Berkeley Blog

"Inside Bill's Brain" Director Deploys Heart -- Not Brain -- Appeal

Film maker Davis Guggenheim (“Inconvenient Truth”) could make you love Henry Ford, anti-Semite and exploiter of cheap labor, because he loved his mother. And created a popular car.

 

That’s we get from the three-part hagiography of Bill Gates, “Inside Bill’s Brain,” on Netflix, ostensibly focusing on Bill’s brain – or his smarts – and not on his unsuccessful and ruthless business practices. Hey, he loved his mom, and doesn’t everyone bless Microsoft for delivering such a stellar operating system to the masses?

 

Let’s forget about Gates’s attack on free software, the way he got his first big chunk of cash through a deal with IBM because of his mom’s connections. A minor detail not covered in Bill’s Brain.

 

Also, no mention in this hagiography of how Gates’s team stole secrets by refusing to sign nondisclosure clauses when examining software from startups they pretended to partner with and then put them out of business by using what they’d learned to create similar programs.

 

The film brushes over many of Gates’s failures, particularly his performance before a Congressional committee where Microsoft faced charges of monopolistic practices. Instead it focuses on how sad and stressed out this confrontation made Bill, who later – the ruthless capitalist now a caring philanthropist bent on eliminating diarrhea and malaria from those third world countries where companies like Microsoft reduced an educated swathe of the population to serving call centers for tech and customer support – admits that he was just “naïve,” a word choice handed to him on a plate by Guggenheim.

 

Even his foundation (Melinda is part of this venture, a partnership that seems to have been initiated more to preserve their marriage, which is briefly depicted through an annoying animation in a car where the wife breaks down because she never gets to see Bill, who works nonstop) has failures ….like pushing $400 million into the Common Core Standards so that teachers – who refused to buy in – could train the future workforce. But these failures aren’t mentioned in the film. All is glorious with the Gates Foundation, according to its director, Susan Desmond Hellman, heiress to the fortune from her dad, hedge fund guru Warren Hellman, despite the high employee turnover that’s been reported.

 

Instead, we see Bill and Melinda gliding over water in their canoe (or kayak?) and Bill chowing hamburgers at an Omaha diner with friend Warren Buffett, who has entrusted much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. Just ordinary guys with bigger brains and wallets than you or me. And that’s why it’s OK for them to run the world.

 

 

Unshackle Anthony Levandowski Now

Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and co-inventor of the self-driving car for Waymo, is probably figuring out a way to deactivate the sensor in his ankle monitor, which he was forced to don by court order after being charged with stealing Google company secrets and exporting them to his next employer, Uber.

 

Nothing will stop Anthony from using AI to make things move. If he were imprisoned, I’m sure he’d invent a self-moving cell gate and attempt an escape.

 

Why are the feds going after this creative genius, once the darling of Google’s founder, Larry Page? Is shunting one’s inventions from one company, which claims ownership by virtue of its employment contract, to another a crime worth imprisonment? Uber, in a civil suit, has already paid Google a sum to compensate for the intellectual property.

 

What if Steve Jobs had signed a nondisclosure with Xerox PARC before purloining their ideas for his computers. Would he have ended up in Leavenworth?

 

The freedom to spread intellectual ideas – sometimes “property” – is what has spurred the growth of technology in Silicon Valley as engineers move from company to company. The more companies that develop self-driving vehicles, the better for the consumer.

 

Levandowski deserves a medal for his achievements. Not an ankle bracelet.

 

Why France Has a Minister of Culture. And the U.S. Does Not.

So I was reminded that France has a Minister of Culture when he was quoted this week in reference to the burning of the roof of Notre Dame. I don’t know what he said but the fact that culture is considered so vital to that country’s identity that there would be a government minister just to make these remarks and do other culture-related tasks blows my mind.

Can you imagine what a Minister of Culture might do in the U.S.? Participate in a ribbon cutting at a new Disneyland or designate the new Apple headquarters, in the shape of a translucent portobello mushroom, a national heritage?

I suppose one could argue that the President usurps this role in his annual awarding of medals to great artists and athletes and musicians. But France doesn’t mix sports with art: it also has a Minister of Sport, which alas, the U.S. lacks as well.

