Berkeley Blog

Air-to-Earth Bnb: From Posh to Poverty in SF's SoMa

Last night I walked from Civic Center BART station in San Francisco down Eighth Street south of Market to a Cal Innovates event on communications technology at Airbnb headquarters. Usually, there’s a huddle of homeless people at the corner of Market and Eighth, but the entire southeastern corner was now fenced off and gutted with a half dozen cranes poised to lift off at dawn.

And so it continued down Eighth, which was pockmarked with great holes in the ground reminding me of the WWII destruction I’d seen as a child in Bremerhaven, Germany, where my dad had been stationed as a U.S. Army bandleader in the early and mid 50s. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether San Francisco is a war zone or a thriving technology center.

888 Brannan’s lobby – where AirBnb is headquartered – looks like Yosemite Valley, with cavernous white walls ascending to stacked floors of windowed offices. Weathered logs, made to look as if they had just fallen into place naturally to form comfortable benches, were scattered throughout the lobby, but to enter the elevators, one had to pass through security by entering one’s name and contact info on a touchscreen computer. On the 5^th floor, where the company cafeteria is located, dinner – braised duck, wild rice pilaf, pinto beans, vichysoisse, and shredded celery heart and Brussels sprouts (no gluten and no dessert) -- was self-service, just like in college.

About 80 employees and other folks came to eat and hear Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC commissioner, being interviewed by Internet rabble rouser Andrew Keen, author The Internet Is Not the Answer, which embellishes on the harmful side effects of the technology revolution. I sat down at an open table with a couple of Airbnb employees, who told me they were both recruiters.

“Whom are you recruiting?” I asked.

“Computer science graduates,” they both said.

When I asked where they found them, they said they were going to five elite universities, including Stanford and Harvard.

I recommended they try local community and state colleges and also find interns from local programs like Oakland’s Hack the Hood, which trains low-income youth in basic web site coding.

I asked the recruiters if they knew how to code.

“No,” they both said.

“Then how can you know how to recruit good coders?”

They didn’t have an answer, but I guess, by reverse reasoning, if someone graduates in comp sci from an Ivy League college, then they know how to code. Or at least how to get a degree.

The FCC commissioner, Rosenworcel, fresh from CES and draped in a lilac scarf, pale green jacket, fitted black pants, and three-inch spiked heels, spoke like a politician: satisfying everyone and saying as little as possible. She does support net neutrality but isn’t sure whether Tom Wheeler, head of the FCC will come out for it. Keen asked lots of relevant questions but he took a scattershot approach to the interview -- covering everything and nothing deep enough to dig someone’s grave.

All I learned after half an hour is that the spectrum – our “invisible infrastructure,” and the air of Airbnb – is limited and that the FCC will come up with “creative” ways to parcel it out so that everyone benefits. Since the FCC’s five commissioners are presidential appointees, I wonder how much politics rather than creativity will play in the commission’s decisions. No one pressed Rosenworcel on what her creative cures might include, but she strongly asserted she was against privatization of what is now public space.

I decided to walk back to the Powell Street BART station via Fifth Street, figuring it might be safer. Near the Bay Bridge freeway underpass, though, an entire block was crowded with men (and a few women) standing around, smoking, drinking, huddled together although it wasn’t really cold. A log was burning in the street and a police car passed by without stopping. I walked in the street rather than on the sidewalk and waved to some of the men as they gave me a surprised look. What was an old lady in a black coat carrying a book bag (with an Albany library copy of My Struggle, Volume 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a memoir proving that living in an enlightened socialist state doesn’t necessarily make one happy; there are just different reasons, other than poverty and ignorance, for being miserable) doing in their hood?

Only at the intersection with the freeway entrance did I notice the St. Vincent de Paul sign on the building I had just passed. Under the freeway was a line of shopping carts ballooning with black plastic garbage bags. And on a dirt embankment across the street I saw shapes of people hanging out, talking and smoking in what seemed like a convivial atmosphere, much like a street fair.

A few blocks north, the scene completely changed as new million-dollar condos popped up, and their denizens and designer pets strolled the glittery streets. I saw a bright white doorway entrance to Yahoo, new hotels and eateries, and a flock of tech companies, like Eventbrite, where I had just listed a tech event I’m hosting in Berkeley this month featuring a fake secret love bot, Smitten, from the AI company Pandorabots.

