Category Archives: New Utopia

Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the companys gender diversity policies and made statements about womens biological suitability for technical jobs.

Portions of the memo violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace, Googles chief executive, Sundar Pichai, wrote in a companywide email.

Its impossible to believe that Google or other large tech companies a few years ago would have reacted like this to such a memo. In 2011 when CNN filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the workplace diversity data on big tech companies, Google, among others, asked the Department of Labor for its data to be excluded. The company said that releasing that information would cause competitive harm. It was not until 2014 that Google began to disclose statistics showing that only 17 percent of its technical work force was female.

The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity. Peter Thiel, one of the ideological leaders in the Valley, wrote in 2009 on a blog affiliated with the Cato Institute that since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.

If women should not even have the vote, why should we worry about gender diversity in the engineering ranks?

Today Google is under growing scrutiny, and the cognitive dissonance between the outward-facing Dont be evil stance and the internal misogynistic brogrammer rhetoric was too extreme.

Google had to fire the offending engineer, James Damore, but anyone who spends time on the message boards frequented by Valley engineers will know that the bro culture that gave us Gamergate an online movement that targeted women in the video game industry is much more prevalent than Mr. Pichai wants to acknowledge.

Google employees who opposed Mr. Damore found their internal company profile pictures posted on Breitbart, the Verge reported. What really gets me is that when Googlers leaked these screenshots, they knew this was the element of the internet they were leaking it to, a former Google employee said. They knew they were subjecting their colleagues to this type of abuse.

The company canceled a planned all-hands meeting on Thursday, citing concern about harassment.

For much of the short life of Silicon Valley, America has held a largely romantic view of the tech industry. Men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were held in high esteem. But increasingly, companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are coming under the same cultural microscope that questioned the greed is good culture of the 1980s. Viewers of the comedy series Silicon Valley note that uber-libertarianism and uber-geek machismo go hand in hand. And certainly Mark Zuckerberg was not happy with his portrayal in David Finchers The Social Network, nor could anyone in the Valley be happy with Dave Eggerss novel The Circle or Don DeLillos Zero K.

The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap. But it will soon involve the heart of Googles business: surveillance capitalism. The trope that if you are not paying for it, you arent the customer youre the product has been around for a while. But now the European Union has passed the General Data Protection Regulation, which will go into effect next May. This regulation aims to give people more control over their data, so search engines cant follow them everywhere they roam online. It will be an arrow to the heart of Googles business.

We have an obligation to care about the values of the people who run Google, because weve given Google enormous control over our lives and the lives of our children. As the former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris points out, Without realizing the implications, a handful of tech leaders at Google and Facebook have built the most pervasive, centralized systems for steering human attention that has ever existed, while enabling skilled actors (addictive apps, bots, foreign governments) to hijack our attention for manipulative ends.

The future implications of a couple of companies having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt. The rise of artificial intelligence combined with Googles omnipresence in our lives is an issue that is not well understood by politicians or regulators.

America is slowly waking up both culturally and politically to the takeover of our economy by a few tech monopolies. We know we are being driven by men like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos toward a future that will be better for them. We are not sure that it will be better for us.

As George Packer, writing in The New Yorker in 2011, put it, In Thiels techno-utopia, a few thousand Americans might own robot-driven cars and live to 150, while millions of others lose their jobs to computers that are far smarter than they are, then perish at 60.

Somehow the citizens of the world have been left out of this discussion of our future. Because tools like Google and Facebook have become so essential and because we have almost no choice in whether to use them, we need to consider the role they play in our lives.

By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future.

Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern Californias Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Google Doesnt Care Whats Best for Us.

Continue reading here:

Google Doesn't Want What's Best for Us - New York Times

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Posted: Aug 12, 2017 12:01 AM

Al Gores new movie, a New York Times article on the final Obama Era manmade climate disaster report, and a piece saying wrathful people twelve years from now will hang hundreds of climate deniers are a tiny sample of Climate Hysteria and Anti-Trump Resistance rising to a crescendo. If we dont end our evil fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles and go 100% renewable Right Now, we are doomed, they rail.

Maybe its our educational system, our cargo cults easy access to food and technology far from farms, mines and factories, or the end-of-days propaganda constantly pounded into our heads. Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Lets take a short journey into that idyllic realm.

Suppose we generate just the25 billion megawatt-hours of todays total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (Thats not total energyconsumption, and it doesnt include what wed need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) Wed need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines!

Spacing them at just 15 acres per turbine would require12.5 billion acres! Thats twice the land area of North America! All those whirling blades would virtually exterminate raptors, other birds and bats. Rodent and insect populations would soar. Add in transmission lines, solar panels and biofuel plantations to meet the rest of the worlds energy demands and the mostly illegal tree cutting for firewood to heat poor families homes and huge swaths of our remaining forest and grassland habitats would disappear.

The renewable future assumes these eco-friendly alternatives would provide reliable, affordable energy 24/7/365, even during windless, sunless weeks and cold, dry growing seasons. They never will, of course. That means we will have electricity and fuels when nature cooperates, instead of when we need it.

With backup power plants gone, constantly on-and-off electricity will make it impossible to operate assembly lines, use the internet, do an MRI or surgery, enjoy favorite TV shows or even cook dinner.Refrigerators and freezerswouldconk out for hours or days at a time. Medicines and foodswouldspoil.

