Because I am a massive nerd, I love Wired. But the cover story in the latest issue left me pretty frustrated. Don't get me wrong; it's super interesting. The writer, Tom Vanderbilt, looks at the various ways that Google and car companies are closing in on cars that will drive themselves, using robotics technology that can basically learn how to operate a car like a person. Besides describing the technology, Vanderbilt examined the question of whether people would even want that. After all, Americans love the freedom and control that a car represents. But as one Google researcher pointed out, that's not really how the daily experience of a car is for most people:

“Most of driving is not a car commercial,” he says. “The average American commutes 52 minutes a day, with the purpose of getting from point A to point B, not with the purpose of winding through the mountains and enjoying The Sound of Music.”

I agree with this sentiment. Owning a self-driving car doesn't mean that it always has to be on autopilot; on those occasions when you're driving through the mountains, car commercial-style, you can turn it off. But most time spent in the car is a drag: going to work, going to store, trying to find a parking space, boring crap like that. I bet a lot of people would love to pass the responsibility on to a robot, so they can then, as Vanderbilt admits, use the time for texting or looking at Facebook on their phones. 

Which brings me to why I was frustrated. These companies are spending a lot of money on researching self-driving cars to address the desire of people to be able to commute without having to drive. But there's already a superior solution to that problem, one that addresses both the desire to not drive and it's better for the environment: public transportation. People don't need self-driving cars! They need better trains and buses, and more accessible trains and buses. Imagine if the resources being devoted to self-driving cars were instead aimed at expanding the public transportation infrastructure and making in more comfortable. For instance, Vanderbilt is right that people's desire to surf the net instead of watch the road could incline them to want to avoid driving to work, if that were an option. Well, why not put high-speed wi-fi internet on all public transportation, and then advertise the shit out of it? Instead of spending money on developing self-driving cars, what about high-speed trains? What about more subway systems? There's a serious "reinventing the wheel" problem here. 

But Vanderbilt addresses none of that, even though that question hangs in the mind of any halfway intelligent reader. I did a Ctrl-F search for the word "train", to make sure I didn't accidentally miss mention of the competition. The first time the word appears on the page, it's in the comment section. Actually, the first comment:

I'd love to live in a city where I could walk or bike safely to nearly all of my regular destinations and take a train or bus to the other ones.

Self-driving cars are a bad solution to a problem caused by automobile-centric urban planning and design that demands the need for cars.

Exactly. For all I know, the price of getting access to the prototypes was to not mention the obvious---that self-driving cars are a distraction from the real transportation needs of our country---but it's a weird oversight. If Google really is interested in not being evil, they should redirect their brain trust away from self-driving cars and more towards better and more extensive public transportation. Even something as simple as making Amtrak more comfortable and appealing would be an interesting and more useful project. 

So I published a couple of quick pieces, one for Forbes and one for XX Factor, about how Siri is sexist. I got a lot of great responses, including Jill's at Feministe,  but I also got a lot of people talking to me like I'm stupid. Lots and lots of people, especially men, condescendingly explaining that Siri can't be sexist, because it's just a dumb program that uses pre-existing databases for its searches. And apparently, since "sexism" can only  be used to describe intentional, hateful behavior, things like neglecting to remember that women have needs or employing subconscious stereotypes about women simply can't count as sexism. Gosh, the stuff you have to explain to ladies! They are so dim. Seriously, I got crap like this:

Besides the fairly hateful stereotyping on display, this tells a story of software development that simply doesn't make any sense. Siri is not really a "program" in the sense that it is not something a group of programmers sit and make. Rather, Siri is a collection of many different services presented under a unified interface. This unification (sort of Apple's specialty) might give you the mistaken impression that it is sort of all one piece, but it is less like a "car" and more like a "mixed urban transportation system". 

There's a good chance that the people who wrote the corny jokes don't even know the people who operate the database Siri uses to search for abortion clinics.

He blathered on like this for awhile, but really this is just hand-waving. I'm fully aware that Siri uses other databases to gather information. In fact, two minutes with the software will make that incredibly obvious, which means that this dude quite literally thinks women are so dumb they can't apply common sense understanding to a product distributed by Apple. The thing is, they also tested their own software to make sure that it was working properly, and while they made sure that it knew how to translate "blow job" into an escort service or "Viagra" into a drugstore, it didn't do the same for "birth control" to drug store. That's a huge oversight. 

To the mansplainers of the world, I have one thing I want to ask you very, very nicely to do before you start telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. Just do me this one favor, please: Read my piece before you respond defensively.  If you could, toss in a little reading comprehension, because really, you'll find that you can take your mansplaining efforts and put them elsewhere. Of course, pompously assuming a woman is obviously too stupid to grasp basic information about how computers work is more fun, so I don't imagine this will help, but at least give it a try. Because if you actually read my piece, you'd realize I never said that the staff behind Siri was out to get women. Never. Not once. On the contrary, I said the opposite:

The problem here is one of neglect and not malice. The programmers behind Siri seem to be a bunch of gleefully juvenile dudes who took the time to teach Siri corny jokes, marijuana know-how and sci-fi references, along with teaching it about serious problems that can affect both men and women, such as suicidal thoughts. And even though they really like the idea of sex with women, they seem to have not thought much about the work that women have to put into being sexually accessible. Just as with the mind-boggling name fail of the iPad, the problem seems to be that there simply aren't enough women working in innovative, customer-driven technology services, and the ones who do have to adopt a bro-like attitude that makes them nearly as forgetful of the concerns of ordinary women as the men are.

Oh yeah and: 

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female. 