The contrast between Airbnb headquarters and the Fifth-to-freeway homeless headquarters in such close proximity stunned me. Talk about inequality. I’m sure the Internet is not the answer or even the problem, but I do believe it could help provide answers to restoring shelter, education, dignity, and work to those living on the streets. An Airbnb for homeless shelters? 

  

Why Seniors Should Spin: Let Me Cycle the Ways.

Every time I endure 45 minutes of the heart-thumping, techno, battle-music beat of spinning class, my IQ goes up 10 points and my body drops at least 10 years. That’s because the blood rushes to my brain as the sweat pours from my flesh, while wrinkles seem to dissipate like those before-and-after photos you see on AOL’s home page (Because like who on earth except someone who signed onto email in the early 90’s would still be using AOL?).

Seniors of America, spinning is your salvation. Two 45-minute sessions a week will deliver you from the plastic surgeon’s knife, the chiropractor’s costly ministrations, and the diet cults of the world. (More people believe in Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig than Jesus Christ; the last supper withstanding, it looks like he was on a perpetual diet.)

And more importantly, spinning will make you happy. Indeed, for at least two hours after your class, you will feel exuberant, mainly because you are no longer spinning. Yes, a moderate amount of self-inflicted physical suffering yields differentially disproportionate joy upon its cessation.

No, I am not arguing for masochism. Once you get over the immediate fear of an impending heart attack, which usually occurs after the first 5 minutes of spinning class when the instructor orders you to stand up, increase the resistance wheel on your stationary bicycle, and pedal faster, you actually start to enjoy the unusual sensation of feeling your body work. Hard.

Your legs are actually moving on their own, the way they used to when you first learned to walk and to run away from your parents. In fact, you realize you even have legs and that joints like knees and ankles are irrelevant when on a spinning cycle.

Your heart is dancing to a beat that matches the electro-techno music streaming from your instructor’s iPod, the way it used to do when you were a teenager doing the twist at the high school prom or wherever you twisted and shouted before your joints began to disintegrate and the cholesterol began its arterial clog fest.

Your lungs have broken the dam between intake and outtake, between your nostrils and your mouth, which are working like a vacuum cleaner in reverse, spewing out the dust and inhaling the clean, carbon-free oxygen.

And best of all, your mind is empty of everything except the desire to end this class so that your body, once purified of its shortened telomeres, can be still. 

And later, for at least two days after class, I feel my mind as sharp as when I took the SATs and nearly scored a perfect 800 on the math test. (How wrong they were! Or maybe 1962 was a particularly easy year for multiple-choice math tests.)

If Ponce de Leon were alive today, he’d be seated next to me in Xabi Zapata’s Happy Hour Fitness class on Ensenada Avenue in Berkeley, California. Together, we’d spin into the next century, ageless, athletic, and mentally on fire until the next cycle.

Virtual Unreality: Bicycle Dreams

When I haven’t been on my touring bicycle for more than a week, I often dream I’m cycling up a long slightly sloping hill between the ocean and the mountains that I’ve ridden before but only in my dreams. It’s a little bit scary, challenging, and yet compelling, and I know in my dream the ride will never end but if it does, all will end.

I asked some friends the other day if they often ‘see’ a place they only ‘see’ in their dreams, and they all said yes.

“What causes that?” I ask.

“Your mind,” someone answers.

The mind creates a virtual unreality, a metaphorical stand-in for life. Because I can’t cycle in reality, I cycle on some mythical road in my dreams.

Perhaps that is how religions were born. In the mind…not from material evidence. From the need to imagine our origins when the tools for investigating our origins hadn’t yet been invented. From dreams spring myths as well as truths about our desires and fears masked as virtual unrealities.

 

Why I Could Never Mate with a PC User and Other Ramblings

One of my former clients, the founder of Astrology.com, made out with millions. Another client, founder of a nonprofit astronomy site, Planetquest, probably lost a million of his own money in the venture. Even in this age of enlightenment, most people would rather be informed by the alignment of the stars and the planets with their birth dates than by the chance to discover formerly unknown stars and planets in our universe. Are myths more powerful than reality because they don't require the intellectual rigor to understand them?

Friends tried to set me up with a recent widower, apparently the only kind of male available today who is not quite yet Match.com detritus. As soon as I saw he had a PC -- with an ancient version of Windows -- I knew we were incompatible. I could never mate with anyone other than a Macintosh user. He also had a large-screen TV, which is another total turnoff.

