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useunknown · 8 years ago

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Why I’m Afraid

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.” Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, Harpers, 1964.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings” and “consider the end.” But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.“ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Reason #1: Because I’m a White Liberal Coastal Elite Unaccustomed to Losing

We joked the race would be called for Clinton by the time our election-watch party started at 6:30. Which was fine, because who wanted to watch Wolf Blitzer stall for five hours while vote tallies streamed in? A gleeful gmail thread counted down to the party. Who was bringing the kleenex? There would be tears of joy to mop up. We wondered if Clinton would find a maze on the inside of Trump’s head when she scalped him. A Trump piñata was going to be on hand.

We gathered at a friend’s Echo Park home, “I Voted” stickers slapped over our hearts, half-surprised the election wasn’t yet in hand. Trump and Clinton were still tracking even in Florida, but needless to say that would change when the urban areas started reporting.

We were graduates of good universities, many of us working in or around Hollywood, who yes, read The New Yorker, and had been listening to Keepin’ it 1600 and joked about Donald Drumpf and told everyone they had to see Moonlight because it’s just incredible. We wanted more diversity at the Oscars and used the right pronouns when we talked about transgender people, and talked about firewall states and paths to 270 electoral votes and how as soon as Clinton won Florida and North Carolina, it would be over.

We flipped between CNN and MSNBC, watching stables of pundits on expensive sets dance around touch screens as they tried to divine the arcana of obscure suburbs. Trump was winning in counties Obama had won in 2012. The pundits scratched their heads– the polls were getting some things unnervingly wrong. Every so often they’d give a projection, a picture of Trump appearing on the screen with his smug smile, a check mark under his name. The map kept getting more red, Trump’s electoral tally creeping towards 270. We looked at each other– what the hell was happening? We poured more wine as we realized Clinton wasn’t going to win Florida, or North Carolina, or Ohio, or Iowa. Even New Hampshire seemed to be in doubt. I pulled up pathto270.com on my phone and did the math... Wait a minute: if Clinton didn’t win Michigan, she was finished. We broke out a moments-away-from-being-legal pre-roll to take the edge off.

And then Wisconsin started to turn red. And then so too did Pennsylvania. Suddenly it was Clinton who needed to surge ahead in five different states. We changed the channel to Fox News because we suspected that MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki wasn’t being entirely upfront with us. Sure enough, they had already called Michigan for Trump. "It’s over, isn’t it,” someone said despondently.

Those fucking deplorables, in their fucking baskets. Did they realize what they had just done to our country?

We looked at the Trump piñata in the corner. We were too devastated to go near it, or acknowledge how wrong we had been. I don’t think a piñata’s ever had the last laugh at a party– but it was that kind of night.

Reason #2: Because I’m Sheltered from Injustice and feel Entitled to Happy Endings

All around me, in communities real and online, in group-texts with friends and conversations with strangers, there’s an unquantifiable sadness. At a hip Silver Lake coffee shop the day after the election, baristas had become de facto grief counselors, each customer arriving at the cash register with a sorrowful sigh.

“How are you?”

“Oh... you know.”

Sigh. “Yeah.”

I was in Los Angeles on 9/11. The mood on November 9th, 2016 was bleaker.

Losing elections is one of the despairs of living in a democracy. Every few years you’re liable to feel like your country has been wrested away from you, and that you’re powerless to stop it. But Trump’s victory left us feeling far more bereft than if McCain had won in 2008 or Romney had won 2012.

Part of it is the dissonance between where we thought our country was and where we’ve found it. We had our phones out, ready to record the moment when we burst through the glass ceiling into an era of a more tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal, inclusive America. After 43 white male presidents, we’d have an African American and now, a woman. John Oliver had joked during the campaign that if Democracy was a computer game and Clinton was completing women’s 100 year-quest to get the oval office, Donald Trump made for a fitting final boss. We could endure his white nationalist chauvinist worldview and categorical unfitness to be President when it seemed like his campaign was a gross-out Farelly Brothers comedy and his defeat was an afterthought.

We had believed in a myth of the teleology of liberal progressivism and placed faith in the ultimate goodness of “the American voter.” Clinton’s victory would be the triumph of forward progress over restoration, togetherness over division, high roads over low ones, love over hate.

So it’s no surprise we were crushed. When a Republican beats a Democrat, that’s politics. When it seems like the forces of evil have triumphed over the forces of good, that can feel like tragedy. Especially to people not used to the world treating them with indifference. Perhaps we’d been standing upside down the past eighteen months– the glass ceiling we thought we’d been looking up at was actually a floor, and we’d just fallen down through it.

But there’s also something more sinister in the air. A cosmic foreboding. A greater trauma has taken place, something menacing and chilling that makes you think “something’s different this time.” My body is tense, an epigenetic voice that’s seen demagogues and persecution in another life, warning me to be on high alert because somehow, I know how this one ends. It was only a hundred years ago that my grandfather bribed a boarder guard and dressed like a girl to flee pogroms in the Soviet Union.

Reason #3: Because I’m Being Reactive and Underestimating America

Cooler heads will cite America’s resilience: “We’ll survive because we always do.”

We’ve had bad presidents. It hasn’t meant the end of the republic. We’ve emerged from wars, economic downturns, and attacks on our freedom. We’ve seen demagogues, and rebuffed them. If a president’s terrible, he won’t get reelected. Everything’s cyclical. The system can be slow and ugly, but it reacts and corrects.

This is by no means the first time a party has controlled all three branches of government. Republicans did it in 2000. They proceeded to lose Congress in the 2002 midterms, and narrowly lost their senate majority in 2006. They may have charged into a few ill-advised wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and ballooned the deficit and accelerated global warming and brought moral shame upon us with secret torture prisons and warrantless wiretapping and aggravated wealth inequality with tax cuts for the rich and the deregulation of banks and fostered conditions for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression along the way, but that whole mess brought us Obama, and the republic survived.

And when Democrats took the White House and a majority in the house and senate in 2008? Republicans curled up in an obstructionist ball for two years, and took back congress in the 2010 midterms. It is the greatest gift the founding fathers gave us– a system that errs towards gridlock, which has protected us against the forces of tyranny for some 240 years.

The Cooler Heads will cite reasons why this will be the case for Trump. They cite the fact that Trump’s Republican coalition is unwieldy at best. That Trump isn’t even really a Republican– his campaign was against Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment as much as it was against the Democrats. Once the Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, appoint a few conservative judges to the courts, roll back Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the Clean Energy Act, Trump’s coalition is going to start to fracture.

Trump didn’t win the election because he broadened the Republican coalition and attracted new voters to the Republican party– he won because voter turnout was down. Trump had a million more votes than Romney in the states he won that Romney lost– Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (with Wisconsin virtually the same), but total voter turnout was lower than it was in 2012 in all of these states (except for Florida, where voter turnout was up 8% from 2012 and Trump outperformed Romney by 11%). Longterm demographic trends still favor the Democrat’s coalition, and if Trump governs as poorly as we fear, democratic voters will be ignited to turn out for the midterm elections in 2018 and to take Trump down in 2020.

The Cooler Heads will also note there are mechanisms for the minority party to obstruct the governing one from getting things done. The Republicans don’t have the 60 votes they would need to force things through the senate. Democrats will copy the Republican playbook from the past eight years and at the very least, they’ll manage to stop Trump from doing anything that puts the country in existential danger.

As for Trump’s campaign of intolerance and the wave of white nationalism he rode into office, cooler heads will argue that while he may hold views that are racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic, he’s more empty vessel than ideologue. His rhetoric during the campaign was designed to make the election about identity. But it was a cynical marketing strategy, not an ideology.

The Cooler Heads might even pontificate that a Trump presidency might not be all bad. I think they’re wrong, and getting there requires a cocktail of denial and privilege, but they might reason that while Trump’s a demagogue and a narcissist with designs to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, perhaps he’ll have a business man’s savvy about running the government. Maybe he’ll pass a big infrastructure bill that doubles as a stimulus, with Democrats ensuring its inclusive and a chastened media monitoring for corruption and graft. He’ll promulgate business-friendly policies that enrich banks and corporations and increase wealth inequality, but the American economy hums as high corporate profits propel the stock market upwards.

Mike Pence and Paul Ryan try to push through a radical Republican agenda, but run into gridlock. They don’t have the 60 votes they need repeal Dodd-Frank, they repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation but delay when the repeal goes into effect because no one can figure out how to replace it, as Republican voters realize through a haze of misinformation that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, that repealing it would mean no longer being able to afford their cancer treatment, and that everything they don’t like about Obamacare was the result of Republican obstructionism and sabotage. Republican lawmakers stop short of Trump’s craziest proposals, which do indeed prove politically unworkable. If Silicon Valley keeps innovating and a policy of isolationism keeps America out of a clash between Europe and the Middle East, Trump could even end up being remembered as a middling President, a tier above George W. Bush and Millard Fillmore.

Reason #4: Because the Real Best Case Scenario is Actually Terrible

Even if Trump was a normal politician, his platform would be dangerous. His incompetency and illiteracy and the fact that he processes the world like a five-year old child is enough to spell disaster.

Trump’s stance on climate change alone could be, by definition, apocalyptic. If he walks away from the Paris Accord, it could be a decade before the world cooperates on climate change again. We could look back on his presidency as the moment when we accelerated environmental degradation and doomed the planet.

Trump’s complete ignorance about diplomacy and geopolitics could also rapidly throw the world into turmoil. He’s exhibited minimal understanding of how the world works or America’s place in it. He’s volatile, reactive and vengeful in a fragile world that manages order only through predictability and diplomacy. Our allies are frightened they can no longer rely on American support, and if we drive them away, they’ll find protection elsewhere.

Trump’s belief in protectionism will cut economic ties that foster cooperation and American soft power. Trump’s plans to walk away from the TPP will cripple American influence in Asia Pacific, and cede influence in the region to China, and his plans to declare China a currency manipulator and use Taiwan as a bargaining chip could escalate tensions with China and make Sino-US relations openly hostile.

Trump and the alt-right’s categorical condemnation of Islam and hardline approach to fighting terrorism, including a Muslim immigration ban, the astonishingly unconstitutional Muslim registry, the resumption of torture and black sites, and even the semantic obsession with saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” threaten to alienate moderate Muslims and foster more extremism, while compromising American values and diminishing our standing around the world. Trump could be the buffoon who brings the clash of civilizations to fruition.

Trump’s volatile temperament is at this point well-documented. He’s reactive and vindictive, prone to late-night Twitter rants that spew invective without any basis in fact. What happens when he takes aim at a foreign leader? What happens when he decides to escalate a Twitter War into a real one? U.S. foreign policy has never been in more reckless hands, and the possibility for a misstep that threatens our security, weakens our standing in the world, or triggers an international crisis have seemingly never been higher.

There’s a current of fear sweeping America and Europe, as white people without a college educations outside of major cities who are culturally and economically alienated from the forces of globalization, who never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and in whom a fear of Islam and terror have been ingrained since 9/11, are turning to right-wing nativist movements that promise a return to a more prosperous past. Countries across Europe are being strained by the influx of refugees, and nationalist parties in Finland (18% of the vote), Denmark (21%), Austria (35%), Hungary (21%), France (14%), and Switzerland (29%) are gaining support on the back of anti-immigration platforms that call out Islam by name.

This is the sentiment that loomed over the Brexit referendum, which saw British voters upend polling expectations and vote to leave the European Union. On the day of the Brexit referendum polls showed a 3-4% lead for “remain” that was within the margin of error, only to have an unexpected victory for “leave” that was spearheaded by the turnout of non-college white people in the heartland, who longed to reclaim some imagined “past greatness,” felt the loss of “national identity,” and scapegoated immigrants for taking jobs and straining public services. Five months later, the US election has followed the exact same script.

Trump spent the campaign stoking fears that America was hurtling towards the apocalypse. Now that he’s the president-elect it’s tempting to invoke the same kind of hyperbole. I’m nervous Trump’s administration is going to be one of unprecedented corruption and division, that serves one part of the country at the expense of others, that brings out the worst in us and represses what’s best.

But even in this scenario, the country would survive. Our system, our principles, our resolve have always allowed us to weather these storms. Progress doesn’t move in a straight line. We’ll survive this and come out stronger on the other side, because we always do. Sure the idea that Trump could be the end of the 240-year American experiment is the thinking of the paranoid conspiracist.

But god, if there was ever a moment to wonder if we’re in uncharted territory, it’s now. Because there’s something dangerous about the “we’ll survive because we always do” axiom: it holds true until it doesn’t.

Because this Time’s Actually Different

There is a critical difference between the 2016 Presidential election and the 57 that came before it: we’ve never elected a demagogue like Trump to the office of the President.

Of all the demagogues that have emerged in the course of US history–Huey Long, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Charles Coughlin– Trump is the only one to seize our highest office. We’ve watched him closely for 18 months. He’s not bound by any norms, or decency or sense of shame. His politics are dangerous.

In Trump, we’ve elected the tyrant our founding fathers feared and designed our democracy to defend against. The populist who could rise to power by appealing to base emotions and making promises to the working class that couldn’t be kept. Soon-to-be-boycotted by the alt-right founding father Alexander Hamilton warned that it was democracy’s greatest vulnerability in Federalist #1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

A vengeful narcissist who believes he’s above our norms should not be in the Oval Office. Trump’s campaign followed a demagogue’s playbook– drumming up fears of terrorism and national decline, scapegoating minorities and immigrants, shamelessly lying and promising the impossible. He’s announced intentions to jail his opponents and sue his accusers, incited violence at his rallies and shown a preference for confrontation and vengeance over compromise or resolution. He’s declared the rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly to be annoyances he could do without.

The institutions and norms that were supposed to keep a demagogue out of the White House have already failed us. This puts the United States in uncharted territory, and the possibilities of a Trump presidency should be considered in that light.

Trump’s consistently demonstrated a belief that the rules don’t apply to him. For 25 years as a private citizen, he stiffed contractors and creditors, committed infidelity and sexual assault, and evaded taxes. Most disturbing, Trump maintained during the campaign he wouldn’t accept the election results if he lost, a statement he modulated but never retracted. The peaceful transition of power is the most fundamental and singular political feat of American democracy. It’s the reason any of this works. If Trump was prepared to challenge these precedents as a candidate who was expected to lose, what might he do when he’s in office? It seems not a matter of whether Trump will abuse power– it’s how brazenly and destructively.

Trump plans to have his children run the Trump Corporation while he’s in office, and has put his children in charge of the transition team that will make all key hires for his administration, an unconscionable conflict of interest. I’m not about to pretend that U.S. politics haven’t always involved horse trading and corruption. I’m sure the alt-right has corruption anecdotes about the Clintons and the Obamas– but what Trump’s trying to get away with is unprecedented.

Never before has there been such an obvious channel for directly bribing the President of the United States. Foreign leaders with holdings in foreign companies could award lucrative deals to Trump Corp to influence U.S. policy. Trump’s recently opened hotel in DC seems poised to become a direct channel for foreign countries to bribe Trump, and puts him in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Trump’s children headed his campaign and have chaired his transition team– there is no separation between them and Trump. The idea that a “chinese wall” could exist between Ivanka Trump, who heads Trump Corp, and her husband Jared Kushner, who Trump has challenged anti-nepotism laws to bring into his administration, is ridiculous.

When a company or foreign government meets with Trump Corp, it will be hard not to imagine it’s also dealing with the United States government. It’s a dangerous line that at best opens the door to unprecedented corruption and at worst leads to Donald Jr. igniting a cyber war when he threatens a well-connected Chinese Developer. As Matt Iglesias reasons in one of the most chilling articles written since the election, given Trump’s philosophy of rewarding loyalists and punishing his rivals, Trump could turn the U.S. into a post-Soviet style kleptocracy. A pay-to-play system in which fealty to Trump’s administration is necessary for doing business, while businesses that voice dissent find themselves on the wrong side of regulations, losing government contracts, or embroiled in federal investigations.

He’s already begun to set the stage for this kleptocracy, with his deal with Carrier “to save a thousand jobs from being shipped to Mexico.” The narrative on the right is that Trump met with Carrier and convinced it to keep a plant open in Indiana, thereby saving a thousand jobs before he’s even arrived in office. Obama would have been pilloried by the right if he ever boasted about “saving jobs from leaving.” He can’t even get credit for creating 16 million jobs during his presidency. No matter that 6,000 Carrier jobs are still leaving, and that Trump has merely slowed the inevitable. This isn’t an economic policy– it’s a precedent for companies to hold the government hostage– “cut our taxes or we’ll leave.” But of even greater concern, Trump has taken the first step towards his kleptocracy, and disguised it in a triumphant and politically-difficult-to-argue-against story about saving manufacturing jobs. A world where he picks winners and losers, singling out private companies to reward or punish on a case-by-case basis. Like the most dangerous demagogues and paranoid psychopaths, Trump keeps a list of his enemies. He has shown no hesitation in using his Twitter account to attack them and seems to relish the power his tweets have to move markets.