The defensiveness on display is due in large part to the idea that saying something is "sexist" means that it's deliberately and malciously hateful to women. Or that there's some sort of anti-choice agenda here. (There's not. If you ask Siri directly for Planned Parenthood, it's really helpful.) The thing is, sexism doesn't work that way. I mean, in some cases, sure. But mostly it's stuff like this: casual assumptions about women's abilities and desires, assuming the default is always male, overlooking women's needs, failing to understand that women are subjective people instead of merely objects for you to fuck. A lot of men---and women!---who do these things don't realize what's going on. That was the entire point. This isn't even really about Siri, except insofar as new gadgets and softwares are an interesting hook to get people talking. Like I said at Forbes, it's about "a sexism that’s so interwoven into the fabric of our society that it’s nearly invisible." I'm actually quite confident that Apple will fix the problem in short order; they've basically said that they will. My hope is that they'll go a step beyond that and realize that the dominance of straight white men in Silicon Valley means that certain blinders will be built into their products that limit their reach into larger markets. No one here is out to get anyone else. This is about just getting better, and working better for everyone. No need to be so ruffled by it.

I'm usually a fan of Good's 30-Day Challenges.  I particularly liked the challenge to keep your trash to one bag a week, which I was even able to accomplish for most of it!  (Cooking from scratch as much as possible helps, as does living in a city that has a huge recycling program.)  But now that their 30-Day Challenge to unplug from the internet at 8PM at night is over, I have to admit that I rejected the challenge from the get-go, because I rejected the premise of the challenge.  

The idea behind the challenge is that people are "addicted" to the internet, and that it's somehow interfering with our real life relationships.  I think that's a very 2004 way of thinking.  Now that it's 2011, I think it's troubling to continue with the assumption that there's a meaningful distinction between online and offline life.  And it's particularly troubling to believe that time online is time spent away from our loved ones or time spent away from engaging meaningful with people. One thing that comes to mind is how often, after 8PM during this challenge, I would be sitting right next to my boyfriend on the couch, with both of us playing in the same room in Turntable and bonding over that.  How is that somehow less meaningful than watching TV or even going out to dinner together?  I didn't experience it that way, and I would also point out that we did those other things, as well.

Beyond that, people use the internet to enhance their social life more than to escape it.  I keep in touch with friends and family better because of it and have met some of my best friends through the internet.  But it's more than that---the way that the internet and real life blend makes "stay off the internet" just plain stupid some times. Cord Jefferson, writing about the challenge, explained how silly it got:

There's no getting around the fact that computers make life easier. Asking people to get offline at 8 p.m. means asking them to not use Google Maps to find directions to a party or Yelp to pick a restaurant. It means sending them to a tangible newspaper to get movie times and to the phone book for the number to a hardware store. Some people don't even receive phone books anymore! What makes the internet simultaneously so great and so awful is its ease of use: It's made life eminently simpler, but it's also created a generation of people who rely on it to solve practically everything at all times of day.

Positing that there's something purer of spirit about using a newspaper or a phonebook rather than the internet is like suggesting someone is better-read if they read by candlelight instead of use a bedside lamp.  It's just plain dumb. 

And that's just it.  I probably get out more because of the internet, because it's simply easier to find shit to do and to coordinate people to do it with. I remember the bad old days before people used the internet to conduct their social planning, and there was no benefit to the old way.  One person would pick something to do, and then they would have to call each person they wanted to come individually, or at least farm that out to others to do.  If one person in the chain had a conflict, that meant another round of phone calls to figure out if rescheduling was an option.  I would often hang up with one person, call another, call the first back, call the second again, and it would take 20 fucking minutes just to get 3 people on the same page.  And that was a best case scenario.  Often people would be forgotten in all the melee and feelings would get hurt. 

Now you just send out an email to everyone all at once.  People can hash out any scheduling conflicts amongst themselves.  Because it takes less time to organize--much less research what to do in the first place---people are more willing to do it.  I definitely see people more often because of all this.  Online tickets help, too.  I remember the bad old days when you had to go to the record shop to buy tickets and wait in line and all that jazz.  Busy people don't have time for this shit and their social life suffers.  Setting up a Facebook party account, however?  Takes no time at all.

And let's not even talk about how people used to get lost in the bad old days.  Yes, lost.  I spent a lot of my youth driving around trying to figure out where the fuck I was going.  Cell phones helped, but I even remember the days before them when you would just drive around and around while the people waiting for you began to get worried.  There was literally no upside and it strained instead of helped social relations.

So seriously, let's stop with the false assumptions that being online is somehow anti-people.  In many cases, it's made being around people exponentially easier. 

I was reading the latest issue of The Believer---the music issue!---today, and I found this tidbit interesting.  It's from Hua Hsu's examination of the telephone in pop music history, and it made me cackle:

Early newspaper reports of Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, exhibited a laughable narrowness of vision.  Short of changing business or politics, the greatest effect, some teased, would be in the arena of courtship.  "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East Boston," an 1870s editorial in the Boston Times forsaw, before warning of "the awful and irresponsible power" such a device would give nagging mothers.

The technology changes, but the complaints remain the same: 1) Someone, somewhere is using this technology to gain pleasures you yourself are not experiencing and that's alarming and 2) Women are frightening creatures whose awe-inspiring powers to destroy are only being restrained by the lack of this new technology in their lives. 

Nona Willis Aronowitz posted a video from MTV News in 1995 about the internet. The broadcasters were not panicked about the internet.  On the contrary, they seemed to think it was a really cool invention that had a lot of potential. But they reported on the fact that a lot of people at the time were panicked by the internet, because, you know, orgasms.

(There's a little bit of Billy Corgan bashing Michael Jackson, too.  Guess who won history?)

People's continual panic over technological innovation---the way we easily convince ourselves that a new medium or device will somehow be the ruin of us all---is one of those topics I find fascinating without ever really resolving it in my mind.  I'm particularly amused at the knee-jerk assumption that older forms are automatically deeper and more interesting.  I was compelled to think about that some today after reading the tedious, joy-killing comments at what I thought was a fun post at XX Factor about MTV's early years and what it meant to people like me. Using a little bit of colorful language, I said that MTV raised me, by which of course I meant that I watched a lot of it growing up and it had a big impact on my way of thinking.  I made a substantive argument that this was a good thing, but of course the puzzling "OMG TV IS THE DEVIL" folks had to show up in comments.

