Berkeley Blog

Why Werner Herzog Needs to Get on Facebook

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World expresses filmmaker Werner Herzog’s reveries and repulsions about the Internet. For a guy who refuses to own a cell phone, it’s a mash-up of talking heads the non-techhie outsider finds amusing, like hyperlink creator Ted Nelson, hacker Kevin Mitnick, education disrupter and self-driving car inventor Sebastian Thrun, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. along with a few solid computer scientists like Internet co-inventor Leonard Kleinrock and AI expert Danny Hillis to ground the film in reality.

Herzog has a sly style, similar to that of Errol Flynn’s: he focuses the camera right onto his subject’s face, then lingers there for a few seconds after the subject ceases to talk. The afterlife portrait seems to reveal a hidden layer of emotion, which makes a viewer feel uneasy, the way the motion on a boat often confuses one’s perception to cause nausea. What Elon Musk just told you about flying to Mars in case the planet Earth becomes uninhabitable some day soon induces a queasiness after the camera lingers on his almost horror-stricken face.

For cheap thrills, one of the ten segments of the film focuses on a ghoulish family of four, posed immobile around a dining room table with the parents standing above their three daughters. The heavily made-up daughters resemble beautiful corpses, and their father talks about how the Internet destroyed their lives. When one of his daughters – about to go into a mental institution – takes the family Porsche and drives it to her death, someone passing by captures her severed head on camera and emails it to dad. Not only that, the photo is widely circulated on the Internet and the family can’t get it removed. Mom claims the Internet is really the devil incarnate. This is where Herzog shines: in depicting American fanatics, like the Grizzly Man in a previous film.

In the final segment about the future, Herzog asks whether the Internet dreams. Some, like Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard and a couple of brain researchers at Carnegie Mellon, take the question seriously. By taunting his interviewees into anthropomorphizing computers – can the Internet dream? Can it love? -- Herzog wickedly sets up a closed loop argument for why the Internet can never be like humans. To clinch his point, he ends the film with a group of wizened looking musicians playing bluegrass in a section of the U.S. where there are no cell towers and therefore no cell phones. This, he seems to say, is what it is to be human.

And what about Facebook? No mention of social networks in this film, just a parting shot of Tibetan monks checking their smartphones by a river by some big city in the U.S. Herzog alludes to their tweeting, but perhaps they are checking out emails from the Dalai Lama or their relatives.

An entertaining movie with some thoughtful interludes thanks to Danny Hillis, but it’s more about Herzog’s reveries than about what the Internet hath wrought.

Where Have All the Tech Reporters Gone? Hired by the Companies They Once Covered

Just the other day I heard from a former tech editor who had been struck by the massive Newsweek layoff this past July. He told me he now worked doing communications and editorial for a startup in Silicon Valley that he had covered for Newsweek.

I started thinking about all the tech journalists who are now working for the companies they covered and often writing “paid content” instead of news articles.

And of course, there’s Dan Lyons, whose book, Disrupted, is about his experience working for a start-up after his career as a tech editor and columnist for Newsweek and Forbes.

Robert Scoble, one of the most popular tech bloggers, was hired as an evangelist – or high-paid communicator -- by Microsoft, then Rackspace, and now UpLoad VR.

Steve Gillmor, who still appears on Techcrunch TV, has a day job in communications at Salesforce.

Karen Wickre, a well-known tech editor for Upside and Ziff Davis, became the voice of Google, then Twitter, and now has her own PR firm.

With the media world in full disruption, it makes financial sense for good tech writers and editors to find firmer footing in the startup scene.

What does it do for the credibility of these former reporters when they become corporate communicators? And does it belie what seems to be an incestuous relationship between tech reporters and the companies they cover?

UCSC Commencement Speech Out of Synch

So I went to my son’s commencement from grad school (Ph.D. in Bioinformatics) at UCSC last week, expecting to suffer through a cliché-filled commencement talk about the challenges facing grads in the 21st century. Instead, the speaker, a philosophy grad well steeped in UCSC’s singular History of Consciousness college, started off by recounting her suicidal impulses, starting at age seven and almost actualized at age fifteen.