This country does have a history of culture, but it’s the culture of the cultures we’ve destroyed through killings, forced migrations, slavery, and exclusion. So we have Native American weavings, jewelry, sculptures, myths, and dance; from the natives of African countries forced into slavery, blues and jazz and gospel, poetry and literature and history; and from the Vietnamese whose country we tried to but couldn’t destroy, and the Japanese we put into concentration camps, and the Chinese whose women we excluded and whom we worked to death on building our railroads, art, music, literature, ceramics, textiles, and ichibana.

Our country was founded by those inculcated with the Protestant culture. It was and is a culture that values money over the arts, although one might argue there’s artfulness in the sermonizing tracts of Cotton Mather. And those with money generally like to acquire works of art, support symphonies and libraries and museums. But art isn’t part of our collective consciousness the way it is for the French or the Italians or the Greeks or the Japanese.

A U.S. Minister of Culture could change all that by diverting the billions to erect a barrier between our country and Mexico (or Canada, if they decide to invade) for artists, art centers, art education, and community art projects. Venezuela did it for training musicians. Cuba did it for ballet education. But it doesn’t require a socialist state to support the arts. All we’d need is a new cabinet position.

 

 

"I Always Hated Reporting About Steve Jobs"

The confessions of John Markoff, veteran NY Times tech reporter

Steve Jobs proclaimed that computers are the bicycles of the mind. John Markoff, a Pulitzer prize-winning technology and science writer for the NY Times for 28 years and author of many books about the computer revolution, now chides himself for having been, like many reporters of his time, “deferential about technology” and slipping into Jobs’s reality distortion field.

“Silicon Valley,” he said before a full crowd at UC Berkeley’s Second Annual Esther Woijcicki lecture April 9, “has had a sympathetic technology press.” Which included Markoff.

This lecture was sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Tad Taube, the SF philanthropist and former real estate investor, who named the lecture series for Woijcicki, a Cal journalism major, after discovering through a DNA sample on 23andme ( founded by one of Woijcicki’s daughters) that he and Esther were second cousins.

Markoff said that he and other tech reporters ignored the warnings of prescient sci fi writers like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, who foresaw and described the technology that has created “a surveillance culture that would put George Orwell to shame.” Instead they bought into Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow’s utopian manifesto of a virtual space that was free from the constraints of “meatspace.”

With gentle prodding from moderator and fellow Pulitzer prize winner and investigative journalist Lowell Bergman, Markoff turned to uncover the dark side of technology, the unintended consequences, which is why he said, “Visionaries are always wrong.” A case in point is the genocide and exile of a minority community in Myanmar, spurred by fake news on Facebook posted by that government’s military.

“Facebook is deeply in trouble on many fronts,” Markoff said, although in public hearings its CEO maintains the company doesn’t have control of its content.

Someone asked how much money Facebook made over the video of the recent Christchurch killings. “I’m sure they know,” responded Markoff. “Facebook speaks out of both sides of their mouth. They convince advertisers they know everything and regulators they know nothing.”

Should big tech companies like Google and Facebook be broken up, as proposed by U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren? Markoff thinks this will happen but not in the immediate future and pointed out the irony of Google protesting it be broken up when previously it joined forces with other tech companies to break up Microsoft’s monopoly on the market.

These tech monopolies, which Markoff terms Little Brothers, include corporate actors like Google and Facebook that acquire large bodies of data and use it for commercial ends. He warned that anyone who uses the Internet cannot escape the constant surveillance of these corporate entities.

“Resistance is futile. We are being assimilated,” said Markoff.

“You’re in this world where you’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms and they are mostly opaque. They have an agenda and we don’t know what it is.”

The talk then turned to the use of artificial intelligence used for warfare. A short video scarily depicted tiny drones programmed to target and kill thousands of university students who had joined a protest movement on social media. The film, “Slaughterbots,” was made by retired UC Berkeley computer professor Stuart Russell to oppose the use of autonomous weapons. htt

Markoff said that the component parts for such weapons are already a reality. The U.S., China, and Russia do not want a ban on autonomous weapons, and Markoff said the only deterrent was to promote the spread of human-centered AI programs to instill values in engineers.

“The only thing that is going to save us,” he said, “is engineers with those human-centered values.” And Markoff continues to record those values in a biography he is writing about Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog creator, founder of the Well --the first online forum -- and inspiration for the environmental and hippie movements that continue to rankle some and inspire others today.

 

 

Newseum Old News from the Start

So the $450 million, 7-story Newseum building in Washington, D.C. erected by the Freedom Forum in 2008, is now being sold to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million to help pay the FF’s mounting debt.

