Why Losing the World Cup Bid Is a Big Win: A Guest Post
Dennis Coates, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, is the immediate past president of the North American Association of Sports Economists. His paper “World Cup Economics: What Americans Need to Know about a U.S. World Cup Bid” carried a stern warning for the U.S. and other countries bidding to host a World Cup. Here, he weighs in on today’s announcement of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid winners.
Why Losing the World Cup Bid Is a Big Win
A Guest Post
by Dennis Coates
A Guest Post
by Dennis Coates
The host countries for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup were announcedearlier today in Zurich, Switzerland. Russia landed the 2018 event in competition with England, Belgium/Netherlands, and Spain/Portugal. Qatar won the 2022 World Cup over Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Congratulations to them. Both winning countries’ representatives promised that FIFA and the world will be proud of the events they host. I wonder if anyone in those countries’ bid committees ever heard of the winner’s curse?
I wonder because bidding for the World Cup is a perfect place for such a curse to arise. The basic idea is that there is a prize of uncertain value sought after by numerous bidders — none of whom has much experience in assessing the true value of the prize. This lack of expertise is the result of the prize (or other very similar prizes) going on auction only rarely. Each bidder makes a good faith effort to determine the true value of the prize, but because of the uncertainty, none of the bidders is likely to get the value exactly right and, indeed, all of them are very likely to be wrong. Some will be wrong by a little, some by a lot. Some will undervalue the prize, while others will over value the prize. The “winner” — in our case the countries that get to host the World Cup — are those bidders that overvalue the prize most. Hence, the winner is cursed to overpay to acquire the prize.
Economists and public policy analysts have studied the economic impact of large international sporting events like the World Cup and the Olympics, and national events like the Super Bowl, and the evidence shows that there is very little in the way of economic benefit from hosting these events. Incomes don’t grow faster, more jobs aren’t created, governments don’t rake in significant hauls of new tax revenues. In other words, the best evidence produced by disinterested researchers is that the economic value of hosting the World Cup or Olympics is not especially large.
There is much less consensus about the value of these events in terms of prestige and national pride. Measuring these benefits is, of course, difficult at best, and impossible at worst. Countries whose bids rely on estimates of these sorts of benefits will be likely to make larger errors in judgment than countries whose bids are predominantly about purely economic, dollars and cents, issues. I would contend that Russia and Qatar fit the description of countries whose bids rely heavily on prestige and national pride benefits. In short, they are countries whose bids are very likely to be wildly optimistic in terms of the value of hosting the World Cup.
So, congratulations to Russia and Qatar. I wish you well as you organize the World Cups in 2018 and 2022. I hope for your sakes that the victory you have today time does not reveal to be Pyrrhic. At the same time, I celebratethat the U.S. avoided the curse of winning the bid.
Robert Greene's Speech at Yale - December 3, 2010
Below is the transcript of a speech Robert did at Yale in October along with the Q&A that followed. For those of you who would prefer to listen to an mp3 of the speech, you can download that here.
Host: Welcome everybody. So, it's a pleasure to have all of you here, and a particular pleasure to welcome our honored guest, Robert Greene. He is, well, you are all here, so I think you probably know a lot about his books, his writings. I'll state just a few words.
He has trained in classical literature. And then had a very shifting career for some early period of his post-college life. And then settled in to write a series of extremely fascinating books that draw on the classical training and readings that he did. The books that the lives and writings of a number of the major figures. He's written about power, about seduction, about war.
With that background, of course, it is not surprising that he also made a wonderful connection with the hip-hop crowd. He became a guru of them for a while. He set up a collaboration with them. We were talking beforehand, it is clear that he enjoyed that collaboration. And it is not bad to be a guru, from what he said. But, it also achieved some of his other aims about who he was hoping to help empower.
I thought what we would do is, after we give him a big applause for welcome, I will ask him to say a bit about himself and what he is working on, and then we will open it up for questions. But, why don't we start with giving him a nice, warm welcome.
Robert: Is it better if I stand or if I sit? Or what is the protocol?
Robert: Is it better if I stand or if I sit? Or what is the protocol?
Host: Whatever is comfortable.
Robert: Okay.
Robert: Okay.
Host: It is informal. You're welcome to sit.
Robert: Well, I come from Los Angeles. I was actually born in Los Angeles. And I don't mean to disparage California, or Los Angeles, particularly, or any of the people from there. But I will say that the IQ levels in a place like that are generally a little bit lower than what I find here. So, I'm actually a little bit intimidated by all of these very smart people here. So, I'm a little bit nervous. I hope you understand.
Robert: Well, I come from Los Angeles. I was actually born in Los Angeles. And I don't mean to disparage California, or Los Angeles, particularly, or any of the people from there. But I will say that the IQ levels in a place like that are generally a little bit lower than what I find here. So, I'm actually a little bit intimidated by all of these very smart people here. So, I'm a little bit nervous. I hope you understand.
Basically, I started writing back in 1996. I've been writing my whole life. But I met somebody, we were in Italy together at the same time, working on a project, and it was a really awful Machiavellian environment, in Italy, if you can imagine that. And all of these terrible political games were being played. And we were just miserable and depressed. This was actually 1995. He was a book packager and he asked me if I had any ideas for books. And all of this pain that I had been through in the work world with all of these political, conniving figures, it just came up out of me. It was a beautiful day in Venice, Italy, and I sort of improvised this idea for a book, and he loved it. He basically paid me to live while I wrote "The 48 Laws of Power". And that's where it started.
For 15 to 16 years, I've had this weird position in life that I don't know how many other people have had where I have been able to devote all of my attention to studying what I consider to be the most powerful, charismatic, successful, Machiavellian characters in history and contemporary figures, like, 50.
I may not be good at many things. I can't build things with my hands or anything like that. But I have this one expertise -- why some people excel, why some people are superior in the political game or in their creativity or whatever it is.
In figuring out what I wanted to talk to you about today, I was talking with Casper, who I want to thank for helping to organize this. There is sort of a philosophy that all of these figures that I've studied share. And I am often asked, or people say, "I want to become powerful. What's the secret to it?"
I don't believe in that kind of glib four sentence or one book answer about how to be powerful. But there is an attitude towards life, a way of looking at things, a way of thinking that all of these people that I have been studying they all share this way of looking at the world.
It is what I call radical realism. And the reason I call it radical is, realism has this idea of just understanding the world and it sort of has a cynical, sometimes an edge to it. I want the idea of really, deeply understanding what life is about, how people operate in this world. And not only being realistic and understanding it, but accepting in a very deep way that this is what the world is like and actually loving it and embracing it and working with reality.
All of these figures from 50 Cent and Napoleon Bonaparte to Cleopatra to John F. Kennedy, I believe they all share this kind of attitude. So, I am going to talk, hopefully not too long, because I really want to get to your questions, and I encourage you to barrage me with all kinds of difficult questions. I want to talk about three aspects of this attitude. The first is, what I call, Machiavellian realism or the Machiavellian reality. The second is existential reality, what it really means to be a human being. The third is what I call aesthetic realism.
My idea is that to the degree that you accept these realities in life, you are going to be successful and powerful. And to the degree that you deny them and you avoid them and you hate them and you are miserable about them and you try and run away, you are not going to have success in life.
So, the first one, as I said, is what I call our Machiavellian reality. There is a concept that lately fascinates me that I have been using for my next book. It is a term called Machiavellian intelligence. And it is something that came about in the sixties and seventies, where various scientists, people studying the brain, they are trying to understand why is it that the human brain is so much larger than anything else we have in nature? How did this happen? Why did our brains develop in this way so rapidly and become so much more complex than any other animal on the planet?
And they basically went back to primates. Unless you believe in creationism, our ancestors. Basically, primates are the other animal that have this exceptionally large brain. A brain that seems to be in excess of their needs. To explain why our brains developed in this way, they looked at primates, and they came up with a really fascinating theory called Machiavellian intelligence.
The gist of it is the following. What makes primates different from any other animal is that they live in very complex social environments. There are other animals, like wolves, etc., that live in packs, that have hierarchies, the alpha male, etc. But primates, and I'm talking about chimps, baboons, orangutans, that whole group, have a much deeper, a much more complex social organization. They have rituals of grooming, where they groom each other for hours upon hours during the day, forming all kinds of friendships and alliances. They remember these friendships and these alliances over the space of 10, 20 years.
The other thing that primates have that is so bizarre and interesting is that they are the only animal we know that practice deception and games of manipulation among each other. There is no other animal on the planet that we can say that about. So, they label primates as the Machiavellian creature, the Machiavellian animal. They have shown colonies of monkeys, for instance, in Puerto Rico, where they do a lot of studies, incredible games of manipulation that are going on among these little, small communities.
One of the discoveries that they have in looking at these primates is that they possess a power that is known as the theory of mind. Now I don't know if you are familiar with this concept. But, basically, it is the idea that only humans or primates have a concept where I can think about, perhaps, what is going on in your mind right now. Most animals can only judge another creature based on its outward behavior about what they are doing, about the threat that they, perhaps, represent. But a human and a primate has the capacity to actually, literally imagine, and I am pointing to you, because I am thinking about you right there. What is it exactly that is going on in your brain right now? What are you thinking? What are you thinking right now?
Now they have discovered that primates actually possess this theory of mind. It is related to something called mirror neurons. I am not going to get too technical with you here. I am not a neuroscientist myself. But, basically, mirror neurons is this fascinating phenomenon where if I pick up this telephone, my cell phone, they can look on a map of my brain and see that certain neurons are firing when I actually pick up this phone.
If I watch him pick up the phone, the same neurons are firing. It is called mirror neurons. So, basically, this allows me to learn by imitation. I can experience what you are doing with picking up that phone as if I, almost, myself, were feeling that.
This allows humans and primates to understand and to put themselves in the mind of another person. This allows for all kinds of complicated social behavior. It allows for us to be empathetic creatures, to cooperate. But it also allows for very deep levels of deception, manipulation, con games, whatever you want to call it. Because the moment I know what you are thinking or I can imagine what your intentions are, I can strategize. I can play all kinds of games. I can try to distract you, deceive you, etc.
So they have shown that monkeys, for instance, possess these mirror neurons. That chimpanzees possess this ability of theory of mind. And from all of this stems all of this incredible Machiavellian behavior. So the theory, to bring this all back to it, of Machiavellian intelligence is that the reason primate brains developed so rapidly is in dealing with this very complicated social environment.
An animal normally is only dealing with its physical environment. But primates are dealing with their social environment. And it is in dealing with the social problems and dealing with fellow chimpanzees and what they are thinking that the brain had to develop very rapidly in a very small period of time.
Primates started evolving, modern primates as we know them, 40 million years ago. Some six million years ago, we humans diverged from that. And we have the first, what are known as homo erectus. And our earliest ancestors have this inheritance in them. This Machiavellian intelligence. We formed larger and larger groupings. We were the first animal that actually hunted big game. And in creating, being able to hunt something like that, involved all kinds of complicated organization.
So if you map out very rapidly, and I'm skipping over millions of years of history, and a historian would be very offended with how I am doing this, but you would see an incredible increase in this social complexity over millions of years leading up to a modern era where a person who is raised as a human being in our environment is not simply dealing with a group of 20 people and having to figure out how to navigate in that world. But you are talking about people, us, who have to deal with thousands of thousands of people living in communities, in our workplace, in politics, in government, in business. All of the deep levels of manipulation, deception, cooperation, that whole element that goes into what is known as Machiavellian intelligence.
So, through this concept, the idea is that we humans, the reason why we have evolved so rapidly, why we are so clever, why we are so smart is that we are inherently social creatures. That you can't divorce the games that we have to play, what we have to learn in how to get along with other people, you can't divorce that from our other forms of intelligence. This is very much who we are. We are, by our nature, the Machiavellian animal. It is 40 million years of evolution starting from primates back then to who we are now. There is no way to deny that. There is no way to, in the course of 20 years or 80 years, to evolve beyond it. It is who we are.
So, this is my definition of that first basic reality, what I call our social reality, or the Machiavellian reality. Now, there is nobody out there who really talks about this. There are not many books written about it. There is nobody here at Yale teaching a class on how to be Machiavellian in the world or how to handle that kind of environment, at least as far as I know.
When you enter the real world, you are suddenly blindsided by this whole realm that exists. It is like our dirty little secret. People will talk about their sex lives. You'll get Dr. Ruth here, we'll go through all of that. But nobody talks about all of these power games that are constantly going on in the world. So, I just wanted to interject into this idea my own personal story. When I got out of college and I suddenly was confronted with this real world.
I had graduated, as he mentioned, with a classical background. I was immersed in studying philosophy and literature and languages. And so when I started working, essentially in magazines, I worked at Esquire magazine and a few others. I had no idea of how things operated in the real world, and I was very much shocked by all of the egos and the insecurities and the game playing and the political stuff. It really kind of disturbed me and it upset me. I can remember when I was about 26 or 27 years old one particular job that was kind of the turning point in my life.
I am not going to tell you which job this was. I don't want you Googling it and figuring out who I'm talking about. But, basically, the job was that I had to find stories that would then be put into either film or a magazine, whatever. But I was basically judged on how many good stories I found. So in this job, I thought, I am a very competitive person, and I was doing better than anybody else there. I was finding more stories that ended up getting produced, because I felt that's the point. You are trying to produce. You are trying to get work done. Isn't that the most important thing? Isn't that why we are all here?
Suddenly I found that my superior, this woman, who's name I won't mention, made it very clear that she wasn't happy with me. That something was wrong. I was doing something wrong and I couldn't figure out what it was.
So going on what I was mentioning, that theory of mind, this power that we have, I sort of put myself in her shoes. And I'm thinking, what is it that I'm doing that is displeasing her? I am clearly producing. And I figured out, well, maybe it is because I'm not involving her in what I'm doing, in my ideas. I need to run them by her. I need to make and involve her more so she feels like she is a part of the research that I am doing.