As for Trump’s unwieldy Republican coalition– I want to believe there are reasonable Republicans that might serve as a check on Trump. That party cooperation with Trump’s agenda will slow after they’ve implemented the top agenda items of the Republican establishment and done their best to erase any trace that Obama was in the White House. But if Republicans were too spineless to condemn Trump during the campaign, how can we expect them to stand up to him when he’s returned them to power, touts a voter mandate, and uses the oval office as a bully pulpit?

These are the same Republicans that began undermining our institutions earlier this year, when they abdicated their constitutional duty to give a hearing to Merrick Garland. A week before the election, Republican senators were vowing to obstruct any Supreme Court nominees appointed by Clinton, abandoning any pretense that this was ever based on even the most rickety of precedents. Our institutions are all that hold our country together. When they cease to transcend any one person or party, our entire republic is threatened.

Normally the losing party regroups after an election and begins to work towards winning back legislative control in the midterm elections. Bush lost his Republican majority in the house and senate in the midterm elections of 2002, and Obama lost his in 2010. But while a lot can change in two years, the 2018 midterm elections don’t seem to offer democrats that possibility. Republican gerrymandering will aid Republicans in holding the house for the foreseeable future, with many Republicans more afraid defeat will come from “getting primaried” from the right than from a Democrat challenger. In the senate, only eight Republicans are up for reelection, seven of them from solidly Red states, while 25 Democrats are up for reelection, ten of whom are from states won by Trump.

Even more than gerrymandering or specific senate races though, the Democrat coalition faces a longterm structural and geographic problem. Democrats enjoy a voter majority, but their support is inefficiently distributed in a system that awards political power based on geography. For the second time in five elections, the Democrats won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, and won its 55 electoral votes– Trump won Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina by about 800,000 votes, and won 108 electoral votes. Representation in the senate is also geared towards geography– the 40 million people in California get the same number of senators as the 600,000 people in Wyoming. The arithmetic of congress and the electoral college was set up to create a buffer between voters and their elected officials and to prevent any one region from becoming too powerful. But with democrats clustered in cities and on the coasts, the arithmetic currently cedes disproportionate representation to Republicans, and even as demographic trends favor the democrats, it could be a while before demographics catch up to geographic distribution. Add to that the fact that Trump can appoint a partisan crony to chair the federal reserve in 2018 to grease monetary policy in the run up to the election in 2020 and that Republicans will delay the repeal of ACA until after the midterms, and the Republican hold on power could end up increasing in 2018.

Trump’s early cabinet moves also portend an Orwellian state, rendering every department’s name into cruel irony. The Environmental Protection Agency will be led by a fierce climate change denier who works for the oil and gas industry, the Department of Labor will advocate pro-business policies that aid in worker exploitation, the Federal Trade Commission will encourage monopolization and consumer exploitation, the Department of Justice will condone civil rights abuse and exact revenge on Trump’s opponents. Trump has appointed a white-nationalist anti-semite to a Bismarckian role exempt from congressional approval, and seems intent on filling most other positions in his cabinet with plutocrats and alt-right loyalists. Instead of emptying the swamp, Trump’s filling his cabinet with muck from the bottom of it. People is policy, and Trump’s administration is shaping up to be an intersection of the Christian right, white supremacists, Trump loyalists, and cronies of the oil and gas industry.

And what happens when a demagogue who doesn’t play by the rules decides he doesn’t want to relinquish power? For now, a 60-vote supermajority is needed in the senate for key appointments and legislation, which will allow Democrats and key Republicans to moderate Trump’s agenda. But what happens when Trump grows annoyed with the filibuster, and pressures the senate to blunt the tools of minority opposition? And makes dangerous appointments with a 51 vote majority approval that turn the courts from a check on his power to a rubber stamp? And declares war on the the press, limiting White House access to conservative media of his choosing, and expanding on the precedent set by his friend Peter Thiel in the lawsuit that ruled against the first amendment and led to the shuttering of Gawker? And helps the passing of discriminatory voter suppression laws (the 2010 reinstatement of which already helped to sway the election for Trump) under the guise of addressing voter fraud, and deregulates campaign financing, while making Breitbart a state-sponsored TV Channel to be transmitted to every home and be built-into every American-made iPhone, which by the way, will now transmit all of your private information to the Department of Freedom. On one hand, it sounds unthinkable. On the other, everything that’s happened since Trump declared his candidacy has seemed impossible– until it wasn’t. It may be time to assume the worst about him and prepare accordingly, rather than being surprised with every new offense that pushes us incrementally closer to an autocratic kleptocracy.

This is all without even mentioning Russia. At the very least, it appears Russia hacked the DNC and leaked information in an attempt to sway the election towards Trump, with the Trump campaign taking advantage of the leaks that dogged Clinton throughout the campaign. Remarkably, Republicans who used to call themselves patriots are now happy to condone interference in an American election by a hostile foreign power. Which is insane. But at worst, all of this goes much deeper. Multiple intelligence agencies seem to believe that Russian intelligence taped Trump getting peed on by prostitutes when he visited Moscow in 2013, giving Russian intelligence blackmail to wield against him. This theory would hold that the Kremlin systematically coordinated with and funded the Trump campaign, working through Paul Manafort, who took over Trump’s campaign over the summer of 2016 before disappearing back into the shadows and whose ties to Moscow are well-documented, and it would mean Russia has a puppet in Washington DC for the next four years. Trump’s consistent pro-Russian stance, his obsession with Putin, and his nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO and Russian Order of Friendship Recipient Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State further suggests treasonously deep ties between Trump and Moscow. Trump continues to deny all of this, even the universally agreed upon fact that Moscow hacked the DNC. If there’s unrest in Latvia in the next few years, and Russia blocks security resolutions to intervene but moves in unilaterally as a peacekeeper, and Trump doesn’t do anything about it, we’ll know the tape is real.

Because This Could Go From Bad to a This-Is-The-Darkest-Period-In-American-History Worse

There was speculation during the campaign that Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were more ideologically extreme than Trump. “Sure, Trump’s got some crazy in him,” the thinking went, “but at least he used to kind of be a democrat.” If Trump was to end up being impeached, be it due to allegations of treason, perjury, violating the constitution, or demonstrating with finality that he’s unfit to hold office– or if he succumbs to a heart attack because of his incredibly poor health– there was an idea that the devil we knew might be better than the devil we didn’t. It was Pence, after all, who backed a law in Indiana that would force women to have a burial for their aborted fetuses, and spearheaded the charge to leverage Hurricane Katrina to pass policies that lowered labor standards and gave handouts to oil and gas companies.

I’m offended by most of their politics, and would no doubt look upon their agenda in horror, but I’d accept this was our democracy playing out. Red vs Blue, D. vs R., hollywood liberals vs bible belt conservatives, with a lot of filibustering, fundraising, and shouting at each other on Sunday shows on the way to relative gridlock. But I would believe that no matter the appearance of corruption, religious fervor, or even bigotry, that they believe in democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law.

But in Trump, we’re faced with a new set of concerns. I’ve spent a lot of words talking about alarming implications of Trump’s temperament, his policy views, and his incompetence. But the only scarier thing than Trump’s blustering incompetence is that he, and more likely Steve Bannon, are in fact maniacally competent.

For the past eight years, Democrats and Republicans have had a philosophical battle over whether our system worked. Obama tried to navigate unprecedented partisan gridlock to pull levers that nudged the country in the direction of a progressive liberal agenda, even if the movement was sometimes slight. With the nomination of Hilary Clinton, Democrats continued to stake out a belief that change could be affected within the current system. The Republicans, radicalized with the ascendence of the Tea Party, became the party of revolution– they decided they didn’t believe the current system worked, and they wanted to overturn it. This made the Tea Party well-suited to be an opposition party, because it was always ready to play the game of chicken. Either it would get its way, or it would lose and take the whole government crashing down with it– and it was perfectly fine with either outcome. The Democrats would never have risked jeopardizing America’s credit to gain a policy victory, as the Republicans did when they threatened sovereign default unless Obamacare was repealed. But instead of being thrown out of power for needlessly threatening to throw the global economy into chaos, Republican lawmakers expanded their hold on both federal and state legislatures over the past six years. There was a time when conservative Republicans could at least be counted on to be patriots and believe in upholding the constitution, but Republicans have become the party that is willing to abandon those tenets for other ideological gains.

The country’s susceptibility to autocracy is made more challenging by the “post-truth” environment in which we now live. The fact that “post-truth” is now a term we throw around and accept is itself ludicrous and dangerous, but seems to be the only way to adequately describe the current political and media landscape. The polarizing impact of social media networks, the death of the local newspaper, the erosion of civil society, the divide between people with a college education and people without, between secular liberals in the cities and religious conservatives in the heartland, have made it so that Democrats and Republicans no longer inhabit the same reality, and have no mechanism for even communicating with each other. As of 2016, 72% of Republicans still doubted whether Barack Obama was born in the US. Over 60% of Republicans still didn’t believe global warming was due to human activities. If we can’t agree on objective facts, we open the door to unspeakable horrors, with no way to hold those who propagate them to account.

Republicans have denounced every news outlet that follows basic journalistic standards as an ideological arm of liberal elites. Meanwhile, many Trump supporters get their news from Breitbart, the propaganda organization of Trump’s top advisor, Steve Bannon. No US President has ever had a news organization for directly misinforming his supporters. State-run news organizations are hallmarks of autocracies.

The Great Con of the Republican party is that it relies on the support of people its policies don’t particularly help. It’s not just democratic campaign rhetoric that Trump wanted to cut taxes for the wealthiest 1% and deregulate banks and enrich businesses at the expense of their workers– that’s really the crux of their plan. Trump added a populist spin that won him the election– but I’m against his policies because I’m confident they’re going to leave the country worse off.

So the scary part of a Trump presidency happens when his policies fail to make a difference in the lives of his supporters. When it turns out that fixing health insurance wasn’t as simple as selling plans across state lines. When protectionist policies increase the prices at Walmart. When putting tariffs on Mexico doesn’t bring back post-WWII manufacturing jobs, but rather accelerates the pace of automation. When the Affordable Care Act is repealed and people can no longer pay for their cancer treatments. When Americans realize they’re worse off, and Trump faces a rising tide of disapproval and charges of incompetency, and begins to scramble to deflect his failures from his administration and place them somewhere else.

This is the point when a lot of presidents would lose reelection. But this is where Trump and his demagoguery set up a different dynamic. Trump has proven uniquely adept at speaking to his supporters, and distracting them from policy by fanning the flames of intolerance and xenophobia. He has a strong cult of personality and commands blind allegiance from a base that puts faith above reason. They have perhaps been failed by our society-- left behind by our economy and education system, they are unequipped to understand their own self-interests or confront ideas that challenge them-- as Errol Morris mused, the "a stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as if he is stupid.” Their shame leaves them angry, their resentment leads to tribalism. Those bright red Make America Great Again hats recall a tactic used by other fascist movements to identify their supporters– badges of allegiance that serve as a mechanism of deindividuation and embolden those wearing them to express their most base and intolerant beliefs.

But it may not just be a matter of incompetency. Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s regime, and Steve Bannon subscribes to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory that every 80 years America has a major crisis, when the system gets remade. Trump and Clinton were both viewed so unfavorably that the 2016 election was often framed as a contest between the lesser of two evils. But we may have actually seen the triumph of a deep-seated white-Christian authoritarian world-view. Trump might be inviting crisis.

I’m afraid we’re about to see the most cynical version of disaster capitalism. Employed by the Bush administration after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (and documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), where the Trump administration welcomes disasters and leverages them to implement policies that roll back our freedom, weaken our institutions, enrich government contractors and cronies, and try to remake the world order. I’ve already mentioned why Trump’s bluster towards Islam is strategically flawed– we risk alienating moderate Muslims we need as allies in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, and ending up in some sort of clash of civilizations. But there’s another, scarier scenario– given Trump’s clear racism towards Muslims, the many mentions he made of killing terrorists and their families during the campaign, and his belief that the mistake in Iraq was not securing the oil– I wonder if Trump is seeking out this clash. If he’d invite another terrorist attack on American soil, blame Obama for being too soft on terror, and use it as an excuse to partner with Russia to create a white Christian world order that wipes parts of the Middle East from the earth. Scarier still, I’m nervous his supporters would welcome it.

It would seem I’ve assuredly veered into the realm of paranoia and conspiracy that I set out to avoid. I hope we’ll laugh about it one day– I’ll be happy to get a boozy, yuppie brunch in Silver Lake with all of my liberal elite hipster friends in two years, after the Democrats retake the house in 2018, a Sunday edition of the New York Times on the table with a headline “Trump Card: Congress to Begin Impeachment Hearings,” as Trump sits at 18% in the polls. We can laugh about how I was a directionless millennial– a “whiny loser,” as Trump would say– who was prone to conspiracy theories and didn’t have enough faith in American institutions, which truly do always win out in the end.

But I can’t help but watch what’s happening and think we’re living through that fateful, chilling, divergent moment that will appear in history books. The kind of moment of which historians will ask, how did this happen and why didn’t anyone stop it?

#donald trump #trump #election 2016

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useunknown · 9 years ago

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What if We’re the Pokemon?

How Pokemon Go May Have Just Ushered in the Age of Augmented Reality

For years, People Who Know Things About Tech have augured the end of the online-offline divide. Yes, it can seem like people are always on their phones, but connectivity is still confined to our screens. A ubiquitous digital reality still seemed like the stuff of the future, albeit an increasingly not-too-distant one.

And then, on July 6th, Pokemon Go happened. If you don’t know what Pokemon Go is, go ask the people who just walked by looking at their phone like it’s a compass and have them explain it to you. For those of you for whom that’s not an option (deep breath): Pokemon Go is a geo-locational, massively multiplayer, augmented reality game that was just released on iPhone and Android. Augmented reality, meaning that when you look at the world through your phone camera, things show up on your phone that aren’t really there, geo-locational meaning the game uses the GPS function on your phone to figure out where you are, such that the movement of your avatar in the game is based on your physical location (as opposed to moving a player through the world by sitting on a couch and holding the toggle button on a controller), and massively multiplayer meaning that an unlimited number of people (or at least as many as the servers can handle) can play and impact the shared world of the game. “But what’s the point?” you might ask, if you’re anything like my mother. To which I’d respond, no one’s entirely sure, but it has something to do with “catching them all” — and that in a virtual Pokemon future, being a powerful trainer will be a symbol of prestige and help to attract a mate.

Obscured by the silliness of grown adults chasing down imaginary digital “pocket monsters” and taking over “gyms” for their arbitrarily chosen “teams” is the fact that the way humans interact with technology has just changed overnight.

People tend to resist change. Getting them to adopt a new technology requires convincing them to leave the comfort of the status quo. When the new technology requires adopting uncharted cultural norms, the friction is even greater.

Just about every popular invention has had a moment when its purpose has been illuminated and it’s been embraced by popular culture. The live reporting of the 1920 presidential election returns on KDKA gave people a reason to buy a radio. Disney’s Wonderful World of Color did the same thing for color television. Conversely, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of the QUBE Remote. Warner Cable released the QUBE in 1977 convinced that the future of TV would involve interactive polling. They weren’t far off from the concept of American Idol, or the way TV shows now integrate Twitter — but the QUBE wasn’t paired with compelling content and left Warner Cable in an $875-million hole.

Nintendo bundled the release of Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64 — the perfect game for showing off the new system’s capabilities. We have fewer memories of the Nintendo Virtual Boy, which came out just a year before. It didn’t have a signature game, the virtual reality it offered was a pixellated world of black and red that left people feeling nauseous, and it was discontinued within a year.

The iPhone was so much sleeker and more powerful than any other phone on the market when it was released in 2007 that people didn’t think twice about learning to navigate its touch interface. But the Apple Newton PDA that came out in 1993? Its interface was too finicky, its capabilities too limited, and its price too high to ever catch on.

