Corporate financial guy: 'The West is finished'

Kind of a remarkable blatt from a corporate executive, saying something many eco and sustainability-minded people have been saying for a long time: The economies of the developed nations can't just keep expanding forever. In fact, he suggests we're at a sun-setting moment now.

"We suffer from no growth and we suffer from imported inflation -- that means we have negative real growth and societies fracture when you have negative real growth and quite simply our society faces fractures for trying to stick Europe back together again is not going to work with that underlying paradigm, unless you can create five percent growth to overcome that imported inflation," Murrin explained.

Murrin said that the East was depending less on the West and the rise of a consumer society was the first step in the expansion of an economic empire.

"If you look at the cycle of an empire system from regionalization to expansion to empire, the first phases of that catalyst are when you have a self fuelled consumer society and so actually that process of building your consumer base which is really what's going on in China, day by day their consumer base increases and the dependence on the West decreases," he said.

Murrin added that while China is by far the biggest emerging economy and would be at the center of a new economic order, other emerging nations were set to join the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and new political orders and alliances would come about as a result.

"This isn't just a BRIC story, this is the end of the Christian Western Empire versus the rise of the whole emerging world led by China as the foremost and most powerful," Murrin told CNBC.

Oh well! had to happen sometime!

And he's not even taking into account global warming and its catastrophic affects, which are in part the subject of this near-apocalyptic screed, on io9.com. So see, it's not just paranoid right-wingers who are sure the sky is falling. It's also depressed corporate types who see no chance for their 401Ks to recover, and futurist types, though that latter guy is probably a libertarian of the Scott Adams variety.

L.A. Times really excited about novel concepts of book serialization, packaging

Yesterday on Twitter I mocked the hype about a new novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, a novel which will be -- shocking new idea!! -- serialized in 27 "volumes." Today there's more information about it in this L.A. Times column.

From this article I want to draw a single quote, emphasis mine:

It's possible that [our publishing] schedule could be accelerated. We're constantly open to new ideas -- where will we be in 2014? Maybe digital releases every week, every few months a trade paperback or hardcover. The novel is designed to accommodate, anticipate various platforms.

I take it that he means this particular novel has been designed to "accommodate" (not to mention "anticipate" -- wow!) "various platforms" -- not that The Novel generically is. Although that's an interesting idea to investigate, maybe a good topic for a master's thesis -- that the novel is, by its nature, flexible enough to accommodate changing media.

But what struck me was this. This is not just a long book that the publisher decided, hey, let's go back to that whole serialization thing that worked so well in the 19th century. After all, it's working for the Paris Review to serialize Roberto Bolaño's "The Third Reich" into four parts -- that's garnered lots of attention (and did, in fact, motivate me to subscribe to the Paris review for the first time ever) -- not to mention the multi-book franchises of Harry Potter and other fantasy creations.

No, according to the author, he designed the books to a) be super-ass long, and b) "accommodate various platforms," like so:

Danielewski was paid a reported $1 million for the first 10 volumes; he's thinking of them as two 5-volume seasons, like a television series.

Uh huh. Now I know why it's the L.A. Times that is the one getting excited about it. Seriously, is this really anything that the awful teen-novel book-packaging industry (cf. "Sweet Valley High," etc. etc.) hasn't already pioneered?

The first of November

Gawker helpfully brings everyone up to date on the official word from EOTW prophet Harold Camping, whose radio station has stopped talking about the EOTW (which didn't happen per his prediction) but also has not said anything about it not happening.

Having finished reading "Infinite Jest," I'm now going to finish reading a Simenon novel, "Strangers in the House," and then get to "The Death of the Adversary" by Hans Keilson.

Bank of America followed the lead of other banks and reversed its proposed fee of $5 monthly just to just its debit card. The fee, announced last month, generated loads of anger at banks in general and B of A in particular and led to a movement to transfer accounts from banks to credit unions. "Bank Transfer Day" is still Nov. 5.

Circle squared

Not sure how I ended up here, but I found myself on the iTunes catalog page for "A Penguin Books Amplified Edition" of "On the Road," where I found these cavils listed on the side:

How depressing is that.

First we have to imagine a universe where someone under 12 listens to audio books. (I have a hard enough time imagining a universe where anyone at all does so, but I hear it's a big market for people who spend a lot of time in traffic or mall-walking, so good for them, but there are no 12-year-olds in either group.) Then we have to imagine that, say, a ten-year-old would pay one bit of attention to the first few pages (or minutes) of "On the Road,' with Dean Moriarty coming to New York and eating creampuffs, living in "a cold water flat" and reminding the narrator of "a young Gene Autry."

Above all, what 10-year-old is going to be interested in something with "mild drug use, infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor"? There is probably more drug use, profanity and crude humor on his own playground.

How it cheapens art when you try to rein it in these bureaucratic categories.

