Bennett — who hates that Elon Musk email telling workers to be "hard core" — concurs:
Honestly, yes.
“Hard core” is a bygone era of management... [W]e’ve now got plenty of other, soft-core
interests to replace it. How about a workplace modeled on cottagecore, in which we just flutter around in forests and forage for mushrooms instead of hovering over Slack? Or cabincore, in which we huddle in cozy flannel (comfycore) in front of a fireplace instead of being warmed by the glow of our screens?...
Maybe what we are witnessing with Twitter’s mass exodus — and the general antiwork sentiment in general — is a labor revolt “in real time,”
as one Twitter user put it....
I'm so glad I have a "moss" tag to use for this... especially since, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Meade came in and announced that the moss he'd planted for me last summer was taking hold. And he saw a mouse on the moss — a moss mouse. How cottagecore is that?!
"Friday’s word was vulgarian, following close after bareknuckle. Others included rodomont (a vain boaster), grobian (a buffoonish person) and Sinon (one who misleads and betrays). Also chirocracy (a government that rules with a heavy hand) and froward (difficult to deal with or contrary)."
From "Trump’s White Whale/Trump will not stop until he brings down Trump" (NYT). Funny. But why is Dowd exposed to other people signing her up for email? I mean, I understand spam, but she says "someone signed me up." I'm amused by the language stuff, and I do think the implicit attack on Trump is intentional. And it's a big week for using circumstantial evidence to decide what in another person's head.
But on to the "Moby-Dick" business. There's this idea that Trump is really out to destroy himself, and I've got to wonder whether it's a genius defense move, making your opponents believe that you've got a death wish. He says he wants a trial, and what does that mean — that he does or he doesn't? Which is the best move for the House Democrats — to give him that trial or to deny it to him?
"... Clifford Stoll is here with a warning in 'Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.' There may be roadblocks up ahead," cautions Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in a 1995 NYT book review, "Feeling Hornswoggled By the Computer Age," which I stumbled into — I kid you not — because I was searching for the word "hornswoggle" in the NYT archive. Hey, you have your research projects, and I have mine.
Anyway, I was up for reading and blogging the review because — 1995! I want to see how people were casting doubt on the internet in 1995. I remember the dubiousness about the internet in the early-to-mid 90s. (I even had a letter to the editor on the subject published in the NYT in 1993 — here.)
Back to Mr. Lehmann-Haupt:
As [Stoll] tells it, his misgivings began on a vacation, when he found himself on a Connecticut farm, "bathed in the cold glow of my cathode-ray tube, answering E-mail." A sense of disorientation set in, a disconnection from the physical world. He felt virtually unreal.
So he begins his book by deploring the lack of physical sensation in cyberspace. The game of Adventure is no substitute for actual spelunking, he reminds us. People won't shop by computer; they prefer real money and flesh-and-blood salespeople.
Ha ha ha.
Children need human teachers, not video screens. E-mail's all right when you've just got something to say, but E-mail's not right when you're trying to get people's attention; the Postal Service is more reliable, he insists, and far more forgiving of mistaken addresses. Besides, real letters have stamps on them, and unique handwriting, which has declined because of computers, like everyone's prose style despite the belief that computers would inspire better writing. And a compact disk is no substitute for a book.
A compact disc? I think he's talking about music.
Goaded by this enmity toward the abstractness of computing, Mr. Stoll proceeds to a general attack on hardware, software and their various interfaces.... In the electronic library of the future, you won't be able to browse through the stacks, although, he adds, given the immensity of the task, the prospect of digitizing all books is probably beyond realization. The flow of bits can be surprisingly slow under certain circumstances. Even the dream of video on demand is unrealizable, he writes. "It's a surprisingly tough engineering job, keeping a thousand movies ready for instant retrieval."...
Some were looking to him to send the column so they could read it. Some of these were anti-Trumpers:
“Please forward the full article that the dumbest president in the entire history of dumb states of America was alluding to in his recent tweet about himself... With apologies in advance for being the gazillionth person to ask.”
Some wrote to say "Fuck you," like the guy (named by Goodwin) who wrote "FUCK YOU!" 75 times and: “The buffoon actually posted your email address on his Twitter. I hope you get 3 million hate emails."
And: "I was subscribed to gay websites, and penis images were attached to a number of emails sent my way. All of which struck me as mighty strange. Here are these so-called liberals who still think the greatest insult is to call someone gay. Their homophobia is out of the closet."