So I would go into her office and I would tell her where my ideas were coming. I was trying to engage with her, figuring that was the problem. Well, that didn't seem to work. She was still clearly unhappy with me. Maybe didn't like me. So, I thought, going further, well, maybe I'm not being friendly enough with her. Maybe I need to be nice to her. Maybe I need to go in and not talk about work, but just talk, be nice and talk like a human being.
Okay. So that was strategy number two. I started doing that. Still didn't have any effect. She still seemed really cold and kind of mean. I figured, all right. She just hates me. That's just life. Not everybody can love you. That's just it. I mean, what the hell? I'll just do my job. Then one day we are having a meeting in which we are discussing our ideas, and she suddenly interrupts. She says, "'Robert. You have an attitude problem."
"What?" "You're not listening to people here." "I'm listening." But, I mean, I produce. I do my work. You are going to judge me about how wide my eyes are open and how I'm listening to people? She goes, "No. You have a problem here." "I'm sorry. I don't think I do."
Anyway, over the course of the next few weeks she just started kind of torturing me about this idea that I had an attitude. And, of course, naturally, I developed an attitude. I started resenting her. And a couple of weeks later, I quit, because I just hated it. I probably quit a week before they were going to fire me anyway. And I went home, and over the course of several weeks, I thought really deeply about it. What happened here? What did I do wrong? I mean, she just didn't like me? I think I'm a likable person.
I figured, I came to this conclusion. I had violated a law of power 12 years before I ever wrote the book. Law number one: Never outshine the master. I had gone into this environment thinking that what mattered was doing a great job and showing how talented I was. But, in doing that, I had made this woman, my superior, insecure that maybe I was after her job or that maybe I was better than she was. And I would make her look bad because the great ideas were coming from me and not from her.
I had violated law number one. And when you violate law number one, you are going to suffer for it, because you are touching on a person's ego and their insecurities. That is the worst thing you can do, and that is what had happened.
So in reflecting over this, it was kind of a turning point in my life. And I said, "I'm never going to let this happen again. I'm never going to get emotional." Because that it what happened. I basically reacted emotionally to her torturing me and developed an attitude. I'm never going to let that happen again. I don't care. I'm a writer. I don't care about these jobs that I get. I am just going to become a master observer of the game of power. I am going to watch these people as if they were mice in a laboratory, with some distance.
I developed a motto. A motto that I still use to this day, and that motto is, "It's all material." Everything that happens is material. Material for a book. Material for a novel, for a screenplay. I want to be the master observer of this world.
This suddenly allowed me, now, to not only observe the power games going on in the many different kinds of jobs that I've had. And I can tell you, I've had jobs from working in journalism. I worked in a detective agency. I worked for a music producer. I worked for film. Everything possible.
In having this distance and looking at the world like this, suddenly I had power. I wasn't emotionally involved. I had some distance, and I could deal with things. From that, I developed "The 48 Laws of Power," when I was finally given the opportunity to write the book. What I decided in "The 48 Laws," and it's a very much a part of me, is that this is the reality that we must all deal with. That we are social creatures. That we live in environments where there are all kinds of complicated networks. We are, in a way, defined by how we handle these environments, this reality.
There are three types of people in this world in dealing with this social reality. There are, what I call, the deniers, the people who deny this reality exists. They almost want to pretend that we are descended from angels and not from primates. That what I am talking about here is cynical. It doesn't really exist. It doesn't happen.
Among these deniers, you will find two types. You will find people who are genuinely disturbed by the politicking aspect of human nature. They don't want any kind of job in which they have to do that. You will find that they are slowly marginalized. They can be happy that way. They are never going to assume a position of great responsibility because it involves all of this.
The other branch of the deniers are the people that are the passive-aggressors. I would classify this woman who had tortured me as a kind of a classic passive-aggressor. People who consciously don't want to admit that there is any kind of manipulation involved, but unconsciously are playing all kinds of games. In my books, I often describe the many different kinds, the trickiest kind of person to deal with, the passive-aggressors.
The second type of person besides the deniers are those who love this Machiavellian part of our nature and revel in it and are master manipulators, and con artists, and connivers and are very aggressive. They have no problem handling this part. In fact, they love it. This type of person, which usually you will find one or two in an office or in an environment. They can get pretty far, but eventually they are tripped up in life because they are too Machiavellian. They don't understand that there is the other side to that whole idea of theory of mind and the mirror neurons, which is empathy and cooperation and seducing people and getting them to work with you. They are too much involved with themselves and their own ego and they love manipulating until they go too far and they have a fall in life. There is a wall. They can never get past it.
The third type is what I am calling the radical realist. It is what I am proposing that you adopt. And it goes as follows.
This is our nature. This is how we evolved over millions of years. There is no point in denying it. It is who we are. And not only am I not going to deny it, I am going to accept that this is the human being as it has evolved over all of this time.
In fact, I love it. It's fine. There is nothing wrong with the fact that in this world people are playing political games. There is nothing wrong with the fact that there are seducers and con artists and it is going on all the time. It is just reality. It is just the world as it is. Stop fighting it. Just accept it.
Within that accepting of it, it is not that you love it and want to go out in the world and play all of these nasty games. It is that you understand they exist. If, occasionally, you have to do them, fine. That's okay within reason. If it is often other people are practicing them against you, which you will find a lot in your life, once you leave the confines of Yale, that's okay.
You understand the laws of power. You understand what people are up to, and they can't necessarily hurt you. In accepting this reality and in dealing with it and studying human nature and this aspect of what I call Machiavellian intelligence, suddenly with that attitude, with that mentality, you have all kinds of power and freedom.
Ever since I wrote my books, and they've been published, I do all kinds of consulting work with business leaders, political figures, artists, very powerful people. Most of them are absolutely brilliant. They are brilliant at the technical side of their business. They have figured out how to make a lot of money. They have figured out how to maybe win elections or how to create a kind of music, etc., and market it. But they inevitably come to me for advice because they have a blind spot. They don't understand the human nature, the political games that are going on. They don't understand why somebody who they groomed as a successor, who they brought off the streets and helped and gave money to and developed is suddenly turning against them and betraying them in a very overt manner.
It is because they have spent their whole lives studying the technical side of their field, and they haven't spent any time observing other people. They haven't spent any time understanding human nature and why some people have egos and how that kind of ego will operate in an environment like an office.
This is the part of the game that trips up most people. All I am trying to say is that in accepting it and in studying it and opening your eyes to this reality, you are going to suddenly find yourself 5hat there is a whole other realm of life that you are not observing, that you are not paying attention to. If you pay attention to it, suddenly the whole power game, the whole dynamic will alter in your favor.
The second reality I want to talk about is in context of my work with 50 Cent. A few years ago, I was contacted by 50, Curtis Jackson, out of the blue. He was a big fan of "The 48 Laws of Power." I had known that there was something going on in the hip-hop world. Jay-Z had been quoting the book and Nas had quoted one of the songs and lyrics. So, something was happening. But 50 wanted to meet me. I had no idea, but I was excited by that. So we met. We kind of hit it off in a very weird way.
You can't imagine two people from two more different backgrounds in the world than he and I. But there was something about us that really clicked. We decided based on this to do a book together. I decided after meeting him and spending some time with him that this guy is really different. Now I live in Los Angeles. I'm not somebody who is generally star struck. I am not really interested in celebrities. They bore me. They don't interest me. So it wasn't a celebrity thing. There was something about him that was really interesting. He is really different. He had a kind of calmness. He had charisma, power. He had power.
So I wanted to figure out what made him different. Why is he like this? Maybe we could learn something from him and I would express that in the book. We would spend a long time talking about his life. And in talking about his life, I began to see a pattern.
I don't know how familiar you are with this. But at the age of about nine years old, he started hustling on the streets in south side Queens, dealing drugs. He did that because he realized that school was a complete dead end for somebody from his background. That only suckers went into school. The schools were really bad. They led to really bad jobs. The only people he could see in the hood that had power were the hustlers. So he was going to become a great hustler. Nine years old is kind of early to start hustling, but that's what he did.
So he was sitting there hustling on the streets. Soon he discovered that hustling wasn't what he thought it was. It was actually quite boring. Day after day at 6:00 in the morning, you had to stand on the street corner. Nothing would happen. You just had to think about whatever. You had no books, nothing to read. No music. Nothing to listen to. Just waiting for people to buy your drugs. It was so boring, and it wasn't glamorous at all. And on top of that, it was a trap. Hustlers don't get out of their life. Most of them die, very few of them live past the age of 25, or they are in prison for most of their lives. To think that you are going to succeed in hustling is an illusion. There is a limit to it.
So, I am going to get out. And about at the age of 15, which is also a bit precocious, he decided he was going to get out of hustling and he was going to become the only other thing he could think you could become, which was a rapper.
So now he started learning how to rap, and he met Jam Master Jay and he apprenticed with him. He started getting reasonably successful. He had record labels interested in him. Then he realized that this was yet another kind of trap. The trap was that the record label owned you and they would develop artists very quickly and then get rid of them as soon as they were not so hot anymore. So you usually have a couple of years of power and success, and then it all faded and you were miserable and then you went back to drugs or dealing or whatever.
It was almost worse than being a hustler, being a rapper. To have power in that world was extremely difficult. And he got fed up with it. He decided to leave it. He decided he was going to go back into hustling. He went back into hustling. This is when he was about 18, maybe 19, I don't remember exactly.
That is when he got shot. I'm sure you all know the story. From a beef that was going on, an old beef, somebody came up to him while he was sitting in the backseat of a car and shot nine times a few feet away from him. One of the bullets went right through his mouth.
He miraculously survived that. It was coming out of that experience that he had his own turning point in life. He determined after that that he was not going to give up. He was not going to get depressed. He was not going to go back into hustling. He was going to launch his music career, but he was going to do it all on his own, all by himself.
He was going to launch a mixed tape campaign on the streets of New York like no one had ever seen before. Because he didn't have a record label, he was going to be able to be as nasty and violent and tell all kinds of stories, the reality of the streets, because there was nobody there who was going to censor him and say, "'We can't get that on the radio. We don't want you to say this or that."
"Fuck all that. I'm going to say exactly what I want. And I'm going to put it out on these mixed tapes. I am going to create a hard sound that is going to kind of reflect the violence that I have known my whole life, and I am going to do everything myself. I am going to package it. I am going to do my own artwork. I am going to mix it myself. I am going to have a group of people around me, but I am not going to depend on any record labels."
He did that with such energy and such drive and such love for it that after two years of this campaign, Eminem got one of his mixed tapes and thought this was the greatest thing he had ever heard. He signed 50 to his record label at Interscope. And then the rest is history.
When I was looking at this, the pattern that I saw was that this was somebody that refused to be dependent on other people. He refused to go for the usual traps in life, in this case, hustling on the streets or being a rapper with a good label. He was supremely realistic. He saw through all the bullshit that the world put at you, and he saw this is where the power lies in life. I am going to go towards it. I was thinking, why would somebody like this be so realistic, so pragmatic and so sharp in his thinking, when a lot of his peers were not like that? A lot of his peers got totally seduced by the idea of becoming a great hustler.
I determined it is because of his very unusual background. 50 never knew his father. To this day he doesn't know who his father was. His mother was killed, murdered when he was eight years old. He lived with his grandparents, but basically he was alone. He had no peers. He had no adult supervision. He was basically thrown out onto the streets of Queens with nobody. Nothing. No protection. No parental support. But on the other hand, which we would almost assume is a very negative thing, on the other hand he had nobody telling him who he should be, what he should do, what defines him.
He had to do everything himself. He had to decide who he was, who he wanted to be, without the usual crutches that most of us have. And I decided, I determined that in fact, this reality of his, this, what I call his existential reality, that he was basically alone in the world and had to do things for himself and define who he wanted to be, that is actually the reality of each and every one of us. But we are not aware of it.
We have the illusion that parents, that friends, that all of our support network is going to help us out in the end, that we can define ourselves through other people, by conforming to a group, by being like other people, by doing what other people tell us to do. But that is actually the illusion. That is actually the con game that goes on. The truth is, you are essentially alone in life. You were born alone and you are going to die alone. And although you have these networks of support and they are real and you do have parents, on the other hand, it is really up to you to define who you are and what you want in life.
What 50 had, and what most really powerful people have in life is a sense that they are unique, that there is something very different about them. And to the extent that you bring out your uniqueness in life, that you become more of an individual, that you bring more of your individuality into play, the more power you are going to have.
By refusing to be a hustler like everybody else, by refusing to be the typical rapper on a label, by going out there and saying, "I don't care about all that. I am going to create the music that reflects my reality," he stood out from everybody else, and he gained power.
Now I talked about this once a few months ago. I was invited to Stanford University to give a little talk. And I was explaining this idea of uniqueness. Essentially saying that each and every human being that is ever born, there is never going to be another you, ever, in the history of the universe. It is an actually remarkable thought that your DNA will never be repeated. Ever in the past. Ever in the future. It is completely different. You and your experiences in your life, there will never be anybody else like you, and that you are truly born as an individual, but that you are spending your life running away from it.
I gave this talk, and it was a group of people that I don't think were very receptive to this talk. Afterwards, this Italian woman came up to me and she said, "You know Robert, you are talking about an individual. It is so American. It is so American. This whole thing about the cowboys and Ronald Reagan and being an individual, that is not how we are in Europe. That is not how we are. For us, these things aren't important. It is just so American." And then she proceeded to tell me about her grandfather, who was a truck driver in Italy and how he loved his life as a truck driver and he was happy as that. And she said, "What's wrong with that? Why can't people just accept that that's what their role in life is? Why do you have to be always striving for something else?"
My answer to her, which I will abbreviate, was basically, first of all, how do you know that your grandfather was happy as a truck driver? Usually, people when they are in their twenties or a little bit younger have a dream about life, an ambition. They want something. Maybe he settled for being a truck driver and maybe he accepted it. But how do you know deep down inside that that was really what he wanted? You are assuming something. But even, let's just pretend that he was happy being a truck driver. You are talking about the 1950s. You are living in a Rossellini neo-realistic movie from the 1950s, in which people had a union and there was communism and left wing activity. Being a truck driver meant something else that it doesn't mean anymore.