Many of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies have challenged cultural norms, and convinced people that the benefits outweigh the costs. Facebook’s success hinged on people deciding the benefit of connecting and doing whatever it is they do on facebook was worth renouncing a bit of their privacy. The Arab Spring helped crystallize Twitter as an information network, and compelled people to engage with it as a way to report and consume news. iTunes needed to convince people that the value of CDs and DVDS was the content, rather than the physical object. Streaming services have required people to privilege access to unlimited content over ownership. Uber made people agree to trust uncredentialed strangers to drive them in exchange for never needing a car and being able to bar-hop like they live in New York. Tinder blunted the stigma of online dating and made swiping apps an accepted form of meeting people and then flaking on them. In all cases, success hinges on adoption by the right people, and a compelling use-case that overcomes the friction of deviating from the status quo.

With this framework, it’s no surprise that one of the biggest failures to come out of Silicon Valley in the past few years is Google Glass.

Google Glass was Google’s attempt at ubiquitous computing-- a “head-mounted optical display” that looked like a pair of glasses, but were in fact a hands-free computer an inch from your cornea. Google believed it finally had its breakthrough piece of hardware — it would be the company that ushered in the end of the online-offline divide. Glass was the manifestation of what an “always connected” world would look like.

Google rolled out Glass by offering a developer kit to eager early adopters. For $1500, tech enthusiasts and developers could be the first people on the block to cruise around like visitors from the future. But the strategy backfired. The glasses were bulky and were mocked as a “handsfree segway for your face.” Like Segways, they had cool underlying technology without a clear use-case — and cruising around in them made you look like an asshole. The first impression of glass for most people was the image of a bulky prototype being strutted around by the douchey tech-head they had always wanted to punch, and any “cool factor” glass might have hoped to achieve evaporated before you could say “OK, Glass.” Reports of hacks that enabled facial recognition and constant recording raised privacy concerns and made Glass seem creepy. Legislators started to raise the prospect of banning Glass from banks, movie theaters, concerts, casinos, and perhaps most unnervingly-- playgrounds. Google strained to correct for this — it hired lobbyists, it appointed cultural ambassadors (“Glass Explorers”) it commissioned Diane von Furstenberg to make them fashionable. It made uplifting commercials that showed how glass could enhance human connection. But it was too late for Glass. The mainstream had laughed the augmented-reality engineers out of the room, and had called them “glassholes” in the process.

But it wasn’t just the clunkiness of glass, or that that they made the wearer look like a tech super-villain about to give a TED talk. Or that people were still into their iPhones and figured Apple would be the company to tell them what came after them. At the end of the day, Glass simply didn’t have a clear reason to exist. It was offering a version of ubiquitous computing before there were any cultural norms or reasons for having it. People wondered, “why would you want to walk around looking at the world through a screen?” In 2012, Google didn’t have a clear-cut answer.

Pokemon Go may have just changed that. In the span of one week, people have acclimated to the idea of looking at the world through their phones. And if all you wanted to do is live out your days playing Pokemon Go — an idea to which millions of people suddenly seem amenable — then Google Glass would be the perfect device. But Google didn’t have Pokemon Go in 2012-- it had a game called Ingress.

Just like Pokemon Go, Ingress is an augmented-reality massively multiplayer online location-based game that has players moving around the real world and holding up their phones in front of public art and monuments to collect objects, gain experience points, and achieve in-game objectives. Just like Pokemon Go, Ingress was developed by Niantic Labs (“Skynet” and “Cyberdyne” were already taken) . The game is estimated to have had seven million downloads since it was released in December 2013, but mainstream adoption alluded it. Maybe it’s the overly serious sci-fi plot or the fact that it wasn’t based on familiar IP, but it failed to lure mainstream audiences.

Google never formally paired Ingress with Google Glass, but the synergy was apparent. The early adopters of Google Glass also may have overlapped with the people who played Ingress. The problem is that it was a user base of tech people, more serious gamers, and segway riders. The mass market had better things to do — like tend their land on Farmville, swipe at each other on dating apps, listen to Serial, and build their network on Google Circle. My bad — no one used Google Circle either. Once again, the general populace wasn’t interested in what Google’s augmented reality people were pedaling.

The mechanics of Pokemon Go are the same as Ingress. Augmented reality. Geolocation. Massively multiplayer. You walk around, hold your phone up, and collect stuff. But unlike Ingress, everyone is playing it. The couple holding their phone up to that mural over there? They’re collecting PokeBalls. The guy staring at his phone as he cruises across the street on his hover-board? He just caught a Rhinocorne. And the five people who just drifted into the coffee shop staring at their phones? They’re all in a “gym.” And the coffee shop in question? It is the “gym.” And it might be paying Google for the privilege to be so, and if it’s not, it will be soon. Or it might put out “digital incense” to attract Pokemon — and by extension, the customers who hunt them.

Judging by the math on the back of my napkin, a lot of the people playing Pokemon Go weren’t interested in Pokemon before last week. They didn’t play it on Game Boy, they didn’t watch the TV show, they didn’t see the movies, and they certainly didn’t collect the playing cards. But Pokemon Go has enough vague ironic 1990′s nostalgia to make mainstream culture comfortable with it, (because there’s nothing mainstream culture loves more these days than 90′s nostalgia) and it’s built to be addictive. Once the app hit critical mass, it raced through the viral-phenomenon circuitry and snowballed into the realm of cultural hysteria. In the ten days since it was released, Pokemon Go has already been downloaded over twenty million times, and it hasn’t even hit Japan yet. That’s Mach 10 Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan, How-Could-They-Kill-Jon-Snow, Hamilton-the-Musical level hysteria. It’s reached the point where Justin Bieber now wanders Central Park hunting for Pokemon — and no one even cares because they’re too preoccupied with catching a Vaporean. Suffice it to say, Nintendo Stock has more than doubled since the game’s release on July 6th.

Perhaps we’ll look back at Pokemon Go as a passing fad of the summer of 2016. But by the time it’s over tens of millions of people will have welcomed augmented reality into their lives. Niantic (backed by Google, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company), has just achieved the most difficult thing there is to do in tech — it’s compelled people to change their behavior and embrace a new technology. When people walk around looking through their phones at a world augmented with Pokemon, they‘re accepting a state of perpetual connectivity. When they refer to real-world landmarks as “gyms” and “PokeStops” without a trace of irony, they’re accepting a concept that there is a virtual world that has been layered on top of the real world. When they train their Pokemon in battle, they themselves are being trained to interact and care for digital beings that aren’t really there. These are huge concepts for people to be embracing.

With Pokemon Go, the augmented reality evangelizers finally found a way into the hearts and minds of the yuppies and the hipsters, the finance bros and the soccer moms, NBA players, MMA fighters, and Justin Bieber. The divide between online and offline has narrowed, and the next time someone shows us a wearable optical display, we might think seriously about trying it on.

#augmented reality #google glass #pokemon #pokemon go

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useunknown · 9 years ago

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“First Joint Interview” Improv Game

First Played on 60 Minutes by Lesley Stahl, Donald Trump, and Mike Pence:

The Set Up: There are three chairs. One person plays the role of “Journalist,” two people play the role of “candidates”– one is the “Presidential Candidate” and one is the “Vice Presidential Candidate.”

Goals: The Presidential Candidate’s goal is to convince the Journalist he knows what he’s talking about, and that the selection of the Vice Presidential Candidate was of his own free will.

The Vice Presidential Candidate has to reconcile his views with those of the Presidential Candidate, even though all of the Presidential Candidate’s views violate his core beliefs.

Neither of the candidates have informed answers to any of the questions, and have no idea what the other candidate is going to say.

Each Candidate has a Secret:

The Presidential Candidate knows he might change his mind and choose a different Vice Presidential candidate after the upcoming party convention– possibly his daughter.

The Vice Presidential Candidate knows his party plans to have the Presidential Candidate assassinated if he wins the election.

Additional Challenges for Advanced Players:

When the Journalist mentions a horrible thing happened in the world, both candidates have to look down, shake their heads, and say “horrible.” (3:17)

The Presidential Candidate needs to convince the reporter that a lot of people wanted to be his Vice Presidential Candidate (6:10).

The Presidential Candidate needs to mention he’d rather have picked legendary Hoosiers Coach Bobby Knight. (7:20)

The Presidential Candidate needs to work in the phrase “the constitution, there’s nothing like it, but it doesn’t necessarily give us the right to commit suicide as a country” (14:20).

If the VP candidate says the Presidential Candidate speaks from his heart, the Presidential Candidate has to assert he also speaks from his brain (15:04).

If the Presidential Candidate feels the Journalist or VP Candidate is alleging he’s not religious (9:10) or humble (20:10), he has to insist otherwise.

The Presidential Candidate has to work in the term “extreme vetting” three times in five seconds (14:40).

The Presidential Candidate doesn’t actually want to be president, but if this is called into question he’s not allowed to give a direct answer (19:10).

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useunknown · 9 years ago

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The Republicans’ War on America

Obligatory Rest in peace to Antonin Scalia, with whom I didn’t always agree, but never would have been able to argue. My favorite quote about him in the wake of his death is from NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, who, regarding Scalia’s conservative bent explained, “He didn’t think he was partisan. He thought he was right.”

When we talk about judges being described as “activist” or “conservative,” we’re usually talking about how closely they adhere to originalism. Antonin Scalia ascribed to originalism completely– the idea that the constitution should be interpreted as it was written, and treated as a document that was “dead.” (This as opposed to Intentionalism, which attempts to project intention onto the text, and Pragmatism, which might privilege other factors over what’s written). Without putting words in the mouth of the dead Scalia, insofar as he was consistent, insofar as he believed in the text of the constitution, you can only imagine that he would have wanted the vacancy he left to be filled in accordance with it. Article II Section 2 Clause 2:

[The President] shall nominate, and, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

It does not say anything about the President losing his power to make appointments in the last year of his term. It does not say that we should wait for the next election to give the American people a chance to elect another President. The referendum as to whether or not Obama should be granted the power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court already happened-- twice-- in 2008 and 2012

The Republicans are now cherry-picking a fantastical interpretation of “Advice and Consent,” using it to rationalize the fact that they are not even going to go through the confirmation process. But “Advice and Consent” does not apply to the President making a nomination. The clause, separated by a comma, applies to the appointment– that’s what a confirmation hearing is. The Republican declaration that they will not even go through the confirmation process for an Obama appointee is a violation of their constitutional duty. The fact that they made this declaration before Obama even made a nomination, (a strategy rationalized here) should be interpreted as nothing short of a war on our democracy.

The idea that there’s precedent for the congress not approving appointments in an election year is also complete fiction– it’s rare because supreme court vacancies are rare– but it’s happened six different times since 1912, most recently in 1988, when a democratic senate approved a nominee of the Republican’s beloved Ronald Reagan. The real precedent, the real way the constitutional duty of the senate has been upheld in the past, is that the senate has never taken more than 125 days to vote on a successor from the time of nomination. Full stop.

The American public should be up in arms over this. It is remarkable that the Republicans have the gall to even murmur the words “make America great again” when they are the ones ignoring our constitution and threatening to bring the judicial branch of our government to a halt. The cases being heard in the court affect peoples lives. But the Republicans, as they’ve done during countless budget negotiations, are prepared to hold the American people hostage for their political gain.

Behold the irresponsibility, the smarminess, the boldfaced mendaciousness of the Republican party. The party of obstruction, that whose leadership declared in 2010 “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” The party of nativism, xenophobia and intolerance. The party proposing tax cuts that will create an additional six and ten trillion dollars of debt over ten years. The party that pretends to honor Scalia while smearing his legacy with an activist interpretation of the constitution before the man was even declared dead.

#scalia

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useunknown · 9 years ago

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Movie Idea 3

When a mysterious event causes 40% of LA’s population to suddenly disappear, the remaining 60% pretend to cope with survivor’s guilt while secretly relishing improved traffic conditions and newfound serenity. We follow Steve Thornby, a frustrated accountant who takes up photography after deciding one morning that LA is the most beautiful city in the world.

#theleftoversgotitwrong?

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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Fat Man, Little Window

With the New York Times’ withering call for Chris Christie to get out of the presidential race, and Christie’s recent failure to make it onto the primetime stage for the fourth Republican Debate, it’s possible Christie’s window to run for president, insofar as there ever was one, is closing.

The Times tears into Christie for failing to fix New Jersey’s structural deficit and infrastructure, allowing economic growth to stall, playing a role in the state’s recent string of corruption scandals, and not offering to forego his $175,000 annual salary. Interestingly, the greatest source of umbrage for the Times isn't that Christie is pursuing a presidential bid while New Jersey burns-- it's that he’s pursuing a doomed presidential bid. The editorial calls on Christie to read the tea leaves, harping on the fact that he’s not raising money, his support among primary voters is “between nobody and 4%,” and the campaign “has turned out to be nothing more than a vanity project.”

And yet I can’t help but take a moment to think about the candidate Christie could have been. I’m not a fan of Chris Christie–- he seems like a liar, a shark, and a psychopath, and the highlight of his governorship seems to be the moment when he put partisanship aside in 2012 and….accepted money from the federal government to help his state recover from a natural disaster-- hardly an act of heroism.

But I’ll say this of Christie– he’s a wonderful campaigner. He’s sharp, he’s a pretty good interview, and he’s exceptional in a town hall format, even in front of a neutral audience (as opposed to McCain, who thrived in a town hall format, but only when he had a friendly, right-leaning audience– when he was put in front of a quiet, neutral audience, ie the 2012 Second Presidential Debate, he was thrown off his game).

Trump usurped Christie’s position as the “pull-no-punches straight-talker,” which, in combination with the taint of Bridgegate and the legacy of Christie’s photo-op with Obama after Hurricane Sandy (which Republicans credit with boosting Obama in the 2012 election), has left Christie an etiolated candidate whose campaign never had a chance to blossom.

But Christie still does the “tell-it-like-it-is” schtick better than anyone. Trump has proven himself a genius at self-promotion and branding, driving home “make America great again,” “I’m a master negotiator,” “I’m a winner,” “I’ll run America like one of my incredibly successful businesses,” “I haven’t been bought because I’m running with my own money,” and by the way, “I’m very very very rich.” He’s bombastic, and a bully. Christie has those same genes, but he veils them with a practiced humbleness, which to me makes him a smoother operator than Trump. But it doesn’t end with bluntness-- Christie has a few other strong go-to moves in his food truck.

1) He’s great at being the adult in the room. He’s good at synthesizing, splitting dichotomies, taking the third way, and rising above the fray. I’ve seen him do this in debates a few times, perhaps most memorably in the second GOP debate when he cut through a ridiculous exchange between Carly Fiorina and Trump, as they argued who had a smaller dick.

youtube

Christie’s always done well in the debates–- the Times editorial conceded as much, even as it fired shots over his lack of substance–- but despite some strong answers and zingers, because by the way, he’s legitimately pretty funny, he’s never managed to “have a moment” that’s granted him traction in the campaign.

2) Christie is doing the best impression of “compassionate conservatism” that I’ve seen since George W. Bush. The best, most recent example is a speech he gave at a New Hampshire town hall about the treatment of people with drug addiction. He tells an emotional anecdote about his mother’s addiction to smoking, and then of a successful law school friend whose life fell apart because of an addiction to percocet. Christie’s a captivating story-teller, and the video proved to have that “je-ne-se-quois” quality that made it go viral-- it’s been viewed upwards towards 7.4 million times in the week since it went up.

Christie’s campaign is probably mourning the fact that the video didn’t spread a few days earlier-- the mini-moment it gave him might have been enough to keep him in the GOP primetime debate, and averted his relegation to the depressing and probably-basically-unwatchable minor league debate of the irrelevant dregs, where Christie will join Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum. I’m not sure who consciously decides to tune into that, besides maybe the rec rooms of a few US military bases, some bars and nail salons in the bible belt, and the writing staff of fake news shows.

The Republican Primary is a game of chicken right now, with all of the candidates holding out hope that they’ll be the ones to get a bounce when the others start to drop out and the Trump/Carson carnival ends. In 2012 Christie would have been among the favorites to win the Republican nomination had he entered the fray (so would have Jeb!). In 2016, the path to the nomination is considerably messier. Christie’s put all his eggs into faring well in New Hampshire, but if he fails to gain traction in the next few weeks he may be forced to accept continuing on is futile, especially with the Times editorial now looming.