It is sad....really sad. To think that so many young people (and now old people) park their behinds in front of a television and let mindless television programing become the "inspiration" and the open window into a view of the world and of their lives. REALLY.....I mean REALLY AMANDA? You were "raised" by MTV? That in and of itself is truely a sad statement about not just one generation but multi generations. It is sad, at least to me, that an entire generations view of what is important from their youth was coming home and parking in front of a television to watch a show about a bunch of musicians in made up videos about made up things. But that is also true of the generation that came home and parked in front of a television to watch Andy Griffith or Lassie, or Gulliagans Island. Again a generation defined not by the things they did but what they watched....sad but true.

I told him I rejected his "get off my lawn" argument, particularly the notion that I'm a stupid or sad person because I like music videos. But it did make me think: would such a person crap his pants if I wrote about an older medium changing my life for the better? What if I posted this song by the Velvet Underground and said I related to it? I'm guessing I'd be praised, because radio is an older medium and therefore assumed to be wholesome and intelligence-improving. 

In fact, I got something of an answer to my question, as a number of people showed up in comments and shamed anyone who watched MTV for not being more into radio.  Radio's superiority was assumed to be self-evident, even though I brought forth evidence in the post and people backed it up in comments that a lot of what was on MTV was simply not available on the radio in much of the country.  In fact, I would say that's the point of the post.  By simply having more diverse and newer content, MTV was automatically superior, in my opinion.  But this notion that technological evolution is somehow immoral (I got both right wing puritans shaming me for the sexual immorality of watching MTV and liberal puritans shaming me for the supposed corporatist immorality of watching MTV) just is asserted as if it's an immutable truth of humanity and not just some arbitrary bullshit.

I remain puzzled as to why people so easily take it as a given that a communication/media technology's newness makes it more immoral and vapid than older forms, which were also considered immoral and vapid when they came out.  I'm sure it has something to do with fear of mortality.  Any way you slice it , there's an irony there, because I would argue that the knee-jerk rejection of a technology simply because it's new is what is vapid and quite often immoral, particularly when it comes to the people who begrudge young people whose lives are very often saved by fascinating new technologies that show them a world behind the limited ones that are smothering them.  

I think it was probaby the combination of the Weiner non-scandal, which absolutely couldn't have happened without cell phones, and this Jonathan Franzen article about smartphones that got a surprising amount of attention, but for some reason I've been thinking on and off about how much the cell phone technology quietly remade people's lives in this country (and around the world, in surprisingly diverse ways), and at what a rapid speed, all things considered.  A couple of years ago, the hip and daring sector of the tech chattering world was all about how cell phones are just as important a development as computers---and maybe even more so---but now that smartphones have really taken off, that statement sounds more obvious than daring. Well, and unnecessary, since smartphones are collapsing the distinction between "phone" and "computer".  So, I thought I'd crowd source a post looking at all the ways that our daily lives have changed in response to this technology.  Many of the changes really snuck up on us, and it's only looking back that you really comprehend how easily personal habits shifted in response to the technology.  So I threw out the question on Twitter of what life pre- and post-widespread cell phone use looks like, and came up with a fun list.  We need a just-for-the-hell-of-it post around here; it's been awhile for some reason. 

*People don't wear watches very much anymore.  This goes double for people who came of age in the cell phone era; watch-wearing is now something primarily done by older people by force of habit.  I personally haven't owned a watch since college.  I got my first cell phone when I was, I think, 22.

*You no longer have to make elaborate plans to meet up with friends anymore.  Increasingly what people do is say they're going to be out at a certain day and time, and then when someone else is ready to meet them, they call them up and say, "Where are you?"  Since waiting on people is quite possibly my number one pet peeve, this shift in and of itself has made me a much happier person.

*A little over a decade ago, it was common for your average American to have at least half a dozen and usually more phone number memorized.  Before I had a cell phone, I could dial my mom, my boyfriend, four or five of my friends, my sister, and my office just from memory.  Now I often have to check even my boyfriend's number in my phone to make sure I'm writing it down properly on things like forms that require an emergency contact.

*One unique entry is someone noticed a huge decline in the amount of yelling in public people do.  She was specifically talking about people yelling from the street into houses instead of using doorbells (which, in our age of marvels still don't work a lot of the time), but as soon as she said it, I realized that this was a much broader advantage.  I remember when you would be out in public with your peeps, and if one of you wandered off, you had to yell for them to find them.  Now people just text message.  The amount of noise pollution has gone down because of this.  Something to think about next time you want to gripe about people talking on their phones in public.

*People don't hand draw maps anymore. 

*Trying to find a fucking phone booth.  I actually had to do this in England a couple of years ago, and the thought of it sent me into a mild panic.  Luckily, for some reason, they actually still have phone booths in the East End of London.

*Picking people up at the airport has drastically changed.  Back in the dark ages, you either had to show up at the airport at the appointed hour and hope the flight wasn't late, or call the airport ahead of time to make sure.  Now what I do---and I think this is common---is either call my ride when my plane lands or have the person I'm picking up (or whatever) call when their plane lands. 

*I've written about this before, but have a few more thoughts: plotting in TV and movies.  A surprising amount of plots move forward because characters lack crucial information, and unfortunately in many cases this becomes a lazy crutch.  (I love Harry Potter, but JK Rowling relies on the trick of having the adults keep important information from the kids way too much, and after awhile, it becomes grating. These kids have beaten back monsters and have seen war.  You can treat them as mature beings capable of handing it.)  But in our world, you can often find out what you need to know in seconds, because the person who has the information you require has a phone on them and can be reached at any time.  For awhile, screenwriters tried to get around this problem in really ham-fisted ways: no cell phone service in an area, the person didn't hear their phone ringing, etc.  That still goes on, but less than it used to.  I'm seeing a lot less reliance on plots that move forward because the main character is ignorant of something they really need to know, or can't get help when they're in danger.  Though I do think they did the "answer your phone" trick in "Thor", which is the "in the distance, a dog barked" of our time. (A classic in the genre of "shows that wouldn't work with cell phones.")