Reading an article in The New Yorker by Tad Friend about viral videos, such as those found on YouTube and Vine. Reminds me of the explosion of aesthetically deviant print designs when Adobe first came out with a slew of available fonts. A new medium, such as video, does not necessarily lead to better content, as the invention of the camera demonstrated a century ago.

Grandmothers Inspire an App, a Platform, and a Cloud

Call it cultural convergence: Three of my clients all feature grandmothers as inspirations for their technologies.

In one case, it was a grandmother's joy in receiving unexpected phone calls when she was laid up that inspired a new phone app, which won't launch until early next year.

Another client was inspired to build an entirely new layer for the Internet that allows for an intention-driven economy because his grandmother -- the first black woman to have her own radio show -- encouraged him to shake up the system and give more power to the people. Again, this platform won't launch until early next year, but it's the grandmother aspect of it that struck me.

And finally, a client I can talk about – ISKME, an education nonprofit that holds an annual Big Ideas Fest to gather education innovators together – just gave its Big Ideas Fest 2014 Innovation Award in Action to Jackie Brown, a volunteer in the Granny Cloud Team, part of Professor Sugata Mitra’s project to recruit virtual grannies around the world with children in developing countries to coach and mentor them via the Internet. Mitra was award the first million dollar TED Prize last year, and Brown, who has been volunteering for the past three years, now helps assist in training new grannies.

Grandmothers often play the role of Zen priest, giving their grandchildren unconditional encouragement and support the way parents -- who see reflections of themselves in their offspring -- rarely do. Generational distance not only appears to make the heart grow fonder but can also spur the creativity that drives our new technologies.

It's Not About Who Owns Your Data. It's What They Do With It.

Andreas Weigand, the guy who built Amazon’s cloud services and is now an itinerant speaker in academic environments, sports a maniacal smile, as if he’d just discovered the algorithm that led to the creation of the universe. Discovery is his modus operandi, as if the world were made for his personal exploration.

The other day, at his invitation, I sat in on the final session of his course on the Social Data Revolution, held at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Information, or the iSchool. This session was about data ownership and featured Pete Warden, founder of JetPack and someone who likes to find patterns by sorting through data about people, and Brad Rubenstein, about whom I know nothing since he likes to make sure to clean up any personal “digital exhaust.” 

Warden said the issue of data ownership is moot since even small companies have the ability to mass analyze data from sensors (the Internet of Things) without the individual generator of that data even being aware of its existence. For instance, Warden did a mass survey of Instagram photos of bars and was able to determine which bars were gay, including ones in Tehran, where being gay can land one in jail.

What’s important, he said, is to take control of data outcomes, not ownership; as an example, he cited the new health laws that prohibit insurance companies from covering persons with prior medical conditions, such as cancer.

Rubinstein added a caveat to information gatherers: “The act of collecting data confers responsibility for the consequences of that data.”

Weigand – who publishes the details of his day-by-day globe-trotting on his web site -- asked how many people gave out fake data  -- a way to protect privacy…possibly. Most of the class raised their hands.

Countering all the negative implications for data scooping, I suggested that the very technology that makes personal data public could also be used to privatize it, so that individuals could sell their data in exchange for sharing some of their habits, needs, and preferences…even the fake ones.

And then, at some point in the near future, processes will have to be developed to assess the verity of data, because taken out of context (by ignoring other critical variables), or generated in ill faith (a lie), social data could become an amorphous or inaccurate guide to understanding human behavior. 

Reinventing Oneself

If corporations are given the status of personhood – at least under the law – then people can also act as if they are corporations. The other day at yet another conference – it’s the season for convening after summer’s respite – I met a friend who has reinvented herself. She now does x instead of y, which she did when I talked to her a couple of years ago, and in a way she reminded me of IBM, which used to sell computers and now hawks services and which continues to morph as CEOs come and go.

It’s disconcerting for flagpoles like myself, who stake an ideological ground base and then stick to it for life, albeit the flag might be at half mast sometimes or whipping wherever the winds directs it. I tend to hew to similar types, those who might change the where of their flutterings and positioning but who do not deviate from the why of their existence.

Apple, for example, was always a hardware company, which later acquired and developed software and content. It’s stayed true to its core mission, its why. Microsoft, on the other hand, was a software company that acquired hardware and then tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to create its own music devices, smart watches, and smartphones. It’s in the process of trying to reinvent itself, just like my friend whose core persona eludes defining.