Petrochemical feed stocks would be gone so we wouldnt have paints, plastics, synthetic fibers or pharmaceuticals, except what can be obtained at great expense from weather-dependent biodiesel. Kiss yourcotton-polyester-lycra leggings and yoga pants good-bye.

But of course all that is really not likely to happen. It would actually be far worse.

First of all, there wouldnt even be any wind turbines or solar panels. Without fossil fuels or far more nuclear and hydroelectric plants, which rabid environmentalists also despise we couldnt mine the needed ores, process and smelt them, build and operate foundries, factories, refineries or cement kilns, manufacture and assemble turbines and panels. We couldnt even make machinery to put in factories.

Wind turbines, solar panels and solar thermal installations cannot produce consistently high enough heat to smelt ores and forge metals. They cannot generate power on a reliable enough basis to operate facilities that make modern technologies possible. They cannot provide the power required tomanufacture turbines, panels, batteries or transmission lines much less power civilization.

My grandmother used to tell me, The only good thing about the good old days is that theyre gone. Well, theyd be back, as the USA is de-carbonized, de-industrialized and de-developed.

Ponder America and Europe before coal fueled the modern industrial age. Recall what we were able to do back then, what lives were like, how long people lived. Visit Colonial Williamsburg and Claude Moore Colonial Farm in Virginia, or similar places in your state. Explore rural Africa and India.

Imagine living that way, every day: pulling water from wells, working the fields with your hoe and ox-pulled plow, spinning cotton thread and weaving on looms, relying on whatever metal tools your local blacksmith shop can produce. When the sun goes down, your lives will largely shut down.

Think back to amazing construction projects of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome or even 18th century London, Paris, New York. Ponder how they were built, how many people it took, how they obtained and moved the raw materials. Imagine being part of those wondrous enterprises, from sunup to sundown.

The good news is that there will be millions of new jobs. The bad news is that theyd involve mostly backbreaking labor with picks and shovels, for a buck an hour. Low-skill, low-productivity jobs just dont pay all that well. Maybe to create even more jobs, the government will issue spoons, instead of shovels.

That will be your life, not reading, watching TV and YouTube or playing video games. Heck, there wont even be any televisions or cell phones. Drugs and alcohol will be much harder to come by, too. (No more opioid crisis.) Water wheels and wind mills will be back in fashion. All-natural power, not all the time.

More good news: Polluting, gas-guzzling, climate-changing cars and light trucks will be a thing of the past. Instead, youll have horses, oxen, donkeys, buggies and wagons again grow millions of acres of hay to feed them and have to dispose of millions or billions of tons of manure and urine every year.

Therell be no paved streets unless armies of low-skill workers pound rocks into gravel, mine and grind limestone, shale, bauxite and sand for cement, and make charcoal for lime kilns. Homes will revert to what can be built with pre-industrial technologies, with no central heat and definitely no AC.

Ah, but you folks promoting the idyllic renewable energy future will still be the ruling elites. Youll get to live better than the rest of us, enjoy lives of reading and leisure, telling us commoners how we must live. Dont bet on it. Dont even bet on having the stamina to read after a long day with your shovel or spoon.

As society and especially big urban areas collapse into chaos, it will be survival of the fittest. And that group likely wont include too many Handgun Control and Gun Free Zone devotees.

But at least your climate will be stable and serene or so you suppose. You wont have any more extreme weather events. Sea levels will stay right where they are today: 400 feet higher than when a warming planet melted the last mile-thick glaciers that covered half the Northern Hemisphere 12,000 years ago.

At least it will be stable and serene until those solar, cosmic ray, ocean currents and other pesky, powerful natural forces decide to mess around with Planet Earth again.

Of course, many countries wont be as stupid as the self-righteous utopian nations. They will still use fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric, and watch while you roll backward toward the good old days. Those that dont swoop in to conquer and plunder may even send us food, clothing and monetary aid (most of which will end up with ruling elites and their families, friends, cronies and private armies).

So how about this as a better option?

Stop obsessing over dangerous manmade climate change. Focus on what really threatens our planet and its people: North Korea, Iran, Islamist terrorism and rampant poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death among the billions who still do not have access to electricity and the living standards it brings.

Worry less about manmade climate cataclysms and more about cataclysms caused by policies promoted in the name of controlling Earths climate, when they really end up controlling our lives.

Dont force-feed us with todays substandard, subsidized, pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-renewable energy systems. When better, more efficient, more practical energy technologies are developed, they will replace fossil fuels. Until then, we would be crazy to go down the primrose path to renewable energy utopia.

Link:

Life in fossil-fuel-free utopia - Townhall

By Katie Dunham

A number of CalArtians are currently in Edinburgh, Scotland, for the 70th anniversary of The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world.

Marking CalArts 14th year partnering with the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to stage plays from emerging Welsh and California artists, this years festival will once again see CalArts Festival Theater visiting Venue 13, the best little venue at the Fringe.

CalArts 2017 productionsall written by womeninvite audiences to venture inside the diverse and global community of Los Angeles. Two of the three shows, Gunshot Medley and The End, The End, The End, have been longlisted for the Festivals 2017 Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. The End, The End, The End is also longlisted for the Festivals Eddies Award.

Made possible by the CalArts Office of Advancement, this year marks the first ever Friends of CalArts Edinburgh Tour, during which a group of CalArts fans and supporters will join Travis Preston, Dean of the School of Theater, in Edinburgh for a week of shows and activities.