Slate's Will Oremus examines the story, propounded by the NYT, that John Podesta relied on advice from an IT guy who wrote "This is a legitimate email" but says he'd made a "typo" and had meant "This is an illegitimate email." Oremus asks the obvious question: Did you also typo "a" for "an"?
The IT guy, Charles Delavan, told Podesta to change his password and to set up two-factor authentication, but he gave him a correct link to Google's website. Podesta reacted by clicking on the link in the original nonlegitimate email, which is a mistake that anyone using email should know about.
Asked about the a/an discrepancy, Delavan told me the Times had the wording wrong. Delavan had actually meant to type that it was “not a legitimate email,” but mistakenly omitted the word not. Are you sure, I asked? “Yes,” he said. I asked why, if Delavan knew the email was not legitimate, he still directed Podesta to change his password.... Delavan said he recommended the password change “out of an abundance of caution,” even though he knew the request was a scam.
There would have been no problem if Podesta hadn't gone to the bad link. Delavan's "abundance of caution" failed to take 2 steps of caution that could have helped save Podesta from his own personal witlessness. Delavan should have had that "not" and should have said don't click the link in that email.
Actually, I don't think Podesta was personally involved in any of this. Delavan interacted with Podesta's chief of staff, Sara Latham. Podesta looks like a fool, and there's this lame effort to shift the blame to Delavan. How about paying more attention to Latham? Are women just invisible?
"John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account. He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both,” the staffer said. "It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP."
His chief of staff, Sara Latham, wrote to another Podesta aide, Milia Fischer: "The gmail one is REAL Milia, can you change - does JDP have the 2 step verification or do we need to do with him on the phone? Don't want to lock him out of his in box!”...
So it was Milia Fischer who failed to use the correct Google link but went back into the original phishing email? How many layers of unsophistication did they have over there at the Clinton campaign?
And as long as we're shining a light on Milia Fischer, there's this Breitbart item from October 16th, "WikiLeaks Reveals Podesta’s Obsession with Aliens… Space Aliens!" in which we learn that Fischer once forwarded Podesta a message from Tom DeLonge (a pop singer, late of Blink-182).
“Please show Mr. Podesta this private teaser. Let him know that I am spending all afternoon interviewing a scientist that worked on a spacecraft at Area 51 tomorrow,” DeLonge wrote.
Fischer's forwarding message said that DeLonge seems to have met with Steven Spielberg about some project that he wanted to get Podesta in on. Here's Podesta enthusing about aliens:
Maybe aliens hacked the election. All that "Russians" business is code, you know.
While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
The story is about the idiocy of falling for phishing! How is that "hard to see coming"? And what's the point of tracing it? Just never fall for it and the problem is solved, wherever the hell it came from. The Russians don't deserve special credit for devious genius. The Clinton campaign deserves to be lambasted for its shocking stupidity. And these are people who wanted to be trusted with the nuclear codes and who relied on the argument that Donald Trump is a dangerous ignoramus.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton did a short press conference about FBI director's Comey's letter to Congress about reopening the email investigation. Here's part of that:
REPORTER: What would you say to a voter who right now will be seeing you and hearing what you're saying, saying I didn't trust her before. I don't trust her any more right now....
HILLARY CLINTON: You know, I think people a long time ago made up their minds about the e-mails. I think that's factored into what people think and now they are choosing a president.
So the question is: What would you say to a voter? And the answer — the nonanswer — is: People don't think. They're done thinking. Anything that could be in the email is already factored into their opinion of me.
It sounds as though she's delivering the contents of what could have been an emailed conversation with her confidantes about what she could say to voters. I imagine a private conversation hitting upon the idea of maybe voters will think that they don't need to think about email anymore because they've already heard a lot about email, and that if they are still voting or considering voting for her, they've factored it in.
But that's not what you should say outright to voters. You should say something that makes them feel they've already absorbed and digested the email and have had their fill. You shouldn't reveal that's what you want them to think!
It reminds me of President George H.W. Bush:
"Message: I care" came in January 1992 as he was just gearing up the process of losing the election to Bill Clinton — Bill Clinton, who had a special knack for making people feel that he cared.
She insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but she wasn’t allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices, a secure space known as Mahogany Row.... Her aides and senior officials pushed to find a way to enable her to use the device in the secure area. But their efforts unsettled the diplomatic security bureau, which was worried that foreign intelligence services could hack her BlackBerry and transform it into a listening device....
“The issue here is one of personal comfort,” one of the participants in [a meeting of security, intelligence and technology specialists], Donald Reid, the department’s senior coordinator for security infrastructure, wrote afterward in an email that described Clinton’s inner circle of advisers as “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts.”
