat to the commonweal, as described below, perhaps the story could be deserving, say, of 10 percent of its page after page after page of anti-Trump coverage, this from the company whose slogan is:  

The Truth Is More Important Now Than Ever

This gem of a paragraph, from reviewer Tom Bissell, author of “Apostle,” appeared tucked away on Page 9 in the review, as part of his assessment of Roger McNamee’s book, “ZUCKED: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”:

 “The planet’s fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A. The totality of this man’s professional life has been running this company, which calls it “a platform.” Company, platform – whatever it is, it provides a curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos, birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish lizard-men. No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary, users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort out surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company’s best efforts to keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Kundera Conundrum

Running for Your Life: Going Postable

It’s past that time of year when folks send greetings through the mail. Early to mid-December, millions of North Americans put first-class stamp on an envelope with a festive card inside.

Most people take out a pen and write a little something in the card to go along with the printed message (i.e., Peace on Earth, Season Greetings, etc.).

That is, after asking Alex, to wit:

“Say, Alexa, please quote me the most meaningful language that would best complement  [homily goes here] in my greeting card. I want to maximize the positive feelings in the recipient of the one piece of first-class mail that I send every year to loved ones.”

Alexa provides the answer and you transcribe the perfect personal remarks on the card’s left flap.

Or just contact Postable. With a few taps on your phone, or clicks of your laptop, tailor the message you want to send.

Hell, you can even send a Postable piece of mail during one of the other eleven months of the year.

Know what that’s called? Progress.

Next: Running for Your Life: Kundera Conundrum

Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Thirty years ago (on Dec. 12) my adventures as a resident of New York City began.

Please note the choice of words: Not New Yorker but resident of New York City.

In fact, I find the idea of considering myself a New Yorker to be a fraud, one that even on this significant 30-year anniversary, I’m unwilling to accept. (Although I did write this note only two days ago [Dec. 10], while traveling in a subway over the East River from Brooklyn to Gotham. “Bluest sky over Manhattan;  a wicked slash of home, that this place is home.”)

Still, such identification of home as it relates to the label “New Yorker” requires more than a fleeting feeling. The “fraud” a loaded phrase like “New Yorker,” the latter being manifest in a slew of tiny cuts of assumptions  -- how a New Yorker dresses, how a New Yorker views the subway, what cocktails does a New Yorker have after a long day of work.

I’m not alone in my un-New Yorker-ness. In fact, the hardened silos of self all around me obviously don’t contain those who think of themselves as identifying within a group that doesn’t meet their ever-narrowing definition of self.

Call it exile for want of a more precise term.

Perhaps I cringe from the straitjacket of a New Yorker sensibility, as is reduced to the clubby magazine of the same name. Imagine, if you will, the strained community of purebred prancing poodles, heads erect, never deigning to root about in street trash, the fetid stain, relish the abnormal, the fresh, the raw exotic that’s not breed-worthy.

Suffice to say, I don’t wear that collar. And if the poodle masters have their way, I never will.

Which, on the face of it, sounds like sour grapes. But what’s required is to check your premises. If the world does not share your ideals, then when you express them and they are not reflected in the outcomes, well, doesn’t the blame fall on you for the feelings of disappointment? Aren’t you, always, setting yourself up for disappointment?

And taken further, the health factor  … It is so important to keep your expectations real, to control what you can control. Is it a matter that you “stick to your guns,” or adjust your thinking, beliefs to obtain the desired result?

It seems to me the objective is to keep it real: to wit, use a “straight talk” analysis when moved. Be who and what you are, others are counting on you; it is how to best answer that sticky question: What did you do during your time on earth to make a difference?

Next: Running for Your Life: Going Postable

Jamaica, Up Close

Blue-black prophet points in a jagged angry way, the endless mountain road; he is surrounded by a gaggle of goats in shade under a mystic-looking tree ...

“Grilled” gate in what seems the middle of nowhere on this fantasy island, rum punch and jerk meat, all you can drink and eat, heavenly days, nasty broken green glass, countless mind-numbing, self-medicated drunks unshameable, embedded in concrete, what Russell Banks writes in “The Book of Jamaica,” how much worse it is to lift up the poor with promise of real hope, real change, and then see the declared others thrive as before, in charge, as always it is better for them, ideals meaningless, what is the accident of birth, eye contact at the risk of a dull, dirty knife stabbed into ….

The signs says:

TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT

SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

It won’t be up much longer, Concrete Utopia. Jan. 13 it comes down.

A part of the world, a moment in time. Currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

Could you find Sarajevo on a map?

Where is Ljubljana?

What borders Serbia to the north?

Split, Croatia? Dubrovnik?

Then there is the library in Pristina, Kosovo … and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia, “a hopeful, future-oriented process in a perpetual state of emergence.”

Back in the day (I hesitate to use my father’s phrase, “Back in my day …” but) we’re talking the Third Way, a living socialism, however imperfect, with bilingual signs (English being one) across the so-called Balkan states of Yugoslavia.

In 1984, the year of the Sarajevo Olympics (I have the pin), I was twenty-eight and impressionable, odd the Orwell string, one I’ve not plucked until now.

Age of the concrete – shown in now vintage photos – limns the limits of theory when it comes to the manifold possibilities of disruption through social – not capital – gain.

I look about me here, at the people attending Concrete Utopia, and think:

The immaculate truth of an idea, so last century.

And what, do tell, feeds the dreams of today’s twenty-eight year olds?

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?