Running the entirety of the Festival Fringe, the following productions have all been workshopped at CalArts:

Gunshot Medley In playwright Dionna Michelle Daniels (Theater BFA 17) Gunshot Medley, past and present meet in a haunted North Carolina graveyard to explore the deep-seated racial tensions in the United States. Set to classic Appalachian folk music and gospel spirituals, the play stretches across the Antebellum American south through present day to weave a rich history of the Black American experience, the historical expendability of Black bodies and the lives lost to hatred, racism and police brutality.

Three slavesBetty, Alvis, and George, played by Morgan Camper (Theater MFA 18), Derek Jackson (Theater BFA 20), and Darius Booker (Theater MFA 17), respectivelyare stuck in a state of limbo, perpetually tasked with cleaning up the wreckage of systemic racism purveying contemporary America. An ever-present fourth character, the High Priestess of Souls (played by Daniel), an incarnate of the Yoruban goddess Oya, awakens each character to their condition, inciting action and social change.

A combination of spoken word and live music, the production pays homage to the real Betty, Alvis and George, three historically documented slaves that died in North Carolina before the emancipation proclamation was signed. It also seeks to respond to the insensitive usage of the Confederate Flag in the wake of the Charleston Church massacre.

Gunshot Medley features lighting design by Jesse Fryery (Theater MFA 17), set design by Alex Grover (Theater MFA 18), music from Kris Rahamad (Music BFA 17), sound design by Sam Sewell (Theater MFA 17), and costume design by Chardonnay Tobar (Theater MFA 18). It is stage managed by Samantha Brounstein (Theater BFA 19).

Gunshot Medley opened at Venue 13 on Saturday, Aug. 6, and runs through Saturday, Aug. 26.

Love Gasoline! Bessie Award-winning artist and CalArts instructor Stacy Dawson Stearns goes inside Marcel Duchamps imagination in Love Gasoline!. Inspired by the artists famously unfinished work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), the play presents Duchamps iconic Nude, who guides the audience into the glass to witness elaborate and unconventional acts of desire.

Featuring cyclical episodes of bizarre human behavior, occasional gambling, shots of music and psychologically graphic film sequences, Stearns innovative dance play seeks to strip down its own form to expose the possible plays within the glass and the hilarity of human desire.

Love Gasoline! stars both Stearns and Brian Ehst (Theater BFA 18) as Nudes, Billy Lawrence (Theater MFA 17) as The Nine Bachelors, and Tyree Marshall as The Bride (Theater BFA 17), and features lighting design by Jesse Fryery (Theater MFA 17), sound design by Sam Sewell (Theater MFA 17), music by Ian Stahl (Music MFA 18), and video design by Jonathan Stearns, CalArts Videographer. Rocky Hood (Theater BFA 19) is Production Stage Manager.

Love Gasoline! opened at Venue 13 on Saturday, Aug. 5 and runs through Saturday, Aug. 26. Recommended for mature audiences only.

The End, The End, The End The End, The End, The End focuses on an international ensembleself-described outsiders in a land of outsidersas they ritualize, remember and perform their exile experience in the United States.

Drowning in media and facing end-of-the-world paranoia and identity crisis in America, the exiles must constantly revise their personal histories and ideologies as the alleged other to survive.

Mixing pop iconography, intimate storytelling, motion-sensor video, real-time light art, operatic manifestos of political prophets, athletic and sensual performance, and more, the result is a defiant theatrical collage seeking to debunk myths of otherness and enlist audience members in a revolution for a new utopia.

Conceived and directed by Scarlett Kim (Theater MFA 18), The End, The End, The End stars Brian Ehst (Theater BFA 19), Gabriel Eduardo Jimenez (Theater MFA 18), Jinglin Liao (Dance MFA 18), Tyler Riggin (Theater MFA 18), Henita Telo (Theater BFA 18) and Carolina Vargas (Theater MFA 18). Produced by Changling Lu (Theater MFA 19), it features scenic design by Alex Grover (Theater MFA 18), costume design by Chardonnay Tobar (Theater MFA 18), lighting design by Dylan Phillips (Theater MFA 18) and Josephine Wang (Theater BFA 18), sound design by Sam Sewell (Theater MFA 17), and video design by Shih-lien Eugene Yen (Theater MFA 18). Samantha Brounstein (Theater BFA 19) serves as stage manager.

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CalArts Stages Three Productions at Edinburgh Festival Fringe - SCVNEWS.com

Damon Krukowskis new six-episode podcast, Ways of Hearing , begins with an exciting analog sound: that of a needle descending on a record. Krukowski, the musician and writer best known for his work in Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, tells us, The first record I made was all analog. It was 1987, and making a record didnt require numbers or data. The tape decks, mixing board, and microphones were mechanical; music was recorded in a shared common moment. And so my bandmates and I set up our instruments in the studio, we counted off, and we played our songs, he says. We hear sublime music: Dean Warehams guitar, Naomi Yangs bass, and Krukowskis drums, beginning Galaxie 500s funny, heavenly Tugboat . Audio technology, whether analog or digital, conveys wonderfully human sounds: emotion, music, art. But the shift to digital has transformed recording, listening, and even the way we experience time and space, in ways we might not fully comprehend.