The audience, sitting in the bright sunny meadow overlooking Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean, fidgeted and squirmed like live sardines in close quarters. Some whispered to their partners, “Is this appropriate? Now?”

Then the speaker descended into a deep philosophical soliloquy, dispatching many to afternoon slumber…myself included. It was if we had descended to a History of Unconsciousness, although the graduates, adorned in plain, rented black gowns and cardboard caps, seemed oblivious to the speech, the sun, the ocean, and the families straining to see their seeds across the meadow like rows of corn, only exuberant over what was over.

TED's Chris Anderson Touts Talk over Writing

Went to a TED Talk talk on how to talk given by Chris Anderson, owner of TED. He has an educated-person’s British accent, which enhances almost any talk right from the start. The event was put on by Berkeley Arts & Letters, the spawn of Melissa Mytinger, who used to be Cody’s Bookstore’s events manager before that shrine to writers went under more than a decade ago.

Ironically, the talk – which lasted precisely 30 minutes – could have been improved by compression to the 18-minute limit of TED talks, because most of it relied on video excerpts from actual TED talks to demonstrate Anderson’s rather obvious points of how to give a good speech (tell a story, vary intonation and speed, etc.).

Best part were the questions – after all, this was a Berkeley audience. Of course, a couple of folks wanted to become TED speakers and were told where to apply. Someone asked about the revenue model for what’s become a nonprofit, especially since the talks are given away for free online. Obviously, they make money by charging what it would cost me to purchase yet another fine titanium-carbon fibre bicycle to attend the actual annual event, where one gets to mingle with the likes of monopolistic capitalists turned mega-philanthropists like Bill Gates, famous or soon-to-be famous “inspired thinkers,” and vulture capitalists sucking up their annual dose of world cross-cultures and benevolent technologies.

TED probably doesn’t need to make that much money, since it has a relatively small central staff; packages the TEDx template that has cloned 3,000 offspring; and since Anderson sold his previous business venture, Business 2.0 magazine, to Time, Inc. for $37 million, so why does he really need the money?

Instead, he wants everyone, including children, to learn to become great speakers because in the future, he says, people won’t read resumes, they’ll watch your video. Hey, people might not read at all in the future. And you’ll probably be able to use AI to do your video resume with an avatar of your choice.

Strange that Anderson had to write a book – which he was selling at this event – to make his point about speech being superior to writing. Who knows? Maybe, he needs the money, or TED needs the promotion, or both.

Believer and the Basis of Democracy

Reading David Axelrod’s political memoir, Believer, I came across his description of studies at the University of Chicago, which required all students to study the Greek and Roman classics, from Socrates to Seneca. Reed College, which I attended in the sixties, had adopted Chicago’s Great Ideas program, and so my very first week I was thrown into a world that seemed utterly foreign to someone who had spent the last six years in the film-and-gym culture of L.A.

I couldn’t make sense of the language of the ancient Greeks, which even in translation, sounded archaic and therefore abstruse. And all the writers as well as most of the people (and gods) they wrote about were men, macho men: warriors, conquerors, adventurers….not my kind of men at all. It all seemed like another world, a virtual reality game that had nothing to do with my experience.

Although in a basic sense, I discovered, the Greek experience defined democracy, and since I wanted to become a politician and was majoring in political science, the subject was relevant to my life goals. And Karl Marx’s Das Kapital aside (which reads better in the German, my fetal tongue), democracy is a concept driving modern civilizations (at least some of them).

More than 50 years later, I look at my notes on lectures about Plato and Socrates and Thucydides and wonder what I was thinking and how much of these Great Ideas I had absorbed. My notes, all written in elegant script with shorthand for commonly used words, seem an attempt to grasp a mass of facts by extensive outlining. It’s not obvious that I grasped anything at all until a lecture on Aristotle by the philosopher professor Marvin Levich, whose sentences were so long one sat on the edge of the pews in the chapel where our lectures were held and anticipated a derailment of this train of thought. It never came. All his sentences seemed fully formed, brilliant and conclusive, and the length of his discursions seemed to allow us inside his thought process itself.