Maybe Christie can generate some news-cycle-winning footage in the Nick Jr debate as Carly Fiorina did a few months ago, and find his way back to the main stage. Bridgegate and the post-Sandy pictures of him palling around with Obama probably condemned him to never make it out of the Republican primary, but I always thought we deserved to have a few weeks of Christie leading the Republican field– hovering at say 24%, standing at the center of the Republican debate stage where he always knew he belonged, going toe to toe with Trump, waxing earnestly about the tribulations of voters he’s met in the heartland, and telling us that we might not agree with him, but at least we know where he stands.

Alas, we may never get to see him soar.

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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The Axis of Old

There were times in high school when I ate a burrito an hour before a cross country meet. Nights in Hong Kong when I’d stay out until 2 am on a Thursday night and manage to be relatively alert at my desk at 8:45 Friday morning. I’ve taken red-eyes with multiple layovers and shaken off the jet lag with a power nap and a red bull. Sprained my ankle at the beginning of a night-hike up a volcano and managed to make it to the top.

You’re not aware of the resilience of your youth when you’re abusing it. It’s only as it begins to slip away that you long for it. That you realize there’s been a turning point. A quiet moment that came and went without announcing itself, that has left you just a bit more vulnerable, a little less equipped to bounce back, with points plotted on the axis of “youth” slowly migrating to the axis of “old.” That leaves you saying things like, “I can’t get away with that anymore,” “I need to cut back on that,” “I have to get this lump checked,” and “I don’t get the point of snapchat.”

I tried to squeeze in a quick workout amid a Friday morning of errands. I didn’t stretch much, but I kept it low-key and felt fine after. I had some soreness Saturday morning, but I didn’t think anything of it. I spent a few hours at a coffee shop Saturday afternoon, and maybe had just a bit more trouble finding a comfortable position in my seat than normal, but still, there was every indication that it was the type of thing I’d shake off. But when I left the coffee shop and started walking down Sunset towards my car, things started to feel off. Suddenly, a tightness in my upper legs. My stomach started to churn. A swelling in my lower back. I tried to massage the pain away, first casually, then more vigorously, like I was throwing water on a spreading fire. I limped across the crosswalk, like Keyser Sozez in reverse, my limp becoming more pronounced, until finally it felt like my right leg had been shot off. I collapsed on a small patch of grass in front of a Valvoline station on the corner of Sunset and Hoover, my back in a full blown blitzkrieg of spasm.

The cop-out would be to use a word like “ineffable” to describe it. Like, “an ineffable pain.” I’ve considered words like “tortuous,” “harrowing,” “agonizing,” “excruciating.” They all fall flat. If words can’t describe it, and saying “words can’t describe it” doesn’t describe it, I probably have to move into the realm of metaphors and states of mind. So… I felt paralyzed. Leana touched her hand to my ankle, and I was genuinely relieved to affirm I hadn’t lost feeling in my legs. But I still felt like one false move could pinch a nerve and leave me paralyzed. Such was my mindset as I tried to cope with the highest level of pain I’ve ever had to bear. Lying still on the ground burned. Any kind of movement burned. I endured a destabilizing shot of pain in order to get myself onto my back with my knees bent. It brought no relief. I endured another spasm in order to turn over on my stomach in order to get into some sort of back-arching yoga pose on my hands and knees. I couldn’t lift myself off the ground. I massaged the tight areas and took deep breaths, trying to create space between my muscles. Useless. I was stuck, writhing on this patch of grass outside the Valvoline station, trying to figure out a way not to die there. The workers at the Valvoline station poked their heads out every so often. “Look at that man grasping for his youth!” said one. “Yo, is it just me or would that guy seem perfectly able-bodied were he not grimacing on the ground right now” wondered another. “Technically he’s loitering,” said Dave. “Shut the fuck up Dave,” they all said-- no one liked Dave.

Leana took a phone call from her mom to give me some time to recover. I swore I’d get it together in a few minutes. Because how could this not get better after a few minutes? We were talking about an injury that had been sustained from walking across the street for goodness sake, and not in a “car-hit-me-when-I-was-walking-across-the-street” way. No matter what I did, I couldn’t straighten my back. I managed to stand with my feet spread apart and my back hunched over, but when I tried to straighten I fell to the ground. I tried to kneel, and then stand up that way-- I fell back to the ground. Each successive attempt to escape from the patch of grass was punished with an extra dose of pain. This was my world now-- it started where the grass met the sidewalk, went five feet in either direction, and sloped 20 degrees upwards until it reaches a Valvoline sign, surrounded by minimum-effort low-maintenance shrubbery befitting oil change stations, parking lots, and median strips.

Leana came back and apologized her phone call had gone on so long. When I said it hadn’t seemed long, she looked down at her call log. “It was 53 minutes,” she said, growing concerned that I might be immobilized in time as well as in space. But then she got sidetracked: “Hey that’s that actor! I know that actor!” I craned my head just in time to see the back of his head as he crossed the street. “He does a lot of indie movies,” she said, looking it up on her phone. “Oh, Jason Ritter. That was Jason Ritter!”

It was a real LA moment, for Leana. We were in Silverlake, after all. “Oh! I actually know Jason Ritter!” I said. He had gone to my high school, my father had been his drama teacher, and recently he had starred in a friend's movie. "Like, I actually would have said ‘hi’ to Jason Ritter, had I been, you know….” Excitement quickly waned. Who cared about Jason Ritter. I was stuck on a plot of grass in front of a Valvoline station.

It was time to figure out a way home. Leana got my car and pulled up to the curb. I used all of my willpower to crawl towards the door. She opened the door for me from the inside, and I leaned my left elbow on the passenger seat, trying to brace myself. But I couldn’t get into the car. I was too tall, and couldn’t bend my head below the top of the door frame. Finally, withstanding a series of brutal spasms, I made it in, leading with my head, hitting the seat with a shudder. I reached out to close the passenger door. It was too far away. Leana considered getting out of the car to close it for me, but then she saw something through the window. I looked up to see an employee from the Valvoline station. He nodded– it might not have seemed like it, but they were all rooting for me. He made sure I was safely inside the car and gently closed the door.

I would spend much of the next 48 hours on the floor or in bed. The first emergency call I’ve ever placed to my father, who heroically brought me ice packs, a heating pad, and vicodin late Saturday evening. Leana spent the weekend playing nurse, never complaining that she had come to visit me for a romantic mid-semester break of museums, bars, and beaches, and was instead spending the weekend in my black hole of an apartment. If there’s anyone still opposed to the medical use of marijuana, may they pull their back and endure the agony of their policy position. An in-call from a masseuse on Sunday loosened me up a bit, and cut the trip from my bed to the bathroom from a half-hour desperation crawl to a five-minute hunchback walk. A trip to the chiropractor on Monday brought my hip back into alignment, and in combination with a back-brace, enabled me to walk in a straight line, albeit with the quality of stitched-back together C3PO. Another visit to the chiropractor this afternoon should help begin to bring me back to normalcy.

But life is different now. Something I had never imagined to be possible is now a constantly looming threat, that has to be accounted for in the realm of what I consider possible. I have a new baseline of “shitty things that can happen to me while crossing the street.” I have a new appreciation for the phrase, “put me out of my misery.” I have a handy new reference point that allows me to say things like, “it’s not as bad as the last time I herniated a disc,” or, god forbid, “this is even worse than the last time I herniated a disc.” And I have no choice but to acknowledge that another vault of youthful resilience has been laid bare, that as I approach my thirtieth birthday, my scale has tilted another degree towards the axis of old.

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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Go Bluefish

“Honestly sweetie—�� that’s my aunt— she still calls me sweetie, which some people might object to, but which she says lovingly to the point where it doesn’t bother me, and is even endearing, “what you should have done is go from Portsmouth to visit your friend in New Haven. Then you should have gone to New York, and then you could have gone with us to East Hampton. And then on your way out, the Jitney takes you straight to a stop where you can transfer to LaGuardia.” She was right. My flight back to LA left from LaGuardia, so it would have made for a better plan with cleaner logistics— less travel time, lower travel costs. But I hadn’t planned things that way.

I had left Portsmouth with my Aunt and Uncle. We had driven a few hours from Portsmouth to New London, then taken the ferry from New London, through Shelter Island, to Orient Point, then driven from Orient Point to their place in East Hampton. I was now confronted with figuring out the next leg of my journey— getting from East Hampton to New Haven. I didn’t have a car, so the ferry was out. I could go into the city with my aunt and uncle Monday evening, stay the night, and then go to New Haven Tuesday morning. Or, it dawned on me, I could just leave East Hampton Monday afternoon, go up to Port Jefferson, and take the ferry from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport.

I told my friend Zelda of my plan, and asked if she’d pick me up in Bridgeport, which was just a half hour from New Haven. “We could see the Bridgeport Bluefish!” she exclaimed. “Assuming there’s a game. Let me check.” We both hit google and found we were in luck. “Monday night, 7:00 pm, the Bridgeport Blue Fish vs. the Long Island Ducks.” I would take the ferry from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport, we’d meet at the Ferry pier, we’d go to the game.

All I needed to do was find a bus that would take me from East Hampton to Port Jefferson, a plan that proved to be presumptuous. Long Island’s public transportation system existed to move people from Manhattan to Long Island— a straight line to a point on the North Fork or South fork. No one seems to travel from North to South. I tried to cobble an itinerary together.

“Bus from East Hampton to Port Jefferson.” There was nothing. “Long Island Rail Road East Hampton to Port Jefferson.” Nothing. “Wanderu Bus Route Aggregator East Hampton to Bridgeport.” Nothing. Google Maps public transportation search. Nothing. Did any buses go from the South Fork to Port Jefferson? There was one. The S61, leaving every hour from Patchogue. Anything from East Hampton to Patchogue? The Long Island Railroad went there. So, East Hampton to Patchogue on the Long Island Rail Road at 11:43 am and arriving at 1:07 pm. Take the 2:00 pm S61 from Patchogue to Port Jefferson, arrive in Port Jefferson at 2:51 pm, then take the 3:00 pm ferry from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport, arrive in Bridgeport at 4:20 pm. If I missed the 3 pm ferry, I could take the 4:00 pm. And if I ubered from Patchogue to Port Jefferson to get on the 2 pm ferry? $90.

“Honestly sweetheart,” you might be better off taking the Jitney. It goes straight from East Hampton to Grand Central. And then you can just take Metro North. And it’s comfortable. Less running around.” It seemed crazy, but she was right.

I called Zelda to give her the option-- now that I was coming through Manhattan, should I just take the Metro North all the way to New Haven? "I’ve been wanting to go to a game for ten years,” she said. And my friend Leana might come with a friend.” We’d go to the game.

Getting to Bridgeport was as easy as advertised. Three hours on the Jitney, five blocks to Grand Central, 90 minutes to Bridgeport. I read, closed my eyes, had time to think. What was this trip I was on? Why had it been so poorly planned? Or what would better planning look like? I went to Portsmouth to see my parents renew their vows. It was my first trip to the East Coast in five years, and I hadn’t been to New York for seven years. I wanted to visit Zelda in New Haven, and had a few college friends in New York, not to mention a friend from Hong Kong who was now in New York, a friend from Singapore who was now in New Haven, and an Aunt and Uncle who had been wanting me to visit since I moved back to the US two years ago.

Zelda pulled up to the curb of the Bridgeport train station at 4:45. I met her friend Leana and Leana’s friend from Berlin, Maxim. We had time to kill and yelped our way into a divey Bridgeport bar.

A life-size bronze statue of Jim O’Rourke greets all who pass through the front gates of Bridgeport’s Ballpark at Harbor Yard. O’Rourke played his first MLB game in 1872 with the Middletown Mansfields, and played his last game an almost preposterous 32 years later with the New York Giants. Career stats of a .311 BA, 2,643 hits, and 1729 runs. On the bottom of the statue, a quote: “We have been given the best of support by the people of Bridgeport. They want baseball and I intend to give it to them.”

And give it to them he did. Or, if you’re a skeptic who doesn’t trust the lapidary histories of statues and gravestones, someone did. Or at least they gave Bridgeport a brand of baseball. Because anyone who follows Major League Baseball knows that the Bridgeport Bluefish aren’t one of the MLB’s 30 teams. Nor, as it turns out are they affiliated with any of the 246 Minor League teams. The Connecticut Tigers can be caught 70 miles East of Bridgeport, in Norwich, and the New Britain Rock Cats can be seen 50 miles Northeast of Bridgeport, in well, New Britain. But the Bluefish play in a wholly separate league— the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball (ALPB), composed of teams from Lancaster, Waldorf, Sugar Land, York, Camden, Central Islip, Bridgewater, and Bridgeport.

The Bridgeport Power plant makes for an interesting backdrop over the right-field fence of the Bluefish ballpark, and evokes thoughts of drunk urban planners, or corrupt real estate deals. It’s a far cry from the picturesque desert hills that encircle Dodger stadium where I watched baseball growing up, but that’s not to say the contrast of grassy baseball field and and towering power plant chimney doesn’t have an ironic appeal. Add in the red and orange hues of sunset, and it’s hard not to start contemplating what your best instagram might be.

In a small town professional league, drumming up attendance is the name of the game. Special nights, give-aways, themes— anything to lure people to watch baseball that has no clear stakes. On the evening of Monday the 24th, in addition to the the fact that they were playing their cross-sound rivals the Ducks, the draw was David Letterman Appreciation Night. It was enough to make us wonder if David Letterman, who recently retired from late night television after 33 years, was from Bridgeport— he’s not— or if he has any affiliation whatsoever with Bridgeport— he doesn’t. We concluded he just must have been popular with the locals. At the gate we were each handed a thick paper cut-out of David Letterman’s face mounted on a popsicle stick, and had as much fun with holding the likeness of David Letterman in front of our faces as might reasonably be expected.

Unfortunately, word of David Letterman appreciation night hadn’t adequately disseminated throughout the town of Bridgeport. The capacity of the Ballpark at Harbor Yard is 5300, and I don’t think the park could have been more than a quarter full. 1300 people paying $11 a ticket gets you $14,575. It’s not difficult to imagine another $15,000-$20,000 is generated from the sale of food and refreshments, that weekends are more crowded, and that there’s some income from local sponsors. But with no TV deal in place, one can’t help wonder about the players. Glorified seasonal laborers who each month play 28 games and make between $600 and $1200 per month. The rosters of ALPB teams are therefore populated by dream chasers— the belief in the slightest possibility that they’ll get signed by a minor league team, and after a bit of AA or AAA, that they might one day get called up to the Majors. Like any gold rush ecosystem, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, the dream chasers hold fast to the stories of those who “made it”– about 50 players are drafted to round out the benches of major league squads each year. It’s an underdog league, with underdog players– a spirit that feels apropos in a small factory town.

The crowd appreciates the effort. It’s a middling level of baseball, but there’s still an air of admiration. That fundamental and pure connection between a town and a team that represents it. No corporate bullshit, no national advertising, no fair weather fans jumping across state lines. Just pure geography— that American idea that goes all the way back to the 1908 Tin Pan Alley song now heard during the 7th inning stretch at every baseball game in the US— “cause it’s root root root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame.” In Bridgeport, those words mean something.

That said, there was a melancholy to the baseball being played on this night. The Bluefish were up 7-0 after seven innings, and took a 7-3 win after the Ducks took some consolation runs in the ninth. A heckler went at the Duck players all evening, and none of them managed to quiet him. In a difficult-to-watch seventh inning, the Ducks made three or four errors, though perhaps only two were recorded as such— a blown catch, an un-fielded ground ball, an overthrow to first, an unresisted stolen base. It feels okay to cheer when an overpaid MLB player on an opposing team makes an error, cause you know, fuck A-Rod– but in the ALPB, there’s a feeling that an error could amount to destroying a man’s dream. You can see him slumping, shaking his head, beating himself up, replaying the sequence in his mind, and wondering if some scout who had been watching him is thinking “he’ll never play in the Majors now.”

With free parking, reasonably priced refreshments (beers were $8 rather than the $14 they cost at Dodger Stadium), and the ability to be close to the field, a Bluefish game might be a better value proposition than an MLB game. If you’re not sold, consider that for $150, you and seven friends can get tickets to a Blue Fish game and watch it from a hot tub in left field.

The bored Bridgeport DJ uses the end of games as an opportunity to sneak his best shit onto the speakers– so we danced out of the stadium to the sound of Rappers Delight. At the exit, we were delighted when ushers handed us vouchers for two free tickets to any game next week– not that there was any chance we’d make it back.

“The people of Bridgeport want baseball,” O’Rourke had said. It wasn’t the majors or minors, and the marketing department had to resort to some gimmicks and ticket giveaways, but we had seen a compelling simulacrum.

