Berkeley Blog

In Foreign Media I Trust

The Knight Foundation just came out with an historical brief on the decline in the U.S. of our trust in media as well as in government. No surprise, since the two institutions are so closely entwined that, like Siamese twins, they needs to be severed at birth in order to thrive and survive.

I grew up partly in Germany and spent some time living in France, so I have always felt as if I had one foot on a different continent than the one I’m living on now: Silicon Valley, which based on its values – progress uber alles – seems as if it were a continent unto itself.

So I read a medley of publications, including the Guardian, BBC News, der Spiegel, RT (the independent Russian media site), and even Le Monde occasionally. Not that I trust any of these publications more than the NY Times or Axios (although the latter with its Why It Matters coda for each story is gaining more of my respect), but by reading news from other countries I can find out more about what’s going on in parts of the world our national media seem to ignore unless there’s a natural disaster or government overthrow.

I can also discover what the rest of the world thinks about our disintegrating government, our shooting-in-schools gun culture, and the #MeToo movement.

As for truth, I try to look beyond individual events, such as crazy people planting explosives at FedEx offices and who is the latest person to lose his or her job at the oh-so-White House. Instead, I read trusted thinkers, people like Robert Reich, George Lakoff, Noam Chomsky, and yes, Michelle Goldberg, Maureen Dowd, and the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, who get the larger picture and can delineate the mindset and motives of the players making the world go under.

So that’s my response to your brief, dear Knight Foundation. Keep funding a free press even if it belongs to the corporations that fund them, as it always has. Maybe some day the promise of the Internet will make us all reporters and create a truly free press. The answer lies in technology that now supports the likes of Facebook but could easily be transferred to an open platform that would allow free access of knowledge and information to all.

Facebook's 21st Century Company Town

Facebook might not be bringing democracy and enlightenment to the peoples of the planet, but after my visit to its headquarters in Menlo Park the other day, it would seem the company is delivering contentment if not euphoria to its 18,000 employees. From my initial encounter with valet parking lot attendants to tram drivers, receptionists, food workers, and a few professional employees, everyone was so Disneyland friendly and helpful, it seemed as if the entire kingdom of Bhutan had been transplanted to Silicon Valley.

Frank Gehry designed a vast room, high enough to fit a standing rocket ship, that houses thousands of employees in an open floor plan, interspersed with wackily named meeting rooms and centered by the glass offices of CEO Zuckerberg and COO Sandberg, neither of whom was around that day. Desks are arranged in clusters, chairs are ergo high end, and vending machines offer employees free cables, batteries, and other devices.

The décor is wake-up orange walls adjacent to plain particle board partitions plastered tastefully with posters designed and printed by employees themselves in one of the “analog” workshops available in a nearby building. Mantras about kindness and inclusion are strung along the corridors much like Tibetan prayer flags, and a cool Gehry Mobius-like winding staircase ascends from the reception area to the grassy rooftop, replete with benches and trees. No one was there, probably because it was lunchtime or because Wednesdays are optional work-at-home days.

Next door, cranes were erecting an identical twin edifice to encompass new hordes of employees. The people we passed at their computers seemed seriously at work but since we were not allowed to photograph anything, we had no idea what they were doing….taking out Russian interlopers? In appearance, the workers seemed to be mostly male, white or Asian, and under 40, and the dress was decidedly Silicon Valley casual.

As a mother myself, it seemed as if Facebook management extends a maternal concern for its employees. The company provides an onsite laundry, dental office, spa, gym, bank, woodworking shop, bicycle repair shop, sweet shop and cafes with food offerings from almost every continent except Antarctica. The day we visited the main dining hall featured German food, including spaetzle, breaded chicken cutlets, red cabbage and a coffee cake with liquor, raisins, and nuts as well as chocolate dipped butter cookies. As good a mom as I thought I was, I never kept a stack of disposable toothbrushes fully loaded with toothpaste next to the bathroom sinks. And the day I was there, an EO pop up near the Facebook swag store offered a hefty 20 percent discount on its cosmetics to employees.

With all necessities taken care of, one need never leave the workplace except to go home to sleep, and maybe do something else on the weekend.  

Buses transport employees from their homes and back. Or employees can borrow company cars and bicycles for short trips. The company leases a row of apartments next to the campus where it houses new employees for a month before they find a place to live. It offers a generous moving allowance to anyone who needs to relocate from more than 10 miles away. Famous people like Condoleeza Rice come to speak to anyone who has the time to listen, and employees are encouraged to invite visitors, like myself, for a tour and free meal, so they can share in the enlightenment.