That truck driver in Italy in the year 2010 is dealing with a globalized environment, the withering away of the welfare state, and is facing all kinds of conflicts and problems. And they are not happy. They are not necessarily happy.
The world as we are evolving right now is becoming completely different from the world of 50 or 60 years ago, where someone like my father would work for one company his whole life and felt protected by them. That is gone. You no longer can depend on anybody and any job or your boss protecting you. We are all dealing with a world that is so much more insecure, where we have to learn these self-reliant skills, where putting out our individuality is the only way we are going to get power in this world.
That you are dealing with an environment that is long gone. Whether that is good or bad, I don't know. The reality that we are all facing is that we are left on our own and we have to develop these self-reliant skills and we have to not be afraid of expressing our individuality.
In the book that I'm writing now, I can talk about it later, if you'd like, I'm interviewing eight of the most eminent people in the world today in different fields -- In neuroscience, in architecture, in music. All of them are inherently non-conformists. All of them are inherently bucking the trend and taking their field in a completely novel direction by bringing out more of that uniqueness that I was talking about.
I have realized that I have come a little bit longer than I wanted to do on this subject. So I am not even going to get to my third reality, because I want to give you enough time to ask questions. But I wanted to give you an idea of this overall philosophy that brings all of my books together.
Chapter one in "The 50th Law", if you've read it, goes very deeply into the subject of realism, and I am going to be going deeper into it in my next book. But I have kind of hit my own wall here. So I want to open this now to your questions.
Host: I think there will be plenty of questions. Let's see some and we also have, since Casper sent out a page before, there is even some anonymous questions. We may get to them. Why don't we take . . .
Audience Member: All right. You sort of wound up talking about happiness. Would you say that you are happy?
Robert: Me? Me personally? Well, it is a weird thing of language to have a word like happiness. When your reality in the day is for three minutes you are happy and then for three minutes you are anxious. Then you get a phone call. Happiness never lasts for three days, I'm happy. You know? But overall, I'm very lucky and very blessed with my lifestyle in being able to write these books. So if I had to say am I happier than I was? Yes, I'm much happier than I was before I had a success as a writer.
Audience Member: So I have to ask. You know how to control men and do you know how to control women, God bless you. But . . .
Robert: I don't know about the latter.
Audience Member: But what makes the good life?
Robert: The good life?
Audience Member: Is it power?
Robert: Yes, because with power comes a degree of freedom. Now, everybody is an individual. Some people like a position of dependence, and they feel happiest when there is somebody taking care of them. But, ultimately, I'm not happy with that because I know that that person will eventually withdraw their support. That unless this is someone who I am going to live with my whole life, that's a different question, that eventually I am going to be left alone. And that dependency, that love or happiness that came from someone else, I can't really 100 percent depend on it. I want to be able to have it depend on something that comes from within. Even to love somebody, even if you are going to live with them, is almost a skill that you have to develop, and it has to come from within.
And the only thing that is of value is something that you develop yourself through your life experiences, through maybe some hard times where you learn how to seduce. You learn how to compromise. You learn how to be in a relationship and how to love. And then once you have that skill or whatever you want to call it, then nobody can take it away from you and you have power and you have freedom and a degree of happiness. I don't know if I answered your question.
Audience Member: But what would be the intrinsic goodness be? What is your intrinsic end of the power?
Robert: Well, there is no end. Because we die and what can I say? That is the absurd human condition that we have. You can accumulate millions, all the money in the world and all the beautiful women and then it's gone at some point. So I don't know what your question would be.
Audience Member: Those people that opt out of your system, can they not keep happiness because they don't have that liberty.
Robert: Well, I think that it is hard to gauge, and you can't put a number on it. But I think people who are depressed are often depressed because they have no control over their lives. They have no control over their destiny. They feel helpless. They feel like at work they might lose their job any moment now. It's a terrible feeling. They feel that their children aren't listening to them. The man or woman that they want to have a relationship with isn't listening to them. That sense of helplessness, to me, is the worst feeling in the world.
Obviously there is a quote you've all heard of. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Malcolm X had a comeback to that line that I like a lot more. He said, absolute powerlessness corrupts even more than that. I'm not quoting it correctly. But the sense of being powerless is much worse, more debilitating on the human spirit, than the few people who are corrupted by having power. I still don't know if I've answered your question.
Host: Well I wonder whether part of your question is, what do you use the power for? Is power the end that you are searching for? Or are there things you actually care about trying to use, to make sense to bother to have power for?
Robert: Well, it's interesting.
Host: I'm not sure if that's your question, but that's mine.
Robert: No, I didn't, that's my fault, I didn't understand. Well, let's say, I could talk about myself. The pleasure that comes for me is in writing a book and in writing the book well, in spending a lot of time getting it right and understanding the real world as it is, the power game, the seduction game, whatever, and then creating a book that goes out in the real world. Half the game of life is doing something that you love and engaging with it deeply.
It is your study. It is your field. It is whatever you produce. But that is only half of it. Because if you don't understand the social part, then the book that I write, if I don't know how to deal with people, and I don't understand human nature, and I can't market my book, and my editor hates me, and my agent doesn't know how to work with me, I could love my book. But it won't get out there. It won't get published. It won't have success. And I won't be happy.
The end in life is doing your work that you love and feeling satisfaction. But my experience is that a lot of people in this world are talented, and they don't succeed because they don't understand that there is this other side of life -- the power game, the Machiavellian game. They fail at it. They might be a great painter, a great musician, a great business idea. But we are never going to hear of them because they don't understand this.
To answer your question, the end is the satisfaction that you get with your work. For me. But that can only come with a larger understanding of the social component.
Host: That is interesting because you succeeded in a way, with these goals, because you were powerless. At least in the vignette that you gave that was your own experience. You couldn't accomplish what you wanted to.
Robert: Right.
Host: That started getting you to think about how do you accomplish it?
Robert: That's right.
Host: That has now put you where you feel like you have accomplished it, which is right. For you, somehow that experience with this extreme powerlessness . . .
Robert: Right.
Host: . . . that became the focus of your book.
Robert: Yeah.
Host: And what you cared about getting.
Robert: And not to compare myself to 50, because I can't. But it was the same thing with him. When he was shot, he was very depressed. Nearly died. He was sitting in bed. He can't talk anymore. He can't sing anymore. He can't go back to the streets hustling, because they are going to kill him. The record label dropped him. He experienced extreme powerlessness. And out of that he analyzed what it was that he needed to do and then he re-emerged. So maybe there is something to what you are saying.
Audience Member: You said earlier that it's only when we step out of Yale that we will see this other dark, the other side and beneath all this Machiavellian strategy. But we will be stepping out into society. Yale is a society. Now why is it different? Like you say, here is a place where there is no need for that. And you are blinded
Robert: At a university, let's say your goal, more or less, is to graduate with a very high GPA, as high as possible and land a really great job, perhaps, out of this. To get those high grades, do you need to have Machiavellian skills? Usually not. Usually, I mean, professors can be, they are not immune to favoritism, to being emotional. So there is a degree of seduction and charm going on. You could charm your professor perhaps. But more or less, you are being graded on what you've accomplished.
That's how life should be, and I wish it were that way. I wish talent and getting answers right and doing a great essay, I wish that was the whole component. That would be a beautiful world if it could be like that. But it is not how it operates.
All I am saying is, the element of ego and gamesmanship and politicking, how much does that enter into your goal of success at the university? I don't think it is as much, nearly as much, as one experiences in the real world. In fact, the university, and I could be wrong here, but, in fact, it tends to breed the opposite idea, which is why I think so many people suffer in life. It breeds the idea that just doing a good job and getting the good grades and succeeding is what will translate into power in the world. And actually, learning that that is not the case 100 percent can be quite traumatic. I don't know.
Audience Member: Is it not interesting that a Yale graduate could go out and be involved in positions of power, as you might call it.
Robert: How do you mean?
Audience Member: After graduation, as I said, those people involve in society and they are doing well because of the character of the education that they got over here.
Robert: Well, the education is extremely valuable, and I don't mean to devalue it at all. It is extremely valuable. The skills that you learn, the analytical skills, the knowledge that you gain will be very valuable. But it is just part of it. And maybe your connections at Yale and the degree, it's has a lot of weight to it. It can lead to a good job. But then you are on your own. Your interpersonal, political skills were not developed at Yale.
There is a university called CalArts in California. I have friends who have gone there. Very interesting place. It was a school that was formed in the sixties, essentially, and basically it is an arts school. They discerned that the art world, there is no more political, crabby, competitive, mean-spirited world than the art world. Because what makes a great work of art or film is very subjective. So there is a lot of politicking. And they created this university to literally train their students to be good at that. They created this thing where you had to learn how to deal with your professors and deal with the politicking and talk about your work in a way that would charm and seduce. And actually develop the kind of political skills that you are going to need when you later go into the art world. That is kind of a unique thing for a university, and a very interesting idea.
Audience Member: You talk about the importance of expressing individuality. What if following your own ideals means that you have to separate yourself from the crowd. Which one would you say is more important? Is it being unique or being able to mix?
Robert: Well, they don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. And I didn't get to go into my idea in as much depth as I would like to. I don't mean that the moment you graduate Yale, you dye your hair green and you start doing something really wild because that is just who you are. That's ridiculous. And it is often not really who you are. It is just because you are trying to rebel and be different. It is more subtle than that. For instance, we all have to serve an apprenticeship in life. So once you graduate Yale, you are going to go work for some high powered law firm or Wall Street or wherever you go. I don't know.
You are not going to have the luxury of suddenly not fitting in and being so weird and different. You are not going to last very long if you do that. You have to be able to take your time and fit into the culture that's created and find your place in it. But the problem is that that ends up becoming the end in life. You end up becoming a kind of person that only knows how to fit in, hat only knows how to fit into that particular culture. And if you do that long enough, and now you are there and you are 30 years old and that is the only thing you have ever learned to do, you are afraid to step away from that. You are afraid to express something unique about yourself.
You have to, when you are in your apprenticeship, in those first years working at that high powered firm, you have to be constantly waiting for that moment when you are going to do something different. You have to cultivate your own individuality, your own self-reliant skills. People who now, particularly in business, who are successful, are creating really unique kinds of business. There are new models being created every day. You are having to think about, that is the end game in life. I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to create my own business.
You can do that from within a large corporation, that apprenticeship phase, while you are learning about the world and you are preparing for that moment when you are going to step out on your own. But all I am saying is if you end up becoming the kind of person that only knows how to fit into a corporate culture, that is going to be the end of it. That is as far as you are ever going to go. And if that is what you want, then that's fine. But power lies in a slightly different direction.
Host: So let me ask one of the written in questions, and then maybe we'll have time for two more after that. People talk about the importance of charm and charisma. How can these traits be defined? And do you have to be born with them? And I assume implied in the latter question is what do I have to do to get it? How do I learn to be charming and charismatic? Or can I?
Robert: The answer to your question is you have to read "The Art of Seduction" because I explain and describe nine types of seducers in the world. One of them is the charmer, and one of them is the charismatic. They are different people. They are different types. Usually charmers are not charismatic. Usually charismatics are not necessarily charmers. They are almost not the same.
Charismatics are people who have a tremendous need to get love from the world. They don't want love from one person. They want it from an audience. They often come from backgrounds that are a little bad. They didn't have happy childhoods. So, to sublimate this need for affection and love, they turn to a large group. They become charismatic on a political, on a global level. They become a Mahatma Gandhi, a John F. Kennedy. All charismatics are burning with a mission, with an idea that makes their whole face light up, their eyes light up with this idea that they want to convey to people. And the sense of being alive with this inner fire is what people feel this charisma.
Seduction is a non-verbal language, which is why, I know "The Art of Seduction" is written with words. But it is a language that is non-verbal. You can't tell people you are charismatic. You can't communicate it outwardly. They have to feel it in an animal way.
In the book, I say some people are born with charisma because they come from bad backgrounds. Like Marilyn Monroe, who was an orphan. You are not necessarily from that background, but you can learn the idea. Your inner conviction is what people feel. They see it in your hands, in your eyes.
50 has charisma. I've watched him. Everybody feels it around him. You have to have that inner conviction. Your whole body has to be alive with it or you are not going to have charisma. You can learn to a degree, but there is a limit unless you are born that way.
Charm is a whole, more possible realm for everyone. Charm is knowing how to please other people. There is a famous quote about a woman who said, this is about Gladstone and Disraeli, two British politicians of the 19th century who were rivals. And she said, "Sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the most brilliant man in the world. Sitting next to Disraeli, I thought I was the most brilliant woman in the world."
That's the charmer. The charmer is somebody who knows how to make the other person feel great about themself. It is a really important social skill. It means not thinking about yourself but imagining what the other person wants to hear. What their weakness is. What they need, validation. You have to be outer directed. And it is very important and very powerful and anybody can learn it. And I talk about it in the book. Seducers are not born, they are made. You may not end up becoming Cleopatra, but you can go halfway or a quarter of the way.
I'm sorry, did you want to ask another anonymous question?
Audience Member: Audience Member: You mentioned entrepreneurs. And I also heard from a lot of entrepreneurs that they say that in order to be wildly successful, you have to be prepared to wildly fail.
Robert: Yeah.
Audience Member: And does that fit into your paradigm of maintaining power?
Robert: Very much so. I'll be looking at a lot about that in my next book. All of the most creative people are experimenters who have many failures. Einstein, who I have been reading a lot about, he said, "I measured my success by how full my wastebasket was. How many ideas I threw away meant that I was on the right track. If my wastebasket was empty, I wasn't being creative."
You are going to be measured by your failures, and the reason is we learn by doing. You can't learn how to run a business, you can't learn how to have success by reading a book. I'm afraid I'm dissuading all of you from buying my books. But, ultimately, a book has a limit. It is your own experience in doing things where you learn, "Oh, this is what connected with my audience. Oh, this is what got that guy interested in my idea." And so you have to go out there and not be afraid of trying things. Starting a business.