Leana and I met eyes. After a week in Portsmouth and East Hampton had played out as I imagined they would, I began to wonder if something else had begun to take shape in the Ballpark in Harbor Yard. Yes, baseball was alive in Bridgeport.

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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Fire Starters

It’s 2015. If you’re married and have found a life partner, congratulations. If you’re still single, I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news— 2014 marked the rise of the matchmaking app, and you can now meet and filter through potential mates with greater ease and efficiency than anyone at any other time in human history. The bad news, these apps could threaten to re-wire how people think, creating a culture of perpetually single, bored, binary-thinking left-swipers with short attention spans, trained to believe something better is always waiting in the wings, potentially condemning you to be single forever.

With Tinder unrolling its premium version yesterday, I thought it might be time to finally weigh in on the modern dating app landscape.

Tinder, if you’ve been living under a rock, is a semi-geolocational “dating app” that allows users to swipe through the profiles of people in their defined geographic area. Your profile consists of your first name, your age, up to six pictures of yourself, a record of how long ago you were active on the app, and how far away you are from the user viewing your profile. Tinder users swipe right if they like your profile, and swipe left when they don’t. You do the same to other Tinder users. If you and another user both swipe right on each other’s profiles, you’ll be given a seratonin-stimulating notification that you’ve gotten a match, and have the opportunity to chat.

The app is populated with all types of people with all types of reasons for being on it. Some people want to hook up, some want to casually date, some want a serious relationship. While the fact that the matching process is almost entirely aesthetic, rather than something in the vein of eharmony’s heavily qualitative matching algorithm, some argue that the ability to quickly filter through people is a time-saving way for a busy-professional to date. Initially filtering through people based on their appearance is no different than what already happens in daily life, the argument goes, but instead of being limited by the people who are physically at the same bar/coffee shop/trail in Runyon canyon, you have a pool of thousands of people that you can filter through with great speed and without any fear of rejection or shame. The experience is made more pleasant by the fact that you only get the positive reinforcement of finding out you have a match, and don’t receive notifications in the thousands of cases when someone rejects your profile, which would be soul-destroying.

The app’s popularity is further aided by the fact that it’s gamified— so much so that the graphic that appears after you get a match gives you the option to either “start chatting” or to “keep playing.”

The Allure of Swiping

Swiping through Tinder profiles is mindless and addictive, and holds with it the promise of finding someone who may agree to sleep with you. But for the aspiring anthropologist or hopeful romantic there’s also the intrigue of getting a brief view into someone else’s life. You get to meet people you would have never otherwise met, garnering insight into lives into which you would have never had insight. You get to imagine the possibilities with a new person who, for the time being, might just be perfect. You may be single and alone— but Tinder furnishes the illusion that you’re taking the smallest of steps towards changing that. Maybe the person in the profile you’re looking at is going to be the person you spend the rest of your life with. They probably won’t be, but right now, in this very moment, isn’t there a chance?

So you swipe and you swipe and you swipe, waiting to find the profile of that perfect match. It’s engineered in the same way as blackjack or poker— you keep wondering if the next profile is going to be the hand you’ve been waiting for, and keep saying “one more hand.”

Cultural and Psychological Ramifications

The Stigma Around Online Dating Doesn’t Exist Anymore. There was a time when online dating was kind of a weird, fringe thing to do— it was for recluses and nerds who didn’t have the social skills to navigate the real world. Online dating companies worked hard to combat this stigma, and eHarmony and match.com came more into the mainstream— a viable option for professional men and women racing against the biological clock. These attitudes have now been flipped on their heads. People have tinder profiles, they open the app out of idleness, and they prolifically date people they’ve met online. This is partly because there is no longer such a distinction between “online” and “real life.” It’s just that quite simply, we’re now always online.

The Paradox of Choice. You’re craving a cheeseburger. Two scenarios. Scenario one— You go to a restaurant that has one signature cheeseburger. Maybe you tell them to hold the mayo, but the burger comes, you eat the burger, you go home happy. Scenario Two. You know you want a burger, so you go to a restaurant that specializes in burgers. You’re presented with a menu of 20 different types of burgers with interesting names. A Tiki burger with Asian slaw, a Piggy Burger with bacon and caramelized onions, a California burger with avocado and swiss. You narrow it down to four options. You ask the waiter what he likes. He recommends the one with bacon, but you reply that you don’t eat bacon, an answer that awkwardly hangs in the air as it becomes clear to everyone that it was stupid of you to ask the waiter what he liked, because there’s no universe in which that information would actually be helpful to you. You end up picking a burger and happily eating it— but somehow, even though you had much greater latitude to get exactly the kind of burger you wanted in Scenario 2 than you had in Scenario 1, you go home less content. The multitude of choices creates higher expectations and actually can function to make you less happy with the outcome. If there’s one burger option, you eat it and leave happy. If there are a thousand burger options, there is an illusion that the perfect choice is attainable. Your expectation for “good enough” is subverted by an expectation of the perfect fit. And once you get the burger, you’re left wondering whether you made the right decision— or if you could have ordered something better. This may sound like the thought process of an indecisive and obsessive lunatic, and the degree to which it’s in effect varies from case to case— but these are more or less the tenets of the Paradox of Choice, and it’s been shown that counterintuitive as it may be, more choices make us less happy. In case you haven’t seen my analogy coming from a mile away, the same thing can be said about modern online dating and the perceived and functional expansion of the dating pool. Tinder users are presented with endless options of potential mates— an overwhelming multitude of options that may prove paralyzing. This means that…..

There’s Always Someone Else. When you swipe left, another picture appears in its place. It’s endless. And it reduces people to their appearance and a few words of text. Think of the world that’s created— lonely people, endlessly judging their fellow single people, swiping and swiping and swiping. Sometimes I walk around, imagine Eleanor Rigby playing in my head, and watch people absently swiping away at their phones. It’s hard not to feel miserable about the state of humanity. This practice is not without deep psychological consequences. Our attention spans keep getting shorter. My parents thought Michael Bay movies and MTV were signs of the shortening attention spans of Generation Y. They were— but an N’Sync music video seems borderline Proustian when contrasted against the 7-second vines that now litter the online media landscape. In the same vein, Tinder has enabled our shortening attention span with regard to people. We can change the channel the moment we lose interest. You match, chat for a bit, and if you lose interest you start looking for the next match. Or you decide to meet— maybe things go well and you meet again— but then when things get dull or hit a rough patch, you can fire up Tinder and start searching again. Our phones fill with transient phone numbers. We stop even bothering to save them with accompanying names in our contact lists— from the moment they’re in our phones, they seem destined to just eventually fade way. We no longer feel a need to endure any discomfort in a new relationship, because it’s so easy for both parties to change the channel and go back to the well. But….

It Can’t Be Healthy to Think This Way. What if I gave you ten pictures and told you to sort them. Put the pictures of the people you thought were attractive in a pile on the right, put pictures of people you thought were unattractive on the left. That’s just a task. No impact on how your brain works or your world view. But what if I had you do that for five five-minute intervals throughout the day, every day, thousands of times every year. And when you moved a picture to the right, “Like” was subliminally written in green letters, and when you moved a picture to the left, “Nope” was subliminally written in red letters. Over time, this could do some serious rewiring. You’d start to think of the world in binaries— “like,” “nope,” “like,” “nope. You know what else thinks of the world in binaries? Computers. But this rewiring is what makes Tinder….

The Perfect Dating Company. Just as cigarette companies have the paradoxical problem of killing their customers, dating companies have the ironic problem by which the service they provide to their customers poses an existential threat to their business (ie, if they do their job, their customers find mates and don’t need them anymore). But I wonder if Tinder is making us so fucked up, that it will have the opposite effect. The prospect of endless options gives people the illusion that they can find perfection. The mindset that there’s always someone waiting in the wings makes it easy to swipe someone left at any time. Tinder may be a platform that matches people together while condemning them to perpetual singledom. So Tinder provides customers with the service of matching them with other people, without the issue that they’ll no longer need Tinder after they’ve been matched. It’s the perfect business model, except for one small issue: Tinder doesn’t actually have any customers. It has 50 million users, but they all enjoy the service for free. And a customer, by definition, is someone who receives a good/service/product/idea in exchange for something else of value.

Monetization

Tinder grew really quickly because 1) it seemed like a fun hot-or-not game that could have the real world impact of getting you laid, 2) it became a cultural phenomenon that people talked about and made people who didn’t have it want to try, and 3) because it was free. Tinder’s active users engage with it a lot— more than facebook, more than instagram, more than twitter. I guess it turns out that when given the option, the platform that allows people to find a stranger that might be willing to sleep with them beats out the platforms that allow them to see their friends’ photos, random thoughts, and trending news articles. All of a sudden, Tinder had 50 million users, and over a billion “swipes” per day. The product was honed and humming, the user base was strong, and Tinder was the dominant dating app. Some “micro-tinders” had emerged for people looking for something more specific who wanted to cut through the noise— JSwipe for Jews, Meld for black people, Hinge for yuppies, The League for elitist douchebags/gold-diggers — but not in a way that disrupted Tinder’s dominance.

In other words— it was time to monetize.

So yesterday, Tinder unveiled its premium version. Some new buttons, some new rules, and some previews of what’s to come:

The “Undo” Button. Tinder has announced the premium version will feature an “undo” button, which will allow users to go back to the profile they’ve just viewed “in case they’ve changed their minds.” This is a euphemistic use case, as “changed their minds” is much more likely to be “was swiping so carelessly that they realize they may have accidentally swiped past someone who was kind of hot.” The “undo” button is a good feature that some other “micro-tinders” already offer, and which any UX person could have told them to include within five minutes of using the app. But it’s not going to make someone switch to a premium version. In fact, telling someone who tries to use the “undo” button that it’s part of the premium version and will cost them $9.99 a month is probably more likely to elicit the reaction of “fuck you” than “where do I sign up.”

Tinder Passport. You have a business trip coming up next week. You’ve got a plush suite at the Four Seasons and a phat per diem. All you need now is to find someone to share it with. Enter Tinder Passport, a Tinder Premium feature that allows you to “swipe in a different city.” All you need to do is click on the location button, change the city you’re “swiping in,” and it’ll be like you’re there— you can swipe in Miami, Paris, New York— all from the comfort of a rooftop bar in Los Angeles. This is the world the visionaries at Tinder have imagined for us, all for $9.99 per month. Tinder Passport is an intriguing feature, and the only new feature that may actually compel people to sign up for Tinder Premium-- doing to Business hotels the same thing Tinder did to the Sochi Olympic Village.

Limiting the number of Likes. The free version will now limit the number of “likes” users get to deploy each day. In its press release, Tinder’s rationale for limiting likes was to combat spammers, which “like” every profile they come across. But limiting likes seems like it would be a way to degrade the free version of the product to make the premium version more enticing. If Tinder has to degrade the free version of its product in order to push people to premium, that doesn’t bode well. The “freemium” business model works when the premium version adds greater value on top of the free product. But people don’t like being asked to pay for something they had grown accustomed to enjoying for free.

Ads. The only type of degradation to a free product that people have been conditioned to accept is the proliferation of advertisements. This is likely Tinder’s most promising source of income, and the irritant most likely to push users to the premium model. We’ve been primed to accept that the free versions of things have ads, and that premium versions don’t. You like spotify? Use it for free. You find the ads annoying? Go premium. And for the right advertiser, Tinder might prove to be an enticing platform. Tinder knows a user’s age, location, and based on the ratio of likes to dislikes a user gets, it actually has an idea of how attractive each user is. If it crosses the privacy line of mining keywords from its users’ chats, Tinder could potentially figure out other interests too. Maybe after someone gets a match, a local bar can put itself forward as a date idea. Maybe after a woman hasn’t had a match after twenty swipes, a cosmetics company will prey on her swelling sense of insecurity and put forth their product as a way to make her more beautiful. There’s the potential here for some incredible manipulation. Neuroscientists studying the effects of a Tinder match on the brain’s receptivity to buying things are about to get some sweet, corporate grant money.

Why Tinder Premium Isn’t Going to Work

When you have 50 million engaged users, there has to be a way to monetize. Is a $9.99/ month premium subscription (4.99/month for users under 30) the best way for Tinder to go about it? Some potential pitfalls.

Millennials don’t buy things. It’s the biggest problem facing every internet company targeting the 18-30 demographic— millennials don’t pay for stuff. Maybe they’ll pay for content. But they’ve been conditioned to believe social platforms should be monetarily free. There’s a vague understanding that what they save in money, they surrender in their attention, their data, their privacy, their ability to think freely, and small pieces of their soul, which they voluntarily parcel off piece by piece and post by post. But in the “pay for this premium digital service” sense, millennials don’t pay for things. And insofar as they were happily using Tinder for free, I wonder if an undo button and Tinder Passport is going to change their outlook. The question looming over Tinder, and over all companies that target millennials is…

Have your target customers ever paid for something like this before? You can have a great product with a great story that comes along at the perfect time. But turning that into a viable business is going to be an uphill battle if your users have never before paid for the kind of service you’re offering. Tinder calls itself a “matchmaking” app (Sean Rad called it a “social discovery app,” a vision fraught with problems that I won’t go into in this post). At the time of writing, the Tinder website boasts the facilitation of 26 million matches per day, and 6 billion matches to date, so “matchmaking” is a safe and innocuous term to describe the literal function of the app, while being ambiguous enough for users to interpret it how they want. People looking to date seriously can conceive of Tinder as a modern-day Yentl, ie, “matchmaking” in the sense of “matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch.” Those who want to use Tinder as a sort of “hook up” app can read “matchmaking” in the more coded sense, ie, “if it were a ‘Dating’ app they wouldn’t be calling it a ‘matchmaking’ app.” But not owning up to its true purpose might hurt Tinder’s ability to get people to pay for it. Instead of selling a use-case and a lifestyle, it’s leaving customers to figure this out for themselves.

Match.com, OKCupid, and eHarmony call themselves “online dating sites,” with eharmony marketing itself as the “#1 trusted relationship-minded dating site.” There’s no confusion here— these are platforms for people serious about finding a long-term relationship. And insofar as they’re for people with a serious purpose, it makes sense for them to charge a serious fee. In the context of these dating sites, the membership fee improves the product because it doubles as a vetting device that ensures everyone in the community is serious about being part of it and has at least a modicum of disposable income. Being a premium member improves the way you’re perceived by the rest of the community, because it affirms you ascribe to the community’s values. Premium membership on these sites also offers a suite of features that make it easier and more pleasant to use the site. These dating sites are able to charge a subscription fee of $10 to $60 per month.

But the traditional dating site fee logic unravels for Tinder. Premium membership doesn’t unlock a lot of value, and having it doesn’t offer any positive distinction within the Tinder community. Tinder is popular because there’s a sense that it’s a ridiculous game. A lot of profiles feature a bashful disclaimer, like “we can tell our children we met at whole foods,” or “I’m only on this to see what all the fuss was about.” No one likes the person who takes the ridiculous game too seriously though, and that’s what premium membership equates to. It’s difficult to see Tinder Premium being a product people feel good about spending money on, because they won’t like the story it makes them tell themselves. Eharmony and match.com are the kind of things people might make a New Year Resolution to join. Tinder is the kind of thing people make a New Years Resolution to stop using.

Only One Real Use Case. The only consumer who might see value in Tinder Premium is the traveling business person who’s excited about the aforementioned “Passport” function (or the person with an anthropological bent who wants to see what dating is life in cities around the world), but that might act as a badge of douchiness, and selling douchiness isn’t a business model. I wonder if there will be enough of these use cases to power the entire business, especially at a price of $9.99 per month. I imagine Tinder considered the Whatsapp model of charging a low yearly rate of $2 per year, but decided there was so much friction as soon as they asked people to get out their credit cards and pay for anything premium that they might as well just gun for the power users who might have the gall to bill it as a business expense.

Better Versions of the “Premium” Product

It strikes me that Tinder has not yet offered the service that would create the most value, and which people would most likely pay for: the ability to optimize your profile. Imagine Tinder allowed you to access data that you could use to improve your profile. You could see how long people looked at your profile, what pictures they responded positively to, and the number of people who liked you. You’d be given the tools to methodically conduct A/B testing on your profile, and increase the number of matches you get. Even better, Tinder could create an algorithm that did this for you. The premium offering of the app isn’t a matter of allowing you to swipe more recklessly— effectively what’s being offered with the expanded geographic pools and an unlimited number of “likes”— it’s to allow you to more efficiently get more of what you want, ie, more matches.