Today's fake: Speculators pursue the Bitcoin, but ... whaaaat?

Last decade's virtual-goods mindfuck was the gold farming industry, in which American entrepreneurs went to China, hired educated but out-of-work tech grads, and put them to work for 12 to 16 hours at a time on repetitive tasks which generated virtual goods in the World of Warcraft game -- goods which could be sold for real money to game players who didn't want to put in the time and effort it took to accumulate those goods within the game. (These goods, such as a "magic sword" object, enable players to play the game at higher levels more successfully.) China made the practice illegal, but that hasn't stopped provincial prison officials from employing prisoners as gold farm slave laborers. So that's still going on.

Then there's the Zynga empire, which essentially turns all its games' players into slave laborers for the company's profit. In a way it's much simpler than the gold farming scheme, which is essentially a parasitical practice on a much larger operation (the WoW platform); Zynga simply creates an addictive product ¹ with no raw ingredients and a potentially worldwide customer base. Zynga is equivalent to a tobacco company which claims cigarette smoking isn't addictive, except it doesn't have to go to the trouble of buying raw materials, manufacturing cigarettes, and shipping them to wholesalers. It simply creates a compelling internet experience and collects an almost unlimited profit stream. It's like putting a video slot machine in everyone's home, only it's a slot machine that never pays out but simply provides its user with the mind-numbing experience of playing.

So it's one thing to create something of value out of nothing, or rather, out of electrons and human sweat. How could you go one better? How about creating nothing out of nothing, putting a value on it, and then having the unlimited greed of speculators do all the work for you? Well, it's happened. Behold the Bitcoin, a virtual currency with no meaning, no tie to any governmental or corporate entity, much less a game or virtual world. It is simply a computer algorithm (no doubt copyrighted) which permits licensees to generate units of valuation.

Bitcoins are snippets of code that use encryption to prevent counterfeiting and double-spending. Complex algorithms control the money supply, in theory replacing the need for banks or a central regulator. Right now Bitcoins can be generated -- or "mined" -- by running a program on a powerful computer. This task requires exponentially more time and processing power as the number of Bitcoins grows, and the absolute number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million, mimicking the scarcity of gold.

Yes, you too can buy the code and generate your own Bitcoin, but notice that caveat about the "exponentially more time and processing power" needed to do so at a meaningful scale. Indeed:

One college student sustained permanent minor brain damage due to heatstroke after he dozed off in his room next to four computers furiously mining Bitcoins. "I wish I was joking," he said in a forum post that was reposted on the website BitcoinMiningAccidents.com.

Yes, there is a website devoted to "Bitcoin mining accidents"!! It's at this point you wonder what the world is coming to.

Certain cynics and libertarian critics of the monetary system -- the kind who yearn for a return to the gold standard -- would say this isn't much different from the current state of affairs in which we endow pieces of paper, some printed with "1" and others printed with "100," with value simply because we agree to. And they would also point out the similarities of limiting the total number of units of exchange and the ability to produce it. (Only the government can print money, and it controls the supply; in the same way only those holding the code for Bitcoin can generate it, and the code contains a self-limiting feature which will prevent more than a certain amount of Bitcoin to be "mined.") To them, our whole monetary system is a similar hoax.

I see this trend continuing. Last week lots of people were transfixed by the "fake lesbian bloggers," and there are still postings and articles being written on its implications for identity politics, online activism, and the whole question of online identity. At root of this issue is the question of whether or not there is substance behind what we value. The fact that Bitcoin exists and that apparently rational people are investing in it calls this into question even further.

Meanwhile, on Gawker just now: A virus that scans computers for Bitcoin and steals it.


¹ The piece on "my Farmville addiction" is not that informative, but notice the article's raison d'etre: the writer is explaining to his readers why he disappeared for two weeks. In other words, he went into a k-hole, or rather an internet hole, and didn't come out for weeks. Because he was playing Farmville. And couldn't stop.

When recordings betray you

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old self-proclaimed "Bible teacher" (he never refers to himself as a "minister" or preacher, contrary to references in SF Gate.com and other reports), is being released from the hospital after treatment for a mild stroke which he suffered a few days ago. Camping is the head of Family Radio, an obscure but world-reaching Christian radio station which he used to disseminate a prediction that Christ would return on May 21 this year.

That prediction, its failure, and Camping's rescheduling of the apocalypse to Oct. 21, has been widely covered. In the meantime, what's Family Radio been doing with its main announcer and on-air presence down with a stroke?

Running recorded programs, that's what. And they don't do him any favors. There's no way of telling when the recorded versions of his daily "Open Forum" call-in show were recorded, but they give us a noticeably younger and more in-control Camping. His voice has always been gravelly and monotonous, but in the last year or two has been quivering with age. The recordings only point up the contrast to his present state.