Maybe some people and some companies are in constant beta, testing out values and offerings until they discover what works or what sells. It seems that those who stay true to themselves – however initially defined – have a greater chance to reinvent a piece of their world. Whereas those in the process of constant reinvention tend to create a vacuum that sucks into oblivion all that fall into their space.

Media is Messy

Just back from the Berkeley Cybersalon on the Media Makeover, which I moderated with a panel of five seasoned journalists exploring new territory on the Internet. Dan Gillmor, who first envisaged citizen journalism before the advent of smartphones and tweets, said media is in a messy period. His main worry is that the monopoly carriers, like Comcast, will determine who gets quick access or not, and as for the ability to find interesting stuff that's not driven by advertising, "We've already given it all away to Google."

More upbeat were the younger journos:  Jennifer 8 Lee, who at 24 and recently out of Harvard with an applied math/economics degree was hired at the NY Times  to cover technology; after taking a buyout from the Times she worked for Upworthy and then started Rooster, a mobile platform for fiction. Josie Garthwaite, is one of seven cofounders and writers for  Climate Confidential, a news site about all things affecting climate change that's part of a media platform called Beacon. Garthwaite said she still keeps her freelance journo jobs while writing stories for the site, which depends on reader contributions to function. She thinks that in time, the site will attract paying readers who value insightful, indepth reporting on climate. 

Lee says there's big money in mobile book publishing, especially fiction, because the overhead is low and people are more likely to buy books -- even ebooks -- than subscribe to news media. Rooster publishes new pieces of fiction alongside older books that are out of copyright. When I asked Lee if she had time to write anymore -- she was one of my favorite reporters at the NY Times -- she pauses, closes her eyes, and says, "No." She was supposed to turn in the draft of a book next year on what determines how parents select a name their child, but she said it won't happen. 

Scott Rosenberg, a former movie reviewer for the SF Examiner, cofounder of Salon.com, author, and former editor of Grist.org, says that technology and economic changes go in cycles. He thinks we're in a bubble  and predicts there will be a collapse within a year. In the meantime, he is writing about technology for Medium, as is Gillmor, both joining forces with their old pal Steven Levy, who is technology editor for Medium.

Why would anyone want to go into journalism today? That's the question Yumi Wilson poses to all her graduate students in journalism at SF State, where she teaches. She cites the glum facts to her students the first day of class and asks them to reflect before returning to class. They all return, she says, because they's inspired to communicate. Both she and Gillmor, who teaches at Arizona State University's Cronkite journalism school, say studying journalism offers many job opportunites that require communication skills. "Every company is a media company, and a degree in journalism provides an excellent liberal education ," said Gillmor.

Gillmor also pointed out that advocacy groups -- such as the EFF, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch -- offer excellent reporting about their respective issues. I brought up the advocacy reporting about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on ACEsConnection.com, whose founder, Jane Stevens, couldn't make the panel. This site as well as a companion site, ACEsTooHigh.com, received substantial funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well as the California Endowment this year.

Lee thinks branded advertising will be one revenue source for all these online media ventures. Other panelists mentioned events as a major source of revenue for media, such as the conferences put on by Recode, Fast Company, and the NY Times. Gillmor said to expect a burnout because there's just too many events.

So, given the predictions of an imminent financial collapse, the demise of net neutrality, the messy state of media, and the continuing erosion of jobs in news reporting, what might be predicted for the careers of our panelists?

Here's what I presage:

Gillmor and Rosenberg will become major Medium tech writers and continue to write seminal books about how technology is changing our lives.

Lee will join a major publishing house as director of mobile platforms.

Wilson will become dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Josie will help grow Climate Confidential, which -- along with the Beacon platform -- will be bought by Jeff Bezos, and used to sell climate proofing products featured on Amazon.

 

Why Should Cyclists Spin? Let Me Count the Ways.

At Happy Hour Fitness in Berkeley, where I take spinning class once a week, I’m the only spinner who regularly rides a bicycle -- both for commuting, because I don’t have a car, and recreation, because I love riding around the East Bay hills. Most of the people in my class don’t even have a bicycle, or if they do, prefer to spin indoors on a faux cycle that goes nowhere.

At the same time, most cyclists I know wouldn’t be caught dead in a spinning class unless it’s raining, which it doesn’t seem to do anymore in California.

