Berkeley Blog

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?

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 gave 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.