Another program in which Camping has been going through the Old Testament book of Ruth seems to have been recorded even longer ago than the "Open Forum" recordings now running. He sounds positively middle-aged, his voice powerful and steady. All the sadder for this misguided man.

It's the end of the world but you don't know it

As everyone knows (but will, no doubt, very swiftly forget), a Bay Area preacher named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on Saturday. When it didn't, he professed to be "flabbergasted," and took a few days to do some thinking. This afternoon he more or less squarely faced a press conference and told the press and his radio audience that something "mystical" had taken place on Saturday and never fear, the end of the world will happen on October 21 "just as we have been predicting."

In fact, he has been preaching that the original May 21 date would be only the beginning of a five-month period of terror and that the real end of the world would come as the earth is consumed by fire on Oct. 21. Now he's saying never mind the terror part -- God is merciful! -- but he was right about everything else.

Play-by-play of the event is here, courtesy of a live-blogging HuffPost writer, but I thought the most interesting and telling part of Camping's spiel was when he was asked about the people who had sold their possessions and quit their jobs to advertise the May 21 date. Even if Camping was right about the Oct. 21 date, what did he advise those followers to do in the meantime? After all, Camping had answered a previous question as to whether he would be giving up his worldly possessions by saying in a mystified voice "But I still have to have a place to live... I still have to have a car to drive. Why would I do that?"

So what advice did he have for his followers who were now bereft of possessions? "Look," he said, his voice hardening. "We just went through a great recession. People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they had to move in with a cousin, perhaps, or cut back very much on spending. But they survived. People cope."

So, anybody who believed this old nutbag and did something stupid like stopped saving for their kids' college tuition or quit their job -- they're on their own for the next five months. Surely some of them will kick themselves, go out and get a new job, and work at not being bitter for the rest of their lives. But others will double down for the real EOTW in October. Those are the people we should be afraid of.

Today's fake: End of the world. So now what?

Okay, it's Saturday afternoon on the 21st, and since Asia is not yet in ruins I think we can assume that series of Christ-sponsored earthquakes, which was supposed to devastate the earth starting in New Zealand and traveling westward, is not happening. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a friend about this whole EOTW thing, when publicity about it was just starting to bubble to the mainstream. (I had been aware of the May 21 prediction for a year, because I have a morbid fascination with cult figures and frauds, and I have listened on and off to the Bay Area radio station of the Harold Camping cult for years, if for no other reason than his amazingly weird delivery.) My friend said, "How liberating! Wouldn't it be awesome if you really knew the end of the world was coming on a certain day? You could do anything!"

Because she's a shrink, I'm sure she didn't mean that in the "You could finally go out and murder that person on your list" way. She probably meant it in the self-actualizing way. Or she could have meant it the sort of dark-side way, because she also rolls that way. You should read her fiction. (You really should. She's in my writing group. In fact, she is my writing group.)

Right, then, back to work. Rain fell all day the day Sirenita died, but the next morning it cleared up, and since then it's been gorgeous. This is a splendid springtime Saturday, sunny and windy and cool, just perfect. I haven't yet been able to make myself go to my other writing friend's basement and work on my book. I think I'll do it from this nice cafe for a while.

Japanese men just go on being lame-ass

Someone please tell me they're kidding: Japanese men ferry virtual girlfriends to beach town.

No, I don't think they're being ironic.

Does not compute

Elsewhere in the unintentional irony front: The New York Times "challenged" readers to go without their cellphones and whatnot for a few days during vacations. The Times then published the results with an introduction that included these sentences (emphasis mine):

The New York Times asked readers to temporarily give up their technological tethers, then make videos about the experience... You can watch a selection of videos prepared by readers here.

So they asked readers to unplug... and then plug back in again to report. I guess if anyone went permanently off the grid and made their report by longhand, we'd never know.

Universe begins collapsing on itself: Facebook at fault

We're reaching the point where irony is so widely employed and ubiquitous that language itself is losing its meaning:

The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write "omg" you are ironically commenting on the use of "omg," but when other people write "omg" they are seriously saying "oh my God."

-- Kaitie Roiphe in the New York Times, 13 August 2010
in article entitled "The Language of Facebook"

That is, if you want to call "omg" (and put as many quotation marks around that as you want before you get tired and start drinking, even though it's only 9:30 in the morning) language. And it is, of course.

Yesterday I had a chat (not a face to face [or F2F] conversation, but a Google chat) with a friend yesterday in which she was telling me about her college students indulging in "code-switching," which in her case is "heritage speakers" in her Spanish classes -- i.e. students whose first language is Spanish -- speaking in a mixture of English and Spanish without even realizing they're doing do. At least they don't write like that, though I don't see why they should stop themselves in certain forums -- including Facebook, no doubt. I immediately thought of Thomas Merton's use of Macaronic language (which is the intentional practice of using multiple languages in a text to shade, obfuscate, or enhance meaning) in his poetry. Merton's work is the only Macaronic poetry I'm familiar with, and I couldn't find a good example online in a short time, but here is an example "from the early 15th century" (!):

A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,
of alle tho that I have found,
    Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
    Dulcissima.
Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
    Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
    in cisto.