One of these transformations is the rise of the podcast. Today I begin a weekly column, Podcast Dept. , in which Ill be talking to podcast creators, listening to podcasts with a critical ear, reviewing the popular and the obscure, and paying attention to the form of podcasting as it evolves. Krukowskis Ways of Hearing is the first show in the Radiotopia networks new podcast, Showcase, which will highlight a succession of short-run podcasts. I chose to begin with Ways of Hearing both because it offers the immediate pleasures of a great podcastinteresting ideas presented in a sound-rich, thoughtfully produced narrative formatand because it makes us think about the act of listening itself, in ways that feel timely and vital.

Ways of Hearing evolved out of Krukowskis recently published book, The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World , about how the way we listen has changed with the shift from analog to digital. The books objective is not uncritical nostalgia, he writesits to identify the good things that this shift imperils and to get us to think about how to preserve them, in the spirit of Jane Jacobss writing about urban spaces. Krukowski worries that digital listening, in all its ubiquity and convenience, threatens the quality of our listening and attention. He wants us to become more careful and aware, and he wants to encourage harmony between the analog and digital worlds.

In the book, he does this through explorations of mono and stereo, signal and noise, The Dark Side of the Moon, loudness, the CD revolution, and so on, with wit and verve; we learn the Victrola-based origin of the saying Put a sock in it and see a photograph of Nigel Tufnels custom volume knob . The aural particularities of headphone listening, he tells us, make us experience what we hear inside our head. The headphone album of the 1970s was meant to take you elsewherenot into the street, but certainly out of your bedroom, where you were tethered to the stereo by a coiled cord like an astronaut tied to an orbiting spaceship, he writes. Close your eyes, turn up the volume, and fly into headspace. Cut the cable, as we now have, and we risk confusing the external world with the internal one. We all understand this: I once turned off Invisibilia for fear of falling through a sidewalk hatch.

Krukowski narrates Ways of Hearing in a smooth, patient, sound-focussed style, augmented with clips of music, street noise, and field recordings. (The sound of what used to be CBGBs will make your blood run cold.) On the page or in your headphones, Krukowski is present, engaged, and eager to share ideas.

I talked with Krukowski and Yang in a back garden at their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square. Their two cats, Chickpea and Lentil, a.k.a. Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethnia, milled around among the flowers. The concept for my project was based on John Bergers Ways of Seeing , Krukowski saidnot the book but the TV series, which came first. It was a BBC series, just a few episodes, made in the early seventies. Berger was a Marxist. And hes using this medium thats obviously extremely popular and thats reaching into every English home, and he is quoting Walter Benjamin and giving this different view of what our visual culture might mean. Its fantastic. Hes so generous of spirita quality that I really admire. He really wants to share the information, but he doesnt talk down. Its clearly meant for every household. In the first shot of that series, Berger, dressed respectably but casually, with curly seventies hair, walks up to Botticellis Venus and Mars and cuts the face out of it. Its a reproduction, we realize. With this provocative gesture, Berger plunges us immediately into ideas about art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

I was thinking about podcasting and digital sound in general, how everybodys walking around with earbuds, Krukowski went on. And its a moment thats very similar to the TV in the late sixties, early seventies, where this hypervisual culture is happening. Suddenly you have this visual medium in every home, and people are just consuming it. But Berger was making you aware of it. To me, the success of Ways of Seeing is that hes making the viewer aware of the television as well. And so it becomes a critique of television itself. Today, he said, everybody is surprisingly unquestioning about audio. He wants to help change that. Without passing judgment, necessarily. I just think theres a strange lack of questioning.

Each episode of Ways of Hearing focusses on a different aspect of the analog-digital audio shift: Time, Space, Love, Money, and Power. (The sixth has not yet been named; a seventh, bonus episode, Ways of Song Exploding, is a collaboration with the forensic music podcast Song Exploder.) Time is full of fascinating observations about how digital technology has altered our relationship to time: if youve ever wanted to hit Undo on something in real life, you understand. He approaches the question musically at first, by talking about analog tempo in music performance and how it can often be variable, even among professionals.

Musicians know time is flexible, he tells us. You steal a bit here, give a bit back there. We hear a solo cello, some jazz, some funk, a hand-cranked Victrola. Hip-hop d.j.s used speed controls on a record to match it to another and keep the groove going, or, in the studio, to pile up samples from older records and make a new one, he says. We hear the beginning of Can I Kick It? and the voice of Ali Shaheed Muhammad on the NPR show Microphone Check , talking about how he and the other members of A Tribe Called Quest noticed that the analog-based musicians they were sampling sped up and slowed down, sometimes even within a two-bar phrase. Galaxie 500 did this, too, Krukowski says: We were nervous and excited, and we sped up at the chorus. In analog time, we make up for imperfections as we do elsewherewith improvisation and moxie.

A big shift came, Krukowski tells us, when bands started recording to a digital metronomethe click track. Machine time is precise. (To illustrate this, he cues up the Human Leagues Dont You Want Me synthesizer and staccato, peppery beats.) The precision and control afforded by digital time can allow for other kinds of variability, in ways that can mess with our head. Krukowski talks about podcast listening speed, speeding himself up to 1.25x, like Im manic, and slowing down to .75x, like Im drunk. Latency, the lag between real time and computer-processed time, messes with us, too. It used to be, he tells us, that in Boston, when the Red Sox scored at Fenway, you could hear simultaneous cheering from open windows in cars and apartments all over the city. But after June 12, 2009, when United States TV stations switched from analog to digital, people watching on TV and listening on the radio were no longer experiencing the same moment. Now the sound of cheering in Boston is staggered. Its observations like this, enhanced with sound clipsand, here, a great interview with the Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglionethat make Ways of Hearing such enjoyable listening. It continually gives you a feeling of Ah, yes, thats whats been going on.