The Wisconsin State Journal reports, based on a 2011 request for a search warrant that prosecutors made public yesterday. The original investigation — the John Doe investigation — was secret. The revelations are now coming in connection with the civil lawsuit brought by Cindy Archer.
The Journal presents this as significant because Walker has been saying that he was never a target of the investigation. Walker campaign spokeswoman AshLee Strong responded:
“The information released today comes from a case that has been closed for more than two years,” Strong said. “It is another example of the politics involved in this process as people who could not prove things in a court of law are attempting to win in the court of public opinion.”
This point seems almost stronger when/if we know that Walker was a target. The investigation was, apparently, extremely aggressive, and if they were out to get Walker and smelled enough blood that they believed he'd committed a felony, then the complete failure to pin anything on him is quite an endorsement. I thought we all commit 3 felonies a day — or... that's the meme that expresses how easy it is to find a law on the books that they can pin on you if they want to get you badly enough. How did Walker slip free of the grip of prosecutors who wanted to get him?
Back to the Wisconsin State Journal article:
Prosecutors... were looking into signs of misconduct and bid-rigging regarding competition to house the Department of Aging in private office space. [John] Hiller, a real estate broker who at the time was Walker’s longtime campaign treasurer, was quietly working for one of three bidders seeking to provide office space and buy an aging building known as City Campus owned by Milwaukee County.
[John Doe investigator Robert] Stelter argued in the warrant request that Walker committed a felony when in June of 2010 he used a personal email account to ask Hiller for a letter that rejected Department of Transportation and Public Works director Jack Takarian’s request for a six-month extension for the county’s Department on Aging office lease in the Reuss Federal Plaza in Milwaukee. That rejection set up the need for a later deal “against the interests of Milwaukee County,” the warrant said. Hiller then forwarded the email to Jensen, according to the search warrant request, who then with Hiller wrote the letter rejecting the extension.
Interesting... the things that happen or may be happening in personal email. Personal email is taking the place of phone conversation in our lives, and the kind of communication that once evanesced remain to haunt us... unless we're good at deleting our email.
Isn't it strange that Scott Walker faced such intense scrutiny over email about the rejection of a lease extension for county office space? Compare that to the subject matter of the lost emails of Lois Lerner and Hillary Clinton!
In the email yesterday, after many emails from the DP all week:
That's a freeze frame. In the original email, the clock ticks down second by second, New Year's Eve style. (I've blurred out the email address, which is my University of Wisconsin work email.)
I get so many emails from the Democratic Party throughout the year, always with that "donate" button, and always with a super-low option like $3. So there must be people who will have lost track of their "supporter record." Perhaps some of these people are susceptible to the worry that the Party has a number on them. They know. I'd better check. Is it enough? How can I not hit the button one last time this year and give them that less-than-a-latte $3?
As for me, I give nothing, ever, to any candidate, in any party, so I never lose track of my "supporter record."
"But my emails, right there for all to see, specifically indicated that I wanted the restaurant to refund all customers who had been overcharged. Somehow that key fact ended up totally missing from almost all the media coverage.... From my perspective, the most distressing aspect of the media coverage was how little attention the articles paid to my true motivations."
Said Ben Edelman, the Harvard professor whose email to a restaurant made so many people think he was a world-class asshole.
"You say the wrong thing — you see what happened to [Sterling]... I’m not defending what Sterling said at all, but if that’s not the First Amendment then what the [bleep] is? And what did he say, ‘I don’t want my girlfriend hanging out with black basketball players’? Me neither!"
Said the actress Lisa Kudrow, commenting on the leaked emails of Sony executives (in which, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio was called "despicable").
"It doesn't matter how many times [an email] says 'This is confidential, meant for just between the sender and the recipient,'" [Kudrow] said. "Why don't we know that there are no rules? Everything is broadcast and published. That's the part I just don't understand."
That tough reality has made Kudrow extremely cautious of what she says.
"I mean, I have almost no opinions anymore," she joked.
Kudrow asks a good question — and she seems to imply that the answer is that these executives were embarrassingly ignorant and out of touch with modern life. But there could be other explanations. I thought of two:
1. Email is an efficient way to conduct business, but only when the speech is sharp and clear and cuts through all the crap. The successful executives are the ones who can communicate like this, and for them, at least until now, it has been worth the risk. Email couched in pleasantries and euphemisms would waste everyone's time and make you look insufficiently hard-assed. The risk of leakage was far outweighed by the potential to succeed, and those who weigh the risk otherwise don't get to these positions of power in the first place. It's fine for an actress to cultivate her niceness image, but she's got a entirely different kind of career. And having "almost no opinions" is a good low-risk strategy for her.