When a company has 50 million engaged users, a lot of smart MBAs doing jobs in marketing, analytics, and strategy, and a ruthless board that doesn’t accept failure, it’s hard to bet against it. That said, I wonder if the relationship between Tinder and IAC may hold the company back. Tinder’s founder, Sean Rad, had envisioned Tinder as a social discovery app. But IAC fired him last year and for now, Tinder has been placed within IAC’s “match group,” a portfolio of dating sites that also includes match.com, okcupid, people media, meetic, speeddate.com, and chemistry.com. For now, Tinder’s brand sits firmly in the dating space. In its current form, it’s difficult to imagine people taking it seriously enough to use it for professional networking or friendships. But there’s a version where Tinder spins off, and a white-labeled platform is branded for different uses. “Campfire” could be used to find roommates. “Fuel” could be used for professional networking. “Brush” could be for finding activity partners, “Burnout could be used for finding people to smoke weed with, and “Ember” could be a matchmaking site for widows.

But it would seem that if Tinder is cornered into IAC’s dating portfolio, a value-creating pivot into other forms of social discovery, mobile commerce, and the swipification of the world may be harder to execute. If IAC wants Tinder to realize its full potential, the move could be to spin it off entirely. But if IAC views Tinder as just one segment of the Match Group ecosystem, it could be perfectly content to have it remain shallow and frivolous, with the emphasis being to migrate customers from Tinder to IAC’s other apps.

Possible Backlashes

I can’t end this post without wondering where Tinder is leading us.

In some ways, the potential for single people to find each other using dating apps seems like a new normal. On the other, it seems like there are two potential backlashes.

This May Start to Feel Too Shallow. The obvious backlash against a shallow, aesthetic approach to dating is a qualitative, heavily algorithmic one. If the Law of Accelerating Returns applies to dating companies, then it’s not hard to imagine a version of the not-too-distant future in which dating algorithms are refined to the point where they really work. Like, to the point where a dating site can say, “we guarantee that we can find you a soulmate better than you can.” If that happens, then secular culture may even more explicitly acknowledge that single life is divided into two periods. The period in which you use a hook-up app to “get it out of your system,” and the period in which you use a qualitative matchmaking app that finds you a life-partner with 99% accuracy. We may come to a point where an app will say, “that’s your person.”

We’re Going to Value How We Meet. In the March 2012 post, Jeremy Lin and The Authentic Moment , I noted that algorithms and the increasing predictability of things make us that much more excited about authentic moments and the anomalies that defy our expectations. A lot of factors went into creating the mania around Jeremy Lin, which came to be termed “Linsanity,” but the thing that gave it an almost mythical quality was that Lin had been passed over by so many teams, and now seemed to be erupting out of nowhere. In an elaborate, high-stakes system that was designed to identify talent, players this good weren’t supposed to fall through the cracks. Lin’s limitations have since been exposed (he’s a good pick and roll player in the right system, but tops out as a back-up guard)— but for a stretch of games in 2012, he took the league by storm.

There have been other times over the last few years when I thought about writing follow-ups to the Jeremy Lin post. There was 2012, when Nate Silver used his algorithm to correctly predict the electoral outcome in all fifty states— an algorithm triumphing over gut-feeling punditry. There was March 2014 when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 seemingly disappeared from the radar without a crash site ever being found. In an age of drone strikes and NSA’s tracking of our metadata, the idea that a plane could completely fall off the map seemed impossible. And then Tinder happened.

The more technology connects us and predicts our behavior, the more we place a premium on authentic experiences.

If we’re meeting each other through apps and algorithms, we lose out on the stories about how me met. Already, there’s a sense of loss accompanying this phenomenon— that’s what people mean when they jest on their Tinder profiles “we can tell people we met at Whole Foods.” They’re bemoaning the fact that they don’t get to have their “meet-cute”— that story where they were reaching for a Jane Austen novel at their neighborhood bookstore and you were reaching for it at the same time. But how could they? Bookstores have been killed off, and you’re not going to spot them drinking coffee from across amazon.com. Maybe dating activities had to migrate online, to compensate for the myriad offline opportunities that have vanished (see Putnam, Bowling Alone). Love works in mysterious ways, and the idea that a dating company will be able to algorithmically point us towards our perfect match still feels a bit sci-fi. But whether that day is close or far away, we are beginning to see a growing emphasis placed on how we meet. In a world in which we’re paralyzed by the Paradox of Choice, these stories act as signs that the choice we made was the right one. A good story can validate one choice over another, and can even allow us to eschew responsibility all together, as we claim “the universe chose for me.”

It’s not difficult to imagine a company creating experiences to simulate meet-cutes for people who met in mundane ways.

Perhaps that’s a premium product Tinder users would pay for.

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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The Golden Rope

My friend got a call from his agent this afternoon— there was a Multichannel Youtube Network that was seeking to get into scripted content. They had watched the movie he directed and wanted to meet him.

Multichannel Networks have been taken somewhat seriously for a few years, but started to be taken really seriously in 2014 when Disney acquired Maker Studios for $500 million. At the time of the acquisition, Maker had 5.5 billion views per month spread over 55,000 channels, making it the biggest Multichannel Network in the world. Disney reasoned that $500 million was worthwhile even if Maker was only leveraged as a marketing channel to push Disney products and promote its films. The upside of the acquisition was that Maker might become a legitimate distribution platform for original programming in its own right, that Disney now had access to a huge new cadre of young stars to slot into its machine, and that it was a hedge if people further migrated away from traditional forms of media and distribution.

No matter that most of the content coming out of these channels is short-attention span nonsense. We’re talking people goofing off in front of a camera, makeup tutorials, gamers doing video game walkthroughs, and guys just playing video games and ignoring the camera altogether, because them playing video games with their friends is just that entertaining. Do you remember when you were younger and you and two friends wanted to play video games, but the game was only for two players, so one person would always have to be sitting out and watching the other two play? The idea was that you’d watch them and then you’d have a chance to play. But now the “watching them play” activity is a popular form of entertainment— like really popular— like the-most-popular-YouTube-Channel-in-the-world popular— a channel called PewDiePie, which at the time of writing has 34.5 million subscribers— or about a thousand times more people than saw my friend’s movie. In the Cable TV age, a girl talking through how she puts on makeup for different occasions would have been the stuff of late night Public Access TV. Now it can have millions of viewers, and can be spun off into millions of dollars of revenue from cosmetic companies who have quickly realized this is the most effective form of advertising available to them.

Cosmetic companies used to pay market research firms to find them an appropriate celebrity spokesperson. They’d then pay the desired celebrity millions of dollars to be in their commercials, and would pay an advertising firm to do media buys during the right TV shows so that the right target audience would see the commercials. They’d cross their fingers that the commercial would reach enough people in the targeted demographic to make the whole thing worthwhile. Now they just pay a boatload of money to youtube stars like Michelle Phan to use their products in her makeup walkthroughs, and they know that her 7.5 million followers (at the time of writing) seek her out and tune into her channel for the sole purpose of finding out what makeup they should be using and how to apply it. Compared to the old process of making commercials and doing media buys, this is shooting fish in a barrel. And they don’t have to go out and do a top-down selection process that they hope their customers will like— the marketplace does the selection process for them, bottom up.

These Multichannel Networks have very quickly become valuable enterprises worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’ve emerged so quickly, with such a terrifying aura that they may be the future of entertainment, that traditional entertainment companies have been forced to snatch them up— if for no other reason than to hedge against yet another force that threatens to render them obsolete and to have a seat at the table before it’s too late. Disney’s acquisition of Maker Studios set off a series of acquisitions that included AT&T and Chernin Group buying a stake in Fullscreen Media for $300 million and Dreamworks buying AwesomenessTV for $117 million.

And yet the current model doesn’t seem to be enough for the Multichannel Networks— they want to move into scripted content. So they’ve had interns pour through commercials, music videos, and indie movies of the past few years to find up and coming directors. That’s how they found their way to my friend. There’s just one problem. Scripted Content is really hard to do, and most companies that try to get into it fail. Insofar as we’re in a “golden age of television,” you can argue that more companies are successfully producing good content than ever. But it can also be a sinkhole that spells doom.

A lot of people would have gone into a meeting with a Multichannel Network and given them a pitch, showing them the respect they believe their new prominence and power affords them. But my friend questioned whether this slick, out-of-his-depth 30 year-old development exec with a plush new Director of Scripted Content title—and his two even less polished colleagues— had any idea about the challenges of what they were trying to get into.

After exchanging pleasantries with them, my friend got straight to the point.

“There’s a story,” he laughed. “About an old fisherman who lived by a lake. One night, this fisherman went out to the lake, and caught a golden fish, a magical fish that could talk. The fish pleaded with the old man to let him go. He told him, ‘Let me go, and I’ll make it worth your while.’ ‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth?’ the man asked. The fish realized the man would never trust him. “Put your hand in the water, and you’ll find a treasure,’ this fish promised. The man looked down into the water, and felt something floating to the surface— he pulled on it, and found himself holding a golden rope. He started to pull the rope up, yards and yards of golden rope that he could sell at the local market. He could make a fortune. ‘You have your treasure,’ the fish said. ‘Now let me go.’ But the old man recoiled— ‘No,’ the old man said, ‘I can sell you at market for a good price. You and the rope.’ He put the fish in a cage, and kept pulling at the rope. But he became so fixated on pulling the rope, he didn’t notice the amount of rope that had already collected in the boat. Pounds of heavy, golden rope. And he didn’t notice the boat had started to sink into the water until it was too late.”

The young executive looked at him. “Okay, so— okay I like that, that’s interesting. Is that based on a book?

“Is this original or adapted from something?” his slightly younger colleague tried to clarify.

“It’s a folk tale.”

“In a book? I guess I’m just trying to figure out the rights situation.”

“No, it’s—“

Another executive that had previously sat quietly-- though he might have been a late-in-life intern trying to find his way in the entertainment industry after leaving an unfulfilling career in accounting-- piped in. “I like it. I think I’d want to hear a bit more about the world. A bit more world-building.” The other executives nodded. They were spitballing now. This was fast-paced Hollywood stuff.

“And stakes. I get that he’s sinking in the water at the end, but maybe more on the fisherman’s wants? And just, higher stakes, like— I don’t know, this is the bad version, but like, if he doesn’t catch enough fish he’ll lose his house.”

“I think that’s good, losing his house, maybe losing his son or family member,” said the slightly younger colleague.

“Maybe his son is going to be sold into slavery if he doesn’t catch the fish. I mean that’s the bad version, but something like that.”

“Yeah I think higher stakes, and definitely tie it to family. And I think you definitely want to meet his family.”

“This wasn’t a pitch.” “Oh— it’s— because I think it’s interesting.”

“Why do you want to make scripted content?” my friend asked. “Right now, you lucked into the perfect situation. Your company sits back, does nothing, and people watch these youtube stars put on make up and play video games. And you just take a cut of their money.”

“Well, scripted content— it’s--”

“Really hard to do well. And getting replaced by superhero and young adult franchises. And by the kind of nonsense on your channels. Why replace something that works with something that usually doesn’t? Is it ambition? Greed? Prestige? Are you afraid that people will get tired of watching teenagers do their hair? You say you liked my movie because of its humanity. You have humanity. A man lifting weights is humanity. A girl shaving her pubic hair is humanity. You start a search for a director who can approximate this humanity, it is impossible. You try to echo humanity, you’ll end up with an echo chamber. It’ll feel hollow. People know the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity. You are the man in the boat, who caught a fish, who exchanged the fish for the golden rope, who will keep pulling on the rope until his boat sinks and he ends up with nothing.”

“Well I think we’ve heard enough here,” the young executive said. “We all saw what just happened here today. We knew we liked your movie. We knew you didn’t have a car and still had an iPhone 4, and didn’t know who we were before this meeting today. I think you’re the perfect point of view to move us into scripted content.”

“Terrific,” my friend relented.

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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I Held a Torah Today

Today, on her 13th birthday, my cousin Mariah became a bat mitzvah. It was the first Bar/t Mitzvah event in my dad’s family since I became a bar mitzvah 16 years ago. Mariah's mother (my aunt) June hadn’t previously belonged to a synagogue and had decided to base her choice of synagogue entirely on proximity to her house. And so it was that my family descended on a conservative Ashkenazi synagogue in Berkeley.

I’ve identified myself as agnostic for a while— ethnically Jewish— complete with grandparents who immigrated from Russia to escape pogroms, a bar mitzvah ceremony, a dog I got for Hannukah when I was seven and named Maccabee, some anxiety issues— but not religiously Jewish.

I began to move away from the Jewish religion near the beginning of college. A few high school history classes had been all it took to push me to the precipice, as I realized that all religions were born of historical circumstances and were trying to get at the same questions. I think that’s a critical inflection point in anyone’s spiritual journey— the moment when you become fully aware of the existence of other faiths that have beliefs incompatible with your own and need to reconcile the resulting zero-sum framework. With the right balance of blind faith and close-mindedness, the conclusion could be “I”m right and everyone else is wrong.” But the sensible person who hasn’t been overly sheltered will conclude at that point that humans have been trying to answer the same questions for thousands of years, and that religion helped to explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena (with the creation, interpretation, and spread of belief systems also having a vast array of other purposes, i.e., wealth, power, war, order, nationhood, oppression, etc). Or at least that’s what I concluded. So for me, the realization that we don’t have answers is agnosticism.

My family mirrored my path away from Judaism, though perhaps for different reasons. It was my mother who had always driven the Jewish culture of my family. Both of her parents had been conservative Jews, and had closely observed its traditions. She had memories from her childhood of setting the table at Rosh Hashannah with her mom’s finest silverware, and it was important to her that at the very least we observed the high holy days and passover. We lit candles on Hannukah and she would make latkes, which I always looked forward to. But my mom’s commitment to Judaism wavered after she got cancer. She had melanoma when she was fifty— now 17 years ago. She had surgery, but then within months the cancer came back. She had surgery again, but again it came back. At this point the doctors were suggesting chemo and warning that she had a small chance of survival. She may have turned to Judaism at some point during her battle with cancer, but I don’t think it really had a lot of answers for her. She tried an experimental vaccine, worked with a holistic healer, and became more spiritual. She somehow survived the cancer, and in the course of doing so, her thoughts about energy, the soul, and our place in the world underwent a transformation. My parents' membership to Wilshire Boulevard Temple came up for renewal, and they decided to let it lapse.

A new wave of children came into my family while I was in high school. When I was 16, my dad’s youngest sister June had a daughter. Two years later, his younger sister Robin adopted a son, and five years after that my sister had a daughter. All of a sudden, there was a cohort of young cousins who found themselves growing up together. My dad had been raised celebrating any holiday that offered an excuse for eating and gift-giving, and so my family decided it wouldn’t hurt to gingerly acknowledge Christmas— with an emphasis on getting the family together when everyone had time off, eating good food, and spoiling this new wave of children with gifts.

Observing Christmas meant telling my young cousins and niece about Santa Claus. My dad enjoyed creating the illusion of Santa’s rushed foray into our home, complete with cookie crumbs, ashen footprints, a tea and coffee stained note, and an empty glass of milk. At first we got a small, ironic tree, to show that we weren’t taking it too seriously. It was just an ironic way of indicating where the presents should be placed. But within a few years my mom had found a tree she liked having in the window of our living room. And she decided she liked the aesthetic of white Christmas lights, and a few years later, of tasteful ornaments. Suddenly Christmas morning was a calendared event, complete with family flying in from out of town, excited children ripping presents open and believing in Santa Claus, and their distressed parents taking refuge in spiked eggnog. We now celebrated Christmas. My mom joked at one point that her mother would be rolling over in her grave— but the holiday was a net-positive for my family, and it was hard to argue that the pragmatic and secular view wasn’t “why not?” Everyone took comfort in the bit of Jewish defiance offered in a Christmas breakfast spread of bagels and lox.

June had been the only one of my father’s siblings to have a bat mitzvah, and had offered her daughter the same opportunity, perhaps more as an exercise in character building than in any kind of religiosity. Despite having had a secular childhood, Mariah had decided to do so, and for the past few years had attended hebrew school. My family now found itself convened in Berkeley and for the first time in years, dusted off our Jewish hats-- both literal and figurative.