*I hear in high schools, kids don't pass notes in class anymore.  They text message. 

*When was the last time you called someone on their office phone for a personal call?  I literally think it's been years; I don't have a single office number for a single friend or family member.  Concerns about tying up office phones have basically fallen away.  That said, when I'm speaking to someone for work-related reasons on their office phone, they often get interrupted by their cell phone. 

*I saw a guy checking IDs in a bar using his iPhone for a flashlight.  In fact, you see it put to this use a lot.  I have to wonder if the number of minor accidents due to toe-stubbing in dark places has gone down. Of course, the number of accidents because people are walking and looking at shit on their phone  has gone up, so it's probably a net loss there. 

*I frequently find myself wondering how the hell I would have made it in New York City without an iPhone.  I never have to wonder where the subway stop is, or how to get from point A to B.  I just look it up on my phone.  I'm actually mildly worried about this as a crutch and have been consciously trying to avoid using it to get around as much as possible. Trying, basically, to relearn how to navigate a city without digital assistance.  I'm old enough that I've had to do so in the past, but my memories on how to do so are surprisingly faded. 

*I really love the new social habit of seeing something awesome, taking a picture of it, and texting it to someone out of the blue.  It's interesting to me how quickly that took off as a thing people do, and I've never seen anyone comment on it.  But many a person's day is made a little more uplifting because their phone beeps and they're immediately rewarded with a picture of a cat doing something cute or some really awesome graffiti. 

*The art of romance has been completely changed by smartphones, it appears. And not just because you can use it to send people pictures of your junk. 

*As someone who likes to go to rock shows, I can tell you text messaging may be the most fucking awesome technology ever.  I still remember vividly the dark days when someone would call to find out where in the club you were and you had to haul your ass outside to take the call, defeating the purpose.  And the even darker days before that, when you could agree to meet someone some place and spend an hour trying to figure out where they fuck they were because neither of you had a way to communicate with the other. 

*The strangest and least predictable change, in my mind,  is that cell phones have actually ushered in a new era of people spending way less time on the phone than they used to.  Long phone calls are just not as common as they used to be.  I rarely pick up the phone and just call someone to chat, except like my mom.  Text messaging is part of that.  It's helped reduce the amount of pressure on people to make idle chit chat out of politeness.  I think it's also email and IM on computers, as well.  But part of it might just be that because you can get someone on the phone whenever you want, it makes the conversations you do have less of a big deal.  And so you put less effort into them.  If you have something else you need to tell them, you can always call them back without worrying that they won't be home. 

*With that in mind, I have to point out that people leave phone messages way less than they used to.  They still do, but not only are you likelier to get a hold of someone if you call them, but if you don't, it's usually easier to text. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but like I said, I'm crowd-sourcing this one.  What are some of the changes, big and small, that have crept up on you because of cell phones?

The debates are going to continue for days about how wrong Weiner was during this, of which I'm going to maintain my concerns that it's much easier to sit in judgment of someone else's choices when you're not the one having to make them while a howling mob is outside calling for your head.  And there will be debates about whether or not what he did is adultery; my feeling on this is that it's alarming how many people feel secure in making declarations about other people's marriages based on what they prefer for their own.  Adultery should be strictly defined by the people in a relationship, full stop.  But this post isn't about any of that.

This post is about another concern I have, and had with the Chris Lee situation, and has been growing generally as the distinction between "men sending pictures of themselves to women who are welcoming of such pictures" and "men who send such pictures unbidden".  I'm seeing a lot of people bunching them altogether and saying, "Ewwww....who wants to see that?  Why would any man think a picture of his cock/chest/etc. be something a woman wants to see?!"  Now, I'm not talking about men who take a picture of their cocks and send it to someone who really hasn't sent any kind of signal that she's interested in that.  I'm talking about pictures that exist in the context of a flirtation or an outright ask for pictures.  I'm seeing the same judgment laid across the board, on Twitter and forums and blogs.  And I'm going to have to push back and point out that this is sexist.

Why? Well, you know what never happens when a naked picture that a woman sent to a paramour gets out?  The "ewwww" reaction.  No one ever says, "Why would any man want to see that?!" or suggest that the distinction between wanted and unwanted pictures is unimportant because there's no such thing as a man who would find it arousing to have that kind of picture sent to him.  To use some radfem terminology on you, that's because we think of women as the sex class, and the viewing of their bodies as sexual things as normal and natural, but to do that to men is considered feminizing and therefore "gross".  

Again, since this is the internet and people want to distort your arguments beyond all recognition, I'm not talking about unwanted cock pics.  Those are often threatening in nature, because men are positioned as aggressive and violent in our culture, and so unsolicited nudity is not only harassing but scary.  But the blanket assumption that it's always foolish, unsexy, and stupid for men to take cameraphone pics and send them to women they're flirting with bothers me.  It carries with it the assumption that women are sex objects and men are sex actors.  And that women aren't sexual beings, but that we simply tolerate sex from men in order to get romance.  I would argue instead that women are very much sexual beings who can find the male body quite arousing, and therefore a picture of a man in the context of a flirtation is not only normal but should be immediately understandable, just as the picture of a woman in a flirtation is.  

Honestly, the fact that gay men exist and can look at each other with lust should have put to bed this ridiculous notion that men's bodies have no sexual allure.  But no.  The myth that women are for romance and men for raw sex and relationships are about a tense exchange of these conflicting desires has such a hold it overrules common sense understanding of the facts at hand.

This bothered me with the Chris Lee situation.  From what I understand, the woman ratted him out not because she was delicately offended that a man would think she'd want to see something like that, but because she recognized him and was upset that he was a cheater. In fact,  he sent the picture in response to communications they'd had, if I'm not mistaken.  The idea was to show off that he had the good despite his age, and let's face it, he made his point.  Personally, I'm glad that we're entering an era where men are toying with the idea that their bodies might have some aeshetic value that women may appreciate.  It opens the door to other ideas that we need to embrace as a society, the first being that because you can look at someone with lust doesn't mean that you should stop looking at them as a full human being with full human rights. And if straight men are seen as people who can incite lust, then we're halfway there---no one is going to take away their right to be full human beings with rights, such as the right to say no.  