2. The Hollywood executives actually don't mind if these opinions leak out. They won't come forward now and own up to actually thinking Leonardo DiCaprio was "despicable" to withdraw from whatever commitment he made to play the role of Steve Jobs in another Steve Jobs biopic or that Angelina Jolie, who was bothering them somehow over another biopic of Cleopatra, is "a minimally talent spoiled brat." Pressuring/controlling/manipulating celebrities is what these executives need to do, and creating anxieties about whether they will get their projects funded or will get work in the future is part of how they play their game. Maybe the executives want Leo and Angie and the others to know that the executives expect better compliance.
I'm not saying I'm sure either or both of those things are true. I'm just playing with alternate scenarios and trying to open up the discussion.
"... while a third said he would take out his phone in the middle of a conversation or during a meal together. A quarter said their partner would actually send texts or emails to another person while they were having a face-to-face conversation."
From an NPR report on a survey of 143 married or cohabiting heterosexual women. No word on whether women (and gay people) interact with electronic devices during conversations.
"Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who can appear a little dour during arguments, revealed a lively wit. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she was working to temper a combative questioning style 'that has held me in bad stead.'"
Justice Thomas... He acknowledged being a “cynical and negative” law student, blaming immaturity and the unsettled political climate of the early 1970s. “I cannot say we were thinking straight about a lot of things, even if we were not using illegal substances,” he said. “I wish I came here at a time when I could have been more positive.... There is so much here that I walked right by.”...
The justices were questioned by Kate Stith, a law professor at Yale. She asked Justice Alito what he had been reading. “I have two books that are inspirational,” he responded. “I keep them on a table by my bed, and I try to read a little bit of them every night. It’s ‘My Grandfather’s Son’ and ‘My Beloved World.’ ”
Alito is hilarious. There's also this:
Justice Sotomayor cited two reasons for the court’s reluctance to use technology [to communicate with each other]. One was tradition. “The other,” she said of some of her colleagues, “is they don’t know how.”
I assumed that was a punchline from Alito, but Liptak signals that it's literally true that there are spittoons. It's still a humorous line, but less funny — less funny of Alito if there really are spittoons,* even though making the observations at that point is a concise, amusing way to say the Court is old-fashioned. And since it's funny if they have spittoons, the sum total of funniness is at least as good as if Alito made it up.
Liptak continues with a Thomas quote, introduced with a Liptak sentence about how to understand the state of mind it reflects:
Justice Thomas said he was content with the way things are. “I like formality,” he said.
I could think of some other ways to interpret those 3 words and don't like being told to think of Justice Thomas as complacent and stiff. A person might like formality without being content with the way things are. A preference for formality can arise out of discomfort and mistrust.** What kind of person shies away from free-wheeling banter and wants things put in writing?
** There is Critical Race Theory scholarship connecting a preference for formality to race. Citation to come.
ADDED: Here's what I was looking for, Patricia J. Williams, "The Alchemy of Race and Rights," Chapter 8, "The Pain of Word Bondage." Williams describes the willingness of her colleague Peter to rent an apartment with no written agreement, to hand over a $900 cash deposit to strangers without even getting the keys. She, a black, female law professor, said:
… I was raised to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute. Futility and despair are very real parts of my response. So it helps me to clarify boundary; to show that I can speak the language of lease is my way of enhancing trust in me in my business affairs. As black, I have been given by this society a strong sense of myself as already too familiar, personal, subordinate to white people. I am still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human, a subpart of the white estate. I grew up in a neighborhood where landlords would not sign leases with their poor black tenants, and demanded that the rent be paid in cash; although superficially resembling Peter's transactions, such informality in most white-on-black situations signals distrust, not trust. Unlike Peter, I am still engaged in the struggle to set up transactions at arm's length, as legitimately commercial, and to portray myself as a bargainer of separate worth, distinct power, sufficient rights to manipulate commerce.
Peter, I speculate, would say that a lease or any other formal mechanism would introduce distrust into his relationships and he would suffer alienation, leading to the commodification of his being and the degradation of his person to property. For me, in contrast, the lack of formal relation to the other would leave me estranged. It would risk figurative isolation from that creative commerce by which I may be recognized as whole, by which I may feed and clothe and shelter myself, by which I may be seen as equal — even if I am a stranger. For me, stranger-stranger relations are better than stranger-chattel.
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