Our Judaism skills were rusty. We donned yarmulkes and talits and managed to more or less look the part, but make no mistake, we were tourists crashing their weekly Shabbat service. They tolerated our presence, but they weren’t about to contort themselves to help us follow along. Most business was conducted in hebrew. Like, the rabbi would say, “and now please turn to page 158 to follow along for the chablahabhcalhalcha,” and they’d start reading in hebrew for five to ten minutes. I tried to turn the pages of my prayer book when the people around me turned their pages, but I could never seem to get on the right page. For what it’s worth, there were a few prayers I remembered— the shema, the gevurot, and the torah and haftarah prayers had been so drilled into me that they are second nature now, even after fifteen years without saying them. I hoped the congregation would look at me as I effortlessly recited these prayers, as I was sure they’d be impressed with my Judaism skills.

Now this was a long service— we’re not talking about an easy-to-consume 90-minute reform Shabbat service. This went on for nearly three hours. I began to feel antsy, like a twelve year-old who starts to check the clock, people watch, and read unrelated passages in the prayer book to pass the time. I looked across the congregation to Mariah’s classmates— four rows of 13 year-old girls dolled up with makeup and sporting heels they hadn’t yet learned to walk in. I imagined they were at least as bored as I was, and that lacking my worldliness and maturity, they’d be doing something inappropriate to offset their boredom, like passing notes, or texting, or snapchatting— but they all seemed to be attentive— or at the very least they were looking at the bimah with glazed looks on their faces. I found myself amused at the fact that attendance at early morning Shabbat services has become a fixture of social life for seventh graders at private schools with sizable Jewish populations, as said attendance is the requisite for admission to the cool parties that follow that evening. I realized that the movement and assimilation of the Jewish diaspora into non-Jewish communities has set the stage for the bar mitzvah to be the greatest proselytization tool available to any of the major religions. What other religion has a mechanism that can draw malleable teenagers to their place of worship 15-20 times a year? If Jews proselytized, they’d have the kind of Trojan horse to drum up young, zealous converts that Christianity, Islam, and Scientology would kill for.

June had been given the opportunity to craft the program and bestow various honors to Mariah’s family and friends. My aunt Penny and two family friends opened the ark— an honor with minimal stress or responsibility. Others were tapped to receive aliyahs (rest in Peace Aaliyah, the talented female RnB singer who was taken from us too early, with whom the honor of reciting a blessing before the reading of the torah should not be confused), including my parents. My dad was game and tried to learn the blessing, but it’s admittedly a lot to learn in the span of a week, and he may or may not have leaned away from the microphone and mouthed “watermelon” a few times to make it through the prayer, relying on my mom, who herself found her voice quivering, to shepherd them through.

But after the ark was opened, the aliyahs were received, the torah and haftarah had been read, the interpretations of Mariah and those of the rabbi had been given, it was time for me to come up. June had given me one of the most high stakes honors of the service— I was to do the hagbah— the “lifting of the torah.” My sister had been tapped to do the gelilah— the dressing of the torah. I had never seen these honors performed before— they were Ashkenazi traditions, and all the previous bar mitzvahs I had attended had been in reform congregations. But I did know this— you cannot drop a torah. Like, that’s the most sacrilegious, unthinkable thing that you can do in a synagogue. The repentance required for doing so involves 40 years of fasting, or something like that. So suffice it to say I was nervous. Somehow, I had been assigned the only task that could have biblically dire consequences.

My sister and I were called up to the bimah and stood for a few minutes while the rabbi said a final prayer over the torah. My inclination was to mouth the words along with the congregation, but I quickly realized I had no idea what prayer was being said and that I’d be better off standing stone-faced and looking solemn. I noticed my mom looking at my sister and me, beaming. I was in a tailor-made blue suit, and my sister had also taken the occasion to look her best, serendipitously matching in a lighter shade of blue. She’s 5’10” and enjoys standing next to me, since I’m 6’3” and provide her an added air of daintiness. I imagine we appeared to be model children of Israel, or that’s what the tears welling up in my mother’s eyes suggested. Standing in yarmulkes in front of a congregation, it was probably easy to forget that this occasion had nothing to do with any achievement, accomplishment, or milestone of our own making.

Another rabbi, markedly less warm than the head rabbi, came over to me and asked in a whisper if I had done the hagbah before. “No,” I said sheepishly. “You’re so fucked,” he laughed. No, I’m kidding, he didn’t say that. He tried to explain to me what to do. I had watched a youtube video, and hoped that the rabbis would guide me through the process more proactively than they had guided us through the Shabbat service. Meanwhile, I began to eye the torah and wonder just how heavy this thing was going to be. My yarmulke started to weigh on my head, and my arms began to feel restricted under my suit. Five nights of crashing on my friend’s futon in the lead up to the bat mitzvah suddenly caught up to me, and I tried to surreptitiously crack my back and unclench my jaw. I wished I had gone to the bathroom before coming up to the bimah, as I now had the added distraction of wondering whether or not I needed to go to the bathroom, and had needlessly introduced the downside risk of pissing my pants. I don’t think I’ve pissed my pants since I was four years old, but this seemed like a moment during which a confluence of freak accidents might lead to SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENING.

Suddenly both rabbis had parted, clearing the way to the bimah and looking at me expectantly. Bimah, by the way, is the term for the podium—and I learned it from a wikipedia article half an hour ago.

I walked forward and eyed the most sacred book of my people. Some masterpiece of 84 sheets of parchment made from the skin of a kosher animal in a stringent process of tanning and curing, and sewn together with thread made from animal veins, inscribed with exactly 304,805 letters by a calligraphy expert who must take a ritual bath before beginning and must follow a series of commandments en route to completing it over a period of months, all so that the words allegedly passed on from God to Moses could reach me unaltered. I unrolled the scroll to reveal three sections of text, as I had been instructed by the rabbi/youtube video. I grasped the torah by the wooden rollers and shifted them over the back ridge of the bimah, allowing it to slide down halfway. I bent my knees and holding only the roller handles, lifted it straight in the air. It’s 25 pounds, but it’s an awkward, squirmy son-of-a-bitch with a high center of gravity. I had unrolled it a bit too much, so the rollers weren’t sufficiently taut and swung back and forth. But I steadied them, channeling my inner-guy-who-balances-spinning-plates-on-a-stick, and with small, cautious steps, pivoted around so that my back was turned to the congregation. Like Moses before me, I raised my arms, lifting the torah above my head, so that the text that had been read during the ceremony was there for all the congregation to behold. I had now steadied the torah, and feeling a rush of power that one inevitably gets when holding a religious text or royal baby in front of a congregation, I began to raise it even higher. But that’s when I was cut off. Sweating and crying tears of joy, I was guided by the rabbis to a nearby chair, where my sister began to dress the torah. She fastened a belt around it, and put on the cover, the breastplate, the pointer, and the crowns. I got up and the rabbis steadied me. “We may need to hire you to do this every week,” the warm rabbi said smiling. “Good job,” the beady-eyed rabbi relented.

I looked around and took in the gratitude of the congregants. I had showed them the words of the torah and hadn’t pissed my pants. And the torah had not been dropped. Not on my watch. I took my seat, pleased that I had done such an incredible job that the rabbi wanted me back in future weeks. It was only later that I realized this was likely the stock line he said to everyone.

We ate lunch at the reception after the service. “You and your sister seemed closer to God today,” my mom mused. Maybe part of her held out hope that some modicum of a Jewish flame still burns inside us. “Well, I can see how standing in front of an Ashkenazi congregation, wearing a talit and yarmulke, and holding a torah above my head could have certainly given that impression,” I countered. Still, it was nice for my family to be back in a synagogue for a day. I have no allusions that we won’t just go back to our secular, assimilated, Jewish-only-in-name lives. But thanks to the gentle reminder of our roots that Mariah’s bat mitzvah afforded us, maybe our Christmas celebration this year will be just a bit more ironic.

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useunknown · 10 years ago

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RHS Presents: Tech Ideas for 2015

We’re very entrepreneurial here at Righteous Harmony Society.

Side note: We like using the first person plural here at Righteous Harmony Society, because it makes us sound more official, and gives the sense that we’re going places, and that we have colleagues who challenge us, and that RHS isn’t just some guy sitting at a Starbucks in a tuxedo at 1:30 am on a Saturday.

2014 was an interesting year in tech. The social media age of the internet is coming to an end. The “sharing economy” is thriving, and is proving to be a “rental economy.” Mobile messaging has proven to be the new social. 2015 promises to be a year where the tech bubble is realized, as overvalued privately owned companies have IPO’s and create instability in public markets. With the promise of astronomical valuations and the perceived attainability of the “acquimerger,” Stanford MBAs and disgruntled Google employees are trawling craigslist for app ideas that fulfill ever-more obscure niches, and using proven ideas to disrupt every facet of your life. Airbnb for parking spaces. Uber for train travel. Salesforce for musicians. Priceline for movie tickets. Instagram for poetry. Square for BitCoin.

Not to be outdone, we at RHS have some open source business ideas of our own.

AirbnbnSublet

People are pitching the airbnb-ification of everything now— airbnb for shipping, airbnb for bikes, airbnb for parking spots— but perhaps the most obvious thing ripe for being airbnb’d has been right under our noses the whole time: airbnb for airbnb.

When the Super Bowl was held in East Rutherford in 2014, there wasn’t enough capacity to accommodate all the fans flying in to see the game. Airbnb hosts saw an opportunity to jack up their prices, and so on Airbnb, a week in a modest apartment was being marketed for as high as $12,000. Enter AirbnbnSublet, a platform which allows you to sublet your Airbnb bookings. Much like stock futures, AirbnbnSublet would allow enterprising people to rent Airbnbs far in advance of major events, and then sub-rent their airbnb bookings to people who haven’t had the foresight to lock in their accommodations in advance. Some might critique this as another middleman skimming value off the top of the relationship between lessor and lessee— but I see a more efficient market— and a mechanism for providing a steadier cashflow to airbnb hosts, who will get money now in exchange for providing accommodations later.

BlewSwipe

BlewSwipe is a unique social network where black and Jewish singles can mingle in a judgment-free zone. “Blew” is a symbolic portmanteau, which reflects the marriage of “Black” and “Jew.” Like Tinder, users create a profile with pictures and a brief description about themselves of up to 500 characters. They can move through the profiles of other users, “swiping left” if they’re not interested, and “swiping right” if they are. If two users match, they’ll be able to chat through the app’s chat platform. BlewSwipe acknowledges the tacit, inexplicable, but very real propensity for black and Jewish people to be attracted to each other, in an alliance of oppressed peoples that crystallized during the Civil Rights movement, and provides a place where this attraction can be explored without the noise of Jesus-loving sorority girls from Texas or narcissistic six-pack flexing Latinos.

Actors Code

Can actors be taught to code? Actors Code believes they can be.

Actors pay money for acting classes, because they believe it will help them hone their craft. They network, they go on auditions, they try to get roles in shorts and plays, and many of them work a job in the service industry that has flexible hours. 90% of these actors won’t end up making a living wage from acting. 60% of them will never actually be paid to act professionally, and will be spit out of Hollywood penniless and with no marketable skills.

That’s where Actors Code comes in (or enters stage right, if you will). A nonprofit funded by some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, Actors Code teaches actors to code for free. When they become an Actors Code Teammate (or ACT-er), they’ll be given free acting classes in exchange for putting in the time to code. Those who end up acting professionally will enjoy the peace of mind of having an additional skillset to fall back on. For the 90% of them who never achieve their goal, they’ll be poised to begin a stable career as a computer programmer, channelling all of that emotional energy and vulnerability into zeros and ones.

3Plan

89% of Americans say they would be interested in having a threesome, but only 4% have done so. You shouldn’t have to be a rapper, a Russian oligarch, a pornstar, or a crusty Englishman on a sex-tourism trip in Thailand to enjoy the thrill of a threesome. On 3Plan, users create a profile with pictures and up to 500 characters to talk about themselves. They can move through the profiles of other users, “swiping left” if they’re not interested, and “swiping right” if they are. If two users match, they’ll be able to chat through the app. But this is where 3Plan deviates from other “hot or not” dating apps. Once two users match, they can then “team up” and “seek out a third.” If they each swipe right on a user profile, and that user swipes right on their pairing, all three users will be allowed to chat and plan their threesome! Fielding a threesome has never been this easy.

GasSplit

Is general reciprocity dead? More and more, the answer is yes. The days of “can you spot me, I don’t have cash” was killed with the advent of VenMo, which allows friends to pass small payments back and forth over their cell phones. But one area in which reciprocity continues to be lax is driving. A lot of friends will alternate who drives, e.g. “you drove last time, I’ll drive this time.” But many of us have that friend who never does drive. The friend who’s foregoing car ownership because he’s decided he can uber most of the time and use you and a cadre of other friends to get him everywhere else.

On a road trip, splitting the cost of gas is an accepted norm— the driver will keep the gas receipts and at the end of the trip he’ll divide the total spent on gas by the number of people on the trip. But on shorter trips, asking for money seems petty, even if these short trips add up to the equivalent of a cross-country drive over the long-term.

Enter GasSplit, an app that will help friends to track the amount of gas they consume. Passengers with the GasSplit app will be connected to the car’s computer when they get into the car. For as long as they ride in the car, the car will tabulate the amount of gas consumed and calculate a cost based on prevailing gas prices in the area. The amount will be divided by the number of passengers, and passengers will then be given the option to venmo that amount to the driver.

What’s Next

We’ve all been at a party that’s beginning to wind down. But while some people prepare to go home, others begin to wonder: What’s Next? Even with group texts, there’s always a flurry of confusion about where people are going next. One of your friends is out on the patio chatting up a girl, another friend is in the bathroom. Everyone runs around trying to coordinate where they’re going after. Enter What’s Next, an app that helps everyone at a party stay in tune with what’s happening next.

How it works: At the beginning of a party, the party host creates a “What’s Next” chat area. Guests with the app are entered into the chat area when they arrive at the party, based on their geolocation. During the party, users can choose to follow other guests at the party, and hear their suggestions for “what’s next?” Once a user has ten followers, they achieve enough “social capital” to create an After Party Subgroup with a suggested activity or venue. Users can join the subgroup on the app, and then subsequently, in person.

Some nights, with robust enough usage, party chatter might actually migrate entirely onto the What’s Next app. And the after party might be contained in the What’s Next subgroup, such that people can interact by chatting through the app, rather than talking to each other in person, and can hang out in the Afterparty Subgroup rather than physically migrating to an afterparty.

But What’s Next has ambitions beyond mere after party planning— this could initiate the What’s-Nextification of the world. For a generation with shortening attention spans, this is the app that will allow people to always think about what they’ll be doing next, rather than enduring the present.

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useunknown · 11 years ago

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Graffiti Sublime Coffee: A Primer

Graffiti Sublime Coffee (“Graffiti”) is a coffee shop on the corner of La Brea and 2nd Street. It’s become a hub of creative energy, and a mecca for pairs of writing partners living in West Hollywood, the La Brea corridor and beyond.

The first thing you’ll notice when you walk into Graffiti is the whiteness. The walls, the floors, the tables, the ceiling beams and the ceiling—they’re all white. And it’s vast. The space stretches back almost half a city block, and the vaulted ceiling is nearly thirty feet high. It feels like it’s been converted from a large barn, or a warehouse, or a section of Noah’s arc. Natural light pouring in from the floor to ceiling windows make it feel almost ethereal. Whether you come to write, to study, to read, or to converse, you’ll feel when you walk into Graffiti that you’ve entered the best possible environment for getting it done.

And Graffiti knows it. Even as it is coffee that is ostensibly being bought, sold and consumed, (and some baked goods, juice, sandwiches, and salads made off-premise), Graffiti is really subletting its space. It’s running a glorified co-working space, where patrons launder money through coffee to pay its rent.

Which leads me to the next few things you’ll notice your first time at Graffiti.

Holy sh-t these drinks are expensive.

A cup of black coffee costs $4.35. They can partially get away with this because it’s a “pour over,” which means hot water is painstakingly poured through a filter to make your personal cup of coffee to order. It takes a few minutes, as the barista makes a show of pouring hot water into a special filter in concentric circles. There is a certain richness in the flavor of pour-over coffee, and this combined with the time it takes to make it almost convinces you that something special has taken place. Such that when your friend says “Did you really just spend $4.35 on a cup of black coffee,” you find yourself saying “yeah but it’s a pour over.”

Of course, the snobbery and performance of the “pour over” are smoke and mirrors. To distract you from the fact that you just paid $4.35 for a cup of coffee. And from the fact that a $2 cup of brewed coffee isn’t an option on the menu. And from the fact that this was never really about coffee at all.

