Berkeley Blog

Sex, Drugs, and Rock n Roll: Most Critical Part of College Experience Eliminated by Distance Learning

My German professor at Reed College – who is long since deceased – once said that if he could get only 5 percent of his students’ attention, he would feel as if he had succeeded. That’s because, he affirmed -- based on decades of observation (including his own participation given this was before the #MeToo movement) -- most college students spend 95 percent of their time focused on sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

That was during the 60s, but I don’t think much has changed except for the musical genres. Why would anyone want to “go to” college when entering an actual classroom is now mostly virtual, dining is take-out or socially distanced, and social activities – not to mention sex – are not only highly discouraged but might also result in death via Covid-19?

My brother-in-law, a retired Cornell professor, just sent me an email from Cornell President Martha E. Pollack to students and staff, outlining plans for an in-person year with “hybrid instruction and opportunities for remote learning for those who can’t return” – mainly international students. The plan covers classroom lectures, living arrangements, travel, and schedules but skips over the essential three elements of a student’s life: sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

If I were a student, I’d be tempted to skip the year, save some hefty college fees, and do something to help stop the spread of the virus, especially among communities of color, the homeless, those in nursing homes, and anyone who is food or rent insecure.

Perhaps someone will initiate a Covid Community Corps, akin to the Peace Corps, composed of young people dedicated to healing this nation and the planet, not to mention learning more about themselves and non-similar others than they would in a place of higher learning.

This does not rule out doing distance learning as well, but it should be free and accredited. Covid community work should eliminate tuition fees, at least for the coming academic year.

As to sex, drugs, and rock n roll, those in the Covid Community Corps would have the opportunity to experience and acquire empathy, compassion, and caring, all attributes that could prove more gratifying and just as useful for living their lives as the knowledge acquired at an in-person college.

It Could Be Much Worse

I was ten years old in 1956 and living in Bremerhaven, Germany, where my dad, a U.S. Army chief warrant officer and bandleader, was stationed, when hundreds-- perhaps thousands-- of Hungarians converged on our town carrying their entire possessions and holding onto their young children. The Hungarians were fleeing from an uprising, known as the Hungarian Revolution, protesting the policies of the Soviet government.

Besides their possessions, these refugees were carrying something else: a new strain of flu, which came to be known as the Hungarian flu. They had walked hundreds of miles to our town because it was a large port, and they could board ships to get to other continents, such as the U.S. 

Because many of these refugees had the Hungarian flu, Bremerhaven -- which was occupied by the U.S. and its western European allies under an agreement with the Soviet government after WWII and still in effect -- immediately enforced a quarantine for three weeks. I don't remember whether we could go outside -- I used to bicycle everywhere on the cobblestoned streets and see if I could weave between Army tanks as conveys drove along the roads -- but I do remember that my parents were worried and had probably stockpiled food from the PX, or military post exchange. I don't remember where the refugees were housed ....it was cold by the North Sea and I do remember they all wore thick, heavy coats three weeks. After the quarantine lifted, we departed for the U.S. 

In these times, I think of those Hungarians suffering from a strange flu and having no home or possessions, like the millions of migrants escaping their homelands today. At least most of us have homes. We still have a country, and we still have some reasonable, responsible people in government, perhaps not at the White House, but elsewhere. We are not under martial law...yet. We have possessions and food and most of us have the technology to stay connected. It could be much worse.

Internet Archive Expands Beyond Books and Taco Trucks

The most exciting development at the street party October 23 marking the annual celebration of the Internet Archive, headquartered in a former Greek-pillared church in the Richmond district of San Francisco, was not only the diversity of cultures represented by the food trucks — offering Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican fare -– but also the diversity of programs the Archive is embarking on. The Archive’s founder and chief archivist, Brewster Kahle, understands that knowledge has no boundaries, so besides scanning books and records, the nonprofit is now recording radio programs generated on stations throughout the world.

The aim of the Radio Archive, which focuses on U.S. radio, will allow researchers to mine data to analyze political memes and propaganda on this medium to gauge better the effect of this (mis)information on public opinion. During a live demonstration of this archive, it was scary to listen to the likes of hate-mongerers like Rush Limbaugh spew lies and cast aspersions on anyone outside his circle of right-wing supporters. I wonder if a Podcast Archive will be next. Certainly, with the increased popularity of the medium, it seems likely that the Archive won’t be far behind in preserving this content, especially since copyright laws haven’t caught up to podcasting yet (or have they?).

The other new projects the Archive announced all are book-bound, including a partnership with Wikipedia, with a “robot” developed by the Archive’s programmers that detects dead links in Wikipedia citations and replaces them with live links; the robot even links book citations to the actual books — including the exact page(s) — in the Wikipedia entry. For this feat alone, the Archive deserves the $80 million Kahle asked the pew-seated Archive worshippers to help raise for this and other projects.

Lisa Petrides, founder and CEO of ISKME, a nonprofit that supports knowledge sharing and collaboration in education, announced a Universal Library Project that would give students anywhere in the world access to any book that is owned and then shared on the project through the Archive’s scanning operation.

The head librarian from Phillip’s Academy — a private secondary school that has educated two American presidents, several foreign heads of state, Nobel laureates, and more — received the annual Archive award from Kahle for donating the library’s distinguished book collection to be scanned by the Archive for the Universal Library Project.

And the CEO of Better Books, a B corp (i.e., “socially responsible”) and one of the world’s largest sellers of used books, announced that it would partner with the Archive to scan the millions of books his business usually tosses in the recycling bin.

Finally, Wendy Hanamura, who heads partnerships for the Archive, presented a new archive for books about the Japanese internment camps during WWII, which was activated partially in response to the internment and separation of immigrant children at the Mexican border with the southern U.S. As she reminded us, a prime reason to archive our history is so that we do not repeat the crimes against humanity the Archive has made sure will not be erased.

 

"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.