Taking Aristotle to heart, he had us compare the function of a knife – to cut – with the function of man – to reason. A good knife cuts well, Levich, argued, but what about a good man?

To say a man’s function is to reason already assigns a value to what his or her function ought to be. Therefore, one who reasons well is a good person, whereas if the function of a person is to be happy, then our definition of a good person has nothing to do with an ability to reason.

Levich’s lectures confirmed what later a client of mine, cognitive linguist and UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff, maintains: framing the question determines the answer. It’s a valuable lesson for politics as well as marketing, which is why philosophy should be part of every college curriculum.

It's Time for a No Party System

It’s been a long time coming, but now the dissolution of the two party system is nigh. The NY Times today reports on a recent survey showing most Democrats distrust the party nominee, Clinton, and even more Republicans distrust its party nominee, Trump. So, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, What are parties for?

It’s about time we just voted for a candidate we support, regardless of party politics. Given the ubiquity of the Internet and the influence of social media as well as fundraising opportunities online, why bother with a two-party system that serves to serve no one but itself? We need to disintermediate the political system, just as we did with every other 20th century institution left over from the Industrial Revolution.

Everyone could run on an independent ticket, and just as in personalized medicine and personalized education, we could have personalized politics. The person supported by the most persons wins. 

Hey, isn’t that what democracy is all about?

News Has Gotten Softer

Used to be that most of the news, except for the oped page and columnists, was about hard facts: politics, wars, airplane crashes, crimes, natural disasters, and business developments.

Nowadays, the news is softer. It’s about childhood trauma and restorative justice, the unaffordability of rent in cities like San Francisco, and the underrepresentation of women, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in politics, work, and movies.

The news is more about social, economic, and cultural issues than single occurring events. As a result, it’s more about why than what, and because the medium for media itself has changed, there’s no need for newspapers to produce breaking news. It’s already been broken on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites.

Maybe news as we know it – like the daily Oakland Tribune, which will now be a weekly published along with the Contra Costa Times by the Bay Area News Group – will disappear altogether. The brilliance of publisher Arianna Huffington was her prescient launch of the Huffington Post – which is mainly soft news… aside from a blaring header news feed. HuffPost writers care more about why than what, and apparently, so do its readers.

I think Dan Gillmor predicted the populist media movement in We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, but media then was still considered hard news. Now, it’s softer and more thoughtful, with the “reporter’s” bias often out in the open.

I wonder what they are teaching these days in journalism schools.

Some Tech Folks I'd Nominate for President

If a dangerous fool like Trump can run for president, why don’t we widen the field and encourage tech CEOs to take the job? If they’ve got the persistence, courage, and leadership savvy to run a very large company, why shouldn’t they be able to scale those skills to lead our country?

Here are my nominations for the office (and yes, I’m ignoring Carly Fiorina because of her poor track record at HP):

Craig Newmark, whose integrity, common sense, and technical feats make him a people’s choice for the job.

Mark Cuban, a visionary, rebel, and great communicator. He’d try to shake up the way things are done in gov, and maybe that’s what we need.

Megan Smith, who already is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer. She was a founder of PlanetOut, headed Google Ventures and biz dev, and genuinely wants to leverage technology to improve the human condition.

Brewster Kahle, founder and director of the Internet Archive, probably the world’s largest collection of knowledge. Just imagine how he might open up all our government records….hey, we’d have to rewrite U.S. history.

Dan and Steve Gillmor, brothers by birth, both brilliant in their lucid understanding of how media (Dan) and technology (Steve) work, so it wouldn’t take them long as co-presidents to figure out the machinations of governance.

Esther Dyson, investor, philosopher, writer. She thinks about things deeply and then introduces new paradigms, like her investment in a wellness initiative for five American communities around the country. She’s also fluent in Russian, which couldn’t hurt our relations with Putin.