Other drinks follow the same pattern. An iced vanilla latte is $5.60. A cup of tea is $4.10. Bottles of cold-pressed juices are available for $10 a pop. I’ve been told that an iced coffee and a shot of espresso are the only drinks available for less than $4, and they’re not even listed on the menu. The baked goods are similarly expensive. Cookies, croissants, fonuts (gluten-free doughnuts)—they’re all priced at above $4.

Holy sh-t these servings are small

Perhaps the most irksome thing about the astronomical prices is what they give you in return. The drinks are good, but not great. The baked goods are mediocre at best. But the main thing you’ll notice about the drinks at Graffiti is their size.

Most coffee shops have arrived at the multiple-size paradigm. This notion is touched on in the RHS post Coffee Bean Part I: Do You Want Anything Else With That. A store assigns a base price for the small size of an item, and then steers customers towards “upsizing.” The customers reason they can achieve greater value by getting a larger size (ie, I get 30% more product for just another 10% of the price). The notion of upsizing will either be stated explicitly by the cashier or implicitly by displaying the information on the menu. For the business, the dirty secret is that giving a larger serving costs basically nothing, so the marginal increase in cost is almost pure profit.

But a funny thing happens when a coffee shop realizes 80% of its customers are there to enjoy the space. Instead of trying to sell a larger drink at a slightly higher cost, Graffiti has taken an approach more in line with a restaurant or a bar. It doesn’t want to sell you more of a drink you were already going to buy. It wants to sell you an entire drink that you otherwise weren’t going to buy. You know that offensively priced $4.35 cup of coffee you bought before you sat down? Graffiti believes it can sell you another one of them before you leave.

So instead of having drinks come in sizes of “small,” “medium,” or “large,” Graffiti only offers one 12-oz size. This is the same volume as the smallest available (a “tall”) size at Starbucks. It doesn’t take a long time to go through a 12-oz drink, and once you have, it won’t be long before you start to think about getting another.

Internet Usage—a race against time

There was a time when wireless internet was a premium technology. When I went to college in 2004, I had an Ethernet cable that I carried around with me in my laptop bag, and the idea was that if I sat next to an Ethernet port, I could plug in the cable, run it to laptop, and surf the information super highway. But by some new telecommunications sorcery, places started to crop up where I could access the internet wirelessly. It was as if the air was enchanted.

Starbucks used to offer a subscription service for wireless internet access in its stores. But as wireless internet and data plans became cheaper, other coffee shops realized they could offer wireless internet to differentiate themselves and entice customers away from Starbucks. Starbucks was ultimately forced to concede that free wireless internet had become the norm, and it began to offer free wireless internet in its US stores in 2010.

When you pay for your drink at Graffiti, the cashier will ask you if you want internet access. If you’re going to be working on your laptop, the answer to that question is probably “yes.” They’ll print out a receipt with the randomly generated name of an actor on it spelled with a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, which will serve as your individualized password. The barista will remind you the password is case sensitive and that it’s good for ninety minutes. Sure enough, you’ll log onto the internet to find a landing page with a timer that reads 1:29—the countdown has already begun. If your time expires and you need more internet access, you’ll have to buy another drink. And that’s going to run you at least another $4.

At no point is Graffiti’s rigid business logic more apparent. It is leasing you blocks of time in its space. The business model probably counts on a minimum of $5 per person per two hours on the premises.

That said, as long as you’re not coming to Graffiti to do research, the internet rationing can actually be a positive thing. It forces you to not log in to access the internet until you really need it, and being forced to work offline eliminates distractions.

“No Outside Food Or Drinks”

The drinks are all 12 ounces, nothing on the menu is less than $4, and internet access is allotted in 90 minute-increments with every purchase.

But of all the things Graffiti has put in place to elicit customers to buy multiple drinks, the starkest and most incredible is its “No Outside Food or Drinks” policy. Most restaurants and venues that hope to sell you their food or drinks have a version of this policy in place, but never has it been enforced with greater resolve, with the possible exception of the TSA agents that confiscate liquids and gels at airports. Graffiti has identified outside food and drinks as the thing most likely to stop you from actuating that second drink purchase. Insofar as its business model is predicated on getting people to buy multiple items, it considers OF&D to be an existential threat, and deals with them accordingly.

If you are nibbling on an energy bar or taking a swig from a water bottle that you’ve brought in from the outside world, you’ll soon find yourself encircled by Graffiti’s Gestapo and taken to a back room. The food or beverage item will be confiscated, and your possession of the item will be used as probable cause to search the rest of your belongings. In extreme cases, you may be forced to regurgitate the food and beverage you’ve consumed in order to recalibrate you to the level of hunger or thirst you would have had without the aid of your outside item, so that said needs can only be addressed with the purchase of Graffiti products.

Don’t Show Up Hungry

Seeing as you can’t bring in outside food or drinks, it’s probably a good idea for you to arrive at Graffiti well-fed and well-hydrated. That probably sounds counterintuitive, as Graffiti technically sells food and drinks. Maybe you’re wondering, “why can’t I just satisfy my hunger and quench my thirst by buying food and drinks at Graffiti?” The answer is that you can—it’ll just come at a great cost.

Adequate salads and sandwiches are available for $7.00-$9.00, which remarkably is less than the cost of a bottle of “cold-pressed” juice. On the surface, this is a perfectly fair price for a sandwich or salad—it almost may seem like a bargain. That’s until you realize the servings are about one-third the size of a normal sandwich or salad. Extrapolating these prices into adequate serving sizes, you realize these sandwiches and salads are actually costing the equivalent of $21.00-$27.00.

So your best option for food is to get it somewhere else. Halfway up the block towards 1st street, Tinga serves good Mexican food. Sycamore Kitchen also has food of the salad and sandwich variety, but they’re better and come in bigger portions. For a nuclear option, Trader Joe’s is a block away and has wraps for as low as $4—yes, that’s cheaper than what you’d pay at Graffiti for a cup of coffee.

Water in the Desert

If you ask for a glass of water, Graffiti will begrudgingly give it to you—in a four-ounce plastic cup. If you ask for a refill, they’ll do so begrudgingly, only filling the cup half way, and daring you to ask again. If you’re still thirsty at that point, you’ll probably be shamed into ordering “box water” that retails for—you guess it-- $4 a pop.

Conclusions: Is it For Me?

At its worst, Graffiti is pretentious and takes itself too seriously. It offers small servings of mediocre coffee for astronomical prices, and is run like an isolationist authoritarian state. The case could be made that its food represents the worst value-for money proposition in Los Angeles. The stringent rules about outside food and drinks and wireless internet are not insulting in and of themselves—it’s just that they’re so damn anal-retentive about it. Other signs and rules: “No pets,” “Please restrain your children from running or climbing on the furniture,” “This store is monitored by security cameras,” “Graffiti retains the right to censor any material produced on its premises,” “Please don’t touch the artwork,” and “Graffiti Parking Only. Do not leave your car if you leave the premises. We Tow.” Laidback bohemian types who enjoy places that are rougher around the edges may find Graffiti to be unnervingly clinical—like they’ve entered an asylum full of writing partners and actress-types reading sides between auditions. If you had the government of each country design its ideal coffee shop, Graffiti would probably be the entry from Singapore.

But at its best, it’s the best work-oriented coffee shop in Los Angeles. An angelic and heavenly office for anyone with a laptop, an idea, and deep pockets.

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useunknown · 11 years ago

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Coffee Bean Part II: A Sixth Sense

Click Here for Part I

I remember my first day on the job here. Had just gotten my GED’s and was happy to even have a job… The guy training me, name was Devin. At first I thought he was kind of a weird dude. Like, a shorter, chubby guy, red hair, and all these freckles. But he was confident and had all these ideas, it just made you willing to follow him, cause it felt like he could teach you something. He was in his late-twenties said he was an actor, and just managed Coffee Bean for extra money.

So my second day of training, a woman, kind of a professional type, walks in the shop with her little boy, like kind of a hyper kid. And as she walks in, he says “Keisha, Keisha what do you see?” And I’m thinking, just some woman and her son. And he looks at me like, “Watch this.” And he grabs a regular cup and marks down a triple skim latte, and he grabs a smaller cup and marks down a hot chocolate. And then he eyes the kid and grabs a cinnamon roll, puts it in a bag. This is all before the woman has gotten to the counter or noticed anything. But so the woman comes to the counter, and he asks her what she wants. She’s like, “I’ll have a regular skim latte, and actually, can you add an extra shot to that, and can I just get a small hot chocolate for him. And Matt, honey, you want any snacks?” Kid looks at the glass, leans on it, gets his fingerprints all over it, and then he’s like “That one.” And he points to a cinnamon roll.

There are different types of people and different types of drinks. You pay attention and after some time, you can match the two together. And there’s always the random people who go against type. Like the jacked up bearded guy with tattoos that orders a vanilla ice blended. Or a ditzy blonde girl in workout clothes who just gets a shot of espresso. Those times you just have to throw your hands up and say “wow I didn’t expect that.” But if you pay attention, you can guess it right more often than not.

Devin was manager of our Coffee Bean for a year. And during that year, we made history. We had the best year on year improvement of any Coffee Bean in California. We’re in a fancy area, at the intersection of Beverly and Robertson. And we’re across from a Starbucks. Devin liked to say that people come here because we provide a less stuck up environment than Starbucks. And I think it’s true— I was always glad that the Starbucks customers didn’t come to us. After a while, I could tell it from the time they walked down the street whether they were going to go to Starbucks or come to us.

Devin always said, “Don’t worry about Starbucks, focus on Coffee Bean.” Sometimes that was hard. Like, I can’t tell you how many times someone would come in and order a “Grande Latte.” Grande is the name of one of the sizes at Starbucks. It’s the Spanish word for “large.” But at Starbucks, it’s the name of the medium size. Devin explained that when someone ordered a “grande” from us, we should just politely ask them if they wanted a medium or a large. Sometimes, I’d say that and watch their brain short-circuit. Like, they’d realize what they’d been saying this whole time, and once they realized it, they wouldn’t be able to decide whether they actually did want a medium or a large.

The thing about us is, we really focus on Coffee and Tea. Devin would always say, “it’s all in the name.” Like, did you know Starbucks was named after a sailor in a book about whale hunting? It’s all this stuff that when you think about it for a second, it’s like WTF?! Who knows what Starbucks even sells these days? But we’re Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. It’s a smart name, because it’s simple and explains exactly what you can expect to get from us, which is the best coffee and tea. It’s like we claimed our turf and there’s no confusion.

Devin taught me a lot about business. He said I was lucky because he was an entrepreneur and was taking me under his wing. The main thing was his system of types. He always said “Keisha, the trick is to look inside the customers’ hearts.” He taught it to everyone at our store, and said it was the thing that was going to make us different than all the other stores— the secret that we knew that no one else knew. ”Seeing inside their hearts.” It meant knowing what they wanted and figuring out what they liked. You had to figure out what made them tick.

It didn’t take long for me to start guessing what drink someone was going to order before they ordered it just like Devin had done on my second day of training, and getting it right five or six times out of ten. It went deeper than women in gym clothes being healthy and liking fruit. Or older guys who looked liked they had idle time holding newspapers and ordering cappuccinos. Or rich white girls getting ice blendeds because they didn’t really like coffee. You could see someone’s drive, how tired they were, and how they actually felt about coffee. If they liked the taste of the stuff or just needed the caffeine hit. If they just like to walk around with a coffee cup so they look important. Or if they just like the ritual of going to a coffee shop like you and I like taking a shower. And you can tell some people just need a place to wait around because they don’t have anywhere else to go. And you can start to guess who’s gonna get coffee and who’s gonna get tea— Devin said the secret to picking out tea drinkers is to look at their eyes. The tea drinkers are the ones that still have a sparkle in their eyes.

Our shop had two registers. Devin worked the first one, and he put me at the other. “The person at the register determines the fate of the entire store,” he would always say. The whole thing was like an airplane. He was the first pilot, and I was the other pilot.

Because the thing is, once you start being able to figure out what makes people tick, you can start to guess more then just their drink, and “that,” Devin would say, “is how you turn an unskilled job into a highly valuable superpower.” All of a sudden I didn’t just know what people were going to want to drink— I could figure out what else they wanted. Sometimes they don’t even order it, and won’t order it unless you say something. But you can see what they look at. You can guess the type of pastry that would make their day. So if I see a woman without a wedding ring hurrying in with a stroller, who orders a triple cappuccino, I can tell this is a woman with a lot on her plate. She needs some relief, and just needs someone to tell her she deserves it. So I smile, and I say “How about a cookie, for later.” The “for later” is a personal touch I came up with myself. Because it’s the kind of thing that makes her pause. Suddenly, I have her thinking about everything good about her life. She’s thinking about when she was a girl and used to eat sweets. And even if she hadn’t been looking forward to the rest of her day, she knows that it sure would be great to have a cookie nearby in case she needs it. So she says, “You know what? Yeah, and one cookie.”

Once I could do this, Devin told me to stop saying the generic stuff. Corporate has us say, “Do you want anything else with that,” but Devin called that “a lowest common denominator.” So we started guessing what people would order, and it started working. We started to have more people buying a little bit more of everything. And for our store, that was the difference.

Suddenly we’re the only Coffee Bean store showing a year on year improvement. Devin gets a lot of credit, because he was the manager, and he deserves it! And he has the heads of the company, all these guys with important business degrees, asking him how he pulled it off. He says it’s because he taught us all to see inside customers’ hearts. And he points to me, and says, “we need more people like Keisha.” They ended up bringing him into the head office, and giving him a big corporate job to train people. And they made me store manager, for now— but Devin says he’s not gonna forget about me, and that he’s gonna get me a spot in the head office too!

And I hope that’s true, because guessing people’s orders all day— it can be exhilarating, but I’ve done it. It’s become like a sixth sense to me. I can just see people, and I know. I’ve started to keep count of how many people I can get to buy food with their drink by nailing what they would pick. If you offer them the right item, you can get them to agree to buy it seven or eight times out of ten. It’s like, you offer them just the thing they were secretly hoping you’d offer, and once you do, they have no choice but to say yes. It’s just a matter of looking into their hearts.

People still surprise me sometimes though. Like the other day a guy comes in. A tall, good looking guy. Normally I’d say he was a model type, probably heading to an audition. But he wasn’t put together like that, and he looked tired. His eyes were sunken like he had just seen a ghost or witnessed something terrible. And he was on edge, like he was running late to something— the model types are never running late— they always move like they have time, because they’re used to having people wait for them. So he was heading somewhere, but I had no idea whatsoever as to where. He comes up to the register, and I find myself just drawing blanks— I just don’t have a read on him at all. I don’t even know why he’s here— I’d have him pegged as the type that would be going across the street. And the guy orders a medium coffee, no room for milk. Just a medium black coffee. The plainest thing you can order. I hadn’t seen that coming at all.

Devin always said, “Black coffee is a dark drink.” And then he would say, “No pun intended.” You could say it’s for purists and serious coffee drinkers who don’t need the milk and sugar anymore. I say, good for them for actually liking the coffee, and not needing to hide the flavor with sweeteners and such. But Devin said it was more than that. It’s just so serious and depressing, and just totally joyless. It’s like ordering a slap in the face. If I had tried to guess, I would have had this guy pinned for a latte or a mocha. But again, I didn’t have a read on him at all. So I wonder if he’s the kind of guy who’s just woken up or if he’s been up for hours. If he’s eaten breakfast, wants to eat, or plans to skip it entirely— or if he knows there’s going to be food wherever he’s going next. If he’s on a break from work, or hasn’t gotten there yet. Or if he’s not going to work at all. He might be heading to the airport for all I know. Or to visit someone in the hospital— there’s a major hospital just a few blocks away from us. I’m starting to think about it and becoming determined to figure out what else he might want. And I realize maybe I’m taking too long, because he just shoots me this cold, heart-stopping glance that could freeze the earth over. It’s like he’s seen me trying to figure him out, and it’s this glance that says, “You get the hell out of there.” But I can’t do it.

And I realize that it’s not even because I want to figure him out or sell him something extra— it’s because I want to help him. All of a sudden, I just want to give him a hug. I want to see him feel better and tell him he doesn’t have to drink black coffee anymore. That he just needs to live one day at a time and take what life gives him, and that everything is going to work out. I want to give him something to light up about later. And that’s when I realize I know just the thing. I remember what Devin told me. He said, “people always choose life— you just have to give them the chance.” So I ask him, “Do you want a blueberry muffin with that?”

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