They have shown entrepreneurs that, I don't know the number, but it was like 95 percent of them, their first ventures fail. And the ones who are successful go on to a second and a third one and a fourth one. They are called serial entrepreneurs.
So you have to not be afraid of failure. You have to be the kind of person that tries things out and learn from your experiences. If you are afraid of that, it is going to be very difficult to gain the real world knowledge that you need in order to have success. So it is very important.
Audience Member: You talk a lot about personal characteristics like charisma, aggressiveness, etc. But, you know, 50 Cent wouldn't have been able to sell that mixed tape if the environment wasn't ready for it. And there is that French minister who survived from the French Revolution all the way through Napoleon and after.
Robert: Oh, Fouchet?
Audience Member: Yeah, Fouchet. Just the ebbs and flows and trends. What do you think about, aside from personal charisma and characteristics at all, about the natural way that opportunities and political opinions sway with the times?
Robert: Well, it's a good question because a lot of people will say, they will look at a Clinton or a Barack Obama and they'll say, "What makes them so brilliant or how do they succeed in an election?"
A lot of it, a good degree is luck. You come on the world stage at the right time. So there is always a degree of luck in anybody's success. I met this man in Italy. If I hadn't met him in 1995, I still might be slaving away in some cubicle in Hollywood and you would never have heard of me. I had the luck to meet this man. But the difference is everybody has luck. Everybody, something happens to you. It is just what do you do with it? Are you the kind of person that recognizes the opportunity?
When Barack Obama was first deciding to run for presidency, it happened to be a lucky moment. This was probably the only moment where he could have won an election given his background. But he was the one that recognized this was the moment and I am going to seize it, when everybody was telling him, "You are not ready to run. You need to wait four more years." And he said, "No. I see this is the opportunity." So what separates people in life are, a good thing will happen to you and you let it pass. You know?
If you are an opportunist, which I talk about in "The 50th Law," you recognize that opportunity has come, and you work like a fiend in order to make it happen. When this man gave me an opportunity to write "The 48 Laws of Power," I worked night and day, my birthday, Christmas, 365 days a year until 1:00 in the morning. I was not going to let go of my one opportunity in life. And that is, to me, what separates people who take an opportunity like that and others who let it slip by.
Host: So let me make a comment and then get your reactions and then I think we'll finish up. I know when I first started looking at some of what you wrote, and hearing you today, it would be easy to take much of what you say as instructions for how to use other people. How to get them to do your bidding. And there is clearly a way in which a bunch of the laws are written, that way. That is a very instrumental view of other people. How do I turn them into a means for me to accomplish something?
Also, though, mixed into, as you have talked and as we talked earlier, there had a sense that some of what you are really interested in is something that say, some of the psychologists here and our provost here have studied, which is emotional intelligence. How do I understand how other people think and what moves them? And what their emotional state is. And how my actions will interact with theirs. And that having some honed emotional intelligence might put me in a position to be able to accomplish things that I want but also be attuned to what they want. And not necessarily treat them as minions, but treat them as their own independent entities. So I was wondering how you think about those tensions?
Robert: Yeah. It becomes tricky, because if you are thinking about them deeply and their own needs, where is the distinction for them becoming a means to it? What are you trying to accomplish? If you are trying to, for instance, forge a political organization where people are all on the same page with a sense of mission and you need to be sensitive to the kinds of people that will join your group, and you are aware of their own needs and the fact that they are an individual. But, on the other hand, you are bringing them into the group and you have a mission you are trying to accomplish. What separates them from being a means or an instrument and also being attuned to their individuality and what their separateness is? Why does it have to be mutually exclusive?
Host: I don't know that they are.
Robert: Oh, okay.
Host: I don't know that they are. But I do think that the focus on what's that other person's interest and what would really matter to that person and how might we both be able to accomplish what we both care about? To get our goals in alignment. We go back to where you ran to, the difficulty that you talked about.
Robert: Right.
Host: The boss who was squashing you. Was there another way than just to say, "Well, never outshine my boss." But to think, well, I shouldn't outshine her. How do I bring her over?'
Robert: Yes.
Host: But then it aligns with we both want to create these stories.
Robert: In the book, "The 48 Laws of Power," I talk about how you do not outshine people and get them. But then it gets very Machiavellian. It is a good point because people mistake my books for being purely about how to use people. And it is all kind of selfish.
But, particularly in "The Art of Seduction," I make the point that you are not going to get far unless you are the kind of person that knows how to think inside the other person's mind. And that requires a totally different kind of personality. Where you have to not be so self-absorbed. Where you can think inside of other people and what their interests are and what is going to appeal to them. That is the secret to being successful as a politician or a businessperson or in any kind of relationship. And I go as deeply into that as I can. But not many people recognize that, because they only see the element of using other people for what you want.
Host: Yeah. Well, that is what I was aware of.
Host: Yeah. Well, that is what I was aware of.
Robert: Right.
Host: You do have that component, but it may not be the most visible.
Robert: Yeah.
Host: I wanted to thank you very much.
Robert: Oh, thank you very much. Thank you.
Narcissim out of the DSM
Jay Mohr, popular comic and actor, did a phone-in to the Opie & Anthony radio show and told this story (I recite from memory):
So I'm shooting Hereafter, and there's a scene where I walk up these flights of stairs, I fumble for my keys and my next door neighbor is supposed to hand me my mail, and it's a letter from Matt Damon and blah blah blah.
So all she has to do is hand me the letter and say, "here's your mail." But she's some San Francisco wannabe actress, and she's decided she's going to get her Oscar on this movie. So she comes over, all dramatic, and she says, "so, ummmm, hi.... You want your mail?... Looks like you got a letter here...." And she hands it to me, but then she pulls it back at the last second, because she wants to be a cunt, and I reach for it, she pulls it out of my hand again. So finally I just grab it, and she says, "well, enjoy your mail."
So Clint Eastwood (the director) is down at the bottom of these three flights of stairs watching all this on the monitors, and you hear him say, "goddamn it!"-- he doesn't even yell cut-- and he starts coming up the stairs, he's like 9000 year sold, coming up, puffing, really slowly. Finally he gets up to the top and he looks at her and he says, "honey, I can't begin to tell you how much this movie isn't about you. If I could have hired just your goddamn arm, I would have."
So all she has to do is hand me the letter and say, "here's your mail." But she's some San Francisco wannabe actress, and she's decided she's going to get her Oscar on this movie. So she comes over, all dramatic, and she says, "so, ummmm, hi.... You want your mail?... Looks like you got a letter here...." And she hands it to me, but then she pulls it back at the last second, because she wants to be a cunt, and I reach for it, she pulls it out of my hand again. So finally I just grab it, and she says, "well, enjoy your mail."
So Clint Eastwood (the director) is down at the bottom of these three flights of stairs watching all this on the monitors, and you hear him say, "goddamn it!"-- he doesn't even yell cut-- and he starts coming up the stairs, he's like 9000 year sold, coming up, puffing, really slowly. Finally he gets up to the top and he looks at her and he says, "honey, I can't begin to tell you how much this movie isn't about you. If I could have hired just your goddamn arm, I would have."
II.
You may have heard the news: "Narcissism is being removed form the DSM."
You may have heard the news: "Narcissism is being removed form the DSM."
Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness.
That sentence is technically accurate. What's missing, however, is that it would be replaced by something else, a more wordy, symptom cluster description of a personality disorder. You can still "diagnose" someone with narcissistic traits.
However, on the face of it, people are understandably freaked out:
However, on the face of it, people are understandably freaked out:
One of the sharpest critics of the DSM committee on personality disorders is a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Gunderson, an old lion in the field of personality disorders and the person who led the personality disorders committee for the current manual.
Asked what he thought about the elimination of narcissistic personality disorder, he said it showed how "unenlightened" the personality disorders committee is.
"They have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing." He said the diagnosis is important in terms of organizing and planning treatment.
Since he doesn't get Pharma money, there's no need to disclose his megalodon sized bias: his whole career is about measurement tools for narcissism.
And so if you're thinking that the craziness is that psychiatry is the doing away with the concept of narcissism you have fully missed the point: the issue isn't whether narcissism exists or not, the issue is who gets to decide if narcissism exists or not.
You break it, you bought it.
III.
Here's a metaphor. When The Oscars, defying all logic and sanity, choose Sandra Bullock as best actress-- a woman who Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare In Love) once used as an example of the kind of actress she didn't ever want to be (Demolition Man-- anyone see the irony?) the strength of that choice isn't that her performance in The Blind Side is even good but that I, me, a guy who watches movies, believes that The Oscars are nuts for choosing her: they have tricked me into thinking that their decision has any relevance.
I realize it matters to the actors' future salaries and sales and blah blah, but these annual terrible picks reinforce to me that they should have picked something else. But why should they have? As a reasonably educated person I recognize that people have individual tastes; but that there are some things that make a work of art better or worse; but neither of those things are the purview of The Oscars-- they only make me think it's their domain. In other words, who cares what they think? But while I have no problem dismissing the relevancy of the Super Bowl victor, it still infuriates me that the Oscar goes to X, and that's because they've beat me. I know they don't have any say about what is good. And yet I'm furious, every single year.
IV.
You want a historical example, here you go. No one gets diagnosed with obsessional neurosis anymore. People do, however, get called obsessional and neurotic by regular people.
What happened is that a term that highly educated and philosophically precise people used all the time was turned into a vernacular label; and the power of "diagnosis"-- read: labeling-- seized by the new emperors of psychiatry with a different paradigm.
The person in the chair is still recognized to have a pathology: but one group is dismissed by the other group as being mean, pejorative and unrigorous: "we don't call it that, that has no construct validity, it's better described as this."
Never mind that the new terms have no more validity than the old terms, and are equally invented. That's not the point, diagnosing the patient isn't really the point, the point is that the DSM is the authority. They've made it that the burden of proof of disagreement is on you, not them. They gain the credibility not by improving the diagnosis, but merely by altering it. And so you all say, "well, I think they're wrong, but they must have had some scientific reason that I don't fully understand..."
And you're stuck. You're left suspecting that there is something really, really wrong, but since it's not bipolar and it's not a unicorn you're left wondering if you're not just a prejudiced ass. Worse, the only one you can turn to for "support" is Freud, et al, which immediately gets you labeled as a nut.
Yet you can't help but see it-- so you tentatively try to dress it up in the least disparaging way you can, and turn to psychiatry for a little help, but:
"Well, we all know there's no such thing as hysterical neurosis. Allow me to offer an equally arbitrary but nonetheless reliable construct that puts all the power of labeling in our hands."
Wait, that's not what I was going for...
V.
Let's go back to that telling scene in Hereafter. To the extent one can make a judgment on a single anecdote, let's agree that at that moment the actress was behaving narcissistically. Psychiatry, however, would not have a quick way of discussing this (and, truthfully, it didn't a year ago either.) But by not having a useful description of it, that behavior is no longer psychiatry's problem.
Added bonus: it's yours.
And so if you're thinking that the craziness is that psychiatry is the doing away with the concept of narcissism you have fully missed the point: the issue isn't whether narcissism exists or not, the issue is who gets to decide if narcissism exists or not.
You break it, you bought it.
III.
Here's a metaphor. When The Oscars, defying all logic and sanity, choose Sandra Bullock as best actress-- a woman who Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare In Love) once used as an example of the kind of actress she didn't ever want to be (Demolition Man-- anyone see the irony?) the strength of that choice isn't that her performance in The Blind Side is even good but that I, me, a guy who watches movies, believes that The Oscars are nuts for choosing her: they have tricked me into thinking that their decision has any relevance.
I realize it matters to the actors' future salaries and sales and blah blah, but these annual terrible picks reinforce to me that they should have picked something else. But why should they have? As a reasonably educated person I recognize that people have individual tastes; but that there are some things that make a work of art better or worse; but neither of those things are the purview of The Oscars-- they only make me think it's their domain. In other words, who cares what they think? But while I have no problem dismissing the relevancy of the Super Bowl victor, it still infuriates me that the Oscar goes to X, and that's because they've beat me. I know they don't have any say about what is good. And yet I'm furious, every single year.
IV.
You want a historical example, here you go. No one gets diagnosed with obsessional neurosis anymore. People do, however, get called obsessional and neurotic by regular people.
What happened is that a term that highly educated and philosophically precise people used all the time was turned into a vernacular label; and the power of "diagnosis"-- read: labeling-- seized by the new emperors of psychiatry with a different paradigm.
The person in the chair is still recognized to have a pathology: but one group is dismissed by the other group as being mean, pejorative and unrigorous: "we don't call it that, that has no construct validity, it's better described as this."
Never mind that the new terms have no more validity than the old terms, and are equally invented. That's not the point, diagnosing the patient isn't really the point, the point is that the DSM is the authority. They've made it that the burden of proof of disagreement is on you, not them. They gain the credibility not by improving the diagnosis, but merely by altering it. And so you all say, "well, I think they're wrong, but they must have had some scientific reason that I don't fully understand..."
And you're stuck. You're left suspecting that there is something really, really wrong, but since it's not bipolar and it's not a unicorn you're left wondering if you're not just a prejudiced ass. Worse, the only one you can turn to for "support" is Freud, et al, which immediately gets you labeled as a nut.
Yet you can't help but see it-- so you tentatively try to dress it up in the least disparaging way you can, and turn to psychiatry for a little help, but:
"Well, we all know there's no such thing as hysterical neurosis. Allow me to offer an equally arbitrary but nonetheless reliable construct that puts all the power of labeling in our hands."
Wait, that's not what I was going for...
V.
Let's go back to that telling scene in Hereafter. To the extent one can make a judgment on a single anecdote, let's agree that at that moment the actress was behaving narcissistically. Psychiatry, however, would not have a quick way of discussing this (and, truthfully, it didn't a year ago either.) But by not having a useful description of it, that behavior is no longer psychiatry's problem.
Added bonus: it's yours.