Which goes back to Slutwalk, as many things do lately.  In her pathetic attempts to debate strategy instead of stand by her suggestion that anti-rape activism shouldn't be a feminist priority, Melissa Clouthier tweeted something about how women who go on Slutwalks don't understand how men think.  (i'm paraphrasing, because I don't want to wade through her ridiculous Twitter feed.)  The implication is that men, when they see women in short skirts, cannot be expected to see the person in the skirt as a full human being with full human rights, including the right to determine who penetrates her body.  I disagree, of course---not only do I see men accomplish this amazing feat all the time, I also have point out that how much skin is "too much" is so culturally constrained that making essentialist arguments falls apart after a minute's thought.  The argument "you know how men are" is an illusion, and part of what upholds it as an illlusion is the strict policing of men to make sure they don't present themselves in sexualized ways reserved for women, thereby collapsing the wall that's been built between being sexy and being a full human being with full human rights.  

So, by all means, denounce men who harass women with cock shots.  But let's be clear on distinctions.  The problem is not that a cock shot is always unwelcome and that women can be considered as a class not into that.  A lot of women (and gay men and yes, even straight men) find penises and male bodies in general arousing.  And there's nothing wrong with a straight man who wants to be seen as sexy by women, any more than there's something wrong with a woman who wants to be seen as sexy or a gay man who wants men to find him sexy.  In fact, we should be welcoming of a world flexible enough where all people have the right to try to feel desireable, and all people have full human rights, regardless of their sexual status. 

Yesterday, for obvious reasons, I was in a crappy mood all day.  So I turned to my favorite resource for lightening a sour mood, which is Regretsy.  After reading a few pages of it until I was all caught up, I looked up at the links at the top and decided to check them out.  I found People of Walmart to be unfunny, since most of the “humor” comes from poking fun at people for being ugly, fat, or unable to afford better-fitting clothes.  But Lamebook is another story entirely.  Lamebook is funny because it, like Regretsy, gets its humor straight from the goofier aspects of human nature.  I particularly like all the posts involving parents interacting with their children on Facebook.  Facebook is great, but it was only until moms started to join Facebook that it really became the centerpiece of the new American renaissance, I say.

The site cheered me up immensely, which is why I was sad to see a link at the top of the page asking for money for their legal fund.  They’re in some legal shit with Facebook over copyright quarreling, they say.  A little googling showed that this is indeed true, and Facebook’s rationale is as poor and mean-spirited as you could imagine:

In response to the complaint, Facebook deemed it “unfortunate” that Lamebook had turned to litigation after “months of working with Lamebook to amicably resolve what we believe is an improper attempt to build a brand that trades off Facebook’s popularity and fame”.

Facebook is claiming that the site can’t hide behind satire, which is funny, because I personally laughed my ass off for hours.  Human nature might be the main target of Lamebook, but the way that Facebook has drawn out certain tendencies in people is definitely part of that.  But what really annoyed me was that Facebook expressed petulant anger that someone else out there is OMG building off their popularity and fame.  Which in no way, shape or form takes jack shit away from Facebook.  If anything, Lamebook probably just makes readers want to use Facebook even more, since it highlights some of the best reasons to waste hours on Facebook (such as laughing at the way people can be).  I know it had that effect on me.  I’m trying to imagine if creative artists reacted to each other in this way.  Can you imagine, say, Dr. Dre being so stupid as to not work with Eminem because he doesn’t want anyone to benefit from his pre-existing reputation? 

This entire situation is a great demonstration of why the ready assumption that businesspeople are motivated mainly be a rational desire to increase profits is a really dumb one.  But you see that assumption all the time!  You see it with libertarians, who argue that we don’t need regulation because the profit motive makes markets self-correcting, as if they were mindless machines that aren’t influenced by some of the more irrational thinking of actual human beings.  And you see it with liberals, who make the opposite assumption—-they believe that business is solely motivated by profit, and that means businesspeople are bound to make harmful choices if that’s how best to make a profit.  The truth is way more complicated.  Yes, profit motive is a big deal, and that sometimes results in good business decisions, as libertarians insist, and it sometimes results in BP spilling unimaginable amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, as liberals insist.  But insisting that businesspeople act mostly out of pure rationality is giving them too much credit.  I think it’s also important to remember how much irrationality impacts business choices.

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Update, to make it interesting: Can you think of movies/books/TV shows where there were obvious technology fails in the plot?  Or, conversely, what movies/books/TV shows would be completely ruined by being set a little later in history, when the characters would absolutely have things like cell phones and email?  No cheating with medieval stuff! 

Spoilers galore.

Years ago, I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about how disconcerting it can be to watch mid-century caper films, because there are routine situations in them where the introduction of the cell phone would clear up the problem creating all the tension.  Of course, they didn’t have cell phones back then, but that was the point—-they’ve become so ubiquitous that the idea of not having one is becoming hard to imagine.  It was something that came to mind for me recently when something quite unusual happened on “True Blood”.  We’re only on season two of the wretchedly sick but deliciously campy horror series, and I think this was the first time I saw a character in these supposedly modern times actually do something most of us do all the time—-receive a communication of some sort on a cell phone.  And of course, it wasn’t actually a communication of any real sort—-Sam the shapeshifting dude gets a call from his restaurant Merlotte’s and it’s a hang up. 