You Don't Have to Like the CEO. Just the Product.

In the 90’s, I used to love reading Stuart Alsop’s letters to high-tech CEOs, including one to Bill Gates, complaining about products as if he were our self-appointed consumer advocate. Because he was an influential journalist,and descendant of Boston Brahmins, CEOs listened and often responded in writing as well as with actions responsive to Alsop’s requests.

In his latest open letter to Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, Alsop complains about a poor marketing launch of the latest model car. He loves the car, but felt the launch event fell short of its promise to start in a timely fashion and introduce the new model. The event also took place during dinnertime, and apparently the food offerings were subpar.

I think Musk is shooting himself in the foot by refusing to let Alsop buy one of these cars because he wrote this open letter of complaint. Had Musk just ignored it, I doubt it would have received the attention it did. Also, I’m sure Alsop could circumvent the ban by purchasing someone else’s Tesla, because there is no way Musk could stop this transaction.

This whole contretemps reminds me of my former boss, an Israeli, who asked me to buy a company car for my use and the company’s use because I didn’t own a car way back then (and still don’t). He said I could buy anything under a certain amount — $15K — as long as it wasn’t a German or a Japanese-built vehicle. The restrictions were based on his WWII biases against our former enemies…after all, this was the mid-80s, so only 40 years had passed.

So I had to buy a crappy Ford van, which got recalled for defects twice and almost toppled over when one of our oversized, South African programmers started swaying in it from side to side as we were returning from an Apple developers conference in San Jose.

This former boss later took a big investment for another company from Deutsche Bank, so I assume he finally got over his WWII German-Japan ally boycott. Or maybe he considered it reparations.

My mother — a German Holocaust survivor — who resettled in Germany with my U.S. military dad and we kids in Bremerhaven during the mid-fifties, had no such qualms when it came to buying a car. We were one of the first Americans to own a Mercedes Benz, even though the company had supported Hitler’s regime.

Here’s the point: You buy stuff and you use stuff because you like it, not because you like the CEO or the way the company is run or the marketing launch event that left you literally and figuratively starving.

So, Stuart, I hope you get your car as well as your U.S. Constitutional right to free speech.

Restorative Justice for Corporate Criminals

Restorative justice is based on the philosophy that although an act may be evil, the person who committed the act is not necessarily evil, so it can be healing if the offender meets race-to-face with the victim to take responsibility for his or her crimes.

UC Berkeley’s Restorative Justice Center Coordinator Julie Bradford Shackley spoke about the roots of the practice today at the Last Friday Ladies Lunch I host every month at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. She said having victims and offenders “make peace” with each other is an old tradition, one that’s been practiced in Uganda and East Timor to reconcile hostilities between warring peoples.

At UC Berkeley’s RJ Center, students are trained to prepare victims and offenders for a face-to-face, where they can ask each other questions and come to some sort of understanding about the offensive action. What motivated someone to commit the act? Why did they pick on a certain victim? How has the victim’s life changed as a result of the act?

I’d love to see this process applied to corporate criminals, such as Bernie Madoff or the CEO of Volkswagen. Imagine having all the victims of Madoff’s pyramid scheme tell him, face to face, how the loss of their money has affected their lives. Every day of his life sentence, he’d have to face another slew of people whose life savings he spent to build up his own cash stash.

What if all the car owners who bought a VW diesel because it was supposed to be less polluting could ask the VW chief and his fleet of captains why violated their trust and whether they really cared about the environment?

I suppose the end result would be empathy: by the victim and by the offender for the position each was placed in. The victim might be able to understand the pressure Madoff was under that made him build ever-larger pyramids to pay off his investors. Or why VW leaders felt they needed to cover up their real emissions data to meet U.S. EPA requirements.

This assumes, of course, that sociopaths and psychopaths, are just a figment of the psychiatric imagination. Otherwise, if folks such as Madoff or corporations such as VW without empathy really exist, restorative justice is just a one-way process.