Viacom Says YouTube Ruling Will ‘Completely Destroy’ Copyright
Viacom appealed Friday its unsuccessful $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube in a case testing the depths of copyright-infringement protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
Viacom, on behalf of its MTV, Comedy Central, Black Entertainment Television, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon units, is seeking to overturn a June ruling that, if it survives, is a boon for internet freedom — and a decision that would make it more difficult for rights holders to protect their works.
The media concern told the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday that, if the lower decision stands, “it would radically transform the functioning of the copyright system and severely impair, if not completely destroy, (.pdf) the value of many copyrighted creations.”
The June 23 decision at issue by U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton of New York said internet companies, even if they know they are hosting infringing material, are immune from copyright liability if they promptly remove works at a rights holder’s request — under what is known as a takedown notice.
Stanton disagreed with Viacom’s claims that YouTube had lost the so-called “safe harbor” protection of the DMCA. Viacom maintains Google does not qualify, because internal records showed Google was well aware its video-hosting site was riddled with infringing material posted by its users.
“To let knowledge of a generalized practice of infringement in the industry, or of a proclivity of users to post infringing materials, impose responsibility on service providers to discover which of their users’ postings infringe a copyright would contravene the structure and operation of the DMCA,” the judge wrote.
Stanton ruled that YouTube, which Google purchased in 2006 for $1.8 billion, had no way of knowing whether a video was licensed by the owner, was a “fair use” of the material “or even whether its copyright owner or licensee objects to its posting.”
The DMCA, which was heavily lobbied into existence by the Hollywood studios, has been a boon for internet freedom. But it has been a bust in other areas.
Among its provisions, the DMCA prohibits the circumvention of encryption technology that protects copyrighted works. The law, adopted in 1998, makes it unlawful to market DVD copying devices, for example, and also paved the way for a Southern California man to be charged on allegations of modding Microsoft’s Xboxes.
Still, the DMCA’s “safe harbor” privilege comes with another price. The law demands intermediaries such as YouTube to take down content in response to a notice from rights holders, without evaluating the claim for reasonableness or accuracy, or considering the fair use rights of users. And on Thursday, Google said it would expedite the process of content removal.
NYU/ProPublica Initiative Seeks to Revive the Genre of "Explainer" Reporting
Matthew C. Nisbet on December 1, 2010, 6:04 PM
In the latest important initiative to emerge from the vibrant journalism ecosystem of university and not-for-profit partnerships, NYU's School of Journalism and ProPublica have announced a joint project to bring back to life the very important genre of explanatory reporting.
New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and ProPublica, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalism non-profit, have formed a joint project to enhance the genre of “The Explainer,” a form of journalism that provides essential background knowledge to follow events and trends in the news.
The project aims to improve the art of explanation at ProPublica’s site and to share what is learned with the journalism community. NYU’s contributions will stem from the Carter Institute’s Studio 20 concentration for graduate students, which runs projects on Web innovation.
“An explainer is a work of journalism, but it doesn’t provide the latest news or update you on a story,” said NYU Professor Jay Rosen, detailing the concept. “It addresses a gap in your understanding: the lack of essential background knowledge. We wanted to work with the journalists at ProPublica on this problem because they investigate complicated stories and share what they’ve learned with other journalists. It seemed like a perfect match.”
“Orienting readers and giving them context has long been a key component of good journalism,” said Eric Umansky, a senior editor at ProPublica. “But the Web allows you to re-think what forms that can take and how it should be done. We’re thrilled to be working with Studio 20 and Jay on experimenting with that.”
Bringing clarity to complex systems so that non-specialists can understand them is the “art” of the explainer. For instance, an explainer for the Irish debt crisis would make clear why a weakness in one country’s banks could threaten the European financial system and possibly the global recovery. A different kind of explainer might show how Medicare billing is designed to work and where the opportunities for fraud lie.
“Good explainers are engaging, not only informative,” observes Rosen. “They lower the barrier to entry to news stories that are difficult to summarize in a headline.”
The joint effort with ProPublica, the “Building a Better Explainer” project, will run through the remainder of the 2010-11 academic year. The project site, Explainer.Net, will be edited by the Studio 20 team. The site will highlight outstanding work in explanation, interview skilled practitioners and update interested audiences on the project’s progress.
Graduate students working under Rosen, and consulting closely with the editors of ProPublica, will:
- research best practices in explanatory journalism;
- collect relevant knowledge from other disciplines about how users absorb complex subjects;
- pick one of ProPublica’s major investigations and produce model explainers suitable for publication at ProPublica.org;
- experiment with different ways of delivering critical background knowledge, using all the tools of the Web
- investigate how to make the explainer genre more interactive with Web users;
- share their findings with ProPublica and the wider journalism world
The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics
AP
Julian Assange at a press conference in London on Oct. 23
(updated below - Update II)
Time's Joe Klein writes this about the WikiLeaks disclosures:
I am tremendously concernced [sic] about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange. . . . If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.
Do you have that principle down? If "a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail" because of the WikiLeaks disclosure -- even a "single one" -- then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a "disaster" and "Assange is a criminal" who "should be in jail." That's quite a rigorous moral standard. So let's apply it elsewhere:
What about the most destructive "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" the planet has known for at least a generation: the "human disaster" known as the attack on Iraq, which Klein supported? That didn't result in the imprisonment of "a single foreign national," but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people. Are those who supported that "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" -- or at least those responsible for its execution -- also "criminals who should be in jail"?
How about the multiple journalists and other human beings whom the U.S. Government imprisoned (and continues to imprison) for years without charges -- and tortured -- including many whom the Government knew were completely innocent, while Klein assured the world that wasn't happening? How about those responsible for the war in Afghanistan (which Klein supports) with its checkpoint shootings of an "amazing number" of innocent Afghans and civilian slaughtering air strikes, or the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, or the civilian killing drones in Pakistan? Are those responsible for the sky-high corpses of innocent people from these actions also "criminals who should be in jail"?
I'm not singling out Klein here; his commentary is merely illustrative of what I'm finding truly stunning about the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden. The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade. And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them. To accomplish that, they're actually advocating -- somehow with a straight face -- the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world. That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned.
Meanwhile, in the real world (as opposed to the world of speculation, fantasy, and fear-mongering) there is no evidence -- zero -- that the WikiLeaks disclosures have harmed a single person. As McClatchyreported, they have exercised increasing levels of caution to protect innocent people. Even Robert Gates disdained hysterical warnings about the damage caused as "significantly overwrought." But look at what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world:
We viscerally saw the grotesque realities of our war in Iraq with the Apache attack video on innocent civilians and journalists in Baghdad -- and their small children -- as they desperately scurried for cover. We recently learned that the U.S. government adopted a formal policy of refusing to investigate the systematic human rights abuses of our new Iraqi client state, all of which took place under our deliberately blind eye. We learned of 15,000 additional civilian deaths caused by the war in Iraq that we didn't know of before. We learned -- as documented byThe Washington Post's former Baghdad Bureau Chief -- how clear, deliberate and extensive were the lies of top Bush officials about that war as it was unfolding: "Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public," she wrote.
In this latest WikiLeaks release -- probably the least informative of them all, at least so far -- we learned a great deal as well. Juan Cole todaydetails the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East. Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA's kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent. The head of the Bank of England got caught interfering in British politics to induce harsher austerity measures in violation of his duty to remain apolitical and removed from the political process, a scandal resulting in calls for his resignation. British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures. Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know: it's just "law," nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).
Do WikiLeaks critics believe it'd be best if all that were kept secret, if we remained ignorant of it, if the world's most powerful factions could continue to hide things like that? Apparently. When Joe Klein and his media comrades calling for Assange's head start uncovering even a fraction of secret government conduct this important, then they'll have credibility to complain about WikiLeaks' "excessive commitment to disclosure." But that will never happen.
One could respond that it's good that we know these specific things, but not other things WikiLeaks has released. That's all well and good; as I've said several times, there are reasonable concerns about some specific disclosures here. But in the real world, this ideal, perfectly calibrated subversion of the secrecy regime doesn't exist. WikiLeaks is it. We have occasional investigative probes of isolated government secrets coming from establishment media outlets (the illegal NSA program, the CIA black sites, the Pentagon propaganda program), along with transparency groups such as the ACLU, CCR, EPIC and EFF valiantly battling through protracted litigation to uncover secrets. But nothing comes close to the blows WikiLeaks has struck in undermining that regime.
The real-world alternative to the current iteration of WikiLeaks is not The Perfect Wikileaks that makes perfect judgments about what should and should not be disclosed, but rather, the ongoing, essentially unchallenged hegemony of the permanent National Security State, for which secrecy is the first article of faith and prime weapon. I want again to really encourage everyone to read this great analysis byThe Economist's Democracy in America, which includes this:
I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy. Of course, those jealously protective of the privileges of unaccountable state power will tell us that people will die if we can read their email, but so what?Different people, maybe more people, will die if we can't.
The last decade, by itself, leaves no doubt about the truth of that last sentence. And Matt Yglesias is right that while diplomacy can be hindered without secrecy, one must also consider "how the ability to keep secrets can hinder diplomacy" (incidentally: one of the more Orwellian aspects of this week's discussion has been the constant use of the word "diplomacy" to impugn what WikiLeaks did, creating some Wizard of Oz fantasy whereby the Pentagon is the Bad Witch of the U.S. Government [thus justifying leaks about war] while the State Department is the Good Witch [thus rendering these leaks awful]: that's absurd, as they are merely arms of the same entity, both devoted to the same ends, ones which are often nefarious, and State Department officials are just as susceptible as Pentagon officials to abusive conduct when operating in the dark).
But Matt's other point merits even more attention. He's certainly right when he says that "for a third time in a row, a WikiLeaks document dump has conclusively demonstrated that an awful lot of US government confidentiality is basically about nothing," but I'd quibble with his next observation:
There’s no scandal here and there’s no legitimate state secret. It’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.
It is a "scandal" when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy. Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified -- whether because it's innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing -- is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers. Because we're supposed to have an open government -- a democracy -- everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That's not just some lofty, abstract theory; it's central to having anything resembling "consent of the governed."
But we have completely abandoned that principle; we've reversed it. Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That's the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics -- whether intended or not -- are helping to preserve. There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue: namely, (a) Washington politicians, Permanent State functionaries, and media figures whose status, power and sense of self-importance are established by their access and devotion to that world of secrecy, and (b) those who actually believe that -- despite (or because of) all the above acts -- the U.S. Government somehow uses this extreme secrecy for the Good. Having surveyed the vast suffering and violence they have wreaked behind that wall, those are exactly the people whom WikiLeaks is devoted to undermining.
* * * * *
On the issue of the Interpol arrest warrant issued yesterday for Assange's arrest: I think it's deeply irresponsible either to assume his guilt or to assume his innocence until the case plays out. I genuinely have no opinion of the validity of those allegations, but what I do know -- as John Cole notes -- is this: as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties. As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing more than routine acts of consensual adult prostitution, ending his career (and the threat he posed to oligarchs). And now, the day after Julian Assange is responsible for one of the largest leaks in history, an arrest warrant issues that sharply curtails his movement and makes his detention highly likely. It's unreasonable to view that pattern as evidence that the allegations are part of some conspiracy -- I genuinely do not believe or disbelieve that -- but, particularly in light of that pattern, it's most definitely unreasonable to assume that he's guilty of anything without having those allegations tested and then proven in court.
Finally, as I noted last night: I was on Canada's CBC last tonight talking about these issues; it can be seen here. I'll also be on MSNBC this morning, at roughly 10:00 a.m., on the same topic.
UPDATE: The notion that one crime doesn't excuse another has absolutely nothing to do with anything I wrote; it's a complete nonsequitur, merely the standard claim of those who want to propound moral standards for others that they not only refuse to apply to themselves, but violate with far greater frequency and severity than those they're condemning.
UPDATE II: This cartoonist (and Professor of History) summarized several of the key points perfectly:
More: Glenn Greenwald
What the World Cup Choices Tell Us About the World
After a secret ballot of 22 delegates in Zurich, on Thursday, Dec. 2, FIFA, soccer's governing body, awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively. The verdicts came amid allegations of corruption and bribery ahead of the pivotal vote, with English and American commentators feeling particularly aggrieved. But TIME sees geopolitical trends at work in the success of the Russian and Qatari bids.(See pictures of past World Cup contenders.)
The Fall of the Anglo Consensus
A decade ago, a U.K.-U.S. one-two combination might have seemed an obvious choice for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Besides being home to the world's most popular and lucrative soccer league, England has long cultivated an overblown sense of ownership of the game, never ceasing to point out that soccer was created by the English and that it spread throughout the world with their 19th century agents of empire. (Skeptics note that England has won the World Cup only once, compared with Brazil's five triumphs, Italy's four and Germany's three.) And in keeping with its tradition of talking up the team's improbable chances on the field every four years, the British press created the impression that hosting the 2018 World Cup was England's divine right. Meanwhile, U.S. soccer authorities have for some time been branding their country as the game's heir apparent: America boasts the largest pool of recreational soccer players, an overabundance of stadiums and the world's most multicultural fan base. But the inherent allure of both nations — in all arenas — has waned of late, not least because of recession and the shift of economic power toward emerging countries. FIFA's verdict (England's bid received a measly two votes out of 22 — and one of them was from its own delegate) is in small part a mark of that decline.(Will China be ready to host the World Cup in 2026?")
A decade ago, a U.K.-U.S. one-two combination might have seemed an obvious choice for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Besides being home to the world's most popular and lucrative soccer league, England has long cultivated an overblown sense of ownership of the game, never ceasing to point out that soccer was created by the English and that it spread throughout the world with their 19th century agents of empire. (Skeptics note that England has won the World Cup only once, compared with Brazil's five triumphs, Italy's four and Germany's three.) And in keeping with its tradition of talking up the team's improbable chances on the field every four years, the British press created the impression that hosting the 2018 World Cup was England's divine right. Meanwhile, U.S. soccer authorities have for some time been branding their country as the game's heir apparent: America boasts the largest pool of recreational soccer players, an overabundance of stadiums and the world's most multicultural fan base. But the inherent allure of both nations — in all arenas — has waned of late, not least because of recession and the shift of economic power toward emerging countries. FIFA's verdict (England's bid received a measly two votes out of 22 — and one of them was from its own delegate) is in small part a mark of that decline.(Will China be ready to host the World Cup in 2026?")