It brought home something about the show that drives me bananas.  Oh, it’s not the fact that vampires, shapeshifters, telepaths, and demon goddesses all are drawn to this tiny little Louisiana town.  Frankly, I can’t think of a better place to get into supernatural mischief than Louisiana, which was practically made for it with its combination of swamps and tolerance for eccentricity.  Nor is it that Sookie is one of those Mary Sue characters, because Anna Paquin plays her with enough knowingness that I find myself not especially perturbed by the obvious wish fulfillment aspects of a character that every sexy male vampire seems to fall in love with at first sight for no particular reason.  I can overlook a lot in a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and “True Blood” absolutely does not.

But man, the lack of communication on that show!  It’s clearly set in present times—-the first book came out in 2001—-and yet no one seems to think to make a fucking phone call, much less send off an email.  I’ve been to Louisiana.  They may be different from the rest of the country in many ways, but they enjoy the use of modern technologies just as much as the rest of us.  But the characters on this show carry on like it’s some huge burden to pull your phone out of your pocket and make a phone call.  For instance, even though we know for a fact that Sam has a phone, he never stops to call Sookie for help or advice when he finds himself targeted for abuse by Marianne.  Even though, if that happened to me, the first thing I’d think is, “Who do I know that might also be a ‘supernatural’ that is impervious to Marianne’s spells, and also has a bunch of badass vampire friends who can kick some serious ass and are probably the only people I can think of to take on a demon goddess?”  She may not be able to help, but it’s not like the cost of asking is that high.  Maybe Sam is watching his minutes, but even so, I’d say spending a few on saving your own life is well worth, especially if you have a bunch of rollover minutes in the bank.  Or what about all the angst Tara has about whether or not to let Marianne & Co. stay at Sookie’s place.  Perhaps you could ask her?  She’s in Dallas, not on the moon.  They have cell phone towers in Dallas.  Or what about Jason Stackhouse disappearing and not telling anyone?  I know Sookie’s head is deep in Bill’s ass, but maybe she could check up on her brother through his Facebook status?  I accept the whole thing where Sookie is kidnapped and trying to reach that other telepath, because you would have your cellphone stripped from you in that situation.  (In fact, if I were the director, I would have made a point of showing the kidnappers frisk the victims and take their phones.)  But a lot of the time, it just doesn’t make sense.  The plot developments on the show rely far too much on a lack of communication that doesn’t make much sense in the 21st century.

This really is an ongoing problem for storytellers in our modern era.  For literary novelists, it’s not really a big deal—-there’s an allergy in anything with literary aspirations to using cheap plot devices like lack of communication to create tension—-but for people making popcorn entertainment, this problem is huge.  You don’t really think about how much lack of information and communication is the fallback technique until you see it shoehorned into a narrative illogically.  I love Harry Potter, but that was the biggest flaw in the books.  JK Rowling created tension by depriving the main characters of information by having the adults talk down to them.  It made sense initially, but after the kids single-handedly win a couple of big battles, you’d expect realistically that the adults start at least coming clean with them.  I will say that Rowling neatly sidestepped the cell phone problem by making the wizard characters ignorant of Muggle technologies, so that even if they would see the benefit in something like cell phones, it’s unlikely they would have the chance to learn about them. 

I’m continually fascinated by the ways that writers of popcorn entertainment find ways to get around the problem of instant communication and information, when so much of what drives their plots is lack of information.  “Lost” was smart in that the writers decided that the way to get around a world full of previously unthinkable modern convenience is to put characters in a situation where they’re completely deprived of it.  But you can’t do that on every show.  The writers on “Angel” knew that this was going to be an issue for them, and they hung a lampshade on it, by having Angel mutter darkly all the time about how much he hated cell phones.  I’ve seen phones cut out on TV shows and characters deliberately refuse to answer.  And in a brilliant move that just goes to show why David Simon is the shit, “The Wire” had a plot where the use of cell phones was the reason that the main characters were deprived of the information they needed, because the cell phones were being used to avoid a wire tap. 

And then sometimes they just ignore the issue altogether, and the writers on “True Blood” are the worst offenders.  I’m sure the justification is that the show is set in a kooky world to begin with, but I don’t accept that excuse.  The whole point of shows like that is to juxtapose the supernatural elements with the known world.  In fact, that’s what makes “True Blood” so fun.  Vampires are out because of advanced technology that makes them able to live without feeding on people, and their struggle is overtly analogized to the gay rights struggle.  Their world is full of HDTVs, innovative drug use, internet pornography (Lafayette makes money web-camming), and even the fundamentalist Christian church has all the markers of the modern day tech-happy megachurch.  But even though we know the characters have cell phones that they use when it’s plot convenient, they somehow seem to forget they have them when the plot needs them to not be communicating.  From what I understand, the show follows the books very closely, so it seems the original sinner in this regard is Charlaine Harris.  I imagine in genre fiction on paper, it perhaps doesn’t seem that strange to have characters not pick up a phone and call when they absolutely would in real life.  (Though even there, I’m going to say it’s a stretch.)  But on TV, it’s absolutely jarring and I wish they would do something about it. 

I will say this—-you hear over and over again from aficionados of genre narratives that they are absolutely the same thing as literary fiction and that making distinctions between the two is elitist.  And I’m often inclined to agree.  You see genre fiction that rises to the level of literary fiction, as I believe “The Wire” did, and you see overtly artistic works borrow heavily from genre tropes.  But in our era of heavy duty information overload, I think genre writers on all levels really have an opportunity to blur the distinctions by accepting that the same old plots that rely heavily on not knowing critical information just don’t work any more.  This burden can be reconstructed as an opportunity to start coming up with new plot devices that rely much less on cliche. 

Telecoms have gone full Tea Party on net neutrality:

The FCC has released a national broadband plan recently, part of which included very, very mild proposals about net neutrality, focused almost entirely on preventing content discrimination by ISPs (short version: any resource a user wants to access should be treated equally by the ISP, regardless of its content). 

As government regulations go, this is about as benign and pro-consumer as you can get.  However, ISPs really, really hate this because it makes their shiny new pipelines slightly less profitable, mainly in the sense that it prevents them from extorting money out of both consumers and content providers to get the same service they’d be entitled to under the service the ISP says it’s supposed to provide anyway.