Facebook has built the 21^st century version of the company town. It’s visually stunning, it’s eco, it’s ergo and all encompassing. Why would anyone ever want to leave?

The City of Tomorrow Is Almost Here Today

This morning, Jim Hackett, the president and CEO of Ford Motor Company, and I worked together to design a human-centric street using toy people, bicycles, markers, trees, and other miniature implements of street fare. When I suggested we erect a sculpture in a designated park area, Jim put together some Styrofoam bits with toothpicks and cut off pieces of tape for me to 'solder' the construction.

This was part of the City of Tomorrow Symposium at Fort Mason in San Francisco, hosted by Ford on August 19, 2017, to explore innovative approaches to urban mobility. The symposium started with a history of NYC’s bike share program by former head of that city’s transportation system, Janette Sadik-Khan, who said it took six years to transform the city’s streets to make them safe and convivial for bicyclists as well as pedestrians. The biggest obstacle, she said, was the culture of the city’s inhabitants, which was anti exercise, anti sharing, and anti environmental, and anti “French,” Paris being seen as the genesis of metropolitan bike share.

Today, Sadik-Khan said, bike sharing and commuting by bicycle is very popular, not only in NYC but also in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. “Streets can be so much more than spaces. They can be places.”

Ford’s lab in Palo Alto -- Greenfield Labs -- works with IDEO and other designers to plan for the city of tomorrow. Facilitators from Greenfield led hands-on workshops where teams designed city streets themselves. Four long tables were covered with paper on which participants could draw, erect structures, such as cafes and overhead trains, and build parks. The only design imperative was to create a street that was human centered. The group I worked with ditched cars altogether, although we did have one woodie that we kept as a historical relic in the middle of a park area and decorated with a phone booth (also defunct) on top.

During lunch – all utensils compostable – I talked to the head of systems and technology and chief research scientist of artificial intelligence at Continental, a German company that is the world’s largest supplier of automobile parts and has a division in San Jose. He said the world is moving so fast, it’s hard to keep up with it. He says car mechanics will soon be a profession of the past – like taxi drivers and travel agents – because even now, all one needs is a software app to diagnose issues in a car. In fact, he diagnoses his own car – a 2009 Saab – using such an app.

He – and others at the symposium – mentioned the biggest barriers to adoption of new technologies, like self-driving cars -- are not engineering issues but regulatory ones, like integrating state, county, and city transportation policies, not to mention federal ones. But change can happen overnight, or almost overnight, as the U.S. went from horses and bicycles to cars in just over a decade, from 1900 to 1913.

Maybe all we need to do now, I sometimes think, is to reverse that process and return to horses and bicycles.

Diebenkorn's Daughter

Last night at the Hillside Club in Berkeley I heard Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, daughter of the artist Richard Diebenkorn, speak about her father’s art and what it was like growing up in the house of a man who made art 365 days and often nights a year.

Gretchen grew up in Berkeley in the early sixties and sometimes wished she lived in a house like those of her friends, which had matching furniture, and curtains rather than bare windows, and didn’t use bedspreads from India as tablecloths. Her father didn’t care about material possessions and either made his own furniture for his studio or picked up discarded chairs and tables from the roadside.

She compared some of his work to that of Matisse, an artist he admired, but apart from similar color and composition choices in several of his works that are now on display at SFMOMA in an exhibit comparing the two artists, the daughter didn’t have much to add except to say both painters ignored world politics as content for their art. (That exhibit seemed to me a contrivance of crowd-pleasing curators that diminished rather than articulated the painters’ respective merits.)

The daughter revealed that Diebenkorn painted from his mind. It turns out the vertiginous, colorful landscapes he painted in his Ocean Park, Santa Monica years were completely imaginary. And he didn’t use photographs or preliminary sketches: he just attacked the canvas, or in many cases, the empty backs of posters since he used any paper surface he could find. He painted directly from his mind to paper, much like a conductor’s wand evokes music from an orchestra.

Most poignant were the match boxes Diebenkorn painted meticulously for his granddaughter’s dollhouse and the Easter egg adorned with a spade – a favorite shape of the artist – created for his grandson. He also sketched a fanciful dragon but tired of filling in the creature’s scales so asked his son-in-law, Richard Grant, to complete the rest and give him co-artist credits.