Who Needs Democracy?
Both Russia and Qatar are ruled by strong, uncompromising governments — one steered by post-Soviet apparatchiks with the tacit backing of a tycoon oligarchy, the other the hereditary bequest of a family that can trace itself back to pre-Islamic times. When the head honchos in Moscow or Doha set out to do something, they have a way of imposing their will (even if the Russian record of getting the trains running on time is a little spotty). Not so for real democracies. South Africa's preparations for what was to be a remarkable 2010 World Cup were repeatedly called into question in the face of strike threats and other logistical inefficiencies that can be commonplace in societies where dissent is part of the social fabric. The chaos that preceded India's Commonwealth Games this year turned New Delhi into a laughingstock — particularly when held up against the shimmering example of authoritarian Beijing's 2008 Olympics. With the recent boom of the Chinese and Russian economies, the appeal of a more authoritarian path to economic development and prosperity has gained some traction in the developing world. Who needs a totally free press or fair elections to guarantee a good show?(See pictures of World Cup 2010.)
Both Russia and Qatar are ruled by strong, uncompromising governments — one steered by post-Soviet apparatchiks with the tacit backing of a tycoon oligarchy, the other the hereditary bequest of a family that can trace itself back to pre-Islamic times. When the head honchos in Moscow or Doha set out to do something, they have a way of imposing their will (even if the Russian record of getting the trains running on time is a little spotty). Not so for real democracies. South Africa's preparations for what was to be a remarkable 2010 World Cup were repeatedly called into question in the face of strike threats and other logistical inefficiencies that can be commonplace in societies where dissent is part of the social fabric. The chaos that preceded India's Commonwealth Games this year turned New Delhi into a laughingstock — particularly when held up against the shimmering example of authoritarian Beijing's 2008 Olympics. With the recent boom of the Chinese and Russian economies, the appeal of a more authoritarian path to economic development and prosperity has gained some traction in the developing world. Who needs a totally free press or fair elections to guarantee a good show?(See pictures of World Cup 2010.)
The Withering Away of the State?
Karl Marx's predictions that the state would wither away under socialism were hardly proved true in the Soviet Union — if anything, the enfeebling of state power began with Russia's transition to crony capitalism under Boris Yeltsin, which set the tone for the "virtual mafia state" described by U.S. diplomats in WikiLeaked cables. Media observers who suggested, ahead of Thursday's vote, that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's decision to stay away from Zurich portended a setback for Russia's bid clearly missed the point: when the winners were announced, the cameras moved in close on the smiling face of the Russian bid's key patron, Roman Abramovich. Abramovich, of course, is a private citizen of Russia who occasionally finds himself in London. He's also the 50th richest man in the world, according to Forbes, having amassed a fortune in oil and aluminum interests in the rough and tumble of Russia's postcommunist privatization of state assets, in the process becoming one of the country's most powerful oligarchs. In 2003, he acquired the London soccer club Chelsea and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its success. He has also invested heavily in Russian soccer; for example, he got the legendary Dutch coach Guus Hiddink hired to run the national team and personally payed Hiddink's wages.
Karl Marx's predictions that the state would wither away under socialism were hardly proved true in the Soviet Union — if anything, the enfeebling of state power began with Russia's transition to crony capitalism under Boris Yeltsin, which set the tone for the "virtual mafia state" described by U.S. diplomats in WikiLeaked cables. Media observers who suggested, ahead of Thursday's vote, that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's decision to stay away from Zurich portended a setback for Russia's bid clearly missed the point: when the winners were announced, the cameras moved in close on the smiling face of the Russian bid's key patron, Roman Abramovich. Abramovich, of course, is a private citizen of Russia who occasionally finds himself in London. He's also the 50th richest man in the world, according to Forbes, having amassed a fortune in oil and aluminum interests in the rough and tumble of Russia's postcommunist privatization of state assets, in the process becoming one of the country's most powerful oligarchs. In 2003, he acquired the London soccer club Chelsea and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its success. He has also invested heavily in Russian soccer; for example, he got the legendary Dutch coach Guus Hiddink hired to run the national team and personally payed Hiddink's wages.
England's bid, fronted by soccer icon David Beckham and two representatives of the state (Prince William and Prime Minister David Cameron), garnered just one vote besides its own in the first round, vs. Russia's nine. Perhaps Abramovich's was the more persuasive presence. FIFA's decisionmaking was never exactly a barometer of geopolitical power; Thursday's vote suggests that, more than ever, it follows the money.(See a brief history of the World Cup.)
Petrodollars Talk
Russia's 2018 World Cup will take place in stadiums flung across a sprawling expanse of 1,500 miles (2,400 km), from the Polish border to the Urals. Qatar's will be the tiniest in the tournament's history — the country is 1,100 sq. miles (about 2,800 sq km) smaller than Connecticut. But both bids were bankrolled by energy resources. Abramovich has plowed billions of his Siberian-oil wealth into the sport, while other powerful state energy companies, like Gazprom, have considerable investments in soccer at home. Qatar sits atop 14% of the world's natural-gas reserves and, as a result, has a GDP per capita considerably higher than that of the U.S. During the financial crisis, the investment arm of Qatar's secretive sovereign wealth fund was able to splash some $30 billion on ailing Western banks, and it has a diverse portfolio of assets across the globe. A small chunk of its cash surplus will now go toward realizing Qatar's surreal, futuristic vision for its 2022 World Cup. All told, it's a far cry from the debt-ridden treasury in Washington or the U.K. counting its pennies while putting aircraft carriers up for auction.(Comment on this story.)
Russia's 2018 World Cup will take place in stadiums flung across a sprawling expanse of 1,500 miles (2,400 km), from the Polish border to the Urals. Qatar's will be the tiniest in the tournament's history — the country is 1,100 sq. miles (about 2,800 sq km) smaller than Connecticut. But both bids were bankrolled by energy resources. Abramovich has plowed billions of his Siberian-oil wealth into the sport, while other powerful state energy companies, like Gazprom, have considerable investments in soccer at home. Qatar sits atop 14% of the world's natural-gas reserves and, as a result, has a GDP per capita considerably higher than that of the U.S. During the financial crisis, the investment arm of Qatar's secretive sovereign wealth fund was able to splash some $30 billion on ailing Western banks, and it has a diverse portfolio of assets across the globe. A small chunk of its cash surplus will now go toward realizing Qatar's surreal, futuristic vision for its 2022 World Cup. All told, it's a far cry from the debt-ridden treasury in Washington or the U.K. counting its pennies while putting aircraft carriers up for auction.(Comment on this story.)
Terrorism's Not So Terrifying
The ability of the host country to provide security for hundreds of thousands of sports tourists has long been a key factor in deciding where FIFA stages its flagship tournament. By that measure, Russia still looks a little dicey. Extremists from Chechnya and other restive territories in the Caucasus have repeatedly targeted public spaces in Moscow and other major Russian cities in massive terrorist attacks over the past decade. And those conflicts remain very much alive despite often brutal crackdowns by Russian security forces. Yet FIFA has put its faith in the ability of those security forces to keep the tournament safe.(See more on Russia and Qatar's hosting of the next two World Cups.)
The ability of the host country to provide security for hundreds of thousands of sports tourists has long been a key factor in deciding where FIFA stages its flagship tournament. By that measure, Russia still looks a little dicey. Extremists from Chechnya and other restive territories in the Caucasus have repeatedly targeted public spaces in Moscow and other major Russian cities in massive terrorist attacks over the past decade. And those conflicts remain very much alive despite often brutal crackdowns by Russian security forces. Yet FIFA has put its faith in the ability of those security forces to keep the tournament safe.(See more on Russia and Qatar's hosting of the next two World Cups.)
Opting to stage a World Cup in the Arab world would probably have been unthinkable even four years ago because of the proximity of any potential host country to the sanctuaries of al-Qaeda and other extremists. Qatar, in fact, saw one major al-Qaeda attack, in March 2005, when a suicide bomber struck a theater frequented by Westerners. And it has been accused of paying protection money to extremists to avoid being targeted. "We are a soft target and prefer to pay to secure our national and economical interests," an unnamed Qatari official was quoted as telling the Times of London in 2005. A U.S. diplomatic cable from last December, revealed this week by WikiLeaks, described Qatar as "hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals." So the decision to award the tournament to Qatar is a sign that the international community no longer deems terrorism the one issue that trumps all others. Either that, or it's a vote of confidence in the Qataris to find their own methods of preventing the tournament from being targeted. Then again, Osama bin Laden is said to be a fan of the game, and a case could be made that he might be loath to tempt the backlash that would come from disrupting an event destined to be a massive source of Arab pride.
Sepp Blatter's Soccer Cabal
Why the United States lost out on its bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
By Brian PhillipsPosted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010, at 6:57 PM ET
FIFA President Joseph BlatterSepp Blatter, FIFA's twinkly pill bug of a president, wasted no time in welcoming the delegates to Thursday's World Cup soiree. Standing behind a slick podium beneath a giant video screen, and looking like an elderly Keebler elf, he crinkled his eyes ingratiatingly: "Welcome to the house of football." Nine groups had traveled to FIFA headquarters in Zurich to present their bids to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. "The home of FIFA is not only the house of football," Blatter informed each of them, "but also the home of the 208 national associations who make up FIFA, one of which you are. So, feel home."
The house of football, on this evidence, is a half-empty blue auditorium where vague, corporate elevator music floats around the ears of the old men who mingle in the aisles—the 22 members of FIFA's Executive Committee, which chooses World Cup hosts in a secretive ceremony that's been compared to the election of a new pope. No one could really "feel home" there, though the delegates from Russia (the 2018 host) and Qatar (2022) must at least have felt like they were in a nice hotel.
The big news in the United States, of course, was that the American bid to host in 2022 was defeated by a tiny, oil-drenched Gulf state that will be by far the smallest ever to host a World Cup. For moderately dedicated observers of FIFA, though, this decision wasn't really a surprise. The American bid featured more potential revenue, more media exposure, and vastly more feasible planning than its Qatari counterpart. The infrastructure to host the tournament is already in place here, while Qatar will be starting from closer to scratch. But FIFA is both legendarily corrupt—in October, two members of the executive committee were suspended when the Sunday Times caught them offering to sell their votes, and they're just the tip of the iceberg—and desperately in love with the idea of "legacy." Its eyes light up for opaque governments, bizarre legal exemptions, huge construction projects, and regions that have never staged a major international soccer spectacle. The United States offered none of those things, while Qatar, like Russia and South Africa, offers them all.
The most revealing thing about the bid conference was the bewildering theater of the presentations, which churned through a singular mix of World Pavilion national stereotypes, marketing slogans, and MBA-speak. Entirely despite themselves, these pitches painted a plausibly accurate picture of how FIFA views the world. Scarcely had Australia's surfing kangaroos faded from the screen when Japan launched a technophilic video that seemed to consist mostly of happy children doing their homework. Russia, which I had hoped would go entirely with a "Putin, crossbow hunter" theme, instead offered up sweeping landscape photography and bikinis. South Korea announced that the tournament would unify the peninsula—you mean the 2002 World Cup didn't?—and strongly hinted that the selection of an alternate site would court the nuclear annihilation of the species (not to mention vast herds of surfing kangaroos).
On this front, I'm sorry to say, the best the United States could manage was a speech by Morgan Freeman, whose primary function in Zurich seemed to be to remind as many committee members of Nelson Mandela as possible. The American presentation zipped past a cheerful park-montage video about diversity before settling in for the important stuff: a recap of Landon Donovan's self-actualizing life journey and an endless corporate seminar about the profit potential of an American tournament. (The executive committee, whose average age is something like 247, might have been looking for profits a little nearer to hand.) For the "legacy" portion of the presentation, Bill Clinton rhapsodized throatily about the accomplishments of the soccer-unrelated Clinton Foundation, while essentially making the argument that—because the United States needs no aid or supervision—FIFA could happily turn the World Cup over to us and go off and build a legacy somewhere else.
Of course, all the presentations had a serious point to make, or at least a unique quirk to exploit. Holland and Belgium's joint bid revolved around the idea of the "green World Cup." Japan promised to beam life-size holographic reproductions of the matches to stadiums around the world, meaning that instead of paying exorbitant prices to fly to Asia and watch humans play the tournament, millions of fans could pay exorbitant prices to stay at home and watch flickering computer graphics. The Qatari bid, which aimed a strong magnet at FIFA's erogenous zone by promising the first-ever World Cup in the Middle East, also conjured up the idea of breathtaking stadiums that could be conveniently disassembled and donated to developing countries after the tournament. This could come in handy if FIFA decides to take the 2026 tournament to Outer Mongolia or the moon.
The most significant thing about the bid presentations, though, was their utter insignificance. While Blatter always seems genuinely gleeful at the helm of this kind of circus—"I could speak more and more," he pouted before opening the first envelope, "but I have to announce it"—the meaningful politicking all took place off-camera, much of it well in advance. (England, whose presentation was spotless, earned just two votes and crashed out in the first round.) The stage show in Zurich was convened largely for the benefit of the press and the audience watching at home, which has to be reassured periodically that soccer is in the hands of pure-minded philanthropists, even as theiractions scream otherwise.
And so Blatter stood behind the podium, panting and gleaming, and opened the envelopes that delivered the World Cup to two oil-rich countries that FIFA's own inspection team had rated as among the riskiest candidates. "I am a happy president," he cooed at the end. Why wouldn't he be? He runs a super-rich, super-secret organization, which exports one astoundingly lucrative product and can afford to shrug off its critics. American soccer fans may be disappointed, but the House of Football and the House of Thani should get along just fine.
The State of Jim Carrey
In I Love You Phillip Morris, he plays a gay con man who is denied the thing he most wants in life. Which makes the film a biography, more or less.