But cyclists could really benefit from spinning class, as I have during the past year I’ve been attending Xabier Zapata’s rigorous 40-minute workout. Here are the ways my outdoor cycling has improved as a result of spinning at Happy Hour Fitness:

1. Smoother. My cadence is not only smoother but faster. That’s because Xabi’s linguistically incomprehensible but emotionally explicit exhortations and the rapid beat of his tunes make me accelerate at speeds I would never do on my own unless riding down a steep hill with a tailwind at my back. And because all the stationary bikes face a mirror, I notice whether one leg is lagging on the downbeat and so I can and do correct my form. Also, Xabi pays attention to form, so if you shake your hips too much or tighten your shoulders, he’ll call you out and tell you to relax, keep your core still, and focus all your energy on your legs.
2. Safer. Because we often ride standing up for the duration of what often seems like an endless tune, I can now easily ride up Berkeley hills standing up the entire time with my brain on automatic. That frees my real brain to be on lookout for cars, garbage trucks, deer, potholes, and the other dangers that riding on the open road is heir to. The result is that spinning has made me a safer rider because I can pay full attention to the road and less to my formerly aching body.
3. Stamina. Although spinning class rarely lasts more than 40 minutes, because it’s so intense, I break out in a Niagara Falls of sweat within the first 10 minutes. As a result, it’s increased my endurance for my weekend outdoor ride from two to three hours, because two hours doesn’t seem enough anymore. Earlier this year, I climbed Mt. Diablo – a peak that’s over 3,000 feet and 10 miles of climbing – and not a single mile was as challenging as the first 10 minutes of one of Xabi’s classes.
4. Slimmer. Oh yes, there’s the caloric output as well: Xabi claims one can lose 500 calories for a session of spinning. He might be right, as I’ve lost a few pounds in the past year and haven’t changed my diet. Just looking around at the other spinners, I notice most of them have lost weight too, or if they were slim to begin with, they haven’t gained anything. And as any cyclist knows, the lighter you are, the easier it is to go up hills.
5. Sanity. Knowing I can get past the first 10 minutes of class and actually go faster and harder transfers over to my work as well. No matter how difficult a challenge I might face in trying to accomplish a task, I know that I will not give up. Surviving a spinning class provides me a measure of sanity….at least for a day.

In addition, the spinning classes offer 15 minutes of core strengthening and arm exercises after the spins. Core and arms are considered insignificant body parts by many cyclists – including myself – but strengthening the abdomen and back allows one to channel more energy into the legs.

Finally – and this has to do with motivation to exercise – the camaraderie of my fellow spinners draws me to the class week after week. It’s almost like being addicted to a TV series like Breaking Bad, where I have to find out how  the mother whose daughter just left for his first year of college is holding up this week or what happened to the woman whose crew team raced in Italy this summer. Not to mention the exuberant charm of Xabi Zapata, who like the perhaps related Zapatistas of Oaxaca, Mexico, could lead a fitness revolution of his own.

iPhone 6 versus Knausgaard 3

While most of my friends are hungering to get their hands on the iPhone 6, I'm champing at the bit to secure an English translation of Karl Ove Knausgaard's volume 3, the latest book translated from the Norweigian in this author's six-volume epic, My Struggle.

If I were his publisher, I'd rename the title Hitler ruined for everyone My Hunger for Life because this memoir by the stay-at-home father of four describes every quotidian moment of life, from changing diapers filled with excrement to cooking a meal of fish and potatoes, as if it were a testament to his need to feel truly alive by recording every single moment of consciousness.

Talk about the quantified man. Knausgaard is the epitome of human consciousness , a man for whom every detail, every experience expands his awareness of himself. The irony is that in his struggle to come to grips with the conformity that Swedish society, where he now lives, demands of him and that he has resisted since he was a child, the only outlet for his creativity is to document the routines his life is bound by. 

The Norwegian's art is in the feelings that surface as casually as the smoke from the cigarettes he goes outside to inhale even in the bitter cold of Stockholm. And also in the endless piling up of details, such as in the blow by blow account of his wife's first labor and delivery, which is the most honest description of childbirth I've ever read because it includes the gore and agony most of us want to forget. 

Knausgaard doesn't forget anything. Memory is what keeps us alive, he implies, and it's only by recording our history can we hope to understand ourselves.