Grant and his wife spent more than 22 years and a fortune -- some of it earned from the sale of Diebenkorns given to them by his wife, Phyllis – to create a four-volume catalog raisonee of all the artist’s paintings, recently published by Yale University Press. They spent two weeks and 12-hour days at a specialty color press in Verona, Italy, to insure the color quality of the paintings in the catalog, and now they are embarked on a similar catalog for all the artist’s prints.

The Diebenkorn daughter, a former actress, is an artist in her own right. With a painter’s eye, she captures the processes of her father’s artistic genius as well as the tenderness between a loving father and child.

Net Neutrality Threatened by New FCC Chair

Heather West is a senior policy manager with Mozilla, a nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser and also takes a leadership role in advocating for open access, privacy, and security for Internet users. A D.C. veteran, West spoke at the Goldman Graduate School for Public Policy February 14, 2017 about the impact of the Trump administration on regulations and practices concerning Internet usage.

Although Mozilla has always been driven by the belief that moral codes are essential to technology, she said that until recently, the tech sector was fragmented politically and disconnected from D.C. That changed suddenly with Trump’s immigration ban, which mobilized more than 140 tech companies to sign on in protest.

“When the tech sector coordinates, it does really well,” remarked West, pointing to the deluge of support during the Obama administration for establishing the FCC’s rules promoting net neutrality, which requires service providers to treat all internet traffic equally and classifies broadband providers as public utilities, giving the FCC authority to regulate them.

This same net neutrality is now under threat by Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the FCC, who has publicly stated he opposes the rules. One impact of abolishing net neutrality, said West, is that start ups would face a greater barrier to market entry than larger companies, such as Netflix, because of the higher broadband service rates providers could charge.

But she thinks that any attempt by the FCC to abolish net neutrality will face barriers, including court challenges and public outcry. In the short time he’s been chairing the FCC, however, Jai has made moves to undo the FCC’s Lifeline program, which provides subsidies to low-income families for Internet access.

Someone asked about a recent incident in which border officials at an airport forced a NASA employee to reveal his PIN number to his NASA-issued work phone. West answered that this request is not illegal but advised travelers to encrypt their smart phones, set up dummy Facebook and other social media accounts, or just get throwaway phones. She said that because the EU takes the position that privacy is a fundamental right, at some point the EU might stand up to the U.S. border patrol policies regarding phone privacy.

“Privacy is a bipartisan issue,” she added, and pointed out that libertarians agree with progressives and many Republicans on the right of digital privacy.

West, who was speaking to an audience of graduate students in public policy and information technology (the latter from UC Berkeley’s iSchool), said that what the government needs now more than ever are IT people. The government IT structure is based on broken legacy systems and built on languages like COBOL, which is quickly becoming archaic. “My personal ambition is to get more technologists to D.C.,” the policy wonk added, before heading back to the capitol to carry on the fight for Internet users.

Go Naked or Buy Your Clothes Consciously

When I was a kid growing up in post-war Bremerhaven, a bombed-out town on the North Sea in Germany then occupied by the U.S. military, my two sisters and I wore winter coats made by Mr. Tennenbaum, a tailor and friend of my mom’s who had survived Auschwitz and moved to Forest Hills, New York. Our sweaters had been knitted by our mom, a German Holocaust survivor who had met my dad, a U.S. Army bandleader right after the war. Our sturdy, all leather shoes were made in Germany and lasted long enough to be handed down from sister to sister to sister.

Today, it seems everything I wear was made in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, or Honduras. That’s why I went to hear Ayesha Barenblat speak about her startup, Remake at a NY Times Live event last year at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Basically, her site spreads the word about which clothing brands and retailers are connected to those suppliers – usually in Asia and Latin America -- that are treating their 40 million clothing makers, 80 percent of whom are girls from 18 to 24 years old, in an ethical fashion.

Even more importantly, Remake tells you which brands and retailers are connected to suppliers that employ unethical labor standards, such as child labor and unsafe working conditions.

Ayesha is a native of Pakistan who received her undergraduate and MBA degrees from UC Berkeley. She recently spoke at one of my Last Friday Ladies (and Gents) Lunches at the Hillside Club, a community-owned organization, in Berkeley. Comparing the 2013 death of 1,134 garment makers in the Rana Plaza disaster when a factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire death of 146 garment workers in New York City in 1911, she said that for most clothing makers, conditions have not improved.