Basically, the government is Robert Mugabe, ISPs are white farmers and I think you’re someone trying to buy a newspaper with a trillion Internet dollars or something. 

There’s a reason this ad provides no specifics and its script could double as a sign at a tax day rally in Sarasota: the actual specifics of net neutrality (the government ensuring that the Internet works the way it has since you were arguing what powers Thor’s hammer had on AOL forums in 1996) so entirely undercut the telecom position in such an embarrassing way that an actual defense of their position would be the equivalent of revealing that the real reason you want to go to Dairy Queen is to stuff Oreo chunks and soft serve into your underwear and tell small children about your Chilly Willy.

When there’s no new episode of Rachel Maddow to watch when I go to the gym, I’ve been biding my time on the hamster wheel recently by watching the TED talks that are available online for free on iTunes.  Hey, got to work that cocktail party chatter gathering in somewhere.  One I watched today is a year old, but I thought it was fascinating.  Stefana Broadbent presented her research on how social networking and technology are creating little pockets of intimacy in people’s work lives.  It’s 11 minutes long, but well worth watching.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days about how modern people are lonely and isolated, and I agree with a lot of that hand-wringing.  But where I draw up short is the desire to blame technology.  I think the “blame technology” tendency has a lot to do with resentments and fears people have about things they don’t necessarily understand.  (Which is one reason I think a lot of people have contradictory, weird ideas about contraception technology, because the “magical” aspects of technology mix with sexual fears to create a potpourri of bullshit.)  But technology’s ability to shape human behavior can’t be understood without the context of culture and power.  In this case, I think Broadbent makes a convincing case that the technological developments blamed for people’s isolation—-namely the car and the television set—-probably had less impact on their loneliness than an entire culture built around the idea that the worker’s personal life is an imposition on their ability to work. Not to say that the car and the TV set don’t exacerbate the problem of lack of community, but the problem originates with a culture that wants you to forget your family and friends the second you walk in the door at work, and try to squeeze time with those people in at the margins.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—-constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.)  It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open. 

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too. 

A lot of attention is paid to the struggles people have with making friends in our isolating society, and I think that focus is important, but it’s also important to ask if the other part of the equation is that people aren’t keeping the relationships they do have healthy.  A culture that expects people to use down time at work to update Facebook and text message their partners and friends is one where people are probably going to have that many real relationships to keep them buoyed.  I’ll add that touching base with loved ones during the day can make a person feel less lonely overall; merely having someone at home isn’t enough if you feel like a lot of their life is mysterious to you. 

A couple of news items were passed to me by folks, and I thought I’d put them together, because they touch on similar questions about the way that technology’s evolution towards replicating human forms for entertainment introduce whole new confusing issues about sexuality and gender and feminism.  Or, to put it another way: Brand new technologies, same old assholes.  And as the distinctions between the self and the outside of the self are collapsed with the increasing amount of time creating communities in virtual spaces, women are getting the shaft, because of the long-standing tradition that holds that women can be regarded as no more than objectified bodies.* 

The first story was sent to me by Tobasco de Gama, who blogged about it here.  Essentially, a dude complained on a gaming forum that his roommate was considering abandoning a PS3 game called Playstation Home, because some dude in the game singled her out for sexual harassment.  (He insisted on stalking her avatar throughout the game and crouching behind her in a threatening manner.)  Unfortunately, the whole thing got ugly because the woman and her friend used the term “assault”, which opened up the door to people doing what they’re going to do, which is to immediately hide behind the fact that her corporeal body was not threatened in order to excuse the behavior.  Well, okay, it’s not assault, but it is harassment, and it functions in the same way cat-calling and public groping do, which is to make the groper/harasser feel powerful and to make the space unfriendly to women, who the harasser views with contempt. 

The virtual nature of this may make it less scary, but it doesn’t change the fact that the man in question imported real world tactics to oppress women into an online format.  The commenters on the article dismissed the complaints by pointing out that there’s a similar kind of behavior in the game Halo, where you run over someone you shot and squat over their face, essentially “teabagging” them.  But as Tobasco points out, that actually doesn’t detract from the woman’s argument, but adds to it:

It’s quite obvious that “teabagging” opponents in online games is a form of humiliation intended to express dominance over the defeated player. I’m a little ambivalent towards this in the context of a competitive game, since often trash talking can be part of the fun. (See: the “taunts” in TF2 and a lot of other multiplater games.) The difference here is two-fold: First, this occurred in a social game, not a competitive game, so dominance displays are at the very least out of place and, frankly, would be considered quite rude even if the interaction involved two male or two female players.

He also points out that this is a man doing this to a woman because she’s a woman, which is an entirely different context than some dude trash-talking an opponent (male or female) according to the observed social rules of the game.  (That’s another discussion.)  This guy was referencing real world assaults on women’s lives and dignity in order to ruin her experience of the game.  And he did it to express hostility towards women for being women.  Like a groper in the non-virtual world.  Intent and context are what make sexual harassment and assault so upsetting in the real world, which is why they are a serious problem in the online world. The notion that this doesn’t count because her physical body wasn’t in play reinforces the worrisome idea that a woman’s physical body counts for more than her subjective experiences.

The other story is kind of the flip side of this—-an attempt to reduce women to bodies without subjective experiences of any importance.  This dude invented a sex robot, with the telling name True Companion (since those insufficient real women aren’t true enough companions, with their opinions and moods).  I watched the somewhat boring interview with the creator because I was curious about why on earth you’d spend so much time on making something that will only matter to a tiny sliver of the population whose abhorrence of women outstrips their disgust provoked while gazing upon an exemplar of the uncanny valley.  It was very….revealing. 