Krukowski and Yang live in an analog utopia with digital enhancements: a sunny space in an ivy-covered building, with high ceilings, a piano, and media galore (a book called The Revenge of Analog; a button that said ASK ME ABOUT MY PODCAST ). Krukowski showed me the living room, where he and Yang record music, and the mixing room, where he mixes music on an old analog mixing board after importing a digital file. Galaxie 500 were on a sixteen-track, but Kramerthe legendary musician and producerhad one broken channel, so we had fifteen, he said, looking pleased.

Recording with people long-distance is the new status quo, Krukowski said. The ubiquity of digital recording, coupled with the ease of sending large sound files in recent years, has dramatically altered the songwriting and collaboration process for many musicians. Krukowski mentioned his recent collaboration with the British avant-garde folk musician Richard Youngs , in which Youngs requested a drum track, Krukowski recorded one and sent it, and Youngs, instead of using it on one song, used it on the whole album. Krukowski laughed, delightedly. When Galaxie 500 recorded, and when Damon & Naomi record, the focus is on a shared moment; digital technology can inhibit such shared moments, but it also opens up what a shared moment can mean.

Ways of Hearing makes you highly attuned to such shifts, and to the complexity and variety of aurally connecting. The second episode, Space, out later this week, takes us to Astor Place, Radio City Music Hall, and beyond. In Tokyo, people on crowded trains pretend to be asleep to avoid eye contact, he says. But here, with all these headphones, its like were avoiding ear contact. The act of listening, we realizenot just in conversation but in our headphones and in the worldis significant. How we control sound, how we use it to insulate ourselves, to transport ourselves, to educate ourselves, to provoke thoughts and to distract ourselves from thoughts, to connect, to escape, can have social, even political, ramifications. And listening to podcaststhese intimate, sophisticated constructions of sound and ideascan connect us intensely to other people and isolate us from our surroundings at the same time.

Krukowski is especially convincing, even poetic, about the artistic and social value of noisewhich headphone listening and digital audio often shut out. Space ends with a lovely story about a visit he paid to the composer John Cage in the early nineties, at the apartment that Cage shared with Merce Cunningham, on Sixth Avenue. When I arrived, he was sitting at a table by the window, composing music on paper, and the windows were open, Krukowski says. The roar of the city was vivid: buses, shouting, honking. (We hear a little Cage, a little noise.) But John Cage said he never closed the window, Krukowski says. Why would he? There was so much to listen to, all the time.

Read the rest here:

Damon Krukowski Will Change How You Listen - The New Yorker

NAIROBI, Kenya Starehe constituencysits almostat the dead center of Kenyas capital, Nairobi. The citys central business district makes up part of the constituency, as well as residential housing areas that run the whole spectrum from fairly well-to-do middle class, to informal settlements and slums. It is the largest single constituency in the country, withover 130,000registered voters.

Perhaps in a way, it is apt that this place is ground zero for a demographic shake-up that has been a long time coming in Kenyan politics.Because of its size, population and economic importance, what happens in Starehe is significant, a canary in the coal mine of a change in Kenyan and regional politics that may increasingly have young people at its center.

For the past five decades Starehe constituencyhas been representedby politicians with deep links to the business class that came up after independence in Nairobi a small elite group of city traders, industrialists and real estate tycoons.

After 50 years, they are now entering their sunset years, many of them having amassed a fortune, by both legal and unscrupulous ways.

But this year, the whole group of old school politicians including the incumbent member of parliament were trounced at party primaries a few months ago, and the three men who emergedas frontrunnersare all under the age of 35, a generational change whose impact will be watched keenly in Kenya.

Around80 percentof the countrys population is younger than 35, and for the first time, a major parliamentary contest, right in the heart of the city, is playing out within that demographic.

It signals the start of the end of an era in Nairobi politics, and perhaps in Kenyan and African politics more broadly, as the grip that older politicians have had is loosened by the simple factor of time and demographic change.

This does not necessarily mean that young people will usher in a new utopia. But at least its a start.

Yet in a country where ethnicity is the dominant form of political organization, will the youth vote make a difference more broadly?

Young people in Kenya often dont feel that they are a powerful voting block, said Nerima Wako, a 20-something-year-old whos executive director of Siasa Place(the place of politics in Swahili), a nonprofit that works to engage young Kenyans in politics and governance.

Noor Khamis / Reuters

There are many other competing identities that intersect with age ethnicity and class are the two most powerful ones. Rather than being different, young people are often co-opted into these more dominant forms of political organization in Kenya.

Odanga Madung, a 25-year-old data scientist and owner of a rising tech business in Nairobi, agrees.

Tribal politics is so endemic in this country that most youth political organizations coming up are easily splintered by appealing to ethnic identities, he said. That makes it difficult to really sustain a youth vote in the classic sense.

Still, the Starehe three are a motley bunch, and will make for a very exciting race, regardless of who wins. They may redefine how young people are seen in political circles in Kenya and the region more broadly until now, their main roles were as hangers-on, cheerleaders and even militia and hired goons.