That’s why Ayesha started Remake: to leverage the power of digital media to connect consumers, particularly millennials, with the people behind their clothing. The goal is through videos to establish empathy by consumers for makers and change their buying habits. Buy less, buy better are some of the mantras of what has become the conscious consumption meme.

Remake was seeded by the Levi Strauss Foundation, whose parent company is a global leader in upping the standards for apparel outsourcing of labor. Twenty years ago, Levi Strauss adopted a code of conduct for its suppliers encompassing standards around child labor, forced labor, working hours, wages and benefits, health and safety, and freedom of association as well as discrimination. But the company admits more needs to be done.

To check out how you can make a difference in the lives of garment makers, see Remake.world. As for the Mr. Tennenbaums of the world, they are long gone as are many of the clothes they made, unlike the new synthetic blends, which can last for 200 years and contribute to the waste fills of the world.

Why The NY Times Drives Me (and the President-Elect) Crazy Sometimes

The NY Times, its editorial board, and many of its reporters frame the news from an implicit bias. Basically, underlying its reporting is a belief in the status quo.

Sometimes the assumptions its editors make about the status of the world order goes contrary to reality, however.

Take today’s obit for Fidel Castro, which compares him to a puppet queen:

“Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II.”

Excuse me, but what power does QEII exert except to complain about her offspring’s romantic dalliances? As for leadership, what was her role in the Brexit debacle? And how dare the Times compare the political leader, albeit a dictator, of a Communist country with a puppet monarch of a parliamentary democracy?

A more apt comparison might have been with the theocratically selected Dalai Lama, who has – until his recent political resignation – been the leader of Tibetans more than a decade longer than Castro.

The President-Elect might have a point about our mainstream media. Even fools sometimes speak the truth.

The Search for Search

Twenty years ago I took on a new client, Ask Jeeves, a search engine that was designed to answered questions about anything using natural language processing. It worked better the more people asked the same question, and if Jeeves didn’t know an answer, it tasked one of the many in-the-flesh librarians and UC Berkeley grad students sitting in cramped cubicles to find the answer.

Obviously, this approach lacked scalability – this was before tech companies outsourced its workforce overseas – so it wasn’t long before Google came up with a scalable search engine based not only on algorithmically determined popularity (Page Rank) but also on the efforts of domain holders to optimize search through SEO. Advertising (and God knows what else) later played and still plays a major role in what results show up first when you conduct a search.

Five years ago, Seymour Rubinstein, whose company launched the first commercially successful word processor, WordStar, in 1979, hired me to position and publicize Webthresher, a search engine he’d been working on for more than a decade. He claimed Webthresher could find more relevant information by scraping other search engines, which you could select, and by using a patented algorithm that identified significance by word length. Basically, the shorter the word, the less relevant.

Webthresher has not yet made it to the commercial stage although it still promises features like complete privacy, and the ability to cache searches into personal files as well as to present an automated synopsis of web sites alongside an index of other possibly related sites.

Taking a different approach is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, developed ten years ago to capture and curate the millions of web sites that might otherwise disappear, as did the Supreme Court opinions at one point. Until now, the Wayback Machine was sourced by researchers, techies, and academics who had to know the exact URL they were seeking in order to conduct a search.

As of October 26, at the Internet Archive’s 20^th anniversary celebration at its headquarters in the Richmond district of San Francisco, Brewster Kahle, founder and chief librarian, demonstrated how to search for sites – including one million Wikipedia sites whose broken links were restored by the Archive -- by using common words. Searches are totally ad free and so is use of the Wayback Machine.

The archive is a nonprofit, initially funded by Kahle, who sold his company, Alexa, to Amazon in 1996 for $400 million in stock options. The Archive – which employs 200 people at centers around the world -- is now funded by federal grants and private philanthropies as well as by the people who use it.

The Internet Archive does not like to describe its Wayback Machine as a search engine. It’s true, it’s no replacement for Google if you want to find up-to-date information. But as an engine for searching web sites of the past – such as GIFs on GeoCities and games like the Oregon Trail and recordings of famous speeches as well as music and actual newspaper articles, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is fulfilling its original mission to save, curate, and provide easy access to the world’s knowledge and culture.

OK, Eulogize Bunnell But Not Those Mac/PC World Pubs

I didn’t know David Bunnell but I did read all those pubs he and others edited through IDG, including PC World and MacWorld. Except for hilarious pieces poking holes in the ballooning tech industry by John C. Dvorak and the pseudonymous Robert Cringely, the articles seemed formulaic and banal. I read these magazines for the ads, where new product offerings and services were explained rather than hyped.