The point is what were the “freedom” founders thinking when they built a physical structure for what had by 2008 become mostly a digital media? Why would anyone pay a $25 admission fee to see what they could easily view on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which provides free access to more a century of newspapers and more than half a century of TV news?

Given the layoffs of journalists throughout media, it seems the money for a building and its decade-long operations might have been better spent supporting the very media it enshrined. Although I’ve never been there, to me the Newseum appears to be more like a cemetery than an institution celebrating and supporting the viability of a free press.

Why Is the Media Glorifying Paul Allen?

Did they forget he got a sweetheart deal based on his partner’s (Bill Gates) mother’s relationship with an IBM board member to write a piece-of-shit operating system, MS-DOS, that was foisted by Microsoft and IBM on millions of computer users who had to struggle with daily system crashes because it was infested with bugs?

Not to mention that Gates created an illegal monopoly (but he hired so many lawyers that the feds finally just gave up) to make sure all manufacturers had to install the operating system on their computers before they shipped out.

Not to mention Gates quashed application competitors by reverse engineering their code (Microsoft refused to sign nondisclosures) or buying them out.

So Allen made his billions – more than $26 – and was able to spend it the ways many profligates do: on energy-burning transportation machines, such as yachts and planes; on real estate; on sports teams; on a museum to house his personal collection of collectibles; and a few million to count the number of African elephants. Sure, he contributed millions to purchase wireless spectrum in Seattle and Portland, but he also funded the now extinct SETI project by Mount Shasta in northern California, which used large telescopes to track “alien” signals from presumedly habitable planets in outer space.

So Paul Allen was a programmer who lucked out in the software business. He made lots of money, thanks to the machinations and connections of his crafty business partner. He spent loads of money to Disneyfy Seattle, formerly a sleepy seaport awash with sailors, whore houses, and bars. Allen’s real estate investments have also transformed Seattle into a mini-Silicon Valley clone, home to Amazon and Intellectual Ventures, spawn of Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myrvold.

But I suppose that when a coder-made-accidental-billionaire dies at a relatively young age, the media will only recall how he made his money….not how it was squandered on trivial pursuits, although perhaps the elephants will benefit.

The Internet Achive Preserves the Past to Create a New Future

On October 3, I went to the annual birthday bash at the Internet Archive, which aims to provide free digital access to all of the world’s knowledge. That includes not only stuff that’s in print but also music, art, television news and programs, and video games. The event is held at a former church in San Francisco’s foggy Richmond district, but last night it was unseasonably warm and welcoming, with swarms of Internet celebs and groupies crowding the sidewalk, checking out demos on outdoor tables, and imbibing spirits as well as free tacos from two trucks straddling Clement Street.

More than a thousand people came to celebrate founder Brewster Kahle’s vision of a decentralized web and I was surprised that so many of my tech friends – all brilliant and selfless champions of the archive’s goals – now work at the Internet Archive. Standing on the steps to greet everyone with a pass was Mark Seiden, the prince of cybersecurity, whose past includes consulting work for U.S. spook agencies as well as a stint at Yahoo and who now works part-time securing privacy for archive users. David Fox, founder of astrology.com and a former client of mine, is now levering his horoscope as development director, and Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, was previously a senior VP with NBC News, where I worked with his team to publicize a live streaming video platform called Stringwire.

Outside, where ice cream sandwiches were being hand delivered after the hour and half presentation of new deliverables from the archive staff and a commitment by Kahle to build a better web that is reliable, includes community partners, represents the unheard (such as Tibetan Buddhists), and is less creepy and more fun, I ran into my friend and animator Albert Reinhardt, who told me he quit consulting and now works for the archive as well.

It’s always a reunion at this event with Berkeley Cybersalon and BMUG friends, like Dan Kottke, Apple’s first employee and a college roommate of Steve Jobs, and Ted Nelson, founder of the everlasting Xanadu and hyperlink, who at 81 was taking selfies and smiling broadly at the announcement of a new archive collection: TedNelsonjunkmail, which someone scanned and posted on the archive site for posterity. I also caught up with former NY Times tech and science reporter and fellow cyclist John Markoff, who will be publishing a biography of Stewart Brand next spring, as well as historian Marc Weber and Len Shustek, board chairman of the Computer History Museum.