Leading in the polls, albeit by a slim margin, isBoniface Mwangi a photographer and artist-turned-firebrand political activist and organizer.

Mwangi spent many of the past few years denouncing politicians in the most strident and sensational ways heonce let pigs loosein front of parliament and drenched them in blood, to highlight the greed of politicians (MPigs, he called them). Now, he says he wants to clean up the system from the inside.

Having created the image of a force for moral change, he does not give voters cash handouts like most politicians do, but, incredibly,ordinary people have been giving money to him for his campaign sometimes in sums as little as10 cents.

It is a shift that was seen before in Uganda, where opposition politician Kizza Besigye, who suffered numerous defeats, surprised many who had written off his political career by mounting an energized and electrifying presidential campaign in the 2016 election against incumbent Yoweri Museveni.

Instead of giving out cash, villagers would go to his campaign rallies and give himsmall gifts to support his campaign, including very small cash contributions, but mostly in kind chicken, rabbits, sheep, or even just a handkerchief to wipe his face, as a way of expressing gratitude for the years of beatings, arrests and tear gas he has faced fighting for the rights of ordinary Ugandans.

They probably knew that Besigye would not win against Museveni as incumbent, the latter was backed by powerful state machinery but they wanted to make a statement that they appreciate his work in the struggle. The same kind of resonance with ordinary people is what Mwangi is finding in Starehe.

- via Getty Images

Running against Mwangi isCharles Njagua Kanyi, a popular musician better known by his stage name, Jaguar. His songs are feel-good pop, a string of similar sounding hits. In fact, in a now ironic way, one of his more popular songs is Kigeugeu, a Swahili word which roughly translates to hypocrites or fraudsters, in whichhe laments the duplicity of politicians. Now, it seems hes hoping to ride his celebrity status all the way into that same parliament.

And the third contender isSteve Mbogo, a candidate who claims to be a businessman, but whose source of wealthmany still question, and whose claim to leadership seems to be on this basis alone that he is wealthy.

What makes the contest even more significant is that all three candidates are from the same ethnic community, in a country where ethnicity is the mostprominent fault linein national politics. Now, without that as an overt factor, it is the perfect natural experiment, where the strong differentiating effect that ethnicity usually has on politics will be suppressed.

Starehe is definitely a race to watch, Wako said.The three candidates are all young and if I could describe each ones claim to the parliamentary seat: one is rich, one is famous and one is an activist. The way the vote goes will tell us a lot about the place of young people in Kenyan politics. Perhaps nothing will change. But maybe, something will.

Madung fears the election will bring about the usual violence. Hes especially worried that his nascent, tech-dependent business could be caught flat-footed.

I was completely taken aback the other day when one of our clients asked us for a mitigation plan, and I hadnt realized how unprepared we were in the case of instability, he said. Getting questions like: How will you ensure continued service delivery in case the roads are closed, or the GSM [global system for mobile communications] network shut down? painted a very grim reality for me.

Madung says that his hope is that there would be no violence.

This is a country that offers little economic opportunity in the way of employment, and if you asked me what was more important a credible election or peace I think peace would come first. Yes, let there be a credible election, but let us also forgo violence in case of a dispute. A lot is at stake here.

Thomas Mukoya / Reuters

More insights on the hopes, fears and disappointments coloring the election come from Wakos organization, Siasa Place. Last August, together with German political foundation Heinrich Bll Stiftung,they started an ambitious project calledElection Diaries. Part of the project included having one young person from all 47 counties in Kenya keep a diary for one year, where they would write about their experiences, thoughts, feelings and fears as campaign season unfolded. At the end of the year, the diaries would be compiled into a book.

Within a few months, the original group of writers was then whittled down to 11, partly so that the journals could be easier to track in an in-depth manner but also because so many of the diary keepers dropped out, citing a lack of motivation and the challenges of keeping a journal.

Still, there are some insights. One diary entry, titled Politics pays, education doesnt, is written by an early-20-something named Niceta Nyaga, in Embu, a largely rural county near Mount Kenya.

Nyaga tells the story of Jeremy, her friends brother, who along with about 20 of his friends has spent the past five months on the campaign team for the local senator.

The senator would provide them with transport[ation] from wherever they were, [and] lunch and accommodation at his home whenever he wanted to see them, Nyaga wrote. Their work involved social media campaigns, hashtags and Facebook posts to popularize the senator for the seat of governor, accompanying the senator wherever he goes and act[ing] as his cheerleaders [during rallies].

This means that since the campaign started, Jeremy has only been to school for about one week in a month, she continued.

He lies to his parents [that] he is in school, but they dont know he is usually a stone[s] throw away from them. To him that wasnt a loss since he was being paid a good amount of money. [but] he is missing out on his final year [of university] as a student.

Nyaga said she was conflicted on how to process the situation.

So what happens after the general elections to such youth? she wrote in her diary. No matter how much you try to [persuade] them out of being used and manipulated by these politicians, its a dead end. Whats the solution? Do we give up on them till the general election, or whats their salvation? Do these youth need salvation?

Perhaps the race in Starehe would be a good place to start to answer this question. What happens when a young person isnt merely a cheerleader to be used and manipulated but is actually a front-row candidate? The results in that city constituency whichever way it goes will perhaps be the start of that new day in Kenyan politics.