By Chris Jones
Roadside Attractions
I Love You Phillip Morris (out this week after months of being in release-date limbo) is a true story about a man who can't stop living lies. In real life, that man's name is Steven Russell; in the movie, he's played by Jim Carrey. Sometimes it's hard to tell Russell and Carrey apart, if that makes any sense. It's impossible to watch one likable-seeming man unable to accept who he really is playing another likable-seeming man with the same curse and not feel bad for them both.
Russell is a Virginia cop, married to a Jesus freak with a daughter and a bungalow. That's before he realizes he's really someone else: "I'm gonna be a fag!" he yells into the night. Not only does he decide he's gay, but he decides he's stone-cold queen gay, with a pair of tiny dogs and a boyfriend and an expensive Miami Beach lifestyle. So he must also become a con artist, and we watch him trade one set of lies (I'm a straight cop, etc.) for another (I'm a makebelieve lawyer, etc.) until he's inevitably caught and sent to the clink, where he meets and falls in love with Phillip Morris, played quite beautifully by Ewan McGregor.
The rest of the film is essentially a love story about these two men who are made almost physically ill by the sensation of being apart. They both get out of prison, but Russell, through a succession of brilliant cons (although not that brilliant because he keeps getting caught) and brilliant prison escapes (although not that brilliant because he keeps getting caught) almost always finds himself just out of reach of the man he loves. Their love is not unrequited, but it's unfulfilled.
Which means it's tragic. Except it isn't, mostly because Carrey can't help playing it as a farce. He's struggled mightily to be taken as a serious actor, and God love him for that — sincerely, it's a painful and difficult thing, watching someone so gifted not being able to hold the gift he wants most in the world — but it's not who he is. Steven Russell was born gay; Jim Carrey was born a clown. Their fates were predetermined, but watching Carrey play Russell, we never sense how awful they must both feel having had their wishes denied again and again.
The film, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Bad Santa), is too quick to crack a joke rather than risk us feeling heartsick. It wants us to feel uncomfortable — McGregor spits a mouthful of semen into the ocean after servicing Carrey on a boat — but not in any meaningful way. The Florida boyfriend conveniently dies of AIDS in a hurried flashback; the Jesus-freak wife is somehow completely fine with her husband deciding he likes to have sex with men; life in prison is portrayed as one buoyant circle jerk. It's as though we're meant to be blind to how hard it is to be gay because of the beauty and absurdity of life.
Who knows? Maybe that's the right way to play it — maybe that's how we finally turn our collective corner, by casting off weights. Maybe every gay movie doesn't have to be Milk or Before Night Falls or Brokeback Mountain; maybe every gay movie doesn't need to be a tragedy.
Except that no matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise, love torn apart is a tragedy. That's the truth. It just is.
Orange Alert
When did prisoners start dressing in orange?
By Christopher BeamPosted Friday, Dec. 3, 2010, at 7:26 PM ET
A murder suspect wearing an orange jumpsuitAn Iraqi minister paraded a group of 39 terror suspects past reporters in Baghdad on Thursday, each detainee clad in a bright orange jumpsuit. Steven Hayes, who was sentenced to death on Thursday after killing a Connecticut woman and her two daughters, was also wearing an orange jumpsuit when he appeared in court. When did prisoners start wearing orange?
Pretty recently. Back in the 19th century, prisoners commonly wore black-and-white stripes. Prisons started abandoning this design in the early 20th century, citing its association with chain gangs. For a while, more demure colors were in vogue. New York state abolished prison stripes in 1904, switching to jackets and caps made of gray cloth. North Carolina kept the stripesuntil 1958, when it replaced them with a color system based on custody levels: Gray uniforms for high-security prisoners, brown for medium-, and green for low-. It wasn't until the 1970s or so that jails started putting some prisoners in orange uniforms—but usually only in special detention situations (like in a temporary facility) or in transit. In California, for example, prisoners must wear orange or red when they're being transported.
While orange may be more popular than in the past, it's actually not ubiquitous. The state of California outfits its male prisoners in denim jeans, blue chambray shirts, and denim jackets. The federal maximum security prison in Florence, Colo., issues khaki trousers and shirts. New York state actually bans the color orange among prisoners: It issues uniforms that are "hunter green," and lets them wear their own T-shirts, as long as they're not blue (the color of prison-guard uniforms), black (too hard to see), gray (other officials wear it), or orange (the color worn by the Correctional Emergency Response Team, or riot control).
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Orange might seem more pervasive than it is because prisoners often change into orange when they go out in public. Sheriffs sometimes put prisoners in orange during perp walks in front of reporters, and prisoners often wear orange in court. Movies such as Con Air—in which a group of convicts clad in orangehijacks a plane—have also helped spread the impression that orange is the new black-and-white. And then there's Gitmo. Pictures of Guantanamo Bay prisoners wearing orange have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, although government officials say that most prisoners there wear white.
Some prisons make a point of picking distinctive uniforms. Cleveland County makes prisoners wear pink shirts and yellow-and-white striped pants, which sheriff's officials say makes escape more difficult. Sheriff Joseph Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, has at various times forced prisoners to wear traditional stripes, orange jumpsuits, and pink underwear.
Mark Zuckerberg Uses the Word "Social" a Lot
Facebook's grand plan for the future.
By David GellesPosted Sunday, Dec. 5, 2010, at 6:46 AM ET
Mark Zuckerberg is pacing before a crowd in Facebook's Palo Alto, Calif., cafeteria just before lunch on a Wednesday in November. Fit and jovial, with pale skin and curly brown hair, his boyish face gives away his 26 years. "Zuck," as friends call him, is wearing what he always wears: a gray T-shirt with an embroidered Facebook logo, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. With this perennially casual demeanour, he is showing off new technologies to a few hundred employees, partners, and the press. "It's a good day to launch some stuff," he says with a laugh. And with that, Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Deals, a new service that in a matter of days will transform the way local businesses reach consumers as they walk down the street.
With Deals, smartphone users who download Facebook's application can "check in" to a physical location, such as their local coffee shop, and get a little reward. If the coffee shop is so inclined, it can create a "deal" for users who check in—50 percent off, for example, an incentive just to show up. Two days after Zuckerberg's presentation, the power of Deals became clear as the Gap gave away free jeans to the first 10,000 people who checked in to its stores. As Zuckerberg was still onstage, an analyst leaned over to me and says, "They just changed local commerce forever." It wasn't even lunchtime yet.
During his presentation, Zuckerberg uses words such as "revolution" and "disruption." He talks in sweeping terms and with no sense of irony, telling the crowd, "our goal is to make everything social." This is bold talk from the young chief executive, yet he has reason to be bullish. In recent years, as individuals, businesses and political movements have embraced Facebook, the company's clout has only grown. Though still a start-up by some measures, it is now squarely one of the three or four most influential technology companies in the world.
After the public presentation I join Zuckerberg and a couple of bloggers in a glass-walled conference room in the middle of Facebook's offices. He and I sit on a couch, and for 40 minutes he talks animatedly, cracking the occasional joke, expounding on his world view and his vision of the future.
"If you look five years out, every industry is going to be rethought in a social way," he says. "You can remake whole industries. That's the big thing." His ambition, it turns out, is not simply to make Facebook an influential technology company, but the most important company in the world.
"You can integrate a person's friends into almost anything and make [it] instantly more engaging and viral," he told me. "You care so much more about your friends. It's not an intellectual thing. It's hard-wired into humans that you need to focus on what the people around you are doing. It's this very visceral, deep thing. That, I think, is the structural thing that is going to make it so that all these industries change."
Zuckerberg uses the word "social" a lot, and it's not always obvious what he means. He is not simply talking about telling your friends what you had for breakfast with a status update. To Zuckerberg, a more social world is one where nearly everything—from the Web to the TV to the restaurants you choose to eat at—is informed by your stated preferences and your friends' preferences, and equipped with technology that lets you communicate and share content with people you know. What Zuckerberg is talking about is a new way of organizing and navigating information.
This is a somewhat different Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the Web is going into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan. It is not just that he is a bit more confident and articulate, though he is both; what is striking is that for the first time in my two years of interviewing him, Zuckerberg seems at ease. "The fear is behind him," said a friend of Zuckerberg's. "Until a year ago, he thought this might be the next Google, but he wasn't sure. Now he's sure. The fear is gone."
Facebook's soaring user base and booming revenues are, strangely, not really what is behind this shift in disposition, impressive as both figures are. (Facebook now has more than 500 million active users, and is expected to take in at least $1.5bn in revenue this year, mostly from advertising. Facebook does not charge users, and as a private company, it does not share its financials.) Nor is it Facebook's "stickiness": The site is the largest on the Web in terms of time spent and page views. Instead, what has endowed this company with a new confidence is a more subtle transformation.
The change is this: Facebook is no longer merely a social network, where users check out updates from friends, glance at photos and play some games. Rather, it is making moves to be an essential part of the entire online experience. The company is becoming people's home page, e-mail system, and more. Much in the way Google extended its capabilities from search to include e-mail, maps and books, Facebook is becoming a part of ever more daily services on the Web. The company is also making strides to achieve one thing Google has not: It is well on its way to becoming the de facto identity platform for the Internet.
With its map of profiles of people from Australia to Venezuela—what it calls the "social graph"—Facebook is becoming the virtual driver's license, house keys, and passport for those traveling around the Web. Since 2008, users have been able to log in to other sites using their Facebook credentials. And in April, the company rolled out a suite of new features that made it even easier for other Web sites to tether themselves to Facebook. These include the Like button, which enables people to quickly express their affinity for a product and share it back to their Facebook newsfeed, and other "social plug-ins" that enable users to interact with their Facebook friends on other sites.
It is a global phenomenon. There are millions of users in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, Colombia, and Turkey. Zuckerberg has said he wants to push further into the developing world, and Facebook has a range of products that allow users with the simplest mobile phone to access the site.
More than 2 million sites have integrated with Facebook since 2008, including 90 percent of the top 1,000 sites on the Internet. That number is growing by about 10,000 sites a day. Nearly one-third of Facebook's 500 million users interact with it on third-party sites every month. In this way, a growing portion of online activity involves Facebook, even though it is not happening on Facebook.com.
"They made this very ballsy decision to transform themselves from a place where everyone came to—a destination—into a service that lets me take my information everywhere," says Sam Altman, chief executive of Loopt, a location services company that works with Facebook.
Facebook colors this as a win-win for the sites with which it works. By giving sites such as The Times of India and TVGuide.com access to Facebook's graph of friends, it allows them to draw in new traffic and easily acquire new users. When movie review site Rotten Tomatoes integrated with Facebook, the number of reviews on the site doubled. Facebook, of course, benefits too. By implanting its links and cornflower-blue F logo on millions of pages, the company is enmeshing itself deeper into the fabric of the Web, one site at a time.
B.J. Fogg is a researcher at Stanford University who studies how machines influence human behavior. In 2007 he began teaching classes about Facebook at Stanford, a matter of miles from the company's offices. "It was pretty apparent to me, even before they had half a billion people onboard, that they were in a position to win the game," he told me. "Now that they have their tentacles in many millions of Websites, it will be really hard for them to ever go away."
It can be tempting to write off Zuckerberg as an overzealous youth too excited with his own ideas. In the six years since its founding, however, Facebook has already reshaped at least two industries online. The first was photos. By 2004, when Facebook arrived, online photos were nothing new. The digital photography revolution was in full swing. Film was on its way out, and sites like Snapfish and Shutterfly were processing millions of snapshots. Flickr, founded the same year as Facebook, quickly became a popular venue to share photos, and was soon acquired by Yahoo. But as Facebook expanded it surpassed Flickr as the largest photo-sharing site on the Web. By February this year, more than 3 billion photos were being uploaded to the site each month. Though the company has made little effort to make any money from its photos service, it has invested heavily in it, designing new software and building data centers to cope with this torrent of data.
What made Facebook the largest photo site on the Web was not simply its enormous user base—it was the ability to "tag" people in a photo, or link that photo back to their profile. In this way, you don't have to look through all of your Aunt Gertrude's holiday pictures; you can just quickly see the ones she appears in. "The takeaway from that is that the social features are really the killer part of this," Zuckerberg told me. "Having good social integration is more important than high-res photos."
More recently, Facebook has upended the video-game industry. In 2007, it began allowing outside companies to build simple applications and games that run on Facebook.com. Games proved the most popular, and lucrative, too. The largest of the social-gaming companies, Zynga, will reportedly take in revenues in excess of $600 million this year. Playfish, one of the largest social-gaming companies, was bought by Electronic Arts, the second-largest video-games company, for up to $400 million in 2009. And earlier this year, Playdom, another social-games company, was acquired by Disney for up to $735 million. Today, upward of 200 million people play games on Facebook, more than on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii combined.
This change in behavior points to the key reasons for Facebook's success, according to Sam Altman. Whether it be in photos, games or location, users tend to be more engaged if their friends are involved. "In the past three months there's been this massive change in terms of acceptance of Log In with Facebook," Altman said. "We've gone from something most of my friends didn't use, to something most of them use several times a day on the Web. That is what has made people realize how much value there is with Facebook."
This more personalized world is already appearing online. Among the bevy of features Facebook introduced in April was Instant Personalization. It's a wonky term for an intuitive, if somewhat creepy, feature: if a user is logged in to Facebook and then goes to a handful of other sites, such as Internet radio Pandora or the local reviews site Yelp, the user is automatically logged in to those sites as well, which are customized to promote content relevant to a user and his or her friends.
Even Instant Personalization, however, is a "light" integration. "This is really just the early stage," Zuckerberg told me, after the Deals launch. It's a big change for the Web. For the past 15 years we've all had the same experience when we went to a Web site. That is over now. If Zuckerberg is to be believed, we are rapidly moving from a world where the Web doesn't know who you are, to a world where the Web knows exactly who you are.
"What we're imagining is very different," says Chris Cox, who dropped out of Stanford to join the company in 2005 and is now one of Zuckerberg's closest lieutenants. "If you imagine a television designed around social, you turn it on and it says, 'Thirteen of your friends like Entourage. Press play. Your dad recorded 60 Minutes. Press play.'" In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one's Facebook friends.