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Reader Stevious attended a town hall meeting held at IBM in Austin by Congressman John Carter (R-TX-31), and the topic of the pol’s no vote on ENDA. The answer that Carter gave can be summed up as sexual orientation isn’t an “attribute” deserving of anti-discrimination protections. So Stevious wrote Carter:

Wrong Answer John
I asked you about your NO vote on ENDA yesterday at IBM, a place that has had a non-discrimination policy for GLBT people since 1984. In your world, apparently, there are forms of discrimination that are OK, because that’s how I understand your answer. You’ll notice the room was flat silent after your answer. You disrespected all of us in the room, and IBM, who, as a company, has come out in support of a fully inclusive ENDA.”

Senator Edward Kennedy said: “The promise of America will never be fulfilled as long as justice is denied to even one among us,” when speaking about ENDA. “The Employment Non-Discrimination Act brings us closer to fulfilling that promise for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens.

Unfortunately Carter (or rather his bone-headed communications spokesbot) doesn’t know about how those darned IP addys tell a tale (143.231.249.137, housegate12.house.gov) and he posted this lush bit of astroturf:

Good job, Judge Carter, thanks for standing up for the vast majority of your constituents who agree with your vote 100%! I was not aware of your vote until this popped up, keep up the good work and let’s take back the House in 2010 with 100 new congressmen just like you!

Pop over to Stevious’s pad to see the tasty bust of this clown.

Okay, so a big part of the reason I don’t blog as much these days isn’t because I’m too busy.  It’s because my computer (an aluminum MacBook) freezes in the middle of everything I’m writing, gives me the rainbow wheel, and forces me to reset it.  When it restarts, Firefox brings up tabs from three days to a week ago rather than what I had open.  Does anyone have experience with this?

It’s time again for our

quarterly Google Outrage.

For those of you who aren’t aware, a Google Outrage happens either when Google changes their logo but chooses, say, the 25th anniversary of Tetris over the 65th anniversary of D-Day (because we always celebrate the 65th anniversary of things, you know), or when Google doesn’t change their homepage on a day that’s important to conservatives, like Ronald Reagan’s birthday or Super Saturdays down at the local Putt-Putt.

There are two overarching issues with Google Outrages.  First, it presumes that people actually view the Google homepage as an authoritative resource on This Day In History, and that a generation of children will somehow gaze upon Google.com for longer than it takes them to type in “gears of war faq” and hit Enter and believe that nothing else happened on June 6th throughout all of history. Second, it presumes that a company which has, this year, commemorated Giovanni Schiaparelli, Dr. Seuss and Jackson Pollock’s birthdays is somehow choosing what days to commemorate based off of a desire to commemorate some message about America’s greatness. 

Anyway, what happened this time was that Google commemorated Tetris’s 25th anniversary on June 6th…and didn’t commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day (my guess is because 65 is not as much of a landmark anniversary as 25, and Google is a technology company, and seriously?).  Predictably, Google hates America and is advancing an anti-American agenda. 

These are also the people who go to baseball games and are convinced that their birthday isn’t on the scoreboard because the Atlanta Braves hate Christians.

If these fine Americans find themselves unable to handle the fact that Google may not at all times reflect their particular preferences in logo design, may I recommend using the power of the market to use any of the other dozen search engines available, such as Bing.com, which currently showcases white text on a large photo background, because it’s apparently 1997 and that’s how webpages are designed.  Alternately, there’s Lycos.  They have Angelfire pages!

So, the “I’m a PC” Laptop Hunters commercials really, really annoy me.  The main reason is because their choppy editing and complete logical inconsistency makes the entire message of the commercial that PCs are great for indecisive consumers who want a computer that will Do Things, and the problem with Macs is Stuff.  The secondary reason is the premise of the commercials, which is as follows:

1.) Microsoft will offer you an amount of money to buy a computer that will fulfill your needs.
2.) Your needs are poorly defined, oddly inconsistent with the needs of a real person in your situation, and ultimately fulfilled by whatever’s cheap and name brand.
3.) For no apparent reason, you will leave hundreds of dollars of free money (and thus free computer) on the table just to get back at those fucking Mac bastard fucks.

Let us watch A Tale Of Two Laurens.

Lauren One is a cute, alternative redhead (she has a SCARF and a BIG PURSE and DARK FINGERNAIL POLISH and probably works at your local coffee shop and smiles at you but is not interested in you like that, but maybe, who knows?) who, if you’ll notice, walks in the Mac Store long enough for a passerby to go approximately 25 feet and be in both her entering the store and exiting the store shot.  She wants a sub-$1000 computer, but does not want the terrible Mac with the 13” screen that she never looked at.

For some reason, Lauren wants a computer with a 17” screen, but given that she ends up buying a $700 HP, I have no idea what she wants the screen for - she’s too busy fake-lamenting her lack of Mac coolness to actually say - but she gets her HP Pavillion with its big screen and its future bevy of technical issues (not a particularly big HP fan here).

Then, there’s Lauren Two.  She’s a cute, perky blonde who’s going out with mom to find a computer for law school (wholesome and smart!), and wants something small and light and portable for under $1700.  So, for some completely inexplicable reason, she goes to the larger $2,000 Mac, which is just a terrible choice.

So, Lauren Two, unable to find a Mac under $2,000, buys a 13” Dell XPS for just under $1,000.  It’s so sad that she…wait the fuck a minute.  Lauren One didn’t even go in the stupid store and still found a 13” Mac for $1,000, but Lauren Two couldn’t find the same computer despite the fact that she was verifiably standing next to Macs - THERE IS VIDEO - and looking at them.  Mom says that Lauren Two always gets what she wants, although I have to wonder how accurate that assessment is when she remains blithely ignorant of her options. 

Also, I get that the point of these commercials is that PCs are a lot more affordable, but really, if a giant soulless corporation offers you X amount of money for something, wouldn’t any rational person take X amount of money rather than saving them a few hundred dollars? 

This, in a nutshell, is why I hate these ads.  It’s people (well, actors) basically shopping for some random set of specifications solely for the purpose of not buying the competitor product.  It’s like having someone wander around a Toyota dealership, fruitlessly searching for a sub-$15,000 sedan with a four-letter name before finding out that the only car which satisfies such a pressing need is the Chevy Aveo.