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Millennials May Be About To Shake Up Kenyan Politics | HuffPost - HuffPost

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A new range of concrete speakers described by their makers as a brutalist design meets audio with Bluetooth aptX connection for design enthusiasts, has been launched by the Indiegogo crowdfunding website this week.

The Utopia Titan handmade concrete speakers provide an interesting mix between rugged industrial design and the latest Bluetooth technology. Watch the promotional video below to learn more about their futures and construction.

UTOPIA Titan is the new breed of wireless loudspeakers! Sleek enough to display in your home and handmade enough to feel personal. Each piece is crafted just for you with concrete that last for a lifetime.Our vision is to create an interesting mix between brutalist, industrial design and wireless sound technology. A speaker that is a beautiful piece of your home, representing your unique taste for handcrafted goods. We prefer one of a kind instead of mass produced in china. We decided to create speakers for those, who are looking for something unique and one of a kind.

Are you not bored of plastic speakers? We are!!! Our speakers made of special concrete, which is a 10 times stronger material, than an average cement based concrete. It provides an outstanding low resonance enclosure that leads to no sound coloration. What you get is crystal clear highs and solid, focused bass.

For more information on the new Utopia Titan handmade concrete speakers jump over to the Indiegogo website for details by following the link below.

Source: Indiegogo

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UTOPIA TiTan Handmade Concrete Speaker Available From $299 ... - Geeky Gadgets

The resuscitation of King Kong is the work of Eric Abraham, a South African-born, London-based producer of theater and film (Kolya, Ida) who encountered the music by chance in the mid-1990s, and immediately decided to pursue the project for the Fugard Theater, which he founded.

Somewhere I had heard about the myth of King Kong the musical, and it just resonated, Mr. Abraham said in an interview at his west London home. The making of King Kong reflected a kind of utopia in the midst of an utterly fragmented society. Having grown up in that society, this appealed strongly to me.

King Kong is set in Johannesburgs Sophiatown neighborhood, until its demolition in 1955 a multiracial cultural hub that bred a generation of writers and musicians. It tells the true story of a famous boxer, Ezekiel Dlamini, nicknamed King Kong for his size and strength, whose downfall (caused partly by his jealousy over his girlfriend, Joyce, the owner of an informal nightclub) and untimely death provided, for many, a parable of lost chances and thwarted lives in apartheid South Africa.

Mr. Abraham had some experience of that himself. Working as a journalist in his early 20s, he was targeted by the South African secret service for reporting on police atrocities and torture, placed under house arrest, and eventually smuggled across the border to Botswana in 1977. For a long time he retained an ambivalent connection to his home country, but by the time he heard the King Kong music, he was actively looking for South African projects.

His path to a revival needed the kind of tenacity that Mr. Abraham has plenty of. (An attempt at a revival in 1979 folded after two shows.) I like a challenge, he said. And who can resist Todd Matshikizas music and Pat Williamss lyrics?

Ms. Williams was 23 and a journalist for Johannesburgs Rand Daily Mail newspaper when she was asked to write the lyrics for King Kong by her friends Clive and Irene Menell, who against all social strictures were friendly with Todd Matshikiza and his wife, Esme. Without their financial and practical support (among other things, Mr. Menell wrote the story line), Ms. Williams wrote in her recent memoir, King Kong Our Knot of Time & Music, the musical would never have happened.

Ms. Williams, who moved to London in 1960, said in a telephone interview from Cape Town that she was delighted when Mr. Abraham approached her about the rights to the lyrics. But he had a longer road to travel with the widow and heirs of Matshikiza, who died in 1968, and of Harry Bloom, the author of the book (a credit Ms. Williams gently disputes in her memoir).

It was a long, hard journey because there were lots of differences of opinion, said Esme Matshikiza in a telephone interview from Cape Town. But we got over them. Now I am very excited to see the show.

By 2011, Mr. Abraham had secured the rights and begun the search for a director. He would, he said, have liked to find a black South African director, but after several unsuccessful forays, he approached Jonathan Munby, an English director with whom he had collaborated previously.

I was completely seduced by the score and songs, but I had great reservations about the book, which felt outdated and thin, Mr. Munby said in a telephone interview from the Fugard Theater, two days before the premiere. I felt it had to be rewritten and reimagined, to tap into an emotional center, in order to survive in the 21st century.

Mr. Abraham called on William Nicholson, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, who noted in an interview that he had worked on South African material before, in scripts for Sarafina! and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

The key was to dramatize pivotal moments that werent shown onstage in the 1959 production, he explained.

They had strong singers and dancers, but not actors, he said. Times have changed, so I said, Ill rebuild the story while keeping the songs and big moments from the original.

Mr. Nicholson also added new characters, composed lyrics for additional songs (with new music, based on Matshikizas compositions, written by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder) and wrote in boxing matches for the choreographer Gregory Maqoma to flesh out. It may be a tragedy, but its an absolute blast, Mr. Nicholson said gleefully. A critic for the Cape Times praised the shows stellar staging and called it a worthy successor to the original.

After initial doubts whether he, as a white European, was the right choice, Mr. Munby said he came to feel that being an outsider was also an advantage. Ive had to do a lot of listening and research, and a lot of empowering the cast to bring their South African-ness into the show, he said, adding that his associate director, Mdu Kweyama, was South African.