Dancing in a courtyard followed the presentation and it reminded me of how much sheer fun and camaraderie rather than competitiveness used to characterize tech events in the 80s and 90s. We didn’t take ourselves so seriously and yet, looking back, we accomplished some serious achievements, including the archive.

The Internet Archive is expanding its reach to millions of school children with a library project that will deliver tens of thousands of books to young readers. It’s ironic that Kahle was able to start the archive and now is investing in this book campaign by selling his previous company, Alexa, to Amazon, a purveyor of books that are not free.

Also ironic, or perhaps inevitable, is that by preserving the past, the Internet Archive is also architecting a new way to share knowledge in the future. It’s called the decentralized web and will eventually insure all the qualities Kahle and those who participated in the archive’s celebration originally hoped the Internet would offer.

DMV Lingers in the Last Century

Dante’s Inferno couldn’t do justice to my hellish experience yesterday at the El Cerrito DMV. I had received a notice, because I’m over 70, that I need to renew my driver’s license, and take a written test as well as an eye exam. So I made an appointment, assuming this might expedite my having to wait in line.

I walked into the El Cerrito DMV after having had a pleasant three-mile bicycle ride on the Ohlone Bike Path and wondering whether I needed to drive a car anymore. As soon as I entered the DMV, I felt the same horror that I had experienced as a college junior entering the Rocky Butte State Prison Farm in eastern Oregon to tutor inmates in math. The teeming masses, some reeking of cigarette smoke and others just reeking, snaked in two long lines: the one of the left was for No Appointments and the one on the right for Appointments.

Grimly, I got in line, and waited 10 minutes to be told to wait in another line where I would have to file an application on one of the two dozen computers that appeared to have been auctioned off at a computer faire in the 1980s. After another wait of at least 15 minutes because the sole attendant had to deal with people coming off the computers as well as people who didn’t speak English and needed basic instructions on what to do, I was told to sit in front of a computer almost as old as me and press the white box to start the application process.

Surprisingly, the process included questions about my voting preferences: which party I prefer and where I would like my ballot sent to. Having just listened to the surveillance prowess on Peter Thiel’s Palantir software on NPR, I was shocked by this inquiry into my voting preferences. This felt as if it were 1984 all over again.

Next, I waited in line to get an identification code on my application form from the same sole attendant. I asked her why she didn’t have help and she said her co-staffer was on lunch break, which seemed to have extended into the cocktail hour.

Then I was told to I would have to wait 30 minutes for my number to be called. I started to feel as if I’d been waterboarded by false promises of oxygen after repeated dunkings into wait lines. I had to sit in a plastic chair sans back support – from an office furniture auction from the 50s? – next to a woman who stepped out from time to time to get a smoke. I gave up watching the clock or even looking at the screen that announced future numbers. This is what severe depression must feel like, I thought.

Finally, I was sent to Window 5, where a cheerful person informed me I couldn’t get the special ID card for air travel without a passport, birth certificate, or social security card. Of course, I had brought none of these.

“How about a regular driver’s license?”

“Yes, but you have to pay $35 first. And we don’t take credit cards.”

They do take debit cards, and this worked.

I have until 2020 to get a special ID license for travel. I might not live that long if I have to repeat this experience, I mused.

Next, I had to take an eye exam. I just had cataract surgery in one eye – I was myopic in both eyes – and had a long distance lens inserted in that eye. Now I have monovision, which means I can see both long distance and close distance. But wait! This apparently requires a special optometry report despite my ability to see long distance in one eye, which is all that the California driver’s code requires. So now I can’t get a permanent license until I return with an optometrist’s report.

Oh yes, I had to wait in yet the same line as the application line to take the driver’s exam. The co-worker who had gone to lunch at 1:30, when I had arrived, was still out to lunch at 3:30. DMV has great staff benefits apparently.

This time, my vintage computer wouldn’t recognize my thumbprint (another 1984 biomarker) no matter how many times I tried, so after waiting in line again, I got a paper test with a pencil. I took the test, waited in line, passed the test and escaped.

But as I was leaving – after 2 and a half hours in this drivers’ Ellis Island – a buxom staff person walked around the room bellowing a warning: “For everyone without an appointment, the wait will be 4 hours and 40 minutes.” This was at 4 p.m. PST.

If there’s an argument for updating the DMV, this is it. Silicon Valley technologists: Come to the rescue.

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?