The brand that is Glenn

From a Forbes profile of Glenn Beck, emphasis mine:

With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company," Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth.

For the narcissist in your life

This Samsung camera has two viewscreens: one on the back, so you can see what you're taking a picture of, and one on the front, so you can take a great picture of yourself.



Not that you would do something like that.

A Samsung press release is quoted saying "The growing popularity of social networking sites has given rise to the self-portrait, with many consumers turning their digital cameras on themselves." There's something very sad about someone who needs a picture for a "social networking" website, yet doesn't known anyone well enough even to ask them to take their picture.

technorati: camera, DualView

'Katastroika'

You know, by now, about collapsitarianism (and its cousin, a so-called "Transition" movement that was written about in the NYT Magazine Sunday).

Now comes a new word to address the Russian version of apocalypse: katastroika. The following is from a World Affairs Journal article titled "Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb":

A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism -- that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past -- but rather of depopulation -- a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing. ...

According to the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base for 2007, Russia ranked 164 out of 226 globally in overall life expectancy. Russia is below Bolivia, South America's poorest (and least healthy) country and lower than Iraq and India, but somewhat higher than Pakistan. For females, the Russian Federation life expectancy will not be as high as in Nicaragua, Morocco, or Egypt. For males, it will be in the same league as that of Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea. ...

Russia's patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

Clearly the 21st century is not going to turn out as a lot of people expected. But it will make for great material -- if there is still an entertainment industry and distribution network for the films, books and other media to be created.

technorati: Russia, zeitgeist, mortality

'Emo jacket' should appear to makers of pr0n

German electronics company Philips Electronics has announced an "Emo jacket" that is "meant to let you more closely immerse yourself in the experiences" of characters in a DVD you're watching. The jacket is fitted with 64 thingies -- all right, "actuators" -- that are intended to give the wearer the sensation of being tapped in the spot on their body nearest the thingy. A radio receiver will receive signals encoded on the DVD and activate the thingies in whatever pattern the programmer has programmed.

For example, it is supposed to give you the sensation of having a "chill up your spine." I wonder what the German word is for that. On second thought, I don't want to know.

The story on C|Net suggests the obvious implications for porn, saying that at this point there are no plans to ship a matching pair of pants. But once the technoogy has been invented, it's only a matter of time, of course -- I'm guessing the Japanese will get right on it -- before you'll be able to watch porn with no hands.

technorati: technology, Phillips, jacket, entertainment, movies

World to end sooner than expected

Slowing of the Atlantic Ocean current and other stuff will drown East Coast U.S. cities twice as fast as other places around the world.

Hey future -- sorry about that!

technorati: global warming, climate change, apocalypse

Focus on the Fundies: Obama not the Anti-Christ, authors decide

The authors of the "Left Behind" series of Christianist novels have announced they do not think Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.

The frightening thing is that some people might have been waiting for that word from them. And what if they had said the opposite?

technorati: Left Behind, fundamentalists, right wing Christians

Things I had to look up: Boethius

After I sent this article on Buddhist-Christian contacts during the 8th century to a friend, she replied, "like boethius, they were busy and a' thinkin' during them there dark ages!!"

Due to my lack of a comprehensive liberal arts education, however, I had no idea who Boethius was. In this case the Wikipedia article was helpful enough for the likes of me. Known to the Roman Catholic Church as St. Severinus Boethius, the 6th century scholar and administrator was dedicated to preserving concepts of classical philosophy; he is credited with developing a three-layered classification of music as well as the Wheel of Fortune. (Cue music from Carmina Burana.)

Satire is dead, no 892134892: Praying with SUVs

A black church in Detroit blessed members who work in the nearly kaput auto industry as "three gleaming sport utility vehicles" shared the stage. In a nod to ecumenism, each car was from one of the Big 3 automakers.

Reinforcing the impression that these people are really stupid was a quotation from a church leader that "We have never seen as midnight an hour as we face this coming week," a sentence I had to read five times before I understood it. (In fairness, it was intended to be heard, not read. But I'm not sure the speaker knows, or cares, that "midnight" is not an adjective.)

technorati: bailout, auto industry, churchesa>, Pentacostals

Sign of the apocalypse: Dentist chair TV's programming is Disney, ads

This definitely falls into the Kill Me First category: a new device you wear like eyeglasses allows you to watch television in the dentist's chair while being worked on. Sounds good, you say? The only programming is:
ð Disney programs
ð Dental health messages
ð Advertising.

It's paid, of course, by the latter.

Personally I'd rather listen to the drill.

technorati: advertising, television, technology