Asked if he had faced resistance from the cast, led by Andile Gumbi and Nondumiso Tembe, he laughed. Early on, absolutely, he said. Deep suspicion. I have had to win their trust. Now we have a show that everyone feels ownership of.

Ms. Tembe said that she had never questioned Mr. Abrahams choice of Mr. Munby as director. We the cast are black, ensuring every day that the integrity of historical accuracy and cultural authenticity is there, she said.

Despite the differences between the South Africa of 1959 and today, Mr. Abraham said he felt King Kong remained a universal morality tale in a post-truth, post-shame, politically fragmented society. He reflected briefly and smiled. Its also great fun.

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Reviving a South African Musical That Once Promised So Much - New York Times

IT IS 7pm on a cold, still night in the city which boasts "100% green energy".

Thousands of electric cars are plugged into chargers, electric lights, heaters and TVs are running, electric stoves are cooking dinner, electric trains and lifts are moving late commuters and early revellers, and the pubs and clubs are busy.

The hills bristle with turbines, but there is no wind and not one is turning.

Every roof is covered with solar panels, but there is no sunshine and the panels are fast asleep.

The green city is facing peak electricity demand... on batteries.

But for several days, clouds have shaded the solar panels and there has been no wind to turn the turbines; the battalions of batteries are running out of juice.

One by one, they drop out.

The street lights fade and the city goes dark.

In this green energy utopia all the wicked coal-powered generators have been demolished, exploration for gas is forbidden, no one dares to mention nuclear, hydro schemes have gone (replaced by Wild Rivers), new hydro developments are stalled by green lawyers, and diesel generators are banned.

There is only one problem with this green perfection.

When the city wakes to another cloudy, windless day, where will its electricity come from?

VIV FORBES

Rosevale

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Green Utopia may leave us powerless - The Queensland Times

New People is a novel where infatuation gnaws at what looks like happiness.

Maria lives in Brooklyn with Khalil, her fiance. They met at Stanford and they love each other, the light skin color they share, and the life they begin in the late 1990's, Khalil an up and coming dot-commer, Maria a grad student studying the Jonestown Massacre. They're called the "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." But Maria's eye wanders to a poet who is vividly and distinctly different from her fiance.

We never see any of his poetry and author Danzy Senna says she wanted it that way. "I liked keeping him somewhat mysterious, so that he could become more of the object of her projections ... he is unlike her fiance, not mixed-race. He's black, she's biracial. I think there's a quest for maybe authenticity, and for something 'real' that she's looking for and sort of not finding in her life."

On the cruel prank Maria played on Khalil

When they were at Stanford and in some ways, the Stanford of the early '90s was similar to the atmosphere on campuses now and it's highly politicized, and the identity politics are at an all-time intensity, and Khalil has just kind of discovered his black identity, and is embracing his blackness. And Maria and a friend of hers smoke pot one night and decide to play a prank on him ... and they leave him a racist message on his answering machine, in the voice of what they think of frat guys. And the horror is, it then sets off this other chain of events where he thinks it actually is a racist incident, and he ends up mobilizing the campus around his newfound victim status.

On Maria's character

I wasn't trying to write a female character who was necessarily the person I would want as my best friend. Maria's a very conflicted and problematic and sort of deceitful character. And as a novelist, we want the character that's going to kind of cause trouble, in their own life and those of others, and that's where the story is, and the pulse.

On Maria's work on the Jonestown Massacre

I was fascinated with the way that Jim Jones used all the rhetoric of racial liberation and progressive politics and kind of left-wing enlightenment to lead all of these people to their death, and the sort of paradox of the Jonestown Massacre that it sounded really amazing, in terms of this utopia he was creating, and then it went so terribly wrong. And it reverberated in me as someone who was raised in the '70s in a sort of multiracial family, and a lot of the politics of my parents and their friends were reflected in those people in Jonestown.

On the end of the novel

I leave her in a very precarious position ... I know not everybody reponds to that but for me, I like a story that leaves the problem inside of me, still alive. For me that ending was very clear, and left her very much alive. And I didn't judge her at all as I was writing this. I felt I inhabited her without any judgment, and watched her, and led her down this path, and this sort of rabbit hole. But the characters we love as novelists are the ones that bring us into trouble and conflict.

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'New People' Author Danzy Senna Loves The Troublesome Characters - NPR

News Written by Emmy Mack on August 6, 2017

SicknewsNew Found Glory fans!The band have just announced a brand new event ontheir forthcoming Aussie tour itinerary.

Theyll be getting up-close-and-personal with fans for an in-store signing at Sydneys Utopia Records in the midst oftheir 20 Years Of Pop Punk dates.

Its going down at the underground heavy music stalwart on Kent street from 5pm before the dudes show at The Metro this Friday, 11th August.

Thanks to the utterly wonderful people atUNFDtop shelf blokes and Soundwave Festival 2009 giantsNew Found Gloryare poppin in for a quick almost secret until now guerrilla signing before theirThe Metro Theatreshow this coming Friday, Utopia wrote on Facebook by way of the big announcement.

They have let us know they will sign just about anything, CDs, LPs, Soccer Trophies, Babies foreheads, you name it!!!

Please be here around 5 pm to avoid disappointment and an array of sadness.

Well, you heard em.

Check out the details below or catch NFGs full list of Aussie tour dates here.

Originally posted here:

New Found Glory Are Doing An In-Store Signing For Their Aussie Fans - Music Feeds