Zuckerberg points to companies such as Zynga (built on Facebook's Platform) and Quora (a question and answer service founded by former Facebook employees, which relies almost exclusively on Facebook for users) as examples of companies building around social "from the ground up." "The real disruption is going to come from people who are rethinking these spaces," he said.
This is a sly piece of semantics. Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives talk about the importance of building new companies and services around "friends" and of being "social." But seeing as Facebook alone is the keeper of the most comprehensive social graph on earth, what they really mean is building new companies and services around Facebook. And while this may sound hubristic, it reflects Zuckerberg's belief that Facebook's map of human relationships is among the most important developments in business history. "That, I think, is the strongest product element we have," he said. "And [most] likely one of the strongest product elements that ever has existed."
Not everyone is onboard with Zuckerberg's mission. Users have revolted against many of the changes Facebook has made this year, calling for more control over their own information. Privacy advocates and regulators, too, are demanding that the company proceed cautiously as it grows.
There are also concerns that by encouraging users to share more information about themselves online, Facebook is changing the very nature of privacy. Zuckerberg acknowledged these shifting mores in an interview earlier this year. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information, and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
Whether Facebook is responding to changing social norms or, in fact, leading the charge is an unresolved question. "There's no point in demonising Facebook, which is obviously providing a great service to hundreds of millions of people," said Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "But to use a famous saying, 'With great power comes great responsibility.' "
The concern expressed by Acquisti and others is that while Facebook itself may be benign, the same cannot be said about everyone online. And it is the unintended consequences of a more social world that cause the most consternation. In one nightmare scenario, a user shares information about their eating and exercise habits on Facebook, and this is paired with other information, such as Web browsing history, by any number of so-called "data mining" companies. These companies create a profile of the user that is sold to various parties, potentially including health insurers. Based on some of this unflattering information, the insurer decides to deny the user coverage.
Such salacious anecdotes are thus far the stuff of speculation. But as Acquisti said: "The major concern is that we are getting used to more and more information about ourselves being available to others. It's often invisible how much information is available about us, how much can be inferred from that, and how that can be recombined and misused. The more this happens, the more consumers become adjusted to this being the new normal."
When Facebook launched Instant Personalization and made other changes to its privacy policy in April, there was initially very little resistance to the moves. But in the weeks after the launch, a growing chorus of critics, including privacy groups and US senators, began calling for Facebook to roll back some of the changes.
The row shook the company to its core. "The privacy backlash was my most difficult time at the company," says Chris Cox. "We were on 100 front pages. That was a moment as a company when we came to grips with how important we are."
Facebook responded the following month, giving users more control of their data. "We really do believe in privacy," Zuckerberg said at the time. It was a familiar pattern. Since Facebook's earliest days, its users have resisted changes to the service. Facebook has routinely made some concessions, only to push further ahead. Users have never left the site in droves. For now, Facebook has succeeded in quieting its critics. But if history is any guide, it is only a matter of time before the company is in hot water once more.
On June 2, Zuckerberg appeared for an onstage interview at the "D: All Things Digital" conference in southern California. The privacy backlash was still fresh, and the interviewers confronted him on the subject. Zuckerberg broke into a profuse sweat, stuttering his way through largely incoherent answers. "D was a low point," a longtime confidant of Zuckerberg's acknowledged. "It was hot in there. He started sweating. He was suddenly really self-conscious. It was a fuck-up. We all fuck up."
Since then, however, Zuckerberg has spoken in public several times, seeming more confident at each appearance. "Mark has always been really good at getting better," Cox told me. "It's one of his two or three superpowers. This year he had to be a better communicator. He did that."
The need for a more polished public persona was amplified this year by the emergence of Zuckerberg as a celebrity in his own right. He has appeared on front pages and magazine covers nearly every week, and guest-starred as himself on The Simpsons. An authoritative book about the company, The Facebook Effect, came out. An unauthorised movie, The Social Network, took the box office by storm, even as it portrayed Zuckerberg in an unflattering light. (Zuckerberg said he wasn't going to see the film but eventually hosted a screening for Facebook employees.) It was enough to elevate the young chief executive to A-list status. "Zuckerberg is the Angelina Jolie of the Internet," said Nick Denton, founder of gossip Web site Gawker, earlier this year.
A few weeks before Zuckerberg launched Deals, I was at Facebook for another event. After the presentation in the cafeteria, the company hosted a barbecue on the lawn. I saw Zuckerberg sitting alone on a picnic blanket and joined him. I had meetings later in the day and happened to be wearing a suit (most people in Silicon Valley wear jeans and T-shirts). Zuckerberg told me to be careful not to get grass stains on my trousers and made some more room on the blanket for me. Then, without prompting, he said: "At least in the movie they got that part right. The first time I met venture capitalists, I really was wearing pyjamas." It was a flip remark, but it indicated a new self-awareness in Zuckerberg. Others who know him confirmed as much. "I met him six years ago, and he was in shorts and flip-flops," said Ron Conway, an angel investor and early adviser to Facebook. "Now you see him and he's literally a business leader."
He has also become a philanthropist. In September, just as The Social Network hit cinemas, Zuckerberg appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to announce he was donating $100 million to the troubled schools of Newark, N.J. Some wrote off the gift as a publicity stunt, but people close to Zuckerberg say the decision was months in the making and heartfelt. As a longtime friend of his said, "He's excited about the opportunity to do something good for the world, beyond Facebook."
These distractions have done little to knock Zuckerberg off balance. "He's always been very focused," said the longtime friend. Today, he seems more intent than ever on extending Facebook's influence. With photos, video games and local deals already feeling the effects of Facebook, Zuckerberg is now looking for other industries that are ripe for disruption. "We're going to see that in probably the other entertainment-type verticals first." Music and movies, he argues, are poised to change. "Those are naturally social things," he said.
Meanwhile, Facebook's power as an identity platform keeps growing. The site will most likely hit 600 million users soon, giving it more muscle as it moves to be the default single sign-on for the Web.
Industry veterans stress that Facebook may not be the only identity one has on the Web. "I think there will be a couple of different identities on the Web," said John Donahoe, chief executive of Ebay. (Ebay, which owns PayPal, works closely with Facebook.) "Facebook will be one of the identities you carry with you. The identity we're focused on with PayPal is your monetary identity. It's not one where you want to share all your information."
And while Facebook has the early lead, the changing nature of social structures makes this an inherently dynamic industry. "The fluidity of social networks is one of the reasons it's not entirely clear that Facebook will be the be-all and end-all," says one prominent social media executive. So far, however, no credible alternative has caught on. OpenID, a single sign-on service designed to work across many companies, is foundering; while Microsoft tried, and failed, in the 1990s with a single sign-on product called Passport. "Facebook has done a much cleaner job of exactly the same thing," says the executive. "It has basically figured out how to create a quasi-monopoly on the address book of the Web, a universal people directory. It's a fundamental service. If you own the address book at some point you can actually monopolise communications."
Last month, Facebook took another step in this direction when Zuckerberg announced that the site would now offer @facebook.com e-mail addresses to its members. He noted that users were already sending 4bn messages a day via Facebook Messages.
Facebook's burgeoning power caught the attention of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley years ago. Many, including Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ebay have sought to partner with Facebook. Google tried to invest in Facebook in 2007 but was beaten off by Microsoft. Since then, it has increasingly become Facebook's main adversary.
The fear, according to people close to Google, is that as Facebook users index the Web through their Likes and shares, Google's algorithmic indexing of the Web will become less relevant. "Search is a business that will be pretty profoundly disrupted by social media," said Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Ultimately, what matters to you is not what Google thinks is important, it's what your friends think is important."
Advertisers are already voting with their dollars. While Google still commands the lion's share of online ads, big brands are increasingly turning to Facebook, where they can target users based on stated preferences. According to comScore, about one in four online display adverts in the U.S. now appears on Facebook.
In an effort to respond, Google is developing its own more coherent social product. Buzz, a social service it launched earlier this year, flopped. A new effort is tentatively called GoogleMe. "It feels like Google is on red alert," says one source close to both companies. "There is a feeling at Google that this could be for them what search was for Microsoft."
Few in Silicon Valley are optimistic that Google will deliver a Facebook killer. That Google just doesn't get social is widely accepted as fact. This being the case, Facebook looks on track to become an increasingly important part of people's online lives. The benefits should be easy to spot: As more sites integrate with Facebook, there will be fewer new accounts to create, fewer passwords to remember. Sites will be pre-populated with content you find interesting. The Web, once anonymous, will be customised to each person.
"Facebook has always thought that anything that is social in the world should be social online," said Matt Cohler, an early employee at Facebook who has gone on to work as a venture capitalist. "Anything where people ask their friends to help them make decisions—whether it's food or movies or travel—could be transformed online by social."
Though it can seem a tad Orwellian, Zuckerberg is resolute in his belief that the future is at once more social and better. "To be a technologist is fundamentally to be an optimist," Cohler said. "Technology is an amplifier and enabler of human behavior, so when you're creating it you'd better have an optimistic view of human nature."
Cohler and others close to Zuckerberg attest to his desire to do good in the world. That is reassuring, seeing as Facebook is a company with big plans for the future. "If you look at their behavior, they are not optimizing for the short term, or even the medium term," says one source close to the company. "They have a 20-year horizon." Exactly where this will lead is unclear. Technology moves fast. Last month, Yuri Milner, chief executive of a Russian investment group that owns about 10 percent of Facebook, said he believed Facebook would be powering artificial intelligence within 10 years.
Instead of maximizing revenue as soon as possible ("They haven't tried to make money yet," says one source who works directly with Zuckerberg. "They've made enough to keep the lights on"), Facebook is instead trying to weave itself as deeply as it can into the fabric of the World-Wide Web. Last year, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen told me the company's user base would "cap out at some point at the number of people who have electricity." Since that interview, Facebook has added more than 300 million users. "It's getting to the point where it is very hard to unseat Facebook," Forrester analyst Augie Ray told me. "Not just because people have their social graph established and don't want to recreate it, but because the more Facebook becomes integrated into the Web and mobile applications, the harder it is to ever replace."
Google Cracks Down on Pirated Material Online
By Jem Aswad
Dec 02, 2010 5:38 PM EST
In response to pressure from music and film companies and other copyright holders,Google announced a number of measures on Thursday intended to fight copyright-infringing material on the web, including a pledge to respond to requests for the removal of such material within 24 hours.
However, the company said these initiatives do not extend to YouTube, which is owned by Google. A representative for Google said in a conference call Thursday that the company already has "highly developed practices there," according to The Guardian. Companies such as Viacom and Universal Music, and artists including Prince, have cracked down aggressively when unauthorized versions of their content appears on the site.
Google will implement four major changes over the next several months. The most significant is that it will take action on "reliable copyright takedown requests" within 24 hours. The company will introduce new tools to make the process easier for rights holders to submit takedown requests.
The company will also prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in its autocomplete search function (which anticipates the terms users are typing); improve its AdSense anti-piracy review (and expel violators from the program when it deems necessary); and explore ways to ensure that authorized preview content is more accessible.
Did Miami Break the Rules and Steal LeBron?
As Cleveland girds itself for the return of its former hometown hero, news breaks that the Cavs are building a tampering case against the Heat
By Scott Raab
Photo credit: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
December 2, 2010
Weird vibe in Cleveland today — no surprise. As ever, when it comes to sports milestones, my home town is on the brink of something... well, not joyous, unless the team can somehow combine an unlikely on-court win against the Heat with an off-court... Hey, wait a second! It seems like Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is trying to build a tampering case against Miami regarding the Whore of Akron's free agency.
Shocking that the story leaked on the eve of LeBronnukah. Shocking to hear it alleged that Pat Riley may have broken the rules in an attempt to win. Shocking that Gilbert would keep punching. But most shocking of all would be if NBA Commisar David Stern were to take an honest look at what went down.
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I've been accused here in Cleveland of fomenting violence simply by dismissing all the morons telling Cleveland to behave like a good little boy tonight. It always tickles me when the media plays schoolmarm, talks down to whole groups of people, and pretends to uphold a standard of morality based on something other than pure profit.
For what it's worth — next to nothing — I'm inclined to vote against any form of physical violence. But if the Whore of Akron walks out on the court and tries his little chalk-toss routine at the Q tonight, I hope a Clevelander has the guts to protest. LeBron James has never had the integrity or courage to hold himself accountable for anything he's done if the consequences weren't to his liking, and I don't expect that ever to change. But if he wants to play the big shot here, he's asking to be treated like the villain that he is. Don't blame Cleveland for standing up for itself.
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Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/lebron-james/lebron-tampering-charge-120210#ixzz17FSCg4yu
Facebook: The Media Company That Could Have Been
DEC 2 2010, 12:10 PM ET
NEW YORK -- In mid-April, Facebook launched a Facebook + Media initiative focused on helping news, television and music partners "drive referral traffic, increase engagement, and deepen user insights on your site," presumably with the intent of closely integrating Facebook with existing media properties and extending the reach of the already monstrous social network.
But is Facebook just an accessory for media companies, or a media company in itself? At Business Insider's IGNITION conference, David Kirkpatrick -- author of The Facebook Effect -- talked with Wendy Harris Millard of MediaLink LLC and Mike Lazerow of Buddy Media about Facebook's odd evolution.
The real question at hand is whether Facebook really is a media company -- that is, a company that produces and distributes attention-grabbing nuggets of content and makes money on them, to paraphrase Business Insider's Henry Blodget.
By this definition, the answer is yes. "Facebook is a media company fueled by technology. All of Facebook's revenue comes from media and ad revenue, hinged primarily on its role as an extraordinary possibility for consumers to talk to each other," Millard said. "Dating site, shopping, ecommerce, etc.... Facebook can do all of it. They can grab a foothold in a lot of the industries, from media to commerce to politics, by distributing content and hearing back. If you can reach more than 500 million people and you don't do so, it's grossly negligent as a business."
Facebook doesn't want to own each individual application like Yahoo does with Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance.
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