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What Silicon Valley Is Really Selling Us

Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes:

One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon Valley its own state or Balaji Srinivasan’s vision of an “ultimate exit” to someplace where engineers could build a world “run by technology.” But they’ve got it entirely backward. People don’t crave technology like drugs, wanting it so bad they’ll wire bitcoins to the offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan just to get it. They adopt technology when they’re seduced by the communities that grow up around it, often for love rather than money. If inventing new modes of communication or collaboration was seen as a mercenary act—as no nobler than drilling a well or devising a mortgage-backed security—then such platforms would never thrive, because their value tends to arise from a long, slow, unprofitable process of experimentation.

If anything, the public love affair with Silicon Valley is more crucial today than ever.

There’s a reason why web giants adopt slogans like “Don’t be evil” or endorse “the Hacker Way”: The entire business models of Google and Facebook are built not on a physical product or even a service but on monetizing data that users freely supply. Were either company to lose the trust and optimism of its customers, it wouldn’t just be akin to ExxonMobil failing to sell oil or Dow Chemical to sell plastic; it would be like failing to drill oil, to make plastic.

When William Gibson envisioned cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” he was right. Unsettle the consensus about the social web and you don’t just risk slowing its growth or depopulating it slightly. You risk ending it, as mistrust of corporate motives festers into cynicism about the entire project.

Read the full story at Wired

Read more on Silicon Valley

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Photo: itia4u, Flickr

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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An Oral History of ‘Ghostbusters’

Longreads Pick

The making of a comedy classic, first published in Premiere Magazine:

HAROLD RAMIS: We very quickly came up with a model: Dan was the heart of the Ghostbusters, I was the brains, and Bill was the mouth.

I found my character on the front page of an abstract architectural journal. There was a picture of a guy and an article about his work. I didn’t understand a word, but his image was great. He was wearing a retro three-piece tweed suit, wire-rim glasses, and his hair was standing way up. I thought, “That could be my guy.” I took the name Egon from a Hungarian refugee I went to grammar school with, and Spengler was from [noted historian] Oswald Spengler.

Source: Esquire
Published: Feb 26, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,562 words)

The Writing Genius of Harold Ramis

Bad is usually good in Ramis’s films, if only because good is so obviously bad. In “Groundhog Day,” Ramis’s masterpiece, a jaded Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is forced to repeat Groundhog Day over and over again in the tiny town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. At one point, he devises numerous ways to kill himself:

INT. CADILLAC

PHIL begins to accelerate, turning a fast lap around the square. Gus looks back at the police car chasing them.

GUS

I think they want you to stop… .

PHIL

It’s the same thing your whole life. Clean up your room, stand up straight, pick up your feet, take it like a man. Be nice to your sister. Don’t mix beer and wine—ever.

The car skids around and comes to a stop straddling the railroad tracks… .

PHIL

(eyes gleaming)

Oh, yeah—don’t drive on the railroad tracks.

GUS

Well, now, that’s one I happen to agree with.

The director Jay Roach says that the six films Murray and Ramis made together define a level of achievement he calls “extreme comedy.” “You would watch people in the audience just lose their minds,” he told me. “Harold Ramis is the yardstick of what you want to reach for, of people’s bodies around you going into convulsions of joy while your brain is thinking and your emotions are deeply tied in to the characters, and you’re going, ‘Oh my God, This is the best two hours I’ve ever spent.’ ”

Tad Friend, in The New Yorker in 2004, on the comedy of Harold Ramis. Ramis died in 2014.

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What Wall Street and Teach For America Have in Common

Film Still from Wall Street 2

Mike: Jeremy and Samson seemed so miserable and I was rooting for them to quit and do something else. But something seemed to be holding them back—they didn’t like the idea of leaving the well-paid jobs they hated for an uncertain future. Which is funny to me, because being worried about an uncertain future is what nearly every college senior on the verge of graduating worries about. Their recruitment into Wall Street sort of allowed them to delay this.

Kevin: And I think in some ways that Wall Street has functioned as a delay mechanism. You don’t have to figure out what you want to be. And I think that one of the smartest things that Teach for America did was make itself a two-year commitment just like the banks, because people who are seniors in college want some kind of certainty. They want to know that they’re not going to be unemployed. These are people who’ve connected all the right dots their entire lives—they are very Type A. And they want to move from institution to institution without a break in the middle and so Teach For America saw what Wall Street was doing, I think—I don’t have any intel—but I think they probably looked at what banks and consulting firms were doing and saying, “two years is about the right amount of time. We don’t have to pay them a ton, but if we promise them that it’ll look good on their resume, that they’ll be able to do whatever they want afterwards, it won’t close off any doors and it’ll give them structure and stability.” And you can see it now: One in every six Ivy League seniors applies to Teach for America—it’s insane. And that’s probably the best proof that it’s not all about the money for a lot of college students, because they’re willing to work for a little bit of money teaching in the Mississippi Delta if it means that they’ll be able to put off some big decisions for a few years.

In The Billfold, my very long conversation with Kevin Roose about Young Money, Roose’s book about young Wall Street workers recruited straight out of college that came out earlier this week. You can read excerpts of the book at NPR, and an adapted chapter about Wall Street plutocrats dressing up in drag and cracking jokes at the 99 percent at New York magazine.

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The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire

But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it “cool.”

When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. “Tell them to send all the drugs they can,” he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. “Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles,” Martínez marveled.

Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped “Comadre Jalapeños,” stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.

But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo’s masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border — more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo’s first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.

The New York Times reports that Joaquín Guzmán Loera—leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel—has been arrested. Nicknamed El Chapo, Guzmán’s cocaine and marijuana trafficking empire is believed to be worth several billion dollars. Patrick Radden Keefe closely examined the Sinaloa Drug Cartel and Chapo’s leadership of the organization for The New York Times Magazine in the summer of 2012.

See also: “Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad.” (GQ, Jan. 12, 2014)

And: “The Narco Tunnels of Nogales.” (Businessweek, Aug. 2, 2012)

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Photo of elaborate cross-border drug smuggling tunnel discovered inside a warehouse near San Diego via Wikimedia Commons

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Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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I.

In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

Taking Care of Business: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Orange Coast Magazine, The New York Times, Business Insider, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 16, 2014

David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

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Not Feeling Carolina: Depression on One of the Nation's Happiest Campuses, Our College Pick

Mental health issues have lost much of their stigma on college campuses, as they have in the rest of the world. Today’s college students self-medicate just as much as they always did, but they also seek professional help in a much more public way than you might remember from your own school days. You’ll find evidence of this openness in this week’s College Longreads pick, from the University of North Carolina. Every one of Claire McNeill’s sources went on the record about their pain, fear, and suicide attempts. But what makes the story stand out, in addition to thorough reporting, is a thoughtful angle.

The University of North Carolina, the story posits, is a college campus known for its positivity and student satisfaction. “From its radiant azaleas to its basketball fever, from its 700 student organizations to its ranking as Best Public Value School in the nation, from the University’s favored buzzwords — inclusivity, diversity, collaboration — to its unofficial motto in ‘The Carolina Way,’ it seems from a distance that UNC’s 18,500 undergraduate students are living the life of a college brochure,” McNeill writes. How do you live with depression in a place that keeps telling you how happy you ought to be? The angle is what makes an otherwise well-trod story compelling. Journalists rely on this no-duh skill of finding fresh angles so much that they forget it’s something they had to learn, to refine, over time.

Depression in the Southern Part of Heaven

Claire McNeill | Synapse Magazine | February 10, 2014 | 15 minutes (3,807 words)