In fact my favorite computer magazine during the 80s and 90s was Computer Shopper, a hefty tome on flimsy paper full of thousands of concise product reviews.

The bevy of IDG and its rival Ziff-Davis computer magazines, like PC Magazine and PC Week, didn’t drive tech growth so much as siphon millions of dollars in advertising from the likes of Microsoft and Intuit and Adobe and Apple as well as smaller companies like the one I worked for, Software Ventures, which made the first commercially successful Macintosh telecom program, MicroPhone.

IDG also made billions in fees from attendees and exhibitors at its MacWorld and PC World conferences, filled with incredibly dull talks and workshops but enlivened by backroom parties and networking.

The only exception to the mediocrity of the IDG stable was the short-lived vanity magazine, NextWorld, which was largely subsized by Steve Jobs’s company Next, itself a vanity computer. I looked forward to every bimonthly issue of NextWorld because John Perry Barlow was a major contributor. If there ever were a Nobel for computer writing, Barlow should get it, especially after he started writing for Wired magazine, the only computer publication that decided to bring in brilliant writers with chops beyond the computer world, like Paulina Borsook and Steven Levy.

In one multi-thousand-word Wired article reminiscent of a John McPhee story on tectonic plates, Barlow raved about the potential of technology to transform African cultures and economies, just as it is doing now more than a decade later.

Wired succeeded when all the other computer magazines from IDG and Ziff Davis have become skeletons of their former selves. That’s because Wired just didn’t report on the computer revolution. Through its radical layout and print design as well as its creative in-depth reporting that often included a global perspective most of tech media ignored, it became part of that revolution itself.

We Need to Face Our Genocidal Past, Says Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, won a Supreme Court case banning mandatory life sentencing without parole for anyone age 17 or younger. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, a hinterland that officially celebrates Robert E. Lee alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harvard-trained lawyer dedicated his life to serving the poor, the incarcerated, and children prosecuted as adults.

Stevenson keynoted the final day of the Conference on 2016 Adverse Childhood Experiences held October 19–21 in San Francisco and hosted by the Center for Youth Wellness, based in Bayview/Hunter’s Point, a part of San Francisco as far removed from the thriving high-tech scene as is Birmingham.

The founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, Nadine Burke-Harris, a dynamic pediatrician turned social activist, introduced Stevenson, whom she met at a dinner hosted by Alphabet (formerly known as Google) chairman, Eric Schmidt. Fortuitously seated together, they both recognized in each other a drive to create more justice in this country.

“America is the most punitive nation in the world,” Stevenson began, and then cited statistics the well known statistics. The U.S. incarcerates 2.3 million people today, upr from 300,000 in 1972. An African American himself, he said blacks suffer most, because one out of three male black babies are now expected to go to prison.

He said that part of the problem is our culture. “We use a punishment mindset that exacerbates the trauma (people have already suffered). We have to change that.”

He offered several solutions, some cultural, some policy-driven, such as having the Centers for Disease control and Prevention declare a health crisis in the 200 zip codes in the U.S. where 80 percent of the children are expected to end up in jail because of the traumatic experiences they will face, including violence in the family, the neighborhood, and schools.

To me, the child of a holocaust survivor, whose own parents and grandparents were survivors of anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, Stephenson’s depiction of America as a “post-genocidal society,” created by “an ideology of white supremacy” rang true.

In school, we are taught that this country as shaped by the desire for equality, yet as Stephenson points out, “The demography of this nation was shaped by racial terror.

“Slavery didn’t end in 1865. It just evolved,” he added.

My parents,” he said, “were humiliated every day of their lives. We haven’t dealt with that.”

He cited examples of countries that have faced up to their genocidal history, including South Africa with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid, and Germany, where in Berlin plaques are mounted on buildings denoting former homes and businesses of Jews who were killed or forced to leave.

In his own attempt to reconcile with our past and promote healing, his institute is putting up markers at every lynching site in the U.S. He’s also written a best-selling book about his work and life, Just Mercy.

Addressing the audience of 450 clinicians, educators, social workers, therapists, and community advocates dedicated to helping develop resilience in children and adults suffering early childhood trauma, he said “I realized why I do what I do. Because I’m broken, too. It is being broken that can lead us to healing.”

As for what impels him to keep serving the poor, “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. It’s justice.”